Page 37 of The Rook’s Obsession

We make it roughly five minutes before I see the truck behind us.

Black. Full-size. Tinted windows. It appears in my rearview, hanging back three or four car lengths on a stretch of highway where there’s almost no traffic. It’s not tailgating. No flashing lights. Nothing overly aggressive. Just following.

“We have company,” I announce.

She adjusts the side mirror without turning around. “I see it. How long?”

“Just appeared. Same guys we met at the diner. I thought we got rid of them. I guess they somehow followed us after all.”

“Or they have another way of tracking us.” She says it quietly, and the implication sits much heavier in my stomach than the plate of bacon and eggs I just ate.

I push it aside for now. At the moment, my priority is the truck.

I gradually accelerate, testing them. The truck matches my speed. When I change lanes, the truck follows suit. I take an exit and loop back onto the highway. The truck follows, maintaining the same distance, patient and professional.

“They’re not amateurs,” she observes.

“No, they’re not.”

“Are we going to talk about this, or are we going to deal with it?”

Good question.

I press the accelerator. The rental isn’t built for speed, but it has enough under the hood to put distance between us if I push it. The speedometer climbs to seventy, eighty, and finally to ninety. The truck responds immediately, closing the gap easily. It tells me somebody put money into that vehicle.

The highway curves ahead, threading through a stretch of hills with guardrails on either side. Trees press close on the right. I take the curve hard, feel the tires protest, and pull ahead by three car lengths.

“Brace yourself,” I warn.

“I’m fine. Drive.”

The next curve is sharper. I take it at full speed, using the full width of the lane, and the truck follows in a wider arc. It’s heavier, and the center of gravity is higher. I watch it rock on the turn. The tires scream against the asphalt.

They’re committed. They’re not going to back off.

A straightaway opens up ahead, and I floor it. The engine roars, and for a few seconds, we pull ahead. Five lengths, six. The truck pushes to match, but the next curve comes fast. Too fast.

I see it happen in the rearview. The truck enters the curve at full speed, and the rear end breaks loose. It fishtails once, twice, as the driver overcorrects, which is the worst thing you can do at that speed. It crosses the center line, clips the guardrail on the left side with a sound like a cannon shot, and flips.

It goes over once, twice, three times before coming to rest on its roof in a ditch. Glass and debris scatter across the asphalt. The engine block is exposed while steam and smoke rise from the wreckage.

I slow down, but I don’t stop. Not yet. I watch the mirror for movement that never comes.

“They’re done,” she announces in a flat, emotionless voice. She’s seen enough death to know what it looks like from a distance.

I pull over half a mile past the wreck, on a shoulder hidden from the crash site by a bend in the road. We sit there for a minute, engine idling, while we both breathe harder than we’d like to admit.

“We can’t question them if they’re dead,” I mutter.

“They’re dead. Nobody walks away from that.”

She’s probably right. That means we’ve lost our best chance of finding out how they tracked us here. The men at the cabin had a phone with intel. These men had a truck and a tail, somehow. The question underneath both situations is the same: how are they finding us?

I pull back onto the highway and drive until a rest stop comes up eight miles ahead. It’s a small one with restrooms, vending machines, and a few picnic tables. I park at a distance from the other cars before killing the engine.

“They found us at the cabin,” I recall, thinking out loud. “Liam’s people swept that location. The security specs might’ve been compromised, which would explain that one. But this? We left in the middle of the night. We drove for hours on random highways. We never used credit cards and didn’t check in anywhere they could trace. There’s no way they followed us from the cabin—we would’ve spotted a tail in the dark on empty roads.”

“Unless they didn’t need to follow us,” she suggests.