Breaking Point

  “Which you’ll find out all about if you don’t tell me what I want to know,” the boss said. “Way I figure it, you have kidnapping, assaulting a federal officer, attempted murder of a policeman, and a shitload of illegal weapons charges staring you in the face, at the very least. A man your age? You’re going to die in prison.”

  That seemed to get his attention.

  “And so why the fuck should I help you, I’m gonna die in prison anyhow?”

  “It’s real simple. I can make the federal charges go away. No kidnapping, no assault, no visits from the BATF about all that hardware. I might even be able to convince the locals to cut you some slack on the shooting, since you didn’t hit anybody. You could be out in five, six years, maybe.”

  Fiscus hesitated for a moment.

  Jay could almost see the wheels going inside the man’s head. Don’t do it. Jay beamed his thoughts at Fiscus. Go and rot in jail forever, asshole!

  “I can get you a lawyer if you want,” Michaels said.

  “No, no lawyers. I’ll take the deal. What do you want to know?”

  Michaels nodded.

  Woodland Hills, California

  “What a mess,” Ventura said to himself again. He was on the freeway with the same name as his own, driving in the general direction of Burbank. “What a fucking mess.”

  And it was, too. Back in the theater were ten shot-up Chinese agents, all of them either dead or well on the way by now. Two of his men had taken stray bullets from the Chinese, but neither were fatal wounds. Four screenwriters had been hit, one was dead, another one pretty bad, two fairly minor. Blackwell was in bad shape, but he’d probably live, even if he wouldn’t be eating any caramel apples for a few months.

  Wu was absolutely dead.

  And Morrison was also gone, killed by somebody on his own side.

  What a pisser that was.

  The wounded civilians were being hauled by cars to the nearest hospital, where they’d be dropped off, the drivers not staying to answer questions. Ventura’s men would be taken to a doctor who was paid to take care of people and keep his mouth shut. The remaining unwounded screenwriters, twenty-three of them, had been stuffed into a storeroom and locked in. Probably half of them were already working on their next movie, one involving a shoot-out in a theater. They wouldn’t starve; there were a lot of candy bars and hot dog buns in there with them.

  Outside, team members had distracted the Chinese surveillance team where feasible—a pepper bomb in the carpet truck, a sap of lead shot against the head of the coffee drinker in Starbucks, like that, but thankfully, no more guns.

  Everybody else had taken off on prearranged escape routes.

  Ventura realized that he could kiss the IMAX theater good-bye. Too bad. It had been making a profit for the first time in three years.

  What a crappy, stinking, rotten piece of work this had been. Not only had he lost the client he was supposed to protect, but one of his own men had done it. No choice, really. In Blackwell’s shoes, he’d have probably done exactly the same thing.

  I never should have given Morrison that gun.

  Yeah, 20/20 hindsight there. Too late to think about that now.

  Though there never would be a way to be absolutely sure, Ventura knew what had happened. One of the Chinese agents had gotten careless, since his own people were more adept than to show a gun that was supposed to be hidden. One of the Chinese agents had gotten careless. Whichever of his people who saw the piece must have felt it was being brought into play. All of his shooters had been told to stay cool—unless a weapon came out. The shout of “Gun!” had been the agreed-upon signal for his shooters to take out their targets, and once that happened, all bets were off.

  Had the Chinese intended to take the shortcut? To grab Morrison instead of paying for the data?

  Well, it didn’t matter. Done was done, no point in crying over it now. Still, there were consequences to consider. The Chinese were going to be most unhappy, and they might well decide that Morrison and Ventura had ripped them off for their four hundred million and decide to try and get it back, and that was real bad. Morrison wasn’t going to be giving anything back, and Ventura didn’t have it.

  He changed lanes, and a fat man in a black Porsche honked at him for cutting in. Ventura had a sudden urge to pull his Coonan and put a round into the fat man’s windshield. Honk at somebody else, dickhead.

