ATHENA FORCE 7-12

CARLA CASSIDY, EVELYN VAUGHN, HARPER ALLEN, RUTH WIND, CINDY DEES AND DORANNA DURGIN

Published by Silhouette Books
America’s Publisher of Contemporary Romance

CONTENTS

DECEIVED

CONTACT

PAYBACK

COUNTDOWN

TARGET

CHECKMATE

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

COMING NEXT MONTH

DECEIVED

CARLA CASSIDY

Published by Silhouette Books
America’s Publisher of Contemporary Romance

Special thanks and acknowledgment are
given to Carla Cassidy for her contribution
to the ATHENA FORCE series.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 1

The rock glittered brilliantly against the swatch of navy velvet, a sparkling gem beneath a single spotlight in the glass display case. Fifteen carats of multifaceted perfection that threatened to steal Lynnette White’s breath away…if she was breathing.

At the moment she was holding her breath and inching down a rope suspended from the large skylight overhead. She paused just before touching the display case and tilted her head to the right.

From the upstairs she could hear the sounds of the owner of the mansion snoring in his bedroom. Good. She’d gotten past the security guards outside the huge mansion and had managed to breach the electronic security system to get inside. The last thing she wanted was for the owner of the house to stumble downstairs for a drink of water and discover her hanging like a spider directly over his precious gem.

If she were like normal people she would never have been able to hear the faint snores coming from an upstairs bedroom. But Lynn wasn’t normal people.

She looked at her watch, still listening for any sound of movement inside the home. She knew the owner was an elderly, eccentric millionaire who lived alone. She hoped he hadn’t chosen this night to invite some lady friend to overnight hospitality. His household staff didn’t live in the house, but were day workers who left after dinnertime.

She checked her watch again. Ten seconds and there would be a thirty-second blip to the computer security system. She’d hacked into the security files and had programmed a fifteen-second delay that hopefully wouldn’t be detected during or after the fact.

Thirty seconds was all she’d have to cut the top of the glass display case, pluck up the gem and get the heck out of Dodge. It shouldn’t be a problem.

The smell of the house surrounded her, a scent of lemon polish and the lingering smell of Italian cooking that must have been dinner for the occupant.

She drew three deep, measured breaths as she stared at the second hand on her watch. When it read precisely 1:00 a.m., she efficiently cut the glass, pulled out the circle with a piece of duct tape, then reached into the top of the display cabinet. She grabbed the cool diamond and placed it into the pouch in her spandex top, then climbed up the rope at warp speed.

Her heart hammered as she listened for the sound of an alarm or racing footsteps. But there was nothing except the pounding of her heartbeat and the faint sound of her own measured breaths.

When she reached the outside of the roof of the three-story stone house she yanked the rope up and coiled it over her shoulder. She carefully placed the panel of the skylight back where it belonged, then headed for the edge of the tiled roof.

A peek over the side of the building would have forced most people backward, away from the steep, sheer drop to the brick patio below. But the height didn’t frighten Lynn. She’d come up the side of the building relatively easily, going down should prove no real problem.

She had no idea how long it would be before somebody would realize the prized diamond named the Star of Russia was gone. She hoped nobody would notice until morning but was aware that she might only have minutes or mere seconds to escape.

Heart still beating a frantic tattoo, she moved to the downspout that had aided her climb up the side of the building. Checking to make sure the security guards were no place in sight, she began her descent.

Like a spider she used both the downspout and the uneven stones of the facade to make her way down the side of the building.

When she hit the patio she ran like the wind, across the lush grass lawn. The dark July night embraced her, shielding her from sight.

Euphoria washed over her as she raced to the place where her car was hidden in a copse of trees in a nearby public park.

She’d done it!

Granted, it had been an easier job than some of the others she’d pulled off. But she still felt that burst of confidence and competence that filled her after every successful heist.

She pulled the black stocking hat off her head as she ran, allowing her shoulder-length, chestnut hair to fall free. She knew she was taking a chance if anyone saw her and could describe her, but if she was seen she’d look more suspicious wearing a stocking cap at this time of year.

The car was where she’d left it, the sleek muscle car her uncle Jonas had disapproved of but that Lynn had been adamant about owning. Three months ago, in a rare burst of stubbornness, she’d fought him tooth and nail until he’d given in and let her buy the bright red Mustang. Before that time she’d been driven by a chauffeur wherever she needed to go.

In the car with its slick contours and powerful V-8 engine was the one place where Lynn felt free…completely liberated from the constraints and worries of her everyday life.

No sirens chased her down the coastal road to the south of Miami as she headed for the mansion she called home. Although she longed to open up the engine and fly with the windows down and the air smelling of midsummer and ocean, she heeded the speed limit.

She wasn’t about to allow a speeding ticket to bust her now. Still, even driving the speed limit with her window rolled down, she felt that aura of freedom, of a world with no threat, of joy in the sheer pleasure of being alone. Jonas allowed her to be alone so rarely.

Smiling, her thoughts turned to the man who wasn’t really her uncle but rather her godfather, the man who had raised her in the lap of luxury but with a paranoia and an isolation that had kept her feeling like the fairy-tale character Rapunzel most of the time.

Jonas didn’t keep her in a tower, but she’d spent her youth surrounded by bodyguards, homeschooled through high school and isolated from her peers. She hadn’t questioned her lifestyle until recently, when she’d begun to feel an edgy restlessness, the need for something different.

She touched the diamond that nestled close to her heart. Jonas would be proud. He hadn’t known she was going after it tonight. She hadn’t told him her plans. It was safer that way…both for him and for herself.

It took Lynn thirty minutes to reach the gates of her home. She punched in the code on her remote, and the iron gates parted to reveal the luxurious oceanside mansion where she lived with Arturo and Rita Batista, Cuban refugees who worked for her godfather.

Jonas was rarely in residence, having business interests all around the world. Although Jonas enjoyed enormous success in his import/export business and defense contract work, his real love was the work he and Lynn did covertly for the U.S. Government.

She parked her car in the garage, then entered the house through a mudroom just off the kitchen. She moved with the stealth of a cat, noiselessly through the massive kitchen and living room. As she moved, she listened for any sound that would indicate somebody had heard her car arrive.

The security guards stationed around the grounds and on the roof would have seen her arrive home, but they would think nothing of it. They were paid a lot of money for keeping their silence concerning the comings and goings of the occupants of the house, but to be completely safe, Lynn went on random night drives all the time. Most of the guards knew she suffered from insomnia and her near-nightly drives helped her relax.

As she made her way through the kitchen and across the living-room floor she was aware of the tiny blinking lights in the walls that followed her progress. They were sensor lights programmed specifically to her and Jonas.

If she spent more than five minutes in any room the temperature would adjust for her comfort level and the artwork on the walls would change to her personal favorite pieces. The elaborate system was one of Jonas’s toys.

She paused on the first step of the grand staircase. If she allowed it, she would hear every sound the house and its occupants made…the tick of clocks, the hum of electricity flowing through wires and the drip of a faucet in an upstairs bathroom. Heightened senses were a gift with which she’d been born. At times growing up, that particular gift had seemed more like a curse. What was loud music to some became an intolerable pain to her. She often smelled what other people couldn’t, felt heat and cold more intensely than others. But she had learned to filter sensation and control her body’s responses.

She focused on a particular area of the house, the area in the back of the house on the bottom floor where Arturo and Rita lived and slept.

From that place she could hear Arturo’s deep, regular snoring. Good. She didn’t want to awaken him or Rita, who would be up before dawn to prepare for Jonas’s homecoming. Besides, as far as they were concerned, she’d gone to her bedroom around ten and had gone to sleep.

When she reached her private quarters, she went through the sitting room and into the bedroom to the canopied bed and pulled the diamond from her top. She flung herself on the bed and set the diamond in front of her on the purple-and-gold brocade spread. The gem was nearly blinding in its beauty.

She turned it first one way then another, admiring the light refraction of the utter perfection of the brilliant-cut fifteen-carat round stone.

The diamond had been in the possession of a Miami businessman named Sebastian Tyler, but he wasn’t the rightful owner of the gem.

According to what Jonas had told her, the rightful owner was a peasant woman in Russia whose ancestors had been wealthy and powerful friends of Peter the Great. The diamond had been stolen and sold on the black market to Sebastian Tyler.

The U.S. authorities had contacted Jonas to see if he could help return the diamond to its Russian owner. When he had told Lynn about it, she’d immediately begun to research Sebastian Tyler’s home to find the soft security spot.

Lynn frowned as she tucked the diamond into a velvet pouch, then placed it in her nightstand. She had done this kind of work dozens of times in the past, but lately, questions niggled at her, questions only Jonas could answer.

Questions that, at the moment, would have to wait.

Still, this was the work she loved, the work that she and Jonas did together. Although they didn’t rob from the rich and give to the poor, they did rob from the wrong and give to the right.

Throughout history, artifacts and treasures had been stolen from their rightful owners during wars and coups. Jonas researched the items and their rightful places, and Lynn did the actual recovery work.

She rose from the bed, stripped off her clothes and padded into the large bathroom. A moment later, standing beneath a hot spray of water, she tried to blank the night’s activities out of her mind.

It took only minutes to wash off the stress and climb into a pink silk nightgown. Because her senses were so finely tuned, she particularly loved the way silk felt against her body.

She shut off her bedroom light, then went to her window. It would take a while for her to wind down enough to sleep. She needed to sleep as soon as possible. She had grad-school classes in the morning.

The moonlight floated down in luminous rays, and from this vantage point it illuminated the ocean waves that crashed against the cliff upon which the house sat. It was a million-dollar view from a multi-million-dollar house.

She eyed her computer on a desk in the corner. She could download her e-mail or wander into a chat room, but she wasn’t in the mood.

As the exhilaration of the night’s heist seeped away, she was once again filled with a restless energy, a yearning for something—but she didn’t know what.

Jonas would be home tomorrow. Maybe that would help dispel the odd sense of melancholy she’d been feeling lately. When Jonas was at home it was Christmas, Thanksgiving and New Year’s all rolled into one. There were presents and laughter and the only sense of family she ever enjoyed.

Surely that would take away the edginess and the caged-in feelings she’d been suffering lately. With that reassuring thought in mind, she turned away from the window and crawled into bed.

“Dammit.” Nick Barnes scowled at the e-mail he’d just received from his supervisor, indicating there had been another heist overnight. This time the take had been a priceless diamond from the private residence of one Sebastian Tyler.

Nick knew there would be no mention of the robbery in the papers. The FBI was keeping a lid on the spat of robberies similar to this latest.

The Bureau was certain that Jonas White was involved. The man had been under investigation for years for a variety of crimes, including the black-market sale of stolen antiquities and treasures. The FBI had recovered several of the stolen pieces, and each roundabout trail had led back to Jonas or his right-hand man, Richard Dunst. Unfortunately, the trails hadn’t included solid evidence that would ensure a conviction. The evidence was all loosely circumstantial. Nick knew there would be no proof, no evidence pointing directly to the man’s culpability this time either.

Jonas White was as slippery as an eel, as cunning as a fox and as wealthy as Midas. He had also been Nick’s sole assignment for the past two years.

The man had been under FBI investigation for art and arms smuggling, drug trafficking and a multitude of other crimes for years, but there had never been enough evidence for an arrest.

Seven years ago as a hotshot, new, twenty-two-year-old FBI agent, Nick had gone undercover and had worked a variety of assignments. Then, two years ago, at the age of twenty-seven, he’d been hired as head of Jonas’s security team. The plan was for Nick to work his way into Jonas’s confidence and gain access to the details of the illegal activities.

Lately Jonas had taken more of an interest in Nick.

For the past six months Nick felt as if he just might be being groomed for something big…something that would get him into a place where he could get the goods on the man, gain the knowledge to bring Jonas down.

He jumped as his cell phone rang. He closed down his e-mail program, then reached for his cell phone in his pocket. The caller ID showed the calling number as private. He flipped it open and said hello.

“Have you read your e-mail this morning?” The deep voice belonged to Nick’s supervisor and only contact while he was so deep undercover, Ray Graham.

“Yeah, I saw it. Unfortunately, Mark was out of the country last night.” Mark was their code name for Jonas. “The e-mail you sent me was sketchy…anything left behind?”

“Nothing. Just like the others.” Ray heaved a deep, audible sigh. “It’s like a ghost got in and out when the security guards outside blinked their eyes. It’s time, Nick…time to play Post Office.”

“Got it.”

Nick clicked off and leaned back in his chair. Post Office. He’d known it was coming. He left the table and walked over to the small desk next to the kitchen sink. From the top drawer he pulled out a manila folder.

He grabbed a fresh cup of coffee, then stepped out sliding doors to a tiny patio that overlooked the ocean. He sat at the small table in the shade of the overhead umbrella and for a moment simply sipped his coffee and watched the waves crash to shore.

He’d been renting this place for the past four years under the name of Walter Tyndale. There was only one person in the world who knew Nick had this small beach house, and that was Ray.

Although his family had cut Nick out of their lives years ago, he and his older brother, Anthony, had maintained strained, occasional contact with each other, but even Anthony didn’t know about Nick’s real work or this safe house.

This place was his escape, his sanity in the dangerous world he’d built with lie after lie as an undercover agent. And now he was about to complicate the situation with more lies.

He opened the file folder he’d brought outside and looked at the picture of the young woman contained within. Lynnette White…Jonas’s goddaughter.

When Nick had first started working for Jonas two years before, Lynn had been a gangly twenty-year-old. There was nothing gangly about her at twenty-two. During the course of the past two years, Lynn had physically blossomed, developing curves where there had been none before.

Up until now Nick had had very little interaction with her. A pleasant nod, a brief hello was all they’d shared in the past. But the game was about to change. She might be the key to bringing down Jonas.

He stared at the photo. It had been taken with a long lens from quite a distance away, but the lab had worked its magic to give him a photo that appeared to have been taken mere feet from her.

She’d been captured just before getting into her car after one of her classes at the nearby college. Her shoulder-length chestnut-colored hair framed her pretty features and her green eyes sparkled with life. She was slender, but not without feminine curves.

The picture had been taken by another agent during the ordinary course of building an up-to-date dossier on Jonas. In truth Nick knew little about her other than she had been sheltered most of her life and was now a grad student in computer science at Florida International University.

He touched her face with the tip of his index finger, a flash of adrenaline spiking through him.

Even though Nick felt that he was on the verge of being invited into Jonas’s confidence, he’d known his superiors were getting tired of waiting for something to happen where Nick’s undercover job was concerned. He wasn’t surprised that they wanted Nick to turn up the heat by targeting Lynn.

Yes, she just might be the ticket to the arrest and conviction of Jonas. All Nick had to do was seduce her—become her lover and her confidant. Not exactly the worst assignment he could draw.

He knew that part of the reason he’d been tapped for this particular job was because he was young and was considered to be handsome and charming, when he wanted to be. He had a reputation for being a ladies’ man. A reputation built on the fact that Nick had enjoyed the company of a variety of women.

He slid the photo back in the folder, finished his coffee, then reluctantly went inside and prepared to leave his little sanctuary. There wasn’t much to do in preparation for leaving. He only managed to spend time here briefly and only when Jonas was out of town.

Officially Nick lived in a luxury apartment with closets filled with silk suits and Italian-leather shoes, all bought and paid for by Jonas, who was a generous employer.

Seducing the lovely Lynnette wouldn’t be easy. Jonas guarded her as if she were a precious artifact that might shatter if out of his control. But Nick didn’t get his reputation as a superagent by backing away from difficult situations.

The other thing Nick had to consider was that if he struck up a relationship with Lynn and it went bad, then it was quite possible Jonas would fire him to get him out of her life.

Nick assumed his superiors had considered this risk and were willing that he take it in an effort to move the investigation forward more quickly.

It was early evening when he changed out of his jeans and T-shirt and into a gray suit and black dress shirt and headed for Jonas’s place. He had a tidbit of information he knew would only serve to ingratiate him further into Jonas’s confidence.

By this time Jonas should be settled in and they should already have eaten the evening meal. Hopefully it was a perfect time to drop in.

As he drove toward the luxury mansion, he thought again of his new directive. Time to play Post Office. He’d kissed the prettiest girl in the sixth grade in a game of Post Office at a birthday party when he’d been eleven years old.

This game of Post Office wouldn’t be as innocent. Nick wasn’t particularly thrilled at the prospect of using any woman as a tool, but Lynnette might be the only way to get to her godfather. The stakes were too high, and Jonas White had to be brought down.

Jonas and his goddaughter lived like royalty. The mansion they called home was a self-sustaining compound complete with backup generators, intensive security and luxuries most people only dreamed about.

Although Nick had been in the house on occasion, there were many of the thirty rooms that he’d not been in, rooms that he knew contained the heart of Jonas’s illegal operations. Hopefully Lynnette White would be his key into those rooms.

He pulled up before the heavy iron gate and punched in the security code that would allow him entry. When his car went through, the gates closed behind him and he pulled around the circular driveway and stopped before the front door of the house.

He was aware of the fact that his approach had been watched by dozens of guards. As head of security, Nick had hired the men who were responsible for the safety of Jonas and the members of the household.

He also couldn’t help but notice another car in the driveway, one he recognized as belonging to Richard Dunst. Nick grimaced with distaste. Dunst had also been on the FBI radar for years. He was another man who needed to be brought down and put behind bars for the rest of his life.

Nick’s knock on the front door was answered by Rita Batista, the housekeeper. Her broad face lit with a smile as she ushered him inside the foyer. “Good to see you, Mr. Nick. I’ll tell Mr. Jonas that you wish to speak with him,” she said. Even though she’d been in the United States for years, her voice still held the heavy accent of her Cuban roots. “He and Mr. Richard and Miss Lynn are in the family room.”

She disappeared, leaving Nick to cool his heels in the foyer. Although Nick knew what he had to do where Lynnette was concerned, he also knew that particular directive would take time and finesse and would best be accomplished when Jonas left town once again and Miss Lynn would be more vulnerable.

He smiled as Jonas approached him, a hand stretched out in greeting. “Nick…how are you?”

Nick grabbed his hand in a firm handshake. “I’m fine, sir. And welcome home.”

“Thank you. I love traveling, but it’s always good to come home and touch base.” At sixty-three years old and standing over six feet tall, Jonas was a daunting figure in spite of the fact that his black hair had become more sparse in recent years. His dark eyes held not only a keen intelligence, but also a soulless quality that could chill to the bone.

He was dressed in a pair of tan dress slacks and beige-and-white shirt that probably cost as much as Nick’s little cottage.

“I’m sorry to interrupt your homecoming celebration, but I have a bit of information I thought might interest you.” Just as Nick suspected, Jonas’s dark eyes lit in anticipation.

“Come into the study,” he said, and led Nick toward the room that was most familiar. It was in the impressive study that Nick usually met with Jonas for security updates and other business.

Jonas gestured Nick into a chair in front of the ornate mahogany desk, but remained standing himself. He looked at Nick expectantly.

“It’s come to my attention through certain contacts that the Marconi family is about to splinter into two warring factions,” Nick said. He knew Jonas wouldn’t ask about his source of the information, knew that Jonas was aware of Nick’s background as the youngest son of a powerful organized-crime family in Miami.

Although Jonas had no specific ties to any organized-crime faction, he liked having an inside source inform him about what was going on and who was in power. Jonas was always looking for a way to exploit or gain strength in the underworld where he functioned.

Jonas’s dark eyebrows pulled together in a speculative frown. “Interesting.”

“My sources tell me Marconi’s right-hand man, Ricky Sanford, is disgruntled and overly ambitious and is about to set up business on his own. I’d say within the next week he’ll either be dead or in control.”

“And if you were a betting man?”

“I’d bet that he’ll take control,” Nick said.

Jonas nodded. “I appreciate you bringing this to me, Nick,” he said as Nick got up from the chair.

Jonas clapped him on the back as the two of them walked out of the study. “Why don’t you go on inside the family room and keep Lynn company for a few minutes while I have a little chat with Richard.”

Nick was surprised by the suggestion. Normally Jonas would have thanked him and walked him to the front door. He realized that his information had done just what he’d hoped it would do…move him further into Jonas’s confidence.

They walked together to the family room where Lynn sat on one end of a deep burgundy leather sofa and Dunst sat on the other end.

Lynn looked distinctly uncomfortable. It was difficult to discern whether Dunst was uncomfortable or not. Nick had never seen his facial features display any kind of emotion at all.

“Richard…we need to talk,” Jonas said and indicated the bald man should follow him back to the study. “Nick, say hello to Lynnette.”

“Hello, Lynnette,” Nick said and smiled at the beautiful young woman he hoped to seduce and use to bring down the empire of the man who had raised her.

Chapter 2

“Lynn, honey, keep Nick company while Richard and I talk in the study.”

Lynn watched in panic as Jonas and Richard left the room. She stood, a ripple of nervous energy making it impossible for her to remain seated. “Good evening, Mr. Barnes,” she forced out the words. “Would you care for a drink?”

“Sure, a scotch on the rocks would be great, and, please, make it Nick.” He smiled, a lazy, sexy smile, and Lynn felt a curl of heat unfurl in her stomach. He had the nicest voice, deep and smooth.

She moved to the wet bar in the corner of the room, grateful to have something to do. She’d never spent any real time with Nick, had only seen him on brief occasions over the two years he’d worked for Jonas. But something about him always made her nervous.

Maybe it was because the man was far too good-looking, with his thick, dark hair and brooding, dark eyes. He wore a suit better than any man she’d ever seen and the first time she’d seen him in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, her heart had stutter-stepped at the vision.

It wasn’t just his physical appearance she found appealing. Self-confidence oozed from him, and she had the feeling that he was a man who never suffered shyness or any feeling of inadequacy. Her natural shyness kicked into high gear.

She poured his drink, then walked back to where he still stood, his dark eyes watching her intently. “Please, sit down,” she said as she handed him the drink.

“After you.” He swept his hand toward the sofa where she’d been sitting before he’d arrived.

She sank down on the buttery-soft leather couch and tried to ignore the flutter in her stomach as he sat next to her, too close for comfort. The familiar shyness built to tormenting proportions as they sat for a moment in uncomfortable silence.

“How’s grad school? Jonas says you’re doing very well.”

A shaft of surprise swept through her. Jonas talked about her to Nick? For the first time she realized Nick’s position with her godfather was apparently closer than she had thought. “It’s good. I enjoy it.”

“Computer science, right?”

“Right.” She didn’t look at him, but could feel his gaze on her face. The scent of his cologne whispered in the air from his direction, an intensely pleasant scent.

She was vaguely surprised that Jonas had invited Nick to stay, definitely surprised that he’d left her in charge of entertaining him. It was a break from routine that was both unexpected and more than a little bit exhilarating.

“What else do you like to do, Lynnette, besides school?”

She forced herself to turn her head and look at him in an attempt to overcome her shyness.

She couldn’t very well tell him she loved breaking into museums and homes and eluding security guards. She certainly couldn’t tell him that she loved to run faster than the wind with a prized treasure tucked in her pocket.

“I don’t know. I enjoy meeting at the Coffee Cloister with my friends. I like designing video games on the computer. I like going for drives in my car.” He had the darkest eyes and the longest eyelashes. She averted her gaze and stared at the pattern of the Oriental rug on the floor.

“Late-night drives,” he said softly.

She jerked her head up to look at him once again. Did he know? Had he somehow figured out what she did on those nights she left the house in the dark? As head of security he would know that she occasionally sneaked out of the house when Arturo and Rita were sound asleep.

He smiled at her obvious look of panic. “Don’t worry, your secret is safe with me. Is it a guy? Are you dating somebody Jonas wouldn’t approve of?”

Her panic subsided as quickly as it had risen. “No, it’s nothing like that,” she said in relief. She felt the blush that swept over her cheeks. “I just like to take long drives at night. I have insomnia, and a drive in the car always relaxes me. Jonas is so overly protective. If he knew, he’d worry.” That wasn’t exactly true. Of course Jonas knew she left the house at night to conduct the work that was so important.

“So, no boyfriend?”

“No…there’s nobody special.”

His gaze swept over her slowly, languidly. “That’s surprising. I’d think somebody like you would have dozens of men knocking down your door. No boyfriend.” He smiled once again, that sexy smile of his. “I guess that’s good news for me.”

He had a nice smile, one that involved all his features. The center of his dark eyes sparkled, and the chiseled lines of his face softened with the gesture. Once again she looked down at the rug as his words caused her heart to beat a strange, new rhythm.

“Ah, good. I see Lynn got you a drink,” Jonas said as he returned to the room with Richard Dunst trailing behind him. “Lynn, honey, why don’t you make me another one. Richard?”

“Nothing for me.”

As the men settled into chairs, Lynn returned to the bar. What she’d like to do was escape to her room and think about how Nick’s gaze had caused her to feel momentarily naked…and excited.

She’d like to think about what Nick had meant by his words. That’s good news for me. The words played and replayed in her mind as she fixed Jonas his usual gin and tonic.

Minutes later they sat and listened as Jonas regaled them with his latest escapades from his travels. Jonas loved an audience, but Lynn had heard most of his stories a hundred times before.

It was easy for her to tune him out and instead focus her attention on Nick. With the simple words he had spoken, he had captured her attention as he never had before. She knew he’d worked for Jonas for a couple of years, knew that Jonas seemed to be depending on Nick more and more, but that was all she knew about him.

There was a part of Lynn that knew she’d be smart to be wary of him. When it came time for somebody to take over Jonas’s defense contracting work and import/export business interests, she didn’t intend for that person to be anyone but herself.

Maybe he’d just been brown-nosing her, sucking up to the boss’s daughter. All her life Jonas had warned her about people taking advantage of her. He’d ingrained in her the fact that her position as his goddaughter and her unusual special talents put her at risk.

Still, whether Nick was sucking up to her or not, she couldn’t control the slight shivery warmth he created inside her when he looked at her with those dark brown eyes of his.

In truth, she was tired of being wary, of not having a life. She knew Jonas wanted only the best for her, but lately she’d been chafing at her confines, hungry for new experiences and to get a taste of real life.

“I’ll be flying out again first thing in the morning.”

Lynn focused back on the conversation in time to hear Jonas. “So soon?” she asked in dismay. He’d only just gotten home. They’d hardly had an opportunity to talk to each other.

“Sorry, honey. You know the state of world affairs. My work is more important than ever right now.” Jonas finished his drink and set his glass on the marble-topped table next to his chair.

“Where are you off to?” Nick asked.

“Here and there.” Jonas smiled enigmatically. “I’m afraid I can’t be more specific than that.”

“Are you traveling with him?” Nick asked of Richard.

“No. I’ll be taking care of things here while Jonas is away.” Although not a muscle in Richard’s face moved, his hazel eyes were cold…reptilian as he stared at Nick.

Richard gave Lynn the creeps. He’d worked for Jonas for as long as Lynn could remember and he’d always given her the creeps. She’d often wondered why he shaved his head, and she thought he wore colored contacts, although she couldn’t be sure.

She was grateful when Jonas called an end to the evening and both Nick and Richard departed, leaving her and her godfather alone.

“I wish you didn’t have to leave so soon,” she said. She loved it when Jonas was in the house. He breathed life into the otherwise silent tomb they called home.

“You know I hate it when I have to leave you, baby.” Jonas gazed at her affectionately. “But duty calls and you know how important my work is. Not just to me, but to our country.”

“I know. I’m just so lonely when you’re away.”

Jonas got up from his chair and joined her on the sofa. He placed an arm around her shoulder and pulled her into an embrace. “I know you get lonely, and I wish I could do something to help ease that loneliness. But you also know how dangerous it is for you to get too close to anyone. Casual friends are fine, but anything else is dangerous for you.”

Yes, she knew. She’d cut her teeth on the fear that Jonas had instilled in her for as long as she could remember. Closeness bred familiarity, and familiarity bred the sharing of secrets. Jonas had warned her that telling her secrets could get her in trouble. She sighed and felt the familiar restlessness ripple through her.

“We’ve talked about this many times,” Jonas said.

“You’re special and the very things that make you special also put you at risk to be kidnapped or worse.” He tightened his arm around her. “If anything ever happened to you, I’d be lost. You must be careful, Lynn, and you should trust nobody.”

“I know…I know.”

“I have a little news that might cheer you up.” He released her and stood once again. “I’ve been in touch with our contact, who has been in touch with the Egyptian government concerning a certain artifact that needs to be recovered.”

Lynn sat up straighter, a burst of adrenaline flooding through her veins. “What kind of artifact?”

“A solid-gold vase that is believed to have belonged to Queen Hatshepshut. It was unearthed and smuggled out of Egypt by an American archeologist, and Egypt wants it back.”

“What are the details?” She sat forward on the sofa.

“I don’t have many to give you. The piece is currently on display at the Markham Convention Center. That’s all I know at this time. You’ll need to research it while I’m away.”

Lynn frowned, remembering the questions that had bothered her the night before when she’d retrieved the diamond. “I don’t understand. If the piece is stolen and is being displayed in a public place, why can’t the police just go in and arrest the person who has possession of it and give it back to the Egyptian government?”

He finished his drink and stood and faced her. “These things are complicated, Lynn. There are all kinds of political ramifications concerning the work we do. I’m sure you’ve noticed there is never any publicity about the treasures you’ve managed to retrieve.”

She nodded. “And I’ve wondered about that, too.”

“Lynn, if you aren’t comfortable doing this kind of work anymore, you certainly aren’t obliged to continue.” His voice held a slightly cool disapproval. “I can just let my contact know that we’re no longer interested in working for them. I’m sure they have other people as skilled, as competent as you.”

“No, it isn’t that,” she said hurriedly. “It’s just that it’s all rather confusing to me.” She couldn’t stand the thought of disappointing Jonas.

“My dear, working for the government is always confusing,” Jonas said with a laugh. He sobered. “You have to trust me, Lynn. What we’re doing is a service to our country.”

“Of course I trust you,” she replied. How could she not trust him? He’d acted as her mother and father since she’d been a baby. She adored him with all her heart.

“Then we can depend on you in this matter?”

“Of course you can…always,” she replied.

“Good! And now I must say good-night,” Jonas said. “I have an early flight in the morning.”

She wanted to protest. They’d scarcely had any time together, and he’d be gone in the morning. But she didn’t protest. She’d learned long ago to merely accept what little time her godfather had to give her.

“Good night, Uncle Jonas.” She stood and kissed him on the cheek. As she watched him disappear up the staircase toward his master suite, she realized he hadn’t really answered any of her questions at all.

The next day as she sat with several friends at a table in the Coffee Cloister, an upscale coffee shop near the college campus, the last thing on her mind was the work she did for the government and her godfather.

The conversation between the four young women, as always, revolved around clothes and guys, sex and love. As the three others talked about their problems with their boyfriends and ex-boyfriends, Lynn’s thoughts turned to Nick.

There had been something in his eyes last night, an expression that had made her slightly breathless with excitement. He hadn’t looked at her as if she was the boss’s daughter. He had looked at her as though she was an attractive, desirable woman.

She had access to his personnel files through her godfather’s computer. She made a mental note to check him out, see what she could learn about the handsome Nick Barnes.

“Earth to Lynn,” Jenny Walbrook said, the impatience in her tone indicating it wasn’t the first time she’d spoken to Lynn.

“Sorry, what did you say?”

“I asked if you’ve been to that new little boutique that just opened over on Palm Drive.”

“No. The last thing I need is more clothes. Uncle Jonas brings me something new to wear every time he goes out of town. I’ve got things hanging in my closet with the tags still on them.”

“Honey, a woman can never have too many clothes,” Jenny said.

“Or too-thin thighs,” Vicki added and they all laughed. The ring of Lynn’s cell phone interrupted the laughter. She rummaged in her purse to get it.

“Right on time,” Sonya Kincaid said dryly as she looked at her watch. “We’ve been here fifteen minutes and he’s checking up on her.”

Lynn ignored her friends as she answered the phone. “Hi, Uncle Jonas,” she said, knowing it could only be him. He was the only person who ever called her cell phone.

“Where are you, my dear?” he asked.

“At the Coffee Cloister with some friends,” she replied.

“How long are you planning on staying?”

The phone call and the question weren’t unusual. Jonas often called to see where she was, whom she was with and how long she’d be gone.

His overprotectiveness had never bothered her much before, but today she found the phone call irritating. She was an adult, yet she had to answer to Jonas as if she were ten years old and spending time away from home for the very first time.

“I’ll be home when we finish having coffee.” She rolled her eyes for the benefit of her friends and tamped down an unexpected edge of resentment toward her godfather.

“You know I worry when you’re out and about,” he said.

“I know, but I assure you I’m fine and will be home later.” It was the same conversation she had with him over and over again on a daily basis. They said their goodbyes and Lynn hung up and dropped her cell phone back into her purse.

“Honestly, Lynn. I don’t know how you stand it,” Vicki Taylor said the moment Lynn had hung up. “I mean, we all have people who care about us, but your godfather definitely takes the prize for being the most obsessive.”

“I know,” Lynn replied. She also knew that within the next fifteen or twenty minutes Jonas would call again to see if she’d made it home yet or not. It was rare that he didn’t call three or four times during the time she spent with her friends after classes.

“I don’t know how you can have a normal life with him calling you all the time,” Vicki continued. “I mean, don’t you ever just want to take that cell phone and toss it into the ocean?”

“Only about twice a day,” Lynn replied, then breathed a sigh of relief as the conversation moved to other subjects.

Lynn couldn’t very well tell her friends that her safety had always been an issue. Not only did Jonas worry about her being kidnapped for ransom because of his incredible wealth, but also because of the special powers she possessed.

She’d often wondered where she’d gotten the special skills that came so naturally…the acute hearing, the unnatural strength and speed, the sharp senses of smell and sight and feel.

Jonas had always told her they were gifts of nature. He’d had a large part in honing those gifts, seeing to it, also, that she had been trained in self-defense and martial arts.

Yes, she loved Jonas dearly and knew he’d done wonderful things for her and worried obsessively about her. But lately she was growing more and more irritated by all of the constraints he placed on her.

She wondered what would happen if she just didn’t answer the phone. What would Jonas do if several hours passed and he couldn’t get in touch with her? She was surprised to realize the thought held a certain appeal.

“Why don’t you meet us tonight, Lynn?” Sonya said as she flipped a strand of her platinum-blond hair behind her ear. “It’s Friday night and you never go with us to Sensations.”

Sensations was a popular Miami nightclub where Lynn knew her three friends hung out regularly on the weekends. She’d never gone with them. In fact, Lynn had never been inside a nightclub before.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she began her usual protests.

“Come on, Lynn. What’s one night of cutting loose a little bit? All you do is go to classes and study. It’s not natural. Come out with us and have some fun tonight,” Vicki said.

“Do it, Lynn,” Jenny reached across the small table and grabbed Lynn’s hand. “We usually meet there around nine and we always have such a good time. It just isn’t normal for a twenty-two-year-old to spend every night at home.”

Lynn’s usual protest rose to her lips, but this time, instead of voicing it, she swallowed hard. Did she dare? Jonas would have a fit if he knew she was even contemplating a night at a club.

“All right, I’ll meet you all there around nine this evening.” The minute the words left her mouth a thrill of anticipation whirled through her.

Tonight she would go to the club and hang out with her friends. If Jonas called her on the cell phone she wouldn’t answer it. She was twenty-two years old. It was time for her to rebel a bit against the lifestyle that had become far too constrictive.

It was time she got a life, a real life. She couldn’t wait.

Shy and beautiful, those were the words to describe Lynnette White. Nick sat in his office in the outbuilding that served as security headquarters for the compound and thought about Lynnette and the few minutes they had spent alone together the night before.

She was like a hothouse flower, and why wouldn’t she be? For the two years that Nick had worked for Jonas, and from everything he’d learned in that time, she’d certainly been treated like a hothouse flower.

Homeschooled through high school, driven back and forth in a car with a bodyguard through college, she’d definitely not had what could be considered a normal lifestyle.

He checked his watch and jumped up out of his chair. She should be pulling through the gates in the next ten minutes or so and he intended to be waiting for her.

As he left the outbuilding, his gaze automatically swept the grounds. Jonas’s illegal activities paid very well. It was Nick’s job to see that his security wasn’t breached.

Surveillance cameras were hidden throughout the property, keeping electronic vigil to make certain the perimeters of the grounds weren’t breached.

Behind the main house was a small shed where Nick and his team did most of their work. There, a huge bank of video screens monitored every area of the property.

There was also a force of security guards that kept an eye on the area immediately around the house. Jonas didn’t take his security lightly and neither did Nick.

As he walked, thoughts of Lynnette once again played in his mind. Somehow the fact that she was shy and so protected made his job to seduce her all the more distasteful. If she were worldly, savvy to the ways of people, and men in particular, he wouldn’t feel the tinge of regret that played in him now.

Still, it had to be done. He’d worked for two years to get into the inner workings of Jonas’s illegal activities and had yet to fully gain the man’s trust. His supervisors at the FBI had decided the way in was through Lynnette, so that’s the way Nick would go. He had his orders, and Nick tried to always follow orders.

Of course, it had been his penchant for not following orders that had first garnered him attention as a raw recruit years ago. He’d gone from raw recruit to deep undercover in the space of weeks. He knew part of his notorious quick climb through the ranks was not only because of his skill and commitment, but also who and where he’d come from.

He shoved these thoughts aside as he reached the front of the mansion and looked at his watch once again. There was no routine when it came to Lynnette’s near-nightly sojourns, but during the day you could set a clock by her comings and goings.

She left the house at seven-thirty in the morning on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays for eight-o’clock classes and returned home between three and three-fifteen in the afternoons.

He knew her classes ended at two and she often went to coffee with friends afterward, but she never stayed longer than an hour or so.

He leaned against the garage to wait for her arrival home. The July sun beat down relentlessly but Nick didn’t mind the heat. He’d been born and raised in Florida, and heat and humidity were part of the package. He could smell the faint briny scent of the ocean and couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.

He straightened as he saw Lynnette’s smart little red sports car pull up in front of the heavy iron gates of the compound. She had the convertible top down and her chestnut-colored hair sparkled with blond highlights in the sunshine.

He knew the moment she spied him. As she pulled her car up toward the garage and where he stood, he saw her cheeks flame with scarlet color.

She shut off the engine, and in three long strides he was at her door. “Hi,” he said as he opened the car door.

“Hi,” she replied. “Thank you,” she said as she grabbed her books and laptop computer and got out of the car.

He slammed the door shut behind her, noticing as he had the night before that she was much prettier up close than her pictures depicted.

The photos he’d studied of her hadn’t begun to capture the intriguing hue of her eyes, a green-and-gold blend that was distinctly unusual. “How was school today?” he asked.

“Fine.” She shifted her books from one arm to the other, not quite meeting his gaze.

“Beautiful day, isn’t it?” Who would have thought when he’d joined the FBI that part of his job would be making small talk with a shy, beautiful woman?

“Yes, it is pretty.” She met his gaze for the first time since she’d gotten out of her car. There was an unexpected boldness in those eyes. “What are you doing, Nick?”

“What do you mean? I’m standing here talking to you.”

Her eyes narrowed slightly. “And why are you doing that? I mean, you’ve been working for Jonas for a long time and you’ve never really talked to me before.”

Nick was slightly taken aback. He reminded himself that just because she was shy didn’t mean she was stupid…quite the contrary. “I don’t know. I enjoyed seeing you, talking to you last night. I realized I’d like to talk to you some more, get to know you better.”

“Why?” Dark distrust shone from her beautiful eyes, making them more green than gold.

A small laugh burst from him. “Why? Why not?”

The distrust in her eyes grew more pronounced. “And it doesn’t hurt to brown-nose the boss’s daughter, right?”

“Is that what you think this is about?”

“Isn’t it?” She held his gaze for another long moment. There was an edge to her, an edge that hadn’t been there the night before. He didn’t know what had caused it, but there was a spark in her eyes that looked mischievous, almost dangerous. It was definitely intriguing.

“No, it isn’t,” he protested, although she was too close for comfort with her assessment of his intentions. “Lynnette, I don’t know whether you’ve noticed or not, but you’re a very pretty woman. You’re twenty-two, I’m twenty-nine. I work here and you live here. I’d say it’s only natural that I’d take an interest in you.”

He held his breath, waiting for a response from her. He hadn’t expected her to be so suspicious. He hadn’t expected her to have such a low opinion of herself that she would just assume any interest on a male’s part would be because of ulterior motives.

She frowned and cocked her head to one side. “Richard’s coming.”

“Excuse me?”

“Richard Dunst,” she replied, and looked toward the gate.

Nick followed her gaze, and a moment later Richard’s car came into view. “How’d you know?” He turned to look at her once again.

Her cheeks blushed with color. “I heard his car engine. It has a distinctive sound.”

Nick had heard nothing until Richard’s car had pulled up to the gate. But he got no opportunity to ask her about it as Richard parked his car behind hers and got out and approached them.

Nick felt himself tense as Dunst drew closer. He sensed Lynnette tensing, as well. As far as the FBI was concerned, Jonas White was the devil himself. But the devil had a right-hand man and that was Richard Dunst.

“Nick…Lynn.” Richard greeted them with a curt nod of his closely shaved head. “I need to get some papers from inside for Jonas.”

Rumor had it the man had at some point in the past gone under the knife of a bad plastic surgeon. Something had gone wrong and that’s why Richard’s face appeared masklike, incapable of displaying any real emotion.

Nick could tell the man wore contacts, but nothing could hide the cold evil that resided within. Nick hoped that when they brought down Jonas, Richard fell with him. Nothing would give Nick more pleasure than to slap a tight pair of handcuffs on the man. Maybe then his features would express some emotion.

Dunst’s gaze went from Lynnette back to Nick. “Is there a security problem?”

“No, nothing like that. I was just visiting with Lynnette.” As if it were any of Dunst’s business, Nick thought.

“And I was just on my way inside,” Lynnette said. She moved past Nick and toward the front door, Richard just behind her.

When she reached the door, she opened it to allow Richard to precede her, then she turned back to Nick. A tiny smile curved up the corners of her full lips.

“My friends call me Lynn and tonight around nine I’m going to be at Sensations, a dance club in Miami.” With these words and a sweet blush, she turned and disappeared into the house.

He reared back on his heels and shoved his hands in his pockets as he took in her words. It had sounded like an invitation to join her.

Maybe seducing Lynn wasn’t going to be quite as difficult as he’d initially thought.

Chapter 3

It was about a thirty-minute drive from Jonas’s house to the outskirts of Miami where the club Sensations was located. As Lynn zipped down the highway toward the club, her heart beat rapidly with excitement.

She’d spoken with Jonas only an hour before and didn’t expect him to call the rest of the night. When she’d spoken to him, she’d told him she was lying on her bed studying, which had been true at the time. She just didn’t mention that she intended to get up and go out.

She didn’t want to lie to him, but she knew he’d disapprove of her plans for the night. He’d fill her head with stories of danger and kidnapping and he’d wear her down until she agreed to stay home.

She was tired of staying home, tired of being followed around the house by little blinking red lights and having only Arturo and Rita for company. She was tired of living like Rapunzel in her tower, protected from life by fear and an overly protective godfather.

Most evenings she spent on her computer, messing around with the video game she was programming or chatting in chat rooms. Although she’d always enjoyed the interaction with other people, she was also always aware that the relationships she had with her cyber friends were superficial and not real.

Again a wave of adrenaline shot through her. Tonight she was going to enjoy life the way most women her age enjoyed it…without fear, without restraints.

She was going to have a couple of drinks with her friends, dance to the music and act like a normal, healthy young woman. Tonight she was going to interact with real people in a real environment instead of in cyberspace with user names.

She’d never done anything like this before. She’d never rebelled in any way against Jonas and his fears and worries over her safety. She adored Jonas, who had taken her in after her parents’ deaths when she’d been five months old, saving her from a life as a ward of the state.

Her single goal through childhood and adolescence had been to please Jonas. She’d spent all of her life seeking his approval by being the good, dutiful daughter. She’d wanted to show him that he hadn’t made a mistake when he’d adopted her and brought her into his home to raise.

