With his bare hands, Mint pried the doors open, finding the elevator trapped between floors. Sliding down through the small gap, he helped rescue the screamer, a severely overweight man who was clearly suffering from a panic attack. Mint shoved him up and out, all three hundred pounds of him, though it wasn’t until the paramedics arrived that he realized Mr. Panic Attack was the CFO of Huntington Ingalls, one of the country’s top federal defense contractors. As Mint used to tease, that’s the only reason he got the medal—to make the CFO feel good.
“Did you hack this account?” he demanded through the iPad.
Nola opened her mouth, but nothing came out. This isn’t— Mint is dead. This can’t be him.
“We should go!” someone shouted. It took a moment to realize it wasn’t Mint.
Nola turned the iPad again. Someone else was there. Another soldier, with darker skin. Hispanic. Close-set eyes. His fatigues were also beige, green, and brown, but the darker camouflage was the modern Scorpion pattern—the current ones you get in basic training.
“MOVE! NOW!” the Hispanic man shouted. Above his head, a beam of blue light shone down. His character began glowing, his body now pixelated, small digital squares of him disappearing, like he was being beamed up on Star Trek.
Plink.
The Hispanic man was gone.
A second blue beam appeared above Mint.
“Sir, don’t . . . !” Nola shouted.
Too late. His body started pixelating.
“Sir!” she roared. “Archie! Look at me! That’s not you, is it?”
Colonel Mint turned and locked eyes with her.
Was it him? It couldn’t be. She went to say something else—
Plink.
Mint disappeared, leaving Nola standing there—alone in her trailer—staring at a digitized tomb in Afghanistan.
Mrrrrr? the cat trilled, trying to decide whether to approach or not. She stayed under the table.
Nola was too busy staring at the screen—was it a video game? An online hangout? She eyed the photo-realistic rendering of the tomb, the Afghan locale now making her wonder if Black House was something created by the military.
Did she believe Colonel Mint was suddenly alive? No—she’d seen the crime scene photos. There was no faking that. But whoever was just logged in there with her clearly knew that Mint used this space for something . . . and it wasn’t just for making dinner reservations.
Nola turned the iPad slightly, watching the view of the darkened tomb turn with her. Whatever was really going on in this app—in this place called Black House—Archie Mint had an account here, and from the looks of it, was communicating with others here. If that was the case, with the right tools and the right person, whatever Mint was doing could be tracked.
Fortunately for Nola, she knew the perfect person for that.
26
Zion Lopez lost his temper too quickly. It would be his downfall.
“I mean it—stay back!” Zion yelled, swinging an empty vodka bottle like a sword. “Stay back!”
Across from him, in Zion’s small but surprisingly well-decorated Japanese living room, complete with a shoji screen, a redheaded woman with different-colored eyes—one green, one blue—stepped toward him. She had a buoyant walk and wore a blue leather coat （it was faux leather, actually, since she was vegan）， but she was the kind of person who made you feel uncomfortable, who you’d somehow know to walk away from. The kind of person you can feel watching you across a room, even when you’re not looking their way.
“Reagan, you’re not listening!” Zion yelled, holding the bottle by the neck.