maintained in Virginia. He wasn’t to know that Nicholson had picked him primarily because he was quite certain that he had never met Elias, Stein or Krywald. All he’d needed was a buffer, somebody who could deliver the necessary briefing to the recovery team, but who would be unknown to all the members of that team, and McCready had seemed ideal.
Once the three agents had left the safe house, Nicholson had said nothing about his performance, but simply told McCready to go out and get himself some lunch and to return to the house for a debrief at three-thirty in the afternoon. That, McCready had guessed, meant that he had been inadequate in some way. The Director was not known as a man who lavished praise on anyone – his direct subordinates were more usually the recipients of caustic tongue-lashings, if canteen gossip was to be believed – and he’d been somewhat apprehensive when he’d walked back into the building.
But to his surprise and relief Nicholson had declared himself more than satisfied: in fact, his comments to McCready had bordered on the fulsome. As he headed north-west back towards Langley along the George Washington Memorial Parkway out of Arlington, the Potomac glinting in the sun over to his right, McCready wondered idly if Nicholson might be grooming him for some kind of advancement, or maybe a different job within the Agency.
If he hadn’t been quite so preoccupied, McCready might have registered the old and battered tan Chevrolet following him, three cars behind his two-year-old Ford compact. If he’d been a more experienced agent, he might also have noticed that the same car had been parked about seventy yards down the street from the safe house, and that the driver had eased it out of the parking space seconds after McCready had accelerated away.
As it was, he didn’t register anything until he was a couple of miles short of the off-ramp for State Route 123. And when he did finally notice the Chevrolet, it was too late for him to do much about it.
McCready was in one of the centre lanes, passing a line of trucks, when the tan car accelerated and moved into a position directly behind his Ford. As McCready reached the cab of the leading truck, the Chevrolet driver accelerated hard, swinging his car to the left, apparently trying to overtake the Ford and making a pretty bad job of it.
‘What the hell?’ McCready muttered to himself, as the image of the Chevrolet filled his door mirror. Instinctively, he steered a little to the right, giving the other driver more room, but supremely conscious of the forty-ton eighteen-wheeler travelling at sixty miles an hour eight feet to his right.
It didn’t help. The bigger car moved over with him, the driver apparently having difficulty controlling the vehicle and, as the two cars cleared the front of the truck, they touched, the Chevrolet’s bumper hitting the left rear of the Ford and forcing McCready further over to the right.
As his Ford lurched forwards and sideways under the impact, McCready suddenly realized that the man in the Chevy might be something more than just another incompetent road-user. He touched his brake pedal, thought better of it and pressed the accelerator instead. If he could just get ahead of the Chevrolet and clear of the Mack truck he might just make it.
The blare of the truck’s horn momentarily deafened him, but McCready was concentrating only on the tan Chevy. Time seemed almost to stop, and the Ford’s pickup seemed slower than normal, the speedometer needle moving with treacle sloth around the dial. The bigger car dropped back slightly, then accelerated again, its big old V8 engine giving it a degree of mid-range acceleration denied the Ford. The Chevrolet smashed into the left rear of the compact car, pushing it sideways and directly into the path of the truck.
Now McCready braked hard, ramming his foot onto the pedal, and wrenched the steering wheel to the left, but the bigger car had the weight and the speed, and the Ford swung right, directly across the inside lane, right- hand wheels lifting. Tyres howled in protest, blue smoke swirling as rubber was torn off them.
The truck’s horn blared again, then McCready heard the hiss of the air brakes as the trucker hit the pedal. As his car lurched directly in front of the eighteen-wheeler, McCready looked with horrified fascination through the passenger side window, and saw nothing but a huge vertical radiator bearing the word ‘Mack’.
Half a second later the truck hit the Ford, its massive steel bumper smashing into the right rear of the car. Immediately, the Ford swung hard to the right, broad-side-on to the front of the truck.
