3

The Campus, London

By the time Salem returned to London, she had reclaimed the safety of rational thought. There was no global plot to suppress a feminine explanation for Stonehenge. There was only a lonely lady who’d created a kitschy model and used it to garner attention, exactly as Agent Curson had argued on the drive back. Once he’d dryly observed that mercy was neither Gaelic nor Proto-Indo-European—the current Irish language and the language of the UK at the time of Stonehenge’s construction, respectively—she’d had to agree with his take on the whole day.

She typed the report as soon as she’d returned.

A waste of time, it essentially said.

Her first FBI field experience, and it was a bust.

Clearly, she belonged behind a desk. She’d been a no-name master’s candidate two years earlier when global security agencies had begun wooing her. They were all interested in the quantum computer theory she’d developed while writing her thesis. If translated into a functioning program, her theory would revolutionize cyber security. Whichever nation developed the program first would possess the equivalent of a nuclear bomb in a butter knife war.

She’d turned all the agencies down.

She’d planned on staying in the safety and comfort of her Minneapolis home as she developed Gaea, the program she’d sketched in her thesis. But forces beyond her control had shoved her out of her comfortable routine. In that new state of mind, she’d accepted the FBI’s offer to join. That they’d promised she could continue her work on Gaea was a deciding factor.

They hadn’t exactly delivered on that promise, though.

She’d been allotted little development time at the Campus, the nickname for the Marylebone building where Black Chamber analysts lived and worked while in London. The Campus was a 1960s block of an apartment building currently registered as an American diplomatic base. That claim wasn’t too far off the reality. The analysts housed inside did interact with foreign representatives, they worked on behalf of the United States’ citizens, and they wrote a lot of reports.

The key difference?

At the Black Chamber, the “diplomats” never left their chairs. They toiled in an enormous room, what had been the communal gathering space back when the building had housed apartments. There were no walls between their workstations. The openness was designed to encourage collaboration among the dozen analysts employed at the Campus.

They started each day with a typed task list. No one knew better than cryptanalysts how easily most computer programs could be hacked. If FBI agents needed to keep something secret, they used a typewriter and hand-delivered it. The task lists were shredded and then burned at the end of the day.

Not that they normally contained high secrets.

Based on their proficiency in a specific foreign language, each analyst at the Campus was assigned servers to track and clean. Cleaning involved running their assigned server’s data through ECHELON, their codebreaking software, and manually decrypting any code that ECHELON couldn’t crack or had red-flagged. On particularly long days, Salem saw them as factory workers sorting through nuts and bolts, looking for defects in the assembly line of information.

Thanks to her mom, Salem spoke Persian, which meant that her job was to decrypt all Persian messages originating in European servers. She had to finish her assigned code cleaning before she was allowed to work on Gaea. Her quantum program would exploit the fact that all existing computers could only process in one direction, meaning they could only be made faster or stronger. Once it became a reality, Salem’s theory would allow designated computers to also process sideways, backward, and into themselves without breaking a sweat. That meant that a line of code could be encrypted and decrypted on multiple levels.

In short, Gaea would make ECHELON look like a cereal box decoder ring. She would protect the United States, starting with shoring up private records, voting systems, government data, weapons algorithms, and individual citizen privacy. There was not a code the quantum computing program couldn’t crack or a codebreaker she couldn’t repel.

However, the FBI, for all its strengths, was still a bureaucracy, one which assigned value based on measurable outcomes rather than more speculative activities, like theory testing. With Salem cleaning code and now working in the field, that left only five hours a week for Gaea. Salem’s boss, Assistant Director Robert Bench, hadn’t been convinced by her multiple pleas to be assigned more development time.

She’d resorted to sacrificing sleep to work on Gaea.

Tonight was no exception. She’d finished the Blessington field report around midnight, grabbed her laptop, and padded to the study hall, a retrofitted storage room that housed a couch, three swaybacked recliners, mismatched tables, and a television. It was one of a handful of afterthought rooms tucked around the Campus.

Salem figured she’d be less likely to fall asleep if she couldn’t see her bed.

She set her steaming mug of peppermint tea on the table and dropped into the sofa. If she balanced her laptop on crossed legs, her neck hardly hurt at all. It didn’t take long for her to fall into the rhythm and security of programming, playing numbers like notes, writing a quantum symphony one line at a time.

The clock ticked away the minutes and then hours. She was exhausted. The couch was so comfortable and the work was mesmerizing, lulling her into a dozy trance. She didn’t hear the door open behind her.

“London treating you well?”

Lucan Stone’s low rumble startled Salem out of her seat. She yelped as she flew to her feet, nearly tumbling her laptop. “What are you doing here?”

