Not an ideal situation, but back in Seville the Peugeot was the first car she’d encountered after McDaniel and the two men fled in the white Fiat. Gerda leaped in front of the powder-blue car, and the driver, a middle-aged man in a suit and tie, braked hard, his front bumper grazing Gerda’s knee. She went to his door, tore it open, dragged the man from his seat, and slung him to the pavement. Gerda slipped behind the wheel and sped after the white Fiat.
At least a dozen witnesses were present at the scene. A messy moment, but unavoidable. Gerda kept it swift and smooth, not more than a few seconds of exposure. There was a remote chance someone had thought to record the Peugeot’s license plate, and an even more unlikely possibility that someone had managed to video-record the episode.
But what else could she do? Let Harper and the two men escape? Risk losing her prey entirely? She had to make an instant decision, and now, half an hour later, with no sirens in the distance, she was feeling optimistic.
Except for the gray-haired woman whose skull continued to sway left and right, and that damn chicken doing its war dance on the granny’s lap. Why the hell were they transporting a chicken? Was it a pet they took wherever they went? A gift for someone’s dinner? Gerda was not a lover of chickens, and this one seemed even more ill-tempered than others she’d encountered. Could chickens fly? She didn’t know. Beyond her area of expertise. If it could fly, then it was only a matter of time before the maniac launched itself over the seat back and presented a serious danger to Gerda’s safety. Especially now that her speed was creeping up to keep pace with Harper and her two associates down the crowded Autovía de Andalucía.
Gerda was a fearless driver. First learning to handle a car on the Bundesautobahn, the German motorway that had no speed limit, only a suggested lower end of 130 kilometers per hour, or around eighty-one miles. Ninety-five miles an hour was normal, 120 not unusual. The Porsches and Mercedes that the German sports federation used to transport Olympic athletes often grazed the lower end of the 150s. She was used to speed, enjoyed the sensation, the uptick in her pulse, the rapid eye movements and fine-tuned reflexes required to stay alive.
At that moment Gerda was doing only one hundred miles an hour, passing everything on the highway, the Fiat and the Peugeot cutting in and out of lanes, staying in tight formation. Gerda’s one worry: the older-model Peugeot had begun to protest with a rattle in the transmission, a quaking in the front seat as though welds might be coming loose. The car was not built for speed, probably never pushed past sixty before. If she was going to make her move, she could wait no longer.
While the accelerator pedal still had some slack, it was time to pull alongside the Fiat and ram it off the road and, with luck, into the rock wall bordering the highway. Her mission would be complete.
The chicken seemed to sense the strain of the engine, the growing vibration in the chassis. It shrieked and fluttered off the grandmother’s lap and hovered in the air.
Steering with her left hand, Gerda reached back and swiped at the bird and swiped again. Somehow, she snagged a leg and yanked the creature forward. It shrieked and pecked at her arm and wrist and fluttered madly against Gerda’s headrest. An admirable fighting spirit.
Before she could drag the damn bird into the front seat and put it out of its misery, its leg snapped off in her hand.
Gerda watched in the mirror as the panicked bird backstroked into Granny’s lap, a fierce resolve in its tiny eyes.
Turning back to the road, she saw a long stretch clear of traffic. Only the Peugeot and the white Fiat and several empty miles of asphalt.
Gerda flung the chicken leg into the back and flattened the throttle.
“She’s coming,” Nick said.
“Buckle up, kiddos,” said Sal.
Harper leaned forward. “That next exit. It’s one kilometer.”
“You sure?”
“We can’t outrun her,” said Harper. “It’s the best option.”
Alongside the highway, flat fields of grain stretched off toward the horizon. There were dusty roads leading through farmlands, the humps of smoky-blue mountains in the distance. Very few trees, scarcely any houses or barns. Not the best place to find a hiding spot.
Harper turned in her seat and watched as the Peugeot continued to gain. A hundred yards back, closing fast.
“The next exit, Nick,” she said. “Last possible second.”
“Nick, Nick,” Sal said. “Told you to get the Benz, but no, you had to pinch pennies, go with this tin bucket.”
