Breaking Point nf-4

by Tom Clancy

  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.

  No sounds drifted down from the sleeping widow. Good. Always good to avoid complications when possible.

  He retraced his steps to the back door. He keyed in the alarm code, cracked the door open a hair, and set the button lock on the door. He had thirty seconds to close the door behind him before the alarm kicked on. It only took one of those seconds for him to draw his pistol and slip the safety off. If somebody had been watching him, it made more sense for them to wait until he left with whatever he had come for before they took him down; otherwise they might never find it. If somebody was watching.

  He held the pistol down by his leg. He took a deep breath, released half of it, and stepped outside.

  38

  Wednesday, June 15th

  Port Townsend, Washington

  Michaels was watching the house when the whole situation suddenly changed. Whatever Ventura had gone into the house for, either he knew where it was, or he’d changed his mind, Michaels thought. He was in and out in maybe two minutes. And the cavalry was still at least three minutes away.

  Michaels watched as the man did something one-handed with the dead bolt lock. Save for a quick glance, he did it without looking at the door — instead he scanned the yard, his gaze sweeping back and forth, seeking. His other hand was hidden behind his leg.

  Even though he knew he was pretty much invisible on the ground under the bushes across the street, Michaels froze. His pucker factor went right off the scale.

  Ventura finished his manipulation with the door’s lock, glanced around again, and started across the backyard.

  Michaels gathered himself to get up. He was going to follow Ventura, come hell or high water, but he was going to be real careful doing it. His hand hovered over the call button on his virgil, but he didn’t press it. Hitting the distress signal now would bring the cavalry with full lights and sirens, and he still couldn’t risk alerting Ventura.

  He was on his hands and knees about to crawl out from under the evergreen when two men stepped out from behind the shed and pointed guns at Ventura.

  “Hold it right—!” one of them began.

  He never finished the sentence. There were several bright flashes and terrific explosions, and all three men went down. But Ventura rolled up, hardly even slowing, ran to the two fallen men, and fired his pistol twice more.

  It all happened so fast and unexpectedly Michaels wasn’t sure what he had seen, but his brain raced to fill it in: Two men with guns braced Ventura, who was either the fastest draw who ever lived or already had his own gun out. One, two, three shots, yes, three, two from Ventura, one from one of the dead guys — and they were surely dead because Ventura sprinted over and put one more round into each one, looked like the heads, but it was hard to be sure about that, the after-images from the first shots had washed out Michaels’s vision some, and—

  Ventura didn’t stop to examine the pair he’d shot; he took off at a run, straight to the street.

  Michaels scrambled from under the bushes and followed, but he stayed crouched, using cover. He did not want Ventura to look back and see him, no, not after that display. Not only was the man a killer, he was expert at it. To take out two men with guns already pointed at you? That was either great skill or great luck, and Michaels didn’t want to test either.

  Lights started to go on in houses along the street. They probably didn’t get a lot of gunfire up here on a week-night. No, probably not.

  Michaels ran on the darker side of the street, and he had his taser in his hand. He hoped he wouldn’t have to get close enough to Ventura to have to use it.

  * * *

  Ventura smiled to himself as he ran. He did a tactical reload, changing magazines, dropping the one missing three shots into his windbreaker pocket. Those had probably been Chinese agents — feds would have yelled out their ID, and there would have been more of them.

  Speed was the most important thing now. Gunfire in a quiet neighborhood would wake people up, somebody’d call the police, and even if they were slow, it would only be a few minutes before cops got here. He’d have a little while longer before the locals unraveled things, enough time to get clear of the city, but he had to figure they might have spotted him earlier, noticed his car, so a different vehicle was going to be necessary. The sooner he found one, the better.

  He was going to have to get rid of this Coonan, too — he hadn’t had time to stop and pick up his expended brass here, and this gun already had two shootings on it, in Alaska and in California. Under better circumstances, he would have dropped the pistol into a lake or ocean after the first time he’d used it, but there simply hadn’t been time. Only a fool would hold on to something that would get him the death penalty if he was caught with it. He had other guns, and as soon as he could get to them, he’d lose this one.

  There was an old pickup truck parked on the street half a block ahead of him. That would do. He could break the window, get inside, crack the ignition for a hot-wire, be gone in another two minutes.

