And where was the other traffic, Rhodes thought as he slid forward, his back and shoulders driving against the rear-facing seats. The moment the Mercedes ground to a halt, he scrambled to his hands and knees. Outside, he saw the rear doors of the van fly open. Two more men in watch caps and camouflage jackets jumped down, automatic weapons braced.
“Dear God,” said Kaia Jesperson. She reached for the handle of the opposite door, ready to run for it.
Rhodes lunged, caught her around the waist, pulled her down. “You don’t want to do that,” he said. He rolled on top of her, thinking oddly, Smoked black windows, they’ll be shooting blind…and then the roar of gunfire began.
***
To the men dressed in the yellow fatigues of a Paris roadworking crew stationed at either end of the tunnel, it might have sounded like a choreographed eruption of jackhammer work. To the four men who had leaped from the van fingers held tightly to the triggers of their weapons, it seemed like they had created the roaring at the end of the world.
Bullets slammed into the windshield, the hood, the side windows of the targeted Mercedes in a deadly, seemingly endless hail. Sixty seconds it might have taken to empty the clips and the reloads, perhaps a few more. Every square foot of the expensive, gleaming sheet metal erupted into tight-stitched pustules, pristine window glass transformed into frost-etched sheets.
One of the assassins, the man who’d been in the side door of the van, strode forward toward the Mercedes, his weapon chattering bullets, spewing fire now at near point-blank range. Abruptly he paused, bringing his hand up, slapping at his cheek as if something had stung him there.
He tottered for a moment, then spun sideways. His left ear was gone, along with a section of his scalp, where a pale, fleshy tulip seemed to have bloomed. He was dead before he hit the ground, his weapon silent, his bloody palm thrust upward in a permanent gesture for help.
The three who were left, their own clips spent, stared in amazement at their fallen colleague and also at the steaming, blasted hulk of the Mercedes: the glass shattered, turned white by a million spidery fault lines, the once glossy skin of the hood and doors peppered with hundreds of bullet holes. It was eerily quiet in the tunnel now, though their ears were numb with the residue of gunfire.
“Ricochet,” said one of the men finally, in a language only they understood. He pointed at the fallen one and shook his head, and his two comrades nodded grudging understanding.
The three stood stunned by this freak occurrence, by the roaring that still lingered in their heads. It must have registered in the mind of one man—all that glass shattered, yes, but still intact; as well as the question of what might have caused that ricochet—but by the time an explanation had occurred to him, it was too late. He had opened his mouth to point at the blasted car, was about to pass on his suspicions…
…when the front passenger door of the limo flew open and Basil Wheatley appeared with a stubby-barreled shotgun in his hands. The first blast from the streetsweeper hit the two men closest to the van. One, who had taken the brunt of the tight pattern, flew backward through the still-open side doors. The other threw his hands to his face, where stray buck-shot had tattooed his forehead and cheeks. This man was in the midst of a curse of pain when the second blast from Basil’s shotgun blew his hands, and the head behind them, into a hot pink froth.
The fourth man, who had finally understood that he and his colleagues had been firing their weapons at an armored limousine, did not wait to see what happened to his colleagues. He turned and stepped quickly behind the sheltering rear door of the van, jacking a fresh clip into the magazine of his weapon. There was another boom from Basil’s streetsweeper, but the buckshot was deflected by the van’s door. Another boom, another harmless clatter on the steel at the assassin’s back. One more round, the assassin calculated, then he’d have the chance to take his shot.
He steadied himself, waiting, about to swing around the sheltering door, blow away that hulking man and his shotgun…
He heard the racking mechanism of Basil’s weapon engage, the roar of the shotgun echoing through the tunnel, and knew it was time to make his move.
But there was something wrong. He felt a strange weightless feeling, a numbness where his legs should have been. Instead of stepping forward, he realized he was moving back, toward the flapping opposite door of the van, which itself seemed to have tilted strangely.