In the car, McCready’s body lurched to the right, then left, crashing into the driver’s door, his seat belt tensioning automatically and the airbags deploying. In a normal crash, that might have been enough to save him, but this was far from normal.
The airbag forced McCready back into his seat, tearing his hands from the steering wheel and turning him into a helpless passenger as the Ford lurched under the colossal impact of the forty-ton weight of the Mack truck. For maybe half a second McCready thought that the Ford would stay upright as the truck’s speed fell away, but then he felt the unmistakable lurch as the car was lifted onto its left-side wheels and it slammed over, rolling onto its roof.
The last image that registered in McCready’s brain was the grooved tread of an immense tyre, inches from his door, just before the left-hand front wheel of the Mack lifted up and over the Ford’s chassis and crushed the vehicle beyond recognition. The momentum of the massive truck bounced the left rear wheels of the cab over the wreck, finishing the job the front wheel had started, and when the Mack finally stopped the Ford was just a mess of twisted steel and leaking fluids.
Murphy pulled the Chevrolet onto the shoulder a hundred yards or so beyond the wreck and stopped the car. He took a pair of compact binoculars from his pocket, turned round in the seat and looked carefully back up the Parkway. Cars and trucks had stopped at all angles, hazard lights flashing, their drivers staring in horror at what was left of the Ford, which lay, like some obscene roadkill, half-under the trailer of the Mack. Already people were milling around, talking on mobiles, pointing at the car. One guy was even taking pictures.
He couldn’t see clearly, but Murphy was as certain as he could be that McCready was dead. The left wheels of the Mack’s cab seemed to have gone right over the passenger section of the Ford and the whole of the bodywork looked as if it had been flattened. Even if he hadn’t been killed outright, McCready would probably be dead long before the fire service and paramedics could cut him out.
Murphy tossed the binoculars onto the passenger seat, pulled the shift into ‘drive’ and eased the Chevrolet down the road. As he accelerated away, he switched on the radio, found an easy-listening station and tapped his fingers on the steering wheel rim in time to the music as he drove. Faintly in the distance he heard the wail of a police siren and automatically checked his speed, then smiled slightly. His ‘extra’ job for Nicholson had gone without a hitch, as he’d expected.
McCready’s death would be classed as just another unfortunate traffic accident on a busy stretch of road. It didn’t really matter if anyone had noticed the manoeuvres he’d performed in the Chevy. The police would likely assume the driver had been drunk or on drugs, and would probably disbelieve any witness who claimed that the driver’s actions – actions which Murphy had been specially trained to execute – were deliberate.
He’d stolen the car in Tysons Corner late that morning, and he was going to dump the vehicle once he got clear of the Parkway. Even if somebody had been able to note down the plate number, and the police tracked it, there would be nothing in the car to provide a link to Murphy. He’d worn thin rubber gloves when he’d jacked the Chevy, and he’d leave them in the car when he walked away from it. In the glove box was a small incendiary charge, slim enough to slide into the fuel tank, fitted with a time switch. Once that blew, any forensic evidence he’d left would burn up along with the car.
Murphy pulled off the Parkway onto State Route 123, heading for McLean. He’d dump the Chevy there and catch a cab back to Falls Church. He’d already set the timer on the incendiary charge for ninety minutes, so all he had to do was flip the switch and slide it into the gas tank as he left the car. He glanced at his watch: if he didn’t meet any problems, he’d be halfway to the airport at Baltimore before it blew.
It had taken the editor less than twenty minutes to be persuaded to put the story of the mysterious epidemic at Kandira on the front page of the following day’s paper.
The reporter had taken the few crumbs he had extracted from the policemen guarding the barricades and from the two village men he had interviewed, and he had concocted a story that sounded dramatic in almost every way. It was dramatic in what it said, which was actually very little, and in what it implied, which encompassed almost every possible permutation of the ‘Unknown Pathogen Kills Villager’ angle. And most of all in the heading, which screamed the story across the top of the front page:
