Rogue Commander. Leo J. Maloney

to strip the wires, trying to move as fast and steady as he could. A false move would have him cut them clear through, which would be bad.

      Cut. Pull. And two sets of copper wires gleamed in the moonlight.

      “Ten,” Bishop said.

      He twisted the exposed wires together.

      “Lily?”

      “Yeah?”

      “If there’s a time for this to kill us, it’s now. Just a heads-up.”

      “Oh. Okay. Good to know.”

      “Five,” Bishop said, his tight tone communicating that this might not be the best time for small talk.

      Morgan cut the wire and survived to see the next moment.

      Lily exhaled in relief.

      “We’re not done yet!” He pulled the vest over her head, holding the wires where he had twisted them together.

      Once the vest had cleared her head, he yelled, “Run!”

      They all took off. Morgan swung the vest around like a discus and hurled it as hard as he could. The vest sailed in the air toward the lake.

      Morgan turned around and ran after Lily, feet pounding grass.

      “Get down!”

      Morgan jumped onto the ground and covered his head.

      The explosion rocked the ground and sent a burst of water thirty feet into the air.

      Morgan turned over onto his back and watched as water rained down and the waves resulting from the burst lapped at the shore.

      “Zero,” Bishop said drily.

      “Fellas,” Shepard said over the comm, “get moving. Someone’s going to come check this out. Pickup spot, sixty seconds.”

      Morgan and Lily ran side by side in the darkness, the others close behind.

      She was safe. But Lukacs was gone...again.

      Chapter Five

      Alex Morgan forced a yawn to clear her ears from the pressure buildup in the cabin of the Dassault Falcon 2000.

      Flying in a private jet was one of countless new experiences that had become commonplace after she’d joined Zeta—along with handling deadly weapons and being in frequent danger. Her father was as secretive as anyone about the organization itself, but some things were becoming clear. The first was maybe that her father was secretive because he knew little more than she did.

      The internal structure was easy enough. Diana Bloch, implacable and professional to a fault, was their chief executive director. Her right-hand man was Paul Kirby, director of operations. He always had an expression on his face like he smelled something unpleasant, and she sometimes endured long rants from her father about what a spineless weasel he was. For a professional special ops agent, Dad was surprisingly invested in his rants.

      Zeta also had their brain trust. Lincoln Shepard was their IT guy—the now somewhat standard kind of child genius who had gotten into hot water by hacking into classified intelligence databases like it was some sort of video game. Bloch got him out in exchange for his service.

      Karen O’Neal, their numbers analyst, was the same deal, except with her it was some kind of insider trading thing. Though Karen was probably Alex’s closest friend in Zeta after her father, she’d never been too forthcoming about those details. Alex didn’t blame her, press her, or really even want to know.

      Karen and Shepard were dating, kind of. They thought they were being sneaky, but it’d been going on for more than a year now, so it was fairly inevitable that everyone would catch on. But no one said anything. Alex figured everyone enjoyed the sneaking around part—Zeta being a nest of spies and all.

      The tactical team was the muscle, whenever it was needed. They were physically quick—in and out, whenever they needed to move in with overwhelming force. They were also an insular group, so Alex didn’t know them all that well, despite nominally being a part of them.

      Once they spread out into the Dassault, the team had gone into decompression mode. Bishop, their nominal leader—a tall black man with a shaved head and bulging muscles under his white T-shirt—had raided the minibar and was in one of the chairs toward the back. He was alongside Diesel, their resident sniper, laughing about something they’d probably be all too eager to tell her about if she asked.

      Alex had a special admiration for Spartan, the only woman in tactical. Short blond hair, muscled, and tattooed, she wasn’t the kind of woman her father might consider beautiful, but he still lived in the Stone Age. Spartan, who Alex thought was magnificent, was lying back in a seat next to Bishop, downing a beer.

      That left “the operatives,” like her. Well, not like her—she was as green as they came. But that was her role.

      She liked to think that the operatives were the versatile ones. They did what needed to get done. Sometimes it was spying, sometimes extraction, sometimes infiltration, sometimes who knows what. They needed to be flexible, independent, smart, quick on their feet, and constantly develop new skills. Alex realized that the operatives were like interns, only the business they served specialized in killing.

      She’d gotten good experience in training. They taught deception from both sides—giving and getting, in other words, how to lie so she would be believed and how to discern lying from truth when someone tried it on her. She also was given stunt driving courses, Krav Maga training from actual Mossad teachers, seminars in explosives, and constant target practice in both shooting ranges and obstacle courses with every kind of handgun, automatic weapon, and sniper rifle.

      But the prime lesson she learned was that training and practice were very different from actual field work.

      It was a good thing she was working with pros. Lily Randall was formerly MI-5, and, like Alex, a relatively recent addition. Lily was curled up in a corner seat with a book in one hand and a flute of champagne in the other. Peter Conley was her father’s old partner in the CIA. He was now in the cockpit, conferring with the pilots. Her father had said that Conley could fly anything, so his presence on any flight was reassuring.

      Speaking of her father, Dan Morgan was hunched over the table, working on his own hobby, building a model Duesenberg SJ Special. The pungent smell of the model glue tickled her nostrils. He had been a spy for the CIA before she was born—sort of a private contractor, the kind who gave the Agency maximum plausible deniability. He’d left after some disagreement he didn’t talk about and was recruited into Zeta a few years back.

      That was also around the time Alex found out who he really was—at the tender age of sixteen. Happy birthday to her. Those had been a rough couple of months, but once she had made the decision to shoot a man who had been sent to kill her, her mother, and her father, the transition had gone smoother—at least for her. Her father, already filled with guilt for lying to his family for years—they’d thought he was a classic car dealer—was still not sure he should have brought Alex to Take Your Daughter to Work Day. But once there, there was no turning back.

      Above Diana Bloch was Smith, the man with no title and no other name other than perhaps “Mister.” Both Dan and his daughter had initially thought he was merely a recruiter—like a baseball scout for assassins and spies—but it turned out he actually represented the mysterious Project Aegis, the shadowy power behind Zeta. Alex had read up on it. Aegis was the shield of the Greek Gods—Zeus, Poseidon, Hera, and those guys. Zeta was the sixth letter of the Greek alphabet or the sixth star in a constellation.

      As far as Alex could tell, their Aegis was not, strictly speaking, a government agency. It was more like they had some bigwigs in government—military and intelligence top brass—plus, she guessed, major financial backers in the private sector. Who they were was kept very close to the chest, though. And she was not about to rattle any cages by prying into it.

      “Alex.” Her father had set down his model and was looking at her with