Bug glanced up from his keyboard at the flow of people in the TOC. Some were hunched over workstations connected through monitored sockets to MindReader’s servers; others spoke on phones or milled like frenzied insects, going about the thousand crucial tasks related to the current crisis.
Despite the constant flow of cool air into his fishbowl, Bug was sweating heavily. Six rogue nukes. Just the thought of those weapons hidden out there terrified him. Violence was such an alien concept to him, despite where and for whom he worked. Most of the time it was an abstraction, a crazy concept no more real than the aliens, monsters, orcs, and zombies he battled in video games. He knew that the problems the DMS faced were real, but they weren’t real to him. He had never heard a shot fired in anger, never saw the enemy anywhere but on a computer screen. It was easy to stay detached if you lived like that.
Bug was a small man. Thin, spare, slightly hunched from a life spent at the keyboard. His work for the DMS was usually pure support. Crack a code, break through an anti-intrusion firewall, steal some guarded information. Fun stuff. Even when providing real-time intel for the field teams there wasn’t much actual pressure on him. After all, MindReader was the fastest computer on the planet. The basement of the hangar had a cold room lined wall to wall with a supercomputer cluster. The primary computer block was made up of three thousand premarket upgrades of the Tianhe-1A system which flew at a speed of 2.507 petaflops. That was more than thirty percent faster than the Cray XT5 Jaguar. Sometimes Bug would sit with his palms flat on the MindReader obelisk and feel the power surging through him. That was real to him.
But today … the real world seemed to have found a way past all of his personal anti-intrusion systems. Fear was like an unbearably shrill sound in his ears.
“Find those other devices.” That’s what Mr. Church had said to him before the Big Man went in for his conference with the president. Not “try” to find them. Find them.
It was on him.
Him.
He closed his eyes and breathed in long and deep through his nose. The air in the fishbowl was ripe with the hot-wire smell of ozone. A beautiful smell.
“Come on, baby,” he said aloud as his fingers hovered above the keyboard. “Come on, my baby. Don’t make me do this alone. Talk to me…”
Almost as if in answer to his plea, a bell softly pinged.
Chapter Nineteen
Park Avenue and McMechen Street
Bolton Hill
Baltimore, Maryland
June 15, 12:53 a.m. EST
The bedside phone began ringing at precisely the wrong moment. Circe O’Tree was na**d, covered in sweat, painted by candlelight, and on the verge of screaming as she moved in a frenzied pace up and down. Her black curls danced above her bouncing br**sts as the rhythm drove her up and up and up toward the crest of cl**ax. Beneath her, drenched and straining and grimacing with the beginnings of his own orgasm, Rudy Sanchez growled out her name over and over again.
The phone kept ringing.
They ignored it. They were only aware of it on some distant level, their immediate need transforming the intrusive sound into a mere component in the symphony of sounds and sensations. The music from the speakers, the sounds from the street outside of Circe’s window, the creak of the bedsprings, the urgent slap of flesh against flesh, and their marathon panting breathing were all parts of something much greater.
“Oh, God!” cried Circe as the orgasm reared above her like a dark wave of velvet beauty, and she screamed incoherently as he came too. Together they spun to the edge of the precipice and plunged over, crying out each other’s names, saying meaningless words, making sounds provoked by sensations that were beyond even the most precise articulation.
The phone rang through to voice mail.
Circe collapsed onto Rudy, showering his face with many small, quick kisses as beads of crystalline sweat dripped from every point of her onto his skin. He gathered her in his arms and kissed the hot hollow of her throat and her cheeks and her eyes and finally her lips.
The phone began ringing again.
They ignored it.
It rang five times and stopped.
Circe could feel Rudy’s heart beating as insistently as hers. She clung to him, her body wrapped around his.
“I love you,” she whispered.
“Te quiero,” he murmured.
Then his cell phone began ringing.
They both glanced at it.
“Let it go,” she said.
“Yes,” he agreed. They did not move as it rang through to voice mail.
There was silence. Circle let herself fall off of him in delicious slow motion, his arms around her to catch her fall and keep her close. Rudy looked at her. Lean and yet ripe, tanned skin a shade lighter than olive, and eyes that held more mysteries than he could count. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever touched; the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Movie-star beauty coupled with a fierce intellect and a personality as complexly faceted as a diamond. He took a strand of her hair and held it to his nose. It smelled of incense and wood smoke and sex. He wanted to tell her all of this, but in more poetic terms, and he fished for words that would convey what he felt without sounding like lines cribbed from old movies.
“I—” Rudy began, and then her house phone started ringing.
And her cell.
