Pit Stop Read online

  Maybe having the kid wasn’t a liability after all. The kid was leverage. What was Reilly going to do? Run him off the road? Shoot out his tires? Run the risk of killing somebody’s little girl?

  Then again, you could never predict what Reilly would do. He was the kind of guy who saw the bigger picture. Who might figure one dead girl was better than millions.

  Kristoff reached down, felt the cylinder by his thigh. Felt its power.

  He turned to the girl, who was still whimpering. “Hey, come on, stop that. But you can’t try to take out the key while we’re moving. You could get us both killed.”

  The girl sniffed, wiped the tears from her cheeks. Her eyes were wide with fear.

  “So, kid,” he said, “what’s your name?”

  “Kelly,” she whispered.

  “Kelly. Nice name. Better do up your seat belt, Kelly. Gonna be a wild ride.”

  REILLY HAD THE PEDAL PRESSED down as far as it would go, but it still wasn’t enough. The car, a Chevy Vega Kammback station wagon from the seventies with wood-grain sides and a burgundy vinyl interior that had to be a health hazard in itself, was struggling to get above sixty. Still, he thought, it could have been worse. He could have commandeered an AMC Gremlin. Or a Pacer. Or pretty much anything with an AMC badge on it, for that matter.

  Up ahead, the F-150 was receding alarmingly, a fact that wasn’t lost on the Ford’s owner, who was now sitting ramrod-straight next to Reilly, his eyes lasered on the vehicle his daughter was in.

  “He’s getting away,” the man blurted. “Why didn’t you just hijack a scooter? Would have been faster.”

  Reilly frowned and squeezed the pedal harder, hoping to coax an extra mile per hour or two from the Chevy’s asthmatic engine. It was no use. The Vega’s speedometer probably hadn’t swung past the half-century mark in decades—if ever. The faint smell of pot and patchouli that impregnated its interior only served to confirm this.

  “Fuel,” Reilly asked. “How much have you got in your tank?”

  The man’s face creased as he thought for a quick moment, then said, “It’s low. Less than a quarter full. I was going to fill up after we ate.”

  Reilly asked, “So what are we talking about, distance-wise? How far can he get?”

  The man thought again for a beat, then said, “Seventy, eighty miles, maybe?”

  Reilly glanced at the Vega’s fuel gauge. It was almost half full. He processed this. Given the speed the F-150 was traveling at, that suggested an hour’s driving time. And with the F-150 pulling away at a rate of ten or fifteen miles per hour—or more—it would soon be out of sight, despite the flat terrain and the more or less straight road they were hurtling—well, gliding—down.

  He had to find a way to bridge that gap. Quickly.

  “Who is this guy?” the man asked. “What the hell’s going on?”

  Reilly glanced across at him. The man was alarmed enough. “He’s a person of interest. We need to stop him.”

  The man stared at him, his eyes wide with disbelief. “Seriously?” he raged. “That’s it? You’re going to stonewall me with some kind of ‘it’s classified’ bullshit? That guy’s got my daughter. He’s got Kelly.”

  Reilly’s guts tightened. He could understand the man’s anger. He’d only recently been through something similar himself, with his now five-year-old son, Alex. He looked at the man and could just feel the fear and worry that had to be coursing through him.

  “The only thing you need to know right now is that I will do everything in my power to get your daughter back,” Reilly said. “That’s priority one. Everything else has to follow on from that. Okay?”

  Even as the words left his lips, he was twisting inside, pained by the knowledge that he was partly lying. Of course, the man’s daughter would be a priority. Just not the priority. Of course, he’d do everything in his power to get her back safely. But ultimately—ultimately—the man Reilly only knew by his online avatar—Faustus—had the potential to unleash a lot of damage. Lethal damage. He needed to be neutralized.

