‘We’ve got them,’ Lemuel Dayan said, looking at a priority email that had just appeared in his inbox. ‘They’ve booked into a hotel in a place called Taunton.’
‘Where the hell’s that?’ Gellerman asked, looking over Dayan’s shoulder at the screen of the laptop.
Dayan used Google Maps to display Massachusetts and then pointed.
‘There,’ he replied. ‘Down towards Rhode Island. Probably about thirty-five or forty miles from here.’
All three men had been prepared to leave the hotel at very short notice, and the only thing they had unpacked was Dayan’s laptop. In less than ten minutes they’d vacated their rooms, checked out of the hotel and were sitting in their hire car and navigating their way through Boston’s busy streets, Gellerman at the wheel.
Getting to Taunton and finding the hotel took them just under an hour. It wasn’t a large establishment, and the first thing they did was look around the car park to try to spot the Buick Encore that they knew Bronson had hired at the airport. There were only about a dozen cars there, but that definitely wasn’t one of them.
‘They’ve probably gone off somewhere,’ Chason suggested, which didn’t help.
‘Exactly,’ Gellerman said, pulling their car into a parking space. ‘We can follow their electronic trail easily enough, but we need to see them to be able to follow where they go and watch what they do. Wait here. I’ll go inside and see if they’re in the public rooms anywhere.’
There was no sign of the targets in the restaurant or lounge, which was not unexpected. If the car wasn’t at the hotel, there wasn’t much chance that the targets would be either. He decided to take a direct approach as a final check. He walked over to the reception desk and smiled pleasantly at the girl sitting behind it.
‘I was hoping to meet some friends of mine here,’ he said. ‘Chris Bronson and Angela Lewis. Do you know if they’ve checked in yet?’
‘Just a moment, sir.’ She tapped away briskly on the computer keyboard and then fiddled with the mouse. ‘Yes, they checked in earlier today, but they checked out again a couple of hours later. I think Mr Bronson said something about a family emergency.’
Gellerman nodded, made what he hoped were appropriately sympathetic noises and walked briskly out of the hotel.
‘They’ve gone,’ he said as he opened the car door and sat down. ‘They checked in and then checked out again.’
‘Where did they go?’ Chason asked, then shook his head, realising it was a stupid question.
Gellerman didn’t even bother responding, just looked at Dayan.
‘Make sure your mobile is switched on and the battery has plenty of charge. They’ve checked out of here but they certainly aren’t going to be sleeping in the car. They’ll have booked another hotel somewhere, and as soon as we know where it is, we’ll get back on the road.’
Dayan looked at the screen of his smartphone to check his inbox, then shook his head.
‘Nothing yet.’
He put the phone on the dashboard and connected the charging lead to the car’s USB power output. Then they settled down to wait, because there was nothing else they could do.