Normally for this kind of work Ventura would have wanted to take his time. He’d get to know the territory, learn the patterns, who went where, when, and how, and not move until he had everything pinned down. The more you knew, the fewer chances for surprises. He didn’t have that luxury now. He needed to move quickly, get his business done, and leave this behind him. He had his money cleared, clean IDs, and safe places where he could hide until he had a chance to work out his longer-term plans. Being in the moment didn’t mean you couldn’t think about the future; it merely meant you didn’t live in the future.
He was, he figured, in a fairly good position. Still there was that nagging uneasiness, that sense of being a bug on a slide. As if a giant eye could appear in the microscope at any time, staring down at him. He did not like the feeling.
Well. You did the best you could, and that was that; nothing else mattered.
They were still an hour or more away from SeaTac. He’d get some rest. It might be a while before he had another chance. He took a series of slow, deep breaths.
In three minutes. he was asleep.
35
Quantico, Virginia
Toni went to the small gym to work off the tension and anger she felt. There was a guy in steel-rimmed glasses, a T-shirt, and bike shorts doing hatha yoga in the corner, otherwise the place was empty. She hurried through her own stretching routine, bowed in, and began practicing djurus, working the triangle, the tiga. Half an hour later, when she was done, she started footwork exercises on the square, langkas on the sliwa.
The moves were there, automatic after so many years, but her mind was elsewhere.
Alex was upset with her, that was obvious. Well, what had she expected? That he would smile and pat her on the head and offer his congratulations? She tried to see it from his viewpoint, but she knew she couldn’t have it both ways, not this time. This was the best thing. Working for him had become a sore point even before they had gone to London; he wasn’t treating her like he did the other members of the Net Force team, he was shielding her, and she didn’t want that, not in the work. So, okay, there was going to be an uncomfortable period while he adjusted to her new job. She didn’t like it, but that was how it seemed to be working out.
In the long run, she kept telling herself, it would be better for them. They’d be able to relate to each other more like equals, the personal relationship wouldn’t be bogged down in the professional one.
Yeah, but in the long run, we’re all dead, aren’t we? So what happens after a couple months of nobody having a good time if you or Alex get hit by a bus crossing the street? How is that going to fit in with your “long run” plan, hmm?
Toni stopped moving and stared into the mirror at the end of the room. Crap. I really don’t need this.
But—what help was there for it? What else could she do? She had to make a living!
She sighed, went back to her footwork.
A few minutes later, she was aware that the yoga guy had finished his routine and left, but that he’d been replaced by a trio of other men. Two of them were in karate uniforms, the third wore dark blue FBI sweats. One of the karate guys wore a brown cloth belt tied around his waist to keep his gi shut, the other a black belt. They were watching her. Watching and smiling. Then the guy in sweats leaned over and said something to the other two.
Pentjak silat wasn’t a flashy art; a lot of what went on in it didn’t look particularly impressive to the uninitiated. The last time a martial arts player from another style stood here and watched her practice, he had made the mistake of making some ignorant remarks out loud. She had been having a bad day when that happened—not nearly as bad as this one—and she had demonstrated to the loudmouth that what she was doing was in many ways superior to what he knew about fighting. It had been a painful lesson for the man.
The lesson she had learned was pretty painful, too.
She didn’t want to think about what had happened with—and to—that man later, but she couldn’t avoid it. Rusty had become her student, then her lover, however briefly, and as a direct result, he was dead.
Given the day so far, the opportunity to offer a correction to any—or all—of these three if they spouted off would feel pretty good. It wasn’t part of a self-defense mind-set to entertain such thoughts, but silat wasn’t primarily a self-defense art, it was a fighting art, and there was a big difference in your level of aggressiveness.
Toni stopped what she was doing and walked toward the trio.
“Afternoon,” she said. “Can I help you with something?”
The guy in sweats was the oldest of the three men; he had short and curly gray hair. He smiled and gave her a small bow. “No, ma’am,” he said. “We were just admiring your art, guru. Silat Tjimande?”
