Chapter 3 - The Phone Call in the Booth
At table four, the old man slowly pushed himself up from the vinyl booth. His joints popped audibly, and he leaned heavily on his scarred wooden cane. He didn't head for the front door immediately. Instead, he limped slowly toward the payphone mounted on the wood-paneled wall near the restrooms—an antique relic that the diner’s owner refused to take down.
He reached into the deep pocket of his soaked tweed overcoat and pulled out an object that looked entirely out of place in the dingy, grease-stained restaurant: a custom-built, military-grade satellite smartphone encased in matte black titanium.
The old man punched in a short, ten-digit sequence with a thumb that was calloused from decades of hard labor and executive boardrooms alike.
The line connected on the very first ring.
"Sir?" a sharp, disciplined male voice answered instantly from the other end. "Are you alright? We lost your locater beacon near the docks twenty minutes ago—"
"I'm fine, Marcus," the old man interrupted, his voice dropping from the raspy, broken drawl he had used with Ethan into a deep, resonant, and terrifyingly commanding baritone. "I was getting hungry. And frankly, the weather in this city is atrocious."
"Sir, where are you? I’m sending the car right now—"
"Hold your horses, Marcus," the old man murmured, his pale blue eyes fixed through the glass partition on Ethan, who was currently scrubbing down the pie display case with a gray rag. "I’m at a small establishment called Harbor Diner on Fourth and Mercer."
There was a brief pause on the line. Then Marcus’s voice returned, laced with sudden tension. "Fourth and Mercer? Sir, that’s the old industrial district. That area is controlled by the waterfront unions, and frankly, it's a slum. Why are you—"
"Because," the old man said, cutting him off smoothly, "I finally found him."
Silence fell over the encrypted satellite line.
"Found... found who, sir?" Marcus asked, his voice tightening. "The asset from the maritime dispute? Or the shipping auditor from Zurich?"
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A faint, bittersweet smile touched the old man’s weathered lips. He watched as Henderson, the greasy manager, barked an order at Ethan, pointing angrily toward the kitchen floor.
"No, Marcus," the old man whispered softly into the receiver. "I found the boy. The son of Thomas Callahan."
