September 8th, 2027

David Penner held the Samsung Vision in his hand, staring at the four-inch piece of metal and technological magic. He’d just been called by Arthur Slogan, the Secretary of Defense for the United States of America, and told by the same politically famous man that there was now a terrorist threat in the form of David’s college professor. The same man had also told David that there was a faction of Darrow’s colleagues or sponsors that had tapped into federal communications and now knew that David was involved in a plot to stop Darrow. Excitement over having talked to someone so powerful ran through David.

Fear at the fact that this was all real drowned out the excitement.

Life, in that moment, had a certain feel to it that could be summed up in one word: conspiracy. Though David had been reluctant to believe any of the past four hours’ events, he knew that something was now happening that was beyond simple coincidence and terrifying realization set in. He suddenly thought that all the guys in the past who’d worn tinfoil hats may not have been so crazy after all.

“David?” Miranda’s voice beat through the mental barrier David had already established between himself and the rest of the world. How could he not reject it? The plain and simple truth was that the world now teetered on one scientist’s choices.

Darrow’s choices. Whether to turn the Kremlin into a weapon of mass destruction or simply go about proving evolution.

Either one was unbelievable. But Slogan had made it clear. Right now the only thing stopping Darrow from going down in history as an insane mass murderer was David’s ability to stall.

He didn’t think he could do it. He could argue with Darrow well enough for hours upon end, that much was definite; but Darrow had other plans in mind. He would see David’s arguments as a simple distraction and leave to go through with whatever else he had planned. Despite what some creationists liked to think, Darrow wasn’t the idiot David sometimes made him out to be.

“David,” Miri called again. Yes, Miri! There was hope after all! As an FBI agent she could just flash her badge, claim she was on official business, and get direct access to all of Darrow’s research and schematics.

David’s hope deflated when he remembered exactly how much trouble they were in. Slogan had used a code to tell David to go to a restaurant in the city called The Big Mississippi, named as much for the river as for their signature chocolate drink. At least, that’s what David had assumed. Slogan wouldn’t say something so odd unless he was speaking so that whoever was listening wouldn’t understand.

If there was anyone listening.

David so hoped that they were all suffering from a severe case of paranoia. He himself still hadn’t heard exactly how they knew about Darrow’s malicious intentions, other than the fact that one of the president’s advisors had said so and the president believed him. Apparently that had to be enough, because the part of David’s mind that revealed the truth in times of uncertainty was screaming out that this was the truth. They weren’t just being paranoid.

David and Miranda were in danger.

“Come on Miri,” David said rapidly, suddenly tearing down the mental wall he’d erected. He dropped the phone where he stood—it was probably being tracked or serving as a listening device even now—then went about grabbing what he’d need before leaving.

“Wait,” Miri said, not sure what David was doing. “What did he say? David?”

But David was already running through the apartment like a tornado, grabbing his laptop, his car keys, wallet, the pistol he kept hidden under his bed, a few boxes of ammunition—

“You keep a gun under your bed?” Miri asked, wide-eyed, as he sped into the kitchen.

“You don’t?” he asked in return.

She shook her head, chiding. “That’s different.”

“Not really,” David said. He turned to face her, satisfied that he had everything he desperately needed. He could buy anything else in the city. “We have to leave.”

“Just wait. What did Slogan tell you? For God’s sake, David, the Secretary of Defense called you on your cell phone. Tell me what he said!”

“He said you’re right,” David told her in a blur. “They suspect Darrow and are sending someone to help us, but there’s a problem. Federal communications have been tapped. Whatever system the government uses to talk to each other, it’s not safe anymore. They’re on to us now. I don’t know if your phone is connected to the same system—”

Miri was already tearing the SIM card out of her phone and throwing the whole thing to the side.

“—obviously it is; anyway, they know where we are by now. We have to go.”

David could see that Miri was used to this already. Her face had already accepted the fact that they were in mortal danger and she was now determined not to fall prey to that danger.

“Where are we going?” she asked, snatching David’s keys from him. Apparently she was driving.

“I really think I should drive—”

“We’ll take my car. It’s faster.” Miri turned and was headed out the door before David could ask why she had grabbed his keys.

He followed after her quickly and nearly forgot to lock the door. David turned back, shut the red hunk of hollow metal, and was twisting the key—he kept his apartment key separate from every other key for reasons not even he knew—when Miri called out from behind him.

“They’re just going to break in.”

“My TV’s in there!”

“David!”

He sighed, knowing full well that an argument with Miri was pointless—even nine years couldn’t change that—then pocketed his key and turned to follow his sister. She sprinted to the right, past David’s gray Mitsubishi, and rounded the corner of the sidewalk to the side parking lot.

