He laughed, and she smiled. But she still wasn’t looking at him.
“But it’s not me. This isn’t me doing all this. Oh, I don’t mean it like I’ve lost my mind and I’m disassociating or anything. It’s more like there are two of me. There’s Julia Taggart, DVM, who comes home from work every night and eats fat-free frozen pasta and maybe stays awake long enough to watch some reality show about fashion designers. That woman could never do these things. But then there’s also a Julia who comes out only when she’s with you. When people are chasing us and I’m always worried one of us is going to get shot and everything is so much more intense. You’d think I would hate being that Julia. You’d think after the first time I would never want to be her again.”
“But… what? You like the adrenaline rush?”
“No. That doesn’t last,” she said. “What happens is — different. I change, somehow. I know you’re relying on me to be strong. To handle this. And so I do. I step up and I get a lot tougher all of a sudden. For a couple of days, I get to be a badass.”
He smiled. “That was what made me fall in love with you,” he said. “You were stronger than anybody I knew. I needed you to be that badass and you were.” Here it was. The little thought he’d been thinking ever since she kissed him back in her apartment. The secret, tiny hope he’d kept burning just in case.
The idea that maybe things weren’t over between them.
“This Julia, the badass Julia, is going to get herself killed someday,” she said. “She’s going to think she’s better at this stuff than she really is. And it’ll mean her death.”
“No,” he said, his heart sagging in his chest. “No, that won’t happen. I’d die before I let anyone hurt you.”
“That’s a promise you can’t make. Badass Julia wants to believe you. Julia Taggart, DVM, knows better. She wants to be at home where it’s safe and she has her own bed to sleep in, and she keeps reminding me — this isn’t going to last. Even if things do work out, even if we clear Angel’s name and somehow it’s safe to go back to Brooklyn… then it’ll just be over. I have to be careful making decisions right now.”
“Sure,” Chapel said.
“For instance, Badass Julia wants to just attack you right now. Pretend like we never broke up and make out with you right here in this stolen car. Because that’s the kind of thing Badass Julia would do. But of course, that’s a terrible idea. Just because something is exciting and reckless and—”
She turned her face to look at him and didn’t get to finish her thought.
The look in her eyes was one he remembered all too well. He hadn’t seen it in a long time. He leaned across the seat and she leaned into him and their lips met, hard enough that their teeth clicked together. That made them both laugh, but it didn’t make them stop kissing. He reached around behind her and pulled her close and she put her hands on his chest and his fingers sank into her hair and the smell of her, that incredible, intoxicating perfume filled his entire head. She broke away but just enough to kiss his jaw, his cheek, to bite his earlobe. God, he’d missed this. He leaned down to kiss her neck and he felt her tremble, felt her responding to his body, to his heat. He reached down with his good hand and cupped her breast through her thin shirt, felt the lacy outline of her bra and then her nipple, felt it harden under his thumb—
And then cold air slapped him across the face as she pulled away, wrenching her door open and stumbling out onto the asphalt and broken concrete. As his senses reeled and he tried to figure out what had just happened, he felt the car rock slightly. She was leaning up against it, breathing hard. Maybe a foot and a half away from him. But the moment was over. She might as well be on the far side of the moon.
He took a second to let his pulse slow down. Then he climbed out of the car on the driver’s side. “We need to get those license plates,” he said.
“Yeah. Definitely,” she said, and she rubbed at her mouth with the back of one hand. “I’ll take the back. You take the front.”
“Deal.”
The CQ-10 Snowgoose didn’t look like anybody’s idea of a drone. It had a stubby little body only nine feet long, ending in a single propeller, and no wings. It kept aloft by dangling from a broad white parachute that glittered in the moonlight. It didn’t move very quickly and it didn’t look like it carried any weapons that might hurt anybody. In fact, it wasn’t designed to be a weapons system at all. It had three square bays built into its side that could pop open and drop supplies — food, survival gear, blankets — to people who were, say, stuck in an avalanche or in the middle of a forest fire.
Due to an extremely unlikely error in its logistics chain, this one had been loaded with a different sort of cargo.
It passed over a power plant just outside of Oakland first, a busy gas-burning plant that provided San Francisco with much of its power. The Snowgoose bumbled along in the sky like a giant white bee, high up enough that no one could have seen it from the ground. One of its cargo boxes popped open and an object the size and shape of a hockey puck tumbled out, a hockey puck with its own tiny parachute. The Snowgoose didn’t even slow down — it had other places to be.
The hockey puck it had left behind drifted slowly down toward the power plant, bobbing this way or that on little gusts of wind. Just as it reached the height of the plant’s tallest smokestacks, the hockey puck exploded into millions and millions of pieces, just as it had been designed to do.
It was known technically as a BLU-114/B submunition, and it was designed for an extremely specific mission. Devices like it had been used over Serbia and Iraq, and they were sometimes called “soft bombs” because they were designed not to hurt human beings but only to cause damage to infrastructure. When it exploded, it sent all those tiny pieces of itself raining down across the power plant in a dense cloud that was sucked into the plant’s air intakes and ventilation systems. The pieces were each only a fraction of an inch thick, and they were quite harmless on their own — just strands of carbon fiber that fluttered through the plant, landing wherever they fell. Some happened to land on transformers or turbines and other pieces of high-voltage machinery. When they touched these machines, they glittered and sparked as they conducted electricity where it wasn’t supposed to go. In the space of seconds, hundreds of short circuits arced across the power plant, liberating enormous amounts of energy. Some of the transformers caught on fire. Every one of them touched by carbon fiber failed in a dramatic way. Around the plant alarms sounded and fire suppression systems switched on, only to stop almost instantly as they too were shorted out.
The plant’s turbines chugged to a stop. Its furnaces roared pointlessly in the dark as all of the incredibly complicated machinery just failed to function. Every light in the plant went out at once.
High above and far away now, the Snowgoose carried on its appointed rounds.
The loss of a single power plant would be a hardship for San Francisco, which sat on a peninsula and had relatively few connections to the larger power grid. But the blackouts that had plagued California in recent years had forced the municipal authorities to improve those connections, and even as the gas-burning plant went off-line, massive switching systems registered the drop in power and compensated by pulling electricity from other sources — from coal and nuclear plants around the state, from hydroelectric plants in Yosemite National Park. At this early hour, the city’s energy demands were at their lowest, and very few people in San Francisco, even those who were already awake, would notice anything more than a brief flicker in their lights.