Diana's Writing Blog

So, I thought up a neat twist to romance novels: replace the female lead with a male. I tried it out using one of Harlequin’s online romance novels, Heavy Metal Honey. This one worked almost too well, since the female character is purposely butch. Oh, well.Anyway, here are the “rules” I’ve set up for myself:

Disclaimer: I don’t own this work of fiction. I’m not trying to pass it off as my own. The original work is Heavy Metal Honey by Doranna Durgin.

Changes:

• Kimmer Reed (f) –> Reed Kimmer (m)
• her/she –> his/him/he (obviously)
• reworded to avoid confusion that same gender pronouns bring (ex.-he asked him to go to his house)
• the character’s physical description, because it just didn’t translate…And was, in part, too butch
• wording and punctuation because the writing is just so very, very bad…

Cheats:

• In Word, Open Find/Replace:
• since I’m switching the first and last name I need to do a little extra work
• first, replace Reed (the last name in the original novel) with Reed1 (for now)
• second, replace Kimmer (the original first name) with Reed (the new first name)
• last, replace Reed1 with Kimmer (our new last name)

Now, on to the fun part…

Intro

Hard-edged Hunter Agency operative Reed Kimmer has always had one goal when it comes to doing his job: nab the bad guys, no matter what. But over the past year, he’s seen a different side to life, thanks to his lover and new partner, Rio Carlsen—an ex-CIA agent with strong ties to his extended family.

On his first assignment with Rio, Reed tries to stay focused on the big picture: catching those responsible for bringing the makings of a dirty bomb in to the U.S. But with Rio by his side, he can’t help but feel a twinge of compassion for a hapless woman caught up in the dangerous game…

Chapter 1

Reed Kimmer peered through his night-vision goggles into a green-hued desert. “Got me some dust,” he said into the miniature mike at the side of his face. “These next gen goggles are sweet.”

In his ear, ex-CIA operative Rio Carlsen responded, “Got dust here, too.”

Rio…they’d met on an assignment, cemented their relationship on an unofficial op, and only a few weeks earlier Rio had accepted the Hunter Agency’s offer of part-time work. And here they were on their first assignment together, scanning the Arizona borderlands for one very specific smuggler.

Also sweet.

“Move in?” Rio suggested.

“Move in,” he confirmed. They wouldn’t spook anyone with their motorbikes, sleek little hydrogen-fueled machines not quite meant for the rugged terrain of the Coronado National Forest. Even here at four thousand feet of elevation, the desert foliage lent itself more to spines and prickles and low-lying brittle brush than actual trees, and the footpaths spit out a powdery dust at the passage of anything on four feet or two wheels.

He and Rio flanked the trail they’d hoped the smuggler would use, with nine hundred meters of combined night vision range between them. More Hunter agents flanked similar trails all along this section of the border–the trails that led to Bisbee, the unofficial drug corridor of the border. And now they had dust.

Reed said, “Could be the jackpot.” He grinned fiercely. They were headed for action and there was nothing better than nabbing a bad guy. Reed and his SIG, Rio and the Colt on which he’d recently settled.

Or to be more precise, Reed and his SIG and every other little weapon he had stashed in his clothing. He also wore a light pack with camelback water supply, restraints and the heavy lined pouch for the smuggler’s contaminated dope–their ultimate goal.

“Might not be our jackpot,” Rio said. More laid back than Reed by far, he was astonishing once he went into action. Which, since the blown operation that had been the end of his CIA field career, wasn’t as often as it had once been. Even now, he still favored his bad side.

“Might be just your average illegal immigrant,” Reed agreed. But he didn’t think so. The average illegal immigrant didn’t have the means to buy a dirt bike. And the dust they saw came from wheels, not feet. This particular runner had been, at least to some extent, financed. Reed eased his own bike forward through the brush, glad for his knee and shin guards–he brushed by a prickly pear without taking damage, and then a cholla.

“What I don’t get,” he murmured to Rio, “is what’s so important about this particular smuggler. Let’s get serious, pretty much the whole agency is in on this one, not to mention the border patrol and friends.”

“Contaminated drugs,” Rio said. “Meaner than your average bear if they get out into distribution. They pulled us in because we could mobilize faster.”

