Deadlock rl-2

by Sean Black

  The motorcade was whipping through the outskirts of San Francisco on the way from the airport to Grace Cathedral. He leaned towards the window, caught sight of the Golden Gate Bridge.

  ‘Hey, girls,’ he said to his two daughters, pointing it out.

  They unbuckled their seat belts. His wife rolled her eyes.

  ‘Let them take a look, honey,’ he said with a smile.

  Then he turned to the agent sitting next to him. ‘Can I put the window down so they can take a look?’

  ‘I’d really prefer if you didn’t, sir,’ the agent said.

  The President let it go. He could overrule the guy, but he tried his best not to. The Secret Service people were there to protect him and his family, to lay down their own lives if they had to. Under those circumstances it didn’t seem fair to make their job any more difficult.

  ‘Sorry, girls.’

  They sank back into their seats, and his youngest daughter stuck out her tongue at the agent.

  ‘Ashley!’ his wife scolded.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ashley singsonged.

  The agent managed a smile. ‘That’s OK. We’re a big bunch of spoilsports, right?’

  ‘Worse than Dad,’ said Ashley.

  ‘And that’s saying something, right?’ the President joked.

  It was tough on the kids, though. He tried to keep to a minimum the number of official engagements they went to, but sometimes it was the only opportunity he had to see them.

  He turned to the agent. ‘How long until we get there?’

  ‘About twelve minutes, sir.’

  ‘You know,’ said the President, addressing his two daughters, ‘if you’re real good, maybe there’ll be a surprise later.’

  ‘Ghirardelli?’ they both asked, wide-eyed.

  The Ghirardelli soda fountain on North Point Street near Fisherman’s Wharf was a San Francisco institution, famous for its chocolate and ice-cream sundaes. You could gain twenty pounds just looking at one of them.

  ‘Depends if you’re good.’ He nudged the agent. ‘I might even get you one too, Mike.’

  ‘Not sure my wife would thank you, sir,’ said the agent.

  The President winked. ‘Then don’t tell her.’

  The First Lady rolled her eyes again but kept a smile on her face. It was part of their married shtick. He’d misbehave, she’d scold him.

  ‘So, what d’you say, kids? Sundaes?’

  The two little girls bounced up and down on their seats with anticipation as The Beast rolled inexorably ahead, freeway rolling under its run-flats, two motorcycle outriders sweeping the First Family towards the cathedral.

  65

  The Secret Service had hustled Lock and Ty out on to the back steps of the cathedral, away from the assembled dignitaries. Over the crush, Lock spotted Coburn walking towards the cathedral. His head was down. He looked troubled.

  Lock shouted out to him, but Coburn didn’t react.

  ‘Ask that guy,’ said Lock, pointing towards Coburn, as a burly Secret Service agent stepped in front of him. ‘He’s ATF. He can vouch for me.’

  The Secret Service agents gathered round them didn’t move.

  ‘OK, I’ll ask him,’ said Lock, stepping around them.

  ‘The hell you will,’ said the burly agent. ‘You still haven’t explained how you came to have explosives residue on a deadly weapon you were carrying in here.’

  Coburn was heading up the steps towards them. ‘Coburn!’ Lock shouted. ‘Coburn!’ He turned to one of the agents. ‘Just ask him, would you?’

  Coburn pulled out his ATF badge and showed it to someone standing halfway down the stairs. The agent checked it and let him pass.

  He was just feet away from Lock and Ty now.

  ‘Hey,’ said the burly agent, ‘you know these guys?’

  Coburn stopped, looked straight at Lock and Ty, and smiled. ‘Never seen them before in my life,’ he said, then ducked past the group and into the body of the cathedral.

  Lock and Ty exchanged a look of disbelief.

  ‘Hey, Coburn!’ Lock shouted. He went to push past the agent, which only signaled to the cops to move in to cuff him.

  ‘Get this guy the hell out of here before POTUS gets here.’

  ‘OK, OK,’ Lock said, giving up.

  ‘Him too,’ said the Secret Service agent, nodding at Ty.

