“I know for a fact that my aunt, Jane Matthews, is in apartment 258. What the hell are you doing in here?” Lana started to push past Madeline into the room.
Madeline was stunned with fear. She knew this woman could kill her in an instant, and from what John Hunt had told them, this Agent in particular would probably enjoy it. But she could not let this woman into this room if for no other reason than the simple fact that her mother could be back any moment.
“Look, I don’t know who the hell Jane Matthews is,” said Lana, allowing the panic she had been suppressing to show, “but she does not live here. This is my mother’s apartment, Sarah Cavanagh, and she has lived here for several years now.”
“And you? What are
you
doing here?” quizzed Lana, standing face-to-face with Madeline and challenging her.
Madeline’s towel was slipping and she thought about letting it fall, but knew that such an act would not faze this woman, if you could even call this thing a woman. No, Madeline had to say something believable, she knew that she needed a reason that she had been staying here for almost six months, and her mind did not have to work hard to find one.
As she opened her heart to the only reason that she might have been in hiding for so long, the tears that came to her eyes were genuine. It was compounded by a deepening fear and stress and that helped her emotions run free, but when she allowed herself to think about James, about what had happened to him, she found she was still filled with unprocessed grief. And now here she stood facing one of the people who had ordered that death, and she could do nothing to avenge the man she’d loved. She could not hurt this murderer. She had no weapon at her disposal that would bring this bitch down. Though she wanted nothing more than to lash out at the almighty cunt standing in front of her, Madeline knew she could not hope to win that fight. Not today, not yet.
But nor did she have to completely suppress her anger and hatred for this murdering, unholy bitch. The woman had barged into her mother’s room and because of that Madeline had every right to be angry, even if she bought the cover story Lana had used. So Madeline took a deep breath, allowed her rage to build up inside her, and then let it rip:
“Look, bitch, I don’t know who the fuck you are, or what the fuck you are doing in my mother’s room, and frankly I don’t give a shit. This isn’t your room, this isn’t your friend’s room or your aunt’s room, this is my mother’s room, and I have been staying in it since my boyfriend was killed in an accident in India a few months ago.”
Lana instinctively stepped back from the suddenly enraged woman. Lana was born a princess and she was not used to being spoken to this way. As she began to consider how good it would feel to punish the human for her tone, she suddenly registered a message coming in from the AI. Apparently Shahim had reestablished contact. He was OK, he had been forced to hide when an internal alarm sensor had registered his presence, but he had managed to disable it. Lana was being ordered to stand down and return to her post in Georgia per the stipulations of the Council. Shahim had completed a thorough search of Neal’s affairs and confirmed that it was a false alarm and there was no need for further investigation.
Lana stared back at the furious human in front of her and cursed her impotence. You’ll get yours, she thought, keeping her face passive, soon you will all be dealt with. It’s coming, you peasants, and when it does I’ll be there to ensure the thunderbolt hits you the hardest.
Outwardly though, Lana remained calm, and Madeline wondered whether she had gone too far. But she was enjoying herself too damn much so she decided to go for broke. Stepping right up to the Agent, she grabbed the woman’s shirt and said into her face, “Now I suggest you go back to reception and check that room number. But that is really up to you. You can go fucking swim for all I care. All I know is that you need to get the fuck out of my room, and you need to do it right fucking now.”
Madeline didn’t know if she was about to die, and at this point she didn’t really care. That had just felt so deliciously good.
But Lana had her orders, and the rules of the Treaty that governed the advanced party were extremely clear. Very well, the princess would stand down, for now. It appeared that these two humans were, indeed, innocent. But she would not forget the words of this lumpen commoner. No one manhandled Princess Lamati and lived.
Madeline sensed Lana’s hands coming up with more than a little trepidation, and she felt them wrap around her own. She felt them squeeze with smooth force and was reminded that the woman she was manhandling could easily crush every bone in her body. Now that her pent-up rage was released, the initial fear came flooding back.
