Free Into the Black by Sean Ellis

us?"  Kismet did not recognize the voice, but heard the unmistakable tone of authority it commanded.  He was close enough to see the group, which meant he might be visible to them.  Hunkering down behind a crosspiece, he eased out just far enough to spy on the discussion below.
    There were eight people gathered at the back end of the hall.  Four men, dressed and postured like bodyguards, flanked Harcourt and the man to whom he spoke.  Three of them wore generic black suits, the conspicuous bulges of shoulder holsters visible beneath their arms.  The fourth was too enormous to wear a jacket, but like the others sported a leather holster that wrapped around his shoulder blades.  More than six and a half feet tall, with bulging muscles and the battered features of a veteran brawler, his wild eyes were nearly obscured by the mop of curly hair that fell down over his forehead.
    The other two figures in the room were seated in a corner.  Kismet could see only their feet, close to the legs of the chairs in which they sat.  One was clearly female, with shapely calves extending from the folds of a simple wraparound skirt.  From his obscured viewpoint, he could see nothing above the knees, but what he could see of the motionless figures was unsettling.
    "I don't know," Harcourt answered.  "He seemed very upset at the speculative nature of our mission.  Perhaps you will succeed in persuading him, where I failed."
    The other man sighed and paced around the area, affording Kismet a chance to glimpse him.  He was a tall man, perhaps a hand's breadth taller than Kismet himself.  A moat of hair encircled a shiny bald pate and continued down the man's cheeks in a bushy, but well-groomed beard.  The fellow was on the portly side, but carried himself with a regal posture apropos of his authoritative voice.  Kismet noted that his dark suit was of a style that had peaked in popularity near the beginning of the last decade, suggesting that the bald, bearded man had worn his girth proudly for many years.
    "A wasted effort," the man declared.  Kismet noted also the soft pronunciation of the consonant 'r', and placed the man in an aristocratic New England background.  "I should have gone directly to him myself in the first place.  But let us focus our attention elsewhere for the moment."
    "I see that you have visitors," Harcourt observed.
    "Yes. Allow me to introduce Peter Kerns, formerly Petr Chereneyev, a fugitive from Soviet Russia."
    "And the girl?"
    "His daughter." The man's answer was off-hand, as if the second prisoner was of little interest to him. He did not offer her name.
    Harcourt was silent for a long moment.  "Is it necessary for them to be tied up like that?"
    "Sir Andrew, I don't think you appreciate the urgency of our situation.  I require results, and quickly.  I cannot invest my resources in the possibility that Mr. Kerns here will cooperate of his own accord.  The measures I have taken will insure that he does."
    "Nick," whispered Lyse at Kismet's shoulder.  "You said that this guy Harcourt knew something he wasn't supposed to know, right?"
    Kismet nodded.
    "Was it some kind of government secret?"
    Kismet's brow furrowed .  "I guess you could say that.  Why?"
    "That guy down there, the fat one.  His name is Halverson Grimes; used to be Admiral Halverson Grimes.  He was an aviator during Viet Nam; a bona fide war hero."
    Kismet looked down at Grimes.  As much as he wanted to believe that he had uncovered the hidden lair of the Prometheus group, there was a more plausible explanation for Harcourt's parting shot.  If Grimes' background in the military gave him a high enough security clearance, then conceivably he would have had access to the after action review that had followed Kismet's disastrous mission into Iraq, which included his description of the artifact the defector had shown him.  It would have been a simple thing to leak that tidbit of information to Harcourt in order to help him recruit