Then he was up and running again, the Metro Police yelling at him even as the row of dark SUVs disappeared out of sight around a corner three blocks up.
Shit.
He was going to lose them.
Jake was damn close to stealing the first vehicle he came to when he heard the roar of an engine behind him. He threw a look over his right shoulder, expecting to see a cop car full of pissed-off Metro Police officers. Instead, it was a familiar silver Audi, Harley behind the wheel.
“Get in!” she shouted out the open passenger window as she drove. “We can still catch them!”
Jake didn’t pause to wonder how the hell she’d thought to get the car when it hadn’t even occurred to him. He simply veered to the left, grabbed the edge of the window, and vaulted inside. The moment he did, Harley punched the accelerator.
Two blocks down, Harley took the same right turn Damien and his crew had—at sixty miles an hour. Jake grabbed the overhead handle, pretty sure the tires on her side of the vehicle actually left the ground. Oncoming cars swerved wildly, honking horns and running up onto the curb.
“You’re on the wrong side of the road!” he yelled.
“No, I’m not,” she shouted back. “They are!”
Jake didn’t bother to point out the obvious:Theircountry…their rules. Instead, he grabbed his seat belt and prayed they survived long enough for him to get it on.
Harley caught up with the SUV convoy in an amazingly short period of time. Probably because she was driving like a frigging lunatic. But he guessed he couldn’t argue with the results.
The men in the vehicle with the broken rear window didn’t see them coming until Harley slammed the front of the car into the back of the SUV. When one of the men flew out, landing on the hood of the Audi, Harley tapped the brakes hard enough for the creature to roll off, then punched the gas and drove over the top of him as if stuff like that happened to her all the time.
The thud and subsequent crunch as the thing passed under the car sounded bad, but when Jake took a quick glance out the back window, he was stunned to see the man already scrambling to his feet, arms held out to his side at weird angles.
Shit.
Harley was just approaching the last vehicle again, a little more carefully now, when the second and third vehicles suddenly turned left, splitting from the others.
“Which ones do we follow?” Harley demanded, hands gripping the wheel as if ready to spin the car into another crazy turn at Jake’s word.
“Stay with the lead SUV,” he said without hesitation. “Damien is in there with the Bilderberg hostages. We can’t lose them.”
Harley nodded and kept with the two vehicles going straight, weaving as the lone man left in the backseat of the one in the rear tried to get a bead on them with his MP7.
How much frigging ammo are these people carrying?
Just then, two Metro Police cars pulled across the intersection ahead of the first SUV, probably thinking it would stop. Instead, it smashed right through both vehicles, sending the smaller cop cars spinning away into traffic.
“Jake, where are you?” Jes’s beautiful voice suddenly asked through his radio earpiece. “Misty said you need our help. What’s the situation?”
Relief like he couldn’t believe flooded through Jake’s body, and it was all he could do to keep from asking if Jes was okay, if she’d gotten hurt in any way.
“We’re heading west on Redesdale Street,” Harley answered for him. “Just past the Royal Hospital Chelsea, running parallel to the Thames, following two SUVs.”
“Damien has three of the Bilderberg people in the front vehicle with him,” Jake added. “The bad guys are heavily armed.”
There was a moment of silence over the radio, then Jes was back. “Okay, got ya. We’re coming toward you from the west, only a couple minutes away. We’ll try and cut them off. Let us know if they change direction.”
Jake wanted to ask how the hell they’d gotten down from St Albans so fast, but with Harley still trying to avoid the bullets coming at them from the SUV in front of them, he knew the questions would have to wait. Instead, he focused on continuing to provide position updates to Jes, leading her and Caleb closer to them with every passing second.
Less than a minute later, Jake spotted Jes and Caleb coming toward them in their rented SUV. Damien must have seen them, too, because his SUV abruptly turned left on a much smaller road heading straight for the river. The other vehicle went with them.
“According to the map on my phone, this road is going to dead end at the river in a few hundred feet,” Jes called out as she and Caleb followed him and Harley. “There’s nowhere for them to go.”
The side street weaved in and out of several big industrial-looking buildings, Dumpsters, and haphazard piles of boxes and pallets. But at least there wasn’t any traffic or people around. If this was going to turn into a shoot-out, an abandoned dead-end street was the best place for it to happen.
“Remember there are three hostages in the lead vehicle,” Jake said. “Check behind your targets before you pull the trigger. Assume they may try to use them as human shields.”
