Jade could not argue with that so she changed the subject. “Rafi. Damn. Why do you think he did it?”
“First thing I’m going to ask him.”
Jade had questions of her own, and felt a burning need to ask them, if only to make sense of the insanity she had just witnessed, but before she could articulate her thoughts, the Rover began to shudder as Professor pegged the speedometer. She decided to let him focus all his attention of the task of driving. The town of Paracas was only two miles away along a lightly traveled road that curved gently as it followed the shoreline, but at their current speed, every bump in the pavement was amplified, every mistake potentially fatal. Jade was glad that Professor had refused to let her drive; his military experience had included training in tactical driving, and those lessons were paying off. They were starting to close the gap. Unfortunately, they were also approaching a populated area.
The fleeing car abruptly vanished into a smudge of brown as Rafi, without any warning and seemingly without reason veered off the highway and out onto the open sand.
“What the hell is he doing?” Professor let his foot off the accelerator, allowing engine compression to slow them down. Even so, they were still pushing ninety Km/h when they reached the edge of the dust cloud. Jade felt herself thrown forward as Professor applied the brakes, further reducing their speed, as he steered to the left in pursuit of the barely discernible dot trailing a plume of dust. Rafi seemed to be heading straight for the bay.
The pillar of dust seemed to stall at the water’s edge, momentarily eclipsing Jade’s view of their quarry, but she knew what had happened. Rafi had stopped the car. Professor put on the brakes and steered to the right, coming to a full stop fifty yards away.
There was a loud crack as something slammed into one of the Rover’s fenders. Jade did not have to hear the gun’s report to know that it had been a bullet.
“Down!” Professor shouted, leaning over the center console and forcing Jade’s head down below the dashboard. The noise sounded again and the driver’s side window went opaque as a round struck the safety glass, fracturing it into a thousand tiny beads.
“Out of ammo, yeah?” Jade said. She grimaced, as much a response to having unconsciously slipped into Pidgin, which made her sound remarkably like her mother, as to their current situation.
Professor ignored the accusation and reached past her, working the lever to open Jade’s door. “Stay here,” he said as he started to crawl over her. “I’m going to try to flank him.”
“Are you serious?” Jade pushed him back. “Just drive away.”
“We might not get another chance.”
“Another chance to what? Get killed?”
“I’d like to know who he’s—”
Before Professor could finish the sentence, something like the fist of God slammed into the Rover and Jade’s world dissolved into darkness.
FIVE
In the instant that he jolted back to consciousness, Professor knew what had happened. He had been in close proximity to enough explosions to recognize the signs even without raising his head. The overpressure wave had pulverized the Land Rover’s windows and sucked the air out of the interior, which more than anything had probably contributed to the black out.
“Jade?” He knew he was shouting, but all he could hear was a persistent ringing sound inside his head.
He could feel her beneath him, still breathing but not moving. Unconscious. Possibly concussed, but more than likely just stunned. He lifted up a little, brushing away particles of safety glass that looked like a shower of diamonds, and stared out at the still burning wreckage of the car they had been chasing. The sedan looked like it had been turned inside out.
Professor did a quick check in every direction to make sure that no one was creeping up from behind, and then turned his attention back to Jade. He shook her gently. “Jade. Wake up!”
She stirred and then came awake with a start. Her lips moved, a question. What just happened?
He faced her squarely so she would be able to read his lips. “Gas tank explosion.”
Her forehead creased in confusion. Rafi?
“Don’t know.” He laid a hand on her shoulder. “Stay here.”
He doubted that she would heed his admonition, but at least this way, if something happened, she would have only herself to blame. It was the kind of lesson that only experience could teach.
He twisted around and worked the door lever, but the door did not budge. He tried shouldering it open, but the explosion had mangled the door and the surrounding frame and nothing less than the Jaws of Life would get it open. Professor abandoned the effort and instead squirmed through the hole where the window had been.
Heat from the burning car buffeted his face, prompting him to raise a shielding hand to his eyes. There was little chance of a secondary explosion; as he had surmised, the gas tank had been the source of the explosion, though what had triggered the detonation was anyone’s guess. He had not fired a single round outside the museum which strongly suggested that Rafi himself had caused the explosion, probably by shooting into the tank. That explained the what, but not the why.
His first thought was that the killer might have been trying to use the exploding car as a diversion to cover his escape or possibly some kind of flanking attack, but if that had been Rafi’s plan, it had ended disastrously. A smoldering body lay twenty feet beyond the wreckage. His clothing had been almost completely burned away, and his skin had not fared much better, but there was enough left for Professor to recognize the corpse as the young intern that had worked alongside him only a few hours before.
He felt Jade’s hand on his arm, felt her shudder in horror as she glimpsed the burned remains. Whether by accident or intentionally, Rafi had killed himself with the explosion, and any answers that he might have given had gone with him into the afterlife.
“I have to know,” Jade insisted.
Professor smiled patiently. He had seen this confrontation coming almost from the moment the attack had occurred. “I understand that. And I agree with you. It’s imperative that we learn what’s really going on. But that doesn’t mean you can go off half-cocked. Let me do some digging.”
“Fine. You dig. I’m going to London.”
He sighed. Although they had been taken by ambulance to the hospital in Pisco — the same place Rafi had been treated after his near-drowning — the doctor had elected not to admit them for observation. Professor felt certain part of the reason for the clean bill of health was the fact that the hospital was now under intense scrutiny from the police who wanted to know how Rafi had slipped away from the hospital without anyone raising an alarm. That was fine with Professor. The hospital was too public, too exposed. Their current accommodations, a cabana at a resort in Paracas, were marginally safer, but Professor would not breathe easy until they were well away from Peru.
He and Jade had also been the focus of police scrutiny, initially at least, since there were no witnesses to corroborate their version of what had happened. Several members of the television crew confirmed that Roche had requested a private meeting with Jade but that did little to exonerate them, particularly when those same individuals reported that Jade’s reaction to Roche’s arrival had been “tense.” An investigation into Rafi’s background however had soon shifted the suspicion away from Jade and Professor.
A cursory examination of Rafi Massoud’s social media presence revealed a connection to the “Crescent Defense League,” a coalition of journalists and Muslim social activists dedicated to fighting Islamophobia. Given the level of anti-Islamic sentiment in the United States and Western Europe, which often took the form of outright racism, the mission of the CDL was laudable, but their tactics, more often than not, only added fuel to the fire. Overly generous application of terms like “Islamaphobe,” “racist” and “Nazi” had stifled meaningful discussion of what many believed was valid criticism of a religious belief system that seemed inextricably, and all too often unapologetically, linked to acts of violence, while inflaming extremists on the opposite side of the political equation who were only too happy to wear such titles as a badge of honor.