by Mark Alpert
“Better gun it!” David shouted. “He’s coming after us!”
A PATH FOR CANOEISTS, THAT’S what it was. So the privileged American pleasure seekers could bring their pickup trucks to the edge of the stream and slip their boats into the water. Simon cursed himself for not noticing it earlier.
As he returned to the Ferrari and shifted into first gear, he decided to adjust his strategy. No more clever attempts to capture the targets unharmed. As long as one of them survived, he could get what he needed.
MONIQUE STOMPED THE ACCELERATOR BUT they were ascending a high mountain ridge and the Hyundai struggled to reach seventy miles an hour. She slammed her fist on the steering wheel while the engine whined and knocked. “I told you we should’ve taken my Corvette!” she yelled, glaring at the speedometer.
David looked over his shoulder at the rear window. No sign of the Ferrari yet on the twisting road behind them, but he thought he could hear the car’s throaty snarl in the distance. In the backseat Michael was staring at his Game Boy again, silently waiting for the screen to come back to life. It looked like he hadn’t even noticed that anything was amiss. But Professor Gupta was thoroughly alarmed. He’d raised both hands to his chest and splayed them across the front of his shirt as if were trying to quiet his pounding heart. His eyes were unnaturally wide. “What’s going on?” he gasped.
“It’s all right, Professor,” David lied. “We’re going to be all right.”
He shook his head fiercely. “I have to get out! Let me out of the car!”
A panic attack, David thought. He held his hands out, palms down, in a gesture he hoped would be calming. “Just take a deep breath, okay? A deep, deep breath.”
“No, I have to get out!”
He unbuckled his seat belt and reached for the door handle. Luckily the door was locked, and before Gupta could unlock it, David scrambled into the backseat and restrained him, lying on top of the old man and holding his wrists. “I told you, we’re going to be all right!” he repeated. But as the words left his mouth he looked out the rear window again and saw the yellow Ferrari about fifty yards behind them.
David quickly faced forward to warn Monique, but she’d already seen it. Her furious brown eyes were in the rearview mirror. “That’s the dean’s car!” she hissed. “That bald motherfucker took the dean’s car!”
“He’s gaining,” David said. “Can’t you go any faster?”
“No, I can’t! He’s in a Ferrari and I’m driving a fucking Hyundai!” She shook her head. “He must’ve gone to my house, looking for us! But he found Keith instead. That’s how he got the car!”
The Ferrari drew steadily closer as they approached the top of the ridge. When the car was about twenty feet behind, David saw the bald man roll down the driver’s-side window. Keeping his right hand on the steering wheel, the man leaned halfway out the window and pointed his Uzi at the Hyundai. David immediately grabbed Michael and Professor Gupta and shoved them to the floor behind the bucket seats. The teenager let out an ear-piercing scream as David covered the two of them with his body. “Get down!” he shouted at Monique. “He’s gonna shoot!”
The first blast shattered the rear window, showering bits of safety glass on their backs. The second went right over their heads, the bullets streaking through the vehicle and punching holes in the windshield. Certain that Monique had been hit, David clambered to the front of the car to take control, but he found her still clutching the steering wheel, apparently unharmed. She wasn’t bleeding anywhere but her cheeks were wet. She was weeping. “Keith’s dead, isn’t he?” she cried.
They both knew the answer, so there was no need to respond. David simply put his hand on her shoulder. “Let’s just get the fuck out of here, okay?”
The Hyundai crested the ridge and started to pick up speed as they barreled downhill. The bald man fired his Uzi at them again but the bullets missed the car this time because the road turned sharply to the right. The Hyundai’s tires squealed as they rounded the curve and David had to grab the dashboard to stop himself from lurching into Monique. “Jesus Christ!” he yelled. “Watch what you’re doing!”
