I didn’t scream. I didn’t launch myself across the tiled floor and wrap my hands around her throat, even though my muscles screamed for violence. My internal temperature plummeted. The frightened, guilty mother evaporated, replaced instantly by the operative. I entered Intel Mode. The world slowed down. The angle of her stance, the slight dilation of her pupils, the forced nonchalance—she was lying, and she was enjoying it.
I didn’t even look at her. I pulled a heavily modified, matte-black smartphone from my pocket. It didn’t connect to commercial cell towers. It routed directly to a satellite in low Earth orbit. I dialed a secure, twelve-digit encrypted line.
“Dad?” I said. My voice wasn’t my own; it was a frozen blade. “It happened. Code Sierra. My house. Ten minutes.”
On the other end of the line, General Thomas Harrison, the former head of JSOC and current director of a clandestine intelligence apparatus that didn’t officially exist, didn’t ask a single question. He just breathed out a heavy sigh. “Units are moving. Stand by.”
I hung up. Tiffany threw her head back and laughed, the sound bouncing off the tiled walls.
“Oh, my god, you are pathetic,” she mocked, swirling her wine. “‘Code Sierra’? Are you calling Daddy to come yell at me? You really are a joke, Elena.”
She was so busy gloating that she didn’t feel the sudden, rhythmic vibration in the floorboards. She was completely unaware that the low, thrumming hum rattling the frosted glass windows wasn’t a passing summer storm. It was the synchronized rotors of a low-flying, radar-evading transport chopper, accompanied by a fleet of blacked-out SUVs tearing down our quiet suburban street.
The front door didn’t open. It was violently removed from its hinges, the reinforced steel lock snapping like brittle plastic.