  ‘What the hell did I do?’ Ty protested.

  The second Secret Service agent hitched his thumbs into his belt. ‘We need you both out of here. If everything checks out, you’ll be released later in the day.’

  ‘Place your hands behind your back,’ said one of the cops to Lock.

  ‘Fine,’ Lock said, doing exactly as he was told.

  ‘You have any needles, any other sharp objects in your pocket?’ a female cop asked.

  ‘No.’

  She came up with a comb in the right front pocket of his jeans and his wallet, which she left where they were. Once they were satisfied that they posed no threat, Lock and Ty were perp-walked down the steps of the cathedral.

  Ty twisted his head round. ‘Hey, take it easy, I got a bad shoulder.’

  His plea was met with a growled ‘And if you don’t keep moving it’s gonna get a lot worse.’

  The crowd gathered at the crash barriers jeered as Lock walked down the stairs and across the sidewalk, propelled towards a patrol car parked directly across the street next to the park. He watched as Ty was given the same treatment, the only difference being that Ty wasn’t going quietly. He couldn’t make out the words but he guessed they weren’t pretty.

  Lock’s head was forced down and he was placed into the back seat of the cruiser. He checked out the crowd once more: hard faces peering in his direction. The locks on the rear doors thunked shut, and then they were inching forward, away from the cathedral.

  From his position on the back seat, he scanned the faces of those gathered at the front entrance but didn’t see Carrie. In a way, he was relieved. He’d go to the station, follow procedure like he’d been asked, and be out again in a couple of hours.

  As they inched away from the kerb, he thought frantically about the explosive residue on the tip of his knife. Had it been near his SIG? That way it might have picked up a few specks of cordite. No, the closest the Gerber had been to either live rounds or his SIG was being in the same room. No way would that have been enough to leave a trace.

  He glanced back at the cathedral through the cruiser window, across the freshly repaired patch of asphalt and up the steps.

  Shit. The road. It had to be! He’d bent down and used the knife to dig a hole into the newly laid road surface.

  ‘Stop the car!’ he shouted, leaning forward.

  The female cop riding up front bumped the brakes, the momentum propelling him forward so that he smacked his head against the hard Perspex divider which separated him from her, then accelerated again.

  Unless he acted fast, his next stop was the station house, and the President’s next stop would be the morgue.

  66

  Chance sat astride a purloined Ducati and watched the San Francisco Police Department motorcycle outriders whip past her, along the Embarcadero, followed by half a dozen other vehicles in the presidential motorcade.

  She clicked on her intercom headset, which was Bluetoothed to her cell phone. ‘They just went past.’

  ‘How fast they moving?’ Reaper asked.

  ‘They’re booking it. I’d say we’ve got under three minutes until we can RV.’

  ‘Freya?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Just don’t move in too fast, ’kay? We need the dust settled before we hit.’

  ‘Got you.’

  Chance hitched up the straps of her backpack full of goodies, toed up the kick-stand on the bike and slipped back down the street, away from the route the presidential convoy was taking. The plan was to run parallel, then after initial detonation move in to mop up. The objective was straightforward in terms of those inside The Beast, and she wa
s looking forward to it.

  Leave no survivors.

  Lock slumped back on the bench seat of the cruiser. No amount of pleading was getting the driver to stop. ‘At least patch me through to someone who can check it out.’

  The female cop eyed him in the rear-view mirror with a jaundiced look that spoke of having had to endure too many crazies. ‘Listen, buddy, the Secret Service know what they’re doing. If there was a bomb they’d have found it already. There was sniffer dogs there just this morning. I saw them.’

  But the dogs, no matter how refined their sense of smell, might not have been able to detect anything apart from the overpowering whiff of fresh tar. He had to get out of the car. And fast.

  As the driver turned her attention back to the road, Lock slipped his right hand into the front pocket of his jeans and pulled out the comb with his fingertips. Without looking, he felt for the final, thickest tooth of the comb, and again by feel used the tooth to press down on the pawl of the right-hand cuff, in an attempt to disengage the swing arm from the ratchet. The cuff on his right hand clicked open. He waited a second to see if the cop had noticed anything, but her eyes were fixed on the road ahead.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, leaning forward again, ‘I gotta pee.’

