Despite his fatigue, he slept sporadically and uneasily. He was awakened before dawn by Charlie Hu hammering on the door. Keene’s personal phone was dead like everyone else’s, and the hotel switchboard hadn’t answered. Roy Sloane had called from Washington and needed to talk to Keene immediately. Leaving Colby Greene in charge at the hotel, Keene drove back with Hu beneath a luridly flaming sky along roads already beginning to fill with loaded-down vehicles. He found Sloane in a highly agitated state. The entire Kronian delegation had vanished from the Engleton. It appeared they had been kidnapped.
30
It had been done smoothly, quietly, and without fuss; so smoothly that it was almost an hour later before anyone realized the Kronians were missing. Transportation to take them to Andrews had been expected, although without an exact time being specified since the shuttle arrangements were uncertain. Not trusting Terran arrangements, Idorf had stated that he would send down a surface lander from the Osiris for them; but with the increasing meteorite influx he was also taking the ship out to a more distant orbit. According to the security officer in charge at the Engleton, an Air Force major with escort had arrived and presented papers that appeared in order, the authorizing officer at the Pentagon had confirmed, and the party departed fifteen minutes later in an official bus. That was the last that had been seen of them.
Keene, using the same office that he had talked with Cavan from the day before, asked Sloane if the Pentagon contact given to confirm the order had by any chance been a Colonel Winter. Sloane had to ask Keene to hold while he checked, and then came back astonished a couple of minutes later to announce that yes, it was. How in hell had Keene known? Keene hesitated. He didn’t want to compromise Cavan’s position; on the other hand, this could be the moment for getting Cavan some official help, which would probably be the biggest favor that Keene could do for him right now. In the end, he summarized the parts of the story that he was reasonably sure of, making it sound like an offshoot of his own scientific investigating and mentioning Cavan as an old friend that he’d involved to check some references. His biggest dilemma was over the Vice President, Beckerson, whose connection so far was purely circumstantial. If Beckerson was a part of whatever was going on, as Cavan suspected, then obviously it should be said; but if the suspicion was wrong, then the whole operation to set up a shadow government on the West Coast could be impaired. As a feeler, Keene slipped in a casual question as to whether Beckerson and his party were still due to follow on to California as planned. Sloane replied that they were and should be leaving late that day. So Beckerson hadn’t vanished; nothing had changed. Keene decided to hold off on that issue until there was more to go on.
“It’s starting to make sense now,” Keene said. “Voler and his group knew early on how bad this could get. The confusion was to gain them some time before controls really start tightening up. Their aim all along has been to get themselves out, and safely to Kronia with the Osiris. That’s what it’s all been about.”
Sloane stared, silently assessing the pattern for himself. “They’ve grabbed the Kronians as bargaining chips,” he said finally.
“That was the line he tried to push at the White House meeting,” Keene said. “You were there, Roy. You heard him. But Hayer shot him down. Then, when it was clear that he wasn’t going to get any help officially, he tried selling me on the idea at Goddard the next morning, hoping I’d be willing to bargain with the Kronians to take them. That didn’t work, so now they’ve taken matters into their own hands and seized the delegation as hostages. . . .”
Sloane had followed it through and nodded slowly. “To force their way aboard the lander that Idorf is sending down to Andrews,” he completed.
A brief silence ensued while they thought over the various angles and options.
“Correct. And we have to let it land, just as Idorf has to send it, even though we know,” Keene said. “There’s no way we can afford to hold off.”