“And to do that you rented a room at a fancy resort hotel in Corpus Christi?”
“Hey, did you see the babes at that place? I figured I might as well partake of a little eye candy while I was pondering the fate of the world.”
Ford couldn’t help but laugh. “You’re a skuzzy little weasel, aren’t you?”
“Maybe, but that doesn’t mean I want to see the government murdering its own citizens.”
Ford glanced sharply at him as the pickup bounced over a stretch of road that resembled an old-fashioned washboard. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Those bio-weapons … they’re not being developed for the military. I don’t think the army even knows about them.”
Ford muttered a curse. This was starting to sound even worse than he’d thought.
“Start at the beginning,” he said.
“Okay. There are several projects in development at Casa del Diablo, but the one that’s closest to being finished, the one I was working on, is a new nerve gas. It’s incredibly lethal. A tiny amount will stop a person’s heart in less than two seconds.”
“Nasty stuff, but it doesn’t sound like anything all that new.”
“There are two things different about it,” Earl explained. “The first is that it’s tailored to the human genome. Dogs, cats, livestock … they can breathe the stuff all day without it doing a thing to them. Even chimps have enough genetic differences from humans that it doesn’t affect them. The second thing is that the gas’s window of viability is extremely narrow. It lasts less than five minutes. After that it becomes inert and harmless.”
“So you could spray a town with the stuff from the air and then waltz in five minutes later to find all the people dead but everything else intact, including the pets.”
Earl nodded. “That’s right. Like you said, nasty stuff.”
“It seems to me, though, that its only applications would be military in nature. You’d only use it in a war, right? And we couldn’t even do that now, with all the laws against bio-weapons.”
“You could use it against anybody you wanted to get rid of. The thing that made me decide I had to get out of there was …” Earl stopped and blew out a breath, as if he had to work himself up to telling what he knew. “Was when I found some documents I wasn’t supposed to find. A report from the chief of the project to the Department of Homeland Security and the director of the Federal Protective Service.”
Ford’s hands tightened on the pickup’s steering wheel. He had been overseas a lot during the past ten or twelve years, but that didn’t mean he was completely ignorant of what was going on in the country. Like many in the intelligence community, though, he had believed that what he did was separate, for the most part, from politics. It didn’t matter who was in the White House. The country would always have enemies who wanted to take it down. It was the job of Ford and Parker and all the other warriors who operated in the shadows to see that that didn’t happen.
But he had heard the rumors about how under the previous administration, the Department of Homeland Security had turned most of its attention away from outward threats and begun to concentrate on what it considered homegrown terrorism.
In theory that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. There were violent nutjobs of all nationalities and beliefs. Always had been and always would be, more than likely.
But the previous President’s paranoia about right-wing conspiracies against her had infected Homeland Security until anybody who expressed the least bit of disagreement with her policies, from an editorial writer for a small-town paper to a radio talk-show host to the executives of the one cable news network that didn’t toe the liberal line, had an official file in Washington labeling them as potential terrorists.
It wasn’t just Homeland Security that was affected, either. People who disagreed publicly with the President suddenly found their tax returns being audited at a much higher rate than those of the general public. New wiretapping and surveillance laws that were much more intrusive and frightening than previous ones were rammed through Congress by the very liberals who had decried such tactics only a few years earlier, a blatant example of the double standard that ruled Washington.
The new Federal Protective Service was part of the Department of Homeland Security, Ford knew. But it had just been formed, and as far as Ford was aware, a director for it hadn’t even been named yet.
When he said as much to Earl Trussell while he wrestled the pickup around a bend in the road, Earl asked, “Have you heard of a guy named General Stone?”
“Weldon Stone?”
“That’s him.”
Ford grimaced. “Yeah, I know who he is.”
General Weldon Stone was a career military man who had been eased into retirement a couple of years earlier after a series of public clashes with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Stone had been in command of U.S. forces in the Middle East, and his growing reluctance to pursue Islamic terrorists because of what he termed “their legitimate grievances against Israel and the United States” had finally led to his removal. That had brought on an anti-Semitic tirade to the news media that was bad enough to force the previous administration to sever its ties with him.
“Stone’s the director of the FPS,” Earl said. “As least according to the file I saw, he is.”
So the new administration, which was cold if not openly hostile to Israel, had brought back General Stone and placed him in charge of the new national police force. That was not good, Ford thought. Stone was a maniac, the sort of inflexible fanatic who thought that anybody who disagreed with his political views was not only stupid but evil and ought to be wiped off the face of the earth. And since his political views had slanted more and more to the left over the years, he was now very much at home in Washington.
“This is the guy they’re going to give that new nerve gas?” Ford asked. Despite the heat of the day and the sweat that made his shirt stick to him, he felt an icy chill inside.
“Yeah,” Earl said. “You can see now why I was worried.”
“There’s no way they can get away with using it against our own people. The country wouldn’t stand for it.”
“Are you kidding? The country will stand for anything if the guy in the White House says it’s the right thing to do.”
