The laptop beeped. There was another course change. The motorcade now turned right onto a road named Forest Circle. Wire was approximately a half mile back. When she reached Forest Circle, she turned in and immediately pulled over to the side of the road and killed her headlights. She observed the computer monitor as the motorcade proceeded ahead of her. The GPS showed that the motorcade turned right onto Elmwood Drive. The vehicles advanced to the end of the road and stopped.
Wire punched in a search on the address; Raymond Hitch came up. Wire opened up another program on her computer and searched for Hitch in Vice President Wellesley’s database of campaign supporters and a few seconds later, there he was. Hitch was known as a Lone Ranger. In Wellesley campaign parlance, that was a fundraiser who committed to raising ten million dollars for the candidate. You had Super PACs and then you had individual donors and the people that bundled them. No matter how long she was around politics, the sums of money spent on campaigns bewildered her. Ten million later on would get you access to the president, perhaps consideration for an ambassadorship or some other plumb reward. Hitch was from Nashville but it wouldn’t be surprising that he had a lake place up in Kentucky.
If you wanted a private late meeting, this would be an ideal place. Kentucky lake country was quiet and lightly populated in late October, especially on a Wednesday night. There would be the odd year-round cabin dwellers still at their lake places, usually retirees or perhaps folks who worked back in town another few miles up the road. However, if Wire had to bet, the meeting place would be one where there was no chance it would be seen by a stray neighbor. If you were going this far out of the way, it was guaranteed to be private. Besides, it was late now, approaching midnight, and the rain was intensifying from a light drizzle to a steady downpour.
Wire looked at the roads leading to the Hitch place. The road she was on would proceed to the south a quarter mile or so and then turn left for a few hundred feet as a road to a half dozen other cabins and then would loop back to the north, bringing her back to Elmwood and within a few hundred yards of the motorcade’s location. Wire left the car lights off and slipped on a pair of night vision glasses. She dropped the gear shift and slowly followed the road as it looped around and stopped two hundred yards from where the road would run back into Elmwood. To be safe, she backed up twenty feet and into a small private driveway for a cabin now dark for the season. She grabbed her backpack from the backseat and did a quick inventory of her equipment, which consisted of binoculars, two cameras, a small handheld video camera and a handheld GPS system to help her find the cottage and navigate her way back to the SUV if need be. Wire quickly slipped on black rain pants and zipped up her short black raincoat. She tightened her ponytail and then slid it through the hole in the back of her black Washington Nationals baseball cap. Wire then pulled the raincoat hood over her head, buttoning up tightly to keep the rain off of her body. She had no idea how long she would need to be outside and there was nothing worse than being cold and wet.
She slipped out of the car and pulled on her night vision glasses. She walked back up to the road, turning right and making her way along the side of the road, hugging the tree line. There was no street or cabin lighting. It was pitch black.
Fifty feet from where the roads merged, Wire glanced right and noticed another car parked as she had, twenty feet back into a small winding driveway. She quickly walked down the road, took the glove off her right hand and felt the hood. It was cold. The cabin at the end of the driveway was dark, no lights. However, with the night vision goggles she was able to see fresh footprints leading back to the road. She followed them and they led towards Hitch’s cabin.
Perhaps she wasn’t alone. Wire took a quick photo of the car and the license plate.
* * *
Adam Montgomery had been sitting in the woods for a little over half