“We’re not immobilized by red tape, you mean.” Reed looked to the side. And discovered Rio within visual range. “I just wish I’d had a chance to talk to the suits. There are things going unsaid. Important things.” Not that it mattered. They’d come to get a drug-dealing smuggler, and they would. When it came to the bad guys, Reed gave no quarter.

Reed gleefully gave no quarter.

And Rio laughed, angling along the other side of the trail from Reed. Rio’s wheat-blond hair was hidden by his helmet but his large, lanky frame made the sleek motorbike seem not quite up to the job. “Why do you think they stayed out of your sights?”

Reed grumbled, but he knew Rio was right. Agency directors tended to avoid Reed, simply because he had a knack for reading the truth behind a situation. Any situation. Anyone.

Anyone except Rio. Reed had had to figure him out from the ground up. At first it had scared Reed. Now he had learned to revel in it. Just as they were learning to reconcile Reed’s alienation from all things family to Rio’s tight-knit, compassionate relatives.

Rio’s voice changed, became all business, “Here we go–”

For the dust had drifted away into the dark night, and the trail widened into a flat area littered with the refuse of previous runners–water bottles and suitcases and belongings that these travelers had once thought they couldn’t do without. And here, a figure stood by a dirt bike, shapeless under layers of ill-fitting clothing, long stringy hair hanging limp, shoulders slumped with fatigue.

Good. The better to snatch you up.

Reed gunned the eerily silent engine and shot forward, balancing as though he rode a living thing, aware of Rio a beat behind him. They circled the figure in an unmistakable message–we found you!–kicking up dust in a ghostly silent display and all the while expecting the smuggler to go for a gun, to jump for the bike.

But none of those things happened, and when Reed stopped his bike, he was greeted with exhausted relief. “Finally!” the smuggler said in Spanish. And in a woman’s voice. She reached inside her baggy long-sleeved shirt to tug at the hem of the oversized T-shirt beneath. “Take this, and give me my papers!”

Rio sent Reed a quick look, as startled as Reed at what they’d cornered Reed lifted one shoulder in a shrug of reply.

“Well?” The woman tucked lank hair behind her ear and mustered up a glare from a young face already careworn. “That’s what you said. I bring this over the border. I don’t get caught. You give me my papers. So take your drugs! I don’t want anything more to do with them!”

Not exactly the gutter-crawling nastiness Reed had expected–just a mule, trading honor for the American Dream. He took a second look, a closer look–he saw the fear and exhaustion and the edges of hope. Reed almost felt sorry for her.

Almost.

“The problem is,” Reed said, also in Spanish, “you got caught.”

“I–” The young woman looked at Reed, looked at Rio. Her hands went to her waist and the fanny bag now visible beneath her clothes. “Madre de Dios!”

“You must be kidding,” Reed told her. “She was a mom. Probably a charter member of Mothers Against Drugs.”

“But they’ll kill me!”

“You don’t look so hot now.” And it was true. The woman didn’t stand quite straight, didn’t show any real energy.

Contaminated drugs.

She’d made her choice.

And then Rio lifted his head in alarm. “Reed–” and the world exploded into light and gunfire. Reed ripped off his goggles and abandoned the bike to hit the dirt. Cholla spines drove through his leather gloves and he blistered the air.

“Rio!”

“I’m good!” he shouted back over the high-pitched engine of the dirt bike kicking in, and the sudden din of several others joining it. Reed blinked furiously, pulling his SIG from its low thigh holster but still unable to see. Sporadic shots kicked up dirt in his general direction, and he hugged the ground, exposing himself just enough to see two new bikes crash into the drug mule’s bike.

Reed realized then that the woman would be killed–she was a liability now–and he took a shot at the dark round blur of a bike tire, wasted another into the dirt just to make sure he had their attention. Return fire kept Reed low as Rio followed his example–another moment of sound and blurry darkness and vague movement, and the motorbikes raced away, two in tandem and a belated third gunning off in the opposite direction with Reed sprinting up to take a chance at it.

He stumbled over something soft but solid and went down, brushing up against another cholla. “Sonuva —!”

“She got away with it,” said Rio–whom Reed had tripped over. “I saw that much. Sort of.”

Reed squinted uselessly into the night. “And we got nothing.”

And now the contaminated drugs were on their way to the dealer pipeline–and Reed had the strong feeling they were about to discover what the stakes had really been.

Chapter 2

The bad guy drug smugglers got away in the dark desert. The drug mule had also escaped, still carrying her payload.

