Travis glanced back at the trailer as he heard some thumping from one of the horse’s hooves, banging against the metal sides of the trailer. “One more thing. As soon as you get in cell phone range, call Barry at the tow company in town and tell them where the truck is. Tell him to come get it and start working on it. He’ll need a flatbed. Don’t tell him what happened, Ellie. Don’t breathe a word of this to anyone.”

  Ellie’s eyes were wide, her lips parted. She nodded, “Okay. I can do that. You’ll be back in a few days?”

  “I hope so...”

  “Wherever you’re going, Travis, be careful.”

  Travis nodded and walked away.

  13

  Travis stood in the middle of the road surrounded by darkness as he watched the truck and trailer Ellie was driving disappear around the remainder of the bend in the road and into the night, the red glow of the trailer lights getting smaller in the distance. Travis got back in his truck, pulled it off the side of the road, and left the keys in it for the tow company, grabbing his backpack, his wallet, and cell phone from inside. From the locked compartment in the backseat, he grabbed two more full magazines for his pistol and another box of ammunition, shoving them inside of his backpack. Where he was going, he couldn’t necessarily take his gun, but there was no telling what would happen in between where he was at that moment and where he needed to get to.

  He glanced around him. His truck wasn’t drivable, not with so many flat tires, but the tow truck should still be operational. He climbed up inside of the cab and turned the key. The engine started with a low rumble, the dashboard lighting up, the dials and gauges coming to life. The truck had nearly a full tank of diesel fuel, enough to get him where he was going. He put it into gear and pressed the accelerator feeling the rumble of the heavy-duty engine under his feet, the tow truck easing forward as he steered around what was left of his own wrecked vehicle.

  Driving away, he glanced at what was left of the truck in the distance gritting his teeth. As much as he’d wanted to ignore the threat against his life, Catherine was right – it was the real deal. He needed to act, and fast.

  Travis drove along in the tow truck, his hands gripping the heavy steering wheel as he headed north toward Dallas. He tapped on the phone number Catherine had sent him and penned a text message, speaking carefully into his phone as he drove, “Want to take you up on your offer. Heading to London. Can you get me a ticket out of Dallas-Fort Worth airport ASAP?”

  Travis put his phone down in the cup holder next to him, picking up a Styrofoam cup the attacker had left behind as if he was having a lovely cup of tea before trying to end Travis, not to mention Ellie and the horses. Travis flung it out of the window into the darkness. He glanced at his phone, waiting for something to happen. If Catherine was already on the plane to London, it was unlikely she would get his text, but then again, MI6 was just as sophisticated as the CIA. Maybe she would.

  A moment later he got his answer. His phone buzzed. He took a single hand off the wheel of the lumbering tow truck growling underneath him and glanced at it, “Ticket waiting at DFW. See you in twelve hours. Be careful.”

  Travis set his jaw and dropped his phone down into the cup holder again. He fumbled in his backpack for his passport, hoping it was there. It was. He might not have any answers about who was coming after him in Texas, but maybe he could get some in London.

  14

  By the time Travis got off of the overnight flight to London, his body felt achy, as though he’d been tightly swaddled in a giant blanket for the majority of the almost ten-hour flight over the Atlantic. Despite his dirty clothes and bandaged arm, no one seemed to give him a second look once the door to the plane closed.

  The flight attendants had been masterful at their pacing while they were in the air, distracting everyone from the fact they were pinched together like sardines in a tin can, feeding them a sleep-inducing, high-carb dinner as soon as they got on board. It consisted of overcooked, gummy pasta covered with equally gooey Alfredo sauce, or at least what they said was an Alfredo sauce. Two hours later, by the time the plane was ready to leave American airspace, the majority of the people had conked out on the plane.

  Despite the threat to his life, Travis was no exception.

  The last day and a half had been mentally and physically exhausting between the horse show, the knife attack, and then getting run off the road and shot at by the tow truck driver and his cohorts. He needed the sleep, especially given the fact he had no idea what to expect when he got to England.

