AMIAN CRANE’S BLACK SUV was moving out in front of us. I started up the car and pulled out after him. A line of cop cars swept by at speed. I had to swerve and brake hard. The SUV made a huge U-turn, leaning hard like it would roll. It shook as it shot by in the opposite direction.
He was headed into the oncoming traffic. What choice did I have, the cops weren’t able to turn fast enough to get after him. I swerved, cutting across a wail of horns and flashing lights. Driving the wrong way on a one-way street in heavy traffic, I went after him.
He cut through the traffic. Cars, trucks, cabs, even a bus hastily veered hard to the sides of the road. He left an angry tangle of vehicles in his wake, and a path opened behind him. He wasn’t too hard to follow, but he had to have seen us by now.
He turned south on Fifth, which was the right way at least. He made the next right. Traffic got in my way now, as well as the streams of soccer fans. They cheered, shouted and sang as they strayed into the road. The black SUV pulled farther ahead.
I lost sight of him momentarily as he pulled ahead. He was several car lengths away when he turned onto Sixth. My pursuit driving skills were being tested to the limit, but Horse looked impressed. Even now, my confusing feelings about him intruded.
I gripped the wheel and leaned forward as I made the turn. “It must be him,” my mouth was tight. “It has to be the SAC who sent Schultz out to pick up the phone in the park.”
“I know he was your colleague and all, but what’s wrong with the simpler explanation?” his voice was dark but not harsh. Feeling him near was reassuring. “You don’t want to think it was Schultz…”
My teeth clenched. “It can’t have been.” I had to concentrate, so I couldn’t explain now.
“I know you say that, but…”
The SAC’s car was pulling away. I was in danger of losing him. I gunned the engine. It didn’t look much, but Schultz had kept this old, brown sedan in pretty goods order.
In the tension, the look he flashed gave me such a raging flash of heat that it took me some effort to stay concentrated.
I told him what I could. “When you were on the phone with El Guapo,” I said as she swerved, struggling to keep visual contact with the SAC’s car, “Did you hear him talking to me?”
“What,” he scowled, “No.”
“Because that’s who I was talking to.” There was a gap in the traffic and I accelerated. It got me a couple of lengths closer, but I was still at least four vehicles behind him. “At the same time as you were on the phone with El Guapo, Schultz was tracing the call for me.”
The SAC turned off Sixth. I stabbed the accelerator pedal, fighting to keep him in sight.
“You had my call traced?” I didn’t want to have this conversation now.
My head shook, “I was having him trace the other end of the call, mountain man. I knew where you were.”
“You were trying to have El Guapo tracked?” He made it sound like some kind of a mortal sin. Which I thought was rich coming from someone like him. “And where was he?”
“I think he was in the SAC’s office.”
He said, “I know everything points to him being your SAC, alright, but I heard his voice earlier, remember?” I was finally catching up with Crane’s SUV. Horse said, “Their voices are different. They’re not the same guy.”
“Well, he literally can’t have been Schultz.”
Loud horns honked from behind us. Two black vans, one after the other, jammed through the traffic and cut ahead of us, after the SAC. At the same time Vesper made the turn to follow, they had drawn alongside the SUV.
From the vans’ open side doors, smoke curled above the sparks and pops of heavily suppressed automatic gunfire.
A small object was thrown hard from the back van. It broke the back window of the black SUV. I braked hard. Horrified, but I knew what was coming.
The two vans accelerated away as black smoke and orange fire burst out of the black SUV. The back of it leaped off the ground as the car exploded. Doors flew outward.
I swerved. A turn was coming right up and I gunned Schultz’s car smoothly into it. My heart pounded. It was almost enough to make me shake. The vans were the same hit squad that destroyed the Jeep near Washington Square. I was sure of it.
And I’d just seen the second of my two closest colleagues brutally murdered. I drove, not thinking too much about where I was going. I remembered my pursuit training. I kept to the evasion techniques by the book. There was no doubt I was in shock. It would take a while to know we were safe, though.
Alongside us and peeling off in a hurry, two black, unmarked sedans flashed red and blue lights behind their grilles. The back window of the car between them was winding up. From the darkness the narrowed eyes of police Commissioner Paul Butler could have cut me in two.
“Here,” Horse’s voice startled me. It was firm, but there was concern in it, too. “There’s an underground car park, just there.”
It was the garage for a hotel. That gave me an idea. I took the car down the ramp. A uniformed valet stepped smartly to stand by and open my door. I took the memory stick off the fob before I got out and handed him the car key. I didn’t know for sure if we’d been followed. The wait was uncomfortable while he got the ticket for me.
I asked him, “Can we get into the hotel from inside the garage?”
“Of course.” His professional smile was a bright tip magnet. “If you’ll just follow me.”
He took us to an elevator. Horse tipped the boy and got a card from him.
Up in the lobby, I found a concierge and asked her if we could use the business center. She was about to ask about my room number and I let her have a look at my FBI ID. Her manner shifted. In a nice hotel like this, law enforcers may not always be a welcome surprise.
She took us to the quiet, plush business center and unlocked a computer for me. I told her to bill me the standard rate for half an hour. She said there was no need. I insisted. She told me the amount and I gave her that plus fifteen percent.
She smiled thinly but her mood didn’t improve much. Horse asked if she would bring a pot of coffee and a plate of sandwiches. At the sound of his voice, her chin lifted and she brightened up. As she left, she directed a little smile his way through the closing door. I kind of wanted to jab her in the eye with a monogrammed hotel pen.
I set to work. The memory stick was jammed with folders, all of them had the names of people and strands in our investigation. All of them contained many documents. Testimony, records of evidence, citations from public records. Schultz had pulled accounts ledgers, scanned documents, photographs and some video.
There was more evidence here than I had seen since I arrived on the team and all of it was methodically organized.
There wasn’t going to be time to read any amount of it now. The main thing I had to do was to make a secure backup. I had an anonymous cloud account. The data would be encrypted there. I figured that would be safe enough for the time being.
The hotel business center’s computers were as comfortingly fast as the chairs were soft and luxurious. While the files were backing up, a name caught my eye. Police Commissioner Paul Butler.
The file had material that dated back more than ten years.
Horse read over my shoulder. “Wow!” Names, dates, amounts of transactions. Payments. Some of them very big payments. One had the name of a mobster. A don who was notoriously gunned down in the street a few years back. I would have happily bet that the date of the payment was very close to the time of his murder.
While the file was still uploading, I set up an email with multiple recipients. Horse saw what I was doing. “Insurance?” He grinned.
“Yeah, something like that.” In spite of the day, feeling him near and hearing the velvety soft drag of his voice close to me, it warmed me up inside.