The Second Shooter (3 page)

"I don't understand," said the old man.

Jake hit the send button on his Blackberry. "I had no idea Chris was this desperate to steal Stacy from me."

"I'm sorry, Agent Miller, but I do not know these people, Chris and Stacy."

Jake stood up. The waitress hadn't come back with his coffee, but he dropped a dollar on the table. "Feel free to text Chris and tell him you had me for a while, but I'm still going to make it to the game. And he's still got no shot with Stacy."

The old man rose and picked up his messenger bag. "Agent Miller, I don't understand what you are talking about."

Jake strode toward the door without further explanation. He had a football game to get to. He heard the old man lumbering to catch up. Old man? Maybe he wasn't even an old man. Maybe that was makeup and a wig. If the accent was hokey, the wig-and Jake was now pretty sure it was a wig-was total cornball. Nobody wears hair like that anymore. This isn't Woodstock. It would be just like Chris to go all out, though, especially when the potential prize was Stacy Chapman.

Jake had to step aside to allow the top-heavy waitress to pass with a full tray. He felt a tug on his arm. The fake Frenchman had caught up with him. "I promise you," the man said, still pushing the hokey accent, "I killed the president of the United States." The buzz in the diner was loud enough so that only a few people heard it, but those who did, stopped talking and started listening.

Jake pulled away. "Listen...sir, I appreciate a good practical joke as much as the next guy. Okay? Whatever Chris paid you, he got his money's worth. You were good, believe me. I totally bought the whole conspiracy kook thing. But this joke's over. I've got somewhere to be." He turned and walked away. In the reflection from the window glass he saw the man standing behind him, staring at his back.

Jake pushed his way out the door and stopped on the sidewalk. He took a deep breath and checked his watch again. It was 6:30. Thirty minutes to kickoff. He could just make it.

How long did Chris think his hired actor was going to tie him up? Through the first quarter? Until halftime? The whole game? In addition to being a ladies man, Chris also had a reputation at the Academy for practical jokes. But this time he had outdone himself. Jake was still pissed, but he knew it wouldn't last. It was hard to stay mad at Chris. Unless Stacy decided to go out on a real date with Chris and not him. Now that would be hitting below the belt.

Jake heard the door open behind him. He didn't turn around. There was nothing more to say. They guy had done his job. Chris was probably getting a hell of a laugh out of it. Jake looked north up 11th Street. Metro Center was two blocks away. He took a step in that direction.

"Agent Miller?" said a voice behind him, and he knew right away that it wasn't the old man's voice, even if it had lost a few decades and the fake French accent.

Jake turned around.

"I had no idea who they were. At first, I thought they were part of Chris's gag. Then I thought, how much would he be willing to spend on this? We were both G.S.-10s and D.C. was expensive, even with the cost-of-living adjustment. That's why we were sharing an apartment. I knew he had the creativity to pull off this kind of prank, but I didn't think he had the money."

***

Four men in dark suits stood on the sidewalk. Spread out in pairs. One pair close to Jake. The other pair near the door and the old guy with the ponytail-Henri Broussard, Andre Favreau, or whatever his name really was-who had just stepped out of the diner.

The four men were almost identical. Near carbon copies of each other. All looking like they worked for IBM or NASA back in the 1960s: buzz cuts, clean-shaven, and skinny ties; but no pocket protectors, slide rules, or horn-rimmed glasses. So exactly how far was Chris willing to go to get a date with Stacy? Jake wondered. No way these guys were actors. They seemed too tough, too confident.

"Sir, you need to come with us," said the man closest to Jake. "You and Mr. Favreau."

Jake felt a prickly sensation crawling up his spine. Could he have misread the situation so completely? "Who are you?"

"We're with the government," Suit Number One said.

"So am I." Jake pulled his credentials from his jacket pocket and flashed the gold FBI badge at the man.

"We know who you are, Agent Miller, but you and Mr. Favreau still need to come with us."

Jake scanned their faces. "Are you guys cops?"

The nearest one took a step closer to Jake. "You need to come with us now, sir."

"I'm not going anywhere until you—"

The man moved with incredible speed. He hit Jake in the solar plexus. It wasn't a hard hit. More of a jab. Middle knuckles bent, ends of the four fingers folded back toward the palm, hand vertical to fit the apex of the ribs just below the sternum. And then Jake had no air in his lungs. Somehow it had all left, forced out by that casual, perfectly-placed jab.

