He slammed hard on the brake pedal, the Mustang sliding to a halt at the edge of the asphalt, the engine purring in anticipation, waiting to be unleashed again. He glanced in his rearview mirror. He could see the shadowy silhouette of the cop coming at him, weapon raised.
Matt was out of options. He ground down on his teeth and slammed the car into reverse. The car lurched, thundering through the alley—
Within a heartbeat, he was almost at the cop’s level. Matt twitched the steering wheel to angle the car right up against the wall closest to him, across from where the cop was firing. The Mustang shuddered and squealed furiously as it scraped the side of the house, and with the cop flattening himself against the opposite wall, Matt managed to thread it through without hitting him. More shots followed him as he bounced out of the alley and onto the main road, where he hit the hand brake, spun the car so it was aimed right, and powered away.
He glanced in his mirror and saw the cop emerge into the street and rush to his car, but Matt knew he wouldn’t be following him. Still, he wasn’t in the clear. An APB concerning his less-than-low-key car would be heating up the airwaves any second now. He had to ditch the car—quickly—and lie low until dawn.
What he’d do the next day, though, was far less certain. He still had the rest of the night to get through first.
Chapter 24
Washington, D.C .
Keenan Drucker felt electric. He was well rested, having managed to tear himself away from surfing the news channels and the Internet soon after midnight and get a decent night’s sleep. In the morning, over a hearty breakfast of waffles and fruit, he’d gone through the newspapers with quiet satisfaction, something he hadn’t felt for years. A feeling he hoped he’d be able to build on as the day wore on.
Presently, sitting in his tenth-floor office on Connecticut Avenue, he pivoted in his plush leather chair, away from his wide desk—nihilistic in its lack of clutter, with nothing on it except for a laptop, a phone, and a framed photograph of his deceased son—and looked out across the city. He loved being in the nation’s capital, working there, playing a role in shaping the lives of the citizens of the most powerful country on the planet—and, by extension, the lives of the rest of the world’s inhabitants. It was all he’d ever done. He’d begun working his way up the system soon after leaving Johns Hopkins with a master’s in political science. He’d spent the next twenty-odd years as a congressional staff member, serving as senior policy advisor and legislative director to a couple of senators. He’d helped them grow in prominence and power while ensuring his own rise in stature, working quietly, behind the scenes, shunning the more visible positions that were constantly on offer—although he’d flirted with taking on that of undersecretary of defense for policy when it had been offered. He preferred the continuity afforded by pulling the strings from behind the curtain, and only left the Hill after an offer that was too good to turn down came in, giving him the opportunity to create and run a well-funded, far-reaching think tank of his own, the Center for American Freedom.
He was made for this life. He was a ruthless and imaginative political strategist, he had a mind like a steel trap, and his appetite for detail, combined with a prodigious memory, made him a master of procedure. And as if that weren’t enough, his effectiveness was further enhanced by an easygoing, gregarious charm—one that masked the iron resolve underneath and helped when one was a dedicated polemicist ready to take on the red-button issues that were splitting the country.
The last few years, though, had instilled a new sense of urgency within him. Groups of civilian advisors had firmly gripped the reins of policy—both domestic and foreign—and steered the country to their vision. Their unapologetic, unbridled sense of mission was, to a political animal like Drucker, a thing of beauty; their methods and tactics, breathtaking.
Most impressive, he thought, was their use of “framing”—the cunning technique of dumbing down complex, controversial issues and policies by using powerful, evocative, emotive catchphrases and images in order to prejudice and undermine any potential challenge to those policies. Framing had been elevated to a fine art in the new century, with deceptive expressions like “tax relief,” “war on terror,” and “appeaser” now firmly embedded in the public psyche, pushing the right emotional buttons and creating a misguided belief that anyone who argued against such measures had to be, by definition, a villain trying to stop the innocent sufferers’ champion from giving them their medication, a coward shying away from a full-blown war against an aggressor nation, or—even worse— one too spineless to stand up to Hitler.
Framing worked. No one knew that as well as Keenan Drucker. And he was now ready to do some framing of his own.
He checked his watch. A late-morning meeting had been hastily scheduled with the available senior fellows of the Center to discuss the unexplained apparition over the ice shelf. He’d already spoken to several of them by phone, and they were—understandably—as excited as they were unsettled.
After that, he’d monitor the news channels to check on the project’s status. Which seemed well on track, apart from that small complication in Boston. Drucker wasn’t worried. He could trust the Bullet to take care of it.
His BlackBerry pinged. The ring tag told him it was the Bullet.
As he reached for his phone, Drucker smiled.
WITH HIS HABITUAL CURT EFFICIENCY, Maddox updated Drucker on Vince Bellinger’s fate, Matt Sherwood’s subsequent escape, and his foray into the now-dead scientist’s apartment.
Drucker had absorbed the information with admirable detachment. Maddox didn’t like much about Drucker. The man was a politician, after all. A Washington insider. But he liked that about him. Drucker didn’t question or second-guess when it came to matters in which he was no expert. He didn’t have any ego issues, nor did he assume the annoying air of superiority Maddox had often seen—and enjoyed deflating—in deskbound executives and, even more so, in politicians. Drucker knew to leave the dirty work to those who were comfortable trudging through the muck, something Maddox had never shied away from, and still didn’t, even though his “security and risk management” firm had grown healthily since he first founded it three years ago, not long after he’d been wounded in Iraq.
Maddox was a hands-on kind of guy. He had a tough, single-minded work ethic, an unwavering discipline forged out of a twenty-year career with the Marines and their Force Recon outfit, where he’d initially earned the sobriquet “The Bullet” because of his shaved, slightly pointed head. It was a name that took on an even more disturbing connotation after his squad was cut to bits in a savage firefight in the apocalyptic town of Fallujah.
The tragedy that had first brought him and Drucker together and united them.
His unit had been doing good work in the mountains of Afghanistan. Hitting the Taliban and their Al Qaeda buddies hard. Weeding them out of the mountains and caves across the border from Pakistan. Closing in on Bin Laden. Then, frustratingly and inexplicably, they’d been pulled out and reassigned. To Iraq. And nine months into that war, Maddox lost fourteen men and an ear that horrific afternoon. Those who’d survived that attack had left