Nick held the speed, eighty, ninety miles an hour, Harper guessed, as she couldn’t see the dashboard, but the engine was wailing and the low rock wall was a gray blur, and the tiny car seemed to be lifting off the pavement, almost airborne.
They flew past a sign for the Écija exit two hundred meters ahead. Harper didn’t know Écija or this part of Spain, but from what she could see of the countryside, it might have been Kansas.
Nick was holding his speed. She felt a shimmy in the chassis, the front tires out of line. Nick was a skillful driver, but at this speed she didn’t know if he could manage the turn onto the ramp. She could see the exit coming up in fifteen, twenty seconds.
“Maybe slow down a tad?” Sal said. He was checking his seat belt.
“I got this,” Nick said. “Hold on.”
The blue Peugeot appeared next to them. An older woman was slumped in the passenger seat, her gray hair smooshed against the window as if she’d passed out. Harper couldn’t see past her to Gerda. But she sensed what was coming.
“She’s going to ram us,” Harper said.
Gerda drifted a few feet left as if to sharpen the angle of her strike, but Nick acted first and cut the steering wheel hard in Gerda’s direction, slamming the Fiat’s front left fender into the Peugeot’s passenger door, then swung the steering wheel to the right and swerved onto the exit. The Fiat lost traction and began skidding sideways down the ramp.
“Aw shit,” Sal said. “Wouldn’t you know.”
A hundred yards ahead, a wooden wagon piled high with hay and a team of horses trundled slowly down the ramp to the intersection.
“Don’t worry,” Nick said. “I took a class.”
Sal stared at him, dumbfounded. “A class? What class?”
Nick braked, downshifted, made a quick adjustment to the wheel, and the Fiat slid into a leisurely 360 rotation, back wheels kicking up gravel along the shoulder, and the front tires screaming against the asphalt. The driver of the wagon swiveled around, his mouth opening as he watched the Fiat careering toward him.
Nick fine-tuned the steering again, and the Fiat came crisply out of the spin and passed the wooden wagon, lightly brushing one of its big wheels with the front bumper. One more correction, and Nick guided the Fiat right onto the two-lane local highway and sped west.
“Two-week course in Poznan,” Nick said. “That’s Poland.”
“Course in race-car driving?”
“Something like that.”
“What, like a hobby?”
Nick shifted through the gears till they were back at cruising speed on a long straightaway that stretched for miles into the featureless farmland.
Harper’s pulse was still revved from the spinout and scrape with the hay wagon. But Nick seemed as serene and self-possessed as always.
He said, “World Bank picks up the tab, two weeks at the European Security Academy. I go every year for the evasive-driving course. Comes in very handy in Miami.”
Looking back at the freeway, Harper said, “I think we lost her. But you probably need to step on it anyway.”
“Where’re we going?” Sal said.
“A few hours east, a town called Canena.”
“What’s in Canena?” Sal said.
“Someone with dirt on Albion.”
Nick was squinting at her in the rearview mirror.
“Canena, Harper? What the hell?”
“Yes,” she said. “Daniela’s helping me.”
“Jesus Christ.�
� He reached up and adjusted the mirror to be eye to eye with Harper. “Of all the people in the world, why the hell drag her into this?”
“She’s connected, knows tons of people in the olive-oil industry. I needed a place to start. Somebody who could steer me in the right direction.”
“Does she know what you’re doing? What your endgame is? Bringing down Albion? She know about the violence last winter? All the fucked-up bad guys that were coming for you?”
“I told her everything. She’s not afraid.”
“No,” Nick said. “She wouldn’t be.”
Harper said, “She’s been calling around, talking to people, and she’s learned something she thinks is important. She wants to talk, but it has to be face-to-face. I was going to see her in the next day or two. I had no idea you’d be showing up. It was just between Daniela and me.”
“Goddamn it.”
“Hey,” Sal said. “You going to tell me who this Daniela person is?”
Harper left it to Nick. It took him a few seconds, but finally he said, “Daniela and I used to be close.”
“Close, huh?”
