“What about the last post? Did you get anything on it?”
Dewey scratched at his goatee. “It’s weird, Karen. It’s like two entirely different groups of people.”
“Maybe it is,” Karen said. “What did you find?”
“It came from Dallas.” He handed her a piece of paper. “There’s the address. It’s a Frontier cable modem registered to a middle-aged couple named Fancher. I hacked their router. What a piece of junk. Did you know that the old Linksys firmware—”
“Get to the point, Dewey.”
“Geez. Don’t you care about the details? Anyway, I put a sniffer on their router. It’s serving out IPs to a handful of devices.”
“A couple of devices? Like what?”
“A couple of Kindles. Two Dell computers that keep trying to phone back to Dell.com. There’s also traffic from a Linux server. That’s your target.”
Karen sighed. “Do you think the Fanchers are behind this?”
Dewey chuckled. “Based on their Facebook pages, they aren’t tech people. No, someone hacked their WAP. It could be anyone within a few blocks, unless they are using an external antenna. I’ve got a really cool design for a Yagi antenna that can intercept a WAP signal from twenty miles away.”
“You’re telling me that it could be anywhere within a twenty-mile radius of this address?” Karen asked, shaking the paper in her hand.
“Well, that’s unlikely,” Dewey conceded. “But I’d extend the search to at least a five-mile radius.”
“This is good work.”
“Not really,” Dewey said. “It’ll be good work when I track back the last release. Hey, did you look through it? I mean really look through it?”
“What? Why do you ask?”
Dewey frowned. “You’re in it. You and Brad.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Karen and Brad Kincaid. Aren’t those your cover names?”
“Yes,” Karen said. “I guess I hadn’t gotten that far yet.”
“It listed your apartment in Las Vegas,” Dewey said. “Didn’t you see that?”
“There were over one thousand names on that list,” Karen said. “I’ve been too busy—”
Dewey blinked and said, “People know where you live.”
With all the excitement, she had yet to analyze the entire list, but the realization finally sank in. “I can’t go back. Oh my God, I can’t go back.”
“What about your stuff?” Dewey asked.
“I’ll have to leave it. I’ve got to call Brad.”
“Isn’t he on deployment in Iraq?”
“Yes,” Karen said. “How am I going to tell him?”
“Just tell him that someone figured out your secret OTM cover identity and that there’s no telling who might be watching your apartment.”
She felt sick to her stomach. “My wedding dress is in our apartment.”
“At least you have a cover identity,” Dewey said.
She blinked. She was so panicked, she had forgotten that Dewey might have his own concerns. “You’re safe, Dewey. No one can reach you down here.”
Dewey nodded. “Yeah. Great. I’m going to find that last data leak. I promise.”
“Thanks, Dewey.”
She left him to his work and returned to the War Room. Once inside, she searched for Todd Clark. Huell, the sergeant on duty, told her that Clark had just left, and she bit her tongue.
The phone call with Eric is going to be hard enough.
Fulton Smith opened his eyes and saw Hobert leaning forward on a chair next to Smith’s bed. “What are you doing here, Hob?”
“You’re sick,” Barnwell said. “Don’t you remember?”
Smith vaguely remembered an old man reading a newspaper, but there was a blank space in his memories, and no matter how hard he concentrated, nothing else emerged from the fog. “I’m sick?”
Barnwell frowned. “You’re very sick. We’ve pushed you too far, and now you’re suffering disastrous consequences. What we’ve done is… abnormal.”
Smith squinted at him. “I don’t understand.”
“Your brain,” Barnwell said. “There is a massive buildup of tau levels. We see new lesions that weren’t there just a week ago. I’m afraid the drugs and the brain implant are accelerating your decline.”
Smith licked his papery-dry lips. “Tau?”
Barnwell took Smith’s hand in his and squeezed. “I’m so sorry, Fulton. I never should have agreed to this.”
“Am I dying?”
Barnwell squeezed harder. “If we had more time, maybe we could devise a therapy—”
“I’m dying,” Smith mumbled. He regarded his best friend and found Barnwell’s face old, and strange, and terrifyingly alien. “Where are we?”
Barnwell’s eyes teared up. “Area 51.”
Smith looked around at the room’s featureless gray walls. “Oh. Is Nancy here?”
“She’s gone with Eric to bring Alexandra back.”
Alexandra was his secretary and his lover. She was a beautiful young woman, and he was entering middle-age, but when he saw her at her desk, his mind wandered to thoughts and feelings long since buried. “Alex is coming? Where has she been?”
“Don’t worry,” Barnwell said. “Eric will keep her safe. He’s everything we had hoped for.”
“Eric?” Smith asked, rolling the name around on the tip of his tongue.
“Eric Wise,” Barnwell said.
Smith blinked. “Bill’s son? But he’s just a boy.”
“He’s a grown man,” Barnwell said. “He’s the director now.”
Smith struggled to sit up, but his muscles weren’t working right. “I can’t… I don’t…”
“We recruited him,” Barnwell said. “He’s a fine soldier and a good man. He’ll handle everything.”
“But… I’m the director,” Smith said. He remembered going to Washington to speak with the hard-as-nails man from Missouri, and hearing the devastating news that his brother, Emory, had died in a firefight in Korea. He was scared that he might die there, too. The man had asked him to do something important. “The president. He asked me. I’ve got to…”
“You did,” Barnwell said. “You saved the world so many times I’ve lost count. You’ve been my best friend, Fulton. Even when I was a drunk. Even when I’d lost all faith in myself. You saved me. I just wish I could have saved you.”
Smith patted Barnwell on the hand. “Hob? Did we get old?”
Barnwell was crying. “It just happened. I was hoping we had a few more days so you could finally see Alexandra and Nancy together, but at the rate you’re—”
“Alex is in danger,” Smith said. “She wasn’t supposed to have a daughter.”
“I know,” Barnwell said. “She’s been in hiding. It’s okay. Eric will protect her.”
Smith tried to picture his daughter, but it was another dark hole. Finally, he remembered her face. She was no more than fifteen or sixteen, listening in fascination as a man explained the instrument panel of the training aircraft. It was his gift to her on her birthday.
He shook his head. “I have a daughter. Her name is…”
The name was on the tip of his tongue, but the harder he concentrated, the weaker he felt. He looked up at the face of his best friend, a face he barely recognized. “I don’t understand what’s happening, Hob. Where am I? I want to go home.”
Barnwell’s chest shook as he sobbed. “You are home.”