Redheads (38 page)

“Jesus, Chris! Get us out of here!”

“I’m trying,” he said, his voice low and calm.

The black car was farther in the distance now because Chris had gotten a head start in the new direction. The rental car’s engine was roaring louder now without the muffler. She could feel the acceleration pressing her against the seat. They shot through a red light without slowing.

“I’ll try to lose them in the park.”

She turned to see out the front, gripping the inner handle of the door. They were pushing past ninety; the parked cars on the side of the road came up and shot by in a blur. There were loud bangs underneath the car. Either something was breaking loose down there, or the car was getting hit by shots they couldn’t hear.

“Try to stay down.”

She ducked low in the seat and watched. They were coming to another red light, skidding as Chris hit the brakes in preparation for the turn. There was a Shell station on the other side of the intersection, the area around its pumps lit in bright fluorescent light. A police cruiser was there, the cop just stepping into the car after coming out of the mini-mart. Chris laid his hand on the horn and made a right turn, taking them into the park at fifty miles an hour. At that speed the car could barely hold the turn. They careened into the left lanes of the road they’d turned onto and mounted the curb before Chris corrected by cranking the steering wheel to the right. The car jumped off the curb and slammed back onto the road. Chris followed the curves and brought them onto a smaller road that led into the park. Now there were no streetlights. He revved the engine, and again Julissa felt the press of acceleration as they picked up speed. She couldn’t believe they made the turn without flipping.

She was trying to get back up to look out the rear window when she heard the siren.

“The cop?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

Chris raced through the park, working mostly west through the stands of dark eucalyptus and past the old polo field. The police car was catching up and she realized it was because Chris was slowing down. They came down a hill and rounded a long curve through a meadow where she could see the road behind them for a quarter of a mile.

“They back there?” Chris asked.

“I don’t see them. Just the cop.”

The police car was nearly on their back bumper now. They heard the officer shouting through the bullhorn mounted to the squad car’s siren, telling them to pull over.

“They must’ve hung back on Lincoln when they saw the cop come after us.”

“What do we do?” Julissa asked.

Before he could answer, another piece of the exhaust system broke loose from the car’s undercarriage. Still leaning to look backwards, Julissa saw the trail of sparks shooting back. They were dragging something made of metal, and as she braced herself, it broke off. She felt the hard jolt as it went under one of the back tires. Behind them, the cop swerved to miss the broken and sparking piece of metal that came scuttling out from behind their car. The cop never slowed, but their own car started to lose speed in a big way, fishtailing all over the road.

One of the back tires had blown.

“Hang on!” Chris shouted.

The car swerved to the edge of the road and hit the curb. This time, instead of mounting the curb and continuing, the left front tire blew. And that was it. Julissa was conscious of the roar of the engine and the red and blue lights reflecting off the mirrors as her side of the car flew up and slammed upside down into the ground; she saw in that moment the shadows cast by the blades of grass, and then they were rolling again.

The car landed with a bang of steel on what was left of its four wheels and rolled through the muddy grass at thirty miles an hour until it slammed into the mulch-covered embankment of a terraced flower garden. Julissa was never aware that the airbags had come out. She only saw, when they had come to a complete stop, that the white silk bags were draped around them, already deflated.

“You okay?” Chris said.

She nodded, just to see if her neck was broken. Shattered electronic equipment and broken glass lay everywhere. She ran her hands along her chest and up her arms but found no cuts.

“Yeah. You?”

Chris nodded. “Okay.”

He unbuckled his seat belt and started to open his door, and that was when Julissa saw the cop. He was standing outside the shattered driver’s side window, his right hand on his still-holstered Beretta.

“Sir, are you—”

That was all the cop ever had time to say to Chris and Julissa before his chest exploded in a geyser of blood. Julissa looked past the slumping cop and saw the black car, its headlights still dark, idling on the street behind the parked police cruiser. In a single motion she would replay for the rest of her life, Chris reached through the broken window and grabbed the Beretta from the cop’s falling body, kicked open his door and dropped out of the driver’s seat to the ground with one knee on the grass and both hands on the pistol, and fired five shots through the passenger window of the black car. Then he was up and running the hundred feet to the car with the Beretta in front of him. When he reached it, he leaned inside through the passenger window and fired three more shots. Then he turned to look at her.

“Are you hit?” he called.

She shoved her door open and stepped out.

“I’m okay.”

There was nothing still intact in the wrecked rental car for her to bring along. She walked stiffly across the tire-marked grass to the black car. Chris opened the passenger door and pulled a dead man out of the seat and dropped him onto the grass. His face and head were so mutilated by gunfire she couldn’t tell which of the men it had been. From his close-cropped dark hair, it could have been the Italian, Giovanni Greco, but she couldn’t be sure. She recognized the dead driver, though, from the dossier she’d read on the plane. As Chris hauled him out, dragged him around the front of the car, and dumped him on the grass next to his dead companion, she got a look at his face and recognized Jonah Chapman, the British fugitive and alleged smuggler. She was still standing in the grass staring at his body, vaguely aware Chris was walking back to the body of the dead policeman and kneeling down to put the Beretta in his hand. Then he was back at the black car, holding the passenger door open for her.

“Let’s go.”

She got into the seat and Chris shut the door. The car smelled of powder smoke and cigarettes. There was an Uzi in the footwell underneath one of her sneakers. She looked at it and moved her foot. The inside of the windshield was misted with blood.

Chris pulled around the police car and drove away from the scene. When they were back into the anonymous, sleepy avenues of the Sunset District, they heard the sirens begin to converge on Golden Gate Park. She noticed Chris was still wearing the gloves he’d worn into the hacker’s house.

