The Trials (The Red Trilogy Book 2) (40 page)

To date, Cryptic Arrow has pulled off three successful missions: First Light, Silent Firebreak, and now, Black Phoenix. Confidence is growing.

That evening, after a late dinner, Rawlings pulls me aside. “You’ve lit a fuse, Lieutenant. The organization wants this mission. A lot of questions remain, but the early consensus is that we have the skills and the personnel to carry it out.”

Wanting to lend my approval without pushing too hard, I tell him: “I think it’s something we need to seriously consider, sir.”

“We will be looking at every element in the coming days. This is the kind of mission we exist to do—a critical project outside the reach of constituted authority. You might not
be aware of this, Lieutenant, but rumors of Semak’s nukes have existed for years. If we can recover the location of the cache and some knowledge of the security around it, then something might finally be done.”

•   •   •   •

It’s nearly midnight by the time I leave Rawlings. The house is quiet. There are only a couple of lights on in the living room. That’s where I find Delphi. She’s been sitting in a recliner, but when she sees me, she stands up, crosses her arms. “Good news?” she asks as I approach.

“All of Rawlings’s patriot friends want to do it.”

“If the intelligence is real, it needs to be done.” Each word is crisp and deliberate. She’s locked down in handler mode, but she’s been so distant in the hours since I got back that even a cold statement of approval feels like a peace offering.

“So are you in? For all of it?”

“It’s not that simple. We need to talk.”

Nothing pleasant ever follows that phrase.

My thoughts shoot back to that first night we spent together in her hotel room. I wish we were there again. “Delphi, I love you. I do.”

Her gaze cuts away. “I love you too—and that’s a problem. Shelley—”

“Look at me.”

She does, but she’s locked down tight. “Let’s go outside.”

I follow her onto the porch where we’re met by a soft chorus of crickets and the dusty scent of night air. No one’s around. Dim light seeps through the blinds, enough to show her shape as she walks to the railing and turns around.

“You know Rawlings will have this porch under surveillance,” I remind her.

“That way I won’t have to say this twice.”

“I thought this was about you and me.”

“This is about the mission.”

I don’t know if that bodes well for me or not—but I’ll find out soon. I join her, leaning against the railing, hip cocked, with the star-spangled dark beyond. “Go ahead.”

“I told you before you left that I knew what I was doing by getting involved with you—and I did know. I believed I could handle it. But I was wrong.”

Okay, I know where this is going. “You’re thinking about what happened on the
Non-Negotiable
.” Delphi broke down near the end of that mission, forcing Shima to take over as my handler. “You need to let that go. Silent Firebreak was a success and you were a big part of that.”

“Colonel Rawlings thinks you need a new handler.”

“Rawlings can go to hell. I want you. And we
need
you if we’re going to do this the way we discussed.”

“I understand that. But I don’t know if I can do it again. It was bad, Shelley. When I lost contact with you on that cargo deck, it was just like Black Cross. I
knew
you were dead and I was dying inside.”

“You didn’t quit, though. You were still there when I checked back in. Delphi, you’re the best handler I’ve ever had.”

“I used to be.” She reaches out, tentative in the dark, to run her palm across my freshly buzzed hair. “Maybe I should get wired up like you.”

I catch her hand, pull it down to my mouth, and kiss her palm. “You don’t need that shit.”

I hear her sigh. “This is . . . hard to convey. When we run a mission, it’s not my life on the line. No one is shooting at me. But I need you to understand what an unbearable anguish it is to sit in a room and watch passively,
helplessly
, as death strikes out at someone you love . . . to hear it happening and not be able to change anything.”

I do know what that’s like. I flash on the sick, consuming horror I felt when I knew Lissa was dead.

“When you went missing and I didn’t know—”

“Shhh . . .” I pull her against me. Stroke her hair, kiss her face. “That’s over now. We got through it. And this next mission, if we go at all—”

“Shelley, you just don’t get it!” She pulls back. “What I’m trying to tell you is that Rawlings is right. You need a new handler.”

“No. If we’re going to do what we talked about, we need you. For just this one more mission. An easy mission. No guns, no grenades. Just a crazy old man all on his own. You can do that, Delphi. And afterward, you can retire. You and Jaynie. If that’s what you want.”

