Angels of Vengeance: The Disappearance Novel 3 (46 page)

‘The tangled webs we weave, Agent Monroe.’

She breathed out heavily. Once this mission was done with, she planned to cut her entanglements, but it would be interesting to see what happened to Culver if she couldn’t give him Blackstone’s head on a plate. The Colonel Murdoch jacket wasn’t meant to be worn in earnest. It was thin cover for a quick and dirty job. And there was always Wales too, of course. Her former controller would go down with Jed Culver and
that
she did care about.

Musso was still talking, however, and she had to set aside these thoughts.

‘In many ways, Caitlin, if your mission is successful, you’ll set this country back on its heels for a decade. Or longer. Conceivably, you could even cause a complete break between Seattle and Texas. You could turn differences of opinion into a
casus belli
.’

Caitlin picked up her phone and stowed it away in a deep jacket pocket. She felt none of the bleakness of spirit that seemed to have taken hold of Musso.

‘But think about those differences, sir. They’re not cosmetic. It’s not just politics, or a personal feud. Culver and Wales briefed you before I came down. You know why I’m here. For New York. For what this asshole did to us in New York.’
And for myself
, she didn’t add.

‘I do,’ he said, sounding very tired now. ‘I do. Some things you neither forgive nor forget.’

He stood up and reached his hand out to shake hers.

‘Good luck, Agent Monroe. Good luck to us all.’

She experienced a point of paralysing clarity just before impact. Sensing Granger’s sudden tension, Jules felt herself pressed back into the seat as he accelerated. Something large and dark and moving much too quickly loomed in her peripheral vision on the driver’s side of the car. That part of her mind – trained, as it had been, by years at sea to judge the lines of force conspiring to undo her while sailing small boats through the huge, angry seas – passed from slumber to full sentience in the space between instants. She registered the inevitability of a collision in the stuttering hundredths of a second before the hollow thunder of impact. The whole world, and them within it, lurched sideways as it broke apart in a bright, shattered mandala of atomised glass and shrieking, collapsing metal.

A blur of colour. A violent catherine-wheel of optics, stretching and encircling them at cyclonic velocity as the car spun around, tyres exploding like gunshots.

A small, almost abstracted part of her rational mind waited for the cab to flip over and over, for the roof to collapse and crush them. But after an eternity of splintered fractions and fragments of time, they came to rest with a slight jerk as inertia tugged back at the momentum of impact.

She heard Granger cursing, weakly, and became aware of blood everywhere, but whether hers or his, she could not be sure. After the savage, caterwauling din of the crash, the silence that followed seemed to roar in her ears like a force nine gale. But not so loudly that she couldn’t hear the tinkling of glass and the tortured creak of metal as the weight of the wreckage resettled itself.

The crunch of boots on gravel. Running. And men shouting.

Gunshots cracked and popped somewhere nearby, but muted, perhaps by distance, perhaps because her ears were full of blood. Granger cursed again, but he trailed off into a groan as he struggled to release himself, or to retrieve something from beneath his seat.

Jules could not put one thought after another in any sort of coherent fashion. She was annoyed at ruining the clothes she’d bought just hours ago, even though she hated them and would have thrown them away. She felt cool, despite the heat of the day pouring in through the damaged windscreen, which looked as though a giant had put his fist through it.

And still the gunfire popped and crackled. Until, without preamble, a single shot roared with the concussive power of a small bomb going off beside her head. Someone screamed – it was her, she was screaming – at a blast wave of mutilation. Blood, bone, skin, gore. And Granger yelling and roaring, and trying to push her head down between her knees as he fired out of his window with the cut-down shotgun.

Two bangs sounded next to her ear, followed by metallic crunching, and then her door was open and she caught a glimpse of a blade. She tried to cry out, to warn Granger of the threat. But he was snarling and shouting as he fired off round after round from the pump-action shotgun.

Julianne tried to sit up but this man was too strong. But then the blade was gone, and her seatbelt had been cut, and she was being dragged out of the vehicle and away. Away from the burning oil, the iron blood, the tangy aftertaste of gunfire. She fought to free herself until she recognised Birendra’s voice.

‘It is fine. It is good. You are safe, Ms Julianne. You are safe. Just come with us, we have to go. Now.’

The world was a red mask of death and chaos. Her eyes were tacky with blood. What little she could see and understand gave her to believe they had been rammed at an intersection and two more cars had blocked them in. Both of the blocking cars were burning, riddled with bullet holes. She and Granger had been ambushed and would have died, save for three carloads of Shah’s men who had materialised from the traffic flow.

