Shadowfires (42 page)

On the other hand, if he crossed Sharp, he would destroy his career in the DSA.

“The macadam should turn to gravel,” Sharp said, consulting the directions The Stone had given him.

In spite of all his recent insights, in spite of the advantages those insights should have given him, Jerry Peake did not know what to do. He did not see a way out that would leave him with both his self-respect and his career. As he drove up the slope, deeper into the dark of the woods, a panic began to build in him, and for the first time in many hours he felt inadequate.

“Gravel,” Anson Sharp noted as they left the pavement.

Suddenly Peake saw that his predicament was even worse than he had realized because Sharp was likely to kill him, too. If Peake tried to stop Sharp from killing Shadway and the Leben woman, then Sharp would simply shoot Peake first and set it up to look as if the two fugitives had done it. That would even give Sharp an excuse to kill Shadway and Mrs. Leben: “They wasted poor damn Peake, so there was nothing else I could do.” Sharp might even come out of it a hero. On the other hand, Peake couldn’t just step out of the way and let the deputy director cut them down, for that would not satisfy Sharp; if Peake did not participate in the killing with enthusiasm, Sharp would never really trust him and would most likely shoot him
after
Shadway and Mrs. Leben were dead, then claim one of them had done it. Jesus. To Peake (whose mind was working faster than it had ever worked in his life), it looked as if he had only two choices: join in the killing and thereby gain Sharp’s total trust—or kill Sharp before Sharp could kill anyone else. But no, wait, that was no solution, either—

“Not much farther,” Sharp said, leaning forward in his seat, peering intently through the windshield. “Slow it to a crawl.”

—no solution at all, because if he shot Sharp, no one would ever believe that Sharp had intended to kill Shadway and Mrs. Leben—after all, what was the bastard’s
motive?
—and Peake would wind up on trial for blowing away his superior. The courts were never ever easy on cop killers, even if the cop killer was another cop, so sure as hell he’d go to prison, where all those seven-foot-tall, no-neck criminal types would just
delight
in raping a former government agent. Which left—what?—one horrible choice and only one, which was to join in the killing, descend to Sharp’s level, forget about being a legend and settle for being a goddamn Gestapo thug. This was crazy, being trapped in a situation with no right answers, only wrong answers, crazy and unfair, damn it, and Peake felt as if the top of his head were going to blow off from the strain of seeking a better answer.

“That’s the gate she described,” Sharp said. “And it’s open! Park this side of it.”

Jerry Peake stopped the car, switched off the engine.

Instead of the expected quietude of the forest, another sound came through the open windows the moment the sedan fell silent: a racing engine, another car, echoing through the trees.

“Someone’s coming,” Sharp said, grabbing his silencer-equipped pistol and throwing open his door just as a blue Ford roared into view on the road above them, bearing down at high speed.

 

While the service-station attendant filled the Mercedes with Arco unleaded, Rachael got candy and a can of Coke from the vending machines. She leaned against the trunk, alternately sipping Coke and munching on a Mr. Goodbar, hoping that a big dose of refined sugar would lift her spirits and make the long drive ahead seem less lonely.

“Going to Vegas?” the attendant asked.

“That’s right.”

“I ’spected so. I’m good at guessing where folks is headed. You got that Vegas look. Now listen, first thing you play when you get there is roulette. Number twenty-four, ’cause I have this hunch about it, just looking at you. Okay?”

“Okay. Twenty-four.”

He held her Coke while she got the cash from her wallet to pay him. “You win a fortune, I’ll expect half, of course. But if you lose, it’ll be the devil’s work, not mine.”

He bent down and looked in her window just as she was about to drive away. “You be careful out there on the desert. It can be mean.”

“I know,” she said.

She drove onto I-15 and headed north-northeast toward distant Barstow, feeling very much alone.

Ben swung the Ford around the bend and started to accelerate but saw the dark green sedan just beyond the open gate. He braked, and the Ford fishtailed on the dirt lane. The steering wheel jerked in his hands. But he did not lose control of the car, kept it out of the ditches on both sides, and slid to a halt in a roiling cloud of dust about fifty yards above the gate.

