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  He hauled ass for invoice eight, looking forward to the promised time off, with pay, after delivery. Vegas. That’s what was on his mind as he tore through the Rockies on I-70 at ninety miles an hour. Six hundred and twenty-four miles to Boulder. Protocol said don’t speed, but they’d given him a badge and a very official-looking card with his photo on it, that the gunny had told him would make any local law enforcement fuck off, because he was working for the FEDERAL government, even though technically he was only contracted. That technicality made a difference, a big one. Federal employees took something called the Oath of Office, the very first law enacted by the very first Congress, so those Founding Fathers had felt it was important. Courier got ten large each month instead and signed a contract. Either way, he got into Boulder a night early.

  And partied.

  He was sure there was something in Chapter 40 of the Protocol (it was pretty damn thick) about not partying the night before a drive, but he’d read what he needed to and skimmed the rest. He’d make the pickup the next day right on time.

  And he did. Wearing fresh khakis, his Glock nestled inside his leather jacket, he checked the file once more before he entered the Biochemistry Building at the University of Colorado. He recognized the Point of Contact in the courtyard outside the building from the picture in the file and she looked better in person than the drab photo that must have been taken for her student ID. He walked over.

  “Hey.”

  That drew him the withering smile pretty girls reserve for “not now, I’m busy” until he pulled out his badge and ID.

  “I hear you’ve got something for me, Ms. Debbie Simmons.”

  Her eyes grew wide. She looked around as if there were spies hiding behind the bushes. Which the Courier found humorous because they weren’t in the bushes, but rather hundreds of miles overhead with a clear line of sight. His first platoon sergeant in the Marines had told him no one ever looked up. He had been referring to snipers in trees, but once the Courier got to Nightstalkers’ Support, old Nada, in his briefing, had modified that to include what you couldn’t see way up there circling the planet. The unblinking eyes in the sky.

  She swallowed and nodded. “Follow me.”

  They entered the building and she walked past the elevators, which the Courier found odd, and opened a fire door. They began to troop up the stairs, which was when the Courier became rather intrigued with her ass. He tried to make small talk, but she was in crisis mode and everyone knows that people worried about their careers seldom flirted. Instead they tended to talk and explain.

  “I don’t know why I got stuck with it. I just did the lab work. The professor did all the real work on the project. And the professor was insistent that no one have access to her data.”

  The Courier could give a shit, and her taking one step at a time was hurting his knees. He wanted to bound up at least two, if not three at a time. She kept explaining as if the Courier hadn’t read the Invoicer, or been briefed by Moms and Nada and Doc.

  He and the others had been grilled with Nada “what-ifs”: What if you can’t locate the Point of Contact? What if the Package is breached? What if gravity as you know it ceases to exist...

  Or, as everyone in Support called it, the Yada-Yada from Nada. But never when he was around.

  “The problem is, well, the professor, she must have gone on sabbatical, at least that’s what the dean said. Sort of. And I got stuck with it. So we brought it over in the safe it came in and up the elevator and into the most secure lab.”

  If you got an elevator, why are we taking the stairs? the Courier thought.

  “I followed the rules in the book the professor had.”

  The Courier felt heartened that he wasn’t the only one who had to follow Protocols.

  “It’s locked up here, because the bio people have the most secure areas.” Simmons literally shivered. “It scares me, some of the stuff they work with.”

  “Why are we climbing the stairs?”

  “I use the stairs for the exercise,” she explained. That explained her tight body, but also a sense of narcissism to include him in her workout routine while he was on a job.

  “Everything should be all right and up to date,” she continued as they made it to a door with a big 6 stenciled on it.

  The Courier wanted to tell her Nada’s theory during his lecture about should be, which Nada had said often translated to what the fuck?

  “I don’t really see the big deal,” Simmons prattled on as she led him down the hall to a door with all sorts of warning signs and big biohazards symbols. “It’s pretty small.”

