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“Not likely. It’s the only way Bruno and company can find us.”
“Too bad we couldn’t slip Chad and Oliver’s phones in someone else’s pocket, like we did at Castle Rising in King’s Lynn.”
“Except we were the ones doing the following . . .” Sam’s voice drifted off. He watched the taxi taking off with a new fare. “Actually, you might be onto something there, Remi.”
“Whose pocket are we slipping their phones in?”
“Ours.”
“You mean you want them to follow us?”
“That’s the plan. At least to start off with. Paris is a fifteen-hour drive from here. We get them to follow the phones for a few hours, I’m hoping we’ll be halfway to France before they realize we’re gone.”
Less than an hour after Sam outlined his plan, Chad and Oliver arrived in a taxi that let them off in the square of the small church across the street. Unfortunately, Bruno and his new partner, a blond man neither of them had seen before, pulled up about a half block behind the church, on the opposite side than Sam had predicted, cutting them off from the car he’d parked around the corner. Sam surveyed the crowded square, a look of concern on his face. “We’re going to need a distraction to get to the car.”
“On it,” Remi said, pulling out her phone. She called the emergency number, reporting two armed men standing in front of the building across from Santa Maria à Trevi Church. “I heard them talking about shooting up the fountain. I saw guns beneath their suit coats.”
Two minutes later, the officers from the fountain rounded the corner, both looking in the direction of Bruno and his partner. Bruno suddenly stopped, as though realizing they were the focus of the officers’ attention.
“That’s them,” she said to the woman on the phone. One of the officers touched his ear, adjusting his earpiece, to hear the dispatcher. When Bruno’s partner turned to run, the two officers tackled him. Bruno, however, took off in the opposite direction.
“One down, one to go,” Sam said, as Remi ended the call. “Nice work. You get the car, I’ll get Oliver and Chad before Bruno catches up to them.”
Remi pulled up a few minutes after that, glad to see Bruno was nowhere in sight.
“Good timing,” Sam said, as he slid into the front passenger seat and Oliver and Chad got in the back. She drove to Rome Termini. At the train station, Sam took Oliver and Chad’s phones, walked inside, and returned a few minutes later. “One is on its way to Austria, the other to Germany.”
“That should keep Bruno busy for a while.”
He opened the glove box and pulled out the tracking device Oren’s men had hidden in their rental car. “Might be a good time to reactivate this little thing before we take off.”
Remi looked over at him. “You don’t think he’ll suspect that it’s suddenly starting up?”
“He might. But these things are designed to sleep if there’s no movement, to preserve battery power. And what better place to wake it than where the phones were last seen?”
“But where?” Remi asked. Sam nodded toward the bus, and Remi smiled. “Pick you up on the other side?”
“See you there.”
Sam jogged over, pretended to drop something next to a bus scheduled for Naples, then planted the device.
“Why go to the trouble?” Oliver asked when he got back in the car.
“Confusion,” Sam said. “Your phones are here. If Bruno’s still tracking them, he’ll end up at the train station, trying to find the both of you. And if we’re really lucky, the device I stuck under the bumper of that bus will cloud things even more. Naples is a long way from Paris.”
“So is Rome,” Remi said. “We better get started.”
61
Sam took the first shift at the wheel, and, minus a few breaks for food and fuel, they drove straight through, arriving in Paris a little after two in the morning. Once again, limited to cash only, Remi’s friend Georgia was able to find them a Paris apartment in the 20th arrondissement. Situated in a working-class neighborhood, the second-story apartment offered a partial view of the Eiffel Tower from the kitchen window—provided they leaned to the left.
Late the next morning, as Oliver and Chad returned from a trip to buy groceries for a late breakfast, Sam sat in the kitchen, looking over a map of Europe.
Remi brought two mugs of coffee to the table, taking a seat next to him. “What if he was lying about the location?”
“In case he can’t trust Oren?” Sam replied.
“Exactly. How certain are we that the Ghost’s not in Paris?”