They started toward the loading ramp with the body.
“You’re lucky you didn’t crash this thing,” she said.
“No, you’re lucky I didn’t crash it.” He held her gaze for a few seconds. “It’s good to see you, Val. I missed you.”
She hated herself for it, but her stomach turned at this.
“Don’t do that,” she said. “That time is over.”
Somewhere in a government facility lay the man who had taken a bullet to protect her and her son. Years ago, she and Kim had drunk Jim Beam together, and the two of them had danced to “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” in the living room of their first apartment. Kim wasn’t a good dancer and had stepped all over her feet, but she had loved him more for that dance than she had ever loved anyone.
When they reached the loading dock, they dropped the body off the edge into the creek. It fell onto a rock with a sickening wet thud. The pilot’s eyes stared up at her.
“Clock’s ticking,” Asa said, and they hurried back up the ramp.
30
“Dr. Bowen,” said Reno. “Dr. Bowen, wake up. Amy Simmons is at the door.”
He’d been dreaming about Theresa when the A.I. voice began to try to wake him. In the dream, he had helped Theresa escape the Institute. Together, they had run away to Mexico. She had slept with him every night, her telepathy making her the best lay in the world. She knew his every thought and desire. And in her gratitude toward him for rescuing her, she did it all. Everything he wanted her to do. Without asking. Perfection.
“Dr. Bowen, wake up,” said the A.I. voice again.
Bowen opened his eyes. Reno had turned on the overhead lights to their dimmest setting, but even that little bit of light hurt his eyes. He turned toward the bedroom window. Still night.
“What time is it, Reno?” he said.
“It’s 2:50,” said the voice.
Bowen rolled in the bed and buried his face in his pillow. His head pounded. After Simmons’s interruption earlier in the night, Bowen had gone on with Theresa for about an hour. He’d gotten off finally, but the experience had been a little disappointing. He should stop combining alcohol with sex. But that wasn’t really the problem, and he knew it. What he really wanted was to go down to Celina, to Theresa. To submit himself to the real women. To die knowing that he’d touched them in all the right places.
But now his head felt as if it might split open.
“Amy Simmons is at the door,” Reno said. “Priority One code. She says it’s important for me to wake you up.”
“Shit,” Bowen said, rolling out of bed. “Tell her to hold on a damn minute.”
“You seem uncomfortable,” said the A.I. voice. “Do you need some acetaminophen or ibuprofen?”
“No,” said Bowen, sitting up and swinging his legs out of bed. He needed pain relief, but he needed something good.
Still naked, he stumbled across the room for medicine. He opened the safe in the dresser and rifled through the bottles. Hydrocodone, oxycodone, methadone, fentanyl, morphine—he had all the good stuff. But the really precious stuff was in the blue bottle that lay buried under the rest, the one that he’d bought for $8,000 from a Canadian who dealt in the best synthetics the world could produce. This stuff was new, and it did the best things you could imagine. It would both dull pain and heighten your senses, making you extremely sensitive to pleasure. He’d used it twice right before sessions with Morgan, and the orgasms had been unbelievable—transcendent, even. It had been the closest Bowen had ever come to a spiritual experience. There were hallucinations, too, but you knew you were hallucinating, and it was never anything frightening. He’d once seen an angel. Naked and beautiful. Wings huge and bluish white. A pink halo shone from her golden hair.
But he wouldn’t take one of those now. They were too expensive to waste on a hangover headache. He was trying to save the rest for the last several weeks before his June 17 appointment next year.
He’d kill to take some fentanyl or morphine and go back to bed, but he probably needed to be able to function if Simmons was waking him up in the middle of the night. So he settled for hydrocodone. He threw back a couple of pills, dressed in pajama pants and a tee shirt, and staggered to the apartment door.
“Took you long enough,” said Simmons. She had one hand on her hip. Her foot tapped the floor. The warm night air smelled humid, and bugs swarmed around the light that hung from the awning.
