“It the best tech on the market,” Bug said. “And you broke the last two, Luanne.”

“They were also distracting.”

“Do you see the care in my eye?”

Luanne looked athletic and strong, and the way she held herself projected a dispassionate calm. Not serenity, just a quiet, competent alertness devoid of any emotional connection. I’d met her type before. She was a professional private soldier. You would look into her eyes and see nothing, and then she’d shoot you in the face, and as the bullets were flying, you’d still see nothing. It didn’t reach her, maybe because of her experience or perhaps it just never did. In everyday life, she’d look completely normal. You’d see her at the supermarket and never imagine that she could kill people for a living.

Behind her men and women in identical garb were checking their weapons.

“What kind of a vest is that?” I asked. It looked segmented under the grey fabric, as if made of small hexagonal sections. Flexible too. The hexagons shifted slightly as Luanne moved.

“That’s a Scorpion V,” Bug said. “Latest, greatest, classified, and civilians aren’t supposed to have them, so don’t see it or we’ll have to gouge your eyes out.”

“No heroics, Luanne,” Rogan said off camera. “I just want to know what they’re trading. Get in, stay alive, get out.”

“With all due respect, Major, this isn’t my first dance,” Luanne said.

“Major worries,” a younger man with a freckled face said as he rested a firearm on his lap. Heckler & Koch MP7.

I glanced at Rogan. His face was blank.

“Major always worries,” an older man said.

“It’s our job to prove that he’s worried for nothing, Watkins.” Luanne turned and the view swung to a group of private soldiers. “Time to earn the big money.”

The screen split into four, each feed attached to a different soldier.

“Fast forward,” Rogan said quietly.

The recording sped up. They divided into four huge black Tahoes, picked up the lawyers—putting them only into two Tahoes—and took separate routes to the hotel. The video slowed to normal speed. We watched them get out and escort two men and two women, all in Scorpion bulletproof vests, into the hotel, where another private soldier met them at the door. Rogan’s team must’ve scouted the location beforehand and done a walk-through.

As the lawyers were hustled into the hotel, the recording caught the taller woman’s face.

Cornelius took a sharp breath.

She was about twenty-eight or so, Asian, possibly of Korean descent, with a round face and large smart eyes that looked just like her daughter’s. Worry twisted her face. She seemed so alive there on the recording.

I was watching a dead person walking.

The lawyers and the private security people moved into the building. Four went ahead. The group directly responsible for the lawyers’ lives followed, clearing the hotel’s corridors in the “hallway” formation: one guard in front, the other slightly behind to his left, then the lawyers, then the third guard on the right and the final guard almost exactly behind the first. From above it would look like a rectangle set on a corner. Four remaining guards brought up the rear. They moved fast, took the stairs instead of the elevator, and arrived at a suite on the second floor. Another private solider, a woman this time, stood at the doors of the suite.

“Any security on the outside?” I asked.

“There are two people,” Rogan said. “One on the building northwest, covering the entrance, and one on the museum’s roof to the north, covering the two windows.”

Thorough. He’d covered the exit and the windows, so if anyone or anything that presented a threat tried to enter the hotel, his people would know instantly and neutralize it. I never took any private security jobs, but back when my father was alive, he and my mother had insisted I take a course on it at a training facility in Virginia. From what I could remember, Rogan’s people had crossed every t and dotted every i.

The lawyers and their bodyguards filed into a spacious suite. A dark coffee table—some sort of wood, nearly black and sealed to a mirror shine—stood in the middle of the room, flanked by a dark grey sectional sofa and two chairs, one upholstered in royal purple and the other in zebra print. The lawyers sat down. Rogan’s people spread through the room, one by the dark red draperies, one by the door to the bathroom, and the rest by the walls, forming a killing field in front of the door. Four people stayed with the lawyers.

The four feeds on the split screen showed every angle of the room. On two of them Luanne’s face was clearly visible and she was frowning. She was looking at the window. What did she see . . . ?

Condensation. A thin layer of fog tinted the glass.

“Bug,” Luanne said quietly. “What’s the humidity in here?”

“Ninety-two percent.”

“What’s the humidity by Cole on the roof?”

“Seventy-eight.”

“Abort.” Luanne bit off the word. “Move them out now.”

The room iced over. In a blink a layer of ice sheathed the walls, the weapons, and the furniture.

“I’m reading a temperature drop!” Bug’s voice called.

Then everything happened all at once.

A short African American soldier standing by the lawyers clenched her fists and jerked them down, as if ripping something. A low sound rolled through the room and the air around her turned pale blue. An aegis, a human bulletproof shield.

Three other soldiers by the aegis jerked the lawyers to their feet and shoved them into the blue sphere.

At the door another soldier grabbed the handle, yanked his hand free as if burned, and kicked the door. It held. The layer of ice on it kept growing, at least an inch thick.

“Make a hole!” Luanne barked.

The two men by the door snapped into mage poses, arms slightly raised, palms up as if holding an invisible basketball in each hand. Crimson lightning flared around their fingertips. Enerkinetics, commanding the raw magic energy. The wall was about to explode.

Suddenly Luanne’s face turned blank. She snapped her MP7 up and shot both enerkinetics in the head.

Across the room a middle-aged African American man spun toward her and fired. The bullets smashed into Luanne, jerking her back with each hit. The view of her camera trembled as each projectile ripped into her body. A small explosion flared before her camera, the bloody mist flying. A bullet hit Luanne in the skull.

She turned, oblivious to the stream of bullets. She should’ve been dead. She had to be dead, but her body rotated, swung the MP7 around, and unloaded the full blast into the aegis’s blue sphere. The bullets slid through, making ripples in the barrier and clattering harmlessly to the floor. The middle-aged man who’d shot her turned as well, the same slack expression on his face, and pumped a stream of bullets into the shield.

What the hell was going on?

I looked into Rogan’s eyes. I had expected anger and pain, but what I saw in their depths made me want to cringe. They were full of darkness, as if a layer of ice had formed over bottomless black water. There were terrible things in that water.

“Give me an exit!” the aegis screamed.

The soldiers near her fired back. Luanne careened and crashed down, her head bouncing off the floor, her camera still recording.

The two soldiers, one by the door and the other by the window, spun in unison and sprayed the room, cutting down the lawyers’ guards like they were straw, then turned their weapons onto the shield. The aegis screamed as multiple impacts ripped into her sphere. Blood poured from her nose. Her hands shook with effort.

The faces of the lawyers behind the shield were so frightened—contorted with panic and helpless.

The first bullet broke through and hit the young blond lawyer in the throat. Blood landed on Nari Harrison’s cheek and I saw the precise moment when she realized she wouldn’t be going home.

The blue sphere vanished as the shield failed. The aegis dropped to her knees, blood pouring from her mouth. Bullets ripped into the unarmed attorneys. For a few moments they jerked, suspended by the stream of armor-piercing rounds tearing into their flesh, and then collapsed. Nari landed four feet away from the camera. Her wide-open dead eyes stared at us through the screen.