Chapter 94: Crazy Driving Skills, Crazy People
"Forget switching vehicles, though," Frank said, before David had even finished the thought. "This car has custom Bilstein coilovers I set up myself. Tuned to spec." He patted the steering wheel once, a proprietary gesture. "I can shake anybody in this."
David shrugged. His reason for wanting a different car had been concealment — the GPS transponder inside this Audi had been swapped out by Johnson's people long before Frank knew about it, which meant Johnson currently had a real-time feed of their position and heading.
But Frank knew that too, and he still wanted to keep the car.
Which meant Frank had a plan for the GPS, or he wanted Johnson to know exactly where they were going.
David thought about it for two seconds and decided either option was workable.
"If you're comfortable with a frontal approach, we keep the car," he said.
Frank's answer was to put it in gear.
David set his phone in the dashboard mount. The navigation was already open — the Machine had reverse-parsed the detonation bracelet's encrypted signal, cross-referenced it against the single hardcoded number on Frank's restricted phone, and triangulated the result to a commercial address on the east side of the city.
A company called Delta Environmental Solutions, Inc.
The kind of name that existed entirely to appear on a lease agreement and nothing else.
David watched the route populate on the screen and said nothing. Frank glanced at the destination, then at David, then back at the road. He pressed the accelerator and the Audi moved into traffic with the smooth, effortless authority of a car that had been significantly modified from factory spec.
He didn't ask how David had found the address. He was running his own test — if the GPS was live and Johnson was watching, he'd know within a few minutes whether the location was real.
Four minutes and fifty seconds later, Frank's phone rang.
He looked at David. David nodded once.
Frank answered it on speaker.
Johnson's voice came through tight with irritation — the specific irritation of a man who considers himself the most dangerous person in any given situation and has just been surprised. "What are you doing? I told you north out of the city. You're going the wrong direction."
Frank's voice was completely flat. "Forgot something at Delta Environmental. Quick stop, then I'm back on route."
Silence. Not long — maybe three seconds. But the quality of it changed the moment Frank said the name.
When Johnson spoke again, the irritation had been replaced by something colder. "You want to end your night early? That what this is? Because I can make that happen right now. Turn around. Get out of the city. Last time I'm saying it."
"Looking forward to seeing you, Mr. Johnson." Frank ended the call and dropped the phone in the cupholder.
He glanced sideways at David with an expression that wasn't quite respect but was in the same neighborhood.
The AI had found Johnson's location in under five minutes from an encrypted signal. Frank had seen a lot of operational capability in his career, and that was not nothing.
What he couldn't figure out was the confidence. David had no weapon visible, no backup that Frank could identify, and had casually declared he had no intention of getting out of the car when they arrived. Frank had been running threat assessments in the back of his mind since the moment David came through his window, and this particular data point didn't fit any of the models.
"When we get there," Frank said. "What's your play?"
David smiled slightly. "No play. This is your problem. You solve it." He glanced toward the backseat. "Valentina and I will be in the car. If she wants to get out and watch, I won't stop her."
Frank processed that.
He'd spent the last several minutes mentally preparing for the possibility of coordinating with an unknown variable — accounting for David's position, his likely reactions under fire, whether he'd freeze or do something unpredictable at the wrong moment. He'd built contingency branches for at least four different scenarios involving David as an active participant.
All of that work evaporated in a single sentence.
Frank exhaled — a long, slow breath of air that carried the weight of recalibration — and stared at the road.
Fine. He'd always worked better alone anyway. A partner who needed managing was a liability. David staying in the car was, on reflection, the most useful thing he could do.
Frank settled into the familiar pre-operation stillness and let the rest of it go.
In the backseat, Valentina pressed her hand over her mouth and turned toward the window so Frank wouldn't see her laughing.
She'd been watching Frank since the moment David climbed through the window, and she'd seen something she genuinely hadn't expected — Frank surprised. Not just once, but repeatedly. Frank, who maintained the same expression whether he was outrunning a helicopter or ordering coffee. Frank, who she'd privately wondered might have some kind of neurological condition affecting his face.
That face had moved tonight. Actual astonishment, more than once, worn openly and apparently without Frank noticing it was there.
David had done that. In about eight minutes of conversation, without raising his voice or making a single threat, he'd taken a man who'd had a gun to his head and turned him into a cooperative participant. Valentina had grown up watching her father run policy meetings with cabinet members and foreign liaisons. She'd seen real persuasion at work. What David had just done was in that category.
She was still thinking about it when Frank's voice cut through.
"Brace yourselves. We're going in."