And here Reed sat in a meeting.

He plucked at the prickly pear spines in the tender skin of his inner wrist. Not the big obvious ones, but the almost invisible ones, fine barbed hairs that made their presence more known with each passing moment. Beside him, Rio casually crossed his ankle over his knee, managing to nudge Reed in the process. A pay attention signal.

Fine. This sleek conference room was supposed to impress him. The fact that they’d been helicopter-ed to Tucson was supposed to impress him.

Thing was, he’d seen what he needed to see. Stripped of his weapons—they thought—and escorted into this government building where a handful of men took their time arriving and then only glanced at Reed and Rio, murmuring among themselves until the final participant arrived—Owen Hunter.

And meanwhile he’d already looked the men over—already knew what they had in mind. “We’re going to get scolded,” he said under her breath to Rio, seeing he’d heard by the slight tilt of his head and the amusement in his dark, angled eyes. Everything about Rio came angled, a courtesy of his heritage—strong Danish bones beneath sculpted Japanese-stamped features.

He was no more impressed by this gathering of authority figures than Reed. They’d both rather be out in the field, coordinating with other Hunter agents to track down the missing drugs. They had suspect names; they had favorite distribution channels. They had places to start.

Though the point had been to get the stuff before it hit distribution at all.

“What about that?” Reed asked abruptly, as the suits shuffled their chairs up to the table in the wake of Owen’s arrival. “How the heck did that stuff get so contaminated that it brought you all together?”

Owen, who had greeted Reed with a nod, now cleared his throat—Reed knew it for the request that it was. Don’t cause trouble.

Too late. This little gathering was all about chastising them, about imprinting them with the importance of what they had failed to do and shaming them into bursting out upon the world to finish the job.

Reed wasn’t too keen on being shamed.

He was, however, pretty much into bursting out upon the world and taking down the bad guys.

One of them cleared his throat. A white middle-aged man with a hairstyle that didn’t quite acknowledge his advancing baldness. “About that,” he said, and then stopped, starting again on a different tack. “I’m Thomas Keen, assistant director of the Homeland Security Terrorist Threat Integration Center. This is Gregor Spellman, deputy commissioner of the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol.” This, a stern tea-colored man with silvered hair and a perceptible facelift. The final nod went to a black man who looked annoyed at the whole idea of being here. “And Jaden DuBois, FBI counterterrorism.”

Owen Hunter, indisputable authority of the elite family-owned Hunter Agency, didn’t offer any title at all. But he did nod at Reed, and he nodded back. “Reed Kimmer,” he said, and glanced down at his leather biking duds. “Ass kicker. And Rio Carlsen—”

“His sidekick,” Rio said dryly.

Keen’s lips thinned briefly. Then he leaned forward to tap the closed file folder on the table in front of him. “I’ll get right to the point. We were very disappointed in the results of last night’s stakeout.”

Tell me about it. Reed scratched at the prickly pear spines in his wrist, and said nothing.

“Frankly,” Spellman said, tapping the table with some authority, “I need to be convinced that we have the best possible team before we go further.” He looked at Reed, who returned a predatory smile.

Reed wasn’t all that big. He had his naturally curly chestnut hair cut cap-short in a disheveled style that always hung over his unreadable, guileless eyes. He was also honed by the best training Hunter could provide after they found him—a runaway caught in the middle of an undercover op—and a dossier of successful assignments. Not to mention that brutal childhood.

Owen cleared his throat. “Don’t waste our time by going there, gentlemen. You may consider us a small private agency, but we’ve been playing in the big kids’ sandbox for a good number of years now. I’ll withhold commentary—for now—about the validity of the intel you passed us, and you can assume I’m competent to assess my own agents.”

Ooh. They hadn’t expected that. They looked as though they’d bitten into a communal lemon. But they were also experienced men, good at their jobs; they dropped the subject with a series of tacit glances among themselves, and then Keen cleared his throat again. “Here’s what you need to know. The woman you failed to intercept last night also thought she carried drugs.”

Thought? Reed quit scratching his wrist; beside him, Rio’s foot thumped to the ground.

“What,” Owen said with distinct care, “was she carrying?” And Reed heard his unspoken words. The cold, hard what did you send my agents into? demand.

DuBois looked as though he could hardly bring himself to say the words. “The powdered remains of a spent fuel rod from the Lagura Verde plant.”

