The Interstate Hard rain blew sideways across I-95 I looked at my watch It was midnight We were in Virginia heading south Somewhere in front of us was a Chevy Tahoe Inside the Tahoe was Secret Service agent Malak Tucker who was supposed to be dead She was posing as a terrorist known as Anmar aka the Leopard She wasn’t alone in the Tahoe A few hours earlier she had drugged and kidnapped Bethany Culpepper the president’s daughter We were all a little tense The Sasquatch-sized ex-spy Felix was behind the wheel of our parents luxury motor coach driving about a hundred miles an hour Lying next to him in the white-leather passenger seat was Croc the ancient almost toothless mongrel with one blue eye and one brown eye Croc was not tense He was snoring and drooling and passing a little gas Felix cracked open the window to get some fresh air
Sunday September 7 12 00 a m to 1 35 a m 7 Boone Angela and I were sitting at the dining table in the back of the speeding coach staring at a laptop computer On the screen was the infrared image of a car traveling exactly seventy miles per hour down the interstate seventeen miles ahead of us according to the readout in the corner of the screen Slow it down Boone called up to Felix Felix eased his big foot off the gas pedal Why Angela asked We’re miles behind them Spotters Boone said The ghost cell is well organized and extremely paranoid which is how they’ve managed to survive all these years They aren’t one step ahead of us they’re ten steps ahead of us Angela pointed to the screen Right now they’re sixteen point five miles ahead of us Angela was my brand-new fifteen-year-old stepsister Two years older than me A fact she was constantly reminding me of But I’m taller She was kind of a know-it-all but I liked her And she was usually right Spotters I asked People sent ahead to see if they’re being followed Angela answered It’s part of countersurveillance Since we’d met Boone we’d had to learn a new language I guess Angela was a little more fluent in spy-speak than I was because of her mother Malak the woman riding up ahead in the Tahoe with the kidnapped Bethany Culpepper Angela’s right Boone said They’ll have people stationed along the route watching traffic maybe even running license plates
8 I Q Kitty Hawk Hard to do that at seventy miles an hour I pointed out Not with a point-and-shoot license plate scanner Boone said I looked out the window Bad luck to get scanning duty on a night like tonight We changed the plates on the coach Boone continued But if they cross-check the plates they’ll see they belong to a Ford Fusion We’ll be busted and the ghosts will vanish Poof I said Boone and Angela didn’t laugh Neither did I I wasn’t joking There was nothing funny about any of this We called the terrorists the ghost cell because we didn’t know who they really were or what they called themselves What we did know is that they had just set off two bombs in Washington D C that killed or injured dozens of people But the bombs were just diversions Their real target had been Bethany Culpepper Boone pointed at the speedometer readout at the bottom of the screen which was still pegged at seventy miles per hour Cruise control he said They don’t want to risk getting pulled over for speeding The video was streaming in from an unmanned drone Vanessa one of Boone’s SOS team was flying it from the back of the intellimobile The president had requisitioned the multimillion-dollar flying bot for our personal use SOS was an acronym for Some Old Spooks The name started out as a joke but stuck The team was made up of exspies exspies former black-op military guys a couple of Israeli Mossad agents two active Secret Service agents Angela and me Q
Sunday September 7 12 00 a m to 1 35 a m 9 Munoz former wannabe magician and rookie terrorist hunter The drone was doing a lot more than tracking the car It was picking up heat signatures from inside it Four orange blobs Two in front Two in back We figured the two in back were Malak Tucker and Bethany Culpepper We had no idea who the two in front were
