The Stefan Mendoza Trilogy Boxed Set, page 40
part #1 of Stefan Mendoza Trilogy Series
So they were both alive. Good. “And Chan?”
Ichi waved at the closest door of the building. Chan stepped through, hunched, staggering beneath the weight of a backpack that seemed cut from the same black material as the baggy pants and hooded jacket that hung off a skeletal frame. Something glowed on one of the backpack straps, and the back passenger door opened. Chan slid across the rear seat, magenta eyes glowing from what might have been a cherub face if not for all the tattoos.
Chan grunted and set the backpack aside, then strapped in. “Can’t stay long. No tracking signals. That could change.”
I suddenly wished I’d brought some air freshener to deal with Chan’s funk. On the plus side, there were no other telltale signs of drugs. Eyes were clear, upper lip wasn’t sweating, no shaking or shivering. I needed to thank Danny for what couldn’t have been an easy task. “You didn’t get here by walking. Where’s your car?”
“Taking you there.”
“Where?”
Ichi waved at something in the distance as she hurried to the passenger door, then rapped the window with a knuckle. When I unlocked the door, she slid in and smiled, dredging up uncomfortable memories of her mother Tae-hee. “Follow him.” She nodded at the windshield.
A motorcycle engine revved, and a black Super-Ninja shot past, brake light winking. The driver was slouched low, dressed in denim jacket and pants and wearing a glossy black helmet.
Danny.
We took the ramp too fast for our own good and shot back onto the highway, heading northeast. The farther out we moved from the abandoned town, the more the road improved. Even so, Danny was going too fast.
I glanced at Ichi, trying not to stare as she pulled the black jacket off. Her bodysuit was sleeveless, her arms sinuous, flawless in every way.
Her eyes narrowed. “What?”
My attention shot back to Danny. “Why’s he driving like this? What’s going on?”
From the back, Chan said, “You get any of the messages?”
“Messages? I thought you’d gone dark like me.”
“Been trying to reach you since the explosion.” Those magenta eyes, like robotic sensors, watching me from the rearview mirror. “Moved around a lot. Someone’s after us.”
“Stovall. The Agency. Whoever put all the money up for Chambliss and his little operation. Take your pick. We’re choice targets, apparently.”
Chan sneered. “Good to be loved.”
“I tried to warn you what this line of work entailed.”
Chan pulled a computing device—expensive, stylish, like the one I’d brought along to be hacked—out of the backpack on the seat. LED ear modifications glowed bright red within the black hood. “Someone else. Someone stubborn.”
“The Agency’s pretty resolute.”
“Different.” Chan flicked an image onto the dashboard display—Grid traffic.
An intricate grid, layers deep, with amber, green, red, and all shades in between. The car was a cyan dot moving across a gray line of infrastructure data pipe. At a glance, we were on a weak section of the network, and signals were building.
Chan leaned forward and highlighted the building signals. “Following us.”
“I thought you said there weren’t any tracking signals?”
“There are now.”
Great.
The Super-Ninja disappeared around a bend. Accelerating. It was reckless. Insane. We were jumping from deep shade to light, and it felt like the car’s tires were barely keeping their grip.
I was getting worried. We needed to ditch the car. “How long—”
A dark shadow flitted past overhead, answering my question.
A flying vehicle—an air limo. Sleek. Swept back. They’d found us.
I floored the accelerator, thankful now for the tall oaks climbing up from the steep cliffside, providing occasional cover and complicating airborne operations even more than normal in the mountains.
I jerked a thumb at the duffel bag in front of Ichi’s feet. “There’s a submachine gun in there. You’re qualified, right?”
“Yes.” The confidence and challenge were gone from her voice.
“It could just be a spotter, or it could be carrying snipers. If it comes back, we have to take it down.”
She dug around in the bag, finally pulling the weapon out. “It is different.”
“Yeah. Very advanced. It still shoots bullets like any other gun.”
