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But my present company wasn’t interested.

The front car almost leapt to the challenge, surging forward to push the two cruisers aside. It was a Hollywood moment-total testosterone fantasy-which our own driver was only too willing to follow, slamming on the accelerator.

The predictable results were more surreal than I would have imagined. Aside from the howling engine, there was total silence in the car, so what filled our windshield appeared as a silent movie. The lead vehicle, gunfire flickering from all windows, slammed into the cruisers, shoved them apart a few feet, and rose up on its rear wheels like a rocket taking off. Catapulting over the hoods of the police cars, deformed and blunted, it smashed down on the other side and skittered away, broken, twisted, and inert.

We burst through right behind in an eruption of sound. With metal tearing at metal, glass exploding like firecrackers, we, too, broke out onto the far side, slammed into the lead car, careened off it at an angle away from the hillside, and became airborne over the Otter Creek valley.

For an instant, the silence returned, to be split first by a single scream from the front seat, and then by a final convulsion of noise and destruction. We landed on our wheels, facing straight down the embankment, heading toward one hundred and fifty feet of near cliff-before we were stopped in our tracks by a single tree trunk. The door next to Rarig flew open, and like marbles in a chute the three of us were thrown farther downhill.

We had little time to assess whatever damage we’d incurred. Tangled in saplings and thick brush, hidden from the road above, we found ourselves dazed and cringing amid the random whine and thud of bullets flying just overhead, a result of the surviving Russians still shooting it out from the first car. Memories of war were so real in my brain, I thought myself back in battle.

I scurried over to where the other two were lying sprawled like sacks of coal, using any vegetation I could find as handholds against the steep slope.

“You okay? Lew-you okay?”

The old man passed his hand across his bloodied face. “I think so.”

“John? We need to get out of here.”

Rarig sat up, began to slide, and flipped over, grabbing some tufts of grass with both hands. He yelled out in pain.

“You all right?” I asked him.

“I hurt like hell.”

A couple of bullets smacked into a young tree overhead.

“It’ll get worse if we don’t move.”

“All right, all right.”

I pointed toward the valley floor. “Straight down, as fast as you can. We’ll stop when we reach better footing.”

We did as I’d suggested, in a haphazard sliding tumble, seeing the college’s distant lights across the valley, greeting the coming evening in blissful, Olympian serenity, perched on the far rise like a diorama of an era gone by. The contrast helped get me off autopilot. I looked for some landmark that might serve us once we reached bottom and found, poking above the trees, the pale shape of something that looked like a grain elevator, presumably lining the railroad tracks north of town.

A few minutes later, we reassembled amid acres of weed-choked gravel, the sound of distant gunfire almost stopped. I looked at my two companions in the coming twilight and asked them again how they were faring.

“I think I am not too bad,” Lew answered, smiling happily at this near miracle. “A stiff neck, perhaps.”

Rarig was less sanguine. He looked pale and winded, his eyes narrowed by pain. “I broke a rib or two. Hurts to breathe.” He held his right arm across his chest, as if carrying an invisible baby.

I peeled the arm back and gently prodded the area beneath it. His sudden intake of breath guided me to a single spot just below his nipple.

“There’s no deformity,” I told him. “It’s probably only a crack or a hairline fracture. Let me know if you feel like your lung’s filling up, though.”

“Swell,” he muttered. “What now?”

“Keep your fingers crossed.” I pulled Willy’s beaten radio from my pocket, turned it on, hesitated a moment, and asked, “You guys out there?”

“Hey, there,” was Willy’s laconic reply.

Sammie was less laid-back. “Jesus. You made it? How are you? Where are you?”

“Within striking distance of the railroad tracks north of town, east of Otter Creek. I took a visual on what looks like a grain elevator. I think we’ll head there.” I glanced at Lew and then added, “Hang on a sec.”

“Lew,” I asked him, “what’s the road closest to the tracks?”

“Exchange Street, but it connects to Route 7, so if you wish to not see all the commotion, perhaps another road might be preferable. A little farther west, there is a small covered bridge over Otter Creek, where Pulp Mill Road becomes Morgan Horse Farm Road. That is a far more discreet way of leaving town.”

I paused before keying the mike again. Twenty minutes ago, I’d told Rarig our little clandestine operation had come to an end. That ambition hadn’t changed, but I was acutely conscious of the mess we’d left behind. I was in no mood to deal with the Middlebury police, or anyone else who’d been shot at today.

I returned to the radio. “Are you both in the clear?”

“10-4.”

“With a vehicle?”

“I got mine back on its wheels,” Sammie said. “We’re in it now, laying low.”

“Good.” I gave them Lew’s directions and told them we’d meet them at the bridge in about half an hour-give or take.

It was slow going. Neither of my companions was in the prime of youth, and the longer we walked the more we all discovered just how pummeled we’d been. Rarig’s rib kept forcing him to stop and gasp for air.

In over the time I’d allotted, therefore, and after carefully pausing at both the railroad tracks and Exchange Street, which proved surprisingly busy, we limped across the small, two-way covered bridge Lew had mentioned and emerged to see Willy and Sam sitting in Sam’s dented car by the side of a small, grassy traffic circle, caught in the anemic halo of a nearby streetlamp. They were alone.

Feeling utter relief at last, not even curious why neither of them got out of the car to greet us, I escorted my two battered charges up to the back door and pulled it open.

A man with a gun was crouching in the rear seat. His accent made Lew’s sound nonexistent. “Put up hands.”

All three of us were too startled to follow orders. “What the hell?” I asked.

From behind me another voice, cultured and smooth, said, “Lieutenant Gunther, please do as he says. We don’t have time to waste.”

I turned around to face a tall, elegant man in a suit, flanked by two others, also carrying guns.

“Georgi,” Lew whispered in astonishment, half to himself.

The tall man nodded as his companions quickly frisked us. “Dimitri. It’s been a very long time.”

Corbin-Teich stiffened slightly. “It is not my name now.”

The other ignored him, addressing me with a slight bow. “I am Georgi Padzhev. You have no doubt heard of me.”

“Yeah.”

Padzhev raised his hand and signaled to someone in the darkness. An engine started up, a pair of headlights came on, and a large sedan rolled up behind Willy’s car.

Padzhev gestured to the three of us. “I think it would be a little less crowded if you joined me in this.”

I looked at him for a moment, studying his placid features. He, like Rarig and Corbin-Teich, appeared to be in his mid-seventies, but he carried himself like a man a good ten years younger.

“I take it we don’t have a choice,” I commented.

He moved to the other car and politely opened its rear door. “That is correct.”

Chapter 19

Georgi Padzhev smiled at me.

“Joseph Gunther-that I can recall without difficulty. Rarig and Corbin-Teich feel strange on the tongue. Dimitri, whatever possessed you to use Lew Corbin-Teich? It is so distinctly odd. I thought the idea was to come up with something out of the melting pot-something to help you disappear.”