But that doesn’t mean it won’t be official to us.
Someday, I’ll find a way to make it true, even for the state.
As long as she says yes.
We can even throw our own unofficial private wedding, no officiant needed.
Hell, I’m looking forward to it. Fine excuse to give her a chance to wear the most obscene, expensive dress of her life.
And knowing her, she’ll decide to get married in all black.
That ring is in my pocket now as I follow Leland down a dark street in D.C. at three o’clock in the morning, surrounded by a security team of over a dozen men.
To call it a long fucking day would be a monster understatement.
I don’t even know why we’re out here, really.
Durham’s been immensely cagey and secretive since he ushered me and several other top officers onto a plane under full guard yesterday.
Something about a high-profile, top-secret project with the highest-level military brass.
Something so classified we may even end up speaking with the president himself.
The biggest project Galentron has ever seen, he says.
So massive, so confidential, so good for his ego that he can’t even breathe a word about it to me until we’re alone in a secured, bug-proof room with the politicos and military chiefs who apparently summoned us out here with zero warning.
Yeah, I’m not buying it.
Things have been weird at Galentron lately.
Lines crossed.
That facility they’ve started building in an old silver mine out in that tiny Montana town for biological research…
Durham’s reaching too far.
And he’s giving me exactly what I need to finally do something about it.
Agent SP-73 is too big. Too dangerous. Too likely to fuck things up beyond any repair the company could ever do if the virus ever got loose.
Too damning.
I wonder if that’s what this meeting is about.
How to keep things hush-hush in the horribly likely event they move forward with this crap? It’s the same crap crafty young Fuchsia brought back to our data boys years ago from her raid in the former Yugoslavia. This lethal doomsday project the Soviets were working on before they went tits up, and a couple years ago, a Galentron team retrieved a sample from some godforsaken place.
They brought a man-made disease that was supposed to be extinct back to life.
I fucking shudder, and it has nothing to do with the chill tonight.
I think I know why we’re walking around in the dead of night on a wet, frozen D.C. street, silent and moving under guard, taking old streets where no one will see us—not even anyone up to more mundane kinds of no good.
No streetlamps here.
No windows facing the street, or else they must have blackout blinds.
There’s trash everywhere. It’s so cold my breaths are steaming, my blood almost too hot in my veins when the rest of me is frozen to the core.
What fucking gives?
We’re nowhere near the sort of private offices military heads direct people to for anonymous meetings that never happened.
I get the sick feeling we’re somewhere we’re not supposed to be.
It feels like the dark side of the moon when I know where I’d rather be instead. Back home in bed in Seattle where it’s warm.
With Fuchsia.
She’s going to be so mad at me, even though she understands.
Galentron protocol.
Full dark on a new initiative.
You become a ghost on the spot until you’re clear to communicate again.
Still, even with my suspicions, even with my reservations that something about this situation doesn’t feel right, I don’t know what I’ve stepped in.
I don’t realize how close I am to becoming a real ghost until the pattern of movement around me shifts.
Suddenly there’s an opening in the wall of men in front of me.
The guards seem to move naturally—and just as we pass the mouth of a pitch-black alleyway, I’m vulnerable, exposed on one side.
My head comes up sharply, something in my old Intelligence Corps training warning me.
With a prickle of alarm, my head darts up right as a shift in the pressure of bodies nearly shoves me toward that alley opening.
And several masked men dart out from nowhere, latching on to me, whipping me into the darkness, right when I’m off balance.
Fuck!
I can already guess what’s happening before the pain proves it.
It’s made to look natural. Just a simple change in formation as we all walked, taking a corner, nobody’s fault, nothing like a deliberate opening created to leave me vulnerable to attack.
And even as I’m jerked backward, struggling and snarling into the alley, the guards are reacting—not to save me, but to protect Durham.
Because that’s their job.
If there’s an attack, he’s the primary target—close ranks, get him out of there, leave anyone else behind to fend for themselves.
Leave me behind to fend for myself.
That wall of bodies closes around Durham, ushering him away, protecting him with their flesh as meat shields against attack.
And I get one last glimpse of him.