by Andrew Huff
“I’m fine. The boys in blue are satisfied with my credentials and helping us try to catch up to you.”
“Paulson?” Cross wondered aloud.
“At my side. We’re heading for some cruisers now, but with traffic it’s going to be difficult to reach Chinatown before the target’s in the open.”
“How did you—” Christine started to say.
“That loudspeaker on the Metro is the most annoying thing, isn’t it? The tracker in your earpiece helps too. John, you’re going to have to stick to this guy if we’re going to have any chance at getting ahold of that bag. There’s a unit nearby. They’re going to try to meet you.”
Cross swallowed the lump forming in his throat. “Guin—”
“I know,” she cut him off. “It’s too late. I had to call it in.”
Without a second thought, Cross dug a finger into his ear, retrieved the bud from inside, and tossed it away. He motioned to Christine and mouthed, Take it out.
She hesitated and questioned him with her eyes, but before he could respond, she repeated his action and tossed her own earbud. “What’s going on?” she asked as they stepped off the top of the escalator and moved with the crowd to the Metro exit.
“The agency’s involved now, which means Al will be involved, and I don’t know how deep this goes. If he’s compromised anyone else, we could walk right into an ambush.”
“So what you’re saying is, no backup.”
Cross nodded.
She sighed. “Then it’s just the two of us.” With a grin, she added, “Like old times.”
Cross grinned back, then focused on the back of Erkan’s head. The crowds parted like the Red Sea, and they stepped out onto the sun-drenched sidewalk of the corner of H Street Northwest and Seventh. The magnificent Chinese gate known as the Friendship Archway towered over the street directly ahead of them. Dragon designs of gold, blue, and red glistened in the bright light. The embellishment helped the gate stand out against the chaotic bustle of Chinatown.
Erkan stood still at the H Street crosswalk. Cross slipped his hand around Christine’s arm and slowed them both to a stop as a crowd mingled, waiting for permission to cross. “Keep your head down,” he breathed into her ear.
Christine obliged and hung her chin low. Cross did the same as he turned his body in to hers. “Don’t look his direction. Pretend like you’re on a phone.”
He couldn’t help but smile as she mimed tapping on a smartphone. He caught a wisp of a scent from her hair. Beneath the sweat and dirt top layer was a hint of apple.
A row of cars slowed to a stop at the traffic light. “Three seconds.”
The signal to go flashed, and the crowd surged. Cross and Christine followed Erkan across the street at a safe distance. Halfway across, he stepped around the next curb and through the open back doors of a black service van.
“John!” Christine exclaimed.
Another man pulled the doors shut behind them as Erkan slid onto a bench seat and cradled the messenger bag on his lap. Just as the door closed shut, he looked back in their direction, made eye contact with Cross, and gave a malevolent grin.
Cross broke into a run. The left turn signal on the van pulsated as it pulled away from the curb and into the flow of traffic heading north on Seventh Street. He skidded to a stop, and Christine appeared beside him. Gritting his teeth, he kicked the curb and said, “We’re going to lose him. And the bomb.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
“NOT IF I can help it,” Christine responded as she took off from his side down the sidewalk.
“Hey!” she heard John call out from behind. “Where are you going?”
Ignoring him, she slid to a stop next to the driver’s side of a black Jeep Wrangler idling in a parking spot. The yuppie male checking his teeth in the mirror of his sun visor let loose a muffled shriek and rose a few inches off the leather seat.
Flashing her best flirtatious eyes, she said, “I need to borrow your car.”
“Excuse me?”
John appeared on the passenger side, the barrel of his gun poking just over the door. “Get out,” he ordered.
The panicked man unbuckled his seat belt as Christine opened his door. He stumbled out of the seat, and she took his place. John was already buckled. She shut the door and put the Jeep in gear.
“Thanks!” she said to the man with a wave, then pressed her foot down on the accelerator and cut off a delivery truck as she pulled out of the spot and raced to catch up to the black van.
A car horn blared, and John braced himself against the dash. “Looks like you should’ve done all the driving in Jordan,” he shouted over the rushing wind.
She glanced at him long enough to catch the charming grin flashed in her direction.
Christine couldn’t help but smile. She felt courageous, ready for a showdown. “You’re the marksman,” she replied. “Time to show me how good you are at shooting tires.”
She pressed her foot toward the floorboard, and the Jeep skidded around a lethargic sedan. She squinted against the sunlight and focused as far down Seventh Street as she could. A flash of metallic black paint appeared as the van changed lanes.
“There,” she announced as she poked her index finger out over the steering wheel.
“I see them. Get in the left lane. He’s going to take K Street.”
Christine obeyed, and sure to John’s prediction the black van veered left just as the traffic light on the corner flashed from green to yellow. “Hold on!”
The Jeep shot into the intersection and struck a puff of smoke against the asphalt as she cranked hard left on the wheel. For a moment, the weight of the Jeep leaned precariously to one side, convincing Christine they would flip. Gravity caught them and the car leveled as she accelerated down K Street in pursuit of the now weaponized cargo van.
She didn’t look at John for fear of catching a startled reaction, but her heart rate soothed when he quipped, “Like a pro.”
