“Surprised” is one word.’”
“The Israelis have their own system.”
“The
“Yeah, little Israel. They worry me less than anyone else who’s got it. Chinese. Think about that. Maybe the French. No more jokes about Paris cabdrivers. God knows who else has it.”
They were almost past the house.
A small round hole was punched through the side window behind Ellie, even as the sound of the shot cracked the night, and Spencer felt the round thud into the back of his seat. The velocity of the bullet was so great that the tempered glass crazed slightly but did not collapse inward. Thank God, Rocky was barking energetically instead of squealing in agony.
“Stupid bastards,” Ellie said as she pressed ENTER again.
Out of airless space, a lambent column of blue-white light shot down into the two-story Victorian farmhouse, instantly vaporizing a core two meters in diameter. The rest of the structure exploded. Flames filled the night. If anyone was left alive in that crumbling house, they would have to get out too fast to worry about holding on to their weapons and taking additional potshots at the pickup.
Ellie was shaken. “I couldn’t risk them hitting the up-link behind us. If that goes, we’re in deep trouble.”
“The Russians have this?”
“This and weirder stuff.”
“Weirder stuff?”
“That’s why most everyone else is desperate to get their version of Godzilla. Zhirinovsky. Heard of him?”
“Russian politician.”
Bending her head again to the VDT, entering new instructions, she said, “Him and the people associated with him, the whole network of them even after he’s gone — they’re old-fashioned communists who want to rule the world. Except this time they’re actually willing to blow it up if they don’t get their way. No more graceful defeats. And even if someone’s smart enough to wipe out the Zhirinovsky faction, there’s always some new power freak, somewhere, calling himself a politician.”
Forty yards ahead, on the right, a Ford Bronco erupted from concealment in a stand of trees and bushes. It pulled across the driveway, blocking their escape.
Spencer halted the pickup.
Though the driver of the Bronco stayed behind the wheel, two men with high-power rifles jumped out of the back and dropped into sharpshooter positions. They raised their weapons.
“Down!” Spencer said, and pushed Ellie’s head below window level even as he slid down in his seat.
“They aren’t,” she said in disbelief.
“They are.”
“Blocking the driveway?”
“Two sharpshooters and a Bronco.”
“Haven’t they been paying attention?”
“Stay down, Rocky,” he said.
The dog was standing again with his forepaws on the front seat, bobbing his head excitedly.
“Rocky,
The dog whimpered as though his feelings had been hurt, but he dropped to the floor in back.
Ellie said, “How far are they?”
Spencer risked a quick peek, slid down again, and a bullet rang off the window post without shattering the windshield. “I’d say forty yards.”
She typed. On the screen appeared a yellow line to the right of the driveway. It was twelve meters long, angling over an open field toward the Bronco, but it stopped a meter or two from the edge of the pavement.
“Don’t want to score the driveway,” she said. “Tires would dissolve when we tried to get across the molten ground.”
“Can I press ENTER?” he asked.
“Be my guest.”
He pressed it and sat up, squinting, as the breath of Godzilla streamed down through the night again, scoring the land. The ground shook, and an apocalyptic thunder rose under them as if the planet was coming apart. The night air hummed deafeningly, and the merciless beam dazzled along the course that she’d assigned to it.
Before Godzilla had turned the earth into white-hot sludge along even half those twelve meters, the pair of sharpshooters dropped their weapons and leaped for the vehicle behind them. As they hung on to the sides of the Bronco, the driver careened off the blacktop, churned across a frozen field beyond, smashed through a white board fence, crossed a paddock, rammed through another fence, and passed the first of the stables. When Godzilla stopped short of the driveway and the night was suddenly dark and quiet again, the Bronco was still going, fast dwindling into the gloom, as though the driver might head overland until he ran out of gasoline.
Spencer drove to the county road. He stopped and looked both ways. No traffic. He turned right, toward Denver.
For a few miles, neither of them spoke.
Rocky stood with his forepaws on the back of the front seat, gazing ahead at the highway. In the two years that Spencer had known him, the dog had never liked to look back.
Ellie sat with her hand clamped to her wound. Spencer hoped that the people she knew in Denver could get her medical attention. The medications that she had finessed, by computer, out of various drug companies had been lost with the Range Rover.
Eventually, she said, “We’d better stop in Copper Mountain, see if we can find new wheels. This truck’s too recognizable.”
“Okay.”
She switched off the computer. Unplugged it.
The mountains were dark with evergreens and pale with snow.
The moon was setting behind the truck, and the night sky ahead was ablaze with stars.
FIFTEEN
Eve Jammer hated Washington, D.C., in August. Actually, she hated Washington through all seasons with equal passion. Admittedly, the city was pleasant for a short while, when the cherry blossoms were in bloom; during the rest of the year it sucked. Humid, crowded, noisy, dirty, crime-ridden. Full of boring, stupid, greedy politicians whose ideals were either in their pants or in their pants pockets. It was an inconvenient place for a capital, and sometimes she dreamed about moving the government elsewhere, when the time was right. Maybe to Las Vegas.
As she drove through the sweltering August heat, she had the air conditioner in her Chrysler Town Car turned nearly to its highest setting, with the fans on maximum blow. Freezing air blasted across her face and body and up her skirt, but she was still hot. Part of the heat, of course, had nothing to do with the day: She was so horny she could have won a headbutting duel with a ram.
She hated the Chrysler almost as much as she hated Washington. With all her money and position, she ought to have been able to drive a Mercedes, if not a Rolls-Royce. But a politician’s wife had to be careful of appearances — at least for a while yet. It was impolitic to drive a foreign-made car.
Eighteen months had passed since Eve Jammer had met Roy Miro and had learned the nature of her true destiny. For sixteen months, she had been married to the widely admired Senator E. Jackson Haynes, who would head the party’s national ticket in next year’s election. That wasn’t speculation. It had already been arranged, and all his rivals would screw up one way or another in the primaries, leaving him standing alone, a giant of a man on the world scene.
Personally, she loathed E. Jackson Haynes and wouldn’t let him touch her, except in public. Even then, there were several pages of rules that he’d been required to memorize, defining the acceptable limits relating to
