He and Morrison had been here for almost two hours, and of course his people had been in place since before Wu had called yesterday. The regular staff had been given three days off with pay and told that a special training session for employees of a different theater was being conducted. If anybody had wondered about it, the free days off were apparently enough to keep them from asking.

Wu would expect Ventura to get there early, of course, and he wouldn’t know who normally worked there, but he’d figure Ventura hadn’t chosen the place because he liked breathing hot smog.

Like a game of chess or go, any move in this level of play, no matter how innocuous it might seem, could have a major impact later on. You had to be very careful, always looking ahead.

Only a fool would choose a neutral meeting place if he could pick one that would tilt the playing field in his favor. Taking the high ground was an old and battle-tested adage. The Chinese knew this—their culture had been steeped in war for thousands of years, and it made for a pungent, bitter drink. They knew this brew.

Within three hours of the call, Chinese agents had put the theater under surveillance, and a couple of them had tried to con their way inside. Ventura’s people had kept the place secure, though they really couldn’t do anything about the watchers outside. Well. That didn’t matter.

The arrival of an ostentatious stretch limo in the front two hours ago had likely drawn most of the outside attention while Morrison and Ventura slipped in the back door, bracketed by four of his best shooters. The guy having coffee in the Starbucks all morning would have seen them and reported it, but Wu wouldn’t want to risk a shoot-out in broad daylight next to a major street—it would be too easy for Morrison to take a round, and nobody wanted that. Yet.

Once inside, Morrison felt a lot safer, and Ventura let him believe that, though the truth was, it didn’t much matter. If Ventura screwed up, the client was in deep shit no matter where he was.

Still, Ventura knew they had the advantages: He had chosen the time and place, he controlled the building, and they needed Morrison alive, whereas Ventura could pot anybody on their side he wanted. And when it got right down to it, he was pretty sure he was better at strategy and tactics than Chilly Wu.

Of course, that was the crux of it—“pretty sure” was not the same as “absolutely certain,” which you could never be in such an encounter. And in that was the secret shared by serious martial artists everywhere. If you were a warrior—a real warrior—there was only one way to test yourself. You had to go into battle, guns ready, and face the enemy. No amount of virtual reality, no practice with targeting lasers against others, nothing other than the real thing mattered. In the end, the only way to know you were better when it came to life and death was to pull the triggers, rock and roll, and see who walked away when the smoke cleared.

That instant of truth, when the guns and knives came out, that was as much in the moment as a man got. That was the ultimate realization that you were alive, when you stared laughing Death in the face and backed him down. Death always laughed, of course, because he knew that in the end, he always won. That was Death—but life wasn’t about the destination, it was about the trek. Playing the song was about the flow of the music, not about reaching the end.

If a man spent years, decades, perfecting a skill, no matter how awful the skill was in application, some part of him wanted to test it. To know.

So, part of this was protecting his client. And part of it was, if necessary, defeating the one who would harm his client. You stepped up and knocked the other guy’s dick into the dirt, and thus you knew that in this instance, however briefly the moment lasted, you were better than he was.

It was not the best measure of a man, to pit yourself against another, but it was a method that gave at least a partial answer right then and there.

Ego, and no way around that, but Ventura had come to terms with his ego a long time ago. Yes, he had to accept that there were likely better assassins out there now than he was—younger, stronger, faster. And while old and devious beat young and strong most of the time, that didn’t happen when it was quicker reaction time that made the crucial difference.

So, yes, there were better assassins, but he was pretty sure that Chilly Wu wasn’t one of them. If the deal went smoothly, well and good, but if things went sour, well, then they’d see.

They’d dance the dance, and then they’d know for sure.

Ventura looked around the parking lot, which was still mostly empty. The first showing in the theater was usually noon or later; most of the stores in the shopping center didn’t open until nine or nine-thirty, so the sub rosa ops fielded by the Chinese had to work a little to hide. In the parking lot of the mall, broadside to the theater, there was a supposedly empty delivery van purporting to be from a carpet store, but Ventura would bet rubies to red rust that somebody was hidden in the back watching every move he made. Maybe through rifle sights, though he didn’t think they’d shoot him.

