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“Drop it!” A woman’s voice shouted. Stryker twisted his head around, and he saw Brandy a dozen yards off. She had her gun drawn, sights fixed on him.

Stryker quickly gauged the distance, calculated the situation. Brandy wouldn’t shoot. Not with Sara so close. Maybe with a rifle but not with a handgun at that distance. He twisted around, putting Sara between them. His left arm snaked out around Sara’s waist and he lifted her to her feet. He brought the knife back up against Sara’s throat.

“Drop the gun,” he said threateningly.

Brandy shook her head. “I can’t do that.”

Stryker smiled. “It doesn’t really matter if you drop it or not,” he said. “You’re not going to shoot.”

Brandy pursed her lips. She lowered the weapon; her shoulders slumped in defeat. “You won’t get far,” she promised.

Stryker edged back, and Sara followed his lead. She was conscious enough to understand the danger she was in. He dropped the knife and pulled his .380 from the holster around his ankle.

They were standing next to a small Honda that had sustained only minor damage to the rear end in the accident. Stryker reached out and tapped the glass with his gun. The woman in the driver’s seat cringed.

“Get out,” he ordered.

The woman’s hand shot out and locked the door. Stryker snorted. He turned towards the glass and pulled the trigger. The woman screamed as the window exploded in her face.

“Get the hell out!” Stryker shouted. This time the woman obeyed. She scrambled out, hysterical and screaming, and Stryker kicked her in the ass as she ran away.

The woman ran towards Brandy, perfectly blocking her view. Stryker shoved Sara into the car and crawled in behind her. The engine was still running. He slammed the car into gear and popped the clutch, peeling out as he sped across the bridge.

Brandy helplessly watched him disappear.

Chapter 44

Brandy lowered her weapon as the hysterical woman ran in front of her, crowding her view. By the time she could get a clear shot, Stryker was already driving away with Sara Murphy in the passenger seat. Brandy made a mental note of the license plate number. For the moment, there was nothing else she could do. Her car was stuck in the traffic jam a quarter mile back, and it would be stuck there for a couple hours.

CHP were the first responders. They arrived within seconds, followed closely by the SFPD. Brandy recited the license number to the first patrolman she saw. “It’s a silver Honda Accord,” she said. “Put out an APB.” The cop wrote it down and disappeared. The EMT’s arrived a few seconds later. There were lots of bruises and jangled nerves, but thankfully there were no major injuries. The woman whose car Stryker had stolen had a few cuts on her face from the glass, and she was sobbing hysterically. Brandy kept hoping the EMT’s would give her a pill or something to shut her up, but they didn’t.

Lee showed up five minutes after the first CHP. He took control of the investigation and got his team interviewing the witnesses while the Highway Patrol focused on getting a lane opened up for northbound traffic. Brandy oversaw the questioning and took notes. When the first of the witnesses described seeing Konrad jump off the bridge, Lee immediately alerted the Coast Guard.

Twenty minutes later, Brandy and Inspector Lee were on a Coast Guard response boat, patrolling the area under the bridge. They circled the bay over an increasing perimeter, but found no evidence of Konrad’s body.

After an hour and a half, they had given up hope. “He’s dead,” Lee muttered, his voice full of resignation. They were standing on the bow of the boat, circling the bay for at least the tenth time. It was almost six PM, and it was starting to get dark. A wall of fog was creeping in from the Pacific. Within a few hours, visibility would be down to ten or fifteen feet.

“Did you say ‘he’ or ‘she’?” Brandy asked. With the waves slamming against the bow, the chugging of the engines, and the wind in her ears, conversation was extremely difficult.

Lee gave her a dark stare. “Konrad. My hopes aren’t high for Murphy, either.”

Brandy leaned up against the rail and watched the dark frothy water swirling under the bow of the boat. “Shouldn’t his body have surfaced by now?”

“Nah, it can take a day or two. You’d be surprised how cold that water is. The cold makes it take longer.” He turned towards the pilot and circled his hand in the air. “Call it a day,” he shouted.

They docked a short while later and Lee gave Brandy a ride to her car. Thankfully, the CHP had been kind enough to move it to the south bridge parking lot.