Some of the attackers lay on the ground. One man in a pair of Levi’s cut-offs lay across the hood of the cab, still twitching from the last sparks of his neurons as they faded away.

The gunfire had ceased, she realised. It had stopped some unknown time ago. Her internal clock seemed to have been damaged in the crash. Had she been here for hours?

‘Come on,’ said Birendra. ‘We have to get you to a hospital. The others can chase them down.’

Although hardly able to stand, she still shook herself free of the Gurkha and the second man hurrying her towards their waiting SUV. Other vehicles in the Shah Security group pulled off down the road at high speed, in hot pursuit.

‘They’re getting away?’ she croaked. ‘No. We have to go now. I’m coming now.’

She reached around and flapped her hand at the small of her back. The SIG Sauer was still there, and for the first time she became aware of a burning pain at the base of her spine, as though she’d been punched there by a stone fist.

‘Come on then,’ said an exasperated Birendra. ‘We have to move quickly. There is no time.’

He hurried her gently, but firmly, over to the last SUV, a black Volvo XC 90. The endorphin rush her body had released immediately after the crash was wearing off, and she was waking into a world of pain. A radio crackled with reports of the chase.

‘
In pursuit. Speed approaching a hundred and ten kilometres per hour. Taking intermittent small-arms fire.
’

‘Hop in, Ms Julianne,’ came a familiar voice. She blinked away the thin crust of dried blood and found Shah patting the seat next to him in the rear of the vehicle. He didn’t seem to care that she was about to bleed all over his soft, cream-coloured leather. Brass casings had burnt small holes into the upholstery and carpet. She thanked him as he handed her an antiseptic wet wipe.

‘We must go now if we are to catch them,’ he told her, smiling.

A PKM very much like Fifi’s old machine gun rested on the wound-down car window. Shah pulled it inside and handed it off to one of his men in the back, in return for a more reasonable, G-36 carbine. Birendra helped Jules up before climbing into the front passenger seat. The driver reversed, slamming into another vehicle before snapping it into gear, jerking them around with almost the same amount of force as that created by the crash. Once they were straight and true, he stomped on the gas before the last door closed, launching them into the disrupted traffic stream.

Birendra grabbed the radio’s microphone. ‘Status?’

‘
Speed now a hundred and twenty kilometres per hour. We’re eighty metres behind and closing. Still taking small-arms fire.
’

‘Return fire at your discretion. We’re coming up on your six now,’ Birendra said.

She heard a siren, and searched fruitlessly for any sign of the police until she realised the warbling klaxon was coming from somewhere just outside. The driver had fired up his own siren. Seeing her confusion, Shah smiled. He appeared serene in the midst of all this chaos.

‘Do you forget, Ms Julianne, that I am an FPDA-approved security contractor. Licensed and bonded to the development authority, and subcontracted to the city to maintain order during emergencies. I think there has been enough gunfire and bloodshed this morning to constitute an emergency. And two vehicles are currently fleeing the scene of that gunfire at high speed, endangering law-abiding motorists and pedestrians and threatening the dignity and repose of the city at large. It is our duty to pursue them. And so we shall. You are still armed?’

She shifted in her seat and retrieved the SIG Sauer. Her neck muscles and most of those in her upper back seized up as she did so; she ignored the discomfort. The weapon felt heavy in her hand. It felt like something that could open up all sorts of possibilities.

‘How is Granger?’ she asked.

Shah turned off his smile while he answered. ‘Mr Cooley acquitted himself admirably,’ he said. ‘He detected the ambush as the attacking vehicle sped through the red light and he accelerated his own vehicle early enough to avoid being rammed amidships, so to speak. The impact was still significant, but it spun you around, rather than smashing and flipping your vehicle into the deep ditch by the side of the road, as was intended, I believe.’

The driver, a man Jules did not recognise, whipped the steering wheel back and forth as he weaved through the traffic at more than a hundred klicks an hour. They passed a pair of police cruisers going in the opposite direction. The cops showed no signs of providing back-up today.

‘But is Granger okay, Shah? He looked terrible after the crash.’

The old Gurkha nodded. ‘He has sustained injury. But he shall live and probably recuperate. Mr Cooley is one of my best men. Even shocked and disoriented by the collision, he managed to hold off your attackers while our support vehicles closed in. He killed one of them, in fact, as the man was leaning into the car to shoot you both.’ This seemed to amuse Shah greatly, and his face lit up again, smiling with Taoist contentment.

‘Oh . . . I guess I didn’t notice,’ said Jules, not really believing the words as they came out of her mouth.

