As was customary, there was only one ring before it was picked up. “Jon. Did you find the car?”

“We’re in it now, sir. And you’re on speaker with Randi and Marty in the car.”

“Understood.”

“Who is that?” Zellerbach said.

“General Davis,” Smith responded, pulling a name off the top of his head. Zellerbach didn’t know anything about Covert-One, so it would be easiest to just play Klein as his commanding officer.

“What happened?” Klein started. “Did you say that Whitfield’s dead?”

“Yeah…Look, before we left, we sicced Marty on the Merge—asked him to see if he could find anything unusual. He called when we got back, saying he had.” Smith paused, trying to put their actions in the best possible light. “We went to his house to make sure everything he’d discovered was wiped off his computer. While we were in the process of doing that, Whitfield showed up with his men.”

“Uh-huh,” Klein said, his tone suggesting that he wasn’t so easily fooled, but was temporarily willing to overlook the fact that they had ignored a direct order. “And am I to understand that you killed the major?”

“No sir. But to tell that story we’re going to have to dredge up an investigation that you’ve made clear is over.”

There was a long silence before Klein spoke again. “Give me the broad overview and I’ll decide if we need to go into more detail.”

“Yes sir. One of Whitfield’s men was on Christian Dresner’s payroll.”

“Deuce Brennan,” Randi said from the backseat. The dripping hatred in her voice suggested that the man’s life span could now be measured with a stopwatch. “He shot Whitfield and another one of his men.”

“Why? What reason would Dresner have for ordering something like that?”

“To cover up the fact that he’s hidden a subsystem in the Merge that’s capable of killing its user.”

Another long pause. “You told me it was impossible for the unit to directly injure someone. Something about a lack of power as I recall.”

“That was the consensus. But it looks like the consensus was wrong.”

“I want to be perfectly clear here, Colonel. You’re telling me that, in your opinion, Christian Dresner intentionally created a mechanism to kill people.”

“Oh, it was definitely intentional,” Zellerbach chimed in, the pain from his injury fading a bit when talk turned to technology. “He went to huge lengths to hide it and to make it difficult to activate. Amazing stuff, really. The guy really is unbelievably—”

Smith ran a finger across his throat, cutting his old friend off. “Yes sir. You understand me correctly.”