by Linda Nagata
“End current call?” her digital assistant queried in its upbeat voice.
“Yes.”
The link to Lyric closed.
“What are you doing?” Matt wanted to know.
“Asking for help.”
Gina picked up after one ring. “You saved the world yet?”
“I need a spike strip, now,” Ava told her without preamble. “Ala Moana corridor—”
“I’m nowhere near. Stand by.”
Ava again lost sight of Kaden as his SUV rounded a curve in the business district. They were on Ala Moana Boulevard now. Two empty lanes ran in each direction, with the streetcar median between them, fenced by low hedges of naupaka.
“I’ve got the nearest unit linked in,” Gina said. “What are we looking for?”
“Federal SUV, dark gray, proceeding at high speed toward the Coastal district. Four occupants, one known to be injured. They are in possession of assault weapons—and they know how to use them.”
“Shit,” a male voice said. “Really didn’t need this today, Ava.”
“Sorry. We’re coming behind, same vehicle type, half-mile separation.”
The male voice again: “Got you both on camera.”
Ava heard a grunt and a car door slamming as he rushed to get the spike strip from out of the patrol car’s trunk. Breathing audibly now, he said, “We might have just enough time to do this.”
Matt could hear only her side of the conversation, but that was enough to understand. “This going to work?” he demanded.
“Gotta try.” A curtain of white water spewed from beneath the tires as she took a curve too quickly. Backing off the accelerator, she let the SUV slide across empty lanes until she felt the tires grip the road again—then she eased the pedal down, reclaiming her speed.
Over her earbud, she heard the rattle of the spike strip unrolling.
Instantly, past the blur of rain on the windshield, she saw the red warning-flash of brake lights a half-mile out, near the west end of the Ala Moana seawall. She maintained speed for a few more seconds, the distance between her and those lights rapidly closing. Then Kaden’s SUV pulled a one-eighty, the chassis rocking. Ava found herself facing its dark windshield. She pressed the brake, holding her breath, waiting for Kaden to accelerate straight at her.
Instead, his SUV wheeled around and lunged over the curb of the median, plowing through the naupaka hedge and bouncing over the streetcar tracks, ending up in the westbound lanes.
The patrol car was on that side, parked across the lanes and partially blocking them, but Kaden found room enough to slip around it. Once past, he took off again.
The cop—Ava still didn’t know who he was—stood on the median, at a gap in the hedge where pedestrians could cross. He yanked the spike strip out of her way. “Sorry, Ava,” he said as she rocketed past.
“Thanks for trying.”
“I’ll be right behind you.”
“Get your vest on,” she advised him, and muted the call.
She still didn’t know where Kaden was going, or why.
She said to Matt, “There’s a traffic barrier at the Ala Moana Bridge. He won’t be able to get past it into Waikīkī. He’ll have to make a hard left on Atkinson. That’s your chance.”
“Understood.”
“If he fucks up and fails to do that, we trap him in front of the barrier.”
“Confirmed.”
Blue lights flashed in the rearview as the patrol car joined the chase.
◇
The failed blockade had given Ava a chance to close the distance to Kaden’s car. No more than a hundred fifty yards separated them now, though Kaden remained on the other side of the median. She opened all the windows again, then leaned over the wheel, straining to see past the scarred windshield and the currents of rain, watching for him to make the turn onto Atkinson—but she saw no reassuring glow of red brake lights.
She glanced at Matt, already leaning out the open window, weapon braced on his shoulder, squinting against the rain. She said, “If he doesn’t slow down he’s not going to be able to make the turn.”
Ava decided to bring her own speed down. Better to hang back and avoid the debris of a crash when Kaden took the turn too fast. No way would he try to run the barrier. The double line of steel bollards would shred his SUV.
“Don’t slow down!” Matt yelled at her. “The fucking barrier is going down. He’s gonna cross.”
“What?”
The barrier was controlled from KCA headquarters. The bollards could be lowered at any time for emergency vehicles, or at fixed times for maintenance and delivery vans—but not for random speeding maniacs.
