Margaret Tabor hadn’t much liked her own father, for reasons that remained locked away in the back rooms of memory.
“What is it, Owen?” she asked, smiling sweetly at the white-haired man, who was hesitating in the doorway to her office. “Come on, out with it.”
“Word from our contact on the coast of California.”
“Yes?”
“Looks like it could possibly be the Aquila’s people.”
“Go on, Owen.”
“Two boats stolen from Eureka. Well, to be accurate, one of them was more like a ship, though I’m not sure quite when a boat becomes a ship, only one—”
She cut across his nervous blathering. “Eureka? Where is that?”
“Ah, yes. Two hundred and eighty-two miles north of San Francisco.”
“Good, Owen, that’s good.”
There was a sheen of perspiration on the man’s forehead, and he nodded and smiled at Margaret Tabor’s words, looking like a dysfunctional puppet.
The woman realized that nerves had overcome him, and her sudden praise had made him forget that he hadn’t yet given the whole message. She smiled encouragingly, wondering whether Owen would soon be making the trip to the narrow, bleak corridor with the meat hooks on the walls.
“Go on,” she said very quietly, pressing keys, watching the jerky movements of some of the silver lights on her large map. “You said that two vessels were taken?”
“Yes, yes, yes. Two. A rowboat. Witnesses there spoke of a man…and a girl about twelve and a youth who seemed clumsy and a grown woman or a skinny man. They didn’t seem too sure of all the details there.”
“Never mind, Owen.”
“There was killing.”
“Of course there was.”
“Three shot by a powerful handgun. Our contact says it was done with extreme prejudice at close range. And a boy was found drowned with a broken nose. That was later. When the sailing ship was stolen.”
“Who took that?”
Owen swallowed hard, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing up and down like an egg in a freezer bag. “Nobody saw them.”
“Except, perhaps, the drowned boy,” she said, managing a thin smile.
“Eureka Belle… the name of the ship. Two sails. One at the front and a big one at the back, painted green.”
“The ship or the sails?”
“What?”
“Painted green. Vessel or sails, Owen?”
“Sails. Forty feet long.”
“The sails are forty feet long?”
“Oh.” Owen hastily consulted a scribbled note that was already crumpled in his sweaty fingers. “The Eureka Belle is forty feet long. No engine.”
Margaret Tabor steepled her fingers on the desk in front of her and stared at them for several long seconds. “I think we might safely begin to assume that it is indeed the survivors of the Aquila, making for the north and for Aurora and the little shit-for-brains, Zelig.”
She looked again at the map, her concentration drawing the eyes of Owen. It made sense. The other sightings. The stupidity of her sec people in allowing the journalist and this mysterious old bitch to escape.
“Is that all, Miss Tabor?”
“Yes, I believe it is, Owen. I think it’s time I left this desk and set off north myself with some support. Time is passing. The game’s afoot.” She waved a dismissive hand at the elderly man, watching him vanish. Her obsidian eyes didn’t alter as she called through to her head of security. “Owen,” she said flatly. “As soon as you like. And make sure you vid it for me.”
When she hung up the black phone, she was smiling again
.
TWELVE HUNDRED MILES AWAY to the north, General John Kennedy Zelig also had his own agents scattered through the ravaged land.
His office was considerably more low tech than that of his most bitter enemy, and was set in one of the circle of Quonset huts that ranged around the sides of the hidden valley in the Pacific Cascade Mountains.
Instead of dancing lights, controlled by a high-powered computer complex, Zelig had a paper map on a board, covered with colored pins.
He stood in front of it, absently fingering the badge in his lapel that represented his organization: the space flag with a circle of tiny silver suns set against a maroon background.