LITMIR.BIZ

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horrors that had been swirling through his head previously were replaced with a steely resolve, a hard determination. There was a hotline. The police were on it. The CIA was on it. And now he too was on the road after them.

      I’m on my way. Dad is coming for you.

      And for him.

      CHAPTER FIVE

      “You should eat.” The assassin gestured at a carton of Chinese takeout on the nightstand beside the bed.

      Maya shook her head. The food was long cold by now, and she wasn’t hungry. Instead, she sat on the bed with her knees drawn up, Sara leaning against her with her head in her older sister’s lap. The girls were handcuffed together, Maya’s left wrist with Sara’s right. Where he had gotten the handcuffs, she didn’t know, but the assassin had warned them several times that if either of them tried anything to escape or make noise, the other would suffer for it.

      Rais sat in an armchair near the door of the seedy motel room with orange carpeting and yellow walls. The room smelled musty and the bathroom reeked of bleach. They had been there for hours; the ancient bedside alarm clock told her in blocky red LED numerals that it was two thirty in the morning. The television was on, tuned into a news station with the volume low.

      A white station wagon was parked directly outside, mere feet from the door; the assassin had stolen it after dark from a used car lot. It was the third time they had switched cars that day, from Thompson’s truck to the blue sedan and now to the white SUV. Each time they did, Rais changed directions, heading first south, then back north, and then to the northeast toward the coast.

      Maya understood what he was doing; a cat-and-mouse game, leaving the stolen vehicles in different locations so that the authorities would have no idea which way they were heading. Their motel room was less than ten miles from Bayonne, not far from the border to New Jersey and New York. The motel itself was a strip of a building that was so rundown and frankly disgusting that driving by it gave the impression it had been closed for years.

      Neither of the girls had slept much. Sara had catnapped in Maya’s arms, stealing twenty or thirty minutes at a time before rousing with a start and a whimper as she woke from whatever dream she’d been having and remembered where she was.

      Maya had fought the exhaustion, trying to stay awake as long as possible—Rais had to sleep sometime, she knew, and it could afford them a precious few minutes they needed to make a run for it. But the motel was located in an industrial park. She saw when they had pulled in that there were no houses nearby and no other businesses that would be open this time of night. She wasn’t even certain anyone would be in the motel office. They would have nowhere to go except into the night, and the handcuffs would slow them down.

      Eventually Maya had succumbed to the fatigue and unwillingly nodded off. She was asleep less than an hour when she woke with a slight gasp—and then gasped again when, startled, she saw Rais sitting in the armchair only three feet from her.

      He was staring directly at her, eyes wide open. Just watching.

      It had made her skin crawl… until a whole minute passed, and then another. She watched him, staring back, her fright mingling with curiosity. Then she realized.

      He sleeps with his eyes open.

      She wasn’t sure if that was more disturbing than waking to find him watching her or not.

      Then he blinked, and she sucked in yet another startled gasp, her heart leaping into her throat.

      “Damaged facial nerves,” he said quietly, almost a whisper. “I’ve heard it can be quite unsettling.” He gestured to the carton of leftover Chinese takeout that had been delivered to their room hours earlier. “You should eat.”

      She shook her head, cradling Sara across her lap.

      The low-volume news station was repeating the major headlines from earlier that day. A terror organization had been deemed responsible for the release of a deadly smallpox virus in Spain and other parts of Europe; their leader, as well as the virus, had been apprehended and several other members were now in custody. That afternoon the United States had officially lifted its international travel ban to all countries except for Portugal, Spain, and France, where there were still isolated incidents of mutated smallpox. But everyone seemed confident that the World Health Organization had the situation under control.

      Maya had suspected that her father had been sent to assist with that case. She wondered if he had been the one to take down the ringleader. She wondered if he was back in the country yet.

      She wondered if he had found Mr. Thompson’s body. If he had realized they were missing—or if anyone had realized they were missing.

      Rais sat in the yellow chair with a cell phone resting on the armrest. It was an older style phone, practically prehistoric by today’s standards—it wasn’t good for anything but calls and messages. A burner phone, Maya had heard such things called on TV. It did not connect to the internet and had no GPS, which she knew from police procedural shows meant it could only be traced by the phone number, which someone would have to have.

      Rais was waiting for something, it seemed. A call or a message. Maya desperately wanted to know where they were going, if there even was a destination. She suspected that Rais wanted their father to find them, to track them down, but the assassin did not seem to be in any rush to get anywhere. Was this his game, she wondered, stealing cars and changing directions, eluding the authorities, in the hopes that their father would be the one to find them first? Would they just keep bouncing from place to place until there was a faceoff?

      Suddenly a monophonic ring tone blared out from the burner phone beside Rais. Sara jumped slightly in her arms with the high-pitched intrusion.

      “Hello.” Rais answered the phone flatly. “Ano.” He stood from his chair for the first time in three hours as he switched from English to some foreign tongue. Maya knew only English and French, and she could recognize a handful of other languages from single words and accents, but she didn’t know this one. It was a guttural tongue, but not altogether unpleasant.

      Russian? she thought. No. Polish, maybe. It was no use guessing; she couldn’t be sure, and knowing wouldn’t help her understand anything that was being said.

      Still, she listened in, noting the frequent usage of “z” and “-ski” sounds, trying to pick out cognates, of which there seemed to be none.

      There was one word that she managed to pick out, however, and it made her blood run cold.

      “Dubrovnik,” the assassin said, as if by way of confirmation.

      Dubrovnik? Geography was one of her best subjects; Dubrovnik was a city in southwestern Croatia, a famous seaport and popular tourist destination. But far more important than that was the implication of the mentioned word.

      It meant that Rais was planning to take them out of the country.

      “Ano,” he said (which seemed like an affirmative; she guessed it to mean “yes”). And then: “Port Jersey.”

      They were the only two English words in the entire conversation besides “hello,” and she picked them out easily. Their motel was already close to Bayonne, a stone’s throw from the industrial Port Jersey. She had seen it many times before, crossing the bridge from Jersey into New York or back, stacks upon stacks of multicolored freight containers being loaded by cranes onto vast, dark ships that would carry them overseas.

      Her heartbeat tripled its pace. Rais was going to take them out of the US by way of Port Jersey to Croatia. And from there… she had no idea, and no one else would either. There would be little hope of ever being found again.

      Maya could not allow it. Her resolve to fight back strengthened; her determination to do something about this situation came roaring back to life.

      The trauma of watching Rais cut the woman’s throat in the rest stop bathroom earlier that day still lingered; she saw it whenever she closed her eyes. The vacant, dead stare. The pool of blood nearly touching her feet. But then she touched her sister’s hair and she knew that she would absolutely accept

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