Gun Metal Heart (21 page)

Paco Montoya and his three aides watched the race from the comfort of the Dodge Durango behind the riders, but they also watched the images being relayed from Estebe's camera.

With Ray-Bans and her helmet's black visor, Daria's vision was unimpaired. She watched the skies when she wasn't watching the bicycles, the other motorcycles, the follow cars, and the fans, who, in the villages, crowded perilously close to the racecourse.

Daria caught sight of a hawk-shaped micro-drone at one point and, as an experiment, spoke into the mic attached to her helmet. “How far to the final climb?”

The drone did not change course. It drifted to her right and soon fell out of view. It hadn't been able to hone in on her audio signal amid the mobile Tower of Babel.

Perfect.

Paco Montoya's voice came back in her earpiece in the helmet. “Twenty kilometers. It's a Category 1 ride: fifteen percent gradient, sometimes a little steeper. Three-thousand-foot elevation gain. The peloton will break up there. Over.”

The peloton will break up there.
Daria didn't know what that meant, but she was having too much fun to care overmuch.

She saw no more hummingbirds or hawks for the day.

The Team Rostelecom Kawasakis ridden by Owen Cain Thorson and Jake Kenner kept close enough to watch Daria as they crossed the border into France.

Sandpoint, Idaho

Todd Brevidge was roused from sleep to come observe the crisis. In the underground observation lounge, Colonel Crace watched live feeds from the Mercutio and Hotspur drones, although one of the screens had been dedicated to the actual television coverage of the Tour de France. The screen showed a gliding, amorphous blob of humanity whipping through picturesque valleys and mountains heavy with green forests.

As Brevidge entered, wiping coke from his upper lip, Crace turned to him. “You said the cameras couldn't lose her in a crowd.”

“No!” The salesman tried to regain control of the situation. “I said our facial recognition system is the best in the business. It's not our fault if she's wearing a helmet.”

“You also said we could track all her communications.”

“I said she could be surrounded by a couple hundred cell phones and we could track her communications. Maybe thousands. Look!” Brevidge waved to the screens. “She's surrounded by tens of thousands of cell phones! Not to mention microwave trucks and helicopters!”

Bryan Snow's voice echoed from the PA system. He must have been listening in. “Speaking of which, we can't keep the Mercutios in the air over the racers. The helicopters are creating too much downdraft. I've had to pull them back. Plus, the support truck is still stuck in traffic in Turin. We've got about forty minutes, maybe forty-five, then we have to send these drones back. We can replace them, but understand: the chase is moving away from the support truck. That means the amount of time we can keep each suite of drones in the air is diminishing.”

Crace looked ready to rip off someone's arm and beat them with it. She glowered at Brevidge. “I thought you said your drone system was the world's best!”

“It is!” he bleated, waving at the screens. “It's the very best! Ever! It's just…”

He gestured vainly at the living, surging snake of the peloton and its assemblage of follow cars and motorcycles and helicopters and rabid fans and journalists.

“It's just … we never anticipated this!”

Belgrade, Serbia

Kostic and Lazarevic came to Major Arcana's double room at the Belgrade City Hotel. “My source in America,” she said. “They found Gibron.”

“And the flying weapons? They're giving chase?” Kostic's polo shirt was, as ever, spotted with ashes from his cheap cigarettes.

“Yes.” The blonde had jotted two sets of numbers and letters onto a sheet of hotel stationery. She ripped it off. “My source gave me coordinates. Find her.”

The quiet, hulking Lazarevic set his laptop down on the room's desk and began keying in coordinates. The blonde had slipped on a short silk robe before the men appeared. Her hair was up in a loose knot behind her head, with icy tendrils framing her face. Kostic made a majestic effort not to stare at her long legs.

Lazarevic stabbed at his fingerprint-smudged screen. He frowned behind his thick mustache.

Kostic nodded. “Is funny.”

“What?” The blonde crowded in behind him, peered over his shoulder.

“She is between France and Italy,” Kostic said. “She is not coming here. She's running the opposite way from us. Smart. Smarter than I'd credited her for.”

