The Detachment

are going to ride in the trunk in one of them. And it’s going to be at least a few hours before we’re someplace comfortable, someplace with a bathroom. If you need to go before then, we’re going to need to put you in an adult diaper. Can you make it?”
    “You can’t be serious.”
    “I’m trying to make this as easy on you as I can, Mimi. But yeah, you better believe that I’m serious.”
    Kei declined the diaper, and I was relieved. Maybe it wasn’t worth much under the circumstances, but I really didn’t want to subject her to the indignity. This was going to be hard enough as it was.
    We spent the next two hours driving under virtually every overpass on the 101, the 110, and the 10, and going in and out of various underground parking garages, too. I took the passenger seat; Larison stayed in back with Kei. When I was satisfied, I called Dox. “You ready?”
    “Ready, partner.”
    “All right. We’re on our way.”
    We made a left off Venice Boulevard onto South Redondo. As we came to the stop sign on Bangor Street, I saw the Fusion, waiting to make a right—Dox. He pulled out ahead of us, and we followed him south toward the 10. As soon as we were under the overpass, Dox cut right and swerved to a stop on the sidewalk. The trunk popped open. Treven hit the hazard lights, cut right onto the sidewalk and then back onto the street, skidding to a stop so that the passenger side of the van was right alongside the open trunk of the Fusion. I jumped into the back and slid open the side door. Larison was already standing there with Kei, still wrist-tied and now blindfolded. The two of us lifted her easily into the trunk and I squirmed in beside her. Larison slammed the trunk shut and Dox peeled out back onto the road, accelerating to the end of the tunnel, then rapidly decelerating and emerging at a normal speed. Treven would be right behind him in the van, same timing, same formation as when we entered.
    What we were doing was creating a kind of shell game using the overpasses and the garages. We still didn’t know how Horton had tracked us to the Capital Hilton, and our working assumption was that he had used spy satellites. We had to assume he had access to the resources of the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. If so, and if he had a fixed point for a target—such as, say, Dulles Airport, or outside his daughter’s house—it was possible he could track that target from the fixed point to wherever the target went, virtually indefinitely. If our working assumption was right, we’d been lucky in Washington, maybe in the hotel parking garage, maybe elsewhere between D.C. and Los Angeles. But we didn’t want to rely on luck again. Every time we drove the van under an overpass, or in and out of a garage, we created the possibility that we’d switched Kei into one of the dozens of vehicles that emerged from under the overpass at around the same time we did, or from the garage afterward. Multiply this dynamic by dozens of overpasses and garages times dozens of cars, many of which would themselves continue under other overpasses and into other garages, and we could create a dataset too big for Horton to act on, at least in the time we would permit him.
    The plan now was for Treven and Larison to continue the shell game for the next couple hours, then to ditch the van, bleach it out, and get back to the hotel using buses and the Metro system. By the time they were done, Horton would be facing thousands of possibilities, each of which would have to be manually tracked, assuming it could be tracked at all. As for Dox and me, we did one more switch, into the U-Haul truck, which we had left in a giant underground garage in a mall in Westwood. Dox stayed at the wheel and I stayed in the cargo area with Kei.
    At a little past noon, I felt a series of short turns that told me were back at the motel. “How are you holding up?” I asked Kei.
    “I need a bathroom. Badly. Please don’t put me in a diaper.”
    I checked my watch. “Can you hold on for three more minutes?”
    She glared at me. “Barely.”
    The truck stopped. “Face the front of the truck,” I told her. She complied. A moment later, the cargo doors opened and Dox climbed in. He was carrying an extra-large cargo carrier, 59 by 24 by 24 inches. Just roomy enough for someone of Kei’s dimensions. He pulled the doors shut behind him.
    “All right, Mimi,” I said. “One more transfer.”
    Dox,