Logan Walsh and Nathan Clark would take up residence in the Hilton Garden Inn a few miles north of here and follow the same procedure. Mason Gray lived a quarter of a mile from that hotel, on the other side of Falls Church. It was the best they could do with the limited resources and personnel available. The biggest flaw in the plan was the inability to watch either of these target locations. Devin Gray could drive right into Falls Church and hang out with Marnie or his dad at their houses, and there was nothing Rudd could do about it. It was a huge flaw, mitigated by the assumption that Devin Gray wouldn’t risk visiting either location now that he knew he was the target of an active surveillance effort. He wouldn’t know how thinly they were spread. In fact, he’d likely assume that the effort had been expanded since he’d so easily spoofed their first attempt to follow him.

Rudd felt so sure about this that he’d almost pushed back against CONTROL’s insistence that he keep Sandy Jones and Leo Ward at the stakeout across the street from Devin’s apartment. He was glad he hadn’t, because after thinking about it for a while, Rudd realized he would have made a fool out of himself. The decision to keep Sandy and Ward in place was a hedged bet by CONTROL against the assumption that Devin Gray would stay away from any obvious surveillance traps.

What if the discovery of the trackers hadn’t triggered some kind of deep conspiracy fears? What if he’d concluded that he was being ridiculous after a day or two of hiding from the deep state and returned to his apartment? Or that it had been the FBI that had tagged his vehicle? It wasn’t unreasonable to assume that the FBI might want to track his movements for a while. His mother had recently kidnapped an elderly man for no apparent reason and shot a sheriff’s deputy in cold blood.

Pinning the cop’s murder on Helen Gray had been a stroke of genius, even if he hadn’t been given a choice in the matter. The deputy had rolled up on them too damn quickly. He’d barely gotten to the intersection in time to keep the officer from spotting the van and the pickup truck, and possibly calling it in. Rudd’s fake FBI credentials had gotten him to stop before he’d driven far enough into the intersection to see the other vehicles. He’d been especially thankful that Helen Gray had left a few rounds in her pistol’s magazine.

If he’d been forced to use his own pistol, an astute forensics team might have cast some doubt on the initial conclusion drawn by the Tennessee State Police investigators, which might have prolonged or even deepened the FBI’s involvement. Never a good thing when you were nearing retirement.