The Protectors
Page 14
The blanket wipe emanated from me in a circle, pulsing in all directions for a hundred feet. Couldn’t go full power because I had to devote enough focus to keep Lyla protected and awake, but it was enough. The driver of the SUV had barely begun his brake-and-swerve maneuver to avoid hitting us when he went unconscious, and the vehicle was too top-heavy for the sudden change in direction and speed. It went up on two wheels and screeched past us into the foliage bordering the loch. Lyla barely waited for the SUV to come crashing down before hitting the accelerator and launching forward again.
“No! Wait! I can take care of the second SUV from here!” I yelled, but she was reacting, not planning. “People chasing” equals “keep running.” When the second vehicle made it around the bend and saw the wreck, they started shooting at us, too . . . but not with sonic suppressors anymore. I saw muzzle flashes from both sides of the vehicle and heavy metallic thumps sounded all around me. When the back window exploded inward, I was already hunched down on the floor behind Lyla. We weren’t going to hold together long against machine guns.
“Same thing! Get to the next curve and I’ll take them out!”
Lyla grunted and kept swerving in the road, trying to minimize our target signature. More pops hit our car but less frequently now. By the time we reached the next curve, I didn’t hear any weapons fire at all. We made it through the bend and stopped hard, brakes locking up as we skidded. I cleared my head and waited.
Nothing. No pursuit.
The idling engine labored almost as much as our breathing. When I peeked above the backseat, tiny pieces of window glass slid off the shoulders and neck of my duster. Lyla craned around and looked, too.
“They’re not following,” she whispered.
“They must know we’re waiting.”
“How?”
Then I noticed the familiar sound. “The goddamn helicopter. They’re communicating with the SUV, telling them we’ve stopped around the bend. If we take off, they’ll tell the SUV to start up after us again.”
“And until then they just wait?”
“If we’re lucky. If not, everybody but the driver gets out and cuts through the woods toward us, guns blazing. I think they’re beyond playing capture-the-fugitive now.”
“I hate helicopters,” Lyla said. She grunted and stared out the rear window. “Should I throw it in reverse and get you in range the hard way?”
“Can’t risk it. If we back around that curve and they’re less than a hundred feet away with those damn machine guns trained on us, we’ll be cut to shreds.”
With no immediate good option, our indecision and lack of movement became painfully noticeable; waiting to be ambushed is a terrible plan. My tactical brain must have sympathized, because it finally spoke up.
Stop reacting. Go on offense.
I assessed our immediate surroundings. No cars coming from the other direction. We were cockeyed, pointed toward the forest side of the roadway. On the loch side, water was at least fifty feet away, with thick brush in between. Trees to the forest side were meaty pines, tall and close together. Ones bordering the road were of the hundred-year-old variety, with boughs sticking out more than ten feet; they completely covered the shoulder from above.
Perfect.
“Start rolling but drift to the shoulder by those tall pine trees . . . make the chopper believe we’re gonna run. When I jump out—punch it. Go like crazy.”
“Jump out? If the helicopter sees—”
“Get as far under the branches as you can. We’re already pointed that direction. No way they’ll see through that cover. Just don’t stop! If you stop, they’ll know.”
Lyla nodded and started her roll.
“Faster! Don’t baby it, we gotta sell this.”
When she got to the side, Lyla picked up speed. By the time I cracked the door, we were going almost fifteen miles an hour. Fifteen might not sound fast, but the next time you roll down a neighborhood street, open your door and look down at the moving asphalt before you call me a wuss.
I sucked in a breath and jumped, tucking into a roll as I hit. Took me a good twenty feet to stop skidding, but I was on the dirt beyond the shoulder, safely under the trees. And thank God for the duster—I now understand why motorcycle owners love leather. I scrambled on all fours into the tree line, glancing briefly back at the car. Lyla was off and running. She burst back into the center of the road, and before I had time to consider whether the plan would work, the tires of the second SUV squealed as it started around the corner after her. Before the vehicle cleared the bend, I took a few quick steps out from under cover. They didn’t notice me until it was too late.
The look on their faces was worth jumping out of a moving car.
Five surprised assholes stared back when I lifted my imaginary gun and pulled the trigger. Put all five of them down, and SUV #2 coasted into the brush, crunching against a tree stump short of the loch.
I jogged over to the vehicle and examined our pursuers close up for the first time: all were decked out in tactical body armor and everyone but the driver had an SA80 assault rifle with a sonic suppressor slung under the barrel. Both front-seat occupants probably had broken noses and needed stitches, but they’d live. I pulled my head back from the driver’s-side window when I heard Lyla return.
“Everything all right?” she said after hopping out and surveying the accident.
“Yeah. There’ll be some headaches and a few bumps and bruises, but looks like everyone’s okay.”
“I don’t care about them. I meant you.”
I waved her away. “Yeah, yeah. Fine. Worked just like I planned . . .” My voice trailed off and she caught me staring out at the loch.
“What is it?”
“Nothing, just realized that’s the first time I’ve gotten to use that sentence in the last four days. It’s nice for a change.”
Lyla was already looking up at our new immediate problem.
