by Tom Clancy
“We’ll get slaughtered,” Tad said.
Drayne reached around the seat and took Adam’s pistol from the dead man’s holster. “Maybe not, I’ve got an idea. Stick the gun out the window and shoot it into the air.”
“Why?”
“Just do it.”
Tad did, the sound loud in the quiet afternoon.
The men behind the copter ducked, but they didn’t return fire.
Drayne almost smiled. Good, that was good. They wanted him alive. Alive, he was valuable. Dead, he was worthless.
And now Tad, bless him, had powder residue on his hand showing he had fired a gun.
“Okay, okay, let’s think about this. We got their attention, but we’re boxed, so we’re gonna have to do this with lawyers. We have money, and we have power. The pharmaceutical companies want what I have. So we get out with our hands up, and surrender.”
“You sure?”
“Trust me, I know what I’m doing. One phone call, we’ll have some very heavyweight people lined up to help us.”
“Okay, man.”
Of course, Tad would have to take the fall for killing Adam. And since Tad would get shot resisting arrest or trying to escape, he wouldn’t say otherwise. Drayne could pull that off. If he yelled, “Hey, don’t shoot, Tad! Put the gun down!” at the right moment, the feds would hose Tad. DEA rules of engagement wouldn’t be that different from the FBI rules when facing an armed perp. Too bad, but Tad had one foot in the grave anyhow. He liked him, but his death might as well count for something. No point in Tad being dead and Drayne being in jail, was there?
Drayne climbed over the seat.
“What are you doing?”
“I want to be right behind you when we get out, we don’t want them to think you’re reaching for something when you move the seat to let me out.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Tuck that gun into your belt and keep your hands in the air when you get out.”
“Okay.”
“Let’s do it. Just stay cool. We’ll walk away from this, believe me. Once we’re out on bail, we can take off and stay gone forever.” Not that they would get bail with a corpse in the front seat of their car. Judges frowned on that.
Tad nodded. “Okay.”
Howard had braked and turned the car to block the road, and the three of them jumped out on the driver’s side, away from the stopped Dodge.
“Get those tasers out, for all the good they’ll do,” Howard said. He pulled his gun from under his jacket, crouched behind the front wheel, and pointed the gun over the hood. “See if you can get the DEA there on your virgil’s emergency band and tell them not to shoot us.”
Michaels nodded. He was the commander of Net Force, but he was willing to defer to the general in this kind of situation. He wasn’t going to to let his ego get them killed.
He hit the emergency call button, got the Net Force operator, and told him to patch them through to the DEA team. The FBI Director should have their number.
Crouched behind the trunk, his taser clutched in both hands and pointed at the Dodge, Jay nervously said, “I think ... I think I’m gonna throw up. And I gotta pee, real bad.”
“It’s okay,” Howard said, “we all feel like that.”
Oddly enough, Michaels didn’t. He felt relatively calm, almost as if he were watching and not participating. His mouth was awful dry, though.
Behind them, a car approached. Howard turned and waved at it frantically. “Stop!”
The car, a dark minivan, did stop. The passenger door opened and a man jumped out and ran toward them.
He had a gun in his hand.
Howard swung his revolver around and almost shot the guy—then they all recognized him.
Brett Lee, of the DEA
Lee crouched into a duckwalk the last few steps. “What’s the situation?” he asked.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Michaels responded.
“I was following you,” Lee said.
They all stared at him.
He said, “Look, okay, I screwed up on the bust at the movie star’s house, okay? My job is going away, at the least. I need to help catch this guy so I don’t leave in total disgrace. I need a little victory.”
That made sense. Before anybody could speak, Michael’s virgil started its musical sting. No ID sig. That damned thing was practically useless. He thumbed the connect button. His camera was still on, but the incoming screen was blank, no visual transmission.
“Commander Michaels? Riley Clark, DEA. Is that you in the car behind the suspects?”
“Yes. And I have Brett Lee here with me.”