“It can’t be!”
“It is. Maybe Coastal gave him a pass, maybe Sigrún hacked it. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. But if you don’t make it across with him, we’re going to be left behind.”
Ava couldn’t see the barrier to confirm. She couldn’t make it out past the ruined windshield. But she leaned on the accelerator anyway, making the choice to trust Matt—though her stomach lurched as she flashed on the horror of what would happen if he was wrong and she hit that barrier at speed.
“Which side?” she asked frantically. Kaden was still on the left side of the road. “Which side is open? Right or left?”
“Both, I think. Definitely right.”
“Okay.”
Finally, a flash of brake lights ahead. She tapped her brakes too.
“No!” Matt yelled. “Close the gap. Do it now!”
She clamped her teeth together and blindly pushed the accelerator down. They shot past Atkinson, closing on Kaden as he went the wrong way into the roundabout, his lead now less than fifty feet.
The shotgun went off.
Kaden’s SUV slalomed, but it didn’t slow as it sped over the retracted barrier and up the low arch of the bridge. Ava followed, on the righthand side of the road. Steel plates rattled under her tires as she passed the barrier. A glance in the rearview showed the bollards beginning to rise again, swinging up out of recessed sockets in the tiled paving. Farther back, the patrol car made a skidding turn onto Atkinson.
“Lost our backup,” Ava said as she followed Kaden’s vehicle in parallel, down the bridge and onto the pedestrian mall. No humans in sight, but at the sudden appearance of the two vehicles, green parrots, scarlet macaws, and white pigeons burst from their roosts and took flight, their feathers catching the gray morning light.
Ava strove to see past the scarred windshield as she jerked the steering wheel right, left, right, slaloming down a serpentine path between coconut palms and concrete benches, driving as if she was in a video game—and she caught up with Kaden. Only the streetcar tracks divided them now.
The shotgun went off behind her, startling her badly. She’d been so focused on driving, she hadn’t even noticed Matt moving to the back.
“Got him!” Matt yelled.
Instinctively, she tapped the brake. Then she looked left—and stomped the brake hard.
Kaden’s SUV came plowing across the streetcar tracks. Its shattered side windows had gone white with ruin and condensation, the front tire was shredded, the back tire nearly flat, and a jet of flame shot from the undercarriage.
Ava turned the wheel hard, skidding sideways as she fought to avoid a collision—and failed. Her vehicle slammed side-to-side into Kaden’s. Air bags blasted her from the front and from the door. The horrible low crunch of crumpling metal, and the carriage rocking.
Three stunned seconds as the airbags deflated. A battery fire hissed. Rain hammered down. And wind raged, roaring through a forest of trees, lifting flights of leaves, and twirling them in the air.
The collision had brought them to a stop where the pedestrian mall passed through Fort DeRussy Park.
From the floor behind her seat, there came a grunt of pain and a string of whispered curses.
“Matt!” she yelled, finding her voice again. “Status?”
“Banged up. Not broken.” Then he adde
d, “Fuck.”
“Then get moving!” she ordered. “Get the fuck out! There’s a fire!”
With her door jammed up against the other vehicle, she needed to exit on the right. She started to rise, then froze at the sight of two figures, bent low and moving swiftly away from the other SUV. One was obviously Dan Conrad, a big bulky man wearing slacks and a red-themed aloha shirt that purled in the wind where it wasn’t held down by the straps of a shoulder holster. As he fled, he shrugged on a slender plastic backpack.
The other figure caused her a moment of surprise and a dagger of heartache. She’d expected to see Kaden in uniform. Instead, he wore black—a wetsuit that embraced the familiar, erotic terrain of his body from neck to feet, and on his back, a pack like the one Conrad had just put on. An air supply.
Ava took a second, two seconds, sorting the implications. Lyric had lured him from the base with a faked message, but he had gone out ready to enter the water. That must have been his plan from the start, or an alternative to use in an emergency. Either way, he was ready to do this. This was not some desperate last measure. Kaden had a way to reach the midget sub, despite the massive storm-churned surf.
