It was Beau. Wade knew his son's voice the way he knew his own heartbeat.
He looked down at the card in his fingers. RANIA I MANSOUR. The woman's face looked back at him out of the photo, framed in dark cloth, calm, expressionless, exactly the face that was looking at him from the driver's seat of the red Honda.
He did not remember standing up. He remembered handing the card through the window, and that his hand was not quite steady, and that she took it without touching his fingers and hung the lanyard around her neck in one smooth motion, the way you'd put on a seatbelt. He remembered reaching for the button that raised the arm.
"Wait," she said.
He froze with his hand over the button.
"The line crew. Your terminal crew on the dock. They're on that channel?" She pointed at the radio in his other hand.
"Yeah. Yes. Yes ma'am."
"I need to talk to them directly. The ship's crew is going to be on the ship's radios and the tugs are on marine VHF, and if the forward lines go before I'm on the bridge, I need to be able to tell your men where to stand without relaying it through three people. Do you have a spare?"
He did. There were two more handhelds in the charging cradle on the shelf behind him, under the clipboard with the visitor log. He pulled one out, checked that it was on the terminal channel, the same channel as his, and handed it through the window. She clipped it to the strap of her bag.
"Thank you," she said. And then she looked at him once more, a short, level look that he would think about for a long time afterward, because there was nothing in it he could hold onto, no contempt, no triumph, no forgiveness either, just a kind of attention, like she was memorizing his face for later. "Open the gate, Mr. Toups."