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“Yeah,” agreed Trout.
Imura came hurrying over, still holding the phone in the way people do when the line is still open. “Mr. Trout, do you still have the satellite phone Weinman gave you?”
Trout nodded and produced it.
“Is it charged?”
“Half-charged, but yeah.”
“He has it,” Imura said into the phone, listened, and added, “Good. We’ll try again in five minutes.”
He disconnected the call and considered Trout. “Listen, I guess it’ll come as no surprise to you that they’ve been jamming all communications from Stebbins County.”
“You don’t say,” murmured Trout drily.
“I just asked my boss to have all jamming stopped. Satellite interference, cell lines, the works.”
“Good,” said Dez, “and then maybe we can go around and close all the barn doors ’cause I’m pretty sure the horses have all run off.”
Imura gave her a few millimeters of a tight smile. “If there’s even the slightest chance that Weinman left the vicinity of the Bordentown Starbucks, then maybe we can reestablish contact.”
“His name’s Goat,” said Trout, “and he didn’t have a car. He walked across a field to get to the Starbucks. Or maybe hitchhiked.”
“Then there’s at least a small chance he hitchhiked again. If he’s as tech-savvy as you said, then maybe he realized that service was being jammed and he moved on to someplace outside of the interference zone.”
“Which he wouldn’t have had to do if you ass-clowns didn’t jam him in the first place,” snapped Dez. “If he and Billy’d been able to stay in touch you’d already have Volker’s notes.”
Imura turned to her. “Really, Officer Fox, you want to Monday-morning quarterback this now? Is that the best use of our time?”
“I’m just saying.”
“Fine, we fucked up. It’s hereby noted.”
Dez looked mildly embarrassed; an attitude that Trout found amusing. As he enjoyed having his scrotum remain attached, he declined to say so.
Imura looked at his watch. “The jamming should be down in a couple of minutes. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.”
Trout glanced from him to the other members of his team. “Who exactly are you guys? You said private contractors? That’s the PC phrase for mercenaries, isn’t it?”
“In a manner of speaking. We’re former U.S. military who do special jobs.”
“Like what?”
“Like classified stuff that I’m not going to talk about to a reporter.”
Dez sniffed. “I met some of your kind in ’Stan.”
Imura smiled. “The contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq were mostly Blackwater, who are, even by the somewhat loose standards of the mercenary community, total dickheads. Not as bad as Blue Diamond, but swimming at the edges of the same cesspool. Personally, I wouldn’t piss on any of them if they were on fire.”
“Don’t sugarcoat it, Captain,” said Trout.
“There are all kinds of contractors just like there are all kinds of reporters and all kinds of cops.”
“And what kind are you?” asked Dez sharply.
“The kind I can live with,” he said. He cocked his head to one side. “You know, Mr. Trout, I was given a pretty free hand for how I wanted to handle this. We could have done a hard infil of th
e school and taken you.”
