She shook her head. “Absolutely not, I can’t put your men out.”
He held up a hand to stop her. “Normally, you’d get a stateroom, but we’re restricted to the hold in hopes of providing some separation between us and the crew.”
“You mean between the crew and anyone who had contact with me, Clarence and Doctor Feely.”
Klimas shrugged. “Tomato, tomahto. We’re in this together now. At any rate, the decision has been made — if you don’t sleep in the bunk room, it will sit empty.”
“Thank you, Commander. At least I know chivalry isn’t dead.”
His expression changed. For the first time, he looked uncomfortable.
“There’s one more thing,” he said.
Her eyes shot to his hip, to the holster there and the pistol in it. She hadn’t given it a second thought… until now.
“You have to test me, right?”
Klimas reached into a pocket of his fatigues and pulled out three white boxes. The number surprised her.
“Three?”
He nodded. “One for you, one for Levinson and one for me. All my men are testing every three hours. If you don’t mind, I’d like you to go first.”
He offered her one of the white boxes. She stared at it. There was only one door into the mission module; by standing between the beds, Klimas had blocked the only way out. If she tested positive, he would kill her.
But if she did see that red light, did she really want to live?
She reached out and took the box.
“Let’s get this over with,” she said.
Seconds later, she stared at the blinking yellow light. Slowing, slowing…
Green.
Klimas smiled. “Only twenty-three more or so to go, right?”
She ran through the math in her head. “Yeah, three days ought to do it. We’ll know by then.”
Margaret sagged back into the bed. She still felt exhausted — the unexpected moment of intense fight-or-flight response hadn’t helped.
Klimas opened another box, cleaned Levinson’s finger, then pressed the tester against it. Yellow, yellow, yellow…
Green.
“Two down,” he said. “My turn.”
“Maybe you should give me the gun.”
He opened his testing unit. “Don’t worry about that. If we see red, I step out that door and everything will be taken care of.”
Yellow… yellow… yellow…
Green.
He gathered the boxes and testing units like nothing unusual had just happened, like he was cleaning up after a late lunch.
“Margaret, you still look pretty beat. If you’d like to move to your bunk module, you could get more sleep.”
He held up another white box: this one full of small, circular Band-Aids.
She nodded. “Yeah, I’d like to get out of here.” She removed the IV, wiped up the drop of blood and applied one of the bandages.
“Lead the way, Paulius.”
He opened the door for her. She stepped out onto the deck. She was in some kind of a cargo hold, much smaller than what she’d seen on the Brashear. Other mission modules were lined up end to end along the hold wall.
Margaret noticed a SEAL standing about fifteen feet from the door she’d just walked out of. A young man, black. The name on his left breast read BOSH. He had a gun strapped to his chest, barrel angling down. She’d seen that weapon before, recognized it: an MP5.
He had both hands on the weapon. Bosh must have been the one who would have taken care of everything if Klimas had tested positive.
“Margaret?” Klimas said. “This way, please.”
She followed him toward a module. From the outside, they all looked the same. She cast a glance over her shoulder; Bosh was following, hands still on his weapon.
Margaret suddenly hoped the testing units were as accurate as Tim claimed — if her next test mistakenly returned a false-positive, she might not have time to ask for a second chance.
Klimas held a door open for her. As Margaret stepped in, she saw Bosh take up position outside the module. Inside were two sets of stacked bunks, gray blankets wrapped so tightly around the mattresses you could bounce a quarter off them.
“Take your pick,” Klimas said. “I’ll have that sandwich brought right out. Someone will check on you for your next test. Until then, I’ll ask that you stay in here.”
She nodded. He left, closed the door behind him.
Margaret sat on the first bunk. It seemed to pull her in, drag her down. With a U.S. Navy SEAL ready to execute her standing right outside, she fell asleep almost instantly.
PAY THE MAN
“It is necessary,” Bo Pan said. “We’ll take them one at a time.”
Steve Stanton could barely breathe. His head throbbed. He was already responsible for killing one man, at least — and now Bo Pan wanted to murder three more?
“No,” Steve said. “I won’t be a part of this.”
Bo Pan’s eyes narrowed. As always, the two of them were alone in the tiny stateroom. Bo Pan stood in front of the closed door. If Steve tried to force his way past, would he make it? Would the old man shoot him down?
“Steve, you have done your nation a great service, but our work is not over yet.”
Steve tried to speak with volume, with intensity, but his throat hurt, felt painfully scratchy — all that came out of his mouth was a cracking whisper, the voice of a boy rather than that of a man.
“We don’t have to kill them. They have no idea what’s going on. Just give them their money and they’ll leave.”
Bo Pan’s nostrils flared. He drew a breath, ready to give a lecture.
Steve spoke first. “If you kill them, I’ll tell.”
The words sounded petulant, childish, but it was all he could think to say.
Bo Pan’s head tilted forward until he stared out from under his bushy eyebrows.
The footage from the Platypus replayed over and over again in Steve’s thoughts. Not the low-res pictures taken every twenty seconds, but the full-speed, high-def footage stored on the machine’s internal drives. The dark footage of the man entering the Los Angeles’s nose cone, light beaming from a bulky suit that looked like it belonged to like a fat astronaut… the look of surprise on the diver’s face as the Platypus shot in, cut the umbilical cord and then snatched the small, black container… a brief instant of that expression shifting to horror as the snake curled around his bulbous helmet.
Steve hadn’t seen anything else, because the Platypus was already slithering quietly through the wreck, leaving the diver behind to die in an explosion of C-4 that likely blew the sub’s nose cone wide open.
That diver’s blood was on Steve’s hands.
He’d thought only of himself. He’d programmed what Bo Pan told him to program, because he’d just wanted to go home.
Bo Pan wanted more death: Steve would not allow that to happen, even if saying no meant dying himself.
Steve sat very still, wondering if he’d die right in this very room, among empty cans of Coke and crinkly bags of Doritos.
And then, Bo Pan’s face softened. The old man relaxed. He let out a sigh.
“As you wish,” he said. “We would not have achieved this without you, Steve. We will pay them, then we go on our way.”
Steve blinked. “You mean it?”
Again, the words of a child. He was in the middle of an international incident, had just defeated the U.S. Navy, was trying to stop the murder of three innocent men, and he sounded like a boy whose mother had just promised him a new toy.