Nick drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as he watched the three of them disappear into the bank. He wasn’t really nervous; the drumming was just an idle habit, something to pass the time. His gaze shifted back and forth between the bank’s front door and the traffic passing by on the street.
He spotted a Bakersfield police car coming toward the bank. No reason to think it would turn in. There hadn’t been time even for a silent alarm to go out, and Chadbourne was good at keeping such things from happening in the first place.
But the cop car turned into the bank parking lot, anyway. Two officers were in it, a man and a woman. The woman was driving. She parked half a dozen spaces away from the van, but nobody was parked between the two vehicles so Nick got a good look at her. She was pretty, with a lightly freckled face and red hair pulled into a short ponytail that hung at the back of her neck.
She looked over at Nick and smiled.
He returned the smile. What else was he going to do? Cop or no cop, she was a pretty girl, and any man would have smiled at her if she smiled at him first.
Barely moving his lips, Nick said, “Cops in the parking lot.”
The Bluetooth phone in his ear was connected to an identical one in Chadbourne’s ear. Nick knew that somebody could be looking right at Chadbourne and never see a hint on the man’s face of the warning he had just received. The guy was that in control of himself.
The redhead’s partner got out of the car. She stayed behind the wheel and kept the engine running. Her partner probably just wanted to dash into the bank to cash a check or make a loan payment or something. Whatever errand had brought him here, why couldn’t he have taken care of it online like a normal person?
No, thought Nick, some people still liked to actually go to the bank, and obviously this jackhole was one of them.
“One coming in,” Nick told Chadbourne.
The cop disappeared into the bank.
This didn’t have to be a disaster. It was possible Chadbourne, Harris, and Galloway hadn’t made their move yet. They might still be pretending to be customers, in which case they would just wait for the cop to conclude his business and leave.
And if they had shown their guns, the heads-up Nick had provided them should have given them enough time to get ready and get the drop on the officer. They could disarm him, put him on the floor with the others . . .
Shots blasted inside the bank.
“Damn,” Nick said softly, under his breath.
The numbers started counting down in his brain. Chadbourne and the others knew they had thirty seconds to get back out here. That was as long as he was obligated to wait. Once the count hit zero, he was gone, baby. That was the way it had to be.
The female cop got out of the car in a hurry as soon as she heard the shots. She was talking into the radio on her shoulder as she drew her weapon and trotted toward the front door. She was using a two-handed grip and advancing rapidly but cautiously, just as they had taught her at the academy.
She was only halfway to the door, though, when she stopped short and turned to look at the van. Her gaze came straight through the windshield and into Nick’s eyes, and just like that he understood.
She knew.
She had figured out he was the wheelman, and instinct told her to take him down, but an even stronger instinct commanded her to get inside and help her partner. He might be hurt, maybe even dead.
The internal debate she had lasted only a second, but that was long enough for the door of the bank to fly open and for Galloway to charge out. Chadbourne and Harris were right behind him. Harris had an arm around Chadbourne, and the older man was limping and stumbling for real now. He was hit.
The female cop whirled toward them and yelled for them to stop. Galloway didn’t slow down. He fired on the run, flame spouting from the muzzle of his revolver as he blazed away. Nick breathed hard through his nose as he saw the cop’s body jerk under the impact of the bullets. She probably had a vest in the car, but she hadn’t taken the time to put it on. A rookie mistake.
But even though she was hit, she stayed on her feet and returned fire. Blood sprayed in the air as one of her bullets hit Galloway in the left cheekbone and blew away a big chunk of his face. He went down.
Harris brought up his gun in his free hand and triggered a shot. It missed because blood loss had caught up to the cop and dropped her to her knees. The slug went past the van and whined off the concrete of the parking lot somewhere behind Nick.
The cop swayed back and forth but fired again. She was either really good or phenomenally lucky, because her bullet shattered Harris’s left shoulder and knocked him away from Chadbourne, who fell to the sidewalk without Harris’s support.
The cop slumped to the side then, done with this battle. Probably done, period. Grimacing, Harris scrambled to his feet and loped past her toward the van. Nick leaned over and had the door open by the time Harris got there.
The count had reached zero almost half a minute earlier, but Nick hadn’t been able to abandon his partners in the middle of a gunfight like that. It would have been different if they’d never even made it out of the bank. He would have been in the wind by now.
As it was, he had to grab Harris’s jacket and practically haul the wounded man into the front seat. With the door still swinging open, Nick threw the transmission into reverse and gunned back out of the parking space. He whipped the wheel around so violently that the van’s rear corner clipped another vehicle parked in the lot. Then the entrance was in front of him and he squirted through it onto the street.
Lights were flashing in both directions.
“Close that door!” Nick yelled at Harris. The cops might not have a description of the van yet, but they would notice a vehicle speeding away from the vicinity of the attempted bank robbery with its passenger door flopping back and forth.
Harris reached for the door and fumbled with it, but he got it closed after a couple of seconds. Nick breathed a little easier.
