side of Morrison's house. The plants were evergreens, big junipers of
some kind, trimmed into windblown bonsai shapes, but thick enough to
crouch beneath and be mostly covered. He had worked his way there
through the yard from the east, so he hadn't been visible from the
street or, he hoped, from Morrison's house.
He had just gotten settled when he saw the man all in black scurry in a
crouch to the back door.
That must be Ventura. A minute later and I would have missed him!
The man fiddled with the lock, and in what seemed no time at all, he'd
opened the door and slipped inside. Either the door had been unlocked,
or this guy was an expert with picks. Long ago, Michaels had covered
that in his training, picking locks, but it had taken him half an hour
to open even simple locks, and complicated ones were beyond him. His
teacher had told him it was a thing of feel, that you either had the
touch or you didn't. If you didn't, you could get better, but you'd
never be a master at it.
Well, enough ruminating on old training classes. Time to call in the
Marines.
Michaels pulled his virgil from his belt and hit the button.
Five minutes, tops, and the cavalry would arrive. All he had to do was
remain alert until they showed up.
Unless his young wife had unknown sensibilities. Morrison had been
quite the classical music fan. A CD/DVD rack above the
Phillips/Technics R&P held a couple hundred titles. The titles tended
to favor the Baroque composers:
Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Telemann, Heinichen, Corelli, and Haydn.
And Pachelbel, of course.
Fortunately, the man had been meticulous in his cataloging.
The titles were alphabetized, so it took only a few seconds to find the
DVD Ventura wanted: Pachelbel's Greatest Hit.
He grinned at the name and turned the case over. The disk was a
compilation, several versions and variations, of the contrapuntal
melody Canon in D, a total playing time of 41:30. You'd have to be a
real fan to listen to what was essentially the same simple tune played
over and over again for that long.
He opened the case to make certain the disk inside matched the title,
and the silvery disk gave off a rainbow gleam in the flashlight's
narrow beam.
The markings looked genuine to Ventura, the little RCA dog and
Gramophone, the cut titles and numbers.
Maybe an expert could tell the difference; he couldn't.
Put this disk into an audio player, and you would get forty-plus
minutes of variations on a musical theme. Put it into a computer and
look in the right spot, using the right binary decoder, and you would
get something else.
Between the end of 'Canon of the Three Stars,' by Isao Tomita and the
Plasma Symphony Orchestra, and the beginning of 'Pachelbel: Canon in
D,' by The Baroque Chamber Orchestra, led by Ettore Stratta--if
Morrison had been telling the truth--lay a secret the Chinese had been
willing to pay nearly half a billion dollars to get their hands on.
