"So what do we do?" Sanders said.
"For better or worse, we're committed now. We've taken this line and we have to continue it. Somehow, we have to force them to come to terms," she said. "But we're going to need something else to do that. You got anything else?"
Sanders shook his head. "No, nothing."
"Hell," Fernandez said. "What's going on? I thought DigiCom was worried about this allegation becoming public before they finished the acquisition. I thought they had a publicity problem."
Sanders nodded. "I thought they did, too."
"Then there's something we don't understand. Because Heller and Blackburn both act like they couldn't care less what we do. Now why is that?"
A heavyset man with a mustache walked past them, carrying a sheaf of papers. He looked like a cop.
"Who's he?" Fernandez said.
"Never seen him before."
"They were calling on the phone for somebody. Trying to locate somebody. That's why I ask."
Sanders shrugged. "What do we do now?"
"We eat," Alan said.
"Right. Let's go eat," Fernandez said, "and forget it for a while."
In the same moment, a thought popped into his mind: Forget that phone. It seemed to come from nowhere, like a command:
Forget that phone.
Walking beside him, Fernandez sighed. "We still have things we can develop. It's not over yet. You've still got things, right, Alan?"
"Absolutely," Alan said. "We've hardly begun. We haven't gotten to Johnson's husband yet, or to her previous employer. There's lots of stones left to turn over and see what crawls out."
Forget that phone.
"I better check in with my office," Sanders said, and took out his cellular phone to dial Cindy.
A light rain began to fall. They came to the cars in the parking lot. Fernandez said, "Who's going to drive?"
"I will," Alan said.
They went to his car, a plain Ford sedan. Alan unlocked the doors, and Fernandez started to get in. "And I thought that at lunch today we would be going to have a party," she said.
Going to a party . . .
Sanders looked at Fernandez sitting in the front seat, behind the rain spattered windshield. He held the phone up to his ear and waited while the call went through to Cindy. He was relieved that his phone was working correctly. Ever since Monday night when it went dead, he hadn't trusted it completely. But it seemed to be fine. Nothing wrong with it at all.
The couple was going to a party and .she made a call on a cellular phone. From the car . . .
Forget that phone.
Cindy said, "Mr. Sanders's office."
And when she called, she got an answering machine. She left a message on the answering machine. And then .she hung up.
"Hello? Mr. Sanders's office. Hello?"
"Cindy, it's me."
"Oh, hi, Tom." Still reserved.
"Any messages?" he said.
"Uh, yes, let me look at the book. You had a call from Arthur in KL, he wanted to know if the drives arrived. I checked with Don Cherry's team; they got them. They're working on them now. And you had a call from Eddie in Austin; he sounded worried. And you had another call from John Levin. He called you yesterday, too. And he said it was important."
Levin was the executive with a hard drive supplier. Whatever was on his mind, it could wait.
"Okay. Thanks, Cindy."
"Are you going to be back in the office today? A lot of people are asking."
"I don't know."
`John Conley from Conley-White called. He wanted to meet with you at four."
"I don't know. I'll see. I'll call you later."
"Okay." She hung up.
He heard a dial tone.
And then she had hung up.
The story tugged at the back of his mind. The two people in the car. Going to the party. Who had told him that story? How did it go?
On her way to the party, Adele had made a call from the car and then .she had hung up.
Sanders snapped his fingers. Of course! Adele! The couple in the car had been Mark and Adele Lewyn. And they had had an embarrassing incident. It was starting to come back to him now.
Adele had called somebody and gotten the answering machine. She left a message, and hung up the phone. Then .she and Mark talked in the car about the person Adele had just called. They made jokes and unflattering comments for about fifteen minutes. And later they were very embarrassed . . .
Fernandez said, "Are you just going to stand there in the rain?"
Sanders didn't answer. He took the cellular phone down from his ear. The keypad and screen glowed bright green. Plenty of power. He looked at the phone and waited. After five seconds, it clicked itself off; the screen went blank. That was because the new generation of phones had an autoshutdown feature to conserve battery power. If you didn't use the phone or press the keypad for fifteen seconds, the phone shut itself off. So it wouldn't go dead.
But his phone had gone dead in Meredith's office.
Why?
Forget that phone.
Why had his cellular phone failed to shut itself off? What possible explanation could there be? Mechanical problems: one of the keys stuck, keeping the phone on. It had been damaged when he dropped it, when Meredith first kissed him. The battery was low because he forgot to charge it the night before.
No, he thought. The phone was reliable. There was no mechanical fault. And it was fully charged.
No.
The phone had worked correctly.
They made jokes and unflattering comments for about fifteen minutes.
His mind began to race, with scattered fragments of conversation coming back to him.
"Listen, why didn't you call me last night?"