“Tomorrow,” Reese threw the word down like a challenge. As if some senator was beyond what the CIA’s best hacker could find. Well, maybe tied for best. Heidi was pretty unbelievable in cyberspace, too.
“Yes ma’am.” He began digging even though she was still there, still leaning that fine ass back on his desk. Didn’t matter. He wasn’t interested, beyond some random hormones firing off where the keyboard covered his lap. But crazy Terminatrix just majorly was not Harry’s type.
For one thing she really was a total whack job.
For another, she’d dug up enough shit on his hacker days to shrivel his balls. Any of that came out, he’d be losing his top-secret clearance for sure. Reese had also dug up shit on Heidi, which was the unforgivable sin to him. Then she’d dumped all that info into his lap just to screw them up.
Harry had told Heidi what he knew, just so that it didn’t blow up their relationship—though it almost had anyway.
“Our only choice is to quit and lose the jobs we love, or give T-X Bitch what she wants.”
They’d agreed to both do the latter.
Sorry, buddy. I feel your pain, he mentally told Ramson’s image on the screen as Reese was leaving his office. He didn’t even turn to watch the view.
Frankly, he wanted to bleach where she’d been leaning on his desk.
28
His assistant was waiting for him when Colonel Arturo Campos set down the Huey helicopter at Davis-Monthan Air Base.
Not a good sign.
He waved Miranda’s and the Chinook’s teams toward the debriefing room—not that there was a whole lot to debrief—then walked up to his Number Two.
“Any word on Moynihan yet?” Arturo still couldn’t believe one of his most senior mechanics would sabotage his plane unless someone had really gotten to him.
“Other than the massive heart attack, nothing, sir. Autopsy is still a couple hours out.”
“Then why the meet-and-greet?”
His assistant looked grim, even grimmer than usual, which was saying something.
“Spill it, man.”
“We lost Major Carl Carmichael in the Nangarhar Province this morning—last night—about ten p.m. our time. Word only just got out to us.”
“MC-Squared went down?” Arturo tried to take it in, but he couldn’t make sense of the information.
“Catastrophically. The helo crews couldn’t even find any remains in the few moments they had. The LZ was extremely hot, but they were able to extract the bodies of the 75th Ranger platoon he’d gone in to save.”
“The bodies.” Not ‘the survivors.’ Shit! And they’d lost one of his men. He’d seen MC-Squared in the bar just two weeks ago. They’d been celebrating the promotion Arturo had pinned on the man himself. The next morning his entire squadron had shipped out.
“Plus they lost a Black Hawk and crew in the recovery itself. Five more injured. Twenty-one US and estimated eighty Taliban Afghanis dead. No civilians as it was isolated, but their government is still pitching a fit.”
“Shit.” It was still the best Arturo could muster. US firepower usually gave a kill-ratio a hell of a lot higher than four-to-one. Even the Mogadishu, Somalia, disaster back in ’93 had been at least twenty-to-one. That made yesterday the worst single-day loss in almost a decade.
Now today had a whole lot of suck in it. “Get me his sister’s number…and his ex-wife. It’s good that his parents didn’t live to see this.”
“Yes sir. Anything else I can do for you, Colonel?”
They’d been together a long time and it was nice of him to offer, but Arturo couldn’t think of a thing.
He studied the pavement beneath his feet. A thousand stains. A long-ago spill of hydraulic fluid had etched the surface. A blue patch of chalk dust that had been part of a recent practical joke that no rain had come to wash fully away. And the memories of a hundred thousand bootheels.
MC-Squared had walked over this stretch countless times just like the rest of them.
Looking at the sky, he wondered who he’d lose next.
Turning to follow the others, he almost plowed Miranda to the ground. Grabbing onto her arms, he managed to save them both from falling. Her arms felt so thin and light, yet he could feel the strength of them as well.
“Do you often lose two A-10 Thunderbolt IIs on the same day?” No exclamation of surprise or alarm at how close she’d come to being flattened. No sympathy for his loss.
He made sure she was steady on her feet, then released her and stepped back as she continued.
“I read the report on the training accident in 2017 that occurred in the NTTR, though I wasn’t part of that investigation. Pilot error when two planes collided at 11,400 feet during a training exercise, but I believe that’s the exception, not the rule.”
“We rarely have two full-hull losses in a decade, never mind a day.”
Miranda nodded to herself as if confirming something.
“Wait. My bird and MC-Squared? You think they’re related.”
“The square of the speed of light?”
That’s about how fast his head was spinning. “Major Carl Carmichael. MC-Squared.”
“As a captain would he have been C-cubed or—”
“Three C.”
Miranda tipped her head to one side, one of her eyes briefly peeking out from under the shadow of her hat’s brim. “Three-C is much slower, less than nine hundred million meters per second. C-cubed is approximately two point—” she barely paused, “six-nine times ten to the twenty-fifth meters per second. A factor of—”
“Yes, a very big number.”
“—three times ten to the sixteenth faster.”
“Who are you?”
“Miranda Chase.” She didn’t appear to be joking. Though she was still watching him sidelong from the shadows of her cap’s brim.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“It would be easier for me if you asked what you did mean.”
