Read Online Darkness at Dawn by Elizabeth Jennings - Free Book Online

Wasting food was something she abhorred.
    While eating, he’d been leafing through the folder Uncle Edwin had given him, his eyes tracking back and forth across the page while he stuffed his face. She was a fast reader, but this beat anything she could do. Who knew if he was retaining everything?
    He had to. Their lives depended on it.
    Nobody knew more than she did about being undercover. You had to live, breathe, eat and sleep your cover story. One slip and you could be dead. Or worse.
    Whatever they were walking into at the Palace, a wrong word, forgetting something about his backstory, could be disastrous.
    All through her childhood she’d been painfully aware of the fact that letting slip the wrong information could cost her parents their lives. And hers.
    Lucy would be fine on this mission. No one in Nhala had ever known her parents were CIA. They’d just been two anthropologists whose hobby was target shooting with a young daughter and who happened to be in Nhala during an attempted coup and reacted very bravely. Lucy would have the great privilege of just being herself.
    Captain Shafer—Mike—was the one who was going to be under a lot of pressure. Not only for impersonating a part but also for being responsible for sneaking outside the Palace in the Himalayas in winter to find a flash drive in a million square miles of snow.
    He turned the last page as he finished up the second peach. Squaring his shoulders, he stood up. “So. Forth into the fray.” He winked at her. “Honey.”

F OUR
     
    THE PALACE
CHILONGO, NHALA
     
    GENERAL Dan Changa studied the large military relief map spread out on the immense, intricately carved desk in his study. A map he knew so well.
    How badly land was distributed in this part of the world. His own people had been apportioned a beautiful but tiny slice of the subcontinent, with very little arable land in the valleys.
    He traced his finger along the familiar borders, tracing Nhala’s outline. Back and forth, to the north the great upswelling of the mountains that had defined Nhala’s existence since the dawn of time, then over the small scimitar that was the inhabitable land and down, across the border to the south, down to Bihar and Gudjarat, the great Gangetic Plains. Millions of miles of arable land, wasted by the Indians, who had no taste or talent for agriculture.
    His forefinger tracked along the black line. The border. But was it? Really?
    What was a border except an artificial line on paper? Borders were changed every day. Throughout human history the stronger and the smarter went over borders and prevailed.
    Men who had the winds of destiny at their backs prevailed, like him. General Changa didn’t believe in destiny or fate. He was a soldier, not a priest. But events were definitely converging.
    His men had noticed. There was a new deference, fear actually, as the king’s disease progressed. King Jomo had wanted to change the nature of the country, which had always had a strong leader. He wanted to be their leader, but he also wanted to “democratize.”
    The fool.
    Nobody cared about democracy. They cared about full bellies and a sense of strength at the top, something Jomo had never provided. The Boy King, who stopped the Chinese, together with two Americans who’d been studying Nhalan culture and who knew how to handle guns.
    Or so everyone believed.
    Nonsense. It had been Changa who’d saved his country, the Americans had only bought him time. Changa who’d called in his faithful Sharmas, his warrior tribe, the way the Gurkhas had been warriors for the English empire.
    The tribe that would occupy the lowlands and turn Nhala into a world power.
    He pulled open a drawer, which had a carved dragon’s head as its pull. He carefully closed his fist over a tiny transparent cylinder as long as the first knuckle of his little finger and laid it gently on his desk.
    Such a small object to hold so much death. Truly almost magical.
    General Changa was not