The park still appeared deserted. Not for long.
She didn’t try to run at once, but instead moved toward the drone when she saw something about it that required taking a better look. Her boldness allowed her to detect, sooner than she would have otherwise, that this either was not a civilian model or had been radically customized in the aftermarket. Maybe the storm light and the shadows misled her, although she knew they didn’t, and maybe in her paranoia she conjured out of innocent shapes the presence of a sound suppressor wrapping the narrow bore of a muzzle, but she knew that paranoia had nothing to do with it.
The drone had been weaponized.
As the machine drifted toward her, she dodged to one side, behind the thick bole of a phoenix palm. Had she turned and run at once, she would have been shot in the back.
In that brief and desperate moment of cover, she drew the Heckler & Koch from her shoulder rig.
Her mind raced, trying to grasp the threat to its fullest nature. The problem of weight mitigated against a civilian-style drone being converted to a weapon with a high-capacity magazine. Without a gun, the average craft—with camera and battery—weighed about eight pounds. The weight of artillery and ammo would affect stability and greatly reduce flight time. So it would have to be a low-caliber weapon loaded with but a few rounds, and she doubted it would be accurate.
Of course it only needed to be on target once.
She expected the remote-control assassin to sweep into view from her left. Then she heard it circumnavigating the massive old palm from the right.
Before the camera could find her, she eased away from it. With her back to the three-foot-diameter trunk of the immense phoenix, she followed in the wake of the drone as it circled toward her.
The firing mechanism wouldn’t be a full handgun. No grip, no standard magazine. Just the bare essentials. A .22-caliber weapon. Something like a miniature belt feed with, say, four rounds.
She had the advantage of hearing. The drone had an eye but not an ear. The remote operator was essentially deaf.
But copper-jacketed hollow-point rounds, even just .22s, could kill at close range.
She stopped trying to hide. Stepped away from the tree, quickly around it, boldly closing behind the drone.
The operator had maybe a 70-degree field of view. He must have sensed a threat in his blind zone. With an angry-hornet noise, the drone suddenly began to rotate in hover mode.
With her pistol in a two-hand grip, at point-blank range, Jane squeezed off three, four, five rounds, the roar of each shot banking like a cue ball off every palm bole in the grove. The freaking machine was all landing legs and propellers, with a narrow fuselage, the camera suspended on a gimbal ring, not much of a target, so that she wished her pistol had been a shotgun. On the other hand, this grandmother of the Terminator wasn’t armored or to any extent designed to withstand incoming fire. Whether she hit it with one round or five, it spat off pieces of itself, reeled through the air, ricocheted off another palm, and clattered across the grass, thousands of dollars in value reduced to pennies in salvage.
She didn’t realize there was a second drone until she saw it coming fast from the area of the fountain.
17
* * *
TWO DRONES, A SURVEILLANCE VAN from which they were launched, surely a quad or more of guys on foot about to appear from somewhere soon: They had resources, and they wanted her, maybe even with more intensity than she had imagined.
When she pivoted to run from the second machine, the massive old phoenix palm blocked her. Before she could juke around the tree, a quiver of slender steel needles stippled it in a vertical line, missing her by a few inches.
Should have known. An eight-or ten-pound airborne drone could not take the recoil of even a .22 and maintain accuracy. This was a low-recoil compressed-air weapon, firing darts. Not darts exactly, these were without fins, so they were technically miniature versions of the quarrels used by crossbows. Poison? Tranquilizer? Probably the latter. They would want to interrogate her—so from her point of view, poison might be preferable.
Out of sight from the street, Jane wove among the palms and the machine buzzed in pursuit as birds racketed out of the protection of the overhead cascading fronds, shrieking and nattering their dismay at being chased back into the pending storm. The big crowns of the palms ensured the boles were farther apart than she needed them to be, forcing her to spend too much time in the open. Weaving, ducking, she counted on the drone not being able to click on her, but as she urgently sought cover, she realized there was no option except continued frantic evasion. The machine could fly at maybe twenty meters per second in calm air, much faster than she could run. She couldn’t evade it for long. And she would never again get away with the circling-the-tree trick that worked before; the drone might be mindless, but its remote operator was not.
The gunfire would draw police, but that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Two months earlier, when all this started, she learned that not all cops were on the side of the righteous, that in this dangerous time when shadows cast shadows of their own, when darkness often passed for light, the just and the unjust wore the same face.
Weaving tree to tree in an obstacle-course marathon that she could only lose, in a dream-strange showdown among the phoenixes from which she would not rise phoenixlike if she were killed, Jane felt a tugging at her right sleeve. Dodging around another palm, she saw three thin quarrels pinned through the slack material of her sport coat, having missed her flesh by a fraction of an inch.
In the early gloaming of the shrouded afternoon, a sudden brightness flashed apocalyptic, flaring across the park as if to incinerate all it touched and bespeak a world of ashes soon to come, so that all the shadows either leaped back into the things that cast them or quaked across the lawns and walks like spirits dispossessed and seeking new anchorage. She didn’t realize the sky had thrown down lightning that had struck nearby until a second after the flare, when thunder shook the day so hard that she could feel it tremble the ground under her running feet.
One of the many lessons she’d been taught at Quantico was to live by her training, to do what was known to work for a thousand times a thousand other lawmen, but also to recognize when by-the-book would result in a eulogy and a postmortem commendation, and then to trust the intuition that was truer than anything learned. In the wake of the blinding light, the tide of banished shadows rushed back in answer to the thunder’s call. As the day darkened around her, she dropped to the ground, rolled onto her back, as vulnerable as an offering on an Aztec altar, the airborne executioner looming as if to the call of sacrificial blood. She saw the hovering drone adjust the barrel of its gimbaled weapon, and she thrust the pistol toward it, squeezing off the remaining five rounds in the handgun.
A glitter of steel flicked past her face, stitching the earth, as the machine fired a misaimed burst. Hit, the drone shuddered up and back, as if to gain altitude and retreat. Instead, having lost one of its rotary wings, it dipped and swayed, bobbled as it strove to execute a turn, accelerated in a cant toward a gap in the trees, and collided with a palm bole at maybe ten meters per second, coming apart like a hurled egg.
Jane was on her feet without remembering how she’d gotten up. She ejected the empty magazine, pocketed it, snapped a full ten rounds into the Heckler & Koch, holstered the weapon, and ran.
18
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