Without saying a word, he walked over to Morgan and stopped inches in front of her. Her breath was hot on his chest.
He didn’t care if he was wrong. He swept her into his arms and kissed her.
When she returned the kiss so forcefully that she twisted him around and pushed him backward into the guest bedroom, he knew he was right.
FIFTY
The nine-hour flight from Lima left Tyler, Jess, and Fay exhausted, but at least they made it out of Peru before anyone discovered that they’d had a hand in destroying part of a major Nazca monument. Tyler dozed fitfully during the flight, preoccupied with speculation about where Colchev was headed.
Now that Fay had access to her insulin, she was feeling better, but the experiences of the last few days had drained her. Jess decided to get her a hotel room in LA, so when the plane landed, Tyler texted Grant to meet them at the airport Radisson.
The shuttle dropped them at the hotel lobby, where Tyler saw Grant and Morgan standing awkwardly next to each other.
Tyler clapped his friend on the back and said, “How are you doing?”
“We’re fine,” Grant said. “Well, Morgan’s not … she’s had a rough day. I’m trying to keep her spirits up.”
Tyler raised an eyebrow at Grant, who knew exactly what he was silently asking. Grant’s lightning-fast grin answered the question.
“We should find somewhere to talk,” Morgan said.
“I reserved a suite,” Jess said. “The living room should be big enough for all of us.”
After the quick check-in, they settled into seats around the coffee table. Even Fay stayed, despite Jess’s pleas to get some rest. It took them an hour to swap stories about Sydney, Rapa Nui, Peru, and Tijuana. Although they had whittled away at Colchev’s crew, he had bested them at every turn, and they were nowhere close to catching him.
Tyler ran his hands through his hair in frustration at trying to figure out Colchev’s ultimate goal. The Russian’s original plan had been to steal both the Killswitch and the xenobium in Australia. He not only was going to bring it back to the US, a risky proposition in any case, but he had a timetable to get it into the country in time for an attack to occur on July 25.
“Could this be related to money?” he asked Morgan.
“Anything’s possible,” she said. “If he’s playing the market, he could profit when an attack devastates stock prices.
“But why tomorrow?”
“Maybe he has to short sell by then,” Jess said.
“That means he created the short timeline for himself. That seems ambitious, even for him.”
“But what would be on Wisconsin Avenue?” Grant said.
“It does seem like an odd place to attack,” Morgan said. “I’ve looked over the satellite and street maps in detail. It’s far away from any of the critical government functions.”
“That doesn’t matter. Colchev has a huge amount of xenobium. Not only will the gamma rays kill everyone within miles, the EMP burst could take out every computer all the way to Baltimore, whatever street he detonates it on.”
“It sounds like we’re missing a vital piece of the puzzle,” Fay said. “Like when I didn’t know that the phrase the alien told me was Russian. If he was an alien, that is.”
Tyler grinned. That was the first time she conceded that perhaps what she experienced wasn’t a close encounter with a spaceman. He was impressed with her ability to change her mind, even after sixty-five years.
“Fay’s right,” Tyler said. “Bedova asked me if we’d heard the word ‘Icarus’ from Colchev’s men when they were in New Zealand. I bet that’s an important piece.”
“I have one possibility, though it doesn’t make sense,” Morgan said. “I couldn’t tell you before because our knowledge of it is classified. Sorry, but I was bound by law.”
“And now?” Grant said.
The corner of her mouth turned up. “I can’t screw up much more than I already have in the eyes of the OSI. Icarus is a Russian code name for a parachute.”
Jess looked at her dubiously. “A parachute that’s classified?”
“It was developed for their military space program. It allows them to bail out of a sub-orbital spacecraft and parachute back to earth from up to eighty miles high.”
Grant laughed. “You’re kidding. I’m pretty much a badass, but that sounds like an impossible stunt.”
“Maybe not,” Tyler said. “There was a US program called Excelsior in the late fifties. The Air Force was worried about pilots ejecting from the high altitudes that the U-2 flew at, so they designed a multi-stage parachute to prevent fatal spins. Icarus could be a Russian version of the same thing.”
“And you know about Excelsior how?” Jess said.
“My father was in the Air Force. He knows the guy who tested the chute, Joseph Kittinger — probably the gutsiest man in history.”
“Why?” Fay asked. “How did they test it?”
“They put Captain Kittinger, who was wearing a pressure suit, into a gondola attached to an enormous helium balloon, then let it float up to a hundred thousand feet.”
Grant whistled. “Almost twenty miles.”
“For all intents and purposes, he was in space. When he stepped off that ledge, it was like jumping into a satellite photo. He fell for four and a half minutes, still the record for longest parachute freefall.”
“And he lived?” Fay said.
Tyler nodded. “He not only survived, he earned a slew of medals for the mission and eventually became a colonel.”
“Fascinating, but what does this have to do with the Killswitch?” Jess said. “Does Colchev have one of these Icarus parachutes?”
“We don’t know,” Morgan said. “We can’t exactly check with the Russians to see if they’ve lost track of one. Besides, Icarus is a common reference. The boy with wax wings who flew too close to the sun and fell to Earth. You could do a Google search and get a thousand hits.”
“I doubt he’s going up in a balloon.”
“From Wisconsin Ave?” Grant said. “Not likely. Those things are gigantic.”
“If he did get it that high,” Tyler said, “the Killswitch would do a lot more damage.”
“Why?” Jess said.
“Because the EMP effect would be amplified by the magnetic flux in the ionosphere. Military planners have worried for years about a nuclear weapon detonated over the central United States. It could wipe out the entire country’s infrastructure. In an instant every machine in the US would go quiet.”
Jess gasped. “With all the computers and communications systems down, nobody would even know that Armageddon had arrived.”
With a faraway look, Morgan said, “‘And we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.’”
“Who said that?” Grant asked.
“George Eliot.”
“Who’s he?”
Morgan rolled her eyes. “She wrote Middlemarch, you illiterate dolt.”
“Hey, if you had said Curious George—”
“The question is,” Tyler said, trying to get them back on track, “how could Colchev deliver the Killswitch to that altitude?”
“Maybe he found the Roswell spaceship,” Fay said. When she saw the looks the rest of them gave her, she continued, “I’m just saying the Russians designed Icarus to be used with a spaceship, and I saw a spaceship at Roswell. That’s awfully coincidental if you ask me.”
Tyler chuckled. Maybe she wasn’t giving up on her fantasy.
Grant snorted. “Right, instead of a balloon, Colchev has a spaceship taking off from Wisconsin Ave.”
Tyler started to laugh, then stopped himself and sat bolt upright. A spaceship taking off from Wisconsin Ave. Something about that jogged Tyler’s memory.