Glen coughed as he tried to swallow, but couldn’t.
‘Let him go,’ Lopez murmured. ‘He’s just a little boy.’
Ethan considered sending Glen sprawling onto the asphalt, but instead just shoved him sideways. Glen stumbled, rubbing his throat as he glared at Ethan.
‘What goes around, Warner.’
Ethan smiled coldly. ‘Ain’t that right.’
Glen stalked off and Jackson looked at each of them in turn, before turning and hurrying away. Ethan looked at Lopez.
‘We’re not going to get much help from them now,’ he said. ‘This whole thing just got a lot more complicated.’
‘We could still be wrong,’ Lopez pointed out as they started walking toward Karina’s car. ‘Maybe this isn’t about revenge.’
‘You saw what happened to Eric Muir,’ Ethan replied. ‘It’s too much of a coincidence. What bothers me more is that the wraith went for Donovan.’
‘You think that he had something to do with this?’
‘I don’t know,’ Ethan replied, ‘but there’s definitely something more going on than we know about, and I don’t like surprises.’
They turned a corner alongside bright yellow police-cordon tapes and saw a television crew already setting up. Ethan caught sight of a photographer standing nearby, camera at the ready, looking toward the law school.
Ethan and Lopez had rounded the police tapes alongside a fire truck, and had been concealed from the view of the television crew and a handful of bystanders. The photographer, hood up and concealing their features, was side-on to them and had not seen them emerge.
‘Get the car and follow me.’
Ethan launched himself into a full sprint, aiming directly at the photographer as he lifted his camera and took a shot of the ambulance leaving the site with the dead lawyer aboard.
Ethan’s headlong dash alerted him. The photographer’s head snapped round at the sound of approaching footfalls and instantly he whirled and took off down the street. Ethan sprinted past the television crew at full speed and barely ten yards behind the photographer.
He saw him slip his camera into a pocket of his thick winter coat, struggling to seal the pocket up as he ran out across 44th Drive and dodged past a slow-moving vehicle. Ethan hurled himself across the vehicle’s hood as it screeched to a halt, sliding off and hitting the ground at a run again as he closed in on the wildly fleeing reporter.
The runner turned south, heading toward the Metro on Court Square as he cut across a tree-lined plaza and headed for Jackson Avenue. Ethan pushed hard, just a few yards behind now and closing fast. He reached out as they cleared the plaza, gambling that the runner wouldn’t head right out across the lanes of traffic.
The runner suddenly slammed to a halt and ducked down, then jerked backwards into Ethan’s path. Ethan stumbled as he tried to avoid him but the reporter’s body crashed backwards into his legs and sent him flying over them.
Ethan hit the tiles of the plaza hard, rolling into his shoulder and coming up onto his feet in time to see the reporter dash between cars flowing south-west on Jackson. Ethan struggled on in pursuit, his joints aching from the impact as he fought to regain lost ground. Cars honked their horns as he ran across Jackson and into Court Square Park, a circular affair with a small clump of trees on the east side and cars parked along the sidewalk beyond them.
Not this time.
Ethan plunged between the trees in pursuit but this time he kept running, dashing through the copse until he burst out onto the sidewalk on the opposite side. He turned back, scanning the trees for his quarry to emerge.
A car’s tires squealed as it turned onto Court Square, the beams flashing across Ethan as he stood on the sidewalk. He saw Lopez driving Karina’s car and then pointed into the trees in front of him.
Lopez did not hesitate. She swerved the car up onto the sidewalk and switched on the high beams to illuminate the copse in bright white light. Ethan saw the trees glowing in the beams and then the figure that dashed from behind one of them, back through the treeline.
Ethan sprinted back into the treeline, hearing Lopez’s car reverse off the sidewalk behind him as he ran, and he burst out onto Thompson Avenue only a few paces behind the reporter. They sprinted across the street and the reporter vaulted a chain-link fence into a courtyard filled with old vehicles.
Ethan flew lithely over the fence into the courtyard, just in time to see the reporter whirl and flick one foot out toward him. Ethan careered sideways, sweeping his right arm down and across to block the blow as he staggered off balance.
The reporter spun with surprising agility, one fist trying to catch Ethan with a back-handed punch. Ethan threw his left forearm up and smashed the wrist aside, regaining his balance as he drove his bunched right fist straight into the man’s chest, just below his throat.
He heard a gasp of shock as the reporter was hurled backward by the force of the blow. He tumbled into the chain-link fence, one hand flying to his chest as he struggled to breathe. Ethan surged forward, driven by anger. He grabbed the reporter by the throat and pinned him against the fence, then reached up and yanked the hood aside.
The streetlights cast a pale glow down on the face that stared back at him, and, all at once, Ethan felt the air sucked from his lungs as the strength drained from his limbs. He staggered backwards as though struck, his jaw hanging limp and his eyes wide in disbelief.
The reporter was a blonde, her hair tumbling out from her hood, and her green eyes seemed dark in the shadows cast across her face by the streetlights above. But there was no mistaking her features, no doubt who she was.
Joanna Defoe stared back at Ethan, but she did not speak.
42
Donovan set his phone back down in its cradle and sat back thoughtfully in his seat.
It was late and the station was virtually empty but for the night crew manning the cells and the phone lines. It not being a weekend, evenings were generally quiet, even in New York City. Only the patrol officers would have their work cut out for them, an endless stream of gangland territorial disputes and domestic disturbances to field.
‘What did the CIA say?’
Glen Ryan sat opposite Donovan. The younger man was intelligent, determined and committed to his job, but he was also vulnerable in his affection for Karina Thorne. Donovan was not sure just how much he ought to be telling him. Yet now there was another crisis. Jackson had been sent home a jabbering wreck. The events in the lecture hall had fractured his nerves and Donovan was not sure when he would return to work. Or worse, if he would fold under the pressure.
‘They know about Ethan Warner and Nicola Lopez,’ he replied finally. ‘It was strange. I got bounced from one department to the next before I spoke to somebody.’
‘What’s strange about that?’ Glen asked.
‘Because each new office was higher than the last,’ Donovan said. ‘Then, they put me through to another number, and this guy answers. I’d called Langley, but this guy was here in New York.’
‘So?’ Glen said. ‘The CIA has field offices in every city, right?’
Donovan shook his head. ‘This guy was in a car and talking on a cell. Soon as the line opened he asked to meet me.’
Glen frowned. ‘Somebody looking for Warner?’
‘Maybe,’ Donovan confirmed. ‘And right now that suits me just fine.’
‘You’re going to sell them out?’
‘Why wouldn’t I?’ Donovan asked. ‘They’re climbing all over our asses right now and we could do without the attention.’
Glen leaned forward on the desk. ‘Right now, it’s the DIA that’s helping us with this investigation and also preventing the media from tearing us to pieces. That guy Jarvis has turned what happened at the law school into a whole big nothing. The media had packed up and gone within an hour of arriving.’