“You do?” Hudro seemed more than just casually interested. He was about to say more, when a tone interrupted from the Terran phone that Vrel was carrying. Vrel frowned, took it out, and answered guardedly, “Who is this?”
“Vrel?” A Terran voice.
Vrel switched to English. “Yes.”
“It’s Roland. No time to talk. I’m downloading the file. You have to get it to Chryse somehow.”
File? It could only mean the file they had recorded with Luodine. Vrel was confused. “What—” he began.
“Just do it!”
Hudro was looking at him questioningly. Vrel waved a hand to indicate that he couldn’t explain. “Some kind of trouble,” he muttered, at the same time keying in the code to direct input to the phone’s integral storage. “Ready,” he said into it. He could make out noise at the other end: voices shouting; distant bangs and crashes. An indicator showed that the file was coming through. In a few seconds, it was done. “Hello? . . . Hello, Roland?” Vrel tried. But the connection was already gone.
“Roland? You mean it was Cade? What did he want?” Hudro demanded. “What kind of trouble?”
“I’m not sure. It sounded as if there was fighting going on there. Roland sent the file. It’s here, in the phone. He wants me to get it to Chryse.”
Hudro thought for a few seconds. “Security must have traced them there.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. There are all kinds of ways.”
Vrel tried to think what it meant. If they had been traced to Tevlak’s, Cade’s and Marie’s aliases were already blown. Vrel’s association with them would be revealed by the Hyadean flight records from St. Louis to the base in Maryland and from there to Uyali. Thryase had used his diplomatic pull to keep the flyer’s movements out of the system, but it was a safe bet that a reception party would be waiting at Vrel’s room in the Hyadean sector of Uyali. “I can’t go back,” he told Hudro. “They’ll be onto me as well.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I came in with the two Americans yesterday. It will be in the flight log.” Vrel looked at Hudro dubiously. “How sure can you be about you?”
“Impossible to say.”
“You can’t just report to the military desk at Uyali,” Vrel said. Hudro’s intention had been to find transportation back to his unit in Brazil. “They could be just waiting for you to show up. Maybe that’s why you haven’t had a recall. Why alert you that something’s up? We don’t want to land back there at all—not until we’ve found some way of checking the situation.”
Hudro frowned, obviously not liking Vrel doing his thinking for him. But he couldn’t argue. He interrogated the on-board system about other options and directed it to reroute the flyer to a construction area thirty miles north, where a power generating installation was being built. There, they could try to find some kind of ground transportation, which would be less conspicuous.
Since anything could happen after they landed, the file from Cade needed to be forwarded now. Vrel couldn’t use the flyer’s system to access the direct net link to Chryse, however. The message protocols would involve his personal ID codes, which were bound to have been watch-listed, and reveal his whereabouts. The only alternative was to use his Terran phone and hope that it was clean. That, of course, couldn’t get the file to Chryse. The only way he could think of to do that would be to send it via the mission in Los Angeles. But communications into there were still likely to be subject to surveillance, as would any to his known contacts if he was being sought—which ruled out using Dee or anyone at Cade’s house.
“You’d better come up with something soon. We’ve got less than five minutes,” Hudro said.
There was a dealer that Dee used for work on her car. Vrel recalled that he was called Vince something. Something to do with ducks. . . . The service manager’s name was Stan. He had wanted to introduce Vrel to golf. Vrel thought, tried to remember. . . . Beak? Drake? Bird? No . . . Walk, waddle? Web! That was what they called their funny feet. Vince Web! Vrel called information but didn’t know enough Spanish to make himself understood. “Can you connect me to an English-speaking operator?” he pleaded. “Er . . . Operador. Habla inglés.”