There was one obvious detail, though. The people chasing her were pulling out all the stops. She thought again about the FBI agents. Noah had claimed they were bogus, but what if he was wrong? What if the people chasing her, who had killed Noah, really were government operatives? It made a sick kind of sense. Noah had disobeyed orders by saving her life. He had gone rogue. That was the expression they used in those movies. Off the reservation. Under the radar.
All of the above?
Somehow, he had ended up back on the radar, and so had she.
How can I hide from the government?
Mercy had started the car, but they weren’t moving. “Which way?”
“Straight,” Jenna replied, but it sounded like a question in her ears. “Go straight,” she repeated, trying to think about the next move. “Might as well use the lights. They can see us anyway.”
They can see us.
The drone probably had night-vision capabilities. Was it armed? Was it locking on to them with one of those missiles that sounded like the name of heavy metal band…Stinger or Hellfire…something like that?
She shook her head. If that was an option for them, they would have already used it. No, the UAV was just an eye in the sky. The real danger was from Zack and his team. They had to get someplace where the killers couldn’t reach them.
She looked at the map again, not searching for a specific route this time, but trying to download every detail into her brain. The satellite image showed an astonishing degree of detail, but the image wasn’t a perfect reference. For one thing, the data was a couple of years old. The cars that were visible, parked on driveways, or captured while moving down the remote roads, were long gone now. Other details might have changed as well. The entire area had been transformed by the opening of a canal designed to restore the freshwater balance of the Everglades.
“Dead end,” Mercy said.
Jenna looked up. There was a low earthen bank ahead. It was a dike to hold back the canal during the rainy season. If the map was accurate, the access road ran along the top of the earthworks. “Drive onto the dike,” she said, trying to inject a tone of certainty into her voice. “Then turn left.”
They slowed, but in the headlight beams, Jenna saw the ruts of old tire tracks leading up onto the dike. She had made the right call. Mercy eased the car up the bank, and for a few seconds, the headlights shone into the sky like a searchlight. They leveled out and Jenna could see the black ribbon of the canal passing in front of them. Mercy steered left as instructed, and found the road Jenna had promised.
The canal hooked to the northwest a few hundred yards later. Jenna saw on the map that it would bring them back to the highway, just a little way from the gated road leading into the abandoned complex. The men hunting them would know this, too. It would be the perfect place to set a trap.
She searched the map for some alternative route, something to confound the expectations of the hunters and fool the watchful eye of the drone. She settled on a swatch of green with a road that ended in a bulb-shaped parking area. A little blue dot indicated that there were photos and more information associated with the spot, so she tapped on it. “That might work.”
She zoomed out and mentally plotted the route they would have to take. It was only a couple of miles away, but it lay on the other side of the canal.
“Do you trust me?”
Mercy glanced over at her. “Of course I…” The automatic response faltered, replaced by suspicion and dread. “Why?”
In a perfectly calm voice, Jenna told her. “I want you to drive into the canal.”
27
There really wasn’t time to explain, but Jenna knew she had to give Mercy something to support her leap of faith.
“We have to get to the other side of the canal,” Jenna said. “Best way to do that is to drive into it, and swim for it.”
“Best way?” Mercy countered. “I can think of a lot of better—”
“Mercy, we have to do this. Now.”
To her credit, Mercy didn’t balk. She cranked the wheel to the right and punched the gas pedal. The engine revved, and the front end of the car dropped with a violent crunch. The surge carried the vehicle forward, scraping across the edge of the bank until gravity took over. The car tilted down and plunged into the water below.
On any other day, Jenna might have been disoriented by the chaotic upheaval, but after everything she had gone through, the splashdown was about as exciting as a cheap, carnival kiddie ride. Her only reaction to the tepid water rushing in through the open window was to hold the phone above her head to keep it dry. Noah’s journal was going to get soaked. She had mixed feelings about that. There might still be a few more answers within its pages, but she wasn’t sure she could handle any more revelations about her past. And Noah’s answers seemed to lead only to more questions.
With the water level rising up around her, she stuck her head and upper body out the window and pushed off, swimming free as the car settled further down the sloping bank.
“Jenna?”
“I’m here,” she called, and she swam toward the sound of Mercy’s voice. The only light was a murky glow rising from the bottom of the canaclass="underline" the car’s headlights shining into the muddy water. “Swim for the other side.”
She tried not to think about what else might be in the water. There were a lot of things in the ‘Glades that could kill a person, ranging from alligators and snakes to microscopic bacteria and viruses carried by mosquitoes. The canal was only about as wide as a two lane road and took all of ten seconds to cross, but getting out was a little trickier. The earthen bank slipped out from under her, dropping her back into the water. On her third attempt, her fingers wrapped around a tuft of Sawgrass. She used it to haul herself onto dry land, ignoring the dull pain caused by the plant’s serrated leaves, which tore into her skin. As soon as she reached the top of the bank, she located Mercy and helped her climb over the slick bank.
“Come on,” she urged, eyeing the rising light across the canal. Their pursuers were closing in. She didn’t think they would attempt to follow. With the drone keeping watch, they could afford the long detour required to reach the other side of the canal. Still, she wasn’t going to underestimate them.
Jenna had chosen this spot for the crossing for a very specific reason — a road intersected the canal here. Even without a car, a road was critical to her plan. She searched the darkness until she found the turn off, and then beckoned Mercy to follow.
Her goal lay a mile away, a fifteen minute walk at a brisk pace, but Jenna wasn’t sure they had fifteen minutes. So she ran. At first, the pain of her many superficial injuries, compounded by the gnawing emptiness in her gut and the throbbing pain of a persistent headache, made the run feel like an exercise in self-torture. But the situation’s urgency got her through the first few steps, and after that, she settled into an almost mindless rhythm, dissociated from the pain. Mercy kept up, and after a few minutes, Jenna stopped looking back.
The road led through a wooded area, deepening the darkness, but also providing some concealment from the drone still buzzing above. Not that they needed to hide. Jenna’s plan relied more on what they would do once they reached their destination and less on concealment.
She slowed to a trot and checked their progress with the GPS dot on the map. Her eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and the phone display was painfully bright. She cupped a hand over it to shield the light, both from her own eyes and from the drone, and she squinted at the map.