At the Clearest Sensation

by M. L. Buchman

  She wasn’t the enemy, but she was definitely the target.

  He’d be ready.

  He’d save her from that hellhole in the Nevada desert.

  Because even death was better than going back.

  Chapter 25

  The day was off to a strangely slow start.

  Isobel was downstairs and halfway through breakfast before she missed Devlin.

  “He’s off with Colonel Gibson,” Michelle set a bowl of fruit and yogurt before her, then came back with two mugs of coffee. “Apparently they were up half the night sifting through last night’s film and wanted to go check something.”

  “Did he say what he found?”

  Michelle just shook her head. “What did you find?”

  Isobel considered. “Humility? Maybe?”

  “Huh?”

  “We, Shadow Force: Psi, we’ve danced in and out of a dozen different assignments, little the worse for wear. Sometimes better,” she smiled at Katie as she sat down across from them with her own bowl. They’d found her by accident during a mission.

  Hannah came into the house. She looked like she’d just run a fast 10K. She poured herself a massive glass of OJ, drank half of it back, refilled it and then sat beside Katie.

  “We’re learning humility this morning,” Michelle told the others.

  “About time,” Hannah grunted out.

  “What do you mean?”

  Hannah toyed with her glass, staring down into it as she twisted it back and forth on the tabletop.

  “Those soldiers last night, they gave too much, didn’t they?” Isobel prompted her when she didn’t speak.

  Hannah shrugged. “They gave what they gave. I’ve never met a soldier, not even glory-hound whack-jobs, who thought there was anything good about war. At least not after the first real battle. But if they’d given any less than they did…” Again that shrug, but she didn’t look up. “Would they be dead? Or their team? Or some civilian they were protecting? They gave what they gave.”

  “What about us?” Michelle’s voice sounded small as she rested her palm on her belly. “Are we supposed to give more? How can I if I’m a mother? I can’t do that, can I? You can’t ask me to do that.”

  Hannah shook her head. “I’m not. No one is. But we have special skills. When they can be applied to advantage, we’ll use them. There are problems out there that we can solve like no others, or I wouldn’t be here. Humility is knowing there are problems out there that we can’t solve, no matter how much we’d wish to.”

  Now she looked up for the first time and studied each of them in turn.

  “You three are civilians. I had five years of training before Delta would even test me. We do what we can safely do. Safely. Every Delta soldier has the choice to abort the mission if we deem it too dangerous. We’re trained a lot in how to make that judgment.”

  “What about Isobel? How does she judge?”

  Isobel had known Hannah for a year and only now felt as if she was getting to know her.

  Hannah turned from Michelle and faced her. Her green eyes looked sad.

  “Sometimes,” her voice was so soft that Isobel had to lean in to hear her. “You run out of choices.”

  “Squat.”

  Gibson nodded his agreement.

  “Bupkis. Diddly. Nada.”

  Gibson narrowed his eyes at him and Devlin shut up.

  The threads had all been there, it had just taken him most of the night to weave them together.

  By the time he and Gibson had reached the vets’ camp, most of the guys had already dispersed for the day. They’d be off begging, hanging out at the library, or just squatting somewhere else for a while. The few they were able to corral were, by definition, not the most together ones—or they’d have gotten out and about.

  One guy thought he might have recognized Claude Vermette from last night’s chow line, but that was the best they had.

  “If he was here, why didn’t he try to attack?”

  Gibson chewed on that one for a while before answering.

  “If it was because he saw the scale of protection we had here, that would be the good scenario.”

  “How big a scale was it?”

  “We had the full team. You weren’t trained to see it, but they were here. I’d theorized that he might have had contact with the local vets. I should have left a man here, but I didn’t.”

  “Why didn’t Isobel sense him?” Then Devlin remembered. “Never mind. She said there was too much pain here and must have switched it off. So you think we might have scared him off?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You said that if he left her alone, it was because of your protection detail. That’s a good thing, right?”

  Gibson shook his head. “The bad scenario is that Claude Vermette was listening and planning. His failure to act earlier, or last night, would be typical if he was observing and studying his target prior to acting.”

  Devlin felt far colder than was justified by the foggy morning.

  “And I suspect that he doesn’t want to simply shoot her. That some part of him must need to do it personally, perhaps to be sure it is done. Just as he destroyed the facility where he was incarcerated.”

  And that was another worry. “If they had him, might they send out a team to capture Shadow Force to study? We can’t take on the whole CIA. Do they know that if they’re ever caught, none of them would ever see the light of day again?”

  “I have tried to mitigate that risk as much as possible. There are backup plans to protect or recover them if I should ever fail, but that’s all they are—plans. However, I have been looking into current risk and there is hope. I have reason to believe that Mr. Vermette destroyed that facility as it was being visited by the project directors as well as all the scientists. They were set to demonstrate something, or had a breakthrough. Claude appears to have awaited his moment, survived somehow, and managed to kill them all at once. I have some associates at the NSA. While they all agree that it was a CIA black site, they assure me that no one knows what that project was, not CIA, FBI, DIA, or any of the others.”

  “So Claude is free and safe, but doesn’t know it.”

