Kill Shot

expected of the guy in charge.

“Are you planning on shoeing someone to death?” A cold voice asked from his right.

Ethan whirled around to find Grace leaning against his kitchen counter, a cup of steaming coffee in her hands. She was dressed in a threadbare grey T-shirt and worn jeans, and her hair was braided loosely down her back. At first glance, Ethan thought she looked closer to his own age, but her eyes held an experience and wisdom that most people never achieved. There was no doubt in his mind that she’d earned every inch of her reputation.

“How in the hell did you get in here?” Ethan asked.

He felt the flush of embarrassment working its way up his neck, and that only intensified his anger. His system had not only failed, but she had been the one to do it. He dropped the shoe and ran to the front door, tripping over the corner of his rug and barely catching himself on the corner of the couch before he face-planted on the tile. He ignored the sting to his pride, too curious to see what she’d done to the system he’d installed. He opened the panel in the wall, but everything was just as it should be. The wires were intact, and the red light was engaged, just as he’d left it the night before.

The muscles in his back tensed, and his palms were damp with sweat. He turned around slowly, wondering if he could make it out of the building before she got him. He’d seen the looks Gabe had been giving him lately. He knew the team didn’t trust him completely. Didn’t think he could handle the pressure or remain loyal to what they were doing. Well, screw them. He knew damned well where his loyalties lay, but he wasn’t going to stop having fun just because everyone else was old. And it might be perverse, but he was having a good time seeing how far he could push Gabe before the man snapped completely.

“Relax, Ethan. I’m not here to kill you,” Grace said.

“Well, that’s a relief. Like you’d even tell me if you were.” He wiped his sweaty palms on his pants and headed back to the kitchen.

“Look at it this way. If I were, you’d already be dead by now. Here, it looks like you could use some of this.”

He took the coffee she offered him, his mind split between thinking he was going to die and wondering how she’d breached his system. Ethan drank from his cup deeply and winced at the bitterness that touched his tongue. The coffee tasted like it had been boiled a week and stirred with a leather boot.

“Never eat or drink anything someone you don’t know or trust offers you. It could be poisoned. Spy School 101.”

“Is that a joke?” He ran his tongue along his teeth and waited for something to happen, for the bitter taste of arsenic on his tongue or foam to start bubbling from his lips, but there was only the bitter remains of too-strong coffee.

“I never joke.”

“My mistake.” They stood in uncomfortable silence for a few minutes—or at least he was uncomfortable. She had a way of looking at him that made him think she could see into his soul. It was a little disconcerting.

He grabbed some cereal from his cupboard and ate it dry out of the box. “What did I do wrong with the system? How did you get in?”

“It’s a good system. You had a couple of secondary traps set up that I’ve never seen before, and I don’t see anyone outside of this group getting past your security. It took me almost fifteen minutes to get in, and if I was on a mission I would’ve had to abort. If it makes you feel better, probably Gabe and I are the only two people in the world who could’ve gotten in. We used to practice B&E for fun. It keeps you sharp.”

Ethan relaxed a little at her explanation, though he was already thinking of ways he could tighten the system. A couple of more secondary trips and maybe a body-temperature sensor would take care of it. She’d thrown down the gauntlet, and he was determined to best her.

“So you and Gabe have worked with each other a lot, huh?” he asked, curious to know more about the man who didn’t seem to have a past. Whose records had been wiped so clean there wasn’t a trace of him anywhere. And Ethan had certainly looked. Hell, he wasn’t even sure if Gabe Brennan was his real name.

Her lips quirked in either a grimace or an attempt at a smile, he couldn’t be sure which, but she didn’t answer the question.

“Now that we’ve had our moment of bonding, you might want to change out of your jammies for our recon meeting. Jack lives to torture, and he’ll be here in about thirty seconds.”

Even as she said it there was a knock at the door.

“Punctual as always.”

Ethan speared his fingers through his hair and went to do just that, not sure if he’d passed or failed whatever test she’d just given him. At least he was still alive.

* * *

“This is very cool,” Jack said, circling the table of a 3-D hologram of the National Museum in Tehran. “Nice going, kid.”

“We’ll need at least two men on the inside,” Grace said. “Two more on point, and then Wonderboy here can set up as home base.”

“Three on the inside would be better,” Ethan said. He changed screens so the interior of the museum glowed with blue lights. Splotches of red lit up where cameras were located, and green lines crisscrossed in the main showroom where infrared beams rotated on a timer.

“That’s too many bodies,” Grace argued. “Three gives the opportunity for someone to get left behind if things go to shit.”

“Agreed,” Jack said. “Two can do it. Where’s the entry point?”

Ethan narrowed the hologram to a small section. “The roof. They’ve got skylights, but I’ve got something to get through the security there.”

“What about guards?” Grace asked.

“That’s where things get tricky. The guards are hired guns, no more than a couple dozen, and only a handful of those are official employees on record. The government is still pretty shaky with the new transition, and money is scarce, so they’ve hired out without asking a lot of questions to fill holes. There have been threats against some of their national treasures, so that’s why security at the museum has been upped.

“There are a lot of factions who still oppose the Iranian government, and from the background checks I’ve done on some of the guards, they definitely fall into that camp. We could always try to pay the guards off. Several of them are barely scraping by.”

“No. Too big of a chance that one of them will cave under pressure if questioned.” Jack rubbed the back of his neck. “Let me make some calls. I have a few men I trust who are still in the area. We need to know exactly how many we might be facing in and outside the building. We’ve got a good start here.”

Grace’s laptop beeped from the living area, and she went to see what it had come up with. Ethan’s apartment was set up much like hers. An open living space where there were no walls between the kitchen and dining room, and a private bed and bath off the kitchen. The only difference in their spaces was that Ethan had a large workroom filled with electronics and his 3-D Hologram machine, which he for some reason felt the need to christen Wanda. The furniture in Ethan’s apartment was more masculine and modern than hers—sleek black leather and glass tables—and he definitely had more clutter. There was a basket of clean clothes on the floor, computer parts and gadgets on every available surface, and a video game console and wires scattered every direction.

She stepped around the mess and sat on the edge of the sofa, pulling the laptop closer to the edge of the coffee table. She’d been running probable scientists and doing research on them since she’d left Gabe in the gym the night before. There was no way she’d have been able to go back to sleep after that fun encounter. So work had been her only option. Ethan and Gabe weren’t the only two who knew how to use a computer, though she wasn’t afraid to admit that her skills came nowhere close to theirs.

“What’s up, Red?” Jack called from the other room. “Anything exciting?”

“I think I’ve got a hit on a scientist who’s a viable candidate for recreating The Passover Project. I did some research last night and ran some probabilities, and less than half a percent of all scientists at various universities and institutes around the world have the genius to even guess at a formula as complex as this. And the percentage shrinks even more when you narrow the scientific field. We’re looking at four, maybe five men who can pull this off.”

“So who’s your top pick?” Jack asked.

“The deeper level background checks just finished, and it looks like a Dr. Allen Standridge quietly resigned