RISDAL LANDS THE PLANE AND opens the door, and Erica barrels out and climbs into the waiting car. She looks around her. There’s a black sedan parked about fifty yards away, a man wearing sunglasses is behind the wheel. Following the satellite map on the dashboard, she speeds out of the airport and gets on Route 7 north. The car follows her. She puts some muscle on the accelerator, pushing it up past sixty, seventy, eighty miles per hour. The black sedan stays right on her. She drives past the Winnipeg suburbs and the traffic thins. She switches lanes, back and forth, and the sedan switches with her. Erica is sweating and sucking air, her heart is thwacking in her chest.
“In three hundred feet, turn right,” Siri intones.
Erica sees the exit ahead. It’s level, with a grass strip between 74 and the exit lane. She drives past the exit—the sedan almost on top of her—and then she jerks the wheel to the right and peels over the grass to the exit road. The sedan tries to follow, but it’s going too fast and cuts too hard and it goes up on its right wheels, then flips over and rolls three times before coming to a smoldering stop. Whoever was in there is no more.
At the end of the off-ramp Erica turns right onto Route 17 and continues for five minutes until Siri says, “In one mile, turn left onto Prairie Health access road.”
Then Erica sees a roadblock up ahead, manned by about half a dozen armed and uniformed guards. They notice her and go on high alert. Two guards rush toward a squad car. Erica pulls a screeching U-turn and speeds away, her eyes darting from the road to the satellite map. There’s what looks like an old logging road up ahead. She swipes to enlarge it—it looks like it loops around close to the clearing behind the Prairie Health lab. Behind her she hears a siren. She guns it, reaches the dirt track, and turns onto it.
When she’s about a hundred yards up the road, she turns her car so that it’s blocking the road. She leaps out and starts to run through the woods toward the clearing and the lab.