Back Blast

66

Suzanne Brewer looked at her hands folded in her lap, and she realized they were shaking. Perspiration formed on her temples, and her mouth was dry.

She and Mayes were still sitting in her BMW in Fort Marcy Park. Blustery rain pelted the side of her car now, and the light from the streetlamp above them was at times blotted out with the movement of the tree branches. Mayes had been talking for most of the past hour, but not all of it had been productive. On the contrary, eighty percent of what Mayes said had been, as far as Brewer was concerned, the ramblings of an inebriated man who, for the first time in his life, felt free to let years of suspicion flow about his superior. He’d produced a flask filled with scotch, and it loosened his lips even more. He needed to talk, so she let him, but after she learned about Operation BACK BLAST and Denny’s involvement with the Saudis here in the U.S., she had stopped listening, and she had begun thinking about what she would do next.

The information she possessed could certainly put Denny Carmichael in prison, and it could conceivably destroy CIA clandestine ops. But it was even bigger than that, as far as she was concerned. Once she got over the shock of it all, she realized this was a watershed moment in her career, in her life. The decision she made now, right this minute, would set the course for her future.

Mayes looked her up and down through eyes at half mast. “Right now you are at the point I found myself in this afternoon. I’d asked for an answer, and when I got it, I really wished I didn’t know. Now we both know, so now we have to end this. I am friends with Juan Ferreria, the deputy director of the FBI, we can go to his place in Tysons right now, wake him up, and get the ball rolling with DOJ.”

Suzanne hesitated. “I think we need to think carefully about our next move.”

“What do you mean? We said we’d take this to Justice.”

But Suzanne wasn’t thinking about justice, duty, or even right and wrong. She was thinking about leverage. In her meteoric career she would never have more power than she had at this moment. She didn’t want to dispel that power by telling the FBI what she knew.

She didn’t want to destroy the CIA.

She wanted to run the CIA.

Suzanne started her car and pulled back out onto the George Washington Parkway, heading in the direction of Tysons Corner. There was some traffic out at midnight, but she was able to move along at the speed limit. She would play along with Jordan, just to buy some time, but she would spend the fifteen-minute-long drive trying to talk him out of revealing anything to the Department of Justice until they knew exactly what they were doing.

She said, “You and I need to make sure we won’t get caught up in the fallout of all this.”

“We are the ones going to the feds. I’m not worried about getting indicted. I’m worried about getting killed!”

Suzanne said, “In light of this information, I agree Denny is compromised, and I agree he might become desperate. But I don’t think you have any reason to worry.”

“Yeah?” Mayes said, clearly not buying what she was selling. “Why is that?”

She pulled into the right lane. Her BMW hummed along at sixty miles an hour without any effort at all. On her left a motorcycle with a passenger riding behind the driver kept pace with her. It was an unusual sight in the heavy rain, but she was focused on the road ahead and on the man sitting to her right.

She said, “Think about it, Jordan. You two have worked together forever. Say what you want about Denny Carmichael, but he’s a pragmatist. He knows he needs friends in that building right now, and you have shown yourself to be a faithful—”

Suzanne Brewer noticed new movement on her left now, out her driver-side window. Through the rainfall she saw the motorcycle encroaching into her lane. At first she thought he’d just drifted over to the right accidentally, but it took less than a second for her to realize that the passenger’s arm was outstretched, towards her window.

In his hand was a gun, pointed nearly at contact distance with the glass inches from her head.

She only had time to tap her brake pedal, barely slowing the vehicle, before the flash of light assaulted her eyes and the pound of a gunshot rocked her eardrums. Her windshield exploded in her face, and to her right she heard the passenger-side window shatter.

She felt the glass in her hair, blood at her hairline and on her left cheek. Somehow she kept her BMW on the road, so she stomped on the gas now, and the six-cylinder engine accelerated.

She had the wherewithal to drop her right hand from the wheel and punch a button on the center console of the vehicle, shifting the BMW into Sport Mode. Her head slammed back into the headrest as the car launched forward, her suspension stiffened and improved markedly. Her luxury sedan was now a sports car, racing ahead and surprising the assassins on the motorcycle with its power.