Certainly he’d given her the best of everything, and she never doubted that he had her best interests at heart. But the restlessness that she’d felt for the past several months could no longer be silenced.

It was time for her to seek her own way, find out who she was separate from Jonas. It was definitely time for a change.

Although she had never been to the dance club, she’d driven by it once not too long ago when she’d come into Miami to pick up some school supplies.

The closer she got, the faster her heart beat with excitement. She felt as if this was the first night of her life, that finally she was going to break free from who and what she was and just have fun like any normal twenty-two-year-old.

The club was housed in a huge steel-and-glass one-story building with bright neon lettering flashing across the top. The parking lot was already three-quarters filled when Lynn turned in at ten after nine.

She spied Sonya’s silver Porsche and pulled into the empty space next to it. She sat for a moment in the car, fighting the shyness that always swept over her when she was going into unknown territory. Go have some fun, she commanded herself.

As she stepped out of her car, the balmy night air wrapped around her, bringing with it the scent of the city and the sounds of music and people, coming from the open door of the club.

A touch of nerves fluttered in her stomach as she reached up and smoothed her hair, then ran her clammy hands down the thighs of her tight jeans.

Her blouse was a forest-green crop top that she knew enhanced the green of her eyes. The blouse displayed her slender waist and was more provocative than her usual choice. She figured if she was going to cut loose, she might as well dress the part.

She grabbed her tiny purse from the car seat, then locked the car and walked toward the front door of the club. Her friends had been talking about Sensations forever. She knew from them that the place had become one of the hot spots of Miami for the young and single set.

A man at the door collected the ten-dollar cover charge, then Lynn walked past him and into the nightclub. For just a moment she was overwhelmed with sights and sounds.

The club was cavernous. At the far end a live band played from an elevated stage area. Writhing, gyrating bodies filled the huge dance floor, and colored lights swept over them like beacons drawn to their movements.

Tables were arranged around the dance floor and a long bar stretched across each side of the room. There were people everywhere and Lynn despaired of ever finding her friends in the mesh of people.

“Hey, sweetheart, I haven’t seen you around here before. How about you let me buy you a drink?” A tall blonde touched Lynn’s arm, his bleary smile letting her know he’d been here awhile and had imbibed more than one drink.

“No, thanks, I’m looking for somebody.”

“I’m the man you’re looking for,” he replied. He paused to sip from the drink glass in his hand, then continued. “I’m the Romeo to your Juliet, the moon to your stars, the music to your song.” He smiled with the overconfidence of a drunk, displaying a row of perfect white teeth.

“I’m sorry, but I’m not interested.” Lynn felt the blush that heated her cheeks. She wasn’t looking for a love connection or a one-night stand. She just wanted a night out with her friends.

At that moment, to her relief, she heard Sonya calling her name. She looked around and spied her friends at a table in the distance. “Excuse me,” she said to the blonde. “Maybe another time.” She didn’t give him an opportunity to say anything else but hurried toward the table where Sonya, Vicki and Jenny were waving to her.

“We thought you were going to chicken out and not show,” Vicki said as she pulled a chair out and yanked Lynn into it.

“I got hung up at the door by some guy who wanted to be the Romeo to my Juliet,” Lynn replied.

The three others looked at each other and laughed. “That’s Roger,” Sonya said. “He’s been looking for his Juliet for as long as we’ve been coming here.”

“Drinks! We need drinks,” Vicki said, and signaled to a passing waitress.

Within minutes they all had drinks before them. The others had ordered Lynn a drink called an Alabama Slammer, a fruit-punch-like concoction that went down smooth and easy and sweet.

“So, did you sneak out of the house, or tell your uncle you were going to the library to study?” Sonya asked.

“Neither,” Lynn replied. “Uncle Jonas is out of the country. I spoke to him on the phone before I left to come here.”

“I’ll bet a hundred bucks you didn’t mention what was on your agenda for the night,” Jenny said, her brown eyes sparkling.

Lynn laughed. “No way. I’d lose the bet.”

Vicki leaned over and grabbed her arm. “We’re just glad you’re here. It’s about time you get a life.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Lynn replied, and hoisted her glass for a group toast.

Lynn had met the other three women two years ago when she’d been attending college. They were the only friends she’d ever had, and she adored each of them.

Sonya Kincaid, with her bleached blond hair and love of makeup was a theater major and the extrovert of the three. Currently she worked teaching high school drama and was active in community theater.

Jenny Walbrook was majoring in child psychology and was a slightly overweight brunette with a smile that could warm Antarctica.

Lynn was closest to Vicki Taylor. She’d known the pretty redhead longer than the other two. Vicki was also a computer science grad student. Vicki came from a wonderfully normal, tight-knit middle-class family. Lynn loved hearing her talk about her parents and siblings.

Lynn had never been much of a drinker. She occasionally had a glass of wine with dinner, but the Alabama Slammers were delicious, and the ambiance around her encouraged her to have more than one.

By the time she was halfway through her third drink, she was having a ball. She felt a pleasant buzz in her head and found everything anyone said vastly amusing.

The first time a guy came up and asked her to dance, she’d declined with a fierce blush. She’d never danced in public before, and her natural shyness raised its ugly head.

But, it didn’t take her long to realize that nobody was paying attention to anyone else, and the music called to her at the same time the drinks gave her courage. When she was asked again, with her friends urging her on, she hit the dance floor.

She danced and laughed and drank with her old friends and the new friends she met. The loud music made any meaningful conversation impossible, but Lynn didn’t mind. With each drink her head grew fuzzier and fuzzier and the last thing she wanted was conversation. She just wanted the music and the laughter and the feeling of utter freedom that sang in her veins.

By the time she finished her fifth drink she was vaguely aware that the fuzz in her brain had grown bigger than anything else.

She grabbed her purse and stumbled toward the rest rooms, deciding that perhaps a cool compress on her forehead would sober her up just a bit.

She was surprised by the way the floor seemed to undulate beneath her feet as she walked slowly and carefully to keep from falling down. Her stomach felt just a tad bit sick, and she stepped up her pace, eager to get to the bathroom.

The rest room was crowded, but she managed to work her way to one of the sinks. She grabbed a couple of paper towels, ran them under the cold water, then wiped them across her forehead and the back of her neck.

Her reflection in the mirror was blurry and she felt as if she were swimming through layers of cotton. The cool water on her neck and forehead did little to clear her head.

So, this is what it felt like to drink too much, she thought. More than anything she suddenly wanted to curl up in a corner and sleep until the brain fogginess passed.

The idea of being found in the morning curled up on the floor by a cleaning crew made her giggle. She swiped her forehead one last time then turned away from the mirror.

As she shuffled from the rest room she vaguely realized she’d learned a valuable lesson tonight…three Alabama Slammers was her absolute limit and at the moment she was way over her limit. If she ever came here again she would know to limit her drinks to no more than three.

She’d gone only a few feet toward the table where her friends awaited when a big hand grabbed her around her upper arm.

“Hey, baby, I think maybe it’s time you and I spend a little alone time together.”

She squinted up at the tall, dark-haired man who held her in his grip. She’d danced with him twice and thought she might have flirted with him a bit. She thought his name was Bob. “I don’t think so, Bob,” she said, and attempted to pull her arm from his grasp. “I need to get back to the table with my friends.”

“Come on, honey. You know you’re hot for me.” He pulled her down the hallway back toward the rest rooms, then backed her up and she found herself pinned between him and a wall. “And the name is Rob.”

“Bob…Rob…whatever, my friends are waiting for me and I’m not hot for anyone. In fact, I’m not feeling very well.” She placed her palms on his massive chest and pushed in an attempt to get some breathing room.

She was uncomfortable by his intimate nearness, and the fact that they appeared to be in a small alcove just out of view of the general public made her even more uneasy.

“I’ll make you feel better. Come on, admit it. You’ve been coming on to me all night long. You’ve been sending me signals and, honey, I’ve been receiving them.” His breath was hot and sour as he leaned forward, apparently preparing to kiss her.

She turned her head to the side and felt his mouth glance off her cheek. Confusion swept through her. Had she been sending signals? She didn’t think so. She certainly hadn’t meant to.

“I’m sorry…I didn’t mean anything…just let me go,” she said, and pushed against his chest again. He was as immovable as a mountain, and the first stir of panic rose up inside her. “Please, let me go.”

“I’ll let you go when I’m finished getting to know you better.” His blue eyes were cold, hard-looking as he sneered down at her.

To her horror, his hands moved up her body and across her breasts. She wanted to throw up. He pressed more intimately against her, and she could feel that he was aroused.

“I’m warning you, let me go or you’ll be sorry.”

He laughed, as if stimulated by her protests and pleas. “I’ll be sorry? What are you going to do, sweetheart? Hit me with that little purse you’re carrying?”

Lynn had never used the skills she’d been born with, outside of her work. Jonas had warned her from the time she was small that those skills should never be used when somebody else could see. But she wasn’t about to allow this half-drunk creep to touch her anymore. She drew a deep, steadying breath, then struck out.

He’d been late. A problem with one of the security cameras had caused Nick to be late arriving at Sensations. The moment he’d arrived it had taken him only a few minutes to spy Lynn at the table with her friends.

He’d stood some distance away and watched her. It was obvious she was having a good time. He’d never seen her look so animated, and it was apparent she was comfortable with her friends.

It was also obvious that she’d had a lot to drink when she stood and staggered off toward the rest rooms. He watched her as she made her way across the floor. Her jeans fit tightly on her long, slender legs and sexy bottom. The short blouse displayed her flat abdomen and the thrust of her breasts. She looked hot, and Nick had a feeling he wasn’t the only male in the place who had noticed that fact.

When several minutes passed and she didn’t come back to her table, Nick headed in the direction of the rest rooms, wondering what was taking her so long.

He saw her immediately, pinned against a wall by a big hulk of a drunk. She looked tiny and helpless and frightened and adrenaline pumped through Nick as he forced his way through the throng of people to get to her.

Before he could reach her, she flew into motion with a speed that astounded Nick. She boxed the man’s ears, jabbed him in the eyes, then shoved him back with a force that looked almost inhuman.

“Lynn,” he cried to be heard above the noise.

Her eyes were wild as she looked around. When she saw him, she ran into his arms. Nick put an arm around her while he looked for the creep who’d had her backed against the wall. He was nowhere to be seen.

“Are you all right?” he asked her as he put his hands on her slender shoulders.

She nodded and looked up at him, her green eyes overly bright and unfocused. “I’m just so glad to see a familiar face.” Her words slurred together so it sounded as if she said “sogladseefamiliarfash.” She leaned into him, and he wrapped his arms around her.

“You’re drunk,” he said.

She nodded, not even bothering to protest his announcement. “Too many ’Bama Slammers.”

She didn’t seem to notice that she was in his arms. She leaned heavily against him as if unsure she could stand on her own. She might not be aware of their closeness, but he was acutely aware of it.

The top of her head fit neatly just beneath his chin and the soft silk of her chestnut hair tickled his jaw. Her breasts pressed against his chest, and her breath was warm and punch scented on his face.

His hand pressed against her back and encountered the warm skin between her short top and the waistband of her jeans. The touch of her warm, smooth skin electrified him.

“You need to go home,” he said gruffly, and moved his arm from around her back.

“You’re absolutely right. I’ll just say goodbye to my friends and be off.” She swayed on her feet without him as an anchor.

Nick cursed under his breath and put his arm around her once again. She was totally bombed. “I’ll drive you home,” he said.

“That’s not necessary,” she protested, the words running together to form one long word. “I’m perfectly capable of driving home.”

Ah, the confidence of drunks, he thought ruefully. “I’m driving you home, and that’s the end of the matter,” he said forcefully. “Now, go say goodbye to your friends and we’ll get out of here.”

As they wove their way back to the table where Lynn’s friends sat, Nick kept a firm grip on her, not trusting that she wouldn’t fall flat on her face if he let her go.

What would she have done if he hadn’t shown up here when he did? Who would have seen to it that she got home safely? He wanted to lecture her on her irresponsibility, drinking too much and not only getting herself in a tight spot with a man, but also not thinking about how she would get herself home safe and sound.

But he knew a lecture at this moment would be wasted on her. Drunks didn’t listen to lectures.

“Wow, did you find him in the bathroom?” a heavily made-up blonde at the table asked Lynn with a pale arched eyebrow. “I need to go to the bathroom more often if that’s what’s available.”

Lynn giggled and placed a slender hand on Nick’s chest. “These are my friends, Sonya, Vicki and Jenny.” She patted his chest. “And this is Nicky. He’s driving me home.”

The flirtatious smile on Sonya’s face instantly disappeared. “Whoa, Lynn, honey. One of us will drive you home. One of the cardinal rules of club life is that you don’t let a man you just met take you home when you’re drunk.”

“I’m not drunk and Nicky is an old friend. He works for Uncle Jonas. I’ll be perfectly fine with him.”

Nick was impressed that her friends apparently did care enough about her to question his motives. “I’m head of security for Jonas. I’ll see that she gets home safely,” he said even as he marveled over the fact that she’d called him Nicky and patted him on the chest.

It was obvious her intake of alcohol had quieted the natural shyness he knew she possessed. “Say goodbye, Lynn, and let’s get you home.”

“Yes, get me home to my ivory tower with the little red eyes that watch me and the cell phone that Uncle Jonas uses to keep track of me twenty-four/seven.”

The long sentence seemed to take everything out of her. She slumped against Nick and moaned. “I think I feel sick.”

That was Nick’s cue to half carry, half drag her to the nearest exit. He hoped when she got some fresh air maybe she’d sober up a bit.

His hope was short-lived. The night air did nothing to sober her up, if anything she appeared to be getting drunker by the moment.

He guided her to his car but paused before putting her in the passenger seat. “Do you feel like you’re going to throw up?” He hated to be indelicate, but he didn’t want her tossing her cookies in his car.

“No, I don’t think so. I just need to close my eyes for a few minutes. Everything is spinning.”

He tucked her into the passenger seat, then hurried to the driver’s side and slid in behind the wheel. She slumped back, eyes closed and appeared to pass into oblivion as he started the car and left Sensations behind.

As he drove, her scent eddied in the air, the fragrance of expensive spicy perfume and the faint sweet scent of punch and Southern Comfort.

She’d felt good against him. Too good. It had been more than two years since Nick had enjoyed any kind of relationship with a woman. Being undercover wasn’t conducive to relationships and usually only led to disaster. He hoped developing a relationship with Lynn wouldn’t prove disastrous for either one of them.

He thought of what she’d said when he’d told her it was time to go home, home to her ivory tower where the red eyes followed her and her cell phone rang all the time.

It wasn’t much of a life. He knew the red eyes she’d spoken of were the sensors in the walls. Jonas had been enthralled by the technology that would allowed him to see on a computer screen where in the house each member of the household was, to control the temperature of the air, the artwork on the wall, the music that was piped into each individual room.

Jonas had loved the unique technology, but Nick had never thought about what it would be like to live everyday life with that kind of Big Brother surveillance. Maybe that was another reason for her nightly drives—to escape the ivory tower that was home for a little while.

He had a feeling tonight had been some sort of latent teenage rebellion for Lynn, a bucking and kicking of the rigid rules and isolated lifestyle she lived to please Jonas.

“Nicky?”

He looked over to see her still slumped down, but her beautiful eyes were open and she looked at him. “Yeah?”

“I’m drunk.”

He smiled. “Yes, you are.”

“I’ve never been drunk before. I’m not sure I like it.”

She sat up and rolled down her window, appearing to sober up just a tad.

“How many drinks did you have?”

She frowned, a delicate furrow appearing between her brows. “I’m not sure…five or six. I think I might have lost count.” She tilted her head toward the window, letting the night breeze blow her hair and caress her face.

For a few minutes they rode in silence, then she turned to look at him once again. “Have you ever gotten totally blitzed?”

He laughed. “I’m ashamed to admit, on more than one occasion, although most of my drunks occurred in the six months after my twenty-first birthday.”

“Did you feel awful afterward?”

“Each and every time,” he admitted.

Once again she fell silent and her eyes drifted closed. He wondered if she’d fallen asleep. If so, it was probably the best thing for her as long as he could rouse her enough to get her into the house when they arrived.

The minute he pulled into the drive and pressed the button on his remote that would open the gates, she sat up and opened her eyes once again.

He parked in front of the door, got out of the car and went around to open her car door. He held out his hand to help her up out of the car. “Are you okay to get inside?”

“I’m fine.” She held on to his hand and leaned into him, the warmth of her body stirring an immediate response in his. “You won’t tell Uncle Jonas about tonight, will you? He’d be upset with me.”

He squeezed her hand. “Don’t worry, this will be our little secret.”

She smiled, a half-drunk grin that was more than a little bit charming. Her face was mere inches from his. To his surprise she threw her arms around his neck. “Thank you. Maybe we should kiss to seal our secret.”

Apparently she hadn’t sobered up much at all because Nick knew if she wasn’t drunk as a skunk she’d never be acting so forward.

That didn’t mean he wasn’t tempted. He was definitely tempted. Her lips looked soft and welcoming, but he knew if he took advantage of her now in her condition, he could kiss any hope of a future relationship goodbye.

He skimmed a strand of her silky, chestnut hair from her face and smiled down at her. “When I kiss you, Lynnette White, I want you sober as a preacher and aware of every second of that kiss.”

Her eyes widened as he released his hold on her. “If you’d like, I’ll be more than happy to drive you back to the club for your car in the morning.”

“Okay.” She blinked a couple of times, as if the gesture might help her clear her thoughts. “First thing in the morning? Maybe around eight?”

“Why don’t we make it around ten,” he countered, knowing she had no idea what was in store for her when she woke up in the morning.

“Okay, and thanks again.”

“No problem.”

She definitely wasn’t sober, he thought as he watched her weave her way toward the front door. One thing was clear—tonight certainly hadn’t hurt him in his bid to get closer to her.

It wasn’t until he was halfway to his own apartment that he thought of how she’d handled the creep who’d had her pinned against the wall.

He’d never seen anyone move so fast or with such skill. He’d intended to ride in on his white horse and save the day, but she hadn’t needed him to help her at all.

He had a feeling there was a lot more to Lynnette White than he’d initially thought. He was aware of the fact that he was probably on a path to destruction no matter how things went.

If he seduced Lynn and learned what he needed to bring Jonas down, then Lynn would live with the consequences of his actions.

If he seduced her and things went bad between them before he got the information he needed, then Jonas would either fire him or kill him.

Nick knew the man was capable of both.

Chapter 4

“Eat your breakfast. Eggs aren’t good when they’re cold.” Rita’s dark eyes gazed at Lynn suspiciously. “Are you coming down with something? It isn’t like you to dawdle over your food.”

Lynn stared down at the eggs on her plate and grimaced. The sunny-side-up eggs appeared to be staring back at her. “No, I’m not coming down with anything. I’m just not very hungry this morning.”

She wasn’t sick. It was much worse than that. She suspected she was on the verge of death.

She’d awakened forty-five minutes ago feeling as if a hundred drums thundered in her head. She’d still been wearing her clothes from the night before. Her mouth had felt as if it had been stuffed with foul-tasting cotton, and she was certain if she moved too fast she would be dead before she made it out of her bed.

A long, hot shower had done little to still the thunder in her head. She still felt more than a little queasy. She barely remembered falling into bed the night before and had only vague memories of the ride home in Nick’s car.

“Are you sure you aren’t getting sick?” Rita asked with a frown of concern. “You look pale.”

A burst of affection for the frowning Cuban woman filled Lynn. Rita was the closest thing to a mother Lynn would ever know. “Really, I’m fine.” To assure the older woman she picked up a piece of toast and bit into it. She thought she could handle toast and coffee.

Rita refilled her own coffee cup and joined Lynn at the kitchen table. “I know what’s wrong. You’re just missing Mr. Jonas,” she exclaimed.

Lynn nodded, relieved to have the subject changed. “It’s always difficult for the first couple of days when he leaves after being here. When he’s home he fills the house with such energy.”

“He spoils you.” Rita’s dark eyes twinkled. “If you were a different kind of person you would be intolerable from all his spoiling.”

Lynn laughed, then sobered. “I would gladly give up all the things Jonas brings me when he comes home if he would just spend more time here with us.”

“He’s an important man and does important work. Besides, it won’t be long until he’ll be home again.”

“I know.” As Lynn ate her toast Rita talked about her children. She and Arturo had three boys, all older than Lynn and all married with their own families. As always, when Rita spoke of her family, a wistful yearning filled Lynn.

Rita’s boys had always been kind to Lynn, but even though Rita and Arturo had been good and loving to her, it wasn’t the same as having her own real family.

“Raoul is coming to visit on Sunday,” Rita said. “You enjoy visiting with him.”

At twenty-five, Raoul was Rita’s youngest son and the one closest in age to Lynn. “Yes, it will be nice seeing him again. Is he bringing his wife and kids?” Raoul had a two-year-old and a three-year-old, both boys, and utterly delightful children.

“Not this visit. It will just be Raoul.”

Lynn took another bite of her toast and thought about the parents she’d never known. “You didn’t know my parents, did you, Rita?” she asked.

Rita shook her head. “No. They were already gone when Mr. Jonas hired us. I only know what you know, that they were close friends to Mr. Jonas and when you were born they named him your godfather.”

“Jonas told me they were quite wealthy and eccentric.”

“They would have had to have been plain loco to take their yacht out on a day when there were storm warnings.”

Rita was right. According to what Jonas had told her, and the copies of news reports he’d saved for her, her parents had taken their yacht out and had been hit by a squall and lost at sea. Jonas, as her godfather, had petitioned the court for and won custody of five-month-old Lynn.

Rita sat at the table until Lynn had finished her toast and coffee then, Lynn headed upstairs to get ready for Nick to pick her up and take her to her car.

Nick. She was embarrassed to see him this morning. She didn’t remember everything that had occurred the night before, but she had a definite memory of being in his arms and of being half dragged, half carried to his car.

She remembered his eyes glittering dangerously dark as he’d grabbed her to him after she’d fought off the masher. She also remembered the feel of his tautly muscled chest when she’d patted it. She couldn’t believe she’d actually patted him on his chest.

She’d never drink again. She would never get so stupid again. As far as she was concerned her first foray into trying to have a life of her own had been a dismal failure. She’d acted like a fool.

At quarter to ten she walked out the front door to watch for Nick. She was dreading seeing him again, ashamed of her actions the night before and the fact that he’d had to rescue her from her own ignorance.

At least the two aspirins she’d swallowed right after breakfast had taken the edge off the headache that was a reminder of the night activities.

She should have just told Nick she’d take a cab this morning to get her car. Then she wouldn’t have had to face him. But even as she thought about it, she knew sooner or later she’d have to see him again. It might as well be first thing this morning.

She tensed as she heard the approach of a familiar car. Not Nick’s but rather Richard Dunst’s. Lynn had no idea what tied her godfather to the humorless, strange man. Richard had been around for as long as Lynn could remember, but she’d never been comfortable around him.

A moment later his car pulled up in front of her and Richard got out. “Good morning, Lynn,” he said. “On your way out?” His shaved head gleamed in the morning sunlight.

She resented the question. She had a feeling that when Jonas was away Richard took it upon himself to keep tabs on her movements. She couldn’t very well lie and tell him she wasn’t going out. Besides, at that moment Nick’s car entered through the gates.

“I’m taking a ride with Nick this morning,” she said. She didn’t intend to explain further. It was none of his business. She certainly didn’t want him to know that Nick was taking her to her car because she’d gone to a club the night before and had gotten too drunk to drive herself home.

“Indeed?” The single word held no inflection, nor did his face show any expression. “Enjoy yourself.” He nodded curtly, then went inside the front door.

She didn’t give Nick a chance to get out of the car but opened the passenger door herself and slid inside.

“Good morning,” he said. “Everything all right?”

“Yes, I’ve just never been comfortable around Richard.” She instantly bit her tongue. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Why? You’re not allowed to have negative feelings? Personally, I find him rather creepy.”

She cast him a grateful smile.

“At least you look a bit better this morning than you did last night.” He put the car into gear and took off. “How’s your head?”

“When I first woke up I thought it might explode. I took some aspirin and it’s feeling a bit better now.” She bit her bottom lip, then continued. “I guess I owe you a big apology.”

“For what?” He gave her a sideways glance.

“For being drunk and stupid last night.” Her cheeks warmed with a blush.

“No need to apologize. Everyone in the place enjoyed it when you stripped down naked and danced onstage with the band.”

She stared at him in horror, then saw the teasing grin and the light of laughter in his eyes. “Stop it,” she exclaimed. “I did no such thing.” She laughed, her laughter quickly dying. “But, what I did was foolish and immature,” she admitted.

“You want a lecture about the dangers of young women getting drunk in bars?”

“No, thanks. Trust me Nick, you couldn’t say anything to me that I haven’t been telling myself all morning.”

“Ah, how quickly things change.”

“What do you mean?”

“Last night I was Nicky and today I’m back to being just plain Nick.”

The heat in her cheeks intensified and her mind filled with a sudden memory of her not only calling him Nicky, but also patting his chest and asking him to kiss her. “Oh my God,” she breathed aloud.

“What?”

“I am so mortified. I just remembered asking you for a kiss last night.”

“Consider yourself lucky, a lot of women who drink too much in a bar don’t remember anything about the night before.”

“I’m sure you’re right.” She turned her head to look out the passenger window, trying to still the beating of her heart. She remembered more than asking him for a kiss. She now remembered his response to her, that when he kissed her he wanted her stone sober so she’d remember every minute of the kiss.

There was no getting around it. Nick Barnes affected her on a level she’d never felt before. There was a light in his eyes when he looked at her that excited her. The very scent of him stirred her, and that sexy smile of his created a heat in the pit of her stomach she’d never felt before.

He was dressed to kill this morning, wearing a pair of charcoal slacks and a black short-sleeved dress shirt that displayed his biceps. He looked cool and elegant and sinfully handsome.

“Personally, I have one regret about last night,” he said.

“What’s that?”

His dark eyes swept over her before turning back to focus out the front window. “There you were, looking all hot and sexy in those tight little jeans and blouse and I didn’t even get a chance to dance with you.”

Hot and sexy. Was that the way he saw her? “Do you like to dance?” she asked, grateful that her voice was steady and didn’t betray anything of her inner emotions.

“I like to slow dance. I think it’s one of the lost arts of our peers, who seem to prefer jumping around on the dance floor rather than being in each other’s arms.” Again those dark eyes of his swept over her. “I’d like to take you dancing sometime.”

“I think I’d like that.” Her breath caught in the center of her chest. Once again she looked out the window as she imagined being held tightly in his arms as they swayed to soft, romantic music.

“Where did you learn how to fight?”

She turned her head to look at him once again, surprised at the abrupt change of subject. “What do you mean?”

“Last night when I got to the club you were pushed up against a wall by some creep. I tried to get to you to help you out, but before I got there you took care of the problem yourself.” His gaze held curiosity. “I’ve never seen anyone move so fast.”

She inwardly cursed her stupidity yet again. Jonas had warned her from the time she was little never to display any show of her skills. In the blink of a few drinks she’d forgotten all she’d been taught.

“I’ve been trained in self-defense. Uncle Jonas made sure of it,” she explained. “He’s always been afraid that I’d be kidnapped because of his wealth and the work he does for the government with defense contracts and such.”

He cast her a look that appeared to be full of surprise, then returned his gaze out the window. “He does seem to have his finger in a lot of pies,” he said as he changed lanes and they flew down the highway.

“Yes, he does. I know that besides the import business and his contract work he dabbles in real estate, among other things.” She felt herself relaxing with each mile that passed. “What about your family? Do you have relatives here in town?”

She saw his fingers tighten around the steering wheel. “My mother and father live here in Miami, and I’ve got two brothers and a sister, but I haven’t seen any of them for years.”

She looked at him in surprise. As someone who’d always hungered for a real family of her own, she couldn’t imagine such a thing…to have a big family in the same city and not see them every day. “Why don’t you see them?”

He hesitated a long moment before replying. “You ever heard of Joey Barnes?”

Lynn frowned thoughtfully. “Isn’t he some sort of Mafia guy?”

“Not Mafia, but organized crime. He’s the head of a large crime network here in Miami and he’s my father.”

Lynn gasped in shock as she digested this information about him. She’d have never guessed. “Does Jonas know about this?”

“Yes, he’s aware of my background.”

“You don’t see your family at all?”

His fingers seemed to relax their hold on the steering wheel. “When I was eighteen I realized I didn’t want to be part of my father’s lifestyle. I wanted to make my own way in the world. When I told my father that, he disowned me. I occasionally talk to my older brother, Anthony, and my mother, but that’s it.”

“When you were eighteen, is that when you started your security business?”

“No, I didn’t start that until about seven years ago. Between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, I just kind of drifted, trying to decide exactly what I wanted to do with my life.”

“Still, it must be hard not to have any real contact with your family.” She sighed wistfully. “I’d give anything to be able to talk to my mother and father or to have sisters and brothers in my life,” she said.

“What did happen to your parents? I know Jonas raised you from the time you were a baby.”

“Their boat capsized in a storm and they were lost. I was too young to even have any memories of them.” She leaned her head back against the seat and smiled. “When I was younger, I went through a period when I was certain that someplace out in the world I had siblings.”

“Do you think that’s possible?” Nick asked.

“No. It was illogical for me to even entertain the notion, but I guess it was kind of like kids who dream up imaginary friends.”

“You must have had a lonely childhood.”

She hesitated a moment, then nodded. “Jonas has been loving and very good to me but he’s gone so much of the time. Rita and Arturo have also been as close to family as can be, but, yes, I guess I did have a lonely childhood. Jonas has always been so protective.”

Nick glanced at her, then returned his attention back to the road. “I’d say that’s the understatement of the century. You mentioned last night something about being in a tower with blinking red eyes and cell phones that never stop ringing.”

Lynn gasped and covered her mouth in horror. “I left my cell phone at home.”

“Do you need to make a phone call?”

“No, but Jonas will probably be trying to call me.” She couldn’t believe she’d gone off without the phone. Apparently the fog in her brain from last night hadn’t completely disappeared.

“So, he won’t be able to reach you until you get back home. What’s the problem?”

Indeed? What was the problem? She leaned her head back against the seat thoughtfully. Was it such a crime if Jonas didn’t know her every movement, her exact whereabouts at all times of the day or night?

What other person her age had a parent figure checking up on them every couple of hours each day? She had to gain some independence in order to grow. Suddenly she didn’t care that Jonas couldn’t get ahold of her.

All too quickly they were back at the club. The only car in the lot was hers. “So, what’s on your agenda for the rest of the day?” he asked as he parked next to her car.

“Nothing particular,” she replied. “What about you?”

“I’m on security duty at noon today.”

“Then I’ve taken up too much of your time already.” She opened the passenger door and grabbed her purse from the seat between them. “Thanks again, Nick.”

“No problem, and Lynn…if you remember asking me for a kiss last night, do you also remember what my response was?”

His eyes were dark and provocative as he held her gaze.

“That you’d kiss me when I was sober and could remember everything about the kiss.” She repeated the words he’d said to her the night before.

He nodded, that sexy grin sweeping over his lips. “You just let me know when you’re ready, and I’ll be more than happy to oblige you.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said.

Minutes later as she drove back toward home, her thoughts were filled with Nick Barnes. She tried to tell herself that he was probably just being kind, being sociable to the boss’s daughter, but she knew it was more than that.

He didn’t look at her as the boss’s daughter. He looked at her as an attractive, desirable woman. Besides, surely he knew that sucking up to her would get him nowhere with Uncle Jonas.

Lynn recognized she was fairly naive in the arena of dating. Although she’d dated several men over the last couple of years, most of those dates had been arranged by Jonas for social events they were attending all together.

She’d met a few guys at college but nobody who affected her like Nick did. Her attraction to him was visceral, but that wasn’t all there was to it.

For some reason she found him easy to talk to, didn’t feel the suffocating shyness with him, and that merely increased her attraction to him.

He’d said he’d like to take her dancing sometime, and she was disappointed that he hadn’t made any real date with her.

She shoved thoughts of him out of her mind and instead thought of the new job Jonas had pointed out to her, the recovery of the solid-gold vase that was on display at the Markham Center.

She’d spent much of the day yesterday on the Internet studying the floor plans of the building and reading up on anything she could find concerning the Markham Convention Center. There wasn’t a computer file in the world she couldn’t access, and she’d pulled up everything she could find on the convention center.

From studying the material she knew how to get in and out of the building and knew exactly what she had to do to retrieve the vase once inside. She’d done her homework and planned to execute the recovery that night.

The weather report predicted clouds moving in, and a cloudy night was perfect for her to do her work. Maybe by focusing on the work she loved, she’d stop thinking about Nick Barnes.

Jonas White stood at the window in his hotel room in Paris, the telephone pressed to his ear. He listened as Richard Dunst updated him on some of their business dealings. They were careful about what they said, knowing that Jonas was under FBI investigation and land phone lines could be tapped.

“I smell a romance brewing,” Dunst said, when they’d finished their business talk.

“A romance? What are you talking about?”

“Lynn. She apparently has a new suitor. I saw her leaving this morning to take a drive with him.”

Jonas tightened his grip on the receiver. So, this was probably why she hadn’t answered his calls that morning. A sick tension began to twist in his gut. “Somebody from her classes?”

“No. It’s Nick.”

“Nick? Nick Barnes?” Jonas frowned thoughtfully, relieved somewhat. At least this was a situation he could control. The tension in his gut ebbed as his mind whirled.

He supposed he shouldn’t be surprised that Nick had finally noticed Lynn was a lovely young woman. And Nick was certainly not hard to look at himself, so it shouldn’t surprise him that Lynn might be interested in the handsome head of security.

“I’ll handle that situation when I get back to the States,” he said to Dunst. “Meanwhile you need to focus on our other project. I’ll be back within the week and I hope you’ll have some good news for me.”

Jonas disconnected the call and sat on the edge of the king-size bed, his mind a jumble of thoughts. He knew he was under investigation by the FBI. He’d been under investigation ever since they tied him to drug smuggler Marshall Carrington. So far they hadn’t been able to prove anything but he was definitely on their radar.

The FBI surveillance was also the reason he tried to be out of the States whenever Lynn was going to retrieve a treasure. He made sure he could never be tied to the theft of those precious items.

If the FBI interest wasn’t enough, there was a possibility that James Whitlow wouldn’t win his bid for reelection as president of the United States in November. Ever since that bitch reporter, Tory Patton, had done an exposé of Whitlow’s questionable campaign money, Whitlow had lost the support of many of his constituents.

Jonas had donated a huge amount of money to Whitlow’s campaign and had slipped in some funding from a drug lord he’d done business with in the past. That source of funds had created a blackmail tool that had put Jonas in the driver’s seat. He’d been able to gently “persuade” the current administration to push legislation that was favorable to his interests.

If Whitlow lost the election in November, then Jonas would lose his power base in the White House. The thought of losing power was enough to put Jonas in a foul mood.

He got up from the bed and paced back and forth across the expanse of lush beige carpeting. The project Dunst was working on was to find a buyer for the diamond Lynn had lifted several days ago. Jonas was confident the sale would occur without a hitch.

Once again he stopped at the window and stared outside, where he could see in the distance the Eiffel Tower rising up against a cloudy sky. But his thoughts weren’t on the pleasures of Paris.

He was worried about Lynn. Never had she questioned him about the work they did the way she had the other night. The intelligence she possessed that was such an asset just might eventually become a liability.

It wasn’t just her intelligence he worried about. He’d always known that she would grow up, that she’d want a relationship with a man. He’d dreaded the moment that might occur, had known it would be the beginning of a loss of control for him.

At least according to Dunst it was Nick he had to worry about instead of a classmate or stranger that he knew nothing about.

He’d been thinking about bringing Nick into the fold, allowing him more responsibility, more access to the inner workings of his business dealings. Maybe now was the time for that.

Surely in the last couple of days Nick and Lynn hadn’t developed a relationship so close that she would have told him about her special powers. He hoped his warnings to her from the time she was a mere toddler would keep her from sharing that particular information with anyone.

Lynn had always been malleable and trusting concerning the work Jonas had her doing. She believed that each time she “retrieved” an artifact or jewel she was doing something good and altruistic. He didn’t want anything or anyone to change that.

Somehow he’d manage to deal with the questions she asked and assuage any doubts she might entertain about their work. She was his golden goose, stealing treasures and allowing him to fill his coffers with money. He would do and say whatever necessary to keep her working for him.

He smiled. Lynn had been his best, his finest acquisition.

If he found out that she’d told Nick about her work and about her unusual skills, and if Nick became a problem, then Jonas would do what was necessary to solve the problem.

Nick Barnes was expendable. If he wound up on the beach somewhere with a bullet in his head, the authorities would probably assume his murder had to do with his background, with the organized crime family he’d turned his back on.

Jonas left the window and walked over to the minibar, where he fixed himself a scotch on the rocks. He shouldn’t be surprised that Lynn was testing her feminine wiles on a man. Jonas had been lucky she hadn’t experienced any real, deep relationship in the past.

Maybe he should encourage this romance between her and Nick. At least Jonas could control the situation better if the suitor was Nick. Nick would have two choices. He could either go along with the program or he could wind up dead.

Chapter 5

Lynn stood at her bedroom window and looked out. The night was dark, with thick cloud cover obscuring any moonlight that might try to shine down to earth.

Perfect, she thought as she left the window. It was just after midnight and she was ready to leave. Clad in a black pair of tight stretch slacks and a long-sleeved black T-shirt, she grabbed the stocking cap and a backpack of equipment from her bed and left the room.

Adrenaline pumped through her as she silently made her way down the stairs. She knew Rita and Arturo would be sound asleep.

She slipped as soundlessly as a shadow through the house out the mudroom door, then hurried across the driveway to where her car awaited her. She was focused solely on the task ahead. Get in, get the vase and get out.

Moments later, as she drove toward the Markham Convention Center, her thoughts raced to the job ahead. There was much about her work that she didn’t understand.

She hated feeling like a thief, but Jonas had assured her many times that these thefts were secretly sanctioned by the government. He’d told her that it was important that he remain as distant from their work as possible, that as a wealthy businessman he’d made political enemies that could make life difficult for him if it was discovered what he and Lynn did.

He had also explained to her countless times that the local authorities weren’t aware of the government involvement, and if she were caught she would be treated like a common criminal until the appropriate authorities could be contacted. However, he’d always assured her that the worst she could expect was a couple of hours in jail cooling her heels.

This made her all the more careful in the planning stages of each retrieval. The last thing she wanted was to get caught, arrested and taken down to a jail cell even if she’d only be there until the matter could be resolved.

Besides, if she were honest with herself she’d have to confess that she loved the challenge of this work. She loved using her natural skills and intelligence to do something few real thieves would even attempt.

It was a matter of pride that she not get caught and hauled into a police station like a common criminal.

The Markham Convention Center was one of several buildings in a block on the south side of Miami. The buildings were specifically used by large groups holding conventions or for special-interest groups holding exhibits open to the public.

Because normally the place was used for business conventions and not exclusively for exhibits, the security wasn’t terrific. There were alarms at the doors and security guards who walked the perimeter, but that was it.

The exhibit going on now was advertised as Treasures from the Nile and touted as being one of the best collections of artifacts and archeological finds from Egypt.

Lynn had been to the Markham Convention Center often in the past. Whenever there was an exhibit of something she found interesting, she attended. During those frequent visits she’d gotten a good feel for the layout of the place, and that was vital for her plans this evening.

There was little traffic on the streets at midnight despite the fact that it was a Saturday night. It was too late for club-goers to be just arriving at clubs and far too early for them to be heading home.

She parked on a residential street three blocks from the convention center. There she left the car and started off on foot, the navy backpack slung over her shoulder and her stocking cap in her pocket.

The street she walked down was quiet, the houses dark while the occupants slept. Occasionally she’d see the flicker of dim lights and could imagine a couple in the house all cuddled up on the sofa watching a late-night movie on television.

What would it be like to have that kind of life? To have somebody beside you who cared about you, somebody who was there when you needed him? Not a godfather but a lover. That’s what she often thought about in the dark hours of night when loneliness pressed so close against her.

She certainly wasn’t going to find a romantic relationship through her e-mail or by surfing the Net. She was always conscious that those friendly relationships were built on a premise of anonymity. A person she thought to be a twenty-seven-year-old businessman could just as easily be a lonely ninety-year-old man or a hormone-driven teenager.

A block from her goal, she left the residential streets behind and walked behind a small strip mall. She would approach the convention center from the back.

She was guessing there would be no guards at the back of the building. A solid ten-foot-high concrete wall provided all the security needed at the back of the building.

At the front of the building there were two spotlights that shone day and night on the front facade, making a frontal attack dangerous. At the back there were no lights at all, and without moonlight it was a thick darkness that enveloped the area around the concrete wall.

Lynn crouched at the foot of the wall and used her acute hearing to assess her surroundings. Insects filled the air with night songs of clicking and buzzing, and in the distance a dog barked.

Lynn hoped there weren’t any guard dogs in the convention center. She rarely encountered guard dogs and didn’t want to ever encounter them again while doing this work.

Dogs scared her. It was a totally irrational fear, bred from a single incident that had occurred when she’d been ten years old. A friend of Jonas’s had come to the house carrying his pet poodle in his arms. He’d put the dog down, and the poodle had taken one look at Lynn and run to her and bitten her on the ankle.

It hadn’t been a bad bite, had barely broken the skin, but from that moment on Lynn had been frightened of dogs.

She placed her ear against the concrete wall. She heard no sniffing, no snorting, nor did she smell anything that would indicate there were guard dogs on the other side.

She stood and shrugged off the backpack. She pulled the stocking cap out of her pocket and pulled it on, hiding her hair beneath. Gloves came next, the thin latex kind that didn’t impede movement but kept fingerprints from showing up.

She retrieved a penlight and Swiss Army knife from the backpack but ignored the rope and grappling hook. She would use those only if necessary.

She was hoping that by using the tremendous power in her legs she could spring to the top of the concrete wall without the aid of the hook and rope. She hid her backpack beneath a nearby bush, then returned to the wall.

Listening once again to make certain she heard no sounds that would portend trouble, she squatted, gathered her strength and sprang straight up the wall. Her hands grabbed the top of the wall and she hung for a moment, gathering her strength to pull herself up and over. One…two…three, she thought, then hoisted herself to the top.

The wall itself was about eighteen inches wide and four feet or so from the back of the building. She jumped to the ground below, once again crouching as she listened for anything amiss.

Just ahead of her on the back of the building was a vent cover. It was small, but not so tiny that she couldn’t get through it. She knew from studying the plans for the building that the vent would lead into the mechanical room, the room that held the furnace, air conditioner and the hot water tanks. This was her way in.

Turning on her penlight, she shone it toward where she thought the vent should be. Sure enough, there it was, connected to the building by six Phillips screws. She pulled the Swiss Army knife from her pocket and shut off the penlight. Using her fingers to guide her, she carefully unfastened the screws and loosened the vent cover.

When she was finished, she replaced the knife in her pocket along with the screws, then once again pulled out her penlight. Shining it into the vent she saw that it was exactly what she’d been looking for. The vent led into a dark room where she could hear the hum of the air conditioner at work.

She slid through the vent without any problems and landed soundlessly on the floor inside. With her penlight she checked out her surroundings.

She was exactly where she wanted to be. A door was just ahead and she was pleased to see that it locked from the inside. Apparently the janitorial staff used keys to get in and out of here. Besides the furnace and water heaters, the room also held a small desk where apparently the janitors took their breaks and stole an occasional puff on a cigarette. She could smell the lingering scent of old tobacco.

The Markham Convention Center was comprised of six different rooms besides the kitchen and various rest rooms. Each room had its own name. The owner of the Markham Convention Center had a thing for the golden years of Hollywood.

