Zero Hour

ops in black biker jackets who had buzzed hornetlike from the Soho req lot.

“You see anything?” Glenn said into his wireless hands-free.

“No,” Ricci said. He shot around a station wagon plastered with old, sun-bleached New Jersey Nets bumper stickers: RIDE THE A-TRAIN TO THE RIM! KENYON MARTIN — NEVER SATISFIED! “Not a goddamned thing.”

They rode on, juicing their engines, dodging and shimmying between the other vehicles on the ’pike. Factory complexes ranged to the left and right of dented metal safety rails, speed blurring their boxy geometries at the corners of the riders’ vision. They didn’t know if the van was out front or behind them, though behind would be far better, meaning they would probably beat it to the chemical plant. Out front meant they needed to make up a lead, and an undetermined one. The van could be a mile ahead or five, and they wouldn’t know until they saw it. The van could be parked outside those tanks filled with hydrofluoric acid, seconds away from puncturing them with a high- intensity laser beam at a distance of fifty or a hundred yards. It could be an eye-blink, a heartbeat, from ending any conjecture about its whereabouts, unleashing a noxious windborne cloud that would envelop every man, woman, and child in every vehicle on the road, snuffing their lives out like a corrosive fist reaching from the arm of the Grim Reaper himself.

Ricci came up on an SUV’s rear windshield, slid sideways. Slipped behind the wide rump of a Greyhound passenger bus, cut sharply around it. He heard a rubber-on-blacktop screech, didn’t look back, glad whatever accident was gumming things up at the bridge had seemingly preoccupied the smokies and local cops, unable to worry too much about them anyway. Instead he raced on hard, gripping his bars, the soles of his boots pressed against his footpegs—

Then Glenn in the hands-free again. “Ricci, hey… look!”

Ricci glanced over at him, saw him gesturing, a high forward sweep of his right arm.

He followed its movement as he bumped over a pothole, saw the orange and blue. A van? He thought so. It was maybe an eighth of a mile off, small in his vision, too small for Ricci to positively verify it was the van. But it was close to the exit that led to Raja Petro, and he didn’t imagine for an instant that was coincidence.

Ricci opened his throttle and charged ahead, thinking he would at least have a chance to take his stab.

* * *

Weak from loss of blood, his shirt red and tacky where Earl’s bullet had penetrated just above his waist, Zaheer leaned over the steering wheel as he neared the turnpike exit, crawling along, moving through the dense metro-area traffic at a snail’s pace. He had put the full thrust of his will into reaching his objective, tunneled his concentration toward the normally automatic act of driving, and he could see that he was almost there, almost…

Then a sound behind him. Getting louder. At first its significance didn’t register. Zaheer knew he was dying from the gunshot wound, and just as the glorious task that lay ahead had summoned whatever was left of his fleshly powers, he had summoned what remained of his inner life force to answer the call. Everything outside had been pushed from his thoughts as extraneous, a waste of precious strength. But perhaps he had been wrong.

Perhaps…

There had been the one in the car at the motel.

The one Earl had thought might be a watcher.

Zaheer listened again. Or rather focused on what he could not do anything but hear. That sound. No… sounds. The combined drone of rapidly accelerating engines. Revving fast in slow traffic. How could the two be reconciled?

Zaheer pulled his mind from the tunnel around it long enough to grasp what was happening, looked into his sideview mirror, and saw the motorcycles swarming up from behind.

The curve of the exit ramp within eyeshot, Zaheer slapped his hand on the wheel, blasting the cars ahead of him with his horn.

He was determined to reach the exit ramp before the infidels could overtake him.

* * *

Three-quarters of an hour late for her sales-clerk job at the Rariton Mall’s Fashion Bee, a job she’d landed just a week ago in the tightest of employment markets, Johanna Hearns was already about to come apart behind the wheel over being stuck in traffic, pound the dash and scream like a madwoman in a fit of frustration, when the idiotic driver of the U-Haul behind her started in with his horn, signaling he wanted to get off at the exit a car or two up ahead of her.

Johanna shook her head, spewing a string of epithets that would have astonished her husband with their inventiveness — and he thought he knew them all, hardy-fucking-har. What did Chief Dirty Ballsucker in the van think? That he was the only one in a hurry? That she was deliberately holding him up because she liked sitting bumper-to-bumper breathing in the smell of exhaust fumes and Jersey swamp air? Or that maybe she just couldn’t get enough of Imus in the Morning on her car radio? And while she was making with the relevant questions, here was another: that honking nut job aside, where the fuck were the cops when you needed them?

Johanna did some Lamaze to keep her cool, a holdover from courses she’d taken when her youngest was born. Mr. U-Haul was in such a rush to get to charming Trenton, she’d get her own flashers going, hope somebody in the left lane was decent enough to hang back so she could shift into it, and let him go on his merry way.

Stay cool, stay cool, Johanna thought, and slapped on her signal.

She only hoped the van driver choked on his next meal.

* * *

“That’s our van,” Ricci said over the radio channel linking his bike team. “I see the plate number.”

“Son of a bitch.” This over the radio from Cole, one of the ops behind Ricci. “He’s riding his horn to the ramp, getting those people up ahead to move.”

Ricci zigzagged between lanes.

“Squeeze him,” he said, and shot forward.

* * *

The last of the vehicles in front of him finally out of his way, Zaheer had almost reached the exit ramp when the attack bikes began to catch up. He checked his side-views, saw several of them closing in on both sides from the rear, the two in the lead nearly at his flanks.

Gunning his engine, he took a jarring turn onto the 25 mph ramp at double the permitted speed.

* * *

Gaining, gaining, gaining.

Ricci fisted a surge of gas into his cycle’s engine, took the exit ramp between the left side of the U-Haul and the concrete barrier to his left, roping along on the narrow shoulder.

He pulled even with the driver’s window, was able to snatch a glance inside.

The dark-suit at the wheel looked back at him — and in his brief distraction started slewing from side to side on the ramp.

Ricci dropped back an instant before the van’s flank would have run him into the barricade, saw Glenn do the same as the U-Haul veered to the right. Too close behind Glenn, one of the other riders lost control of his bike and took a vaulting jump over the barricade. The cycle flipped over sideways, hurling its rider from his banana seat to whatever was below the ramp.

Ricci heard his screaming begin over the wireless, heard it peak, then heard it abruptly stop.

“God almighty.” Glenn’s shocked voice in his ear now. “God almighty.”

“Cole,” Ricci said. “You hear me?”

“Yeah. That was Margolis. Shit, I think he—”

“Don’t think, just pull off and stay with him. The rest of you follow me.”

Ricci’s temples pounded. For a millisecond he was back in Earthglow, Nichols dying in his arms, turned into a sack of blood by the Wildcat. Ricci had felt something turn inside him. Grinding like a great stone wheel. I’m here with you, he’d told the kid. Be easy.

A millisecond.

It never ended.

Ricci saw the van pulling off the ramp ahead of him, and followed.