The First Prophet

by Kay Hooper

  EIGHT

  “I am guilty of criminal stupidity.”

  Sarah turned her head quickly to look at Tucker, startled by the grim anger in his voice. “Why? You couldn’t know they’d find us back there so quickly—”

  “That’s just it. I should have known. I should have realized.”

  “Realized what?”

  “How they could find us. Wasn’t there a sign back there for a rest stop coming up?”

  “I think so. But—”

  Tucker shook his head. “Let’s see if I’m right about this. Ah…” He took the exit for the rest stop, and minutes later he was pulling into a parking space slightly apart from several other cars. “There should be a flashlight in the glove compartment; could you get it for me, please?”

  She did, and handed it across. “Tucker—”

  “It’ll just take me a minute to check something. Stay here, Sarah.”

  He left the car running, and she watched in puzzlement as he got out and promptly dropped to the pavement to check underneath the car. He hadn’t been there more than a couple of minutes when another motorist paused on his way past and called sympathetically, “Hit something?”

  Tucker’s response was cheerful, “Yeah, a hell of a pothole back there. No damage, though.” He climbed to his feet and brushed at his jeans.

  “Your lucky day,” the man responded, and continued on his way.

  Tucker slid into the car and closed the door. “No damage at all,” he muttered, his face grim once more as he reached across Sarah to return the flashlight to the glove compartment.

  “What is it?”

  “A bug,” he said bitterly. “A damned electronic device used to track things. In this case—us. They didn’t have any trouble finding us because they knew exactly where we were.”

  It shouldn’t have surprised Sarah since they had already agreed that their enemy had to be both smart and organized. But it did surprise her. And it gave her a creepy feeling, even worse than being watched. Someone knew every place they had been, every stop they had made. It was as if a ghostly companion had come along in the backseat, smiling derisively because they’d thought they were alone.

  “Did you remove it?” she asked him, trying to keep her voice steady.

  “No.” He looked at her intently. “Let’s make it work for us.”

  “How?”

  “By leading them on a wild-goose chase while we head in another direction. How do you feel about a quick but roundabout trip to Chicago?”

  Her first impulse was to say that was the wrong direction, but she thought she had some idea of what he had in mind. “Then we’d double back?”

  “Later. After we get rid of this car.”

  Sarah thought about that, then said, “Wouldn’t it be easier to just put the bug somewhere else—maybe on a bus or something? You shouldn’t have to lose your car because of this.”

  He shook his head. “This bug has a magnetic seal, and I’m betting they’d know it if we tried to switch it to another vehicle. But if we switch vehicles, they won’t know. And by the time they find out, we should be well on our way back…to wherever it is we’re going. And I was about ready to trade this car in anyway. We need something more rugged, maybe a Jeep or some other four-wheel-drive utility. Our romp through the woods proved that.”

  “We couldn’t just switch vehicles here?”

  “We could. But if we want to throw them off the track for any time at all, we should head in a direction other than north for a while. Besides, I have a friend in Chicago in the car business who’ll let me trade this car and conveniently lose the paperwork for at least a few days, which might give us a little more time.”

  Paperwork could be traced, Sarah knew. And the DMV could almost certainly be accessed with a computer and the right codes, so they had to assume the enemy could do just that. At least that. But she still felt profoundly uneasy. So much time and distance would be lost. “If you have to wait until Monday to trade the car…”

  Tucker started to reach for her hand but stopped himself before he touched her—and both of them were aware of that reluctance. “Chicago’s only ten or twelve hours from here, Sarah. We won’t lose much time. We can take a more direct route east as soon as the trade’s made, and be heading north again by Monday night.”

  “With only a few days of September left.”

  “It’s a risk, I know. We could just tear the bug off and leave it in the trash can out there. But if we do that, there’s a good chance they’d still be able to find us. This car is fairly visible, and they know we’re driving it. They could guess we’d still be heading north. If they have the right connections in law enforcement or just the right equipment, they could track this car’s GPS. Or they could even have all the major highways covered somehow, have people on the lookout for us. But even more, we can’t be sure they didn’t plant something else in this car. Something I wouldn’t recognize as dangerous to us. And that’s a chance we can’t take.”

  Slowly, Sarah nodded. But in her mind was the panicked awareness of delay and time lost.

  It was almost October.

  Murphy’s third burner cell phone of the week rang, and she answered it with a frown. “Yeah?”

  “What the hell happened?”

  She didn’t allow his anger to spark her own. “I was doing my job. Did you enjoy your swim?”

  “Goddammit, Murphy. Did you put them on alert?”

  “Duran was coming.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you warn me? Five minutes earlier and I wouldn’t have ended up looking like a jackass.”

  “You’ll have to forgive me. I was more concerned with them than you.”

  He drew a breath and let it out slowly. But the words were still snapped out when he said, “This is what happens when the right hand doesn’t know what the left one is doing. I’ve warned you, Murphy.”

  “I work alone.”

  “And I have no problem with that. But when I’m working the other side of the street, I expect you to alert me before you act.”

  “Noted.” Her voice was level.

  “Are you on them now?” He had the wisdom not to sound triumphant.

