the question posed by the bottle. Finally she said, “Well, all right, yes. I will spend the rest of my life with you if you keep turning up with bottles of wine and that sweet look on your face.” And then she leaned in to kiss him.
The night Parker had gone shaking to one knee to utter his blur of compliments and confessions and, finally, the proposal, they had been right here in their new living room with an identical bottle of wine—the winery was called Eons; he was prone to gross sentimentality—and a too-expensive dinner the y’d ordered for takeout to avoid paying extra for a tip.
“Oh, shit. Dinner. Yo u’r e probably starving,” Kera said, remembering now with a pang of guilt. “I got distracted with work. What are you in the mood for? I’l l order us something.” She made a move to carry the wine to the kitchen, which, like most of the apartment, was only a few feet from the front door.
“Big news day today, huh?” Parker said, watching her with his gray-blue eyes and a big grin.
“Hmm?”
“Your story. This spy business with Iran.”
“Oh, that,” she said, struggling to remember what she had supposedly written about Iran. Iran and China had become her main fields of expertise, first at the agency and now at Hawk. But she could n’t remember what latest piece of the international saga had been released by the Pentagon or uncovered by an actual reporter somewhere that would have triggered a story today under her byline in the Global Report . Sh e’d read the brief at the office, and she must have glanced through the copy—she always did—but her mind had been preoccupied after her meeting with the ONE whistle-blower, and sh e’d failed, apparently, to retain even a few conversational details about the latest Iran headline.
“It was hardly a scoop. I’m not exactly reporting from the front lines,” she said.
“At my job it might matter who gets there first. But at yours it only really matters who gets it right,” he said, opening his laptop. “Look, your piece has dozens of shares on Facebook. Almost a hundred tweets.” He looked up at her. “My fiancé e’s famous.”
“Hardly. And do n’t say that. Fame ruins careers in my business,” she said, kissing him playfully and pushing him toward the bedroom. “Get out of here. Make yourself at home. I’m going to order Thai.”
The moment he disappeared into the bedroom, dragging his suitcase, she spun his laptop around and started reading. There was her name under the headline M ALWARE C RACKED, S HEDDING L IGHT ON I RA N’S A MBITION . She was doing some real multitasking now, one hand in and out of a drawer with the takeout menu, the other scrolling the web page as she read through blocks of copy.
“The stor y’s published now. You still ca n’t talk about it?” Parker said from the bedroom.
“Order for delivery,” Kera said into the phone, loud enough for him to hear. The details came back to her as she skimmed through the article. The virus had targeted British, Israeli, and American intelligence assets in the Mideast. As a countermeasure, the CIA had exposed the malware to disinformation, feeding it data that could be traced back to the viru s’s creators. It was a classic trapdoor, only in reverse. The trail led to a bundle of servers in Tehran. Busted.
By the time sh e’d placed their order and hung up the phone, sh e’d absorbed enough to carry on a conversation.
“The cyberattack originated in Iran, but we turned it against them?” Parker asked.
“Yes, essentially.”
“And in the process, we discovered that the y’r e selling nuclear weapons?”
“Correct. Except we do n’t think they actually have the capability to make nuclear weapons. Not yet.”
“Whoeve r’s buying them must think they do.”
“Maybe. I t’s more likely the weapons deals are fake. I t’s disinformation designed to provoke Israel. They like to provoke, the Iranians.”
An ambulance or fire truck raced past the end