by Linda Howard
Oh God, that so freaked her out just thinking about it. She should just throw the damn thing out the window.
But not yet. There had to be a better way, a way that would confound them and cost them valuable time. And just because the cell was the most likely item didn’t mean she could just assume that was the means they were using.
Lizzy drove west on I-66, her mind spinning as the miles passed. Thinking about the cell phone made her think about the people she called. That was a very short list: Diana. It was a sad testament to the past three years of her life that she didn’t have anyone to call but one friend. And she didn’t dare call her, not with that damn phone.
Wait. Sean would have a phone, right? Everyone had a cell phone, these days.
She’d gone far enough. Lizzy took the next exit and pulled into the parking lot of a closed service station. Stopping at the side of the building, near the back, she got out and opened the rear door, and tugged and pulled until she got a groggy Sean out of the car and on his feet. For someone so skinny, he sure was heavy.
She put her arm around him as she urged him forward, using the opportunity to pick his wallet from his back pocket.
“This way, sweetie,” she crooned, leading him toward the Dumpster just behind the building.
“This isn’t my house,” he said, sounding confused.
“No, we’re just making a quick pit stop.”
“Oh. That’s okay.”
“You know, Sean,” she said as she lowered him to the ground as gently as possible, behind the Dumpster where he’d be out of sight from the street and the gas station, until morning at least, “you really should give up drinking. It doesn’t agree with you at all.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, as if he’d heard that before. He sighed and leaned back, then he was asleep again, his head lolling against the side of the Dumpster.
She swiftly, lightly patted his front pockets and located his cell. She used two fingers to ease it out. Then she got back in his sister’s car and drove away.
She drove farther west for a few minutes before she keyed the phone, making it light up. It was an expensive smart phone; too bad she couldn’t keep it a while longer. No way could she call Diana at home in the middle of the night to say goodbye, or anything else, but she hated to just disappear.
She dialed Diana’s work number, and when prompted, hit the key that would allow her to leave a message.
“Hi, Diana,” Lizzy said, and for a moment the voice was … hers. It was the easy voice of the woman she’d been for the past three years, not the voice of the woman who would roll a drunk and disable a motorcycle. “Just wanted to let you know that I won’t be in today.” That was an understatement. “Or tomorrow.” She hesitated to say more, not wanting to let them know Diana meant anything to her, but then realized if they’d been watching her all this time, if her phone had been bugged, they already knew. There was no hiding it at this point. “Thank you for being such a good friend. I’ll miss you, but things are going on and … I quit. If I’m ever able to get in touch again, I will. Take care.” She ended the call before she started crying.
Damn it, they’d not only stolen part of her former life, now they’d cost her her home, her job, and her friend. If she could ever get her hands on the sons of bitches who were doing this to her—
She pulled into the right lane, rolled down the passenger window, and violently threw Sean’s phone out of the car. It might survive the landing, but probably not. If they triangulated the call they’d be able to tell she’d been in this area, and, like the passed-out Sean, the clues would lead them west.
She was like Gretel, but without a Hansel leaving breadcrumbs to lead them home.
Chapter Twenty
The little shit had completely tricked him. Xavier was torn between fury and laughter. On the one hand, she’d really pissed him off by vandalizing his Harley, but on the other hand, pretending to go out the bathroom window had been a slick move. He was proud of her. Exasperated as all hell, but proud.
She’d been on foot and he figured he could easily catch her, but then what? She’d fight like a wildcat, in which case he could either knock her out and sling her over his shoulder—not a good thing on a public street—or he could not knock her out and throw a fighting, screaming Lizzy over his shoulder, also not a good thing. Cops would be all over him within five minutes. Okay, ten, considering the part of town they were in. Either way, he was now on foot and had no way of transporting her anywhere.
His best option was to just let her go; it wasn’t as if he couldn’t catch up to her later, as long as she didn’t figure out there had to be a tracker on her somewhere, and ditch everything she had with her, including her clothes. The Lizzy he knew wouldn’t hesitate to do exactly that. The fact that she was still partially Lizette threw in an unknown factor, making it harder to predict what she would or wouldn’t do.
He had to deal with his motorcycle, too, get the spark plug wires replaced. The motorcycle was still the best way for him to travel anonymously.
He also needed to come up with a plan, move some people into place. If Felice thought he wouldn’t hit back, she was bat-shit crazy. No way would he let this go unanswered.
It went without saying he’d be burning his bridges in this country. Taking out a high-ranking employee of the NSA would bring down all kinds of shit on his head, especially if Al had gone along with Felice in the assassination attempts. He’d thought about it some more and even though Al would have used different people and different methods, that didn’t mean he hadn’t agreed to let Felice handle it. Xavier couldn’t assume Felice was acting on her own authority.
If she could use the NSA’s resources to track both himself and Lizzy, they were probably as good as dead. The average citizen had no idea of the extent to which their own government spied on them. But if she did use the NSA, that was an official link between them that might bring up questions. She could resort to that later, but for now Xavier bet that she would still be using her outside sources. As she lost each battle, she’d escalate to the next step.
