Free Nowhere to Hide by Sigmund Brouwer Page A

paused as Moore swung onto the highway.
    â€œTrust me on this too,” Evans continued. “It’s in your best interests not to know.”

CHAPTER 19
    Cruising down the interstate gave King a chance to mentally review what he knew about the three days when MJ and Blake had been cyber bounty hunters for Evans.
    During the first few hours of the trip, between stupid knock-knock jokes from MJ, Evans and Blake and MJ had put it together in pieces for King.
    Evans had first approached the parents of all three, asking permission for the three to help track down Jack Murphy, a man who had failed to make child-support payments.
    Evans had used a few arguments with the parents. One, the boys would get paid, so it was summer employment. Two, they were on a summer break, so they wouldn’t miss school. Three, it was routine cyber work with no danger—a chance for Blake to use his white-hat hacking skills while MJ and King learned extra computer skills. Four, Evans was short staffed because his own computer people were focused on higher-priority national security issues. Five, while Evans couldn’t reveal why, there were national security reasons for needing to locate Jack Murphy, so in short, King and MJ and Blake would be serving their country.
    The parents had seen no danger and no reason not to help Evans. King, fighting panic attacks, had used illness as an excuse not to leave the island.
    After assaulting Mundie and fleeing the hotel with the others, he learned how easy it had been for Blake to find Jack Murphy’s location.
    Armed with the man’s Social Security number and other information supplied by Evans, Blake had tracked down Jack Murphy within hours to a site in Washington State’s Yakima River Valley between the towns of Ellensburg to the north and Yakima to the south.
    Evans had put other things in motion, including the authorization for a military drone with a high-power camera to watch Murphy’s mobile home. During the day, it was visual surveillance. At night, infrared.
    That’s when MJ had become a valuable resource. Blake and MJ spent day and night, alternating shifts, in constant real-time monitoring of the aerial view of the mobile home with instructions to call Evans the instant Jack Murphy stepped outside.
    Nothing had happened until King and Mundie entered the hotel room. Then Mundie’s SWAT team had appeared. Once he had King and Blake and MJ contained in one place, it was time for Jack Murphy to be apprehended too.
    One phase of Mundie’s plan had been successful. At least, it was assumed to be successful. The drone had been blown from the sky before it could record Jack Murphy’s arrest, but Evans concluded that Murphy would not have been able to escape.
    Evans also concluded that Mundie must have somehow had an inside track on what Blake and MJ were doing because he knew enough about it to find King and pretend that Evans had sent him to get King. But Evans had no idea how Mundie could have learned about the entire off-the-books operation in the first place.
    That was essentially all King had known until Moore showed up in the black Escalade. Now, with the rented Dodge Charger in a place unlikely to be found for days, and in a government-sanctioned vehicle from the governor’s security detail, they seemed to have gained some freedom for a while.

    King was willing to accept that they didn’t have the clearance to know what might be in some tunnels that might be on Murphy’s property. But he did have an important question.
    He waited until they’d unpacked lunches and everyone was eating as they drove. Then King spoke in a quiet voice. “Evans, Mundie obviously made up a fake report about a bank robbery just to get the police to look for us.”
    â€œI figured there was an even-even chance he’d go that far,” Evans said. “I thought he’d probably want this to stay as off-the-books as possible. But I guess he