Alongside Night(41)

Grabbing an attaché case stashed under his seat, Chin led the two into a waiting room with the other passengers already inside; it was empty except for a table and some folding chairs. There were no windows, of course. Some of the passengers were expressing, loudly, indignation equal to Elliot’s. One man with Beacon Hill written all over him was wondering “whether this ghastly gassing is usual or not.”

“I’m getting hungry again,” said Lorimer. “What time do you have?”

“Eh?” Elliot checked his watch. “Ten to six,” he replied absentmindedly—then a thought took hold, and he felt as if he should hit himself. “Lor, what time did we leave Aurora?”

“Don’t know,” she answered, tapping her bare wrist. Elliot began calculating time lapses. “We returned to the Cadre complex just before two—I checked—and … how long would you say we made love?”

“I wasn’t watching the clock,” she said drolly.

“Be serious. Forty-five minutes? An hour?”

“If you must measure,” Lorimer said, “then closer to an hour and a half.

“That brings us somewhere close to three thirty. How long was I out, just now?”

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“No more than five minutes after everyone else.”

“Right. Then maximum possible travel time was about fortyfive minutes—assuming my watch wasn’t tampered with, which I can check as soon as we hit the streets.”

“Fine,” said Lorimer. “What does all this have to do with the price of congressmen?”

“It puts Aurora within four hundred miles of New York, assuming we were knocked out to prevent us from feeling the unmistakable accelerations of a jet. Far closer if we were in a hydroplane, a submarine, or the intermodal containers they switch from trucks to trains to freighters.”

“Thank you, ‘Joe.’ Care for a banana?”

Elliot groaned, regretting his alias: Hello, Joe—Whadd’ya Know? “Television,” he muttered.

A few minutes later, Elliot and Lorimer were seated facing Chin, whose attaché case was open on the table in front of him with a computer inside. “You’re returning to Manhattan?”

Chin asked Elliot.

Elliot looked to Lorimer. “It doesn’t matter where I am,”

she said, “as long as I’m not caught.”

“Manhattan,” Elliot agreed.

“Got a safe house?”

“A what?”

“A place to hide out,” Lorimer explained.

“Oh,” said Elliot. “I have a standing invitation with allies but I doubt if it extends to two. I figured we’d take a room somewhere—probably in the Village.”

Chin took out a pad of paper and began to scribble. “Check this place out first. Not fancy, but comfortable. Weekly rates. The owners aren’t formal allies, but they’re countereconomic. They won’t ask nosy questions.”

“Will they take gold or eurofrancs?”

“If you approach it right. You don’t look like goldfingers.”

“I’ll be needing to make some other countereconomic Alongside Night

137

contacts.”

“I was coming to that.” Chin wrote on a second piece of paper. “Here’s a phone number to call the Cadre—good for another week. Call only from a nonvideo pay phone. A recorder will answer. Give your identification code, the pay phone’s number, then hang up. If you don’t get a callback within two minutes, get lost—fast. If the callback comes but the person at the other end doesn’t address you by name, then it’s a trap, and there’ll be a police wagon along as soon as they’ve located your phone.”

“Why the restriction to calling from a pay phone?”

“If police capture our relay station, they can hold on to the connection from the other end whether you hang up or not—

then trace it. Cell and PCS phones are even worse for us. Got all that?”

Elliot repeated it back with one minor error, and was corrected. “What if I have to contact the Cadre after the week is up?”

“Use this number at least once before it is up,” replied Chin.

“Once you’re identified, you’ll be cleared for monthly phone numbers, eMail aliases and public keys, contact points, mail drops, bannering codes—”

“Hold up,” Elliot interrupted. “Bannering codes?”

“You don’t know?” Chin asked.

Elliot shook his head, mystified.

“I thought you already knew because you’re wearing the ring.”

Tumblers clicked. The engine turned over. Queen takes pawn, Mate. “A Christmas present.”