  “Not exactly.”

  “Murphy—”

  “You worry too much, Brodie.”

  “Do you understand how much time we have left?” His voice was tight. “Are you aware that it’s probably just a matter of days now?”

  “I am aware of that, yes.” It was her turn to draw a breath in an attempt to hold on to patience.

  “Then do your job.”

  He hung up on her.

  Murphy closed the burner phone and removed the battery for good measure, tossing it into a trash can as she passed while the phone itself was drop-kicked into the gutter. “But that’s what I’m doing, Brodie,” she murmured to herself. “My job.”

  She pulled yet another disposable phone from the leather pouch hanging against her hip, turned it on, and punched in a familiar number. As soon as the call was answered, she spoke briskly.

  “I kept him from making contact. And he’s pissed.”

  “Never mind him. He’ll get over it.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Murphy muttered. “He has a mean right hook. I’ve seen him use it. I’d rather not be on the receiving end, thanks all the same.”

  “With a little luck, you won’t be anywhere near Brodie for a while, so relax.”

  “Yeah, right. And in the meantime?”

  “Chicago.”

  Sarah didn’t say much after they turned back onto the highway, grappling with the growing certainty of just how far-reaching and complex this situation obviously was. And how terrifying.

  The lake had seemed like a safe place, a place where they could rest and regroup, make plans. Then that warning had come, presumably from a friend or ally and, again in the middle of the night, they had run for their lives.

  Where had the warning come from? A friend? Another psychic? How had it been sent to Tucker’s compute
r when he, a computer expert, insisted that was next to impossible?

  Their car bugged, their every action apparently monitored by the enemy, and now it was beginning to look like there was someone else out there watching them, someone who might be on their side…

  And Sarah had no idea who they could trust.

  She wasn’t able to brood about it for too long, because Tucker turned the car toward the west about fifteen minutes later. And it required all her self-control to keep from reaching over and jerking the wheel to turn them north once more.

  It was an actual physical sensation, a tugging deep inside her that almost hurt. This was the wrong way. The wrong way! She had to close her eyes and consciously argue with whatever was tugging at her. We’ll go the right way. We will. In a day or two, we will.

  It has to be north.

  I know.

  The answer is north.

  What answer is that?

  North.

  Right. We’ll go north. Soon.

  After a few minutes of the continued silence between her and Tucker, she reached and turned on the radio, needing to listen to something besides the faint, anxious echo in her head.

  “So she’s just a friend, huh?” Keith Hayden grinned at Tucker as they sat in his office at the car lot. “How come all your friends look like her and all my friends look like you?”

  “Because there is a God.” Tucker was signing his name on a multitude of papers and didn’t look up.

  Keith snorted. “Listen, Tuck—”

  “Please don’t call me that,” Tucker interrupted. “It doesn’t sound any better now than it did in college. And it especially sounds bad when I’ve just let you rob me blind.”

  “Who, me?” Keith was deeply injured. “Can I help it if you’re in too big a hurry to insist on a better price for that tank of yours? By the way, you didn’t tell me why you were in such a hurry.”

  “Because we have places to go and people to see.” Tucker hesitated and looked at his old friend. “You won’t get into any trouble misfiling the papers on the Jeep for a few days, right?”

  Keith shrugged. “It’s my business, I can do what I like. And I’m lousy at filing things promptly. Just remember, you’re still using your own tag, and it’ll be listed in the DMV as belonging on a Mercedes. If you get stopped or pulled over, they might ask questions. But you’ll have your copies of the papers, so it should be all right, at least for a few days. I still say you ought to switch the insurance, though.”

  “I have a special policy that covers me no matter what I’m driving. It’ll have to do.” Changing his insurance would reveal the make and model of the Jeep in all the necessary records, and Tucker wasn’t prepared to risk that.

  “Then for God’s sake, drive carefully.”

  “I intend to.” Tucker nodded. “So we’ve taken care of my end. But on your end…Keith, if anybody shows up asking questions about Sarah and me, tell them you sold me a Corvette or something and don’t have a clue where we’re headed.”

  “Is somebody likely to show up?”

  Shrugging, Tucker finished signing and pushed the papers back across Keith’s desk.

  “In trouble, old buddy?”

  “Sarah’s ex isn’t too happy about us,” Tucker said lightly, ever inventive. “Let’s just say he knows some pretty ugly customers and we’ll both be better off if the trail ends here.”

  “No problem.” Keith looked through the glass half wall of his office where he could see Sarah standing outside in the showroom apparently watching traffic pass the car lot. “I thought she looked a little ragged. You too, buddy. And now coming all the way to Chicago to trade your car in is starting to make a little more sense.”

  “I want Sarah to have some peace finally, that’s all,” Tucker said in one of the few utterly truthful statements he’d made today.

  “Yeah, I imagine you’d do most anything for a pretty lady like her.” Keith grinned, then added, “My guys are switching your stuff from the Mercedes to the Jeep, including the tag. While they’re doing that, I’ll have our bank transfer the balance I owe you to a branch of your bank here in Chicago.”

  “Tell them I’ll be by for the cash within an hour,” Tucker said.

