I nodded and he kissed me softly. I followed him back downstairs and we sat down at the kitchen table, the phones between us.
“Now,” he said, “don’t use this for anything stupid. Don’t access social media or banking or something like that. Don’t message friends.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t give my mom one,” I said, frowning.
He paused. “You’re probably right.” He slipped Camille’s phone into his pocket.
I sighed. “Are you sure you can’t stay?”
“Sorry. I need to get to work. Somebody has to solve this problem.”
“How pissed is your dad?”
“Pretty mad.” He grinned. “But that’s okay. He’s a big teddy bear.”
“Somehow I don’t think that’s true.”
“No, it’s not.”
We sat in silence for another minute before he stood up.
“Come back later?” I asked.
“I will as soon as I can.”
He walked around the table and hugged me again, kissing me softly.
“It’s going to be okay, right?” I asked him.
“It’s going to be okay.”
And I believed him. I had no real reason to expect anything good was going to come of our situation, but I didn’t think Lucas would lie to me. I trusted him.
“See you later,” he said as he walked out the door.
I stared for a few minutes before getting up and locking the dead bolt after him.
Life in a safe house was boring.
Camille got up an hour later, sat on the couch, and refused to talk to me. She watched trashy soap operas all day, which worked fine for me. I much preferred not talking to her; at the moment, I wasn’t sure I could remain civil, let alone be nice.
I retreated up to my room with the burner phone and idly looked around news sites. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but I needed something to occupy my mind.
And then I remembered the weird notebook.
The night before, when my phone had fallen down between the seats, I had found something jammed in there. At the time I hadn’t thought much of it since everything was moving so fast, but I decided to take a look while I had a free second.
I fished the thing from my bag. It was small, the sort of small notebook that a reporter would carry. It was clearly well-used, though, as the pages were smudged and the cover was old and stained.
I opened it up and began to leaf through. At first I had no clue what I was looking at. Most things were numbers, with some English words and what looked like Russian mixed in. I recognized the Russian because it used that weird script; I think it was called Cyrillic. At any rate, I couldn’t read the vast majority of it, and the numbers just made no sense.
Still, a few words jumped out at me. Toward the back, the word “oil” was followed by some numbers, and the word “meet” was followed by what looked like a time and a date.
That instantly struck me as strange.
I pulled out my phone and turned to a page of Russian script. I took a picture and then did a Google search for a forum for Russian speakers. Once I found one that I could actually read, I made an anonymous post asking for someone to translate the page, or at least to give me an idea of what it said.
The notebook was clearly important. I wasn’t sure who’s it was or what it meant. I wanted to get in contact with Lucas, but I didn’t want to seem like a needy alarmist. I wanted to confirm that the notebook was important before I started to bug him with it.
An hour went by before someone finally made a comment on my post. Apparently, the page was a list of people’s names and addresses. That didn’t tell me much, so I posted another page and asked the same question.
The response came back much faster.
Looks like he was taking notes on a meeting, NaNaKlashnikov said. There’s something about Russians (?) and about a third group of people. This is actually really shady. Where did you find this thing?
I felt chills run down my spine.
That confirmed it for me. I was holding something important, though what exactly it said was beyond me.
I opened up the contacts list and found only one: Lucas. I tapped his name and let it dial.
Maybe this was the break we needed.
Chapter Thirty-Two: Lucas
“Where did you get this?” I asked her.
She looked down at the floor. “I’m sorry if I’m wasting your time.”
“Hey.” I grabbed her chin and tilted it up. “This is important.”
“Remember when I dropped my phone last night getting out of the car?”
“Not really.”
“Well I did, and I found this wedged down between the seats right next to it.”
I shook my head, absolutely amazed.
“Do you know what this is?”