Dirty Harry 11 - Death in the Air (11 page)

“You don’t understand . . .”

“Make me understand.”

“They want to kill me.”

“That much is obvious. They want to kill me, too.”

She waved her arms abruptly, as if trying to clear the air of all the words which swooped around and stung her like verbal bees. He saw her silhouette against the clear winter moonlight slipping under and around his pulled shades.

“Please. Let me explain. It’s hard for me.”

“Better start talking then,” Harry said hastily, moving into the room. “I’m only here for a couple of minutes.”

As the young woman began to talk, Harry began checking up the electronic junk he had picked up at Sid Kleinman’s shop on the way home. Sid had outfitted him with the body mike he had used when delivering the extortion money to the Scorpio Sniper way back when, and he had serviced Harry’s police needs ever since then. But tonight he had outdone himself. Still, in all those years, his payment never changed.

“Bring it back in one piece,” he would say. “That’s enough.”

Harry didn’t know what he’d do without friends like Kleinman and MacKenzie. Actually, he did know what he’d do. He’d die.

First, he tested the room and the phone for bugs, using a little box-shaped counter. There were none. Next, he started installing little things in the receiver and base of the phone. While he worked, the woman told him her life story.

Her name was Denise Barbara Patterson and she had graduated from Cornell with honors, going on to graduate work in the biological sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work so impressed government representatives that they offered her a job with Uncle Sam.

She was an executive secretary to the Surgeon General for five miserable years, during which time she fought sex discrimination so that she could be transferred to active research duty. Once she had finally achieved her goal, she had had reason to wish she was back in the typing pool.

She became a lab technician for the West Coast ARDF—or, as they called it affectionately, “Arf.” Sadly, it turned out that this dog’s bite was worse than its bark. It all spelled out the Army research and Development Facilities—a fancy name for an autonomous government-funded unit dedicated to one thing: the perfection of germ warfare.

“Dr. Carr, the head of the Program, is a brilliant scientist,” Patterson admitted, “but, like many dedicated scientists, he loses track of the means through which to achieve his end.”

“Which means he doesn’t give a shit about people,” Harry translated, screwing the mouthpiece of the phone back on.

“Y-
yes
,” she hesitantly agreed. “He needed a method with which to test our latest advance which incorporated the responses of several thousand cases. And he was sure that the government wouldn’t grant him the right because of the recent cutbacks in spending, and the danger of mutated contamination . . .”

“Hold it,” Harry declared. “Inflation I can understand. What does the rest of that mean?”

It seemed that the substance they had come up with was not a permanent one. There was a possibility that it could change from causing temporary light damage to causing permanent heavy damage.

What Patterson called the “advance” was a mixture dubbed “Vasculene.” It wasn’t a new hair tonic, but a slowly spreading gas which could cause the tips of the human circulatory system to constrict. In other words, it could cause light cases of frostbite in the fingers and toes.

“The subways,” Harry breathed, pausing in his toils as the information sank in. “He tested it in the subways.” Callahan remembered the old lady holding up her chalky-colored fingers. He remembered blowing on his own digits, trying to dispel the strange chill.

Patterson nodded. “I just stumbled onto it by accident. He was keeping it a secret, but I met him by chance down there and noticed a gas-dispensing device on his attaché case. I confronted him with it, right then and there. He argued that it was harmless, and that he was willing to take the risk himself. I argued that it was unfair, irresponsible, and impossible to gauge the results.”

“Not to mention illegal,” Callahan interjected sourly.

Patterson laughed—a sick, hopeless satire of mirth. “Then I tripped. I was so upset that when I tried to move away from him, I stumbled and fell off the platform.”

That’s how it all started. That simply, and that stupidly. By the time she had saved herself and gotten pulled out, Dr. Carr was already gone. She was confused, upset, and in pain from her broken leg. Suddenly, she didn’t know how to tell the truth without dragging Carr’s name into it. So she lied. She said she didn’t know how she had come to fall.

“Later, I realized that I should have simply said that I tripped,” she admitted. “But by then it was too late.”

“By then, Dr. Carr was having other girls shoved in front of trains so your accident wouldn’t look so unusual,” Harry reasoned.

