(eng) Lisa Shearin - SPI Files 01 by The Grendel Affair

Author:The Grendel Affair [Affair, The Grendel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

14

THE four of us ran down the block, across the street, and back into Saga Investments. Ian had tried getting Moreau on his phone, and when he didn’t answer, he tried Vivienne Sagadraco. No answer. No voicemail.

Meanwhile my mind was racing. What if being seen as me wasn’t my doppelganger’s main reason for being sent to SPI? I didn’t know anything about bombs, but I was pretty sure you could get a whole lot of boom into a bowling bag. If the vampire ex-CIA agent worked for the adversary and hired the doppelganger to infiltrate SPI, delivering a bag full of boom was a distinct possibility. They’d turned a pair of grendels loose on New York. We wanted to stop the grendels. So following the bouncing logic ball, one could assume that they’d want to stop us.

Hence a big boom.

In the bull pen, things were still business as usual. Nothing ticking, no smoke, no fizzing fuses or however it was that bombs did their thing.

But something was going on, something big.

Kenji Hayashi’s work area had become a hive of activity for those of the brainy persuasion, the folks at SPI who rarely came out of their labs.

“Looks like we’ve got an answer on that flash drive,” Ian said. “Mac, find out what the deal is. Yasha and Calvin, stay with her. Don’t let her out of your sight. I’m going to find the boss and Moreau.” And he was gone, running for the stairs.

The lab folks around Kenji’s computer were equal parts excited and . . . okay, they were just excited. I stood back a little, waiting for the brainiac brouhaha to die down enough to ask Kenji what he’d found on that flash drive.

“Don’t think I’ve ever seen the lab rats this excited,” Calvin noted.

Those that weren’t gathered around Kenji’s screen, talking, debating, and arguing nonstop, had broken off into white-coated clumps, scribbling on tablets—both the paper and electronic kind. One enterprising group had commandeered a whiteboard, filling it with numbers, symbols, and diagrams that made absolutely no sense to me, nor I suspect to anyone with less than three math or engineering degrees.

“Whatever it is, they do seem to be enjoying themselves,” I said.

I caught Kenji’s attention, and the tech elf stood and pushed his way out of the human and nonhuman crush of his fellow science nerds, and made his way over to us.

“So what’s got the smart kids in a tizzy?” I asked.

Kenji was grinning like it was Christmas morning. “Just the coolest thing ever. The actual working schematics for a device that renders its wearer visually and audibly undetectable.”

“Uh . . . you mean unseen and unheard?”

“That’s what I just said.”

“Not unless you’re in Mensa.”

Kenji’s dark eyes sparkled with geeky joy. “It’s a cloaking device. The thing’s small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, and will conceal anyone wearing it—from sight and sound. Eat your heart out, Romulans.”

“It works like a veil?”

“It takes a veil about fifty giant leaps forward. Veils just project an altered appearance; this thing can conceal you completely.

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