The largest room, the Bogart Room, was the one typically used for huge gatherings. Next to the Bogart Room was the Hepburn Room, another large area. Doors between these two rooms could be opened to create a space big enough to hold any group that might want to use this facility.

The smaller rooms, the Monroe, the Davis, the Crawford and the Gable were the ones usually used for the occasional exhibits. The Treasures from the Nile exhibit was taking place in the Gable room.

Lynn had been in that room several times for various displays and exhibitions. She unlocked the door that led out of the mechanical room and slipped a flat piece of metal out of her pocket.

Placing it against the lock mechanism, she went out into the hallway and allowed the door to close behind her, knowing the piece of metal would keep it from locking again. The last thing she wanted was to be locked out of her escape route.

The hall was dark, and she turned to the left, where the Gable Room was located. Once again she listened for any sound of human presence. The air conditioner was noisy, making it difficult to hear much of anything else, but she didn’t sense anyone around.

Still, she kept her penlight off, knowing that somewhere in the building there would be at least one security guard. She didn’t want a single, faint beam from the tiny light to give away her presence.

She smelled the air surrounding her, the scent a combination of floor wax and disinfectant and the odors of people who had passed through the hallway in the past twenty-four hours.

Using her hands to guide her, she made her way down the long, dark hallway and entered into a large lobby. Here, lights from the front entrance flickered in, giving the lobby a ghostly gray light. This is the place she’d be most vulnerable, as she crossed the lobby to get to the Gable Room.

Once again a burst of adrenaline rushed through her. Within minutes she would have the vase in hand and hopefully be back in her car and driving home. She could do this. This was the one thing she did well.

It was odd, but she felt as if somehow, by completing this job successfully, she would make up for both her indiscretion the night before in the club and not answering Jonas’s phone calls to her that morning.

Focused on the opposite side of the lobby, she left the deep black of the hallway behind and started across.

“Freeze! FBI!” The deep male voice came from someplace on her left.

FBI?

She didn’t freeze. She whirled on her heels and ran back the way she had come. Bang. Bang. Bang. Her heart crashed frantically, like bass drums thundering in her chest.

She raced back down the hallway toward the mechanical room. A flurry of activity and shouting came from behind her. Sheer panic ripped through her.

“Get him!”

“Go…go!”

Voices yelled from every direction.

Run! Run! A voice screamed in her head. She moved faster than she’d ever moved in her life. She’d just ducked into the mechanical room when she heard the unmistakable sound of a gunshot.

Guns. Bullets.

Fingers fumbling, she locked the door behind her and raced to the vent.

Her mind was numbed, in shock.

Get out.

Get out. The two words screamed in her head. Get out and get away. Panic constricted her lungs, making each breath painful.

She slithered through the vent and to the outside, vaguely aware of the sounds of bodies slamming against the locked door behind her in an effort to spring it open.

She hit the outside and jumped at the wall, nearly sobbing with relief as her fingers gripped the top. In two seconds she’d pulled herself up and over.

She hit the ground on the other side, grabbed her backpack and ran for her life.

Lungs sucking air, feet pounding the pavement, she raced down the block, at any moment expecting the sound of pursuit or the whiz of a bullet speeding toward her.

Her head was devoid of any thoughts other than for her survival. By the time she reached her car she was out of breath and trembling uncontrollably. She slid in behind the steering wheel, yanked off the stocking cap and pulled off the gloves.

It took her three tries before she finally managed to get her key into the ignition.

Not too fast, she told herself as she pulled away from the curb. The last thing she wanted to do was draw any attention to herself as she left the area.

The trembling stopped within minutes of driving, but once she realized she was relatively safe, the events replayed in her head in horrifying detail.

When she felt she’d put enough distance between herself and the convention center, she pulled over to the curb, needing to pull herself together before continuing the drive home.

She’d been shot at! A shiver raced up her spine as she thought of how close she’d come to not only being caught, but to being killed or maimed.

They’d been waiting for her. And it hadn’t been the local cops, it had been the FBI. What was the FBI doing there?

They’d shot at her, for God’s sake. Jonas had always warned her that if she were caught on one of these work details, she’d be arrested and taken to jail until the appropriate authorities could arrange for her release. But nobody could arrange for a release if she was dead.

She drew deep, steadying breaths for several minutes, trying to still her trembling, the jagged nerves that roared through her. Finally she pulled away from the curb and headed home.

She had to talk to Jonas. Something wasn’t right. She had to tell Jonas that the FBI had tried to kill her. Why had they been there? Surely they would know about the work she and Jonas did for the government.

By the time she got back to her house and was in her room, she was in a state of frenzy. She stripped off her clothes and buried them in the back of her closet, then pulled on a robe and sat on the edge of her bed.

At any moment she expected a knock on the door, an arrest warrant to be served. They had been waiting for her. How had they known that she’d attempt a heist tonight? And why were the FBI involved?

Maybe they’d been there to protect the display. It could be a coincidence.

She grabbed her cell phone and punched in the number to connect her to Jonas. His phone went directly to his voice mail.

“Uncle Jonas. Call me as soon as possible.” She disconnected and threw the phone aside. Nervous energy raged inside her, and she stalked over to the window and peered outside.

For the past couple of months the questions about the work she did had been growing bigger and bigger in her head. The answers Jonas had given her the other night when she’d asked some of those questions hadn’t really satisfied her, but because she loved Jonas, because she trusted him, she hadn’t pushed too hard.

She stared out the window where the clouds still obscured the stars and the moon. The only lights shining were the ones for security purposes on the property.

She leaned her forehead against the glass windowpane and wondered if Nick was working. She doubted it. He’d mentioned that he was on duty at noon today. By now he’d be home.

The fear that had chased her home was dissipating, leaving in its wake only confusion. How she wished she had somebody to talk to, somebody other than Jonas.

Somebody like Nick. But of course she couldn’t talk to him about what had happened tonight. Even though he’d rescued her from her own stupidity at the club, she didn’t know him well enough to tell him her secrets. She didn’t trust him enough to tell him about her work, about herself.

She’d been lonely all her life, but at this moment she felt more isolated and alone than she’d ever felt in her entire life.

The phone rang and she whirled from the window and grabbed it from the bed. “I went after the vase tonight and the FBI was there waiting for me. They even shot at me. I could have been killed.” The fear that had momentarily quieted now shouted from her. “Why was the FBI there? You always told me that all I had to worry about was local cops and security guards.”

“Slow down, Lynn. Take a breath,” Jonas said calmly.

His calm only fed the flames of her anxiety. “Take a breath? I was almost killed tonight. Didn’t you hear what I told you? They shot at me.”

“Calm down, Lynn.” She drew a deep breath, at the same time sitting on the edge of her bed. “Now, first of all, I’m assuming you aren’t hurt or in jail.”

“No, I managed to escape.”

“Did anyone get a good look at you?”

She frowned thoughtfully. “I don’t think so. As I was running, I heard somebody shout, ‘Get him,’ which means they didn’t realize I was female.”

“Did you get the vase?”

The question irritated her. “I barely got out with my skin intact. No, I didn’t get the vase. They were on to me the minute I stepped into the lobby. Since when is the FBI involved in all this?”

Jonas was silent for a long moment. “I don’t know,” he finally said thoughtfully. “There must have been a breakdown in communication somewhere. The Feds shouldn’t have been involved in this at all.”

“Yeah, well, they were. I want to talk to your contact. I want to know exactly what happened tonight that almost got me killed.”

“Calm down, dear. We’ll discuss all this further when I get home. I’ll talk to my contact and see if I can get some answers. In the meantime, perhaps we should lay low until this is all resolved.”

“Trust me, I don’t intend to try another recovery until I know you have things under control at your end.”

“I’ll make some phone calls and see what’s going on. You might want to think back and see what you might have missed when you went in.”

Lynn frowned thoughtfully. Had she missed something? “When will you be home?”

“I won’t be there until Monday or Tuesday. In the meantime, I understand you’ve been dating Nick.”

It took a moment for her to follow the jump in topic. “So, Richard is doing double duty, not only working as your partner but also as your spy.” She heard the edge in her voice and knew if she weren’t so upset she’d never use that tone with her godfather. “For your information, I’m not dating Nick. We just went for a drive together this morning. It was no big deal.”

“He’s a good man, Lynn. The idea of seeing two people I care about getting together certainly doesn’t upset me.”

The night was filled with surprises. She never would have expected this kind of reaction from Jonas, who’d always cautioned her about dating and getting too close to any one person.

“Of course, I would expect you to be circumspect about sharing with Nick anything about our work or your particular skills,” Jonas continued.

“Of course,” she replied, and stretched out on the bed. Now that the fear had been spent and her anger vented, she was exhausted.

She didn’t want to think about Nick, or her work, or anything else. At the moment she just wanted to drift into sleep and put this nightmarish night behind her.

“Lynn, honey. Don’t worry. I’ll get everything straightened out and we’ll discuss it all when I get home. In the meantime you just relax and enjoy the next couple of days.”

“All right,” she agreed.

“And remember, baby, that I love you.”

“I love you, too, Uncle Jonas.”

The minute they hung up Lynn shut off her light and crawled beneath the covers on her bed. Sleep was a long time coming.

She’d been doing recovery work for Jonas for almost two years. In total, she’d recovered about fifteen items. In all of those fifteen times she’d never been accosted by anyone, never been seen at all.

Had she done something to screw up tonight? Had she not listened carefully enough? Had she been arrogantly reckless? She didn’t think so, but now she wasn’t sure. Had she been thinking about Nick and not focused enough on the job?

There was no way she could have known those agents were waiting for her. But was it possible her mind had wandered for a moment and she’d missed a sound, a scent that should have alerted her?

Once again she was struck by the illogical elements where her work was concerned. If the FBI had somehow become aware of the “robberies” she’d committed, then they would have to know that the items she’d been stealing were stolen. Why didn’t they just get the items themselves and return them to their rightful owners?

Jonas’s vague explanations of the craziness of politics and the work having to be carried out by a secret, covert agency just didn’t ring true.

But if she believed Jonas was lying to her about the work, then she’d have to wonder what else he might be lying to her about.

These were crazy thoughts. Of course he wasn’t lying to her. He was the one constant in her life, the one person she’d always looked up to, depended on. She couldn’t imagine a reason for him to lie to her about anything.

It was almost noon when she awakened the next day. Whatever clouds had possessed the night had long ago burned away as brilliant sunshine streamed in through her window.

Relax. That’s what Jonas had told her to do for the next couple of days. Maybe she’d meet Vicki for lunch. She felt the need to connect with somebody wonderfully normal. A brief phone call to Vicki let her know lunch wasn’t possible.

The pool. It had been over a week since she’d swum, and maybe the physical exercise would still the restless energy that had possessed her since she’d opened her eyes a few minute ago.

By one o’clock she was on her way out to the cabana. The Olympic-size pool beckoned to her as she walked past it and into the cabana, where she’d find everything she needed for swimming.

Moments later, clad in her one-piece swimsuit, she dove into the water and began to swim laps. The temperature of the water was perfect, and Lynn had always enjoyed swimming.

She swam the length of the pool with powerful strokes, did a tumble and swam back. Her mind was blessedly empty as she cut through the water. She did twenty laps, then pulled herself up and sat on the edge of the pool.

“Exorcising demons?”

The deep, familiar voice came from behind her, and she whirled around to see Nick standing just outside the pool area. Despite everything that weighed heavily on her mind, the sight of him caused a shiver of utter feminine pleasure to sweep over her.

Clad in a pair of tight jeans and a white T-shirt, he looked casually rugged and masculine.

“No demons, just getting a little workout.” She was grateful her towel was nearby and grabbed it to her chest as he stepped closer.

She felt the heat of his gaze as it swept over her scantily clad body. She felt danger as clearly as she had the night before, but this was a delicious kind of danger. She stood, keeping the towel in front of her as if to shield her from the provocative heat of his eyes.

“No Alabama Slammers poolside?” he teased.

She winced. “No more Alabama Slammers for the rest of my life.”

He laughed. “There’s nothing wrong with cutting loose occasionally, as long as you’re among good friends. And you were.”

“Yes, they are good friends,” she agreed.

“Have dinner with me, Lynn. Tonight. Let’s have dinner and go dancing,” he said.

“All right,” she said without hesitation.

“Good. Why don’t I pick you up around seven?”

“That would be fine. I’ll be ready.”

He nodded and she watched him as he walked away.

Funny, yesterday she’d wanted her work to take her mind off Nick. Now she hoped being with Nick would keep her mind off work and the doubts about certain things Jonas had told her.

Chapter 6

Time crept by for the remainder of the afternoon as Lynn anticipated her date with Nick. At least she didn’t have to worry about Jonas’s disapproval of her plans for the night. He’d all but given his blessing for her to see Nick.

At quarter to seven she stood in front of her mirror and gazed at her reflection. She had chosen a black-and-red knee-length Valentino dress she’d never worn before. She was pleased to see that the fit was perfect. She looked chic and sexy.

Thankfully the nerves that thrummed inside her weren’t outwardly evident. She turned away from the mirror and picked up her cell phone and her purse. She started to tuck the phone into her purse, then changed her mind and instead tossed it into the dresser drawer in her nightstand.

She would not be bothered with phone calls tonight.

At five to seven she went downstairs to await Nick’s arrival. She went into the living room and sat on the burgundy leather sofa. Within seconds the paintings on the walls turned from the Picassos Jonas loved to display to several Monet watercolors that were Lynn’s favorites. Of course, when they were both in the room, the Picassos remained. Jonas was master of the house.

She rarely paid much attention to the technology that Jonas loved, but tonight it irritated her. She didn’t like the idea of sensors being able to track her movements through the house even if only for the benign reason of attending to her personal comfort levels.

She wondered what Jonas would do if she told him she wanted to move out, to get a place of her own. In truth she didn’t have to wonder. She knew he’d blow a fuse.

He’d tell her it was ridiculous to move out of a house in which, other than the help, she was often the sole occupant. He’d warn her about kidnapping plots and personal danger as he always did when it came to her stretching her wings in any way.

But no one had ever attempted to kidnap her. Jonas had kept her like a treasure under glass, but she was beginning to wonder if she were a treasure wanted by anyone other than Jonas.

Lately she’d thought a lot about what it would be like to have her own little place, a place where her friends could gather, a place where she would feel competent and in control of her surroundings.

The ring of the doorbell pulled her from her thoughts, and a new surge of nervous tension filled her. “I’ll get it,” she called out for Rita’s benefit. She went to the door and pulled it open.

Nick looked more handsome than she’d ever seen him. He wore a pair of black slacks and a dark gray dress shirt, but it wasn’t his choice of clothing that she found so appealing. Rather it was that look in his eyes, the appreciative look of a male for a female he found attractive.

She had a feeling it was going to be a night to remember.

“You look amazing,” he said, and held out his hand for hers.

“Thank you.” She slipped her hand into his and allowed him to draw her out of the house and toward his car. It was a perfect evening, warm but with a faint breeze that kept it from being too warm. To Lynn it felt like an evening filled with romantic possibility, and all her senses were alive with a simmering excitement.

“Where are we going?” she asked once they were in the car and were headed down the highway.

“A favorite place of mine. The food is terrific, the dance floor is small, and the music is slow.”

How was it possible that with a single sentence he could spark a fire in the pit of her stomach? “Sounds wonderful,” she murmured.

Not only did the plans for the evening sound wonderful, but Nick smelled wonderful. He wore a woodsy cologne that filled the interior of the car, which, coupled with the fainter scent of a menthol shaving cream, was boldly masculine.

“Beautiful night, isn’t it?” he asked.

She smiled. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

“Have you heard from Jonas since he’s been gone?”

“Yes, he’s in Paris. I spoke to him last night. He’s planning on coming home in the next day or two.” She hesitated a moment, then continued. “I’m thinking about telling him when he gets back that I want to get my own place.”

Nick looked at her, his dark eyebrows raised in surprise. “Really? Have you been thinking about moving out for a while?”

She frowned thoughtfully. “It’s crossed my mind off and on for the past year, but lately I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I adore Uncle Jonas, but he treats me like a baby, and I’m not a baby.”

His gaze slid to her face, then down the length of her. “No, you definitely aren’t a baby,” he agreed dryly.

The man should have those looks bottled, she thought. He could sell them as sheer sex appeal. She fought to regain her composure. “Where do you live, Nick?”

“I’ve got a one-bedroom apartment at the Heritage Arms.”

The Heritage Arms was a luxury apartment building not far from where she lived. “It must be nice to have your own space, be surrounded by your own things and be able to come and go as you please without feeling as if you’re being watched all the time.”

“When Jonas is out of town, you pretty much have the house to yourself,” he countered as he made a right turn onto a coastal road.

“True,” she agreed. “But it’s Jonas’s house and of course Rita and Arturo are always there.”

“Yeah, but if you move out won’t you miss all the bells and whistles you have at home now?”

“Not a bit,” she replied. “I don’t care a thing about those bells and whistles.” She thought of all the technology Jonas was so proud of, technology she found intrusive.

He cast her a quick sideways glance. “What do you plan to do when you graduate?”

“I’d like to work for Uncle Jonas. I’m hoping once I finish school he’ll bring me into the business and make me a more active partner in his import/export work. I keep most of his financial records for him, but I’d like to do more.”

“No desire to strike out on your own? Build something that’s just yours?”

“Certainly I want to have a life of my own. I like dabbling in developing video games, but I’d be a fool to turn my back on the opportunity of working with Uncle Jonas. Besides the import business, he does such important work with the government, and I’d love to be a part of all that.” She slid him a glance. “Isn’t that why you’re working for Uncle Jonas?”

“Sure. I’ll admit it. I want to do more than work for Jonas. I want to work with him.”

“Sounds like we both have a common goal.” She flashed him a challenging look.

He laughed, his straight white teeth flashing in the illumination from the dashboard. “I’d say there’s room for two at the top, don’t you think?”

“Is that why you invited me out? Why you’ve taken an interest in me? To advance your career with Uncle Jonas?”

He sighed with obvious impatience. “I told you the other day that has nothing to do with it. I’ll tell you why I took an interest in you, Lynn.”

He didn’t look at her but instead kept his focus on the road ahead. “I took an interest in you because for the first time the other night I realized how silky your hair looked. I noticed when you smile your mouth looks like it needs to be kissed badly, and I realized I wanted to be the man to do it.”

“Do you always do this?” she asked, her heart beating a little faster at his words.

“Do what?”

“Seduce a woman with words before you’ve even eaten dinner with her?” Lynn felt her cheeks burn with a blush at her own boldness. But something about Nick made her feel reckless and bold.

“Would you prefer I wait until after we eat?”

“No…I mean, I’m not sure. I don’t think I’ve ever really been seduced before.”

“Really?” Once again he looked at her in surprise, then grinned that bold, sexy smile. “Then I’ll have to make sure and do it right.”

That seemed to set the tone for the evening. He took her to a place called Smokey’s, a small club that catered to an older crowd and was located on the waterfront.

The interior was semidark, the dance floor small and the tables spaced to provide maximum privacy to all of the diners.

Nick placed a hand in the small of her back as they were led to their table near the dance floor, where several couples swayed to an old standard tune being played by a quartet. She felt the burn of his touch through the fabric of her dress.

They were left alone to peruse small menus. “How did you ever find this place?” she asked as she opened her menu.

“My parents used to come here when I was younger. We had a lot of family gatherings here. They all stopped coming a long time ago, but I occasionally drop in for dinner or a drink. I like the old music and the ambiance.”

She wondered if by coming here he felt some sort of connection to the family who had disowned him. Her heart softened with empathy for him. What must it be like to have a father who had cut you out firmly and forever from his life? What kind of scars did that leave behind?

The waitress arrived to take their orders. “The house specialty is seafood, but they also make a mean steak,” Nick said. He ordered a steak and baked potato, while Lynn decided on shrimp with wild rice, and they both ordered a glass of wine.

“So, you don’t do the club scene?” she asked when the waitress had departed.

“Not much. To tell the truth, for the last couple of years I haven’t had much time for socializing. I’ve been too focused on work. But you know what they say about all work and no play.” His dark eyes gleamed in the light of the candle that flickered in the center of their table.

“I can’t imagine anything making you boring. I’m the boring one with no life outside of school.”

“There’s a difference between being boring and being a bit naive. From what I’ve heard about your upbringing, you’ve just been sheltered, that’s all.”

Sheltered. She was naive and sheltered, but she’d been shot at by an FBI agent the night before. She shoved this thought away, not wanting to ruin the evening with Nick by dwelling on what had happened the night before.

“Maybe I should have remained sheltered, considering what a fool I made of myself at Sensations,” she said dryly.

He laughed. “It’s not an uncommon phenomenon that young women who have never really been free tend to overimbibe when they get a taste of freedom.”

“I’ll keep that in mind for the future.”

Their dinner arrived, and as they ate they talked. It was a conversation of discovery. They spoke about favorite foods, movies they’d seen and politics. It was the kind of talk that began the path to knowledge about each other, the path that led to the first step in intimacy.

There wasn’t a moment during the conversation that Lynn didn’t know he was subtly seducing her. The seduction was there in his dark eyes each time he looked at her, there in the frequency of his touch to her hand when he wanted to make a point.

It was a heady experience for Lynn. She’d had men come on to her before, but never with the smoothness or the breathtaking intensity of Nick. It both excited her and made her wary. Her isolated lifestyle and unusual senses had kept her from acting on an attraction to a man so far. Perhaps it was time to take a chance.

There was no getting around it: she was hungry for a relationship. Not so hungry that she’d settle for a smooth-talking man with lust in his eyes and nothing else on the table. She wasn’t a fool.

But she found Nick easy to talk to. The shyness that normally plagued her seemed to disappear with him.

They ate at a leisurely pace, as if they had all the time in the world to enjoy each other’s company.

When they’d finished eating, he got them each another glass of wine, then gestured toward the dance floor. “Ready for a spin?”

The music was soft, romantic, and the thought of being held in his arms thrilled her more than just a little. “I’m game if you are, although I can’t promise I won’t step on your toes.”

“I think I can handle that.” He rose and held out his hand to her.

She had a feeling he could handle anything. She hadn’t forgotten the look in his eyes that night in the bar when he’d looked around for the creep who had backed her into a corner. Nor had she missed the way his gaze had swept the room when they’d first walked in here tonight. It had been the watchful gaze of a man with secrets.

There was something slightly dark, slightly dangerous about Nick Barnes. She wondered if perhaps it had something to do with his family. All she knew for sure was that he intrigued her.

He led her to the dance floor and pulled her into his arms. He didn’t hold her so close as to be offensive, but close enough that she felt the inviting heat from his body, the warmth of his breath on the top of her head and the strength of his arm around her back.

She had a perfect view of his jawline and the hollow of his throat. His skin looked soft, and for a moment she wondered what it would be like to press her lips against it. The idea of kissing him electrified her.

He was a good dancer. He didn’t just stand in place and sway, but rather moved them around the floor with an easy masculine grace, using his hand in the small of her back to guide her.

He looked down at her. “So far so good. No crushed toes.”

She smiled. “You make it easy to stay off your toes. You’re a good lead.”

He tightened his arm around her and pulled her a bit closer. She could now feel his hard chest against her breasts, feel his muscled thighs against her own. A wave of warmth swept through her.

“So, what’s Jonas doing in Paris?” he asked as they continued to move to the music.

“I’m not sure. He goes there pretty frequently.” In fact, that’s usually where he was when she did a recovery for him.

“Does he have business interests over there?”

“You know Uncle Jonas. He has business dealings everywhere.”

“There’s still a lot about his work that I don’t know.”

Lynn said nothing. There was a lot about her that Nick didn’t know. She wondered if she would ever be close enough, ever feel safe enough to share with somebody the secret of her amazing physical skills. Would she ever be able to share the details of the work she did for Jonas? Would she ever find somebody with whom she could share all the pieces of herself without being afraid?

“What’s this government work he does? He’s never mentioned that to me before,” Nick asked.

“I don’t know much about it. I just know he has defense contracts with the government, but he keeps that business separate from the import/export business.”

When the song ended, they returned to their table and made small talk while they each finished their glass of wine. They danced two more dances, then left.

As they were walking toward the car, Lynn noticed how beautiful the beach looked behind the restaurant. The moon was a plump round ball that shot shimmering silver across the ocean waves and the sandy beach.

“Look, Nick. Isn’t it beautiful?”

“Want to take a walk?” He looked down at her high heels. “Never mind, bad idea.”

“On the contrary.” She walked to the edge of the sand and kicked off her shoes. “I’d love to take a walk.”

He grinned at her, that slow sexy grin that stole her breath. He took off his shoes and socks, and together they walked on the still-warm sand.

As they walked, he reached for her hand. “I can’t imagine living anywhere else, can you?”

She shook her head. “I’ve traveled to so many places, seen some beautiful countries, but Miami is my home and I love it here.”

“I know you like to swim, but do you enjoy other water sports? Boating? Surfing?”

“I’ve never tried to surf, but I enjoy being on the water. What about you? Do you surf?”

“Whenever I get a chance,” he replied.

Her mind filled with a vision of him in a bathing suit, balancing on a surfboard as it flew across the waves. “I’ll bet you’re good at it.”

His dark eyes gleamed in the moon’s illumination. “I try to be good at everything I do.”

“I’m sure you do,” she murmured. She broke the eye contact and instead gazed out at the water. “I’d love to have a place right on the beach.”

“Jonas’s place is on the beach,” he countered.

“Yes, and it’s always been home. But now I’d like my own place. I’d like just a little cottage where nobody knows who I am, where nobody could find me unless I want them to.”

They walked several steps in silence. “I have a place like that,” he finally said.

She looked at him in surprise. “But I thought you said you lived in an apartment at the Heritage Arms.”

“I do, but I’ve also got a beach house down on Harbor Road. It’s just a little two-bedroom cottage that I’m renting with the option to buy. I don’t get to spend as much time as I’d like there, but it’s my little getaway from the world.”

“Sounds marvelous,” she said.

“The house number is 215. The key is under a flowerpot on the front porch. You’re welcome to use it whenever you want.”

The offer was unexpected, and so generous that she was momentarily at a loss for words. She squeezed his hand. “Thank you, that’s very kind of you.”

He shrugged. “Most of the time it just sits there empty.”

They continued to walk in a pleasant silence. A balmy breeze blew off the water, and the rhythmic rush of wave to shore was intoxicating.

“I’m so glad I left the cell phone at home,” she said, finally breaking the silence.

“Won’t your uncle wonder where you are and who you might be with?”

“I think he’ll guess who I’m with. Richard must have mentioned something about seeing the two of us together yesterday morning because Jonas asked if we were seeing each other when I spoke to him this morning.”

She felt the sudden tension that filled him. “What did you tell him?” he asked. “He isn’t going to take me out to the swamp and feed me to the ’gators, is he?”

She laughed. “No, nothing like that. I told him that we’d gone for a drive together and it wasn’t a big deal. Uncle Jonas likes you.”

He stopped walking and turned to face her. “How do you know that?”

“Because he gave his approval about me seeing you.”

“Let me tell you something, Lynn.” That dangerous look shone from his eyes, transforming their dark depths to an almost silvery sheen in the moonlight. “If I wanted to see you I wouldn’t give a damn whether your uncle gave his approval or not. I respect and admire your uncle, and I hope to work with him for a long time to come, but there are times when a man has to go after what he wants and damn the consequences.”

There was a passion in his eyes, a dangerous light of a man who always went after what he wanted and got it. It was that kind of passion she hungered for, the balancing without a net, the taking chances with your life, the reaching out for what you wanted without fear of failure or pain.

He squeezed her hand. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to get so carried away.”

“It’s all right.”

“We’d better get you home. Don’t you have classes tomorrow?”

“Yes, I do,” she said reluctantly. She didn’t want to see the evening end.

They started walking again, back toward the car. Lynn was vaguely disappointed that he hadn’t tried to kiss her. The setting, with the moonlight and the beach, had been so perfect for a romantic kiss.

She scoffed at the thought. She hadn’t realized she had the heart of a romantic until this moment.

As they drove home Nick asked her about the many foreign places she’d visited in the past with Jonas. “We traveled a lot when I was younger,” she said. “We’d fly to Paris or London, spend time in Switzerland and the Bahamas. We often went to Puerto Isla for visits. You name it and I’ve probably been there.”

“Puerto Isla?”

“It’s in Central America.”

“Do you enjoy traveling?” he asked.

“I did when I was little, but not so much anymore. Uncle Jonas seems to thrive on the jet-setting lifestyle, on never being in one place for too long. But I’m tired of it all. I like the idea of sticking in one place and building something permanent.”

“I’ve never done much foreign traveling, but I’ve never had a big desire to,” he said. “Like I said before, I love Miami.”

All too soon he pulled up in front of the house. Again she thought of how much she hated to see the night come to an end. It had been one of the best nights she could ever remember.

Together they got out and walked toward the house. When they reached the door she turned to face him. “Thank you, Nick. I had a wonderful time.”

“So did I.” He reached up and brushed a strand of her hair back from her face. “I’d like to see you again, Lynn.”

A flush of pleasure washed over her. “I’d like that.”

“How about tomorrow night?”

She laughed a little breathlessly. “You don’t let much grass grow under your feet.”

“Not when it’s something I care about.” He leaned closer to her. “Remember what I said about your lips? That they looked like they needed kissing badly?”

“I remember.” She felt as if she was scarcely breathing.

“They’re looking like that right now.”

“Then maybe you should kiss them.”

He dipped his head and captured her mouth with his. Initially it was a soft kiss, the mere meeting of lips. But within seconds it transformed into something more, something deeper as she opened her mouth to him.

His arms wound around her, pulling her tight against him, so tight she could feel the press of his thighs and the hint of his arousal against her. His tongue swirled with hers and she felt herself burning from the inside out.

Before she combusted into fiery flames, he released her. “I don’t know how well you do anything else, but you do that extremely well,” she said unsteadily, then blushed.

He laughed, a low, sexy chuckle. “Can I call you tomorrow?” She nodded. “Then I’ll just say good-night for now.”

“Good night, Nick.” She watched as he left the porch and returned to his car. She touched her lips with two fingers, the feel of his mouth still imprinted there.

Lynn had been kissed before, more than a couple of times by several different men, but none of them had affected her like Nick had. He made her want more.

She stood on the porch until his car disappeared from view, then turned to go inside. As she reached for the doorknob she heard the faint crackling of brush nearby.

“Hello?” she called out. “Is somebody there?” She frowned and took a couple of steps away from the door. She tilted her head and listened, a wave of apprehension sweeping over her.

She could have sworn she heard footsteps…or had she? She allowed herself to listen. A breeze rustled the trees. Insects clicked and chirped. Nothing out of the ordinary. Maybe it had been a stray cat or a raccoon. “Is anyone there?” she called again. Nothing.

She went inside and locked the door behind her, her thoughts going back to Nick.

She liked him. What’s more, she instinctively trusted him. Maybe it was because he worked for Jonas that trust had come so easily. Or maybe it was because he seemed to really listen to her, to ask questions that made her feel as if he was genuinely interested in her thoughts.

Whatever the reason, he excited her and she looked forward to spending more time with him. This was so much better than computer relationships, so much more real.

She went up to her room, drawn to her window by the stream of moonlight dancing in through the glass. She still tasted his kiss, felt the texture of his lips imprinted on her own. She’d wanted more…still did.

She froze as her gaze caught on a moving shadow. In the distance…in the trees. It was there only a moment, then gone. Or had it been there at all? She blinked and focused but saw nothing amiss.

Had she imagined it? Had her encounter the night before with the FBI made her imagine moving shadows and rustling leaves?

She turned away from the window, certain that if anyone who didn’t belong had gotten on the property, security would have seen and responded.

Still, it was a very long time before she allowed herself to sleep that night.

Chapter 7

“It’s been over two weeks, Nick. Surely you’ve learned something we can use.” Ray’s voice held more than a touch of impatience.

Nick fought back a sigh. “And I’ve seen her every night, but these things take time, Ray. If I ask too many pointed questions, she’ll get suspicious and clam up altogether.”

“A young woman like Lynn who has been so sheltered and isolated, I figured you could get beneath her defenses in no time.”

“She’s young and naive, but she isn’t stupid, and she certainly isn’t loose-lipped when she talks about Jonas.”

“Our sources tell us he’s out of the country again,” Ray said.

“He is. According to Lynn he’s in Rome arranging for the import of some unusual vases and glasses he found. He left yesterday.”

“That’s funny. Our information has him currently in Cuba.”

Nick frowned. “What’s he doing in Cuba?”

“Wish the hell we knew.”

Nick leaned back his chair. “Look, Ray, I don’t know what to tell you. If I push too hard, not only will I chase her off and we won’t get anything from her, but I might jeopardize my job with Jonas, as well. I did manage to learn that she thinks he does some kind of defense contracting with the government.”

“Yeah, right, and I’m the Easter Bunny,” Ray said dryly.

“And I already told you that she does a lot of the bookkeeping. If evidence is there of his illegal activities, she’ll have it.”

“The evidence is there all right. It’s just a matter of us getting our hands on those records. Turning her to our side would definitely be beneficial.”

Nick frowned. “I agree, but trust me, that’s not likely. She loves the man. You have to remember, Jonas is all the family Lynn knows.” Nick sighed. “Look, Ray, I’ll get what we need, you just have to give me a little more time.”

“I know, I know.” Ray’s voice held the weight of the world. “I’m just getting tired of waiting, Nick. We’ve been after this guy for over two years and we don’t seem any closer to putting him away now than we were when he first hit our radar.”

“I’m doing the best I can,” Nick replied. “I’m seeing her again this evening. I’ll try to push a little harder for something we can use. I’ll report in tomorrow morning.”

Nick hung up and walked out onto the back deck of his cottage, irritated not just with the not-so-subtle push from his supervisor for results, but also by his own conflicted emotions where Lynn was concerned.

What had begun as an uncomplicated goal of seduction had, over the past two weeks, suddenly become complicated. The complication was the fact that he didn’t want to seduce her completely. He didn’t want to take her to bed with the intention of winning her trust and gaining her confidence to get Jonas behind bars.

He wanted to take her to bed for all the wrong reasons. He wanted to take her to bed because she smelled like lush summer flowers and her touch lit a flame in his gut. He wanted to take her to his bed to further explore the satin softness of her skin and hear moans of pleasure escaping her lips.

He wanted her, and that worried him.

Over the course of the past two weeks he’d gotten to know her better and had come to recognize her relative innocence. He didn’t want to be the one to introduce her to lovemaking, knowing that it was part of his job and his own desire but without promises of anything lasting. She deserved better than that.

He’d decided to continue a psychological seduction, but had also made up his mind that he would not attempt to take her to bed. Even this felt wrong, but it couldn’t be helped.

He liked her—a lot—and he hadn’t expected to. But he’d come to look forward to seeing her, to spending time with her, to sharing thoughts with her and hearing everything she thought about.

Dammit, he didn’t want to like her, but he found himself drawn to her in a way that he hadn’t been drawn to a woman in a very long time.

He walked back into the house and grabbed a beer from the refrigerator, recognizing that he’d never been so conflicted about doing a job. Something about Lynn White got to him. Something about her touched soft places Nick had forgotten still remained in his heart.

She continued to surprise him, as well. He hadn’t expected the inner strength he occasionally saw flash from her eyes, hadn’t expected the keen intelligence she possessed.

He returned to the patio, popped the top of his beer and checked his wristwatch. She’d be here in an hour. He’d invited her to his little beachfront cottage for a quiet dinner.

Although he knew he’d taken a chance telling her about this secret place, he’d decided the risk might be worth the result. Getting her not only away from Jonas’s house, but also out of a public area might make her relax enough to talk more openly about Jonas and his business.

He didn’t believe Lynn knew anything about her godfather’s illegal activities, but little pieces of information she gave him confirmed much of what the Bureau already knew.

As his financial bookkeeper she knew where Jonas’s vast ill-gotten fortune was stashed, but she appeared to be certain that Jonas’s fortune had been gained from his import/export business and Defense Department contracts that Nick knew didn’t exist.

The information that she and Jonas had spent a lot of time in Puerto Isla had also not come as a surprise. The Bureau had already tied Jonas to a powerful drug lord in that small Central-American country.

He’d like to turn her, to get her on their side and have her help in bringing down the man who had raised her, but he knew that was impossible. Part of her charm was her unswerving devotion, her loyalty and love for Jonas White.

He took a drink of the beer and settled back in the deck chair. He had a few minutes before he had to start the charcoal for the steaks and throw together a salad.

Also weighing heavily on his mind was the most recent attempted robbery at the Markham Convention Center, which should have resulted in an arrest.

Although Nick hadn’t been present at the convention center when the botched robbery attempt had gone down, the officers who had been there had reported to Ray that the suspect had been like a superhuman phantom. The perpetrator had run at the speed of light and had leaped over a concrete wall that nobody should have been able to jump over.

They’d had the culprit almost in the palm of their hands and yet he’d managed to escape their little net.

They knew Jonas was tied to the robberies, knew that he had sold several of the stolen items on the black market. But knowing and proving beyond a reasonable doubt were two different things. What they had to figure out was who worked as Jonas’s agent. Who was doing the actual robberies?

Certainly it wasn’t Dunst—although the man was mentally capable of anything, he didn’t have the physical skills necessary to accomplish what the thief had done.

Nick suspected somebody on Jonas’s payroll was their thief, but he had yet to identify who exactly that might be.

He had to consider everyone, even Lynn. Perhaps her late-night drives and talk of insomnia were just a cover.

It was difficult for him to believe that she’d have anything to do with the thefts. As far as he could discern, Lynn didn’t have a criminal bone in her body. And Jonas had men on his payroll who had the backgrounds, the temperaments, the records of real criminals.

But he had to consider the possibility.

He’d just finished the last swallow of his beer and was about to get up when his phone rang once again.

The caller ID let him know it was his brother. It had been months since he’d heard from him. He steeled himself as he answered. “Anthony, what’s up?”

“The old man wants to see you.”

Nick couldn’t have been more surprised if his brother had told him he’d just personally given birth to twins. It had been years since Nick’s father had even acknowledged he was alive. “Yeah, well I’m not interested in seeing him.”

“He’s ill, Nick.”

“Then tell him to call a doctor,” he replied.

“Too late for that. It’s cancer, Nick. He doesn’t have much time left. He wants to see you again before it’s too late.”

Nick’s chest tightened. He closed his eyes, unsure what he felt, what to do.

He’d long ago resigned himself to the fact that he was a man without a family, without a past. As far as he was concerned, his real life had begun when he had joined the Bureau.

He’d believed he was at peace until this moment, when the past reached out to grab him.

“Nick, you there?”

He opened his eyes as a sigh escaped him. “I’m here.” He rubbed the center of his forehead where a headache began to throb. The knot in his chest constricted tightly.

He wanted to hang up the phone, stay away from the poisonous grip of his family, but instead heard himself saying, “Tell him tomorrow night. I’ll come to the house around seven.”

“Good. He’ll be pleased.” Without another word Anthony hung up.

Nick clicked off and stared out at the ocean waves. He rubbed his forehead once again and thought about downing another beer but decided against it. No amount of beer would lift away the chunk of stone that sat heavily on top of his heart.

Perhaps part of the problem with Lynn was that he could empathize with her too well. For years he’d seen the evidence of the kind of man his father was, the kinds of crimes he had committed. He’d seen the kind of men his father surrounded himself with, but he’d been too blind or just plain unwilling to recognize what he saw.

His awakening to who and what his father was had been excruciatingly painful. He’d had to face the fact that his life with his father had been built on broken trust, lies and manipulation.

He was surprised by how much he hated that eventually Lynn would have the same kind of awakening where Jonas was concerned and she, too, would know the kind of pain Nick had experienced.

Nick had never gotten emotionally involved with anyone on a case before in his life, but Lynn was getting under his skin. He’d have to walk a fine line. He needed to get what he could from her to help them build a case against her godfather. He had to be an active participant in destroying her life and he had to not care that that was what he was doing.

With another deep sigh he got up to start the charcoal.

Lynn drove the beachfront road slowly, looking for the address to Nick’s cottage. It had been a strange and unsettling two weeks for her.

Jonas had returned to the States, but there had been a strain between them. He’d seemed cool, and she knew he’d been disappointed by her failure to retrieve the gold vase he’d wanted from the exhibit.

He’d assured her that he’d spoken to his contact, who had confirmed that a screw-up had occurred with the FBI involvement that night. He’d also mentioned another artifact he’d like recovered, a jeweled urn in the same exhibit as the gold vase.

“But I certainly don’t expect you to handle it, Lynn,” he’d said. “I just don’t think you’re up to it.”

Those words had haunted her for the past two weeks. Her unusual physical skills had been the one thing she could always count on, the one gift she used to repay her godfather for taking her in and raising her like his own daughter. The fact that he’d lost faith in her and her abilities weighed heavily on her heart.

She had to believe that he was telling her the truth, that there had been a glitch with his contact and it had all been straightened out. She couldn’t imagine any reason for Jonas to lie to her. As far as she knew, he’d never lied to her in the past.

He’d left again for another trip the day before and although everything had seemed okay between them when he’d told her goodbye, she’d felt a distance that had never been there before.

At that moment she had decided to go in for the urn and surprise him when he returned home again. The decision wasn’t just for him alone. She needed to prove to herself that her skills were as sharp as they’d ever been and she could still depend on them.

Besides, that wasn’t the only decision she’d made over the past two weeks. She would present Jonas not just with the urn, but also with the vase, then she would tell him that she was moving out.

It was time for her to build a life separate from her godfather. As much as she loved Rita and Arturo, she was too old to need caretakers. She was more than ready to embrace life on her own terms.

She knew Nick was at least a bit of a catalyst in her desire to make some changes. Although she’d been feeling restless, caged in and in need of change for some time, it had taken these two weeks with Nick to solidify her need for action rather than wallowing in dissatisfaction.

She wanted a place of her own, a place where she would be responsible for herself and her own needs, a place that nobody else could claim where she could build a life for herself.

A place where she could cook a meal for a friend, or have a man spend the night. It was time for her to be in charge, to make her own way, make her own decisions and grow.

She tightened her grip on her steering wheel as she thought of Nick. She hadn’t been looking for a romantic interest in her life, had never felt the need for a man to make her complete. But she loved spending time with him, talking about everything and nothing with him.

She had never been as comfortable with another person, outside of Jonas. Nick excited her with his heated dark eyes and even hotter touch, but he also put her at ease with his gentle teasing and attentive thoughtfulness.

She was precariously close to being completely in love with him despite the brevity of their relationship so far. She had no idea where their relationship was going, felt no need to worry about it. She simply intended to enjoy each moment as it came.

Slowing her car, she turned into the drive of the cottage that bore Nick’s address. It was just as he’d described it, a small bungalow painted white with cheerful yellow trim.

Before she got out of the car, he appeared on the porch. In jeans and a white T-shirt, he looked cool and casual.

He’d told her to dress casually and bring a swimsuit. She wore a pair of red shorts and a red-and-white-striped sleeveless blouse. As she got out of the car she grabbed her purse and her beach bag from the back seat.

“Hi,” she said as she approached the porch.

“Hi, yourself. I see you found me all right.”

“Your directions were perfect and this place is lovely. It reminds me of an enchanted cottage.” She joined him on the porch.

Immediately she recognized an unusual darkness in his eyes, a tension that radiated from him that let her know something was wrong. “Is everything all right?”

“Fine. Come on in.” He took her by the elbow and led her through the front door. “I’ve got the salad made and the charcoal ready for the steaks but thought maybe you’d like to swim a little before we eat.”

“Sounds wonderful,” she agreed.

He ushered her through the small but comfortable living room and into a bedroom. “You can change into your suit in here. I’ll be out on the back deck whenever you’re ready.”

A moment later, alone in what was obviously the bedroom where he slept while here, Lynn changed into her suit and wondered what was wrong. Even though he’d said everything was fine, she knew something weighed heavily on him.