He chuckled. Had she ever seen him laugh before? She did not know the FBI agent well. He’d saved her and Bel’s lives almost a year ago, but it felt further in her past, occupying that murky dreamscape when Salem and Bel had been on the run, chased by the Hermitage and the law, racing to save their own mothers. She hadn’t known back then if she could trust Agent Stone.

She still didn’t.

He crossed his arms languidly as she collected herself. He wore a well-cut suit, hair shaved close, his skin so dark it reflected purple in the dim light. He exuded calm power. “The president is coming to town for the summit. I’m on her advance team.”

Salem sat back down on the couch, only partially facing him. Agent Stone made her nervous.

Nearly everything but computers made her nervous.

“Oh,” Salem said. Something didn’t line up, but she wasn’t sure what. “I see.”

“What are you working on now?”

Salem glanced at her laptop. This was the first conversation between her and Stone that could be considered personal. She still couldn’t believe he was here, at the Campus. Non-crypto FBI weren’t supposed to know the Black Chamber existed, and Stone wasn’t a code breaker. He was a straight-up G Man. She didn’t think he had clearance to hear about Gaea, so she lied.

“A new social media filter that tags unsourced news. That way you know if you’re getting your information from a legit source or some Eastern bloc computer rat.”

Stone leaned over for a look. “Still protecting the world, even during your downtime?”

She tried to close her laptop so he couldn’t see, but he smelled so good. Freshly showered. His breath reached her neck, the slight caress of air like a finger trailing from her ear to her shoulder blade. He was heat and smooth darkness, safety and danger and so close. A thrill burned along Salem’s skin.

She told herself to be calm.

They were professionals.

Colleagues, apparently.

“Saving time, not the world.” Salem’s voice cracked. “People are too busy to check all the news they read.”

She risked a glance at him, swiveling her head until their eyes locked. Amazingly, her neck no longer hurt. But she shouldn’t have turned toward him. He was too much, his lips a magnet. She set her computer on the table, unwilling to fight the pull.

She exhaled softly as she leaned toward him.

Her pulse throbbed at her wrists.

Their lips met, his soft and then more passionate.

This had been a long time coming.

She grabbed the front of his shirt and helped him over the back of the couch and onto her. The weight and hardness of him was electric. His edges melted into her curves. She wanted to touch every inch of him, her skin naked to his.

She ground her hips upward. Her sexual courage embarrassed her, but her body was insistent.

He drew back, pushing her curls out of her face. When he saw his desire enthusiastically reflected in her, he kissed her deeply, tipping his weight so he could touch her, lingering on her neck before brushing over her right nipple, causing a shiver the length of her. His hand moved slowly and deliberately across her hip before sliding between her legs.

The pleasure was building inside of her, a spark that flickered and then caught, growing, consuming her with heat. She moaned, swung out her arm, and knocked her computer off the table.

Crash.

She blinked, disoriented, woken by the sound of her laptop clattering to the ground. She was in the study hall, alone. The calm repetition of programming had put her to sleep as she’d been typing. The crash of her computer had been real, everything else a dream. The delicious heat and weight of Lucan Stone was gone, but the echoes of her orgasm remained. She blushed in the quiet of the room. It had been awhile since she’d had a clutch dream; she hoped she hadn’t been so … expressive during the previous ones. What if someone had been walking by?

Agent Stone.

She sighed. It’d been months since she’d thought of him. Last she’d heard, he was on another of President Hayes’ secret projects, much like the Black Chamber. He likely lived and worked in DC. Bel would know, if Salem dared mention his name. She sat up, stretched, and asked her phone the time.

“Five forty-five AM. Would you like to hear the weather?”

Nope. She would be strapped to her computer today and for the foreseeable future, unless another field job came her way. She doubted Agent Curson would request her help if it did. She’d behaved like the greenhorn she was, with a dash of hysteria thrown in for good measure.

She rolled her eyes at herself before standing to make her way to her room, grateful that everyone else seemed to be asleep as she walked down the hall. Her X-rated dream was surely playing over her head on a movie screen, visible to anyone she met.

She slipped inside her room with a plan. She didn’t need to be at her work computer until eight, and her dream had made clear she had some juice to work off. She changed into sweats. At Quantico, she’d discovered muscles she didn’t know she had, plus an affinity for weight lifting. She wanted to keep both. The designers of the Campus had knocked out walls and removed kitchens and bathrooms to make dormitory-style bedrooms for the analysts, keeping the original apartment building’s pool, steam room, and weight room surrounded by an elevated track.

She leaned over for her running shoes and knocked the blue-
flowered sachet off the bedside table. It smelled of sage. Mrs. Molony. A familiar hot rush of shame flooded her cheeks. Should she have said something about her Stonehenge hunch after all?

She picked the sachet off the floor and was inhaling deeply of its spice when her phone rang. She glanced over.

Bel’s image winked at her from the brightly lit phone.

Salem’s guts jerked.

It was midnight in Minneapolis. This would not be good news.