TOM SEELEY ROLLED the hard peppermint across his molars with his tongue. The sharp flavor filled his mouth and slivered down his throat. The oral fixation was supposed to help him quit smoking, but he could still taste the tobacco at the back of his throat, permanently stained from years of consuming a pack of cigarettes daily. With each passing moment he craved the taste more.
He was alone, standing in the hallway outside the director’s office. He could overhear a muffled apology through the thick wooden door as Director Robert Hammon explained to the secretary of defense the events that had unfolded in the last dozen hours. Hours that had been tasked to Seeley. Orders directly from the president. Orders he’d failed to execute.
The voices stopped, and a moment later the door opened.
Hammon didn’t even bother to stick his head out. “Inside, now,” he barked. Seeley was going to need a lot more peppermint.
He entered the office and closed the door. The space was simple, undecorated, with large, dark leather furniture, a single mahogany desk, and zero windows. The walls were concrete, like most of the building and the ones that surrounded it. It had been an easy material to haul over the mountainous terrain when they’d built the black site labeled CX4-B.
The soldiers referred to the place as Xerox because it was a carbon copy of the ground-zero location outside of Washington State. Buried in the Ozark Mountains along the northwest border of Arkansas, Xerox was covered in thick forests that helped keep the site off the map and hidden from hikers.
It was the birthplace of the Grantham Project, a project Seeley had volunteered for ten years earlier. Being off the grid and buried deep inside the mountains was exactly what he’d been looking for to escape his past. A place where there was nothing but work and stress. Nothing familiar to remind him of what he didn’t have.
“What happened out there?” Hammon asked as he paced. “The orders were simple: Retrieve. Alive.”
“She attacked. My men were defending themselves. There was no other course of action,” Seeley said.
“Retrieve Dr. Rivener and the girl alive was the only course of action!”
Seeley remained quiet, standing with arms behind his back, shoulders stiff, eyes trained on the concrete wall behind Hammon.
“And the girl?” Hammon asked, controlling the rage in his voice.
“Gone. We believe west, but the trail ran cold about a hundred yards from her last known location,” Seeley replied.
“Any idea where she’s heading?”
“We’re working around the clock, scouring Olivia’s office and quarters for information. We’ll find something.”
“Likely not. She was smart.”
“But she was rushed. There’ll be a thread to pull, and I’ll find it,” Seeley said.
“How did she know we were coming?”
Hammon already knew the answer. Seeley said nothing.
“We’re running security protocol on everyone on campus,” Hammon said. “We’ll find whoever helped.”
“This escape was thoroughly thought out.”
“It was more than an escape. With the information she took, it was an attack.” Hammon stopped pacing and exhaled loudly. He moved to the chair behind his desk and sat. His dark hair was littered with graying stripes, his dark eyes ringed with exhaustion and too many hours of overtime. The navy-blue suit that draped across his large, tall frame was wrinkled. He’d worn it yesterday. Seeley knew the kind of pressure he was getting from the powers that pulled all the strings in Washington, knew how severe the situation had become.
“What was her endgame here?” Hammon asked. He was talking more to himself than to Seeley, but he was vocalizing all the thoughts that had been running through Seeley’s head over the last forty-eight hours.
He replayed Olivia’s words in his head for the thousandth time. You can’t kill her. She’s the only one who knows where the information’s hidden.
They’d discovered the internal scan of all their confidential documentation and traced the upload of that information to a hard drive that was missing. She’d copied their files, everything that would be needed to expose them if it got out. Further exploration of lab notes showed a final physical scan had been run on the girl right before their escape. Against direct orders, Olivia had erased Lucy’s memories. But she’d done more than that. Her final words indicated as much. They just needed to figure out what, and how to reverse it.
“Mental scans show a full wipe?” Hammon asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Before or after Olivia told her where the drive was hidden?”
“That’s the question of the day, sir. I suggest we find the girl, follow her, see if she leads us to what we need.”
Hammon shook his head. “You knew Olivia. That seems too easy.”
It was true that Seeley had underestimated the attachment between Olivia and Lucy. He’d failed to anticipate the danger it would pose at the end. That mistake could cost them everything.
Hammon swore under his breath. “We needed Olivia alive.”
Olivia had been Seeley’s colleague; some might even say friend. Yet he’d felt nothing staring down at her lifeless body sprawled across the forest floor. He’d grown numb to death long ago. Sloughed off that part of the human condition that reacted to loss. It was the only way to manage each day without losing his will to exist. They’d zipped Olivia’s corpse into a body bag and placed her in the on-site morgue.
Hammon stood and started pacing again. “I don’t have to tell you what will happen if the information regarding the Grantham Project isn’t recovered.”
“No, sir,” Seeley replied. He bit into the hard candy thinning in his mouth and swallowed the fractured pieces, the mixed flavor of peppermint and tobacco swirling across his tongue.
“Olivia wouldn’t make idle threats. There was a plan here, and we need to know what it was. And we need the girl.”
“We’ll find her,” Seeley said.
“We have to control this. That girl might as well be running around with launch codes. I need it buttoned up, Seeley.”
“Understood.”
A hard knock sounded at the door, and a moment later Dave McCoy, a technical analyst who’d joined the Grantham Project only a year earlier, stepped inside.
“We found something,” he said. He walked across the room, a black folder in his hand. He opened it and laid it on Hammon’s desk, revealing several enlarged black-and-white photos. “These were taken outside a commercial gas station along Highway 75 near Sherman, Texas.” McCoy pointed to a blurry figure under a streetlamp that appeared to be across the street. “Facial recognition pings her at a 65 percent match for our missing girl.”
Seeley moved to the desk and pulled one of the top photos off to examine it more closely. He could barely make out the girl’s face since it was mostly a side view, but it could be Lucy.
“When?” Hammon asked.
“Just over an hour ago. Could be nothing,” McCoy replied.
Could be something, Seeley thought.
Hammon looked up at him. “Worth sending a team to check it out.”
Seeley nodded.
“Approach with caution. We have no idea how she’ll respond. Move quickly but carefully.”
Seeley turned and headed for the door.
“Alive, Seeley,” Hammon barked.
Seeley didn’t turn back as he exited the office. He understood what was at stake and would get the job done. There was no other choice.