AVANTEC COMPOUND
TRANSNISTRIA UNRECOGNIZED TERRITORY
NO AMOUNT OF SHOWERING could banish the smell of smoke from Talia’s skin. And no amount of scrubbing could remove Dr. Visser’s blood from her blouse. As she fought with the stain, dressed in a set of Avantec sweats, Talia felt the scientist’s death resting squarely on her shoulders. When had this assignment made the leap from a rent-a-cop security job to a life-and-death battle over unknown weapon designs? Talia paused in her scrubbing and looked in the mirror, anger tightening her features. Visser’s death was not her fault.
That blame belonged with Brennan.
Barefoot, she padded the twelve or so feet to the next room over, and quietly knocked.
After a long wait, the door opened. Eddie rubbed his eyes. “What’s wrong? Can’t sleep?”
Talia pushed past him and took command of his bed, leaving Eddie the small table in the kitchenette.
He flopped down in a wooden chair. “You know. Because I can sleep. But hey, come on in.”
“This doesn’t make any sense, Eddie.” Talia sat cross-legged at the center of the mattress.
“A pretty girl on my bed and me nodding off ten feet away at the kitchen table?” Eddie rolled his eyes. “No. That makes perfect sense.”
She pursed her lips at him.
“Sorry. Go on.”
“Brennan played this assignment off as small potatoes—a way to get our feet wet. Now we’re dealing with blown-up buildings and murdered scientists.” She crossed her arms. “I want to talk to him. Get him up on SATCOM.”
Eddie picked up a tablet from his table. “You want to see the security video first?”
“Bazin came through?”
“If you can call it that.” Eddie began working the screen. “The files he gave me were ugly, corrupted by the software Lukon’s people uploaded at the gatehouse. I spent the last half hour running enhancement algorithms.” He looked up at her, eyelids drooping. “I had just gotten to sleep when you knocked.”
“I get it. I interrupted your beauty sleep.” Talia held out a hand, curling and uncurling her fingers. “Bring it here, snowflake.”
“You’re the snowflake.” Eddie got up to bring her the tablet, then sat down again, cheeks flushing. “Um . . . Why don’t you come here . . . to the table?”
She had forgotten who she was dealing with. Eddie took chivalry and virtue as seriously as one of Arthur’s knights. Sitting on a bed with a girl made him uncomfortable. Talia bounced herself up and walked over. “Yeah. Okay.”
Two open windows on the tablet showed varying levels of grainy, wavy video. Eddie started the playback in both simultaneously. “These come from the residence. I matched up the times.”
Talia held a finger close to the second window. Amid the flickers and distortion, she could make out two standing racks of black boxes, all with green, blue, and red LEDs flashing at random. “That’s Ivanov’s personal server room.”
“Correct. Second floor of the residence. I was in there yesterday, checking it out with Bazin while your boyfriend gave you a personal tour of his six-thousand-square-foot living quarters.”
“You mean while I was checking Dr. Ivanov’s motion detectors.”
“That’s what I said, right?” Eddie glanced down at his tablet. “Oops. Here they come.”
Three figures moved through the first video window, all in black, making their way down a long hall toward the camera. The largest of them looked up at the camera as they passed. The prickling sensation in Talia’s neck told her it was the same man she had faced in the lab, and he wore the same rigid mask. The eyes were covered by tinted glass.
“We’re looking at the main hallway.” Eddie pointed out the spot on a rough diagram he had drawn on a notepad. “They entered through the front door. Brash.”
“Probably let in by our mystery guard. He wasn’t running away. He was on their team.”
“I’ll have Bazin check his rosters.”
“Good call, but I’m betting Lukon is too good to leave that kind of trail behind.”
Seconds after the three intruders passed the hallway camera, two of them appeared in the server room feed, blinking in and out of view like ghosts in the distorted playback. Talia watched for several seconds, then touched Eddie’s arm. “Whoa. Go back.”
He rewound the footage and played it frame by frame. Between the flashes of digital snow, the two figures moved within the server stacks, placing white globs.
“There,” she said, lifting his hand away to keep him from advancing further.
“Those are the bombs.” Eddie shrugged. “Can’t tell much about them from the video. Could be C4, but we can’t be sure.”
“Actually”—Talia used her thumb and forefinger to zoom in on a black box fixed to one of the figure’s belts—“I was looking at that. What would you say it is?”
Eddie held his glasses steady as he looked closer. “Portable hard drive. Ten petabytes, maybe more. The blue LED tells me there’s data on board.” Realization hit, and he let the tablet slap down on the table. “So Lukon got what he came for. We lost.”
“No. We didn’t.” Talia got up and started pacing. “I’ll explain later. For now, get me Brennan.”
BRENNAN HAD NOT GIVEN Talia the full story on Ivanov, Lukon, and Avantec. He couldn’t have. Talia wanted to throttle him, and the cumbersome nature of a secure call into a monster system like the CIA’s didn’t help. Satellite to hard line. Digital to analog. Multiplexing, scrubbing, encryption, decryption. Talia understood the process, but the pregnant pauses it caused before Brennan’s every answer still gave her the feeling he was hiding something.
“Stop,” she said when Brennan tried to explain away the explosives and the shoot-out as pointless violence from an overzealous thief. “Just stop. Lukon is a serious player, former CIA if Tyler is right. The stakes here are higher than a simple rent-a-cop security job. What is Ivanov working on? What type of weapon was I sent here to protect?”
Halfway through the encryption-decryption pause, Talia added, “And so help me, if the phrase ‘need-to-know’ comes out of your mouth, I’ll fly home right now and choke you with your own donuts.”
When Brennan spoke again, Talia could hear the resigned sigh in his tinny, overprocessed voice. “Tyler.”
Talia exchanged a look with Eddie, then frowned at the tablet’s blank screen. “Tyler is not a weapon, Frank.”
“No, but Tyler has the answers you’re looking for. Go talk to him.” The secure line went dead.