“What?” she demanded. His expression was enough to make her stomach tighten without his even having to say a word.
“See that black BMW?” His voice was very quiet. His hand tightened on her arm, and he started walking again, urging her toward the metro station. His eyes were on the intersection that was maybe a quarter of a block away.
Following his gaze, she saw that there were three vehicles lined up waiting for the light to change: a red Honda or something similar, a white Econoline van with some sort of writing on the side, and the black BMW. Shiny and new-looking, it had tinted windows and bright chrome wheels.
“What about it?” she asked, as the light changed and those vehicles got under way in turn, crossing in front of them.
“It was at the 7-Eleven.” They were almost at the steps that led down to the station. “I think it’s a Dark Car.”
24
A
Dark Car? You want to tell me what that is?”
The answer was going to be bad news, Jess knew as she asked the question. She could tell from the rigidity of his jaw, the tightness of his mouth, and the sudden deepening of the lines around his eyes as he shot a look at her. She swallowed hard. Her heart, which was already beating too fast, began to race.
“It ’s a special-ops vehicle.”
Jess hesitated at the top of the long flight of concrete steps that led to the metro platform, glancing down them with dismay. Making a sound under his breath, Mark scooped her up and started down with her. Jess grabbed his shoulders and hung on. The truth was, the stairs were a problem for her for the moment, and they both knew it.
“They always use black, foreign-made cars. The tags, registration, all that will turn out to be attached to some sham company. Untraceable.”
“Does it belong to the Secret Service? The CIA? What?” It was all Jess could do to keep the squeak out of her voice. They were on the platform now, and he set her on her feet. While not crowded, it was fairly well populated even as early as it was. Her gaze shot around, looking for—what? Men in dark suits? If so, there were a few, but none who looked threatening. Jeez, was she making a possibly fatal mistake by assuming that all government operatives wore dark suits and were as big and buff as Mark? But he was scanning the crowd, too, and didn’t appear to find any fresh cause for alarm. The ubiquitous smell of subways everywhere, the stale air and exhaust mixed with notes of body odor, urine, and alcohol, wasn’t too bad. D.C. was known for its clean stations. Jess could see that the train was already rushing toward them. The roar echoed off the concrete walls.
“Way more off the grid than that. Black ops. We ’re basically talking government-authorized hit men.”
“Oh my God.”
The train pulled into the station with a wheeze. As far as Jess could tell, nobody was paying them the least bit of attention. Just to be safe, she shot a nervous glance back toward the entrance: a college-age girl bumping a bicycle down the stairs, a middle-aged woman in a red dress in a hurry to catch the train. Nobody threatening.
“You good by yourself for a minute?” he asked.
That caught her attention.
“Where are you going?”
“Right over there. Don’t move.”
Giving the newcomers a once-over as they reached the bottom of the steps and joined the milling group of waiting riders, Mark wove through the swelling assemblage to a vending machine half a platform away. Shooting continual wary glances at the eddying tide of people around her, Jess watched as he put in a few dollars and procured two fare cards. Returning, he handed one to her.
“I have a fare card,” she told him as she accepted the one he gave her. Most residents of D.C. did; the metro was the easiest, most economical way to move around inside the District.
“I have one, too, and neither of us can use ours.” His expression turned flinty again. “They’re hoping we’ll do something that dumb. We can’t use credit cards, or debit cards, or anything else like that, either, without them pouncing on us. We’re strictly cash-and-carry from here on out.”
Jess ran a fingertip along the edge of the fare card. Her stomach was now knotted so tight it actually hurt.
“I have about twenty-four dollars in my purse.” That was including the emergency twenty, which her mother had replaced, showing the folded bill to her before tucking it into the zippered compartment.
“Well, I have a hundred and twelve, so that gives us a kitty of . . .”
“A hundred and thirty-six dollars.” Jess’s tone was glum. That wouldn’t last long. She faced the terrifying truth. “We can’t run forever, Mark.”
