Whirlwind (19 page)

No time to retrieve the Tokarev, Irina held the wheel with both hands, fingers so tight that veins rose on the back of her hand.

The Sierra whipped past. The driver she saw him clearly peered at her intently.

Brakes shrieked. She glanced over her shoulder. The white Sierra slid sideways in a moonshiner’s turn.

They’d seen her in profile. They knew who she was.

She locked her leg, standing on the gas pedal. The speedometer needle ticked up. Seventy. Eighty. Ninety…

The Sierra was faster. She’d not outrun it. . one hundred and ten. One hundred and twenty. Her tachometer crossed the red line. The Dodge’s engine howled. One hundred and twenty-five miles per hour, but no faster than that.

The steering felt loose as though her front wheels were lofting off the road. Mitch’s truck was not meant for this sort of speed. Neither was the Sierra, although modifications surely had been made.

It was close, so close. She could see both men’s faces, their teeth shining white between pulled-back lips.

They wouldn’t try to ram her fender. At high speed, a tap on her rear bumper was all they needed. They custom engine and custom suspension would not lose control. She would.

There was nothing she could do. The Dodge would go no faster. Pulling on to the graveled shoulder was suicide. Braking would slam them into her rear, and send her spinning out of control.

Her only chance: decelerate slowly, be ready with the Tokarev when they came.

Two guns against one. Not a contest of equals. She steeled herself. Equals or not, she was as deadly as they, and would not sell herself cheap.

“Pull over!” A voice through a loudspeaker. The piercing whoop of a siren. “Slow down and pull over!” Whiteness behind a white Sierra, white striped green, a row of colored lights across the roof.

“Both of you dragsters. This is your last warning. Pull your vehicles off the road.”

The men in the Sierra were so near that she shrank at their fury. The driver’s eyes bulged, a moment of indecision. Then a clenching of the jaw, a bunching of shoulder muscles. He’d made his choice. No hick cop was going to stop him now. He had her, and he was going to take her, and fuck you, Deputy Dawg.

He swerved into the left lane. Irina caught a glimpse of the highway patrol car, a single officer, his features grimly resolute.

The Sierra exploded forward. He planned to ram her after all. She glanced left, seeing the driver’s meaty arms ripple as he readied himself to turn the wheel.

Wait for it! Wait!

His right hand edged up the steering wheel. His grip tightened. He said something to the man in the passenger seat.

Now!

Irina slammed on her brakes. The Sierra sliced in front of her, missing her bumper by inches, j uttering off the road, over the shoulder, into the sandy desert. The highway patrol car screamed into a slide. Irina jerked her foot from the brake pedal, kicking the gas pedal hard. The Sierra spewed dirt into the air. She wove blindly through an alkaline fog, pumping the brake, slowing the Dodge. She heard the slap of pistol fire behind her, nails hammered into concrete, hard and flat, five shots fired, then six.

The Dodge jolted to a stop. Snatching up her Tokarev, Irina sprang from the truck. She bent low, running into the gritty dust cloud, two hands gripping her weapon, ready to fire at the first target that presented itself.

Wind whisked dirty plumes across the highway, impenetrable haze becoming translucent smoke.

Both of the Sierra’s doors were open. One man sprawled limp on dry earth, his head twisted in a sickening angle. A second, still alive, slumped in the driver’s seat. Blood pulsed from his chest, poured to the ground, hissed as it puddled onto hot sand.

A highway patrolman with a pistol in his hand staggered drunkenly up the road. He stumbled, and fell. His legs drummed on asphalt as he died.

The Sierra’s driver, the man vomiting blood from an open wound, held something in his hand, fumbled with a console on the dashboard.

Irina ran.

He twisted a knob, depressed a switch, lifted the radio to his mouth. Red spittle bubbled from his lips as he tried to speak.

Well beyond conventional range, he was a difficult target. Irina stood like a statue, quarter turn right, knees flexed, elbows locked, left hand cupping the right, finger gentle on the trigger, deep breath in, then exhale half the air, and squeeze gently, ever so softly…

She killed her first man cleanly, and with a single shot. She took no comfort in the fact that he was already dying, and was sickened at the pride she took in her marksmanship.

vjrlowering, Sam strode toward his office. Junior staffers scuttled from his path.

