THE OVERTON WINDOW (34 page)

Danny took his right hand from his pocket, casually scratched the side of his nose, feigned a leisurely yawn, and then let his arm hang back down by his side.

Randy, the one still on the phone, looked back over his shoulder.

He was listening intently, not talking; his eyes went first to Stuart Kearns, and then over to Danny, and then he turned back around, with his back to them, as he’d been before. A few more seconds passed, and still facing away, Randy’s free hand came up slowly and touched the shoulder of the man to his right, the mouthy guy who looked like he just couldn’t wait for the lead to start flying.

And that was it.

When you’ve practiced enough it gets to look like one fluid motion, but there are four distinct parts to a quick draw, at least to the one that

Molly had taught him. In the beginning the count is slow and you stop between the steps so your teacher can make sure you’ve got them right. After a few months and several thousand repeats, though, it starts to go so fast that if you blink, you might miss it.

Danny’s right hand swept back to clear his clothing and found the pistol grip just where he’d left it; he pulled the weapon free and brought it forward, the barrel coming parallel to the ground and his left hand joining the solid grasp; he extended toward center-mass of his target with the iron sight rising level to his eye; and at the end of the forward movement, as it all came together at his ideal firing position, without a pause he squeezed the trigger to its stop.

The
boom
of their first two shots was almost simultaneous, though Kearns had a much easier draw from his pocket. They’d chosen the same primary target, the man to whom Randy had given his too-obvious go-ahead, the guy who would have cut them in half with a hail of bullets if they’d given him half a chance to shoot first. As Kearns took off to his left, still firing, their designated executioner was crumpling backward, likely dead on his feet, but surely out of commission.

Danny broke right, aiming by the seat of his pants and squeezing off another shot as soon as any one of the scattering men appeared in his line of fire. He was a below-average marksman on a static range, but now he and his targets were moving and they were starting to return fire, so he was shooting a lot but not hitting much of anything.

But at least he’d gotten their full attention. In the next moment he ran out of ammo and good ideas at the very same time as the second man with the heavy artillery had finally found his wits and started shooting. A jagged line of bullet impacts stitched across the sand toward him, and as Danny dropped to the ground in a shallow gully he heard a tire explode and the windows shatter in their van just behind him. He saw Stuart Kearns step from behind the cover of one of the random concrete walls, and the FBI man made his next four rounds count. As the
last gunshots echoed back from the mountains, three of the men were lying motionless on the ground, and one was unaccounted for, but only for the moment.

The silence was broken by the sound of a diesel engine turning over and starting. Danny watched Kearns limping toward the back of the truck, then grabbing on and hoisting himself up into the open compartment.

As the truck dropped into gear and started to roll Danny got to his feet and ran for it. The faster he ran the faster it went, and it had nearly accelerated to the point of no return when he caught up to the tailgate, stumbled forward to get a grasp on to Stuart Kearns’ extended hand, and felt himself pulled up and in.

CHAPTER 42
 

Noah had shaken his one remaining pill out of the prescription bottle halfway through the flight, and now as the last of the medicine was wearing off, a nasty withdrawal was setting in with a vengeance. By the time they reached the car rental counter he could feel himself starting to fade. Headache, chills, dizziness, a general sickening malaise—it was already bad, and he could tell it was going to get much worse over the next few hours.

Molly was driving, since he clearly wasn’t fit to sit behind the wheel, and to put it delicately, she drove with a purpose. If he’d been feeling good and in the right sort of daredevil mood her driving might have been easier to take in stride. As it was, though, between his worsening physical condition and being jostled around the front seat by all the surging and braking and swerving through traffic, he wasn’t having any fun at all.

Plus, she wasn’t talking. Since they’d started out in the car all he was getting were one-word answers, along with clear unspoken signals that there was nothing so important that it needed to be discussed at the moment.

They’d left the city limits of Las Vegas over half an hour ago, so his
hope of a good night’s recovery in a five-star bed was more than thirty miles behind them and fading fast. According to the speedometer, wherever she was taking them she was trying to get there in way too much of a hurry.

“We’re going to get stopped,” Noah said.

She didn’t answer, and she didn’t slow down.

“Where are we going, Molly?”

“To help a friend,” she said curtly. “Now would you please just let me drive?”

“Fine.”

“Thank you.”

Before long they’d left the main highway and were barreling down some narrow desert road that was only a thin single line on the GPS screen. Before they’d gotten started she’d spent quite a bit of time and frustration entering their destination into the device. It was hard, she’d said, because it wasn’t a street address that she’d been given, only a latitude and longitude.

The sheet of paper from which she’d read those coordinates was still tucked into one of the cup holders.

Okay, then.

If she didn’t want to take a few seconds to tell him what was going on, he could damn well figure it out for himself. Before she could stop him Noah picked up the sheet and opened it up, tapped on the overhead map light, and held the paper near his eyes.

