CHAPTER 34
Dillard looked from one member of the group to the other. “My money is still betting that Ashby is planning a double-cross. Otherwise why would he hire detectives to track your every move?”
“Maybe he’s just trying to protect the fifty thousand dollars he paid us up front,” Kevin said.
Dillard shook his head. “I don’t think so, Kevin. He knows you guys are amateurs, so he knows that with his resources he could have you tracked down no matter where you tried to run. No, the only reason I can come up with to put at least two agents on you at all times along with electronic tracking devices, is so that he can find out where all your hidey-holes are, and when he’s ready, he can have you picked up wherever you might try to go to ground.”
“Then you are sure he does not plan to go through with our deal?” Kat asked.
He shrugged. “Sure is too strong a word, but I think it is a distinct possibility that as soon as he is convinced that you have given him the formula, he will do all that he can to make certain that it is in his control, and then he has no choice but to eliminate you.”
“You mean you think he will try to have us killed?” Sheila asked, a horrified expression on her face.
Dillard reached over and put his hand over hers to calm her. “Dr. Goodman, people have been killed for far less than this formula of yours is worth. Like I say, I have never met Mr. Ashby, but from what I’ve read about him in the past, he is certainly ruthless enough and has enough power to do whatever he thinks he needs to do to gain complete control of your formula.”
When no one had anything further to add, he nodded. “Like I say, you all are paying me a lot of money to keep you safe and to help you get through this process with both your skins and your formula safe.”
He bent over and reached down into the duffel bag lying next to his chair. “Which I am going to start earning right now.” He held up a flash drive. “This is designed to fit most burner phones. Plug it into the charging port and a screen will come up on the phone. Download the app on the screen, and it will automatically encrypt all of your phone calls and also bounce them off of several different satellites so that your location cannot be tracked. Only another burner phone with the same app can hear and understand your calls.”
He glanced over at Kevin. “And Kevin, since I assume you are the cyber expert for the group, you can download the same app onto your laptops and it will scramble all of your Wi-Fi transmissions so that they cannot be hacked or used to locate your computers. It will also have a feature where you can hit a key combination and it will immediately wipe your hard drives so that they cannot be recovered, in case the computers are in imminent danger of being stolen. That means you should save a copy of important documents in the cloud so you can recover them later if you have to wipe the laptops.”
While they were each in turn downloading the encryption app, he handed a piece of paper to Burton. “Pass that around, please. It’s my secure phone number and I want each of you to put it as number one on your speed-dial.”
While they were busy downloading the app and putting in his phone number, he got up from the table and walked around the room until he found a window that looked out on the parking lot in front of the restaurant. He stood slightly to the side of the window and peered out for a good five minutes before returning to their table.
“I understand from what you told me that each of you has a regular car and you also each now have a car that is not under your names and you are fairly sure have not been bugged or tagged with GPS trackers?”
When they all nodded, he went on, “Now, Burton and Sheila and Kevin came here together. Did you come in your regular car?”
Sheila nodded. “We figured that coming out to dinner in town would arouse no suspicions, and we didn’t want to risk being seen in an unknown car in case we were being watched.”
He smiled. “Good thinking, and it also gives me a chance to get a line on who is following you, since they almost certainly followed your car’s GPS tracker here. Since Kat and I got here first, they don’t know which car is ours and they haven’t seen my face yet.”
“Uh, how do you know they haven’t come into the restaurant and seen us together?” Kevin asked.
Dillard grinned. “Because I’ve been watching the door. No one other than couples or people with children have entered, at least no single or paired men, so I am fairly certain the men who followed you are waiting out in the parking lot to see who you met here. They’ve probably got a camera with a telephoto lens on it trained on the entrance right now.”
“But that means when we leave they’ll find out what kind of car I’m driving,” Kat said, alarm on her face.
Dillard shook his head. “No, they won’t, Kat. I’m going to take care of that right now. Why don’t you all have another cup of coffee and a pastry? I’ll be right back.”
He moved from the window and walked back down the hall toward the kitchen. Once there he asked to talk to the head cook.
A thickset man in a white apron with a chef’s hat on his head walked over, a scowl on his face at this interloper in his kitchen. Dillard handed him a hundred-dollar bill and asked if he could borrow an apron and slip out the back door.
The man’s face went blank and he palmed the bill and shrugged, inclining his head toward a rear wall, where several aprons hung next to the back door.
Moments later, Dillard slipped out of the rear door, wearing an apron and chef’s hat. Next to the door he found a garbage can, which he hefted up on his shoulder, and he sauntered across the parking lot toward a dumpster in a corner.
As he walked, he used the can to shield his face and he scanned the cars in the lot, looking for someone just sitting in a vehicle. To his surprise, he found two such cars. One was parked in the second row and held two men, one of whom had a camera equipped with a telephoto lens resting on the dashboard pointed toward the entrance.
The other car was parked a couple of rows behind the first and was an obvious government-issue automobile . . . plain black sedan with tiny, cheap hubcaps and no frills at all. Hell, it even had a small radio antenna on the rear bumper—some undercover operative with no sense at all.
The man sitting in that car was wearing a rumpled suit and looked as if he hadn’t slept for several days. Typical government type, thought Dillard as he walked by a few cars over.
