Katherine had said this with a smile, a gentle and playful sort, slipping stacked plates from his hands, her own fingers wet and sudsy from the sink in which she had been setting a roasting pan to soak. She’d fixed prime rib roast for dinner, sparing no expense for their guest. If she hadn’t agreed with Andrew’s choice of women or shared his enthusiasm for Lila, then at least, she had gone along with it well.
“You think she’s too old for me,” Andrew said.
“I didn’t say that.” Katherine turned and began scraping table scraps into a square of aluminum foil. She rinsed each dish in turn, then passed them to Andrew, who placed them into the dishwasher.
“You didn’t have to. I can tell by your face.” She was deliberately avoiding his gaze and he cocked his head to meet her eyes, ducking a bit because he was taller than she was. “Mom, I keep telling you. That doesn’t matter to us.”
“Okay.” Katherine nodded, paying too much attention to the growing mound of meat scraps and half-eaten asparagus spears.
“She’s smart,” Andrew said. “More than that, she’s brilliant.”
“Okay.”
“She’s got her Ph.D. She’s tenured. And she’s beautiful. And funny. She makes me laugh, makes me think. She likes to argue—politics, religion, philosophy, you name it.”
Katherine nodded again, handing him a plate. “Okay.”
“Will you stop saying that?” he pleaded, catching her hand, making her look at him at last. “Mom, I love her.”
She studied him for a long, quiet moment. “I can see that.”
“I love being with her. I love talking to her. I love listening to her. You always say I should find a partner I enjoy being with, who I can talk to.”
“Is that what you see her being?” Katherine had asked. “A partner for you? You’re that serious about this woman?”
He’d nodded, eyes round and earnest. “Yes, Mom.”
She’d reached up, touching his face, her hand still damp. “What I think of Lila doesn’t matter, Andrew. It’s what you think that counts because you’re the one who’s involved with her.” With a gentle smile, she added, “And it’s obvious to me that you think the world of her, that what the two of you have makes you happy. And that makes me happy.”
He’d smiled back, then hugged her, drawing her onto her tiptoes. “Thanks, Mom.”
She stepped back, brushing his hair back from his brow. “If she breaks your heart, I’ll break her kneecaps.”
He’d laughed. “She won’t, Mom.”
“Meals are served in the dee-fack at oh-six-thirty, twelve hundred and seventeen hundred sharp,” Corporal O’Malley said as Andrew trailed him across the main lobby toward the adjoining barracks annex.
“The what?” Andrew asked.
O’Malley glanced over his shoulder. “That’s what we call the dining facility. The dee-fack. The mess hall. There are snack and soda machines in the rec room. There’s also a canteen, too, with toiletries, cigarettes, magazines.”
“Nice,” Andrew remarked dryly.
“It beats Fallujah,” O’Malley said. He led Andrew up a flight of concrete steps in a narrow stairwell to the second floor of the barracks.
“You were in Iraq?”
O’Malley nodded. “Served fifteen months. Just got back in December. You ever been enlisted?”
“Me? No.” Andrew managed a laugh.
“Something funny about serving your country?” O’Malley stopped in his tracks, arching his brow, clearly not sharing Andrew’s amusement.
“Uh, no.” Andrew shook his head. “Not at all. It’s just…” He sputtered for a moment, trying to figure out how to get the proverbial foot out of his mouth before O’Malley planted his up Andrew’s ass—non-proverbially. “I’ve never really thought of myself as military material.”
O’Malley cut him a head-to-toe glance, then offered a concurring snort. “Yeah,” he said. Then, continuing with his tour, “Anyway, DARPA just finished building all of this a couple of months before we arrived. Before that, this was all a federal reserve forest, inaccessible to the general public. Like the Major said, you can use any of the public areas, the downstairs facilities. Just don’t leave the grounds or go near Dr. Moore’s residence again. Or the house of pain.”
Andrew blinked. “The what?”
“Dr. Moore’s lab. The building in the back of the compound.” He walked again, stopping next at the end of a corridor, outside a closed door. “Each person at this compound has their own unique security pin number. That way we can control who has access to restricted areas. Yours will be four-two-eight-zero.” As he said this, he punched it into a key pad beside the door, and Andrew watched the red light on the panel change to green.
Inside, the room looked like any standard full-size hotel accommodations, with nondescript furnishings—desk, bed, bureau, nightstand—and adjacent bathroom with shower stall. As with a hotel, the room had been stripped of any sign of previous occupancy; of the absent Lieutenant Carter, nothing remained. Andrew thought O’Malley might say something about the former occupant, what had happened to Lieutenant Carter and why his room was now conspicuously vacant, but he did not.
“I’ll have someone run you up some clean towels.” O’Malley crossed the threshold, reached into the darkened bathroom and flipped on the lights. “Fresh sheets for the bed, too. Oh, you’ve got a mini-fridge over by the bureau.”
Andrew followed him, curious, taking note of a television set atop the bureau. And matching VCR, he observed. “Jesus, didn’t these things die out with the dinosaurs?” he asked with a laugh.
“There’s a video library down in the rec room,” O’Malley said. “No cable or satellite.”
Great, Andrew thought.
“If there’s nothing else, I’ll leave you to it,” O’Malley said, not elaborating on whatever ‘it’ he was specifically leaving Andrew to.
“Oh,” Andrew said. “Hey, sure. Thanks for the nickel tour.”
O’Malley nodded once, politely, as he walked toward the door. “Be seeing you.”
After O’Malley had left, Andrew went back outside. He followed the sidewalk encircling the compound and annex until he came to the approximate spot beneath Moore’s balcony where his iPhone would have landed. It didn’t take long for him to find it. Or what was left of it after its two-story fall.
“Shit.” He stared in dismay at the cracked, darkened screen, pushing impotently at the power button, even though he knew there was no way in hell it would work.
“Wherefore art thou, Romeo?” he heard Suzette Montgomery say from the deck above, and he looked up, eyes flown wide with surprise.
“Hey,” he said with a startled, awkward laugh. “Uh, hi. I didn’t see you there.”
“Hi, yourself,” she replied, leaning languidly over the deck railing, her arms crossed, a cigarette dangling from one hand. In the other, she held a glass tumbler with ice cubes, a wedge of lime and a clear liquid inside. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were trying to spy on me.”
“I was looking for my phone,” he replied. “I dropped it into the bushes earlier.”
“Any luck?”
Again, he glanced at the broken iPhone in his hand. “Yes and no.”
He wondered if Dr. Moore was still in the apartment and thought about just turning around, bolting back into the building to be on the safe side. Apparently he was going to be stuck there for awhile, and since for all he knew, Dr. Moore was working on biochemical weapons in that top secret, hush-hush lab of his—one O’Malley had ominously referred to as the “house of pain”—he figured it might be in his own best interest to avoid pissing the guy off any more than he already had.