DEADLY DRIVER Read online

  Bryce smiled at the man. “10-4,” was Bryce’s only response.

  The next morning, after a quick meal of breakfast tortillas and large quantities of coffee and orange juice, the four of them hopped in a white mini-van that had been sent for them by Baja Driving Adventures. Of the four, only Madigan was a so-called morning person. After he repeated a few things he’d heard on the Howard Stern show earlier that morning on SIRIUS, the rest of them livened up. Bryce could see from Nitro’s expression that Gunn had shared his words from the night before, but when he smiled and winked at her he could see her relax. After the short ride, most of it down dusty roads, they arrived at BDA, and after suiting up and a thirty-minute orientation and instruction meeting with the guides, the four participants walked out into the bright Mexican sunshine. It was time to choose a partner, buckle up, and get going.

  “Joan, you ride with me,” Gunn stated. “We can talk business along the way.” Bryce looked to her and then at Madigan and agreed. He smiled.

  It took a few minutes for the crew from BDA to make sure everyone was buckled in and ready to go. Gloves, neck braces – check. They attached the breathing tubes to the side of their full-face helmets allowing for filtered air to be pumped into them. The dust and silt of the desert would make life miserable without them. Helmet communications were connected and tested, window nets meant to keep arms inside the cockpit and foreign objects out were latched into place, and then the two drivers fired up the Subaru engines and pulled out onto the road that would lead them from into the wild. Bryce had driven this course many times, so it was agreed that he would lead the way out of town and onto the course. To Bryce’s surprise, Gunn bumped his vehicle hard from behind as if to remind Bryce he was back there and wanted to get moving. Bryce switched his radio setting from A to B so he could speak to his navigator who was riding shotgun.

  “You know, I’d forgotten she had a real name,” he said.

  “Me, too. I thought for a second, who the hell is Joan,” Madigan responded.

  “This is going to be fun,” Bryce said with a laugh.

  “Let ‘er eat,” was Madigan’s reply.

  The moment the two vehicles cleared the city’s limits, away from the children and the dogs playing in the streets, Bryce hit the gas and left Gunn and Nitro in his very dusty wake. Over the next two hours both teams ran hard and fast through the open desert. Eventually they began to encounter saguaro cactus, at least twenty feet high, that and had been growing for nearly 100 years. In the daylight it might be easy to avoid running into one of them, unless you were trying to pass or following a vehicle in front of you too closely and the dirt and dust kicked up obstructs your vision.

  “We better back off a bit,” Gunn told Nitro over their in-car radio. “Those big ones, if they’re full of water, can weigh over three thousand pounds. If hitting one at speed wouldn’t hurt enough, their barbs would make a porcupine jealous.”

  “Yes, please,” Nitro responded, her tone of voice showing concern. “Anyway, I can’t read this damn map with all the dirt flying around. Bryce said we’d encounter some cliff sides before lunch, and I’m not up for breaking my neck in Mexico.”

  The guides had shown the CIA staffers how the maps and GPS worked on the course. Dash-mounted satellite tracking systems were critically important in off-roading, especially when racing in the dust or in the dark. The map would show the hazards and the places where left or right turns needed to be made to stay safe and on-course, and the distance between them. There was the occasional straightaway that would give the navigator a chance to take their eyes off the map and enjoy the scenery for a short time, but as quickly as it had come break time was over and they were back on edge. Drivers or navigators couldn’t make mistakes for if they did it could be a fatal one.

  A few times Gunn had been able to leave the path the leader had taken and get alongside Bryce, intending to pass as he flipped his rival the middle finger. But sudden evasive maneuvers to avoid a rock or a looming cactus always sent Gunn and his shotgun rider back into second place. Bryce had driven all sorts of race cars in all sorts of conditions all around the world, and his reflexes and judgment were second to none. For a novice to desert racing, like Gunn, things could happen fast. The two-seaters they were racing would typically top out at 80 mph, but the guides, and Madigan, had cautioned Gunn and Nitro that at that speed they’d be traveling at over 100 feet per second – the length of an American football field in three seconds. On dirt and gravel that gives way, and with the challenges of steering and braking, crashing a vehicle and screwing up your day (or body) wasn’t worth it. So, they had cautioned, “don’t do anything stupid.”

