“Zach, you need to get me a car, quick. Wait! Under Gabe’s name. Not mine. Not yours.”
“What—”
“Just listen. Get one with power—I may be driving out of town. And that can change colors.”
“Are —”
“Zach, listen! Have—” She whacked into an overweight man, who yelled at her as she took off in a run. “Have it outside Ford’s Theatre on, fuck, on—”
“Tenth.”
“Right. At”—her eyes shot to her watch—“10:35.”
She ran flat out.
He flipped a text back to her with the license plate and reservation code. The car was waiting for her. A nondescript Ford Damn Boring: good. Currently colored black. She got in, entered the code, and told the car she’d be on manual directions.
She swung it around the block. Parked across from the FBI building, half a block shy of the main entrance. Hoped to God he was here and coming out this exit, that she hadn’t missed him and that he wouldn’t spot her. On the other side of the street, a honking-big gray SUV slid in like grease on wheels. She dimmed the windows until they were mirrored on the outside.
Three minutes later, Teko Teko came out and jumped into the SUV.
“Let’s go,” she said.
Over to 15th, across K to Connecticut, up past Dupont Circle, along New Hampshire, and a right onto Q. Small street. This wasn’t good.
She rounded the corner and immediately slipped into a parking spot behind a parked car. Farther down, the SUV had stopped in a no-parking zone in front of a town house. Teko Teko climbed out and ran up the front steps and inside. Was this the inspection? Of the place he’d been renting, rather than possibly inspecting their lab?
A moment later, a windowless van passed her and cozied in behind the SUV. Teko Teko reappeared carrying two suitcases. She clicked off photos with the phone. The driver jumped out of the SUV, but Teko Teko waved him off with a sharp flick of his head. The back of the SUV swung open; Teko Teko tossed the suitcases in, and they drove off, the van tight behind.
Jen changed the car’s color to beige before following. They headed west and through Georgetown. The van made it easier to follow, and she was able to stay a bit farther back. They crossed the Potomac and a moment later were on I-66 heading west. Damn, she thought, we’re going to Dulles. He’s catching an earlier flight.
She realized she hadn’t phoned Zach back.
“Zach, put this on speaker. Gabe, you there?”
“Jen, I was so—”
“I’m fine. Listen, I got the password. He has three appointments today. The first was at the FBI. He got picked up there and—thanks, Zach—the car was waiting for me. By the way, are you tracking me?”
Gabe said, “Sorry, I used ANON to book the car.”
“I’m following him now. The second appointment, at 10:45, had two words, pickup and inspection. The pickup was at the FBI. The inspection might have been at the townhouse I think he was renting. We stopped there, but he was back out in a minute with two suitcases. Wait, I’ll send you some photos.” She did that and continued. “I was hoping, and I’m still hoping, it might be to inspect where their lab is getting shut down. The third is for a flight tonight from Dulles. BA292 to London. But we seem to be on our way there now.”
She gave them the address of the town house. She said there should be a photo of the man who’d jumped out of the SUV to help, but she described him anyway. Medium height. Solid looking. Asian features. Short-cropped hair. Erect posture, soldier type. Jeans, white T-shirt, boots. She checked the photos but couldn’t find clear ones of the license plates. She dredged her memory and gave the license numbers of the SUV and the van.
“Stay with me,” she said to Zach and Gabe.
“We’re right here.”
At the last possible exit for Dulles, they kept going, and Jen whooped with excitement.
She told them more about getting hauled off to the police station and then her adventure getting the password. Gabe said the editor of the Post had agreed to publish a series of articles. The first, on Jen getting the treatment, was edited and waiting for Jen and Gabe’s go-ahead. The others were in the works.
They talked about what she was hoping to see wherever they were heading and what could happen when she got out there.
“Don’t worry,” she said when Zach expressed his concerns. “I’ll keep my distance. I’ll take pictures. And once they’re gone, I’ll go inside and take more pictures and, who knows, maybe find a smoking gun.”
Gabe said, “Your friend, Les. Maybe we should call him.”
Over the past week she’d been talking a lot to Gabe and Zach about the role of police in all this. She didn’t think the police were in on the Big Pharma Eden scam. She figured they were being played. After all, the fewer people who knew what was going on, the better. Big conspiracies simply did not work. Perhaps one or two people in the FBI or DEA—very high up or particularly corrupt—knew the truth, but even that seemed unlikely. She was certain that the DC cops and other departments were just dupes of the corporate powers that be.
Even so, she still wouldn’t want any of them getting called in. She was officially a fugitive. Perhaps the alarms had already been sounded on her. Les was off duty, but they could’ve already connected him to her escape.
