“And leave the Group out there running around?”
Brennan shook his head. “I’ll do what we already planned. That was going to come down to me anyway. My firm, my manpower. I don’t need your help for that.”
“You do,” Whitcomb said. “You need my intel to do it the right way. If you get it wrong, you have no idea what’s going to come down on you.”
Brennan tapped the binder of e-mails with his free hand. “Everything you know came from this.”
Whitcomb shook his head. “I know a lot more than what’s in that binder. Don’t do this, Cal. You’re going to make a mistake, and then—”
“My firm has its own intelligence assets. Our Vegas office alone does counterintel work for three of the top twenty companies in the U.S. We know what we’re doing.”
He took another step backward, moving away from the three of them while keeping the gun leveled. It was clear he meant to back up some farther distance and then turn and run down the long channel between the scrap piles, to where it angled blindly to the right, a hundred feet away. His car was probably parked somewhere deep in the maze. If he made that corner, there would probably be no catching him. Getting in the Explorer and racing to block the exit road would be useless; Brennan could crash through the chain-link fence anywhere and drive away down the broad slope of the hillside. The freeway was right there at its base, a few hundred yards down.
Brennan took another step back. And another.
Dryden had one of Claire’s Berettas in his own rear waistband, but going for it was pointless while Brennan had them all covered. When he turned to run, shooting at him would be easy. Accidentally hitting the machine would also be easy.
The man took another step back. He was ten feet beyond the fire pit now, thirty feet from where the three of them stood.
Whitcomb said, “If you slip up at some point, next month or next week or tomorrow, these people will learn about it today. You don’t understand what you’re up against.”
“I’m a quick study,” Brennan said.
On the last word, Dryden saw a pinprick of light flash behind the man, high in the wooded hills west of the scrapyard. Half a second later, Brennan’s head blew apart above his eyes.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Dryden was moving even before the shot hit Brennan. He got a hand on Marnie’s shoulder and shoved her sideways. The two of them, and Whitcomb, were standing at the mouth of the long channel between the scrap rows. To their left and right, the ends of the rows would provide cover from the shooter on the hillside.
Marnie staggered, caught her balance, and threw herself the rest of the way past the end of the row. Dryden caught a glimpse of Whitcomb going in the other direction, dropping flat, scrabbling fast for cover on the other side of the channel.
Adrenaline-rush math flashed through Dryden’s thoughts in a tiny fragment of a second. How many shooters up there in the woods? Logic said it was just one, because two shooters would have synchronized their first shots—an easy opportunity to drop two targets before all the rest scattered.
There had only been one first shot, though.
Therefore, one shooter.
How much time would there be between shots?
Two seconds, maybe, if the shooter was skilled. Which seemed to be the case. Brennan could vouch for it.
Dryden threw himself after Marnie, behind the cover of the scrap metal stack. In the same quarter second that he cleared it, he heard the insectile whine of a rifle bullet passing close by, cutting through the space his head had just occupied.
He turned and looked back. He saw Whitcomb standing behind cover on the far side of the open lane, looking across at him and Marnie.
Between their two positions, in the wide space of the channel’s mouth, the Explorer sat parked like an offered sacrifice. Its driver’s-side door still hung open. The baseball game was still playing over the sound system.
Dryden stared at the vehicle. He expected a shot to punch through its front quarterpanel into the engine block. Or the fuel tank. Or the tires. Or all of the above.
Five seconds passed. Nothing happened.
Dryden understood. From the shooter’s point of view, it was temporarily better to leave the vehicle drivable. To leave it as bait.
Across the lane, Whitcomb edged up to the corner of the stack he was hiding behind. He lowered his eye to a narrow horizontal gap between a pair of crushed car bodies, and looked through into the empty space of the channel. Toward the fire pit. Toward where Brennan had fallen.
“Brennan drove here in a rental,” Whitcomb called out. “Parked it somewhere in these stacks. Probably has GPS on board. Whatever slipup he was going to make, looking for these people—next week, whenever—they probably saw it hours ago now. They would have narrowed down his name after that, and then where his car would be. Chess in four dimensions.”