The thought, and the accompanying feeling, she realized, was insane, and she pushed it aside. Still, the feeling wouldn’t go away, brushed against the walls of her heart when Anton turned in his seat and grabbed something that didn’t go with his tough-guy image: a Gucci backpack. He took it with him as he got out of the car. Ellie followed, leaving her purse and phone behind as instructed, and saw him walking across the bay, the mechanics ignoring him. She followed, stopped when he turned to her.

“You drive,” he said, and pointed to a silver SUV with tinted windows.

Ellie got behind the wheel. Anton tossed the backpack in the rear seat, and when he slid into the passenger seat, he programmed an address into the console’s built-in GPS system.

“When the door goes up,” he said, “start the car and drive.”

Anton adjusted his seat all the way back. He folded his hands on his stomach and said, “I need to meditate, clear my mind. No talking.”

The door went up.

Ellie drove out of the bay, heading for the highway.

* * *

They drove north on California State Route 99 for two hours in silence. Well, not total silence. When the British female voice wasn’t announcing her turn-by-turn directions, Ellie listened to Anton snoring softly beside her.

The address Anton had plugged into the GPS was in Fresno.

What would bring Anton all the way out here, two hundred plus miles from LA?

Clearly Anton was afraid of being followed, which was why he had switched vehicles at the dealership and ordered her to leave her phone in his car. Clearly he suspected Frank or his people might be tailing him. Ellie was more concerned about her people.

Roland used her phone’s cell signal to track her movements. His people, Roland had told her, were watching her at pretty much all times, but they didn’t get too close, as they didn’t want Anton, Frank, or anyone else to get even the slightest whiff of being under surveillance. Ellie had no idea who Roland’s men (or women) were, because Roland wanted her to act natural and focus on her job, not spotting a familiar face and risking Anton or someone else she was working with picking up on it. The phone was the device that allowed the task force members working surveillance to hang back, and her phone was in LA. Had Roland’s people found out they had been duped? Probably Frank’s people, too, if they had been following Anton.

One thing was clear: there was a good chance she was on her own.

The uptight British GPS lady stiffly announced their destination was a mile ahead, on the right. Anton stirred awake. He sat up abruptly, and for some reason it reminded her of an old black-and-white horror movie she had seen a long time ago, when she was a kid—Dracula sitting up in his coffin, wide-awake and ready to feed on blood.

Where, exactly, are we going? Ellie wondered. Not a residential area—that was for sure. So far, the only things she’d seen on this long street were of the commercial variety: strip malls, big-box stores, and a couple of gas stations.