Brad Thor - The Athena Project

“I kicked him in the chest and knocked him out a third-story window.”

“You what?” he shouted. “Damn it, Gretchen. You could have killed him.”

“He’ll be fine.”

Hutton and Casey had been down this road before. “So once again the ends justify the means?” he asked rhetorically.

“Defenestration was the safest and most expedient option at the time. I exercised what I believed to be sound operational judgment.”

“Save it,” said Hutton. “You’re not on the record.”

Casey shook her head. She knew why he was upset. They weren’t fighting about who left the cap off the toothpaste. She colored outside the lines a lot. That’s what made her and the team successful. No, this wasn’t because of what she’d done to Bianchi or any of her unorthodox behavior on countless other operations. It was because as much as she wanted to, she refused to let Hutton get that close to her again.

“I haven’t looked in the bags below deck, but I assume everything we need to get home is in there,” she said, changing the subject. “Clothes, money, passports, the usual?”

Hutton wasn’t in the mood to fight her. It wouldn’t get him anywhere. “It’s all in there,” he said, his tone softening. “But we’re going to arrange to get more.”

Casey didn’t like the sound of that. “More for what?”

“I just heard from the Pentagon. There’s something they need you to do before you fly back.”

CZECH REPUBLIC

SATURDAY

With a top speed of over forty knots, they traversed the Gulf of Venice in under two hours. Harvath and Riley dropped the team in the Slovenian coastal town of Koper. The idea had been to get them out of Italy as quickly as possible.

It was dark when they arrived and found the car with German plates that had been left for them. After throwing their bags in the trunk and climbing in, Ericsson slid behind the wheel and drove them inland toward the A1. Rhodes acted as copilot as Casey and Cooper slept in back.

It was a boring, pitch-black, nine-hour drive that cut across Austria to Salzburg, skirted Munich, and went up through Germany before crossing into the Czech Republic.

Despite the coffee and energy drinks they’d purchased while gassing up the car and stretching their legs, everyone was exhausted. Even if they hadn’t had to drive nine hours, they still would have been wiped out. The Bianchi assignment had required absolute, laserlike focus from all of them. Each had performed at her physical and mental peak. What the women needed now were hot showers, a week of doing nothing, and probably more than a couple glasses of wine. What they had been given, though, was another assignment.

They had stopped in Munich for breakfast, and by the time they pulled into the Czech town of Zbiroh, it was late morning.

Sixty kilometers from Prague, Zbiroh was in the southeast of the country and the landscape looked very much the same as it had in Germany before they crossed the border; rolling green foothills, forests, and farmland. After they left the somewhat industrial city of Pilsen, there was nothing but small villages, cows, and Eastern Orthodox-inspired churches.

“Okay, who’s up for shopping?” joked Rhodes as they took a drive through the rather austere couple of blocks that passed for Zbiroh’s center.

“First guy we see with a full set of teeth is all mine,” said Ericsson.

“ If you can pry him off his sister,” added Cooper.

Casey shook her head. “What a bunch of big-city snobs.”

“Wait a second,” countered Rhodes. “I grew up in the Chicago suburbs .”

“Same thing.”

“No it isn’t.”

“Don’t bother arguing with her,” said Ericsson. “As far as Gretch is concerned, she’s got all of us beat in the small-town-girl thing.”

Casey laughed. “If the Choo fits.”

“You’re unbelievable,” replied Rhodes, unwilling to let it go. “My dad was a cop. Julie’s dad was a fisherman, and her mom taught school. Alex’s mom was an immigrant and her parents saved all they had to open a restaurant. You can’t get any more red, white, and blue than that.”

Ericsson threw up her hands. “You’ve done it now, sweetheart.”

“What? Why do you guys just roll over for her?”

“Because they know,” said Casey.

Rhodes let her mouth hang open as if she was heavily medicated and slurred, “That East Texas is the best place in the whole world.”

Casey ticked the points off on her fingers as she spoke, “One gas station and only one gas station. It’s where you get your gas, get your car repaired, and fill up the air in your bicycle tires or the inner tube you’re taking swimming.

“There’s only one store for groceries and if they don’t have it, you don’t need it. If you don’t dress and prepare your own game, the store’s butcher will do it for you. He’ll meet you in back, unload whatever you’ve got in your truck, and call you when he’s got your steaks, burgers, sausages, and jerky ready to be picked up.

“The town has one doctor. He delivered my mother and he delivered me. He’s eighty-eight years old and he still makes house calls.

“When our sheriff sees a ten-year-old boy walking down the road with a rifle he doesn’t call a SWAT team, he asks the boy how the hunting is.

“We have one church and that church still puts on socials year round and picnics in the summertime.

“We have front-porch swings because we like to see our neighbors pass by and we like to ask them how they’re doing. We know everyone’s names and they know ours. And yes, just about every single house flies the American flag.

“So with all due respect to Honolulu, Atlanta, and Chicago, I think I’ve got all of you beat.”

“We had a Williams-Sonoma,” snarked Rhodes.

Casey smiled. “You didn’t have Mayberry. I had Mayberry.”

“But if you wanted your ears or anything else pierced in Mayberry, you had to see the vet, right?”

Casey shook her head. “Someday, when you finally come down to visit, you’ll see for yourself.”

“Let me know when the Victoria’s Secret opens,” said Rhodes, “and I’ll be on the first covered wagon down there.”

“I hate to interrupt,” said Cooper, who was now taking her turn driving, “but do we all have a feel for the layout of this place?”

“I haven’t seen the public pillory yet,” offered Ericsson.

“Or where they burn the witches,” chimed in Rhodes.

Casey ignored them. “I think we’re good, Alex. Let’s head for the hotel.”

Cooper nodded and made a left turn. She followed a narrow, winding road up to the top of the forested hill overlooking the town. There they were greeted by the statues of two enormous lions flanking the entrance of the majestic Zbiroh castle.

“Wow,” said Ericsson. “I’m not surprised the Nazis commandeered this place during the war.”

“As monstrous as they were, the SS seemed to appreciate the finer things in life, but that’s not why they picked this castle,” said Casey, who had been filled in, to a certain degree, by Hutton. “It is sitting on top of one of the largest quartz deposits in Europe. This hill functioned as a huge radio wave amplifier, and the SS used it as an electronic listening post.”

“But what’s that got to do with the abandoned bunker we’re supposed to check out?” asked Cooper as she steered the car toward the south wing of the castle where the Château Hotel Zbiroh was housed.

“Apparently, radio wave intercepts weren’t the only things the quartz helped amplify.”