going, after another five hundred feet the road would curve again, coming within twenty feet of the next field over. If the team was going to try to flush him, that was where they would start. He had a hunch about the other car, but only time would tell if he was correct.
He took off running again, heading due east. The trees gave way to a strip of open ground, then another hedgerow; Fisher pushed through this and into the next field and kept running. To his left, across two more fields, Fisher could see a pair of headlights heading east down the bridge road. Though he couldn’t make out the model, it was similar to the first car. Hansen was learning. Rather than going “all in” and sending all his troops on a foot chase, he’d split his forces and hedged his bets in case Fisher decided to double back — which was exactly what he’d done. With team members probably in the trees behind him and the second sedan on the bridge road to act as a blocking force, they had him in a nicely designed pincer movement. Unfortunately, nicely designed wasn’t going to be good enough. He hoped.
He kept running due east. The car on the bridge road had spotted him but hadn’t stopped, acting instead as forward observer for the flushing team. The next hedgerow came into view. The field beyond was rectangular and separated from the road by a narrow wedge of trees. When Fisher was fifty feet from the hedgerow, the sedan disappeared behind the trees. He veered left and put everything he had into a full sprint, covering the distance to the road in thirty seconds. He slid headfirst into the ditch, crawled up the other side, and stopped a few feet short of the shoulder. The sedan was still moving east, negotiating a slight incline. As its taillights disappeared over the top, Fisher stood up, ran across the road and into the trees beyond. Another short sprint brought him within sight of the southern wall of Ernsdorff’s property. He turned right-east-and kept going until the trees to his right thinned out slightly. He stopped and dropped flat. A few moments later the sedan came speeding back west. Having reached the eastern edge of the wedge and realized Fisher had not kept to his course; they’d doubled back. They would search the wedge of trees first, then the ditches, and only then would they realize he’d taken to the larger forest — thousands of acres’ worth.
Fisher got up and kept running.
He put another half mile between himself, Ernsdorff’s estate, and Hansen’s team, then stopped. He needed to process what had just happened. Unless he’d made a huge mistake at some point in the last two days, Hansen and company shouldn’t have been able to track him here. Fisher mentally retraced his steps, starting with his boarding of the train in Tetange and ending with his arrival at the campsite outside Scheurerof. His credit cards and passports were sanitized; he’d given no one specifics of his plans; his comm protocols were streamlined and compartmentalized… So how had they known to come here? Only one answer popped into his head, and the thought of it made his stomach churn. It didn’t seem possible; at the very least she wouldn’t have been that sloppy. If he were wrong, however, he’d just uploaded the contents of Ernsdorff’s server to the one person who shouldn’t have it.
He crossed the bridge adjoining the camping grounds thirty minutes later, found the trail, and made his way back to his site. Through the trees he saw a glimmer of light and realized it was a car’s dome light. Fisher crouched down and got his bearings. He was in the right place. He got up and crept closer. When he was within twenty feet of his Range Rover, he knew there was no mistake: The tailgate was open. Fisher drew his pistol. Silhouetted by the dome light, a figure was leaning into the Range Rover, rummaging through Fisher’s belongings. The figure turned his head, and in the dim light Fisher saw a red, green, and yellow knit cap on the person’s head. One of his campsite neighbors. The idiot was pillaging his vehicle. Fisher couldn’t help but smile. If this didn’t take the prize, he didn’t know what would. He barely survives a hairy exfiltration only to find himself being burglarized by a Luxembourgian hippie, probably so high he was simply looking for Twinkies. So surreal was the situation that it took Sam a couple of moments to wrap his mind around it.
He pulled the Nomex balaclava down over his face, tucked the SC next to his leg, and stepped from the bushes. “Stop right there,” he said in rough but passable Luxembourgish. “Police.”
The hippie froze.
“Hands up. Turn around.”
