Rio slapped on Gert’s radio and got an earful of static. He switched over to the AM news station he often used when navigating traffic, and it, too, was pure white noise.
Gertie’s old-school radio had a search function that would find the stations that came in the clearest, but it swept through the entire dial without stopping.
Both AMandFM.
Rio punched the clutch and jammed his stick into first, and peeled out of the parking lot, heading back toward Coronado and the Navy Base.
It sure seemed as if power had gone out throughout all of San Diego—and beyond, because why wasn’t he picking up any radio stations from Los Angeles?
The federal government, run by Shitty McConman and his mobster henchmen, was in the middle of a pissing contest in the form of a shut-down. Air traffic controllers and other federal workers had been sending out warnings for weeks now.
Ifhewere the head of a terrorist organization determined to strike the United States, he’d fucking do it, right now.
Shiiiiit.
Yeah, there had either been one motherfucking huge earthquake somewhere in SoCal, or...
They were under attack.
Either way, something was seriously, gravely wrong.
Rio punched Gertie into fifth gear and blasted back toward Coronado.
* * *
“I don’t get it,” Tasha said.
Thomas glanced at her. They’d left the road, navigating their way through a dense forest of pine trees as they made their way toward the royal family’s compound.
He was hyper-aware of the handcuffs on her wrists. Because she’d been cuffed in the front, he didn’t have to worry as much about her not being able to catch herself if she tripped and fell. Instead, the real issue was the rapidly increasing cold. She was unable to put her hands into her pockets and instead had pulled the sleeves of her winter jacket down as far as she could, to cover as much of her fingers as possible.
And true, it wasn’t dangerously frostbite-inducingly cold, so that at least was a plus.
He’d grilled her on her kidnappers—there were six or seven, she wasn’t quite sure—all men, all white, all heavily armed. The voices she’d heard had American accents, but she didn’t think she’d heard them all speak.
Had she noticed any dogs?
To Thomas’s relief, there were none that she’d seen or heard. Being hunted by men with assault rifles wasn’t great, but it would be far worse if there were dogs involved.
Tash had told him that the cabin where they’d taken her was small and three point four miles off the main road, then another twenty-two point seven miles back down the mountain. The fact that she’d had the presence of mind to pay attention to the SUV’s odometer while fleeing her captors was impressive.
After she’d finished giving him every little last detail that she could remember, they’d fallen into silence as they’d walked. But now she shook her head, and said, “It doesn’t make sense. They had me. If they wanted me dead, why not shoot me? They had guns. I’m assuming they had bullets.” She looked at him, her blue eyes wide in the waning late afternoon light. “I mean, it’s gotta be easier to get ammunition than it is to get those assault rifles.”
“Pretty easy, these days, to get both,” he agreed.
“So why did they leave it to chance?” she asked. “My death? Yours, too.”
Thomas shook his head. “Yeah, I don’t know, Tash. I’m just happy we’re alive.” Understatement.
“At first, I was thinking they wanted it to look like an accident,” she said. “Brakes fail—although not at first, because I jumped on them hard when I first saw you. But okay, maybe they’d damaged them, and my stopping that way finished them off. So eventually the brakes fail, which they did, and the SUV... plunges from a cliff...? But that doesn’t explain that bomb, with a trigger or a timer or whatever it was. Forensics will find evidence—even if just traces of the explosive shows up—and it will... No way that will it be labeled an accident. So are they stupid or...?”
“Or,” he told her. “Bomb-making’s an art.”
The outraged confusion she shot him made him wish for his phone’s camera. “I would argue a hardnoto that,” she countered. “Art?”
“Skill,” Thomas corrected himself. “Skill’sa better word. See, bombs have signatures that tie them to the maker and whatever group of tangos—terrorists—they’re part of, so... It reallydoesmake sense.”
“But if the terrorists wanted to be sure to take responsibility, why not just take video? If they want everyone to know they killed me,” she clarified. “Film it, post it online.”
