Breaking Point nf-4

by Tom Clancy

Well, if Wu was the guy negotiating, he hadn’t done too good a job of it, had he? And Morrison wasn’t going to be pedaling anything, either.

  Paris, France

  Jay sat slouched in a wicker chair at the Cafe Emile, looking out on the Champs Elyseés, not far from the Arc de Triomphe. He sipped black, bitter espresso from a tiny china cup, and smiled at the couples who strolled past. The war was over nearly two years, the Nazi occupation history. Postwar Paris in the spring was a much nicer place than a military surplus store in any season.

  Henri, the waiter, approached. He had in his hand a small paper tablet. He gave Jay a nod that was both servile and arrogant and offered him the tablet. “ ’Ere iz ze list you wanted, Monsieur Greedlee.”

  “Merci.” Jay took the tablet and waved Henri away. He looked at the list, scanned down the row of names — no… no… no… wait!

  Jay sat upright, bumped the table, and sloshed espresso from the cup. Yes! There it was!

  He snapped his fingers loudly, caught Henri’s attention. “Garçon! Voulez-vous bien m’indiquer ou se trouve le téléphone? Je desire appelez faire!”

  Henri rewarded Jay with a sneer. “Bettair you should work on ze pronunciation and ze grammar first, monsieur!”

  The arrogant prick knew he wanted to make a call, but he had to correct his French first.

  “Montrez du doigt, asshole!”

  Henri shrugged off the insult and did as Jay requested — he pointed toward the café.

  Jay stood and hurried to find the phone.

  Wednesday, June 15th

  Woodland Hills, California

  Michaels had supper at the hotel, and when room service brought him the chicken sandwich, it had bean sprouts on it. Well, of course. This was L.A.

  He ate the sandwich mechanically, not really tasting it. He was screwed, there was nowhere to go from here. Toni had been right, he wasn’t a field agent. He couldn’t just hop on a plane, fly to a crime scene, and expect to spot some crucial clue that the local police and FBI forensics team had somehow missed. He knew better. But he had needed to see the place for himself, hoping it would somehow jog something in him.

  Well, it hadn’t. And here he was in a hotel in La-La Land, eating a chicken sandwich with bean sprouts, without a clue as to what he should do next.

  On the bedside table, his virgil lit, telling him it was bad to the bone. That was probably Toni, calling to tell him what an idiot he was. At the moment, he was inclined to agree with her.

  The tiny screen on the multipurpose toy didn’t show Toni’s face, however. It was Jay Gridley.

  “What’s up, Jay?”

  “I think I got him, Boss.”

  Michaels stared at the virgil. “What? How? Where?”

  “I crunched all the commercial airline flights leaving SoCal in the last twelve hours. Burbank, LAX, John Wayne, in Orange County.”

  “And you found Ventura?”

  “No. But I did find a Mr. B. W. Corona.”

  “I don’t see—”

  “It’s another freeway name, Boss.”

  “Kind of a reach, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe not. Guy booked a ticket two days ago, a round-trip to Seattle. He was originally scheduled for this evening, but he called and changed it to an earlier flight. Return is open-ended.”

  “I don’t see how that makes it any more certain.”

  “Okay, look. He planned to leave tonight, but there was some kind of a problem, a shoot-out, so he had to take off early.”

  “But he’s planning to come back, your Mr. Corona.”

  “If you’re on the run, you don’t buy a one-way ticket, that’s a red flag, first thing cops look for.”

  “But why would he use a name we might know?”

  “Because he doesn’t know the freeway names have been compromised. He doesn’t know we picked up his pal at the surplus store in Washington, so why would he throw away perfectly good ID?”

  “Still sounds like a stretch.”

  Jay did an imitation of a late-night infomercial: “But wait, but wait, don’t order yet, listen to this!”

  The virgil’s screen was tiny, but it had good resolution, and Michaels could see Jay’s grin easily enough.

  “I checked the car rental places at SeaTac. A Mr. B. W. Corona walked into Avis, no reservation, and rented a midsize Dodge ten minutes after the flight from L.A. landed late this afternoon. You got a computer terminal there in your room, Boss?”

