“Not if we catch who’s behind it all,” I said.
Chapter 72
Past midnight and beneath a chill, driving rain, a pile of leaves stirred in a gully in Rock Creek Park, below Twenty-Sixth Street. A hand emerged slowly and pushed the sopping dead leaves off the cowl of dead skin Pablo Cruz still wore.
The skin and the jacket had kept his upper body mostly dry, but when Cruz sat up, he was drenched from the waist down and using every breathing skill he knew to keep his core warm.
His feet were numb, and when he stood, his knees were stiff. The narcotics the doctors had given him were wearing off. His face ached. His broken teeth screamed.
An ordinary man might have succumbed to hypothermia by now. A weaker man might be focused on finding drugs to kill the pain.
But Cruz was neither ordinary nor weak. He’d long ago trained himself to be a superior man, one who could control his emotions, mind, and pain. Whatever it took to survive, he would do, and he would deal with the physical damage later.
The assassin peeled off the cowl of skin and buried it before he crawled out of the gully about three-quarters of the way up the slope above the creek bed. Blue lights flashed far to the northwest, down through the trees, down there on the parkway.
Forcing his mind to his contingency plans, Cruz figured he had only one chance of getting out of the nation’s capital alive. He’d heard all the sirens heading toward the hospital and seen the roadblocks at the bridges to Virginia from a distance.
Cruz expected that all major and minor roads leading out of the District were now closed. The Metro was down. He hadn’t heard a plane in the sky in hours. Few cars had passed, and even fewer helicopters were flying in the relentless rain.
He traversed north along the muddy slope, using the shadows thrown by streetlights and buildings up on Twenty-Sixth to make out downed logs and low-hanging tree branches. He reached the M Street bridge and crawled through the brush and up the side of the embankment by the abutment.
Above him on the bridge, he heard two distraught-sounding women hurrying toward Georgetown and talking about President Hobbs’s death. Cruz allowed himself a moment of congratulation, a mental pat on the back for a job not only complete but well executed. All in all.
He considered climbing the rest of the way up to the street and just crossing it with his head down to the rain, the way he imagined the women who’d just passed him had done. But instinct overruled the idea. He scrambled back down and beneath the bridge.
Cruz stopped there when he heard a mechanical noise in the distance. Tanks!
They were bringing in soldiers and tanks. Of course they were. Larkin had declared martial law, hadn’t he?
For a moment, the assassin felt unnerved. It was one thing to evade police and even federal agents, but an army?
It won’t be an army, he told himself. They’ll be brought in as a presence, a threat. There won’t be a soldier on every corner. Or will there?
Cruz shook off the questions. In dire situations such as this, he’d always found it better to stick to the plan and execute it rather than ponder it to death.
He kept on to the north of the bridge where Twenty-Sixth hit that dead end. When he climbed up to the edge of the park, he could see back to M Street, where one tank had blocked the entrance to the bridge. A second was continuing on toward Georgetown.
Cruz crept across the slope, peering up at the lights in the nearest apartment building, then focusing on two windows on the third floor on adjacent walls of a corner. When he got the angle right, and still watching those two windows, he slid down the hill and shuffled his feet through the leaves, wondering if the dry bag could have been found by a kid exploring in the park or by a nosy dog. Or maybe the rain had flushed the drain cover off and then out and...
His heel found the edge of the corrugated drainpipe, which was belching water. Cruz got around and below it, felt for the edge of the cover, and pried it off. The dry bag slid out and fell at his feet before he could reach inside. He knew smiling would be torture, but he grinned anyway.
Cruz did his best not to moan at the pain as he stooped to pick the dry bag up, thinking, Now? Now I’ve got a real chance.
Chapter 73
Cruz sidestepped slowly down the steep slope, the rubber bag held out in front of him to block the branches he couldn’t see in the darkness and rain. Several hundred yards to his north and down on the parkway, those blue lights were still flashing, and behind them he saw the bulk of yet another tank.
He stopped in a thicket above Rock Creek itself and opened the dry bag. He found the headlamp, but he did not use it. And he tossed the hammer and chisel before feeling around for and tugging out a Bare X-Mission dry suit made tough enough and warm enough for cave divers.
Black, and made of nylon ripstop, the suit could withstand extreme climates and still keep the wearer alive. He stripped out of his wet clothes, and, teeth chattering, he struggled into the suit, booties, and gloves.
From neck to toe, he almost immediately started to warm.
Only then did Cruz fish in the bag for the hood, a dive mask, and a smaller dry bag that contained a brick of cash in various currencies, several identifications, and a small book with critical phone and account numbers. He also got out a combat knife in a sheath on a nylon-webbed belt and a small Ruger pistol in a holster before finding the first-aid kit and the antibiotics and painkillers.
Cruz figured the massive dose of antibiotics the doctors at George Washington had administered were enough to hold him for a while, but ate four painkillers and then a fifth before strapping the Ruger and the knife to his waist.
He got his arms in the shoulder straps and hoisted the smaller bag onto his back. Carrying the hood and the dive mask, he eased in the shadows, going tree to tree, until...
The assassin stopped, catching movement no more than ninety yards away. Across the creek, up on the parkway, a soldier stepped beneath a street lamp, and then more soldiers. A squad of them were moving on patrol and slowly coming his way.
With a dog.
A black and tan German shepherd.
Even in the rain, Cruz knew, the dog would alert to his scent sooner rather than later. He yanked the hood down over his battered face, fought off the urge to curse at the agony that caused, and then tugged the dive mask on. He sat and then slid feetfirst down over mud and slick leaves, losing sight of the soldiers before plunging into the rushing muddy Rock Creek itself.
With the bag on his back causing drag, Cruz had difficulty keeping his feet out in front of him. He got sideways quickly, hit a submerged rock with his hip, and was swept over it.
Then his arm snagged on a branch, and he had to struggle against the current to get free; he turned around on his back, feet leading again. It was all he could do to keep his head above the water as he searched downstream for the shape of rocks and sharper obstructions.
He hit several, all unseen, but took the blows without a sound. The raging creek was doing its job, whisking him farther and farther from that patrol.
Ahead, however, up on the parkway to his right, Cruz soon saw flashing blue lights. Above them, on the M Street Bridge, soldiers were shining powerful spotlights down into the park.
Other flashlights appeared behind the cruisers on the parkway. Another patrol of multiple soldiers were headed north toward him, shining their beams down into the creek bed, crisscrossing like so many light sabers.