Six did likewise, then turned to look. The four pursuit cars were nearly on top of them, no more than fifty meters back, splitting apart in an encircling maneuver as they screeched to a halt. From behind him, up at street level, another set of screeching brakes joined into the cacophony.

  Because he was listening for it, Six heard the soft chummpf. A small canister arced over their car and dropped onto the pavement between them and the approaching police.

  And with a brilliant flash the canister erupted with heat and fire and a billowing cloud of dense smoke.

  Six didn’t wait to see any more. Ducking out of the car, he dodged around the open door and scrambled up to the street above. The general was waiting there, his car deftly inserted into one of the few sections of undamaged pavement left. Six caught a glimpse of the spent single-shot grenade launcher as the other tossed it into the drainage ditch.

  Then he and Seven were at the car and the general was thrusting a second launcher at him. “Upwind,” the other reminded him.

  Six turned his face into the wind and fired at a spot perhaps five meters away. Again there was a flash and burst of smoke, this cloud softer and gentler than the red phosphorus they’d used to block the police.

  But it was just as thick. Even as Seven yanked open the rear door, the wind blew the smoke into a concealing cocoon around them.

  ~

  “Damn!” one of the cops snarled as Delgado charged out into the cold morning air. “What the—?”

  “Back up—back up!” someone else cut in urgently. “That’s red phosphorus. Burns like hell.”

  “Get away from it,” Delgado ordered, craning his neck to look toward the expanding cloud at the far end of the lot. He had just a glimpse of a car sitting up at street level between two of the orange barriers before the phosphorus smoke screen rose high enough to block his view. “Can anyone see them?”

  “Richards—northeast lot,” another voice chimed in. “I can. Oh, hell—they’ve laid down another smoke screen over themselves. We’ve got collisions. Traffic’s going nuts.”

  “Get some cars up there,” Delgado ordered, making for one of the police cars idling beside the curb. “Move those semis—we’ve got to block the street before they just drive away. Where the hell is the chopper?”

  “Coming up and over,” a new voice put in as Delgado jumped into the front seat and jammed the gearshift lever into drive. “We’ve got the smoke screens in sight. What are we looking for?”

  “Dark-blue full-size car in the south-bound lane,” Richards answered. “Looked like a late-model Buick, but I couldn’t tell for sure before the smoke rolled in.”

  “Get ready to watch it roll out again,” the chopper pilot said grimly. “I’m going in.”

  “Watch yourself,” Delgado warned, accelerating across the lot toward the southeast exit, the one that would get him out onto the street ahead of the escape car. The semi blocking that access was starting to back out of the path now, and out of the corner of his eye he saw two more unmarked squad cars racing from different directions to join him. With luck, maybe they could get ahead of the Buick before it made its break for freedom.

  That moment would probably be coming sooner than the murderers had anticipated. Overhead, the chopper came to a halt directly over the second smoke cloud. With casual disregard for his own safety and whatever FAA regulations applied, the pilot dropped straight down.

  The smokescreen had been drifting south in response to the northerly breeze. Now, suddenly, it was like something inside a high-speed blender. The cloud flattened and bulged outward in the downdraft from the chopper blades, tendrils of it flying in all directions.

  There it was: a dark-blue Buick, sitting in the torn-up lane between a pair of barriers.

  Empty.

  The murderer and his accomplices were gone.

  27

  Delgado cursed, swinging out of the lot and up onto the street. He accelerated hard toward the Buick—going the wrong way, but of course all southbound traffic had come to a sudden crunching halt behind the Buick when the smoke canister went off. He braked to a halt a dozen yards away, slammed the lever into park, and shoved open his door. As he drew his gun, the other cars arrived, stopped beside and behind him in street-blocking positions. “Lieutenant?” one of the cops called.

  “Cover me,” Delgado ordered. Bracing himself, he slid out from behind the relative protection of the car and headed forward, squinting against the downdraft from the chopper.

