The Protectors (13 page)

“ ‘Rock and Roll, Part Two,’ by Gary Glitter?” I waited to see the surprise in his face, the look of astonishment at what my pathetic self could do. For just a moment, I wanted to bask in his fear.
See what I’m capable of now, you piece of garbage,
I thought.

Instead, he grinned. Smiled like he’d just won first prize.

Shit.

“Well, isn’t that special. Knockout can read minds now, can’t he?”

He’d played me. Suspected I was hiding something, and used my bruised ego to flip over the cards and show my entire hand.

Goddammit, I can be a first-class idiot.

Tucker noticed my jaw muscles contract. “Come now, don’t grind your teeth on my account. The lab boys estimated a thirty-eight percent probability your sleep-induction power came from mental projection rather than pheromones. Provided that was the case, there was an eighty-five percent chance your ability’s evolution would include telepathy.”

“Is that right?” I grumbled, still disgusted with myself.

“I bet on telekinesis in the office pool. You’ve cost me five dollars.” He motioned to Reyes. “This means you can take off that silly mask.” Reyes made no move to do so. Obviously he was of the better-safe-than-sorry school of thought.

Anger overwhelmed my patience. “We’re done here. I listened, and the answer is no. Run the world without us.” I pivoted to walk back to the boat and heard the click.

“No, Mr. McAlister, I don’t believe we’re finished,” Tucker said.

I turned to see Reyes with a .45 pointed at me. Were they kidding?

“Seriously? Like I can’t just drop both of you right now and walk away? Your lackey thinks it’s a good idea to pull a gun on me?”

“Relax, he won’t shoot you. That was just to get your attention.” At a sideways glance from Tucker, Reyes slid the gun back inside his suit
jacket. “I’m the real obstacle you should be worried about.”

I advanced on the smaller man with quick steps, saying “. . . what exactly do you think you can do . . .” and he brought his hand up out of his uniform coat pocket. I was less than five feet from him and in the precious seconds it took my brain to realize Tucker held a fragmentation grenade, he pulled the pin and tossed it away. The live grenade sat in his closed fist, safety lever depressed. If his grip released, I’d have less than three seconds before detonation. I’m a pretty fast runner, but not that fast.

“Go ahead, Knockout. Drop me.”

“What do you want?” I said, eyes on his fist. I took a hesitant step backward, and he countered by stepping forward. Maintaining the kill zone around me guaranteed his consciousness.

“You know what I want,” was his measured reply. “Accept the mission I’m offering, go to Iran, and do what you’re told.” He kept coming and I stood my ground. His voice got colder as he got closer. “I am
sick
of dealing with coddled children playing comic-book heroes.” In three steps, he was face-to-face with me and the grenade pushed against the titanium chest plate beneath my shirt. “You are a tool, McAlister . . . nothing more. No different than a missile in a silo. You don’t get to decide when you launch. The grown-ups do.”

“And what happens when we do this job for you? Do we walk away then?”

His eyes flicked back and forth between mine. They seemed to relax for an instant as he took a step back. “Of course.”

“Wow, I
so
don’t believe you.”

“Why don’t you try reading my mind, then?” He looked smug in the knowledge he’d been able to shout me out the first time.

“Maybe I don’t have to.” My head twisted to Reyes.

If Tucker’s thoughts had the detailed, intricate workings of a Swiss watch, Reyes’s brain had the complexity of a seesaw. It was like watching a brightly lit movie with zero subtlety. And to top things off, it was a porno.

His thoughts focused on a lithe blond woman, writhing and moaning beneath him.
Carmen . . . Carmen . . . Carmen
echoed through
his mind like a metronome. Someone was mentally still on his romantic weekend getaway. Useless.

When I looked back at Tucker, he was completely at ease.

“Violate Mr. Reyes as you see fit . . . he has no knowledge and even less control over your destiny. Unlike me.” Tucker motioned to the big man, who unlocked the briefcase and walked it over. After delivery, Reyes retreated out of the kill radius with a kick in his step.

Tucker shoved the case at me with his free hand. “If I recall, you’re fond of dog metaphors. So go be a good little doggie and do what I say. Oh, and in case you get any urges to simply vanish over the horizon with Ms. Ravzi, I should warn you . . .”

My eyes switched from the briefcase back to Tucker’s malicious grin.

“. . . the gloves will come off. If I don’t hear from you within one week, I will sign the TOS order myself.”

Terminate on sight. No arrest. No jury.

