It wasn’t that, it was a tail. Shame on him for taking so long to pick up on it.

Nobody tailed him for long. He was hypervigilant in and out of a car. That this guy had been able to follow him just went to show how much Nick’s head was up his ass. Or up his dick.

God, if he did get offed, he’d fucking deserve it.

Thoughts of Charity and everything else fled from his head when the bastard behind him bumped his rear fender again.

Nick pulled away fast. The SUV had tinted windows. All he could make out behind the windshield was a male figure, tall and broad shouldered, wearing a watch cap. Mud had been smeared on the plate. There was nothing to call in.

Nick bared his teeth when the guy behind him bumped the Lexus again, only this time harder.

Fucker was making a bad mistake. Nick was a good shot, but there were better shots around. He was a good man in a fight, but he had never won any martial arts awards. He’d been a damned good soldier and was shaping up to be a fine law enforcement officer, but he wasn’t the best there was.

But by God, no one could beat him in a car. No one. If Watch Cap wanted to kill him while Nick had a steering wheel in his hands, he had the wrong guy.

The guy behind him bumped the Lexus again, only this time harder, maintaining contact while swerving hard to the left. He was angling to drive Nick across the next lane and off the road. This stretch of winding road had a thin guardrail against a sheer drop of four hundred feet. The guardrail wouldn’t hold against a big heavy car like the Lexus crashing into it.

Another jolt, harder this time, just as they were coming up to a curve. The SUV driver messing with his head. I’m coming after you.

Did the guy know this road? Nick did, intimately. Besides strong driving skills, he had a natural compass in his head. He never got lost, ever. All he had to do was drive a road once to find it again and if he drove it a couple of times, it was as if he’d been driving it all his life. He’d been driving this road to the surveillance van several times a day for the past ten days. He could do it blindfolded.

With a little luck, the scumbag behind him had been called in from outside. By Worontzoff, no doubt about that. Whether he’d made Nick for a cop or he was just crazy jealous of Charity, it didn’t take much detecting to realize that Worontzoff had put out a contract on him.

Nick didn’t think Worontzoff would send one of his goons out on local wetwork. That would be fouling his nest in case something went wrong. Mobsters like Worontzoff were executives. They thought along cool, rational lines and the cool, rational thing to do would be to bring in hired muscle with a cut-out for deniability.

But even if this shit head trying to ram him off the road had been born and bred here, he’d just signed his death warrant.

Okay, Mr. Hired Gun, Nick thought grimly. Let’s see how good you are.

They were coming up on the first leg of a big, sharp S curve. At the next jolt, Nick applied the brakes, hard, as if panicked. As if he were someone who has just now realized that the taps from behind weren’t minor accidents and that the other driver was trying to drive him off the road. The first thing a civilian would do is freak and then brake. Nick could almost feel the smile of satisfaction behind the dark windshield.

Enjoy that feeling while you can, fuckhead. You’ve got about five minutes left to live.

The SUV rammed his back fender again, violently, and this time stayed in contact with the Lexus. Then the driver gunned his engine as Nick braked harder. The Lexus had excellent brakes, Nick was almost completely stopped. The only thing propelling him forward now was the SUV. Even above the wind, he could hear the SUV’s engines whining as it took the burden of driving two heavy vehicles uphill in the snow.

Nick waited until the road started its first curve, long enough for the driver to have gotten used to the feel of strain in his vehicle. Long enough to make him complacent.

Just after the SUV shifted gears to start the steep, climbing curve, Nick gunned his engine, shooting forward, the Lexus taking him from almost zero to sixty in a couple of seconds. He rounded the curve, losing the SUV, and then took the other curve as fast as he dared. He’d effectively disappeared from sight.

As soon as he rounded the second curve, he made a bootlegger’s turn, big hood pointed back from where he’d come. He pulled over to the extreme left-hand side of the road and waited, engine running.

Sure enough, a minute later, the SUV appeared, headlights on bright, cutting through the darkness. He saw Nick too late and stood on his brakes. He didn’t have Nick’s experience driving in extreme weather and he lost control of the heavy vehicle. The SUV spun almost 180 degrees on the ice, and Nick rammed into it hard.

He used the momentum of his own heavy vehicle to keep the SUV pinned in, then suddenly swerved left, hard, straight into the SUV, ramming it against the cliff.

The impact could be heard over the wind as the SUV’s front fender ran into the cliff. The airbag inside deployed. Nick could see the driver slumped over the airbag. An airbag deploys at two hundred miles an hour in the first fractions of a second. As a distraction, it wasn’t as good as a flash-bang, but it would have to do. The guy would be disoriented for at least two minutes and that’s all the time Nick would need.

Inside twenty seconds, he was out of the Lexus and had picked the SUV’s lock. The airbag was slowly deflating and the man was moaning, moving slowly, still in shock. His eyes sharpened with panic when he saw Nick and he fumbled for the Sig Sauer P210 in the passenger seat. Expensive gun. Nothing but the best for Worontzoff’s goons.

But the airbag impeded his movements. He never had a chance.

There was a quick way to do this. Nick placed the flat of his hand against the man’s right temple, his other hand on the left side of his neck and in one quick motion, broke his neck.

He pulled out his Maglite and looked around the vehicle, checking registration papers.

The SUV was a rental. The name on the rental contract was Stephen Anderson, no doubt a false name. The inside of the vehicle was clean, almost sterile. He checked the ashtrays, under the seats, inside the side pockets. Nothing. No cigarette butts, no food packages, no marked maps. No clues, no prints, since the guy was wearing gloves and probably no DNA.

Nick frisked him, fast. No ID, no labels on his clothes. He was more or less Nick’s height, more or less Nick’s weight. Perfect. This would work.

Nick ran back to his car, popped open the trunk, and got out his suitcase and emergency kit hidden under the spare tire. He always kept a jerry can of gas and got that out, too.

Go, go, go!

Even in this weather, someone might come up along this road any moment. Bending down in the SUV, he pulled the man up in a fireman’s lift, carried him over to the Lexus, and put him behind the wheel. His neck was broken, but that would be attributed to the fall of the vehicle from over four hundred feet. The clothes would burn up and with any luck the skin of his fingers would, too. Together with the skin all over. A suspicious coroner might want to match dental records but there weren’t any for Nicholas Ames and who was going to demand it, anyway? There would be a six-foot-two male charred body in Nicholas Ames’s car and Nick Ireland would drop out of sight.

Nick placed his non-Unit-issued cell phone in the guy’s pocket, on the off chance the SIM card would survive the fire. No one would be contacting Nicholas Ames ever again, anyway.

Working fast, Nick grabbed the jerry can, poured some gas into the driver’s footwell, and in the trunk, close to the gas tank. He checked the level. Thank God it was full. He figured there were over eighteen gallons of fuel in that sucker. Basically a rolling bomb.