The Shack series

Chapter 39

Tess... Tess wasn't annoyed or disappointed...she was scanning, breaking the room into sections and looking it over methodically. She looked up at me with a calculating, almost machine-like expression. "Where were you exactly when you met him?"

I looked over the room. "Over there at the table, but there's no computer there."

She shook her head. "There's plenty of dust on the kiosk where the computer used to be, but no outline. That computer was long gone before this ever started. Nobody has been in here for months. He had to know that."

She was already moving to the chair I'd pointed to; she pointed to Delaney. "Stay on the door. Mack, I need a light."

Delaney gave a curt nod and moved closer to the door, in a position to "accidentally" temporarily block entry. Mackenzie reached up into her hair and pulled out a hair clip that turned out to be a miniature flashlight. It would have looked like any other hair clip on the backscatter x-ray we'd passed through.

With one quick look at the door, she was on the floor and scooting under the table.

It took her about thirty seconds, and only that because either Michael or me had misremembered the precise location. Embarrassingly. It was probably me; I'd been a Special Agent at the time, so I probably hadn't been as far up the table as I "remembered."

She rolled out with a high capacity flash drive in her hand and gave me a smile with a wry twist as she held it up to me. "You know anyone named 'Legs?'"

I felt myself flush red. Michael's nickname for me had only ever been spoken when we were alone. Usually completely undressed.

All three girls shot me quick, sly looks. Mackenzie smiled knowingly. Delaney glanced down over my legs and snorted. "Figures."

I concentrated on the flash drive for a long moment; right up until Mackenzie plucked it from my hand and tucked it into her hair.

Exiting was far easier than I expected. For a change, everything went smoothly -- passing through security on the way out went without a hitch. We even stopped at the gift shop.

A few minutes later, we were on the crowded sidewalk and headed to the parking garage.

*****

Wolves in the Darkness

*****

We made an effort not to look like we were hurried or rushed, but we moved with a definite sense of purpose.

Tess pushed me into the van, and we rolled out before I could even get my seat belt buckled.

I looked around. "Where's Delaney?"

"She's meeting up with us later."

It chilled me that I hadn't even noticed her drop out of our group. "I don't like leaving her..."

"We didn't leave her." Mackenzie was insulted, but she kept her tone even, if a hair clipped. "You're paying us to do our job. At least, I hope we're getting paid. Just let us do it."

She moved the van through traffic as smoothly as any driver I'd ever had assigned, and we'd escaped just ahead of the heaviest surge. Rush hour is a kind of obsolete concept in DC, but there are heavier and lighter moments.

We were well south when I sensed a change in Mackenzie. She hadn't done or said anything, but it felt like the temperature had shifted. Tess caught it too, raising her eyes only slightly from her laptop.

Mackenzie finally spoke. "They are definitely on us. About a half mile back; silver sedan and black SUV closing slowly."

"They'll wait a while. Catch us out where there isn't any traffic. Less chance of police interference." Tess had a map up on her laptop, and I could just see the corner.

"That's what I would do. They have to know this van can't outrun anything." Mackenzie scanned the road.

We were another five miles down the road when Tess spoke. "Five hundred meters. They're waiting for traffic to clear. Probably another three miles."

She shifted her laptop, and I realized she had activated the backup camera on the van somehow. Mackenzie kept looking straight ahead. "Got it. Are you buckled in?"

I realized the last question was for me. "Yes."

"We have a plan for this. Just hang on."

After a few more miles, Tess glanced at Mackenzie, then back at the screen.

"They're moving up. One hundred fifty meters." Tess pulled a handgun out of the glove box and passed it back low between the seats to me, followed by two extra extended magazines. "Hang on to it just in case."

I looked down at it for a moment. A Glock, but not one I'd ever handled before. Distinctive, almost unique factory barrel porting. I twisted it and looked at the rear left of the slide. A selector switch for full automatic. "An 18C."

Tess didn't blink. "Twelve hundred rounds per minute with three magazines; armor piercing. If this goes wrong, use it. We'll hold them as long as we can. You get free. Contact K2."

"If you have to fight, fight like you're the third monkey on the ramp to Noah's Ark, and it's starting to rain." Mackenzie's laugh sounded all too much like Delaney's, and I had no doubt where that saying had come from.

Our pursuers continued to close quickly as Tess called the distance. "Fifty meters. Two in the sedan, four, maybe five in the SUV."

At twenty-five meters, Mackenzie took a deep breath. "Now."

Tess straightened up and looked directly back over her seat at our pursuers, and sat back down. I choked in shock. It was a completely unprofessional move; there was no way our hunters could have missed her looking back at them through the untinted windows.

To make matters worse, Mackenzie stomped on the accelerator, pushing the van to its pathetic limit as we pushed past the last of the traffic, an old battered pick-up truck. We sure as hell weren't going to outrun them, but now they knew we'd seen them.

The blatant amateurishness was so completely out of character I could only sit and watch in horror.

We pushed ahead, and they followed, leaving the few remaining vehicles behind.

Then I noticed that Tess was smiling. So was Mackenzie. Not normal, happy teenager smiles. A hunter's anticipation.

