AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Whatever he heard made the corporal look at Valentine again.
"Yes, Doc." He replaced the receiver. "You want some coffee or anything, Major Valentine?"
"I'm good."
"One of the senior fellows will be right down, Major."
"And he'll hear how polite you've been as you've done your duty," Valentine said.
"Thanks. I mean it."
The two guards looking down from the balcony on the second floor lost interest, and Valentine heard footsteps over more distant construction noises.
A limp-haired woman wearing shapeless scrubs that looked as though they belonged in a hospital emerged from a door behind the security station and came around the desk, giving a friendly nod to the corporal as she passed. She extended her hand and Valentine shook it. She had an easy, confident manner that made Valentine think of the midwife from his youth in the Boundary Waters.
"Gia Dozhinshka," she said. Valentine wondered if he'd been greeted in an Eastern European tongue. "Zhin's the shorthand around here," she continued.
"David Valentine, or just Val. I don't think we've met."
"No, but I summarized your debriefs. Nebraska and the Caribbean, and I read your Wisconsin and Great Lakes material. Call me a fan. Let's go to an interview room. We can sit."
"New digs," Valentine said as they passed through a different set of doors under the balcony at the back of the foyer.
"We hid our low-level archives here when we got the order to bug out. Seemed easier to move Mohammed to the mountain afterward. No one's complaining. Central air, if you can believe it."
"I thought that was a legend outside the hospitals and Mountain Home."
"We've been blessed. That's what it seemed like at first, anyway."
A young woman pushed a cart down the hall. "Interview A, Tess," Zhin called.
They turned a corner and she opened a door to a room that had been subdivided by half-glass walls. Valentine saw two people speaking to a hairy-faced man with the look of a frontiersman, though even with hard ears he couldn't make out any words through the glass. She led him to a warren of enclosed cubicles.
They circumvented most of them and went to a smaller office at the back, where she turned on a light.
"The chairs in this one are better. It's got its own sugar and such for coffee, too. Have to wait on Tess with your files. Anything to drink? Coffee? We have sage tea, courtesy of your Texas friends."
"Water would be good," Valentine said, spotting a cooler.
"Cups are up top. We don't have the kind that go in the little dispenser anymore."
Valentine got his drink and sat down at the bare table. Zhin settled herself opposite him.
"They decided you're worth guarding, it seems."
"We've come up in the world. Curse of being right."
"How's that?"
"A couple of our guys picked up on some strange dealmaking with the Texas-Kansas-Oklahoma Kurians. Solon hiring himself an army-but you know all about that. We figured we were going to get hit, and hard. Southern Command figured they were going to clean out the Grogs up and down the Missouri-Solon sent out a bunch of false intelligence indicating that. We ended up being right."
"But nobody listened," Valentine said.
"We were always outside the whole command structure. We'd give an opinion on this or that. What might work to pierce Reaper cloaks. Is there a way to disrupt the signal between a Kurian and his Reapers. What kind of ailments kill 'em. But since Solon's bid we've got to issue regular reports, assessments, and they're even starting to filter who we talk to and where we go so we don't lose 'assets.'"
"I met one of the filters at the security desk. Seems a reasonable precaution."
The young woman with the cart knocked and entered, pushing a collapsed binder with Valentine's name and some sort of catalog number printed on the outside. Be interesting to take a look at the supplemental notes in that file, Valentine thought. Pens, notepaper, and storage bags and jars littered the cart.
