“It’ll just take me a minute to check something. Stay here, Sarah.”
He left the car running, and she watched in puzzlement as he got out and promptly dropped to the pavement to check underneath the car. He hadn’t been there more than a couple of minutes when another motorist paused on his way past and called sympathetically, “Hit something?”
Tucker’s response was cheerful, “Yeah, a hell of a pothole back there. No damage, though.” He climbed to his feet and brushed at his jeans.
“Your lucky day,” the man responded, and continued on his way.
Tucker slid into the car and closed the door. “No damage at all,” he muttered, his face grim once more as he reached across Sarah to return the flashlight to the glove compartment.
“What is it?”
“A bug,” he said bitterly. “A damned electronic device used to track things. In this case—us. They didn’t have any trouble finding us because they knew exactly where we were.”
It shouldn’t have surprised Sarah since they had already agreed that their enemy had to be both smart and organized. But it did surprise her. And it gave her a creepy feeling, even worse than being watched. Someone knew every place they had been, every stop they had made. It was as if a ghostly companion had come along in the backseat, smiling derisively because they’d thought they were alone.
“Did you remove it?” she asked him, trying to keep her voice steady.
“No.” He looked at her intently. “Let’s make it work for us.”
“How?”
“By leading them on a wild-goose chase while we head in another direction. How do you feel about a quick but roundabout trip to Chicago?”
Her first impulse was to say that was the wrong direction, but she thought she had some idea of what he had in mind. “Then we’d double back?”
“Later. After we get rid of this car.”
Sarah thought about that, then said, “Wouldn’t it be easier to just put the bug somewhere else—maybe on a bus or something? You shouldn’t have to lose your car because of this.”
He shook his head. “This bug has a magnetic seal, and I’m betting they’d know it if we tried to switch it to another vehicle. But if we switch vehicles, they won’t know. And by the time they find out, we should be well on our way back…to wherever it is we’re going. And I was about ready to trade this car in anyway. We need something more rugged, maybe a Jeep or some other four-wheel-drive utility. Our romp through the woods proved that.”
“We couldn’t just switch vehicles here?”
“We could. But if we want to throw them off the track for any time at all, we should head in a direction other than north for a while. Besides, I have a friend in Chicago in the car business who’ll let me trade this car and conveniently lose the paperwork for at least a few days, which might give us a little more time.”
Paperwork could be traced, Sarah knew. And the DMV could almost certainly be accessed with a computer and the right codes, so they had to assume the enemy could do just that. At least that. But she still felt profoundly uneasy. So much time and distance would be lost. “If you have to wait until Monday to trade the car…”
Tucker started to reach for her hand but stopped himself before he touched her—and both of them were aware of that reluctance. “Chicago’s only ten or twelve hours from here, Sarah. We won’t lose much time. We can take a more direct route east as soon as the trade’s made, and be heading north again by Monday night.”
“With only a few days of September left.”
“It’s a risk, I know. We could just tear the bug off and leave it in the trash can out there. But if we do that, there’s a good chance they’d still be able to find us. This car is fairly visible, and they know we’re driving it. They could guess we’d still be heading north. If they have the right connections in law enforcement or just the right equipment, they could track this car’s GPS. Or they could even have all the major highways covered somehow, have people on the lookout for us. But even more, we can’t be sure they didn’t plant something else in this car. Something I wouldn’t recognize as dangerous to us. And that’s a chance we can’t take.”
Slowly, Sarah nodded. But in her mind was the panicked awareness of delay and time lost.
It was almost October.
Murphy’s third burner cell phone of the week rang, and she answered it with a frown. “Yeah?”
“What the hell happened?”
She didn’t allow his anger to spark her own. “I was doing my job. Did you enjoy your swim?”
“Goddammit, Murphy. Did you put them on alert?”
“Duran was coming.”
“Why the hell didn’t you warn me? Five minutes earlier and I wouldn’t have ended up looking like a jackass.”
“You’ll have to forgive me. I was more concerned with them than you.”
He drew a breath and let it out slowly. But the words were still snapped out when he said, “This is what happens when the right hand doesn’t know what the left one is doing. I’ve warned you, Murphy.”