“Ah, man…!” Jack called, and stopped running. He checked his watch, then called, “Damn.” At the same time he reached under the hem of his jacket and drew his Glock.
Whether his showmanship was impressing the car’s occupant Jack didn’t know, but he decided to err on the side of caution. If Möller was inside this car, Jack was an easy target. He had no cover.
Twenty feet ahead, the Subaru slowed its reverse course, did a Y-turn, then headed toward Jack. The headlights pinned him. The car picked up speed, veering slightly left to take Jack down its passenger side.
As the Subaru drew even with him, the passenger window rolled down a couple of inches. Through the gap came faint strains of easy-listening jazz.
“Hey,” a man’s voice called from the car’s darkened interior.
Jack could see nothing through the window.
“You looking for the train? You just missed it.”
Jack dropped his head in dejection, shading his face with the hood, and raised his hand in thanks. “Really? No one else got off?”
“Just my wife. Sorry.”
The voice didn’t sound like Möller’s, Jack thought. Unless he was disguising his voice, that was. It seemed unlikely. Why stop at all? Why not just drive on past?
“You need help or something?” the voice asked.
“Nah, thanks,” Jack replied in his best SWNE — Southwestern New England — accent. In his own mind he sounded like an extra from the set of Good Will Hunting. “Ah, man, she’s gonna kill me.”
As the car sped off, Jack memorized the license plate, then watched it turn onto Meadow Street and head south toward the highway.
He holstered his Glock, pulled out his cell phone, and speed-dialed Effrem. It rang four times, then went to voice mail. “What the hell?” Jack muttered. “Come on, pick up…”
He dialed again and got the same result. He texted in all caps: CALL!
Jack walked the rest of the way to the platform. Nine or so cars remained in the lot. Better safe than sorry. As he neared the compact car’s parking spot something on the ground glittered under the platform lights. He pulled out his penlight and panned the beam ahead.
Sitting in the dirt was a small mound of glass that reflected green.
Auto glass. From where the Subaru’s driver’s door would have been.
Jack turned and started running.
The pursuit was hopeless, he knew, but realizing he might have just been talking to Stephan Möller, might have just watched him drive away into the night, overrode rational thought. He turned onto Meadow and sprinted down the sidewalk toward the next intersection, some three hundred yards away, glancing at the parked cars as he went.
Panting, his lungs burning slightly in the cold air, Jack reached the intersection and stopped. He looked left, saw nothing, looked right. A quarter-mile away, a white car sat at a stop sign, its right blinker on.
The car turned and disappeared.
Jack’s cell phone trilled. He pulled it out, checked the screen: Effrem.
“Where are you?” Jack demanded.
“Uh, I don’t know. A few blocks away from the train station. Just a sec… State Street. I thought I saw him, so I followed. It wasn’t him.”
No kidding. God damn it!
“Why are you breathing hard?” asked Effrem.
16
By the time Effrem had made his way back to the intersection, Jack had already logged into the Enquestor portal and punched in the Subaru’s license-plate number. As he climbed into the passenger seat the results appeared on his screen:
Eunice Miller
6773 Willow Drive
Wolcott, CT 06716
Without looking up, Jack said, “Find a coffee shop or diner or something.”
Using his Yelp app, Effrem located a Denny’s on Division Street, about a mile to the west, and started heading that way.
Having caught his breath and cooled off, Jack said as calmly as possible, “The next time I call you, answer the phone.”
“I couldn’t. I was afraid I’d lose him.”
Jack repeated, “The next time I call you, answer the damn phone.”
“Okay, I will. Sorry.”
“And I didn’t tell you to follow anyone. I told you to keep in touch.”
“You didn’t tell me not to follow anyone, either.”
Jack bit off the sharp reply on the tip of his tongue. Effrem had a point. They lived in different worlds. What Jack considered obvious or implied might be neither to Effrem. Effrem didn’t have the experience to know when initiative crossed into recklessness, or perhaps even the discipline to pull himself back across the line.
A thought struck Jack: He could easily imagine John Clark or Gerry Hendley saying the same things about him. And they wouldn’t be wrong.
“What’s happened?” asked Effrem.
“I think I might have been talking to Möller. He was right there, within arm’s reach,” Jack replied, then explained the encounter.
If it had been Möller, had he recognized Jack? Back at the nature preserve Möller’s attention had been divided between Effrem and his SUV and Jack and his Glock, and Jack’s cap had been pulled low. It was a toss-up.
“If it was him, why stop at all?”
“To check me out, maybe.”
“Maybe, but they’ve tried to kill you twice. It sounds like you were an easy target standing in that lot. Why not take advantage of it?”
“Good point.”
Then again, if Möller’s sole focus was escape—
Jack caught himself. Leave it.
The world in which he and the others at The Campus moved was one where there could always be a wheel within another wheel. At some point you had to stop the recursive thinking and make a choice. For someone like Jack, who was blessed or cursed with a fertile imagination, this was often challenging. It wasn’t unlike chess, a game he both loved and hated. He had read somewhere that the number of available piece positions was represented by a 1 followed by 43 zeros, and this was governed by strict rules and limited space. Neither of these factors existed in Jack’s world.
Still, Möller’s theft of the Subaru seemed like a departure for him. So far the man’s E&E — evasion and escape — plan had felt paint-by-numbers, with little room for improvisation. He’d used a credit card to call attention to his location, a risky but often effective strategy, especially when those pursuing you are part of a larger, less nimble force like the Secret Service or FBI, both agencies you’d expect to be called on to hunt down the would-be assassin of a VIP. Perhaps Möller and whoever he was working for had planned his exfiltration based on this assumption. Schrader was ex — German Special Forces. Möller might be as well, in which case their doctrine might be steeped more in rote response than it was in flexibility.
If so, stealing a car didn’t fit.
Unless Möller’s calf wound had worsened enough that he went off script.
Effrem pulled into the Denny’s lot and chose an open parking spot before the main doors. “Coffee? Anything to eat?”
“Just coffee.”
Jack used Enquestor to pull up Eunice Miller’s Department of Motor Vehicles file. The picture showed a woman with a plump face and short gray curly hair. Her birth date put her at sixty-five years old. According to Jack’s map, her address in Wolcott was about fifteen minutes north of Waterbury, off Highway 69.