That surprised her. He got the subset wrong, but he knew it was silat and he had enough appreciation and understanding to call her “guru,” as well. Damn.
“It’s Serak,” she said, the “k” silent. “But it’s Western Javanese, like Tjimande. I’m surprised you recognized it.”
“I used to work out with an old Dutch kuntao teacher in San Diego,” he said. “He had done a little training in silat as a boy. My JKD teacher also had some training in Harimau, tiger-style.”
Toni nodded. JKD—jeet kun do, the way of the intercepting fist—was the style created by the late Bruce Lee. It was a hybrid system, and while they weren’t big on forms, many of the moves were based on wing chun, which to some people looked at least superficially like silat. At least the WC players knew in theory what the centerline was, even if they didn’t cover it adequately according to Serak standards ...
If Curly here knew enough to recognize and respect what she was doing, he probably wouldn’t be interested in trying to deck her to impress his friends. Silat fighters didn’t go in much for point-sparring, and for that matter, neither did JKD players.
Well. Too bad. Kicking somebody’s butt would feel pretty good about now.
And she was going to have to do something or she would explode.
But—what could she do?
Woodland Hills, California
It was dark by the time Michaels got to the theater, and there really wasn’t much left to look at by then. Truth was, there really wasn’t any good reason for him to be here, except to see things—such as they were—for himself. Anybody involved with this who was still alive was undoubtedly long gone.
The bodies had been removed, the screenwriters released after giving their statements, and the local police still puzzled as to what had happened. The mainline FBI op who showed up to meet Michaels was a junior man, not the special-agent-in-charge, but he was willing to say what he thought. His name was Dixon.
Michaels and Agent Dixon ducked under the yellow crime-scene tape covering the doors and went into the building.
“Here’s what we know,” Dixon said. “The dead men, all thirteen of them, were shot in the theater proper. We have identification on six so far”—he looked at his palm computer—“Wu, Morrison, a screenwriter named C. B. Shane, and three men with criminal records: two Vietnamese-Americans, Jimmy Nguyen and Phuc Khiev, and a man named Maxim Schell. Nguyen, Khiev, Schell, and Morrison were armed with handguns. Nguyen’s was in his hand, Khiev’s on the floor under his body, Schell’s still tucked into his belt. None of them got a shot off, though some of the other dead men did fire their weapons.
“Morrison’s gun, a little .22, was locked in his right hand in a death grip, and shot empty. Nobody got hit with a .22 that we can tell. We haven’t come up with IDs on the other dead men yet, but all of them had guns, too.”
Michaels said, “So what do you think happened here?”
“No way to tell for sure. The dead guys were mostly shot in the back or back of the head, so what it looks like is some kind of ambush. You have to figure that if you have a dozen armed men, most of whom didn’t do any shooting before they got taken down, there were a lot of other guys in here blasting away, too. Forensics hasn’t gotten t
he blood all sorted out, but a quick prelim says there were a few who got hit hard enough to bleed, but who didn’t stick around.”
“Jesus.”
“We’d take his help if he offered. You must have some ideas. You got anything for us?”
Michaels thought about it. Toni would tell the director anyway, it was her job now, so it didn’t matter if Dixon knew. He said, “Morrison had some kind of valuable data and he used it against the Chinese. We think maybe they were after him. Maybe they caught up with him.”
“What kind of data?”
“Sorry, that’s need-to-know only.”
Dixon shook his head. “Doesn’t seem right. The dead guys were all sitting down when the shooting started. And according to the interviews with the screenwriters, everything was quiet until somebody yelled ‘Gun!’ At which point, all hell busted loose. It sounds more like a negotiation than a face-off.”
“It must have been an ugly scene in here.”
“Yeah. Though a couple of the screenwriters were more pissed because they didn’t get to see the movie than they were upset about all the corpses. Welcome to L.A.”
Michaels considered what Dixon had said. A negotiation. Yes, it did, didn’t it? Why would the Chinese be negotiating with a man who had wiped out a couple of their villages?
Maybe they wanted him to tell them how. Maybe they were willing to pay for it?
