Run for Cover

by Michael Ledwidge

  “You didn’t just rape her,” Gannon said. “We saw her body.”

  He shook his head.

  “No. I hit her, too,” he sobbed. “I flipped out, man. First with my fist. Then with a rock. A bunch of times. Then I think I bit her. I think. I’m telling you. It was like someone else was doing it. I, like, came out of myself. I became a caveman. It was the drug. I was watching myself do it.”

  Kit looked at Gannon wide-eyed while Alex exhaled deeply.

  “When I woke up the next day, I saw her and I flipped out. I mean I just ran. I got lost. I almost fell into a ravine. But then I finally made it back to the car and I drove back to the hotel and told Ethan.”

  “Wait, what?” Gannon cried. “You told Ethan? Weber knows this? You told him you raped and killed his wife?”

  “Well, not exactly,” Novak said. “I mean I lied. I said she fell but I was high and didn’t notice until I woke up.”

  “And he just accepted that?” Gannon said. “Why didn’t he turn you in?”

  “Because he’s my friend. We worked at Apple together. I helped him to get Sonexum off the ground. I’m his main advisor. And well, also because of tonight, I guess. Tonight’s been in the works for over a year.”

  “What’s so special about tonight?” Kit said.

  “The Chinese merger. For the last year it’s been all about the Chinese merger. They need me for the AI. I’m the expert on the AI program. Without me there’s no merger. I have to move to China now, Ethan said. I said before I wasn’t interested but things are different now. Because if I don’t, they won’t be able to protect me. Either I move to China or I have to go to jail. That’s the deal.”

  “You taping all this?” Gannon said, turning to Kit.

  “Every word,” Kit said.

  “So Weber didn’t kill his wife after all?” John Barber said from the front seat.

  “No, his number one meal ticket here did after he got whacked out on his Silicon Valley goofballs.”

  “Weber just killed everyone else for the cover-up,” Kit said. “How’s Dawn Warner involved with the Chinese?”

  “Who’s she?” Novak said.

  “That lovely woman with Ethan back at the restaurant,” Gannon said.

  “I don’t know her,” Novak said with a shrug. “She came with Ethan. I thought she was a lawyer on the merger. He has so many lawyers now. Am I going to jail now?”

  “Mike, listen. Heads up,” John Barber said as the throb of the Caddy’s V8 engine suddenly went up several levels in volume.

  Gannon turned.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “We’ve got company,” Barber said tossing a thumb behind them.

  106

  There were three vehicles in the pursuing security detail.

  The second of them was an incredibly fast Jeep Cherokee Trackhawk and Westergaard sat in the front passenger seat of it, looking out its windshield as they closed in on the rapidly accelerating Cadillac.

  He looked down at his phone, consulting the map that showed the tracking device in Alex Novak’s thigh.

  Then he looked back at the Escalade.

  “We have confirmation,” Westergaard said over the radio. “Novak is in the truck.”

  He shook his head. He’d told Weber and Warner’s people several times that his team should have a presence inside the damn restaurant. But did they listen to him? Of course not. They said that they needed to keep a low profile. That the Chinese would handle the inside.

  “The Chinese, my ass,” Westergaard mumbled.

  If he hadn’t personally insisted at great resistance on injecting the bio tracker into Novak, the whole lot of them would already be up shit’s creek.

  “I think they made us,” Westergaard’s new team member, Stackhouse, said from behind the wheel beside him.

  “I know they did,” Westergaard said as he looked up from his phone.

  Including Westergaard, his new team consisted of seven men. Stackhouse and Addison were with him. Coleal and Hardwick were in the Ram pickup lead car and Villar and Reynolds were in the third car, a Range Rover.

  As money was no object, he had managed to convince Weber and Warner to bring together the very best men in his multinational intelligence security firm.

