He grinned. Yep, things were back on track. Except for that crap with his old man. Well. He could sort all that out later. Come up with some story that would make the old man feel bad, like maybe he was a spy or an undercover cop or something. Yeah. Wouldn’t that be poetic justice? Having his father think he was serving his country while being accused of doing something illegal and immoral. That would be a hoot.
For now, maybe it was time to pop a cork and have some bubbly. And maybe get one of the new bodyguards to show him about guns, too.
“You are leaving me here and going where?” Toni said.
“Hey, you discovered the clue,” Alex said. “We need to follow it up.”
“We need to do that? Net Force doesn’t do that kind of field work, that’s for the regular FBI.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t know how secure that would be now. If Jay’s suspicion is right, we have two guys who are capable of getting information not normally available. NSA has ears everywhere.”
“Come on, you couldn’t figure a way around that? Couldn’t you hand-carry this info to somebody in the shop and have them check into it without exposing it to outside ears?”
Alex continued packing his overnight bag, tucking his bathroom travel kit into the case. “If I knew who to trust, sure. The director is on our case about this. If it goes wonky, even if it’s not our fault, you know who will get the blame. Much easier to shove it off on Net Force than to admit problems in her house. Or worse, making accusations against a brother agency without ironclad proof. You’ve been around long enough to know which way that wind blows.”
“It sounds like rationalization to me,” she said. “An excuse to get out of the office. And. out of here.”
He stopped packing and looked at her.
“I’m fat, hormonal, pale, and pregnant,” she said. “And I’m driving you crazy.”
He came over and caught her shoulders. “No. You are carrying our child, and I love you. You are the most beautiful woman in the world, more so now than ever.”
“You’re just saying that to make me feel better.”
“Well, yeah,” he said. But he grinned.
She grinned back at him. “You’re a bastard.”
“Take that up with Mom. She never told me, and I’m sure my father would have been surprised to know that.”
“A smart-ass bastard at that.”
But she grinned, too.
“I’m meeting Jay and John Howard at the airport in about three hours. We have time for a shower and a proper good-bye, don’t we?”
“A smart-ass goat-boy bastard.”
He laughed, and she did, too.
The area around Manassas was, like much of northern Virginia, rolling hills, suburbs and mini-malls, and roads that gridlocked during rush hour. Still, there were areas where the pine and oak trees still held their own, and there were a few stone fences and old houses standing against the weather.
Howard had driven for about thirty minutes, until he found an empty, tree-lined rural road narrow enough for his purpose. He drove along until he was a half mile or so ahead of the Neon, then turned right into a narrow tractor path leading to a cattle-guard gate in a barbed wire fence. He shut off the engine. There were no houses nearby, just some brown and white cows grazing in the pasture.
What he planned to do was get out, head through the cow pasture and into the little patch of woods opposite it, and then circle behind the Neon, which he figured would stop and wait to see what he was up to. Once he was behind the shadower, he’d creep up on him with his revolver in hand, and find out exactly who he was and what he wanted. A simple plan, but one that should work.
Behind him, the Neon pulled off the road about four hundred meters away, turned sideways with the passenger side facing Howard, and stopped.
Howard waited a few seconds, then got out of his car.
He was still on the driver’s side closing the door when there came a chink! chink! as the passenger’s and driver’s side windows shattered, followed by the sound of a rifle shot. The bullet, traveling faster than the sound, missed him by maybe two inches.
Shit!
Howard took two steps to the front tire and dropped into a crouch behind it. He pulled his revolver. The engine was the best protection, and the heavy steel wheel would probably deflect a sniper’s bullet aimed lower.
Another shot, another round pierced the car’s doors, through and through, and if he’d been there, it would have gutted him.
This was bad.
There was no other cover nearby. It was fifty meters through an open pasture to the tree line, and trying to cross the road the other way would be equally stupid, he’d be exposed. A decent shooter could nail him. And his handgun, while a fine weapon, was not going to do the job at four hundred meters unless God intervened in his favor.
He risked a quick look.
Another shot echoed over the pasture land, and the round smashed into the car’s side above the front tire but stopped when it hit the engine. Made a terrific clang.
If the guy came toward him, he’d still have the advantage for another three hundred, three hundred fifty meters, and if he circled around, Howard was really in deep shit.
He could call for help, but it would never get here in time. What the hell was he going to do?
Memory was a funny thing. Up until that moment, he had forgotten what he had in the car’s trunk. He felt a sudden surge of hope and possibility flow over him when he remembered.
Howard scooted toward the rear of the car.
Another shot hit the car amidships and must have struck a frame support or something in the door; it didn’t go all the way through to his side.
He reached the back tire. He had his keys, and the trunk release was on the electronic alarm and opener. He took a deep breath, put his revolver over the car’s trunk, pointed it at the Neon, and triggered off three shots as fast as he could.
At the same time, he popped the trunk control, lunged under the still-rising lid, and grabbed the hard-shell case inside. He jerked it out and fell back behind the tire.
The sniper’s next shot was great; it hit the passenger-side tire, lanced through the steel-belted radial, hit the driver’s side tire and penetrated that, then punched a hole in the comer of the hard-shell carrying case, almost jerking it from Howard’s grip.
The car dropped to its rims, and he wasn’t going to be driving it anywhere any time soon.
Howard popped the latches and dumped the parts of the.50 BMG rifle onto the ground. The bullet had missed anything important. He put his handgun down and, with a speed aided by adrenaline, assembled the rifle in what had to be record time. He loaded the magazine with five cartridges of the match-grade ammo, chambered a round, and lit the red-dot attachment on the scope. It was sighted in at three hundred meters, he recalled, so he’d have to adjust his aim a bit. Or maybe not. This thing shot pretty flat for a long way.
Time to make an assumption here. The shooter was probably using a scoped deer or sniper rifle, 30-6, maybe.308, something like that, and if it was, it would likely be a bolt action. So he was going to have to manually chamber a round after each shot, which meant that Howard would have half, maybe three-quarters of a second between shots.
Not much time to get set up. And if it was a semiauto, that would be really bad. But it was what he had.
Howard took a grip on the heavy rifle. He stuck his head up, held it there for an agonizingly long time, maybe half a second, then ducked.
The shot came, hit the trunk, zipped through, but missed by a good six inches.