  He’d been wrong about the car being empty. Its occupants were long gone, but the package sitting on the dashboard more than made up for it. “They left us a going-away present,” he called into his radio, his chest tight as he stared at the collection of red sticks and the small mechanism holding it together. “Looks to be a bomb.”

  “Get out of there,” Garcia’s voice called sharply. “Winslow, get that chopper up.”

  “Easy,” Delgado said, leaning forward for a closer look at the wires disappearing beneath the dashboard as the helicopter lifted away. “I don’t see a timer, so it probably won’t go off on its own. But it’s wired into something under the dashboard, probably the security system. They’ve also added a bunch of suction-cup breakage sensors to the windows. My guess is that messing with the car will set it off.”

  Garcia cursed feelingly. “Smith, Kelsey, get a team together and block off traffic in both directions back at the cross streets,” he ordered. “U-turn all the cars already inside the box. We don’t want anyone getting nervous and bumping the Buick on their way out.”

  “Better yet, route them all into the mall parking lot,” Delgado suggested as a sudden thought struck him. “Away from the booby trap, but someplace where we can search them.”

  “You think the killer’s in one of those vehicles?”

  “He has to be somewhere,” Delgado pointed out. “Winslow, Harrington, did either of you see anything?”

  “I didn’t,” the chopper pilot said.

  “Me, neither,” the observer added hesitantly. “But that cloud was pretty big, and spread damn fast. Someone might have sneaked out the east side before we got over there.”

  “Jawarski, get your squad checking the businesses on the east side of the street,” Garcia ordered. “And throw a cordon around the area—they may try to steal a car.”

  “Or already have one standing by,” Delgado said, giving the Buick one last look as he backed away. “We’ll want to block all those parking lots, make sure no one gets out.”

  “Right,” Garcia ground out. “If we’re going to be unpopular, we might as well be unpopular with the whole damn city. Come on, people—move it.”

  ~

  The detective—it was Delgado himself—backed away, looking rather pathetic as he waved his gun at basically nothing. Pathetic, even comical, Six decided as he squinted through the fiber optic eyepiece. He hadn’t been able to hear more than bits and pieces of the conversation, but it was clear that the police had not a single clue as to what was going on.

  Seven, sitting stiffly beside him beneath the collapsible framework that filled much of the interior back seat space, was obviously thinking the same thing. “Not very smart, are they?” he murmured.

  “They’re smart enough,” the general put in quietly from the driver’s seat before Six could answer. “The first reaction of trained men in an unexpected situation is always to fall back on standard routine. Given sufficient time, they’ll pause and think things through. We simply have to make sure not to give them that time.”

  “Yes, sir,” Six said. Personally, he still thought the police were just stupid. “How long?”

  “Fifteen minutes,” the general said. “Just long enough for them to shift their focus elsewhere. Six, tell me what you can see at the mall. Seven, try to locate the helicopter.”

  “Yes, sir,” Six said, setting the windshield eyepiece back into his lap and selecting the one connected to the right-hand-window suction cup. Making their spy-line system look like a set of breakage sensors had been a stroke of genius on the general’s part. Not that the police were likely to appreciate it.

  Given the fish-eye distortion and the distance between them and the mall, Six wasn’t sure exactly what he was supposed to see. Their first smoke screen, the phosphorus one, had dissipated, leaving more cops standing around waving their guns uselessly. “Helicopter’s off to the east,” Seven reported. “Seems to be hovering.”

  “Can you see where they’ve blocked off traffic behind us?” the general asked.

  “Looks to be at the last cross street,” Seven said, changing eyepieces. “Yes, they’re directing traffic away from this section. They’re also directing the southbound traffic in here with us out through the northbound lanes.”

  “They’re doing the same at this end,” the general said. “Five minutes, and the way ahead of us should be clear.”