  ‘Hold it.’

  ‘I can’t. Can you at least pull over so I don’t make a mess of your back seat here?’

  ‘Forget it.’

  It was the answer he’d been expecting. Keeping his hands low, he opened the zip of his jeans. ‘I’m sorry about this, officer, but I ain’t wetting my jeans.’

  She squinted in the rear-view mirror. ‘Aw, Jesus. OK, OK, wait.’

  She pulled sharply over to the kerb, and got out. As she opened the rear passenger door, Lock kept his hands low, figuring that her eyes would be everywhere but waist level or below. He guessed right.

  He had a second, maybe two.

  As she began to usher him to a patch of barren ground which doubled as a street-side parking lot, he hit her hard in the face just below her nose, sending her tumbling to the ground. As she fell, he was on her, freeing her service weapon from its holster. Next, he ripped her radio from her belt.

  Picking her up under one shoulder, he tossed her into the still-open rear door and slammed it, then climbed in the front, jammed the cruiser back into drive and spun it round in a thick one-eighty turn that drew honks from oncoming cars as he cut directly across their paths.

  He glanced back at the female cop in the back seat. She was sitting up now, trying to staunch the blood from her nose.

  ‘Lady, I’m sorry, but we’re short on time, so buckle up.’

  She glared at him. He could hardly blame her.

  Finding the switch that engaged the lights and sirens, he flicked the toggle and jammed his foot down on the accelerator, weaving through the traffic, scattering pedestrians and other vehicles behind him as he raced to the cathedral, praying he wasn’t already too late.

  67

  The motorcycle outriders slowed as they edged within a block of the cathedral. People crowded every sidewalk, children hoisted on to aching parental shoulders, while others craned their necks over police sawhorses, everyone eager for a glimpse of the President and his family.

  Then, from a side street, came screams, the roar of a car engine at full throttle and the whip-crack of gunshots.

  The needle of the cruiser’s speedometer hit seventy miles an hour as Lock’s mantra played out in real time.

  Fast.

  A patrol officer, set in a Weaver stance, his gun pointed straight at Lock, dived for the sidewalk as the patrol car Lock was piloting bore down on him.

  Aggressive.

  In front of him, three blue San Francisco Police Department sawhorses disintegrated, splintering under the wheels as the road opened out in front of him, shots pouring in, the presidential limousine in plain sight. Lock spun the wheel so that the limousine’s trajectory matched his own.

  Action.

  As the heavily up-armored SUV to the rear of The Beast spun out, the tailgate dropped to reveal two Secret Service agents sporting M-4s. As they opened fire on him, Lock’s hands slipped down to grip the bottom of the steering wheel, his foot lifted from the accelerator, and he wedged himself as tight as he could into the footwell.

  With determination.

  Seconds before The Beast moved on to the fresh asphalt in front of the cathedral, the front of Lock’s patrol car concertinaed into it at the driver’s-side front wheel arch. Lock’s shoulder rammed into the base of the steering column, sending a screaming pain through his body. A few more shots poured in, shattering what was left of the windshield. There was a fresh whimper from the officer in the back.

  Lock closed his eyes and didn’t move. The engine block was directly in front of him, which was about all he had in his favour.

  Voices, panicked and urgent, emanated from outside the vehicle.

  ‘Officer inside! Officer inside!’

  ‘Cease fire!’

  ‘Stop firing, you assholes! We got a cop in back!’

  Lock stayed still. Any movement could get him killed. The preferred method of dealing with a suicide bomber, which is what they might safely assume he was, was to fill him full of lots of holes, quickly and without mercy.

  The rear door was flung open first. Then his door.

  ‘Do not move, you asshole!’

  Big hands rushed in and scooped him out, dumping him face down on the street. A gun was pressed into the back of his neck. Not a good sign.

