Chaban adjusted his aim and saw Tempest speeding up. He squeezed off one short burst and realized he was even farther off than the first time. He looked at where his shots were landing and patiently did the calculation again.

  Tempest saw the second volley come in, and she adjusted her speed again. She let off the accelerator as a third volley came in, this one nearly raking the hood of her car. She slammed on the brakes. The bullets arched toward the Rolls, but the pace of her braking outran the arc of the bullets. A single round impacted the Rolls, a hit to the left front fender. Tempest smashed the accelerator again.

  Chaucer struggled to pull himself back up atop the truck. It was like doing a one-handed pull-up, with his right hand gripping the case. He realized he would have to let go of it. He pushed the case forward on the truck and pulled himself up with both arms.

  Saad saw the case in the open and ran at full speed, leaping over Chaucer and grabbing the case. Chaucer lunged at him, grabbing his foot. Saad used his remaining foot to kick Chaucer hard in the face. Chaucer stumbled back and almost fell into the gap between trailers.

  Now Saad, case in hand, ran forward. He hurdled the gap between the second trailer and the first, looking to the helicopter for rescue. When he looked ahead again, he saw the next road sign approaching. He cursed himself for not paying better attention. He tried to guess whether there would be room enough under the sign or if he had to leap over it. He leaped over it, continuing his run, timing it as best he could, and he leapt into the air.

  The sign was higher than it looked. It caught Saad at the knees. With a deafening crunch, he flipped end over end, and slammed into the front of the first trailer on his neck. The case clattered to a stop next to his body.

  Chaucer saw all of it. He was preparing to jump himself and aborted. He threw his legs out in front of him and slid across the roof of the second trailer. The sign came at him, inches from the roof. He wasn’t going to make it under it. But he wasn’t trying to.

  He slid right into the gap between the second trailer and the first, falling just as the sign passed overhead. It came within an inch of decapitating him.

  Chaucer lashed out both hands, trying to catch the lip of the roof ahead of him, but he missed horribly. His body smacked the back of the first trailer. As his hands flailed, looking for something to keep him from the road below, one hand caught a door latch. And miraculously, Chaucer held on.

  Chaban had missed three times. He willed himself not to miss a fourth. He yelled ahead to his chopper pilot, “Keep it steady!”

  He saw Tempest in that damn Rolls, accelerating, braking, doing a complicated and unpredictable dance to avoid oblivion. This time he would have her. He started sustained fire, and it was close. He led her slightly too little, and the shots were falling just behind the Rolls. He could see the Rolls accelerate as Tempest stepped on the gas, and he adjusted his aim, the bullets and tracer fire arcing ever forward, gobbling up the feet between them and the Rolls.

  He had her this time. Two more seconds of sustained fire and his gun would be ripping the Rolls to pieces.

  One second.

  And then the Rolls disappeared behind a delivery truck. Chaban’s bullets ripped into the side of the delivery truck, Tempest’s Rolls hidden safely behind it.

  Chaban shouted, “No!”

  Chaban fired again into the delivery truck until its driver braked to a stop. Again the Rolls was in view, but Tempest floored it and darted ahead, hiding behind another truck.

  Chaban called out to the pilot, “Up! Up! Get me over that access road!”

  CHAPTER 54

  Chaucer’s muscles screamed at him as he braced himself between the two tractor-trailers and pushed himself back up onto the roof of the first trailer. Saad was unconscious. The case remained next to him. Chaucer smiled.

  And then he saw the bridge.

  A large cement bridge, allowing traffic to pass over the highway, loomed ahead. Chaucer could tell instantly that it would leave barely any room beneath it, and it was not something one could jump over either.

  And it was coming on fast. If Chaucer ran for the case, he wouldn’t be able to get back in time. If he didn’t run for the case, that bridge would smash it into a thousand pieces, and the world would never be the same.

  Tempest saw the helicopter rising. She accelerated past the trucks, knowing that the next attack would come from above. Then she saw Chaucer, and she saw the bridge. In a single second, she made the same calculation as Chaucer. She stomped the accelerator to the floor, racing ahead of the trucks and heading for that bridge.

  Chaban swiveled the machine gun, aiming it down. He saw Tempest accelerating, and he knew that would make for a harder shot. But his bigger problem was ammunition. The belt was low. He had maybe four bursts left. He had to make them count.

  But Tempest wasn’t dodging the way he had expected her to. In fact, she was straight-up accelerating the Rolls as fast as she could go in a straight line. That made his job easier.

  He let loose a single burst.

  Paydirt.

  The burst ripped into the backseat and trunk of the Rolls. Nothing hit Tempest. Nothing disabled the car. But Chaban knew he was dialed in.

  Tempest heard the roar behind her. She felt the impact of little bits of leather and shrapnel as the bullets ate up the lush interior behind her. She ignored it, forcing it out of her mind. She had one thought, and one thought only: reach the middle of the bridge before that truck did.

  Then she saw that the access road didn’t directly feed onto the bridge. It went past the bridge to a roundabout that eventually led her onto it.

  There wasn’t enough time.

