She shuddered and Neal fell silent for a moment. But then Madeline suddenly took up his line of thought, her expression one of childlike fear, “They … they were attacked from space.” she said, reticently.

Neal had concluded the same thing, but he desperately needed to check his thinking, and so, despite how much it might hurt her to think of it, he prompted her to go on, saying, “Why do you say that?”

“Two things,” Madeline continued, “firstly, the wreckage. A missile would have left some damage, pieces. But the ship must have been downed whole, taking everything that was bolted down with it.”

An image filled her mind but she went on, driven now by a new emotion growing inside her: anger. “But there is more than that. Years ago, the Institute helped test a laser platform for the air force. It was going to be part of what Reagan stupidly used to call Star Wars. It was designed to be fired from space, but for testing purposes we fired it from an air force gunship. It ended up being scrapped because even minimal cloud cover cut the laser’s effectiveness markedly.

“With more power we could have made it more capable, but we couldn’t generate enough juice within the predefined weight limits. Anyway, I was part of the team that laid the targets for the laser, and picked them up afterward.”

She turned to face him, clasping his forearm with her hand, “Neal, the burns on the bag, the soot, our targets from back then had the same pattern. It radiated from laser hits as the targets burned. The coast guard said it looked like there had been a fire,” Neal could hear the venom growing in her voice, “they must have been burned alive as they tried to get away.”

She looked into his eyes, her growing fury burning now as well, as fierce as he had ever seen, and he almost recoiled from her.

“We have to fight these fuckers, Neal.” Madeline said in a low grumble, her lips and eyes set now in determination. “We have to fight them and we have to win. James was a good man, and I know you and Laurie were close. This was a terrible end for them.”

She fixed his gaze and said, finally, “We need to avenge them.”

He nodded, her resolve filling him, allowing his anger at Laurie’s death to finally hit him. The emotion focused his mind into cold calculation, his uncommonly good instincts starting to guide his thinking once more. He thought about their next move.

“We will, Madeline, we will, but first we must survive this first storm. If they were cut down from above, that means we are always going to be vulnerable whenever we are in plain sight, possibly even when we are inside too, depending on who or what is watching. Either way, for now, at least, sunbathing is probably not a good idea.”