Kill Me (32 page)

“I’m thinking that you may not be right about your colleagues’ reluctance to take us out together.”

She sat up straight and focused her attention out the windshield. “Tell me what you’re thinking. Exactly.”

“About fifty yards up on the left there’s a pedestrian passageway that leads over to the parallel tunnel, the one that carries westbound traffic. Workers use it, not the public. See it? That opening in the tile? It’s a dark shadow.”

She nodded. “Yes, I do.”

A horn honked someplace in front of us. Some other idiots echoed the noise.

Above our heads, the emergency lights flickered for a few seconds. Then they, too, died. The upper reaches of the bore went from shadowy to dark. The only illumination left in the tunnel came from the vehicle headlights.

Lizzie’s temporary placidity evaporated. She was breathing heavily, through her mouth. “Go on,” she said.

“You know about the sniper who’s been working in Colorado?”

“Yes.”

“Is it one of yours?”

“I don’t know. I’ve wondered. It’s not out of the question. It wouldn’t be a primary plan. But it might be a backup. Kill a few people at random. Then kill you. Your death will look random, too.”

I growled, “Fuckers.” Then I refocused. “For the sake of argument, let’s say the sniper’s a Death Angel, and they’ve decided it’s time to kill us. If someone takes us out in here, that pedestrian tunnel could be their escape route. Two quick shots, then a short run down the passageway. It would be choreographed so a car would be waiting to pick them up on the other side. The only thing I can’t figure is how they would avoid the surveillance cameras.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, Lizzie said, “Smoke.”

“Where?”

“No, no, I don’t see any. I’m saying they’ll use smoke to mask what they’re doing from the cameras.”

“How will they see us?”

“They’ll identify us before they create the smoke, and then if they need to, they’ll track us with infrared. The tunnel surveillance cameras need visible light; they won’t be able to see a thing.”

Her confidence in the tactical plan told me that the strategy she was imagining wasn’t a novel one for the Death Angels. Lizzie had seen smoke diversion used before. I was curious to learn more about the previous tactical details, but wasn’t sure I had the time to pick her brain.

In front of us, drivers began shutting off their engines. People climbed out of their cars. They began to huddle together; strangers started chatting with strangers. Lots of fingers were pointed down the tunnel. At what? I didn’t know.

“Should we get out of the car?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Definitely. If they already have us identified — and they know this car, so I’m sure they have — then they have an infrared scope on us by now. We have to move out of their line of sight so they can’t identify us so easily when the smoke starts. We have to put something between us and them to block the infrared signature. Otherwise we’re just …”

I silently finished her thought:
Sitting ducks.

She got out of the car first. I thought of lowering the window on my door and pulling myself out of the opening like a stock car driver. Instead, I fumbled my way over the gearshift and climbed out in a more conventional manner on the passenger side. We were both still trying to act casually.

“Should we get behind the car in front of us?” I asked, my voice low.

Far down the tunnel somebody yelled, “Fire! That car’s on fire! Smoke, look!”

Someone else yelled, “Ruthie? Look! Let’s get out of here. Run! Run! Shit! Fire!”

I hopped forward and pulled myself up on the bumper of the Suburban that was stopped in front of the Porsche and used the perch to peer as far down the tunnel as possible. I couldn’t see any smoke at first.

Then I could.

White smoke was billowing out rapidly from the line of cars in big puffs, like thunderstorm clouds, or like steam bursting from a smokestack. My eyes moved left across the blocked-off lane and found the rectangular opening in the tile wall. The source of the smoke was just beyond the passageway. The cloud was moving in our direction.

“Smoke, Lizzie,” I said, without turning. “Almost exactly where the cross-tunnel passageway is. You were right.” When I turned to see why she hadn’t answered me, she was gone.

SIXTY-THREE

I dropped off the bumper and fell into a crouch in the space behind the Suburban. I wondered what I looked like in the sniper’s infrared scope.

Green, I decided. I looked green.

The panic in the tunnel in reaction to the smoke was predictable, and almost immediate.

People not already out of their cars jumped out and everyone began scrambling up the short ladders on the outside tunnel walls to get to the raised emergency pedestrian passageways, but since we were stuck somewhere close to the middle of the tunnel the throngs couldn’t decide which way to run. Some were pushing back in the direction from which we had come, away from the smoke. Others had apparently decided to try to sprint through the smoke to get to the eastern portal.

Tempers were flaring. People hurrying became people shoving. Yells became screams. Fear became panic.

Within thirty seconds the visibility in front of me was less than two car lengths. The smoke continued to thicken.

