Page 41 of Centurion

“I hope you’ll come back after all this is over. I’d love to have you both over for dinner before you go back to the States.”

“That would be wonderful.” She turned to Malice. “I’m going to go shopping while you’re gone.”

Malice threw back his head and laughed as he put his arm over her shoulder. “Babe, when you shop, you look; you don’t buy.”

“Maybe I’ll buy something today.” Anya laughed with him.

Malice waved at Ronnie from the door. “Be back as soon as possible.”

Then Ronnie went to the door after he closed it and locked it before she went into the library. “All right. What’s going on?”

Con looked up from the diagrams on the desk. “Malice found a paragraph describing this device.”

Ronnie frowned and walked over to where he was. “What did it say?”

Con ran his hand through his hair and stared at the diagram. “According to what’s written here, it’s a platform that, when launched, is capable of emitting a massive high-altitude electromagnetic pulse.”

“What would cause that? The pulse, I mean?”

Con lifted his eyes to hers. “An explosion.”

“They’d have to launch a lot of them, then.” Ronnie pointed to his book. “To hit all those cities and areas, right?”

Con drew a deep breath. “Not if it’s nuclear.”

CHAPTER 16

He saw the second Ronnie understood the gravity of what they’d discovered. “I’ve got to get a call started. Has Malice left with Anya?”

“Yeah.” Ronnie sat down and stared at the diagram. “This will light a fire under a lot of big players.”

“You’ve got that right.” Con cleared his throat and hit the combination of keys that would put out a scarlet clearance priority meeting. It was the only way to get all the players on board at once.

He hovered over the enter button. “You ready for this?” The alert would go out to every executive with a scarlet or higher clearance. Higher … Con wondered how much higher the clearances went in Guardian.

“Do it.” Ronnie nodded.

He hit the button and watched as the screen split into sections.

Jewell was the first online. “CCS online.”

“Alpha online.”

“The Rose is online.”

“Dom Ops online.”

“I’m online, and I still don’t have a call sign.” Jade DeMarco was the name under her screen.

“Archangel online.”

“Saint is online.” The one with that name didn’t have a video feed.

“Con and Centurion are online. The call is secure. When reviewing the information found at Eisenberger’s house, we discovered the schematics written in Russian are for a platform that, when launched, is capable of emitting a massive high-altitude electromagnetic pulse.”

“How sure are we?” Archangel asked.

“Malice was one hundred percent positive what he read was correct. He took Anya back to the hotel because this was above her clearance.” Con looked at Ronnie. “The only type of explosion that could cause the disruption indicated in the documents we’re looking at is?—”

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