gift had hidden strings attached.
“Yeah, go,” Grant said, looking into the screen where a tiny camera picked up his face and relayed the image to Lakesh up in the operations room.
“Grant,” Lakesh began in his mellifluous voice, “did I wake you?”
Grant shook his head slightly as he felt Shizuka sidle behind him and wrap her arms around his wide chest, pulling herself close to him and nuzzling against his neck. “It’s no problem, Lakesh. What’s going on?”
“We’ve just heard from our contact in Tennessee,” Lakesh explained. “The meeting’s set up and, as we discussed a few days ago, I want you to attend with Kane and Brigid.”
Grant nodded his acceptance. “The old crew back on the clock,” Grant muttered with a reluctant smile. “When do we leave?”
“The meeting’s set for 10:00 a.m., local time,” Lakesh said. “You jump in forty minutes.”
“No problem. I’ll see you there,” he vowed as he hit the button to cut the communication.
Behind him, Shizuka tightened her grip on his chest, grinding her hips against him. “Do you really have to rush off so soon, Grant-san?” she asked.
Grant turned his head to look over his shoulder. “Sorry, darling,” he said, “but it’s a simple pickup. It won’t take more than a few hours.”
Still holding him tightly, Shizuka kissed Grant beneath his ear. “I’ll wait right here,” she whispered.
After a moment, Grant extricated himself from the woman’s grip and made his way to the tiny bathroom cubicle attached to the room. Shizuka watched from the bed as Grant flicked the motion-sensor light switch to the cubicle and began running the water for the little shower stall within. After a moment, Shizuka pulled herself from the bed and, naked, padded silently across the room to join Grant in the shower.
WHEN HE ARRIVED at the operations room thirty-five minutes later, washed and shaved, Grant found the large room a hive of activity. Lakesh had spread a series of papers across his desk that included several maps of the area around the recently destroyed ville of Beausoleil, Tennessee. Beside him, the red-haired Brigid Baptiste was glancing over the papers as Lakesh pointed out specific items of interest. Brigid was dressed in a shadow suit now, a one-piece black body stocking that appeared to be so thin as to be a second skin, and yet the fabric had remarkable properties. The shadow suit worked as a self-contained, self-regulated environment, and the weave was strong enough to deflect a knife blow or other blunt trauma but could not redistribute kinetic shock.
Off to one side of the room, Grant’s longtime partner, Kane, rested against a desk as he spoke with Cerberus physician Reba DeFore. DeFore was a stocky but curvaceous woman with long ash-blond hair that she had tied up in an elaborately braided knot atop her head. Grant couldn’t hear the details of their conversation, but he could see Reba count off items on her fingers. Grant watched as Kane copied her, his brow furrowed as he tried to remember each item that she had told him. Like Brigid, Kane was dressed in one of the remarkable shadow suits, as was Grant himself. Kane had added a thick belt with a heavy copper buckle to the suit, along with a pair of combat boots, and on the man’s right wrist Grant could see the familiar pressure-sensitive holster containing a Sin Eater handgun.
Grant had added his favored long black duster over his own shadow suit, its dark Kevlar weave reaching past his knees. Like Kane, he wore the familiar weight of the Sin Eater pistol at his right wrist, tucked out of sight, just a little bulge beneath the sleeve. The weapon was a legacy from their days as Magistrates in Cobaltville, a position that Grant had held for almost two decades prior to his exile at the Cerberus redoubt. Kane had been his partner in Cobaltville, and the pair of them had defected together, along with archivist Brigid Baptiste, after stumbling upon the first hints of the Annunaki conspiracy.
Crouched at a desk beside the anteroom that held the mat-trans unit, Donald Bry and one of his technical team, a petite, coffee-skinned woman whom Grant had seen around a few times, were working through a bunch of wiring amid what looked like the remains of a half-dozen computer terminals.
Catching Lakesh’s attention, Grant pointed to the tangle of wiring. “Trouble with the mat-trans?” he asked.
“No, thank goodness,” Lakesh replied. “Just general problems with the old computers. Emphasis on old.”
“Happens to us all,” Grant said amiably as he joined Lakesh and Brigid at their desk to look over the paperwork that had been assembled for the mission.
Ten minutes later, Grant, Brigid and Kane were standing within the mat-trans chamber, ready to blast themselves through the ether in an instantaneous transition from Montana to Tennessee.
Chapter 2
It took the blink of an eye to strip them down to their component atoms and fling the essence of their very beings across the country. And yet, no matter how many times he experienced it, Kane swore that he would never really get used to traveling by mat-trans.
Kane had added a denim jacket, a washed-out black turned gray, over his shadow suit. He stood in the Tennessee mat-trans chamber, its standard tiled floor and ceiling with the familiar, smoked armaglass walls all around. The armaglass here was tinted an odd color, and Kane knew from the color alone that he had not been here before. With the typical paranoia of the prenukecaust military mind, the mat-trans network, now over two hundred years old, used a simple color-coding system to establish location without any explicit indicators.
There were mat-trans units hidden in ancient military bases scattered across the old United States of America, with many others worldwide, including similar units developed by comparable military groups for other nations. The mat-trans units digitized an individual and thrust him or her across quantum space to a chamber at a programmed destination. In the intervening two centuries since their development, the network had remained largely undiscovered, with only a small number of people aware of these hidden gateways scattered across the globe.
Kane and the other Cerberus operatives considered the mat-trans a useful part of their arsenal, although traveling by it was still a disorienting and alien experience to the human body.
As his roiling stomach settled from the instantaneous journey, Kane glanced left and right, checking that his two colleagues had passed through the mat-trans gateway intact.
Grant stood to Kane’s left, his dark skin shining with beads of sweat. While he had grown more used to travel by mat-trans, the man still had a deep-rooted dislike for the transportation method. All muscle, Grant was an ominous presence on any mission.
To Kane’s right stood Brigid Baptiste. Brigid had put a loose-fitting suede jacket over her clinging shadow suit, and the scuffed, shabby-looking jacket gave her ample freedom of movement. Her ankle boots were a matching brown to the jacket, and she wore her compact TP-9 pistol in a low-slung hip holster. A pockmarked leather satchel, also brown, was hanging at her opposite hip, its strap slung across her body, cutting a line between her breasts.
Tensing his wrist tendons, Kane drew the Sin Eater blaster into his hand, the compact weapon opening up to its full size in a half second. Less than fourteen inches in length when fully extended, the 9 mm Sin Eater folded in on itself to be stored in the holster just above Kane’s wrist. The holster reacted to a specific tensing of the wrist tendons, powering the pistol automatically into the user’s hand where, if the index finger was crooked at the time, the weapon would begin firing automatically. The trigger had no guard—as
