The Prisoner - Carlos J. Cortes [161]
“They’re going to fire.” Laurel closed her eyes when Lukas joined with Barandus in singing, “We shall overcome, one day …” in a trembling voice.
“Someone is coming.” Raul glanced at his mirror, almost filled by a dark van approaching from behind at a sedate pace.
The tiny tanklike vehicle slowed to a standstill thirty feet ahead, then it swerved to the right and continued moving at an angle to take up station ten feet to their side, the cannon rotating on top as if preparing for a broadside.
“It’s a camera,” Laurel said.
“What is?” Raul asked.
“The cannon. It’s a camera.”
The contraption drew closer, motors whirring. Three feet from their van, it stopped, and the tube rose on concertina arms like the eye of an alien cyclops. Then powerful projectors fired, bathing the interior of the van in bluish light. Laurel flinched and her knees started to shake. After endless seconds, the lights doused and the contraption whirred away, its rubber tracks producing curious flapping noises.
On their left side, some fifty feet away, the dark-blue van stopped and its side door slid back to disgorge a slight man in an old-fashioned hat, smart tweed overcoat, and thick glasses. The man raised his face to the sun, then turned toward a single DHS officer standing to one side and nodded. When the officer drew near, the man in the hat reached into his jacket pocket and handed him a piece of paper. He waited until the officer finished reading and recovered the paper. Then, hands deep in his coat’s pockets, he strolled in their direction, lazily glancing right and left.
Around them, scores of DHS FDU officers, their black armor gleaming under the strong sun, deployed in a circle perhaps one hundred feet in diameter containing both vans. Their weapons were trained steadily on the fugitives.
“That van is just like ours—same model, same year, same color,” Lukas said, looking straight ahead into the black ring of DHS forces.
“And same plate number,” Raul muttered.
Laurel looked at the parked vehicle. The driver, a young man with wraparound sunglasses, had descended, hefting a large shoulder bag, and marched purposefully toward the other side of the road. The tracked vehicle with the camera turned around when it reached the ring of troops, and its arm swung to train its camera on the van the young man had just vacated. The officer who had conferred with the man in the hat marched before the line of DHS troops and pointed toward the other van.
“How do you know?” Laurel asked.
“I checked as it approached.”
When the newcomer stopped, his nose scant inches from their van’s driver’s side, Raul reached to his door and lowered the window. “Wh-what do you want?” Raul asked, his hands back on the steering wheel at ten and two.
The man didn’t answer but peered with piercing china-blue eyes at Raul’s head, slowly traveling his face and chin, then panned over to Lukas, his lips blossoming into a slight pout, as if ready to blow a kiss. He sidestepped to the passenger window and leaned both arms on the windowsill, his nose inside the vehicle.
Laurel caught a slight whiff of cinnamon and something else, perhaps citrus but equally pleasant, like a warm cake.
Then the man must have caught Barandus’s song, even though it had died down to a whisper. He cocked his head and narrowed his eyes in concentration for what seemed a very long time before nodding once. “Indeed you shall.” Slowly he straightened, rested a hand with soft fingers on the sill, and spoke into his lapel. “Blast it.”
The air burst into an earsplitting cacophony of explosions as the troops fired a never-ending rosary of high-caliber bullets into the van parked scant yards away. Windows shattered, tires burst, and the sickening crunch of twisting metal followed when the vehicle exploded in a fireball.
Laurel closed her eyes and screamed, hands drawn to her ears in a useless effort to stop the clamor of smashing bullets. Then a whoosh of