Had Granger blown some bugger’s head off right next to her? She shook her own head in wonder, aggravating the strained muscles in her neck again.

‘How many of them are there?’ she asked.

Birendra drew out his seatbelt so he could turn around to answer. ‘There were about thirty of them, Miss Julianne. Many more than we expected.’

‘I am certain we will find that Mr Cesky’s agents have secured support from one of my rivals,’ said Shah. ‘I recognised two of the men back at the intersection. Freelancers. And not in the way Mr Pappas is a freelancer. These men are scavengers. Not skilled or reliable enough to secure permanent employment with any reputable contractor, they sell their services on the grey market, doing work like this, one or two steps away from the agency holding the original commission.’

The driver swung hard left, taking them off the main drag past the airport and away from the thickening chaos of the traffic banked up there. Jules was not familiar enough with the city’s layout to know where they were headed, but down in her gut she suspected the destination was New Town. Shah leaned forward to mutter instructions to the driver, who sped up to the point where every course correction, every small turn of the wheel to whip them around a slower car, threw the Volvo’s occupants back and forth across the cabin.

Ahead of them, Julianne could just make out the rear of two late-model cars. Streamlined and low to the ground, they wove through the stop-start traffic like barracudas streaking through schools of slow-moving guppies. Flickers of flash suppressors could be seen as tracer rounds zipped towards them. One of the shooters emptied a clip into a passing civilian vehicle, causing it to slam into oncoming traffic.

‘
Evasive
,’ the radio crackled.

‘Oh shit,’ said Jules.

The driver cranked the wheel, taking their car across two lanes. He ran up the shoulder until he was clear of the collision site, before whipping back into the proper lane. The scenery outside changed in brief strobes of blurred imagery. The Volvo screamed through the wide, dusty streets of a factory and warehouse district before bursting out onto a wide four-lane arterial road that swept alongside the upper reaches of the harbour.

‘
Speed increasing
,’ the radio said. The pursuit vehicles were zeroing in on the fleeing hit squad. ‘
Closing. Fifty metres. I’m going to try and ram him . . .’

A black pepper cloud suddenly enveloped one of Shah’s Landcruisers, shredding the passenger compartment into disassociated bits of glass, flesh, metal and bone. Bursts of flame brewed up around the undercarriage as the vehicle turned over on its side. The other pursuit SUV whipped around their fallen comrades before ramming the offending vehicle off the road.

‘Stay with that one,’ Birendra ordered. ‘We’ll take the last one.’

‘Grenade launcher,’ Shah remarked, as they passed the burning ruins of his men. ‘This is most unfortunate.’

There, up ahead on the left, Jules could see the marina where the Rhino had moored his boat. Police tape still fluttered across the entrance near the manager’s hut. She then caught a sunburst flaring off the tinted rear windows of the car in front as it screeched through a hard right turn and disappeared into the diabolical labyrinth of the city’s red-light district.

‘Oh God, we’ll lose them,’ she said, despair in her voice.

‘They cannot move at speed now,’ Shah assured her.

Yeah Shah, but neither can we
, she thought to herself.

Within moments they had reached the same corner where their quarry had just entered New Town. The driver yanked the wheel once more and took them into the congested chaos, blowing through a pile of garbage as he did so. The stench of rotten eggs, meat and vegetable matter saturated the inside of the Volvo. Jules resisted the urge to gag.

She craned around awkwardly to see how much back-up Shah had. She could see one other SUV, an older Toyota of some sort. Red and blue flashers turned inside its grille work, adding their own urgency to the bubble the driver had placed on the roof. She might have shaken her head had it not been so painful to move. The longer she was in this city, the less she understood it.

‘Where are the police?’ she asked.

‘They will be back at the crash site,’ said Shah. ‘But Northern Territory and city law prohibits them from exceeding the speed limit by more than twenty kilometres an hour, even while in hot pursuit. There have been incidents. Pedestrian fatalities.’

As if to underscore that point, they passed a trio of bodies, lying face down in the bone-dry dust, their blood spilling into the earth. Crowds had gathered, but kept their distance, as if the corpses might somehow transmit the violence of their ending through simple proximity.

‘But we –’

‘We do not answer to the city or Territory,’ he explained patiently. ‘We are licensed by the development authority.’

Birendra spoke up again from the front seat, where he was loading shells into a military-style shotgun. ‘They would not follow us into New Town anyway, Miss Julianne.’

‘Turning right,’ their driver said, giving another brutal hoist on the steering wheel. The Volvo scraped past a pair of pedestrians, the vortex of the vehicle’s passing yanking their hats off into the rubbish.