“Shit!” That was Colin’s explosive acknowledgment of her conclusion, uttered as he tried, and failed, to force his door open. Their eyes met in a split second of mutual comprehension. This time she was glad they were on the same page of the operative handbook. She didn’t have to explain what she meant by Boston brakes: he knew as well as she did that the CIA had the ability to remotely seize control of a vehicle, a capability that (like so much else) they consistently denied. It was a form of cyberattack, a super-hacking, if you would, that was supposed to be impossible and was way beyond top secret and had been used in a number of intelligence-service-organized assassinations disguised as accidents. As common as they were, car crashes offered the Agency the ultimate in deniability. Unless they could find a way to prevent it, this would be just one more regrettable fatal accident.
His tone held a degree of grim satisfaction as he added, “Believe me about the CIA kill team now?”
“Are you really choosing this moment to say I told you so?” Bianca gripped the steering wheel so hard her fingers hurt. Dread made her chest feel tight as she realized how helpless she actually was. Then a thought occurred, and she shot an accusing look at him. “You! You can stop this! They must not realize you’re in the car with me! You need to let them know now.” She scrabbled in the console for the phone.
“What? You think I can just— Hang on.” Colin gave a vicious yank to the wheel that did no good whatsoever. As the wheel was torn from her one-handed grip on it, Bianca snapped a look at the tsunami of oncoming vehicles, forgot the phone and went rigid, instinctively steeling for a collision as the Jeep plowed straight ahead into oncoming traffic.
Brakes screamed. Headlights skewered them. Cars swerved, drove off the road, rear-ended each other. The din of shrieking horns was loud enough to drown out even the blaring radio. A horn blasted a strident warning as a UPS truck barreling through the intersection apparently only spotted them at the last minute. Slamming on its brakes, the truck skidded sideways, tires squealing, in a desperate attempt to avoid running them down.
“Ah!” Wide-eyed with fear, Bianca grabbed the wheel, turned it (nothing) and pressed back against the seat as tightly as she could as the truck hurtled toward them.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Colin yelled.
Bianca cringed as the huge brown blur spun past with inches to spare then jumped the curb on the opposite side of the intersection and smashed into a storefront. The impact sent glass flying everywhere. It sounded like a bomb going off.
“Oh no! Oh my God!” Her thoughts flew to the patrons inside the store as smoke started to billow from the truck.
Brakes squealed as approaching cars stopped. Drivers leaped out, presumably to help. Witnesses on the sidewalk, having scattered, started running back. Shoppers spilled out of the surrounding stores. A dazed-looking woman staggered out of the shop the truck had hit. The acrid smell of smoke was strong, making Bianca fear an imminent fire.
She remembered the phone in the console, grabbed it, thrust it at Colin. “Call them off.”
“You think there’s some kind of 1-800-Spooks-R-Us number? I can’t just call them off. I’m not with them. Remember them shooting at me in Moscow?”
“They were shooting at me. You just got in the way. And you said—”
“Boss! Boss, can you hear me?” Doc: she’d forgotten Doc. He was still on speakerphone, his voice a tinny thread amid the uproar. From his tone, this wasn’t the first time he’d called out to her. She only heard him now because the phone was in her hand.
“Yes. Yes. I can hear you.” Ridiculous as it was, the phone felt like a lifeline. Chaos replaced the steady stream of traffic around them as vehicles slammed to a stop, changed lanes, swerved to avoid each other. The Jeep continued to roll, cutting through the barrage of opposing traffic like it wasn’t even there.
“I need the VIN number.” Doc’s voice was high-pitched with urgency.
“What?”
“The VIN number! You got Boston brakes, right? I need the VIN number to get the Jeep’s IP address to maybe turn it off.”
Doc had clearly heard everything. She wasn’t about to waste time trying to remember exactly what “everything” entailed, or in peppering him with questions. She’d seen him work too many hacking-related miracles.
