Chapter 13: The Big Secret

WHEN WE GOT OFF the plane in Manila, I was past exhausted and about to throw a temper tantrum. Char wasn’t in much better shape.

“We’ve spent three days on airplanes and in airports. Our next flight isn’t until tomorrow morning. I need a hotel,” I said after we cleared customs.

“I booked one,” Char said. “Let’s get a cab.”

Well, that took me by surprise. I didn’t know when she had made the reservation, but I went along with it. She was apparently thinking more clearly than I was. We checked in to an airport hotel and dragged our bags to our room.

Room. Singular. Bed. Also singular. I looked at Char as she stripped off her clothes and headed for the shower.

“You can join me if you want,” she said. “I don’t bite. Usually.”

It was an invitation I couldn’t resist and slipping into the shower with her was pleasant. It wasn’t like we could avoid touching each other while getting the grime of three days off our bodies. Some of that touching was distinctly pleasurable. I felt almost human again when we’d dried and eyed the bed.

“We should have some food,” I ventured. “Room service?”

“Definitely. If I don’t eat, I can’t sleep.”

An hour and a half later, we’d pushed our plates of Lumpia away. Neither of us had dressed, but had towels wrapped around us. I was ready to hit the hay. Char was only a step ahead of me. We’d been sleeping together on airplanes and in airports for three days. It didn’t take long for us to be comfortably in bed together and Char leaned into me for a kiss. We hadn’t really done much of that but the relaxed situation of being naked in bed led to a passionate embrace.

“Too tired for anything else, I’m afraid,” she said. “Goodnight, Stefan.”

I had to agree and we were both soon asleep.

While we were too tired the night before, we were too rushed in the morning. It was a pleasure to dress in clean clothes for the last two legs of our journey but I was sorry to see her body disappear beneath her clothing. We cleared customs in Bangkok and finally caught a flight to Chiang Mai. David picked us up at the airport and drove us back to the resort. I’d officially checked out but I’d paid to have the bungalow held for me until I got back. I quickly dropped my bags in my room and joined Char as we went to visit Terry. David said he was okay but seemed extra tired this morning.

Terry was still in his bed but was awake. He struggled to sit up and Char went immediately to assist him. It was obvious to see her training as a nurse kick in as she efficiently got him positioned and checked all his vitals, including blood pressure.

“Okay, okay. You should have enough information by now to know I’m alive,” he griped good-naturedly. “Give me some time to talk to your man.”

“My man? He came here for you. I just got dragged along as a distraction.”

“And did you succeed? In distracting him?”

Char looked at me and shrugged. “I think he’s as hard to distract as you are.”

“In all fairness, there wasn’t much opportunity to get very distracted when we were running from flight to flight and sleeping in airports,” I said. I was more than willing to get distracted by Char. I hoped there would be other opportunities.

“Well, let me talk to Dag for a while. Maybe you can get distracted over dinner,” Terry said. Char nodded and left the room. Terry leaned forward and pulled his laptop from beneath his pillows. “I did a big thing while you were gone. I made the decision to do it before I went on the run, and having you both out of the way let me focus on it. No one is looking for any of us in Thailand. For some reason, the records of your travels ended in Seoul.”

“We didn’t go to Seoul. We got off that plane and doubled back from Hong Kong to Manilla,” I said. “Did you tamper with records?”

“More than that. I took out the nukes.”

“What?” I couldn’t believe what he was saying. This was one of the things Jordan had warned me he thought Terry was capable of. He could start a nuclear war. I was too angry to be coherent. “They’ll be all over you. Before now, your attacks have been targeted to individuals no one liked. The search for you was sporadic and not particularly intense. This will bring every spy in the world out of his rabbit hole.”

“I don’t think so. Listen to me, Dag. There were nine countries in the world with nuclear arms. Now there are three. I didn’t touch anything in the US. And because I didn’t touch theirs, I couldn’t do anything about Russia or China. But North Korea, India, Pakistan, France, the UK, and Israel no longer have launch codes for their nuclear arsenal. They still have their weapons, but no way to deliver or detonate them.” He chuckled to himself and broke into a fit of coughing. I helped him to water and saw that what he’d coughed up in the tissue was bloody.

“They’ll just reprogram things. Load the backups,” I muttered.

“The virus is very carefully programmed,” he said after he drank a few sips. “It will replicate into any reload or new code. It will take a generation for them to rebuild—new ways of looking at it from a new generation of programmers. I can’t see into the future, but it won’t be programmers who are active today. And education and training work in our favor. New programmers get taught the existing methods. Few will come up with new methods after such brainwashing.”

I groaned into my hands. All I could see was how this would come back to bite us in the end.

“Of course, when the six powers—seven if you count the three unconfirmed nukes in Iran, which I confirmed—discover they don’t have control of their weapons, they won’t be able to say anything. They might suspect another power of tampering, but Iran isn’t going to suddenly confess they don’t have control over weapons they didn’t want anyone to know about. India isn’t going to admit to Pakistan that it has no functioning arsenal. No one can say a word about what they’ve lost because it reduces their threats to impotence,” Terry said. “And besides, those who can discover footprints—like the US and Russia—will find they all lead to Seoul, just ahead of your arrival there.”