The Whole Truth (A. Shaw 1)

Katie drew the blanket tighter around her as Shaw turned his attention to the back of his seat again.

“So what are you going to do after this is all over?” she asked.

“Depends on which way it turns out to be all over.”

“I mean the way where we both walk away from it still breathing.”

“Haven’t really thought that far ahead,” he said.

She glanced up to the front of the plane where Royce and Frank were sitting at a small table going over some documents.

“But not stay with Frank? You need to get out, before it’s too late.”

“What don’t you get? It’s already too late for me, Katie.”

“But Shaw-”

He turned away from her, slid his seat back, closed his eyes, and went to sleep.

Katie kept her gaze on him for a while before turning to look out the window. The sky was black, the wide ocean seven miles below invisible. She’d been on thousands of flights over the years, and, for some reason, had felt cold on every single one of them.

Yet Katie had never experienced the ice in her veins she felt right now.

CHAPTER 83

FRANK, ROYCE, SHAW, AND KATIE sat in a room and looked at the video stream pouring over the large screen. Now Katie understood what Shaw had been talking about.

“There’re video cameras mounted on poles all along the highway here,” Shaw had explained. “They’re as much to address accidents and traffic backups as they are about Big Brother watching, but they’re very useful for what we want to do.”

On another screen was the video Shaw had taken of Katie talking to Pender with the LED clock readout also clearly visible.

“Okay,” Shaw said. “Start the highway video at the same time as the film that I shot of Katie and the clock.”

The videos started up and the time ticked away. At midnight there was still traffic on the Dulles Toll Road. D.C. was just that kind of place. But it wasn’t bumper to bumper.

“There’s the starting position of the cell signal burn,” Frank pointed out on the screen.

“Looks like the cars are going about sixty-five,” Shaw estimated. “So a minute a mile.” He looked at the video of Katie and the LED clock.

He told Royce, “As soon as Frank told me they’d picked up the signal on the highway and that the guy was moving, I had Katie do the ‘pull the car off the road’ maneuver. That was three minutes and three seconds into the conversation.”

Royce nodded. “So about three miles of drive time.”

“I thought I could hear the squeal of tires on the cell phone when I told him,” Katie said. “And a horn too.”

“We’re coming up on that time slice now,” Shaw noted. He paused. “Five, four, three, two.”

He broke off and everyone stared at the video of the highway.

“There!” Royce snapped. He was pointing to the far left lane where a black Mercedes swerved into the middle lane, nearly hitting a pickup truck.

Frank spoke into a headset. “Zoom in on the black Mercedes that almost took out that truck. And then freeze it.”

A few moments later the image of the Mercedes grew in size until it nearly took up the entire screen. Unfortunately, the angle wasn’t great; the driver, though clearly a man – something they already knew – wasn’t completely visible.

“White guy,” Shaw observed. “Thin, a little gray in the hair, but the doorjamb is hiding his face. Looks like he’s on the phone.”

“So are probably ninety percent of the people on that road,” Katie said.