Chapter 17: Sudden Complications
"Simon — look."
They'd been sitting in the Supra for the better part of an hour, engine off, windows cracked, talking about nothing in particular the way two people do when they're comfortable with each other and the silence isn't awkward.
Meg's hand on his arm brought him back.
He followed her look.
Sarah Walker was coming out of the bar moving fast — not running, but with the compressed urgency of someone who had made a decision and was executing it. Chuck was right behind her, three steps back, his face doing the specific thing it did when he was confused and trying not to show it.
"They cut the date short," Meg said.
"Yeah."
Then Simon saw the SUV.
Black, heavy, no plates visible from this angle. It was idling half a block up and it pulled forward the moment Sarah and Chuck hit the sidewalk — not coincidentally, not gradually. It accelerated with intent.
"Someone's following them," Simon said.
"Are you sure—"
"Yeah."
Sarah had already processed it. She had Chuck's arm and was moving them toward the Nerd Herd cruiser at a controlled but urgent pace. She got the car open, got Chuck in, and instead of pulling forward into traffic — which would have put them directly in the path of the SUV — she reversed, fast and clean, burning backward down the street with the wheel cranked.
The SUV adjusted instantly. Whoever was driving knew what they were doing.
"Simon—" Meg's voice was careful.
"I see it."
Sarah found her opening — a pedestrian staircase dropping down to the lower road, the kind of passage designed for foot traffic that she was apparently willing to reinterpret. She took it, the government car bouncing down the steps at a speed that should have been structurally inadvisable, and disappeared below street level.
The SUV was too wide for the stairs. It swung out to find the ramp.
Simon had the Supra running.
"I need to follow them," he said. "Chuck is my — he could be in trouble."
Meg was already reading his face. "I know what you're about to say."
"There's a coffee shop on the next block. If you wait there—"
"No." Flat. Immediate. "Simon, no."
"Meg—"
"If you're going, I'm going. Don't waste time arguing." She pulled her seatbelt on. "Go."
He looked at her for half a second — the specific calculation of someone weighing two bad options — then shifted into first.
"Phone out," he said. "Anything goes wrong, anything at all, you call 911. Don't wait for me to say so."
"Already on it." She had the phone in her hand.
He pulled out.
He kept thirty meters back from the SUV, which was keeping thirty meters back from Sarah's car — a three-vehicle procession moving through the lower grid at speeds that were making other drivers very unhappy.
Below them on the road, the government car was running hard. Sarah was good — she was reading the lane ahead and making decisions faster than the SUV could anticipate, using the lighter vehicle's maneuverability against the bigger one's momentum.
But the SUV had power and the driver had patience.
At a bend in the lower road, the SUV closed the gap and made contact — a deliberate push into the rear quarter of Sarah's car that sent it sliding toward the barrier.
Simon hit the brakes.
"Call it in," he said.
Meg was already dialing. "911, yes — I need to report a — a vehicle pursuit, it looks like an assault—" She gave the street, the description, stayed on the line the way the dispatcher asked.
Simon watched.
Sarah didn't panic. She got the car stable, looked for her angle, and then Simon saw her hand come up with something small that he processed before he fully understood what he was seeing.
A throwing knife. She placed it — placed it, not threw it, with a precision that suggested she'd done something like this before in conditions that were considerably more difficult — into the button panel of a retractable security bollard embedded in the curb. The bollard shot up from the pavement directly in the SUV's path.
The SUV hit it at speed. The front end lifted, the vehicle skewed sideways, and for a second it looked like it might roll. It didn't, but the driver lost several seconds recovering.
Sarah had Chuck out of the car and moving toward the building entrance before the SUV stopped rocking.
A man came out of the passenger side of the SUV. Large, moving with the deliberate economy of someone trained for exactly this situation, a weapon already at his side.
Simon looked at the glove compartment.
"Simon." Meg's voice.
"I know." He was already opening it.
"Simon—"
He pulled out the Glock — legally purchased, licensed to carry, cleaned last week — checked the chamber and the magazine with the practiced speed of someone who had put in genuine range time, and looked at Meg.
She was looking at the gun with the expression of someone who had known abstractly that it existed and was now confronting the reality of it.
"I know it's scary," he said. "It's okay to be scared. But I need to go check on Chuck. Stay in the car. Keep the dispatcher on the line. If anyone approaches the car, you drive. Don't wait."
"Simon—"
"Meg." He held her eye. "Do you trust me?"
A pause that lasted less than a second but contained a great deal.
"Yes," she said.
