Not least of which was the fact that her mother had apparently been working on some kind of classified software project for the Department of Defense. And she’d never even hinted at it to June.
Unable to sleep, June had planned to use her mother’s key card and code to let herself into the cluttered lab at Stanford. She told herself she was there to collect family pictures and the few plants her mother had managed not to kill, but mostly she just wanted to sit with the memory of her mom in the place she’d most fully inhabited, her computer lab.
Instead, June found a broken lock, the door held open by a chair, and a pair of thick, humorless men in dark suits with Defense Department IDs packing Tyg3r, her mother’s experimental bench-made mini-supercomputer, into a cardboard box with all the spare drives they could find. They’d already stacked their hand truck with banker’s boxes, apparently filled with the contents of her mother’s secure, fireproof file cabinet, which now stood open like a corpse for the medical examiner.
Although the G-men didn’t show their IDs long enough for her to get their names, they made sure June could see the guns on their hips. The pale one did the talking, while his eyes wandered up and down her body. The dark one didn’t say a word. They left her standing in the doorway with a warning that even this incident was classified, and if she even spoke of it she would face federal prosecution.
June watched them trundle the hand truck down the hall, thinking that her mother had always hated the government.
So why would she work for the Department of Defense?
Put another way, why would they show up at three a.m.?
And why would they take Tyg3r, the temperamental mini-super, but leave the big blazing-fast liquid-cooled Cray her mother had been so proud of?
So June had a lot on her mind. And when she finally dragged her ass out of bed the next day, she realized there was no coffee in the house. How the hell had that happened?
When she recognized the emergency conditions, she pulled on yesterday’s clothes, slung her messenger bag over her shoulder, got on her mother’s ancient but highly tuned single-speed Schwinn, and headed for Philz Coffee.
On Middlefield Road, a giant black SUV with tinted windows pulled up beside her, crowding her toward the parking lane. Red and blue lights flashed on the dash. When the passenger window hummed down, the same pale humorless G-man from the night before pretended to smile at her now.
He wasn’t looking at her face, of course. He was watching the way the cross-strap from her messenger bag defined her breasts. Definitely not cool, she thought. Some woman needs to rewrite the DoD training manual.
“Please pull over, Ms. Cassidy. We’d like to speak with you for a few moments.”
“Not right now,” June said crossly, still pedaling. She was dangerously undercaffeinated, with a headache that would kill a rhino, and hadn’t done shit for exercise in several days. The bike ride was just beginning to unknot her muscles when this moron showed up. “I need some coffee.”
The big SUV kept pace with her. “This will just take a moment,” he said. “We can drive through Starbucks if you’d like.”
The G-man clearly failed to comprehend. Plus she would never go to Starbucks unless she was taken hostage, and even then she would fight it. “Hey,” she said. “I’m busy. Send me an email. Call my cell. I’m sure you can figure out the number.”
The G-man looked at the driver, who was definitely less pale but appeared no less humorless. Why did they have such horrible suits? The driver nodded.
“Ma’am,” said the pale G-man, “I’m with the United States government. Are you refusing my lawful request?”
“Jesus Christ, no.” Although she was starting to wonder if it was a lawful request. This wasn’t her area, but she could make some calls and find out. “After lunch, okay? I have a meeting. Send me a text.”
The G-man raised his hand and the driver slanted the black SUV into her path, leaving June no option but to slam on the brakes or be forced into a parked car.
“Hey listen, motherfucker,” she began, but the G-man stepped out of the SUV, jammed a crackling electric stun gun into her side, and pulled the trigger.
It felt like being punched by a gorilla. June’s legs stopped working, and she collapsed over her mom’s bike.
The man captured her wrists in a pair of plastic riot handcuffs, disentangled her from the Schwinn, picked her up like a rag doll, and threw her into the back seat.
The driver scanned his mirrors. “What about the bike?”
“Leave it,” said the first man, picking up June’s fallen bag and getting in beside her. He took a phone from his pocket, touched a button. “We have her,” he said.
The SUV roared back into mid-morning traffic, red and blue lights still flashing, conveying the impression of importance and urgency, with only a faint crunching sound as the left rear wheel rolled over her mother’s beautiful old bicycle.
The next car slowed as he detoured around the twisted frame of the fallen Schwinn, but he was the only person to wonder what had happened.
By then, the black SUV was long gone.