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President Kevin Martindale, now the owner of Scion, a private military and intelligence company. They had wanted a means to communicate quickly, securely, and secretly with Brad in an emergency. EXODUS was essentially shorthand for “make an excuse and get out of Dodge fast.”
    Which meant there was trouble brewing somewhere.
    His hands balled into fists. What the hell was going on now? he wondered.
    For years, he had been caught up in events well beyond the pay grade of any trained military officer, let alone an ordinary college student barely into his twenties. In 2015, together with his father and other Sky Masters pilots under government contract, he’d flown an unauthorized retaliatory strike against the People’s Republic of China after Chinese bombers attacked the U.S. Air Force base on Guam. Almost everyone thought his father had been killed during that mission. The fact that Patrick McLanahan, though terribly wounded, had survived was known only by a tiny handful of people.
    Then, last year, funded by a grant from Sky Masters, Brad and ateam of fellow students from Cal Poly had worked hard to build and deploy an experimental orbital solar power plant called Starfire. It used a microwave laser to beam all the power they collected back to Earth. Despite their peaceful intentions, the Russians and Chinese claimed they were building space weapons and launched an attack on Starfire and Armstrong Station. With salvos of S-500 air-to-space missiles streaking toward them, Brad’s team had been forced to convert their laser into a real fighting weapon. And it had worked—helping defend Armstrong Space Station successfully right up to the moment when a Russian EMP blast knocked out their electronics.
    That would have been way more than enough danger and excitement for anyone. Unfortunately, Brad had also found himself hunted by Russian assassins, narrowly escaping being murdered more times than he liked to think about. It seemed that Russia’s president, Gennadiy Gryzlov, had embarked on a personal vendetta against anyone bearing the McLanahan name. It was a vendetta that went back more than a decade, all the way back to the day when Gryzlov’s own father had been killed by American bombs—bombs dropped in a raid commanded by Patrick McLanahan.
    Things had been quieter in the months since the tangled wreckage of Armstrong Station fell burning through the atmosphere. The press, quickly bored by old news, had stopped hounding him for interviews. The survivors of his Starfire team had drifted apart—drawn back to their own academic challenges and lives. Even Jodie Cavendish, the Australian exchange student with whom he’d fallen in love, or maybe just lust, and shared the secret that his father was alive, had gone back to Brisbane. Then, after the school year ended, the higher-ups at Sky Masters, impressed by his work and leadership skills, had offered him this summer internship. And even the Russians seemed to have stopped trying to kill him. Brad had been hoping that destroying the Starfire Project had satiated that nut case Gryzlov’s rage.
    His father and Martindale weren’t so sure. Both men suspected Brad was still under close surveillance—certainly by the U.S. government and probably by Russia’s SVR, its Foreign Intelligence Service, and the PRC’s Ministry of State Security. If so, none of his phone calls or e-mails were secure. That was why they’d ginned up a number of code words and phrases for different situations and made him memorize them.
    So now his father and Martindale were privately signaling him to bail out of his Sky Masters internship and head for the hills. Fair enough, Brad thought. The trick was going to be how to do that without tipping off the FBI and various Russian and Chinese intelligence agents that something weird was up. If he just waltzed into the personnel office and said he was quitting, he might as well send up a flare.