“. . . and it won’t just be a CIA directive. It’ll go to every agency, every ally, and probably a few enemies, just to be safe. I’ll put a price on your heads so high, it’ll make the bin Laden bounty look like cab fare. I’ll even smile while I do it.”

There was nothing I
could
do but accept the case and fume. Tucker needed to be dealt with, but today wasn’t the day. Before I could whip myself into a complete frenzy, Tucker’s head tilted to the side and his gaze fixated on the horizon. Five seconds later he turned all the way to Reyes and I saw the tiny microphone jutting out of his left ear.

“Get to the chopper,” he ordered his partner before smiling at me. “It appears MI5 has located Ms. Ravzi. They are on their way to your pickup point.”

“But how . . .”

“You called me as soon as I got off the helicopter at the golf club in Inverness. Someone told you I’d arrived. I assume the Brits found your lookout.”

And Calvin had Lyla’
s cell phone number . . .

Jesus. She left her phone on. They’d had enough time to triangulate her exact position.

“Dammit! How did MI5 even know about Inverness?”

“Because I called them. Extra motivation for you to abandon Scotland and accept your mission. Run along now. You’ve got to take Ms. Ravzi and get out of the United Kingdom. I’d offer you a ride, but sadly, I don’t feel like it. My mission was to brief you, not help you.”

Tucker took a couple of self-satisfied steps backward, granting the permission I needed to turn and sprint for the dock. When I started the boat I heard his discarded grenade explode in the loch fifty yards to my left . . . he hadn’t been bluffing. I didn’t wait to troll away from shore before punching the engine to full power. The boat rose out of the black water and shot up to speed. Despite the scream of the motor, I heard the navy Seahawk rotors spin to life. The chopper passed over my head by the time I hit the midpoint of the loch.

I prayed Lyla was ready to run, because I was coming in hot.

CHAPTER 21

D
ocks are for pussies.

I rode the boat right up onto shore and was running with the briefcase before the speedboat stopped moving. Lyla must have seen the king-sized wake kicking up behind me on the loch, because the car was idling and the passenger door was already open.

“What’s wrong?” she yelled through the window when I got close.

I slammed the door behind me yelling, “Go! Go! MI5 is coming! Dump your phone . . . they’re tracking the signal.”

“Shit!” I honestly couldn’t remember if I’d ever heard her cuss before. She clawed at the center console, found her phone, and threw it past my face out the open window. We spun out of the gravel lot and headed south, directly away from Inverness. Both of us scanned the mirrors for pursuit, expecting to see a caravan of military vehicles, but none looked back. Lyla kept the pedal to the floor, quickly reeling in and passing the only car within a half mile ahead. The road along the southern contours of Loch Ness mirrored the water’s edge, so it was a pretty straight shot for more than ten miles—but it didn’t mean I had a perfect view forward and back. We were still in heavily wooded terrain and the road wound back and forth as it clung to the shoreline.

Lyla’s eyes were full-on saucers while she negotiated the curves, but on the straightaways her gaze would flick back to the mirrors.

“I don’t see anything.” Her voice was stern, not panicked. “You?”

“No, but they’ve gotta be back there . . .”

I twisted full around to see out the back window and realized we
hadn’t been looking high enough. About a half mile behind and above, a small black helicopter shadowed our path. My desperate hope for the pursuit to be Tucker’s sadistic version of a joke wilted. I lowered my gaze to the twisting ribbon of roadway unspooling behind the car, and within seconds two SUVs got close enough for me to see.

“They’re coming,” I told Lyla. The whine of our econobox’s four-cylinder engine was pathetic; no matter how good Lyla was with the car, two powerful SUVs were going to catch up fast.

Too bad for them.

I scrambled into the backseat so I could concentrate and get a better look. Lyla kept plowing ahead, but she knew what I was going to do.

“How close do they need to be?” she said.

“Not sure, never done it from a moving car before. Hundred feet, maybe less . . . the motion makes it hard to lock in.” Finding someone’s specific consciousness in the distance was like trying to identify them in a crowd. Bouncing around turns and up over bumps in the road made it tough. Sending out a blanket wipe, dropping everyone in the vicinity, was easier but the range was a lot smaller; they’d need to be close enough to shoot at us—closer than I wanted.

Lyla eased up on the gas and the first SUV gobbled up the distance between. The second vehicle dropped back to give the leader room to engage. I closed my eyes. I could see the buttons far off, jumping and jostling with the terrain. Found the driver, he was coming into range.

Still hazy. Just a few more feet . . . almost there . . .

