No, not completely brand new. Pieces from previous chapters rearranged and edited for story flow and continuity.
I’ve learned to live with such things. Hope you can, too.
Enjoy.
Rexall Shaul stood quietly at the top of thirty flights of stairs. He made it through antoher day without suspicion. As before, he was the last one to leave the offices.
But he hadn’t left the building yet.
And Thorne was a nasty bitch when fucked with. She didn’t like being out of the loop. Any loop.
Her he could handle. Her and five or six of her people? Not so much.
He received word the NXS had gone active but he didn’t know where. Somewhere along the Atlantic shelf, he suspected but couldn’t be sure.
He hadn’t seen any more ghosts since close to a month ago.
He hadn’t heard any Beatles, either. That cleaning crew quit a few days later.
Connection?
He handed it off for others to handle.
He’d discretely pumped Thorne about any new tech SkyHook had in the works. Nothing. And he knew her tells. She was good, he was better.
He missed the Beatles music and smiled. That cleaning crew really had a thing for the Yellow Submarine album.
Check his watch, relax, breathe.
Two-forty-five seconds later he walked around his Exige, the pilot inspecting his craft before takeoff.
Satisfied, he stopped at the driver’s door, pulled out his phone, tapped a number.
The Exige rumbled to life and the driver’s door opened. Patches of the Exige’s antireflective coating glowed as if several flashlights shone all it, all in close proximity. Shaul turned around.
Nobody.
More tech? Something popped and he looked up.
A crack started in the concrete wall behind the Exige. Shaul watched it crawl like a crazy ant down to the corner of the garage. His jaw ached. He clutched his ears. Tinnitus like coming up too quickly from a dive, or climbing too high without oxygen.
An explosion shook SkyHook HQ’s building down to its foundations, and pieces of Rexall Shaul embedded themselves in the concrete walls at the front of his car.