Pursuit

by ROBARDS, KAREN

  All that went through her mind in a flash as Ryan disconnected. At the same time, the RAV4 rocked to a halt at the stop sign—and she grabbed the door handle and shoved the door open.

  “Jess!” Ryan grabbed at her and missed.

  “Leave me alone!”

  “Damn it to hell, Jess!”

  This time his grab caught the tail end of her jacket. She just managed to yank it free as she catapulted from the car.

  Her feet in the cursed high heels struck the gravel shoulder hard. She staggered and almost fell, barely managing to catch herself before she hit her knees. One shoe came loose, and she kicked it off, then kicked off the other to match and went plunging barefoot down the slope. Darkness immediately cloaked her, but she knew that wasn’t going to be enough. Behind her the RAV4’s interior light glowed yellow, lighting her path at the same time as it ruthlessly exposed her. Gravel cut into her soles. The straw-like grass was slippery underfoot and whipped around her legs. Her heart raced and adrenaline surged through her like rocket fuel as she launched herself through the waist-high grass, stumbling frantically toward the woods. Her legs felt as heavy as if she were wearing concrete boots, and she knew escaping from him was going to be all but impossible—but she had to try. The tone of the conversation had made it perfectly clear—Ryan was one of them after all. Maybe reluctantly, maybe halfheartedly, but still a team player just as the other man had said.

  The hard truth was, she was a danger to them. A danger that could only be fully eliminated by her death.

  Ryan had agreed to bring her back to his house. Even as she reeled at the knowledge that he was involved, that she was just as foolish as she had suspected, Jess shuddered at the thought of what they might be planning to do to her. An accident—would they want to make it look like an accident, like Marian’s death? Or a suicide like Davenport? Or would they . . .

  There was the smallest of sounds behind her, a funny little metallic click. It was such an insignificant sound that she didn’t know what made her glance over her shoulder in an attempt to identify it.

  But she did, and was just in time to watch as the RAV4 exploded with a hollow-sounding boom accompanied by a fireball the size of a house.

  21

  Jess whirled to face the explosion, both hands flying to cover her open mouth. For a moment she just stood there, dumbfounded, as a whoosh of heat blasted past her and a geyser of debris shot skyward. A split second later, car parts rattled down on the road and the area surrounding it, although none reached as far as where she stood frozen in the tall grass perhaps thirty feet away. The blaze completely engulfed the RAV4, lighting up the night like a giant bonfire. Black smoke billowed toward the sky. The smell of burning hit her, bringing back instant hideous memories of another burning car. . . .

  “Mark!” she screamed, as the past was wiped out by a rush of brand-new horror. “Mark!”

  He had been in that car.

  Moving like she had never believed she would be able to move again, she raced toward it, adrenaline giving her dicey legs a strength and purpose that carried her back through the grass toward the car faster than she had run away from it. Heart thundering, pulse pounding, gasping with emotion, she watched the flames devouring the vehicle and knew already that there was nothing she could do, no help she could give.

  Too late, too late, too late—the thought beat through her mind like the desperate pounding of a drum.

  Scrambling up the slope, feeling the heat as intense as a furnace on her face and exposed skin, she heard the crackling of the fire, smelled burning rubber and gasoline and she refused to think what else, and saw that the asphalt on which the vehicle sat was already melting and bubbling from the intense heat of the flames.

  Then she was on the road, running around the front of the RAV4 to the driver’s side, her eyes stinging, her throat aching, knowing it was useless but . . .

  Even as she tried to absorb the reality of the total conflagration that made any attempt at rescue both impossible and pointless, she spotted him. Her heart gave a great leap.

  He wasn’t in the car. He lay sprawled on his stomach on the pavement on the opposite side of the road. The leaping flames that lit up the night bathed him in a flickering orange glow so that the dark bulk of him was just visible against the glittering blacktop.

  Oh, God, thank God, he’d been thrown clear.

  “Mark!” She flew toward him. Is he hurt? Is he dead? “Mark!”

  Dropping to her knees beside him, she ran her eyes over him, put her hands on his shoulders, and felt the solid, intact strength of them, slid her hand to the center of his back to see if she could detect the rise and fall of his rib cage that would indicate he was still breathing, checking the extent of his injuries as best she could by the uncertain light of the blazing fire behind them.

  Please, God, please, God, please, God . . .

  He groaned and rolled over, then sat up, blinking at her.

  “Mark!”

  Throwing her arms around him, she hugged him, pressed her face to his, kissed his warm, bristly cheek a couple of times, so glad he wasn’t dead that she completely forgot everything else. One hard arm came around her, and she felt him clumsily patting her back. That brought her back to reality a little, and she let go of him, sinking back on her haunches to frown at him, her freezing toes curling into the rough pavement. He quit patting her, but his arm still curved loosely around her waist, casually intimate.

  He was looking past her at the burning car, his expression as astounded as hers must have been moments earlier.

  “Holy shit,” he said.

  “Are you hurt?” Her voice was sharp.