  He glanced behind him. No sign of pursuit, no men chasing him with guns. Maybe those were the only two. Maybe.

  But even as he ran, that part of him that feasted on danger grinned and smacked its chops, looking for more. There was nothing like an adrenaline rush, the immediate sense of danger and possible death. He should be afraid, but what he felt was closer to orgasm than fear. He had the prize, he was on his way, enemies were down. All around him, life was crystalline, razor-sharp, throbbing with triumph.

  He lived, they died.

  It didn’t get any better than this.

  Here was the truck. Try the door — hah! not even locked! He reached up over the visor, just in case — and lo! the keys!

  He laughed aloud. No. It couldn’t get any better than this!

  He put the gun down on the seat and shoved the key into the ignition slot—

  “Going somewhere, Colonel?”

  Surprised, Ventura jumped, started to grab the Coonan—

  “Don’t! You won’t make it!”

  Ventura froze. He looked up.

  Standing six feet away, a shotgun aimed at Ventura’s head, was General Jackson “Bull” Smith. Smiling.

  This was not in Ventura’s game plan. “General. Odd running into you here.”

  “Not odd at all, Luther. Me and a few of the boys have been waiting for you to show up.”

  “Those two were yours?”

  “They were.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it. They deserved what they got — it was a bonehead move, going at you face-on.”

  Smith smiled again, and the shotgun didn’t waver a hair. Ventura was looking right down the muzzle. Twelve-gauge, he noted. Modified choke.

  “There was a pair of other guys here before us, commie agents, near as we could tell, but they… went away.”

  “I thought there might be. Thanks.”

  “Don’t thank me yet. I had a couple other boys tailing you, but you lost ’em after that mess in Los Angeles. Lost your client, too, that’s a real shame. Figured you’d show up here sooner or later.”

  “You continue to surprise me, General. How?’

  “Because there are better surveillance gadgets than the ones you had in your car at the compound, that’s how. You think because we live up in the woods and stomp around in the bear shit we don’t have access to modem technology? You get a flunking grade for underestimating folks, Luther. Especially your friends. You should have cut me in, instead of trying to bullshit me with that story of yours.”

  Ventura smiled and shook his head. “I sit corrected, General. Real impressive work. Not too late to make amends, is it?”

  “I’m afraid it is, Colonel, I’m afraid it is.”

  When he saw the man with the shotgun point the weapon at Ventura where he sat in the truck he was presumably going to steal, Michaels slid into a front yard and behind a thick-boled Douglas fir tree. He was across the stree
t and they were busy enough with each other that they hadn’t noticed him. Reaching down, he hit the alarm button on his virgil. It would take them a minute or two to react, but he was no longer worried about alerting Ventura.

  Now what? Who was this guy? Was he connected to the two dead men at Morrison’s? What the hell was going on?

  Michaels was sixty, seventy feet away, and the taser was accurate for fifteen or twenty feet, if you were lucky. But he’d only get one shot and then he’d have to reload, and as John Howard and Julio Fernandez had pointed out to him, the fastest taser reloader in the world could not outpace a handgun with multiple rounds. Net Force computer and management people were supposed to be desk jockeys, they didn’t need guns, that’s what the military arm was for.

  If he got out of this alive, Michaels planned to start carrying a real gun.

  Yeah. Unfortunately, the military arm was not here, he didn’t have a real gun, and a taser was what he did have. So — who to shoot? — assuming he could get close enough to shoot either one of them?

  He couldn’t hear what they were saying to each other, but he was able to hear what the shotgunner said next, because he said it loudly: “Bubba!”

  A shaven-headed bodybuilder in dark camo approached the truck from the passenger side, a long-barreled pistol in his hands. He was careful not to come in straight on, but angled slightly from the back. Good move — that would keep him out of the shotgunner’s line of fire if things started cooking.

  Nothing like another little complication to make his life harder.

  Even if he’d had an assault rifle instead of the taser, Michaels didn’t like those odds. And he didn’t know who these new players were — in theory, they might even be on his side.

  Maybe he should wait a second and see what happened before he stood up and commanded everybody to drop their weapons. Maybe a couple of seconds.