Breaking Point

  No, the conversation about Alex and sex and love would have to wait until she could pay a visit to one of her college buds, Dirisha Mae, or Mary Louise, women she’d kept in touch with since school. Women who had been there and done it themselves, and had come back to cry on her shoulder about it. The Man War, they had dubbed it in the dorm when they’d lived there. Some battles you won, some you lost, but the war itself never ended.

  The cab ride through the sticky summer night to Alex’s was incredibly fast, as of course it would be, since she was suddenly not in a real hurry to get there. Back in London, thousands of miles away, this had seemed urgent and absolutely necessary. The closer she got, the less brilliant the idea seemed. Just showing up on Alex’s doorstep, no call, no warning? What if he wasn’t home? What if he didn’t want to talk to her?

  What if he wasn’t alone?

  That had just come to her for the first time. What if he had a woman in his bed and they were giggling and playing games under the sheets?

  The grinning, green-eyed monster popped up like magic in her mind and chortled its nasty laugh. This jealousy crap was really hard to take. It wasn’t like somebody coming straight at her she could elbow or throw, it was this sneaky, insidious beast that popped up unexpectedly, stabbed her with a long trident when she wasn’t expecting it, then ran like hell before she could gather herself to react. She hated the feeling, and she really hated not being able to prevent it. Toni wasn’t altogether dense about this kind of thing. You don’t spend more than half your life learning a martial art that would allow you to kick serious butt without recognizing that you have some ... control issues. She didn’t really think Alex would have found somebody else, given his track record—he hadn’t dated anybody to speak of for years after he and his ex-wife split—but you never knew. Having jumped back into the pool finally, maybe he would have found a new partner for synchronized swimming. And certainly that would screw things up, wouldn’t it?

  Toni shook her head at her thought. Okay, fine. Whatever. She wasn’t going there for some kind of tearful movie reconciliation, she was going there for some answers. Answers that Alex, by God, owed her.

  And thinking of there, all of a sudden, here they were.

  Alex’s condo was on a fairly quiet street in a solid upper-middle-class neighborhood filled with condos and houses much like his. Rich people wouldn’t stoop to live here, poor couldn’t afford to, but the residences were comfortable and in keeping with the kind of job Alex had. Nice place, nice neighborhood, and until that horrible moment in London, nice guy.

  She had to know what had happened to change that. It didn’t make any sense.

  Toni paid the cabbie, towed her single suitcase on its built-in wheels to the front door, and stood there.

  And stood there. And stood there some more.

  There were lights on inside, and it wasn’t that late. All she had to do was push the doorbell.

  She realized that she was breathing too fast, and that her hands were damp. It was a warm, humid night, but that wasn’t what was causing her to sweat. She was, she realized, afraid. And coming from a solid base of being able to protect herself, that was really scary.

  She took a deep breath, let half of it out, and gathered her resolve. She pushed the doorbell. She heard it ring. There was a space of time, how long she couldn’t say, but subjectively, about ten or fifteen thousand years.

  “Yes?”

  His voice over the intercom was the first time she’d heard him speak since he’d left London seven weeks ago. It was a sound she hadn’t realized how much she had missed until she heard it, and the simple question stunned her, so that all she could say was “Hi.”

  “Toni!? Don’t move, I’ll be right there!”

  And despite whatever she had felt, it warmed her to hear the joy in his voice.

  Gakona, Alaska

  Ventura made the rounds of his surveillance stations. He was running a basic six-person team, not counting himself, and that was not really enough, considering what his client was into, but as much as he was likely to get away with up here in the middle of nowhere. Disguised as a birdwatching club out looking for owls, it gave his people a reason to be out with binoculars and starlight scopes and cameras, but it was still something of a stretch to have them wandering around in the woods. The locals would surely notice his people, and while they had all the proper gear and had done enough quick research to fake it, they wouldn’t fool any real birders they might run into.

  Fortunately, there wasn’t much in the way of law enforcement up here, so even if somebody thought the birders were a bit odd, they weren’t likely to call the cops, and even if they did, it probably wouldn’t be the top priority for an overextended Alaskan police force. Weird-looking birdwatchers? Isn’t that redundant? What are they doing? Walking around in the woods looking through their binoculars? Oh, wow. How sinister! What, you think they’ve come to steal the trees? Smuggle Kodiak bears down into tlae lower forty-eight? C’mon!

  Ventura had installed them at the Two Moose Lodge, a relatively new fifteen-unit motel a few miles from the HAARP site, a place that looked like a bunch of log cabin condominiums. Aside from five ops tromping around outside where they could watch the comings and goings around the last room on the west end of the building where Ventura had put the client, there was an op in the room, a young woman. Armed with a short-barreled shotgun, a snub-nosed revolver, and a couple of knives, Missey White would surely be a big surprise for an unsuspecting assassin who assumed from her bubble butt and perky breasts, all of which were barely hidden under a miniskirt and halter top, that she was a piece of fluff and harmless. If the locals knew Morrison was married, they’d likely assume Missey was a girlfriend he’d brought up here into the woods for fun, where his wife wouldn’t be the wiser.

