Ghaith leaned forward to Khalid. “How fast?”
“Two-fifty, two-sixty kph.” One hundred and sixty miles an hour, give or take. Suicide speed.
Wells checked the back window but saw only their chase cars. He tucked the pistol away.
Ghaith’s phone buzzed. He reached for it, listened briefly. “No. A ghost. Keep on exactly as you are. Text when you reach Turki Road.”
He hung up, turned to Wells. “I didn’t think you were the nervous type.”
“You’re telling me that was a coincidence.”
“We call them ghosts. You know how many times every year the ambulances clean up the accidents? Our sons, they have too much hormones, no women, nothing to do. They want to find out how fast they can go on these big empty highways. Know the police can’t catch them. He’s on his way into the desert. He sees the limousine, he stops. Sees who’s inside. You think a jihadi acts like that?” Ghaith mimicked the rider’s finger pistol.
“Or else he’s tracking us, checking out the setup, the chase cars.”
“Even if he is what you fear, he can’t touch us in here. These windows stop an AK.”
“VBIED.” The letters, all too familiar to American soldiers, stood for vehicle-borne improvised explosive device.
“At one hundred fifty kilometers an hour?” Ghaith yawned.
“What time did you get up this morning, Colonel?”
“Five a.m.”
“I’ll bet you get up at five every morning.”
“Yes. Why?”
Ghaith understood the danger, or he wouldn’t be running an eight-man protective team. But fatigue was giving him tunnel vision. He wanted to explain away these obvious danger signs, because responding to them required energy he didn’t have. He wanted to stick to his original plan—get Wells home as quickly as possible, the most direct route—instead of recalibrating.
Natural mistakes. Wells had made them himself. Which didn’t make them any less dangerous.
“We should tighten up. Pointless to have four vehicles that can’t cover each other.”
“You want us to slow down?”
“I want time to react.”
“You’ll be at the house in three, four minutes. Tomorrow morning I promise you a ten-car police escort. A tank if you like. A helicopter.”
Wells ignored the sarcasm, checked the door next to him. Its knob was low, locked. Wells tugged on it, couldn’t raise it.
“Unlock the doors, Khalid.”
Khalid stole a glance at Ghaith.
“What is this?” the colonel said.
“Just tell him.”
“As long as you don’t jump out at one hundred fifty kph. His Majesty will be very angry if anything happens to you.”
“I won’t.”
Ghaith muttered the order. Khalid popped the back locks.
They passed the King Faisal Hospital apartment buildings. Khalid pulled off the highway as he had that morning. Wells had a sense of déjà vu that could have come straight from The Matrix. He’d been in Afghanistan when the movie came out, but he caught up years later. He didn’t watch many movies, but he had to admit he’d enjoyed that one. The super-slo-mo bullets. Keanu Reeves with his sleepy surfer’s twang. All the techno mumbo jumbo. Déjà vu is a glitch in the Matrix… It happens when they change something.
Then the whole world exploding.
Ahead, the white Nissan ran a blinking yellow traffic signal, turned left onto Prince Turki Road. Hardly a second passed before Ghaith’s phone buzzed with a text. He read it, leaned toward Khalid. “Go.”
Khalid turned south on Turki Road, passing over the highway. Ahead, the big apartment buildings of the medical center were mostly dark. The chase cars followed. South of the overpass the boulevard turned oddly claustrophobic. The perimeter wall of the hospital complex hemmed the road to the east. To the right, apartment buildings and a block-long mosque loomed several stories high and extended nearly to the edge of the road, blocking any view of the intersecting streets. An attack could come from almost any direction, including overhead. Yet Ghaith seemed unconcerned. “Two more minutes,” he said. And then Wells heard a pair of motorcycle engines screaming. To the north, behind them. Through the back window, he saw the headlights closing. The Toyota tried to block them, but it had no chance. They swerved around it as easily as a running back cutting past a fat defensive lineman.
The lead bike tucked itself off the back bumper of the BMW, which was about sixty meters behind the limousine. The rider extended his arm. This time the pistol in his hand was real. Three quick pops echoed through the night. The BMW slowed, swerved right, trying to force the rider off the road—
As the trailing bike cut left, closing on the limo—
The Mercedes roared ahead and swerved right, toward the curb. Khalid was trying to keep the motorcycle where he could see it, stop it from sneaking up on the passenger side.
And Wells saw the trap. The assassins knew the limo was armored. They couldn’t hope to shoot out its windows. But they could flush it into a suicide attack, into a car pulling out from one of the side streets. By cutting to the curb, Khalid had given himself even less time to react—
“No—” But even as he spoke, Wells realized he couldn’t possibly explain in time. He had only one move. He grabbed the door handle, swung open the door—
He braced himself, threw his body out of the car, angling backward onto the pavement, throwing his hands over his head so that his shoulders and back and arms would take the worst of the contact. He rolled left over right, bounced over the curb, scraped along the narrow strip of concrete and rocks that separated the roadbed from the four-story apartment building that fronted it. His left hand caught on the edge of a concrete slab. He heard a bone snap and his left pinky caught fire, the pain radiating up his arm. Hold tight, hold tight…
A moment later, he thumped against the side of the building. He blinked, but regained his bearings quickly enough to see a white minivan pull out from a cross street barely twenty feet in front of the Mercedes.
The motorcycle that had been tailing the limo suddenly cut hard left—
Much too late, the limo’s brakes screeched—
Wells squeezed his eyes tight, but even from half a football field away the heat of the explosion singed him and its blast wave pummeled his face with gravel and dust, a devil’s wind. He wiped his face clean as best he could and opened his eyes. An orange-yellow fireball rose as high as the tops of the apartment buildings. The minivan was obliterated, its frame twisted and shattered. The motorcycle was gone, too. Wells guessed that it had outrun the explosion and survived. The Mercedes was nothing more than a burning box. Its armored frame had hung together, but Ghaith and Khalid couldn’t have survived. The buildings nearest the explosion had partially collapsed.
The BMW chase car was now past Wells. It had stopped short of the explosion. It was basically intact, but its windshield had been blown out. The motorcycle that had tailed it—
Sat stopped about fifty feet past Wells. The rider figured out what had happened at the same time as Wells did. He turned and looked at Wells with his gold faceplate. Wells reached for his pistol. It was gone. It had fallen from his pocket when he’d jumped from the limo. It was lying to his left. He dove for it as the rider reached across his body and fired three times, the first round close enough for Wells to hear it ding off the concrete.
Wells swept the Glock up with his busted left hand. He ignored the pain in his pinky and squeezed the trigger. He didn’t have much chance at shooting the guy under these circumstances, but he didn’t much care. As long as he could get the guy back on his bike and away. The rider fired twice more—