Chapter 3: The Tracking Device
The rain began to fall in earnest as Mark’s battered old sedan navigated the winding, potholed roads leading out of the town limits. The windshield wipers clicked in a frantic, uneven rhythm, slicing through the gray fog that hung low over the fields of dead winter grass.
In the passenger seat, I sat with my personal phone resting on my lap. It had been silent for hours, but I knew the peace wouldn't last. Richard was a man of schedules. He would have landed in Portland—or wherever he actually went—and by now, he would have realized that the navy briefcase wasn't at his hotel. He would have called our apartment. He would have realized I wasn't there.
Suddenly, the phone screen lit up.
[1 NEW MESSAGE: RICHARD]
"Olivia, the courier service says the apartment was empty when they arrived to pick up the navy bag. I need those files for my morning meeting. Where did you take it?"
My breath hitched. I didn't reply. I stared at the text until the screen faded back into blackness.
"Don't text him back," Mark said, his eyes fixed on the dark road ahead. "If he realizes you're not in Chicago, he’s going to start pulling strings. He has private security on his payroll, Olivia. Men who handle 'corporate anomalies.' If he thinks his empire is threatened, he won't hesitate to use them."
"He already knows something is wrong," I muttered, my fingers tracing the cold leather of the navy bag sitting between my feet. "Richard doesn't ask questions he doesn't already know the answer to. He’s tracking me, Mark. Or he’s tracking this bag."
The thought hit me like a physical blow.
Richard never left anything to chance.
"Mark, pull over," I said, my voice rising in panic. "Pull over right now!"
"What? We're in the middle of nowhere, Olivia—"
"Pull the car over!"
He slammed on the brakes, the tires skidding slightly on the wet gravel shoulder of the empty country road. Before the car had even come to a complete stop, I grabbed the navy briefcase, yanked the zipper open, and dumped the contents into my lap.
I ignored the pressed shirts and the transparent folder of documents. I rammed my hand deep into the silk lining of the interior pocket, tearing at the seams where the fabric met the leather backing. My fingers brushed against something small, hard, and metallic hidden beneath the structural cardboard of the bag’s base.
With a sharp pull, I ripped the lining away.
Tucked neatly into a custom-cut slit in the leather was a sleek, black, coin-sized disc with a faint, pulsing blue light. A military-grade GPS tracking tile.
"Jesus," Mark breathed, leaning over the center console to look at the blinking light. "He didn't just tell you not to open it. He ensured that if the bag moved outside of his designated perimeter, he’d know its exact coordinates."
"He knows I have it," I whispered, the sheer scale of his surveillance sending a chill straight down my spine. "He knows I didn't leave it at the apartment. He knows I’m not in Chicago. He’s probably looking at his tracking application right now, watching this little blue dot move down Highway 9."
"Which means he’s already redirecting his flight," Mark said, his face turning an ghostly shade of white beneath the dashboard lights. "He’s not going to wait for the meeting tomorrow. He’s coming to terminate the problem tonight."
"We have to ditch it," I said, my hand tightening around the tracker. I reached out to roll down the passenger window, ready to hurl the device into the dark, flooded ditch beside the road.
"Wait," Mark said, catching my wrist. His tired eyes suddenly sharpened with a brilliant, calculating wit. "Don't throw it here. If the dot stops moving in the middle of an empty county road, he’ll know we found it. He’ll look for the car. He’ll find the sanctuary within an hour."
"Then what do we do?"
Mark looked ahead, toward a faint neon glow cutting through the rain about a mile down the road. It was a twenty-four-hour truck stop, a massive depot where hundreds of long-haul semi-trucks parked before heading across the state lines.
"We give him a wild goose chase," Mark said, a slow, grim smile breaking through his exhaustion.
Five minutes later, we pulled into the gravel lot of the truck stop, surrounded by the roaring diesel engines of massive eighteen-wheelers. While I stayed in the car, Mark took the tracking tile, wrapped it in a piece of waterproof plastic, and quietly walked toward the back of a massive cargo truck with Ontario license plates that was currently idling near the exit lane, its driver inside buying coffee.
With the precision of an experienced operative, Mark slid the tracker deep into the spare tire well underneath the truck's massive steel chassis.
May you like
He walked back to our sedan, getting into the driver's seat and slamming the door just as the semi-truck began to pull out of the lot, its massive brakes hissing as it turned onto the interstate heading north—towards Canada, hundreds of miles away from where my sister was hiding.
"The dot is moving at seventy miles an hour in the wrong direction," Mark said, turning the key in our ignition. "That buys us until midnight. Let’s go get your sister."
