“You’re going to get yourself killed.”
“Maybe, but at least I will have tried.”
She was rapidly clearing away his beard. His face was even more attractive than she’d first thought. She studied him for a moment more.
Or maybe her view of him was improving.
She leaned close to scrape away the last of the beard along his chin, edging around the slight cleft. She looked at his lips and then up into his eyes. She was an inch away.
And then she lowered the razor and kissed him. Almost immediately he began kissing her back. She dropped the razor, and they were immediately locked in a passionate embrace.
McKinney felt his powerful arms as he pulled her close to him. It had been a long time since she’d been with a man, but now McKinney realized she’d been attracted to him from the start—but especially so now. As she ran her hands over him and smelled his scent, she saw the kindness in his eyes. How he was letting her in, and how much she wanted to be let in.
They made love on the edge of the stream, at the base of an ancient oak, and as she kissed the scars along his body, his calloused fingertips ran along the scar of her own wound.
He spoke softly in her ear as she felt him within her.
“I lied to you.” He searched her eyes. “I’m glad you got caught up in this, Linda. . . .”
The ravens observed curiously, perched on the branches above them.
* * *
Hours later McKinney and Odin lay in the bed at the hacienda. Having made love again, she felt spent, and calm for the first time in many weeks. Odin was a considerate lover. She turned to face him in the low lamplight, her arm across his chest. McKinney ran her fingers along his cleanly shaved chin. He looked like a different man. No longer the Taliban warlord or the ZZ Top drummer. “My God, you’re handsome.”
“There were arguments about who was going to get to rescue you. I had to pull rank.”
“Rescue me? I’m in more danger than ever now. Some rescue.”
He grabbed her close and kissed her forehead. “We’ll figure something out. We have to.”
She rested her face on his chest. “You said something by the creek that I’ve been thinking about.”
“What’s that?”
“About autonomous killing machines. I hadn’t thought about it until now, but if machines based on insect intelligence are widely used in warfare, it could remove evolutionary safeguards that have been in place for millions of years. Among the creatures on earth only certain species of ants engage in unrestrained slaughter.”
“What about the Holocaust? Or Hiroshima?”
“But that came to an end. People didn’t continue the killing. And they didn’t kill everyone who surrendered. Mammals aren’t predisposed to murdering their own species; they engage in a primordial fight-flight-posturing-or-submission process that naturally inhibits killing. But replacing that with an insect paradigm: That means killing without exception. It could begin a self-destructive pattern that circumvents millions of years of evolution—in particular the safeguard that prevents humans from engaging in unlimited intraspecies slaughter.”
He sighed deeply. “That’s why I have to go back.”
“Why we have to go back.”
He glanced down at her.
“There’s no one who knows more about these things than me. You know it, and I know it. And it’s not negotiable.”
He let a slight grin crease his lips, but then he said nothing.
“Besides, you remember back in Kansas City you had all those experts searching for a pattern among the drone attack victims?”
“Expert Three and Expert Five.”
“Yes. Back then we still thought the drone builders were outsiders, but now we know whoever’s behind this is inside the defense complex—or at least they have access to all the same data your team did. Maybe more.”
“I don’t see how that gets us closer.”
“The Web is a lot like the pheromonal matrix of an ant colony; popular messages get reinforced, less popular messages fade away. That creates a data trail that others can follow. That got me thinking about all this data being gathered on everyone—purchase records, calling patterns, social media, and e-mails, everything. What if the systems that these private security firms built to analyze that data—to keep us safe—actually did the opposite? What if whoever’s doing this is using that data to select targets?”
Odin leaned up on his side, looking at her. He nodded slowly, pondering what she’d said. “Meaning maybe we shouldn’t have been searching for patterns between the victims but instead on who was watching their data trail just before they died.”