Pursuit (21 page)

“You gonna tell me the rest, or am I supposed to try to guess?” Ryan’s voice snapped her back to the present.

Swallowing hard, Jess looked at him. The tall lights illuminating the spaghetti-like junction with I-95 shone brightly inside the car, and headlights from cars going in the opposite direction slashed directly across his face. Internally, she juggled seared-into-her-psyche images of the sexy Fed who hadn’t known she was alive despite her cringe-worthy efforts at getting him to notice her against what she now knew of him. His face was shiny and damp, his hair and clothes were wet, he had tired lines around his eyes and mouth, and he managed to look hot anyway. But he also looked tough, competent, and, yes, dammit, trustworthy.

She was going to trust him. God help her if she was wrong.

Taking a deep breath, she continued.

“We were all screaming, and the car just started flipping over, and then all of a sudden I was out of the car, sailing through the air kind of doing somersaults, but I could still see the car rolling down the hill and I realized I must have been thrown clear. Then I hit and . . .”

“You blacked out?” he supplied when she hesitated.

She nodded, relieved to have been offered such an easy out. “Yes.”

“So that’s it?”

Wetting her lips, she shot him a wary glance. Her mouth had gone dry. This was the part that frightened her the most. It was also the part that she most needed to tell.

“Jess?” he prompted. Something in her silence must have told him there was more.

I could always say, “Then I woke up and you were leaning over me.” It would be so easy.
She was tempted. Then she shook her head at herself.
No, finish it.

“Okay.” She swallowed. “I did black out, but not for long. I remember opening my eyes and thinking how dark the night was, and wondering what I was doing lying outside where I could see the stars, and why I hurt so much. Then I saw these small, round lights coming down the hill. Flashlights, I realized. There had to be people carrying them. I tried to call out to the people with the flashlights—I knew something was wrong by that time, knew I needed help—but I guess the breath had been knocked out of me because I couldn’t make a sound. I lay there gasping for air, watching these dark figures holding flashlights rushing—they were moving as fast as they could with the ground so steep—past me down the hill. And then I realized that somebody was screaming. I hadn’t noticed it before, maybe because my ears were ringing. I don’t know.”

Closing her eyes as the memory took on life in her mind, she raised her hands to her temples, where her pulse pounded ferociously. She had to remind herself to breathe, and deliberately took in a couple of slow, careful sips of air.

Still, she could almost hear the screaming.

“Jess?”

Once again, his voice brought her out of it.

Her eyes opened. Her hands dropped to twine in her lap. Unable to look at him, she stared out through the windshield without seeing anything of the closed-for-the-night strip malls and car repair shops and apartment complexes they passed.

“I looked down, toward where the screaming was coming from, and I saw the car. One of the headlights still worked, kind of marking where it was, so I saw it as soon as I looked, lying on its roof with its tires still spinning.” She swallowed. “The people with the flashlights reached it right about then. They shined their lights on it. Someone . . . someone was moving inside, trying to get out. And there was still that screaming.”

Her fists clenched. Her eyes slid toward him. He glanced her way at the same time, and for the briefest of moments their gazes met. His expression was impossible to read.

Get it out there
.
All of it.

He was watching the road again. Her eyes stayed glued to his face. She took a steadying breath.

“There was this small burst of flame. Just a little
poof.
About the size of a tiki torch, or something like that. It burned for a couple of seconds—I watched it. And then the whole car just exploded into flames.” Her heart clutched as she remembered. “Everybody was still inside. The people with the flashlights didn’t even try to get anybody out. They stood there and watched it burn. The screaming . . . it got worse, and then it stopped.” By then, she was having so much trouble getting the words out through her dry throat that her voice was scarcely more than a hoarse whisper. “I’m almost sure it was a woman screaming. I’m almost sure it was Mrs. Cooper I heard.”