The hippie complied, and Fisher saw what looked like a bayonet in his right hand, but in the next instant realized it was a lock shim. The hippie had some skills; opening automatic locks with a shim took a fine touch.
Suddenly, to Fisher’s right came a woman’s scream. He flicked his eyes that way — saw another flash of red, green, and yellow — and thought,
The woman ran screaming in the direction of the main road.
For a split second Fisher’s instincts took control, and he brought the SC up and around, drawing a bead on her back. He caught himself and turned back to the hippie boyfriend, who hadn’t moved a muscle.
“Leave,” Fisher said.
The hippie hesitated.
“Go!” Fisher barked.
The hippie took off, sprinting after his girlfriend.
Fisher checked the Pelican case; thankfully, it was unmolested. In addition to miscellaneous bits of gear, the case contained all his credit cards and passports. He had little to worry about, actually. As with everything it modified, DARPA had engineered the case not only to be tamperproof but also to withstand a remarkable amount of abuse.
He slammed the tailgate shut, got into the Range Rover, and started the engine. He reached the site’s main entrance a few seconds after the hippie couple and caught a glimpse of them pounding on the door of the caretaker’s cabin as he swept past them and turned onto the dirt tract. Thirty seconds later he reached a blacktop road, rue de Sanatorium, turned east toward Scheuerof, drove fast for a quarter mile, then slowed down to the speed limit. He wasn’t happy about heading into town, as the Scheuerof police department would be the first to get the call from the distressed hippies, but his only other choice was to backtrack through Vianden, an even larger population center. The sooner he could get through Scheuerof and onto the rural roads that ran along the German border, the safer he would be.
As he passed through the center of town, he saw the flashing lights of a police car heading in the opposite direction down a parallel street. A couple of minutes later, as Fisher reached the northern outskirts, he saw a second police car, which he hoped made up the entire complement of Scheuerof cops.
He approached a slope and a gentle turn to the east, and soon the road was hemmed in by thick stands of fir trees. The lights of Scheuerof faded behind him, and he took a deep breath and let it out.
A pair of headlights appeared on the road behind him, almost a mile back but gaining ground quickly. He saw no flashing lights. An unmarked police car, perhaps? He doubted it, not in such a small town. So, either a local in a hurry or… Fisher felt his belly turn over. He had to assume the worst. He jammed the gas pedal to the floor and the Rover’s engine revved. The speedometer swept past 115 kph and kept climbing. With one hand and one eye on the road, Fisher took the OPSAT off standby, called up the map screen, and touched the keys: RECENTER, ZOOM 4?, and TRACK. He needed something and he wasn’t sure what. But if, in fact, it was Hansen and his team on his tail, he needed to end the chase sooner rather than later. As the speedometer climbed past 130 kph, Fisher watched the OPSAT screen reorient itself, auto-scrolling with the movement of the Range Rover. The German border was a mile to his left, and given the rolling hills and thick vegetation he doubted there would be fencing. The nearest border checkpoint would be where?… Probably Bettel, about six miles ahead. He had to make his move before then.
The headlights reappeared over a crest behind him, a half mile back. Fisher looked again: two sets of headlights. They’d cut his lead by a half mile in four minutes, so whatever they were driving had some horsepower. Some model of Audi, Fisher suspected. He glanced at the OPSAT. On the screen, a thread of a road appeared two miles ahead and off to his left. He zoomed in on it and traced its zigzagging course deeper into the forest, along the German border, and then across. It was unnamed. A fire road or construction site? It didn’t matter. He would take it. The Range Rover’s higher clearance and four-wheel drive would hopefully negate his pursuers’ advantage in speed. The problem was, they would catch up to him before he reached the turnoff.
Fisher switched the OPSAT map to topographical view. The two-lane road had turned into a series of humps and dips a few hundred yards apart. Each time he topped a crest, he saw that his pursuers had shaved a little more off his lead, until a mile from the side road they were only a crest behind. The slope before the side road was