The tall blonde glared at the screen. And, slowly, her face morphed from a frown into a smile. The smile changed to a grin.

She giggled. It was an unsettling sound, making the two Serb hitters glance nervously at each other.

Kostic said, “Is problem?”

The tall blonde spoke English. “Oh, my stars and garters!” She laughed harder and used the back of her pale hand to wipe her lips. She switched to Serbian. “That's beautiful!”

Kostic said. “Ah … what is beautiful?”

Major Arcana pointed at the screen. “I know what she's doing. Punkin's using the Tour de France as camouflage. That's freaking brilliant!”

“So … are you saying she could escape the drones?”

The blonde shrugged. “Oh, she will. Trust me.”

“So? Doesn't matter, for us. She is still running away. Yes?”

The blonde put one pale arm across his shoulder and leaned in. Kostic had spent his entire adult life hurting or killing people. Yet he flinched as she leaned in toward him.

“She's running. But not away.” She grinned, leaned in, and whispered into his ear, “Around!”

The Western Alps

As the riders reached the Category 1 climb of Col du Mont Carbonnel, the racers split into three clusters.

Seven of the best young mountain riders made a mad dash for the higher elevations and quickly built up a lead of 3 minutes, 30 seconds over the rest of the bikes.

Twenty more riders formed what is called the chase group. They pulled 3 to 4 minutes ahead of the 180 riders in the peloton but still more than 3 minutes behind the seven leaders.

Then came the peloton. Going uphill, and struggling slowly, the scrum took on a compact, lozenge-shaped form. Once they hit the summit and began zooming downhill they would spread out into a snake shape.

The racers would stay like that for a while: Seven leaders, twenty chasers, and 180 in the peloton.

Daria and Estebe could hear Paco Montoya shouting, “Stay with the chasers! Stay with the chasers!” Team Tarantola had two riders in that center group.

Daria edged the Moto Guzzi around the peloton and rocketed uphill, past the perilously in-leaning fans and along the relative straightaways that lead to the summit. She quickly lost sight of the peloton and, within two minutes, caught up with the twenty chasers.

Owen Cain Thorson and Jake Keller also negotiated their way around the peloton and stayed with Daria. Once they headed toward the summit, and the crowds packed in around the riders, Daria would be vulnerable to their attack.

 

Twenty-Five

Three and a half hours into the four-hour race, and day one of the tour stayed broken into lead, chase, and peloton
.

In front, the seven leaders were just summiting Col du Mont Carbonnel.

Behind them, twenty chasers pumped like madmen, gaining ground steadily on the leaders.

The 180 riders in the peloton fell back slowly and inexorably from the mountain climbers up ahead.

Daria and Estebe rode up with the twenty chasers.

Thorson and Keller stayed with Daria.

The Dodge Durango of Team Tarantola was stuck back behind all the bicyclists, along with the other cars.

The chasers were obviously straining. They rode vertical: standing up in the pedals, several inches between their crotches and the bike seats, and looked like gym-goers on elliptical machines.

The assent of Col du Mont Carbonnel was brutal, the elevation ranging from a 14 percent gradient up to a nasty 20 percent. The roads were more or less straight, curving only here and there. The riders' pace was such that fans could run alongside them for a few dozen paces, screaming, many waving national flags or dressed up as characters such as Norsemen or comic book heroes or the pitchmen for products. Most of the crazies didn't seem to notice when they drew within an arm's reach of the riders. Daria had to dodge several of them, including a fool wearing the Kool-Aid red pitcher costume.

She gave the Kool-Aid pitcher an elbow, and the perfectly spherical costume rolled into the road's borrow ditch like a gutter ball in a bowling alley.

Estebe's voice rose a pitch over the helmet speaker. “The fuck are you doing?”

Daria spoke into the mic. “Knocking that fool out of my way.”

“That's unsportsmanlike!”

Daria laughed, a high, lyrical laugh. “Who cares?”

The Basque said, “Think, woman! Do you bowl over everyone who's in your way in life?”

“Generally, yes. Why?”

*   *   *

Thorson and Keller pulled around to the left-hand side of the twenty chasers. They were behind Daria.

