Temple

Van Lewen looked at Race honestly. 'Professor Race, I'm just a grunt, okay. I was told that this was to be a protective assignment. I was told to protect you. So that's what I'm doing. If Colonel Nash lied to you, I'm sorry but I didn't know.'

Race clenched his teeth. He was pissed as hell. He was furious at having been tricked into coming along on the mission.

In addition to being angry, however, he was also determined to know everything, for if Nash wasn't really with DARPA then it raised a whole lot of other questions. For instance, what about Lauren and Copeland? Were they with Army Special Projects, too?

Even closer to home were the questions regarding how Race himself had come to be a part of the mission. After all, Nash had claimed to have been put onto him by his brother Marty. But Race hadn't even seen his brother in almost ten years.

Strangely, Race found himself thinking about Marty.

They'd been close as kids. Although Marty had been a good three years older than him, they had always played together— football, baseball, just plain running around. But Will had always been better at sports, despite the age difference.

Marty, on the other hand, was easily the cleverer of the two boys. He'd excelled at school and been ostracised for it.

He wasn't handsome, and even as a nine-year-old he was the image of his father, all hunched shoulders and thick dark eyebrows, with a permanently severe expression that was reminiscent of Richard Nixon.

Conversely, Race had his mother's easy good looks— sandy brown hair and sky blue eyes.

As teenagers, while Will would go out on the town with his friends, Marty would just stay at home with his computers and his prized collection of Elvis Presley records. By age nineteen, Marty hadn't even had a girlfriend. Indeed, the only girl he'd ever liked—a pretty young cheerleader named Jennifer Michaels—had turned out to have a crush on Will. It had devastated Marty.

College came and while his schoolyard tormentors went off to become bank tellers and real estate agents, Marty had headed straight for the computer labs at MIT—fully paid for by his father, a computer engineer.

Race on the other hand—intelligent for sure but always the lesser academically—would go to USE on a half sports scholarship. There he would meet, court and lose Lauren O'Connor and, in between all that, study languages.

Then came their parents' divorce.

It happened so suddenly. One day, Race's father came home from the office and told his mother that he was leav ing her. It turned out he'd been having an affair with his secretary for almost eleven months.

The family split in two.

Marty, then twenty-five, still saw their father regularly— after all, he had always been his old man's son both in looks and manner.

But Race never forgave his father. When he died of a heart attack in 1992, Race didn't even go to the funeral.

It was the classic American nuclear family—nuked from within.

Race snapped out of it, returned to the present, to a sea plane flying over the jungles of Peru.

'What about Lauren and Copeland?' he asked Van

Lewen. “Are they with Army Special Projects too?”

'Yes,' Van Lewen said solemnly.

Son of a bitch.

'All right then,' Race said, changing tack. 'What do you know about the Supernova project?“

'I swear I don't know anything about it,' Van Lewen said.

Race frowned, bit his lip.

He turned to Renee. 'What do you know about the American Supernova project?'

'A little.'

Race raised his eyebrows expectantly.

Renee sighed. 'Project approved by the Congressional Armaments Committee in closed session: January 1992. Bud get of $1.8 billion approved by Senate Appropriations Committee, again in closed session: March 1992. Project was intended to be a co-operative joint venture between the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the United States Navy. Project leader's name is—'

'Wait a second,' Race said, cutting her off. 'The Super nova is a Navy project?'

“That's right.'

So Frank Nash had told more than one lie to get him to come along on the mission. The Supernova wasn't even an Army project at all.

It was a Navy project.

And then, suddenly, Race found himself recalling something he had heard the previous night, when he had been imprisoned inside the Humvee, before the cats had attacked the BKA team.

He recalled hearing a woman's voice Renee's maybe saying something in German over the radio, a sentence that he had found quite incongruous at the time, a sentence which he hadn't translated for Nash and the others.

Was ist mit dem anderen amerikanischen Team? We sind die jetzt?

'What about the other American team? Where are they now?'

The other American team…

'I'm sorry, Renee,' he said, 'who did you say was the Supemova's project leader?'

“His name is Romano. Doctor Julius Michael Romano.'

And there it was.

The mysterious Romano, revealed at last.

Romano's team was the other American team. A Navy team.

Christ…

'So let me just get this straight,' Race said. 'The Supernova is a Navy project led by a guy named Julius Romano, right?'