BETA - Project Avatar, page 19
The panicked young man ran straight toward Dee’s car. Realizing that Ramsey was in position to see her while Holtz could not, Dee rolled down her window and waved her arm excitedly in the air, trying to attract his attention.
Just then, the red-haired commando emerged through the brasserie door, following on Ramsey’s path. Dee retreated into the darkness of the car, hoping she hadn’t been seen.
The red-haired man’s face looked emotionless, inhuman—the personification of murder. He leveled his short weapon, bending his back to wedge the stock against his shoulder while sighting down the barrel.
When he fired, the weapon made only a quiet punk sound.
The front of Ramsey’s chest exploded in blood, not more than three yards in front of Dee’s car. He fell, face-first onto the wet blacktop, without so much as a cry.
Chapter 19
Dee sat staring out through the windshield at Ramsey’s fallen body. In the confined space, she could hear her own breath: loud, ragged paroxysms that threatened to break into screams. So she held her breath and closed her eyes, concentrating on the dull, tinny patter of the rain on the metal roof.
When she opened her eyes again, the tall soldier had caught up with his comrades, and now all three of them were standing in front of the brasserie patio, clutching their weapons across their chests and staring right at her. She knew they were actually looking at the body lying on the ground in front of her car, and she was almost sure they couldn’t see her through the windshield’s glare. She continued to hold her breath.
Beta was saying something in her ear. She realized that it was saying, “Please confirm.”
“Confirm what?” she whispered, her voice a dry rustle.
“Repeat: I have analyzed the sound signature of weapons fire. Fully automatic nine-millimeter rounds with sound suppression. Please confirm.”
The three soldiers were exchanging a few words. In a moment, she realized, at least one of them was sure to walk toward her to examine the body and, maybe, drag it away.
“Yes,” she whispered, her voice shaking. “Something like that. Assault weapons—yes, three of them.”
“Start the vehicle,” Beta advised her, “and advance out of the parking lot with maximum haste.”
She held the key against the ignition keyhole, trying to work up the courage to start the car. Her hands were shaking and she could feel tears running down her cheeks.
The tall soldier separated from the other two and began walking toward her with long strides.
She took a couple of deep breaths and brushed the tears from her eyes, shoved the key in the ignition and turned it. As the car roared to life, she jammed it into gear, spun the wheel hard to the right, and floored the accelerator. The fat tires screamed and blew a dense cloud of white smoke in an arc behind her as the car cut a tight turn through the empty parking lot. It fishtailed wildly over the wet asphalt, then launched itself like a missile toward the exit gate.
Dee had no idea if they were shooting at her, for the engine noise from behind her head was deafening. It was all she could do to keep the car from hitting anything big.
“Turn left and accelerate,” Beta advised.
The car flew over the curb ramp with all four wheels in the air, hit the wet street, and skidded sideways across four lanes. Then she was accelerating hard up a suburban street, shifting quickly to higher gears, dodging around the slower-moving vehicles as if they were traffic pylons.
“Turn left,” Beta said again. “Attempt to achieve a higher velocity.”
She slid around a corner onto the main road leading to the city, almost sideswiping a Citroen in the process. She dodged through the traffic as fast as she could, slipping from lane to lane, using some ridiculously small gaps between the cars and only just avoiding one accident after another.
“Attempt to achieve a higher velocity,” Beta nagged her.
“I’m driving as fast as I can!” she shouted.
She glanced in the rearview mirror. There was some sort of disturbance behind her, but she had no time to look. At the next opportunity, she glanced again.
It was the black van, following close behind, less than a dozen cars away, and visibly closing the distance. This was a driver who knew things about high-speed chases that Dee did not.
“They’re right behind me!” she cried.
”What is your objective in this situation?”
“I want to live!” Dee shouted. She struggled to articulate and drive at the same time. “I want to get away from the van that’s chasing me. I want to hide the car . . . I need a safe place to hide!”
“I am entering calculation mode. Please wait.” There followed several seconds during which Beta was silent. The traffic opened up a bit, and she pressed hard on the accelerator, swerving into oncoming traffic a couple of times to pass cars in the fast lane.
“I have calculated 4.2 times ten to the sixth . . . ” Beta started to say.
“Beta, for God’s sake, I don’t care how many calculations you’ve made! Just tell me what to do!”
“Continue straight through the upcoming traffic circle, two-hundred twenty meters ahead. Attempt to achieve a higher velocity. Probability of successful evasion and concealment is seven to eighty-three percent, depending on unknown variables.”
Traffic thickened as she approached the roundabout, and it also slowed a bit as a burst of heavy rain obscured visibility. A lane split off to the right to merge with the roundabout traffic, and she roared into the clear space between the dividing lanes and floored it, heading straight for the red light.
Just as she was coming to the intersection, she glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the black van, not more than four car lengths behind her. She cut the wheel hard to the right and sped into the traffic circle, crowding into the flow amid a blare of outraged honking.
Hearing a screech of tires behind her, she glanced in the mirror to see the black van slide sideways into the side of a Peugeot sedan, knocking it off the road and into a tree on the broad median. Like a billiard ball, the van caromed neatly off the sedan, then accelerated into the traffic in the circle.