  Waking up, he realized people were stirring. The flight attendants had disappeared. Travis tilted his head, staring toward the cockpit. He saw two of them, buckled into their jump seats. The captain’s voice came on. “For those of you waking up, we are about to land at Heathrow. The local time is noon. Please fasten your seatbelts and prepare for landing. Enjoy your time in London.”

  The plane touched down without any fanfare, the enormous jet floating over the runway for a moment before the fuselage shuddered as it set down on the rubber-stained asphalt. It didn’t take long for the plane to taxi to the gate and for the jetway to be extended. Along with the other passengers, Travis got up, grabbed his backpack from the overhead compartment, and shrugged it over his shoulders. He adjusted his baseball hat on his head and walked off the plane, following an elderly couple that was shuffling along. Passing them as soon as he could, Travis walked away. He was sure it was a relief to the people sitting next to him that he was off the plane. He’d showered the morning before he and Ellie left Oklahoma City but then managed to get himself covered in sweat from loading the horses, grime from the attack, and fighting off the people that had run him off the road.

  As he walked down the jetway, he felt his phone buzz. It was Catherine. “I’ll meet you at baggage.”

  It only took Travis a few minutes to wind his way through immigration and customs, scanning his passport at the immigration terminal and waiting for the gates to click open. He shook his head. It was an automated process now, as if the British government didn’t much care who you were or where you came from as long as you had a passport. There were only two of Her Majesty’s Border Agency Customs and Immigration officers in the entire area, two young men in uniforms leaning against the wall, chatting with each other. As Travis passed, he could hear them talking about the soccer scores from the day before. Football, not soccer, he realized as he passed, shaking his head. Soccer might be the biggest sport in the world, but there was nothing like American football, at least not in his mind.

  Two rides on churning escalators descending below the gates amid a throng of other weary travelers let Travis off at the lowest level of Heathrow. The metallic clatter of the luggage turnstiles could be heard in the background delivering bags and boxes to people who had just arrived. Travis stopped and glanced around. So far, Catherine had appeared to him as an older woman and young cowgirl. Who would she be this time?

  “Hello, Travis,” he heard from behind him.

  Travis turned to find Catherine standing in front of him. Her hair was brown and shoulder length, completely straight as though she had spent quite a bit of time with a flat iron early that morning. Given that she had only gotten back half a day before him, she looked surprisingly fresh. Catherine was wearing a pressed white blouse with a red sweater vest over it, a pair of perfectly fitting jeans, stylish brown boots with a matching messenger bag, the strap draped across her body and resting on her right hip. She had on a pair of glasses with fashionable, thick, dark frames and red lipstick that matched her vest. He blinked. This was an entirely different Catherine than he’d met before. “I almost didn’t recognize you.”

  She smiled, “Oh this? Yeah, this is how I really look. At least most of the time...” Catherine glanced at the crowds moving around him, a faint flash of seriousness turning her face stony, “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  Walking out into the early afternoon sunshine, Travis blinked again, his eyes adjusting to the bright light after being sequestered on the plane overnight. It felt good to move, the aches and stiffness from his body evaporating as he and Catherine made their way through the baggage area. The weariness of travel was nothing new to him. He’d suffered through far more uncomfortable flights during his time with the military, strapped into a jump seat for hours at a stretch. That was probably why he’d slept so well, besides the fact that he figured once he fell asleep if someone wanted to kill him, it didn’t matter. It probably wasn’t an opportune time to take another stab at his life anyways. Too many witnesses and nowhere to escape while flying thirty thousand feet over the Atlantic.