His hands felt cold and useless, his fingers turned to stone. His head had jerked backward, affording him a momentary glimpse of the tunnel’s soot-stained vaulting. Then his chin was on his chest, which seemed warm, and dark, and wet. His cheek bounced off the opposite door frame, then struck the gritty pavement below, but he felt no pain.
He lay motionless, his unblinking eyes focused steadily on the back of the door where he’d been hiding. He saw the great rupture in the steel sheathing there, just where he’d been leaning, saw the tendrils of metal reaching inward at what might have been belt level. He felt the slightest tingling at the base of his spine, or where that part of him had been at least, and in the next moment, before he could even try to look down, he felt nothing at all.
***
By the time the blue van emerged from the other end of the tunnel, the blockades had already been cleared, the yellow-clad men posing as roadworkers vanished. Angry motorists, incensed at the delay, eager to make their own way along, paid no attention to what vehicle might have passed them by. It was nearly dark. Who would have noticed a few pellet holes, or paid attention to the driver of some service vehicle after all?
“A scattergun is good,” Basil Wheatley was saying, “but you always want to keep you a deer slug packed.” He was in the passenger’s seat, Frank was behind the wheel. “That’s your ace in the hole, little brother.”
“Pack a deer slug, drive a bulletproof car,” answered Frank, who kept his eyes on the road ahead. “That’s what Daddy always said.”
“Don’t get smart,” Basil said, but there wasn’t any malice in his voice. He glanced into the back of the van and waved his hand to his passengers as if to suggest that what was going on between him and his brother was of little consequence.
One of the passengers was Kaia Jesperson, who sat haggard-faced on a wooden crate in the cargo area. She turned to Rhodes, who sat on the corrugated metal floor opposite her, his back against the rattling side door. “Why didn’t you tell me the car was armored?” she asked.
Rhodes shrugged. “There wasn’t much time for discussion,” he said. “I didn’t want you running outside, that’s all.”
She nodded, watching him in the strobelike effect of the passing streetlights. “Does this sort of thing happen to you often?”
“Babescu had friends,” Rhodes said, his tone philosophical. He gestured dismissively. “We’ll be leaving them behind, now.”
She lifted one of her expressive eyebrows. “They seemed quite determined to me. How do you leave men like that behind?”
He shrugged. “They made a gesture, it didn’t work out. Sometimes that’s the end of it.”
“And if it isn’t?”
The van rumbled across a rough stretch of pavement, making speech impossible for a bit. He stared across the dim interior at her until the rumble had subsided. “You don’t have to get involved,” he said.
“I’m already involved,” she said.
“I’m serious,” he said. “You’re free to go your own way.”
“You would trust me?” There was the slightest tone of mockery in her voice.
“Implicitly,” he said. And it was true. If he knew anything, he knew that he had nothing to fear from this woman.
“You think I’m as soulless as you are,” she said.
Rhodes glanced at the front of the van. What did the Wheatleys make of such conversation? he wondered. Where did it fit in the world of deer slugs and car crushers and down-home aphorisms?
“You enjoy cheating death, that much I know,” he said.
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It brought dismissive laughter from her. “I was too frightened to breathe back there. My pants are wet.”
“Even so,” he said.
Rhodes felt a hesitation in the vehicle’s momentum. He glanced forward.
Frank Wheatley spoke over his shoulder. “The turn’s coming up. We still going to the airfield?”
“I’m not certain yet,” Rhodes said.
He turned back to her. “What do you say, Kaia?”
“I like the way you say my name,” she said. “I wish you’d use it more often.”
Rhodes nodded, waiting. The hum of the tires beneath him was muted now.
“Where will you go?” she asked.
“Home,” he told her, as if he had not shared his intentions with her already.
“Home,” she repeated. “An interesting concept for the soulless.”
“I’m going home,” he said. “What would you like to do?”