As if he sensed her watching, he turned—and aimed a pistol at the bullet-scarred windshield through which she gazed.
Ava didn’t think he could see her. It wasn’t personal. Not yet.
She threw herself down between the seats as three more bullets struck the windshield. It gave way at last, spilling a handful of glass cubes across her legs.
“It’s Kaden and Conrad!” she snapped at Matt as he lay on his back, reloading the shotgun amid a scatter of empty cartridges. “They’re rabbiting.”
“Two rounds left,” he told her.
“And two sailors unaccounted for,” she reminded him. One of Kaden’s bodyguards had been hit in the first exchange of fire, but with the extent of the injury unknown, they had to assume that individual could still pull a trigger. A glance up showed her flames rising inside the other vehicle. “If they’re alive, they’re outside,” she said with grim certainty.
Her skin crawled as she imagined the two creeping around the wrecked vehicles, positioning themselves to gun her down, along with Matt, the moment they exited.
She squeezed past the seat to the right-side front door. Got up on her knees and risked a glance out the open window, warm rain sluicing over her face and the fire’s radiant heat pressing against her back.
No sign of the two sailors. But Conrad was running makai, deeper into the park, moving with the toddling awkwardness of a man who has doubled his weight since the last time he’d pushed his pace beyond a walk. In contrast, Kaden, in his black wetsuit, followed with a leopard’s grace, shielding Conrad while looking back, watching for pursuit.
From these two clues—the wetsuit and their retreat into the park—Ava guessed where they were going. “It’s the pirate tunnel,” she told Matt, raising her voice to be heard over the pounding rain and the dull roar of the fire.
“The what?”
Now that she knew where to find Kaden, she could be patient. No point making herself a target. Better to wait, give him a few more seconds lead-time—and figure out where the two missing sailors were.
She told Matt, “There’s a tunnel running through Komohana Point.”
“That peninsula, at the end of the beach?” he asked as he crawled to the side window. He peered out, but kept checking the SUV’s rear window, too.
“Right. The tunnel’s twice as long as the peninsula. It goes out to deeper water. The lower section is flooded, but Kaden’s got an air supply. He can use it to get out under the waves.”
“No fucking way. This is a resort. A tunnel like that has to be sealed.”
“Sure. Gates at both ends. But are they still locked?”
Recent experience said no.
She checked her weapon, reassuring herself that the magazine was full. Then she glanced at Matt. A ribbon of blood, bright in the gray light, seeped from his temple to his ear before it was diluted by the rain coming in the window. How hard had he hit his head? Was he dizzy? Did he have a concussion?
She didn’t ask, because there was no way he could take a timeout now.
She hooked her fingers around the door latch. What did it mean that Kaden’s sailors had not followed him? Were they dead, or injured? Or had they stayed behind to ensure there was no pursuit?
“Ready to exit?” she asked.
“Confirm. I go first. I’ll cover. You get clear.”
He pulled the latch, kicked the rear door open, and jumped out, firing off a round toward the back of the SUV—but he took a round at the same time. It knocked him against the open door, while an anguished scream erupted from behind the car.
Ava shoved her own door open and jumped out, dropping to her knees in the spongy lawn. The scream devolved to panicked gasps. She aimed her pistol in that direction and saw a figure on the ground, hunched over, face down . . . wearing a wetsuit. Kaden’s sailors had also come prepared. She squeezed off a round. The sailor went limp.
A glance toward the front of the SUV revealed no movement. So she scrambled to Matt. He sat on the muddy ground, his back against the open door, head lolling, but he still held onto the shotgun.
“Talk to me, Matt.”
“I’m alive,” he croaked. “Vest stopped it.” He grabbed the doorframe and started leveraging himself to his feet. “Why are you still here, anyway? Get going! I’ll finish this and come behind you.”
“Right.”
