Free The Polaris Protocol by Brad Taylor

and glanced at it. Seeing who it was, he answered, holding his finger in the air to Eduardo, begging him to let the call go through. He talked for a minute, then hung up.
    “That was the clerk. A woman came around asking about the reporter. Asking direct questions. He had his son follow her because he thought we would want the information of where she’s staying.”
    “Who is she? Why was she searching? Did he say?”
    “No, but we can find out ourselves. She didn’t go to a hotel. She’s coming across into Juárez.”

14
    W aiting to cross the border, Jennifer spent the time pinpointing the last location of Jack’s phone. It was just across the Rio Grande, in the northwestern section of Ciudad Juárez. Googling further on her tablet, she saw the area was called Delicias and had the highest murder rate in the city. An indicator of why the phone was there, and a not-so-subtle reminder of the danger Jack was in. If he was still alive.
    She plotted the location in the cheap GPS that came with the rental car and was dismayed to see the Mexican side of the border had no fidelity. The only streets listed in Juárez were the main north-south and east-west corridors. Something she should have expected, since the rental agreement forbade her from taking the car across the border in the first place. The plot appeared in a blank gray field, no roads listed. She would have to navigate there by blind driving.
    She crossed the Stanton Street Bridge and passed through the customs facilities without issue, drawing a stare on the US side but nothing on the Mexican side. She felt her gut tighten as she entered Juárez, expecting to see
narcos
walking the streets with AK-47s proudly displayed or hear the popping of gunfire. Instead, it looked much like the city she had just left. A town of Mexican middle-class people trying to make their way. Families walked with their children, vendors on the street sold vegetables and fruit, and a healthy amount of traffic clogged the roads. It didn’t look like Murder City, but she knew the history of the bloody ground, including the serial killing of women like her over the past decade.
    Still on guard, but somewhat relieved, she pulled over and booted up Google Maps on her tablet, happy to see a 3G connection south of the border. She brought up the city and now at least had a map for reference, although it wasn’t tied to the GPS and wouldn’t move as she did.
    She started driving east on David Herrera Avenue, keeping an eye on every vehicle around her but seeing nothing suspicious. Mostly old pickup trucks and a few motorcycles. Nothing like the late-model SUVs the
narcos
supposedly drove.
    She penetrated farther east, the buildings becoming more run-down and the town starting to fulfill its nickname. As she left behind the hotels and restaurants, the area became full of utilitarian concrete structures advertising car repair or dollar sales intermixed with one-story cinder-block houses, all unashamedly tinged with graffiti and fenced off from the street. She tried to look at her tablet as she drove but found it impossible without pulling over. The neighborhood was a compact mass of crisscrossing streets, and she lost her orientation. She threw the tablet on the passenger seat and decided to just vector in by the GPS. She glanced into her rearview and caught a glimpse of the same motorcycle she had seen right after she’d crossed the border, the man in the saddle wearing a lime-green full-face helmet from the 1970s.
    She turned left blindly, and the motorcycle followed. She felt a trickle of alarm and studied the bike rider. He showed nothing overtly threatening. The bike was an old Honda with a milk crate bungee-corded to the back, holding bags of some sort. She turned right, and the bike continued straight. She relaxed.
    Getting paranoid.
    She looked at the GPS and saw she was within a quarter mile of the marking. She continued on, following the blind little GPS tag, weaving left and right, at