“Whoa,” Reed said, implications reeling through him. “That stuff is hot.”

Spellman offered, “As far as we know, the woman had no idea what she carried. She, too, thought it was drugs. She was chosen to smuggle the material so that our main targets could dissociate from her if there was trouble.”

“And you thought this would make no difference to us?” Rio’s voice seemed only to hold calm query, but Reed knew better. A congenial ex-CIA agent on his first Hunter assignment…and he was about to walk away. The CIA had taught Rio some hard lessons about trusting the chain of command.

“We sent you with more than adequate container materials,” Keen pointed out. No wonder that pouch had been so damned heavy. Lead-lined. He shot Reed a look meant to quell any objections. “You were to intercept the woman and obtain her cargo. It wouldn’t have gone down any differently had you known the details.”

“Gentlemen, I’m surprised at you.” Owen stood. His hard, rugged features were tightly set and he, too, was on the verge of walking out.

Not Reed. Reed still wanted the bad guys. And Reed had grown up with worse betrayals. Still, he backed Owen, standing beside him. “Except we could have been ready for them. Do you think real drug dealers would have risked apprehension to grab a package that small? Do you think they would have had the inclination to swoop in on a busted mule for a firefight over the goods? Terrorists and drug deals have different resources; they have different goals. We could have been ready for them — but now they’re on the loose with their radioactive goods. Just how hot did you say that stuff was?”

“Dirty bomb hot,” Rio muttered, and by their reaction Reed saw he was right. “From Lagura Verde? Probably some cobalt-60; definitely some cesium-137. Gamma ray stuff, would have triggered border patrol detectors.”

God. “Then quit playing agency games with us and tell us the whole story,” Reed said, snapping the words out. “We’ve got some bomb boys to catch.”

And Rio, compassionate Rio, looked at the men with a drawn brow and said, “What about the woman?”

DuBois looked Rio in the eye and said, “She was never meant to survive—and unless she gets immediate medical attention, she won’t.”

Chapter 3

Bisbee, Arizona. Copper mining ghost town turned tourist town, shadows shifting in the late afternoon sun, summer heat just beginning to fade.

“Wishful thinking, tourist town,” muttered Reed, shifting on the seat of the stealthy motorcycle he’d so quickly grown fond of. He’d named his She-Ra. “More like a leftover skeleton town.”

“Bet that even makes sense in your head somewhere,” Rio said, and just grinned when Reed gave him a squinty eye.

“I was thinking,” Reed said, “that there’s no way to not stand out in this town. Especially if you’re you. Better keep that motorcycle helmet on.”

“I don’t think it matters if I stand out.” Which he would, with that wheat-blond hair and that height and that sculpted face. “If we spook our mule and her little radioactive package, at least we’ll have a dust trail to follow.”

“Won’t need it,” Reed said, hefting the radiation survey meter in his hand. “If she’s anywhere around…”

They had personal dosimeters, as well, although they’d been reassured that any short-lived contact would expose them to far less than the 15 rems considered to be in the safe zone — especially if they underwent decon.

Reed, however, was not inclined to believe the agency contacts that had deceived them about their mission in the first place. But with the Hunter reputation on the line, and the materials for a dirty bomb somewhere here on U.S. soil, he wasn’t inclined to walk away, either. Not even when the border patrol had agents crawling through Bisbee, the FBI had taken up residence in Hotel La More, and there was sure to be a Homeland Security rep here somewhere.

So they sat outside the totally unexpected Chinese Country Antiques and waited for a certain old blue panel van to cruise by Copper Queen Plaza. It was driven by a known contact for illegal immigrants—and while the missing mule might once have expected a perfect set of papers, now she was on the run.

Reed just hoped she hadn’t dumped the package, leaving them to track it down in the desert before the terrorist boys got their hands on it.

“Poor woman,” Rio said, his voice a strange echo in Reed’s ear, both direct and via the ear-mike. “She had no idea what she was getting into. I wish we could—”

“Don’t count on it,” Reed said. He didn’t need to hear the rest of that sentence to know that Rio wanted to save the woman—and that he’d already sensed Reed was focused on their original target. More than focused on it, given the newly revealed nature of the threat it posed. “She made a bad decision, and she’s probably going to pay for it. We can’t compromise recovery of that package to save her. Or try to save her, to judge by our little better-late-than-never briefing.”

