The two men stood looking after him. Neal smiled, shaking his head as he said, “I imagine you can’t say this, so I’ll say it for the both of us. What a prick.”

The colonel looked down, biting his lower lip to stop smiling. “No, I probably wouldn’t have put it quite that way, no.”

“Listen, Colonel, if you had plans this evening, don’t feel the need to hang out with me, I’ve got plenty of prep work I can get on with.”

The colonel looked at him, trying to assess if the man was just being nice. Then he smiled to himself. No, one thing you could rely on from Neal, he would never say anything just to be nice.

But orders were not negotiable, and he also thought that in the end he could probably come up with a few useful pointers for the rough-hewn physicist. The colonel smiled, without humor. Seeing this, Neal nodded, smiled, and then looked away, acknowledging the futility of trying to get the colonel to ignore the general’s ‘request.’

Dinner it was.

* * *

At that moment, across the city, Madeline sat in a hotel room across town that she had gone halves on with Neal. Madeline was sitting on one of the two queen beds going through her notes.

They had both decided they would not use PCs for anything to do with their investigation. After all, word files could be easily hacked if the PC was ever linked to the net, even if the files were never actually e-mailed to anyone.

So she had revived to her note-taking techniques from university, making copious, denoted, bulleted, color-coded pages of scribble. She was now trying to categorize them into a file binder she had pilfered from the Institute.

A knock at the door told her that Neal had probably forgotten his room key again, so she stood, straightening her T-shirt, then stopped as it opened from the outside.

It was not Neal. She looked at the stranger, confused, and then her sharp, blue eyes started to widen in fear and panic as she focused on the deep, black eyes staring back at her.

* * *

It had been a fun evening. Surprisingly so. Neal and the colonel had decided to go and grab some dinner together, and the officer had taken Neal to one of his favorite seafood restaurants from one of his three stints at the Pentagon.

They had spent most of the night talking about the job opportunity, but the conversation had frequently veered to stories from the past, with some especially entertaining gossip about the various people working at the array, as seen from both sides of the proverbial fence.