She didn’t seem to hear him. She stared at the road ahead, her eyes trained on the double yellow line. Her right calf bulged from the effort of pressing the gas pedal and her hands gripped the steering wheel so tightly that the veins popped up between her knuckles. Her whole body was a tense arc of nerves and muscle, and on her face was a look of ferocious concentration. The mind that had plumbed the intricacies of string theory, the complex equations and topologies of extra-dimensional manifolds, was now calculating centrifugal forces.
Halfway down the slope the road straightened out, becoming a steep chute that sliced through the woods. The Hyundai was going faster than a hundred miles an hour now, but the Ferrari was still close behind. On both sides of the highway the trees whipped past, an unbroken blur of leaves and trunks and branches. And then David saw a break, about a hundred yards ahead. A narrow strip of asphalt branched off to the left, making a forty-five-degree angle with the highway. He glanced at Monique; she was looking at it, too.
Turning around, David stared at the Ferrari. The bald man was leaning out the car’s window and leveling his machine gun at them, taking careful aim now. David had just enough time for a short, silent prayer. Not yet, he pleaded. Wait one more second before firing. Just one more second.
Then Monique swerved the Hyundai to the left, throwing David violently against the passenger-side door. The car tilted on its right wheels, on the verge of rolling over, but after an instant the left wheels bounced back to the pavement and the Hyundai leveled out and sped down the narrow road. Surprised, the bald man looked up from the Uzi’s gun sight and belatedly tried to follow them by turning his steering wheel with one hand. He turned it too far. The rear end of the Ferrari swung forward, sending the car into a vicious counterclockwise spin. It glided across the road like a bright yellow pinwheel, almost beautiful in its velocity and strangeness and shine. Then it slid off the asphalt and smacked into one of the trees with a sickening crunch.
Monique eased up on the gas but continued down the road. Gazing through the Hyundai’s shattered rear window, David saw the Ferrari wrapped around the gnarled trunk of an oak tree. Then the road went into an S-curve and the wreck passed out of sight.
KAREN AND JONAH STOOD IN the lobby of the New York Times building. A sullen, hawk-nosed man in a blue blazer sat behind the security desk, looking them over. “Can I help you?” he asked.
Karen gave him a big smile. “Yes, I’m here to see Ms. Gloria Mitchell. She’s a reporter at the newspaper.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
She shook her head. She hadn’t tried calling Gloria because she suspected that the FBI had tapped her phone. “No, we’re old friends. I just wanted to stop by her office and say hello.”
The security guard reached for the telephone on his desk. “What’s your name?”
“Karen Atwood.” Her maiden name. “We were classmates at Forest Hills High School. We haven’t talked in a while but she’ll remember me.”
The guard took his time dialing the number. Karen anxiously surveyed the lobby, looking for any FBI agents who might be tailing her. She was worried they might arrest her again before she could get to the newsroom. To calm her nerves, she squeezed Jonah’s hand.
The guard finally got Gloria on the line. “Karen Atwood is here to see you,” he said into the phone. There was a pause. “Yes, Karen Atwood.” Another pause. Then he cupped his hand over the mouthpiece and turned to Karen. “She says she doesn’t know anyone by that name.”
Karen’s chest tightened. How could Gloria have forgotten her? They’d taken gym class together for three years! “Tell her it’s Karen Atwood from Forest Hills High. From Mr. Sharkey’s gym class.”
With an impatient sigh, the guard repeated the information over the phone. There was yet another pause, a long one this time, and then the guard said, “Okay, I’ll send her up.” He
hung up the receiver and began writing Karen’s name on a visitor’s pass.
She breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank you.”
Still sullen, the guard handed her the pass. “Ms. Mitchell’s on the sixteenth floor. Go to the elevators on the left.”