After looking it over, she ejected the magazine, looked at the bullets, then slapped it back in. “This will take down such a vehicle?”
“You shoot the pilot, you take down the aircraft. Any aircraft.” Not technically true, but I needed her focused on what we could do, not what might not work.
The dashboard display pulsed with Chan’s feed. “More signals. Ahead. Grid’s getting better here.”
I couldn’t tell if that was supposed to be encouraging. “More signals meaning what?”
Danny leaned close to the road and disappeared around another sharp bend. I braked a little and cut into the oncoming lane to keep us on the road. Ichi was pressed against her door by the inertia. Coming around the bend answered my question before Chan could: Three cars accelerated up another ramp ahead of us, rising from another dead place festering on the mountain’s rump.
They gained the highway before I could close on them, and they accelerated toward Danny’s Super-Ninja.
“Change in plans,” I said. “We’re not going to be able to keep up with those cars. I don’t know if Danny can outrun them.”
Ichi nodded. “Shoot them?”
“Start with the one in the back. Chan, can you do anything about the air limo?”
A twitch ran across Chan’s baby face. “Already trying.”
“Great.”
Ichi lowered her window and leaned out. She fired, seemed to wrestle with the awkwardness of the effort, shifted, then fired again. I felt Norimitsu’s eyes on me. I had always sworn to protect his daughter. One bad maneuver at the speed we were going, and we were all dead.
The dark shadow passed over us again, this time larger. Closer.
A chunk of asphalt came up from the road ahead, thundering when it slammed against the hood, then again on the windshield.
“Sniper,” I said. Calm. Focused. “Just in case you weren’t sure, Chan.”
Chan’s magenta eyes flashed bright. “Hardened. Not going to be easy.”
None of it was going to be easy. I already knew that.
Ichi got off a third burst just as the trailing car went into a hard turn. Cracks splintered the driver-side windows, and the driver seemed to lose control.
The car swerved to the right, and the passenger-side tires spun out over nothing.
Then the vehicle dipped over the side just enough for the tires to catch on the rocks, to smash into something. Burst.
And the car jerked hard to the right, launching into the air. Disappearing.
The rattle and clatter of the vehicle tearing apart was a distant, welcome accompaniment to Ichi’s gunfire as she zeroed in on the next vehicle.
One of the other cars drifted back toward us.
The leading one moved up on Danny, slowly choking off the road ahead of him.
Danny took the Super-Ninja onto the narrow shoulder, then there was no space ahead for him to take, and he was gone, plunging out of sight.
“Shit!” I squeezed the steering wheel. We were outnumbered, and they had better gear.
The car that had dropped back earlier drew closer.
I yanked Ichi into the car. “Buckle up. Now.”
We rounded another bend, and ahead, the air limo hovered over a straight run. Time had run out.
I jerked hard on the wheel as we closed on the car ahead of us. It was like the one used by the assassins at the ranch. They were fast, agile. And light. Lighter than the sluggish thing I was driving. The front left of my fender dug into the rear passenger tire. The driver’s head—covered with a ski mask—came up, glanced up at the rearview mirror, but it was too late.
The car fishtailed slightly. I caught its rear passenger quarter panel with the front quarter panel on my side and pushed it into the oncoming lane, toward the cliff wall.
My windshield splintered into an intricate web, followed immediately by the rear windshield.
I lost contact with the other car. “Chan!”
“Sniper. I know. Nearly there. Defenses keep changing.”
The bullet must have come close, but Chan was absorbed in the hacking.
Thermographic imagery eliminated the worst of the obscurement of the cracked windshield, but as we sped beneath the air limo, the lead car quickly dropped back to our position. The pilot spun the air limo around, giving the sniper a shot at our rear.
I braked, and the damaged car banged into us just as the sniper fired. The round tore through our car’s roof and grazed my leg.
It’s still functional. Stay focused.