As Dee came around the circle, she bullied her way toward the inside lane on the left as aggressively as she could. But European drivers were not easily cowed. She found herself trapped for several seconds in a dense pack of cars, receiving bellicose and no doubt unflattering comments in French through the open window of the car on her left, which she was cutting off from making its exit.
Managing to break free of the pack, she sped into her second loop around the traffic circle. She had a glimpse of the black van, almost all the way around on the other side. The chaos that she had left behind her seemed to be working to her advantage, slowing the van down.
A light changed at one of the entrances to the traffic circle and let a thick wave of traffic merge in. A Porsche sped right in front of Dee, apparently not realizing how fast she was going. She screamed, and her car caught the Porsche hard on the front left fender. The two right tires of the Audi lifted up off the road a few inches and landed with a great slam of metal undercarriage against the road.
Dee, stunned, saw a big red car racing up behind her, its horn blaring. It barely managed to swerve around her. Then she saw the black van looming above the other cars in the wave of traffic that was rushing toward her.
She pulled the steering wheel far to the right and stepped on the accelerator. The Audi’s tires screamed, chafing up a cloud of white smoke, and the car shot across two lanes, burst out of the traffic circle, and sped onto the open road toward Geneva.
The lanes in front of Dee were clear, and she finally had the opportunity to indulge her fantasy of flooring the gas pedal with complete disregard for the speed limit. She had only about a mile of uncontested straightaway before she ran into traffic again, but that was plenty to demonstrate that the Audi R8 was indeed a fast car. When she came to the first red light she considered turning off the main road. But before she had a chance to turn, she caught sight of the black van speeding toward her from behind. They were still far in the distance, but she knew that if she could see them, they could see her bright yellow sports car.
The light changed, and she began weaving through the cars, trying to get ahead of the pack.
“Beta, where are we going?” she demanded.
“For maximum evasive opportunities, follow directions to the old quarter of the city. Small streets in dense urban grids are highly conducive to evasion during a close chase.”
She swerved around a farm truck, nearly smashing her windshield on its protruding rear bumper. “Okay, but what about after that?”
“After successful evasion maneuvers, you will leave the city by a randomly selected route. At that time, priority will shift from evasive action to creating maximum distance between yourself and pursuit.”
“All right. Sounds good to me.”
As the road approached the channel of the Rhône River, it became a six-lane street penned between two rows of nineteenth-century apartment complexes, with little storefronts lining the sidewalk. Despite the rain, a lot of people were out. The traffic was thick enough that Dee had to brake and swerve constantly, but she managed to avoid stopping. She ran several red lights, enduring the outraged honking of the law-abiding Swiss motorists around her.
As she squealed through a wide left turn onto the avenue that fronted the north side of the Rhône, she had a chance to glance behind her. The van was less than a block behind.
“They’re really close,” she said hoarsely.
“Attempt to achieve a higher velocity.”
Dee didn’t see how. She was darting through dense city traffic more recklessly then she had ever imagined possible, and was sure that if she kept this up much longer, she was going to have a serious accident. The Audi had a big advantage over the van in a chase on the open road, but it lost that advantage here in city traffic.
With a blare of sirens, a white police van suddenly U-turned out of the opposing lanes and lurched into position behind her, almost touching her rear bumper. It switched on its big rack of red and blue lights, filling the avenue all around her with color and noise.
For about two seconds, Dee felt a tentative surge of relief. She was unaccustomed to being on the wrong side of the law, and her first instinct was to think of the arrival of police as salvation. Then she remembered the truth: that she absolutely could not allow herself be taken into custody by any authorities, not in any country on earth. No one could protect her from the people who were chasing her now.
But to her surprise, she discovered that fleeing from police officers in dense traffic gave a driver some unexpected advantages. In the glare of the flashing lights and the scream of the sirens, the mass of cars in front of her began to part like a metallic sea. As she watched, half a block of clear lane opened in front of her, and that path was growing longer even as she watched.
She floored it, and the Audi leaped forward into the breach, with the howling police van directly on its tail. The police began interspersing their siren with the squawk of a louder horn, and commands issued from a loudspeaker. The extra noise was useful to Dee, causing the cars up ahead to get out of her way with even greater alacrity.
“Turn right at the bridge,” Beta said.
“I don’t know if I can—yikes!” she exclaimed, dodging around a little Volkswagen that had stopped in the middle of the road.
“Turn right at the bridge,” Beta said again. “Repeat: turn right at the bridge.”
“Okay! I heard you the first time.”
Turning onto the bridge was easier said than done. The very crowding-aside of cars that was giving Dee the freedom to drive forward was also blocking all turns right and left. The intersection at the bridge road was jammed with traffic that had pulled haphazardly aside to get out of the way of the siren, and the cars formed a solid blockade between her and the bridge entrance.
She turned and aimed the Audi at two of the cars blocking the bridge access. She leaned on the horn. In proper European form, they honked back at her, and one of the drivers rolled down his window to wave his arm about, making rude gesticulations. Neither car tried to move.
