Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 83040 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 415(@200wpm)___ 332(@250wpm)___ 277(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 83040 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 415(@200wpm)___ 332(@250wpm)___ 277(@300wpm)
Rule number one—know your exits. Which feels a lot like face the door whenever you take a table in a restaurant, which it is. But it applies to everything. If you enter a stairwell, you had better know how to get out. If you get in a car, you better be ready to throw that door open on the freeway and roll out. And if you’re told to live in a country estate as part of an elite group of CORE operative, you better have a go-bag buried in the woods.
And I do.
I haven’t thought about it in years—that’s why it takes me so long to locate it—but the gray backpack filled with survival gear, should my shit ever hit the fan, is here. It’s packed tight too. I was always losing points in the academy for over packing my bag, but it’s better to have too much of what you need than too little.
I don’t bother to check the contents, just shoulder it on and keep going, heading east through the woods towards the nearby public rec center. When I get to the edge of the woods, I pause to scope out the parking lot. It’s filled with cars. Commuters who take the bus over to the Ashburn Metrorail, then on to Union Station in DC. Which is exactly what I’m gonna do too.
Brose, despite being a company man to the core, was a Plan B, C, and D kind of guy. We’ve got pre-established local check-in points in DC, Baltimore, Richmond, Pittsburgh, and Philly, just in case we were ever separated while on a job.
Before leaving the woods I take the pack off, set it on the ground, and bend down to open the front zip compartment so I can find my SmarTrip card. Pulling it out, I realize this is real. I’m on the run.
It’s surreal and I don’t understand how I got here. It doesn’t make sense how one day I can be living on a CORE estate with access to a clandestine high-speed train tunnel system, and the next day I’m staring down at a prepaid bus pass, ready to take public transportation hauling a twenty-five pound go-bag on my back.
From now on, Olive, you won’t be thinking. You’ll be acting.
These were the first instructions Brose ever gave me. I was eighteen, he was twenty-five, and boy, was I ever enamored with him. Right from day one.
If you think, he’d said, you’ll make mistakes. And if you make mistakes, we’ll fail. I don’t fail, not at anything, so you won’t either. Everything you do from here on out needs to be instinct.
He thinks for me, I act for him. That’s where it came from. That very first conversation.
I blow out a breath as I stand back up and hike the pack onto my back. “All right, Brose. I don’t know what you’re doing or why you’re doing it, but instincts it is.”
Then I head out of the woods and down the grassy embankment and join the crowd of commuters waiting to get on the bus.
I sit next to a professional woman on the bus who talks on her phone the entire twenty-five-minute ride to the train station. I look out the window, watching the world pass.
In Ashburn, I catch the Silver Line to Union Station. The slow, methodical motion of the train wants to lure me into sleep for the ride in, but I fight the sleep. I force myself to stay awake and on high alert, making up stories in my head about nearby passengers to keep me sharp.
Brose taught me this little trick. Sleep is your enemy, Olive. If you’re ever on the run, and you get tired, you just look at everyone around you and tell yourself they’re a spy. They’re here to get you. They’re here to kill you. Trust me, you won’t be able to fall asleep. And this little trick will probably save your life.
So that’s what I do. I target everyone in my vicinity and make up a backstory. This lady here, she’s an assassin. That guy over there, that’s her handler. The old man reading the paper three seats up is a spy.
It sets up a purposeful kind of paranoia.
But Brose was right. I do not fall asleep. In fact, I’m more alert than ever, almost buying into my fake backstories about my fellow commuters, when the train pulls into Union Station.
I wait for them all to get off first, watching them as they continue on with their day. Because wouldn’t that just be my luck? That my fantasies about them turn out to be true and one of them takes me out in an alley outside?
But they don’t. No one follows me as I leave the station and make my way over to a landmark coffee shop on 2nd Street. It’s nine-forty am now, so while the place is busy, it’s not crowded.