An hour later, the Tahoe’s transmission automatically shifted into four-wheel drive. Nearing the top of another steep incline, Malcolm Purvis found himself mildly relieved to feel the SUV’s tires solidly grip the road. Despite his questionable stature, Edgar’s minion was quite adept at handling himself behind the wheel of any vehicle with a couple of pedal extenders.

  Samuel, on the other hand, felt the exact opposite way. Pinned in the passenger seat, the haggard scientist poured over the ever-growing mountain of data. Each moment that passed on the treacherous road made the whole situation more and more unbelievable. Holograms, artificial intelligence, mysterious EM signals that were more than he initially thought.

  Why hadn’t he just stayed at CERN… or back at the lab with Barbara?

  Barbara was left behind in a concerted effort to run interference for the program. Soon, half the research agencies in the country would be pulling the plug or calling around to see why a program named Hoover had hijacked their computers. Someone would either need to explain or push back against their threats.

  In the worst-case scenario, she would have to tell them no. This left Samuel in a pickle because he hadn’t chosen the young researcher for her ability to say no.

  While that storm raged on, Justine and Foster sat quietly in the backseat.

  After exchanging a few pleasantries in the hotel parking lot, anything resembling a conversation was ignored in favor of staring out their respective windows. Lost in thought, Foster played around with a long stream of problems that needed to be solved. One of them was how does a person start a conversation with a dangerous woman without ending up looking like a fool, or worse an enemy?

  Justine, in the meantime, was feeling a little bit intimidated. An unusual situation for the overconfident agent, since her line of work often weeded out the weak minded. Many times, over her career with the bureau, she had stared down some of the most terrifying monsters anyone could ever want to come across.

  And each time, Justine had never once flinched, not once.

  But Foster did intimidate her. It was either his demeanor or his cool toys, but something was throwing her off. Justine hated not knowing how to proceed.

  Hoover recognized the lull in their conversation as an opening, and he tried to help his friend make the first move. “Are you going to talk to her?” He came across like a guy at a bar. “She’s obviously into you.”

  “How would you know?” Slightly on edge, Foster responded to Hoover louder than he would have liked. Already on edge, Justine jumped in her seat. More ashamed than scared, her first instinct was to punch Foster on the shoulder so hard it made him cry. But after seeing a similar embarrassed look on his face, she decided against retaliation.

  “Are you talking to me?” Half expecting him to be playing with that damn Blackberry, Justine didn’t realize she had made a cheesy movie reference until it had already escaped her lips. Why did she have to be such a nerd? “Or are you still talking to that little friend of yours?”

  Hoover made his best attempt at a giggle. “She called me your friend.”

  Hoover had been goading him all morning to talk to Justine, and this slight was the final straw. “I’m cutting you off for a while.”

  Foster reached up and found a small pressure sensitive button on the side of his newly improved earpiece. Developed originally for the secret service, Hoover had chosen to repurpose the prototype because of its better range and audio quality. On the other hand, Foster liked the device because it came equipped with a handy mute button for whenever Hoover got a little too chatty.

  “I can still hear what you say. Even if you mute me, I can still hear what you say.”

  “Fine by me.” Foster pressed the button, and the sweet sound of silence greeted him instantly. “That’s better.” He turned to face Justine who was sitting there staring at him. “Sorry. I was talking to my friend again. By the way, Hoover finds it extremely funny when anyone refers to him in that capacity. I guess the absence of any verbal communication with anyone other than me has thrown him off.”

  “I bet it has,” Justine said, still unable to wrap her head around the existence of Hoover.

  “This whole situation must’ve thrown you a little bit off too. At least I would imagine it has.”

  “What do you mean, Mr. Evers?” A purposeful look appeared in Justine’s eyes that Foster imagined only her enemies saw. “I think I’m dealing with all this well enough.”

  “Well…” He thought a deft touch would be best. “Forty-eight hours ago, you were a normal FBI agent hoping to enjoy her weekend. Suddenly you’re picking up a strange prisoner from a secluded mental institution, followed by an impromptu gunfight, then getting stripped of your weapon, and finally being reprimanded by your superior. I would think that is the textbook definition of thrown off.”

  “You’re not that strange, Foster.” She played with her ponytail while digesting his list. “But, I think you’re really referring to the shooting?”

  “Yes,” he tried horribly to convey sympathy, “I couldn’t imagine having to take a life.”

