“He’s got us,” I said to Jade. “We could have gone in the opposite direction.”
Jade nodded, nibbling her lower lip. “Maybe.”
“This dude just went off his rocker,” Anderson went on. “No connection to you or DeLario. However, if you’re proven right and I’m wrong, I’m putting you both under protection.”
“With a plant in your people?” I snapped. “Not likely.”
Anderson sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’ll order our computer analysts to run scans on everyone in our department. If any suspicious e-mails, communications, pop up, then we’ll know. And I’m telling you, there’s no plant.”
“I suppose that’s as much as we can ask for,” I admitted. “I’d find it easier to believe in a plant than someone followed us across the country.”
“Driving different cars in relays.” Anderson shrugged. “Could be done without you detecting them.”
He glanced at his watch. “Look, I’ve got meetings. Where are you staying?”
“I’ve no idea,” I replied. “I’ll be kicked out of here this afternoon.”
“And I stayed all night with him,” Jade added. “We don’t have a car now.”
“All right,” Anderson said. “I’ll send a car and driver to you in a few hours. He’ll take you to our safehouse. It’s a place for you to stay, I know where you are, it’s got food, cable, nice beds. Agreed?”
“Just you and the driver know where we are,” Jade warned him. “No one else. Agreed?”
“I’ll send someone I personally trust. I promise.”
After he left, Jade stood up to stretch, limping to the window. “Can we trust him, Magnus?”
“At the moment, we have to. We’re both incapable of doing much, we don’t have a car. They brought your backpack, right? With the money?”
“It’s by the bed.”
Her back to me, she stared out the window.
“You’re thinking we should just fly out of here, aren’t you?”
Turning, Jade leaned her butt against the sill as Anderson had. “Yeah. Maybe we should.”
I gazed down at the needle under my skin, attached to a tube feeding some sort of shit into my bloodstream. “We’re still needed here. For a while longer.”
“They can finish what we started,” she answered. “They can arrest him, put him in jail. Why should we risk our lives any more than we have?”
“I want to see this through, Jade.” I met her gaze. “I want to see him jailed, humiliated, crawling at my feet. He’s done too much for me to want to just leave it in Anderson’s hands. I’m not running from him again.”
Jade crossed her arms over her chest. “I see.”
Her expression gave me no clue as to what she thought, or what she wanted.If she wants to fly to Greece, I’ll let her. I don’t want her hurt.
“So you’ll go?” I asked. “You’ll fly away?”
Her upper lip curled. “Are you nuts? Where you go, I go.”
***
Anderson’s trusted agent took us to a decent sized house in Arlington, Virginia, a colonial type with white pillars holding up the porch roof. It sat in a quiet residential neighborhood, and I observed a few kids riding bikes along the sidewalks. A pairof lady fitness buffs jogged past, and a big dude walked a tiny Chihuahua on a leash.
“Nice place,” I commented as the agent drove the sedan into the driveway.
His finger on the remote button rolled the two-car garage door up, and he drove inside. The door rolled back down. The entire trip out here to the sticks had been silent, none of us talking at all. The agent never introduced himself. Nor did he speak now.
