The Bishop's Pawn (Cotton Malone #13)(68)

I swung the wheel hard left, into the oncoming lane. Away from the gun, but right into the path of a vehicle coming straight at us.

An eighteen-wheeler.

The van seemed to see the approaching truck, too, dropping speed and trying to hem us in in the wrong lane. I had no choice but to hit the brake and slow, so we could drop in behind the van, but the move was going to allow the eighteen-wheeler to close the gap between us even faster.

Timing was everything.

I popped the brake, slowed the truck, then veered right into the correct lane just as the eighteen-wheeler swished by, its horn blaring.

“Not bad,” Lael said.

We were now back behind the van with our original problem.

Men with guns ahead of us.

The rear doors swung open again.

But Lael was ready.

He hung his head and arms out of the passenger-side window with the rifle in hand, firing twice.

The van swerved into the opposite lane to disrupt our line of fire. No cars were coming from ahead. Trees and fields lined both sides of the rural highway.

“Can you take out one of the tires?” I asked.

The speedometer showed we were moving at 75 mph. The van had started weaving back and forth between the two lanes, the men inside probably readying for more shots of their own. Lael stuck his head and shoulders back out the window, along with the rifle, and tried two shots that missed. I decided I’d had enough and floored the accelerator, speeding us up so that when the van veered left into the opposite lane, I brought the truck parallel to it, then I jerked the steering wheel left, slamming the truck into the van.

Once.

Twice.

A third time, adding even more speed to the thrust.

The van vaulted the highway and plowed a path into a field, bumping and weaving before settling into soft earth.

Lael let out a yell.

We kept barreling down the highway.





Chapter Forty-one


I followed the directions Cie provided. We eventually found U.S. 301 and turned south, driving thirty miles to Gainesville, home of the University of Florida. Neither Lael nor Cie had much to say. Cie led us through town to the Greyhound bus station. I parked out front and we walked inside.

“This is where we leave you,” Lael said. “We’d planned on a different route. But that won’t work anymore.”

“I’ll say it again. You two are the only ones who can verify any of this.”

Lael unzipped his duffel bag, removed the files, and handed them over. “This is your problem, rookie. Not ours. We’re done.”

“You’re just going to let this all fade away,” I asked.

“Better than us dying,” Cie said. “You have no idea all the bad things COINTELPRO did. It was so much more than Martin Luther King. Tom Oliver wants all that to stay buried, and I agree. You need to take a lesson from us and let this lie. Give those damn files to whoever you have to give them to, then forget any of this ever happened.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Sure you can,” Lael taunted. “It’s real easy. Nobody is going to believe you anyway. They’ll just say those files were fabricated.”

“That’s where you two come in. It’s called corroboration.”

Lael wrapped an arm around my shoulder. A friendly gesture. “Listen to me. There’s nothing here. You can’t prove a thing. Let it go.”

The bus station was crowded, typical probably for a college town. I’d only ridden on a Greyhound once, years ago when my mother and I traveled from my grandfather’s farm in middle Georgia to Atlanta for the weekend. An adventure, she’d called it. I was eleven, my father gone by then. I remembered every minute of the entire weekend.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“Better you don’t know,” Lael said. “But it’ll be somewhere that Tom Oliver, you, and the FBI will have a hard time finding.”

“Keep the truck,” Cie said. “You’re going to need it more than we do, since I don’t suspect you’re going to take our advice and give this up.”

“Valdez has Foster, his daughter, and his son-in-law. And Oliver is still out there. I’m the only one who can deal with that.”

“Now, that’s some new information you kept close to the vest,” Lael said. “Another piece of advice. Being the hero is great. There are rewards. But when you tug on Superman’s cape, expect him to tug back. Oliver has resources and reach and he’s on high alert. Everything he’s worked to accomplish could unravel. He lives that rich high life now off his wife’s money. He doesn’t plan on spending the rest of his time in jail. So he’s prepared to do anything, and I mean anything. Are you?”

I didn’t answer him.

But it was a fair question.

“I saw a lot of agents in my time,” Cie said. “I became pretty good at judging them. You need to turn this over to the professionals.”

Now, that one hurt. “I can handle it.”

She chuckled and looked at Lael. “Another hotshot. How many did we know?”

“You can change history,” I said to her.

“And get myself killed in the process.”

“You have to realize something,” Lael said. “We didn’t know anything about anything at the time. I knew some, thanks to the taping I overheard. More than most, in fact. But I didn’t know it all. Cie, here, learned a lot from me, and I learned things from her. When I made contact with Foster years ago, I learned some more, as he did from me. But I never had the whole picture, and I liked it that way. I know just enough to get me either jailed or killed.”