  She honked her horn, long and loud. And she got Chaucer’s attention. She pointed to the bridge ahead, and then she pointed to herself.

  Chaucer understood Tempest in a way no other human being could, but even with that said, her communication was not the clearest. She definitely pointed at the bridge. She definitely pointed at herself.

  Then Chaucer put it all together.

  She was going for the bridge.

  Why? There was only one reason. She wanted him to get the case⁠—

  And she wanted him to jump.

  An involuntary shudder passed through his body. He couldn’t even begin to calculate the odds of success for what she was proposing. But Chaucer did know Tempest better than any other human being on the planet. And he knew if she was proposing it, it was because, in that psychopath’s mind, she thought she could do it.

  Good enough for him.

  Chaucer pulled himself up onto the first trailer and ran forward. The bridge loomed ahead, growing larger with each second. He leaned forward in his run, throwing his hand down, ready to grab the handle of the case, and continued his forward momentum.

  Chaban took aim ahead of the Rolls. With the last burst from the gun, he was going to fill that section of pavement with bullets until the Rolls had to pass through it. He opened fire, ripping the road up just a dozen feet ahead of the Rolls’ current position.

  At that instant, Tempest yanked hard on the wheel. She yanked hard left, jumping the curb and heading for a gravel embankment.

  Chaban saw the maneuver. He tried to adjust his aim, but he was too late. The gun’s ammo belt ran dry.

  Chaucer’s fingers found the edge of the handle of the case. He scooped it up, gripped it tight, and continued running right for the literal brick wall coming at him at sixty-five miles an hour.

  The Rolls raced up the embankment, traveling at such speed and velocity that the gravel acted as another road. At the top of the embankment, the Rolls went airborne, sailing clear over a guardrail before smashing onto the oncoming lanes of traffic on the bridge. A Mercedes driver freaked out and drove his car directly into a concrete barrier.

  Tempest and the Rolls continued unimpeded, now racing perpendicular to the highway on an intercept course with the truck.

  Chaucer counted steps. He figured he had three more before he had to leap. In his peripheral vision, he saw Tempest in that Rolls-Royce racing into view. He thought to himself, Be right, you psycho. Be right!

  A truck in the oncoming lane came right at Tempest. Tempest swerved out of its way. But rather than correct the swerve, she kept right on turning, turning the car perpendicular to the bridge but parallel to the highway beneath. She cut across the first two lanes of traffic and plowed into the plastic divider barrels separating the different directions of traffic.

  Chaucer took his last step and leapt.

  His hands windmilled; his legs did as well as he pulled them up toward his chest, hoping to clear the railing at the edge of the bridge. His body sailed clean over the edge of the bridge, flying horizontally over the first two lanes of bridge traffic like a sixty-mile-an-hour human missile.

  And as if they had scripted it, Chaucer slammed into the backseat of the Rolls. His head and body hit the back of Tempest’s driver’s seat, throwing her into the steering wheel as she yanked hard on it, trying to avoid crashing into the far concrete wall.

  She wasn’t quite so lucky this time.

  The Rolls impacted the wall hard, at a forty-five-degree angle. The front right fender accordioned, the front axle bent. Part of the engine block crumpled into the passenger side of the car, and all twenty airbags in the Rolls went off.

  But the Rolls kept rolling.

  Tempest pulled a knife from her belt, cut the airbag in front of her, and she could see Chaucer, dazed, staring back at her. “I’m gonna get you registered in the stuntman’s union, you maniac. You got the case?”

  Chaucer was still out of it. He lifted his right hand, curious what the answer would be. There, still gripped tightly in his hand, was the stainless steel case.

  Tempest steered the wounded Rolls back into the right lane of traffic, and pulled it off the bridge.

  CHAPTER 55

  Chaban was speechless. He could hardly believe what he had just seen. He had no gun. No means of stopping them. He yelled to the pilot to set her down, but in his mind he knew the Rolls would be long gone, limping into the densest part of downtown Kuwait City and disappearing down a narrow alley.

  The Red Serpent was gone.

  Jefferson received the call at 2 a.m. He was awake for it, as was his team. “Chaucer?”

  “We got it.”

  Several of Jefferson’s team cheered behind him until he put up a hand to shut it down. Jefferson knew as well as anyone that an operation wasn’t over until it was over.

  Chaucer said, “We need an exfil.”

  Jefferson heard Tempest’s voice in the background. “You’re goddamn right we do!”

  Chaucer replied more calmly, “You know our situation. We’re in a hostile-rich environment, and there’s no way we could know who to trust.”

  Jefferson said, “Let us bring you in. Two-eight-one Raman Boulevard. There’s an alley next to it. Red brick stairs going down to a basement. You get yourselves there, and we’ll get you the rest of the way.”

  Chaucer hung up the phone and sat back in the narrow private room of the worst backpacker’s hostel in Kuwait City. It was a trick he had picked up from Tempest. Lots of agencies had concierges and front-desk agents on payrolls. But backpacker hostels? They ran to the beat of their own drum. They were often the unlooked-for item.

  Tempest sat up beside the mirror in the room, which was barely larger than a hand mirror, as she braided her hair.

