Regarding him, she raised a hand to block the sun. “So you developed a thing against bullies?”
“I’ve never sent them Christmas cards.” He turned onto Barnstable Road and accelerated past a crowd of seafood shacks and souvenir shops. “How about you? How did you become a Fortune 50 °CEO?”
She sighed. “As it happens, my father’s a journalist.”
He smiled in spite of a bad feeling about where she was headed.
“Ever read Love Bus Monthly?” she asked.
“Somehow I’ve missed it.”
“He published it out of our Love Bus, which was one of about fifty Volkswagen Kombinationskraftwagens in our hippie-come-lately colony in New Mexico.”
“So you grew up in a Volkswagen Kombi?”
“Only until I was five and needed to be less than a hundred miles from a school. We rented a house in Phoenix, which was hard on Mom and Dad because they believed two hundred cubic feet was ample living space for a family of three, and that anything more was socially irresponsible. So, to answer your question, anything they’d done or hoped to do, I tried to do the opposite, and—”
Her phone beeped with a new text message.
“Excuse me for a second.” With the speed and dexterity of a pianist, she keyed a response on her phone’s minuscule keypad. Meanwhile the phone kept beeping.
The old BMW’s heater chose to work, not that Mallery would have noticed if it hadn’t: She parried messages for the better part of the next four hours, at which point Thornton began to wish they’d taken her jet after all, because, he suspected, they were now being followed. A tall white Nissan van had stayed five or six cars behind them since New Haven, eight miles back.
On major commuting routes, if he recalled correctly, cars averaged 1.4 passengers, a figure that included the driver. Vans, used mainly for commercial purposes, averaged 1.1. Two people sat in the front seat of this van. Men or women, he couldn’t tell; they were too far back. By a two-to-one ratio over utility-company vans, all-white were America’s most common vans, making them the ideal hide-in-plain-sight ride, or what a surveillant might rent — at the New Haven Airport, perhaps. This was the height of leaf-peeping season, though, making it difficult to rent anything last-minute, particularly today, a Sunday. If you were lucky enough to get a van, you might get stuck with a deluxe model with eighteen extra inches of headroom nobody but an NBA player needs, at three times the price of an ordinary van. Then again, the two people in the deluxe white van might just be two tall people in a deluxe white van. Either way, Thornton heeded the fundamental guiding principle of countersurveillance—See your pursuers but don’t let them know you see them—and didn’t try for a better look.
“You hungry?” he asked Mallery.
She remained focused on a spreadsheet. “Not really.”
“Mind if I stop at a McDonald’s?”
She smiled. “Someone has to keep cardiologists in business.”
He crossed over from the fast lane, resetting the blinker well in advance of the exit. The van remained in the fast lane. Then, a quarter of a mile before the exit, it signaled its intent to turn right.
Taking in the road signs lining the off-ramp, with listings of gas stations, hotels, and restaurants, Thornton said, “Crap, only Taco Bell.” He turned off the blinker and sped up.
As did the van. He felt as if he’d just swallowed an icicle. Unless the bugs had somehow malfunctioned, whoever installed them had no reason to tail him or Mallery; the devices themselves could serve as tracking beacons. A good-case scenario, he thought, was that the two people in the van were FBI. But the Bureau would deploy a fleet of surveillance vehicles and maybe a helicopter, not just one van. A single van was too easily detected, as Thornton had just established.
His mind leaped to the worst-case scenario, which, unfortunately, fit the facts: The eavesdroppers were onto him and Mallery, and the van carried assassins, one to drive and the other to fire something like a compact active denial system, so that the killing would appear to be a traffic accident. Assassins liked highways because targets were especially vulnerable in speeding vehicles. Also mistakes were more likely and more perilous, and the incidents seldom yielded reliable witnesses. And what better highway to stage such an operation than the Connecticut Turnpike, commonly referred to by locals as the Highway of Death? Connecticut had designed its segment of I-95 to accommodate a maximum of 90,000 vehicles per day, but after five decades of explosive suburban growth along the corridor and the installation of two of the country’s largest casinos, 200,000 vehicles was the daily norm, and the fatality rate of 2.7 per million vehicle-miles of travel nearly tripled the national average.
Thornton’s car had retained the handling that made BMW’s name, but it had a hard time topping ninety these days, so he doubted he could outrun the Nissan, the van’s two tons notwithstanding. He might try anyway in hope of getting caught at a speed trap. But with vehicles so often limited to forty miles per hour by all the traffic, the Connecticut Turnpike offered such slim pickings that state troopers didn’t bother.
A pair of yellow arches shone through the trees lining the road. A McDonald’s in the food court at the next rest stop. Or, as Thornton thought of it, an escape route.
“Finally,” he exclaimed, signaling right and accelerating toward the off-ramp.
The van followed.
Mallery didn’t look up.
Thornton recalled a recent incident that he’d tracked online but never wrote about. Two men wearing ski masks and gloves entered a bank in nearby New Canaan, Connecticut. Brandishing guns, they ordered the customers and employees to lie on the floor. Encountering no resistance, one robber stood watch by the front door; the other jumped over the counter, heaped cash from the tellers’ drawers into his duffel bag, then had the manager and assistant manager go to the cash vault and enter their combinations. The thieves made off with $103,400, in a Honda Accord reported stolen in New Haven an hour earlier. The car was recovered by police a half mile from the bank minus the bank robbers and any substantive clues. At the time, the story hadn’t been RealStory material. But, Thornton thought, it might be useful today.
He planned to enter the food court, find a policeman, and, conveying with a finger to his lips that stealth was in order, hand off a note explaining that the two New Canaan bank robbers were about, having parked a tall white Nissan van outside. For the sake of credibility, he would write the note on his reporter’s pad. Flashing the distinctive notebook — it was half the width of an ordinary page in order to fit in a back pocket — usually got him into crime scenes faster than an actual press credential. It was a good bet that the cop would read the note and investigate. Then, while the men in the van protested their innocence — maybe while being taken to a holding cell — Thornton and Mallery could get away.
The exit ramp sliced through a field of patchy brown grass before forking, one lane for cars, the other for trucks. Thornton took the car route, as did both a Saab and a station wagon behind him. The white van followed.
While the Saab and station wagon rounded the parking lot to get on the line for drive-through, the van accompanied Thornton to the food court.