The First Prophet (21 page)

Murphy’s third burner cell phone of the week rang, and she answered it with a frown.
“Yeah?”

“What the hell happened?”

She didn’t allow his anger to spark her own. “I was doing my job. Did you enjoy your
swim?”

“Goddammit, Murphy. Did you put them on alert?”

“Duran was coming.”

“Why the hell didn’t you warn
me
? Five minutes earlier and I wouldn’t have ended up looking like a jackass.”

“You’ll have to forgive me. I was more concerned with them than you.”

He drew a breath and let it out slowly. But the words were still snapped out when
he said, “This is what happens when the right hand doesn’t know what the left one
is doing. I’ve warned you, Murphy.”

“I work alone.”

“And I have no problem with that. But when I’m working the other side of the street,
I expect you to alert me before you act.”

“Noted.” Her voice was level.

“Are you on them now?” He had the wisdom not to sound triumphant.

“Not exactly.”

“Murphy—”

“You worry too much, Brodie.”

“Do you understand how much time we have left?” His voice was tight. “Are you aware
that it’s probably just a matter of days now?”

“I am aware of that, yes.” It was her turn to draw a breath in an attempt to hold
on to patience.

“Then do your job.”

He hung up on her.

Murphy closed the burner phone and removed the battery for good measure, tossing it
into a trash can as she passed while the phone itself was drop-kicked into the gutter.
“But that’s what I’m doing, Brodie,” she murmured to herself. “My job.”

She pulled yet another disposable phone from the leather pouch hanging against her
hip, turned it on, and punched in a familiar number. As soon as the call was answered,
she spoke briskly.

“I kept him from making contact. And he’s pissed.”

“Never mind him. He’ll get over it.”

“Easy for you to say,” Murphy muttered. “He has a mean right hook. I’ve seen him use
it. I’d rather not be on the receiving end, thanks all the same.”

“With a little luck, you won’t be anywhere near Brodie for a while, so relax.”

“Yeah, right. And in the meantime?”

“Chicago.”

Sarah didn’t say much after they turned back onto the highway, grappling with the
growing certainty of just
how far-reaching and complex this situation obviously was. And how terrifying.

The lake had seemed like a safe place, a place where they could rest and regroup,
make plans. Then that warning had come, presumably from a friend or ally and, again
in the middle of the night, they had run for their lives.

Where had the warning come from? A friend? Another psychic? How had it been sent to
Tucker’s computer when he, a computer expert, insisted that was next to impossible?

Their car bugged, their every action apparently monitored by the enemy, and now it
was beginning to look like there was someone else out there watching them, someone
who might be on their side…

And Sarah had no idea who they could trust.

She wasn’t able to brood about it for too long, because Tucker turned the car toward
the west about fifteen minutes later. And it required all her self-control to keep
from reaching over and jerking the wheel to turn them north once more.

It was an actual physical sensation, a tugging deep inside her that almost hurt. This
was the wrong way.
The wrong way!
She had to close her eyes and consciously argue with whatever was tugging at her.
We’ll go the right way. We will. In a day or two, we will.

It has to be north.

I know.

The answer is north.

What answer is that?

North.

Right. We’ll go north. Soon.

After a few minutes of the continued silence between her and Tucker, she reached and
turned on the radio, needing to listen to something besides the faint, anxious echo
in her head.

“So she’s just a friend, huh?” Keith Hayden grinned at Tucker as they sat in his office
at the car lot. “How come all your friends look like her and all my friends look like
you?”

“Because there is a God.” Tucker was signing his name on a multitude of papers and
didn’t look up.

Keith snorted. “Listen, Tuck—”

“
Please
don’t call me that,” Tucker interrupted. “It doesn’t sound any better now than it
did in college. And it especially sounds bad when I’ve just let you rob me blind.”

“Who, me?” Keith was deeply injured. “Can I help it if you’re in too big a hurry to
insist on a better price for that tank of yours? By the way, you didn’t tell me why
you were in such a hurry.”

“Because we have places to go and people to see.” Tucker hesitated and looked at his
old friend. “You won’t get into any trouble misfiling the papers on the Jeep for a
few days, right?”

Keith shrugged. “It’s my business, I can do what I like. And I’m lousy at filing things
promptly. Just remember,
you’re still using your own tag, and it’ll be listed in the DMV as belonging on a
Mercedes. If you get stopped or pulled over, they might ask questions. But you’ll
have your copies of the papers, so it should be all right, at least for a few days.
I still say you ought to switch the insurance, though.”

“I have a special policy that covers me no matter what I’m driving. It’ll have to
do.” Changing his insurance would reveal the make and model of the Jeep in all the
necessary records, and Tucker wasn’t prepared to risk that.

“Then for God’s sake, drive carefully.”

“I intend to.” Tucker nodded. “So we’ve taken care of my end. But on your end…Keith,
if anybody shows up asking questions about Sarah and me, tell them you sold me a Corvette
or something and don’t have a clue where we’re headed.”

“Is somebody likely to show up?”

Shrugging, Tucker finished signing and pushed the papers back across Keith’s desk.

“In trouble, old buddy?”

“Sarah’s ex isn’t too happy about us,” Tucker said lightly, ever inventive. “Let’s
just say he knows some pretty ugly customers and we’ll both be better off if the trail
ends here.”

