“You’re right about one thing,” she said. “These fries are fantastic.” She put three more in her mouth.
“Actually, we call them chips here,” Lewis said.
Before Kate could answer that, they all heard a vehicle pull up on the street. Kate got up, went to the small window in the door, and looked out at the street. She saw a black van, unmarked. The front and back doors opened in perfect choreography. Four men got out. One of them was the giant Kate had shot in the alley. As the foursome approached the house, each man took a quick glance up and down the street.
“We gotta get out of here,” Kate said, turning to see the three men still sitting at the table. Nick was stealing some of her chips. “Move!”
“Where’s your back door?” Quentin asked Professor Lewis. “Come on, sir. Let’s go.”
“But, but,” Lewis stammered, “whatever’s happening, I’m not a part of this!”
“You are now,” Nick said, pulling him to his feet. “Back door.”
Kate saw the intruders just a few feet from the house now. She hurried after Nick, Quentin, and Lewis, running into Lewis as he paused to turn off the burner under the teapot. She gave him a wide-eyed look, like seriously?, and pushed him forward.
The front door was kicked open just as Kate made it out the back. She closed it quietly, hoping they’d spend a few seconds clearing the house before coming out the back. Ahead of her, Nick and Quentin were helping Professor Lewis over the fence of his garden. Lewis went up to the back door of the house behind his and politely knocked on it. Nick pushed past him, put his shoulder into the door, and then pulled him inside. Quentin followed, and then Kate. The house was empty.
“Which way?” Nick asked as he pushed open the front door. As Kate looked back, she could see all the way to the rear window of the house. The other men were already climbing the same fence.
“That way,” Kate said, pointing south, toward the Swanage Pier. It was a quarter mile away, but she saw some of the locals out for their after-dinner strolls.
“How fast can you run?” Nick asked Professor Lewis.
“I was a speedy lad in my day.”
“Well, your day just came again,” Nick said. “Let’s go.”
Nick and Quentin ran on either side of him. Kate brought up the rear, turning to look behind her. Three of the four men were on the street, moving toward them. They didn’t seem to be hurrying. It was like they knew there was nowhere to escape.
Kate had a good idea where the fourth man had gone, back out to the front of Professor Lewis’s house, just in case she tried to double back for her rental car. These guys are pros, she thought.
As they got closer to the pier, Kate surveyed their options. There were no police officers in sight, just a few dozen innocent people walking around, worst case collateral damage, best case a stampede running away once the shooting started. Neither scenario would help them.
“I’m going to hang back,” Kate said. “Tie them up. You guys take the professor and find some help.”
“You’re not doing that,” Nick said. “There’s got to be a way out.”
They were about to reach the pier. A left would take them back to the house, where the fourth man was waiting. A right would take them away from town and make them isolated on the empty road. They’d be easy targets if the men got back in their van and followed them. Straight ahead was a short walk to the end of the pier and then the English Channel.
Kate spotted a boat on the water, a twenty-five-foot cruiser, cutting in from the channel toward the pier. It was moving slowly, maybe too slowly to reach the pier in time, but it was their only hope. She ran ahead and waved at the driver of the boat. She didn’t see anyone else on board.
“I’m done for the night,” the owner called to her. “Just bringing her in for fuel.”
“We need your help!” Kate called back, taking out her FBI badge. The man was fifty yards away, but she hoped the flash of gleaming metal would look official.
She glanced back up the pier. The men behind them were moving faster.
“Please hurry!” she said.
The boat angled in toward the pier’s edge. Kate leaned over, trying to grab the bow. She misjudged the distance, lost her balance, and went into the channel. Son of a bitch! she thought. Twice in one day!
The boat owner helped pull her up out of the channel, just as Quentin and Nick arrived with Professor Lewis, who was breathing so hard it looked like he was about to have a heart attack. As soon as they made it into the boat, Nick pushed the driver away from the controls and took over. The men on the pier were twenty yards away, their weapons already drawn.
“Get down!” Nick yelled.
Quentin pulled the driver onto the floor of the boat and Kate covered the professor as Nick gunned the engine. The propeller churned at the water, the bow lifted, and the boat lurched away from the pier just as the first shots rang out.
Nick ducked his head but had to stay high enough to see where the boat was going. One shot shattered the boat’s windshield. Another pinged off the top of the engine. Several others dug into the gunwales. The good people of Swanage out for their after-dinner stroll on the pier were screaming and running away. The gunmen ignored them and kept firing shots at the boat as it sped away.
Finally, the shooting stopped. Kate peeked over the gunwale and saw the men running back up the pier.
“They’ll get in their van and follow in this direction,” she said to Nick.
Nick nodded. “I’ll keep going for a while, then double back.”
“What’s going on here?” the boat owner asked. “Who were those men shooting at us? At my boat?”
He surveyed the pebbles of glass that had once been his windshield, the dent on the engine casing, and the divots dug into his gunwales.
“We’re sorry,” Kate said. “But we would have been dead if you hadn’t showed up.”
* * *
An hour later, Kate was wrapped up in a bathrobe and sitting by the window on the third floor of a little inn, in another channel-side town called Bournemouth. Her cell phone, just one month old, was sitting in a public garbage can a half block down the street.
The boat had brought them to this town, several miles down the coast. They had checked into this inn for the night. To recover, to catch their breath, to figure out what to do next.
She took a sip of hot tea and kept watching the street. A few minutes later, the black van came rolling by, moving slowly. It stopped directly next to the garbage can. The men got out, looked up and down the sidewalk, and peeked into the windows of the storefront. The big man dumped out the garbage and kicked through it. He picked up Kate’s phone and showed it to the other men. He put it in his pocket, the men got back in the van, and it drove away.
Kate looked up when the door opened. Nick came into the room, with Quentin and Professor Lewis behind him. Quentin took a laptop out of his bag and set it up on the desk. Lewis took a seat and started typing.
Nick came over and sat in the chair across from Kate. “Need any help warming up?” he asked.
“What I need is a clean phone, if you have one.”
He pulled out a burner phone from his pocket. “Did they show up for yours?”
“Tracked it down to the exact can,” she said.