Drone Threat

4

Breaking glass.

Pearce awoke, startled out of a fitful sleep. Head pounding. He glanced at his pistol in its holster on the nightstand, but something stopped him from snatching it up.

Bacon.

He smelled bacon.

His stomach was sour, but the bacon smelled like maple and sweet pork fat. His mouth watered. But that meant someone was cooking downstairs.

More glass broke.

He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and pulled on a pair of jeans that lay crumpled on the floor. He sniffed the wrinkled T-shirt. Not good. He tossed it aside.

The white marble tiles felt cool under his bare feet as he made his way unsteadily toward the staircase. The air in the stairwell was heavy with the smell of fried potatoes now, too. Maybe he really had died and gone to heaven.

But, judging from the way his head throbbed, it could’ve been the other place.

He carefully picked his way down the floating white oak stair treads until he reached the kitchen. The whole downstairs was a huge open-concept floor plan of glass and marble. Ultramodern and elegant, just like the woman in the kitchen.

“Morning,” Pearce said.

Margaret Myers looked up from the frying pan full of potatoes. Another was larded with scrambled eggs. She wore form-fitting athletic wear that complemented her healthy physique. The former president only pushed herself harder in the gym these days out of spite for her adult-onset type 1 diabetes. Her brand-new wireless iLet Bionic Pancreas receiver was strapped to her waist and hidden beneath her shirt.

“Good morning. I’m sorry if I woke you.”

Pearce glanced over at the stainless-steel garbage can brimming with beer bottles, its electronic lid jammed open.

“Sorry about the mess. I thought you weren’t coming back until tonight.”

“Caught an early flight. Thought we could spend the day together instead of me hanging around in a stuffy old hotel. How are you feeling, by the way?”

“Better than when you left.” He stepped closer to her.

She pushed the pan of eggs off the burner and wrapped her arms around his neck. “I was so worried.”

He pulled her in closer but his mind was somewhere else. “I know.”

She leaned back. Cupped his face in her hands. “You need to shave.” She sniffed, grinning. “Maybe a shower, too. Breakfast will be ready in ten.”

“Tea?”

“Green as grass and steeping in the pot.” She gently touched the nasty bruise on the side of his head. “You sure you’re all right?”

“Shower and some caffeine and I’ll be right as rain.”

“Did you get to the doctor?”

Pearce shrugged his wide shoulders. “I’m fine.”

Myers caught herself admiring his bare, broad chest and powerful arms. He’d spent more than half of his life throwing punches — or worse. A myriad of minor scars bore witness on his skin to his years in combat.

“Call him today, please.”

His face darkened. He let her go. “Will do, Madam President.”

Meyers turned around and picked up an already cooked plate of bacon, his favorite. “The bacon is a strictly volunteer mission, should you decide to accept it.”

He stared at the bacon and then her fake-scowly face. She deserves better, he thought. A slight smile stole across his face. She knew how to make him laugh at himself. He picked up a piece of bacon in his fingers and crammed the whole thing into his mouth, caveman style.

“Verdict?”

“Perfecto,” he said, still chewing.

He snatched another piece and plopped it into mouth. “Back in a flash.” He dashed back upstairs, his mood lightened.

She watched him jog up the stair treads, then pulled the eggs back onto the burner to finish them up, still worried.

A quick glance in the bathroom mirror told the story. He examined his stubbled face closely. His exhausted blue eyes were shadowed by dark circles. The place above his ear where the pistol had struck him was swollen and still hurt like hell. His head hadn’t stopped pounding since the Turk hit him, but two days of heavy drinking didn’t help, either. Maybe she was right. Maybe it was time to see a doctor.

He didn’t have any of his things at her place, but she had been thoughtful enough to buy a couple of disposables and some shave gel and leave them in the all-glass shower enclosure. She was old-fashioned in a funny way. They were in love, for sure, but he hadn’t asked her to marry him and she wasn’t going to shack up. “Not my style,” she’d said with a smile. Not his, either, actually. They were serious but taking it slowly. They’d been friends for a few years now but only recently had become lovers.

Pearce’s blood pressure suddenly dropped.

When, exactly, was their anniversary? Sometime soon, he knew. Not the kind of thing he should be forgetting, but it had been more than a decade since he had to worry about such things, and if he missed it, well, Margaret wasn’t the kind of woman to lord it over him. But then again, she was a woman, and something told him it might be a good idea to figure that out before she called him on it.

The plan had been to land back in D.C. after the mission and lay over for a day in order to give her a status report and reconnect, then fly on to California to check up on Tariq and his family while Margaret attended to business in Denver.

But Tariq was dead. No reason to head out.

He decided to stay in town at his hotel, but Myers saw his heavy fatigue and insisted he crash at her place for a few days and recover. What she really wanted to do, he knew, was take care of him, at least that first night.

He took her up on the offer. His company suite was sterile and he wasn’t big on room service.

It was the call to Tariq’s wife the next day when Myers was out of town that finally set Pearce off on a bender. He hadn’t boozed like that in years. At least he had the sense to do it here and not get hammered in some crosstown bar like he used to do in the old days.

He flipped on the shower and let it run good and cold. Nothing like a blast of freezing water to sober a guy up and get the blood flowing. A small mirror suction-cupped to the slate tiles helped him slather on the gel and shave pretty close with the triple blade without cutting any parts off, and a quick splash of shampoo and liquid soap rinsed off the mess of the last few days. He wished he could rinse out the image of Tariq’s truck lighting up the night or the ghost-white images of the women getting gunned down on that mountain slope so far away now.

He pushed open the glass door and toweled off briskly, pushing all of the negative thoughts out of his mind and crowding it with images of the breakfast he was about to consume. He learned on the long, hard marches in the mountains of Afghanistan that the only way he could make a steep climb was to focus on just the next step. The cold shower even managed to push away the queasy feeling in his gut. He dragged a brush through his longish hair, then pulled open the one dresser drawer that held a few of the things he’d left here before and pulled them on: boxers, Levis, and a Denver Broncos T-shirt Margaret bought him to remind him where his new football loyalties belonged. The thought made him smile a little.

He was a lucky bastard, for sure.