But a cool engine means they were already here, waiting for me.
Which means they knew where I would be.
I open the truck door and get in. At first examination, the truck is empty, the seats clean, the change tray empty.
Inside the glove compartment I find a legal registration and insurance in the name of a generic fleet-leasing company.
I reach down into the space between the seats, and I find a black knife with a three-inch retractable blade.
I don’t like knives, but I slide it into my pocket just the same. I may need it.
I fire up the engine. I drive out of the neighborhood at normal speed, avoiding the police cars rushing past me into the neighborhood.
I need to find someplace where I can think for a while, sort through the things that have happened to me in the last twenty-four hours without worrying about my safety.
I need someplace large and public. Someplace busy on a Sunday afternoon.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
THE MALL OF NEW HAMPSHIRE.
I drive into a three-quarters-full parking lot, find a corner space with a view of both the mall and the parking lot entrances, and back the truck into it. I keep the engine running for a full ten minutes as I wait, scanning the parking lot and monitoring all traffic coming into and out of the mall. There are no tails, no suspicious vehicles or foot traffic, only a mall security patrol in a small electric cart moving in a lazy arc at five miles per hour around the perimeter of the mall.
None of it has anything to do with me.
I turn the engine off and lean back into the seat, the tension bleeding off from my body for the first time in hours.
I pull out my iPhone. There’s no use trying to call Mother or Father again, but maybe there’s another way to get a message through.
I put the phone in secure mode and open the Instagram app. I lean out the window and take a photo of a trash can. In the description I write, “What a mess!” then I geotag the photo, not to the mall but to the neighborhood where the safe house was located. Under normal circumstances, I could upload this to a monitored Tumblr blog, and it would trigger an investigation by The Program as well as an immediate call to my phone to check up on me.
But now the photo will not upload, a progress wheel perpetually spinning on the screen. I check the phone and see that I have reception, but it doesn’t matter.
Every means of contacting The Program has been blocked.
Why?
I run through the facts.
First I lost communication with Father and Mother, now with The Program as a whole.
The safe house was gone and sanitized.
Finally I was attacked by a freelance team, waiting for me at the location of the safe house. The team may or may not have known who I was, but they knew enough to be there, waiting.
None of it makes sense.
I back up and go through the list again, this time starting with the disappearance of the dead Program soldier.
There’s something I’m not understanding, some critical fact that is missing.
I need more data if I’m going to make an informed deduction.
But how can I get it?
I am trained as a solo agent, a soldier alone in the world, my only links to Father, Mother, and The Program assets they can access.
With those links severed, there is no help for me.
Not Program help, at least.
There was only one time during a mission that I breached protocol and sought help outside The Program.
It was from a boy a few years younger than me.
His name was Howard.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
I STOP AT A BEST BUY INSIDE THE MALL.
I buy a new iPhone for cash, set up an account under an assumed named and e-mail address. I have credit cards under a dozen names, the numbers memorized in a sequence algorithm that exists only in my memory. These numbers are anonymized, even within The Program, a firewall to protect against the one-in-a-million-chance scenario where The Program’s data is breached.
I type in the memorized credit card number and security code, and I wait as the wheel spins in the prompt box.
A moment later, the card is accepted.
I take the phone to an isolated section of the mall. I find a bench and I sit down.
I send a text to a special number, a throwaway phone I purchased for Howard from an electronics shop in New York City.
My text is a simple, prearranged message: CAN’T SEE YOU NOW. CALL YOU LATER.
If Howard remembers the protocol, he will write down the number from this text message, destroy the first throwaway phone, then call me from a second phone that has never been used before. It should take no more than two minutes.
That’s if he remembers, if he hasn’t lost courage in the weeks since I’ve left New York, and if nothing bad has happened to him because of the secrets he learned after meeting me.
It takes ninety seconds for my new iPhone to vibrate.
“Howard?” I say.
“Holy shit,” Howard says. “It’s really you.”
“It’s me.”
“Holy shit holy shit holy shit,” he says.
“Nice to talk to you, too,” I say.
“Are you kidding? It’s great to talk to you. It’s incredible. I thought you would forget about me.”
I remember the first time I saw Howard in the cluster group at an Upper West Side private school in Manhattan. He was pale, curly haired, and excessively sweaty, never participating in the social life of the school but watching everything from the sidelines.
The memory makes me smile.
“How could I forget?” I say.
It was during my last mission that Howard used his hacking skills to help me research my target, the mayor of New York, and sort truth from fiction. In the process we became friends. I told him things about who I am and what I do. Things that put his life in danger.
When I left the city, I told Howard that I might call on him someday. I didn’t know that day would be so soon. Or how much trouble I would be in.
“What’s going on, Ben?” he says.
Benjamin. That’s the name he knows me by from my last mission.
I have to be very careful what I say to him on an open line. Even with his using a throwaway phone and our call bouncing through the crowded digital traffic of the Northeast.
“It’s good to hear your voice,” I say.
“Where are you?” he says, then interrupts before I can dismiss the question. “Wait, that’s a stupid thing to say. I can’t ask a question like that, can I? Let me think of a better question.”
“Howard—”
“I’m going to think of one. Just give me a second. This is much harder than I thought it would be.”
“Please, Howard—”
There’s silence on the line.
“You sound strange,” he says.
“I’m going through some things.”
“What kinds of things?”
I think about what it might mean if I tell Howard what’s happening. The risks he’ll take without fully understanding them, the risks I’ll take by opening myself up to him again.
It’s one thing for me to take risks. I’m trained for it, but Howard’s innocent, a high school hacker with a Japanese girlfriend he’s only met in avatar form online.
“Ben?” he says.
“What?”
“Whatever it is, you can tell me.”
The lessons of The Program ring in my head. I am a solo act. I can handle things on my own, without assistance from anyone or anything. When in doubt, I am to trust my instincts and intuition.
But what if The Program has been breached? What if Mother or Father need my help?