TailSpin - Catherine Coulter [140]
Laurel walked to her husband, put her arms around him, and kissed his cheek. “That was well done, Stef.”
Stef? Laurel called her philandering husband Stef?
His arms went around her. “It will be all right, matia mou,” Stefanos said, and kissed her hair. “I always snip loose threads.”
“And why not?” Laurel said, eyeing both of them impartially. “Does everyone agree? We can’t have an FBI agent disappear. Agent Savich would never let that go, never. It would have been hard enough to have Rachael disappear. Our only choice now is an auto accident, fitting, I think, particularly for Rachael.”
Quincy nodded.
Stefanos stepped away from his wife and pulled a small blunt-nosed .38 from his jacket pocket. “Ladies, we will untie your feet. You will stand up and we will go out to Agent Sherlock’s car. You needn’t concern yourselves about anything else.” He turned to his wife. “I believe we’ll drive to those cliffs near where Rachael’s father died. There’s never much traffic there, even this time of day.”
“Yes, that’s good. Let Brady help,” Laurel said.
Quincy said, “Brady must have slipped out, the puking little coward.”
“No matter,” Stefanos said, and smiled at Rachael and Sherlock. “We don’t have to worry about Brady. He has a very strong sense of self-preservation.”
SIXTY
Dillon shut MAX’s top and rose. He said, “Excuse me, sir, but Agent Crowne and I have to go. There’s trouble.”
He and Jack were halfway to the conference room door when Maitland called out, “But, Savich, where are you going? What happened?”
“Sherlock’s in trouble,” Savich said over his shoulder, never slowing. “MAX helped me track down her cell phone GPS coordinates.”
“But how do you know she’s in trouble?”
There was no answer because Savich and Jack were gone. Savich roared out of the Hoover Building garage, only to hit the afternoon traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue. The Porsche preferred to fly, but Savich also knew how to skim around other cars, slip in and out whenever there was a sliver of an opening. Too many people, Savich thought, and turned onto Seventh Street and picked up some speed as they passed the National Mall. He caught Pennsylvania Avenue again, heading toward the Potomac, and crossed the John Philip Sousa Bridge at a crawl, but was soon speeding north on 295, the Baltimore-Washington Parkway still light with commuters.
“Looks like we’re heading to Hailstone,” Savich said. “Eighteen minutes, if traffic stays light and the cops stay away.”
“I can’t believe she and Rachael are at Stefanos’s mansion. Why? How’d they get from Rachael’s house to Hailstone, Maryland?”
“We’ll find out. Jack, have one of our people check out Rachael’s house, see if her Charger and Sherlock’s Volvo are there. Is your seat belt fastened?” There was a break in traffic and Savich let the Porsche hit one hundred miles an hour, smooth as a slide of silk.
Jack nodded and used his cell phone.
A clear stretch ahead. Savich hit the hammer. The Porsche glided to 110, passed a speeding Cadillac. Savich saw the guy’s white face flash by.
A black Ferrari danced with them for a mile or two, then let them go, Savich smoothly pulling around it. The driver sent Savich a look of surprise and a thumbs-up.
Traffic thickened up and the Porsche growled back down to sixty. “They got both Rachael and Sherlock, Savich, you know they did. But how? Sherlock’s more careful than the Secret Service.” What are they going to do to them? But he didn’t ask that, his jaw locked so tight he couldn’t get the words out. “Why now? In the middle of the day? It’s a huge risk. What happened to make them move now?”
The Porsche ate up the miles. Savich said, “Jack, I’ve never believed that people like Laurel Kostas commit murder based on strong emotions. Everything has happened so quickly, we never really thought this through. I don’t buy they murdered the senator because he was going to talk,