by Tom Clancy
“This later?”
Lathrop breathed, exhaled.
“Zero hour,” he said. “Time to move or crash.”
Another pause. Ricci held Lathrop’s gaze.
“I need more,” he said.
“You’re getting to where it costs.”
“We can take care of that part between us,” Ricci said. “Come on. Talk about the part I need right now.”
Lathrop sat there for a very long moment, then finally nodded.
“There’s a weapon,” he began. “A serious weapon.”
* * *
Ricci phoned Glenn on his cellular from a coffee shop bubbling with students on West 4th Street, opposite the broad stone steps of NYU’s Tisch Hall.
“Ricci,” Glenn said, his semi-distracted voice that of someone glancing at a caller ID display. “I was just gonna contact you.”
“You out of the cop’s office yet?” Ricci paused, absorbing Glenn’s words. “Hold it, contact me about what?”
“Something’s gone down upstate,” Glenn said. Speaking quickly now. “Earl shook our guy at the motel before his support could get there.”
Ricci took a snatch of breath.
“Shook him in the U-Haul?”
“Yeah, looks like some kind of setup,” Glenn said. “Noriko got word over the phone and cut the meeting with Ruiz short—”
“You give him anything on Earl or Kiran?”
“No, not yet. We didn’t know how much to share, wanted to figure out what to do next—”
“Never mind figuring,” Ricci said. “Just hurry up and meet me at headquarters.”
“Wait a minute, I—”
“Headquarters, both of you,” Ricci interrupted. “Soon as you can.”
Then he pressed the END button on his touchpad, reached into his coat for his Palm computer, and set it on the table in front of him.
* * *
It took Ricci just minutes to read the van’s license-plate number off the digital photo he’d uploaded to his Palmtop, obtain a U-Haul nationwide 800 hotline from directory assistance, and, under the pretext that he was a renter who might have left his wallet inside the van, feed a customer service operator its plate number so she could search for the location where it had been picked up.
“The information’s right here on my screen, sir,” she said. “It’s an affiliate in Trenton, New Jersey.”
“You have directions from Manhattan?”
“I’m sorry, no, but there is an address, and a direct exchange—”
“Let me have it.”
The operator did, and Ricci called an instant after he hung up on her.
Three rings later, a man’s voice: “Hullo, Turnpike U-Haul.”
“I’m bringing a van back to you,” Ricci said. And again read off the plate number. “Want to confirm you’re the same center that leased it.”
The guy paused a second at the other end.
“You Mr. Donovan?” he said, sounding confused.
Ricci thought.
“A friend of his,” he said. “Why?”
“Well, I explained to him that it only comes and goes from our center for two days max,” the U-Haul rep said. His bewilderment seemed to deepen. “Also, he just had one driver listed on his application. Means nobody but Mr. Donovan should be getting behind the van’s wheel, let alone retur—”
“He can’t make it,” Ricci broke in. “Got to be me or nobody.”
“Look, something happens to you on the road, I’m screwed insurance-wise—”
“I told you my friend isn’t around,” Ricci said. “Now you want the damn thing back or not?”
The guy paused a beat, issued a resigned sigh
“You the same fella who drove Donovan over yesterday?”
“No, how come?”
“Because I’m trying to save you some time,” he said. “He — your pal who isn’t around, that is — mentioned that they went past the Raja Petrochemical plant coming here, saw those big acid gas storage tanks out back… which tells me they must’ve got lost off the Turnpike ramp, driven out of their way trying to find my lot.”
Ricci’s hand tightened on the phone.
“You better tell me how to get to you,” he said.
* * *
Earl had driven the U-Haul down I-87 almost to where it ran into the toll plaza when he passed a sign that said one of those public rest stops was coming up on his left.
It would be a gem of a place to give Zaheer — who hadn’t spoken a word from over in the passenger seat since they split the Super 8—his hard jolt of reality.
He rolled on for a quarter mile, saw the entrance to the stop, and grooved the van toward the access lane.
Zaheer looked at him, suddenly seemed to remember he had a tongue that worked.
