He watched her unlock the padlock and slide back the gate. Hendricks drove the Cherokee out. Its back was empty, which meant they’d unloaded the gear inside. It made him wonder what had been in the other black duffel bags. And where Hendricks had been while he had been coding the program for the library.

Jenn relocked the gate, and Gibson watched them drive away for the second time today. He thought about going over the wall to do a bit of recon, but it might take a week to find wherever they had set up camp inside. Better to stay with them and see where that took him. He brushed himself off and walked back to the car.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The red dot led Gibson east through a series of small lower-middle-class townships, each bleaker than the last. By the time he passed through the last one, dusk had fallen, and the sky was a charcoal red in his rearview mirror. He slowed to check his phone—Hendricks’s dot had been stationary for thirty minutes. Not far now.

A grim certainty had settled over him since he’d left the storage facility, and he was afraid he knew exactly where Jenn and Hendricks were headed. He hoped he was wrong, but it was the only thing that made sense of their actions. He’d know soon enough.

The houses thinned out until more than one hundred yards separated one home and the next. Out here, there was no clear demarcation between one property and the next. No fences. Just wide-open spaces that bled into each other.

The properties might be large, but the houses themselves were modest single-story ramblers or double-wides on cinder-block foundations. Satellite dishes dominated most of the yards. Not a lot out here to do at night except watch TV and surf the Internet, and it would be a long time before anyone bothered to run cable out in the sticks.

He rounded a bend and spotted the Cherokee ahead on the left. It was parked in the gravel driveway alongside an old wood-paneled station wagon. Whatever color the house had once been had long since faded and mottled into a sloppy bowl of old porridge. One of the front windows had blown out, but instead of a replacement, plastic sheeting was stapled across the opening. The gray shingle roof sagged lamely in the middle, and the whole house looked like it was one swift kick from toppling down. A brown-and-yellow couch had been dragged under an elm tree, where it moldered forlornly in the knee-high grass.

It was depressing to think what would drive someone to live out here. This was no one’s first choice.

He saw no place to pull over where he wouldn’t be seen, so he drove on. He didn’t see anyone in the Cherokee; presumably they were in the house.