Pursuit

by ROBARDS, KAREN

  “Bigger trouble than I was in before.”

  “Oh, yeah.” His eyes cut toward her. There was a sudden glint of wry humor in them. “Of course, now they’re trying to kill me, too. They probably feel the job’s going to be a little harder.”

  “So call out the big guns, hmm?” As her grip tightened convulsively on the armrest, Jess took a deep breath. Panicking was useless. What she needed to do was stay calm so she could think. “Who do you think is behind this? Who could order out a black ops team? To hunt people down and murder them?”

  Despite her best efforts, her voice shook. To think that this could possibly be happening to her, in the United States of America, was mind-boggling.

  Mark was slouched down in the seat, his arms crossed over his chest, his long legs sprawled out in front of him. To the ordinary observer, his posture would look casual, even careless. Until they got a good look at his eyes. There was a cold watchfulness in them that reminded her of steel. They were the eyes of a man who had been trained to protect the lives of those he shielded by dying—or killing. Whichever it took.

  Jess took heart.

  “Not more than a handful of people.” He seemed unwilling to go on.

  “The President?”

  He nodded curtly. “Along with a small group of his top advisers. The Secretary of State. The Secretary of Defense. The Secretary of Homeland Security. People like that.”

  “Harris Lowell?”

  “Not on his own. Only if it was presumed he was acting on the order of the President.”

  Mark’s expression had grown increasingly thoughtful. By the time he finished that last sentence, he was frowning into space as if he were turning something over in his mind. Jess was just about to demand to know what that something was when the brakes squealed and the train shuddered into another station.

  Mark immediately stood up. She looked at him questioningly. Unless there was something she was missing, this definitely wasn’t their stop.

  “Before we do anything else, we ’ve got to muddy the waters.” Mark reached for her hand and pulled her up beside him. The doors opened, and riders started exiting the car as more filed in. Glancing nervously out through the windows, she realized that this station was much busier than the last, so busy that after only a moment she gave up on trying to scan every face and hunt for every dark suit. Seven a.m. marked the start of rush hour and, according to the big clock on the opposite wall, it was twelve minutes after that now. Maneuvering her so that she stood in line in front of him, Mark rested his hands lightly on her waist to give her some support and spoke in her ear as they filed out of the car. “It’s obvious that they were able to identify the truck and track it into town. We can’t take a direct route anywhere anymore. It ’s too easy to follow.”

  THE MAIN BRANCH of the library was a modern four-story glass-and-steel cube located on G Street NW at 9th. By the time Jess slid into a seat in front of one of its computers, it was after two p.m. She was wearing new-to-her jeans and a white Hanes T-shirt straight from a really new three-pack along with her own jacket, a pair of black Converse sneakers, and a D.C. United baseball cap. Mark was still in the blue dress shirt and black suit pants he’d been wearing all along. The only change was the addition of a newly acquired Redskins cap. At his insistence, they’d gone shopping at a Goodwill outlet that morning. Their purchases, which included a three-pack of cheap cotton panties for her and a pair of boxers for him, had mostly come from the clearance bin and had totaled seven dollars and twenty-two cents. Mark had insisted the wardrobe change was necessary to make them harder to spot, and Jess was glad for the fresh clothes, especially the sneakers, but she regretted spending the money. After eating lunch at Taco Bell, which had cost an alarming four dollars and ninety-eight cents for both of them, their kitty had shrunk to one hundred twenty-three dollars and eighty cents.

  Just thinking about it gave her palpitations.

