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Chapter 153 – March HareAlex looked over when Jack suddenly woke up. From Willow’s reaction, Alex thought maybe Jack had just had a nightmare. She sure knew how that worked. And she knew Jack had nightmare material even she didn’t have. She wondered if Jack had ever read “The Red Badge of Courage” and what he thought about it. She made a mental note to talk to him and Riley about it.
* * *
They got to London just after nine at night London time. Alex manually adjusted Annie Farrell’s wristwatch and trusted that all the computer and telecom stuff would adjust itself like it was supposed to.
They took two cars from the British airfield to the hotel where the meetings would be. General Baylor and his staff took the second car and went off to have a nice dinner before checking in. But Alex’s group drove straight to the hotel in downtown London. Apparently, important Terawatt liaisons needed much nicer, more expensive accommodations than the stuff on military bases. Alex figured that would make her Annie Farrell impersonation go a lot more smoothly, especially at shower time and stuff like that.
There was a British soldier driving their car, so whatever secret stuff Jack wanted to say was going to have to wait. Still, the drive wasn’t that long since it was nighttime and the traffic was light. And Willow had started making phone calls to the hotel about their rooms and room service before they were even out of the jet.
Annie Farrell already had emails. There was one from Hermione telling her to make sure she was free for dinner at Hermione’s flat tomorrow night, and also Jimmy had spent over an hour going through all the system logs tracking down how Miss Farrell had gotten into the system and sent him that message from Hermione’s account, and was going crazy trying to patch everything in sight. So Alex sent her a message back telling her how ‘she’ had done it using what ‘she’ had figured out from going into the webserver the proper way.
Boy, this would be a lot simpler if Annie Farrell wasn’t supposed to be a hacker, and she could just let Willow be Willow.
When they got to the hotel, Alex was pretty surprised. She had been assuming it would be like a Holiday Inn or maybe something surrounded by armed guards and big concrete walls, but it was this big, fancy place that made her feel like a hick. And a ton of people were looking their way, probably because she and her group were walking in with a masked superheroine and Willow Rosenberg.
Jack strolled over to a special desk where a couple of British soldiers were standing stiffly on either side of a British officer who looked like a movie studio had just finished making sure his uniform was too perfect to believe. His clothes didn’t even have a wrinkle that Alex could see, and he had to have been sitting there for hours. Plus his hat was like perfectly set on his head.
Jack showed his ID and his papers, and the officer gave Jack a set of electronic keys. They went up to the fourth floor with a bellman who had all their bags and stuff on a big luggage cart. Alex noticed that Jack and Riley both kept an eye on the bellman and their stuff, too.
It turned out they had three side-by-side rooms, with two soldiers standing guard in front of the middle door. Alex and Hanna grabbed their bags and stuck them into their room, Riley grabbed one small hanging suitcase, the oversized ‘golf bag case’, and a big military-green duffel bag. The rest went into the middle room for Jack and Willow.
Alex spotted Jack’s insistent head-tilt, so as soon as her gym bag was hidden away inside the plinth base under her bed and Annie Farrell’s bag was open and hanging in the closet, she and Hanna went next door. Alex didn’t even stop to check out the huge gift basket on the table.
Jack had a nice suite, with a sitting room and a separate bedroom and a kitchenette and a big bathroom. Riley showed up a few seconds after Alex and Hanna. Willow was putting clothes and things away in the bedroom, while Jack was inspecting the suite with a couple of gadgets. Room service had already set out a couple large trays of cold sandwich fixings and a basin full of ice and soft drinks.
Jack finished checking his rooms, and then he scowled. “As of two hours ago, we’re on full alert. Lieutenant Farrell, I want you to have fast access to your emergency gear at all times. Colonel, ditto for the happy fun gear you brought even though Walter said not to.”
Willow stopped hanging up dresses and Jack’s uniforms, and she stepped out of the bedroom. She asked, “Jack? What’s wrong?”
He took a deep breath. “I had that dream again.” No one but Riley knew what Jack was talking about, so he explained, “Our first SRI op in Siberia, which is still classified so I’m not talking about it, even if certain people went and dug up electronic copies of the after-action reports when they weren’t supposed to.” Willow blushed a little. “Ever since then, when I’ve had that dream it’s meant my intuition is about five steps ahead of the rest of my brain, and we’re going to hit trouble.”
Willow fussed, “Jack we did those tests, and you’re not of the psychic!”
