Breaking point - By Tom Clancy & Steve Perry & Steve Pieczenik Page 0,94

happened. One of the Chinese agents had gotten careless, since his own people were more adept than to show a gun that was supposed to be hidden. One of the Chinese agents had gotten careless. Whichever of his people who saw the piece must have felt it was being brought into play. All of his shooters had been told to stay cool—unless a weapon came out. The shout of “Gun!” had been the agreed-upon signal for his shooters to take out their targets, and once that happened, all bets were off.

Had the Chinese intended to take the shortcut? To grab Morrison instead of paying for the data?

Well, it didn’t matter. Done was done, no point in crying over it now. Still, there were consequences to consider. The Chinese were going to be most unhappy, and they might well decide that Morrison and Ventura had ripped them off for their four hundred million and decide to try and get it back, and that was real bad. Morrison wasn’t going to be giving anything back, and Ventura didn’t have it.

He changed lanes, and a fat man in a black Porsche honked at him for cutting in. Ventura had a sudden urge to pull his Coonan and put a round into the fat man’s windshield. Honk at somebody else, dickhead.

He resisted the urge. That wouldn’t help matters, to start shooting morons on the L.A. freeway. Once you started, you’d run out of ammo quick. Probably couldn’t carry enough extra rounds in a moving van to get them all...

He giggled at the thought. He was stressed out, yes, better just take a few deep breaths and think this through.

He did just that. Three deep breaths, in and out, and now think about it calmly.

Well. The first thing was, the couple of million he had tucked away didn’t seem like all that much money anymore. The way he figured it, he was going to have to disappear, just as he had told Morrison he would have to disappear, forever. Yes, he was living on borrowed time and had been for a long time, but the truth was, he wasn’t quite ready to check out yet.

If the deal had come off, he’d have been safe enough from the likes of Wu. They’d have gotten their money’s worth, and pros didn’t need to take each other out for doing their jobs.

But it hadn’t come off. The Chinese were out that money; they didn’t get what they wanted, and too bad for them. This was certainly going to make them real unhappy.

Morrison hadn’t given Ventura the account number, so he couldn’t get his hands on it, either. Too bad for everybody.

The fat man found an opening on the outside lane, whipped the Porsche around Ventura, and zipped past. He waved his middle finger at Ventura as he went by, and though he couldn’t hear him, Ventura could read the man’s lips easy enough. A fourteen-letter word.

Maybe he could shoot just the one and stop?

The Porsche accelerated and gained away, and Ventura forgot the fat man.

The Chinese money was out of reach, but—there was more where that had come from. Because if he had been telling the truth—and Ventura had no reason to doubt that he had been—Morrison had told him where to find the secret that had just caused more than a dozen people to die. And the Chinese weren’t the only oysters in the ocean who had pearls.

Yeah, okay, it was a bad deal all around, a major disaster, a perfect example of Murphy’s Law. But now that it was done, Ventura had to get on with his life. That moment was past. If you drove down the road looking only into your rearview mirror, you were going to plow into somebody ahead of you. Time to look forward.

Somebody could still benefit from all this, and it might as well be him. He could even drop the price a little. He didn’t need four hundred million, he could get by on half that. No point in being greedy, was there?

He drove toward the airport in Burbank. He had a flight leaving in an hour. It would probably take the screenwriters longer than that to figure a way out of the storeroom. Yes. He had a course of action now. He knew what he was going to do.

34

Wednesday, June 15th

Quantico, Virginia

“I just got a call from Julio Fernandez,” Jay said. “John Howard is home.”

“That was quick,” Toni said.

Michaels nodded at her. “Yeah. Old soldiers never die, but they