His paranoia poked at him a few blocks later, when he came to an intersection blocked by police vehicles. Officially neutral like the city, the Tripoli police were generally considered pro-rebel, though you could never tell whose side they were on. And given Kharon’s situation, either could instantly decide he was their enemy.

But the police were investigating a routine traffic accident, and waved him past as he approached.

Kharon drove to the dense residential districts north of Third Ring Road. After making sure he wasn’t being followed, he pulled down an alley and raced toward a building at the far end. Reaching into his pocket, he took out a garage door opener and pressed the button in the middle. Then he hit the brakes, skidding under the thick branches of several trees as he turned into a bay whose door was just opening. He took the turn so hard that he had to steady himself with his foot on the cement floor, half crashing to a halt.

He jerked his head back and forth, making sure he was alone. Then he hopped away from the bike and went to the empty workbench a few feet away. Reaching under it, he found a key taped to the underside. He used it to open the circuit breaker box above the bench just as the door opener’s automatic lights turned off. With his fingers, he hunted until he found the switch at the very bottom of the panel. He threw it to off, and then, still in the dark, walked to the side of the room and found the light switch.

When the lights came on, he glanced to the right, looking for the red light connected to his security system. The light stayed off. No one had been inside since his last visit.

Kharon went to the door to the garage and opened it. He glanced around the small room, making sure it was empty. Then he went back outside to the garage and the power panel, turned the breaker back on, and went inside.

The garage was the side end of a small workshop used as a sewing factory some years before. All of the machinery had been removed, a perfect place for Kharon to set up shop had he wanted. But he had decided it could be too easily surrounded; he used it only as a temporary staging area.

Inside the large room, he retrieved a touchscreen computer hidden in a small compartment beneath the tile floor. He activated it, then used it to interface with the security system, running a second check to make sure it had not been compromised. Satisfied, he pulled a large duffel bag from the compartment, replaced the tile, and went back to the garage, where he put the CPU drives in the bag. Then he locked down the building and went out through a side door.

An hour later Kharon carried the duffel bag down the steps of a lab building at Tripoli University to the subbasement where the utilities were kept. He waited at the bottom of the stairs, listening to hear if anyone was following. Then he slipped a thin plastic shim into the doorjamb to get around the lock. He stepped into a corridor lined with large pipes. Closing the door, he found himself completely in the dark.

The confined space stoked his claustrophobia. His hand began to shake as he reached for the small flashlight in his pocket.

It’s nothing, he told himself. Nothing.

But that didn’t stop his hand from shaking. Kharon’s fingers finally found the light. He switched it on and played it across the space in front of him.

Breathe.

He took a step forward, then turned back and made sure the door was locked. Lifting the duffel onto his shoulder, he walked swiftly to the end of the hall, where he found a set of steps leading off to his right. He went down cautiously, one hand tight on the rail. Then he ducked under another set of large pipes and electrical conduits and walked through an open space to another door. This one led to a second hallway, lit by a dull yellow light at the far end.

There was a door near the light, guarded by a combination lock. Kharon pounded the numbers quickly, pushing inside as the lock snapped open. Still breathing hard, he reached for the two switches to the left. One killed the light outside; the other turned on a set of daylight fluorescents that lined the ceiling.

The light helped him relax. He was inside a hidden lab complex that was once part of the Libyan effort to build a nuclear weapon. It had been abandoned for years when Kharon stumbled upon it.

He walked through what had been a large security/reception area. There was a lab room at the far end, guarded by another coded lock. Inside, he found his two workstations in sleep mode just as he had left them.

After making sure that his security had not been breached, Kharon unpacked his boxes and began downloading the information from the hard drives into his native system. While the drives spun, he booted a third computer that was tied into the university’s mainframes. He used it to get onto the Internet and scan the news relating to Libya.

Most of the stories about the riot either hinted that it had been staged or said so outright.

Idiot government.

The commission had returned to Tripoli. They said all the right things—the accident had been inexcusable, the loss of life was horrible.

And the questions he had asked about the autonomous drones?

Not even mentioned. The reporters were too stupid to understand what was going on.

Frustrated, Kharon began scanning stories from several days before, looking to see if the tips he’d planted had borne fruit. Rubio’s name didn’t even come up in the stories related to the incident.

Kharon leaned his elbow on the bench in front of the keyboard. He put his chin against his hand, then bit his index finger. He bit it so hard and so long that when he finally let go, his finger was white.

Embarrass Rubeo? Ruin him?

Hardly.

He was going to have to just kill him and be done with it.

6

Sicily

Following their return to base and the formal debrief, Turk joined Shooter Squadron at their second ready room—the hotel lounge at the Sicilian Inn a few miles from the base. The seaside resort had been taken over by the allies, and the bar was filled with fliers from several member countries: Greece, France, a few Brits, and even some Germans. The pilots from Shooter Squadron commandeered a table on the terrace overlooking the beach and the sea. It was a brilliant night, with the stars twinkling and the moon so massive and yellow it looked as if it had been PhotoShopped in.

Grizzly and most of the others were still sick, but two pilots Turk had never met before came down to join them, Captain Frank Gordon from San Francisco, and the squadron’s junior pilot, Lieutenant Li Pike, a woman who had joined the Hog squadron just a few weeks before.

There was plenty of the usual joking around, but there was also a serious conversation on the rebel movement and the role of the allies as well. Pike, who had a degree in international relations, pointed out that this was the second time around for the allies—the first intervention, almost universally hailed when it ousted Gaddafi, had resulted in a terrible regime that was now itself being contested. In her opinion, intervention of any sort was futile; the locals should have been left to fend for themselves.

Paulson countered that just because things hadn’t worked out in the first place, there was no reason to give up—try, try again was more or less his motto.

“Ah, waste ’em all,” groused Beast, reaching for his beer. “Shoot ’em up and go home.”

“Do you really feel that way?” asked Pike. She had a sweet, almost innocent face—pretty, thought Turk.