Elusive (On The Run Book #1) (16 page)

“This is wonderful,” Zoe said,
already several bites into the cheese and tomatoes.

“Local products,” Roy said and
drizzled some olive oil over his plate. “Try some of that jam,” he said,
hitting the side of the glass jam container. “Made it myself from the
tangerines from this tree,” he said pointing overhead. Jack gave him a doubtful
look, and Roy said, “Retirement does strange things to a man, I’m warning you,
Jack.”

“So you make marmalade and have a
cat?” Jack said, his face carefully blank.

“Damn straight.”

They ate in silence, the only
noise the wind ruffling the leaves overhead and Leo crunching through his bowl
in the kitchen. When they’d finished, Zoe said, “That was wonderful.”

“Tasty,” Jack agreed. “Especially
the jam.”

“Thank you. I’ll send some home
with you if you don’t wipe that smirk off your face,” Roy said, and then his
voice shifted. “Now, about your situation...” he carefully stacked the empty
plates on the tray. “I can ask around. See what I can find out.”

“I’d appreciate that. I might need
you to vouch for me,” Jack said.

Roy nodded his head slowly. “Of
course.”

Zoe felt her eyelids slipping
lower. The food had filled her up and she felt lethargic, except for the dull
pulse of a headache beginning behind her eyes. The guy’s voices seemed to
recede into nothingness, then she felt her head bob, and she jerked herself
back into a sitting position. The guys didn’t notice. It sounded as if they
were working their way through a roster of old acquaintances, updating each
other on where people were now and what they were doing. Zoe excused herself,
asking Roy if she could use his bathroom.

“Sure. Use mine in the bedroom on
the right at the top of the stairs. The sink in the one down here is broken,”
he explained.

Zoe made her way up the curving
staircase and through a bedroom with a heavy antique four-poster bed, matching
dresser, and nightstand. Several black and white prints of mountains hung on
the walls. In the bath, she splashed water on her face, which jerked her out of
her dozy state.

She patted her face dry with a
white towel and still had a moment’s surprise when she raised her gaze to the
mirror and saw brown hair framing her face. Her eyes looked like she’d pulled
an all-nighter and her fair skin seemed paler than it normally did. She looked
rather vampireish. She had a love/hate relationship with her skin. She loved
her creamy complexion until she put on a swimsuit or a tank top, then she felt
like she looked more ghostly than glamorous.

The headache was still there, and
she opened the mirrored door to the medicine cabinet, thinking that Roy
wouldn’t mind if she took a few aspirin. She found some ibuprofen behind a
bottle of perfume. A gold chain necklace with a butterfly pendent inset with
diamonds was curled into a careful coil beside the perfume. She returned
downstairs, thinking that the café owner better make her move because it
appeared Roy wasn’t quite the lonely guy she thought.

Leo met her at the bottom of the
stairs and arched his back. As she paused to run her hand over his fur, Roy’s
deep voice carried inside from the terrace. He sounded almost angry as he said,
“You know that wasn’t your fault. There’s no way you could have known someone
was about to give her up.”

“The government thought it was my
fault.”

“You know what bureaucracy is
like, Jack. Someone had to go down. You were it—the lowest man on the totem
pole, a perfect scapegoat. But you, of all people, should know that
bureaucratic paperwork doesn’t mean crap.”

“She was my responsibility.”
Jack’s voice was low and unyielding.

Roy’s sigh was audible even to Zoe
standing several feet away. “Just don’t let it ruin your life, Jack. It
happened, but it wasn’t your fault. Try to get your head around that.”

There was a long silence, and Zoe
decided she’d probably eavesdropped long enough. She walked outside and Jack
stood up immediately. “We should go,” he said to Roy, then turned to Zoe. “Roy
says the cruise ships come in today, and the hotels will be packed. We’ve got
to get into town and find a hotel before it gets too late.”

Roy offered to let them stay with
him, but Jack turned him down, saying they were better off if they kept moving.
Roy nodded his agreement.

“Thanks for the food and...well,
everything,” Zoe said.

“You bet,” Roy said as the cat
curled through his legs.

“Tomorrow?” Jack asked.

