Breaking point - By Tom Clancy & Steve Perry & Steve Pieczenik Page 0,104

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