  Six smiled. The police would block the northbound lanes ahead of them, of course. But with the southbound traffic already blocked behind them, there would be no reason to do anything more with the southbound lanes. Once the rest of the trapped traffic had been cleared out, there would be nothing between them and the anonymity of the city but the barrier across the other half of the road. The cops manning that barricade would probably be too stunned as they drove past to even draw their guns.

  Then, at the mall entrance, Six caught a flicker of new movement.

  “Keep an eye out for a police truck,” the general continued. “We’ll need to move before the bomb squad arrives.”

  “Something’s happening at the mall,” Six reported. “Looks like they’re bringing out a body bag on a stretcher.”

  The atmosphere beneath the Cloak went suddenly tense. “How many?” the general asked.

  “One so far,” Six said, squinting into the eyepiece and silently cursing the distortion.

  “Any sign of an oxygen tank?” the general asked. “Or an IV, or other life-support equipment?”

  “None that I can see,” Six said. “Two ambulances are pulling up. Here comes a second stretcher . . . and a third. Body bags, all of them. They’re loading them into the ambulances.”

  He heard the general’s long, tired sigh. “Then the final question mark is gone.”

  “Assuming she didn’t talk,” Seven cautioned.

  “She didn’t,” the general said. “I’m convinced she never realized the significance of what she knew. But in time she might have. We couldn’t afford to take that risk.”

  “No, sir,” Six said, vaguely surprised that the general seemed to feel it necessary to justify his actions.

  Still, Six had felt the same twinge of guilt as he pulled the trigger. Perhaps the general was simply making sure his men fully understood the reasons for the order they’d just carried out. “Not with Hooker, either,” he added.

  “Hooker earned his own execution.”

  “Of course,” Six agreed.

  “Let’s hope he didn’t talk, either,” Seven muttered.

  “Again, he didn’t,” the general said. “That knowledge was his only bargaining chip. He wouldn’t have given it away so quickly. Now, he never will.”

  “Yes, sir,” Six said. “The ambulances are pulling away. Not running with lights.”

  “There’s no need to hurry,” the general said. “The morgue is always open.”

  ~

  The ambulance pulled away from the curb; and with a harsh ripping sound that sounded like it was right in her ears, someone pulled open the zipper of Angie’s body bag. She opened her eyes, squinting against the light, to find Talbot leaning low over her, swaying a little as the ambulance made a turn. “You okay?” he asked.

  Angie closed her eyes again. What kind of answer was there to a question like that? What kind of answer could there be when you’d been scared, then terrified, then in agony, then literally face to face with what had happened back there?

  What could you say after you’d lain in someone else’s blood and your own vomit?

  “Sure,” she said, her voice sounding as dead as her soul felt. “I’m fine.”

  “I’m sorry, Angie,” he said quietly. “Sorry for all of it.”

  Almost involuntarily, she opened her eyes again. There’d been an unexpected edge of pain in his voice, an emotion she wouldn’t have expected in a professional like Talbot.

  She hadn’t been mistaken. The pain was visible in his face, too. “Going in there was my idea,” she reminded him, feeling an obscure need to offer comfort. “It’s not your fault.”

  “Unfortunately, it’s all my fault,” he said. “Someone once said that sooner or later in this business you run into someone cleverer and stronger and more ruthless than you are. Whoever these guys are, they beat me hands down on at least two of the three.”

  “Not necessarily,” came a muffled voice from the other stretcher, the words accompanied by the ripping of another body bag zipper. “They’ve been clever enough,” Ross continued, working his way awkwardly out of the bag and into a sitting position. The sight of his blood-soaked shirt made Angie want to throw up again, even knowing it was fake. “But we haven’t exactly been slouches in that department, either.” He thumped his chest.

  “Yeah, right,” Talbot growled. “Except that those vests were fifty percent luck and thirty percent the grace of God and the Secret Service. Did you hear what Barry said about those slugs?”

