Chapter 6 - Highway North
The station wagon smelled of stale cheerios and upholstery cleaner. Marcus drove with both hands fixed at ten and two, his eyes constantly scanning the rear-view mirrors, the side mirrors, and the traffic patterns three cars ahead. He avoided the interstate, navigating through a web of secondary state routes heading northwest into the rolling, wooded hills of Pennsylvania.
In the back seat, Lily had fallen asleep, her head slumped sideways against the safety seat, clutching a stuffed rabbit Sarah had grabbed in the mad rush from the house. Sarah sat in the passenger seat, her knees drawn up against her chest, staring blankly at the glove compartment.
""You have to talk to me,"" Sarah said after an hour of suffocating silence. Her voice was brittle, stripped of tears. ""You can't just shove us into the car with three duffle bags and tell me we aren't going back home. Whose blood was that, Marcus? Really?""
Marcus flicked his indicator and turned onto an empty two-lane blacktop flanked by dense pine forest. ""It was Miller. And he wasn't crazy.""
""He was supposed to be dead, Marcus! The Army sent Clara a letter stating his transport was lost over the border three weeks ago!""
""They lied,"" Marcus said, keeping his tone measured, fighting down the adrenaline that made his fingers tingle. ""Miller found something during our extraction from Site Bravo. We were supposed to retrieve data drives from a buried insurgent communications facility. But when we cracked the lower vault, the equipment wasn't foreign. It had Department of Defense procurement serials. It was ours.""
Sarah turned her head slowly, looking at him with wide, incredulous eyes. ""What are you talking about?""
""The network we were tracking wasn't an enemy cell,"" Marcus explained, his knuckles whitening against the steering wheel. ""It was an unacknowledged black-budget surveillance system operating domestic wiretaps through offshore relays. Miller copied the routing tables before the team was ordered to demo the facility. When command realized the drive was copied, they didn't bring us home—they scattered the unit to ensure none of us compared notes.""
""And Miller came to you,"" Sarah whispered.
""Miller knew I was the only one who kept the secondary decryption keys,"" Marcus said. He touched his collar where the micro-SD card was taped to the underside of his rank insignia. ""They think they took the data when they shot him. But Miller knew they were tracking his truck. He used the paper folder as a decoy. He gave me the raw drive.""
""Then throw it away!"" Sarah cried out, her voice breaking into a sob that woke Lily in the back. ""Throw it out the window, Marcus! Let them have it! We have a baby! We have a life!""
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""If I throw it away, we're still loose ends,"" Marcus said grimly. ""They don't leave witnesses to an operational cover-up, Sarah. They only negotiate when you hold the trigger.""
Suddenly, behind them on the empty country road, two sets of high-beam headlights flared to life around a sharp bend, closing the distance at high speed.
