and removed his cuffs. Rainey had his right hand on the knot on his head-he seemed woozy, uncertain of his feet as he was being helped up.
“You don’t need those,” Rainey said. “What can I do now? They’re gone.”
“Orders.”
“The man on that sailboat killed my wife and two children. You have kids?”
The opening of the street door stopped the conversation, and Rainey and Mullin turned to the sight of an ensign walking into the boathouse. He stopped and stared at the doors open to the harbor and the spot where the Cheetah had been. Then his gaze turned to the two men near the Cigarette racer. He put his hand reflexively to the Beretta at his side but stopped when he realized that one was a police officer.
“Halt!” he yelled. “Where’s…” he started. He approached and saw the gun and cuffs in the officer’s hands.
“Gone fishing,” Mullin said, turning back to Rainey. “No,” he replied to Rainey’s interrupted question as he clicked the cuff on Rainey’s free wrist. “No kids.”
Rainey turned as though he were offering the other wrist, but instead he brought his fist down into the side of the cop’s face like a hammer. When the dazed man hit the deck, Rainey kicked him in the stomach twice, deflating him and leaving him immobilized. Before the young ensign could get to his gun, Rainey had picked up the. 357 and turned it on him.
“You know how to drive that?” he demanded. The ensign nodded weakly as he stared at the gun, which was aimed directly at his chest.
“I’m Rainey Lee, DEA.”
The ensign shrugged, not visibly relieved that the man holding the gun was law enforcement.
Rainey untied the lines at the bow and stern and stepped into a Coast Guard speedboat. “In here, son, and drop the gun belt.”
The ensign obeyed, letting the web belt with the Beretta fall to the deck with a thud. He stepped gingerly around Captain Mullin and dropped down into the cockpit. Rainey glanced at his name tag. “Okay, Gleason, move it.”
The young man found the key in the ignition and twisted it. The big motors thundered to life with a deafening roar.
Mullin came around with a moan, shook his head, spotted the ensign’s gun, and pulled it from the holster. He stood unsteadily and aimed at Rainey’s head. “Cut the engine,” he yelled, trying to make himself heard.
Rainey frowned at him and shrugged.
“Give me the gun!” Mullin yelled. “I’ll shoot you, Lee!”
Rainey moved his own gun up so fast the policeman didn’t have time to react. He saw the first muzzle blast- frozen in disbelief even as he was pitched back-never thinking to return fire. Three shots hit him, two high in the right leg and one in the right shoulder. He collapsed, writhing, on the pier. The street door opened, and another Coast Guard ensign entered, pulling his gun out, but he stopped when he saw Rainey’s pistol on him. He raised his hands.
Rainey looked as if he were waiting for a signal to fire, his eyes emotionless, reptilian. Then he turned his head toward the open door as the ensign named Gleason throttled the vessel. When the boat’s engines caught, the bow rose out of the water and the boat shot out of the facility. Once in the harbor, the ensign aimed out through the channel, and then, in what felt like seconds, they were out into the lake where the Cheetah had gone.
Rainey took a stance beside the ensign and laid the gun on the control panel, his large hand all but covering it from sight. His head was extended over the windscreen, and he stared out before them.
“Gleason, you familiar with that HSSI rig?” he yelled to be heard over the engines.
“Yes, sir.” Gleason nodded in case his nervous voice didn’t carry.
“Find it!”
“I’ll do my best,” he muttered. “But it’s cloaked.”
Rainey used his thumb to cock the pistol’s hammer where it lay flat on the console. “This is for her,” he said, smiling and pitching his head toward the seats at the rear of the cockpit.
“Her?” Gleason replied, trying to understand, assuming Rainey was indicating the harbor. Someone who had died in the explosions.
“My wife!” he yelled. “Her!” Rainey smiled, exposing a row of teeth all the way to the gums.
The ensign turned, halfway expecting to see a woman in the bench seat. He looked back into Rainey’s eyes for a second and realized with shock that the smiling man with the gun wasn’t seeing an empty bench.
The young ensign began saying a rosary in his head.
54
’ Everything you could need is in the storage units,” the Cheetah’s navigator said.
Paul and Thorne sat watching the walls of water that were being spewed aside as the boat left the harbor and began skimming the tops of the waves, the props shooting a rooster tail of water high in the air behind the craft. There was almost no noise, even as the engine had powered up. The SWAT-team members sat on bench seats, facing each other and speaking in half sentences, trying to dispel the tension they were feeling. One of them kept removing the magazines in his guns and checking them as though the bullets were an illusion that might disappear if he failed to keep an eye on them. Paul realized he didn’t even know the men’s last names. He didn’t want to know them. Ted, the bigger one, and Brooks, the smaller. Kids, really. Weren’t they all?
The pilot was watching a small screen that broke everything outside the craft into small, colorful, seemingly three-dimensional blocks. “Virtual reality,” the systems operator said proudly. “Like a video game or a simulator.” Another screen showed the lake as it might look in the daytime through a red lens. There was a blinking beside the bridge, and a seven-mile readout at the corner of the screen. The bank of screens taken together gave 360 degrees of view. Ten minutes out, the navigator pointed to a small blue light on the radar that represented something behind them, just exiting the harbor.
“Someone’s following us,” he said. “Fifty, sixty, now sixty-five knots.”
The navigator touched the earpiece in his right ear. He turned to Paul. “Sir, your arrested civilian is unarrested. He just took that cop’s gun and the speedboat that was docked. The police captain’s got three rounds in him. Nothing fatal, it doesn’t sound like. He took an ensign as hostage.”
“Son of a bitch,” Paul growled.
“Rainey never did like people saying no to him,” Thorne said, shaking his head.
Paul rubbed his eyes. “He have radar?”
“Yes, nothing that’ll track us or find the Shadowfax as long as it hugs the bridge.”
“So he can’t find us?” Paul asked.
“We’ll be a needle in a haystack,” the navigator said. “In this soup I’d rather have lottery odds.”
“Good,” Paul said. “We’ll deal with him after.”
From five hundred feet above the wind-seared surface of the lake, and a mile behind, the big orange-and- white Sikorsky helicopter was also tracking the sailboat, because even though the Shadowfax was hugging the bridge, the sophisticated system was not fooled. The Sikorsky was also monitoring the thirty-five-foot-long Cheetah and the third vessel that had just come out into the lake. The craft’s computers worked with the one aboard the Cheetah, plotting and replotting the estimated interception point, factoring in the speed and direction. According to their figures, the third boat, on its present northeastern line, would be off by a half mile in a few minutes. At the Cheetah’s interception point with the Shadowfax, the big Cigarette would be at least twice that.
Paul, seated in the control room with his hands gripping the cane, was relieved that Erin was no longer in harm’s way, but worried that Martin might have caught the news of Rainey’s escape and the shooting on the radio. The cop hadn’t used Rainey’s name but had just said that the man under guard had escaped in a speedboat. Martin would naturally assume he was being trailed. He might also think the report was a cover for launching a surveillance vessel. He was counting on Martin’s believing that no one would move against him, not with a bomb likely, until they had better intelligence, a plan of action. But who could be sure? It was of little consequence, so Paul fought to keep his mind on the present. What is, is.