“She was used,” Rio countered. “She didn’t deserve this.”

“No one deserves radiation poisoning.” Reed held his gaze through the narrow open area of their respective full-face helmets. “But there’s nothing we can do about it.”

He looked away, but Reed knew better than to think he’d given up. Not until that woman was dead would he give up.

Didn’t seem like that would take long.

“There,” Rio said, lifting his head—proving he wasn’t as distracted as he seemed. A blue panel van tracked a casual path along Bisbee Ave. Rio pulled out into the light traffic behind it with Reed right on his tail. They headed for the complicated little traffic circle at routes 80 and 92 and then turned east to the—

“No way,” Reed murmured into her mike, drafting along behind Rio.

“Cemetery,” Rio confirmed.

“Trite,” Reed said. “Really trite. And it’s not even a proper cemetery.” Not to his eyes, not without a green lawn and vast spreading crowns of maple trees sheltering the graves. This cemetery had rough caliche ground and clumps of sparse grama grass. The spear-shaped lombardy poplars that formed rows and boundaries only served to create a spook factor. “Ugh. There’s no rest in peace here.”

Rio pulled his silent motorcycle into the tree shadows, leaving the occupants of the van some illusion of privacy as they pulled up to a fresh grave site. Reed sliced in ahead of him and—smaller, more compact on his bike—crept up along the shadows to gain a better vantage point, flipping up his face shield. Not so close that he didn’t need the diminutive binoculars tucked away inside his leather jacket; he reached for them, never taking his eyes off the scene.

“And here comes our mule,” Reed said, holding the binocs up and fine-tuning the focus on the woman, moving up from behind a mausoleum on the same dirt bike she’d had on the trail. Still dressed in baggy clothes, hair still lank and dirty…the harsh afternoon sun revealed the grayish nature of her complexion, the hollows of her eyes and cheeks. “Nope, she doesn’t feel so good. And hot damn!” An old sedan had crept up not far away.

“Hail, hail, the gang’s unexpectedly all here,” Rio noted under his breath.

“Our bomb boys,” Reed said, his voice warm with welcome as the two men emerged from the car. This time he’d seen their dossiers; he knew their faces. Average American melting pot faces. “But how did they find her here—?”

Rio’s voice came with startled realization. “She called them. She’s still trying to get her papers. To make the original trade.”

Reed felt a jolt of respect. “Good for her.” Futile, but still. “And she arranged it so she’d have the van boys for backup, too.”

“With no idea what they’ve gotten into.”

Not likely. This woman didn’t have a clue how far over her head she’d gotten. Still hoping for her happily ever after here in the good old U-S-of-A—and she probably had no idea her illness was caused by the package to which she still clung. How desperate she must be…

“We may not be able to save her, but this meet’s not going down according to our bomb boys’ plans,” Reed growled. He put the binocs away and reached into his jacket for the small handmade war club he kept there. Red oak root, a lumpy ball of scrap metal worn smooth by time and use…he hefted it with familiarity and fondness. “Ready?”

Rio moved up beside him. “The noisemaker,” he said, referring to the motorcycle’s ability to generate noise so those in traffic would be aware of its presence. “I’ll take the front, turn mine on. You and your little friend can be the sneak attack.”

“My favorite,” said Reed, and pulled down his helmet face shield. It wasn’t enough to hide the wicked grin he sent at Rio. “Let’s go get us some bomb boys.”

Chapter 4

Not gonna make it–

Reed realized it as soon as they started their stealth motorcycle run toward the blue panel van—toward the fugitive woman half hidden behind it, and most important, toward the two men who wanted the stolen radioactive powder the woman had been duped into smuggling as drugs. If she truly thought she’d get her visa out of it, she’d been mistaken…but Reed couldn’t blame her for taking this one last chance.

He could blame the bomb boys for being so treacherous, and he did. Even as he silently closed on them. Even as Rio turned on the noisemaker for his own hydrogen-fueled motorcycle and drew their startled attention, the bomb boys went into action. One of them jumped the woman, wrestling with the fanny pack secured at her waist. The other turned a gun on the van, blowing out the back tires in quick succession, not the least taken aback by Rio’s sudden noisy presence. He merely turned the gun on Rio next.

And Reed, leaning over the silent bike, still building speed, veered away from the protection of the tree line and his chosen target—the radioactive package.

Not Rio!

