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“I don’t
suppose you’ve been trained for field work. Can you shoot?”
    Before she could answer, Klein spoke up.
“Don’t worry about that, Jack. I’ll take care of her. You guys just need to get
us through the front door.”
    A dozen different retorts flew through
Sigler’s mind, but this time he checked himself. He stood up. “I’m going to
need that imagery from the drone as soon as you can get it to me. The more I
know about the site…” He let the thought trail off; there was nothing to be
gained by stating the obvious. He motioned for Parker to follow, but to his
surprise, his friend waved him off.
    “Actually Jack, I’d like to have a word with
Miss Therion.”
    For a moment, Sigler wasn’t sure he’d heard
correctly, but before he could inquire, Pettit snapped: “Parker!”
    Usually, a stern look from Cipher element’s
top NCO would be enough to put any member of the team in their place—even
Sigler, who, as the platoon leader, outranked him. Pettit rarely had to
chastise with words, but when he did, everyone sought cover.
    Parker, however, didn’t even blink. He
pointed at the computer screen and kept his gaze on Sasha. “I know what that
is. So, either you can talk to me, one-on-one, and tell me what’s really going
on here, or I can walk out that door and tell the rest of the team that we’re
about to go put it on the line over an undecipherable medieval manuscript
that’s probably a hoax.”
    Sigler gaped at him. So did nearly everyone
else. Klein swore softly under his breath.
    Sasha shook her head. “It’s not a hoax. That
much, I’m sure of. And this could be the closest anyone has come to cracking
the code in over four hundred years.”
    “What the fuck?” growled Pettit, turning to
Rainer in disbelief. “Medieval
manuscript? Is this shit for real?”
    Rainer didn’t respond to his sergeant major.
Instead, he stood abruptly and motioned toward the door. “Gentleman, let’s give
Danno and Miss Therion a chance to get acquainted.”

 
     
    THREE
     
    Rainer’s abrupt declaration caught even Parker by surprise, and he
didn’t hide his elation very well; he grinned so hard, his jaws started to
hurt. As the others filed out of the TOC, Sasha just stared at him in what he
guessed was complete disbelief.
    Yeah,
that’s right , he thought,
nodding his head ever so slightly. The
black man was the smartest guy in the room. Bet you didn’t see that coming,
princess.
    “So,” she said, when
they were alone. “You know about the manuscript?”
    He shrugged, but his irrepressible grin
foiled his attempt to appear nonchalant. “Maybe. Or maybe
I was just trying to find an excuse to be alone with you.”
    She blinked, uncomprehendingly. “Why would
you do that?”
    That dulled Parker’s smile just a little.
This girl wasn’t pretending to be aloof as a way of fending off unwanted
advances; this was who she really was. “I’ve dabbled a little in number theory
and mathematical codes. I like to do brain teasers. Lateral thinking puzzles,
cryptograms…stuff like that. I must have come across an article about it
somewhere and it stuck in my head.
    “Probably when I was at Yale,” he added with
a wink.
    That seemed to penetrate her shield of
inscrutability. “You went to Yale?”
    His only answer was an airy wave. He hadn’t
attended Yale as a student, but he had grown up in New Haven, where his father
still worked at the University as a janitor. He’d spent a lot of time on the
campus while growing up, and he had, for a short while, dared to dream of
attending the Ivy League institution. It was a dream that could not withstand
the harsh realities of socio-economics and race politics.
    His higher education—still a work in progress—had come through distance learning programs, but Sasha
didn’t need to know that.
    “The article called it ‘the most mysterious
manuscript in the world.’ An entire book written in a language that no one has
ever seen before, and which no