  He decided to show the college girl up, with a tidbit of knowledge he’d had hurled at him during the Support briefing by Doc. He tapped the closest yellow sign. “The engineer who developed the biohazard sign said: ‘We wanted something that was memorable but meaningless, so we could educate people as to what it means.’”

  He remembered that because it was one of the dumbest things—among many dumb things—he’d been told, not even realizing his remembering actually validated the engineer’s point.

  She stopped talking for a moment and stared at him as if he had two heads. “The professor has never taken a day off since I’ve known her. She’s always like ice; nothing bothers her, but this,” the girl nodded at the steel door, “this bothered her. Why would the professor take a sabbatical now?”

  “Right,” the Courier said, not really listening to her, eyes on her breasts. Figuratively, wishing for literally.

  Shaking her head, Simmons entered a punch code and the door slid open.

  They walked over to another door that required a second punch code, as well as a retina scan this time, so he knew they were getting close to the Package.

  There was a safe inside the next room.

  An old iron safe, like Butch and Sundance used to rob.

  She pulled out a rumpled piece of paper and began twirling in the combination and he stifled a laugh. He could see Nada’s long hand in this last line of bullshit.

  “So the Package is all right,” she said with enough degree of uncertainty that even the Courier realized why the government was taking this particular thing away from the university boys and girls. “So you can see the problem?” she asked, indicating she had no clue what the problem was. She swung open the heavy door and pulled out a small metal box.

  For the Courier the problem was that his knees were killing him.

  She was anxious to pass the problem over to him. “I don’t know why the dean was so upset, since he had to have given the professor the sabbatical.”

  The Courier tuned her out once more. He didn’t see any opening to the box. There was a set of numbers etched on the side after the letters ASU. He checked his Invoicer. Bingo. “Okay.” He held out the Invoicer. “Sign here, here, and here on the screen and I’ll be off.”

  “The professor was really, really upset about getting this in the first place,” Simmons said as she scrawled with the electronic pen. “She said it should have never been sent here. She said someone named Doc should have been responsible, not her. And certainly not me,” she added as if he didn’t get it.

  “Someone is taking care of it. Now. Me.” The Courier grabbed the Invoicer from her and hefted the Package under one arm. It was light, for which he was grateful.

  “What about the safe?” Simmons asked, looking as if she had to take the thing home.

  “Not on my form.”

  “I did everything correctly, right?” Simmons asked. “You’ll keep it safe, right?”

  She seemed overly concerned about something for which she was no longer responsible, even the Courier could see that. “I work for the government,” he said. “This is my job. It’s taken care of.”

  He didn’t say good-bye. Not that it mattered: she didn’t do small talk, yet she talked too damn much, he thought as he took the elevator down. He unsealed the back of the van and secured the box in the vault that took up half the rear, the rest being full of weapons and oth
er military equipment.

  He got in the driver’s seat and accessed the onboard computer. He synced the Invoicer, indicating a positive pickup, and waited for the machine to tell him his next, and final for this tour, destination.

  Area 51 Archives.

  The GPS calculated the route in seconds. Seven hundred and seventy-seven miles.

  “Hot damn,” he muttered as he started the van up.

  Not far from Vegas at all.

  To Carter, it just looked like an old deserted filling station out in the middle of the desert. Colonel Orlando was driving the battered Jeep, which was the latest in a bunch of strange things to happen ever since he’d been “tested” back in the ’Stan.

  Since then, Orlando hadn’t said two words, ignoring every question Carter had thrown at him, and using the defense of that silver oak leaf indicating his rank to treat Carter like the staff sergeant he was.

  Except after landing at some incredibly long runway in the middle of Nevada, the colonel had gotten in the driver’s seat of this old beat-up Jeep that had been waiting for them. A colonel driving for a staff sergeant wasn’t normal, even for the elite army. They’d been bumping along for over an hour now, leaving the runway and the hangars and the guards and all that far behind.