As Jake dropped to his knees, his vision shrank, narrowing from the sides. Fighting to breathe, he was only dimly aware of his surroundings, but he was alert enough to sense that the man who had hit him was stepping behind him and yanking his arms together. He also saw the pair of men nearest to Favreau, which did, in fact, seem to be his real name, shove the old guy against the brick wall between the door and the plate glass window.

Several passersby had stopped to watch, and the fourth suited man was waving them away. "Metro Police. Move along." Some did move along, some didn't. But those who stayed kept their distance.

Suit Number One dropped to one knee and yanked Jake's hands together behind his back, and although Jake hadn't actually arrested anybody yet, he had done enough handcuffing exercises at the Academy to know what was coming next. The man held Jake's wrists with one hand and pulled out a set of handcuffs with the other.

But I can get out of this, Jake thought. I have a handcuff key in my pocket. Then he realized the key in his front pocket wasn't going to do him any good with his hands cuffed behind his back.

So Jake did the very next thing he thought of. He slammed his head backward into the man's face and heard his nose crack. The man howled in pain.

Jake lurched to his feet and looked at Favreau. One of the two suits who'd shoved Favreau against the wall was down with his face in the concrete. The second suit looked stunned at whatever had happened to his partner, but he recovered quickly and threw two fast strikes at Favreau's head. Except the old guy blocked them. Then Favreau countered with a strike of his own, a knuckle-punch to the throat, a technique that FBI defensive tactics instructors had told Jake and his Academy classmates was absolutely prohibited for FBI agents to use because it could result in permanent damage, even death. The second suit crumpled to the sidewalk, gagging with both hands clutching his throat.

Jake reached for his service weapon, a Glock 23, .40-caliber pistol, holstered on his right hip. As his hand closed on the polymer grip, Jake heard a sharp pop to his left. Then his head exploded in burning white light. Somewhere far back in his mind, he registered a stabbing pain in his neck. He heard the crackle of electricity and smelled burning flesh. He'd been hit with a Taser. Something clanked on the sidewalk and Jake realized it was his pistol. Then his knees gave out, and he dropped to the ground beside his FBI-issued Glock.

After several seconds-or maybe hours, it was hard to tell-the electricity stopped crackling. But Jake's body kept twitching. He knew he was conscious because his eyes were open and he could see. He just couldn't move, at least not voluntarily. Just the twitching. He saw two things in quick succession: Suit Number One picked up Jake's Glock from the sidewalk, and then a foot came flying from somewhere outside of Jake's field of vision and slammed into Suit Number One's chest, knocking him out of Jake's view.

Favreau reached down and grabbed hold of the two steel wires sprouting from Jake's neck. He yanked on them and more pain shot through Jake, but it wasn't the electric-shock kind of pain. It was the skin-tearing kind. He wasn't sure which one was worse.

From his supine position on the sidewalk, Jake saw the fourth suit, the one who'd played Metro cop, draw a pistol from under his coat, but before he could get the muzzle up, Favreau was on him, grabbing the pistol with one hand and delivering a knifehand chop to the side of the man's neck with the other that put him on the ground, almost eye to eye with Jake, except the man's eyes were closed, like he had suddenly decided to lie down on the concrete and take a nap. Favreau even ended up with the man's gun.

Jake pushed himself up into what was close to a sitting position and scanned the ground for his own pistol. His brain felt like fried jelly. He almost threw up. Then he spotted his gun on the sidewalk not far from Suit Number One. And although Suit Number One was still on the ground and still had blood pulsing from his nose, he was crawling toward Jake's gun, and he was a lot closer to it than Jake.

"Come on," Favreau said in his French accent, somewhere behind Jake. Then Jake felt a pair of strong hands grip him under his arms and jerk him to his feet. His legs wobbled and threatened to collapse. But in the end they held. Then the Frenchman hauled Jake up the street.

They lurched north on 11th Street, with Favreau pulling Jake along on legs still shaky from the 50,000-volt blast he had taken. They hadn't quite made it to the end of the block when Jake heard the crack of a gunshot behind them. He knew that exact sound, having heard it tens of thousands of times on the firing range during his five months at Quantico: a .40-caliber, 180-grain jacketed hollow point, the FBI's standard duty load. Then he heard another shot. Then another. Someone was shooting at them with Jake's gun.

