“See, I hacked into the police database. Cheap, low-grade encryption. You’d think our tax dollars would buy better.”

  “Okay.”

  “Of course, it helps that I snagged a log in and password from my job. The rest was easy. This here is the search that came in from those cops in the diner. That’s probably how they found us.”

  I shook my head. “Yeah, but those were private investigators. And they zeroed in on us rather quickly. Meaning they must’ve been in the area.”

  She logged out and closed her lid. “Meaning they’d been following us since we left Misty’s.”

  “Right. My question is, how? How’d they know? How’d they know where we were going? How’d they know what car to look for? I mean, I suppose Larry might’ve talked after all, but it still seems like they found—”

  She put her hand on my mouth. “I know how. It’s my fault.”

  I frowned.

  She lifted her laptop and showed me. “They tracked my IP address.”

  “They tracked you through the computer?”

  “It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  “Not the only thing,” I replied, my mind churning. “Cell phones.”

  She nodded. “You’re right. If they’ve got a friend on the inside, they might have been able to triangulate our position every time we passed a cell tower. Might even have cloned our phones.”

  “They can do that?”

  “Like I said. It’s my fault. I should’ve thought of this. I should’ve known they would do something like that.”

  “Okay. So we’ve got to ditch the laptop and phones.”

  “Not so fast, Andretti. This is a major machine. I’m not about to just toss it.”

  “So what do you want to do?”

  “We hit an electronics store. New SIM cards for the phones, and a new hard drive for me.”

  “Why not a whole new computer?”

  “Did you miss the part about only having five hundred dollars? Besides, I only need to get rid of the old hard drive. Obviously, they’ve got a Trojan buried on my laptop somewhere, something I can’t find. I just need to transfer over the known files and reinstall the relevant programs and we’ll be fine.”

  “You’re sure?”

  She patted my cheek. “Trust me.”

  Chapter 12

  Mel powered down her laptop and we switched off both phones before heading out to the truck. I gave it a thorough inspection just to be on the safe side. It was always possibly that Malcolm and Curly had found us again and reinstalled their tracker—though I hoped they were hip deep in the back of some West Virginian’s truck by now.

  Satisfied the Toyota wasn’t bugged, we left the room behind and headed into town. It didn’t take us long to find a computer store that met Mel’s precise calculations. While she haggled with the sales technician over the right laptop for the job, I snagged a pair of cheap burner phones that I paid for with cash and set about removing them from their packaging while I waited.

  After twenty minutes, Mel came to me looking grimly unsatisfied. She plopped down onto the seat beside me and made an obscene gesture toward the sales tech’s back.

  “Problem?” I said.

  “Technical difficulties,” she replied. “He won’t take the old hard drive as a deposit.”

  “Is that unusual?”

  She shrugged. “And he insists on doing the data transfer himself. Says he can’t let nonemployees handle their equipment.”

  “Again, is that unusual?”

  “No. It’s just frustrating. I could buy the data transfer box and do it myself, but they don’t have a data transfer box. ‘Cept the one they’re keeping behind the counter.”

  I put my arm around her. “It’s not a big deal. We’ll just sit here a bit till they’re done. That’s all. Look,” I pointed, “there’s a coffee shop ‘cross the street. Let’s go there, grab a cup, and come back here once they’re done.”

  She rolled her eyes, but then stood and told the clerk we’d be back in a few. Arm in arm, we strolled out of the shop next door to the restaurant.

  The café featured multiple sitting areas, one around a fire place, with various television screens in different locations with their volumes turned low. Above our heads, lasers painted different patterns—and sometimes advertisements—across the ceiling. I saw a lot of people hunched over laptops, most with headphones stuck in their ears, working on various projects and paying little attention to the electronic noise around them. More than a few couples sat next to each other texting—a behavior I found both puzzling and slightly repugnant. Why couldn’t people just talk to each other? Between its sepia tones and bohemian-tech décor, the place felt like a cross between a coffee shop, a sports bar, and a Grateful Dead concert.

  At the counter, Mel talked me into some ice and sugar concoction she called a mocha caramel macchiato.

  “What ever happened to just coffee?” I said.

  She pressed the cup into my hand. “Live a little.”

  Together, we sauntered over to the overstuffed easy chairs beside the fire. “Interesting place,” I observed. “They didn’t have joints like this when I was a kid.”

  “Malt shops and burger joints with girls on skates?”

  I curled my lip. “I’m not that old. It was more video arcades and roller skating rinks.”

  “Girls on skates.”

  “Yes, but they didn’t bring you burgers. Sure could skate though.” My memory flashed to a couple of the girls I used to hang out with, wondering what had ever become of them. “And we didn’t have anything like laptops or cell phones. Nobody texted anyone. If you wanted to talk to somebody, that’s what you did. You talked to them.”

  “That’s right. The eighties. Where the men wore mullets and jackets with hi-tops, the women wore leather and lace, and everyone got rich in the bond market. Preach it, Old School.”

  “All right. You made your point.”

