Chapter 16: The Courier Order

Eamon's POV

The quartermaster's window opened at seven, and I was standing in front of it with a pen.

"Courier order," I said. "One rifle feed prototype and its designer, to a demonstration range outside Chicago, Wednesday evening."

"Designer travels with the prototype?"

"Team leads can escort their own hardware. It's in the handbook, under rule four."

I knew it was there because I had read the whole handbook the week I got here, and nobody else had since.

He stamped it without looking at the name on the line.

The Field Office read the director's requests, and nobody had told it to read the quartermaster's.

That was the first piece of my plan, and it cost me nothing but a signature.

The second piece was the hangar wall.

Rule nine hung there in a black frame.

Two frames down from it hung a poster for the Inspector General's hotline, with a phone number in red.

I had walked past it every day for four years.

I took the walk to the guard shack at noon, with the memo number from Maeve's file in my head.

I had read it over her shoulder once, a string of seventeen digits.

Numbers stay in my head whether I want them or not.

The guard on the shift looked at my badge and then at the landline on his desk.

"Personal call?" he asked.

"A complaint."

He went out for a cigarette, and I dialed the number in red.

A voice answered, tired, and gave no name.

I gave the memo number and said the words COVER ASSET and DORAN and the name of the Field Office.

The voice stopped being tired.

"Say that number again, slowly," it said.

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