A monumental snafu like this had been bound to happen sooner or later, he told himself. But things would be all right. Even if Chadbourne and Galloway survived their wounds, they wouldn’t give up their partners. Harris needed medical attention, but he looked like he would pull through. Nick made a left, taking them off the street that ran by the bank. A few more turns, and they would be out of the woods.
Flashing lights appeared in the rearview mirror.
Nick bit back a curse. Somehow the cops must have gotten a description of the van. The redhead, maybe? Nick had thought she was either unconscious or dead, but she could have revived and put the description out on the radio.
Whatever the source of the bad luck, it was here and he just had to deal with it. He whipped the van into an alley.
More bad luck. The far end of the alley was blocked by a truck parked behind a store to make a delivery.
Nick slammed on the brakes, threw the van into reverse again. As he came out of the alley, a cop car screeched out of nowhere and plowed into the van’s left rear. The collision slewed the boxy vehicle around. Nick hit the gas. It still ran, although the left rear wheel was making an ugly thumping sound.
Cop cars skidded up ahead, turning sideways to block the road. More behind, Nick saw in the mirrors.
Looked like his streak of not going to jail was finished. He took his foot off the gas.
“What are you slowin’ down for?” Harris yelled. “We gotta get out of here!”
“There’s nowhere to go,” Nick told him. “We’re boxed in.”
“You’re supposed to be the best wheelman in the world! You said so yourself! Now get us away from those cops!”
“We can’t get away. It’s over, Harris.”
“The hell it is!” He reached under his shirt, pulled out a hideaway gun, a little .32. He twisted in the seat to reach across his body and jab the barrel into Nick’s side. “Drive, you son of a bitch!”
Nick could see only one way this was going to end—in a shootout with the cops th
at would probably leave both him and Harris dead, because with two of their own down the boys in blue weren’t going to be in the mood for anything else—so he did what Harris told him. He drove.
He turned the wheel and drove right into a parked car.
The van was old enough that it didn’t have a passenger side airbag, only one for the driver. It exploded out into Nick’s face and cushioned the impact for him, but Harris was thrown into the windshield hard enough that it shattered and shredded his flesh as he wound up hanging halfway out of it, unconscious.
Nick kept his hands empty and in plain sight as cops surrounded the van, dragged him out, and threw him roughly to the pavement.
He wanted to ask if that cute female cop had made it, but he didn’t figure that would be a very good idea.
CHAPTER 25
Langley, Virginia, one month after the New Sun
The windowless room Bill Elliott was in didn’t exist. Langley was famous for being where the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency was located. That wasn’t where Bill was. Any connection between the CIA and the outfit that leased this building was carefully hidden. Every yokel in the country knew about The Company. The people who knew about Bill’s former and once again current employers numbered in the dozens.
Three men and a woman came into the room where Bill sat at a long, gleaming, marble-topped conference table. One of the men was Clark. He grinned at Bill and said, “Good to see you again, old buddy-roo. Looks like you’ve been busy since San Antonio.”
Clark pointed at the thick file folder resting on the table under Bill’s hand.
“You told me to look for who I wanted,” Bill said. “I’ve been lookin’.”
As the newcomers sat down around the end of the table, he slid the file toward them. Then he reached over to an open laptop computer and hit a few keys. A big screen on the wall lit up.
“The information I’m about to go over is in that file,” Bill said, “but it’ll be quicker if I just tell you about it and let you study the stuff in more detail later. These are the candidates I’ve picked.”
“Wait a minute,” the woman said. “You were supposed to come up with a pool of potential candidates, Mr. Elliott, and we would pick the team.”
“No offense, ma’am, but if you want me to lead this team, I’m gonna decide who’s on it.”
The woman frowned and looked over at Clark, who shrugged and said, “I told you he’s got a mind of his own. But I trust his judgment.”
“Very well,” the woman said coldly. “We’ll listen . . . but no guarantees.”
“Fair enough,” Bill said, “since I don’t have any guarantees that these folks will go along with what we want. The odds are gonna be stacked pretty heavy against ’em, after all.”
“Just get on with it,” one of the other men said. “I have to get back to the White House so I can brief the president. He’s been very clear that none of this can ever come back on him.”
“We know,” Clark said. “Can’t have the president doing anything that might offend other countries . . . even countries that hate us and are trying to destroy us.”
The other man flushed angrily.
“Can’t we leave politics out of this?” he asked. “We have to put the good of the country first.”
“Since when did your party ever put—” Clark stopped short, shook his head, and went on, “Forget it. It’s a waste of breath arguing with you. Just tell the guy in the Oval Office that nothing we do will come back to bite him on the butt.”
“You mean the president,” the other man snapped.
“I mean the guy sitting in an office that he bought, just like the two bozos before him.”
The third man started to get to his feet, saying, “If you’re going to waste my time with your bickering—”
“Sit down, General,” Bill drawled, even though the man was in civilian clothing.
“You’re not supposed to know who I am, Mr. Elliott.”
“I’ll bear that in mind,” Bill said dryly. “For now—and I say this with all due respect—all of you just shut the hell up and listen.”
