Hell with it, she concluded. I’m going to call 911, bust this thing wide open. Even better, call 911, then call the nearest television station.
Start a media circus. But then she hesitated again. That last bit was not such a great idea. It might provoke Galantz to do-what? Shoot them both, the kid, too, and vanish? She groaned in frustration, finger poised over the keys.
Then the windshield suddenly filled with headlights, from ahead and from behind, accompanied by the sounds of cars skidding to a stop. She was blinded by all the white light, and she heard Gutter start barking outside, but now the lights were everywhere, all pointing at high beam into the car, and then there were several men outside, shouting some tense orders to Hiroshi to drop the gun, someone else shouting about tranquilizing the dog. A large man was opening the door on the driver’s side and sliding in. Before Karen could say anything, he told her to put her seat belt on, and then he was autolocking the doors and starting up the car. -She looked frantically for Hiroshi, but he was gone, and the other cars outside were already starting to pull out.
“Who the hell are you?” she asked, ignoring the order to put a seat belt on.
“The cavalry, Commander. You’ve done your part; now we’re taking over, okay? Put your goddamn seat belt on.”
He slammed the car in gear and pulled out onto Cherry Hill Road, headed uphill. It looked as if there were two cars in front and another behind.
“But what about the admiral? And-“
“Not your prob anymore, Commander.” The car swerved around the next curve, going up the hill at much too high a speed. Karen grabbed a handrest on the right-front door as the car almost went into the ditch.
She decided she’d better put her belt on.
“Who the hell are you, goddarrm it?!” she yelled, struggling with the seat belt. “Where are you taking me? What have you done with my dog?”
“FBI,” he answered, swerving again, again almost missing the next turn.
There was a roar of gravel from the leftrear wheel. “Goddamned road!” he yelled, looking back in his rearview mirror. The car behind had backed off to avoid all the gravel. “We’re handling the secondary. Another agency is working the primary. That there’s a kill zone, lady, back on that hill. Our orders were to pick up you or anyone else who came back down that hill. The dog’s okay; they’ve just tranked it. This guy Galantz-he’s got von Rensel?”
“I think so, yes.”
“He was a good man. Too bad.” The two cars ahead were slowing down now that they were well away from the dirt road. “Too bad? “Was’? What’s going to happen up there?”
He didn’t answer her, concentrating on the road. She repeated the question. He still didn’t answer, but he looked over at her for an instant, and she was shocked to read sympathy in his face. She faced forward then, realizing now that Sherman, Train, and Jack had all become expendable.
Someone was going to solve the rogue operative problem once and for all, and any bystanders be damned. The cars up ahead were slowing down even more, apparently preparing to turn off into a large driveway that was visible up ahead on the right. The car behind them had already pulled over, its emergency flashers going. The “secondaries” were going to wait here until the “primaries” had finished whatever was planned up on the hill.
A decision crystallized in her forebrain like a bright sunrise. She didn’t give it a second thought, just like when Jack had run his mouth.
She pulled the .380 out of her right pocket, pointed it right in front of the driver’s face, and blasted tworounds through his side window, sending the rounds about one inch in front of the big man’s nose. The window exploded.
With a shout of fear, he slammed on the brakes, bucking up against the wheel as he did so, because he had not put his seat belt on. She fired again, this time behind his head, screaming at him, “Stop the car! Stop the car. Now, get out! Get out of the goddamn car! Now! Do it!”
She fired once again just past his head. The man was white-faced and screaming back at her, a series of
“Hey!
Hey!” and then he was babbling incoherently. She could barely see in all the gunsmoke, but he got the car stopped, and then he was pushing the door. open and rolling out onto the pavement, still yelling as he scrambled away from the car’s rear wheels as it continued to roll forward. Karen unsnapped her belt and grabbed the wheel to pull herself into the driver’s seat. She slammed the door and pulled the big car around in a tire-screeching U-turn, the right-front tire banging off the culvert. She caught a glimse of the terrified agent rolling into the ditch, and then she was blasting back down the hill, nearly losing control as she floored it.
She had to stomp on the brakes-thank God for antilocks-to maintain control through the first curve, ignoring the flare of headlights and taillights from the chase car that had pulled out of her way. Goddamn them! Goddamn them!
Absolutely typical. They’d lost control of one, of their supergoons, and now innocent people had to die so they could cover up their latest mess.
The whole thing had been a setup, right from the beginning. Goats staked out in the jungle, that’s all they had been. Bait for the tiger-Galantz.
She saw the white blur of the trash piles just in time to slam on the brakes. She barely made the hard left turn onto the dirt road. There were more lights behind her now, but she didn’t care. She had no plan, no idea of what she was going to do up there, but she was god damned if she was going to let them just nuke the place to get Galantz. She blasted bags of trash all over the entranceway as she made the turn, and the big car’s V-8 screamed when she lost traction momentarily in one of the ruts, but then she was banging up that hill, accelerator mashed flat down. The car flew past the bikers’ trailer, went off the road into a stand of small trees, and then back onto the road briefly before swerving off on the other side. She fought the car’s wheel viciously, then realized she still had the accelerator mashed all the way down.
Control, she thought. Control-slow the hell down!
The car fishtailed three or four times as she took her foot off the gas, and then it settled into a banging, bumping track up the dirt road, until she finally saw the big dead tree.
Again, she didn’t hesitate. She hauled on the wheel and drove off to the right, around the tree, fishtailing again in the bushes; except this time, the rightrear wheel hit a soft spot and started spinning helplessly. She banged her fist on the wheel and gunned it, but it was over. Her headlights were pointed directly up the hill, unnaturally high. She cursed the hill, the car, the FBI and every other government agency she could think of, and then shut the car down, tears of pure frustration in her eyes.
After a minute, reality settled onto her shoulders like a cold, wet towel. What the hell was she doing? She was a Commander in the Navy, a commissioned federal officer, an officer of the court. She had shot at an FBI agent, driven through a law-enforcement cordon, and now what?
Going to charge up San Juan Hill here guns blazing, like Teddy Roosevelt? And accomplish what, exactly?
She suddenly felt a wave of nausea sweep through her as’ the adrenaline, started to crash. She punched off the headlights and opened the door. A small cloud of gunsmoke puffed out of the car, along with a few shards of glass from the shattered window. She reached over for the .380 and wondered if there were any rounds left. She swung her legs sideways and sat with her head down, half in, half out of the car, holding the smooth steel of the automatic against her belly and taking deep breaths of rain-cool air. She never heard the man who stepped out of the woods until he called her name.
She looked up in shock. It was Mcnair, walking carefully through the rain toward the car, his hands held out at his waist, one eye on her face and the other on that .380.
“Commander Lawrence? Karen? It’s me, Mcnair.”
She stared dully at him. He was dressed in khaki pants, a white shirt under a dark bulletproof vest covered by a khaki windbreaker, and what looked like combat boots. He had some kind of automatic weapon strapped across his back, the barrel just visible over his right shoulder. He wore a khaki baseball cap on his head. He stopped a few feet from the car and showed her his hands, wiggling his fingers to make sure she saw they were empty. But his left hand wasn’t quite empty, there appeared to be a flip phone in it.
“Commander?” he said again in a soft voice … “We okay here? This is just a phone, okay?”
She”Stared at him, her fingers closing unconsciously over the automatic in her lap. He saw her hand move,