“It’s two o’clock in the damn morning and I’m hung over,” said Bowen, rubbing his eyes. “Or maybe I’m still drunk. Give me a break, maybe. What’s wrong?”
“It’s almost three o’clock,” said Simmons. As if that made a bit of difference. She crossed her arms. “The father is here. Mwangi just closed the GSW. Wasn’t anything major. I wanted you to come down and talk to him. I’m going to wake up Celina and Francis, too. One of them might be able to figure out where the wife and son will go.”
Bowen stared at her. Only after a moment did he realize that his mouth was hanging open.
“You know what?” said Simmons finally. “Never mind. You’re clearly not functional yet. I’ll come get you in a few hours.” She turned to leave.
“No, no,” said Bowen, sighing. “I’m fine. Just give me a few minutes. I need a shower before I come down.”
Simmons turned, one eyebrow raised.
“Yes, you do,” she said. “You smell like...”
But she didn’t finish the thought.
31
Val flipped the ignition switch. A small tremor ran through the cockpit as the lift engines whined to a start.
Asa settled into the gunner’s seat next to Val. “You good for this? Should be very similar to the carrier you flew before.”
The flight controls and instrumentation in this carrier were much like those of the Timberwolf. The Dragonfly combined the functions of a helicopter and a fixed-wing plane, so the controls were something of a mix of the two.
“I’ve got it,” said Val, though in truth she felt a little panicked. She hadn’t flown anything in almost ten years. “Here goes nothing.”
She flipped the switch on the dash that shifted the wings into their horizontal position for flight. At the same time, she throttled up the lift engines. With another slight tremor, the Dragonfly lifted from the creek bed. The lights inside the cockpit dimmed and turned blue. She was flying again.
“Controls are basically the same, huh?” said Asa.
“Basically,” said Val. She looked out at the creek and the woods. All of this land had belonged to her mother, her grandfather, and his grandfather before him. It had been her home most of her life. It had been Braden’s whole world. And now it would be taken from them.
“Good,” said Asa. “Then let’s move. They’ll be here any minute.”
Only now as the Dragonfly rose into the air did Val realize her whole body was shaking. The rush of survival instinct had given way to fear and to the sickening realization that she had just come damn close to losing Braden. She had also come just a finger squeeze away from killing him. Her hand trembled on the flight controls at the thought, and her skin turned cold when she realized she wouldn’t be able to hide this from him.
Please, God, let him understand, she thought.
“Still feels like somebody stuck an ice pick in it,” Asa said. “I’m going to be lucky to hear out of it again.”
Val looked at him. He had covered his ear with his hand.
You deserved that, she thought.
She settled the Dragonfly into a hover about thirty feet above the creek, just under the treetops.
“Where are we headed?” she said, turning to face Asa.
Asa shifted in his seat. He still had his palm cupped around his ear, and his face wore a grimace. “You realize that you’re endangering all of us—my family included?”
“Where are they keeping him?” she said.
He sighed. “They took him to a research facility in
North Carolina,” he said. “Northwest of Durham.”
“Research facility?”
He looked wary now. Val thought of Hapkido sparring. You kept your head down to protect your throat and face, and your eyes looked out from under your brow. That was how Asa looked at her.
“It’s where they research people like your kid,” he said. “There are three or four of them there.”
Val’s stomach tightened. “Why would they take him there?” she said.
“Probably so the three of you would be in one place,” he said. “That’s where they would take your boy if they caught him.”
Val turned and looked through the cockpit door into the troop and cargo area. Braden still dozed away, his head propped against the safety bar around him. Kim wouldn’t want her to risk their son in order to get him out. It was irresponsible, but then Val couldn’t imagine the future—any future—without Kim.
“Heavily guarded?” she said.
“It will be right now,” he said. “It’s completely off the grid, so it won’t appear on the GPS at all, and there’s—”
But a beep from the dash cut him off. Two blips appeared on the radar screen.