  “Yes.”

  “Plug your virgil into it, I want to show you something.”

  Michaels opened the terminal, lit the screen, and tapped the infrared send-and-receive code into his virgil. Jay’s face appeared on the hotel’s computer screen. “I’ve got your visual on the hotel’s computer,” Michaels said.

  “Stand by.”

  The image of Jay was replaced by a digital line-by-line image. It was a close-up of a California driver’s license.

  “This came from the counter scanner at Avis. They log all licenses.”

  The man in the hologram had short hair, but a full beard. Could that be Ventura?

  Michaels couldn’t tell. “I don’t see the guy in our sketch.”

  “No law against growing a beard, having your picture taken, then shaving. But forget the picture.”

  Michaels was already scanning the information on the license. He got no farther than the name. “Son of a bitch! Why didn’t you tell me this in the first place?”

  “C’mon, Boss, you always save the best part of a story for last. You want me to call the Washington state police and have him picked up?”

  “I suppose you know where he is, too, huh?”

  “Sure.”

  “Oh, really?”

  Jay laughed. “You are really gonna love this part. Avis has theft-recovery devices installed in their fleet. Somebody decides to keep a car instead of turning it in? They can dial a number and turn on a little broadcast unit wired into the car’s battery. The unit sends a GPS signal to the nice folks at Brink’s, and they can tell you exactly where the vehicle is.” He shifted back into the infomercial announcer’s voice: “Now how much would you pay?”

  “Son of a bitch.” Michaels looked at the computer’s flatscreen. The name on the license was the final selling point: The “B.W.” stood for “Bruce Wayne.” And everybody who read comics, watched television cartoons, or went to action adventure movies knew that Bruce Wayne was the secret identity of Batman, mentor and elder partner of Robin the Boy Wonder, aka Dick Grayson.

  If this wasn’t the guy they wanted, it was one hell of a coincidence.

  “All right, Jay, I’m impressed. What will it take to get the car rental company to give us the tracking information?”

  “Already done, Boss. You want to guess where he’s going?”

  “Surprise me.”

  Jay laughed again.

  36

  Wednesday, June 15th

  Port Townsend, Washington

  It was almost nine P.M. when Ventura rolled into the small tourist village of Port Townsend. And though he had the GPS maps his ops had sent in with their electronic reports, he spent thirty minutes driving around, getting a feel for the place. Situated on a fat, semi-hook-shaped isthmus jutting into Puget Sound, the sleepy town had once upon a time been the gateway to the U.S. Northwest via the Straits of Juan de Fuca. Those glory days were long past, and now the tourists came to see some of the prime examples of Victorian-style houses left in the country. Ventura had been here in the daylight, and it looked almost as if somebody had gone back in time, grabbed a section of San Francisco just before the Great Earthquake of 1906, and dropped it up here. Some of the larger and more ornate old houses were now commercial businesses or bed-and-breakfast lodgings, but many of them were still in use as regular housing. There was a paper mill still working down on the waterfront as you got to town, but other than that, not much industry.

  The main drag downtown was Water Street, where most of the old buildings were pre-turn-of-the-century
. There was a restaurant and marina at the end of the street, and a lot of nicely kept wooden boats moored there.

  Above downtown, overlooking a bluff, Lawrence Street was the parallel uptown road. Here were stores, a theater, and other odds and ends. From Lawrence Street, Taylor Street ran up the hill to Foster, which was where Morrison’s house was. A bit farther to the north was the old Fort Warden Military Reservation, now a park where you could rent an officer’s or a noncom’s old house and spend a few days hiking and exploring the long-empty bunkers. Morrison hadn’t snagged one of the Victorian homes, but a more modest stone house built in the 1920s. It hadn’t been cheap, according to his operative’s research, but it wasn’t outrageously expensive, since he’d bought it just before the big real estate boom hit here. Houses that had been going for two hundred thousand three years ago now went for half again that much. The town was in the Olympic rain shadow, and while they did get some rain and wind, it was a lot less wet than much of northern Washington state. A lot of the baby boomers had decided this was a good place to retire and enjoy their golden years.

  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. May
be 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, 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.