Patriots Betrayed (12 page)

“I was thinking we’ll enter our respective banks simultaneously. Yours must be across the street, since you parked here, mine’s just past that intersection. We’ll give them – what, fifteen minutes – before walking out with or without the transfer.”

“Make it ten minutes from the time we show them our IDs and account numbers until they execute the transfers. If it hasn’t happened by then, walk out without a word.”

Carla checked her disguise in the rear-view mirror. “Ten minutes then. I sure don’t want to be caught in that bank without my H&K. Ten minutes sounds good.”

He reached for the door latch. “If you make it back here before I do, get the key, get in, and strap in. Be ready for some fast driving. If I make it before you, I’ll be in the passenger seat, because I want you to drive while I ride shotgun with the M4.”

She took one last look around and opened her door. “Oh, you like my driving, huh?”

He got out and closed the door. “You did well at the trailer park.”

She smiled and started down the sidewalk at a fast pace.

~~~

Raylan stepped past gray marbled walls and into a vestibule that welcomed and funneled patrons to the brass-framed double doors of stained oak. He entered the bank and nodded at the skinny elderly armed guard, who barely acknowledged him and kept both thumbs hooked to his gun belt.

There were few people inside, pleasing Raylan, as he wanted to get back to the car as soon as possible and had no desire to wait in line for thirty minutes. A thin blonde no more than twenty-one stood behind the counter. Smiling, she said, “Good afternoon. How may I help you?”

“Looks like we’re in for another hot afternoon,” Raylan said. “I need to transfer some funds to an account in another country.”

The teller checked through the open door of an office on the other side of the lobby. She saw no customer inside, just the manager at her desk. “Uh, follow me and I’ll get someone to help you.”

Raylan kept a calm and cordial air about him. “Certainly.” She walked around the counter and he followed.

The teller stopped at the office door. “Margret. A man needs to wire funds to an international account.”

The plump, fifty-something manager stood. “Come on in and I’ll get you taken care of.”

Raylan smiled pleasantly and sat in a chair. He laid out his credentials on the desk. Handing her the account numbers of both the account with that bank and the name and account of the bank in the Bahamas, he said, “I would like to transfer all but $10,000 from my account in Florida to my other account.”

“Okay. Let’s see.” She punched the numbers in. Her eyes grew wide as she scanned the screen.

“What’s the current balance?” Raylan asked. “I’m not sure how much I still have in the account in Florida.”

“Uh, it’s uh, one million forty-three thousand six hundred dollars and eight cents.”

“Great. That’s a little more than I thought. Here’s my driver license, passport, Social Security card, and birth certificate.”

Before she looked them over, she said, “There will be a small fee for this, mainly because I’ll have to fill out an IRS form, as the amount is way over the limit to avoid reporting it.”

Knowing it would be days before the IRS received the form and knowing of the reporting requirement already, he said, “That’s fine.”

Her hands shook as she double-checked his ID.

“Is there a problem?” he asked.

She looked up from his passport. “No. It’s just nerve-racking to handle this much money.”

“It really shouldn’t be,” he said with a warm smile. “After all it’s not real, just a digital transfer, a few strokes of the keyboard, numbers on the screen.”

“Yeah,” she laughed, “but it’s still nerve-racking.”

Eight minutes later, Raylan walked out of the bank. He rushed across the street as soon as the pedestrian walk/don’t walk light turned green at the intersection where Carla’s bank stood. Carla was nowhere in sight. A glance through the bank windows as he walked by told him everything appeared normal inside. He unlocked the door and sat in the passenger seat. It was hot inside the car, but he didn’t bother to reach over and crank the engine to run the air. After waiting for the area to clear of people long enough for him to get the M4 out from under his bug-out pack and in his lap, covered by an open newspaper, he checked his watch.
She should have been out of there by now.
He stuffed pistol magazines in his pockets and slipped the pistol in the holster, getting ready for trouble.