  Two minutes ago, Orlando had turned off the hardtop road onto a dirt road, passing a plywood sign spray-painted none too steadily with the warning NO TRESPASS: WE WILL SHOOT YOUR ASS along with a skull and crossbones also crudely sprayed onto the wood next to the words. Now the old gas station was ahead on the right and Carter could see three guys shooting a beat-up basketball at a metal rim set about eight feet off the ground on a leaning light pole. He knew right away they were Special Ops, even though two had long hair. It was the same way at Bragg, where you could always tell the difference between guys in the Eighty-Second Airborne, not exactly slouches, and someone in Special Forces. They looked different because they were different.

  The three didn’t even look over as Orlando screeched the protesting brakes of the Jeep, bringing them to a halt a hundred yards short of the station. Carter saw the reason. Two men had materialized from spider holes, weapons at the ready. Carter blinked as a red laser designator wavered over his face, settling in between his eyes. Shifting his glance to the left, he saw Orlando also wore a red dot.

  A third man, who must have been in a hole, too, came up from behind. He held some weird device and flashed it in Orlando’s eyes. It beeped, and since the colonel wasn’t shot, Carter assumed that was a positive beep. All three wore ghillie suits with black fatigues underneath and no sign of rank or unit, so Carter figured they were contractors. He’d seen a ton of them in the ’Stan and Iraq. The guard started to go around the rear of the Jeep—not crossing the line of fire of the others—when Orlando spoke up.

  “He’s the new one.”

  The guard nodded, looking vaguely disappointed for some reason, as if Carter were stealing his role in the school play. “Proceed, Colonel.”

  Orlando put the Jeep into gear, the clutch protesting loudly.

  One of the three, a tall black man whose left side of the face was terribly scarred, took a long shot and it flew past rim and pole into a pile of old tires, sending them tumbling. A rattler came buzzing out, trying to see who’d interrupted its late-day nap.

  “Yo!” one of the others, a big hulking guy with what Carter initially would have called an honest, happy face, yelled. “Eagle got a snake.”

  “I hate fucking snakes,” Eagle said.

  “Tell Doc about snakes,” the third guy said with a Texas drawl. He was a young Tom Cruise look-alike, handsome in a way that initially irritated almost every man who met him.

  “Fuck you, Mac,” Eagle said to him as he drew a Mark-23 from under his T-shirt and fired, hitting the snake in the head, and firing again, hitting the stump.

  “No one would think you were any army of one,” Mac said. “Afraid of snakes.” He stepped over the body and retrieved the ball. “We used to eat rattler back home in Texas. Tastes like chicken.”

  “Bet you had to eat rattler,” the big guy said, with all seriousness. “My mom used to make us pine bark soup flavored with pine needles.”

  “You had one fucked-up childhood, Roland,” Mac said. “We ate it ’cause we liked it.”

  Carter got out of the Jeep as Orlando did. Now that he was closer to the big man, he could see that thing deep in Roland’s eyes that belied his genial face. The man was a killer.

  The three finally decided to notice the newcomers.

  Eagle nodded at Orlando. “Colonel.”

  “Eagle. Roland. Mac.” Orlando nodded three times, like he was blessing them or asking permission to pass, it was hard for Carter to tell. “Been a while.”

  “It has indeed, sir,” Eagle said. He looked at Carter. “Must be an officer. He isn’t covered in shit.”

  Orlando was the only one who got it, and he laughed as he got back in the driver’s seat. “You gentleman have a fine rest of the day. Until next time.”

  Carter hastily grabbed his duffel out of the back of the Jeep. And then the colonel was gone in a cloud of dust. Carter stood there, uncomfortable in the late-day sun, duffel bag weighing on his shoulder, his camos drenched with sweat. He knew they were reading the cues on his fatigues: Ranger Tab, left shoulder; Ranger Regiment scroll, right shoulder, meaning combat service with the unit; Combat Infantry Badge; Master Parachute Badge; Free-fall Parachute Badge; Scuba Badge.

  Most people were impressed.

  These were clearly not most people.

  “Where do I report?” Carter asked.

