Quinn nodded. “Clear.”
Cooper took another deep breath and a look around. The place had a dorm room feel, everything cheap and secondhand. The couch was Salvation Army. There were no pictures on the wall. Shelves of cinderblocks and boards were packed with books, mostly politics, some memoirs, a row of electronics manuals. The tri-d was the only expensive thing in the place; a recent model, its hologram field was sharp and unwavering, the colors vivid. It was tuned to CNN, tickers and ribbons hanging in midair, the head and shoulders of an anchor ghostly as she talked about the grand opening of the new stock exchange. An open bag of Doritos sat on the coffee table, along with half a dozen beer bottles.
Cooper turned to his prisoners. “You guys having a party?”
“You have a warrant?” Evans glared. “Some ID?”
“We’re not cops, Dusty. We’re gas men. We don’t need warrants. We don’t need a judge or jury, either.”
Evans tried to lock down his expression, but fear flashed across it like a spotlight.
Quinn said, “Still think this lead is thin, boss?”
Cooper laughed and pulled out his phone. They’d need to let the cops know what the gunfire was about before some local got twitchy and rolled in. And Director Peters would want to know that they had their targets. Not only that, but the first credible recording of John Smith’s voice in three years.
Of course, the bad news was that meant an attack was likely to happen today—
Wait a second.
The beer. The Doritos. The tri-d tuned to CNN.
Oh shit.
A horn blared. Cooper yanked the Escalade hard right, the tires popping up the curb shoulder, gravel spitting behind them, clearing the pole of a streetlight by inches. The man in the passenger seat screamed. They’d tied a kitchen towel around his thigh, but the blue-checked terrycloth was crimson now. He was trying to keep pressure on it, his hands still bound, fingers and handcuffs covered in gore. In the backseat, Quinn grunted, but said nothing. Beside him, Dusty Evans had recovered his screw-you face.
Cooper jammed down on the gas, cleared the van in front of them, and then bounced back into his lane. He had both the siren and the flashers going, but he also had the accelerator nearly to the floor, and it seemed like they were outrunning the sound.
The clock on the dashboard read 1:32. He glanced at the GPS. A thirty-minute drive, and they didn’t have thirty minutes. He pushed the accelerator a little farther down, the speedometer breaking a hundred now, Highway 1 a blur of concrete barriers and low warehouses. Airplanes bound for Newark International cut crosses from gray skies.
“Hey,” Cooper said. “What’s your name?”
“I need a doctor, man, I need a doctor bad.”
“We’ll get you a doctor soon. I promise. What’s your name?”
“Gary Nie—”
“Don’t tell them nothing,” Dusty Evans said from the backseat. “This is Gestapo bullshit. This is what we’re fighting against.”
“Listen, Gary,” Cooper said, ignoring the outburst, “we don’t have a lot of time.” The back of a semi loomed, brake lights flaring as the trucker tried to pull over, but Cooper was going too fast, had to skim between the lanes, the left mirror inches from the concrete barrier, the right almost touching the truck panels. He was good at driving fast, enjoyed the dance of hurtling steel, but the circumstances were making it tricky, the chaos of sirens and lights and horns and screams and blood, not to mention the stakes, a vision of what he feared was about to happen. “I need you to answer some questions. First, where exactly is the bomb?”
“How do you know about the—”