Allergies raging, he felt as if his world was tilted two martinis into the evening, and the itch that needed scratching most was the one behind his eyes. Charlie’s damned cats had left his sinuses vulnerable to every virus in Washington.

Jesus. What could be worse?

Easy answer: the Chinese. They’d caught wind of trouble with Whirlwind. Now they were on the warpath, and who needs this grief? Calming them down had been tough. Keeping them that way would be tougher.

He slammed his office door, strode to his desk, and dry-swallowed a Claritin.

Sitting down, he glanced at the stack of messages waiting for him. He really wasn’t in the mood to deal with them. All he wanted to do was curl up in bed and sleep. Reluctantly, he flipped through the green slips. The senator from Oklahoma. Dr. Sangin Wing. The secretary of the treasury. Dr. Sangin Wing. The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Mr. Cobra. Dr. Sangin Wing…

Oh hell!

Mr. Cobra. 12:05.

Asks you to call his service on the secure line. Says you know the number.

Sam reluctantly picked up his phone, hesitantly tapping in both Schmidt’s number and the eight digit password that gave him access to the South African’s messages, said messages always being accompanied by some opera singer’s emotional counterpoint to a serenely unemotional voice.

Good afternoon, Samuel.

This voice mail system is secure. I intend to leave you progress reports every three hours. Do try to review them in a timely manner. If you need to speak to me in person, you have my cell-phone number.

Regarding our status, at the moment I am nearing the Arizona border, following Charles’s ostentatious vehicle. His planned destination is unclear. Tucson, perhaps. Possibly Phoenix. No doubt he has a specific objective in mind. I expect that as we move closer to that objective, he will attempt to elude me. You may have every confidence that he will not.

We do not yet have a sighting of Miss Kolodenkova. I remain certain that she is headed west, not, as the always obtuse FBI imagines, east. Accordingly, I have every road and highway between here and California under surveillance. She’ll not slip through my net.

Now, with regret, I have disturbing news. When I accepted this mission, you advised me that you’d given Charles a tidy sum in marked, sequentially numbered bills. I assume either you or the FBI broadcast an alert regarding them to the local law enforcement lads.

Where an ordinary adversary is involved, I would deem this to be a clever ploy.

However, Charles seems to have turned the tables on you. Or rather on me. He has played an irksome prank with your bills. Somehow he managed to get them into the hands of my team. The consequence? Six of my men used that money to pay for food or fuel. Four of them are, at this present time, under lock and key. Two are dead.

Naturally enough, a policeman is as well. When uniformed law enforcement officers intrude in matters beyond their competence, the outcome is predictable.

However, in the instant case, because my subordinates are armed at your direct command with small-caliber weapons, two good warriors died. A risk of the trade, to be sure, but nevertheless vexatious.

Please understand the gravity of the situation. A policeman was killed by two men, since deceased, who passed marked currency to a momentarily attentive gas station clerk. Four other men carrying the same currency have been taken into custody. These four were arrested in trucks modified in ways similar to that driven by the late deceased, and bearing similar equipment. Well, you can imagine the furor. County sheriffs, town constables, highway patrolmen, and others of that amateurish ilk are behaving in a counterproductive fashion. Indeed, their intervention threatens to disrupt my mission.

Sort this out for me, Samuel. It is a distraction I do not need.

Finally, I wish you to reconsider your orders that Charles not be harmed. At the moment, both I and my people are in a punitive frame of mind. Once Kolodenkova is located, I genuinely believe it would be in everyone’s best interest if we are permitted to neutralize him in a manner that insures he plays no more of his insufferable practical jokes.

Do give this matter some thought, and call me at your earliest convenience.

Swallowing another Claritin tablet, Sam laid a yellow legal pad on his desk. He always found it easier to reach a difficult decision if he prepared a ledger listing the pluses and minuses of a given course of action.

Uncapping his Mont Blanc pen, he started to write. Five minutes later, he leaned back in his chair and studied the surprising outcome of his analysis. The number of minuses were fewer than he’d expected.

Only one really mattered.

That fucking Internet data vault.

If someone could find it and crack it, Charlie was Schmidt’s meat.

