Jeffery Deaver - Watchlist

Which made no sense.

And there was a scrap of paper that had apparently spilled out of a trash-can. Scribbled green handwriting that seemed to make no sense either. A code, perhaps, or a foreign alphabet. Maybe Cyrillic. Or a combination of foreign letters and numbers. He stared at it for a long moment.

Then he turned his phone upside down.

GREEN LANTERN. EVAC.

He thought of Harris, immediately. For a moment he wished it had not been necessary to eliminate him. Harris had loved comic books. Which was a part of what had made him a useless wastrel. But he would have understood the reference, maybe.

Archer texted Jana: CALL ME NOW.

Jana’s phone made a sound in Nora’s pocket just as she and Charley stepped into an Apple reseller on the Boulevard Saint Germain. There had been no Apple store under the Louvre pyramid. Planned, but not yet built. Mired in bureaucracy. Old Europe. The Saint Germain place had been recommended by a clerk in an Orange cell phone store. Orange was the old France Telecom and was the exclusive carrier for the new iPhone in France. An iPhone charger was OK for an iPod, but it wouldn’t fit the MacBook Air doohickey. Hence a taxi ride and a short search along a row of chic boutiques.

There were two guys loitering in the corner of the store. Tesla noticed them immediately. She thought: cops . Then Jana’s phone made the sound and she delayed for a crucial second. She saw the cops staring at her, at her face, at her shirt, at her awkward posture.

She said, “Charley?”

“Yes?”

“Run.”

“What?”

“Now.”

The big Boeing flew on, straight and level, thirty-eight thousand feet. Middleton finished his soda and said, “Dams are big things.”

Chernayev said, “Tell me about it. I paid for most of the concrete.”

“Too big to destroy with explosives. The problem has been studied many times, both defensively and offensively.”

“I know. So whatever wild card is in play here is not only wild but also quite possibly stupid.”

“So why worry?”

“The dam will survive. No doubt about that. But we can’t issue the same guarantee about your secretary of state.”

“She dies, there’ll be a world war.”

Chernayev said, “I don’t want that.”

“Just a regional war?”

“First things first, Harry.”

Tesla was hampered by the raging pain in her shoulder, so Charley got out to the street first. Nora turned at the door and flung the first thing that came to hand, which was Jana’s cell phone from her pocket. It caught the leading cop hard under the eye and he spun away and crashed into a glass display case and sent small technical items skittering across the floor. The second cop stumbled and sidestepped and Tesla had a two-yard lead by the time she hit the sidewalk.

Charley had bolted straight through the traffic. Panic, probably, but smart too. Tesla plunged after her through yelping tires and blasting horns. Together they made it across.

They ran.

They had no idea where they were going. They turned randomly left and right in alleys and entrances and barged through knots of people. Every step sent bolts of agony through Nora’s body and every accidental contact with passersby nearly killed her. But adrenaline kept her moving.

Moving, but not fast enough.

The cops were in their own city and they had radios. To Tesla and Charley, the streets were a maze. To the cops, the streets were a map they knew by heart. Alleys had exits and exits could be blocked. Sirens were howling everywhere, feet were pounding, whistles were blowing, radio chatter was loud in the air. Twice Tesla and Charley had to jam to a halt and spin around and take off again in the direction they had come. Twice the streets behind them were blocked, so they ducked into stores and barged through and came out through rear entrances to start all over again. Once a cop got his hand on Charley’s sleeve, and she whirled and ducked and pulled loose and fled.

In the end, Tesla’s pain saved them. They stopped running. Counterintuitive, but the right move in a mobile game. Fugitives run. Pursuers look for rapid movement. People sitting still pass unnoticed.

They dragged themselves through a shirt maker’s door and collapsed breathless on a sofa. Two seconds later a squad of police ran past the entrance to the store without a second glance. The shirt maker approached, tape measure around his neck.

Charley said, “We’re waiting for my father.”

The shirt maker withdrew.

Charley whispered, “What now?”

Tesla said, “Airport.”

“But our stuff is at the hotel.”

“Passport?”

“Here.”

“We’ll leave the rest of our stuff. We have to go.”

“Where?”

“Can’t talk to Wiki, can’t talk to Harold. It’s up to us now.”

“So where?”

“Kashmir.”

Thirty-eight thousand feet, but Middleton saw mountains ahead on the right that looked almost exactly level with the plane. Hundreds of miles away, probably, a trick of perspective in terms of distance, but there was no doubt about their elevation. A gigantic range, white, icy, jagged, majestic, shrouded with low clouds down around their knees.

Unmistakable.

Famous.

The Himalayas.

But: on their right?

Middleton asked, “Where the hell are we going?”

Chernayev said, “Who do you think is painted on the innermost doll? Who do you think we all serve, ultimately?”

And at that moment two jet fighter planes rose alongside, one to port, one to starboard, both of them slow and respectful and gentle. Unthreatening. An escort. For safety and for courtesy. The fighter planes were painted with muted camouflage patterns and toward the rear of their slim fuselages they had bright red bars separated by red five-pointed stars.

Middleton said, “China?”

Middleton tried to use the mountains to orient himself, keep his bearings. But before long the sky stole them from him, the jet vanishing into the clouds. In the moments of silence that followed, he felt its steep descent in the pit of his stomach. The clouds cleared to reveal the mountains gone from sight and some sort of airstrip below.

“We’re landing.”

His words drew only a smile from Chernayev, and Middleton realized the altitude was playing tricks with his damaged hearing. His voice sounded like someone else’s, and the lameness of his statement made him wish it actually had been. Middleton had landed at enough secret airfields to know this was something quite different from any of them. Far too barren to be military and much too isolated to have ever been civilian. No landing lights were anywhere in evidence until he spotted discolored patches in the ground on both sides of the strip. Those patches, his experience indicated, likely concealed high-powered halogens that could be activated with the proper signal from an aircraft approaching under cover of darkness, upon which the fake turf would recede so the lights could surface.

Someone had taken great measures to hide whatever truth lay here.

The strip boasted not a single building. Not a hangar, tower, storage or refueling facility-nothing. Well, not quite, Middleton thought, as he felt the jet’s landing gear lower. Because parked at the far end of the airstrip, where the tarmac widened into a football field-sized slab, was another jet.

He heard the zooming hiss of their fighter escorts soaring away as Chernayev’s jet touched down and taxied toward the second jet, a 767.

“Come,” Chernayev gestured, after their plane ground to a halt.

Middleton started to rise, realizing he’d forgotten to unfasten his seatbelt. He joined Chernayev in the aisle.