And if it is, he paused. Then this situation is significantly more complicated than a weather emergency. Make the call, Rebecca said. Gerald took out his personal cell phone. He looked at the signal strength.
One bar, he said. Solar installation brought the communications repeater back up partially. Rebecca said the southeast corner of this building has the strongest signal. Gerald moved to the southeast corner. He dialed.
He turned away from the room and spoke quietly and nobody in the room could hear what he said. They could hear that he said it with the particular controlled urgency of a man who has been in enough serious situations to know how to communicate importance without communicating panic. The call lasted 3 minutes and 40 seconds. When Gerald turned back around, his face had completed the journey from concern to something that Rebecca recognized as the expression of a man who has just had a hypothesis confirmed that he was hoping would be wrong. Her name is not Catherine Park.
Gerald said she is a federal witness currently under an informal protection arrangement. She was placed in this event 6 weeks ago by a protective services team as part of a low-profile relocation protocol, not formal witness protection, an informal arrangement that relied on anonymity rather than active security. The room was completely silent. The people watching her, Gerald continued, are almost certainly assets deployed by the party. She is scheduled to testify against a federal procurement fraud case.
Trial begins in 11 days. They manufactured this emergency, Rachel said. Not entirely, Gerald said, but they amplified it. The storm was real. The isolation they accelerated, the communications they compromised, the flares they removed.
She looked at Rebecca. They needed her isolated, unable to signal outside their controlled communications environment long enough to extract her, Rebecca said. Or eliminate the testimony, Gerald said quietly. One of the two, Derek said. There are four of them on site.
At least four, Rebecca said. And we have no external response for another. Derek looked at the clock. 74 minute. 74 minutes.
Rebecca confirmed. What do we do? Rebecca looked at the encrypted radio. She picked it up. She turned it over in her hands.
She set it back down. He looked at the map at the positions of the four flagged individuals Frank had identified. At the location where Catherine Park was sitting in the main tent, at the operations room they were standing in, at the exits, the access points, the structural layout of the facility. She was quiet for 20 seconds. Then we do not move her.
She said moving her confirms that we know. If we confirm that we know, they accelerate their timeline and we lose the controlled variable. The controlled variable being Derek said the fact that they don't know we found the radio. Rebecca said they queried it once. It didn't respond.
They're operating under the assumption that it's still in the cache undiscovered. That means they believe their communications architecture is intact and we are managing a weather emergency exactly as it appears. So we let them think that. Rachel said, "We let them think that. " Rebecca confirmed for 64 minutes and then external response arrives. Derek said external response arrives with significantly more context than a standard emergency call.
Rebecca said he looked at Gerald. Can you reach your contact again? with one bar. Yes. Tell them what we have. Tell them the nature of the situation.
Tell them we need the response team to include personnel capable of handling a federal witness protection situation. She paused. And tell them to arrive without lights and sirens. Gerald was already moving to the southeast corner. 5:58 in the afternoon.
The 64 minutes that followed were the most disciplined thing Derek Vance had ever witnessed. Rebecca re-entered the main tent. She did not avoid Reyes. She did not steer around the sightelines of the other three flagged individuals. He moved through the tent with the same systematic unhurried attention as before, refilling coffee, checking in with Doc Riley's medical team, making himself visible as exactly what he was supposed to be, the site coordinator managing a weather emergency.
She stopped near Catherine Park's table. She introduced herself as the logistics coordinator. She asked her group how they were holding up. She told them external response was roughly an hour out. She made a small joke about the generator situation that was specific enough to be credible and bland enough to be forgettable.
Catherine Park looked at him for a fraction of a second, less than a second, the kind of interval that only exists if you know to look for it. Her eyes asked her a question. Rebecca answered it without words. A small nod. Almost nothing.
The kind of nod that looks like a man acknowledging that the conversation is wrapping up. Her shoulders dropped approximately 3 mm. She understood. She returned to her conversation. Rebecca moved on.
Derek watched all of it from the far end of the tent and felt for the first time in his adult life that he was watching an expert operate in their actual domain. Not a gym, not a competition, not a curated professional environment with agreed upon rules and safety margins and an audience. A real situation with real stakes and a man navigating it with the total commitment of someone for whom the cost of failure was not a loss on a record, but something he could not afford to carry. 612 in the afternoon. 47 minutes remaining.
The second radio query came in at 6:14. The encrypted device pulse twice a different pattern from the first query, not a status check, a coordination signal, the kind used when a team is establishing a shared timing reference. Rebecca looked at it. She looked at the clock. He looked at Gerald, who had returned from his second call.