“Bigger! Bigger than four months of my—”
“Yeah,” he said, and focused on the road. The speedometer was up in the eighties already. The BMW’s tires squeaked warningly as they tried to grip the asphalt on the sharp turns. One curve came up faster than Jack realized, and the BMW rubbed against the metal guard rail. The blond shut up for a minute, her face losing all its color.
“Shit, you’re going to kill us.”
On a rare straight piece of road, Jack saw the Mercedes and the truck down below. He accelerated.
“Okay,” the woman said, her voice changing tone. “Okay, okay, we, um, got off on the wrong foot. I’m Sue. Agent Sue Mishler, FBI. Jesus!” At the next turn, the BMW lifted off its two left wheels for a second.
“Call for backup,” she said. “Why not call for backup!”
“No signal,” Jack grunted. But that wasn’t the reason. He couldn’t call for police backup. They would confiscate the meth, or at least tie it up with paperwork until he could extricate it, and he had no time.
Reckless driving closed the distance between them, and on the next straightaway Jack pulled up close behind the Mercedes. He used the driver’s console to lower the passenger side window, letting in the roar of the wind.
The silhouette looked more like Sergei. Jack saw him look into the rearview mirror and then look down without changing his demeanor. He must have glanced backward, seen a man and a woman in the BMW, and assumed all was going according to plan.
“Do you have a gun?” he asked over the noise.
Sue put her hand into her pocket, then hesitated. She engaged on a brief internal struggle, then produced a Glock.40.
“Get ready to shoot him.”
Jack gunned the engine and swerved into the opposite lane, pulling up next to the Mercedes. Sergei glanced over at them and the grin collapsed on his face. “Shoot him,” Jack advised.
“I can’t! He hasn’t done anythi—” The first two shots shattered the passenger window behind them.
Sue flinched, then swiveled her upper body like a turret and brought the Glock to bear. Jack kept his eyes on the road, but at the corner of his vision he saw her calmly squeeze off three rounds. The Mercedes veered away, clipping the back of the Dodge pickup and then disappearing from sight.
“Nice,” Jack said. “Now don’t shoot.” He needed the truck intact. The Dodge fishtailed a little, then straightened itself out. Jack pulled up even enough to see Franko appear startled, then recover and glance over at them. “Trade places!” Jack commanded. He slid over until he was practically on top of the FBI agent. She had no choice but to take his place at the wheel. She planned to pull over the moment she was at the wheel, but somehow during the switch Jack had plucked the gun from her hand.
“Son of a bitch!” she yelled.
“Stay with him!” Jack warned, seeing the BMW drop a little behind. But Sue Mishler was no trained driver. Jack saw that she was losing ground, the BMW’s nose now halfway down the side of the Dodge. Jack hauled himself up out of the window. The two vehicles rounded another hard curve, and Jack nearly flew off. He clutched at the windshield wiper and scrambled on to the hood. Gathering himself, he leaped across the space between the BMW and Dodge and landed heavily on the edge of the cargo bed, his face planted in the plastic wrap that covered kilos of meth.
Jack threw himself over the side and into the cargo bed. He tried to stand up, but the Dodge swerved violently as Franko tried to throw him off. Jack half crawled up to the outside of the cab and dropped low when he saw Franko raise an arm. He heard the shots only as short, sharp claps, all but drowned out by the roar of wind and engine. Blindly, Jack raised the Glock, so close it almost touched the glass, and poured six rounds into the cab as glass shrieked and shattered. In response, the engine roared but the truck swerved. Risking a look, Jack saw Franko slumped against the steering wheel like a rag doll. But they weren’t slowing down, so his dead weight had to be resting on the accelerator.
Through the front windshield, Jack saw the Dodge heading for the edge of a precipice.
He scrambled up and jack-knifed his body, nearly upside down, into the cab, grabbing onto the steering wheel and swerving away from the abyss. He couldn’t reach the brake, so he steered the truck as best he could as he wormed his way inside, pushing Franko’s blood-soaked corpse out of the driver’s seat. The Russian’s dead foot came off the gas pedal and the truck began to slow. Jack shoved Franko over to the passenger side and settled in. The truck belonged to him now.
Suddenly the dark shape of the BMW flew past him, swerved back into his lane, and started to slow down. She was a determined agent. She knew her duty. Jack liked her.
But that wasn’t going to stop him.
He reduced his speed for a moment, waiting until they’d cleared the precipice and were driving through a cut in the mountain with sheer walls on either side. Then he gunned his engine, lurching forward. The Dodge struck the back of the BMW to the sound of tortured metal.
Jack caught a glimpse of Sue Mishler’s surprised, frightened face as he ran her into the side of the mountain.
20. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 3 P.M. AND 4 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
“No offense, but you seem a little overconfident to me,” Kyle Risdow said.
He and Zapata were sitting beside his backyard pool, enjoying the afternoon sunshine. Kyle was drinking a mojito and Zapata was nursing a Pacifico.
“Because I’m relaxing here?” Zapata said, closing his eyes and lifting his face up to the sun. His shaved head exposed more skin to the sun’s UV rays, and he found that he liked it. “It’s just about planning.”
“Not just that.Your plan itself. How do you know it’s going to work?”
“Oh,” Zapata said, a little wearily. “It’s not complex. Have you ever done Rubik’s Cube?”
“That puzzle thing? Can’t stand puzzles.”
Zapata wasn’t surprised. Kyle was not a creature of intellect or, really, of ambition. He was simply a creature of money. “Let me educate you. In the cube you create corners that are like anchors. Preserve them and you finish the puzzle. Break them up, and you fail. A few sections support the whole. Remove the small piece and the whole thing falls apart.”
“But that’s just a game,” Kyle said lazily. “Life is more dynamic, more flexible.”
“Not really.” He drank his beer. Seeing that Kyle was unsatisfied, he continued. “This idea is not original to me. The U.S. Army, for instance. Their strategies involve understanding what they call ‘centers of gravity.’ They try to understand what is most important in a battle, in an occupation. When they fail, it is because they do not identify the right center of gravity.”
“And you think you’ve found one that will do that will help throw this country into chaos.”
Zapata nodded.
Sue Mishler was unconscious, but not badly hurt. She hadn’t been wearing her seatbelt during the pursuit. The BMW’s airbag had deployed when she hit the wall and the force of it had thrown her back against the driver’s seat, knocking her out. She might have a miserable case of whiplash, but her neck was fine.
Jack jumped back into the Dodge truck and drove off with the crystal meth. He had to get to Lopez.
Tony Almeida stood in the center of the wide, high-ceilinged lobby of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Marina del Rey. The hotel was, at the moment, the most beautiful fortress Tony had ever seen.
“Tight as a drum,” Nina said, voicing his thoughts. “If Jemaah Islamiyah is doing anything here, I don’t see how they’re going to succeed.”
Tony had to agree. A combination of local law enforcement, the FBI, and security units from the visiting nations had established a standard three-layer security system with a wide perimeter, including emergency
