Breaking Point (35 page)

"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.

Chapter
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, nestled 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.

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.

Chapter
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--