Jerome Preisler - Net Force--Attack Protocol

She paused a beat. “Anything new from him?”

“Not that I know,” Howard said. “Duchess...what are your orders?”

Morse was silent. This one had to come from her gut.

“Godspeed, Colonel,” she said after a moment. “You’re on-site, I’m not. I won’t step on you. Just keep me informed.”

They disconnected. She sat there thinking for about fifteen seconds. Then she took the dripping wad of tissues off her desk and dropped it in the wastebasket. It hit the bottom of the plastic liner with a soggy thunk.

Morse looked at her desk. The coffee was almost sopped up. She reached for some fresh tissues, bunched them together, and began wiping away the rest of the spill. Rubbing the tissues over the spot in little concentric circles and thinking some more about Romania.

She’d noticed the desk was buff and dry and was about to toss the second bunch of tissues when her phone rang again. The caller ID said it was Leo Harris.

She was thinking POTUS would have notified Alex Michaels. And Michaels would have called her ex. Medical leave or not, he was Net Force’s Director of Cyber Investigations.

The desk clock said it was ten minutes to nine at night. Not quite 3:00 a.m. But still within the time range when incoming phone calls signaled bad news more often than good. Add that this was the start of the long holiday weekend, she figured it might as well be the wee hours of the morning.

Reminding herself that the modified rule was statistically unverified—as yet—Morse took a deep breath and picked up.

Jersey City, New Jersey, USA

“I really don’t care what you have to tell me,” Harris barked over the phone. “I do not want to hear it!”

“Then why did you call?”

“Because I’d like to know why I wasn’t consulted when you were planning this thing.”

“Leo, you’re ranting.”

“I’m not ranting.”

“You definitely are,” Morse said at the other end. “You’re also contradicting yourself. Either you want to have a conversation or you don’t. And if you don’t and are just going to sound off, I’m hanging up.”

He took a breath. An abdominal breath. A belly breath. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Slow. One hand on his rib cage to remind him it wasn’t supposed to move up and down. He was breathing with his diaphragm, not his chest muscles. Because his damaged, stitched-together lungs needed all the help they could get.

“Leo? Are you alive?”

He swung around in his desk chair. There were exercise machines all around him, thousands of dollars’ worth of useless junk he hardly ever used. The place looked like a rehab facility instead of his living room. It made him feel pathetic.

“Halfway,” he said.

“Good enough if you’ll stop the crap,” Morse said. “Why are you clobbering me?”

“I just heard from the prof,” he said. “About what’s happening in Romania.”

“Before we go on...we’re secure?”

“I might need a cane to walk to the grocery for toilet paper. But there’s nothing wrong with my damn brain.”

“Which I’ll take as a yes,” Morse said. “Okay, Leo. If you were briefed by Director Michaels, I assume you know the situation’s in flux.” She paused. “Howard updated me just now. There have been some additional developments at Janus. And not good ones.”

He listened to her summary. Drone swarms flying out of two Romanian airports without the knowledge of their military operators. And in the air over Janus and the Wolf’s Lair. Armed with explosives.

Harris felt his cheeks drain of color.

“Goddamn it,” he said. “I was afraid of something like this.”

“We all understood the risks. But we had to move.”

“Why?”

“The Russian activity in and around Rosalvea. Petrovik’s bluff to convince us he hadn’t left the barn, complete with the most sophisticated deepfakes we’ve ever seen to make Zolcu appear to be him in our aerial surveillance images. Do you need more of a list? They’re cooking something up, Leo. No one’s keeping secrets from you.”

“Or wants to hear what I have to say.”

“That’s grossly inaccurate. And unfair. It took us a while to plan things out. This mission required preparation and precision, with no time to waste, and you were on medical leave until two weeks ago. Less than four months ago, you almost died when that car bomb exploded.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.” The explosive device had been in the Tesla’s trunk when he opened it, and he’d dived in front of the vehicle seconds before it blew. The click of its triggering mechanism had clued him, and the protection he’d gotten from the engine block had saved him...but he’d been badly hurt.

Damaged , he thought.

Leo stared at the aluminum cane under his desk. At first he’d tried leaning it against the side of the desk when he sat down to work. But somehow or other he kept kicking it over. When his pet box turtle Mack didn’t knock it down first while on the way to its salad bowl. So he’d started laying it flat on the floor, which is where it always wound up anyway.

“Fact is, I might’ve objected to the mission if anybody asked,” he said after a pause. “And I definitely wouldn’t have okayed Outlier staying on at Janus after the Bucharest job. She was supposed to be shipped back to the States for interrogation. That was our bargain.”

“Leo, you’re all over the map. Why even mention this to me now?”

“Because it was you who made the offer,” he said. “We never should’ve let her see the inside of a classified bird like Raven . Never mind go along on the op.”

“She’s earned that much trust. Carmody requested that she accompany him, and it was my call to approve it or not.”

“Yeah, well, fuck Carmody. He’s the one who got us into this spot.”

“Leo—”

“No, check that. It was you listening to his bullshit.”

“Leo, stop right there. Before you get in any deeper. I won’t let you punish me for your own misguided sense of inadequacy. We’ve been through it before, and it didn’t end well.”

Harris clenched the phone tightly in his hand, listening to the tunnellike silence of an end-to-end encrypted connection. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m in the thick of a major crisis, Leo. That’s my sole priority right now. It ought to be yours, too,” she said. “I suggest you take my advice and pull your head out of your ass.”

Click.

“Carol? Hello?”

Harris was quiet. He heard the odd whooshing digital silence again. Even though she’d hung up and their connection was broken. He still thought he could hear it.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Nose. Mouth. Belly.

He sat with the phone cradled between his ear and shoulder for a long while, trying to pull in enough air to somehow make himself right.

But he couldn’t do it.

He couldn’t.

16

Satu Mare District, Romania

Castle Graguscu

Carmody halted at the bottom of the stairs, dismounted the bike, and looked around the apron. There was enough star glow above him and artificial light spilling from inside the castle that he didn’t have to flip down his DNVGs.

Schultz and the BearCat had done a whole lot of damage. The dead man on the cobbles to his right could have been mistaken for something that wasn’t human. A mangled animal. The body was crushed and smeared across the snow.

He swiveled toward the castle on his boot heels and walked up the broad, low stairs outside the portico. His feet made crackling noises against the granite as he strode over drifts of shattered window glass. The sky overhead whined and pulsated.