Snow and twigs and pine needles swirled in the rotors’ wash. In the general ruckus, it was useless for Charlie to shout to Alice.
Not that there was anything she needed to be told. Letting the takeout containers fall to the snow, she shot a hand toward the Sig Sauer tucked into the rear waistband of her jeans.
Doors on both sides of the helicopter’s cabin slid open. The waning sun showed four men in silhouette, bracing themselves on taut ropes anchored within the helicopter. Gaining a foothold on the craft’s skids, the men let their rope ends drop to the ground, giving the helicopter the appearance of a giant mosquito. In unison, the men jumped, arcing outward and rappelling down, ropes screaming through the carabiners on their harnesses. They wore thick white jumpsuits with red crosses, as a team of paramedics might, along with ski masks. All were built like they’d spent plenty of time in the weight room.
They converged on Alice so quickly that she barely had a chance to raise her gun. On his way down, the first man dealt her a swift, steel-toed boot to the cheekbone, costing her her hold on the Sig. The next two, still attached to their ropes, tackled her, driving her into deep snow on the passenger side of the BMW.
Charlie flung himself onto the car’s hood, intent on recovering Alice’s gun.
She wriggled free, regained her feet, and spun two hundred degrees, gaining force and leverage and delivering a kick to the nearest jaw. The man sagged, dangling from his rope.
For better or for worse, Alice Rutherford’s nature was to fight. She would have taken on ten such men. She had her hands full with two now, one corralling her from behind, the other spraying her in the face with a tiny aerosol can. She went limp, falling into the first man’s arms.
As Charlie slid off the passenger side of the BMW’s hood, he caught sight of a pistol capped by a silencer, pointed at him by the fourth man, who shouted something. The chop of the rotors made it impossible to hear what. Charlie guessed, “Freeze!”
And what choice did he have?
Alice and the first three men-including the one she’d KO’d-rose into the air, as if levitating. Arms extended from the helicopter’s cabin, hauling them in. The door snapped shut and the ship appeared to fall upward into the sky.
Like that, she was gone, with only a faint whir as evidence that the helicopter had been present. And then it was just the breeze whispering through the bare branches.
When Charlie looked down, the remaining man was unclicking his harness. “Back up, against the car,” he said, waving his gun. His accent was unmistakably American. “Put your hands where I can see ’em.”
Charlie took two steps and hit the bumper.
“Now shrug off your jacket, one sleeve at a time, then toss it toward me.” The gunman’s rasp had a touch of cowboy. He looked the part too, with the build and bearing of a broncobuster. And when he pulled up his mask-revealing a combative leer, a pointed chin, and long blond locks-anyone would have been reminded of Jesse James.
Charlie shook at his parka until it fell to the ground. Having submitted to the same inspection before, he wasn’t surprised when Jesse James advanced, patted him down-everywhere-and took his car keys.
“I’m guessing this isn’t a carjacking,” Charlie said.
“It’s a rendition.”
“A rendition of what?”
“In layman’s terms, a kidnapping.”
“You’ve kidnapped Wendy? Why?” Charlie feigned the shock of an ignorant vacationer, less of a stretch than he would have liked.
“It’d be a tragedy if we’ve kidnapped someone named Wendy,” said the cowboy. “See, we’re after Alice Ann Rutherford.”
“Alice Ann Rutherford?” Charlie repeated as if bewildered.
“If it helps, she was born in New Britain, Connecticut, on October 17, 1980, she’s currently absent without leave from the National Security Agency, and she lives with you.”
An icy gust slashed through Charlie’s sweater, stinging his chest. He resisted the urge to wrap his arms around himself, afraid the movement might spur the kidnapper to precipitous use of his trigger. “Okay, okay. So what do you want?”
“An ADM. You know what that is, right?”
Charlie knew atomic demolition munitions only too well. They were portable Soviet-made bombs with a ten-kiloton yield. Under the auspices of the CIA, his father had founded the Cavalry with the objective of putting malfunctioning ADMs into the hands of terrorists who believed they were purchasing working weapons of mass destruction. The ultra-classified operation had succeeded for the better part of three decades. When Drummond fell prey to Alzheimer’s, his own men decided it best to sacrifice him in order to maintain the secret and safeguard the identities of their operatives. Charlie had learned the secret just two weeks ago, while trying to figure out why assassins were preventing him from putting his father in a nursing home. Before that, he’d known the old man only by his cover as a stern and straitlaced appliance salesman.
“You can’t exactly get ADMs on eBay,” Charlie said.
Jesse James grinned. “So why don’t you ask your dad?”
Charlie eyed his shoe tops. “There’s a problem with that.”
“Isn’t your father Drummond Clark, Central Intelligence Agency operations officer, born in New York, New York, on July 14, 1945?”
“He was. He passed away twelve days ago.”