by Dean Koontz
Of course it only needed to be on target once.
She expected the remote-control assassin to sweep into view from her left. Then she heard it circumnavigating the massive old palm from the right.
Before the camera could find her, she eased away from it. With her back to the three-foot-diameter trunk of the immense phoenix, she followed in the wake of the drone as it circled toward her.
The firing mechanism wouldn’t be a full handgun. No grip, no standard magazine. Just the bare essentials. A .22-caliber weapon. Something like a miniature belt feed with, say, four rounds.
She had the advantage of hearing. The drone had an eye but not an ear. The remote operator was essentially deaf.
But copper-jacketed hollow-point rounds, even just .22s, could kill at close range.
She stopped trying to hide. Stepped away from the tree, quickly around it, boldly closing behind the drone.
The operator had maybe a 70-degree field of view. He must have sensed a threat in his blind zone. With an angry-hornet noise, the drone suddenly began to rotate in hover mode.
With her pistol in a two-hand grip, at point-blank range, Jane squeezed off three, four, five rounds, the roar of each shot banking like a cue ball off every palm bole in the grove. The freaking machine was all landing legs and propellers, with a narrow fuselage, the camera suspended on a gimbal ring, not much of a target, so that she wished her pistol had been a shotgun. On the other hand, this grandmother of the Terminator wasn’t armored or to any extent designed to withstand incoming fire. Whether she hit it with one round or five, it spat off pieces of itself, reeled through the air, ricocheted off another palm, and clattered across the grass, thousands of dollars in value reduced to pennies in salvage.
She didn’t realize there was a second drone until she saw it coming fast from the area of the fountain.
17
* * *
TWO DRONES, A SURVEILLANCE VAN from which they were launched, surely a quad or more of guys on foot about to appear from somewhere soon: They had resources, and they wanted her, maybe even with more intensity than she had imagined.
When she pivoted to run from the second machine, the massive old phoenix palm blocked her. Before she could juke around the tree, a quiver of slender steel needles stippled it in a vertical line, missing her by a few inches.
Should have known. An eight- or ten-pound airborne drone could not take the recoil of even a .22 and maintain accuracy. This was a low-recoil compressed-air weapon, firing darts. Not darts exactly, these were without fins, so they were technically miniature versions of the quarrels used by crossbows. Poison? Tranquilizer? Probably the latter. They would want to interrogate her—so from her point of view, poison might be preferable.
Out of sight from the street, Jane wove among the palms and the machine buzzed in pursuit as birds racketed out of the protection of the overhead cascading fronds, shrieking and nattering their dismay at being chased back into the pending storm. The big crowns of the palms ensured the boles were farther apart than she needed them to be, forcing her to spend too much time in the open. Weaving, ducking, she counted on the drone not being able to click on her, but as she urgently sought cover, she realized there was no option except continued frantic evasion. The machine could fly at maybe twenty meters per second in calm air, much faster than she could run. She couldn’t evade it for long. And she would never again get away with the circling-the-tree trick that worked before; the drone might be mindless, but its remote operator was not.
The gunfire would draw police, but that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Two months earlier, when all this started, she learned that not all cops were on the side of the righteous, that in this dangerous time when shadows cast shadows of their own, when darkness often passed for light, the just and the unjust wore the same face.
Weaving tree to tree in an obstacle-course marathon that she could only lose, in a dream-strange showdown among the phoenixes from which she would not rise phoenixlike if she were killed, Jane felt a tugging at her right sleeve. Dodging around another palm, she saw three thin quarrels pinned through the slack material of her sport coat, having missed her flesh by a fraction of an inch.
In the early gloaming of the shrouded afternoon, a sudden brightness flashed apocalyptic, flaring across the park as if to incinerate all it touched and bespeak a world of ashes soon to come, so that all the shadows either leaped back into the things that cast them or quaked across the lawns and walks like spirits dispossessed and seeking new anchorage. She didn’t realize the sky had thrown down lightning that had struck nearby until a second after the flare, when thunder shook the day so hard that she could feel it tremble the ground under her running feet.
One of the many lessons she’d been taught at Quantico was to live by her training, to do what was known to work for a thousand times a thousand other lawmen, but also to recognize when by-the-book would result in a eulogy and a postmortem commendation, and then to trust the intuition that was truer than anything learned. In the wake of the blinding light, the tide of banished shadows rushed back in answer to the thunder’s call. As the day darkened around her, she dropped to the ground, rolled onto her back, as vulnerable as an offering on an Aztec altar, the airborne executioner looming as if to the call of sacrificial blood. She saw the hovering drone adjust the barrel of its gimbaled weapon, and she thrust the pistol toward it, squeezing off the remaining five rounds in the handgun.
A glitter of steel flicked past her face, stitching the earth, as the machine fired a misaimed burst. Hit, the drone shuddered up and back, as if to gain altitude and retreat. Instead, having lost one of its rotary wings, it dipped and swayed, bobbled as it strove to execute a turn, accelerated in a cant toward a gap in the trees, and collided with a palm bole at maybe ten meters per second, coming apart like a hurled egg.
