She’s pale. Her hands fidget on her thighs. She swallows, breathing shallowly. Beneath her veneer of calm, she’s nervous.
Adrenaline snakes a jittery path through my veins.
Chan’s hands hover over the keyboard. “Sir?”
“Proceed. Tabby, give him the number.”
Tabby recites it robotically off the top of her head. I know she has a photographic memory, but it still irks me that she can recall so easily a number she claims never to have dialed in almost a decade.
Chan enters it, his fingers expertly flying over the keys. Then we wait.
A hiss, a faint click, and then the lonely electronic sound of a phone ringing somewhere out in the vast emptiness of cyberspace.
Three rings. Four. Five. The tension in the room ratchets higher.
When the line is finally picked up, the voice that barks through the speakers is so unexpectedly loud and jarring, I wince.
“Bun? ziua, cine este?”
It’s a male, his age indeterminate, the language—for the moment—unknown.
Without hesitating, Tabby answers in the same harsh tongue. “Spune-master care iad are peste congelate.”
I exchange sharp glances with O’Doul. His eyes tell me in no uncertain terms to keep my trap shut or get personally acquainted with a five-by-seven-foot cell. I look at Tabby, but she isn’t looking back at me. She’s staring straight ahead, unblinking. Her fidgeting hands have fallen still on her legs.
A pause follows. In the background, I hear street noise: traffic, a car horn, the squawk of a pigeon, people chattering nearby. I listen intently, trying to pick up any clues about who might be on the other end of that line, his location or even general whereabouts, when finally, in heavily accented English, the voice says, “He’ll be pleased.”
What the ever-loving fuck?
“How can the master contact you?” continues the voice.
My eyes bulge. Master?
Tabby looks to O’Doul for direction. He whips a yellow pad off Chan’s desk, dashes off a number, and holds it out. Tabby reads it aloud.
The voice makes a noise of assent. “You will wait.” Then abruptly, the call is cut off.
Bewildered, Chan says, “He hung up.”
“He’ll call back,” Tabby says quietly. “It won’t be long.”
O’Doul is irritated. “Chan, did you get anything?”
Chan quickly navigates around the software interface and then shakes his head. “No. We need more time to dial down to the country and city.”
“What’s the country code at the beginning of the number?”
Chan types into his interface and then shakes his head. “No matches.”
O’Doul curses and then turns to Tabby. “What language were you speaking?”
“Romanian.”
Suspicion is etched into his blunt features. “So we just called Romania?”
“Maybe. Probably not. The man who answered the phone could know several languages. Today he could’ve been instructed to answer in Romanian…maybe last week his instructions were to answer in Italian. I don’t know. We can’t assume anything, except that that phone won’t be anywhere near S?ren’s actual location. From the sounds of it, we called a pay phone on a busy street. He’d have picked a spot with bad cell phone reception, poor infrastructure, or an area where a sizeable part of the population doesn’t own mobile phones. That pay phone probably gets used by dozens or even hundreds of people a day.”
I hate to admit it, but that’s a smart move. If that pay phone were located and put under surveillance, you’d have dozens of suspects to follow…and dozens more the day after that. And on and on. It would be a logistical nightmare.
O’Doul slowly lets out a breath. “So someone has been paid to answer that phone when it rings, and then relay any messages to S?ren.”
Tabby nods. “And there are probably several more someones in between who know nothing of the links in the chain beyond the one past themselves. And before the call even got to that pay phone, it was bounced through different telecommunications satellites in different countries and the encryption changed an infinite number of times before finally reaching its destination. I told you there would be layer after layer of obfuscation. His paranoia is almost as big as his ego.”
“What did you say when he picked up the phone?” My voice is rough.
When Tabby turns her head and our eyes meet, I’m startled by how wide her pupils are dilated. It almost looks as if she’s recently ingested drugs.
“I said to tell the master that hell has frozen over.”
We stare at each other. The moment stretches out. I feel like I’m on the verge of understanding something important, something I’ve been missing that’s the key to this entire mystery, when a distinct electronic ring comes through Chan’s computer speakers.
Because we’re looking right at each other, I see clearly how all the blood promptly drains from Tabby’s face, turning it white as stone.
“It’s him,” she whispers.
She’s terrified.
Operating on pure instinct, I stride over to her, kneel beside her chair, take her hand, and squeeze it.
She squeezes back, hard.