  “It was hard to miss,” Ross said grimly. “Teflon-coated expanders, cop-killer variety. Guaranteed to punch through bullet-proof vests like they were cardboard.”

  Angie stared at him, feeling the blood draining from her face. “But—”

  “Standard bullet-proof vests, that is,” Ross hastened to add. “That’s what that plaster-mold procedure last night was all about. Lyman talked the Secret Service into fitting us with a set of the same turtle things the President wears when there’s extra danger. Uncomfortable, but they work.”

  “Yes,” Angie murmured. “A shame you didn’t make one for Scott.”

  The look on Talbot’s face made her immediately wish she hadn’t said that. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

  “Yes, you did,” Talbot said. “And you’re right. That was my fault, too.”

  “It was as much mine as yours, Madison,” Ross put in. “Don’t forget, I backed your argument that if they wanted to kill him they’d have done so already.”

  “Fine; so we’re both idiots,” Talbot countered. “Pretty cold comfort.”

  “He must also have thought they wouldn’t kill him,” Angie pointed out. “Otherwise, he wouldn’t have shown up.”

  Talbot shrugged. “Maybe.”

  Angie leaned up onto one elbow, not an easy maneuver in the form-fitting armor she was wearing, and looked around the ambulance. The thought of Kingsley’s body in here with her was suddenly chilling. “Where is—you know? The—?”

  “It’s in the other ambulance,” Talbot said. “I didn’t think we wanted . . . Anyway, there wasn’t enough room for all three of you in here.”

  “Speaking of realism, we’re sorry about the body bags,” Ross put in. “But these guys would certainly have had a spotter in the crowd. We needed them to think they succeeded.”

  “I understand,” Angie said. Which wasn’t to say she’d liked the idea, then or now. Being zipped up inside a body bag was about as gruesome a sensation as she’d ever experienced, just one step shy of being sealed in a casket. “What happens now?”

  “You’re going into hiding in an FBI safe house,” Ross said. “Your parents are being officially notified of your death right now, and privately told that you’re all right.”

  “You put Ng on that?” Ross asked.

  Talbot nodded. “He’ll drive them up here for identification of the body and the rest of the official hoops. After that, they’ll go into seclusion for a period of mourning, probably at the same safe house. Something similar is being done with your brother and sister.”

  Angie felt her throat tense up as a horrible thought struck her. “You said identification of the body. Does that mean I’ll have to—at the morgue—?”

  “No, no,” Talbot assured her hastily. “That’s all just for the benefit of the media. Your parents will basically go into a room with Ng and Chief Garcia, and a little while later they’ll come out.”

  “And while they’re doing that, we’ll be sifting through Hooker’s private papers,” Ross added. “Looking for his insurance policy.”

  “His what?” Angie asked, frowning.

  “The stuff shady people tuck away to keep the bedbugs from biting, if you get my drift,” Ross explained. “Notes, important documents, damning evidence. Hooker’s bound to have left something like that behind.”

  “Not that it matters,” Talbot said with a sigh. “I got a call while you were being loaded into the body bags. Kingsley’s apartment is currently going up in smoke.”

  “Hell,” Ross murmured. “Anyone hurt?”

  “I don’t know,” Talbot said. “Hopefully, most of them are at work, and it sounded like they’ve kept the blaze confined to Kingsley’s end of the building. But any dirt he’s got on his buyers is long gone.”

  “Someone cleverer and stronger and more ruthless,” Ross murmured. “Maybe you were right.”

  “Certainly on the ruthless part,” Talbot agreed darkly. “Did Hooker say anything useful before the shooting started?”

  “Nothing worth listening to,” Ross said. “Mostly just asking Angie if she was all right and who the hell I was. You can listen to the tape later—”

  “Hold it,” Talbot interrupted, digging out his phone and flipping it open. “Talbot. What is it?”

  For a long minute he listened in silence. Angie watched him, her throat tightening again as his face slowly went rigid. “Sure,” he said at last, his voice low. “Thanks.”