Jake Keller glanced to his left into the borrow ditch and watched a man in a round, red pitcher costume, like a beached whale, trying to roll enough to get his arms or legs beneath him. He shook his head in disgust.

“Fuckin' foreigners,” he muttered. He'd adjusted their comms so he and Thorson could speak and hear each other but none of the rest of Team Rostelecom.

Thorson's voice echoed in his helmet. “Tire iron.”

“I know, man.”

They had agreed that Keller would ride ahead and knock over Daria's motorcycle by coming abreast and sliding a tire iron—currently holstered against his Kawasaki's gas tank and hidden by his right leg—into the spokes of her bike. Once she was down, Thorson would run over her. Or shoot her.

Or both.

Once Gibron was dead, the men could cut across the fields and hit farming roads that paralleled the highway. They'd be long gone before any authorities wound through the two-hundred-plus bikes and follow cars to the much-trampled crime scene.

*   *   *

“Brute of a climb!” Estebe grunted in Daria's ear. “They're stamping on the pedals!”

Daria could see what he meant: the twenty riders in the chase group were slamming their pedals downward, again and again, virtually willing their bikes forward, rising and falling, battling gravity as much as each other.

Out of the range of their vision, the seven leaders now were 3 minutes, 15 seconds ahead of the chase group. And the chase group was 3 minutes, 45 seconds ahead of the peloton.

Daria's radio crackled. “Leaders are summiting!” The seven riders up front had reached the top of the mountain.

Daria tucked her bike in close to the twenty chasers as they wound through the wall of screaming fans, leaning over the temporary barriers, waving flags, and screeching. She wore her wrist-length gloves with the thin gold zippers. Form-fitting leather sleeves wrapped around her forearms, leaving an inch of wrist exposed, along with the upper half of her throat and the lower half of her face. The rest of her was glistening black and fuchsia leather.

Daria glanced over her shoulder, aware that another motorcycle was closing the gap behind her. The rider wore teal and cream; she didn't know which team he represented.

They were two minutes from the top when Daria double-tapped her brakes and pulled sharply to her left. The road curved up ahead, overlooking a cliff, and thankfully the line of fans thinned out to nothing at the curve.

The twenty chasers began moving ahead of her as a solitary unit.

Over her shoulder, Estebe said, “The hell…?”

The blue-and-cream motorcycle surged even with her.

Daria spoke into her microphone. “Look.”

Keller reached for the tire iron in its side holster. Daria was even with him, on his left. The tire iron was on his dominant, right side. He reached across his gas tank and attempted to draw the tire iron with his left hand.

*   *   *

Daria had braked because one of the racers in the chase group had wobbled, the Herculean downward pressure on his pedals overcoming his forward momentum. Daria had seen it first, even through Estebe was an experienced hand at the European bike-racing scene.

The rider swerved and his front wheel connected with another rider.

Both bikes went down. Thanks to their momentum, when their front wheels collided both riders tumbled over the top of their handlebars.

Daria tapped her brake again. The chase group nudged ahead of her as a third, then a fourth rider slammed into the tumbling bikes and their fallen riders.

The motorcycle to her right pulled ahead a bit. And Daria saw the tire iron in the rider's left hand.

A fifth, sixth, and then a seventh bike collided with the twisted wreckage of wheels and arms and legs in the upward-facing road. The other riders either had passed the accident or began maneuvering around it, everyone just jostling for position and praying to miss their fallen comrades. An eighth bike tipped over.

All of the chasers had backup bikes, stowed and strapped down atop the follow cars, but the follow cars were four minutes back, behind the peloton
.

With the collisions, the chase group, within site of the summit, dropped from twenty riders to twelve.

Daria goosed the Guzzi's eight-valve engine and jumped ahead.

The helmeted rider in teal-and-cream jabbed the tire iron at her front tire but missed, the point of the iron hitting her gas tank two inches in front of her kneecap. A spark flared and bounced off Daria's leather-encased breast.

Estebe shouted, “Idiot! What's he—”

Daria's right hand snapped out, toward the teal-and-cream rider. She reached under his neck and grabbed his helmet strap. A flick of her thumbnail, and the strap unbuckled.