Jane was on her feet without remembering how she’d gotten up. She ejected the empty magazine, pocketed it, snapped a full ten rounds into the Heckler & Koch, holstered the weapon, and ran.
18
* * *
OUT OF THE PALM GROVE, in the open near the fountain, she saw them coming at last. Two guys hurried this way from the library lot, which was west of her, and three others sprinted in from the street on the north side of the park, none in uniform, though they were surely not citizens out for the exercise.
The Ford Escape stood at a meter a block to the south of the park, but she didn’t want to lead them toward the car if it might be still unknown to them.
She fled east, into the longest sward of this green zone, glad that she had been avoiding carbs, doing stretching exercises every evening, and running regularly.
Even at a distance, she could tell that the five on her tail were formidable enough to have qualified for the NFL at defensive positions: huge guys, big muscles, serious stamina. But she weighed a hundred fifteen pounds, and each of her pursuers bulked twice her size; greater weight required additional energy to move it. She was lean and fleet, and her motivation—survival—gave her a more powerful motor than anything that might be driving them.
She did not glance back. To do so would slow her. She would be caught or not, and the race was more often won by the quarry that had confidence in its endurance.
The second lightning bolt seared the sky, brighter than the first, and cleaved to the heart the tallest tree in sight, a nearby live oak, from which foamed showers of fiery splinters, incandescent chips of bark. A slab calved from the main trunk, bearing a limb of intricate branches like some fantastic microwave mast receiving signals from uncountable worlds.
Although the toppling mass crashed short of her, Jane raised one arm across her face, protecting her eyes from the shrapnel of shattered branches, twigs, and crisp brown oval leaves set afire and swarming like a pestilence of beetles.
As the last of the debris fell behind her and the crash of thunder rolled away through the city, as she came to the east end of the park, the once-dark sky paled, abruptly glaucous, and cataracts of rain fe
ll hard, fat droplets hissing through the trees and grass, snapping off the pavement, plinking the metal hoods on trash cans, carrying with them the faint bleachy odor of ozone, a form of oxygen created by lightning’s alchemy.
The torrents of silver rain were suddenly threaded through with red skeins as brake lights revealed drivers reacting to the abrupt drop in visibility. Without hesitation, she leaped off the sidewalk, into the street, blacktop glistering underfoot, and plunged into the mid-block traffic, greeted by the blare of horns and the banshee shriek of brakes. She briefly glimpsed some startled and some angry faces in the wake of thumping windshield wipers before they blurred behind the fresh rain sluicing down the glass.
Arriving on the farther sidewalk intact, she turned south and ran flat out, dodging among other pedestrians who might have been annoyed but not surprised to see a young woman, sans umbrella, in a hurry to find shelter. She turned north at the corner, sprinted half a block before trading the street for an alleyway, then the alleyway for a narrow service passage between buildings, suitable only for foot traffic.
Halfway along that claustrophobic accessway, she at last risked a look back. She saw none of the five bulls from the park, but she knew she couldn’t have shaken off all of them. They were in the area, and likely to cross her path by surprise.
She paused only to drop her disposable cell phone through the bars of a drainage grille. Even above the chorus of the rain, she could hear it splash into dark water below, and then she ran once more.
19
* * *
FROM THE NARROW ACCESSWAY, she entered a new street mid-block. She was about to cross it when she noticed, fifty or sixty yards to her left, on the opposite side of the avenue, a large man in dark clothing, soaked as she was, standing oblivious to the bustling pedestrians around him. He might have been anybody, nobody, looking for somebody else, but intuition cautioned her to back off toward the passageway from which she had a moment earlier departed.
Just before she would have ducked out of sight, she saw him see her. He raised his head and stiffened, as an attack dog will freeze for just an instant when it catches the scent of quarry.
She retreated to the three-foot-wide accessway and ran, blinking rain from her eyes, dispirited by the sound of her labored openmouthed breathing. Throat hot and getting raw. Heart knocking. A thin acid refluxing into the back of her throat.
Insane, this womanhunt in broad daylight, in a busy city. Insane and incredible, but no more incredible than Nick killing himself with his Ka-Bar, than Eileen Root hanging herself in the garage, than jihadists crashing a plane into hundreds of cars, trucks, and buses on a crowded expressway.
Bursting into the alley she had traveled previously, acutely aware that she didn’t have time to reach either end of the block before her pursuer arrived, she saw a truck parked at the back of a restaurant, the logo of a bakery emblazoned on its flank. Delivering bread or pastries or both, the driver wore a yellow rain slicker as he finished stacking four large rainproof plastic cases on a hand truck, which he rolled into the receiving room or kitchen of his customer.
She darted to the driver’s door, glanced into the cab through glass partly clouded by interior condensation, saw only that no one occupied it, and hurried to the back of the vehicle. She decided against the cargo area, where the driver had left one of the two doors ajar, most likely because he had more goods to offload. She boarded the front of the truck on the starboard side, pulling the cab’s passenger door shut behind her, and she slid below window level, as far into the footwell as she could go.
