Nero drove away from the abandoned farmhouse. He figured it was best to avoid Highway 50, with all of its traffic and all of its state troopers. He turned south on a dirt road at the end of the abandoned farmhouse drive, accelerated, and worked his way through the gears with his left foot.
He had no sunglasses, and the wind dried his eyes, blowing tears backward toward his ears as he bounced up and down in the dusty, dirty Colorado scrub.
It felt damned good not to be chained up in a box. But he had his work cut out for him.
Before long, he came to an intersection with a paved road. Just a little two-lane job, untrafficked, with narrow shoulders and a faded stripe down the center. Exactly what he was looking for.
He turned east, toward Pueblo. He was aiming for the southern edge of town. Nothing there but dust and despair. Perfect for his needs.
Soon an expanse of dilapidated mobile homes, boarded-up shops, and a faded 1960s sparkle announced that he had reached Pueblo’s outskirts. He was surprised how short the trip had been. The van wreck really hadn’t been too far out of town.
Time to get to work. He needed gas to get where he was going. He needed money to get gas.
Or ingenuity.
Nero turned into the Dandy Deal Mobile Home Park and drove around. It didn’t take long to find what he was looking for. He spotted a pickup truck parked in the weeds outside a ramshackle mobile home. Eighties vintage, judging by the truck’s body rust and uneven lines.
Nero smiled. Trucks had gas. Old trucks had unlocked gas caps.
Nero looked around, searching for a hose, or anything he could use as a siphon. Nothing presented itself, so he drove around the trailer park again, looking for anything that he might use to pull gas from the truck’s tank and siphon it into the motorcycle.
An old man peered from a trailer window. Nero smiled and waved. Best to be friendly. Human psychology. Nobody expected a friendly, courteous criminal.
He rounded the corner and made his way up the adjacent lane, looking around and behind each mobile home as he passed.
The third house from the left prominently featured a disused clothes washing machine in its final resting place at the side of the trailer, next to a rusting water heater. Nero got off the motorcycle, climbed through waist-high weeds, and examined the washing machine.
Bingo. Two black hoses, still attached to the hot and cold water inputs on the washing machine. Nero smiled. It was one hell of a lucky day.
The knurled hose caps dug into his fingers as he twisted them free. It took no small amount of doing, but Nero liberated both hoses from the washing machine. He only needed one hose, but they said you only needed one kidney, too. Redundancy was insurance.
He hopped back on the motorcycle, drove back around to the far side of the trailer park, stopped his bike several houses down from his target, and separated the ignition wires to kill the engine. He didn’t want the sound of his motorcycle to alert the truck owner several addresses away.
He slung the washer hoses over his shoulder and pushed his bike nonchalantly down the narrow lane, just a guy taking his motorcycle for a walk through a trailer park, a nothing-to-see-here expression on his face.
He parked his bike next to the truck and looked around the mobile home for signs of occupancy. There was no motion inside the small, run-down trailer. Nero looked up and down the street, as well. He was the only thing moving on this particular block.
Satisfied he wasn’t under surveillance, Nero snuck to the rear quarter panel of the pickup truck, pressed against the gas cap cover, and pumped his fist in victory when the cover sprang open.
He unscrewed the gas cap, inserted the hose in the tank, stuck the other end in his mouth, and sucked until he felt gas coursing through the hose. He pulled away to avoid a mouthful of petroleum.
Too late. Nero gagged and sputtered. Gasoline tasted terrible.
He quickly shoved the hose into the motorcycle’s tank and watched as it filled up. It only took a few seconds. He hoped it would be enough gas to get to where he needed to go. He didn’t like stealing from people, and he didn’t want to have to do it again.
He put the gas caps back on the truck and motorcycle, flung the hose into the bushes, reconnected the ignition wires, and jumped on the starter. The bike revved to life, and Nero made his way back to the main road.
He was tempted to go home. Denver was just a few hours away. He was betting he could make it on a single tank of gas. In fact, he was certain he could make it.
