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Cooke could attest to that.
Traffic was light after dark. There were no accidents this time, and apart from a brief stretch of construction there were no delays. Cooke woke once—surprised to discover he’d drifted off—and looked at Anne in the back seat. Events had worn on them both like forty-eight hours without rest. As the car passed from intervals of darkness to the light shed by the towering pole lamps across the shoulder, her sleeping face stuttered in and out of view. She looked more peaceful than he’d seen in all the time he’d known her.
All the time? How long had it been? Less than a day.
Time enough to fall in love.
The realization shocked him more than the brevity of their relationship. On some level he’d known ever since she’d joined him at the Hawthorn.
After an hour they saw the lights of Kansas City reflecting off the belly of the clouds. Anne was awake now, once again looking through her window at service stations and all-night stores forming light boxes in the dark, stacked rows of parked cars in the employee lots of factories with back-to-back shifts, traffic closing in on the Impala as they penetrated deeper into civilization.
The Hilton was a tall rectangle illuminated by ground-mounted floods. The lot was almost full. A snap-letter sign supported by tall posts—lit also from below—read:
WELCOME COUGARS
Mapes smirked. “Either there’s a sports team in for a banquet or it’s the annual convention of horny old ladies.”
Anne’s Lexus was where she’d left it; apparently the hotel’s towing policy hadn’t kicked in yet. A heavy dew had gathered on its surface in thousands of droplets that sparkled under the parking lot lights as if the car had been dipped in egg and milk and rolled in diamond dust. Cooke entered the image into his memory bank.Watercolors,he decided.
They found an open slot two cars down. “Good thing you waited long enough for me to put away my key,” Anne said, getting out. She produced a fob from a pocket of her slacks.
Mapes stood sentry and Cooke shielded her from public view while she unlocked the car and leaned across the seat to drag over her purse. It was the clutch she’d had in the bar. She rummaged inside, hesitated—or did she?—when she came to a cocktail napkin with her face sketched on it, and took out—
—An e-cigarette. She slid it between her lips, inhaled nicotine mist, and blew it out her nostrils. “God, I needed that!” She looked at Cooke, grinned wide at his expression; he hadn’t thought she was capable of showing that much joy. “Todd disapproves, too. He has clean habits.”
He couldn’t think how to react to that.
“Enough chit-chat,” Mapes said. “Is it in there, or are you rehearsing an endorsement for cancer?”
She straightened, faced him—and pulled apart the e-cigarette, showing them what looked like the connection to a computer USB port in the end of the section containing the mouthpiece.
“Great-grandson of the flash drive,” she said, “with a kicker: the mist passes through an outer sleeve. It makes no contact with the circuit board, which is tiny enough to lose under your fingernail.”
“Plevin’s IT genius,” Dennis Cooke said.
She glanced quickly at the federal agent. “You didn’t hear that from me. You either, Mapes. If things don’t fall right, Todd will ruin him.”
“You have my word. Who’d back me up anyway? If what you’ve got there is what you say, I won’t need a witness.”
“I knew about the homing device,” she told Cooke. “He guessed what it was for when Todd had him install it. He’d already stumbled on this—what’s in it, I mean.” She reconnected the two sections. “Somebody at Aspectus had to have a conscience.”
“Why didn’t you ditch the homing device?” Mapes said.
“It’s hard-wired into the electronics system. I’m not a technician, and I hadn’t time. The plan was to get as far away from Todd as I could before he tumbled.”
She thrust the small flash drive at Mapes with a flourish. He snatched it up with less grace and examined it. “Whose idea was it, yours or your alleged source?”
“My alleged source. I tell you, if the James Bond movies ever need anotherQ,they won’t have to look beyond him. If Todd suspected I had more on my mind than adultery, he’d search my luggage and purse, might even take a puff on the cigarette.” She shook her head. “Thanks toQ,he still thinks I’m a harlot.”
“And I’m not wrong. There are all kinds of harlot, Anne.”
This was a new voice, but a familiar one. All three turned toward a man standing just outside the glow of the nearest lamppost. A thin shard of light reflected off the barrel of the pistol in his hand.
CHAPTER 22
“TODD?”
It was Mapes who asked the question. Of all three, he’d gone the longest without hearing Todd Plevin’s voice, but was the first to recognize it, unless Anne’s silence was pure shock. Cooke had been so intent on their exchange, the sudden interruption from the shadows had shattered his faculties of reason.
