Breaking point - By Tom Clancy & Steve Perry & Steve Pieczenik Page 0,96

out of him—not to mention I had the guy responsible for all of this in my hands and I let him walk away. This has been a FUBAR from the word go.”

“You didn’t know—”

“But I know now. You want to tell your new boss I’m overstepping my bounds, fine, go ahead. I can take some vacation days myself if I have to.”

“You don’t have to,” she said. “And if you want, I’ll go with you.”

He considered his next words carefully. He considered not saying anything, but decided he needed to: “This is Net Force’s problem, Toni, and I think Net Force should take care of it.”

She blinked at him. “And I’m not part of Net Force anymore, is that what you’re saying?”

“You said it, not me.”

She nodded. “I see.”

He didn’t like the way it made him feel, didn’t like the distress on her face, but it was going to come out eventually, and better sooner than later. Maybe they could salvage their personal relationship; he sure hoped so. But the job had already changed. It wasn’t going to be the same as it had been. If Toni didn’t work for him anymore, okay, fine, he could learn to deal with that. If she was going to report about what he did to somebody else, he needed to have some control as to what he let her see and hear. If the director wanted to keep tabs on him, all right, that was her prerogative. Nothing said he had to make it easy for her.

Toni had made her choice. Now they’d both have to live with it.

In the air over northern California

Ventura glanced around, uneasy. There was nobody looking at him, and he hadn’t seen anybody following him, but something felt... off, somehow. He was in full-alert mode, scanning, listening, being aware, and he hadn’t spotted anything about which to be worried, but even so, something was not quite right.

He glanced at his watch. Maybe it was the flight. He was concerned about being in the jet’s first-class cabin—

“Can I get you anything?”

Ventura gave the young flight attendant a polite smile. “No, thank you.” He had booked a business-class e-ticket, using one of a dozen fake IDs he always carried, but the flight had been full, and by the time he’d checked in, the only empty seats remaining had been in first class. Normally, he didn’t fly first class; it was harder to blend into the herd when you were up front. But demanding to sit in the tourist section would really make you stand out—who refused a free upgrade?—and the idea was to be as anonymous as possible. You wanted to be just another middle-aged businessman, do nothing to stick in somebody’s memory, and hope you didn’t remind the stewardess of her favorite uncle.

The attendant moved on, and Ventura turned to stare out at the terrain. The flight from L.A. to Seattle took about three hours. He’d rent a car at SeaTac and drive to Port Townsend, probably another three or four hours—you had to allow for the ferry ride, plus he wanted to do a little circling for his approach. That would put him there in the evening, but it didn’t get dark up this far north in the summer before maybe nine-thirty or ten. So there was no real hurry, since night was your friend. Plenty of time to stop and have supper, get set up, do the job.

He looked out through the jet’s double-plastic window. There was a big snow-covered mountain below and in the distance. Shasta? Must be.

Ventura figured the local authorities in L.A. had uncovered the mess in the theater by now, and if so, they had certainly identified Dr. Morrison. As hard as the feds would have been looking for Morrison after the shootings in Alaska, they’d be on the case quickly. He had considered hauling the corpse away, disposing of it, but since the man was dead and no longer his responsibility, it was tactically much smarter to let him be found. He’d made sure that Morrison’s wallet was still in the dead man’s pocket, to speed things up. That would certainly stop the direct search, and maybe the feds wouldn’t be all that interested in looking for accomplices.

It wouldn’t slow the Chinese down. Surely Wu had passed his intel along to somebody higher up the food chain—Ventura couldn’t imagine that the man’s stingy government had given him hundreds of millions of dollars to spend without knowing every detail of what they were