And his cell.
All at the same time.
“Damn,” Circe said.
Rudy cursed quietly in Spanish as he stretched an arm over and picked up both cell phones. Circe took hers and answered first.
“Dr. O’Tree.”
“Where are you?” asked Mr. Church.
She closed her eyes and mouthed the word “Dad.”
Rudy looked at the screen display on his. It said TIA. Aunt. Aunt Sallie.
He nodded to her.
“I’m home,” she said.
“How quickly can you get to the Warehouse?”
“Why? I’m off this week. I have to do revisions on the chapter on—”
“That can wait.”
“But it’s important.”
“Not as important as this,” said Mr. Church.
Circe sighed and considered smashing the phone against the wall.
Then Mr. Church said, “Bring Dr. Sanchez with you.”
Before she could ask a single question, he disconnected.
All of the phones went silent.
“What?” asked Rudy, and Circe told him. Then she buried her head against his chest.
“I hate this,” she growled. “I hate that he can just pick up a phone and ruin a perfect moment for me.”
“I expect,” said Rudy, “that he hates it too.”
She looked at him for a moment, reading his eyes. She sighed again and nodded. “Damn it.”
Five minutes later they were in Rudy’s Lexus breaking speed laws all the way to the Warehouse.
Chapter Twenty
Warbah Island
The Persian Gulf, Near the Mouth of the Euphrates River
Kuwait
June 15, 8:57 a.m.
Top Sims sat on the edge of the open door of a stealth helicopter. The helo was a model Top had never seen or heard of before last night—a Nightbird 319, a prototype variation on the OH-6 Loach used by the CIA during Vietnam but updated with twenty-first-century noise reduction technology, better construction materials, and radar-shedding panels that made the craft look like it was coated in dragon scales. The Nightbird had skimmed a few yards above the sand as it crossed the Iranian border, flying well below radar and inside the bank of total darkness provided by the rocky landscape. Almost totally silent beyond two hundred feet, it used special rotor blades that thrummed out a much softer vibration signature than that used by regular helicopters. If the pilot had not sent Top a locator signal, the two cars would had driven right past them in the night.
Echo Team abandoned the cars and crammed themselves and the rescued college students into the chopper, but then they had to endure a terrible two minutes of waiting and praying as a phalanx of Iranian Shahed 285 attack helicopters came sweeping across the star field above. Top was very familiar with those birds. Each Shahed was rigged with autocanons, machine guns, guided missiles, antiarmor missiles, air-to-air and air-to-sea missiles. Seriously badass, and Iranian helo pilots were no fools.
However, the helicopters swept past and then split into two groups, heading north and south along the border, their surveillance systems looking right through the bird on the ground.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” breathed Bunny. The three former hostages were panting like dogs. Khalid was murmuring prayers in Egyptian.
Top felt every one of his very long, very hard years settle over him as he exhaled a deep breath and closed his eyes.
“We’re clear,” said the pilot over the intercom. The rotors spun up to a higher whine—though still eerily quiet—and the Nightbird lifted off. “Next stop Kuwait. First round’s on me.”
That was ten hours ago.
Now the three freed American college students were with their families. Laughing and weeping, hugging each other, kissing their families and each other. A happy ending and for once no one had died. Despite his weariness, it made Top feel like there was some clean air to breathe in the world.
Bunny sat nearby on an overturned milk crate, sipping Coke from a can. Khalid was throwing grapes into the air and catching them in his mouth. Lydia, who had found her own way out of Iran, had her boots off and her feet in a bucket of cool water.
The three of them looked like they were at a picnic, but Top wasn’t fooled. He knew every trick in the book about the “fake it till you make it” approach to regaining personal calm. All of them were feeling it. Anyone who ran this kind of game or played in this league felt it; but all of the nerves, the fears, the existential doubts were wrapped tight in affectation and shoved out of sight of the rest of the world.
To let it show would be to admit openly that they were human, and they couldn’t do that. Not on the job. Not in front of people. Not when there was another mission ahead, and another after that.
Top ached for the cigarettes he’d given up fifteen years ago. Or maybe a nice cigar. That would give his hands something to do, and concentrating on the smoke rolling down into the lungs and then swirling out again was something orderly and controllable. Even if the cigarettes were killing you, the process of lighting, inhaling, holding, exhaling, watching the smoke, shaping it with lips and tongue as it flowed out, and tapping the ash—all of that was deliberate process. Process was part and parcel with calm. But he didn’t have a smoke and promised his ex-wife that he would never start again. So, instead he chewed a piece of gum very slowly and precisely, and he grinned at the hikers and their families.