Agent Hill: Powerless by James Hunt Page B

how much snow was actually falling outside, but the howling winds gave it an ominous tone. Thankfully, the servers had booted up enough to the point of warming the room to where they could take off their jackets and gloves.
    Bryce bounced his knee up and down nervously. He’d turned one of the computers he had inside out in an attempt to keep himself busy, but the pile of dismantled technology had lost Bryce’s interest. He sat there, curled up in a ball by himself, wondering when he’d have the same level of intelligence that had allotted him so much information. It was like a strange withdrawal that he was going through—he could even feel himself getting the shakes.
    A few times, Bryce had glanced over at Mack, who was busy jotting something down on a sheet of paper. The man hadn’t looked up for more than three hours, and Bryce wasn’t sure if Mack even realized they were alone. The lines on his forehead seemed permanently creased in his concentration on the notepad in his lap.
    Bryce didn’t like not being able to talk with Sarah. Granted, there were times when he wished he could shut her up, but the fact that she was out there alone made him uneasy. He’d gotten that feeling in Spain, and it had once again returned. His job was to see the things she couldn’t see. Hear the things she couldn’t hear. As fast and strong as she was, she couldn’t stop a bullet from a sniper in the back of her skull.
    The fact that Sarah had been gone for as long as she had made Bryce uncomfortable. It’d only taken a little more than an hour to drive to the location, but he figured the storm was slowing her down. Finally, unable to take the silence any longer, Bryce spoke up. “What are you working on, Mack?”
    The scrape of lead against paper continued between the howls of wind and snow outside, and Mack kept his head down, and the end of the pencil kept on with its jerky motions. Bryce reached over to one of the small circuit boards on the floor next to him, picked it up, then tossed it in Mack’s direction. The small board landed right on top of Mack’s notepad, and the scribbling stopped. Mack slowly raised his head and looked at Bryce with the same set of annoyed eyes that Bryce had seen being given to Sarah thousands of times. “You’re really lost in thought over there.”
    Mack pushed the piece of circuitry off the paper and continued his writing. “What’s the status on the servers?”
    “Uh, well, they’ve all gone through their start-up sequences, and all but one of them had no errors, but the glitch was easy to override, and now I’m just waiting for Sarah to get back so we can start the uplink to the satellite,” Bryce answered.
    “How long will that take?”
    “The initial installation will only take a few minutes, but establishing the link between these servers and the satellite could take a while. It’s a lot of data that they’ll have to upload. In fact, it’s thousands of terabytes of data. God, you know, when you sit down and really think about all the computing power we’re able to handle, it’s quite impressive. Did you know that the first computer system only—”
    “Bryce?”
    “Yes, sir?”
    “Do you go on tangents like these with Sarah during her missions?”
    “Um, well, sometimes. It’s not intentional.”
    “I see.”
    “What?”
    “Nothing. I think I’m just beginning to understand some of her insubordination. I think it comes from having to listen to you.”
    Mack finally looked up from his pad of paper, and Bryce frowned then turned away from Mack and returned to the computer pieces lying on the ground. He sheepishly picked up one of the pieces and kept his head down, muttering softly to himself. “And I can see why Sarah doesn’t listen to you.”
    “What was that, Bryce?” Mack asked.
    “Nothing, sir,” Bryce answered quickly.

 
    ***
    Sarah’s boot crunched into a patch of crimson-stained snow and kicked up a flurry of red slush on her sprint toward the