Why she was sprinting was a mystery. Why she pulled up to a 2025 Mercedes Gullwing was another entirely. As far as David knew, it was a $250,000 car. V-8 engine. Five-hundred forty-nine horses. As stylish as cars came these days.

This was Miri’s car?

She pulled up to the driver’s seat, popped the locks open electronically, and the shining silver door beckoned her inside.

“Come on!” she yelled.

“This is yours?” David asked as he walked to the passenger side.

“It’s a loan, get in.”

David did as prompted and sat in the leather chair after the door automatically greeted his entry. Miri was already flipping the keys, starting the car before the door had fully shut.

“Now,” Miri said as she backed up and pulled out of the parking lot. “Where are we going?”

“A restaurant.” David set his gun and laptop in the back seat of the car, which was also a deep black leather.

“A restaurant.” Her voice wrung with skepticism.

“Yes, a restaurant. Slogan said we should go to a restaurant and that one of his people would find us there.”

“He said that knowing that the line was compromised?” She turned a sharp right without using her blinker, and they’d officially left the apartment complex. David still worried about his TV.

“David?”

“Well no, of course he didn’t. He used a code.”

“Okay, tell me exactly what he said.”

She didn’t trust him. It was either because of her work as a Fed or their ill-maintained relationship, but she didn’t trust that he knew what he was talking about. He was smart, of course. There was no way she could deny that. But when it came down to matters of a serious nature, she had to make sure he wasn’t misinterpreting. As always.

“I’m not sure I remember word for word.”

“Please. All that hyperactivity nonsense the doctors kept feeding mom when you were a kid doesn’t include good memory?”

It did, in fact. Perfect memory. Sometimes a gift, sometimes a curse.

“‘David,’ he told me, ‘I’m going to tell you something that will make absolutely no sense, but if you listen closely it may save your life. Take a dive in the river and you’ll come out feeling better than you went in. Stay in there too long and eventually someone will have to pull you out, but not many will know where to look. It’s a big river, after all.”

Miri turned left and then they were out of the woods, on the freeway. I-55 to Saint Louis, the same way David always went to school. She paused momentarily after hearing David’s verbatim quote.

“And you got a restaurant out of all that.”

“The Big Mississippi,” he explained. “It’s on Chouteau and Jefferson, right near SLU. ‘Dive’ is a dated word for restaurant. ‘Big river’ sealed the deal. Apparently there’s somewhere we can hide out there where Darrow’s people won’t find us. My guess is it’s a federal safe house so their agent can get to us easily. We’ll be safe there.”

Miri nodded. Though she probably wouldn’t have followed the code in the same way David had, she had to admit it was sound reasoning.

“Then we just wait there until tomorrow? That’s a long time to just stay in a restaurant and twiddle our thumbs.”

“If Darrow’s supporters are as die-hard as the president and his source say they are, we won’t be safe anywhere else.”

She couldn’t very well argue with that.

And then silence ensued. David supposed the reality of the situation and the gravity of that reality were settling in. There they were, brother and sister going into hiding for something that may or may not be true.

David laughed, and then he too fell silent.

David had gone quiet. For that matter, so had Miranda. She’d sat idly by while the Secretary of Defense told her brother, a college kid with no more clearance than a hobo, that he was now responsible for safeguarding the entire nation.

Not that she was jealous. Well, that wasn’t entirely truthful. Miranda had been helping protect the nation from threats for the past two years and never once had she been considered important enough to be called by someone far more important. David, on the other hand, was now their sole hope simply because he knew Darrow personally and was arguably one of the smartest people alive.

But Miranda was proud of that fact. Her kid brother who’d been just a short squirt with glasses when she’d left was now a grown man with enormous responsibility and the dedication to follow it through.

And she hadn’t been entirely dismissed. She had, after all, been personally assigned to aid the man who was now their sole hope, never mind the fact that he was her brother. He wouldn’t get anywhere without her, even if they had been somewhat distant in their relationship.

Miranda decided that she was proud of both herself and David for becoming the people they had despite their hardships early in life. There they sat, the brother and sister from Meth County, Missouri, two of the most important people in the world. The President of the United States was now relying on them.

It was kind of awesome.

She couldn’t let it become more than it was, though. She’d told David that he needed to take things more seriously, and she had to treat it the same way she expected him to. It was a serious situation, no doubt about it. If they took it for granted, God only knew what kind of trouble they’d end up in.

Miranda realized she was speeding and eased off the accelerator a bit. A car behind her honked—no one followed the speed limit in the cities—then abruptly pulled around her and sped forward. Another came on the right. She decided to ignore them.

They were only a couple minutes out from the city now. Miranda may not have been in Saint Louis for nearly ten years, but she could hardly forget the first big city she’d been to.

It suddenly occurred to her that the car on the right had stopped speeding and was keeping pace with them. Miranda looked to the right briefly to see that David was staring at the same thing she was. The driver was holding up a notebook. Words written with black marker.