But it was not necessary. Lana was leashed, for now, and Madeline would be allowed to savor her small victory. Limiting her phenomenal strength, Lana simply pulled Madeline’s hands off her shirt, stared at the human for a moment, and then turned and left.
Madeline stood there in the Agent’s wake, the door ajar, her heart racing, sweat beading her forehead, and butt naked except for a shower cap and a threadbare pink towel. She smiled and thought about what she had just said to the alien assassin. Her adrenaline soaked fear slowly turning to relief. She tried to contain a sudden urge to laugh. That was fucking awesome, she thought. Then she closed the apartment door.
As she went to get dressed, she stopped, changing her mind. Taking the towel into the bathroom, she removed the shower cap and climbed into the shower to rinse away the stress that she could feel permeating every part of her. The heat was a sweet release; it washed over her. There was so much to do, so many hurdles, and she knew that would not be the last time she faced death so closely, not by far. The worst was no doubt yet to come.
But the littlest victories resounded all the more in a war as hopeless as theirs. Taking a deep breath, she allowed herself to relish this one.
The sun was setting on Pearl Harbor Naval Base in Hawaii. On the side of a large storage hangar on a wide pier, a small door opened, casting a long shadow along its aluminium walls and the concrete surface of the pier. The newly promoted Major Jack Toranssen stepped out of it, bidding a final good night to the forty or so officers and enlisted men that made up his new team. He was leaving them to finish cataloging the shipment of modified tactical missile casings that they had been busy putting together in Hanscom. As he closed the door, he turned to stroll pensively toward the pier’s edge, squinting into the sunset as he went. The sun’s reflective sparkle danced on the diamond surface of the water as his gaze wandered out over the harbor’s breakwater and out to sea, blinking into the blood orange glow of the setting sun. Slipping on his sunglasses, he surveyed the storied harbor.
It had been three months since the fateful day when the enemy Agents Shahim Al Khazar and Lana Wilson had come so close to discovering the plans of the team. Much had happened in that time. Though Jack had not even known about the day’s events until days afterward, it was clear that John had truly saved them all. His quick thinking had been extraordinary, as had Madeline’s equally daring response. Both of them had faced imminent death without thought and it had been a reality check for the whole team. Though the world would never know it, they had been a hair’s breadth from triggering a response that might have wrought the eradication of the entire human race. It had been inordinately close, and since then, they had pursued their security measures with renewed vigor.
But from the jaws of utter failure they had managed to grasp an unexpected new ally. For many on the team, including Jack Toranssen, the thought of bringing the infamous terrorist into their midst had been difficult to stomach. The man had killed so many innocents, women and children falling in the face of his callous attacks. During Shahim’s brief stay on Earth, he had become an international symbol of everything that Jack despised. But the strategic and tactical options opened up by John’s induction of Agent Shahim Al Khazar to their ranks were undeniable.
No, there could be no doubt that it had been a coup for the resistance and it had paid off tremendously. But to achieve it John Hunt had risked everyone’s fate on the integrity of an Agent responsible for the brutal execution of countless innocents, and, in truth, Jack still felt that it had been too great a risk for the man to take independently.
In the days following the fateful fight, Shahim had apparently also met with Neal, Ayala and Admiral Hamilton. Given that he already knew Neal’s complicity, and John’s, it seemed moot to keep the rest of the team from him. If he planned to betray them, then they were, to all intents and purposes, already sunk.
Shahim had approached Neal even as the dust still settled, even as John Hunt had rushed to get back to the HMS
Dauntless
before his absence became suspicious, and he had been introduced to Ayala not long afterward. Later, now with Ayala’s approval, they were able to involve the admiral as well, and though the meetings between them all had been strained, it had apparently led to some significant improvements in their overall plan of attack. Ayala had said she was very excited at the new options that Shahim had been in a position to propose. But after an all too brief time with Neal and Tim Hamilton, the enigmatic double agent had been forced to vanish back into the underground. By design, they would not hear anything from him again for some time.