A violent shudder wracked her. The others had burned alive. That was the knowledge that she had to share, that was the knowledge that she couldn’t live with. The horror of it made her sick, made her want to vomit, made her want to push it out of her mind forever and never think of it again. Everything seemed to spin. Dropping her head back against the headrest, she closed her eyes, wrapped her arms around herself for warmth, and breathed.

In, out. In, out. Slow and steady, not too deep.

“Okay, hang on.” The car seemed to slow, and then there was a bump, and then they rolled forward for a minute before stopping altogether.

Jess opened her eyes. She was still nauseated, still light-headed, still haunted by the images she couldn’t shake. Bright light bathed the inside of the vehicle now, and she saw they were at a McDonald’s. In the drive-thru line, to be precise. Just as she made the connection, a tinny voice came over the intercom asking to take their order.

“You drink coffee?” Ryan asked.

Jess nodded.

“Two large coffees. Cream and lots of sugar.” He glanced at Jess again. “You had supper?”

Jess shook her head.

“You like hamburgers? Big Macs? What?”

Actually, she wasn’t a real big fan of McDonald’s. But she felt so bad, so weak and shaky and drained, that she was willing to try anything that might make her feel a little more normal.

“A hamburger,” she said. “Plain.”

He repeated her order into the intercom, added a Big Mac and two large fries, and rolled on around to the pick-up window. Moments later a white bag was passed through the driver’s-side window, along with two coffees in foam cups.

He didn’t stop, just took the food and pulled back onto the road, and Jess was glad. Everything around the McDonald’s was closed, and even though the surrounding parking lots and businesses had their night lighting on, she still felt exposed. Somebody could be following them. Somebody could be watching them. Somebody could be just waiting for a chance.

To do what? To kill her, Jess thought, and shivered.

Clearly hungry, Ryan ate while he drove, taking big bites out of his sandwich and shoveling in fries by the bunch. Jess couldn’t choke down more than a couple of bites of her hamburger and she flat-out couldn’t stomach the fries, but the coffee helped. She was still nursing it, savoring each hot, sweet sip, when he finished his meal, passed her the trash so that she could stuff it down in the bag with her own, then shot her an assessing look.

“Better?” he asked.

“Better,” she agreed.

“You feel like talking any more?”

Actually, she didn’t. She never wanted to speak of it again. She never wanted to think about it again. She just wanted it all to go away.

She faced the bitter truth. And she looked out at the road unspooling before them, at the rolling hills and fields that were cloaked in darkness now, and tried not to remember the last time she had driven this way.

“I guess,” she said.

“You were pretty woozy when I found you on that hillside, you know. Are you sure you actually saw everything you just described to me? I’m asking if you’re positive it really happened, or if there’s any possibility that you could have imagined or dreamed some of it?”

Suddenly the few bites of hamburger Jess had managed to get down felt like billiard balls in her stomach.

“Like the attack in the hospital, you mean?” Sarcasm laced the question.

He didn’t so much as twitch an eyelash. “Yeah, like that.”

Jess let it go for the moment. “I can’t be totally sure, of course, because I was in a terrible accident and I did get knocked unconscious.” She reasoned it out for him just as she had for herself when the memories had first come flooding back, and she had hoped and prayed they
were
just a really bad dream. “But I am as certain as it is possible to be that they’re real.”

“You think that the car you were riding in was struck by something unspecified and forced off the road, and then unknown subjects with flashlights, presumably from the car behind you, ran down the hillside past you, surrounded the crashed car with at least one screaming survivor still inside it, and either set it on fire or watched it burn without doing anything to help?”

Jess clenched her fists and tried not to let the memories in again. “Yes. That’s exactly what I think.”

“Then you were attacked later that same night in the hospital by someone who presumably had not realized you had been thrown clear of the car at the time and wanted to silence the only living witness to the murder of the First Lady?”

“Yes,” she said again. Then she took a deep breath and looked at him steadily. “You were lying about the tests on the IV equipment coming back negative, weren’t you?”