“Where are you going?”
“Gentleman’s room.” Earl nodded at the visitors’ building that had come into view. “We’ve got a long stretch of road ahead to our exit.”
Zaheer’s expression was incredulous.
“You’ve lost your senses,” he said. “It was you who feared that a watch had been placed on the motel. We cannot pull over now.”
Earl shrugged. That was almost a joke, Zaheer calling him screwy. Here was somebody who was heading off to die as some kind of martyr, looking for paradise on the other side of a cloud that would turn everyone for hundreds of miles around into a popped, runny blister. Somebody who had to damn well know those biohazard suits they’d been given wouldn’t offer squat for protection when the laser cannon in back zapped Raja’s HF tanks… that nothing would be able to shield them, not at ground zero.
A real fucking hoot, all right, his fellow road warrior Zaheer. He really believed the payment he’d brought from Hasul would be worth something in the world beyond.
“There was a watch, we beat it,” Earl said now. “And far as stopping, that’s Mother Nature’s call, not mine.”
Before Zaheer could issue another squeak of protest, Earl swung into the deserted parking area outside the redbrick visitors’ house and cut the van’s motor, leaving the keys in the ignition.
“You waiting out here?” he said.
Zaheer gave a curt, silent nod of displeasure.
Shrugging, Earl climbed out of the van, entered the unoccupied visitors’ station, and pushed through the men’s room door.
In a locked toilet stall, he took a minute or two to urinate — no sense making himself a liar—and then zipped up and transferred his Sig-Sauer compact nine-mil from its peekaboo holster under his pant leg to his coat pocket, where he’d keep his hand comfortably around its grip and be able to bring it out fast and easy the minute he got back to the van.
Leaving the bathroom, Earl realized the only thing he hadn’t remembered to do was flush after himself… but then you couldn’t cover everything when you were in a hurry.
* * *
As Earl exited the visitors’ station, hands in his coat pockets, Zaheer sat with the fingers of his right hand wrapped around the butt of a Zastava Model 70, the Russian police pistol tucked in the space between the U-Haul’s passenger seat and door. He did not trust the kaffir for an instant, and would be prepared should he attempt any betrayal. Should no such attempt be made, Zaheer would simply release his hold on the little pocket automatic and continue with the mission as planned.
Either way, he was satisfied he’d covered every possibility.
Now Earl approached the van, took one hand out of his coat, reached out to open the driver’s door.
“Now that was a blessed relief,” he said the moment it swung wide.
Zaheer saw the gun appear in Earl’s other hand at the same instant, faster than he would have anticipated.
He brought up his Zastava without hesitation, pulling the trigger even as Earl fired his weapon, both barrels crashing and spitting their loads.
His face contorted, Earl staggered backward, clutched his chest, and went tumbling into the brown grass in front of the building.
; Zaheer dropped his gun onto his seat with a grimace, then, fiery pain spreading up the left side of his abdomen. He must hurry now to carry out what fate had designed for him.
Shoving himself into the driver’s seat, he simultaneously keyed the ignition and slammed the door shut. Then he footed the accelerator, tearing out of the visitors’ stop and back onto the Thruway as quickly as he could manage.
* * *
The motorcycles darted onto the Jersey Turnpike from the I-95 turnoff, an even half dozen of them weaving through heavy four-wheeled traffic as it eked southward from the bottlenecked George Washington Bridge. Lightweight, nimble, slender, and speedy, they were virtually the same bikes UpLink had designed for the Defense Department to equip the 75th Rangers for rapid deployment and attack, providing maneuverability where there was no real room to maneuver.
Ricci bent over the handlebars of his cycle, his eyes scouring the road from behind the visor of his molded speed helmet, looking for any sign of the U-Haul’s orange-and-blue markings. Astride the cycle to his right in a narrow channel between lanes of trucks and cars, Derek Glenn was doing the same, as were the four other Sword ops in black biker jackets who had buzzed hornetlike from the Soho req lot.
“You see anything?” Glenn said into his wireless hands-free.