Mark Darrow says hello.

Two seconds later the SUV slammed into the side of Miri’s car, sending them flying into the next lane. Several horns went off behind them and Miri struggled to keep the steering wheel shoved to the right, fighting the obviously much larger vehicle.

“Miri!” David yelled.

She slammed on her brakes, dropping behind the SUV, then put the gas pedal through the floor and turned a sharp right. The front of her car collided with the rear of the black Chevy Tahoe, and the larger car skidded sideways, colliding with the divider.

Miranda sped on, revving the car far past the speed limit. Her rear windshield shattered.

“They’re shooting at us!” David exclaimed. He ducked into the seat and Miranda followed suit, never letting up on the gas pedal. They could make it.

Another two holes shot through the glass and into the front windshield. Then they were out of reach, topping a hundred twenty.

The turn-off appeared before Miranda on the freeway and she swerved to the right, barely making it. The brakes got their workout as she skidded around the turn-off onto I-70. If the attacker had any sense, he would have guessed where they were going and would be following shortly. Once she’d completed the turn, Miri found the off-ramp for Tucker Boulevard and slowed to a halt behind a line of four cars. The light was red.

“They shot at us,” David repeated. It was obvious he hadn’t been prepared for this level of danger. “How can you just sit there? You’re used to being shot at?”

He was rambling because of the adrenaline coursing through his veins. Normally when adrenaline surges people either run like their lives depend on it or fight. Having to wait it out in a car without being able to do either was no doubt maddening.

“We’re almost there,” Miranda said, trying to calm David.

“Yeah only because you pulled some Need for Speed street racing moves back there. Who was that guy?”

The light turned green and Miranda checked the rearview mirror. No black Tahoe. She turned left onto Tucker, but her speed was limited due to the amount of cars on the road.

“Slogan said we’d be in danger, right?” she asked. “I guess that was it.”

David breathed heavy and fast. Of course, she should have been a bit more understanding. He wasn’t a law enforcement agent—he didn’t come under fire on a regular basis.

Miranda put a hand on his shoulder and tried to comfort him. “We’re fine, David. Look, we’re about to turn onto Chouteau right now.”

David looked and saw what she saw. The light was green this time, thank God, and Miranda quickly took her turn around the corner, onto Chouteau. They were only a block from this supposed safehouse/restaurant.

“I’m fine,” David said. “I just can’t believe we were almost killed on I-55. This is insane. I mean, just yesterday I was sitting in my apartment watching . . .”

Miranda didn’t hear the rest of his statement because her mind, through her eyes, was fixed on the road ahead.

The black Tahoe was stopped in the middle of the intersection at Jefferson and Chouteau. Impossible! He’d taken a left off 55 onto 44, then a right onto Jefferson. Why hadn’t she thought of that?

Come to think of it, how had the attacker known where to cut them off? Was he aware of their supposedly secure location? If so, others may come to aid him.

He and his allies, if he had any, would swarm their safehouse and kill them before David could bring a shred of evidence against Darrow. Unless . . .

That was it. The police would keep them away well enough.

Miranda sped up, past the blue Ford Focus that had been driving so annoyingly slow since the turn onto Jefferson and angled straight for the Tahoe.

“What are you doing . . ?” David asked, but she kept driving.

She was topping fifty when she pulled a hard right and an immediate left to avoid the Tahoe. Miranda heard a shot hit the car, but she couldn’t be sure exactly where it hit or where it had come from because the car was spinning wildly, right around the black SUV. Several more shots hit the car as it began to straighten, and Miranda dove for the gun David had put in her backseat. Her own was in the side compartment of her door; too hard to get to in a pinch.

The car stopped spinning and the engine had shut off to stop from overheating. Miranda popped her door open and immediately three shots hit the other side. She crouched low to the harsh pavement, protected by the door.

“Miri!”

“David get down!”

Panic grabbed at her spine, as it always did when she was in a mess like this—facing an armed assailant while she had a VIP to protect and no one else on her side—but if there was one thing the academy had taught her, it was that fear killed more people than guns. She had to set that aside until she could let it run its course without paralyzing her.

Miranda poked her head out of cover for just a moment to see where her opponent was. Four more shots fired off in succession, two hitting the car door and two hitting the asphalt beside Miri. Several hit the front windshield.

The gun was a 9-millimeter pistol by the sound of it, capable of holding a maximum of twenty-one rounds with an extended magazine. With the stock magazine, depending on the make and model, probably seventeen rounds.

Miranda listened carefully for the dead man’s click, when her assailant would run out of ammo and have to change magazines. That would be her chance to leave cover and fire away.

Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen rounds he’d fired so far.

Click.

