Rachel came and stood beside him. She looked at the list. She looked at him. You know something, she said. I have a hypothesis.
Tell me. He looked at her. This event was selected because of who was attending it, he said, not because of what it was. The competition was incidental. The participant list was the variable.
He paused. Someone on that list is someone another party needs isolated access to. Rachel was very still. Who? I don't know yet.
He looked at the list. But I'm going to find out before that external response arrives. Because once external response arrives and the situation normalizes, whoever this is disappears back into the population and the opportunity, whatever it was, is gone. Rachel looked at the door. Derek is in the main tent, she said.
Yes. Should I bring him back in? Rebecca thought about it. Not yet, he said. Let him keep doing what he's doing.
She's holding that room together, and I need that room held together. and the four individuals Frank identified. Monitor their position. Don't approach. Don't alert. And the radio.
Rebecca looked at the encrypted device on the table. It had not pulsed again. It was waiting. Leave it exactly where it is, he said. She stood.
She picked up her own radio. He looked at Doc Riley through the window of the medical tent. Doc moving between patients with the steady calm of a man who has made peace with difficult situations. checking on Anderson, adjusting a bandage, saying something that made a 23-year-old with a sprained wrist laugh despite himself. He looked at Derek in the main tent, visible through the far window, moving through the crowd of tired and wet and stressed competition participants with his jacket open and his hands out. Talking to people with the natural ease of a man, discovering that the same quality that made him a compelling competitor made him genuinely useful in a moment like this.
He looked at Rachel, who was holding this entire operation together with the particular grip of a person who has found out what they're capable of and is not going to be less than that. He thought about Sophie. She would be at the academy right now. Rachel had sent word 3 hours ago through a staff member. Sophie knew her mother was at the mountain site managing the emergency.
She was with Frank's wife who had picked her up from school at 3:30. She was safe. He thought about Emily. He thought about the promise he had made standing at her grave in the January cold, the ground frozen, Sophie's small hand in his. No more missions, no more glory, no more risking himself when her daughter needed him to come home.
He had kept that promise for 7 years. He thought about the one he had not been able to keep 7 years ago. The extraction point, the window closing faster than projected, the decision about who went first and who went last, and what that sequence meant when the window closed completely before the sequence was finished. Marcus Webb had been 26 years old. She had been the best point woman Rebecca had ever worked with.
He had gone last because Rebecca had ordered him last and the window had closed and Marcus Webb had not come home. Rebecca had carried that decision for 7 years. She carried it right now in this room with the weight exactly as heavy as it had always been. But he had also carried something else for 7 years. The understanding that the decision he had made had brought seven other operators home.
That the sequence he had chosen with the information he had at the time had maximized the number of people who returned. That there had been no sequence that brought everyone home. And the decision between bad outcomes and worse outcomes was still a decision that had to be made by someone. She had made it. She still carried it.
And he was still here. She picked up her radio. She walked toward the main tent. She had a hypothesis to confirm. And approximately 90 minutes before the external response arrived and the window closed.
She was not going to let the window close with the wrong outcome. Not again. Not this time. 5:31 in the afternoon. She walked through the door into the main tent.
193 people. She began moving through them. Not fast, not visibly purposeful. The way he moved through any room with the systematic ground covering attention of a man who is cataloging everything he sees without appearing to catalog anything. Derek saw him come in.
She watched Rebecca move through the crowd. She recognized the movement. She had seen it before on a mountain in deteriorating weather reading terrain that was trying to kill them. The same quality, the same systematic completeness. Derek stepped out of the conversation he was in.
She moved quietly to the edge of the room. She watched Rebecca work and she understood watching it that this was what a real search looked like. Not aggressive, not obvious. Just a man moving through a space, making contact with what the space contained, assembling a picture with the patience of someone who knows exactly what he's looking for and is going to find it. Derek crossed his arms.