Chapter 18: Freeway

“Why do you want a tracker?” asked Mia.

“We can’t find my mum by looking, can we?”

“But we can’t plant a tracker on the agents,” Paul pointed out, “they’d notice even if we could get close enough somehow.”

“I don’t like the look of that,” Mia was looking at a big off-roader that had come up on their left side.

Grace made herself not look. “What is it?”

“Big SUV,” said Paul, “Ford Explorer. Gray. Two guys in it, same type as in the lift - big, open shirts, and looking a bit serious. Heavy.”

“The pickup vehicle,” surmised Mia. They were all supposed to be in it, zip-tied and helpless, with nobody knowing where they’d vanished to.

“Okay,” said Grace. She spotted a gap and accelerated. She pulled past a pickup, across in front of it into the next lane, passed the car in front, and returned to the second lane. Seventy-five miles an hour now. “A tracker,” she persisted. “How big are they, and where can we get some?”

“Radio Shack, I guess,” answered Paul.

“Okay hang on...” said Mia. She started googling.

Grace saw the SUV come through the gap that she’d come through, then the traffic shifted and the blobby white car was stuck behind the row that was blocking all four lanes again. She didn’t want to be sandwiched between the two agents’ vehicles - they might force her down an off-ramp or something, to somewhere nobody could see. The agents might get desperate and decide they could shoot some of them, as long as they didn’t kill everybody.

The SUV looked enormous enough for anything, back up alongside again. She speeded up some more. The pointer was on 80. 85. She was closing on a truck in front. Quite quickly! She swerved right into the inside lane.

“Exit coming up,” said Paul, in a warning tone.

Shit. Grace put her foot to the floor. The gearbox changed gear, the revs rose, and the car began to gain speed. Her mum would’ve been explaining about the power curve. Her mum, who she mustn’t get distracted thinking about. Though she could feel her spirit, kind of thing, as she saw the lane turn right up ahead, in front of a bridge that was getting closer. Her mum wouldn’t bottle it. Grace mashed the pedal into the carpet ... gaining, gaining ... just before the lane split she was able to swerve back in front of the truck.

The SUV was behind them now, in the third lane, but she was doing ninety-five! It didn’t feel that fast. But there was a car in this lane ahead, that she was catching really quickly. She moved into the left lane, passed it, then back. She was the fastest car around, passing everybody. She moved into the third lane, then the fourth, then back to the third to pass someone.

She was weaving from lane to lane. But the SUV was still not far behind.

“Okay,” said Mia. “There’s a thing called a Trackimo. Radio Shack have it. You sign up for their service and then you can always see where it is. It uses satellites and has a rechargeable battery.”

“What size is it?” asked Grace, trying to concentrate on two things at once.

“It’s forty-seven by forty by seventeen,” read Mia on her phone. “Millimetres. Why?”

“That’s not too bad,” Grace hedged, “where can we get them?”

“There’s a store in Vacaville, about thirty miles away. What are you thinking?”

“She is going to get herself captured,” sighed Claude, “then the rest of us are going to follow the tracker.”

“What? This is CIA, probably.” Mia didn’t like it. “How would the agents not find a tracker on her?”

“We get two,” Grace swerved round an old pickup that was barely moving at all. “They’ll find the first one and switch the scanner off.”

“It’s insanely dangerous.” Paul didn’t like anything about it. “And what are we supposed to do, the rest of us? Storm a CIA black prison?”

“Well what else can you think of?” Grace challenged him. “How’s Mo anyway?”

“Still the same,” said Mia after looking round, “grey, and out of it.”

“So he can get captured with me,” said Grace, “and they’ll get him a doctor which he really needs. He might be bleeding inside, and he might get an infection. We mustn’t let him die.”

“No,” said Mia definitely, “it’s clever but it’s too risky. We’d just lose you too. We can take Mo to a doctor.”

Grace swerved round another car. They were doing a hundred now. “We HAVE to,” she said loudly. “They’ve got my mum somewhere and it’s the only way to find out where. Unless we grab Honeyeva and torture her, which we wouldn’t actually do, and they’d know anyway, that she’d gone missing and then move mum and the others somewhere else.” Her eyes had gone a bit tearful, which she didn’t need at a hundred miles an hour the first time she’d ever driven. She wiped her eyes furiously.

“I can’t allow it,” Claude was sure Zara would want him to put his foot down, to save her crazy daughter.

“WELL SINCE I’M DRIVING THE FREAKING CAR,” Grace lost it as tears tracked down her face, “AND SHE’S MY FREAKING MOTHER, I’M DRIVING TO FREAKING RADIO SHACK OKAY?”

Nobody said anything for a minute while the car flew along the freeway, swerving from lane to lane. The sudden transition from cute little Grace to enraged Grace was disconcerting, just as it had been the last time.

Mia tried to work out all the different angles. Grace’s idea did seem like the only way to find Zara and the aliens. Mia tried to compensate for her protective feelings for Grace, which weren’t important at all in the big picture.

“Okay. But I’ll do it,” she said.

“They’ll be scared of you,” Grace pointed out, trying to make herself calm down. “They know you do kung fu and you’re much bigger and look older. With me they know as long as I haven’t got a gun they don’t need to worry. So they’ll scan me quickly, find a tracker and then they’ll relax. With you they’ll never relax. And they’ll think I just did it with being a bit crazy about them having my mum.” She hadn’t quite been able to keep her voice steady, but she’d got herself under control again.