Page 4 of The Lazarus Protocol

“Of course.” He returned her professional smile.

“However, we’ll be ready for you by the time you get through to the other side.” She clasped her hands in front of her.

“I appreciate your time, Doctor.”

“See you on the other side, as they say!” She waved him to the front desk and stayed on the periphery the entire time. He was divested of his belongings, sent through the scanner—a hallway only big enough for one person to pass through, with glass on the sides that reflect his image back to him on all axes—and finally given a visitor pass, but was told to remain with his escort at all times.

“Understood.” Noah wanted to ask if they meant the doctor should accompany him to the bathroom as well, but figured his humor might backfire with these guys.

“This way, Mr. Rourke.” Dr. Peraya led him to an elevator, where she hit the button for basement level two.

“How is our…guest doing these days? Settling in okay?”

“Wonderfully. Our conversations have proven fruitful.”

“Really.” Noah hadn’t figured Kessler would say much of anything, but then again this was the CIA. He probably didn’t want to ask precisely how they had gathered intelligence from a man Noah and his team had detained in Miami months ago.

“I’m good at my job.” The doors slid open, and they stepped out into a long empty hallway lined with closed doors that had numbers etched into them. At the end, stopping in front of a set of double doors in some kind of dark wood—at least the façade—Peraya slid a key card across a scanner beside the door. A lock clicked, and she pushed the door open.

Noise from inside washed out of a room, which had been set up like a NASA control room. Tiered rows of computers all faced a huge LED wall. Smaller screens filled the walls on either side, and about fifteen people were sitting or standing. Most wore headsets.

Noah gave the screens a quick scan.

“See anything you recognize?” Peraya asked.

“Ah.” Noah cleared his throat.

“Do you?”

Noah pointed at the man pictured on a screen to the left. “His name is Richard Leesbury. When I knew him, he was an SAS soldier working with a European multinational unit outside Djibouti.”

One of the analysts close enough to have heard him unplugged her headset, ran over to a guy at the end of the tier, and leaned in to tell him something. The room started to buzz.

Peraya winked at him. “And you haven’t even been here five minutes.” She continued walking, leading him to a glass-walled room where the division chief sat behind a desk.

“So you’re interested in Leesbury?”

“We’re interested enough we’d like to find out who he is currently—and who he has been. Which you’ve just aided us with.” She shut the door behind him and touched a button on a panel beside the door. “Chief Kraus, this is Noah Rourke.”

The chief leaned back, making his chair creak, and laced his hands over the strained buttons at his middle. “Rourke. You’re the Navy SEAL?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll admit, delivering Nathan Kessler to us gives you some credence. We don’t take kindly to our own going freelance through embezzling US funds and making millions smuggling for cartels and the like.”

Sounded like a Wikipedia bio. And all of that information was the least of what Noah had discovered about Kessler.

“He came after my brother.”

“And so your team scooped him up.” Kraus gestured toward a chair in front of the desk, and Dr. Peraya settled in. “Now you want contracts.”

Noah wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of shifting his weight like he was nervous, but the itch in his spine almost made him give in. He eased into the available seat. Carefully avoiding leaning his back against the chair, but not so carefully they’d know something was wrong with his spine. No one knew. Not even Caleb.

“I know about Division Zero, Chief.” Noah paused. “I know the last two teams you’ve contracted with have proven less than reputable. My team has the utmost integrity. I vouch for every single one of them.”

“We can do our own assessment,” Kraus said. “Give us their names, and we’ll run our own backgrounds.”

Noah shook his head. “Nathan Kessler was surrendered to you in good faith.”