  Addison, sitting behind him watching their six, was especially good. A former marine sergeant from Memphis, Tennessee, he had flown up from Culiacán, Mexico, where he was the lead military advisor to the Beltrán Leyva Mexican drug cartel.

  “What’s up, boss? What do you want me to do?” asked Coleal over the radio from the Ram pickup.

  Westergaard consulted the phone map.

  “We have an overpass coming up in a mile and a half. Just as you approach it, I want you to pit them, send them into a sidespin.”

  “Under the underpass?” Coleal radioed.

  “Yes,” Westergaard said.

  “Done,” Coleal said.

  “Sounds dangerous,” Stackhouse said. “You sure, Boss? That Novak guy is useless if he’s dead or even brain dead. I want that bonus.”

  “The only ones who are brain dead are our bosses,” Westergaard said. “We’re in a box here. We don’t have a choice. We have to grab him now.”

  “If you say so,” Stackhouse said.

  “Addison!”

  “Yes, Boss?”

  “Once Novak is culled,” Westergaard said, “I want full fire on that Cadillac. Full fire.”

  “We’re dealing with some pros here, huh?” said Addison.

  “If this is who I think it is,” Westergaard said, staring at the back of the speeding Cadillac, “once it’s on, you put it to full auto and keep the trigger down until further notice.”

  107

  The rev of the Cadillac’s engine continued to rise as John Barber floored the accelerator.

  Then Gannon turned as he heard another roar.

  A dark truck was close on the left. It was a big jacked-up performance model Ram pickup truck.

  Behind this truck was another vehicle, red in color. It looked like some kind of Jeep except it was easily keeping pace at nearly a hundred miles an hour. A third car followed it, a dark Range Rover.

  Not good, Gannon thought as he glanced back around and saw the number 97 on the Escalade’s digital dash.

  “I count three following,” Barber shouted. “You got three?”

  “Yep. Three,” Gannon shouted back.

  “Sensational,” John Barber said as their speedometer hit triple digits.

  The only good thing about any of it, Gannon thought, was that Barber was the best driver he had ever seen. In Iraq they always had to drive at about a hundred miles an hour to not get shot and he’d seen Barber squeeze an accelerator-pinned Hummer through spaces you wouldn’t think a moped could fit.

  “Intersection, red light ahead,” John Barber said as he put the SUV into the shoulder with a rumble.

  Gannon held his breath as they flew through it safely, then looked back as the three speeding vehicles quickly followed suit, zipping neatly into the shoulder behind them.

  Terrific, Gannon thought. The people chasing them seemed like some pretty good drivers, too.

  “They’re still coming,” Gannon said.

  They were approaching an overpass doing a hundred and ten when the Ram truck drove up on their left and sideswiped them.

  “Shit!” Gannon yelled as the back end went skittering.

  Rubber shrieked and smoked as the Escalade went in under the overpass sideways. They were perpendicular to the road when the front driver’s side bumper clipped one of the concrete columns.

  They whipped around even more violently and were in a full 180 when they went backwards off the road to the right.

  The rear windshield smashed in a split second later as they bounced off another column. Then, still tra
veling backwards, they hit a chain-link fence with a jingling sound of tearing metal.

  As Gannon’s head whipsawed back into the headrest, he looked out, dazed, over the deployed airbag through the cracked windshield where the vehicles were shrieking to a stop.

  “Shit,” he said again as he turned and looked back through the glassless rear window and saw the tangle of ripped steel fencing.

  When Gannon turned to the right, he saw the Ram truck that had pitted them was somehow on the other side of them now. It was parallel and almost touching them, only facing the other way.

  Gannon turned back to see Kit gaping at him and then looked over at Novak as he started coughing and then looked forward at John Barber, who was pushing at the airbag that was in his face.

  Past John Barber, he could see through the windshield as the doors of the Jeep and the Range Rover popped and men spilled out.

  There were four of them. Each one was wearing a balaclava and bulletproof vest and was strapping a long gun. Some kind of lid flipped up on the red Jeep’s roof and then a fifth armed man in a balaclava appeared, standing in the turret.

