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Raul’s skin prickled. “Was it an official test? Is Toby’s name going to appear anywhere?”
“No. Absolutely not. My name wasn’t on it, either. The owner of the lab knows me and owes me and expedited the results. Here. Here’s the analysis.” Colin held out his phone.
Raul and Emma bent over it, then both looked up at Colin. It was a string of chemical products. Raul had a passing acquaintance with street drugs and incapacitating drugs, but the numbers baffled him. “Can you interpret that for us, Colin?”
“Yeah,” Colin said tightly. “He was perfused with enough flunitrazepam to keep him docile but aware enough to drink to keep hydrated and to void bladder and bowels. Carefully calibrated so they wouldn’t have to hydrate him intravenously and clean him. Also, enough to stop the creation of memories so he wouldn’t remember what happened to him. Another couple of days of this, though, and they would have created permanent neurological damage. They knew what they were doing. They were neutralizing him in a way that created the least mess for them. I don’t think they cared that they might be creating lasting damage.”
No, they wouldn’t have cared. Two operators for SSS? They wouldn’t have given a shit.
Toby reacted as if they were talking about the weather on Mars – nothing to do with him. He sat, shaking slightly, staring down into his cup of tea.
Emma touched his shoulder lightly and he started. “Toby? Tobe? Are you up to talking about what happened? We might be on a … on a timeline here.”
He put the mug on a small table by the side of the couch. It rattled for an instant. “I don’t know what happened, Emma. I can’t remember anything after Friday evening. I told you.”
“Uh huh. Yes, you did tell me. Let’s try something else. You didn’t show up for work on Monday. We had the files on rare earth mineral mining corporations to go over, do you remember that? We were supposed to discuss them and take a decision whether to recommend or not.”
Toby’s eyes widened. He sat up a little straighter. “Yeah. Yeah, I remember that. I was projecting a possible five-year 27% return. I was about to recommend a sizable investment.”
“The day you didn’t show up, I pored over the data and you really called it, Toby. I waited for you to kick the recommendation upstairs but …”
“But I disappeared.” Toby sighed and stared at his hands, frowning.
Emma leaned forward a little. “Toby, you’d been a little agitated lately, and not because of rare earth minerals, either. Both of us had seen those anomalous data, together with some massive shorting. Here, let me show you –”
Emma took out her laptop and opened it, screen turned toward Toby. She pressed a few keys and the screen lit up with coursing data, the Matrix-like configuration. Raul thought she was maybe pressing this too soon, but Toby snapped to attention, like a recruit suddenly spying his commanding officer.
Nerds, he thought, with a wry internal smile. Hope and Felicity were the same. If something caught their attention, they forgot tiredness, hunger, thirst. They were like dogs with a bone until they got to the heart of it.
Emma put her head next to Toby’s and they started speaking some special language Raul couldn’t follow. Some words were in English, many were in math. He couldn’t understand any of it but it was intense. Toby was taking the lead, pointing things out that were incomprehensible.
The only thing Raul could do was wait and finish his scone. Luckily, it was really good. So was the tea, which surprised him. He was more a coffee guy, himself.
He glanced at Colin, who was patiently waiting, too, while Emma and Toby did their thing. He and Colin exchanged a wry glance, two men whose partners had completely forgotten about their existence and were immersed in apparently fascinating nerddom. Toby even had regained a little color in his face.
It took them about an hour. Emma had supplied the data she had which she shared and it turned out Toby remembered he had copied much of the data he’d studied to a secret place in the cloud.
Raul didn’t dare make small talk with Colin because he didn’t want to disturb them. Though in truth they looked like it would take a nuclear explosion close by to jog them out of their focus trance. After a while, Colin got up, cleared the cups, and went to do something in the kitchen.
Raul was a sniper. He had endless wells of patience. He’d once hidden in a hide for three days, not moving, barely breathing, pissing in a bottle, holding back dumps, waiting for a high value target to come in his sights. The fucker finally appeared, Raul snapped into high alert, smoked him and left fast.
Patient waiting was his friend. And since what was being figured out wasn’t his circus, he was free to get lost inside his head. Normally, he defaulted to work mode. ASI was in the process of evaluating renewing its weapons. An upstart tech company was offering a series of handguns that were made out of a new kind of ceramic that was used to coat modules landing from the space station. The ceramic had amazing heat resistance, strength, but was very lightweight and didn’t show up on metal detectors. The weapons became slightly fragile after the 100,000thround had been shot, but they were easily replaceable, since they cost a tenth of an ordinary firearm. His colleague Jacko was the company armorer, but Jacko had brought him in on the considerations.
Raul had spent a lot of time and effort and thought on the issue.
But right now? Nah. He’d rather think about Emma. Beautiful, fascinating Emma. Raul was starting to understand his buddies Metal and Luke, the partners of Felicity and Hope. Partnering with a really smart woman was dangerous stuff, but both of them seemed off the charts happy. Raul knew them from their military days and would have described both of them as tough, no-nonsense guys. Guys without a romantic bone in their bodies. And yet, when their women were around, they were reduced to puddles of goo. It would have been weird, borderline insane, if it weren’t for the fact that both Felicity and Hope were really fantastic. They were beautiful and smart, both of them. But, also, kind and hard workers and a ton of fun to be around. Both of them geniuses with computers and data and not one operator at ASI, not even one highly trained SEAL or Ranger, in Luke’s case, had ever beat them at Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter. Not even close.
You had to admire that. Raul sure did.
And now, he was close to a woman who was as beautiful and as smart as Felicity and Hope. Actually, though he could never say so to either Metal or Luke, she was more beautiful than either woman. Metal and Luke both said loudly and often that their woman was the most beautiful/smartest/most fantastic woman in the world. They didn’t say it in each other’s company, though.
The thing was, Raul secretly thought that was bullshit. Emma was more beautiful than Felicity and Hope were and was certainly as bright as, if not … no. Not going there, not even in his head. But Emma was really bright.
She shared with Hope and Felicity the fact that she was easy to be with. No games at all, just fun when it was time for fun and serious and focused when at work, and never high maintenance. No maintenance at all, really. Emma didn’t pout for attention. As a matter of fact, right now she probably wasn’t even aware he was in the room.
She hadn’t once been morbidly curious about his career. SEALs sometimes were catnip to women, for all the wrong reasons. Some women liked the thought of a violent man, without realizing SpecOps screened out for violence. For violent natures. Violence was a tool. They’d missed with Buchanan but, generally speaking, SEALs weren’t violent men. They used violence as a precision tool. Plus patience, an ability to improvise, ability to work in a team. Violence didn’t define them, effectiveness did. They did what they had to do to establish order. Sometimes that was investigative work, sometimes that was persuasion, sometimes that was, yes, violence.
Some women liked that, liked a hint of violence, as if he could ever hurt a woman. If he ever hurt a woman, he’d have his grandmother, his mother, his two sisters and a billion female cousins on his back. They were all tough women and they’d make him pay.