Well, if Wu was the guy negotiating, he hadn’t done too good a job of it, had he? And Morrison wasn’t going to be pedaling anything, either.
Paris, France
Jay sat slouched in a wicker chair at the Cafe Emile, looking out on the Champs Elyseés, not far from the Arc de Triomphe. He sipped black, bitter espresso from a tiny china cup, and smiled at the couples who strolled past. The war was over nearly two years, the Nazi occupation history. Postwar Paris in the spring was a much nicer place than a military surplus store in any season.
Henri, the waiter, approached. He had in his hand a small paper tablet. He gave Jay a nod that was both servile and arrogant and offered him the tablet. “ ’Ere iz ze list you wanted, Monsieur Greedlee.”
“Merci.” Jay took the tablet and waved Henri away. He looked at the list, scanned down the row of names—no ... no ... no ... wait!
Jay sat upright, bumped the table, and sloshed espresso from the cup. Yes! There it was!
He snapped his fingers loudly, caught Henri’s attention. “Garçon! Voulez-vous bien m’indiquer ou se trouve le téléphone? Je desire appelez faire!”
Henri rewarded Jay with a sneer. “Bettair you should work on ze pronunciation and ze grammar first, monsieur!”
The arrogant prick knew he wanted to make a call, but he had to correct his French first.
“Montrez du doigt, asshole!”
Henri shrugged off the insult and did as Jay requested—he pointed toward the café.
Jay stood and hurried to find the phone.
Wednesday, June 15th
Woodland Hills, California
Michaels had supper at the hotel, and when room service brought him the chicken sandwich, it had bean sprouts on it. Well, of course. This was L.A.
He ate the sandwich mechanically, not really tasting it. He was screwed, there was nowhere to go from here. Toni had been right, he wasn’t a field agent. He couldn’t just hop on a plane, fly to a crime scene, and expect to spot some crucial clue that the local police and FBI forensics team had somehow missed. He knew better. But he had needed to see the place for himself, hoping it would somehow jog something in him.
Well, it hadn’t. And here he was in a hotel in La-La Land, eating a chicken sandwich with bean sprouts, without a clue as to what he should do next.
On the bedside table, his virgil lit, telling him it was bad to the bone. That was probably Toni, calling to tell him what an idiot he was. At the moment, he was inclined to agree with her.
The tiny screen on the multipurpose toy didn’t show Toni’s face, however. It was Jay Gridley.
“What’s up, Jay?”
“I think I got him, Boss.”
Michaels stared at the virgil. “What? How? Where?”
“I crunched all the commercial airline flights leaving SoCal in the last twelve hours. Burbank, LAX, John Wayne, in Orange County.”
“And you found Ventura?”
“No. But I did find a Mr. B. W. Corona.”
“I don’t see—”
“It’s another freeway name, Boss.”
“Kind of a reach, isn’t it?”
“Maybe not. Guy booked a ticket two days ago, a round-trip to Seattle. He was originally scheduled for this evening, but he called and changed it to an earlier flight. Return is open-ended.”
“I don’t see how that makes it any more certain.”
“Okay, look. He planned to leave tonight, but there was some kind of a problem, a shoot-out, so he had to take off early.”
“But he’s planning to come back, your Mr. Corona.”
“If you’re on the run, you don’t buy a one-way ticket, that’s a red flag, first thing cops look for.”
“But why would he use a name we might know?”
“Because he doesn’t know the freeway names have been compromised. He doesn’t know we picked up his pal at the surplus store in Washington, so why would he throw away perfectly good ID?”
“Still sounds like a stretch.”
Jay did an imitation of a late-night infomercial: “But wait, but wait, don’t order yet, listen to this!”
The virgil’s screen was tiny, but it had good resolution, and Michaels could see Jay’s grin easily enough.
“I checked the car rental places at SeaTac. A Mr. B. W. Corona walked into Avis, no reservation, and rented a midsize Dodge ten minutes after the flight from L.A. landed late this afternoon. You got a computer terminal there in your room, Boss?”
