He pulled her phone from his jacket pocket—formerly the inside pocket, now the outside. “Do you have anything stored on here to do with the book? Files? Recordings? Downloads? Anything at all?”
“Absolutely not. Nika would have flipped. She was crazy careful. She wouldn’t even let me use Windows. Said ‘they’—whoever ‘they’ were—could get access to your every keystroke. She disabled Wi-Fi on my laptop and made me use some software she said would lessen the chances of anything being tracked. I tried to at least talk her into storing backups on the cloud—everything was on that laptop, all her notes, and mine, research, every draft, the master copy—but she was adamant. She even went through in a frenzy before she died and permanently deleted all her notes and every draft. I tried to get them recovered after she died, so I could check some stuff, but the tech guy said it was impossible.”
“That didn’t clue you into the fact that this wasn’t fiction?”
“I thought she was just paranoid about plagiarism, and the cancer was affecting her brain. That can happen. I just really wanted to write a book, but before this I never felt like I had anything to write about. Believe it or not, not every day in Montrose is the stuff of page-turning fiction.”
Carter held the phone up. “Are your photos backed up?”
“Um, yeah?” She reached for it. “I should call the principal. She’ll be wondering what’s going on. Call in sick, maybe.” And how would she explain being escorted from the property by the trash collector?
He turned away, swiftly removed the SIM card and snapped it, then threw the phone to the ground, and stomped on it with a series of sickening crunches.
“What the hell?”
He kicked the remains to a grate over a drainage hole and slid them between the bars. “It was a shit phone anyway. I’ll buy you a better one.”
“You think someone’s tracking me?”
“They’d be stupid not to.”
“How aboutyourphone?”
“It’s clean. You ready?” he said, swinging his leg over the bike.
“Couldn’t we have just left the phone here?” she said, pushing her helmet back on and managing to do it up all by herself. It wasn’t all that different from wearing a virtual reality headset. In fact, the whole experience felt like some super-vivid virtual reality game, though she’d only tried that once, and only for a few minutes before she’d gotten nauseous. “I could have picked it up later.”
“I’d rather keep them guessing.”
“There you go with the ‘them’ thing again,” she said, managing a less clumsy mount this time.
“One thing I forgot to mention—don’t hold your head too close to mine.”
“Noted.” She realized she’d slid right up behind him without thinking twice. She eased off so they weren’t quite touching.
Itwaslike an alternative reality, driving in disguise down streets she’d known all her life. Few people looked their way, but to those who did, she was invisible behind the helmet and visor. The hipster who worked Friday nights at the pizza shop—a former student—waited to cross the road, looking straight through them as they passed. Her Zumba teacher sat at a table outside the juice bar on Main Street, on her phone. Who knew a motorcycle was the perfect spy vehicle? An Aston Martin driven by Mr. Muscles here would likely make the local newspaper.
They turned onto her street. As they approached her house, Carter didn’t slow. She tapped his hip once. He still didn’t slow. She tapped three times.
Then she saw what he was seeing. Big black SUVs were parked on the road outside her house. A police car blocked the driveway, its front doors open. People in suits carried beige cardboard boxes down her front path. Two men were hoisting her filing cabinet into the back of a black van. Beside them, a guy was constructing another box from a flat pack. On her neighbor’s porch, a cop and a woman in a suit stood talking to the single dad who’d just moved in. They all stared at her house like Alice had buried ten bodies in the yard.
Alice tapped Holt’s hip again, three times. This was nuts. She needed to come clean, explain, before things got even crazier. He still didn’t slow. His head didn’t even turn. She tapped his other hip. He drove right on past.
As they approached the T-junction at the other end of her street, out of sight of the SUVs, a dark blue sedan parked across the road suddenly U-turned, forcing Carter to accelerate to avoid a collision. Carter’s helmet tilted slightly—watching the car inhis side mirror? Alice ducked and twisted to get a sightline in the mirror. The car was following. A loud, echoing crack blasted in her ears, and Carter swerved. Shit, that couldn’t be a—? Another crack. Someone wasshootingat them? At the junction, Carter made a sharp left turn, throwing them into a lean. He hunched slightly and she copied, digging her gloves into his hips and flattening herself into his back. Personal space be damned. As he wove through traffic, accelerating and slowing, earning the occasional horn blast, she had to concentrate hard to stay glued to him. The town passed by in flashes: the library, where she had a book on hold; the Swedish bakery, smelling of cinnamon buns as if this were any old day; old Mr. Flannery turning to scowl at the reckless motorcyclists as he walked into his art gallery. As they left the last block of houses behind and hit the town’s green belt, she felt Carter’s spine lose some of its tension. She could no longer see their pursuers—any of them.
Had she just become a fugitive from justice? And window cleaners? And random people taking potshots from a car? This was not what she’d expected from her afternoon.
Chapter 8
Carter
Izmailovsky Market, Moscow
Eighteen months earlier
If Restaurant Fyodor was the oligarch theme park, then Izmailovsky Market was the Disneyland Kremlin—a medieval fairytale citadel built circa 2005. Carter’s tourists, who wouldn’t be caught dead on public transport or at a swap meet back home, reliably got a kick out of taking the Metro and haggling for Soviet medals or rabbit-fur hats as if their survival depended on it, while vendors called out “whereyoufrom?” or “howdy, stranger” as they passed. The One Percent were invariably astonished that the stallholders could guess just by looking at them that they were American.
Carter and Nika had ushered their charges out of the hotel early, before the snow on the market paths turned to slippery mush, and before the city’s streets and subway got so busy with Saturday crowds that their CIA tail would struggle to spot an FSB tail. As Carter helped the birthday girl haggle over an antique porcelain chess set, there were no likelies in sight. Bartering was a game for her, of course, given that she couldafford to buy a set made from platinum and diamonds and fly in Kasparov himself to tutor her. Carter ensured she paid a premium, while letting her think she’d gotten a bargain. As she triumphantly handed over her rubles, the stallholder huffed as if disgusted at being bested. She handed the set to Carter to carry—not that he’d offered.
