Free The Directive by Matthew Quirk Page B

shirt.
    I eased him down to one knee, then to the ground, and laid him on his back. I took off my jacket, tore the sleeve off my dress shirt and balled it into a compress. He’d been shot in the chest.
    Half a dozen people walked by as he lay bleeding on the dirt. Lynch’s car had disappeared.
    My phone rang.
    Sacks stared at the sky, unbelieving. He mouthed the words “Oh my God” over and over, but with the hole in his lung he had no breath to speak with. Thanks to the traffic, the wind, and the idling tour buses, I hadn’t even heard a shot. Maybe they’d used a suppressor. I knew Sacks had told the police where to find me. I had to run. I might have time to get away, but that would mean letting this guy bleed out on the Mall.
    I held the compress tight. “What’s the directive?” I asked.
    He was too far gone to hear me, to give any sign.
    Four Capitol Police walked toward me across Madison. I lifted my hand off the balled-up cotton, saw blood pool and spill down his chest, then pressed it back down.
    “What’s going on here?” the lead cop shouted.
    “This guy’s hurt,” I said as they gathered around. “I don’t know what happened. Here,” I took one by the arm and guided his hand to the compress.
    “I’m an EMT,” I said. “I’ve got my kit in my car.”
    I jogged toward the rows of parked cars, picked out an Escalade, and circled around it. Once out of sight behind the SUV, I ducked down and sprinted across the street toward the trees surrounding the National Gallery.
    “Hey!” I heard the police yelling behind me. I kept moving toward Constitution. As I wiped the sweat from my forehead, I succeeded in painting my face with my bloody hand.
    The police must have put the word out. Soon I had company: Metro PD drove past on Pennsylvania, then pulled a U-turn and came back at me with the siren screaming and some ground-shaking whoomp emanating from the bottom of the cruiser.
    I wheeled toward the Metro entrance. One escalator was out of order, the other two clogged with the lunch rush. Washingtonians can be a little cranky about the rules for the Metro escalator. It’s stand right, walk left. I needed something faster, so I jumped onto the sheet metal between the escalators, eased myself down on two hands, and turned sideways onto my hip as I slid. I hadn’t noticed them as I sized up the slide, but as I shot down the incline, little steel discs bolted onto the metal slammed hard into my tailbone every eight feet. I shot off at the end, lost my footing, crashed face-first into the filthy red tiles, and came up running.
    Metro police spread out from the other end of the station. The only thing I had going for me was that we were at a stop on the stepchild Yellow/Green line, which serves some of the poorer parts of DC. It only comes every fifteen minutes, and the cars and stations are always packed.
    The flash of the red lights along the platform and a cold rush of air announced that a train was coming. I worked my way toward the front, and waited until the last minute. As the crowd surged toward the doors, I pushed back and darted into a dark corner past the escalators, where an elevator entrance was framed in greasy sheet metal.
    The police held the train, and as I rose in the elevator I watched them begin to search the cars, barking orders into radios. The elevator doors opened aboveground. I expected a wall of blue. But the police were still arriving, and had only covered the escalators, fifty feet away. I stepped out.
    I had seen my reflection in the wired glass of the elevator car, blood streaked across my face. I needed to get myself cleaned up. As I sprinted away from where the sirens wailed the loudest, I ducked between two of the street vendors’ trucks that worked the tourists around the Mall. I took a deep toke of generator smoke as I passed through, grabbed a sweatshirt and a bottle of water, then darted through traffic across Constitution and threw myself under the thickest shrubs I