“Not really,” Moose said. “Looks to me like she’s smiling a lot.”
“I can see that she’s smiling, but she’s got her hands under the table instead of on top of it, and both feet are flat on the floor. That’s the posture of somebody who’s unhappy about being where she is, and might be expecting trouble. Wait a minute.” Noah leaned closer to the monitor and watched as Molly picked up her purse, which had been sitting toward the outer edge of the seat beside her, and moved it to her other side. “Sarah, get up and head for the ladies’ room. Molly will be going there in just a moment.”
On the monitor, they watched as Sarah got up and began walking toward the restrooms. Five seconds later, Molly did the same.
“Boss, how did you know?” Moose asked.
“Observation,” Noah said. “She moved her purse to the other side of herself so she could slide out of the booth. If she had been planning to get up and leave, she would’ve picked it up and held it. When she set it down on the inner end of the booth, I knew she was only planning to be gone for a few minutes. Logically, that meant a trip to the ladies’ room.”
Inside the bathroom, Sarah had taken advantage of the break to make a hurried stop in one of the stalls. She heard the door open as Molly entered, and then another stall door opened and closed. When she finished, she stepped out to the sink and washed her hands, then fidgeted with her hair until Molly came out of her own stall and stepped up to the sink beside her.
Molly washed her hands quickly, then turned and looked at Sarah. “You and your boyfriend keep looking over my way,” she said. “Just thought I’d let you know, I’m not into those kind of games.”
Sarah’s eyes went wide and she spun her face to look at Molly. “Games?” she croaked out. “Um, I’m sorry if I gave you any kind of weird impressions...”
“Then you’re following me,” Molly said. “That seems to be a popular pastime the last few days. So far, I’ve counted thirteen different people who seem to like following me around. Most of them are men, and that makes it hard to confront them the way I’m doing with you right now. You want to tell me what’s going on, or should I just push the panic button that I carry in my pocket. Trust me, you don’t want to deal with the guys who would come running.”
Sarah’s eyes were even wider than before as she tried to think of something to say. “Look, I don’t know...”
“Don’t try to play games with me, sweetie,” Molly said. “I have to take a refresher course in surveillance recognition every three months, it’s part of my contract. Believe me when I tell you I know surveillance when I see it. On the other hand, you’re obviously not with the other two guys in there that are watching me. Both of them have been identified as guns for hire, and we’ve already got people watching them. You’re not part of that group, though, I can tell. You’ve been watching me, but you’ve also been paying close attention to one of those two guys; that selfie trick was pretty obvious, you didn’t even have the phone pointed at yourself. Looked to me like you were getting a photo of that guy, and then you sent it to someone. So cut the shit and tell me who you’re working for, or you’re going to end up in one of those nasty little rooms in the basement of the Pentagon before this night is over.”
“Um...”
Noah’s voice suddenly spoke up in her ear. “Hand her the earpiece,” he said.
Sarah breathed a sigh of relief as she reached up to her ear and lifted off the little Bluetooth-style earpiece and handed it to Molly. “Put that on for a minute,” she said. “I think you’ll start to understand things.”
Molly looked the earpiece over and then slipped it onto her own ear. “Hello?”
“Don’t say any names, just in case you’re bugged,” said a voice in her ear. “This is your old Vulcan friend, do you recognize my voice?”
It was Molly’s turn to have eyes the size of saucers. “Oh my—is it really you?”
“It’s me. Long story, and I don’t have time to go into it right now, but I work for a government agency you probably never heard of, and that girl and the guy with her are part of my team. I sent them in to watch you because I have reason to believe you may be in some danger.”
“What about the other bunch that’s been watching me? Are they with you, too?”
“Some of them are working with us, four of them. As for the rest, we believe they’re working for the man I’m after. He’s trying to draw me out into a trap, and we have a theory that he may try to use you as bait. We’re hoping to catch him before he can act on his plans, so that means we have to keep you in sight at all times.”
“For what it’s worth, I knew you weren’t dead. Suicide is not logical, you’d never have taken your own life. That meant somebody faked it, to get you out of Leavenworth. CIA?”