Shadow Woman: A Novel by Linda Howard Page B

was niggling at her, something she needed to think through if she could just figure out whatever the niggling thing was.
    “Need help with a phone?” the barely-twenty-something clerk asked. He was lanky and earnest, and wore glasses that sat crookedly on his nose.
    “I don’t know,” she replied. She’d come in here fully intending to pick up a basic phone, but now that she was here in front of the display she wasn’t certain she’d be accomplishing anything.
    “Are you thinking smart phone, or a more basic model?”
    “I’m really just browsing. Thanks.”
    Did she really need a burner cell phone? The idea was one of those weird thoughts that had popped out of the blackness of those missing two years, but if she applied it to now, what use was it? She had no one to call that she couldn’t call with her normal phone—which she’d destroyed in a sudden panicked certainty that it was bugged.
Bugs
. That was the point, not secrecy.What she knew about prepaid cell phones wasn’t a lot, but she did know the phone had to be activated online, which meant it was registered in her name. What would she be accomplishing?
    Nothing.
    Okay, that question was answered. What she needed was a phone she knew wasn’t bugged, which she might as well get from her regular service provider, given that she was already paying for a contract. If she kept the battery out of it, then she couldn’t be tracked by the phone’s GPS. Likewise, if the phone was dead, it couldn’t be cloned. A separate bug installed in the phone might be able to pick up her conversations if she was in the room, but first someone would have to have access to her phone, and she could definitely control that.
    She felt as if she’d been lost in a wilderness of ignorance and was slowly beginning to find her way out. Nothing made sense, but order was beginning to assert itself; she wasn’t as panicked now and she could think logically.
    She had walked in the doors hell-bent on getting a prepaid cell phone that she didn’t need, but getting one would send an alert to the mysterious “They,” which was what she wanted to avoid. A true burner was one a third party had picked up and passed on, so it wasn’t linked to her. She didn’t know how she knew this little detail, but she did, and it wasn’t giving her a headache, either. Yay for her.
    She left the store without buying anything, not even OTC meds for headaches and nausea. She obviously didn’t have any kind of virus, because what bug could be stopped by concentrating on songs or other trivial stuff? No, both symptoms were obviously triggered by surfacing memories from the missing two years.
    Something had happened to her, something catastrophic and maybe even sinister, though she had no evidence of the latter. Instead she seemed to have been set adrift in a new life, and left to her own devices.
    Maybe she’d had some kind of weird reaction to anesthesia whenever she’d had the facial surgery. Maybe it was nothing more than that, and all these suspicions about bugged cell phones and being watched were by-products of movies she’d watched in the past.
    She’d be careful because she didn’t know for certain what was going on, she thought as she drove to her cell service provider to get a new phone, but she wouldn’t let this drive her crazy.
    That was the smart thing to do—right?
    For the rest of the day and evening, things were normal enough, at least on the surface. Lizette did what she routinely did, ate soup for dinner, fielded another call from Diana and reported that she was feeling a little shaky but overall much better. She watched TV. She read—or tried to read. The whole time, she was thinking about the creepy-crawly feeling that her house had been bugged—not just the phone, not just her car, but the house, too. If someone really was going to all that trouble,
not
bugging the house would leave a big hole in the electronic fence, and she simply couldn’t see that.
    But how in hell