Valentina looked up.
They were on the elevated section of highway that ran alongside Delta Environmental's building — a six-story commercial structure with a glass exterior and, she now realized, a gap in the guardrail that corresponded almost exactly with the width of an Audi A8.
This was not a road entrance.
"What — no. No no no. Frank, we are seventy feet in the air, if you go over that railing we will die—"
Frank wasn't listening. His right hand moved through a sequence of controls on the center console that she didn't recognize, and she heard something mechanical shift in the car's suspension. The front end rose slightly. The rear wheels began to spin against the asphalt with a sound like something waking up.
Valentina grabbed her seatbelt and hauled it across her chest with both hands, clicked it home, and pressed herself back into the seat with everything she had.
David sat perfectly still in the passenger seat, hands relaxed in his lap.
The car launched.
Three seconds of freefall — glass exterior rushing toward them, the building's interior visible through the facade, the ground floor impossibly far below — and then the Audi hit the sixth floor of Delta Environmental Solutions at approximately forty-five miles per hour and came to rest inside the building in a cascade of safety glass and structural framing.
Frank had the door open before the last piece of glass stopped falling.
The men in the room — four of them, in suits, looking at the car with the expressions of people whose threat assessment had just catastrophically failed — were still reaching for their weapons when Frank shot two of them. The other two went down in the next three seconds. It was less a gunfight than a correction.
Frank stepped over the nearest body and walked to the stairwell without looking back.
Downstairs, Johnson had known the Audi was coming since the GPS feed showed it deviating toward the building. He'd had twelve minutes to position his people — the good ones, not the floor staff — at the ground level entrance points. A solid perimeter. Anyone coming through the lobby would walk into a crossfire.
What he hadn't accounted for was that Frank didn't use lobbies.
The sound of the car hitting the sixth floor came through the building's structure like an earthquake, and for about four seconds, every one of Johnson's positioned men instinctively looked up. Formation discipline collapsed in the same moment. The perimeter became a cluster.
Frank came down the stairs into a group of men who were still reorganizing.
In the car, the silence was relative.
Valentina had the color of someone who'd just survived something she didn't have a category for. Her hands were locked around the seat edge and hadn't fully released yet. The difference between bungee jumping — which she'd done twice, with certified equipment and trained supervision — and what Frank had just done was the difference between a calculated experience and something that had simply happened to her.
She was not getting out of the car.
David had produced a deck of cards from somewhere and was shuffling them.
"Gin rummy?" he said.
Valentina stared at him.
"You need something to do with your hands," he said practically. "And you're not going to be useful out there right now, which is fine." He dealt without waiting for her agreement.
She picked up the cards because her hands needed something to hold.
The gunfire outside went through phases — heavy, then intermittent, then sparse. Frank was moving through the building methodically, which was apparently just what Frank did.
After about eight minutes, Valentina said: "He's not going to die in there, is he?"
"No," David said, without looking up from his hand.
"You seem pretty sure."
"I am pretty sure."
She glanced at the stairwell door. "Can I borrow your phone? I should call my father — let him know I'm okay."
David held out the phone without comment.
Valentina took it, and made sure to keep her expression neutral. Her father's number wasn't what she was actually planning to dial — or rather, it was, but the call she was imagining would have a certain additional detail in it. Specifically, a location. Specifically, the kind of location that had FBI tactical teams attached to it.
It wasn't that she wanted David and Frank arrested, exactly. She just wanted the situation rebalanced. At the moment, David held every card — information, the AI, the angle of approach to every conversation. Valentina had grown up in rooms where information was power, and right now she had none.
A call to her father changed that equation.
David glanced at her over his cards, said nothing, and discarded a seven.
She picked up the phone and started to dial. Then she looked at David's face and stopped.
He wasn't watching her. He was looking at his hand. But something in his posture — the complete absence of concern — made her put the phone down on the seat between them.
He knew. He'd handed her the phone knowing exactly what she was thinking about doing.
She picked up the seven he'd discarded and added it to her hand.
The stairwell door opened.
Frank walked out — jacket gone, shirt in a state that suggested the past fifteen minutes had been vigorous — with one hand gripping the collar of a man who looked like he'd had a very bad evening. Johnson. Older than Valentina had expected, heavyset, wearing the expression of someone who'd been confident forty minutes ago and had since substantially revised his position.
Frank opened the rear door, took the detonation bracelet from his jacket pocket, and snapped it around Johnson's wrist.
Johnson's composure broke on contact. He made a sound that was almost below hearing range and went rigid, looking at the bracelet with pure biological fear.