Rain streamed across the windshield, and the windows in both side doors were partially obscured by condensation. The interior cab light was off, the dashboard dark. As long as she stayed low, she probably would not be seen—unless her pursuer yanked open a door. But he was more likely to think she’d found an unlocked entrance to one of the businesses that backed up to the alley, most obviously the restaurant.
As she tried to quiet her breathing, she heard sounds outside. She couldn’t make much of them over the rataplan of rain.
Then came the distinctive crackle of a voice transmitted on a walkie-talkie, the words not quite discernible.
The man holding the walkie-talkie was close, too close. He must have been standing beside the bakery truck. His voice was deep and muffled, but just clear enough. “Half a block east of your position. Behind some joint called Donnatina’s Restaurant.”
The far voice crackled, and again Jane couldn’t understand it.
“All right,” said the nearer man. “You two in the front. Sweep the joint hard, restrooms, everything, drive her to me.”
His voice faded as he stepped away from the truck toward the back entrance of Donnatina’s.
Jane thought of drawing her pistol. But curled in the footwell, with her back wedged between the seat and the passenger door, facing the steering wheel, she wouldn’t be able to take a smart shot at anyone if it came to that.
Anyway, they wouldn’t give her a reason to shoot first. Whether they were remotely a legitimate authority of any kind or a totally rogue group, they would want to take her away for interrogation.
They.
Although she might not be able to name them now, she would know their identity one day. That was what she’d promised Nick, and even though it was a promise made after he was weeks in the grave, she would damn well keep it as if it had been made to the living man, hold it as sacred as she had held their wedding vows.
A couple of minutes passed before the driver opened the cargo-box door that he had left ajar when he’d taken the first part of his delivery into the restaurant.
The pass-through slider between the cab and the back of the truck had been left open. She heard the guy with the walkie-talkie, his voice no longer muffled, querying the driver. “You see a woman, brunette, five-six, a looker but half drowned like me?”
“Seen her where?”
“Here, the alley. Maybe going in this joint?”
“When was this?”
“Since you got here.”
“I been delivering.”
“So you haven’t seen her.”
“In this shitty weather, wearing a hood, keeping my head down?”
A different male voice entered the conversation. “The bitch is slick, Frank. She’s somewhere else.”
Frank said, “I’ve got a real hate-on for the pig.”
“Get in line. Who’s this plastic banana?”
The driver in his yellow raingear said, “I’ve made deliveries here five years, never saw what you’d call a looker.”
To the new arrival, Frank said, “Bakery guy. He’s got nothing.”
“What I’ve got is work to do in this shitty rain. What’re you guys, anyway—cops or something?”
“Better you don’t know,” Frank said.
“Better I don’t,” said the driver, and he began to offload more waterproof plastic boxes of baked goods.
Jane waited, listened, expecting a face at a window, steam-blurred and menacing like a face in a dream.
Hard rain drumming the truck. No more lightning or thunder. Rain in California was seldom accompanied by extended pyrotechnics.
Soon the driver returned. She heard him lifting the dolly into the truck. He slammed the back door without speaking to anyone.
Jane almost eeled up from the footwell to scramble out of the truck—but then she heard the tinny, static-speckled voice of someone on the walkie-talkie, which had been turned louder to compensate for poor reception.
The driver’s door opened, and the deliveryman swung in behind the wheel before he startled at the sight of her.
“Please don’t,” she whispered.
20
* * *
THE DRIVER was about Jane’s age. His broad and pleasant face, sprayed with freckles and capped with rust-red eyebrows, suggested red hair under his bright-yellow cowl.
He pulled his door shut, started the engine, switched on the windshield wipers, and drove away f
rom the restaurant. Before they reached the end of the block, he said, “All right, they’re behind us. You can get up now.”
“I’d rather stay down here for a little ways. Then you can let me out, maybe at your next stop.”
“I could do that.”
“Thank you.”
He braked at the end of the block. “But if there’s somewhere in particular you want to go, I could also do that.”
She considered him as he turned right into the street. “What’s your name?”
“Believe it or not, Ethan Hunt.”
“Why wouldn’t I believe it?”
“Well, Ethan Hunt—like Tom Cruise in those Mission: Impossible movies.”
“Ah. You get kidded about that, do you?”
“Not by anyone who knows the truth about bakery delivery. I disarm suitcase nukes and save the world about once a month.”
“Once a month, huh?”
“Well, every six weeks.”
She liked his smile. There was neither snark nor megalomania in it, as characterized so many smiles these days.
“I need to get to my car.” She told him where it was parked. “But if you see any of those goons, drive right on by.”
She squirmed out of the footwell and sat upright in the passenger seat.
Rain sheeted through the streets and gutters brimmed. The haloed headlights of approaching vehicles made the falling rain look like sleet and seemed to pave the blacktop with ice.
“Probably I better not ask your name,” Ethan Hunt said.
“That might be safer for you.”
“Don’t you believe in umbrellas?”
She said, “The drowned-rat look is so becoming.”