  Gannon almost had to hand it to Novak at what he did next. Before any of them could so much as catch their startled breath, the spiky-haired dude was out of his seat belt and working the door latch with his cuffed hands.

  Then he was out and running toward the balaclava men as fast as his feet could carry him.

  Still dazed and confused as he breathed in the burnt chemical smell of the airbag, Gannon was frozen, watching Novak run, when he heard the sound.

  From somewhere behind him through the shattered back window came a dull metallic quivering sound that was followed quickly by a dinging bell.

  “No, no, no,” Gannon said as he turned and undid his seat belt and scrambled past Kit over the seat toward the back.

  Gannon didn’t think his eyes could go wider as he poked his head out of the glassless rear window and saw the train track and train trestles almost directly underneath their SUV’s jutting rear end.

  His mouth worked wordlessly as he turned to his right and saw the approaching light of an oncoming train.

  “John, move the car! We’re out over the damn tracks!” Gannon finally screamed out as the train’s horn suddenly sounded.

  Which was the precise moment when the automatic gunfire started.

  108

  Gannon scrambled back to the third seat as every window of the Escalade seemed to shatter simultaneously.

  Kit was already down in the footwell and he dove down on top of her. Through the rain of exploding glass, Gannon watched Barber bend low himself. He lay down flat on the front seat, almost under the steering wheel, as he rammed the transmission up into Reverse.

  When Barber stomped on the accelerator, they shot backwards through the rip in the fence and bumped up onto the tracks.

  Had they just kept going, they would have easily made it clear of the approaching train with time to spare.

  But then the front right-side bumper of the Cadillac suddenly caught on something, and they stopped as their wheels began to spin.

  “Why did we stop?” Kit cried. “C’mon!”

  Gannon thought they were maybe held up on one of the trackside fence poles until he shot a look to his right and saw the side panel of the Ram truck beside them was slowly moving. As they reversed, it slid with them and then crushed up against the passenger side rear door.

  Shit! Gannon thought. No!

  The bumpers had locked!

  More bullets whined and flew through the car. Then the burnt rubber reek of tire smoke started pouring in as Barber held down on the gas, trying to rip free of the pickup they were stuck to.

  The Ram truck’s tires started smoking a second later as the driver suddenly noticed it was being pulled onto the train tracks and tried to pull back in the opposite direction.

  The train horn erupted again much closer now as the two truck bumpers’ tug-of-war over the middle of a railroad track continued.

  The bellowing train was maybe twenty feet away, its headlamp and rising roar and clank filling the entirety of the inside of the SUV, when the Cadillac’s front bumper finally gave way with a wishbone-like pop.

  Then the Cadillac lurched backwards in a bumping jolt and just cleared out of the way of the arriving train.

  Gannon gaped as he sat up and turned back just in time to see the speeding commuter train T-bone the cab of the Ram truck dead center. In a fantastic howl of bleating horns and blue-white smoke and shooting sparks, he watched as the train plowed the pickup truck away to the south.

  As this happened, Barber did the world’s bumpiest reverse K-turn over a second train track and then squealed the shot-up Escalade through some weeds at the base of the overpass’s embankment.

  “Man, is the rental guy gonna love us!” Gannon cried as they arrived at the top of the overpass.

  Barber squealed out onto the overpass into the left lane going the wrong way. Halfway across the center of the upper roadway, he brought the Caddy to a shrieking stop directly above where the truck had sideswiped them.

  Gannon flipped over into the front seat with their long rifle gun bag. Tearing at the Velcro and grabbing up two cut-down M4 carbines, he and Barber leaped from the vehicle out into the street.

  Reaching the overpass’s rail, they could see the Range Rover below them already on the move a hundred yards to the north.

  “Shit! You know Novak is in there. He’s getting away!” John Barber said.

