Breaking point - By Tom Clancy & Steve Perry & Steve Pieczenik Page 0,102
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