CRISPR

The wind swallowed him the moment he stepped off the Cessna's cargo ramp.

Malcolm fell blind. No moonlight, no horizon, nothing but the roar of air hammering his body and the altitude meter on his wrist counting down in luminous green digits. His fifteenth HALO jump, but only the third at night, and the previous two hadn't been this dark. Cloud cover smothered everything above, and the Atlantic spread invisible below, waiting to kill him if his timing slipped by two seconds.

"Fifty-eight hundred meters," Jensen's voice said through the waterproof earbud—dry and unhurried, that east Tennessee vowel flattening the numbers to the same cadence he used whether things were going well or going wrong. "Looking good, boss."

The numbers descended, and Malcolm kept his body tight. The drone of the plane's engines had vanished the instant he'd left the ramp, replaced by the violent rush of air that pummeled his suit and stung the exposed skin around his goggles.

"Five thousand meters."

The clouds thinned. A faint scattering of lights appeared on the horizon—Delaware's coastline, a sparse constellation that gave him bearing but no depth perception. The sea wall that now lined the shore from Rehoboth to Lewes glowed faintly in the ambient light—a line of concrete and steel that the Army Corps had finished two years ago after the third hundred-year storm in a decade. Below that, nothing. He was still falling toward a surface he couldn't see.

"You're clear. Pull whenever you're ready."

Malcolm yanked the release strap. The chute bloomed above him, invisible in the dark, and his body jerked hard enough to rattle his teeth. A gust caught the canopy and flung him sideways. He corrected, gripping the steering lines, and guided himself toward the single point of light growing below—the running lamps of The Lonely Spirit.

A cargo ship out of Paranagua, Brazil, bound for the Delaware coast. Three containers aboard carried proprietary equipment belonging to CDM Pharmaceuticals—gene-sequencing arrays, cryogenic storage, the kind of hardware that companies fought patent wars over. Since the biotech boom had turned genetic research into the decade's gold rush, outfits like CDM shipped this kind of equipment under armed guard and insurance policies worth more than the ship itself. Malcolm's job was to destroy them.

"Any last words before you get wet?" Jensen asked.

"Tell Amy I said to stop pouting."

"She can hear you. And she says—actually, I'm not going to repeat that."

Malcolm smiled despite himself. His team. Seven years of working together, and Jensen still couldn't keep quiet during an operation—his voice steady as a metronome on the comms, even when the plan was burning down around them—and Amy still resented being left on shore, her knuckles cracking twice before every breach, always twice, always the same whether she admitted the habit or not. They were the closest thing he had to family.

The ocean materialized a half-second before impact. Malcolm crashed through the surface feetfirst, and the frigid Atlantic closed over his head like a fist. His amphibious suit kept the water out, but the cold slammed through regardless—a deep, systemic shock that tightened every muscle. He shed the parachute harness, kicked free, and broke the surface gasping.

The Lonely Spirit bore down on him, eighty meters out and closing. Her floodlights threw long white beams across the swells, and the diesel rumble of her engines vibrated through the water and into Malcolm's chest.

He positioned himself in her path, grappling hook ready. The hull loomed—a riveted cliff face pushing through the dark—and he caught a ridge with his right hand and drove the hook through the fiberglass siding with his left. The current dragged him under. Salt water flooded his mouth. He hauled himself upward hand over hand, boots scraping against the hull, arms screaming, until his torso cleared the waterline.

He climbed.

At the deck rail, he paused. One guard at the far end—a man named Quinn, according to Jensen's recon—leaning against the railing with the comfortable inattention of someone who'd stood watch on an uneventful voyage for three weeks. Nobody else topside.