  “And probably would never believe it either. He also believes that Isobel is either a threat or…”

  “Or what?”

  Gibson didn’t speak again, even after they were back in their car and headed once more for the houseboat.

  “Out with it, you’ve got something stuck in your craw,” Devlin pushed at his silence.

  “I fear…”

  The fact that the former commander of Delta Force used that word definitely gave him the creeps.

  “…what if Mr. Vermette’s madness isn’t to kill Isobel? Or not exactly? What if his goal is to save her?”

  Chapter 26

  “We ready?”

  “Every day is a new day.” Isobel did her best to smile. Devlin and Gibson had both been very quiet upon their return. When asked if they’d found anything, Devlin had shaken his head no, then shrugged as if it was a “maybe” that he wasn’t comfortable with.

  “Too bad it’s nighttime,” Devlin was sitting in the passenger seat of “Rosamarie’s” ’57 Chevy.

  Eleven p.m. on a Tuesday night.

  They’d worked through the day. Prepared both of yesterday’s sessions for Richie. Tonight’s storyboard should be simple. They were just doing the car chase from Pioneer Square, up onto the ramps, through the tunnel, and finishing at the Seattle Opera. Tomorrow they’d start the final scenes inside the Opera House.

  “Aw shit!” Devlin’s curse was emphatic enough to make her jump and look around frantically.

  “What?”

  “It’s Tuesday. For the second time in two weeks, I missed the Duck Dodge. They’re going to think I died.”

  “You go to every one?” Isobel tried to remember how to breathe. She really didn’t want to drive the tunnel again, even if it was in the other direction. They simply didn’t have enough foo
tage of the Hummer and had to rerun the scene. And the footage they had of her only showed the one passenger in the car. The script required two as she was now teamed up with Roscoe.

  “First two races I’ve missed in three years.”

  Isobel tried to imagine what that was like. To be somewhere that she could do that. She rarely knew where she’d be month-to-month. She’d given up the house in San Antonio and bought a condo to store her stuff. But films were shot on location or in massive studios like Pinewood or Baja or Mammoth. In its entire history, San Antonio had about three dozen films that included scenes there. Seattle boasted well over two hundred and Vancouver, Canada, just a few hours north, had shot almost six hundred.

  Neither one was Hollywood, but neither were they San Antonio.

  Maybe it was because it was the city she’d been raised in, but San Antonio didn’t hold much attraction for her. Seattle had the movie scene, an incredibly active theater scene (she hadn’t done a stage play since Texas A&M), restaurants, sailing, Devlin…

  No! It was just because they were shooting this crazy, dangerous movie together. That’s all it was.

  She’d fallen for a costar once. It had blown up first in the media, then in real life. An ugly mess that had led each of them to turning down roles—good roles—if the other was in the movie.

  There was no reason to believe there would be any relationship once the movie was a wrap. In fact, there was every reason to believe there wouldn’t be. He’d made that clear so often she almost believed him.

  Almost.

  Which was a world apart from thinking there might be a future with him?

  She wasn’t even sure what the question was anymore.

  Isobel almost yelped with relief when Jennie had Ricardo announce that they were finally ready.

  Devlin’s palms itched to be at the wheel but, for the film, it wasn’t his car.

  He watched the leads roll out.

  The city had come up with a variation to his rolling roadblock model, but they still had to keep it tight.

  Flashing road signs had been posted announcing: “Possible Delays—up to 10 minutes.”

  First the cop cars who’d be making sure the tunnel was clear. After that came the general traffic. Which couldn’t be civilian traffic, of course. But he’d contacted the local stunt driver school and they’d agreed to make it the graduation exercise for their latest master class.

  Once they were well dispersed through the tunnel, and instructed to hold their lane and relative position precisely so that Isobel and the Hummer could weave through them at speed, it was their turn.

  “Do it up, Isobel.”

  “That’s Rosamarie to you, boss.”

  Once again, Michelle was slouched in the back seat with a camera. This time Ricardo was driving the film Jeep and Hannah was at the very rear, driving the Hummer. She had on a dark wig and they’d raised the seat enough that she’d look like Claude Vermette in a high-speed night shot.

  Jen signaled them off the mark.

  Isobel gunned the engine and popped first gear hard enough to smoke the tires.

  She didn’t ease up the entire way up the curved on-ramp.

  “Jesus,” Devlin hung onto the door’s armrest. “This is a top-heavy tank, not a Lotus. Don’t roll it.”

  In answer, Isobel popped the next gear and kept up the pressure.

  He was leaning as far as he dared into the curve when she hit the end of the ramp and jumped between the first cars. To make the motions look real, they hadn’t slowed down the “traffic,” instead running it at fifty through the tunnel. She was into third gear and doing eighty by the time she had to volley between lanes to clear the first group of vehicles.

  He caught a glimpse of the bright orange Jeep in the passenger’s side mirror—the addition had been one of his few concessions to modern safety. That and shoulder belts. The nitrous system was an exact copy of a 1958 mod kit he’d found, so he didn’t count that.

  Then he spotted the Hummer.

  On the next lane change, he saw the Hummer coming hard. Harder than it was scripted to.

