Clarke noticed it and chuckled to himself. “Old media will get to it eventually, I’m sure.”
Amid her ringing phones she called to him. “Get out of here and go create me a groundswell of popular support, please. I might need it, after all.”
He smirked as he exited. “I thought you might.”
CHAPTER 10
Deconfliction
Linda McKinney stared out the window of a clerk’s office at a U.S. Army air base in Wiesbaden, Germany. At least that’s what they told her this place was. It was night, the offices deserted. The runway quiet. Blinding vapor lights illuminated the snow-blown tarmac outside. Inside Christmas decorations hung from doorways. Photographs of children and unit logistics awards studded the desks.
The phones were dead. Tapping keys and pressing line buttons achieved nothing. They were inert. Likewise with the computers. All the hard drives appeared to have been pulled, and there were small locked safes beneath each desk. Every drawer was locked too. They had things battened down tightly.
McKinney parted the window blinds so she could see the tarmac more clearly. Uniformed servicemen rushed about in olive drab parkas as wind gusted around them. Young Americans of diverse ethnicity, pointing and talking as they pushed pallets of equipment on hydraulic jacks. Occasionally laughing as their breath stabbed plumes in the cold air. Their words were inaudible through the double-paned glass.
None of it seemed real. Everything had happened so fast. Right now in Tanzania it was the hot dry season—a time for getting research finished before the spring rains. Here it was snowing. She pondered the fate of her weaver project now that the government had abducted her. It had taken her years to get the funding.
She realized she was being selfish, but she couldn’t resist a bout of self-pity. Yet, it could have been far worse. If Odin and his team hadn’t rescued her, she’d be dead, and there would have been no project, period.
So her work was being misused by someone to attack the United States. Over a hundred people were dead. She recalled images of the carnage—photos of burned bodies—not the sanitized video from the news, but graphic images of the grievously wounded. What had been in the headlines as terror bombs all these months had ultimately been traced back to her own research. And now, after a short flight to the Tanzanian air base at Morogoro, they’d boarded a waiting, unmarked Gulfstream V jet and flown seven hours here to Germany. She’d sat almost the entire way in brooding silence. Mercifully they left her alone with her thoughts.
Not even twenty-four hours had elapsed since she’d been lying in blissful ignorance on a lumpy cot in Africa. Hard to believe that that humid, cramped little cabin, along with everything in it—along with her foreseeable future—had been incinerated in a flash. None of this seemed real. Not even the room she stood in.
McKinney thought back on all the times she’d experienced this feeling of sudden, surreal dislocation, of everything being torn up. Heading out into the unknown. That was her entire childhood. Her dad worked as a chemical engineer helping to design oil refineries—a job that had taken their family around the world. It had given her diverse life experience at an early age. As an outgoing, curious girl, she thrived on it, gathering insects, plants, and friends from every continent to add to her collection—a collection that grew into a lifelong fascination with the people and creatures of this world. To this day she maintained friendships from her years in South America, Eastern Europe, Africa, Australia, Asia.
Her childhood experiences taught her one thing above all: that the world was not filled with danger. Danger was there sometimes, but it wasn’t the norm. The common thread she’d found in every culture was that the majority of people were decent and simply wanted to raise their children in peace. That basic desire was what linked us all.
Which was why America’s recent, all-encompassing fear puzzled McKinney. She felt like someone who’d returned from a long, inspiring journey only to discover that an old friend had gone crazy-paranoid. She barely recognized what America had become.
And now that old friend was telling her that her work was somehow the latest threat.
And how was any of this her fault? She’d been doing primary research on the natural world. Are we afraid of ants now? Ant society went back a hundred million years—kind of hard to view it as a pressing emergency all of a sudden. And how on earth were we supposed to contain knowledge—especially in a world where others were rapidly eliminating America’s technological edge? This wasn’t something that could be stopped.
She heard a knock, and the office door opened behind her. She didn’t bother to turn around. In a moment the bearded “Odin” came up alongside her. He also parted the blinds and looked out.