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CHAPTER 43

WHEN LUKE WENT into the control room the next morning, he found Mack already at her station. Judging by the dark smudges under her eyes, she’d had as little sleep as him. Her gaze dropped to his hands, or more specifically what he held in them.

“Coffee? You’re a lifesaver.”

“Two sugars, right?”

“Mmm. I should cut down. One day...”

He took his seat beside her. “Anything?”

“Not yet. I still can’t get into this server. Can we try again together?”

“Of course.”

Side-by-side, they tried everything they could think of to get through the encryption, but to no avail. The clock ticked around to eleven, and Mack needed to head off to another meeting with some shadowy government department she wouldn’t even tell him the name of.

“There’s something we’re not seeing,” she said before she left.

Didn’t Luke know it?

He had another go while she was gone, but got no further. They were sure the system held a backup of the email traffic between several army departments and the Syrian government, but their cyber security was proving to be far more sophisticated than that on the army base that Emmy had got into. Luke guessed they’d found out where a significant part of the military budget was being spent.

After almost two hours, he gave up, frustrated. Time to take a step back before he put his fist through the screen.

Lunch seemed a good idea, so he headed for the kitchen, only to bump into Ruth in the hallway.

“Oh, Luke, do you want something to eat?”

He took in her attire—coat, scarf, gloves. Welcome to springtime in England.

“Are you going out?”

“I can stay to make you lunch if you’re hungry.”

“No, no, it’s fine. I’ll do it.”

A moment’s hesitation, and she didn’t quite stop her eyebrows from shooting up. “You?”

“It’s no problem, honestly.”

“Well, if you’re sure.”

In the kitchen, Luke opened the fridge, only to find a bewildering array of ingredients but no actual food. He’d mastered re-heating, but cooking from scratch? Way out of his depth here. Could he call his PA and have her arrange something? Actually, hang on, they were in London. There had to be an easy way to get food delivered. An app or something.

He was scrolling through search results when Mack walked in, and as soon as he saw her sombre expression, all thoughts of eating fled his mind.

“What’s wrong? You look like someone just died. Is it Emmy?”

“None of the Brits know anything. It was another dead end. And when I spoke to Nate on the way back, he and Nick have switched everyone over from searching to mission planning.”

“Which means what?” Luke had no idea, but from the look on Mack’s face, it wasn’t good news.

“They’ve given up hope she got out of there. They’re preparing to send a team in to look for her, or more likely, her body. And it’s worse—Jed’s been analysing satellite feeds, and between those and intelligence on the ground, we think the security at the base has been increased significantly.”

“So that means it’s going to be even harder for the new team?”

“Yes. And Emmy described it as practically a suicide mission when she went in the first place.”

“So who’s going this time?”

Please, please don’t let it be Mack.

“Logan’s going back, Jack and Evan, who I don’t think you’ve met, Dan, and either Nick or Nate. They’re arguing about which right now.” Mack put her head in her hands. “First Black, then Emmy, and now this. I can’t believe it’s actually happening.”

Luke breathed a sigh of relief that Mack was staying put and gave her a hug. She looked as if she needed one.

“From what you’ve said, nobody can stop them going, so let’s do everything we can to make sure they come home safely.”

“You’re right. Of course you’re right. I need to pull myself together and get on with doing my job.”

Lunch forgotten, Luke followed Mack into the control room. She linked up with the States, and the processes she worked her way through left him mystified. Not wanting to disturb her, he kept out of her way and carried on with his earlier search.

But he kept getting distracted. Every so often, Mack gave a little sniffle, and he knew she was trying to hold back tears. He’d never been one for emotional women, but he liked the way Mack wore her heart on her sleeve. Far better than trying to read a woman’s mind all the time.

After she gave a particularly loud sigh, he reached over and tucked a few strands of hair behind her ear. “You okay?”

“No.”

“We’re doing everything we can.”

“But it’s not enough, is it? I’ve already lost two friends in the last year, without more dying.”

“We don’t know Emmy’s dead.”

“Even she isn’t invincible, no matter what Black thought.”

Luke gave Mack’s shoulders one last squeeze and turned back to his laptop, holding back his own sigh. All he could do was carry on trying to crack this code.

Except when he looked at his screen, it had changed. The frustrating, blinking cursor from his previous attempts was gone, replaced with a string of Arabic words. What did it say? He ran the text through his newly improved translation software and found it was the beginning of a file directory.

Luke let out a yell. “Get in there!”

“What? Get in where?” Mack asked, distracted.

“Nowhere, it’s just an expression. I finally got into that email system we’ve been trying to crack for the last couple of days.”

She scooted her chair over and pressed against him, her body heat turning the words on the screen into a blur.

“How? What have you found?”

He forced his mind out of the gutter. “I think it’s to do with timing. I didn’t type anything while I was talking to you, and when I went back to where I left off, it had advanced through the process by itself.”