People around them were screaming and scrambling out of the way. A few with less street smarts, who didn't know the sound of gunfire, stood looking around, waiting to catch a stray bullet. Favreau yanked Jake around the corner onto F Street. Using a passing city bus for cover, they dashed across the street, ran halfway down the block, and ducked into the cover of an alcove in the façade of a building. Jake peeked back the way they had come. None of the men in the dark suits had rounded the corner.

"We have to keep moving," Favreau said.

Jake turned on him. "No, we don't." Then he noticed the pistol in the Frenchman's hand, which Jake's brain automatically catalogued as a Beretta 92F, the standard-issue handgun of the U.S. military. The way Favreau held the pistol, the muzzle was angled down at forty-five degrees, not quite pointed at Jake, but not quite pointed at the ground either. Instinctively, Jake's hand twitched toward his holster until he remembered it was empty and that his FBI service pistol was now in the hands of one of the men who had attacked him in the street. Jake felt his face flush with shame.

"They're going to keep coming," Favreau said.

"Who?" Jake demanded, keeping one eye on the pistol in Favreau's hand. "Who's going to keep coming? Who are they?"

Favreau glanced back down the street. "I'll explain everything later. Right now we have to go."

"Explain now," Jake said. "Explain everything now." Then he heard another pop from the direction of 11th Street and a glass door thirty feet past the alcove shattered. The well-dressed woman stepping out the door screamed and dropped her shopping bag as she scurried back inside the store.

Favreau grabbed Jake's arm and yanked him down the sidewalk. Jake caught a glimpse of two of the suits, the one Jake had head-butted and the one who had played Metro cop, running toward them from 11th Street.

Near the next corner was a Chinese laundry. Favreau pulled Jake through the door. They charged around the counter, past startled customers holding bright blue nylon bags stuffed with dirty clothes. The man behind the counter screeched at them in some dialect of Chinese. Favreau kept running, towing Jake along behind him. They pushed through a curtained doorway and into a warehouse-like space filled with dry-cleaning machines and dozens of wheeled racks of clothes. Everyone stopped work and stared. No one screamed. No one ran. They just stared.

Favreau and Jake burst out the back door of the laundry into an alley, where Jake finally got his feet under him enough to drag Favreau to a stop beside an overflowing Dumpster. Jake shoved the Frenchman against the grimy wall beside the garbage bin. "Give me that," he said and twisted the pistol out of Favreau's hand. Jake took a step back and pulled the Beretta's slide open a quarter-inch, seeing the brass shell of a cartridge resting in the firing chamber. Police sirens wailed all around them. "Tell me what the hell is going on."

"I already told you," Favreau said, "but you weren't listening."

A small Chinese man stuck his head through the door. Jake pointed a finger at him. "FBI. Get back inside." The man disappeared. Jake turned to Favreau. "Who are those men, and why are they shooting at us?"

Favreau took a deep breath. "They work for your government."

"You expect me to believe that government agents tried to kidnap us and are shooting at us in downtown Washington, D.C.?"

Favreau pointed into the air, as if at the sound waves of the approaching sirens. "Do you hear that? They're coming for us. We have to go. Now."

"We're not going anywhere," Jake said. "Not until I say. I'm an FBI agent," he poked the Frenchman in the chest, "and you're under arrest."

"They'll never let you take me in alive."

"Who?" Jake shouted, his frustration boiling over. "Who exactly is it that won't let me take you in?"

The back door to the laundry banged open. The two suits piled out with guns in their hands. Jake's brain shifted into overdrive and his body responded as the hundreds of hours of firearms training kicked in, and he opened fire just a fraction of a second faster than the two suits.

There was no time for the sights. Just point shooting. Jake looking over the top of the gun, both eyes finding the targets fifteen feet away, finger working the trigger again and again as the 9mm shells kicked out, clattering and bouncing off the filthy concrete of the alley. The suits fired back. Jake got off six shots before the two suits tumbled back inside the door. The bad news was that Jake's bullets had chewed up the door and the wall but missed the two men. The good news was that their bullets had missed Jake and the Frenchman.