“Evolutionary biology,” she said. “The science of how creatures change. Adapt.”
Doug nodded thoughtfully. “You mean, like… how a man changes when he meets an attractive woman?”
Casey grinned. Someone who knew her well would have known to take a few steps back at the sight of that grin.
“It’s funny, you know? Darwin thought it was about agility, intelligence… but nowadays? You just have to be a rich, fat, white guy.”
“I…” Doug started, and then he blinked, as if realizing for the first time that maybe his presumed charms were not working on her. “What?”
“Now, drop a CEO into the Serengeti? Only question is, what color animal shits him out twenty-four hours later? The Serengeti, probably be a jackal… reddish tan. Jackals? Eat fuckin’ anything.”
Doug visibly gulped. She saw his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed.
“Um, I don’t wanna hold you up, so…” he murmured, and then he bolted, labradoodle hurrying to keep pace with him.
Casey watched him go, reaching into her jacket to fish out a silver flask. She opened it and took a swig.
“Doctor Brackett?”
Casey turned to see three men in dark business suits regarding her. They stood tall, not exactly ready for a fight, but ready for trouble. Immediately she thought of federal agents. Or somebody’s expensive bodyguards. Then she spotted the fancy sedan idling at the curb and the government license plate on the back, and she knew her first guess had been on the mark.
“I understand you enjoy stargazing,” said the agent who’d spoken.
Casey flinched. Her thoughts flickered. She’d heard the words before, but never expected to hear them again.
“My men will take care of your dogs,” the lead agent said. “Would you come with me, please?”
Rattled, and hating to show it, she let them take her paperwork and the leashes she’d been holding, and then allowed them to lead her to the sedan.
Moments later, she was climbing into the back of the car, glancing out the window at her dogs as the car pulled away.
“Dog person, huh?” the agent said.
Casey took a breath, trying to settle down. “They don’t judge you. They don’t lie. No hidden agendas. Love you or tear your throat out. I kind of have to respect that.”
The agent handed her a file. “How are you with higher forms of life?”
“I wasn’t aware there were any,” she replied, trying to keep her shit together.
The file bore the eagle-and-shield insignia of the Central Intelligence Agency. Casey opened it and studied the top sheet:
Classified: Project: Stargazer
Memorandum for Cleared Personnel
Subject: Class 4 Incursion—Monterrey, Mexico
Casey frowned. Her throat went dry as she flipped through the file. An eight-by-ten photo of someone named Quinn McKenna was the first in a series of photos. She saw a debris field and her heart raced with excitement. The next photo showed what appeared to be a spacecraft, not very large, surely not capable of interstellar travel. Some kind of sub-transport vessel, ship to ship? Ship to surface?
Then she flipped to the next photo and her heart froze in her chest. She sucked in a sharp breath, unable to process for a few seconds. This was a satellite photo, shot through the upper limbs of trees. No spacecraft debris in this photo. No charred spacecraft.
The picture was blurry, but she knew what she was looking at.
A humanoid figure. Whatever had been inside that spacecraft.
Casey Brackett forgot all about her dogs.
5
There were no windows, unless you counted the one-way mirror on the far wall, and McKenna didn’t. It amused him to think that anyone still bothered with such antiquated interview techniques. Anyone who’d seen a movie or television show in the past fifty years would know that someone lurked unseen beyond that reflective surface, watching in silence, evaluating both the person being interviewed and those doing the interviewing.
The floor and walls trembled, and McKenna could both hear and feel the rumble of thunder outside. The storm had already been going on when he’d been brought into this room, but in the past few minutes the thunder had grown much stronger. He couldn’t hear the rain or see the lightning, but he imagined they must both be ferocious. A shame. He loved to see lightning burning inside storm clouds, and to watch it lance down from the sky. As a boy, he’d fallen in love with mythology—tales from various pantheons—and when he heard thunder roll or saw lightning flash, he still thought of Zeus and Thor and Hephaestus and so many others.
But the room had no windows, so he had to focus on these assholes instead.
“Tell me about the mission,” said the man in the ugly tie, who sat across from him at the table.
McKenna, now wearing an orange jumpsuit, stared at him, and then glanced at the two other people in the room. One of them, he guessed, was a psychologist of some kind. The other was the polygraph tech, who had hooked McKenna up to the machine with the detachment of a gravedigger.
They’d already been through all the baseline questions, asking him his name and date of birth, that sort of thing, to establish what the machine would do when he lied versus when he told the truth. The tech reminded him of another tech, years earlier. McKenna’s wife had been sixteen weeks pregnant and he’d taken her for an ultrasound. They’d been debating whether they wanted to know the sex when the tech glanced up, face flat and emotionless, and said at the moment she was just looking for a heartbeat. The callous bitch hadn’t found one.
McKenna laced his hands together and leaned forward. “It was a rescue op. Couple of DEA agents had their covers blown. They were being taken to the head of the cartel.”
He couldn’t help feeling he was going through the motions here. He knew all of this would be in the file that these guys would have read before coming into the room. The US government had spent many hours and a vast amount of money trying to punch holes in the drug cartels, but had still never gotten serious enough to do any lasting damage. The cartels were like the legendary Hydra—cut off one head and two more would grow in its place. The truth was, too much money was on the table, and too much cash found its way into the pockets of government officials and corporate overlords in Mexico, the US, Central America, and South America for the problem to ever go away.
“I see,” Ugly Tie said primly. “You were instructed to kill him?”
McKenna controlled himself with an effort. “No, I was instructed to offer him a selection of donuts.”
The psychologist stared at him. Adjusted the ugly tie.
McKenna indicated the blood pressure cuff on his arm. “What’s with the polygraph? I thought this was a psych eval.”
“We need to know if you pose a threat.”
“I’m a sniper. Isn’t posing a threat kind of the fucking point?” He left off the word dumbass, but it was definitely implied.
“I meant to the general public… to yourself,” Ugly Tie replied.
McKenna sighed.
Behind the one-way glass, Traeger stood with his arms crossed. From the moment he’d confronted McKenna, he had known the guy was going to be a problem. Quinn McKenna had the same hardass quality that Traeger had seen in hundreds of military men, but the guy also had a brain. Not to say that the average soldier or sailor or Marine was a moron, but most of them had been trained to follow orders and that tended to carve grooves into their behavior patterns. They didn’t usually study the shadows or the angles too deeply.