policeman, a blue slicker obscuring his uniform, appeared by his door, Callahan powered down his window.
"You know how fast you were going?"
Callahan displayed two laminated plastic cards. "Check 'em out, Officer," he said. "You really don't want to be here."
"Oh, sorry, man. I had no idea." The officer sounded genuinely abashed, but it was funny - he couldn't have been a rookie. He seemed to be in his forties, with a boxer's squashed-looking nose and a thin scar that ran along his jaw.
"Take a careful look at the plates next time," Callahan said, his tone bored, officious. "You see the prefix SXT, it means it's high-security federal transport."
The officer tore up a slip of paper. "I'm scratching this from my records. You too, huh?"
"It's understood, Officer."
"No hard feelings?" the officer said, sounding slightly panicked. He extended a hand through the window. "I respect the work you guys do."
Callahan sighed, but reached out to shake the cop's hand - which, oddly, extended past his hand to his wrist. He felt a sudden prick. "Shit!"
"Sorry, man," the police officer said. "My goddamn signet ring." But he didn't move.
"What the fuck, man?" Callahan protested. All at once, he felt strangely weak.
The man in the blue slicker reached through the window and unlocked the door. Then he pulled on the knob.
Callahan was puzzled, even outraged. He wanted to say something ... but nothing came out. He wanted to swat the man away ... but when he tried to move his arm, nothing happened. And when the door opened, he found himself slumping out of it like a sack of gravel. He could not move.
"Easy, boy," the man in the slicker said, laughing genially. He caught Callahan before he hit the ground. Now he leaned into the car, lifting Callahan up and over to the passenger seat on the right.
Callahan stared impassively, slack-jawed, as the man settled beside him in the driver's seat.
The intercom light flashed blue, and a voice squawked through a small speaker: "Danny? What the hell's going on?" Hildreth, on the other side of the opaque "privacy window," was beginning to fret.
The man in the blue slicker pressed the driver-override buttons so that the rear doors were locked and could be reactivated only by him. Then he smoothly shifted into drive and made his way toward the Arlington Memorial Bridge.
"I'll bet you're wondering the same thing," the man said to Callahan companionably. "It's called Anectine. A neuromuscular blocker. They use it during surgery. Sometimes people on respirators get it, too, to make sure they don't thrash around. It's a strange sensation, isn't it? You're fully conscious, but you can't fucking move. Your diaphragm goes up and down, your heart pumps away, you can even blink. But your voluntary muscles are out of commission. Plus which, the way it's metabolized, it's damn hard to identify in forensics unless you already know what to look for."
The man pressed the window controls, lowering both rear windows partway. Another squawk came from the intercom, and the man switched the sound off.
"Your passenger can't figure out why we'd lower the windows when it's raining like a mother," the man said.
What the hell was going on?
Callahan focused all his mental energy on the task of lifting his index finger. He strained with all his might, as if he were bench-pressing three times his weight. The finger trembled ever so faintly, and that was all. He was helpless. Utterly helpless. He could see. He could hear. But he could not move.
They approached Memorial Bridge, which was almost empty of traffic, and the driver suddenly floored the accelerator. The powerful three-hundred-horsepower engine surged, and the car leaped forward, cutting a diagonal across two lanes of traffic on the bridge. The driver ignored the furious hammering against the opaque partition as the powerful armored vehicle crashed over the railing on the side of the bridge, sailing through the air and into the river.
The impact with the water was greater than Callahan had expected, and he found himself slammed forward against the straining belts. He felt something snap: probably one of his ribs had broken. But the armored car provided the driver's seat with four-point belts, the sort used by racing drivers, and Callahan knew that for the man in the blue slicker, the force of impact would be safely distributed. As the car sank rapidly into the turbid depths of the Potomac, Callahan could see him release his own belts and roll his window down. Then he released Callahan's belts, and