Flood Rising (Jenna Flood #1)

“Stop here.”


Mercy did, and the brake lights flashed again behind them, but she quickly shifted into ‘park’ and shut off the car. Jenna leaned her head out the window and found the bright glow that marked the advancing vehicle. It was close enough that she began to wonder if the men in the car might have seen them turn off. She unconsciously squeezed the gun in her hand and held her breath as the light grew closer, closer…

The car passed without slowing.

Jenna let out her breath in a long sigh, but she had to be sure the ruse had worked. She threw open the door and got out, looking over the car’s roof until she found the glow again, moving away in a northward direction. While it was impossible to judge their speed, she figured it would take the men about ten minutes to reach the highway, if they drove at a reasonable speed. If they threw caution to the wind, they could probably do it in three.

Something about the receding glow changed. It dimmed for a few seconds, and then returned, brighter than before.

Jenna’s breath caught again. They were coming back. She was sure of it. But why? Had one of them seen the car? A lucky guess? She glanced down at the phone, wondering if they were tracking its GPS locator, as they had done with Mercy’s. It seemed impossible that they could have identified Carlos so quickly or known that she now had his phone, but if there was even a chance that the phone was leading the killers to them, it would have to go.

She studied the map again, committing every detail to memory. About a mile ahead, the road intersected a canal, but there was an access road that ran alongside the waterway. There would probably be another gate at the end of that road, but it looked like their only option. She cocked her arm, preparing to hurl the phone away, but then stopped.

Over the tick of the rental car’s cooling engine and the low cacophony of insect noise, she heard a persistent whirring sound that reminded her of a leaf-blower or a small outboard motor. She tried to isolate the sound, but it did not change when she turned her head. It sounded distant, yet everywhere. She looked up at the night sky, seeing nothing, but detecting the sound’s source.

With widening eyes, Jenna realized what the sound was and why the men in the car had turned back. She rejoined Mercy.

“We have to go,” she said. “They’re tracking us with a drone.”

“A drone?” Mercy was incredulous.

“Go!”

Jenna’s mind raced. She knew nothing about surveillance drones beyond the fact of their existence. She had seen them in the sky a few times during charter trips. Various government agencies used them to patrol the Gulf, looking for drug smugglers. Noah had pointed them out to her—UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles, that’s the technical name for them—but none of his lessons had included what to do in the event that a drone was stalking her.

There was one obvious detail, though. The people chasing her were pulling out all the stops. She thought again about the FBI agents. Noah had claimed they were bogus, but what if he was wrong? What if the people chasing her, who had killed Noah, really were government operatives? It made a sick kind of sense. Noah had disobeyed orders by saving her life. He had gone rogue. That was the expression they used in those movies. Off the reservation. Under the radar.

All of the above?

Somehow, he had ended up back on the radar, and so had she.

How can I hide from the government?

Mercy had started the car, but they weren’t moving. “Which way?”

“Straight,” Jenna replied, but it sounded like a question in her ears. “Go straight,” she repeated, trying to think about the next move. “Might as well use the lights. They can see us anyway.”

They can see us.

The drone probably had night-vision capabilities. Was it armed? Was it locking on to them with one of those missiles that sounded like the name of heavy metal band…Stinger or Hellfire…something like that?

She shook her head. If that was an option for them, they would have already used it. No, the UAV was just an eye in the sky. The real danger was from Zack and his team. They had to get someplace where the killers couldn’t reach them.

She looked at the map again, not searching for a specific route this time, but trying to download every detail into her brain. The satellite image showed an astonishing degree of detail, but the image wasn’t a perfect reference. For one thing, the data was a couple of years old. The cars that were visible, parked on driveways, or captured while moving down the remote roads, were long gone now. Other details might have changed as well. The entire area had been transformed by the opening of a canal designed to restore the freshwater balance of the Everglades.