“Yes.”
“Plug your virgil into it, I want to show you something.”
Michaels opened the terminal, lit the screen, and tapped the infrared send-and-receive code into his virgil. Jay’s face appeared on the hotel’s computer screen. “I’ve got your visual on the hotel’s computer,” Michaels said.
“Stand by.”
The image of Jay was replaced by a digital line-by-line image. It was a close-up of a California driver’s license.
“This came from the counter scanner at Avis. They log all licenses.”
The man in the hologram had short hair, but a full beard. Could that be Ventura?
Michaels couldn’t tell. “I don’t see the guy in our sketch.”
“No law against growing a beard, having your picture taken, then shaving. But forget the picture.”
Michaels was already scanning the information on the license. He got no farther than the name. “Son of a bitch! Why didn’t you tell me this in the first place?”
“C’mon, Boss, you always save the best part of a story for last. You want me to call the Washington state police and have him picked up?”
“I suppose you know where he is, too, huh?”
“Sure.”
“Oh, really?”
Jay laughed. “You are really gonna love this part. Avis has theft-recovery devices installed in their fleet. Somebody decides to keep a car instead of turning it in? They can dial a number and turn on a little broadcast unit wired into the car’s battery. The unit sends a GPS signal to the nice folks at Brink’s, and they can tell you exactly where the vehicle is.” He shifted back into the infomercial announcer’s voice: “Now how much would you pay?”
“Son of a bitch.” Michaels looked at the computer’s flatscreen. The name on the license was the final selling point: The “B.W.” stood for “Bruce Wayne.” And everybody who read comics, watched television cartoons, or went to action adventure movies knew that Bruce Wayne was the secret identity of Batman, mentor and elder partner of Robin the Boy Wonder, aka Dick Grayson.
If this wasn’t the guy they wanted, it was one hell of a coincidence.
; “All right, Jay, I’m impressed. What will it take to get the car rental company to give us the tracking information?”
“Already done, Boss. You want to guess where he’s going?”
“Surprise me.”
Jay laughed again.
36
Wednesday, June 15th
Port Townsend, Washington
It was almost nine P.M. when Ventura rolled into the small tourist village of Port Townsend. And though he had the GPS maps his ops had sent in with their electronic reports, he spent thirty minutes driving around, getting a feel for the place. Situated on a fat, semi-hook-shaped isthmus jutting into Puget Sound, the sleepy town had once upon a time been the gateway to the U.S. Northwest via the Straits of Juan de Fuca. Those glory days were long past, and now the tourists came to see some of the prime examples of Victorian-style houses left in the country. Ventura had been here in the daylight, and it looked almost as if somebody had gone back in time, grabbed a section of San Francisco just before the Great Earthquake of 1906, and dropped it up here. Some of the larger and more ornate old houses were now commercial businesses or bed-and-breakfast lodgings, but many of them were still in use as regular housing. There was a paper mill still working down on the waterfront as you got to town, but other than that, not much industry.
The main drag downtown was Water Street, where most of the old buildings were pre-turn-of-the-century. There was a restaurant and marina at the end of the street, and a lot of nicely kept wooden boats moored there.
Above downtown, overlooking a bluff, Lawrence Street was the parallel uptown road. Here were stores, a theater, and other odds and ends. From Lawrence Street, Taylor Street ran up the hill to Foster, which was where Morrison’s house was. A bit farther to the north was the old Fort Warden Military Reservation, now a park where you could rent an officer’s or a noncom’s old house and spend a few days hiking and exploring the long-empty bunkers. Morrison hadn’t snagged one of the Victorian homes, but a more modest stone house built in the 1920s. It hadn’t been cheap, according to his operative’s research, but it wasn’t outrageously expensive, since he’d bought it just before the big real estate boom hit here. Houses that had been going for two hundred thousand three years ago now went for half again that much. The town was in the Olympic rain shadow, and while they did get some rain and wind, it was a lot less wet than much of northern Washington state. A lot of the baby boomers had decided this was a good place to retire and enjoy their golden years.