One more glance around. Probably, the other shooter was badly injured and immobile—fingers crossed—but she’d have to take the chance of a bullet in the back.
Still gripping her pistol, she took off across the park’s sodden, slippery lawn, her duty belt bouncing against her hips with every step. She didn’t follow Kaden, but took a more direct route to the tunnel door.
Behind her, a pistol cracked. A fraction of a second later, the shotgun answered.
Ava had left her smart glasses in her pocket, but she still wore her tactile mic and its linked earbud. “Call Matt Domanski,” she said as she ran beneath the wildly tossing canopy of a monkeypod tree.
The call went through. The ring tone pulsed. But she got no answer.
He’s busy. That’s what she told herself, unwilling to believe anything else.
Seconds later, her earbud beeped an alert.
It’s him! Or maybe Lyric?
But it wasn’t.
“Link to Dispatch established,” her system’s voice announced.
“Really?” she whispered.
Akasha must have persuaded Ivan to restore her credentials—temporarily anyway—putting her back inside the Coastal Authority network.
“Yes, really,” a familiar voice assured her as she splashed down a concrete path slippery with thousands of pea-sized fallen banyan fruits. The dispatcher added, “You’re having an exciting shift.”
“You got that right,” she answered, floating the words out on a quick low-voiced exhale—all the breath she could spare.
“Officers are on the way to secure the scene of the accident. And backup is inbound to assist you in the pursuit.”
“Meet me at . . . pirate tunnel,” she snapped between breaths, running uphill now, to the coastal promenade.
“The pirate tunnel? Confirmed. But why there?”
Ava stopped before she emerged onto the promenade. Squinting against the rain, she looked right and left, but saw no sign of Kaden, so she crept across the tiled walkway, to look down on the other side. As she moved, she sketched, in as few words as possible, her theory of the midget sub, concluding, “If he can get out under the waves, he can make it.”
“Umm . . . got it,” the dispatcher said doubtfully.
Wind rippled the water of the lagoon below her, the westernmost in the park. It tore at the fronds of the surrounding coconut trees, and lifted a mist of wet sand off the dunes.
Komohana Point lay just Ewa of her position. It ha
d been made to look like a natural peninsula, constructed of concrete tinted and sculpted to imitate smooth dark lava rock. Pockets of sand softened the rock, and plantings of naupaka shrubs and small coconut palms gave it a tropical feel. Nothing in its outward appearance suggested the presence of a tunnel within.
On most days, kids swarmed the point, climbing the rocks and jumping from them into cool, deep water. On that day, the feeble morning light showed only a single visitor.
Daniel Conrad.
His red aloha shirt shone like a beacon in the gray rain. He stood with his back to her, at the far end of the bridge spanning the lagoon. Twenty feet farther on, a high grass-stabilized dune spilled over a few of the outlying false lava rocks at the start of Komohana Point. A footpath wound up past the dune’s toe and into the rocks. She did not see Kaden. But past the roar of the wind, she clearly heard a distant harsh rattling of steel, like a madly wild prisoner shaking a cell door.
Staying low, using a hibiscus hedge for cover, she moved quickly toward the path that zig-zagged down to the lagoon and to the bridge that spanned it.
Dispatch spoke: “You were right, Ava. Subject in the wetsuit is at the tunnel door. But it’s locked. I confirmed that. He’s got no way to get it open.”
Ava murmured, “He has a way.”
Kaden wouldn’t be there if he didn’t have a way in. He would have planned for things to go wrong. He probably had multiple contingencies, but it had come down to this: a crazy scheme pursued out of the existential necessity of getting Daniel Conrad out ahead of the storm Sigrún meant to launch.
Now Ivan spoke in her earbud, just as she reached the end of the hedge. “Hold your position,” he warned. “Do not go in alone. I’ll be there with backup in a minute and a half.”
She hunkered down, breathing hard, debating the wisdom of the order. “I don’t think we have a minute and a half.”
Conrad had already moved farther away, past the dune’s toe and into the rocks. He could be at the tunnel door in twenty seconds.