He said to Hannah, “Let’s get to work.”
59
She’d heard from him.
Colter Shaw had called and said that the search had paid off. Alli and Hannah were safe.
Sonja Nilsson had asked if he wanted any help. He’d told her no; they would be on the run. It would be better to remain in Ferrington and continue to follow up on leads there. He’d hesitated a moment before answering, though. This told her he’d considered her offer.
She concurred with his decision. It was a good idea. A wise idea.
But after what had happened to her, and now feeling crosshairs on her back, Nilsson knew that sometimes you didn’t feel like doing what was good and wise.
You felt like doing something for yourself.
Still, she could be patient. The memory of the kiss remained, the memory of the contours of their bodies fitting together.
She was presently in her Range Rover, driving through the Garden District of Ferrington. She had canvassed around Dorella Muñoz Elizondo’s house, trying to find someone who had seen Merritt around the time he’d received a rubber-slug welcome from the woman.
No luck there.
She was now approaching John Adams High. The young manwho’d boosted Merritt’s bait truck was a student here and she hoped a teacher or fellow student might have seen him—and, ideally, seen what his new wheels were.
As often happened, her mind went to her “situation,” as she thought of it.
Crosshairs...
The shot that had killed the target was not distant: eight hundred yards. Nor was it difficult. The day was windless and dry (moisture lumps the air and makes bullets do strange things on their route to kill). A soft pull, a hard recoil and two seconds later, the man stiffened as if under an electric current and dropped, the man who tortured his prisoners, who married children—yes, plural—who mesmerized a cult of foolish, unquestioning and dangerous followers.
An easy day’s work.
And, pre-internet, that would have been that. She’d have gone to other jobs, then retired, started work for a contractor. She might actuallyhavemarried a man like the fictional sort in the tale she’d originally spun to Colter Shaw. Only kinder, nicer. Maybe someone who was a little like him.
But, that was not to be: thank you World Wide Fucking Web...
Which gave Michael Dean Thomas the opportunity to publish the thousands of pages of files he’d stolen from the Pentagon. Endless bureaucratic prose, dense and dull and remarkable for only one thing: its betrayal of hundreds of hardworking, patriotic individuals.
You just kissed a marked woman...
The Pentagon and other national intelligence officials sent her TARs—“threat appraisal reports.” They said virtually nothing, in effect: “Might be someone on your trail, might not. Just be careful.”
She couldn’t blame them. Five hundred people had been put at risk by the traitor’s leaks.
The traitor who, as last reported, was living in a beachfront villa on the coast of Venezuela, probably using the extradition noticessent to officials there from U.S. law enforcement to start the fire in his barbecue pit to cook dinner.
Nilsson now parked the SUV in the lot where the kid had reported he’d jacked Merritt’s pickup truck. She climbed from the vehicle, closed the door and locked it. She adjusted the Glock 43 on her hip. The nine-millimeter model. She believed Shaw had the same. Or possibly the 42, which fired the slightly smaller .380 slug.
She made the rounds, knocking on doors, displaying her private investigator’s license and Merritt’s picture, and telling those who answered she was looking into a suspicious individual who had been hanging around the school.
True, in the way that truth can wear several coats.
Everyone was happy to talk to her—who didn’t want to round up all the perverts?—though men spent more time talking to her than the women did. The reason for this was obvious. But the six-foot Nilsson, who’d done a bit of modeling in college, wasn’t troubled. As somebody had once said of advertising: sex sells.
However long the discussion, though, no one could provide anything useful.
Then it was time to get back to the office. There she would check with the police, get a status update for the Jon Merritt manhunt. She would also attend to a dozen other matters. Security for a nuclear reactor manufacturer wasn’t put on hold simply because of one employee’s abusive husband.
Or for a manufacturer that had been the victim of an attempted robbery of a vital component by two different thieves in the same few days.