killed people, and ruined the championships, too. A dragfoot juicesucker who needed to be shorted out, no feek. He had his laptop with him, in his pack in his dad’s room. He’d get it and get on-line.
Nadine could help him. She didn’t know a whole lot about computers, but he could take her along and show her as they went. He was not as sharp as he’d been, but he could still lubefoot the net okay. He’d help Jay and they would catch the sucker who had shot his dad.
28
Tuesday, June 14th
Coeur d’Alene, Idaho
Inside the car, even with the motor running and the air conditioner going on high, it was warm. It was just the two of them, Morrison in the back, Ventura driving. They passed the odd militiaman on the dusty gravel road as they crept along at just over walking speed.
Over the phone, Wu’s voice was silky, relaxed, lulling. He said, “Of course we trust you. It’s just that some of your ... ah ... associates seem to have a bias against people of our ... persuasion. No point in tempting fate, now, is there?”
Morrison nodded at the unseen speaker. Both phones had their picture transmission off, so neither man could view the other. Not that it would have helped Morrison much to see Wu. He wasn’t particularly good at reading expressions on Western faces; as far as he was concerned, the Chinese were inscrutable. Besides, it didn’t matter. Ventura had coached him, and so far, everything the bodyguard had said was right on the button. In theory, their conversation was scrambled, encoded so that it couldn’t be understood even if somebody was able to intercept and record it.
“Perhaps the Chinese embassy might be more to your liking?”
Wu had the grace to laugh. “Well, of course, we could arrange that, but somehow I don’t think Luther would feel very comfortable under such circumstances. In his place, I would not.”
“Let’s cut to the chase,” Morrison said. “I’ll name a place, and we’ll meet there.”
Ventura had told him they wouldn’t like that, getting right to the point. The culture from which Wu came was more patient than America’s, by and large, and the Chinese were willing to engage in as much ceremonial talk as necessary to please all the speakers. They viewed Americans’ lack of formality and impatience as signs of youth and poor breeding.
“Let them think what they want,” Ventura had told him. “The lower an opinion they have of us, the better.”
“Perhaps,” Wu said. “Where?”
Morrison glanced ahead at Ventura, who saw him in the rearview mirror. He nodded.
“There’s a theater in Woodland Hills, California. That’s just outside Los Angeles.”
“I know where Woodland Hills is, Doctor.” His voice was dry, and no overt anger came through, but Morrison smiled. Ventura had told him that would irritate Wu, too.
Morrison continued: “The theater is fairly new, an IMAX. It’s on the edge of a big shopping center—”
“Ah, yes, on Mulholland, just north of Oxnard,” Wu broke in. “I saw the latest James Bond picture there a few months ago. You take the Ventura Freeway.”
Again Morrison smiled. “He’ll one-up you,” Ventura had said. “But it’ll be subtle.”
“Good, that’ll save me having to give directions. Tomorrow at noon.”
“Any particular reason for this meeting place?”
“I haven’t seen the picture they’re showing.”
“I see. All right. But there are a few details to which we must attend.”
“Such as?”
“Well, you can hardly expect us to show up hauling a suitcase with four hundred million dollars in small bills, now can you? It would take a truck to carry that much.”
“I have a secure account in an island bank,” Morrison said. “Electronic transfer will do. Bring a laptop with a secure wireless modem.”
“Ah, but there is the rub. You expect us to deliver that much money to you, and then you will give us the information, is that correct?”
“I’m the only one who can. It isn’t written down anywhere.” His meaning here was clear enough: If something happens to me before you get what you want, you won’t get it. The truth was something else: He did have a copy of it—but only one. Any other references to the sequence had been erased, and he’d done that using a deletion program that made all those files unrecoverable. The remaining file was well hidden, too. Nobody would ever find it. He could not imagine forgetting the sequence, but if for some reason he did, he wouldn’t lose it.
That’s what you thought about the feds connecting you to all this,