The police van jerked to a halt behind the Audi, blocking her retreat. Its passenger door opened, and a uniformed policeman jumped out, carrying a shotgun.
Dee gave an involuntary shriek and stepped on the accelerator. The Audi’s bumper smacked against the back of the Mercedes in front of her. To her surprise, she found herself shoving the larger car out of the way. Its brakes didn’t avail it much against the Audi’s massive engine, and she soon ran it into the back of the truck just ahead.
While this didn’t open access to the bridge, it did give her an opening to escape, and she slipped back onto the riverside road. As she pulled out, she glimpsed the black van, prudently holding back a short distance in the wake of the police.
As she pulled back onto the main avenue, the police van fell in behind her again, siren wailing, with the black van presumably somewhere close behind it. The police bellowed outraged commands at her in four languages through their loudspeaker. “Driver of the yellow car, pull over immediately! Conducteur de la voiture jaune, arrêtez immédiatement! Fahrer des gelben Wagen, sofort zu stoppen! Conducente della vettura gialla, fermata immediatamente!”
She rocketed down a clear path for a long block, with the police van just a yard or two behind her bumper. On her right, she could see another bridge coming up.
“Turn right at the bridge,” Beta told her again.
“I don’t know if I can.”
“This is the last bridge into downtown Geneva. If you do not turn right at the bridge, your chance of successful evasion will diminish to below ten percent.”
At the intersection, Dee turned again into a dense mob of cars blocking the way. Now aware that the Audi’s engine was vastly more powerful than most of the others on the road, she tried to bulldoze her way through. She picked a Fiat—a meek little economy model with the unfortunate look of a born victim. She came up behind it with her horn blaring and gave it a good shove. It skated forward helplessly. Its locked wheels left black trails on the road behind it but didn’t slow its progress. She slipped around it and accelerated onto the bridge.
To her relief, she saw four empty lanes stretching out before her, crossing the long span into the city. She pressed hard on the pedal and roared across the Rhône in a few seconds.
As soon as her wheels touched land, she saw an immense intersection just a block ahead of her, and the traffic light was turning yellow. She shot up the block like a drag racer, burning a lot of rubber, and entered the long intersection just a couple of seconds after the light turned red. Slipping between the advancing walls of cars as they came at her from both directions, she cleared the last one by mere inches.
This maneuver went so well that she felt somehow betrayed to find herself immediately stuck in unmoving traffic on the other side of the intersection. She was the last car in a line of honking, motionless traffic jammed up behind something at the next cross street.
She had nowhere left to go. Little inarticulate noises of frustration and fear escaped her lips as she struggled to turn her body in the small, deep seat and look over her shoulder through the narrow rear window.
The police van was creating chaos in the big intersection behind her. It had evidently rushed into the intersection against the light, intending to clear a path with its sirens and lights. But eight lanes of dense, rolling traffic cannot be made to disappear on demand. The public-spirited citizens of Geneva were doing their best to get their vehicles into some position that would let the police pass, but the intersection was a mess. Cars were stopped at every possible angle, each driver apparently with his or her own idea of what would be the most effective way to make some room for the officers of the law.
Whoever was on the microphone inside the police van sounded as if he were having some kind of fit. His multilingual shouting had degenerated into a multilingual shriek, as he ordered everyone to get their cars out of the way.
“The velocity differential between you and your pursuers will be unacceptably low if your vehicle does not proceed more quickly,” Beta warned her. “Increase speed or abandon the vehicle. Repeat: increase speed or abandon the vehicle immediately.”
The car in front hadn’t moved an inch, and she wasn’t happy with either of Beta’s two options. So she ignored the advice, and turned back to look through the rear window.
One lane at a time, the police van was making gradual progress in her direction, but they still had a long way to go. The light changed, and dozens of impatient drivers on all sides of the intersection began sounding their horns, adding to the sense of anarchy.
Dee had lost sight of UMBRA’s black van. But now it suddenly came into view behind the police van. The black van pushed its bumper against the side of a small car next to the police van and, with a great roar of engine power and screeching of tires, shoved the smaller vehicle out of the way. It appeared that the commandos had grown tired of letting the police lead the chase, preferring to take matters into their own hands.
The two vans were flank to flank in the middle of the intersection, about four feet apart. Dee had a clear view as the sliding door on the side of the black van jerked open and the sanguinary, red-haired commando appeared from inside like a jack-in-the-box. He leaned out with a fearsome grimace and shouldered his gun.
He fired a short burst into each of the police van’s left tires. Then he disappeared as quickly as he had emerged, and the sliding door sealed shut behind him.
With its tires shot to ribbons, the police van sagged pathetically to the left. The voice from the loudspeaker went silent—this turn of events had apparently left the police speechless. The sirens kept up their monotonous wail, and the colored lights kept on flashing. It looked like a windup toy with its batteries running down.
Chapter 20
The double door on the side of the police van burst open, and a pair of blond, Teutonic-looking policemen in black uniforms leaned out. They wore grim expressions, and each was holding a huge automatic assault rifle, made even more imposing by their long banana clips of ammunition. Dee knew that the Swiss police were the most paramilitary in Europe and were armed accordingly.
