Hellbent (Orphan X #3)(110)

“I’m out. Some other life.” Her smile held equal parts trepidation and excitement. “Ponytails and white picket fences.”

“The minute this operation goes live—”

“I’ll just sail out of here,” she said. “I’ll be fine.” She paused. “But you? I don’t see you getting out of this.”

He listened to the wind whistle through the I-beams overhead. Jack, paraphrasing the German field marshal and the Scottish poet, used to say, Even the best-laid plan can’t survive the first fired bullet. Evan had taken his measurements, charted his course, laid his plans. He had escape routes planned and off-the-books emergency medical support on standby. Despite all that he knew Joey was right, that this man-made valley could well prove to be his grave.

“Maybe not.” He placed a wire-thin saber radio in her hand; the bone phone would pick up her voice and allow her to listen directly through her jaw.

She said, “We could still get into that ugly-ass Town Car and just drive away.”

A wistful smile tugged at his lips. He shook his head.

The breeze blew across her face, and she swept her hair back. “He’s gonna come with everything he has. And he’s gonna kill you like he has everyone else. You think Jack would want this?”

“It’s not just about Jack anymore. It’s about everyone else who Van Sciver’s got in his sights.” His throat was dry. “It’s about you, Joey.”

He’d said it louder than he’d intended and with anger, though where the anger came from, he wasn’t sure.

Her eyes moistened. She looked away sharply.

For a time there was only the breeze.

Then she said, “Josephine.”

“I’m sorry?”

“My name. You wanted to know my full name.” Her eyes darted to his face and then away again. “There it is.”

Beyond the concrete rise, vehicles whipped by on the freeway, oblivious people leading ordinary lives, some charmed, some not. On this side of the wall, there was only Evan and a sixteen-year-old girl, trying their best to say good-bye.

Joey lifted the forgotten Snickers bar from her side and tossed it to him. She took a deep breath.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s bring the thunder.”





72

Thin the Herd

The freelancers came in first, and they came by foot. The five men wound their way toward the valley in a tightening spiral, a snake coiling.

Former Secret Service agents, they brought the tools of the trade designed to protect the most important human on earth. Electronic noses for hazardous chemicals and biologicals, bomb-detection devices, thermal-imaging handhelds. Though it wasn’t yet dusk, they had infrared goggles around their necks, ready for nightfall. After safing the surrounding blocks, they meticulously combed through every square foot of the valley, communicating with radio earpieces, ensuring that anything within view of the construction site below was clear.

Each man wore a Raytheon Boomerang Warrior on his shoulder, an electronic sniper-detection system. Developed for Iraq, it could pinpoint the position of any enemy shooter within sight lines up to three thousand feet away.

Two of the freelancers rolled out, hiking back up the slope, giving a final check, and disappearing from view.

Ten minutes passed.

And then two Chevy Tahoes with tinted windows, steel-plate-reinforced doors, and laminated bullet-resistant glass coasted down the slope. They parked at the base of the construction building in front of the porta-potties.

Van Sciver got out, swollen with body armor, and stood behind the shield of the door. Candy and Thornhill strayed a bit farther, the freelancers holding a loose perimeter around them, facing outward. The operators now held FN SCAR 17S spec-ops rifles, scopes riding the hard-chromed bores. Menacing guns, they looked like they had an appetite of their own.

Van Sciver cast his gaze around. “Well,” he said. “We’re here.”

Thornhill scanned the rim of the valley. “Think he’ll show?”

Van Sciver’s damaged right eye watered in the faint breeze. He wristed a tear off the edge of his lid. “He called the meet.”

“Then where is he?” one of the freelancers asked.

“The GPS signal from the microchips is long gone,” Thornhill said. “It’s up to our own selves.”

The faint noise of a car engine rose above the muted hum of freeway traffic behind the concrete wall. The freelancers oriented to the street above.

The noise of the motor grew louder.

The men raised their weapons.

A white Lincoln Town Car plowed over the brim of the valley, plummeting down the slope at them. Already the men were firing, riddling the windshield and hood with bullets.

The Town Car bumped over the irregular terrain, slowing but still pulled by gravity. The men shot out the tires, aerated the engine block.

The car slowed, slowed, glancing off a backhoe and nodding to a stop twenty yards away.

Two of the freelancers raced forward, lasering rounds through the shattered maw of the windshield.

The first checked the car’s interior cautiously over the top of his weapon. “Clear. No bodies.”

The other wanded down the vehicle. “No explosives either. It’s a test.”

Twenty yards back, still protected by their respective armor-plated doors, Van Sciver and Candy had already spun around to assess less predictable angles of attack that the diversion had been designed to open up.