“Get to the goddamn point!”
“Okay, okay. So I’m watching the van and I see the rear door swing open. No big deal, but then this sim hops out of the bushes and jumps inside.”
The PCA’s seams let out a faint squeak as Luca’s grip tightened. “Was it her?”
“Nah. This was a skinny male, but you could tell from his coveralls he’s from the crib.”
“He’s leading them to her! Where are they now?”
“About twenty-five yards ahead of me, heading back toward the crib.”
“Don’t lose them. You hear me, Snyder? Do…not…lose them. And don’t let them spot you either. You spook them, they’ll take off.”
“Maybe I should contact the others so we can tag team them on the tail.”
“Good idea. No, wait.”
Luca’s mind raced over the possibilities. These people had fooled him before. Was it sheer luck that Snyder spotted the sim jumping into the van, or was hesupposed to see it? The expected response was to mobilize the entire surveillance team, which would leave the sim crib unguarded. Could that be their real purpose?
“Do it this way. Lowery and Stritch have the front door. While Lowery takes the car to back you up, tell Stritch to go inside and find out from that jerk Morales which of his sims is missing. If the sim from the van somehow makes it back to the crib, I want to know which one it is.”
“Got it,” Snyder said.
“I’m on my way over now. I can’t emphasize how important this is, Snyder. Don’t blow it.”
He returned to Lister. “Gotta go. Tell the folks upstairs our ‘big manpower commitment’ just paid off.”
He ended the call without waiting for a response. He told Maria not to wait up as he rushed for the door.
“You did a good job, Tome,” Romy said, feeling for the agitated old sim.
Tome sat hunched on a rear seat of the van, distraught that he’d failed to find Meerm. Romy had moved out of the front. She and Zero flanked him.
“Yes,” Zero added. “An excellent job. But now tell us again what Beece said. Try to remember exactly.”
Romy listened closely to Tome’s recitation of Beece’s fractured directions to Meerm’s hiding place, trying to fathom a way to put them to practical use.
And then from the front seat Patrick said, “I think we’ve got trouble.”
Zero leaned forward. “What’s wrong?”
“A green Taurus has been following us since McDonald’s.”
Romy tensed. “You’re sure?”
“He’s hanging back, but I just made a couple of turns and he’s still with us.”
“Let’s leave the neighborhood, then,” Zero said. “Head for one of the highways—22, 78, doesn’t matter, just so long as it takes us to the airport.”
“Newark Airport?”
“It’s a maze, and a traffic nightmare. If we can’t lose them there, we never will.”
“But what about Meerm?” Romy said.
Zero shook his head. “Too risky to look for her now. We’d lead them right to her.”
Romy hung on as they bounced along. She saw a red, white, and blueTO 78 sign flash by and cried out, “There!”
“Damn!” Patrick said. “Missed it! Look for another.”
Romy peered through the windshield. “Where are we?”
“Haven’t a clue.” Patrick shook his head. “Don’t know a thing about Newark.”
The buildings had fallen away behind them and now they were moving through a no-man’s-land of junkyards and railroad tracks, bouncing along a rutted gravel path.
“The Taurus isn’t pretending anymore,” Patrick said, and Romy thought she detected a tremor in his voice. “He’s getting closer. And there’s another car behind him.”
“He knows we’ve spotted him,” Zero said. He moved to the rear doors and crouched among the overnight bags he’d told Romy and Patrick to bring. If they found Meerm, they wouldn’t be going home. She watched him peer through a small, unpainted area of one of the windows. “Looks like he brought back-up along. I was afraid of this.”
“He’s getting closer!” Patrick called from the front.
Romy moved back beside Zero. “What do you think they’ll do?”
“Try to stop us, find out who we are, maybe kill us. Except for Tome. They’ll want to interrogate him.”
Romy sensed a cold wave slip over her, just as it had last week when it had come time to dose the man called David Palmer with his own truth drug. As she felt her emotions crystallizing, falling one by one into deep-freeze hibernation, she reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out a .45 caliber HK semiautomatic. She worked the slide to chamber a shell.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
Zero’s head swiveled to the pistol, then to her. “Where’d you get that?”
“From one of the two creeps who invaded my home.”
“How long have you been carrying it?”
“Ever since two creeps invaded my home.”
“He’s riding my tail!” Patrick cried from the front.
Romy gestured with her HK toward the rear door. “Hold that open and we’ll stop this right now.”
Zero shook his head. “It may come to that, but let’s try my way first.” He opened a heavy-duty plastic cooler and reached inside.
“You were ready for something like this?”
“I try to be prepared for everything.”
Despite the situation, she had to smile. “You must have been a great Boy Scout.”
He looked at her again. “No. Never had the chance.” His voice sounded sad. “But I think I would have loved it.”
He came up with a red, softball-size object that jiggled in his gloved hand.
Romy stared at it. “A water balloon?”
“Not quite. Put your pistol away and get ready to open the door for me.”
Romy didn’t know what Zero was up to, but she’d learned to trust his judgment. And his preternatural calm bolstered her confidence. She stowed the pistol and unlatched the door.
Zero called toward the front: “Do we have any curves coming up, Patrick?”
“About thirty yards.”
Zero turned to Romy. “Get ready. Five-four-three-two-one-open!”
Romy gave the door a shove. As soon as it swung open, revealing the green Taurus no more than half a dozen feet from their rear bumper, Zero launched the balloon with a gentle underhand toss.
Romy watched it wobble through the air and land on their pursuer’s windshield—which then disappeared in a splatter of dark green paint.
The car swerved as the windshield wipers came on.
“Those won’t help,” Zero said. “Oil-based.”
And then the van leaned to the right as it rounded a curve, but the Taurus kept going straight, bounding off the gravel roadway and ramming nose first into a deep ditch. It hung there, trunk skyward, steam boiling from under its crumpled hood.
She heard Patrick laugh. “What the hell?”
“Not in the clear yet,” Zero said, staring out the rear door at the second car. He had another paint balloon in his hand. “Come on,” he whispered. “Just a little closer.”
But the second car, a dark blue Jeep, hung back. Obviously they’d seen what happened to the Taurus.
“Have to try something else,” Zero said. He rummaged in the chest and came up with a plastic container. “Here. Toss these out.”
Romy lifted the lid to find a couple of dozen steel objects that looked like jacks. But these were much bigger, and instead of six tips, these had only four, each ending in a sharp barbed point.
“What are—?”
“Road stars. Just toss them out. They’re configured so that they always land with a point up.”
Romy emptied the container, watched the Jeep roll over them, and waited for its tires to go flat.
“Hmmm,” Zero said. “Must have self-sealing tires. The stars will chew them up eventually but we don’t have time for that. They’re probably calling for more back-up now.”
He pulled two lengths of chain from the chest, each with a dozen or so road stars attached, and dropped them out the back.
Again Romy watched the Jeep run over them, but nothing happened.