He waited. She was ready when Rebecca needed her. 5:31 in the afternoon. Rebecca moved through the main tent. The way water moves through a room, finding every corner without appearing to rush, touching every surface without appearing to search.
193 people tired and wet and running on the particular adrenaline residue of people who have been through something real and are still processing whether it's over. She had been in the tent for minutes when she found the first thread. It was not dramatic. It was a man standing slightly too still near the east wall. One of the four indivi Frank had flagged listed on the contractor manifest as an event logistics coordinator named Daniel Reyes.
She was holding a cup of coffee she hadn't touched. Her eyes were moving through the crowd in a specific pattern that Rebecca recognized, not as casual crowd watching, but as active scanning someone looking for a specific face in a specific location. Rebecca did not look at her directly. She moved to the beverage station 12 ft away and poured herself a cup of coffee. She didn't intend to drink and used the next 90 seconds to establish what Daniel Reyes was scanning for.
The pattern resolved in 60 seconds. Reyes was watching a woman seated at the far end of the tent. 50s, short gray hair, wearing a first responder jacket from a Phoenix, Arizona organization. She was talking to two other participants, laughing at something completely at ease. Her body language said exhausted but fine.
Her registration listed her as Catherine Park emergency management coordinator attending as part of a corporate team. Rebecca looked at Catherine Park for 30 seconds. She was good. Her ease was genuine looking. Her conversation was natural.
She made eye contact with the people she was talking to in exactly the proportions that normal people use, not the proportions that trained people use when they're performing normality. But she was also positioned with her back to the main structural support of the tent, giving her a sighteline to both tent exits simultaneously, and her right hand resting on the table beside her coffee cup was positioned in the specific way that left-handed people rest their dominant hand when they want it available quickly. Catherine Park was not an emergency management coordinator from Phoenix. Rebecca took a sip of coffee. She didn't taste.
She walked back out of the tent. 5:44 in the afternoon. Derek was waiting for him at the edge of the operations room. "You found something," Derek said. "Two people," Rebecca said.
She kept moving toward the operations room door. "One is watching the other. The one being watched doesn't know it yet. " "Derek followed him inside. Rachel was at her station. Gerald was in the corner chair.
Frank was by the door. The encrypted radio sat on the table exactly where Rebecca had left it. Rebecca went to the participant list. She found Catherine Park's registration. She read the organizational affiliation, the contact information, the emergency contact listed.
The emergency contact was a phone number with a Washington DC area code. He looked at Gerald. Phoenix emergency management coordinator, he said. 50s gray hair first responder jacket left-handed back-to-wall positioning dual exit sight line. Gerald looked at him.
He said nothing. Gerald. Rebecca said. Gerald stood up from his chair. He walked to the participant list.
He read Catherine Park's registration. He was quiet for a long time. Then he said, "I need to make a phone call. " To who? Someone who can tell me if what I'm thinking is accurate. Gerald said.
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.