Frank grabbed Johnson's right hand and applied pressure to the joint in a specific, practiced way. The sound was not pleasant. Johnson's hand went limp. Frank repeated the process on the left. Then he pushed Johnson onto the backseat, where Valentina immediately relocated to the far door.
Frank opened Valentina's door from the outside.
"Out," he said.
"What? Why—"
He was already reaching across her. She had approximately one second to process what was happening before Frank's arm guided her — firmly, not roughly — out of the vehicle onto the building's interior floor, and closed the door behind her.
The Audi's engine turned over.
And then Frank put it in reverse.
Valentina watched the car back toward the glass exterior wall with the unhurried certainty of a man who had done this before, or who had at minimum thought about it in enough detail that the gap between planning and execution had ceased to exist. The rear wheels crossed the shattered frame of the window the car had come through, and then they were outside, on the glass exterior, the back of the car hanging seventy feet above street level—
And holding.
The Bilstein suspension, the custom modifications she hadn't understood when Frank mentioned them, were doing something she didn't have an engineering vocabulary for. The car adhered to the glass facade and descended, controlled, the tail tracking downward with the precision of something on a rail. Everywhere the tires touched, the glass developed fracture patterns — delicate spider-web cracks radiating outward — but nothing gave way.
Valentina stood in the shattered window frame with the night air coming through from both sides and watched a black Audi A8 drive down the side of a building with a man who'd orchestrated her kidnapping in the backseat.
From inside the car, Johnson was producing a continuous stream of sounds that ranged from prayer to profanity and back again, which David could hear clearly. Johnson had concluded, with reasonable logic, that he was about to die. The car's tail was pointed at the street. The street was a long way down. In the backseat, with two broken hands and a live explosive bracelet, his options for self-preservation were approximately zero.
David watched the ground come up in the windshield — or rather, the rear window, since they were descending tail-first — and said nothing. Frank's hands on the wheel were absolutely steady.
Twenty feet from the street, Frank entered a command sequence on the center console panel. Something in the rear suspension fired — a pneumatic adjustment, the tail geometry shifting — and the Audi's back end rotated to meet the asphalt at an angle that absorbed the final impact across four contact points simultaneously.
The car landed.
Reverse became seventh gear in the same motion, and the Audi accelerated into the empty street and was gone before the first police siren reached the block.
Five blocks east, Frank pulled into an unlit service alley and cut the engine.
He turned around and looked at Johnson the way a carpenter looks at a piece of wood he's about to work on.
"Those were my best shock absorbers," David said, before Frank could speak. "Still intact. I'm impressed."
Frank ignored this. He looked at David. "I need him to answer some questions. You said you could handle that."
"I said I could."
"Then do it. Whatever you need from me after, I'll do it."
"Hold that thought," David said. He got out of the car, opened the rear door, and pulled Johnson out by the collar.
Johnson stumbled onto the alley floor, hands limp at his sides, and looked up with the expression of a man trying to calculate his remaining options and coming up empty.
David walked him ten feet from the car.
The bracelet on Johnson's wrist shifted from green to amber.
Johnson went very still.
He knew what amber meant. The first compound had released. It was beginning to seek the second.
"Hey — hey — whatever you want, I'll—"
David kept walking. Twelve feet. Fourteen.
The amber deepened.
Sixteen feet.
The bracelet cycled to red.
Johnson stopped trying to negotiate and started trying to stop, digging his heels into the alley floor, pushing back against David's grip with arms that barely worked, making sounds that were purely biological — the sounds a person makes when the brain has stopped generating language and gone directly to survival.
David stopped.
Fourteen inches from full detonation. The red hadn't completed its cycle. The two compounds were mixing but hadn't reached critical ratio.
Behind them, Frank was watching through the car window with an expression that David recognized — the expression of someone who considers themselves extremely difficult to rattle, confronting evidence to the contrary. Frank had calculated the risk as insane and the execution as precise, and the combination had produced something he didn't have a clean category for.
Johnson was on his knees, chest heaving, sweat visible on his face in the sodium light from the alley entrance. He was staring at the ground six inches in front of him with the focus of a man who has decided that staring at a specific point might somehow help.
David crouched to eye level.
"Now," he said pleasantly. "Frank has some questions. I'd like you to answer them completely and without the parts where you explain how we're all going to die. Do you think you can manage that?"
Johnson nodded. The motion was rapid and very sincere.
"Good." David stood. "Can we go back to the car?"
Johnson looked up with something approaching hope.
"No," David said. "We can't."
He smiled and waited.
End of Chapter 94
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