More car horns announced the displeasure of other motorists, but the wind whipping through the open top of the Jeep clipped the sound like a pair of scissors against paper. Christine wanted to slow their pace, but the van increased speed, and the gap between them widened.
“They’re onto us,” John said, confirming her suspicion. “Not a great day for traffic to be manageable.”
Fighting against her better judgment, Christine pressed the weight of her foot against the gas pedal, and the needle on the speedometer moved right. She gripped the wheel tighter to quell any fear of a mere slip of her fingers sending them to a head-on collision with certain death.
“He’s aiming right.”
“That’s a one way!”
“They’re going to try to lose us.”
Christine stifled a scream as she followed the van’s lead and turned the wrong way down Ninth Street. More car horns and raised fists welcomed them. The van struck the curb as it banked left. Christine took a wider angle and breathed a sigh of relief as they rejoined K Street heading in the appropriate direction.
“You’re doing great,” John’s voice boomed from the passenger side.
In the previous harrowing seconds, she’d forgotten he sat next to her.
“Get as close as you can, and I’ll try to slow them down.”
The Jeep’s engine groaned as she pushed it harder. The distance closed. John pulled the gun from his waistband, gripped it in both hands, and leaned over the passenger-side door.
Christine let off the gas pedal and jerked down on the steering wheel to skirt ramming an SUV as she sped through a red light. The maneuver pitched John back into his seat.
“Sorry!” she yelled.
Without a retort, he jumped back to his position and leveled the pistol with his elbows pinned against the Jeep’s bouncing frame. Christine regained the short distance they’d lost and slid into the lane adjacent to the black van.
The wail of sirens wafted into the cab, and Christine caught sight of red and blue bulbs alternating at a distance in
the rearview mirror.
Her eyes darted from the mirror back to John and the van in time to catch movement at the back. “John, look out!”
A flat-faced man cracked the back door open and aimed a submachine gun in their direction. John dropped a hand, grabbed the steering wheel, and pushed downward against her grip.
The Jeep swung toward the van as John unleashed a volley of shots into its bumper. The flat-faced man ducked backward to dodge the spray of bullets as the two vehicles smashed into each other.
John teetered on the edge of the passenger door, the force of the blow threatening to tear him from the seat belt’s hold around his waist. Christine whipped the Jeep away from the van, and he fell back into place against the passenger seat.
The bellow of a truck’s horn startled her. She looked forward to see the truck’s grill bearing down on them. She piloted the Jeep back into the right lane, just missing a kiss with the truck’s front bumper.
The van recovered and raced off. Police sirens pierced the air in an unseemly cacophony surrounding their car. John braced himself, his neck bent at an awkward angle as he stared over his shoulder. “The cavalry’s here.”
Ahead, the van drifted into the right lane. K Street split apart, the middle lanes descending into a tunnel and the outer access roads rising upward.
“John!” Christine kept her eyes straight, not daring to look at him.
“Just follow them, whatever they do.”
The van maintained a straight course as the curb rose and blocked off an exit to the outer lanes. Just before a guardrail would guarantee their route, the driver swerved right and bounced over the sidewalk and into the outer lane.
Christine followed suit, and the Jeep scaled the curb as expected. In the rearview mirror, she watched the police cars slow to traverse the obstacle.
“No, no, no!”
She looked back at the van as it turned left into a crossing street against the flow of traffic. A cascade of horn blasts flowed from the line of cars veering out of its path. The van cut right and entered the chaos of the roundabout just ahead of them. One of the police cars broke off to pursue but clipped a bus and slammed into a light pole.
Christine slowed to merge and watched the van escape a collision with a sedan before it disappeared around another corner. “What do we do?”
“You caught them once. Time to do it again.”
She stole a glance at John’s smart smile. Narrowing her eyes, she pressed on the pedal and guided the Jeep around the bewildered vehicles clogging Washington Circle. She bullied her way through, but it felt like it took too long to reach the van’s chosen escape route: Twenty-Third Street, though less a street and more a zoo.
“This is nuts. We’re going to lose them.”
John’s hand touched hers on the wheel, sending her heart into a greater state of commotion than it already was. “It’s OK,” he replied. “They’re in this too. He can only get so far.” His hand left hers and the thumping in her chest died down.
Christine relaxed enough to notice the lack of flashing lights and sirens behind them. “What happened to that other cop car?”
“They couldn’t keep up.”
“John, we’ve got to do something.”
“I am.”
Christine pumped the brake as an SUV pulled out from the exit of a George Washington University Medical Center parking garage and merged ahead of them. Red brake lights announced a momentary cease of activity for their lane.
She looked over at him and knit her eyebrows together above her nose. “What?”
He couldn’t return her gaze, as he sat facing forward, both eyes shut tight. “I’m praying.”
Praying? Now? At a time in the past, Christine might have mocked his judgment. Or perhaps scolded him for such mystic behavior during a crisis. But for a strange reason, it seemed precisely the right exercise at the moment. She believed God was real. She had to. It was the only explanation for what she’d witnessed only hours before.
