Breaking Point

by Tom Clancy

  After his reconnaissance patrol, Ventura found a restaurant still open and had a late supper. He took his time, and when he was done, he parked downtown and located a busy pub. He bought a beer and nursed it, killing more time. It was after ten-forty-five P.M. when he left, having spoken to nobody but the waitress.

  At this time of night, given the lack of traffic—there was almost none—Ventura didn’t drive past Morrison’s house even once. If the Chinese had people watching, or if some laggard fed had hung around, a car passing by would certainly be an object of interest if it was the only one they’d seen for an hour or two. He knew where the house was, knew how to get there, and he would be a lot harder to spot on foot, as long as he didn’t walk down the middle of the road waving a light.

  He had made some purchases when he’d gotten here. There was a big grocery-department store complex on the highway into town, not quite a Wal-Mart, but big enough. He stopped there and bought black jeans, a black long-sleeved T-shirt, and a navy blue windbreaker, as well as a pair of thin-soled black wrestling shoes. He’d changed clothes in a public rest room downtown after he left the bar, putting the new clothes on under his pale gray slacks and white shirt. The rest room was not far from the police station, which appeared to have all of two people manning it.

  He parked the car five blocks away from Morrison’s, in a line of other cars at the curb. If some sharp-eye local patrol cop happened to notice a vehicle that didn’t belong to anybody he knew on the street, likely he would think it was somebody visiting. A rental car with Washington plates wouldn’t exactly scream “trouble.”

  He had the Coonan under the windbreaker—it was chilly enough to justify a light jacket, if not two shirts and two pairs of pants—and he carried a set of lock picks and spare magazines in one windbreaker pocket, a small flashlight in the other. Probably nobody would notice him at this hour. In his mind, he was B. W. Corona, married, two kids, up to meet his family for a holiday. He was staying at a local B&B down in town—he couldn’t remember the name, but it was that big Victorian place on the corner, you know?—and he was out walking because he couldn’t sleep.

  Subterfuge was in the attitude. A cop might stop somebody skulking from shadow to shadow if he spotted him, but a tourist out walking had a different look, a different feel to him. Until he got closer to his destination, that was what Ventura was going to be, a tourist. A local cop would see nothing more. And when the bars started to close, that was probably where the local patrol car would be—looking for drunks.

  Once he was within a block or so of his destination, Ventura would shuck the white shirt and light slacks and become a ninja, part of the night. He would be invisible in the darkness, but if a cop did somehow miraculously see him, then it would be the cop’s bad luck.

  At this stage of the game, he couldn’t leave anybody behind to tell tales.

  He’d find a quiet spot and wait until it was late enough for the widow Morrison to get to sleep, then he would move.

  The rental car waiting at the Port Townsend Airport was a six-year-old Datsun that was badly in need of a tune-up. Only thing they had available, the guy from Rent-a-Beater had told him. Somebody had rented the good Dodge only half an hour earlier. The contract had been done over the phone, the rental place was closed, and the keys were over the sun visor.

  Trusting souls up here. Then again, somebody would really need a ride pretty bad to swipe this hunk of junk.

  The Datsun chugged and rattled along, ran ragged, and nearly stalled several times. The dash GPS was broken, but there was a worn and greasy paper map in the glove box, and between that and his virgil’s GPS, Michaels was able to locate the address he wanted.

  He knew that Ventura had been headed here. Jay had gotten the GPS readings from Brink’s, and Port Townsend wasn’t really on the way to anywhere else, unless you planned to catch a ferry to the San Juan Islands. By nine, Ventura’s rental car was in the town, and it was still here now, at eleven, but Michaels had to hurry, he might already be too late.

  It wasn’t that outlandish, when you thought about it. This was where Dr. Morrison had lived, and within an hour of his estimated time of death, a man going under the name of Corona, who was in all likelihood the late doctor’s bodyguard, had gotten on a plane headed this way. He could be going somewhere else in this town, that was true, but this was one more coincidence that didn’t play.

  There must be something in Morrison’s house that Ventura/Corona wanted, something worth taking a hurried flight here for. And what did Morrison have of value? Well, that was pretty obvious.

  Maybe it was something else. Maybe he was coming here for some other reason entirely, but Michaels couldn’t think of any offhand.

  Michaels could call the local police, get some backup from the county sheriff, and maybe a few state police officers for good measure. Surround Morrison’s house and grab Ventura when he showed up. Simple.

  He could do that, but he didn’t want to scare the guy off. If there were a dozen local cops tromping around this quiet little burg in the middle of the night, Ventura would have to be blind to miss them. So what Michaels had in mind was to find the house, hide somewhere he could watch it, and wait. When Ventura showed up, then he’d call in the cavalry. Give him time to find what he came for, maybe, to save Net Force having to look for it themselves. If Ventura was already there, as soon as Alex saw him come out, he’d make the call. Ventura might be able to run, but he couldn’t hide, not as long as he drove his rented car. And that car, according to Jay, was parked not far from here, and had been there for at least fifteen minutes.

