It took some doing, but Evan found a motel on par with the beauty in Cornelius. Stale cigarette smoke oozed from the bedding, the towels, even the popcorn ceiling. The toilet was missing the tank lid. A pull-chain table lamp with a yellowed shade threw off a jaundiced glow. The comforter sported a stain the color of dried blood, which Evan hoped it was, given the less appealing alternatives. He’d rented the room for three hours, which explained everything worth explaining.
Now he sat cross-legged on the floor, the Hertz NeverLost GPS unit before him. Still attached to the metal stalk, it resembled a dismembered antenna. The lookout’s wallet and Samsung were laid on the floor beside the stalk, parallel to each other, edges aligned.
Order helped him think.
Joey leaned her shoulders against the bed, her hand working what seemed to be a steroidal Rubik’s Cube that she’d produced from her rucksack. She spun it with the speed and focus of a squirrel stripping a walnut.
Evan opened the lookout’s wallet. It contained four crisp hundred-dollar bills and nothing else. All the slots and crevices were empty. He set it back in its place.
Then he turned on the Samsung and checked the contacts. There were none. E-mail was empty, as was the trash folder. No recent calls. No voice mail.
The clacking of Joey’s Rubik’s Cube continued, grating on his nerves. Without looking up, she said, “No luck, huh?”
He ignored her, powering on the NeverLost GPS. When he searched the settings, he saw that everything had been deleted from this device as well. No saved locations, no last destinations, no evidence that the unit had ever been used.
Clack-clack-clack-clack—
“Can you please stop that?”
She halted, cube in her hands. The thing had exploded outward into different planks and beams, an architectural scribble.
He frowned at it. “What is that thing?”
“This?” She turned the monstrosity in her hands, showing off its various dimensions. “It’s a three-by-three-by-five. Cubers call it a shape-shifter.”
“What does it do?”
“Gives you a headache.”
“Like you.”
She flashed a fake grin. Let it fall from her face.
She returned her focus to the cube. Her hands moved in a flurry, whipping the various planes around. “You have to solve the shape first. Wait, wait—see?” She held it up. She’d wrangled it back into form. It looked like a miniature tower. “Then you solve the colors. This part’s easier. There are algorithms, sequences of steps.…”
To him it was just a blur of primary colors.
“You have to look for the wayward pieces, find the patterns that make them fall into place. Like so.”
She held it up, finished, gave it a Vanna White wave with her free hand.
“Impressive.”
“They say girls suck at geometry, but they forgot to tell me that.”
“You would’ve ignored them anyway.”
She tossed the cube into her rucksack, flicked her chin at the GPS unit. “How’s it going with that?”
“They wiped everything. Can I use your laptop? I need to get into this thing.”
She shrugged. “Sure.” She retrieved her laptop and a USB cable, watched him plug in the NeverLost. “Whatcha doing?”
“Even if they deleted everything, the GPS still has coordinates, destinations, and deleted routes stored internally somewhere.” He set to work. “First step of a forensic recovery is to image the data. It’s called mounting the file-storage system. Then you make a copy of the device’s internal memory in your computer but contain it so it can’t infect your own data. Then I’m gonna wade through it, determine the data structures, see where and how the data’s stored, what kind of encryption I’m dealing with. Like jailbreaking a phone. Understand?”
She tilted her head at the screen, taking in his progress, then looked at him with an expression he couldn’t read. “What grampa taught you to hack? You learn that when COBOL and IBM S/370 were state-of-the-art?”
This joke seemingly amused her.
He said, “What?”
“Maybe you could use a dial-up modem. Or, like, we could get a bunch of hamsters on wheels to power the software.”
He stopped, fingers poised above the keys. “You have a better approach?”
“You’re using a memory-dumper program,” she said. “Why don’t you spin up a new local virtual machine like any idiot would, image and then boot the virtual device inside it, use the Security Analysts desktop code to do the heavy lifting?”
