Money to Burn

59

IVY HEARD IT ALL-EVERYTHING ERIC VOLKE TOLD MICHAEL IN THE seeming privacy of the WhiteSands’ corporate dining room.

Ian Burn heard it, too.

He dimmed the LCD on Ivy’s cell to conserve the battery. Her speakerphone function was still activated, however, relaying every word that was uttered within range of the cell that Ivy had given Michael outside the emergency room in North Bergen. Ivy hadn’t morphed into one of those smartphone-aholics who carried both a BlackBerry and an iPhone in her purse. It was simply a matter of survival. When you spent every day of your life on the run, the thought of being trapped in a church or other hiding place with a cell that said No service was enough to make you carry two devices-each with a different provider.

“Very impressive,” said Burn, admiring the technology. “A master smart phone programmed for remote activation of the speakerphone on a slave cell that goes everywhere Michael goes. And they have no idea that as long as the phone has a battery in it, we can hear every word they’re saying, even though it’s just sitting there. I have to confess,” said Burn, “your spyware is every bit as good as mine.”

The white commercial van was parked less than a mile from WhiteSands’ headquarters, and Ivy was alone with Burn in the rear cargo compartment.

“It’s really pretty basic,” said Ivy.

And it wasn’t just about eavesdropping. Ivy’s spyware also had GPS tracking capability, enabling the master to follow the slave wherever the slave took his cell. Tracking Michael all the way from North Bergen to Somerset County had been a snap. It was so reliable that Burn had even felt comfortable stopping on the way for food. He was finishing off the last of the hand-stretched naan, a round flatbread that was a staple in northern India, but in the United States was mainly for rich folks who shopped in trendy grocery stores in places like Somerset County.

“What are you going to do with me?” asked Ivy.

She was seated on the metal floor of the van, her back to the side panel. Her jaw felt slightly out of alignment from the left cross that Burn had delivered, and her ribs were still sore from the takedown to the pavement in the hospital parking lot. She worked at the plastic handcuffs that fastened her wrists behind her back, but there was no slack whatsoever.

“What do you think I’m going to do?” said Burn.

She knew his reputation, but she didn’t let her mind go there.

“Let’s put it this way,” he said in an icy tone. “You will wish you really had been lost at sea and eaten by sharks.”

Ivy was silent. There was nothing she could say. She should never have gone back toward the hospital in search of Michael. She should have kept running, just as she’d run for the past four years. In hindsight, seeing Michael face-to-face had probably been a mistake. Emotion had taken over, and even though splitting up outside the ER and heading off in opposite directions had been the correct tactical move, she’d doubled back in hope of finding him and escaping together. A silly romantic notion-and a complete blunder that had allowed Burn to capture her. And now he had hijacked her spyware as well. She wished now that she hadn’t given Michael her spare cell, though it had seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

Suddenly, her mother’s voice was on the speaker. Olivia obviously had no idea that her words were being picked up by Michael’s cell and transmitted from the corporate dining room to Ivy’s phone a mile away.

“We’d better get going,” Ivy heard her mother say.

Burn also heard. “Let’s do what Mamma says,” he said to Ivy.

One last time, Burn checked the tension on the cuffs behind Ivy’s back. Satisfied, he moved to the van’s cockpit, placed Ivy’s phone on the dash, and climbed behind the wheel.

“We’ll see you all there,” he said as he turned the ignition.