  But at the moment, she’d filed it, along with a whole boatload of other terrifying things, under the category of something to worry about later. The first thing she did, upon sitting down at the computer, was e-mail her mother, who she knew would be frantic with worry as soon as she heard about Davenport’s death, especially considering the fact that Jess was no longer answering her cell phone. Using Grace ’s account to make it less obvious in case anybody was monitoring her mother’s incoming e-mails, Jess left a message that she was fine, under Secret Service protection, and would be in touch as soon as she could. Then, she checked out a license plate number Mark gave her—BCW-248. It was registered to a chain of local dental clinics, which made Mark snort, “Yeah, right,” when she told him. After that, she concentrated on gaining access to the phone records that, she hoped, would provide the information they needed. Ordinarily something like this was a snap. She knew how to bypass the access codes and passwords, how to worm her way into the phone company’s or the Internet service provider’s or the IRS’s or whoever’s information systems, how to zero in on the individual in question and pull up the appropriate data: It was part of what had made her so valuable to Davenport.

  But almost immediately she ran into a problem.

  “What?” Mark whispered as she quit tapping and frowned. He was leaning on the back of the open, shoulder-height cubicle, scanning the screen along with her. The screen that was, unfortunately, blank except for a code that she ’d seen only once before.

  Not good.

  “Shh. It looks like somebody’s pulled the records.” There were maybe a dozen other users scattered among the terminals that lined the room. All of them looked harmless and appeared to be totally engrossed in their own work, but the last thing they needed was to attract any attention.

  “Whose?”

  “Shh.”

  Annette Cooper’s, Davenport ’s, Marian’s, Prescott’s, the driver’s—she hadn’t known his name but Mark supplied it when asked. As the pattern became alarmingly clear, she checked Marty Solomon’s. Same code. Same blank screen.

  She faced the truth with a thrill of fear. The speed of it, the thoroughness of it, the power it would take to do such a thing, was terrifying.

  “They’ve pulled them all. Everybody who’s been killed. There’s nothing here.”

  “Shit.”

  “Shh.”

  Okay. The next step was to try to access the records of likely suspects. Like Harris Lowell. Jess wasn’t optimistic, and her lack of optimism was rewarded: His records were unavailable, too. Ditto the President ’s, of course, and the Secretaries of State, Defense, and Homeland Security—those whom Mark had mentioned as having enough clout to send out a government hit squad—as well as a few random shots of her own, like the Vice President and the Speaker of the House.

  All blanks.

  Fingers poised on the keyboard, Jess stared at the blinking code on a screen that should have been crawling with phone numbers, and thought. With no way to determine who any of the victims had spoken to in their last hours, it seemed they were well and truly stymied. They would have to find some other means. . . .

  Wait.

  Just like hacking into computer files, the key to getting the information they needed was to go in through the back door.

  The records of high-level officials clearly were too protected to be accessed by a skilled amateur at a public computer. And whoever was behind this was smart enough to have pulled the pertinent records for those who had been killed. No one was getting to those.

  But had they pulled the records of the people still in the game? The minor players, the foot soldiers, the extras?

  To start off with, how about the limo company? Aztec Limos: Jess knew the name because that was the company Davenport always used.

  Jess smiled, a satisfied little curl of her lips brought on by a flash of, if she had to say so herself, absolutely brilliant insight.

  “What?” Mark must have seen the smile, because he moved to stand beside her, thrusting his hands into his trouser pockets as he leaned forward to peer at the sc
reen.

  “I’m going to check the limo company.”

  Pulling up the records was a snap. No attempt had been made to make them inaccessible. Jess paged to the night in question and found Davenport’s cell phone number. It was the calls that came in immediately afterward that interested her most.

  “Anything?”

  “Maybe. That’s Davenport ’s number.” She pointed. “See those calls that came in to the company after that? The three of them right after Davenport’s are from the same number. I’m guessing they’re from wherever the limo was heading, checking to see why it didn’t arrive as scheduled. You notice they were all placed between one and one-fifteen, and then they stopped.”

  “Because word of the accident was getting out.”

  “Yes.” She pointed to the calls that started arriving nearly every minute right after the last of the three. Hundreds of calls, one right after the other. “Those are probably reporters and news agencies. But we need to check them, too, just to be sure.”

  “Can you print that out?”

