First shot and I slid down against the soft leather upholstery to bring my head below the rear window and saw Treader doing the same thing, settling back against the head-rest, wouldn't help him much because Proctor would be using heavy armament against a car like this or he wouldn't have started firing at all, though Treader could get away with it if the slugs had to plough through the rear panel of the boot and then the back of the rear seat before they hit the head-rest with most of their momentum gone, he was just making things as easy for himself as he could, never say die, so forth, take what cover you can get.
'What do you want me to do?' he asked me, and I liked that, we were having a conference, and if we needed advice from headquarters we had a line still open for signals, you can't say, you can't say, my good friend, that the situation was not under control.
Slug hitting the boot and bursting its way through the seat-back very close to my left arm the bastard, oh the bastard he's going to put the next one straight into the spine and that means a slow death with unbearable pain or six months' rehabilitation and a wheelchair, put it into the head you bastard don't forget your bloody manners, chipping away at the cocktail cabinet with splinters flying up from the woodwork, rattling against the windscreen with not enough momentum left to smash a hole in it.
'Situation?'
Ferris.
'He's firing on us.'
'I've ordered three cars in. Where are you now?'
'Still going north, past Shenandoah Park.'
'You're still on 22nd Avenue?'
'Yes.'
'Then don't divert. I'll route them to intercept.'
I told Treader.
The flashing through the rear window had stopped. Treader wasn't going to pull up because if he did that it would finish me off and it was his job to keep me alive for as long as he could or God help him when it came to debriefing. There was a bit of noise from behind us and I asked him about it and he said he thought Hood was using the Honda to worry the Corvette, ramming it obliquely to burst a tyre. It looked as if Proctor was alone in his car because I didn't hear any shots going off that weren't putting slugs into the limousine.
Proctor had decided how to handle the police thing: the gun was making a noise and it wouldn't be long before we brought a patrol car zeroing in but he was now relying on a quick kill with enough time to get him clear. He -
Pock-pock in quick succession as the next one hit the boot and then the three-ply bulkhead and began nosing through the upholstery and I shifted to the right and felt the bloody thing ripping into the sleeve and saw the starburst on the windscreen as the glass frosted over.
Very close and I crawled across the seat to the other side because he'd shifted his aim six inches to the right every time, feeling for me with his gun. Sweat on the skin and the scalp creeping because the situation was not in fact in control and there was nothing we could do and he was going to get fed up in a minute and pull out and gun up alongside and aim for Treader and send this barouche into a shop window and get out of his car and walk across and kick the glass in and empty the whole chamber into the side of the head, unless of course Ferris could bring in his interceptors somewhere north of here and do something useful.
By the look of things we were doing approximately sixty mph and Treader was using the traffic lights as best he could, slowing enough to bring him to the next intersection still fast enough to gun up and go through on the green without losing too much speed. We could -
Pock-pock and the thing glanced off the door pillar and buried the last of its momentum into the sun visor on the forward passenger's side and I moved again, crawling across the seat to the right, little tufts of nylon padding lying around like puffs of smoke, torn away from the leather.
Treader saying, 'OK?'
'Yes.'
Quite a lot of noise suddenly from behind us and I saw headlight beams sweeping across the face of the buildings on the other side of the street and the flush of light under the roof didn't change so it must be Hood in the Honda, some kind of trouble.
'He's lost it,' Treader said.
'Hood?'
'Yes.'
Crumpling noise, a roll-over, the headlights flickering across the shop windows and then going out.
'Ferris?'
'No, sir. he's on the other line. This is Tench.'
'Tell him we've lost Hood. He's crashed.'
'Will do.'
Pock-pock and the door of the cocktail cabinet buckled and glass smashed inside it. I got onto the floor and asked Treader, 'What made him crash, did you see?'
'It could've been the Mazda behind him, sideswipe or something.'
Treader couldn't see all that much because he was hunched down against the seat squab and could only use the outside mirrors and from his angle they wouldn't be showing him a lot more than the top half of Proctor's Corvette, but it was logical to assume that the Mafia hit man in the Mazda had got the Honda out of the running because it had been a threat to Proctor.
We were leaving the park on our right and crossing 16th Street as the yellow turned to red but the Corvette and the Mazda came through without stopping and I gave it a minute, another two minutes at most unless Ferris could get his interceptors into the action because we were a sitting target and it was simply a matter of time.
'Listening?'
Ferris.
I said yes.
'Change of plan.' He sounded quietly impersonal. 'My instructions are to call off my people.'
'To call -'
They won't be intercepting. You're expected to deal with the situation by whatever means. Stay in contact.'
Finis.
I told him I understood. It did not in point of fact take a lot of understanding: Ferris was speaking from his base and Croder must be there too and either he'd only just found out that Ferris had ordered mobile support into the area or he'd given the order himself and then changed his mind. The Bureau gives a great deal of licence to the executives and their directors in the field but there are some rather strict guidelines and one of them is that we don't fight a running battle through the streets of any given city and place the citizenry at risk, and – sirens – and that was precisely what we would have started doing if the interceptors had been sent in.
Shot and then a secondary bang that sounded right underneath us and the limo gave a lurch and Treader said, 'Got a tyre,' and we began weaving and then straightened. There was a lot of noise now as the rubber wrapped itself around the rim and started heating up. The sirens were fading in from behind us, I suppose because of the Honda thing – someone had seen it roll and they'd got on the phone.