Mozart’s Don Giovanni played in the background. Captain James Hancock Falcon had always enjoyed the opera’s dark tonal qualities. And a fellow had to admire the outright chutzpah of any lecherous character with the guts to spit in the devil’s eye as he was being dragged into hell.
Falcon sat at his desk, absently rubbing the day-old stubble on his chin. Dressed only in a white terry cloth robe, he leaned over the open binder on his blotter and carefully reread the précis. There had to be a pattern here. His uncanny ability to recognize patterns had taken him to MIT at the age of seventeen. And after the major had convinced him to enlist, his talent had led to rapid promotion and an office in the Pentagon basement. Now it had brought him here, to his safe room in Grantham Barracks.
The trick was to fit the disparate parts of the intel together in the right order. When that happened—like popping a champagne cork—the pattern would emerge from what seemed chaos.
But which parts? And what were the missing pieces?
Falcon leaned his head back, staring at the white acoustical panels in the ceiling. The small black dome that hid the security camera mocked him. He’d studied that ceiling intently over the last couple of years. Outside of the light panels and the fire-suppression sprinkler heads, the camera was the only interruption in an otherwise bland surface.
He rubbed the back of his head, feeling close-cropped hair ruffle under his palms. He only stood five-foot-six, brown hair, brown eyes . . . everything about him reeked of the average, even his weight and frame. To look at him, he’d pass as the middle of the bell-shaped curve. Mean, median, and mode for an American male. For his entire twenty-nine years he’d hated being ordinary. When Aunt Celia . . .
“Stop it,” the major barked.
“Stop what?” Falcon growled back, glancing across his small room to where Major Marks leaned back in the recliner, his feet up. The man had laced his powerful fingers behind his head and he, too, now stared at the featureless ceiling.
Major Bradley Kevin Marks appeared to be in his fifties. He looked every inch what he was: an old-school officer. A wealth of colorful campaign ribbons decorated his left breast. The creases on his olive pants could have been knife blades, and the man’s shoes reflected like black glass.
“You’re distracting yourself, Falcon. You always do when things don’t make sense.”
“Major, I didn’t even hear you come in.”
“In my world, people who can’t move with silent grace get ‘made dead’ in a hurry.”
“You’re in Grantham Barracks,” Falcon muttered, turning back to the document on the desk. “It’s not the jungle, or the mountains . . . and there’s no one around here to shoot at you. Not even the guards carry weapons.”
“Nothing is as it seems, Falcon. You’re stumbling over that intel report like a five-year-old on an obstacle course.” The major grinned. “It’s right there in front of your nose.”
“In front of my nose?” Falcon jerked his head around to give the major a hard glare. “You want to elaborate, or are you just going to flop in my chair like a beached carp?”
“You’re distracting yourself. Stop looking at your nose.”
Idiot. Then Falcon hesitated. Stop looking at my nose?
He closed his eyes and imagined that his nose was gone. That his face was flat. Nothing but air lay between his eyes and the report. Yes, he could see it more clearly, the detail remarkable. One by one he built images from the descriptions and arranged them on the backs of his eyelids, shifting them, moving the image of a spec ops team here, a missile battery there, a fuel truck over there. Then he rearranged one or another, trying new combinations. Sections from the report rolled through his thoughts, echoing slightly as the words resonated in his memory. And the pieces slipped together.
“The communications are compromised,” he said as he opened his eyes. “I don’t know how, but they’ve got a security breach. Someone is reading General Grazier’s top-secret traffic.”
“There, see?” Major Marks grinned. “Distracted by your nose.”
Falcon slapped the intel folder shut . . . rolled back in his chair. His room measured fifteen by twenty-five feet, the floor sealed concrete. He had one small window above his solitary desk. In addition to his reclining chair, the only other furnishing was the bed, neatly made up. It rested opposite his bathroom door. He had covered the underlying white walls in a cluttered collage of maps, aerial photos, tables, and graphs.
“You’re sure about the communications breach?” The major gave Falcon his steely-eyed look.
“Do you think I need to bring Theresa in on it?”
Major Marks made a face. “What for? Do you see operational info buried in that skimpy report? Anything to hint how they’d do it?”
“No.”
“Then why do you need a skirt like her to look for mathematical probabilities? General Grazier asked you to determine what, not how. All you’ve got in that folder is the ‘what.’”
“One of these days, Theresa is going to hear you call her names, and she’s going to get even.”
“Oh, I heard, all right.” A woman’s voice announced from the half-open bathroom door. “He’s just an overblown, hyper-egotistical military hack. After all these years of putting up with his supercilious and condescending ego, if I’d needed to put him in his place, I would have.”
Theresa Applegate slipped past the bathroom door. In the process of pinning back her spill of curly black hair, she shot Major Marks a disdainful look. Then she gave Falcon a crooked smile and walked over to his desk.
Falcon knew she had a PhD from Harvard, was twenty-two, single, and the most brilliant woman alive. Theresa must have weighed no more than a hundred and ten which, given her five-foot-seven, just wasn’t enough. She insisted on wearing 1950s style floral-pattern cotton dresses. Today she’d chosen red roses on a white background. Dark, strapped-leather shoes covered ankle-high white bobby socks.
Stopping at his desk, she stared down at the report and quickly scanned the pages. “Makes sense,” she agreed as she closed it again. “Grazier’s got a leak.”
“But no idea where?” Major Marks asked.
She shook her head. “Not from this. If Grazier’s people had provided any ancillary data . . . who planned the op, how the team was inserted, how Major Savage was chosen for command, anything that we could draw comparisons to . . .” A frown lined her high forehead. “Can you get that kind of data?”
“I don’t know,” Falcon said with a sigh.
Major Marks replied through gritted teeth, “Just asking might be enough for General Grazier’s people to figure it out. Save the skinny witch from having to strain her brain.”
“My only brain strain is trying to fit you into the phylogenetic tree, Major. You put a whole new twist on the term ‘primitive life-form.’”
Theresa primly seated herself on her favorite corner of Falcon’s bed. She laced her fingers around a bony knee, crossed her legs, and ignored Major Marks as he speculatively studied her thin calf.
Falcon chuckled to himself. “I’ll put Theresa’s thoughts in the memo. See what comes back.”
“My call is that they’ll need us to discover how the system’s compromised,” Theresa said lightly. “They should never have relocated you, Falcon. Running down to that little basement office you had in the Pentagon was a lot quicker than sending couriers all the way out here. But then”—she cast a dismissive look at Major Marks—“since when is the army ever efficient at anything but carpet bombing?”
“Lady,” Marks straightened on the recliner and pointed a hard finger, “carpet bombing is done by the Air Force. Something even a broomstick-thin rear-echelon analyst like you should know. Not even the vaunted Roman legions could compare with the professionalism, the duty, the adaptability . . .”
Falcon tuned them out. They’d be at each other’s throats for the next couple of hours. And sometime—while he was preoccupied—they’d get tired of baiting each other and leave. Reaching into his drawer, he fetched out a Sharpie and a sheet of paper. One by one, he began jotting down his conclusions about the report.