That police car had plenty of horses under the hood, and it gained speed rapidly, roaring directly toward the back of a parked box truck half a block away. Rook hunched his shoulders and half turned away but still peeked. At the last second, though, a hair’s breadth before head-on impact, the front wheels turned hard and the car lurched to the left, its side doors making a piercing screech as they were raked by the edge of the truck’s steel motorized lift. Astonished, but far from frozen, Heat shouted to the uniforms, “Call it in and get some keys! Go, go, go!” One of the officers was already getting in the blue-and-white behind her.
While he cranked up his engine, Heat’s commandeered unmarked busted the red light up at Columbus. Taking the hard right turn at too much speed, its tires squealed and its momentum whip-cracked the rear of the car into a one-eighty slide-spin, smacking sideways into the potted trees that marked the bike path divider three lanes across the avenue.
Heat started sprinting toward the intersection, just in case the car had stalled. She’d shoot the tires if she got there in time. But the thick rumble of the engine vibrated the air again as it revved, then fishtailed off down Columbus, disappearing in a streak of blue smoke. The patrol car sped past her, but in the wake of the driverless car, confusion and alarm had caused a gridlock, and all the officer could do was slam on his brakes and keep burping his siren.
When she reached the corner, Heat stood on a planter to get some height, craning her neck for a view of the car. Rook arrived, and she shook her head, indicating that it was long gone. When she hopped down, he put his arms on her shoulders, stared at her and said, “This never happened.”
But it had. And—since it was a first—she had to write the rules as she went along on how to deal with it. Naturally, the APB went right out, although Detective Raley had to repeat himself to the dispatcher who insisted on a description of the driver. Heat requested two helicopters and got them. Another effect of the cyber attack was that the signal from the transponder in her car couldn’t be located, so she needed one chopper to fly a grid, hoping for a sighting. The second one she had make an aerial survey of rooftops around the precinct. Assuming that her car was being controlled remotely, whoever was doing it would need to have some sort of visual capability to work the turns, sloppy though they were. To cover possible window vantage points, a squad of uniforms and detectives was walking 82nd, knocking on doors of likely apartment buildings.
It never took long for dark humor to take root in a police station. On the hallway bulletin board, someone had already posted the cover of that month’s Car and Driver magazine, but defaced with a Sharpie to read, Car and No Driver. To a cop’s mind, there was no such thing as “too soon.”
By the end of a very uncomfortable call from Heat to Special Agent Jordan Delaney—who first voiced concern that Heat had invented this story as a smokescreen to delay George Gallatin’s handover to the FBI—he had become convinced, saying he found the account too bizarre to be anything but plausible. “Plus, you’re not known for playing games.” Then he added, “Just be careful this isn’t the start of your new legacy,” and hung up.
Of course, Heat’s suspicions, along with everyone else’s, went to Tangier Swift as the man behind all this. “Thinking it’s one thing, proving it is another,” said Rook after Nikki had red-circled Gallatin’s name on the Murder Board and drawn an arc to the automotive software tycoon.
“What the hell is this?” said Ochoa. “When those kidnappers put that hood over your head, did they cut off your oxygen?”
“Really,” added Feller. “This is Rook? Cautioning us about caution?”