High Crimes

Take the FM radio from the bedroom, Tom had instructed in the letter he’d sent her, not the one she’d drafted for the FBI’s eyes. Tune it to a station high on the dial, around 108 megahertz. Make sure the signal comes in loud and clear. Now take it out to the garage, and bring the antenna as close as you can to every surface on the car.

Listen for interference. Listen for a squawking noise. Listen for the abrupt change in the quality of reception.

If you detect the presence of a transmitter somewhere in the car, or you’re not sure, don’t go anywhere.

If the car is clean, go.

But wait for rush-hour traffic. Drive in rush-hour traffic, because they’ll find it hard to follow you when the traffic is dense. Drive at nightfall, when tailing is harder, because lights are visible for a long distance.

Take a circuitous route, he had instructed, which was easier said than done. If you’re being followed, nothing is really circuitous. Before you get on the Massachusetts Turnpike, drive around the city. Make four right turns, one right after another, to flush out any followers, because anyone still behind you has to be following you.

Make plenty of left turns, because left turns are harder to shadow unnoticed. Go through yellow lights whenever possible. Come as close to running reds as you can without getting killed.

They will not follow directly behind if they’re attempting covert surveillance. They will follow one or two cars behind. There may be as many as four vehicles following you. Or there may be none.

Watch the right rear of the car, the blind spot that followers favor.

Drive at inconsistent speeds. Speed up, then slow down. Drive very slowly, excruciatingly slowly, forcing everyone to pass you. Stop at a rest stop and park in the back. Have dinner. Kill a couple of hours. Take some hard object and smash out your rear right taillight. Then return to the pike.

At least once, make a U-turn on the pike, wherever there’s a turnoff.

Once you’ve passed Exit 9 on the turnpike — out beyond Sturbridge, in the far-western part of the state — begin to drive slowly, in the right lane, with your flashers on.

At first she had marveled at Tom’s expertise at tradecraft, at the techniques of surveillance. It was a side of him she’d never seen.

Then she remembered who they said he’d been, and she knew that at least part of it was true.

At just past ten o’clock at night, when it was too late to call Annie even if she dared, which she didn’t, she was driving along a stretch of the turnpike in the Berkshires near Lee, Massachusetts, where the road was lightly trafficked. She thought about Annie, asleep in bed, with Jackie downstairs, smoking.

The road became hilly out here. It cut through ravines, then out into the open, up a steep grade to the top of a hill. She drove slowly, in the breakdown lane, hazard lights flashing. No one was following her, that she felt sure of. As she began her descent down the steep gradient, she noticed, in her rear-view mirror, a car pull out of a wooded turnoff, lights dark, and accelerate until it was just behind her. The car flashed its high-beams twice.

She pulled off the road into the next turnoff, which was shrouded by a dense copse, and switched off her lights.

Her heart hammered.

She stared straight ahead, not daring to turn her head to look.

The other car pulled up just behind her and coasted to a stop. She heard the car door open, heard footsteps on the pavement.

Now she turned to look out of her rolled-up window and saw Tom, a few days’ growth of beard like charcoal smudge on his face, binoculars hanging from a strap around his neck, smiling down at her, and she smiled back.

Tears flooded her eyes, and she threw her arms around him.

12

She followed him in the Lexus along a meandering route, off the turnpike, onto local roads that became country roads, until she had no idea where they were. Tom was driving an old black Jeep Wrangler, though where he’d gotten it he hadn’t explained. They passed through a small town that seemed frozen in the 1950s. She glimpsed an old orange Rexall Drug sign, a Woolworth that had to be fifty years old, an antique round Gulf sign. The town was dark and shuttered. Along an unlit country road past a low modern brick elementary school, through a railroad crossing, and then nothing for a very long time. Then Tom signaled her to stop.

She parked the Lexus and joined him in the Jeep.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

He nodded. “I’ll tell you everything. Soon.” He took an abrupt, unmarked turnoff into a dense forest, the road degenerating in abrupt phases from macadam to hard-packed gravel, on which the wheels crunched for a good five minutes, to rutted earth for even longer, until it dead-ended at a shelf of rock, jutting shale and schist and irregular boulders. He switched off the lights, then the engine, and let the Jeep coast to a stop. Then took a large black Maglite from the floor and motioned for her to get out with him.