Breaking point - By Tom Clancy & Steve Perry & Steve Pieczenik Page 0,37

young woman. Armed with a short-barreled shotgun, a snub-nosed revolver, and a couple of knives, Missey White would surely be a big surprise for an unsuspecting assassin who assumed from her bubble butt and perky breasts, all of which were barely hidden under a miniskirt and halter top, that she was a piece of fluff and harmless. If the locals knew Morrison was married, they’d likely assume Missey was a girlfriend he’d brought up here into the woods for fun, where his wife wouldn’t be the wiser.

And the wife wasn’t apt to drop by unannounced, because a pair of Ventura’s ops were parked in a rented house in Port Townsend on the Morrisons’ street, keeping an eye on Mrs. Morrison. You had to assume that if somebody came after the client, they’d probably consider a pass at his wife worthwhile, and while she wasn’t the primary client, it was just good business to watch her when she and the client were apart.

It hadn’t taken the ops—another male and female team—but a few hours to figure out that Shannon Morrison, nee Shannon Bell, wasn’t the world’s most faithful spouse. Since they’d begun the surveillance on Monday, Mrs. Morrison had visited a young and well-built leatherworker, one Ray Duncan, and stayed in his shop behind a locked door three times, for more than an hour each visit. It was the opinion of Ventura’s ops that judging from the flushed face and big smile when she left, Mrs. Morrison was not being custom-fitted for moccasins—unless she was doing that with both feet in the air while lying on Duncan’s couch.

Ventura saw no reason to mention this to his client. Ray Duncan, twenty-seven, had been a resident of the town for more than ten years, long before the Morrisons had moved there, and a background check of the man showed nothing more illegal than a couple of traffic tickets and a dismissed bust for a single marijuana joint in Seattle when he’d been eighteen.

Mrs. Morrison’s extramarital activities weren’t relevant to protecting the client. Yet, anyway.

“Situation?” Ventura asked.

The man to whom he was speaking looked to be about sixty, gray and grizzled, wearing a fisherman’s vest and floppy-brimmed canvas hat, overalls, and boots, and a pair of binoculars and a digital cam dangling from around his neck. A battered copy of Peterson’s Guide to Birds of North America stuck out of a vest pocket next to a small flashlight.

The older man laughed. “Well, let me see. About thirty minutes ago, something that looked like a big rat ran behind the garbage bin over there. Maybe it was a nutria or a possum—zoology is not my strong suit. And fifteen minutes ago, a light went on in the bathroom of unit number five, stayed on for two minutes, then went out. What else? Oh, yeah, a couple of real big mosquitoes buzzed me. That’s as good as it’s gotten.”

Ventura gave him a tight professional grin in return. “You rather be shooting it out with the Mexican drug dealers again?”

“No, but if they were all as exciting as this one, I’d have to start taking Viagra just to keep my attention up. This is going to be a cakewalk.”

“You said that about the Mexicans at first.”

The older man looked at him. “You expect things to warm?”

“Highly likely, though probably not for a while yet. I’ll keep you apprised.”

Ventura drifted away, a man out for a late night stroll, meandering toward the next station, a couple hundred yards away.

As he walked, he considered the client and the situation again. He had no problems with what the client was doing, that was his business and not Ventura’s, save how it affected the job. Ventura didn’t think much about morality. He had his own ethical system, and it didn’t match that of most citizens when it came to what they did, or why they did it. From his viewpoint, he was mostly, well ... amoral about most things—when you had killed as many people as he had, the rules just didn’t seem to apply to you in quite the same way as they did to normal people. He knew what sociopaths were, and he wasn’t one. He had loved, had hated, had felt the usual emotions. He had been engaged once, but she had broken it off because she wasn’t ready to settle down. He had fathered a child in South America, and though it had been twenty years ago, he still sent support to the woman and his daughter,