Lincoln:
You can handle things there. My obligation is to bring Shaw home.
Chris:
You are not supposed to be operating in the field. By the standards you set for this company, you are not physically qualified.
Lincoln:
A one-time exception. Shaw is my problem. This is my task.
Chris:
What’s the real goal here? To take down Shaw? Or are you after True?
Lincoln:
I need to find both of them.
Chris:
Why don’t you give her time to work? She’s got her own goal, she can handle herself, and she hasn’t asked you to come rescue her.
Lincoln:
It’s not a rescue. It’s an intervention. She’s never been able to reconcile with what was done to Diego. She wants Shaw to tell her a different story, spin some new meaning out of it. She’s ready to risk her life for that. We already lost Renata. I am not going to stand aside and lose True too.
Chris:
You actually believe she’s going to find him. That’s why you’re in such a hurry. You think he’ll talk to her. Why? Why would he do that? Just because she’s Diego’s mother?
Lincoln:
Yes. Because she’s Diego’s mother. And because he knew her. He respected her. He cared about his men. If he’s going to talk to anybody, it’ll be her.
Chris:
So you’re using her as bait.
Lincoln:
I didn’t set it up. I didn’t send her after him. But the situation exists, so I will exploit it. I need to be there if she finds him. I need to ensure Shaw comes home, because there needs to be an accounting. It’s as simple as that.
Tamara gave them a place to begin their search when she reported the results of her dust and pollen analysis. Lincoln knew True would head to Morocco. When his phone logged a missed call from Dove Barhoum—almost ten hours ago now—he took it as confirmation that she was in Rabat.
He called Dove after that—several times—but Dove never picked up, never called back, never tried to contact him again in all the hours since.
One more thing to worry about.
Now he turns his head slightly so that Nadim Zaman appears within the full range of color perceived by his natural eye, and says, “If you could feed her profile to the network of municipal cameras, we could backtrack, find out where she went after she left the hotel.”
“No.” The liaison officer says this in a tone that allows no possibility of negotiation. “I have helped you locate her hotel room as a gesture of good will but I can go no farther. She is present in this country legally and she is not named in your warrant. I have no cause to investigate her activities.”
“She may have information material to our search for Jon Helm,” Lincoln says.
Nadim turns his hands palm up. “She is a professional soldier, yes? She is on your team. Give her time. If she is passing the night in pleasure, she will be here again in the morning. And if she is hunting this Jon Helm, she will contact you when she has a lead. Until then, I suggest you get some sleep.”
The wafer shape of a surveillance beetle clings to the frame of the hotel room window, its camera eye watching the street below and the sky overhead—although at this late hour the city is quiet and no one’s about.
Miles watches the street too, even though he knows ReqOps’ impromptu surveillance network will issue an alert when True shows up.
If she shows up.
He’s here to witness what he hopes will be the last action in the book he’s writing. He wants the narrative to end with Shaw Walker being taken down—but True is missing and he worries he’ll have to describe one more atrocity before he gets to the end.
“They’re coming back,” Felice announces. “They just stepped off the elevator.”
She’s sitting cross-legged on one of the beds, a tablet balanced on her lap as she idly monitors the surveillance feeds. Khalid has been lying beside her, hands behind his head, but he gets up now and goes to the door.
Lincoln booked the team into adjoining rooms with a door open between them, but the three of them gravitated to one side to wait together.
Khalid opens the door, stepping back as Lincoln comes in with Rohan right behind him.
“That Nadim is a real prick,” Lincoln announces.
Rohan affirms this with a fervent “A-men.”
“Did you find anything?” Miles wants to know.
“Nothing in her room,” Rohan says, looking worried. “Not even a toothbrush. I don’t think she’s planning to come back.”
“We can’t know that,” Lincoln counters, irritated. “All she was carrying when she took off was a daypack with a few toys inside. If she went out for any reason, she would have taken that with her. Doesn’t mean she’s not coming back.”
“You want me to launch the copters?” Khalid asks. “Start looking for her?”
They brought four starburst copters with them. Lincoln nods his approval of this suggestion. “Put up two, unarmed, cameras only. Hold the second pair in reserve.”
“Hey,” Felice says, “looks like our friend Nadim wasn’t satisfied with his first inspection of our truck.”
Miles sits down beside her so he can look over her shoulder at the tablet. A video feed shows Nadim crouching beside the rear bumper of their leased SUV—a rugged off-road model, desert tan in color. His hand disappears underneath the bumper. Then he walks swiftly to his own vehicle. “Tracking device,” Felice says. “Got to be.”
“Prick,” Rohan mutters.
“He’s got a job to do,” Miles says. “And you can’t expect him to be happy about a bunch of foreign assholes showing up in his hometown with a special writ of kickass.”
Felice snorts, but Lincoln is somber when he says, “Let’s just hope our pal Nadim is not on Jon Helm’s payroll.”
“Fuck Jon Helm,” Rohan says with feeling. “I don’t give a shit about Jon Helm. We’re not even getting a bounty on him. What I want to know is, where is True?”
It’s almost 0200. Too late at night for pleasant assumptions and comforting excuses. “She’s with him,” Miles says. “Or she’s on her way to him. But she’s found him. Otherwise she’d be here.”
Lincoln’s lip curls. It’s not what he wants to hear. “Help Khalid get the copters up,” he tells Rohan irritably. “And leave the tracker in place for now. We’ll get rid of it when we need to go stealth.”
Time Enough
There are no sidewalks in this district, so True walks in the streets alongside parked cars tucked up against the buildings. She is cautious as she approaches the address, pausing at the corner to study the block where the riad is located, and to listen.
The neighborhood is quiet.
The street rises uphill, but other than that it’s similar to the streets she’s just passed—hemmed in by parked cars and high white windowless walls. The conjoined residences can be counted by the number of arched double doors, each pair wide enough to drive a small car through, although all of them are closed. There are four sets of doors on each side of the street. Friendly amber lights illuminate the door of the farthest riad on the left. More lights glow on two of the rooftop terraces on the right-hand side of the street. But the residence True seeks is the second on the left, and like most of its neighbors, it’s dark.
She does not want to stay in one place too long so she walks on past the foot of the street to the next block. She lets her MARC run the sky survey and again it detects only city UAVs and private network relays. No unidentified devices. No devices following her.