  “Hey, Gunn, you tired of eating my dust yet?” Bryce crowed after switching his radio back to A so the two cars could talk.

  “Copy that,” Gunn stated.

  “How long before a pee break?” Nitro asked. “I know that coffee’s been sloshing around way too long, at least for me, and then it’s my turn to drive!”

  “Not long, maybe another twenty minutes,” Madigan answered. “We have to make it around one more set of cliff sides and then the guides will be waiting for us with food and toilet paper for anyone who needs it.”

  Running out front in cleaner air was preferred, but to Bryce there wasn’t much of a challenge to it and gestured to Madigan that he was getting bored. He let off the gas slightly and pushed the radio button mounted on the steering wheel.

  “Hey, Gunn, you a betting man?” Bryce asked over the radio.

  “Absofuckinglutely,” he replied.

  “Okay. I’m going to pull over and stop and let you pass. We’ll wait five minutes and then if I catch and pass you before we get to the pit stop you have to burn my file and turn me loose.”

  Madigan slapped Bryce’s right shoulder then shot his hands up in the air, as if to say, When did you come up with that one? Bryce attempted to shrug his shoulders but the four-inch wide shoulder harnesses wouldn’t allow it. He waited for a response from Gunn and then radio checked to make sure he was still there.

  “Winters to Gunn. You copy?”

  “Negative on the fire, nice try, but I accept the challenge. We’ll be waiting for you at the checkpoint.” Bryce shook his head in frustration but pulled off the course onto a low hillside and waited. Madigan switched the in-car radio back to B so they could talk, but Bryce just shook his head, slowly this time, and turned the radio back to A.

  Two minutes later, Gunn and Nitro blew past Bryce and Madigan’s vehicle, leaving them in the dust for a change. Finally, Gunn had clear skies and air in front of him, with his foot hard on the gas pedal. The clock was ticking.

  *

  Gunn watched as Nitro switched the radio back to B and told him that within a mile they would have a sharp, ninety-degree right turn and then a slow ride along a very narrow and high cliff path before it opened up to where Madigan said the crew would be waiting.

  “Tell me when we’re a quarter mile out, and I’ll slow it down,” he told her. As they rode closer and closer to the spot where they’d need to turn, the gray mountain in front of them rose higher and higher into the sky. Closer now, Gunn could see rocks of all shapes and sizes strewn across its face.

  “Half-mile,” Nitro said. “Remember, there’s a cliff coming.”

  Gunn didn’t respond. He kept his foot hard on the gas and kept going.

  “Quarter mile,” Nitro told him, this time her voice sounding a bit more concerned.

  “Eighth mile, please slow down,” she begged.

  “What did you say?” he joked, shouting over the whine of the engine. He knew the cliff side was coming fast, at this speed they’d be on it within seconds. But the urge to compete, to win, had overtaken him. He let off the gas, touched the brake, downshifted from fourth to third gear, and got on the brake pedal again as he turned to take a quick look at his navigator. He saw her white helmet falling forward with the deceleration and noticed she had let go of the clipboard holding the map. He pushed harder on
the brake and shifted down into second gear as he looked back to the road. It seemed to end right in front of him.

  Suddenly his hands fell from their grasp of the wheel. At 40 mph the vehicle continued on, straight off the side of the cliff.

  *

  Years before on a New Year’s Eve, Nitro Circus star driver Travis Pastrana had travelled 269 feet over water in a Red Bull rally car through the air in Long Beach, California, from a pier to a barge. But the scene unfolding 250 miles to the south on the Baja peninsula was a polar opposite. The vehicle crashed onto a mound of jagged rocks and boulders that had fallen down the mountainside over the decades and collected far below. Something must have punctured the fuel cell as fire immediately engulfed the vehicle. A swirling wind carried the smoke away and through the ravine.