But he had been around long enough to know that going home would be a colossal mistake. The feds would be all over him. In fact, by now, the feds were probably all over Penny and the kids, pressing them for details about his whereabouts.
He longed to touch them, to hold them, to talk with them, to reassure them, tell them that everything was going to be all right. But he knew that doing anything of the sort would be catastrophic. They would swoop in and snatch him up again, maybe with those damned helicopters.
And they would be much more careful with him this time around. He’d already escaped once, and they would want to make sure it didn’t happen again. They would truly tie him by the balls.
He had to work out a way to get a message to Penny, to tell the kids he was okay.
But that would have to wait. He had more pressing needs at the moment. Money topped the list, both the green kind that bought things like gas and food, and the unbearably arrogant Middle Eastern kind, who Nero was sure held the key to understanding why the Department of Homeland Security had crawled up his ass.
Nero followed signs for I-25. He headed north, a plan forming in his mind.
19
Sam followed her phone’s driving instructions to the airport. She didn’t take the exit for passenger parking. She followed the signs for employee parking. Throw the opposition a curveball at every opportunity, she figured. If she added enough of them together, she might even survive the day.
As she pulled toward the employee entrance, she saw a gate. There was a metal box on a post to the left. A card reader. The driver in front of her swiped a badge, and the gate opened. Easy.
But Sam had no badge. She pulled over to the side of the road, knee bouncing impatiently, checking the time on her phone.
It only took a few minutes for another car to appear. It drove confidently toward the gate and the box. Sam tucked in behind. When the gate lifted, Sam mashed the accelerator to make it through before the gate slammed shut behind. It was close, but she made it. She ignored the slightly put-off look from the driver she’d tailgated through the entrance.
She wound her way around a circular drive leading to the employee parking lot. All of the employee spots were numbered, meaning they probably used an assigned parking system. But the spots were not all full, so Sam chose an empty stall, parked, got out of the car, and threw the keys into the bushes. She was tempted to hold onto them, to keep them as an option for later in case things got dicey, but she knew that driving a dead assassin’s car around town was a beautiful way to get pinched.
She had another problem to solve. She needed to get into the airport. She followed signs toward the employee shuttle bus, merged with a small crowd gathering at the bus stop, tucked the scarf tighter around her head, making sure none of her bright red locks were free to wave around in the breeze. There was no use drawing any unwanted attention, and she tried to blend in as much as possible, which was difficult for someone with Sam’s looks and dimensions. She slouched, giving the world her impression of a downtrodden wage laborer, reducing her height and changing her vibe.
She performed a cursory scan of the crowd, noticed no threats, and cast a blank expression on her face, just another worker starting another day on the job.
The shuttle bus arrived. Sam shuffled on. The ride lasted just a few moments, and the shuttle emptied at the employee entrance. Sam merged with the flow of people. The first worker in line badged the door open and held it for the next guy, who held it for the next, all of them igno
ring a printed sign exhorting everyone to badge in individually for anti-terrorism reasons. Courtesy continued to displace security, and Sam flowed with the crowd inside the employee center.
She noticed half the workers wore uniforms, while the other half didn’t. The uniformed half went straight to work. The non-uniformed half went into a locker room. Sam followed a couple of female workers, of North African descent, by Sam’s estimation, into the female locker room. The room was surprisingly large, filled with rows of lockers, most with locks.
Sam began her work in a far corner, away from the other laborers, who chatted drearily in a foreign tongue while changing into their work smocks.
She reached into her purse, retrieved two small, thin metal instruments, selected a locker at random, and picked the lock. It didn’t take much time at all.
For her effort, she was rewarded with a gray cleaner’s smock. The locker also contained a pair of gray pants. Sam donned the clothes. Too big in the waist, too small in the shoulders, arms and legs too short, and not by a little. Not ideal. But who really noticed cleaning people, anyway?
