John Sandford - The Devil's Code

"We were set up. They're tracking the call and they've maybe got us isolated. See that chopper straight ahead? We've got another off to the right."

"Aw, man, Kidd, what do we do?"

"Don't do anything, yet; keep the speed steady," I said. "In case they haven't spotted us."

"The front chopper is sliding this way."

"So's the side guy," I said. An exit was coming up, with signs for a shopping center. I could see it to the north, a big one, with what looked like an enclosed parking garage. "Take the exit, take the exit."

She cut right and took the ramp, "What next?"

"Take a left. There's a shopping center over there with a covered ramp. If they've isolated us, we won't be able to run from them as long as they can see us."

It was a cool day, and I was wearing a light sweatshirt over a golf shirt, and had a jacket in back. I peeled off the sweatshirt and began wiping down every surface I thought we might've touched, and at the same time tried to look for the choppers. The one that had been to the right was closing fast.

"I think they've spotted us," I said. "Get in the parking ramp."

LuEllen ran a stoplight, took a hard right into the shopping center, went the wrong way up a one-way drive and into the parking ramp, under cover. "We were in the backseat," she said. "We were in the back, we've got prints. We used the radio."

I'd spotted a parking space: the inside end of it, against the wall, was slightly lower than the outer end. "Right there. But don't go in head first. Back into it."

"Why?"

"Do it, goddamnit."

I crawled over the seat into the back, wiped down everything, stuffed the laptop back into my briefcase, and got out my old Leatherman tool as LuEllen maneuvered the car. When she killed the engine, I said, "Pop the trunk. Get out. Don't touch anything."

She did, pulling her hands inside her jacket sleeves, wiping frantically along the way. I hopped out, wiped the handles, then ran around behind the car, dropped to the ground between the barrier wall and the back of the car. I got the Leatherman out of my pocket and unfolded a long pointed blade with a serrated edge. After a couple of timid attempts to do it by hand, I pulled off a shoe, stuck my hand in it, and smashed the blade through the gas tank. Once I got a hole, the rest was easier, enlarging it to the size of a dime. A steady stream of gasoline flowed out and began pooling under the car and I slid out from under and stood up.

As I did, LuEllen said, "Kidd, I hear the chopperthe chopper's coming in."

"You still carry a lighter?"

"Jesus, you're gonna blow up the garage." But she got it out of her shoulder bag, a cheap blue-plastic Bic, and handed it to me. I stooped and fired it into a finger-wide trickle of gasoline. The flame caught and we ran.

Ran for fifty feet, until we were away from the car, then slowed to a walk. There were people further down the structure, but they were paying no attention to us. I could hear the chopper, somewhere, the beating sound seeming to come from all around. Then the fire jumped up from behind the retaining wall, and I heard somebody yelling; and then we were inside.

A mall is a mall is a mall. We either had to get out of this one in a hurry, or hide. I said so to LuEllen. Run or hide.

"This way," LuEllen said, grabbing my arm.

"Where?"

"Backside exit."

We walked across the width of the mall, to the far exit. "Look for somebody, a woman, getting out of her car. Spot the car. Spot the woman."

How many people have you seen getting out of cars in parking lots? A million? But try to see somebody getting out when you need to see them, and they don't. We could see that there was excitement on the other side of the mall. A couple of people running, but they were the best part of a block away. I was looking toward them when LuEllen said, "There."

I looked where she was looking. A woman was climbing out of a deep-red Dodge minivan. She was wearing a hip-length teal-colored jacket and carrying a purse. When she passed the back of the minivan, she casually turned and pointed her hand at it, and the tail-lights blinked. Then she dropped the keys in a side pocket of her jacket.

"That's her," LuEllen said. "That's her. Now do what I tell you. You gotta do it exactly right."

What I did was, I hurried halfway down the mall, until I was standing in front of a Victoria's Secret store. The woman in the teal jacket came through the inner door a second later. I started toward her, carrying my briefcase open and across my chest, digging in it with one hand. LuEllen was behind her, four or five feet back, pacing her. As we closed, I suddenly crossed in front of her and stopped abruptly, bowing over the briefcase, and she almost ran into me. She put her hands up to fend me off, and I said, "Oh, jeez, I'm sorry," but she was already past.

When she'd swerved to avoid me, then ricocheted off my arm, LuEllen had dipped her pocket for the keys. As the woman went on down the hall, LuEllen nodded at me, turned, and headed out. I was a step behind.

"We might not have long," LuEllen said, as we crossed the parking lot. She was tight. We could still hear a chopper, but it must've been on the other side of the building. Then there were sirens and for a moment I thought the cops would be blockading the place, but the sirens were fire trucks, coming in from off the mall.

We got in the van, LuEllen driving, and headed out; from the corner stoplight, we could see the parking ramp, and a fireball in the near end. Two big choppers were down in a vacant area of the lot, and a couple of hundred people were standing around, looking at the fire.

"If they get any prints out of that, they'll have earned them," I said.

"You think there were any left?"

"I don't think so. But why take a chance? And the fire got people looking that way."

"You think that woman saw your face?"

"Yeah, probably," I said. "A slice of it. Not all of it."

We took the van to the airport, trying not to touch anything. At the airport, we wiped it and left it in a reserved slot. I put a sheet of notebook paper on the dashboard with a note: "This car was stolen." A cab took us back to the motel.

At the motel, LuEllen took advantage of me. She tends to do that when there's trouble, when things have gotten tight. She went to her room, did a couple lines of cocaine, then, her eyes all blue and pinpointed, came down to mine.

"You need some exercise," she said, pulling her shirt off. LuEllen's a good-looking woman and an old friend. It would have hardly been polite to say no.

The first round of sex all done with, I was tracing some of her more interesting contours with my fingertips, and she said, "Tell me what they did."

"They must want us fairly badly," I said. "But then, we're right where they've got all their equipment. I think they probably put up several pairs of helicopters around Baltimore and probably Washington, with radio direction-finding equipmentcell phones are radios."

"I know that…

"Then, with the access the NSA has to phone call-tracing equipment, they probably picked up the cell our phone was using, spotted it, vectored in the nearest helicopters and fed them our signal at the same time. They'd get us pretty close just with the one cell, and our speed would probably tell them that we were on the Interstate. Then, if we switched to another cell, they'd have our direction, and from the time of change, a pretty good location. From that point, with their direction-finding equipment, it was only a matter of time. That's why they were downloading those pictures. They were keeping our signal going back and forth, and getting us to focus on what was happening."

"Smart," she said.

"Yeah. We fucked up. Sorry, Ifucked up I forgot who we were dealing with. If I'd been using my brain, we could've taken the tram to New York, which they would never in a million years have been covering, and we could have called from midtown at lunch. Instead." I spread my hands. "We have a major screwup. Hertz is gonna be pissed at Nancy M. Hoff."