“We don’t have to run forever. We just have to keep a step ahead of them until we come up with some way to bring them down.”
“Oh, is that all?” Jess shot him a look. “If that was supposed to make me feel better, I should probably tell you it failed miserably.”
He smiled.
“Keep your head down. You’ve been on the news a lot lately.” His hand slid around her elbow, urging her into motion. “The last thing we need is somebody recognizing you.”
A thrill of alarm shot out along her nerve endings at the thought as she obediently ducked her head. Probably because she ’d watched almost none of the coverage, she ’d forgotten she had just been all over TV in connection with Annette Cooper’s death.
“Do you think they will?” Her shoulders rose defensively as her head sank between them. She moved closer to his side.
“I don’t think so. The glasses are good. Every time I’ve seen you on TV, you haven’t been wearing them.”
“That ’s because I hate them.”
“Do you?” He sounded surprised. “You look cute in them. Brainy. Hot.”
If she hadn’t been scared out of her mind, Jess thought she might have blushed. She flicked a quick sideways look up at him.
“If you’re after my twenty-four dollars, you can just forget it,” she said tartly.
He laughed. “I’m serious. Brainy
and
hot. The combination’s killer.”
She didn’t answer. Instead, she secretly hugged his words close as they fell in with the queue of people boarding the train. Oh, God, how idiotic was it that even while she was running for her life, just getting a compliment from him could make her go all warm and fuzzy inside? Unbidden, she had a sudden flashback to that blazing kiss.
Mark . . .
“Careful.” His hand tightened on her elbow as she reached the train and stepped aboard, and the necessity of quickly vetting all the people already sitting in the upholstered seats was as effective at banishing romantic yearnings as a bucket of cold water to the face.
Forget being in love. What you want to do here is survive.
Her legs were more unsteady than she ’d hoped, and she was relieved to find a seat. Mark dropped down beside her, eyeing the people around them before apparently deciding they were all as harmless as they looked.
The train groaned and jerked as it got under way.
“So what you’re telling me is that somebody’s decided your Secret Service buddies aren’t getting the job done, and now they’ve sent in the real professionals?” Jess asked under her breath. The situation was now so bad it was almost funny.
Not.
“It’s because of me.” His eyes were harder and colder than she had ever imagined they could be. His mouth was tight, his expression unreadable. She was reminded that he was a federal agent, with a gun holstered on his belt.
Thank God.
“Last night, or rather early this morning, whoever’s behind this apparently realized that if they killed you I wasn’t going to be fine with it, and they were going to have to deal with me. So now they’re out to eliminate us both.”
“The bomb,” Jess said, appalled.
“Yeah.”
She tried to think logically despite the panic that was welling up inside her as irrepressibly as fizz in a shaken soda bottle.
“You realize this means I’ve been right all along. Nobody would send out a government hit squad if they weren’t trying to cover up something as big as”—her voice, which had been scarcely louder than a whisper before, dropped even lower, although an anxious glance around re-confirmed that no one seemed to be paying the least bit of attention—“the First Lady’s murder.”
“I got that.”
“In other words, we ’re in trouble.”
He gave a curt little nod.
“Bigger trouble than I was in before.”
“Oh, yeah.” His eyes cut toward her. There was a sudden glint of wry humor in them. “Of course, now they’re trying to kill me, too. They probably feel the job’s going to be a little harder.”
“So call out the big guns,
hmm
?” As her grip tightened convulsively on the armrest, Jess took a deep breath. Panicking was useless. What she needed to do was stay calm so she could think. “Who do you think is behind this? Who could order out a black ops team? To hunt people down and murder them?”
Despite her best efforts, her voice shook. To think that this could possibly be happening to
her,
in the United States of America, was mind-boggling.
