Page 20

Ian rolled over as his phone buzzed him reluctantly awake.

God, it felt good to be home in his own bed.

The traffic sounds of Washington D.C. outside his window soothed him like nothing else.

They were sounds of America. Of safety. Of beer and pizza and football—played with an oblong leather ball, thank you very much.

“Yeah?” he mumbled sleepily into the receiver. Christ. How long had be been out? Jet lag usually wasn’t bad heading from east to west, but the non-stop flight home from Djibouti to D.C. had kicked his ass.

“Hey, M&M. Rise and shine. The Old Man wants to see you in his office. Now.”

M&M. His SEAL handle and unofficial nickname among his old buddies. And the “Old Man” was the moniker reserved for unit commanders. In his case, that was the admiral in charge of his intelligence unit. He was abruptly wide awake.

“Any idea why the admiral wants to see me?” he asked. There were no secrets in the military. Biggest gossip mill on the planet was a military unit.

“Word has it he’s pretty unhappy you lost your target.”

An ass-reaming awaited him, then. He sighed. “I’ll be in as soon as I can drag myself out of bed and get dressed.”

“Oh, and we’re getting the preliminary data off your flash drive. The brass are shitting cows as we speak.”

Someday, he’d love to see an admiral actually squat down and expel a calf from his or her body. “Good to know the intel was worth it.” He ran a hand over his face. “I’ll be there in an hour.”

“Make it a half-hour. After the Old Man is done with you, everyone, and I mean everyone , wants to talk to you.”

Great. An ass-reaming followed by a tactical, nuclear brain-picking. Debriefings from desk-jockey, intel analysts with no field experience made him flat crazy.

He rolled out of bed and forced himself to race through showering, shaving, and dressing.

He picked a freshly dry-cleaned and pressed pair of khakis and black polo shirt.

He supposed he could dig out an actual uniform and button himself into it, but civvies were an authorized uniform for him, and they’d fucking woke him up on his first day home.

A day he was supposed to have off to rest and recuperate.

He drove downtown, found a parking spot—a miracle on a work day in D.C.—and jogged to the unmarked office building that housed his classified unit. He paused to take a deep breath, reinforcing his poker face, before stepping into the admiral’s, office.

The butt chewing went about like he expected. His boss was rip-snorting mad that Ian had lost the Scientist. The admiral understood that a fellow American intel operative had been inside a burning house, but apparently Ian should’ve let her die and kept eyes on the Scientist.

Intellectually, Ian got it. But something deep in his gut rebelled at the notion of letting Piper die, no matter that it would’ve been in the line of duty. A quiet little alarm bell started to ring in the back of his mind. Since when did he choose a girl over the mission?

He was the job. Always. He never did long-term relationships. At least, not the kind with real emotions.

What the hell had Piper done to him?

He had no time to consider it further. The shouting admiral in front of him effectively distracted him.

His boss finished the mother of all ass chewings with, “At least you brought out actionable intel.” The way the admiral said it made it clear that the evidence Ian had brought out of the burning house was the only thing that had saved his career from being flushed down the toilet.

“Are we clear on what’s expected of you in the future, Commander McCloud?”

“Yes, sir. Crystal clear.”

“All right, then. You’re due in the conference room for debriefing in ten minutes. Get down there and help them find the Scientist that you lost.”

Translation: fix the mess you made…or else .

Message received, loud and clear. Disgusted with himself for screwing up so royally, and furthermore for letting a woman mess him up so completely, Ian stepped into a big conference room decked out with the latest electronic bells and whistles.

It was tucked into an innocuous office amid all the other innocuous offices in the building.

He looked around at the assembled group of people and allowed himself a moment of being impressed.

Top analysts from Naval Intelligence, plus hot thinkers from DIA, CIA, NSA, and a couple of other alphabet agencies were here.

Wow. They’d called in the bug guns on this one.

What had been on that thumb drive, anyway?

Guess Piper hadn’t been nuts, after all, to insist on waiting for the data to load before they bugged out of that burning building.

He might’ve felt bad about lifting the evidence from her room back in Djibouti, except a) she owed him one after nearly destroying his career with her stunt, b) she wasn’t read in on the Scientist, and c) he didn’t have permission to brief her on who the guy was and what he was potentially up to.