  He resisted the urge. That wouldn’t help matters, to start shooting morons on the L.A. freeway. Once you started, you’d run out of ammo quick. Probably couldn’t carry enough extra rounds in a moving van to get them all...

  He giggled at the thought. He was stressed out, yes, better just take a few deep breaths and think this through.

  He did just that. Three deep breaths, in and out, and now think about it calmly.

  Well. The first thing was, the couple of million he had tucked away didn’t seem like all that much money anymore. The way he figured it, he was going to have to disappear, just as he had told Morrison he would have to disappear, forever. Yes, he was living on borrowed time and had been for a long time, but the truth was, he wasn’t quite ready to check out yet.

  If the deal had come off, he’d have been safe enough from the likes of Wu. They’d have gotten their money’s worth, and pros didn’t need to take each other out for doing their jobs.

  But it hadn’t come off. The Chinese were out that money; they didn’t get what they wanted, and too bad for them. This was certainly going to make them real unhappy.

  Morrison hadn’t given Ventura the account number, so he couldn’t get his hands on it, either. Too bad for everybody.

  The fat man found an opening on the outside lane, whipped the Porsche around Ventura, and zipped past. He waved his middle finger at Ventura as he went by, and though he couldn’t hear him, Ventura could read the man’s lips easy enough. A fourteen-letter word.

  Maybe he could shoot just the one and stop?

  The Porsche accelerated and gained away, and Ventura forgot the fat man.

  The Chinese money was out of reach, but—there was more where that had come from. Because if he had been telling the truth—and Ventura had no reason to doubt that he had been—Morrison had told him where to find the secret that had just caused more than a dozen people to die. And the Chinese weren’t the only oysters in the ocean who had pearls.

  Yeah, okay, it was a bad deal all around, a major disaster, a perfect example of Murphy’s Law. But now that it was done, Ventura had to get on with his life. That moment was past. If you drove down the road looking only into your rearview mirror, you were going to plow into somebody ahead of you. Time to look forward.

  Somebody could still benefit from all this, and it might as well be him. He could even drop the price a little. He didn’t need four hundred million, he could get by on half that. No point in being greedy, was there?

  He drove toward the airport in Burbank. He had a flight leaving in an hour. It would probably take the screenwriters longer than that to figure a way out of the storeroom. Yes. He had a course of action now. He knew what he was going to do.

  34

  Wednesday, June 15th

  Quantico, Virginia

  “I just got a call from Julio Fernandez,” Jay said. “John Howard is home.”

  “That was quick,” Toni said.

  Michaels nodded at her. “Yeah. Old soldiers never die, but they don’t hang out in hospitals tempting fate if they can help it.”

  They were in the conference room at HQ. Somebody had put a pot of coffee and a box of assorted pastries on the table. Michaels picked up a bear claw, examined it, and put it back. He selected a glazed donut instead. A nice sugar rush and a little caffeine, just what he needed, so he could rot his teeth, court diabetes, and raise his blood pressure all at the same time.

  Hell with it. Given the way things had been going lately, what difference would it make? He took a big bite of the donut.

  “Julio says Howard’s ready to come back to work no
w.”

  “He can take a few days off and heal. So can you.”

  Jay shook his head. “I’m fine. I want to be here for this. It’ll be a lot less strenuous in VR. I can ride the net here, or I can do it at home, but I’m gonna ride somewhere.”

  “All right,” Michaels said. “Let’s review what we have. According to your Mr. Fiscus, the man we are looking for used to be some kind of freelance hired assassin who supposedly got out of that business and into bodyguarding a few years back. Aside from ‘Dick Grayson,’ he uses a variety of names, among them Diego, Gabriel, Harbor, Colorado, and Ventura. Is he Hispanic, do we think?”

  Jay laughed, then said, “Ow.” He pressed his hand against his sore rib.

  “What?”

  “I shouldn’t laugh. I don’t think he’s necessarily Hispanic or Latino, Boss. Those are all names of Los Angeles freeways.”