As Karen headed toward the elevator bank she kept expecting the men in gray suits to descend on her, but she and Jonah boarded the elevator without incident. She found it odd that the FBI agents would let her contact the newspaper. Maybe they assumed no reporter would believe her story. In truth, she didn’t have much of a story to tell; although she knew the drug charges against David were bogus, she had no idea why the government would invent such lies. More to the point, it was her word against the U.S. attorney’s. In the eyes of the world, she was just the wife of a drug-dealing professor, and no newspaper would take her accusations seriously.
Unless she had evidence, of course. And Karen wasn’t going to the newsroom completely empty-handed. She remembered the name of the police detective who’d called her apartment the night before, the man who could tell the New York Times why David had been summoned to St. Luke’s Hospital. It was Hector Rodriguez.
LUCILLE SAT BEHIND THE DESK in Amil Gupta’s office, speaking on her cell phone with the director of the Bureau while her agents dissected the professor’s computer. In the four hours since Gupta, Swift, and Reynolds had escaped from the Robotics Institute, her team had investigated every corner of the Carnegie Mellon campus, searching for clues to where the suspects had gone. Agent Walsh had interrogated a janitor with Carnegie Mellon Building Services who’d admitted selling her uniform to Reynolds and Swift, and Agent Miller had found Reynolds’s Corvette in one of the campus parking lots. Although there was no denying that the Bureau had fucked up big-time, Lucille felt sure that with a little legwork her team would locate the suspects and take them into custody. And that’s why she got so furious when the director informed her that the Pentagon was taking over.
“What the hell are they thinking?” she shouted into the phone. “The army can’t do law enforcement! It’s illegal for them to participate in a domestic operation!”
“I know, I know,” the director replied. “But they say they have an executive order. And the Delta Force has experience with man-hunts. In Iraq and Afghanistan, at least.”
“But where are they gonna go? We don’t have any leads yet on the suspects’ whereabouts. They could be anywhere from Michigan to Virginia by now.”
“According to the deployment plan, the troops are flying into Andrews Air Force Base and they’ll spread out from there. They have helicopters and Stryker vehicles, so they’ll be able to move pretty quickly.”
Lucille shook her head. This was pure stupidity. Deploying a brigade of commandos wasn’t going to help them find the fugitives. More likely the soldiers would end up shooting some drunk Bubba for speeding through one of their checkpoints. “Sir, just give me a little more time,” she said. “I know I can find these bastards.”
“It’s too late, Lucy. The troops are already loading into their C-17s. You have control of the operation until midnight. Then we’ll do the handoff to the Defense Department.”
She said nothing. A silent protest. The director waited a moment, then said, “I’ve got to go to another meeting now. Call me in two hours with your plans for transferring control.” Then he hung up.
For several seconds she just stared at the cell phone in her hand. The screen said CALL ENDED 19:29 and then it went back to displaying the familiar FBI seal. But she wasn’t really looking at the screen; she was looking at the end of her career in the Bureau. For thirty-four years she’d struggled through the ranks, the only woman in an army of bullheaded men, and she’d succeeded by being tougher and smarter than any of them. She’d tackled bank robbers, infiltrated motorcycle gangs, foiled kidnappings, and wiretapped mobsters. A month ago the director had promised to make her the head of the Bureau’s Dallas office, a plum job to cap off her decades of service. But now she saw that it wasn’t going to happen. Instead of getting a promotion, she was going to be pushed into retirement.
Agent Crawford, her second-in-command, edged toward her warily, like a whipped dog approaching its master. “Uh, Agent Parker? We’ve finished the analysis of Gupta’s computer system.”
She pocketed the phone and turned to him. She was in charge for four more hours, so she might as well make the best of it. “Did you find any physics documents?”
“No, it’s all robotics. Big files full of software code and hardware designs. We also found the program that allowed him to communicate with his robots. That’s how he got the Dragon Runner to sound the radiation alert.”
Lucille winced. She didn’t like to be reminded of this screwup, but she couldn’t ignore it either. She needed to see the source of her undoing. “Show me the program.”