“Okay.” Her hand tightened on the phone as she tried to think. The VIN number was stamped on the dashboard—in a spot that could only be seen from outside the car. It was—
“Who the hell are you talking to?” Colin roared. He was running his fingers along the junction of the roof and his door frame, clearly hoping to find a weak spot.
“Doc.” She threw the answer at him as an aside as she frantically reviewed all the places the VIN number could be found. On the engine—
“Look out!”
At Colin’s hoarse cry her head snapped toward him.
Crash.
“Oh!” Bianca was thrown sideways. Her head bumped hard against the window beside her. Seeing stars from the impact, she blinked at a yellow MINI Cooper skidding by. Two screaming women in the front seat looked back at her with terror in their faces as the little car, having just rammed into the Jeep’s front passenger-side fender, flew past.
The Jeep corrected course with a jerk and kept going.
“You okay?” Colin’s voice was harsh. His arm was in front of her now, stretched out at shoulder level, hard with muscle beneath his expensive jacket as it pinned her to the seat. He’d thrust it out to protect her, she realized, and grimaced at all that the gesture implied. There was no time at the moment to process her feelings, but she wasn’t used to being protected.
“Yes. Don’t hang up.” She shoved Colin’s arm out of the way and pushed the phone into his hand at the same time as she released her seat belt and jackknifed across his legs to yank the glove compartment open. She’d remembered—
“Boss, the VIN number,” Doc shrieked.
“One minute,” she responded, yelling to make sure he heard. She’d remembered the one obvious, accessible place to find the VIN number. The glove compartment light came on; she could see a corner of the rectangular slip of paper that was the registration down under the owner’s manual. Grabbing it, she pulled it free and, still bent across Colin’s legs to take advantage of the light, snatched the phone out of his hand and read the VIN number off the registration.
“Got it,” Doc crowed. “Game on, you mothers!”
Bianca guessed the target of that last was whoever was Boston braking the Jeep.
Primed to face the next horror, she snapped upright to find that the barrage of cars careening past them had vanished. A glance in her rearview mirror told her why: the light had changed. The cross traffic had stopped. The Jeep continued to roll, but now they were through the gauntlet, disgorged into a connecting street with relatively few vehicles, all of which were going their way. The Jeep was just one more unremarkable blip in the traffic.
They were alive, and basically unharmed.
“Oh my God. We survived.” She felt light-headed with relief—or maybe from the blow to her head. It was hard to tell. Taking a much-needed deep breath, she glanced around, her eyes raking the activity sliding past outside the windows. A service station on one side, a 7-Eleven on the other—
In all the excitement her foot had slipped from the brake. She slammed it back down, once more grinding the pedal into the floor.
The Jeep didn’t stop. It didn’t slow.
Her pulse raced anew as she faced the hideous truth. The CIA kill team was still out there, still operative, still controlling the Jeep. They could be anywhere. In the white van pulling away from the 7-Eleven. In the black SUV two cars up. In the Domino’s Pizza delivery car behind them.
Or maybe they were working remotely. Maybe they were using satellites. Or drones. It wouldn’t be the first time. Bianca caught herself peering up through the swishing wipers at the night sky. Other than a whole lot of darkness, there was nothing to see. Not even the moon, or any stars.
“They’re not finished with us,” she said. Her mouth tasted sour with fear. The Jeep rolled past a strip mall, closed office buildings, a used-car lot. Multiple sirens screamed in the distance as, presumably, emergency responders headed for the mess they’d left behind. On the radio, “Havana” had been swapped out for somebody singing about thunder. Imagine Dragons—with the tiny part of her brain that wasn’t wholly occupied with fighting off terror, she recognized the song.
“Probably not,” Colin agreed. The very evenness of his voice told her how on edge he still was. “Put your seat belt on.”
Then, releasing his, twisting around in his seat so that he was once again encroaching head and shoulders into her space, he lifted one long, powerful-looking leg and slammed his foot into his window with what looked like all his might.
The glass didn’t break. It didn’t even shiver.
“Bulletproof glass,” she told him.
