call McDonough back. He picked up immediately.
“Bill, I have an emergency,” Allison began.
“This is an emergency,” McDonough thundered. “This is the biggest goddamn emergency in the world. You are here in two minutes or you have no job and you never have a job again and I give you to CIA for debriefing until you die.”
“Sir, with respect—”
“Respect? You have no respect! No respect for your teammates or your project or your country. Who the hell do you think you are?”
“Sir—”
“One minute, or I’m sending someone after you to haul your ass in here.”
“Yes, sir,” Allison said, disconnecting.
She pushed her foot down a little harder on the gas and went back to Selena. “My boss,” she said flatly. “Wondering why I haven’t shown up for our meeting. I guess that tells us I’m not blackmailing him.”
“No. So far Oracle has reported no evidence of Gracelyn-NSA corruption, you’ll be gratified to know.”
“Keep searching,” Allison told her. “Not that I’m hoping you’ll find any.”
She saw what Echo was doing—setting fires, wreaking havoc. Allison moved her tense shoulders, rubbing her forehead as a headache threatened. She was tired down to the marrow. Her day had already been very long and incredibly tense.
She had landed at Washington’s Dulles International Airport at one this afternoon, every cell of her body on extreme high-alert as she unclasped the spider necklace containing the precious flash drive and calmly placed it in one of the plastic bowls at the airport’s security checkpoint. Of course the guard who took the bowl had no idea what was in that necklace—the last third of Arachne’s vast web of off-the-books state secrets; corporate espionage capable of shutting down Wall Street; career-ending dirt on superstars; and life-ending intel on world leaders.
Echo already had the other two memory sticks; she needed this one to fully reweave her mother’s web. Echo would stop at nothing to get it; Allison half expected the airport guard to reveal himself as a plant, pull out an AK-47 and gun her down as she walked through the metal detector.
Once on board the jet, she put herself beside a window exit and monitored the other passengers for the duration of the flight. She skipped the champagne and went for the steak, storing up protein in her body, staying loose and easy so she could go from zero to sixty if she had to.
In the airport parking structure, she swept her Infiniti a dozen times for both bugs and bombs before she drove straight to Old Alexandria Self-Storage, two blocks away from the new Oracle headquarters, still located in Old Alexandria.
There she ran an hour-long soft recon on the storage facility, studying the security cameras, staring into the shadows. Popping some button cams when and where she could, making sure the wireless uplink to her laptop was solid. Once assured of that, she forwarded the feed to the Oracle mainframe.
She left the you-store-it to buy some supplies so her unit would pass cursory inspection—paint cans, a ladder, tarps. She did it alone; she told no one where she was and asked no one for help. She warred with herself about that decision as every step of the way she thought about the stupid little things that could happen: slipping on the newly washed floor in the paint store; getting hit by a car. But it was too late in the game to change her rules.
Returning with her purchases, she rented Unit #217 from the overly friendly, middle-aged man at the desk, surreptitiously adding more button cams under the ledge of the office counter as she filled out forms, paid cash and collected the keys.
She also installed a fully portable state-of-the-art laser security setup at #217, which she tied into the existing alarm system. It was identical to the system she had put in her town house in Old Alexandria, and at the new Oracle headquarters location.
Although Allison worked steadily, remaining focused, her nerves were screaming. She herself could task any number of satellites to track a target if she could lock onto it; she had to assume Echo had the same capability. Despite wiping down the necklace and the memory stick for homing devices, there was no way to be one hundred percent positive that even now, the flash drive wasn’t signaling Echo as to its location.
That was why Allison hadn’t hidden the spider necklace and its contents at the far more secure, brand-new Oracle headquarters. Keeping Oracle HQ off Echo’s radar was every bit as vital as retaining possession of the necklace. If Echo took out Oracle’s nerve center, she’d hamstring the organization. Allison knew Oracle was the only way to stop Echo; she had to keep the flash drive out of Echo’s hands, and she had to keep Oracle intact.
Two top priorities—three, if she counted Project Ozone—one woman juggling all of them.
She’d told Selena to go to the new town house location and watch for intel that revealed Echo’s next move. However, there were layers to Oracle’s intricate data mining programming that Allison had reserved for her own eyes only, and now she debated about the wisdom of that as well.
I’m spread way too thin, Allison thought grimly. And I’m playing a dangerous game with the lives of millions. Maybe it’s time to change strategies and get more of my own players on the board.
“Oh, no,” Selena muttered. “Damn.”
“Talk to me,” Allison ordered her.
“Abductions. Three girls. They were all conceived via the Women’s Fertility Clinic in Zuni,” Selena bit off.
“No,” Allison breathed, clenching her jaw. “No way.”
“I don’t recognize any of their names. Hang on, I’m pulling up Jeremy Loschetter’s file.” About half a minute went by. “Allison, he swore the full list was on that memory stick he hid in his shoe heel. But none of these names are on it.”
“He lied to us. Imagine that,” Allison said bitterly, feeling ill. She’d thought they were done with this, with the abductions of young women—with Loschetter, a loathsome human being.
“Oh, my God, Allison, I’m getting more pings. There have been seven domestic kidnappings that the FBI has gotten involved with in the last forty-eight hours. All girls. Their mothers were infertility patients at the clinic.”
Ignoring her tumultuous inner state, Allison processed the new information. Echo had still been in India when the kidnappings began. Was that why she had been so focused on stealing Lilith’s necklace? Did it hold more information about the technology Loschetter had used to genetically enhance eggs that had been harvested at the Women’s Fertility Clinic and place them into gestational surrogates?
Allison had no idea what was on Lilith’s memory stick. She couldn’t read it. She knew that Lilith had downloaded some files onto a laptop back in India, and she figured Lilith’s mother, Arachne, had programmed in a one-time-use code that she, Allison, had yet to crack. Allison hadn’t tried very hard. For all she knew, activating the stick sent out a beacon. That might have been how Echo had found Lilith in the first place. Maybe when Arachne had created the three drives, one for each of her daughters, she meant for them to find each other and work together to restore her empire.
Acting as Delphi, Allison had sent the twins Elle Petrenko and Samantha St. John to India to retrieve the laptop, but
