A poke of white light from the back of the truck told her she’d miscalculated. They did have weapons, and they weren’t in the mood to bargain.
Melissa raised her submachine gun and fired back. The barrel of the MP-5 pushed up from the recoil harder than she’d anticipated, and the shots flew wild over the truck. She tucked the weapon tighter against her side. The road rose, then veered to the right; she shifted her weight, trying not to slow down around the curve. Tilting back, she saw the truck square ahead of her, fat between her handlebars and no more than thirty yards away.
She pressed her finger against the trigger. As she fired, the front of the bike began to turn to her right.
Starting to lose her balance, Melissa let go of the gun and grabbed the handlebar. But it was too late — she went over in a tumble, rolling around in the dust as a hail of bullets from the truck passed overhead.
Chapter 14
Jonathon Reid sat at the large conference table, staring at the gray wall in front of him. He was alone in the high-tech headquarters and command center.
The top of the wall began to glow blue.
“Open com channel to Ms. Stockard,” he said softly.
The rectangular window appeared in the middle of the wall. It expanded, widening until it covered about a third of the space. The outer portion of the wall darkened from gray to black. The interior window, meanwhile, turned deep blue, then morphed into an image of Breanna Stockard in a secure conference room in Dreamland.
She was alone, and she was frowning.
“Breanna,” said Reid. “Good morning again.”
“Jonathon, what’s really going out there in Africa?”
“I told you everything the director told me.”
“Nuri says there’s a lot more to the project than we’re being told.”
“I don’t doubt he’s right.”
“And?”
Reid said nothing. The Raven program was clearly an assassination mission, and clearly it involved top secret technology that the Agency had developed outside of its normal channels. But Harker hadn’t spelled any of this out; he had merely said the UAV must be recovered. All Reid had were guesses and suppositions, not facts.
“Jonathon, you’re not saying anything.”
“I know, Breanna. I don’t have more facts than I’ve shared.”
“Listen, the only way this is going to work is if we’re completely honest with each other.”
Reid nodded.
“Well?” prompted Breanna.
“Clearly, this is a CIA project that’s highly secret, and they don’t want to tell us any of the details,” he said. “And they haven’t.”
“I got that.”
Breanna and Reid had gotten along fairly well since the program began, despite the vast differences in the institutions they reported to, their backgrounds, and their ages. Cooperation between the military and the CIA was not always ideal in any event, and on a program such as Whiplash and the related MY-PID initiative, there was bound to be even greater conflict. But so far they had largely steered clear of the usual suspicions, let alone the attempts at empire building and turf wars that typically marred joint projects. Partly this was because they had so far kept the operation — and its staffing — to an absolute minimum. But it also had to do with their personal relationships. Reid, much older than Breanna, liked and admired her in an almost fatherly way, and she clearly respected him, often treating him with professional deference.
Not now, though. Right now she was angry with him, believing he was holding back.
“I can only guess at what they’re doing,” Reid told her. “I have no facts. I know exactly what you’re thinking, but they’ve put up barriers, and I can’t just simply whisk them away with a wave of my hand.”
“We need to know exactly what’s going on,” Breanna told him.
“Beyond what we already know? Why? We have to recover the UAV. It’s already been located.”
“What we don’t know may bite us.”
“Granted.”
“God, Jonathon, you’ve got to press them for more information.”
“I have.”
“Then I will.”
“I don’t know that that will work,” said Reid. “I have a call in to the director. I am trying.”
Reid could already guess what Herm Edmund was going to say — this is on a need to know basis, and you don’t need to know.
“Jonathon, I’ve always been up front with you,” said Breanna.
“And I’m being up front with you. It’s a UAV, it’s obviously an assassination program, though they’re not even saying that. Not to me, anyway.”
“If one of our people gets hurt because of something we should have known—”
“I feel exactly the same way.”
The window folded in on itself abruptly. Breanna had killed the transmission.
Reid sat back in his chair. One of the rock bed requirements of being a good CIA officer was that you stopped asking questions at a certain point. You stopped probing for information when it became clear you were not entitled to that information. Because knowing it might in fact endanger an operation, and the Agency.
On the other hand…
“Computer, show me the personnel file for Reginald Harker,” said Reid. “Same with Melissa Ilse. Unrestricted authorization Jonathon Reid. Access all databases and perform a cross-Agency search for those individuals, and all references to Raven. Discover related operations and references, with a confidence value of ten percent or above.”
“Working,” replied the computer.
Chapter 15
Melissa rolled in the dirt as the motorbike flew out from under her. She threw her arms up, trying to protect her face as the rear wheel spun toward her. A storm of pebbles splattered against her hands as the wheel caught in a rut; the bike tumbled back in the other direction.
Her shoulder hit a boulder at the side of the ditch. Her arm jolted from its socket and an intense wave of pain enveloped her body. Her head seemed to swim away from her.
My shoulder, she thought. Dislocated. Something torn.
I need the gun.
Get the gun.
Melissa pushed herself to her belly. Her eyes closed tight with the pain.
For a moment she thought she was still wearing the night goggles, and feared that the glass had embedded in her eyes, that she was blind. She reached with her left hand to pull them off, then realized she hadn’t had them on.
There was dirt in her eyes, but she could see.
Get the gun!
Her right arm hung off her body as she pushed herself to her knees. The bike was a few yards away, on the other side of the road. But where was her gun?
Melissa crawled onto the hard-packed dirt road, looking for the MP-5, then shifted her weight to rise to her knees. The pain seemed to weigh a hundred pounds, throwing off her balance.
Another wave of dizziness hit her as she got to her feet.
The gun! The gun!
Melissa turned back in the direction she’d taken. She started to trot, then saw a black object just off the shoulder on her left. After a few steps she realized it was just a shadow in the rocks. She stopped, turned to the right, and saw the gun lying in the middle of the road.
“The motorcycle has stopped following us,” the driver told Li Han.
Li Han twisted in the seat, looking behind them. The men in the back were clutching onto the wrecked aircraft, holding on for dear life as the truck flew over the washboard road.