Puzzled, Harker shoved his way through the crowd to the desk in the foreground and said to the uniformed clerk, "I'm James Harker. I was just paged for a phone-call."
"You can pick it up in there."
Harker stepped through into a waiting-room and picked up an extension phone—audio only, no visual. He said to the operator, "I'm James Harker. There's a phone-call for me."
"One moment, please."
There was the sound of phone-jacks being yanked in and out of sockets. Then Mart Raymond's voice said, "Hello? Jim?"
"Harker here. That you, Mart?"
"Oh, thank God I caught you in time! I phoned your home, and your wife said you'd gone to the airport to make a 9:53 jet! Another few minutes and you'd have been aboard the plane, and—"
Harker had never heard Raymond this excited before. "Whoa, boy! Calm down!"
"I can't. Cancel your trip and get out here right away!"
"How come? I'm on my way down to see Thurman."