Word had it that Macy was storming around the offices inside the compound, looking for God knows what. Maybe looking for her data, or what was left of it. Tansy wouldn’t keep it just lying around. The guy might be totally chill when it came to most things, but when the job was on, he was a complete professional.

He also knew that Macy wouldn’t understand, at least right now.

“All I know,” Jasper said, “is that she’s still here. That’s got to mean something.”

“Yeah, but there’s no guarantee that it’s anything good.”

“What are you saying?” Jasper nodded at the pile of bags up against the EMP tripod. “That she’s gonna sandbag us? I don’t know her as well as you, obviously, but from what I know now . . .”

“From what you’ve spied from her?”

“What I’m trying to say, Tucker, is that she wouldn’t have come around here at all if she didn’t want to take part in the mission.”

“What if she’s just trying to retrieve her personal data?”

“I think she’s smart enough to know it would be a lost cause,” Jasper said. “And she’s definitely smart. She’s definitely an asset, if we can we win her back.”

Tucker knew all too well the importance of wining Macy back. He knew what kind of asset she could be to him, to his life moving forward. He wanted to be an asset to her, too. He thought he was, already . . .

“But whether she shows or not, we need to leave.” Jasper locked eye contact. “No waiting around. You understand that, Tucker?”

“I do.”

“No more drama. We can’t have any delays.”

They’d been hanging around the truck for the last half hour, Tucker feeling restless. He found a piece of broken concrete on the ground, and was kicking it idly with his shoe.

“So if you need to take care of something, to hash something out with her or whatever, it has to be now. The next hour is game time and it’s full speed ahead, with or without her,” Jasper said.

Tucker took another look up the steps of the building that housed the cyber warfare room, and Tansy, and Macy’s data. If she would be anywhere, it was in that room—most likely giving Tansy the business.

“I can hear it from here,” Jasper said. “The gears in your head grinding away.”

Tucker kept his gaze on the building.

Jasper laughed. “What are you waiting for, man? Just go.”

Tucker took his advice, not even turning back to say anything else. He trudged up the stairs, every part of him concentrating, thinking, planning what he’d say first. He was as nervous as the first time, walking up to her hotel room. Only now it was sick, dark nervousness. And guilt. Something he’d destroyed still lingering around and choking like black smoke from an IED blast.

He found Tansy in the main computer bay. The man had been practically glued to his seat for the last two days. He controlled the hub of the entire mission from his perch—everything from highway traffic monitoring to analyzing the most intimate details of Macy’s data. If anyone had a window into her mindset, it would be him.

“You ready to roll soon?” Tucker asked him, trying to sound calm about it.

“Yeah, but hopefully not too soon. I still have almost thirty scenarios to run in the events risk simulator.”

Tucker had no real idea what that meant. Nor did he really care. He took a seat at the empty workspace next to him, noticing how Tansy almost leaned away from him, from his latest guest. The man seemed truly annoyed at the interruption. He didn’t take it personally. Back in Washington, the man was known to disappear inside his pigsty of an office for weeks at a time while on a case, living entirely on takeout and beer.

“I won’t bother you too long,” Tucker said.

“She was just here.”

It took him a moment to regain his senses, to think of a worthwhile question to ask. “Where did she go?”

“No idea.”

“What did she . . . What did she want?”

Tansy sighed. “She sat right behind me, watching over my shoulder, making sure I deleted everything we had on here. And not just deleted, she made sure I nuked it. Like, scorched earth.”

“And you did it?”

“Of course.”

“Where is she now?”

“Tucker, I have to say . . .” He finally turned around. “My brain is pretty much, like . . .” He held his hands out, apart, as if demonstrating the size of a fish. “My brain is only in this tight space right now. Outside of this zone, I’m completely clueless.”

“Yeah,” Tucker said. “That sounds about right.”

“And now he’s a funny guy,” Tansy said. “A cop and a funny guy.”

It didn’t register at first, the word “cop,” at least not the specific word and its meaning. There was, however, a nagging sensation along his body like someone had been pinching his skin. All he could say was, “Tansy . . .”

DARC Ops’ best hacker turned around and looked at him, his face a little tight and apprehensive. “What?”

“What did you just say?”

“Relax,” Tansy said, “I just called you a cop.”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Weren’t you a cop? I never knew about that. I don’t think anyone did, and I was the one who did the full background on you.”

So there was no public record of him ever having been on the force in St. Louis. That was weird. Could the police chief have been behind that? There were possibly reasons for him not being on record, he supposed. Probably the same reasons he hadn’t stuck around.

“You okay?” Tansy said.

“I wasn’t actually a full-fledged police officer.”

Tansy just stared at him.

“Maybe that’s why you didn’t see anything,” Tucker said. “I didn’t make it past probation.”

