'They'll know you're at the airport, but since the phone isn't in your
name, they don't know who you are, so they'll look for the phone. When
they find that, they'll look for single men traveling alone. You're
under a pseudonym, ticketed as part of a group of three passengers,
including two women, so they won't get that immediately.
With enough computing power, they can strain out all the flights
leaving here today, and check on every passenger.
Our phony IDs will hold up under a cursory scan, but if they can dig
deep enough, they'll figure out they are fake eventually, though that
won't really help them except to tell them we were going to Seattle,
and that we weren't on the plane.
'We could probably get to your house in Washington before they get who
you are. You are dealing with some serious people here, and it's never
been a matter of 'if,' but of 'when.'
' 'My wife--' '--is being watched by my people, and I've just sent more
ops to back them up. She'll be safe. And we aren't going there.'
'Where are we going?'
'To a place where I can control access for the meeting.'
'We're going to drive there?'
'No, we're going to drive to a private airstrip and rent a plane. We
want to be in the air as soon as we can.'
Now that he had been put on alert, Morrison regarded the other people
in the airport hallway with a newfound suspicion. Those young men with
snowboards, that middle-aged gay couple laughing over a laptop, the
tall man in a gray business suit carrying a briefcase. Any of them
could be armed and out to collect him.
'Frankly, I don't think they will scramble the A-team to' grab you;
yet,' Ventura said, as if reading his mind.
'They know about the tests you did in their country, what the effect
was on their villages, and they know you know about it, but they don't
know for certain that you caused it. They'll have to check you out.
Once they believe you, that's when we'll have to be extremely
careful.'
Morrison's mouth suddenly felt very dry indeed. He'd known this was
coming, but it hadn't seemed so ... real before. The pit of his
stomach felt like it did on a roller coaster. Well. There was nothing
for it now. He was committed.
'This isn't quite what I expected,' Morrison said.
'It never is,' Ventura said.
Friday, June Portland, Oregon
The boomerang championships were being held in Washington Park, which
Tyrone thought was funny. They'd driven a couple thousand miles from
Washington, D.C-, to wind up in an Oregon park with the same name. It
wasn't like any park in his neighborhood, though. The place was a
giant sprawl that contained a lot of hills, tall evergreen trees, the
Portland Zoo, plus a forestry center and some other stuff. Up and away
from the zoo parking, they had carved a flat field out of one of the
meadows, big enough for three or four soccer teams to play at the same
time. The field was covered with what Tyrone thought of as winter
