VICTOR ONE HEARD a footstep and quickly put his hand on the pistol holstered at his hip. His eyes scanned the woods around the cottage.
This was a good location, he thought, easy to defend. A clearing near the top of a forested hill. There was no way to get here by car or chopper, and no way to scale the cliff to the south. You had to come right up the slope in plain sight from the north or east, and you had to walk it. And there was no way to walk silently either—especially not now when the forest floor was carpeted with dry, crunchy autumn leaves. It was like a natural alarm system. If anyone tried to approach, Victor One would hear him coming a mile off.
Victor One was a bodyguard, twenty-six years old. A rangy six-foot-four muscleman with short-cropped brown hair and kindly, humorous blue eyes in a tanned, weather-beaten face. He was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and a windbreaker—and the pistol in the holster on his belt. He had a modified combat rifle secreted nearby as well—so did his colleagues, Alpha Twelve and Bravo Niner, who were both stationed in the trees farther down the hill.
Their assignment was to protect this cottage—or, rather, to protect the man inside the cottage—at any cost.
The man inside the cottage was code-named Traveler.
Traveler was an odd sort of character. One of those absentminded genius types who seemed to be living on another planet somewhere inside his own head. But over the past few months, Victor One had come to like the guy, to like him a lot. Keeping him safe wasn’t just a job anymore; it was a mission. And any unfriendlies who came through that forest with evil intent were going to find out very quickly that Victor One was not the person they wanted to meet. He was a man who could take on a whole army by himself if he had to. He’d done it in Afghanistan. He had the scars—and the medals—to prove it.
Hand on his weapon, Victor One stepped backward until he was up against the front of the cottage. It was a rustic clapboard structure with a pitched roof and a metal chimney. Peeking in through the living room window, he could see Traveler sitting at his desk: a small, narrow man in his late forties, bald except for a fringe of gray-brown hair. He had a mild, thoughtful face; dreamy eyes. He had his glasses perched on top of his head, and he was gazing with a puzzled expression at a screenful of incomprehensible equations on the computer in front of him.
Victor One smiled to himself. He didn’t know what Traveler was puzzled about, but it probably wasn’t the equations. The professor understood that mathematical gibberish better than anyone else alive.
Victor One stepped carefully away from the cottage and continued to peer through the forest in the direction of the oncoming footsteps. Another second or two and he made out the elegant figure of Miss Kent—Leila Kent—trudging up the hill. He took his hand off his gun and put both hands in the pockets of his windbreaker instead. Miss Kent was with the U.S. Department of State. She was one of the good guys.
The cottage door opened behind him. Traveler stepped out onto the flattened dirt in front of the entrance. He was wearing wrinkled slacks and a moth-eaten cardigan over an aging button-down shirt. He still looked puzzled.
“I can’t understand it,” he said. “I had my glasses a minute ago, now they seem to have disappeared.”
“They’re on top of your head, Doc,” Victor One told him.
Startled, Traveler reached up and found them. “Ah!” he said, and he beamed with delight. “Thank you, Victor. I can’t see a thing without them.” He pulled the glasses down onto his nose and blinked through the lenses. “Oh, look, here comes Leila!” he said.
“What a surprise,” said Victor One drily, hiding his smile. It struck him as funny that a guy as brilliant as Traveler could also be kind of dopey at the same time.
Traveler moved forward to greet Leila as she crested the hill. Victor One hung back near the house and pretended not to watch them. He judged Leila Kent to be about the same age as Traveler, late forties, but she was far younger-looking. She was beautiful, in fact, like a fashion model you might see on TV. She was tall and slender and wore a tan fall jacket belted loosely around her narrow waist. Her hair was golden—maybe she dyed it; Victor One didn’t really know about such things—and she wore it short and sort of swept back. She had a thin face with high cheekbones. Victor One thought she looked very smart and sophisticated.
He also thought something else—something he would never tell anyone. He thought Leila Kent was in love with Traveler. He could see it in her eyes right now as Traveler took both her hands and kissed her cheek in greeting. She loved him, all right—which Victor One thought was sort of sad because Traveler pretty obviously didn’t love her back. Traveler was a devoted family man. Practically all he ever talked about was his wife and kids. Plus he was religious, judging from the Bible he kept on his bedside table and the cross he’d hung on the cabin wall. In fact, the cross—and the framed picture of his family on his desk—was the only decoration he’d put up in the cabin anywhere. So Victor One didn’t think Traveler was going to be returning Leila Kent’s love any time soon. Which really was sort of sad—for her, anyway.
