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Vogel smiled, looking smug. “The probable crash site is seven hundred to nine hundred feet deep. You need specialized gear for that. The intelligence community has been consistently monitoring all domestic companies that have the right kind of equipment, with a special eye on Lake Michigan outfits, of course. Canadian and Mexican companies as well. The navy task force made short work of discouraging filmmakers, reporters, doc.u.mentarians, even conspiracy theorists from venturing into a maritime exclusion zone.”
He sat back, gave his bald head a quick, damp rub. “The only way anyone could steal our alien technology, which we haven’t even secured yet, would be to invade the United States of America and occupy Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota.”
The man knew his business, no doubt, but after all this time he still didn’t get the big picture.
“I’m not talking about stealing it,” Murray said. “I’m talking about touching it. We just lost a nuclear sub, a destroyer, a cutter and over four hundred brave men and women. That didn’t happen by accident. If the wreckage was somehow contaminated with any of the contagious s.h.i.+t that forced us to nuke Detroit, then the Chinese don’t have to get the thing out of the country, they just have to be dumb enough to go down and try. That alone could be enough to goat-f.u.c.k us right in the a.s.s.”
“That’s enough,” President Blackmon said.
Murray didn’t know if she’d had that voice of unquestionable authority before she took over as commander in chief, but she sure as s.h.i.+t had it now.
“This briefing is over,” she said. “I think Director Vogel has clearly ill.u.s.trated that the site is protected against espionage. He’s doing his job. Murray, you do yours. Find out what turned the crew of the Los Angeles into traitors, and find out fast.”
DAY THREE
NIGHT FLIGHT
Margaret’s belly wanted to be sick, but Margaret was in charge of such things and she was not going to let this helicopter ride make her throw up.
She’d spent most of the last three years sequestered in her house. Now here she was, at 4:00 A.M., in a loud-as-h.e.l.l helicopter streaking across the black surface of Lake Michigan, strapped tightly into an uncomfortable seat and wearing an ill-fitting helmet. Her soon-to-be-ex husband sat next to her, a constant reminder of her failures as a wife.
How had Murray talked her into this?
Maybe it hadn’t been Murray at all. Maybe it was because the infection had returned, and she couldn’t stand aside while others fought that evil for her.
Before “Project Tangram,” before she and Amos stumbled onto something that would turn out to be one of humankind’s biggest and worst discoveries, she had been an epidemiologist with the CDC. She hadn’t been a “n.o.body,” by any stretch, but no one had really known who she was.
The infection changed all that.