Dark Rivers of the Heart

town, where she could blend into a busy flow of traffic and use whatever architecture of the urban landscape might help her to escape their eyes.
        Cedar City wasn't nearly large enough, of course, to provide her with the opportunities she needed. Evidently she underestimated the power and clarity of surveillance from orbit.
        At the front of the chopper's passenger compartment, the four strike force officers were checking their weapons. They distributed spare magazines of ammunition in their pockets.
        Civilian clothing was the uniform for this mission. They wanted to get in, nail the woman, capture Grant, and get out before Cedar City law enforcement showed up. If they became involved with the locals, they would only have to deceive them, and deception involved the risk of making mistakes and being unmasked-especially when they had no idea how much Grant knew and what he might say if the cops insisted on talking to him.
        Besides, dealing with locals also took too much damn time. Both choppers were marked with phony registration numbers to mislead observers.
        As long as the men wore no identifying clothing or gear, witnesses would have little or nothing useful to tell the police later.
        Every member of the strike force, including Roy, was protected by a bullet-resistant body vest under his clothes and was carrying Drug Enforcement Agency ID that could be produced quickly to placate the local authorities if necessary. If they were lucky, however, they would be back in the air three minutes after touching down, with Spencer Grant in custody, with the woman's body, but with no wounded of their own.
        The woman was finished. She was still breathing, still had a heartbeat, but in fact she was already stone dead.
        On the computer in Roy's lap, Earthguard 3 showed the target drastically slowing. Then the Rover passed another vehicle, perhaps a pickup, on the shoulder of the highway. The pickup increased its speed, too, and suddenly a drag race seemed to be under way.
        Frowning, Roy squinted at the display screen.
        The pilot announced that they were five minutes from the target.
        Cedar There was too much traffic to facilitate their escape, and too little to allow them to blend in and confuse Earthguard. She was also hindered by being on streets with gutters instead of on open highways with wide shoulders. And traffic lights. And that stupid pickup jockey insistently pounding, pounding, pounding his horn.
        Ellie turned right at an intersection, frantically surveying both sides of the street. Fast-food restaurants. Service stations.
        Convenience stores.
        She had no idea exactly what she was looking for. She only knew that she would recognize it when she saw it: a place or situation that they could turn to their advantage.
        She had hoped for time to scout the territory and find a way to get the Rover under cover: a grove of evergreens with a dense canopy of branches, a large parking garage, any place in which they might evade the eyes in the sky and leave the Rover without being spotted. Then they could either buy or heist new wheels, and from orbit they would again be indistinguishable &from other vehicles on the highway.
        She supposed she would earn a bed of nails in Hades for sure if she killed the creep in the Dodge pickup-but the satisfaction might be worth the price. He hammered on the horn as if he were a confused and angry ape determined to beat the damned thing until it stopped bleating at him.
        He also tried to get around them during every break in oncoming traffic, but Ellie swerved to block him. The passenger side of the pickup was badly scraped and crumpled from when she had bashed into it with the Rover, so the guy probably figured that he had nothing to lose by pulling alongside and forcing her to the curb.
        She couldn't let him do that. They were quickly running out of time.
        Having to deal with the ape would consume precious minutes.
        "Tell me it's not," Spencer shouted above the blaring horn.
        "Not what?"
        Then she realized that he was pointing through the windshield.
        Something in the sky. To the southwest. Two large executive-style helicopters.
        One behind and to the left of the other. Both black. The polished hulls and windows glistened as if sheathed with ice, and the morning sun shimmered off the whirling rotors. The