The Persona Protocol

41


Race and Chase


Bewilderment spread through the Bullpen. The symbol representing one of the MPD vehicles was right behind the green triangle on the map . . . then came to a sudden stop, Adam’s Hyundai leaving it behind. ‘What’s going on?’ demanded Morgan.

Holly Jo was monitoring police frequencies. ‘The cops just crashed!’

‘Have we got the traffic cameras yet?’ said Tony as he put on a headset.

‘Coming up,’ said Levon, hurriedly closing the window on his monitor from which he had been overriding the traffic lights at the intersection. A view appeared on the video wall. Cars were scattered like a bored child’s toys across the centre of the crossroads. The police cruiser tried to move, but one of its tyres was flat, battered bodywork cutting into the rubber. ‘Damn! That’s a mess.’

‘Yeah,’ said Tony, giving him a tiny nod of thanks.

Kyle ran back in and hurried to his workstation. ‘Man, there’s a lot of water upstairs!’ he said as he brought the UAV on line. His screens lit up, displaying the roof of the STS building. The viewpoint rose sharply as the drone took off. He looked up at the traffic chaos. ‘Did I miss something?’

‘Way too easy,’ said Holly Jo quietly. A couple of people smiled at the joke even through the tension.

Morgan was not one of them. ‘Minds on the job, people!’ he snapped. One screen now showed the view from the drone’s camera; his gaze fixed on it. The vehicles on the streets below were little more than coloured specks. ‘Kyle, why are you flying so high?’

‘So I don’t crash into anything,’ Kyle replied, as if it were self-evident. ‘Sir,’ he quickly added as Morgan’s glare turned on him like a laser.

‘What?’ said Kiddrick incredulously. ‘The buildings in DC have a height limit – there’s hardly anything more than seven storeys. You’d be looking down on the Washington Monument from that altitude!’

‘I told him to go that high,’ said Tony. ‘So we can use the computers to tag and track all the vehicles involved in the chase. We need maximum situational awareness to avoid any more incidents like that.’ He jerked a thumb towards the scene at the intersection – not adding that with the drone flying far higher than necessary, it would make the job of tracking Adam and Bianca much harder if they left their car.

Morgan appeared dubious, but accepted the explanation. ‘Just find them,’ he said, before turning back to the map. The three green triangles representing the positions of Baxter and his men were now racing diagonally through the city along Rhode Island Avenue. The tactical team’s SUVs were fitted with strobe lights and sirens to help them carve through the Washington traffic.

They would not catch up with the Hyundai before the police did, however. Two more MPD cruisers were rapidly closing on the green square from different directions.

Holly Jo gave Tony a conspiratorial glance, then her hand moved to the button for the emergency bleeper.

Adam twitched as a tone sounded inside his ear – three shrill beeps, a second of silence, then a repeat. Bianca saw his irate reaction. ‘What is it?’

‘Someone’s using the alert beeper, and they won’t shut up.’

‘Can you switch it off?’

‘No. I’ll just have to not let it distract me.’ The pattern continued, more insistently.

A pattern . . .

The rising sound of a siren elbowed the thought aside. The police were getting closer – but he couldn’t tell from which direction, the electronic wail echoing off the surrounding buildings.

The Hyundai was fast approaching an intersection. The siren didn’t sound close enough to be coming from one of the side streets, so the police car was probably at least another block away. If he turned now, he had more chance of evading it.

Which way? Left or right?

He chose the former, braking as little as he dared to sweep the station wagon through the apex of the corner. Bianca gasped, trying to hold herself in her seat as the Hyundai listed. No sign of the cops ahead, or in the mirror. He swung across to the left side of the road to overtake a couple of cars.

The sound in his ear became more frantic. The pattern had changed, now four beeps. Short, long, short, short . . .

Morse code!

Adam had already committed to turning right at the next crossroads as the realisation struck him, the lanes ahead full of traffic – but even as he made the move he knew it was a mistake. Morse code was obsolete, but he had still been trained in it, and some recess of his mind told him that the signal represented the letter L.

L for left.

‘Adam!’ cried Bianca, but he had already seen the danger. There was a police car dead ahead, running silent with strobes but no siren. It turned sideways to block their path. Parked cars lined both sides of the street, not enough space for him to get past.

Instead of braking, he accelerated—

Bianca screamed – but Adam was not planning to ram the obstruction. Instead he yanked the handbrake lever, simultaneously flicking the steering wheel to full right lock. The Hyundai’s tail end swung wide – and clipped the Crown Victoria’s front wing.

