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“Then you must call me Jacob.” She blinked at the thought of calling one of the most powerful men in America, in theworld, by his first name. It felt unnatural.
“Hmm.”
“Let’s sit down,” Pierce suggested, “and we can talk about Riley’s … issue. I don’t know too much about it. ASI and our IT department pressed the emergency button and sent me to pick up Riley at the NSO, but there wasn’t time for a briefing. I have little intel.”
“Good thing you came, too,” she said. “Otherwise I’d be dead.” She sat down at the end of a sectional couch. It was very comfortable.
Jacob Black’s head turned at that, but he didn’t say anything. He sat down in an armchair perpendicular to the couch.
Pierce was still standing. “Before we start, does anyone want anything? Coffee? Tea? Water?”
“Coffee. Black.” She would have guessed that was Jacob Black’s drink of choice.
“Tea. Milk. Again. Please,” she said. “And I’m going to need a laptop. I left everything of mine behind at the office.”
In a moment, Pierce had her cup of tea and two cups of pitch-black coffee on the coffee table. He disappeared for a second and came out with the latest version of a laptop produced by a big company.
He set the laptop in front of her and surprised her by sitting right next to her.
She opened the laptop and winced. Then sighed.
Pierce sighed too. “Emma told me you’d turn your nose up at the laptop.”
She side-eyed him as she went to the browser, torn between snobbishness at the inferior hardware and software, and gratitude that he was doing everything in his power to help her.
“Hmmm.”
Pierce looked mournful. “It’s the latest version. Costs a lot. Has a pretty fancy shell. Has a big memory.”
She side-eyed him again. The laptop was crap. She and her friends were continuously testing beta models of ambitious companies, and even the lowliest beta would leave this POS in the dust. But no use saying that.
She glanced up, out the window. The sun was starting to set and the sun’s rays beamed horizontally into the window. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the flatscreen TV over the fireplace, tuned to an all-news channel with muted sound.
“Whoa!” Riley sat up straight.
Pierce and Jacob Black swiveled their heads.
She pointed at the flat screen TV, where a female news anchor with old fashioned helmet hair was talking against a background of aircraft carriers. The chyron at the bottom said,Two carriers of the 7thfleet sailing to Taiwan.“Turn the sound on!”
Pierce touched a button on a remote and the sound came on.
“… though no official statements have been made by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, unofficial sources say that a General Alert has gone out to the People’s Liberation Army Navy, the lowest level of alert, the equivalent of our Defcon IV. The top brass has been meeting inside the headquarters in Beijing nonstop for the past 24 hours. To recap, days after an attack on American scientists in Congo …”
The famous photo showed. Men in lab coats in a clearing in the jungle, Chinese attackers just emerging from the jungle, weapons out.
Riley muted the TV again.
“OK,” she said. “You guys have been watching this, right?”
Both men nodded.
“It’s all fake. All a lie, every second of it, from beginning to end.” She pulled Pierce’s laptop to her. “Watch.”
4
Pierce knew in very broad strokes what was happening, but it was news to Jacob Black. He wasn’t the kind of guy to rear back in surprise. Special Forces operators—and Black had been one of the best—never showed surprise. But he could sense Black’s intense interest.
Riley was pounding away at the keyboard of a laptop he was sure she disdained. But she hadn’t said anything, even though he was certain she was thinking it. She was intensely focused on whatever it was she was doing, and Black was focused on her, after she’d thrown her little bombshell.
