Thinking of her doubts about the government and Gauntlet Group’s story caused her to check the time on her phone again, and since the man she’d come to meet was almost twenty minutes late, she started to send him a text via Signal. She’d just opened the app when someone appeared from nowhere and stood over her table, his back to the road, momentarily blotting out the meager but welcome sun.
She looked up with a smile, expecting she knew who this would be, but quickly her smile faded. Before she spoke, her eyes flitted left and right.
She swallowed hard. “It’s you.”
The man she only knew as Six sat down in front of her, facing the bistro. He’d arrived on foot with a small blue canvas backpack that looked like a student’s bookbag, and he positioned it under the table between his knees. He wore a black canvas coat, jeans, and brown boots. A dark gray watch cap covered his hair; his beard was dark, with just a few flecks of gray.
He also wore a single AirPod in his right ear.
His face showed deep intensity; his brown eyes remained locked on hers when he said, “I need you to stay very calm. Keep your voice low and make absolutely no dramatic reaction.”
A sudden fear coursed through her, but she did her best to hide it. She said, “Well, plopping down at my table with that look on your face and saying all that isn’t really the best way to get me to avoid a dramatic reaction.”
“A, it’s just my face, Cathy. Nothing I can do about that. And B, if I were a people person, I probably wouldn’t be doing what I do for a living.”
“Fair…okay. What’s going on?”
“Having said all that, youarein danger right now.”
“What?”
She said it with less stealth than the man across from her wanted, clearly, because he shushed her. Then, his voice still low, he said, “Cool as a cucumber, please.”
“What?”She said it more softly. She put her phone down and reachedfor her coffee with a quivering hand, trying to appear nonchalant but failing.
The female server came outside; Six ordered a cappuccino, and as the woman turned to go back inside, Catherine said, “Miss? Could I…could I have a glass of champagne?” She looked at Six now. “Unless…unless we have to…to…to run.”
Six smiled a little. “No. We’re fine for a few minutes.”
The server acknowledged the order with a smile and retreated to the warmer restaurant.
Catherine said, “Please tell me what’s going on.”
“We’ve been scanning the area for the past hour, making sure we know where the adversaries are. We’ve detected some…activity that we find suspicious. At the right time, you and I are going to rise from this table, stroll into the restaurant. From there, we’ll go out the back door and into a waiting car.”
“There’s a car waiting for us now?”
Six made an apologetic face. “At the right time, there will be. To be totally honest, we’re still kind of getting our shit together.”
“Wow,” Catherine said. “That iscomforting.” She made a face of confusion. “How did you know I was here?”
“We picked up some intel.”
Despite herself, her eyes flitted around again. This quiet little Georgetown street showed absolutely no evidence that there was some sort of surveillance mission going on. People walked their dogs, delivery people rolled by on bikes. The outdoor café tables were half-empty, and those patrons who were out here spoke in polite, hushed tones. She said, “I don’t see anyone around here watching—”
“They’re pros,” Six replied. “I really have no notes for them. I just drove the neighborhood in a tow truck, looking for them.”
“Why a tow truck?”
“Tow trucks have LPRSs. License plate recognition systems. We know, in general, what we’re looking for; we have access to cameras in the area, a mini drone overhead, but I wanted to do a better scan. I drove the neighborhood, got the ownership of most every vehicle from the tags. There’s a duo in a car directly behind me, I won’t tell you where, because you’ll justwant to look, and my team is not yet in place to get in their way. There are two more vehicles a block away I spotted, but no one is inside either one. We think the folks we’re worried about are on foot.”
She couldn’t help herself now. “On foot? Meaning…they could be anyone around us?”
“Everyone around us has been checked out by my associate watching the cameras. There’s no one within a block who we’ve pegged as a threat. We think we’ve ID’d one person on a rooftop across the street. Can’t get a view of the face under their hat, not so far anyway, but they are acting suspicious. No gun visible, so that’s good news.”
With a tremor in her voice, she said, “I’d say so. Who…whoarethese people?”
Six did not answer directly. “We came across a different one of these teams the other day, and there were six people in total. Looks like, for some reason, there might be more than that around today.