~~~

Carla sat in the bank manager’s office, knowing something was wrong. The man sitting at the computer and posing as a bank manager was too young and too self-confident to be a bank employee. He carried himself like a military man and was in top physical shape. Then there was his high and tight haircut. Using the desk for cover, she slid a five-inch ceramic knife out of a hidden sheath in her belt. Razor sharp, the blade could cut a man’s throat in a flash. It had only one fault — its glass-hard but brittle composition meant it could be easily broken. Knowing she had walked into the trap that she and Raylan had talked about, she stayed calm. “You know, darling,” she said, while staying in the character of an older woman that matched her disguise, “you remind me of my son in the Army. He just got back from Afghanistan.”

The man froze for a second. Their eyes locked. He sprung across the desk at her, a mistake that cost him his life. His exposed throat was met by Carla’s slashing ceramic blade. Blood sprayed across her chest as she watched his eyes go blank when he passed out and died. She yanked his body closer and reached under his jacket with her left hand for the pistol she knew was there. It was her bad luck that he was left-handed. That cost her time, time enough for another killer to come rushing out of a back room and through the office doorway, pistol in hand but not yet aimed. She swung around with the knife in her right hand, arm fully extended, releasing it at the perfect fraction of a second. The blade flew three feet and buried itself into his Adam ’s apple. He dropped the pistol and clawed at his throat, then collapsed to the floor.

Carla scrambled for the Glock he had dropped, two bullets passing inches from her head. Coming up with the pistol in both hands, she double tapped a man in the forehead so fast it sounded like one shot. He dropped the pistol and fell in his own shadow. The two young bank tellers were already on the floor behind the counter, screaming their heads off. One of them reached up and frantically pumped the panic button that would send the local police. Carla nearly ripped the door off its hinges as she exploded out onto the sidewalk.

Just as Carla emerged from the building, two black SUVs with tinted windows raced up and came to a tire-smoking stop, one jumping the curb and blocking the sidewalk on the far side of the bank entrance, the other stopped in the middle of the street. Rayland had heard the shots inside the bank and was ready for trouble. He jumped out of the Explorer and ran down the sidewalk, his M4 under a jacket. Carla saw him coming and put herself against the building, out of Raylan’s the line of fire. She fired at the door of one SUV, forcing the man inside to hesitate before swinging the door open and exiting so he could join the battle. Firing in controlled bursts, Raylan killed two men on the sidewalk before they had a chance to shoot, his rounds passing by only feet from Carla. He recognized both of them – CIA. There was no time to ponder over killing men he had once fought alongside. Carla dropped and fast crawled to the nearest cover: a compact car parked against the curb.

The pandemonium that ensued resulted in several traffic accidents as Carla and Raylan fought for their lives. Finding an opening while the killers reloaded, Carla ran toward Raylan, who kept the killers’ heads down with aimed three-round bursts. She ran past him and stuck her head in the open passenger window of the Explorer just long enough to get her hands on the MP5.

What Carla did next shocked Raylan, and he wasn’t easily shocked. She switched to semi auto, extended the stock, and calmly approached the killers while firing deliberate shots. Raylan ran into the road, as all traffic had frozen, the street jammed with crumpled vehicles, many abandoned by their occupants, who ran for cover down the street or ducked into shops. There, he had a better angle and plenty of cars to use for cover. His controlled bursts kept them busy while Carla closed on the killers, firing whenever she had a shot, taking out two more of them. Raylan reloaded, moved to a better position, and poured rounds under one SUV, glancing rounds off the pavement and hitting one man’s lower legs with indirect fire. Their cover rendered partially ineffective, the remaining killers were forced to move and expose themselves to Carla’s fire, and she took full advantage of it, her face emotionless, as she calmly stepped closer, firing. A bullet hit her right shoulder, but she kept firing until the last killer was dead.

Raylan yelled, “Come on!” They ran for the Explorer. Carla slid behind the wheel, ignoring her bleeding shoulder. The street was blocked with wrecked or abandoned cars, so she climbed over the curb and backed down the sidewalk. The engine roared as she picked up speed, skillfully whipping around at the next intersection, narrowly missing a woman on the sidewalk. Snatching the car into forward and stomping the gas, Carla maneuvered around vehicles, and laid on the horn as people scrambled to get out of her way.