Mark was slouched down in the seat, his arms crossed over his chest, his long legs sprawled out in front of him. To the ordinary observer, his posture would look casual, even careless. Until they got a good look at his eyes. There was a cold watchfulness in them that reminded her of steel. They were the eyes of a man who had been trained to protect the lives of those he shielded by dying—or killing. Whichever it took.
Jess took heart.
“Not more than a handful of people.” He seemed unwilling to go on.
“The President?”
He nodded curtly. “Along with a small group of his top advisers. The Secretary of State. The Secretary of Defense. The Secretary of Homeland Security. People like that.”
“Harris Lowell?”
“Not on his own. Only if it was presumed he was acting on the order of the President.”
Mark’s expression had grown increasingly thoughtful. By the time he finished that last sentence, he was frowning into space as if he were turning something over in his mind. Jess was just about to demand to know what that something was when the brakes squealed and the train shuddered into another station.
Mark immediately stood up. She looked at him questioningly. Unless there was something she was missing, this definitely wasn’t their stop.
“Before we do anything else, we ’ve got to muddy the waters.” Mark reached for her hand and pulled her up beside him. The doors opened, and riders started exiting the car as more filed in. Glancing nervously out through the windows, she realized that this station was much busier than the last, so busy that after only a moment she gave up on trying to scan every face and hunt for every dark suit. Seven a.m. marked the start of rush hour and, according to the big clock on the opposite wall, it was twelve minutes after that now. Maneuvering her so that she stood in line in front of him, Mark rested his hands lightly on her waist to give her some support and spoke in her ear as they filed out of the car. “It’s obvious that they were able to identify the truck and track it into town. We can’t take a direct route anywhere anymore. It ’s too easy to follow.”
THE MAIN BRANCH
of the library was a modern four-story glass-and-steel cube located on G Street NW at 9th. By the time Jess slid into a seat in front of one of its computers, it was after two p.m. She was wearing new-to-her jeans and a white Hanes T-shirt straight from a really new three-pack along with her own jacket, a pair of black Converse sneakers, and a D.C. United baseball cap. Mark was still in the blue dress shirt and black suit pants he’d been wearing all along. The only change was the addition of a newly acquired Redskins cap. At his insistence, they’d gone shopping at a Goodwill outlet that morning. Their purchases, which included a three-pack of cheap cotton panties for her and a pair of boxers for him, had mostly come from the clearance bin and had totaled seven dollars and twenty-two cents. Mark had insisted the wardrobe change was necessary to make them harder to spot, and Jess was glad for the fresh clothes, especially the sneakers, but she regretted spending the money. After eating lunch at Taco Bell, which had cost an alarming four dollars and ninety-eight cents for both of them, their kitty had shrunk to one hundred twenty-three dollars and eighty cents.
Just thinking about it gave her palpitations.
But at the moment, she’d filed it, along with a whole boatload of other terrifying things, under the category of something to worry about later. The first thing she did, upon sitting down at the computer, was e-mail her mother, who she knew would be frantic with worry as soon as she heard about Davenport’s death, especially considering the fact that Jess was no longer answering her cell phone. Using Grace ’s account to make it less obvious in case anybody was monitoring her mother’s incoming e-mails, Jess left a message that she was fine, under Secret Service protection, and would be in touch as soon as she could. Then, she checked out a license plate number Mark gave her—BCW-248. It was registered to a chain of local dental clinics, which made Mark snort, “Yeah, right,” when she told him. After that, she concentrated on gaining access to the phone records that, she hoped, would provide the information they needed. Ordinarily something like this was a snap. She knew how to bypass the access codes and passwords, how to worm her way into the phone company’s or the Internet service provider’s or the IRS’s or whoever’s information systems, how to zero in on the individual in question and pull up the appropriate data: It was part of what had made her so valuable to Davenport.
But almost immediately she ran into a problem.
“What?” Mark whispered as she quit tapping and frowned. He was leaning on the back of the open, shoulder-height cubicle, scanning the screen along with her. The screen that was, unfortunately, blank except for a code that she ’d seen only once before.
Not good.