He nodded tersely. “Right. No superpowers here. Just … I think I’ve seen clues that my brain hasn’t recognized, or hasn’t pieced together in a deductive or inductive manner. So one part of my brain is giving the rest of my brain a wake-up call.”
Riley said, “He had the dream before we had our Chernobyl op, and he just thought it was stress. Then he had it again before we went into Myrhorod.”
Jack added, “And I had it before Arizona, and before Gojira, and before North Korea, and before Ogden’s Marsh. In every case, when I looked back on it, there were clues. Hints. Stuff that I should have put together. Sometimes it was stuff I’d read in some of those documents I hate going through, so that’s why I read ’em anyway. But I’d had the dream, so I knew I’d missed something and I needed to be paying more attention.” He paused for a second. “I had the dream on the plane over here. I don’t know what I missed, but there may be a problem.”
He walked over to the window with the closed curtains. “Curtains closed if there’s a chance someone in a neighboring building could see into the room and take a shot at you. I’m canceling maid service: you can make your own bed and hang up your own towel for three days. We need to be on alert for anything, so tonight I want Action Girl to go out on her balcony and use those bat-grapples I know she snuck into her suitcase when Janet told her not to, and check out the roof and all the buildings within a two-block radius. Tera, take the ductwork, make sure it’s clear and doesn’t have any surprises in place, then go up top and downstairs, and check likewise but stay blobby and avoid being detected. Let Action Girl attract all the attention. I’d rather have it look like you’re not arriving until Thursday. Finn? Alert General Baylor that there may or may not be a problem, but we have no solid intel yet. And Willow? Check out all the computer security for the conference and the area around us. Hotel mechatronics, CCTV in and around the hotel, anything you can think of.”
Willow worried, “Can we eat the room service I ordered?”
Alex was really hungry, so she said, “I’ll volunteer, and if I don’t keel over, everyone else can eat.”
Riley pointed out, “Bad idea. You’re mission-critical. I’ll be the taste tester.”
Jack pointed at the food and said, “Make it so, number one. And remember, the chemical sensor didn’t pick up anything suspicious from the food, so it’s probably clean.”
Hanna asked, “What about gift baskets?”
“What?” Jack asked sharply.
Alex said, “We have a nice, big gift basket in our room.”
Jack twitched like someone had just stuck him in the butt with a hatpin. “Lieutenant Farrell, you and I are going to make a quick scan of your room with our equipment.”
“Yes, sir.” Well, she didn’t know what else to say, and Jack was upset, even if he wasn’t showing it except by how he was standing.
Jack had three gadgets. One was a one-foot by one-foot by four-inch metal box with a thin vacuum cleaner hose coming out of one side. That had to be the ‘chemical sensor’. One was Willow’s electronic bug detector box. And one was a viewscreen with a long fiber optic cable. Alex noticed that there was also an infrared viewer in Jack’s suitcase. That would be pretty handy for looking at all the windows that were facing these rooms.
She and Jack walked into her room. She went over everything with the bug detector, while Jack went over the room and the gift basket with the chemical sensor. Then Jack took a peek into the air ducts with the fiber optic cable.
The gift basket had a card on it from Hermione. ‘Lieutenant Farrell, welcome to the conference. This is so you won’t get hungry.’
Jack glanced at it and said, “She remembered how much Terawatt eats, too. Smart woman.”
Alex pawed through the basket with her TK, lifting up layers to peek further down. There were fruits and cookies and crackers and chocolates and cheeses and a bunch of other yummy things. She pulled out a box of chocolates and ate a bunch. It wasn’t her fault she was hungry and she didn’t get to eat enough on the Cessna when there were outsiders watching her.
By the time they got back to the cold cuts, Riley was eating a sandwich and Hanna was fixing herself a plate of yummy stuff.
Hanna looked at Jack and said, “Everything is okay except the beef. It smells … contaminated.”
Riley swallowed and added, “Sir, they could have gone with a simple biological to beat ordinary chemical sensors. Or it might just be a problem in the kitchen.”
Jack nodded. “Or it could be a biological that someone could claim is just a sanitation problem in the hotel kitchen.”
Willow looked up from her computer. “Annie Farrell just sent Hermione and Jimmy a message that there may be an agent in the kitchen, and to find out who could have gotten near our food in the past hour.”
Jack muttered, “This sounds like it’s turning into a giant clusterf–… A big fiasco.”