“You mean if you constantly keep trying to get in, it throws more locks?”

“Something like that.”

Together, they tried the same trick on Mack’s laptop. “Holy guacamole, it worked!” she squealed, then threw her arms around him. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

With Mack pressed against his chest, Luke most certainly agreed. But did the computer trail lead anywhere?

They set the search program they’d written together to work, leaning forward on their elbows as they watched it scroll through files, looking for keywords. Every time it flagged a message, one of them would scan through by eye to see if it looked important.

It was close to midnight when something piqued Luke’s interest. “This is odd. It seems Emmy wasn’t the only person irritating the Syrians that night.”

“In what way?”

“One of their own pilots tried to defect. Stole a plane and tried to make it to Saudi Arabia. The Syrians chased him and shot him down over Jordan. By the looks of this memo, the Jordanians are furious. They say the Syrians should have asked permission before flying into their airspace.”

“Where did the plane originate? Does it say?”

“No. The interceptor took off from just over the border with Jordan. Oh, wait, now the Israelis have joined in. They seem disappointed they didn’t manage to blow up both of the planes.”

In an instant, Mack was on her feet, leaning over Luke’s shoulder. “Find out where that plane came from and where it ended up.”

“Why? Do you think it might be important?”

“Emmy’s a seriously good pilot.”

“The emails are talking about a fighter jet. Do you really reckon she could fly that?”

“If it’s got wings and an engine, she’d have a good chance.”

They couldn’t find the plane’s exact origin, but they did manage to find an approximate location for the crash site. Jed woke up one of his buddies at the CIA and wheedled, cajoled, and threatened until they promised to have a satellite take photos of the area at first light.

After this new development, the rescue mission, which had been due to depart that morning, was put on hold for a few hours until they were able to get a look at the plane’s final resting place. The images started coming in just before lunchtime. Mack stared in dismay at the charred, twisted body of a plane surrounded by scattered pieces of wreckage.

From the state of it, the Syrians hadn’t lied about shooting it down. The damage in the photo was clearly catastrophic. Mack zoomed in, trying to get a good look at what was left of the cockpit, but the plane had rolled as it hit, leaving the top buried in the sand.

“What if Emmy’s in there?” she whispered. “Nobody could have survived that.”

“We still don’t know for sure Emmy was even flying it.”

Mack couldn’t keep her hands steady as she swiped across the screen in front of her. Luke tried to comfort her with words, but they fell on deaf ears.

Nate took control, live from Richmond. He hadn’t gone home since Emmy disappeared, according to Mack, and this morning, his customary scowl had been replaced with a frown.

“We need to send a team to Jordan right away. I want that cockpit checked before any of our people go back into that Syrian base.”

Jed shook his head. “If we have any further delays going into Syria, that could cost Emmy her life. This is eight days now. If you’d seen what they did to Phil, you’d know how little time we’ve got in that respect.”

“We’re not sending a team when Emmy might not even be in the same country. And from the way you described Phil, we’ll only be looking for a body to recover if they caught her.”

Jed slumped in his seat and Dan snapped, “There’s no need to be so blunt, Nate.”

“Someone needs to tell it like it is. If Black was here, you know he’d say the exact same thing.”

“If Black was here, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”

“She’d still have gone. You know that. Black wouldn’t even have tried to talk her out of it.”

“That’s not what I meant. I’m talking about that weird connection they had. He’d have got inside her head and worked out where she was by now.”

“And even if he hadn’t, he’d be sitting in that seat…” Nate motioned to the desk where Jed was leaning back in a chair with his cast propped up on a stool. “Saying ‘let her get on with it, the woman’s indestructible.’”

“Then he’d rub his nose to remind himself,” Dan finished.

In London, Mack sat stiffly, gripping Luke’s hand out of sight under the table. She’d grabbed it when Nate so kindly reminded everyone of Emmy’s possible fate. Luke squeezed it back, trying not to let on how worried he was himself. Until now, the only death he’d suffered through was his father’s, and he’d passed away in the hospital. Mack’s world scared him more than he cared to admit.

“Why would he rub his nose?” Luke asked her.

“Emmy broke it for him once. That fight they had when they first met, remember?”

“Wasn’t Black a big guy?”

“Huge. About six and a half feet tall, muscles on muscles. But Emmy fights like a caged tiger.”

How different was this new Emmy from the Ash he’d known? Luke was glad now that he’d never got into a serious argument with her.

Turning his attention back to the screen, he listened as Nate dispatched a group to Jordan to do the necessary. The second team would fly out to Syria at the same time to prepare on the ground, and if the answer came back negative at the crash site, they planned to hit the base the following day.

He saw in Mack’s eyes that she didn’t think this story was going to have a happy ending. All the money in the world couldn’t buy the fairy tale she craved. As he wrapped his arms around her and hugged her tight, he wondered if what he felt for her, this strange kinship mixed with heat that sizzled in his veins every time they got close, would end any better.