“No,” Ricci said. He shot around a station wagon plastered with old, sun-bleached New Jersey Nets bumper stickers: RIDE THE A-TRAIN TO THE RIM! KENYON MARTIN — NEVER SATISFIED! “Not a goddamned thing.”
They rode on, juicing their engines, dodging and shimmying between the other vehicles on the ’pike. Factory complexes ranged to the left and right of dented metal safety rails, speed blurring their boxy geometries at the corners of the riders’ vision. They didn’t know if the van was out front or behind them, though behind would be far better, meaning they would probably beat it to the chemical plant. Out front meant they needed to make up a lead, and an undetermined one. The van could be a mile ahead or five, and they wouldn’t know until they saw it. The van could be parked outside those tanks filled with hydrofluoric acid, seconds away from puncturing them with a high-intensity laser beam at a distance of fifty or a hundred yards. It could be an eye-blink, a heartbeat, from ending any conjecture about its whereabouts, unleashing a noxious windborne cloud that would envelop every man, woman, and child in every vehicle on the road, snuffing their lives out like a corrosive fist reaching from the arm of the Grim Reaper himself.
Ricci came up on an SUV’s rear windshield, slid sideways. Slipped behind the wide rump of a Greyhound passenger bus, cut sharply around it. He heard a rubber-on-blacktop screech, didn’t look back, glad whatever accident was gumming things up at the bridge had seemingly preoccupied the smokies and local cops, unable to worry too much about them anyway. Instead he raced on hard, gripping his bars, the soles of his boots pressed against his footpegs—
Then Glenn in the hands-free again. “Ricci, hey… look!”
Ricci glanced over at him, saw him gesturing, a high forward sweep of his right arm.
He followed its movement as he bumped over a pothole, saw the orange and blue. A van? He thought so. It was maybe an eighth of a mile off, small in his vision, too small for Ricci to positively verify it was the van. But it was close to the exit that led to Raja Petro, and he didn’t imagine for an instant that was coincidence.
Ricci opened his throttle and charged ahead, thinking he would at least have a chance to take his stab.
* * *
Weak from loss of blood, his shirt red and tacky where Earl’s bullet had penetrated just above his waist, Zaheer leaned over the steering wheel as he neared the turnpike exit, crawling along, moving through the dense metro-area traffic at a snail’s pace. He had put the full thrust of his will into reaching his objective, tunneled his concentration toward the normally automatic act of driving, and he could see that he was almost there, almost…
Then a sound behind him. Getting louder. At first its significance didn’t register. Zaheer knew he was dying from the gunshot wound, and just as the glorious task that lay ahead had summoned whatever was left of his fleshly powers, he had summoned what remained of his inner life force to answer the call. Everything outside had been pushed from his thoughts as extraneous, a waste of precious strength. But perhaps he had been wrong.
Perhaps…
There had been the one in the car at the motel.
The one Earl had thought might be a watcher.
Zaheer listened again. Or rather focused on what he could not do anything but hear. That sound. No… sounds. The combined drone of rapidly accelerating engines. Revving fast in slow traffic. How could the two be reconciled?
Zaheer pulled his mind from the tunnel around it long enough to grasp what was happening, looked into his sideview mirror, and saw the motorcycles swarming up from behind.
The curve of the exit ramp within eyeshot, Zaheer slapped his hand on the wheel, blasting the cars ahead of him with his horn.
He was determined to reach the exit ramp before the infidels could overtake him.
* * *
Three-quarters of an hour late for her sales-clerk job at the Rariton Mall’s Fashion Bee, a job she’d landed just a week ago in the tightest of employment markets, Johanna Hearns was already about to come apart behind the wheel over being stuck in traffic, pound the dash and scream like a madwoman in a fit of frustration, when the idiotic driver of the U-Haul behind her started in with his horn, signaling he wanted to get off at the exit a car or two up ahead of her.
