The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

note of relief in her voice.
    “Tell everyone to sit tight,” Paige said. “We’ll talk soon.”
    She ended the call. Turned to Travis and Bethany. “We need to get moving, fast.”
    “Where to?” Travis said.
    “Yuma, Arizona. I’ll explain at the airport.”
    They packed in less than three minutes. Travis broke down the shotgun just enough to fit it back into the duffel bag, along with the manila rope. They stowed the cylinder in Bethany’s backpack and left the hotel without bothering to check out.
    They hit a shop on 14th Street, where Paige bought a pair of jeans and a T-shirt to replace her outfit, which still smelled like gasoline from the motorcade attack. She changed in the restroom. Travis had a cab waiting when she came outside.
    “Reagan or Dulles,” Travis said.
    “Baltimore International, in case they’re watching both of those. We need to be paranoid at every step from now on.”
    She ducked into the backseat, followed by Bethany and then Travis.
    None of them spoke during the forty-minute cab ride. Travis glanced across Bethany at Paige a few times. The hug in the hotel room had been a nice enough icebreaker, but there was still a tension that couldn’t be helped—and wouldn’t be. He had no plan to bring up anything that’d happened between them, including his departure. Neither did she, in all likelihood. And that would be fine. When this was over, he’d go back to sitting on loading docks at two in the morning and trying not to remember her. He’d just be starting from scratch, that was all.
    They got out of the cab in front of the private terminal in Baltimore. They headed for the building, set back thirty yards from the drop-off lane.
    “We’re done with Renee Turner,” Bethany said. “After what just happened in the green building, her travel pattern is too easy to zero. These people have Homeland resources at their fingertips. They can look at the timing of our attack on them, then pull up travel and lodging patterns in a radius and interval around it. They’ll see Renee’s checkin at the Ritz, and they’ll see that she flew from Rapid City last night, just over the state line from Border Town. Taken all together, it’s enough to smoke us. Renee shows ID here, the ticket agent gets a red pop-up window on her screen. We get a polite smile, and thirty seconds later we get arrested.”
    She thought about it as they walked. Glanced at Travis.
    “Rob Pullman’s a different story,” she said. “They have no travel or lodging records for him. They have nothing that ties him to Renee, either. Her stopover in Atlanta can’t link the two of them. Rob Pullman didn’t show ID to board the flight. The only thing his name is on is a credit-card transaction: he bought a shotgun and some climbing rope in Virginia. But so what? That’s a single purchase out of 10 million that happened around D.C. this morning. It’s one point in the cloud. It’s nothing.” She looked at Paige. “Can our friends in the office building guess we’re going to Yuma?”
    “They can assume it.”
    Bethany thought it over. “Okay. If Rob Pullman flies from Baltimore to Yuma, it’s almost unthinkable that their algorithms will flag it. And if he flies into the next town over from Yuma, there’s not a chance.” She took out her phone. “Rob’s gonna need a membership with Falcon Jet.”
    Paige glanced at Travis. She managed a passing smile. “He’ll need a better job to swing it.”
    “I get double time on Sundays,” Travis said.
    “I’ll give him an oil tycoon uncle whose cholesterol intake caught up with him last spring,” Bethany said.
    “While you’re at it,” Travis said, “give him an encounter with Renee on a park bench.”
    Rob Pullman booked a private flight to Imperial, California, fifty miles west of Yuma. The ticket agent smiled politely, but nobody showed up to arrest them. The agent said the plane would be ready in forty-five minutes. They found an outdoor food court that was all but deserted, and ordered lunch.
    Paige ate two huge slices of pizza in a few minutes. She hadn’t eaten since early the night before. She washed them down with most of a large Pepsi.
    The food court looked straight down the airport’s busiest runway, eighty yards from its approach lights. Airliners passing overhead in the last seconds of their descent made the glass tabletop rattle.
    Paige waited silently for one—a DC-10, Travis thought—to land, and then she said, “Most of what I