shadowy silhouette of the cop coming at him, weapon raised.
Matt was out of options. He ground down on his teeth and slammed the car into reverse. The car lurched, thundering through the alley—backward—its V-8 roaring angrily. Matt hugged the passenger headrest as he steered the car, riding virtually blind. In the best of light conditions, the fastback didn’t have the greatest visibility through its rear windshield, and here, in the dark and narrow alleyway, with only the Mustang’s feeble reversing light to guide him, all he could do was keep the car in a straight line and hope for the best—hope he could avoid the walls, and hope the cop didn’t have a death wish. He stayed as low as he could, tensing up while awaiting the inevitable gunshots, and sure enough, a shot reverberated in the narrow space, followed by several more, one of them drilling through the rear windshield and slamming into the passenger headrest, another pinging off the A-pillar somewhere to his right.
Within a heartbeat, he was almost at the cop’s level. Matt twitched the steering wheel to angle the car right up against the wall closest to him, across from where the cop was firing. The Mustang shuddered and squealed furiously as it scraped the side of the house, and with the cop flattening himself against the opposite wall, Matt managed to thread it through without hitting him. More shots followed him as he bounced out of the alley and onto the main road, where he hit the hand brake, spun the car so it was aimed right, and powered away.
He glanced in his mirror and saw the cop emerge into the street and rush to his car, but Matt knew he wouldn’t be following him. Still, he wasn’t in the clear. An APB concerning his less-than-low-key car would be heating up the airwaves any second now. He had to ditch the car—quickly—and lie low until dawn.
What he’d do the next day, though, was far less certain. He still had the rest of the night to get through first.
Chapter 24
Washington, D.C .
Keenan Drucker felt electric. He was well rested, having managed to tear himself away from surfing the news channels and the Internet soon after midnight and get a decent night’s sleep. In the morning, over a hearty breakfast of waffles and fruit, he’d gone through the newspapers with quiet satisfaction, something he hadn’t felt for years. A feeling he hoped he’d be able to build on as the day wore on.
Presently, sitting in his tenth-floor office on Connecticut Avenue, he pivoted in his plush leather chair, away from his wide desk—nihilistic in its lack of clutter, with nothing on it except for a laptop, a phone, and a framed photograph of his deceased son—and looked out across the city. He loved being in the nation’s capital, working there, playing a role in shaping the lives of the citizens of the most powerful country on the planet—and, by extension, the lives of the rest of the world’s inhabitants. It was all he’d ever done. He’d begun working his way up the system soon after leaving Johns Hopkins with a master’s in political science. He’d spent the next twenty-odd years as a congressional staff member, serving as senior policy advisor and legislative director to a couple of senators. He’d helped them grow in prominence and power while ensuring his own rise in stature, working quietly, behind the scenes, shunning the more visible positions that were constantly on offer—although he’d flirted with taking on that of undersecretary of defense for policy when it had been offered. He preferred the continuity afforded by pulling the strings from behind the curtain, and only left the Hill after an offer that was too good to turn down came in, giving him the opportunity to create and run a well-funded, far-reaching think tank of his own, the Center for American Freedom.
He was made for this life. He was a ruthless and imaginative political strategist, he had a mind like a steel trap, and his appetite for detail, combined with a prodigious memory, made him a master of procedure. And as if that weren’t enough, his effectiveness was further enhanced by an easygoing, gregarious charm—one that masked the iron resolve underneath and helped when one was a dedicated polemicist ready to take on the red-button issues that were splitting the country.
The last few years, though, had instilled a new sense of urgency within him. Groups of civilian advisors had firmly gripped the reins