“So what’s the plan?” Brandy said as he dropped her off.

“Well, we haven’t had any hits on that APB. If this Stryker character is as smart as you say he is, we probably won’t. My guess is that Sara Murphy is either dead, or will be within the next couple of hours.”

“So what, we just wait for someone to find her body? There must be something we can do!”

“Look, I understand what you’re feeling,” Lee said. “Unfortunately, sometimes there isn’t anything you can do. We’re only human. We’ve been chasing Sara Murphy for a day and a half now, and we haven’t even come close to her. Not really. The best thing we can do at this point is hope Konrad’s body surfaces. Maybe then we’ll be able to connect a few dots and find out who’s at the bottom of this whole mess.”

Brandy glanced to the north, over the roof of Lee’s car. It was getting dark. Everything west of the bridge was buried in fog. The lights were coming on in the northeastern hills around the edges of Marin County. Brandy felt helpless, looking out there, wondering where Sara might be. She couldn’t even imagine how Sara Murphy had gotten mixed up in all this, but she now believed that Sara was completely innocent.

“She’s out there somewhere,” Brandy said.

“Forget it. You’d never find her. You could drive around the North Bay for a week and still never find her. It’s out of our hands. You might as well accept that unless we get a hit on that license number, Sara Murphy is as good as dead.”

Chapter 45

Konrad hit the water going seventy-five miles per hour. The fall should have killed him. What saved him was the fact that he had read an article on the subject once. Konrad knew that people had fallen from much greater heights and survived, and he knew why.

Suicide jumpers had survived their fall from the Golden Gate many times. Skydivers had survived hard landings after their parachutes failed. It wasn’t miraculous, and luck could only account for a few of those survivors. The majority of those survivors were either unconscious or eager to die when they hit. They weren’t afraid, and they weren’t struggling or panicking. What it came down to, was that they were
relaxed.

Konrad held the briefcase tightly in one hand, lifted overhead where it wouldn’t harm him if it slipped out of his grip. He plugged his nose with the other hand. He knew the damage the pressurized rush of water could do to his sinuses, and even his ears and eyes. The last thing Konrad wanted to do was blow up his eardrums, or pop his eyes out of their sockets.

He hit the water feet first, his muscles loose and relaxed, toes pointed down to help break the surface tension. When he hit, Konrad rolled with the impact, allowing his body to compress and tumble into the icy depths. The next thing he knew, he was forty feet under the surface.

The water was ice cold. The pressure was intense. Konrad’s ears popped painfully and he fought to keep air in his lungs. Spots swam before his eyes and he couldn’t tell which way was up. He panicked for a moment, eyes scanning the black water, arms flailing wildly. Something touched his leg.

It’s just seaweed,
he told himself.
Or driftwood, maybe.
The image of a shark flitted through his mind and Konrad forced it back.
Not that. Anything but that.

Konrad’s natural buoyancy began to pull him in the right direction, and the briefcase became an anchor. He kicked towards the surface. He was half-tempted to let the thing go. What were the odds that the briefcase would ever make it to shore? But if he did let go, he knew that it would most assuredly come back to haunt him. That was just the way the world worked.

If Konrad told Paolini that the briefcase was destroyed, it would most assuredly reappear at the most inopportune moment. Then, knowing Paolini, she’d probably have him assassinated. Or set him up as some sort of domestic terrorist. She always had some trick up her sleeve.

Paolini was the quintessential politician. She knew how to play the system better than anyone he’d ever met. The last thing he wanted to do was get on the wrong side of her wrath.

Konrad burst through the surface. He gasped, sucking in huge gulps of air. The cold in his extremities gave way to a tingling numbness that spread over his body. He tried to control his breathing, to slow the hammering in his chest. He was going to be fine. He just had to get out of the water, get warmed up before hypothermia took hold.

Konrad had been on the west side of the bridge when he jumped, but he surfaced on the east. He was a couple hundred yards away from the pilings now, riding the slow moving current away from the bridge and deeper into the bay.