Johanna shook her head, spewing a string of epithets that would have astonished her husband with their inventiveness — and he thought he knew them all, hardy-fucking-har. What did Chief Dirty Ballsucker in the van think? That he was the only one in a hurry? That she was deliberately holding him up because she liked sitting bumper-to-bumper breathing in the smell of exhaust fumes and Jersey swamp air? Or that maybe she just couldn’t get enough of Imus in the Morning on her car radio? And while she was making with the relevant questions, here was another: that honking nut job aside, where the fuck were the cops when you needed them?
Johanna did some Lamaze to keep her cool, a holdover from courses she’d taken when her youngest was born. Mr. U-Haul was in such a rush to get to charming Trenton, she’d get her own flashers going, hope somebody in the left lane was decent enough to hang back so she could shift into it, and let him go on his merry way.
Stay cool, stay cool, Johanna thought, and slapped on her signal.
She only hoped the van driver choked on his next meal.
* * *
“That’s our van,” Ricci said over the radio channel linking his bike team. “I see the plate number.”
“Son of a bitch.” This over the radio from Cole, one of the ops behind Ricci. “He’s riding his horn to the ramp, getting those people up ahead to move.”
Ricci zigzagged between lanes.
“Squeeze him,” he said, and shot forward.
* * *
The last of the vehicles in front of him finally out of his way, Zaheer had almost reached the exit ramp when the attack bikes began to catch up. He checked his side-views, saw several of them closing in on both sides from the rear, the two in the lead nearly at his flanks.
Gunning his engine, he took a jarring turn onto the 25 mph ramp at double the permitted speed.
* * *
Gaining, gaining, gaining.
Ricci fisted a surge of gas into his cycle’s engine, took the exit ramp between the left side of the U-Haul and the concrete barrier to his left, roping along on the narrow shoulder.
He pulled even with the driver’s window, was able to snatch a glance inside.
The dark-suit at the wheel looked back at him — and in his brief distraction started slewing from side to side on the ramp.
Ricci dropped back an instant before the van’s flank would have run him into the barricade, saw Glenn do the same as the U-Haul veered to the right. Too close behind Glenn, one of the other riders lost control of his
bike and took a vaulting jump over the barricade. The cycle flipped over sideways, hurling its rider from his banana seat to whatever was below the ramp.
Ricci heard his screaming begin over the wireless, heard it peak, then heard it abruptly stop.
“God almighty.” Glenn’s shocked voice in his ear now. “God almighty.”
“Cole,” Ricci said. “You hear me?”
“Yeah. That was Margolis. Shit, I think he—”
“Don’t think, just pull off and stay with him. The rest of you follow me.”
Ricci’s temples pounded. For a millisecond he was back in Earthglow, Nichols dying in his arms, turned into a sack of blood by the Wildcat. Ricci had felt something turn inside him. Grinding like a great stone wheel. I’m here with you, he’d told the kid. Be easy.
A millisecond.
It never ended.
Ricci saw the van pulling off the ramp ahead of him, and followed.
* * *
Grappling with the steering wheel at the bottom of the ramp, trying to keep it from wrenching out of his hands, Zaheer suddenly tasted blood. Coppery blood in his mouth, coming up from deep inside his body. There was a moment of greater weakness, his consciousness fading to gray.
Then he remembered the mission, the glory, and summoned himself again.
Al-hamdu lillahi, he mouthed silently. Repeatedly. Al-hamdu lillahi.
Feeling God guide his hand, Zaheer swung off the ramp, and as his eyes cleared, realized he’d turned the wrong way onto the boulevard into which it fed and was shooting into oncoming traffic.
* * *
The bikes were pouring off the exit ramp behind the van when it took its wide, erratic swing against the rush of traffic, then suddenly went screeching around in a U-turn.
Ricci heard a cacophonous outburst of horns as the stream of cars and trucks skidded and parted, saw two cars sideswipe while unsuccessfully veering to avoid a collision. There were screeches, a sickening crash, and then the van looped back in the right direction, roaring toward Ricci and the others, forcing them to scatter out of its way as it plunged ahead through two red lights and then barreled down a side street.