I accelerated, trying to pull away from the lead car. Impossible, even before my rental had taken so much damage.
They had their windows down, masked people with guns turning toward us.
“Get down!” I swerved into the other car, knocking the gunmen back from their windows for a moment.
But there were only so many times I could do that, and things were getting worse.
And now there was a third car speeding toward us.
Another round tore through the roof, this time catching me in the right tricep area. My arm felt like it came out of its socket and went limp.
I drove with my off hand. “Chan! Get that car out of the air!”
“Yeah,” Chan shouted. “Done!”
Something shifted in the tenor of the air limo fans’ hum, and a second later, the vehicle plunged to the road, crashing into the wounded, trailing car.
Two cars left, one of them damaged, the other accelerating toward us. Almost manageable.
Almost.
I swerved into the damaged car and tried to push it into the cliff, but all I could manage was to keep it in the oncoming lane.
Ichi must have realized the trouble I was in, because she unbuckled and leaned out the window, spraying the damaged car as the gunmen brought their weapons up again.
The driver started pushing me back, trying to get out of the other lane.
Why? The approaching car would come at me, not him. Wouldn’t it?
But it wasn’t. It was staying in the oncoming traffic lane, heading right at the other car.
The oncoming car’s door opened, and a human form shot out. A bubble inflated around the form, growing, bounding off the road, arcing out over the dropoff, bouncing up, over the rails, and out of sight.
Reckless. Insane. We were speeding straight at a head-on collision, on a narrow mountain road.
“Ichi, get in!” I reached for her with my right arm, surprised that I could even lift it.
She fell back in her seat and desperately reached for the seatbelt.
The gunmen in the other car aimed, and I hit the brakes. Hard.
The other vehicle shot forward and the driver swerved. Too late.
With a horrendous shriek of metal and tinkling of shattered glass, the vehicles crashed into each other, front ends plunging low and rear ends climbing.
We came to a stop a few feet beyond the twisted wreck.
The shattered windshield of our ambushers’ car was red with blood except where one of the gunmen had been launched through it. The top of the gunman’s head was pulped, like ground beef.
Ichi stared at me, pale, hands braced against the window frame, knuckles white, muscles bulging along her arm and shoulder.
“You okay?” I knew she wasn’t.
“I—” She blinked.
“Yeah. We’ll all need to change our pants.” A glance in the rearview mirror revealed a new look for Chan, trembling lips and wide eyes—more frightened than when the cybernetic assassins had attacked us in the hotel room. “Chan?”
Chan nodded. “New pants.”
Something rumbled toward us from the direction we’d come. I pulled my pistol, shoved the door open with some effort, then braced on unsteady legs. Real flesh would’ve been a lot less steady in that situation.
A motorcycle came around the distant bend—black, sleek. It slowed.
The rider brought it to a stop in a pool of shadow, straightened, pulled off a glossy black helmet.
Danny.
I headed back toward him, still trying to sequence everything into something approximately linear. They’d been waiting for us, known the path we’d take. Three vehicles, an air limo.
And then a fourth vehicle had rammed into one of them.
The bubble!
I ran to where I thought the bubble had gone over the mountainside. About sixty feet down, a short woman with dark hair was extricating herself from a deflated rubbery shape. She wore a black bodysuit—slick, bulging at the shoulders with armored plates.
She glanced up at me, big brown eyes alert, small mouth pursed. Her movements were choppy, almost birdlike. Full cheeks puffed out. Korean, maybe; Chinese more likely. “It’s good to see you alive, Mr. Mendoza. I wasn’t sure I had made it in time.” Spoken with hardly any accent.
“I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but who the hell are you?”
“Huiyin Lin. I’ve come to save your life.”
