Breaking point - By Tom Clancy & Steve Perry & Steve Pieczenik Page 0,40

you don’t bounce it—major national intelligence services have access to some very sophisticated equipment. They’ll probably send somebody. It won’t be a trio of longfingernailed Chinese dressed in colorful Mandarin silks and sporting Fu Manchu mustaches smiling and bowing and looking like the incarnation of the Yellow Peril. More likely it’ll be a busty Norwegian blond nurse helping a little old man with a cane hobble along—the last people you’d look at and think ‘Chinese intelligence.’ Certainly they have local agents within a few minutes of most major cities. Fortunately, Anchorage isn’t that big a town. If you used a decent remailer, they won’t backtrack your e-mail for a while, though probably they’ll get that soon. I’d expect them to know who you are within a day or two at most, even if you don’t call them back.”

Morrison swallowed dryly. “The service I used guaranteed confidentiality.”

Ventura smiled, looking at that moment like a human shark. “Sure, if somebody calls them on the phone and asks, they won’t say anything. But confidentiality goes right out the window when somebody puts the point of a sharp knife into your remailer’s back, over his kidney, and asks.”

“They would do that?”

“Sure. I would.” He flashed the smile again, and Morrison was in that moment as afraid of Ventura as he was the Chinese. Thank God the man was on his side.

“They’ll know you’re at the airport, but since the phone isn’t in your name, they don’t know who you are, so they’ll look for the phone. When they find that, they’ll look for single men traveling alone. You’re under a pseudonym, ticketed as part of a group of three passengers, including two women, so they won’t get that immediately. With enough computing power, they can strain out all the flights leaving here today, and check on every passenger. Our phony IDs will hold up under a cursory scan, but if they can dig deep enough, they’ll figure out they are fake eventually, though that won’t really help them except to tell them we were going to Seattle, and that we weren’t on the plane.

“We could probably get to your house in Washington before they get who you are. You are dealing with some serious people here, and it’s never been a matter of ‘if,’ but of ‘when.’ ”

“My wife—”

“—is being watched by my people, and I’ve just sent more ops to back them up. She’ll be safe. And we aren’t going there.”

“Where are we going?”

“To a place where I can control access for the meeting.”

“We’re going to drive there?”

“No, we’re going to drive to a private airstrip and rent a plane. We want to be in the air as soon as we can.”

Now that he had been put on alert, Morrison regarded the other people in the airport hallway with a newfound suspicion. Those young men with snowboards, that middle-aged gay couple laughing over a laptop, the tall man in a gray business suit carrying a briefcase. Any of them could be armed and out to collect him.

“Frankly, I don’t think they will scramble the A-team to grab you, yet,” Ventura said, as if reading his mind. “They know about the tests you did in their country, what the effect was on their villages, and they know you know about it, but they don’t know for certain that you caused it. They’ll have to check you out. Once they believe you, that’s when we’ll have to be extremely careful.”

Morrison’s mouth suddenly felt very dry indeed. He’d known this was coming, but it hadn’t seemed so ... real before. The pit of his stomach felt like it did on a roller coaster. Well. There was nothing for it now. He was committed.

“This isn’t quite what I expected,” Morrison said.

“It never is,” Ventura said.

14

Friday, June 10th

Portland, Oregon

The boomerang championships were being held in Washington Park, which Tyrone thought was funny. They’d driven a couple thousand miles from Washington, D.C., to wind up in an Oregon park with the same name. It wasn’t like any park in his neighborhood, though. The place was a giant sprawl that contained a lot of hills, tall evergreen trees, the Portland Zoo, plus a forestry center and some other stuff. Up and away from the zoo parking, they had carved a flat field out of one of the meadows, big enough for three or four soccer teams to play at the same time. The field was covered with what Tyrone thought of as winter grass, trimmed short, like something you might