She sensed him out of the corner of her eye, a hulking figure wrapped in an ERT combat-utility uniform, stepping out from between two parked police motorcycles.
His energy drew her focus immediately, something off about him—not just size but a ferality behind the eyes. He was sweating heavily, the trickle that ran down the side of his throat leaving a bluish stain.
No—not a stain.
A makeup-covered tattoo.
That happened to be a swastika.
His shadow stepped out from behind him, and she realized it wasn’t his shadow but a slightly less enormous version of him.
Wade Collins and one of his cousins. Bob or Jimmy. Either way it wasn’t going to go well for him.
In her ear came X’s voice. “Standing by.”
She looked ahead at the vanishing rear of the presidential limo and then back over at the men confronting her.
A still moment, as fragile as a spiderweb, all of them connected by silk threads and trembles in the air.
And then Wade charged, his cousin at his heels. Stray tourists were still darting between them, so Wade dropped his FN P90, letting it dangle from the sling, and opted for the SIG in his hip holster.
Instead of running away, she ran at him.
She had to intercept him before his arm got to horizontal.
She barely did.
Seizing his rising wrist with her left hand, she planted a foot on his thigh and literally ran up his body, seating her other boot in his gut before flipping backward and locking up his arm between both of her legs. Her weight ripped him forward off his feet, and they pitched together to the asphalt. Even as they fell, she reached to his side with her free hand, grabbing the swaying submachine gun, and squeezed off a burst under his armpit.
Impact with the street was brutal, Wade’s weight crushing her into her courier bag.
But she held the arm bar, keeping his limb clamped between her legs, the elbow flexed outward, a breaking hold.
Behind them Bob or Jimmy held his feet a moment, staring down at them. Then crimson spots bloomed through his ERT uniform like shirt buttons, a neat line up his torso.
He toppled.
Screams split the air, leading to another mini-stampede, nearby agents and cops strobing in and out of view in the seething crowd. A few alerted to the gunfire and started forging through toward them.
Keeping pressure on Wade’s arm, Candy twisted hard over her shoulder and stared down 6th Street.
Between the bodies in motion, the motorcade cops, and the weaving SUVs, Cadillac One flashed into view a quarter mile away. It crossed the first streetlamp on the eastern side, and then she lost it.
When it reappeared, it had barreled across C Street.
She strained to snap Wade’s arm, but it was too goddamned thick, a log of muscle. Wade bellowed and bucked, the force lifting her off the ground and pounding her shoulder blades into the street again. Her vision blurred.
It clarified just in time to see Cadillac One occlude the second streetlamp.
She released Wade, flipping free and scissor-kicking him as hard as she could in the side of the head. As she spun up onto her feet, she initiated the earpiece to get out the command.
*
The weapon Evan had set up on the rooftop beside him was indirect fire, which meant he’d have to shoot it blind.
Tommy had machined the mortar out of a solid chunk, the same drawn-over-mandrel manufacturing process he used for Evan’s ARES pistols. The mortar was two feet long with a baseplate and a bipod—two legs that folded down off a stainless-steel, heavy-wall, high-pressure tube.
A sleek instrument of destruction with no welded seams. It had no instrumentation, just a simple drop-and-shoot like the improvised mortars perfected by the IRA.
All calculations had to be made beforehand.
Tommy had range-tested the weapon, calibrating it for a precise distance and altitude from the target.
Candy had lased the measurements to the millimeter.
Evan had worked up a speed chart, figuring out how much he needed to offset the interception point ahead of the traveling vehicle—a sniper’s trapping technique. Cadillac One was a full eighteen feet long, which gave him a lot of slop. He’d doped the breeze with the average rate for this time of day in this location, so as long as the shopping bag on the telephone pole didn’t move to horizontal, indicating a full-value wind, he’d be good to go.