He swooped in at a calculated angle and slammed the war club into the man’s arm—a wicked and unexpected ambush that made him scream in surprise as much as pain. Broken, no doubt.

If it wasn’t, he’d just have to come back for seconds.

But not now. Now, the gun skidded across the gritty desert soil. The two immigrants from inside the van leaped on the hapless bomb boy, and Reed slewed the bike around to take a run at the second target just as he separated from the woman, his gun aimed at her head and the radioactive fanny pack dangling from his hand. Not gonna make it—

Rio blasted between them, knocking the woman to the ground and sending the man staggering back—his gun discharged into the air. But he kept his feet and, without even a glance at his downed partner, bolted the few yards to his sedan, diving in to crank the engine and spit gravel from spinning wheels.

Rio’s noisemaker switched off, leaving them in an eerie silence—nothing left but the crunch of car tires on gravely ground. Reed lined his bike up to go after the sedan, hesitating only when he realized that Rio had stopped, had straightened those long legs to brace the bike upright even as he bent over the woman.

“Rio!” he shouted, loudly enough to make Rio wince as it came in through his earpiece. “The package!”

He froze; he stopped in the act of reaching out. Then he withdrew his hand, his fingers curling into an angry fist. “Stay here,” he told the woman in Spanish. “We know why you’re sick. We’ll come back to help you.”

Reed knew from the look on the woman’s face that it wouldn’t happen; she’d bolt as soon as she could. Probably wouldn’t even wait for the help of the two men in the van who’d come specifically for just that.

Nothing to be done about it. Not with the dirty bomb materials heading out of the cemetery with hasty purpose. “We can’t outrun him on the road,” he told Rio, and kicked the bike forward, steering across the grounds. The sedan hung in his peripheral vision, flashing behind the sepulchral landscaping and toward the exit. Reed leaned forward, riding the bike over the rough spots as though it were a steeplechase jumper.

Coming in behind Reed at a more extreme angle, Rio quickly made up ground; in moments, they rode nearly side by side. The car ignored the road at its driver’s whim, cutting across the looping asphalt, bouncing and lurching over old shocks.

“Get ahead of him,” Reed said into the mike, breathless as the bike jarred on uneven ground. “See if he wants to play chicken at the cemetery gate.”

Rio sounded so close, right in his ear. “My pistol and I say he doesn’t.”

“Works for me,” Reed said, and pushed the bike to the limit, splitting off from Rio to pull up alongside the sedan, pacing it a moment—and then pulling ahead, with the cemetery entrance coming up fast.

The car slowed, and Reed gave it a disbelieving double take. The man within it didn’t look tense, or concerned, or even annoyed. Behind the glare on the windshield he—

Dammit, he was grinning.

He knows something. Reed didn’t doubt the instant assessment; he didn’t doubt that it would be bad for them. And when he glanced ahead to the gate, still speeding alongside the car, Rio on the other side and just as intent as Reed —

Just a glint. Nothing more. And they were almost upon the gates with the sedan dropping well back, to all appearances giving up, when he realized.

“Wire!” he cried. Wire, set to stop the woman in case she ran with their goods again. “Go down, go down!”

Rio’s surprised grunt sounded in Reed’s ear just before he laid his own bike down, leathers skidding over rocky ground, body tumbling away. The car shot past, once again in full acceleration—Reed heard the twang of wire breaking overhead and hunched in anticipation of the whiplash. The end of the wire snapped across the back of his helmet and he waited no longer than that before scrambling to his feet, not waiting to see if everything still worked.

“Rio!”

Reed yanked his helmet off, losing the ear bud in the process—and then had to dive out of the way when the blue van came bearing down on him, chasing on the heels of the woman’s dirt bike. He landed hard beside Rio, sparing the speeding procession little more than a glare as he pulled himself to his hands and knees—a little more slowly this time.

And by then Rio was rolling over, getting to his knees; tugging on his own helmet. “Damn!”

Reed knew by the way Rio held himself that he’d wrenched his back. And he knew by the tone of Rio’s voice that he wasn’t thinking about his back at all.

They’d lost the radioactive powder. They’d lost the woman. They’d lost the men who could lead them to her again.

“Damn,” Reed echoed. And then, “I think I broke one of them.”

“Not in so many pieces he can’t talk?”

“Not yet,” he replied. “Let’s go see how long he can keep it that way.”