His lips twitched in a half smile. “You’re always telling me what I know.”
“Can’t help it. Occupational hazard.”
“You really want to get him?” he asked her.
“Only because I am so sure we can.”
Quinlan sighed thoughtfully. At that moment they heard two cars pull into the motel parking lot. Sabrina pulled the curtain back and watched as two men got out of their respective vehicles. They had “spook” written all over them.
“They’re here,” she told him. “This is your last chance. What are you going to do?”
Chapter 15
The knock on the door didn’t startle Sabrina since she’d seen their approach. “It’s now or never.”
“Open the door,” Quinlan told her.
She cursed under her breath, but did as he asked. There was only one option left to her now. She was going to have to take out the agents and Quinlan, incapacitate them to the point where she’d be able to make her escape and send her message to Kahsan. Looking over her shoulder, she realized Quinlan was right behind her. His size was suddenly more apparent to her now.
Yeah, taking him out wasn’t going to be a whole lot of fun. Then she thought about his accusation of seducing him in order to get him to cooperate and decided a flesh wound wasn’t a horrible price to pay. Maybe something high and neat on his upper thigh, somewhere a little too close for comfort to the family jewels.
Sabrina opened the door and the two men each flashed identification. They were of equal size and girth, dressed similarly in khakis, boots and ski jackets. One, however, was clearly younger than the other. She backed away from the door and Quinlan nodded. He must have recognized the older of the two agents from the Farm.
“We brought two cars. Agent Patterson will take Ms. Masters, and you and I-” he pointed to Quinlan “-will follow and act as a shield in case anyone tries to intercept. We also brought some gear for you.” The agent dropped a gym bag at Quinlan’s feet.
There was a change of clothes for him and her. Quinlan showed the bag to Sabrina but she shook her head not wanting to take the time to change. For himself he took out a ski jacket and a pair of gloves.
Then Quinlan stood and said casually, “If it’s all the same to you I’ll drive with Ms. Masters. I think she would be more comfortable with me.”
Sabrina glanced at him sharply, but his face showed nothing.
The two agents looked at each other. The younger one, Patterson, shrugged as if to suggest that he didn’t see a problem. The older man concurred. “That’s fine.” He tossed the set of keys to Quinlan who snatched them out of midair.
“Get your coat.”
Sabrina picked up the coat from where she dropped it on the floor. The Colt still deep in its pocket bumped against her thigh. The situation worked to her advantage. With the two of them isolated in the car all she needed to do was take out Q. But as she followed him to the car she had to consider why he wanted them to be together in the first place.
Comfortable, my ass, she mused.
“It’s the silver sedan,” Patterson pointed out.
Quinlan nodded, then tossed the keys to Sabrina. “Why don’t you drive?”
This had her stopping in her tracks. “You want me to drive?”
He looked over at the two agents, who had paused by their car, a green sedan of the same model, to observe the exchange.
“I’m beat. You’re a little more alert than I am. You drive.”
Instantly, she understood. With a casual shrug of her shoulders she circled the car and got behind the wheel. Quinlan was already buckling himself into the passenger’s seat.
“You’re sure you want to do this?” she asked him. She didn’t need to clarify what this was. And she wasn’t sure why she was giving him an out when this was exactly the outcome she wanted. Maybe it was because she knew that he was probably going to pay a price one way or the other for disobeying orders even though Krueger was counting on him to do exactly that.
“Am I sure? No.” He turned his head to study her for a moment. “You better be able to bring him here.”
“He’s waiting for an e-mail.”
“Then let’s go send him one,” he said grimly. “It’s been a while since you’ve had to do this, too. Think you still got it?”
Sabrina smiled devilishly and turned the key in the ignition. “Q, as I once explained to you a long time ago, driving, like shooting, is all about physics. And I’m a whiz at physics.”
“Don’t get crazy,” he warned her. “Just lose them.”
Sabrina pulled out of the motel slowly and waited at the entrance to the two-lane highway for a few cars to pass. As she waited, she considered her options. There were only a few exits off this highway that led to some small towns, most of those towns consisting of a main street surrounded by culs-de-sac of single-family homes. Not the best place to lose a tail. Especially considering the agents following her were no doubt highly skilled in evasive maneuvering driving. Though it was doubtful they had her particular edge.
With her ability to see distance accurately, and her understanding of physics and how the car would react given its approximate weight and the speed at which it was traveling, she always knew just how much she could accelerate through a turn and still make it and also when she needed to brake in order to stop the car before collision.
Quinlan was an excellent evasive driver. But she was better. It was why he had wanted her to drive and how she knew that for all his doubt and mistrust, he’d essentially agreed to help her. For that, she wouldn’t let him down.
“You know,” she said as a car sped past and she was able to pull out on to the highway. “Not only are you going to get into a shitload of trouble for disobeying Krueger’s orders, but all the macho guys at the Farm are going to give you hell for letting a woman drive.”
She glanced over quickly and saw his sour expression. “I know.”