Just because we’ve seen each other every night for the past two weeks that doesn’t give me the right to pry, she chided herself as she changed into her modest two-piece suit. Two weeks of dating didn’t mean he owed her all his thoughts, all his concerns.

As she’d walked through the living room she’d noticed the room contained nothing personal to indicate who lived there. No photos, no knickknacks decorated the room, nothing but an ordinary sofa and chair, small television and coffee table.

Here in the bedroom it was the same. The room contained a double bed, two nightstands and a dresser, but nothing personal. She supposed his apartment at the Heritage Arms was more a reflection of him and had the personal touches that made a place a home.

He hadn’t invited her there yet. One day at a time, she reminded herself as she left the bedroom.

As she walked through the kitchen toward the back door, she saw him through the glass windows on the porch. He wore only a pair of black swim trunks, and the sight of his broad tanned chest, slim waist and long muscular legs forced a heat through her entire body. Even though she hadn’t been looking for a romantic interest in her life, Nick Barnes made her think of deep kisses and tangled sheets and hot sex.

At that moment he saw her through the glass window and opened the door for her to join him on the deck with its incredible view of beach and ocean.

“Wow, this is great,” she said.

He gestured toward the waves. “You ready for a dip?” She nodded. He reached out and grabbed her hand, and together they ran across the expanse of sand and toward the water.

He released his hold on her hand as they both dived into the waves. When she surfaced she saw him just ahead of her, swimming out with strong, sure strokes.

She drew a deep breath and swam toward him. When she caught up with him, she paced him stroke for stroke until he finally surfaced and looked at her in surprise.

“You’re a hell of a swimmer,” he said.

“What are you doing? Swimming or exorcising demons?” she asked, remembering that he’d said the same thing to her when he’d seen her doing laps in the pool.

“A little of both,” he replied, and gestured for them to return to the shore.

Their return was more leisurely as they swam a little and let the waves carry them back in to where they could touch their feet to the ocean floor.

“You want to talk about it?”

He didn’t pretend not to know what she meant. “Maybe later,” he replied. He swam closer to her. “Right now I just want to play a little.”

She squealed as he picked her up and threw her through the air. For the next few minutes they wrestled and dunked each other, playing like children in the invigorating water.

However, Lynn was aware of the fact that there was nothing childlike in the way she felt when her bare legs tangled with his, in how his muscled chest felt beneath her fingertips, in how her breath caught when his hands touched her bare skin.

By the time they left the water, all her senses were heightened to a level she’d never felt before. She wanted him, but he seemed preoccupied as they stood together beneath an outdoor shower to rid themselves of salt residue from the ocean water.

When she’d changed back into her shorts and blouse, she joined him in the kitchen where he was setting the table for their meal.

“What can I do to help?” she asked.

“You can get the salad out of the fridge along with any dressing you want and I’ll go turn the steaks. How do you like yours?”

“Medium well.”

He nodded and disappeared back outside to the grill. She got out the salad and several bottles of salad dressing, then poured water and ice in glasses and set them on the table.

She went to the door and watched him at the grill. Even though he had been playful in the water, there was a quiet intensity about him she hadn’t seen before. She was vaguely surprised to realize the depth of how much she cared that something was obviously bothering him.

He looked up and saw her watching him and motioned for her to come outside. “There’s a bottle of wine in the refrigerator. Why don’t you pour us each a glass.”

“All right.” She returned to the kitchen, poured the wine, then once again joined him on the deck.

He took a glass from her, gesturing her toward one of the chairs. “Sit and relax, the steaks will be ready in just a few minutes.”

“It’s so peaceful out here,” she said as she sank into one of the deck chairs. “If I were you, I’d give up my apartment at the Heritage Arms and move in here permanently.”

“I need the place close to your godfather’s house for business purposes. Nobody knows I have this place, not even your godfather. It’s my secret hideaway.”

“The enchanted cottage,” she repeated, then sipped her wine and digested this information, touched that he’d shared this particular secret with her, even though she sensed he had others.

She thought of all the secrets she possessed. She couldn’t really blame him for keeping his when she was keeping so many of her own.

It was after dinner while the two of them were standing at the sink washing their dishes when he finally told her what was bothering him.

“I got a call from my brother this evening. My father wants to see me.”

Lynn set her dish towel on the counter and looked at him in surprise. “But that’s good news, isn’t it? I mean, you told me he’d disowned you and it’s been years since you’ve spoken to him. Maybe he finally wants to fix things, mend fences.”

Nick eyed her for a long moment, then placed his palm against her cheek. “You’re very sweet.” He dropped his hand. “But I doubt very seriously that my father wants to mend fences. He’s just not that kind of man.”

A deep sadness filled his eyes and it shot straight through to Lynn’s heart. She knew the sadness of basically having no family. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have a family who didn’t want you.

This time she placed her palm against Nick’s face, wanting, needing to offer solace. “If he doesn’t want to mend fences, then he’s nothing but an old fool,” she said softly. “Any other man in the world would be proud to have a man like you as a son.”

She hadn’t intended to kiss him, but she stood so close, and the dark fires in his eyes enticed her forward, to touch his lips with her own. Besides, it wasn’t exactly a hardship. She’d learned in the last two weeks that she loved kissing Nick.

He remained perfectly still, his mouth neither accepting nor rejecting hers until she wound her arms around his neck and pressed closer against him. It was only then that he took command of the kiss.

His tongue danced with hers at the same time his arms wrapped around her and he pulled her intimately close against him. Lynn gave herself to the pleasure of his body so tight against hers, his mouth so hot, so hungrily demanding.

She’d never wanted anyone the way she wanted Nick at this moment. As his hold loosened and she sensed he was about to bring the kiss to an end, she leaned even more intimately against him, letting him know she was ready and willing to take it to a new level.

“Lynn,” he said as he tore his mouth from hers.

“What?” she asked breathlessly, then trailed kisses along his jawline. She felt the tension in his body and was also aware of his arousal. It reflected the arousal that flowed like hot honey through her veins.

“We should finish the dishes.” His voice was husky and thick.

“On the contrary, I think we should finish this.” It was the boldest, most forward thing she’d ever said. But for the first time in her life she knew what she wanted and had found the courage to go after it.

Chapter 8

His eyes were darker than she’d ever seen them as he gazed down at her. Hot. Hungry. Yet she also saw a hint of hesitation.

She gave him no opportunity to entertain the latter. She pulled his head down and kissed him once again, her tongue seeking entry into his mouth.

He held himself rigid against her for a long moment, then he groaned as he opened his mouth and returned the kiss. His hands moved up and down her back, beneath her blouse as the fire in the kiss increased.

She could kiss him forever. His kisses were as drugging, as intoxicating as a hundred Alabama Slammers. She loved the warmth of his mouth, the taste of it. She loved the strength of his arms surrounding her, the feel of his body so close to hers. His hands were fevered on her bare skin, and she wanted him touching her everywhere.

She felt not only the beat of his heart against her own, but also the press of his hips into hers and the unmistakable evidence of his desire for her.

He groaned, a deep, husky sound that enflamed her senses further.

At the moment, her gift of heightened senses was truly a treasure. She could not only smell the scent of Nick’s cologne but also the fragrance of his laundry detergent and fabric softener in his shirt and the underlying musk of his maleness.

Her fingertips reveled in the feel of his thick, soft hair at the nape of his neck as her body warmed in his embrace.

This time, when the kiss finally ended, it was he who rained kisses down her jaw, into the hollow of her throat. She dropped her head back, allowing him access to the length of her throat. Shivers of pleasure raced up her spine at each touch of his lips against her skin.

She pushed her hips into his, loving the feel of his hardness against her, loving the fact that it was her kisses, her touch that put him in that condition.

Moving her hands down, she felt the taut muscles of his back through his shirt. She wanted to feel his warm skin. She wanted him naked against her.

His hands moved to her sides, slowly caressing upward over her ribs until they rested just beneath her breasts.

Her nipples tingled and hardened as if he’d already touched her there, as if she already felt the heat of his hands on her breasts. Her breath caught in her chest in anticipation, but his hands moved no further.

Instead he dropped his arms to his side and stepped back from her, his gaze not meeting hers. He swiped a hand through his hair, drew a deep breath and finally looked at her.

“Lynn, I want you. Trust me, there’s nothing I’d like better than to take you into my bedroom and make love to you until the sun comes up tomorrow morning.”

His words, coupled with the desire that flamed in his eyes caused her knees to threaten to buckle. She wanted to tell him that was exactly what she wanted, but her mouth was dry, and before she could speak he continued.

“But we’ve only been seeing each other for a couple of weeks. I don’t want us to rush into this. It’s…you’re too important to me for that. I don’t want to take the chance of any regrets when we do make love.”

Disappointment swept through her, but it was a disappointment tempered by the fact that he obviously had her best interest at heart. It had only been a couple of weeks, even though it felt much longer. Even though she’d never felt this way about any man before, that didn’t mean it wasn’t wise to go slowly.

“Then I guess we’d better finish the dishes,” she said, her voice breathy and slightly unsteady.

“I guess we’d better,” he agreed.

They finished the dishes, then carried wine out to the patio and sat to watch the waves rushing to shore as the last of daylight slipped away.

“This is my favorite time of day,” she said as she watched the splash of the sun’s last light gleaming on the water.

“I’m a dawn kind of person myself,” he replied. “Especially when I’m here at the cottage and can watch the sun come up.”

As they talked, Lynn was aware of the simmering tension between them, a tension she knew was blatantly sexual.

But certainly her attraction to Nick wasn’t just sexual in nature. There seemed to be a chemistry at work between them, one that went beyond mere physical attraction. She’d never felt this way about another person before in her life.

Although she felt wonderfully at ease with him, she also felt a spark of electricity, the promise of endless possibilities whenever she was with him.

“To me, dawn is always about the possibilities the day might hold, and dusk is always about reflections of what the day did hold,” she said.

He smiled, his features barely discernible in the growing darkness of night. “And what are you reflecting about at this moment?”

“About what a lovely evening I’ve had.” Her cheeks warmed slightly, and she smiled shyly. “And about how much I enjoy spending time with you.”

“I feel the same way,” he said after a moment’s hesitation. “You’re easy to be with, Lynn. You don’t seem like most twenty-two-year-olds.”

“What does that mean?” she asked, unsure whether to be offended or pleased.

He looked out at the water and sighed thoughtfully. “I don’t know, you just seem older, more mature and more sure of yourself.”

She laughed. “Get me in a room with more than three people in it and you’ll see just how unsure I can be of myself.”

“That has nothing to do with maturity,” he countered. “Lots of people are shy. From what I know, you just haven’t had a chance to practice the skills of socializing with a lot of people, apart from your friends at school.”

“That’s definitely true.” It was her turn to stare out at the water, where the sun had gone away and moonlight cast a faint silvery illumination onto the tips of the waves. “But you’re right, I don’t think I’m like other women my age. My peers were always my godfather and his friends. I never really had friends my own age until the last couple of years.”

“All I know is that you seem older, more settled than most young women I’ve known.”

She looked at him once again. “I’m going to take that as a compliment.”

He laughed. “Good, because I meant it as one.”

He’d told her earlier in the evening that he was on security duty that night at midnight, so when eleven arrived, she stood to prepare to leave.

“I’ll follow you to the house,” he said, also rising from the deck chair.

“Do you often work the overnight hours?” she asked as they walked through the house toward the front door.

“Not often, but occasionally. One of my men called in sick this afternoon so I’m working for him tonight.” His hand in the small of her back as he led her out the door was a reminder of what they had almost shared, what they would have shared had he not stopped it.

He opened her car door, then leaned forward and captured her lips with a gentle kiss that was every bit as seductive as the hotter, deeper kisses they had shared earlier.

“I won’t be able to see you tomorrow night,” he said when the kiss ended. “I have that reunion with my family.”

“I hope it goes well for you.”

He smiled. “I’m not expecting any miracles.” His smile faded and instead his gaze on her was darkly serious. “Sometimes you just have to face the fact that the people who raise you, the people who are supposed to love and guide you, the people who are supposed to teach you right from wrong and good from bad, don’t always have your best interests at heart. Not everyone who has children deserves them.”

Confusion swept through her. She had the feeling he wasn’t just talking about his own situation, but somehow was trying to say something to her personally.

However, there was no way she could compare Nick’s family to her godfather. Jonas had taken care of her, supported her and loved her every day that she had been in his life.

“You’ll call me tomorrow night…if you need to talk?” she asked.

He smiled and reached out to brush a strand of her hair away from her cheek. “I’ll call you even if I don’t need to talk.” He leaned forward and gave her a chaste kiss on the forehead. “Drive safely going home. I’ll be right behind you.”

As she got into her car, she was aware of him getting into his behind her. Within minutes she was back on the highway heading home, her thoughts filled with the evening she had just shared with Nick.

The fact that he’d halted any lovemaking, proclaiming that he wanted to wait to make sure it was right for both of them only made her want him more. How many men would have done what he’d done? Not many, she thought.

Lynn had no idea if Nick was the man who would be in her life forever. She had no idea if they had a future of endless nights together or only a few. That didn’t matter. She knew with certainty that she wanted to make love to him, that she wanted to experience for the first time total intimacy with him. Beyond that, she didn’t know what the future held for the two of them.

When she reached the house, she zoomed through the opened gates and Nick followed her in. As she pulled up and parked, he waved and drove around the back of the house where the security shed was located.

She got out of her car and was almost to the porch when she felt the hair at the nape of her neck raise in a subliminal warning. She froze as she had the distinct impression that she was being watched.

Narrowing her gaze, she looked all around, seeking a reason for her uneasy feeling. But she saw nothing out of the ordinary. Here, behind the gates of her home, should be the safest place in the world. The security was top-notch, and surely there was no way anyone who shouldn’t be on the property would be on the property.

Maybe she was still suffering some sort of paranoid reaction to her encounter with the FBI the other night. Even though she still felt as if somebody…or something was out there in the dark, watching her, she turned and went into the house.

Inside she was greeted by the relative silence of a house at rest. The whoosh of the air conditioner cooling the air, the tick of the antique clock on the mantel in the living room and the creak of the stairs leading up to her room welcomed her with familiarity, and she felt herself once again relaxing.

When she reached her room, she went into the bathroom and removed her makeup, washed her face and brushed her teeth, then pulled on the short pink silk nightgown she usually wore to bed.

She had just gotten into bed when she heard the faint, but unmistakable sound of glass breaking. She sat up, heart pounding. The sound had come from someplace downstairs.

She flew from the bed and took the stairs two at a time. She couldn’t be certain, but she thought the sound had come from the back of the house, in the living room area.

As she entered the living room she turned on the light switch and saw movement at the French doors that led out to the patio. The pane of glass next to the door lock was broken out. Apparently that’s what she’d heard shattering.

She didn’t hesitate, but ran to the doors, unlocked them and threw them open. In the shadows of the night she saw a figure racing away. Without conscious thought, she took off after the dark figure.

She ran as fast as she could, surprised that she gained nothing on the intruder, who flew like the wind. When she was halfway to the high wall that surrounded the perimeter of the compound, bright floodlights lit the area enough for her to see the figure leap to the top of the wall then disappear over it.

She slowed, her breath coming in labored gasps as she realized by the time she reached the wall, the intruder would be long gone.

“Lynn!”

She whirled around to see Nick running toward her. “Somebody tried to break into the house,” she gasped as she tried to catch her breath.

He touched her arm, his features as hard and set as she’d ever seen them. “Are you all right?”

She nodded. “Whoever it was is gone.” She pointed toward the wall. “He went over the top.” She drew several more deep breaths, then continued. “I’ve never seen anyone so fast. It was inhuman!”

Nick stared at her for a long moment, but before he could say anything else to her, several other security guards came running toward them.

His gaze raked the length of her and he tightened his grip on her arm. “Scan the perimeter then go back to your posts,” he yelled to the approaching men, then looked at her once again. “Let’s get you inside.”

It wasn’t until that moment that she realized how skimpily she was dressed. The silk nightgown clung to her, making her look almost naked with her nipples hardened by the night air and her exertions.

She was grateful he’d kept the other men away. She didn’t mind Nick seeing her in this condition, but she certainly didn’t want any of the other men to see her like this.

Together they walked back to the house. “What I’d like to know is how the intruder got past the security cameras,” he said more to himself than to her.

Lynn said nothing. Her mind whirled with troubling thoughts. At least she knew now she hadn’t been paranoid. She’d sensed somebody watching her and somebody had been out there. But who? And why would they want to get into the house?

And who could run so fast…as fast as she could?

When they reached the French doors Lynn excused herself to run upstairs and get a robe as Nick studied the broken glass.

Minutes later when she returned, he’d positioned a piece of wood over the broken pane of glass and stood at the edge of the patio, staring out into the darkness. “I need to check the security tapes, although I was sitting at the desk watching the cameras and didn’t see anyone come or go over the wall.”

“I’d like to go with you,” she replied. She wanted to know how somebody had managed to slip past security. She needed to see if the cameras had caught a picture of who had been on the property.

She followed him around the side of the house and to the shed that served as security headquarters. Lynn had never been in the shed before and was astonished by the elaborate bank of monitors that lined one wall.

“The cameras monitor the front gate and all along the perimeter of the compound,” he said. “There are a total of twenty cameras.” He pointed to one of the monitors. “That’s the one that should have shown me our intruder going over the wall to escape.” He pushed several buttons on a large console.

“I know it sounds crazy, but when I got out of my car and was walking to the front door, I sensed somebody nearby,” she said.

He frowned thoughtfully and sat in the chair in front of the control panel. “We got here around eleven-thirty, and if you sensed somebody hanging around, that means whoever it was came over the wall sometime before eleven-thirty.”

The picture on the monitor began to rewind, small numbers in the corner providing a time stamp. “Is everything recorded?” she asked, wondering how many times they had recorded her leaving the premises for one of her middle-of-the-night retrievals.

“Yeah, everything is on a seventy-two-hour loop, so the recorded images are kept for three days, then the tape is recorded over.” He stopped the tape. The time stamp in the corner read 10:00 p.m.

“Can you tell by this picture where exactly he went over the wall?” he asked.

She frowned and studied the frozen picture intently. “There,” she said and pointed. “It was just to the right of that tree.”

Nick fast-forwarded the picture and they both watched the screen. Lynn gasped as the dark figure appeared and seemed to fly over the wall.

Nick stopped the tape, rewound it and played it again. He played it a total of three times, then stopped the tape and turned to Lynn. “I’ve never seen anyone move that fast in my life. What do you think—male or female?”

“Hard to say. With the mask and all it could be either.” Whoever it was had been wearing black clothing, and with the darkness of night it was hard to discern a distinctive body shape.

“We see how he got out, but we don’t see how he got in.” Once again Nick rewound the tape and they watched it in fast motion, beginning at eight in the evening. Nothing. Nick checked all the camera angles, but they couldn’t find out how the intruder had entered the premises.

A muscle ticked in Nick’s jaw. “There must be a flaw in the security. And the only way an outsider could know about a flaw is if they studied the entire system or somebody from the security team identified the flaw and told them. Both situations concern me.”

What concerned Lynn was the speed with which the figure had shot across the lawn. Lynn had never met another person in her life that she couldn’t outrun…until now.

“So what happens now?” she asked.

He leaned back in his chair, a frown furrowing his forehead. “I need to write a report and talk to Jonas and see what he wants to do.”

“When I spoke to him this morning, he said he wouldn’t be contacting me for the next few days and I wouldn’t be able to get in touch with him.”

“Did he say when he’d be back here?”

She nodded. “He said he’d be back sometime on Monday.”

“Then I guess I’ll talk to him when he returns.” He swiped a hand through his thick, dark hair. “In the meantime, I’ll add a couple of extra guards to walk the perimeter during the nighttime hours.”

His features were taut as his gaze once again raked over the length of her. “You were foolish to chase after him.” There was anger in his gaze coupled with the heat of a deeper emotion.

“I didn’t think. I just reacted. I had just gotten into bed when I heard the sound of breaking glass.” Every inch of bared skin prickled beneath the heat of his gaze.

“I know there’s a panic room in the house. You should have immediately locked yourself inside and called for security.”

Lynn thought of the small room that was hidden inside Jonas’s bedroom closet. The bulletproof, fireproof panic room was another of Jonas’s whims.

She wasn’t going to argue with Nick, but there was no way she’d lock herself into that tiny room and wait for help to reach her. She suffered from just enough claustrophobia that the very idea caused her skin to crawl.

She would much prefer to depend on her physical skills and face head-on whatever danger might be present, instead of hiding in what felt far too much like a small, steel-enclosed coffin.

Nick stood and held out a hand toward her. “Come on, I’ll walk you back to the house. There’s nothing more that can be done tonight.”

She allowed him to pull her up from her chair, and together they left the shed and walked to the back of the house. She saw several guards in the distance, walking the perimeter of the back wall.

When they reached the back door he turned to face her, his gaze solemn. He reached out and grabbed the ends of the robe belt and pulled them to tighten the robe around her. “Promise me you won’t ever do anything so foolish again,” he said. “I don’t want anything bad to happen to you.”

Heat blossomed in the pit of her stomach, created both by his words and by his close proximity. “I promise.”

He used the ends of her belt to draw her closer until her lips were mere inches from his. “I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened to you.” He gave her no opportunity to reply, but instead took her mouth with his in a kiss that stole her breath away.

When the kiss finally ended, she wanted nothing more than to invite him inside with her, take him to her room and make love with him beneath the canopy above her bed.

He seemed to sense her thoughts, her desire, and he released the ends of her belt and stepped back from her. “Go to bed, Lynn. It’s late and I’ve got to get back to the security shed.”

“I’ll sleep better knowing you’re there.”

He smiled, touched her cheek with the back of his hand, then turned and walked away. Lynn waited until he was out of sight, then she went inside and carefully locked the door behind her.

Even the warm glow of Nick couldn’t banish the troubling thoughts that stirred in her head as she once again went up the stairs to her bedroom.

Who had been on the property? Who had tried to break into the house? Somehow she couldn’t believe it was an ordinary thief. No common thief would attempt a robbery at a place that boasted camera surveillance and guards.

No ordinary person could run like that. No ordinary person could leap a high wall like the intruder had done.

There was only one person Lynn knew who was capable of such things, and that was her. Lynn remembered the fantasies she used to entertain about having a sibling. She knew she didn’t—Jonas surely would have known and told her—but perhaps it was possible she had other family out there. It had been a long time since she’d read the news reports about her parents. Perhaps it was time to look at them again.

Nick sat in front of the bank of monitors staring blankly at first one, then another. The attempted break-in had him disturbed on two levels. First, he couldn’t believe that somebody had managed to breach the security, had figured out where one of the blind spots was and had exploited it.

More important, he was disturbed by what Lynn had said when he’d caught up with her in the backyard. Superhuman speed and agility and strength to match, those were the same qualities used to describe the superthief who had been plaguing the department for the past two years.

Nick had always believed Jonas was tied to those robberies. Was it possible that the thief had come here tonight to check in with his boss, not knowing that the boss was out of the country? If that was the case, Lynn fell off his list of suspects. Still he’d stick to the decision he’d made to tail her on her nightly drives for a while. Just to cover all bases.

He raked a hand down his face and straightened his back, trying to ease some of the tension that had been with him all evening.

The phone call from his brother had started the first stir of stress. The idea of seeing his father had created a ball of tension in his chest, and being with Lynn, fighting his intense desire for her, had merely served to heighten it.

He thought of those moments earlier in the evening, when her mouth had been so hot against his, when she’d pressed her body so close that he could feel every curve beneath her clothing.

She’d wanted him to take her to bed, to make love to her, and he’d wanted it more than he could remember wanting a woman before in his life.

The most difficult thing he’d ever done was to deny his own desire and call a halt to those kisses.

As if that hadn’t been difficult enough, seeing her in that skimpy, sexy nightgown—her nipples thrusting out as if to taunt him and her breasts heaving from her exertion—had nearly undone him.

He’d wanted to take her in his arms and pull her down in the sweet lush grass and make her moan as she’d never moaned before. He’d wanted to lose himself in the pleasure of making love to her.

Dammit.

Business and pleasure were mingling together in a dangerous way. Even though his instinct was to protect Lynn, he had to focus on getting the information he needed from her.

He couldn’t afford to get soft. Too much time and too much money had already been spent in an effort to bring down Jonas White.

No matter how much he wanted to spare Lynn from the truth about her godfather, tomorrow he was going to step up his campaign with her. He wanted access to financial records, and he needed to see who, exactly, Jonas kept on his payroll.

He had a feeling that somewhere in those records he would find the identity of the superthief and the information to bring Jonas down. He just hoped Lynn didn’t get crushed in the process.

Chapter 9

The next morning Lynn went to class unusually early. She wanted some extra time alone in the computer lab. Although the computer search she intended to conduct could have been done at home on her godfather’s computer, she preferred doing it in the neutral territory of a classroom.

Before heading for the lab, she went to the student union, wanting to fortify herself with an extra cup of coffee before getting down to work.

Even though it was early, the student union was hopping with people, most utilizing the coffeemaker and the vending machine that offered snack substitutes for breakfast.

She got her coffee, then with surprise spied Sonya looking half-asleep and more than a bit grumpy, seated at a table alone. She made her way to the table.

“What on earth are you doing here so early?” she asked her friend.

Sonya wrinkled her nose in disgust. “In half an hour a bunch of us are supposed to start painting sets for the play.”

Lynn sank down in the chair next to her friend. “Painting sets? But I thought you were the leading lady.”

Sonya snorted indelicately. “Yeah, right. Leading lady, set painter, prop getter, costume seamstress. I can’t wait until I work on a production that has a bigger budget than a buck eighty-five.”

Lynn laughed. “Just think of everything you’re learning.”

“What I’d like to learn is what it’s like to have a personal assistant and make more money than Oprah. I’d like to learn what it’s like to get dressed in Dior or Chanel for the Oscars and be nominated for three different awards.”

“Give it time, Sonya. If you want it badly enough it will eventually happen for you.”

“I suppose. What are you doing here so early?” Sonya grabbed her coffee cup and took a deep drink.

“I wanted to get in some extra time in the computer lab.”

Again Sonya wrinkled her nose. “Sounds perfectly boring. So tell me what’s been going on with you. You’ve been pretty scarce since that night at Sensations. And what about that hunk who took you home from there?”

“You mean Nick?” Despite her best efforts, Lynn felt the blush she knew reddened her cheeks. “I told you that night that he works security for Jonas.”

“Right. So, where have you been keeping yourself the last couple of weeks? You haven’t even made it to the Cloister for coffee lately.” Sonya raised one of her perfectly plucked eyebrows. “It’s been my experience that when a woman stops meeting with her friends, there’s a male somewhere in the picture. So tell me, where have you been and with whom?”

Lynn’s blush grew hotter. It was true, she hadn’t spent much time with her friends in the past couple of weeks. After her classes she’d hurried home each afternoon to see Nick. “I’ve been here and there.”

Sonya eyed her narrowly. “It’s a guy, isn’t it? I can tell. You’ve got that look about you. It’s the security guy, isn’t it.” She smiled like the proverbial Cheshire cat. “There’s more going on between you two than just the fact that he works for your godfather.”

The desire to tell somebody how she felt about Nick was suddenly overwhelming. She reached out and grabbed Sonya’s hand. “Yes, there’s more to it than that. We’ve been seeing each other every night for the past two weeks. Oh, Sonya, I’ve never felt this way about anyone before. He excites me, yet puts me at ease at the same time.”

She paused, aware that she hadn’t even begun to explain how she felt whenever she was with Nick. No words could adequately describe what she felt.

“Oh, girl, you got it bad. I see it in your eyes.”

Lynn laughed once again. “I’ve got it so bad it feels good.”

Sonya squeezed her hand, her features unusually somber. “Go slow, Lynnie. If this Nick is really special, then take it slow and savor every moment.”

“I am…I mean, we are.”

“Good.” Sonya released her hand. “And of course it goes without saying that you need to remember that a man is a luxury, not a necessity for women in our generation.”

“Don’t worry, I don’t need a man to complete me,” Lynn said dryly. “But I sure enjoy spending time with him.”

“From what I remember of him, the man isn’t exactly hard to look at.”

“No, he isn’t, and what’s even better, he’s a good guy.”

“Then, honey, hang on to him. They don’t always come as a complete package.” Sonya checked her watch, then jumped up. “I’ve gotta split. We were told if we arrived late this morning then we’d be spending our Friday night painting sets. Like I want to do that. Call me,” she said over her shoulder as she hurried away.

Lynn remained at the table and finished her coffee, her thoughts on Nick and what Sonya had said about women of their generation.

Certainly Lynn wasn’t one of those women who desperately needed a man in her life, who defined who she was by what a man thought of her. She was just beginning the process of defining herself.

Nor was she in a hurry for marriage. Someday she’d like to bind her life to a man’s, but certainly not anytime soon. That didn’t mean she didn’t want a real relationship based on not only sexual desire but emotional intimacy, as well.

She dumped her empty foam coffee cup in the trash, then headed for the computer lab. As she took a seat at one of the computers, she wasn’t alone in the room. Several other students were already working. She waved to a guy she knew, then settled in and powered up the machine.

It was funny, for the past few weeks since spending time with Nick, she’d spent less time chatting on her computer. It was so much more wonderful having a real relationship instead of one built on technology.

She shoved thoughts of Nick away and focused on the reason she’d come to the lab in the first place.

It had been years ago, when she’d been thirteen, that Jonas had first shown her the news accounts of her parents’ deaths. At that time Lynn had been hungry for any detail of their lives and deaths.

Jonas had saved clippings and photos to answer her questions about where and whom she had come from. He’d also shown her a bank book that contained the information about the trust fund her parents had left behind for her. When she got older, the realization had sunk in that she was a wealthy woman in her own right.

Seeing the figure run across the grounds with a speed and agility to match her own had ignited questions. What had the person wanted? Was there something she didn’t know about herself?

She knew the computers here at the college were linked to all kinds of news services and also tied into the college library system of newspapers from the last thirty years or so. She should have no problem pulling up those old news stories that Jonas had shown her so many years ago.

It took her only minutes to pull up the link to the Miami Herald. In the search box she put her parents’ names, Malcolm and Anne Winters, then she added the words, yacht…drowning and storm.

The results she got were overwhelming, and she realized quickly she had to narrow down the search. It had been foolish for her to put the words drowning and storm in a search of a Miami newspaper. Every year there were dozens of storms and drownings in the area.

Once again she typed into the search box, this time listing only her parents’ names. It took only seconds for her to get the dialogue box NO MATCHES FOUND.

She frowned and tapped her index finger against the mouse. She had no idea how sensitive the search function might be for old newspapers.

Her parents had died when she was five months old. She’d been born in December. That meant her parents had to have died in the month of April. She would have to read the papers for that month and see if she could find any report of the accident and storm that had claimed their lives.

There was no way she was going to make her classes today. This was far more important than anything she could learn from a teacher. She intended to sit here until she got some information.

Once again she thought of the person she’d seen running across the backyard the night before. She had no idea if the person had been male or female. All she knew was that the person had run like the wind…run like her.

Jonas had always told her she was an anomaly, that her unusual speed and agility, her heightened senses had been some sort of genetic gift. If that was true, then how was it possible that there might be somebody else like her?

Hours later she leaned back in the chair and moved her shoulders up and down in an attempt to alleviate some of the exhaustion that weighed her down.

Nothing.

She’d found nothing about the boating accident that had taken her parents away from her. She’d gone through every newspaper for the month of April. There had been stories about murders and robberies, fires and even a shark attack or two, but nothing about a millionaire and his wife dying in a storm.

But she’d seen the clippings. So, why hadn’t she been able to find them?

As she drove home, she once again thought of the person who had tried to get into the house the night before. And thinking back, she remembered several times when she’d had the feeling she was being watched, that somebody was nearby.

Was it possible the FBI were watching her? That somehow they’d tied her to the thefts of precious artifacts? Was it possible Jonas’s contact hadn’t straightened things out with that agency after all?

She shook her head. That didn’t make sense. She could understand the FBI watching her, watching the house but why would any of them try to break in? If they wanted in, if they wanted her, they’d get a warrant and show up at the front door. She wouldn’t have been left to chase after the person and she would have left the house in handcuffs.

Confusion stayed with her when she got back home. She was vaguely disappointed that Nick wasn’t waiting for her when she pulled through the gates. She’d gotten accustomed to him meeting her each day after her classes. But he’d worked all night and had probably gone home to get some sleep before meeting with his family this evening.

She hoped the meeting went well. It would be nice if his family made peace with him and erased some of the dark shadows she occasionally saw flit across his eyes. She knew that hunger for family and she hoped Nick’s problems with his were resolved.

A wonderful fragrance of apples and cinnamon wafted in the air when she entered the house. Lynn followed the scent into the kitchen where Rita sat at the table with a cup of coffee in front of her.

“Apple pie?” Lynn asked.

“Dumplings.” Rita looked over at the clock on the oven. “You’re later than usual. Did you have coffee with your friends?”

Lynn slid into the chair opposite the housekeeper. “No, I didn’t even go to classes today.”

Rita looked at her in surprise. “Is everything all right?”

Her first instinct was to reassure the plump Cuban woman that everything was fine. But it wasn’t fine, and Lynn wasn’t going to pretend it was. She released a deep sigh. “No, everything isn’t all right. I’m confused, Rita.”

“Confused about what?”

“My parents died in a boating accident in a storm when I was five months old.” Rita nodded and Lynn continued. “But I just spent the morning going through all the local and national newspapers for the month and that whole year, and I can’t find any record of such an accident.”

Rita frowned. “I’m sure there must be a logical explanation for that. You know Mr. Jonas has always said your parents were eccentric. Maybe the story was intentionally kept out of the papers for some reason or another.”

Lynn shook her head. “No, that’s not right, because a long time ago Jonas showed me news clippings about the accident. Not only were there reports about their accident, but there were also several about my father’s philanthropic work with charitable foundations.”

Rita shrugged. “I don’t know anything about clippings.” Her dark eyes filled with concern. “What’s wrong, Lynn? Why are you looking for reports of tragedy?”

She thought carefully before answering. Why was it suddenly so important that she know more? Because she’d seen somebody possibly as skilled as her. Because the image of that person running and leaping had put questions into her head. “I’m curious. It’s been a long time since I read about my parents. I guess I’m hungry to know more about them.”

“You’re just feeling lonely. Things will be better when Mr. Jonas returns. He’ll have the answers you need.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Lynn replied, then excused herself.

A few minutes later she called her uncle from her room, unsurprised when the call went directly to his voice mail. He’d said he wouldn’t be communicating until he returned home on Monday.

He must be in the middle of some intense negotiations, probably on a defense contract. She wished he were here to answer her questions. She wished she’d asked more questions in the past.

She walked over to her window and stared outside. From this vantage point she could see the perimeter wall in the distance and her gaze went directly to the place where she’d seen the figure disappear over the wall the night before. She tapped a finger against the glass, then sighed and turned away.

She was going after the urn and vase tonight. She was banking on the fact that nobody would be prepared for lightning to strike twice in the same place. The FBI had thwarted her two weeks ago at the Markham Convention Center. She was gambling that they would never think she’d attempt to get into the same place so soon after the failed attempt.

She had no intention of changing her routine. She knew the security cameras would capture her leaving, but tonight would be no different from any other night. There was no way she could be tied to the robberies. She’d long ago established a pattern that would make it difficult for anyone to prove what she did when she left the house each night.

She spent most of the afternoon going over her plans again and again. She checked and rechecked the floor plans for the convention center, making sure there was nothing she’d missed in her initial research.

Dinner was a quiet affair with Rita and Arturo in the kitchen. Arturo spent the meal entertaining her with stories about his childhood in Cuba and she wondered if Rita had told her husband that Lynn was depressed. Love for the couple filled her heart.

When dinner was finished she returned to her room. At six-thirty her phone rang. She half hoped it was Jonas, but was pleasantly surprised to hear Nick’s voice.

“Hi…where are you?” she asked.

“At the enchanted cottage. I needed a little quiet time before heading into the lion’s den.”

“Oh, Nick. I hope things go well for you. It would be wonderful if you could have some sort of relationship with your family again.”

“We’ll see how things go,” he replied. It was obvious from his tone of voice that he had no expectations about his night to come.

“I spent the day trying to find information about my parents,” she confessed.

“Really? What did you find out?”

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing.” She ran a hand over the brocade material of her bedspread, her fingers tracing the lines of one of the lavender flowers that decorated the spread.

“Where did you look?”

She told him about the unsuccessful newspaper search. “I even did a Web search and came up with nothing. Jonas showed me news clippings about them, and the accident years ago, but I couldn’t find any record of them.”

“Have you asked Jonas about it?”

She sighed. “I haven’t had a chance. He’s still not answering his phone. I’m going to talk to him about them as soon as he gets back home.”

“What are your plans for this evening?” he asked.

“I’m going to study for a test I have next week, then go to bed early.” She hated to lie to him, but the last thing she wanted was to bring trouble to his door if trouble should come. Better he not know anything about the work she did for Jonas and the government. Eventually, if their relationship continued, then she’d share all of her secrets with him.

“Lynn, I’ve been thinking about that intruder last night.”

“What about it?”

“I can’t help but think that it might have been an inside job, and I have a favor to ask of you.”

“What?”

“You mentioned before that you keep the books for Jonas. Does that mean you also take care of his payroll?”

“Yes, I do. Why?”

“I’d like a copy of everyone who is on the payroll. I’d like to do some background checks and see if we can find out if somebody who works here was the person who tried to break in.”

Lynn sat up on the bed. “But why would somebody who works for us try to break into the house?”

“For starters, if somebody is having financial problems, it’s possible they or someone connected to them might have taken a chance.”

“All right. I guess I could get you a list of the people who work for Uncle Jonas,” she said.

“I have one more favor,” he said. “Could we keep this just between you and me? I hate to ask you to keep secrets, but I’d prefer Jonas doesn’t know about it until I’ve checked everyone out.”

He wasn’t asking her to lie, he was simply asking her to keep silent until he could sort things out. “I don’t have a problem with that. I’ll have the list for you first thing in the morning.”

“Great. If I can find the culprit before Jonas gets home, then I’ll feel better about the security breach.”

She hadn’t realized until this moment just how personally he was taking the security problem. “It’s no problem, Nick.” She looked at her wristwatch. “And shouldn’t you be leaving? You don’t want to be late for the meeting with your family.”

“Yeah, you’re right. Guess it’s time for me to head out of here. How about we go back to Smokey’s tomorrow night?” His voice deepened. “I’m in the mood to dance with you again.”

Pleasure swept through her. “Sounds wonderful. Just let me know when and I’ll be ready.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow to set up a time.”

“Nick, good luck tonight.”

“Thanks, I’ll call you tomorrow.” With these words he clicked off.

She left her bedroom and went downstairs to the study, where Jonas’s computer sat, ready for use. This was the computer she often worked on when she was doing work for her godfather.

She’d never wandered through the files before. Usually she pulled up the financial program she used and did whatever needed to be done. This time she pulled up a directory and studied the files contained on the hard drive.

Maybe there was something about her parents in a file, some information that would tell her more about them, about what kind of people they had been.

She opened dozens of files but found nothing of interest. She finally pulled up the payroll records and printed them to give to Nick. Then she shut off the computer and carried the papers upstairs with her.

The rest of the evening stretched out before her. It would be hours before she would be able to leave to get the urn that Jonas had indicated he wanted.

Nothing had been as hurtful to her as Jonas questioning her ability to continue to help him in this work. She had to get the urn to reaffirm his belief in her, and she needed to get the urn to reaffirm her belief in herself and her ability to do the work that Jonas loved.

It was midnight when she left the house. Clad in jeans and a T-shirt, she walked with the nonchalance of a woman with nothing to hide, as if this night was like a hundred other nights.

The trunk of her car contained all that she would need: dark clothing, a stocking cap and the tools of the trade all neatly packed in an oversize book bag.

She got into her car and punched the remote button to open the gates at the end of the driveway. As she left the house behind, she focused on the next step. About three miles down the road was a liquor store that had gone out of business. The alley behind the place was a perfect place for her to change clothes and prepare for the job ahead.

Within minutes she was back in the car clad in black jeans and a long-sleeved black T-shirt. As she drove, she drew deep breaths, centering herself for the task ahead, hoping she was right that nobody would suspect the convention center would be hit again so soon after the last failed robbery.

She was also praying that Jonas’s contact hadn’t lied to him and the situation with the FBI had been resolved.

She parked her car in front of a house in a residential neighborhood three blocks away from the convention center. After the job was done, she’d drive for another hour or so, putting additional miles on the car so time and distance couldn’t be matched up.

She wasn’t going in the same way she had last week. She’d found another air vent that led to what appeared to be a small janitorial closet.

It would be a little trickier, as this particular vent was on the side of the building rather than in the back. She’d have to keep an eye out for security guards.

When she reached the side of the convention center, she crouched in the shadows of a large bush and eyed the scene before her. Thankfully there was little light on this side of the building, just enough for her to see the vent she intended to use to get inside.

She pulled on gloves, then exchanged the ball cap for the stocking cap to completely hide her hair. She cocked her head and listened, ignoring the audible beat of her own heart to focus on the noise surrounding her.

She heard the scrape of boots against the concrete walk out front, heard the strike of a match and the intake of breath as one of the guards lit a cigarette.

There seemed to be only one guard on duty, and while he smoked his cigarette Lynn removed the cover of the vent and slithered through. Once inside she turned back to the vent cover and balanced it so it looked as if it hadn’t been removed, then she clicked on her penlight to orient herself.

Just as she’d hoped, she found herself in a small room used to store janitorial supplies. The air in the room was thick with the scent of astringent ammonia, bathroom deodorizer and floor wax.

The penlight showed metal shelving units of supplies, not only the cleaning items, but also rolls of toilet tissue and paper towels.

She moved to the doorway that would lead her out of the supply closet and pressed her ear against the door. She heard absolutely nothing to indicate any human presence on the other side of the door.

She shut off her penlight, twisted the doorknob and eased the door open, grateful there was no squeak or groan. Once again she stood perfectly still and listened. Again she heard nothing to cause her alarm.

The hallway outside the closet was dark, but she knew from studying the floor plans that if she followed it to the right it would lead her into the main artery that ran between the various exhibit rooms.

Using a hand to anchor herself against one wall, she moved silently, slipping over, under and around the laser alarms, eager to get the job done and get back home. For the first time since she’d begun this work for Jonas, it didn’t feel quite right. Her instincts were all screaming that something was off.

She reached the end of the hallway and paused, her senses all alive. So far so good. She hadn’t really expected trouble, and so far she hadn’t found any.

Her heartbeat accelerated when she reached the lobby area that she would have to cross to get to the room where the Treasure of the Nile exhibit was being held. It was in this same area she had nearly been caught a week before.

Tonight faint moonlight drifted in through the bank of windows, illuminating just enough of the area for her to see there seemed to be nothing amiss.

She took a step out of the dark hallway, then another and another. Suddenly every light in the place flashed on, momentarily blinding her. Panic clawed up her throat.

“Freeze,” several voices shouted. One came from in front of her, another from behind her, letting her know that this time there was no escape.

Chapter 10

“Get those hands up where we can see them,” one of the men yelled. “Simms, call headquarters and tell them we have the perp in custody.”

Lynn thought of fighting, of using her skills to try to escape. But rational thought won over emotional impulse. There were too many of them and they had guns. She slowly raised her hands above her head as her vision adjusted to the bright overhead lights.

Six men surrounded her. They all wore black T-shirts with the yellow FBI acronym emblazoned across their chests and backs. She should have heard them, their breathing, but she’d been too focused on the alarm sensors, on getting in and out.

“There’s been a mistake,” Lynn began, her heart knocking almost painfully against her ribs.

“Yeah, your mistake.” A tall blond-haired man with cold blue eyes approached her. “You got any ID on you? Any weapons?”

“No…neither,” she replied. To her horror he patted her down. It was both intrusive and humiliating. He checked her pockets, then took her backpack off her back.