  Michaels nodded. “Okay, so he knows about Batman and the SoCal highway system. What else do we have?”

  “Zip. I looked in the phone directories,” Jay said. “He ain’t listed, and we haven’t been able to get a facial-points match on any police agency computers. Man has a very low e-profile.”

  Michaels looked at Toni. He had to ask. “You’re going to take the job with mainstream, aren’t you? Working for the director?”

  “I—yes.”

  “So is the information flow going to be both ways?”

  “That’s what the job description says.”

  “Okay. See what you can get from them on this.”

  If they could find out who this Ventura character was, if they could background and history him, they might be able to track him down. And if they found him, they’d find Morrison.

  The intercom blipped. “Yes?”

  His secretary said, “Sir, we have an incoming call from the director for Toni Fiorella.”

  Michaels frowned. He waved at Toni, who picked up a handset on the table.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  The director said something, and Toni nodded. “Yes, ma’am, I have decided.” She glanced at Michaels. “I’ll take it.”

  His gut twisted a little at that, but she was a grown woman, she had to make her own choices.

  “Yes, ma’am, go ahead.”

  Toni listened for what seemed like a long time. Neither Michaels nor Jay made any pretense they were doing anything other than listening to her end of the conversation.

  “I see. Yes, I’ll tell them. Yes, ma’am, I’m glad to be onboard.”

  She cradled the phone, looking disturbed.

  “What?” Michaels said.

  “Sheriff’s deputies in Woodland Hills, California, were called to a disturbance at a movie theater there a few minutes ago. Inside, they found more than a dozen bodies, all shot dead, plus a locked storeroom full of screenwriters.”

  “Corpses and a room full of screenwriters? This concerns us how?” Jay put in.

  “One of the bodies was IDed as a man named Qian Ho Wu, a registered foreign lobbyist who the FBI Counter Espionage Unit has tagged as a probable spy for China.”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “One of the bodies has been identified as Dr. Patrick Morrison.”

  “Oh, shit,” Jay said. Then he thought about it a second, and said, “But that solves our problem, doesn’t it? Dead men don’t generate radio broadcasts.”

  Toni said it before Michaels had a chance to say it: “You’re assuming he didn’t tell anybody how he did it before he died.”

  “Well, he probably didn’t tell the Chinese. Maybe they were after him because they figured out he was responsible for what happened to their villages. They caught up with him, there was a shoot-out, end of story.”

  “Too easy,” Michaels said. He tapped the com. “Get me on the next flight going to Los Angeles.”

  “You’re not a field agent, Alex,” Toni said. “The FBI will take care of this, you can’t—”

  “But I can,” he said, cutting her off. “Portland got zapped with some kind of death ray, the leader of my strike team is in bed nursing a gunshot wound, and my top computer whiz just got the crap beat out of him—not to mention I had the guy responsible for all of this in my hands and I let him walk away. This has been a FUBAR from the word go.”

  “You didn’t know—”

  “But I know now. You want to tell your new boss I’m overstepping my bounds, fine, go ahead. I can take some vacation days myself if I have to.”

  “You don’t have to,” she said. “And if you want, I’ll go with you.”

  He considered his next words carefully. He considered not saying anything, but decided he needed to: “This is Net Force’s problem, Toni, and I think Net Force should take care of it.”

  She blinked at him. “And I’m not part of Net Force anymore, is that what you’re saying?”

  “You said it, not me.”

  She nodded. “I see.”

  He didn’t like the way it made him feel, didn’t like the distress on her face, but it was going to come out eventually, and better sooner than later. Maybe they could salvage their personal relationship; he sure hoped so. But the job had already changed. It wasn’t going to be the same as it had been. If Toni didn’t work for him anymore, okay, fine, he could learn to deal with that. If she was going to report about what he did to somebody else, he needed to have some control as to what he let her see and hear. If the director wanted to keep tabs on him, all right, that was her prerogative. Nothing said he had to make it easy for her.

