Ricci’s hand tightened on the phone.
“You better tell me how to get to you,” he said.
Earl had driven the U-Haul down I-87 almost to where it ran into the toll plaza when he passed a sign that said one of those public rest stops was coming up on his left.
It would be a gem of a place to give Zaheer — who hadn’t spoken a word from over in the passenger seat since they split the Super 8—his hard jolt of reality.
He rolled on for a quarter mile, saw the entrance to the stop, and grooved the van toward the access lane.
Zaheer looked at him, suddenly seemed to remember he had a tongue that worked.
“Where are you going?”
“Gentleman’s room.” Earl nodded at the visitors’ building that had come into view. “We’ve got a long stretch of road ahead to our exit.”
Zaheer’s expression was incredulous.
“You’ve lost your senses,” he said. “It was you who feared that a watch had been placed on the motel. We cannot pull over now.”
Earl shrugged. That was almost a joke, Zaheer calling him screwy. Here was somebody who was heading off to die as some kind of martyr, looking for paradise on the other side of a cloud that would turn everyone for hundreds of miles around into a popped, runny blister. Somebody who had to damn well know those biohazard suits they’d been given wouldn’t offer squat for protection when the laser cannon in back zapped Raja’s HF tanks… that nothing would be able to shield them, not at ground zero.
A real fucking hoot, all right, his fellow road warrior Zaheer. He really believed the payment he’d brought from Hasul would be worth something in the world beyond.
“There was a watch, we beat it,” Earl said now. “And far as stopping, that’s Mother Nature’s call, not mine.”
Before Zaheer could issue another squeak of protest, Earl swung into the deserted parking area outside the redbrick visitors’ house and cut the van’s motor, leaving the keys in the ignition.
“You waiting out here?” he said.
Zaheer gave a curt, silent nod of displeasure.
Shrugging, Earl climbed out of the van, entered the unoccupied visitors’ station, and pushed through the men’s room door.
In a locked toilet stall, he took a minute or two to urinate — no sense making himself a liar—and then zipped up and transferred his Sig-Sauer compact nine-mil from its peekaboo holster under his pant leg to his coat pocket, where he’d keep his hand comfortably around its grip and be able to bring it out fast and easy the minute he got back to the van.
Leaving the bathroom, Earl realized the only thing he hadn’t remembered to do was flush after himself… but then you couldn’t cover everything when you were in a hurry.
As Earl exited the visitors’ station, hands in his coat pockets, Zaheer sat with the fingers of his right hand wrapped around the butt of a Zastava Model 70, the Russian police pistol tucked in the space between the U-Haul’s passenger seat and door. He did not trust the kaffir for an instant, and would be prepared should he attempt any betrayal. Should no such attempt be made, Zaheer would simply release his hold on the little pocket automatic and continue with the mission as planned.
Either way, he was satisfied he’d covered every possibility.
Now Earl approached the van, took one hand out of his coat, reached out to open the driver’s door.
“Now that was a blessed relief,” he said the moment it swung wide.
Zaheer saw the gun appear in Earl’s other hand at the same instant, faster than he would have anticipated.
He brought up his Zastava without hesitation, pulling the trigger even as Earl fired his weapon, both barrels crashing and spitting their loads.
His face contorted, Earl staggered backward, clutched his chest, and went tumbling into the brown grass in front of the building.
Zaheer dropped his gun onto his seat with a grimace, then, fiery pain spreading up the left side of his abdomen. He must hurry now to carry out what fate had designed for him.
Shoving himself into the driver’s seat, he simultaneously keyed the ignition and slammed the door shut. Then he footed the accelerator, tearing out of the visitors’ stop and back onto the Thruway as quickly as he could manage.
The motorcycles darted onto the Jersey Turnpike from the I-95 turnoff, an even half dozen of them weaving through heavy four-wheeled traffic as it eked southward from the bottlenecked George Washington Bridge. Lightweight, nimble, slender, and speedy, they were virtually the same bikes UpLink had designed for the Defense Department to equip the 75th Rangers for rapid deployment and attack, providing maneuverability where there was no real room to maneuver.
Ricci bent over the handlebars of his cycle, his eyes scouring the road from behind the visor of his molded speed helmet, looking for any sign of the U-Haul’s orange-and-blue markings. Astride the cycle to his right in a narrow channel between lanes of trucks and cars, Derek Glenn was doing the same, as were the four other Sword ops in black biker jackets who had buzzed hornetlike from the Soho req lot.
“You see anything?” Glenn said into his wireless hands-free.
“No,” Ricci said. He shot around a station wagon plastered with old, sun-bleached New Jersey Nets bumper stickers: RIDE THE A-TRAIN TO THE RIM! KENYON MARTIN — NEVER SATISFIED! “Not a goddamned thing.”
They rode on, juicing their engines, dodging and shimmying between the other vehicles on the ’pike. Factory complexes ranged to the left and right of dented metal safety rails, speed blurring their boxy geometries at the corners of the riders’ vision. They didn’t know if the van was out front or behind them, though behind would be far better, meaning they would probably beat it to the chemical plant. Out front meant they needed to make up a lead, and an undetermined one. The van could be a mile ahead or five, and they wouldn’t know until they saw it. The van could be parked outside those tanks filled with hydrofluoric acid, seconds away from puncturing them with a high-intensity laser beam at a distance of fifty or a hundred yards. It could be an eye-blink, a heartbeat, from ending any conjecture about its whereabouts, unleashing a noxious windborne cloud that would envelop every man, woman, and child in every vehicle on the road, snuffing their lives out like a corrosive fist reaching from the arm of the Grim Reaper himself.
Ricci came up on an SUV’s rear windshield, slid sideways. Slipped behind the wide rump of a Greyhound passenger bus, cut sharply around it. He heard a rubber-on-blacktop screech, didn’t look back, glad whatever accident was gumming things up at the bridge had seemingly preoccupied the smokies and local cops, unable to worry too much about them anyway. Instead he raced on hard, gripping his bars, the soles of his boots pressed against his footpegs—
Then Glenn in the hands-free again. “Ricci, hey… look!”
Ricci glanced over at him, saw him gesturing, a high forward sweep of his right arm.
He followed its movement as he bumped over a pothole, saw the orange and blue. A van? He thought so. It was maybe an eighth of a mile off, small in his vision, too small for Ricci to positively verify it was the van. But it was close to the exit that led to Raja Petro, and he didn’t imagine for an instant that was coincidence.
Ricci opened his throttle and charged ahead, thinking he would at least have a chance to take his stab.
Weak from loss of blood, his shirt red and tacky where Earl’s bullet had penetrated just above his waist, Zaheer leaned over the steering wheel as he neared the turnpike exit, crawling along, moving through the dense metro-area traffic at a snail’s pace. He had put the full thrust of his will into reaching his objective, tunneled his concentration toward the normally automatic act of driving, and he could see that he was almost there, almost…