Her call was cut off after that.

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Later that week

Sylvia spotted them earlier that afternoon, when she’d stopped by the mall, before hitting the interstate that led to New York.  The man, in a ballcap, had been hanging around one of the pop-up stores in the mall outside the electronics store Sylvia had bought a couple of throw-away mobile phones from.  After exiting the electronics store and halfway to the mall’s central meeting point, Sylvia ducked into a hall where she knew she could pretend to drink from a water fountain, but would also have a view of the main hallway, where the man would have to come from if he kept following her.

As she’d expected, he walked past her as she drank from the water fountain, and then, thirty seconds later, he doubled back, passing by Sylvia again.  She slipped behind him and quick-walked to her car.

But when she turned into the street leading to the interstate, she saw their car following her swing into a position in the traffic flow a few cars behind hers.  The man was seating in the passenger seat, so his partner must have been waiting for Sylvia to return to her car, and then called his partner to tell him Sylvia had made it back to her car.

Instead of continuing on to Manhattan to hand-deliver to Bette what she’d wanted Bette to include in her files, she pulled into the nearest exit ramp and drove back to her house.  She blew out a sigh of relief.  Thank goodness she’d insisted Bette take all the materials they’d been working on when the brunette had left yesterday.  She’d also slipped in amongst the things Bette had taken an early draft of her write-up of the long ago case, along with the drafts of the various versions of the codex that she and Bette had been working on.

She wanted to ensure someone else had a copy of everything about the intelligence case that Sylvia knew now with great certainty was related to the gold bullion bars that bore markings she and Bette had decoded.  The gold bullion dated to 1987 was meant as payment from unstable regimes for key components of weapons they were planning to assemble.   Sylvia had painstakingly built on the few leads that she’d unearthed, after her colleague had died under mysterious circumstances.  It had taken decades, almost her whole career, to assemble all of the information on this case, working on the side, unobtrusively so as not to arouse suspicion, because she’d found out there were a few highly placed intelligence chiefs who’d been involved in the whole scheme.