“And you? What do you want?”

It’s late, so I go for the direct approach. “I want to stop thinking about all this shit tonight. I want to be in bed with you, Delphi. I want to be having sex with you.”

She’s silent for a few seconds. Then she leans in to kiss the corner of my mouth. “Okay. I want that too.”

•   •   •   •

We wake up to news of a verdict in Sheridan’s trial.

She has been found guilty of crimes against humanity for her involvement in the nuclear terrorism of Coma Day. In deference to those judges on the international panel whose countries prohibit the death penalty, the recommended sentence is life in prison.

Colonel Kendrick would have been pleased to know it.

Most court observers are commending Ahab Matugo for overseeing an exemplary proceeding. In an interview, a mediot from Japan asks his opinion of Sheridan’s allegations about the Red. “Is it real, sir?”

Matugo sits in an upholstered chair in what looks to be
an opulent library decorated in African prints and dark hardwoods. He is a soldier and a scholar, his innate dignity reflected in his posture and in a reserved expression that makes him seem older than he is. There is no gray yet in his short, tightly curled hair, and his black skin is smooth over strong, balanced features. He answers the mediot’s question without any hesitation, speaking with a crisp accent: “Studies I’ve commissioned indicate that it is, that there is something out there, something of vast reach and influence, skilled at engineering coincidence—and frightening in the way of all things that hold immense power.”

“Then you feel Ms. Sheridan was right in her concern?” the mediot asks. “Even if she was wrong in her actions?”

“No, that is not my opinion at all. Power must reside somewhere. Accept that, and the question becomes, whom do we trust? This endeavor at justice”—he waves his hand vaguely—“which has earned such accolades, would not have come about without the subtle interference of this hidden entity, the Red.”

He leans forward in his chair. “The Red is real, and it is, in any practical sense, beyond our ability to eradicate, supposing we should want to do so. Make no mistake—it is a dangerous thing. No one truly understands its intentions. We do not know that it
has
intentions in the aggregate beyond this one: to maintain a thriving marketplace—or market
places
, many arenas in which we may seek and perhaps find that which wakens our souls. Not always a good thing, that—the human soul is as often corrupt as it is beautiful—but it is surely better than nuclear annihilation, environmental contamination, or the climate change that is already killing us, here in the equatorial world.

“The tragedy of the human race is that we need this thing, that we are not brave enough or wise enough to live to our potentials on our own.”

Later, we gather over coffee to celebrate the guilty verdict. Rawlings makes a short speech about how those who died did not die in vain. We congratulate one another. And then it’s back to business.

Delphi heads to the basement to help Jones with the ongoing analysis of evidence recovered during Black Phoenix. I spend the next two hours in a PT session with both squads, where the decline in my physical condition becomes abundantly clear. I’m near death when we’re released. I’m given an hour to shower, eat, and try to convince my body that this is better than prison. Four hours of detailed debriefing follow. After that, Rawlings pulls me aside again and tries to convince me I need a new handler, but I refuse to be persuaded. “Delphi’s the best,” I insist. “If we get to do this, I want the best behind me.”

It’s late afternoon before I get any free time, and by then all I want is to sit on the porch in a rocking chair—which is what I do.

From my vantage on the porch I can look down a one-lane asphalt road that climbs a rise maybe seven hundred meters away, and disappears. Tall trees in bright green leaf grow in the low ground on the eastern side of the road, their canopies shimmering in a soft, steady breeze. My overlay tags them as cottonwoods. The sky is bright blue with only a few clouds and two hawks idly circling. I watch them for a minute, until something else catches my eye: a blue glint, hard to see, like a hairline fracture in the sky.

It’s a surveillance drone. Delphi restored all my command privileges when she reformatted me, so I link into angel sight. The angel is following the road from the south. Far behind it I can see a highway with scattered traffic. Thunderclouds are gathering to the east. As the angel floats silently above the cottonwood grove, I look down at a sparkling stream running beneath the trees. There are fish
in the water, and birds flitting in the tree branches, and one lone human following what looks like a well-worn path out from under the trees to the road. The angel identifies the subject of observation as Mandy Flynn. She’s dressed in brown uniform pants, a T-shirt, farsights, and her skullcap. She looks up at me on the porch, squares her shoulders, and picks up her pace, closing the distance to the house.

