The Liar's Lullaby (39 page)

He locked eyes with Jo. For an instant, the look on his face was shock. Then he seemed to realize that she, and she alone, could pull him onto the sill. Beneath fear and eagerness, unreadable emotion swam in his eyes.

The attacker was trying to crawl up Lewicki’s back. He looked like a drowning man who pulls the lifeguard under. Jo reached out the window. But before she could grab Lewicki, the attacker’s ferocious momentum swung the cable against the building. Lewicki’s hands cracked against granite.

The attacker grabbed Lewicki’s left arm. The sudden addition of weight pulled Lewicki’s left hand off the cable. Lewicki scrambled, but certainty flashed in his eyes. His right hand lost its grip.

They fell, arms windmilling.

Dana Jean screamed,
“No.”

Jo’s breath left her like she’d been punched. She squeezed her eyes shut.

Dana Jean shrieked again. The cable vibrated. Jo opened her eyes.

A woman stood outside the window on the sill in front of her.

 

 

S
HE WAS PALE, with a smoker’s worn skin. Her lipstick was the color of ice. In the wind her white hair flew around her head like an electrical storm. She hadn’t rappelled but had simply slid down the cable. She wore a blue uniform shirt and had two guns jammed in her belt. Stenciled on the big one, in front of Jo’s face, were the words DESERTEAGLE.

“Holy fuck.”

Jo scrambled free of the body rappel. The woman ducked under the window and jumped off the sill into the office. She drew the Desert Eagle from her belt.

Jo, the men, even the air in the room, fled.

Heedless, running like panicked deer, they careered across the office. Two men, acting out of habit, aimed for the elevator. Jo heard the metallic
shrick
of a slide being racked on a pistol.

All the hairs on her head jumped to attention. She pinned her eyes on the big red EXIT sign over the fire door. She crashed through it just as she heard a deep gunshot behind her.

The men screamed. She bolted down the stairs. She didn’t think she could take any more of this. But her legs didn’t pay attention, and kept going.

The cops were outside. That meant the cops might be in the lobby too. They were four flights down. With every raggedy step she took, they came closer.

The stairwell door above her slammed open. Her world seemed to flare white. She heard footsteps and phlegmy breathing. She passed the third floor, and the second, heard metal scrape concrete as the shooter knocked the gun against the wall. She thought she was going to pee herself.

She reached the ground floor, threw open the fire door, and sprinted barefoot along a forty-yard-long hall toward the marble lobby. She heard a police voice shouting information to his colleagues.
Thank God, oh thank God.

“Multiple shots fired. Suspect is a white woman with long brown hair, wearing a black suit. Armed and extremely dangerous.”

“I repeat, the suspect has fired indiscriminately at civilians.”

Behind her, the stairwell door flew open. She heard breathing. She ran into the lobby. It was full of cops.

“Hey!” she yelled.

Before the officers could turn, before Jo could raise her hands in surrender, the Desert Eagle fired with a bass-clef roar.

T
HE LOBBY SPREAD OUT TO JO’S RIGHT, GLEAMING AND FULL OF echoes. And full of cops. They had guns. When they heard the blast of the Desert Eagle pistol, they crouched and threw themselves against the marble walls.

Drew their weapons, aimed them at Jo, and shouted, “Freeze.”

“No.
No
.”

She heard the slide rack again on the giant pistol. The white-haired woman was in the hall behind her, coming, and the cops couldn’t see her.

“On the ground,” the cops yelled. “Now, do it. Do it.”

If she stopped, she’d die. “The shooter’s in the hall behind me!” Jo screamed.

Ahead was a side door, an emergency exit. The giant pistol fired.

The cops fired. Jo crashed through the door into the sunshine and kept running.

Holy shit.
The cops thought she was a bad guy. A bad guy, her, how the hell?

She ran, hearing more gunfire inside. She didn’t dare look back. Look back and they’d shoot her, and this was how it happened—how undercover cops got shot by DEA agents, how Army Rangers ambushed their comrades by mistake and we brought home soldiers in caskets and called it friendly fire. She would explain later. She ran.

She heard the emergency exit blow open behind her. She didn’t look back.

G
ABE SCANNED THE street. He saw too many cops. Up the block, a black-and-white was stopped sideways in the street. A uniform was waving traffic toward a detour. Vehicles and pedestrians were being ushered away from Waymire & Fong’s building.

He kept his right hand on the gearshift. This was pit-of-the-stomach bad. He looked at the building. The side doors. The emergency exit.

And he saw Jo. She was running straight toward him. And she was being chased, only this time it wasn’t by a news team. There were cops behind her. Were they running from the building too? It didn’t make . . .

“Oh, crap.”

“Gabe, unlock the doors,” she yelled.

He did. She leaped in.

“Go,” she yelled.

 

 

C
HENNAULT WAS A hundred yards up the street, behind the wheel of the armored car, when he saw the cops storm the building. There must have been shooting. And then he saw a 4Runner pull out from a side alley and accelerate toward him up Sacramento.

Black 4Runner. “I’ll be damned.”

It was Beckett’s boyfriend, driving the SUV he’d seen on TV—the SUV whose license number he’d written down, for a time such as right damned now. He was a certified genius.

The 4Runner raced past him. The boyfriend, the National Guard prick, was driving. Beckett was in the passenger seat, more or less, fighting to close the door, turned around backward, staring at the scene behind them.

Chennault phoned 911.

“I’m on Sacramento Street near the terrorist attack.” His voice quivered, panicky. “One of the terrorists jumped in an SUV and drove away—a woman with long brown hair, dressed in black. It’s a Toyota FourRunner with a Hispanic guy driving. Or maybe Middle Eastern.” He grinned. “Oh my God—they just hit a woman in the crosswalk. Ran her down . . . Jesus, she’s just lying there. And the woman is shooting at people.”

