He looked back at the booth and saw her speaking into the phone handset, at the same time writing hurriedly on a scrap of paper. Whom could she be talking to if she had only recently arrived in the area herself? Maybe they had a way of inserting coded information in local ads and announcements that would give a number to call if you knew what to look for. His mind drifted back to where it had been previously.
Information to identify Cade to Marie!
Could finding CounterAction’s conduits have been just another part of the cover story too? Had the real objective all along been to track down Marie? Anything was possible for all he knew. How was Cade supposed to have known what she might have been involved in?
And then a more uncomfortable thought hit him. If Rebecca hadn’t been what she said, then what kind of a coincidence would just happen to make her an old college friend of somebody living with a man on the ISS watch list whose former wife was a suspected CounterAction operative? A pretty unlikely one, to put it mildly. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more he was forced to conclude that it couldn’t happen. So she hadn’t been an old college friend of Julia’s at all. But if that were true, then Julia had to have been part of the setup as well.
Surely not. After all that time? . . . It had to be impossible.
Then he remembered the strange way in which Julia had suddenly started asking questions about Marie, whom she had never expressed curiosity over before, and insisting that surely there was some way of contacting her again. . . .
He was still grappling with the implications when Marie came back. She got in and sat looking for a minute at the paper she had written on, as if memorizing it, then folded it and slipped it into a side pocket of her coat. “There’s a coffee shop we need to find and wait in for a while,” she said. “Someone will get back to us there.” Cade merely nodded. If she had wanted him to know more, she would have said. He was completely out of his depth by now.
They drove out of the mall parking area and took a backstreet route, slowing occasionally for Marie to check street names and landmarks until they were on a road leading out of town. They followed for about twenty minutes to another township, smaller this time, standing below tree-covered hills looming into the dusk, which was closing in by now. Marie stopped under an intersection lamp to check her directions again, and then stayed on the main street to a traffic light, where she turned right and stopped two blocks farther on outside a diner billed as “Dean’s.” It was workaday and nondescript, with a few old cars and pickup trucks drawn up facing the building.
Cade had been thinking over events yet again. He looked at Marie as they were about to get out. “That guy who called in on the radio earlier. Was that some kind of code that the station broadcasts? The exit we turned off at was the name of the town that he said. He made it sound like some old fool just chatting, but he said something about not going any farther than that. Were they stopping the traffic farther on up? Was it something like that?”
Marie gave him a look that said he ought to know better than to ask; but there was a hint of a compliment there too. “A lot of people are getting really tired of what’s going on,” was the most she would admit before opening her door. On the way in, she stopped and took out a lighter to burn the piece of paper she had written on, stirring the ash into a cigarette sand-tray standing outside the door.
Inside was a counter with stools, a row of booths by the window, and tables and a few more booths at the back. The place was moderately busy with people who looked like local farmers and tradesmen, a group of teenagers, and several casual customers, none of whom gave Marie and Cade more than a glance as they entered. Cade found he had no appetite and ordered just a coffee at the counter. Marie took a sweet cold tea. Cade carried them to an empty corner booth, with nobody in immediate proximity.