“Still, there should have been something.”

Tansy turned back to his work.

“How did you find out about it, then?” Tucker asked.

After a few seconds of typing, Tansy said quietly, “You know how.”

“Macy? She was a cop, too.”

“I know,” Tansy said. “Same department.”

“Yeah. Only she stayed a cop and I didn’t.”

“I know,” Tansy said.

“You do?” He didn’t like where the conversation was headed. Tucker rolled his chair closer. “What do you know?”

“I was just trying to kid around with you, I wasn’t trying to . . . uh, trying to—”

“I just want to know how you found out. Did she tell you?”

“It was in her files,” Tansy said.

“What was?”

“A document. She wrote about it, like a memoir or something.”

A fucking memoir . . . why did it have to be of the police in St. Louis? Why that of all things to memorialize? Of all things to focus on and write about. Those times were some of the worst in his life, and probably weren’t too fondly remembered by Macy, either. So what the hell was she doing writing about them?

Tansy’s voice broke through his thoughts. “Do you really want me to tell you about it?”

He nodded. “Yes.”

“She wrote about what happened with you. It’s fucked up.”

Tucker realized his hands had been squeezing the armrest of his chair so hard it was shaking.

“And she’s always felt guilty about it. So she wrote about it. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be a book or something, but she had good intentions. Just don’t . . . you know . . .”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t bother her about it.”

“Oh, I won’t.” Tucker got up from his seat. No, he wouldn’t bother her about it.

“Where are you going? And can you not start something like this right now? We’re about to head out soon.”

“I’m not starting anything.”

“Tucker. The bottom line is that she cleared the background check. She’s good to go. She’s on our side.”

Tucker took a deep breath, his eyes scanning over to the exit.

“And she’s on your side,” Tansy said.

“Yeah, well she was.”

“I bet she still is.”

Tucker had no idea. Everything, including the trust—or lack thereof—between them was still there. Only now he had something else to worry about. He could barely let himself think about it, her writing that book and Tansy reading it. And now Tansy saying something about her being on his side . . .

In St. Louis, when it meant everything, where was she then? He’d been a rookie, unsure about nearly everything. Had Macy been more heavily involved in the shit storm than he’d even realized? If anything, she’d been in tight with the police chief back then. He’d moved on, let it go. Whose side she was on was practically irrelevant now. And yet, it bugged him to think she’d known something, that she’d had a chance to maybe stop it. Tucker shook his head. No. He might not have known the whole story of what happened in St. Louis, but he knew Macy. Still, what did she know that he didn’t?

He could still hear Tansy’s voice in the background as he sped out of the room, the DARC hacker almost pleading with him now to “take it easy.”

Sure, he’d take it easy.

As he walked, he tried thinking again of where her head would be. She’d just had an intimate conversation with Tansy, who was still a relative stranger to her. She’d had her personal information hacked into and scoured over by this same stranger. And then a conversation about her past with Tucker. If she felt even half as confused as he did right then, then perhaps they shouldn’t have a conversation at all. Maybe he should just do what his boys had been telling him, take care of it later. If she agreed to board the ship with them, there’d be several days of uninterrupted time to talk to her.

He liked that idea, somewhat.

But there was also the fear of it going wrong, and how wrong it could go stuck together with her on a freighter. Isolated at sea, facing only each other. If things didn’t go right there, it wouldn’t be a peaceful, polite disagreement. No, things would go right or very, very wrong.

But first, they had to at least get past this and get on with the mission.

He knew he could do it, the emotions draining away. Pragmatism returning. He’d trained for it.

But what about her? The CIA would have trained out every inch of emotion. She’d have impeccable control. But then, being on the run for your life for years could easily destroy that.

Tucker looked up. His feet had walked him to the loading dock while he’d been lost in his thoughts. Jasper was still there, smiling at him now. Right away he knew the reason.

Macy.

She was sitting on the tail gate, leaning back on her palms, swinging her legs back and forth like a bored child. And like a bored child, she was playing games, pretending, quite absurdly, not to see Tucker. He walked closer, for sure entering her line of sight. But still no reaction. For a CIA operative, for an agent in the field, a cunning warrior, he knew she had better periphery than that. Though he assumed, in this circumstance, that her field of view was conditional.

When Jasper acknowledged Tucker with a loud hello, she had no other excuse but to turn and lift her chin in greeting. Despite preparing himself for the worst, her cool greeting ran a shiver through him, through his heart.

“Ready to go?” Jasper asked.

Tucker walked up to Macy and stood in front of her, in front of the legs that stopped swinging. “Are you?”

Macy just shrugged. She didn’t look upset, nor did she look particularly happy. Perhaps this was the new edition of Macy, the professional colleague having finally arrived.