For a moment he thought at least two of them were going to storm out, but then they settled back in their chairs. Clark said, “Go on, Bill.”
Bill tapped a key on the computer and an image appeared on the big screen on the wall. It showed a big man in combat gear with a sandy wasteland behind him.
“John Bailey,” Bill said. “Did two tours in Iraq. Highly decorated. Then his squad was ambushed and wiped out except for Bailey and another soldier. Bailey was wounded. Got shipped home, and after he’d rehabbed, he waited out his enlistment and didn’t re-up. Went back to New York City, where he was from. Had the same trouble fitting in that a lot of vets did, drifted from job to job, finally started workin’ as a bouncer and doorman at a nightclub. But his friend from the squad, the other survivor of the ambush, was in New York, too, and he was a pretty scummy character. He got Bailey mixed up in a plan to rip off a drug deal. The job went bad, things blew up—literally—and a lot of people died, including Bailey’s friend. Bailey wound up goin’ down on murder, armed robbery, and weapons charges. He’s been behind bars the past four years and has been nothin’ but trouble there, too. He beat two other convicts to death after they attacked him for refusin’ to join their gang. Doesn’t seem to want anything to do with anybody. They’ve got him away from general population and plan to keep him that way, because they know if he goes back into gen-pop, sooner or later he’ll kill somebody else.”
“Why do you want him?” the woman asked.
“Because I met him while I was over there in the sandbox doin’ a little job for somebody who can just remain nameless. His squad helped get me where I needed to be. Bailey may have screwed the pooch when he got back stateside, but in combat he was damn good. A born warrior who can follow orders and take the initiative when he needs to.”
The man from the White House said, “You know all this from being around him for, what, a day or two?”
“A day or two when folks are tryin’ to kill you nearly the whole time can tell you a lot about a man,” Bill said flatly.
“I don’t have any problem with Bailey,” Clark said. “Can we move on?”
None of the other three raised an objection.
Bill tapped keys and changed the image on the screen. This one was a police mug shot of a mild-looking, sandy-haired young man.
“Wade Stillman,” Bill said. “Georgia boy. Also a decorated vet. He fit in better once he got back, or at least he seemed to. Until one day he snapped while he was at his job—workin’ at a MegaMart, by the way—and nearly beat a customer to death. The way I understand it, the guy probably had it comin’, but Stillman wound up in prison anyway.”
“Let me guess,” the general said. “He’s killed men in prison, too.”
“Nope,” Bill replied with a shake of his head. “From all reports, he’s been a model prisoner. Keeps his head down and stays out of trouble. Works in the prison library, even.”
“Then why do you want him?” the woman asked. “Do you know him personally?”
“Never met the young man. But I put out the word to some old acquaintances, and Stillman’s commanding officer was one of ’em. He said I won’t find a better fightin’ man once he’s riled up. Only possible problem is that Stillman’s pretty laid back and it’s hard to make him lose his temper. That shouldn’t be a problem where we’ll be goin’, though, since everybody there will want to kill us.”
“So you want Bailey as your second-in-command and Stillman behind him, because of their military experience?” Clark asked.
“I don’t know if it’ll be that cut-and-dried, but basically, yeah.”
“Well, that sounds doable. Who else do you have for us?”
The next image that came up on the screen was that of an attractive young woman with a nice smile and long, honey-colored hair.
“This is Megan Sinclair. Used to be in Special Forces.”
>
“Special Forces!” the general repeated in surprise. “That little girl? You’re crazy, Elliott.”
Bill controlled the flash of anger he felt. He said, “You can look her up if you want, General. She worked mostly in the command center with computers, but she did some fieldwork, too, and handled herself well. Until she took her skills and dropped off the grid. She surfaced in London a couple of years later when she was arrested for trying to rip off the son of a British billionaire. Turns out that after she deserted, she became a professional thief, mostly in Europe. Interpol wanted her, and so did several countries. But after untanglin’ a lot of red tape, we got her back, since the first crime she committed was desertin’ the Army. She’s still in military lockup, and once she gets out of there, she’s lookin’ at bein’ extradited back to England. In fact, it looks like she might spend the rest of her life goin’ from one country’s prison to the next, unless we step in and offer her a way out.”
“Do you know her personally, Bill?” Clark asked.
“As a matter of fact, I do.” Bill paused. “Her father’s an old compadre of mine. The girl went off the rails, no doubt about that, but I don’t want to see her spendin’ the rest of her life behind bars.”
The woman said, “Do you really think someone like her can be of assistance on a job like this, Mr. Elliott? I have to say, she looks harmless.”
“Looks can be deceiving.”
“It’s your show,” Clark said. “Who else do you have for us?”
Bill tugged on his earlobe, grimaced slightly, and said, “Here’s where it starts to get tricky. Bailey, Stillman, and Sinclair all have military backgrounds. I know I can work with them. The rest of this bunch . . . well, they’re lowlifes. Criminals. There’s no gettin’ around that. But some of ’em have skills we can use, and some of ’em are just plain badasses. And where we’re goin’, the badder the better.”
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