“Hutchens, this is Dog One; we have a scent trail outside the main doors, heading down Fairlane. Over.”
“Copy that. All teams converge on Fairlane.”
“Kill the flashlights, quick!” Sam said. “And get off the bridge—get down into the spillway.”
Dodge pushed Tyler roughly sideways, but he kept his feet and followed Sam, climbing over a low mesh fence and down a steep bank covered in tussock grass, toward the spillway canal.
Sam risked a flash of his light here in the dip, out of sight of their pursuers. The water looked murky, with patches of dark green. It spluttered and spat under the impact of the rain. It also looked freezing cold, but fortunately, there was sufficient dry bank on either side for them to clamber along under the bridge without getting wet. They crouched beneath the thick concrete span and waited silently.
The sound of running footsteps came from above them, and the beams of strong flashlights splayed out across the water. At the point where they had left the roadway, the sounds paused but did not stop, the dogs losing the scent in the rain and moving on across the bridge overhead.
Tyler made no sound, mostly due to the fact that the barrel of Vienna’s pistol was firmly wedged in his mouth.
“It won’t take them long to realize they’ve lost the scent,” Vienna said. “We need to move. Get in the water —it’ll kill the trail for the dogs.”
Sam took one more look at the murky, sludgy canal water and obeyed without hesitation. There was a faintly putrid smell to the water, a whiff of decayed vegetation. It filled his shoes and soaked his jeans, sending shock waves of cold through his body.
“Go west,” Vienna whispered, pointing in the darkness. “The canal splits and they won’t know which way we’ve gone.”
At the spillway intersection, they turned north, heading back toward the Great Mall but well below the level of the road.
“Move it!” Dodge said, prodding Tyler in the back. They all picked up the pace, trying to get as much distance between their pursuers and themselves as possible.
“Wait here,” Vienna said a few minutes later, clambering up the bank through the tussock grass.
Lights turned the corner of the canal, and they could hear the voices of the searchers, no more than thirty or forty yards away.
“Where is she?” Sam whispered urgently.
“She’ll be here,” Dodge replied. The sound of a large engine came from the top of the bank, and Vienna’s voice hissed, “Up here, quick.”
“There!” A shout came from behind them.
Tyler tried to delay them as they climbed the steep bank, but Dodge grabbed his wrists and lifted, twisting Tyler’s arms up so that he gave a small cry of pain and had to keep stumbling forward to take off the pressure.
“Freeze!” voices called from behind them, but Sam ignored them, hauling on the long damp strands of tussock to help himself to the top of the bank.
A small van, a black Volkswagen Transporter, was pulled up to the fence, its engine idling, its lights off. The side door was open, and Dodge jerked Tyler roughly over the fence and threw him through the opening, where he landed facedown on the carpet.
“Freeze! Armed federal agents. Do not move or we will fire upon you!”
“Get in,” Dodge yelled. “They won’t shoot, not while we have Tyler.”
Sam threw himself in the open door on top of Tyler and felt Dodge climb in beside him. Dark figures appeared at the fence behind them, and he rolled over and grabbed the handle of the door, slamming it shut.
No sooner had he done that than it opened again, and a black-suited figure was reaching into the van.
Sam kicked the man as hard as he could in the chest, and the man staggered backward as the tires spun in the wet, then gripped the road. The van took off at high speed, the soldier falling away into the darkness behind them.
They saw the helicopter before it saw them, the huge “night sun” floodlight washing away the darkness from the roadway in front of them and filling the air below it with a heavy curtain of rain. Vienna spun the van off the road as the massive circle of light approached and hid beneath the canopy of a group of trees in front of a used-car lot.
The helicopter passed by without seeing them. “Time to change cars,” Vienna said, the van crawling down the long rows of the car lot.
She stopped alongside a black Ford crew-cab pickup with raised suspension and outsized, off-road wheels. It towered over the other cars in the dark of the lot.
“This’ll do,” she said.
40 | THE VALLEY OF DEATH
The darkness was overwhelming. Without streetlights, the streets and buildings were black against the black of the sky, an enveloping night punctuated only by the lights of vehicles and the flashing red-and-blues of police cruisers.
Into this darkness drifted ever-present freezing rain, lighter than before and invisible, except where it caught the police lights.
The intersection of Parkway and South Main Street was blocked with cars, at least six of them jammed together in a multicar pileup, no doubt caused by the sudden loss of street and traffic lights. The drivers were standing around yelling at each other in the darkness. Vienna swung the wheel sharply, the pickup lifting and tilting as she cut left across the center line, aiming straight at a pair of ornate wrought-iron gates in a wall surrounding an apartment building.
“Hold on!” she yelled, but it wasn’t necessary. The blunt knife that was the front bumper of the pickup sliced through the gates as if they were made of cardboard, twisted metal spinning away to the sides.
They raced through a construction site, with timber stacked in tidy piles, over some scrubby ground, and through another fence, this one just a plastic orange safety fence.
Then they were out on South Abel Street, and Vienna pressed her foot down, disregarding the people who had to jump out of the way.
An overturned car, on fire, blocked the road ahead. Clearly visible in the flickering yellow flames, the dazed occupants sat on the curb. This time Vienna didn’t stop, didn’t change course; she just veered slightly, aiming for the trunk of the car. There was a jarring crunch, and then they were past. Sam looked back to see the car spinning and burning like a giant Roman candle.
Sirens on police cars wailed as they circled around aimlessly, helpless in the omnipresent darkness.
Sounds of smashing glass came from both sides, and the sound of shredding tires somewhere nearby was followed by the sickening thud of an accident.
A police car pulled out of a side street and raced up behind them, lights flashing. Before Sam could even warn the others, however, a four-wheel-drive slid out of a side street, sideswiping the police car, which screeched to a halt and fell away behind them.
They took Calaveras Boulevard out to the Sinclair Freeway interchange, then went north on I-680.
The rain eased, then stopped as they rolled out into the desert. Sam sank back into the upholstery and said nothing, exhausted by the day’s events.
Tyler glared at him from the rear seat, handcuffed to the door handle.
“We don’t have time to get to Cheyenne,” Vienna said. “Even if we drive through the night. Someone will have reported this car stolen before then. We’ll have to hide the pickup and change cars again.”
“What do you think, Dodge?” Sam asked.
Dodge looked blank.
“We need to do something,” Vienna said harshly, “or Tactical will be all over us when Ursula comes back online.”
Sam looked back at Dodge. He looked tired and confused.
