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.
They're synchronizing, Rebecca said. They're moving their timeline up, Gerald said. Something changed. What changed? Gerald was as quiet for a moment.
The external response, he said, "If they have any monitoring capability on the county emergency services frequency, and if they've been operating at this level, they almost certainly do. They know help is coming. They know they have less time than they planned for. " "How much less time? " Based on the coordination signal pattern, Gerald said, "I'd estimate they're planning to move in the next 20 to 30 minutes. " 20 to 30 minutes, Derek said. Everyone in the room recalibrated. The 74-minute cushion had just become 25.
Rebecca looked at the map. She looked at it the way she had looked at terrain on the mountain, reading it, not describing it. Finding what it offered and what it didn't. They need to move her from the main tent to a vehicle, he said. The only vehicle access right now is the East Fire Road.
The primary road is collapsed. The south approach is flooded. East Fire Road is the only way in or out until County Response clears the primary. So, they move her east, Rachel said. They try to move her east, Rebecca said through a crowd of 193 people.
She paused. Four operators, one target, confined space, witnesses everywhere. She looked at the group. They're not going to do this with force. They're going to do this with a pretext.