*
Dryden saw the hand moving. Saw what it was moving toward. In the fraction of a second he had to work with, he considered what he had seen in the previous instant: The now-unconscious passenger had Claire’s other Beretta, and the man’s rifle was leaning upright in the footwell, against the door. Neither gun was a useful option—not in the time it would take the driver to draw his own gun, at which point everything was going to get messy. Grappling for a firearm, especially in a confined space, was clumsy as hell at the best of times. Too many variables. Too much luck involved.
The driver’s hand reached the Beretta. Closed around it. Dryden gave up on grabbing for it himself.
He reached for the driver’s head instead. He looped his left arm around it and got a grip on the guy’s chin. He braced his other hand on the back of the skull. He twisted the head counterclockwise, facing it toward the driver’s-side window, as far as it would turn before the neck stopped it. He tightened his grip, locked his elbows to his own sides, and pivoted explosively at the waist, wrenching the head through another forty-five degrees of turn. He heard a vertebra crack like a walnut shell, and the man’s hand went slack around the Beretta. Dead, or within seconds of it. Good enough.
Dryden thought of the Jeep Wrangler, probably five miles south now, doing 70. He could feel the seconds draining away. There were no more to spare.
He swept the Beretta forward off the seat, into the footwell, then unclipped the driver’s seat belt. He grabbed the guy by the waistband of his pants and hauled the body over the console into the middle bench seat. A second later he’d clambered behind the wheel himself. The engine was still running; the Explorer was, in fact, rolling gently forward at idle.
Ten seconds since he’d stopped the vehicle.
Dryden glanced at the passenger. The man was still breathing but showed no sign of waking anytime soon. Dryden took the second Beretta from the man’s waistband, then cranked the wheel and made a tight U-turn. When the Explorer was pointing south, he floored it, pushing the speed up through 50, 70, 90. The needle edged past 110 and hovered there, the engine screaming like it might blow something if he pushed it any harder.
The man in the passenger seat shuddered. Dryden glanced at him again, considering the layout of the situation.
He had a decent chance of catching the Jeep. The desert was big and mostly flat, and still mostly dark—he would see the Jeep’s taillights if he got within even a couple of miles.
But if he didn’t …
Dryden kept one hand on the wheel and kept the other poised to backhand the passenger if he woke. If he didn’t catch the Jeep, he would need the man alive for questioning.
He kept the speedometer near 110 and divided his attention between the passenger and the road blurring by.
*
He passed the shot-up police cruiser ninety seconds later. The eastern sky was just bright enough now to cast a bit of light over the desert. The cruiser was still steaming, hunkered in the dark like a smashed insect.
He watched the road to the south, though he didn’t expect to see the Jeep’s taillights for another couple of minutes at best.
The needle wavered up and down near 110. The yellow lines on the highway looked unnatural, sliding by at this speed. Like a bad special effect in a movie.
Thirty seconds past the cruiser.
Sixty.
Nothing ahead but darkness.
Ninety seconds.
Then he topped a rise and saw a light. Not red. Pale yellow, a single pinpoint in the black landscape.
Half a mile later he knew what it was. He felt his chest tighten. He let off the accelerator.
The keening whine of the Explorer’s engine cycled down—80 miles per hour, 60, 40.
He rolled to a stop twenty feet shy of the white light. It hung high above the roadbed on a rusty arm sticking out from a wooden post. In its glow, a second paved road bisected 395, running east and west into the desert.
The men in the Jeep Wrangler would have had every reason to get off 395 as soon as possible. There were sure to be police coming up the highway any time now, closing in on the stricken cruiser with the unresponsive driver.
The Jeep could have gone east or west from here.
West seemed more likely. It would lead toward the coast, and eventually Silicon Valley, several hours north, if that was where they were going.
But the men in the Jeep weren’t necessarily going straight back to wherever they’d been sent out from. They were taking Claire to the interrogation site, wherever that was.
Dryden put the Explorer in park and shoved open his door. He reached across the unconscious passenger and took hold of the man’s rifle, a Remington 700 with a scope the size of a small coffee can.
A night-vision scope.