In Yunus Anar’s shoes, the act of a divine being would’ve been the only way she could have seen fit to forgive John Cross for the murder of her brother. And that was exactly what Yunus did.
God, her mind whispered, help us.
A flash of black metal startled her. She couldn’t believe it. God answered her prayer. But something about it seemed odd. Her brain fought through the cloud of confusion, and she realized the problem.
It was a black van, sure. But she saw it in the rearview mirror.
“How did they—” Before she could utter another word, the van struck them from behind.
She and John lurched forward in their seats. Christine pressed harder on the brake to keep from ramming the SUV. Plumes of white smoke consumed the screech of crushing metal.
John looked over his shoulder. His upper lip curved in a snarl. “Simpson.”
The van pushed harder, and the Jeep lurched forward an inch. Christine pumped the brake, but it wouldn’t give her anything more. “They’re going to push us right into a three-car pileup if we don’t do something!”
But there was nowhere to go. Traffic clogged the lane beside them, and there wasn’t enough room for the Jeep to get around the stopped cars ahead.
God, please.
The squeal of tires alerted Christine to the mirror again, and she watched, mouth agape, as a white van marked METROPOLITAN POLICE barreled out of the parking garage exit and T-boned the black van behind them into a dump truck in the next lane.
The cars ahead rolled forward as the jam cleared. Christine hesitated and looked over her shoulder at the wreckage. The smoke cleared enough for her to recognize Guin pushing away from the passenger airbag of the police van and coughing out the window.
“Go!” Guin yelled, her voice thick with pain.
Christine stepped on the pedal, and the Jeep took off.
“She’ll be fine,” John said, answering the unspoken question.
The traffic ahead thinned, and Christine accelerated the Jeep. The turbulent wind inside the open cab tugged at her hair. “I don’t see them.” Panic threatened to seize her mind.
They crossed H Street, then swerved around a delivery truck parked at an awkward angle at the entrance to an Episcopal church.
“Up ahead.”
Christine strained her eyes, then caught sight of the back of the black van a hundred yards down the road. She increased speed, and the distance closed.
Cars in both lanes slowed as a traffic light at the intersection of Virginia Avenue flashed from green to yellow.
“Hold on!” Christine shouted as she yanked on the steering wheel. They shot around the stopped cars and through the crossway. Half a football field ahead, Erkan’s van cut off a taxi as it slid into the right lane.
Movement beside her prompted Christine to avert her eyes for a brief moment. John leaned out of the Jeep pointing his gun at the van. Returning her focus to the road, Christine gripped the steering wheel and mentally willed the car to hold steady.
Gunshots rang over the howling wind. Sparks bounced off the back bumper of the van. A short explosion sounded. Smoke poured from the back left tire, and large slices of rubber tore across the road in the van’s wake.
John ducked back into his seat and grimaced.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m slipping. It took me more than one shot.”
The van hugged the curb and swerved right at the next intersection. Christine followed close behind. A tall apartment complex sat on the right, and a freeway rose from a tunnel in the ground on the left.
The van careened around other vehicles traveling both directions on the two-lane road, and the skin on Christine’s fingers rubbed raw against the steering wheel as she guided the Jeep through the chaos the van left behind.
The oncoming lane disappeared as they entered the entrance ramp for Whitehurst Freeway. A guardrail to the left ended as another entrance lane merged. The van slowed, then cut hard to the left and bounced over a short median. It hopped anot
her curb and tore up a grassy hill before sailing onto another ramp, a trail of rubber crumbs making it easy to follow the van’s path.
The Jeep made it easy for Christine to copy the van’s stunt. She zoomed up the ascending lane to catch the limping van. Rounding a curve, the modern white block architecture of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts came into full view.
“They’re heading out of the city,” John noted. “We’re about to merge with Interstate 66 and cross the Potomac.”
“Do you think they’re trying to get to Dulles?” Christine’s familiarity with the DC metroplex was limited to its airports.
“Not anymore. They won’t make another mile on that tire.”
If he was right, the van would stop on the bridge. The bomb could do little harm there. Christine drew a deep breath. Thank you, God.
And now she thanked him. What next?
True to John’s word, the lane merged with three more as they approached Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Bridge. The van moved as fast as it could on three tires, though still fast enough to elicit angry horn blasts from motorists braking to prevent a collision.
The van slowed even more. “I think they’re going to stop,” Christine said as its brake lights flashed.
But they didn’t. Instead, the van lurched forward and cut across several lanes as it tried once more to lose its tail.
Christine groaned and attempted to accelerate, but a nervous soccer mom in a minivan forced her to brake and switch lanes. The van put a handful of other vehicles between them, somehow generating more velocity than Christine decided it should be capable of.
“Speed up!” John shouted.
“I am,” Christine growled back. Erkan’s driver had caught her relaxed and used her mistake to his advantage, though she wasn’t sure what kind of escape plan they had in mind. Maybe jump off the bridge into the Potomac?
She’d be fine with that.
What she didn’t bank on was an exit ramp that suddenly appeared just ahead on the right.
“What?” she said aloud in confusion.
John’s hand smacked against the dash. “New development on Roosevelt Island. Look out. He’s cutting through!”