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The text was from an unknown number: “Opening move complete.Your response?”
Riley reported it to Rich, “Text from unknown number.Chess reference—‘Opening move complete.Your response?’”She placed the phone back on the seat without responding to the text.“He’s watching.Somehow, he’s watching.”
The second delivery took her down a narrow side road to a farmhouse set back from the highway.An older man accepted the package, barely looking at her as he signed.As Riley walked back to the truck, the skin between her shoulder blades tingled with the certainty of being observed.
“Still nothing visible,” she reported, climbing back into the cab.“But it feels like—”
The phone buzzed again.Same unknown number: “Bishop to d4.Pressure building on queen.”
“Another message,” Riley said.“‘Bishop to d4.Pressure building on queen.’”She frowned.“He’s playing some kind of game.”
“We’re scanning all approaching vehicles,” the sheriff replied.“Nothing matching our suspect profile.”
Riley pulled back onto the highway, her eyes constantly checking the mirrors.No vehicles behind her.Nothing ahead but empty road cutting through fields and woodland.
By the third delivery—a small package to a rural mailbox where the recipient wasn’t home—the phone had buzzed twice more.Each message deepening Riley’s unease.
“Knight advances, check,” followed by “Pawn sacrifice imminent.”
“He’s setting something up,” Riley told Ann Marie as she drove away from the mailbox.“These aren’t just random chess terms.He’s narrating his plan.”
“Can you see anything from your position?”Sheriff Rich asked.
“Negative,” Riley replied, frustration edging her voice.“No tail, no suspicious vehicles.He must have eyes on us another way.”
She considered the possibilities as she drove.Traffic cameras?Not on these rural roads.Drone?Perhaps, but they’d have spotted it.Someone in one of the houses they’d visited?Possible, but how would Tony coordinate that?
The phone buzzed again: “Rook aligns with king.Check in three moves.”
The chess metaphors were becoming clearer now—Tony positioning his pieces, setting up an endgame.But what kind?What was his actual plan?
“Sheriff,” she said, “these messages are escalating.”
“We’ve got nothing on visual,” the sheriff replied, tension evident in his voice.“No unusual vehicles, no one on foot.”
The road curved gently between hills now, offering limited visibility ahead.Riley slowed slightly at each bend, anticipating a blockade, an ambush, something to force her to stop.
Nothing.
The phone buzzed one final time: “Checkmate: 12 kilograms, 60-meter radius.No survivors.”
That’s not a chess move.
But Before Riley could share that text with anyone, her vehicle had rounded a sharp curve.Her foot slammed the brake pedal and the delivery truck skidded to a halt, tires squealing on asphalt.
There, in the center of the road right in front of her, stood Tony Bartlett.
He was slender, almost frail-looking in a plain dark jacket.But it was what he wore around his torso that froze Riley’s blood—a vest wrapped with what could only be explosives, wires running to a cellphone strapped to his wrist.
Riley and Ann Marie were ten feet from a man obviously prepared to kill anyone within a 60-meter radius—including himself.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Riley turned off the delivery-truck engine.Tony Bartlett just stood there in the middle of the road, smiling with triumph.She was sure that the homemade explosives he was wearing were enough to turn anything in its proximity into twisted metal and bloody fragments.His thumb hovered above the cellphone secured to his wrist.
One tap, Riley knew, was all it would take.
Her mind raced through options, each one ending in disaster if she made the wrong move.Tony stood motionless, waiting, seemingly unconcerned.There was no other traffic.This stretch of highway had been empty for miles.