On the other hand, she was now convinced Teko Teko was leading her to a lab or a production and distribution facility. There were at least two people in the SUV; she assumed more in the van, although it might have been empty of passengers. But if they were bringing a van to fill with equipment, she had to guess there were at least another two. She was unarmed. She was suspended from the force. She was forty minutes into Virginia and heading west. She had no backup. No radio. And—here she checked the battery for the first time—a cell phone that appeared either defective or that hadn’t been fully charged.
“Shit. My battery’s low. Call him.”
Her instructions were simple. Tell Les he must not alert the Virginia or DC police under any circumstances. He should get a car and follow her trail as quickly as possible. Switch on P.D. She wouldn’t call him directly, so both he and P.D. would be able to truthfully say that Jen hadn’t contacted him, but that he was acting on a tip. She would keep phoning Zach and Gabe to give them updates on their route but, for now, she was still on I-66, finally past the DC/Northern Virginia sprawl and into the countryside.
“One sec,” she said. “Damn, they’re getting off.”
She had been passing a semi when the SUV and van swung onto the exit ramp and she was boxed out from following. As she went under the overpass, she yelled at the car to pull over on the left. She tapped the emergency override code, hit “agree” at the $2,000 penalty warning for misuse, and instructed the car to cross the grassy median and go back to the exit. She caught the SUV and van crossing the overpass, heading south.
“Get off here,” she ordered the car.
Coming up the ramp, she caught a momentary glimpse of the car and van on a parallel side road.
“Jen,” Zach said, “we’re still here.”
“Getting off I-66. Exit twenty-seven. Hang on. I’m turning onto … Zach?”
She looked at the phone. Dead.
She came to a stop at the top of the ramp. All things considered, not following them up the exit ramp had been a lucky break, for they would surely have spotted her. Still tricky: she was now on country roads, and if she could see them, they might see her. But if she didn’t see them at least once in a while, she would lose them.
She changed the car to a muddy green and took off in pursuit.
As soon as she swung onto their road, she caught sight of the back of the van as it turned down an even smaller side road. She waited thirty seconds before following, and when she got there, they were already out of sight.
She drove along the heavily wooded road, straining to glimpse them in the distance. On the left, the woods opened to reveal a shabby farm, unpainted fences, a tired-looking horse, a rusting truck. Woods again. Another farm.
There! A flash of metal as their vehicles banked over a small rise.
For eleven minutes, she followed the winding road, luckily spotting them when they made a turn. She followed them onto an unpaved road and knew they must be getting close.
Four minutes later, she hit a dead end.
Somewhere, she had lost them.
She inched back along the road. A dirt drive cut off on the left. Through a stand of sickly trees, she made out a mobile home, but no van or SUV. Farther up on the right lay a skinny dirt track. Before she reached it, she had the car back up around the first curve and park, in case there was a lookout on the driveway. She cut through the woods, scooting low until she spotted a dilapidated house and a shack or a small barn. She heard chickens clucking. She saw no cars or vans. She headed back to her car and slowly drove forward.
Next dirt track, she got lucky.
She again backed up to park around a bend and then scuttled through the woods as quietly as she could. It was a good thing she did. A hundred yards up the drive, a man clutched an automatic weapon. He was Black, no one she’d seen before. So there were at least three of them. She slipped back, deeper into the woods. Scrambling through the underbrush, she jumped over a tiny creek, and when she saw the woods thinning out, she dropped onto her belly. She smeared dirt onto her face and bare arms, rubbed dead leaves into her hair, and on high alert crawled forward.
The building in the clearing was squat, maybe thirty or forty years old. Could have been used at some point for storage or to process, what—chickens? Illegal marijuana?—and then abandoned. Unpainted concrete blocks for walls, sheets of tin for a roof. A recently added steel door on the front. To the right of the door, heavy wire mesh protected a solitary window; to the left, the van had been backed in, filling the opening of a garage door. The SUV was parked on the dirt driveway, facing out. The other visible side of the building was a wall of concrete block, staring at her, blank and ugly.
She collapsed onto her belly. She didn’t know how many men and women were inside. She assumed they were dismantling equipment. She didn’t know if the people who had worked here were still inside, but she suspected they were gone: otherwise, wouldn’t there have been more vehicles?
She watched the building for ten minutes. Fifteen. Twenty. Aside from occasional sightings of the guard, there was nothing to be seen from out here.
Going for help and calling the cops would be useless or even counterproductive, she was convinced of that. Even if Zach and Gabe had persuaded Les to come out here, once he reached the I-66 exit, he’d have no idea which way to go. She could wait and follow them, but what if it was only to drop Teko Teko off at the airport? And what if they were destroying evidence, and the vans were only to cart away innocuous machinery to be destroyed later? With her phone dead, she couldn’t even take pictures.
She had to get inside.