was crowded with strolling pedestrians who’d wandered away from the nearby waterfront attractions in search of food or window shopping along the tree-lined streets. Well-maintained brick buildings, common to The Rocks, as the area was known, provided a quaint respite from the bustling business district only a few blocks away.
Grant didn’t need binoculars to see the planter at the corner of Hickson and George where Kessler was supposed to drop off the xenobium, but he used them anyway. Morgan, lithe in a sports bra and Lycra leggings and pretending to be out for an afternoon jog, stretched her legs on the planter, surreptitiously depositing a fist-sized metal container into the box of geraniums.
When she peeled out of her stretch, she threw a pointed glance at the window before she trotted away. Morgan knew Grant was watching her through the blinds and wanted him to know it.
Eh. He didn’t care that she knew he was staring. Grant had been sitting in the third-floor apartment for six hours now. He didn’t mind Morgan’s fine form spicing up the day, even if she had been nothing but a pain the entire time.
She’d picked a room at the Holiday Inn high enough to give them a good view of the area, but low enough that it wouldn’t take them long to reach ground level if they spotted the target. Their luggage lay on the beds and Chinese takeout containers littered the small kitchen nook.
Two tactical squads of the Australian national police waited in vans around the corner, ready to move in if Grant recognized one of the targets.
But they’d decided they needed bait. The scientists at Pine Gap rigged up a small device that would emit just enough radiation to set off a detector. Now all they had to do was wait until midnight to see if their trap would snare any varmints.
Five minutes later, a key rattled in the door and Morgan walked in.
“Have a good run?” Grant said cheerfully.
“Did you get a good look while I was down there?” she said with a deadpan expression.
“Of you? Bird’s-eye view.”
“You’re not around women much, are you?”
“Are you kidding? I grew up with four older sisters. There were nothing
As she rummaged in her bag for a change of clothes, Morgan said, “If you’re trying to bother me, it won’t work. After spending time in a squadron with fifteen guys, this is a breeze.”
“You were a pilot?”
She sighed, as if she were sorry she’d brought it up. “F-16.”
Fighter jockey. Grant was impressed. “Then what are you doing in the OSI? You get drummed out of the service?”
“I still hold a rank of captain in the reserves, Sergeant.”
“I’m not in the reserves, so you can just call me Grant. Although I like the way you say ‘sergeant’. Very authoritative.”
She ignored him and took her clothes into the bathroom. When she came out, she was dressed in her suit again. Disappointing.
She picked up the second pair of binoculars and peered at the street.
After a few minutes of silence, Grant sat back in his chair, thinking to himself how boring stakeouts were. Well, that was easily rectified.
“So what happened?” he asked Morgan. “Did you sleep with a colonel and his wife found out and they bumped you down to investigator?”
“None of your business.”
“Come on, Morgan. Lighten up. We’re going to be here for a long time. And don’t forget I saved your life yesterday. Might as well tell me your story.”
Another sigh. “If I tell you, will you shut up?”
“Absolutely.”
“Fine. It happened when I was stationed in South Carolina at Shaw. I had an old Corvette—”
“Sexy.”
“Do you want to hear the story?”
“Sorry. Continue.”
“It was late one night. I was on my way back from leave at my grandparents’ house in Atlanta when a deer jumped onto the road. I missed it but lost control and spun off the road into a tree. They tell me I hit my head on the steering wheel and blacked out. Because it was down in a ravine, I was unconscious for an hour before someone spotted the skid marks and found me.”
“You look fine to me. And I mean that in the health sense.”
“I was in the hospital for a couple of days with two broken ribs and a concussion.”
“Then what happened?”
“I was cleared to fly the next month, but when I was up in the air and performed some routine maneuvers, I got severely dizzy. I tried to shake it off, but on landing I nearly ran off the runway. When I got out of the plane, I tossed my cookies all over the tarmac.”
“Because of your head trauma?”
Morgan nodded but didn’t look at him. “A rare form of benign paroxysmal positional vertigo. In my case it only shows up under high-g maneuvers. The doctors tried everything, but they couldn’t find the source. MRIs. Exploratory surgery. Even did tests inside a centrifuge at Brooks. Nothing worked. After a year of not flying, my career was stalled, so I asked for a discharge. Since I majored in criminology in college, I applied to the OSI. Been there five years. Now you know the story.”
“I’m sorry to hear about your flying status. I just dabble. Got my helo license a few years back. But Tyler’s logged a couple thousand hours in jets. I know he’d be crushed if he could never fly again.”
“There’s nothing I can do about it, so there’s no sense dwelling on it.”
Morgan went to her bag and pulled out two pairs of night-vision goggles. She handed a set to Grant. He recognized them as thermal imagers, but they seemed to have been modified.
“You really think we’ll need those with all the streetlights?”
From her coat she removed a vial of what looked like gray dust. She took off the cap and dipped the tip of her pinkie into it.
She nodded to his goggles. “Take a look.”
Grant donned them and flipped the switch. Most of the room was a cold green, and Morgan glowed yellow. The end of her pinkie, though, was covered with bright red crosshairs.
“What’s going on here? I thought I knew all the latest toys.” He reached out to touch her finger. He just barely brushed against it, and when he withdrew his index finger, it too had red crosshairs on it.
“This technology is still classified top secret, so you can’t discuss it with anyone else.”
He removed the goggles and looked at his finger. The dust was now invisible.
“Is this ID dust?” He’d heard about it, but he thought it was still in the testing phase.
“Yes. Because we suspected a leak, we didn’t tell the team that we coated the inside of the Killswitch containers with tracking dust. Pine Gap internal sensors are configured to identify the RF signature of the dust. We were planning to see if any unauthorized personnel were accessing the containers. Anyone handling the open container would have been tagged with the ID dust.”
“So why didn’t you track it?”
“The range is limited. No more than a few hundred yards. These goggles are tuned to sense it. If someone walking by down there has it on his hands, we’ll see it.”
“What if they wash their hands?”
“The nanoparticles are so small that they embed themselves in skin and clothes. It would be like trying to wash off the markings of a Sharpie. Because it transmits a radio-frequency ID, the signal is even visible through walls and thin metal casings.”
Grant wiped his finger on his clothes, but all it did was transfer a few of the particles. “Is it safe?”
“It’s not FDA approved, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“I’m not worried.” But he couldn’t shake the sensation that the motes were pricking his finger.