As he emptied the garbage can in the dumpster to maintain his cover, Dillard’s mind raced. What to do? He could easily take out all of the men, but that would tip Ashby off that they knew about the surveillance. And what about the government-issue man in the black sedan? He would need to find out just which agency was watching, and whether it was watching Ashby’s men or whether it was watching Dillard’s clients.
On the way back into the restaurant, Dillard made a mental note of the government sedan’s license plate and then reentered through the back door.
When he got back to the table, he waved at the waiter to bring him more coffee and then he addressed the group, who were watching him anxiously.
“Bad news, but just as I figured. There are two men out front with a camera watching the entrance. They’ve got to be Ashby’s men. Problem is, there is another man watching who is an obvious government type, and I don’t know if he’s watching Ashby’s men or if he is here to watch you guys.”
“What?” several of the group exclaimed at the same time.
Dillard nodded. “I’ve no idea which governmental agency is involved in this, but it does make our job considerably more difficult. Private dicks are easy to handle, but governmental types have a lot more power and have access to much more sophisticated surveillance equipment.”
“So, what do we do?” Kevin asked.
Dillard shrugged. “Like I said, our first priority is to obtain a few safe houses and then to move into them and disappear off the grid, though that’s gonna be a bit more difficult now that Uncle Sam is involved.”
He thought for a moment while the waiter poured his coffee. After the waiter left, he said, “Okay, here’s what we’re gonna do. Burton, you and Sheila and Kevin leave the restaurant just as you entered and head back to your apartments as if nothing is going on. I’ll make sure our tails all follow you guys, and then Kat and I will go about getting some safe houses ready for us to move into when the time comes. We’ll also see about getting your professor safely out of the house in Conroe. When we’re ready, probably sometime after midnight, I’ll call you on the encrypted burner phones, and you can sneak out of your apartments, get into your safe cars, and come to the safe house.”
“What about the detectives following us?” Burton asked.
Dillard grinned. “I’ll be there to make sure they don’t see a thing.”
* * *
As Sheila, Kevin, and Burton went out the front door, laughing and talking as if they hadn’t a care in the world, Dillard slipped out the rear door and made his way to a corner of the restaurant where he could get a good look at both of the cars that were tailing them.
When Sheila drove her Mercedes sedan out of the IHOP parking lot, both of the trailing vehicles followed, showing Dillard that the men had no idea that Sheila and the others had met someone else for lunch.
As soon as the vehicles were out of sight, Dillard hurried back into the restaurant and motioned to Kat for her to follow him.
Moments later Kat was pulling out of the parking lot in her safe car while Dillard pulled a tablet notebook out of his duffel bag.
“Are you going to use that to rent us some safe houses?” she asked.
“Yeah. Google is great about listing all of the Realtors who have rental property available in the area.”
“So, you’re gonna rent here in Houston instead of Conroe, where our other safe house is?”
He nodded. “Yeah, ’cause the detectives probably already know about Conroe, and that city is just too small for the five of us to hide in for very long without being spotted.”
“What are you going to rent—a house, condominium, or town house?”
He smiled and looked over at her. “Well, they all have their advantages and disadvantages.”
She raised her eyebrows and glanced over at him. “Such as?”
“Well, a condominium building is good, because once you’re in the doors, you could go to virtually any apartment in the building and it would be very hard to follow you to find out which one without becoming obvious. On the other hand, the disadvantage is that your car would be easy to watch and there are usually only two entrances, front and rear, that have to be watched, so they are hard to sneak out of without being observed.”
“What about town houses?”
He shrugged. “Depending on the layout, both good and bad. If it is a gated town house community, it would be difficult to follow you onto the grounds to see which unit you live in, unless there is a good line of sight from the fence surrounding the property. If there is, then a good pair of binoculars would be all that was needed to track you to your unit. Another disadvantage is that individual units are easier to kidnap someone from without causing a disturbance. Then it would depend on just how good the guards are who man the gate.”
“And houses?”
“If I can find at least two next to one another and another within walking distance of the first two, and if they have enough land to keep them apart from their neighbors, that would be perfect. That will be hard to find in a town like Houston, but hopefully with a large budget, not impossible.”
“Why do you want two next to each other? I would think you’d want them far apart.”
He shook his head. “No, just the opposite. If we find that our first house has been discovered, it’ll be fairly easy to slip next door without being seen, and the people following us will think, just like you, that we would never have a second house so close to the first.”
“Okay, so which way do you want me to drive?”
He looked up from his tablet and motioned with his head toward a roadside park. “How about pulling in there and give me a few minutes on the phone to see what is available?”
When she’d pulled up next to a concrete picnic table, he got out of the car, stretched his legs, and pulled out his burner phone.
It took him three phone calls before he found a Realtor who had what he considered were strong possibilities.
He arranged to meet the real estate agent at the first address and told Kat to drop him off at the nearest rental car agency.
“Why not just use my car?” she asked. “Ashby’s men don’t know about it.”
“I know, and I want to keep it that way. There is no need to let the real estate person see either your face or your car. I’ll rent a car using a fake ID that I always carry and give the agent the same name. Once the houses are rented, both the ID and my rental car will be discarded.”