The Spy Who Loves Me (30 page)

D
rake watched as Monahan peered over Diana's shoulder at the terminal, his temper bubbling just beneath the surface.

“Excellent,” Monahan said. “I see Waterman cooperated.”

“With the right persuasion,” Drake said. “Yes.” He couldn't stand it anymore, and moved forward, cupping his hand against the small of Diana's back. She leaned against him, and he relaxed just slightly.

“Timing?”

“The satellite will be in range in two hours,” Diana said. “I've preprogrammed the system and put it in fail-safe mode. It's firing the moment it comes into range unless I tell it otherwise.”

Monahan nodded, then leaned over the console, staring at the rows of numbers and codes flashing across the monitor. “I would have preferred to fire the day she and Teague escaped. There's still time,” he said. “Time for something to go wrong.”

“That was a holy day,” Drake said.

Monahan raised an eyebrow, fixing him with a dark look. “The bastard's blowing up a mosque.”

“To further his cause,” Drake said. “He wouldn't do it on a holy day.” He kept his voice level. He'd gotten a lot of use out of Monahan. Not, he thought, enough to justify taking his friend's crap. But he might need Monahan again. Until the man was officially retired from Unit 7, he still had his uses. “Nothing will go wrong,” he added.

“The money?” Monahan said.

“The balance will hit my account as soon as Mujabi confirms the mosque's destruction. You'll get your share soon enough.”

“Half,” Monahan said.

Drake forced a smile. “Yes,” he said. “I know.”

“And where is our little computer geek?” Monahan asked.

Drake glanced at Diana. “He had a rather bad night, I'm afraid.”

Monahan closed his eyes, taking a deep breath. “You promised me you wouldn't kill him.”

Drake had to laugh. “Turning sentimental on me, old man? We don't need him anymore. Diana's in, she's taken control. He's useless. As they say in the business, collateral damage.”

“Shit.”

Drake laughed. “I swear, there are times when I wonder how you had the balls to turn on your two young protégés.”

“I do what's necessary.” He licked his lips. “Of course, I would have preferred a different outcome,” he admitted. “Neither one was supposed to be in Los Angeles during this project. Amber's assignment to watch Diana was without my authorization.”

Drake laughed. “You just keep getting screwed. Schnell's assigning your people all over the goddamn globe, and you're getting pushed into forced retirement with a piss-poor pension plan.”

Monahan's smile registered about thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit. “That's why I decided to create my own retirement plan.”

Drake just shook his head. “All those years,” he said. “You and I could have been working together all along.”

“No,” Monahan said. “I'm not like you.”

Drake looked him up and down, then nodded. The man standing before him was a selfish coward, utterly lacking in loyalty, and willing to sacrifice his friends just to make his own life more comfortable. “No,” Drake said. “You're right. We're not alike at all.”

 

Amber held out a hand, stopping Finn as she poked her head into the corridor to make sure the way was clear. He pressed himself back against the wall, his heart pounding in his ears.

“Okay, partner,” she said. “What now?”

The import of the question wasn't lost on Finn. Somewhere along the line, they'd become equals. But he wasn't about to dwell on the victory. There wasn't time. “I'm going to see about grabbing one of those lab coats and joining the other rats in the control room. If I'm lucky, I can access the controls through any terminal. If I'm even luckier, they won't realize what I'm doing.”

“Good,” she said. “I'm going back to the dish.”

Finn shook his head, then repeated what he'd heard Garner explain to Beltzer.

She shook her head. “Six dishes. Shit.” She met his eyes. “Then you really are up at bat, sweetheart. We've got to do everything we can to make sure you take control. In the meantime, I'll see about rescuing Bernie. If anyone can help you, he can.”

He nodded. “Once I get in and find a terminal, it'll take me a few minutes to patch into the system. If we're lucky, they won't notice me nosing around. I'll just be another guy in a lab coat.”

“But?”

“But I can't just turn the thing off or set it for some other coordinates. As soon as the plan goes awry, they'll know, and they'll blow my head off. We don't have any backup. We have to kill all their options from the get-go.”

“Self-destruct,” she said.

He nodded. “As soon as I set it for self-destruct, everyone in that room is going to know. It's going to show up on that giant television screen and Diana's monitor and everywhere else. I don't know if there's an instantaneous destruct button or a countdown. If there's a countdown, there's time for Diana to blow me away and reset the commands.”

“Unless she's otherwise occupied,” Amber put in.

“Exactly.”

“So you need a distraction.”

“That I do.”

She grinned, and he wondered if she was thinking about a Mrs. Digby type of distraction. “I can do that,” she said. She glanced at her watch. “Eighty-four minutes to range. Hopefully, it won't take me long to find Bernie.” She squinted, eyeing him carefully. “Is that enough time to get in?”

“It better be,” he said.

She nodded, a silent show of both support and agreement, and then started to turn away. He pulled her back, needing to feel her against him one last time. His lips pressed against hers, then lingered in a sweet kiss that built to an explosive frenzy with each passing moment.

As they broke the kiss, her breathing was uneven, her eyes bright—adrenaline mixed with a hint of sex. “If that was your ‘in case we don't see each other again' kiss, I'm going to be sorely disappointed.”

“No way, babe,” he said. “Previews of coming attractions.”