  Keith raised his brows. “Is the ex that close? I was hoping I could buy you two lunch.”

  “We need to be on our way, Keith, but thanks.” Tucker glanced back over his shoulder, and added, “I’ll wait with Sarah while you finish up in here, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Tucker came up behind Sarah as she stood looking out at traffic, approaching her warily. He couldn’t help wondering how on earth Keith had mistaken them for lovers; two more guarded and isolated people would be hard to imagine.

  She had withdrawn from him almost completely during the journey to Chicago. They had gotten motel rooms both Saturday night and last night but had spent less than six hours in them each night. Tucker, for one, had barely closed his eyes since they had left the cabin on the lake, and on Sunday morning Sarah had come to breakfast hollow-eyed and strained, saying in answer to his insistent questions that she’d had another vision. The yawning grave again, and the whisper of voice she couldn’t quite understand, but this time accompanied by the sounds of bells—“like church bells”—and the sight of a Celtic cross.

  Neither of them had said much after that.

  “Sarah?”

  She looked at him, unsurprised by his approach but with distant eyes, as if she returned from someplace else.

  “Keith’s taking care of the final details, so we’ll be out of here in just a few minutes.”

  She nodded, but said only, “Did you notice it?”

  “Notice what?”

  “That.” She pointed toward the passing traffic.

  He looked in the direction she indicated, but it took him several moments to realize what she meant. Across the street, at a slight angle to the car lot where they stood, was one of those places that sold stonework. There were all kinds of things outside the building advertising the business: birdbaths, statuary, columns, benches and tables—even tombstones. Off to one side, curiously isolated and leaning a bit, was a Celtic cross. A big one.

  “I saw a Celtic cross, canted to one side.”

  “Is that—?”

  “It’s the one I saw in the vision.” She turned her head to look up at him again, her expression still. “A part of the journey. We were meant to come here all along. Do you still believe it was all your idea?”

  “Sarah, there must be other crosses like that one, especially in the northeast where so many Irish settled. We’ll probably see dozens of them once we head north again.” He questioned her certainty not because he doubted her, but because he didn’t like to think that his decision to come here had been less his own idea than the dictate of fate.

  “There may be thousands of crosses for all I know. But that one is the one I saw.”

  He gazed into pale brown eyes that were distant and wary and very sure, and sighed. “Okay. But it still doesn’t mean your life will end the way the vision did. That is not going to happen.”

  Slowly, she said, “Switching cars like this…it’ll give us a head start maybe. A few days’ grace, if we’re lucky. But they will find us eventually. They want me too badly to just give up.”

  “We’re going to use the time we have,” Tucker told her. “I’ll disable the GPS in the Jeep so nobody can track us that way. Hopefully they’ll believe the trail ends here, at least for a while. In the meantime, while we’re heading north toward whatever it is you feel is so important, we’ll use the computer every chance we get and keep gathering information until the pieces start to come together.”

  “Couldn’t they trace that? If we connect to the Internet even wirelessly?”

  “Don’t worry; I’ll run it through so many proxy servers they’ll never be able to trace us. Sarah, we’ll make sense out of this. And then we’ll find a way to deal with these people.”

  “You’re so sure we can
deal with them.” She shook her head a little. “How? How can you deal with people willing to kill a cop? How can you deal with people who bug cars? Who abduct children? Who kill people only because they’re…different? How are we going to deal with people like that, Tucker?”

  He didn’t have a ready answer, and admitted that reluctantly. “I don’t know. But we’ll find a way.”

  Still looking at him, she nodded slowly, but her voice was remote when she said, “Don’t underestimate them, Tucker. Whatever you do…don’t do that.”

  “No, I won’t. Not again.” He hesitated, and then, needing to regain the sense of control her questions had shaken, said, “I’ve been thinking. It’ll probably be smarter to avoid staying any place where either of us has stayed before. Even at the places I have no traceable tie to, I probably used credit cards in local stores, or talked to people who might remember. We have to assume somebody asking the right questions could find out about those places. And find us.”

  “So we stick to anonymous hotels and motels?”

  “I think it’ll be safer, and not just because it’ll be harder to find us. If we’re surrounded by other people and not isolated, it won’t be easy for them to move against us.”

  Sarah nodded again, but said, “Unless they have another Sergeant Lewis on the payroll. People usually don’t interfere with the police.”

  “That’s a cheerful thought.” He managed a smile. “Look, everything they’ve done so far has either been designed to look accidental or scheduled for the dead of night with no witnesses. Lewis didn’t come to ‘arrest’ us openly, and I’m betting no other cop will. They don’t want to be that visible, Sarah. What they’re doing is secret, and they want to keep it that way. That’s our ace.”

  “Our only ace.”

  Deliberately, he said, “No. You’re our ace too. One vision warned us to move. You could have others.”

  “Don’t count on me, Tucker.” Her pale eyes were completely unreadable, her voice matter-of-fact. “I can’t control what I see. Or when I see it. Don’t forget—I never saw them coming to the lake.”

  He frowned slightly. “But somebody did. Somebody knew, and warned us.”