  Michaels certainly didn’t plan to try and take the guy down on his own. This was the man who had outshot John Howard, and the general was no slouch when it came to guns, a lot better than Michaels was. He didn’t even have a gun with him, only the issue taser, and while that would knock a man on his ass with a single hit, you had to be pretty close to get that hit. He had no desire to go up against a highly skilled killer who was certainly better armed and more desperate than he was. No, Michaels had a strike team in place, five minutes away—as close as they could get without risking alerting their quarry—ready to move on his signal. He’d watch, make sure the guy showed up, and then get all the help he needed. At least Net Force would get partial credit for the capture. And if they were lucky, maybe the workings of the mind control ray as a bonus. That would go a long way to making up for all the mistakes.

  He looked at the map. He was still a couple of miles away. Might as well make the call he had been putting off. He pushed the button for Toni’s phone. Her message came on before even one ring.

  “Hey, you’ve reached Toni Fiorella. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you soon as I can.”

  He frowned. Was she not taking any calls? Or just not taking his calls? Well, okay, it was the middle of the night here, so it was the wee hours in D.C. Maybe she was just asleep and had turned off the ringer.

  “Toni, it’s me. Just calling to see how you’re doing. I—well, look, I’m sorry about everything. I’ll be back in town tomorrow, let’s sit down and talk about it, okay? We can work all this out.”

  He thumbed the discom button, tucked the virgil back onto his belt. After he collected Ventura, that would give Toni something she could pass along to her new boss.

  He had to hatch this egg before he could count it as a chicken, though.

  37

  Wednesday, June 15th

  Port Townsend, Washington

  Ventura had studied the overview maps his ops had done of the neighborhood when he’d taken on Morrison as a client. He knew as much about the houses and inhabitants for a block in either direction as a team of good surveillance ops could learn in a short time. He knew which houses had dogs, which houses had kids, which houses had night owls who stayed up watching vids until all hours. And, fortunately, there weren’t a lot of any of these close to Morrison’s.

  So it was that Ventura now sat in the backyard of the house behind Morrison’s, ne
stled into a gap between a small metal utility shed and a couple of cords of firewood. From the look of it, the wood was fir, alder, and madrona, a good combination. The fir, when dry, would burn very quickly. The alder could be used without seasoning, and the madrona would burn longer and hotter than oak. once it got going.

  Odd, the things you learned along the way.

  Ventura glanced at his watch. Almost twelve-thirty. The lights had been off in Morrison’s house for more than an hour, so the widow was likely asleep by now. What was her name? Ah, yes, Shannon. That sounded like the name of a teenaged starlet, or somebody who was a cheer-leader for some NFL football team. Hardly the name one would connect to a scientist who had been twice her age.

  Ventura looked around carefully. It was quiet, cool, and he hadn’t seen anything to worry him as he had sneaked to this hiding place. If there were other watchers here, they must be working the street out front. Good and bad, that. If they were there, he hadn’t been able to see them, which meant they were adept. Then again, if they were out front, they wouldn’t see him as he went to the back door.

  He took several deep breaths, inhaling and letting them out slowly, oxygenating his blood, trying to relax. He would go at one.

  Michaels had left his beat-up Datsun at the bottom of the hill, half a block away from where Ventura’s rental was parked, and hiked up toward Morrison’s house. It had been a while since he’d done any covert surveillance in the field, a long while, and his skills were not as sharp as he would have liked. A lot of it came back as he worked his way toward his target. He used trees for cover, went through backyards when possible, kept low, listened carefully for dogs. He moved steadily when he left cover, and he stayed in the shadows as much as possible. That nobody seemed to notice him was probably more a testament to the hour than any real skill on his part, but, hey, he’d take it.

  His hormones were flowing pretty good, too. He sometimes had to remember to breathe. He had remembered to shut the ringer off on his virgil. It wouldn’t do to be skulking in the bushes somewhere and suddenly start chiming out “Bad to the Bone.”

  As he drew closer to the house, Michaels wondered exactly what he was going to do once he got there. He knew that Ventura’s rental car was still parked down the hill, so unless he missed him in passing, he was out here on foot somewhere. Maybe already in the house.

  There was a streetlight up ahead on the right. Michaels crossed the road, to stay in the darkness.

  One A.M., straight up, time to go. Ventura ran in a crouch toward the back door. It was only a ten- or twelve-second trip, but it seemed to last for hours. He kept expecting to feel the impact of a bullet in the back, even though he knew that wasn’t likely—there was no point in shooting him on the way in.

  The trip ended; the bullet had not come. He tried the doorknob. Locked. And the dead bolt would also be locked, if Shannon had been doing what her husband told her.

  Ventura took the leather pouch with his lock picks and torsion tools from his jacket. The button lock on the doorknob would be a snap, and that was all he needed. He had a key for the dead bolt, since his people had overseen that lock’s installation.

  He put the torsion tool into the key slot on the doorknob, used a triple triangle pick to rake the pins. Might as well try it the easy way first, before picking each tumbler separately ...

