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“Steve, you have done your nation a great service, but our work is not over yet.”

Steve tried to speak with volume, with intensity, but his throat hurt, felt painfully scratchy — all that came out of his mouth was a cracking whisper, the voice of a boy rather than that of a man.

“We don’t have to kill them. They have no idea what’s going on. Just give them their money and they’ll leave.”

Bo Pan’s nostrils flared. He drew a breath, ready to give a lecture.

Steve spoke first. “If you kill them, I’ll tell.”

The words sounded petulant, childish, but it was all he could think to say.

Bo Pan’s head tilted forward until he stared out from under his bushy eyebrows.

The footage from the Platypus replayed over and over again in Steve’s thoughts. Not the low-res pictures taken every twenty seconds, but the full-speed, high-def footage stored on the machine’s internal drives. The dark footage of the man entering the Los Angeles’s nose cone, light beaming from a bulky suit that looked like it belonged to like a fat astronaut … the look of surprise on the diver’s face as the Platypus shot in, cut the umbilical cord and then s.n.a.t.c.hed the small, black container … a brief instant of that expression s.h.i.+fting to horror as the snake curled around his bulbous helmet.

Steve hadn’t seen anything else, because the Platypus was already slithering quietly through the wreck, leaving the diver behind to die in an explosion of C-4 that likely blew the sub’s nose cone wide open.

That diver’s blood was on Steve’s hands.

He’d thought only of himself. He’d programmed what Bo Pan told him to program, because he’d just wanted to go home.

Bo Pan wanted more death: Steve would not allow that to happen, even if saying no meant dying himself.

Steve sat very still, wondering if he’d die right in this very room, among empty cans of c.o.ke and crinkly bags of Doritos.

And then, Bo Pan’s face softened. The old man relaxed. He let out a sigh.

“As you wish,” he said. “We would not have achieved this without you, Steve. We will pay them, then we go on our way.”

Steve blinked. “You mean it?”

Again, the words of a child. He was in the middle of an international incident, had just defeated the U.S. Navy, was trying to stop the murder of three innocent men, and he sounded like a boy whose mother had just promised him a new toy.

Bo Pan nodded. “Yes. You are right. It would just cause too many problems. They don’t know what is going on, so it is not worth the risk. We will dock and I will leave.”

Which brought up another problem — Steve wanted to be as far away from Bo Pan as possible.

“Am I supposed to go with you?”

“No. You will return to your parents.”

Steve was going home. In a day, maybe a little more, he’d be sitting at the restaurant, eating his father’s cooking. Could it be true?