For a moment, Marie registered too much surprise to be capable of saying anything. She collected her wits quickly and nodded. “Dee? Yes. She’s okay.”
“We need to use her.”
“How? What are you talking about?”
“Well, obviously we can’t risk alerting Julia,” Cade said. “What are the chances of getting a message to Dee somehow, through this network of yours?
“They could do it, sure,” Marie agreed. “But in a situation like this, it’s best to assume that anyone who comes to mind as a natural contact will have been marked by the other side too. That means they’re likely to be watched and their lines tapped. It could take some time.”
“Then the sooner we make a start, the better,” Cade said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THEY GAVE JOHN DETAILS of how Dee could be contacted, along with an instruction that she was to mention it to nobody. After that, there was little else to do but wait. There was no way Cade could use a credit card, write a check, or present ID without being picked up. The confidence of the people sheltering them evidently grew over the next two days, or maybe their story was authenticated somewhere. More of John’s friends began showing up at the house, many of them at night. John himself stopped by from time to time to check up on things and drink a coffee or beer with Cade and Marie. Times had grown bad since the coming of the aliens, he told them, and that seemed all that was needed to establish cause and effect. Cade wasn’t aware of any activities on the Hyadeans’ part that would depress U.S. agriculture, and from what he had heard attributed it more to rising Third World productivity and changes in East-West relations, but there was no arguing with the local wisdom. Cade wondered how typical this might be of thinking across the country. Maybe he had been getting more out of touch than he had realized. Marie borrowed a laptop and encrypted as much as she knew of Reyvek’s story in a file that she entrusted to John for consignment to Sovereignty. So at least there was some safeguard now in that respect.
Meanwhile, the news brought reports of more operations by security forces, and an apparent act of retaliation in Minnesota, where a stretch of roadway was blown up while a military convoy was passing over, causing over sixty fatalities. Globalist Coalition fighter-bombers were shown in action against “bandit” forces in South America, long portrayed as organized by drug and other criminal elements to disrupt lawful land transfers and development programs that threatened their business. Cade didn’t believe it anymore. Another clip showed Hyadean military advisors training Brazilian counterinsurgency troops in the use of prom guns, which were apparently being introduced into the bush fighting with devastating results, along with other Hyadean innovations and methods. Cade recalled what Marie had said about the real motives behind the assassination of Lieutenant General Meakes. He wondered how long it would take for similar provisions to be introduced in the U.S.
He found he was beginning to see things in a new light. In one of their conversations he asked Marie what was going on behind it all, the big picture. What was it all intended to bring about? She told him he had already half figured it out. It was to serve the elite who controlled the Hyadean power structure. Did she mean by profiting from dumped products that had no value back among the Hyadean worlds, and the resale there of cheap Terran labor? Yes, he could see all that. Hadn’t he been involved on the fringes of it himself?
But it went further than that, Marie told him. They were moving in to take over choice parts of Earth as their own private preserves. Huge tracts of places like western Brazil, eastern Peru—and now they were talking about South Africa—were being transformed into estates and palaces for the Hyadean ruling clique to escape to from the drabness and overdevelopment of their own worlds. And the properties came with willing managers and domestics that outperformed Hyadean AIs, and none of the political difficulties associated with hiring subservient labor back home.