The custom mortar shell was already locked and loaded. Given Evan’s requirements, Tommy had opted to supply a high-explosive squash-head projectile. The tech was generally defunct, having enjoyed wide use in the Second World War and Korea. Before armor penetrators were developed, soldiers had to rely on armor defeaters .
Squash heads featured two key components. A hollow ballistic windscreen of a nose cone. And the C4 load, stored in a bag behind it.
On impact the aerodynamic front collapsed and stuck to the armor, sending the C4 crashing forward inside the shell to make contact with the surface and detonate.
Tommy had weighed the C4 to a tenth of a grain. For the effect Evan required, the explosion could be neither a speck too powerful nor a speck too weak.
Since the charge wasn’t dependent on kinetic energy to penetrate the target, Evan could fire it nice and low over the breadth of the Newseum, keeping it out of the wind. Like lobbing a water balloon—he just had to deliver it and let physics do the rest.
His RoamZone vibrated. If Candy had switched comms from the earpiece to the RoamZone, something must have gone wrong.
He snapped the phone to his face. “What happened?”
“The Scaredy Bugs are back.”
Evan could see the helicopter now, blazing through the airway over 6th Street.
He gritted his teeth. “It’s not the best time.”
Trevon said, “I saw … um, um, I saw the countdown clock had moved, okay? It jumped ahead seventy-two hours and I didn’t know why, but then I got another e-mail from Kiara and it said she was coming home three days earlier ’cuz she ran outta money and now that’s only three days till she’s here and Big Face can get her.”
Within seconds Evan would be spotted by the helicopter pilot. Below him on the balcony, he could hear the museum patrons milling about, confused by the mayhem outside.
He could not afford three fewer days.
He could not afford to be carrying out missions of this magnitude simultaneously on both coasts.
He could not afford to be talking to Trevon right now.
Rising up onto one knee next to the mortar, he pinched the phone between cheek and shoulder and looked back to check the subtle wind indicator one last time. The trash bag showed a moderate wind factor.
On the other end of the phone, Trevon was crying.
“I promised you I would handle it,” Evan said. “And I will. But I have to go now.”
A movement all the way across Pennsylvania Avenue caught his eye.
A man sprinting to the edge of the rooftop of the Federal Trade Commission Building, an FN P90 pinned under one elbow.
Orphan A.
Even through his alarm, Evan felt a stab of admiration. How many hypotheticals had A considered to track Evan to this location at this moment?
Evan let the phone slip from his shoulder, thumbing open a cargo pocket to catch it as it fell.
Orphan A neared the edge of the rooftop across from Evan.
The helicopter was louder now, the sound of its approach thundering off the walls of the surrounding buildings.
Candy’s voice crackled over the earpiece, cutting through Evan’s thoughts. “Shot out!”
Orphan A drew to a halt at the brink of the roof.
Evan gave him a little nod in greeting and then fired the mortar.
It left the tube with a pop.
The shell floated up over the building, past the windscreen of the helicopter, and plummeted from view. Evan saw the pilot’s eyes rise to meet his.
He swung back in the other direction in time to see Orphan A hoist his submachine gun to aim at him.
Rolling onto the metal overhang, Evan gripped the edge with one hand and snatched the backpack with the other. He swung down onto the balcony among the patrons and vanished into the museum’s sixth floor.
*
The squash-head round sailed down at the speeding limousine, striking directly above the back right seat of the rear compartment.
Cadillac One’s passengers had a split second to register the thud of the charge sticking onto the roof.
Wong screamed.
The body man covered his head, his cry muffled through his arms.
Naomi jerked her eyes and the muzzle of her pistol upward.
Bennett’s head rotated, too, dread pulling down on his face, gathering his skin at the jowls.
The charge detonated.
51
Breaking News
Candy blazed through the crowd, running at a full sprint. A block and a half and then she could lose herself underground.
Wade had recovered from the kick to the jaw, hustling in pursuit, but she wasn’t worried about him. He was linebacker-huge without the speed.