Page 119 of Crossing the Line
Ganim was whistling now. A cheerful, tuneless riff. Looking forward to killing her, she supposed.God damn it.She felt a hot tear streak down, sliding over her lips so she could taste the salt.
She had lived her life so carefully, and now she was going to end up as some grisly Hollywood story?No. For once in her pathetic, charmed life, she was going to put up a fight.
The car was moving but not at highway speeds. There were streetlights here and headlights from other cars. Maybe she hadn’t been unconscious too long. If they were still downtown, there was a good chance Xavier would find her.
She just needed to hang on until then.
She worked through her options in her head. If she could open the backdoor with her foot, she could slide out. It wouldn’t be a pretty exit or a fast one, and odds were he could catch her before she made it out. Her other option was to wait until he tried to get her out of the car. If he thought she was still unconscious, she might have a chance at surprising him and getting away. But if he didn’t stop soon, if he took her out of the city, her chances for survival were zero.
“I bet you’re wondering how I found you,” Ganim said, and Waverly froze. Her breath stilled in her chest. His voice was thin, reedy, and oh so confident. “Come on. I know you’re awake. I can hear your breathing.”
She weighed her options. If she was going to die, she at least wanted some answers.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked, her voice a rasp of fear and sickness.
“Wrong question,” he admonished. “Ask me how I found you.”
Waverly took a shaky breath. “How did you find me?”
“Do you remember when we met?” he asked.
She closed her eyes and took another breath. “At the premiere.”
“Good girl. What do you think I was trying to do there?”
Waverly squeezed her eyes shut tight against a new roll of nausea. “Get my attention?” she guessed.
“Well, that was secondary. Tell me, what did I do?”
“Besides the bombs? You got close to me.”
“Exactly right. A-plus. I could have killed all those people, you know. I could have killed you. But I didn’t.”
“Th-thank you.” Blackness lurked on the edge of her vision, and her heart thundered in an irregular rhythm.
“Don’t be stupid. I didn’t do it for you. I wanted witnesses. I wanted them to see what I was capable of and spread the word,” he crowed.
And it’s exactly what they had done. Les Ganim’s name was currently synonymous with terror.
“Why did you want to get close to me?” Waverly asked. She debated sitting up but decided that appearing too weak to sit would play more in her favor. And she wasn’t one-hundred percent sure that she was capable of sitting up.
“Well, you see, my dear. I have a bit of a flair for technology.”
“You were a... a systems analyst. At home.”
He scoffed. “I was a puppet to them. A speck of nothing. But in my own time, I developed some special skills. There wasn’t much else to do while Mother was sick, you see. If I wasn’t working, I was taking care of her. But I did carve out time to learn a bit about hacking and build an interesting little program.”
Waverly’s head was throbbing, and the urge to vomit was rapidly becoming a priority.
“What kind of program?” she whispered.
“All I had to do was get within ten feet of you, and my program could detect your phone.”
“Detect?” Waverly felt the sick roll. “Oh my God. It was you. You texted me today.”
Ganim laughed, a high-pitched snicker. “I did more than text you,” he scoffed. “I tracked you. I knew the second you came home,” he said proudly. “I knew where you went after the premiere. I knew how long you were there. As long as you were within a hundred miles of me, I knew where you were.”
She hadn’t told Xavier about the text, a mistake for which she would now pay dearly. Waverly groaned, making a noise that she hoped passed for admiration.
