Chapter 10

The sudden stretch of flat, open highway was not a surprise to the Overseer. It was a deliberate part of the plan and meant they were only a few miles from the extraction point. It would do him no good to get there and be run over by the madmen in the futuristic-looking fire truck.

He stood pensively, feet planted wide, one hand gripping an overhead strap like a commuter riding an unstable subway car, the other holding a MAC-10 submachine gun like a character from a video game.

A quick glance out the side door showed him the problem hadn’t gone away. His first spread of shots had forced the fire truck to back off, but it was now tucked in behind them, blocked from view.

“Hold this thing steady!” he demanded.

As the driver grunted a reply, the Overseer leaned out, putting his shoulder against the doorframe to brace himself while extending his arm as far as he could. Bending his wrist, he pulled the trigger repeatedly. Two quick bursts and then a third. It was a wild form of shooting he and other professional soldiers called pray and spray, as in pray you hit something while blindly wasting your ammunition by spraying it everywhere.

It was the way amateurs and the untrained draftees of the world fought, firing blindly around the corners of buildings and up over the tops of trenches. Occasionally they got lucky, but usually they just made a lot of noise.

As he ducked back inside the van, the Overseer could tell his shots had done nothing.

“Get them off our tail,” the driver shouted to him. “Otherwise the boat will never pick us up.”

“Just drive the damned truck and keep your mouth shut,” he grunted back.

Instead of wasting the last of his ammunition—he hadn’t come here expecting a war and had only the MAC-10 and a pistol to fight with—the Overseer pulled a radio headset over his ears. Switching to a prearranged channel, he keyed the mic twice and then spoke. “Being followed, need backup and extraction. Where’s the boat?”

“Coming in now,” a voice replied. “Prepare to egress in two miles. At pylon fifteen. The boat is standing by.”

“Move it closer or we’ll never make the rendezvous.”

As if to prove the point, the neon-green truck came surging toward them, charging at the rear of the van. Their pursuers had deployed some type of extendable arm equipped with a six-foot metal spike at the tip. The tip surged through the back of the van, puncturing the sheet metal and nearly skewering him as he dove to the floor to avoid it.

As it pulled back, it left a wide gash in the back door of the van.

The Overseer grinned. “Thanks for the firing port.”

He crawled over the back seat and aimed his weapon out through the breach and opened fire at the cab of the neon-colored truck.

He saw the occupants duck and cover. Watched as the driver jerked the wheel to one side. And then saw the big truck re-center and charge forward once more.

This time the boom punched through the right side of the door before scraping across the ceiling and ripping the headliner down and nearly tipping the van over as it slammed into the side panel.

Adding insult to injury, a blast of high-pressure fire retardant erupted from the nozzle. The Overseer was knocked backward and drenched in the foam, the cabin itself filled with the stuff, and it was soon impossible to see or even breathe.

Down on the floor, unable to open his eyes, the Overseer fumbled for a way to end the battle. He pulled out an incendiary grenade like the ones he’d used on the lab. He pulled the pin, released the grip, and counted to three before shot-putting it through the foam and out the back end of the van.

—

Kurt saw the grenade coming and tried to swerve around it, but there was just no time. The explosion was moderate. It felt like they’d hit a curb at high speed. But two ruptured tires and a bent axle sent the vehicle careening out of control.

Kurt jerked the wheel one way and then the other. The Striker rocked to the left and then back the other way. The boom—still stuck inside the fleeing van—tore out through the side panel, jerking the van to the left. Both vehicles went over on their sides and slid across the lanes of the beautiful new road.

The van went all the way to the retaining wall, crushing its front end and then sliding along the wall to a halt.

The Striker remained more centered, sliding on its side and slowly swapping ends until it came to a halt in the middle of the highway with the back end pointed toward the overturned van.

As the grinding slide came to a stop, water began pouring into the cab from a ruptured hose while foam retardant from the main tank spread across the highway in all directions.

Joe—who had smartly belted himself in—popped the release on his harness. “At least we won’t catch on fire.”

“That was my plan all along,” Kurt insisted.

Swinging around onto his back, he kicked the battered windshield with both feet. It bent with the first blow and then popped free with the second. With the windshield gone, he and Joe could climb out. On foot, they edged around the vehicle until they could see the wrecked van. It lay on its side, smoking and venting steam from a shattered radiator.

“See any movement?” Joe asked.

They were both aware that their target was armed, while they were not.

Kurt stared through the smoke and steam. All he saw was the fire-retardant foam pouring out of the vehicle. He grabbed a Halligan bar from the back of the truck. The tool was a combination crowbar and pickax, used by firefighters to break through walls and smash open windows. “I’m going to take a look,” he said. “Stay here, in case he’s still got that peashooter.”

Halligan bar in hand, Kurt marched down the road while Joe acted as a traffic cop, holding up a growing crowd that was stopping behind the accident scene.

As Kurt neared the van, a pair of shots rang out. He dropped to one knee, but the shots weren’t aimed at him.

The driver came staggering out, hand clutching a bloody gut. Another shot hit him in the back of the head, sending him to the ground, as a second figure ran from the van, hopping across the divider and charging to the far side of the road.

Kurt recognized the man in black, a backpack over his shoulders and the laptop in his hand. He rushed to follow, but the man turned back toward Kurt and raised the pistol.

With no choice but to take cover, Kurt dove behind the concrete median. He pressed into it as the shells pinged off the other side. Looking through a gap in the sections of concrete, he saw the man dashing to the far side of the road, where he scaled the wall and stood looking down.

Kurt raised his head above the median. “You might as well give up,” he shouted. “There’s nowhere left to go.”

To Kurt’s surprise, the man turned back toward him and answered. “Such a vigorous pursuer,” he yelled back. “And yet, you think only of the end, forgetting to savor the thrill of the chase.”

“Throw down the gun and I’ll chase you all the way back to Saint-Denis if you want.”

“Another time,” the man replied. “For now, I bid you adieu.”

Then he leaned back and allowed himself to fall, arms wide, face calm, as if he were flopping into the softest of feather beds.

Surprised, if not shocked, Kurt jumped up, hurdled the median, and raced across the three lanes of stopped traffic to the edge of the elevated road. He looked down at the dark water below. A small circle of foam caught his eye, and then the man surfaced and began swimming for an oncoming speedboat. Helping hands pulled the swimmer aboard and he took a seat. It was hard to tell for certain, but Kurt thought he saw the man salute and wave as the boat sped off toward the open sea.

Joe arrived at Kurt’s side, easing up to the edge and marveling at the drop. “I can’t believe he jumped. And backwards, too.”

Kurt considered himself a brave man, but he would have been hard-pressed to backflip off the viaduct himself, no matter what he was facing. And yet the man in black almost seemed to enjoy the stunt. “He really didn’t want to miss the boat.”

“He’s lucky he missed the rocks near the pylon,” Joe said.

By now, the sound of emergency vehicles could be heard approaching from all directions. It gave them both a moment to appreciate all that had happened. The grenades. The carnage on the road. The wrecked vehicles and a dead getaway driver, shot in the face by his own passenger so he wouldn’t be easy to identify.

“This isn’t part of the riot,” Joe said. “This is something else.”

Kurt nodded. “The riot was just a cover. Drummed up so this guy could get to our lab and blow it to bits.”

“Someone really didn’t want us examining those dead whales,” Joe concluded.

Kurt agreed with that conclusion as well. He was determined to figure out who and why.