‘What are we going to do?’ Lynn asked, and Adams struggled to come up with an answer. If they stopped, it would be instantly suspicious, and the police would immediately come to them. If they got to the checkpoint, their identification would almost certainly get them instantly arrested. And Adams wasn’t sure if the little Fiat was capable of smashing through the roadblock.
‘I guess we’re just going to have to make it up as we go along,’ he said finally.
Police Sergeant Manuel Vega sat on the hood of the lead car, chatting to his men. Sitting out in the middle of the Atacama waiting for vehicles to come along was nobody’s idea of fun. The temperature out in the desert could drop well below zero, and although it was the middle of the day, the men were all starting to feel the effects of the cold.
Stamping their feet to keep warm, one of the officers suddenly pointed down the road at the small car coming towards them.
Vega slid off the hood and clapped his hands together. ‘Oh joy,’ he said, feeling nothing of the sort. ‘Another one. Still,’ he joked to his men, ‘at least we get overtime, eh?’
As Adams rolled the car to a stop in front of the lead police car, he rolled his window down and cold air spilled into the cabin. The sweat started to freeze on his body.
He watched with interest at the reaction of the police chief and his men. First there was total disinterest; then, as they realized the car held a Caucasian woman and an Amerindian man, there was a flutter of concern, a narrowing of the eyes, and then rapid movements as orders were given.
Adams saw the police chief check an A4 sheet of paper, presumably with their pictures on, then bark orders at his men, who then surrounded the vehicle, weapons drawn.
‘Get out of the car, hands on your head!’ shouted the sergeant. ‘Now!’
‘Just wait a minute,’ Adams said reasonably from his place behind the wheel. ‘Do you know who we are?’
‘Terrorists, damn it!’ the police sergeant screamed. ‘Get out of the car, now!’
Perfect, thought Adams. Branding people as terrorists was a typical move if you wanted things to happen quickly. Tell people there’s a criminal on the loose, and the wheels will turn very slowly, if at all. Tell them it’s a terrorist, and the reaction couldn’t be more different.
Vega watched the pair in the car with eagle eyes. He couldn’t believe it was his team that had caught them! Terrorists, in his country! And he had caught them! He was going to be rewarded for this, that was for sure. A promotion was a certainty, possibly with a presidential citation to follow.
But why was the man so calm? And why was he asking questions?
The man’s next words caused even more confusion.
‘You’ll know what we are carrying then,’ he said, a smug smile on his face.
What did he mean? Whatever it was, it didn’t matter. ‘Get out of the car! This is your last warning! Get out now, or we will open fire!’
And then the woman moved, her hands raising something up to the windscreen for them to look at. What was it?
He peered forward, trying to make it out.
It was a… a test tube?
Lynn held one of the DNA samples of the frozen body up to the windscreen. She had been reluctant to show it, but Adams had argued that if they were arrested, the samples would be lost anyway, and so she had agreed to go along with his off-the-cuff plan.
‘Bacillus anthracis,’ she heard Adams tell the nervous police sergeant through the open window. ‘Anthrax.’
Anthrax? Vega’s head started to spin. He’d been told nothing about this! But there it was, something in a cold-storage test tube, just like you’d find in a laboratory.
Would it be anthrax? Vega just didn’t know. What else could it be? Why would terrorists be carrying test tubes of anything, if it wasn’t a weapon of some sort?
‘Once I let go, and you gentlemen breathe in the spores,’ he heard the man continue, ‘you’ll start to feel the effects by later this afternoon. It’ll feel like flu to start with, then get rapidly worse, your body’s systems collapsing until — in maybe a week’s time, if you’re lucky — it progresses to lethal haemorrhagic mediastinitis.’ The man flashed him a smile. ‘Fatal in ninety per cent of cases.’
It took less than thirty seconds for Vega to make up his mind.
‘Drop your weapons,’ the sergeant ordered his men, and both Adams and Lynn sighed with relief. They’d bought it, hook, line and sinker.
As the policemen lowered their weapons, Adams progressed to phase two of the plan.
‘Now put your guns on the ground and step back two paces.’
The police sergeant barked a translation of the order to his men, and they all did as they were told. Passionate about their work as they might otherwise be, the threat of infection with a lethal bioweapon was more than enough to ensure their compliance.
Adams and Lynn slowly stepped out of the car, Lynn keeping the fearsome test tube held up where everyone could see it. After assessing the assembled men, Adams picked two of the most promising candidates. ‘You two,’ he said, gesturing at them, ‘handcuff the rest of the team.’
The sergeant again translated, and the handcuffing was quickly done, the fear writ large across the faces of the officers. The handcuffed men were told to lie face down on the ground, and Adams turned back to the two policemen who had done the handcuffing.
‘Now,’ he said to them, ‘take off all your clothes.’
Like many things in life, the discovery of the handcuffed police officers was down to sheer bad luck. Adams and Lynn were only sixty miles from the border; if the policemen had been undiscovered for only an hour, then the two of them would have made it in their stolen police car, their borrowed uniforms allowing them to cross over into Peru unquestioned. On the empty desert roads of the Atacama, it was certainly feasible. Traffic here was scarce, and it certainly wasn’t unheard of for hours to pass without any vehicles whatsoever.
Adams had taken the police team fifty yards off the main road and hidden them behind a small copse of trees. He had considered taking the vehicles off the road as well but had decided against this, as he couldn’t be sure if the area was being monitored by satellite. It was unlikely such units would be zoomed in, but the absence of vehicles at a requested roadblock would certainly be noticed. He had just prayed that no driver would come across the empty vehicles in the next hour or so.
But it was not to be. Not more than twenty minutes after Adams and Lynn had accelerated away in the sergeant’s police car, a small livestock truck came trundling slowly up the road. The driver had slowed even further, and then stopped. After waiting in his vehicle a few moments, he had got out and wandered over to the first car. Seeing nobody, he had then checked the second police car, and then the Fiat. Still nobody. Not a soul.
The driver stood there wondering what to do when he caught motion out of the corner of his eye. His head turned, and he first of all saw the copse of trees further back from the road. And then he saw the movement again — a leg, kicking out from behind one of the trees.
Nervous, he had grabbed the shotgun from the passenger footwell of his truck and tracked slowly across the dirty scrubland towards the trees. Under a minute later he was at the copse, rounding the first tree, shotgun at the ready.
His eyes widened in disbelief as he saw the six police officers, bound back to back on the ground, screaming silently at him through their gags.
Once freed, Vega found that the police radios had been broken. Likewise, their personal cellphones had all been smashed to pieces by the crazed terrorists.
Upon quizzing the truck driver, it appeared that he had a cellphone, and Vega quickly commandeered it, finally managing to get through to headquarters.