“Maybe three miles out,” said Asa. “They’ll reach us in less than a minute.”
“Well,” she said, killing the Dragonfly’s exterior lights. “Let’s see how well this thing handles. And maybe how good of a gunner you are.”
Asa let out a groan. “I can’t believe we’re doing this.”
Val turned the stick so the Dragonfly rotated a hundred and eighty degrees. Now they were pointed upstream, toward the north. She started forward using only the lift engines to move the craft while staying below the tree line. This was slower, but the thrust engines would create an afterburn, which would make them visible from a long way off. One thing Val missed about the Timberwolf was that it had stealth technology and a minimal radar cross-section. Domestic craft like the Dragonfly had nothing like stealth tech. Their only hope to slip past the approaching craft was to stay between the trees in the creek bed. That might keep the approaching Dragonflies from picking them up on radar.
The two blips were very close now. They had neared the center of the radar screen, and Val thought she could barely hear the scream of their thrust engines. They were traveling fast.
“If we stay down here,” said Val, “maybe we can avoid detection. But if they spot us, you’re going to have to help me take them out.”
“Well,” said Asa, flipping switches on the dash to activate the Dragonfly’s weapons. “I just blew up two of my buddies and snapped another one’s neck. Four more can’t make a lot of difference.”
“You chose to do this,” Val said.
“Oh, I don’t regret it,” said Asa. “You do what’s right.”
“Did you know you were coming after me?”
But before he could answer, an alarm sounded on the dash. One of the other Dragonflies had radar lock on them.
“Shit, go,” said Asa.
Val gripped the lever that activated the thrust engines and pushed it all the way forward. There was a two-second pause and a low groan from behind them, and Val’s heart stopped. Had she stalled it out? But then the thrusters rumbled to life, and the acceleration rocked her head backwards into her seat. For a big troop carrier, this thing could move. The trees on either side of the creek quickly became a blur of dark gray and green.
“Why are you staying between the trees?” said Asa. “Get out where you can maneuver—”
“Not yet,” said Val, banking to follow the curve of the creek to the northwest. In Iran, Val had flown her Timberwolf in tight urban environments without trouble, but never running for her life. It was all she could do not to clip the trees with the Dragonfly’s wings. “I’m going to try to make them come down here with me.”
She turned on the rearview monitors. Trees and water raced behind them, but nothing else yet.
“You’re banking on them not being the pilot you are?” said Asa. “Look, these pilots are some of the best in the country, and you probably haven’t flown in—”
“Just shut up,” said Val, banking to the northeast again.
On the radar screen, one of the other Dragonflies was nearly right on top of them. The second one had gone north to get ahead of them.
“It’s not going to be enough to run,” said Asa, just a hint of panic in his voice. “Those are going to be UAD-8s or 9s. A lot faster than this one.”
“Will they shoot us down?” said Val.
“They’ll use EMP rockets first,” he said. “They make a low-power, targeted pulse, but it’s enough to shut this thing down. We might survive that. But they might also use conventional weapons and blow us out of the sky. They want the boy, but they won’t risk us getting away.”
Speakers in the dash crackled.
“This is the Department of Homeland Security,” said a voice. “Land the craft now or we will force you down. You have five seconds to acknowledge.”
“It’s going to be EMPs,” said Asa.
“Does this thing have flares?” said Val.
“Yes, but—”
“Then get them ready.”
“That’ll only work once,” said Asa. “The UAD ahead of us will—”
“Get the flares ready!” shouted Val.
Another alarm sounded. The UAD behind them had launched weapons. On the radar screen, two tiny dots raced toward them.
Asa flipped a switch.
“Ready.”
The dots had almost reached the center of the screen.
“Now,” she said.