Willow giggled into her hand. She added, “I’ve been checking the mechatronics, and I put some telltales in a few chunks of their computer software. The only thing I’ve found so far is someone set the main ballroom temperature to be too cold now and too high tomorrow morning, but that could’ve been an accident.”
Jack looked over at the cold cuts. “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. Tera, I need you to check that ballroom tonight. Look and see if there’s anything suspicious in the vents or under a table or maybe under a little raised dais.”
Willow frowned. “What’s going through that sneaky brain of yours?”
Jack said, “There are gel systems that are pretty much like paintballs. In fact, they use a paintball-making machine to crank ’em out. The CIA developed them for certain … anti-insurgent tasks. You put something nasty like mustard gas in the gel bubbles and plant ’em in the target area, usually at night while it’s cold. When it gets hot in the daytime, the gel melts, releases the toxins, and wackiness ensues. This could be something exactly like that, or something slightly like that. And the toxin could be something like the t-virus or the hate plague, instead of just sarin gas.”
“Just sarin gas?” Alex winced.
“Right, just sarin gas. That would only kill the people in the room. You know what the t-virus or the hate plague would do.”
Eww. Either one would turn everyone in the room into a homicidal monster in somewhere between a few hours and two days. That would be mega-bad in a lot of ways, and could be anywhere from ‘threat to all of London’ to ‘wiping out most of Europe’. She asked, “If I find something, do we have a bioweapon containment system?”
Riley said, “I brought four, just in case we ran into another NBC problem.”
Oh. Of course he did. Was there anything Jack and Riley didn’t think of?
He went on, “It’s essentially a multi-layer plastic bag, but the zipper has a sealant that gets spread as you move it, so when you zip it closed with the threat inside, it can’t leak out. Unless the bag gets shot to pieces or run over. You just can’t unzip it or change the volume of air inside afterward, because the sealant dries really fast once the bag is zipped.”
Jack pointed out, “And don’t pull it into your morph once you’ve loaded it, because we still don’t know if you’d be safe from the contents while you’re silvery.”
“Right.” She’d worried about that, too. She needed to ask Willow how to test something like that, so she’d know the answer. Someday it might really matter.
Alex wolfed down four sandwiches, a couple of pickles, and two cans of Diet Coke. She really wanted a roast beef sandwich, but that was the one thing Hanna said smelled suspicious. By then, Willow had notified conference security and Hermione that Action Girl was going to be making a fast sweep of the area before long. As usual, it went out under the name ‘Annie Farrell’. Alex was getting kind of tired of the whole fake ‘genius hacker’ deal.
* * *
Hanna dived off the railing of the balcony for her room. She soared through the air as she aimed a grapple at one of the top-floor balconies. She snagged her target with no trouble, activated the reel in the grapple, and went flying upward in a smooth curve.
She didn’t really understand why Alex had looked worried when Hanna started. It wasn’t as if Alex did not know how easy this was. She knew that Janet worried about her, as mothers were supposed to do. She knew that her father had worried about her and had given his life to protect her, even though she was much more physically capable than he was. Perhaps it was because Alex was a good friend, or because Alex felt responsible for her in some way, or perhaps it was just because Alex worried a great deal about everyone.
She would ask Alex at bedtime.
She pulled hard and as she rose, she fired her other grapple at the top of a large HVAC unit on the roof. She was careful, because now-General Jack had pointed out that lots of grappling points on these units were less sturdy than they looked. It was embarrassing when she targeted something with a grappling hook and it didn’t hold up to a solid tug.
She knew it was supposed to be scary when that happened. It wasn’t. But sometimes it was … inconvenient.
She landed on the roof and retracted both her grapples. Then she smiled at the somewhat alarmed soldiers who were standing guard up here. She went with a slightly thicker Finnish accent than she actually had now. “Hello! Did you get the notification that I was going to make a short patrol?”
A tough-looking sergeant strode over. “Yes, we did. We just weren’t prepared for … you popping in like that.”
She gave him a smile, too. It was interesting how a smile from a pretty girl could make even trained soldiers let their guard down a tiny bit. Granted, it didn’t work on General Jack or Colonel Riley because they knew her, and it was never going to work on Lieutenant Jo. Still, she was standing there wielding a pair of grapples that almost let her fly in an environment like this one. She had a .45 under one armpit and a combat knife on one calf. They should be treating her like a serious threat, even if they had been briefed that she was on their side.
On the other hand, the rest of the eight-man team was not letting themselves be distracted by what was going on over here. They were focusing on potential threats that might be coming toward their sides of the hotel. That was a very good sign.
