The Tenth Circle by Jon Land Page B

their flak jackets.
    “This woman needs help!” he called.
    “Not our problem,” one smirked casually, listening to his walkie-talkie clack off a description of the suspect as a big man with a beard.
    The officers’ stares froze on him, their hands starting for their holstered pistols, when McCracken pounced. An elbow to the face shattered the nose of one and a heavy palm-heel blow under the second man’s chin sent him slamming backward into his squad car and then slumping down it.
    The next instant found Blaine lurching behind the wheel and tearing off down the road, past a fresh armada of arriving vehicles. He watched them spinning around wildly in his rearview mirror to give chase, others joining in as McCracken clamped down harder on the accelerator.
    His eyes were still cheating looking toward the mirror when a roadblock formed by two squad cars parked nose to nose appeared directly before him across the road.

CHAPTER 21
    Mobile, Alabama
    “What the hell happened down there?” Hank Folsom demanded­, once McCracken finally managed to reach him.
    “I see you’ve heard.”
    “Heard? It’s on every network. Please tell me that wasn’t you who crashed through a police barricade. Jesus Christ, what was I thinking giving you the Go on this?”
    “That you were fortunate I volunteered for the job. Now you should be thinking that I had nothing to do with what happened, because I didn’t.”
    “You’re supposed to be a professional.”
    “Are you listening to what I’m saying? I was set up. They knew I was coming.”
    “That’s ridiculous!”
    “Wake up and smell the way the world works, Hank. Someone’s always watching you and somebody else is always watching the watcher. Somebody got wind you were sending me down here and that somebody’s the one who set me up.”
    “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
    “Okay, let me put it this way: There’s a leak smack dab in the Homeland office you’re talking to me from right now that could only have originated on your end. Means this probably isn’t a secure line,” McCracken added, from beneath an empty, covered bus stop being hammered with hailstones atop its glass roof in downtown Mobile. “So get to one and call me back in twenty minutes at this number.”
    “They’ve got your picture somehow, identified you as a suspected covert government operative,” Folsom told him, upon calling McCracken back nearly thirty minutes later instead.
    “You believe me now about the setup, Hank?” McCracken asked from beneath another bus stop overhang. The rain was still pounding the streets, but the wind had abated and thunderclaps sounded only distantly.
    “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”
    “For being a fool or an idiot?”
    “Take your pick.”
    “We need to meet, Hank. We need to sort this out.”
    “Just name the time and place, McCracken.”
    “Something else. Get in touch with whoever Homeland has inside Rule’s entourage.”
    Silence filled the other end of the line, making McCracken figured he’d been cut off.
    “Hank?” he prodded.
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    “Yes, you do. You told me Rule’s been on Homeland’s radar for a while. You know stuff about him you couldn’t get out of news reports or religious pamphlets. That means Homeland must have had someone on the inside feeding you information.”
    A deep sigh filled the line. “You make me feel like a fool and an idiot, McCracken.”
    “You’re neither, Hank, just an amateur. In over your head, and now you’ve dragged me along for the ride, and I was dumb enough to follow.”
    “I just thought—”
    “Forget what you thought. Too much thinking gets you into trouble. Just have your man meet me at the Greyhound bus station on Government Boulevard. Tell him to come prepared to tell me everything he knows about the Reverend Rule, so I can figure out why a two-bit preacher has the kind of security a million bucks wouldn’t buy.”
    “That means