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being a Courier, the gunny explained, was to keep a low profile. A single panel truck, a single man, playing it cool, wouldn’t draw attention the way a clearly armored vehicle and escort convoy would.
    Whatever
, the Courier thought.
    There were eight deliveries, all around Colorado, Utah, Idaho, and Nevada. Pick this up here, drop it there. Then the next, and the next.
    He’d gotten briefed, along with other new Support personnel, by some Nightstalker people with weird names: Moms and Nada and Doc. Moms told them to be very, very careful, and Nada told them to read the Protocols very, very carefully and then follow them exactly to the letter, and if they had any questions, any at all, there were no dumb questions, to call on the sat phone they were each issued.
    The Courier knew from high school there were dumb questions. Those were the nerds who never got laid.
    At least in high school. He wasn’t experienced enough to know the inverse of that formula as one got older.
    The last guy, Doc, had some really scary shit to say about bugs and viruses and nukes and stuff that would kill you, which the Courier wasn’t sure how to take. According to this Doc guy, looking the wrong way could cause you to get some disease and die a horrible death.
    At first he’d felt really cool, driving the van with all the guns and high-tech gear. After the seventh time, though—loading a sealed locker full of who the hell knew what in the vault in the back, driving 387 miles from some computer tech place in Boise, ID, to Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah (he knew the exact mileage because one of the Protocols required him to fill out all these little boxes on the electronic invoices and two of them were start and end mileage of each run, as if he were going to detour to Malibu or some such; plus he had no doubt the van GPS and the damn thing plugged into his chest were also recording everything)—it began to get boring.
    He hauled ass for invoice eight, looking forward to the promised time off, with pay, after delivery. Vegas. That’s what was on his mind as he tore through the Rockies on I-70 at ninety miles an hour. Six hundred and twenty-four miles to Boulder. Protocol said don’t speed, but they’d given him a badge and a very official-looking card with his photo on it, that the gunny had told him would make any local law enforcement fuck off, because he was working for the FEDERAL government, even though technically he was only contracted. That technicality made a difference, a big one. Federal employees took something called the Oath of Office, the very first law enacted by the very first Congress, so those Founding Fathers had felt it was important. Courier got ten large each month instead and signed a contract. Either way, he got into Boulder a night early.
    And partied.
    He was sure there was something in Chapter 40 of the Protocol (it was pretty damn thick) about not partying the night before a drive, but he’d read what he needed to and skimmed the rest. He’d make the pickup the next day right on time.
    And he did. Wearing fresh khakis, his Glock nestled inside his leather jacket, he checked the file once more before he entered the Biochemistry Building at the University of Colorado. He recognized the Point of Contact in the courtyard outside the building from the picture in the file and she looked better in person than the drab photo that must have been taken for her student ID. He walked over.
    “Hey.”
    That drew him the withering smile pretty girls reserve for “not now, I’m busy” until he pulled out his badge and ID.
    “I hear you’ve got something for me, Ms. Debbie Simmons.”
    Her eyes grew wide. She looked around as if there were spies hiding behind the bushes. Which the Courier found humorous because they weren’t in the bushes, but rather hundreds of miles overhead with a clear line of sight. His first platoon sergeant in the Marines had told him no one ever looked up. He had been referring to snipers in