  “Hannah’s on a tear, Rosamarie. Keep your pretty ass moving.”

  Isobel drove like she was riding the tail of a twister, clearing one car after another by inches.

  The three key vehicles were supposed to come together in a choreographed gap so that the Hummer could swing around the Jeep and the camera could then follow it into the next set of cars, chasing their Chevy.

  Instead, the Hummer cornered the Jeep behind a Toyota pickup, and blew past on its right side.

  “Shit, what is Hannah doing?”

  “Talk to me,” Isobel called out. “I can’t take the time to look behind me.”

  “It isn’t Hannah,” Michelle called out. “Ricardo, in the Jeep, said that it wasn’t Hannah. It’s him.”

  Chapter 27

  Isobel opened herself up for just a split second.

  It was a near fatal mistake.

  The blazing white of the Glory Killer was so much brighter than the first time that she was momentarily blinded.

  She cut it off just as Devlin grabbed the wheel and jerked it sideways so that they could careen between a Jetta and a Camry.

  Isobel took the wheel back. “It’s definitely him,” she managed to gasp out.

  “You guys really need a telekinetic to unplug that guy.”

  “The best we’ve got is for Hannah to throw a sonic boom, but she needs Jesse for that and… Oh God, if he’s there, where’s Hannah?” Isobel took her foot off the gas to go for the brake.

  Devlin stomped down on top of her foot hard enough to hurt, pinning both her foot and the gas pedal to the floor.

  They blew through the gap where the passing was supposed to happen at over a hundred miles an hour. He yanked out the Overdrive that would ease the engine back from redline at such speeds. A 1957 third gear simply wasn’t all that deep.

  She plunged into the second phalanx of traffic.

  Deep in the tunnel, no police were going to serendipitously appear on the scene. The front sweep team would have cleared the tunnel by now, and the follow-on team was ordered to stay well behind so that they weren’t captured on camera.

  They were passing through the low point, two hundred feet underground and a hundred below sea level. No convenient helicopter was going to save them.

  “Are there any big trucks ahead?”

  Devlin had taken his foot off hers, but didn’t answer. Which was the answer. She’d have seen them in the queue.

  “Did you recharge the nitrous bottle?”

  “No. How long did you run it the first time?”

  “I wasn’t exactly counting seconds; I was more running for my life.” A memory that Isobel had hoped to never, ever, under any circumstances repeat.

  “I doubt if you could have run more than twenty seconds or you’d have launched into orbit. You should have maybe a minute more, five or six ten-seconds thrusts, still in the bottle.”

  Isobel looked at the massive grill of the Hummer that was fast filling up her rearview.

  “It’s set to trigger whenever I put my foot to the floor?”

  “Exactly.” Devlin leaned down to crank open the valve on the nitrous bottle on the floor under her seat. “Once we hit that arming switch, a wide-open throttle will fire it.” When he was done, he kissed her on the thigh.

  She really hoped this wasn’t goodbye.

  Again she delayed the Hummer’s attack by dodging around a couple of the slower moving cars.

  “He seems to have decided that hitting anyone else will delay him too much.”

  “Good thing for our helpers. Bad for us.”

  She found a bit of straightaway and shouted out. “Hit it, Devlin!”

  Devlin barely remembered the next few minutes. It was all chopped into snapshots.

  An opening, Isobel hammering the throttle, and the old Chevy leaping through the gap. There were no straightaways, they’d intentionally mixed up the traffic.
<
br />   After one or two seconds of jarring acceleration, she backed off the throttle and the transmission whined, but it held.

  From the backseat, Michelle was calling out the approaches of the Hummer. In watching behind, she swung the camera around for a whole series of trailing shots.

  The Production Manager part of Devlin’s brain fully approved. His desire to live through this decided he was nuts for caring at all.

  “Transition lights!” The overhead tunnel lights ahead were dimmer indicating the end of the tunnel just as they ran out of traffic to dodge behind.

  The Hummer closed the gap fast.

  The police had parked across the highway lanes just past the exit to guide them onto the turn for the Opera House.

  “No way through.” In a car as old as his Chevy, there simply wasn’t the safety equipment to survive crashing through the blockade.

  Isobel punched down on the gas. With a roar, the nitrous oxide dumped power into the engine and the Chevy leapt again. He wondered how much more the engine could take.

  “It’s not going to be enough room to do this,” Isobel shouted out.

  “To do what?”

  “I’m sorry, Devlin.”

  For killing him? Yeah, he was sorry too.

  Isobel stood on the brakes.

  The Hummer plowed into the rear of his car, crumpling the tailfins and trunk. It also knocked them partly sideways.

  Then Isobel dropped down a gear and punched the accelerator again.

  With a nitrous driven roar, she shot sideways into the L-sharp turn of the exit. It was a perfectly executed move.

  The Hummer overshot and plowed into one of the cop cars.

  Just as Isobel took the next of the three right turns to head them to the Opera House, the Hummer slammed into reverse, then raced after them—but it was now a block behind.

  “Shit, woman, you can drive.”

  “The police are just standing staring at the wreckage,” Michelle called out. “Don’t know whether to poop in their pants or the hats.”