Chapter Nineteen

Druid Hill Park, Baltimore, Maryland

Saturday, August 28, 10:31 A.M.

Time Remaining on Extinction Clock: 97 hours, 29 minutes

I was waiting by the exit for my ride when my phone rang. I looked at the screen. Grace. Normally that would make me smile, but I had a flash of panic wondering if something bad had happened to her.

“Hello?”

“Joe…,” she said, sounding on edge.

“Hey,” I said. “Eggs?” A coded query about scramblers.

“Of course, you sodding twit.”

“Nice language. You kiss the Prime Minister with that mouth?”

She told me to sod off, but she said it with a laugh. I breathed a sigh of relief.

Grace Courtland, an agent for the British government and now head of the Baltimore Regional Office of the DMS, was one-third my local boss, one-third a comrade in arms who had stood with me in several of the weirdest and most terrible battles since I’d started working for the G, and one-third my girlfriend-and if anyone has ever had a more interesting, complex, and smoking-hot girlfriend, I never heard about it. The relationship was not a public thing; we were trying to keep it off the public record, though we were both realistic enough to accept that we were working with about a hundred class-A trained observers, so our little clandestine fling was probably old news in the pipeline.

“I’m glad to hear your voice,” I said.

“Glad to hear you, too,” she said. “I had images of you in the back of an NSA car with a sodding black bag over your head.”

“It’s not for a lack of them trying. I hope you’re not calling with more bad news. I’m going to stop answering my phone.”

“Yes. I heard about your man Faraday,” she said. “Bloody awful, Joe. I’m so sorry.”

I knew she meant it. Grace had lost a lot of people in the years she’d been one of Church’s field commanders.

“Thanks.”

Grace was on semi-permanent loan to the DMS from Barrier, a group in the U.K. that was a model for rapid-response science-based threat groups like ours. Church had asked for her personally, and he usually got what he wanted.

“I have some updated info for you, though,” she said. “Jerry Spencer is at the crime scene now. Some of Mr. Church’s friends in Wilmington were able to float false credentials for him. He’s at Gilpin’s apartment and will call in as soon as the smoke clears.”

“That’s something.” I felt a flicker of relief. Jerry Spencer was a former D.C. cop who’d put in twenty-plus as a homicide dick before acting as DCPD’s contribution to the same Homeland Security task force I’d worked. He could work a crime scene like no one else I ever met, and there had been some talk about the FBI recruiting him away to teach at Quantico once Jerry finished his twenty-five with D.C., but the DMS got to him first and now he runs our crime lab.

“Grace, it’s nice to know that the DMS hasn’t been forced to completely close up shop today. I guess you already know about Denver?”

“Yes. I tried to get the go-ahead to take Alpha Team out there, but we’re buttoned up too tightly here. Church tells me that Top and Bunny are on their way out there and that you’ll be joining them.”

“Did he tell you about the friends of his who have been killed?”

“He mentioned it, but he hasn’t gone into details yet. He also said something about a video I’m supposed to watch when I get a moment. No idea what’s on it, but Church seemed pretty upset.”

I smiled at the thought. “Church? Upset? How can you tell?”

“His tie was ever so slightly askew. With him that’s a sign of the apocalypse. He’s the only bloke I know who would probably show up to his own autopsy in a freshly pressed suit and talk the doctor through the postmortem.”

“No joke. But, listen, do you have any idea what’s brewing? Church is being even more cryptic than usual.”

“He’s that way when he’s caught off-guard. He plays it close until he knows the shape of it and then he drops it all on us. If he’s stalling us that means he’s digging for information himself.” She paused. “I suspect, my dear, that your cynical mind is traveling on the same routes as mine.”

“Yep. We’ve had stuff come at us this way before. A bit here, a fragment there, and suddenly we’re ass deep in it. I hate this part of the job, Grace. I feel like someone’s lit a fuse and all we can see is a little smoke.”

“Too bloody right. Whatever this is, it’s tied to something stored at a facility in Denver, Russians are involved, and it has something to do with computer theft. Plus I got a faint whiff of the Cold War from something Church said. When he was telling me about the colleagues that had been killed he mentioned they were mostly from the U.K. and Germany, and that they worked together on projects in the early eighties.”

“Germany and Russia, the U.K. and America. You’re right, Cold War’s a good call,” I said. “I can’t wait to see this video. But more than that, I want to get into this game. I know it’s not the right way to look at it, but going to Denver feels like running away from this thing.”

“I know. And I feel like I’m locked in a cage.” She let out a breath. “So… how are you holding up, mate?”

“Oh, just peachy, babe.”

“ ‘Babe’?”

“Sorry. Major Babe.”

“Bloody Yanks,” she complained.

The realities of the moment couldn’t support jovial banter and it collapsed around us.

“It’s funny,” I said, “but there are always guys you think have some kind of Kevlar painted on them, guys that are never the ones to take a hit, and Big Bob had that in spades.” After my initial DMS mission had cut Echo Team in half, Big Bob had been the first new guy we signed on. Big Bob was affable, diligent, and though he could storm hell with the best of them, he had a gentle heart. My mind suddenly twitched when I realized that I’d already begun to categorize his virtues the way you do when someone dies. “He’s a fighter,” I said lamely.

“That he is.”

I saw a car approach and the driver flicked his lights on and off.

“My ride’s here. Got to go.”

“Me, too. I’ve got a bunch of NSA lads outside who have their knickers in a knot. I’d better go see if I can sort them out.”

“Take care of yourself, babe.”

“That’s Major Babe.”

“Yes, it is,” I said.

“Be careful, Joe,” she said, but before I could reply she’d hung up. It may have been her thick London accent, it may have been the distortion of the scrambled phone, or it may have been my own screwy emotions… but it almost sounded like she said, “Be careful, love.” I thought about it. Nah… she’d never let herself get into that kind of emotional quagmire. Not with a colleague.

Would she?

I closed the phone and closed my eyes for a moment, indulging in a memory of the last time I saw Grace. Yesterday morning as she left my bed. Tall and tan and fit, with extraordinary legs, lush curves, and eyes that could make me melt or instantly charge me with electricity. I’d never met anyone like her, and I counted my blessings every day that I had found her at all. It was a crying shame that we’d met as fellow officers in the ongoing war against terror, a war that had no end in sight. Wars are great breeding grounds for enduring love, but warriors should never allow themselves to fall in love. It made the risks that much worse.

I opened my eyes and watched the car approach, forcibly shifting my mind back to the crisis du jour.