“Drop it!” Maggie commanded, her finger tightening on the trigger.
The man’s gun stayed locked on Brent, but he looked at her, then past her at his companion. His eyes widened.
“Drop it!” Maggie shouted. “Now!”
The man looked back at Brent, his face now oddly contorted. “McTighe!” he shouted, but his partner didn’t answer. “Oh Jesus,” he whimpered.
“Drop it,” Maggie repeated.
He kept the gun on Brent, but he cut her another sideways glance. “I can’t,” he said.
“You can’t win,” Maggie said. “Drop it, now!”
“I am one of the chosen!” he said, his voice cracking.
“Put down the gun,” she said, struggling to sound calm and steady.
The man shook his head.
Brent was on his knees, holding his stomach. “Who are you?” he grunted.
“One of the chosen,” the man repeated.
“Why did you steal the money? Why did you kill Dr. Faisal and Owen Smythe? Is Prescott Biddle your boss?”
Sweat was streaming down the man’s face, and his hands shook. “I am one of the chosen,” he said for a third time, as he thumbed back the hammer.
“No!” Maggie screamed as she saw the man’s finger tighten on the trigger. She fired twice, knocking him backward even as his gun went off. She looked at Brent, who was frozen in shock, staring at the twitching body.
“Are you okay?” she asked in a trembling voice.
Brent only nodded. All around them the world had fallen deathly silent. Maggie’s pulse thundered against her eardrums. After several more seconds, as frogs resumed peeping in the swamp, she turned to look at her other prisoner. He lay motionless. She went over, knelt beside him, and put her hand over her mouth upon seeing the jagged wound where his partner’s wild shot had blown the corner of his forehead away.
Brent stood, hobbled over, and touched her shoulder. When she finally glanced up, she saw blood in his hair from where the handcuff had lacerated his scalp. Without a word he took the corpse by the ankles and dragged it into the deep grass beside the right front tire of the truck, out of sight of a passing car. He pulled the larger man behind the tire as well and then collapsed against the truck’s hood, his head bowed. “Who the hell were these guys?” he mumbled.
Suddenly, headlights appeared in the distance, and a car approached out of the misty dark. Maggie was still frozen, but Brent recovered his senses enough to scuttle into the road for the pistol that lay a few feet from the slick of wet blood. He shoved it into his waistband, jerked his shirttail to cover it, and then pulled Maggie to her feet and back to a safe spot. They waited by the front fender of the truck as the car slowed.
“Car trouble?” a man’s voice asked.
“This lady just hit a deer,” Maggie heard Brent say. She waved to show that she was unhurt. “We thought it was dead,” Brent continued, “but then it jumped up and ran off.”
“Happens all the time around here,” the man said. “As long as everybody’s okay, I wouldn’t worry. Those damn things have an amazing ability to live.”
“Yeah, thanks for stopping.”
“Okay, ‘night.”
Brent waved as the car drove away, and then let out a moan. He turned toward Maggie, his eyes tight. “This has gone too far,” he said. “I’ve got to turn myself in.”
“No!” she said, the heat of her emotion catching her by surprise. She was operating purely on instinct, but she felt no doubt whatsoever. “We’ve got to hide all of this and get out of here.”
“No!” Brent said. “We’ve got two more guys dead! This can’t go on!”
“If you quit, they win!” Maggie shouted. She forced herself into motion. She had several plastic evidence bags in her purse, a holdover from her detective days in Morristown, and she used one as she bent down and hurriedly removed the contents of the first man’s pockets. She repeated the process with the second man, sealed both bags, and then wrote “passenger” on the first one and “driver” on the second. She wasn’t sure the distinction mattered, but she was pleased that her brain still worked on some level.
Brent watched her for a few seconds then pulled open the pickup’s door and searched the inside. A moment later he climbed out holding a manila file and the truck’s registration papers.
Another car materialized out of the mist, coming faster than the last. Maggie stepped into the truck’s headlights to make herself visible, but as this car passed it did not slow. Maggie glimpsed a woman passenger’s face turned toward them for an instant, her expression a worried frown. Was it possible she would call the police and report two suspicious vehicles stopped in the wildlife sanctuary?
“Hurry,” she called to Brent.
He tossed the file in the Toyota then came around to where the bodies lay. Without another word, Maggie took the nearest one by the ankles while Brent grabbed it under the armpits. Together, they hoisted it into the truck bed where it fell with a sickening thud. The second body was much heavier, but they managed it as well.
Brent lifted his shirt, pulled out the gun he’d picked up, and started to toss it into the bed.
“Don’t,” Maggie said, her voice tight. Her mind was leaping ahead. She was operating on a cold certainty now, not only of Brent’s innocence but that all the usual rules had been put on hold. “You’ll probably need it.”
He hesitated and looked at her as if she was some stranger he’d never met, but then he tucked the pistol back in waistband.
“Find a place where the truck will be out of sight,” she said. “I’ll follow you.”
Brent nodded and then climbed behind the wheel of the truck and started off. As Maggie followed in her Toyota, her mind raced. This wasn’t just a theft. It wasn’t even a theft/murder. It was a complex operation of some sort, and it pointed right back to Prescott Biddle. So, why would a billionaire steal a billion dollars?
She thought she already knew the answer, but others would say it was a wild supposition, pregnant with political risk. She hadn’t even shared her thoughts with Brent because they seemed so improbable. She’d put them down in her memo and left it on Jenkins’ desk, but that was as far as she thought it would go. She estimated zero probability that anyone at Project Seahawk would want to follow it up.
However, her gut instincts told her she was absolutely right and that she was looking at a full-blown national crisis—all of which brought her back to Brent. Two more dead bodies were even more reason for him to remain at large. If he turned himself in, the police and FBI would consider the problem solved, and it might be weeks before anyone could persuade them differently. By then it might be too late, which meant Brent had to remain on the loose until the two of them could build a credible argument. What were the odds, with the police and FBI coming from one direction and these would-be killers coming from the other?
She’d been following Brent as he searched for a turnoff, and now she noticed a strange sound, something halfway between a moan and a voice. It took her several seconds to realize she was the one making it. She was a lapsed Catholic, hadn’t been to Mass in over a year, but she’d been saying, “Oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus,” over and over through gritted teeth.
FORTY-FOUR
GAS STATION, SOMMERVILLE, NJ, JUNE 30
BRENT SLUMPED LOW IN THE Toyota’s passenger seat, using a paper towel to dab at the gashes on the back of his head, while Maggie filled the tank with gas. His hair was matted with dried blood, and he had a pounding headache, but at least the bleeding had slowed. A moment earlier he’d unbuttoned his shirt and checked his abdomen. Amazingly, only one of the butterflies had popped. A thin trickle of blood oozed from the wound, nothing serious.