"Is it him?" Mackenzie's voice sounded like a hungry growl, and I wondered for a moment if Delaney's feral nature was contagious.

When Tess answered, the predatory sound made me was certain it was. "It's him."

Before I could ask what the hell they were talking about, Tess went on coolly.

"Do you think he wants her alive or dead?" The casual tone in Tess' voice was disturbing, especially if I focused on the fact that I was the "her" that Tess was so casually asking about.

Glancing in her mirrors, Mackenzie gave a half frown for a second. "Dead. All the windows just came down, and I saw a long g*n barrel. The sedan gets ahead of us, boxes us in, the crew in the SUV shoots us up and finishes us off after we wreck. Not that it matters."

"Not real creative, are they?" Tess twisted in her seat, eyes sparkling with something like glee but hungrier. She caught me looking, and her smile widened a bit more. "Spooky says a friend of hers has a saying."

Mackenzie gave a soft, almost mocking laugh. "Wolves are the most dangerous of prey. Because they always hunt you back."

I turned to see what she was looking at. The SUV never had a chance. Our pursuers were locked on the van. Realizing we'd seen them and were running, they did what predators instinctively do.

They chased, trying to close the distance.

The old farm pickup truck we'd passed suddenly surged from behind, and Tess laughed and spoke in an eerily flawless Russian accent, in a beautiful angelic voice I recognized all too well. "And there are always more wolves in the darkness."

Police sometimes call it tactical vehicle intervention, although I'd heard the term tactical ramming used. These days, it is usually called a pursuit intervention technique. Or just a PIT maneuver.

The men in the SUV didn't catch on fast enough, although if they had, it probably wouldn't have made any difference at all; the truck was far quicker and more powerful than it looked. It pulled up until the front bumper was just even with the back of the rear passenger door of the SUV, then seemed to lunge into it, pushing the rear sideways, forcing it to spin out.

A police officer would have backed off as the SUV fishtailed, but the truck pushed harder, and it was both far heavier and more powerful. It forced them onto the shoulder and beyond.

The SUV driver was good; he tried to pull out of the fishtail, and turn it into a J-turn, but the narrowness of the road, the high center of gravity, the speed and the sheer power of the truck were too much. The SUV went into the ditch and crunched into a hard rollover.

Even if the crew weren't seriously injured, the SUV itself was done.

The truck neatly evaded the wreck and pushed ahead, far faster and more agile than an old farm truck should have been. The guys in the sedan reacted, but quick as they were, they had nowhere to go. Boxed in from the front by our van, their chance of evading the overpowered truck was near zero. They'd been caught by the same maneuver they'd planned to use on us. Their only chance was to get past us and run for it.

Mackenzie twisted the van slightly when the sedan tried to pass us, forcing him to compensate.

It was only for a fraction of a second but easily long enough for the vicious predator-truck to slam in and force them off the road and into the ditch, where it rolled. I caught a glimpse into the truck and wasn't at all surprised to see Delaney, her rage intensely focused, teeth bared as she slammed her vehicle to a stop next to the still rolling wreck.

Mackenzie had the van stopped, into reverse, and was back to the wrecked sedan before I could even react, bumper to bumper with the old farm truck.

Tess dropped out the door, moving low and fast, clutching something in her hand. I could see Delaney ahead of her, some kind of g*n leveled at the wreck. The girls moved wordlessly in from the front, light and fast. It made sense, as the deployed airbags blocked anyone inside from seeing where they were as they approached.

Mackenzie was out, using the corner of the van as a prop to steady a rifle at the ready. They must have had a hide built into the van, as I'd had no idea at all that the heavy, magazine-fed rifle was there. A military nightmare of some kind; I didn't recognize it, but the shark-like profile, large scope and wide magazine all pointed to something that could go through a vehicle from end to end.

Delaney and Tess hit the open windows simultaneously, and I could hear the snap and stutter of police-grade stun guns.

"Two tangos, two down! Our package is on the passenger side." Delaney yanked the door open.

Rifle in one hand, dragging a bag in the other, Mackenzie rush to her side while Tess stayed focused on the driver.

An unbelievably short time later, Delaney and Tess roughly dumped a bagged, handcuffed, and duct-taped figure into the rear of the van while Mackenzie kept the area covered with her rifle. Delaney pulled what looked like silvery survival blankets out of a pocket, and they hurriedly wrapped him in them.

We pulled away, and Delaney gave a flippant wave as she pushed ahead of us.

A few minutes later, Mackenzie started talking. "We figured there'd be a good chance they'd acquire us at the FBI. That's what we would do. But we didn't figure it would be more than one or two vehicles because there are too many federal agencies in that area that might notice. They needed to keep a low profile."

"So you gambled. Too much. You didn't need the guy. We probably have what we need, and hired muscle isn't going to know anything useful."

A look shot between the two girls before Mackenzie turned to followed Delaney down a dirt road. "We created an apparent tactical opportunity for them and then exploited it. We know our limits. We had to maximize our advantages." She paused for a second. "And we have our reasons for taking this guy."

Tess shot her a warning look, and she stopped. I figured that was a pretty clear sign that subject was closed.

We bumped down the road for a few miles until we pulled into a barn. An older Toyota SUV was waiting inside.