Breaking point - By Tom Clancy & Steve Perry & Steve Pieczenik Page 0,86

places with Chilly Wu, he’d be a little concerned about that.

Morrison stood by the concession stand, nervously sucking on a straw stuck in a cup of fizzy orange drink.

He’s going to ask me if everything is okay, Ventura thought.

“Everything okay?”

Ventura smiled. “Under control.”

“I’m worried about this screenwriter business,” Morrison said. “Aren’t you concerned that the Chinese might know about it, slip some ringers in?”

“Not really. The op in the ticket booth is checking membership cards. He’ll scan those into our systems. I have a man in the manager’s office with links to the WGA database. He’ll match the names on the cards against a list of members, and the faces on the closed-circuit secircuit security cam in the booth against those in the guild’s database—those are new, the pictures—and also against California driver’s licenses. Anybody who shows up to sneak in using a friend’s card had better not sneeze at the wrong time.”

“You aren’t worried at all? Wouldn’t a hidden metal detector or X ray be wise?”

“No point. They know we chose this place for a reason, and they know we’re here several hours early. I figure they’ll try to slip a minimum of eight men in with Wu, a maximum of twelve. I am assuming they will all be armed. I have twenty men on call, but I probably won’t use all of them. Remember, the idea here is not to get into a shooting match, but to keep the balance of power even. It’s our place and Wu knows that. If he gets his people in, he’ll be a lot more comfortable. If he couldn’t get them in, then it might make him twitchy; and that’s not what we want.”

“No?‘

“No. A nervous man might do something rash. They’ll take what you have for free if they can get it that way, but if they realize they can’t, they’ll pay for it. What we want is a nice smooth negotiation in which the Chinese get what they want, and you walk away a rich man, everybody’s happy, a nice win-win situation.”

“But if they try something—”

“—they won’t live to regret it, Doctor. Then we have to start all over again with a new negotiating team. Nobody wants that.”

But secretly, a small part of Ventura wanted exactly that.

C’mon, Wu. Show me what you got. Reach for your pocket—and let’s see who goes home.

31

Wednesday, June 15th

Quantico, Virginia

Michaels stopped at Jay’s office, but didn’t see him. He saw instead one of the techs, Ray DeCamp, carrying a stack of hardcopy printouts. The man always wore thick, round computer glasses while at work, so of course he had a nickname appropriate to that:

“Hey, Owl. Jay around?”

“Commander. Nah, he said he hadda go into town, said he’d be back inna couple hours.” Owl had a strong Boston accent, so the last word came out “ow-wuz.”

That surprised Michaels. Jay seldom left during the day for any reason. A lot of times, before he’d hooked up with the Buddhist girl Soji, Gridley would stay in his office for days, sleeping on the couch and showering in the gym dressing room. There were jokes that he was a vampire, that exposure to sunlight would cause him to burst into flames. And coming from other ghost-white computer geeks who spent a considerable amount of their own time in semidark rooms, that was saying something.

Oh, well. Given everything else going on around here lately, Jay leaving the building during the day was no weirder than the rest of it.

“Hey, Alex.”

He looked up and refocused on Toni. “Hey,” he said. He repressed a sigh. He’d flown off the handle this morning. Sure, she had provoked him, but he expected better of himself. A man who couldn’t control his temper was weak—losing it almost always got you in more trouble than it solved.

“You want to talk to me?”

He nodded. “Yeah. Come on, we can go to my office.”

“Kind of stuffy there. How about the gym?”

He had to smile. His office, his advantage. The gym was where she was stronger. He said, “Why don’t we go to the conference room instead?”

She smiled back at him, and he knew she understood what he’d been thinking. What they had both been thinking. God, he loved smart women!

Washington, D.C.

Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea coming here, Jay thought.

“Here” was a kind of Army-Navy surplus store, though that wasn’t strictly true—there were odds and ends from other branches of military surplus for sale here, too, including some stuff from what looked like the Coast Guard, the