There was a pause. Then the voice on the phone said, “Very well.” Evidently, Cade had passed muster; the subject was closed. So was that what he had been brought all this way for? It needled him.
“Well, I’m glad that you’re satisfied,” he said. It was one of those rare times when he was unable to keep an edge of sarcasm out of his voice. “My plane back to LA will have left already. I’m going to have to get some kind of a regular connection instead from here, wherever this is—unless you’ve got rules that say we have to go on another mystery tour first. You realize that you’ve cost me my whole evening.”
The person who the voice belonged to seemed unimpressed. “There are people out there right now for whom it’s costing their homes, their families, their lives,” he replied coolly.
The remark hit Cade as disconcertingly as it came unexpectedly. He sat back on the bed, finding himself too troubled and confused to respond. He had never thought of it that way. Somehow, the thought of putting in an expense claim didn’t feel like such a good idea.
Marie and Rebecca came back. Len held a muted conversation over the phone. It seemed that business was concluded for the moment. He would need to go back to confer, he announced. Rebecca would probably be moved to another location later that night and arrangements made to send Cade home. In the meantime they were to remain here. Marie would keep them company. Len collected his coat off the bed. When he opened the door, the van had magically reappeared. As he was leaving, Marie caught Cade’s sleeve, and drew close to keep her words private. “We have to take care of business first,” she murmured. “Maybe we’ll be able to talk a little later. There must be lots. It’s been a long time.” Cade nodded.
While Marie rinsed out the coffee pot and prepared another brew, Rebecca lay back along the bed they had been using and stared at the ceiling. Cade paced disconsolately to the door and back several times, then settled down on the other and picked up one of the magazines still lying there. An ad at the bottom of the page it was opened at was for a restaurant called the Chattanooga Chew Chew. Its phone number had the area code 423. Well, that answered one question, anyway, he told himself.
* * *?
The miniature locator that ISS operative “Ruby,” currently operating under the field name Rebecca, had attached beneath the collar of Len’s jacket while it lay on the bed updated its position from satellite fixes every five seconds and had connected with the national security network via booster relays covering the area. The computers at ISS Regional Command in Atlanta had found voiceprint matches with two samples from previously tapped recordings, both established from interrogation leads as belonging to members of the Scorpion cell. The male was the operative known as “Len”; the female went as “Kestrel.”
For ten minutes, the plot from the locator traced a route northwest of Chattanooga to coordinates shown on a large-scale map as pinpointing one of a number of mobile homes situated in a wooded area just over the Tennessee River. Conversation picked up later inside the house identified the Scorpion member, believed to be cell leader, known as “Olsen,” and a female voice not on file. Then, after a further fifteen minutes, another male voice was detected. Within seconds, the analyzer monitor in Atlanta started beeping and flashing a box with the caption PRIORITY. An operator transferred spectra samples to an auxiliary screen and ran a full Fourier and time series comparison. He picked up a red phone that connected directly to the section supervisor.
“Bingo!” he reported. “It’s him, Reyvek. We’ve found the defector.”
A Status Report, Operations Plan, and Request for Action Approval were flashed to Washington within eighteen minutes. Before a half-hour was up, the response came back: GO.
Choppers from a base in the mountains between Chattanooga and Nashville, experimentally fitted with quiet-running Hyadean ducted fans in place of conventional rotors, landed strike teams a mile from the target in opposite directions along the north bank of the river. Their orders were to identify and take out the designated Subject, along with all other opposition on sight. When that objective was confirmed, a second unit would go in to relieve operative Ruby in the motel on the south side of the city, and eliminate the two remaining hostiles there.