“Let them think what they want,” Ventura had told him. “The lower an opinion they have of us, the better.”
“Perhaps,” Wu said. “Where?”
Morrison glanced ahead at Ventura, who saw him in the rearview mirror. He nodded.
“There’s a theater in Woodland Hills, California. That’s just outside Los Angeles.”
“I know where Woodland Hills is, Doctor.” His voice was dry, and no overt anger came through, but Morrison smiled. Ventura had told him that would irritate Wu, too.
Morrison continued: “The theater is fairly new, an IMAX. It’s on the edge of a big shopping center—”
“Ah, yes, on Mulholland, just north of Oxnard,” Wu broke in. “I saw the latest James Bond picture there a few months ago. You take the Ventura Freeway.”
Again Morrison smiled. “He’ll one-up you,” Ventura had said. “But it’ll be subtle.”
“Good, that’ll save me having to give directions. Tomorrow at noon.”
“Any particular reason for this meeting place?”
“I haven’t seen the picture they’re showing.”
“I see. All right. But there are a few details to which we must attend.”
“Such as?”
“Well, you can hardly expect us to show up hauling a suitcase with four hundred million dollars in small bills, now can you? It would take a truck to carry that much.”
“I have a secure account in an island bank,” Morrison said. “Electronic transfer will do. Bring a laptop with a secure wireless modem.”
“Ah, but there is the rub. You expect us to deliver that much money to you, and then you will give us the information, is that correct?”
“I’m the only one who can. It isn’t written down anywhere.” His meaning here was clear enough: If something happens to me before you get what you want, you won’t get it. The truth was something else: He did have a copy of it — but only one. Any other references to the sequence had been erased, and he’d done that using a deletion program that made all those files unrecoverable. The remaining file was well hidden, too. Nobody would ever find it. He could not imagine forgetting the sequence, but if for some reason he did, he wouldn’t lose it.
That’s what you thought about the feds connecting you to all this, too, remember?
He tried to ignore the thought. He still couldn’t figure out how they had done that. He had been so careful.
“How do we know you will deliver?”
“You know I have the information. I’ve demonstrated it to your satisfaction, haven’t I? Once I have the money, why wouldn’t I? It doesn’t make any sense not to, does it?”
“Having it and giving it to us are not exactly the same though, are they?”
“I’ll be sitting right there next to you. You transfer the money. I transfer the information. I assume you will have scientists standing by who can verify the information. I can give you the names of some of yours who have the ability to confirm it — Dr. Jang Ji, or George Chen, or Li Hun—”
“That won’t be necessary. We know who our scientists are. But can they verify it immediately?”
“If they have a test subject and access to ECG equipment and a couple of basic transmitters, they can be ready to run the experiment as soon as they get the code sequence. They’ll be able to confirm it before the movie is over. Only on a small scale, of course, but in this case, size doesn’t matter. It will work as well in the field as it does in the tab — you’ve seen that.”
There was a short pause as Wu apparently digested this information.
“That’s the deal, Mr. Wu. Take it or leave it.”
“All right. I’ll see you at noon tomorrow. Have a pleasant trip.”
Wu disconnected, and Morrison blew out a big sigh of relief. This had all gone a lot more crossways than he had ever anticipated. A large part of him wished he could turn back the clock and reconsider this whole idea.
“He went for it,” Ventura said. Not a question.
“Yes.”
“Good. We’re in business.”
Morrison was worried. “This sounds very risky to me. A public movie theater? It will be too easy for him to bring men with guns in and hide them among the audience. He could have fifteen or twenty of them and we wouldn’t know it.”
Ventura smiled into the rearview mirror. “Do I tell you how to program your signals? Offer advice on frequencies?”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
“Don’t worry, we’ll know who they are. The theater will be having a special screening tomorrow at noon, for screenwriters, members of the WGA. They’ll have to show a card to get in the showing. Everybody else will either be one of ours or belong to the Chinese. We’ll let their people in, because we will have the advantage. The employees, from the booth to the concession stand to the guy who tears your ticket in half, will be our people. For every one they get inside, we’ll have one in a nearby seat covering them. Everybody our men don’t know will be a potential target. If click comes to bang, they will know who to shoot. And if they miss? Well, nobody will notice if there are a few less screenwriters anyhow. Everybody in L.A. is working on a script.”
“How can you do this? You know the guy who owns the place?”
“I am the guy who owns the place. Over the years, I’ve done pretty well for my retirement, Doctor. I own that theater, a bar, part interest in a health club, and a couple of high-profile restaurants. Plus the blue chip stocks and bonds, of course. I’m not in the same class as you are about to be, but I could live fairly comfortably off the investments and interest without ever touching my principal. If your money isn’t working for you, it’s just gathering dust.” He smiled.
Morrison shook his head. This was incredible. Why would a man of wealth and property risk his life to work as a bodyguard?
Ventura must have read his mind. “ ‘Idle hands are the Devil’s workshop.’ A man likes to keep busy doing work he enjoys.”
Morrison looked away from Ventura.
This was getting stranger — and more frightening — all the time.
Michaels sat at his kitchen table, holding a cup of coffee. It was early, just about dawn, and Toni was still asleep. He drank and stared at the wall, his gaze going through the paneling and Sheetrock and wood and focusing on nothing a thousand miles away.
And how is your life, Mr. Michaels?
Why, just fine, thank you very much. My ex-wife is getting remarried to some Idaho dork and taking my child away from me — unless I want to get into an ugly child custody case that will probably scar my daughter for life, something she doesn’t deserve and I won’t do.
I personally spoke to the man who almost certainly killed scores of Chinese by using some kind of radio beam to drive them crazy, and if I had been on the fucking ball, I would have stopped him before he did it again to scores of Americans. He walked into my office and I smiled and let him walk out.
The head of my military arm was shot and seriously wounded because I wanted him to go along and keep the federal marshals company, and the guy I sent them all after plugged a marshal while he was at it, got away, and is still on the loose.
My boss is ready to nail my ass to the nearest wall for not keeping her in the loop.
What else? Oh, right. My woman is back and sleeping in my bed, but she’s considering taking a job where she’ll be looking over my shoulder at my work and then telling my boss all about it. And she didn’t think it was worth mentioning.