She centered her car on the white dashes on the road and weaved right between a pair of vehicles taking up the two lanes in front of her, and then she jacked back to the left, pulling in front of the motorcycle as it went left around the car in the left lane. The bike was forced to brake to avoid rear-ending her, but when she looked in her rearview she saw two more bikes race past the first. Both of them had riders on back as well, and she knew this was far from over.

The sound of their engines came through the shattered window by her face, along with the cool rain.

For the first time since the gunshot she looked over to Jordan Mayes. He hadn’t made a noise, so she expected to find him slumped over in his seat dead, but instead he just held his hand against the lower part of his face. Blood dripped through his fingers.

“How bad is it?” she asked.

“I… I don’t know.” He took his hand away. The bullet had cut across his chin; a flap of skin hung open and blood gushed. From the location of the wound Suzanne knew it wasn’t life-threatening, but it was certainly messy. Mayes leaned towards the rearview to get a look for himself, but when he looked in the mirror he shouted, “They are still coming!” He covered the wound again with his hand.

Another pop from a pistol behind them, then the sound of tearing metal in the trunk of the 535i.

“It’s Carmichael!” Mayes said.

Suzanne Brewer knew he meant it was Carmichael’s Saudi Arabian proxy force, but she did not correct him. Obviously this was Carmichael’s doing. The Gray Man was capable of many things, but she had seen no intelligence claiming he also ran a team of motorcycle hit men.

Another crack of gunfire. This round must have missed the car completely because she heard no impact. She shifted lanes again, then raced forward.

Suzanne didn’t want to take her eyes off the road to check her navigation screen so she called to Mayes. “How far to the next turnoff?”

“I… I don’t know.”

“Well look, dammit!”

Mayes did so, still holding his bleeding chin. He looked to the navigation map on the console display. “In about a mile we come to a T intersection. Jesus Christ! We’ll have to stop! They’ll kill us! Even if we make the turn without them overtaking us, we’ll be on the 495. There’s nowhere to go!”

Suzanne Brewer put the pedal all the way to the floor, but she knew Mayes was right. She could not hold the motorcycles back in this traffic for that long.

She squinted rainwater from her eyes as she weaved between two semis, pushing her speed to ninety miles an hour now, but soon she had to brake again to avoid rear-ending a van.

Another crack of a pistol behind them. The nearest bike was less than twenty-five yards back and closing.

Suzanne knew Jordan Mayes was right. There was no way she could outrun the six assassins on her tail. It was only a matter of seconds before she was either hit by gunfire or miscalculated and crashed her vehicle.

The BMW shot under the Turkey Run Road overpass and began a half-mile-long curve to the left. On the right side was a long gradual drop-off that went down a hill covered in trees and shrubs.

Suzanne looked at the drop-off, then in the rearview again. A plan formulated in her mind quickly, and she knew what she needed to do now. “Get Denny on the phone!”

“What?”

“Tell him to call it off.”

“Are you insane? He won’t answer a call from me!”

“I’ll talk to him. Get my phone.”

He looked around the center console. “Where is it?”

Another crack of gunfire, and the back window shattered high by the roofline. Brewer and Mayes both tucked their heads low.

“In my purse in the backseat.”

Mayes reached back, grabbed her purse, and dug through it. “It’s not here!”

“Then it fell out back there! You have to find it! It’s our only chance!”

Mayes reached back and felt around, but he couldn’t locate it. “Forget it!”

“Hurry!” she screamed at him. Another pop from behind shattered her driver-side mirror. On her right an SUV slammed on its brakes as a two-door compact in the next lane veered in front of it, trying to get out of the way of the car chase overtaking it. “We have to do something! Get back there and find it!”

Mayes unfastened his seat belt so he could look for the phone. As he turned around to reach between the seats he said, “This is crazy! Calling Denny isn’t going to work!”

Suzanne Brewer looked to Mayes, saw him out of his seat and up on his left knee, his upper torso twisted and turned, leaning halfway into the back.

She gripped the steering wheel until her knuckles went white. “Not for you, it won’t.”

And with that Suzanne Brewer closed her eyes, jacked the wheel hard to the right, and sent her BMW across a lane of screeching traffic and off the road, crashing through a thicket of brush along the shoulder and then hurtling down the hill at nearly seventy miles an hour.