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Riley glanced over at him. “There’s no road there.”
“Is that a problem?”
Riley wrenched the wheel to the right, and the Lamborghini bumped over the lawn toward the conservatory. Riley checked the rearview mirror and saw the assault team running for their SUVs.
“Where am I going?” she asked.
“That way,” Emerson said, pointing to the zebra enclosure.
“How do I get around the fence?”
“You don’t.”
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Riley narrowed her eyes, leaned on the horn to warn the zebras, and raced toward the chain-link fence. “Have air bags been installed in this car?”
BANG! The Lamborghini plowed into the fence, knocked a section to the ground, and rolled over it.
“No,” Emerson said. “No air bags.”
Riley sped through the pasture with the Lamborghini bucking and caroming over the rough ground.
“Are the SUVs gaining on us?” Riley asked.
“Not so much,” Myra said. “They’re having a tussle with the zebras, being that the zebras are through the hole in the fence and stampeding all over the place. So far one SUV has hit a tree and a second one’s flipped over.”
“What about the zebras?”
“The zebras are having a good time,” Myra said.
Riley had a white-knuckle grip on the wheel. “We’re coming to the end of the open pasture.”
“The fence extends into the woods,” Emerson said. “If you look carefully you’ll see a narrow break in the trees where a path leads to an old stone-and-iron gate.”
Riley slowed to a crawl and turned onto the path. She stopped at the gate, and Emerson jumped out and opened it. Riley drove to the other side and into an affluent suburban neighborhood. Emerson closed the gate, pitched his laptop into a small pond that backed up to the gate, and got back into the car.
“That gate looked a lot less substantial than the chain-link we demolished. Couldn’t we have just knocked it off its hinges?” she asked Emerson.
“Yes, but that gate’s almost a hundred years old,” Emerson said. “I wouldn’t want to destroy it. And it keeps the zebras out of the neighborhood swimming pools.”
—
Riley drove to Fourteenth Street and parked a block away from the Columbia Heights metro stop.
“Now what?” she asked Emerson.
“Now we take the yellow line train to Virginia,” Emerson said.
“I don’t mean to talk out of school,” Myra said, “but shouldn’t we be going to the police?”
Emerson shook his head. “We’re dealing with corruption at the very highest level and we have no idea how it trickles down. At the very least we would be detained and remanded to involved authorities.”
Myra raised an eyebrow. “Do I want to know what the heck is going on?”
“It’s the NSA,” Riley told her.
“It’s not the NSA,” Emerson said. “If it was the NSA they would have caught us leaving the estate. They would have had helicopters and a fleet of cars all through the neighborhood to track us down no matter what we did. As it was, the operation at Mysterioso was limited to a small number of men.”
