High Crimes

Her eyes were blurry with tears, but they did not move from the headlong rush of the paved road ahead, her hands clenching the steering wheel with a death grip. The car hurtled forward wildly, now sixty, seventy miles an hour, accelerating madly. For a split second she felt herself at a remove, looking down calmly at this terrifying scene; then the next second she was screaming at the top of her lungs, petrified in her seat, immobilized while the car plummeted down the road. She shifted into neutral, but that made little difference.

Should I switch off the ignition? No, don’t dare, that would shut off the steering!

She spun the wheel left, then right, then left, then right, as the road whipped by and the trees and boulders on either side were dark blurs.

And then she saw, parked in the dead center of the road just ahead, a green military jeep, two large gas cans at its rear.

There was no way to avoid crashing into it!

She made an instant decision and spun the wheel to the left, steering the car sharply up the steep embankment overgrown with brush. As the car ran over the low bushes, rocks and branches crunching loudly, it slowed considerably, just what she’d hoped would happen, and she forced her left hand from the wheel, reached down for the car door, couldn’t find it, fumbled around, not daring to take her eyes off the road; then her hand touched steel, and she grabbed at the handle and pulled it, and the door flung open—

— and with a gasp of terror she leaned to her left, tucked her head in, and tumbled out onto the embankment, her head striking something hard among the brush, the taste of blood and fear metallic in her mouth, her eyes shut tight, a terrible crack of pain shooting up her neck, and then she heard the car lurch on forward, veering back onto the road, and strike something. There was a horrifying crunch of steel.

Crouched along the side of the road, half in the pine needle — covered soft earth, half on the asphalt, her head throbbing, she opened her eyes and stared ahead and saw that her car had crashed into the jeep, and then there was a cataclysmic, deafening explosion, and she shut her eyes, and even through her eyelids she saw the brilliant flash of light that was a gasoline fire, and she scrambled to her feet and turned and ran up the road, screaming.

A few minutes later, though it seemed hours, stumbling and weaving up the pitch-dark road, she remembered she was wearing her cell phone.

Part Five

41

“I’m moving in,” Devereaux said. “You got more rooms in here than the goddamn Hilton, and the roach motel’s starting to wear on me. And you need protection.”

Claire lay on a couch in one of the sitting rooms, both Jackie and Grimes hovering nearby with grave concern. It was close to one in the morning. She was considerably banged up, particularly along her side and her left hip, where she had landed on several small rocks. There were quite a few scrapes as well, including a long, ugly one along her neck and left cheek, by the ear. She also had a ferocious, thudding headache. She’d spent over an hour being questioned by Maryland state police, from which nothing, she knew, would ever come.

“I don’t need protection, Ray,” she said weakly.

“Naw, you don’t need protection,” he said sardonically. “Not you. Someone disables your braking system, intending for you to wipe out on a jeep that’s conveniently left in your path, with two probably half-empty gas tanks on the back, and get blown up, but, naw, everything’s fine.”

“If you care about me—” Jackie said. “No, forget about me. If you care about Annie, you’ll take him up on his offer.”

Claire shrugged, unwilling to argue with such logic.

“So you never lost consciousness at all?” Devereaux asked.

“Nope.”

“No vomiting, change in vision, none of that?”

“Nope.”

“Your pupils look the same size, far as I can tell. So you don’t have a concussion, but you really should get over to the ER and have ’em do a CAT scan.”

“Suddenly you’re a doctor, too?” Claire said.

“You’re not disoriented.”

“No more than usual,” she replied.

“All right, now, Jackie,” Devereaux said, “I want you to wake her up in a couple hours, make sure she can wake up.”

“Don’t bother,” Claire said. “I’ve got my nightly harassing phone call to wake me up.”

“You think it really was Lentini behind this, or just someone using his name for the set-up?” Grimes asked.

“Who cares?” Claire said.

“Nah,” Devereaux said. “The call you got — arranging your little meeting in Maryland — I got a local phone-company source tells me it came from a payphone inside the Pentagon. I doubt it really came from Lentini — if he’s lying low, hiding, he won’t be calling from inside the belly of the beast.”

“We gotta file a notice with the Quantico cops, the MPs,” Grimes said.

“To what end?” Claire asked. “Until we can figure out who did this to me, and prove it, we’ve got nothing.”