The dispatcher asked him a question. He smiled like the god he was.

“Yes, I got the license number.”

He gave it to the dispatcher. Hung up and put the armored car in gear.

 

 

T
HE 4RUNNER DRUMMED through traffic, swerving around cars and delivery trucks on the one-way street. Jo knelt backward on the front passenger seat. Through the rear window Waymire & Fong’s office building receded. She felt like she’d grabbed a lightning rod just before a bolt cracked from the clouds.

Gabe kept the pedal down. “Any time.”

Back at the Waymire building cops poured into the street. Cars started and their light bars lit up.

“Get out of sight so I can phone the police,” she said.

He cast a look in the mirror. The view was full of uniforms. “You seem to be missing an opportunity here.”

“Head for Grace Cathedral.”

“Jo
.”

“And give me your phone.”

Grimly he slapped the phone into her hand. They barreled across an intersection. Sacramento steepened, traffic thinned, and the signs changed from English to Chinese. Jo turned and sat down.

“Vienna’s law firm was attacked.” Her voice began a slide toward a cliff. She clenched her teeth to keep it from tumbling off. “There’s going to be an assassination attempt on the president.”

Gabe hit the brakes, as hard as a wrecking ball. He spun the wheel and swerved left to the tree-lined curb.

He turned and took Jo’s face in his hands. “Are you hurt?”

“No.”

“What do we need to do?”

A revving engine drowned out his voice. Jo glanced in the wing mirror. An armored car loomed and filled it and kept coming.

“Gabe—”

The armored car sideswiped them, hard. It shoved the 4Runner into a row of bollards, crushing Jo’s door. The noise was horrendous. Glass shattered. Jo was flung against the dashboard.

She bounced back against the passenger seat, stunned.

Through the buckled windshield, she saw the armored car stopped in the street fifty yards ahead. Its backup lights came on, its wheels spun, and it reversed toward them.

“Out,” Gabe shouted.

He grabbed her arm, threw open his door, and pulled her across the gearshift to safety. Jo jumped out as the armored car screeched into the 4Runner and sliced off the wing mirror. It braked. Beneath a helmet and dark glasses, the driver’s boyish face looked mean. His left hand, encased in a blue cast, could barely grip the wheel.

At the bottom of the hill, sirens and lights filled the road. For a moment Chennault glared at Jo. Then he put the armored car in gear and floored it up Sacramento. Jo glanced back at the orchestra of police sirens.

“Run,” she told Gabe.

They sprinted into the warren of streets that made up Chinatown.

 

 

A
CCELERATING, CHENNAULT WATCHED Beckett and Quintana vanish down an alley. He urged the Blue Eagle Security armored car up the street.

Grace Cathedral sat on top of Nob Hill, across a park from the Fairmont Hotel. The view from its steps coasted over the Financial District, the deep waters of the bay, and the distant hills of the People’s Republic of Berkeley—which would soon be laid to waste. Who was going to defend Berkeley, the homeless and old hippies?

Two blocks from the cathedral, police cars barricaded the intersection. A Filipino cop approached Chennault’s window.

“Street’s closed.”

“I’m late for a pickup at the Wells Fargo on Fillmore.”

“You’ll have to find another route.”

“Come on, man. Ten seconds and I’m straight across.”

“Sorry. You can get through on Washington.”

Chennault’s nerves flared. That was exactly the information he needed. And this little dandy dog ROW cop would soon regret his arrogance.

He detoured toward Washington Street. He skirted the edges of the no-go zone, angling around the cathedral, until he found a parking spot. His chest swelled. Half a block away from Sacramento on a cross street, he had a beautiful view of the cathedral. He parked the rear end of the armored car facing the church.

In the back of the truck, he changed from the Blue Eagle uniform into a dress shirt, jacket, and tie. He tucked his broken arm back in the sling, and his invitation to the memorial service in his pocket. He was, after all, closer than family. He was Tasia’s ghost.

 

 

J
O AND GABE ran down a narrow street between redbrick buildings on one side, a chain-link fence and playground on the other. The concrete stung Jo’s bare feet.

“Nobody knows Chennault’s behind this,” she said, “except me and K. T. Lewicki. And Lewicki . . .”

Her voice caught. Again she saw him and the attacker plummet to their deaths.

“Call nine-one-one,” Gabe said.

“They won’t believe me.” She still had his phone. “Tang.”

She slowed and stared at the phone, trying to remember the number. It wouldn’t come. Gabe took the phone from her shaky fingers. He scrolled through his phone book. Punched a number and handed the phone back.

“Tang gave me her cell number a few months back. And I never delete a cop from my contacts.”

Jo put the phone to her ear.
Pick up.
After four rings, she heard, “Tang.”

“Amy, I need your help and I need it now.”

She explained. She felt like a climber sliding down a rock face toward the fatal drop into a chasm. She was digging her fingers in, trying to arrest the fall.

“Where are you?” Tang said.

“Hang Ah Alley, near Sacramento.” She glanced back across at the steep hillside and saw an ornate, red-tiled Chinese gate. “Near the YMCA.”

“I’ll find out what’s going on and call you back,” Tang said.

“Amy, I ran from the cops. They think I’m one of the bad guys. They drew on me. I made tracks like hell.”

“I’ll call them off.”

“This attack isn’t a surgical strike. These people think they’re the vanguard of a revolution. They want to spill blood. They want major damage.”

“What are you suggesting?” Tang said.

“Don’t look for a highly disciplined sniper. I think Chennault is more likely to launch a brute force assault. And he won’t care who gets killed, as long as it includes the president.”

“I’ll meet you outside the cathedral,” Tang said. “I’m in Chinatown. I’ll be right there.”