In the rearview mirror she could see that Patterson had pulled out directly behind her. For a time she drove carefully, just a notch over the speed limit and did nothing to raise any suspicions. It was best to let them think that she was on board with their plan, lulling them into a sense of comfort, so that when she did make her move, they would be slower to react.
Twenty minutes later Quinlan was beginning to get anxious. “Okay, you did understand what I meant when I said lose them.”
She flashed a smile. “I’m waiting for the right moment.”
“If you wait any longer we’ll be at Langley. There,” he said pointing. “Take that exit for 95 South.”
“Is that the way to Arnold’s?”
“Yes. We need to get to a small town in Maryland called Havre de Grace, but it’s also the exit we would take to get to Virginia.”
Sabrina hit her blinker and watched the car behind her do the same. Slowly, like a careful little old lady driver, she pulled the steering wheel to her right. She’d slowed down so much that Patterson had been forced to brake. Which was exactly what she’d been waiting for.
“Ready?”
She didn’t know why she bothered to ask because she didn’t give him time to answer. Instead she slammed her foot on the gas and waited until the influx of fuel into the carburetor did its thing. The car lurched forward into a high speed and the sound of tires screeching along paved road signaled their escape.
She calculated the turn at the top of the exit to be an eighty-two degree angle and watched the speedometer. Five more miles per hour, maybe seven. She hit the wheel hard and the car careened around the turn propelled by the acceleration it had going into it.
The ramp dropped sending them onto the busy interstate highway. Checking the rearview mirror again, she could see that Patterson was struggling to keep up. Sabrina glanced at the right side mirror and saw traffic approaching and determined, as the lead car moved closer, the speed at which it was traveling. She checked the speedometer again. Another five miles per hour. She hit the accelerator and watched the needle jump,
then she didn’t look at all behind her as she hit the left hand merge lane at full speed barely sneaking in front of an oncoming SUV.
A horn blared behind her. No doubt the guy driving the SUV was furious, but there was no time for apologies. She watched as she quickly came up on a car in front of her. Looking again to her right she saw the hint of an opening between a cherry-red Volkswagen and a Jeep in the center lane next to her.
“You’re not going to make it,” Quinlan hissed, his hands now positioned on the dashboard in front of him-as if that would do him any good in a crash.
“Hey, who is driving?” she barked.
“I’m just pointing out that us dying does absolutely no good.”
Sabrina checked the gap again and swung the wheel hard to the right. The sedan sat on the Volkswagen’s bumper and the Jeep immediately careened off into the far right lane.
Sensing her urgency the Volkswagen also moved to the right and Sabrina was able to leave both cars in a blur behind her. She barely registered the obnoxious gesture she’d been given by the driver of the Volkswagen.
“Where are they?” she asked as she quickly came up on another car. This time she pulled the wheel hard left and the car swerved into the left lane. As soon as she passed a black Mercedes, she scrambled back into the center lane where there was more room to maneuver.
Quinlan turned in his seat and peered out through the back window. “About four cars back.”
Sabrina took in the information and contemplated her next move. Traffic was too heavy on the highway to lose the tail with speed and maneuvering. Eventually, she was either going to clip or get clipped by, another car.
The highway consisted of two sides of three lanes each separated by a stretch of grass in the center. She could cross the median, but the oncoming traffic was too thick to hope that she would make it across without getting hit.
On either side of the highway was a smattering of trees and the remnants of a woods. Sabrina saw a green sign looming about a mile up, which meant they were coming to an exit. Working on the assumption that at the point of an exit the trees would have to be cleared even more to make room for the gas stations and convenience stores that typically occupied that real estate around a highway exit, she made her decision.
“Hold on,” she told Quinlan. “It’s time to take this baby off road.”
Taking her foot off the gas she let the car slow naturally until the station wagon that she’d been adjacent to passed her. Sabrina steered right, then right again until she was on the shoulder of the highway. A guardrail separated the lane from the trees for most of the length of the shoulder, but she could see where the exit sign was that there was a break.
Judging the distance to the sign, and determining the width of the car against the width of the gap in the guardrail, she concluded it was going to be a tight fit. Which meant she was going to need more speed to propel the car through the opening. Once again she pushed her foot down hard and watched the red needle on the speedometer jump. Her hands steady on the wheel, she turned it the exact amount to hit the gap at only the slightest angle.
Mimicking the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard, metal scraped against metal as the car was attacked by the guardrail on one side and the exit sign on the other. Then suddenly, the noise stopped and they were on the other side of the rail. The car dipped and heaved on the uneven ground as the first obstacle, a tree, approached.
The still vivid image of the Cadillac from this morning wrapped around a trunk flashed behind her eyes. She turned hard left and ended up clipping a poplar tree, but still the car advanced. Another tree loomed only this time there was a small gap to her left. Then to her right. Then to her right again. It was like trying to drive through a snowstorm and missing the flakes of snow.
“Where are they?” she called out, not for one second taking her eyes off the impediments in front of her. She turned again to miss a tree and felt the back end of the car take a hit. There was a patch of cleared ground to her right so she aimed for that.
