Laura stared for several seconds at the almost-emptied glass of bourbon in front of him, then raised her eyes to meet his. For a moment, Drisson thought she was about to decline or start debating the issue. But she nodded finally and said, simply, “Okay.”
Drisson smiled, relieved. “I knew you had it in you. Call me immediately to confirm, before you leave. That’s important. I need the timing right to make sure Ibsan isn’t around when you leave. Afterward, I’ll meet you back here at say . . . eleven, unless we agree something different. Any more questions?” Laura shook her head. Drisson raised his glass, emptied it, and brushed his mustache with a knuckle. “Okay. Then we probably shouldn’t walk out together. I’ll see you here later.” He rose and squeezed her shoulder. “Don’t let me down, eh, baby?”
Actually, Drisson had arranged a quiet meeting between Ibsan and a confidential informant from the Pentagon concerning private matters that evening, so Ibsan wouldn’t be anywhere around. But the timing was still important. Drisson had other plans.
* * *
“No, no! I don’t want to talk to them. Just say you couldn’t find me. . . . I said I’d take care of it.” In his room at the Grantham, Toddrel cut off the phone. Everything was closing in. The Hyadeans were looking for blood over what had gone wrong in South America. Police detectives were already rounding up victims for the war-crimes show-trial circus that would be staged eventually to allay the public’s already emerging thirst for revenge and justice. His name would surely be on a dozen lists. He wiped his brow. The clean shirt he had put on after getting back was already sodden. Had to control his nerves. He reached for the printout he had taken of the progress being made in restoring travel services. As he did so, his eye caught the shot being presented on the room’s view screen of Cade, Cade’s former wife, and the two Hyadeans talking to a news reporter on their arrival in California. Cade! . . . Toddrel’s fingers crumpled the paper involuntarily. Ever since their interference in Chattanooga, vanishing and subsequent reappearance in South America, and then the screening of that disastrous TV documentary, it seemed they had been at the center of everything connected with the reversal of Toddrel’s fortune’s. Arcadia, the agent in California, was supposed to settle the score; only, Arcadia turned out to be the one who was blown up instead. Toddrel still hadn’t heard a satisfactory explanation of how that could have happened. Cade hadn’t even been there, in any case. So Cade had to be dead—killed in South America somewhere, Toddrel had been told—until intelligence reported him turning up again, alive and well in Beijing with the Hyadean. And finally bringing the whole house down, Cade and his woman were there in the broadcasts coming back from Chryse itself!—which had resulted in a whole planet erupting in turmoil there and the final ruin of everything here. Now all Toddrel had left was his neck, and that was on the line.
The phone beeped again before his anger boiled over. Even though it was his private channel tone, he kept it on audio. “Yes?”
“Casper, it’s Laura. I was in town. With everything that’s going on I thought you might be here.”
Toddrel keyed the screen on to reveal Laura. “I . . . I am rather busy just now.” He didn’t sound especially pleased.
“Staying low? I hear it’s a witch hunt out there. The long knives are coming out everywhere.”
“That’s friends for you. It’s what you get to expect.”
“Can I come over there?”
“I’m hardly in a mood for romantic distractions right now.”
“Nothing like that. I’m scared, Casper. I need to talk to you. A lot’s going on that I don’t understand.” Her gaze from the screen was insistent.
Toddrel gazed at her sourly, seemed about to refuse, then thought better of it. “Very well,” he said curtly. “I’ll order dinner in the room at, say, eight. We can talk then. Would that suit you?”
“That would suit fine. I’ll be there shortly just. Which room is it? The desk wouldn’t tell me.”