  Jess hit print. The distant hum of the printer going to work sent Mark off to retrieve the papers.

  Annette Cooper had accused Prescott of calling someone, presumably backup, right before the Lincoln had been forced from the road.

  “Give me the full names of the Secret Service agents who were at your house last night.” Jess scooted a pad and pencil, thoughtfully provided by the library and left in the cubicle for the use of its patrons, toward Mark when he returned. “Also their phone numbers and addresses, if you know them. And Prescott’s, too.”

  “Why?”

  “Mrs. Cooper accused Prescott of calling for backup. If he did, it’s possible that whoever he called either was in the car behind us or sent the car.”

  “I know their names, partial addresses, and Fielding’s number.” He bent over, writing. “The other numbers were in my phone.”

  Which meant they were lost. But as long as she had the names, she could work it out.

  Fielding’s records came up beautifully. Scrolling quickly through them, working without Prescott ’s cell phone number, Jess realized that knowing the date and approximate time of the call would be enough.

  Bingo.

  Elated, she almost called out to Mark and stopped there. But then, just to make sure, she decided to check Matthews’s phone records.

  Another bingo. Same number, presumably Prescott’s, two minutes later.

  Frowning, she went into Wendell’s.

  Bingo again. Same number again, four minutes earlier than Fielding’s hit. And then a second one ninety seconds after Matthews’s.

  “So what ’ve you got?”

  “Prescott texted Fielding, Matthews, and Wendell separately in the ten minutes before the crash. Actually, he texted Wendell twice.”

  “He contacted all three? You’re shitting me.”

  “Nope.”

  The problem was, the fact that Prescott had contacted all three agents made the information practically useless. It did nothing to pinpoint a traitor in the ranks. As they both silently absorbed that, Jess hit print so they could comb through the records more thoroughly later. Mark again went to fetch the printouts before anyone else could pick them up.

  Prescott would have been in the Lincoln with them at the time. Jess realized that the picture of him frantically texting his fellow agents fit with what she remembered. That’s why he had been so quiet in the front seat and had paid so little attention to the histrionics in the back. The First Lady had been right on the money: Prescott had contacted backup. Actually, when Jess thought about it, she had been right on the money about everything so far.

  I’m a fucking prisoner. The words echoed through Jess’s mind. Annette Cooper had been referring to her Secret Service detail, Jess was almost sure.

  Of which Mark had been special agent in charge.

  Just because of that, and because she was now a charter member of Paranoids-R-Us, and because she wanted to make absolutely certain that none of her really sick residual suspicions weren’t so, Jess keyed in Mark’s information.

  His cell phone records popped right up. No problemo.

  Jess’s eyes widened and her heart started beating faster as she paged through them. Before the crash, nothing jumped out at her. But in the days after the crash, a familiar number occurred with increasing frequency: Davenport ’s.

  In fact, Mark’s last call to Davenport had been placed some two hours before he had fired a shot at Jess and then stepped out the window.

  “Jess. We gotta go.” Mark was back, thrusting the folded printouts into his pants pocket as he spoke. She barely had enough presence of mind to push the quit button to exit the file before she looked up at him.

  Blindly.

  “Get up. We ’re leaving.” He hit the power button on the computer, turning it off as he grabbed her arm and pulled her to her feet. She must have looked as stunned as she felt, because he gave her arm a little shake. “Jess. They’re here.”

  25

  What?” That got her adrenaline going. Whatever he may or may not have done, she discovered that at her core, she did not fear Mark. However, she feared those who were chasing them to the point of teeth-chattering terror.

  “I checked out the window when I was coming back with the printouts.” Mark grabbed her purse and the plastic bag with their old clothes and the new purchases from Goodwill as he spoke. “I saw the Dark Car drive past. If they’re in the vicinity, you can bet your sweet life it ’s because they know we ’re here.”

