"And the four thousand dollars sitting in an unsealed bank pouch behind your passenger seat?" Vance asked, leaning his arm against the Cruiser's roof rail. He had already pulled the canvas deposit bag from beneath the driver's floor mat. "Does Gentry pay his patrol deputies cash to handle county culvert repairs at two in the morning?"
Mitchell didn't answer. He turned his face away toward the dark pines, his teeth clicking together against the damp chill.
"The motorcade is already on Bypass Twelve," I told Vance, looking down the dark road toward the south. "If Gentry filed the culvert repair order here, what did he file on the bypass route?"
Vance reached for his tactical handset, his face tightening under the hood of his wet parka. He keyed the private command band. "Command Lead to Shadow. What is your position on Bypass Twelve?"
Static hiss dragged through the small speaker for four long seconds. Then a voice cracked through, broken by severe terrain interference: Shadow to Lead. We have a physical obstruction at the railway bridge. County maintenance dump truck stalled across both travel lanes. No driver present. Hazard lights are off. We are bottled in the cut.
They had never intended to stop me out of malice or spite. My Charger hadn't been pulled over because I was driving an unmarked car or because Mitchell wanted to humiliate a Black driver on a dark country road.
I had been the tripwire.
By pulling my advance car off the road three miles north of the motorcade, Mitchell had ensured that the primary security sweep never reached the railway bridge to verify the clearance. The protocol demanded that if the advance car went dark, the convoy diverted immediately to the designated alternate route—Bypass Twelve.
Gentry had used Mitchell to deliberately force the President's convoy off the reinforced federal highway and straight into a pre-staged, blind cul-de-sac beneath the railroad overpass.
"Get in the Suburban," Vance said, grabbing my arm and steering me toward the armored passenger side. "Miller, cuff the deputy to the steering wheel of his own cruiser. Strip his keys, take his phone, and leave the strobe cycling. If anyone comes down this asphalt looking for the flatbed, let them find an empty cage."
"We can't leave the cruiser in the lane," I said, glancing back at the Explorer. "If the backup interceptor runs this sector, they’ll ram it."
"Nobody is coming down this sector," Vance replied grimly. "Gentry owns the dispatch desk until six. That's why he needed four minutes. The dump truck on Twelve wasn't meant to stall the motorcade. It was meant to halt them long enough for a secondary sweep that isn't ours."
We piled into the Suburban, the heavy ballistic doors sealing with a dull, pressurized thud that cut off the sound of the roaring culvert and the falling rain. Vance slammed the transmission into four-wheel low, cut the high-intensity light rack, and swung the three-ton vehicle across the muddy shoulder, tearing through the weeds and limestone gravel as we mounted the old logging spur that skirted the ridge above the railway cut.
The dashboard monitors lit up green and amber, displaying the live overhead thermal feed relayed from the airborne surveillance platform orbiting three thousand feet above the cloud layer.
On the screen, two miles south, six dark rectangles were clustered together in a tight, defensive wedge beneath the towering concrete abutments of the Southern Railway bridge. Across the two-lane road in front of them, a ten-wheel commercial gravel truck lay jackknifed, its steel bed raised high enough to snag the low-hanging communications wires and block both lanes of travel completely.
On the blind ridge fifty yards above the stalled limousines, two heat blooms were already moving through the wet scrub brush, carrying long-barrel equipment that the infrared software outlined in sharp, pulsing red brackets.
"Gentry isn't waiting for the morning impound," I said, leaning over the console as my hands gripped the tactical grip of the passenger dash. "He’s got his own people on the high ground."
Vance reached down, unsnapped the center console safe, and lifted out a spare Sig Sauer nine-millimeter service weapon, dropping two loaded magazines onto my lap. "Can you shoot with that shoulder?"