"Then trust me now." He leaned across and kissed her quickly. "I'll be right back."
He tucked the Glock into his waistband, got out of the Supra, and moved toward the building.
He took the stairwell. Twelve floors at a pace that left him breathing harder than he wanted to admit, the Composure skill keeping the adrenaline from eating his focus.
He heard the shot before he reached the roof door.
One shot. Then silence.
He pushed through the door with the gun up, moving through the threshold fast and low—
"LAPD! Drop the weapons — everyone!"
The roof was wide and poorly lit. Three figures. Chuck, near the center, eyes wide and uninjured. Sarah, to his left, holding something. And the large man from the SUV, ten feet from Chuck, now frozen, his eyes moving to Simon with the flat professional assessment of someone calculating new variables.
The man was also holding a gun.
Simon kept his pointed at the man's center mass, kept his breathing even, and did not move.
"I said drop it."
A long three seconds in which no one moved and everyone was doing math.
The large man lowered his weapon. Then, with the practiced compliance of someone who knew when a situation had shifted, he set it on the ground.
Sarah moved. She had him secured inside four seconds in a way that suggested the knife had not been the most dangerous thing about her.
Chuck was staring at Simon.
"Simon?" His voice was genuinely bewildered. "You're — are you a spy?"
Simon lowered the Glock. "I saw you getting chased. I followed." He looked at the large man now controlled by Sarah, then at Chuck. "Are you hurt?"
"No, I'm — no. But how did you—" Chuck gestured at the gun, the roof, all of it.
"I have a carry license," Simon said, which was true and also completely beside the point. He holstered the gun. "What's actually going on here?"
"I'll explain in the car," Chuck said. He was already moving toward the stairwell door with the energy of someone who had recently decided that whatever this is was something to be resolved at ground level.
"There's an assassination in progress at the hotel across the street," Sarah said, clipped and efficient, not stopping her work securing the man. "We need to be there in the next four minutes."
"Assassination," Simon repeated.
"Correct."
Simon looked at Chuck.
Chuck spread his hands: I know. I know. I'm sorry.
"Fine," Simon said. "I have a car."
He took the stairs back down faster than he'd gone up. He was on the street in ninety seconds, jogging to the Supra where Meg was still on the phone with the dispatcher.
She saw his face and ended the call.
"Are they okay?"
"They're fine. Chuck's fine." Simon pulled the passenger door. "I need you to move to the back. We're giving three people a ride."
Meg stared at him. "Simon—"
"I'll explain everything later. I promise." He held the door. "Please."
She climbed into the back without another word, which he registered as one of the most trusting things anyone had ever done for him.
Chuck appeared from the building entrance with Sarah behind him, and behind them, the large man — whose status had apparently shifted from prisoner to colleague in the thirty seconds Simon had missed — moving with the specific energy of someone who had things to do and was annoyed at the delay.
"Car's here," Simon said.
The large man looked at the Supra with an expression that suggested he had opinions about it and was choosing not to share them.
"Back seat," Simon said. "It fits five. Barely."
Chuck got in beside Meg. Sarah took the far back. The large man folded himself into the front passenger seat with the resigned posture of a very large person in a very small space.
"Where?" Simon said.
"Hotel Carmichael," Chuck said. "Two blocks east, the big one—"
Simon shifted into first.
The Supra covered two blocks in under three minutes. At a different time of night, on a different day, Simon might have been conservative about that. Tonight he was not.
The car had barely stopped when the front passenger door opened and the large man stepped out in one motion, already scanning the hotel entrance with the flat-eyed attention of someone resuming a job that had been briefly interrupted.
"Move," he said, to no one and everyone.
Chuck and Sarah were right behind him.
Simon killed the engine and looked at Meg in the rearview.
She looked back at him.
"So," she said, in a voice of remarkable composure given everything that had just happened. "That was different."
"Yeah," Simon said.
"The big guy," Meg said. "He's not actually going to introduce himself, is he."
"Probably not tonight."
She nodded slowly. "Are we going in?"
Simon looked at the hotel entrance, where three people had just disappeared into a building that apparently contained an assassination in progress.
He looked at Meg.
"You should stay with the car," he said.
"Simon—"
"This time," he said carefully, "I genuinely mean it. Not because I don't trust you. Because I need to know you're safe so I can focus. That's the actual reason."
Meg held his eyes for a moment.
"One hour," she said. "If you're not back in one hour, I call everyone. Dom, Veronica, the police, the National Guard. Everyone."
"Fair," Simon said.
He got out of the car and walked into the hotel.
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