Threat Vector

executed an emergency reload, pulling a spare magazine from inside his waistband on his left and slamming it into the butt of the gun. As he got his weapon back into battery and aimed it, he saw the surviving gunman retreating back to the van, falling twice on the way, obviously wounded.

And then the van screeched out into high-speed traffic on the Rock Creek Parkway. It sideswiped an SUV, sending the other vehicle crashing into the center divider. The dry-cleaning van then raced off to the north.

Jack climbed out of his BMW, stumbled in a daze, and then raced over to the taxi. He knelt down. “Melanie!” He saw the cabdriver, a young Middle Eastern man, still strapped in his seat belt, and he was obviously dead. Part of his forehead was missing, and blood drained down onto the roof of the car below him. “Melanie!”

“Jack?”

Ryan turned around. Melanie Kraft stood behind him. Her right eye was dark and puffy, and there were cuts on her forehead. She had climbed out of the other side of the cab, and Jack was relieved to see her on her feet, with only minor scrapes. But looking in her eyes he saw complete shock, a dazed look that told him she was lost, confused.

Jack grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her to his BMW, pushed her into the backseat, and then leapt into the front.

“C’mon, baby! Please start!” Jack said as he pushed the ignition button.

The luxury sedan fired up, and Jack slammed it into gear and then sped off to the north, pieces of the smashed vehicle tumbling around the passenger seat, and small pieces of safety glass blowing off the broken windshield, hitting him in the face as he raced away.

* * *

Melanie Kraft woke up to find herself lying on her side in the back of Jack’s car. All around her was broken glass and spent shell casings. She sat up slowly.

“What’s happening?” she asked. She touched her hand to her face and found a little blood, then put her hand to her right eye and felt the swollen eyelid. “What just happened, Jack?”

Ryan had pulled off the parkway, and now he turned onto a series of back roads, using his in-car GPS to keep his journey off the main roads to avoid being noticed by law enforcement.

“Jack?” she repeated.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes. Who were they? Who were those men?”

Ryan just shook his head. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and made a call. Melanie listened to his side of the conversation.

“Hey. I need your help. It’s serious.” A short pause. “I need to meet you somewhere between D.C. and Baltimore. I need a car, and I need you to watch over someone for a while.” Another brief pause. “It’s a fucking mess. Come armed. I knew I could count on you, John. Call me back.”

Ryan put the phone back in his pocket.

“Please, Jack. Who were they?”

“Who were they? Who were they? They were Center’s people. Who the hell else would it be?”

“Who is Center?” Melanie asked.

“Don’t lie to me. You have been working with Center. I know it. I found the bug on the phone.”

Melanie shook her head slowly. It made her head hurt to do so. “I don’t… Is Center Lipton?”

“Lipton? Who the hell is Lipton?”

Melanie was so confused. She just wanted to lie down, to throw up, to get out of the moving car. “Lipton is FBI. National Security.”

“He’s with the Chinese?”

“The Chinese? What’s wrong with you, Jack?”

“Those men back there, Melanie. They work for Dr. K. K. Tong, code name Center. He’s a proxy agent for Chinese Ministry of State Security. Or at least I think he is. Pretty sure of it, anyway.”

“What does that have to—”

“The bug you put on my phone. It came from Center, it told Center where I was, and it listened in on my calls. He tried to kill me and Dom in Miami. They knew we were there because of the bug.”

“What?”

“The same group killed the five CIA operatives in Georgetown. And today they tried to kill you.”

“The FBI?”

“The FBI my ass!” Jack said. “I don’t know who Lipton is, but you have not been dealing with the FBI.”

“Yes! Yes, I have! FBI. Not the Chinese! Who the hell do you think I am?”

“I don’t fucking know, Melanie!”

“Well, I don’t know who you are! What just happened back there? Did you just kill two men? Why were they after me? I was doing what I was ordered to.”

“Yes, by the Chinese!”

“No! The FBI. I mean, at first Charles Alden with the CIA told me you were working for a foreign intelligence agency; he just asked me to find out what I could. But when he was arrested, Lipton called me, they showed me the court order, he introduced me to Packard. I had no choice.”

Jack shook his head. Who was Packard? He did not understand what was going on, but he believed Melanie. He believed she believed she was working for the FBI.

“Who are you?” She said it again. This time, however, it was softer, less panicked, more imploring. “Who do you work for, and don’t tell me you are in fucking finance!”

Jack shrugged. “I haven’t exactly been honest with you.”

She looked at him in the rearview for a long moment before saying, “No shit, Jack.”

* * *

Jack met John Clark in a parking lot behind a furniture store that was not yet open for business for the day. Melanie said little. Jack had talked her into giving him the benefit of the doubt for a short while so he could get her somewhere safe, and then they could talk.

But after a several-minutes-long consultation with Clark, out of Melanie’s earshot, Jack returned to the damaged BMW. Melanie sat in the back, looking straight ahead, still dazed by what she had gone through.

Jack opened her door and knelt down. When she did not look his way he said, “Melanie?”

She turned slowly. He was glad she wasn’t any more out of it than she was.

“Yes?”

“I need you to trust me. I know that’s hard right now, but I’m asking you to think back over everything that’s ever happened in our relationship. I won’t say that I’ve never lied to you, but I swear to you I have never, ever done anything to hurt you. You believe that, don’t you?”

“I do.”

“I’m going to ask you to go with John Clark. He’ll take you back to his farm in Maryland, just for the day. I need to know that you are somewhere safe, somewhere where those guys can’t get you.”

“And you?”

“I have to leave town.”

“Leave town? You’ve got to be kidding.”

He winced; he knew this looked bad. “This is very important. I will explain everything when I get back, a couple days at most. Then you can decide if you still believe in me. At that point, I’ll listen to anything you have to say. You can tell me about this guy Lipton who you think is with the FB—”

“Darren Lipton is with the FBI, Jack.”

“Whatever. We’ll discuss it. All I am saying is, for now, let’s try to trust each other. Please go with John, and let him take care of you.”

“I need to talk to Mary Pat.”

“John and Mary Pat have been friends since before you were born. We need to lie low for right now, we don’t want to get MP involved just yet.”

“But—”

“Trust me, Melanie. Just for a couple of days.”

She did not seem happy about it at all, but after a moment she just nodded.