Meryl Sawyer - Better Off Dead

“Are you from Ohio?” she asked as she walked up to the couple.

The woman looked up from the earring case. “We live in Indianapolis. Bud went to Ohio State. He never lets you forget it.”

The man smiled, his eyes cold blue marbles in his fleshy face. “What can I say? It’s a great school.”

A sense of unease lurked in the back of her mind. “I went to UCLA—another great school.”

She was surprised at how easily the lie came from her lips. Her undergraduate studies had been at Duke, but when WITSEC created a new ID for her, they had chosen UCLA. It was so big that even if she ran into someone from her class, they wouldn’t necessarily have known each other.

The man smiled again, his soft chin sinking into the fold of flab at his neck. “We just drove in from Albuquerque. Is there a good place to eat around here?”

Something in the reptilian part of her brain clicked, and a chill coursed through her, but she refused to allow her face to reflect her feelings. “You just drove in? Was there a lot of traffic?”

He chuckled. “Not compared to L.A. Right, honey?”

“Right,” she replied without turning around.

A frission of alarm waltzed across the back of Lindsey’s neck as she realized what had been bothering her. Hadn’t she seen this couple walk past the gallery shortly before Derek arrived?

Trust your instincts.

That’s what Derek had taught her. A depth charge of fear exploded in her chest. Move! Get out of here!

“You know, Casa Sena is the best restaurant in the area. I just had lunch there today. You won’t get in without a reservation, but my neighbor next door is the owner’s cousin.” She was making this up as she went and managing to sound convincing. “I’ll get you one of Romero’s cards. Give it to the hostess and you’ll get in without a problem.”

“That would be great. Right, honey?”

“Sure. Whatever.”

Lindsey walked through the connecting door into Romero’s gallery. Inside, she picked up her pace and bolted out the back door. She sprinted down the alley, rounded the corner, and dashed for a dark side street. Only a breath separated her from debilitating panic.

No one was around, and the soft summer night seemed unusually quiet. In the distance, she heard the lonely wail of a coyote, urging his pack to pounce on some small animal—probably a rabbit.

I’m the rabbit, she thought.

She stood, panting, wondering what to do next. Verify. Don’t panic until you know if you’re imagining things or not.

She slithered behind a cluster of lilac bushes and hid in the shadows of a rambling adobe home where no lights were shining from the windows. She jerked her cell phone out of the pocket in her skirt. Maybe she’d imagined all this. She punched autodial for her voice mail.

Lindsay picked up the conversation from the point when she’d asked where the couple in the gallery was from. Their voices had a hollow ring, but just as Derek had shown her, the cell had acted as an open mike. She listened—a full minute behind real time.

“What happened to her?” Lindsey heard the woman ask after a static-filled pause.

“She probably can’t find the card.”

He sounded casual enough. Maybe she’d made a silly mistake. This might not be a pair of operatives—disguised as a couple from the Midwest—sent to carry out a hit. She agonized through another long silence punctuated by a low hum of static.

The woman’s shrill voice came through the small cell phone. “Check on her.”

A few seconds of dead air.

“She’s not in there! The bitch must have gone out the back door.”

“Shit,” screamed the woman. “What tipped her?”

“You, stupid! You were too interested in the jewelry for a broad from Indy.”

“I was just browsing like women do. I don’t think I—”

“Stop sweating it. The bitch can run but where’s she going to hide?”

Lindsey flipped her cell phone shut, sank down to the ground and asked herself the same question. The metallic taste of fear nearly choked her. They were coming to kill her.

“EVERY INCH HAS BEEN RESTORED to its original condition,” Brock told the admirers clustered around his Gull Wing in the Bethesda Sports Center where the car rally was being held.

The two doors were open and thrust upward like the majestic wings of a metallic bird, Brock thought. The lipstick-red paint glistened and the chrome was like a mirror. Hell, Brock decided, his car was better than it had been when it rolled off the assembly line in Stuttgart in 1952.

His baby. He had other cars, sure. A George Barris modified all steel ’32 Ford and a rare ’27 T Roadster, but the Gull Wing was his favorite. It was a crowd pleaser. People flipped over the unusual doors.

The show would close for the day in another twenty minutes. There were a few people wandering around looking at the other cars, but he was the only one with a crowd. He grinned, pleased with himself and the Mercedes.

He caught his distorted reflection on the chrome fender. His brown eyes were grotesquely wide as if someone were pulling taffy. His sandy hair didn’t show, but he knew women found him handsome.

Brock admitted he was a tad short. Before Obelisk had lured him away from the Defense Department, a general had accused Brock of having a Napoleonic complex. The prick had a tragic fatal car accident the following week.

The cell phone clipped to his belt vibrated. He yanked it off and glanced at the screen. It was his operatives in Santa Fe, Number 111, a man, and 32, a woman.

They had the bitch!

Brock punched “talk” and walked away from the car to avoid anyone overhearing him. “Yeah?”

“I—I d-don’t know what happened,” the woman stammered. “She slipped out the back door.”

“Unfuckingbelievable!”

“She’s only been gone a minute. Well, maybe two minutes.”

“The bitch can’t be far. Get her!”

Brock hit the end button. Hearing how his operatives had bungled it could wait. At least they hadn’t started searching before they notified him. Samantha Robbins—now Lindsey Wallace—was a black-bagger, a high risk WITSEC witness. The Federal Marshals knew she was very likely to be killed. She would have been given an emergency 800 number at the U.S. Marshal’s D.C. office.

Her cover blown, the bitch would call the number. It took Brock a few seconds to get on the Internet. He always insisted the con bring him a cell phone with Internet access for emergencies like this. Trouble was no two phones worked the same.

It felt like hours, but it was less than a minute before he was online and had contacted his computer at Obelisk. He gave it instructions to dial his anonymizer. This remailer was based in Switzerland and used a super-powerful software program that buried your real e-mail address.

Within seconds—thanks to technology—the remailer had contacted the phone company in D.C. When Lindsey Wallace tried to alert WITSEC that she’d been compromised, all she would get was a busy signal.

PANTING, A STABBING ACHE in her side from running, Lindsey slumped against an adobe wall blocks from where she’d listened to the hit team over the cell phone she’d left behind in her gallery. She punched the autodial for the emergency number she’d been given.

Still busy.

How could that be? Perhaps there was a storm back East or another widespread power outage. What else could explain a constant busy signal on an emergency line?

Frozen by fear, she could hardly think. Derek had drilled her relentlessly on what to do if worse came to worst. What would he say to do now?

There was an FBI field office here somewhere. Contact them. Her fingers were trembling so much she could hardly dial, but finally she managed to call information and obtain the number.