  “No,” she stopped twirling her hair and stared at him. “Shootings come with the territory. If I hadn’t been there, those assholes would have killed a lot of innocent people. As for the director, I refuse to feel guilty about saving lives, even if two people had to die in the process.”

  “Three,” he corrected her misinformation. “Last night, the other suspect died from his wounds.”

  Surprised, but not shocked, this news flash didn’t appear to faze her in the least. “Brad and his heavily armed friends shouldn’t have tried to rob a Starbucks.”

  “Don’t you mean, your Starbucks?”

  The phrasing of the question gave her pause. “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing.” Seeing the unrest in her face, Foster backtracked. “I just meant that you must have felt pretty protective of that place to defend it the way you did.” Justine didn’t say it, but she would have done the same thing at any Starbucks, or anywhere for that matter. “I’m just saying that they must have had excellent coffee.”

  “Not really,” she partially confessed. “But you are right. I do feel a little bit off.”

  Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

  From her jacket pocket, Justine retrieved the small stun gun. As a joke, she began to make condescending little pew sounds while pretending to shoot at invisible targets out her window.

  “This is what’s bothering me. I miss my gun.” She thought back to her meeting with the director and smiled. “As for being reprimanded, let’s just say I’ve had my fair share of bosses reaming me out over the years.”

  In the front seat, Samuel chuckled.

  Too scared to join in on the joke, Foster remained perfectly motionless hoping that Justine wouldn’t pick up on the innuendo or Samuel’s childish reaction. In prison, even a psychiatric prison, that word was often a sore subject. Thank you, Mouse, he thought, the protector of my virginity.

  After a few seconds, he calmly said, “I know. Hoover ran a background check on you and Agent Saunders the minute you were assigned to pick me up. Say what you want to about his bedside manner, but my friend is extremely thorough. And what he dug up made for some fascinating reading. Saunders may have more time in service, but your record with the bureau is nearly twice as thick.”

  “So, you’ve been checking up on me.” She weirdly smiled at him. The experience was mildly confusing. “A girl could take that the wrong way.”

  Foster didn’t know how to respond. “No… uh,” he stammered fearfully. “I was just being thorough. I mean… Hoover was just being thorough.”

  “Calm down, Foster. Sheesh.” Out of nowhere, Justine laid a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “Listen, if the roles were reversed, I would have done the same thing. Intel is the one thing an agent relies on more than a gun. Besides, there are worse things I could be doing on a cold January day.”

  “Yeah, but you could probably think of something better to do. Couldn’t you?”

  She nodded in the affirmative.

  A world away in the front seat, Mosley cursed the heavens and smashed his fists into the Tahoe’s very new, spotless dashboard. Immediately, the scientist recoiled thinking that maybe this outburst might set off the vehicle's airbag. When it didn’t, his next thought was Malcolm. What might the dwarf say?

  Nothing. He ignored the outburst in favor of making the sharp turn ahead. Relieved to have gotten away with his little temper tantrum, Mosley twisted around in his seat so he could address Foster face to face. “If you two love birds are through flirting, I think there’s something you should see.”

  Embarrassed but interested, Foster leaned forward far enough to see what Mosley was pointing at on his laptop. It was a counter that kept track of the computers still online. The number had fallen from sixty-one percent to forty-nine.

  Such a drop turned four days of number crunching into almost twenty-four.

  “That’s not good,” Foster offered with very little emotion. “But we expected there to be a drop off eventually. The government’s slow, but not that slow.”

  “But this quickly,” Samuel said in a panicked voice. “I figured Barbara could have bought us just a little bit more time. You know,” his eyes partially glazed over with lustful thoughts. “She has the sexiest little telephone voice you have ever heard.”

  Justine rolled her eyes at his blatant misogyny, but Foster didn’t get the innuendo at all. “Do you know how much money the average supercomputer costs to run? I’m surprised that we got as much time as we did.”

  Justine holstered her “gun” and was now following their conversation intently. “Couldn’t you guys just get the director to allocate some more resources? I mean, we work for the NSA. There has got to be hundreds of those supercomputers somewhere just sitting around doing nothing.”

  “Nothing?” Samuel sounded as if someone had insulted his child. “Do you know how many people the NSA keeps tabs on during any given day, Agent Rushing? A hundred? A thousand? Please. Over two hundred million people in the United States have a trackable phone. Worldwide, there are over twenty countries the government has deemed aligned against our national interests.”

  Mosley’s designer Ray Bans fogged up from his rising anger. “So, no, there aren’t any supercomputers just lying around ‘doing nothing.’”

