It turned out I was right; they were coming after me.

I'd just thought they'd give me more time before they did it. Three minutes out from the safe house, following Foreman Road, the reserve light for the gas tank lit up on the Civic's console. There was no tone, no warning buzzer, but there didn't need to be. It was a hard light to miss.

My first thought was that, in his haste to acquire a car, Illya had forgotten to check how much gas was in the tank. Then I thought that there was no way in hell that Dan would have permitted that kind of mistake, no way in hell he would have supplied me with an escape vehicle that wouldn't be able to manage my escape.

So maybe it was a fault in the console someplace, a short in the warning light or a skewed sensor in the tank.

I was willing to believe that, until I saw the headlights in the rearview mirror.

They were distant, maybe a hundred feet back, but riding high enough to throw reflected glare into the Civic. As I watched, the lights came closer, then held steady. Maybe fifty feet off. A good covering distance. Not so far away as to lose the target; not so close as to risk unnecessary exposure if the target did something unexpected, hit the brakes, for instance, or threw a U-turn.

I told myself that it didn't mean anything, that it was a public damn road, and that other vehicles would thus be using it. I told myself that, yes, while it was half past four in the morning and only assassins and their students and the people who protected them would be awake and up and about in the sleepy little Putnam County town of Cold Spring, that was no reason to become alarmed.