Unknown Rider полностью

She wanted to cry but knew it would do no good. What she needed to do was figure out how to get in touch with the pilot who had downloaded the aircraft data and get it to somebody who could analyze it for clues leading her to KMART. But without a ride out to the ship, she was back at square one.

What would Uncle Rick do?

She shook away the thought, reminding herself that she had gotten to where she was on her own and didn’t need anybody else’s help. But the thought of her father’s best friend reminded her of the early morning phone call, and she replayed the conversation in her mind.

She removed her cell phone to check for missed texts or phone calls and noticed a notification of a waiting message. She unlocked the phone, opened the secure message portal, then entered her passcode to download the pending message. After decrypting it, she felt the blood drain from her face.

“Holy shit,” Punky said.

She backed away from the chain link fence and looked up into the sky in time to see the Greyhound climbing slowly into the air toward Point Loma before banking and turning out to sea. If she thought the pilot had been at risk before, this message made it crystal clear TANDY wanted him out of the picture. Espionage, sabotage… murder. The Abraham Lincoln was getting way more than she bargained for during her workups.

She might have missed the first COD out to the Lincoln, but there was still a chance she could pull some strings and find herself on the next one. She slipped her phone back into her pocket, then smoothed back her hair and pulled it into a ponytail before turning for the hangar and the door leading to the VRC-30 quarterdeck.

Rick climbed back into his BMW after watching TANDY deposit something at a dead drop location on campus. He had been torn between following her or recovering whatever it was she had placed under the bench, but in the end decided he couldn’t afford to lose her. He had placed the tracking device on the Jeep, but there was no guarantee she wouldn’t ditch it for new wheels, and he needed to be prepared for that eventuality.

Still, his walk back to the M5 was more relaxed. The pulsing blue dot on his phone’s map showed the Jeep leaving campus and returning to Highway 101, and he felt confident he could home in on the beacon and close the distance gradually. He backed out of his space and drove down the hill, passing a man walking in the opposite direction toward a Mission-style house set back in the trees. He turned left on Perimeter Road and drove toward the stadium, before making another left to exit the campus.

Within minutes, Rick was back up to speed on the highway, contemplating the significance of KMART’s handler driving through the night to Cal Poly to complete a drop. Was somebody at the university involved in the conspiracy? He reached across the center console for the pen and notepad sitting on the passenger seat and hastily scrawled three words.

Chen sat behind the wheel of the Jeep, focused on returning to Long Beach to prepare for the night’s operation. Though the brief walk through campus to the dead drop had shaken off some of her fatigue, the prospect of sitting behind the wheel for several more hours was daunting. She cracked the windows to allow the cool sea breeze to waft over and invigorate her, but it wasn’t until she received a message in Signal that her fatigue evaporated.

Of course, her first instinct was to glance into her rearview mirror to look for a car she might have seen more than once. But she resisted, not wanting to look suspicious and spook whoever was following her. She had been careless during the night, but it wasn’t too late to turn the tables. Mantis wouldn’t have sent her the message if she wasn’t certain, which meant that the professor had been watching her make the drop and spotted the tail.

How could I have missed it?

Without changing speed or giving any outward sign that she had become more aware, she scanned the road ahead and saw an exit coming up. She changed lanes with furtive glances in her mirrors to see if anybody moved to follow and took the single lane off-ramp up a small hill to a four-way stop. When nobody exited behind her, she turned left onto an overpass and glanced down at the steady flow of traffic on the highway below.

Where are you?