  Catherine walked in front of him, her boots clicking on the concrete sidewalk. She stepped out near the edge of the curb and waved down a cab, getting in. As they did, she caught Travis’s eye, putting her finger up to her lips. Travis nodded. The cab was unsecured and he was now on MI6 territory. Her country, her rules. Travis leaned back in the seat and stretched his neck left and right while Catherine gave the driver, an older man with a shock of gray hair sticking out from underneath a tattered plaid flat cap, an address, “320 Bucksley Southeast, please.”

  “Certainly.” the driver replied.

  While they rode in the back of the cab, Catherine started up a conversation, pretending it was Travis’s first time in London, “Well, seeing that you’ve never been to this beautiful city of ours before, I thought for sure we should stop at Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey. Those are definite,” she cooed. “And, since you’re my cousin, I’ve also arranged for us to have dinner out tonight.”

  Travis raised his eyebrows, amused by Catherine’s creative dialogue, “Really? Where are we eating?”

  She slapped him on the knee playfully, “Now, if I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise, would it?” she said in a thick British accent. “You’ll just have to wait. Now, I know you’ve heard that British food leaves something to be desired, but let me tell you, the culinary scene in London has evolved immensely over the last ten years or so…”

  Travis nodded and smiled as Catherine spun the tale about his time in London for the benefit of the cab driver, droning on about young chefs and fusion food. The man had probably heard the exact same discussion twenty times just that week.

  Catherine was smart and cunning. She let enough information slip that the driver wouldn’t have any questions at all in his mind about who they were and what they were doing in London. If the two of them had sat in the car in silence, the driver, given human nature, would have come up with questions of his own — Were they fighting? Were they married? Had they only now come into town to attend the funeral of a close family member? Silence was dangerous. Catherine filled the time with enough boring information the cabbie would be more than happy to simply get his payment and have them leave.

  Ten minutes later, after winding their way through bumper-to-bumper London traffic, the cabbie trailing the car in front of him with not more than about a two-inch buffer, they came to a screeching halt in front of an apartment building on the outskirts of downtown London. Catherine popped the door open, handed the man a few pound notes, and waited for Travis to get out, slamming the door behind him. Travis scanned the area. There was a line of tall white apartment buildings spanning the block as far as he could see. On the opposite side of the street was a wide park, thick with the bright green of early June leaves, the trees and brush dense, much like what he’d seen when he’d traveled to the Midwest, even if the temperature seemed to be a bit cooler. He cocked his head to the side. Thinking about it, the longitude of London wasn’t that much different than New York, Buffalo, Columbus, or Detroit. No wonder the foliage looked so much like the Midwest. The quote, “There’s nothing new under the sun,” certainly applied to what he was seeing.

  Catherine didn’t give him much time to stop and look around. She started off at a fast clip, “This way,” she waved, the messenger bag bouncing on her right hip as she took off.

  Travis jogged a couple of steps to catch up, his backpack shifting over his shoulders with the sudden movement, “Where are we going?”

  “Someplace you can get a shower,” Catherine smiled, looking him up and down.

  “I need one.”

  “At least that much we can agree on.”

  Travis walked next to Catherine for the next few minutes, as they wound their way past clusters of people strolling on the sidewalk who were either checking their phones or pointing at something, holding up the foot traffic. Across the street in the park, Travis spotted a tour group from an unnamed Asian country, all of them wearing matching blue T-shirts, the leader carrying a flag extended high in the air, a whistle around her neck. The kids followed her like she was the mother duck and they were her ducklings, the wave of them trailing her with giggles and shouts. Travis glanced back at Catherine in time to see her dodge down a narrow alley. Following, he saw she’d stopped at a single door in the side of the building. Looking left and right, she keyed in a code to the door and slipped inside. Travis followed.

  “Where are we?” he frowned.

  “It’s a safe house we keep for visitors. A flat, really. It’s up here,” she pointed to a flight of steps.

  As they got to the second floor, Catherine turned left down the hallway and went to the first door, keying in another code on the door panel. She pushed it open, waving Travis inside.

