Damn, damn job.
“We did not contain,” Moms summed up the “Clusterfrak at the Gateway,” as the team had designated the mission. Moms had a couple of broken ribs, making any deep breath difficult. According to Doc, it would be especially painful if she laughed, but she hadn’t laughed since the Snake went down and didn’t see much laughter on the horizon. It was early morning at the Ranch, but underground, time often meant little. They’d been flown back from St. Louis, landing at Groom Lake instead of the Barn, since the Snake was out of commission, and driven back here, a rather unhappy group.
No singing, no Roland in the gun turret of the Humvee.
Ms. Jones was actually seated at her desk, making the journey from her hospital bed in the suite behind her office with the assistance of Pitr, her right-hand man. She looked like a wreck of an old woman, hunched over, emaciated, an IV in each arm, because she was a wreck of an old woman. When she spoke, her voice held the Russian accent of her childhood and early adulthood.
“It is worse than that,” Ms. Jones said. She gestured with a bony finger at a display for Moms and Nada to watch. They were in Ms. Jones’s office, the rest of the Nightstalkers in the team room beyond the flimsy door separating them. The team could hear everything that was said, a deliberate ploy on Ms. Jones’s part to make them feel there were no secrets, which, Eagle often reminded them, was the very definition of irony since they were so far in the dark, they might have been at the heart of a black hole.
The screen flickered and then showed the highway coming out of St. Louis. “From the nose camera of the Snake,” Ms. Jones said.
Headlights flared as the Prius came down the road.
“Pitr,” Ms. Jones said, and her assistant paused the display. “Observe,” she said to Moms and Nada as Pitr magnified the view. The windshield of the Prius expanded and then they could see the face of the driver.
“We also received positive identification of the carjacker from the owner of the Prius,” Ms. Jones said.
“Fuck me to tears,” Nada said, giving up on the Battlestar Galactica verbiage. He even threw protocol out the window as he announced loud enough for the team in the other room to hear: “It’s Burns. He’s back.”
“That was a test,” Ivar said, a statement, not a question. The sun had cleared the horizon and was sending long fingers of light across the desert floor.
It was almost pretty.
For such a desolate place.
“Good.” Orlando nodded. “Scientists always want to know why. Why this? Why that? And that’s great, brought us indoor plumbing, because some scientists way back when figured out shit flows downhill. Fucking geniuses, they were. But they still don’t know exactly how gravity works, do they?”
That stirred the scientist in Ivar. “Well. Sort of. There are theories and all great science starts from a theory. Nobody has directly observed them, but we believe gravitons exist and they act like photons, except instead of carrying light, they carry gravity.”
“Right. A theory. Theories get you killed.”
Ivar was not deterred. He might shoot at nothing, but science wasn’t nothing. “Einstein defined the space-time continuum, which is a theory, and it’s worked pretty well so far. And gravity is a product of that theory.”
“But you’re not sure.”
“We don’t know everything. When we finally break out the unified theory, we’ll understand gravity like we understand electromagnetism. Let me ask you something. Do you know how your cell phone works?”
“I know how my weapon works,” Orlando said. “And you know how yours works. On an op, the big thing is you get an order to do something, you do it. You don’t ask why. You don’t bring up whether it makes sense. I coulda had you shooting Harvey out there. You know who Harvey is?”
“No.”
Orlando sighed. “Jimmy Stewart? Big rabbit no one else can see?”
Ivar shook his head.
“You might be a scientist, but you don’t know a lot of important shit. I miss Eagle.”
“We can—” Nada began, but a flutter of Ms. Jones’s hand silenced him.
“We have a potential team member coming in. If he accepts, we will name him. It’s the tradition.”
Nada wasn’t sidetracked. “Burns is—”
Once more, this time just a lift of a finger, and Nada’s mouth snapped shut. He glanced at Moms and she shook her head ever so slightly. Everything was off, out of step. They’d lost containment. They’d lost the Snake. Burns was back, from wherever it was that was the other side of a Rift. If that thing in the Prius was even Burns.
“The scientist was named Melissa Eden,” Ms. Jones said. “The initial check on her body indicates she received a fatal dose of radiation prior to expiring. So she was dead regardless. The bullets saved her some misery.”
“I’ll be glad to save Burns some misery,” Nada said. “We can—”
“Please let me in-brief the new team member,” Ms. Jones said, and the weariness in her voice was palpable. “And, before that, I must make a call to determine our next step. Go upstairs and welcome our arrival. Colonel Orlando is almost here.”
She took a deep rattling breath. “You should also know that we pulled video surveillance from cameras in the area. As best the Acmes can determine, the only thing that came out of the Rift was Burns. No sign of Fireflies, so this is a very different situation. Thus it must be handled differently.”
Nada blinked in surprise and glanced at Moms as he got to his feet. They all knew Ms. Jones reported to someone, but she’d never been so open about it. She’d never outright said she had to defer a decision to someone else.
Moms and Nada quickly left the office, Nada carefully shutting the flimsy door behind them, Moms with a finger on her lips to keep the team from exploding in fury over Burns’s return.
CHAPTER 4
Somewhere near Knoxville, Tennessee. That was all Blake had as far as an indication of who had sent the text. The code that went with this particular number indicated a path for the message to be passed. A path that consisted of five cutouts.
Blake stared at the screen of his laptop. He’d never heard of using five cutouts. One was usually sufficient since the very definition of a cutout was someone who knew both sides, but the two sides didn’t know each other. Thus the cutout was expendable and once expended, both sides were safe. Five meant whoever had set up this commo line was being extra, extra, extra, extra careful. Some paranoid son of a bitch, which defined a lot of people Blake had worked with over the years.
In this case, Blake didn’t know either side other than the message received and the mode by which he was to forward the message.
Which meant there was more to this than simply keeping it secure. It had to be a heads-up for each cutout along the way.
Regardless, he had a duty to perform and he knew the immediate task wasn’t going to be pleasant.
He missed the pool, he missed the young mother, and he even missed his grandchildren as he headed out to his truck.
“Fancy digs,” Ivar said as they passed a plywood sign with NO TRESPASS: WE WILL SHOOT YOUR ASS spray-painted on it along with a skull and crossbones. “I assume someone would indeed shoot my ass if I wasn’t supposed to be here.”
Again not a question, so Orlando didn’t respond. They’d left the tar road a minute ago and were rattling down a dirt road toward what appeared to be a deserted filling station, which Ivar assumed was anything but deserted.