“I… I don’t know.” He took his hand away. The bullet had cut across his chin; a flap of skin hung open and blood gushed. From the location of the wound Suzanne knew it wasn’t life-threatening, but it was certainly messy. Mayes leaned towards the rearview to get a look for himself, but when he looked in the mirror he shouted, “They are still coming!” He covered the wound again with his hand.
Another pop from a pistol behind them, then the sound of tearing metal in the trunk of the 535i.
“It’s Carmichael!” Mayes said.
Suzanne Brewer knew he meant it was Carmichael’s Saudi Arabian proxy force, but she did not correct him. Obviously this was Carmichael’s doing. The Gray Man was capable of many things, but she had seen no intelligence claiming he also ran a team of motorcycle hit men.
Another crack of gunfire. This round must have missed the car completely because she heard no impact. She shifted lanes again, then raced forward.
Suzanne didn’t want to take her eyes off the road to check her navigation screen so she called to Mayes. “How far to the next turnoff?”
“I… I don’t know.”
“Well look, dammit!”
Mayes did so, still holding his bleeding chin. He looked to the navigation map on the console display. “In about a mile we come to a T intersection. Jesus Christ! We’ll have to stop! They’ll kill us! Even if we make the turn without them overtaking us, we’ll be on the 495. There’s nowhere to go!”
Suzanne Brewer put the pedal all the way to the floor, but she knew Mayes was right. She could not hold the motorcycles back in this traffic for that long.
She squinted rainwater from her eyes as she weaved between two semis, pushing her speed to ninety miles an hour now, but soon she had to brake again to avoid rear-ending a van.
Another crack of a pistol behind them. The nearest bike was less than twenty-five yards back and closing.
Suzanne knew Jordan Mayes was right. There was no way she could outrun the six assassins on her tail. It was only a matter of seconds before she was either hit by gunfire or miscalculated and crashed her vehicle.
The BMW shot under the Turkey Run Road overpass and began a half-mile-long curve to the left. On the right side was a long gradual drop-off that went down a hill covered in trees and shrubs.
Suzanne looked at the drop-off, then in the rearview again. A plan formulated in her mind quickly, and she knew what she needed to do now. “Get Denny on the phone!”
“What?”
“Tell him to call it off.”
“Are you insane? He won’t answer a call from me!”
“I’ll talk to him. Get my phone.”
He looked around the center console. “Where is it?”
Another crack of gunfire, and the back window shattered high by the roofline. Brewer and Mayes both tucked their heads low.
“In my purse in the backseat.”
Mayes reached back, grabbed her purse, and dug through it. “It’s not here!”
“Then it fell out back there! You have to find it! It’s our only chance!”
Mayes reached back and felt around, but he couldn’t locate it. “Forget it!”
“Hurry!” she screamed at him. Another pop from behind shattered her driver-side mirror. On her right an SUV slammed on its brakes as a two-door compact in the next lane veered in front of it, trying to get out of the way of the car chase overtaking it. “We have to do something! Get back there and find it!”
Mayes unfastened his seat belt so he could look for the phone. As he turned around to reach between the seats he said, “This is crazy! Calling Denny isn’t going to work!”
Suzanne Brewer looked to Mayes, saw him out of his seat and up on his left knee, his upper torso twisted and turned, leaning halfway into the back.
She gripped the steering wheel until her knuckles went white. “Not for you, it won’t.”
And with that Suzanne Brewer closed her eyes, jacked the wheel hard to the right, and sent her BMW across a lane of screeching traffic and off the road, crashing through a thicket of brush along the shoulder and then hurtling down the hill at nearly seventy miles an hour.
67
The 535i went airborne, careered nose-first down the decline, and then crashed into a copse of saplings, flipping it onto its right side. Brewer’s arms and head whipped in all directions, but Jordan Mayes, who was out of his seat, flew completely into the back of the sedan, his body hurtling from one side to the other like a rag doll as the BMW began tumbling. The air bags deployed like cannon fire, restraining Suzanne’s movement for a moment, but Mayes’s body slammed into the rear windshield, and then his head dropped straight to the left side of the car when it bounced hard once more, snapping his neck on impact.
The BMW finally lost all its momentum, finishing its long crash sequence with its wheels spinning in the air and the roof lying in a relatively flat portion of wet grass, 150 yards down the hill from the George Washington Parkway.
All was still for a moment other than the rain on the metal undercarriage of the sedan. Soon Suzanne Brewer’s bloody hand reached out, away from her body, pushing the deflated air bags out of her way so she could orient herself. She hung upside down, her bruised waist and her scraped shoulder and neck held secure by the seat belt.
In another second searing pain crept into her left ankle, and it seemed to amplify more and more with every single beat of her racing heart.
She drooled blood that flowed up into her nose.
Still dazed by the crash, she wiped her face, and then, finally, she opened her eyes.
Jordan Mayes lay in front of her sight line, dead in the dark, facedown in the mud fifteen feet from the BMW. Suzanne took this in without emotion, then her eyes were drawn up the hill. She saw three pinpricks of light above her, back in the direction of the George Washington Parkway. They moved like fireflies, dancing in the blackness, but growing larger, sometimes shooting out in wide arcs, then returning to their original shape.
It did not take her long to realize what she was looking at.
Three flashlights, each one carried by a man, no doubt a Saudi Arabian assassin. They closed steadily on her position 150 yards down the hill.
And she understood. They were coming down here to make sure their work was finished.
She did not reach for her seat belt release button. Her leg seemed to be stuck and her ankle was clearly broken — she’d never felt pain like this in her life. But even though she couldn’t get away if she tried, her original intention had never been to run away; it had been to make a deal.
With a pathetic sob and a boyish grunt of pain she looked in the other direction, back inside the shattered vehicle. She strained against her seat belt to reach out across the roof of the sedan below her. She opened the armrest storage compartment, pulled out the Faraday cage that held her phone.
It had been by her side all along, and not in the back like she had told Jordan Mayes.
She opened the case and dialed a number with a thumb that trembled almost too much for her to accomplish the simple task. Holding the ringing phone to her ear now, she looked back in the direction of the men negotiating the hill and trees, descending the rain-swept hillside to finish her off while she hung upside down like meat in a market.
Her ankle throbbed with sharp, murderous agony, but she forced the pain from her consciousness, because she had to give the performance of her lifetime now, and she could not allow for any distractions.
“Denny Carmichael.”
She coughed; the blood on her face splattered the phone. “Listen to me carefully, Denny.” Another cough. “Don’t make a mistake.”
A pause. “And what mistake would I be making, Ms. Brewer?”