She smiled at him. The look in her eyes seemed somehow patronizing. Yet her lips were full of promise. “I’ll go with you,” she told him.
Rhodes nodded again. He took no sharp intake of breath, nor any marked release. No variation in his pulse, no dilation or constriction of his pupils, no detectable change in the pressure of his blood. And still…and still…he felt himself a different man.
He glanced at Frank. “You can turn here,” he called.
And, of course, they did.
Chapter Eight
“Why don’t you go to the police?” Janice said.
Deal pursed his lips, glancing across the corner of the L-shaped bar at Two Chefs, where a sleekly dressed couple sat toying with pale pink drinks in stemmed glasses. The woman—jet black hair, dark eyes, bright lipstick—wore a plum-colored silk dress with a plunging neckline and pressed herself to the man’s arm as she whispered in his ear. No danger of being overheard—nothing short of gunfire was likely to attract the attention of those two.
“And tell the police what, exactly?” He took a swig of Red Stripe from a squat brown bottle. “That I had a conversation with a guy?”
“He tried to blackmail you.”
“Yeah?” He glanced at her. “Where’s the evidence?”
She thought about it. “Well, if you got the contract fair and square, they could look into it, see exactly how it happened…”
Her voice trailed off, and he knew she’d realized as soon as she said it.
“There are only two possibilities,” he said. “Sams actually rigged it somehow, some way that I’d take the heat for if anyone investigated—” He broke off, shaking his head. “Or it’s all bullshit. Either way, it stalls the project and gives everybody else who wanted it the opportunity to climb back in.”
He gave her a bleak look. “It’s the biggest piece of work we’ve had since my old man died, Janice. If I get the county oversight board on the case, it could queer the whole deal before it gets off the drawing board.”
“Well,” she said, sounding petulant. “He did break into your office.”
“Maybe I left the door unlocked,” he said, feeling exhausted. A couple of hours ago, he’d been ready to celebrate the revival of his fortunes. Now it took an effort to lift his beer.
“You do things like that,” she agreed. He could tell by her expression that she was trying to stay calm. She raised her own glass, sipped her martini, closed her eyes tight, as if she were trying to will trouble away herself.
“This is good,” she said after a moment. “I haven’t had a martini in a long time.”
Two weeks ago, he wanted to tell her. Sitting here, on these stools, at this same bar. But he didn’t. It had been one of the not-so-good nights, when the “other” Janice had shown up. Not the beautiful, self-possessed woman he’d known for so many years there beside him, but the distracted, hesitant stranger who glanced over her shoulder every half-minute while she talked, as if she were waiting for the arrival of someone or something that had been about to swoop down for a long, long time.
Deal felt a pang going to the very core of him. If he insisted, if he tried to remind her of that last encounter, he would only wound her. She didn’t mean to drift away, to erect that self-referential shield about her very being. She simply did. It is just what happened sometimes, and just as troubling was the fact that it often seemed apropos of nothing.
The doctors could not say why, beyond positing that it was another of the seemingly endless manifestations of post-traumatic stress reaction, a disorder so protean that the best practitioners were prone to throw up their hands: “Nothing you can do about it, Mr. Deal. Nothing for you to do but be supportive, and loving, and patient.”
Easy for them to say. But Deal knew this: Men who had meant to kill him had nearly killed his wife, and ever since that time, he had lived with the possibility that the person he loved most in all the world would, without warning, simply drift away from him—for a day, a week, a month. Worst was the fear that one day it would be forever. And no amount of reasoning could ever convince him that it was not, at bedrock, his own damned fault.
He forced himself from his gloomy thoughts, determined not to let this time with her go sour. He smiled at her. “You look terrific,” he said. He poured some of the beer in the frosty glass that Cyrus, the bartender, had brought with his Red Stripe, then touched the glass to hers.
She smiled. “Thanks,” she said. “I got a haircut.” She fluffed the short hair at the back of her neck.
“I noticed,” he said.