Nick looked over at Sal but said nothing.
“First I heard of this,” Sal said.
“I don’t share everything with you, Sal.”
“You in love with her? That kind of close?”
Nick sighed and said, “Yes, but it didn’t work out.”
“With you it never seems to,” Sal said. “Starting to wonder why that is.”
“Travel,” Nick said. “Both of us were on the road all the time.”
“Bullshit,” said Sal. “Nothing personal, Nicky boy, but you love a woman, you find a way. That’s how it works. People find a way.”
Nick focused on the road ahead.
Before the silence could harden again, Harper said, “Just let me off in Canena, Nick. I’ll take it from there.”
“No,” he said. “Now that you’ve got Daniela involved in this shit, somebody’s got to look after her.”
“Now you’re talking, kid,” Sal said. “That’s more like it.”
Gerda blew past the exit, braked hard, swung to the right, and came to a stop on the shoulder. The east-west highway was divided by a six-foot retaining wall, and the next exit was nowhere in sight, so Gerda saw no alternative.
She waited for a gap in the eastbound traffic behind her, then U-turned in the middle of the highway, switched on her high beams, and headed back into the stream of oncoming cars. Horns blared, headlights flashed, cars swerved from her path, a transfer truck hurtled toward her but at the last second swung into the shoulder and rammed the rock wall.
After two more near misses, Gerda made it back to the exit that McDaniel and her crew had taken, squealed down it, and slammed the shifter through the gears. In the backseat, the chicken was quiet. And Granny’s eyes were open. She was glaring at Gerda in the mirror and clutching the bird tightly against her breast as if Gerda might try to steal the damn thing.
Halting at the end of the exit ramp, Gerda looked north then south, saw nothing but empty road in both directions. She lowered her window and sat for a few seconds, listening, but could hear only the roar of the highway overhead. She sat awhile longer, trying to decide which way to go. North would eventually lead her toward Madrid, south toward Málaga or Gibraltar.
This was the reason Lester Albion should have told her more about the nature of her mission. She had no idea of her ultimate destination. All she knew for certain was that olive trees and the olive-oil business seemed to play a role in her task. For all she knew, olive groves might be growing in either direction.
Her gut told her to pick north, if only because more landmass lay in that direction, the bulk of Europe, and far to the north and east was her own fatherland. As she swung into the road, she took a quick southward glance and spotted a small plume of dust drifting in the wind far in the distance. A car kicking up a trail on some unpaved road. It might be nothing, but she’d seen no other sign of life as she scanned the countryside.
Already into her turn, she reversed direction, spun the wheel, floored it, skidded, lost control, banged the passenger door against a guardrail, got the car straightened, and floored it again. A half mile later the sluggish Peugeot managed to reach fifty-five.
With the throttle flat to the floor, she kept her focus on the dust cloud, let it guide her off the main highway onto a rutted, one-lane trail of gravel and dust. Ten minutes later she saw the white Fiat about a mile ahead, just a glimpse of its rear end as it rounded a curve, brown dust boiling up behind it. They must not have spotted her yet because she was gaining quickly.
“You sure this is right, Harper?”
She studied the map on Nick’s phone, tightened her fingertips against the screen to enlarge the view.
“This leads to Santaella, then on to La Rambla, and after that we pick up N-432 for a while. Better roads to Jaén and on to Canena. Or so says this map.”
“It gets any bumpier,” Sal said, “my spleen is breaking loose.”
“You’re right, Sal. The Benz would’ve been better.”
“Next time, listen to me. The old man knows a few things.”
They jostled along in silence for a while, then Nick said, “I hate to tell you this, guys. But she’s back there again.”
Harper turned and looked through the dust at the pale-blue Peugeot closing in.
Nick shifted into third, and the bumpy road got a whole lot bumpier.
Three against one. Was Gerda worried about those odds? Was she concerned that on this isolated back road she would not be able to confront a woman and two men, one of them elderly, and take them down? Was she worried that one of her adversaries was armed?