  “Times change. Gotta change with them or get left behind.” She slurped her drink.

  I rolled my eyes and sipped my beverage. A moment later, Mel stiffened and put her hand on my arm. “Maybe sitting here isn’t such hot idea.”

  I frowned and turned my head to where she nodded. There, on the various television screens mounted on the walls and over the coffee bar was a news feed showing the security footage from the gas station I’d torched. The footage was in color, showing the way I sprayed the ground before lighting the fuel. Seconds later, a brilliant ball of orange flame flashed out, and the camera cut back to the news reporter. As she talked, looking very concerned, a window opened on the screen beside her, showing a different view of the gas station, and a straight on shot of my face. I felt my pulse quicken. The only saving grace was that the image was blurry, not nearly so well defined as it’d need to be to make a positive ID.

  “Ger…”

  “It’s all right. They’re still looking for the car. And there’s no way they’ll get an ID off of that pic.”

  “The cops might have more detailed ones.”

  “True.”

  “So what do you want to do?”

  I ran a hand over my mouth, considering. “Couple of things, I reckon. A, we gotta stay out of the limelight. Make sure we ain’t visible to any more cameras where they might track our progress, or worse, figure out what ride we got now.”

  “They get to that used car guy, they might be able to figure things out.”

  “Mmm. I’m counting on his sense of self-preservation to keep that from happening. B, we better get back on the road and put as much distance between us and that gas station as we possibly can. And C, I think we need to change up our look.”

  She thrust her head back against the headrest. “I could change my color easily enough, but you ain’t got a whole lot to work with. No offense.”

  I grimaced. “None taken. You think a wig might do the trick?”

  “Maybe. Can’t be a cheap one.”

  “What if I just shave my head?”

  She shrugged. “Won’t make a difference. Getting spotted by someone ain’t a problem. They’re probably already awash in sightings up and down the east coast. The real trouble is beating the facial recognition system.”

  “How’s that work?”

  “Department of Homeland Security set it up. It uses an algorithm to analyze the relative position, size, and shape of your eyes, nose, your cheekbones, and your jaw. They’ll do two things with it. The first is compare the image they have from the gas station with your driver’s license.”

  “They don’t have my driver’s license. And anyway, it’s a fake, remember?”

  She tilted her head to one side and gave me a patient glare.

  “Okay, I’m missing something.”

  She nodded. “Your license isn’t fake. Remember? We set it up so that it’s actually in the database. All they gotta do is compare the image with all the images in the database from your state, and they’ll find you.”

  “Yeah, but there’s millions of people. And they don’t know what state I’m from.”

  She sighed. “They have our license plate. They’ll start there. I’m sure Larry’s already filled them in on my ‘kidnapping,’ so they’ve probably already ID’d me.”

  “Do a search on known associates.”

  “You got it, babe. Besides, with your state, they have a general view of your features. They can rule out people based on height, gender, race, hair color and estimated age. That’ll limit the results. Combine that with known associates, and—”

  “And they got me dead to rights.”

  “So like I said, they’ll run the pictures through the database to get your ID. The second thing they’ll do is start scanning all cameras in a geometric area to determine where we went. They figure out our direction, and then they do it again. Again and again and again, each time placing us further and further along our route until they’ve got a pretty good idea where we’re headed and how fast we’re getting there.”

  “Then they just set up the road block and close the net.”

  She nodded, and slurped the last of her drink.

  “How do we beat it?”

  “We change our look, maybe even change our ID’s again. They might figure out who we are, but not our aliases. We can get around that. The second part is making sure we don’t give them our path. That means avoiding the cameras, or better yet, making the cameras see something that isn’t there.”

  “So we stay on the back roads. Avoid anything resembling toll booths or traffic cams.”

  Just then, a loud rumbling sounded from outside. I turned my head, seeing the Harley Davidson pull to a stop near the window, a side car attached to one side. As the driver and his passenger climbed out, I looked at Mel. “Can those cameras see through helmets?”

  She met my eyes, and a wide grin spread across her face. “Always had a thing for bikers.”

  I ran a hand across my mouth. “We’d have to trade in the truck for it.”

  “That’d put us in our third vehicle in less than a day. We’re not exactly racking up the miles here.”

  “There is that.”

  “I mean, there’s something to be said for just putting some distance down.”

  “True. We also got to think about how we’re getting out of here. I mean the state,” I clarified when she furrowed her brow. “We came into Delaware from the north. Now, we can cross on I-95 or 40, come down through Baltimore and on to D.C. Or we can take 301 south and cut across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge toward Annapolis.”

  “Those are all D.C. sounding names.”

  I nodded.

  “D.C.’s got more cameras than Congressmen got interns. It’s like the surveillance capital of the country.”

  “So we avoid D.C. entirely.”

  “That’d be my vote.”

  “That only leaves us two options. We either backtrack out of the state, and go the long way round through the western corridor—”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “—or we keep going south, and take the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, dumping us out in Norfolk/Virginia Beach area, about twenty-five miles from the Carolina border. That way, we avoid D.C. entirely, along with Maryland and most of Virginia.”