Below, two men in dark suits had already gotten out of the sedan. One of them was hanging back, although the other—and bigger—man was rushing straight up the hill, closing fast, like a too-eager marathon runner who had forgotten to change into his running shorts and shoes. The yellowish dust gave the illusion of marbled solidity as it whirled through veined patterns of shade and sunshine. But in spite of the dust and in spite of the thirty yards that separated Ben from the oncoming man, he could see the gun in the guy’s hand. He could also see the silencer, which startled him.

No police or federal agents used silencers. And Eric’s business partners had opened up with a submachine gun in the heart of Palm Springs, so it was unlikely they would suddenly turn discreet.

Then, only a fraction of a second after Ben saw the silencer, he got a good look at the grinning face of the oncoming man, and he was simultaneously astonished, confused, and afraid. Anson Sharp. It had been sixteen years since he had seen Anson Sharp in Nam, back in ’72. Yet he had no doubt about the man’s identity. Time had changed Sharp, but not much. During the spring and summer of ’72, Ben had expected the big bastard to shoot him in the back or hire some Saigon hoodlum to do it—Sharp had been capable of anything—but Ben had been very careful, had not given Sharp the slightest opportunity. Now here was Sharp again, as if he’d stepped through a time warp.

What the hell had brought him here now, more than a decade and a half later? Ben had the crazy notion that Sharp had been looking for him all this time, anxious to settle the score, and just happened to track him down now, in the midst of all these other troubles. But of course that was unlikely—impossible—so somehow Sharp must be involved with the Wildcard mess.

Less than twenty yards away, Sharp took a shooter’s spreadlegged stance on the road below and opened fire with the pistol. With a
whap
and a wet crackle of gummy safety glass, a slug punched through the windshield one foot to the right of Ben’s face.

Throwing the car into reverse, he twisted around in his seat to see the road behind. Steering with one hand, he drove backward up the dirt lane as fast as he dared. He heard another bullet ricochet off the car, and it sounded very close. Then he was around the turn and out of Sharp’s sight.

He reversed all the way to the cabin before he stopped. There he shifted the Ford into neutral, left the engine running, and engaged the handbrake, which was the only thing holding the car on the slope. He got out and quickly put the shotgun and the Combat Magnum on the dirt to one side. Leaning back in through the open door, he gripped the release lever for the handbrake and looked down the hill.

Two hundred yards below, the Chevy sedan came around the bend, moving fast, and started up toward him. They slowed when they saw him, but they did not stop, and he dared to wait a couple of seconds longer before he popped the handbrake and stepped back.

Succumbing to gravity, the Ford rolled down the lane, which was so narrow that the Chevy could not pull entirely out of the way. The Ford encountered a small bump, jolted over it, and veered toward one drainage ditch. For a moment Ben thought the car was going to run harmlessly off to the side, but it stuttered over other ruts that turned it back on course.

The driver of the Chevy stopped, began to reverse, but the Ford was picking up a lot of speed and was bearing down too fast to be avoided. The Ford hit another bump and angled somewhat toward the left again, so at the last second the Chevy swung hard to the right in an evasive maneuver, almost dropping into the ditch. Nevertheless, the two vehicles collided with a clang and crunch of metal, though the impact wasn’t as direct or as devastating as Ben had hoped. The right front fender of the Ford hit the right front fender of the Chevy, then the Ford slid sideways to the left, as if it might come around a hundred and eighty degrees until it was sitting alongside the Chevy, both of them facing uphill. But when it had made only a quarter turn, the Ford’s rear wheels slammed into the ditch, and it halted with a shudder, perpendicular to the road, effectively blocking it.

The stricken Chevy rolled erratically backward for maybe thirty feet, narrowly missing the other ditch, then came to a halt. Both front doors were flung open. Anson Sharp got out of one, and the driver got out of the other, and neither of them appeared to have been hurt, which was pretty much what Ben had expected when the Ford had not hit them head-on.

