Dead Man's Rule (36 page)

They carried little else: a change of clothes, some toiletries, small arms and ammunition hidden in the seats, and a five-gallon red plastic jug of gasoline. The gasoline had two purposes. First, it was an emergency supply in case they ran out of fuel somewhere.

The second purpose was more grim. They would do all they could to avoid infecting themselves during their travels, but contracting Variant D was still a significant risk. If one of them began exhibiting symptoms, the others would have to kill him immediately. They would then smash the teeth on the corpse to prevent identification through dental records and burn the remains sufficiently to eliminate fingerprints, scars, tattoos, and facial features. They had to remain anonymous, even in death.

The Wilmette police finally seemed satisfied. They had called the FBI to confirm Will’s and Elena’s identities. Then they’d called their office to confirm Anthony Simeon’s murder. Only then were they willing to release Sergei and his passengers.

The officer in charge didn’t exactly apologize, but he did say, “It’s too bad this happened. We’ll get you onto I-94 and call the state police to let them know what’s going on. Tell us if there’s anything else we can do to help with your manhunt.”

Escorted by police cruisers, Sergei raced for the highway, but no one in his Mustang had any great hope of reacquiring the signal from the bug. The delay at the roadblock had cost them fifteen minutes, which meant their target was now miles—perhaps as many as fifteen to twenty miles—outside of the scanner’s range.

Still, there was nothing to do but try. Sergei turned onto the highway and sped north, weaving in and out of traffic and driving down the shoulder while the rest of them held on tight. Semitrailers traveled the road in long convoys, taking advantage of the light holiday traffic to pick up time on their delivery schedules. Sergei threaded his way among the behemoths, drawing occasional air-horn blasts from angry truckers as he cut in front of them. He hardly noticed, though, as his entire attention was focused on the road ahead. He was going about thirty miles an hour faster than the trucks, so driving through them was like negotiating a moving obstacle course. He brushed the fender of one truck and nearly lost control of the car but managed to muscle it away from the guardrail.

“Whoa! We’re almost on top of him,” said Ben. “He’s practically shooting toward us.”

“What? Let me see,” said Sergei.

“No, no,” Elena called from the backseat. “You drive. I’ll look.” Ben handed the monitor back. “Ben’s right. He must have doubled back.”

Sergei laughed with relief as he slowed to a more reasonable speed. “I’ll bet he’s trying to lose tails. Little does he know. Where is he now?”

Elena looked up from the monitor and watched the southbound lanes across the grassy median. “He just passed us.” She handed the scanner back to Ben and took out her gun. Will did the same. “It’s possible he just spotted us. Drive carefully.”

Sergei smiled. “That’s the only way I know how to drive.” He turned off onto an exit ramp, drove across an overpass, and got back onto the highway heading south. “Ben, get my gun out of the glove compartment. Be ready to hand it to me if anyone starts shooting at us.”

Ben opened the glove compartment and gingerly took out the weapon. It had a matte-finish steel slide and black grips bearing the three rings and arrows of the Beretta logo.

They followed the bugged vehicle at a distance of about a half mile—far enough back so that there was no danger of being seen, but not so far that there was any risk of losing the signal again. The chase took them from I-94 onto I-294, a loop of tollway that swung through Chicago’s western and southern suburbs.

“He just turned off,” Ben said, looking up from the monitor. He scanned the highway signs announcing upcoming exits. “It looks like he took North Avenue.” He glanced down at the tracker again. “He’s heading west.”

Sergei pulled off the highway and turned west on North. He drove into the setting sun—which was at precisely the right position in the sky to make driving nearly impossible. He pulled down the visor and squinted into the glare, hoping he wouldn’t crash. They followed the dot on the tracker through several turns into a commercial and light-industrial area of Elmhurst.

“Okay, he stopped,” Ben said. “He’s straight ahead of us. Maybe five, six hundred yards.”

Sergei pulled over and parked partway down the long entranceway to an industrial park. Everyone shaded their eyes and scanned the neighborhood in front of them. Sergei reached across Ben and took a small pair of binoculars out of the glove compartment. “The warehouse and the brewery look like the most likely candidates,” he said after examining the scene for a few seconds. He took a deep breath. “It looks like this is it.”

“What do we do now?” asked Noelle.

“We call in the cavalry,” answered Will, who was already dialing the Elmhurst police. Elena was looking for Agent Gomez’s home number.

“And we wait,” added Sergei as he put the binoculars down and retrieved his gun from Ben. “Once they’ve got the area cordoned off and their SWAT units in place, we’ll work with the officer in charge to plan strategy.”

