“Sure, but only if there’s something of use in there,” said Isaac. He was a very short man, barely above five feet tall, which made him quite a comical companion to Doc, who was over a foot taller. And while Isaac was slim as a sword blade, Doc was what her Jewish aunt used to call zaftig—curves upon curves. The running joke was that Doc looked like a younger Dolly Parton on growth hormones, which was not entirely inaccurate, even down to the embroidered cowboy shirts and hand-tooled boots. Doc, who had endured being a figure of fun as a girl—having grown to double-D cups by tenth grade—decided to stop trying to hide and instead use her body as both a distraction and a challenge. People too dim to look past the bustline, wildly coiffed blond curls, and oversized hourglass figure did so at their peril. It meant they didn’t bother to look into Doc’s eyes and see the scathing humor and bottomless intellect. While most of the kids in high school were trying to get laid, she was filing her first dozen patents. She was born poor, graduated high school three years early, and with $4 million in a new trust account. She blew through the corporate world, racking up more patents and more millions, then fell in with the Defense Department eggheads at DARPA until they started to bore her. When Mr. Church offered her carte blanche to do any side research she wanted while also overseeing the Integrated Sciences Division—first with the DMS and then in an even more expanded capacity with RTI—she jumped at it. It was refreshing to work for someone who was not her intellectual inferior.

Isaac Breslau was not on the same level as Doc, though he wasn’t that many floors below. A professor of biological engineering from MIT, with a handful of master’s degrees in chemistry, materials science, and health sciences. They’d met at a conference in Zurich and fell in together thick as thieves, because they were in a room of brilliant minds but were clearly—in terms of intellect—the big dogs in that room.

Doc had hired Isaac, and when he saw the sophistication of the RTI science labs, he nearly wept.

“There’ll be something we can use, lamb chop,” she said. Doc was fond of diminutives with everyone except Church—at least not to the boss’s face. Not often, anyway. “We’ll pick all the meat off it and suck out the marrow.”

“First … ewww,” said Isaac. “And second … I agree.”

They watched the workers move in a constant line like ants going out to forage, bringing back goodies, and heading out for another load.

“How much of this is there?”

Doc looked at a clipboard, flipped over a few pages. “Three tons of paper, two tons of computers, including several Fujitsu Fugaku supercomputers.”

Isaac sniffed. “Last year’s models.”