“He knows.” This was what she called a designer lie. Not entirely untrue. It just omitted his opinion of what he knew.

“Report when the operation is complete. And your colonel, let’s bring him in. I think we need to talk this thing out with him and Dr. Turner, if we’re gonna keep peace in the house.”

“Consider it done.”

Peace in the house was agency code for not doing something that alerted the politicals to anything they didn’t need to know, and no elected official wanted to know anything about hybrids lurking around that nobody could get a handle on. The media would go berserk, and when you tell any political anything this incredible, no matter how deeply classified you say it is, the media are going to rise up around you with the certainty of a drowning tide.

She went to her safe and opened it. Peering into its gray interior, she found her operations manual. She took it back to her desk and began working through it, reading the complex protocols that she needed to use if the operational orders she was about to cut were going to be heeded by the military.

Soon enough, she’d hear more from the outraged Dr. Turner. Maybe she’d be hung out to dry. But that was then, this was now. She had a forest to burn. She began cutting the orders.

She could not begin to imagine Turner’s reaction to the video when he saw it, his horror and his rage, his pacing his office as if it were a locked cell, his sudden requisitioning of an aircraft.

He would confront her one last time, then, if he failed, he would do what he had to do.

Chapter Six

CHAPTER SIX

WILLOUGHBY

In Willoughby, the noon hour was marked by the low moan of the lumber mill’s whistle, as it had been every noon since August 11, 1889, when the mill had been set to running, its big boilers fired with thousands of logs in a place where logs were plentiful beyond dreams.

Now, although the mill still made occasional runs and even brought in a small profit most years, the lumber whistle had long been silent, replaced by the lumber whistle MP3 file, and a digital PA system that had been installed by the Ludwig family, who still owned the mill.

In Willoughby, tradition meant a lot. In the Glade, the local watering hole, Jimmy W. Painter raised a glass to the familiar wail. When Jenny Pawlenty brought his sausage sandwich, he dug into the meal happily, starting with a mouthful of homemade kraut to prepare his taste buds, then biting through the crackling good skin of the sausage, penetrating to the deliciousness within. The Glade made its own sausage and you knew it. You knew that this was excellence, American style.