Breaking Point

  Ventura looked around the parking lot, which was still mostly empty. The first showing in the theater was usually noon or later; most of the stores in the shopping center didn’t open until nine or nine-thirty, so the sub rosa ops fielded by the Chinese had to work a little to hide. In the parking lot of the mall, broadside to the theater, there was a supposedly empty delivery van purporting to be from a carpet store, but Ventura would bet rubies to red rust that somebody was hidden in the back watching every move he made. Maybe through rifle sights, though he didn’t think they’d shoot him.

  Another smile. During the American Revolution, there had been a British sniper, a crack shot, who had once lined his rifle sights up on George Washington. From the reports, it would have been an easy shot, but the sniper hadn’t taken it. Washington had been standing with his back to the shooter, and a true British gentleman wouldn’t shoot an officer in the back, now would he? Could have changed the whole course of the war, that one shot un-taken, but that wasn’t the issue. There were rules, after all. Otherwise, what was the point?

  A public works-type truck was parked next to a manhole cover nearby, orange rubber cones and blinking lights blocking the area, with three men in hard hats industriously pretending to be working on something down under the street.

  A telephone truck was backed up to a junction box across the street at the pizza place.

  There were also joggers, dog walkers, women pushing baby carriages, bicyclists, and little old ladies in tennis shoes strolling to the stores for their daily mall walks. Ventura figured that any or all of them could be other than what they seemed. Probably some of them were legit, but he couldn’t make that assumption about any particular one—that kind of thinking got you killed. That old lady might be a kung fu expert; and instead of little Mac, that baby carriage might hold little Mac-10. If you were prepared for the worst, then anything less was a gift.

  He smiled as he headed back toward the theater. He liked films, but he had always found those movies hilarious where the bad-guy kidnappers or extortionists showed up to collect their money and never looked twice at the wino on the park bench, or the young couple holding hands, or the priest feeding the pigeons, all of whom might as well have had big flashing neon signs on them saying “Cop!” Crooks who were that stupid deserved to get shot—it was good for the gene pool.

  Of course, good people were always hard to find, in most any line of work. Ventura himself had only a dozen pros he’d personally let watch his back when the bullets started to fly, and it had taken twenty-odd years to find that many he trusted. They all worked for him on and off. There were another twenty or thirty second-tier shooters who could do things like the theater setup today, who would follow instructions and hit their marks if push came to shoot. Past that? Well, most of the people he’d met who played at being soldiers of fortune or freelance bodyguards or hitters were okay at best, coffin fodder at worst. He figured the Chinese would send the sharpest they could round up on short notice to play here today, but how many they could get inside was tricky. Too few and they wouldn’t feel covered properly; too many, and it would alert anybody half-awake. If he had to trade places with Chilly Wu, he’d be a little concerned about that.

  Morrison stood by the concession stand, nervously sucking on a straw stuck in a cup of fizzy orange drink.

  He’s going to ask me if everything is okay, Ventura thought.

  “Everything okay?”

  Ventura smiled. “Under control.”

  “I’m worried about this screenwriter business,” Morrison said. “Aren’t you concerned that the Chinese might know about it, slip some ringers in?”

  “Not really. The op in the ticket booth is checking membership cards. He’ll scan those into our systems. I have a man in the manager’s office with links to the WGA database. He’ll match the names on the cards against a list of members, and the faces on the closed-circuit secircuit security cam in the booth against those in the guild’s database—those are new, the pictures—and also against California driver’s licenses. Anybody who shows up to sneak in using a friend’s card had better not sneeze at the wrong time.”

  “You aren’t worried at all? Wouldn’t a hidden metal detector or X ray be wise?”

  “No point. They know we chose this place for a reason, and they know we’re here several hours early. I figure they’ll try to slip a minimum of eight men in with Wu, a maximum of twelve. I am assuming they will all be armed. I have twenty men on call, but I probably won’t use all of them. Remember, the idea here is not to get into a shooting match, but to keep the balance of power even. It’s our place and Wu knows that. If he gets his people in, he’ll be a lot more comfortable. If he couldn’t get them in, then it might make him twitchy; and that’s not what we want.”

