Page 58 of Radar

“My car arrive early. I leave now,” Orest replied, ending the call.

Xander glanced at the clock; it was zero four hundred.

Over the room surveillance, they heard shuffling and banging, followed by a click of the door.

There was nothing else.

“He’s on the move,” Hiro said.

“Hiro, does Xander need to shadow him?” White asked.

“We’ve got access to his phone. We can track him that way,” Hiro said. “Better that Xander stays in Elyssa’s good graces.”

“It would be odd if Xander kicked her out of bed in the middle of the night, then packed and drove away,” White agreed. “Elyssa would mention it to her uncle. I would, anyway.”

“Look,” Hiro said, “it’s been a stressful couple of days, and you're still recovering from getting jumped, Xander. Get some sleep. I’ll listen to his phone and mark anything that comes up. It’s a two-hour drive to Fairbanks with no side roads.”

“Wilco. One other thing, though. Did you figure out why he’s heading to San Francisco?” Xander asked. “I’m worried about the boxes he mentioned. Specifically, I’m thinking about when Russia planted magnesium incendiary devices at logistics hubs in Germany and the UK. While they were found because they accidentally went off before the cargo was loaded, if those devices had lit up over the ocean, with as hot as magnesium fires burn, it would be a conflagration. Is it at all possible that the boxes might be caught up in something like that?”

“Washington sent a backchannel message to the Kremlin to knock it off,” Hiro said. “They said if a flight went down, it was an act of war, and we’d act accordingly. If war was the Zoric family’s aim, why not just blow up a plane so everyone understood their game? Why mess with the system to drive a jet into the ocean? The same number of people are dead. But in the act of exploding a plane, there had to be retribution. In the case where a plane simply disappeared, there was only confusion and grief.”

“They want something big enough to dial geopolitics back to the seventies and eighties, putting the USSR back on the map,” White said. “But that something has to be just under the threshold of war. That’s a fine line. They’ve spent considerable time and resources trying to perfect their balancing act, but they’re also hedging their bets by heading to an escape hatch on Davidson’s Realm, in case their calculations were wrong.”

“What did the back channel communication produce?” Xander asked.

“Poland arrested four people over that,” Hiro said. “We’re pretty sure that Russia handed the names and evidence over to smooth the waves. Russia denies that it was involved in any part of the events.”

“And they’re right,” Xander said. “Russia herself didn’t do it. It was the families with whom they had a wink-wink, nod-nod relationship. The families are doing the things that Russia wants done but also wants to keep at arm’s length. Russia invokes plausible deniability—as unplausible as it actually is—and everyone is grateful that we can pretend that it’s okay because otherwise, an allied leader might have to push a nuke button or two.”

“Dangerous times,” Hiro said.

“Dangerous, indeed.” White sighed. “Xander, rest so that when you put on your thinking cap tomorrow, you don’t fry your electrical system. Sleep, that’s an order.”

“Not in your chain,” Xander said.

“I am,” Hiro said. “Sleep. That’s an order.”

Chapter Twenty

Xander

Sunday

Lumberjack, Alaska

Sleep, for Xander, was impossible.

His body buzzed from head to foot.

Even Radar’s rhythmic snoring, which was usually the soft rumble of white noise that put Xander out, couldn’t distract Xander from his racing thoughts.

Phone in hand, the light dimmed, sound playing in his earpiece, Xander conducted his own Elyssa research on social media. The whole time he searched, his gut clenched.

He didn’t want his esteem for her to be disabused.

But he wasn’t naïve.

After navigating the typical social media landscapes, Xander came up empty-handed. He wasn’t that surprised. Many of his female friends chose avatars and nicknames to connect with friends while maintaining their anonymity.