I dropped to all fours and hugged the roadway to try to stay below the worst of the smoke, and I searched for Lizzie. As I crawled back toward the Porsche I heard the retort of a rifle, and the metallic
phhhfft
of a slug piercing metal.

Before the volume of the screaming grew even louder, a second shot impacted the fender of my car just above the front tire on the driver’s side. That second shot had missed my head by no more than a foot.

I dove back for the relative safety of the shadow of the SUV.

I hissed, “Lizzie!”

“I’m under here,” she said. I felt fingers on my ankle.

“They’ll come for us,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “They will. Soon. Any ideas?”

“Come on,” I said. I took her hand.

We crawled, we crouched, we hopped, and we sprinted, trying desperately to stay in the shadow of the single line of vehicles as we made our way up the far right side of the roadway in the direction the cars were heading. In the direction of the smoke. In the direction of the sniper.

Despite the fact that traffic was at a dead stop, most of the people who were emptying out of the cars continued to fight for space on the emergency pedestrian walkways. Lizzie and I stayed on the tunnel roadway, using each sequential vehicle to shield our body heat from the infrared sensors in the Death Angel’s rifle scope.

She stopped in front of me seconds after it became clear we weren’t fooling whoever was shooting at us. Another slug whizzed between us as we skipped between two cars. The bullet chipped off a two-square-inch piece of subway tile from the wall behind us.

Lizzie sat on the roadway, her back against an old Dodge pickup. I did the same. The sniper knew where we were, and was obviously in a terrific position to intercept us before we made it to the pedestrian passageway.

“He can’t be on the walkway on either side. There’re too many people around,” she said. “He has to be up on —”

“One of the scaffolds,” I said. “You’re right.”

By then Lizzie and I were only about two car lengths away from the pedestrian tunnel that ran between the two bores. The smoke had become a thick, still fog. The light in the tubular beams from the parked cars’ headlights bounced right back at them. I knew that the stillness of the smoke cloud meant that the tunnels’ ventilation fans had failed. If enough drivers had left their engines running, carbon monoxide poisoning would be a factor.

We had to act.

“I have an idea,” I said. I told her what I was thinking.

“Why not?” she said. She turned around, reached up, and opened the door of the old Dodge.

I crawled in first, staying low in the foot well as I wormed my way to the floor on the driver’s side. Right behind me she did the same, but she stayed on the passenger-side floor. As I’d suspected, the keys to the truck were in the ignition. I forced the gearshift into neutral before I used one hand to turn the key, and the other to put slight pressure on the gas pedal. After a couple of plaintive turns of the starter motor, the engine kicked to life.

“Ready?” I asked. “On three. One, two —”

The last number got lost in the flurry of activity that followed. I pulled myself up onto the driver’s seat, pounded the clutch and popped the gearshift into first. Lizzie jumped up onto the passenger seat. The weight of the clutch threw me for a moment and I almost stalled the truck as I turned the wheel hard left and begged the thing to begin to accelerate. But the truck was all torque, little acceleration. Once the transmission finally accepted what I wanted it to do it became apparent that the truck had plenty of low-end power. After a short initial roll, we jumped out of our lane and began to devour the series of flimsy orange cones that were cordoning off the work space in the left lane.

Lizzie reached over and kept pressure on the horn with her left hand so that any stray pedestrians would have a fighting chance to get clear of our path. I could see occasional glimpses of the tile wall off to my left, just enough to keep the truck going relatively straight as I built up speed and shifted into second gear. The smoke made it impossible for me to know how far it was going to be until the truck collided with the first scaffold.

It wasn’t long. The interval between my first sighting of the scaffold and our impact with the metal frame wasn’t more than half a second, barely enough time to brace myself, not enough time to get a “hold on” warning out of my mouth for Lizzie. The metal-framed structure was more substantial than I’d suspected, and at first I thought it was actually strong enough to slow the truck’s momentum. But I floored the gas pedal at the initial contact and within another half-heartbeat, it was clear that the pickup was shoving the reluctant structure down the left lane of the Edwin C. Johnson Bore at significant speed.

Three seconds later, maybe five, we cleared the worst of the smoke. Lizzie was leaning forward on her seat, looking straight up at the top of the scaffold. She screamed, “He’s still there! I can see him!” The truck slowed, but the scaffold kept moving. I could see it begin to rock forward, but it didn’t appear that it was going to tip enough to fall over. Gear teeth grated as I pounded the transmission back into first and floored the accelerator. The second impact with the truck rocked the unstable scaffold hard.

