Breaking point - By Tom Clancy & Steve Perry & Steve Pieczenik Page 0,84

lot. It was probably almost eighty degrees, and it was not yet nine A.M. Hardly a surprise that the sun came up bright and hot here this time of year. The Los Angeles basin pretty much had two seasons—hot and real hot. Ventura could remember going to the beach in January, and getting sunburned lying on the sand, watching girls hip-roll past in bikinis. He grinned again. That had been a long time ago.

He and Morrison had been here for almost two hours, and of course his people had been in place since before Wu had called yesterday. The regular staff had been given three days off with pay and told that a special training session for employees of a different theater was being conducted. If anybody had wondered about it, the free days off were apparently enough to keep them from asking.

Wu would expect Ventura to get there early, of course, and he wouldn’t know who normally worked there, but he’d figure Ventura hadn’t chosen the place because he liked breathing hot smog.

Like a game of chess or go, any move in this level of play, no matter how innocuous it might seem, could have a major impact later on. You had to be very careful, always looking ahead.

Only a fool would choose a neutral meeting place if he could pick one that would tilt the playing field in his favor. Taking the high ground was an old and battle-tested adage. The Chinese knew this—their culture had been steeped in war for thousands of years, and it made for a pungent, bitter drink. They knew this brew.

Within three hours of the call, Chinese agents had put the theater under surveillance, and a couple of them had tried to con their way inside. Ventura’s people had kept the place secure, though they really couldn’t do anything about the watchers outside. Well. That didn’t matter.

The arrival of an ostentatious stretch limo in the front two hours ago had likely drawn most of the outside attention while Morrison and Ventura slipped in the back door, bracketed by four of his best shooters. The guy having coffee in the Starbucks all morning would have seen them and reported it, but Wu wouldn’t want to risk a shoot-out in broad daylight next to a major street—it would be too easy for Morrison to take a round, and nobody wanted that. Yet.

Once inside, Morrison felt a lot safer, and Ventura let him believe that, though the truth was, it didn’t much matter. If Ventura screwed up, the client was in deep shit no matter where he was.

Still, Ventura knew they had the advantages: He had chosen the time and place, he controlled the building, and they needed Morrison alive, whereas Ventura could pot anybody on their side he wanted. And when it got right down to it, he was pretty sure he was better at strategy and tactics than Chilly Wu.

Of course, that was the crux of it—“pretty sure” was not the same as “absolutely certain,” which you could never be in such an encounter. And in that was the secret shared by serious martial artists everywhere. If you were a warrior—a real warrior—there was only one way to test yourself. You had to go into battle, guns ready, and face the enemy. No amount of virtual reality, no practice with targeting lasers against others, nothing other than the real thing mattered. In the end, the only way to know you were better when it came to life and death was to pull the triggers, rock and roll, and see who walked away when the smoke cleared.

That instant of truth, when the guns and knives came out, that was as much in the moment as a man got. That was the ultimate realization that you were alive, when you stared laughing Death in the face and backed him down. Death always laughed, of course, because he knew that in the end, he always won. That was Death—but life wasn’t about the destination, it was about the trek. Playing the song was about the flow of the music, not about reaching the end.

If a man spent years, decades, perfecting a skill, no matter how awful the skill was in application, some part of him wanted to test it. To know.

So, part of this was protecting his client. And part of it was, if necessary, defeating the one who would harm his client. You stepped up and knocked the other guy’s dick into the dirt, and thus