Parkerson stared at his cell phone. Lind wasn’t answering. Either he’d broken training or he’d been captured, and, frankly, Parkerson would have preferred the latter at this point.
If Lind was in jail, he would break down and talk. That was almost a certainty; Parkerson didn’t train his assets to resist interrogation. It didn’t matter. What did the kid know, besides a couple of fragments?
Anyway, if Lind was in jail, it would be on the news soon enough. Then Parkerson would know what to do. He would know if the kid had given the police anything they could work with. If there was even the slightest chance law enforcement was headed his way.
So far, though, none of the major news sources had reported anything about Lind turning up anywhere. His girlfriend was alive and in custody—she was a pretty, young Delta Airlines employee, said she’d befriended Richard O’Brien after seeing him at the priority check-in counter a few too many times. Parkerson shook his head. Lesson learned. No frequent-flier status for the next asset.
Caitlin Sherman was her name. She’d shown up at a police station in some pissant town south of Wilmington. The reports on the news didn’t have much except her picture and a police sketch of Lind. A description of the Mustang and a phone number to call. If they knew where he was going, they weren’t saying.
Parkerson stared at the kid’s picture on TV until it went away. Wondered where he would go. Parkerson hadn’t trained him for this kind of endgame eventuality. He’d always told the assets to get out and avoid detection. Get back to base. So maybe the kid was headed to Philadelphia, the apartment. Maybe he was too brain-dead to remember it was compromised.
Or maybe he was headed to home base. Maybe he was coming back to the lake house. Parkerson mulled the thought over for a few minutes. Couldn’t shake the sudden chill. He picked up the Killswitch phone and dialed Wendell Gray’s number.
“It’s me,” he said when the asset came on the line. “How far away are you?”