Prodigal Son (Orphan X #6) - Gregg Andrew Hurwitz Page 0,119

trust himself to speak the words to someone else? That would make it real, would put it into the world where he’d have to stare it in the face. Dog the dog padded over to him and slurped his hand.

He said, “Andre is my half brother.”

“Oh,” Joey said. And then, “Oh.”

She saw it all. He watched her get it.

He cleared his throat. Looked back at the beckoning vodka. Then gave it up. For the moment. “You said there’s a heightened risk now. To him.”

Joey nodded. It wasn’t back to normal between them, everything still heightened, but they would reach for operational specifics and that would make it safe again.

“Molleken’s putting the finishing touches on a new gen of dragonfly drones,” she said.

Evan thought of those thousands of yellow-green eyes glowing at him from the darkness of the battle lab. The terror of being vastly outnumbered by a swarm of things coldly robotic and yet alive.

“They do more than seems imaginable,” she said, a horrified awe touching her voice. “Once they decide to lock onto you, they’re locked for life. Your face. Your thermal signature. Your electronic records. Everything. If they so much as spot you, they can store your biomarkers to find you later, once they’ve joined up with others. They can read your skin moisture, determine how far you live from the ocean. Assess your shirt and link to places you might have bought it—even trace elements that might show where it was shipped from and where to. They can search for you, neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block, looking at faces on the streets, through windows into houses. They hook into whatever databases they want and don’t even report back to leave a record. No oversight. No accountability. They just find you and figure out the best way to kill you, and they do it all on their own.”

Evan nodded. He felt tired, so tired. He wanted to meditate, to sleep, to go back in time and refuse to answer that call from Veronica. But it was too late, and he was in now, and he owed it to himself to finish this.

“What’s our time frame?”

“The swarm is due for delivery to Creech North tomorrow night. Obviously the war capabilities are, like, incredible. But I found an encrypted kill order in the system at Creech, hidden in the list of high-value targets. The rest of them are in the Middle East. But the encrypted kill order is for someone right here at home.”

Evan said, “Andre.”

“He’s the only witness to have seen the program in action illegally on U.S. soil.”

Evan said, “When they got Hargreave.”

“Kill Andre, save the program,” Joey said. “If they launch those things, he will die.”

“Tomorrow night.”

“That’s right. The encrypted kill order is a hack, put in place by one person at the source. Guess who?”

“Molleken.”

Joey dipped her chin in a nod. “The rest of the government doesn’t even know about it, obviously, since you can’t kill a U.S. citizen. Or at least leave a record of it. And the thing is, I can’t lift the kill order from the outside. Someone has to get in there and access the hardware directly.”

Evan grimaced. “If I’m gonna get back in there, I’m gonna need help on the ground.”

Joey took her phone out of her pocket, spun it on her palm, and at last broke a smile. “I was thinking the same thing.”

57

Some Kind of Thrill

Candy McClure leaned back in the seat of the King Air plane, listening to the dipshit jumpmaster drone on.

It was an affront to her training even to be here, on a commercial skydiving jaunt in the skies above Flagstaff, Arizona. She was surrounded by overly zealous thrill seekers who were pumped up on adrenaline and their own inflated self-images. The twenty-something women next to her—Madison (“call me Maddy”!) and McKenzie (“Me and Maddy are, like, sisters but not sisters”)—wore tight-fitting jumpsuits that still bore the fold marks from the store. The dude-bros wore similarly unnecessary suits with scuba-yellow sleeves, cone collars, and tight legs, patches adorning the synthetic nylon like military ribbons.

Candy wore jeans and a T-shirt, her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. The more disinterest she showed, the more the men showed interest in her, sneaking nervous glances, eyes dropping to her not insubstantial breasts, visible between the vertical straps of the harness belt.

Her back and shoulders, covered with rippled scar tissue from a chemical burn, felt feverish against the seat. The twin propellers roared. They were nearing ten thousand