“But I didn’t know that!” Patterson stressed, leaning forward on the bed. “I just thought that my falling had given some psycho a sick idea!”

Harry got to his feet, work completed. “Until the night I showed up,” he told her. “Come on, we can’t stay here.”

He took her hand and led her down to the basement. From there, they went out the back way and into an alley. Harry’s new car was parked in a spot across the alley road. Pulling out his .44, he brought the girl across the cold, dark space. He checked the edges of the passenger door before he opened it for her.

“Get in,” he instructed. She complied, while he checked the rest of the car for wires and other assorted booby traps. With the Magnum still in his hand, it took him almost ten minutes.

“Do you think they’ll try to kill us?” she asked hesitantly as he got in.

“Not here,” he guessed, turning on the motor. “They can’t afford to make too much noise. It’ll wake up the neighbors.”

“They could have silencers,” Patterson worried.

“This doesn’t,” Harry said, holding up his big revolver. He pulled out of the spot and drove into the streets.

“We had all signed oaths of secrecy,” Patterson went on to explain. “I couldn’t tell you anything when you came that night. And then, when the shooting started, I realized that the Program now considered me a security risk. I thought the only way I could save myself was by getting to Dr. Carr and explaining.”

Here she paused, looking guiltily down at the cracked dashboard. “Explaining that I had no intention of telling anybody anything,” she confessed. “Our work is important, Inspector,” she said with sudden pride, sitting up straight. “We’re responsible for the security of this entire country. I’m not about to risk that because Dr. Carr got a little overzealous . . . !”

“Save it for the judge,” Harry suggested with sickened sarcasm as he scanned the streets carefully, looking for any hint of a tail. “Carr, with his Program, is obviously way beyond that point now. The only reason he decided to kill you gangland style was because I entered the picture. He wouldn’t risk your telling me anything. He obviously thinks no leak is too small to drop an elephant on.”

“If only I could get him . . .” she seethed.

“Don’t look at me,” Callahan said flatly. “I’m not going to ride through the gauntlet. You’d only be signing your own death warrant, anyway. Carr’s never going to trust you again, no matter what you say. He’s got it in mind that you’re a threat, and even worse, he’s already told his goons to do something about it.”

“Then,” Denise Patterson said in a frightened, faraway voice, “there’s nothing I can do . . . ?”

Harry was about to answer when he heard a ragged chopping sound outside the car. He looked in the rear-view mirror, seeing only the rolling hills of South San Francisco. He had driven that far off the beaten path to make sure they weren’t followed. But now, a whipping, humming sound was filling the inside of the car from outside the open window.

“Shit,” Callahan spat. “What is that?”

Patterson turned to look out of her own window as the noise got so loud it made the dashboard vibrate. Harry saw the wind whipping up the loose dirt on the hilly roadway. He realized what was happening just as the big metal bird dropped out of the sky and onto the car’s roof.

The helicopter smashed down on the auto’s roof with its landing struts. The worn vehicle’s roof was not strong enough to take that sort of punishment. It bent in the middle and cracked open, accompanied by Patterson’s scream.

The car sank on its ancient shocks, sliding across the mostly dirt road. Harry practically had to spin the wheel to keep in control. Then he figured, why bother trying to keep on the road?

“Hold on!” he warned her and whirled the wheel to the right. The heavy, tanklike auto pointed itself in that direction and took a dive. The helicopter swept by as the aged vehicle barreled down the grassy hill.

Patterson was screaming as the car seemed to gather momentum. Harry started by tapping the brake, then stomping on it, finally slamming both feet on the pedal and keeping them there.

“Get under the dashboard!” Harry demanded between his clamped teeth. “It’s going to be a bumpy ride!”

Just as she obeyed, the car hit a tip and took it like an Olympic ski jumper. The front smashed down, slamming Harry into the wheel, and then the back swept up, pushing his head into the ceiling.

The damn thing was just too heavy to fly very far, and it landed on all four wheels as Harry locked his arms and pushed his legs straight. The hill had settled into a sloping decline, so Callahan tromped back down on the accelerator while looking out of the window for the Program’s eye-in-the-sky.