“What now?” Julissa asked.

“I need a payphone.”

“A payphone?”

“I need to call Avis. My rental car’s gone missing.”

An hour past sunrise, they were doing seventy miles an hour on Interstate 5, heading south towards Los Angeles. The sub-machinegun was locked in the trunk along with their few possessions from the hotel. Julissa had fallen asleep, her hand on top of Chris’s, her red hair blowing in the strong wind coming through the shot-out driver’s side window. In her mind as she slept, she fit the bleeding letters
A
and
I
into the beginning of every word she could, and in this dream, as in her last few hours of wakefulness, she came up empty.

Chapter Forty-One

The ocean was limitless blue from horizon to horizon: blue waves and blue sky overhead, broken only by the occasional patch of white foam where current lines brought opposing waves together in wet claps of spray. Where he was, the waves were widely spaced and running to the east northeast, the direction he was going, and there was no spray at all. He’d opened the overhead hatch for fresh air and had been running with the waves and wind at six or seven knots for the last eight hours.

He still didn’t know where he was, but he had a good idea of where he needed to go. This was thanks to the battery operated AM/FM radio he’d found in one of the supply kits while he was taking stock of the boat. It was a cheap little radio receiver with a built-in speaker and a flimsy telescoping antenna. He’d been hoping to find a handheld GPS, but instead he’d found this. As an old-school naval officer, who had navigated ships around the world decades before anyone even dreamt of GPS, he knew exactly what to do with a tool like this. While sitting in the helm seat with the overhead hatch open, he switched the radio to receive on the AM band, extended its antenna through the open hatch, turned the volume all the way up, and scrolled through the AM channels listening for any kind of signal. He found one at 850 kHz—a signal so faint he could only discern music behind all the static, but he couldn’t tell what kind of music it was. But it was real, which was all that mattered.

When he found the station, he carefully stood on the helm seat, head and shoulders poking through the hatch. Then he’d turned the radio in his hands so the antenna was parallel to the sea, the little silver ball on its tip pointing at the blue horizon. The signal came in just as strong as before. He slowly rotated three hundred and sixty degrees, moving his feet cautiously on the helm seat so he wouldn’t fall down the hatch, holding the antenna out like the dowsing rod it had just become. When the antenna was pointing east northeast, the signal abruptly faded out. A hundred and eighty degrees in the other direction, west southwest, the signal faded out again. He listened to the wind blowing past, and the sound of the engine vibrating below him, and the gurgle of waves sliding past the fiberglass hull. He listened to the silence of the radio and looked at the horizon where the antenna was aimed. There was nothing there, but that wasn’t important. He noted the position of the sun in the sky, and the angle of the waves lined up on the face of the sea, and ducked into the boat again with his hand shading his eyes so he could read the correct bearing on the bulkhead compass.

What he knew was that AM radio stations fade out when a radio’s antenna was aligned horizontally with the earth and pointed directly at the transmission source. What he didn’t know was whether the transmitter was in front of him or behind him. The only way to figure that out would be to motor along in one direction or the other and see if the signal strengthened or faded. Because he was already going basically east, and because the wind and waves were carrying him that direction anyway, he chose east.

Near sunset, he knew he’d chosen correctly. The music was clearer. For a stretch of ten seconds, he heard an acoustic guitar backed by drums, but when the singer’s voice came in, static cut it off. The signal still faded in and out, but it was getting stronger. He turned the radio off to save the battery and steered by compass, wondering how much fuel the engine burned and how long the little boat could carry him. There were tarps on board and a pair of wooden oars, so he supposed if it came to it, he could rig a sail and work downwind. But he hoped it didn’t come to that. With the engine running at 1500 RPM and the gentle, steady push of the wind and waves, he was making good speed on the course he wanted. He locked the wheel and climbed down the ladder to find something to eat in the boat’s supplies.

At full dark, he stood on the helm seat again and looked at the stars. All he was sure of was that he was in the northern hemisphere. He saw the Big Dipper and followed the pointer stars in its outer edge to the North Star, which hung a little less than halfway between the horizon and the zenith above his little boat. By this he guessed he was at about forty degrees north latitude. He took his time making this estimation, adding up the degrees in a swath of sky by measuring up from the horizon by the width of his thumb. But even if he had his latitude fixed within a hundred miles, he still had no idea whether he was in the Pacific and heading east towards California, or in the Atlantic and heading east towards Spain. For that matter, he could be in the Mediterranean, motoring to Greece or Albania, or in the Yellow Sea, plugging towards North Korea.

That last thought, at least, made him smile.

He settled into the helm seat and watched the night. After an hour or two, he slept in a fashion, waking every few moments to check the compass and the engine gauges, and then to scan the horizon, looking first for signs of the ship he’d escaped, and then ahead for signs of land. Just before dawn, he woke cold and stiff. He hobbled down the ladder and forced himself to stretch in the little aisle between the seats. Then he redressed his wounds, took another dose of the antibiotic and urinated into one of the empty water bottles.

As he was standing, he saw the sleeve of the Englishman’s jacket poking through the aft hatch. No wonder small splashes of water came inside the boat in the following seas: the sleeve kept the hatch from sealing properly. He looked through the window to be sure no wave was on the verge of overtaking the boat, spun the wheel, opened the hatch, and pulled the jacket inside. Then he slammed the door and sealed it. Because the jacket was soaking wet, he could see a rectangular shape of something stuffed into its inner-liner pocket. He flipped the jacket’s lapel back, unzipped the pocket and pulled out the little leather case of syringes the man had used. He opened it and saw four intact syringes, held in place by nylon loops.