Up ahead, the F-150 was receding alarmingly, a fact that wasn’t lost on the Ford’s owner, who was now sitting ramrod-straight next to Reilly, his eyes lasered on the vehicle his daughter was in.
“He’s getting away,” the man blurted. “Why didn’t you just hijack a scooter? Would have been faster.”
Reilly frowned and squeezed the pedal harder, hoping to coax an extra mile per hour or two from the Chevy’s asthmatic engine. It was no use. The Vega’s speedometer probably hadn’t swung past the half-century mark in decades — if ever. The faint smell of pot and patchouli that impregnated its interior only served to confirm this.
“Fuel,” Reilly asked. “How much have you got in your tank?”
The man’s face creased as he thought for a quick moment, then said, “It’s low. Less than a quarter full. I was going to fill up after we ate.”
Reilly asked, “So what are we talking about, distance-wise? How far can he get?”
The man thought again for a beat, then said, “Seventy, eighty miles, maybe?”
Reilly glanced at the Vega’s fuel gauge. It was almost half full. He processed this. Given the speed the F-150 was traveling at, that suggested an hour’s driving time. And with the F-150 pulling away at a rate of ten or fifteen miles per hour — or more — it would soon be out of sight, despite the flat terrain and the more or less straight road they were hurtling — well, gliding — down.
He had to find a way to bridge that gap. Quickly.
“Who is this guy?” the man asked. “What the hell’s going on?”
Reilly glanced across at him. The man was alarmed enough. “He’s a person of interest. We need to stop him.”
The man stared at him, his eyes wide with disbelief. “Seriously?” he raged. “That’s it? You’re going to stonewall me with some kind of ‘it’s classified’ bullshit? That guy’s got my daughter. He’s got Kelly.”
Reilly’s guts tightened. He could understand the man’s anger. He’d only recently been through something similar himself, with his now five-year-old son, Alex. He looked at the man and could just feel the fear and worry that had to be coursing through him.
“The only thing you need to know right now is that I will do everything in my power to get your daughter back,” Reilly said. “That’s priority one. Everything else has to follow on from that. Okay?”
Even as the words left his lips, he was twisting inside, pained by the knowledge that he was partly lying. Of course, the man’s daughter would be a priority. Just not the priority. Of course, he’d do everything in his power to get her back safely. But ultimately — ultimately — the man Reilly only knew by his online avatar — Faustus — had the potential to unleash a lot of damage. Lethal damage. He needed to be neutralized.
Reilly hoped it would never come down to it, never reach a point where a binary decision had to be made, where it would have to be one or the other but not both. Some decisions were too horrific to contemplate. At Quantico, during training, they referred to them as Coventry moments, after the widely accepted but false story that during World War II, Churchill had allowed the city to be sacrificed and not have it evacuated so as not to let the Germans know that his men had broken the Nazis’ Enigma code and knew about the devastating raid to come. It was nonsense, of course. The code-breakers hadn’t known that the target was Coventry. Still, the story had become widely accepted, and the myth endured.
Reilly hoped there wasn’t a Coventry moment waiting for him.
The man didn’t seem convinced by Reilly’s words. “You bet your ass she’s priority one. I’ll see to that.”
Reilly held the man’s gaze, and nodded. “What’s your name?”
“Garber. Glen Garber. You?”
“Sean Reilly.”
“That your real name, or is that also classified?”
Reilly shrugged. “It’s real.”
“Where’s the rest of your men?” Garber asked. “Don’t you at least have a partner or something? You guys work in twos, right?”
Reilly grimaced. Under normal circumstances, Garber was right. But this case had been anything but normal right from the get-go. “I’ve been undercover and I didn’t have a phone,” he told Garber. “Then things happened real quick. I had to improvise. I was hoping to connect with my people from the service center.”
“But you didn’t?”
Reilly shook his head. “We’re on our own.”
“Well, you’ve got a phone now,” Garber told him. “Use it. Get help.”
But Reilly already had another idea. “I will,” he said. “But first, tell me this. Does you daughter have a cell phone on her?”
Garber’s expression clouded, then morphed from confusion to concern. “Yes, she does, but — why?”
Reilly handed him back his phone. “Call her.”
Kelly couldn’t take her eyes off the man.
When you’re a kid, everyone tells you to be wary of strangers. She was old enough now to realize anyone could present a threat, but when she was younger, she imagined strangers as evil-looking people. Long, pointy noses, devil ears. Thick eyebrows and bad teeth.
This man just looked like an ordinary person. He could have been someone her dad worked with, one of his crew that built and fixed houses.
But there was something about the eyes. They were cold.
Worse than cold. They were dead.
When the man glanced over at her, and she looked into those eyes, she thought about when her dad took her to the Central Park Zoo on one of their trips into the city. She and her dad did everything together since her mom had died. She remembered the reptile exhibit, and how when they looked through the glass, you couldn’t tell if they were really looking at you or not.
Creepy eyes.
She noticed something else about him, too. He kept touching that cylinder, the thing that looked like a narrow Thermos, that was tucked between his thigh and the center console.
Kelly was thinking about that when the sound of her own cell phone made her jump. It was in her small purse, which was on the seat beside her.
“That you?” Kristoff asked, his head snapping right.
“Yeah.” She took out the phone, looked at it, saw that it was her dad. She couldn’t believe it hadn’t occurred to her to call him before now, but she was so scared, she wasn’t thinking straight.
“Well,” Kristoff said, “you better answer it.”
She did. “Dad! A man stole the truck! I’m in the truck!”
Glen said, “I know, sweetheart. I’m with a… I’m with a policeman. We’re following you. Are you okay? Has he hurt you?”
Kelly glanced at the man. “He hit my arm when I tried to take out the key. But it doesn’t hurt that much.”
“Honey, everything’s going to be okay. We just have to figure out how—”
“Give me the phone,” Kristoff said to Kelly. When she hesitated, his eyes narrowed and his voice dropped an octave. “Now.”
Kelly handed it over. Kristoff put it to his ear and said, “You’re the kid’s dad?”
“No,” said Reilly. “It was. Now it’s me.”
Kristoff smiled. “That’s you in that little wagon behind me, isn’t it? The Vega? Those things didn’t run when they were new forty years ago. Unless it’s got a rocket launcher on it, I think you’re screwed.”
“Let the kid go, Faustus. Keep the truck but let the kid out.”
Kristoff chuckled. “I think when I hit you in the head you suffered some kind of brain damage.”
“You pull over, and I’ll pull over at the same time. There’ll be half a mile between us. Let the kid out. I’ll drop her dad off. Then it’ll just be you and me. We don’t need a whole lot of collateral damage here.”