So how had she been found?
Right then, as Mary had another sip of her wine, she heard the sound of a commercial plane crossing the sky high above the hotel. She looked up and saw its lights blinking against the night clouds.
Two seconds later, her brain engaged, making her heart stutter inside her chest.
‘Oh fuck!’ she said in a whisper. ‘But of course – Kyle fucking Doyle.’
Kyle Doyle was one of Nelson’s best friends and a mammoth of a man – greasy hair, chubby cheeks, and always hiking up his trousers, the ones that every couple of minutes or so would slip down below the pouch of his belly, well fed, as it was, from a daily serving of beer and fried food from one of the many junk food outlets at Logan International Airport in Boston, where he worked. Doyle was an Assistant Director for the US Federal Air Marshall Service in Massachusetts – a position that would grant him easy access to any national or international flight manifest from any airline flying inside US territory.
And that had been Mary’s mistake.
Just a few days after her identity change process was finalized, once she had secured all four of her new bank accounts, Mary had purchased an airline ticket to Nashville, with the booking being made under her new name – Mary Smith. She flew out from JFK airport in New York City, not Logan International in Boston, but even so, armed with her new name, Doyle could’ve easily done a search through all the flight manifests from aircrafts flying out of any US airport, starting with all the ones in Massachusetts before branching out to adjacent estates – and New York City was just 230 miles south of Boston.
It had clearly taken Doyle a while to properly narrow the resultlist down. There was no telling how many other Mary Smiths would’ve shown up on those flight manifests, but in the days following her first-ever flight to Nashville, Mary flew back and forth between Nashville and New York City twice more, with the second time being the final move. That must’ve been what had alerted Doyle because five months later, gangster-suit man had finally found her.
Mary walked over to the minibar and poured herself another glass of wine. From her handbag, she retrieved her burner smartphone and connected to the hotel’s Wi-Fi. She knew that she needed to start again – find a brand-new city to move to – and since she was sure that she had lost gangster-suit man once she left The Whiskey Bent Saloon through its kitchen door, he too would have to start again, but this time, he would have no passenger manifest to follow because Mary wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice.
She sipped her wine and stepped out onto the room’s balcony. Despite also being a touristic city, Franklin was, without a doubt, a much quieter town than Nashville. At that time of night, the streets surrounding The Comfort Inn hotel seemed deserted – no vehicles driving by… no pedestrians walking around anywhere.
Mary welcomed the cooling night breeze that kissed her skin and brushed at her hair, before thinking back to the man outside The Whiskey. She tried to imagine what he had done after he’d realized that he’d lost her. The most probable move would’ve been to stake out her apartment, hoping that Mary would turn up to collect a few things before making a run for it. Going straight from The Broadway to the bus station, the train station, or even the airport, were also possibilities, albeit unlikely. For that, gangster-suit man would’ve had to have anticipated that after spotting him outside The Whiskey, Mary was not only prepared, but also all set up to get the hell out of Nashville at the blink ofan eye – CIA spy style – and the chances of him having predicted that were very slim, to say the least.
As crazy as it might’ve sounded at the time, Mary’s go-bag plan seemed to have already paid off… and with dividends, because while she was already on the move, gangster-suit man was back in Nashville, wondering where the hell she was.
Mary returned to the room, refilled her wine glass and opened up the browser on her cellphone. After a lot of pondering and a lot of Internet searching, she decided to stick to her original plan and for now, stay within the ‘Bible Belt’, where the biggest concentration of women whose first name was ‘Mary’ resided. She also decided to stick with the idea of relocating to a large city, instead of a smaller one, for the same reasons as before, but this time she picked a place even larger than Nashville – the fourth largest and most populated city in the USA: Houston, Texas.
Twenty-Two
There was no doubt in Mary’s mind that she had figured out exactly how Nelson had managed to track her down all the way in Nashville – Kyle Doyle, with the help of the flight manifest. There was no other explanation, so the first item on Mary’s new ‘no go’ list was air travel – at least not for a while. She’d also decided that for good measure, she would bounce from city to city for a bit before finally reaching her desired destination of Houston. The bouncing around had been something else that she had picked up from spy movies, and since she was in no hurry to get to Texas and she certainly had the means to afford as many hotel nights as she wished, bouncing around sounded just like the kind of distraction she needed – but her first priority was to get out of Franklin… pronto. It was too close to Nashville, and despite having managed to give gangster-suit man the slip, Mary had this nagging feeling that she was still far from safe. The faster she got out of town, or better yet, the faster she got out of Tennessee, the better.
George Oakfield’s cliché sentence came back to her – ‘This is the first day of the rest of your life.’
