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them: Kat’s main analyst, Jason Carter.
    The young man sat at a station, typing furiously. He was dressed in black jeans and a Boston Red Sox T-shirt. His flax-blond hair was cowlicked and disheveled, like he’d just woken up, but more likely, the exhaustion on his face was from not having slept at all. Though only twenty-two, the kid was whip-smart, especially when it came to anything with a circuit board. According to Painter, Jason had been kicked out of the Navy for breaking into DoD servers with nothing more than a BlackBerry and a jury-rigged iPad. After that incident, Kat had personally recruited him, taking him under her wing.
    Kat spoke to Gray. “A little over an hour ago, a military research base out in California had some sort of disaster. There was a frantic mayday.”
    She touched Jason’s shoulder.
    He tapped a key. An audio feed immediately began to play. It was a woman’s voice, stiff but plainly winded, struggling to maintain composure.
    “ This is sierra, victor, whiskey. There’s been a breach. Fail-safe initiated. No matter the outcome: Kill us . . . kill us all. ”
    Kat continued. “We’ve identified the caller as Dr. Irene McIntire, chief systems analyst for the base.”
    On the computer screen, an image of a middle-aged woman in a lab coat appeared, smiling for the camera. Her eyes twinkled with excitement. Gray tried to balance this image with the frantic voice he’d just heard.
    “What were they working on?” Gray asked.
    Jason interrupted, cupping a Bluetooth headphone more firmly to his ear. “They’ve arrived. Coming down now.”
    “That’s what I’m hoping to find out,” Kat said, answering Gray’s question. “All I know is the research station must have been dealing with something hazardous, something that required drastic action to stop. Satellite imagery showed an explosion. Lots of smoke.”
    Jason brought up those photos, too, flipping through them rapidly. Though the images were gray-scaled and grainy, Gray could easily make out the flash of fire, the billow of an oily black cloud.
    “We still can’t see through the smoke to evaluate the current status of the base,” Kat said. “But there’s been no further communication.”
    “They must have razed the place.”
    “It would seem that way at the moment. Painter is looking into matters out west, tapping into local resources. He’s tasked me with discovering more details about the base’s operations.” Kat turned to Gray, her eyes worried. “I already learned that the site is managed by DARPA.”
    He failed to hide his surprise. DARPA was the defense department that oversaw Sigma’s operations—though knowledge of this group’s existence was restricted to only a few key people, those with the highest security clearance. But he shouldn’t have been so shocked to learn this base was tied to DARPA. The military’s research and development agency had hundreds of facilities spread through several divisions and across the breadth of the country. Most of them operated with minimal oversight, running independently, tapping into the most unique minds and talents out there. The details of each operation were on a need-to-know basis.
    And apparently we didn’t need to know about this .
    “There were over thirty men and women at that base when things went sour,” Kat said. From the stiffness in her shoulders and hard set to her lips, she was furious.
    Gray couldn’t blame her as he stared at the monitor and the billowing black cloud. “Do you know which specific DARPA division was running that place?”
    “BTO. The Biological Technologies Office. It’s a relatively new division. Their mission statement is to explore the intersection between biology and the physical sciences.”
    Gray frowned. His own expertise for Sigma straddled that same line. It was dangerous territory, encompassing everything from genetic engineering to synthetic biology.
    Voices echoed down the hall, coming from the direction of the