Francis’s eye popped open, and it took him a few seconds to remember where he was. He’d fallen hard into long, deep sleep, curled all the way to one side of the bed.
Emma had taken the other side of the bed, still wrapped in a towel. When Francis had broached the subject of what would happen next, she’d claimed to be too exhausted to think clearly. All she’d wanted was sleep, but she’d promised to hash it all out in the morning. She’d even go with Francis to the police and explain everything if Francis insisted. He’d been mollified. They’d slept.
He rolled over, looked. Emma wasn’t there.
Francis sat up slowly, rubbed his neck. Various pains still ached his body. He needed to exercise more, maybe join a gym.
He staggered into the bathroom, yawning. He splashed water in his face. He looked up at the towel rack. The panties and socks were gone. It took Francis a moment to realize what that might mean. He jerked his head around, saw her clothes were no longer on the hook.
Shit shit shit.
He ran back into the other room, eyes frantic.
No suitcase. No girl.
“Shit! Fucking dumbass idiot!” How could he have been so stupid? Of course she was gone. She’d said pretty clearly she couldn’t go to the police. What had Francis thought? That he’d won her over somehow?
His hand went automatically to his back pocket. His wallet was gone. No, wait. He’d taken it out last night. He checked the nightstand. It was there. Right next to it was his American Express gold card. Next to that was a stack of crisp hundred-dollar bills, and next to that was a short note scrawled on hotel stationery. He snatched it up and read.
I had to use your credit card. I left enough cash to cover it. Sorry. Had to go.
Francis counted the money. Fifteen hundred dollars.
Credit card? It didn’t make sense. He remembered her warning. That’s how they find you. She’d been pretty serious about it. It was specifically why they’d found a hotel that would take cash only without a credit card or identification. What could she have needed so desperately?
Francis flipped the credit card cover and dialed the toll-free number on the back. He navigated through the automated options until he found himself talking to a live human being on the other end.
“I just need to confirm a recent transaction,” he told her.
She confirmed that his most recent transaction was for two first-class airline tickets leaving from New York’s LaGuardia Airport flying to Los Angeles, California. She rattled off the airline and details of the flight.
“Did you say two tickets?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Can you confirm those names for me, please?” Francis asked.
“Absolutely,” she said. “Emma Middleton and Francis Berringer.”
Francis glanced at his watch. He had fifty-seven minutes to make the flight.
* * *
“We assembled a team to meet her at LAX as soon as the computer flagged her,” the agent told Gunn over the phone. “There’s an interrogation facility nearby, and our California office has good relations with local law enforcement and airport security. Plus we’ll have ample time for the team to set up at the gate. We thought it a better plan than trying to take her at LaGuardia or diverting the flight.”
“Agreed,” Gunn said. “Arrange a government jet for me. I want to be there when she disembarks. I’ll take command of the team.”
Gunn grinned. The girl had messed up this time. They all do eventually. You can’t run from the federal government forever.
* * *
Bryant sat at his control station, monitoring the traffic from Manhattan to Queens. Cavanaugh and his goons would never make it, but they had to try. The new software had immediately picked up the NSA chatter and the reception they were planning for the girl at LAX, so getting ahead of her there was out. Cavanaugh’s only chance was to try to catch her at LaGuardia.
But … well … just no. It wasn’t going to happen. The bridges were a mess, and anyway, they’d never get through security in time. Cavanaugh’s only chance was that the girl’s flight might be delayed. Considering they were talking about LaGuardia, the odds weren’t really so bad.
Middleton would not be pleased to hear the government had beaten them to his wife. Not pleased at all. Aaron Middleton looked about as benign as a man could on the outside, bland and pale, a computer nerd straight from central casting, but Bryant had glimpsed some streak of menace lurking below the surface, ready to be triggered. He could almost hear the kid ticking whenever they were in the same room.
A dulcet chime alerted Bryant that the computer had something to tell him. He brought it up on the central monitor. The program had been slowly getting better at anticipating the user’s needs, making mistakes at first but then correcting them with little or no input from Bryant. It knew they were searching for the girl. It had been the program that had not only flagged the girl’s name on an airline reservation—which was simple enough, really—but also had identified the NSA activity as directly related to her.
Apparently, the program now had something else it thought Bryant wanted to know.
Information scrolled across the screen. Emma Middleton’s life story unfolded before his eyes. Every pay stub from every job, every place she’d ever paid rent or had mail delivered. Names and addresses of relatives. Every scrap of information that had ever been collected and digitized.