“Guess it doesn’t matter, though, if he’s still spotting us,” I said, following her gaze. The chopper hovered far above. The pilot was no doubt calling in the situation and asking for more backup; no way was he flying in for a closer look. Lyla squinted upward and circled around to the other side of the vehicle. I heard her open the SUV’s passenger door and rummage through the front; when she came back around, she carried an SA80 by the barrel in each hand. She tossed one to me in midstep, then the Goddess of Love stalked to the middle of the road and hefted an assault rifle to her shoulder.
“Lyla, what the hell?”
She pointed the rifle at the stationary helicopter and I remembered her thirst for violence in the casino. We could justify all we’d done so far as self-defense, but laying down machine gun fire at an innocent spotter was a step beyond.
“Lyla, do not shoot that helicopter!”
She turned her cheek far enough to smirk at me.
“Relax. I think it’s time someone from MI5 experienced these noisemakers for themselves, don’t you?”
An intense burst of relief washed over me—like when the flashing red and blue lights illuminate your rearview mirror, then pass by as the cop chases somebody else. I pulled the secondary trigger on the black plastic tube underneath the main barrel of the gun, then trained the SA80 on the chopper, some five hundred feet above. I couldn’t hear anything, but that was the point of the sonic suppressors—completely safe to fire, completely awful to be fired at.
At first, nothing happened.
“Maybe mine’s broken,” I said, barrel pointed at the sky.
Lyla lowered hers to check the trigger, then tried again. “Perhaps the helicopter is too far—” she started.
There was no need to finish. The helicopter bucked and went into a nosedive, then leveled off above the treetops. We followed the movement with the suppressors, and again the chopper reeled away like a mosquito chased by a can of repellent. Th
e pilot dipped, dived, climbed, anything he could to escape the pummeling. Lyla giggled while we played chase-the-chopper with our fearsome noisemakers. After a minute of sonic torture, the pilot decided he’d had enough; the helicopter powered into a hard climb and peeled back toward Inverness. I lowered my weapon and released the trigger. Lyla was in the middle of the road, beaming at her shiny new toy. She caught me staring, so she walked back to the car, ejected the magazine, and tossed the rifle in the backseat.
She put her hands on her hips and demanded, “I’m keeping it.”
I laughed and tossed mine in the grass by the SUV. When I got back in our car, I saw Tucker’s briefcase still lying on the floor of the front passenger seat, which took the edge off any victory dance. Still, ten more miles until a major interchange in the road—once there, we’d be untraceable. Couldn’t help but feel a little invincible—Knockout: 2, MI5: 0.
CHAPTER 22
We exchanged our bullet-riddled car with a pleasant Scottish couple three miles before the interchange. One of the perks of having Lyla around. I have to knock people out, which, as several MI5 personnel will attest, makes auto and health insurers cranky. When Aphrodite needs to swap vehicles? A wave, a roadside stop, a dose of the hypno-eyes, and everyone comes away unharmed with smiles all around. Hell, she even let me drive.
I thought I’d need the entire three hours to Edinburgh to convince her that Tucker’s mission was our only chance of getting a fresh start—although just how fresh was up for debate in light of the grenade corsage he’d tried to pin on my chest. Turns out all Lyla needed was one word. As soon as I said “Iran,” she couldn’t pop open the case fast enough. But as Lyla read through the documents, sighs and grunts revealed the dampening of her initial enthusiasm.
“They want us to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program,” she said.
“You sound disappointed.”
“Any steps to weaken the regime are welcome, but this . . . this is not enough!”
She punched the glove box, and the car swerved as I jumped in surprise—not only at the sound but the violence of it. She flexed her miniature fist of fury a couple of times before propping an elbow on the doorsill.
“Half measures,” she said under her breath. The road ahead drew Lyla’s empty stare for a moment and she feathered her ponytail between sore fingers. When she spoke again, it was louder, more forceful. “No different than before. Sneak me into Algeria to broker a cease-fire, when I could just as easily end the war altogether. But nooooo . . . that would be against policy. Order Diego to destabilize Pakistan’s electrical grid to send a ‘message.’ A mysterious avalanche blocks North Korean troop movements and Carsten giggles because it is fun. We were pathetic then, and this is pathetic now. I can do so much more !”
I sucked in a deep breath to begin the long monologue—you know, the one where I pick apart her argument, assure her that Tucker’s plan is our ticket to safety, tell her she needs to relax—all the sanctimonious crap that all people—scratch that—all men think is the perfect strategy to calm someone down. But before I could utter any of my gold-plated advice, a last-second burst of common sense intervened and reminded me how things work. Not in my overrational, A+B=C imagination but in the real world of relationships, where A+B often equals “fuck you.”
Experience taught me that the only message I’d actually manage to get across is: your feelings don’t matter and I’m smarter than you. I won’t go down in history as a rocket scientist, but let it never be said Scott McAlister doesn’t learn from his mistakes.
Eventually.
“You’re right.”
Lyla twisted toward me. “What?”
“You can do more. We can. One day, we might. But right now, we need to focus on making it to ‘one day.’ And that path goes through Iran.”
She grunted and slumped down, clamping her arms across her chest. After a long look at the passing countryside, she issued a tired “All right.”
