Like I said, the owners don’t realize they’ve set up a signal.

But I do.

I shove the binoculars back into the glove box, resume my driving.

A few minutes later I’m parked in the shade behind a three-store strip that has a Laundromat, a dollar store, and a liquor store. I’m scribbling some notes, re-creating what I just saw on Linden Street and how best to approach it.

I know my time deadline is far and away gone, like New Year’s Eve hats and banners from several months ago.

But like that Israeli general said more than a half century ago, I’m stopping for nothing.

I realize the stacked odds against me have gotten higher and higher with each passing hour, from the time delay to being robbed of all of my cash.

But I’m still not stopping.

If in the next hour or so, I get out of here with my guy in my Wrangler, I’ll make the call and find out where to deliver him for the trade.

Oh, yes, I’ll make the drive, and I’ll make the trade.

No matter what happens, I’ll bring my own kidnap victim to the criminal who’s taken my husband and daughter, and if Tom and Denise aren’t produced alive and breathing, then I’ll blow out the man’s brains in front of said criminal.

And I’ll drop my weapon, and if I’m instantly killed or eventually sent to prison, it won’t matter a bit to me.

Without my family, I’m dead anyway.

CHAPTER 47

AFTER GETTING off the phone with his mom, who is still living near Seattle with his increasingly ill father, Army Lieutenant Preston Baker goes for a walk to clear his head and stretch his legs.

The call did not go well. A year ago, his dad, a retired engineer from Boeing, was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, and in the past few months, his situation has gotten worse. There was a time when Preston’s dad would impress friends and family with his ability to multiply two-digit numbers by other two-digit numbers quickly in his head and always have the right answer, but now that’s gone.

For the past couple of months, his father has managed to muddle through by reading little Post-it notes around the house, reminding him to zip up his pants, comb his hair, and brush his teeth, but now, as his mother tearfully said, “his doctors think we need to put him in a facility. Oh, Presty, we don’t have that kind of money!”

And neither do I, he thinks, as he walks along the roads near his apartment complex, wearing jeans and a faded blue polo shirt, taking his time, going from one busy intersection to another.

To anyone out there, it would look like Preston was wandering aimlessly, but there is a point to his walk, and after fifteen minutes he gets to a dingy-looking 7-Eleven next to a Shell station. The area around the gas station is littered with plastic bottles, plastic bags, fast-food wrappers, and other trash, but the 7-Eleven is relatively clean, because the guy running it—an immigrant from New Delhi—is an old-fashioned sort who wants to keep his place tidy.