Breaking point - By Tom Clancy & Steve Perry & Steve Pieczenik Page 0,64

him. It was the stalk that mattered most not the shot, the path and not the destination. Once in the proper position, any fool could pull a trigger. Getting to the proper position was the trick. Always.

“This way,” Morrison said.

“How can you tell? I can’t fucking see anything!”

The two cars pulled to a halt, and Ventura heard doors slamming and voices raised.

“Trust me,” Ventura said. “I know exactly what I am doing.”

His phone vibrated.

“What?”

“Another player approaching. Black man in a new Dodge van, Alaskan plates, looks like a rental car. Just passed me.”

Ventura frowned. Who was this? Just a coincidence? Some fisherman running late for his hotel reservation, or part of the backup plan? And a black man? That would be unusual. The Chinese didn’t much like black people. Of course, they didn’t much like anybody who wasn’t Chinese. A lot of people in the West didn’t realize that Eastern societies were the most racist on Earth. They not only despised and looked down on Westerners, they despised and looked down on each other. The Chinese hated the Japanese who hated the Koreans who hated the Vietnamese, and all variations thereof. The only thing worse than being a foreigner was being a half-breed.

Well. Whoever he was, it didn’t matter. As long as Ventura knew where the man was, he was no problem, just one more piece on the board he needed to track. “Keep me advised,” Ventura said. He tapped the headset off.

“Let’s go for a little ride in the cool summer night, shall we, Doctor?”

Morrison stared at him, and that wide-eyed sense of amazement that arrived when he’d realized that Ventura was having fun here was still on his face.

A man like Morrison couldn’t understand it, of course. Men like him never did.

23

Sunday, June 12th

Beaverton, Oregon

Tyrone stood by the Coke machine at the hotel and ran his credit card through the scanner slot. The credit appeared on the screen, and he tapped the button that delivered a plastic bottle of the cola. The noise it made seemed loud in the quiet night.

He was still rattled. Once everything seemed to be okay, his dad had gone off to Alaska, to help collect the man supposedly responsible for what had happened at the boomerang tournament. Tyrone, Nadine, and his mother were at the motel, miles away from the park, and the madness had stopped, but he couldn’t forget it. It was like some kind of nightmare. He had wanted to kill people, and if he’d had a weapon—a knife or a gun or a stick—he would have killed somebody. And the thing was, it would have felt just great to do it, too.

He sipped at the soft drink. Life had been easier when he’d been into computers. He sat at home, jacked into the web, lived his life in VR. Once he’d discovered girls and boomerangs, things had gotten a lot more complex. Nothing risked, nothing gained—but nothing lost, either. But the thought of going back to where he’d been before, a web-head with butt calluses from sitting in a chair? That just didn’t resonate. Data interruptus, Jimmy-Joe would say.

The tournament had been canceled after all the crazy stuff. He’d never even gotten a chance to compete. Given all the other crap, winning or losing a contest like that meant zed, but even so, he wondered how he would have done.

“Hey, Ty.”

He looked up to see Nadine standing there. “Hey,” he said.

“Couldn’t sleep?”

“Yeah.”

“Me, neither.”

They stood silently for a few seconds. “You want a Coke?”

“I’ll just have a sip of yours, if that’s okay.”

“Sure.” He passed her the plastic bottle and watched her sip from it.

She handed the bottle back to him. “You think it’s true?” she said. “That somebody did it on purpose?”

“My dad thinks so, and he knows about stuff like this, so, yeah, I think so.”

“Why? Why would somebody do a thing like that? Zap people and make them go crazy? Make people hurt each other?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. I can’t think of any reason good enough.”

“I didn’t like how it made me feel,” she said. “I was so angry. I wanted to hurt people. I didn’t care about them at all. I was watching the vids on the news. They showed a Catholic school somewhere. Some nuns beat a janitor to a pulp. How could that be? Something that could make nuns do that, that’s really scary.”

He could see she was on the edge of tears, really upset. “Yeah. Scares me, too. But it’s okay.