  And the wife wasn’t apt to drop by unannounced, because a pair of Ventura’s ops were parked in a rented house in Port Townsend on the Morrisons’ street, keeping an eye on Mrs. Morrison. You had to assume that if somebody came after the client, they’d probably consider a pass at his wife worthwhile, and while she wasn’t the primary client, it was just good business to watch her when she and the client were apart.

  It hadn’t taken the ops—another male and female team—but a few hours to figure out that Shannon Morrison, nee Shannon Bell, wasn’t the world’s most faithful spouse. Since they’d begun the surveillance on Monday, Mrs. Morrison had visited a young and well-built leatherworker, one Ray Duncan, and stayed in his shop behind a locked door three times, for more than an hour each visit. It was the opinion of Ventura’s ops that judging from the flushed face and big smile when she left, Mrs. Morrison was not being custom-fitted for moccasins—unless she was doing that with both feet in the air while lying on Duncan’s couch.

  Ventura saw no reason to mention this to his client. Ray Duncan, twenty-seven, had been a resident of the town for more than ten years, long before the Morrisons had moved there, and a background check of the man showed nothing more illegal than a couple of traffic tickets and a dismissed bust for a single marijuana joint in Seattle when he’d been eighteen.

  Mrs. Morrison’s extramarital activities weren’t relevant to protecting the client. Yet, anyway.

  “Situation?” Ventura asked.

  The man to whom he was speaking looked to be about sixty, gray and grizzled, wearing a fisherman’s vest and floppy-brimmed canvas hat, overalls, and boots, and a pair of binoculars and a digital cam dangling from around his neck. A battered copy of Peterson’s Guide to Birds of North America stuck out of a vest pocket next to a small flashlight.

  The older man laughed. “Well, let me see. About thirty minutes ago, something that looked like a big rat ran behind the garbage bin over there. Maybe it was a nutria or a possum—zoology is not my strong suit. And fifteen minutes ago, a light went on in the bathroom of unit number five, stayed on for two minutes, then went out. What else? Oh, yeah, a couple of real big mosquitoes buzzed me. That’s as good as it’s gotten.”
br />   Ventura gave him a tight professional grin in return. “You rather be shooting it out with the Mexican drug dealers again?”

  “No, but if they were all as exciting as this one, I’d have to start taking Viagra just to keep my attention up. This is going to be a cakewalk.”

  “You said that about the Mexicans at first.”

  The older man looked at him. “You expect things to warm?”

  “Highly likely, though probably not for a while yet. I’ll keep you apprised.”

  Ventura drifted away, a man out for a late night stroll, meandering toward the next station, a couple hundred yards away.

  As he walked, he considered the client and the situation again. He had no problems with what the client was doing, that was his business and not Ventura’s, save how it affected the job. Ventura didn’t think much about morality. He had his own ethical system, and it didn’t match that of most citizens when it came to what they did, or why they did it. From his viewpoint, he was mostly, well ... amoral about most things—when you had killed as many people as he had, the rules just didn’t seem to apply to you in quite the same way as they did to normal people. He knew what sociopaths were, and he wasn’t one. He had loved, had hated, had felt the usual emotions. He had been engaged once, but she had broken it off because she wasn’t ready to settle down. He had fathered a child in South America, and though it had been twenty years ago, he still sent support to the woman and his daughter, whom he had seen several times secretly, but never officially met. There were a couple of people he had deleted that he’d felt sorry for, and wished he hadn’t had to do them. So he wasn’t mentally disturbed or unstable, he had just gotten into a line of work that involved terminal violence, and had happened to be very good at it.

  Of course, he had been in business long enough to realize that most governments operated with the same kind of amorality he did in many—if not most—areas. Certainly in those areas where public scrutiny wasn’t likely. He had known federal prosecutors who had let multiple murderers go free so that they could make a case against major drug dealers. He had known intelligence officers who had looked the other way and allowed whole villages of innocent civilians to be killed because to do otherwise would have jeopardized some covert operation. He had known boy-soldiers who had cranked up their assault rifles and hosed grandmothers and babies into bloody pulp—for no other reason than because they had been having a real bad day. All of these people had convinced themselves they had been working for a greater good, that the end justified the means. That what they had done was, in fact, moral.

  Ventura did not try to fool himself that way.

  Protecting a man who had created some kind of mind-control device he wanted to sell to a foreign power for a lot of money was not much in the grand cosmic scheme of things. Ventura wasn’t going to get any piece of the man’s action, nor did he want it. He was hired to do a job, and he would do that. Money was not even a way to keep score, it didn’t mean anything, especially if you had enough of it tucked away to live the rest of your life without ever lifting a finger. No, it was the personal challenge, the achievement of goals you set for yourself, that mattered. When he was hired to kill somebody, he killed them. When he was hired to keep somebody alive, he kept them alive. Simple.

  Up here in the woods where he could command the lines of fire around his client, keeping him alive would be fairly easy. If another birdwatching group showed up, Ventura wouldn’t make any assumptions, but he certainly would consider them a potential threat.

  Outright assassination wasn’t likely, not yet, anyway. No, the worry would be kidnapping, torture, then execution. And it would be a lot harder to protect the man once they went back to civilization.

