About a mile down the road she found a nice little shopping center. A few of the stores opened at nine, so she was in luck. In a Dollar General store she bought beef jerky, peanut butter crackers, a kitchen knife—it was better than nothing—a box of Band-Aids, and three bottles of water. More water would have been better, but space and weight were an issue. Right now, she had to carry everything she owned, and water was heavy. There would be places to buy water on the road.
Moving on to a Big Lots, she also found a backpack; the selection was limited, but at this point she didn’t care. The main thing was that it was big enough to hold all her possessions. She got a dark green one, as well as a baseball cap and sunscreen, thick socks, a wristwatch, a few pairs of clean underwear, and a box of wet wipes. Next she went to a convenience store and used the bathroom to clean up some, change her underwear, put bandages over the blisters on her heels, and don a pair of the thick socks to better protect her feet.
Then she was ready for the final stop: a bicycle shop.
She tucked her hair up under the baseball cap and slid the sunglasses on. Disguise in place, she walked in the door of the shop and immediately looked around for security cameras. She spotted one immediately: a mounted half-round black camera with a blinking light. She tensed for a second, then noticed that the red light on the camera was blinking too fast.
The camera was a fake. She relaxed, shifted the backpack, and settled the straps around her shoulders. She’d already packed it with all her new possessions, as well as everything else she’d been carrying, and it was too damn heavy, but she’d deal. At this point a heavy backpack was the least of her problems.
The bike store didn’t exactly do a booming business on a Wednesday morning. The only other person in the store was an older man behind the counter; he looked up and greeted her as she walked past. “Anything in particular I can show you?”
“I’m just looking around,” she said. She thought he was probably the owner, given his age and the fact that he seemed to be going over a checkbook, but she couldn’t be sure.
She found the sale section of the store. She couldn’t afford the most expensive bicycle here, the good performance road bikes were well over a thousand bucks, but she didn’t want a piece of crap, either. If just the cheap bicycles were on sale, she’d have to fork out more money than she wanted to, but she needed something good with enough gears to handle the terrain. Was there such a thing as last year’s styles in bikes?
There were just a handful of bikes on sale; there was some variety, but only one model that looked as if it would fit the bill. It was black and kind of dull-looking, despite some blue detailing, which was okay with her; she didn’t want anything flashy. She flipped over the sale tag and winced a little. Even on sale, the bike was still a bit more than she’d wanted to spend. Moving down the line, she checked the other bikes; they were cheaper, but didn’t have the gears she’d need.
When the old guy realized that she was interested and not just browsing, he came out from behind the counter and joined her. “Can I interest you in one of these?”
Lizzy removed her sunglasses. “I like the black one, but it’s pretty expensive. Do you give a discount to customers who pay cash?”
In the early morning hours, the cell-phone signal had stopped at an apartment building less than a mile from the Leesburg Walmart; the wallet signal continued moving.
Xavier considered the matter as he cruised through the cool early-morning hours just before dawn, the big Harley rumbling beneath him. It wasn’t impossible that Lizzy had dumped both wallet and cell, which would have made catching up with her much more difficult. Not impossible, but definitely more difficult, and dangerous for her. If her training was coming back she might have thought to discard everything she’d had from before, but he was betting the farm she still didn’t have back her full operational cognizance. Instinct, yes, and native intelligence, but the rest of it … probably not yet. She’d obviously found the tracker on the cell phone, and after that most people would then think they were safe; they wouldn’t consider there being a second tracker. He was almost confident that she’d kept the wallet with her, for now.
But for how much longer?
There were a couple of different dangers here. For the time being, she was safe from Felice; they’d completely lost her when she dumped her car. The first danger was that she’d recover enough of her training that she was able to give him the slip. At her best, Lizzy was damn good, and predicting her actions was never easy. The second danger was that she’d recover more of her memory and remember him—but she didn’t know how to contact him, so she might well double back to the D.C. area in an effort to find him. If she did, the street cameras and all the other NSA capabilities would identify and locate her, and she might as well have a laser target painted on her back.
As long as she was moving away from D.C., though, he was content to follow.
In Front Royal her speed—rather, the speed of the wallet she carried—changed. Odds were Lizzy had dumped whatever car she’d stolen to get away from D.C. and was now on foot, a move that assured him she still had the wallet in her possession.
As long as she kept the wallet on her, he’d be close behind.
He could have caught up with her during the night, not long after his bike had been repaired. But then what? If he roared up behind or alongside her on the interstate, she’d just panic. Maybe she’d gotten her hands on a gun and would try
to shoot him; it wasn’t as though he could shoot back. Maybe she’d simply panic and drive off the side of the road, wreck her car, hurt herself or be killed.
His approach needed to be smoother than that. For now, he just wanted to know where she was. He wanted eyes on her. No, that wasn’t quite right. He wanted his eyes on her.
She was easy to find, thanks to the tracker, but he had to make certain she didn’t spot him. According to the tracker and the detailed map overlay, she was in a Dollar General store in a strip mall. He parked his bike at the end of the mall, almost completely obscured by a van, and a few minutes later watched as she walked out of the store, juggling her purchases. That answered that question: she still had the wallet.
He couldn’t very well confront her here and now. There were too many witnesses, too many ways it could go wrong. Knowing she still had the wallet on her was all he needed, for now.
In the meantime, he was starving, and he needed caffeine in the worst way. He watched until she was safely inside another store, then started the Harley and headed back toward a restaurant he’d passed driving in. He’d let Lizzy continue to believe she’d shaken him, that she’d gotten away, and when she was in a more remote area he’d find a way to talk to her. She couldn’t just keep running; eventually she’d make a mistake and Felice would be there.
He didn’t rush through breakfast, but took his time and gave Lizzy a little space. After the waitress had cleared away his dirty plates, he sipped on a last cup of coffee while he watched the tracker on his cell phone as it moved away from Front Royal.
What the hell?
Something didn’t make sense. The tracker didn’t give him her exact speed, but close enough. She was moving along too fast to be on foot, but too slow to be in a car. Maybe if there was heavy traffic on that road, construction that had traffic at a crawl, but … not likely. The traffic on the road he watched moved steadily enough, and she wasn’t too far away. If the road she was on had construction, the locals would know and avoid it, but he didn’t see any increase in traffic on this road. Of course, he wasn’t familiar with the local patterns, so when the waitress came back by to ask if he wanted another refill, he said, “I’m good. Maybe you can tell me something. Is there any construction in the area? I’m heading south, and I need to make good time.”
“Not that I know of, and if there was, there’d be someone in here bitching about it all day,” she said.
“Okay, thanks.” When she’d left, he checked the image on his phone again. He watched for a while, puzzling it over as he finished his coffee. After a few minutes her speed varied. She moved along pretty slowly for a few minutes, then there was an increase in speed before her speed leveled out again.
Something occurred to him. There was one rather far-fetched possibility that actually made him smile. He switched the mode to topographical and laughed. That slow speed had come on one side of a hill, the burst of speed on another.