That wasn’t Xavier’s way. One step at a time was stupid. If it were him, he’d go straight for the big guns, annihilate the threat, and move on. Why waste time dicking around?
But getting to her wouldn’t be easy. She’d take precautions now, after her first attempt had failed. He might have to take out Al at the same time, something that would be infinitely more difficult. And he had to deal with Lizzy.
Tactically, he should remove the threat first, then go after Lizzy. That was what Felice and Al would both expect him to do, to follow training and deal with the immediate threat. But even though he’d been protecting Lizzy all these years, none of them knew that he and Lizzy had been lovers during most of the training and operation phase. Al thought it bothered Xavier because a woman had been killed during the action, and afterward he had become more protective, angrily rejecting the need for the memory wipe that they’d performed anyway. When he and Lizzy had been together, they’d gone to great lengths to keep their relationship private; hookups and affairs did happen between operatives, but because of the extremely sensitive nature of the mission, they’d both thought their connection should be kept on the down-low.
That was then. This was now. When it came to Lizzy, to hell with tactics. She was on the run, she was scared, and Felice would still be searching for her. Xavier wanted to get to her first. Even if she didn’t remember him, even if she was now running from him as much as she was from Felice, he could calm her down and get her to a safe place, convince her that he’d never hurt her. He wanted to know how much she remembered, how much of Lizzy had surfaced. The essence of Lizzy was back; that she had even partial recall was more than he’d ever hoped.
He placed a call, knowing his chops were going to get busted, big time. “I need a tow for the Harley.” He gave his location, and waited for the fun to begin.
There was a pause. “You have an accident?”
He could just say it
had quit on him, but he wasn’t going to put the blame on such a fine machine. “She cut the spark plug wires.”
He heard a muffled snort of laughter. “No shit? Fuck, I’m in love.”
“Don’t get any ideas, dickhead. She’s mine. Just make the arrangements.”
* * *
Sitting in Sean’s sister’s car in the parking lot of a Leesburg, Virginia, twenty-four-hour Walmart, Lizzy watched the people around her, looking for anything suspicious, and furiously thinking.
She had to figure out how X had found her.
She’d ditched her car; that had been the most likely means of tracking her. But he’d still found her within hours. So there had to be a tracker on something she was carrying. But what?
She pulled her purse from the bottom of the shopping bag, took out the cell phone and battery, and stared at them. The phone hadn’t been turned on, hadn’t even been activated. She’d been so careful, was there any way in hell X could have tracked her through this phone? But how else could he have found her so soon?
Maybe “They” had implanted a chip in her skull, or something. Maybe they weren’t tracking her phone; maybe they were tracking her.
Except the idea didn’t trigger even a glimmer of a headache, unlike the memories she’d come to accept as a real part of her unknown life. Still, she spent a few minutes raking her fingers through her hair, feeling her skull for a small raised section. Nada. Finally she shook her hair back and sat there feeling like the fool she would definitely have looked like to anyone who’d happened to see her.
That didn’t rule out the possibility of an implant on her back, but there wasn’t any way she could check herself for that. Or maybe laparoscopic surgery had implanted a chip on her liver, or something like that.
No, no Band-Aid scars on her belly.
She was running out of ideas, and was back to the phone. Except that didn’t make sense. The phone hadn’t been out of her possession since she’d bought it, and had never had the battery installed, much less actually been turned on and used.
She could have tossed the cell phone out the window miles back, just to be on the safe side, but she hadn’t. Watching people come and go at Walmart gave her a better idea, anyway.
She took a long, considering look at her handbag, then sighed. She really liked that bag, and she carried it a lot. She liked it so much, in fact, that she probably hadn’t changed bags in at least a month, which was a long time for her. That made the purse a suspect, too.
She sighed again, then seized the bag and turned it upside down, dumping the contents into the plastic drugstore bag. The purse was leather, butter soft, and just the right size for her essentials, but it wasn’t impossible that it was bugged—unlikely, but not impossible. It had to go. If she had the time she’d search it, take it apart seam by seam, to be certain, but time was not her friend. Every delay held the potential for disaster. She had to keep moving.
She’d slowed X down by cutting his motorcycle’s spark plug wires, but she didn’t kid herself that the delay was anything more than temporary. All she’d done was buy herself a little time—if she was lucky, if he was working alone. If he wasn’t, which was far more likely, then he’d have backup, maybe just around the corner. He could be closing in on her right now.
No, if he’d had backup close by, X would have found her by now and she’d be … what? Dead? In custody?
Beneath him in bed, her legs wrapped around him…
God! She shoved the thought away. She had to be one sick puppy, having sex thoughts about the man who was trying to kill her. Damn those dreams; if she had another one, she might have to punch herself in the face, just because.
She removed the cash—less than sixty bucks—from Sean’s wallet and stuffed it down into the shopping bag, wishing as she did that he was a wealthier man who’d carried more money on him. She considered his credit card, dismissed it as too risky, then dropped his wallet into her purse.
