breaking a basic rule.
He was out in traffic, I couldn’t catch him. But. One chance. Insane but I did it.
Running at full power, I jumped onto the trunk and roof of a parked car next to the alleyway and launched myself, timing it to land on the side of a moving NY Metro bus barreling past, closing in on them. I gripped a side ad of the bus and clambered – past the astonished stares of the riders – onto the roof.
Everything hurt. Fingers, arms, chest, legs. Brain.
The bus driver, trying to figure out what that sound of an impact was against his bus, slowed. No doubt the passengers were telling him a crazy man was on board. I ran the length of the bus as it slowed, launching myself onto the roof of the Navigator.
Just one perfect shot and my son would be safe.
Training dictated that I eliminate the bigger threat: the other Special Projects agent. He could kill me before I got to Jack. And although I was willing to kill Jack I wasn’t eager to kill an innocent man.
The Navigator skidded into a parked car, on the passenger side.
I slid off the roof onto the trunk, on my knees, gun drawn. I emptied the clip into the windshield. The reinforced glass pocked but didn’t surrender to the bullets. I placed my shots hard and neat where Jack Ming sat and I swear above the roar of traffic and horns and the gun blasts I could hear Jack Ming screaming.
But the glass held. Through the blizzard of fractures in the windshield I could see Jack scrambling toward the back of the Navigator, squeezing between the driver and passenger seats. Wriggling toward the rear exit. Panicking.
The agent was brave. He was going to cover Jack Ming’s escape. Good guy, doing his job. My throat thickened at the thought of what I would have to do. He jacked down his window and he snaked an arm around the windshield to fire at me.
I dropped off the trunk, heard the first bullet kiss the paint. I was trapped in a narrow wedge between the parked car and the Navigator. The pavement was warm. The tire slanted toward me and I barely had room to curve and wriggle between the cars to get under the Navigator.
I started snaking toward the back. The car’s heat radiated against me.
To my left the driver’s door opened and I saw a foot hit the ground.
I shot the agent in the fleshy part of the calf. He howled and the leg withdrew into the car.
Ahead of me I saw red Converse sneakers hit the asphalt. Running. I writhed out from under the car, dodging through stalled and slowing traffic. The sidewalks had cleared at the first sound of the shots. Thank you, considerate, frightened pedestrians. But I had to dodge cars and Jack, fresh and unbeaten, bolted at full speed on the fast emptying sidewalks.
He rounded a corner and vanished.
I chased him. He glanced back, fear on his face. An ache tore through my ribs, in my chest, where August had dealt me a beating. Where I’d thrown myself against the bus. Trying to sneak up on them had hurt me.
A cheap street market loomed up ahead, one of those full of stuff like prepaid cell phones and knockoff purses and anything from lingerie to DVD players still in original packing, but not sold at original prices. People thronged between the booths, along the edges. Old folks, kids, babies in strollers, scatterings of families.
I couldn’t risk a shot at him. Not there. Too many people.
Jack dodged between the tables and the booths. Loud Chinese pop and a competing undercurrent of reggae thrummed the air. I risked a backward glance and saw Leonie, a few blocks back, weaving toward us. She’d had the presence of mind to hide the gun. I didn’t see either August or his men. But they would either be coming, very soon, or calling in reinforcements.
I tailed Jack Ming into the marketplace. He glanced back every ten seconds to see if I was following. We were blocks from where we’d started and this crowd was calm, and he wasn’t eager to panic them. He wanted them between me and him. He wasn’t screaming for help. Or for the police. He was determined to run. And he was determined to stay in a crowd.
The fear in his face tore at me. I didn’t want to kill this man.
50
August opened his eyes. His face hurt. Everything hurt. Blood on the back of his head, sticky. He got to his feet.
He heard the whine of the metal door opening, footsteps pounding the concrete floor. He groped for his gun. Gone. His head felt broken and dreamy and misty. Concussion, probably.
A woman. Petite, red hair pulled back into a ponytail, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. She stared at him and raised the gun in her hand.
‘Stay there,’ she said. ‘Stay right there.’
He stayed right there.
He saw her gaze dart about the room. She ran to Jack Ming’s knapsack, lifted it almost gently. Before she picked it up he could see in its unzippered opening a small laptop. She grabbed the knapsack, put it over her shoulder. She kept the gun leveled at August.
‘Just stay there,’ she ordered him.
‘Who are you?’ he said.
Of course she didn’t answer. She kept her gaze on him, tightened her grip on the gun.
She vanished back out into the alley.
August staggered to the door. Who the hell was she? Was she in league with Ming or with Sam?
He came out into the alley and she shot at him. Not close enough to hit but, you know, a bullet in your general direction is enough to make you retreat.
‘I told you to stay!’ she screamed at him.
One of the backups, Griffith, was lying in the alley, groaning, pawing at his ribs. No sign of the Navigator. He counted to twenty and risked coming out the door again. The redhead was gone.
He keyed his earphone. ‘Two, this is One, report?’
‘I’m getting the informant away, we’re being pursued, an armed male, he knew your name, he said you were shot-’
And then chaos. The distant thrum of metal against metal crashing, the drum-drum-drum of gunshots hitting bulletproof glass. Grimes cussing, screaming at someone to get down and stay down, Jack Ming’s voice answering I am getting the fuck out of here.
‘The hostile is trying to kill the kid,’ Grimes said and then more shots. Grimes howled and cussed again. August ran now. ‘Where are you?’
The hostile. Sam Capra. His best friend – who should have wanted nothing more than an informant from Novem Soles coming forward – was trying to kill their best hope of unveiling the ring’s every secret.
August ran.
51
I ran.
Ahead of me, Jack Ming dodged a booth full of DVDs from Bollywood and Hong Kong, leaping over the stacked tables, scattering packaging and earning a scream of annoyance and rage from the elderly vendor. The man hollered at him in a quilted howl of obscene English and Mandarin. Ming stumbled and his T-shirt hiked up his back. He reached for something in the small of his back and I thought it was a gun and I couldn’t let him shoot the old man but it was a swath of red leather. Like a book or a journal, firmly lodged in the back of his pants. He yanked his shirt back over it.
He was making sure it was still there.
The notebook. The secrets of Novem Soles.