Miranda stepped up from cover, leveled the pistol, and fired. Smoke hissed and the gun popped and a hole entered the driver side door of the Tahoe, but the attacker was no where in sight. He was hiding, reloading.

Miranda sprinted away from David in her car and toward the pale green Saturn that had stopped in the middle of the road. No one inside.

Three shots rang out, all of them striking glass but not near Miri. She leaned out of cover just enough to see the Tahoe and, more importantly, her attacker. He was firing at David.

Miranda raised her gun and fired. Two shots. One in the chest, one in the gut.

The man staggered from the first blow and dropped his gun. The second had him on the ground.

A crowd had formed on the sidewalks, all of them ducking low like Miranda had. They were shocked. Gang violence and shootouts were common in the inner city, in the ghetto, but here on one of the most traveled intersections it was almost unheard of. Cars had stopped in the middle of the road—outside the line of fire, naturally—and passengers were as hidden as they could make themselves.

“It’s okay,” Miranda addressed them with a firm voice. She took her ID out of her coat pocket and waved it above her head. “I’m with the FBI. Does anyone have a cell phone?”

At first no one answered. They were all too amazed at what they’d just seen.

“I do,” a timid voice in the crowd cried out.

“Call the police,” Miranda said. “Tell them an FBI agent just gunned down an assailant at Chouteau and Jefferson and I’ll be here to answer any questions.”

“You just killed that guy and you expect us to believe you’re with the FBI?” someone asked.

“This is official business,” she said, flashing her badge. “Please go back to your day.”

A dozen cries of protest erupted, but Miranda ignored them, jogging over to her car. David wasn’t inside!

“David!” Miranda yelled.

“I’m fine,” she heard from her right. Miranda spun in the same direction and saw David sitting behind her car, back to the rear bumper.

She paced over to him quickly, knelt down beside him, and put her hand on his shoulder. “You okay?” She began checking for wounds. Found none and let out a breath.

“He’s dead?”

Miranda nodded. “You should go to the restaurant. I have to go see who he was.”

David offered no words, only a nod.

Miranda stood and turned back to face the Tahoe and the dead man. A few people had moved off the sidewalks and were inching closer to the body, eager to see what had happened and who he was.

“Back!” she yelled at them. “This is a crime scene! Off the street now or I’ll charge you with obstruction of justice.”

They turned slowly and headed back for the sidewalk, some of them glaring. Miranda ignored them and went about her business.

The man lay dead on the concrete, hole straight through his chest, another in his abdomen. At first glance he looked as ordinary as the next man: short black hair, jutting chin, civilian clothes. But when she inspected his wallet, Miranda found that the man didn’t exist. No driver’s license. No credit cards. No money.

Then Miranda leaned closer and saw the incredible. No fingerprints! The man had either cut his fingertips or burned them. A rare practice, but not unheard of in large crime syndicates. She took his wrist and turned it over. All five fingers had been wiped clean of their prints. The same on the other hand.

“Miri?”

David’s voice broke her startling revelation and she looked up to find him a few feet behind her. He was supposed to be in the restaurant.

“We’re okay now, David, don’t worry.”

“You’re okay?”

“I’m fine.” She looked back to the body. “Can’t say the same for him.”

David stared at the man, perhaps longer than he should have.

“Do you know him?” Miranda asked.

He shook his head, snapping out of whatever daydream he’d entered. “No. I guess he just looks familiar.”

Miranda nodded. He was in shock, having been in more danger during the past ten minutes than he had in all the dangerous moments of his life combined. He needed to find the safe room in the restaurant and settle down for a while.

And Miri needed to be there to deal with the cops. A long inquisition would follow, including why her attacker had chosen them and whether or not killing him was justified. All the criminal jargon and needless process.

When she thought about it, that was something they couldn‘t afford. Not only would the investigation take up a good deal of time, it would also draw attention to this supposed hiding place. She couldn’t afford that right now, but she couldn’t very well flee the scene of a crime.

This was different, though, wasn’t it? They were in the middle of a national emergency. Arthur Slogan and the president himself would say that they couldn’t get tangled up in a police investigation right now. But as a federal agent Miranda was held accountable for these kinds of incidents. Not being there to answer to her gunning down of the assailant would be tantamount to murdering one of the gawking civilians on the sidewalk.

Then again, national emergency. The circumstances demanded she remain anonymous.

Why did she stop the car instead of simply avoiding the attacker? She cursed her lack of intelligent thinking. She’d intended all along to kill the man, involve the police, and keep both herself and David impervious to any more attacks. But now she had to ignore the police and simply hope that they warded off any would-be assailants.

She came to the decision then. Miranda had to stay out of it. She had to go with David to the restaurant, hide out, and hope that the room was so secure that any prying police couldn’t find it and demand they open up.

She grabbed David by the arm. “Show me where the safehouse is.”