Chapter - 291

[Ding!]

[System Notification: An impressive display of... something. You didn't let him die. Weird, but okay. New opportunity available!]

[Quest: The Awkward Alliance]

[Objective: You need to find the targets, but they're gone. You have no leads. The System can provide one. But the System requires... 'inter-personal synergy' to unlock its advanced tracking features.]

[Task: Plant a passionate, convincing, 5-second kiss on Lieutenant Sharon Vintner.]

[Reward: 2-hour 'Live Location' feed of 'Sparrow One' and 'Sparrow Two'.]

[Penalty for Failure: Permanent loss of the 'System Quest' feature. (The System will be too embarrassed to work with you.)]

Rick stopped dead in his tracks. He stood in the gravel, his back to the container, and just… processed. He read the prompt. He re-read it. He closed his eyes, counted to three, and opened them again. The quest was still there.

"You have got to be kidding me," he muttered under his breath.

He looked back into the container. Sharon was a vision from hell. She was covered in soot, her hair was singed, her face was smeared with Sparrow's blood, and she was yelling at him.

"Did you hear me, Rick?! I said I'm not letting you just walk away! We're in this together, you son of a—"

"Sharon."

His voice was strange, cutting her off. She paused. "What?! I'm busy saving a life you almost took!"

"I need to... uh... do something," he said, walking slowly back toward her. "For the mission. To find them."

"What? What are you talking about?" she said, scrambling to her feet, her eyes narrowed with suspicion. "Do what? Use your 'gut instinct' again? Because you're all out of birthday clues!"

"Sort of," Rick said. He was standing in front of her now, the heat from the fire outside washing over them. "Just... don't shoot me."

"Don't shoot you? What the hell does that—"

He didn't let her finish. He grabbed her by the jacket, yanking her forward with a force that made her stumble. Before she could curse, before she could raise her hands, before she could even process what was happening, he mashed his lips against hers.

It was not romantic. It was a catastrophe.

It was all teeth, soot, adrenaline, and the metallic taste of Crimson Sparrow's blood. Her eyes flew open, wide with sheer, unadulterated, brain-short-circuiting shock. She was so completely, profoundly stunned that she just stood there, frozen, her bloody hands hovering uselessly in the air.

Rick counted in his head. One... two... three... four...

[Quest Complete! Live Location Feed Activated.]

...five.

He let go. Sharon stumbled back, her hand flying to her mouth. She just stared at him, her entire mind a blue screen of death.

Rick, his face a mask of pure, professional focus, tapped his ear as if listening to an earpiece he didn't have.

"Got 'em," he said, his voice crisp. "They're heading north on the I-95. Moving fast. They're already at the city limits. I have to go."

He turned and sprinted, leaping over the burning wreckage at the container's entrance and disappearing into the night.

Sharon just stood there, her brain slowly, painfully, rebooting. She watched him go. She looked at her bloody hands. She looked at the dying musician on the floor. She touched her lips, which were now smeared with soot and God knows what else.

The sound of distant, approaching sirens finally broke her trance. She stared into the darkness where Rick had vanished.

