Still, she had to call him.
She speed-dialed Reilly and described what she was seeing.
“What do you want me to do?” she asked.
He went silent for a quick second, then said, “Don’t engage them, okay? Do not engage them in any way. Like you said, we don’t know how many of them are there. There’s got to be cops in the plaza or close by. I’ll get you some backup.”
“Sean, I don’t want a shoot-out here. Not with all these people. Not with Alex and Tess in the middle of it.” Instead, she ran through her idea with him.
He exhaled with frustration, then said, “You’d be leaving them unguarded.”
“Yes, but with a bit of luck, they won’t have anyone on them.”
He went silent again, clearly juggling between unattractive options.
“I can do this, Sean,” she insisted. “It’ll work.”
“Okay. But be safe, Jules. No heroics. I mean it.”
She cracked a nervous smile and was suddenly aware of how quickly her heart was beating. “I’ll keep you posted.” Then she hung up.
44
Jules turned casually, walked over to the theater, and slipped inside. She spotted Tess and Alex immediately. They were sitting at the edge of a row, with Tess on the aisle seat and Alex beside her, his face all lit up with wonder.
Jules crouched down beside her.
“There’s a couple of guys outside. I think they might be bad news.”
She looked at Tess, making sure the information sank in calmly, before adding, “We don’t have much time. There’s a chance they’re tracking you through your cell, so I need you to give it to me. I’m going to use it to lead them away from you.”
“But—”
“I spoke to Sean,” she insisted, keeping her tone calm and low. “It’s the safest option. Give me your phone.”
Tess took out her iPhone and passed it to her. Jules guessed that the novelist had been through her share of potentially lethal situations and probably knew that efficiency was often the key to survival.
“Stay here for ten more minutes,” she told Tess. “Then meet me by the exit of the lot where we parked.”
She handed Tess the keys to her car. Jules reckoned it would take Tess and Alex no more than ten minutes to walk to the parking lot they’d left it in. Once the three of them had regrouped they could drive straight onto Park Boulevard and slip away.
“Good luck,” Tess said, before putting her hand on Jules’s forearm. “And thanks.”
Jules nodded, then skulked back toward the doors.
She turned off the iPhone, slipped it into a pocket, then left the theater. She hated leaving Tess and Alex alone, but the risk of staying with them and being overpowered was even worse.
She emerged from the darkness into the brightness of the museum’s main exhibit area and scanned her immediate surroundings. The two hostiles were now over by an unusual, boomerang-shaped plane. If they were pros and they were tracking Tess’s iPhone, then they were going about it the right way—anticipating the movement of the target, but positioning themselves so they could change direction if they needed to. Staying close, but not too close.
More confirmation that they were what she suspected.
Using a group of museum visitors as cover, Jules ducked low and walked briskly toward the main entrance. She figured she had maybe half a minute or so before the hostiles knew they’d been made. GPS tracking was pretty good, but it wasn’t perfect. The signal had a massive bounce before it got to the phone company. Then there was the latency between the signal itself and whatever cell network the hostiles were using to track it. As long as she had the iPhone turned back on within thirty seconds, she’d buy herself the time she needed to put some distance between them, and the hostiles wouldn’t ever know they’d lost signal lock.
Jules left the museum by the main rotunda entrance and switched the iPhone back on. She ensured the slide-lock was active, then headed north toward the Museum of Art. The plaza was still heaving with summer-camp day-trippers, groups of tourists climbing in and out of buses, parents helping their toddlers out of SUVs, and lovers holding hands and carrying picnic baskets—all of them enjoying the gorgeous weather. Jules knew she couldn’t allow herself to walk any faster than an excited four-year-old, but she used every bit of cover available: gaggles of retirees, oversize vehicles, and families arguing over what they should see first. As she stepped onto the wide sidewalk that ran alongside the parking lanes, she joined a large group of tourists and allowed them to swallow her.
She tried to avoid looking back. The hostiles would certainly know what Alex looked like—they might even have a picture of Tess—but there was no way they knew Jules by sight. To pick out one four-year-old boy from a moving crowd wasn’t going to be easy for them. Jules just had to trust that the men wouldn’t notice they were following a false trail until it no longer mattered.
After another hundred yards, she ducked behind some trees, found cover, and peered back the way she’d come. Sure enough, the hostiles were following, eyes darting between the handheld and the large group of tourists moving slowly away from the museum.
As Jules worked her way through the trees and up the ramp toward the Marie Hitchcock Puppet Theatre, she saw the perfect move. Crawling at a snail’s pace heading away from the theater was an electric buggy carrying two elderly ladies. Emblazoned on the side of the cart were the words SAN DIEGO ZOO.
The zoo was all the way at the other end of the park, and the cart was obviously heading that way. Jules glanced back, assessed that she was out of sight of the hostiles, and sprinted up to the buggy.
She slowed right down when she reached it and caught the driver’s eye.
“Excuse me,” she asked, motioning for him to stop.
He hit the brake.
“Will you be coming back this way?” she asked him, smiling. “I’ve got my grandparents here and they could use a ride to the zoo.”
The buggy’s driver told her he’d come back for them in about twenty minutes. Jules thanked him and stepped aside, and as the buggy started up, she dropped Tess’s iPhone into one of its rear baskets, then ducked back into the cover of the trees and waited.
Barely twenty seconds later, the two hostiles passed within ten yards of her as they tracked the iPhone’s GPS signal. She stayed put and watched them, every nerve pulsing, then slipped out from her cover and started walking back.
After a few seconds, she glanced behind her and saw them rounding the curve. She was now out of their sight line. She jogged back toward the museum, her jog quickly turning into a sprint as she put more distance between her and them. Soon the Air and Space Museum was just a couple of hundred yards ahead of her, and she was about to take a pathway down to the lot where she’d left her car, along a service road that ran between two large administration buildings, when she stopped in her tracks.
There was a third hostile.
Another Latino, no more than thirty yards away, standing right at the edge of the lot, next to a black Chevy Tahoe SUV—the one she’d seen on the clip from the dead deputy’s in-car video. He also had a phone cord going up to his ear.