  The apartment, or flat, that Catherine had led him to was of moderate size. The narrow entry door led to a wide living space, a bank of long, thin windows covered with gauzy white curtains that were keeping the dappled noonday sun from entering the apartment directly across from the door. The ceilings were high, at least by American standards for an apartment building. If Travis had to guess, the building was quite old, like most things in England, although it looked to have been recently redecorated. Tile covered the floor, scattered area rugs tossed about with furniture carefully laid out on top of them. The sitting room had a long wide couch with a coffee table and two chairs facing in, a flat-screen TV mounted on the wall over a fake fireplace filled with unlit candles. From where he was standing, Travis could smell the vanilla-scented wax, as though the candles were new or had been recently burned, although none of their wicks were black.

  In the corner, there was a four-seat dining table next to a long counter that divided the kitchen from the sitting area, shiny stainless-steel appliances lining the walls next to a narrow hallway, which Travis expectedly led to either two or three bedrooms with probably two bathrooms. The entire apartment was appointed with the feeling of high-end luxury, certainly not something he expected to be used as a safe house. But then again, this was London. Everything was more high-end in Europe, at least fancier than what he expected to find in Texas. It wasn’t his style, but then again, no one asked him.

  Travis walked through the rest of the space, checking it carefully, pulling his tactical pen out of his pocket, the tip protruding out of the pinky side of his hand. It wasn’t his gun, but the reinforced tip could do a lot of damage, especially given he couldn’t bring a gun on the plane or into London.

  As he guessed, there were three bedrooms, two on the hallway with a shared bathroom to one side and a master suite at the end of the hall, with a large bathroom complete with a clawfoot soaking tub attached.

  “Oh, Travis, you don’t need to do that,” Catherine said, wrinkling her nose, taking off her messenger bag and tossing it on the couch.

  “What?”

  “Check the space. This building is completely secure. Our agents left as we were coming into the building.”

  Travis narrowed his eyes. “How do you know that?”

  She pointed to her ear, pulling the brown hair away from the side of her face. “Comms. I do hope you Americans use these ingenious little devices.”

  “Very funny,” he frowned. “I bet if I looked it up, we probably invented them.“

  “Or the Israelis did. Lord knows they seem to come up with all of the most necessary inventions, now don’t they?” Catherine said, flinging herself down on the couch.

  The mention of the Israelis reminded Travis of Eli Segal, the legendary Mossad agent he’d ended up meeting a few months ago. Travis’s mind wandered for a second. Had Eli heard about the threat on Travis’s life? That he was now in London? It seemed like Eli had information on everyone, no matter where they were in the world. For a moment, he considered asking Catherine if she knew him but then decided not to. Espionage was a funny game. He needed to remember he was in London as Catherine’s guest, which meant he was really a guest of the British government, more specifically MI6. No matter how well-intentioned they seemed to be, he was still cavorting with a foreign government.

  “What now?” Travis said, tossing his backpack down on the chair across from where Catherine was sitting.

  “You go take a shower. Then we go to MI6.”

  15

  Twenty minutes later, after taking a shower, Travis felt like a new man. Catherine had told him to use the bathroom of his choice. “You’ll find a few sets of fresh clothes in the first bedroom across the hallway from the bathroom, the door on the left,” Catherine pointed, playing with her phone. She glanced at him, “I had to guess at your size, but I think I did all right.”

  “You're not putting me in one of your fancy disguises?”

  “Don’t tempt me,” she smiled, the corners of her eyes wrinkling her grin was so wide. “Now, go get tidied up. We have an appointment to keep.”

  After his shower, Travis pulled on a fresh pair of jeans, a white T-shirt with a plaid long-sleeved shirt over top in a mix of aqua, black and white. He’d found a few fresh bandages in the first aid kit in the bathroom and managed to cover the wound on his arm, but the edges of it weren’t looking very good, having a greenish tinge to them. He ignored it, pulling the shirtsleeve down over the bandages.