Quinlan looked over his shoulder. He could see the green sedan pulling through the guardrail and watched as sparks danced along each side of the car. The agent driving had slowed down too much in an attempt to drive cleanly through the gap, and as a result the drag against the car had slowed it down almost to a complete stop.
“We’re losing them. Get us the hell out of these woods.”
That was easier said than done, Sabrina realized. Her plan had been to drive through the woods to get to whatever road the exit emptied on to. But she’d had to make so many right turns that, instead of running parallel with 95, she was now driving west. She spotted another clearing up ahead and steered toward that, consistently trying to work her way south.
The sturdy vehicle protested the bumpy terrain with squeaks and knocks, but it still moved forward until a fallen log loomed ahead blocking her path. It wasn’t huge, but currently she didn’t have enough speed to get the car over it. She slammed on the brake and watched as Quinlan pitched forward.
“Sorry,” she mumbled.
“Interesting idea picking the woods. We’ve lost them, but unfortunately we’re stuck.”
Sabrina heard the sarcasm and scowled. Under her breath, she muttered a complaint against all back-seat drivers. Then she switched the gear into reverse. A tree grew larger in the rearview mirror and she stopped at the last second before impact. In front of her she determined the distance between the car and the log, the height of the log, what a set of standard-size car tires might do when they hit it and calculated how fast she could get the sedan moving in the distance left to her. Best-case scenario she only had a fifty-fifty shot of the car getting over the fallen trunk.
Given the situation, fifty-fifty wasn’t all that bad.
She put the car in drive and the sedan lurched forward. The tires hit the log hard and for a second Sabrina closed her eyes. But then she felt the car lifting, climbing over the dead tree. The crunch of the chassis scraping against wood was actually a comforting sound.
The vehicle dropped suddenly as the tires cleared the log and Sabrina could see that the path ahead was mostly free of obstructions except for a few thin trees that she would have no problem navigating.
She looked behind her and saw the green sedan stopped about fifty yards back as the driver struggled to negotiate the bushes and trees in front of it without a whole lot of success. Certainly without any speed.
“Poor Patterson. Beat by a girl,” she sang.
“Stop gloating and move it.”
“Again with the orders. Have I mentioned that I don’t really have to take them from you anymore?”
Still, Sabrina did as asked. The car kicked up twigs and dead leaves in its wake and started to decline down a hill. At the bottom of the hill she saw the expected gas station.
Using the brake generously, she maneuvered the sedan steadily down to the station not bothering to avoid the small bushes, instead plowing over them. By the time she got down to the bottom of the hill and over the curb onto pavement, she could see that she’d attracted the attention of the three patrons and the gas-station’s attendant.
Sabrina hit the power-window button as she cruised past the four men who were currently staring at her with both fascination and horror.
“Traffic was a real bitch,” she said and shrugged her shoulders as if to suggest she’d been given no other choice but to take to the woods.
With that, she accelerated out of the station where she made a right onto the single-lane road. Twenty minutes later, not a single car in sight, she smugly proclaimed that she had lost them.
Quinlan allowed a slight nod of agreement.
“Okay, how were you planning to contact him?”
Sabrina reached for her back jean pocket and cursed. “Shit. My phone. It must have fallen out of my pocket at some point. Damn it, do you how much those things cost? And this one had a camera and everything.”
“You have a phone number for Kahsan?”
“N
o, a wireless link to the Internet. I could have posted a message that way. What about your phone?”
“It’s a two-way. I have a Palm to connect to e-mail, but I’m not carrying it. We need to get to a computer, fast.”
“I know just the place,” Sabrina said. “You said Havre de Grace, right? I’ve been there a bunch of times looking for antiques and stuff for the house. If I remember correctly, and we know I do, there is a library in that town that should have what we’re looking for. How much time do you think we have?”
“They’re going to be stuck in the woods for a while, but they’ll call Krueger.”
“What will he do?”
“He’ll call me. Let’s get to the library. Once we get the message off, his hand is going to be forced. He might have to consider letting us do this our way.”
She stuck to the back roads until she again found herself driving south. They pulled up into the quaint historic town and after a few turns found the library. Sabrina parked the car and got out. For the first time she saw the damage that had been done to the body.
She whistled softly and over the hood of the car she met Quinlan’s gaze with a worried expression. The paint was ruined and the driver’s side of the car was dented beyond repair.
“Hey, you don’t think they’re going to make me pay for this, do you?”
He didn’t bother to answer, but merely pointed to the doors of the library. She studied his face for a moment and saw a look that she hadn’t seen in some time. There was determination and there was steel.
Quinlan was on the hunt.
She remembered telling Krueger to send her the best. This close to the end, she was damn glad he’d listened to her.
Chapter 16
“How are you going to do this?” Quinlan asked. He’d already given her the information she needed to pass on to Kahsan, but he was curious how she was going to deliver it. “I don’t imagine Kahsan has an AOL account.”
Calculated Risk Page 15