Page 76 of Gryphon

“No, Max would have already shot you if you were. GIS thugs?”

“I get that sometimes,” Tad spoke up. “Being a thuggish sort of guy. But that girl is all sweetness and light.” He shot a smile at Holly that said he wasn’t done making a play for her. Mike wondered how one man found so many ways to be wrong. Not his concern. When Holly was ready, she’d put Tad down hard enough that he’d never forget it. By her looks, she was ready to perform a vivisection on him atop the bar this very moment.

“Could you two go squabble somewhere that isn’t on the brink of war?” Mike moved toward the bar. “We’re—”

“War?” The brief life that had come into the woman dissipated in a single breath.

“We’re trying to stop one.”

“War?” The woman sank onto the stool, would have gone to the floor if it hadn’t stood close behind her. “Between Sweden and Russia?”

Now it was his turn to wish a stool stood close behind him.

59

“The problem is one you could not have foreseen,” General Kurbanov stated.

Kancheli’s grimace agreed.

Pavle stared out the vast window of the GIS building at the Tbilisi Sea. He should go out and drown himself there. That would solve…absolutely nothing.

“They called in an American investigator who is most unusual. I had the opportunity to observe her closely. Any further actions against their aircraft would be ill-advised at this time. She accurately identified in hours what should have taken them weeks for the first events. There was little time for public sentiment to swing negatively toward government reports as were predicted and necessary in your planning document.”

Ongoing confusion and the public frustration with government’s inability to find answers had been an essential element. Without that, it became simply a series of events somehow connected together and became more suspicious in their relationships than the events themselves.

“They weren’t supposed to happen so close together,” Pavle attempted to show his loyalty to the topic. “The Defence Minister’s trip was moved forward by a week. That the copilot saboteur was scheduled to fly both trips was a fortunate coincidence. He took matters into his own hands. Still, they should never have been connected.”

“They were,” Kurbanov waved a negligent hand to the northwest.

Then Pavle caught the fleeting expression on Chief Kancheli’s face as the man reacted to Kurbanov’s statement. Pavle wouldn’t have noticed it if he hadn’t been working so closely with the chief these last months. No, it wasn’t the copilot who had jumped the gun. It was Kancheli. He was the one who had piled the three attacks so close together, ignoring the timeline Pavle had originally laid out.

Three separate investigation teams should have been called out, straining the general population’s credulity.

Instead, they were already solved. The third because the clumsy oaf hadn’t made good his escape despite equipping him with two Stinger missiles and a getaway driver.

Pavle bit his tongue to avoid reacting. If Kancheli wanted the copilot to take the blame for botching the timing, let him. Pavle could only pray that Chief K hadn’t caught on that he now knew who had screwed up the plan.

Kurbanov missed everything. “I would recommend not implementing Phase Four as planned. You did well.”

Pavle was glad that someone thought so.

Then he thought about his and Elene’s plan to inform NATO and that here was the NATO general in charge of determining whether or not Russia had breached Article 5 to launch an attack. After that, he felt less glad.

“I would recommend escalating directly to Phase Five.”

60

Holly’s phone chirped. Without the normal press of bodies to dampen the echoes, it filled the Bunker, making everyone jump. Except Max and Holly of course; that had been trained out of their systems. Or perhaps Max’s sideways glance at Holly was a Spec Ops soldier’s version of being startled.

All Mike knew was his heart skipped a beat, Tad splashed coffee on his pants, and the Georgian woman cried out.

Holly read the message. “Well, that’s as much fun as tangling with a box jelly.”

“A box jelly?”

“Sure, Max. Come hang out on our northern beaches of Oz in the summer, when the heat starts really cooking the beaches. The box jellyfish come in close to shore. A good sting and they send you back here in a box—the kind that are nailed shut from the outside.” Holly’s Strine was in full force.

But then she looked at the message again and he saw the humor collapse out of her.

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