Patriot Acts Read Online Free PDF Page A

the Civic to a stop, turning the wheel slightly to the left, leaving the engine running. There couldn’t be much gas left in the tank, but the Civic wouldn’t need much to do what I wanted it to do. I had the Glock in my right, ready. At the Ford, the two men were still pretending to speak to one another, not looking my way. It was a big tell. At almost five in the morning in a deserted gas station, when a new car pulls in, shining its lights at you, you look at it. If you don’t, you’re hiding something.
    To my left, the lights in the garage and the office were dark. If they’d been that way when Natalie had driven us past, on the way to the safe house, I couldn’t recall. I hoped they had been. If not, it meant someone had been working but wasn’t anymore.
    The Cherokee passed the row of pumps, now turning slightly to the left about fifteen feet past the last one, coming to a stop, its driver’s door angled roughly in my direction. Ford, Cherokee, and Civic now described a chevronlike shape, with me in the Civic at the apex. It was a strong firing solution; if I tried moving forward, the shooters would tighten their cones of fire. If I tried to run, they could cut me to ribbons from two angles.
    The Cherokee came to a stop, and that was the go-signal. The driver reached for something on the seat beside him, his weapon, and then I had to ignore him, because the two at the Ford were more trouble, at least at the moment. Each of them had already turned in my direction, their hands coming up from where they’d been hidden behind their doors, and each held a submachine gun, an MP5, but the barrels were extended, suppressors fixed in place.
    I tapped the accelerator lightly at the same time I opened my door, swung my legs around and slid out of the Civic, into a crouch, and I didn’t hear the shots as they opened fire, but I heard the impacts, the sound like rocks being driven into the body of the car, the sound of the windshield cracking. The Civic was still in drive, and it kept rolling forward, doing no more than four, maybe five miles an hour, and I stayed with it, stayed low, using the open driver’s door as a shield. Another battery of silent shots slammed into the car, but nothing penetrated, and that was as I’d hoped. Between the two panels and the window glass, it would take a meaner round than the suppressed nine-millimeter the MP5s could fire to cut its way through.
    I kept moving with the Civic as it rolled steadily forward, staying low. If I’d done it right, the car would be on course to meet the Ford, though it would take the better part of a minute to get there. It was going to be a very long minute, especially with three people shooting at me.
    I reached out for the door, pushed it fully open to give me the most cover I could manage, then released it and went to a two-handed grip on the Glock, and it was only then that I realized that I wasn’t afraid. I was vaguely surprised to discover that I wasn’t truly worried at all. It’s not that I didn’t recognize the danger I was in, and it wasn’t that I didn’t acknowledge how perilously close to my own death I was standing. But as I moved, as I shifted my weight and stutter-stepped to keep pace with the car, as I brought the Glock up to kill the one wearing the watch cap, I felt precise, sure, even certain. I had done everything I could to even the odds, I had a plan, and either it would work or it wouldn’t, but there was only one way to find out.
    I came out quick, sending five shots from the Glock at the shooter in the watch cap as fast as I could pull the trigger. He was the priority target; he was at the driver’s door of the Ford, and that made him the driver, and I didn’t want him getting behind the wheel and turning the tables on me.
    My shots rang out, one atop the other, and the gunman wearing the watch cap jerked, then toppled back. The clatter of his MP5 hitting the ground rang across the lot, and I heard his partner, the bald