  He frowned, then shook his head. “I don’t think so. A little dazed, maybe. Jesus Christ, if you hadn’t gone jumping out of the car like an idiot and I hadn’t gotten out to go chasing after you, we’d both be toast right now.”

  That brought everything rushing back in a reorienting burst of memory. He was going to take me back to his house to be killed. Her widening eyes met his narrowing ones for a pregnant instant of shared knowledge, and then she pushed his arm aside and surged to her feet.

  Lunging forward, he grabbed her wrist, his long fingers circling it like a manacle.

  “Oh, no you don’t.”

  She did her best to yank her arm free. “Let me go, you son-of-a . . .”

  “What the hell is the matter with you, anyway?” He held on tight. “Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

  “What, do you think I’m stupid? Do you think I’m deaf? I heard that phone call. I heard that man telling you to take me back to your house, and you agreeing to do it!”

  Grimacing, he rolled to his feet without letting go of her wrist. “I was just agreeing with him to buy a little time. Jesus, we don’t have time for this. I’m on your side, okay?”

  Your side.

  “You need convincing, take a look at my car. That bomb would have gotten me, too.”

  Bomb. That was the first time that exactly what had happened really registered with her. The RAV4 had been blown up with a bomb.

  She stopped struggling to look at the burning husk of what had been his SUV. The fire was consuming the RAV4 at a furious clip. Hot and orange, it popped and crackled and hissed, putting out incinerator-like heat intense enough to shimmer in the air and warm the pavement beneath her feet. If either one of them had been inside, they would have been cremated by now.

  “Give me your purse.” Apparently feeling he had convinced her, or else figuring it just didn’t matter because there wasn’t any place she could run to that he couldn’t catch her easily, Mark released her wrist, grabbed her purse off her arm, and opened the small zipper compartment at the side.

  “What’re you doing?” His action so completely surprised her that she actually felt indignation, and tried futilely to snatch her purse back without even thinking about attempting to get away.

  “There’s a homing device in here. How the hell do you think I found you?” He tore somethi
ng from the zipper compartment and, taking a step forward, hurled it into the fire. Speechless, Jess watched the button-sized device arc into the flames. “Where ’s your phone?”

  He was already pawing through the larger compartment.

  “What? No . . .”

  Too late. He tossed her phone into the fire, then followed it with his own.

  “We can be tracked anywhere with those.” He thrust her purse back at her. “Here. Let ’s go. We need to get out of here before they show up.”

  They. The word was even more galvanizing than the idea of a bomb. It made her heart jump.

  He grabbed her hand and was pulling her across the pavement in the direction she had been going to begin with when she happened to glance past the flames up the road in the direction of his house.

  What she saw sent a stab of terror through her.

  Round white lights flickered through the trees, small because they were still distant but moving toward them far too quickly.

  A car.

  Jess stared, electrified.

  Of course, it doesn’t have to be them. . . .

  At this time in the morning? Who are you kidding? Who else would it be?

  “Headlights,” she gasped, tugging on his hand and pointing. “A car’s coming.”

  “Shit.” His gaze followed hers. He was just starting down the slope while she still stood at road level close enough to the fire to feel its heat radiating through her jacket to warm the skin on her back. Plunging on, he pulled her down to the bottom of the slope with him. She barely felt the sharpness of the gravel on her cold, bare feet this time. With what she considered great presence of mind, she grabbed her shoes as she passed them. The heels were a problem, but she had already figured out the hard way that bare feet were worse. “Come on.”

  At the bottom she stumbled and would have fallen to her knees if he hadn’t caught her. Making an impatient sound, he snatched her up in his arms and bolted toward the woods with her.

  “You don’t have to carry me.”

  “Baby, I want to live.”

  Okay, he had a point. Clearly, in this moment of emergency, he was going to be far faster at getting them both out of the reach of danger than if she tried to run on her own. Her shoes were useless, and the ground was tearing up her feet. Her legs already ached from her previous efforts, and her lower back throbbed. She spared a momentary longing thought for the pain pills in her purse, but there was no time. Tucking her shoes in close to his body, balancing her purse on her stomach, Jess gave in to expediency, twining her arms around his neck and curling close to his chest and hanging on for dear life, watching dry-mouthed over his shoulder as the approaching headlights closed in.

  He was just bounding from the grass into the deeper darkness of the woods as the headlights slowed and then stopped a few yards behind the burning car.

  An icy shiver of fear shot up her spine.

  “Mark.” It was an urgent whisper delivered almost into his ear. She could just see the denser outline of his profile against the backdrop of tree trunks and hanging vines. Glancing back, she saw a quick flash of light as the interior light came on, but then as he kept going more trees obscured her view before she could see anything else, like someone emerging from the stopped vehicle, which she guessed was what was happening. “There they are. At the car.”

  The tangle of undergrowth beneath the trees had caused him to slow down. He was no longer running but, rather, forcing a path through prickly branches that reached as high as her bent legs and hanging vines that occasionally smacked her face like cold, damp hands. The earthy smell of vegetation gone wild was strong. Here in the trees, the insect chorus was loud enough to all but block out the now-distant roar of the fire. Holding her higher against his chest in a near-futile attempt to protect her from the scratchy things all around them, turning to maneuver through a particularly dense patch of undergrowth, he cast a quick look back, but he didn’t stop, or even slow down. He couldn’t see anything anyway, she realized as she followed his gaze, except two frosty white beams of light pointing toward the bright orange glow that had been his SUV.

