The Memorist

Chapter 73

Thursday, May 1^st-9:39 a.m.

“I have some bad news,” Bill Vine said as he rushed into the makeshift office at the concert hall, slamming the door behind him.

Paxton stood up, ready to spring into action.

“The signal we’ve been tracking out of the Czech Republic, to Vienna and then to Durnstein has been taking us on a joyride. Apparently our buyer found the little gift we put on the knapsack and attached it to the underside of a car belonging to a couple from St. Mary’s, Georgia, who had the bad luck to visit the Moravsky Krumlov on Monday. He’s a lawyer and would-be novelist; she’s a Mary Kay executive. We’ve run them through every computer system we have and they are who they say they are with no connections to any known terrorist group. She grew up in St. Mary’s and her family practically owns the town. He’s been on the city council for ten years. Brother, are they brand-spanking clean.”

“So now we know the tracking device was on a holiday and the device we lost in the subway was the damn Semtex,” Paxton said. “And we still don’t have a clue where that disappeared to, do we?”

It was a rhetorical question. They’d been obsessed with locating it since it dropped off the radar two days before and everyone knew they didn’t have any idea where the Semtex was.

“I thought we were using a global positioning system that would prevent this very thing from happening. You guaranteed it.”

“As long as the tracking device wasn’t taken out of range.”

“Well, how did someone get it so fucking high in the sky or deep in the ocean that we didn’t watch him on his way there to do it? Where’s the device, Bill?”

“We don’t care anymore.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“We’re wasting time now, Tom. It doesn’t matter where the hell the device is, we can’t find it. We can’t waste time looking for it. All we have time to worry about now is that no one with that block of Semtex winds up in the vicinity of this building.”

Paxton glowered at his employee. “And what are we doing to make sure that isn’t happening? We’re going to have top brass from twenty-five countries and every branch of our own government including the fucking Vice President-”

“We’re fine,” Bill interrupted. “We’re in good shape. We’ve had men combing through the tunnels under this place for days and have air traffic control on alert. We’ve doubled the teams. If anyone’s above us or below us, we’ll find them.”