“Are you all right?” Tequila asked, eyeing her meager breakfast. “It’s not like you to be nervous before a demo.”
“It’s not that,” Alex said. “The stadium disaster has me rattled.”
Tequila instantly turned serious. “You didn’t know anyone there, did you?”
“My dad was at the game.”
Tequila’s eyes flew wide. “Was he—”
“No, he’s okay. I talked to him on the phone. He left early, before the bomb went off. He was on the way home when it blew, miles away. If he had decided to stay just a few minutes longer…” Her voice choked, and she fought back a sudden rush of tears. She had been so close to losing him.
“What are you doing here?” Tequila said. “We can cover things without you. Go and hang out with your family. Give your dad a hug.”
Alex shook her head and wiped her eyes. “We’ve been working on this for how long? More than a year? I’m not backing out now. I’ll go home afterward.”
“You’re sure? You don’t have to, you know. Everyone would understand.”
“I’ll be fine.”
Tequila put a strawberry Danish in her hand. “Eat it,” she said. “That’s a command.”
Alex managed a watery smile and took a tiny bite of the Danish. It did taste good. “Thanks.”
“It’s entirely selfish,” Tequila said. “I was lying when I said we could cover things. Without you, we’ll crash and burn, and they’ll give the contract to Boeing.”
“Look,” Alex said. “My sister’s on the Philadelphia police force, and I’ll guarantee you she hasn’t gone home. Probably hasn’t slept, either. If she can keep working, so can I.”
Tequila swallowed a large bite of eggs. “Competitive relationship, huh?”
“You could say that. Her name’s Sandra. She’s a twin.”
Tequila whistled. “How come I didn’t know you had a twin?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Don’t I know it. Family always is.”
“I have an older sister, Claire, and a younger brother, Sean, but Sandra and I are the most… closely linked.”
“Identical?”
“In appearance? Absolutely. In personality…”
Tequila laughed. “Say no more. You know, I always fantasized about having an identical twin when I was a kid. I bet you pulled some crazy pranks when you were growing up together.”
Alex smiled noncommittally. The truth was, she and Sandra hadn’t grown up together, not until they were fourteen years old. They weren’t even really twins, not in the traditional sense. But that was more than she wanted to explain right now. To change the subject, she said, “My brother’s stationed in Poland. Everyone says that’s where the war will break out first, if it comes.”
“Army?”
“Marines. Force Recon, actually.”
“Ooh, a real man,” Tequila said, wiggling her eyebrows. “Can I meet him? When does he come home?”
Alex elbowed her. “He has two months left in his tour of duty. But that won’t make any difference if Turkey attacks. Two months might turn into two years. Or he might never come home.”
The speakers crackled, and all eyes turned. A Lockheed Martin functionary stood at the podium, kicking off the day’s events and introducing Lockheed Martin CEO Linda Staker. Staker stood to light applause. Tequila said, “Good luck—you’ll be great,” and squeezed Alex’s shoulder. The two of them took their places on the lower level of chairs.
Alex sat next to Vijay Bhargava, their development team lead, who knew more about the nanocircuitry in their product than any other two of them combined. Vijay was resolutely pessimistic, a glass-half-empty-and-probably-poisoned-anyway kind of guy. “And our fearless CEO takes the stage,” he said. “I’ve never heard anyone talk as much as she does. She could put a class of five-year-olds to sleep on cupcake day.”
Alex grinned and elbowed him. “She’s not that bad.”
“She could out-filibuster a senator,” Vijay said. “She could bore a snake to tears.”
“I get the idea.”
“Get it? Snakes don’t have tear glands, so she’d have to be really boring to bore them to tears.”
She raised her hands in surrender. “Yeah, okay. I got it.”
The room was large enough for a NASA convention. It was decorated like a war zone, with burned-out buildings and rubble. A special stage had been built at one end to seat the VIPs, with leather chairs and attendants to bring drinks. This was where Ryan Oronzi sat, along with the Lockheed Martin executive staff, NJSC chief Stanley Babington, two congressmen, the Joint Chiefs, and Secretary of Defense Jared Falk with his security detail. On either side of the stage were the rows of folding chairs for everyone else: the NJSC scientists, the reps from the military and intelligence communities with their science aides in tow to explain the technology to them, the Lockheed Martin executives and business managers.
True to Vijay’s prediction, Staker droned on for a good ten minutes, spouting platitudes about the importance of all the people working there at Lakehurst, their dedication to excellence, ability to work together no matter their employer, and the importance of their efforts to national security. Her speech was upbeat, inclusive, patriotic, and desperately dull. Alex had nothing to do but dwell on her role in the coming demo, and the various possible ways she could botch it. At the end, Staker introduced Secretary Falk, and Alex cringed, expecting him to give more of the same.
But he didn’t. He took the podium and said, “You all know what happened in Philadelphia last night. Whether Turkish terrorists were to blame or not, we live in dangerous times. The world covets our wealth and power and wants to destroy us. What we see here today might be just the edge we need to preserve our way of life for the next generation. Let’s begin.”
Staker nodded to a vice president, who nodded to Alex’s boss, and Alex and Tequila and their team stood. It was time.
Music started, a marching drumbeat with horns in the background, probably lifted from some old war film by the Presentation Arts team. The house lights dimmed, replaced by a diffuse light from above that gave the sense of a cloudy morning. Smoke drifted across the warehouse floor. From the back, soldiers in Turkish army uniforms started working their way through the debris, slipping from wall to wall, AK-74 assault rifles at the ready.
Alex settled behind the control table with the other technicians to monitor the show. They were visible to the audience, but off to the side, not part of the action. Vijay took a back seat, monitoring them rather than actually participating. He was more familiar with the design than he was with the actual hands-on controls. That left Alex, Tequila, and their two programming experts, Rod Zeidman and Lisa Mancini. Tequila was tall, but Lisa was perhaps the tallest woman Alex had ever met, an occasional bodybuilder who climbed mountains in her free time and intimidated every man she met. Rod, by contrast, was short, red-haired, with a little-boy-cute face that make him look fifteen years younger than he really was. The five of them made up the Lockheed Martin team. Hundreds of others had worked on the program in some capacity, but the five of them were principle contributors, the ones best suited to run this demonstration. Alex was the youngest of them, but she liked to think she could hold her own.
“Do it like we practiced it,” Vijay whispered.