“Yeah, she’s ready,” Jasper said.

The way she sat, her body language, gave off the impression that she was no longer available to Tucker as a hot fling, but as just another one of the guys. A dude, almost.

“Hi,” Tucker finally said to her, looking Macy straight in the eyes and challenging her for a reaction. A greeting, eye contact. Anything.

“Hello,” she said coolly.

“Everything okay?” Tucker asked.

She shrugged again, but with a slight smile. An in-between attempt with lips half-curled. It was the kind of smile that bothered Tucker.

“She already buried the hatchet with me,” Jasper announced to him. “So . . .”

“So,” Tucker said, “now it’s our turn, right?”

Her head titled, almost in a nod. Was it a nod? Was she agreeing? Tucker wanted nothing more than for whatever drama was between them to die down. At least die down enough so they could talk again, so they could figure things out. “It could be,” she said. “Yeah.”

“We can talk about it later,” Tucker said. “If you want.”

“Yeah.”

“We have a truce then, for now?”

“Truce,” she said. Her eyes seemed to be studying him. Macy seemed ready to say something else when the truck’s engine roared to life. Instead of saying anything, whatever it was, she pointed to her wrist, where a watch would be. Time. Time to move on, perhaps. Time, surely, to get on with the mission of getting Macy back to safety.

And then she did something that surprised him. Macy reached out a hand to lift him aboard the truck. Tucker took her hand in his, and for half a second he allowed himself to just feel her, trying to translate her touch, wondering if he could feel through to her true intentions. It was a warm, soft touch, and then firm, yanking him up onto the truck. He wasn’t sure what to make of it, or her, but at least there had been contact. At least they were together. And looking at her again, on the truck, he was okay with taking things slowly.

“All set?” That came from Jasper, still outside the truck, his arm reaching up for the door strap.

“Yeah,” Tucker said, looking back to Macy. “We’re good.”

Behind him, the door rolled down loudly, squeaking wheels, metal on metal, until it finally shut and they were bathed in darkness. All he could hear was the muffled engine. No other sounds, not even Macy. It was like she wasn’t there. Two ghosts in the darkness. Passing ships, never to make contact again.

With arms outstretched forward like a zombie, Tucker moved instead away from where he’d assumed Macy was, and found his way to the closed metal door, his fingertips touching up against its warm surface. He felt around there for a minute, up, down, left, until his hand ran across the cut outline of a rectangle: their custom gun port. He found the handle and pulled the port door open, swinging it back and folding it against the inside of the door. Light now shone in, almost blinding him at first. Tucker turned around, now able to see the inside of the truck. Macy sat, the side of her face lit up and glistening. The truck moved, and she swayed out of range of the light and he was alone again.

They moved with the truck, swaying. Tucker held on to a cargo box, careful not to make contact with the EMP gun. When the truck sped up, the momentum forced him to take a seat on the wooden box. He called over to Macy, “You okay over there?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you sitting?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Against the wall.”

Tucker forced out a laugh. “Some adventure, huh?”

She shrugged. “It’s a nice ride.”

“Probably better here than in the truck ahead with the uranium. Unless you still consider me dangerous and toxic.”

“I don’t think you’re dangerous,” she said. “Just sort of a goof.”

A goof. He could handle that.

“Anyway, I thought you didn’t want to bring it up,” she said. “You’re talking about it again.”

“I’m just trying to lighten the mood. This could actually be kinda fun.”

“Fun?” She chuckled quietly. “I think I forgot what that is. I haven’t had fun in years.”

“Really? I thought we had some last night in the hotel.”

“I thought so, too.”

“You think or you thought?”

No answer. Tucker stayed quiet as the truck bounced over a giant pothole, the jolt rattling his body. Finally, he said, “What changed your mind?”

She stayed quiet.

“Okay,” Tucker said. “I helped them access your phone. I was sneaky about it. I suck, I get it.”

“I get it, too.”

“You get what? That I’m sorry?” He waited, hoping that was the realization, and not something much worse, something irreparable.

“I get that the whole thing sucks,” she said.

“It really does. But it’s over now.”

“It is?”

“Well, not until we get you on board, and into the US.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Hopefully that’s it. You know, I’m taking a huge risk coming back there. I’ll find out right away if I get to live or not. If an assassin doesn’t make an attempt in the first week, then I should be good.”

“You know Jackson has a lot of pull in Washington, right?” Tucker said.

Macy paused for a moment. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, it could mean that . . . um . . .” He didn’t want to say it. Jackson would probably kill him for even thinking he was some kind of hero, but the guy had worked miracles more than once before. Was it possible he could do it again?

Jasper’s voice crackled over the radio. “You guys ready? Look alive back there.”