  The torsion tool rotated the barrel mechanism on the second rake. Maybe six seconds from start to finish

  Ventura grinned. He still had the touch.

  He slipped the key into the dead bolt, turned it, and came up from his crouch as he opened the door and stepped into the hallway that led to the basement and the kitchen. He closed the door silently behind him.

  The alarm keypad was on the wall just past the light switch. He could see the red On diode gleaming. The only other light was from instrument glows in the kitchen, no help this far away, so he flicked on the flashlight and covered most of the lens with one hand, allowing only enough illumination to see the keypad. He punched in the four-digit number—1-9-8-6—the year Shannon had been born. Morrison had said she wasn’t very good at remembering numbers, so he’d wanted to keep it simple.

  1986. Ventura had shoes older than that.

  The hard part was done. The master bedroom was upstairs, and the living room/study was just on the other side of the kitchen/dining room. That was as far as he needed to go. If he didn’t bump into the furniture or sneeze, the young widow would likely continue her beauty rest. He’d reset the alarm and relock the door when he left. Shannon would never know he’d been here.

  He moved through the kitchen. There was enough ambient light from the digital LCD clocks on the stove, microwave oven, and coffeemaker for him to keep the flashlight lens covered completely. He didn’t like to use a flashlight on a hot prowl; it was a dead giveaway to anybody who might be passing by or watching a place. Unless there was a power outage, residents normally didn’t move around their own houses using flashlights. But he didn’t want to use the overheads or a lamp in here, either. Watchers would at the very least be alerted that somebody was up and about. And some people had a hypersensitivity to light, even when they slept. It was as if they could somehow feel the pressure of the photons on their bodies, although they couldn’t see them. It wouldn’t do for young Shannon to come yawning and padding down the stairs in her birthday suit, wondering who’d left the light on. If she saw him, it would have to be the last thing she saw, and while killing her didn’t bother him per se, finding her corpse would give the authorities pause to wonder why it had happened. Whoever had done it must have wanted something, they’d figure, and Ventura reasoned they would figure out what pretty quick. Right now, they didn’t know that Morrison had passed on anything to anybody. Best to keep it that way until he was in a safe harbor.

  He let a thin ray of the flashlight peek from between his closed fingers as he stepped into the dining room, just enough to avoid the furniture. He crouched low and duck-walked toward the study. There was what he wanted, just ahead and to the right.

  Michaels was prone in a clump of bushes, across the street to the east side of Morrison’s house. The plants were evergreens, big junipers of some kind, trimmed into wind-blown bonsai shapes, but thick enough to crouch beneath and be mostly covered. He had worked his way there through the yard from the east, so he hadn’t been visible from the street or, he hoped, from Morrison’s house.

  He had just gotten settled when he saw the man all in black scurry in a crouch to the back door.

  That must be Ventura. A minute later and I would have missed him!

  The man fiddled with the lock, and in what seemed no time at all, he’d opened the door and slipped inside. Either the door had been unlocked, or this guy was an expert with picks. Long ago, Michaels had covered that in his training, picking locks, but it had taken him half an hour to open even simple locks, and complicated ones were beyond him. His teacher had told him it was a thing of feel, that you either had the touch or you didn’t. If you didn’t, you could get better, but you’d never be a master at it.

  Well, enough ruminating on old training classes. Time to call in the Marines.

  Michaels pulled his virgil from his belt and hit the button. Five minutes, tops, and the cavalry would arrive. All he had to do was remain alert until they showed up.

  Unless his young wife had unknown sensibilities, Morrison had been quite the classical music fan. A CD/DVD rack above the Phillips/Technics R&P held a couple hundred titles. The titles tended to favor the Baroque composers: Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Telemann, Heinichen, Corelli, and Haydn.

  And Pachelbel, of course.

  Fortunately, the man had been meticulous in his cataloging. The titles were alphabetized, so it took only a few seconds to find the DVD Ventura wanted: Pachelbel’s Greatest Hit.

  He grinned at the name and turned the case over. The disk was a compilation, several versions and variations, of the contrapuntal melody Canon in D, a total playing time of 41:30. You’d have to be a real
fan to listen to what was essentially the same simple tune played over and over again for that long.

  He opened the case to make certain the disk inside matched the title, and the silvery disk gave off a rainbow gleam in the flashlight’s narrow beam.

  The markings looked genuine to Ventura, the little RCA dog and Gramophone, the cut titles and numbers. Maybe an expert could tell the difference; he couldn’t.

  Put this disk into an audio player, and you would get forty-plus minutes of variations on a musical theme. Put it into a computer and look in the right spot, using the right binary decoder, and you would get something else. Between the end of “Canon of the Three Stars,” by Isao Tomita and the Plasma Symphony Orchestra, and the beginning of “Pachelbel: Canon in D,” by The Baroque Chamber Orchestra, led by Ettore Stratta—if Morrison had been telling the truth—lay a secret the Chinese had been willing to pay nearly half a billion dollars to get their hands on.

  He grinned again, put the disk back into the case, and slipped it into his inside windbreaker pocket. He looked at the stairs.