Colleen had never seen anything so beautiful. It was just as Brother Michael had told her it would be. It was better than any drug. This was power in its rawest form, and as her bullets raked the Users and sent them to Hell, she found herself laughing.
As far as she could tell, every burst of bullets had hit exactly where she’d wanted it to. Puffs of glass and puffs of blood. Her senses took all of it in and it nearly overwhelmed her. Blaring horns and crumpling metal mixed with the pounding thump of her weapon, echoed half a mile away by the hammering of Stephen’s gunshots. The tableau of destruction-the tableau of success-was unlike anything she’d dared to imagine.
The first magazine emptied itself in no time at all, it seemed. She leaned into each burst as she pulled the trigger, bracing herself against the recoil, and each trigger pull drummed the rifle’s stock into the soft tissue of her shoulder. After the tenth pull, the receiver locked open, but Colleen was too into it to notice. When the shots didn’t come, she nearly fell on her nose.
She’d practiced the first reload dozens of times. Brother Michael had stressed that that would be the moment when soldiers would be most exposed. She’d taped two magazines end-to-end so that when the time came, she’d have only to thumb the mag release, flip the array in her hand, and then reinsert it into the slot. On the range, back at the Farm, she’d learned to do this with her eyes closed. She believed that she might even be able to do it in her sleep. But out here, in the heat of the battle, her hands shook, and she had difficulty finding the slot after she’d made the flip.
She unclipped the Bushmaster from its sling and raised the weapon, pointing it toward the sky. Maybe if she could see the slot, she could get the mag to seat. She took a deep breath. She had to settle herself. She needed to Something kicked her in the chest, then kicked her a second time. She staggered back, and as she did, she lost her grip on the rifle. Despite her efforts to grab it, she watched it clatter to the ground.
Somehow, she knew that she’d been shot, and when she looked up, she could see the man who’d done it, very far away, across three lanes of traffic. He stood in a crouch, his hands clasped in front of him. They made eye contact, and the muzzle on the man’s pistol flashed again.
Jonathan knew he’d hit his target. First of all, he always hit his target-certainly from this range-and second, he saw the bullets hit their marks, dimpling the fabric of the shooter’s clothing and causing him to drop his weapon and stagger back a step.
Yet he didn’t fall. These were kill shots, yet his target remained standing. Reeling wasn’t enough, not after being hit with two. 45-caliber slugs. He should have dropped like a sack of bones. That he continued to stand could only mean that he was wearing body armor. As Jonathan shifted his aim for a head shot, the shooter looked up and made eye contact. Jesus, he was only a kid. A teenager. A girl! He hesitated on the trigger just long enough for the shooter to comprehend that she’d been made.
The target flinched as Jonathan squeezed the trigger. The bullet missed its mark by inches, and then the shooter was on the move, running full tilt toward the Virginia side of the bridge. Jonathan followed on his parallel span, plunging headlong into jammed oncoming vehicles while his target emerged into the open in the downstream gap formed by the plug of traffic that she had created.
Cursing himself for his hesitation before, Jonathan would not make the same mistake with a second chance. With the shooter in the open, Jonathan stopped running and readied his aim. This time, there’d be no “Freeze!” someone yelled from behind. “Federal officer! Don’t move!”
Jonathan froze, even as his mind screamed for him to take the shot. The opportunity lost, he broke his aim and raised his weapon to the sky. He knew all too well that when a federal office yells “Don’t move!”-whether FBI, ATF, DEA or any of the other alphabet agencies-the command was to be taken literally. Another trait common to federal officers: they were all very good shots.
“Hold your hands up high, where I can see them,” the voice commanded.
A step ahead of you, Jonathan thought. He didn’t move. The officer would figure it out.
“Drop your weapon!”
Now, here was a potential problem. “No!” Jonathan yelled back. “I’m a good guy, not a bad guy, and this is a three-thousand-dollar pistol. I will not drop it, but I will lay it on the ground.” Former Unit member and renowned gunsmith Barry Vance had customized this weapon for him, and he’d be damned if he was going to ruin genuine artistry. Moving slowly and keeping his back to the cop so as not to spook him, Jonathan sank to his knees.
“I said drop the weapon,” the officer demanded. “Drop it, or I will shoot you.”
Jonathan assessed it as a bluff. If this guy hadn’t already pulled the trigger, he wasn’t going to now that Jonathan was clearly not a threat. That’s what he told himself, anyway. The next five seconds proved him to be correct. He gently placed his weapon on the ground and raised his arms again. On the opposite span, panic had begun in earnest. People screamed as realization washed over them.
And the shooter was getting away.
“Get on your face!” the officer yelled. His voice cracked from the strain. “Arms out to the side!”
With his arms still raised, Jonathan pointed the forefingers of both hands toward the opposite span. “The shooter’s over there!” he said.
“Now!”
Moron. The cop was so invested in Jonathan as the bad guy that there’d be no reasoning with him. Jonathan did as he was told and lowered his belly to the pavement. Partly to streamline the process, but mostly to steal the officer’s thunder, he went ahead and placed his hands behind his back, cuff-ready.
“Don’t you move,” the officer warned as he approached. “If you so much as blink, I swear to God I’ll kill you.”
Jonathan listened as the footsteps halted on his right side, near his hips, he figured. This would be the time-at this range-when Jonathan could take the guy out if he’d wanted to; but the officer would be aware of that, too, making it that much more important for Jonathan to be on his best behavior. Most of the friendly-fire incidents that Jonathan had witnessed over his years in the military had been tied one way or another to a bad case of the nerves.
“I see you’ve done this before,” the cop said as he placed his knee in Jonathan’s back and gripped his thumbs for control. From the way he fumbled with the cuffs, the guy gave himself away as one who did not do this very often in the field.
“Actually, no,” Jonathan grunted through the pressure on his back. “But I’ve done it enough to others to know the drill.”
The cop hesitated. “What, you’re going to tell me you’re a cop?”
“I’m a lot of things,” Jonathan said. “For tonight, though, I’m a private investigator who was seconds away from killing the son of a bitch who shot up the bridge.”
“Right,” the officer scoffed. “That’s not what I saw.” He ratcheted the cuffs tighter than they needed to be, then climbed off Jonathan’s back and pulled on his wrists to bring him up to his knees. He continued to grasp the chain of the cuffs while he reached into his prisoner’s back pocket for his wallet.
Jonathan sighed noisily-a growl, really. “Look, Officer…” He waited for the guy to fill in the blank.
“ Agent,” the man corrected. “Special Agent Clark, United States Secret Service.”
“Special Agent Clark, then. United States Secret Service. If you got on your radio right now, you might be able to stop a mass murderer before she gets away.”
“Why be greedy?” the agent quipped. “I’ve already got one member of the team in custody. You’ll give me the rest in time.”
Jonathan bowed his head. Surely the man was being deliberately obtuse. Did he really imagine, even for a moment, that the destruction here could have been wrought by a man with a. 45? Jonathan didn’t have a lot of respect for cops in general, but he had a particular hard-on for federal agents whose bravado outstripped their abilities. It happened a lot. He resigned himself to losing this battle.