The Secret Service agents gathered round them didn’t move.
‘OK, I’ll ask him,’ said Lock, stepping around them.
‘The hell you will,’ said the burly agent. ‘You still haven’t explained how you came to have explosives residue on a deadly weapon you were carrying in here.’
Coburn was heading up the steps towards them. ‘Coburn!’ Lock shouted. ‘Coburn!’ He turned to one of the agents. ‘Just ask him, would you?’
Coburn pulled out his ATF badge and showed it to someone standing halfway down the stairs. The agent checked it and let him pass.
He was just feet away from Lock and Ty now.
‘Hey,’ said the burly agent, ‘you know these guys?’
Coburn stopped, looked straight at Lock and Ty, and smiled. ‘Never seen them before in my life,’ he said, then ducked past the group and into the body of the cathedral.
Lock and Ty exchanged a look of disbelief.
‘Hey, Coburn!’ Lock shouted. He went to push past the agent, which only signaled to the cops to move in to cuff him.
‘Get this guy the hell out of here before POTUS gets here.’
‘OK, OK,’ Lock said, giving up.
‘Him too,’ said the Secret Service agent, nodding at Ty.
‘What the hell did I do?’ Ty protested.
The second Secret Service agent hitched his thumbs into his belt. ‘We need you both out of here. If everything checks out, you’ll be released later in the day.’
‘Place your hands behind your back,’ said one of the cops to Lock.
‘Fine,’ Lock said, doing exactly as he was told.
‘You have any needles, any other sharp objects in your pocket?’ a female cop asked.
‘No.’
She came up with a comb in the right front pocket of his jeans and his wallet, which she left where they were. Once they were satisfied that they posed no threat, Lock and Ty were perp-walked down the steps of the cathedral.
Ty twisted his head round. ‘Hey, take it easy, I got a bad shoulder.’
His plea was met with a growled ‘And if you don’t keep moving it’s gonna get a lot worse.’
The crowd gathered at the crash barriers jeered as Lock walked down the stairs and across the sidewalk, propelled towards a patrol car parked directly across the street next to the park. He watched as Ty was given the same treatment, the only difference being that Ty wasn’t going quietly. He couldn’t make out the words but he guessed they weren’t pretty.
Lock’s head was forced down and he was placed into the back seat of the cruiser. He checked out the crowd once more: hard faces peering in his direction. The locks on the rear doors thunked shut, and then they were inching forward, away from the cathedral.
From his position on the back seat, he scanned the faces of those gathered at the front entrance but didn’t see Carrie. In a way, he was relieved. He’d go to the station, follow procedure like he’d been asked, and be out again in a couple of hours.
As they inched away from the kerb, he thought frantically about the explosive residue on the tip of his knife. Had it been near his SIG? That way it might have picked up a few specks of cordite. No, the closest the Gerber had been to either live rounds or his SIG was being in the same room. No way would that have been enough to leave a trace.
He glanced back at the cathedral through the cruiser window, across the freshly repaired patch of asphalt and up the steps.
Shit. The road. It had to be! He’d bent down and used the knife to dig a hole into the newly laid road surface.
‘Stop the car!’ he shouted, leaning forward.
The female cop riding up front bumped the brakes, the momentum propelling him forward so that he smacked his head against the hard Perspex divider which separated him from her, then accelerated again.
Unless he acted fast, his next stop was the station house, and the President’s next stop would be the morgue.
66
Chance sat astride a purloined Ducati and watched the San Francisco Police Department motorcycle outriders whip past her, along the Embarcadero, followed by half a dozen other vehicles in the presidential motorcade.
She clicked on her intercom headset, which was Bluetoothed to her cell phone. ‘They just went past.’
‘How fast they moving?’ Reaper asked.
‘They’re booking it. I’d say we’ve got under three minutes until we can RV.’
‘Freya?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Just don’t move in too fast, ’kay? We need the dust settled before we hit.’
‘Got you.’
Chance hitched up the straps of her backpack full of goodies, toed up the kick-stand on the bike and slipped back down the street, away from the route the presidential convoy was taking. The plan was to run parallel, then after initial detonation move in to mop up. The objective was straightforward in terms of those inside The Beast, and she was looking forward to it.
Leave no survivors.
Lock slumped back on the bench seat of the cruiser. No amount of pleading was getting the driver to stop. ‘At least patch me through to someone who can check it out.’
The female cop eyed him in the rear-view mirror with a jaundiced look that spoke of having had to endure too many crazies. ‘Listen, buddy, the Secret Service know what they’re doing. If there was a bomb they’d have found it already. There was sniffer dogs there just this morning. I saw them.’
But the dogs, no matter how refined their sense of smell, might not have been able to detect anything apart from the overpowering whiff of fresh tar. He had to get out of the car. And fast.
As the driver turned her attention back to the road, Lock slipped his right hand into the front pocket of his jeans and pulled out the comb with his fingertips. Without looking, he felt for the final, thickest tooth of the comb, and again by feel used the tooth to press down on the pawl of the right-hand cuff, in an attempt to disengage the swing arm from the ratchet. The cuff on his right hand clicked open. He waited a second to see if the cop had noticed anything, but her eyes were fixed on the road ahead.
‘Listen,’ he said, leaning forward again, ‘I gotta pee.’
‘Hold it.’
‘I can’t. Can you at least pull over so I don’t make a mess of your back seat here?’
‘Forget it.’
It was the answer he’d been expecting. Keeping his hands low, he opened the zip of his jeans. ‘I’m sorry about this, officer, but I ain’t wetting my jeans.’
She squinted in the rear-view mirror. ‘Aw, Jesus. OK, OK, wait.’
She pulled sharply over to the kerb, and got out. As she opened the rear passenger door, Lock kept his hands low, figuring that her eyes would be everywhere but waist level or below. He guessed right.
He had a second, maybe two.
As she began to usher him to a patch of barren ground which doubled as a street-side parking lot, he hit her hard in the face just below her nose, sending her tumbling to the ground. As she fell, he was on her, freeing her service weapon from its holster. Next, he ripped her radio from her belt.
Picking her up under one shoulder, he tossed her into the still-open rear door and slammed it, then climbed in the front, jammed the cruiser back into drive and spun it round in a thick one-eighty turn that drew honks from oncoming cars as he cut directly across their paths.
He glanced back at the female cop in the back seat. She was sitting up now, trying to staunch the blood from her nose.
‘Lady, I’m sorry, but we’re short on time, so buckle up.’
She glared at him. He could hardly blame her.
Finding the switch that engaged the lights and sirens, he flicked the toggle and jammed his foot down on the accelerator, weaving through the traffic, scattering pedestrians and other vehicles behind him as he raced to the cathedral, praying he wasn’t already too late.
67
The motorcycle outriders slowed as they edged within a block of the cathedral. People crowded every sidewalk, children hoisted on to aching parental shoulders, while others craned their necks over police sawhorses, everyone eager for a glimpse of the President and his family.