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“Bill! No!”
Laura screams this and I have already traversed to her silhouette. She thinks her colleague following me through the tunnel has accidentally fired on them. It’s a fatal mistake. The first round spins her like a rag doll. The second puts her on the hard rail roadbed.
Ten seconds have passed.
I rise and walk quickly to Stu. He’s on his back with a pair of holes in his white shirt and no pulse. I go through his pockets and retrieve what I hope are the keys to the black SUV. His flashlight lies with its head atop one of the rails, spotlighting the face of an attractive woman with short blond hair.
Three feet away, Laura is on her side, her arms splayed out. Blood is coming out of the side of her mouth and her eyes follow me dully. I keep the revolver trained on her. One round is left in its five-shot cylinder. I pat her down and find the mass of a semi-auto in a holster on her back, still in place. Her pulse is weak and thready.
“You can’t stop it.”
She says this as clearly as if she were still talking to me the day I was chained to the waterboard chair. I kneel down on my haunches, brushing her hair out of her face with involuntary tenderness.
“Stop what?” I nearly shout it. My ears are still ringing from the gunfire.
But she’s gone now, her eyes milky marbles in the glare of the flashlight.
***
The black SUV is parked on Alaskan Way, fifty feet from the tunnel portal near the Port of Seattle office. Traffic is light and the bay beyond is blue-black, nearly invisible. I walk quickly from the tracks, across a low railing, and to the sidewalk. I cross the four lanes of the street and approach the SUV from behind. Someone is sitting in the back seat.
Tamping down the rage that has followed me from the tunnel, I walk calmly along the sidewalk, wishing I had reloaded. One live round is left in the .357. It’s back in the holster in my right pocket. As I stride along, just a normal gait, just like anybody going down the sidewalk, my hand rests on the gun. Through the tinted windows, I can only see a shadow, sitting on the driver’s side rear seat. He seems to be looking forward.
Backup.
This is where a sane man would walk the other way, catch the 99 bus that would take me to Pioneer Square and home. Yet I walk toward the vehicle. “You can’t stop it,” Laura had said. They know what “it” is. The man sitting in the SUV will know.
Now I move quickly, quicker than he can check the side mirrors and react. In an instant, my hand is on the cold doorknob. I rip the door open and lean in, putting the gun barrel an inch from his nose.
“No!” It is Rachel who screams. She draws back against the opposite door in a fetal position.
“What’s going on? Where are the FBI agents?” she demands.
“In the tunnel. And they’re not FBI agents.”
I put her in the front seat, put Stu’s key in the ignition, and drive.
She must see a wild look in my eyes. She keeps quiet, glances at me in brief bursts, seeking recognition. I watch her out of the corner of my eye, something in me not trusting her, even though she was the one who alerted me to the danger at the station, even though her body language was stiff with fear. Still, she was sitting unrestrained in the SUV—nothing keeping her from summoning help when Stu and Laura went to get me. She obviously had suspicions about them—why else would she have mouthed the word “run”? My bloodstream, bones, muscles are all animated by mistrust now.
After we have gone several blocks, she starts to talk quickly. The three caught her in the parking lot, showed their identification, demanded to know what she was doing at the station. She told them—it was just instinct. Deference to authority. Stupid, sure. But they said they were federal agents. Maybe they were there to protect me. She blurted it out: I was arriving tonight. They walked her in to the station to meet the Portland train, Stu keeping a tight grip on her upper arm. She points to it, rubs it.
“Something about the way he was holding me made me realize they were there to hurt you…”
We drive past the businesses on First Avenue. I don’t notice the clever marquee of the week at the Lusty Lady. Rachel talks in a quiet voice. She had been careful driving to meet me, taken all the precautions I had given her.
“But you stayed in this SUV. Nobody kept you here. Why?”
Her voice grows steely. “I can’t tell you anything that you’ll believe. You’ve decided now you don’t trust me.”
I want to hope she’s telling the truth. A hundred things could have gone wrong, setting them back on my track, including my own carelessness. She’s either a part of this—call it what it is: plot—or she’s in danger. She sent me a note warning me off eleven/eleven. She claims she doesn’t know what it means. Her father does. But maybe he thought he was doing the right thing by keeping me from Praetorian. Maybe he thought eleven/eleven was another drill, and my digging into it would just bring lethal trouble my way. But he’s the one who ran the original Praetorian. A man trained to conceal and deceive. I don’t have time to sort it all out.
I let her lean across and caress my face. Later I might wish I had been less out of my mind, wish I had debriefed her more. But that would be later.
“You’re hurt.”
For the first time I notice the throbbing in my left cheek. Where I was knocked to the hard ground by Bill.
“I like your beard,” she says.