Arturo opened his mouth, considered, then closed it again. How had they gotten on the subject of the speed of light? Then he remembered and felt even worse for forgetting for even a moment. Carl was dead.
Just to ram it home, his phone pinged—a message from his assistant with the numbers of Carl’s family members. He had to clench his teeth hard to ignore the churn in his gut; he hated making these calls. For the moment, he set those aside.
Ask what he really wanted to know?
Normally he knew everything in a person’s file before they even reached his command—part of how he built teams. It wasn’t practical with a group as big as the 355th Wing, but he did what he could.
All he really knew about Miranda Chase personally, even after spending the whole morning with her and her team, was that she flew a historic fighter jet and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had recommended her.
She gave every appearance of being utterly scatterbrained, except after twenty years of service he knew how to recognize competence at a glance—a skill honed by observing an entire generation of flyboys ever since he’d taken his first A-10 aloft.
What did he really want to know?
“Do you actually think that the two crashes are related?”
If the subject change bothered her, she gave no sign. “It seems unlikely, but it is a curious coincidence. In crash investigations, coincidence is a possibility. However, it’s one that rarely plays out when studied with sufficient care.”
She turned and headed to follow the other teams to the debriefing room. He fell in beside her.
“For example, the two A-10s that collided in Nevada a few years ago. Was it coincidence that a well-trained pilot, intentionally pushed to absorb large amounts of dynamic mission information, should accidentally climb twenty-four hundred feet above his assigned operational altitude and then precisely impact his trainer’s aircraft, which was flying properly within a hundred feet of the center of his assigned thousand-foot operational zone?”
Arturo had known both of the
m as well. Good pilots. But it never should have happened. “Isn’t that why they’re called accidents?”
“By the first definition, yes. ‘An unfortunate incident that happens unexpectedly, and unintentionally.’ However, the second definition, ‘An event that happens by chance or that is without apparent or deliberate cause,’ leaves far more room for doubt.”
It sounded as if she was quoting a dictionary verbatim.
“Was it truly chance?” Miranda continued in that relentless way of hers. “The cause was ‘apparent’—an error by an overtaxed pilot. And the accident report concluded that an unmeasurable element of apparentness was the cause—no method for calculating the overload that was placed upon that pilot as part of the training scenario. Because the pilots both ejected and survived, we know that it probably wasn’t deliberate as we have their debriefing statements, but ‘accident’ is an unclear term under any conditions.”
“What would you prefer?”
“Oh, ‘accident’ is so deeply imbued in the culture memory that I have no hopes to excise its use.”
“What would you, Miranda Chase, prefer?” He held open the glass entry-door for her, which she walked through without acknowledging as if doors everywhere just opened for her.
“ ‘Unexplained crash event’ strikes me as more appropriate. It also has the advantage of removing conjecture and focusing on the known facts.”
And she began giving orders as she swept into the conference room where the crews were just settling into chairs.
Except they weren’t orders; she wasn’t behaving like some military commander. Rather, she was giving specific instructions as if everyone was just a natural extension of herself.
29
Harry began sweeping through Senator Hunter Ramson’s electronic files.
By Washington, DC, standards, the guy was squeaky clean. No known affairs. No public arguments with his wife. Despite being a pillar of the Republican party, even the liberal press seemed to like him—or at least tolerate him.
He lived very comfortably, but not outrageously for a direct descendant of a major Mormon church elder.
Just one wife and they’d been together forever, since he’d joined a law firm and she’d won Miss Utah…at which he’d been a judge.
“Sly dog.”
Harry wasn’t a fan of the guy’s politics, but Ramson was consistent and it matched his highly conservative state—he still had a home up in Park City in addition to DC. Okay, he had a small, but tasteful mansion with an amazing high-mountain view. Better Homes and Gardens had covered it, but not Architectural Digest.
Ramson’s star had been on the rise since the beginning and was showing no signs of abating.
Harry plunged down another layer.
Good buddies with just about every important person there was out there, especially in the armed services suppliers. Be surprising if he wasn’t—he was a top player on the Senate Armed Services Committee after all. Chair of Airland had major say in what happened for all the services.
Scraps and rumors, but no smoking guns. Some investments that the SEC might want to look at pretty closely and an oil lease that was a real anomaly in his portfolio. Published his tax returns every reelection.
“Fucking boy scout.”
“If you’re fucking a Boy Scout without inviting me, we’re gonna have a serious talk.”
“Christ! Where did you come from, Witchy Lady?” Heidi was leaning exactly where T-X Reese had been just… He checked the clock, a couple hours ago.
“Straight out of the ether, Wizard Boy.”
He double-checked that his office door was closed. They really shouldn’t be using their past monikers at all.
But Heidi had known he might use her nickname and had silently shut the door. Awesome. The only word for her.
“The ethernet,” he responded. Heidi’s brain, at least, was born right out of a computer protocol.
“Precisely.”
Which was where he’d first met her.
Deep in the code.
Back then Witchy Lady was a Black Hat hacker with a sense of humor.
They’d met when she’d hacked every electronic reader board in the Shanghai Stock Exchange and uploaded Papa Smurf peeing on Chinese President Xi Jinping’s head.