She told them, “I will be checking out the surrounding buildings. Your men should see me moving about. But it won’t take long, unless something comes up.”
And just for fun, she did a backflip off the roof. She easily snagged a balcony railing with one grapple and did two quick loops around the hotel at different heights. There wasn’t anything obvious, like packages secured to the wall under a balcony where they wouldn’t be seen. So she moved outward.
She swung across the street in front of the hotel. Traffic was being re-directed, so no one could drive a truck full of explosives up to the hotel building. Or a truck full of Orphans. Or a truck full of giant man-eating clams. Or a truck full of indestructible, pain-immune Neumanns.
She missed out on so much fun stuff.
She swung around the buildings surrounding the hotel. London was really pretty. Charlie was right. She should start doing more sight-seeing and less tactical analysis. Just not right now.
The four buildings facing the hotel all had squads of soldiers patrolling on their roofs, too. She checked out the windows facing Jack’s room and found two possibly suspicious rooms she called in to General Jack for quick investigation by the conference security. So she checked out the other three buildings and called in four other possibles.
After that, she swung her way outward a block and made another sweep. It looked like someone very well trained had dealt with the surface traffic. So it was time to use the very fun codenames again.
“Spike to Pinkie Pie. No other problems. Still vulnerable to Victor Cready or a paratrooper battalion, though. Any news from Rainbow Dash?”
“Pinkie Pie here. Twilight Sparkle’s passed your findings on to Fluttershy and security. Nothing new from Rainbow Dash. Applejack is taking a little stroll, too.”
“Spike coming in for a landing. Over and out.”
* * *
Alex puddled through yet another boring vent. There hadn’t been anything in any of the ductwork except dust and a couple of spiderwebs. There wasn’t even a lot of dust. Somebody must clean the whole duct system regularly. She had no idea who, but it had to be more often than the air conditioning ducts got cleaned at her house, which was pretty much never.
After the thing with the cold cuts, she’d expected to find a bomb, or a tank of poison gas with a timer and boobytraps, or something. But there was nothing.
It took a little bit to check things out on the roof while staying in the ductwork, because Jack wanted Terawatt to not be in London yet. She had a feeling ‘Terawatt’ was going to stop a bank robbery or something in America, just to establish that Annie Farrell couldn’t possibly be Terawatt. But the roof was secure, and the British soldiers looked like they knew what they were doing, and the roof exit doors were boobytrapped so no one could sneak up on the soldiers. That was smart.
There was also a fancy parabolic dish pointing up at the sky and hooked up to a computer and transmitter, so Alex was assuming they could detect incoming parachutists and stuff. That was even smarter.
She flew through the ductwork down to the conference area. They had a ballroom set aside for the main meeting room, then the conference room next to it set up for meals, and then the conference room on the other side of that set up as a ‘breakout room’ to hold up to six small, private meeting groups at a time. So she needed to check all three rooms, plus the hallways around them and just to be safe, the adjacent rooms. And she needed to stay in the ducts when anyone was around. She really would have preferred to be flying around the outsides of the buildings.
She moved to a vent and popped the phone out of her morph again. “Rainbow Dash to Pinkie Pie.”
“Pinkamena Pie here. Updates?”
“Nothing new. Ducts clear. Rooms ID’ed. About to begin searches.”
“Be careful, and watch for boobytraps. Pinkie Pie out.”
Alex did have to smile some. She really hadn’t thought Jack would ever go for the ‘My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic’ theme for codenames, especially after she and Willow named him Pinkie Pie. But he’d gone along with it as soon as Willow agreed that General Hammond could be Princess Celestia.
It pretty much went without saying that Wacky Maggie and her Collective were going to be Discord. Jack had also insisted that General Flagg and the NID would be Nightmare Moon, and Hermione would be Fluttershy. Riley was Applejack, which meant that if Grover or Sergeant Scott had come along, Jack probably would have made them be Rarity.
“Applejack to Pinkie Pie. There’s a four-person DSS detail here. One is meeting with General Baylor and one is down with the guards around the meeting rooms. The other two will be on duty during conference hours.”
Alex was glad Jack had told her about the DSS, so she knew they were the Diplomatic Security Service and they were like an overseas Secret Service agency.
“Pinkie Pie. Get their names and let Twilight Sparkle verify.”
“Applejack. Already done, sir.”
