Danny and Nuri sped southward, blowing some of the carbon out of the engines as they went. The boat was a Phantom 21, sporting a massive engine and capable of somewhere around 75 knots—expensive to lease but well worth the price. They touched fifty knots before throttling back to enter the marina at a controlled speed.

Standing on the dockside waiting as they approached, Hera did her best to keep her mouth shut, trying to block the remarks that came into her brain from traveling to her tongue. Danny and the others had been cold to her the whole trip, through Egypt and on the flight here. Even Flash, who talked to everyone and was everyone’s friend, barely spoke to her.

Separation from Whiplash was inevitable. It wasn’t fair, she thought—she had done her job, and done as well as anyone else. But that’s the way it was going to be.

As long they didn’t blame her for McGowan’s death. She knew it wasn’t her fault. She hadn’t been anywhere near him and she’d done her job. Getting stuck in the prisoners’ pen wasn’t her fault.

“All right, Whiplash, let’s go,” shouted Danny as he nudged the boat next to the dock. “Hera, you’re with me.”

She tossed down their gear bags and jumped into the boat. Nuri, meanwhile, clambered out and got into the second boat, a Sunseeker with twin Mercruisers. Not quite as fast as the Phantom, but no slacker, either.

“We gonna race?” said Flash, handing down a pair of jerry cans filled with fuel.

“Let’s just get across the Gulf in one piece, all right?” said Danny. “Nuri, we’ll stay in touch.”

“Yeah. What are we going to do if Tarid doesn’t get on that plane?”

“Then we’ll definitely have a race on the way back,” said Danny, gunning the throttle.

40

Pentagon

BREANNA PICKED UP THE PHONE A SPLIT SECOND AFTER IT started to ring.

“Breanna Stockard.”

“Jeffrey Stockard,” replied her husband.

“Oh, it’s you.”

Zen laughed. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

“I’m waiting for a call.”

“An important one, I bet. You have your serious voice on.”

“All my phone calls are important,” she said.

“Even the ones from me?”

“Especially yours. It’s just—I’ve been waiting for you to call all morning.”

“It’s beyond morning. A half hour beyond,” he added. “I thought we were having lunch.”

“Oh, crap!”

Breanna looked down at her computer. The alarm noting lunch was buried under eight windows, half of which she couldn’t even remember opening.

“Guess it’s off, huh?”

“I forgot all about it. I lost track of the time. I’m sorry.”

“You need a secretary,” said Zen.

“I have a secretary.”

“Where is she?”

“Lunch.” Ms. Bennett had in fact reminded Breanna that she had an appointment before leaving.

“So: We having lunch, or not?”

“No. I can’t. I—I have to get something cleared up.”

“What you were working on last night, huh?”

“Something along those lines.”

Breanna wanted to talk about the situation but couldn’t—she and her husband had agreed that they wouldn’t discuss anything involving national security on her side, and party politics on his. While they occasionally bent the rules, Zen would have immediately ended the conversation if she began talking about the mission.

It was too bad. There was no one whose opinion she trusted more than her husband’s, especially when it came to dealing with the Washington bureaucracy.

“It’s all right,” said Zen. “I’m a little squeezed myself. I have an appointment with the President at one. Which means it’ll be about two when I get in there.”

“You’re seeing a lot of her lately. Should I be jealous?”

“Ha. I’m her favorite thorn. In the side or elsewhere. You going to be home for dinner?”

“Yeah.”

“Because Teri’s thing is tonight.”

“Which thing?”

“Concert thing. Spring concert.”

“Oh right, right, right.”

“I’m missing a reception at the Korean ambassador’s home for it,” said Zen, as if this was the greatest sacrifice in the world. Zen hated receptions, and wasn’t very fond of the Korean ambassador, either. “So you better show up.”

“I’m showing.”

Breanna looked at the windows on the computer. She had a lot to do, but it was difficult to focus on any of it while the Whiplash mission was under way. She knew she had to separate herself—and yet she couldn’t.

Maybe it would be better to go over to Langley and work from there. At least she wouldn’t be checking the secure message system every few seconds, and looking at SpyNet, and checking the news…she could hook directly to MY-PID and get regular updates.

Her secure sat phone beeped. It was a call from Danny, asking for an update.

“Zen, I have to go,” said Breanna, barely getting the words out of her mouth before hanging up.

41

Approaching the Iranian coast

IT WAS A LITTLE OVER 250 MILES FROM BAKU TO THE COAST of Iran. The speedboats made the trip in just over four hours, dodging a small patrol craft operating out of Babol.

The Voice gave them directions the entire way. Danny still felt it was intrusive but he was beginning to think of the system as a personality, rather than a computer. It definitely acted differently than any computer he’d ever dealt with before.

Technically, MY-PID was simply the sum of its various connections and databases. The programmers had kept the interface portion extremely basic, using techniques and routines developed and tested at Dreamland. Most of these, at their very core, were barely more sophisticated than the routines that worked GPS units, or the so-called personal assistant bots that gathered Web and media feeds for smart phones. But the sheer volume of the data available to the system and the algorithms it used to sort through them shaped the MY-PID’s interaction with users in the same way a human personality did.

The Voice was like a brainy, overknowledgeable kibitzer, an egghead that could be extremely valuable, but at the end of the day was still an egghead. In many ways it reminded Danny of Ray Rubeo, though the computer wasn’t quite as full of himself as its real-life analogue.

They were already in Iranian waters when Breanna called, using the Voice’s communications network.

“Danny, your subject is on his way to Tehran,” she told him.

“Roger that. We’re like zero-two minutes from shore.”

“I see.” Breanna paused. “I thought you were going to hold until we were positive he was in the air.”

“Schedule is a little tight, Bree. We have a bus to catch.”

“Acknowledged.”

“You wish you were out here, huh?” said Danny. “It sucks sitting behind a desk.”

“How’d you guess?”

Her voice had made it obvious. “I know exactly how you feel,” he told her.

“We’ll trade notes when you get back.”

“Deal.”

The Voice warned that a car was approaching on the road a few yards from where Danny wanted to land. He cut his speed, drifting to let the vehicle go by before moving closer to shore. As he coasted, he looked back for Nuri. Though the boat was only a mile or so behind, Danny couldn’t see it; the night was too dark and it was too low to the water. The engines were plenty loud, but the hum from his own craft drowned them out.

“Trouble?” Hera asked. It was practically the first word she’d said since they left Baku.

“It’s just a car. We’ll let it pass,” he said. “You ready to use your Farsi?”

She told him, in Farsi, that she was as ready as an old woman to bake a cake—an expression her Iranian grandfather had used to indicate that he was willing to do whatever had to be done.