The Memorist

Chapter 50

Tuesday, April 29^th-1:44 p.m.

The violin’s cry was driving Tom Paxton nuts. Music even in the background was distracting but it was necessary to them to have an office inside the music hall. “Where are we with the Semtex tracking?” he asked Vine. “Damn it, if you haven’t had any luck, make some. We only have two days left. Way too close for comfort, my friend.”

They were seated at a table covered with papers, coffee cups, glasses and a few laptop computers while Alana Green and Tucker Davis conferred over a computer screen at a desk shoved into a corner where there was barely room for it. The one window in the room faced into an alley that offered almost no ambient light and by itself the hanging brass lamp with its mediocre lumens wasn’t enough to brighten the gloom, all of which added to Paxton’s sense of impending disaster.

“We have three of the buyers under heavy surveillance-not anywhere near Vienna by the way. Two of them bought Semtex and the third-”

“I know all that-what I don’t know is what we’re doing about the fourth buy,” Paxton interrupted. “Why didn’t your contacts tell you they’d arranged another sale? What damn good does it do us if we don’t even know how many buys we need to track?”

Vine didn’t even bother responding but continued explaining what he did know. “Yesterday, for about a half hour, we were able to track the fourth buy to a hotel here in the city. And we just found out that it seems to have been coming from a room registered to one of the press.”

“Who’s the reporter?”

“David Yalom.”

“Shit. He’ll do anything to protect a source. I’ve known the guy for years and he’s fearless. Meeting with a known terrorist wouldn’t faze him, especially after what he’s gone through. Can you ask Kerri to call him and ask him to come in and talk to us, and in the meantime also put a tail on him to see who he’s talking to and what he’s doing?”

“Will do.”

“You said you only caught the signal in his room for a short period of time. What happened to it?”

Vine only hesitated for a fraction of a second but Paxton was all over him.

“Are you saying you don’t know?”

“We lost it.”

“How do you lose a tracking device?”

“We followed it from the hotel to the subway and then lost it.”

Paxton got up and walked around the small room, inspecting every computer screen he passed while the melancholy violin solo tested his patience. “We should have been able to read signals at the subway level, shouldn’t we?”

“Yes. That’s what makes no sense. We’re still investigating.”

“And what about this area?” Paxton pointed to one of the screens that showed a darkened area under the concert hall. “Tucker, you said you couldn’t get a reading past a certain point in that shaft. Is that right?”

“Right. We haven’t even been able to ascertain how deep the shaft goes but it’s so narrow-not even two feet wide-that we’re not focusing on it.”

Paxton took a deep breath, trying to ease the tension gripping his chest.

“Well, I’m focusing on everything within five blocks of the concert hall now that we might have missing explosives. Bill, get on the phone and find out if anyone has even the most rudimentary next-level test model GPR that can get us a deeper reading-”

“Nothing out there exists that we don’t have.” Vine cut Paxton off somehow, managing not to allow even the thinnest vestige of aggravation in his voice although he’d had this conversation with his boss several times in the last few hours.

“Then we’re vulnerable. We’re unprepared. And that’s unacceptable.” Paxton put extra emphasis on the first syllable of unacceptable so the un was almost its own word.

“You don’t need to tell me. Regardless, the machines you are asking for don’t exist.”

Kerri walked in with a tray of fresh coffee, bottles of water and a plate of cookies and had to shove papers out of her way to put it down. Just as she did, Paxton responded to Vine by banging his hand on the table and shouting, “Fuck that.”

China and silverware clattered.

“Getting angry isn’t going to get us deeper readings or find that fourth tracking device,” she said as she twisted open a bottle of water and handed it to him. “I think you wanted this about four screams ago.”

There was an imperceptible shift in Paxton’s expression as he took a long drink. Coming up for air he looked over at Alana Green. “Can you show me the tunnels you already have mapped leading into and out of the area?” His tone was back to even, his drawl was smoothed out and everyone in the room relaxed a little. But only a little. This was still what it had been from the beginning: a high-level security situation. Thursday’s concert was a target. There was no other way to look at it. No smarter way to look at it. There may or may not be a terrorist threat but Paxton’s plan was to operate as if there were.

Green hit some keys on her keyboard and pulled up a series of computerized graphics illustrating the underground world she’d been charting since arriving in Vienna. Paxton and Vine were riveted to the screen, as was Kerri, but Tucker Davis was still working on his own laptop. Since he’d announced his wife was pregnant, Paxton had noticed Davis had been preoccupied a couple of times and that made him nervous. He couldn’t afford for a senior member of his team to be lax about any part of this job. “I think we need to get more men down there,” Paxton said.

Tucker’s head was still down.

“Tucker?”

“What?”

“I said I think we need to get more men down and search all that uncharted terrain.”

“Okay, I’ll get more men on it.”

“But? I hear a but in your voice.”

Tucker hesitated; no one liked giving Paxton no for an answer.

“What is it?”

“We’re on top of fucking Roman ruins that no one’s ever excavated. There are entire cities down there that we couldn’t find, even if we had dozens of teams and months to work. Why didn’t we know about this before we bid on this job?”

“None of that matters now,” Paxton snapped. “If you can’t get the job done, tell me and I’ll find someone who can.”

Kerri looked up sharply at the tone and the threat in Tom’s voice. She was the only one who really got him. But there were too many other sparks right now; far more dangerous ones he had to make sure didn’t burst into full-blown fires. “Is there anything we need to worry about before we move on?” He threw out the signature line and then added a coda. “As if we don’t already have enough to worry about.”