MORNING,” SMITH MUMBLED as he stepped into Covert-One’s inner offices. He’d been up all night working and didn’t bounce back from sleeplessness like he had in his twenties. Of course, he could use his Merge to knock him out at six o’clock tonight and be good as new by morning, but now he felt a little hesitant.

“Everything all right?” Maggie said, peeking out from behind the monitors she was barricaded behind.

He’d caught up with Klein on an encrypted line late last night and it was likely that she hadn’t yet been briefed on the conversation. Maggie was the only other person who knew the full extent of the Covert-One operation and she wasn’t accustomed to being in the dark.

“Yeah. Randi’s got a burr under her saddle…”

“Nothing new there.”

He laughed. After years of dancing around, Randi had been brought into the C1 fold only recently. And while she’d already proved her value ten times over, neither Maggie nor Klein had completely figured out how to deal with her. When they did, hopefully they’d teach him.

“It’s one of those things that’ll probably turn out to be nothing.”

“But you’re not a hundred percent sure.”

“Exactly.”

She retreated behind her monitors. “Go on in.”

Klein was on the phone when Smith entered, so he just fell into a chair and looked around at the old maps decorating the walls.

“So nothing at all. You’re telling me straight, right, JC?”

Smith perked up at the initials. It was what close friends called the director of the CIA.

“…No, no reason,” Klein continued. “Okay. Maybe next week? Give me a call.”

He hung up the phone and immediately went for his pipe.

“Any whispers?” Smith said.

“Nothing at all. In fact, the silence is deafening. No one seems to know anything about this.”

“And you think they’re telling the truth?”

Klein couldn’t reveal the existence of Covert-One or his working relationship with the president, so he had no authority beyond his history and reputation. And while both carried a fair amount of weight, they didn’t preclude the possibility that he was being kept out of the loop.

“I’d say I’m seventy-five percent confident that no one in the intelligence community knows anything about the Merge being used in Afghanistan prior to its release—or even that it existed before Dresner’s unveiling.”

The skepticism was not only audible in his voice, but clearly visible in his face. And it wasn’t hard to guess why.

“Randi…” Smith said.

Klein’s pipe finally caught and he gave it a few hard pulls. “We both know she has a way of grabbing hold of things she can’t let go of. And that she’s a bit of a technophobe.”