Free Dark Target by David DeBatto

says.”
    “I’ll have a look tomorrow,” DeLuca said. “I don’t know what time, but I’ll call first. So just sit tight until I see you
     tomorrow, how’s that?”
    “I will sit tight and hang loose,” she said.
    He found a motel near the airport in Albuquerque around midnight. The next morning, he went online at www.UNM.edu and learned
     that Dr. Penelope Burgess would be holding office hours between ten and noon.
    Burgess looked up when he knocked on her door, glancing over the wire-rimmed reading glasses that rested on the end of her
     upturned nose. She was around forty, attractive, petite, brunette, her hair in a kind of Martha Stewart cut, though the glasses
     gave her a sort of Mother Hubbardish look, which was also a thought he kept to himself. She was marking the paper she was
     reading with a red pen. She asked if she could help him.
    “Dr. Burgess?” DeLuca said. “I hope I’m not interrupting—I know these are office hours.”
    “I haven’t had a student visit me during office hours in five years,” she said. “I think they think if they do, I’m going
     to give them extra work. How can I help you?”
    “David DeLuca,” he said, extending his hand, “U.S. Army counterintelligence. I was hoping I could have about fifteen minutes
     of your time.”
    She shook his hand, exhibiting palpably less enthusiasm when she heard the words “U.S. Army.”
    “Sit down, Mr. DeLuca,” she said coolly. “Do you have a rank or do I just call you ‘Mr. DeLuca’?”
    “Chief warrant officer. You can call me David, or Mr. DeLuca, or Agent if you’d prefer,” he said.
    “You don’t wear uniforms?” she asked.
    “Counterintelligence is the one part of the Army where we’re allowed to go pretty much outside the box. Probably the best
     way to explain it is that what the FBI is to your local police, counterintelligence is to the military police. Who, I gather,
     have already questioned you.”
    “About that girl,” Dr. Burgess said. “The one who said she had information for me.”
    “Cheryl Escavedo,” DeLuca said. “We found her Jeep abandoned about ten miles north of the Mexican border, in Arizona, but
     we still haven’t found her.”
    “I told the CID people I’d call them if I heard from her,” Dr. Burgess said. “And I haven’t. I don’t know what else I can
     tell you. I’m being honest with you and I’m trying to cooperate, but I’m not sure I appreciate all this attention. All I know
     is that someone I never met supposedly wrote me a letter I never received, and now everyone is acting like that’s enough to
     send me to Guantanamo with a bag over my head.”
    DeLuca took her to be a sensible woman, in which case he needed only to wait for her to realize what an extreme statement
     that was. She didn’t disappoint him.
    “I’m sorry,” she said. “That was out of line. I’ve been up since five o’clock grading papers and each one is worse than the
     next. Maybe if you told me what sort of information she was going to give me, we could make some sense out of this. But I
     suppose that’s going to be classified, right?”
    “I’m supposing that, too,” he said, “once we figure out what it was she took. I can tell you that she worked in the archives
     at Cheyenne Mountain, so she had access to pretty much everything that went through there. It could have been brand new or
     it could have been forty years old. We just don’t know.”
    “And she smuggled it out of Fort CMAFS?” she said, pronouncing it “sea-maffs.” “She must have been a very clever girl.”
    “You’re familiar with the facility?”
    “I used to know someone who worked there,” she said.
    “You work underground, too, do you not?” DeLuca asked. He’d had MacKenzie pull out what she could find on Dr. Penelope Burgess
     and e-mail it to him, but he’d only had time to skim the report.
    “Primarily,” she said. “That and other extreme environments. And in the lab.”
    “And this is