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To Court he asked, “Why are you here?”
“Why don’t you take a wild-assed guess?”
“I honestly don’t know, but if there is one thing I know, it’s this. When Sierra Six shows up, it means some shit’s about to go down.”
Court shrugged. “Shit’s about to go down.”
“Or maybe it already has?”
Court sniffed. “Some shit has happened, some shit is yet to happen. Let’s just say, we are in mid-shit at the moment.”
“Did Pace send you?”
“Yeah.”
“Were you at the harbor today?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Pace and Travers had an op, and Z and I were sent in to run countersurveillance on the overwatch.”
“And you killed a bunch of cops?” Zack didn’t think for a moment Court would have killed any cops that didn’t deserve to die, but he couldn’t imagine what else could have happened.
Zoya spoke up now. “Jim killed one of the cops, Court killed one, and Kincaid killed one. Guess which two had it coming?”
Hightower wasn’t sure he’d heard that right. “Kincaid? You mean…”
“Yep,” Court said. “That Kincaid. He goes by the code name Lancer.”
Zack knew Scott Kincaid, though not personally. They’d both been Navy SEALs, but Zack had been on Teams Two and Six and Kincaid on Team Three, and Zack had gone to CIA several years before Kincaid made a name for himself by getting arrested for war crimes in Syria.
“Kincaid came to assassinate Anton?”
Court shook his head. “We weren’t protecting Anton Hinton from Lancer. We were protecting Jim Pace from Lancer.”
Zoya said, “Someone brought Lancer and an ISR expert into Cuba to kill the CIA officer here seeking intelligence on Anton Hinton, the same assassin and the same ISR expert who were involved in some of the other technology assassinations. Who do you think would do that?”
Zack’s eyes hardened as he stared at the Russian woman. “How would I have any fucking clue?”
Zoya said, “Your boss is dirty. Court doesn’t think you’d work for the bad guys knowingly, although I don’t think you waste much time thinking about right and wrong.”
Zack shook his head. “Hinton’s shady, he’s got some crazy ideas, but I don’t see how he could be directly behind what’s happening.”
“Listen, man,” Court said. “Six containers full of lethal autonomous weapons parts arrived on a container ship from Hong Kong this morning. It’s supposed to be delivered to a location in Havana, but that place is an empty shopping mall. Instead, it went to the old Lourdes SIGINT headquarters building there, just a block away from Hinton’s lab. That means you and your boss are either in a great deal of danger, or you and your boss are the villains in all this.”
Zoya said, “Answer this. Has anyone mentioned something called Cyrus?”
Zack shook his head slowly. “Nope. Never heard of that.”
“Have you seen a server farm at the lab?”
“I…I wouldn’t know one if I saw it.”
“A data center. A massive amount of mainframe computers, dozens, easily, maybe one hundred or more. All linked together. Data communication lines, cooling units, probably some sort of protective area around it. A metal cage, a plexiglass enclosure, something like that. Could be in a basement or a subterranean level.”
“No. There’s a room of mainframes in the basement of the lab, but three fourths are still in their packaging. There might be a dozen working units, tops.”