  Gannon had just put one in the chamber of his carbine with a click of the charging handle when they heard the roar below them.

  Gannon and John Barber looked straight down as the red Jeep broke cover out from beneath the overpass.

  The armed balaclava man was still in the turret, standing backwards now.

  He looked up straight at them as he began to raise the rifle at his side.

  109

  “Straight to the airport! Get Novak to the airport! Gun it!” Westergaard radioed to Villar in car three as he heard the burst of gunfire at his back.

  The damned overpass, he realized as the Jeep’s rear window exploded inward.

  “They’re up on the overpass!” he yelled at Stackhouse. “Turn in somewhere. We need cover. Cover! Turn in!”

  Just as he said this, the automatic gunfire became one long thunderous staccato. Westergaard threw up his hands in front of his face as a decimating fusillade of bullets knifed through the center of the roof, blowing apart the console and the radio and the dashboard.

  “Return fire! Covering fire!” he yelled at Addison, standing in the back.

  But Addison wasn’t standing in the turret anymore, Westergaard saw as he turned. He was kneeling now in the rear footwell, spitting blood.

  “Addison!” he said just as the ex-marine turned cartel advisor caught one in the head.

  The spray of his blood in Westergaard’s face from the head-shot was horror-movie-level. The sudden sprinkler jet of blood got in his eyes, in his mouth. Blinded and spitting, he wiped at it, yelling. It was warm and sticky on his fingers.

  As the withering barrage of firing continued, something caught him in the shoulder from the back. He felt the bullet slice down inside of him. It was a weird sensation. Like swallowing something hot.

  Then something touched the back of his neck below the base of his skull. A moment later, wetness began trickling down the back of his throat like a nasal drip. The liquid thick and salty and metallic.

  When he looked up, he saw they were still rolling rapidly even though Stackhouse was now slumped over dead against the driver’s door.

  He didn’t even have a chance to look forward to see the telephone pole that suddenly sailed in through the shattered windshield.

  He blacked out briefly and when he came to, everything was black-and-white.

  Like
the old TV his father kept on his workbench in the barn, he thought.

  After a moment, he noticed that the horn was stuck in the On position. He pushed at Stackhouse over the shattered plastic and glass until he slumped back over off the horn. Over the deployed airbag, white fumes rose from the folded-back edges of crumpled hood like smoke from the nostrils of a dragon.

  He tried the door. No go. It was wedged tight.

  He heard car brakes nearby.

  “Freeze, asshole!” said a man a moment later.

  Westergaard turned out the shattered window to see a blocky man arrive beside him.

  It was him.

  The American.

  The stumbling block had arrived.

  110

  Sirens started in the distance, and then John Barber turned and drew down on a car that slowed behind them.

  It was a shiny black Mercedes-Benz, a small elderly couple in it, staring over at them with wide eyes.

  Just a couple of curious onlookers, Gannon thought, waving and smiling as he lowered his own rifle. The old guy wisely peeled out.

  “It’s you,” the bloody blond-haired guy in the passenger seat of the wrecked Jeep said with a funny accent.

  “Dude, didn’t I tell you?” Gannon said.

  “This him?” John Barber said. “The sniper?”

  “This is him,” Gannon said as he reached in over the assassin and picked up the dropped phone between his feet.

  “Look, John. There’s a map and a blip on it moving near the highway. It’s tracking Novak. Has to be. This ain’t over. Let’s go.”

  “One second,” John Barber said as he stepped up to the window. “I want to say goodbye to our friend.”

  Barber leaned in until his face was an inch from Westergaard’s bullet-nicked ear.

  “How’s it feel, fella?” John Barber whispered to the killer. “Hell’s gates are gaping wide-open for you. Excited? How’s it feel to bathe in your own blood?”

  He watched as the assassin reached for a water bottle in the drink holder.

  “This what you’re looking for? Thirsty, are you?” John Barber said as he reached in and took it out.