A second later he heard the chute ruffle again. He looked up. Audrey had put herself into a dive; she stayed in it until she was almost lateral to their position, then pulled up and swung directly toward them. Twenty feet out and coming in fast.
Dryden readied himself. He’d killed with his hands before, but never while lying on a narrow ledge, forty stories up, with a child in his arms.
Audrey brought her feet up in the final seconds, coming toward Dryden like a battering ram. He raised his arm to block, knowing it would have almost no effect. Audrey’s left boot came into his viewpoint, connecting with his cheekbone hard enough to make the world flash white. Then she was atop him, kneeling right on Rachel, raining blows against Dryden’s face with some heavy steel tool in her hand. Blood everywhere now, in his mouth, his eyes.
With his left arm he blocked one of Audrey’s blows and blindly got hold of her wrist. He sent his other fist into her face; with deep satisfaction he felt her nose disintegrate beneath it in a shower of blood. She screamed. Then she took the tool into her other hand and landed the heaviest blow yet, right behind his ear. His muscles failed almost instantly; he felt like he was buried in sand and trying to move. It was all he could do to stay conscious.
He felt Rachel’s limp weight torn away from him, and then she was gone, along with Audrey.
He blinked, raised one lead-filled arm, and palmed the blood away from his eyes. Audrey had pushed off from the building and was gliding away. She held Rachel in one arm and with the other fastened a strap around the girl and locked her in place. Then she took to the controls again, spilling air out of the canopy and making what looked like a suicidal dive for the street.
Gaul’s three ground vehicles covered the last block on Michigan Avenue and swung around the corner, only to be confronted by the blazing roadblock of the downed AH-6. The vehicles made no attempt to look for survivors in the wreck; they tried to nose around it instead, but the strewn metal covered the entire path, from the base of one building to the other, with pooled fuel burning under all of it. The vehicles could not get through.
Audrey reached the street in less than twenty seconds, pulling up from the dive and flaring the chute for a soft landing. She released the harness the moment her feet touched, and the freed canopy drifted away down the street like a ghost. As Dryden watched, she set Rachel on the pavement, then used the steel tool to pry up a manhole cover. She lowered Rachel inside, followed her down, and replaced the lid behind her. Obviously, she would be prepared. She would have the tunnel system memorized, and a vehicle staged somewhere, ready to go.
Gaul’s vehicles didn’t reach the manhole until nearly a minute after Audrey had entered it. She and Rachel were gone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
The team that had landed on the building’s roof got to Dryden first. They entered the office, broke the window, and hauled him in. They zip-tied his wrists and ankles. As they did, he got a look at their weaponry: 9 mm Berettas holstered on their hips, but tranquilizer rifles slung on their shoulders. Looking back, he thought the sniper on the helicopter had been aiming the same kind of rifle.
They took him down to the SUVs and shoved him into the back of one. He asked them nothing and they volunteered nothing. He expected the vehicles to swing back south onto Michigan Avenue and return to the Willis Tower, but they didn’t. They went north instead, finally turning west on a street called Division. Three minutes later they got onto I-94 heading northwest out of the city, toward the glow of O’Hare on the horizon.
*
“Blink S-O-S for me.”
The medic—the man who seemed to be a medic, anyway—was leaning toward him, carefully watching his responses.
Dryden blinked S-O-S.
“Touch the tip of your tongue to the center of your front teeth.”
Dryden did.
“Are you having any double vision?”
Dryden shook his head.
“Are the lights in here causing any pain in your eyes?”
Dryden shook his head again.
He was seated in the cabin of a large private jet. It was pushing back from its hangar now, its turbofans whining. The predawn sprawl of the giant airport rotated past the nearest window.
His wrists and ankles were still zip-tied. He was secured to the seat as well, by a strap encircling his torso and the backrest. Across the aisle, ahead of and behind him, the men with the dart guns sat watching.
“Look directly into the overhead lights for me and count to three,” the medic said.
Dryden did. He squinted against the glare. Everything about it felt normal.
“No likely concussion,” the medic said, mostly to himself.
One of the gunmen took out a phone and dialed. He waited. Then he said, “We’re a minute from wheels up, sir.” Five seconds passed. “Copy that. We’ll have him ready when you get there.”