What was printed there appeared to be two cut-and-pasted text messages or e-mails, he couldn’t tell which. Maybe it was because his mind was working only at half capacity, but he had to read it all over twice. The first time through he couldn’t accept what he was seeing.

molly -

spread the word --- stay away from las vegas monday

FBI sting op --> * exigent *

be safe

xoxo

db

* FYI ONLY DO NOT FORWARD DELETE AFTER READING *

Big mtg today, Monday PM, southern

Nevada. If you don’t hear from me by

Wednesday I’m probably dead*, and this is

where to hunt for the body:

Lat 37°39’54.35”N Long 116°56’31.48”W

> S T A Y A W A Y from Nevada TFN <

db

* I wish I was kidding

“Unbelievable.”

She glanced over at him, but only for a second before she got her eyes back on the road. When he looked down he found he’d crumpled the paper in his hand so hard that it might never come unfolded.

“I can’t believe it,” Noah said. “You people got me again.”

CHAPTER 43
 

“Nine-one-one, this call is recorded, what’s your emergency?”

Wherever they were going, the ride was awfully rough. Danny was holding on tight to a cargo strap near the open door at the rear of the moving truck, the only place in the metal compartment with a signal solid enough to make a call on Kearns’s satellite phone.

“My name is Danny Bailey, I’m out in the desert somewhere northwest of Las Vegas, and I’m with FBI Special Agent Stuart Kearns. I’m in the back of a truck that’s on the move, and this truck belongs to a terrorist organization that might have their hands on a nuclear weapon.”

“What’s your location, sir?”

“Listen, I know what you people can do. You already know where I am better than I do, you know whose phone I’m calling from, you know the route I’m on, and in about ten seconds you’ll be sure who I am because you’ll have verified my voiceprint, so stop wasting my time.”

Some odd noise broke onto the line for a time; not interference, but a series of electronic clicks, tones, and dropouts.

“Okay, good deal, is everybody on now? Everybody listening? This is about an operation code-named Exigent. Did you get that?
Exigent.
So now you know who I am, who I’m with, why I’m here, and where to send the cavalry, and you’d by-God better know this is real. Just follow this signal down and get here, understand?”

He left the phone switched on and placed it in a niche on the bed of the cargo compartment.

Kearns was near the front wall, kneeling next to the tarp-wrapped bundle they’d both seen earlier, before the shooting had started.

It was a body, of course, and the face of the dead man had been uncovered. When Kearns turned to look at him, Danny didn’t have to ask who it was that was lying there. He’d already known who it would be.

Agent Kearns had said that after these last few years of working this operation undercover—all the while doing his best to appear to be a raving militant agitator who’d turned against his government and was openly calling for a violent revolution—he really had only one remaining contact in the FBI. His frightening online persona was well-known to tens of thousands of fringe-group wackos and law enforcement personnel alike, but only one person alive could have credibly testified that Stuart Kearns was actually a loyal American doing his duty to protect and defend the United States. And here was that person, dead.

“Did you call 911?” Kearns asked.

“Yeah, I did. And now they’ll either come or they won’t.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Danny touched the metal gantry next to him, the frame that held the thing that at first glance he’d thought might be a torpedo. “Take a look at this thing with me, and tell me what you think.”

As Kearns moved to stand, he winced and leaned his head back against the corrugated wall of the compartment. Below the knee his right pants leg was stained with blood.

“Are you okay?”

“I’ll be fine. Just help me up.”

They stood on either side of the framework, bracing themselves on its crossbars as the truck moved over the rough road they were traveling.

“This looks like an old Mark 8 atomic bomb,” Kearns said, “from the early 1950s.” He pulled the light down closer and ran his hands over the surface, stopping at a series of seals and stickers that carried dates and the initials of inspectors. “It’s been maintained all these years.”

“So this is a live one, then?”

“Sure looks that way to me.” A line of heavy metal conduit ran from the rear of the thing and Kearns followed it with a finger, pointing. The tubing went across the floor and through the wall to the driver’s compartment. “And it looks like they’ve jury-rigged it to be set off from the front seat.”

“So your guy over there on the floor: he brought them this one, and you brought yours. You both got managed so you didn’t know what the other was doing, and we all got set up at once.”

“But why,” Kearns said. He wasn’t really asking; he was thinking it through.

“It’s like I told you before. Whoever’s behind this needed a patsy for a false-flag domestic attack, Stuart, and that’s you. And they needed to make my people the enemy, and that’s why I’m here.”

“Based on your file, they could have had you picked up anytime they wanted, but they picked you up Friday night, to make you a part of this. And me, they’ve just kept me in cold storage—”

“Waiting for the right time, when they needed a couple of fall guys,” Danny said. “The crazy Internet conspiracy theorist who incited these thugs into violence, and the lone nut ex-FBI man who helped them pull it off.”

“Well, whoever’s behind this, we’ve screwed up their plans for now.”

“But not for too much longer. This guy’s driving somewhere like he means to get where he’s going, but if he calms down long enough to stop and come back here to check his load, we’re toast. We’re unarmed, and he’ll just stand back and shoot us like fish in a barrel. Then he’ll go on to Vegas tonight and do what he’s going to do. We can’t wait for him to do that.”