  Nearly eight minutes later, Bryce slowed to a stop and pulled up to the edge of the cliff. Madigan tapped Bryce’s shoulder again, gesturing with both hands as if to say, What gives?

  Bryce flipped the ignition switch to kill the engine, lowered the window net and then removed his gloves, unbuckled the shoulder harnesses, lap and crotch belts, unplugged the wires to his helmet headset, removed the neck collar and unstrapped his helmet, placing it on the dashboard. Bryce climbed out and walked a few feet to the edge of the cliff and looked down, gesturing for Madigan to join him.

  After his navigator had repeated the same steps Bryce had taken, he climbed out and walked toward the side of the cliff. A spot of bright light washed across Bryce’s dust-covered driving suit and then Madigan’s, causing him to stop dead in his tracks. Bryce looked across the canyon and up the mountainside at the source of the blinding light and gave a thumbs-up to the sniper who had decided the race.

  “Well, that’ll help get the CIA off our backs, maybe for good,” he said without taking his eyes off the floor of the canyon.

  Bryce pointed down to the mess that used to be two CIA agents and an off-road vehicle.

  “What did you do?” Madigan asked as he turned his eyes from the sniper’s location on the hillside to the site far below them. “What did you do?”

  Having learned his new handler left no loved ones behind Bryce felt no remorse for what had just happened. He then turned his thoughts to the beautiful Nitro, who had played the good cop to many CIA bad cops since their arrangement had been made. She may have appeared sympathetic to his plight now and then, but she had also pulled hard on the leash one too many times. Her ambivalence about hits that left children without a father sealed her fate; he would shed no tears for her either.

  “What’s that saying?” he asked as he turned toward Madigan.

  “Which one?” he asked dejectedly, still shaking his head as he stared at the accident scene below them.

  “Live by the sword, die by it, too?”

  With that, Bryce began to reverse what they had just done and prepared to move on to the checkpoint. Madigan stood quietly at the hillside until Bryce called out to him.

  “We need to get moving now, bud. You good?” he called out. Madigan turned toward his friend, nodded, and walked back to rejoin the driver.

  Once the engine was restarted the two sped off, Bryce driving as if they were on a qualifying lap, flying around the cliff side and headed for the refreshments and food that would be waiting for them. Bryce switched the radio to B and laid out the rest of the plan. They’d wait patiently for five minutes, then ten, and eventually feign concern for their friends when they didn’t arrive at the rest stop that was marked clearly on the map.

  “Why didn’t you tell me what you had planned?” Madigan asked Bryce over the radio. When he didn’t answer, Madigan asked again.

  “It was a game-day decision,” Bryce began. “I gave the guy an out. When he didn’t take it, I fed him to the dogs. I didn’t want to, but I needed a plan and he fell into it.”

  “No, they fell into it, Bryce, they did.”

  The two didn’t speak another word until they arrived at the checkpoint, hydrated some plants and then themselves before washing the dirt and fine silt from their faces. They sat down to eat the tortillas and enchilada lunch that had been staged there for them but Madigan had pushed his plate away. Once Bryce finished his meal the acting began, and the concern for the two drivers late to the lunch was heightened. A satellite phone, the only thing that could reach civilization way out in the middle of nowhere, was used to call the tour’s office in Ensenada. A quick check of the locater for the GPS device in Gunn’s vehicle told the teams exactly where the car had come to a stop.

  “They’re in the ravine,” the contact in Ensenada informed them. “I’ll call for a rescue chopper right away.”

  When the rescue party discovered the crashed vehicle, it initially seemed as if yet another set of adventure-seekers had somehow messed up. Their charred bodies were removed from the wreckage. Only then did it become clear, from the condition of their helmets that something else had happened. There should only have been one opening – in the front for vision. But both helmets had new, larger openings in the back. In the following week, the news media around the world would describe the failed murder attempt on the famous race car driver and one of his engineers. The target the CIA had wanted Bryce to kill in Mexico City would never know just how lucky they were.

