Origin (9 page)

Eldridge looked in the wing mirror, seeing the flashing lights behind them, closing in. ‘Ram the other cars off the road if you have to,’ he ordered. ‘We need to catch that damn horse!’

The horse was nervous, Adams knew, and he couldn’t blame her. The road was jammed up, and he had to guide her at a gallop through tons of moving steel, the sound of growling engines and blasting horns being enough to make any animal nervous – humans included, Adams thought as he struggled to control their unconventional transport.

Behind him, Lynn was keeping him posted on what was going on in the street. ‘The van’s getting closer, even nudging other vehicles out of the way now,’ she yelled into his ear. ‘Police cars too, coming up fast behind them.’

Adams nodded his head, watching the road. He then turned to Lynn quickly.

‘Hold on!’ he yelled as he pulled down to the left, the unbridled mare turning with his will, straight across the oncoming traffic of the Compañia de Jesús.

Adams was glad that Lynn couldn’t see what was happening in front of them, as a huge Ford RV headed straight for them down the busy street. He leant in close to the mare’s neck, coaxing her onwards, until she reared upwards and vaulted the massive vehicle in one smooth motion.

‘Matt!’ Lynn cried out as the horse landed and then immediately veered sharply around another car. As Adams turned to Lynn, he felt her grip slipping from his waist, and his eyes went wide as he saw her slide straight off the side of the horse.

‘She’s going!’ Eldridge announced to the teammates in the rear of the van as they rounded the corner, forcing their way on to the Compañia de Jesús. ‘She’s going!’

In the front cabin, Eldridge and Renfrew watched as the horse miraculously vaulted the front of a huge 4x4, then snaked lithely around another car, and then – yes! – as Evelyn Edwards lost her grip on Adams and plummeted towards the hard concrete street below.

As soon as Adams felt Lynn’s grip go, his body reacted instinctively, and instantaneously.

Gripping the mare’s thick mane in one hand, he shifted his weight to the side, digging his knees in to tighten his grip, his other arm shooting out towards Lynn.

Just as she left the horse’s back, Adams clamped down on her forearm with his powerful grip, leaning halfway down the animal’s flank. The horse continued to gallop along the street, and Lynn secured her other hand over Adams’ outstretched arm, screaming as she was dragged along, feet banging painfully against the rough asphalt.

Adams grimaced in pain himself as he struggled to pull Lynn back up, still trying to control the unsaddled horse. As he pulled, Lynn’s hands clawing up his arm, he glanced forward, gasping as he saw the truck bearing down on them, its huge steel mass threatening to smash straight into both of them.

Lynn followed his eyes, her own going wide as she saw the truck. Adrenalin pouring into both of their bodies, Adams pulled with all his might, Lynn grabbing him tight, as he lifted her higher, higher, until finally she was up and Adams swung her on to the back of the horse once more, pulling his own body back out of the way as the truck blared its horn and passed them, just inches away.

In the van, Eldridge at least had the satisfaction of knowing that the police were no longer on his tail – Jacobs must have somehow called them off.

It was a blessing not to have to worry about the city’s own police force; if it had been planned from the start to be multi-agency, that would have been different. But if additional elements started to get involved once the mission was already in motion, then things would definitely get screwed up.

More
screwed up, Eldridge corrected himself, because of course things were already screwed up royally. The escaping targets had not only got through the intersection with the Ricardo Cumming unscathed, weaving their way almost magically through the oncoming vehicles, their unlikely transport had now disappeared from view entirely. Luckily, the voice through his earpiece was able to update him with an instant fix, informing him that the horse had taken a sharp right up Arz González, towards Catedral. Unfortunately, it also seemed that the distance between them was steadily increasing.

‘Come on,’ he urged Renfrew. ‘Can’t this heap of junk go any faster?’

