“What did you inject him with?” Lindstrom asked.

“A synthetic form of curare concocted by our Psy-Ops division.”

“What if he remembers the needle?” Lindstrom asked in a none-too-steady voice.

“If he remembers anything it’ll be me shouting ‘Watch out!’ When he wakes up, the nurse in his room at Walter Reed will assure him that he hit his head while getting into the SUV and suffered a mild concussion. End of story.”

“You’d better be right.”

“Doc, I’m always right. Always.” He gestured toward Flix’s supine form. “You’d better get a move on. You have twenty-six hours until he’s scheduled to report to Universal Security for the final team briefing prior to deployment. He needs to be mission-ready before then.”

Lindstrom glanced nervously from his patient back to St. Vincent. “As I told you, we’re only beginning to move on to human trials.”

“And as I told you, I want one of those trials in the field.”

Lindstrom winced. “It’s too soon.”

“We’ve already been through this argument. The security of Mobius may have been compromised, Doctor. It is imperative that the trials be accelerated. This is the ideal way to do that.”

“There is nothing ideal about what you are ordering me to do.” Lindstrom looked like he was about to have a stroke. “Remember the monkey that tore its face off.”

“That was a fluke.” St. Vincent’s voice was calm, reassuring. “You said so yourself.”

Lindstrom licked his lips. “As long as you understand the risks. I can’t be held responsible.”

“If not you, Doctor, who?” St. Vincent slammed the door in Lindstrom’s ashen face, and the ambulance drove off to its date with destiny.

What both Lindstrom and St. Vincent failed to notice was Lucy’s face, peering out of one of the front ground-floor windows. Having asked to use the toilet, she had adroitly sidestepped Sister Margaret and all the other sisters, making her way to what was quaintly called the parlor within whose thick drawn-back drapes she stood while observing what had happened to her uncle. It was impossible to hear the conversation between the two men, but she didn’t need to. She knew Flix was being taken to a place he did not want to go.

PART TWO

WAR

Resolute imagination is the beginning of all magical operations.

—Paracelsus

14

The Red Rover team, thirty thousand feet over the Atlantic, was LIM.

Any other team Universal Security Associates put in the field would have been transported via either commercial flight or small cargo transshippers. Red Rover was special, and so they were embedded in a cadre of the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit ground combat element.

In other words, Red Rover was LIM: Lost in the Military. There was no trace of them having left the States, nor would there be. There would be no trace of them when, in approximately twelve hours, they were on the ground in Djibouti. The Horn of Africa was one of the major staging areas for Marine ops. Its forward posts were manned by members of Marine Intelligence, who worked around the clock trying to make sense of Babel, otherwise known as Middle East chaos.