20
Sunday, June 12th
Gakona, Alaska
No Chinese assassins materialized to try and intercept them as they drove from the old pipeline airstrip just north of Paxon toward Gakona. Ventura said it wasn’t likely, and he had ten of his people checking possible ambush sites along the route, plus cars in front and behind of theirs. The older man, Walker, drove again, with Morrison in the front and Ventura sitting in the back. “If anybody shows up, they’ll probably think I’m you, since the VIP usually rides in the back,” Ventura had explained.
“You think they’ll be here?”
“Oh, they are here, somewhere. I’m not sure they’ll try for you yet; they may be waiting for the test, to be certain you can do as you say before they get really serious.”
“You think once we’re inside the facility we’ll be safe?”
“No. I have a roster of the guards, and if any new faces show up, we’ll deal with that, but that fence and a few half-trained guys on patrol won’t stop somebody really determined to get inside. I’ll have my people watching the roads and the air, so if they show up in force we’ll know about it in time to haul ass. I’ve worked out a few escape routes from the facility.”
Again, Morrison was surprised at the man’s thoroughness. Everything he did seemed thought out to the last detail.
The trip was uneventful, however—if you didn’t count a small elk herd crossing the road—and within an hour they were inside the auxiliary trailer, warming up the system. As Morrison worked, Ventura prowled around like some kind of big cat—alert, watching, listening.
“About ready,” Morrison said. He picked up a dogeared phonebook-sized tome of locations by latitude and longitude and thumbed through it until he found the ones he wanted. There it was ... 45 degrees, 28 minutes, 24 seconds North; 122 degrees, 38 minutes, 39 seconds West ... Not the center of the city, but it would take in all of downtown on both sides of the river ...
Ventura nodded. “Okay.”
“It’ll have to run for a couple of hours to get the optimal effect. Not as long as it did in China, since the target is closer, and we lose less energy for the beam.”
“Fine.”
He looked at the control. Flip the cover up, push the button, and it was done. He could go eat or take a nap while it worked. “I feel kind of, I don’t know, awkward about this.”
“Why?”
“Well, the target being in the United States and all.”
“A pang of nationalism?”
“Maybe a little. I somehow didn’t think it was going to go like this.”
“That’s always the way. ‘No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.’ You know why it’s a deal breaker if you don’t do this, don’t you?”
“No, why?”
“Because if this works, and if as a result of it a few dozen people die, then you haven’t just killed some faceless people nobody cares about a million miles away, you’re a multiple-murderer in your own country. And the city you were given as a target? It is in a state with the death penalty, did you know that?”
Morrison felt the taste of bile threaten to rise in his throat. “No. I didn’t think about that.”
Ventura shrugged. “You can only ride the needle once—that’s how they do it there, strapped to a gurney by lethal injection. What the Chinese want is more assurance you won’t change your mind and go running to the authorities once the deal is done. Once this deal is complete, they don’t have to find you and kill you—all they have to do is tell the feds who you are, sit back, and let them do the work. The Chinese wouldn’t want a trial, of course, having all this come out, but neither do you. And once you get arrested? Well, then they’d know exactly where to find you. It’s very difficult to stop an assassin who is willing to die to get the job done.”
Morrison felt the ugly truth of this flood into him like liquid oxygen, chilling him to his core. “I—I see.”
“Not quite yet, you don’t. Before you push that button, let me lay out a few more things you have to know.
“Once you get your money, Patrick Morrison has to disappear. You have to vanish so completely that the best agents in China and maybe the United States and half a dozen other countries can’t find you, because eventually they all might be looking. If you had visions of yourself being on the board of directors of some university and benevolently awarding grants to starving scientists or some such, you might as well erase those ideas now. The only way you are going to survive to spend that money is to become somebody completely different from the man you are. You will have to sever all links to your past—and unless your wife is willing to go along for the ride, which’ll get a little bumpy up front—that will include giving up contact with her, too. You’ll be a new man, in a new country, with a made-up background and history. You won’t even be able to read the same magazines you used to read, or practice any of your hobbies, because you can bank on it, somebody will try to track you from something as innocuous as those, and probably be able to do it. Say you subscribe to a small scholarly journal that thirty or forty thousand people get. You better read somebody else’s copy, because while it might take years to physically look at everybody on the subscription list, the Chinese are nothing if not patient. You only have to make one mistake, Doctor, and you lose the game. Patrick Morrison will have to die figuratively, or he will surely die literally.”
Morrison stared at him. He hadn’t thought it through to this end. But as he heard Ventura speak, he knew what the man said was so. For a moment, it took his breath away. How could he have been so shortsighted?
“That’s how it will have to be if you want to survive. I can help you do it, point you in the right direction, tell you the steps you have to take, but once you’re set, I can’t have any more contact with you, either. They might want to convince me to tell them, and better for you if I don’t know your new name and face.”
“I didn’t even think about the risk to you,” Morrison admitted.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ve had people looking for me for a long time, and I’ve managed to stay alive against the best. I came into this with my eyes open, and I’ve been living on borrowed time for years. But this is what you are facing. So the question you have to ask yourself is, Does four hundred million dollars justify you becoming an entirely new man? With that kind of money, there are places in the world where you can live like a king, have luxury, sex, the power of life and death—as long as you don’t stick your head up too high and get noticed. There are men who have done this before, men of wealth and power who had to go away for whatever reason, and they survived twenty, thirty, fifty years, some of them. Some of the ones who are very careful are likely still out there. The careless are for sure dead.”
Morrison stared at the button, and a realization solidified in his belly like a lump of cold steel. He said, “It’s already too late to turn back, isn’t it?”
Ventura gave him a thin smile. “Truth? Yes.”
Morrison took a deep breath. “F*ck it, then.”
He reached out and pushed the button.