Even though the lit parking lot was an oasis of light in the darkness, she put on the hat and sunglasses. Let people think she was weird, or some politician’s wife up to no good, though why anyone would meet a lover at Walmart she didn’t know. People did weird things every day, especially at Walmart. There were cameras everywhere, and she wasn’t ready to be spotted.
As she walked toward the well-lit store, she fingered the cell phone, searching for some clue as to how X had found her. She ran her fingertips along the phone, the case, even the battery. Her attention was split between the phone and her surroundings, because she couldn’t let anything slip by her, but she wanted to know how. She wanted to know why, too, but at the moment the how was more important.
Then she felt it. There, under the 7 on her keypad, the smallest of bumps. She could barely feel it, would never have paid any attention if she hadn’t been looking for something, anything, out of the ordinary.
“You asshole,” she said beneath her breath as she walked into the Walmart. An employee standing by the shopping carts looked up sharply, and Lizzy smiled at him. “Not you.”
The man acknowledged her with a nod, but he remained wary. Good. He’d remember her. When X showed up maybe he’d waste some time searching the aisles for her, because he’d be so sure she was here. He’d be wrong.
But when the hell had he gotten his hands on the phone? The only possible answer was that he, or someone else, had broken into her house while she was asleep and planted the tracker. God, that was a creepy thought, but what else could it be?
That also brought up another question: if someone had been in her house, and this someone wanted her dead, why hadn’t she been killed in her sleep?
Because something had changed—and the only thing she knew of that had changed was herself. By taking the small steps she’d taken, she’d set off a situational alarm. The thought had occurred to her before, but the tracker on the cell phone was proof positive.
Finding the tracker was a relief. Now she knew how he’d been doing it, and she knew for certain what to do. She placed the purse in the cart seat and wheeled toward the grocery section, trying to move fast without looking as if she were in too much of a hurry. She grabbed a bag of orange-slice candy from an end of the aisle display and tossed it into the cart, just to make it look as if she were actually shopping. Paper plates went on top of the candy.
People who shopped at this hour of the morning apparently weren’t in a hurry. Why would they be here at this hour? They worked weird shifts, or wanted to avoid the crowds, or maybe they were just night owls. They meandered down the aisles, stopping with their carts turned to the side, blocking anyone else who wanted to go down the same aisle. And man, what a motley crew they were: druggies, men on their way home from a bar, people who looked as if they never left their houses at all by the light of day. That one looked as if he might live in his car. She shouldn’t judge; she might be next. But, damn—over there was a woman wearing pink camouflage tights two or three sizes too small, teamed with a lime-green tank top and no bra. Lizzy blinked and hurried past, lest she be blinded.
She passed a man with a black eye, a limp, and a cart filled with beef jerky and beer. Dang. With her hat and sunglasses, and her too-big drugstore tee shirt, Lizzy fit right in. She even qualified as one of the better-dressed shoppers.
Come to think of it, she’d love some beef jerky of her own, just to have something to eat that didn’t come out of a vending machine, but she couldn’t take the time to actually go through a checkout line. X would be behind her, and she didn’t know how close he was. He might not be the only one, this time.
Her heart jumped at the idea. Fear could stop her in her tracks if she allowed it, so she shook off the feeling of panic. She had to push forward, one step at a time.
There were a few people in the grocery section of the huge store, but she found an aisle that was momentarily deserted. She popped the battery into her cell phone and switched it on, then swiftly pushed her cart to the next aisle, where a short, plump Hispanic woman intentl
y studied the labels on two different cans of soup. Like Lizzy, the woman had placed her purse, a huge red tote-bag kind of thing, in the cart’s seat that was intended for a toddler’s butt or a loaf of bread—or an unguarded purse. And, hallelujah, that purse was wide open at the top. Lizzy didn’t even slow down as she walked by and dropped the phone into the bowels of the big red bag. Considering the depth and girth of that purse, it might be weeks before the phone was discovered—if it didn’t ring.
She moved on to the frozen foods, plucked Sean’s wallet from her purse, and reached into the cold case for a pizza, leaving the wallet behind as she removed a large pepperoni and tossed it into her cart. Another crumb. Figure that one out, Mister X.
On the next aisle over she parked her shopping cart, with the empty purse, candy and all still in it, and made a beeline toward the exit. As she went past the checkout lanes she whipped off her hat and her glasses, fluffed her hair, and hoped that the employee who’d noticed her walking in wouldn’t notice her walking out, in case X arrived while the woman who now had Lizzy’s purse was still shopping.
She thought of all the things she’d like to buy here: boots, a different hat, protein bars, water, a knife or two or three. But not here, and definitely not now. There would be another Walmart, farther down the road. Or better yet, a string of smaller stores that were less likely to have working security cameras. Maybe she could find a flea market, though for that she might have to wait for the weekend. She’d definitely need a new car before then. Hell, she’d need to dump Sean’s car by morning, because as soon as he woke up and could get to a phone the theft of his sister’s car would be reported.
As soon as she dumped that car, she was going to turn south. Every clue would lead west, and she’d be going toward Florida instead. Would that work? Was it enough of a head-fake to spring her free?
