Free Silent Assassin by Leo J. Maloney Page A

whatever changes were made while the project was underway.”
    “And this is from the developer’s actual servers?” Morgan asked.
    “Blue Sky Corporation, yeah,” said Lowry.
    “Show me the underground,” said Morgan. Lowry zoomed in to the garage. Everything looked perfectly innocent—no sign of a multilevel secret base anywhere. The entrance to Zeta Division was, in this blueprint, nothing more than an innocent utility closet. “Is there anything else there?” Morgan asked.
    “What do you mean?” asked Lowry. “That’s it. That’s the blueprint.”
    “Does anything seem odd to you?” Morgan asked.
    “Beats me,” said Lowry. “I’m not an architect.”
    “All right. That’s all I need to know. I owe you one, bud.”
    “You owe me a hell of a lot more than one,” said Lowry. “Grab a beer sometime?”
    “Don’t drink,” said Morgan, on his way out. “You never saw me.”
    “I never do.”

C HAPTER 10
    Boston, December 30
     
    B loch looked down on Morgan with her steely eyes. She looked especially stiff and detached, like she always did when she was angry, her chin upturned to signal the unquestionable superiority of her position. She was acting like a high school principal, standing over him as he sat in his chair as if she were intimidating a student who had been caught red-handed stealing a test. However, it took more than dirty looks to intimidate Morgan. “Do I even have to tell you, Cobra?”
    She didn’t, and Morgan wished to hell she wouldn’t. “No. But I guess you’re going to anyway.”
    They were in Bloch’s office in Zeta Division head quarters. The spacious room was more like a glass box that overlooked the elaborate Zeta war room, with its long oak table and enormous screens. Bloch kept her office colder than most would while there was still snow on the ground outside. Her workspace itself was modern, sleek, all done in glass and metal, with no personal touches at all—no photographs, no decorations, no trinkets. Only a computer and a pen occupied the glass surface of the desk. It was almost as if she left no personal mark on anything she touched, which made the question of what existed underneath all the more intriguing. The only scrap of personality that existed in that room was Bloch’s own chair, a fancy ergonomic articulated leather office chair. Even the light was sterile and impersonal. The glass that made up the outer walls of her office would turn opaque on command, as it was now, frosted so that it was impossible to see through, giving them privacy as she chewed him out.
    “Damned right I’m going to tell you,” said Bloch. “This was our lead—our one lead—in this whole series of incidents.” Her face was stonily stern as she spoke. “Novokoff could have led us to the people behind this. We could have stopped these events, if only we had captured him. Instead, we’re left to look for breadcrumbs again.”
    “Damn it, Bloch, I know that,” he said. “I nearly died out there to get him.”
    “But you didn’t get him. You let a dangerous arms dealer with ties to a global, sustained terror campaign slip through our fingers—”
    “Remind me again who got us that meeting with Novokoff ? That’s right, it was me. And just the fact that I survived that disaster should get me a goddamn employee-of-the-month plaque on your wall!”
    Bloch’s eyes narrowed to tiny slits, and she said, coolly, “You want a medal for not dying , Cobra? I like to think we hold ourselves to a higher standard than that. You know, being that we are an elite, super-secret intelligence outfit. And as the head of this division, I am not in the habit of rewarding incompetence.”
    Morgan scoffed incredulously. “You think I blew this op?”
    He’d already been debriefed about the failed mission as soon as he had been physically able. He’d never seen the face of the man who had asked him the questions. It had gone down in one of the interrogation rooms in the deep recesses