John Gordon remained silent for long minutes after Rick had finished. Finally he said, "You've certainly stirred up something, Rick, but I don't know how it fits into the over-all pattern. You and Scotty meet me in thirty minutes in my quarters and we'll see."
Rick dropped the scientist off at his office, then went to find Scotty. His pal was just emerging from the big maintenance shed. "Anything new?" Rick greeted him.
"Mac and Pancho took their truck out last night," Scotty reported. "The timing was right. They could have been driving the second vehicle that arrived while we were getting loose in the jail."
Rick looked at him curiously. "Funny. Why would they take a truck out? I mean, what legitimate reason could they have?"
"They made one. Mac told the dispatcher they'd left an important piece of gear at Careless Mesa."
So their hunch about Mac and Pancho had been right! But Rick still couldn't figure out how they were involved.
"How did you find out?" he asked.
"Easy. I checked the board. The dispatcher was sitting right there, so I just kind of wondered aloud what a tracking team would be doing off the base at night. He's a talkative sort, anyway, so he just handed me the dope."
Exactly twenty minutes later Rick and Scotty walked through the door into the barracks in which John Gordon had his quarters. They hadn't been inside before, although they had taken the precaution of locating it in advance. It wasn't like their barracks. Instead, it was divided into a series of individual rooms, occupied by the chief executives of the base.
Gordon was waiting, and with him was Colonel Tom Preston. Preston shook hands with them.