“Hold your positions, and please don’t shoot unless you are fired upon—”
As if his words were a signal, a gun went off. Michaels ducked instinctively.
From the virgil, Clark’s excited voice came: “Negative, negative, do not return fire, the gun was pointed into the air, repeat, hold your fire!”
Michaels raised from his squat and looked. The driver’s side door opened, and two men stepped out, their hands in the air. The zombie and the surfer. What an odd-looking pair they were together.
“Which one is the chemist?” Lee asked.
Jay said, “Gotta be the surfer.”
Drayne felt tight, knowing all those guns were pointed at him, but he also knew he was the golden goose, and while the DEA field guys might want to burn his ass, the higher-ups would know which way the political winds blew. Sure, he might have to do some time at one of those country-club honor farms somewhere, working on his tan and Ping-Pong game, but in the end, he was going to cut a deal, and he was going to walk away rich. Guys worth tens of millions of dollars didn’t go to jail very often, almost never, and he’d be very cooperative. The feds would bargain with him, because he had something everybody wanted. He could turn people into superhumans. Hell, the Army would be first in line, if the Navy and Marines didn’t beat them to it.
He was smarter than the guys they sent against him, always had been, always would be. He could think circles around them. This was a temporary setback, that was all. He was a genius, and he’d show them just how smart he was.
He smiled. “Don’t shoot!” Drayne yelled. “We give up!”
Something was wrong, Howard felt, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Lee was right here next to him; Howard didn’t trust him, and if Lee raised that pistol, he was going to bat it down, but that wasn’t it, it was something else.
Then he knew. It hit him like a lightning bolt.
Lee had gotten out on the passenger side!
He twisted around, looked at the van, said, “Shit!”
The driver’s door was open, and a man was behind it, a rifle resting on the windowsill, but not aimed at Howard or Michaels or Jay or Lee.
Howard swung his revolver around.
The rifle went off.
Tad was looking right at him when Bobby’s head exploded. The skull deformed in front, like it was plastic, and Bobby’s whole forehead spewed into the air, blood and bones and brain in a greasy fluid like a water balloon bursting, spraying every which way.
Fuck. They shot Bobby.
Tad didn’t even think about it, he bolted, ran straight for the only way not full of guns, right over the side of the hill. He hit five or six yards down, his legs collapsed, and he rolled himself into as much of a ball as he could, bouncing and smashing into creosote bushes and rocks and dirt, until he hit something so hard it took his consciousness.
Michaels watched in slow motion as John Howard shoved his handgun forward and started pulling the trigger. There were orange flashes from the muzzle and smaller flashes from the cylinder, but the sound was oddly quiet, like a cap pistol.
Brett Lee screamed—Michaels saw his mouth open—and he tried to point his pistol at Howard.
He’s going to shoot John, Michaels realized.
Michaels lunged, slamming into Lee. They both sprawled on the road. Lee dropped his gun to break his fall, hit, rolled up, and kicked at Michaels.
Without thinking or pausing, Michaels swept his right hand down and up again in an arc, caught Lee’s ankle and, at the same time, dropped into a low position and shoved with his left hand at Lee’s chest.
Lee fell backward, hit the road flat on his back, and his head thumped the asphalt and bounced. He was stunned enough so he didn’t move.
Michaels blinked and realized he had just done an angkat, a throw against an unweighted leg. Huh.
Jay, who probably didn’t have any more of an idea of what was going on than Michaels did, stepped up and shot Lee with his taser. Lee juddered and jittered on the dusty road as the electrical charge spasmed his muscles.
Michaels turned to look at Howard, who was up and moving toward the minivan, gun still extended in front of him. Michaels didn’t see his taser, he must have dropped it, but he hurried to join Howard.
Behind the still-open driver’s door, which had several holes in it, a man lay on the ground, bleeding, a rifle next to him. His chest was a ruin, dark with arterial blood, and Michaels knew the man had been shot in the heart. He’d be dead soon, if he wasn’t already.