  “If we’re lucky, for the next fifteen minutes or so they’ll think we’re inside the car.”

  “What happens if we’re not lucky?”

  “They’ll come looking sooner.”

  Jess’s stomach knotted. She took a deep breath to try to stay calm.

  Plan. Plan. What’s the plan? Aha, she had one.

  “Whoever you were talking to on the phone was right: I did call a reporter. Marty Solomon from the Post. I’m supposed to meet him at the 7-Eleven just up the road. He should be there now. If we can get to him before . . .”

  She let her voice trail off, because the “before” was obvious. Before they were caught.

  “Didn’t I tell you going to the press was a bad idea?” He was starting to sound breathless. She could feel his body growing progressively warmer through the thin cotton of his shirt. Good thing the guy was muscular, because no matter how petite she was, she was still a solid armful under the circumstances. Her calves began to cramp, and she unobtrusively tried to stretch. “I bet you used your own phone, didn’t you?”

  “I sure wasn’t going to use the phone in your house.”

  “Well, guess what? Your calls were being monitored. When you called this reporter, somebody was listening in. They heard every word you said.”

  “And you knew about this?” Jess’s voice, though still scarcely louder than a whisper, went shrill with indignation.

  He didn’t answer. Instead, his mouth twisted. And that, for her, was answer enough.

  “You did. You knew!”

  “Yeah, I knew.”

  “You put a tracking device in my purse! You knew they were listening to my phone calls! You lied about the results of the IV testing! You agreed to take me back to your house where you know as well as I do I was going to be killed! And I’m supposed to believe you’re on my side?”

  “In case it’s escaped your notice, I’m also lugging your ass through a fucking jungle and my car just got blown up with me almost inside it. I think you’re pretty safe in assuming I’m trying to keep you alive.”

  Okay. Good point.

  “Anyway, I think you’re missing the important thing here,” he continued. “That being that if you made the arrangements to meet your reporter friend at the 7-Eleven on your cell phone, anybody listening in heard that, and if they have half a brain they’ll guess that’s where we ’re headed.”

  Jess felt her stomach tighten.

  “I did,” she said in a small voice.

  “Figured.” He sounded more disgusted than alarmed. “The good news is, we’ve got a little time. Whoever’s calling the shots is still hoping the bomb worked. When the people on the ground figure out it didn’t, they still have to call the bad news in, and whoever’s listening to your conversations has to remember about the 7-Eleven. So if the reporter’s there and we’re quick, we ’ve got a shot at getting away before they put it all together.”

  Jess digested that.

  “Who were you talking to, anyway?”

  There was a pause, as if he were debating answering. “Harris Lowell.”

  Jess’s jaw dropped. “The White House Chief of Staff?”

  “That’s the guy.”

  “Oh my God.” Her world rocked on its axis. “At least tell me you believe me now about the Secret Service being involved.”

  “Looking that way.”

  “And one of your agent friends from the house attacking me in the hospital.”

  “That way, too.”

  It wasn’t a ringing endorsement of everything she ’d told him, but for the moment it would have to do, because just then they reached the outer edge of the woods. The terrain before them was awash in moonlight. It seemed hideously open compared to the darkness and heavy cover they were leaving behind. Jess realized that she could see it all clearly: another strip of tall grass about thirty yards wide, a narrow ditch, and then
the road that intersected the one the RAV4 was still burning on. On the other side of the road was more tall grass leading into more woods. The intersection was up to the left. Jess couldn’t see it from where they stood. The road that led to the 7-Eleven—a continuation of the road the RAV4 was on—could be just glimpsed as a solid black strip cutting through the trees across the road.

  Moonlight wasn’t the reason she could see so much, Jess realized about as soon as Mark went plunging into the grass, and suddenly she had to work a little harder to breathe. Cold little curls of fear twisted through her insides. It was no longer quite as dark as it had been. The deep charcoal of night was slowly fading into a paler shade of gray. Dawn would break soon. . . .

  Jess’s breath caught as a terrible thought occurred.

  “If they don’t know it already, they’ll know we ’re not in the car as soon as it gets light. They’ll be able to see our trail through the grass.”

  “Yeah.” Mark didn’t sound like this revelation came as a surprise. Clearly, it had already occurred to him. “As much as I think your little chat with the reporter was a bad idea in principle, that’s what we’re banking on now. You better pray he ’s there, because we ’re running out of time.”

  “What happens if he’s not?” she asked, anxiety making her voice catch as he reached the ditch and, gathering himself, jumped across. She hung on, her arms tightening around his neck even as his grip tightened on her, then cast a scared glance back the way they had come. Through the trees, she realized she could still see the orange glow of the fire—but not the dark outline of the car parked behind it. Should she be able to see it? Had she ever been able to see it? God, she couldn’t remember.