Darkness at Dawn Read Online Free Page A

without ever mentioning exactly what the threat was. But then, he had the brains of a cocker spaniel, so it was entirely likely that if it was a complex threat, he had no real grasp of it, as Uncle Edwin obviously did.
    The room was full of security types. Not for the first time, Lucy thought how ill at ease her parents would be with the modern intelligence apparatus, staffed almost entirely with officers completely dedicated to climbing a career ladder while looking good. And never mussing their hair.
    Her parents, on the other hand, had been serious and dedicated type A’s who never shrank from danger or—she had to admit—adventure. They wouldn’t recognize the corporate types here as belonging to their business.
    Well . . . there was one person here who wasn’t a brown-nosing paper-pusher, and he was sitting across the table staring at her. He didn’t look like a drone or a bureaucrat.
    He looked like trouble.
    He was dressed in some kind of ragged battle uniform, otherwise he’d seem like a homeless person, though no homeless person she’d ever seen looked as athletic as he did. Tall and very broad, incredibly fit underneath the grungy uniform, shaggy hair and untrimmed beard. Not homeless, then. Maybe he was what her parents would have called a “snake eater.” Special Forces.
    He seemed to be fixated on her. In any other setting, she’d take it as masculine interest, but it didn’t seem to be that. He seemed surprised and . . . and disapproving. Obviously thinking she was out of place in this room of movers and shakers.
    Well yes, Mr. Snake Eater, yes I am out of place . She couldn’t wait for the dog and pony show to be over and to finally get back to her peaceful, perfumed apartment.
    She suddenly tuned back in to Connelly’s droning voice, the pitch having changed: “. . . and so now for a better explanation of the threat to our country, I’ll give the floor to Deputy Director of Operations Montgomery.”
    Lucy focused on Uncle Edwin. Whatever his faults, he was a serious and intelligent man, and whatever he had to say, she was obviously here to listen to it.
    As he rose, the lights dimmed, making the laptop and netbook monitors glow in the dark.
    A disembodied voice came over the loudspeaker system. “Ladies and gentlemen, please turn off your computers and cell phones and pagers. It goes without saying that the report you are about to hear is SCI—Sensitive Compartmented Information. Clearance level Majestic.”
    The entire room took in a shocked breath. Not even the President of the United States was always cleared for Majestic-level intel. It was the level of clearance needed to know that aliens had landed. Certainly she shouldn’t be privy to Majestic-level intelligence.
    The room was too dark to see individual features, but she could hear a low buzz.
    “Quiet please.” Uncle Edwin bent down to press a button, and the enormous monitor behind him lit up. At first Lucy thought the projection system was broken, because the screen was blank, white. Then the image came into focus, and she could see granite outcroppings and snow-covered peaks against a blindingly bright turquoise sky.
    Something small was moving across the white landscape. The image zoomed, so fast it nearly gave her nausea, and focused on a man, trudging across a snowy valley floor.
    Uncle Edwin’s voice was clear, calm and emotionless. “This image was taken two days ago at 0600 Zulu time by a Keyhole satellite that was instructed to change the direction of its lens. The man you are watching is one of my operatives, following up SIGINT and HUMINT that a biowarfare laboratory had been set up by Al Qaeda in . . . mountain terrain.”
    Lucy could hear between the lines. Someone at NSA had picked up a cell-phone conversation or an email—SIGINT—and an operative or operatives had been sent in to wherever to get human intelligence, HUMINT.
    Figures were superimposed on the screen, probably geotagging coordinates, and probably