21

ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, Captain Ryan Brock felt like shit as the helicopter he was in banked to the north to continue its trip back to Palm Springs. He was pretty sure he had taken more electricity in a sixty-second period than the entire power grid of the Eastern Seaboard. Four jolts in quick succession from a Taser set to maximum power wasn’t something he was eager to try again.

And now Steve Fuller was in his vision, projected in front of the lower part of his eye as a tiny image in the specialized glasses he was wearing under his headphones. Like bifocals, when he looked straight ahead his view was unobstructed, but when he shifted his eyes downward the tiny imagine of Fuller, only centimeters away, looked like it was projected on an eighty-inch screen made of air.

Big Brother? Very Big Brother, with a face the size of a car tire.

But even if Fuller’s face had been tiny, Brock would have no trouble telling that the man was not happy. Not happy at all. Probably worried about Brock’s health after the unfortunate Taser incident, he thought wryly to himself.

Fuller was in the back of a stretch limo, using a section of the lacquered bar as a table for his laptop, which showed Brock’s image and transmitted his own. Not unexpectedly, Fuller wasted no time on pleasantries. “Please tell me I’ve been misinformed,” he said icily, barely above a whisper. Brock had never known the man to explode or even raise his voice. It was when the opposite happened you knew you were in trouble. The quieter and colder his voice got, the more infuriated he was. If you had to lean forward to hear him, you weren’t going to enjoy the outcome. “Please tell me you didn’t lose everybody? Tell me that on the most critical mission you’ve ever led, with unlimited resources at your disposal, you and your teams didn’t go oh-for-three. Or was it oh-for-four? I may have lost count.”

Brock knew it was a rhetorical question, but he also knew it called for a response—and one that ignored the sarcasm of the question. “We were unsuccessful in all of our mission objectives,” he said simply.

“Let’s recap, shall we?” said Fuller, absently swirling a glass of unknown liquid in his right hand. “You let this girl, this Ph.D. student named Erin Palmer, escape from your men in San Diego. No, escape isn’t the right word. I think the word I’m looking for is overpower. She overpowered your men. And outmaneuvered them. She was playing chess and they were playing checkers. It was supposed to be the other way around.”

Brock fought to keep his face impassive. Yes, they had been outplayed at the heliport in San Diego, but their mission briefing had been woefully inadequate. Not just in describing the extent of Erin Palmer’s fighting skills but in the very nature of the assignment. It was presented to be as routine as a walk on the beach. She had agreed to an interview and was willingly, and happily, coming on board the helo.

But given the secrecy Fuller operated under, Brock rarely knew the reason for what he was asked to do. Which was just plain stupid. Why did Fuller have such a hard-on for this girl? Understanding what was going on, the bigger picture, helped a team understand the motivations of the people they were trailing or trying to capture, and enhanced their own motivations. It allowed them to anticipate the unexpected in many cases, or react better to it if they couldn’t anticipate it. Turning Brock into a pair of remote hands, without a brain, was crippling.

He had been told nothing other than Erin Palmer’s name, background as a scientist, and that she was not to be harmed. So when things changed, when the mission went to hell and the rug was pulled out from under, it would have been nice to know what the fuck was really going on. Otherwise, Fuller had to know the options open to Brock’s team had been limited to the point of being nonexistent.

“Then your team let her disappear in LA,” continued Fuller, still barely above a whisper. “Just disappear. You knew exactly where she landed—in real time. You had more people hunting for her than hunted for bin Laden. And she just slipped through like Houdini. This is a fucking grad student, not Carlos the fucking Jackal.”

Brock didn’t respond.

“So I make that oh-for-two. But that isn’t the end of the world, is it? Because we know exactly where she’s going to be. And we even learn that Drake is sending a surrogate to the meeting. We even get you deep background on the surrogate.”

The helicopter Brock was in banked again and continued cutting through the cloudless blue sky.

“And both of them got through your trap? Both of them?”

“Yes, sir. I’m afraid so.”

“You’re afraid so. What we need to find out is if she’s just that good, or if you’re just that bad. Did I not make it clear just how fucking important this was?” he whispered, and if Brock hadn’t turned the volume of his headphones to their maximum level, he couldn’t have begun to make this out. “I know I didn’t tell you why they were important. But am I given to fits of hyperbole? Do I seem the type to alarm easily? To cry wolf?”

Brock shook his head, but didn’t reply.

“How many men did you have on site at the student union?” asked Fuller.

“We had ten,” came the reply. Brock had almost said, “ten of my best,” but had stopped himself from walking into that particular verbal trap.

“Ten,” repeated Fuller. “And how many in direct visual contact with the targets?”

“One. Only me.”

“Only you. So what genius decided that would be a good idea?”

The question this time didn’t deserve a response. Fuller knew full well it was Brock’s operation and he had made this decision.

“This girl was already paranoid after what happened in San Diego,” said Brock. “And even having one person at the food court, big as it is, was a risk, as we found out. How conspicuous did we want to be? If there had been any way to blend in, we’d have had five men in direct visual contact.”

Brock was still convinced he had made the right decision. All of his men had that mercenary, Special Forces, stick-out-like-a-neon-sore-thumb look to them. Not the old professor look, and not the look of an undergrad only a few years removed from the acne phase of life.

“As it was,” continued Brock, “they had no trouble picking me out of the hundreds of people in the food court. They came to me straight as an arrow.” He paused. “But even so, this should have worked. Even when they took me out. There are a number of exits from where they were, the literal heart of the student union, but I had men on all of them, so they couldn’t slip through.”

“Wow,” said Fuller sarcastically, “you and I must not have the same definition of the word couldn’t. Any guesses how they did, in fact, slip through?”

Brock and his team had easily been able to piece together their quarry’s strategy after the fact, once every muscle in his body wasn’t paralyzed from taking a million fucking volts. They had incapacitated him in a way they knew would draw gawkers, not to mention emergency personnel, to the food court area. They had timed their assault right after classes had let out all over the university, when there was a dramatic upsurge in movement in and out. And they must have changed clothing and disguised themselves, blending in with the crowd.

After Brock explained to Fuller how they had escaped, he added, “I know she’s supposed to be an amateur, but she seems to be a natural. Or else she’s had training of which we weren’t aware.”

“She hasn’t,” said Fuller simply.

“How can you be absolutely sure?”

“Haven’t you been listening? This woman is now the most important woman in existence. I’ve pulled out all the stops in the past few days learning about her. I’ve climbed up her ass with a microscope. I know what fucking condiments she puts on her cheeseburger. Every movie she’s seen in the past twenty years. And I am absolutely certain that, while she has some martial arts training, she has absolutely zero experience.”