“Rollie?” For the first time there was fear in Laura’s voice.

“Not good,” I said. “Very not good.” I made my first decision. “Listen, they don’t know you’re with me. Soon as we get to the next town, I’m letting you off. You’ll have to figure out how to get back…”

“Oh, don’t be silly.” She dismissed that thought as if I were suggesting buying the twenty-roll package of toilet paper at Costco rather than trying to prevent her from going to prison for aiding and abetting a federal fugitive. Things clicked into place in her mind pretty quickly. “You’re right, they don’t know I’m with you. So they’re not going to be looking for a couple. We’ve got good IDs. They don’t have the right plate number. We got the Dr. Watson’s signs on the van.” In those few seconds she had convinced herself. There was real confidence in her voice as she said firmly, “We can still do this, Rollie. We just have to be smart and careful.”

Apparently my best Bogie wasn’t sufficiently convincing. Laura was not getting on that plane with Victor Laszlo. “Ho-kay,” I agreed, breaking it into two syllables to hide both my relief and gratitude.

With Cher’s alert, the plans we’d made were abandoned. We had to assume that the main highways and border crossing points were being heavily patrolled. Law enforcement had my information. In a strange way, though, the advantage had shifted a bit. Until a few minutes earlier, I hadn’t been aware that a massive search for me was in progress and we had been driving right into the spider’s parlor. But we were aware of that now and could take precautions. All they had was the full cooperation and participation of every law enforcement officer, soldier, and militia member covering the entire East Coast, while we had almost a full tank of gas.

This presented a whole new set of problems I hadn’t anticipated, starting with getting through customs. I could no longer be Rollie Stone. Even Chair might need a new identity. My famous Rodney Dangerfield imitation probably wasn’t going to work, so somehow I’d have to get ahold of new identification. Laura was reading my mind; her brow furrowed and her left cheek crunched up, pulling her mouth to the side. A full McKayla. “We’re gonna have to get some new identification,” she said. She looked at me. “Don’t worry, they’ll figure out something.”

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” I said evenly. “They don’t know that we read their BEAT. So instead of going north, which is what they’ve got to be expecting me to do, let’s work our way west.”

It was amazing how quickly my mind made the necessary adjustments from being uncertain exactly where I was going to not having the slightest idea where I was going. We got off at the next exit. We were just outside Lake City, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Erie. “We should stop and figure this out,” I said. “Let’s find a diner.”