“Yes.”
“There’s someone in there. General Riggs’s science adviser, named Brennan. He’s being held there. There’s been an accident with a DORKA experiment and he’s infected.”
“That’s Nightstalker territory,” Neeley said.
“They’ve been alerted,” Hannah said. “But I want you to get to Brennan and ask him some questions.”
“Break into Deep Six?”
“It is designed primarily to keep people out,” Hannah said.
“Is this a Sanction?” Neeley asked, which meant she had permission to use deadly force at her own discretion.
There was a moment of silence, then the reply. “It is a Sanction. I think Brennan knows about Pinnacle. As much as anyone knows. We can finally end this.”
“Roger that.”
Neeley expected to hear the click, meaning the transmission was over, but static lingered. “Hannah?” she finally asked.
“Yes.”
“What’s going on?”
“The accident at DORKA. It’s some sort of truth serum called Cherry Tree. It hasn’t been contained yet. It’s gotten loose in the White House and is spreading. I’m not sure how or what the long-term effect is, but this could get out of control. And when things get out of control…”
“Murphy’s Law,” Neeley said, a maxim that was more ancient than Gant’s rules. What can fuck up, will.
“Be prepared to move to the White House on an adjunct mission as needed after you get to Brennan and find out as much as you can from him.” Hannah made it sound like breaking into a highly secure, underground facility was a fait accompli.
“Roger that.”
“Be careful.” And then the click.
Doc looked at the menu, trying to find something he would be willing to eat and could afford. The woman hadn’t shown up yet and part of him hoped she wouldn’t. The place was way too expensive for him by his lonesome, never mind with a date. Not that he wanted to call her a date, but it was obvious that’s what she thought when they talked on the phone, so splitting the check probably wasn’t an option. He wondered why he let his sister do this to him. He always agreed when she set him up and it always turned out badly. She always said this next one was perfect, the one, and he had a growing suspicion that there was no one. That his job, his passion for knowledge, was and would forever be his first and only love.
But one has to humor a sister, especially when she is the only family one has left.
Still. Sixty-nine bucks for a steak? This was Vegas. One could get a steak for two dollars with ten dollars’ worth of chips at most of the lower-class casinos and they might even throw in the start of a lap dance. Doc only knew because Roland had dragged him out one night, and Doc had had the honor of watching Roland wolf down fourteen bucks’ worth of steaks at seven different places.
Besides the base pay, combat pay, danger pay, Black Ops pay, jump pay (not worth it), and various other streams of income as a Nightstalker, it was barely making a dent in the student loans required to get the four PhDs he boasted about so much.
Even with those PhDs, including one in physics, Doc had no idea what fusion meant when it came to food. Why would anyone want to fuse sushi and Indian food? Could that even be fused? He mused on that for a moment, as Roland had mused on spear vs. arrow. Wasn’t the point of sushi the opposite of Indian food?
Doc sighed. He’d have to order something and push it around. Doc ate for energy and he understood very much how calories translated into force. He had never understood eating for the flavor, especially when the flavors were so weird. He was so caught up in the energy trail from food to calories to energy to how much energy the brain required that he failed to notice the woman until she sat down across from him.
She was a bit older than he had expected, but other than that, exactly what he anticipated when he’d walked into her favorite restaurant and scoped it out, the way Nada had taught him to “scope it out.” For most men that meant checking out the women, but for a Nightstalker it meant first assessing the potential threats, the security, then the emergency exits, both marked and those other avenues that could be made into an exit with a little bit of ingenuity. Then for things that could be used as field-expedient weapons and cover; Roland had taught him that, constantly pointing what could be used to burn, impale, explode, maim, slash, and otherwise damage the human body. Roland had also explained what a table could be composed of and the depth needed to stop various caliber rounds when you flipped it up for cover. It had all been rather complicated and confusing but also intriguing, even for Doc, with all his PhDs. Roland was only good with certain numbers, but on those, he was worth listening to. He was an encyclopedia of calibers and armor and entry wounds and exit wounds and ricochet angles that would make the best quant on Wall Street run screaming to Hell’s Kitchen.
But it was Nada who’d said you can judge people by the surroundings they chose. Like the woman. The restaurant was too polished, meaning the food wasn’t going to be that great and neither was she. The food was going to be art, not sustenance, like some people.
“Doctor Ghatar,” the woman said, nodding her head in greeting, her expensive earrings glittering in the candlelight.
For a moment he wondered who she was referring to, then he realized she only had his last name from his sister. A name that was fading away from him with every year in the Nightstalkers.
“Yes. And you must be Gay.” He did not phrase it as a question, but the name got his mind going. Having a name that projected a mood meant you rarely lived in one. (Frasier, Ms. Jones’s one-eyed shrink, had told him that.) But still, Doc had to cut her some slack. Applying Nightstalkers’ templates to civilians might not be fair. For all he knew Gay could be a fun and lively person who was straightforward and down to earth and laughed off gentle criticisms and accepted compliments gracefully.
But he doubted it. She looked too perfect, like the restaurant. It was why Roland never went to those top-tier strip clubs. He said the women’s bodies were too perfect and that they’d cut you. Doc had never quite grasped that last part.
“You are as your sister said you were,” Gay said. She too was Indian. Despite their years in the States, his sister could not imagine marrying outside of the home country.
One part of Doc’s brain worked on trying to untwist the meaning in that statement while he evaluated the net worth she was covered with. He thought it ironic that people spent so much time and money on things in an attempt to show others who they were. She had perfect hair, expensive clothes, and a watch that cost more than his car. But one could buy all that with a loan, or from an ex-husband’s alimony. Or they could all be fake, which is the first conclusion he knew Nada would jump to, and then it really bothered him to be channeling Nada.
Real things that no one could take a loan on and buy seemed to have little value. Doc knew he was overthinking this, but the last mission, time running out, had brought him a bit too close to the black void. Like most who gazed over into that chasm, one tended to get a little introspective.
Or they were a psychopath and never thought of it again.
“As are you,” Doc finally replied.
“Do you have a first name?” she asked.
Doc lied.
“And what do you do for a living?” she asked. “Your sister was very vague.”
That’s because his sister had no clue. Doc told her a very elaborate lie, the same one he’d been telling ever since joining the Nightstalkers and getting his cover for status. Which was different than cover for action, Nada had patiently explained to him during his in-processing.
The good thing was there were no student loans tied to all the training the Nightstalkers had given him in tradecraft and fieldcraft.