  Reilly hoped it would never come down to it, never reach a point where a binary decision had to be made, where it would have to be one or the other but not both. Some decisions were too horrific to contemplate. At Quantico, during training, they referred to them as Coventry moments, after the widely accepted but false story that during World War II, Churchill had allowed the city to be sacrificed and not have it evacuated so as not to let the Germans know that his men had broken the Nazis’ Enigma code and knew about the devastating raid to come. It was nonsense, of course. The code-breakers hadn’t known that the target was Coventry. Still, the story had become widely accepted, and the myth endured.

  Reilly hoped there wasn’t a Coventry moment waiting for him.

  The man didn’t seem convinced by Reilly’s words. “You bet your ass she’s priority one. I’ll see to that.”

  Reilly held the man’s gaze, and nodded. “What’s your name?”

  “Garber. Glen Garber. You?”

  “Sean Reilly.”

  “That your real name, or is that also classified?”

  Reilly shrugged. “It’s real.”

  “Where’s the rest of your men?” Garber asked. “Don’t you at least have a partner or something? You guys work in twos, right?”

  Reilly grimaced. Under normal circumstances, Garber was right. But this case had been anything but normal right from the get-go. “I’ve been undercover and I didn’t have a phone,” he told Garber. “Then things happened real quick. I had to improvise. I was hoping to connect with my people from the service center.”

  “But you didn’t?”

  Reilly shook his head. “We’re on our own.”

  “Well, you’ve got a phone now,” Garber told him. “Use it. Get help.”

  But Reilly already had another idea. “I will,” he said. “But first, tell me this. Does you daughter have a cell phone on her?”

  Garber’s expression clouded, then morphed from confusion to concern. “Yes, she does, but—why?”

  Reilly handed him back his phone. “Call her.”

  KELLY COULDN’T TAKE HER EYES off the man.

  When you’re a kid, everyone tells you to be wary of strangers. She was old enough now to realize anyone could present a threat, but when she was younger, she imagined strangers as evil-looking people. Long, pointy noses, devil ears. Thick eyebrows and bad teeth.

  This man just looked like an ordinary person. He could have been someone her dad worked with, one of his crew that built and fixed houses.

  But there was something about the eyes. They were cold.

  Worse than cold. They were dead.

  When the man glanced over at her, and she looked into those eyes, she thought about when her dad took her to the Central Park Zoo on one of their trips into the city. She and her dad did everything together since her mom had died. She remembered the reptile exhibit, and how when they looked through the glass, you couldn’t tell if they were really looking at you or not.

  Creepy eyes.

  She noticed something else about him, too. He kept touching that cylinder, the thing that looked like a narrow Thermos, that was tucked between his thigh and the center console.

  Kelly was thinking about that when the sound of her own cell phone made her jump. It was in her small purse, which was on the seat beside her.

  “That you?” Kristoff asked, his head snapping right.

  “Yeah.” She took out the phone, looked at it, saw that it was her dad. She couldn’t believe it hadn’t occurred to her to call him before now, but she was so scared, she wasn’t thinking straight.

  “Well,” Kristoff said, “you better answer it.”

  She did. “Dad! A man stole the truck! I’m in the truck!”

  Glen said, “I know, sweetheart. I’m with a . . . I’m with a policeman. We’re following you. Are you okay? Has he hurt you?”

  Kelly glanced at the man. “He hit my arm when I tried to take out the key. But it doesn’t hurt th
at much.”

  “Honey, everything’s going to be okay. We just have to figure out how—”

  “Give me the phone,” Kristoff said to Kelly. When she hesitated, his eyes narrowed and his voice dropped an octave. “Now.”

  Kelly handed it over. Kristoff put it to his ear and said, “You’re the kid’s dad?”

  “No,” said Reilly. “It was. Now it’s me.”

  Kristoff smiled. “That’s you in that little wagon behind me, isn’t it? The Vega? Those things didn’t run when they were new forty years ago. Unless it’s got a rocket launcher on it, I think you’re screwed.”

  “Let the kid go, Faustus. Keep the truck but let the kid out.”

  Kristoff chuckled. “I think when I hit you in the head you suffered some kind of brain damage.”

  “You pull over, and I’ll pull over at the same time. There’ll be half a mile between us. Let the kid out. I’ll drop her dad off. Then it’ll just be you and me. We don’t need a whole lot of collateral damage here.”

