“Questioned.”
“Yes,” he said. “Hopefully, they’ll tell the agents about us right away. That will make things go easier. They might get off with a warning.”
“Don’t lie to me, Cooper.”
He glanced at her, saw the intensity in her eyes. Turned back to the road. “They’ll be charged. The bar and apartment will be seized. One or both of them will go to prison for harboring fugitives.”
“And Alice?”
Cooper gritted his teeth.
“Oh Jesus.” Shannon buried her face in her hands. “An academy?”
“It’s…it’s possible. It depends if she tests as tier one.”
“And even if she doesn’t, she’ll be marked. They’ll track her. Now that the microchip bill passed, they’ll put a tag in her throat. Embedded up against the carotid, so even micro-surgery can’t remove it. She’ll never be safe again.”
He wanted to say something comforting, something to make it better, but he couldn’t think what that would be.
“My God. This is my fault. I should never have brought you there.”
“There’s nothing we can do for them now. We just have to get to Wyoming and get this settled. Get ourselves clear. Then maybe.”
“Right.” Her laugh had no humor in it. “God damn it.” She stared out the window, but he doubted she saw anything. “I sure hope you’re worth it.”
“What?”
The hesitation was tiny, a clenching in her trapezii, a flutter of the fingers. Tiny, but there. “I said I hope it’s worth it. Getting to Wyoming.”
Cooper held his own reaction back, tapping the steering wheel. Had she just misspoken? Possible. But that hesitation…she was holding something back. Hiding something.
Yeah, well, she’s on the other side, remember?
He thought about calling her on it, decided against it. The events of the last twenty-four hours—my God, was that all it had been?—had generated a camaraderie between them. And yeah, she was attractive, in every sense of the word. But their friendship, or whatever it was, wouldn’t survive this mission. It wasn’t as if he could betray her, kill John Smith, and then see if she wanted to grab a cup of coffee sometime.
She was the enemy. Better not to forget that. Play his part, play it to the hilt, and keep an eye on her throughout.
Just get to Wyoming, get to John Smith, and end this.
For all the children.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Three days of green and brown and the road humming beneath their tires, of billboards against endless sky, of seemingly identical gas stations and fading radio stations. I-90 west, a long gray ribbon unfurling through the rolling hills of Wisconsin, the flatlands of Minnesota, the sun-bleached scrub of South Dakota. The cities decreased in size as they rode, from the Milwaukee skyline dotted with church towers and brewery signs to the barely-there hint of Sioux Falls and the low-slung strip malls of Rapid City.
They could have made the whole thing in a mad run but needed to kill time anyway and so drove eight-hour days and had dinner at chain restaurants. The silence hadn’t lasted. By the first evening, they were back to their calculatedly casual routine. They avoided politics, kept things light. Told stories of growing up, of friends and drunken misadventures and favorite books, tales neither intimate nor distant.
Last night they’d stopped at a roadside motel in the Black Hills. Ate delivery pizza and flipped channels on the tri-d, skipping the news networks without acknowledging it. Outside the world was black, just gone, and the sky awash with stars. He’d fallen asleep to the sound of her breathing in the other bed.