wrist around, yanked it toward his body and up to the level of his shoulders, then, sharply, down, using his forearm like a crowbar, and slammed the driver's arm against the edge of the mostly lowered window.
The driver yelped, but he didn't let go. His grip was like steel. With his other hand, he was beginning to feel for an under-the-dashboard compartment, no doubt where a weapon of some sort was stored.
Ambler let his right arm go limp, let the driver pull him part of the way into the cab. Then, with his other hand, he spear-punched the man's larynx with a carefully aimed blow.
The driver released him and leaned forward, both hands tearing at his collar. He was struggling for breath, as the ruined cartilage impeded his airflow. Ambler opened the door and pulled the driver from his seat. The man took a few steps away from the van before collapsing to the ground.
As Ambler climbed aboard, gunned the motor, and sped down the street, he could hear the cries of confusion among the men of the second unit. But it was too late for them to take action.
Ambler did not envy the team leader who had to explain how the parcel not only had escaped from under their noses but escaped in the team's own vehicle. Yet his maneuver involved no calculation or forethought. Reflecting upon it now, he realized that his actions sprang from the look on the first man's face: searching, wary-and uncertain. A hunter who was not sure whether he had found his quarry. The retrieval team had been dispatched too quickly to have been provided with photographs. Ambler was expected to do what fugitives almost invariably do in such situations: identify himself by attempting to flee. But how to give chase when the fox was running with the hounds?
The van was serving admirably as a getaway car; within minutes, though, it would become a glaring beacon, signaling his presence to his pursuers. A few miles farther down Connecticut Avenue, Ambler eased the van into a side street and left it idling once more, with the keys in the ignition. If he was very lucky, someone would steal it.
At this point, anonymity would be best secured by a populous area that was both a residential and a business neighborhood-a neighborhood that contained embassies, art museums, churches, bookstores, apartment buildings. A place with a brisk pedestrian traffic. A place like Dupont Circle, then. At the intersection of three of the city's major avenues, Dupont Circle had long been a thriving neighborhood, and even on this dismal winter morning the sidewalks were reasonably full. Ambler took a cab there, getting out at New Hampshire Avenue and Twentieth Street and swiftly losing himself among the day-trippers. He had a destination in mind but maintained an expression of bored aimlessness.
As he walked through the crowds, he tried to stay aware of his surroundings without making eye contact with anyone. Yet whenever his gaze alighted upon a passerby, the old feeling returned: especially in his hyper-alert state, it was as if he were reading a page from someone's diary. It took only a glance to register the hurrying step of the sixtyish woman with peach-blond hair, a navy kick-pleat skirt showing beneath an open check-patterned coat, large gold-plated earrings, a plastic Ann Taylor shopping bag gripped too tightly by an age-spotted hand. She had spent hours getting ready to go out, and
out meant shopping. A pouting loneliness flickered on her countenance; the raindrops on her cheeks might as well have been tears. She was childless, Ambler guessed, and maybe that, too, was a source of regret. In her past, no doubt, there was a husband who was going to make her whole and complete her life, a husband who-ten years ago? longer?-got restless and found someone younger, fresher, to make him whole and complete
his life. Now she collected store-specific charge cards and met people for tea and played rubbers at bridge, but maybe not so often as she would have liked; Ambler sensed a larger disappointment with people. She probably suspected that her own sadness repelled them in some subliminal way; they were too busy for her, and her isolation only made her sadness deeper, her company all the less appealing to others. And so she shopped, bought clothing that was too youthful for her, pursuing "bargains" and "deep discounts" for apparel that looked no more expensive than it was. Was Ambler's every supposition correct? It hardly mattered: he knew