by Penny McCall
Several people pulled out cell phones. Cole raced for the door, and Harmony was right on his heels, getting a flash of Veda and Ron, backdropped by their RV, telling a roving reporter how they’d been in fear for their lives.
They hit the car, Cole taking the passenger seat. “Did you see—”
“Yeah,” Harmony said over the sound of the engine roaring to life when she sparked the ignition wires together. She straightened and put the car in gear, backing out of the parking space. “The guys in the bar are already calling the cops.”
“I don’t think you have to worry about the guys in the bar.”
She swung around and looked past him, out the passenger side window. A half-dozen locals were piling out of the bar and heading for their vehicles, all of which said 4WD on them somewhere. “Damn!” She stomped on the gas and the Taurus sent up a plume of gravel before the tires caught and it shot forward, the back end fishtailing until they hit the paved road.
“We’ll never outrun them in this,” Cole said.
“I didn’t pick it for speed.” She’d picked it for anonymity, which was no help now that they’d been outed on national television.
“We don’t know the roads around here, either.”
“We don’t have to.” She hit the ramp to the interstate, narrowed down because of repaving. She flew across the two open lanes without using her signal, then put as much distance between them and the bar as she possibly could. Since it was after eleven at night, there wasn’t much traffic and what there was had eighteen wheels.
“With any luck we can get lost in all these trucks,” she said, tucking the Taurus between a car hauler and frozen food truck pacing each other in the right lane.
“You mean the ones with the CB radios?”
“Don’t you ever have good news?”
“You’re optimistic enough for any five normal people,” Cole said. “Somebody has to represent reality.”
“Choosing to think positively isn’t ignoring reality. Sometimes you get good news.”
“The good news is I won’t survive to see the inside of a jail cell again.”
“The hell you won’t. There’s no way I’m letting you die before you tell me what’s really going on.”
“I thought you were going to keep me out of jail.”
Harmony glanced over at him. “You’re changing the subject. There’s no way the FBI would go on television and admit you hacked into their system if they didn’t want you bad.”
That shut him up. The pickup truck that roared up next to them kept her from gloating. She hit the gas, cutting the wheel sharply to the left in a feint that made the pickup driver slam on his brakes automatically, and gave her time to cut over into the left lane in front of him. The Taurus’s engine sounded game, and the speedometer inched up, but not nearly fast enough to keep the rear window from filling up with an F-150 grille.
“Shit,” Cole muttered, bracing himself between the door and the console.
The F-150 nudged their back bumper, its engine roaring as it accelerated, pushing them toward the rear of the semi in front of them. There was another truck in the right lane. To their left were orange construction barrels, and beyond them the remaining lanes of the highway were nothing more than an open pit corrugated with reinforcement steel, waiting for concrete to be poured in. Harmony let the car drift toward the barrels. Cole grabbed the steering wheel, trying pull it back to the center of the lane. Harmony brought her fist down on his wrist as hard as she could.
“Ouch. Jesus, Harm!”
“I can’t fight you and him at the same time,” she shouted back.
“But—”
“If you touch the steering wheel again, I’ll shoot you.” The threat might have had real teeth if her gun hadn’t been in her duffel, which was in the backseat. But Cole appeared to have gotten the message.
The pickup hit them again. Still hugging the barrels, Harmony let it drive them toward the semi, waiting, waiting, her eyes glued to the truck ahead, and when the Taurus’s hood nosed beneath it, she swerved right, almost into the semi beside them. The pickup driver shot ahead, and being an amateur, he jerked his steering wheel just slightly to the left to avoid hitting the truck. He tried to correct but it was too late, his left front tire slipped over the edge of the pavement and towed the vehicle into the pit. Rebar came flying up and then they were past.
“I hope he’s okay,” Cole said.
“If he’s not, it’s his own fault,” Harmony shot back, her eyes on the rearview mirror. “His friend certainly hasn’t learned anything.”
Cole twisted around to look over his shoulder. “Jesus,” he said, “what is this guy thinking?”
“He’s thinking that I’m female and blond and I probably can’t drive a vacuum cleaner in a straight line. People constantly underestimate me.”
“I’ve noticed,” Cole muttered.
“Noticed? You’ve done it yourself.”
“I won’t again.”
“Let’s hope you get the opportunity to prove you mean that.”
The semi in the right lane had dropped back, probably wanting to get out of the danger zone. Harmony pushed the Taurus up to top speed again and went around the truck in front of her, cutting in and out of traffic as fast as she could. The second pickup stayed right on her bumper.
“Shit,” Cole said again. “He’s on the radio.”
Harmony looked over at him, both of them coming to the same sick conclusion just as two big rigs lined up on the road ahead. A pig hauler with an open top and slatted sides took the left lane, a tanker pacing it on the right.
“At least the tanker isn’t carrying anything explosive,” Harmony said. Just cooking oil, judging by the name-brand logo on the back.
“It’ll still hurt when we smash into it.”
Sure enough, the two big trucks seemed to be answering the pickup driver’s call to aid. They lined up together, as the pickup inched up close behind the Taurus just like the first truck had.