Chapter 10
We pushed the rental off the road and descended into the woods below while Danny and Ichi retrieved her car from a trail about ten miles out from the crash site. The car was charcoal gray, a generic Chinese model that was smaller and more sluggish than my rental. It smelled like it had just come off a used car lot, cleaners and air fresheners. But with four of us squeezed in, it was tight, and it didn’t take long for Chan’s smell to overpower everything else. Fortunately, the place Huiyin was taking us to was just over an hour away. She spent the first half of the drive alternating between sullen glares at Chan and grunting clipped directions. When I pulled onto a stretch of interstate about ten minutes out, Chan finally said we were clear.
Danny radioed that he would run decoy to be sure, then sped off.
Shadow became twilight as we pulled into a little subdivision of single-story houses with fresh-looking paint and pristine siding. The places were large for the area, the smallest probably over twenty-five hundred square feet, all of them in good repair, with well-manicured lawns. Even the streetlights—quaintly fashioned after old gaslight lamps—worked.
Money. In a region of the country that didn’t have much.
Huiyin activated the garage door using a palm-sized data device, and I pulled in. The headlights revealed gardening tools hanging from hooks, and the fresh mountain air was replaced by the stuffy smell of tools, oil, and fresh-cut grass.
I powered the car down and said, “You don’t strike me as the lawn care fanatic sort, and a cozy ranch house in the mountains of West Virginia seems even less authentic.”
Huiyin smirked. “The people I work for have many connections.”
“And who would those people be?”
“The same people Dong Jianjun was supposed to be working for.”
Chinese intelligence. “I’m assuming revenge isn’t on the menu.”
“Mr. Dong brought about his own demise.”
“And you are here to save me why?”
The dome light came on when she opened the car door. “We can speak inside, where the air is fresher.”
A quick glance at Chan caught the color where ink didn’t cover cheeks; the blow had landed.
Inside, the house was cool, the air laced with holiday aromas. We passed through a utility room into a hall with bedrooms off of it and a long dining room at the end. The aromas came from a table there, covered with stacks of plastic boxes stuffed with Christmas detritus: a disassembled tree, ornaments and a wreath, wrapping paper, lights. At the other end of the long dining room was the sort of kitchen people saved up for but could only afford in the years where they were too old and tired to appreciate it—stainless steel appliances, high-end cutlery, granite countertops, and tailor-made cabinets with a matching island. The living room off to the left of the kitchen was even more impressive—plush leather furniture, pale oak paneling, mountain stone hearth and tile.
I put the lid on one of the boxes and clamped it shut, then strode to the refrigerator, noting the expiration date on the carton of eggnog that rested on the front of the main shelf. I pulled out a bottle of beer—expensive, trendy. “So you were saving me from someone?”
Huiyin caught the refrigerator door before it closed. “Many someones.” She pulled a beer out for herself, then surprised Ichi by tossing her one.
Chan set the hefty backpack down beside the table with a thud. “Where’s the bathroom?”
Huiyin twisted the top on the bottle off, sucked away foam, then pointed the opposite direction from where we’d come. “First door on the right.” She glared at Chan’s back while sipping beer.
When the bathroom door closed, I said, “Chan’s a gifted Gridhound.”
“He needs to clean himself up.”
“One thing you have to understand about Chan: Chan is Chan. No he. No she. And the obvious isn’t really that. Not with Chan. We deal with it because we’re a team. An effective team.”
Huiyin snorted. “This job carries too many risks for unnecessary complications.”
“And this job relies on trust. I trust Chan. And Ichi. And Danny.”
Huiyin sauntered into the living room, set her beer down on an end table, peeled off her jacket, and plopped onto one of the leather chairs. A sheer, sleeveless black mesh blouse clung to her slender body. Not overly athletic, but she carried herself confidently. “You have any idea who wants you dead?”
I leaned against the wall separating kitchen and living room. “I can give you a pretty big list. My former employer sits at the top.”
“The Agency?” She took a long drink. “They have problems of their own right now.”
“They outsource a lot of cleanup work. I just assumed these were guns for hire.” I had no reason to share all my thoughts.
