The higher floors of the Kyle Hotel were unoccupied. A short jog up the fire escape put her well beyond the reach of the bugs in her room. Her cell phone, a late-model Siemens, confirmed that. Thicker and heavier than it should have been, tightly packed with augmented technologies, including the RFID interceptor she’d used in McCutcheon’s office, the handset’s scan function continually sought out anomalous electronic signatures within a ten-metre radius, but had found nothing here. This room was clean.

She flipped open the cell and keyed in her code to access the Echelon network. It took a little longer than usual to acquire the satellite, but less than a minute later she had a secure channel to Vancouver. The overwatch desk put her through to Larrison immediately.

‘Hey, Wales, it’s me, your favourite.’

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’ve been waiting to hear from you. I have a message from Jed Culver to forward to Colonel Murdoch from a Special Agent Dan Colvin in KC.’

‘What’s Colvin say?’

The deputy director’s reply came back squashed and a little delayed by the encryption software.

‘He says he got the phone data you were after. From that hit-and-run you thought was more hit than run. The Mexican farmer and his girlfriend. One of the cells was a burner, completely untraceable. But Colvin got lucky, or the other guy got lazy, with the second phone. It’s a high-end satellite unit. Explains why he was using it in KC, I guess, because of the shitty local network.’

‘Yeah,’ said Caitlin. ‘Colvin told me that if you don’t have access to the federal system, your phone’s basically bricked. So what did he get?’

‘Sat phone was registered to a ghost, which isn’t surprising. But it was being used right at the moment your man Pieraro was run down. And then the call terminated.’

‘Our spotter?’

‘Almost certainly. Satellite logs traced the phone out to the spot where the KC cops found the burnt-out vehicle.’

She paced the empty room, ending up near the window, where she was able to gaze out over the streets of Temple again. A bus pulled up at the Federal Center, unloading what looked like a party of homesteaders on their way to the Mandate. They stretched their legs as they took a break on the lawn in front of the old city building.

‘So no ID on either the spotter or the driver?’

‘No, but they found the driver. Or somebody they’re pretty sure was the driver.’

‘Deader than Elvis, I’ll bet.’

‘And then some. The body was burnt. The hands cut off, and for bonus points somebody ran over the head a couple of times.’

‘Huh. Thorough.’

‘Not so much. Because whoever this spotter is, he’s still using the satellite phone.’

Her laugh was short and humourless. ‘Stupid. Mother. Fucker.’