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There was no hint of amusement or patience in his voice. It was all cold steeliness.
“You do,” she said quickly.
"Good," he warned. "Now, step the hell back while I search this guy. Only then may you engage with him."
Jessie did as she was told. For now at least, discretion was the better part of valor.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Hannah didn’t know what she was expecting. Maybe some part of her hoped her safe house would be some cool, high-tech home in the Hollywood Hills. This wasn’t that.
There was nothing wrong with the place. A two-story Craftsman, the home sat on the edge of the historic Craftsman Village in Long Beach, a good hour south of the house she shared with Jessie and Ryan. It was charming, with an olive-painted exterior, high shrubs to block the first floor windows, and a giant porch she would never get to take advantage of.
Once she was inside, she saw why Grover and his team had selected this place. Looking out, she noted that the front yard was huge and there was no way to access the home without being seen well before arriving. The fencing around the sides and back of the house was a good fifteen feet high and comprised of vinyl rather than wood, making it harder and noisier to cut through or try to scale. As they walked around, Rufus pointed out several other features that he thought she should be aware of.
"The windows are bullet-proof," he noted, "and can be tinted to make it impossible to see inside clearly. The front door looks like it's wood, but it's steel-reinforced. The only other way in or out of the house is via the equally secure door to the backyard. Later, I’ll show you the panic room, which is under the stairs. Your bedroom is on the second floor, twenty-five feet up. It has one window, also bullet-proof.”
He gave her the full tour, showing her how the security system worked and giving her a code to activate the electric backyard mesh netting.
“What’s that for?” she had asked.
“The yard isn’t visible from nearby homes, but a drone could get a glimpse of you from overhead, so whenever you go out, you’ll need to set the mesh to ‘block’ mode. That will create an electrical field that makes it impossible to get a good visual from above.”
Hannah thought that was overkill but kept it to herself.
“When do I get my phone back?” She asked.
Before they had left Jessie’s place, Rufus had placed her phone in a Faraday bag, which blocked her cell signal so it couldn’t be tracked. In its place, he’d given her a burner phone.
“Unfortunately, not until we’re out of this mess,” he told her. “You’ll need to use the burner and only sparingly. And while I know it sounds obvious, please don’t even hint to anyone about our location. Ash Pierce will have looked into all your contacts. You don’t want her ‘questioning’ them about where you are.”
After getting the lowdown on the situation, Hannah had wandered the house for a while to get more of a feel for where everything was. But that only took about a half hour. After that, she was stuck with the rest of the day and not much to do.
Rufus had warned her that she wouldn’t be able to take online courses for school because Pierce might be able to trace her through them. Luckily, Jessie had managed to secure the syllabi for the fall classes she would have taken if she were at UC Irvine right now.
Hannah and Rufus had stopped by a college bookstore to pick up the relevant textbooks on the way here. But as this was the first day of the quarter, there wasn’t much to look over. By the time she wrapped that up, it was still only lunchtime. After five hours of reading, watching TV, and staring at the ceiling in her bedroom, she finally gave in to her boredom and called Chris.
Chris Balfour was her long-distance semi-boyfriend, who had just left town last week to start his freshman year at the Rhode Island School of Design. They had met when she, Jessie, and Ryan had been in hiding from a serial killer in the small mountain town of Wildpines. He attended the local arts academy.
They’d hit it off but only acted on their attraction when Chris and some other Wildpines friends rented a Santa Monica beach house a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, their budding romance was short-circuited when she was attacked on the Santa Monica Pier by a guy they later learned was Mark Haddonfield.
She wasn’t sure if she and Chris had any kind of future, but he was cute, sweet, and generally unfamiliar with the trauma that had consumed her life in the last two years. Right now, that was enough to hold her interest.
“And they can’t even give you a rough estimate for when all this will be over?” he asked after hearing about the current situation, sounding as frustrated as she felt.
“As long as Ash Pierce is out there, I’m vulnerable,” Hannah said. “I haven’t told you this, but she was some sort of black ops CIA assassin before she decided to make a lateral move into being a hitwoman. She knows how to access information on people that most of us couldn’t dream of finding. She actually manipulated a military database to trick me and Kat into thinking someone else was a hired killer when it was her all along.”
“Great,” Chris said, “should I be worried that she’ll come after me?”
“I think you’re good,” Hannah said. “We didn’t …get close until Pierce was in prison, and you left for school before she escaped. She probably doesn’t even know you exist—no offense.”
“None taken,” he replied with a chuckle. “I’m definitely fine with not being on her radar.”
“Plus, you're on the other side of the country, and she's a fugitive. She'll probably want to keep her head down and stay close to where she thinks I am. Even if she had a clue about you, you don't know anything about where I am, so torturing you would be pointless."
“You had me feeling pretty good up until that last part,” Chris said.
“Don’t worry about it,” Hannah assured him, before adding, “but maybe take a look at photos of her every now and then. If a petite woman in her late thirties tries to get close to you, you might want to bail.”