Alex smiled to herself and flew out of the vent into the breakout room. The lights were down really low but the room wasn’t pitch black. And her eyes had adjusted a lot after being in the stupid ductwork so much already. So she had no trouble flying all around and checking everything out.
There was nothing under the tables. There was nothing in the light fixtures on the ceiling. There was nothing out in the service hallway hidden in the pieces of dais or in the folded-up tables or in the stacks of chairs.
She moved into the room set up for meals. There were more tables to check, and a raised dais to fly under and inspect, and more stuff off to the side to look around, so it took twice as long, but she still didn’t find anything.
The official meeting room was set up like a hollow square made of rectangular tables, with extra chairs behind the tables for the less-important people. There was an eight-foot-by-eight-foot dais in the middle of the square, and it was only raised about six inches off the floor. It had a nice little lectern on it, and there were wireless controls sitting on the lectern, probably to run presentations and control projectors.
Alex started at the floor and worked her way up. Nothing. Not even under the little dais that was totally unnecessary if you asked her. She even went and checked around the chandeliers and in the boxes up near the ceiling where the special projectors were, and still nada.
She was just about to pop her tPhone out of her morph and give Jack the news, when there was a rattling at the service door into the room. That was supposed to be locked and bolted on both sides. She hadn’t checked. Oops. She darted into the open box around the fancy projector.
Two guys dressed like they were supposed to be working in a restaurant kitchen slipped into the room. One made military hand signals at the other and got a nod in return.
The second guy took out a stethoscope and held it to the door so they’d know if anyone was coming. The first guy silently moved over to the dais in the middle of the room and laid down on his back. Then he reached into his white chef’s blouse and pulled out what looked like several strips of the kind of bubble wrap that had the really large bubbles so they were extra fun to pop.
Uh-oh. It looked like Jack was being way too intuitive again.
Alex thought about zooming in and zapping the guy, or trying to rip all the strips out of his hands before he could do anything. But she figured if anything went wrong, things would instantly get mega-bad. She waited patiently for him to finish his stuff.
Okay, she was really impatient, but she pretended she wasn’t.
Each strip had paper the guy peeled off so he could stick it on the underside of the dais. He carefully stuck all the strips in there and then hurried back toward Stethoscope Guy.
He didn’t make it. As soon as he was moving, Alex darted across the ceiling. As soon as he was forty feet from the dais, she divebombed him and zapped him unconscious, then hit Stethoscope Guy with another lightning bolt.
Both of them struggled to get back to their feet, and Stethoscope Guy reached into his chef’s blouse for probably a weapon.
Crud. And now that she was a lot closer, she could see they were both really, really handsome. Extra crud.
She pinned Stethoscope Guy’s arm down with her spare TK while she hit both of them harder with her electricity. Then she pinched their carotid arteries closed for half a dozen seconds just to be sure.
“Rainbow Dash to Mane Six, come in please.”
“Pinkie Pie to Rainbow Dash. Situation?”
“Rainbow Dash. Two Orphans, probably from the kitchen, just planted something way too much like what you were talking about, and stuck strips of ’em under the dais in the middle of the ballroom. Both are unconscious. I need Applejack and Spike here ASAP with a taser to fake what I did. I’ll peel the strips off and put ’em in the bag Applejack gave me.”
“Pinkie Pie. I’ve got Twilight Sparkle ready to send messages to Fluttershy and on-site security as soon as Spike and Applejack signal they’re ready.”
“Rainbow Dash. Good. I’ll wait here until they arrive. I’m staying on the line while I handle the bio-stuff.”
“Pinkie Pie here. Do not — repeat, NOT — force it. If you even think any of it might rupture, stop and wait for Applejack.”
“Rainbow Dash. Roger that.”
She used her TK to slide the lectern over to one side of the dais and flip over the one section of dais that had the stuff stuck under it. It looked like four strips of the big bubble wrap, only the bubbles were full of stuff and the strips were sticking to the dais.
She pulled the bioweapon bag out of her morph and set it down right next to the strips. She told herself to just take it easy, because if the strips didn’t come loose really easily, she could just leave them on the chunk of dais and they could haul the things away like that. She held her breath, even though she was a slivery blob.
One smooth, easy pull with her TK …
It didn’t want to budge. Crud.
She didn’t dare pull any harder, because she could bust one of those bubbles.
“Applejack to Rainbow Dash. Incoming in four.”
“Roger that. Clear inside.” Alex darted up to the ceiling and hid behind one of the chandeliers.
