“If we can get to the West Side Highway, we’ll lose them,” he said. “It’s thirty blocks.”
He ignored everything but his car and the UPS truck. Broadway dropped into soft focus. At the 111th Street intersection, he wrenched the steering wheel counterclockwise. The ’02 executed one of its signature ninety-degree turns. He accelerated down 111th, a block between Broadway and Amsterdam lined with stores and apartment buildings. His mirror showed the UPS truck trying to keep pace while rounding the corner. Its left front wheel caught the curb, sending the vehicle partly onto the sidewalk. The gargantuan grille struck a metal garbage can, causing an eruption of trash and shattering the headlamp. Pedestrians jumped out of the way. The driver tried to return to the street, but the rear of the truck fishtailed. The entire truck tipped to the driver’s side, booming onto the sidewalk, sliding and hitting the base of a streetlamp with a clank that might have been mistaken throughout the West Side for a head-on collision of speeding trains.
Climbing back onto her seat and regarding the ruined truck, Mallery said, “Shame about that streetlamp.”
Thornton smiled as he shot the ’02 across Amsterdam, which ran uptown. A block later, he shifted into neutral, swinging the car downtown onto Morningside Drive, which, as usual, was quiet. There were no businesses or residences on this stretch, just the vast expanse of concrete forming the back side of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine to his right and, to the left, the stone wall protecting vehicles from a precipitous plunge into Morningside Park.
“From here, we can just hop down to 110th and get back—” Thornton cut himself short at the sight of a Big Apple Plumbing van speeding west on 110th. It jumped a red light before grinding to a stop so as to block their way.
“See that?” asked Mallery.
“Yeah,” Thornton said. “I was worried we weren’t going to run into any vans.”
He U-turned, sending the car up a tunnel-like stretch of Morningside, with a canopy of trees extending over the street from the park and no turnoffs for three blocks. He intended to turn at 113th. Then he glimpsed the distinctive kidney-shaped grille of a BMW ahead, a brawny model X5 SUV, driving the wrong way on 116th before barreling down Morningside. The tall white van from the Connecticut Turnpike — or a van just like it — pulled even with the X5. If Thornton were to continue up Morningside, his car would be blocked, rammed, or worse. Turning back meant contending with the Big Apple Plumbing van.
“Now what?” Mallery asked.
“I have an idea.” Thornton clocked the wheel, sending the car thumping over a curb and onto a patch of grass, heading toward what appeared, in the minimal lighting, to be a rocky ledge dropping straight down.
Builders in Manhattan had steered clear of the thirty acres that became Morningside Park because of the impossibility of laying streets through the rocky valley that resembled the Hindu Kush, to an extent that shocked out-of-towners. No exception, Mallery shouted, “You want to drive off a cliff?”
“There’s a bike path.”
He aimed for the aperture in the stone wall. The car zipped through, bouncing onto a crumbling asphalt bicycle path that wound into the park. At no point was the path as wide as the ’02. Undergrowth raked the bottom of the car. Coarse bushes stabbed and grated its sides.
A throaty rev announced that the BMW X5 had also made it into the park. Thornton picked up the SUV in his rearview mirror, gliding around a hairpin curve, its headlights growing brighter and larger. In seconds it was just three car lengths behind.
The woods thickened, making the ’02’s headlights almost useless, showing Thornton what he was about to hit too late for him to react. Although better suited to withstand the beating, the bigger BMW faced the same problem. To capitalize, Thornton figured he just needed to find the playground. Somewhere around here, he thought. Sure as hell would help to be able to see ahead.
In the rearview mirror, by the light of the X5’s dash, he made out the form of a man in the passenger seat, his pistol extending from the window. A bullet tore into the top of the ’02’s backseat, filling the interior with a cloud of forty-year-old cushion particles — probably horsehair — before fragmenting the glass face of the instrument panel.
Thornton sent the ’02 hurtling down a hill so steep that the front fender scraped the road, raising sparks. The X5 driver had to crunch his brakes. The SUV went into a shrieking slide. The ’02 opened the gap to the length of a football field.
In her mirror, Mallery regarded the luminous dot that had been the SUV. “Was that your plan?”
“No, that’s coming up.” Thornton focused on the road ahead. A diamond-shaped yellow sign appeared in his headlights. Branches blocked the words on the sign, but not its figures of two children on a seesaw. He slowed down.
“What are you doing?” Mallery said in alarm.
Before Thornton could reply, a thick tree limb hanging like a bent elbow materialized in front of the windshield. He zigzagged around it. Then he tamped the brake again, slowing. Two more bullets bit into the ’02’s rear panel.
“They’re just trying to shoot out our back tires,” he said, continuing to slow the car.
She slipped beneath her seatbelt and back into a ball in the foot well, her hands covering the back of her head. “You okay?” she asked, as if suspecting he weren’t.
A bullet ricocheted from the trunk into the rearview mirror. She ducked out of the way of the explosion of glass. The X5 was within five car lengths.
“That’s it.” Thornton pointed ahead to what appeared to be an expanse of grass in the faint glow of the yellow dome lamps surrounding it.
Mallery peered over the dashboard. “The field?”
Thornton hit the brakes. The ’02 skidded, turning counterclockwise, the tires squealing, coming to a stop ten feet shy of the green area and facing the X5.
The SUV braked, the driver probably suspecting Thornton was reversing course.
Thornton went nowhere. He watched the X5 slide off the bike path, stopping on what was actually not grass but a green algae film, cracking it, and raising hundreds of gallons of water.
“It’s a pond,” Mallery exclaimed as the SUV sank.
Putting the car into first, Thornton rounded the pond. An upsurge of bubbles was the only trace of the X5. A beautiful view, he thought, taking the bike path past the playground, exiting the park, and turning down residential Manhattan Avenue.
The battered ’02 drew looks from pedestrians and other motorists, but no one was more astonished than Mallery, who returned to the passenger seat, a jumble of relief and mystification. “Did you at some point drive a getaway car?”
Thornton felt a measure of contentment. “I’ve seen the CIA’s old evasive-driving instructional film — it’s on YouTube.”
“I’ve got to check that out before I have to drive in LA again.” She sat back as they continued downtown.
A few blocks later, she asked, “So which spooks have a station in New York?”
“All of them,” he said. “There’s an old joke that UN is really short for United Network of Foreign Intelligence Agencies.”
“So you think these guys are from a foreign intelligence agency?”
Thornton turned right onto a clear 107th Street. “American services don’t usually whack Americans on American soil, if only because of the ever-increasing likelihood of getting caught.”
“There’s nothing usual about this business, though.”
“I agree. And it wouldn’t be the first time that someone or some organization, convinced that the ends justified the means, placed a higher value on a secret than on human lives. They could be from any number of domestic services, maybe an entity operating off the books, afraid that we know enough to incriminate them.”