“Touching,” Marcus added, drinking the last dregs of his coffee. Dani wondered if he could read his fortune in the grounds that clung to the bottom of the mug.
“She’d been collecting information for years, and needed me to help her. I got some of it, she got the bulk of it.” He turned to Luke. “You would not believe some of the people on that stick. Important people. From all over.”
“Like Ray...” Luke murmured. Dani could see the pain that memory caused him, and placed her hand on his arm.
“Former boss,” Dani said, turning her head in an aside to her father and Marcus, figuring they may as well have the truth of it. “FBI.”
“FBI?” Edwin chortled, and shook his head. “Please. I’m talking senators. CEOs of multinational corporations. The people who form the foundation of society.”
The four of them let that soak in for a moment.
“So, tell me,” Edwin asked Luke, “why are we talking about this in the present tense? If Katie burned it....”
Luke cleared his throat, his turn to look awkward as he looked from Dani to her father. “Er... There’s a copy.”
“You can’t copy an encrypted drive,” Edwin protested. “The device and the file...”
“...are considered the same thing,” Luke finished. “Not in Unix. At least in Ubuntu. You can copy the file independently of the device.”
“But...” Edwin thought for a moment. “It’s still worthless without the key.”
Luke gave him a sharp look. “Which I presume you have?”
Edwin nodded.
“Excuse me for interrupting,” Marcus said quietly, dabbing at his lips with a napkin as though he’d just finished a divine gourmet repast, even if the napkin was paper, and torn from having gotten caught in the dispenser on the table. “But it seems to me that simply knowing about such a device is enough for several foreign and domestic governments to want to kill us. This is a very, very bad thing to have.”
“You’re Navy,” Luke smiled. “Bravest of the brave.”
“I’m also a single person against several countries.” He looked at the other three, arms crossed across his broad chest as he leaned back, vinyl protesting as he shifted position. “And, I’m a hired hand. This really isn’t my fight. This is a lot bigger than anything I signed up for.”
Dani quailed inside. She hadn’t thought about it from his point of view, and she should have. He was right: he was a bodyguard, not a merc. This wasn’t his fight, and it was a hopeless situation. But somehow everything seemed a little bit scarier when she considered facing whatever came next without his calm demeanor.
“Anyone else know how to fly a helicopter in the dark?” she asked, wondering just how much she remembered from a certain lesson she’d been given once, entirely off the books. Yeah, she was a Ranger. But she’d never done any night-flying. No one moved. “You’re stuck,” she informed Marcus, “There’s no hope for us now, you have to stick around.”
“As flattered as I am that you appreciate my flying skills, there isn’t enough money in the world to hire someone on something like this. It’s a suicide run.”
“Marcus,” Edwin said, picking up a roll and examining it carefully before putting it down again. “You’re bored as hell and you know it.”
Marcus looked at his employer for a long moment, and swore in a fashion that Dani envied. Only military training could have produced the profanity he said, and it was all without emotion, as though he were reading it off a menu.
When he was spent, he only nodded and looked at Luke. “I’m in.”
“Where’s the stick?” Dani asked.
“I gave it to my mommy,” Luke said, and dropped several twenties on the table. “Let’s find a car.”
Chapter Three
Marcus sat sprawled in the seat with his face against the window, making little streaks with his nose against the glass. Dani watched as the car bounced on an uneven bit of pavement and he circled the pane with his face, never waking.
“Wow, he’s out,” she said to Luke.
Luke shrugged, and though he smiled he didn’t take his eyes off the road. It was pitch black, the kind of black that only happens in the country when all the electricity was huddled into city pockets for the night. “I knew a guy who flew helicopters at night,” he said. “Didn’t last long. Eventually, he caught on a powerline and the whole thing blew up.”
“I can’t imagine how Marcus put that thing down in that little courtyard.” Dani twisted in her seat, checking on the passengers in the back before facing forward again. She whistled. “That was some skill.”
“Is that why you wanted him to stay?” This time Luke did glance at her, taking his eyes and his mind from the endless stretch of blacktop. “So he could fly? You were a Ranger. You know how to.”
“Not at night. And maybe.” She shrugged. “You never know when that kind of skill is going to come in handy. But it’s more than that.” She sat silently for a long time, twisting once to turn around and look at her father who slumped against the seat, arms crossed in front of his chest, as though even in slumber he needed to rule the world. Luke eyed him in the rearview mirror, not trusting him to stay asleep when he shifted a little, snorting and making an ugly snoring sound. Dani shook her head and turned to face the front again. “I’ve known Marcus a long time. He watched David and me sometimes when we was small.”
“Armed babysitter?” Luke chuckled, and then nodded as he seriously thought about it. “Yeah, I can see that for you. You probably needed an armed sitter, didn’t you?”
“Still do,” she said tersely, folding her own arms in a gesture that mirrored the man in the back seat. He almost chuckled, then thought better of it, not wanting to have to explain what was so funny. “I just... I felt better. Daddy’s going to try to take charge, you know that, right? It was just nice to have someone else who would take orders without doubting everything you had to say.”
Luke glanced at her again.
“What?”
“Just trying to figure out if I’m supposed to take orders or give them.”
“So am I,” she answered, and he sensed more than saw her shift so that her body faced him fully. “How about we go as a team?”
“Right.” Luke nodded once, decisively. That he could do.
“Good.”
“Good.”
The car ate up the miles. In the darkness, a light amount of traffic passed in one direction or another. The moon reluctantly made an appearance, as if loath to break out of its bed. In the silence of the night, with only the steady humming of the tires on the asphalt, Dani said suddenly, “It won’t work.”
“Not in a crisis,” Luke agreed, having been thinking the same thing.
“No, there has to be a single point of command.”
“One person giving the orders.”
“It gets too confusing otherwise; you can’t have a committee.” Dani nodded.
“We need to decide, then, which of us is actually... you know...”
“In charge?”
“Yeah. Who gives the final orders. Who follows.” Luke watched her cautiously out of the corner of his eye, keeping his focus on the road.
“Well, I have had some experience in this...”
“You think I haven’t?”