The FBI showed up to the scene in Cottonwood Heights less than an hour after the attack. They flew in by helicopter and came in jeeps, surrounding the area and closing it off for investigation. They found both of the missing Air Force pilots at a local hospital.
Steven Beck was being treated for a gunshot wound to the knee, and Jack was outside, waiting to see if his friend would be okay with a gunshot wound to the shoulder. There was a woman with them named Helen Allison, though they were unable to determine if she was part of the incident or a bystander.
They also found two bodies and a severely wounded man. The man was a known criminal working for an underground mercenary organization known as JanCorp. The two dead men were his associates Victor Cross and Francis Umstead.
In the building where the drones crashed, they found a large amount of blood belonging to their highest priority criminal, Lyle Goldman, but no body. They checked all local hospitals but found no trace of him. They decided with the amount of blood loss he was probably dead.
2
Lyle groaned as he woke up, agony flooding his entire body. Bright light assaulted him from overhead, and he raised his arm to shield his eyes.
“Finally,” Kate said, sitting in the chair next to him.
“Finally?” he said. “Is this heaven?”
“Am I in your heaven?”
“If you were, you would be wearing fewer clothes,” Lyle said. Then he paused. “Did I just say that out loud?”
“It’s the painkillers,” she laughed. “You’ll be loopy for a while.”
“Where am I?”
“I called in a few favors and got you patched up. Now we’re hiding out so you can recover.”
“Hiding out?” he asked.
“The FBI is still after you, and you’re still a person of interest. There isn’t a manhunt anymore. It’s died down a little, but it’ll be a few weeks before you are off their radar.”
“Then things can go back to normal?”
Kate smiled sadly at him.
“No,” she said. “Things will never go back to normal. The life you knew is gone. The only thing you can do now is move forward.”
Lyle thought about that for a second. “Didn’t my plan work?” he asked.
“It did,” Kate said. “And you are a hero. But, no one will ever know that except us.”
“So I don’t get a medal?” he asked, laughing.
She smiled. “No. But how about a consolation prize?”
“Like what?” he asked.
She leaned in and gave him a long and passionate kiss. When she got done he was breathless.
“Yeah,” he said. “That works.”
“I thought it might.”
“What do we do now?” he asked.
“We?”
“You saved me. In some cultures, that makes you responsible for me.”
She laughed. “Maybe.”
“So, what do we do now?”
“Well,” Kate said, leaning back in her chair and smiling. “It just so happens that we’ve got a new job.”
