A single pulse of indicator light, the kind that signals an incoming query on a frequency. Everyone in the room went still. Rebecca looked at it. He looked at Gerald. Gerald looked at the radio and said nothing.
Rebecca picked it up. She looked at the frequency. She looked at the activation code displayed in the indicator window. She processed what those two things together meant in terms of the operational context she understood from her years in naval special warfare. Then he set the radio back on the table without responding.
"Rebecca," Gerald said carefully. "Someone just queried this device," Rebecca said, checking if it's been activated. "Do you know who? " "No, but I know what frequency they're using. " He paused. "It's a coordination channel, not a command channel, which means there's more than one person, and they're lateral to each other. You're not going to respond. " "Not yet. " He looked at the device.
If they think the device is unactivated still in the cache, they'll assume their position is unchanged, they'll continue whatever they're doing. And if they figure out we found it, then the situation changes, Rebecca said, and we deal with the new situation. He looked at Frank. I need a quiet inventory of every face at this event that you don't personally recognize from prior Iron Ridge contact, he said. Participants, contractors, visitors, anyone you can't place.
Frank nodded. He went out the door. 4:41 in the afternoon, Derek came back. All 21 people, every single one. He came through the main tent door with Morris over two volunteers shoulders and Crawford studying a woman who had twisted her ankle in the final/4 mile and Ricky Salazar, who had somehow ended up in the South team without Derek noticing until they were already moving, carrying a pack that was not his on top of his own gear.
Derek walked into the operations room and put both hands on the map table and breathed for 20 seconds. Then he straightened. She looked at Rebecca. 21, he said. All 21.
Rebecca looked at her. Good, he said. Derek nodded. She looked at the map, then at the encrypted radio on the table, then back at Rebecca. What's that?
She said. A complication we're managing. Derek looked at it for a moment. Is this situation over? She said, "The weather situation is beginning to moderate, Rebecca said.
External response is approximately 90 minutes out. We have everyone accounted for sheltered medically stable. " A pause. The weather situation is manageable, but Derek said. Rebecca looked at her. But someone wanted this event to become what it became, he said. and I don't yet know if they got what they were looking for.
Derek absorbed that. What do you need from me? He said, "Right now, stay visible in the main tent. Talk to people. Keep energy calm.
People are tired and stressed. And the next 90 minutes of waiting are going to be harder emotionally than the last 2 hours were physically. You want me to be a presence. I want you to do what you're actually good at. " Rebecca said, "You connect with people. use it. Derek looked at him for a moment, then he nodded.
He went out. 5:03 in the afternoon. Frank came back with his inventory. He had identified four individuals he could not place in the event registration. Three listed as event contractors by the external management firm.
One listed as a sponsor representative. All four had arrived on site through the normal check-in process. All four had standard event credentials. All four had arrived on the same vehicle. Rebecca looked at the four names Frank had written down.
She looked at the encrypted radio. She looked at the topographic map, specifically at the area around the collapsed access road. The access road had not simply failed under storm runoff. She had known that since she saw the drainage pattern. The failure was structural.
The kind of structural failure that happens when the subsurface support material has been compromised in a specific way. Someone had prepared that road failure. Not during the storm before the event. During one of the unauthorized access visits, Rebecca sat down. I was not tired.
She was the opposite of tired in the way that people who operate at her level sometimes reach a state that looks like calm from the outside, but is actually the highest register of full engagement. every system running, every available input being processed, nothing being wasted. She was thinking about a mission seven years ago. I was thinking about it not because the memory was intruding, but because there was a pattern here that rhymed with a pattern he had encountered before, a manufactured crisis, an isolated location, a population that couldn't leave, a communications infrastructure compromised at multiple points. She had seen this architecture before. 7 years ago, the target of that architecture had been two individuals who needed to be removed from a specific location under cover of an emergency that created the justification for extraction.
She looked at the participant list. 193 people, most of them were exactly what they appeared to be. Veterans, first responders, emergency management professionals, people who had come here for a competition and found themselves in a real emergency and had managed it with the particular competence of people who trained for exactly this. But someone on that list was not what they appeared to be. Rebecca did not know who yet.
She thought about the encrypted radio query, the lateral coordination frequency, two or more people working horizontally. She thought about the flares being removed. Not to create darkness, there was plenty of other lighting, but to prevent signaling. To prevent someone at this event from signaling externally in a way that was not controlled by the communication infrastructure. The people who had prepared this situation had compromised.
Someone at this event was trying to prevent a specific person from being able to call for help through channels that this person's handlers didn't monitor. She looked at the list again. She looked at it differently this time. Not as a population to protect, as a document containing one name that someone had gone to significant lengths to place in an isolated location under controlled conditions. 5:27 in the afternoon.