“Apparently he did learn something,” she said, because the pickup driver stayed on their rear bumper, keeping his truck at a speed she couldn’t outrun. A big SUV roared up beside the pickup, the two of them herding her across the white line and forcing her between the two semis. Then all four trucks began to slow, leaving them trapped, nowhere to go.
“They’re trying to hold us until the police can get here.”
“The hell they are,” Harmony said. She floored it, sending the Taurus shooting ahead.
The semi drivers fought back, nosing the cabs of their trucks together. They’d expect her to stop. Harmony poured on more speed. The Taurus shuddered, smoke beginning to seep out from under the hood. But it gave her a couple more miles per hour. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Cole leaning back in his seat, his right leg straight, like he was pushing an imaginary brake pedal. She kept the speedometer pegged and her hands steady on the wheel, and if there was a prayer running through her mind, who could blame her as they rocketed toward a vee of steel and rubber with an increasingly small opening.
She hit that seemingly tiny gap, steel shrieking as both sides of the Taurus scraped against the semis’ cabs. They had enough speed for the car to make it past the front doors, before she felt it jerk, the rear quarter panels hanging up. For a minute she didn’t think they were going to make it through. Then the Taurus shuddered, there was the sound of steel screaming as it tore, and they were free.
The man driving the pig hauler reacted with lightning speed, Harmony saw in the rearview mirror, hand-overhanding the wheel to steer the truck straight again. The tanker driver didn’t have the same skill, or reflexes. The sudden absence of the Taurus caught him off guard, causing him to jackknife the truck.
Air brakes shrieked. The pig hauler tried to turn but there wasn’t enough time. It hit the tanker, sending it over onto its side. The last thing she saw was pigs being catapulted from the hauler and landing on the highway, still moving, thankfully, slipping and sliding in the fountain of
cooking oil spilling out of the top of the tanker. If there were any other guys chasing them from the bar, they were behind the brand-new roadblock.
“I hope that thing doesn’t catch on fire,” she said, bringing the car down to the speed limit. “The whole state will smell like a pig roast.”
Cole didn’t say anything, and when she glanced over at him, he looked kind of green. “Do you remember when you asked me to trust you,” he said, “the day you broke me out of jail?”
“You told me ‘when pigs fly.’ ”
“They didn’t have wings,” Cole said, “but I’m pretty sure a couple of them were airborne, at least briefly, and if they weren’t, I’m still willing to take that as a sign.”
Harmony didn’t even try to hide her grin. “I wonder if hell froze over, too.”
HARMONY STAYED ON THE INTERSTATE UNTIL THEY HIT an exit that wasn’t circled by gas stations, party stores, and chain restaurants. By then the cloud of smoke billowing out from under the Taurus’s hood was nearly too thick to see through. She pulled the car as far off the road as she could, trusting the darkness to hide them.
“Spill,” she said, turning to Cole, her face lit faintly by the dashboard lights. “Any more surprises like the last one, and we’re not going to make it.”
“Give me a minute to enjoy the fact that we survived this one, and the air bags didn’t even go off.”
“We’re not out of the woods yet. The police are going to be looking for us. We can’t stay here very long.”
Just long enough for her to get an explanation. Cole knew she was right. He had to take a risk and come clean, but he gave it a minute anyway.
“Let’s start with what you were thinking when you sent that virus,” she prompted.
“I wasn’t,” he admitted. “At least not clearly.”
“No kidding.” Harmony settled back in her seat, facing the darkness through the windshield. “Every time you try to get into the FBI’s system, you get angry. If you’d been thinking instead of striking back—”
“I know.”
“We’re supposed to be a team,” Harmony said. “I realize it didn’t exactly start out that way, but you just got done telling me you trust me. So trust me.”
Saying it and doing it, Cole thought, were two different things. But she was right. The time had come for honesty. Her life was on the line, too, the more so because of one bad decision on his part.
“My freshman year in college I roomed with a kid by the name of Scott Treacher, and we became friends.”
Harmony said something that sounded like “fuck” under her breath. He’d been expecting that kind of reaction, but hearing her say it felt like Tinkerbell had flown up his pants and done something obscene. It also gave him an idea how she was going to react to the rest of the story. Not that he blamed her.
“Scotty and I got an apartment off campus, and we lived together the whole six years I was getting my undergrad and master’s degrees,” he said. “Kid was a total screwup. It took him all that time just to get his bachelor’s degree, but I helped him get through it, and he got me a face-to-face with his father.”
“Victor Treacher, head of Systems Security for the FBI.” Harmony sounded like she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the rest of the story.
Cole told her anyway. “Not back then,” he said. “Treacher’s career had stalled. Computer technology changes at light speed, and guys like me, coming right out of school, have the edge over anyone who’s been in the industry awhile. I spent every second of my spare time working on a new kind of software security system. By the time I was starting on my doctorate, I had it pretty much perfected. Victor was tired of watching younger men get promoted over him. He saw my system as an opportunity to move to the top of the ladder.”
“So he stole it from you.”
“Right after he got me to hack into the FBI’s computer system in order to prove to them they needed an upgrade.
