She shot a glance over her shoulder. Three agents pursued her on foot and two motorcycle cops — wait, three.
Ahead, the exposed escalators burrowed into the earth, slanting to the Metro station below.
Without slowing she jumped onto the metal slope between the up and down escalators and rocketed into the hot breath of the underground. As she slid past, the rising courtgoers blinked into the light of day, confused.
Riding down on her ass, she dug in her courier bag and yanked out a fat industrial razor, a 380-watt beast designed for shearing sheep. She hit the Metro platform, dumped the bag into a trash can, and shouldered into the spill of an emptying train. Ducking her head, she raked the razor through her hair.
Five wide swoops left her long rose-gold locks on the concrete floor. All that remained were blond roots bristling in a buzz cut. Next she ran the razor up her shirtfront, peeling it away and dumping it onto the tracks. She wore a bright pink jog bra.
Her gestures were largely lost in the herd, though a little boy holding his mom’s hand looked up at Candy with wide eyes. She winked at him as she fastened a magnetic septum bar into place between her nostrils.
A new train screeched up to the platform.
As the agents and cops tumbled down off the escalator, she popped in headphones and bopped her head, watching them in the reflection of the subway windows.
The doors parted.
She got in and turned around, keeping herself in full view at the window. A half dozen officers filed past, checking the cars frantically, their gazes sweeping right over her.
The doors closed, and she pulled away from the station.
Despite the disruption outside, the Newseum was still filled with patrons. Evan made it through Today’s Front Pages and Reporting Vietnam to the stairs, but shouts carrying up the stairwell forced him out into Breaking News on the fifth floor.
He jabbed his finger at the DOWN button of the elevator, waiting for it to arrive. The wrong set of doors dinged open, and he cursed himself for not asking Candy to prep both cars. With agonizing slowness the car clanked shut and departed.
He clicked the DOWN button again.
Shouted commands reached him, ever louder.
He waited for the other elevator to arrive. He didn’t punch the button more than once. He didn’t bounce impatiently on his boots. He didn’t crowd the doors.
It took all of his training to stand there and wait.
Without the mortar and squash head, the backpack felt light on his shoulders. He prayed the shell had hit home.
Behind him he heard the stairwell door bang open.
At last the doors spread to welcome him. He stepped inside the enormous hydraulic elevator and turned to the others waiting to board. Over their shoulders a stream of agents poured into sight.
Evan held up his hands, blocking the patrons. “You don’t want to be in here. Trust me.”
The rubber bumpers closed on a dozen startled faces.
The huge transparent car, wall-to-wall glass, had a capacity of seventy passengers.
He’d need all the room.
Dumping his skateboard backpack on the floor, he hopped up onto the handrails and tilted the third ceiling panel on the right. A load-out duffel bag slid into his hands.
He ripped out what looked like a stubby mutant rifle. The Lake Erie gas gun, named in honor of the location of the lab that engineered it, was a single-shot break-open with a tube barrel. Tommy had sawed off the butt stock behind the action, the whole thing no more than a foot and a half.
Two ballistic-nylon pouches were prepped and waiting, filled with less lethal thirty-seven-millimeter rubber bullets, the same baton rounds the Brits had used during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The pouches clipped onto his belt, their dilated elastic tops ensuring that he wouldn’t lose any spare rounds as long as he didn’t go upside down.
As the elevator dropped, the cavernous atrium of the museum yawned before him, a 3-D maze of mezzanines, floating staircases, and dangling displays.
Agents and cops scurried on the steps and across various levels, an Escheresque confusion of activity.
He tucked to the right side, partially hidden behind a massive piston nearly two feet in diameter. He’d not been noticed. For now.
Holding the gas gun low by his leg, he passed the fourth floor.
The third floor was coming up. None of the officers or agents had taken note of him descending here in near-plain view.
Then, without any warning, the neighboring car swooped up, its passengers suddenly right beside him through two glass walls and a few feet of open air.
Its passengers happened to be four Secret Service agents, their SIGs at the ready.
As they rose and he dropped, two sides of a pulley, the agents clocked the rifle at his side.
He threw himself flat in a sprawl a split second before their rounds shattered the transparent walls of his elevator, spraying him with pebbled safety glass.
An instant of onslaught and then they’d swept up out of range.
When he rose, the scene before him in the atrium had frozen, as though the plug had been pulled on an elaborate windup toy. From various levels and staircases, at least a dozen cops and agents stared at him, scrolling slowly by as he continued to descend.
The volley of nine-millimeter rounds had converted the car into a platform elevator. This was good because there would be no refraction on his outgoing shots.
It was bad for everything else.
He picked out a cop on the balcony just below, raised the gas gun, and fired a rubber bullet across the open divide. It struck the cop in the thigh, spinning him in a 180 and knocking him to the floor. It would leave a nasty bruise, but nothing more.
Evan stepped back from the brink and waited for incoming.
Bullets and sparks blew out the rest of the glass clinging to the maw of the frames. Evan waited for a break in the action and then eased forward and popped off another sabot round at an agent standing on the concourse level two floors below. Reloading, Evan knocked down another agent on the ground floor just before the guy could squeeze off a shot.
Clearing a path.
A hefty cop made heftier by a Kevlar vest bulled through the front door into the lobby, well out of rubber-bullet range.
Pulling back from the edge once more, Evan slung the gas gun down, thumbing the barrel release with his left hand so he could maintain a firing grip while his other hand dug in the ballistic pouch. The weapon broke open as his fingers closed on the cool metal he was looking for — a D-cell battery in the bottom of the pouch.
The battery’s weight gave him greater range.
Sweeping the spent cartridge out, he slotted the battery into place and snapped the barrel up with a jerk. He was drawing fire now from above and below, though the moving car made pinning him down tricky, the sight lines constantly shifting. If he stayed back from the lip, most of the shots hit the car’s ceiling and floor in front of him.
He hoped not to catch a ricochet.
Laboring downward, the elevator was just above the concourse level now. The displays dangling in the atrium provided sporadic cover as Evan stepped forward and sighted on the hefty cop’s sternum.
“Sorry,” he said, and fired.
As he jerked back, he heard the ping of the D cell against the armor plate of the vest, the cop giving a bark that echoed up the six-story rise of the atrium.
Gunfire answered furiously, cops and agents raining lead down from the open staircases and balconies. Sprawled on his stomach, squinting against the sparks, Evan fumbled in another round. Then he jerked the skateboard free of the straps on the rear of the backpack.
He gauged the elevator’s descent, the ground floor coming up fast. From outside the building, muffled voices reached him, agents shouting to fall back and set a perimeter.