  That prompted a second chuckle from Kristoff. “Seriously? The collateral damage I had in mind amounts to a lot more than one little girl.” He leaned harder on the accelerator. “You’re getting smaller in my rearview. You’re gonna have to pedal harder.”

  The Ford edged up toward eighty-five. The truck cleared a stand of trees, and parked there, tucked in behind them, was a state police car.

  Kelly whipped her head around to see the car as they sped past it, then said to the man, “I think he had radar. You’re gonna get a ticket,” with a hint of satisfaction, like he was really in trouble now.

  “Son of a bitch,” Kristoff said, tossing the phone into a tray in the console. He glanced in his mirror. The police car was shooting out of its hiding spot and hitting the highway, back tires drifting.

  Siren on, lights flashing.

  IN THE VEGA, REILLY SAID, “Son of a bitch.”

  “What?” Garber said. “He’s got the cops after him. Isn’t that a good thing?”

  Reilly said nothing.

  “LOOKS LIKE WE’RE GOING TO have some fun,” Kristoff said.

  The cruiser was one of those souped-up Crown Vics, an Interceptor. Kristoff knew he could outrun Reilly’s commandeered Vega, but the cruiser was another matter.

  It was gaining on him. Gaining on him fast.

  He couldn’t outrun it, and he couldn’t outhandle it. But one thing this Ford had over the Crown Vic was bulk.

  Maybe Kristoff could run it off the road. But he’d have to let it catch him first.

  Kelly was twisted around in her seat, watching the cruiser close the distance.

  “You better pull over,” she told him. “You’re gonna get a huge ticket. And he’s going to put you in jail for stealing my dad’s truck.”

  “Shut up.”

  The cruiser was coming up in the passing lane, siren continuing to wail. When it was only a car length behind, the officer behind the wheel was pointing to the shoulder, ordering Kristoff to pull over.

  Kristoff hit the brakes. Once, hard.

  The Interceptor was suddenly alongside.

  Which was when Kristoff cranked the wheel suddenly to the left, ramming the pickup truck’s front fender into the cruiser.

  The Interceptor swerved over to the left shoulder, the left wheels rolling over the rounded edge. At that point, the driver couldn’t right it, couldn’t regain control and get the car back onto the pavement.

  The cruiser barreled into the grassy median, spun around twice before coming to a halt in a spray of dirt and dust and grass.

  Kristoff was looking in the driver’s door mirror, smiling. “I think your dad’s gonna be pissed about his fender,” he said, and glanced over at Kelly.

  He didn’t like what he saw.

  Kelly was holding the cylinder. While Kristoff had been occupied with the cruiser, she’d reached over the console and grabbed it.

  Now she was clutching it in her right hand, holding it up by the open window.

  “Let me out,” Kelly said. “And give my dad back his truck.”

  “CHRIST!”

  Half a mile back, Glen Garber’s heart imploded as he watched the police cruiser’s high-speed tussle with his pickup truck. He watched helplessly, his fingers squeezing the armrest until all the blood had rushed out of them, as the cars collided—then he breathed out as the cruiser spun off to the side and disappeared in a cloud of dust in the median.

  He glanced left at Reilly, who was also fixated on the drama up ahead. “You need to call your people and get them to back off. You can’t put Kelly at risk with another face-off like that. This guy—what was it you called him, Faustus?—he’s not gonna give up lightly, is he?”

  “I didn’t expect him to.”

  Glen pointed angrily at the phone. “Then call your people. They need to steer clear of him. We’ve got a phone link into him, we can speak to him. Negotiate. I don’t know, just—no more of this Fast and Furious bullshit. My kid’s in that truck.”

  Reilly peeled his eyes off the receding pickup truck long enough to take in Garber’s scowling face, then stared ahead again and nodded.

  “I’ll send out an alert. Make sure no one engages him. But we can’t just let him ride off into the sunset. Even if he does let your daughter go. We need to make both things happen. We need to get her back, but we also need to grab him.”