With that in mind, just a few hours later, as the night sky began morphing itself into a bright-blue and cloudless morning, Mary took the first bus out of Franklin Transit Center bus station, heading south. The bus she hopped on was half empty and heading to Birmingham, Alabama. It was just a short three-hour trip,but it got her across the state line, and as soon as she got out of Tennessee, Mary could feel her heartbeat finally starting to settle into a steady rhythm.
Twenty-Three
The man in the gangster suit scratched his chin, as he watched the CCTV camera footage from the Transit Center bus station in Franklin, Tennessee. He’d been doing so for less than five minutes when he finally spotted her, boarding an early bus to Birmingham, Alabama.
‘And there you are,’ he whispered to himself, freezing the image on the screen, with the touch of a button. ‘You really are a clever one, aren’t you,MissMary Smith? I have to give you that. And very well prepared too.’
In the footage, Mary looked a little different than she had the night before, at The Whiskey Bent Saloon – certainly a lot less glamorous. Her hair was tucked under a baseball cap that she had clearly purchased from the hotel in which she had spent the night. Her jacket was zipped up to her neck, and she kept her hands firmly tucked into its pockets. She had no carry-on luggage with her, except for her handbag, which was slung over her shoulder. As she boarded the bus, Mary had kept her head low – eyes on the ground – so that the CCTV camera wouldn’t capture her face, but the man had no doubt that it was her – she was wearing the exact same outfit as last night – which wasn’t exactly surprising, given that she’d never gone back to her apartment in Nashville to pack a bag. The man in the gangster suit knew that because he had waited for her there the entire night.
After he had placed the call to his employer to inform him that he had lost Mary, he tried to anticipate what her next move would be, and the most obvious one would be for her to return to her flat to at least pack a bag before hitting the road again, but that was not what she did.
The man had been given a lot of information on Mary, including that she was a very smart woman, but what he was never told was that she either had some kind of photographic memory, or an incredible talent when it came to remembering faces.
At Nelson Stewart’s trial, just over seven months ago, gangster-suit man had sat as far back as he possibly could – last row – last seat on the far left. During Samantha Stewart’s testimony, her eyes had circled the courtroom, like a teacher’s during a lecture, trying to make sure that every student’s attention was on her, but it was a large courtroom, with one hundred and twenty-five seats, and most of them were taken. There was no way that six months later she could still remember every face in that room, unless she had an eidetic memory or a gift when it came to remembering faces. But last night, outside The Whiskey, Mary Smith had done just that – recognized him – even though their eyes had met for just a fraction of a second. Why else would she have fled the way she did?
This morning, as the sun cracked through the horizon line, the man, who had been sitting in his car all night, hidden away, but with a clear view to the entrance door to Mary’s apartment building, knew that he’d anticipated the wrong move from her. Mary wasn’t coming back to her flat to pack a bag, grab some money, or anything else. She was already gone, but the worst of it was that now, she also had at least a five-hour head start on him.
‘She jumped into a cab last night,’ the man had finally concluded, angry with himself for not thinking of that earlier. Every other possibility would’ve been too risky for anybody who knew that they had just been tracked down. Survival instinct would tell anyone in that situation to get away… fast… not wait for a bus,order an Uber, or try to get away on foot – but if Mary didn’t go back to her flat, then where did she go at that time of night with nothing but her handbag? A hotel? A friend’s house? Where?
He knew that right then, only two people would have the answer to that question – Mary herself and the cab driver who had picked her up.
Now the race was on to find the cab driver, which despite having a precise five to ten minute window – from the time that Mary had spotted him across the road, until the time that guitar man had come out again looking for her – it still took gangster-suit man almost two and a half hours to find out which cab companies had picked up a single female passenger around The Whiskey Bent Saloon area at that exact time last night. Four different drivers made the list, but only one had had a female passenger who matched Mary’s description. The driver had dropped her off at The Comfort Inn Hotel, in Franklin – just off the I-65.
At the hotel, all that gangster-suit man had to do was flash his fake FBI ID to find out that they had only one guest who had checked in late last night – Vicky Anderson. She had also checked out first thing this morning – before 6:00 a.m. And that was how he came to be sitting inside the control room at the Transit Center bus station in Franklin, going over all the CCTV camera footage from every bus leaving the station early that morning. Mary had jumped onto a Greyhound bus that had left at 6:25 a.m., heading towards the city of Birmingham, in Alabama.
The man checked his watch – 10:55 a.m. Mary would’ve already arrived, as the trip from Franklin to Birmingham took around three hours. He could make it in just under two-and-a-half, depending on traffic, but he had to leave pronto.