"I... I hate him," she whispered, her voice trembling with a feeling she couldn't even begin to identify. "I actually, genuinely, hate that man."

~~~~~~

Rick was sprinting. The live location feed in his head was a beautiful, perfect thing: two red dots in a black sedan, already merging onto the highway. He was on foot. He was losing them. He couldn't run fast enough. He needed the bike.

He skidded to a stop at the shipyard's main gate. The Harley was there. But he didn't have the keys.

"Damn it!" he roared, punching the side of a forklift.

"Looking for these?"

He spun around. Sharon was stalking toward him, her face a mask of thunder. She had left Sparrow. The sirens were getting closer. She had made her choice. She was dangling the Harley keys from her bloody finger.

"You kissed me," she stated, her voice dangerously calm.

"It was tactical," Rick panted, his eyes on the keys. "I needed a lead."

"Tactical?" Her voice cracked. "You shoved your *face* on *my face*! You call that tactical? You think I'm some kind of... of... *objective*?"

"Yes! Exactly!" Rick said, lunging for the keys. She snatched them away. "It worked, didn't it? I've got a lock on them! They're getting away, Sharon! Give me the keys!"

"Give me one good reason," she hissed, "why I shouldn't just tase you right now and let those cops scrape you off the pavement. You assaulted a witness, you tampered with evidence, you're an accomplice to a felony, and you just assaulted *me*!"

"Because in five minutes," Rick said, his voice dropping to a low growl, "those two are gone forever. The laptop is gone. Nadia is dead. And we're *both* implicated in a container-bombing with one dead musician inside. You want to explain that to your boss? Or do you want to win?"

She stared at him, her chest heaving. He was a monster. He was a sociopath. He was her only way out.

"Damn you," she spat. She threw the keys at his chest. "You're driving. And if you *ever* 'tactically' touch me again, I will 'tactically' empty my magazine into your kneecaps. Clear?"

"Crystal," he said, swinging his leg over the bike. The engine roared to life.

She got on behind him, her entire body rigid. "Just... don't," she muttered.

"Don't what?"

"Don't make me hold onto you."

Rick smirked. He gunned the engine and popped the clutch. The Harley shot forward, and Sharon, caught off guard, shrieked and instinctively grabbed him around the waist, her bloody hands clamping onto his jacket. The tension was so thick it was almost comical. She was furious, embarrassed, and now she was clinging to her assailant.

"You did that on purpose!" she yelled over the engine's roar.

"Just follow the map in my head, navigator!" he yelled back.

The Harley tore out of the shipyard, its taillights vanishing just as the first ambulance and two police cruisers screamed into the entrance.

***

They were on the I-95, a black-and-chrome bullet devouring the white lines. Sharon held Rick's cracked phone, which was now displaying a perfect, real-time tactical map. The two red dots of Sparrow One and Two were three miles ahead, moving at a steady 90 mph.

"They're pulling away!" Sharon yelled, her voice muffled by the wind. "Go faster!"

"I'm maxing it out!" Rick yelled back. "This isn't a crotch rocket! They're in a tuned sedan. We can't beat them on raw speed. We have to beat them on *route*!"

"What are they doing? They're just driving into the middle of nowhere! They're going to meet Raven. Their boss."

"No," Rick said, his eyes flicking between the road and the map in his head. "Look. They're slowing down. They're taking the next exit. 114B." He processed the map. "It's an old industrial park. They're going to dump the car, switch vehicles, or hand off the laptop. We can't follow them in there. They'll hear this bike a mile away."

"So what's the plan, genius?"

"We get ahead of them." Rick saw it. A thin, grey line on the map. An old, half-abandoned service road that cut through a stretch of dark woodland and intersected with the road to the industrial park. "Hold on."

"What? Rick, don't! That's not a road!"

He ignored her. He cranked the handlebars, and the Harley veered off the highway, smashing through a chain-link fence with a sound like a gunshot. They landed hard on a bumpy, overgrown dirt track.

"I HATE YOU!" Sharon shrieked as they were bounced and jostled, her arms now locked around him in a death grip.

"You said that already!" he yelled back, fighting to control the bike on the loose gravel.

They rode in the pitch dark, headlights off, navigating by the dim glow of the phone's map. After five bone-jarring minutes, they skidded to a halt at the intersection. It was a dark, silent T-junction, surrounded by the skeletal silhouettes of abandoned warehouses. They were first.

Rick killed the engine. The sudden silence was deafening. "They'll be here in two minutes," he whispered.

"What's the plan?" Sharon whispered back, pulling her pistol. Her hands were shaking. "We've got one 9mm with maybe twelve rounds. They're two high-end professionals with silenced weapons who just tried to barbecue us alive."

Rick's eyes scanned the darkness. He saw a pile of discarded construction debris: jagged chunks of concrete, a few lengths of rusty rebar, and a single, massive, empty oil drum.

"We don't fight them," Rick said, a cold, vicious smile touching his lips. "We *stop* them."

They had ninety seconds. They worked with a frantic, desperate energy, dragging the heavy oil drum into the middle of the dark road, just around a blind corner. They reinforced it with the concrete blocks and the rebar, creating a crude, low-visibility, car-destroying roadblock.

They scrambled behind a crumbling brick wall, crouching in the shadows. They heard it. The faint whine of a high-performance engine, moving fast.

"Here they come," Rick whispered.

The black sedan came around the corner at over sixty miles an hour. The driver, Sparrow Two, saw the roadblock at the last possible second. He slammed on the brakes.

*SCREEEEECH!*

There was a deafening, sickening *CRUNCH* of metal and concrete. The car plowed directly into the oil drum, the front end crumpling like paper. The airbags deployed with a violent *THWUMP*. The car, now a hissing, steaming wreck, spun to a stop.

Rick and Sharon stood up from their hiding place. Rick was holding the bent 9-iron he'd salvaged. Sharon had her pistol up, aimed with both hands.

"Now," Rick said, his voice carrying in the sudden, shocked silence. "We talk."

The passenger door of the sedan was kicked open. Sparrow One stumbled out, coughing, airbag powder covering his black suit. He was holding the black laptop. He saw them, and his face, visible in the dim moonlight, twisted into a mask of pure, professional rage. He had been beaten by amateurs.

He raised his pistol.

Sharon fired.