The Enemy Inside

FIFTY-SIX

Three days earlier, just after five in the morning, Ana had been roused from a deep sleep by a signal from her cell phone. One of the lawyers, Hinds, was on the move. It woke her and caught her attention because it was so early.

She waited for him to break the geo fence surrounding the law office, but this didn’t happen. Instead he crossed the other fence, the one surrounding Madriani’s house. The two of them were meeting. They were headed somewhere.

Ana threw on her clothes and ran for the car. In less than seven minutes she was parked down the street from Madriani’s house. She was just in time to watch as an official-looking dark blue sedan pulled into the lawyer’s driveway.

Through the field glasses she tried to read what was printed on the driver’s door. All she could read, in small white letters, was GOVERNMENT VEHICLE, OFFICIAL USE ONLY.

The two lawyers gave each other a quick hug. Madriani got in the backseat of the car and a second later it backed out of the driveway and drove in the other direction. Ana waited for Hinds to turn and walk toward the house before she pulled from the curb and followed the car.

Forty minutes later she watched as it disappeared down the same rabbit hole used by the Dumpster diver and his driver a month earlier-the guardhouse at the entrance to the Marine Corps Air Station at Miramar.

She couldn’t follow him, but it set off alarm bells. The instant she got back to her hotel she set another geo fence around the Miramar Air Station. It wouldn’t do any good in terms of tracking Madriani because he was in another car. But it would give her a signal if either of the lawyers went out there again in their own vehicles.

It made Ana wonder what was going on at Miramar. Maybe the lawyer was into this thing deeper than she thought. Was it possible? Could the lawyers be in collusion with the people who had the French auto-nav system? It didn’t seem to make sense, since their own client was involved in the accident. But then who knows. Maybe they were on the take.

The next day and a half Ana spent scoping out the location of her new client’s contracted hit, the job she had been delaying. She had been watching the place on and off over the last several days. She wanted to be able to move the instant she recovered the equipment. That is, if she could find it. She was prepared to wait two days, no more. If by then she didn’t have it, she would grab one of the lawyers, probably Madriani, and subject him to enough pain that he would tell her everything he knew.

If after that she still couldn’t find it, Ana would have no other choice. She would have to perform the new contract and disappear back to Europe and home.

She could pray that no one would find the navigational computer, trace it back to its French designers and from them to her. But Ana didn’t like to leave such matters to fate. If they did find it and made the connection, everything in her life would unravel. Authorities would start linking passport pictures and fingerprints, aliases, and travel records to jobs she had performed on two continents over nearly a decade.

Interpol, the FBI, and every state intelligence service in the Western world would descend on the picturesque villa in southern France. They would find her grandmother and her aunt and destroy their refuge from the world.

This morning she was back, tracking after the lawyers. She was getting ready to snag one of them. At the moment it looked like it might be the older one, Hinds.

He was driving north on I-5 when he took the interchange at I-8. He went a few miles and got off on Mission Bay Drive. Ana was just about to take the off-ramp when the signal on her cell phone told her that Madriani was now also on the move. His car had broken the geo fence around the law office.

Ana let Hinds go. She shot past the off-ramp and drove west toward the ocean. She turned off on Nimitz Boulevard and pulled into a parking lot in front of a motel to check her phone.

The tracker on the little Spark Nano under the fender of Madriani’s Jeep was set to report its location at intervals of five minutes. It took three intervals, a full fifteen minutes, before she could confirm that he was headed north on I-5 and had passed the interchange at I-8. He was driving fast, approaching the 805, running north, out of the area.

Ana tossed her cell phone on the passenger seat, started the engine, and took up the chase. Every few minutes she glanced over at the phone to see if the GPS had updated his position. She was afraid he might turn off the highway at some point and she would fly past him.

When she looked over to check the phone, she realized it had timed itself out and gone dark.

“Damn.” She kept her eyes on the road, reached over, and picked up the phone. It took a few seconds looking back and forth between the highway and the phone to key in the four-digit code to unlock it.

Seconds later the GPS showed Madriani moving west toward the ocean on what appeared to be a major thoroughfare off the highway. From the small map on the cell Ana couldn’t identify the turnoff. She wanted to look more closely in order to study the phone, but she didn’t dare. Traffic was moving too fast. If she took her eyes off the road to look at the small screen, she could end up like the charred occupants of the car at the gas station.

Ahead she saw a sign, a broad overpass with a long straight exit on her side of the divided freeway. There was a large curving cloverleaf on the other side. Whatever road it was it ran east and west, a major thoroughfare. She decided to take it.

At the top of the overpass Ana stopped at the signal and checked the phone once more. Distance was hard to calibrate on the small map.

She saw the flashing marker on the map noting Madriani’s last position. He’d obviously moved on since then. She wouldn’t get another GPS reading on him until the next timed interval.

She pinched the screen in an effort to zoom in, trying to read the street names on the map. Ana had no clue as to where she was or whether she and Madriani had even taken the same exit from the freeway.

If she could identify the street where the GPS marker was located she could look for signs along the way to see if they were on the same road.

The light turned green and traffic started to move. Ana laid the phone back down on the seat and took a left. She went west over the top of the freeway toward the ocean.

The road was good, two lanes in each direction and few stops. The traffic moved quickly, no congestion. She glanced down at the phone and noticed that the marker had moved.

She touched the screen quickly in order to keep it alive. Madriani was now moving on some side street off to her right, assuming he had used the same road she was on.

From the rapid glimpse she got at the small screen, the narrow thread he was traveling on looked like it snaked its way through a canyon. It was either that or the top of a ridge. She couldn’t tell which. It was almost impossible to make out any details squinting at the small display from four feet away.

Ana almost reached over to touch the screen one more time and instead closed the leather cover and gave up on it. She decided she would move toward the ocean, stop, and park somewhere until she could check the map thoroughly and get her bearings.

By then Madriani would be farther along. But she could still find him, thanks to the GPS.

She passed through a residential area, large houses with late model luxury cars parked out front. There was a traffic signal ahead. It looked like a major intersection.

She touched the brake just as the GPS signal toned on her phone and began to play. Hinds was back home. He had tripped one of the geo fences, either at his apartment, Madriani’s house, or the office. Ana was beginning to feel comfortable with the system. She wished she had gotten it earlier.

Before she could come to a complete stop, the light changed. She drove through the intersection, pulled to the right, and parked at the curb. She left the motor running, air conditioner humming, as she checked her phone.

Ana lifted the flip leather cover and punched in the code. The map came up along with the circled geo fence. As Ana looked at it she realized that the signal wasn’t coming from the law office, Hinds’s apartment, or Madriani’s house, the three areas she had fenced off. Instead the signal being emitted by the sensor on Madriani’s car was coming from somewhere else.

As she looked at it she realized what it was. It was the electronic fence she had set up the day before. The one she put near the large oak tree in front of the gauche American knockoff of a French provincial estate house in the hills above Del Mar. The house was owned by the pigeon, her next victim, the new contract Ana was being paid to pluck by some high-ranking Chinese general.