Page 22 of Once a Hero

Jake helped him get his foot out of the hole. “Is it a sprain?”

Even before Earl could answer, Jake knew. His foot was sideways. He had probably broken it.

Jake helped Earl to hop on one foot so they could hide behind a tree.

Jake tried to call 911.

No signal.

“Give me your phone,” Jake said.

Earl looked everywhere for it. “I had it a minute ago.”

“Well, if my phone doesn’t have signal, yours might not either.” It was all he could say.

Jake checked his phone again. His battery power was at ten percent. He texted Helen Hu, who had told them to call her twenty-four seven. Maybe texting would work if voice didn’t.

SOS. Send help.

He entered their GPS coordinates.

And prayed.

Chapter Ten

“Do you think they’ve found the cabin?” It was Raynelle’s turn to drive, and she was making chitchat to stay awake.

Or at least that was Beatrice’s assumption.

Raynelle’s job was to follow the signal on Jake’s burner phone. Wherever they were going seemed to be in the direction of Philomena’s cabin in the woods.

The problem was that Jake’s phone had no directions. It had been obvious that Earl’s phone was the one with the address of the cabin. For some reason, Kenichi was unable to hack into Earl’s phone. It was NSA-grade.

Beatrice was in the back of the cargo van with Kenichi, going over data that he had collected about Jake’s time at Molyneux’s organization. Nothing so far. When Jake had been undercover there, he was a low-level employee—dispensable—whom Molyneux had deployed to the Great Smoky Mountains several years before to capture a British Special Forces soldier who had been hiding at a top-secret retreat center.

“To answer your question, Ray, I don’t know.” Beatrice didn’t look up from the laptop she had been staring at for hours.

There was nothing there. No leverage.

Beatrice sighed. “So all we have is the three-amber brooch. Assuming Jake has the one-amber brooch, we still can’t get the location of the Amber Room.”

“Correction, Bee,” Kenichi said. “The location ofsomeof the panels of the Amber Room. And we still don’t know if the brooches are what your dad said they are.”

“Hey guys,” Raynelle said. “Something wrong here.”

Beatrice tried to stretch but the van didn’t have a ceiling tall enough for her to stand up. At five nine, she wasn’t that tall, but her thick lug-sole boots didn’t help.

Beatrice went to the front to sit down on the passenger seat. She buckled up. “What?”

“His phone is stationary—in the forest.”

Beatrice leaned toward the display on the dashboard. They were ten minutes from the location of the phone. “So they added another a few minutes to their drive?”

“Like they’ve stopped,” Raynelle said, eyes on the dark road ahead.

“Maybe they went to the bathroom,” Kenichi shouted from the back of the van. He laughed all by himself.

Beatrice wondered… Nah.

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