‘Fire!’
Glen leaped from the car, his pistol in his hand, and rushed toward the smouldering wreckage of the flatbed, as Karina got out and sprinted in the opposite direction toward the cries and shouts from panicked civilians trapped in their vehicles.
‘Fire!’
As she rounded the back of the four-by-four behind them, she saw that its rear had been crushed by a smaller vehicle that was itself pinned in place by a Lincoln. Behind that, four more cars were crushed in by the tanker. Karina’s pounding heart seemed to stop in her chest as she saw the bodies in the trapped, crushed vehicles. Bloodied. Still. Slumped across steering wheels behind splintered windshields.
A sinister blanket of flame burst from the vehicle nearest the tanker and snaked its way across the wreck.
‘Forget them!’ she yelled back at Glen and Tom. ‘Get over here!’
Even as her brain fired neurons ordering her to call for ambulances and fire trucks, so she saw the final vehicle down the line, crunched into a barely recognisable pulp of twisted metal by the huge tanker. Dark blue Prius. Two occupants. A woman and a child in a baby-seat. Both motionless. Karina felt a terrible fear as she scrambled up across the hoods of mangled cars, but she wasn’t even close before the Prius was engulfed in a sheet of writhing flames that spat a boiling pillar of black smoke into the pale blue sky.
As Glen and the others raced to join her, so she saw Tom Ross lay eyes on the burning vehicle.
‘No!’
Tom hurled himself onto the mountain of twisted metal and plastic. Karina threw herself into him and they slammed down onto a Lincoln’s warped hood. Tom fought her with the strength of a fallen angel, screaming as he hurled her aside and scrambled to his feet.
Glen and Jackson tackled him down before he could enter the writhing flames that seethed around the Prius.
Karina knew it was already too late, even through the tears that stung like acid in the corners of her eyes.
6
‘We’ve got them. Two males heading north, just passing us now.’
The voice came through a radio transmitter fitted to the vehicle’s dashboard, designed to look like a cellphone. The agent in the front seat glanced out of the tinted glass of his window and spotted the two figures strolling down Union Avenue. Both wore clothes that looked normal enough but could also be used to conceal their identities and physiques; one wore a hoodie while the other wore a baseball cap, shielding their faces.
‘They look like the same ones from the CCTV footage in Grand Central,’ said the driver. ‘You sure one of ’em’s a woman?’
The two men sitting in the front of the vehicle watched as the two suspects ambled along, pointing at shops and chatting.
‘Like they haven’t got a care in the goddamned world,’ said the man in the passenger seat.
‘Don’t be deceived,’ came a voice from the back seat of the vehicle. ‘They’re professionals. We need to disarm them quickly or this will all go very wrong.’
The agents in the front both looked over their shoulders at the old man behind them. A senior intelligence officer, his word was highly respected, but even so…
‘There’s only two of them,’ the driver replied.
The old man nodded. ‘That’s all they need.’
‘What’s the plan then?’ asked the other. ‘Call in the Marines?’
The old man grinned bitterly but shook his head.
‘We let them get to wherever they’re going, circle them to prevent an escape, and then we close them down.’
‘They’re onto us.’
Lopez’s voice betrayed no concern as she walked alongside Ethan down Union toward the motel they had booked.
‘Where?’ Ethan asked.
‘Ten o’clock, corner of South 2nd.’
Ethan didn’t look up immediately as he walked with a bag of groceries tucked under his left arm. He feigned a chuckle and nodded as though Lopez had muttered a gag, kept looking the way they were walking. But his focus switched immediately to an SUV parked near the sidewalk, maybe thirty yards away on the opposite side of the street.
‘Looks like government,’ Lopez said as they walked, pointing randomly at a furniture store on their side of the street. ‘Too damned clean.’
Ethan did not reply but he agreed. The vehicle’s windows were tinted with a film that concealed enough of the occupants’ features to make it suspicious.
‘Check our tail,’ he said, and stopped on the sidewalk to examine the interior of his bag of groceries.
Lopez stopped alongside him, reaching into the bag as though searching for something within but scanning the sidewalk behind them. As they started walking again, she spoke quietly.
‘Another one about a hundred yards behind,’ she confirmed. ‘It’s not crawling, just sitting there.’
‘Anybody on foot?’ Ethan asked.
‘Not close enough to be a threat.’
Ethan felt certain that anybody wanting to take them down would not be foolish enough to open fire in broad daylight in New York. Even a drive-by shooting from the relative cover of a vehicle would present numerous risks if those responsible were identified in any way. No. If they were going to make a hit, it would be at the motel and probably through more covert means than a shooting disguised as a drug or gangland dispute.
‘How the hell did they find us?’ Lopez asked. ‘We’ve barely stayed still for six months.’
‘Maybe a lucky break,’ Ethan hazarded. ‘Or somebody anticipated our next move.’
Lopez shook her head. ‘I doubt that. What are we going to do about it?’
Ethan didn’t look at the SUV as they passed by, instead thinking about angles and distances. ‘We have to assume they already know where we’re staying,’ he said, ‘and that we haven’t just spotted them.’
‘Could be a team waiting,’ Lopez cautioned him.
‘Yeah, but if we don’t keep going, they’ll know we’re onto them.’
‘You want to fight it out?’ Lopez asked, looking up at him.
Ethan shook his head. ‘No, but let’s see if we can’t vanish again.’
They walked across the lot of the motel and passed the foyer. Ethan glanced inside the small waiting room as they passed and saw nobody waiting for them. As he looked up he saw a cleaning lady wheeling her trolley of laundry down along the rows of apartment doors just past their own.
Lopez led the way to their motel-room door, fumbling for the keys as she did so.
‘We’re virtually inviting them in for coffee,’ she said.
‘I think they’re hoping to corner us,’ Ethan replied. ‘But they didn’t have anybody out on foot, so that means they were in vehicles when they spotted us. But if they’d pulled in ahead of us now they’d have risked being spotted by us. So my guess is they’ll let us get inside, quietly surround the motel, and move in.’
‘Which helps us how?’ Lopez asked as she opened the door.
‘Because we won’t be here.’
‘They’re inside, room 27.’
The old man in the rear seat of the SUV reached up to one ear and pressed a tiny button on the microphone that he wore.
‘Block all exits, secure the room and take them down!’
The driver started the engine and pulled out, just as the second vehicle passed in front of them on Union. They pulled in behind and followed it to a weary-looking motel a couple of hundred yards down, drove into the lot and parked a short distance from a block of rooms that ran east — west along one side of the lot.