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But a feeling of being watched nagged at her, and when she looked up, she saw the ghostly gray plane gliding overhead, outlined against the stars It banked away, and Francis thought she was done with it But then, in the sky, a flare of flame

In the tiether in Francis’sthat had blown up the cohost she’d seen on any number of news broadcasts: a Predator drone

And it had just fired a second missile

Francis punched the accelerator, and the bike leaped from sixty miles an hour to a hundred and ten in two blinks of an eye as the highway just a hundred yards back exploded The blast wave nearly knocked her over, the bike fishtailing ravel and felt the wave of hot air

She roared on through the night, fear welling inside her alongside hope The coone up in smoke and flame Her mother was probably dead, and maybe the day would coht now it justher

Except of course for whoever had just used a Predator drone to launchhole in the westbound I-40 Her first thought after herlike norency, was getting awfully das

But her second, o bank’s interior security ca on a Sunday In which case

It was after me!

She had sooal but to soirl on the Kawasaki

That, plus a pohose uses she had barely begun to understand

CHAPTER 8

The Symbiosis of Good and Evil

“ACCORDING TO GOOGLE Maps, it’s 103 miles from here to the county line Round trip just over 205 miles”

“And?” Cruz asked, indifferent

They were in the backyard of their illegally occupied ho back and forth on what ht have been a lawn once upon a time but was now a patch of dirt scarcely punctuated by the occasional weed