Lizzie and I both stared upward as the tower leaned toward us, tottered for a second on two wheels, and finally began to tumble back on top of the truck. The sniper’s balance couldn’t adjust to the rapid rocking. As the scaffolding fell he went flying over the safety rail in the opposite direction, flipping backward off the far side. We instinctively slid low in our seats to brace for the impact of the heavy frame on the roof of the passenger cab. But the concussion was minor; most of the frame missed the part of the truck where we were sitting.

A secondary shudder followed a second later. It came from below. The sniper’s body had passed under the truck’s frame.

I hit the brakes hard, and screamed, “Now!”

Lizzie and I had already choreographed our next move. The moment the truck stopped moving, we jumped out and starting running forward toward the eastern portal, making a rapid perusal of the inventory of available abandoned vehicles so that we could pick one for the next leg of our escape. Without consulting me, Lizzie sprinted ahead four cars and jumped into the right seat of a BMW M3.

It was a great choice. The car was a little rocket. I followed her onto the driver’s seat, found the key in the ignition, started the engine, popped the gearshift into first, turned the wheel hard left, and squealed through a gap in the orange cones into the closed lane. I accelerated through the remaining length of the tunnel, slowing once to dodge a terrified pedestrian, and once more to do a nifty slalom around the final scaffold.

By the time we were approaching the eastern portal I was already doing about eighty.

SIXTY-FOUR

At the first sign of electrical failure the tunnel administrators had undoubtedly closed both bores to traffic. Once smoke started to fill the eastbound lanes and drift out the exit portals, drivers stopped at the eastern slope entrance must have recognized that their wait to get through the tunnel was going to be a long one.

By the time Lizzie and I exited the eastern entrance to the westbound bore in the stolen M3, a couple of cops were already in place diverting vehicles that were lined up to enter the tunnel from the east into a U-turn that would permit them to go back down the hill and exit onto Loveland Pass, the sole alternative route in the vicinity over the Divide to the Western Slope. Seeing what was going on in front of us, I braked hard, slowing the M3 so that I could sneak into the orderly procession that was heading back down the hill. I feared a cop would stop us and ask how we’d managed to get out of the tunnel, but the one who saw us coming gave me a thumbs-up and waved us on. Most of the other cars in the queue joined the slowly crawling line to exit at the Loveland Pass off-ramp.

We didn’t. Lizzie and I had a different destination.

I moved into the left lane and maintained an approximation of the speed limit until we reached Silver Plume.

At that point, I let the M3 stretch her legs a little and I attacked the decline of the Georgetown hill as though I were still in the Porsche.

We were going to New Haven.

Initially I surmised that we would enjoy at least an hour’s cushion before the owner of the M3 realized that her car — the insurance card in the glove compartment identified the owner as Carrie Belvedere of Littleton — had been stolen. Before Carrie would be allowed back into the tunnel, at a minimum, power had to be restored. The source of the tunnel fire would need to be identified. The exhaust fans would need to be checked, and rechecked. The air quality might have to be sampled. The reports of sniper shots would have to be investigated.

The puzzle of the toppled scaffold and the battered Dodge pickup with the body trapped below it would need to be solved.

Lizzie disagreed with my assessment about the time all that would take. “The owners of those cars aren’t going to be allowed back into the tunnel to retrieve them for a long time. The whole tunnel’s a crime scene. The cops are going to shut down access for hours. Maybe all night. They might use the other side for two-way traffic, but the side we were in? It’s closed for a while.”

“So no one’s looking for us?” I said hopefully.

“No one in law enforcement,” she said.

The Death Angels are still looking for us.

That’s what she meant.

“Oh.”

“They’re not accustomed to taking casualties. To my knowledge, it’s never happened before. It will complicate things.”

Lizzie had said “they.”

“For them?” I asked.

“Yes. For us, too.”

“Will they try to hit us again on the way down?” I asked.

“They didn’t expect to fail in the tunnel. That was a complex op.”

“That means no?”

“If we’re lucky they don’t know where we are right now.”

“They did before? They knew where we were?”

“All of your vehicles are GPS’d,” she said. Her tone conveyed her disappointment that I hadn’t figured that out myself.

Of course they are.
“The plane, too?”

She nodded. “Planes are easy to track. Anyone can do it on the Web. They’re angry at you now. You stated a clear preference not to be shot. Those kinds of preferences are typically honored. That they were planning to take you out with a bullet is a clear indication that their patience is exhausted. Anything goes now. Anything.”

“My home?”

“Maybe not your home.”

“My plane?”

“Even your plane. My advice? Don’t fly it over water. If they bring it down, they’d much prefer that it go down in the water.”