Before I could lock in, the rear window splintered in a web of cracks and the interior of the car exploded with high-intensity sound waves. Just as bad as the alley behind St. Moritz, but with the bonus challenge of trying not to crash at fifty miles an hour. I couldn’t even hear my own scream.

The car zigzagged violently in the road. I turned to the front and saw Lyla fighting for control—one hand on the wheel and one clutched against an ear—as a curve to the right came at us way too fast. The approaching tree line gave her enough willpower to grip the wheel with both hands and force the car into the curve, kicking up a curtain of gravel from the shoulder. As we cleared the bend, our pursuers lost line
of sight and the sonic suppression cut off like somebody had pulled the plug. Lyla kept the pedal down, moving with a purpose as the road straightened. Within seconds the first SUV came around the curve and I knew the ultrasonic assault was closing in. Less than a half mile ahead another bend in the road waited, this time to the left.

“Get to that curve! Clear it and stop—”

The piercing sound waves cut me off, but this time Lyla was ready. She ducked in the seat and intentionally jerked the wheel from side to side, careening across the two-lane road. The sonic waves lessened, then charged back, then faded. Our pursuers couldn’t focus the beams as Lyla swerved, which was unfortunate news for the lead SUV: Lyla could drive, and I could do worse.

We dove into the turn and she braked hard—not all the way to a stop, but enough to ensure they’d be right on top of us when they followed. I took a deep breath and cleared my head. Lyla saw a flash of the SUV grill as the driver gunned it out of the curve and she yelled,
“Now!”

The blanket wipe emanated from me in a circle, pulsing in all directions for a hundred feet. Couldn’t go full power because I had to devote enough focus to keep Lyla protected and awake, but it was enough. The driver of the SUV had barely begun his brake-and-swerve maneuver to avoid hitting us when he went unconscious, and the vehicle was too top-heavy for the sudden change in direction
and
speed. It went up on two wheels and screeched past us into the foliage bordering the loch. Lyla barely waited for the SUV to come crashing down before hitting the accelerator and launching forward again.

“No! Wait! I can take care of the second SUV from here!” I yelled, but she was reacting, not planning. “People chasing” equals “keep running.” When the second vehicle made it around the bend and saw the wreck, they started shooting at us, too . . . but not with sonic suppressors anymore. I saw muzzle flashes from both sides of the vehicle and heavy metallic thumps sounded all around me. When the back window exploded inward, I was already hunched down on the floor behind Lyla. We weren’t going to hold together long against machine guns.

“Same thing! Get to the next curve and I’ll take them out!”

Lyla grunted and kept swerving in the road, trying to minimize our target signature. More pops hit our car but less frequently now. By the time we reached the next curve, I didn’t hear any weapons fire at all. We made it through the bend and stopped hard, brakes locking up as we skidded. I cleared my head and waited.

Nothing. No pursuit.

The idling engine labored almost as much as our breathing. When I peeked above the backseat, tiny pieces of window glass slid off the shoulders and neck of my duster. Lyla craned around and looked, too.

“They’re not following,” she whispered.

“They must know we’re waiting.”

“How?”

Then I noticed the familiar sound. “The goddamn helicopter. They’re communicating with the SUV, telling them we’ve stopped around the bend. If we take off, they’ll tell the SUV to start up after us again.”

“And until then they just wait?”

“If we’re lucky. If not, everybody but the driver gets out and cuts through the woods toward us, guns blazing. I think they’re beyond playing capture-the-fugitive now.”

“I hate helicopters,” Lyla said. She grunted and stared out the rear window. “Should I throw it in reverse and get you in range the hard way?”

“Can’t risk it. If we back around that curve and they’re less than a hundred feet away with those damn machine guns trained on us, we’ll be cut to shreds.”

With no immediate good option, our indecision and lack of movement became painfully noticeable; waiting to be ambushed is a terrible plan. My tactical brain must have sympathized, because it finally spoke up.

Stop reacting. Go on offense.

I assessed our immediate surroundings. No cars coming from the other direction. We were cockeyed, pointed toward the forest side of the roadway. On the loch side, water was at least fifty feet away, with thick
brush in between. Trees to the forest side were meaty pines, tall and close together. Ones bordering the road were of the hundred-year-old variety, with boughs sticking out more than ten feet; they completely covered the shoulder from above.

Perfect.

“Start rolling but drift to the shoulder by those tall pine trees . . . make the chopper believe we’re gonna run. When I jump out—punch it. Go like crazy.”

“Jump out? If the helicopter sees—”

“Get as far under the branches as you can. We’re already pointed that direction. No way they’ll see through that cover. Just don’t stop! If you stop, they’ll know.”

