Breaking point - By Tom Clancy & Steve Perry & Steve Pieczenik Page 0,105
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.