Chao and the investigator shouldered past him out the door and ran across the lobby toward the exit.
“Be sure he’s taken alive!” Chao repeated as they jumped into a waiting police car in front of the hotel. “I don’t care how many of your men he kills—I want him alive!”
“We’ll do our best,” promised the investigator.
Chao knew that catching an American CIA agent alive in the middle of Hunan Province would be a lot like catching a unicorn, only better, because it would guarantee him a promotion to the Beijing office.
The investigator got on the radio, making it clear to his men that the suspect was not to be killed under any circumstances.
Chao sat in the backseat as they raced through the streets of Zhangjiajie in a wild attempt to join the chase. Excited reports were now coming over the radio saying the suspect in the Land Rover was driving like a lunatic, and that so far he had already taken out three police cars by ramming them off the street.
“Drive faster!” Chao shouted. “I want to be there when he’s caught!”
The land rover was battered, but it was built like a tank compared with the Chinese-made Chery QQ patrol cars chasing after it.
“Break it in the way you’re gonna drive it!” Gil snarled, ramming the tiny police car out of his way as it tried to get alongside him. The police car jumped the curb and crashed into the corner of a building. “Three down, half a million to go.”
He was disoriented now because of the chase, listening in frustration as the GPS system tried bringing him back on course for the city of Chongqing. He and Lena had never made it to the Dragon Wall. The local police had responded far more quickly than he’d planned for, giving him serious doubts about his escape plan.
Maybe burning three men alive in an elevator had been a little overkill.
“Well, go big or go home,” he muttered, cutting the wheel and gunning it around a corner to bring himself back onto the proper heading. He didn’t think it would be much longer before the police started shooting at him. Their fuel-efficient little cars couldn’t keep up with the Land Rover, and they were just no match in a ramming contest.
He felt sorry for the person Nahn had stolen the Rover from, because the truck wouldn’t be fit to use for a garbage can by the time he was finished with it.
Chao was on the phone calling for a roadblock to be set up on the far side of the Lishui River. “If he’s stupid enough to try for Chongqing, we’ll trap him on the bridge!” he said excitedly, tossing aside the phone. “Do your men understand he’s to be taken alive?”
The investigator was getting tired of the government man’s incessant hounding. “They understand very well. There’s no need to continue pestering me about it.”
Chao took immediate umbrage as they flew past a disabled police car that had crashed into the back of a city bus. “Do you realize how important this is? If this man is CIA—”
“I understand very well!” the investigator barked over the back of the seat. “And he’ll be taken alive. So relax and let us do our jobs!”
The driver cut the wheel so sharply that Chao had to grab the handhold over the door to keep from being thrown across the seat. The radio was alive with a cacophony of excited calls requesting additional units. They were trying to box in the suspect, but there were never enough cars because the American was picking them off one at a time.
Someone called out asking for permission to open fire on the tires.
“No shooting!” Chao shouted. “Tell them no shooting!”
The investigator grabbed the radio, ordering no shooting under any circumstance.
“He’s definitely headed for Chongqing,” the driver remarked. “There’s no other place for him to go from here. It’s the bridge or nowhere.”
Chao sneered. “We have him. He’ll never make it off the bridge.”
Gil answered his phone, knowing it would be Nahn. “Whattaya got?”
“You’d better hurry!” Nahn said. “They’re blocking the far side of the bridge.”
“They sure got their shit together in a hurry!” Gil checked the mirror to see that he’d picked up another cop car. There was steam coming from beneath his hood now, and there was a bad shimmy in the front right. “Have your people gotten Lena to the airport?”
“She’ll be on the ground in Taiwan in six hours.”
“Excellent.” Gil jerked the wheel to ram the lone police car out of the way. “How’s the fog on the bridge?”
“Thick but passable.”
Gil saw the pillars of the Lishui River Bridge drawing into view over the hill. “See you in a bit.”
He tossed the phone out the window and jammed the pedal to floor, speeding up the grade to the bridge approach. As the suspension bridge came fully into view, he glanced up at the mirror to see five police cars in hot pursuit, finally enough of them to box him in. He saw brake lights in the fog on the bridge and realized traffic was coming to a stop because of the roadblock at the far end.
“Not a good sign,” he muttered, cutting onto the safety median and racing past the slowing cars. The police cut onto the median right behind him, lining up to follow in echelon along the four-foot-high guardrail.
Out of the fog appeared a flatbed tow truck with its ramp down, its yellow lights flashing atop the cab. “This is gonna taste like shit!” Gil locked up the brakes, skidding out of control up the ramp.
Chao leaned forward in the backseat of the fourth police car in the line, watching in triumph as the battered black Land Rover slid cockeyed up the tow truck’s ramp to slam into the back of the cab. He let out with a cheer, but sucked it back in as the Land Rover caromed off the cab and careened over the guardrail.
“No!” he shouted, watching the Land Rover tumble off the bridge and disappear into the fog. “No, no, no!” He banged his fists on the seat like a child throwing a tantrum, all hopes of securing a Beijing post lost forever.
The investigator smiled in the front seat, Chao’s livid outburst music to his ears.
47
Forty-eight hours after the Land Rover impacted the surface of the Lishui River, Director of the CIA Robert Pope discovered that the Chinese Ministry of State had learned Gil’s true identity through facial recognition and was in the process of searching the river for his body. Deep river currents had washed the Rover more than a half mile downstream before it was located, and by the time Chinese authorities fished it from the drink, all of the windows had long been broken out of it.
Pope sat before his computer, staring at the screen for a long time. At length, he took off his glasses and then sat looking out the window. It would be his responsibility to break the news to Marie Shannon. The poor woman had been through so much already, and now her ultimate nightmare had become a reality.
He rocked back in the chair, lacing his fingers behind his head.
So far the Chinese were not telling the outside world that they had identified an American CIA agent operating within their borders, and Pope doubted very seriously they ever would. There were too many reasons to keep it secret, and almost nothing to gain by making it public. This meant he could take his time about telling the White House. Had Gil been captured alive, the political situation would have been much different, so the colder, more calculating part of Pope’s persona took solace in the fact Gil had not been captured, and he hoped that his body would not be found, though he was certain the Chinese would make every effort.