“Could you tell who made it?” KC asked.
Flynn wiggled another biscuit out of the packet Yardley had given her and took a bite before she answered. The hesitation was so obvious that Yardley couldn’t be sure it wasn’t an act.
“A ghost, looked like to me.”
Flynn and KC held eye contact as KC tried to keep any expression off her face. But Flynn wasn’t a spy, so she didn’t know how to give KC what was obviously a shared codeword without inflection.
A ghost.Who or what was the ghost?
“Did you rebuild it?” Yardley carried the chamomile over and dragged her chair close to KC’s. When she sat, KC’s auburn eyelashes fluttered, and she looked briefly down.
Composing herself.
“I tried to refuse,” Kris said. “That was when they showed me my last ultrasound picture, which Declan had pinned up in his study. They’d been in our home. They wouldn’t tell me if Declan was all right. So I did what they asked, but I also tried to find out everything else I could to save myself, the baby, and Declan.”
“That’s what you had in the safe,” KC said. “All the information you could find about the project and who was involved.”
“It is.” Kris stretched her arms over her head. “Not difficult to track down, to be honest. More difficult to track down who I could trust to report it to.”
“Dang.” Yardley whistled. “I have to give it to a girl who’s thinking ahead.”
Flynn shifted in her chair to look at her. “Not just about me anymore, is it?” She stood up and lifted up her shirt, where there was a black band wrapped around her belly. Before KC could reach Kris, Yardley had her restrained from behind.
“Take it off her.” Yardley directed this to KC.
But she could already tell it wasn’t necessary. Flynn was compliant, and she didn’t have a gun or a bomb, which Yardley’s scan would’ve picked up anyway. It was a passport belt, the cheapest kind, like you’d get at any souvenir shop. KC gently unbuckled it and unzipped the pocket as Yardley released Flynn’s arms and helped her back to the seat.
A sage green thirty-terabyte micro hard drive gently clacked into KC’s palm.
“How didn’t I catch that with the scanner?” Yardley sat back down.
Flynn’s expression made it clear that she didn’t think too highly of Yardley’s technical prowess. “It has a silencer, doesn’t it? Like how noise-canceling headphones work because they’re actually making sounds that exert silencing pressure on your ears. This emits a signal that makes it invisible to devices looking for a signal.”
KC rubbed her thumb over the smooth plastic. “If it’s what I think it is, how do you have it?”
“Better question,” Yardley said. “Where, exactly, have you most recently come from, and how many people are looking for you?”
“That’s two questions.” Flynn took a long drink of tea. “I escaped a few hours ago from a fancy row house. My guess it’s a place Mirabel has use of, not where he lives. I was able to upload a signal to my friend using the chip in the silencer case. It was only Morse code, but they got it. The electronic lock on my door released a few minutes later, and I got a lift directly to the Hole. My friend has a friend who’s obsessed with planes. They’ve got drones with telephoto lenses filming at Bromma, the Air Target base, and Arlanda. Your Hermeus came in this morning. This drone fella had never seen a plane like that, so it’s a bit of a flap for him. Two women get in a car, and he follows with his robot. I knocked on four doors before I found you.”
Kris pulled another biscuit out of the packet and ate it in two bites with the rest of her tea.
Yardley wondered if, when this was all over, Kris would consider relocating to the States to take a job at the CIA.
“What’s on the drive?” KC asked.
“The whole wheel of cheese. But it’s a copy. Mirabel doesn’t know I have it, but he knows whathehas, which is the new and improved version of the weapon he wanted. If I’d had more time, I could’ve miscoded it to do nothing more than turn off the freezers in every Aldi in Europe, but the best I could do is make sure you lot can take a look and see what you’re dealing with.”
“And it’s only on two drives—this one and the one Devon has?”
“Correct. Cleaned up behind me.”
Yardley’s proximity to KC was doing what she’d hoped it would. KC couldn’t stay cool knowing Yardley was monitoring her reactions. Two hot pink stripes had emerged on her cheekbones, indicating high emotion—relief? fear?—in response to Flynn’s news.
“You’re sure that everything is on these drives, this one and Devon’s?” KC asked. “The code wasn’t captured when it was deployed in Toronto? Or at the time you retrieved it?”
“I told you, I cleaned up.” Flynn gestured at the drive in KC’s hand. “That and its twin are it. And here’s something that may provide a little breathing room. I also managed a teeny, tiny failsafe, just in case someone uses it before you get to them. I tried out what Simsenshi came up with a couple of years ago. It was theoretical. Now it’s not.”
“The Fuse,” KC said with a nod. “That would mean you could upload this weapon into any infrastructure or machine, and it would burn the evidence of itself up right behind it. If Mirabel did use it, it might be bad, but it wouldn’t be bad again and again. Do I have that right?”
