David ed. - Face Off (2014) Anthology

Not a bad idea, actually. But he’d lose time.

There wasn’t much time before he was to make the rendezvous.

But if there was no one on his tail . . .

He glanced into the rearview mirror again.

He’d already passed several cars since leaving the service station. No one else out here on the interstate was driving any faster than he was.

But there was a car coming up from behind. Growing larger in the mirror.

A burgundy car, a station wagon it looked like, judging from the roof racks. But a small car. Maybe he hadn’t hit Reilly hard enough on that goddamn head of his. Maybe the son of a bitch had commandeered a car and was coming after him.

Maybe having the kid wasn’t a liability after all. The kid was leverage. What was Reilly going to do? Run him off the road? Shoot out his tires? Run the risk of killing somebody’s little girl?

Then again, you could never predict what Reilly would do. He was the kind of guy who saw the bigger picture. Who might figure one dead girl was better than millions.

Kristoff reached down, felt the cylinder by his thigh. Felt its power.

He turned to the girl, who was still whimpering. “Hey, come on, stop that. But you can’t try to take out the key while we’re moving. You could get us both killed.”

The girl sniffed, wiped the tears from her cheeks. Her eyes were wide with fear.

“So, kid,” he said, “what’s your name?”

“Kelly,” she whispered.

“Kelly. Nice name. Better do up your seat belt, Kelly. Gonna be a wild ride.”

REILLY HAD THE PEDAL PRESSED down as far as it would go, but it still wasn’t enough. The car, a Chevy Vega Kammback station wagon from the seventies with wood-grain sides and a burgundy vinyl interior that had to be a health hazard in itself, was struggling to get above sixty. Still, he thought, it could have been worse. He could have commandeered an AMC Gremlin. Or a Pacer. Or pretty much anything with an AMC badge on it, for that matter.

Up ahead, the F-150 was receding alarmingly, a fact that wasn’t lost on the Ford’s owner, who was now sitting ramrod-straight next to Reilly, his eyes lasered on the vehicle his daughter was in.

“He’s getting away,” the man blurted. “Why didn’t you just hijack a scooter? Would have been faster.”

Reilly frowned and squeezed the pedal harder, hoping to coax an extra mile per hour or two from the Chevy’s asthmatic engine. It was no use. The Vega’s speedometer probably hadn’t swung past the half-century mark in decades—if ever. The faint smell of pot and patchouli that impregnated its interior only served to confirm this.

“Fuel,” Reilly asked. “How much have you got in your tank?”

The man’s face creased as he thought for a quick moment, then said, “It’s low. Less than a quarter full. I was going to fill up after we ate.”

Reilly asked, “So what are we talking about, distance-wise? How far can he get?”

The man thought again for a beat, then said, “Seventy, eighty miles, maybe?”

Reilly glanced at the Vega’s fuel gauge. It was almost half full. He processed this. Given the speed the F-150 was traveling at, that suggested an hour’s driving time. And with the F-150 pulling away at a rate of ten or fifteen miles per hour—or more—it would soon be out of sight, despite the flat terrain and the more or less straight road they were hurtling—well, gliding—down.

He had to find a way to bridge that gap. Quickly.

“Who is this guy?” the man asked. “What the hell’s going on?”

Reilly glanced across at him. The man was alarmed enough. “He’s a person of interest. We need to stop him.”

The man stared at him, his eyes wide with disbelief. “Seriously?” he raged. “That’s it? You’re going to stonewall me with some kind of ‘it’s classified’ bullshit? That guy’s got my daughter. He’s got Kelly.”

Reilly’s guts tightened. He could understand the man’s anger. He’d only recently been through something similar himself, with his now five-year-old son, Alex. He looked at the man and could just feel the fear and worry that had to be coursing through him.

“The only thing you need to know right now is that I will do everything in my power to get your daughter back,” Reilly said. “That’s priority one. Everything else has to follow on from that. Okay?”

Even as the words left his lips, he was twisting inside, pained by the knowledge that he was partly lying. Of course, the man’s daughter would be a priority. Just not the priority. Of course, he’d do everything in his power to get her back safely. But ultimately—ultimately—the man Reilly only knew by his online avatar—Faustus—had the potential to unleash a lot of damage. Lethal damage. He needed to be neutralized.

Reilly hoped it would never come down to it, never reach a point where a binary decision had to be made, where it would have to be one or the other but not both. Some decisions were too horrific to contemplate. At Quantico, during training, they referred to them as Coventry moments, after the widely accepted but false story that during World War II, Churchill had allowed the city to be sacrificed and not have it evacuated so as not to let the Germans know that his men had broken the Nazis’ Enigma code and knew about the devastating raid to come. It was nonsense, of course. The code-breakers hadn’t known that the target was Coventry. Still, the story had become widely accepted, and the myth endured.

Reilly hoped there wasn’t a Coventry moment waiting for him.

The man didn’t seem convinced by Reilly’s words. “You bet your ass she’s priority one. I’ll see to that.”

Reilly held the man’s gaze, and nodded. “What’s your name?”

“Garber. Glen Garber. You?”

“Sean Reilly.”

“That your real name, or is that also classified?”

Reilly shrugged. “It’s real.”

“Where’s the rest of your men?” Garber asked. “Don’t you at least have a partner or something? You guys work in twos, right?”

Reilly grimaced. Under normal circumstances, Garber was right. But this case had been anything but normal right from the get-go. “I’ve been undercover and I didn’t have a phone,” he told Garber. “Then things happened real quick. I had to improvise. I was hoping to connect with my people from the service center.”

“But you didn’t?”

Reilly shook his head. “We’re on our own.”

“Well, you’ve got a phone now,” Garber told him. “Use it. Get help.”

But Reilly already had another idea. “I will,” he said. “But first, tell me this. Does you daughter have a cell phone on her?”

Garber’s expression clouded, then morphed from confusion to concern. “Yes, she does, but—why?”

Reilly handed him back his phone. “Call her.”

KELLY COULDN’T TAKE HER EYES off the man.

When you’re a kid, everyone tells you to be wary of strangers. She was old enough now to realize anyone could present a threat, but when she was younger, she imagined strangers as evil-looking people. Long, pointy noses, devil ears. Thick eyebrows and bad teeth.

This man just looked like an ordinary person. He could have been someone her dad worked with, one of his crew that built and fixed houses.

But there was something about the eyes. They were cold.

Worse than cold. They were dead.

When the man glanced over at her, and she looked into those eyes, she thought about when her dad took her to the Central Park Zoo on one of their trips into the city. She and her dad did everything together since her mom had died. She remembered the reptile exhibit, and how when they looked through the glass, you couldn’t tell if they were really looking at you or not.