  She made an ‘O’ with her fist and peered at it. “Tunnels are enclosed space.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And if they see us coming, all they gotta do is just wait for us on the other end. We’d drive right into their net with nowhere else to go. Why’d we come this way again?”

  I shook my head. “My fault. I shouldda been paying attention. I got so focused on what we were trying to get away from that I didn’t think clearly about where we had to get to, or how to get there.”

  “So what do you want to do?”

  I pushed out of my chair. We’d lingered here long enough. “Well, we don’t know that they’re on to us just yet, let alone that they’ve ID’d our vehicle or what route we’re taking. I think we’re at as much danger of getting caught there as we are anywhere else. I mean, once they decide to drop a net on you, they do it pretty quickly and rather effectively.”

  “You got away. Twice.”

  “I got lucky twice. Third time, they nailed me.”

  “No, third time they used me. And that’s not gonna happen this time out.”

  “So I think we go for it. The longer we stay nearby, the greater our chances of getting caught. Let’s get your computer and get the heck outta here.”

  Chapter 13

  Mel’s laptop was ready and waiting when we returned to the shop. She paid the man in cash and we hit the road. As I drove south toward Newport, she sat in the passenger seat with the computer plugged into the adapter, loading software onto it. She swapped out the SIM cards in the cell phones and used one of them to access the internet. I glanced at them warily when she did so.

  “You sure that’s safe?”

  “Safer than sex,” she muttered.

  “So they can’t track us?”

  She shook her head. I took that for good news, but she didn’t appear happy. “So what’s the problem?” I asked.

  “Ger? Please don’t take this wrong, but I kinda need some quiet to work for a bit.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m accessing the police computers now. I want to see what they know about us.”

  “You can do that?”

  “Uninterrupted? Yes.”

  “Sor-ry,” I muttered, and concentrated on driving. Outside, the flatlands of the state passed by in an endless display of unremarkable fields, unnamed houses, and indistinguishable, lonely trees. The sky above us turned gray, with the sun hidden behind the clouds in such a way as to make it invisible.

  I kept the cruise control on at the posted speed limit, and was summarily passed by practically every other car on the road. The endless stretch of straight highway reminded me of my native Texas, but colder, more damp. Less friendly.

  It had been hard, living in New York after getting married. At the time Mary and I bought the house and had our children, there was no sense in leaving. When Mary died five years after our daughter was born, there was no way I’d leave.

  It took the State of New York to make me reconsider. If I could’ve gotten my kids out of the child protection racket before being sent off to prison, I’d have moved anywhere else in a heartbeat.

  It was not to be.

  I chewed on these thoughts as the miles disappeared beneath us, trying hard to envision what my kids must look like now, five years after I’d been sent away. Would they even recognize me? The last time I’d been up close and personal to them, I’d been in a hospital bed recovering from the severe burns that turned my face to hardened silly putty, and they hadn’t known me then. ‘Course, I’d remained hidden behind a curtain, doing my dead level best to keep them from recognizing their old man while feigning amnesia to throw Detective Rogan off my trail. But Sara had started to cry, and Matt hadn’t admitted that he even knew my voice. And he was in flat-out denial of anything that I’d done.

  Later, I’d spoken to them over the phone and tried to explain to Matt what had happened. I almost had them back at the zoo, too, when I’d tried to get Rogan to do the right thing and handed over the laptop to him with all that incriminating evidence on it. But he’d turned Mel against me, and I’d been captured before I could pull it off.

  Matt testified against me at trial. And I never saw him again.

  I confess I have some lingering resentment about that. I suppose I ought to just forgive him for it and let it go. And maybe I will when I see him again, but it’s stuck in my craw for the time being. The more I thought about it as we cruised south through Delaware, the more it weighed on my spirit, till I felt like I’d swallowed a bowling ball and it was dragging me through the floor.

  After a few hours, we passed the border into Maryland. In less than an hour, we’d be in Virginia, and another hour and a half after that, we’d enter the bridge and then the tunnel heading into North Carolina. I felt a growing apprehension as we neared it.

  On the one hand, every mile put us closer to our destination. And as eager as I was to get back to finding my kids again, I had to agree with Mel: confronting Rogan and getting the laptop from back that bastard was priority one. Getting justice for all those kids trapped in that trafficking ring was priority one A. And then, finally, I could work on getting my kids back.

  On the other hand, there was that bridge and tunnel. Once on there, for twenty minutes or so, we’d be completely vulnerable. That made me nervous.

  As we passed Capeville, Mel suddenly swore, loud enough that I nearly swerved off the road.

  “What?!”

  “No,” she said, “pull over!”

  I hurried the truck to the side of the road and threw on the hazards. “What is it?”

  She stared out the window a moment, chewing her fingernail. “They know.”

  I put my hand on her wrist. “Who is they? And what do they know?”

  “They are the police. And they know you broke out of prison. They know that you are with me, and that we were last seen at the gas station.”