Renfrew was ignoring Eldridge at this point, concentrating with everything he had just to keep the unwieldy van on the road. But he was determined to catch them. He’d never be able to live it down if he failed to catch a horse, driving a vehicle with a five-litre V8 under the hood. But the horse did have its advantages; it was far more manoeuvrable than a motor vehicle, for a start, able to weave in and out of traffic with ease. But surely the horse would begin to tire at some stage, and then Renfrew would have them.

As the horse pushed on towards the end of Arz González, it seemed to slow. Was it getting tired already? Renfrew gunned the engine harder.

And then something happened that caused both him and Eldridge to gasp out loud.

Adams saw it from a distance, and it took him only seconds to make the decision.

The entrance to the Cumming metro station was right there ahead of them, across the Catedral that transected the end of Arz González.

He slowed the mare as they reached the end, checking the traffic on the Catedral and, seeing that it was mercifully light, speeded up straight across the street, over the sidewalk, and down the steep stairs that led to Santiago’s underground rail system.

T
HE
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ETRO DE
Santiago is South America’s most extensive metro system. Its five lines have more than a hundred stations and over a hundred kilometres of track; servicing over two million passengers per day, it is the city’s lifeblood.

As Adams led the loyal mare on to the platform, past the screaming, pointing, awed spectators, he was pretty sure that this would be the first time a horse had been on the tracks. He didn’t even know if the horse would be willing to leave the platform and make the jump between the steel rails, but he knew he had to take the chance – the rest of his plan depended upon making it to the tunnels.

Lynn holding tightly to him, he pulled the horse in short on the edge of the platform, and then they jumped from the safety of the platform to the tracks beneath.

The operators in the Nevada intelligence section were having their work cut out for them.

Following a horse down city streets via CCTV and satellite imagery was fairly easy, but now the horse – and nobody in the control room had
any
idea how the rider was managing to do it – had gone down into Santiago’s subway system.

The chief technician had to immediately hack into the city’s municipal transport department’s mainframe, and hive off its surveillance camera footage.

By the time he had got the raw footage feeding through to his own monitors, the only image from the platform camera showed the back legs of the horse taking off at full gallop down the east tunnel towards Santa Ana.

Reluctantly, he reached for the telephone.

The reports came through to Eldridge thick and fast.

Orders were given to the transport police to immediately halt the trains on the system, and send men down the tunnels to flush the horse and riders out. Meanwhile, Eldridge was urging Renfrew faster on down Catedral towards Santa Ana station, where they planned on intercepting the pair and putting an end to their crazy race across the city once and for all.

Minutes later, Eldridge was leading his team down the stairs of Santa Ana subway station four at a time, weapons shouldered, safety catches off.

At the same time, crowds of people were surging the opposite way up the stairs towards the exit, and Eldridge didn’t know if it was because the transport police were evacuating the subway or because of something else.

The team hit the bottom of the stairs at a fast run, and Eldridge could have sworn he heard the whinnying of a horse coming from round the corner.

Heading for the westbound platform, the team passed the last few stragglers as they streamed along the modern, tiled corridor and eventually turned through a grand archway on to the platform itself.

‘Ready!’ Eldridge called, and the team raised their weapons in unison, 9mm submachine guns aimed straight ahead at the dark tunnel opposite them, ready to shoot the horse the moment it came through. If the two targets weren’t instantly electrocuted on the track’s rails as they fell from the dead animal, his men would then race forward and subdue them.

The men adjusted their positions as they heard the horse whinny again from just inside the tunnel, seeing its vague outline coming towards them, and exhaled steadily, each man holding his breath to make his shots accurate.

And then the chestnut mare burst into the light of the platform, still coming forward at full gallop, racing between the steel rail lines, a beautiful, impressive beast, its coat glistening in the fluorescent lighting, muscles rippling down her flanks.

‘Hold your fire!’ Eldridge yelled as the horse continued past them, racing at full speed, along the track and through into the next tunnel, until she disappeared again from sight.

The horse was an impressive sight, but there had been something missing. Something vital.

