He was closing in now, but keeping up while avoiding collisions was getting trickier by the second. The driver in the Mercedes was leaving a mess of cars in his wake, slowing down and veering unpredictably as he cut them off. Morgan almost crashed twice, and then was almost sent into the guardrail by an errant sedan.
Then, ahead, he saw that a heavy red SUV was slowing down warily after the Mercedes passed him, slowly closing the gap between it and a truck in the next lane. Morgan was going too fast to brake, and hitting the SUV or the truck at his speed wouldn’t be too different from hitting a brick wall head-on. There was only one way to go. He accelerated harder toward the narrowing gap. Scraping paint against the truck’s back fender, he made it through. But immediately, he saw a car that was braking hard, tires screeching, just up ahead. He cleared the truck with inches to spare. Immediately he was faced with a compact car that had spun out, and he banked hard to the left, nearly losing traction himself.
At that point, Morgan noticed that all this chaos wasn’t accidental. The driver in the Mercedes wasn’t just cutting it close trying to get ahead. The bastard was trying to cause an accident by getting as many cars as he could to brake, spin out, or crash.
Morgan followed, dodging car after car. They covered ground astonishingly fast. They passed a policeman who started giving chase, but was trapped almost immediately behind two slow-moving vehicles and was left far behind, siren fading in the distance. Morgan turned his attention back to the Mercedes, and noticed the highway was nearly over, feeding into the George Washington Bridge, a long, curving on-ramp with nowhere else to turn.
Morgan’s tires squealed as he drifted the entire length of the on-ramp onto the bridge, not a hundred feet behind his quarry.
He made it almost halfway across when the Mercedes narrowly cut off a car that was pulling a trailer. The car tried stopping, skidded sideways, and with the trailer, blocked Morgan’s passage altogether.
Morgan pulled the handbrake, but too late: he smashed sideways into the trailer, which caused him to spin counterclockwise. Moving too fast to regain control, he spun, until Morgan felt the jerk of a hard impact and blacked out.
He opened his eyes again, disoriented, not knowing how much time had passed and feeling like he was on a boat. He looked out ahead, and saw no road, just the sky. Suddenly, he realized why: the GTO was hanging over the edge of the bridge, teetering uncertainly over the abyss.
Morgan was groggy, but even in this state he understood the need to get the hell out of there. He undid his seat belt with far less care than was necessary, and the car rocked a little farther forward. From his perspective it seemed as though the whole world tilted, giving him a clear view of certain death below. Slowly and carefully, Morgan began to move to his right, keeping his weight as far back as he could, until he was holding himself above the handbrake. He slowly pushed himself backward, squeezing between the two front seats and onto the backseat. The car seemed to stabilize as he did this, resting more comfortably on solid ground. The back window had shattered at some point, and the glass on the seat bit into his hands. Struggling to focus, he climbed out the window, and pulled himself clumsily onto the trunk lid, feeling the broken glass making a thousand shallow cuts on his side. He then rolled off the trunk and onto the hard asphalt, crying out in pain at the impact.
Without Morgan’s weight to hold it back, the car tilted forward to its tipping point. With a loud moan, it tumbled off the bridge, disappearing from sight and smashing into the Hudson River below with a distant crash.
Bruised and beaten, Morgan slowly got up, then looked down the length of the George Washington Bridge. Traffic had stopped completely behind him, and a crowd of people, having left their cars, began to form around him. He looked to the far side, trying to spot the Mercedes, but there was no sign of it. Wherever it had gone, it was far out of sight by now.
CHAPTER 24
Washington, D.C., January 29
Chapman walked out into the National Mall again, this time by the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. It was midafternoon. The temperature was dropping fast, and the reddening sky made the water seem like it was on fire. He stood there for hardly two minutes, feeling his limbs grow slightly numb from the cold, before he spotted Smith walking toward him in his precise and controlled gait, wearing a discreetly tailored black trench coat. The mysterious man had left him with a promise last time and nothing more. Since then, the Emergency Task Force’s investigations remained perfectly stalled. They had scrupulously analyzed all the evidence relating to the Paris bombing, including security video, interrogation transcripts and forensic reports, but they had yielded nothing. The handful of promising leads had only led to dead ends. Every other source had dried up, and Chapman clung to the hope that Smith would deliver something.