Well, yes, that last possibility was sobering. But Gerda the Warrior would not be deterred. She’d received her orders and would carry out her mission no matter the risk. Gerda saw this as her greatest strength—bending her will to the will of her superior, subduing her own petty wishes and grievances and yielding to a higher authority. A dutiful soldier.
She entered the thick cloud of dust, pushed on, gripping the wheel tighter and craning forward as her vision was hindered by the thick veil kicked up by the Fiat. She forged into the brown fog, her right foot jammed against the pedal, her body jolted by the ruts and potholes, the washboard furrows, Gerda bouncing in her seat, sightless now, lost in the brown haze, tasting the dust as it seeped into the car, becoming slime in her mouth, and onward she drove until finally, finally she saw the white shape appear close before her, the squat little Fiat with the red decal on its rear bumper, an advert for the rental car agency, and Gerda pushed harder on the accelerator, hard enough to jam her shoe through the floorboards, her quadriceps straining as if her leg muscles alone could power this flimsy car, and a second later she rammed into the rear of the Fiat, bounced back a foot or two, then rammed it again.
It was then that her engine belched and sputtered, then she was falling away, ten feet, twenty, the dust cloud thinning, Gerda stomping on the pedal again and again, but it was useless. The engine made a last stammer, then went dead.
“Estás sin gasolina.”
Granny was giving Gerda a baleful glare. The Peugeot was out of gas.
Gerda turned to face the wretched woman and was met with a stinging spray of violet and lavender. A spurt of the old lady’s cheap perfume.
Blinded, Gerda drew back and cursed the old fool. While she scrubbed at her burning eyes, she heard the rear door open, the granny trying to escape. Gerda opened her door and stepped out into the dazzling afternoon light, the heat, the haze of dust. Through a bleary film she caught sight of the old one hurrying down the road, the chicken clutched to her chest.
Gerda was on her in seconds. She seized her thick white hair and slung her to the ground. The chicken broke loose and fluttered a few feet away. Gerda stood over Granny and rubbed the last of the prickle from her eyes.
Then she lowered herself and sat astraddle Granny’s belly.
“Eres un diablo. Diablo, diablo.”
No, Gerda was not the devil. At best, she was his tireless servant.
She quieted the granny’s denunciations with a hand across her mouth. Quieted her for a minute, then a minute more, until there were no more harsh words rising from her throat, not even a warble from her lungs.
The chicken stood nearby watching solemnly as Gerda climbed off the dead woman and walked back to the Peugeot. She opened the trunk, searching for extra petrol. With a few gallons she could resume her pursuit of Harper McDaniel and the other two. That’s all she needed, just a gallon or two, and she knew she could catch up to them.
But there was no gasoline. Only a few tools and a roll of duct tape.
Gerda looked back at the chicken. It was staring at the granny. Its imprisonment had ended, but with only one leg it could not escape. It settled its plump breast in the dusty road alongside the dead woman as if waiting for her to wake and resume their journey.
Gerda opened the back door of the car, located the chicken’s leg lying on the floorboard. From the Peugeot’s trunk she picked up the roll of duct tape and walked back to the chicken.
The bird fluttered, clucked, and tried to swim away, but Gerda caught it, lifted it up and cradled the hen in her arms and braced it against her own indomitable heart, holding it there until finally the bird quieted and looked up into Gerda’s face with something like resignation.
Gerda carried the bird to the side of the road and took a seat in the yellowing grass. What she was doing was silly and very unlike her. Gerda the Warrior, Gerda the Ruthless. But she couldn’t stop. Not sure why.
She tore off a length of duct tape, set it aside, then lifted the chicken up and fit the severed leg against the bird’s stump. After several attempts, she managed to mesh the broken leg with the stump. She then wrapped the tape tightly around the joint, just as athletic trainers had so many times bound compression bandages around Gerda’s torn muscles, her ruptured tendons, her hairline-fractured bones, repairs not meant to last forever, only long enough for Gerda to climb to her feet and compete in the next event, um ihr eine faire Chance zu geben. To give her a fighting chance.
When You Can't Stop (Harper McDaniel Book 2) Page 9
