He ground his teeth together and fought warring impulses. He could end this thing right now. Right here. But wouldn’t that mean the tapes, set to a dead-man trigger, would be released? Wasn’t that exactly what he was supposed to prevent?

Larison picked up his bike and mounted it. He rode past Ben. And looked directly at him.

Somehow, even through the visor obscuring Larison’s face, Ben thought he felt a kind of… recognition pass between them. He still had the shot. Larison must have known it. But he didn’t react. He just looked at Ben, and then rode away.

A second later, Paula came barreling down the street, going right past Larison. She must have missed Ben crouching between the cars because she went by him. Shit. He ran out after her.

She turned around in the cul-de-sac. Her window was down. “Here,” Ben called. She nodded and stopped. Ben went around the back of the van and saw her pushing the passenger door open as he came up the side. He would have preferred to drive, but if they encountered opposition, for the moment it would be better for Paula to drive and for Ben to shoot.

There was a squeal of tires from the opening of the street. Ben gripped the side of the door and watched a brown sedan rapidly approaching. Cops? he thought. It would have been a pretty fast arrival. And that kind of bad luck twice in a row, first Manila, now here… he didn’t believe it.

“Keep your head down,” he said. He could see a passenger and a driver, both Caucasian, both wearing shades. No one in back.

The car stopped ten feet in front of them. The driver and passenger, both in poplin suits, stepped out. Their hands were empty. Ben scanned the area. He saw faces in gated windows and people coming to their doors. But no other immediate threats.

“Paula Lanier?” the passenger asked, moving toward the driver side of the van.

Paula looked at him. “Who are you?”

Ben didn’t like the whole thing from the beginning, and he was liking it less by the second. The way the car was blocking them. The fact that whoever these guys were, they wanted to have a conversation of some sort at the scene of a recent multiple homicide. The way the passenger had called out Paula’s name, which felt like an attempt to lull her by establishing false familiarity. And now they were engaging in a flanking maneuver. Five more feet, and the passenger would disappear from Ben’s view. Meanwhile, the driver was continuing to advance on Ben.

He didn’t think these things consciously, but rather realized them in a kind of instanteous mental shorthand. Nor did he consciously weigh a decision. Rather, he simply understood what needed to be done. And did it.

He moved up from the side of the van, tacking right so he could keep the driver and passenger in a single line of vision. “Stop moving,” he called out, loudly and in a flat tone that would have made an attack dog pause. He put the Glock’s sights on the driver’s face. “Now.”

But the passenger didn’t stop. And the driver said, “Relax, fella, we’re here to help. Diplomatic Security. Here, let me show you ID.”

The guy started to reach inside his jacket. Under more relaxed circumstances, Ben might have asked, What part of “stop moving” don’t you understand? As it was, he shot the guy instead. A neat hole magically appeared in the guy’s forehead. His body twitched once and slid to the ground.

The other guy lurched toward the driver side of the van. Ben sprinted forward to prevent him from getting to cover, the Glock at chin level in a two-handed grip. As he angled around the front of the van, he saw the guy had gotten his gun out. Too late. Ben nailed him with another head shot. Blood and brain matter sprayed the side of the van and the guy tipped over to the ground.

Ben ran up to the door and yanked it open. Paula’s mouth was hanging open in shock. Her face was flecked with red and gray. He knew she wasn’t going to be able to drive. Not now.

“Move,” Ben said. “Passenger seat. Go.”

She complied. He stepped over the dead guy, jumped into the seat, engaged the transmission, and swerved around the sedan. The sedan’s front bumper clipped the open door and slammed it shut as they squealed around it.

“What… what the fuck…,” Paula spluttered.

Ben drove. They could figure out what the fuck later.

“What did you just do? They said… they said they were-”

“What they said was bullshit.”

“How can you be so sure? You killed them.”

“You’re goddamned right I killed them. You think Diplomatic Security doesn’t know enough to stop moving when a guy pointing a gun point-blank at their faces tells them to? You think DS is so inept that not only don’t they stop, they reach for something unseen? There’s not a cop or a DS in the world that stupid.”

“That’s it? You decided to kill them… based on that?”

Ben shot onto the highway and headed west. He slowed his speed to normal.

“Actually, no, there were a dozen things. The way they stopped. The way they approached. The way they used your name. And why wouldn’t anyone have had the sense to tell us they were coming? You don’t send in a B-team like that without a heads-up to the A. It’s guaranteed to cause friendly fire.”

“They knew me!”

He glanced at her. “Did you know them?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“Then they didn’t know you. They knew your name. I’m sure they had a photograph. The rest was artifice to help them get close.”

“But how could you really know-”

“Look, I don’t tell you how to dust for fingerprints, okay? So don’t tell me how a couple operators get close to their targets before drilling them with head shots. If you’d waited a second longer for the proof you want, you’d be dead now.”

“Then who were they?”

Ben shook his head. “I don’t know. I’m starting to think they could be anyone. That’s the problem with those damned tapes.”

He thought. Could Hort have set him up? He still didn’t trust him, not after Obsidian. But why would he? Hort was getting overruled back in Washington, and Ben was his only set of eyes and ears on the ground. What possible gain would there be for Hort?

Besides, if it had been Hort, why would that guy have used Paula’s name and not Ben’s? It was Ben they needed to lull more than Paula. He was the greater tactical threat. If Hort had sent them, he would have told them as much.

And it was more than that. So soon after the emotional whipsaw of Obsidian and Manila, Ben didn’t want to believe it could have been Hort. Some things, he decided, just had to be determined by your gut. And his gut told him it wasn’t Hort.

Which didn’t answer the question of who it had been. Backup for the snatch teams? What would have been the point? And why would they have asked for Paula? CIA? FBI? He just didn’t know.

About the only thing going well for them at the moment-beyond the welcome fact that they were still alive-was that it was getting dark and starting to rain. The cars on the highway were becoming indistinct, their headlights on, their wipers pumping. Still, a van was far from impossible to spot. Fourteen people shot to death in a quiet San Jose suburb, probably a dozen witnesses describing the vehicle leaving the scene, possibly noting that a white man and black woman had been inside it. An unusual combination, one the staff at the InterContinental might remember, even if they couldn’t describe the faces of the man or woman in question. He knew he’d been careful about keeping his head down in the lobby and elevator of the hotel, where the cameras were. He hoped Paula had been, too.

He pulled off the highway into a strip mall full of cantinas and bodegas. “Where are we going?” Paula said.

“We need a vehicle change. Police will be looking for this van. I don’t want to be driving it when they find it.”

“I am the police,” Paula said, shaking her head as though in disbelief.