Blowing hair out of her eyes, she spun the laptop around to face her. Her fingers moved across the keyboard, a virtuoso pianist hammering through Rachmaninoff. Then she flicked the laptop back around to him.
The screen was doing lots of things and doing them speedily.
She settled back against the bed again, as bored as ever. He read the coding here and there, catching up to it well enough to start directing the software.
“Lemme see the phone,” she said.
“I already checked it. It’s been wiped.”
“Two sets of eyes are better than one. Especially when the second set is mine.”
“Trust me. There’s no point.”
She plucked up the Samsung, started thumbing at it.
The laptop spit out some results. It took Evan a moment to decipher them.
“Shit,” he said.
“Hmm?” The phone made little tapping noises, its glow illuminating her round face.
“Looks like they used a secure erase tool,” he said. “Layered over the data with twelve hours of alternating ones and zeros.”
“There is a shortcut, you know.”
He closed the laptop a touch harder than necessary. “What’s that?”
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe the Waze app on his phone.” She held up the Samsung to show the nav application lighting up the screen. “It shows where the cops are, accidents, traffic jams. You know, useful stuff for lookouts and getaway drivers. Why did you think he had a phone?”
Heat rose beneath Evan’s face. “To make calls.”
“To make calls,” she said. “That’s so cute.”
“The app—it has all the routes?”
“Yeah. But we don’t need them.”
“Why not?”
“Because look what happens when you touch the smiley car.” She pressed the icon. A column of recent destinations came up. The second one down, an address in Portland’s Central Eastside, was labeled HQ.
“That’s what we in the spy business refer to as a clue,” she said.
Evan rubbed his eyes.
“You really need to watch your nonverbal tells,” she said.
He lowered his hands to his lap. “You have location services turned off on that phone, right?”
“Of course.”
“Power it off anyway. Just to be safe.”
She did. Then she tossed it back onto the worn network of threads that passed for a carpet. “When you said they could pick me up on the surveillance cameras at the train station, I thought you were being paranoid. But it’s not paranoid when you’re right, is it?”
“I need to get you far away from here before we put you on any kind of public transportation. I’m talking multiple states away.”
“What about the headquarters?” She tapped the phone. “I mean, we’re forty minutes away. You drive me to Idaho and come back, they’ll be cleared out by then.”
“What am I supposed to do with you?”
She just looked at him.
“No. No way.”
“Give me your gun.”
She stared him down, unblinking. Finally he unholstered the skinny ARES and handed it to her. She regarded the slender 1911 with amusement, turning it this way and that. “Nice gun. They make it in pink?”
“Only if you special order it.”
“It goes well with your hips.”
“Thanks.”
“You should accessorize it with, like, a clutch purse. Maybe a string of pearls.”
“Are you done?”
“Just about.”
He waited.
She said, “If you pull the trigger, does a little flame come out the end? Or a flag that says ‘Bang’?”
“Joey.”
“Okay, okay,” she said. “Go to the lamp.”
He rose and walked over to the table lamp.
“Turn it off, count five seconds, then turn it back on.”
He pulled the chain, the room falling into darkness. A five count passed, and he turned the light back on.
The 1911 rested in front of her crossed legs. It had been fieldstripped. Frame, slide, bushing, barrel, guide rod, recoil spring, spring plug, and slide stop. In a nice touch, she’d stacked the remaining four rounds on end on the magazine.
Her gaze held steel. “Again,” she said.
He tugged the chain once more, counted to five, clicked the lamp on.
The pistol, reassembled.
She had a tiny dimple in her right cheek even when she wasn’t smiling. She wasn’t smiling now.
“You can be my lookout,” he said. “But only because it’s safer for you to be near me than on your own.”
“Gee,” she said. “Thanks.”
She stood, twirled the gun on her palm, and presented him with the grip. He took the ARES and clicked it home in his high-guard Kydex holster.
“What if they’re expecting you?” she asked.
“Even if they are,” he said, “it won’t help them.”