Dox turned and looked at Margarita. It was a reasonably surreal sight. “Well,” he said, rubbing his chin, “as Nicolas Cage put it in Con Air, ‘On any other day, that might seem strange.’”
Diaz was stroking Margarita’s shoulder. Margarita dropped her head. “That’s good,” Dox said. “That means she likes you.”
Diaz smiled, still intent on the horse. “Yeah?”
Dox nodded. “You bet. Though it doesn’t exactly answer the question of what she’s doing here. Maybe old Kanezaki thought this outfit needed a mascot. Well, they ought to be here to explain soon enough.”
chapter
sixty-six
DELILAH
Delilah slept well on the flight from Virginia. Hunger was the best seasoning, and exhaustion the best soporific.
The first pale light was showing in the eastern sky as they left the plane and walked onto the tarmac. There were three vehicles waiting. A gray Toyota minivan. A FedEx truck. And a bright yellow Porsche 718 Cayman GT4.
Kanezaki reached under the truck, felt around for a moment, and retrieved a magnetic lockbox. “Okay,” he said, opening the lockbox and taking out a set of keys. “No fighting over the cars. The Porsche is for Delilah.”
John was scanning the parking lot. He was attuned to good clothes, but cars meant nothing to him. Delilah appreciated both.
She looked at Kanezaki. “Your idea of a low profile?”
He handed her the keys. “More hiding in plain sight. You won’t be out of place in Woodside. Shit, you can drive a stick, right?”
She cocked an eyebrow.
“Sorry,” he said. “Of course you can.”
Dash, who had been staring at the car, signed something to Evie. Evie looked at Kanezaki. “Are we going far?”
Kanezaki shook his head. “Fifteen minutes up the highway.”
Delilah didn’t know sign, but she caught the drift. “It’s okay with me,” she said to Evie. “If it’s okay with you.”
Evie smiled and nodded to Dash. The boy laughed delightedly, and he gave Delilah a double thumbs-up.
“Why don’t I take the FedEx truck?” Kanezaki said to the rest of them. He handed John a set of keys. “You take the minivan. The others should be waiting for us. It’s an office park on O’Brien Drive in Menlo Park, straight up 101. Follow me. I doubt anyone’s going to get lost, but if there’s a problem, each vehicle is outfitted with encrypted walkie-talkies. No cell towers, no way to track a signal. Good to go?”
Delilah got in the Porsche with Dash, who was all smiles. Resilient kid, she thought. Just twenty-four hours earlier, he and his mother had killed someone who was trying to do the same to them. Or to do them some kind of harm, anyway. If he’d been Israeli and the IDF had gotten wind, they’d be eyeing him for Sayeret Matkal. If that worked out, Mossad would recruit him for Kidon. For whatever reason, the thought made her sad.
He buckled his seatbelt. “We don’t really have to stay behind them, do we?”
She smiled at him. “This time, I think yes. But maybe we’ll get a chance to drive her properly later. Would you like that?”
“Yes!”
“Okay. We’ll see.”
They all moved out. Dash had a point—keeping the race-bred machine behind a minivan at fifty-five miles an hour, the engine growling as though enraged at being so unfairly hobbled, was frustrating.
“You’re French?” Dash said.
She looked at him so he could read her lips. “These days, yes. It’s complicated.”