Riley and Hanna ducked inside, Riley moving forward really fast with his automatic out, and Hanna making sure the door closed silently.
Alex dived back down. She pointed at the two downed badguys and the strips of bioweapon or whatever it was. She whispered, “I couldn’t get it loose.”
Riley nodded quickly and hissed, “We only have a few seconds. Go now. We got it.”
She pulled her tPhone back into her morph and darted into the closest vent. Behind her, Hanna threw a couple of chairs through the air as she ran over to the two downed badguys, and Riley tipped the section of dais back over.
The noise as the chairs crashed had two soldiers diving in through the door and coming up with weapons at the ready. Alex was glad she was already in the ductwork and out of sight, because the soldiers were looking everywhere.
Riley called out, “Colonel Riley Finn, U.S. SRI! Today’s password is ‘culmination’.” He pointed at Hanna and said, “And this is Action Girl.” He explained, “Our hacker found signs that someone was messing with the computer controls for the temperature in here, and we got here just in time to catch these guys planting something under the dais and making a break for it. A.G. dropped them, but they’re too fast to be normal. We need your NBC people in here in case it’s another Code Walsh.”
Alex zoomed off to her room, satisfied that Riley had it all under control. And she didn’t want to be there if they started checking the vents and things. Plus she was hungry again.
She dived into her gym bag, changed back into Annie Farrell, and walked out of her room to Jack and Willow’s room like a completely normal adjutant. She even knocked and waited until Willow let her in.
She hurried in and grabbed a Diet Coke from the room service stuff that was still set out. Jack was pacing back and forth, while Willow rushed over to one of the couches and started typing again.
Jack said, “Pinkie Pie to Applejack. The Pegasus has landed. Status?”
Riley said, “We have two Orphans who look like they could be from the Indian subcontinent, and Action Girl has briefed everyone here on proper restraint and control techniques for Orphans. We have an NBC team on the way, and they’re going to just take the dais section out of here and handle it elsewhere. That should be safer, since there’s no other triggering mechanism and they know to keep it cold.”
* * *
Alex had eaten several more sandwiches and polished off the pickles and the Diet Cokes before Hanna and Riley got back. And she’d read two short journal articles on “The Red Badge of Courage” so she was almost ready to read the story again.
Willow was working on her computer while sitting in Jack’s lap. The computer was over on an end table, but Willow had two Wifi toys. One was a pair of glasses that had a tiny battery pack behind the right ear and a tiny weird triangle glued near the middle of the right lens on the inside. The other toy was in her right hand. It was a gray plastic thing about the size and shape of a squared-off corncob, but it had several rows of buttons down one side under her fingertips. She was apparently typing away one-handed using the cob, even if typing meant pressing a couple of buttons at a time, like it was a really complicated flute.
Jack was looking through reports on his tablet, trying to figure out if there were clues to these attacks in any of the reports he’d read recently, and if not, what his intuition was really trying to tell him.
Hanna and Riley walked in, with Hanna still in her Action Girl uniform and mask. It looked like Jack had also given Riley a keycard to Jack’s room. Jack just looked up at Riley and asked, “Anything new?”
Riley stood stiffly and reported, “Both Orphans looked like they could be from the Indian subcontinent. One of the soldiers called them ‘Pakis’ so the guards recognized it, too. That could mean that Khan Noonien Singh is behind this, or it could mean Walsh’s group is still trying to direct our attention his way. We made sure security understood what was needed to restrain Orphans. And their NBC people seemed highly competent.”
Hanna grinned. “The guards on the roof told the guards in the ballroom that the terrorists were probably lucky I only knocked them out. One of the guards had his earpiece turned up high enough for me to eavesdrop.”
Jack nodded. “Okay. Everyone get as much sleep as possible. We’re on local time for the next few days. But we’re still on alert. Hanna, I want you in your standard uniform for the whole day. Lieutenant Farrell, can you get from the ballroom up here through the ducts in under thirty seconds?”
Alex nodded. “In under ten, if I can get to a vent without being seen.”
He replied, “Good. I’m hoping nothing goes wrong tomorrow, but I’m expecting more headaches. And I still don’t know if General Baylor’s gonna take the hint I dropped. We need to be on better terms with the E.U. in case there’s another Code Walsh in the works and we need a combined element.”
Alex admitted, “The thing in Rome could’ve gone a lot better.”
Jack just said, “Well, some children will never learn to play nice with others. That’s what timeouts in the corner are for.”