Again, this was not beyond the capabilities of intelligence programs already in existence. It was exactly how the NSA’s mainframe had tracked the girl. But as Bryant watched the computer monitor, he realized yet again he was seeing something different. The program was sorting the information, discarding some bits of data, rearranging others. It was doing the work normally done by a human analyst who sifted the raw data to come up with educated guesses and likely scenarios.
The program knew what Bryant wanted and traveled down informational back alleys, linking together unlikely scraps of information that might not be obvious to others. It had its guess and showed it to Bryant.
Bryant picked up the phone and dialed Cavanaugh. “You’ll never make it to LaGuardia in time to catch her, but I’m arranging a charter flight for you and your men. I know where she’s going.”
* * *
Francis gulped for breath. He’d run all the way to the gate. They were still boarding when he arrived. He spotted the suitcase first, registering a fraction of a second later it was Emma carrying it. She fell into line with the last few stragglers boarding the plane.
Francis ducked into the magazine shop across from the gate. Emma obviously wanted to be shed of him, so she could still bolt if he surprised her before boarding. He pretended to browse the magazines, keeping one eye on the gate.
He spotted the new issue of Adventure Travel. On the cover was a gorgeous woman in a bikini, snorkeling underwater with a spear gun. The water was an impossible blue, and colorful fish swarmed around her. The issue would eventually arrive at his apartment, but it was a long flight from New York to Los Angeles, so he hastily paid the cashier, then jogged to the gate.
The door was just starting to close when Francis arrived. The gate attendant frowned at him but took his boarding pass and waved him through.
The flight attendant in the first-class cabin looked him up and down. He remembered he was wearing yesterday’s outfit, clothes he’d actually slept in. He probably wasn’t coming off as first-class cabin material, but his boarding pass spoke for itself. She managed a welcoming smile and gestured toward his aisle seat four rows back.
Emma sat in the window seat, pensively looking out the little portal.
In his head, Francis had rehearsed a few different ways to do this. He hadn’t had a lot of practice making an entrance, and the best he could come up with was to flop down into the seat next to her and say, “I’ve never flown first class before. Kind of makes multiple near-death experiences all worth it.”
Her head snapped around, eyes shooting wide. Surprise instantly turned into acute annoyance. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Apparently, I have a ticket.”
“Idiot.”
“You know, I did chase you down in a taxi when those guys grabbed you,” Francis said. “I’m not saying I rescued you just to be thanked … but it would be nice to be thanked.”
“I was thanking you, dumbass. Why do you think I bought you a plane ticket? When the credit card flags what we’re doing, they’ll stop looking for you in New York because they’ll think you’re flying with me to California. Except now you are flying with me to California. Sort of undermines the whole strategy.”
Ah.
“Well,” Francis said. “I … uh … did not know that.”
She crossed her eyes at him. “Duh.”
“You still could have said something,” Francis insisted. “Waking up to find you gone was … disconcerting.”
“Disconcerting?”
“Very.”
“Probably I was trying to avoid this exact conversation.”
“Yeah, well, that’s not cool.” He remembered Enid saying something similar about leaving a note so she could avoid an awkward conversation.
Emma considered him a moment, softened her voice, and said, “Listen, Frankie—”
“I don’t really go by—”
“—the thing is I’m sorry if this isn’t cool,” Emma said. “You seem like a decent regular guy. I got you into something you didn’t want to be part of. I get it. But as I think you’ve noticed, this hasn’t been exactly cool for me either. Quite obviously, I have some shit going on. I did my best to get you out of it, but you fucked that up. Okay, so I didn’t let you in on the plan, and that’s on me too. But I have very important life-and-death shit on my plate right now, and I don’t have time to babysit you.”
“Who’s helping you?” Francis asked.
“I don’t need anyone’s help.”
“We’ve already seen that’s not true,” Francis said. “Here’s a radical idea. Yeah, I didn’t ask for this, but here I am. So maybe you tell me what’s going on, and I can help. Look, I help you, I help myself, right? If you just vanish, God knows how I explain myself, but if I help you solve whatever this is, then that clears you to come explain to the police that I’m just some dumb schmuck who found a suitcase in an alley. How about that?”
She shook her head, laughing in that way people do when nothing at all is funny. “Forget it. I’m talking to a brick wall. Just sit back and relax, okay? It’s a long flight.”
“Fine with me.” Francis showed her the copy of Adventure Travel. “I have a magazine.”