Roy nodded. “
Piazza dei Martiri
.”

––––––––

Naples, Italy

Monday, 2:22 a.m.

––––––––

ZOE rolled over and looked at the
clock. Two in the morning. She checked her watch. No wonder she felt
wide-awake. It was seven in the evening in Dallas. She pushed her pillow around
and tried to relax. She could hear Jack’s shallow breathing, slow and steady,
from the other twin bed. After the meeting with Roy, jet lag had hit her like
an anvil. She’d dozed in the car as Jack navigated into Naples. She had been
awake enough to haul herself up the two narrow flights of stairs to their hotel
room, then she had collapsed onto her twin bed.

Jack had probably followed the
recommendations for fighting jet lag listed in the in-flight magazine and
stayed awake as long as he could in the new time zone to get his body
acclimated. Either that or he’d taken a sleeping pill, but she knew he avoided
taking even an aspirin, so she couldn’t really see him popping sleeping pills.
He probably willed himself to sleep, Zoe thought sourly. He was so freakishly
self-disciplined he probably could make himself drop off into REM whenever he
wanted.

She tried to sleep, but couldn’t.
The last few days replayed in an endless loop like a slideshow: the swiftly
moving water of Deep Creek, Connor’s still body, the wide open sky during the
drive to Vegas, the shock of realizing Jack was alive, the panic she’d felt
when she saw their photo online. Were they still in the news? She thought of Roy’s
house and Jack’s face—a picture of disappointment at the news this Costa guy
was long gone.

What would they do now? She’d been
so sleepy then that she couldn’t process what the news meant, but now as she
stared at the ceiling, she realized they were at a dead end. Not that their
plan was all that stellar to begin with. She’d been so worried about getting
out of Vegas sans handcuffs that she hadn’t really questioned Jack about how
Roy could help them.

Remembering Jack’s distressed
expression when Roy told him about Costa, which he’d quickly managed to hide,
she guessed that Jack had expected Roy to contact his buddies at the CIA and
explain that Connor’s death was related to an old assignment. But it wasn’t.
And Roy didn’t appear to have copious contacts that he could exploit to get
them out of their situation.

What would they do now? Go back to
the States? Her stomach clinched at the thought. She was sure that the FBI pair
hadn’t stopped looking for them. And Mr. Stubby Guy, whoever he was, hadn’t
seemed like the type to just give up and go away either. After about twenty
minutes, she slid out of bed, picked up her messenger bag from where she’d
dumped it on the floor, and slipped into the bathroom. They’d been on the move
since the plane had landed and she’d fallen into bed without so much as washing
her face. She took a quick shower, which felt heavenly, then wrapped herself in
the cotton waffle-weave robe hanging on the back of the door.

The hotel wasn’t a deluxe,
five-star hotel with fluffy bathrobes and fresh flowers. It was more low-key, a
place in the busy area near the port with about twelve rooms. No room service
or concierge, but Zoe didn’t care. Their room had crisp sheets, was sparkling
clean, and they had plenty of hot water, which checked all the boxes for her.

She put the toilet seat down and
perched there, using the small counter surrounding the sink for a desk as she
removed everything from her messenger bag. Since it didn’t look like Roy would
be able to help, their only option was to go back to Connor’s death and figure
out why he’d been targeted.

She put the spreadsheets they’d
salvaged from Connor’s apartment, his black journal, and the photos in one
pile. Her meager stash of emergency repair makeup went in another. If she’d
known how long she would be gone, she certainly would have brought more than
mascara, concealer, and lip-gloss. Heck, she’d even have thrown in a few
changes of clothes or at least underwear she thought, throwing a glance at the
underwear she’d washed out before her shower and hung to dry on the bathroom’s
small radiator.

Sunglasses, breath mints, a few
crumpled tissues, a hair clip, and her wallet with her true identity went on
the other side of the sink along with the Irena passport. The rolls of money
that had been so fat when she first pulled them from their hiding places were
looking a little depleted.

She flattened the bills and
counted the money. Four hundred seventeen euros. She folded the bills in half
length-wise and bit her lower lip. That wasn’t much. She hoped Jack had
pre-paid for the hotel room with the euros they’d already exchanged.

