Breaking point - By Tom Clancy & Steve Perry & Steve Pieczenik Page 0,93

Earth possessed you to go into the field on your own?”

Jay started to shake his head, but that made him dizzy, so he stopped. He said, “I dunno. Pure stupidity would be my best guess. Not ever gonna happen again, I guarantee that. Reality sucks.”

They were in the hospitial’s lock ward, where one-eyed Fiscus had been transferred after they’d patched him up. He’d been hit twice after firing at the cops, in the side and in the leg, but neither hit was life-threatening once they stopped the bleeding. He was awake, and the boss had flexed his Net Force muscle to get in and question the guy before the mainline boys and the D.C. detectives got there.

Jay and Toni were with Michaels as he walked into the room, and they all nodded at the cop sitting in the chair next to the bed.

“We want some information,” Michaels said to Fiscus.

Full of IV tubes and things clipped to his fingertips or taped to his chest, Fiscus flashed his gap-toothed grin. “People in Hell probably want ice water, too,” he said. His snakeskin patch was gone, and the eye it had hidden had a milky film over it.

“Which you’ll find out all about if you don’t tell me what I want to know,” the boss said. “Way I figure it, you have kidnapping, assaulting a federal officer, attempted murder of a policeman, and a shitload of illegal weapons charges staring you in the face, at the very least. A man your age? You’re going to die in prison.”

That seemed to get his attention.

“And so why the fuck should I help you, I’m gonna die in prison anyhow?”

“It’s real simple. I can make the federal charges go away. No kidnapping, no assault, no visits from the BATF about all that hardware. I might even be able to convince the locals to cut you some slack on the shooting, since you didn’t hit anybody. You could be out in five, six years, maybe.”

Fiscus hesitated for a moment.

Jay could almost see the wheels going inside the man’s head. Don’t do it. Jay beamed his thoughts at Fiscus. Go and rot in jail forever, asshole!

“I can get you a lawyer if you want,” Michaels said.

“No, no lawyers. I’ll take the deal. What do you want to know?”

Michaels nodded.

Woodland Hills, California

“What a mess,” Ventura said to himself again. He was on the freeway with the same name as his own, driving in the general direction of Burbank. “What a fucking mess.”

And it was, too. Back in the theater were ten shot-up Chinese agents, all of them either dead or well on the way by now. Two of his men had taken stray bullets from the Chinese, but neither were fatal wounds. Four screenwriters had been hit, one was dead, another one pretty bad, two fairly minor. Blackwell was in bad shape, but he’d probably live, even if he wouldn’t be eating any caramel apples for a few months.

Wu was absolutely dead.

And Morrison was also gone, killed by somebody on his own side.

What a pisser that was.

The wounded civilians were being hauled by cars to the nearest hospital, where they’d be dropped off, the drivers not staying to answer questions. Ventura’s men would be taken to a doctor who was paid to take care of people and keep his mouth shut. The remaining unwounded screenwriters, twenty-three of them, had been stuffed into a storeroom and locked in. Probably half of them were already working on their next movie, one involving a shoot-out in a theater. They wouldn’t starve; there were a lot of candy bars and hot dog buns in there with them.

Outside, team members had distracted the Chinese surveillance team where feasible—a pepper bomb in the carpet truck, a sap of lead shot against the head of the coffee drinker in Starbucks, like that, but thankfully, no more guns.

Everybody else had taken off on prearranged escape routes.

Ventura realized that he could kiss the IMAX theater good-bye. Too bad. It had been making a profit for the first time in three years.

What a crappy, stinking, rotten piece of work this had been. Not only had he lost the client he was supposed to protect, but one of his own men had done it. No choice, really. In Blackwell’s shoes, he’d have probably done exactly the same thing.

I never should have given Morrison that gun.

Yeah, 20/20 hindsight there. Too late to think about that now.

Though there never would be a way to be absolutely sure, Ventura knew what had