‘Where the hell are Adams and Edwards?’ Eldridge yelled in exasperation.

Adams had stopped the horse halfway down the tunnel, dismounted with Lynn, and then slapped the animal on the flank to send her towards the next platform. As he watched her gallop off down the tracks, he offered a prayer to the animal spirits, thanking them for delivering the magnificent animal to them, and asking for her safety.

Adams was sure that there had to be an access point somewhere along the track, a crew hatch that would lead to a service area. The tunnel was dark, though, lit only by dim red emergency lights, and his night vision was nowhere near as good as it had once been.

It was Lynn who spotted the steel door, over on the left, in the shadows.

Adams raced over and levered it open. Checking the tunnel once again for signs of pursuit, he took Lynn by the hand and pushed through into the dark service corridor beyond.

Their eyes finally adjusting to the dark, Adams decided to leave the lights off, unwilling to draw further attention to themselves. But within less than two minutes, he stopped dead.

‘People up ahead,’ he whispered urgently to Lynn, ‘coming towards the corridor. They’ll be in here soon.’

Quickly, he pulled her back down the corridor, several feet beyond where they had just come. In the dark, Adams had noticed a row of lockers and metal cupboards lining the wall, and now both he and Lynn pulled at the handles frantically, trying to find one that was open.

‘They’re at the door!’ Adams warned, even as Lynn managed to get a door open. They pushed into the confined space, pulling the aluminium door shut behind them as quietly as they could.

The cupboard was used for cleaning products, and was full of brooms, mops and chemicals. But there was enough room for them, and they both watched through the slats in the door as the lights went on.

After a few moments of adjusting to the blinding illumination, they could make out a group of uniformed police – probably the municipal transport police Adams realized – racing down the corridor towards the tunnel.

Adams didn’t know whether the horse would have been found yet – the Santa Ana platform was still some distance away from where they had dismounted, but she might have managed it if she was going at full speed – and therefore didn’t know whether it was already suspected that the pair had left the tunnel via the corridor, or whether the police were just accessing the tunnel through a direct route. Either way, it would now certainly appear to the police – and whoever they reported to – that the targets were not in the service corridor, which would hopefully give him and Lynn some breathing space to make their escape.

They waited until the steel access door to the tunnel swung shut behind the men, and then opened the cupboard door, stalking carefully down the now brightly lit corridor, ready for action at any moment.

They emerged at street level less than ten minutes later, mercifully only having to hide twice more, Adams’ returning senses giving them just enough time to react.

The exit took them out on to Catedral, just a hundred yards from the intersection with Brasil.

There was minimal CCTV coverage in this area, but both Adams and Lynn were now both fully aware of the danger of satellite surveillance and immediately ducked under the cover of a grocery store awning, pretending to look at the varied fruit on display.

‘We need to find a car and get out of the city,’ Lynn said decisively. So far, it had been her ex-husband who had been leading the way, and although she was more than grateful – it was what she had contacted him for in the first place, of course – she was not the kind of person who dealt easily with being helpless. Taking charge now would at least let her salvage something of her sense of worth.

She checked her backpack nervously, relieved – and amazed, given what they had just been through – that it was still there.

‘Just what I was thinking,’ Adams agreed. ‘But where do we get one?’

‘Right here,’ Lynn answered instantly.

‘What?’ Adams asked in surprise, but as he saw the excited glint in the eyes of his ex-wife, he knew that her plan would be a good one.

In the control centre, deep beneath the Nevada air force base, the technicians were frantic.

They had entered the search parameters – platforms, tracks, service entrances and exits, all possible locations where the two targets could have emerged on to the streets of Santiago – and they were now monitoring each and every one of these potential areas.

The problem was that it had taken a number of minutes for the request for the satellite redirects to go through from their own organization to the NSA, and from the NSA to the National Reconnaissance Office which actually operated the satellites.

If the targets had exited the tunnels in that time and made it far enough, such a direct search would reveal nothing.