"Thank you." Gunnar tucked the paperwork into his new backpack. "I was already severely unable to pay you back."
"You never need to pay me back. We're mates. Whatever that means, I'm here for you."
He nodded, but it felt like a dismissal. He didn't believe me. "I'd still like to pull my weight."
"You do. Believe me. You found that link. You're the reason the Coast Guard, Navy, or whoever wasn't waiting for us when we landed."
The new smart phone Sam had picked up for me in LA buzzed, interrupting my speech. "Shit."
He'd promised the phone was untraceable, but I recognized the name on the Caller ID all too well. Ivan Paska.
I pulled up the new chat window to see the message.
"I don't know where you are, but I'll find you."
I blocked the number.
"Everything all right?" Gunnar asked.
"So far." I sighed. "We'll need new phones before we leave Vevey."
"Look, I'm only going to say this once." Beneath his anger lay something soft and vulnerable. The breath caught in my throat. "I need you to be honest with me. I have lived my entire life with people sugarcoating any truth they thought I couldn't handle. I can't dealwith that bullshit from you. Tell it to me straight. If we're going to somewhere beyond Vevey, I need to know."
I exhaled the breath I'd been holding and took another before attempting to answer. "We're going to my personal resort," I finally said. "Vevey's the closest town, but it's still a good twenty miles away."
"In the mountains."
I nodded.
"Is it a ski resort?"
"It was. I don't have anyone working up there at the moment."
He blinked. "If this place looks anything like that hotel inThe Shining, no way am I staying there."
"It's Swiss," I said. "Gorgeous wood trim everywhere, and no weird carpets. I promise."
I didn't even bother texting my driver about the delay as I led Gunnar to the train station's cell phone kiosk. Gunnar growled when he couldn't transfer his applications and contacts from his old phone to the new one, but I didn't want to take any chances with spyware. Once we were on the mountain road, I ripped the batteries from his old phone and my new one and waited for the right spot to throw them into the darkness.
"Did you just kidnap me?" Gunnar asked.
"If I were kidnapping you, I wouldn't have bought you clothes or given you a new cell phone."
"So you have kidnapped people in the past …" He waggled his eyebrows, the only sign he was joking.
"I have not."
"That's what a kidnapper would say, right Hans?"
The driver glanced at us through the rearview mirror and went back to driving.
"He doesn't speak much English," I said. "He might understand kid, and napping, but not together."
That didn't stop him from yelling at me in Swiss German. "Kein Müll werfe," he said when I rolled down my window. His expression said he would pull this car over and make me climb down the steep embankment to pick up whatever I was about to throw outside. I pulled the batteries back inside with a grimace.
"I can destroy the GPS chips on the old and new phones, so we can brick the batteries later," Gunnar whispered. "Have him pull over before we get too close to our destination."
I motioned to Hans to pull off to the shoulder, except there was no shoulder. Thankfully, we were alone on the road. He flipped on the hazard lights and watched Gunnar through the rearview mirror.