What were they going to do when
they were out of cash? It wasn’t as if they could waltz up to an ATM and
withdraw cash from their checking accounts back in the US and, even if they
could do that, she didn’t have that much in her checking account to begin with.
Maybe two hundred dollars. On a good day.

She had already cashed the check
from Kiki, but she’d used most of it, paying for gas to get to Vegas, then for
food, and supplies for their makeover session. Except for fourteen cents and a
single petrified stick of gum, that was it—all her resources.

She took a deep breath and pulled
the stack of papers they’d lifted from Connor’s house toward her. First, she
looked through Connor’s black journal page by page. She didn’t have any spare
paper, so she made notes on toilet paper. Fortunately, the hotel had provided
toilet paper with less than Charmin-like qualities. It was more like tissue
paper. She listed all Connor’s travel, arranging it by date and noting city
airport codes. LVS had to be Las Vegas. It was always his first stop. He’d
spend a few days, sometimes only one day, before leaving for other cities.
There were a smattering of places he’d visited, and she recognized most of
them, like Atlanta and Chicago. There were a few she could distinguish from the
hotel info that was included with each listing.

Thank goodness Connor didn’t
embrace new technologies. Of course, he probably didn’t want to risk keeping
his travel reservations on his office computer in case Jack or even Sharon used
it for some reason. He could have used the old computer in the apartment in Las
Vegas to make his travel reservations or some anonymous Internet café to plan
his travel. Didn’t matter, Zoe thought as she jotted the last of the airport
codes and dates. She recognized or was able to work out almost all of the
codes, except for one. Where was VCE?

It was his most frequent
destination in the last few months, and there was only one address associated with
it, a street called
Calle delle
Botteghe
, which sounded Italian or Spanish to her. She tapped her
pen against the toilet paper. They’d have to find an Internet café of their own
to look up the city codes and the street name. There were a few names associated
with the cities, but none with the VCE notations. There were also a few random
lists of mundane household things like milk, cereal, and plastic spoons. She
skipped over those, but paused at one of the last lists.

––––––––

Contacts

Wig/hair
die

Fake
tan

––––––––

Other than the fact that Connor
hadn’t paid attention during the homophone lesson at school, Zoe noticed that
the first two items on the list were written in blue ink and the slant of the
letters were more pronounced that the letters of the last item on the list,
which was written in pencil. It looked like he’d written the first two items,
then added the last item later. Was he planning some sort of disguise? She
shook her head. All their slouching through airport security and worry about
the Internet video had her paranoid. She had disguises on the brain. Why would
he plan to change his appearance?

There was a set of numbers
scrunched on the last line, 13.4.75.1.6.10. Zoe frowned at them. More numbers.
She was beginning to hate numbers, and she’d never had an aversion to them
before. She hadn’t disliked math in school like some of her friends, but all
these numbers floating around without a code or key or some way to explain
them...well, they were beginning to annoy her. She supposed that if you took out
the periods they might be a phone number? Not an amount of money—there were too
many periods. Not an address. Maybe an account number? GPS coordinates? Lock
combinations? She sighed. There were too many possibilities.

She tore off her toilet paper
list, which resembled more of a scroll at this point, and tucked it into the
black journal.

She moved to the printouts of
spreadsheets. She’d tried to make sense of them on the airplane, but the print
was so tiny and she’d been so jumpy that she hadn’t made much progress. Instead
of reading everything straight through, she tried a new approach and sorted
them by date. Although the columns weren’t headed with titles, she’d worked out
that the first column in each spreadsheet was a date. After about twenty
minutes, she felt as if her eyes were beginning to cross. There were some
duplicate pages, which kept throwing her off. She sorted those into stacks,
blinking and opening her eyes wide, fighting off a returning wave of
sleepiness. She checked her watch. Only three a.m. She could still get a couple
more hours sleep, but the stack was almost sorted, so she pressed on. If she
ever had insomnia, she now knew reading spreadsheets would put her out in a
couple of minutes flat. She struggled through the last pages, tossing them in
the correct piles and then quietly tiptoed back to bed.