Clive Cussler - Flood Tide

Julia snatched the radio transmitter from her purse. “This is Dragon Lady. Come in, Shadow, and give me your position.” She patiently waited for a response, but her only reply was static. She repeated the message four times but received no answer. “This is inexcusable!” Julia snapped.

“Can you raise anyone else with your call box?” Pitt asked cynically.

“No, it's only good for about two miles.”

“Then it's time to—” Pitt stopped in midsentence as the two vans suddenly turned the corner of the block and pulled up at the curb, one on each side of the Duesenberg, which was still sitting in the driveway. They left barely enough room for the Duesenberg's wide, flowing fenders to pass into the street between them. They showed no headlights, only parking lights. The figures inside looked vague and shadowy through the darkened, solar-coated windows.

“I knew nothing was wrong,” said Julia, squinting at Pitt with a know-it-all look. She spoke into her radio transmitter again. “Shadow, this is Dragon Lady, why did you leave your positions around the carriage house?”

This time a voice answered almost immediately. “Sorry Dragon Lady, we thought it best to circle the block and look for any suspicious vehicles. If you are ready to leave, please give us your destination.”

“I don't buy it,” Pitt said, eyeing the distance between the two parked vans while gauging the passing traffic on the street. “One van should have remained in position while the other circled the block. You're an agent. Why am I telling you?”

“Peter would not have hired irresponsible people,” Julia said firmly. “He doesn't work that way.”

“Don't answer just yet!” said Pitt harshly. Danger, like a red warning sign, began to flash in Pitt's brain. “We've been sold out. A dime will get you a dollar those are not the same men Harper hired.”

For the first time Julia's eyes reflected a growing apprehension. “If you're right, what do I tell them?”

If Pitt thought their lives were in deadly peril, he didn't show it. His face was cool, his mind focused. “Say we're going to my place at the Washington National Airport.”

“You live in an airport?” Julia asked, baffled.

“For almost twenty years. Actually, I live on the perimeter.”

Julia shrugged in bewilderment and gave the instructions to the men in the vans as Pitt reached under the seat and produced a cellular phone. “Now get a hold of Harper. Explain the situation and say we're on our way toward the Lincoln Memorial. Tell him I'll try to stall off our arrival until he can arrange an intercept.”

Julia dialed a number and waited for the party on the other end to answer. After giving her identification, she was put through to Peter Harper, who was at home relaxing with his family. After she gave him Pitt's message, she sat and listened in silence before punching off the phone. She looked at Pitt expressionless. “Help is on the way. Peter also said to tell you that considering what happened at your hangar earlier this evening, he regrets not being more alert to possible problems.”

“Is he sending law-enforcement teams to the Memorial for the intercept?”

“He's contacting them now.”

“You never told me what happened at your hangar.”

“Not now.”

Julia began to say something, thought better of it and said simply, “Shouldn't we have waited right here for help?”

Pitt studied the vans parked quietly and ominously at the curb. “I can't sit here any longer looking like I'm waiting for the traffic to ease or our friends will begin to think we're onto them. Once we reach Massachusetts Avenue and merge into the main stream of traffic, we'll be reasonably safe. They won't risk exposure by attacking us in front of a hundred witnesses.”

“You could call nine-one-one on your cell phone and ask them to respond with a patrol car cruising the area.”

“If you were a dispatcher, would you buy some bizarre story and take responsibility for ordering a fleet of patrol cars to charge to the Lincoln Memorial and look for an orange and brown nineteen-twenty-nine Duesenberg that is being pursued by killers?”

“I suppose not,” Julia admitted. “Better we left it to Harper to call out the posse.” He slipped the big stick shift on the floor into first gear and accelerated out into the street, turning to the left so the vans would lose time swinging a U-turn to follow him. He gained almost a hundred yards before he caught the lights of the lead van coming up on his rear bumper. Two blocks later he whipped the heavy Duesenberg onto Massachusetts Avenue and began snaking in and out of the nighttime traffic.

Julia tensed as she looked through the steering wheel and saw the needle creep up and waver at seventy miles an hour. “This car doesn't have seat belts.”

“They didn't believe in them in nineteen twenty-nine.” “You're going awfully fast.”

“I can't think of a better way to attract attention than by exceeding the speed limit in a seventy-year-old car that weighs almost four tons.”

“I hope she has good brakes.” Julia resigned herself to the chase, uncertainty still in her mind.

“They're not as sensitive as modern power brakes, but if I stomp on them they do the job just fine.”

Julia gripped the Colt automatic but made no effort to remove the safety or aim it. She balked at accepting Pitt's assertion that their lives were in jeopardy. That their bodyguards had turned on them seemed too incredible to believe.

“Why me?” Pitt moaned as he careened the monster around Mount Vernon Square, the big tires howling in protest, heads turning on the sidewalks, people staring incredulously. “Would you believe this is the second time in a year a pretty girl and I had to escape sharks who chased us over the streets of Washington?”

She stared at him. “This happened to you before?” “On that occasion I was driving a sports car and had a much easier time of it.”

Pitt aimed the polished hood ornament on the radiator cap down New Jersey Avenue before hammering a right turn onto First Street and accelerating toward the nation's Capitol and its Mall. Cars that got in his way, he frightened aside with warning blasts from the big twin horns mounted beneath the massive headlights. He spun the thick rim of the steering wheel violently as they raced between the traffic on the crowded street.

The vans were still on his tail. Because of their faster acceleration, they had closed until their reflections loomed in the rearview mirror atop the center of the windshield. Although the Duesenberg could outpull them if given a long enough straight stretch, it was not a car that would set records at a drag strip. Pitt had yet to shift from second to third, and the gears wailed like a banshee.

The giant engine with its twin overhead cams turned effortlessly at high rpms. The traffic on the street ahead thinned, and Pitt was able to push the Duesenberg as hard as she could go. He slewed the car into the circle around the Peace Monument behind the Capitol building. Then another quick twist of the steering wheel and the Duesy drifted on all four wheels around the Garfield Monument, skirted the Reflecting Pool and shot down Maryland Avenue toward the Air & Space Museum.

From behind them, over the exhaust roar of the Duesenberg, they heard a brief staccato of gunfire. The mirror attached to the top of the spare-tire cover mounted in the left front fender abruptly disintegrated. The shooter quickly adjusted and a stream of bullets shredded the top frame of the windshield, shattering the glass, which showered across the hood of the car. Pitt slipped down low behind the wheel, his right hand grabbing Julia by the hair and yanking her horizontal on the leather seat.

“That concludes the entertainment part of the program,” muttered Pitt. “No more chicken-hearted maneuvers.”