He couldn’t see the man’s face until Howard kicked the door shut, and when he did, it was not really all that much of a surprise:
The heart-shot man was Zachary George of the NSA.
37
When Tad woke up, he didn’t know where he was. Outside, somewhere, and buried in some kind of sweet-smelling brush. He had cuts and bruises he didn’t remember, and felt like crap, but that wasn’t anything new, it had happened before. Lots of times.
He tried to sit up, couldn’t make it, then fell back and gulped for air.
This might be it, Tad, old son. The last roundup.
Damn. How’d he get here? Where was here, anyway?
The sight of Bobby’s head blowing apart filled his memory.
Aw, shit! Shit, shit, shit!
It all came back to him in a jumbled rush of pain and emotion. Killing Adam, the helicopter in the road, the leap he’d taken to get away—
Bobby’s head exploding. In slo mo and Technicolor.
Jesus!
He looked at his watch to see how long he’d been out, but the crystal was shattered, the minute hand bent to the face and stopped, the hour hand gone completely. The feds would be coming for him, they might be almost here, and he had to get up, he had to get moving, or they’d catch him. Probably none of them would have just jumped off the fucking cliff like he had, but they’d figure a way down soon enough to grab his ass. He didn’t know how long ago it had been. It felt like it was still afternoon going into evening, so maybe he’d only been out for a few minutes.
He wasn’t going to get far in his condition, he knew.
He reached into his pocket and came out with one of the Hammer packets. A couple of them fell on the ground, but it was too much trouble to bother picking them up. Well, he sure wasn’t going to be making any deliveries anytime soon, and the clock was running on this batch. He had until tomorrow around noon before the stuff would all go sour. Use it or lose it, and he couldn’t take them all.
He tore open the packet and dry-swallowed the Hammer cap. Thought about it for a few seconds, then ripped open another packet and took that cap, too. It would be a while before the stuff would kick in, and he couldn’t sit here waiting for it, no matter how much he hurt.
The gun he’d had tucked in his belt was gone. His car was God knew how far up the hill, surrounded by feds. He was screwed.
And Bobby was dead. That hadn’t really sunk in, it didn’t seem real. They’d killed him, they’d fucking executed him, he’d had his hands up, and they had blown his head off!
Tad felt a surge of anger well up, filling him with murderous rage. He wanted to run back up that hill and tear them apart with his bare hands, rip their arms and legs off, stomp on the bloody torsos.
The anger was good, but it was barely strong enough to get him to his feet and moving. If he could stay clear long enough for the Hammer to kick in, he’d be okay. Once the drug took hold, he’d be able to travel at speed.
And go where?
The safe house. They didn’t know about that. Bobby had the place stocked, there was some running-away money stashed there, more in the safe at the storage space.
Bobby was dead.
Tad couldn’t believe it. Bobby was smart, good-looking, rich, he had everything going for him. And they cooked him, blam! Just like that.
Tad stumbled, fell, and managed to get back to his feet. Oh, they were gonna pay for killing Bobby.
He was fucking going to make them pay.
“No sign of the zombie?” Jay said.
“The DEA people haven’t found him yet. Local deputies will be joining the search soon,” Michaels said. “General Howard went down with them and found this.” He held up a purple capsule. “There were several of them under a bush down there. DEA got the rest, but it doesn’t look as if they have turned sour yet. So this is still an active capsule.”
“No great loss. We got the chemist.”
“We have his body,” Howard said.
Jay nodded and blew out a sigh. What a fuck-up this had been.
“I bet forensics will match that rifle George had to the bullets they found in my agency car at Manassas,” Howard said. “George was the shooter. That’s why Lee had such a great alibi.”
“So they were in it together all along. But why shoot this guy Drayne?”
“I don’t know,” Michaels said.
Lee had recovered from the fall and taser shock and was handcuffed and sitting in the back of one of the DEA vehicles that had finally arrived. He was more than a little distraught when he saw the body of George covered up and waiting for the coroner.