“Of course it is. Fuck.”
Her insides twisted as she played connect-the-dots with what was happening. Maybe getting them killed in a car crash at that intersection hadn’t been the endgame here. Maybe—
“We’re being taken somewhere,” she said.
8
“Yeah.”
At that flat rejoinder, which told her Colin had come to the same conclusion—blame the blow to her head if he’d gotten there before she did—Bianca felt goose bumps spring to prickly life all over her skin. She remembered the fate the CIA had planned for her the last time they’d had her in their clutches: they’d been in the process of trying to drown her in a vat of preservative liquid when she’d managed to escape.
She was, she discovered, still holding the phone. She spoke urgently into it. “Doc?”
“On it.” He sounded abstracted. She pictured him feverishly working his computer magic—on Lifson’s computer, she had no doubt—and realized that the best thing she could do was leave him alone to do his thing.
“Great,” she said. And hoped her voice didn’t sound as hollow to him as it did to her. The knot in her stomach was now boulder-sized. She had to work to keep her breathing even. She had great faith in Doc, she really did. But—
Praise the Lord, but pass the ammunition: a favorite saying of the grizzled former Army Ranger who’d trained her in wilderness survival, that was what popped into her mind in this moment of extremis. In other words, waiting for rescue was all well and good, but if you wanted to live you’d best get busy saving yourself.
“This your buddy who knocked me out?” Colin took the phone from her.
Bianca nodded. And bent double, twisting herself into a pretzel as she wormed her way down to reach the gas pedal in a quest to see if, perhaps, lifting/prying it up would close the throttle valve—stepping on the gas makes a car go forward because it depresses the mechanism that opens up the throttle valve, which lets air into the engine to mix with the gas—thus stopping the car. But the gas pedal was up, the throttle valve mechanism was in the closed position and impossible to manipulate without going through the metal floor, and the Jeep was still moving.
And picking up speed. At least, she thought it was. The vibration, the hum of the tires, the sensation of hurtling along, was intensified by her being wedged into the foot well. The faint smell of exhaust seeping through the floorboard made her nauseous.
Or maybe what was making her nauseous was burgeoning fear.
“You find a way to stop this thing and we’re quits, brother,” Colin said into the phone. That’s when she knew for sure that he was as alarmed about their potential fate as she was.
“Doing my best.” Doc’s reply was barely audible. Again Bianca pictured him at Lifson’s computer. Popping up, taking a steadying breath of fresher air, she turned the steering wheel—nothing—hit the gas as well as the brakes just to see—nothing. Absolutely no change. The Jeep was driving itself, or, rather, being driven remotely by someone unseen, zipping along and dodging the few cars in front of it as if it had eyes and could see.
And, yes, they were picking up speed. A glance at the speedometer showed her that it was creeping toward forty. On a street with a thirty-five-mile-per-hour limit, that was fast.
Not good.
“Doc?” Her thumb hovered above the disconnect button. She hated to cut off contact.
“Yeah?”
“I’m hanging up,” she told him. “Call me back if something comes up.”
“Yeah.”
She hated to do it, but she disconnected. Then she held the phone out to Colin. “I’m taking your job offer, okay? You said the kill team would be called off when you got the word out. So get the word out. I’m in.”
“You know I know you’re lying, right?”
“Does it matter? Make the damned call.”
He took the phone from her, but shook his head. “You think the people I work for take calls from any random cell phone? That’s not the way they operate. We communicate through authorized channels only.”
“You have a phone number to call, don’t you?” His expression told her that he did. “Try.”
His mouth twisted. Then he punched in a number, hit the speaker button. The phone rang once, twice. A click as the call was picked up made Bianca’s pulse quicken with hope. Then a voice recording said, “We’re sorry. You have reached a number that is disconnected or that is no longer in service. If you feel you have reached this recording in error, please hang up and—”
He disconnected. “I can keep trying, use other numbers even, but the result’s not going to change, and we don’t have that kind of time.”
