The Lancer was coming towards us, kicking up dust.
‘Keep going,’ I told Travis, and took the Grach. The Ero was virtually empty and I didn’t want to have to change weapons in mid-fight if it came to it.
It did.
The Lancer saw us and slowed, then swung across the road to block us. Nobody got out, and I figured they were ready to move if we tried to squeeze by them. All it would take was a nudge and we’d be off the road and helpless.
We got to within a hundred yards when I said, ‘Stop.’
This kind of stuff could go on all day long if I didn’t neutralize them. For all I knew they had reinforcements on the way here or others ahead of us ready to block the road. It was time to call a halt.
Travis stamped hard on the pedal and the Land Cruiser slewed sideways as the brakes bit unevenly. I was out of the car before it stopped moving and walking towards the Lancer. I could see Grey Suit sitting there watching me, mouth open, and the driver frantically moving the gear shift to go.
This was something they hadn’t expected. In their world fugitives simply don’t get out of their cars and walk towards trouble.
Well, this one does.
I fired twice into the nearside tyres as I approached the car, and twice more into the engine block, killing it dead. Or maybe the driver stalled it in his haste to move. Just for effect I put another round through the rear window. I’ve been in a car taking incoming shots and the noise of impact damage is considerable. No matter how experienced you are, when a window goes bang it’s enough to scramble the brain and delay a reaction.
The two men sat very still.
I signalled for them to get out of the car and told them to sit on the ground at the side of the road. The driver was in standard police uniform, but he didn’t have the look of a real cop to me, and was shaking with nerves. Grey Suit was a different animal altogether; he looked mad enough to spit but kept his mouth shut. Wise man.
I motioned Travis to drive by. It was a squeeze but he made it. Then I leaned into the Lancer and disabled the car radio, and tossed a cell phone I found into the ditch at the side of the road.
FIFTY-THREE
Walter Conkley was feeling relaxed for the first time in days. After a second meeting with Marcella Cready, this one at her apartment and going into far greater detail about his meetings with the Dupont Group, of dates, times, topics under discussion and even some recording of recent talks, he’d experienced a sense of enormous relief at what she had agreed to. His own position as a newfound ‘Deep Throat’ would be protected at all costs, and Cready had claimed the discovery of enough information on Benson and his friends in the Dupont Circle Group to confirm that she would be going after them with everything that she had.
He took a deep breath and chuckled with an almost childish sense of excitement. An enormous weight had been lifted from his shoulders and he felt like a new man. Cready’s reputation in Washington DC was awesome. She was the pit bull of investigative news-hounds, and once she began looking into a case, the end was already in sight. All she had to do was drop the investigative package on a news editor’s desk and the fallout was both guaranteed and earth-shattering.
He decided to walk while mulling over his next move. Staying on in the White House might prove less than comfortable after the story broke, and he’d already made a few enquiries into property in the Catskills in New York State. He had lots of stories to tell, and there was always a demand for memoirs and nuggets of gossip from people in the know, like himself. He could already imagine an ‘insider’ column syndicated in various newspapers, and who knew — maybe a book deal?
He headed northwest to Connecticut Avenue, then drifted along, needing the exercise, his mind in a whirl as he considered the possibilities open to a single man with enough money to keep himself comfortable in a world that wouldn’t ask too many questions. Time to forget his lack of discretion and the way he’d allowed himself to be sucked in by others; time to kick back and let others listen to the daily fights and squabbles among the movers and shakers of home and foreign policy in the bear-pit that was Washington.
He found himself close to the Parrotts Woods area and wondered how he’d managed to walk so far without noticing. He smiled to himself. Maybe this was an indication of a newfound interest in life; being free and able to do whatever the hell he wanted, when he wanted.
He decided to eat somewhere special for dinner, and took out his cell phone. A little early to celebrate perhaps, but he felt he owed himself at least a little something nice. A French menu, perhaps. And a nice Burgundy — a Brouilly. He could already taste it along with the sense of victory.
He checked the street and turned to cross when he saw no traffic.
The phone screen flickered brightly as his thumb accidentally brushed the keys, and he glanced down automatically, eyes off the road. It was enough. His mind filled with thoughts of pleasures to come, while slowly registering the unchanged home screen and no incoming messages. Simultaneously, his auditory senses became aware of the roar of a powerful vehicle engine approaching very fast.
His final thought was that it was too fast for these streets.
When he looked up, it was too late.
FIFTY-FOUR
Marcella Cready sat and stared at her laptop screen, where she had been thrashing out the main details of what she had learned from Walter Conkley. She was too experienced to be thrilled by what she now knew, too hardened to feel anything but quiet satisfaction at the promise of what lay ahead. She had uncovered other men and women involved in corruption, double-dealing and outright criminality on a vast scale; but the members of the group Conkley had called the Dupont Circle Group were something else. Benson, especially.
She had only a vague knowledge of Chapin, Teller and Cassler — a man she’d thought was long dead — but the former senator from Virginia was the big beast who would occupy the very heart of the story, providing it with the meat that would make it fly. Financial investors, bankers, lawyers — even former members of the Intelligence Community going back to the Cold War era — were big game, but Benson would be the biggest kill of all. The reverberations caused by Conkley’s testimony would echo around Washington DC and the rest of the country for years to come.
She decided to celebrate with a drink at the thought of Benson’s upcoming fall from grace. She walked round the room first, straightening cushions, adjusting pieces here and there. She regretted inviting Conkley to her apartment, which she habitually kept as her private space, a retreat from the daily grind of interviews and reports. But with what Conkley had promised to reveal in detail, she hadn’t trusted anywhere else to be private enough. And she needed absolute trust in her surroundings to put the facts down that would effectively nail the Dupont Circle Group to the wall.
As she lifted the whisky decanter, she heard the buzz of the entry phone. She walked over and pressed the button.
‘Yes?’
‘It’s Walter Conkley. I have something else—’ The voice was indistinct and the rest of his words were lost in the clatter of a delivery truck roller going down. Maybe he had more juicy details he’d forgotten about. Jesus, like what — that Benson was in bed with the North Korean president? Or had he simply developed cold feet and wanted to retract his story?
No chance, not now. This was going global. She pressed the button.
‘Come on up.’
Two minutes later the doorbell buzzed and she walked down the corridor, whisky in hand and already experiencing a light heady feeling. She needed food to counter the alcohol. She hadn’t eaten a bite all day. But that could wait. Maybe she’d send out for a pizza and get this thing done and dusted.