For what seemed like forever Reenan stared blankly at the steering-wheel condom, though it was only a few moments. Awareness seeped back into him, and he realized that the condom was an air bag and the “smoke” was powder from the bag.
With an almost audible pop, reality snapped back into place.
The car was in the middle of a tangle of metal. To his left were two other cars, steam rising from the broken radiator of one. A panel truck of some kind was squashed against the right side. He remembered trying to turn the car so they wouldn’t be T-boned, then an impact harder than anything he’d ever imagined. The truck had been aimed right at Mr. Vinay’s passenger door-
Oh, my God.
“Mr. Vinay,” he croaked, the sound nothing like his own voice. He turned his head and stared at the director of operations. The entire right side of the car was smashed in, and Mr. Vinay lay in an impossible tangle of metal, seat, and man.
Someone finally silenced the maddening car horn, and in the sudden relative quiet he could hear a distant siren.
“Help!” he yelled, though again it was nothing more than a croak. He spat blood out of his mouth, drew a deep breath that hurt like hell, and tried again. “Help!”
“Just hold on, buddy,” someone called. A uniformed officer climbed over the hood of one of the vehicles on the left, but the two were so crunched together that he couldn’t get between them. Instead he got on his hands and knees on the hood and peered at Reenan’s face. “Help’s on the way, buddy. Are you hurt bad?”
“I need a phone,” Keenan gasped, realizing the cop couldn’t see their license plates. His cell phone was somewhere in the wreckage.
“Don’t worry about making any calls-”
“I need a damn phone!” Keenan repeated, his tone fierce.
He fought for another breath. CIA people never identified themselves as working for the CIA, but this was an emergency. “The man beside me is the director of operations-”
He didn’t need to say more. The cop had worked in the capitol area a long time, and he didn’t ask, “What kind of operations?” Instead he whipped out his radio and barked a few terse words into it, then turned around and yelled, “Anyone have a cell phone?”
Silly question. Everyone did. In just a moment the cop was stretching out on the hood to hand Keenan a tiny flip-phone. Reenan reached out a shaky, bloodstained hand and took the phone. He punched in a few numbers, realized this wasn’t a secure phone, then mentally said, “Shit,” and punched the rest of them.
“Sir,” he said, fighting back the black edges of unconsciousness. He still had a job to do. “This is Keenan. The director and I have been in an accident and the director is severely injured. We’re at…” His voice trailed off. He had no idea where they were. He held the phone out to the cop. “Tell him where we are,” he said, and closed his eyes.
Chapter Sixteen
Even though her regular contacts were out of the question, over the years Lily had met a number of people of questionable character with unquestionable skills who, for the right amount of money, would dig up dirt on their mothers. She still had some money left but not a huge amount, so she hoped that “right” translated to “reasonable.”
If Swain checked out okay, that would help her financial situation, because he’d volunteered to work with her. If she had to hire someone, that would put a serious dent in her bank account. Of course, she had to remember that Swain had admitted he wasn’t an expert at security systems, but he said that he knew people who were. The big question was, would those people want to be paid? If they did, then she’d be better off hiring someone from the beginning, rather than wasting money having Swain investigated.
Unfortunately, that was something she wouldn’t know until it was too late to do anything about it. She wanted Swain to check out okay. She wanted to find out he hadn’t escaped from a psychiatric ward somewhere or, even more important, he hadn’t been hired by the CIA.
It was as she was going to an Internet cafe that she realized she’d made a tactical error in walking away from Swain the day before. If the CIA had hired him, Swain had now had the opportunity to call and have his file sanitized to fit whatever story he told. No matter what she or anyone else was able to find out about him, she couldn’t be certain the information was correct.
She stopped dead in her tracks. A woman bumped into her from behind and gave her a nasty look for stopping so abruptly. “Excusez-moi,” Lily said, detouring to a small bench so she could sit while she thought this out.
Damn it, there was so much about spy craft that she didn’t know; she was at a huge disadvantage here. There was now no point in investigating Swain; he either was or wasn’t CIA. She simply had to make up her mind to contact him or not.
The safest thing to do was not call him. He didn’t know where she lived, didn’t know what name she was using. But if he was CIA, then he had somehow figured out that she’d be after the Nervi laboratory complex and he had staked it out, waiting for her to appear. Either she abandoned her plan completely, or he’d eventually find her there again.
As far as the laboratory went, the circumstances there had become enormously complicated. Rodrigo had obviously found out who she really was and somehow gotten a photo of her sans disguise, otherwise the soccer players wouldn’t have recognized her so readily. The little fracas at the park would put him on double alert, and security at the complex had undoubtedly been doubled.
She needed help. There was no way now she could accomplish anything on her own. The way she saw it, she could either walk away and let Rodrigo Nervi continue to flourish, without making any more effort to find out what had been so important to Averill and Tina that it had cost them their lives, or she could cross her fingers for luck and accept Swain’s aid.