She was already logging in to the app on her phone, but we were in the middle of nowhere, and it was slow to load. “It’s not showing up,” she said.
“Damn it,” I said. “Just pull off, Frank.”
O’Reilly was calling, but I ignored him. As we slowed, he passed us, a confused look on his face.
“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” Cassie said. Quitting out of the app and restarting.
Then she had him.
“Get off,” she hollered, and Frank swerved onto the exit.
“Go right. He took an exit. Got on another state route. About two miles east of us.”
Cassie directed Frank toward the location she was tracking, and he accelerated down a tiny strip of road in between two giant fields.
“We can pick up where he is from here?” Frank asked.
“If you stop driving like an old lady,” Cassie said, with attitude in her voice.
The van lurched forward, and my body pressed back against the seat. I got on with O’Reilly and told him where we were headed.
“How do you know he went that way?” he asked.
Kemp and I had agreed not to share intel with anyone outside the team. “At this point,” I said to him, “it’s just a hunch.”
We came down the next incline, and the hillsides were black, perforated with white lines. Fields of solar panels on the left and right; they rose up in front of us, too.
Frank swung a hard left and put his foot to the floor again, the van moving now at over ninety miles an hour. In the back, the recording equipment that was bolted to the floor creaked.
A mile down, we saw the U-Haul, and I let out a long breath.
I got on with O’Reilly and set a new plan. Told him we’d both stay behind the U-Haul, in case one of us had spooked the guy.
“Thank God you put that tracker in the truck,” I said to Cassie.
“Yeah, remember that, will ya?” She smiled. “Like maybe when you do my annual review.”
The sun came up, and the road turned north again. “If he’s heading up through Orlando or around it,” I said, “this was not a shortcut. He’ll have to cut back to the main highway.”
The area seemed to alternate: farms—then swampland—then ranches with loose numbers of cattle. In a field, a farmer used a tractor to tow a traveling gun system for irrigation from one field to the next, a boy and his dog following a car length behind.
Another ninety minutes passed. Up ahead, we saw a sign indicating we were five miles from Interstate 4.
I got a text from Barry Kemp at ATF that satellite surveillance had come online, and the F-150 was “red,” as they say. Which means it was marked for good.
Frank exhaled, and I sat back. I had been gripping the binoculars hard in my hand for the last fifteen minutes. Now I placed them in the center console.
“I could grub,” Cassie said, breaking the tension. “Anyone down to grub?”
“I’m sick to my stomach,” Frank said, “but I could use coffee. Let’s get around all these cars first.”
He drove us past the tourist traffic around Orlando, and we pulled over at a diner an hour from Daytona. I told O’Reilly where we were, and everyone looked at the breakfast menu, even if we weren’t hungry.
All the while, Cassie kept her eyes on the dot that represented the F-150 on her app.
“They’ll have a sat operator,” I said. “Watching a close-up of that truck for the next eight hours.”
“I know,” she said. But she kept staring at the dot anyway. “So what exactly did you see?” she asked. “Last night at the storage place.”