She rolled her other outfit — stolen from the hospital an hour earlier — into a ball and tucked it under her arm. A change of clothing might come in handy later. Little things made a big difference.
She still needed a badge to access the various doors throughout the airport. This proved trickier. Workers needed a badge to get through the automobile gate on the entrance road, so nobody left their badge in their locker.
Except by mistake. Sam surveyed the row of locks, took a deep breath, and went to work.
She felt grateful for her misspent youth. Picking each lock took only a few seconds. Picking two dozen locks only took a few minutes, even counting the time spent hiding in the bathroom stall while a fresh wave of workers changed clothes.
That was the magic number, it turned out. Two dozen. An unfortunate worker had left her badge in the twenty-fourth lock Sam picked. She smiled. It could have been a long morning. She was grateful for her good fortune.
She needed props to complete her disguise. Cleaning people used cleaning supplies. Sam exited the locker room and joined a gaggle of workers heading toward the airport door. A row of cleaning carts lined the hallway near the exit. Sam watched as one of the workers in front of her carefully selected a cart, evidently for the quality of its rolling casters, and pushed it through the double doors and into the airport area.
Sam followed suit. Nobody cast an askew glance in her direction, and nobody spoke a word to her.
She looked at her watch. Thirty minutes had passed since Brock’s text had announced his flight’s arrival. She hoped he was okay. She hoped he followed her instructions.
She checked her phone for his flight details, then cross-referenced the flight arrival board to find the concourse and gate. She studied an airport map, found the right concourse, and set off, being careful not to walk faster than a real cleaning employee might walk on her way to start a long day scrubbing toilets.
Sam kept her eyes on a swivel. But she did so surreptitiously, staying in character. She saw no signs of trouble.
Until she got to Brock’s concourse.
Three men. Two looked Slavic. A third looked Greek. They weren’t standing together. They were milling about, but doing a poor job of blending in. They were not the kind of people you would find in an international airport wing, because they had no luggage. Amateurs, Sam thought. They might as well have walked around with a sign taped to their foreheads.
But knowing who they were and getting around them on the way out of the airport were two very different things. She felt for her purse, slung around her shoulder beneath her cleaning smock. She felt for the familiar heft. Even heftier now, with two handguns stashed inside. She hoped she wouldn’t need them. An airport was a terrible place to have to shoot somebody quietly.
Sam trudged toward Brock’s gate, calling on every ounce of self-control not to break into a run, to sprint to him, to make sure he was okay. The trek took an excruciatingly long time.
She scanned the small crowd at Brock’s gate. Most were sitting down, likely waiting for the next flight. Brock was not among them, and Sam felt her pulse rise. She looked around, far less nonchalantly than she would have desired.
Then she spotted him. He had folded his tall frame into a wheelchair, just like she had asked. He sat hunched over, a dull, bored expression on his face, a blue airline blanket pulled up to his chin, his carry-on bag perched on his lap.
Sam’s heart fluttered. Even in his awkward affectation, she just loved him on sight. Her diaphragm spasmed with a bit of pent-up emotion, and her eyes misted.
Then she got herself together. Her eyes scanned the area. She was looking for any of the three goons, or any goon-like person whom she hadn’t previously spotted.
She saw no one suspicious, but that didn’t mean they weren’t being watched. Maybe the rest of the surveillance team just sucked less than the first three clowns.
Sam strolled up to Brock. “May I help you sir?” she asked.
Brock did a double take. His eyes lit up. “Holy shit! Sam!”
“Baby,” she said sotto voce. “Am I glad to see you. But we need to play it cool for a minute.”
She maneuvered behind Brock’s wheelchair, unlocked the wheel locks, and pushed him forward down the concourse.
The team following Sam was expecting to find two tall, athletic people. Wheelchairs, hunched-over postures, and cleaning smocks were details that did not fit. Sam hoped the incongruousness would buy a little time.
