‘We didn’t mean for this to happen!’ Ryan whispered. ‘It wasn’t supposed to be this way! It’s not our fault his damned kid and wife turned up on the bridge, not our fault that it all went sour!’
Donovan’s expression remained stony and impassive. ‘I don’t think that Tom sees it that way, Glen. Would you have, if Karina had been killed?’
‘Oh, God, Karina,’ Ryan said. ‘How the hell are we going to explain this to her?’
‘We’re not,’ Donovan growled. ‘Nobody knows now and nobody knows ever. We deal with Tom and then we bury it, understood?’
Ryan’s face collapsed into a tortured rigor of dismay and torn loyalty. ‘She’ll see through it, Donovan. She won’t stop until she gets to the bottom of it all.’
The line of Donovan’s jaw hardened. ‘Then she’ll have to be silenced along with Tom.’
Ryan stared at Donovan in horror, but he did not move from the spot. Donovan knew that despite what he was suggesting, Ryan just did not have the guts to come clean to Karina or hand himself in. He was a puppet, dancing to Donovan’s touch.
‘Get in the car,’ Donovan ordered him. ‘We need to find Karina, and where we’ll find her, we’ll most likely find Tom.’
Ryan stared at Donovan for a long moment, and then, like an automaton, he walked to Donovan’s car and climbed in.
50
‘Are you sure about this?’
Joanna stood with Ethan on the sidewalk outside the precinct, her hand on his forearm as she hesitated at the steps.
‘The police are not the enemy,’ Ethan replied, ‘at least, not all of them.’
‘That’s not very reassuring.’
Ethan offered her a smile. ‘We’re here under the jurisdiction of the DIA. Nobody’s looking for you, least of all in this station, okay?’
Joanna sighed and followed Ethan into the building. They made their way up to the offices and Ethan showed his identification to an officer before requesting access to the archivist’s files he had previously viewed.
‘What are we looking for?’ Joanna asked as they waited.
‘Evidence,’ Ethan replied in a whisper. ‘I’m not quite sure what, exactly, but there’s got to be something on the tapes we’re about to see that will expose corruption within this department. Trouble is, I can’t admit to anybody here that that’s what I’m looking for.’
An officer approached them with a disc. Ethan took it and walked across to the small room nearby that contained chairs, a table and a television with built-in DVD player. He shut the door as soon as Joanna was inside and then set up the disc to play.
Joanna watched as a fuzzy black-and-white image of a traffic intersection appeared.
‘Fill me in,’ she suggested.
‘Armoured car robbery,’ Ethan replied. ‘The vehicle outside the Pay-Go on the corner of the intersection will get hit by a truck, busting it open. There’ll be a gunfight between cops staking out the Pay-Go and the thieves, who will then escape in a pickup onto Williamsburg Bridge. That truck will then crash on the bridge and ultimately cause a pile-up that claimed several innocent civilian victims, including the wife and daughter of one Tom Ross.’
Joanna nodded as she watched the screen. ‘The guy I’ve been searching for.’
‘The same,’ Ethan replied.
A huge Kenworth appeared on the screen and plowed into the armoured car. Ethan watched as the armoured car was split open and spun sideways across the sidewalk as the Kenworth smashed into the Pay-Go store. The armoured car then hit a fire hydrant and launched a pillar of white foaming water into the air.
‘The hydrant leak’s blocking the view,’ Joanna said.
‘Which is what’s bothering me,’ Ethan replied. ‘Look, there are the cops moving in. Now, watch the big guy.’
Ethan followed the movements of Donovan as he ran across the intersection, his pistol raised and pointed at the crashed vehicles. Moments later, he vanished behind the pillar of water and the crashed armoured car.
‘He can’t be using that water as a shield,’ Joanna said. ‘There will be other cameras and he couldn’t have known that the hydrant would blow.’
‘I don’t think that he’s hiding,’ Ethan replied. ‘But look how he’s sent all of his colleagues toward the Pay-Go. He’s separated himself from his team.’
‘Why?’ Joanna asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Ethan said. ‘It bothered me when I first viewed the footage, but I couldn’t think why. My problem is that there’s no tactical advantage in doing so. In fact, with one gun where he is and the other three officers approaching the Pay-Go from the front, it means that he’s almost forcing the thieves to move toward him.’
Joanna shrugged. ‘Maybe that’s what he wants?’ What if he’s covering them instead of attacking them? You said that this is about corruption — is it him you think is up to something?’
‘Maybe,’ Ethan replied, ‘but I just can’t figure out what.’
They watched as the thieves dashed for the pickup truck that appeared nearby, the cops’ heads all down under blasts of automatic fire. The truck’s tires spewed smoke as it accelerated away toward the Williamsburg Bridge, and Joanna pointed to a pile of boxes in the back.
‘That the money?’ she asked.
Ethan nodded. ‘Aluminum cases, about a quarter million in each.’
Joanna leaned back in her chair. ‘It’s possible the driver and one other could have pulled up and loaded the cases in just a few seconds, but they would have been right in your man’s line of sight.’
Ethan nodded. ‘They could have fired in his direction, kept his head down. He’s only got the wreckage of the armoured car for cover.’
‘Too close,’ Joanna replied. ‘They’d be unloading it just feet away from where he’s standing and couldn’t fail to miss.’
The images switched to the traffic cameras high on the bridge as the truck swerved between other vehicles. A police sedan, its hazard lights just visible flashing through a grill above the front fender, pursued them.
‘Here comes the crash,’ Ethan said.
They watched as the truck was hit by the pursuit vehicle, lost control and crashed violently. The police sedan screeched to a halt nearby, the cops tumbling from it with their weapons aimed as the truck, its rear hanging precariously out over the bridge’s ruined railings, spilled the money cases to fall out of shot toward the East River.
Then the fuel truck plowed into the stationary traffic in a tangled mass of crushed metal and burgeoning flames.
‘Jesus,’ Joanna uttered.
The cops apprehended two of the dazed thieves on camera.
‘Where’d the other two go?’ Joanna asked.
‘Escaped,’ Ethan replied. ‘Maybe had another vehicle on the bridge, we thought, but nothing got picked up at the blockade on the east side of the bridge.’
Joanna sat staring at the screen for a long moment.
‘Wind it back to the crash,’ she said. ‘When the flatbed lost control and busted the railings.’
Ethan used a remote to wind the footage back, and then advanced it at half-speed. Joanna leaned forward, watching closely as the vehicle hit the railings, careered into the other side and then finally spun out of control, before smashing through the railings and coming to an abrupt halt, side-on to the flow of traffic.
The silver cases tumbled from the rear of the flatbed.
‘You said they grabbed twelve cases,’ Joanna said.
‘Yeah,’ Ethan agreed, ‘twelve were taken from the armoured car. Two were recovered from the flatbed, and one more from the shore of the East River a couple of hours later. The other nine were lost in the river.’
Joanna shook her head.
‘What if they never made it into the truck?’ she said. ‘What if the truck was a deliberate diversion? Wind the footage back to the Pay-Go attack.’