As they talked, a white minivan drove past the parked Mustang. Because of the glare from the setting sun, no one noticed that the driver of the minivan was staring at them as he passed. They also didn’t notice when the van took a corner just a little too fast a block behind them.

Elbek frowned as he saw the Caravan drive back into the brewery parking lot. Something must be wrong. “Why are you back here?” he asked as soon as the driver’s door opened.

“The Russian detective is here,” the man said frantically. “I saw his car as I drove out. He’s watching us with binoculars.”

Rage filled Elbek, but he refused to let it cloud his mind. “Is he alone?”

“There were others in the car with him, but I didn’t see anyone else nearby.”

The sentries hadn’t reported anything suspicious, which probably meant that the detective and his friends were alone, at least for the moment. The vans and other vehicles obviously couldn’t continue to leave while they were being watched. They also could not simply wait for the watchers to leave, particularly now that one of the vans had driven past them—and likely alerted them that they had been discovered. Something had to be done immediately. He turned to his aide, Yunus. “Go get Ibrahim. I have another problem for him to eliminate.”

The sun had almost set. Long shadows streaked the landscape, providing excellent natural camouflage. A chill wind blew through the grassy field as Ibrahim crept toward the car. He carried a pair of rocket-propelled grenades and a grenade launcher in place of his sniper rifle. A grenade explosion surely would attract more attention than rifle shots, but he had no choice. He needed to kill everyone in the car, and he needed to do it quickly. An RPG, though less elegant than a bullet, was the only practical solution.

He stopped about a hundred yards from the car and lay flat, listening and watching. He heard no sound except the deep-throated idling of the Mustang’s engine. The car’s occupants appeared to be either focused on the buildings in front of them or talking among themselves. Apparently, no one was watching the empty fields on either side of the road.

The grenade launcher was a five-foot-long tube with a pistol grip and trigger about a third of the way from the end that attached to the grenade. Ibrahim slipped the launcher from its sling on his back and took an RPG out of a pouch slung over his shoulder. He attached the RPG to the launcher, got up on one knee, shouldered the launcher, and took careful aim at the car.

“How much longer until the police get here?” Noelle asked nervously.

“They said half an hour or so, and it’s been twenty-five minutes,” replied Elena. “It takes some time to put together a squad big enough to surround a building full of armed men.”

“Yeah, and I’d rather they do this right than do it fast,” added Sergei. “This could get very bad very quickly if they go in with too few cops or without the right equipment.”

“Can you tell how many of them there are?” asked Ben.

“Not really,” said Sergei. “There are five or six of them loading some SUVs and minivans, but—hold on.” He squinted through the binoculars again. All the activity outside the brewery had ceased. “That’s weird. They’re all gone. It’s almost like . . .”

“Like they know we’re watching them,” Ben said.

“Yeah,” said Sergei. He removed the binoculars from his eyes and scanned the fields around the car. The wind kept the tall grass in constant motion, making it difficult to see anything moving through it. The long, early-evening shadows also didn’t help.

An object in the grass off to the left caught his attention. It seemed like a lump of dirt, but he couldn’t be quite sure. He looked through the binoculars—and saw a man suddenly rise to a kneeling position and shoulder a grenade launcher.

“Hold on!” shouted Sergei as he threw the car into gear and slammed the accelerator to the floor. Shouts of surprise and alarm filled the car as its tires spun in the loose gravel on the side of the road.

The RPG shot toward them in a burst of fire and white smoke. It missed the back of the Mustang by two feet and exploded in the field on the other side of the road. The concussion shattered the right rear window on Sergei’s car and blew it onto two wheels for an instant.

Sergei kept his foot down and accelerated toward the cluster of buildings ahead. For a split second he considered making a U-turn, but he glanced back and saw that the man already had another RPG ready to launch. If there was a way out, it lay past the hornet’s nest in front of them. Also, the Chechens almost certainly would not expect him to drive
toward
their base.

The buildings were only silent silhouettes in the sunset, but Sergei had no doubt that at least one of them was a hive of activity as the Chechens scrambled to deal with the speeding Mustang. He hoped no one else had an armed grenade launcher handy. “Everybody get down,” he said. “They’ll start shooting any second.”

Everyone except Sergei ducked below window level. He crouched over the wheel to present the smallest possible target. For several seconds, nothing happened. The buildings loomed larger, and Sergei spotted a narrow lane between the warehouse and an electronics factory—a perfect shooting gallery if the Chechens could get men to it in time. If they couldn’t, it would be an excellent sheltered escape route.