She scanned the side of the concourse for an exit sign, one marked for employees only. Her impatience grew as she walked past gate after gate, shop after shop, restroom after restroom, spotting no employee exit.
She fought the urge to charge down the concourse, to find an exit and get the hell out of sight as soon as possible. She knew that the fastest way out was to slow down and not attract unwanted attention, uncomfortable as it felt.
Finally, an exit appeared, just beyond a set of restrooms on the left side of the concourse. She wheeled Brock up to the door, swiped her stolen badge against the key card reader, and held her breath.
The door beeped, and Sam heard the clack of the latch. She opened the door.
She gasped.
A large, muscular security guard stood in the doorway on the other side. He eyed her. He looked at Brock in the wheelchair. Sam held her breath.
The guard asked her something in Hungarian.
Sam didn’t have to feign ignorance. She had no idea what he’d said. She spoke in rapid-fire gibberish, throwing in an Arabic word or two, gesturing occasionally toward Brock. She stopped and looked up at the guard expectantly, as if her brief monologue should have cleared everything up.
The guard shook his head. Damn foreigners, his expression said.
He held the door open. Sam wheeled Brock through. “teşekkür ederim,” she said. Turkish for thank-you, if memory served.
She quelled the sudden and irrational feeling of panic caused by the thought that the guard might, in fact, speak Turkish.
He didn’t, evidently. He just waved and went back to doing nothing.
Sam’s heart rate settled. She pushed Brock around the corner, and they found themselves alone in a long, narrow hallway. She stopped the wheelchair, locked the wheels, moved around to the front, and planted a long, hard, wet kiss on him.
She felt the usual stirrings in the usual places, and it brought a smile to her heart. “You have no idea how glad I am to see you,” she said.
Their reunion was short. Brock stayed in the wheelchair. Sam followed signs for the employee center. If anyone thought it was unusual for a cleaning employee to be pushing a passenger around in a wheelchair, nobody said anything. Testament to human nature. If you looked like you belonged, people just assumed that you did.
But that didn’t stop Sam from being nervous about it. She moved quickly, but was careful not to move too quickly. Her eyes surveyed her
surroundings carefully, but she worked hard not to appear skittish.
They left the wheelchair parked next to the row of cleaning carts in the employee center. Sam ditched her cleaning uniform and changed into her stolen street clothes.
Next problem: transportation. Sam wasn’t keen on stealing cars. Always problematic, especially with all the video cameras in the world. The average time needed to catch a car thief had dropped dramatically over the past several years. Sam didn’t want to push her luck.
But neither did she want to walk, and renting a car was out of the question. There would undoubtedly be someone watching the airport rental counter.
She returned to the employee locker room, cursed her lack of foresight at not having stolen a set of keys earlier, and set to work yet again while Brock watched the door.
A Volkswagen this time. She smiled. The car would have a friendly little beep when she pushed the button on the key fob. She hoped it would cut down on the time they spent wandering around the parking lot looking for the car.
It took fifteen minutes. They wandered up and down the rows looking for a Volkswagen, pressing the key fob, searching for flashing lights, listening for the friendly little beep. Sam felt horribly exposed. It was déjà vu all over again. Just like earlier in the morning, in the hospital parking lot. Two corpses earlier.
Finally, they heard it. “Over there,” Brock said. They walked briskly, reaching the car in a few strides.
It was relatively new, nice, a Passat. They climbed in. Brock tossed his carry-on bag into the backseat.
Sam leaned over and kissed him again, drinking in his scent, feeling the warm, pleasant tingle of his presence.
He reached his arm around her waist to pull her closer. She barked in pain. He looked at her face, then at her abdomen. “Jesus, Sam! You’re bleeding!”
“I imagine quite profusely by now,” she said. “I ran into a bit of trouble.”
Worry and anger crossed Brock’s brow. “Who did this to you?”
“Don’t worry. Karma already kicked his ass.” She started the car and backed out of the parking spot.
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 66