  “Get a grape soda,” Mac said as the other two turned back to the basketball and their game.

  “I don’t want a grape soda.” Carter regretted the words as he spoke them.

  Mac laughed. “Buddy, no one wants a grape soda, but one time me and this hot little cheerleader, all we had was some Jack and some grape soda, and it worked then. It’ll work now,” he added, nodding toward the rusting soda machine leaning against the side of the station.

  Carter went over. The peeling labels indicated he could get Dr. Pepper, Pepsi, Orange, or Grape. Twenty-five cents. He reached for his pocket, then realized he didn’t have any change. Before he could turn, Eagle called out.

  “Just push the button. And make sure it’s grape. You don’t want the orange, trust me.”

  Carter hit the grape button.

  With a hiss of escaping air, the soda machine slid to the side and a stairway beckoned, cool air blasting out.

  Carter hesitated.

  “You got eight seconds,” Eagle added as he took a shot. “Or it will shut on you.”

  Carter scooted down the stairs and the door slid in place above him. He caught his bearings for a second, then continued down. He reached a landing, noting the unblinking eye of a camera staring at him. There was someone at the other end of that camera and Carter shivered for a second.

  There was a steel door facing him, one that just screamed “try and blast me open and let me laugh at you.” The door slid aside and a gray corridor beckoned. A figure filled the corridor. Short, built like a power-lifter, dark skinned with an acne-scarred face, gray hair, and an attitude that said he was the one who ran things. The well-worn handle of a machete poked over his left shoulder from a sheath on his back and he had an MK-23 strapped to his right hip, tied down with a strap around his thigh.

  Carter stiffened to attention as the door slid shut behind him.

  “We don’t do that shit here,” the man said.

  The door behind opened once more and the three who had been playing basketball pressed by, paying Carter no heed.

  “I’m Nada.”

  Nada? Carter thought. “I’m—”

  “I know who you think you are,” Nada said, “or else you’d be a pile of ashes back there on the landing.”

  Eagle laughed as he looked over his shoulder at the end of the corridor. “Best to forget who you were and focus on who you will be.”<
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  “That’s real fucking Zen-like,” Mac said.

  “Follow me,” Nada ordered. “And drop that bag. You won’t need any of that shit.”

  They went down the hallway and into a large circular room with dull gray walls. There were several tables in it, along with whiteboards, flip charts, corkboards for imagery, and a row of lockers. The three from outside were stripping off their soaking shirts.

  “You’re meeting Ms. Jones,” Nada said, stopping in front of a surprisingly flimsy and ill-fitting door, the antithesis of everything Carter had seen since entering the complex. “You listen to her very carefully.”

  The door to the left opened and a tall woman in fatigues stepped out. The way Nada shifted his posture, Carter realized with surprise that he answered to her, so he stood a little straighter.

  “I’m Moms,” the woman said.

  Moms? Carter was trying to take it all in.

  “I was just telling him to listen carefully to Ms. Jones,” Nada informed her.

  Moms nodded. “Listen to her offer. Then you get to say yes or you get to say no. There’s no shame, no blemish on your record for saying no.”

  “No is the easy way,” Eagle yelled from across the room.

  “No is back to the world,” Mac added.

  “Hush,” Roland scolded the other two. “Moms is talking.”

  Moms put a hand on Carter’s shoulder. “You understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Mac laughed. “He ain’t got a fucking clue.”

  Moms nodded at Nada. He rapped on the flimsy door, rattling it on the hinges. Then he swung it open and indicated for Carter to go in. “Take the seat in front of the desk. Do not get out of the seat until dismissed, then come straight back out here. Anything else and I’ll kill you.”

  He said it so matter-of-factly that Carter only realized he was serious after taking three steps into the room. A hard plastic chair faced a massive wooden desk. The smooth surface of the desk was unmarred by any phone, computer, or knick-knack. Behind the desk was a huge wing-backed chair, the occupant completely in the shadow cast by the large lights pointed directly at the plastic chair.