Jeffery Deaver - Edge

“I’ll do it!” Ryan muttered. “I’ll get the fucker.”

This brought Joanne to life. “No, honey, please! You’ve been drinking.”

“Goddamnit, I’m a better shot drunk than all of them put together.” He strained forward. But we were saved from a confrontation because we hit a speed bump and he was knocked to the side. Thank God his weapon didn’t discharge.

Garcia leaned forward and fired in bursts of three with his handgun.

I couldn’t tell if he’d hit anything. I couldn’t be concerned with that now; I had the Yukon up to about forty in four-wheel reverse, the transmission screaming, and we were crashing over speed bumps and tearing the shrubbery apart.

A bullet thudded into the back of the Yukon, the fender or bumper. One glanced off the windshield. No glass broke; it was resistant but not bulletproof, depending on the jackets of the rounds, so I was thankful there’d been no direct hit on the windows, though it made sense; Loving would not want to risk killing Ryan.

Then, about ten yards from the motel, a straight stretch loomed.

“Both of you,” I called to Garcia and Ahmad. “You’ll have clear targets in about five seconds. Go for the grille of the Dodge. Take out the engine.”

“No, the windshield!” Ryan shouted.

I said nothing else, not explaining that the rational move in a situation like this was to aim for a vital area of the car; you’d have to be very lucky to hit the driver.

But just as we leveled out, Loving ditched the lights and veered to the right. The Dodge skidded behind a bush beside a curve in the driveway and vanished over the lawn.

“No target,” Ahmad called calmly.

But I didn’t slow; I kept speeding backward, my sweating hands clutching the wheel so hard my wrists were cramping. “Garcia, call Fredericks. Let him know.”

“Yessir.”

He alerted Freddy of the situation, then disconnected and took up a defensive position again, basically sprawled over Joanne. Maree was huddled in the corner, sobbing.

“Hold on, watch your weapons.” I hit the next speed bump at close to 50 miles per hour, still in reverse. We bounced into the inn’s courtyard and I continued on, toward the back, with a fast glance into the lobby, where the panicked clerk was on the phone.

“Where?” I shouted. “Loving, where is he?”

“No sign!” Ahmad called.

The gears were screaming now and the floorboard seemed to be hot. Reverse was not made for these speeds.

“Coming to the end of the drive,” I called. “Big bump! Fingers off triggers and hold on.”

Without slowing we careened over the curb through the narrow gap we’d just taken on foot ten minutes earlier in our three teams, to get to the rear parking lot. I destroyed a low row of bushes and then bounded onto a concrete patio that jutted into the parking lot, sending the colorful lawn furniture sprawling over the asphalt. Glass from the tables shattered loudly. I skidded the vehicle to the left and braked to a stop, gasping for breath. My shoulders ached.

Running parallel to the motel on the other side of the parking lot was a six-foot stockade fence. To the left was a brick wall about four feet high. To the right was the driveway we’d just exited by and beyond that a small thicket of trees.

“No, no, no,” Maree was wailing. “We’re trapped. What’re we going to do? Oh, Jesus.”

“You’ll be okay,” Joanne said to her sister.

“I’m so fucking scared.”

“Stay on the alley, the driveway and the trees,” I said to Ahmad, nodding to what we’d just backed through and the small forest beyond.

“Garcia, the brick wall.”

“Yessir. I’m on it!”

“Shadow in the alley,” Ahmad said. “Somebody’s coming. In a car, looks like.”

“Now!” Ryan called. “Ram him! He’ll be coming through there any second. He thinks you’re still going. Hit the gas!”

I ignored him.

Ahmad had opened his window further and was aiming his weapon toward the alley.

“What are you going to do?” The urgent question came not from Ryan, as I might have thought, but from his wife.

I didn’t answer her either.

Ahmad said, “Shadow’s getting closer.”

I glanced that way. A car was slowly following our route along the path we’d just torn along. Cautious.

“It’s him,” Ryan said. “The lights’re out. Ram him! Ram him!”

“Garcia, the brick wall. Stay with it.”

“Yessir.”

“Forget the fucking wall. He’s coming up the path between the buildings!” Ryan blurted. “You can see it!”

“No, he’s not,” I said. “Loving’s forced somebody to drive their car up here slowly. Just like in Fairfax. He and the partner split up to flank us from the trees and from the brick wall. Ahmad, take out the tire of the car that comes through the gap. The driver’ll get spooked and stop. Then watch the driveway and those trees beyond it. Garcia, the wall.”

They acknowledged the orders.

The feint car hood edged slowly into view from the alley.

Ahmad shot out the tire and immediately lifted his weapon’s muzzle, staring past the vehicle. “Can’t see clearly but think there’s somebody in the woods. Solo.”

“Brick wall,” Garcia called. “It’s Loving’s car. They’re flanking us.”

“Covering fire,” I shouted. “Both directions. Mind innocents.”

Both men fired, driving Loving back. The partner too vanished under cover in the woods.

“They’re going to try again,” Maree said, still crying. “We’re trapped here!”

Now they knew we were ready for them. I dropped the transmission into four-wheel low gear and turned directly toward the stockade fence.

“What’re you doing?” Maree gasped. “No! We’ll get stuck!”

I nosed the Yukon against the wood and, a slight nudge, the panel of fencing broke free. I drove over it and into the farm field on the other side.

I ordered, “Target the gap in the fence. But don’t fire unless you’re sure it’s them. There’ll be spectators now.” I was heading slowly down the hill toward a line of trees.

Surprisingly it was Joanne Kessler who caught on. “You had that escape route planned. You cut mostly through the fence posts, so you could drive over it if you needed to. When?”

“A couple years ago.”

I pick all my halfway houses for escape as well as defensibility and I do a lot of work on the properties late at night. The Hillside Inn people never knew I’d vandalized their fence.

“I don’t see anything,” Ryan said. “Not yet.”

We rolled slowly down the hill, slick with dew, then through a series of soft dirt rows of recently harvested corn husks and stems. You could measure the progress in feet but we were moving steadily.

“Still nobody,” Ahmad said.

I ordered them to keep targeting the opening in the fence we’d just eased through, though I knew that Loving would take one look at the ground we were traversing and know that his sedan couldn’t possibly pursue us.

He’d make the only rational decision he could: to retreat as fast as possible.

A HALF HOUR later we were on the highway again, heading for the safe house.

It was a little after 8:00 p.m. and I’d been driving a fast, complicated and unpredictable route generally north though Loudoun and Fairfax counties.

In the back Ryan Kessler sat brooding, looking through his canvas bag. For ammo? Or booze? Joanne was quiet, staring out the window. Maree, calm finally, fidgeted with a pacifier, her computer. She was coming out of her hysteria but hadn’t yet returned to referring flippantly to me as a tour guide.

Principals get terrified, of course. Disoriented too, and a little bit crazy. I need the people in my organization to be 100 percent with me. My principals, though? If they can be 75 or 80, if they can do what I ask with a measure of promptness and intelligence, I’m content. A sizable portion of my task is fixing as many of their inevitable mistakes as I can and minimizing the principals’ more destructive foibles and habits.