by Tom Clancy
Morrison read off a fifteen-digit series of numbers and letters.
Wu typed it into his computer. He looked up at Morrison and smiled. “And that was for… three hundred million dollars, U.S.?”
“Four hundred million,” Morrison said quickly.
“A small joke, Doctor.” He tapped in the numbers. He said, “It’s a fair-sized transaction, but nothing huge. It’ll take only a few seconds for them to verify the account we’re transferring from, and acknowledge the credit.”
Ventura did a sweep of the room. It seemed as if this might come off with no problems. His team was on alert. If anything that looked like a gun, or a canister of gas, or any kind of weapon, made an appearance in the still-well-lit theater, things would happen fast. Nobody was going to be yelling “Drop it!” or “Don’t move!” At the first sign of aggression, his people were to cook the Chinese — all of them — no hesitation, no questions. Any screwups, and Wu’s people were all history. It was a harsh response, but the only way to go here. One guy blasting away indiscriminately with a small subgun or even a pistol could do a lot of damage — and it wasn’t going to happen.
“There you are, Dr. Morrison. You should see it on your machine.”
Morrison tapped keys. “Yes. It’s in and verified.” He typed in another sequence. “The account number and password are both changed.”
“Then you have it. We can deposit but we can’t take it back. You’re a rich man. Now it’s your turn.”
Morrison nodded. He still looked like a man sitting in an electric chair, waiting for the current to flow.
“Here is the address for our people,” Wu said. He held the computer up so Morrison could see the screen. “You send them the data, they say they can have it tested in less than two hours. They work, we watch the movie, everybody goes home happy.”
Wu turned to look at Ventura. “You know, Luther, if it had been left up to me, I expect I would have tried for a — how shall we say? — cheaper offer.”
Ventura gave him a small smile. “Such an offer couldn’t have been… acceptable, Chilly.”
“You don’t think so?”
“I know so.”
Wu’s smile matched Ventura’s own. “It would have been very interesting to see whose opinion was right, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes.”
The two of them held gazes for another moment.
Wu said, “Well. Another time.” He looked away, back at Morrison. “Doctor, if you would?”
Ventura was victorious. His smile broadened.
Morrison nodded and started to type in the electronic address.
“Gun!” somebody screamed—
— and sure enough, guns started to go off.
33
Wednesday, June 15th
Washington, D.C.
Toni was right behind Alex. The gas mask had big, wide lenses that left her peripheral vision clear, but there was an annoying clicking sound every time she inhaled. And she was breathing pretty fast, too. She forgot about her breathing and the noise fast enough when the first of the six-man team ahead of them crashed through the door into the back room of the surplus store. Bright flashes of actinic light strobed her, but the mask’s polarizers kicked in and blocked the glare within a hundredth of a second or so. She should have worn earplugs, she realized, because the noise was loud inside the building. A misty cloud of green gray vapor boiled up with the explosions and lapped against the walls with the racket.
She heard a triplet of quick, smaller explosions—pap! pap-pap! — gunshots, she was sure — and Alex doglegged to the left. She followed him. Somebody yelled something she couldn’t make out, and somebody retched so loudly it sounded as if he was turning his guts inside out.
Alex looked back at her. “You okay?”
“Yes, I’m fine.”
Then it was all over.
The mist, which felt greasy on her bare skin, started to clear, and the police team spread out enough so Toni could see four men who weren’t cops. Three of them were on their hands and knees, vomiting. One was on his back, blood oozing from holes in his side and one leg. He had his head sideways and he was throwing up, too.
One of the men on his knees enjoying the purging benefits of emetic gas was Jay Gridley.
“Thank God,” Toni said into the mask. The sound was muffled, but she saw Alex nod.
“Yeah,” he said.
Woodland Hills, California
Wu was quick. He dropped from his seat onto the sticky floor and tossed the tub of popcorn into Ventura’s face as he fell.
Ventura was able to hear the rifle shot from the projection booth, was aware even as he pulled his own gun that the flat crack of the small-bore longarm was distinct from the duller, louder handgun sounds—
Wu came up with a gun — it must have been underneath the popcorn tub — and jammed it at Ventura. He fired twice—
Quick and good, too—
The bullets hit Ventura square in the chest, but the titanium trauma plate in the pocket of the blended Kevlar/ spidersilk vest under his shirt stopped the rounds, even though they felt like sledgehammers against his sternum—
Ventura cleared his own weapon and brought it around—
Morrison was up and running, screaming wordlessly—
Wu cursed and got off another round, higher this time, right on the edge of the trauma plate—
More gunshots blasted in the theater—
One-handed, Ventura fired—one-two-three! — letting the recoil raise the muzzle each time, so the shots walked up Wu’s body, in case he was also wearing a vest, so the hits were chest-throat-head—
“Stop, stop, stop—!” Morrison screamed.
Ventura looked up from Wu, saw that Morrison had his own little.22 revolver out and pointed in front of himself as he reached the aisle—
One of Ventura’s best shooters — the ex-SEAL, Blackwell — moved to grab Morrison, to pull him down and out of the line of fire — good, good! — but Morrison was panicked, and he thrust his weapon out at the man—
“Morrison, no!” Ventura screamed. “Don’t—!”
Too late. Morrison pulled the trigger. Blackwell, coming to save the scientist, was five feet away, and even Morrison couldn’t miss every time at that range. At least two or three of the six shots chewed into Blackwell. The vest he wore stopped a couple, but one went high, hit him in the jaw, and Ventura saw a tooth explode from the torn mouth in slow motion as Blackwell’s head jerked to one side—
Ah, shit—!
And he saw with razor-edged and expanded clarity as Blackwell did what any really good trained shooter instinctively did if somebody pointed a gun at him when the situation went hot—
“No!” Ventura screamed, trying to bring his own gun up around, but he was mired in subjective slow-time, and too late.
Blackwell knew Morrison was wearing a vest, and Blackwell didn’t want to die. So even as he fell, wounded, Blackwell lined his pistol up on Morrison and stopped the threat—
He shot him right between the eyes.
The back of Morrison’s head blew out in a spew of brains, blood, and bone.
Washington, D.C.
He was going to be okay, Jay realized. The doctor had taped him up, given him a shot to counteract the puke gas, and another for pain. Every breath he took still hurt his ribs a little under the tape, and his stomach was sore from vomiting, but he was real happy to be feeling anything at all.
It was sure better than the alternative.
The boss said, “What on Earth possessed you to go into the field on your own?”
Jay started to shake his head, but that made him dizzy, so he stopped. He said, “I dunno. Pure stupidity would be my best guess. Not ever gonna happen again, I guarantee that. Reality sucks.”
They were in the hospitial’s lock ward, where one-eyed Fiscus had been transferred after they’d patched him up. He’d been hit twice after firing at the cops, in the side and in the leg, but neither hit was life-threatening once they
stopped the bleeding. He was awake, and the boss had flexed his Net Force muscle to get in and question the guy before the mainline boys and the D.C. detectives got there.
Jay and Toni were with Michaels as he walked into the room, and they all nodded at the cop sitting in the chair next to the bed.
“We want some information,” Michaels said to Fiscus.
Full of IV tubes and things clipped to his fingertips or taped to his chest, Fiscus flashed his gap-toothed grin. “People in Hell probably want ice water, too,” he said. His snakeskin patch was gone, and the eye it had hidden had a milky film over it.
“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, bu
t 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 now.”
“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?”
