was around fifty miles from London as the crow flies, which didn’t really help any, so Ingrid tapped the details into her trusty app to get the distance by road: seventy-two miles. “That’s an awful long way to travel undetected with a small boy when the whole nation is looking for you.”
“It would be plain dumb for him to return to the base. What possible reason could he have?” Gurley sucked his teeth.
“A network of people he can trust?” Ingrid suggested.
“Not after what he did,” Gurley said.
“I expect Radcliffe has asked the Suffolk cops to watch the train and bus stations close to the base, but it’s worth checking, I guess.”
“I’ll get onto it,” Jennifer said.
Gurley returned to studying the map of England and Wales. “If he is on his own…” He lowered his voice. “And if he’s gone to ground, living off the land, we might not get any more sightings. We’ll just have to track him the old fashioned way.”
“Which way is that?”
“Weighing up all the possibilities, trusting your gut, and hoping like hell it doesn’t let you down.”
“And what’s your gut telling you right now?”
“He’s going to return to what he knows.”
“The base?”
“Not necessarily, but some place related.”
Ingrid stared into Gurley’s piercing blue eyes. He obviously had a theory. Why didn’t he just come right out and tell her? She thought about it for a moment. If Foster returned to what he knew, what was it he knew better than anything else? “Airplanes,” Ingrid said, after a beat.
A corner of Gurley’s mouth curled into something close to a smile.
“Jennifer, we need a list of all the small airstrips within a…” Ingrid paused, looking at Gurley, “sixty mile radius of London.”
“You can’t visit every one of them,” the clerk said.
“We don’t intend to. You’re going to call them for us,” Gurley smiled at her. “Find out if they’ve seen anyone hanging around acting suspicious in the past twenty-four hours. If maybe any of their aircraft have been tampered with.”
“So I should start from the center and work outwards?”
“See,” Gurley said. “I said we couldn’t do this without you.”
Jennifer beamed up at him then set to work.
Gurley strode to the door.
“You’re not staying?” Jennifer’s disappointment was obvious.
“I need to get a tracker survival pack together. Want me to get one for you too?” he asked Ingrid.
“This isn’t the wilds of Wyoming. You can’t go too far in this country without passing a McDonald’s or a Dominoes Pizza.”
“Please yourself. Don’t come running to me when you don’t have a ground sheet or a bed roll.”
“You’re suggesting we track him on foot, like stalking a deer or something?”
“It might come to that. Nothing wrong with being prepared.” He set off down the corridor for a few steps then hurried back again. “Jennifer? Where should I head for a camping supply store in this city?”
Jennifer frowned at him. “Try Selfridges—on Oxford Street. They sell pretty much everything.”
“Is that on the Tube?”
Ingrid found the location quickly on her GPS app. She showed Gurley. “It’s just a few blocks away.” He stared at the route for a few seconds, nodded his thanks, then disappeared back out the door.
“What do you make of him?” Jennifer whispered, staring at the vacant doorway.
“I really don’t know.” It was true. Ingrid had assumed he was an unfeeling, tough, arrogant son of a bitch. But he’d shown a different side with Jennifer just now. Maybe she needed to keep an open mind.
Jennifer returned to her mammoth task and Ingrid sat at her desk, hating the fact that all she could do right now was wait for information. From Jennifer’s inquiries… from the police… She blinked. There was some other information that she’d already waited far too long for. She shoved her purse over her shoulder, pulled her jacket from the back of her chair and told Jennifer she was going for a walk to clear her head.
15
As Ingrid waited for Mike Stiller at FBI HQ to pick up, she soon discovered she was headed not to the main entrance of the embassy as she’d previously intended, but downstairs toward the underground parking lot. Somehow, on autopilot, her brain had found something useful for her to do while she waited for more news. The call to Mike diverted to his voicemail and she left a terse message.
She was climbing off her Triumph Tiger 800 outside the Fosters’ hotel off Russell Square less than fifteen minutes later. She swapped her motorcycle helmet for her purse and locked the box on the