“Malik, I don’t want to lose her either. I don’t think this will take much longer. Everything’s kind of feeling like it’s closing in, but we’re so close to figuring it all out. I have to go.” She hung up and pulled the mask down for a second to take a big breath. Kimberly was okay, relatively. Thank God. But now Alice had six minutes to get to the florist.
She left the room and headed for the seminar annex. If she handed herself in, if Malik was right that she wouldn’t be in trouble, she could be back at the whiteboard within—what?—days? Regular programming restored. Which suddenly seemed … bleak. Living with ghosts. Doing a job that didn’t feel as heroic as she’d once thought it would be. Dithering about bathroom taps. Getting pranked every year for the next thirty years. Once Kimberly was gone, was that all that would be left?
Sure, this craziness right now was more adventure than she could handle, but the physical rush of being with Carter… How was it that she had finally started to feel something for a guy when the situation was as impossible as this? She wasn’t the type to be addicted to drama—she tended to run from it. Was itbecausehe was unattainable? Did that make it safe?
Well, shit, she was redefining her definition of ‘safe’ by the minute.
As she approached the glass doors to the corridor, a heavyset man with a bushy gray beard passed along the main corridor ahead. Shit. One of the fake window cleaners, the one she’d kicked. She pulled aside, ducking over the sanitizer station.
Never go into a situation unless you know two ways out.
There was one way she could get out without returning to the corridor: the emergency exit that lay along the back of each ground-floor ward. It’d mean a slightly longer route back to the florist, but hopefully a safer one. She walked as fast as she dared down the ward, dodging a patient on crutches. She looked for a clock. It felt like it had been longer than six minutes. At the far end, she ignored the sign warning that the exit door was alarmed—the least of her problems—and pushed it open. She braced for a siren but there was none. An internal alarm?
After taking a second to reorient, she strode around the side of the building and out through the service alley she’d entered through. Straight ahead, the hood of the Audi was just peeping out from behind a big concrete wall, sunlight glinting off the windshield. She ripped the mask off and took a long, beautiful breath. She could already picture Carter’s face—the one she knew, not the one she’d overlaid with preconceived ideas of Anderson Holt.You were right, she’d tell him as she got in.It was a trap. A lucky escape. They would return to the apartment and hunker down safely until they came up with a watertight case. She would jump him again—boy, would she jump him. Make the most of it before they returned to their apples and oranges existences. It was hard to separate the emotions flooding through her into their separate streams—mostly a swirling torrent of terror and anxiety, but also an insistent current that was pulling her towardhim, toward possibilities she didn’t dare entertain.
As she neared the car, she realized the passenger door was open. And the driver’s door. She slowed. The rear doors came into view, also open, along with several uniformed police and a couple of people in suits. A cop wearing plastic gloves picked up something from inside the car—Carter’s cell phone. It was too late for Alice to turn around without drawing attention to herself, so she changed her bearing and walked swiftly up the road in the other direction, staring resolutely at the pavement.
Carter wouldn’t have willingly abandoned his phone. They had to have caught him. So shouldn’t she be turning around now and timidly giving herself up? Why was she walking in the other direction? She spun the tracker around her finger—not her ring finger, it had only fit on her pointer finger, and even then it was loose. Should she ditch it now that the FBI had his phone?
As unlikely as it seemed, she might now be Carter’s best chance of escaping a murder charge. If she gave herself up and things turned out badly, would she always wonder, as she stood at that whiteboard every school day for the next thirty years, whether she could have played things differently, if she’d had more courage? If she’d forced herself to have more courage.Courage isn’t a lack of fear, Kimberly had said,it’s doing what you believe in despite the fear. Would she even make it to thirty years in front of a whiteboard? What if she already knew too much?
The alternative was to return to the apartment and retrieve the remaining documents. Could she get in touch with Carter’s mom? Alice didn’t even know her name.
She finally made it to the closest side street and sheltered behind a parked van—just as one of the people searching the car called out.
“Alice? Alice Thornton? We know where you are. Come out nice and quietly now and we can talk.”
Alice leaned back on the van, planting a hand on her chest. Was it possible to break a rib from the pressure of your own heartbeat? None of this was actually happening, right?
“Alice? We just want to get your side of the story.” The voice was closer. Alice looked around, her breath sawing. There was an alleyway maybe two hundred feet away. The woman said something in an undertone to her colleagues that Alice could only imagine was, “Surround her and take her down.” Or: “You’re authorized to use whatever force necessary.” Or more likely, “Just bring the poor woman in before she does herself any more harm.”
How had Alice’s otherwise dull life descended to this? The FBI surrounding her. Sleeping with a super-spy. And—let’s face facts—falling fora super-spy, like that couldn’t have been predicted from the start.
Wait—she, Alice Thornton, was seriously considering running from the police? She had officially gone crazy.
“Alice?” The woman, again. “We know you’ve been dragged into this. It’s not your battle.”
“I’m coming out! Don’t shoot!”
As Alice was summoning the courage to push off from the van, the door she was leaning against slid open. She flailed backward into thin air. Someone caught her, strong arms closing around her arms and yanking her inside, twisting her until she was face down on the floor of the van. What the hell? The engine started, rumbling against her chest. The arms relented slightly, and she heard a metal squeal—the door sliding shut. She managed to turn her head to the side before a hand came down on the side of her neck, pinning her. The van sped off, and her body slid out from under her. A weight pushed into her back, stopping the slide. A knee? In the driver’s seat, a big, bearded man hunkered over the wheel. The Daisy Sparkles guy. Shouts, from outside. A bang, and another. The van swerved to one side.The grip on her neck loosened and she tried to pull her head up. Another bang. The hand tightened.
“Stay down unless you want to be shot,” said the man holding her, his accent unmistakably Russian.
Chapter 28
Carter
And so, Carter again found himself in an interview room at the FBI field office, again sitting across from Silvia Maldonado and Benjamin Schneider, again with the deputy director of the CIA, Herman Folds, observing by video link. Except now there was a name for their joint investigation—Operation Safehouse. And now they werereallypissed.
“We’ve been trying to find you for a while, Mr. Beck,” Silvia said, shuffling as if she was trying to get comfortable, which was impossible on the plastic chairs—deliberately so, no doubt.
“Have you now?”
She crossed her arms. “I’m puzzled at the extreme efforts you’ve made to evade us.”
“Name a single law I’ve broken.”
“There’s kidnapping, for one.”
