“Let go of me.” Dean pushed his shoulders back and walked on his own. They took a turn and headed onto a moving walkway. At the edge of the terminal was a bus, just taking on passengers.
“Where are we going?” asked Dean.
“No questions.”
Dean hadn’t heard from the Art Room since his abduction. He reached up and adjusted his glasses, pressing the right side rim twice, which was supposed to send an alert back to the runner — basically asking for instructions. But nothing happened. Dean tried again.
“My glasses,” said Dean out loud.
“What about your glasses?” said one of the thugs.
“They seem crooked or something.”
“Get on the bus,” said the man.
Dean climbed up, shuffling toward the back. He tried to think about the character he was supposed to be. How would a lifelong lab assistant act?
Geeky. Scared, or at least apprehensive.
Geeky was tough, but he could do apprehensive. He got on the bus, jerking his head back and forth, wondering how close Lia was.
While Lia made her way to the airport by taxi, Rockman worked on figuring out where Dean was heading. He located the booking by guessing that it had been made in a block of three seats; he tapped into the reservation systems at the airport and got an answer so quickly Lia suggested it was a ruse: a Lufthansa flight to Hamburg boarding in ten minutes.
“If it’s a blind, at least I have a credit card and names,” said Rockman. She could hear him pounding the keys, entering different databases at will — some with permission, some decidedly not. The men came up as Irish nationals with no known files at Interpol or anywhere else, but the credit card they used was from an active account in Austria, and Rockman began plumbing for information about it.
“They’re going to Alitalia,” said Telach.
Lia, stuck in traffic a good distance from the airport, fumed.
“Wait — here they go over to Lufthansa,” said Rockman. “You owe me five bucks, Marie.”
“Just tell me where to go and shut up,” Lia snapped.
The taxi driver turned around.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” she told him. “I’m Joan of Arc. I hear voices. Now get me to the airport before you start hearing them, too.”
Lia arrived at the terminal ten minutes after the plane cleared the runway. She booked a seat on the next flight to Hamburg, which didn’t leave for another two hours.
She started to walk away, then came up with another idea. Lia reached into her pocketbook and pulled out her satellite phone, pretending to use it so she wouldn’t be grabbed as a bag lady.
“I can take a flight into Austria,” she told Rockman. “It boards in ten minutes.”
“Austria?”
“That’s where they’re going.”
“How do you know that?”
“The credit card.”
“I doubt it,” said Rockman.
“They probably chose Austria because of the banking laws,” explained Telach. “The records are held in strict confidence. The red tape’s incredible.”
“If I’m wrong, I can catch another plane from Vienna. It’ll be faster than waiting around here.”
“Not necessarily,” said Rockman. “By the time you change planes and—”
“I got to go,” she said, spotting a bobby at the other end of the waiting area.
The policeman walked off in the other direction without noticing her, but Lia realized there was no way in the world she could wait here for two hours. Taking a chance on Austria seemed to be a better idea than getting detained in London. So she went to the counter and bought a ticket, handing over a credit card. She was relieved to get it back — she had half-expected Rockman to kill the account on her so she couldn’t take off.
15
Lia’s run-in with MI-5 had several consequences. Not the least of these, as far as Rubens was concerned, was the need to personally brief the National Security Advisor first thing in the morning. Since it was already past 4.00 A.M., Rubens had to wait until George Hadash was awake.
Rubens gave him until 4:55, knowing from experience that Hadash’s alarm was just about to ring.
“I need to go over the biology problem,” said Rubens. Both men preferred euphemisms even though they were on a secure phone.
“William.” His name in Hadash’s mouth sounded halfway between a sigh and a lament. “You woke me up.”
“Yes.”
“This is the Kegan project?”
“Some very important tangential issues. I can tell you now or—”
“Meet me for breakfast at the White House,” said Hadash. “Six-thirty.”
Hadash’s office was located two doors down from the Oval Office, with only the room used by the President’s appointments secretary intervening. Not even this physical proximity caught the actual closeness of the President and Hadash, who as National Security Advisor ran the National Security Council (NSC) and shaped much of the administration’s foreign and military policy. The two men had worked together in various capacities for more than twenty years. Hadash’s background was split between government and academia, while the President’s had been exclusively political. Their personalities, however, couldn’t be more different. Rubens saw Hadash as something of a nervous Nellie, while the President — a naval officer in his salad days — was the sort of man who would stand calmly on the bow of a destroyer as it dodged through a minefield at flank speed.
Hadash was on the phone when Rubens came in. A tray of coffee sat atop the papers on the National Security Advisor’s desk; Hadash gestured for Rubens to sit, then poured him a cup of coffee as he continued the conversation.
To Rubens’ surprise and consternation — much more the latter — the conversation appeared to be about the Internet biometrics proposal. Even worse, Hadash seemed to think it was a good idea.
“Well, thank you, Senator, I appreciate hearing from you,” said Hadash finally. “Yes, we’ll speak later on in the week:”
Hadash hung up the phone, then rose and refilled Rubens’ cup.
“So what went wrong?” asked Hadash. The blunt greeting was completely in keeping with his usual style; he would play the distracted host one second and the impatient taskmaster the next.
“Nothing,” said Rubens. “But the situation appears considerably more complicated than we first believed.”
The opening statement was necessary to lay the background for the real purpose of his appearance — damage control for Lia’s run-in with MI-5. The overall context must be firmly established before the diplomatic incident was trotted onto the stage and shown to be the ridiculous diversion it was.
“How complicated?” asked Hadash. He sat down in his seat, his brow beginning to knit.
“Well, they’ve kidnapped our operative for one thing,” said Rubens. “Mr. Dean.”
“Kidnapped?”
“Dean is fine. I was told on the way over that he’s on a flight to Vienna from Hamburg. We’ve lost direct contact with him, but we have one of our best people on his tail. After some difficulties.”
That was meant as a cue for Hadash’s sympathies, but the National Security Advisor didn’t take the bait.