Disappointment felt thick in her throat. Well, she should have known that nothing was ever that easy. She gave a nod of reluctant acceptance.
“You armed?” she asked as he dropped the phone back into the console. “With anything besides the Glock 17 in your ankle holster, I mean?”
He gave her a narrow-eyed look. “A knife in my shoe.”
“That’s it?”
“Sorry, I left my AK-47 at home. What about you? Besides the throwing star necklace, that is. That sexy garter belt got anything lethal in it?”
“A switchblade. A garrote. My earrings are bo-shuriken.” Her favorites for special occasions when she had reason to fear for her safety, they were long, dangly crystal dazzlers with needlelike centers. He frowned at them. “Japanese throwing darts,” she explained.
“I know what bo-shuriken are.” His eyes slid over her. “No gun?”
“You know, when I got dressed this morning, I didn’t know you were coming. If I’d known, the answer might be different, but as it is, the throwing star and the rest are it.”
“So we’re facing a well-armed, highly trained and extremely lethal CIA kill team with one gun, two knives and some jewelry between us.”
“When you put it like that—” She broke off as their eyes met.
“Piece of cake,” he said.
She had to smile.
“They don’t need to get up close and personal to kill us,” he said.
This time the look they exchanged was grim.
“We need to get out of the car,” she said.
“Yep.” Clambering to his knees, holding on to the seat backs for balance against the Jeep’s rocking, he shimmied/squeezed into the back seat. At any other time, watching him lever his six-foot-three-inch frame through the few inches of space available to him would have made her laugh. This was not that time.
“How long do you think we have?” She couldn’t quite keep the tension out of her voice.
“They’ll want as few witnesses as possible, so at a guess we’ve got till we’re out of the city.”
Roughly fifteen minutes, then, was her estimate, and she thanked God for urban sprawl. Fifteen minutes she could work with.
The Jeep changed lanes again as it dodged a gray sedan emerging from a McDonald’s. Grimacing, she looked ahead for possible obstacles: some cars, a few red lights. She knew this street—there were warehouses and a dock down at the end of
it, complete with security fences and guards. The river was to the left; Talmadge Bridge was coming up. To the right was the entire city of Savannah. And beyond that—the world.
Bottom line was, they could be headed anywhere. She wet her lips as anxiety dried her mouth. Realizing that she was glad Colin was trapped with her didn’t make her feel any better. He was, of course, a second trained body to fight, but that wasn’t entirely it, and she didn’t care to speculate on exactly what the rest of it was. Survive first, soul search later, she ordered herself.
“This isn’t aimed at you. It’s aimed at me.” She spoke with far more sangfroid than she was feeling as she studied the interior of the door. No way to wedge even the slimmest tool between the door and the window to hit the lock mechanism; thanks to the bulletproofing, the fit was too tight.
“Looks to me like we’re in it together.”
A glance in the rearview mirror revealed that he was trying the door handles and the window switches.
“Just think, if you’d minded your own business and left me alone, you wouldn’t be in this fix.”
“And if you weren’t so bloody pigheaded, we’d both be on a plane right now and neither one of us would be in this fix.”
“Like being in your power and the power of whoever you’re working for would be so much better.”
“Five Eyes. I told you. And in case you haven’t quite picked up on what’s happening, somebody’s trying to kill us here. How much bloody worse could it get?”
“Who knows? You already threatened my friends and my business.”
“Anything I could do to them beats the hell out of us being dead.”
Fair point. She didn’t say it. Instead her response was a scornful grunt as she ran her hands searchingly over the hard, smooth plastic of the door panel.
The ironic thing was, she could break into just about any car ever made in a matter of minutes. Breaking out of a car, however, was trickier, because the locks providing easy access were on the outside of the doors. To get to them from the inside without being able to use some kind of makeshift slim-jim would require digging into the door itself: doable but time-consuming. Especially given all the custom reinforcements she’d added to the Jeep.
The Fifth Doctrine: The Guardian Series Book 3 Page 8