Crawford leaned over the desk and used the mouse to click on a triangular icon on the computer screen. A window appeared showing a three-dimensional layout of Newell-Simon Hall with a dozen flashing yellow dots scattered among the floors. “This screen shows the location and status of each robot,” Crawford said. “Gupta was able to send them commands using a wireless device.”
“Wireless?” She felt a flutter of hope in her chest. Because cell phones and other wireless devices periodically send signals to their networks, the Bureau could determine their approximate positions as long as they were turned on. “Can we track it down?”
“No, Gupta’s device uses short-range radio only. To control robots at other locations, he sends the commands by landline to a local transmitting node, which then broadcasts the signal to the machines.”
Shit, Lucille thought. She just couldn’t catch a break. But then another idea occurred to her. “What other locations? Where else does he have robots?”
Crawford clicked on another icon and the screen changed to a map of the Carnegie Mellon campus. “There are some in the computer science department and a few at the engineering hall.” He pointed to a cluster of flashing dots at the map’s edge. “Also a few here at Gupta’s house.”
“Anywhere outside Pittsburgh?”
With another click of the mouse, a map of the United States unfolded across the screen. There were four flashing dots in California, one in Tennessee, one in West Virginia, two in Georgia, and half a dozen near Washington, D.C. “The Defense Department is testing Gupta’s surveillance robots at several locations,” Crawford explained. “And NASA is preparing one of his machines for a mission to Mars.”
“What about this location?” Lucille pointed at the flashing dot in West Virginia. It was the closest one to Pittsburgh.
Agent Crawford clicked on the dot and a label appeared beside it: “Carnegie’s Retreat, Jolo, West Virginia.”
“That doesn’t sound like a military base or a NASA center,” Lucille noted. The flutter of hope in her chest became a steady pounding. She knew it was just a hunch, but over the years she’d learned to trust her hunches.
Crawford squinted at the label on the computer screen. “I haven’t seen this name in any of Gupta’s records. It could be the location of a private contractor, I suppose. Maybe one of the defense companies that do robotics work.”
She shook her head. The dot was flashing in the southernmost part of the state, the heart of Hatfield-and-McCoy country. There were no defense contractors anywhere near the place. “Do we have any agents operating in that part of West Virginia?”
Crawford reached into his pocket for the BlackBerry he used to track the agents assigned to the operation. “Uh, let’s see. Agents Brock and Santullo are on I-77, helping the state police run a roadblock. They’re about fifty miles from Jolo.”
“Tell Brock and Santullo to head over there as fast as they can. They’re gonna need some backup, so round up a dozen agents and get the Learjet ready.”
Crawford raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure about this? All we know at this point is—”
“Just do it!”
Chapter Eight
IT WAS FULLY DARK BY THE TIME THEY REACHED CAR- Negie’s Retreat, but in the glare of the Hyundai’s headlights David could see enough of the place to know that Andrew Carnegie would’ve never spent a single night there. It was no more than a shack, a one-story cabin constructed from railroad ties in a small clearing in the woods. Fallen branches littered the front yard and a clumpy carpet of wet leaves covered the porch. Carnegie Mellon University had let the place fall into disrepair. It was clear that no faculty members had visited the cabin since the previous summer, if then.
David opened the passenger-side door and helped Professor Gupta out of the backseat. The old man had recovered from his panic attack but his legs were still wobbly. David had to hold him by the elbow as they stepped over the dead branches. Monique and Michael got out of the car, too, leaving the headlights on so they could see where they were going. When they reached the front door, Gupta pointed at a flowerpot that contained nothing but dirt. “The key’s under that pot,” he said.
As David bent over to grasp the thing, he heard a distant, muffled boom that echoed against the hills. He instantly straightened up, his muscles tensing. “Jesus!” he hissed. “What the hell was that?”
Gupta chuckled and patted him on the back. “Don’t worry, it’s just the locals. In the evenings they like to ramble through the woods with their shotguns and hunt down their supper.”