  “No?‘

  “No. A nervous man might do something rash. They’ll take what you have for free if they can get it that way, but if they realize they can’t, they’ll pay for it. What we want is a nice smooth negotiation in which the Chinese get what they want, and you walk away a rich man, everybody’s happy, a nice win-win situation.”

  “But if they try something—”

  “—they won’t live to regret it, Doctor. Then we have to start all over again with a new negotiating team. Nobody wants that.”

  But secretly, a small part of Ventura wanted exactly that.

  C’mon, Wu. Show me what you got. Reach for your pocket—and let’s see who goes home.

  31

  Wednesday, June 15th

  Quantico, Virginia

  Michaels stopped at Jay’s office, but didn’t see him. He saw instead one of the techs, Ray DeCamp, carrying a stack of hardcopy printouts. The man always wore thick, round computer glasses while at work, so of course he had a nickname appropriate to that:

  “Hey, Owl. Jay around?”

  “Commander. Nah, he said he hadda go into town, said he’d be back inna couple hours.” Owl had a strong Boston accent, so the last word came out “ow-wuz.”

  That surprised Michaels. Jay seldom left during the day for any reason. A lot of times, before he’d hooked up with the Buddhist girl Soji, Gridley would stay in his office for days, sleeping on the couch and showering in the gym dressing room. There were jokes that he was a vampire, that exposure to sunlight would cause him to burst into flames. And coming from other ghost-white computer geeks who spent a considerable amount of their own time in semidark rooms, that was saying something.

  Oh, well. Given everything else going on around here lately, Jay leaving the building during the day was no weirder than the rest of it.

  “Hey, Alex.”

  He looked up and refocused on Toni. “Hey,” he said. He repressed a sigh. He’d flown off the handle this morning. Sure, she had provoked him, but he expected better of himself. A man who couldn’t control his temper was weak—losing it almost always got you in more trouble than it solved.

  “You want to talk to me?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. Come on, we can go to my office.”

  “Kind of stuffy there. How about the gym?”

  He had to smile. His office, his advantage. The gym was where she was stronger. He said, “Why don’t we go to the conference room instead?”

  She smiled back at him, and he knew she understood what he’d been thinking. What they had both been thinking. God, he loved smart women!

  Washington, D.C.

  Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea coming here, Jay thought.

  “Here” was a kind of Army-Navy surplus store, though that wasn’t strictly true—there were odds and ends from other branches of military surplus for sale here, too, including some stuff from what looked like the Coast Guard, the U.S. Marine Corps, and the Russian Air Force. And on one scratched glass counter next to a rack of moldy uniforms from some unrecognizable African army, there were even Net Force buttons and insignia.

  The whole place had a sour odor, like unwashed cotton socks mixed with damp wool, and instead of air-conditioning, a pair of l
arge and loud metal fans mounted on seven-foot-tall posts circulated the too-warm and fetid air without doing much to cool it, or the people inside. Some of the patrons looked familiar—maybe Jay had seen their pictures on the post office’s Most Wanted website—and none of them were what you would call savory.

  Still, he was Jay Gridley, a master scenarist. He’d built uglier scenarios in VR.

  The guy perched on the stool behind the counter next to the old-style mechanical cash register was the least appetizing character in the place. He was fat, bald, and wore an eyepatch made of what looked like rattlesnake skin over his right eye, and vaguely green Army-style fatigues that had probably been unwashed since the Spanish-American War.

  As Jay watched, a customer who looked old enough to have been a veteran of that same war shuffled to the register. The old man was in baggy green parachute pants and a stained and ratty green T-shirt over untied combat boots, the laces dragging along the floor. The man plunked a bayonet onto the counter. “How much for this here baloney slicer?” the old man said. He cackled, amused at his own poor joke, a laugh that ended in a dry wheeze.

