Part 8 Superpower #3
His whole front half was cloaked in shadow, his head shrouded by a hoodie, his hands wedged in the pockets.
He was fifty yards away.
And looking directly at me.
I’m not easily unnerved, but the way he just stood there, absolutely still, unmoving in the slow-falling snow, staring right at me, was genuinely unsettling.
It was as if he wasn’t just watching me.
He was evaluating me.
‘Sam, what are you doing back there?’ Heidi called from up ahead. From where she was, she couldn’t see the mysterious man.
Suddenly, explosively, my phone rang.
I almost jumped out of my skin.
Fumbling, I grabbed it from my pocket.
The call was from a number I didn’t know.
I turned back to check on the dark figure behind the snow mound.
He was gone.
I answered the phone, half-expecting to hear the chilling voice from December 21st.
‘Hello, Mr Speedman? It’s Narelle Wyvill, the nurse looking after Agent Mills at Phelps Hospital.’
I exhaled. ‘Hey, Nurse Narelle. What’s up?’
‘Well, thirty minutes ago, Dr Shepherd brought Agent Mills out of her coma. Now the FBI is all over the place. That other agent, Mr Hooper, said they’re going to take her to the Irving Center at New York-Presbyterian down by Columbia University.
It has a Level 1 adult trauma centre and can do much more than we can with her injuries.
I, well, I just thought you’d like to know. ’
‘Thank you so much for telling me, Nurse Narelle. That’s very considerate of you.’
And it was. She was a nice lady.
I felt bad that I hadn’t been there when Audrey had woken up, but then again I doubted that Special Agent Hooper would’ve let me see her anyway.
I said, ‘Did they say when they were going to take her to the other hospital?’
‘It’s not a case of when, sweetie. They’re doing it right now.’
‘Gosh, thanks again, Nurse Narelle.’ I rang off. ‘Heidi, Georgy, quick, we gotta hustle.’
With a final concerned look back across the stream at the mound of snow, I hurried away with Heidi and Georgy.
Audrey was awake and I desperately wanted to get back to the hospital to see if she was all right.
Phelps Hospital
28 December, 1735 hours
We arrived at Phelps Hospital in Georgy’s little red Yaris to find FBI vehicles and NYPD cars filling the ER’s turnaround.
The whole area was bathed in the strobing glare of police lights.
This was serious.
The Feds were giving Audrey—the last person to see the QuantumSpeed-7 chip—an armed escort to New York-
Presbyterian.
There was even a black FBI Hostage Rescue Team van among the vehicles.
We got there just in time to see Audrey—lying on a wheeled hospital bed with an oxygen mask over her nose and mouth—get loaded into the back of a large ambulance marked ‘New York-Presbyterian: Emergency Medical Services’.
Special Agent Trey Hooper strode alongside the gurney, along with three other suit-wearing agents, all with their hands on their holstered pistols.
A male paramedic climbed into the back of the ambulance with Audrey and slammed its rear doors shut.
Hooper and the other agents hurried for their cars.
The motorcade took off.
Four NYPD cruisers—their lights flashing—led the way.
Then the ambulance.
Then two unmarked FBI cars, the first one containing Special Agent Trey Hooper.
And last of all, the big black FBI HRT van.
While this didn’t bode well for my chances of seeing Audrey any time soon, I was actually glad to see that the FBI were taking her safety seriously.
Whoever was after the QuantumSpeed-7 chip may still have wanted to try to get information out of Audrey as to its location.
‘Dr Sam? What should we do?’ Georgy asked me.
‘Follow them,’ I said.
THE MOTORCADE ROUTE
New York-Presbyterian Hospital’s Irving Center is at the northern tip of Manhattan Island, very close to the enormous George Washington Bridge.
The drive there from Sleepy Hollow would normally take about fifty minutes, but at this time of the evening, going against the flow of traffic, and it being three days after Christmas, it’d be closer to thirty.
As the motorcade escorting Audrey’s ambulance made its way south down the Saw Mill River Parkway, heading toward the glow of Manhattan, Georgy, Heidi and I followed it from a respectful distance in Georgy’s little Toyota.
The motorcade made good time.
Pretty soon, it had reached the Henry Hudson Parkway and was sweeping over the Riverdale interchange just north of Manhattan Island when—
—I saw a gang of four black vehicles sweep quickly up an on-ramp on the right-hand side of the interchange, join our parkway and accelerate quickly, gaining on the FBI motorcade in front of us.
They were four large black pickup trucks.
Ford F-150s.
Each had men crouched in their rear trays, wearing black ski masks.
And then one masked man popped up from the rear tray of the lead pickup brandishing a rocket launcher.
‘Oh, gosh . . .’ I said.
‘Fuck me . . .’ Heidi gasped.