Another smile. During the American Revolution, there had been a British sniper, a crack shot, who had once lined his rifle sights up on George Washington. From the reports, it would have been an easy shot, but the sniper hadn’t taken it. Washington had been standing with his back to the shooter, and a true British gentleman wouldn’t shoot an officer in the back, now would he? Could have changed the whole course of the war, that one shot un-taken, but that wasn’t the issue. There were rules, after all. Otherwise, what was the point?

A public works-type truck was parked next to a manhole cover nearby, orange rubber cones and blinking lights blocking the area, with three men in hard hats industriously pretending to be working on something down under the street.

A telephone truck was backed up to a junction box across the street at the pizza place.

There were also joggers, dog walkers, women pushing baby carriages, bicyclists, and little old ladies in tennis shoes strolling to the stores for their daily mall walks. Ventura figured that any or all of them could be other than what they seemed. Probably some of them were legit, but he couldn’t make that assumption about any particular one—that kind of thinking got you killed. That old lady might be a kung fu expert; and instead of little Mac, that baby carriage might hold little Mac-10. If you were prepared for the worst, then anything less was a gift.

He smiled as he headed back toward the theater. He liked films, but he had always found those movies hilarious where the bad-guy kidnappers or extortionists showed up to collect their money and never looked twice at the wino on the park bench, or the young couple holding hands, or the priest feeding the pigeons, all of whom might as well have had big flashing neon signs on them saying “Cop!” Crooks who were that stupid deserved to get shot—it was good for the gene pool.

Of course, good people were always hard to find, in most any line of work. Ventura himself had only a dozen pros he’d personally let watch his back when the bullets started to fly, and it had taken twenty-odd years to find that many he trusted. They all worked for him on and off. There were another twenty or thirty second-tier shooters who could do things like the theater setup today, who would follow instructions and hit their marks if push came to shoot. Past that? Well, most of the people he’d met who played at being soldiers of fortune or freelance bodyguards or hitters were okay at best, coffin fodder at worst. He figured the Chinese would send the sharpest they could round up on short notice to play here today, but how many they could get inside was tricky. Too few and they wouldn’t feel covered properly; too many, and it would alert anybody half-awake. If he had to trade places with Chilly Wu, he’d be a little concerned about that.

Morrison stood by the concession stand, nervously sucking on a straw stuck in a cup of fizzy orange drink.

He’s going to ask me if everything is okay, Ventura thought.

“Everything okay?”

Ventura smiled. “Under control.”

“I’m worried about this screenwriter business,” Morrison said. “Aren’t you concerned that the Chinese might know about it, slip some ringers in?”

“Not really. The op in the ticket booth is checking membership cards. He’ll scan those into our systems. I have a man in the manager’s office with links to the WGA database. He’ll match the names on the cards against a list of members, and the faces on the closed-circuit secircuit security cam in the booth against those in the guild’s database—those are new, the pictures—and also against California driver’s licenses. Anybody who shows up to sneak in using a friend’s card had better not sneeze at the wrong time.”

“You aren’t worried at all? Wouldn’t a hidden metal detector or X ray be wise?”

“No point. They know we chose this place for a reason, and they know we’re here several hours early. I figure they’ll try to slip a minimum of eight men in with Wu, a maximum of twelve. I am assuming they will all be armed. I have twenty men on call, but I probably won’t use all of them. Remember, the idea here is not to get into a shooting match, but to keep the balance of power even. It’s our place and Wu knows that. If he gets his people in, he’ll be a lot more comfortable. If he couldn’t get them in, then it might make him twitchy; and that’s not what we want.”

“No?‘

“No. A nervous man might do something rash. They’ll take what you have for free if they can get it that way, but if they realize they can’t, they’ll pay for it. What we want is a nice smooth negotiation in which the Chinese get what they want, and you walk away a rich man, everybody’s happy, a nice win-win situation.”

“But if they try something—”

“—they won’t live to regret it, Doctor. Then we have to start all over again with a new negotiating team. Nobody wants that.”

But secretly, a small part of Ventura wanted exactly that.

C’mon, Wu. Show me what you got. Reach for your pocket—and let’s see who goes home.