They were sitting in two of the permanent side seats in the cavernous main cargo hold. Crates of equipment bound for Pine Gap were chained to pallets running down the center of the plane. Some of it was Dr. Kessler’s, but most of it was routine machinery and supplies used to run the facility. The only passengers were Morgan, Vince, and Kessler’s technician Josephson, who slept on a seat at the far end of the hold.
“Why couldn’t we go with Kessler and the rest of his team?” Vince said.
“Their charter flight was full,” Morgan said without looking up from her e-book reader. It was loaded with every book by Charles Dickens and Jane Austen, so she had plenty to keep her occupied. She found that losing herself in nineteenth-century English literature was a strong inoculant against stress.
“This sucks,” Vince said. “At least in coach you get dinner and a movie.”
“I told you to bring some books.”
“I was going to watch a few DVDs, but I forgot to charge my computer, and they don’t have any outlets down here.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Then we get a flight attendant who thinks he’s a comedian.” Vince aped the loadmaster’s Alabama drawl. “‘You have a life jacket under your seat, but if we crash into the ocean, we’re all going to die anyway, so don’t worry about it.’”
“You sound worried about it. He said don’t.”
“If I liked the water, I would have joined NCIS.”
“Get some sleep.”
“Sleep? On these seats? Sure. And then once I get my eight hours in, what do I do with the other twelve?”
“You could keep whining. That seems to be working for you.”
Vince crossed his arms in a huff. He stayed quiet for a whole five minutes. Elizabeth Bennet had just received an all-important letter from Mr. Darcy when Vince interrupted Morgan’s reading.
“I’d feel better about the transport from the airport to Pine Gap if we went with the weapon.”
“The truck will have four armed agents in it. What would you add to the equation?”
“We could follow in our own car.”
“It’s a nondescript truck. A chase car would draw attention.”
“Do you think the leak is an Aussie?”
“We shouldn’t talk about it outside of a secured facility.”
Vince exaggeratedly looked around at the hold. “Where do you think they hid the bugs?” he said in a stage whisper.
He had a point. On board an Air Force cargo jet was about as secure as they could get. The noise from the engines would make it impossible for Josephson to hear them, even if he were awake. And they wouldn’t have much time to plan once they arrived in Australia. She closed the cover on her e-reader with a sigh.
“Since the person who posted it used an anonymizer,” Morgan said, “we can’t pinpoint where it came from. So it could be anyone on the team from the US or the Australian side.”
Since they’d discovered the posting three days ago, Morgan and Vince had been working nonstop trying to trace where the message had come from. Backgrounds, relationships, and possible motives for everyone involved in the project had all been checked. On the US side, the trail was cold.
“Maybe we should look at it from a question of motive.”
Morgan nodded. “All right. There’s greed.”
“Could be. There are a dozen countries that would be willing to buy the Killswitch technology. But nobody on the team seems to have sufficient money troubles to sell out their country.”
“And none of them has any suspicious bank deposits. But we can’t rule it out because a lot of these people are smart enough to hide overseas accounts.”
“Unfortunately, we don’t know if they want to steal the Killswitch itself, steal the technology, or sabotage the test.”
“It’s doubtful they’d attempt to steal it before we get to Pine Gap,” Morgan said.
“Why?”
“Because of the xenobium stored there. It’s the only known sample in the world, and the Killswitch is useless without it.”
“Xenobium. Ever since I heard the name, I keep thinking it’s a heartburn medication. ‘Xenobium — Relief is on the way.’ What do you think it is?”
“I don’t have enough information to speculate.”
“We don’t need info to speculate.”
Morgan eyed the six-foot-long crate and shrugged. “Kessler will give us the rundown on it in Australia.”
She and Vince had received only a minimal briefing on the Killswitch, so they didn’t yet know how it worked, only that it was an unprecedented new weapon that fried electronics with an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, and that xenobium was the material used as the explosive trigger.
“The forum didn’t say anything about the xenobium,” Morgan said. “It’s possible that someone is trying to sell the plans for the Killswitch and didn’t mention the xenobium because he’s trying to have his cake and eat it too.”
Vince clucked in disapproval. “You mean, sell somebody a worthless weapon? That’s a recipe for getting yourself killed.”
“It may be enough for someone to know how it works. If they had the plans, they could build it themselves.”
“Then where do they get more of the xenobium?”
Morgan shook her head, but said nothing.
“Of course, this could all be coincidence,” Vince said, “and we’re just getting a free trip to Australia on the dime of the American taxpayer.”
“You don’t think that.”
Vince smiled. “No, I don’t. Neither do you. So what’s the plan?”
“We should get our interviews of the team underway as soon as we arrive. Maybe we’ll get one of them to crack.”
“And I’ll double check the security plan for moving the Killswitch to the test range. If someone’s planning to steal it, the likeliest scenario would be during transport, because that will be the first time the xenobium will be with the weapon outside of a secure facility.”
Vince went silent and sighed. After two more sighs, Morgan took pity on him and lent him her laptop so he could watch his DVD.
With Vince plugged in and tuned out, she went back to reading her novel. Though she tried to immerse herself again in the machinations of nineteenth-century British landed gentry, Morgan couldn’t keep her eyes from flicking to the crate holding the Killswitch.
TWELVE
Colchev sat at a metal desk in the Alice Springs warehouse office and watched the news report from Queenstown for a second time. The laptop’s streaming video cut from a view of Fay Turia’s smoldering house to the overturned jet boat lying behind a body covered in a sheet. Colchev’s lip curled in anger at the thought of his men being killed on what should have been a routine operation.
As the anchor continued her narration of the events, the video showed two men exiting the police station. The first was a huge black man dressed in the brightest orange parka Colchev had ever seen. Bald, with a neck as thick as a telephone pole, the man was identified as Grant Westfield, an electrical engineer and former professional wrestler who was known as “The Burn” before he left the sport to join the Army.
The slightly taller white man who followed Westfield was identified as Dr. Tyler Locke, another engineer with a company called Gordian Engineering. Though not as bulked-up as Westfield, Locke in his leather coat didn’t conform to the doughy awkward lab denizen that Colchev had worked with in the past. They both looked like men