“We’ve been waiting for you, sweetheart,” the blonde said. “We’ve been hoping you’d come back to see us after the last little fiasco.”

“How did you know I’d come back?” she asked, curious as to how they’d guessed this would be a target and not someplace else.

“We weren’t sure. We’ve got teams set up all over Miami in museums and galleries just hoping you’d show.” Lynn slowly digested this information. “What’s your name?” he asked when he’d finished frisking her.

She hesitated a moment, then decided there was no reason not to cooperate with them to the fullest. Surely when they got to the station or wherever they would be taking her, the whole thing would be straightened out and she’d be released immediately.

“Lynnette White.”

“Ms. White, put your hands behind your back. You’re under arrest for attempted robbery and suspicion of several other robberies.”

The snap of the handcuffs around her wrists sounded like gunfire in her ear. The cuffs were cold and tight. As the agent began to lead her toward the entrance of the convention center, he read her her rights.

This will all be straightened out soon, she told herself as the officer’s words rang in her ears. There was no point in trying to explain things to these men. She needed to talk to somebody in charge.

A phone call from Jonas or the contact he had with the government would surely effect her immediate release. All she needed to do was be patient and stay calm. However, it was difficult to stay calm with her hands cuffed behind her. It seemed to take forever before she was finally led toward the entrance of the convention center.

The thick night air wrapped around her as she was led to the door of the building. They had just stepped out when a car screeched to a halt in front of the building. She stared at the car…a familiar car.

For a moment her mind refused to make any sense of it. It looked like Nick’s car, but that didn’t make any sense at all. What would he be doing here?

Her heart leaped as a thought occurred to her. Maybe he was here to help her. Maybe Uncle Jonas had sent him. But even as she thought it, she knew it was impossible. How could he be here to help her? How could he or her Uncle Jonas know she was in trouble?

She stared in confusion as he stepped out of the car.

“Agent Barnes,” the officer behind her yelled. “We got the perp.”

Agent Barnes? For a moment her mind simply refused to understand. Agent Barnes? Nick was Agent Barnes? But he worked for Jonas. He was head of security.

His gaze met hers, and in his eyes she knew the truth. He was an FBI agent. Numbness swept through her as their gazes remained locked for a long moment. With a gasp, she tore her gaze from his.

Moments later as she sat in the back of a car driving her to wherever they intended to take her, her mind tried to wrap around what she had just learned.

Agent Barnes. FBI Agent Nick Barnes. When their gazes had met for that single moment, she’d seen the shock in his gaze, but no amount of shock he felt in seeing her could compare to what she felt at seeing him, at learning who he was.

She closed her eyes and leaned back, instantly feeling the painful pinch of the cuffs biting into her wrists. She welcomed the physical pain that momentarily obscured anything else she might feel. Tears burned at her eyes, but she focused only on the pain at her wrists.

Soon enough the cuffs would be removed, the numbness of shock would wear off and she’d have to face emotions she didn’t want to feel.

The blessed numbness remained with her as she was taken into the local precinct. She was fingerprinted and her mug shot taken, then finally she was led into a small interrogation room.

The room was like something from a movie, containing a table and two chairs and nothing else that could be used as a weapon against an officer or herself. A long mirror stretched across one wall and she assumed it was some sort of two-way mirror that allowed people to see into the room.

She was left alone, and, as she sat at the table, the first real wave of emotion struck her. Pain. It seared through her heart.

A fool. She’d been such a fool. Initially she’d been afraid Nick was using her to get closer to her uncle, to gain a more favorable position in Jonas’s employment.

In the time they’d spent together, he’d assuaged those worries, seducing her into believing that his only reason for spending time with her, sharing moments with her, was that he liked her, he wanted her.

And she’d taken the bait, hook, line and sinker. An aching bereavement shot through her as she realized it had all been false. Every heated glance he had given to her, every special word he had spoken to her, every touch and kiss he’d shared with her had been lies, all lies.

Tears once again burned at her eyes, and she swiped at them angrily. He didn’t deserve her tears. He was a liar, a deceiver.

She had no idea what was going on for sure. Had this been about trapping her, concerning the robberies? She leaned back in the chair and rubbed her fingers across her forehead. Think. She had to think. She had to somehow make sense of all this.

Looking back now over the past two weeks they had shared, she realized how often he’d asked her little things about Jonas, about where he was, what he was doing. His casual questions had seemed benign at the time, but now nothing that had occurred in the past two weeks seemed benign.

Why had he been using her? What had he wanted from her? Information about Jonas, or had he been trying to entrap her for the robberies?

Thank God she hadn’t shared her innermost secrets with him. Thank God Jonas had spent her lifetime warning her about people like Nick.

But that didn’t make his betrayal any less painful.

She stared at the door, waiting impatiently for somebody to come in and speak with her. She needed to make a phone call to let Jonas know what had happened. He would straighten this out. She was certain it was just a matter of time and she’d be released.

At least they’d removed the cuffs. She rubbed her reddened wrists absently. She couldn’t wait to get out of here and when she did, she’d never see or speak to Nick Barnes again. Certainly he could be assured his job as head of security for Jonas was over. Not that losing his job there would probably bother him. After all, he was apparently a hotshot FBI agent.

What was his game? Why had he been working for Jonas? Obviously he’d been undercover, but why? At the moment nothing made sense except the pain that ripped through her heart.

He’d used her. For the first time in her life she’d allowed a man to get close to her, had let down her guard and had trusted like she’d never done before.

She closed her eyes, remembering each touch of his hand, every word he’d uttered to her, the fire of every kiss they had shared. Lies. All lies.

The pain inside her transformed to a rich cold anger. She opened her eyes as she heard the door to the room open. She frowned as Nick walked in and closed the door behind him.

“Get somebody else in here to talk to me, because I’m not talking to you,” she said, her voice thick with the anger that rippled inside her.

He ignored her words and seated himself opposite her at the table. “Why don’t you tell me what in the hell you were doing tonight?”

She wanted to scream at him, ask him what in the hell he thought he was doing, but she refused to give him the satisfaction of seeing how utterly devastated she was by his subterfuge. “It’s complicated,” she said, refusing to meet his gaze.

“Well, uncomplicate it for me.” There was a toughness in his voice she’d never heard before.

“I’d like to make my phone call, then all of this will be straightened out,” she replied.

“I don’t think you recognize how much trouble you’re in, Lynn. You’re facing felony theft charges, along with a multitude of other charges. No phone call from anyone is going to straighten this out.”

She looked at him then and raised her chin in a show of defiance. “Trust me, you’re all going to have egg on your face when Uncle Jonas talks to his government contact.”

He stared at her as if she were speaking a foreign language. “What government contact?”

“If you just let me call Uncle Jonas, then he can explain it all to you. This is all one big mistake. I’m not a thief, there’s just been some sort of mix-up.”

He slammed his hands down on the table. She jumped at the force of his action. “I don’t want Jonas to explain anything to me. I want you to talk to me. We have over a dozen thefts on the books, and right now you’re looking good for all of them. I want to know what in the hell you think you’ve been doing.”

She jumped up, the chair skittering backward on the floor as something snapped inside her. “Why don’t you tell me what in the hell you think you’ve been doing, Agent Barnes?” She was appalled by the tremble that seemed to take possession of her voice. “Why don’t you tell me what kind of game you’ve been playing?”

For a moment the air between them crackled with tension, with the acrid scent of broken trust and the simmering rage of betrayal. “Tell me what you were doing, Agent Barnes, working for Uncle Jonas. Tell me why you’re on our payroll as a security expert when you have such a prominent position with the FBI. Tell me what you were doing every time you held me in your arms and kissed me.”

The words fired from her and the tremble that had been in her voice disappeared beneath the cold, hard anger that ripped through her. “You get me a phone so I can make my phone call, and beyond that I don’t have anything else to say to you.”

She sat back down, folded her hands and glared at him.

A muscle ticked ominously in his jaw. He stood and pulled his cell phone from his pocket. “Make your call. I’ll wait outside.” He set the phone on the table, then turned and left the room.

The moment he left the room the anger that had sustained her vanished, leaving in its wake a heart heaviness she’d never known before.

He hadn’t answered any of her questions. She still had no idea why he’d been working for Jonas. More important, she had no idea why he’d worked to get so close to her, what he could possibly want from her.

She picked up the phone and dialed Jonas’s number, praying that he would answer. As she’d feared, it went directly to voice mail.

“Uncle Jonas, it’s me.” She paused a few seconds, then continued. “I went after the urn tonight and I’ve been arrested by the FBI. I’m at the South Patrol precinct. You need to talk to your contact and get me out of here. Please, Uncle Jonas…get me out of here as soon as possible.”

She clicked off and set the phone down on the table. How long would it be before Jonas checked his voice mail? Even on those rare occasions that he told her he would be incommunicado, he’d always assured her that he listened to his voice mail frequently and would always be available should she need him.

She needed him now. This room, this place, was getting to her. She could smell the odor of the people who had sat at this table before her. The stench of sweat and fear permeated the room.

A surge of panic swept through her and she grabbed the phone and once again punched in Jonas’s number. “Uncle Jonas, please hurry and call me as soon as you get this message. I need you.” She read off the number from Nick’s cell phone, then disconnected.

She remained in the room by herself for what seemed like an eternity, staring at the phone and willing it to ring. She looked up as the door opened and Nick walked back in.

He sank down in the chair across from her and for a moment they sat in silence, their gazes locked. As Lynn stared at his familiar features, she realized the depth of her emotional involvement with him.

She’d been perilously close to falling in love with him, and this recognition refired the flames of her rage. It had felt so real with him, but she realized now that her relationship with him had been no more real than the cyberspace relationships she shared through the Internet.

“Did you get in touch with Jonas?” he finally asked.

She shook her head. “I left a message for him. I also gave him your phone number. I’m sure he’ll be calling very soon.”

“Are you going to tell me why a woman who has everything she could want would spend her nights stealing antiquities and jewels?” he asked. There was no anger in his voice this time. Instead there was a deep weariness. “I’d really like to understand. Can you explain it to me?”

“I don’t owe you any explanations,” she said with a forced coolness.

His lips thinned. “Perhaps you’ll feel more like talking after spending a night in jail.”

“I shouldn’t be here more than an hour or two,” she said with a burst of confidence. She stood. “Take me to a cell. I’d prefer to cool my heels there than in your company.”

“Lynn, let me explain—”

“I don’t want to hear any explanations,” she said, interrupting whatever he was about to say. No explanation he could offer could take away what he had done. He’d taken her emotions, all her trust and abused them in the worst possible way.

“Fine.” The muscle once again ticked in his jaw as he stood and left the room. A moment later a uniformed police officer came into the room to escort her to her accommodations for the night.

Lynn had never been in a police station in her life. As the officer walked her toward the back of the building, she noted that this particular station house was smaller than she would have guessed most police stations to be.

It was housed in an old brick building, and she fought a shudder as she anticipated the cell where she’d be spending the next couple of hours or so.

There was absolutely no doubt in her mind that her uncle Jonas would move heaven and earth to get her out as soon as possible. All she had to do was endure until he made the appropriate arrangements.

The cell she was led to wasn’t as bad as she’d anticipated. Although small, containing only two bunks and a stool and sink, everything appeared to be clean. The clang of the cell door resounded in her head, and when the officer disappeared she was utterly alone.

The only sound was the slow, steady drip of the sink faucet and the screaming inside her own head. She could deal with being locked up for a couple of hours, she had even dealt with the indignity of being fingerprinted and having mug shots taken, but what she was finding impossible to resolve were her feelings about Nick.

Why had he done what he’d done? What had he gained by pretending to like her, pretending to desire her? Why had he been working for her Uncle Jonas? It wasn’t as if he’d just been hired recently. He’d worked for Jonas for the past two years. None of it made any sense.

She climbed onto the upper bunk, leaned her back against the wall and pulled her legs up to her chest. She’d never known heartache before now.

She felt stupid and naive. Whenever she’d been with Nick she’d listened with her heart, not her head. She’d forgotten all the things Jonas had warned her about and had allowed herself to be taken advantage of.

Never again. Never again would she trust as easily. Never again would she believe the sweet-talk of any man. She’d actually contemplated sharing with Nick the secrets of her physical gifts. Thank God she hadn’t, for she had no idea what he might have done with that information.

The minutes ticked by with excruciating slowness. Her thoughts flittered in confusion as she waited for her godfather to rescue her.

Her mind played back in great detail each and every moment she’d spent with Nick. Her cheeks burned as she thought of how close she’d come to sleeping with him.

She had no idea when she fell asleep, but she awakened with a start. Across the hallway from her cell, a window showed the first light of dawn.

Dawn? How could it be dawn? Where had the night gone?

She unkinked from her position, her muscles aching from too much time cramped up. She slid to the floor and stretched, the first stir of disquiet sweeping through her.

Why hadn’t she been released? Surely Uncle Jonas had gotten her messages by now. How long could it take to let the people in charge know that she wasn’t a common thief but rather had been working for the government?

She thought of the doubts she’d entertained concerning the work she’d been doing, doubts that now seemed bigger and stronger than ever. She refused to entertain those doubts. She had to believe in Jonas. She had to believe there was a logical reason why she was still behind bars.

She used the facilities, grateful that no guard was leering at her, then washed her face and hands at the sink, then sat on the bottom bunk to wait for what happened next. She didn’t have long to wait.

Within an hour an officer came to get her and led her back into the room where she’d been held the night before. She sat at the table and prepared herself for whatever might come.

She was unsurprised when Nick came into the room. He carried two foam cups of coffee and a file folder. Even though she wanted nothing to do with him, her need for creature comfort won out as she reached for one of the cups of coffee.

“You didn’t want to listen to me last night, but you’re going to listen to me now,” he said as he sat at the table. “I’ve been undercover for the past two years, working for Jonas in an attempt to gain access to information that would put him behind bars for the rest of his life.”

She looked at him in surprise. “For what?”

His ruggedly handsome features were drawn and taut. He looked as if he’d gotten considerably less sleep than she had. “Lynn, your godfather isn’t the man you think he is. We’ve linked him to a worldwide smuggling network. He deals in illegal drugs and weapons. He uses the black market to sell artwork, antiquities and jewels that we now believe you have obtained for him.”

“That’s not true,” she replied in a hoarse whisper, appalled by what he’d said. “The things I retrieved from museums and other places, they weren’t for Jonas. They were for the government. Jonas works for a government agency to help in the recovery of stolen items. I get them, then they are returned to their rightful owners.”

He stared at her for a long moment and in the depth of his dark brown eyes she saw a whisper of pity. “Lynn, there is no government agency. Just like there are no defense contracts. Jonas White is a criminal. He supplies terrorists with weapons, he manipulates people for his amusement and monetary gain. When you took those items and gave them to Jonas, they immediately went up for sale on the black market and he put the money he got into his bank accounts. He used you, Lynn.”

“I don’t believe you.” Her voice was barely audible. She felt as if she’d been sucker punched and all the air in her body had been violently slammed out of her.

“Why should I believe you? You’re the one who used me.”

It was much easier for her to focus on his betrayal than to even contemplate that what he said about Jonas might be true.

Nick leaned back in the chair and swept a hand through his thick, dark hair. “You’re right. Part of my job was to seduce you and find out what I could about Jonas’s illegal activities.”

She’d guessed it, but the words, so stark and bold, were like arrows into her heart. Once again she felt the hot press of tears burning at her eyes, but she swallowed hard against them. It had been his job. Every kiss, every touch, every heated glance had been nothing more than a job to him.

He leaned forward, usurping his half of the small table and venturing onto her half. “Lynn, I know you probably won’t believe a word that comes out of my mouth right now, but I want you to understand something. I went into this assignment thinking I had a job to do. Within hours of spending time with you things got complicated, because it was no longer just a job.”

He reached a hand across the table and touched the back of hers. She drew hers away, not wanting him to touch her when her head was filled with such chaos. She knew she would find even the most casual touch from him excruciatingly painful.

He sighed and pulled his hand back. “Trying to get information about Jonas from you was my job. But when I kissed you, when I danced with you and held you close, I forgot all about the job. I realized I just wanted to be with you.”

It would be a wonderful balm to her aching heart if she could believe him. She rubbed the center of her forehead with trembling fingers. “At the moment I don’t know what to believe,” she finally said.

“Believe this. Jonas can’t get you out of this. There isn’t going to be some magical phone call from a government agency telling us that you work for them. You’re in deep trouble here, and you are the only person who can help yourself.”

“What do you mean?”

“We don’t want you, Lynn. We never wanted you. We want Jonas. And we know that you can bring him to us.”

A headache banged at her temples. “How am I supposed to do that?” she asked.

“We need his payroll and other financial records. It’s the last piece we’re lacking in making our case against him. We need you to confirm that Jonas was behind the robberies. You get those records for us and go on record that he told you to steal those items and we’ll drop all charges against you. You can walk away from here without any record that you were ever arrested.”

So, he wanted her to betray the man who had raised her, the man who had taken her into his home as a baby and had given her a life of love and care.

How could she possibly justify doing such a thing to the man who had been like a father to her? How could she possibly believe that Jonas was the kind of man he’d described to her?

“Lynn, I know I’ve thrown a lot at you in the last few minutes, and I know I’ve given you no reason whatsoever to trust anything I say to you.” His eyes were beguiling and she averted her gaze from his, unable to continue to look at him.

“There’s been no phone call, Lynn. I had the phone with me all night long. Jonas isn’t going to call and save you. He’s hung you out to dry.”

She rubbed her forehead once again and frowned. “Maybe he hasn’t gotten my message yet. Maybe he’s traveling and can’t use his phone or can’t get hold of his contact.” She desperately wanted, needed to believe either scenario.

Nick didn’t reply. Instead he pushed the file folder he’d carried in across the table in front of her, then stood. “That’s background information on your godfather. I’ll give you some time to go through it, then we’ll talk again.”

He walked over to the door, then turned back to look at her once again. “Lynn, maybe I lied about who I was, but I didn’t lie about how I feel about you. We have something special between us. The last thing I want to do is hurt you.” With these words he turned and left the room.

She stared after him, emotions warring in her soul. Something special. That’s what she’d felt as well. She wanted to believe what he said, but couldn’t forget that ultimately he wanted something from her. He wanted Jonas.

She looked down at the file folder on the table, almost afraid to open it. Like Pandora’s box she feared what might escape and how it would affect the life she believed she’d had.

With an enormous sense of dread she pulled the folder closer and opened it.

She had no idea how long she sat there alone, reading about the man who had taken her in, lavished her with gifts and created the only family she knew.

She learned that her godfather had been born Johannes Bianco and had grown up on the streets of New York just outside of Hell’s Kitchen. His mother had been killed in a mob shooting when he’d been ten and he’d lived with his stepfather until he’d turned sixteen and struck out on his own.

It was sometime during the next several years that he changed his name to Jonas White and, according to the information in the file, began a life of crime.

The crimes they suspected him of doing stole her breath away. Drug smuggling, arms dealing and black-market trade were only part of what they believed he was involved in.

When she finally closed the file folder, her headache had grown to mammoth proportions. She wanted to escape from all of this…the jail, Nick and the information she’d just read.

If she believed everything that was in that file, then nothing in her life had been real or good. If she believed what she’d just read, then that meant Jonas had trained her, lied to her and made her one of the best thieves around in order to further his personal wealth.

If she believed what she’d just read, then she was left with nothing to hold on to, nothing whatsoever to believe in. If she believed what she’d read then her entire life had been built on lies.

A thunderous roar shook the building. She jumped up from the table as tiny pieces of sheetrock rained down and dust filled the air.

From outside the room she could hear the excited shouting of men and the slap of running footsteps. What had happened? What was going on?

The door to the room flew open and a young woman stepped inside. She was clad all in black, her golden blond hair a startling contrast to her dark clothes. She grabbed Lynn by the arm. “Come on, let’s go.”

Lynn had no idea who the woman was, but it was obvious she wasn’t an officer of the law. She ripped her arm from the woman’s hold. “What’s going on? What’s happening?”

“We don’t have time for that now. Let’s get out of here,” the woman said. Once again she grabbed hold of Lynn and attempted to pull her through the doorway.

Lynn shoved the woman away from her. She had no idea what was happening. She was tired, confused and more than a little bit cranky. She certainly wasn’t going to let some mysterious woman drag her anywhere.

The woman’s pretty features pulled into a frown and she lunged for Lynn. Adrenaline spiked through Lynn. The lunge was overly aggressive and Lynn countered with aggression of her own.

She sidestepped the woman then kicked out, a high kick that the woman deflected with her arm. Lynn had the feeling that the world had gone mad as they began to grapple in earnest.

She was fighting a woman she’d never seen before, a woman whose physical skills seemed to match her own. Her kicks were as fast, as high as Lynn’s and she moved with an agility to rival Lynn’s.

Who was this woman and why did she want Lynn to go with her? Questions screamed in Lynn’s head, but she was too busy fighting to worry about answers.

As the woman attempted to get Lynn into a headlock and drag her toward the door, Lynn used every ounce of skill she possessed to flip the woman onto the floor on her back.

“Who are you and what do you want from me?” Lynn asked breathlessly as she stared down at the pretty woman.

Unusual green-gold eyes stared up at her, eyes that looked hauntingly familiar, eyes Lynn saw each time she looked into the mirror.

“I’m Dawn. I’m your sister, Lynn, and we’ve got to get you out of here.”

Chapter 11

Her sister?

Lynn felt as if she’d entered an alternate reality. As the woman—Dawn—held out her hand, Lynn made an instantaneous decision. She reached for the outstretched hand, grabbed it tight and pulled Dawn up from the floor.

At that moment another roar ripped through the air and more shouts erupted in the hallway.

“Come on, we’ve lost precious time.” Still holding her hand, Dawn pulled her out the door and into chaos. Uniformed officers ran in all directions, paying no attention to the two women as they made their way toward the back of the building. The sound of sirens rent the air.

Dawn led her to a door, and they burst through it and into the early-morning sunshine. As Dawn took off running down the sidewalk, Lynn followed, surprised by the speed Dawn displayed.

They ran for two blocks, then Dawn stopped at the driver’s-side door of a sports car. “Get in,” she said, and gestured toward the passenger door.

Lynn slid in and said nothing as Dawn started the engine and pulled away from the curb. She had no idea what she was doing. She had no idea if coming with Dawn had been a mistake or not. She was functioning on sheer adrenaline.

It wasn’t until they were some distance from the police station that she turned to Dawn. “What happened back there?”

“I created a few little diversions so I could get in and get you out.”

“What kind of diversions?”

“A few bombs carefully placed so they wouldn’t kill anyone, but would cause enough havoc that I could get you out.”

Bombs. Could things get any worse? “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

“Not now. First we need to stash you someplace safe, then I’ll explain everything.”

Lynn leaned her head back against the headrest and closed her eyes. She felt as if too much information had been pumped into her brain in the past twelve hours.

Nick’s betrayal. Jonas’s suspected crimes. And now this woman breaking her out of jail and claiming to be her sister. It all jumbled together in her head, creating a feeling of overload.

She opened her eyes and stared at the woman who sat in the driver’s seat, a woman who claimed to be her sister. How was that possible? According to Jonas, Lynn had been the only child of a couple who had died at sea. He’d been her godfather and had adopted her when she’d been five months old.

If she believed Jonas, then there was no way she could have a sister. If she believed…

“Dawn what?” she asked.

“Dawn O’Shaughnessy.” She cast Lynn a quick smile. “I know you’re confused, Lynn. I promise you I’ll tell you everything just as soon as we get to the motel.”

“The motel?”

Dawn nodded. “I’ve got a room at a motel not far from here. Once we get settled in there I’ll explain everything to you.”

That was fine with Lynn. She didn’t think she could stand any more surprises at the moment. She was not only exhausted, hungry and confused, she was also now a fugitive from justice.

The thought gave her chills. Even if she was eventually cleared of the charges for the robberies, she now faced other charges equally as serious.

She was grateful when Dawn drove through a fast-food drive-in and ordered burgers, fries and soft drinks. A block from the fast-food restaurant she pulled into the Sleepy Time Motel and in front of unit 101.

Minutes later the two sat across from each other at a small table inside the motel room, the food on the table before them. “Eat first, then we’ll talk,” Dawn said.

Lynn unwrapped her burger. “We’ll talk while we eat,” she countered. She stared at Dawn in open curiosity. Dawn returned the gaze, as if taking stock of exactly what she’d pulled out of the police station.

“I was told that my parents were eccentric millionaires who died in a boating accident when I was five months old,” Lynn began.

“You were told a pack of lies,” Dawn replied. Her eyes, so like Lynn’s in shape and hue, held secrets Lynn wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

If Jonas had lied to her about who her parents were and how they had died, then she had to face the fact that he’d lied to her about other things. She had to face the possibility that Nick had told her the truth about the man who had raised her. The thought sent a chill of despair through her.

“Then tell me the truth,” she said to Dawn, although she wasn’t sure she’d know the truth if it bit her on the butt.

“It’s a long, complicated story,” Dawn warned her.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Lynn replied dryly.

As they ate, Dawn began an incredible tale about a woman named Lorraine Miller Carrington. Rainy, as she had been called, according to Dawn, had years before been a student at the Athena Academy for the Advancement of Women, in Arizona.

The school was located just outside of the Glendale/Phoenix area at the base of the White Tank Mountains. The school had caught the interest of Lab 33, a top-secret government facility located in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico.

Dawn explained to Lynn that she, herself, was born and raised at Lab 33 and had only left the lab recently to search for some answers she needed, and to search for the sibling she was certain existed.

“But what does this have to do with you and me being sisters? I’ve never heard of Rainy or Athena Academy or Lab 33 before,” Lynn said. “This has to be a big mistake. What makes you think we could be sisters?”

“I don’t think. I know,” Dawn replied with certainty. “When Rainy was a student at Athena Academy, she underwent what she thought was an emergency appendectomy. What really happened was that eggs were taken from her. You see, Aldrich Peters, one of the men in charge of Lab 33, wanted to see if he could create genetically enhanced females…superfemales.”

Lynn thought of her tremendous strength and agility and her enhanced senses, which Jonas had always told her were gifts from nature. Her heartbeat quickened and she shoved the last of her hamburger and fries aside, her appetite gone.

“What happened next?” She felt as if she were hearing a fantastic, science-fiction kind of story, one that had nothing to do with her.

“Ads were placed in newspapers to look for suitable surrogate mothers, and the embryos were implanted in these women.”

“What about Rainy? What happened to her?” Lynn asked, her mind reeling with each new bit of information that was exposed.

Dawn’s eyes darkened and her lips compressed into a grim line. “She died almost a year ago. Initially it was thought she fell asleep at the wheel of her car, but we now know she was murdered. Her death began all this. Rainy had several close schoolmates from Athena, and when she died, these women became determined to find out the truth.”

“And the truth is?”

“You and I are the products of a genetic experiment.”

Even though Lynn knew where the conversation had been headed, to hear these words spoken aloud shook her. “But I don’t understand. If that’s true, then how did I end up with Uncle Jonas? Is he part of Lab 33?”

Dawn took a sip of her soda, then carefully folded up the empty wrapper from her burger and placed it back into the sack. “One of the surrogates was a woman named Cleo Patra.”

Lynn looked at her dubiously. “Cleo Patra?”

“I’m not lying, that’s her name. She was a Vegas showgirl. Anyway she agreed to be a surrogate and was implanted. When she went into labor and was being taken to the hospital, she and her doctor were waylaid by a man and taken to a warehouse. Cleo gave birth to a little girl, but the baby was stolen from her that night. Cleo’s life was threatened and the man and the baby disappeared.”

“The man was Jonas?” Lynn felt sick as she thought of the man she loved, the man who had raised her.

“No. From the description Cleo gave me of the man, I believe it was Richard Dunst who stole the baby and gave her to Jonas White. Dunst was a drinking buddy of a Lab 33 scientist, the man who infiltrated Athena Academy and handpicked our biological mother to be the egg donor. His name is—was—Carl Bradford. Dunst’s connections to Bradford and Jonas are what led me to you.”

Lynn leaned back in her chair as the final nail in Jonas’s coffin was pounded in. “And that baby was me,” she said flatly.

Dawn nodded. “We believe Dunst told Jonas about the secret genetic experiments that Lab 33 was conducting, and Jonas decided he wanted one of the superbabies.”

“I became the perfect tool for him,” Lynn said bitterly. “I stole for him.” She felt sick as the full ramifications of it all filled her head. “He raised me solely for the purpose of being a thief for him.” Nick had been right. There wouldn’t have been a phone call to help her out of her jam with the FBI.

She looked at Dawn once again. “It was you who tried to break into Jonas’s house, wasn’t it? It was you I chased across the lawn.”

“Yeah. I’d been watching you for a couple of weeks. I wanted to make sure I hadn’t made a mistake. The night that I tried to break in I was going to talk to you, but the glass made more noise than I anticipated and I was afraid of getting caught by your security, so I freaked and ran.”

At least Lynn knew now she wasn’t crazy, that somebody had been watching her.

Dawn took another sip of her soda, then frowned at Lynn. Lynn steeled herself, knowing there was more to come.

“Like you, I have unusual strength and agility, but I also got another ability. I have superhealing genes.” Lynn stared at her skeptically. “It’s true,” Dawn exclaimed.

As Lynn watched, Dawn withdrew a small penknife from her pocket. She opened the knife then drew the blade across her wrist. Lynn gasped as blood welled up in the wound.

“Are you crazy?” Lynn said, and fumbled on the table looking for napkins or something to use to stanch the flow of blood.

However, before she could find anything, the bleeding stopped and the wound began to close itself. Lynn grabbed Dawn’s hand and pulled it closer to her, staring down at the place where Dawn had cut herself. It was completely healed with no sign of the wound she’d just seen.

If she’d needed any proof of the incredible story Dawn had just told her, she had that proof now. She closed her hand over Dawn’s. A sister. She had a sister. “When I was little I used to fantasize about having a sister,” she said, surprised by the emotion that suddenly clogged her throat.

Dawn squeezed her hand. “It isn’t a fantasy anymore, Lynn. We’re sisters, and we have a lot of catching up to do. I want you to come with me, to meet the Athenas—the women who were closest to our mother.” Dawn squeezed her hand once again, then released it and stood. “I know I’ve hit you with a lot. I understand you need some time.”

She looked at her wristwatch. “I’ve got some things to take care of and will be gone for several hours. There’s food in the mini refrigerator, and the microwave works. You’re welcome to anything you can find.”

She walked over to the dresser and grabbed a small notepad and pen. “I’m giving you my cell phone number. Call me if you need me for anything, otherwise I’ll be back later this afternoon.”

Lynn stood and followed her to the door. “I just need some time to digest all this.”

“I understand, but Lynn, don’t take too long. We need to get you out of here and I’m eager to introduce you to Rainy’s friends.” Dawn wrapped Lynn in an embrace. “I didn’t find my sister just to lose her,” she said fiercely.

Lynn returned the embrace, her heart welcoming in the warmth of this new connection, this family bond she’d never known existed.

Dawn slipped out the door, and Lynn closed and locked it behind her. For a moment she leaned against the door, completely overwhelmed by everything that had happened.

The few hours of sleep she’d gotten seemed long ago and not nearly enough to sustain her as she worked to make sense of everything that had happened.

Maybe after a few hours of sleep her head would be clearer, she thought. She crawled into one of the two beds the room held and closed her eyes.

If she believed Dawn, she was the result of an experiment, and she had no parents who had drowned at sea. Jonas had been responsible for her being kidnapped from the woman who had given birth to her. Round and round it all whirled in her head until finally she fell into an exhausted sleep.

She dreamed that she was back in Sensations, drinking Alabama Slammers with her friends, but every time she tried to take a drink her cell phone rang and Jonas yelled at her to get home. Then Dawn burst in and threw Lynn over her shoulder and carried her toward the exit. As they went out the door, she saw Nick calling after them, his eyes filled with regret and pity.

She awakened with a gasp and sat up, for a moment disoriented as to her surroundings. Then she remembered. She was a fugitive from the law, hiding out in a motel room rented by a sister she’d never known she had.

The clock on the nightstand told her it was almost four in the afternoon. She raked her fingers through her hair and got out of the bed. What she needed now was a shower to wash away the stink of the jail. Hopefully a hot shower would also clear her mind.

A satchel with some clothes sat on the dresser. Lynn assumed they belonged to Dawn. She hoped her sister wouldn’t mind if she borrowed some items. The two women were about the same size, and Lynn couldn’t stand the idea of showering, then putting on the same clothes.

She found a T-shirt and a pair of jeans and she carried them with her into the bathroom. Minutes later, clean and rested, she looked in the mini refrigerator for something to eat. She grabbed a store-prepared chicken sandwich and a soda, then sat at the table to eat and to think.

She was a fugitive. The police, the FBI, they would all be looking for her. New charges would certainly be added to the ones she already faced. From here on out, she would forever live her life looking over her shoulder, waiting to be rearrested for the crimes she had committed.

Crimes she had committed. Her heart constricted as she thought of all the precious items she had stolen, then handed to Jonas. She’d believed she was helping the government. She’d believed she was doing something good. It killed her to recognize there had been nothing good in any of it.

She’d not only been incredibly naive, she must have been positively comatose. She’d had questions. She’d had concerns, but she’d shoved them aside, listening to Jonas when she should have been listening to her instincts.

Her entire life with Jonas had been nothing more than a pack of lies. If she believed what Dawn told her, then Jonas and Richard Dunst had stolen her when she’d been a baby, specifically in order to exploit her unusual abilities.

Jonas had kept her isolated and filled with fears from the time she’d been a small child. Of course he hadn’t wanted her to get close to anyone. He’d been afraid of questions, afraid that somebody else’s involvement with her might complicate his manipulation of her.

Then there was Dawn. The story she’d told Lynn had been truly incredible…an evil lab and human experiments. It would have been easy for Lynn to reject the entire thing had she not seen with her own eyes the immediate healing of the wound on Dawn’s wrist.

Besides, as crazy as it sounded, when she’d looked into Dawn’s eyes—eyes that were so much like her own—she’d felt a strange connection. She wasn’t sure if it was because she so wanted to believe that Dawn was her sister, or if there was truly a kind of mystical link between siblings.

In any case, she believed Dawn, and she wanted to learn more about Lorraine Miller Carrington and the Athena Academy.

Finally there was Nick, who had used her to gain information about Jonas. Who had told her he hadn’t meant to hurt her with his deception, that getting close to her had been more than a job.

She finished the sandwich and got up from the table. Thoughts of Nick hurt. She walked over to the window and pulled the thick curtain aside.

She had no idea where this particular motel was located. She’d never been to this area of Miami before. She let the curtain fall back into place and sat on the edge of the bed, her thoughts still consumed with Nick.

He’d made her feel so special when he’d gazed at her with those soulful dark eyes of his. His kisses had been filled with desire, or at least that’s what she’d thought. She’d believed everything he’d shared with her. She’d believed he’d cared about her. She’d cared about him.

But how could she believe him now? How could she believe him when he told her it had been more than a job, that he did care about her? He still wanted something from her. He wanted her to help put Jonas behind bars for the rest of his life.

And she wasn’t at all sure she could do that. She needed to talk to Jonas. Even though the evidence she’d been shown and had been told pointed to him being a man who had lived outside the law for many years, she couldn’t forget all that he’d done for her.

She knew another man, one who had been a philanthropist, who had given money to all kinds of charitable organizations. She knew a man who had hugged her when she’d been frightened, made her laugh when she’d been sad. He’d given her the best education money could buy and a life of luxury that many would envy.

She realized she couldn’t make a decision to help Nick until she spoke with Jonas. She certainly couldn’t leave here to go with Dawn until she spoke with him. Somehow she needed to make contact with him.

There was only one person she knew who could get her in contact with her godfather. Richard Dunst…the man who had kidnapped her as a baby and threatened the woman who had given birth to her.

The sound of a key at the door forced her off the bed and into a defensive stance. She relaxed as Dawn stepped in. “I borrowed some of your clothes. I hope you don’t mind.”

Dawn flashed her a smile. “No, I don’t mind.” Her smile faded, and she eyed Lynn with obvious concern. “Are you okay?”

Lynn sank back down on the edge of the bed. “I don’t know. I got a couple hours of sleep, but my head is still reeling with everything that’s happened.”

“Have you made a decision? Will you come with me?”

“Yes, I’ll go with you. But there are some things I have to take care of first.” Lynn explained to Dawn about the FBI wanting her to help them put Jonas behind bars. “I need to talk to Jonas,” she said. “And in order to do that I need to borrow your car.”

“All right, but what are you going to do? How are you going to get in contact with Jonas?” Dawn asked.

“I’m going to call Richard Dunst and meet him someplace.”

Dawn’s eyes darkened, turning more green than gold. “That man is evil, Lynn.”

“He won’t hurt me,” Lynn said with a certainty she didn’t feel. “This is something I have to do. I feel like I’ve spent all my life being manipulated and used by everyone around me.”

She stood up and paced the carpet. “Now I intend to take control of my own life. I need answers and I’m not going to stop until I get them.” Lynn felt the strength flowing through her, a strength she’d never felt before. A swell of excitement welled up inside Lynn as she realized she was about to take her destiny into her own hands.

Dawn gazed at her for a long moment. “Okay. Tell me what I can do to help you.”

Chapter 12

It had taken a single phone call to Richard Dunst to arrange a meeting between Lynn and the bald, expressionless man who had always given her the creeps.

It was impossible to set up a meeting in a public place because Lynn had no idea what news stories had broken about the explosions at the police station and her subsequent escape. There was no way she wanted to chance being seen in a public place, so she and Dunst agreed to meet at a warehouse Jonas owned near the docks.

Dawn wanted to go with her, but Lynn insisted she had to go alone. For too long Lynn had been dependent on others. She’d allowed herself to be led without standing on her own two feet. She needed to do this alone.

The meeting time was set for nine that evening. At eight-thirty Lynn left the motel room. She wore a baseball cap covering her hair and pulled down low to shield her features, and she was armed with a knife that Dawn insisted she take with her in case of trouble.

Lynn wasn’t expecting trouble. There was no reason for Dunst to want to harm her. All she wanted from him was to find out where Jonas was and how she could get in touch with him. She had to talk to Jonas one last time before she made a decision about betraying him.

She’d been to the warehouse where she was meeting Dunst several times in the past. The warehouse was one of several that contained Jonas’s overstock from his import/export business.

Dusk fell in deep purple shadows as she pulled up to the warehouse. Dunst’s car was already parked in front of the building.

She sat in the car for a moment, gathering her strength, her thoughts. She was about to face the man who, according to Dawn, had stolen her and presented her like a gift to Jonas.

She got out of the car, her hand tracing the length of the knife in her pocket. The burgeoning strength she’d felt at the motel with Dawn had only grown stronger with each passing minute.

Lynn had always been confident of her physical skills, but this was the first time she felt empowered by her own mental and emotional strength. For years Jonas had called her his baby, but she wasn’t a baby. She was a woman with special gifts, a woman who was just beginning to understand the magnitude of her abilities and choices.

The warehouse was unlocked and she walked in and went directly to the office, where Richard Dunst sat at the desk in the small, airless room.

As she walked in he rose and came around the front of the desk. “Lynn, thank God you called me when you did.” To her surprise he reached out and took her hand in his. “Jonas and I have been worried sick about you.”

Lynn pulled her hand from his. “I called Jonas from jail twice last night. Why didn’t he call me back?” She realized that what she wanted more than anything was a logical explanation, a reason to believe that all the things Nick had told her about her godfather were lies.

She wanted to believe that Dawn was mistaken about where Lynn had come from, how she had come to be a part of Jonas’s family. She wanted to believe in the man who had been her surrogate parent. She desperately wanted to believe that Jonas was the man she had thought he was.

“I’m afraid it’s a difficult matter,” Richard said and returned to his seat behind the desk.

A difficult matter. A complicated situation. Those were the same kinds of words Jonas had always used to explain what they’d been doing for the government. They were words that answered nothing.

“I don’t understand what’s difficult about it,” she replied as she sank into the chair opposite the desk. “He told me all he had to do was make a phone call to his government contact and I would be released.”

“How did you manage to escape?” Richard asked, obviously ignoring what she’d just said.

“That isn’t important. Why didn’t Uncle Jonas get me out of jail last night? He had plenty of time to arrange for my release.”

Richard’s shaved head shone in the harsh artificial light overhead, and his hazel eyes glittered brightly. She thought of what Dawn had said about him, that he was an evil man. For the first time she felt his evil, smelled it in the air emanating from him, saw it in the cold, brittle shine of his eyes.

“Lynnette, your uncle Jonas has been betrayed by his contact. He’s in hiding here in Miami and plans to fly to Puerto Isla as soon as possible. He wants you to go with him. I can take you to him right now.”

It would have been easy for her to take his words at face value. The old Lynn would have accepted Richard’s explanation without question. But in the past twenty-four hours, Lynn had undergone a transformation of growth and inner strength.

She now saw the cold calculation in Richard’s gaze. She also realized from his words that Jonas wasn’t out of the country as she had believed the night before. He was right here in Miami.

“Go to Puerto Isla?” She feigned confusion. “I can’t make a decision about going anywhere unless I talk to Uncle Jonas,” she said.

“You don’t have many choices. You’re a fugitive, Lynn. The best thing for both you and Jonas is to get out of the country, and Puerto Isla has no extradition laws.”

“I still need some time to think,” she said firmly. “So much has happened.”

“Lynnette, I don’t know what the police might have told you, but whatever it was you can be certain it was lies. I certainly hope you didn’t talk to them about your special talents or your work with Jonas.”

“I refused to speak to them at all,” she replied.

“Good. Jonas loves you and he’s quite impressed with the way you got away from the jail.”

A cold hard knot formed in her chest. What kind of man was impressed when somebody he loved broke out of jail and became a fugitive from justice? Certainly not a man who valued the difference between right and wrong. Certainly not a man who was innocent of doing anything illegal.

Richard stood once again. “I can take you to him right now, Lynnette. We can be out of the country in a matter of hours.”

“I want to talk to him first. Give me a phone number where I can reach him,” she said.

Richard’s eyes flashed darkly, although his masklike features betrayed nothing of his emotions. He grabbed a scrap of paper from the desk and scribbled down a number, then held it out to her. “You’d better call him soon. He can’t wait around for you forever. It’s imperative that he leave the country as soon as possible.”

Minutes later, as she drove Dawn’s car back toward the motel room, she once again thought of all the information she’d seen about Jonas in the file Nick had given her to read.

All they needed to arrest Jonas was her telling them that Jonas had been the mastermind behind the thefts. If she gave them his financial records she had no doubt that they would be able to link him to any number of crimes. In all probability he would spend the rest of his life behind bars.

Even if Jonas deserved whatever the judicial system handed him, that didn’t make betraying him any easier.

Dawn waited for her at the motel. “How did it go?” she asked when Lynn walked through the door.

“Okay. I got a number for Jonas from Dunst.” Lynn handed the car keys to Dawn. “It was so hard to look at him and know that he was the one who stole me from Cleo Patra. I always thought Richard was creepy, but now I know he’s evil.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Dawn replied. “I don’t think any of us knows the extent of Richard Dunst’s evilness. So, are you ready to come with me?”

“I can’t, Dawn. At least, not right now.” Lynn sat on the edge of the bed and realized that at some point on the drive back to the motel room she’d come to a decision. “I want to clear my name before I do anything else. I need to get in touch with the authorities and take care of some unfinished business.”

She could tell that her words disappointed Dawn, but this was something she had to do.

“You’ll come with me when you’re finished with your business?” Dawn asked.

Lynn saw the need in Dawn’s eyes and realized she wasn’t the only one who had hungered for family.

“And you have my phone number.”

Lynn nodded.

“Then I’m going to head out and take care of some business of my own. This room is rented for the next couple of days. You should be safe here as long as you don’t venture out where somebody could recognize you. I’m just a phone call away, Lynn.”