Unfortunately, that was probably true. A large part of the population thought the President could do no wrong, and with the media constantly reinforcing that idea, that percentage grew larger and larger all the time.
“Anyway,” Earl went on, “they’ll probably try to keep it quiet. Say somebody’s giving the administration a lot of trouble. They pipe the stuff into his house, kill him and his family, and then blame it on a carbon monoxide leak or something. Even if they wanted to use it for something bigger, like taking out a whole town, they could say the water supply got contaminated by some corporation. You know how those people like to blame corporations for everything bad that happens.”
Ford nodded slowly. “Yeah, yeah, I see where you’re going. No wonder finding out about it shook you up.”
“I may be a weasel, but I’m still an American,” Earl said with a note of pride in his voice.
Suddenly, Ford yelled, “Hang on, Brad!” He jammed on the brakes and hauled hard on the steering wheel, sending the rear end of the pickup slewing around. The truck went into a sideways skid and came to a stop about two feet from the edge of a sheer drop-off where the dirt road ended. The road had been going up a slight rise, so Ford hadn’t been able to see the drop-off until it was almost too late.
He twisted around in the seat to look through the broken window into the pickup bed. Parker was still back there, clinging to the side of the pickup with a slightly wide-eyed look on his face. “What the hell!” he said.
“We’ve run out of room to run,” Ford said. “Last stop, everybody out!”
CHAPTER 30
The dust cloud swirled over the pickup and began to thin as Ford and Earl climbed quickly out of the cab and Parker
jumped down from the bed. Out here in the middle of nowhere, it was quiet enough so that the growl of the SUV’s engine as it powered toward them was shockingly loud.
Ford saw the black vehicle. It was about three hundred yards behind them and coming fast. The drop-off wasn’t too deep, only about a dozen feet to a narrow creek that twisted across the countryside. He saw what was left of some thick posts that indicated a bridge had crossed the creek at some time in the past. It must have been swept away by a flash flood, he thought, and was never rebuilt. What remained had been left to rot.
“Get down there,” he told Earl as he and Parker crouched behind the pickup bed and leveled their pistols at the onrushing SUV.
“What?” Earl yelped. “There’s no trail.”
“Then jump! It won’t kill you. Take off up the creek.”
“What about you two?”
Parker said, “We’ll slow those bastards down. Go, Earl!”
Earl swallowed hard, sat down on the edge of the bank, and slid off. Ford heard him thud to the ground at the bottom of the drop-off but didn’t turn around to look at him.
“You land all right, Earl?” he called.
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess I’m okay.”
“Then get the hell out of here!”
The two agents opened fire. They knew their shots were hitting the heavily armored SUV, but it was like throwing pebbles at a runaway locomotive. The SUV didn’t slow down.
“Get ready to jump,” Ford warned.
“Yeah,” Parker said. It would be like on the Indian Point bridge back in Corpus.
Only it wasn’t, because the driver of the SUV suddenly braked, too, and brought his vehicle sliding to a halt with the passenger side toward the pickup. Someone inside kicked the door open and the chatter of an automatic weapon ripped through the air.
Ford and Parker ducked as the slugs pounded into the pickup. Ford knew it was a lot harder to make a vehicle’s gas tank blow up than the movies made it appear, but when the sharp reek of spilled gasoline filled his nose, he knew the tank had been holed and it was only a matter of time until a spark set it off.
“Jump!” he said.
He and Parker whirled around and leaped off the edge of the bank. Behind them, a ball of flame erupted and engulfed the pickup. That was yet another vehicle he and Parker had gotten blown up, Ford thought as he landed in the shallow creek and went to his hands and knees, feeling the heat of the blast on the back of his neck. They were racking up quite a score in automotive destruction.
The sound of splashing made him glance to his left. Earl was running away down the creek with desperate speed. Ford and Parker went after him. They heard the men from the SUV shouting above them.
“Sounds like … just two of them,” Ford said between panting breaths. “Stop and … make a stand?”
“They’ve got us … outgunned,” Parker said. “Better try to give them the slip.”
What Parker said was true. All they had were the two pistols. The guys after them had automatic weapons and a grenade launcher, for God’s sake! Ford promised himself that if they made it out of this mess alive, he would never go on a mission again armed with anything less than a bazooka.
But, knowing what he knew now about Casa del Diablo and its connection to the guy in the White House, he figured he would never be going on a mission for the Company again anyway. Those days were over and done with. He would have a target on his back for the rest of his life….
Unless they could somehow get the truth out and convince enough people to believe it.
They could worry about that later, Ford told himself. Right now his only concern was their immediate survival.
Parker said, “Fargo! Where the hell did Earl go?”
Ford looked along the creek, but didn’t see the little scientist. Earl had been moving fast, but not fast enough to get completely out of sight.
Then an arm emerged from a clump of brush and dead limbs against one side of the bank and waved frantically to them.
“Guys! Guys! Over here!”