“Nah.”

Jess felt herself tensing. “I know I did not imagine that. I—”

“Hold on a minute.” He glanced at her. “I did not lie. I told you the truth. But what I didn’t tell you was that the equipment tested negative for everything except standard saline solution. None of the medications that should have been in there according to your chart were there. Which means that either the tests were wrong or somebody switched the bags.”

Jess felt a thrill of horror at having her suspicions confirmed, followed by a rush of indignation.

“So you knew I was telling the truth. You knew somebody attacked me. Is that why you were following me?”

He didn’t reply. They had reached Dale City by that time, and traffic had picked up again. She allowed him a few minutes of concentration time as he drove past exits for the Potomac Hills Mall, which Jess knew from her own personal shopping experiences was the second-largest outlet mall in northern Virginia, and the Waterworks Water Park. But when they pulled off onto the exit for Clearbrook, stopped at an intersection that boasted a 7-Eleven and a liquor store, then turned onto a two-lane road devoid of traffic and he still didn’t answer, she narrowed her eyes at him.

“That’s why you followed me to Davenport’s office, isn’t it? Because you knew I’d told the truth about what had happened in the hospital.” The headlights swept over a strip of golden, waist-high grass. Ahead the road gleamed pale, curving away into the night.

He glanced her way. He still looked abstracted, as though he was having a hard time leaving behind whatever thoughts occupied him.

“I followed you as a precaution,” he said at last. “Just to make sure you were all right.”

Before she could reply he hit the brakes, pausing briefly before continuing through an intersection onto a narrow asphalt lane. It was only then, as the tires swooshed over the smooth ebony surface and her attention shifted to her surroundings, that Jess realized they had well and truly left Dale City behind. Thanks to the still-falling rain, the night was dark as pitch. Woods crowded in close, and the headlights flashed past what seemed like an endless stockade of enormous trees on both sides. She was just opening her mouth to ask where they were when he turned into a driveway and a two-story house came into view. It was a clapboard farmhouse, painted dark gray with white trim. It had an outbuilding off to the side.

His house. Of course, this had to be his house.

There was not a single light on in the place.

It occurred to her that, aside from the RAV4’s headlights, there was not a single light in sight.

This was not a neighborhood. There were no other houses around, no other buildings of any description that she could see. Just dark, dark, and more dark.

Apprehension tightened her muscles. Her pulse quickened. She sat up a little straighter, looking all around.

“Is this your . . . ?” she was asking just for clarification as he braked in the small paved area to the right of the house. That was as far as she got because, just as he slid the transmission into park and killed the headlights, she caught a glimpse of two tall figures stepping out from behind the outbuilding and moving swiftly toward them.

That was when she quit talking, because fear closed her throat.

Y
o,” Mark called out to Wendell and Fielding as he stepped out of the SUV. They replied in kind. Mark immediately started breathing easier. With what had gone down with Davenport and his secretary, it was clear that the situation was out of control. At least, out of his control. He had no doubt that somebody was pulling the strings. He just wasn’t sure who it was yet, or exactly what was going on. And while he found out, he meant to do what he had to do to keep Jess alive and well. Thus he’d texted Fielding as soon as he had put Jess in the RAV4 and before he had gotten in himself, and told him to round up Wendell and Matthews and meet him at his house. They were pulling bodyguard duty for the next few hours, or until he figured something else out, whichever came first.

If Davenport had been coerced by some means or another to first kill Jess and then commit suicide, as Mark suspected, and his secretary had then been run down by a vehicle that, he was almost certain, would turn out to be stolen, then the safest thing was to assume he was dealing with a sophisticated assassin or team of assassins operating under a scorched-earth policy.

One who either had orchestrated the murder of the First Lady, as Jess suspected, or was pulling cleanup duty in the aftermath of her death. Either way, it didn’t bode well for Jess.