Surprisingly, after a beat, a man’s voice answered, “Well done, Bette. Showing courage, confidence, that’s good.” A faint French-German accent, overlaid with English boarding-school polish. Bette raised her eyebrow at Brom, who nodded at her, understanding this was a clue for them. He urged Bette to continue to talk. The tech was motioning that the call was bouncing across servers located in different parts of the world. He was continuing to try to pin down the source.

After a few seconds of silence, the man continued, “You must know by now that it will be useless to try to trace this call. For all you know I might be using any number of call forwarding devices… so even if you manage to trace it, I may not even be there in the location you think you’ve traced the call to … nor in the next one … nor in the one after that. And so on and so forth.” He was arrogant, patronizing even.   Another useful piece of information, Bette thought.

While the man paused again, Bette pictured in her mind the image of a tightly coiled snake, who was beginning to rise, poising itself to snap out and bite its prey at any moment.

She kept her silence, mentally timing the silences between them.. If she didn’t respond, and he filled the silence, then she most likely had an upper hand in something. She just had to figure out what it was. If he was content to let the silence drag on, then that spelled danger for Bette.

Mentally, she set the limit of further silence between them at 4-5 seconds – eternity in the opening phase of a blind negotiation that she had no idea what the stakes were, for her and her family.

He was clearly an expert at this, however, and he pushed it to the limit Bette had set for this opening stanza. Just as their silence hit the limit she had set, and she had opened her mouth to speak, the man interjected smoothly, “Do what you must about the tracer. Let’s not waste anymore time talking about it, shall we?” When he wanted to, she imagined he could switch his nasal-inflected voice to a lower pitch, dripping with elegance, and charm. Even if they’d met under other circumstances, she’d have been repulsed by too-suave, unctuous manner he had adopted now.