Ruby winced as she thought about her sister, big as a house, on the sofa with her little three-year-old son, Sean, running around like a monkey.

Hopefully, she could get the preliminaries started on whatever the hell this was and then pass it off to the other members of her team and skedaddle.

“What kind of plane crash you going to?” the pilot said, absently flicking off the autopilot on the console as he sat forward again. “A navy plane? Some arrogant navy Tomcat pilot seen too many Tom Cruise movies and became tarmac pizza?”

“I don’t know yet. We do all branches. They didn’t tell me much. They just said they needed me in Miami ASAP.”

“One other question,” the pilot said, looking back at her with his creepily plain grin.

Oh, boy, here we go, Ruby thought.

“Shoot,” she said.

“You married?”

“Engaged,” she lied.

She saw the spinning chopper right away as they landed. To the left of the big coast guard hangars was one of their famous rescue helicopters seen in the recruiting commercials, red with the white stripe. There was a crewman in a helmet and a dark blue flight suit sitting in its open side door.

What was it called again? she thought as she unbuckled her seat belt. A Dolphin, she remembered as she stood and shouldered her gear bag. An MH-65 Dolphin.

“Lieutenant, your chariot awaits,” said a chief petty officer with a ruddy face and a beer gut on the other side of the Hercules’s dropped ramp.

“What’s going on, Chief?” she said.

“No rest for the weary, Lieutenant,” he said over the wind rush and rotor whine as he led her through the humid night air toward the Dolphin.

“We have a cutter on scene, the Surmount, out of Miami Beach. The bird will take you straight out.”

“Are there any other members of my team here?” she said.

“No. There’s no one. Are you supposed to wait for them?”

“I’m not sure. I keep texting my boss, but he hasn’t gotten back. Did you send anybody else out?”

“No, but my orders are to get you out there right away. I recommend you just head out now, and I’ll send out your friends later if they show. This one’s a four-alarmer, from the sound of my boss.”

Ruby looked at the old salty coastie, at the bright blinking lights of the churning chopper waiting for her.

“Let’s do this,” she said, tucking down her cap as she plunged into the rotor wash.

8

A thousand miles due north of Miami, snowflakes fell steadily against the upstairs window of Robert Reyland’s house in Falls Church, Virginia. There was a pretty good wind going as well. Downstairs in the brick chimneys of Reyland’s big new house, the whistling gusts of it sounded almost musical.

But Reyland didn’t see the flakes, didn’t hear the wind.

He was too busy watching it become midnight on his encrypted secure cell phone.

He raised his large bald head and looked around the small silent room. There wasn’t much in it. The eyebrow window above the gun safe, the cardboard boxes in the corner they still hadn’t unpacked.