Lynn stood and walked her sister to the door. “I still can’t believe everything that’s happened, everything you’ve told me.”

“I know, but trust me, it’s all real.”

“A couple of days, that’s all I need,” Lynn replied.

The two embraced, and then Dawn was gone, leaving Lynn alone with her thoughts in the silence of the motel room.

She sank down on the edge of one of the two beds. For all intents and purposes, she’d lost her past. Everything she’d believed in had been stripped away from her.

Jonas had wanted her because he’d known about the gene enhancement. He’d masterminded her kidnapping because he’d wanted a superbaby he could raise into a superthief. And he’d succeeded. Oh, how he had succeeded.

She’d been trained by the best that money could buy, her abilities had been honed to perfection, and she’d used them for Jonas.

What would her life have been like if Dunst hadn’t kidnapped her? She’d have been raised with Dawn, in a lab, she supposed. Would Rainy Carrington have eventually found her? Would she have been reunited with the woman who’d given her life? She would never know the answer to these particular questions. She would only know the sadness of what might have been.

Her past was disintegrating into the dust of lies, but her future loomed ahead, a future she now controlled. But she couldn’t go forward with that future until she cleaned up what was left of her past.

Where to begin that job? Nick. She had to deal with him. Even though her heart rebelled at the thought of having anything more to do with him, she knew he was her ticket to cleaning up the mess she was in.

With this thought in mind, she went to the phone and dialed in his cell phone number. He answered on the second ring.

“Nick. It’s me.”

“Lynn, where are you? Do you have any idea how much trouble you’re in now? How in the hell did you manage to rig explosives at the station?” His voice held a strained intensity.

“None of that is important now. I need to talk to you.”

“Then turn yourself in,” he replied. “We’ll sort things out here.”

“No. I’m not coming in there.” She couldn’t be in control if they were at the police station, and Lynn would never again place herself in a spot where she wasn’t in control.

She frowned thoughtfully. “Does that cottage of yours have a telephone?”

“Yes…why?”

“Be there in half an hour and I’ll call you there and tell you where I’ll meet you.” She could tell he didn’t like the plan, that he’d much prefer she turn herself in and go through the appropriate channels. But he acquiesced. She carefully memorized the number he gave her to the phone at his beachfront hideaway, then disconnected the call.

The last time she’d been at that cottage she’d had no idea that Nick was an FBI agent. She’d only known him as the man who excited her, fascinated her, drew her like none other.

It was just after eleven when the cab Lynn rode in let her out several blocks from the road that led to Nick’s cottage.

Seeing him again would be difficult. The taste of his betrayal still lingered in her mouth, still burned in her heart. There was a part of her that desperately wanted to believe what he’d said to her, that getting close to her had begun as a job but had become something far more. But she was afraid to believe in anything at this moment.

She crept up on the cottage, checking the area to make certain Nick hadn’t arranged some sort of trap for her. She’d told him she’d call to set up a meeting with him, hoping that she would catch him here alone.

There was no indication that a trap had been set. Nick’s car was in the driveway, and the night was silent except for the distant roar of waves to shore. The briny scent of the salt water was thick in the humidity of the night, and she remembered that night when she had Nick had walked on the beach at Smokey’s. She hardened her heart against those memories.

She sneaked up to the porch and peered into the front window. Although a lamp was on, nobody was in the living room. Soundlessly she went around the cottage, peeking into windows to make certain there weren’t agents waiting to pounce out and slap handcuffs on her.

Each room that she looked into appeared empty, except the kitchen. There she saw Nick seated at the table, the telephone at his elbow.

For a long moment she merely looked at him through the window, drinking in the masculine features that had become so familiar to her over the past couple of weeks.

He looked tired and worried and yet still so handsome that her heartache grew in intensity. She drew in a deep breath, refusing to become an emotional mess. She had things to take care of, and Nick could help her straighten them out.

She knocked on the kitchen window. His gaze shot to her, surprise lifting his dark brows. He got up from the table and unlocked the back door to let her in.

For a moment neither of them said anything. The past twenty-four hours and everything that had happened in that time hung between them along with a barrier of distrust.

“I thought you were going to call and arrange a meeting place,” he finally said to break the silence.

“I didn’t want to give you a chance to have a bunch of men there to arrest me.” She pulled out a chair and sat at the table. “I want to deal.”

She hoped they could keep this on a purely professional level and not discuss or delve into anything personal that had happened between the two of them.

“There’s only one thing you have to deal with,” he replied, and sat across from her at the table.

She nodded. “I know…Jonas.”

“And you’re willing to give him up to us?”

There was a part of her that wanted to tell him no, a part of her that yearned to hold on to the fantasy of Jonas’s goodness and love. But that was a child’s desire, and over the past twenty-four hours Lynn had been thrust into an adulthood where there was no space for childish whims and hanging on to what had never been.

Had she been a beloved goddaughter to Jonas, or just an asset he’d stolen, a tool to be used? Things would be easier to understand if she could believe that, but the situation wasn’t so black and white. Yes, Jonas had used her, molded her into his own personal thief, but that didn’t mean he didn’t also care about her. He’d given her everything she could need growing up. And deep in her heart, she still loved him—which made what she was about to do horribly difficult.

“Since I called you, I’ve given this a lot of thought,” she began slowly. “I met with Richard Dunst and I now know that Jonas is someplace here in the city. He’s preparing to fly out of the country as soon as he hears from me.”

Nick’s jaw muscles tightened. “If he gets out of the country, we’ll probably never catch him.” He gazed at her for a long moment.

She held his gaze, refusing to look away. “I have a number to reach him and I can set up a meeting. You and your men can be there to arrest him. But before I do that, I have to know that my name will be cleared, just like we discussed before.”

“What if he doesn’t agree to meet you?” he asked.

“Oh, he will.” She looked away from Nick and instead focused her gaze out the back door where the deepest night shadows hung heavy.

She sighed, a touch of thick emotion creeping up her throat. “I always thought of myself as Rapunzel, a princess so beloved that her godfather kept her locked up and protected from the world.” Her heart swelled with grief as she mourned all that she’d lost, all that she now knew had never been. “Now I realize I wasn’t like Rapunzel at all. I was the golden goose, kept in a cage until it was time to produce more wealth.”

“Lynnette.” His voice was so soft she wanted to fall into it, let it carry her away to a place where there wasn’t so much pain.

Instead she drew a deep breath and looked at him once again. “Trust me. He’ll meet me. He’ll want a chance to talk me into going with him. He won’t want to lose his golden goose.”

“I’m sorry, Lynn.” He reached across the table, but stopped when his hand was mere inches from hers. “I know you loved him and I can only imagine what must be going through your head, through your heart right now.”

She suddenly remembered him telling her that there were some people who shouldn’t be parents, that there were people who didn’t make the best of parents. She’d thought he’d been talking about his own situation at the time. Now she realized he might have been warning her about what lay ahead.

“Tell me something, Nick, were the things you told me about your family true, or was that something made up to get closer to me?”

His hand that had been close but not touching hers, touched her then. Just a light touch to the back of her hand, but it was a touch that sent a wave of emotion through her. “I never lied to you, Lynnette. Everything I said to you was always the truth. I’m guilty of not telling you everything, but what I did tell you was always the truth.”

She moved her hand away from his. She couldn’t stand his touch, because she wanted it so badly, because it reminded her of all she’d believed they’d shared. “Did you go see your father? Were fences mended?” she asked.

His eyes, already such a dark brown, deepened in hue to almost black. At the same time a furrow formed in the center of his forehead as he frowned. “No, fences weren’t mended. My father wanted to tell me one last time what a disappointment I was, that he would curse me with his dying breath. It was one more kick in my face after too many years of kicks.”

Even though she still harbored bitterness in her heart toward Nick and she wanted to maintain that anger to keep the pain at bay, she couldn’t help but be touched by his words.

“I’m sorry, Nick.”

“Don’t be.” He shook his head. “I made peace with my family and my choices a long time ago. I hoped that you’d never have to face the same kind of thing, but here we are.”

Lynn reached into her pocket and pulled out the slip of paper that had Jonas’s phone number on it. She placed it on the table between them. “And now it’s time I make peace, as well. I’ll set up a meeting for sometime in the morning.”

“Where?”

She frowned thoughtfully. “He’ll never return to the mansion so it can’t be there. What about here? I can even tell him the truth, that it’s a place you own and that sometime last week you gave me the key. There would be no reason for him to be suspicious about this place.”

Nick leaned back in his chair, obviously contemplating her suggestion. “I guess this would be as good a place as anywhere. At least here we don’t have to worry about civilians getting in the way.” He nodded. “Yeah, we can make it work here if he agrees to show up.”

“He’ll agree, and if he doesn’t I can make certain he’ll agree to meet me before he leaves the country.”

“How can you do that?” Nick asked curiously.

“If you can get me into the mansion and to Jonas’s computer, then I can freeze all of his banking accounts.”

“We’ve already done that,” Nick replied. “I had them frozen about an hour ago.”

“You might think you froze all of Jonas’s accounts, but I’m sure he has accounts you don’t know about. He has accounts in banks all over the world, in places there would be no records of here.”

“Then we’ll get you to that computer to freeze the rest of them. Even if he agrees to meet with you, I’d like to make sure he can’t get to his accounts.”

She reached for the phone, surprised to see her fingers trembling slightly. Before she grabbed the receiver she paused and looked at Nick once again. “Even though I have absolutely no reason to trust you, I am trusting that you aren’t lying to me, that all charges against me will be dropped and I can walk away from all this unscathed.”

“I swear,” he said solemnly.

She had to believe him. She picked up the receiver and dialed the number Dunst had given her. Jonas answered it on the second ring.

“Uncle Jonas,” she said.

“Lynn, baby, where are you? Why didn’t you come with Richard to meet me? I’ve been anxiously waiting for you from the minute I heard about your escape.”

“I needed to think, Uncle Jonas. I’m so confused by everything. I was so scared in jail.”

“I know, honey. I’m sorry you had to go through that all alone.” There was a long pause. “Lynn, baby, I tried desperately to get you out of there, but I’ve been betrayed by our government contact.”

“Yes, Richard told me,” she replied. “But how? What happened?”

“I can’t tell you how upset I am. I’ve been handing over to him the precious things you’ve been retrieving, but he’s been selling them, Lynn. He’s as crooked as they come and now he’s trying to destroy me. He has position and power and he will make things difficult for us.”

Lynn listened dispassionately, surprised to discover that she was already moving away from Jonas, that the seedling of strength she’d felt growing over the past couple of days had bloomed. She could give him up and she could walk away.

“Lynn, it’s vital we go away. This contact, he won’t stop until he sees us both in jail. While you were in police custody…you didn’t say anything about our work, did you?”

“I refused to speak to any of the officers who tried to talk to me,” she replied, repeating what she’d told Dunst.

“Good, good. We can continue our work elsewhere…in another country.”

Bitterness swelled up inside her at his words. It was just as she’d thought. He didn’t want her, but he needed her. He needed her unique skills, her unusual abilities, to carry out his own plots and pillaging.

“I want to see you,” she said. “I need some time to think. I’m exhausted, Uncle Jonas. Can we wait until morning to leave? Can we meet in the morning someplace and talk? Please, Uncle Jonas.”

There was a long silence and she knew he was probably irritated by her request. “Lynn, there’s nothing to be confused about. We need to leave here. Time is of the essence.”

“I got the urn, Uncle Jonas. I managed to get it and hide it before the FBI took me down. I wanted to surprise you with it.” It was bait she hoped he’d swallow. “I don’t want to leave it behind. I need tonight to get it from where I hid it. I have to be careful because the police are looking for me.”

There was another long moment of silence, and Lynn knew Jonas was weighing his options. The urn and vase were priceless, but so was his freedom.

“All right, I’ll meet you in the morning,” he finally said as greed ultimately won out. “Meet me at the airport. I have the plane ready to go.”

“We can’t meet there. My face is being splashed all over the news and I’m sure the authorities will be watching the airports. If you’re seen with me, you may be arrested as on accessory.” She hesitated, then continued. “I know just the place where it will be safe for both of us,” she continued. “You know I’ve been seeing Nick for the last couple of weeks.” Once again her gaze went to Nick. “He’s got a little cottage on Harbor Road. A couple of nights ago he made me dinner there and gave me the key to the place. We can meet there. He won’t even know about it.”

She gripped the phone tightly and looked away from Nick as memories of that night cascaded through her mind. They had nearly made love that night. She almost wished they had, that she’d have that memory to carry with her despite the knowledge that he’d used her.

“You’re sure it will be safe?” he asked.

“Why wouldn’t it?” she countered. “Nick told me nobody knows he stays there, that it’s just a little weekend getaway he keeps. It should be perfect for us.”

“All right. Ten o’clock,” Jonas said. “I’ll meet you there at ten. We’ll only have a few minutes, Lynn, then we must board the plane and leave. Richard will have the plane ready for us. I hope, I pray you’ll come with me, Lynn. I can’t imagine you not being with me.”

“I’ll talk to you in the morning,” she replied. “Uncle Jonas, I love you.” She disconnected the call before he could reply, before he could tell her that he loved her, too.

“Ten o’clock in the morning,” she said.

Nick stood. “I’ll set things up on my end, then we’ll get you to the house to freeze the rest of Jonas’s assets.”

While Nick got on his cell phone and made the arrangements he needed to make, Lynn slipped out the back door and stood on the small patio, staring out to where the moon played on the water.

She was betraying the man who had raised her and it weighed heavily on her heart. She thought of all the times she’d eagerly waited for Jonas to return home from his trips. How happy she’d been when he’d given her an assignment to retrieve a treasure. She’d been so sure she was doing good, pleasing Jonas and helping her country.

Instead she’d been nothing more than a common criminal, a highly trained burglar, the almost perfect thief. She’d used her computer skills to crack into security files. She’d used her physical skills to steal, all because she loved Jonas.

Jonas wasn’t the good man she’d believed him to be. The crimes he was suspected of weren’t just crimes of property; they were crimes of people. He belonged behind bars.

Nick stepped out the door. “Are you all right?” She hesitated, then nodded.

“I’m fine. This is just a bit difficult.”

He came to stand just behind her. She could smell his nearness and feel his body heat. “I know it’s difficult, Lynnette.” Again his voice was soft and filled with empathy. “But, it has to be done. I can’t begin to tell you the kinds of things that Jonas has done to hurt people. And I hate it that he’s hurt you.”

“I know.” She sensed that he was about to touch her, and she turned to face him and stepped aside, not wanting his touch, afraid that it would make her shatter into a million pieces.

He shoved his hands in his jeans pockets, his eyes dark and enigmatic. “You ready to go to the house and freeze the rest of his accounts?”

“I’m ready,” she said softly.

She knew it would be her last time in the house where she’d been raised. She knew that tonight she was closing the book of her past to open the book of an uncertain future.

Chapter 13

It was after two when they returned to the cottage. Lynn had stayed true to her word. She’d changed the passwords for the last of Jonas’s bank accounts, making it impossible for him to access any of them, then she had packed two suitcases of clothing and personal items and had left the mansion for the last time.

She hadn’t asked Nick to take her back to the motel. She hadn’t wanted to be alone. Being in the house again had been difficult. Knowing that she’d never again return had been nearly devastating.

While Nick waited downstairs with several other agents who were watching the house, Lynn had sat in her bedroom and cried silent tears of grief. The very fabric of her life had been ripped out from beneath her, and she mourned for the man she’d thought her godfather had been.

Godfather. Even that had been a lie. He hadn’t been good friends with her parents, he hadn’t adopted her through legal channels. He’d stolen her.

When she finally left the bedroom, her tears were spent, and she knew they were the last she’d ever shed for Jonas White.

She’d said painful goodbyes to Rita and Arturo, who were confused and frightened by the FBI who had the house staked out. The elderly Cuban couple were planning on staying with one of their sons and looking for new work. They were good, hard workers and Lynn felt confident they would have no problem being hired by somebody.

Rita had hugged her tight and sobbed and Lynn had silently cursed the man who had caused all this pain, the man who had betrayed all their love. She promised to keep in touch with the couple who had been like surrogate parents to her.

When they finally returned to the cottage, Nick finalized his plans for the morning meeting with his team, and she returned to the patio, once again looking out to the ocean.

When she’d been at the house she’d grabbed her cell phone and she now used it to call Dawn and arrange to meet her at the motel room around noon the next day. By then Jonas would be in custody and there was nothing else keeping Lynn here. She would be on to her new life and new challenges.

Arrangements made, she put the cell phone in her pocket and stared out at the waves. Always before when she’d gazed at the water she’d thought of the parents she believed had been lost in a storm. She’d mourned the parents she couldn’t remember and had wondered how her life would have been different if they hadn’t taken their yacht out on that fateful day.

Now she knew the truth—that there had been no eccentric couple who had drowned in a boating accident. Jonas had lied. Now she knew why her Internet search had yielded no results about the tragic boating accident. It had been a figment of Jonas’s manipulation and evil mind. He’d even manufactured photos and news clippings to satisfy the questions he’d known she would ask.

However, there was Dawn. The empty spaces in her heart filled with warmth as she embraced the reality of a sister. She and Dawn shared the same genetic makeup.

She leaned against the railing around the patio and stared at the moon overhead. She thought of a woman named Lorraine Carrington, Rainy, her mother. What exactly had happened to Rainy? Had she discovered what had been done to her, and had that been the reason for her murder?

She hadn’t asked Dawn who their father was. If she and Dawn had come from eggs from Rainy, then who had fertilized those eggs? There might be a man out there somewhere who was her biological father.

She wanted answers. She wanted to learn more about the woman who had been her mother and the friends who had held her dear.

She turned and looked through the window where Nick sat at the table. His thick, dark hair was tousled as if he’d run his hands through it more than once in the last few minutes. His features were animated as he talked on the phone.

She didn’t want to leave here without making love to him. The realization hit her like a bolt of lightning.

It didn’t matter that he’d betrayed and used her. It didn’t matter that she would be leaving soon to explore the secrets of her own life.

What did matter was that, even knowing all this, she still wanted Nick. It was the one thing that was clear in her head, and the idea of being held in his arms and loved to the fullest extent both excited her and filled her with awe.

She turned back around and once again stared up at the moon. Beginning tomorrow she would be on a journey that would take her far away from Miami and everything she knew.

She should be afraid but she wasn’t. The inner strength she’d discovered she possessed filled her up, and in that strength she knew her own desire.

She heard the sound of the back door opening and closing, but didn’t turn.

Nick walked to her side, bringing with him the masculine scent of his that filled her head. “Are you all right?” he asked softly.

She nodded. “I’m fine. You seem to be asking me that a lot.”

“I know how difficult this must be for you.”

She finally turned to look at him. His dark brown eyes glittered in the moonlight. “It’s not as difficult as I thought it would be. If even half of what you’ve shown me is true, Jonas deserves to go to jail for the rest of his life.”

Nick leaned on the railing and looked up at the moon. “I was thirteen when I recognized that my father was a monster. I watched him beat a man almost to death. I knew at that moment that my only hope for a good future was to get away from him and I knew I wanted to choose a path opposite from the path he’d chosen.”

She memorized his features in her mind—the strong lines of his jaw, the slightly square chin, the rugged planes that somehow came together in a face both handsome and filled with strength and character. “So you became an FBI agent, fighting evil with good,” she said lightly, fighting her desire to lean against him.

“Something like that.” He looked at her once again, his gaze soft. “Lynnette, I meant what I said to you before you escaped from the police station. I never, ever meant to hurt you.”

“But it was your job to bring Jonas down, and I was a tool for you to use to do that,” she said, unable to help the touch of hurt that colored her tone.

He nodded slowly. “We’d worked so hard for so long to get to Jonas, and my supervisor was getting impatient. It was his idea to try to get at Jonas through you, and I agreed to it. I thought it was going to be easy.”

He reached up and gently swiped a strand of her hair away from her face. The gesture was achingly familiar, and a swell of desire swept through her. “But that night at Smokey’s when I held you in my arms, I realized this was going to be the most difficult assignment I’d ever accomplished. I wanted you, and it had nothing to do with my job or getting to Jonas, nothing to do with my supervisor telling me to get close to you. I wanted you for myself.”

She’d wanted to hear these words from him. She’d needed to know that what they’d shared had been real and not manufactured. “I want you, Nick. I want you to take me to bed and make love to me.”

He seemed to freeze in position, his gaze locked with hers. “Lynn, this has been a confusing time for you.”

“Wanting you is the one thing I’m not confused about. You don’t want me anymore?” She held her breath, wondering if he’d lied about his feelings.

His eyes flashed darkly. “You have no idea how much I want you.”

Her breath released itself on a relieved sigh. “Then show me, Nick. I don’t need any promises from you. I don’t need any tomorrows. I don’t need anything but this moment in time. Show me that you want me.”

He didn’t wait for her to ask him again, but rather grabbed her in an embrace at the same time his mouth crashed down to hers.

He couldn’t manufacture the fire in his kiss, the hunger that marked the way he pulled her tightly against him. There was no lie in his arousal, hard against her as she molded her body to his.

When he finally tore his mouth from hers, he gazed at her with desire shining from the dark depths of his eyes. “I don’t want to be somebody else who manipulates or uses you.” A deep huskiness filled his voice. “This can’t be about what I want. It has to be about what you want.”

“You can’t manipulate or use me, nobody can, ever again,” she replied with certitude. “But I know what I want, Nick, and more than anything right now I want to make love with you.”

Without saying another word he took her by the hand and led her back into the house. They went through the kitchen and living room and into his bedroom, where the only light was the soft moon rays drifting into the window.

He released her hand when they stood in front of his bed.

“No means no, Lynn. If you change your mind or have any doubts about this, all you have to do is tell me no and we’ll stop.”

If she’d wanted him before it was nothing like the passion that swept through her now. In reply she moved to the head of the bed and pulled down the bedspread and top sheet. She then turned to face him and pulled her T-shirt over her head.

Nothing else in her life was for certain except the very rightness of this tonight. She hadn’t lied to him before when she’d told him she needed no promises from him. She didn’t need the promise of a future. She just needed him now.

Once again he seemed frozen. Only his chest moved, rising and falling in accelerated breaths. His hungry gaze never left her as she reached behind and unfastened her bra.

The wispy garment fell to the floor as she kicked off her shoes at the same time.

The only thing he moved was his gaze as he watched her undress for him. Her bare skin warmed with a flush, and her fingers trembled slightly as she lowered her hands to the fastening of her jeans.

The sound of the zipper seemed unnaturally loud in the silence of the room, and the fabric rubbed her sensitive skin as she slid the jeans down her thighs. It wasn’t nerves or fear that made her tremble and flush, it was sweet anticipation.

It was only when she pulled her panties off that the inertia that had gripped him snapped. As she slid into bed beneath the sheet, he yanked his clothes off in a frenzy.

His shirt fell to the floor, exposing his beautiful, tautly muscled chest. He kicked off his shoes and pulled off his socks, then tore off his jeans in a near frenzy of motion. It was as if he was afraid if he didn’t hurry she might change her mind. But she wouldn’t. She knew this was what she wanted.

When he was naked, he slipped into bed and pulled her into his arms at the same time his mouth found hers. His body was warm against hers as he deepened the kiss with his tongue.

She moved against him, loving the sensation of his firm hairy chest against her taut nipples. A deep ache gnawed in the pit of her stomach, an ache that spoke of hungry need.

She gasped as his hands cupped her breasts, his thumbs raking over the peaks and shooting shivers of delight through her. His mouth left her lips and trailed down her throat, across her collarbones, then to one of her nipples.

Her hands clutched in his hair as his tongue caressed first the tip of one breast then the other. A building tension twisted inside her as her pleasure grew.

She moaned as his hands moved down her body. He splayed them over the flat of her stomach, then raked them down the sides of her hips. Once again his mouth sought hers in a kiss that swept all other conscious thought away.

“Lynn…sweet Lynn,” he murmured as his hands brushed her inner thigh. Her hips arched toward his touch, wanting the intimacy of his hands on her where no other man’s hands had ever been.

Still his fingers caressed the sensitive skin of her inner thighs. The soft, featherlike strokes electrified her as he teased and tormented her by not touching her where she wanted him most.

She moved her hands down his body. She tangled her fingers in his chest hair, then moved them down across his muscular abdomen.

A moan escaped him as her fingers moved over his hips. Before she could explore his body further, he touched her at her center and she cried out his name.

His finger rubbed against her and it was as if every nerve in her body began and ended where he touched. Her entire body quivered. She moved her hips in a wild rhythm against him as the tension inside her built.

She was on fire, burning in flames of Nick. When she thought she could stand no more, when the tension inside her threatened to overwhelm her, it shattered and crashed through her, sending rivulets of warmth through her veins.

She was breathless and gasping but still not sated. She wanted more. “Nick…please…” She reached down and encircled his hard length with her hand. She liked the feel of him, hard and yet smooth and velvety.

“Lynnette.” He groaned her name and at the same time rolled away from her. He reached into the nightstand and pulled out a small foil package.

A condom. Relief flooded through her. She hadn’t even thought about safe sex. Thank goodness one of them had their wits about them.

He ripped open the package and rolled the condom on himself and when he hovered over the top of her she opened her legs to welcome him.

For a long moment he gazed down at her, and in his eyes she saw not only desire, not only want, but also a gentleness that spoke of something more.

She closed her eyes, not wanting to see that, knowing that if she saw that he truly cared about her it would only make leaving that much more difficult.

She gripped his hips and pulled him closer, letting him know she was ready. She tensed as he began to enter her. She expected pain, but there was none, just a bit of discomfort that lasted only a moment.

He lay perfectly still against her, not moving a muscle. “Are you all right?” he whispered against her ear. “Am I hurting you?”

“Yes…I mean no, you aren’t hurting me.”

Then he moved and she gasped as pleasure swept through her.

Her senses were alive with him…his familiar masculine scent, the play of his back muscles beneath her fingertips, the sound of his heartbeat and rapid breathing. He filled her up on all levels.

She’d listened to her friends talk about sex, but nothing they had said had prepared her for the emotional rush. She’d expected physical pleasure, but she hadn’t expected the intimacy that transcended the physical act.

She’d wanted him to make love to her, but she hadn’t expected her heart to be involved. But it was. Her heart swelled with emotion as she felt him deep inside her.

As he moved his hips against hers and their heartbeats crashed in rhythm, she felt as if he surrounded her, invaded her in body and soul.

It was an invasion she welcomed. She wrapped her legs around his and ran her hands down the smooth warm skin of his back as he sent that crazy, wonderful tension building inside her once again.

He crashed his lips onto hers as their hips thrust together frantically. Tongues battled as they kissed with a hunger that was all consuming.

“Lynnette,” he moaned when he tore his lips from hers and instead trailed them down the curve of her jaw.

She loved it that he’d called her by her real name and not the diminutive. Nobody else in her life called her Lynnette.

That was her last conscious thought as physical sensation swept away everything else. Faster and faster they moved in unison and she was swept higher and higher on a plane of pleasure.

She tumbled over the precipice, moaning his name, and at the same time he stiffened against her, a groan escaping his lips.

For a long moment they remained locked together, waiting for heartbeats to slow, for breath to return. Her hand stroked down his back, loving the feel of his warm skin. Nick. They said you always remember your first lover. She had a feeling she would have remembered him even if he hadn’t been her first.

He finally raised himself up and looked down at her, his gaze holding a wealth of tenderness. “You okay?” He gently moved a strand of her hair away from her eyes. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

Yes, he’d hurt her when she’d realized he’d used her. He’d hurt her in those moments when she’d seen him at the Markam Convention Center and realized he’d betrayed her. That’s what she wanted to tell him, but instead she shook her head to assure him he had not hurt her. Knowing now what she did about Jonas, she couldn’t fault him for what he had done. She couldn’t hold on to her bitterness where he was concerned.

He eased away from her. “I’ll be right back.” He slid from the bed and disappeared into the bathroom.

Lynn rolled over on her side and stared toward the window where the moonlight filtered in through the sheer curtains. Her body tingled with the warmth of their lovemaking, and she had no regrets about what they had shared. She was glad it had been Nick who had introduced her to the pleasure of lovemaking.

He returned to the bed and gathered her in his arms. She snuggled against him although she knew she should get up and go back to her motel.

“What are you thinking?” he asked, his voice a soft whisper in the darkness as he tightened his arms around her.

“That I’m glad we made love, that I’m glad we had this night together because tomorrow I’m leaving.”

“Leaving? What do you mean?” He leaned away and gazed down at her.

“As soon as you and your men arrest Jonas, I’m leaving Miami.”

“Why? Lynn, there’s no reason you can’t build a life here. With your computer skills you could find a job easily.”

“I found out I have a sister.”

“What? Where?” He reached out and turned on the bedside lamp.

She sat up as she realized she wanted to talk about it. She wanted to tell him some of the secrets that Jonas had wanted her to keep to herself. “In the last twenty-four hours I’ve discovered some things about my past, about where I came from. There never were eccentric millionaires who were my parents and who were lost at sea. That was just another of Jonas’s lies.”

He looked at her in surprise. “So how did he get you as a baby?”

Lynn told him about being kidnapped as a baby and that her biological mother was dead. She didn’t tell him that Dawn was responsible for her escape from the police station. She certainly didn’t want to cause Dawn any problems.

“I guess Jonas wanted a baby he could raise and train to do his dirty work,” she said.

His dark eyes were filled with speculation. “Lynn, I know now you pulled off a lot of robberies for Jonas. I also know that the men who tried to catch you said you were like a superhuman phantom, able to accomplish physical feats that were nearly impossible.”

“I was well trained,” she replied, but she was unable to hold his gaze.

“Well trained,” he repeated flatly. “You know, I saw signs of your unusual quickness that night at Sensations when you defended yourself against that drunk. It was more than mere training that I saw. You have amazing abilities. Talk to me. You can tell me. You can trust me, Lynn.”

“I do have some unusual abilities,” she finally agreed.

He touched her cheek. “And you aren’t telling me everything, are you?”

She looked at him once again. “No, I’m not. But I can’t, Nick. I don’t have all the answers yet.” She was suddenly exhausted. She hadn’t expected the emotions that flooded through her as she gazed at him, as she thought about leaving both him and Miami behind. “Maybe we should get some sleep,” she finally said. “It’s late and tomorrow is going to be a difficult day.”

He looked as if he wanted to say something more, but instead he turned off the light and once again gathered her in his arms.

As she molded herself against his warmth in the darkness of the room, she realized that by making love to her, he’d not only won back her trust, he’d also won her heart.

But she’d told him she wanted nothing more from him than this night. She’d insisted she needed no promises, no tomorrows, and he hadn’t offered any.

Chapter 14

She awakened just after dawn to find herself alone in the bed. She rolled over on her back and stared up at the ceiling. It was betrayal day.

Today she would betray the man who had raised her, the man who had fed her and clothed her for all her life, the man who had seen to it that she had the best education, the best of everything.

Today she would betray the man who had given her everything but the truth, the man who had kidnapped her and used her to further his own criminal activities.

She was surprised to discover that she felt little regret over what she was going to do. She only hoped when they put Jonas behind bars that Richard Dunst would share the same quarters.

This wasn’t just the day she’d betray Jonas, it was also the day she would say goodbye to Miami and follow Dawn to an unknown place to discover the mysteries of the past.

Today was also the day she would say goodbye to Nick.

Nick. Her body still felt the memory of his sensual touch, his demanding kisses. Her heart still felt the wonder and magic of their lovemaking.

It would have been easy to say goodbye to him if she still felt betrayed by him, if she still tasted the acrid flavor of bitterness where he was concerned. But her anger had left, taking with it any bitterness that might linger behind.

The scent of fresh-brewed coffee wafted in the air, and she pulled herself out of bed, grabbed clean clothes from her suitcase and headed for the bathroom and a shower.

As she stood beneath the hot spray of water, she remembered each and every moment of their lovemaking the night before. She would never forget last night.

Nick had made her body sing with his heated caresses and fiery kisses, but he’d also made her heart sing with his tenderness and caring. Saying goodbye to him was going to be more difficult than she’d thought.

Minutes later she entered the kitchen to find him at the table. “Good morning,” she said.

He smiled. “Good morning to you. Coffee is ready. I left a cup on the counter for you.”

“Thanks.” She walked over to the counter and poured herself coffee, then carried the cup to the table and sat down across from him.

“You ready for today?”

She nodded. “As ready as I’m going to get.” She took a sip of her coffee, then continued. “I don’t have any regrets about setting up Jonas.”

“And no regrets about anything else?” His dark eyes held her gaze.

Her cheeks warmed, but she held his gaze. “No, Nick. No regrets at all.” She took another sip of her coffee. “Even though I was angry with you, hurt by the fact that I thought you’d used me, I wanted last night with you.”

“Are you still angry and hurt?” His expression told her that her answer was important to him.

She hesitated a long moment before answering. “Maybe a little hurt, but you’ve made me believe that using me was difficult for you, that it was something you had to do. You’ve made me believe that what I thought we had when we were together was real.”

This is what she truly believed, what she desperately wanted to believe, yet she also knew it was possible he was still using her. Until Jonas was in his custody, she was useful to Nick and she couldn’t forget that fact.

“It was real, Lynn,” he said. “It is very real.”

She sat back in her chair. “What’s important now is that we get Jonas.”

“That’s important,” he agreed. “But it isn’t all that’s important. I want you to understand what the last couple of weeks with you have meant to me.”

She held up a hand to still whatever more he would say. She didn’t want to hear this, not now, not with goodbye so very near.

He looked as if he wanted to say something more, but at that moment a knock tapped at the back door. Nick’s team had arrived and the time for personal talk was over.

There was a total of five men who would be responsible for arresting Jonas. They had arrived early to be in place for the meeting between Lynn and her godfather.

Even though it was a little more than three hours before the ten-o’clock meeting, the men each took a post inside the house to wait. Two were stationed on the outside of the house, hidden on the property next door. The other three took positions in each of the two bedrooms and one in the bathroom.

Nick moved his car down the road so it wouldn’t be in the driveway to spook Jonas, then he and Lynn sat at the table, listening to the clock tick by the minutes.

“When he gets here, I’ll stay out of sight,” Nick said. “As soon as he gets into the living room we’ll move in to take him down.”

“I want an opportunity to speak with him,” Lynn said. She needed to tell him that she knew how he’d used her all her life. She needed to look into his eyes and see if there was any love, any affection at all for her.

“I can’t make any promises, Lynn. We’ll have to see how things go down. At the very least, once we have him in handcuffs, I don’t see why you can’t have a word or two with him.”

Handcuffs. It was almost impossible for her to imagine Jonas in handcuffs. She remembered the bite of the cuffs around her own wrists, and her heart hardened.

It had been Jonas who had placed her in a position to be arrested and handcuffed. It had been his lies that had prompted her to steal and ultimately be caught. She would weep no tears for his arrest.

As the minutes ticked by, she felt a growing tension inside her. What if he didn’t show up? What if he’d already left the country? She tried to tell herself he wouldn’t leave without the precious urn he thought she had. More important, he wouldn’t leave once he found that the passwords on his accounts had been changed and he could no longer access any of his money.

“I wonder if he ever loved me,” she said aloud.

Nick knew about whom she was talking. “He probably loves you as much as a man like him is capable of loving.” He sighed. “My mother used to tell me that my father loved me despite the fact that he beat me about every other day and ignored me the rest of the time.” He smiled, a sad, rueful kind of expression. “I used to think it was a good thing he loved me, because if he didn’t I wouldn’t have survived him at all.”

“It’s sad, isn’t it, how much we as children need to believe that our families love us, how much we need to believe they would never do anything to hurt us.”

“Things could be worse, Lynn,” he said. “I could have become just like my father and you could have become just like Jonas.”

“Never,” she replied fervently. “The only way he got me to steal for him was by lying, by telling me we were accomplishing something good.”

She glanced at the clock on the oven. One more hour and everything would be over. She gazed back at Nick. “You know, I felt good when I was stealing those things. I was pleasing Jonas, but I was also pleasing myself. I enjoyed the challenge and I thought I was doing something good.”

“Don’t beat yourself up, Lynn. You were manipulated by a master.”

“I should have known better.” She got up from the table and carried her cup to the sink, then turned back to face Nick. “I should have asked more questions, demanded better answers. For the past several months my instincts kept telling me something wasn’t right, but I ignored my instincts and instead followed Jonas like a docile lamb.”

He got up from the table and walked over to her. He placed his hands on her shoulders, his gaze intense. “Don’t blame yourself. It’s done. It’s over and you’re doing the right thing now. He belongs behind bars, and within the next hour or two that’s exactly where he’ll be.”

He pulled her against his chest and willingly she went. She closed her eyes as his arms encircled her. “You’re a good person, Lynn,” he whispered against her hair. “Don’t let him make you question yourself and the kind of person you are. If you do, then he wins.”

She nodded, loving him more at this moment than ever before. She knew he was right, but she also knew it would be a long time before her regrets over what she had done for Jonas finally went away.

For a long moment she remained in his embrace, her face turned into the fresh scent of his shirt. She drew in the smell of him, capturing it in her memory for the nights of loneliness she knew lay ahead. She memorized the feel of his hands on her back, those beautiful hands that could be so gentle.

She eased out of his arms and forced a smile to her lips. She had to leave. “This is difficult, you know. Betraying Jonas,” she said, focusing on the task at hand. “But I know it’s the right thing to do.”

Nick’s eyes shone with approval. “That’s what we all want, Lynn. The world will be a better place if he’s not working it.”

At nine-thirty Lynn sat in the living room alone, waiting for Jonas’s arrival. Nick was in the kitchen. The other men were in place and hidden from sight. All they were missing was the guest of honor.

As she waited, her thoughts went back in time, through her childhood and adolescence. Surely Jonas had loved her just a little? Surely he’d cared about her. But even as she thought this, her mind refused to embrace it.

It was a parent’s job to teach their children how to have wings, how to stand on their own, depend on themselves and grow into independent people. That’s how people loved their children, by preparing them to leave the nest.

Jonas had done just the opposite. He’d taught her nothing about freedom, had kept her bound to him through fear. He’d wanted to keep her a prisoner forever, using her until she was all used up. That wasn’t love.

She heard a car approaching in the distance, and every muscle in her body tensed in anticipation. As the car noise grew louder, Nick stuck his head out the kitchen door and gave her the thumbs-up sign, then disappeared once again.

Lynn stood, heart thumping loudly in her chest. This was it. Her final showdown with Jonas. She went to the front window and looked outside as a black sedan pulled up and parked in the driveway. Jonas got out of the driver’s side.

She saw him look around, obviously making sure there was no reason for concern. She stepped to the door and opened it to make sure he could see her.

“Uncle Jonas,” she said. She hated even calling him Uncle but knew it was important that she act as if nothing had changed between them. If he sensed anything wrong he’d never come inside, and their plan might fall apart.

He hurried toward the door. “Lynn, thank God.” She stepped aside so he could enter the living room. She’d expected Nick’s men to move in immediately, but everyone stayed in their hiding places as Jonas hugged her, then stepped back from her.

“It’s so good to see you, baby. I was worried sick when I heard that you’d been arrested.”

“It was awful.” She forced a shudder.

“It’s all over now,” he replied. “Within hours we’ll be safe. Do you have the urn?”

“It’s in the bedroom, but before I get it for you I need to know what’s going on. Where are we going, Uncle Jonas?”

“So you’re coming with me?”

She hesitated a moment, then nodded. “Last night I wasn’t sure. I thought maybe I could stay here in the States, but I realize now I can’t. I’m a fugitive from justice,” she said. “I can’t stay here. I sure don’t want to go to prison.”

“What did you do to my bank accounts, Lynn?”

“I changed the passwords,” she said truthfully. “I didn’t want you to leave without me.”

“I wouldn’t have left without you unless it was absolutely necessary,” he replied. “Just because things got screwed up here doesn’t mean we can’t continue our work someplace else.”

Where were Nick and his men? “I’d like that,” she said. “And don’t worry, I know the new passwords. The accounts are safe.”

“Then get the artifacts and let’s get out of here,” Jonas said. “We’ve got the jet waiting for us. We can be in Puerto Isla by nightfall.”

“I don’t think so.” Nick stepped into the room from the kitchen, gun in his hand and pointed toward Jonas. “You aren’t going anywhere.”

“What’s this?” Jonas looked from Lynn to Nick, then before she could guess his intent Jonas grabbed her by the hair and pulled her against his chest. She felt the cold steel of a gun barrel at her temple.

Lynn’s heart crashed against her rib cage as Nick cursed. “Let her go, Jonas,” he said, his features taut. “You don’t want to hurt Lynn.”

“Of course I don’t want to hurt Lynn,” Jonas agreed, his voice smooth as silk. “But I will if necessary. Sorry, baby, but there’s no way I’m going to prison. Now, put your gun down, Nick, or I’ll shoot her in the head.”

Nick’s features were tortured, but he bent down and placed his gun on the floor in front of him.

Jonas backed up toward the door as the other three agents stepped into the room from the hallway.

“Hold your fire,” Nick exclaimed. “Dammit Jonas, it’s over. Let her go.”

“You aren’t locking me up,” he said and tightened his hold around Lynn. “Tell your men to drop their weapons. If you have men outside, you might want to tell them that with my last breath I’ll pull this trigger. You’ll get me, but she’ll be dead. Can you live with that?”

Nick glanced at one of the other men. “Go tell them to hold their fire. Hold their fire, dammit.” The agent ran toward the back of the house while the others placed their guns on the floor.

As Jonas half dragged, half carried Lynn out the front door, she felt as if she’d fallen into the middle of a nightmare. The shock of the realization that Jonas would kill her to save himself had her numb.

She hadn’t realized until this moment that a small part of her had clung to the belief that Jonas loved her just a little.

They reached the porch, and still the barrel of his gun drilled into her temple, telling her exactly the extent of his love. He would gladly sacrifice her life to save his own. He would shoot her before he’d allow himself to be taken into custody.

“Hold your fire! Hold your fire!” Nick yelled as he followed them onto the porch.

As Jonas yanked her toward the car, she knew that if he managed to get her inside, then Jonas would get away and the odds of Lynn surviving were minimal.

“I’m sorry, baby,” Jonas said. “But you shouldn’t have done this. You shouldn’t have set me up like this.” He opened the driver’s-side door, and as he did, Lynn summoned all the strength she’d ever known.

She flung her elbow backward, hitting Jonas’s belly. He grunted in surprise and cracked her in the head with the butt of the gun.

She kicked and hit his hand, sending the gun flying from his grip. He shoved her backward and she fell, hitting the ground hard. Before Nick or the agents could do anything to stop him, he was in the car and had started the engine.

Lynn skittered backward like a crab to stop from being run over as Jonas peeled out. The agents fired at the retreating car, but it didn’t stop. They ran toward their cars parked down the street, but she knew by the time they managed to give chase Jonas would be gone.

“Call it in,” Nick cried as he raced to Lynn’s side. “Are you all right?” He crouched down and grabbed her to his chest.

“He got away,” she cried. At the same time she grabbed the side of her head where she’d been hit.

“We’ll get him,” Nick replied, helping her to her feet. “There’s no way he’s getting on any plane for Puerto Isla. He’ll be in custody in a matter of hours.” Although Nick spoke with assurance, she saw the deep frustration burning in his eyes.

“I’m sorry, Nick.”

“It’s not your fault. We underestimated him. It will never happen again.” He took her by the arm. “Come on, let’s get you back inside.”

Once inside, the first thing Nick did was look at her head where a goose egg had knotted. He wanted to call for the paramedics, but she assured him she was fine. He got an ice pack for her, then got on the phone.

Lynn sat on the sofa and held the pack on her head. She’d known that Jonas was a criminal, and she’d known that he’d used her. But she’d never dreamed that he would have the capacity to kill her.

But he did. She’d felt it in the steadiness of his hand as he’d held the gun to her head. She’d heard it in the even tone of his voice. He’d gambled that Nick wouldn’t sacrifice her, and he’d won.