  Jay took a step backward, so he wouldn’t have to share too much of the man’s air. Surely the guy must have something contagious.

  “That’s for an ’03 Springfield,” Eyepatch behind the counter said. His raspy voice sounded as if it had been pickled in high-proof whiskey, then left out in the desert to bleach for a few years.

  Jay made a mental note of the sound. He could use it in a scenario. This whole place was great research; he could get all kinds of material from it.

  Patch picked the bayonet up. It was rusty, the wood handle cracked and worn. “Don’t see a lot of these around much anymore.”

  “I know what it is, sonny. I just need to know how much it costs.”

  “I could let it go for ... eighteen.”

  “What, cents?”

  “Dollars.”

  “Sheeit, sonny, you cain’t get ten for it. Look at it. It’ll take me a week to scrape the rust offen it. And lookit the handle.”

  “I can sell you some naval jelly that’ll eat the rust right off. I might take fifteen.”

  “Eleven.”

  “Twelve.”

  “Now you’re talking.”

  The old man pulled a clump of greasy-looking bills from his voluminous pants and peeled a dozen ones off a wad that would choke a rhino.

  Patch rang the sale up. “You want a bag for it?”

  “No, I’m gonna walk down the streets of D.C. carrying it where the cops kin see me and shoot me fulla holes. Yes, I want a bag for it. I’mona track me down a couple of cats been diggin’ in my garbage and give um a new haircut.”

  Patch pulled a purple plastic bag from under the counter, with the store’s logo printed on the side: “Fiscus Military Supply,” it said under a pair of crossed rifles and stylized lighting bolts.

  When the customer shuffled out, Jay watched to see if he was going to trip on the untied bootlaces and break his neck, but the old man achieved the door without incident.

  “Old fart couldn’t track an elephant herd across a football field covered with fresh snow. What can I do for you?” Patch said.

  “You Vince Fiscus?”

  “That would be me, yeah. And who wants to know?”

  “I’m Jay Gridley. I called earlier.” Jay pulled out his Net Force ID card.

  Fiscus took the card and looked at it carefully, turned it over and examined the back. The hologram flashed a rainbow reflection under the overhead lights. “You want to sell this? Tell ’em you lost it, they’ll give you another, but I don’t have any Net Force ID.” He waved one flaccid arm to take in the store.

  “I don’t think so.” He took his ID back. He wanted to wipe it off, but thought that might not look too good.

  “All right. What it’s about, Mr. Net Force Agent?”

  Jay kind of liked the sound of that. He tendered the picture of the mystery man. He said, “You know this guy?”

  Fiscus looked at the picture. He grinned, showing a gap where a front eyetooth had once been.

  “That’s ole K.S., sure I know him.”

  Jay felt a sudden surge of excitement. Aha! Gotcha! “K.S.?”

  “Yeah, stands for ‘Killer Spook.’ Ain’t seen him in a while. He never give me a real name, so I just called him K.S.”

  “How is it that you know him?”

  “Oh, he’s been coming around for—must be five, six years now. We first did a little business back in, what? ought-four or ought-five. Sold him some fourth-gen spookeyes—starlight scope image intensifiers, Army Ranger surplus, off an old SIPEsuit. He’s bought a few things since then, some of it in person, some of it over the wire. What are you looking for him for? He’s not into computer stuff.”

  “I am not at liberty to say,” Jay said. “It concerns an ongoing investigation.”

  Fiscus shrugged.

  “Why ‘Killer Spook’?”

  Fiscus showed the tooth-gap again. “I asked around, some people I know. Rumor was, this guy made a living doing odd jobs for various folks, including a few guvamint ones. Black bag ops, wetwork, stuff you don’t want to show up on the books, you know what I mean?”

  This was getting better by the minute. Colorful ole Vince here was giving him all kinds of information. This exterior investigation stuff was a walk in the park—why did the field ops make it sound so tough? Must be worried about job security.

  “What kind of weapons you guys carrying now?” Fiscus asked. “I heard that issue was some kinda pansy stun-gun.”

