but it had been pushed out, just like Kate’s name had?
Calm down, he commanded himself. It’s just a little absentmindedness, nothing more.
He took a breath and answered the phone. “I am so sorry,” he said immediately. “I was supposed to text you, and it completely slipped my mind—”
“That’s not why I’m calling, Kent.” Maria sounded somber. “And I’m the one who should be sorry. I need you to come in.”
He frowned. Maya noticed and mirrored his expression as he rose from the stool and sought the relative privacy of the adjacent living room. “Come in? You mean to Langley?”
“Yes. I’m sorry, I know the timing couldn’t be worse, but we have a situation and I need you in this briefing.”
“I…” His first instinct was to refuse outright. Not only was it a holiday, and not only was he still dealing with Sara’s recovery, but Maya was visiting for the first time in a long time. Throw in an ample helping of terrifying memory loss and Maria was right; the timing couldn’t be worse.
He almost blurted out, “Do I have to?” but held his tongue for fear of coming off as petulant.
“I don’t want to do this any more than you do,” Maria said before he could think of any way to refuse. “And I really don’t want to pull rank.” Zero read that part loud and clear; Maria was reminding him that she was his boss now. “But I have no choice. This isn’t coming from me. President Rutledge asked for you personally.”
“He asked for me?” Zero repeated dully.
“Well, he asked for ‘the guy that cracked the Kozlovsky case,’ but close enough…”
“He could have meant Alan,” Zero suggested hopefully.
Maria chuckled halfheartedly, though it came out as barely more than a breathy sigh. “I’m sorry, Kent,” she said for the third time. “I’ll try to keep the briefing short, but…”
But this means I’m being sent into the field. The subtext was plain as day. And worse, there was no excuse or defense he could give to turn it down. He was under the CIA’s thumb for what he’d done, now more than ever—and he couldn’t very well say no to the president, who was for all intents and purposes his boss’s boss’s boss.
“Okay,” he relented. “Give me thirty minutes.” He ended the call and groaned softly.
“It’s all right.” He spun quickly to find Maya standing behind him. The condo wasn’t big enough for him to actually take the call privately, and he was certain she could ascertain the nature of the conversation even hearing only his side of it. “Go, do what you have to do.”
“What I have to do,” he said plainly, “is be here with you and Sara. It’s Thanksgiving, for crying out loud…”
“Apparently not everyone got the memo.” She was doing the same thing he tended to do; attempt to diffuse the situation with gentle humor. “It’s okay. Sara and I will take care of dinner. Get back when you can.”
He nodded, grateful for her understanding and wanting to say more, but ultimately he just murmured “thank you” and headed to his bedroom for a change of clothes. There was nothing more to say—because Maya knew just as well as he did that his day would be much more likely to end on a plane than it would sharing Thanksgiving with his daughters.
CHAPTER SIX
If anyone were to consider the phrase “Middle America,” the images they conjured would likely be shockingly close to that of Springfield, Kansas. It was a town surrounded by gently sloping farmland, a place where the cows outnumbered the citizens, so small that one could hold a single breath while driving clear through it. Some would find it idyllic. Some would call it charming.
Samara found it disgusting.
There were forty-one towns and cities in the United States named Springfield, which made this town not only unremarkable, but particularly uninspired. Its population hovered around eight hundred; its main street consisted of a post office, a bar and grill, a mom-and-pop grocer, a pharmacy, and a feed store.
For all of those reasons and more, it was perfect.
Samara pulled back her bright red hair and bunched it into a ponytail, exposing the small tattoo on the back of her neck, the single simple character for “fire”—which transliterated in Pinyin to Huŏ, the surname she had adopted after defecting.
She leaned against the commercial box truck and examined her fingernails, biding her time. She could hear the music from there, teenagers and young adults playing poorly while marching to the beat of a rattling snare drum. They’d be at her location soon.
Behind her, in the cargo area of the truck, were four men and the weapon. The attack on Havana had gone surprisingly well, easy even. With any luck, the Cuban and American governments would believe it to have been a testing ground, but their weapon had been tested plenty already. The purpose of the Havana attack was much more than that; it was to introduce chaos. To sow confusion. To present the illusion of a fair warning while making the powers-that-be scratch their heads and wonder.
Nearby, Mischa sat on the curb behind the colorful box truck and idly tugged at brown weeds that had made their way through the cracks in the pavement. The girl was twelve, typically sullen, dutifully quiet, and delightfully lethal. She wore jeans and white sneakers and, almost comically, a blue hooded sweatshirt with the word BROOKLYN screen-printed in white letters across the front.
“Mischa.” The girl looked up, her green eyes dull and passive. Samara held out a fist and the girl opened her hand. “It is nearly time,” Samara told her in Russian as she dropped two objects into the small palm—electronic earplugs, specifically designed to counter a particular frequency.
The weapon itself was unremarkable, ugly even. To see it, most would have no idea what they were looking at, and would hardly believe that such a device was even a weapon—which only worked in their favor. The frequency was emitted by a wide black disc, a meter in diameter and several centimeters thick, which produced the ultra-low sound waves in a unidirectional cone. The most potent of its effects occurred within a range of approximately one hundred meters, but the deleterious effects of the weapon could be felt from up to three hundred meters away. The heavy disc was mounted to a swiveling apparatus that not only held it upright like a satellite dish, but allowed it to turn in any direction. The apparatus was in turn welded to a steel dolly with four thick tires, which also held the lithium-ion battery pack that powered the weapon. The battery alone weighted thirty kilograms, or roughly sixty-five pounds; all together, including the dolly cart, the ultrasonic weapon weighed in at just under three hundred pounds, which was why such weapons were typically mounted on ships or atop Jeeps.
But mounting their weapon on a vehicle would make it far less mobile and far more conspicuous, which was why the four men in the truck were necessary. Each was a highly trained mercenary, but to her they were little more than glorified movers. Had the weapon been lighter, more maneuverable, Samara and Mischa could have handled this operation themselves, she was sure. But they had to work with what they had, and the weapon was as compact as it could be for how powerful it was.
Samara had been mildly concerned about logistics, but so far they had not run into any hitches. Immediately following the Havana attack they had loaded the weapon by ramp onto a boat, which carried them north to Key West. At the small airfield they quickly transferred to a mid-sized cargo plane that took them to Kansas City. It had all been arranged weeks earlier, bought and paid for. Now all they had to do was carry out the careful plan.
Samara meandered casually to the corner of the block as the marching band’s music swelled. They were in sight now, heading her way. The box truck was parked at the curb outside the grocer’s, two car lengths from the corner where orange cones blocked the road for the parade route.
Samara had done her research. The Springfield Community College put on a Thanksgiving Day parade every year, led by their marching band and following a circuitous two-mile route that started from a local park, wound through the town, and doubled back to the