The transport eased toward us, closing from twelve feet to ten, from ten to eight. The guy behind the wheel didn’t care what damage might be done to the expensive piece of government machinery in his care. The cost wouldn’t come out of his pocket. We would not have been in such a dire situation, pressed to take such reckless evasive action, if he’d been a person with a higher regard for taxpayers and a sense of responsibility for the community purse. But I supposed the country might not again enjoy the high-quality public employees who once served it, at least not in my lifetime, especially not if my lifetime ended in three minutes.
Under other circumstances, Bridget could have angled away from him, but she stayed on course, straight ahead, because she had no choice, which I now understood since my own psychic magnetism had drawn me as taut and target focused as a quarrel in the groove of a crossbow.
We raced westward at forty-five miles per hour, then fifty, fifty-five, over furrowed ground on which the tires drummed, testing the springs. The body of the Explorer rattled at every connection to the chassis, and we accelerated to sixty, sixty-five.
The transport closed to six feet, so near to us now that the previous illusion of immateriality could not sustain.
Simultaneously, Bridget and I issued an identical, prolonged exclamation—“Ohhhhhhh”—as though tuning our voices to sing a noble anthem in harmony. Then we were airborne, launching off a brink we couldn’t see. No longer relieved by lightning, the night beyond the rain-blurred windshield gave no clue to our imminent fate. A quick glance out of the side window revealed some substance of a slightly lesser darkness, which I perceived to be in turbulent motion. As the Explorer reached the apex of a low arc and began to fall, I realized the surging mass below us was a temporary river, fed by flash flooding, racing through an arroyo that would probably end in a sinkhole that fed an aquifer. I turned my attention to the left in time to see the transport, also airborne, no more than two feet from our port-side flank. With a sudden respect for public property, that profligate driver might have dramatically cut his speed at the last moment, when he realized what lay ahead, or perhaps the greater weight of his vehicle proved less aerodynamic than that of Ford’s finest, or maybe we met the arroyo at a slightly narrower point in its course than he did. Whatever the explanation, the transport fell faster than our SUV, and fell short. As I saw that armored vehicle drop out of sight into the arroyo, Bridget and I completed our harmonized response—“Ohhhhhhh, shit!”—as the Explorer’s front tires met the riverbank an instant before the back of the SUV touched down with a jolt. The steering wheel whipped out of her hands, but she regained control a moment later. We rocked on, no less blind than before, as from the back seat came two voices, each expressing relief and incredulity, one with a vulgarity and the other with a reference to the deity, and Winston barked just once.
|?26?|
Having dropped back to let the driver of the doomed transport torment us, the remaining ISA pursuer would have had time to stop before plunging after his compatriot.
The tempestuous torrents were an effective barrier between him and us. However, unlike an ordinary river formed in the mountains and descending to a sea or lake, this one was not hundreds of miles long. It would end abruptly in a mile or two, five or six at most, when the arroyo terminated in an open fault in the underlying strata of rock. A vortex of water would swirl into the substructure of the desert, perhaps continuing for a while as an underground river, but eventually expiring in a subterranean reservoir, deep water for those who chose to drill for it.
Already, the driver of the remaining transport would be chasing the river south, seeking the end of it, so that he might come around its terminus and head north in search of us. Furthermore, it would be foolish to suppose that the posse was comprised of only two parties. Considering that the ISA’s budget was, although highly secret, rumored to be as much as two hundred billion per year, they could afford to assign to us a dozen transports or, if they fancied, a fleet of spanking-new desert-adapted Rolls-Royce sedans, at least until runaway inflation resulted in two hundred billion being just enough to buy a McDonald’s Happy Meal.
There was also the ghost drone to worry about. If it was, as Panthea thought, an instrument of attack, a mere weapon rather than also a search engine, spotters on the ground would have to provide a target’s location before the drone could strike. The trick then was to get far away from this territory without being seen.
The night was long, the desert vast, the storm obscuring, and we were in a vehicle that could not be tracked by GPS. However, the driver of the remaining transport would have radioed those manning the interstate roadblocks, providing them with a description of the Explorer and the license plate number that belonged to a Porsche in Phoenix. The ISA was likely to have issued an all-points bulletin, making no mention of our bizarro DNA, but naming us as suspects in the murder of two agents at the Sweetwater Flying F Ranch. After this, if we dared return to the interstate or in fact to any major highway where we might encounter any federal, state, or local law enforcement, we would sooner than later be apprehended or abruptly terminated.