The Drive to Portland
Safety is never where you expect it.
Escape || Road || Risk
She packed in eleven minutes and was on the highway by 1 a.m. The drive to Portland was three hours under normal conditions. She watched the rearview mirror obsessively for the first hour, then forced herself to stop — because the paranoia was real but the visibility was poor and watching mirrors on a mountain highway at night was its own kind of danger. She called Gina hands-free and they talked for ninety minutes, Elena reciting everything she had, Gina typing on the other end with the focused percussion of someone building a wall in real time.
“The FBI will want physical evidence,” Gina said. “The recordings.” “I have them all. On the drive and backed up to the cloud.” “The documents.” “Photographed and uploaded.” “And you.” A pause. “Me?” “You’re the chain of custody, Elena. You need to be physically present, credible, calm, and not dead.” The word landed flat in the car. “That was blunt.” “It’s 2 a.m. and two journalists who dug into this thing before you are unaccounted for. I don’t do decorative language at this hour.” Fair, Elena thought. She drove.
At mile marker 47, a pair of headlights appeared behind her and matched her speed exactly for four miles — not overtaking, not falling back. She changed lanes twice. The headlights changed twice. She accelerated to 85. The headlights accelerated. Then — a truck pulled out from a rest stop, inserted itself between them, and the headlights fell back and eventually turned off at an exit. She sat with her heart rate at 140 for the next twenty minutes. It might have been coincidence. Everything could always still be coincidence. She had long since stopped believing in coincidences.