Lucian grinned. “Yeah. We look so strigoi, don't we? Did you bring your identity papers?”
Kate glanced at her watch. Four hours to go twenty miles. “What next?”
Lucian pointed at the river. It was at least a hundred feet wide here, but it looked shallow. Reflected light from the distant searchlights gleamed on numerous ripples.
“We'll never cross here without them seeing us or hearing us,” hissed Kate. “Isn't there another place? Farther from the road?”
Lucian shrugged. “I don't know of any. This is where the locals used to reroute traffic when the bridge was out.” He looked to his left. “Hear their music? Somebody in one of the trucks has a radio going.”
“Yes, but all they have to do is look this way.”
Lucian cranked his window down and leaned out. “The trees overhang here for most of the way. It's dark near the banks.” He turned and looked at Kate. “You call, Kate.”
She hesitated only a second. “Go.”
Lucian started the car. The fourcylinder motor sounded like a jet engine to Kate. Lucian put the car in first and edged out into the river. Within seconds the water was up to the car's hubcaps, then to the bottom of their doors, then rising along the fender. The Dacia rocked and bumped.
“We're shipping water,” whispered Kate, lifting her feet from the dribbling floorboards. Lucian kept one hand on the wheel and one on the stick shift and jostled them forward.
Suddenly the right front wheel dipped, something smacked the bottom of the car hard, and the engine stalled. They sat there in the middle of the river, the current lapping halfway to the windows, and tried not to breathe too loudly.
The music from the two military trucks was a loud, Gypsy beat. Lucian pulled the choke out and set his hand on the ignition keys.
“No!” Kate said aloud and stopped his hand just as he was turning the keys.
A limousine had glided up to the roadblock. The music stopped. In the sudden silence they could hear the questions of the three soldiers and even soft replies from the car. The beam from one of the bright searchlights atop the truck jostled, lost its focus on the Mercedes, and stabbed out onto the river. A moment later the limousine rolled on, the searchlights were aimed lower, and the music started up again.
Lucian turned the ignition key.
Please God, prayed Kate to a God she had never really believed in, don't let the coil or the spark plugs or the other things Tom used to try to explain to me be wet or broken. Amen.
The Dacia started. Lucian rocked it carefully forward and back, freed the wheel from the hole, and drove on to the opposite bank. Kate felt her skin and muscles beginning to unclench when they were half a mile down the rutted lane and out of sight of the roadblock because of thick trees and the hill. She had not known that one's body physically awaits the impact of bullets.
“OK,” breathed Lucian as he bounced the Dacia back onto the narrow highway. “I don't know what the fuck we'll do when we get to Curtea de Arges, but, hey . . . the name of the game is improvise, right?”
They bypassed Curtea de Arges and two roadblocks they could see in the distance by driving north up the railroad line that ran along the west side of the Arges River. “O'Rourke's idea,” said Kate.
They had a flat which Kate helped change by the light of the few stars now shining between high clouds. The spare was so patched and so threadbare that she could not imagine it getting them much farther. There isn't much farther to go, she assured herself. Fifteen kilometers. This tire will make it.
If you're not planning on coming back, another part of her mind answered.
A kilometer farther and the rail line diverged west through tunnels into the Fagaras Mountains. Kate went out on foot until she found two overgrown ruts in the darkness and they bounced east down the old access road until they reached a twoplank bridge over the river and Highway 7C that ran past the citadel.
Lucian got out of the car and Kate joined him. The highway was quiet here but they had seen traffic earlier. To the east and west, foothills rose to mountains lost in the night and clouds. To the north, the valley visibly narrowed until it made Kate think of a narrowly opened door. Into darkness.
Lucian pointed toward an orange glow against the clouds low above the peaks ahead. “They have the ceremony site lit up already.” He glanced at his watch. “It's tenfifteen. Time sure flies when you're having fun.”
Kate felt like pounding her fists on the car roof. Instead she touched Lucian's arm. “We can't keep creeping along like this. How do we get there quickly?”
He grinned at her. “What do you say we just drive? Maybe they don't have any roadblocks this close. “
“How close are we?”
He looked toward the black doorway in the mountains. “Three miles. Four.”
Kate stepped out onto the highway. “I don't see any spotlights like at the other roadblocks.”
Lucian nodded. “Maybe we're past them all. Maybe there's nothing between us and the citadel but valet parking for the strigoi.”
Kate tried to smile but found that she was on the verge of crying instead. She walked over to Lucian and put her arms around him.
“What, babe?” he whispered.
She shook her head, feeling how soft his cheek was. “Thank you, Lucian. Thank you for . . . stopping him . . . today.” Her throat was too tight for her to say more.
Lucian patted her awkwardly on the back. Kate smiled through incipient tears at the thought of how young he was, how filled with energy. She kissed him on the cheek and stepped back. “OK, let's go find that valet parking.”
There was a roadblock less than two miles ahead. No searchlights or military trucks here, two black strigoi vans pulled out from the woods behind them while a black Mercedes and some sort of armored vehicle became visible around a bend in the road ahead.
Lucian hit the breaks and the Dacia wallowed to a stop between the two barriers. “Damn,” he whispered.
There were no back lanes here, no friendly railroad grades, no obvious ways out. The strigoi had set this trap well: the sides of the road dropped steeply six or eight feet on each side, the river ran by beyond the ditch to their left, and the canyon wall was to their right.
Searchlights snapped on from the armored car and the grimy windshield of the Dacia became opaque with white light. Kate blinked and shielded her eyes, but the intensity of the glare was like a physical assault.
Someone hailed them with the bullhorn.
“They want us to drive slowly to them,” whispered Lucian. He was grinning broadly and waving at the unseen figures behind the spotlight. “They want us to keep our hands in sight.”
Kate lifted her hands to the dash. Lucian kept both of his on top of the steering wheel. He put the car in gear and began edging slowly toward the Mercedes and armored car a hundred feet ahead.
The bullhorn barked in Romanian again.
“They want us to stop and get out of the car,” said Lucian. He stopped. “I don't really want to stop and talk to these guys, do you?”
“No,” said Kate.
“Shall we go for it?” Lucian was grinning in all sincerity now.
“Go for it,” said Kate. Her heart was pounding so fiercely that her chest ached. The white light filled the world.
“Okay, babe.” He shifted his right hand, touched her hand, and then slammed the car into gear while flooring the accelerator.
The Dacia lurched, almost stalled, and then whined into motion. The bullhorn barked again. Lucian smiled and waved. Maybe they recognize him, was Kate's thought. Then the shooting began.
Lucian jerked the car to the right as if they were going to try to get behind the armored car, the searchlight lost them for a second, Kate saw the slightest gap between Mercedes and armored vehicle the same instant Lucian shifted to third gear and aimed for it, and then the windshield disappeared in a thousand flakes, Kate covered her eyes, bullets pounded across the hood, roof, and fenders, there. was a terrific impact that slammed her against the door, and then Lucian was steering hard to keep them on the road. He turned the headlights on to show empty highway ahead and then the blazing white light was back in their rearview mirror and rear window. That window exploded inward, Kate felt something tug at her left heel and something else pass between her upraised arm and her ribs, and then they were around the bend in the road and accelerating again, weaving wildly as they did so.