“How are you, Traveler?” she asked him. Victor One thought he could practically hear the love in her voice, but maybe he just imagined it.
Traveler sighed. “I’m about as well as I’m going to be until I see my wife and kids again, Leila.” Leila Kent smiled at that, though Victor One thought it was sort of forced. “It’s peaceful here, at least. I like the animals. There’s a chipmunk who visits me at the kitchen window every morning. I find my little pleasures wherever I can.”
Leila Kent squeezed his hand reassuringly. “It’s almost over,” she said. “We’ll have you home soon, I promise.” She gestured toward the cabin. “We should go inside. We need to talk.”
When they were inside the cabin, Victor One remained where he was, patrolling the clearing outside the cottage, watching the woods beyond. He could hear the voices of the man and the woman inside the house. From time to time, he could even make out the words.
“We’re going to have to move you,” he heard Miss Kent say. “We have intel that there are killers hunting for you. They’re closing in.”
“Never mind me,” Traveler answered. “What about my wife? What about my kids? Are they still safe?”
“We think they’re safe for now. We’re watching them round the clock,” said Leila Kent. Then she dropped her voice and Victor One could not make out the words.
A little while later, the two of them must have moved closer to a window or something because suddenly Victor One could hear them very clearly.
“We think that Kurodar is planning to launch some kind of new attack from the Realm—something bigger than the train wreck,” she said.
Traveler replied: “No. It’s impossible. He can’t be ready for that yet. Not for anything really big, anyway. The Realm is still months away from being fully operational.”
Miss Kent said, “Maybe he can’t make any kind of full assault. But our surveillance shows he’s constructing some sort of outpost from which he can—I don’t know—stage a raid, I guess. We think that’s why he brought in Reza—the assassin I told you about: to protect the outpost in case we try to get in again.”
“But why would he do that? Why would he do something small when, in a few months, he’ll be able to cripple our entire defense system?”
“Because he needs to impress the Axis so they’ll keep funding the project. That’s why we want to attack the outpost. If we can stop him now, maybe the Axis will lose faith and the money’ll dry up. Maybe we can slow the whole project down.”
Victor One heard a silence inside the cabin after that—and then Traveler said, “Why are you telling me this, Leila?”
There was an even longer pause before she answered. Then the answer came, “We’ve asked Rick to go into the Realm.”
Victor One straightened as he heard Traveler shout at her, “What? Are you out of your mind?” He had never heard the mild-mannered professor so much as raise his voice before. “You can’t do that! You promised . . .”
“It’s not me. The order came from Commander Mars himself. There’s nothing I can do about it,” Leila Kent said.
“I won’t let you do this! I can shut you down. You know I can.”
“Listen to me. You know what the Realm is. You know what Kurodar can do already. No communication is safe. No one can be trusted. This new development caught us by surprise. We needed to act fast and we didn’t have anywhere else to go, anyone else we could ask without risking the entire program. And . . . well, it turns out Rick is perfect for the job.”
“Does he know what can happen? To his mind? To his body? Does he know?”
Miss Kent’s response was low. To Victor One, her voice sounded sad. “Not all of it,” she said. “We didn’t want to tell him the worst. But he knows it’s very dangerous—and he’s agreed to go.”
Victor One could not hear what Traveler said then. He spoke in a rapid murmur, his tone harsh, but his words inaudible. All Victor One knew was that when the cottage door came open and Miss Kent came out, she was crying. Her chin was down and her cheeks were wet with tears.
Traveler came into the doorway behind her. His face was set and serious. Victor One could see that—in spite of his mild manners and his absentmindedness—there was something very strong about the man. Tough as Victor One was, he thought he would not want the Traveler for an enemy.
Leila Kent hurried away from them toward the tree line, but she stopped before she reached the forest. She turned around to face Traveler. She didn’t try to hide the fact that she was crying. As far as Victor One could tell, she didn’t try to hide the fact that she loved the man either.
“I want you to know,” she said, “that I did everything I could to stop this. I never wanted to do anything to hurt you, Traveler. That was the whole point from the beginning.”
But Traveler’s expression did not soften. He frowned coldly.
“God help that boy in there,” he said. “And if anything happens to him . . . God help us all.”
He turned, went back into the cottage, and shut the door.
Crying, Leila Kent hurried away through the woods.