  More gunshots, then the rip of a single motorbike engine. The cold metal tickle of the gun lifted from his neck and he could hear the man holding it say, ‘Holy Mother of God.’

  Lock opened his eyes, lifted his head from his prone position and caught sight of a man mounted on a fat-boy Harley with a teenage boy, presumably plucked from the crowd to serve as a human shield, in front of him. He was dropping flares behind and to either side of him, creating a thick, acid-trip-surreal soup of multicolored fog around him. It took a second for Lock to shift from looking to seeing, a second before he recognized the lone gunman as Reaper.

  Lock grabbed for the sill of the driver’s door, pulling himself back inside the patrol car. The female officer’s service weapon had fallen into the passenger-side footwell. He reached in and grabbed it, aware of the screams of panic and confusion from the crowd.

  Just in time, Lock emerged to see Reaper toss the M-4 he’d been spraying in all directions to the ground and reach back into the saddle-bags of the Harley. Lock took a quick breath in. He knew what was coming next.

  There it was: an RPG launcher.

  Reaper pushed his temporary hostage off the bike and took aim. And there was Chance, her blonde hair marking her out in the crowd, hunkered down at ground level among the terrified onlookers. Lock could see her hands working the zip of a large designer-leather backpack that lay on the sidewalk in front of her. Her knees and elbows were pumping as she slithered forward, unnoticed by those around her.

  Could any of the police snipers positioned on the rooftops around the cathedral see Reaper? Lock assumed not: the smoke from the flares was still far too thick. He crawled back out, belly on the ground, aimed his SIG towards Reaper and fired a quick shot. It was enough to distract him. Lock fired again, this time finding his target. Reaper was blown backwards from the bike, the leather jacket he was wearing shredding into pieces to reveal Kevlar body armor As Reaper scrambled back to his feet, Lock took his chance, punching out another round which caught Reaper at the very top of his nose. Reaper’s forehead opened up. Blood and chunks of his brain spattered across the sidewalk. He fell with a thump backwards on to the sidewalk, his arms splayed out at his sides.

  Lock’s focus snapped back to Chance as she opened her backpack and pulled out a matching compact RPG launcher. Most women carried Mace, or at most a taser, but Chance wasn’t most women. Moving on to one knee, the RPG launcher slung over her shoulder, she took aim.

  So did Lock. Aiming for
her chest, he began to squeeze down on the trigger. Then he froze.

  The hard swell of her belly, made visible by her T-shirt riding up as she hefted the RPG launcher, stopped him cold. Something primal, or maybe something hard-wired from years of protecting life, kicked in. He shook his head. She was every bit as dangerous as her father, he told himself, resighting and moving his hands up less than half a foot so that now it would be a head shot.

  But the two-second hesitation was enough. There was a zip, then a bang, and finally the roar of an impact as the grenade tore into the hood of The Beast. The front of The Beast arched up, then a hundred yards in front of it the newly repaired patch of road erupted, sending earth and debris high into the air and twisting The Beast in the other direction.

  When Lock looked up, his mouth, nose and eyes clogged with dust, The Beast had come to rest on its side. The windows and the inner core looked intact, but what about the people inside?

  There was a moment of stunned silence, then the screams began again, but where exactly they were coming from was anyone’s guess.

  Through the smoke, what was left of the Secret Service detail poured towards The Beast, fanning out to surround it, while others worked to prise open the doors that lay air side up.

  Lock got to his feet, the muscles in his legs shaking as he tucked the Glock into the waistband of his trousers.

  Ty suddenly appeared through the murk. Lock was as surprised as he guessed Ty was to see him out of custody, but there was no time to dwell on that now. Already the limp body of a child was being lifted carefully from the wreckage of The Beast.

  68

  As Lock stared at the scene before him, through the fog emerged the President and the First Lady, their arms around each other and their eldest daughter. Lock put a hand on the cruiser to steady himself, wiped the dust from his mouth and took a big gulp of fresh air. They were safe.

  Ty clamped a hand on his shoulder. ‘Good shooting, brother.’