“Sorry, I didn’t mean to shout.” He swore under his breath. “It’ll take them a while to stitch things together—if they ever do. In the meantime, we should at least get out of London, out of CCTV Central.”
“We have to figure out what happened to Charlotte.”
“And find a Boots.”
“You want to buy shoes?”
“A chemist. Pharmacy. Drugstore.”
“Oh.” Her gaze fell onto his arm, not that anything beneath the stolen coat was visible. “Shouldn’t we go to a doctor? A hospital?”
“For a bullet wound? Not if we want to avoid attention—they’d have to call the police. Anyway, it’s not that bad—a ricochet or shrapnel or something.”
“If it wasn’t that bad you wouldn’t be looking like you’d rolled in chalk. Should I drive?”
“That’s okay. I can... Shit, Samira, get down.”
Before she could react, his hand was on the back of her neck, pushing her face to her knees. He ducked, too. Her pulse rocketed.
“Oh my God, what?” she said.
“The Peugeot, coming our way.”
“Are you sure? How the hell did they find us?”
“I swear they didn’t follow us here.” After a few minutes he eased back up, checking the road and the mirrors. “They’ve gone past.”
“Could they have tracked us through traffic cameras?”
“Then why didn’t they recognize the car just now, and stop?” He slapped the steering wheel. “Could it have been the phone call to Charlotte’s mobile? It rang out. The number would have come up. And if they have Charlotte’s phone, they could have—?”
“I used a prefix that disables caller ID—and they’d be searching the store by now. Has to be something else.”
He started the engine. “I’m not sticking around to find out.”
They drove west, avoiding the main arterials, until the indistinguishable suburbs became towns separated by fields. To give herself something to focus on, Samira repacked the spilled contents of the backpack. Charlotte’s postcard had been crushed in the bottom of the bag.
“This is definitely the same handwriting as the note,” she said, pulling it out. “But I can’t be sure either was written by Charlotte.”
She smoothed her hand over a dog-eared corner. Her finger struck something sharp. She frowned, examining it. Her cheeks went cold. A wire, sticking out of the corner.
“Shit!” She yanked off her gloves and tore into the card with shaking fingers.
“What is it?”
The postcard had a false front stuck to it. She ripped it off. Underneath was an identical Parisian scene. The two postcards had been glued together. Between the layers was a microchip connected to a wafer-thin battery and an antenna running the width of the postcard.
“A tracking device. Oh my God, they’ll be tracking us right now.”
“How pinpoint could it be?”
“Only to a few blocks but this is next-level stuff.” The postcard trembled in her hand. “This is how they found me in Italy. How they knew I was traveling across France, heading for the Gare du Nord, how they knew we were at that internet café, and at Charlotte’s. Maybe the postcard was just an attempt to track me down. Have they been waiting for a chance to pounce, this whole time? Oh my God, maybe there’s no evidence at all. Maybe they forced her to write it. Or could they have intercepted it after she posted it, in which case thereisevidence? Were they watching her? Shit—maybe she’s working for them. Or maybe they were watching my parents, and that’s when they intercepted it?”
“Whoa, whoa. I can’t answer any of it but I know that we need to—”
“Get rid of it.” She lowered the window, nodding, her finger so shaky it slipped off the button.
“Wait.”
