Page 25

“I’m okay.” She opened her coat and peered inside the backpack. “Laptop looks okay.”
“Good.”
“What are we going to do? Can we call the police?”
He shook his head. “Local cops would just get slaughtered. The best thing we can do for the people who might still be alive is to get as far from the center as possible. If those people really want us, they’ll start chasing us.”
“Seriously? Shit. Okay.” She put the laptop down by her feet. “Should I start going through what’s in here?”
“How easy is it to get to the, what did you call it?”
“OBD port? It’s over there by your left leg on the dash. We’ll have to kill the Jeep and unplug things.”
He grimaced. “Let’s wait to do that.”
“Want me to start going through what’s in here? What if, I don’t know, they have stuff in here?”
“Good idea. How are you holding up?”
“I’m freaking the fuck out, but that doesn’t help us. I just need something to do.” She pulled the displaced bag up onto her lap and started riffling through it. “Good grief, hungry?”
He glanced over as she pulled packages of beef jerky, granola bars, and candy from the bag.
They wouldn’t need to stop for snacks anytime soon.
“We need weapons.” The two guns resting on his lap felt like they weighed a hundred pounds each. “Check around, see what you can find? Bullets if nothing else.”
“I’m on it. Just, keep telling me what to do, okay? I’m going to stay calm so long as I have something to do.”
Her voice was beginning to waver.
Samuel reached over and gripped her knee for a moment. “We’re okay. We’re alive. We’re safe.”
“I know, but what about Maureen?” she whispered. “And the others?”
Samuel wasn’t going to lie to her. Chances weren’t good anyone had survived besides them. He was also glad the security team had been decidedly unfriendly. He didn’t know any of their names.
“Should we call someone?” Jessica asked.
“No.” He wrestled for a moment with how much to tell her before deciding she deserved the truth. “We’ve already had one issue with someone informing Daar’s peers about our movements. On the off chance someone in the office is a mole, I don’t want to say a word to anyone until I am certain we are safe.”
“Then… What are we doing, Samuel? Where are we going?”
“DC. We’ll go straight to the offices there. We’ll be safe.”
“How will we be safe if you also suspect there might be a mole?”
“I don’t know that there is one. All I know is that our chances are only going to get better if we have the team at our back on this.”
“Okay.” Her voice was high and brittle.
“Hey, that’s pretty smart about the OBD thing. When did you learn that trick?”
“High school. I might have been avoiding my parents trying to control what I was doing and where I was going.”
“Isn’t that their job?”
“Well, yeah, but I had other ideas at the time. There were some guys at my school who were really into cars and they showed me how to bypass the different GPS options.”