He’d sobbed and begun crying. Not really the kind of reaction an op from one agency usually had for an op from another agency, certainly not the same sex. Something there, all right.
“Bastard,” Lee had said to Howard. “You killed him!”
“Damn straight,” Howard had replied. “I only wish I’d shot him two seconds sooner.”
“Bastard. You’re a dead man.”
“Not by your hand, pal. You’re an accessory to murder and attempted murder, probably seven kinds of conspiracy, and God knows what else. You’re going away for a long, long time.”
“Maybe not. Maybe I have something to trade.”
“Better be damned good, whatever it is,” Howard said. “And between you and me and my colleagues here, if I see you on the street anywhere close to me or mine, I’ll drop you and worry about the consequences later.”
“You threatening me, General Howard?”
Michaels said, “You must be mistaken, Mr. Lee. I didn’t hear any threats. Jay?”
“Nope, I didn’t hear anything at all.”
Howard nodded at Michaels and Jay.
Jay smiled. Well, what the hell, they were a team, right?
On the drive down the hill, Michaels called Toni.
“Hey,” she said. “How’s the glamour there in Tinsel-town?”
“Great, if you like chase scenes and shoot-outs.”
“What?”
“We tracked down the dope dealer. He’s no longer with us, however.”
“What happened?”
Michaels filled her in on the operation.
When he was done, she said, “That’s good work, Alex. Nobody got hurt except the bad guy, and Net Force gets the credit. How are they going to play it with the media?”
“Straight, I hope,” he said. “But I wouldn’t bet on that. Camera teams were all over us ten minutes after it happened, news choppers circling like mechanical vultures. I let Jay talk for us and he kept it vague, but I don’t know what the DEA and FBI guys had to say. Rogue operatives are never a good spin for any agency. You can say, ‘Yeah, we had a problem but we cleaned it out,’ but the first question from the reporters will be, ‘How’d you get a problem like that in the first place?’ It’s a no-win situation.”
�
��Not for Net Force.”
He grinned at the small image of her on the virgil. “Well, yes, that’s true. We get off smelling like roses.”
“So, when are you coming home?”
“Probably tomorrow morning. We need to file reports with the local FBI and DEA offices, talk to their supervisors, like that.”
“Couldn’t you file those reports on-line from here?”
“You know how that is, they want to see us when we tell it. Won’t take long, but by the time we get done, it’ll be late, and we’re flying into a three-hour time difference. Might as well wait until the morning.”
“At least it’s all wrapped up.”
“Not completely. The zombie—that’s Thaddeus Bershaw, we got that from his car registration—got away.”
“That’s not major, is it?’
“Not that we can tell. We don’t know for sure what his part was in things, but he wasn’t the brightest bulb on the string. Jay dug up his background, and he was an uneducated street kid. Probably no more than an errand boy. The dealer was Robert Drayne; he had a degree in chemistry. Also had a father who was with the Bureau for thirty years, retired to Arizona.”
“Interesting.”
“DEA and FBI put out an APB net and street on Bershaw. They’ll find him eventually. Anyway, he’s not our problem anymore.”
“I miss you,” she said.
“Yeah, I miss you, too. See you tomorrow. I’m thinking maybe I’ll take a couple personal days and we can do something.”
“I’d like that.”
Michaels discommed and leaned back in the seat. It had been a long day, and he wasn’t looking forward to the double debriefing. It would be nice if they could do it once, with ops from both the DEA and FBI listening together, but that wasn’t how it was going to go, of course. That way would make too much sense.
They were way too slow coming down the hill to find him. By the time he heard them yelling at each other, Tad was six hundred yards away, and the double-hit of magic purple was coming on strong. Ten minutes after that, he was feeling good enough to jog, and ten minutes after that, he was able to run like the wind, hopping over rocks and bushes in his path, covering ground much faster than any normal man would be able to do on foot in the gathering darkness. He could run faster, see better, and make quicker decisions, and no way were they going to catch him from behind, if they even had a clue which way he had gone. Probably still looking for his body under the bushes back there.