Raylan reached over the back of the seat and grabbed more magazines for the M4. He scanned the streets for police cars. There were none, but he heard sirens coming closer. “We have to get out of the area. We’ve got maybe five minutes before we’re in trouble. Cops are sealing the area off right now.”

She nodded and kept it floored as they slid around a tight curve. Immediately, they were faced with a problem: Two city police patrol cars had the intersection ahead blocked. She yanked the wheel and nailed a bus stop bench, flying across the sidewalk and scraping paint off the right side of the SUV as she squeezed between the building and a light pole. Executing a turn at the intersection that would’ve made Mario Andretti proud, she left the sidewalk and slid back onto the street, tires smoking as they squealed in protest. She turned left at the next intersection.

When she turned right at the next intersection, Raylan saw a concrete wall behind them that would stop bullets, so he shot out the rear window while it was safe to do so without endangering bystanders. Then he held his fire, waiting for police cars to come after them and into range. They made it through three more intersections before coming to another roadblock. With no way to get past the three patrol cars parked end-to-end across the street, she hit the brakes and whipped the wheel around, executing a one-eighty in the middle of the street. Snatching it into reverse, she hammered the pedal to the floor. The officers stopped firing and jumped out of the way. The rear end being lighter, she aimed for the trunk area of the first car in the line and slammed into its side, knocking it around and creating a gap that she continued on through. Rayland leaned out of his window and fired at the cars but not the officers, trying to keep their heads down, as Carla sped down the street in reverse, the engine whining. At the next intersection, she had traffic to deal with, but she still managed to execute another one-eighty and race away.

They were out of the downtown area when two patrol cars came up behind them. Carla maneuvered skillfully through the streets, turning right at one intersection and left at another, often bouncing off cars and sliding between others, scraping paint off both the Explorer and the hapless driver’s vehicle. The mangled metal she left behind finally stopped the police, when they couldn’t get by several disabled vehicles. She sped on, taking back streets and allies until on the edge of town, and headed for the interstate.

“Think I hurt anybody back there?” she asked.

Raylan yelled over the roar of the engine and rush of one hundred mile per hour wind. “I’m not sure, but you did your best.” He checked her face, trying to read her. “I doubt anyone got more than a few bruises.”

She just nodded and said nothing for ten seconds. “What about our rounds?”

He swallowed. “If someone took a stray bullet, it was mine. All of yours hit the target.”

“Yeah, nice try.” She drove around slower traffic.

Knowing the sheriff department as well as the Highway Patrol would soon have officers positioned on the highway to catch them trying to leave town, after only five miles of one hundred and ten miles per hour driving, Carla turned onto an off ramp and raced down a country road. They traveled twelve miles and came to a desolate crossroad, where she slowed to eighty and blew by a stop sign. A quarter mile farther, she glanced at the rear view mirror. “Damn it, a deputy’s on us. Must have been hidden behind that abandoned barn.”

Raylan looked back to see how close he was. “There’s time for me to bail on the other side of that curve ahead. I’ll try not to kill him or her.”

She had the tires screaming as the SUV raced around the tight curve, the rear end swinging out to the edge of the pavement. Coming out of the curve and hammering the gas to the floor, she put a little over 200 yards of straight road behind them, then she slammed on the brakes.

Raylan bailed out before the Explorer came to a complete stop and got into the prone shooting position on the road’s grassy shoulder. After thumbing the selector to semi auto, he took aim through the Aimpoint sight and held his fire, not wanting to kill the deputy by taking out a front tire as he came around the curve at high speed, which would certainly cause him to lose control and wind up in the trees. When the patrol car straightened out after traversing the curve, he squeezed the trigger. The right front tire instantly deflated. The deputy struggled to keep the car on the road and slowed down. Raylan fired again, missing. A third shot took out the left front tire. Carla backed up, tires smoking. He jumped in as the deputy fired, but the distance and his excitement prevented him from hitting anything with his pistol.

Strapping himself in, Raylan said, “Floor it. We’ve got to put distance behind us and dump this ride somewhere.” He checked her wound while she drove. “Your arm’s no problem.”