Dark Rivers of the Heart

were along the top half of those tall panes; through the glass, below and between the signs, Ellie could see the checkout stations. In the fluorescent light, a few clerks and customers were looking out, alerted by the strident horns. As she shot toward them, the small ovals of their faces were as luminously white as the painted masks of harlequins. One woman ran, which startled the others into scattering for safety.
        She hoped to God they would all manage to get out of the way in time.
        She didn't want to hurt any innocent bystanders. But she didn't want to be gunned down by the men who would pour out of those helicopters, either.
        Do or die.
        The Rover was moving fast but not flat-out. The trick was to have enough speed to jump the curb onto the wide promenade in front of the market and get through the glass wall and all the merchandise that was stacked waist-high beyond it. But at too high a speed, she would crash into the checkout stations with deadly impact.
        "Gonna make it!" Then she remembered never to lie to the dog.
        "Probably! " Over the horns and the sound of the engines, she suddenly heard the chuda-chuda-chuda of the choppers. Or maybe she felt more than heard the pressure waves cast off by their rotors. They must be directly over the parking lot.
        The front tires rammed the curb, the Range Rover leaped, Rocky yelped, and Ellie simultaneously released the horn and took her foot off the accelerator. She tramped on the brakes as the tires slammed into the concrete. The promenade didn't seem so wide when the Rover was skidding across it at thirty or forty miles an hour, with the scared-pig squeal of hot rubber on pavement, not so very wide at all, hell, not nearly wide enough. Her sudden awareness of the Rover's oncoming reflection was followed instantly by cascades of glass, ringing down like shattered icicles.
        They plowed through big wooden pallets, on which were stacked fifty pound bags of potatoes or some damn thing, and finally took a header into the end of a checkout station. Panels of fiberboard popped apart, the stainless steel grocery chute buckled like gift-wrapping foil, the rubber conveyor belt snapped in two and spun off its rollers and rippled into the air as if it were a giant black flatworm, and the cash rester almost toppled to the floor. The impact wasn't as hard as Ellie had feared, and as if to celebrate their safe landing, gay foulards of translucent plastic bags blossomed briefly, with a flourish, in midair, from the pockets of an invisible magician.
        "Okay?" she asked, releasing the buckle on her safety harness.
        He said, "Next time, I drive."
        She tried her door. It protested, screeching and grinding, but neither the brush with the Dodge nor the explosive entry into the market had jammed the latch. Grabbing the S.I.G 9MM that was trapped between her thighs, she clambered out of the Range Rover.
        Spencer had already gotten out of the other side.
        The morning was filled with the clatter of helicopters.
        The two choppers appeared on the computer screen because they had entered the boundaries of Earth and's two-hundred-foot look-down. Roy sat in the second of the craft, studying the top of that very machine as it was photographed from orbit, marveling at the strange possibilities of the modern world.
        Because the pilot was making a straight-on approach to the target, neither the porthole on the left nor the one on the right gave Roy any view.
        He stayed with the computer to watch the Range Rover as it strove to elude the pickup truck by weaving back and forth across the shoppingcenter parking lot. As the pickup tried to get back up to speed after making a bad U-turn, the Rover swung toward the central building in the complex-which was, judging by its size, a supermarket or a discount store like Walmart or Target.
        Only at the last moment did Roy realize that the Rover was going to ram the place. When it hit, he expected to see it rebound in a mass of flattened and tangled metal. But it disappeared, merged with the building.
        With horror, he realized that it had driven through an entrance or a glass wall and that the occupants had survived.
        He lifted the open attache case off his lap, put it on the cabin deck, in the aisle beside his seat, and bolted to his feet in alarm.
        He did not pause to go through the back-out security