Something’s up.

I watch her with angel sight until the angel moves off on its route. A minute later she’s standing on the lawn in front of me.

“LT?”

There’s anxiety in her wide green eyes. It’s contagious. I get up and move to the stairs.

“You think you could come look at something with me, sir? It won’t take long.”

“Something wrong, Flynn?”

“No, sir. No. Not like you mean. If you could just come.”

“Where?”

“Not far.”

She leads me back down the asphalt one-lane, glancing at me every few steps, but refusing to meet my gaze. It puts me on edge. Anything unexpected or unexplained puts me there.

“Flynn, what—?”

“Just a little farther, sir.”

She doesn’t want to talk about it. I tell myself I need to respect that, because it’s trust that binds us together, loyalty that defines us. Flynn wasn’t with us in the hangar, but to let myself consider that she might have betrayed us would itself be a betrayal of who we are. So I follow in silence, shamed by my doubt.

She brings us to the path I saw with angel sight. The spring grass growing beneath the trees has been cut to
make it easy to walk. The stream is ahead of us, but before we get there, we come to an open space where the grass has been trimmed and trampled. There’s a monument at the center of it, a gray granite obelisk six feet high set on a smooth, round base made of some kind of resin that looks like black glass.

Sitting on that base with his back to the monument is Matt Ransom, wearing the gray-and-white Arctic uniform we used during First Light. He looks up at me, meets my gaze, and then he’s gone.

I rear back, reaching for a weapon that I’m not carrying.
“Holy shit!”
My heart is hammering as I turn away, rubbing my eyes as if I can reboot them. I thought I was doing okay handling all this shit, but if I’m starting to hallucinate—

Flynn touches my arm. “LT, it’s okay. It’s this place. It’s for us. To remember them, you know?”

“What are you saying?”

“You saw Ransom, right? That’s how it works.”

Together we circle the monument. I look for the names of the dead, but it’s the mission names I see—
First Light
and
Silent Firebreak
.

Flynn sounds like she’s apologizing when she says, “Silent Firebreak is always going to be secret—that’s what Colonel Rawlings said—so we didn’t put any names at all on the memorial.” She taps her farsights. “But they’re here. We can see them. You and me, and Sergeant Nolan and Captain Vasquez. And Rawlings. Only us.”

I look up, and glimpse Jayden Moon among the trees, alongside the path we followed to get here. Tall and skinny, with his arms crossed over his chest, he smiles at me. It’s a half second of forgiveness, and then he’s gone, no trace left behind.

I breathe again.

“It’s a projection in your overlay,” Flynn explains quietly.

“Yeah. How did you get the access?”

“Delphi set it up.”

We sit on the monument’s black resin base. The trees rustle overhead, the stream whispers, birds sing to one another, and slowly, as the day draws to a close, I see the rest of them: Vanessa Harvey, Samuel Tuttle, Anne Shima, and Steven Kendrick.

Flynn tells me, “When you were gone . . . those first days, we didn’t think we’d get you back.”

“Did you put me here, Flynn?”

She shrugs. Not a question she’s willing to answer.

“This memorial . . . it was your idea, wasn’t it?”

She shrugs again, refusing to meet my gaze.

“You did good,” I tell her.

•   •   •   •

Technically, Eduard Semak is not an American problem, but no one likes the idea of rogue nukes that might someday be used against us. So after fifteen days spent evaluating captured files, the analysts declare a new mission, designated Vertigo Gate.

The plan is tentative and pieces are missing.

One of the missing pieces is Amity.

During the initial debrief, I told Jones about her visit on the day before the raid. “We called her Amity, but that wasn’t her name. I couldn’t ID her, but she had a slight Russian accent.”

At a later meeting, the analysts had shown me a photo.

“Yes,” I confirmed for them. “That’s her.”

They told me her real name is Ulyana Kurnakova. She’s the new hire among six pilots flying for Sidereal Transit Systems. Prior to that, she claims to have served twenty-five years in the Russian air force. The analysts still don’t have details.