He could do that, but he didn’t want to scare the guy off. If there were a dozen local cops tromping around this quiet little burg in the middle of the night, Ventura would have to be blind to miss them. So what Michaels had in mind was to find the house, hide somewhere he could watch it, and wait. When Ventura showed up, then he’d call in the cavalry. Give him time to find what he came for, maybe, to save Net Force having to look for it themselves. If Ventura was already there, as soon as Alex saw him come out, he’d make the call. Ventura might be able to run, but he couldn’t hide, not as long as he drove his rented car. And that car, according to Jay, was parked not far from here, and had been there for at least fifteen minutes.
Michaels certainly didn’t plan to try and take the guy down on his own. This was the man who had outshot John Howard, and the general was no slouch when it came to guns, a lot better than Michaels was. He didn’t even have a gun with him, only the issue taser, and while that would knock a man on his ass with a single hit, you had to be pretty close to get that hit. He had no desire to go up against a highly skilled killer who was certainly better armed and more desperate than he was. No, Michaels had a strike team in place, five minutes away — as close as they could get without risking alerting their quarry — ready to move on his signal. He’d watch, make sure the guy showed up, and then get all the help he needed. At least Net Force would get partial credit for the capture. And if they were lucky, maybe the workings of the mind control ray as a bonus. That would go a long way to making up for all the mistakes.
He looked at the map. He was still a couple of miles away. Might as well make the call he had been putting off. He pushed the button for Toni’s phone. Her message came on before even one ring.
“Hey, you’ve reached Toni Fiorella. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you soon as I can.”
He frowned. Was she not taking any calls? Or just not taking his calls? Well, okay, it was the middle of the night here, so it was the wee hours in D.C. Maybe she was just asleep and had turned off the ringer.
“Toni, it’s me. Just calling to see how you’re doing. I — well, look, I’m sorry about everything. I’ll be back in town tomorrow, let’s sit down and talk about it, okay? We can work all this out.”
He thumbed the discom button, tucked the virgil back onto his belt. After he collected Ventura, that would give Toni something she could pass along to her new boss.
He had to hatch this egg before he could count it as a chicken, though.
37
Ventura had studied the overview maps his ops had done of the neighborhood when he’d taken on Morrison as a client. He knew as much about the houses and inhabitants for a block in either direction as a team of good surveillance ops could learn in a short time. He knew which houses had dogs, which houses had kids, which houses had night owls who stayed up watching vids until all hours. And, fortunately, there weren’t a lot of any of these close to Morrison’s.
So it was that Ventura now sat in the backyard of the house behind Morrison’s, nestled into a gap between a small metal utility shed and a couple of cords of firewood. From the look of it, the wood was fir, alder, and madrona, a good combination. The fir, when dry, would burn very quickly. The alder could be used without seasoning, and the madrona would burn longer and hotter than oak. once it got going.
Odd, the things you learned along the way.
Ventura glanced at his watch. Almost twelve-thirty. The lights had been off in Morrison’s house for more than an hour, so the widow was likely asleep by now. What was her name? Ah, yes, Shannon. That sounded like the name of a teenaged starlet, or somebody who was a cheer-leader for some NFL football team. Hardly the name one would connect to a scientist who had been twice her age.
Ventura looked around carefully. It was quiet, cool, and he hadn’t seen anything to worry him as he had sneaked to this hiding place. If there were other watchers here, they must be working the street out front. Good and bad, that. If they were there, he hadn’t been able to see them, which meant they were adept. Then again, if they were out front, they wouldn’t see him as he went to the back door.
He took several deep breaths, inhaling and letting them out slowly, oxygenating his blood, trying to relax. He would go at one.
Michaels had left his beat-up Datsun at the bottom of the hill, half a block away from where Ventura’s rental was parked, and hiked up toward Morrison’s house. It had been a while since he’d done any covert surveillance in the field, a long while, and his skills were not as sharp as he would have liked. A lot of it came back as he worked his way toward his target. He used trees for cover, went through backyards when possible, kept low, listened carefully for dogs. He moved steadily when he left cover, and he stayed in the shadows as much as possible. That nobody seemed to notice him was probably more a testament to the hour than any real skill on his part, but, hey, he’d take it.
His hormones were flowing pretty good, too. He sometimes had to remember to breathe. He had remembered to shut the ringer off on his virgil. It wouldn’t do to be skulking in the bushes somewhere and suddenly start chiming out “Bad to the Bone.”
As he drew closer to the house, Michaels wondered exactly what he was going to do once he got there. He knew that Ventura’s rental car was still parked down the hill, so unless he missed him in passing, he was out here on foot somewhere. Maybe already in the house.
There was a streetlight up ahead on the right. Michaels crossed the road, to stay in the darkness.
One A.M., straight up, time to go. Ventura ran in a crouch toward the back door. It was only a ten- or twelve-second trip, but it seemed to last for hours. He kept expecting to feel the impact of a bullet in the back, even though he knew that wasn’t likely — there was no point in shooting him on the way in.
The trip ended; the bullet had not come. He tried the doorknob. Locked. And the dead bolt would also be locked, if Shannon had been doing what her husband told her.
Ventura took the leather pouch with his lock picks and torsion tools from his jacket. The button lock on the doorknob would be a snap, and that was all he needed. He had a key for the dead bolt, since his people had overseen that lock’s installation.
He put the torsion tool into the key slot on the doorknob, used a triple triangle pick to rake the pins. Might as well try it the easy way first, before picking each tumbler separately…
The torsion tool rotated the barrel mechanism on the second rake. Maybe six seconds from start to finish
Ventura grinned. He still had the touch.
He slipped the key into the dead bolt, turned it, and came up from his crouch as he opened the door and stepped into the hallway that led to the basement and the kitchen. He closed the door silently behind him.
The alarm keypad was on the wall just past the light switch. He could see the red On diode gleaming. The only other light was from instrument glows in the kitchen, no help this far away, so he flicked on the flashlight and covered most of the lens with one hand, allowing only enough illumination to see the keypad. He punched in the four-digit number—1-9-8-6—the year Shannon had been born. Morrison had said she wasn’t very good at remembering numbers, so he’d wanted to keep it simple.
1986. Ventura had shoes older than that.