And her blunt response: I am.
Lincoln is not the only one hunting Shaw. Someone with deep links within the global intelligence community is interested. Someone with the resources to engineer a police roadblock.
Their detention was brief, just overnight. Not even long enough to make them miss their plane. But if they didn’t have the State Department to vouch for them? If they didn’t have a backstory that let them threaten a public relations nightmare? They might have been held up for days.
Just the idea of the delay eats at her.
Shaw has been invisible for eight years, but now the existence of “the American” is revealed. A survivor of the Rogue Lightning mission. A witness to events that have been, until now, successfully concealed.
Finding Shaw has become time-critical.
True needs to reach him before the opposition does. She needs to know what he knows—what went wrong on that mission, why he and Diego were abandoned in Nungsan, why he never came home.
It chills her soul to think that whoever condemned Diego might still be in a position of power, able and willing to trade the lives of good, brave soldiers just to protect their own welfare. More than Shaw, that person needs to be brought into the light.
Phones and tablets chime: a bright chorus of simultaneous beeps. True stops pacing, checks her screen to find a message from the airline. Their flight is delayed due to the crew’s late arrival last night. Departure has been pushed back six hours.
Lincoln gets up, grabs his pack. “There’s an earlier flight to Los Angeles,” he tells her. “I’m going to find a gate agent. See if we can get on that.”
She nods, casting her gaze over Alex and Miles, still asleep.
A new thought stirs: Why go back at all?
They aren’t going to find Shaw in Seattle or anywhere in North America.
Curious to know what options might be available, she connects to the airport’s website, pulls up the departures schedule, and finds flights leaving for all over the world.
Alex wakes up. She tells him about the flight delay. “Lincoln’s trying to get us on an earlier flight.”
Half an hour later Lincoln returns, the slight lift at the corner of his mouth hinting at cautious optimism. “We’re on a standby list for the Los Angeles flight, leaving in fifty minutes. The agent thinks we’ll get seats, but we won’t be together.”
Alex turns a tired gaze on True.
She shrugs. “That’s all right. We’ll be sleeping anyway.” She wakes up Miles and they walk to a new gate, this one packed with milling passengers. Kids scamper among the bags and backpacks and the buzz of a hundred conversations in Tagalog and English. The odors of coffee and damp carpet are thick in the air.
There are no empty seats, so they retreat, taking up a position at the edge of crowd, but still close enough to hear the gate agent’s announcements.
Lincoln’s tablet chimes with an incoming call. True turns an idle gaze on him, but her interest picks up when he says, “It’s Tamara.”
“Put her on speaker,” True says.
He taps the screen. They cluster around. “We’re all here listening,” he tells Tamara. “Me, True, Alex, Miles.”
Tamara has heard about their adventures from Chris. She’s full of questions, almost breathless with worry and relief. It takes several minutes for her to get to the point, but finally she tells them, “I got the lab results back on those filters we recovered from the crashed Arkinson. The analysis looked at mineral dust as well as microbiota. No surprise, it indicates low-altitude flight in the TEZ. But pollen in the filters points much farther west. Best guess: that Arkinson was last serviced near the western reach of the Atlas Mountains.”
True shuffles through her knowledge of geography. “So that would put it in—”
She meant to say Morocco, but she’s interrupted by interference in the call—a muted background roar—then Tamara, her voice pitched high, “Jesus, what was that? It sounded like an explosion.”
“What?” Lincoln asks. “Where?”
“I don’t know! I’m in the Robotics Center. I think it was up at headquarters. Hold on. I’m checking security feeds.” Her voice is shaking. Then it gets whispery. “Oh God. Lobby cameras are out. Front door cameras are out. Oh… I see it now. Lincoln, it’s the front gate. The security gate. Two cars are burning. I’ve got to go up there. I’ve got to see if I can help.”
“No!” Lincoln says, sharply enough that heads turn in their direction. He lowers his voice to a gruff whisper. “Stay where you are. There could be a second bomb. Wait for the police—”
“No, I’m going. Someone could be hurt.” She’s breathing hard. It sounds like she’s running. “Lincoln, come home.”
“I am. I’m coming.”
“We need you,” she insists as if he said nothing.
“I’m coming,” he repeats.
The call ends.
Lincoln immediately puts another call through, this time to Chris. It’s the middle of the afternoon at home. A weekday. Everyone should be in, at work somewhere on the ReqOps campus. There should be a class in session.
Chris doesn’t answer. Neither does Jameson. He finally gets Hayden on the phone. The kid sounds shaky but coherent. “It was a car bomb at the front gate. We’re on lockdown.”
“Tamara’s with you?”
“Yeah. Chris did a roll call. None of the clients are hurt.”
“And our people?”
He hesitates. “Everybody was down at the range except me and… and Renata. She was in the city, talking to potential clients.”
“You’ve been in touch with her?”
“No. She’s not answering her phone.”
Two cars, burning at the front gate.
True feels Alex’s arm encircle her waist. His calm proximity is a shield, a brace against the crushing pressure of grim expectation.
“Find Chris,” Lincoln says. “Tell him to call.”
They hear nothing for an anxious ten minutes—then all their tablets chime. True is sure it’s a group message from Chris—but she’s wrong. It’s their seat assignments for the Los Angeles flight.
They’re in line to board when Chris finally calls. “Hold on a second,” Lincoln growls into the tiny mic. He leaves the boarding line. True follows. So do Alex and Miles. They huddle in an empty corner while the other passengers continue to file onto the plane. Lincoln shifts the call from his TINSL to the tablet’s speaker. He tells Chris, “Report.”
Chris’s voice is flat, hard. “They must have followed Renata’s car back here. They used another vehicle to trap her at the security gate. She was their target, Lincoln. That’s what their message said. A combat pilot. Fair game. It was that interview she did. It made her the public face of the mission.”
“What is her status?” Lincoln demands in a hoarse whisper.
“She’s dead.”
True reaches for Alex, returning to the comfort of his embrace. Miles swears softly. Lincoln pushes on. “Any other casualties?” he asks Chris.
“No. The second car was empty. The gate’s destroyed, of course, and at least twelve parked cars have been damaged, but there’s no structural damage to the building. Police are outside. FBI are on the way. Lincoln, I’ve got to go.”
But Lincoln has another question. “Who signed the message?”
“Al-Furat.”
Hussam’s organization, supposedly taken over by his brother, Rihab. For True, this is a glimmer of good news. She leans in, wanting to be sure. “Not Variant Forces?” she asks.
“You think there’s a difference?” Lincoln snaps.
She turns to him, guarded, cautious in the face of his anger. She would like to believe that there is a difference, that this was not Shaw’s doing—but she answers him honestly: “I don’t know.”