Ford and Parker ran to the brush and pushed it aside. Behind it was a depression that erosion had hollowed out of the bank. It was too shallow to be called a cave, but Ford thought it was big enough so that all three of them could crowd in there.
They did. Ford and Parker pulled the dead brush back in place in front of them. Their bodies shielded Earl, who was pressed against the hollow’s rear wall.
“Careful,” Earl said in a strained voice. “I’ve still gotta breathe back here.”
“Pipe down,” Ford whispered. “Not a sound, understand?”
They stood there in complete silence. Using the iron discipline they had learned from years in a dangerous profession, the two agents slowed their breathing until it was inaudible.
A few moments later, they heard footsteps crunching through the sand not far away. The searchers were still above them on the bank. The footsteps grew even louder, until they were right above the hollow.
Then, while the three men hidden there held their breath, the searchers moved on.
Not for long, though. The footsteps stopped, and a man’s voice said, “You’re sure they came this direction?”
“I heard the splashing as they ran along the creek this way,” another man replied.
“Then where the hell did they go?”
“I don’t know. Let’s climb down there and see if we can find any tracks.”
They wouldn’t find what they were looking for, Ford thought, because they had already gone farther than their quarry. But when the killers realized that, they would probably double back.
He and Parker looked at each other. This would probably be their only chance to get the drop on the would-be assassins, and they knew it.
The sounds they heard told them that the men were climbing down the bank about twenty feet to the left. When they heard feet splashing in the creek, they looked at each other again and nodded.
With a splintering of dead limbs, they burst out of the brush and leveled their guns at the two men.
Unfortunately, the men didn’t have their backs to Ford and Parker, but at least they were half-turned away. The split-second delay in being forced to turn and raise their automatic weapons gave the two agents time to fire. Shots blasted from the pistols.
They had expected the pursuers to be wearing flak jackets, so Ford and Parker both went for head shots. They drilled their targets, sending slugs coring through the brains of the two men. The killers flopped bonelessly into the creek, polluting the water with the blood and brain matter that seeped from the holes in their skulls.
More footsteps pounded on the bank above them. There had been three enemies left, not just two. Ford cursed as he and Parker swung around and lifted their guns. The third flak-jacketed killer had already slid to a halt and his finger was tightening on the trigger of the assault rifle he had pointed at them.
Earl burst from the brush and flung a broken tree limb at the man just as he fired. It was a good throw, right at the man’s face so that he flinched involuntarily and the bullets from his gun whipped through the air above Ford and Parker. The two of them fired at the same time. Their bullets, traveling at an upward angle, tore through the assassin’s throat, severed his spine, and pulped his brain. He jerked spasmodically, dropped his rifle, and pitched off the bank to land facedown in the creek with a huge splash.
“God, I hope there’s not any more of them!” Ford said fervently.
“Get back in the hole, Earl,” Parker snapped.
“Hey, in case you guys didn’t notice, I think I just saved your lives,” Earl said.
“Yeah, thanks,” Ford said. “Get back in the hole until we check things out.”
Parker backed off to the far side of the creek and scanned the bank as far as he could see. Ford made sure the three men were dead and gathered up their weapons.
“Anything? “ he called to Parker.
“Nothing that I can see or hear. I think that was the last of them.”
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“All right. Earl, come here and help me with this gear.”
Earl pushed his way through the brush and walked toward Ford. He made a point of not looking directly at the bloody corpses. His face was a little green now. “You, uh, killed them,” he said.
“Yep. Seemed like the thing to do at the time,” Ford drawled.
“Doesn’t it, I don’t know, bother you? Now that it’s all over, I mean, and you’re not caught up in the heat of battle.”
“We weren’t caught up in the heat of battle. That’ll get you killed. The man who keeps his nerves cool is the one who usually survives.” Ford handed him web belts full of ammunition that he had stripped off the dead men. “You can carry these.”
Earl grunted under the weight of the belts. “Aren’t you going to give me one of their guns?”
“Have you ever shot a gun?”
“Well… no. Only in video games.”
“Then I think it’s safe to assume that you don’t know how to use one of these babies that fires more than a thousand rounds in a minute.”
“Uh, no, I guess not. “ Earl hefted the belts. “What are we gonna do now?”
“Take their SUV and get the hell out of here,” Parker said as he rejoined them. “We have to find some place to hole up and figure out our next move.”
“Before they find us again and try to kill us again, you mean.”
“I’d say that’s pretty inevitable,” Ford told him.
They found a place where they could climb out of the creek bed and started toward the black SUV, which was about a hundred and fifty yards away. Black smoke still rose from the burned wreckage of the pickup they had been using.
“You think they left the keys in it?” Earl asked.
“Doesn’t matter, “ Parker said. “We can get it running.”
“Once we’ve made sure it’s not booby-trapped,” Ford added.
“They’d do that? Booby-trap their own vehicle to make sure no one else used it?”
“Oh, yeah. That’d be the smart move, wouldn’t it? Those boys weren’t quite as lucky as we were, but they were smart enough.”
“FPS wouldn’t hire dummies,” Parker put in.
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