Her tone reminded me how heavy my hands felt on the wheel; the adrenaline high from the meeting and the chase was fading into exhaustion. If I was feeling it, Lyla had to be as well, but she didn’t have the ability to nod off whenever she liked. Maybe I’m biased, but there are few things in life as calming as a well-timed nap.
“Would you like to sleep? Some rest before Edinburgh?” I offered.
“Please.”
“Lean the seat back, let Knockout do his thing.” Within seconds, she was out.
Much better than a monologue.
—
I cursed myself a couple of times for offering up peaceful slumber so quickly; if anything, Lyla’s condition made her the perfect designated driver. Me, on the other hand? I fought an annoying three-hour battle against fatigue the whole way to Edinburgh; one of those slap-yourself/play-mental-games/listen-to-loud-music marathons. At one point I plucked part of the file out of Lyla’s lap and stole a few glances in between curves of the A82 through Trossachs National Park. I hadn’t peppered Lyla with questions about the mission before, mostly because I assumed it was a straightforward “find a couple of guys, do mind-control mojo, get outta Dodge” kind of thing. The Agency has a way of taking those three simple steps and turning them into an encyclopedia-thick dossier, though. Dry, boring stuff. There comes a point after your fourth fatigue-induced panicked mini-swerve, however, when you will give even the most boring file a look-see.
Turned out the objective was more than a couple of guys: seven, to be precise. The seven scientists who formed Iran’s atomic brain trust. They’d all played major parts in design, construction, and implementation of twin reactor facilities. Now the scientists were mission-critical pieces in the two big-boy steps of nuclear club membership: creating weapons-grade plutonium and fashioning it into a bomb. The ultimate piece of the nightmarish puzzle was an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of delivering the device anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, but according to the file, Iran was a decade away from launching anything so powerful. Still, even without an ICBM, building a crude atomic bomb was a line Washington wasn’t willing to let Tehran cross. You didn’t need a billion-dollar rocket to kill millions; a guy with a twenty-dollar-a-day rental van and a low-yield nuke could ruin Manhattan’s day just fine.
And the Iranians weren’t stupid. If seven people hold the key to your country’s nuclear future, you don’t let them eat lunch together in an open-air market. Each man worked in a different location, each had his own security detail, and they collaborated via Internet to get their work done. The whole setup was designed to prevent what Lyla and I were assigned to do: get to all of them.
But with our combined abilities, the tough part wasn’t getting to these guys, but how long it would take. Provided the intel in the rest of the thick dossier was solid, we’d be in and out in two weeks, tops. If the information was out-of-date, inaccurate, or simply a bunch of bullshit thrown together by a clueless junior analyst, three weeks was more like it. Bottom line: when you have an asset who can speak the language, blend in seamlessly, and wear a head-covering hijab to hide her identity in broad daylight, the mind-control stuff is almost icing on the cake. Having me along for the ride was overkill, unless . . .
Unless the whole operation was an elaborate trap.
Set us up on foreign soil with no backup and a huge file of false intel to walk into an ambush. If I was setting me up, that’s probably how I’d do it. If Tucker went rogue and continued his streak of ratting us out to the local authorities, the mission’s success wasn’t guaranteed, nor was our ability to, well, stay alive. It was really the only thing to give me pause.
The longer I stewed about it on the drive to Edinburgh, though, the harder a betrayal was to believe. Basic strategy stacked the deck too high in our favor:
The Iranians had spent years hardening their nuclear infrastructure.
The program and facilities were buried in bunkers with heavy defenses.
Iran had a real army, which would fight back.
These facts meant ending the Iranian nuclear threat militarily would take an operation bigger than the Iraq War and the Afghani occupation combined—which would run up a tab somewhere in $800 billion territory. Not to mention how bad it would piss off Iran’s two biggest allies, Russia and China, who weren’t exactly wearing matching friendship bracelets with the USA to begin with. Last but not least, an invasion would generate fun-filled stats, like somewhere in the neighborhood of forty thousand dead American soldiers.
Or the CIA could spend three grand on two coach tickets to Tehran and roll the dice.
When you got right down to it, we were too damn cost-effective to kill.
CHAPTER 23
Uncle Sam (Uncle Tucker?) was nice enough to put an Agency credit card in our mission packet, so once we got to Edinburgh and dumped the car, I let Lyla indulge some of her shopping desires. Nothing too elaborate, but we both needed a few changes of clothing, as well as specialized garb for her. The traditional Islamic stuff took a while. Trust me, shopping for a niqab and hijab in Scotland is like a Boston fan trying to find a Red Sox jersey outside Yankee Stadium. Thankfully, a helpful cabdriver from Oman pointed us in the right direction.
There were other gifts buried in the briefcase, too. A small contact lens case with Lyla’s “celebrity contacts” was a handy addition. She used to wear them along with a blond wig as part of her street disguise when she wanted a quiet night out. The contacts changed her eye color to an unremarkable brown. The change didn’t detract from her loveliness one bit, but since her eyes were such a well-known part of her image, the lens dissuaded most potential gawkers in mid–“Hey, isn’t that . . . ?”