Disconnecting the bomb is the easiest bit. She loosens the solder joins with the light blade and pulls the bomb away. The light blade retracts into her finger. She tosses the bomb at Daniel, who catches it reflexively.
“Here, a memento of what I’m sure, for you, is yet another brush with death.” She doesn’t expect the unreadable expression on Daniel’s face. “How many brushes with death have you had?”
“Not once every couple of days. Definitely not enough to be as blasé as you about it.” Daniel stares at the bomb as if he expects it to go off at any moment. “What should I do with this?”
“Daniel, relax.” She pushes the hood shut. “It’s harmless now.”
Daniel gingerly places the bomb in the backseat, then gets in the driver’s seat. Ellie buckles herself in on the passenger side and pulls out the list the Chief Architect gave her.
The name at the top is Jerry Neeson. She taps his number into her cell phone. They can chat, he explains, only if she and Daniel drop by right now. His flight home is in a few hours.
“Jerry Neeson.” Daniel buckles himself in and pauses for a moment before he starts the car. “Should be fun.”
The car does not explode. It purrs down the street, exactly as it’s supposed to.
CHAPTER 8
It’s been a couple of years since Ellie has lived in metro DC during the summer. After she moved to metro Boston, she convinced herself that summers in metro DC couldn’t possibly have been as bad as she remembered. It’s the second day of her visit home, and she’s convinced that it’s worse.
The area is one gigantic crab boil. There are sections of the skunkworks where the air is even thicker, but they have the excuse of literally being in another universe. The sheer heat of metro DC could be comforting, but the air presses down on her and blocks her way no matter which direction she walks. A wave of humid heat overwhelms and drowns her as she leaves the desultory air-conditioning of Daniel’s car.
Daniel, of course, is oblivious to the weather. His beautifully fitted suit still looks freshly pressed from the tailor. He doesn’t so much walk as glide through the late-afternoon heat, as if the air were thirty degrees cooler and fifty percent drier. Compared to him, she’s swimming through the muck.
The hotel, on the other hand, is aggressively arctic. The harsh cold slaps Ellie when she makes it through the automatic revolving door. Daniel takes several tries to find the right stride length. His natural one is too long for this door. It halts after each of his first few steps. His exasperation grows with each try. If pressed, Ellie would admit that walking through revolving doors may be one of the few advantages of being at most half his size.
The hotel bar diffuses into the lobby in three ragged layers.Tiny square and round tables are scattered in a vague grid next to the bar. People sit around them, sipping their expensive cocktails and eating their overpriced burgers. Long tables stand off to the sides. People sit in front of them on tall stools, typing on their laptops. Stuffed chairs surround tiny circular tables that are likely a little too far away for Ellie to set down or pick up a drink.
Daniel explodes out of the revolving door, as if it has swung him around and ejected him into the lobby. He rushes directly at a man sitting in one of the stuffed chairs. Ellie follows at a walk, like a reasonable human being. The man is leaned back, his feet propped on the tiny circular table, reading an ebook. A roller bag rests next to the chair. Ellie side-eyes the bag. It probably only fits in an airplane overhead with a lot of vigorous encouragement. It must be a couple of inches too large in every dimension for what an airline calls a carry-on.
For a split second, Daniel looks like he’ll run through the man. In the space of a step, though, he goes from full tilt to dead stop in front of the tiny circular table. If it were anyone else, Ellie might wonder whether momentum was truly conserved and how he didn’t face-plant into the table.
“Hello, Daniel.” The man looks up from his e-reader with aplomb. He shifts his gaze as Ellie walks up. “You must be Ellie. Call me Jerry. My condolences about your mother. She was a dear colleague.”
Neeson stands and offers Ellie his hand. Like Daniel, he’s in a tailored suit, although Neeson clearly has a bigger budget for this sort of thing. It fits so flatteringly that it was probably patterned and cut specifically for him. Unlike Daniel, Neeson belongs in a suit. It doesn’t make him look like a waiter or anyone who might have a license to kill from a covert state organization. It is his skin. He carries himself like the prince of a foreign land who deigns to accept your presence but who is so magnanimous he would never insist your presence is something anyone needs to deign. Ellie forces a smile.
“Thank you.” She accepts his hand, which squeezes hers as though it were Jell-O.
He sits down and gestures at the other stuffed chairs around the tiny circular table. Ellie sits next to Neeson. Daniel sits in the chair opposite him.
“So what can I do for you?” Neeson leans back in his chair but doesn’t prop his feet up on the table.
“We were wondering about the side channel uncovered in the audit.”
“Yeah.” Daniel hunches forward, resting his forearms on his thighs. “How are you so sure that it’s a bug and not sabotage?”
Ellie shoots Daniel a look. Daniel looks puzzled back at her, mouthing “What?” Neeson grins.
“I don’t know that I can drill down to the level of detail that will satisfy Daniel.” Neeson side-eyes him. “The car I hired to take me to the airport is coming and, besides, I haven’t done any meaningful verification in years. All I do is oversee the folks who conducted the audit that found the bug. What would a manager know?”
The way Neeson stresses the word “manager” makes it a bullet. Not one, however, aimed at Ellie. Despite looking at her, he’s obviously resuming some protracted conversation he’s been having with Daniel. Knowing Daniel, Ellie would guess that Neeson has been having that conversation mostly with himself. Either way, if the bullet hit its mark, Daniel doesn’t seem to notice.
“Daniel will survive.” Ellie doesn’t roll her eyes, no matter how much she wants to.
Daniel, to his credit, stays silent. He’s still hunched forward but a vague if genial smile rests comfortably on his face. Then again, rising to the bait would require Daniel to realize he’s being baited in the first place. Ellie isn’t sure whether he’s being magnanimous or oblivious.
“There’s nothing about this bug that hasn’t been part of how the skunkworks operates for over a century,” Neeson says simply.
“Pretend I’ve only ever been in the skunkworks once.” Ellie is not above underplaying her experience.
