Chapter 10
"Tracked?" Willa leaned over the center console, staring at the flashing red interface. "How? You said this car was secure. Did they plant a GPS unit while it was in the garage?"
"No, the chassis sweeps for magnetic trackers every time the engine turns over," Corbin said, his mind racing through tactical possibilities. He gripped the steering wheel, his knuckles white. "It has to be an internal signal. Something pinging from inside the cabin."
"Our phones?" Willa suggested, pulling her smartphone from her pocket.
"My personal phone is shielded, and my work phone is at the estate," Corbin replied. "Unless your phone has a backdoor installed by a third-party app, it shouldn't be broadcasting an unencrypted geolocation."
Willa rapidly tapped her screen, pulling up a diagnostic application she had installed during her cybersecurity days. She ran a quick sweep of the immediate radio frequencies inside the vehicle. The progress bar shot across the screen, stopping abruptly at ninety-nine percent.
She looked up at Corbin, her eyes wide with a horrific realization. "It's not my phone."
"Then what is it?" Corbin demanded, checking the rearview mirror. A sleek, unmarked black sedan had just crested the hill behind them, closing the distance at a terrifying speed.
Willa turned around in her seat, her gaze falling upon the sleeping figure of Juniper in the back. Her eyes drifted down to the small, embroidered pouch clipped to the little girl’s dress. The pouch Tabitha had snatched. The pouch that held the life-saving inhaler.
"Corbin," Willa whispered, her voice trembling. "The inhaler."
Corbin’s heart stopped. He slammed on the brakes, pulling the heavy armored SUV onto the shoulder of the highway, gravel crunching violently beneath the tires. He threw the transmission into park and reached into the back seat, unzipping the small pouch.
He pulled out the blue plastic casing of the inhaler. He popped off the cap and examined the bottom of the canister. Nested perfectly in the small indentation of the plastic mold was a micro-GPS transmitter, blinking with a faint, almost invisible red LED light.
Tabitha hadn't just taken the inhaler to torture the child. She had swapped it. She had planted a tracking device on the one object she knew Corbin would never leave behind.
"They knew we would run," Corbin breathed, the sheer, calculating malice of his family chilling him to the bone.
He rolled down the heavy ballistic window and hurled the plastic casing into the dense brush on the side of the highway.
"We need to move," Willa urged, pointing at the rearview mirror. "The sedan is catching up."
Corbin slammed the car back into drive, tearing back onto the asphalt. The black sedan behind them accelerated, a second vehicle appearing over the hill to join the pursuit.
Willa looked down at her phone, her fingers flying across the screen. She opened the secure cloud server where she had uploaded the video of Orson and Tabitha.
"Corbin," Willa said, her voice dropping into a hushed, urgent tone. "When I uploaded the video... the cloud server synced with the deleted files on my phone's cache. I recovered an audio file. I think you need to hear this."
Corbin kept his eyes on the road, swerving to avoid a slow-moving truck. "Play it."
Willa pressed play. It was not a recording of Orson or Tabitha. It was a recorded phone call, timestamped from five years ago.
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"The brakes have been cut, Mr. Voss," an unfamiliar, gravelly voice crackled over the phone. "Your daughter-in-law's car will not make it down the mountain pass. The extraction is clean."
Corbin slammed on the brakes, the world spinning out of control as the truth of his wife's death echoed in the cabin, leaving him staring into the abyss of his father's ultimate betrayal as the pursuit vehicles closed in.
