Christine paced by the window of her upstairs room. Everything was happening faster than she had anticipated, a day and a half faster. She looked at the tracker again and tossed it to the bed. Michael and Stuart were ten minutes from the town. They weren't supposed to arrive for another twenty-four hours. She'd purposely dropped them twenty-five miles away so it'd be a two-day hike. Yet somehow they managed to get a car.
To make matters worse, Claude's flight was on its way. Which, by her estimates, placed him in the town in a mere six or seven hours. She hadn't given him enough money for a plane. She checked multiple times throughout the week to make sure he wouldn't have enough. She'd given him enough to afford a hotel room, a taxi ride, and some leftover cash for any material he needed when he inevitably had to rob a place. She knew with the stakes so high, Claude would find a way across the country, but not this fast.
She wasn't ready. The agents weren't prepared, they were asleep in the rooms next to hers. She couldn't alert them now. It'd be too obvious if, as Michael's car pulled up, agents were turning around from various Trail Lake Lodge rooms. If Gary was here, he’d see them and immediately be suspicious. She had to wait. Play it by ear.
She flicked off the light. The one good thing was, she knew they were here. She had woken up to get a drink and decided to check the trackers. When she'd gone to bed two hours earlier, the two were still twenty miles away, and Claude was in Maine. Had she slept a full eight hours, the whole thing could've ended without her even knowing.
She turned off the light and watched through the thin white curtains awaiting the car. Moose Pass had made sense on paper. One road in, one way out. Hundreds of miles in between. An old military runway that had been built and never used. If her target showed up, he'd be caught. She was sure of it. But with this new timeline, would he show up in time for Michael to recognize him? Or by some miracle was he already here?
She sent out an alert to the agents, notifying them to get ready, stay inside, and keep their lights off. She'd only been given a week to prepare. She'd been confident the plan was mapped out so well it would have been the same had she been given a month. Now it was falling apart. She didn't have a week anymore. She had moments. One moment to the next. It'd come down to split-second decisions. What would The Company do if their top informant ended up dead?