  “I appreciate the lesson.” Justine had that look in her eye again. “But you could’ve just said no.”

  “That’s not what the government likes to do. Is it, Agent Rushing?” Foster tried another attempt at humor. Partly for her, but mainly to keep Samuel from getting killed. “No. They prefer to string you along with hope and promises before bringing your entire world crashing down around you. All while saying, ‘It’s in the best interest of the country.’ Saying no to someone would be far too easy for them.”

  More disturbing than funny, his attempt at making things better just seemed to suck the air out of the Tahoe’s cabin.

  So far, Foster had managed to keep his feelings on the matter of his incarceration hidden. He waited for someone to threaten him with being sent back to Wilson. Instead, Samuel and Justine did something which surprised him. They took what he said in stride and nodded reassuringly.

  Agent Rushing even went one step further, “The government sucks.”

  “Said the four-people working for them,” Mosley quipped.

  “Three actually… but wait a minute.” His emotional outburst presented Foster with a novel idea. Diving back into his black bag, he pressed the mute button allowing Hoover to enter the conversation once again. “Hoover,” he said quickly. “Can you bring up any available computers on the west coast? Let’s narrow our search parameters to the universities of southern California.”

  Hoover kept silent for a moment then out of nowhere blurted out. “She said reamed. Many bosses had reamed her out over the years. How could you not laugh at that?”

  “Now’s not the time.” A small hint of a smile crossed his face. “Bring up everything not currently in use.”

  The tablet’s screen ignited into sharp blue followed by deep amber. Unlike most tablets, this device had no loading screen or icons or even search windows, only a quick dissolve into a map of the western United States. Specifically, the state of California outlined in bright yellow followed by the appearance of three flashing dots near the area of Los Angeles. Next to each dot flashed the initials UCLA.

  “You’re going to use UCLA’s three main campuses?”

  “There’s no major research going on right now, but these schools are prepped to do extensive research in cancer treatments. That means their computer simulation departments are stuffed with servers designed to fit our needs. Classes don’t begin for another week, so anything we task them to do should go unnoticed.”

  “What will that do to our window?” Foster couldn’t help but notice Samuel becoming more agitated with every passing moment. Hoover had already run the calculations, so the map of California morphed into the countdown timer from Mosley’s laptop.

  It read: 44 hours and 13 minutes.

  “What was that all about? What do you mean, Southern California?” Samuel’s patience hearing only half of their conversation was growing thin. “Did he find something or not?”

  Foster handed Samuel the tablet. The scientist saw the updated time and sighed. “Hoover found that missing twelve percent. Are you happy now?”

  “No.” Mosley stared at the countdown clock, and secretly hoped it would turn all zeros. “How much longer before those are gone too?”

  “We should be good for at least a week. But I can’t guarantee the other assets won’t fall offline soon.”

  “Maybe Barbara should work on her sexy voice some more,” Justine said, grinning at her own bad joke.

  “No,” Mosley handed the tablet back to Foster. With a highly satisfied look, his said. “She’s just fine there.”

  “You’re a pig.” Justine reached out to run her fingers across the tablet surface while a wholly satisfied Mosley made a series of exaggerated oinks under his breath. “How come you didn’t use the hologram function?”

  This question had been bugging her ever since the impromptu briefing, and now seemed like a perfect time to broach it.

  “Not enough room for the beams to sync properly.”

  Without a second thought, Foster handed over the tablet so she could get a better look. Trembling hands scrutinized the machine for a long minute. Justine’s inner child wanted to dig in deeper, but the fear of being seen as unprofessional kicked in at the last moment. Reluctantly, she handed it back.

  “Besides,” he tucked the tablet back into his bag, and right away the sounds of metal hitting other unseen metal echoed throughout the Tahoe. “The hologram function is only useful for briefing a large group of people or when you’re working on a problem that requires a fresh perspective on things.”

  Justine wondered if there were other things in the bag that he was still keeping secret. “What else is in the bag?” She asked tentatively.

  “Tools.” Foster could see she was dying to get a peek at what was inside his canvas bag. He shot her a sly grin. “Tools, Agent Rushing… just some tools that might come in handy on our little adventure.”

  “I wouldn’t exactly call going to the county morgue an adventure.” Mosley felt his body involuntarily shiver at the thought. “I am still wondering why we are even going there?”

  Justine ignored Samuel’s whining and playfully tugged at the satchel. “What kind of tools?”

  “Let’s hope we don’t have to find out.”