“Scotty got into trouble right about that time,” Cole continued, “big trouble. Drugs. His old man wouldn’t help him out of the jam unless he stole all my paper documents. Then he copied my hard drive and wiped it so I had no proof I’d created the system.” Cole gave a slight, humorless laugh. “It never occurred to me to hide anything from a guy who’d been my friend for so long.”
“That’s because you don’t have a devious mind. Or a cynical one. Not back then, at least.”
“Yeah,” he said, feeling demoralized, victimized, and pissed off all over again. “Victor won himself a lot of kudos by ‘catching’ me. I went to jail, and once I was safely out of the way, he sold my system to the Bureau, with Scotty as the author.”
“Ouch.”
An understatement if he’d ever heard one. Victor couldn’t claim to have written the system because anything he’d created as a federal employee would automatically be the property of his employers. So Scott Treacher had gotten a big payday, Victor had gotten a big promotion, and Cole had gotten the shaft.
“I’d be willing to bet Treacher’s been getting regular updates on you,” Harmony said. “He probably knew every time you had a visitor—heck, he probably knew what you had for dinner every night. And he knew it the minute you checked out of Lewisburg.”
“I’ll bet he sent those agents day one.”
“Yeah, and they were the same two guys on that boat in Cleveland. My guess is they’re a couple of secret agent wannabes who work for Victor. That explains why they’re so inept. It also allows Victor to keep their activities off the books, which is why Mike doesn’t know anything about it. So what happened tonight?”
Another subject Cole didn’t want to revisit. He took a couple of deep breaths, vowing never again to give Harmony grief for doing it, and plowed on. “You’re right about Treacher. I underestimated his paranoia. The first time I tested the FBI’s firewall—my firewall—he probably knew it was me. When I got into the system at Juan’s, he kicked me out right away. Today I got in, no problem, and I didn’t get kicked out. I figured it was a trap.”
“You were right. And it ticked you off so you wrote that virus, and while they were dealing with fairy tales you hijacked four million dollars. Not a bad strategy, except for the part where Treacher plastered our faces on every television and website in the country.”
Cole scrubbed a hand over his buzzed scalp. “I didn’t expect him to do that. Putting me on the nation’s radar as a federal fugitive might help get me caught, but it also gives me a pretty big soapbox.”
“Not if you’re dead.”
“Shit. I didn’t think of that.”
“That’s what I’m around for,” Harmony snapped.
“You? Mary Sunshine?”
“There’s a difference between recognizing trouble and borrowing it. Just because I’m an optimist, it doesn’t mean I can’t understand the workings of a criminal mind.”
She had a point there.
“If you’d told me you were taking on someone like Victor Treacher, I might have been able to anticipate this kind of situation and avoid it. What else haven’t you told me?”
“That’s everything.”
She shook her head, and there was nothing cute about her expression. She didn’t look like Barbie or Jessica Rabbit or any of the other harmless sexpot characters he’d likened her to. She was furious, and for once he was glad she chanted mantras to calm herself down. Otherwise she’d probably be shooting him.
“At least we know what we’re up against now,” Cole said into the silence. He’d been hopping to defuse her anger, but the look she shot him said he’d missed the mark. “You can call your guy now, right? Get them pulled.”
“They’re not the problem anymore.”
No, he’d been an ass and let loose that virus, pushing Treacher into going public. By now everybody and their brother was looking for them, probably with guns drawn, and there was a pretty damn good chance they wouldn’t be talking to anyone ever again. “So I signed our death warrant with that virus.”
Har
mony didn’t say anything, the tension in the car growing thicker as the seconds ticked by, until Cole couldn’t take it any more.
“Harm—”
“We have to split up.”
Cole closed his eyes and just let that sink in. He’d known from day one how she would feel going up against a high-ranking FBI official. “I guess I should be glad you’re not taking me back to jail.”
“What?” She turned to him, puzzlement overlaying the anger still on her face. And then it sank in. “Our deal still holds. But it’s nice to know how little faith you have in me.”
“Taking on Treacher is a career ender for you.”
“Yeah, well”—she looked away—“I think it’s too late to worry about that. They’re looking for a man and a woman together, and I’m a lot more recognizable than you are. That’s why we have to separate. Just for a little while. We have to get as far away from the last confirmed sighting as we can, and the best way to do that is separately.”
Cole digested the implications of her decision, and what it said about their partnership. “How do you know I won’t take off and leave you hanging?”
“Because Treacher won’t stop until you’re dead, Cole. I’m the only hope you have.”
“What makes you think he won’t kill you?”
She shrugged. “Arrogance. He’s confident the Bureau will sweep this under the rug.”
“He’s probably right, but as far as he knows, you’re not working for the FBI on this one.”
“He has no way of knowing if that’s true. Mike could have made it appear I was out in the cold for a reason. Treacher can’t risk taking me out without there being a lot of uncomfortable questions asked.”
“So how does that help me?”
“Mike will back me up,” she said with absolute conviction. “And I believe you, which means he won’t just write you off as a crackpot with an axe to grind.”
“Great, I can see how far I get with a murderous FBI computer geek on my ass, or I can trust an FBI agent and her FBI handler to take my side when the shit hits the fan.”