Lone Star Standoff by Stuart Jaffe

Author:Stuart Jaffe [Jaffe, Stuart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: urban fantasy, action adventure, immortality
Publisher: Stuart Jaffe
Published: 2020-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

For ten minutes, Nathan drove. He had no destination in mind, no direction planned. He just drove. The echoes of Octavia’s laughter filled his head.

Worst of all, he could hear Robin clacking away at her keyboard, hear the sounds of Tupac rapping in the background, hear everything but Robin’s voice. For her to go silent, to be so wrapped up in whatever she had discovered online, meant things were much uglier than he wanted to know. When he pulled over and shut the car off, he waited like a convicted criminal about to learn if he had been sentenced the death penalty.

“I’m sorry,” Robin finally said. “She wasn’t lying.”

“I didn’t think she was.”

“She’s been setting you up for this ever since Kansas. Like she said — it was her backup plan in case you ever got hold of the laptop.”

“What exactly am I facing?”

Shutting off Tupac, the silent background chilling in its emptiness, Robin said, “They have security footage of you at the airport and especially in the TSA interrogation room. So, they know exactly what you look like. Those guys who attacked us on the highway — Octavia must have hired them. Gave them orders to put on a big show for the traffic cameras. Best I can tell so far is that they were straight up mercenaries.”

“She knew they wouldn’t think to kill me more than once, and she hoped we’d do what we did and kill them.”

“I think you’re right. When Altman blasted the last car with a grenade, we had pulled a lot of attention by that point. Some people caught it on their phones and it’s already floating around the internet. The images of you aren’t clear in any of that, so I can probably get enough doubt going that it won’t connect to you directly.”

Altman cleared her throat, and Nathan could hear the wind blowing as she floored her car toward Robin. “I should think the sentry I killed, the prostitutes we terrorized, and the motel owner we robbed will do more than enough to paint the picture.”

“Yeah, well there’s that.”

Placing his hand on the laptop, Nathan said, “How long will it take to make it all go away?”

Robin sputtered out whatever caffeine boost she had been drinking. “Are you kidding? Clockwork is behind the tech part of all this. I can and will do a lot to muddy the waters as far as the public goes, and I’ve got several bots working at destroying every mention of you — those things are always in place cleaning up after you — but there’s no easy way to stop this for now. Not until Clockwork moves to another project. To be clear, I’m not saying he’s beaten me. I’m just pointing out that this isn’t the kind of thing I can get ahead of overnight. All I can do is scrub whatever he tries to put out there, and I can only do that to things I know about.”

“I get it.”

“I don’t think you do.

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