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“Did you frame Terry Howard?”
Le looked up at me, smiled, and seemed to try to wink before blood spilled from his lips and the light in his eyes turned a dull shade of gray.
Chapter
46
John Brown appreciated overcast nights like these, when it was so dark he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. Blinded, Brown found his other senses heightened. He smelled manure and ripening tobacco, heard a barn owl hooting, and tasted the bitter espresso bean he was chewing to stay alert.
“Three miles out,” Cass said in his earpiece.
“Copy,” Brown said, shifting his weight on the corrugated steel. “Hobbes?”
“We’re ready.”
“Fender?”
“Affirmative.”
Brown bent to dig into a knapsack at his feet. A stabbing pain drilled through his knee, and he grunted through the spasm.
He managed to get out his iPad and stand, feeling the bones in his knee crack and settle. In a cold sweat, Brown turned on the tablet and signed into a secure website.
“Coming at you,” Cass said. “Lead car’s a blue Mustang, Florida plates. Behind the trucks, there’s a black Dodge Viper, Georgia plates.”
“Copy,” said a male voice.
Brown clicked on a link that opened a private video feed from a camera carried by one of Hobbes’s men. The scene was an interchange on Interstate 95 near the town of Ladysmith, Virginia, roughly one hundred and fifteen miles south of Washington, DC.
I-95 below the interchange was under repair. Crews were down there laboring under bright lights, and a detour forced all northbound traffic off the Ladysmith exit ramp. Another of Hobbes’s men stood at the top of the ramp.
He was dressed in a workman’s jumpsuit, a yellow reflective vest, and a hard hat, and he held a flashlight with an orange cover that he was using to direct the sparse traffic west, toward Ladysmith and the Jefferson Davis Highway.
The blue Mustang came into view, followed by the first of three eighteen-wheel refrigerated semis bearing the logo of the Littlefield Produce Company of Freehold Township, New Jersey. The black Dodge Viper brought up the rear as Hobbes’s flagman waved them east, to State Route 639.
When the flagman had done the same to Cass, who was driving a white Ford Taurus, Brown changed the feed to a camera held by one of Fender’s men, who was standing in the road directing traffic a mile west of the interstate. He waved the little convoy north on Virginia Route 633.
When Cass’s taillights disappeared, Brown said, “Stick to the plan. Execute the plan. Surgical precision in every move.”
Brown did not bother to watch the feed of the flagmen turning the convoy off Route 633 onto a little-used, unpaved county road that cut through woodlots and agricultural fields. He could already see the headlights of the Mustang turning off the county road, following the detour signs.
“Come to Papa,” Fender said.
Hearing guns being loaded all around him, Brown watched the semis make the turn onto the farm road and saw the Viper coming behind them. He knew he was going to suffer, but he knelt and gritted his teeth at the agony in his knee. The headlights came closer, revealing Brown on the corrugated steel roof of an old tobacco-drying shed.
There were six such long, low sheds in all, three set back on either side of the road that passed between them. The Mustang slowed at the blinking red light next to the sign they’d put up beyond the southernmost shed; it read TIGHT SPOT, 15 MPH.
Brown watched through the sheer black mask he wore as the Mustang kept coming. He could see the driver and the passenger now, both wearing T-shirts and looking around as if to say Where the hell is this detour taking us?
“Patience,” Brown said as the Mustang passed below him and beyond the northernmost shed.
He glanced at the semis but then focused on the Mustang as it followed a curve in the road and stopped at a high berm and dead end.
The trailer of the first semi was almost beyond the sheds when it stopped. The second one was completely between the sheds, and the third had its cab and half of the trailer between them.
Brown waited until he heard shouting from the men in the Mustang before he said, “Take them.”
He saw it all unfold in headlight glare and shadows.