Tucker responded with a ten four, and then walked to his position behind the EMP cannon, taking a seat behind the tripod.

“Have you ever done this before?” Macy asked him.

Tucker didn’t need her to be specific. In the past few days, almost everything he did, especially getting intimate with Macy, were first times. The EMP cannon was no different.

“Flying by the seat of my pants,” he said. “I told you it’ll be fun.”

The jostling that resulted from going through another pothole almost jarred the headset off his head. Tucker fixed it over his ears and then asked Macy if she was okay.

“I’m fine, but, what the hell do they expect me to do back here?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what’s my job?”

Tucker laughed. “I don’t know. Maybe just sit there and look pretty?”

“Sure. Sitting on the floor of some dirty truck, in pitch dark.”

“It’s got to be better than some other places you’ve been.”

“That’s not saying much.”

“And it’s definitely with better company,” Tucker joked, trying to edge closer and closer to normalcy with her. Fake it till you make it.

But Macy just responded with a simple “Yep.”

That was fine. Crawl before you walk. A “yep” was better than most things she could have said.

“Do you want a turn, maybe?”

“Excuse me?”

“At the gun here. The EMP cannon. It’s not as scary as it sounds. If you miss, you just disable a car. You wouldn’t necessarily kill anyone.”

“Are you sure about that?” she said.

He wasn’t sure.

“Won’t the steering wheel seize up? And the brakes . . . what happens with the brakes?”

Tucker hadn’t really thought about it. When he was given his quick run-down about the cannon, Jasper and Tansy just assumed that he was a good-enough shot. And so the topic of collateral damage had been skipped over. But now that Macy mentioned it, the idea of collateral damage in the form of fiery car wrecks began lingering in the back of Tucker’s mind while he swept the cannon’s sights across the road.

He would be the one to make the call, to decide if any vehicle looked menacing enough. If he felt threatened, a simple curl of his finger would end up completely disabling a car—or anything with electronics. He would just have to bear down and concentrate. Use his instincts.

Focus and concentration . . . In that case, whose bright idea was it to have him riding with Macy?

“You’re going quiet on me,” Macy said. “I didn’t mean to plant any doubts in you.”

In the last few hours, she’d definitely planted more than a few doubts in Tucker’s increasingly fragile state of mind. But he said, “No,” anyway, trying to force his concentration to the road behind the truck, the scenery flying backward, the pack of vehicles behind. Which one would come barreling through traffic? Which one was full of terrorists?

“Tucker,” Tansy’s voice came through the radio. “Tucker, do you copy?”

He fixed his headset and said, “Go ahead.”

“I’m just curious about something.”

“Go ahead.”

“Well, I’m starring at the battery pack reading from up here . . .”

“Yeah?”

“Is the fucking thing even turned on?”

At first the words didn’t make sense. The idea that he’d forgotten to power up the EMP weapon. “Ummm,” he mumbled, his brain misfiring as his hands checked in the dark for the EMP’s power switch.

“You don’t, do you?” Tansy muttered.

Tucker flicked the switch. “I do now.”

His radio remained silent, but over the sound of the EMP devices charging on and humming, and over the drone of outside road noise, Tucker almost swore he could hear Jasper’s cursing from the truck’s cab.

“Jesus,” Macy said. “Maybe I should take over.”

“I can’t believe I did that,” Tucker said. God, he had to get his head on straight. Now. No matter what sharing the back of a dark, closed-in truck compartment with Macy was doing to him. Hell, sharing any small, private space with her right now sent his mind reeling with both fear and possibilities. But he couldn’t let it affect this. It wasn’t just their lives at stake right now.

“Okay,” he said, turning to her. “We need to hash it out, for real. No more of this passive-aggressive shit. You got me? So have it out. Let’s hear it. You hate me? You think I suck? Whatever, let’s just get it over with, because neither of us is going to make it anywhere if we keep this up.”

She didn’t say anything,

“So I helped them connect to your phone,” Tucker said. “I’m sorry, I’ll always be sorry I had to do that, but I had to do it. We’ll get you back to the US and that’s all we need in return—to know you were on our side.”

Macy was saying something, but he couldn’t hear. His eyes were trained on a van speeding up through the traffic, swerving around cars, racing to catch up to their speeding truck and the uranium transport in front.

“Hold on,” he told Macy.

“Hold on!?”

He radioed to Jasper, “We might have a bogey on our six.”

“Roger,” replied Jasper. “You know what to do.”

He did. Tucker waited until the vehicle got dangerously close, until he could see through inside to identify the drivers, so he could be dead certain before pulling the trigger. Through his concentrated glare, he could hear Macy’s voice again, worming through his mind like his head was full of mud. “Hold on,” he told her.