James Rollins - THE DEVIL COLONY

"I better stick close," she said, heading inside. "In case my uncle calls..."

It was a lame excuse, even to her own ears, but he didn't call her on it, which made it that much harder to turn her back on him and head inside. Still, she glanced over a shoulder, staring at Jordan as he stood silhouetted against the morning's brightness. She couldn't help but compare him to Chay, whose fierce activism was all too often blunted by peyote, mushrooms, or weed. Though she'd known Jordan for less than an hour, there was something purer and more honest about his tribal pride, the way he doted on and supported his grandfather, the way he listened patiently to Iris's teachings.

Seeming to sense her attention, he began to swing around. She hurried away, bumping into the table, almost knocking over a tray of cooling pi on nuts. She headed to the back room, needing some privacy.

She stood in the darkness and covered her burning cheeks with her palms. What am I doing?

Across the room, the closed laptop's idle button glowed like a green cat's eye in the dark. Painter had left the satellite hookup and one of his linked sat-phones, in case he needed to reach them. She was thankful for that.

Needing something to distract her, she crossed to the desk, sat down, and opened the laptop. She feared seeing a second note from John Hawkes, but she had to check. She called up her e-mail account, and after an interminable wait, saw she had no new mail. She reached to close the laptop, but her eyes drifted to the saved note from WAHYA's founder. Scrunching up her face in determination, she opened it again. She wanted to read it once more, maybe as some sort of punishment, maybe to see if it was as bad as she remembered.

As she read it again, she felt no despair as she had felt last time-instead, anger slowly built with each line. Already bitter from Painter's abandonment, she recognized that John Hawkes was trying to do the same. To shuck her off when there was the least bit of trouble.

After all I did... all I risked...

Before she could think otherwise, she hit the reply button. She didn't intend to send the response. She just needed to vent, to get it off her chest. She typed rapidly, unloading her fury through her fingertips. She wrote a long, rambling letter, declaring her innocence and explaining how she was actively clearing her name without any help from WAHYA. She underlined that last part. It felt good to do so. She expressed her disdain for the lack of loyalty and support shown to one of their own. She listed all of her accomplishments and contributions to the cause. She also let John Hawkes know how much WAHYA meant to her, how this betrayal and mistrust of her wounded her to the marrow of her bones.

By the time she typed those last words, tears were welling up in her eyes, blurring the screen. She knew they came from somewhere deep inside, from a wound that would not heal. She wanted to be loved for who she was-for the good, the bad, the noble, and the weak-and not to be tossed aside when her presence grew inconvenient. In the end, she recognized a truth about herself. She wanted to be loved like her father had loved her. She deserved that. She wanted to scream it at the world.

Instead, she stared at the screen, at the letter-and did the next best thing. She reached out, moved the cursor, and allowed her finger to hover. Painter said the Internet connection was vigorously encrypted.

What could be the danger?

Taking back a bit of control over her own life, she hit send.

9:18 A.M.

Salt Lake City, Utah

Rafe smiled as the in-box chimed with new mail. He checked his watch. It was hours earlier than he'd anticipated. Matters were moving forward splendidly. He straightened with a luxurious stretch, wearing a plush hotel robe and slippers, his hair still damp from a shower.

He glanced around the presidential suite, situated at the top of the Grand America Hotel at the heart of Salt Lake City. For the first time since arriving in the States, he almost felt at home, ensconced amid all the European appointments of the room: the handcrafted cherrywood Richelieu furniture, the Carrara marble in the spa bathroom, the seventeenth-century Flemish tapestries. From his perch atop the hotel, floor-to-ceiling windows looked out onto breathtaking views of the mountains and down to the meticulously tended parterre gardens far below.

A sniffling sob dampened his good mood.

He turned to the scrawny young man, stripped naked and taped to one of the Richelieu dining chairs. Duct tape sealed his mouth. Twin lines of snot ran from his nose. He gasped, struggling for air, eyes wide and glassy like a wounded fox.

But he wasn't a fox.

He was Rafe's hawk... a hawk he'd sent hunting.

The biographical data on Kai Quocheets had listed her affiliations, including her participation in WAHYA, the fierce young wolves fighting for Native American rights. It had taken less than an hour to determine where the organization's leader had squirreled himself away. He'd come to Salt Lake City to be close to the action in the mountains, ready for the exposure that came with such a tragedy. But apparently John Hawkes had other needs, too. Bern had collected him out of a strip club near the airport. Seems the Native American activist liked his women white and blond, with perky fake breasts.

Another whimper rose from the chair.

Rafe held up a finger. "Patience, Mr. Hawkes. We'll get back to you soon enough. You've been most cooperative. But first let's make sure your hunt was successful."

It had not taken much to convert John Hawkes to their cause. Two of his fingers still pointed toward the ceiling. Ashanda had snapped them back as easily as breaking small twigs. Rafe, with his brittle bones, knew that particular exquisite pain. Over the course of his life, he'd broken every one of his fingers and toes.

Not always by accident.

Eventually they won Mr. Hawkes's cooperation, gaining all the necessary insight and personal details about Kai to craft a letter intended to draw out Rafe's little escaped bird. And it had apparently worked.

Much faster than I expected...

In the e- mail sent out, he'd set a noon deadline for her to respond. She wasn't wasting any time. He didn't intend to either.

"Sir, we've succeeded in decrypting the e-mail's text," the team's computer asset informed him.

Rafe turned to the man. The technician went simply by the name TJ-but Rafe had never been curious enough to ask what those initials stood for. He was an American, emaciated, often hyped on stimulants so he could run code for days at a time. The expert stood before a bevy of mini-mainframe/servers, all interconnected by Cat 6 cables and hooked into a T2 broadband line.

Rafe didn't understand a tenth of it. All he cared about were results.

"The text will be coming up on your personal screen in a moment, sir. We're tracking IP addresses, triangulating sat-nodes, sifting server connections, and running a killer algorithm to untangle packet pathways."

"Just find where it was sent from."

"We're working on it."

Rafe rolled his eyes at the use of the word we . TJ was no more than a glorified assistant. The true digital magician sat in the center of the wired nest of equipment. Ashanda's long fingers danced over three keyboards, as swiftly and elegantly as any concert pianist's on a baby grand. In place of sheet music, her gaze swept through lines of flowing code. On another screen, server nodes and gateway protocols splintered into a tangled web that spread across a digital global map. Nothing could stand in her way. Firewalls toppled before her like dominoes.

Satisfied, Rafe crossed to his personal laptop and read the text message on the screen from Kai Quocheets. He tapped a finger against his lower lip as he read through the wash of teenage angst and hurt feelings. A small part of him felt a twinge of sympathy, drawn by her passion, by her raw exposure on the screen. He glanced over to John Hawkes, suddenly feeling like breaking a third finger on the man's hand. Clearly the leader sorely used his fellow members, taking advantage of their youth and exuberance. In the end, he let others suffer the consequences while he took all of the glory.