It was fast approaching the noon hour when Nick finally came into the living room and sank down on the sofa next to her. “We lost him.”

“Oh, Nick, I’m so sorry. Although I’m not surprised.”

He shrugged. “The good thing is his bank accounts are useless to him. We’ve got men at every airport. Hopefully he’ll turn up and we’ll be there to arrest him. We have enough on him now to ensure a conviction on a multitude of charges. We’ll get him, Lynn. It’s just a matter of time. How’s your head?”

“Better. You should have taken the chance and shot him.”

“I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t take a chance with your life,” he said. He reached for her hand and grabbed it in a tight grip, his eyes as dark as she’d ever seen them. “I’ve never been more terrified in my life than when I saw that gun pressed to your head.”

She pulled her hand from his, a new pain filling her chest as she realized it was time for her to go. “I’m fine. I need to call a cab. I need to get to the Sleepy Time Motel.”

He frowned. “You don’t need a cab. I’ll take you.”

“Don’t you need to be here, or doing something about Jonas?” she asked.

“It’s out of my hands now. We’ve got agents all over the city looking for him. I can take you wherever you need to go.”

In minutes they’d loaded her suitcases in the trunk of his car. For most of the twenty-minute drive to the motel room, they were both quiet.

It was not a comfortable silence. Rather, it was filled with a tension she’d never felt between them before. She cast a surreptitious glance at Nick. His jaw muscle was knotted, and she wondered what thoughts were whirling in his head.

She was certain he was thinking about Jonas and the escape. After all, he’d worked two long years undercover to see it all fall apart in a matter of minutes. He must be devastated.

She had no words of comfort to offer him, although her heart ached for his disappointment. But that wasn’t the only reason her heart ached.

There was no more time to explore the depth of her feelings for Nick. There would be no more times for making love, no more slow dances at Smokey’s or walking on the beach and talking about nothing and everything important.

It was time to say goodbye.

When they reached the motel, she saw that Dawn’s car wasn’t there. Apparently, she hadn’t arrived yet. Nick helped Lynn unload her suitcases and carry them inside the room.

“What happens now?” he asked, his gaze dark and brooding as it lingered on her.

“My sister should be arriving soon, then we’ll be leaving.”

“Are you going to tell me where you’re going?”

She thought about it, then shook her head. “To tell the truth, I’m not sure exactly where we’re headed.”

He stepped close to her, so close she could feel his breath on her face and smell the scent of him. “Secrets. I see them in your eyes.” She didn’t reply. She didn’t know what to say.

All she knew for certain at this moment was that saying goodbye to him was going to be more difficult than she’d thought. Not that he was asking her to stay, she thought. He’d gotten what he needed from her even though Jonas had managed to escape.

And she’d gotten what she needed from him—a glorious night of lovemaking to remember for the rest of her life….

“Lynnette.” His voice, soft and deep, pulled her from her thoughts. She looked into his eyes, and what she saw there frightened her more than anything she’d ever faced. “Don’t go.”

Those two words shot through her heart like twin daggers. She hadn’t expected to hear them from him. She hadn’t realized until this moment how much she’d wanted to hear them from him.

He placed his hands on her shoulders and drew her closer against him. Her head fit perfectly just beneath his chin. She leaned into him and closed her eyes.

She was capable of doing amazing physical feats, she could hear the wings of a butterfly in the air and endure a man who had a gun to her head, but nothing had prepared her for this.

“Don’t leave,” he murmured into her hair at the same time that his arms encircled her. “I’ve dated a lot of women, have had my share of relationships, but I’ve never felt about anyone like I feel about you.”

It would have been easy if he’d just been using her. She’d hurt when she’d believed that, but it was nothing like the pain that ripped through her now.

“I have to go,” she said, and kept her face turned into his chest.

“Why? Tell me your secrets, Lynn.”

She finally looked up at him. “I can’t, Nick.” Reluctantly she pulled away from him and stepped out of his embrace. “I can’t tell you why, but I have to leave.”

His gaze held hers intently, and he shoved his hands into his pockets. “So this is it? We make love last night and we say goodbye today?”

She felt the pain she saw reflected in his eyes. It shocked her, and she realized his feelings for her were as deep as hers for him. “Nick, there are things I can’t tell you about, things I have to do before I can go on with my life.”

“Are you in trouble?”

She didn’t know how to answer that question. “I’m not sure.” She had no idea where the circumstances of her birth and Rainy’s death might take her.

He reached out for her hands and squeezed them tightly. “I’m an FBI agent, Lynn. If you’re in trouble, talk to me. Let me help.”

“I have to do this for myself, Nick. I had to find out about my past before I can go forward with my future.”

He squeezed her hands once again. “You’re an amazing woman.”

She smiled. “Thank you, but I’m just beginning to know the woman I am…to envision the woman I can be.” Aware that Dawn would arrive at any moment, she knew she could no longer put off the final goodbye.

“Nick—” she pulled her hands from his “—you need to go now.” The words threatened to choke her.

“One more thing before I leave.” He reached out and pulled her back into his arms, and his mouth claimed hers in a kiss so deep, so complete, that tears burned her eyes.

When he finally released her, his gaze held a wistfulness she felt in her soul. “Will you be back?” he asked, his voice sounding deeper than usual.

“Maybe when I’ve taken care of what I need to.”

“How long do you think that will be?”

She drew a deep breath. “I don’t know. Days…weeks…I just don’t know. Nick, I can’t think about any kind of a future right now. I don’t even know what’s going to happen an hour from now.”

“I’ll wait, you know. However long it takes. We had magic, Lynn. I don’t want it to end. All you have to do is tell me there’s a reason for me to wait.”

She started to open her mouth to reply, but he placed a finger over her lips. “Not now. The past forty-eight hours of your life haven’t exactly been calm. You get where you need to go, Lynnette White, then if you want me to wait for you, if you think we can have some kind of future, you call me.”

He didn’t wait for her reply but slid out the door and into the afternoon sunshine.

She moved to the doorway, the late-July sunshine almost blinding her, bringing tears to her eyes as she watched him get into his car and roar off.

The moment he was gone Dawn pulled up in her car and stuck her head out the window. “Come on, shake a leg, sis. We’ve got a flight to catch.”

With those words, Lynn’s future reached out to her, even as she mourned what might have been.

Chapter 15

The next two hours passed in a blur for Lynn. Dawn explained to her that they would be flying into Phoenix, and would rent a car there and continue on to the Athens, Arizona.

They boarded the plane, and she and Dawn made small talk until they were served soft drinks and pretzels by the flight attendant. It was only when the flight attendant left them alone that Lynn began to ask questions.

“Tell me about you,” Lynn said. “Where have you been, what’s your background?”

“I was raised in the lab by scientists,” Dawn began. “I trained at the lab and was educated there except for one year that I spent attending the Athena Academy. I was there my junior year, then went back to the lab to continue my studies and training.”

“What’s the academy like?” Lynn asked. She wanted something, anything, to keep her mind off her painful goodbye to Nick.

“It’s a wonderful place for girls between the seventh and the twelfth grade. It has state-of-the-art training facilities and the best educational programs in the world. Students there not only do the usual studies, but also are trained in martial arts, weaponry, survival courses and at least three languages.”

“Why did you only attend for a year?”

“Look, my background isn’t important,” Dawn said, her eyes flashing more green than gold. There were secrets there, Lynn thought, secrets that Dawn wasn’t willing to share. “What’s important is finding out the truth about us and about Rainy.”

“Tell me about Rainy,” Lynn said, eager to learn anything she could about the woman who had been their biological mother.

“From everything I’ve learned about her, she was a wonderful woman. She was one of the students the first year that Athena Academy opened. She started there when she was thirteen and remained one of the top students in her class until she graduated. But if you really want to find out about what kind of a person Rainy was, you need to talk to the Cassandras.”

“The Cassandras?”

Dawn ripped open her bag of pretzels and nodded.

“When Rainy was a senior at the Athena Academy, she became the leader of a group of girls who called themselves the Cassandras. They began as schoolmates working as a team, but they became the best of friends. Rainy was going to meet with the Cassandras on the night she died.” Dawn popped one of the pretzels into her mouth as Lynn digested all she was learning.

“Did she tell the Cassandras why she wanted to meet with them that night?” she asked.

Dawn shook her head. “All she told them was that she needed them to meet her and Christine Evans, Athena’s school principal, at Christine’s bungalow on the school grounds. All the Cassandras who could showed up to wait for Rainy. All she’d told Christine was that she wanted to look through the school records, but Christine didn’t know what she wanted to look for.”

“And Rainy never showed up for the meeting.” Lynn was surprised to discover a wave of grief sweeping over her. She’d long ago mourned the death of her imaginary parents, and now she mourned the mother she’d never know.

Dawn reached over and touched Lynn’s hand. “I know,” she said softly.

Lynn cast her a smile. “It’s just sad. In the space of a sentence I found my mother and lost her.” She took a sip of her soda. “Tell me about these other women, the Cassandras.”

“There are six of them. Alex Forsythe is a forensic scientist, Josie Lockworth is in the Air Force and is an aeronautical engineer. Tory Patton is…”

“I know her,” Lynn interjected. “I mean, not personally, but I’ve seen her as a reporter on television.”

Dawn nodded. “That’s right. Then there’s Kayla Ryan, who’s a police lieutenant. Samanatha St. John works for the CIA and Darcy Steele is a former Hollywood makeup artist and private investigator.”

“Wow, an impressive bunch of women,” Lynn said. And what was she? Nothing more than an ordinary thief. When this was all over she vowed to make something of herself, to use her talents to become a dynamic and positive influence.

“They’re more than impressive because of the jobs they do,” Dawn continued. “What’s really so special about them is the bond they forged while they were classmates. When these women were at the Athena Academy they made a promise to one another, that if any of them called for help, they would be there for each other. That night Rainy called on the Cassandra Promise.”

“Well, what happened when she didn’t arrive at the meeting place?”

“Initially it was thought that Rainy’s car wreck had just been a tragic accident, but since then investigators have learned otherwise. Alex and Kayla were the main force behind that. Rainy was murdered, and at the time of her death we think she had realized that her eggs had been mined and was pursuing the truth. We think that’s what got her killed.”

“My head is spinning,” Lynn said. “This is all so confusing.”

“It’s a lot of information,” Dawn replied. “And there’s so much more to tell you. But maybe we should both try to catch a nap. When we get to Phoenix we’ve got a short car drive ahead of us, then we’re meeting with Kayla. I have a feeling it’s going to be a long day.”

Dawn punched the button to put her seat back, and Lynn turned her attention out the plane window. Outside was nothing but blue sky, and she felt as if she’d been thrust into a vast sea where nothing was as it should be and what had been was nothing more than a dream.

Had she made a mistake in coming with Dawn? Certainly the stories Dawn had shared with her sounded fantastic, yet they held a ring of truth she couldn’t deny. No, this wasn’t a mistake. This was her destiny.

It seemed impossible to believe that only last night she’d been in Nick’s arms, and that mere hours ago he’d held her in his arms and told her goodbye.

She felt as if a lifetime had passed. She lowered her seat and closed her eyes, knowing that she would need every ounce of her strength to face what lay ahead.

She awakened when the plane began its descent. Dawn was already awake, and she smiled at Lynn. “Feel better?”

Lynn put her seat up straight. “I don’t know. I think I’ve been numb ever since you broke me out of jail.”

Once again Dawn touched her hand. “It’s going to be all right, Lynn. We’re going to make things right.”

Looking into her sister’s eyes, eyes so like Lynn’s own, Lynn felt a surge of strength. Yes, things would be all right. She and Dawn and the Cassandras would get to the bottom of things and make them right.

Dawn had arranged for a car to be waiting for them, and within minutes of arriving in Phoenix, they were leaving it behind, headed for the small town of Athens.

The scenery was like nothing Lynn had seen before…barren and brown and filled with rock formations that looked like alien landscapes.

As they traveled through the desert, they shared with each other bits and pieces of their former lives.

Lynn found herself telling Dawn about life with Jonas, about the loneliness and isolation of that life and about the nights she’d gone to retrieve precious treasures, believing she was doing something good.

“I know you’re unusually fast and agile,” Dawn said. “Are there any other enhanced traits?”

“Nothing like your healing ability,” Lynn replied. It still amazed her, remembering that moment when Dawn had cut her wrist and the wound had healed before her eyes. “I have enhanced senses. Smell, touch, hearing and sight—they’re all unnaturally heightened.”

“That must be awful,” Dawn exclaimed.

Lynn was surprised by Dawn’s reaction and pleased that her sister obviously understood the ramifications of such a gift.

“It can be awful,” she agreed. “If I allow myself, I hear a cacophony of sound that hurts my head. I can smell every product anybody has used on their body, what they had for lunch and everything in a mile radius. But I learned fairly early on to block out everything extraneous. The enhanced eyesight isn’t bad. It’s nice to know I’ll probably never need glasses, and the enhanced senses of touch and feel are a real gift.”

“How so?”

“When a nice breeze blows across my face, I think I feel it more than other people. The warmth of the sun, the feel of a particular fabric against my skin…” Her voice trailed off as she thought of making love with Nick…the feel of his hands against her skin, the whisper of his breath on her face, on her body. The pleasure had been near mind-blowing. She blushed as she caught Dawn eyeing her curiously.

“I would imagine that means you feel pain more intensely.”

Lynn frowned. “I guess. I never really thought about it much before.” She reached a hand up to touch the side of her head where Jonas had hit her. It was still tender to the touch, but not bothersome.

She looked at Dawn once again. “If Rainy was our mother, then who is our father?”

“We think he’s a man named Thomas King. He’s a Navy SEAL commander and his sperm was stolen from a fertility clinic around the time that Rainy’s eggs were mined.”

“Is he alive?”

“Very much so. I don’t know how much you watch the news, but he was held captive for a year in a secret prison on the island of Puerto Isla in Central America.”

“Puerto Isla!”

“You know it?”

“I’ve been there many times. It was one of Jonas’s favorite places to visit.” Imagine, the last time she’d been there her biological father had been there as well—as a prisoner. “Small world, I guess.”

Dawn flashed her a dark look. “Or huge conspiracy.”

They fell silent after that. They drove for about an hour leaving behind the Phoenix/Glendale area and arriving in Athens. They drove down Olympus Road, the main street, and Dawn pulled into a motel parking lot.

“Good, Kayla is already here.”

Lynn tried to remember which one Kayla was…the six Cassandra women had become jumbled in her mind. “And what does she do?”

“Kayla works as a police lieutenant on the Youngstown, Arizona, police force. Part of her area is Athens.”

As they got out of the car nerves jittered through Lynn. With her past burned to ashes, she realized how important it was that these women accept her, like her.

Kayla had been friends with the mother Lynn would never know, and more than anything Lynn wanted Rainy Carrington to be proud of the woman Lynn had become.

A beautiful, tall woman with long brunette hair, brown eyes and a honeyed complexion to envy answered Dawn’s knock on room 1. She wrapped her arms around Dawn in a hug and at the same time eyed Lynn in open curiosity over Dawn’s shoulder.

“You must be Lynn,” she said as she released Dawn. She held a hand out to Lynn. “It’s wonderful to meet you. I’m Kayla, and I loved your mother very much.”

Together the three of them went into the room, and Kayla motioned them to the small table in the corner of the room. “I’m expecting Darcy at any moment,” Kayla said to Dawn. “She called a little while ago and said she had news for us.”

While they waited for Darcy to show up, they talked, letting Lynn and Kayla get to know each other.

Lynn learned that Kayla was a single mother. She had a daughter named Jazz who was twelve years old. Jazz was starting Athena Academy in the fall. Kayla explained that she was half Navaho and had grown up on a reservation with loving parents.

Kayla also gave her more information about the other Cassandras and about the woman who was Lynn’s surrogate mother, Cleo Patra. Lynn learned that Cleo was a beautiful African American.

“Years ago she was a prostitute in Phoenix,” Kayla explained. “She answered a newspaper ad about becoming a surrogate and was placed in the care of Dr. Henry Reagan and Betsy Stone, who was also the nurse for Athena Academy. Cleo’s been frightened for a long time by what happened the night the baby was stolen from her, but now she’s helping us get to the bottom of all this.”

“I want to help. I’ll do whatever is necessary to take down the people responsible for our mother’s death,” Lynn said.

“We need all the help we can get,” Dawn said. At that moment a knock sounded on the door.

Kayla jumped up. “That must be Darcy.” She opened the door and hugged the woman who stepped in.

Lynn looked at the woman with interest. She knew from what Kayla and Dawn had told her that Darcy was a former Hollywood makeup artist who now worked as a beautician and a private investigator.

Darcy Steele was fragile looking, with dyed brown hair that she was growing out, judging by the blond roots, and blue eyes. She greeted Dawn with a hug, then turned and smiled at Lynn. “I can see the resemblance,” she said, and gestured toward Dawn. “It’s amazing. You both have the very same eyes.”

For the next couple of minutes it seemed as if everyone was talking at once as the three caught up with each other, and Lynn sat back and watched. She knew from Dawn that Darcy ran a sort of underground railroad for abused women and realized the woman’s appearance of fragility hid a wealth of inner strength.

They also told Lynn more about Lab 33, that it was built underground with an entrance in the side of a rock formation. It was Dawn who told her about the many levels of the structure that went down into the earth, and to Lynn it sounded like something from a science-fiction novel. However she knew from the look in Dawn’s eyes when she spoke of the place that it was very real and the people who worked there could be very dangerous.

It was a conversation of discovery for Lynn as she learned more about the Athena Academy and the women who had been Rainy’s friends.

“You mentioned on the phone that you have news,” Kayla said to Darcy.

“I got a late response to the ad,” she said.

Lynn looked blankly first at Kayla then at Dawn. It was Dawn who explained. “Darcy has been hunting down the surrogate angle. She found ads in some of the tabloids in the Phoenix area and decided to place an ad of her own.”

“I offered a reward for anyone who might have information about surrogate mothers from about twenty years ago. It’s through the ad we found Cleo. And now I found somebody else.”

“Who?” Kayla asked and leaned forward.

Darcy looked at all of them. “A woman called me. She told me that years ago she worked with a woman who answered an ad for surrogate mothers. She also said that this woman, Tamara Hallwell, paid her to give her a urine sample at the doctor’s office. According to the woman who called me, Tamara Hallwell had unusual pale blue eyes. She sounds like a woman Cleo remembered seeing in the doctor’s office.”

“When Cleo went to the doctor’s office for her pregnancy test, she remembered seeing a nervous-looking woman with startling blue eyes,” Dawn explained.

“What are you thinking?” Lynn asked. “Why would a woman pay another one for a urine sample?”

“So that nobody would know she was pregnant?” Kayla said.

Darcy nodded and leaned back in her chair. “I’m thinking that maybe this Tamara Hallwell was a third surrogate and she didn’t want anyone to know that the pregnancy was a success.”

“So she paid a woman who wasn’t pregnant to provide a urine sample—and then what happened to her?” Kayla asked.

“She disappeared. Or maybe was killed,” Darcy replied. “I’ve tried to find her and there’s no trace.”

“If what you’re saying is true, then it’s possible there’s another one of us.” Dawn looked at Lynn. “We could have another sister.”

Hours later Lynn sat in her motel room alone. The four of them had talked until after ten, then Kayla and Darcy had left to return to their homes, and Dawn and Lynn had gone to separate rooms for the night.

It had been a night of revelations, ending in a new mystery. Someplace there might be another sister, and if that were true then they needed to find her. She and Dawn needed to find the rest of their family.

Family. She got up from the bed and undressed. As she slipped her silk nightgown over her head, she thought of the women she’d met tonight and the rest of the women she knew she’d meet in the future.

Funny, but in a matter of hours she’d felt as though they were family. She’d felt the bonds that tied them together, bonds of love and respect for each other.

Their obvious love for Rainy Carrington, and their commitment to each other, was as strong a bond as any family could ever offer, and Lynn wallowed in the warmth of knowing that she was now a part of such a warm, caring, strong group of women.

She’d found her place among these women, and she shared their common goal in finding out what had happened so many years before at the Athena Academy and discovering the secrets of Lab 33.

She slid into bed and tried to blank out the neon buzz of the motel sign just outside of her room, the noisy tick of the clock on her nightstand and the sound of water running in another one of the units.

As she quieted the noise of her mind, she heard Nick’s deep, sweetly familiar voice telling her that all she needed to do was call him and he’d wait for her.

He hadn’t been far from her thoughts throughout the day. Even as she had listened to the women talk about mysteries and potential siblings and danger, Nick had remained in the back of her mind.

She had no idea what the future held. She had no idea where the winds of fate might carry her. She certainly didn’t need Nick in her life.

But she wanted him. Eventually, hopefully, the answers they sought would be found, the mysteries all solved and Rainy’s children reunited.

It would be nice if she and Nick could pick up the pieces of what they’d only just begun—a relationship that had felt good and right and wonderfully real.

Magic. That’s what he’d told her they’d had, a magic they had just begun to explore when she’d had to say goodbye.

She thought of his smile, that slow, sexy grin that warmed her from the inside out. He’d listened to her like no other person had listened in her life. Her opinions and thoughts had been important to him.

He’d asked her to stay, but when she’d made it clear that she had to go, he hadn’t tried to change her mind. He’d cared enough about her to let her go. He’d allowed her wings, and she’d known that he hoped eventually those wings would bring her back to him.

She sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the telephone. It was after ten here in New Mexico, which meant it was after midnight in Florida. Too late to call him, she thought, even as her hand reached out for the phone receiver.

She didn’t realize she’d memorized his number until she punched it in. She held the receiver tight against her ear as she waited for him to answer.

It was possible that the words he’d spoken to her had been spoken in the heat of the moment, with the adrenaline of Jonas’s escape still rushing through him. It was possible now that he no longer needed her to put Jonas behind bars, that he would realize he hadn’t meant what he’d said.

If that were the case, she would survive. She had learned in the past couple of days that she could survive many things and, if she had to, she would survive the loss of Nick.

His deep voice filled the line. “Hello?”

She gripped the receiver even tighter, surprised by the depth of emotion that swept through her at the sound of his voice. “Nick? It’s me. I know it’s late…”

“Lynn. I’ve been hoping you’d call. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. I’m not sure why I called.”

“Because you miss me?”

She smiled, her heart warming. “Yes, because I miss you.”

“I miss you, too.”

“Has Jonas been arrested? Did they find him?” This wasn’t why she’d called him, wasn’t really what she wanted to hear from him.

“So far he’s managed to elude us, but that’s not important right now. What’s important is that you know that my bed isn’t the only lonely place right now. My life is lonely without you in it.”

She gripped the receiver so tightly she was afraid she might shatter it. This was what she had wanted to hear.

“I don’t know any more now than I did this morning. I don’t know when I’ll be back to Miami or when I’ll see you again.”

“Lynn, honey, I don’t know what demons are chasing you, but you slay them, then you come back to me.”

She closed her eyes, her love for him filling her up. “Thank you, Nick. For believing in me.”

“I told you, you’re an amazing woman. I’m a patient man, Lynnette, when it comes to things that matter to me. You matter. I’ll wait.”

In those simple words Lynn knew whatever her future held, it definitely included Nick.

CONTACT

EVELYN VAUGHN

Published by Silhouette Books
America’s Publisher of Contemporary Romance

Special thanks and acknowledgment are given to
Evelyn Vaughn for her contribution to the
ATHENA FORCE series.

For my sisters at Silhouette Bombshell.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 1

It was sensory overload. Especially for her.

“You been here before?” shouted the bartender over the noise. He was a gruff old Vietnam-vet type with a long cowboy moustache and tattoos, but Faith didn’t sense any threat off him. Of course, in this chaos, he’d have to come at her with a switchblade before she sensed a threat.

Maybe noise created its own kind of pseudo-silence—a benefit to partying with her new roommates that she hadn’t expected.

“Here, New Orleans?” she shouted back from the sanctuary he’d allowed her on his side of the bar, out of the worst of the crowd. “Or here, DeLoup’s?”

With a bottle of tequila he pointed at her green crop top which read, Tulane University. Ah, proof of her previous life. He could see she’d been in New Orleans awhile now. He grinned. “DeLoup’s.”

Faith shook her head and grinned back while, ever in motion, the bartender set some tourists up with shot glasses, lemon and salt. She usually avoided places like DeLoup’s. She wouldn’t be here now except that she hated to back down from a challenge.

Like she’d told her mom in that last, ugly argument before she’d moved out, she was through hiding in the shadows. Faith wanted people in her life, even if only people on the margins of society could really accept her. And people—social people—went dancing. And drinking. And…

And other things she’d avoided.

On that determination, she said, “It’s fun!”

And despite her enhanced senses, inexplicably keen for as long as she could remember, it was. Fun. In a throw-you-in-a-blender-and-hit-puree kind of way.

Jazz music bounced off walls hung with crooked neon beer signs and dented license plates. It mixed with laughter and shouted conversation—and heartbeats, the vibration of dozens of thudding heartbeats. Bare, multicolored bulbs dangled from ceiling fixtures, not quite reaching some of the bar’s intense shadows, but Faith could see in the dark almost as clearly as she could in the light. Frigid air-conditioning fought a losing battle against the hot, humid Louisiana night that poured into the bar every time the doors opened, not to mention the heat rolling off of its gyrating patrons. The aromas of beer and rum, sweet fruit drinks and fried appetizers mingled with colognes, breath mints and sweating, pressing humanity.

Faith could also smell the emotions, almost like perfume, could hear them on intermingled heartbeats. Currents of attraction. Patches of jealousy. Pockets of lust. From more than one area she smelled the decay of unhappiness and uncertainty.

And a whiff of…fear?

Faith frowned. Surely she’d imagined that amidst all the confusion. But real fear had its own scent, cold and acrid like metal. She did a quick head count of the roommates who’d brought her here.

Absinthe, a kohl-eyed Goth, dirty-dancing with a frat boy.

Evan, the unassuming, sandy-haired boy-next-door type, dancing with the kind of wiry, sharp-eyed guy who never pledged a fraternity.

Innocent Moonsong, hair dyed far lighter than her brown skin, rings and necklaces and piercings glistening as she belly danced in solo circles, with at least three admirers looking on.

And Krystal…

Where was Krystal?

The bartender’s hand settling onto Faith’s bare shoulder might as well have been an exposed power line. But instead of electricity she got a hard shock of concern, curiosity, wary attraction. Now she sensed that he smoked more than cigarettes…took pain pills for old pains…had pins in his knees from that wreck, shrapnel from when he saw some buddy blown up—

She stumbled back, away from the uninvited information dump, away from her own freakishness. She caught herself with an elbow on the bar’s sticky wooden surface. Jazz music swirled back in around her.

When the bartender reached for her again—“You okay, kid?”—Faith ducked quickly back, avoiding contact.

“I’m—” But what could she say? She was a freak, strange enough that even her mom couldn’t explain it, strange enough that the most accepting friends she’d found so far were French Quarter psychic readers, not exactly mainstreamers themselves. That wasn’t new. But tonight, she was a freak with a missing roommate. “I have to go find my friend. I haven’t seen her come back from the restroom.”

Which lay across a sea of dancing, mixing, pressing people.

Not that Faith had a choice. Something was wrong.

Like a swimmer taking one last breath before diving into freezing water, she braced herself, then stepped into the dancing crowd.

Every person who brushed or bumped her brought a static jolt, a blare of fragmented sound, a blast of intense scent. Like being in a pinball machine. She was the metal ball, drawn by a force as sure as gravity in one direction while too many uncaring obstacles knocked her everywhere else. Zap. Ring. In the confusion, she got only flashes of real or imagined information.

This one told her husband she was at a girlfriend’s house. That one lost out on a raise. Another just tried E for the first time.

Faith gritted her teeth as she waded through them all, finally pushing into the moderately quieter back hallway with the pay phone and the bathrooms. The door marked Filles was closed, so she knocked. “Krystal?”

Nothing. Certainly nothing good. If she concentrated, Faith could hear a heartbeat, but there was something strange about it. Something…off.

She tried the doorknob. If she wound up invading someone’s privacy, she could always claim to be drunk. The door opened barely half an inch before catching, latched with an old-fashioned hook-and-eye to go with the Old N’awlins flavor.

It was enough for Faith’s gaze to track three things.

The back of Krystal’s pale-blond head, where it lay still on the linoleum.

The faucet, pouring water into the pedestal sink.

And a booted foot seeming to levitate upward off of that sink to vanish, ghostlike, into the ceiling.

Faith jammed her hand into the crack and sliced upward, hard. The hook snapped free. Then she was in the room, skidding to her bare knees onto the gritty linoleum beside…

Beside a human shape that used to be her friend, one of her new roommates. No.

Faith didn’t have to feel for a pulse. She could hear Krystal’s lifelessness in her silence—no heartbeat, no breath. She could see the purpling stripe, like a gory scarf, around her friend’s throat, could smell death amidst the usual toilet smells, a stagnant scent, along with the remnants of that cold, metallic fear and…

And something that turned her stomach even more harshly than this violent death. That scent was also an emotion, but one she’d never caught before. And it came from—

She looked up at where the booted foot had vanished—presumably with a killer attached—and at a white ceiling panel that hadn’t been replaced quite straight in its channel.

No time to think. If she stalled on the enormity of what must have just happened in here, like a normal human would, any chance she had of identifying Krystal’s killer would vanish.

Good thing Faith wasn’t normal.

Springing to her feet, she kicked the door shut and jammed the hook back into place—protect the evidence, right? Then she scrambled onto the sink’s edge and rose, stretching upward for the metal runner that supported the drop ceiling. She had to go on tiptoe, precariously balanced on porcelain, to wedge her fingers around the metal bar. The I-shaped runner gouged cruelly into the flesh of her hands. Wishing she’d done more chin-ups at the gym, Faith had to make do with swinging herself once, twice.

On her third try, she kicked a second panel loose and caught that runner behind her knees. Now she hung like a scantily dressed U, shoulders straining, but it was enough. Stepping her feet closer to her hands with awkward lurches, glad she’d worn running shoes instead of heels, she edged her knees close enough to give her leverage.

She wedged her head and arms up past the wood-fiber panel into the narrow crawlspace of the drop ceiling.

She heard a slither of movement, rapidly retreating.

Crawl was the right word for this suspended space, Faith thought, wriggling quickly in after the fleeing suspect. The drop ceiling, a precarious collection of acoustical tiles balanced on an exposed framework of metal channels, lay barely a foot below the wooden joists of the upper roof. Her view up here was obstructed not just by the darkness, which she could handle, but by lengths of taut hanger wire and aluminum air-conditioning ducts swathed in paper-wrapped, pink fiberglass insulation. But she could hear him—statistics told her it would be a him, as surely as did instinct and smell. She twisted in the direction of the telltale scuffling and caught a glimpse of retreating boot soles, barely ten feet ahead of her.

Faith launched herself after them, not on hands and knees but on thighs and forearms, her bare tummy and legs rasping across years of accumulated dirt. Her neck ached with the strain of keeping an eye on her quarry as she wriggled after him. The ceiling panels felt horribly unstable beneath her. They probably were—those yard-by-yard squares—barely an inch thick, suspended from the joists by mere wire. From beneath her she caught wafts of jazz music, shouted conversation, blurred heartbeats and breaths and mingling emotions. But ahead of her…

She heard the distinct rhythm of her quarry’s pounding heart and breathed in his smell as it faded from that strange, stomach-turning scent to surprise and distress at her pursuit.

Not surprisingly, he was bigger than her. The crawlspace was even tighter for him. It was slowing him down.

Faith was maybe eight feet behind him now. She dragged herself closer, digging with her elbows, scrabbling with her arched feet.

One of his shoulders glanced off a metal duct.

Now she was barely six feet behind him, putting her hips into it.

He had to flatten onto his stomach to avoid a low-hanging swag of electric wiring that had pulled free of its staples.

Now she was barely four feet behind him. She caught her hand on an exposed nail and barely noticed the slice of pain. She kept crawling.

He stopped. Why? Three feet, two…

Faith reached out her hand, ready to grab the killer by the ankle if that’s what it took. She doubted she could capture him alone, but she’d come to know evidence. She could damn well tear some vital clue off him.

But with the appearance of a sudden square of light, he vanished.

At least, that’s what it looked like. Even as she gaped, Faith realized that the man had punched out another ceiling tile and dived, headfirst, into whatever lay below.

Wriggling closer, she peered over the edge of the runner and saw metal racks, industrial-size bottles, cardboard boxes. Storeroom. She pivoted onto her hip, her shoulder brushing a joist above her as she rolled on her side and dropped her feet down first. Then she levered herself the rest of the way through the ceiling and let go.

With a light thud, she landed in a crouch on the floor below.

The storeroom was empty—of everything but storage, anyway. Faith shouldered quickly out the door….

And found herself behind the bar again. The man she’d been after could be anybody amidst the milling, churning crowd now. And the bartender wasn’t there to say who’d just appeared from the storeroom.

Like everyone else, he’d apparently been drawn away by the shrill screaming coming from the bathrooms.

With a deep breath, Faith dived back into the crowd, an overly aware pinball trying to go in one inexorable direction.

“You touch anything?” demanded the first officer on the scene, a tall brown patrolman named Lee. He’d responded not to the bartender’s 9-1-1 call but to one of DeLoup’s customers rushing out onto Bourbon Street to fetch help.

“Of course I did,” admitted Faith. “But I’ve contained the scene since.”

The shrieking CPA who’d found Krystal had not pushed the door hard enough to force the hook-and-eye latch a second time. Apparently, when she’d looked in, she hadn’t wanted to.

Faith had gotten there just as the bartender shouldered his way through—in time to keep him from compromising evidence.

The patrolman, after an unsteady look at poor Krystal’s blue-tinged face and a grateful check of Faith’s ID badge, agreed to leave the bathroom to her while he worked crowd control.

“Not like you can go anywhere,” he said, as if the ceiling panels weren’t gaping like missing teeth above the still-running sink.

One down. But Faith wasn’t worried about patrolmen.

“Did you throw up?” asked a kindly EMT not ten minutes later, about the running water. A good-looking guy named Steadman, he was careful to step only where Faith had indicated he should. The likelihood that the crime-scene investigators could pick up a single distinct boot print off the chaos of a bathroom floor were low, especially with something gritty, like sand, crunching underfoot. Faith should know. But it didn’t hurt to be careful.

“No. I found the water that way.”

“Did you check for the victim’s pulse?”

“She was already dead when I felt her wrist.” And she hadn’t needed to check for a pulse to know that. But Faith had wanted to leave a fingerprint, just in case. Her mother had stressed the need for paranoia about Faith’s freakishly acute senses since childhood. Leaving proof of an unnecessary assessment had seemed a better idea than trying to explain that she could hear the absence of her roommate’s heartbeat.

Steadman crouched easily beside Krystal’s body and eyed the straight-line bruising around the neck and the welts where, if Faith had to guess, Krystal had gouged her own throat trying to dig away the killer’s garrote. Steadman, too, seemed to check for the absent pulse more out of procedure than practicality. “She looks familiar. Didn’t she read tarot in Jackson Square?”

Faith stiffened, concerned he would recognize more than Krystal. Not that Faith had been on the Square for a while. She’d only been…experimenting. It had been a failed experiment.

“Yes,” she said. “She did.”

He swore under his breath and stood. “Well, ma’am, this is one for the cops, the coroner and the crime scene unit.”

Two down. But Faith wasn’t worried about EMTs, either.

Again she found herself alone with the body. She looked into Krystal’s staring eyes, not quite able to reconcile the corpse with the tall, vivacious young woman who’d offered to style Faith’s hair before they’d headed out that night. Krystal.

It had always been one of Faith’s favorite daydreams, to live with a bunch of other women. Roommates, sisters, dorm-mates at some kind of boarding school—no matter the details, she’d always imagined it would be like an endless slumber party. Like…belonging. This new apartment—rather, her newly rented half room in a very old apartment—was her first real effort toward that.

But slumber parties usually didn’t include murder.

Now she wished she’d accepted Krystal’s offer, despite her dislike of being touched and Krystal’s overreliance on hair spray. Krystal had been teaching her breathing and relaxation techniques to control her oversensitivity. They’d been friends, though maybe not as close as normal people got. Faith wasn’t sure she knew how to get close to other people. Now she’d lost any chance to get closer to this one.

She hadn’t expected losing someone to hurt like this.

Still, the worst part about standing here in the bathroom, alone with Krystal, wasn’t that guilt. It wasn’t the eerie stillness, a now blatant absence of jazz music, laughter and shouted conversations that made the simple gurgle of water running down the drain become deafening. It wasn’t even being this close to a dead person.

The worst part was the lingering…smell was what Faith could best call it, but that wasn’t wholly correct. A perverted sexuality hung in the air, part musk, part heat. It had been left by the killer and this horrible, irrevocable thing he’d done. It smelled like power. Dominance.

Evil.

More than the corpse’s presence, that atmosphere of evil twisted deep in her stomach.

“So,” drawled someone loudly. Though the man in the unbuttoned coat didn’t throw the door open hard enough to bounce it off the wall, he might as well have, the way Faith jumped at his arrival. “What do we know?”

Damn. Not only had the detectives arrived, they included Roy Chopin.

Faith had been around Chopin only a handful of times. He was a rangy man with a rolling walk, blunt and expressive. He wore his brown hair styled back from his long face, to keep it out of his tired eyes. His mouth alternated between threatening and mocking, and his jaw looked like a dare. His sheer physicality made her uncomfortable, even without touching. He didn’t have to touch. A cop in every sense of that word, Chopin seemed to expect the whole world to get out of his way. To judge by his cocky attitude, the world usually did.

Tonight, though, his presence felt welcome as it washed over the crime scene like a rainstorm clearing out the gutters of Bourbon Street. Imagining all this ugliness through his detached gray eyes demoted Krystal’s death from a scene of horror to a mere shame and, more to the point, a puzzle to be solved.

Faith grasped gratefully at that air of detachment. She would return to the horror soon enough, after all. And she would need all her wits. Where Chopin went…

Well, when his partner arrived, she’d be three down. The detectives were the ones who had worried her all along.

For good reason.

In the meantime, Chopin was already looking impatient.

“This is Krystal Tanner,” she reported. “I found her like this at about ten-fifteen. Someone was climbing out through the ceiling. I went after him, but he had a pretty good head start, and—What?”

Chopin had shaken his head, his tired eyes widening.

“You went after him?” he demanded.

“Yes.”

He looked her up and down. She sensed the way he saw her as surely as she could read his perusal of the scene. She was a blond-haired, ponytailed coed with full lips, unusual green-gold eyes and tanned arms and legs, bared by the miniskirt and crop top. The outfit had seemed a better choice before her crawl through the filthy roof space.

“Alone?”

Her chin came up under the challenge of his gaze. “Yeah.”

Chopin leaned closer, faux conspiratorial. “And why would you do an idiotic thing like that?”

Well, duh. “Because the alternative would have been not to go after him?”

He grinned as he straightened, fishing a notebook out of his shirt pocket. “Krystal Tanner,” he muttered, making a note. “Ten-fifteen. You’re not on the force, so how is it I know you?”

She was surprised he’d remember her, even vaguely. Then again, powers of observation went back to his cop-ness. “I’m an assistant evidence technician for the city. Faith Corbett.”

She fisted her right hand, hoping he wouldn’t want to shake. The man was intense enough without risking direct contact.

“Yeah, that’s it.” He nodded and, to her relief, kept his own hand busy taking notes. “You’re one of Boulanger’s day shift, working the desk, right? Sometimes you make pickups and drop-offs at the station. So Corbett, how is it you know the deceased?”

Poor Krystal. One minute she’d been dancing, drinking, celebrating life. Then she’d headed for the ladies’ room and…God. The deceased.

“She’s my roommate.”

Chopin stopped writing and angled his wide gaze back to her, brows furrowed. “Oh. I’m…uh…”

Why was it some men had trouble expressing even the most conventional courtesy, lest it betray some emotion? Faith saved him the effort. “Thanks.”

“So, Bernie, you went charging after this killer and…?”

Had he just called her Bernie? Unwilling to be distracted, Faith repeated the story as quickly as she could without looking too suspicious, increasingly aware of him studying her as he listened and took notes. She felt as if he could see every hair on her arms, every piece of grit embedded in her tummy, every scrape on her knees. It wasn’t sexual—there was a corpse at their feet, after all. Well…not any more sexual than any man staring at a woman’s bare tummy, anyway. But such intense scrutiny made her uncomfortable.

Like he could maybe see just how weird she was.

“You didn’t get a good look at him?” Chopin demanded, when she finished. At least he hadn’t interrupted her.

“Just the bottom of his feet.”

“And you didn’t ask anybody if they saw him leave the storeroom?” His mouth had gone back to threatening. His questions were starting to feel like little shoves of energy.

“No, everyone was distracted by finding Krystal.”

“And how was your relationship with the vic?”

Faith’s mouth fell open. “Why are you questioning me as if…oh.” But she knew the answer to that, too. “The first person on the scene’s always the first suspect, right?”

“Yeah.” Chopin didn’t even bother to apologize for his suspicions. But he did include her in another mocking grin.

“Nothing personal, hon. It’s one of those hard truths, like ‘everybody lies.’ Statistics would put the odds on either you or her boyfriend-slash-husband.”

“She didn’t have a boyfriend or a husband.”

“Could I see your hands, please?” Shove.

Faith spread her bare palms for him. Only when she felt his interest spike—a minute change of his temperature, a sharp inhale through his teeth—did she notice the pink lines where she’d pulled herself up through the ceiling, the bleeding cut from that exposed nail. “Oh…” she whispered.

For a moment she felt dizzy with the very real possibility that she might be charged with this crime. So much for keeping a low profile!

“Don’t sweat it. If you’d done the deed, you’d have lines on the sides of your hands, too. Here—” to her relief, he indicated where he meant with his pen, not his finger “—and here. Besides, she’s fashion-model tall—pushing six feet? I’m no M.E., but I’m betting the ligature marks on her neck would be a lot lower if you did her. Unless you somehow made her kneel first, which, how could you without imminent threat, and I don’t see anyplace you could’ve hidden a gun. Or much of a knife. Nice shirt, there.”

“You’re smarter than you look,” said Faith, fully aware it was her own way of shoving back.

“’Cause of my fashion sense, or ’cause I’m not hauling you down to the station yet?” Detective Chopin looked less exhausted as he eyed her. “Usually I’m the brawn of the outfit. Right, Butch?”

Strike three.

“Now, Roy,” demanded Chopin’s partner from the doorway. Here stood the sweet, trustworthy man whose arrival Faith had feared even beyond the slap-in-the-face energy of the younger Roy. “What are you doing harassing this here helpful citizen? Sugar over vinegar, son. Sugar over vinegar. How do you do, Miss? I am Detective Sergeant Butch Jefferson. I am most terribly sorry to have to meet you under such clearly distressing circumstances, and I apologize for my partner’s appalling lack of manners.”

“He’s the Good Cop,” muttered Chopin amiably, still taking notes. Which made him what?

Butch, who had more than twenty years on his thirty-ish partner, extended both a genuine smile, which made his dark eyes crinkle at the corners, and his worn brown hand. There was no way Faith could refuse to take the latter. Not without rousing suspicion and requiring more conversation, which—around Butch Jefferson, anyway—she wanted even less than touching.

With a determined smile, she allowed Butch to envelop her hand in his.

It wasn’t anywhere near as unsettling as touching his partner would have been. Butch’s personal energy was slow and easy, like the Mississippi in the summertime. The flashes of possible information that accompanied his touch—widowed, volunteered with Big Brothers, loved beer and boiled crawfish—he released it all so freely, it didn’t carry the unsettling jolt of so many other people.

“Faith Corbett,” she said—the first time she’d ever given this particular cop her real name. Please don’t recognize me.

“From evidence,” added Bad Cop, who proceeded to take over most of the talking.

The older detective didn’t seem to realize he and Faith had spoken before, much less that it had had nothing to do with her job with the crime-scene unit.