It came sweeping from the passenger’s side, coming in so low it actually ripped the swinging radio antenna off the hood.

“Fuck,” Harry muttered, ducking his head back in. “They mean business.” Reacting to his comment, Patterson started to crawl out from under the front section. “Stay down!” Harry commanded. “There’s no neighbors to wake out here.”

Harry kept the gas pedal floored as the slope reached bottom and things began to move up again. He saw that they were rapidly coming to the top of another hill. And from the right, he heard the helicopter coming in to make another run.

“Roll up your window,” he barked. “I don’t want to lose you.” Staying where she was, Patterson did as she was told and then pressed herself even harder into the cramped opening.

Just as they reached the top of the hill, the whirlybird swept across again, this time leaving souvenirs. The window Patterson had just closed shattered, and bullets dug into the passenger seat where Patterson had been sitting.

Harry spun the wheel to the left, but that was too much for the old car to take. The front jerked in the right direction, but the rear wheels skidded, tearing up huge hunks of grassy ground, and the car tottered on the crest of the hill for a moment before it started rolling.

In that one second, Harry killed the engine and joined Patterson under the dashboard. The car rolled sideways all the way down the second hill. All the windows were broken, the ceiling was almost caved in, and the auto’s sides were badly battered.

Callahan rose quickly behind the wheel and looked out to see a forest two hundred yards in front of them. He jammed the key in the ignition. Incredibly, the engine turned over.

“You can’t kill the good ones with a stick,” Callahan marveled. His judgment of cars hadn’t failed him. After all, he had owned the one he sold to get this one for more than ten years.

“To hell with the car, you’re trying to get us killed!” Patterson shouted.

“Shut up,” Harry told her. “If we stop, they’ll do the job for me.” He set the car heading right for the woods, as the copter swept down behind them.

Harry hit the ceiling with one fist until the cracked rear-view mirror was high enough for him to see plainly the flying machine behind them. Two men were in the clear, open cockpit. One was handling the controls and the other had a .308 calibre Mark V assault rifle in his mitts.

Callahan wanted to swerve the car so they wouldn’t make such an easy target, but he needed speed to get to the trees. The copter had to veer off to avoid crashing into the branches. Now, if only he could get there before the gun’s bullets tore them up . . .

He heard the lead thunking into the trunk and zipping into the back seat. He no longer had a choice. He swerved the car to the left, pulling it out of the line of fire.

The bullets which would have punctured both of them dug into the ground, the speeding copter swept ahead, and the car scraped between two trees into the forest.

“Okay, okay, we made it,” the woman cried. “Slow down.”

“Forget it,” Callahan declared. “I’m not going to be boxed in here.” He continued to fight the wheel for supremacy as the car kept narrowly missing trees.

“Boxed in?” Patterson echoed. “Boxed in? What are you talking about!”

“Shut up and stay down,” Harry said quietly, intent on what he was doing. The dangerous edge in his hushed voice finally convinced Patterson to stay out of the way.

The side-view mirror was smashed off by a tree as Harry squeezed the auto through. A branch reached through the passenger’s window and was broken off by a sudden turn. Harry saw moonlight up ahead and directed the seemingly armored vehicle toward it.

He slammed on the brakes almost as soon as the car emerged from the other side of the woods. Patterson was thrown forward, and the wheels skidded at least ten feet.

All Harry had seen when coming out of the trees was Daly City, a suburb of San Francisco, stretched out before him. That meant there were no more trees, no more hills, no more ground. They were just yards away from the edge of a cliff.

Callahan slammed the vehicle into reverse, spun the wheel to the left, and drove between the lip of the cliff and the edge of the forest.

“Listen,” he snarled. “You asked me what you could do against Carr, before. Well, I’m telling you now. You can stand and fight. Fight, God damn it.”

The car burst into a clearing, but Callahan kept it close to the cliff’s edge. He heard the whirring blades and looked out his nonexistent windowpane. “Here they come now. Right on schedule.”

As soon as he had spoken, Harry slammed on the brakes. The car lurched to a stop, but even before the rear tires had settled, Harry was struggling into the back seat. He pulled the seat’s back away, revealing the inside of the trunk. From the trunk he pulled a steel case, which he quickly unclipped.