  The FBI and Mexican authorities reviewed the crime scene photos that showed the remains of the occupants, still strapped in their seats. The face shields of the victim’s helmets had melted in the ensuing fire and erased any trace of a bullet’s entry, but the significant holes in the back of both helmets told investigators what had happened long before autopsies back in the States verified it.

  In a secret arrangement made by the American State Department with their counterpart in Mexico, the true identities of the individuals found in the wreckage wouldn’t be disclosed. What would the CIA have been doing off-roading with this F1 driver and his mechanic and who would have killed them? The Mexican government relied heavily on tourism and wanted no part in anything that might threaten even one of those much needed dollars and euros.

  In the coming days, Gunn’s boss at Langley would want answers while Bryce went about his business racing, waiting for the next handler to arrive. When they did, his story would be simple.

  “Look what you bastards have gotten me into,” he’d tell them when the call came. Only one of the two bullets, or what was left of it, was recovered after it was found imbedded in the fuel cell of the vehicle. FBI’s ballistics experts identified it as the 7.62 type used by the Russian military, particularly snipers.

  “You had me knock off a Russian oligarch. Now they’re trying to kill me. The shooter obviously thought I was driving the lead vehicle. So, what are you going to do to protect me now?”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Mexico City rests at an elevation of over seventy-two hundred feet, nearly the same as Bryce’s mountainside home two thousand miles northwest of there in Utah. While some foreign visitors to the Formula One event held at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez circuit needed a day or two to acclimate to the thin air, Bryce embraced it. He ran, biked, and hiked the area around his home in Park City as often as he could and was ready and eager to get back to the pursuit of his second F1 Driver’s Championship. The media, and others, had different opinions on how his week should go.

  Immediately after Bryce and Madigan had been interviewed by the local police who had been called to the scene of the double murder in the desert, they flew back to Ensenada by helicopter, retrieved their luggage, boarded a small private jet there, and headed for Mexico’s largest city. F1 management and the Mexican promoter hesitated but eventually agreed that the star driver would not participate in the customary media blitz of interview and photo sessions that took place on Thursday before the race.

  But the media hounded Bryce at his hotel and at the track, shouting allegations ranging from conspiracy theories, that he’d been having an affair with the dead man’s wife, and on and on. Bowing to pressure from the race promoter, and with Ma
x Werner’s encouragement, Bryce agreed to make a brief statement at a hastily arranged press conference in the track’s media center. He insisted that was the last he would speak on it.

  “They were a couple we met in San Diego who said they were there on vacation and asked me if I thought it was safe traveling to Mexico. One of our team engineers, Jack Madigan, and I had planned on running Baja for a few days to have some fun, so we suggested they come along. They were informed of the dangers of the course. Sadly, they messed up. Motorsports can be dangerous. My thoughts go out to their families and friends and that’s all I have to say on the matter.”

  The local press persisted in shouting questions while the media that traveled the world with the Formula One tour let him go. They knew better. Pursue a driver too hard, and that would be the last interview you’d ever get—especially when your target was Bryce Winters. He had showed them that a year before when allegations of an affair with a married woman in Spain had been front page news on tabloids all across Europe. Bryce denied it, saying someone had set him up and was trying to blackmail both him and Werner to make it go away. Race fans are a very passionate breed, especially the Europeans, and the couple were hounded by protestors who followed them to work every day and played loud music in front of their residence every night. When the husband and wife were found dead in their home in Madrid in what was called a murder-suicide, along with a note admitting they had made the whole thing up, Bryce demanded an apology from the media and those who didn’t repent were never spoken to again.

  On Sunday morning, just like he had at Sochi and all the races he’d run in recent years, Bryce sought out the solitude and comfort of the private space the team always provided as part of his contract. When travelling outside of Europe the team shipped their race cars and container loads of parts, tools, support equipment, hospitality and meeting facilities via cargo aircraft from their headquarters in the Midlands of England to faraway places like Singapore, Melbourne, and Austin, Texas.