“Let’s go,” he said.
They collected their backpacks and hurried outside.
“What about the train?” Su asked.
Jake pulled out a set of keys and led her to the crappy, beat up car in the back lot.
“You’re getting good at stealing cars,” she said. “You sure you don’t do this for a living?”
He opened the driver’s door. “Nope. But everybody has to have a hobby.”
Getting in, he unlocked the other doors and they put the packs in the back seat.
“Where we going now?” she asked, sitting in the passenger seat.
He cranked over the car and shrugged. “You’re asking me? This is your country.”
“Shenyang is that way,” she said, pointing toward the south.
“Great.”
He pulled back, ground the gears, put it in first gear, and shot away from the terminal.
After they got out onto a main road heading toward Shenyang, Jake considered what to do. They had to leave China as soon as possible. But their choices were limited. There would be no direct flights to Alaska. They’d have to fly to Seattle or San Francisco. But maybe. He smiled at his idea. It wasn’t the first time he had thought of it, though. When Armstrong and Anderson had first recruited him for this job, he had considered the option that he might be hung out to dry. After all, that’s why they had hired him in the first place. They could disavow any knowledge of his existence. He was, as they would say, not affiliated with the U.S. government in any way. So, he had always known he might need another way out of China. Now it was time to call in an old favor.
Traffic on the main road got heavier as they closed in on the city of six million people.
“How far?” Jake asked. “What’d that last sign say?”
“About five miles.”
“I hope you’re ready for another road trip.”
She looked confused. “We can catch a flight to Beijing here. Be there in time for evening meal.”
He shook his head. “No, they’ll be watching the airport. They’ll expect that. We’ll do the unexpected. With the right traffic, we’ll be there by late evening.” That is, if the car held up, he thought.
When they got to an outer ring of Shenyang, Jake drove around the east side of the city, not even catching more than a glimpse of small Hutongs on the outskirts.
31
There had been no choice. Fisher had thought his new partner had taken a shot to her shoulder, but the bullet had actually struck her just below her left shoulder socket, ripping a hole through her left biceps. Another shot had hit her directly in the chest, sinking deep into her Kevlar vest, and taking her breath away for a moment. With Harris hit, Fisher had driven her to the closest hospital in the Portland area, dropping her at the emergency room door, and then speeding off after the Asian woman in the white Trooper.
Fisher would have been quite angry had they not placed the satellite tracker on the Trooper while it sat in front of the house in Eugene. He had just gotten off the phone with the Portland office; they had relayed the woman’s position to him.
The more difficult part had been swapping cars, since theirs had been shot up and the windshield destroyed. They had coordinated an exchange on the side of Interstate 205 just before it crossed over the Columbia River, and were now in a huge Crown Victoria. That didn’t satisfy Fisher, since the car was purchased by mostly police departments or old folks.
As he suspected, the Asian woman had passed up the Portland International Airport exit and crossed the Columbia River into Washington.
“You won’t catch her,” Cliff said from the back seat. “She’s smart, man. Really smart.”
“Shut the fuck up, Cliff.” Fisher was still kicking himself for not dropping him off at the hospital. But, at the time, his partner, Agent Harris, had been in no condition to baby-sit the guy. Besides, he felt responsible for all that had happened. If he had caught on to Cliff Johansen sooner, none of this would have happened. That was one way to look at it. The other, and the one that would stand up in court, was that he couldn’t have stopped Cliff for espionage until he had actually taken the Brightstar information. How was he to know that the guy would make a run for it? Most spies hung around for a while to make sure they would not arouse suspicion, or at least to squeeze more money out of their runners. But Cliff’s motivation had been both money and sex. As it turned out, sex might have been just as important to him.
“I’m sorry, man,” Cliff said.
Fisher checked him out in the rearview mirror. “You’re sorry all right. What the hell were you thinking?”
“I meant about your partner gettin’ shot. I didn’t think it would ever come to this.”
“It almost always comes to this,” Fisher told him.
A cell phone rang and Fisher picked it up from inside his jacket pocket. “Yeah.” He listened carefully and then said thanks before hanging up.
“How is she?”
“It wasn’t about Harris,” Fisher said. He picked up the map and threw it to the back seat. “Here. Make yourself useful. Your partner is near Chehalis. We just passed mile marker fifty-nine. Do the math.”
“Hey, ya got me cuffed to the door back here. How the hell ya expect me ta…”
“Cliff.”
“Twenty-two miles.”
Fisher calculated that in his mind. She was traveling under the radar at sixty-four miles an hour. He was pushing the limit at eighty-two. That means. Damn, he hated those math problems.
“If she’s going the speed limit,” Cliff said, “which I’m sure she is, then you’ll catch her somewhere between Olympia and Tacoma. Unless you slow down for Olympia.”
“Shut up, Cliff.”
“Hey, you asked, Pal. I gotta piss, by the way.”
“Let’s see,” Fisher said, “a man gets thrown from a car traveling eighty-two miles an hour. How far do his brains splatter?”
“Funny.” Then Cliff mumbled something under his breath.
Traffic started to pick up somewhat, but the fast lane remained fairly calm. Fisher only had to slow a few times until he flashed his brights behind a slow poke who lingered where he shouldn’t. The biggest problem was the rain, which went from anywhere from a few sprinkles to a complete downpour without warning. Which it was doing right now, making it almost impossible to maintain speed.
“You’re gonna kill us, Steve. Excuse me. Agent Fisher. Or whatever your name is this week.”
“Keep talkin’ Cliff and I’ll make sure you get a huge cell mate. I think you know what I mean.”
“Fuckin’ A.”
“Exactly.”
That kept his mouth shut for a while. Fisher tried his best to concentrate, but the smell and the sight of Harris’s blood lingered in his mind. He knew she would be all right, though. In fact, at the hospital, she had gotten out of the car herself and walked the last few feet to the emergency room, banging her hand on the roof of the Taurus and telling him to catch the bitch, before slamming the door. He could simply have the Asian woman stopped ahead. Set up a road block between two long stretches of highway where she would have no choice but to stop. That’s what the Portland office had wanted to do, but Fisher had convinced them that they needed to know where she was going. Who she was working for. Nothing else mattered now.
“Why’s she going to Seattle, Cliff?”
“Don’t know. Maybe she likes Sea-Tac.”
“Maybe you like another punch in the mouth.”
“Damn. When did you become such a bad ass?”
“Maybe because I had to repress my masculinity for so long pretending to be a programmer.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem.”
There was silence for a moment as the windshield wipers swished their music back and forth.