  Well. Worry about that later. A man with his mind too far into tomorrow was more likely to get blindsided by somebody today. You had to consider the future, of course, but you didn’t live there. Be in the moment, that was the way of it.

  Always.

  The second man in the surveillance unit watched Ventura approach him across the parking lot, lit by the yellow bug lights mounted on tall wooden posts. Some of the bugs were apparently too stupid to realize they couldn’t see the yellow light, for dozens of them swarmed the lamps, flitting around in ragged orbits, banging against the glass that covered the bulbs.

  The op disguised as a birder kept one hand under the untucked tails of an unbuttoned, oversized, short-sleeved shirt until he was sure it was Ventura heading toward him. Good. You never let your guard down when you were working. Never.

  13

  Thursday, June 9th

  Washington, D.C.

  Michaels could hardly believe it. “Toni! I’m glad to see you.”

  She nodded. “Can I come in?”

  “Oh, yeah, yeah, come in, come in.” He reached for her bag.

  “I got it,” she said.

  Inside, there was an awkward silence.

  “You want something to drink? Eat?” God, she looked great. It was all he could do to keep the baboonlike grin from taking over his face.

  “We need to talk,” she said.

  His stomach twisted and churned, but he said, “Yes.”

  “Why did you lie to me?”

  “I... I...”

  “You said you slept with her!”

  “Toni—”

  “She says you didn’t! Which is it, Alex?!”

  She was facing him squarely now, and her anger was a tangible thing in the room. “Did you have sex with Angela Cooper or not?”

  “No,” he said, his voice quiet.

  “Jesus Christ, Alex! What is the matter with you?!”

  He raised his hands palms up, then dropped them. “I—It’s hard to explain.”

  “Well, you are gonna explain it, right here and right now!”

  He nodded, and started to tell it.

  When he got to the end, she was shaking her head. “Why didn’t you tell me that was what happened?”

  He had had a lot of time to think about that, too much time. “Because I was ashamed.”

  “You turned down a gorgeous woman who wanted to jump your bones and you were ashamed?”

  “I shouldn’t have gone to supper with her, I shouldn’t have had the beer, and I sure as hell shouldn’t have gone to her apartment, shucked my clothes, and let her rub my back.” “All true. Why did you?”

  He’d had time to think about that one, too. “You and I were having some problems. I was rattled about the whole British situation, I wasn’t in control of work, of what was going on with us, there was all that crap about Megan and Susie and that private eye. Angela is an attractive, competent woman and she was interested in me. I was flattered. I know none of it excuses what I did, but just so you know.”

  “You’re an idiot,” she said.

  “I know. It never should have come up,” he said.

  “So to speak,” she said. She gave him a small grin, and a great weight left him, as if he had suddenly shrugged off a coat made of lead. “But that’s not what I meant. You’re an idiot for not telling me.”

  “When I saw you in the hotel lobby that morning, I didn’t think you would believe me. You were certain I had done it, and you didn’t want to talk about it, remember ? You said you didn’t want to hear another word.”

  She frowned, as if trying to remember. “Did I say that?”

  “It doesn’t matter. The truth was, I was lying naked on a table with a naked woman straddling me and the desire was there.”

  “But you didn’t act on it.”

  “The thought is as bad as the deed.”

  She smiled again, shook her head. “Not on my planet, it isn’t. You felt guilty because in the moment you thought about it? You really are an idiot. If they could hang us for thinking, we’d all be pushing up daisies. You can’t always control what you think, only what you do. You could have saved us both a lot of grief if you had just told me, Alex, even if I told you not to.”

  “Yeah, well, I can see that now.”

>   She reached for his hands, took them in hers. “Come here.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  And just like that, Michaels’s life was very, very good again.

  Friday, June 10th

  Anchorage, Alaska

  They were in the airport waiting for the Alaska Airlines flight to SeaTac to board when Morrison’s new phone cheeped. He froze for an instant. It was them! He looked at Ventura, then slipped the wireless headset on and adjusted the straw-microphone. “Yes?”

  A crisp, accentless voice said, “Good morning. I understand you have a used car for sale?”

  Morrison’s neck prickled with gooseflesh and he had a sudden urge to visit the nearest toilet. This was the phrase he had told them to use, and outside of the anonymous note he had posted into a security page run by the Chinese, nobody had been given the number of this particular phone, which he’d paid for in cash and registered under a phony name.

  He put his thumb over the mike. “It’s the Chinese,” he said to Ventura.

  Ventura looked at his watch. “Thirty seconds,” he said, pointing at the phone. “No more. Follow me.”

  Morrison nodded and stood. He moved his thumb from the mike as Ventura pulled his own com from his pocket and started talking into it quietly.

  “Yes, I have a car for sale.”

  “I would like to see it,” the man said. “When can we get together?”

  “Is your call number blocked?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll call you back.”

  “I’ll look forward to it.”

  Morrison thumbed the discom button on the belt phone.

  Ventura said, “My people have scanned the incoming number, we have it. Go in there and put the phone in the trash.” He pointed at the men’s room.