  “Kick-tasers,” Jay said. That was true. Jay did have a compressed-gas electric dart gun. His was in a drawer somewhere at home. Or maybe at the office—he hadn’t seen it in a while. Since he wasn’t a field agent, he didn’t have to qualify with the weapon, and he had only fired the thing once, a long time ago. He did all his shooting in VR.

  “Now about this K.S. guy,” Jay said. “Where might I find him?”

  “Well, I’m afraid I’m gonna have to ask you why you need him again,” Fiscus said.

  “Like I said, I can’t tell you that.”

  “You wanna bet?” Fiscus raised his whiskey-soaked voice a couple of notches. “Vic, Rudy! C’mere!”

  Two fairly young men in green-on-green camouflage shirts and pants tucked into gleaming combat boots seemed to materialize from nowhere behind Jay. The pair of them were huge, five, maybe six hundred pounds combined.

  Uh-oh.

  Jay had seen enough vids to know he was maybe in a little trouble here. He was alone, unarmed, and it looked as if he was about to make the unwilling acquaintance of Vic and Rudy. Maybe it was time to see if discretion was indeed the better part of valor. He smiled nervously and started to head for the door.

  “Whoa, hold up there, Mr. Net Force Agent.”

  Jay looked at Fiscus and saw that the man held a big, dark metal pistol. “You aren’t supposed to have that in the District. It’s illegal.”

  “Do tell. Take your hands away from your belt and put them where I can see them.” He waved the pistol.

  Jay had another sudden flash. The only reason Fiscus had told him any of this stuff about the man he’d come looking for was because he didn’t expect Jay to be able to act on it—or tell anybody else.

  He had seen a lot of vids.

  Jay suddenly had a vacuum in his belly that must rival deepest space. This was not VR. He couldn’t just ax a command and drop back into his office. That gun was real.

  He was turned slightly so Fiscus couldn’t see his right hip. He double-triple-pressed the panic button on his virgil—one-two-three, one-two-three—then slowly moved his hands away from his body.

  “Take it easy,” Jay said. “Let’s be reasonable here.”

  “That’s real good, Mr. Agent. Now, let’s mosey on into the back room, and have ourselves a little talk, hey?”

  Woodland Hills, California

  Morrison leaned against the counter in the bathroom, staring a
t himself in the mirror. His face had a psychedelic cast to it—it was as if he was seeing a stranger.

  He washed his hands, bent, and rinsed out his mouth. He had the little gun in his sport coat pocket, but the small weight of it bumping against his right hip was not comforting. He was scared, frightened to the point where all he wanted to do was to take off at full speed and run until he couldn’t keep going. He wanted to find a place to hide when he got there and sleep until all this somehow went away.

  He looked at the frightened man in the mirror again. Running and hiding wouldn’t do any good now. It was too late. In a few minutes, an agent for the Chinese would arrive—already some of his people were probably lined up outside the theater waiting to get in—and Morrison was going to have to sit and negotiate a deal with the man who called himself Chilly Wu.

  Morrison stood there for what seemed like a long time, staring into the mirror, but not really seeing himself any longer.

  Ventura came around the comer behind him, and Morrison jumped.

  “Wu just pulled up. You ready?”

  “I—Yes, as ready as I can be.”

  “Don’t worry. My man in the projection booth has an Anschutz Biathlon rifle that will be lined up on the back of Wu’s head the second he takes his seat. The shooter can hit a quarter ten for ten at that distance. Every one of Wu’s people will have somebody watching him. We have this covered.”

  Despite just washing out his mouth, it was dry again. “Listen,” he said, “there’s something I want you to know. I have a hidden copy of the data. If something happens to me, I want you to have it. Sell it, give it away, whatever you want, I don’t care, but—sell it to anybody but the Chinese.”

  “Nothing is going to happen to you.”

  “I believe you. But just in case. This is the only original research I’ve ever done that amounted to anything. It’s important work. I don’t want to see it lost.”

  “If it makes you feel better, fine. I’ll see that it gets to a good home.”