Covenant

61

The Knesset Guards pushed Ethan into the back of a government sedan as soon as he’d finished his phone call. As he got into the vehicle the two men took their places in the front seats.

Ethan glanced at the doors as the sedan rolled out of the Knesset compound. Both were locked and controlled from the front seat by a panel of switches on the center of the dash.

As the vehicle joined the main road away from the Knesset, Ethan saw a white jeep pull in alongside. He refrained from looking directly at it, but could see Safiya Luckov driving, her long black hair billowing out behind her as the jeep passed the sedan and gently eased into place in front of it.

Ethan tensed, waiting to see what would happen next.

Ahead, a set of lights turned red at a junction. He could see Safiya braking gently as she eased up to the lights. The sedan began to slow. Ethan lifted one arm up and braced it against the back of the passenger seat.

In an instant, Safiya’s jeep suddenly braked hard and then flew into reverse, accelerating backward. Ethan’s escort yelped in alarm as the jeep smashed into the sedan with a crunch of shattering plastic and rending metal, and instantly two impact bags billowed out from the dashboard as the windshield imploded with a tinkling avalanche of glass chips.

Ethan lurched forward between the seats, reaching out and hitting the two lowest switches in the panel on the dashboard. He heard the whine of the central-locking system as he pushed his door open and dashed out, running round to Safiya’s jeep and leaping aboard as the two escort drivers floundered behind the safety cushions.

Safiya crunched the jeep into gear and accelerated away from the red light, swerving briefly to avoid a couple of startled motorists before clearing the junction.

“This had better be worth it!” she shouted above the hot wind.

“It’s worth it, trust me,” Ethan said. “MACE has gotten things all neatly packaged up and Rachel’s fallen for it, but the whole thing stinks. Something just doesn’t add up.”

Safiya drove two blocks before turning right, then left, then right again, and pulling up alongside a red pickup parked by the sidewalk. Ethan jumped out of the jeep and climbed into the pickup to see Aaron Luckov grinning at him from behind his thick beard.

“Three years of peace, Safiya and I had, before you came back here. Three whole years.”

Ethan smiled grimly as the pickup pulled away.

“Safiya going to be okay?”

“She’s pretty damned sore with you, Ethan,” Luckov said, “but she’ll come round. It’s not like we’re doing this for fun. Not entirely anyway.”

“Where’s Griffiths?”

“Not far,” Luckov said. “He phoned you?”

“Yeah,” Ethan said. “Whatever he’s got to say, it had better be good, because Israel’s going to be on my ass for this.”