His phone lit.
Hers didn’t.
She gave it a little shake, said something under her breath.
“The damn things never work when you—”
Zach held up his hand. He was online, clicking from site to site and picking up nothing until… Yes. There. Something was coming in. CNN. The reception on the news station was poor; whatever the anchor was saying was completely lost, but the text crawl at the bottom of the screen was clear.
Powerful storm wreaks havoc along northeast corridor. Massive power outage reported from Montreal through Baltimore. Authorities say they have no estimate yet as to how long it will take to get the situation under control…
OK. It was the weather. And he believed it. Two separate nations were involved. If this had been an attack, they’d be sending out a very different kind of announcement.
Still, there was always that faint element of doubt. You didn’t survive wars in two of the world’s most godforsaken places without hanging onto what his unit had always called survival cynicism.
“Have you found something?”
He looked at the woman. At Jaimie. Wordlessly, he turned his iPhone toward her. She read the crawl, read it again, then looked at him.
“The storm,” she said, on a slow exhalation of breath. “That’s good. I mean, at first, I thought it might have been—”
He held up his hand again, turned away from her, hit a speed dial number on the phone. It rang once and then a voice said, “Figured you’d call.”
“Yes,” Zach said.
“You can relax, dude. Word just came in. It’s the weather. Nothing else.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem.”
Zach nodded, disconnected, and turned toward Jaimie.
“Who’d you call?”
He gave a lazy shrug. “A friend. A, uh, a government meteorologist. I thought he might have more info about how long this is liable to last.”
“And?”
“And, they have no idea. An hour, a couple of hours…”
“You think it’ll take that long? I have a flight back to D.C. at nine o’clock.”
What he thought was that it might take days and that even if it didn’t, the airports would be canceling planes right and left, but there was no logic in telling her that. Instead, he nodded, shut off the phone and tucked it back into his pocket.
She made a little sound of distress.
“We can’t use it,” he said. “We have to conserve the battery.”
“But you just—”
“We’ll turn it on every hour and check for news. How’s that sound?”
She hesitated. He’d heard the wariness in her voice. Yeah, and who could blame her for that? She knew squat about him and here she was, trapped with only him for company.
“Every half hour,” he said, with a quick smile. “OK?”
She nodded. “Fine.”