True Fiction (Ian Ludlow Thrillers #1)(34)
“Excuse me, gentlemen,” Cross said. “I have a small operational matter to deal with. It will just be a moment.”
He stepped out of the conference room with her and then down the hall, where the three billionaires couldn’t see them and read their facial expressions or body language. The men weren’t fools.
She spoke as soon as they were out of sight. “We got a hit on Ian Ludlow and Margo French from a Walmart in Klamath Falls, Oregon.”
That didn’t make sense. Ludlow and French were dead. “What kind of hit?”
“The radio-frequency ID chips in their driver’s licenses pinged the ‘known shoplifter’ profiles that we planted for Ludlow and French in all of the national chain-store security databases after they first eluded us in Seattle.”
Several explanations came to his mind. One was that the hit was a false positive from a software glitch or it was a mechanical error. Another possibility was that someone stole the wallets from Ludlow and French before they got to the house, or after they were killed, which meant there was another loose end with a heartbeat that had to be tracked down. The third was that Ludlow and French were in Klamath Falls, which would be hard for them to do, unless their ghosts went shopping.
“Do you think it’s a software glitch or a mechanical one?” he asked.
“Both are conceivable explanations but also highly unlikely. I could see one false positive at a location, but not two at the same time.”
“Do we have photos from the store?”
“No,” she said. “The purchases were made right when the store opened. The camera system was being rebooted and backed up at the time.”
“Have you followed up with the asset? Did Ludlow and French have their IDs on them before they were killed?”
Victoria shifted her weight, telegraphing her discomfort. “I haven’t been able to reach her.”
Cross didn’t like this. “You’ve had no contact with the asset since she confirmed the kill last night?”
Victoria nodded.
This was unsettling news. The asset’s behavior was highly irregular. Assets were always reachable unless they were on a flight or were in the middle of executing a kill—or were dead.
“Where is the asset supposed to be right now?” he asked.
“Awaiting instructions in Seattle. I kept her there in case we learned that French shared whatever information she got from Ludlow with a third party.”
The implication being that more killings might be necessary. Cross thought it was a wise precaution on Victoria’s part to keep the asset in Seattle after the kill but it made the subsequent silence even more disturbing.
“Trigger the intruder alarm at the house in Seattle. Let’s see what the police discover.” He thought for a moment. The driver’s licenses weren’t the only things that had RFID chips in them. These days almost everything did, from breakfast cereal boxes to key chains. “Do you have the RFIDs from the products that Ludlow and French bought at Walmart?”
“It’s all junk food.”
“I don’t care what it is as long as there are RFID chips in the packaging that we can home in on,” he said. “Get our combat drone at Nellis Air Force Base airborne and searching for any combination of those RFIDs around Klamath Falls.”
She nodded and headed back to the situation room. It was a large search area and the odds of the drone happening upon those RFIDs were slim. They needed to find a way to narrow the possible location of their targets, whoever they were.
Cross took a deep breath. He couldn’t let any sign of problems creep into his expression, his gait, or his tone of voice. It conveyed vulnerability and weakness, something his bosses were instinctively attracted to, like blood in the water to sharks. He waited until he was sure he was in complete control of himself, then returned to the conference room to tell his masters what they wanted to hear.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
At the Nevada state line, the two-lane strip of highway through the vacant grasslands abruptly became an unpaved dirt-and-gravel road that stretched out over a low rise and then down into a long valley. A twisted and peeling roadside sign riddled with bullet holes announced that Ian and Margo were entering Washoe County, Nevada, that the road was not maintained, and that they were traveling at their own risk. As if that weren’t enough to dissuade them from venturing on, ahead were uninhabited places like Massacre Lake and Hell Creek, all named to underscore that this was a landscape more hospitable to death than a long, healthy life.
The old Mustang wasn’t built for rutted dirt roads so their journey wasn’t a pleasant one, the car bumping and rocking along as they delved deeper into the desolate expanse of rocks and sagebrush. Far across the dry valley, they could see the serrated edge of a long, barren mountain range that had doomed many settlers heading for Oregon.
Ian and Margo passed through Vya, a ghost town of three decrepit wooden buildings, but after that, they didn’t see any more structures. They also didn’t see any other vehicles or human beings. They were seemingly alone in the middle of a vast nowhere. Ian felt conflicting emotions: relief, because he was far away from civilization and all the spying technology that went along with it, and vulnerability, because he was completely out in the open, easy to spot and kill if anyone knew where to look. But he was fairly certain that nobody did.