He was tired and he was injured. Stryker had given him a good cut across the forearm, and it was still bleeding. Konrad tried not to think about the dozens of sharks that were probably circling beneath his feet at that very moment. The water was black and deep, like an abyss ready to swallow him. It was too easy to visualize himself on the cover of an old
JAWS
movie, some giant Leviathan rising towards him out of the inky depths. Konrad didn’t fear many things, but hungry sharks were close to the top of the list. Swimming in that water with an open wound like his, he was bait on a hook.

That was when Konrad saw the windsurfer headed in his direction. He waved and shouted until he got the young man’s attention. The guy looked in his early twenties, probably a college student. He called out to Konrad as he approached:

“Are you all right?”

“I need help,” Konrad shouted.

“I’ll be right back.” The surfer started to turn. “I’ll get some help.”

“No, just let me rest on your board for a minute,” Konrad said. “Just for a minute. Then I can swim back.”
Yawning, gaping jaws. Thrashing fins. Teeth like razors.
He shook the images out of his mind.

The windsurfer lowered his sail and straddled the board. He paddled the last few yards to Konrad.

“Thanks,” Konrad said. He tossed the briefcase up on the board and then threw his arm around it.

The man gave him an odd look. “What’s that?” he said. He looked at Konrad, for the first time realizing he was fully dressed. “How did you get out here?”

Konrad’s arm rustled under the water as he pulled his push dagger. “You know, I’m in kind of a hurry,” he said.

His arm flashed out of the water. He thrust the blade hilt-deep into the surfer’s leg, all the way to the bone. Konrad felt a
ka-thunk
as the blade pierced the kid’s femur. The surfer screamed. Konrad reached up to shove him off the board, but he didn’t have to. In his panic, the young man jumped off and began paddling back towards shore. Konrad climbed onto the board and hoisted the sail back up.

“Have fun with the sharks,” he called out.

The sun had set by the time Konrad hit the beach. He made his way into the Sausalito houseboat marina in search of a place to shelter out the night. Konrad had heard about the marina before but he’d never seen it. He marveled at the odd assortment of dwellings along the piers, some of them dating back more than a century. The area was once the unsavory home of hundreds of drug addicts, prostitutes, and all manner of riff-raff, but now the riff-raff was gone and the unwieldy houseboats -some three or four stories tall- were remodeled into high-class, high-dollar properties, some valued in the millions.

Because of the cold weather, Konrad had the docks to himself. He wandered the area until he found a vacant houseboat and let himself in. It was an elegant, three-story home with basement windows looking straight into the water and a sundeck off the upper floor. The place had a nice view of the San Francisco skyline but Konrad wasn’t interested in any of that.

He searched the cabinets in the bathroom until he found some first-aid supplies, and then found a sewing kit in the linen closet. He cleaned the wound on his arm with rubbing alcohol and antibacterial lotion, and then stitched it up. The cut didn’t go all the way to the bone, but it was close. It took ten stitches.

When he was done, Konrad helped himself to a drink. He searched the wet bar until he found something satisfactory, and then poured himself a scotch on the rocks. He dumped a splash of the expensive booze on his arm for good measure and grimaced as the whiskey burned into his open wound. Konrad threw back the rest of the glass in one gulp, and then he refilled it. He grabbed the phone off the kitchen bar, and took it and the whiskey with him to the sofa.

The briefcase sat on the table before him. He opened it up and pulled out a laptop computer. He peered into the bag. There was nothing else inside. Just the laptop. Konrad dialed the phone.

“Hello?” said Paolini’s voice.

“It’s Konrad. I have the briefcase.”

“Thank God. Did you get Murphy?”

Konrad bit his lip. He took a swig of booze. “Not exactly.”

“I see. Well, don’t worry about it. Stryker’s dead and we have the files. That’s all that matters.”

“It’s not that easy,” Konrad said reluctantly. “Stryker isn’t dead.”

“What?” Paolini shouted. “But you told me… I saw the explosion on the news!”

“He tricked me,” Konrad said. “Somebody tipped him off.” Konrad hadn’t even had time to think about it, until that moment. Somebody must have tipped Stryker off. How else could he have known? Who could it have been?

There was only one person: Lisa. She knew everything. Konrad had confided everything to her. Konrad’s hand folded into a fist. He’d have a talk with Lisa soon. Very soon.