“No problem.” Keith looked through the glass half wall of his office where he could
see Sarah standing outside in the showroom apparently watching traffic pass the car
lot. “I thought she looked a little ragged. You too, buddy. And now coming all the
way to Chicago to trade your car in is starting to make a little more sense.”

“I want Sarah to have some peace finally, that’s all,” Tucker said in one of the few
utterly truthful statements he’d made today.

“Yeah, I imagine you’d do most anything for a pretty lady like her.” Keith grinned,
then added, “My guys are switching your stuff from the Mercedes to the Jeep, including
the tag. While they’re doing that, I’ll have our bank transfer the balance I owe you
to a branch of your bank here in Chicago.”

“Tell them I’ll be by for the cash within an hour,” Tucker said.

Keith raised his brows. “Is the ex that close? I was hoping I could buy you two lunch.”

“We need to be on our way, Keith, but thanks.” Tucker glanced back over his shoulder,
and added, “I’ll wait with Sarah while you finish up in here, okay?”

“Okay.”

Tucker came up behind Sarah as she stood looking out at traffic, approaching her warily.
He couldn’t help wondering how on earth Keith had mistaken them for lovers; two more
guarded and isolated people would be hard to imagine.

She had withdrawn from him almost completely during the journey to Chicago. They had
gotten motel rooms both Saturday night and last night but had spent less than six
hours in them each night. Tucker, for one, had barely closed his eyes since they had
left the cabin on the lake, and on Sunday morning Sarah had come to breakfast hollow-eyed
and strained, saying in answer to his insistent questions that she’d had another vision.
The
yawning grave again, and the whisper of voice she couldn’t quite understand, but this
time accompanied by the sounds of bells—“like church bells”—and the sight of a Celtic
cross.

Neither of them had said much after that.

“Sarah?”

She looked at him, unsurprised by his approach but with distant eyes, as if she returned
from someplace else.

“Keith’s taking care of the final details, so we’ll be out of here in just a few minutes.”

She nodded, but said only, “Did you notice it?”

“Notice what?”

“That.” She pointed toward the passing traffic.

He looked in the direction she indicated, but it took him several moments to realize
what she meant. Across the street, at a slight angle to the car lot where they stood,
was one of those places that sold stonework. There were all kinds of things outside
the building advertising the business: birdbaths, statuary, columns, benches and tables—even
tombstones. Off to one side, curiously isolated and leaning a bit, was a Celtic cross.
A big one.

“I saw a Celtic cross, canted to one side.”

“Is that—?”

“It’s the one I saw in the vision.” She turned her head to look up at him again, her
expression still. “A part of the journey. We were meant to come here all along. Do
you still believe it was all your idea?”

“Sarah, there must be other crosses like that one, especially in the northeast where
so many Irish settled. We’ll probably see dozens of them once we head north
again.” He questioned her certainty not because he doubted her, but because he didn’t
like to think that his decision to come here had been less his own idea than the dictate
of fate.

“There may be thousands of crosses for all I know. But that one is the one I saw.”

He gazed into pale brown eyes that were distant and wary and very sure, and sighed.
“Okay. But it still doesn’t mean your life will end the way the vision did. That is
not going to happen.”

Slowly, she said, “Switching cars like this…it’ll give us a head start maybe. A few
days’ grace, if we’re lucky. But they will find us eventually. They want me too badly
to just give up.”

“We’re going to use the time we have,” Tucker told her. “I’ll disable the GPS in the
Jeep so nobody can track us that way. Hopefully they’ll believe the trail ends here,
at least for a while. In the meantime, while we’re heading north toward whatever it
is you feel is so important, we’ll use the computer every chance we get and keep gathering
information until the pieces start to come together.”

“Couldn’t they trace that? If we connect to the Internet even wirelessly?”

“Don’t worry; I’ll run it through so many proxy servers they’ll never be able to trace
us. Sarah, we’ll make sense out of this. And then we’ll find a way to deal with these
people.”

“You’re so sure we can deal with them.” She shook her head a little. “How? How can
you
deal
with people willing to kill a cop? How can you deal with people who
bug cars? Who abduct
children
? Who kill people only because they’re…different? How are we going to deal with people
like that, Tucker?”

He didn’t have a ready answer, and admitted that reluctantly. “I don’t know. But we’ll
find a way.”

Still looking at him, she nodded slowly, but her voice was remote when she said, “Don’t
underestimate them, Tucker. Whatever you do…don’t do that.”

“No, I won’t. Not again.” He hesitated, and then, needing to regain the sense of control
her questions had shaken, said, “I’ve been thinking. It’ll probably be smarter to
avoid staying any place where either of us has stayed before. Even at the places I
have no traceable tie to, I probably used credit cards in local stores, or talked
to people who might remember. We have to assume somebody asking the right questions
could find out about those places. And find us.”

“So we stick to anonymous hotels and motels?”

“I think it’ll be safer, and not just because it’ll be harder to find us. If we’re
surrounded by other people and not isolated, it won’t be easy for them to move against
us.”

Sarah nodded again, but said, “Unless they have another Sergeant Lewis on the payroll.
People usually don’t interfere with the police.”