“Good job, Agent,” he said. “Last thing. You’re going to drop your pants and shorts and then turn in a full circle for me.”

“I want to see my daughters.”

Malkira jabbed the pistol at him. “Shut up and follow instructions.”

Musil opened the button of his waistband, unzipped his fly and pulled down his pants and shorts. Then he spun around and stood there facing Malkira again in only his shirt and socks, almost naked in the dim garage.

“All right, little man,” Malkira said. “You can pull your pants up. Slowly.”

He did it.

Malkira watched him. “To answer your question,” he said, “I’m here to slow things down while other things speed up. Call me a balance.” He paused. “I’m also here to kill you.”

“Don’t hurt my daughters.”

“That will depend on whether you brought anyone with you.”

“I came alone.”

Malkira’s smile curled more tightly on one side. “You’re a good father. I envy your girls. Mine gave me up to an awful place. Ask Natasha Mori.”

Musil breathed. Malkira held the gun steady on him.

“She’s like me, you know. Motherless. Fatherless. Bred to kill. They blocked her instincts. Her appetites. She was too much for them to handle. But I knew her before. I know better than anyone. And your people will find out. You won’t be there to warn them. She’ll eat their hearts out of their chests. Their blood will flow down her pale lips. When she wakes up.”

Musil said nothing. Malkira moved back and sideways into the house, one nimble step. Then he waved him over to the door with the gun.

“Suppose we go see your daughters,” he said.

Lucas knew the drone couldn’t see through walls—not exactly.

Thermal imaging technologies had come a long way, and Little Wing’s camera was sensitive even at a great altitude. It could inspect a site with astounding clarity in pitch-darkness. It could rapidly switch between wide and narrow fields of view, magnify what it saw at a very high resolution and downlink its pictures over large distances without appreciable degradation. It really was a powerful eye in the sky.

But glass rejected huge swathes of the IR spectrum. The thick, insulated sides of a building also blocked clear and distinct infrared images. The beams could only go so deep before they decayed. Thermal cameras were limited by physics.

Lucas knew Little Wing didn’t have physics-defying supervision. Exactly. But he had served with the Army’s Task Force 160—the Night Stalkers—right up until retiring from the service and knew it came damn close.