The guy bent down, and in the next frame he was standing again. He had something in his hand.
"Uh, sir," Curtis said uncertainly.
"Keep shooting!"
The man raised one hand, holding an unidentifiable object, and he waved with the other hand. This time it was a goodbye wave.
The next frame showed the object as large as life, hanging in the air a few feet above the hood of Professor Frank Curtis's Lincoln Continental.
Damn good camera, thought Greg Grom. The threefoot steel tube looked frozen in place, and the crisp detail showed the jagged end where it had been pulled off the roof of the bus. Amazing that you could get such detail when you consider that the metal spear had to have been thrown with tremendous force.
Alone in his little private room, Greg Grom was thinking these things as the muffled sounds of the violently self-destructing Lincoln Continental reached him and then receded.
Then came the screaming. Well, it was more like the hacking of a hyena trying to vomit out rotten meat. It was Amelia Powlik, of course.
The bus was slowing, and there were shouts of alarm and pounding on his door. "Mr. President, there's been an accident," Amelia screeched. "A horrible accident!" Greg Grom was sure it was quite horrible. Shattered wreckage and a mutilated body inside. But somehow that wasn't as horrible as the image on his screen. The last photograph relayed by the camera was still there, waiting to be refreshed for a follow-up image that would never come.
That damn piece of metal tubing, hanging in midair, was coming almost straight at the camera-but not quite. It went just a little bit higher and a little bit to the left, which meant it was targeted directly at the old professor himself. When they finally extracted the corpse from the wreckage, they would discover the old man had a piece of metal skewering his skull-not to mention a pants load of poop.
Well, the old professor had been a total asshole. Grom would have enjoyed Curtis's final touch of humiliation if he wasn't terrified.
He didn't know who these two guys were, where they came from, how they had tracked him down. He only knew that they were ruthless killers, with some sort of Special-Forces training like Grom had never heard of.
And they were onto him. And the bus, it occurred to him now, was stopping.
"Oh, shit!" he shouted, bounding to the door just as the air brakes brought the bus to a halt on the shoulder of the highway.
He burst out the door of his private room. Amelia Powlik was babbling tearfully while the rest of his staff jostled for the exit.
"Get back in here!" Grom shouted. "Get this bus moving now!"
The bus driver, pulling the first-aid kit from its wall mountings, gave him a look of disbelief. "Mr. President, there's a horrible accident and we have to help."
"Help?" Grom's laugh was morbid and humorless. "He's dead! That's why he crashed! And whoever got him is trying to get me!"
"What's going on here, Mr. President?" demanded the ex-Secret Service agent in charge Grom's security detail. His voice always dropped deeper when he became annoyed, and right now the words were rumbling out like the big tumbling boulders.
"How about we discuss it after we get out of range, you idiot!"
"Oh. Yeah." The agent turned on the openmouthed driver and boomed, "What's your problem, driver? Get this vehicle moving now!"
Greg Grom collapsed in a leather couch, his body drained of energy but his mind a riot of conflicting emotions. And none of them were good. He laid his head on the back of the couch and stared straight up.
He expected that any second the ceiling of the bus might begin showing a small round opening to the daylight. Once the killers realized they had failed to flush out their prey, it seemed logical that they would simply start firing into the vehicle at random. Eventually they'd get Grom. Or they'd kill enough people that the bus driver would surrender and the killers would come in and get their intended victim. Isn't that the kind of thing hard-core killers did?
"You feeling okay. Mr. President?"
Grom realized that the two warm bodies pressed up against him on either side were the pair of Justice Department rejects hired for his protection.
"How about some space?"
The bodyguards scooted to the ends of the couch but stayed close, 9mm semiautomatic handguns held at the ready. The agent in charge touched a hand to his earpiece and nodded. "State and local emergency services are on the scene of the accident. One car. They've got the fire out and they can see one victim inside, but the wreck's still too hot to pry open. You want to pass on your information, Mr. President?"
"I got a phone call," Grom lied absently. "A stranger. He said I was about to be ambushed by a group of trained snipers. They'd cause an accident, hoping we would stop to help, then gun down me and my staff."
"I'll have a Justice forensics team called to the scene," the bodyguard said without hesitation. "I'll need your phone to trace the call."
Two exciting ideas came to him at that moment, and Greg Grom stifled his enthusiasm. He scowled at the bodyguard and said, "No way in hell."
Chapter 21
Eileen Mikulka knocked, waited a moment, then pushed open the door to Harold W Smith's office. She entered with a tray. Tea and prune whip yogurt for the Folcroft director, coffee for Associate Director Mark Howard.
She took one step inside and stopped, feeling something in the air that wasn't pleasant. Dr. Smith was as emotionless a man as Mrs. Mikulka had ever known, but right now he was angry. It was there in his hard eyes, his locked jaw. He was actually gripping the edge of his desk. There was a vein, emerging from the sallow flesh of his right temple, that Mrs. Mikulka had never seen before.
Mark Howard was sitting stiff and uncomfortable in the ancient, creaking chair in front of the desk.
She set down the tray. The air in the room was poisonous.
"Will there be anything-?"
"No, thank you."
Mrs. Mikulka left as fast as her arthritic knees would carry her. When she collapsed at her desk, she felt like crying.
Whatever was wrong, Dr. Smith was clearly not happy with his assistant. Whatever could Mark have done that would make Dr. Smith so angry? Dr. Smith never got that angry.
"Oh, dear." She bit her lower lip to stop its quivering. She couldn't bear to think of that nice young man losing his job. Mark Howard had brought life back into Folcroft's executive wing. A little sparkle. A little humor. The years before Mark came seemed so gray and bland by comparison. To lose him would be awful.
AFTER THE DOOR CLICKED shut, Dr. Harold W. Smith said, "Mark, I want to know why you did this."
"I understand, Dr. Smith," Mark Howard replied tentatively, as if he felt remorse but also felt unsure of how to proceed. "First of all, when I give you my full report you'll see that there was no real urgency. Remo did not have anything to go on."
"Obviously he did," Dr. Smith replied. "He went after the Union Island tour group and now there's been an assassination attempt on the Union Island president. Remo is up to something."
"He didn't come across as having any agenda other than tracking down the source of the violent outbreaks," Mark insisted. "When he came to my office, he asked me to trace the movements of the Union Islanders. They happened to have an itinerary that meant one of them could cause the poisonings. I tried telling him we had a long list of people whose known movements gave them the opportunity."
"So what made him suspect the Union Islanders?"
"He had no reason, not that he would tell me about."
Harold W Smith frowned, and some of the anger was evaporating. "So why did he suspect them?"
"He mentioned seeing the island president on TV on a talk show, and placed him at the first set of poisonings. But that was all he had. We tried to brainstorm on a motive and couldn't come up with anything. There's nothing that connects the Union Island group to anybody involved in the mayhem. Nothing. We couldn't see any way the island independence movement could benefit from the killings. And that was about it."
Dr. Smith had his assistant start from the beginning and report, word for word, the conversation between Mark and Remo. It didn't take long.