She touched the brakes and steered into a tight U-turn. The nimble little car easily negotiated the about-face, despite the narrow confines of the street. In a matter of seconds, Jenna was facing back toward the site of the gun battle. The gunmen and their vehicles were lined up on her left. Mercy was concealed somewhere to the right.
The gunmen shifted forward, the muzzles of their pistols flashing as they hurled lead down the street at the Mini. A bullet smacked into the windshield and plowed through the air right above her head. A jagged crack split the glass but it did not shatter.
Jenna ducked down behind the steering wheel, and moved her foot off the brake, preparing to charge headlong into the fray. Like a chess player working through the moves and counter-moves of a gambit, she rehearsed what would happen next.
Mercy waited across the street from the safe house and the shooters. Jenna would have to stop to pick her up, and when she did, they would both be exposed for as long as it took for Mercy to make the dash to the Mini. She groped for a better plan, but without being able to communicate her intentions to Mercy, there was no better alternative.
Except…there was.
They will find you, Cort had said, and Jenna knew he was right. The killers would never give up. They would not stop until she was dead — she and anyone with her.
Earlier, she had balked at the thought of dragging Mercy into the mess in which she now found herself. Despite the fact that Mercy had saved her from Carlos and had hauled her out the Everglades, despite the fact that the idea of facing the uncertain future alone terrified her, Jenna now saw with startling clarity that there was really only one way to ensure Mercy’s safety.
She stomped on the accelerator and the Mini shot down the street.
One of the gunmen leaped in front of her, striking a defiant pose, as if daring her to run him down, and he started firing. Jenna took the dare. The man realized his mistake a fraction of a second too late. There was a crunch, followed by a thumping sound as the man rolled across the hood, up onto the fractured windshield, and then fell away. Without raising her head or easing off the accelerator, Jenna sped past the cars, past the place where Mercy was hiding, and kept going.
Mercy wouldn’t understand her decision. She had not been privy to Cort’s revelation about Jenna’s origins or the reasons why the government hunted her so relentlessly. She would only know that Jenna had abandoned her.
But she would live.
The killers had no interest in Mercy. They probably wouldn’t even look for her, not with Jenna slipping away. Mercy would be safer without her.
It was cold comfort. As the Mini reached the intersection with the main thoroughfare, the reality of her situation sank in. There was no longer anyone she could ask for help or advice. She would have to face the rest of her life — however short that span would prove to be — completely alone.
But as she coasted through the stop and turned right onto Seventh Avenue, something else Cort had said echoed in her memory.
There are others.
38
The question of how to track down—
My brothers and sisters?
— her fellow clones, and the thornier moral problem of their evident involvement in a worldwide terror plot designed to ignite World War III, occupied Jenna’s thoughts for less than a minute. That was how long it took for the first signs of pursuit to appear.
She realized now that her inner conflict about leaving Mercy behind had hidden flaws in her getaway plan that were now apparent. The Mini Cooper was not the most inconspicuous vehicle, and there was every reason to believe that the men hunting her would have other assets at their disposal — more surveillance drones, traffic cameras, who knew what else?
I need to ditch this car.
Easier said than done.
She had seen the two cars pull out from the cross street, fifteen seconds after she passed. Traffic was light, giving her a clear line of sight to the sedans, which meant that they could see her as well. In the time it would take her to pull over and get out, they would close the gap.
On the plus side of the equation, the Mini was fast and seemed eager to prove it. Despite its compact design and bulldog appearance, it had the heart of a race car and the ground-hugging handling of a go-cart. The only thing holding Jenna back was her own caution, and with each passing second, confidence replaced fear. She was, as she had told Mercy, a quick learner.
Of course, she realized. That’s how I was designed.
Cut it out, a second inner-voice said. Save the pity party for later.
A traffic light two blocks away turned yellow. Jenna pushed harder, knowing that there was no way she would make the light. It turned red when she was still a hundred yards from the cross street, but she had no intention of stopping.
As cars rolled into the intersection, her eyes darted back and forth, fixing each vehicle in her mind’s eye, estimating speeds and rates of acceleration, plotting the course that would carry her through with the least amount of maneuvering. It reminded her of that old arcade game where the goal was to get the frog across a busy street without getting him turned into a green blob of roadkill. If she didn’t get it right — or if one of the other drivers saw her and got spooked — it would be her going splat. As she closed on the intersection, the connections solidified in her mind. Eye, hand and foot, were perfectly synchronized with past, present and future.
It didn’t go quite as smoothly as she had anticipated. The one thing that she could not have accounted for was the reaction of the other drivers. The intersection erupted in a cacophony of screeching tires and honking horns. Jenna had planned her route with the expectation that none of the drivers would stop for her, but some of them tried anyway, slamming on their brakes or swerving out of their lane even though these late reflex actions were unnecessary. It took less than two seconds for the Mini to traverse the intersection, but that was long enough to transform the crossing into total chaos.
With the intersection snarled, Jenna seized the opportunity to put some distance between herself and the chase cars. She stomped on the gas pedal, and pushed the little car faster. The speedometer registered fifty…sixty…seventy miles per hour. Pedestrians on the sidewalk flashed by so fast that she couldn’t make out their features. Cars in the oncoming lanes were a blur. In the rapidly diminishing distance, she saw a traffic light — green — marking the next intersection. This time, there was no need to plot a safe route through. She passed beneath the light before it could so much as flicker yellow.
The road shrank to five lanes, two on either side and an escape lane in the middle. While Sunday traffic remained light, the cars traveling in the same direction loomed closer. Despite the Mini’s superior handling, she was going much too fast to weave between them. She was about to ease her foot off the accelerator when she spied something new in the rearview: the distinctive flashing red and blue lights of a police car.
She mentally kicked herself. She had been so focused on escaping the killers, it had not occurred to her that her escape was not happening in a vacuum. The most probable explanation was that one of the irate drivers from the intersection had taken a moment to call 911 on a cell phone, reporting a blue Mini Cooper driving recklessly.
Surrendering to the police wasn’t an option. Even if she found someone to believe her crazy story, the killers wouldn’t be intimidated by legitimate law enforcement officers any more than the bogus FBI agents that had shot Noah and the two deputies. They wouldn’t even need to use force. They would simply flash their government credentials, claim jurisdiction and take her away. And if any well-intentioned policemen got in their way, there would be more blood on her hands.