Ben grabbed the shotgun and the Combat Magnum, turned, and ran around the side of the cabin. He sprinted across the sun-browned backyard to the toothlike granite formations from which he and Rachael had observed the place earlier. He paused for a moment to scan the woods ahead, looking for the quickest cover, then moved off into the trees, toward the same brush-flanked dry wash that he and Rachael had used before.

Behind him, in the distance, Sharp was calling his name.

 

Still caught in the spiderweb of his moral dilemma, Jerry Peake hung back a little from Sharp and watched his boss warily.

The deputy director had lost his head the moment he had seen Shadway in the blue Ford. He had gone charging up the road, shooting from a disadvantageous position, when he had little or no chance of hitting his target. Besides, he could see that the woman was not in the car with Shadway, and if they did kill the man before asking questions, they might not be able to find out where she had gone. It was shockingly sloppy procedure, and Peake was appalled.

Now Sharp stalked the perimeter of the rear yard, breathing like an angry bull, in such a peculiar state of excitement and rage that he seemed oblivious of the danger of presenting such a high profile. At several places along the edge of the woods, he took a step or two into the knee-high weeds, peering down through the serried ranks of trees.

From three sides of the yard, the forested land fell away in a jumble of rocky slopes and narrow defiles that offered countless shadowed hiding places. They had lost Shadway for the moment. That much was obvious to Peake. They should call for backup now, because otherwise their man was going to slip entirely away from them through the wilderness.

But Sharp was determined to kill Shadway. He was not going to listen to reason.

Peake just watched and waited and said nothing.

Looking down into the woods, Sharp shouted: “United States government, Shadway. Defense Security Agency. You hear me? DSA. We want to talk to you, Shadway.”

An invocation of authority was not going to work, not now, not after Sharp had started shooting the moment he had seen Ben Shadway.

Peake wondered if the deputy director was undergoing a breakdown, which would explain his behavior with Sarah Kiel and his determination to kill Shadway and his ill-advised, irresponsible, blazing-gun charge up the road a couple of minutes ago.

Stomping along the edge of the woods, wading a few steps into the underbrush again, Sharp called out: “Shadway! Hey, it’s me, Shadway. Anson Sharp. Do you remember me, Shadway? Do you remember?”

Jerry Peake took one step back and blinked as if someone had just slapped him in the face: Sharp and Shadway knew each other, for God’s sake;
knew
each other, not merely in the abstract as the hunter and the hunted know each other, but personally. And it was clear—from Sharp’s taunting manner, crimson face, bulging eyes, and stentorian breathing—that they were bitter adversaries. This was a grudge match of some kind, which eliminated any small doubt Peake might have had about the possibility that anyone above Sharp in the DSA had ordered Shadway and Mrs. Leben killed. Sharp had decided to terminate these fugitives, Sharp and no one else. Peake’s instincts had been on the money. But it did not solve anything to know he had been right when he’d smelled deception in Sharp’s story. Right or not, he was still left with the choice of either cooperating with the deputy director or pulling a gun on him, and neither course would leave him with both his career and his self-respect intact.

Sharp plunged deeper into the woods, started down a slope into the gloom beneath interlacing boughs of pine and spruce. He looked back, shouted at Peake to join in the chase, took several more steps into the brush, glanced back again and called out more insistently when he saw that Peake had not moved.

Reluctantly Peake followed. Some of the tall grass was so dry and brittle that it prickled through his socks. Burrs and bits of milkweed fluff adhered to his trousers. When he leaned against the trunk of a tree, his hand came away sticky with resin. Vines tried to trip him up. Brambles snagged his suit. His leather-soled shoes slipped treacherously on the stones, on patches of dry pine needles, on moss, on everything. Climbing over a fallen tree, he put his foot down in a teeming nest of ants; although he hurriedly moved out of their way and wiped them off his shoe, a few scaled his leg, and finally he had to pause, roll up his trousers, and brush the damn things off his badly bitten calf.

“We’re not dressed for this,” he told Sharp when he caught up with him.

“Quiet,” Sharp said, easing under a low-hanging pine branch heavy with thorn-tipped cones.

Peake’s feet almost skidded out from under him, and he grabbed desperately at a branch. Barely managing to stay on his feet, he said, “We’re going to break our necks.”