Choppy Water

37

Bess sat in the living room, reading a book. Sykes usually turned in earlier than she, so she waited him out.

Sykes came in from his study. “You ready for bed?”

She ignored the double entendre. “Not yet. I’m into my book.”

“Turn the lights off when you come up,” he said, then went on his way.

She waited for another hour or so, and when no noises of movement came from upstairs, she got up, turned off all the lights, and waited a moment for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. She set her handbag near the bottom of the stairs, then removed a very small flashlight, the two trackers Tom had given her, and a folded piece of plastic sheeting from the bag. She listened for a moment, heard no more noises, then walked outside onto the porch. There was a clear sky and a quarter moon, enough to let her see the parked cars.

She waited a couple more minutes, then stepped off the porch, slipped out of her shoes, and walked over to where Sykes’s Explorer was parked. She checked the upstairs windows for a light and found none, then listened again for noise and heard none. She walked to the rear of the Explorer, unfolded the plastic sheeting, hung one end around her shoulders, and fastened it into place with a snap. She lay down on the ground, maneuvered until her head was under the car, then held the little flashlight in her mouth and illuminated the underside of the car. She began moving backward, farther under the vehicle.

When the gas tank came into sight, she found a niche between that and the chassis and ripped the plastic tape off the tracker, marked number one, leaving an adhesive surface. She slipped the tracker into the niche and pressed it firmly in place for at least a minute, then she worked her way sideways from under the SUV.

She got up, walked over to the van, and repeated her actions with the second tracker, marked number two, then wriggled out from underneath. She stood up, then brushed the dirt off the plastic sheet and off the seat and legs of her jeans. She was almost back to the porch when she heard footsteps from inside. She stepped into her shoes and quickly sat down in a rocking chair on the porch.

The door to the house opened and she turned her head to find Sykes standing there.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Enjoying the night air.”

“You’ll freeze your ass off out here.”

“When I get cold, I’ll come inside. What are you doing up?”

“I felt like one of Elroy’s biscuits,” he said. “I’ll sleep better now.”

“Good night, then.”

“Good night.” He went back inside and closed the door behind him.

She waited ten minutes, shivering in the dark, before she went up the hill to see if she’d had any e-mails. She had none, but she typed out one to the e-mail address with her father’s name in it.

Dad, it read. Thank you for your kind gifts of the beautiful china pieces. I’ve put them in just the right spot in my living room. Love, Bess.

If anybody cared to look, there was a pair of china pieces on a bookcase in her apartment’s living room.

Tom Blake sat down at his office desk and checked his iPhone for messages. The one from Bess stood out, and he was relieved to receive it. He switched on his computer and loaded the new tracking software, typing in the serial numbers of each of the trackers.

The map on the screen was of the continental forty-eight states, and at the press of a button, the software zoomed in closer, first to the state of Virginia, then to the location of the two trackers. He keyed in tight on the vehicles until he could see the symbols for the trackers. “Good,” he said aloud to himself.

Then, as he watched, the SUV image began to move. He zoomed out half a mile or so and watched the car’s progress as it drove toward the main road, then made a left turn toward the village a couple of miles away. He watched as the car drove into town and parked. He consulted a map to see that it was in front of a little grocery store. It stayed there for ten minutes or so, then began to move again.

The symbol for the SUV suddenly disappeared from the screen. Something was wrong. He zoomed out to a one-mile scale but could not recover the image. He superimposed the map of the village onto the tracking software and searched the main streets for the tracking symbol. Then, suddenly, it appeared in the lower, left-hand corner of the screen. It seemed to be leaving a gas station. That was it: he had stopped for gas and had been under a canopy for several minutes while he filled his tank.

Tom breathed a sigh of relief and went on with his work, but he left the tracking software on-screen until the vehicle was back in its usual parking spot at Sykes’s compound.

Bess slept fairly late for her, making up the time lost in last evening’s excursion. She missed breakfast, then after lunch climbed the hill again and perched on her favorite rock. Sykes came out of the house once with a pair of binoculars and trained them on her. She smiled and waved at him, then he went back inside.

At dinner, she was alone with Sykes; the others were apparently away from the compound. He turned on the TV for the evening news, and they both watched a story from the network’s White House correspondent.

“The kerfuffle over the broken window at the White House is apparently over. The window has been replaced, and the staffer, who had minor cuts from the glass, is back at work.” She returned the audience to the anchorwoman in the studio.

The anchorwoman continued, “President-elect Holly Barker has been spotted shopping on Madison Avenue in New York. A reporter who caught up with her got this comment.”

They switched to a medium shot of Holly carrying shopping bags, and someone shouted a question at her from off camera.

“It’s hard to campaign and shop at the same time, so I’m making it up today,” Holly said, smiling at the camera.

Sykes switched off the television. He seemed annoyed.

“Had enough of the president-elect?” she asked Sykes.

“Not nearly enough,” Sykes replied grumpily, and then changed the subject.