There had been stories in the news about Shahim. Stories about the FBI locating him and his terrorist cell in DC. According to the news they had not apprehended Shahim himself, which was lucky for the FBI agents involved, of course, but since those initial frenzied reports, there had been nothing. If all was going according to plan the notorious killer should be back in Pakistan by now and they would have to hope the man was true to his word. True to his word, and indeed able to do all he had promised. Because now that they had him on their side so much depended on him being every bit as fearsome as his terrible reputation suggested.
An unsettling feeling rumbled in Jack’s stomach, part hunger, and part discomfort at having to rely on unknowns. Jack did not like variables, he liked known entities and detailed intelligence. He liked his plans to be layers of redundancy upon redundancy, and his brow furrowed at the thought of leaving so much to the efforts of one man, let alone this particular man. But John had been insistent that the Agent that they knew as Shahim Al Khazar was both extremely reliable and amply resourceful. No, his abilities were not in question, thought Jack, they had seen plenty of evidence of what he could do. And despite concerns on the parts of Jack and Barrett, Neal and Ayala had mirrored John’s opinion that Shahim could be relied upon, and had even expressed cautious optimism about the new plan.
Jack had wrestled with it all for months but had failed to come up with a better solution, or a way to mitigate the risks he saw in their current course, so, like he had numerous times before, Jack set his doubts aside and returned his focus to the sky, contemplating the satellites which his friends and he were quietly plotting against. A mental image of the earth rotated in his mind with a caricaturishly large version of himself standing on the Hawaiian isles as the planet revolved.
As he visualized the planet revolving, he tried to switch his mental perspective, just as Galileo had first done hundreds of years beforehand. Locking the sun in place, he instead envisioned Earth as it span relative to it, the inhabitants on its surface racing at a thousand miles per hour toward the sun in the morning, and away from it each night. When he had first learned of the satellites from Colonel Milton all those months ago, it had been difficult to imagine how the four satellites fitted into that picture, but after many months of thinking about them, Jack’s mental image was now clear. The satellites were orbiting against Earth’s rotation, in retrograde orbit. As everyone on Earth revolved into the east to meet the dawn’s sun, the satellites came round in the other direction, flying overhead at phenomenal relative speed and effectively overtaking the sun and the moon as they went. He knew, for example, that at this very moment one of the deadly platforms was soaring far above him, tracing its long arc over the earth. Soon it would head toward the horizon to catch the rapidly receding sun, only to be replaced by another satellite perennially chasing it from the east, and so it went on.
But hopefully not for too much longer. His team’s arrival in Hawaii meant that in just a few more months they would be ready to launch their attack: a massive barrage of missiles flying up into the satellites’ paths, carrying the hopes of humanity with them. Hopefully it would be enough.
For his part, Jack Toranssen was leading the Western arm of the effort to modify the huge battery of GBMD missiles. It was this mammoth job that had brought him to the Hawaiian archipelago where the southern branch of the tactical explosive arsenal was based. There were similar arrays of missiles in Alaska and California, and this was matched on the Eastern seaboard by batteries in Florida, the Carolinas, and Maine. Finally, a string of batteries in the northern US and Canada served to protect the country and its neighbor to the north from long-range missiles that may come over the North Pole from Russia, or, of course, should China get uppity all of a sudden.
For the task at hand the team would only be able to utilize the two large batteries in Hawaii and Florida because of their proximity to the orbits of the satellites. So Jack’s team had travelled with the shipment of the new missile nose cones in a C-17 Globetrotter military airlifter from Hanscom Base, leaving behind an equally large team under Colonel Milton that was continuing to work on more shielding for the Eastern batteries.
But the massive airlift plane had carried more than just GBMD shields, and as Major Jack Toranssen looked out over the harbor, his eyes came to rest on a particular ship moored across the bay. As part of the long standing alliance between the US and Great Britain dating back to the Second World War, the two navies shared an uncommonly liberal access to each other’s dockyards. So it was as normal to see a US naval sub in one of the berths at the British naval base in Gibraltar as it was to see a British ship in port here.