herself behind it. Not ideal, but she had less than fifty yards for this shot. A piece of cake considering that with an M21 and this ammunition she had never missed a kill at less than eleven hundred yards.*****
'If anything strange happens, call my cell. It's on vibrate. Make sure yours is too.'
I kept my eyes on the SUV.
'Already did,' Jasmine said.
I looked over toward the white SUV. 'Watch that one. Something about it bothers me.' I put the Ruger back in its holster and clipped it as best I could to the drawstring waist of my scrubs pants.
'Why?'
'It's way across the lot; they'll get wet heading for their room.' I paused. 'On the other hand maybe the fiber-optic people all have to park there.'
I got out then and dived through the solid sheets of rain, sprinting up the steps two by two through the driving sleet and rain. When I got to my room, light was leaking around the curtain edges from the lamp I had left on so my alarm warning would be visible.
'Shit.' The light would make me a perfectly silhouetted target going in.
Jael tracked Stone with the Night Quest monocular as he exited the stairwell. Next, she set down the monocular, picked up the M21, turned on the Raptor, and rested the rifle on the makeshift stand and trained the crosshairs in the middle of Stone's door right where she figured he'd stand when he put his key card in the slot.
Right on cue the big man appeared in her scope and stopped by the door. But instead of standing in front of the door to put in the key as she expected, he stood to one side and extended his left hand with the card.
Smart, she thought. Avoid being silhouetted by the room lights. Not smart enough for me, she thought as she moved the crosshairs to the right. Then she took a regular breath and exhaled normally, stopping at her usual respiratory pause. She made sure the crosshairs were where she wanted them, then squeezed the trigger ever so gently to take up the free play in the trigger.
Jael St. Clair held her breath, and the trigger steady, focusing on the crosshairs and spotting the pockmark in the wood siding right where Brad Stone's heart would have been had it not been for the lightning. Never rush a round, she thought as she slowly released her breath and her trigger finger. An indicator light blinked on the motel room door lock.
She trained the crosshairs on Stone again and visualized the slug entering the left side of his rib cage. She was glad then for the full metal jacket because it would penetrate even if it hit a rib. The bone fragments would make more shrapnel.
Jael St. Clair inhaled, breathed out, and held it. She began to squeeze the trigger.
Then the night exploded like a bomb.
CHAPTER 47
Lightning lit up the night brighter than day. Reflexively, I dropped into a low crouch, transfixed by a broad arcing river system of electric blue tendrils reaching down. Thunder crackled, then a light stanchion in the newspaper parking lot about fifty yards to the east exploded, sending off flares like white phosphorous.
The rest of the parking lot lights went dark. The air-conditioning in my room faltered, then resumed. I lunged forward then, hoping anyone who might be watching was momentarily blinded and startled by the crash. I put my card in the door lock and got only a red light. I prayed the computer in the front office that controlled the lock had not been fried by the lightning surge. Damn.
CHAPTER 48
The low rumble of a large truck cut through the maelstrom as I tried the card again without success. Down below, a large white truck with the cable contractor's name on the side came barreling in, pulling a trailer with a giant coil of fiber-optic cable. It lurched to a stop near the rest of the white vehicles.
Jael rubbed at her eyes, stunned by the flash of lightning. She took a breath, and set the M21 down.
Jael covered the M21 and crawled into the front seat, quickly running down her options as her vision cleared. From her expansive saddlebag purse, she pulled out the HK4 in its leather clip holster, chambered a round, then clipped the HK4 to her belt. She reached back into the bag and pulled out a loop of high-C piano wire with two lengths of broom handle on each end and a small collar where the wire crossed to make its loop. It was her own invention. She tucked it into her back pocket.
Male voices from the truck filtered through the open tailgate window; one of them had spotted it and was coming over to be a Good Samaritan. Jael turned the ignition key to its accessory position, rolled down the front passenger-side window. Then, to avoid opening the door and activating the interior lights, she slid out the window and into the storm.*****
I tried the room access card again and again with no luck. Then lightning and thunder came simultaneously, and this time when the flash faded, there was no light from my room and the air-conditioning had stopped altogether. Time pressed tight around me, so I abandoned stealth and battered the door open with my shoulder, setting off the laptop's alarms. I fumbled the locking cables off the computes, snatched the laptop's power supply out of the wall, jammed it in my duffel, and zipped it up. Then, with all the alarms shrieking, I shoved the laptop into its case and sprinted from the room. It had taken just seconds.
Jael crouched in the deep shadows by her SUV's rear wheel and saw the Good Samaritan running toward her, shoulders hunched against the rain.
'Hell if I know,' the Good Samaritan called out to the driver. 'Call him on his cell. He was supposed to tell us where he wanted the rig.'
As the Good Samaritan pushed the tailgate window shut, Jael slipped through the cloak of darkness and rain. She slipped the piano-wire loop over his head and jerked it closed around his neck. The garrote's little ratcheting collar prevented the loop from opening.
Jael stepped back quickly to avoid the man's thrashing and flailing. Seconds later, the lack of blood to the man's brain carried him off into unconsciousness. His head made a ripe-cantaloupe sound as it thudded off the SUV's rear bumper.
In the next instant, she heard a car door slam and the revving of a car engine. Pulling the HK4 from the holster, Jael thumbed off the safety and raced toward the noise. The Mercedes pulled out of the parking space. Joel stopped, crouched into her two-handed shooting stance, and sighted in on the Mercedes as a shout sounded behind her.
'Hey! What's holding you up?'
Jael turned as the truck driver got out. She shot him twice in the head. When she turned around, the Mercedes had reached Highway 82 and turned left into a slow line of westbound traffic. Jael St. Clair sprinted toward Highway 82 with Braxton's orders to get Stone and the lawyer ringing in her ears.
CHAPTER 49
A raw, rasping pain burned her lungs and made Jael St. Clair regret her cigarette addiction. Her legs grew heavy, but she ran on through the pain, closing in on the Mercedes, tangled in a stop-and-go mess. Jael knew she'd have to make a point-blank shot. Her ragged breathing would spoil her aim for anything more.
The windshield wipers struggled against the downpour as Jasmine inched us forward in a long slow snake of cars, pickups, semis, flatbeds, SUVs, and minivans-all clogged by stoplights the storm had blinded.
'You know,' I said, 'the smartest thing for you to do is to drop me off somewhere and get as far away from the manhunt as possible.' I looked over at Jasmine and tried unsuccessfully not to admire the remarkable features