  Chaucer just shook his head. “You’re braiding your hair.”

  “So?”

  “We’ve got the end of the world sitting on this bed, and you’re braiding your hair.”

  Tempest misinterpreted, smiling. “Is it making you horny? I mean, I could get into that. The power!”

  Chaucer shook his head. “No. What I’m saying is, how can you be taking things so calmly?”

  Tempest shrugged. “I’m not. We’re in a backpacking hostel. I’m looking like a backpacker. You should too. You look like a total square.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  Tempest came away from the mirror and sat beside Chaucer on the bed.

  She put a hand on his leg, less for comfort than as an invitation. “But you are the most powerful square on the planet! Seriously, if you’re into a little role-play, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

  Tempest batted her long eyelashes at him, opening her eyes wider than he’d ever seen, and affected a childlike voice. “Please, sir, what would I have to do to get you to save the world instead of destroying it?”

  It was a tempting offer. Chaucer had half a mind to take her up on it, but he knew he was too stressed to let his guard down. “If it wasn’t the Venture…”

  Tempest shrugged and returned to the mirror and her braiding. “You do realize that’s every day. Every day of our lives, anyone in our life could mean us harm. Sometimes you’ve just got to live, Chaucer. Also? Nobody, nobody, has turned down sex with me as much as you have. You could give a girl a complex.”

  Five minutes later, Tempest’s braids were done. Ten minutes later, she had stolen a backpack and a Tommy Bahama shirt from one of the adjoining dorms. She stuck the case in the backpack and pulled the Tommy Bahama shirt over Chaucer. She stepped back and took a good look at him.

  “Still square?”

  Tempest squinted. “Not exactly. You might be a rhombus.”

  “Math jokes?”

  “See how far I’ve fallen. No, seriously, I’m going to scout the safe house out. I’ll have you waiting nearby with the case.”

  Chaucer pursed his lips. “Just go easy. These are the good guys.”

  “Never met such an animal. You’ll have to introduce me sometime.”

  CHAPTER 56

  Chaucer and Tempest caught a taxi—not in front of the hostel; Tempest wouldn’t allow it. Instead, they zigzagged five blocks and then caught a taxi.

  As they headed for the safe house, Tempest grew more serious. “It’s not that I don’t trust Jefferson and his crew. It’s like you said. Our opposition is different. Jefferson’s floating black site was infiltrated. What are the odds the rest of his org is?”

  “Greater than zero.”

  Tempest nodded. “Greater than zero.”

  “What about the case?”

  Tempest considered it. “Good question.”

  They got out of the cab five blocks from the site of the safe house. The neighborhood was still within the confines of Kuwait City, but they were definitely on the outskirts. The buildings here maxed out at three stories. On their walk, Chaucer spied a Filipino and Pakistani food place next to one another. That sealed it. This was a neighborhood where the foreign workers lived, the ones well off enough to afford their own housing.

  That was why Chaucer and Tempest didn’t get the stares Chaucer was expecting. This was why it was an excellent location for a safe house.

  Chaucer grabbed some type of pupusa at the Filipino place as Tempest headed the rest of the way. There were no words spoken between the two, just a half head-nod from Tempest.

  Tempest found the address, a sand-colored three-story building exactly like every other one on this block. She found the alley right beside it and a red brick stairway to a basement room. Entirely unremarkable.

  Tempest turned her head left and right. To the outside observer, she was cracking her neck. But for Tempest, she was doing one final check and preparing for anything that might come.

  She descended the stairs and rapped twice on the black metal door with the small peephole. Less than five seconds later, the door creaked open. The man inside was Arab. What flavor of Arab, Tempest couldn’t tell. His eyes darted past her up the stairs, checking to see if she was alone, and then he waved her in.

  No name check, thought Tempest.

  Then she tamped down her paranoia, realizing that her face would be completely recognizable to Jefferson’s crew.

  Inside was a narrow hallway lit by red lights. To preserve night vision, Tempest thought. At the end of the hall was another steel door and a security station.

  The Arab stepped into the security station, looked at his computer screen, and asked, “I’m supposed to be expecting two.”

  “The second will be along.”

  The Arab stared at her again. “We’re expecting two.”

  Tempest stared right back at him. “We’re not a package deal. You take me. Then, later, you take him. This isn’t calculus.”

  The Arab shrugged. He pushed a metal tray out to her. “I’m going to need your weapons.”

  Tempest laughed. “Yeah? Well, I’m going to need a butler who works for encouragement, but it’s not going to happen.”

  The Arab didn’t budge. “You’ve been in a safe house before, Ms. MacLaren. You know the drill. No weapons in the safe house.”

  “No weapons but yours,” Tempest corrected him. “Look, call your superiors and let them know that due to special circumstances, I’m taking exception to their rule.”

  The Arab went for the phone, but then the inner metal door opened. The woman standing in the doorway wore a neat, elegant dress—white, far more formal than the usual safe-house attire. She looked to be a mix of Caucasian and Arab, and was quite beautiful. Tempest expected she had been pulled away from something far nicer than this detail.