They sat for a while toying with their mugs and stirring the contents needlessly, looking around with intermittent glances at each other, each adjusting to the situation in their own way. Despite whatever impressions he might have had earlier, Cade got the feeling that this wasn’t exactly what Marie did every day. He wanted to talk, but it seemed pointless to start asking about what was supposed to happen next, which would reveal itself in due course.
Taped music was playing from speakers overhead, which would mask conversation. Finally, he brought up the subject of Julia, which was still nagging at him. He summarized the conversations that had led him to attempt contacting Marie, and his sudden suspicion just now, while Marie was making her call, that Julia must have been part of it. “But how could she have been?” he concluded, turning up his palms. “It’s been over a year. . . . Yet why else would she pretend to have known Rebecca?”
Marie didn’t seem to find it so surprising. “Tell me more about her,” she invited. “How did you meet?”
Cade did his best to describe Julia and their relationship in a way that was sensitive to Marie’s situation, mentioning her former husband who ran night clubs and how her social life as a consequence had clicked with Cade’s own agenda. “I met her at a dinner party somewhere. She had a spare ticket to a show that someone had canceled out of and asked me if I wanted to fill in. It developed from there.”
“It sounds ideal.” Marie regarded him dubiously, as if not quite sure that what he’d said was adequate grounds for what she was thinking. She ran a fingertip around the rim of her mug, then said, finally, “Doesn’t it strike you that it could have been just a little too ideal?. . . I mean, a bit over year ago, right? That is, by the time I’d have been marked as a CounterAction active.”
Cade shook his head, at the same time smiling as if this had to be some kind of joke. “Surely not. I mean, would they really go so far as to set me up with my own permanent live-in agent?”
This time Marie nodded without hesitation. “Oh sure. It would be routine to put a watch on anyone connected with a marked name like mine. With a person in your position, constantly in touch with influential Hyadeans, they’d want to know everything about your deals and interactions. What better way to do it than that?” Cade could only stare at her aghast. Marie seemed amused. “Are you only starting to notice for the first time, Roland? We’re being turned into a Hyadean colony. There might be some friendly ones that you can meet and party with, but the system they work for is ruthless about imposing its own ideas. Their style of security is being introduced into the U.S., and our own people—the ones who run the machinery that serves the interests that stand to make big—are collaborating.” Cade felt a twinge of discomfort, wondering where that put him. But Marie’s phone beeped before he could say anything. She took it out and answered, then produced a pen and another piece of paper and proceeded to jot down more instructions, answering in monosyllables. “Right. . . . Yes. . . . No, I’ve got it. That’ll be okay.” She closed the phone and put it away. “Time to go,” she said to Cade, rising.
They followed a different road a few miles to a disused gas station, which Marie entered, parking on one side of the forecourt. They waited in the darkness for a little under twenty minutes. Then a car drew up on the roadway outside and flashed its lights once. Marie started the engine, turned on the lights, and exited to pull behind it. The car led them about a mile and then pulled off onto an expanse of open ground that seemed, in the moonless night, to be bordered by trees. Marie’s phone beeped again. She answered it, listened for several seconds, and announced that she was to leave Cade here for a while. Meanwhile, the car ahead had moved on a distance and doused its lights. Marie got out, closed the door, and disappeared on foot in the same direction. Cade waited for about another fifteen minutes, feeling as if he had been pitched into the middle of one of those movies that he’d never really managed to connect in his mind with reality; or maybe a country that you read about but never thought about long enough to realize might actually exist. If he got out of this in one piece, that was it, he told himself. No more heroics or dabbling with intrigue and subversives. From now on he would . . . But even as the thought formed, he realized he was no longer so sure. The voice on the phone in the hotel room came back to him. There are people out there right now for whom it’s costing their homes, their families, their lives. The picture of himself running back to his world of comfort and security didn’t sit very well with him either.