  They were moving as he spoke, Jess managing to keep up with Mark’s long strides because of the sheer juicing power of abject fear. Her heart pounded. Her pulse hammered in her ears. Her stomach—well, the poor thing had almost forgotten what if felt like not to be twisted into a pretzel.

  “Somebody must have tagged the files.” Jess had been afraid of that. Of course, if somebody went to all the trouble of pulling the information, tagging the files so they would be notified if someone tried to access them would be the next logical step. She had at least hoped to have a little more time before anybody noticed and took action. “When I tried to access them, it sent out an alert.”

  “Which they were able to trace back to the computers here.” Mark’s voice was grim. They were moving through the third floor’s open center aisle as they spoke, heading, Jess realized, toward the far corner of the building, where, presumably, there was a staircase and elevator bank other than the central one. It was Friday afternoon, school had apparently just let out, and the rows of tall shelves were fairly well populated. A story session, complete with small chairs and a yellow-smocked librarian, was getting ready to get started in one corner, Jess saw as they reached a back hall, which held restrooms and an emergency exit.

  “How did you know where the exit was?” Jess asked in a hurried whisper as Mark, holding her hand tightly, raced her toward it. Unspoken between them ran the knowledge that they had very little time; their pursuers would almost certainly come straight up to the computer room, realize immediately that their quarry had fled, and give chase. Remembering the open nature of the corner on which the library was situated, Jess realized they would be ridiculously easy to spot as soon as they left the building.

  “I read the signs.”

  Before Jess could point out an alarm would probably sound if he opened the door—in her experience, emergency exits were like that—he flipped open the little plastic door on the small red rectangle set into the wall by the exit and pulled the fire alarm.

  Immediately, loud, clanging peals filled the air. Jess’s jaw dropped as he pulled open the door to the emergency exit—an alarm did sound, a tinny little one almost lost beneath the full-throated scream of the other—dragged her into the stairwell, picked her up, and ran down the stairs with her.

  She didn’t even protest.

  “That was brilliant,” she said, holding tight and regarding him with awe.

  “Fuckin’ A.”

  By th
e time they reached the ground floor, the stairwell behind them was clogged with people heading down. More people streamed out the exit at the bottom of the stairs. Emerging into the crisp spring air, looking desperately all around, feeling hideously exposed in the bright sunshine that had burned off most of the morning’s chill, Jess saw that there were swarms of people pouring out of the building, milling around on the sidewalks, coming out of nearby businesses to stop and stare. Librarians tried to herd the kids into a group and keep them out of the street at the same time, with scant success. Patrons holding books and magazines blended into the growing crowd. This was an area of three- and four-story buildings, mom-and-pop-type stores, lots of foot traffic, and lots of vehicular traffic, all of which was slowing down and gawking and honking. Jess could hear the wail of sirens rushing to the rescue.

  Putting her down, taking her arm, Mark pulled her out into the middle of the street at a near run. Trailing behind, Jess nearly got mowed down by a startled-looking mom in a minivan at approximately the same time that she saw a tall, dark-haired, granite-faced man in a black suit thrusting through the swirl of bystanders at the corner.

  He was obviously looking for something. Jess felt a jolt of terror as she realized what—or, rather, who.

  “Mark,” Jess squeaked, as her eyes stayed glued to the man, who continued to wade through throngs of people and head in their direction without, she was sure, having yet seen them. “There ’s one of them.”

  Jess heard the quick intake of Mark’s breath as he looked—at the exact same instant as the black-suited man saw them. Throat tightening with alarm, Jess watched the bad guy’s gaze sweep over them, freeze, and come back. His face registered surprised recognition, and then he stuck his hand beneath his suit jacket. One word popped into Jess’s horrified mind: gun.

  Her heart leaped.

  “Mark,” she moaned in warning, but he had already seen, or maybe not; maybe the plan was already in motion and she had missed it, because he grabbed her and thrust her ahead of him.

  “Get in.”