Three times she reached over and hung up when the White House forced her phone on.

Finally, the gear was all on. Jesus, just putting it on was a lot of work.

“Display map,” she said.

There, that was the spot. That overpass.

She reached out with her finger. It trembled.

Whew.

She took a deep breath. Superior intelligence. Data. Planning.

I’ve got a plan, she told herself. It’s going to work.

She reached out with her finger again, pointed at the overpass. Her finger was steady this time.

Steady enough, anyway.

“Pause at this underpass,” she told the car. “Let me out. Then continue towards Billings at normal speed.”

Three hours later, as the light was starting to fail, Carolyn Pryce stopped her off-road hike across the fields of Montana and stood, panting, trying to catch her breath, her heart pounding in her chest, cursing herself for not keeping up a more intense training regimen in her day-to-day life.

To anyone passing by, she would have been the faintest of blurs, with the faintest of wide, soft depressions as tracks left behind her.

Then the blur reached down into a thigh pocket of the heavy chameleonware parka she wore, pulled out the un-stealthed black rectangle of her second phone, and punched in a code, before returning the phone to her pocket, and returning herself to near invisibility.

Her primary phone she’d left in the Tesla. Not to avoid the President.

But as a beacon for Jameson.

Twenty minutes later, she heard the whup-whup-whup of the helicopter. The Special Forces cold weather mask painted a vector for her. She turned, blinked at the tiny spot, and it magnified.

Blink, magnify.

Blink, magnify.

Blink, magnify.

Until she could read the registration on the side.

Only then did Carolyn Pryce deactivate her chameleonware.

It was only once she was in the helicopter, chartered under an alias, on her way to the airfield at Bozeman, that she checked the news on her phone.

Then she saw that there had been a terrible accident on icy highway 87.

The highway to Billings.

Head on collision between a truck and a passenger vehicle.

Her vehicle.

Total loss. Completely flattened.

Pryce felt numb from it. She felt no victory. No sense any more that her plan had been superior, that she’d outsmarted anyone.

I deal in lives and deaths in my job, she thought. But this is the first time that it’s been my life on the line. Or my death.

Then later, as the airfield of Bozeman appeared below her, and the entirely different plane, with a different aircrew, chartered under yet another name, came into view, did she think:

They’ve tried to kill me. Like they killed Becker. And Holtzman. They’ll probably try again.

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Tuesday 2041.01.08