Except for a tattooed girl with a green crew cut at the register, there were no other people in the store. Hardwick led the way to a wall of refrigerated drinks. “You want anything?”
“Tell me about the brochure.”
He opened one of the glass cooler doors and took out a bottle of springwater. “Chamber of commerce kind of brochure. Harpers Dale. You’ve heard of it?”
“Hot air balloon rides?”
“Plenty of shit like that. Tourist hot spot at the ass end of one of the Finger Lakes.”
“So . . . you got a Harpers Dale travel brochure? And?”
“It came in the mail. Someone had written the word ‘Unforgettable’ across the front of it. They even fucking underlined it.”
“This means what to you?”
“This means a world of shit. You remember why I brought you into this Hammond thing to begin with? I mean, apart from my wanting to save you from wasting your brain on some fucking porcupine.”
“You wanted a front man—so Gil Fenton wouldn’t know you were personally involved in undermining his case.”
“You remember why I didn’t want him to know?”
“Because he had some dirt on you from something that went down the wrong way a long time ago. And if he got pissed off enough, he might drop the dime.”
“That thing that went down the wrong way? It went down in Harpers Dale.”
A teenager with droopy denim pants, an oversized red baseball hat, a fur jacket, and shiny onyx disk earrings came down the aisle, clicking his tongue to a hip-hop beat. He opened the cooler door next to Gurney and took out four cans of a super-caffeinated drink called WHACK.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” growled Hardwick. He paid the green-haired girl for the springwater, and they walked out of the store.
Out by the GTO Hardwick lit a new cigarette and took a couple of fierce drags on it.
“I guess there’s no way that Harpers Dale brochure might have been a coincidence?” Gurney asked.
“No reason anyone else would mail me that kind of brochure. And that little addition—‘Unforgettable’—no way is that a coincidence. It’s a fucking threat. Fenton knows I’m working with the Hammonds. Which means there’s a bug somewhere.”
“At the chalet?”
“Most likely place.”
“Okay. What now?”
Hardwick made an acid-reflux face. “It’s a problem I was trying to avoid. But facts need to be faced. Bottom line, whatever Fenton knows or doesn’t know at this point makes no fucking difference. I’m in for the duration. If he wants to play the Harpers Dale card, that’s his business. But I’ll make fucking sure that fucker goes down with me.”
He took out another cigarette and lit it.
Gurney shrugged. “It may look like Fenton knows, but it’s not a certainty.”
Hardwick coughed up some phlegm and spit it on the pavement. “Nothing’s a fucking certainty, but it’s a good working assumption.”
“I’m just saying, in the event that he doesn’t know, and the brochure came to you by some other route, you shouldn’t advertise your involvement unnecessarily. It’s not like he signed his name to it. If you confront him, he could deny being the sender. You’d just be giving him the satisfaction of knowing he’d gotten to you.”
“I shouldn’t stick my middle finger in his eye?”
“I’d resist the temptation if I were you.” Gurney paused, then patted the jacket pocket where he’d stowed the device. “I assume you want me to visit the chalet with this little item to verify your surveillance suspicions?”
“Absolutely. You might want to go over that Presidential Suite of yours, too.”
Gurney nodded his agreement, then glanced at the Outback. “Can it identify the presence of a GPS tracker?”
“According to Wigg, it picks up everything.”
“You checked your own car?”
“Yep. It’s clean.”
“How about we check mine right now—before I meet with Angela?”
Hardwick took a thoughtful drag on his cigarette. “Good idea.”
MADELEINE WAS FULLY AWAKE NOW, EYEING THE SMARTPHONE screen with as much curiosity and concern as Gurney and Hardwick.
A device more advanced than any Gurney had ever seen, the scanner was displaying a clear outline of the vehicle they were sitting in.
Hardwick explained that he had set its “primary range perimeter,” one of its breakthrough features, to focus on the area defined by the Outback itself.
Gurney gave him a quizzical look.
Hardwick shrugged from the backseat. “All I can do is repeat what Wigg told me. According to her, this thing incorporates two technologies. One detects and displays transmission frequencies. The other is a new kind of short-range radar—CAM, stands for Close-Area Mapping. It detects and displays the perimeters of any enclosed space. Working together, they give you the precise location of any transmitter.”
On the scanner’s screen, within a graphic representation of the steel shell of the vehicle, two red lights were blinking—one near the front of the engine compartment, the other near a rear wheel well. Next to each red light were three number sequences and the letters GPT.
Madeleine looked at Hardwick. “What does all that mean?”
“The letters indicate the type of device—GPT for geoposition trackers. The large number next to each is its transmitting frequency. The other two numbers pinpoint the location of the device in vertical inches above the ground and horizontal inches from the car’s perimeter.”
Gurney looked skeptical. “Two flashing lights indicate the presence of two trackers?”
“The little wizard doesn’t lie.”
Madeleine’s eyes widened. “Those things are telling someone where we are, right now, sitting here in our car?”
“You got it.”
“Can you get rid of them?”
“We can, but we need to give some thought to when, where, and how.” He looked at Gurney. “Any thoughts on how we should deal with it?”
“That depends on who we think put them there, and why there are two of them.”
“Simple redundancy? Or different performance characteristics for different conditions?”
Gurney looked doubtful. “How many times have you found two trackers on one vehicle?”
“Never.”
“Maybe the two devices have separate sources?”
Now it was Hardwick’s turn to look doubtful. “Like two different investigators? And neither one wants to rely on getting data from the other?”
“Could be separate investigative agencies. And neither one knows about the tracker placed by the other.”
“What two agencies are we talking about?”
“I have no idea, just questions. For example, who authorized electronic surveillance on the personal vehicle of a private investigator? Presumably I’m not suspected of committing a crime. If probable-cause warrants were issued for the placement of those trackers, what was the basis? And if no warrants were issued, who was willing to break the law that way? Why do my movements matter that much?”
“You also gotta ask, what’s being done with the tracking data?”
Madeleine turned in her seat and stared at him. “What do you mean?”
“Location data can be used in a lot of ways. It can be fed directly to an automated drone with hi-res photo capability. Or to the navigation screen of a surveillance team, so they can follow you but stay out of sight.”
Gurney checked his watch. “We’ve got a time issue here. It’s almost 9:25, and I need to be half a mile up the road at ten for my meeting with Angela Castro. I’d rather not have that destination fed to anyone. Problem is, disposing of the trackers here would make it obvious that I found them, which would eliminate future options, so we need a different solution.”