“Right now I’d settle for a shower,” Pavesi told her.

“In your room.”

Zimmer voiced a thought. “You said ‘menus.’ As in, printed menus?”

Their hostess nodded. “We try to keep the use of electronics down here to a minimum. Security.”

Dev glanced over at Reed. “So no one can hack into your breakfast choices.”

The taller man stared back at him. Then, realizing that they were going to have to work together, he proffered the most humorless smile Dev had ever seen.

“Funny. Yes, amusing.”

Don’t hurt yourself with hysterics, Dev thought. He decided that being on the same team as Gavin Reed might present some difficulties. On the other hand, if things were to devolve into hostilities, Reed would be the first man Dev would choose to hide behind.

His room was small but surprisingly plush. Concurring with Pavesi’s choice, he luxuriated in a long, hot shower. Delighted to see that tea was available alongside the expected coffee, he availed himself of a cup of Darjeeling first blush and settled in to watch an all-news channel. Apparently the restrictions on electronics did not extend to closed-circuit systems bringing in signals from well outside.

Understandably, the news remained dominated by talk of the alien visitors. Assorted pundits of widely variant qualifications engaged in all manner of speculation. As for the general public, reaction varied across the expected sociological spectrum, from delirious wide-eyed hopefuls anticipating the dawn of a golden age of human-alien cooperation to heavily weaponized survivalists in full-blown cackling I-told-you-so mode. There were so many shots of the alien craft from so many different perspectives that Dev quickly grew tired of them. Nothing was happening. Nothing would happen, apparently, until sometime much later in the day. As he set his empty cup aside and clicked off the TV, he wondered where contact was set to take place. In the park above them? Downtown Houston? He would find out soon enough.

As would the rest of humankind.

—II—

He woke to the sound of Champagne coming from concealed speakers. To be precise, Claude Champagne’s Symphonie Gaspésienne. What was truly impressive was that Champagne was a largely unknown composer, that the piece was a favorite of Dev’s, and that to the best of his knowledge he had never told anyone at the Johnson Center about his admiration for it and for the composer. But somebody knew.

What else did they know about him?

Enough, anyway, to anoint him 20 percent of the team responsible for attempting humankind’s first contact with an alien species. No, that isn’t entirely accurate, he corrected himself. To be precise, he was 20 percent of the American team attempting first contact. If there was anyone in the U.S. intelligence community in a position to know what was happening outside Moscow, Beijing, or Brussels, they had yet to share that knowledge with him and his colleagues.