  Toni had made her choice. Now they’d both have to live with it.

  In the air over northern California

  Ventura glanced around, uneasy. There was nobody looking at him, and he hadn’t seen anybody following him, but something felt... off, somehow. He was in full-alert mode, scanning, listening, being aware, and he hadn’t spotted anything about which to be worried, but even so, something was not quite right.

  He glanced at his watch. Maybe it was the flight. He was concerned about being in the jet’s first-class cabin—

  “Can I get you anything?”

  Ventura gave the young flight attendant a polite smile. “No, thank you.” He had booked a business-class e-ticket, using one of a dozen fake IDs he always carried, but the flight had been full, and by the time he’d checked in, the only empty seats remaining had been in first class. Normally, he didn’t fly first class; it was harder to blend into the herd when you were up front. But demanding to sit in the tourist section would really make you stand out—who refused a free upgrade?—and the idea was to be as anonymous as possible. You wanted to be just another middle-aged businessman, do nothing to stick in somebody’s memory, and hope you didn’t remind the stewardess of her favorite uncle.

  The attendant moved on, and Ventura turned to stare out at the terrain. The flight from L.A. to Seattle took about three hours. He’d rent a car at SeaTac and drive to Port Townsend, probably another three or four hours—you had to allow for the ferry ride, plus he wanted to do a little circling for his approach. That would put him there in the evening, but it didn’t get dark up this far north in the summer before maybe nine-thirty or ten. So there was no real hurry, since night was your friend. Plenty of time to stop and have supper, get set up, do the job.

  He looked out through the jet’s double-plastic window. There was a big snow-covered mountain below and in the distance. Shasta? Must be.

  Ventura figured the local authorities in L.A. had uncovered the mess in the theater by now, and if so, they had certainly identified Dr. Morrison. As hard as the feds would have been looking for Morrison after the shootings in Alaska, they’d be on the case quickly. He had considered hauling the corpse away, disposing of it, but since the man was dead and no longer his responsibility, it was tactically much smarter to let him be found. He’d made sure that Morrison’s wallet was still in the dead man’s pocket, to speed things up. That would certainly stop the direct search, and maybe the feds wouldn’t be all that interested in looking for accomplices.


  It wouldn’t slow the Chinese down. Surely Wu had passed his intel along to somebody higher up the food chain—Ventura couldn’t imagine that the man’s stingy government had given him hundreds of millions of dollars to spend without knowing every detail of what they were buying. The Chinese would very much like to speak to anybody connected to the deal. Once they found out Morrison was dead, they’d really have their underwear in a wad. Ventura would be at the top of their list of people to see.

  The feds would have dropped their surveillance of Morrison’s house as soon as they realized what had happened to him—dead men didn’t move around a lot on their own, and the only way he’d be coming home would be in a box. Ventura’s team was, of course, long gone, pulled off as soon as he’d realized the man he’d shot in Alaska was a marshal and not a Chinese agent, and that more feds would thus be coming to have a little chat with Morrison’s spouse. He hadn’t told his client, who thought his young trophy wife was protected—no point in giving him anything else to worry about.

  The feds would probably want to have a few more chats with the widow Morrison, and certainly the Chinese would pay the young lady a visit, but since she didn’t know anything, she couldn’t tell either side anything. She might be joining her late husband by the time the Chinese figured that out, but that wasn’t his problem—as long as he wasn’t there when the Yellow Peril came to call.

  The Yellow Peril. He smiled. He wasn’t a racist. Sure, he played that card for people like Bull Smith, to allow them to believe he was simpatico with their beliefs, but he didn’t care one way or another about somebody’s skin color or gender. He’d worked with people of every race, male and female, and the single criterion that mattered to him was how well they could do the job. If you could pull the trigger when it came to that, and hit your mark, you could be a green hermaphrodite with purple stripes for all he cared. He’d learned the term “Yellow Peril” from the old Fu Manchu books, material that had been written in an age where racism was the default belief and nobody thought much about it.