The silver sedan’s gas tank detonated. It drove on like that for fifty yards before skidding hard to the right, running off the road and rolling end over end for twenty-five yards through an uncultivated field.
Court was thankful, but he held his applause; he was in the backseat of a car with no driver, racing towards traffic at ninety miles per hour and, just as he started to move back to the front seat, he heard the telltale thump thump of a blown tire below him.
He dove forward through the seats and turned off the cruise control, then directed the vehicle out of the oncoming lane.
He climbed back into the driver’s seat and pulled a U-turn, racing on the flat tire back to where Kent lay in the road.
Court skidded to a stop next to the still body, climbed out, and ran up to him. He saw that Kent’s right leg was all but severed at the thigh; blood poured out of his ripped pants leg.
Kneeling down, Court began running his hands through the man’s clothing.
“Hang on. Don’t you fucking die! You better not die, dude.”
Court found what he was looking for. He pulled Kent’s phone out of a front pants pocket and examined it. It was an iPhone 8, which caused him to look back up to Kent’s face. It was white as a sheet and his eyes were slowly rolling back into his head.
“No!” Court shouted, then dropped the phone onto the highway and began applying chest compressions. “Come on, Kent! Hang on!”
The first passersby came running up, their vehicle parked in the road to the west. A husband and wife, both in their sixties, appeared next to Court. The husband had a small first-aid kit he’d taken out of the boot of his little car.
The woman said, “We’ve called for an ambulance! The others are dead. What can we do to help?”
Court didn’t answer; he just kept pumping Kent’s chest, virtually as hard as he could, while watching the man’s eyes.
The husband said, “He’s bleedin’ from the leg, mate. We need a tourniquet!” The man began ripping off his belt.
Court kept up the compressions, ignoring the massive wound in the man’s leg, and finally he saw Kent’s eyes flicker. They were unfixed, but he was definitely alive.
The husband said, “Let me get in there and put this around—”
Court stopped the chest compressions.
“Keep it up, mate. He’s not going to make it unless—”
Court lifted the phone off the ground, grabbed Kent’s limp right hand, and held his thumb to the home button.
“What the hell you doin’?” the husband asked.
Almost instantly the phone unlocked.
He opened the phone, used Kent’s finger again to allow him to change the password on the device. Court pushed “1” six times, confirmed it by repeating it, and then rose from his knees and stood over the horribly wounded man. The husband was still kneeling, working on the makeshift tourniquet on Court’s right, the woman busy opening the first-aid kit on his left.
Court looked down to Kent lying in the road. “You can die now, motherfucker. Don’t need you anymore.”
The two Brits looked up at him in shock, but Court didn’t notice. He’d already turned away, heading back towards the Audi.
The iPhone Touch ID sensor uses the capacitive signal from the owner’s finger to unlock the device, and the signal only comes from the electric pulses made by a living body. Court knew if Kent was dead he’d have a hard time getting into the man’s phone, and since he’d not accomplished much of anything in the last several hours as far as recovering the banker, he knew he needed to risk going back to the injured killer to try to get it.
Sounds of sirens seemed to appear from nowhere, and they grew in all directions.
The Audi was virtually dead now, both the front and the back glass were shattered, and the right rear tire was shredded with pieces lying all along the highway behind, so Court left it and continued sprinting to the east, pulling out the CIA phone and cables from his pocket as he ran.
Behind him smoke and fire roiled from the Mercedes in the field along the A1, and somewhere behind that there was a gray Charger, presumably out of commission in the middle of the highway and filled with dead or wounded. Ahead Court saw a gas station a quarter of a mile off, and he made for it as fast as he could as the effects of adrenaline began to wear off. He felt the exhaustion taking hold, but he pressed on, hoping he could get the hell out of there before every single police officer in the East Midlands arrived at what must have been the biggest violent crime committed in this part of the UK in decades.
He wasn’t happy about what had happened, not psyched at all about killing multiple carloads of men. It was not that he felt bad about the shooters, not in the least, but he understood he’d pressed his luck with all the gunplay, and only by undeserved fortune had he survived.
He told himself he couldn’t just continue bouncing from one gun battle to another, one car chase after the next, from impossibly close call to impossibly close call.
He was good, many said he was the best, but Court knew better than to believe all the hype about his skills. He was well aware he was operating on borrowed time, and if he continued shooting it out with every bad actor he came into contact with, time would run out sooner rather than later.
As he ran through a trash-strewn field near the gas station he slowed, stopped, and then dropped to his knees.
He vomited the contents of his stomach onto the dirt, puked again until he retched, and then climbed heavily up to his feet. He felt drained, ill, worn through, and defeated.
He’d gotten nothing out of this morning save for the phone. He had to get some actionable intelligence from it, and that meant he’d have to work fast.
Court shook away his doubt, his recognition that his next move might be his last, and he began walking again towards the gas station.
He glanced at his watch. It was time to steal his fourth vehicle of the day, and the day was still young.
CHAPTER 15
Suzanne Brewer sat in her office more pissed off this morning than usual.
She’d come into the office early to prepare for her seven a.m. meeting regarding the disappearance of a protected code-word asset during an attack on a CIA safe house. The meeting went as she’d expected; no one there was read in on Anthem, per Matt Hanley, and Hanley hadn’t bothered to attend. So Brewer took the heat from ten execs from Support and Personnel, none of whom knew any of the victims from the night before in Great Falls, but all of whom would find themselves roped into the inevitable hot wash and cleanup of the incident.
Every one of these execs was already feverishly working on the upcoming Five Eyes conference in the United Kingdom, with most of them flying out within the next couple of days. Great Falls was a disaster even without the impending trip, of course, but with their schedules already full, to a man and to a woman they all held Brewer accountable for their added stress.