His speech bubble, in Cantonese, “I’m just smurfing.”
While she was at it, she’d changed the passwords on all the display control computers. Even scrambled the electronic security locks on the service room so that they couldn’t just cut power.
It had taken them a long time to take the images down.
He’d stumbled on her hack and had been the first to unravel her code far enough to figure out who did it.
Not as cool as doing it himself, but he’d been the one who outed Witchy Lady as pulling it off.
In thanks, she’d hit him with a back-looped polymorphic Trojan Horse virus of such magnitude that it had taken him a week to confine and unravel it. When he did, there was a hidden message in the core code that said, “Hi!” with a Papa Smurf smiley face.
He’d slapped her back with an evolved copy of Brain—the world’s first-ever virus from way back in the prehistoric days of DOS 1986—a total retro-hack that he’d upgraded for pummeling on Linux systems.
Wondering if Witchy Lady was for Hermione, he’d planned his core signature to match.
Since he and Harry Potter shared first names, he’d signed it Wizard Boy—with an image of Potter and Smurfette totally getting it on.
They’d teamed up and escalated their harassment of China, Russia, and whoever else came to mind, until the day a CIA recruiter had shown up on their electronic doorstep.
It wasn’t until they’d both decided to take the jobs that he finally met Witchy Lady in person and found out her real-world name. They hadn’t bothered with separate apartments.
“So tell me about this Boy Scout you’re fucking without me.”
“Not gonna happen, Witchy Lady. Got all I need right in front of me. Though don’t go tempting me with grown-up Girl Scouts, especially not bearing those mint cookies. I’ve got a weakness for those mint cookies. Were you ever a Girl Scout? Still got the uniform? Got any mint cookies?”
“No and no way,” she laughed. “But I’ll buy you some of those cookies without the Girl Scout.”
“Bummer. And I had such hopes.” He leaned back and just enjoyed looking at her. She had Hermione’s curly brown hair, but wore it short. Which made her look permanently sixteen—they were always getting carded at bars. Heidi was cute as hell—which was where the similarities to Emma Watson ended. She towered several inches over him and was sleek enough to make Watson look voluptuous.
“So who’s the Boy Scout?”
“Some guy T-X wants me to trash.”
“Some guy?” Heidi did her dubious-Hermione look with that perfect air of superiority.
“US senator.”
“Christ but that woman’s totally out of control.”
“Maybe I should find some dirt on her instead.” Harry pulled his keyboard toward him to see what he could find on T-X.
“No! Don’t!” Heidi shoved it out of his hands so hard that it clattered against his monitor and his empty can of, God help him, Diet Coke. “Someone has a block of alarm code in our system for anything that touches her. Heavy duty shit. Not just military grade, but way the hell up there. I can’t even find a cover to peel back and peek inside without fear of it exploding.”
“What kind of alarm?”
“The kind that crawls up your ass and rips your brain out of your skull the long way round. You go after any back info on Reese and you’ll get a very nasty visit very fast.”
“Serious enough to stop both of us?”
“Unless you have a death wish.”
Harry studied his screen. How many people around could write a block of code that would spook Witchy Lady? Maybe twenty in the world.
Though he couldn’t think of one who’d do that to them if Witchy Lady and Wizar
d Boy were the ones cracking it. Unless…
He felt a chill up his spine.
“Daemon?” he barely dared breathe the moniker aloud.
Heidi did a one-shoulder shrug that said, “Yeah, maybe.”
Daemon—like the spiritual counterparts in The Golden Compass—but more like Nicole Kidman’s pure-evil Mrs. Coulter villain.
Daemon, Demon, whatever, had gone dark just about the same time he and Witchy Lady had retired to the White Hat world of the CIA. At least government-sanctioned White Hat—which mostly still felt like Black Hat—except when Reese came around and it felt like slime mold.
Daemon had been pure slime-mold Black Hat since forever.
What the hell had happened to him? Or her? Whoever it was.
Suddenly surfacing to write protection code for Reese? Beyond creepy.
If—
Then he noticed the countdown timer in the corner of his screen.
Four.
Three.
Two.
30
“Super freaky,” Toucan whispered in his ear as they came out of the briefing room and headed for the simulator room.
“Hey, it’s more than they told me this afternoon.” William “Poet” Blake still hadn’t found out what had happened up there. “I whupped ass on a pair of Frogfeets, and then someone fired on my ass.”
“At least you got to fly,” Toucan sounded testy.
“Not my fault that I’m so much better than you.”
Toucan snorted in mock disbelief and seemed happier about it.
The guys hadn’t taken it well that he’d been the first of their class to fly in the new simulators. So not well that he hadn’t mentioned it more than a couple dozen times throughout the afternoon just to make them suffer.
Having decided that a fellow-Bronxite could do no wrong, Major Ashton had stopped by their group while they were warming up for a training run. He’d told Billy that had been a hell of a piece of flying earlier—right in front of all the others. Even shook his hand.
Ashton’s half smile said that he knew exactly what he was doing, and Billy would have to thank him later for helping make the other guys suffer. It was good to, for once, be on the right side of a little superior-officer hazing.
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