Michael Prescott - Last Breath

Rawls went back into Accounts and typed the user name backup. A password request came up. He retyped backup. He knew how a lazy person’s mind worked. It was easier to remember one word than two.

A moment later the screen filled with lines of text. Adam Nolan’s account in detail.

“Man, you are on a roll,” Brand exulted.

The most recent cell-phone activity came at the end of the list. Nolan’s last call began at 19:54 Pacific Standard Time and continued for three minutes twenty-three seconds. The terminal cell site was given as a string of figures-the cell tower’s latitude and longitude.

Rawls wrote down the numbers, then stood and pulled out his cell phone. “I’m calling LA. Can you clean up?”

“No prob,” Brand said, settling into Rawls’s seat.

Rawls pressed redial and heard the long-distance call go through. Behind him, Brand went about the business of covering their tracks. He would schedule the deletion of the ncx. exe file from the phone company’s server, and for good measure he would go into the server’s log file and erase all references to the intrusion. He would delete “ncx. exe” from the field office’s Web site, as well. It wouldn’t be a good idea for anyone to find it, since what Rawls and Brand had just done was highly illegal.

“Walsh.” The familiar voice from three thousand miles away.

“We’ve got the cell site.”

“This fast?”

“What can I tell you, Morrie? We’re bona fide federal agents. We’re the best of the best.”

In the farthest corner of the office park, C.J. found the warehouse.

It was a large metal shell of a building with hangar doors and two smaller doors, all padlocked. Cut into the side wall was a casement window four feet square-intended, presumably, for ventilation.

She peered at the window, looking for evidence of security wiring-a magnetic contact sensor or a sound-activated glass-break detector. In the dim light, with the moon hidden behind the roof of the warehouse, she found it hard to be sure.

There.

Strands of wire, barely wider than individual hairs, ran up the sides of the glass and connected to small black nodules.

Pressure sensors.

Break the glass, and the alarm would go off, even before she had a chance to reach inside.

Well, that was all right. Might even be helpful, in fact. The noise of the alarm would add to the confusion and urgency she was counting on.

The window faced an alley that ran between the warehouse and the complex’s perimeter fence. Fig trees grew outside the fence, and their leaves, shed in winter, had blown over the loops of razor wire to lie in dry drifts along the alley. C.J. knelt and touched them, heard them crackle under her fingers.

Perfect.

Elsewhere in the complex, the two alarms-one from each building she had violated-must still be ringing, though she couldn’t hear them from this distance. Couldn’t hear the BMW’s engine either, but she knew the car was out there, circling like a shark, trolling for its prey.

Adam would find her before long.

She kicked the leaves into a thicker pile not far from the window, making a nice firm bed. It was all part of her plan-a dangerous plan, but she would risk it. She was through hiding. She had wriggled into her last crawl space. She had played the victim long enough. Now it was time to go on offense.

Adam thought she was weak. Well, let him find out how weak she was.

She expelled a breath of pure rage and saw it turn to frost in the night air, chillier than before.

He had tried to fumigate her, for God’s sake. Like a cockroach.

Even now he must think he had her trapped. She couldn’t escape the office park, couldn’t enter any buildings without setting off an alarm, couldn’t hide outside because there was too little cover.

Couldn’t run. Couldn’t hide.

But she could fight. That was the one thing he hadn’t counted on.

She knelt and pried off the lid of the one-gallon can she’d swiped, using a sharp stick for leverage. Slowly she swirled the can’s contents.

“I’m going to win this game, Adam,” she whispered. “And you-you son of a bitch-you’re going down.”

The distance from Brentwood to the Santa Monica Municipal Airport was two miles, a trip that normally took about fifteen minutes in the congested streets. The police convoy made it in five, with Tanner in the lead, flashing the light bar of his squad car and blaring the siren.

He pulled into the airport parking lot just as the big Sikorsky helicopter was setting down on the helipad. The Sikorsky was one of four U.S. Navy SH-3H Sea Kings recently purchased by the Sheriff’s Department, three of which had been adapted for search and rescue operations. Most of the time, this meant carrying paramedics to remote locations, but occasionally it was a Sheriff’s SWAT team that took the ride.

Tonight was one of those times. A SWAT squad led by Deputy Garrett Pardon was already forming up. The Sikorsky, which had flown north from the department’s Aero Bureau station in Long Beach, would head to a county airfield east of downtown LA, which would serve as the rendezvous point.

Tanner wasn’t part of Pardon’s squad, but he figured Pardon wouldn’t object to another man on the job. And if he did, to hell with him. Tanner had come this far, and he wasn’t bugging out now.

He waved the LAPD detectives-Walsh and Cellini, and the two others whose names he hadn’t caught-out of their unmarked cars and led them across the asphalt to the chopper. The air crew hailed him when he climbed aboard.

“Hear we’re lookin’ for a bad guy,” the pilot yelled over the thrum of the motor.

Tanner nodded. “Near San Dimas. Got a cell site and that’s all.”

“Cell tower in that part of the county could cover a lot of territory.”

“That’s why we need to be airborne. For the bird’s-eye view.” And for speed, Tanner added silently. There was no faster way to cover the thirty-seven miles from the Westside to San Dimas than by air.

The chopper’s interior had been stripped down for medevac use, and the only seats were benches along the walls. Walsh and the others took their seats, and instantly the Sikorsky was under way, floating upward as the land diminished to a checkerboard of lights. Tanner saw that the Sea King was equipped with a video display screen that showed its current location, tracked via GPS, superimposed over a moving topological map. Heading and distance were displayed on the screen in digital readouts. There would be a FLIR display as well-Forward Looking Infrared, which picked up the heat signatures of vehicles and even persons, showing them on the video screen.

If Adam Nolan was there, they would spot him. And C.J. too-if she was alive.

Tanner shifted restlessly. The Sikorsky was flying fast, but maybe not fast enough.

He thought of the slick blond man in the lobby of the Newton station house, the guy who dressed like a young lawyer and conveyed a lawyer’s phony charm, and he wondered if the fucker was murdering C.J. right now, at this minute.

“Hang on, Killer,” he breathed, talking to her across the miles. “Cavalry’s coming.”

Adam had to admit that he was now seriously ticked off.

He’d thought for sure the exhaust fumes would get her. Instead she was still on the loose, and time was passing. It was already 11:35-much too late. His only consolation was that his cell phone hadn’t buzzed. The police hadn’t tried calling him yet.

His luck couldn’t hold much longer. He had to find her, kill her. Had to win.

“Nobody fucks with me. Nobody makes me their bitch…”

He steered the BMW past the padlocked gate, circling the front of the complex. His car windows were down to let in the cool night air and the sound of a new alarm, if one should ring. When the office park was finished, the security system would be linked to a monitoring station in San Dimas, but either the telephone hookup had never been established or it had been disconnected when the project fell into limbo. Roger Eastman hadn’t been clear on the details when Adam quizzed him over drinks, but he had been lucid enough on the one point that mattered-the alarm would not draw a crowd.