Hunting Zero. Джек Марс

cruiser, Reid tugged the younger cop’s pistol free and aimed it at them. They fell still immediately.

      “I’m not going to shoot you,” he told them as he retrieved his bag. “I just want you to stay quiet and don’t move for a minute or so.” He leveled the gun at the older officer. “Put your hand down, please.”

      The cop’s free hand fell away from his shoulder-mounted radio.

      “Just put down the gun,” the younger officer said, his uncuffed hand out in a pacifying gesture. “Another unit is on its way. They will shoot you on sight. I don’t think you want that.”

      Is he bluffing? No; Reid could hear sirens wailing in the distance. About a minute out. Ninety seconds at best. Whatever Mitch and Watson had planned, it needed to arrive now.

      The boys on the baseball field had paused their game, now clustered behind the nearest concrete dugout and peering out in awe at the scene mere yards from them. Reid noticed in his periphery that one of the boys was on a cell phone, likely reporting the incident.

      At least they’re not filming it, he thought glumly, keeping the gun trained on the two cops. Come on, Mitch…

      Then—the younger cop frowned at his partner. They glanced at each other and then skyward as a new sound joined the distant screaming sirens—a whining hum, like a high-pitched motor.

      What is that? Definitely not a car. Not loud enough to be a chopper or a plane…

      Reid looked up as well, but he couldn’t tell what direction the sound was coming from. He didn’t have to wonder long. From over left field came a tiny object, soaring quickly through the air like a buzzing bee. Its shape was indistinguishable; it appeared to be white, but it was difficult to look directly at it.

      The underbelly is painted in reflective coating, Reid’s mind told him. Keeps the eyes from being able to focus on it.

      The object dropped in altitude as if it were falling from the sky. As it crossed over the pitcher’s mound, something else dropped down from it—a steel cable with a narrow crossbar at the bottom, like a single rung of a ladder. A rappelling line.

      “That must be my ride,” he murmured. While the cops stared in disbelief at the literal UFO soaring toward them, Reid dropped the gun on the gravel. He made sure he had a tight grip on his bag, and as the crossbar swung toward him, he reached up and grabbed onto it.

      He sucked in a breath as he was instantly swept into the sky, up twenty feet in seconds, then thirty, then fifty. The boys on the baseball field shouted and pointed as the flying object above Reid’s head retracted the rappelling line rapidly, gaining altitude again at the same time.

      He glanced down and saw two more police cars screeching into the park’s lot, the drivers exiting their vehicles and looking upward. He was a hundred feet in the air before he reached the cockpit and settled into the single seat that waited there.

      Reid shook his head in astonishment. The vehicle that had picked him up was little more than a small egg-shaped pod with four parallel arms in an X shape, each of which had a spinning rotor at the end. He knew what this was—a quadcopter, a single-person manned drone, fully automated and highly experimental.

      A memory flashed in his mind: A rooftop in Kandahar. Two snipers have you pinned at your location. You have no idea where they are. Make a move and you die. Then, a sound—a high-pitched whine, barely more than a hum. It reminds you of your string trimmer back home. A shape appears in the sky. It’s hard to look at. You can barely see it, but you know help has arrived…

      The CIA had experimented with machines like this one to extract agents from hot zones. He had been part of the experiment.

      There were no controls before him; just an LED screen that told him their air speed of two hundred sixteen miles an hour and an ETA of fifty-four minutes. Beside the screen was a headset. He plucked it up and fit it over his ears.

      “Zero.”

      “Watson. Jesus. How did you get this?”

      “I didn’t.”

      “So Mitch,” Reid said, confirming his suspicions. “He’s not just an ‘asset,’ is he?”

      “He’s whatever you need him to be for you to trust that he wants to help.”

      The quadcopter’s air speed increased steadily, leveling out at just under three hundred miles per hour. Several minutes fell off the ETA.

      “What about the agency?” Reid asked. “Can they…?”

      “Track it? No. Too small, flies at low altitudes. Besides, it’s decommissioned. They thought the motor was too loud for it to be stealthy.”

      He breathed a small sigh of relief. He had a trajectory now, this Starlight Motel in New Jersey, and at last it wasn’t a taunt from Rais that led him. If they were still there, he could put an end to this—or try to. He couldn’t ignore the fact that this would only end in a confrontation with the assassin, and keeping his girls out of the crossfire.

      “I want you to wait forty-five minutes and then send the motel lead to Strickland and local PD,” he told Watson. “If he’s there, I want everyone else there too.”

      Besides, by the time the CIA and police arrived, either his girls would be safe or Reid Lawson would be dead.

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      Maya hugged her sister closer to her. The handcuff chain rattled between their wrists; Sara’s hand was drawn up over her own chest, her hand gripping Maya’s on her shoulder as they huddled together in the backseat of the car.

      The assassin drove, easing the car down the length of Port Jersey. The cargo terminal was long, several hundred yards by Maya’s best guess. Tall stacks of containers loomed high on either side of them, forming a narrow lane with no more than a foot of room on either side of the car’s mirrors.

      The headlights were off, and it was dangerously dark, but it did not seem to bother Rais. Every now and then there would be a brief break between the cargo stacks and Maya could see bright lights in the distance, closer to the water’s edge. She could even hear the drone of machinery. Crews were working. People were around. Yet that gave her little hope; Rais had so far shown a propensity for planning, and she doubted they would come into view of any prying eyes.

      She would have to do something herself to keep them from leaving.

      The clock in the car’s center console told her it was four in the morning. It had been less than an hour since she had left the note in the toilet tank of the motel. Shortly thereafter, Rais had stood suddenly and announced that it was time to go. Without a word of explanation, he led them out of the motel room, but not to the white station wagon in which they’d arrived. Instead he led them to an older car a few doors down from their room. He seemed to have no problem as he jimmied open the door and put them in the backseat. Rais had tugged off the cover of the ignition column and hotwired the vehicle in a matter of seconds.

      And now they were at the port, under the cover of darkness and drawing near to the northern tip of land, where the concrete ended and Newark Bay began. Rais slowed and put the car in park.

      Maya peered beyond the windshield. There was a boat there, a fairly small one by commercial standards. It couldn’t have been more than sixty feet long end to end, and was laden with cube-shaped steel containers that looked to be about five feet by five feet. The only light on that end of the dock, other than the moon and stars, came from two sickly yellow bulbs on the boat, one on the bow and another at the stern.

      Rais turned off the engine and sat there in silence for a long moment. Then he flicked the headlights on and off, just once. Two men emerged from the boat’s cabin. They glanced his way, and then disembarked down the narrow ramp between the ship and the dock.

      The assassin twisted in his seat, staring directly at Maya. He said only one word, drawing it out slowly. “Stay.” Then he got out of the car and closed the door again, standing only a few feet from it as the men approached.

      Maya clenched