Home Invasion - J. A. Johnstone [68]
A barbed-wire fence loomed in front of the windshield. Ford never slowed down. He aimed the pickup between two fence posts and hit the wire at full speed. It parted with several loud twangs! The truck bounced across an open field, smashed through another fence, and slewed onto a dirt road.
“At least one of the bastards is still alive!” Parker called through the broken rear window. “The SUV just pulled out of the park and is coming after us.”
“If I let it get close enough, can you shoot out a tire?”
“Hell, no! It’s bound to have run-flats on it, anyway.”
In the pickup cab, Ford turned his head to look at Earl as the vehicle raced along the dirt road, raising a cloud of dust behind it.
“There’s only one thing to do,” Ford told Parker. “We’ve got to give them Earl.”
“What!” Earl said in a high-pitched squeak of terror.
“Good idea,” Parker agreed. “They’ll still have to come after us, of course, but since Earl’s the one they’ve really been after all along, they’ll have to stop and kill him first. That’ll give us a little breathing room.”
“Wait, wait!” Earl babbled. “You can’t—”
“He’s already told us he’s never gonna talk,” Ford said. “I’ll be damned if I’m gonna die for something without even knowing what it is.”
“And you saw the way they broke out the heavy artillery right away, back there at the park,” Parker said from the pickup bed. “They didn’t even know for sure it was us in that camper. They want Earl dead so bad they were willing to take a chance on slaughtering innocent people, just because it was possible he was there.”
“All right, I’ll talk, I’ll talk!” Earl screeched. “Don’t throw me out! Please! What is it you want to know?”
“What’s Casa del Diablo?”
“A research lab in the mountains out in West Texas. I worked there.”
“Research into what?” Ford asked.
Earl took a deep breath. “Biological weapons.”
“Bio-weapons have been banned.”
“Tell that to the guys running the place, and the guys who give them their orders.”
“What did you do there?”
“I’m a chemist. You might not believe it to look at me, since I’m so handsome and all, but I’m actually pretty smart.”
“Not smart enough,” Ford muttered. “What did you do, think you could blow the whistle on them and they’d just let you get away with it?”
Muddy sweat coated Earl’s face. He wiped some of it away and said, “You don’t get it, Ford. The stuff they’re making there … it’s bad. Really, really bad.”
“And the government’s funding it?” Parker asked. He had been listening through the broken window.
“Somebody is. I don’t know who. I just figured … well, it had to be somebody pretty high up.”
Ford glanced back at Parker, and as the eyes of the two men met, Ford knew they were sharing the same thought:
There were several people in Washington who might be able to marshal the sort of forces that were arrayed against them.
But there was only one man in Washington who definitely could.
“Yeah, I think we’re gonna be about as rogue as rogue can get,” Ford muttered.
That is, he amended to himself, if they survived the next few minutes with pursuit closing in behind them.
CHAPTER 29
Ford hoped that the dirt road they were on would lead to a highway, or at least another paved road. The pickup they were in almost certainly didn’t have the power of the SUV following them. The SUV’s engine probably had been souped up so it would be capable of more speed.
So maybe it was a good thing after all that they were on a dirt road, Ford decided after a moment’s thought. That way the SUV’s extra power was less of an advantage for the pursuers.
The problem was that the road was getting narrower and rougher, and if that trend continued, it was liable to peter out completely, leaving them with nowhere to run.
Ford glanced at the side mirrors. The pickup’s tires were kicking up so much dust he couldn’t really see anything else behind them, but he knew