“You must not like it, then,” she said, “if you didn’t say anything.”
“I do like it,” he insisted. He was about to say that it made her look younger, but he wasn’t sure if that would sound right. “I’m just a little distracted, that’s all.”
She smiled brightly, gave her head a toss. “It’s okay,” she said. “Hair grows.”
He stared at her. How anyone so lovely could have doubts about her appearance was beyond him. That was another lingering effect of the attacks. She’d been badly burned, all right, but what scars remained were virtually invisible, a fine line here and there, most of it hidden under even that short haircut. But that didn’t matter, did it? Be supportive, Mr. Deal. Be patient and understanding. In this case, leave well enough alone.
“Did you say something?” she said, glancing up from the menu Cyrus had left.
“No,” he said. “Unless I was thinking out loud.”
She shrugged and lay the menu down. Her gaze traveled over his shoulder at the couple opposite them. “I think that woman intends to have sex with that man,” she said.
Deal glanced over his shoulder, then back at her. “People do that,” he said.
She gave him a look that didn’t discount the possibility. “Do they?” She bent to her drink and sipped, so that Deal couldn’t tell if she was hiding a smile. Living apart hadn’t put an end to their sex life, but it had certainly had an effect. Sex with the “other” Janice was out of the question, so that every one of their “dates”—weekly, more or less—loomed for him with all the charged uncertainty of a college boy’s blind date.
“Stop thinking about it,” she said, putting her drink down.
“Thinking about what?”
“You are so obvious,” she said. “We haven’t even had an appetizer.”
“Neither have those two,” he said, nodding over his shoulder.
She rolled her eyes. “Would you like me to behave that way?”
He shrugged. “Not here, maybe.”
She shook her head, and he could tell by the new set of her features that she was back to business. It was like watching weather sweep across a plain from a great distance, he thought. No trouble reading Janice’s moods.
“So how much of this do you really believe?” she said. She was leaning toward him on her elbows, staring at him over her drink.
He shrugged. “I’m going to talk to Vernon Driscoll. He can find out if the guy’s for real.”
Deal gave her a bleak look. “That’s all I’ve been thinking about since I called you.”
“Say it’s all true,” Janice said. “About your father, about everything. Would you do what this man Sams wants?”
Deal took a deep breath. “That’s just it. I don’t know what he really wants. If it just means keeping my eyes open, picking up some dirt on a major scumbag, I don’t know. Maybe I can justify that much.”
He broke off as Cyrus the bartender approached and slid a plate of something between them. “Did I order this?” Deal asked.
Cyrus shrugged. He was in his fifties and had once tended bar on a yacht owned by Aristotle Onassis. He had perpetually squinted eyes and a bushy mustache that sometimes made it difficult to read his facial expression. “It’s an artichoke and lobster thingy,” he said. “Franco’s experimenting,” he added, referring to one of the chefs. “He wants to know what his favorite diners think.”
“I already know it’s good,” Janice said. She had leaned to cut a piece of the dish with her fork. “Anything Franco does is good.”
“Where’s the lobster?” Deal asked, peering at the arrangement on the plate. Carved rosettes of what he presumed were artichoke hearts drizzled with a mustardy lacework of sauce…it seemed too attractive to eat.
“Tell Franco it’s an awesome thingy,” Janice said. There was a tiny yellow dot of sauce on her upper lip. Deal reached for it with his finger, but she beat him to it with her tongue.
“I’ll leave you two alone,” Cyrus said.
“Bring more food when it’s ready,” Janice told him.
“Did you want to order?” Cyrus said.
“Just take care of us,” Janice said.
Cyrus smiled and nodded. You’re smitten by her too, pal, Deal thought, watching the man walk away.
“You were saying?’
“It’s never as simple as what they make it seem, that’s all,” Deal said. He noticed his beer was empty and wished he’d asked Cyrus for another. Then he saw the man coming back their way, squat brown bottle and fresh frosty glass in hand.
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