  “Why?” Garber shot back. “Kelly’s the only thing that matters here. Even if he gets away, you’ll find him again. You guys always do.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “It is for me. We get Kelly back. Priority one, remember? Then you use your drones and your keyword surveillance and facial recognition software and all the other tricks you guys have these days and you go in and grab him. After I have my daughter back.”

  Reilly grimaced. He hated moments like this. He wanted to say something to get this man to understand the seriousness of the matter, the utterly unthinkable consequences that might well occur if his quarry were to get away. But he couldn’t tell him everything. Not when it was that classified. Not when security protocols dictated who could know the truth and who couldn’t.

  Garber seemed to read his hesitation, as he pressed on. “Who is this guy? And what kind of a name is Faustus? I mean, Christ, it sounds like something Stan Lee dreamed up.”

  “I wish it was,” Reilly said.

  “So who is he?”

  Reilly weighed his words carefully. “He’s a guy with a grudge. A really big grudge. And right now, he’s got the means to get himself some serious payback.”

  Garber went quiet for a second, then said, “A grudge? Against who?”

  Reilly slid a glance across at him. “Everyone.”

  UP AHEAD, KRISTOFF HAD TO fight to yank his eyes off the canister in the girl’s hands and make sure he kept the truck on the road. That damn girl—after everything he’d been through, after everything he’d done to get to where he was now, even if it was in the middle of nowhere, far from the nearest big city where he could unleash the demon he’d risked everything to get his hands on—she had it in her power to ruin it all.

  He couldn’t let that happen.

  “Give me that canister, Kelly,” he rasped. “Give it back, right now.”

  “No,” she fired back angrily.

  What the hell kind of a kid is this? he fumed inwardly. A stab of admiration cut through the rage he felt. She was a tough kid, and he liked that. Better than some sniveling, pathetic crybaby, he thought. A kid with some gusto in her. Good for her.

  Still, it wouldn’t distract him from doing whatever it took to get the canister back. Even if that meant snapping her neck with his bare hands.

  He couldn’t just reach out and grab it. She was holding it right by the open window. He couldn’t risk her throwing it out of the car, which is what she was threatening to do.

  The canister was supposed to be strong, able to withstand a considerable impact. But flying out of a car at eighty miles per hour, hitting th
e pavement, maybe getting run over by a car behind them—

  No, that would not be good.

  There would come a time when he’d be happy for the contents of that canister to hit the atmosphere, but not just yet.

  Kristoff wouldn’t mind a little time to get away first. Didn’t want to be downwind and all that.

  So he needed to persuade this kid, who was starting to get very annoying, to be very respectful of that canister.

  “Kelly,” he said, mustering as much calmness into his tone as he could, “you need to give it back to me. You want to know why?”

  She scowled at him, a fierce determination radiating out of her face—but some uncertainty broke through, and after a moment, she said, “Why?”

  “Well, right now, the reason I need you, the reason you’re still alive, is because of that canister. You’re kind of my safety net. My way of making sure the cops stay off my back and let me get to where I’m going. But if I don’t have that canister you’re holding in your hand, well then I don’t need to go there anymore. Which means I don’t need you anymore.”

  She thought about it for a second. “Which means you can let me go?”

  “No,” he replied in a measured, calm tone. “It means I can kill you.” He kept his gaze on her, able to let it linger on her now that the road ahead was relatively straight and flat. “Do you understand? If you want to stay alive—if you want to give me a reason to keep you alive—you need to give it back to me.”

  Kelly stared at him, confusion clouding her expression.

  “Do you want to die, Kelly?” he asked, his voice taking on a sharper edge. “Do you? Is that what you really want?”

  He saw her lower lip quiver as the horrible realization settled into the little girl’s mind. But she didn’t say anything.

  “Do you want to die, Kelly?” he asked again, putting more pressure on the accelerator as the interstate began a long, steady hill climb.

  The flutter of her lip quickened. Then she dropped her eyes, and shook her head, slowly, from side to side. “No,” she muttered. “I don’t want to die.”