Page 35 of Gryphon

The fact that he was more hyper than even his norm in her presence told her he was still worried about forcing her to talk to Mike.

Nope. Jeremy counted as one too many things to think about at the moment.

Holly ignored him and Jeremy finally fell silent.

Not once did Mike look toward the window. Not until the major was weeping on his shoulder. Not until he’d finally given her the permission to purge her pain. He’d gone far above and beyond his duty, making sure that the pilot fully understood from her own words that it wasn’t her fault in any manner, shape, or form before allowing her the release.

Only then did he look at the mirror. His face was complete…blank.

He’d know she was there, watching. Know that she’d heard and understood every word.

Two women who’d never physically met had cared that much about each other. Their connection ran that deep.

Her and Mike? Three years in each other’s arms almost every night. What did they have to show for it?

When Jeremy’s phone rang in the observation room, so loudly it might cause deafness at twenty meters, she still couldn’t look away.

Why was Mike’s blank look causing so much pressure in her chest?

28

Harry lay on his back with his left leg up on a stack of pillows as high as his thigh was long. The surgery on his ankle had been orthoscopic and required no cast. What it did require was immobilizing his leg between two side braces held in place by enough elastic bandage to hog-tie an elephant.

Doom.

Four days already felt like four weeks and he had ten more days to go. He wanted to be at the CIA, working on the latest cyber defense upgrades he’d designed. Or at Black Hat Europe with Heidi. Not kicking around the apartment going quietly insane.

He’d become pitiful. When had that happened?

Where was the hacker he’d been? Heidi too, once they’d e-met. Together they’d wreaked merry havoc on servers from Beijing to Belarus like there was no tomorrow, flouting everyone’s attempts to pin them down—until the CIA.

Caught, they’d been given a choice—entrust their future to the US justice system or take over the CIA’s cyber division. Not a bad deal, but he missed the old days where he chose his own targets and what to do to make them suffer for transgressing his definition of truth and justice. Now it was the US government’s game in the highly questionable form of Director Clarissa Reese.

That had all been back before he’d bunged up his ankle by merely stumbling while carrying a new computer.

He never asked if Heidi missed those days, too, for fear that the answer was yes.

Back then he’d never been pitiful.

What had the CIA done to him?

Well, one good thing, they’d finally met in person. That had turned out to be a very good thing. It still startled him that she’d agreed to marry him; not that he’d ever complain on that point.

He missed her even though the woman was only a couple tenths of a microsecond away electronically. Actually with the one-third slowdown in the speed of light over fiber optic cable and various computer switching delays, it was closer to a millisecond—irrelevant on all except the most extreme hacks. Still better than satellites and their heavy handshake latency in most conditions.

Because she wasn’t here to clock his opiate usage, Heidi had forbidden his taking any of the oxycodone painkillers without her express instructions. He hadn’t told her that he hadn’t needed or taken one since the first day. At least that way he had an excuse to talk to her every six hours. It broke up the utter tedium—now his big daily excitement was dinner and sponge-bath break. The drawback of stringing Heidi along about the drugs was the two a.m. wake-up calls to remind him to take his next pill—you have to stay ahead of the pain, Harry. There wasn’t any pain other than itching, but the extra chance to talk to Heidi was totally worth it.

Twice it had devolved into utterly spectacular phone sex that he eagerly awaited to try in person.

Eighteen hours since Jeremy had asked him about the mystery copilot. He wasn’t much farther along than he’d been eighteen hours before, but he called anyway, mostly to have someone to talk to. Except he’d never admit to that as it sounded even more pathetic.

“Hi, Harry!”

“Hey, Jeremy. Your 737’s Swedish copilot is a real black hole. I have him at an Italian flight school.”

“Well, that’s something.”

“Except it doesn’t exist.”

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