The detainee ducked sideways each time, as if he were just stepping out of the way of the bullets. That was when Lourdes realized just how fast the asshole was moving. Time had slowed down, and even his racing heartbeat sounded like a dull, thudding bass line.
The detainee was on top of him so suddenly he didn’t have a chance to breathe. The guy stank, but Lourdes didn’t care about that so much after the detainee’s thumbs sank into his windpipe and pressed down, hard.
Lourdes tried to raise the handgun again, but he couldn’t feel his arm. Couldn’t feel much of anything anymore. His vision was going black.
The last thing he saw was the detainee’s eyes, staring down into his. Eyes that weren’t human. They were black, solid black, like an animal’s eyes.
The detainee leaned in harder with his thumbs, but it didn’t matter to Lourdes. Sergeant Brian Lourdes, U.S. Army, was already dead. So he didn’t see what happened next. He didn’t see his killer’s face split down the middle with a cruel smile.
FORT BELVOIR, VIRGINIA: APRIL 12, T+3:17
Three hundred miles away in an office cubicle, Captain Jim Chapel was trying not to fall asleep at his desk. It wasn’t easy. It was too early in the year for air-conditioning, so the air in the office building at Fort Belvoir was still and lifeless, and the only sounds he could hear were the noise of fingers clacking away at keyboards and the low buzz of the compact fluorescent lightbulbs.
He sensed someone coming up from behind him and sat up straighter in his chair, trying to make it look like he was busy. It wouldn’t do to have some civilian bigwig come in here and see him slouched over his desk. When the newcomer walked into his cubicle and leaned over him, though, it wasn’t who he’d been expecting.
“So are you going to ever tell me what you did in Afghanistan?” Sara asked, her breath hot on Chapel’s neck. She laughed. “I’ll make it worth your while.”
Chapel didn’t move an inch. Sara — Major Sara Volks, INSCOM, to be proper about it — was leaning over his shoulder, theoretically looking at the same computer screen he’d been staring at all morning. It was displaying yet another memo about the technical details of a weapons system under development by a civilian contractor. He doubted very much she was interested in what it had to say.
Still, old habits die hard. In his head he matched up the required clearance to look at this memo with what he knew of her clearance. She was a major in INSCOM, the army’s Intelligence and Security Command. Which meant it was fine, she was more than qualified to see this, and he relaxed a bit.
Then he realized she was leaning over his shoulder, her mouth only about half an inch from his ear, and that she smelled really, really good. After that he didn’t relax at all. “You know I can’t talk about that,” he said. “Ma’am.”
Chapel moved office every few weeks as his job demanded, and every time he found himself a new cubicle he ended up having a new reporting officer — a new boss, for all intents and purposes. Major Volks was hardly the worst of the lot. She was capable and efficient enough that she didn’t need to yell at her people to keep them working. She was also an audacious flirt… at least as far as Chapel was concerned. He hadn’t seen her make eyes at any of the other men in the office, and he was pretty sure he was the only soldier in the fort who got to call her by her first name. The way she spoke to him was ridiculously unprofessional and probably enough to get both of them written up and reassigned, if he’d wanted to make a stink about it.
Not that he minded. It didn’t hurt that her regulation-cut hair was platinum blond, that she had big, soulful eyes and a body sculpted by countless hours in the fort’s excellent fitness center. Or that she had a mischievous grin that made Chapel’s knees go a little weak.
Up to this point she’d kept her comments suggestive rather than brazen. She’d asked him a lot of questions about himself, always prodding for information she had to know he couldn’t give her — like his wartime record, and what exactly his job description was now. It was the kind of flirting people in Military Intelligence did because they spent so much of their time staying secret that even the hint of disclosure was exciting.
She’d also asked him what he liked to do when he went home at night, and whether he enjoyed Italian food. There was a nice Italian restaurant not a mile outside of the fort — the implication was clear.
So far he hadn’t taken the bait.
“We are silent warriors, right?” she said, a hint of a laugh in her voice. “That’s the creed of the MIC.” She leaned in closer, which he hadn’t thought was possible before. Her shoulder touched his back. “All right. Keep your secrets. For now.”
Chapel was no shrinking violet, and he was sorely tempted. And this was definitely the moment. She’d opened a door — it was up to him to walk through. He could ask her out on a date and he knew she would say yes.
Or he could say nothing and keep things casual and flirtatious and harmless between them forever.
Initiating things would put his career at risk — his career, such as it was. A series of boring desk jobs doing oversight on weapons contractors until he retired on a comfortable little pension.
Go for it, he told himself. “I will tell you one secret,” he said. “I love Italian. And, in fact, I was thinking—”
Was it possible she could lean in even closer? She was almost rubbing his back with her shoulder. “Yes?” She reached out one hand to put it on his.
His left hand.
Damn.
He felt her flinch. Felt her whole body tense. “Oh,” she said.
His left arm wasn’t there anymore. He could forget that sometimes, because of the thing they’d given him to replace it. Some days he went whole hours without remembering what was attached to his body.
“It’s… cold,” Sara said.
“Silicone,” he told her, his voice very low. “Looks pretty real, right? They did a great job making it look like the other one. There’s even hair on the knuckles.”
“I didn’t know,” she said. “You didn’t say anything…”
“It’s not a secret. Though I tend not to mention it until it comes up.” He lifted the hand and flexed the fingers for her. “State of the art.” His heart sank in his chest. He could pretend it was normal, pretend that there was nothing weird about his new arm. But he knew how it creeped people out. “Almost as good as the real thing.”
“Afghanistan?” she asked, her eyes knowing and sympathetic. He’d learned to dread that look.
The last thing he wanted was her pity. “Yeah. It’s not a big thing. Listen, as I was saying, I don’t have any plans tonight and—”
“I need to think about it,” she said. She stood up straight. She wasn’t meeting his eyes when she spoke to him, now. “Let me get back to you. Fraternization isn’t exactly permitted, after all, and—”
“I understand,” Chapel told her. And he did. This wasn’t what she’d been expecting. She’d been flirting with a professional soldier, a strong, vigorous man in his early forties with just a touch of gray at his temples. Not an amputee.
She turned to go, and he sighed in disappointment. This wasn’t the first time things had worked out this way. He’d had years to get used to the arm — and how people reacted to it. But damn, he had really hoped that this time—
“I, uh,” she said, and now she did look him in the eye. “I didn’t say no. I said, let me get back to you.”
“Sure,” he said.
She walked away. She looked angry. Like he was the one who had brushed her off.
Well, in a couple of weeks he would be reassigned to a new office, anyway. Probably one where his reporting officer was fat and bald and smelled like cheap cigars. And it wasn’t like it could have gone anywhere with Sara anyway, not with both of them hiding a relationship from their superior officers and hoping they never got caught.