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  Stood. Took a few steps, one mound to the next.

  Flick, flick.

  I raised the water bottle to my lips. Perhaps the god was everywhere, melted down into the Earth. Or maybe there was more than one—­two, three—­thirty-­four? Gods in swarms, like birds, like fish . . . ?

  I looked back. “Nouri!” I called. I saw his head come up; he’d been playing on his phone. Now he jumped to his feet, gave me a mock salute. “Let’s get the gear,” I said, “and get started!”

  I don’t know how many jobs I’ve done. I daresay there’s a record somewhere. Some were easy: in and out, more time setting up than actually doing them. Still, there are always dangers. “Your biggest threat,” I’d tell trainees, “is you, thinking you know it all.” But sometimes it’s not that. Sometimes it’s just dangerous, and no amount of care and forethought is ever going to make it safe. As a trade, Field Ops has its share of casualties, and everybody thinks, “It won’t be me.” Until the day it is.

  I’d had my own slice of the damage, sure enough. Esztergom, in Hungary. I could pretend it hadn’t been my fault, except it had: I should have done the final check myself, and not left it to my trainee partner. A good op checks once, and then again. Another message for trainees. And I bore my share of guilt for what had happened since, and what might still be happening, somewhere in the world. Hopefully a long, long way from here.

  I scanned the ground for scorpions and other nasties, then sat down on a rock. Carl and Nouri brought the truck as close as possible and started unloading equipment. A bunch of kids had gathered. Nouri bribed the bigger ones to keep the rest away. I hoped that they were good at it. I didn’t want kids within a mile of the place, especially with the strategy I’d got in mind. That’s if I went with it. Right now, I couldn’t quite make up my mind.

  What I wasn’t happy with, though—­ and less and less so, as the day wore on—­was Dayling’s “stealth” plan. It wasn’t terrorists that worried me. There were just too many ­people round about. Carl felt the same, I knew, but he was careful not to say too much. He came towards me now, a canvas carrier of cables loaded on each shoulder.

  “Hey, boss.”

  I pointed north. Up where the readings had been highest, by the palace, and the temples, and the big mound of the ziggurat.

  Nothing for it now except to carry on.

  I joined the other two, lugging the gear up to my chosen spot. I wish I could have called someone, got some advice. One of the older guys. Fredericks, say, or Karen Meier in Frankfurt, both great ops in their day, just to ask them, “Is this smart? Would you do this?” The trouble was that I’d been doing the job so long now, I pretty much was one of the older guys. I was the one the new kids came to for advice, unaware how ignorant I still was, how much I, like them, was flying by the seat of my pants.

  How much the guys who’d taught me had been doing just the same.

  So I knew already what advice I’d get out of the older guys. If it works, they’d say, then yes, you should have done it. If it doesn’t, no, you shouldn’t.

  Then maybe I should trust myself. “Acceptable risk.” Maybe I did know what was best, after all.

  “Yanks were guarding it during the war,” said Carl. “Thought they were trying to protect the history, an’ aw.”

  “Our history,” said Nouri, “has been mortgaged many, many times. I am surprised, to tell the truth, that we have any left.”

  “Ha.” Carl handed him a cigarette. “You’re kind of selling off the family silver here, aren’t you?”

  “Silver. Oil. We give it you, perhaps you fuck off, leave us alone, hey? No offence there.”

  “Aw, none taken.”

  “And you, Mr. Englishman.” Nouri turned on me gleefully. “Already, you have half Iraq, locked away in your Museum. I have been in London, I have seen this! Half our heritage! I tell you, one day—­” He leaned towards me, squinting through his glasses, pointing with his cigarette, “one day, I am coming to London again. And I will take it back!”

  It was the first time they’d involved me in their banter, and I took it for a good sign. Maybe they’d trust me. More than I could trust myself just now, at any rate.

  So we finished off our break. I told them what I wanted: where to put the generator, where I’d start to lay the cables.

  “I’ve worked with Registry before,” said Carl. “This isn’t how they did it last time.”

  “No.”

  “This like, some special method, then?”

  “Not really. But I can’t get a proper fix on the thing, the way it is. I’m going to try . . . kind of a trick. I’d like to get it done before the sun goes down. Then we’ll camp, finish off by sunrise, yeah?”

  They looked at me. I said, “You might want to keep back once I get started. You know. Just in case.”

  Nouri took his glasses off, polishing them on his shirt. “What is your plan, my friend? What will happen here?”

  “I’m not going to go for the catch. Not right away. I’m just going to . . . nudge it a bit, see?”

  “Nudge.”

  This didn’t fill them with delight.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Just try and . . . kick it into shape. You know. See if it’ll start behaving.”

  Nouri put his glasses back on, frowning through the lenses, looking like an anxious gnome.

  “My friend. It sounds like you plan to wake it up.”

  “Just a bit,” I said. “Only a little bit . . .”

  About the Author

  TIM LEES is a British author living in Chicago. His short fiction has appeared in Postscripts, Black Static, and Interzone, among many other publications. He is author of the collection The Life to Come, nominated for a British Fantasy Award, the novel Frankenstein’s Prescription, described by Publishers Weekly as “a philosophically insightful and literary tale of terror,” and the first two Field Ops novels, The God Hunter and Devil in the Wires, available from Harper Voyager Impulse. When not writing, Tim has held a wide variety of jobs, including teacher, conference organizer, film extra, and worker in a psychiatric hospital. He can be found on Twitter @TimLees2, and occasionally remembers to update his website at www.timlees.wordpress.com.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Also by Tim Lees

  Devil in the Wires

  The God Hunter

  Frankenstein’s Prescription

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Excerpt from Devil in the Wires copyright © 2015 by Tim Lees.

  steal the lightning. Copyright © 2017 by Tim Lees. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers. For information, address HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007.

  Digital Edition JANUARY 2017 ISBN: 978-0-06-249689-8

  Print Edition ISBN: 978-0-06-249690-4

  Harper Voyager, the Harper Voyager logo, and Harper Voyager Impulse are trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers.

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