He rolled on top of the woman, lying on his back with his Sig Sauer aimed toward the open window—more out of habit and training than an expectation that it would do any good. After an excruciatingly long two-count, he came to the realization that they weren’t following. He could still hear the bottle-rocket sound of their engines, but whoever programmed them had obviously set them up to stay within the confines of the house.

He moved off the moaning woman and into a crouch, sweeping his weapon from left to right. They were sandwiched between the house and a dense, blossom-covered hedge. He couldn’t see out, but that probably meant no one could see in either. His vehicle would be to the right at about twenty yards, but it might as well have been a mile. Genjiro’s wife was going into shock and his injuries were going to make carrying her that distance a slow and painful process.

Smith pulled his cell from his pocket and dialed Randi, sliding cautiously along the rough-hewn boards that sided the house.

“Yeah,” she said, picking up on the second ring.

“Abort! Do you understand me? Abort!”

“Jon? What the hell—”

His body was suddenly racked with a kind of pain he’d never felt before. Randi’s voice turned to static and he felt his legs buckle. The gun fell from his hand as he fought to stay upright. Then everything went dark.

43

43

Utsunomiya
Japan

Jon!” Randi shouted into the phone. “Jon, can you hear me?”

It was obvious he couldn’t. The static was so loud that she had to hold the phone more than a foot from her ear. And then it went silent.

She resisted the urge to slam the cell repeatedly into the dashboard of her rented car and instead threw it on the passenger seat. The traffic was bumper-to-bumper and she gunned the car into oncoming traffic, turning onto a slightly less crowded street lined with high-rise apartment buildings.

As expected, there were no empty spaces, so she pulled into a loading dock decorated with emphatic signs that she assumed said “No Parking.”

“Calm down,” she said in the empty confines of the car.

People walking by on the sidewalk started looking at her with vague concern, probably based on her expression. She picked up the phone again and pretended to be in the midst of a cheerful conversation. A few moments later, no one was giving her a second thought.

What the hell had happened? She’d seen Smith bleeding from an artery, getting shot at, and playing with viruses that could wipe out half of humanity. He always sounded like he was speaking at a PTA meeting. This call had been different and it unnerved her. He’d sounded desperate.