The impact threw Bianca against him. Metal crunched, the station wagon’s rear window bursting apart. But it was still driveable, smoke pouring from its front tyres as they scrabbled for grip. The Elantra’s mangled rear bumper was ripped from its body as it lurched away.

The police car started to follow – but didn’t get far.

Like a supermarket trolley with a bad castor, it suddenly veered off course and slammed into a stationary car. The Crown Victoria’s right front wheel bounced free and wobbled away down the street, the stub of the broken axle protruding from its hub.

Bianca recovered from her shock and looked back. ‘What – what happened? Why did they crash?’

‘I took out their front wheel,’ Adam told her.

‘You mean you deliberately hit them when you skidded?’ He nodded. ‘Where did you learn how to do that?’

‘I have no idea.’ The bleeper sounded in his ear again. Dot-dash-dot-dot: L. He turned the car back down the road along which they had come. ‘I’ll tell you what I do know, though – Holly Jo’s helping us.’

‘How?’

‘The beeper. She’s sending Morse code, telling me which way to go.’ Another message came through, this time three beeps. Dot-dash-dot: R. Right. He followed the instruction. Only normal traffic ahead.

‘You think Tony asked her?’

‘Yeah. And Levon, too – he must have hacked the lights at that intersection.’

‘So we’ll be able to get away from the cops?’

‘Not until we deactivate the tracker – and we need more of a lead to do that. But I think our chances just went up.’

‘From what baseline?’

‘You know when we jumped off the roof?’

She gave him a pained look. ‘How could I forget?’

‘The odds weren’t much better than if we’d jumped without the Mary Poppins.’

‘Oh. Now I see why you didn’t tell me any of this before we started.’

Another signal came through the bleeper, telling him to go left. Adam put the Hyundai through a tyre-torturing turn, listening for sirens. He heard one – but it was a few blocks away, fading with every moment.

Morgan glared up at the video wall. The map had turned into a bizarre version of Pac-Man, Washington’s streets representing the maze and the symbols of the pursuing vehicles the ghosts moving through it.

The green square was the avatar of the person playing the game. And at the moment, he was winning.

‘Damn it, he’s got past them!’ he growled, watching the square make another turn. The nearest MPD vehicle was now two blocks away from the fugitives, and heading in the wrong direction. ‘Tell the cops he’s heading north again! They’re reacting too slowly.’

‘They don’t have a live tracker feed,’ Tony reminded him.

‘It’s still not good enough.’ He glanced down the map. Unlike the police, the three STS vehicles did have real-time tracking of Adam’s position – and were closing on him remorselessly.

‘Take the next left,’ Baxter ordered from the passenger seat of the lead SUV. A map on his open laptop showed him exactly what those in the Bullpen were seeing. ‘He’s six blocks from us, going north. We should be able to intercept—’

He broke off as his phone rang. He had assigned a specific tone to this particular caller, and knew that no delay in answering would be tolerated. ‘Baxter.’

‘Situation?’ Harper demanded.

‘We’re closing on him, sir,’ he replied.

‘You know that you’re authorised to use deadly force?’

‘Yes, sir.’

When Harper spoke again, his voice was unnaturally clipped and precise. ‘Let me restate that, in the strongest possible terms. You are authorised to use deadly force to stop Gray. He cannot be allowed to learn what is on that disk. You know why. Confirm that you understand.’

Baxter responded without hesitation. ‘Yes, sir. I confirm.’

‘Good. Clear this up quickly, Baxter.’ The line went silent.

Baxter lowered the phone and turned in his seat to address Fallon and Spence behind. ‘I’ve just received new orders. Gray is now considered an imminent threat to the security of the United States. We do whatever’s necessary to take him down.’

Neither man could quite suppress a brief expression of satisfaction. ‘Understood, sir,’ said Spence, readying his gun.

Morgan’s frustration grew as he watched the chase play out on the screens. Every time the police started to close in, the Hyundai turned to evade them, widening the gap.

Kiddrick was even more agitated than the STS director. ‘This is ridiculous! How does he keep avoiding them? It’s like he’s psychic!’

‘It’s just luck,’ said Tony firmly. ‘There’s no way he can know where the Metro PD cars are.’

‘What if he’s got access to our system? Baxter and his team are using laptops to track what’s going on – maybe he’s got one too.’

