Read Online Saturn Run by John Sandford, Ctein - Free Book Online Page B

said, putting a hand on his sleeve.
    The woman who was coming up said, “Bob, stop twinkling at her.” The woman held up her phone and flashed her ID. “Dr. Johansson, my name is Marla Clark. Pleased to meet you. You have a meeting.”
    “A meeting? Right now?”
    “Not exactly right now, but first thing in the morning, in Washington, D.C.,” Clark said. “By the way, we assume you’ll need a moving company, though you don’t really have all that much. We’ve contacted two that have been approved by Homeland Security.”
    Becca: “A moving company?”
And how did they know she didn’t have that much?
    The next morning, Becca was fifteen hundred kilometers from home. She’d been snatched, politely but firmly, and shoved into a private hopjet that had delivered her to the D.C. airport barely an hour later, a little after one o’clock in the morning, EST. Her “entourage”—she decided to think of them that way, instead of as her “handlers” or, worse, “captors”—had been pleasant, solicitous of her comfort, and entirely uninformative.
    They’d hustled her off to a terrific hotel, where she was deposited in a luxury suite that contained a fresh change of clothes, which were her size and even her style, which struck her as efficient, considerate, and creepy. Clark had come with her. She recommended a hot shower before going to bed. “I’ve put in a seven o’clock wake-up call for you, so you won’t be late for the meeting.”
    “What meeting?”
    “The meeting,” Clark said with a shrug.
    Nine hours after getting on the train in Northfield, Minnesota, she was sitting in a White House waiting room decorated with paintings of former First Ladies. Clark was no longer with her, but another woman, this one named Marsden, from the same tribe as Clark, handed her a cup of coffee and said, “Relax.”
    “If you were in my shoes, would you relax?” Becca asked.
    “I don’t know exactly what shoes you’re wearing,” Marsden said. A navy officer was walking across the room toward them, and she added, in a low voice, “But if this guy is coming for you, my answer would be, ‘No.’”
    The officer was coming for her. His name was Rob, he was a lieutenant commander, and he shook her hand pleasantly and said, “You’re up, you can bring your coffee,” and to the escort, “I’m told she’ll be half an hour or so.”
    Santeros was on her feet, talking to a fat man, when Becca was ushered into the Oval Office. Santeros smiled at her and waded across the carpet, extending a hand.
    “Dr. Johansson, Rebecca,” she said. “Good of you to come, on such short notice.”
    “Happy to,” Becca said, biting back a less polite reply:
Did I have a choice?
    Santeros gestured to the fat man. “This is Jacob Vintner, my science adviser. We’re going to have to make this quick. I brought you here because the United States needs your skills. We want you to design the power management system for a twenty-thermal-gigawatt reactor, and we need it rather quickly. Might you be interested? We want you badly enough to have rushed you here like this, but you’re free to decline. We do have other candidates.”
    “I’m currently committed to a project with Minnesota Power—”
    “We’ve already talked to your employer and they’re happy to give you an indefinite leave of absence, with no loss of position or seniority, in the national interest,” Santeros said.
    “What kind of power plant is this?”
    Vintner said, “We can’t really go into the details because of national security. All I can—”
    “Wait a minute,” Becca said, jabbing her finger at Vintner. “This has got to be for the Mars mission! You need a big honkin’ reactor, I bet. Hot damn. Okay, I’m in, on one condition.”
    Santeros asked Vintner, “Why do all these people have conditions?”
    Vintner said, “Because they’re important enough to have them, I guess.”
    Santeros was amused. She turned back to Becca and asked, “What’s