Lyla nodded and started her roll.

“Faster! Don’t baby it, we gotta sell this.”

When she got to the side, Lyla picked up speed. By the time I cracked the door, we were going almost fifteen miles an hour. Fifteen might not
sound
fast, but the next time you roll down a neighborhood street, open your door and look down at the moving asphalt before you call me a wuss.

I sucked in a breath and jumped, tucking into a roll as I hit. Took me a good twenty feet to stop skidding, but I was on the dirt beyond the shoulder, safely under the trees. And thank God for the duster—I now understand why motorcycle owners love leather. I scrambled on all fours into the tree line, glancing briefly back at the car. Lyla was off and running. She burst back into the center of the road, and before I had time to consider whether the plan would work, the tires of the second SUV squealed as it started around the corner after her. Before the vehicle cleared the bend, I took a few quick steps out from under cover. They didn’t notice me until it was too late.

The look on their faces was worth jumping out of a moving car.

Five surprised assholes stared back when I lifted my imaginary gun and pulled the trigger. Put all five of them down, and SUV #2 coasted into the brush, crunching against a tree stump short of the loch.

I jogged over to the vehicle and examined our pursuers close up for the first time: all were decked out in tactical body armor and everyone
but the driver had an SA80 assault rifle with a sonic suppressor slung under the barrel. Both front-seat occupants probably had broken noses and needed stitches, but they’d live. I pulled my head back from the driver’s-side window when I heard Lyla return.

“Everything all right?” she said after hopping out and surveying the accident.

“Yeah. There’ll be some headaches and a few bumps and bruises, but looks like everyone’s okay.”

“I don’t care about them. I meant you.”

I waved her away. “Yeah, yeah. Fine. Worked just like I planned . . .” My voice trailed off and she caught me staring out at the loch.

“What is it?”

“Nothing, just realized that’s the first time I’ve gotten to use that sentence in the last four days. It’s nice for a change.”

Lyla was already looking up at our new immediate problem.

“Guess it doesn’t matter, though, if he’s still spotting us,” I said, following her gaze. The chopper hovered far above. The pilot was no doubt calling in the situation and asking for more backup; no way was he flying in for a closer look. Lyla squinted upward and circled around to the other side of the vehicle. I heard her open the SUV’s passenger door and rummage through the front; when she came back around, she carried an SA80 by the barrel in each hand. She tossed one to me in midstep, then the Goddess of Love stalked to the middle of the road and hefted an assault rifle to her shoulder.

“Lyla, what the hell?”

She pointed the rifle at the stationary helicopter and I remembered her thirst for violence in the casino. We could justify all we’d done so far as self-defense, but laying down machine gun fire at an innocent spotter was a step beyond.

“Lyla, do
not
shoot that helicopter!”

She turned her cheek far enough to smirk at me.

“Relax. I think it’s time someone from MI5 experienced these noisemakers for themselves, don’t you?”

An intense burst of relief washed over me—like when the flashing red and blue lights illuminate your rearview mirror, then pass by as the
cop chases somebody else. I pulled the secondary trigger on the black plastic tube underneath the main barrel of the gun, then trained the SA80 on the chopper, some five hundred feet above. I couldn’t hear anything, but that was the point of the sonic suppressors—completely safe to fire, completely awful to be fired
at.

At first, nothing happened.

“Maybe mine’s broken,” I said, barrel pointed at the sky.

Lyla lowered hers to check the trigger, then tried again. “Perhaps the helicopter is too far—” she started.

There was no need to finish. The helicopter bucked and went into a nosedive, then leveled off above the treetops. We followed the movement with the suppressors, and again the chopper reeled away like a mosquito chased by a can of repellent. The pilot dipped, dived, climbed, anything he could to escape the pummeling. Lyla giggled while we played chase-the-chopper with our fearsome noisemakers. After a minute of sonic torture, the pilot decided he’d had enough; the helicopter powered into a hard climb and peeled back toward Inverness. I lowered my weapon and released the trigger. Lyla was in the middle of the road, beaming at her shiny new toy. She caught me staring, so she walked back to the car, ejected the magazine, and tossed the rifle in the backseat.

She put her hands on her hips and demanded, “I’m keeping it.”

I laughed and tossed mine in the grass by the SUV. When I got back in our car, I saw Tucker’s briefcase still lying on the floor of the front passenger seat, which took the edge off any victory dance. Still, ten more miles until a major interchange in the road—once there, we’d be untraceable. Couldn’t help but feel a little invincible—Knockout: 2, MI5: 0.