Wednesday, July 22. 0915 Hours Pacific Time i3an Francisco! Charlie loved the place.

Alarmingly pierced Goth girls, hollow-chested Lawrence Ferlinghetti wannabes, graceful street jugglers, in-your-face gay activists, tie-dyed sixty-year-old hippies who remembered the summer of love as if it were only yesterday (and, the by-product of too many drugs, probably thought it was), and the cooks yeah! the cooks, caring for each dish and every serving as if it were a newborn child. Hey, you! Food is fun. If you aren’t here to enjoy it, the chef politely recommends you go back to New Yawk.

Mary came here for the opera. Not for her the ponderous gaudy of New York’s Metropolitan. Every winter, she’d be in San Francisco. Charlie, no matter what he was doing, managed to join her. Two seats on the aisle and four hours time-travel to a more innocent era when heroes were gallant, villains wore capes, and heroines were e’er willing to Die For Love.

These are good things to believe in, Mary said. Believing in Romance with a capital R makes us human.

Except at the last she in the hospital, he in prison they’d visited San Francisco every year of their married life. But that city was only their starting point. They roamed all up and down the state, overnighting in BBs, four-star resorts, and anonymous little back-road motels that provoked Mary to

more than ordinary lasciviousness. All in all, they’d behaved liked two overgrown kids, playing hooky, no adults to deny their whims.

Toward the end those final years before whispering death wooed her for his bride they found themselves returning to one place, a single spot that had become their personal Shangri-la. Love at first sight, they instantly knew it for their destiny. Turn off the main highway; drive down a prosaic two-lane road; pass quiet farmlands and lush coastal groves. Then the sudden glory of a Pacific sunset, the sky liquid gold, infinite beauty, and it struck them to their hearts.

San Carlos do Cabo, a tiny seaside village at the tip of a broad cape. A few hundred delightfully quirky citizens. Victorian houses of lively color. Fields of infinite flowers. A wind off the ocean bearing air that no man had breathed before.

“This,” Brigham Young had said, “is the place.” Mary said the same. Charlie added, “Damned right.”

Land was cheap, at least by California standards; building a good a perfect retirement home was affordable; they’d have two fireplaces against the summer fogs, a big broad porch for sunny winter days, an enormous backyard garden for Mary to putter among the flowers she adored, and Charlie would breed fine pedigreed cats, and the world could go to hell because both of them had found what few are given, and would be together always, always smiling, until the end.

A tear beaded at the corner of his eye. Embarrassed, he brushed it away. Life, which is never to be trusted, had different plans for Charlie and Mary McKenzie, and he’d never see San Carlos again.

Pushing aside old memories the happy ones and the sad he steered a course through San Francisco’s backstreets, circumventing yet another protest march, the city’s favorite outdoor sport. Dropping down from Presidio Heights, he wheeled his Hertz Rent-a-Weenie onto the Golden Gate Bridge’s feeder road. Traffic was light. He was ahead of schedule.

His plane had arrived at SFO twenty minutes earlier than the flight plan called for; the pilot was a hundred dollars richer for every minute of it.

Charlie trotted across the tarmac. Sledge, well groomed for a change, was waiting for him in the general aviation terminal.

If Sledge had a real name, Charlie didn’t know it. No one did. In the subterranean world of computer hackers, you only needed to know that Sledge, short for Sledgehammer, was the man who could crack anything.

He hung out at U.C. Berkeley. Not a student, most definitely not faculty, he was one of those ageless eccentrics found in every university’s computer sciences department a lone gunslinger without title, position, or stipend who nonetheless had his own cubicle, his own hot-rod workstation, and plenty of money for late-night pizza.

“Whadya got, Charlie?” Sledge reserved polite greetings for his equals. As near as Charlie could tell, Sledge acknowledged no equals.

Handing the hacker the floppy he’d filched from Irina, Charlie answered, “Mission Impossible. This disk will self-destruct in “

Sledge peered down his nose. “Been there. Done that. Got the T-shirt. When do you want it back?”

“Three hours. Here at the airport.”

Aloof and abrupt, the hacker asked, “Ten grand sound about right?”

“Cheap.”

“Fine, it’ll be fifteen.”

Charlie peeled the bills off a roll. “I need the original disk back in pristine condition.”