‘If he were logged in, we’d know,’ said Morgan, shaking his head. But an idea had been planted. He frowned, turning his gaze back to the map. One of the police vehicles turned on to an east–west street . . . and just a few seconds later, the Hyundai changed direction as if in response, moving on to a new course to take it further away. ‘Kyle, how long before the drone will be able to spot him?’

‘Couple of minutes,’ Kyle reported.

‘That’s too long,’ complained Kiddrick.

‘It’s going as fast as it can, brah. It’s not a jet.’

Morgan waved a hand impatiently to silence them. ‘Tell the cops going west along R Street to make the next turn south.’

The instruction was passed on. After a short delay, the vehicle’s icon altered course . . . and soon after that, the Hyundai turned away once again. ‘He knows,’ he muttered. ‘He knows what route to take to avoid the other cars.’

Tony tried to hide his concern. ‘Martin, that’s not possible. Like you said, if he had access to our system, we’d know.’

‘He wouldn’t need direct access if someone was helping him.’ Morgan slowly turned, his eyes locking on to one particular workstation. ‘Miss Voss.’

Holly Jo looked up in alarm, hurriedly jerking her finger away from the beeper. ‘Uh, sir?’

‘Why are you using the emergency signal?’

‘I’m, ah . . . trying to distract him?’ she said, flustered. ‘I thought that if he had a constant beeping in his ear that he couldn’t shut off, it might drive him nuts enough to make a mistake.’

Morgan was unimpressed. ‘You’re relieved, Miss Voss. I want you to— Miss Voss!’ he barked as Holly Jo tapped a frantic tattoo on the button. ‘Security! Get her out of here!’

A pair of security protective officers had taken up station by one of the Bullpen’s entrances when the building was placed on alert; they hurried across the room and pulled Holly Jo from her seat. She gave Tony a despairing look as she was hustled away.

‘Take her to holding,’ Morgan snapped. ‘Someone take over her station. Maybe now we’ll have a chance of catching them!’

Behind him, both Levon and Kyle swapped nervous glances with Tony.

‘I think we just lost our guide,’ Adam told Bianca. ‘Holly Jo sent me an SOS.’

‘So now what do we do?’ she replied, worried.

‘STS will be able to direct the cops right to us. We need to disable the tracker.’

‘By “we”, you mean me, yes?’

‘Afraid so. Hold on.’ He threw the battered Hyundai into a sharp left turn.

Bianca clung to the cases as she was thrown sideways. ‘Where are we going?’

‘I think there’s a building with an underground parking garage a few blocks from here, near a subway station. It should be—’

He saw rapidly pulsing blue lights reflecting off the flank of a car ahead – a moment before a black Chevrolet Suburban SUV roared out of an intersecting street and powered towards the Elantra.

Baxter leaned out of the passenger-side window, aiming an MP5 sub-machine gun—

‘Down!’ Adam shouted. He hunched lower in his seat, reaching across to shove Bianca’s head down as Baxter opened fire. Bullets clanked against the Hyundai’s nose, shattering a headlight. More chewed into the hood before the stream of automatic fire punched holes through the windscreen. One round smacked into the headrest mere inches above Adam’s skull.

His view was obscured by spiderweb cracks in the glass, but he could still see enough to make out the Suburban still charging towards him. He swerved sharply to avoid it, riding the car up hard on to the sidewalk.

Plastic recycling bins lined up outside a brownstone apartment building scattered like tenpins as the Hyundai ploughed into them. The SUV whipped past, tyres shrieking as its driver hurled it into a skidding U-turn.

Baxter’s vehicle was not alone. Another two Suburbans charged around the corner, strobes flaring. One tried to block the Hyundai’s path – but the hulking vehicle couldn’t turn fast enough. The Elantra shot past and swung back on to the tarmac as the SUV spun out.

Baxter fired again, more bullets searing down the street—

They hit the Hyundai’s tail as Adam flung the car around the corner, cutting off his line of fire. It would take the Suburbans several seconds to come about and rejoin the pursuit – but the government-issue SUVs were equipped with upgraded suspensions and more powerful engines than the standard civilian models. The station wagon stood no chance of outrunning them. And unlike the police, the STS pursuit team had direct access to his tracker, pinpointing his position.

No escape. And Baxter had fired not at the car, but its occupants. He had been given clear instructions.

Kill the fugitives.