Asa launched the flares. The rearview monitor turned white as the flares trailed behind the Dragonfly. After a few seconds, a pale blue flash broke through the white glare. The lights inside the cockpit of the Dragonfly flickered and dimmed, and for a second, Val thought the EMP would knock them out of the air anyway. But the Dragonfly stayed running.
“Guns!” Val shouted.
Please let this work, she thought.
With one hand she killed forward thrust, and with the other, she forced the Dragonfly into a turn and used the lift engines to slow it to a hover.
“Shiiiit,” Asa groaned. Val’s stomach and head swam with the G-force, too.
The cloud of sparks created by the flares and the EMP rockets died, but in their place the UAD’s spotlights appeared. It started to bank to avoid colliding with them.
“Fire, dammit!” Val yelled.
The glass of the canopy lit up with machine gun fire, and as the UAD banked to fly over the tops of the trees, Val thought Asa had missed it. Her hand reached for the accelerator lever again so that they could pursue it for another chance to shoot it down. But just as the UAD topped the trees, it burst into flame and smoke. Wings and pieces of metal spun off in different directions, and the burning fuselage tumbled into the woods.
“Hell yes!” shouted Asa. He grabbed Val’s hand and squeezed it. “Right in the damn chops! Just like that helicopter in Tehran!”
Val’s insides turned at the touch of his hand on hers. She jerked away from him and hit the accelerator. “It’s not over yet.”
32
Bowen stood at the door of the recovery room, looking in. The father lay on the bed with his head elevated, his eyes turned toward the window blinds as if he could see right through them. An IV fed him fluid and pain medication. A strap across his stomach kept him secure in the bed.
“Mr. Hara,” he said, stepping into the room. “I’m Dr. Richard Bowen.” He extended a hand. Hara turned to look at him, but he didn’t take the hand.
“Dr. Kimiya Hara,” he said, looking Bowen squarely in the face.
“Right. I’m sorry,” said Bowen. “Dr. Hara.” He put his hands in his pockets. “Dr. Mwangi has you all fixed up. You were lucky. The bullet just barely missed your brachial artery.”
Hara stared at him, his dark eyes fixed on Bowen’s face. Head still throbbing, Bowen h
ad a hard time returning the man’s gaze. He should have taken something stronger than hydrocodone.
“Lucky,” said Hara. He let out a noise that was half laugh, half sigh. “Is that what you call it when the government comes after you and your family with guns and a SWAT team? Did I hit the jackpot? Win big? Is there a prize at the end of all this?”
“Mr...” Bowen began. “Dr. Hara, I’m just a doctor. Like you. Like Dr. Mwangi and Dr. Simmons. I assume you met her? Our jobs are to make sure you and your family are safe and healthy. Your son—is his name Braden?”
Hara looked away, his lips pursed.
“Braden has a serious condition that can cause major problems for him and for people around him. We’re only interested in helping him. And helping you and your wife.”
“That’s why you shot me?” he said. “To help me?”
“It was a Homeland Security officer who shot you,” said Bowen. “I didn’t do that.”
Shit. He needed another drink.
Hara turned toward him again. Now his eyes were narrow, deep lines radiating from their corners. His lip trembled. “You know, I used to be certified with DHR to install and inspect contraceptive implants.”
“Oh?” said Bowen. He felt his hands ball into fists in his pockets. Not out of anger, but desperation. It was taking everything he had not to show this man just how hungover, sleepy, and partly drunk he still felt.
“Parents would bring their twelve-year-old girls to me with their letters from DHR,” Hara continued. “A lot of them seemed happy about it. Now they could breathe a sigh of relief. Their daughters weren’t going to get knocked up by some boyfriend and have to have an abortion.”
“Makes sense to me,” said Bowen, trying to put on a light tone. A vein in his temple throbbed.
Hara shook his head and looked at the floor. “But there were some who came to me...”
He paused. Down the hall, Bowen could hear Simmons talking with one of the Homeland Security agents who had brought Hara here.
The Way Out Page 17