She kissed her palm, then pressed it over his lips. “Good man. Now go kick butt.”

 

“Sixty-five minutes,” Diana said.

Drake watched as the screen on the far wall displayed the countdown. Soon…soon…

His hands practically itched, and he rubbed his thumbs over the pads of his fingertips. A red light on the console squawked, indicating an incoming call, and he waved a hand, gesturing for one of his technicians to answer it. The man did, his face turning visibly paler as he signaled for Diana to pick up.

“What?” she snapped, her voice reflecting Drake's own irritation. This was not a time for interruptions. Not at all. A second passed, and then her face went totally flat. And as it did, a sick sensation rose in Drake's stomach, and he knew that James had been right—there was still time for something to go wrong.

“What?” he barked.

Diana licked her lips, replacing the handset. “No one's heard from Beltzer, and they can't raise him on the radio.”

“She's in the complex,” Monahan said.

Drake turned on him, barely able to contain his fury. “She's your goddamn loose cannon. Go take care of this. And you,” he said, pointing to Diana. “Close the control center doors after him. So long as we're locked in here, she's not getting in. Not through solid steel, and certainly not in sixty-five minutes.”

 

The doors clanged shut with solid determination, the sound echoing through the domelike room. Finn kept his head down and his hands in the pockets of his lab coat, trying to look blasé yet productive as he ambled toward an unoccupied terminal.

The other lab coats essentially ignored him, and Finn considered that a stroke of luck. He wasn't certain if they were all busy working hard, or if they were just so scared of Drake that they were afraid to look up from their appointed tasks. Not that the reason mattered. Finn was just grateful he could blend into the background.

Considering Drake had sealed the doors, Finn had no idea how Amber intended to cause the appointed distraction. But he'd leave that up to her. If her assignment was to distract, Finn knew damn well that's what she'd do.

Besides, there was no sense worrying about what Amber was going to do when he hadn't yet even figured out what
he
was going to do.

First things first.

It took a bit of maneuvering, but he got logged into the compound's network. As he'd hoped, Prometheus's operational controls were on the network—a nice little benefit that allowed whoever was programming the thing to move from terminal to terminal, just in case they were being pursued. Of course, that added bit of convenience for the bad guys was also a perk for the good guys. And in less than five minutes, Finn had found his way to Prometheus's front door.

So far, at least, he was right on schedule.

Too bad he hadn't yet gotten to the tricky part.

He started with the basics, trying every gamer's back door he knew. It wasn't uncommon for game programmers to put in sort of a “master key,” thereby letting programmers across the globe get into the meat of the game. But none of the codes he ran through worked. Okay. On to other options. In addition to the information he'd collected poking around on Bernie's computer, he'd also asked Digby to make him a file on Bernie, and he'd memorized the key information. Now he tried variations on Bernie's name, birth date, mother's birth date, and other assorted factors. No luck there, either, but even with a computer, it would take him days to run all the combinations. And Finn didn't have days. He wished he had the software he'd developed, but it was at home and useless to him.

Think, dammit. Think!

There had to be something. Some tidbit that held the key.

Finn shook his head, trying to focus. One by one, he mentally ran down every item he knew about Bernie, but nothing stood out. Nothing until he got to that odd e-mail about the moon. Could that be it?

He played the moon landing in his head, the famous words so familiar—
Houston, the Eagle has landed.
And then Neil Armstrong had opened the hatch, climbed down the ladder, and been the first man to walk on the moon.
One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
Beautiful. And utterly unhelpful.

Armstrong.
That was who the draft e-mail was addressed to. Finn had assumed Bernie intended to send the e-mail. But maybe not. Maybe that was just Bernie's way of remembering his codes. Hide them in plain sight.

He stared at the monitor, gnawing on the end of a pencil as he typed in moon, and Apollo and Armstrong. Nothing.

The Eagle has landed….

Finn squinted. What was the story about Prometheus? He stole fire, sure. That explained why the Unit had named a laser after the god. But there was something else.

And then he remembered—Prometheus had been doomed to eternity. Every day, an eagle pecked out his liver, and every day his liver was renewed to start the process all over again.

That had to be it.

He typed in
Eagle,
then
Apollo Eagle,
then
Eagle11,
all to no avail. He typed in a few more random words related to the moon mission, including the absurd
Eleven Leaping Eagles.
He was all set to try
Eagle-eye Armstrong
when he realized he was in—
Eleven Leaping Eagles
had done the trick. What do you know?

Bless Bernie. The man
was
a genius. And Finn wasn't too shabby himself.

Now all Finn had to do was find the self-destruct. He glanced at his watch; time was getting away. He had to move fast, or else this whole trip was going to be for nothing.

He took another quick glance around the room. As far as he could tell, he was still unnoticed. That wasn't likely to last for long, and he hoped Amber got going with the distraction. As soon as Finn figured out how to convince the satellite to commit suicide, they were going to need it.

He entered a few more codes, poking around in the inner workings of the program. It was a Unix system, one he knew well, but damned if he could figure out how to conjure a self-destruct. The satellite seemed determined not to commit hari-kari.

And that's when he realized—someone else had been in here before him. Fiddling around just like he was.
Diana.
And she'd basically locked the system down.

He couldn't operate the self-destruct.

He couldn't shut the system down.

He couldn't even change the time at which the satellite was scheduled to fire.