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Noa gets into the front seat, leans down—moans from the pain radiating up from her side—and with the Leatherman tool, gets to work, undoing the low plastic panel next to the steering wheel, tugging it free.
Three clusters of wires dangle in front of her.
She ignores the one to the left and the one to the right, focusing on the middle set of wires, consisting of three: red, yellow, and white.
Noa blinks her eyes. Things are looking shaky.
Focus!
Leatherman tool in hand, she cuts all the wires away, strips off some of the insulation.
“Eddie, old boy,” she whispers, thinking of one of her instructors back at the CIA’s Farm years ago, “I sure hope I remember this right.”
Using part of a T-shirt she found in the car’s rear seat as insulation, she wraps the bare ends of the red and yellow wires together.
The Celica’s dashboard lights up.
There you go.
She takes the last white wire, and gently touches it to the twisted red and yellow wires.
The engine roars into life.
She feels like fainting.
No, not yet.
She slowly maneuvers her way back so she’s sitting in the driver’s seat.
Grabs the steering wheel.
It’s locked.
Noa finds the rock she used earlier and hits the metal keyhole on the side of the steering column as hard as she can. On the fourth blow, it breaks, and she tugs it free, digs out a spring, and tries the wheel again.
It moves smoothly under her touch.
She puts the Celica in reverse just as she hears, “Hey, hey, hey, what are you doing to my car!”
“Stealing it, silly,” she murmurs, heading to the lot’s exit. “For the good of the country.”
After some turning and driving—avoiding potholes and manhole covers, so the twisted wires don’t loosen up—she’s heading south on Wisconsin Avenue NW, heading for O Street NW, where the director lives.
Her wrist is burning and every breath she takes causes a jagging pain in her left side. She keeps glancing at the side view and rearview mirrors, looking for district police cruisers to come racing up to her, lights flashing, siren wailing. The breeze coming in through the smashed window makes it one chilly ride indeed.
Noa gets off on O Street NW, into a pleasant avenue lined with Georgian-style homes. She figures she’s about six blocks away from Director Abrams’s home.
Just six blocks.
We can make it,she thinks,we can get there.
We’ve got to tell the director what’s been learned.
The unauthorized spending from upgrading the government retreat at Mount Weather, to paying for the weapons and car those Iranians had—a setup, had to be a setup—the extent of Barrett’s actions are getting more terrifying with each passing hour.
Three blocks to go.
Noa reaches a four-way stop at 31st Street NW, looks both ways, and gently eases into the intersection.