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 SeaT ac 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
5
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 buying.
The Chinese would very much like to speak to anybody connected to the
deal. Once they found out Morrison was dead, they'd really have their
underwear in a wad. Ventura would be at the top of their list of
people to see.
The feds would have dropped their surveillance of Morrison's house as
soon as they realized what had happened to him--dead men didn't move
around a lot on their own, and the only way he'd be coming home would
be in a box. Ventura's team was, of course, long gone, pulled off as
soon as he'd realized the man he'd shot in Alaska was a marshal and not
a Chinese agent, and that more feds would thus be coming to have a