For all he knew, she barely had the minimum security clearance to be in Sudan.

She was technically a one-each aid worker only qualified to administer immunizations and vitamin shots.

It took a hell of a lot higher clearance than some glorified grain-passer had to be privy to the terrorist shit he was trying to track and stop.

“Commander McCloud, thank you for joining us.” His boss’s boss, an Army general sporting a bunch of stars on his shoulders, continued pleasantly from the head of the long conference table, “We’d like to discuss the information you brought to us.

” The general gestured at a chair partway down the table.

Everyone looked at him expectantly as he sank into the indicated chair, and he had no idea what they were waiting for him to say. He muttered, “Any chance someone around here can produce a cup of coffee for me?”

In about ten seconds, an assistant to someone at the table set a steaming mug of black, caffeine alertness in front of him.

He sipped it appreciatively. The tiny cups of espresso-on-steroids they drank in North Africa packed a punch but got old after a while. He looked up. Everyeone was still staring at him expectantly.

“What, umm, exactly, was on the thumb drive?” he ventured to ask.

One of the analysts answered, “Scientific data. The research notes of a brilliant mind, detailing the development of an engineered virus.”

A flash in his head of dead girls piled in body bags sent a wave of nausea coursing through him. Jesus. He shouldn’t drink coffee on an empty stomach. He reached for one of the stale donuts on a platter in front of him.

The entire wall at the end of the room lit up with what looked like lines of computer code. They might as well be in Latin for all he understood them. He would take the analysts at their word that those were the Scientist’s research notes.

“Where exactly did you find this stuff?” a youngish man asked from the other end of the table. “How recent is it?”

“Miss Roth and I found it—“ he checked his watch and did the math in his head, “forty-six hours ago in a basement lab in South Sudan. I witnessed a man I believe to be the Scientist and a little girl departing the house in question. They appeared to have packed bags and be leaving on a trip of some kind. And given that the house burned down shortly after his departure, I conclude that they did not intend to return.”

The youngish guy swore. “The Scientist could be anywhere by now. You should have gotten this information back to us faster.”

“So sorry,” Ian retorted sarcastically. “I was busy not burning to death, avoiding being shot by gunmen, and getting across the Sudan border zone alive. Silly me for not stopping the whole evading death thing long enough to fire off the files to you experts.”

The civilian analyst glared and Ian glared back. CIA shithead .

The general broke up the glaring match smoothly. “Tell us anything you can about this lab you found and your sighting of the Scientist.”

“I got a tip that the guy I’d been looking for had headed south out of K-town.” He glanced down the table at the CIA twink and added in a tone as dry as dust, “That’s short for Khartoum.”

The guy rolled his eyes and Ian allowed himself a tight smile before continuing, “My informant gave me a description of where to find the Scientist and his patients.”

“Who was your informant?” one of the military guys asked.

The man held a pen posed over a pad of paper preparatory to taking methodical notes.

Ian had been debriefed by him before. The man would question him into the ground and chase down every last detail Ian could dredge out of his memory.

The guy was as boring as hell, but a great debriefer.

Belatedly, Ian answered, “A local told me where to find the Scientist. Named Mala. Her information always was good.”

The CIA boy analyst interjected impatiently, “What was the condition of the Scientist’s patients? Did you examine any of them in person?”

“They were in a pile of body bags in the basement. I did not examine them, but in my completely amateur estimation, they were fucking dead.”

“Ian,” The Army general intervened. “This thing is highly time sensitive. The information you brought us indicates that the Scientist has completed development of a potentially lethal virus appropriate for a biological attack. We need to figure out if he finished his work and what his next move will be if he did. We thought it would be faster if all the involved agencies debriefed you together. If you could start at the beginning and tell us everything, that would expedite matters.”

“Yes, sir.” He set aside his irritation and walked them all through his observation mission in Sudan. He left out the juicier details of his encounters with Piper, of course.

The group interrupted with frequent questions, and he schooled himself to patience as they wrung him out like a wet washcloth for every bit of intel he could produce.