Grantham Barracks.
I studied the dead man’s features. The photo gave his face an empty look. Periodically, during the year since Prisoner Alpha’s arrival—and the attack that had almost killed her—I had pulled out the file on her attackers. The man had been relatively young and fit. His weathered skin had the nut-brown look of a long-time desert tan—a possibility enhanced by the incipient wrinkles at the corners of his half-lidded and death-dull eyes.
“Who are you?” I asked the frozen visage yet again.
When I’d shown the photos to Prisoner Alpha, her gaze had chilled. She’d shaken her head—what I took to be a barely restrained satisfaction behind her closely pressed lips.
The photographs occupied me while I waited for General Elijiah Grazier’s call. I’d known Eli for years, worked with him off and on until my retirement. Since the unsettling arrival of Prisoner Alpha, I’d found myself in constant communication. Eli had an almost killing interest in my patient. His people had claimed the dead man’s corpse; and to my amazement, not even Eli—who could finger anybody—had been able to ID the guy.
Nor had there been so much as a whisper of the whereabouts of the mysterious green-eyed female companion who’d popped into our garage, unleashed the barrage, and vanished. She’d definitely cried, “Dear God, no!” in an American accent. So why hadn’t Eli been able to tag her?
The phone rang. Eli. Right on time.
“Ryan? I’m sending a file. I’d like Falcon to take a look at it.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll have Janeesha print it out the moment it comes through on the—”
“Not that I don’t trust your secretary, Ryan, but I’ve got a courier bringing the physical documents. It’s ‘eyes only.’”
“Yes, sir.” I paused. “Anything I should be aware of on this one, sir?”
“You know Sam Savage? One of his teams got shot up over in the Sandbox. Something’s screwy. Shouldn’t have happened.”
“I never met the man. Heard of him, though.”
“He’s a good egg.” A pause. “Any progress on Alpha?”
“You have my weekly report.”
“It’s been a year, Ryan. All she’s done is make that doohickey machine out of TV parts and draw cartoons on her walls.”
“She’s been learning English at a rapid rate. Though, God knows, most of it is from television given her isolation from the rest of—”
“I know your feelings. And yes, Tim, you’re a good doctor. Your overriding concern is to heal your patients, but Alpha is different. Orders stand. She stays in maximum security.” I heard him take a stressful breath. “Have you had any breakthrough? Is she really nuts? Or is she lying?”
“I watched the entire recording of her interrogation by that Kaplan woman you sent last week. Alpha seemed vaguely amused by the schematics the woman showed her. But from her pupil dilation, galvanic skin response, pulse and respiration, she might have been tolerating a precocious five-year-old instead of a highly trained physicist. Now, if you’d just tell me what this is all—”
“Ask me something I can talk about.”
“What about the corpse? I was just sitting here staring at his picture.”
“Still nothing. You ever heard of Dr. Kilgore France?”
“The forensic anthropologist?”
“That’s her. She ran a series of tests on the body. Bone chemistry. Took samples from the teeth. She says the guy was raised on the East Coast, grew up in Massachusetts, was affluent, and had good dental hygiene. So why is it that we’re still drawing a bust? We’ve run facial recognition programs on every DMV, college ID, Facebook page, you name it. Nada. The guy might never have existed. Even the serial number on his weapon is a mystery. Manufacturer says it would be another three years before they came to that number.”
I stared down at the photo, trying to imagine how a man raised in affluent Massachusetts could erase his record. “Any chance he was spec ops?”
“Let’s just say he never existed among the ranks of the operatives ‘that never existed.’”
“And the woman?” I lifted the second photo. The security cameras had oddly fuzzed out, like static when the man and woman arrived. When the image had firmed up, they’d just been standing there, the woman’s rifle spitting bullets at me and Alpha. The man beside her was already falling, his M4 dropping from his fingers. The short segment of recording showed her reaction as she shot down Captain Stanwick, dropped beside the man, and cried out. She’d grabbed some kind of box from her companion’s belt. At her touch a blue holographic display projected above the box. Her eyes had flicked across the screen. She’d blinked what looked like a pattern, or code.
Then the image went fuzzy again.
“Nothing,” Eli growled. “Did you bring her up just to irritate me? Because I’m having a bad day?”
“Would have, if I’d thought of it. Call it a serendipitous score on my part.”
He sighed. “Believe me, we’re looking. Every airport, train station, bus terminal, embassy. We’ve got eyes in places that—if they were discovered—would land us in the middle of World War III. Never known a bitch to go to ground like this. Not even a rumor.”
“Well, she’s never been seen around here again.”
“You stay damn frosty. But for your reflexes, Ryan, she’d have killed Alpha that day.” I heard muffled voices on his end, and he said, “I’ve gotta go. The moment that courier arrives, get that file to Falcon. I need his magic ASAP.”
The line went dead.
I replaced the receiver and stared thoughtfully at the green-eyed woman in the photo.
How do two people just appear out of nowhere in this modern world?
Among the monitors that covered my opposite wall, one was dedicated to Prisoner Alpha. The tawny-haired woman was standing at her small table, doing something with the doohickey—the unfathomable electrical device she’d cobbled together from her first TV.
“If I could just reach you, maybe you could tell me why two assassins wanted you dead.”