Empire Games Series, Book 1(14)

AGENT GOMEZ: Nothing bad’s going to happen. Trust me, it’s all going to go like clockwork.

DR. SCRANTON: Oh, really?





END TRANSCRIPT





Evasions

BOSTON, MARCH 2020

The ride roughened as the car rolled to a stop by the side of the road. Rita heard voices, muffled through the carpet. A door opened, then slammed. Footsteps on gravel coming round the trunk. Okay, they figured it out. She tensed.

Click.

The trunk unlocked and the lid began to rise. Rita bounced upright, uncoiling like a jack-in-the-box, and slammed the wrench right to left along the length of the gap, two-handed. The impact nearly yanked it from her grip. Someone gasped, trying to inhale; she shouldered the tailgate open and lunged from the trunk, landed sprawling on top of a man who was trying to lever himself upright. She heard the warble and scream of sirens in the distance. Dry-mouthed terror lent her strength as she whacked the wrench into the side of his head, rolled off him, and came up in a crouch.

Some subtle cue made her duck and spin; the fist that had been aiming for her face missed. She continued her turn and jabbed with the wrench. Her second assailant was a shadowy silhouette, backlit by the dim blue LED glow of the streetlights: he was taller and heavier than she was, and fast enough to dodge her inexpert attempt at punching him in the gut. She took a long stride backward, keeping the wrench extended, then another step, trying to open a gap. Long-ago classes in karate and Krav Maga and less-long-ago women’s self-defense courses had stressed the importance of not letting a big aggressor get within arm’s reach. The one she’d put down wasn’t moving, but his friend was following her warily, reaching for—oh shit—

Rita spun and ran, jinking sideways. The taser dart whipped past her on its crackling tether. There was no traffic and no lit windows on this stretch of all-but-deserted highway, just shuttered exhaust shops and landscaping services. She made for the slope at the side of the road, looking for a gap between bushes and fences. Her phone buzzed in her pocket like a box of angry bees, but she ignored it. Then there were footsteps behind her. She was fast and he’d paused to ditch the taser, but if he caught up with her, this could only end badly. And if he didn’t chase her, but had a real gun, he’d eventually get hyped up enough to use it. The sirens, still distant, were fading now. She found a gap, a driveway leading into a row of closed shop units, and dashed through it.

There was a whining noise overhead, and a pool of blindingly white light appeared around her. She threw up one arm to shield her eyes as an alarm began to beep frenetically. She heard a flat crack of gunshots—two, three—as she dove for the side of the nearest shop, trying to get out of view. The whine rose to a metallic screech above her, then cut off, followed half a second later by a tearing crash as something refrigerator-sized fell in the parking lot behind her. There was another volley of gunshots, then a roar of engine noise and a stentorian amplified voice commanding her to freeze.

Rita lay facedown, shaking with fear. Her kidnapper had a gun. She could see him silhouetted in the light from the second drone, this one keeping a healthy distance overhead. He raised it, fired twice more, then swept round toward a target she couldn’t see. Two more shots rang out: not his. He dropped where he stood, like a marionette with cut strings. The amplified voice kept bellowing at him to lie still long after it was obvious he was beyond hearing. And her phone was still buzzing when the first cop—a for-real Highway Patrol officer, advancing in swivel-eyed starts with pistol drawn—reached her and put the cuffs on.

Frying pan, meet fire.

*

Shock can affect short-term memory. Rita retained only fragments of the next half hour, sitting in the back of a parked police cruiser with her hands zip-tied behind her back. She saw more cruisers with light bars flaring against the night converging on the parking lot. There were a few terse questions—name, what was she doing here—repeated in tones of angry disbelief when she explained she’d been carjacked and had escaped. Someone took her emergency phone. Kidnappees were not supposed to escape, she gathered. Someone else asked her to identify her handbag, her phone. More questions: what was she doing, where had she been, had she seen her assailants, why are you lying to us? While they were asking, her fatphone vibrated for attention. One of the officers answered it, asking a couple of brusque questions. Then his manner changed completely.

“Aw shit,” he said. “Okay, we’ll wait here.” He ended the call. “Did you get the ID to match?” he asked his partner.

“Yup.” The partner in question eyeballed Rita in the rearview. “Name check is—”

“Hey, listen up.” The cop cranked his head round to look at Rita. “Your friends want you out of here. They’ll be here in ten minutes.”

“What friends?” she asked, but they had no answer for her.

A gathering dust storm and the thunder of full-sized rotor blades brought Rita back from the dark place. She looked up dully, squinting puffy, red-rimmed eyes against the wind blast through the open front windows of the car. She’d been scared sick before, wondering how she was going to make bail—they’d find something to charge her with, just for inconveniencing them; that’s how it worked, wasn’t it?—but now something worse was descending, gravid with dark possibilities.

The chopper touched down at the far end of the parking lot. To her uneducated eye it looked huge and menacing, studded with doors and odd protuberances. (In fact, it was a regular police Black Hawk, an ex-military transport chopper rigged for urban search operations, with cameras and satellite drones to augment its cyclopean searchlight stare.) The side doors opened and two men and a woman climbed out, ducking involuntarily beneath the swoosh of the slowing blades overhead. After a brief conference with the officers clustered around the incident control van, one of the men peeled off and walked toward the cruiser. As if it was a prearranged signal, the driver up front climbed out, walked round to the passenger door, and casually tugged her to get her moving.