The masked man fired his weapon.
The rocket-propelled grenade lanced forward from the chase truck, issuing a dead-straight smoke trail, and hit the FBI Hostage Rescue Team van.
The blast lifted the big HRT van fully off the road.
It was hurled sideways, slamming wildly into the guardrail before tipping completely over it.
What happened next could only be described as clinical.
Moving with practised coordination, the four black trucks sped past the two FBI escort cars . . .
. . . and as they did . . .
. . . I saw a man in the back of one of the trucks throw some small shiny objects onto the road in front of the two FBI cars.
Loud puncture-like whumps boomed as the FBI cars’ tyres blew out and the Bureau cars fishtailed wildly and smashed into the concrete divider, their tyres shredded by the spikes the man had tossed into their paths.
‘Go round! Go round!’ I yelled to Georgy.
We skirted the glittering spikes on the road and as we sped past the two crashed FBI cars, I saw Trey Hooper leap out of his car, swearing angrily and helplessly.
By then, two of the black chase trucks had sped ahead of Audrey’s ambulance and had started ruthlessly ramming the four much smaller NYPD cars.
Within seconds, two of the cop cars were toast.
Then the masked men in the black trucks opened fire with compact machine guns at the last two NYPD cruisers.
They ripped apart the drivers and the two cruisers peeled away and crashed.
Leaving Audrey’s ambulance alone and defenceless . . .
. . . which was when the other two black trucks swept into place on either side of it, wedging it in.
The passenger door of the left-side truck swung open and a masked man stepped nimbly out of it onto the running board of the ambulance.
He yanked open the ambulance’s door—fired his gun at the unseen driver then tossed the dead driver out the door, onto the speeding road—then he slid inside the ambulance, taking it over.
They now had control of Audrey’s ambulance.
It had taken less than sixty seconds.
Clinical.
Georgy’s mouth fell open as we watched all this go down.
Now the four black trucks were keeping pace with the fast--moving ambulance, two in front of it, one on each side.
‘What’s happening?’ Georgy gasped.
‘They want Audrey alive.’ I threw Heidi a look. ‘They waited till she was out in the open and now they’re trying to snatch her. They want to find out what she knows about that quantum chip.’
‘But who are they?’ Heidi said.
‘Georgy,’ I said. ‘Quick, move. No offence, but can you let Heidi drive?’
Georgy and Heidi traded places. Heidi took the wheel, gripping it like a race-car driver.
(As I mentioned before, usually, I don’t like driving with Heidi. She’s a very fast and reckless driver, but that was exactly what we needed right now.)
I said, ‘Heidi, give me your gun and speed up. Get on the left side of the ambulance.’
‘Copy that.’ She handed me her Glock 43 and gunned the accelerator.
As our little car sprang forward, I opened the passenger-side window, leaned out and fired Heidi’s short-barrelled pistol at the Ford F-150 on the left side of the ambulance.
I hit both its rear tyres and they blew out.
Then I shot its driver in the back of the head.
Blood splattered all over the inside of the truck’s windshield and now it veered left, its driver dead, away from the ambulance, and slammed into the concrete divider.
‘Heidi, go! Get in close to the ambulance’s driver-side door while we have an opening!’
‘On it!’ Heidi replied.
‘What are you doing?!’ Georgy exclaimed.
‘I’m not gonna let Audrey get kidnapped without a fight!’ I said. ‘Heidi, hit the fucking gas!’
Heidi hit the fucking gas.
As the mighty pylons of the George Washington Bridge appeared ahead of us in the night, our little red car zoomed up to the left side of the ambulance, the only flank free of enemy trucks.
The compact size of our car helped me the most, because the ski mask–wearing man now driving the big ambulance didn’t see me creep up alongside him till it was too late.
Of course, by now the trucks in front of me had seen one of their number go crashing into the divider and were visibly slowing to see what was going on.
Which meant I only had a few seconds to do what I needed to do.
The roadway whipped by below me in a blur of speed as Heidi brought me in close to the ambulance’s driver-side door—
—just as the truck directly ahead of her reduced its speed to come and investigate.
‘Heidi!’ I called over the wind. ‘See if you can distract those two trucks in front of us!’
‘You got it!’
I leapt across onto the ambulance’s running board.
Its masked driver didn’t see me until I’d swung open the door, raised my gun and shot him in the chest.
He flopped across the front seats of the ambulance, dead. I saw that he wore black fatigues and combat boots plus black goggles over his ski mask.
A professional assassin.
I kicked him further across the cabin and took the wheel.
(Outside, Heidi whipped away in the Yaris, driving it like an absolute maniac—which was normal driving for Heidi—zinging it around and in between the two trucks ahead of my ambulance, driving them crazy and, most of all, distracting them.)