Then again, she’d chosen Butch Jefferson last year specifically because he didn’t have a terribly suspicious nature—not for a homicide detective, anyway. She’d always used a fake accent, the dozen-or-so times she’d telephoned him. And she’d given him a fake name, Madame Cassandra. But the information she’d passed on as Detective Jefferson’s anonymous contact with the psychic community had always been real.

As long as the information stayed anonymous, Faith could remain useful. But if he recognized her voice, or learned the tips came from her…

Well, either he’d see her like Chopin had—young and blond and thus somehow unreliable—or he’d see her like the few other people who had learned her secret.

Freak.

Worse, they would want to know how she did it. And that, not even Faith could tell them.

She honestly didn’t know what she was.

But whatever she was, keeping quiet about it was one of the few things her nervous mother had gotten right. Look what happened to Krystal.

The thought caught Faith by surprise. How could Krystal’s murder have anything to do with the tarot reader’s special abilities?

She stiffened, increasingly aware of the gurgling drain beneath Roy Chopin’s surprisingly accurate narrative of her night. It would keep running until the night shift for the crime-scene unit arrived.

Running water?

She might only do glorified clerical work for the crime-scene unit, so far. She might only be an assistant crime-scene technician. But she knew the water had to mean something.

What?

Amidst the Bourbon Street crowd that lingered into the night, attracted by flashing lights and yellow police tape, He closed His eyes to savor His…His amplification.

Strength. Meaning. Confidence. Yes!

That last time hadn’t been a fluke, after all.

He stood for what may have been hours, too powerful to tire of it, relishing how helpless the so-called authorities looked. Patrolmen had come and gone, as had an ambulance. Now the photographers and the crime-scene investigators, the night shift, had arrived. But He waited.

He wanted to see the detectives leave as ignorant as when they’d arrived. Stupid, arrogant suits. He wanted to gloat.

When finally they emerged, a younger man with an old black partner, they didn’t seem as helpless as He’d hoped. The younger one looked dusty enough to have been clambering around the crawlspace over the ceiling.

But they didn’t look satisfied, either. Or done.

Both seemed distracted by the blond bitch who’d chased Him from His kill before he was done. The one with the green tank top and the miniskirt. He didn’t like that one at all.

“Let me or Roy get you a cab now, Miss Faith,” He heard the black man say. “Gang activity’s gotten worse, not far north of here. No need for you to take chances.”

“No,” said the girl, all but backing away. “Really. My roommates will walk with me. We’ll be safe together.”

The trio who shuffled nearer, red-eyed and lost, looked as if they needed more protection than they would provide. Even the man among them had the posture of a girl.

Those three looked familiar—from Jackson Square.

More psychics?

Even as He thought that, as His breath fell shallow and His heartbeat sped and his groin tightened, the one called Miss Faith suddenly turned her head. Her unnerving green gaze raked across the remaining onlookers as if she knew what she was looking for.

He leaned back just enough to hide behind the shoulders of some good ol’boy. When He dared look again, she’d gone. She seemed to deliberately ignore the detectives staring after her. She was too busy dividing her attention between her friends and the street around them, like a little blond bodyguard.

He dared breathe again after they turned a corner. More than one psychic there, for sure.

The kind of people with power to spare.

A few more like tonight, and even the Master could no longer control Him.

Chapter 2

Faith couldn’t tell if she’d really sensed the killer among the onlookers, or if it had been her imagination. Sure, she was weird. But could she really recognize a particular heartbeat, a particular smell, in that kind of crowd?

Probably she’d just been distracted by Roy Chopin and Butch Jefferson watching her retreat.

“They asked a lot of questions,” noted Moonsong, after a block. “Who Krys dated, if we knew anybody who would want to hurt her. That was nice and thorough of them.”

“Bull! Did you see how they looked at me when I told them I’d met Krys at an astrology class?” Between grief, guilt and frustration, or maybe the simple boredom of waiting out the administrative elements of a crime scene, Absinthe had chewed most of her black lipstick off. “Like I was crazy. Like Krystal was crazy. It’s disrespectful, is what it is.”

“Krystal would have thought it was funny,” Moonsong insisted. Her real name was Emily, but a surprising number of psychics changed their names. It wasn’t so much to hide their true names—like Faith masquerading as Madame Cassandra when she made anonymous calls to the police. It was more about…identity.

About making a fresh start, even honoring their unusual abilities.

“Well, it’s not funny,” said Absinthe who, because Faith had helped her through the paperwork of a legal name change, really was Absinthe. Faith had majored in pre-law, before dropping out.

Until she knew what she was, it seemed premature to settle on what she should do.

Moonsong’s expression set. “But she would have thought it was. Remember? Whenever people got all cynical about what she did, she’d say, ‘That is so Queen of Swords.’”

Absinthe laughed. “Or she’d say, ‘Don’t get all Virgo on me.’”

Then she pressed a black-nailed hand to her mouth as her laugh shuddered into a sob. Moonsong circled her dark arms around her, and the two of them walked like a four-legged, two-headed creature.

So much for an endless slumber party. Faith wrapped her arms around herself and tried not to picture Krystal’s dead blue eyes and the welts on her throat. Mostly she tried not to imagine the moments before Krystal had died.

She and her three roommates took the same close, shadowed, cobblestone streets that had seen five of them heading out mere hours before. Never had the quieter, late-night backstreets of the French Quarter seemed so empty.

“Would you…?” Evan hesitated beside her, then forged on. “You don’t like to be touched, right?”

Faith longed for normal contact at that moment far more desperately than she feared the intimacy. “It’s not so bad if you don’t touch bare skin. I mean…yes. I could use a hug.”

So awkwardly, like a junior-high kid learning the waltz, Evan positioned one hand on Faith’s shirted back, the other on her denim-covered hip, and drew her tentatively against his shirtfront.

She laid her cheek on his shoulder and sighed. The worst of the night’s horrors eased, if only a little, under the comforting thrum of his concern and his heartbeat, gently muffled by the pressed cotton of his shirt.

What a sweet, sweet man. They were kind, all of them.

Krystal. Tears of gratitude and loss burned in Faith’s eyes.

Faith’s roommates knew her secrets—the few she’d figured out herself, anyway. Better yet, they accepted her abilities without demanding explanations. They respected her need for privacy. And they were, for the most part, able to deal with her despite her issues. The so-called fringe really had become friends.

A little over a year ago, Faith had gone to a psychic fair to figure out if being psychic was why she was such a freak. She’d hoped that maybe, like in the Ugly Duckling story, she would discover she’d been a swan all along. A psychic swan.

It didn’t happen that way. They turned out to be swans, all right, but she was still something different and strange. A heron, maybe. Maybe something weirder, like a platypus.

God, she’d wanted to be one of them. To be one of anything. But she couldn’t predict the future. She didn’t get reincarnation. The only impressions she felt off runes or tarot cards were a sense of who’d last held them, partly because of how they smelled. The true psychics used paranormal, extra- sensory skills. Faith’s abilities seemed to be pure sensory.

Just…sensory with the volume turned up.

These weren’t her people, after all. But she’d liked them—and more important, they’d brought out her protective instincts. As Absinthe pointed out, a lot of people distrusted psychics. And too many psychics depended on ethereal defenses when they could use a good lesson in kickboxing. After an incident at the psychic fair’s “open circle,” when Faith had faced down some large, loud disbelievers, she’d realized that this half-hidden community needed someone like her. Someone who could kickbox, sort of, and who wouldn’t hesitate to do so. Even the ex-military pagans, when in a sacred circle, had hesitated.

Faith had not.

She hadn’t started protecting them just to buy their friendship. Between her mother’s paranoid habit of relocating every few years, and Faith’s own issues about touching, Faith had resigned herself to being a loner. But the psychic community had welcomed her. When one of Krystal Tanner’s roommates had moved out, and they’d started looking for someone to pay a fifth of the rent, they’d asked Faith, who’d jumped at the chance to fulfill that slumber-party dream of sisterhood.

Now Krys was dead. Murdered.

Faith pulled back from Evan’s platonic embrace, smiled her sad thanks, and continued walking.

Some protector she’d turned out to be.

“I heard what happened. Are you all right?”

The man who asked that, two days later, was Faith’s supervisor. Black-haired, brown-eyed, bearded Greg Boulanger ran the day shift of the crime-scene unit. He was something of a Cajun science geek with the extra strike against him of being management. At almost forty, he was clearly too old for Faith’s interest. And yet she liked him. A lot.

And not just because she felt loyal to him for hiring her.

The best way she could describe how comfortable she felt around Greg was that he had a quiet presence. Kind of like her roommate Evan did. Besides, like so many of the people who worked evidence, Greg often smelled of balloons. It was because of the latex gloves, Faith knew. But the scent had remarkably pleasant, innocent associations, all the same.

“I’m fine,” she assured him. He stood beside the desk where she sat. Although his brown eyes seemed concerned behind his wire-rimmed glasses, Greg didn’t come at her with the shield of sympathy that so many other people in the office had…probably because, despite being a nice guy, he remained distracted by the job.

“Even coroners aren’t cavalier about the bodies of people they know,” Greg insisted. “People you know are different. They’re supposed to be.”

“I’m okay.”

“You should probably take some time off.”

“No. Really. I kind of like being here.”

Greg’s eyebrows rose as he looked around them. Unlike those on television, the crime-scene unit consisted of four rooms and one small hallway, crowded into too little floor space on the third floor of a generic municipal building. Faith’s desk, up front, was open to a room with three other desks and two crowded worktables. Books overflowed on shelves. The place smelled like a cross between a library and a science lab, with an undercurrent of death because of the morgue down the hall.

“I’ve been handling the practical stuff,” Faith tried to explain. “Calling her family—Krystal was from East Texas. Packing her belongings for when they come. Contacting a local funeral director to make arrangements for after…”

Her need for a deep breath surprised her. So much for Krystal’s lessons in stress management through breath control. Maybe Faith wasn’t so okay after all.

“After her body’s released?” Greg finished for her, gentle.

Faith nodded. “And contacting the coroner to see when that will be. The family wants to have two funerals, one here for her friends and one in Caddo, just for them, so I’ve been helping to arrange that.”

Greg picked up the sheaf of evidence reports that still needed to be entered into the computer system and turned it over. “All the more reason you need a break. Things are crazy with that gang shooting.”

Krystal’s death hadn’t been the only murder that weekend.

“But this is a break. Everyone at home…well, they were friends with Krystal longer than I was.” Her roommates smelled of salty tears and wet misery. Their very breathing sounded like an uneven dirge. The usually strong Absinthe’s moods seemed to carry an unpleasant edge of guilt, too. Not that Faith blamed any of them. She felt more than a little guilty that her own grief felt so distant and so, well…mundane.

Absinthe had distracted herself by increasing the spiritual “shields” around their apartment, with incense and crystals; she’d stayed up all night making protective amulets for each of them. Faith wore hers even now, under her top, more for sentimental reasons than because she believed in it.

She didn’t disbelieve.

Moonsong had taken to bed, hoping Krystal’s spirit could contact her in a dream so that they could say a proper goodbye—though Faith thought it was as likely that grief or depression had simply exhausted her. Evan, bless him, had run interference with Krystal’s other friends, spending hours on the phone, answering the same questions over and over. No, they didn’t know why anyone would have killed Krystal. No, the police knew nothing. No, they couldn’t believe she was dead.

Maybe that was the difference. Faith was the only one among them to have spent time with Krystal’s corpse. She very much believed her friend was dead, so she seemed best able to handle all the customary indignities that shouldn’t be heaped on people in mourning, either her roommates or the poor Tanner family.

Greg sighed. “Then don’t go home. Go to the zoo or the aquarium. Take a riverboat ride. Go shopping.”

Faith shook her head. She could justify forgetting Krystal for whole minutes at a time, to focus on her work. But to shop? “I’m good here.”

“That’s debatable.”

She stared, confused, and he sighed. “Since you’re personally involved, you’ll want to keep some extra distance from this case. You understand that, don’t you? It’s not that I distrust you, but if anything compromises the evidence…”

“I understand.” Between this job, and her pre-law work at Tulane, she got evidence.

Her boss’s pale eyes focused on her as intently as they might focus on a strand of hair, or a fingerprint, or a particular bug he might be studying. Which, from Greg, was quite a compliment.

She was still startled when she caught a whiff of attraction. Even more when, almost as if an afterthought, he tucked a strand of her blond hair behind her ear.

Because he was wearing latex gloves—he almost always did, around here—the touch didn’t send an unpleasant jolt through her. In fact, she wouldn’t describe the sensation as unpleasant at all.

He was a human. She was a human. It was human contact.

But here, it still unnerved her. To judge from how his eyes widened, it unnerved him, too. Greg stepped quickly back, fisting his hand as if he’d done something wrong with it. And he hadn’t. It wasn’t like he’d traced her lips, or her collarbone. It wasn’t like he’d told her she looked hot in black.

“I…” he said, then cleared his throat. “Sorry. We’ve still got that Storyville shooting to deal with. I’d better go check on some ballistics results the lab was faxing over….”

To maybe the relief of both of them, Faith’s phone rang.

She smiled reassurance at Greg as she picked it up, but he was already hurrying away. “Evidence,” she said.

“I told you the Quarter was a dangerous place.”

Faith hadn’t had time to brace herself against this second wave of guilt. “Mother?”

“I just saw the news,” insisted Tamara Corbett. “Krystal Tanner—she’s one of your roommates, isn’t she? The one from Texas?”

“Well…she was.”

“Please, Faith. Don’t try to make light of it!”

“Trust me, Mom. I’m not making light of anything. But there’s no reason for you to worry. You know she wasn’t killed at the apartment, don’t you?”

“But she was in the Quarter. Were you there, too?”

Faith scowled at her computer screen, not sure how to answer that.

“Oh, baby…” moaned her mother, which was even worse than lecturing. Tamara had always been overly protective of Faith. All they’d ever had was each other. Leaving home to move in with Krystal and the others had been one of the hardest things in Faith’s life. Especially since she’d been able to hear the reality of her mother’s despair in her catching breath, in her pounding heartbeat, as she left. She’d been able to smell it on her, to taste it in the air.

But that wasn’t the only thing Faith had been sensing when she moved out. The guilt in the air hadn’t just been her own. And until her mom was able to explain what that was all about…

Well, wasn’t Faith’s life complicated enough?

“I’m okay, Mom,” she said now, feeling like the grown-up in this equation. “I mean, of course I’m not okay, but considering everything, I’m as good as can be expected. Try not to worry.”

That was like saying try not to fly away to a frightened bird.

Or like saying try not to wonder where you’re from to a fatherless girl, which was essentially what her mother had said whenever Faith tried to pursue the mystery that shrouded her past. Had she inherited her freakishly keen senses from her dad’s side of the family? Was it possible she might have cousins, even distant cousins, even one, who understood what she was going through?

Tamara had always refused to talk about Faith’s dad. He’d left them, he hadn’t wanted them, he’d died, and that was that. Her stubbornness on that front made it easier not to bleed sympathy for her seeming apprehension now.

“I’m terrified you’re going to pull a Thomas King,” said Tamara, referring of course to the Navy SEAL team leader who’d vanished and been thought dead for over a year, until his recent dramatic rescue. Because of the political ramifications of his mission, he was still making news. “If something happened to you, what would I do? Maybe you should move back home. For a while. Just until things die down.”

“What things? The funeral? My friends’ grief? They need me now more than ever, Mom.”

“But you’re so close to Rampart Street, to Storyville….”

“You’re the one who moved us to the murder capital of the United States.” As soon as she said that, Faith regretted it. Not only was it cruel, but it put the city in far too dark a light. “I’m sorry, Mom—”

“No. You’re right. I’m just glad to know you’re safe.” And Tamara hung up.

“Damn!” Faith hung up, too, and pressed fingers to her forehead. She loved New Orleans. She’d been just as glad to leave Kansas City, where she and her mom had lived for two years before coming south. New Orleans had a dark side, yes. But the flaws of this old, magical, slow-moving city were what made it feel like home. It made her own flaws—or her eccentricities, anyway—more acceptable somehow. More normal, even.

Faith had longed to be normal her whole life. Living amidst the quirks of the Big Easy was as close as she’d come to it, especially once she’d found the psychic community. The older she got, the more aware Faith became of how guilty her mother felt. About something. Tamara wouldn’t say and Faith couldn’t—wouldn’t—sense it off of her. It was one thing to stumble across a jumble of half-clear impressions about someone. It would be another thing entirely to drag out someone’s hard-kept secrets. That would be invasive. A violation. Damn it.

But whatever it was, Tamara shouldn’t also feel guilty about moving them here.

The phone rang again and Faith took a deep breath before answering it. “I’m fine,” she repeated.

“Glad to know it,” said a much deeper voice than the one she’d expected. “That’s exactly the word I would have used.”

His energy actually seemed to pulsate out of the phone. Or was that just the man’s inability to moderate his voice?

“Detective Chopin,” greeted Faith, sitting up. Like he could see her. At least he’d called, and not his partner. Faith had been on the phone with Butch Jefferson as an anonymous contact too often to risk letting him recognize her disembodied voice. “Do you want to talk to one of the technicians, or maybe Mr. Boulanger?”

“If I’d wanted to talk to them, I would’ve called them,” he said. “I figured…that is, I thought I’d ask…”

Faith waited, feeling as handicapped as if she’d been blindfolded. All she could hear over the line in this busy office was that Chopin sounded frustrated. If he were here, she could have read his body language and his scent and even his temperature as if he were holding up cue cards with personal insights. On the phone…

Maybe that’s why she and cell phones had such a bad history. She resented their limitations.

“You are Faith Corbett, right?” asked the cop, managing a slightly quieter voice after all.

“Yes, Detective. What can I do for you?”

“I just wanted…” Chopin swore, and his voice went normal again. Which meant, pushy. “Evidence. On the Tanner case. We’re past the 24/24, and I need a damned progress report.”

The 24/24 stood for the day before and the day after a murder, the time from which the most valid clues came. Soon, people’s recall would fade. Undiscovered physical evidence might vanish. That’s why the majority of murders were solved within the first forty-eight hours.

Krystal had been dead thirty-seven hours and counting.

“I’m not supposed to involve myself with the Tanner evidence, Detective Chopin.”

“Which wouldn’t keep you from looking from a safe distance, right? So what’s the status? And call me Roy.”

He had her there—she had looked, on the computer network. She just hadn’t modified any files. “We’re still waiting on the M.E. for the autopsy results, and so far Officer Hinze hasn’t found concrete matches on any of the fingerprints from the scene. Considering that there were over fifty prints and partials, that’s still going to take some processing. The footprints will be even more tricky—for some reason, there was a lot of spilled salt on the floor. You know this one went to the night shift, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I know. So, is the body still there? Did it—” Then he said, “Aw, f—” He bit off the swear word. “I’m sorry. Hell. I almost forgot it was your friend. I mean…uh…she.”

“You were right the first time,” Faith assured him. The evidence in the morgue was no longer Krystal. “I hope you’ve got some leads on the bastard who murdered her.”

He knew better than to commit himself. “Just to humor me—the body’s still there?”

As in many cities, the crime-scene investigators were not part of the police department, so they didn’t have offices at the police station. Neither was this unit part of the parish—Louisiana talk for a county. As soon as the city coroner finished with the corpse, it would be released to the funeral parlor or moved back to the parish morgue. But as long as it remained evidence to be examined…

“The body’s still here.” Faith’s fingers darted across her keyboard to access the proper file and confirm that. Looking only. No interference. “Why do you need to know? Do you need to see it for…something?”

“Unless the M.E. has something pertinent to the case, I’m just as happy leaving that part to you folks. Hell. Maybe I do need to talk to Boulanger.”

“Hold a moment, and I’ll put you through.” Never had she felt more like a glorified secretary. But at least her job kept her near law enforcement. She’d dropped out of college the previous year when she was questioning everything, including why she’d thought she would even want to be a lawyer. But in the meantime, she had to pay the rent. This job felt…right.

Greg’s voice mail clicked on, and Chopin swore again.

“Would you like to leave a message?” Faith asked.

“No. I’d like you to find him. I need to see if anything got—” Did he start to form the T from taken, or was Faith imagining it? “Hunt Boulanger down and have him call me. Got it?”

“Yes sir, detective sir,” said Faith.

“You’re cute when you’re a smart-ass,” said Chopin, as if he could see her, and hung up.

Faith let the phone roll off her shoulder into her waiting palm. Her neck felt cricked already. But once she had the receiver in her hand, she held it for a long moment, as if she’d be able to sense anything of importance off of it.

Other than the fact that Officer Leone had used her line recently, she sensed nothing. Not off the telephone, anyway.

Roy Chopin had called her cute. Actually, at the start of the conversation, he’d called her fine, too. Then he’d gotten self-conscious.

He’d called to talk to her? Using her friend’s corpse as an excuse? Surely not.

She’d thought she was socially inept.

Since she’d been sitting too long anyway, Faith decided to head down to the autopsy room where the medical examiner would be working his magic. If Greg wasn’t with him, she could work her way back from there, but there was no reason to waste time checking the nooks and crannies if she’d only find him where he usually was—with the evidence.

The frigid autopsy chamber was large for a room, but small for a morgue. Only a dozen stainless steel drawers fronted one wall, with three slabs—two regular steel tables, one with a trough underneath it—positioned down the room’s center. Two of the tables had a sheet-draped body on them. It seemed sad, them left out like this, but Faith supposed bodies were too heavy to put away every time someone ran out for coffee or a bathroom break.

Either way, nobody was here. Nobody living, anyway.

She glanced toward the sheet that she thought hid Krystal’s corpse. This time, she couldn’t smell her friend’s presence because she was breathing shallow, through her mouth. Although everything here had been made for easy cleaning—the floor, the tiled walls like a bathroom’s, lots of metal—even the reek of disinfectant couldn’t mask the odor of death.

“Tell me,” she whispered, keeping her distance as she’d promised Greg she would. Never had she more fervently wished that she really was psychic. “Tell me who did this to you.”

Then her head—Faith’s head, of course—came up. She heard something in the hallway, male footsteps. Someone was coming.

Someone who didn’t belong here. In fact…

She didn’t know those boots. So why did they concern her?

She concentrated, straining to catch this particular heartbeat. It pulsed more rapidly than the heart of someone who was simply taking care of tasks at work. It sounded more like someone doing something they shouldn’t. And in this otherwise lifeless room, surrounded only by hearts that never would beat again, she recognized it.

The killer was coming.

Time to leave, thought Faith—but her feet didn’t move. It wasn’t from courage. Some instinct more powerful than her desire to see the killer’s face was holding her transfixed, listening to those footsteps, listening to that heartbeat. What was different about it? A murmur? A rhythmic anomaly? Could she even be sure it was the killer, and not her imagination?

Her head couldn’t. But her instincts weren’t letting her go out there, all the same.

The problem was, he was coming in here. She didn’t have to be psychic to guess that. This room was at the end of a hallway. He was coming in here, and either she stood here and waited for him, or she left by forcing herself to walk right by him—

Her feet weren’t cooperating.

He was barely ten feet from the door, if that much. She could hear it. Nine feet. Eight….

Faith wanted to stand her ground. But she’d been raised on paranoia for too long. Almost in defeat, she spun, tugged open one of the steel drawers at her feet—

A man’s ashen face stared back up at her. One of the dead gangbangers. Being a crime victim, he didn’t look happy, even in death.

The footsteps were only six feet from the doorway. Five….

She kicked that drawer smoothly closed and yanked the handle of another. It glided open, empty. She swung in, feetfirst.

Three feet from the doorway…

Planting either hand on the disinfected, death-scented linoleum beneath the drawer, Faith pushed backward, sliding herself into the dark, steel confines of a drawer that normally held dead bodies.

Chapter 3

It was cold. Cold and dark, and so very, very close.

Not that the former residents of this drawer had needed to see or stay warm.

On her stomach, Faith tucked her arms beneath herself, both for warmth and to lever her face farther from the steel slab that had held countless corpses. She shivered. Even her extra-keen eyes could see nothing. She could hear nothing. Was this thing actually soundproof? If so, was it so the dead could sleep peacefully…or so that the living wouldn’t hear them?

Stupid, thought Faith of her own fancies. Stupid, stupid. Now that she’d committed to this foolish course of action, she felt frustrated with her own cowardice. That, and its impetus.

A person couldn’t really have such distinct hearing that she could recognize a specific heartbeat, from down the hallway. Could she? Not even a freak like her. It had to be her imagination. Or maybe she was mentally deficient. Her mother had never wanted to consult a doctor about Faith’s “condition.”

Even if she wasn’t crazy, and the visitor to the morgue was the killer, why hide? She’d had a chance to see the man’s face, to finally know who had done this horrible thing to her friend…

But even now, when she considered pushing out of this body locker, she couldn’t quite summon the courage. She’d been in shock when she’d gone after the killer at the bar. Now, in daylight, facing him down seemed even more foolish than hiding from him.

Even in here.

She could feel her muscles stiffen, her breath strain in this cold, solid tomb of sensory deprivation. If she raised her head, she bumped it on steel.

Something felt sticky under one elbow—don’t think about it!—and she shivered harder.

Minutes passed.

Desperate, she harnessed her thoughts back to logic. Okay, suppose the intruder really was the killer from the bar. What the hell would he be doing here? How could he have gotten past security? Why would anyone take such a risk?

The last question echoed through her skull as surely as her own heartbeat and chattering teeth echoed blindly, deafening, back at her in this closed metal drawer. Why?

Roy Chopin had almost asked if anything had been taken from Krystal’s body. Faith felt sure of that. But shouldn’t he be asking about Krystal’s personal possessions rather than her corpse? What could be—

Taken from a corpse?

Oh, God. A trophy.

When the bodies on the slabs had merely been things, the empty remains of crime victims, hiding made sense. But when Faith thought of them being further victimized—here, where they should at least be safe—she couldn’t stand it.

She might already be too late. Safety be damned. Planting her hands on the sides of the drawer, wincing to imagine whatever else might have touched the same spot, she pushed forward—

And bumped her head on steel.

No.

She was locked in?

No! Barely swallowing back an embarrassing whimper, she fumbled at the front of the drawer. Oh, God, no. She couldn’t have made such a horrible mistake. What if she suffocated in here? What if nobody found her for days? She would never have a chance to make up with her mother. She would die a virgin. It would be like being buried alive!

When her hands encountered a latch, her relief was dizzying. Her reaction to the snick of that latch, to the rush of air that now smelled fresh in comparison to where she’d been, was heaven itself. But she didn’t have time to savor it as she threw open the door to the body drawer. She pushed the tray that held her forward, rolled stiffly off it, braced herself for an attack from—

From nobody.

Faith crouched there beside the open drawer, her heart pounding, her hands fisted, and faced an empty examination room. She spun one direction. Turned the other. Nothing.

Had she imagined it?

But no. She wasn’t imagining the scent that lingered beneath this smell of antiseptics and death. It didn’t matter if most normal people wouldn’t be able to smell it; many smokers couldn’t discern scents like baking bread or cheap perfume either, but that didn’t mean the smells weren’t there. This smell was here, too. Part musk, part heat. Power. Dominance. Evil.

If Faith needed further proof of intrusion, Krystal’s corpse now stared blankly at the ceiling.

Someone had moved the sheet from her blue-lipped face.

Still catching her shuddering breath, skin crawling from her momentary entombment, Faith took a hesitant step closer to her friend’s remains. The bruised horror that had once been Krystal’s slim, smooth neck seemed all the more blasphemous. Her eyes were open, blank. Her pale blond hair…

Was something different about her hair?

Faith bent closer, peering at it. There was definitely a blunt wedge where a chunk of hair by Krystal’s temple had been inexpertly sliced away. Someone had taken—

A knock at the open doorway startled her so badly, Faith sprang back from the corpse with a cry. Then she stared at her boss, confused. How had Greg gotten so close without her hearing him?

Just how upset was she?

Still, now that she did notice him, his heartbeat sounded comfortingly, familiarly like Greg. He wore Nikes, not boots. He, at least, wasn’t the killer.

“This is your version of keeping distance from the case?” he asked, pale eyes frowning behind his glasses.

Faith flushed. “I came looking for you and I…I found her like this.” It was technically the truth. She was just leaving out the middle part, where a more honest woman would say, and I heard someone coming and hid in the drawer and then climbed back out once he was gone and then I found her like this.

“Like what?” He came closer. He had a clipboard in one hand, a pen behind his ear, fresh gloves flapping out of his pocket. That was so Greg. Now that she’d noticed him, he wasn’t the least bit silent. Just…quiet-natured.

Easy to be with.

“Uncovered. And…some of her hair’s been cut off. Did the medical examiner take it to run tests?”

Greg took her by the shoulders—luckily his hands made contact with her sleeves, not her bare skin, but subtle sensations flowed across her all the same.

Nothing bad.

“That’s it, Faith. You’re done for the day. I don’t care where you go, but you’re too close to this case to be here until we’ve finished processing the evidence. Consider it bereavement leave.”

This time, Faith was aware of someone else coming. He didn’t sound like a threat. He sounded like the medical examiner. “But Greg, look. She’s missing hair.”

At least he looked—which meant he also let go of her. And he frowned. “That’s odd.”

“Then the M.E. didn’t…?”

“Didn’t what?” asked Dr. Mandelet, entering. He was a round man with café-au-lait skin, curly black hair and a neatly trimmed beard, his accent faintly touched by the Caribbean. His shoes, Faith noticed, had crepe soles.

“If you took hair to test, wouldn’t you take it by the root?” asked Greg, using his pen to ruffle the fresh, blunt cut amidst Krystal’s perm.

“I’d want the follicle attached, yes. But—” Close enough to see the cut himself, Mandelet swore. Then he glared at Faith. “Did you do this?”

“No!”

“Of course she didn’t,” agreed Greg. This time, his hand on her shoulder felt downright comforting. His belief in her innocence felt simple, straightforward. Easy. She found that she could still concentrate on the situation around them, even with this subtle, physical connection to another human. Interesting. “So who would have?”

“Didn’t you say the DB was a tarot reader?” asked the M.E.

Faith frowned. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

“It matches her hands.” Now that he had an audience, Mandelet drew one of Krystal’s waxy hands out from beneath the sheet. Faith caught a glimpse of her friend’s bare hip beyond it, and felt embarrassed for her. “She’s got calluses on the inside joints of her fingers, on the edges of her thumbs. See? Feel here.”

Faith shook her head.

Mandelet grinned, clearly thinking Faith’s hesitance had to do with the fact that Krystal was dead, not knowing that Faith had hesitated to touch her even when she lived. “Trust me. This young lady knew her way around a deck of cards. So what I’m thinking is, one of her witchy friends snuck in.”

“What? No!”

“Faith,” cautioned Greg. “We’re just theorizing.”

“It’s happened more than once around here, especially in the funeral homes,” Mandelet insisted. “Voodoo practitioners. People pretending to be voodoo practitioners. Pagans. Psychics. Hair and nail clippings are a big deal to those kinds of weirdos.”

Faith’s roommate Evan, a practicing Wiccan, would call it the Law of Contagion. Having a piece of something, or something that had been in constant contact with your focus, was considered as good as having the actual focus.

“Huh.” Greg sounded amused. But he also dropped his hand from Faith’s shoulder, so she couldn’t tell why he was amused and had to get her information the old-fashioned way—by turning to him. He was taller than he looked.

“I was just thinking about how important hair and nail clippings are to us,” he explained. “Maybe this is another case of magic and science being more closely connected than they’re given credit for.”

Sometimes Faith really liked Greg.

“Anyway,” said Mandelet, and from the way he eyed Faith, she knew he hadn’t completely discounted her as a suspect in the hair theft, “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

But before he twitched the sheet back over Krystal’s face, Faith had to ask. “Wait. How—exactly how did she die? I really need to know.”

Mandelet and Greg exchanged a look, and Greg nodded. The M.E. shrugged and pulled the sheet farther down, so that it barely covered Krystal’s breasts. “You work here, little lady. How about you tell me?”

“She’s a desk clerk,” protested Greg, but this time Faith didn’t appreciate his protection.

“She was strangled,” she said, starting with the obvious. “I don’t know what he used—”

“He?” inquired Mandelet.

“Women only account for a tenth of the murder arrests made, right? And then they usually kill lovers or their children. And aren’t women more likely to kill from a distance, like with poison, than in a physical attack?”

Both men were nodding. So Faith felt sure enough to ask, “But what did he use?”

“Wire garrote?” suggested Mandelet. “That would be a professional’s choice.” But he waited for her response.

“That would leave a cleaner line, wouldn’t it?” She bent closer to what had, thankfully, been reduced back to evidence. “And a belt would have left a wider mark. I’m thinking some kind of cord or rope?”

“Silk,” agreed Mandelet. “Red silk. I removed fibers from the wound. If we can find that rope, her DNA will be all over it. The killer may have left epithelial evidence on it from his own hands as well, so that we can work toward a second DNA match.”

“And if we can’t find the rope? Did she maybe scratch him, or pull some of his hair, or—”

The M.E. shook his head. “The only tissue under her nails was her own, from when she fought the rope. There was evidence that she’d had sex in the last few days, but not recently enough for us to match the semen. It seems to have been consensual, in any case. The pattern of tearing on the—”

“That’s enough,” Greg interrupted firmly, and drew the sheet over Krystal’s face. “This is getting too personal. Faith, you’re taking a few days off, and that’s that.”

She nodded slowly. If we can find that rope…

It was as good a place to start as any, and she couldn’t very easily start looking for it if she was at work all day. “You’re right. I’ll go. Thank you, though. Both of you.”

“When you get back, you’re welcome to sit in on a few autopsies,” offered Mandelet, and as disgusting a thought as it was, Faith recognized the compliment in his offer. “You have a good eye for it. You don’t want to stay a clerk forever, do you?”

“Stop poaching my administrative staff,” warned Greg, saving Faith the necessity of answering that question. She really didn’t know what she wanted, in the long term.

But in the short…

She wanted to find Krystal’s killer.

“You should call Detective Chopin,” she said, as she and Greg left the examination room. “That’s why I came looking for you. He wants to ask you some questions.”

About whether anything had been taken. She’d let the detective and the CSU supervisor work that part out, though.

She had her own investigating to do.

Faith hoped she wouldn’t be the only one of the roommates to resume work that Monday. She figured their landlord, some British guy who lived with his wife north of the lake, would want his rent whether there were four people or five living in his multiroomed French Quarter apartment.

She found Evan, at least, where she thought she would, a ten-block walk from work.

Jackson Square.

If Bourbon Street was the heart of the nighttime French Quarter, Jackson Square—spread between the spires of the St. Louis Cathedral and the wide Mississippi River—was its daytime heart. Tankers and barges made their slow way down the expansive river, along with riverboats playing bright calliope music. Cab horses with their great, grassy scent pulled open carriages on slow tours of the oldest part of the city. Street performers—balloon clowns, mimes and today, a truly talented saxophone player—plied their talents in exchange for tips from the tourists. Different psychic readers set out chairs or tables in what Faith had learned was a silent hierarchy, the best readers at one end of the Square, the less experienced at another.

Krystal had been one of the best.

And artists, protected from the heat by little more than oversize patio umbrellas, hung their work on the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the Square, hoping for a sale or a commission.

Evan was one of those artists. He did portraits and was particularly skilled with charcoal and pastels, though he could do caricatures for a quick ten bucks as well.

The humid August air smelled of grass, azaleas, coffee and beignets as Faith crossed the sunny square to her friend’s purple umbrella. “Hey.”

“Hey there!” He stood from the canvas camp-chair where he’d been sitting, sketching on heaven knew what, as he saw her. Evan had been raised an old-fashioned southern gentleman, by a Garden District family that expected him to become a doctor and marry a debutante. His decision against either option had caused something of a rift in his family, though they still invited him for holidays. “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”

“They threw me out,” she admitted, sinking onto the cement base of the fence so that he’d feel comfortable sitting as well. “My boss is calling it bereavement leave, but what that really means is, they’re uncomfortable having me so close to the evidence.”

Evan’s eyes widened. “They don’t suspect you, do they?”

“I doubt it. But most murdered women are killed by someone they know. Since we knew Krystal, we might know her killer. So there’s always the chance I might try to cover something up, you know? Why take that risk? Although…”

Evan resumed his seat and turned the page in his sketchbook. “What?”

“Were you aware that Krys was seeing anybody? Even sleeping with them?” Usually, Faith could catch a whiff of other people off her roommates, if they’d gotten close. But not always. She tried to give them their privacy.

“Not that I know of.” Evan shrugged. “So are you going home now?”

“No. What I want to do…This may sound weird.”

Evan grinned. “No. Not that. Anything but weirdness.”

“You know the community better than I do. Are you aware of any readers who are good at finding things that are lost?”

“Like what?”

“Krystal’s murder weapon.”

Evan gulped, his hand slowing on the page of sketch paper. “Oh.”

“The bastard used some sort of cord or rope, and he didn’t leave it with her body. When you pull that hard on something, then some of your own tissue is rubbed off. So if I can find the cord, we might be that much closer to finding the killer. Assuming he didn’t take it with him, of course. Or wear gloves.”

Evan looked kind of green, but he forged on anyway. “I do know of one person who’s good at psychometry. She can touch something and tell you all kinds of things about it, like who held it last, and how they were feeling, and where they were. Nose like a bloodhound, too.”

Her recognition of his sarcasm had everything to do with the pitch of his voice and the slight change of his body temperature and scent, and nothing to do with paranormal abilities. “I’m not a psychic.”

“Sure you are. You’re just a different kind of psychic than most of us.”

“No! Moonsong’s a psychic—she can look at a person’s palm and tell all kinds of things that have nothing to do with how their heart’s beating or how they smell. And Absinthe, with her horoscopes. Even Krystal. She could shuffle those cards and lay them out and tell you things nobody could have guessed. She could predict—”

She stopped, tilted her head, met Evan’s eyes.

“She could predict the future,” he said softly, guessing or intuiting or maybe even reading what she’d just thought.

“So why couldn’t she predict hers?”

“Well, some readers believe they can’t see their own destiny, that they’re too subjective to have any clarity.”

“Or maybe she did predict it,” supposed Faith, “and just didn’t tell anyone.”

“Or maybe she predicted it, and just didn’t tell us.”

“Absinthe,” said Faith, standing.

“Absinthe,” agreed Evan. Neither of them imagined that a frightened Krystal would go to Moonsong. Moonsong, for all her innocence and kindness, was one of the protectees of their little group, not one of the protectors. But Absinthe took no prisoners. And if she’d known something…

It certainly would help explain some of the extra grief and guilt their usually implacable roommate was feeling.

“I’ll go see what she knows. And then I’ll try to find someone who can help me find that rope. Are you sure you don’t have any suggestions there?”

“Look, I’ve heard of some things my circle and I could try. Not psychic, but magic. Like maybe using a pendulum over a map to locate an item or a person, that sort of thing. But if it was my killer you were looking for, I’d put my faith in you. So to speak.” Evan turned his sketchbook. “Do you mind if I display this?”

He’d done a charcoal sketch of Faith, every line of her face a graceful curve, a stylish edge. Her reaction—surprise, pride, uncertainty—all of it mixed in her chest, and she took an uncertain step backward. “I—”

“I know it’s not that good,” Evan insisted.

“No! It’s—” Beautiful. But how could she say that? “My mom would have a cow,” she said instead, changing the subject. “Once I got my picture in the paper, when my sixth-grade class sang Christmas carols at a nursing home, and she called the paper to complain about not getting permission. She never liked…”

Never liked the idea of strangers seeing Faith. Never wanted the publicity.

“That’s okay,” said Evan, with a shrug. “If you want, I could—”

“No. Go ahead and hang it. It shows what a great artist you are. Mom won’t know about it, and if she finds out, she can lump it.” Or finally do me the favor of explaining what the hell she’s hiding. “I’ve got to go talk to Absinthe.”

“Between the lot of us, I bet we can find Krystal’s killer,” said Evan hopefully.

Faith said, “We can at least help.”

In more ways than one.

By that evening, she had enough with which to make a call. It was awfully soon after her interview with the detectives the other night. But for Krystal, Faith had to risk it.

The information she’d gotten from Absinthe was too weird—and too pressing—to ignore.

And forty-two hours had passed since Krystal’s murder.

It was time to revive Madame Cassandra.

Chapter 4

“The dead woman,” Faith said, with the fake Virginia accent she’d adopted for these anonymous public-telephone contacts, “was having nightmares about vampires.”

“Vampires?” repeated Detective Sergeant Butch Jefferson, from his mobile.

In his background, Faith heard someone else—his partner, Roy Chopin. “She’s gotta be kidding you.”

“Y’all clearly don’t understand dream interpretation.” As soon as she’d decided to pass information from her psychic companions to the New Orleans Police Department months ago, Faith had known she must remain anonymous. For one thing, she’d been raised to keep a low profile, a habit difficult to shed. For another, explaining that she was merely speaking for the psychics, instead of as a psychic, would lessen her already shaky credibility.

Instead, when she made contact, she pretended to be a reader herself. She’d pulled the name Cassandra out of the blue, probably because she believed herself to be conveying the truth, as surely as the ancient Greek heroine had, and because, like that mythic Cassandra, Faith honestly doubted anyone in authority would believe her.

“Well then, Miss Cassie,” said Butch, his drawl far more real than hers. “Won’t you please enlighten us?”

“I would be delighted.” She readjusted the black receiver of the pay phone in the Aquarium of the Americas. She never used private numbers to call Butch. “Dreams can’t generally be taken at face value. They tend to be symbols.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“If Miss Tanner feared vampires, that could mean she was afraid of being drained of power, of energy.”

She heard Butch say, away from the mouthpiece, “She thinks maybe the dead psychic was worried about being drained of power.”

“Could be she just went into withdrawal when Anne Rice moved to the suburbs,” said Chopin.

“Could be,” insisted Faith, “that she was predicting something about her own death. Being murdered is about as drained as a girl can get, isn’t it? Did either of you nice detectives get the impression that the murderer might believe in magic?”

“I fear we’ve been too short on likely suspects to do that kind of questioning,” admitted Butch. Whether or not that part was true.

“Well, y’all should check. All kinds of details could have magical meaning, which could tell you something about your killer. For example, if you found salt at the crime scene.” She knew they had. “Salt’s a protective substance, magically speaking. Or if there’s a chance she was strangled with something made of natural fiber, that would indicate a killer who’s concerned with energy transference.”

She’d learned of the dreams from Absinthe. Moonsong had explained the significance of salt, and of a silk cord versus, say, nylon.

“You don’t say,” mused Butch. “Miss Cassie, I do believe you may be on to something here.”

Then she had to wait while he repeated the insight to his partner and fielded the usual smart-mouthed responses. Faith shifted her weight, feeling exposed in the bluish light, filtered by displays of wavering water. The Aquarium of the Americas would be closing in half an hour. She hoped to finish this call before they made any kind of announcement that would tell the detectives where she was.

She also wore a black wig and sunglasses, in hopes of skewing anyone’s description if the police traced the call and come around asking questions.

It was during long delays like this that she got the most paranoid. She also didn’t like having the time to notice that whoever had used this public phone before her had drunk more than one hurricane. It reeked of rum.

“So what’s your opinion, Miss Cassie?” asked Butch. “Was Krystal Tanner killed by one of her spiritualist co-workers?”

“No! I mean—most folks who work on, shall we say, the edge of expected reality? They understand the consequences of karma. If this man you’re after wanted to take Krystal Tanner’s energy, he’s likely some kind of untrained wannabe.”

“Why is it you think that?”

“Only two things could make him think he can escape the karmic repercussions of murder, Detective Sergeant. Either he’s got such strong personal power, psychic shields, that he doesn’t have to worry about it—in which case he’d know that someone else’s energy wouldn’t do him a whole lot of good—or he’s too ignorant to know better.”

Butch murmured what she’d said to his partner, then asked, “Do you have anything else for us just now, Miss Cassie?”

She heard a slow beeping on his end of the line, like a car door had been opened while the key was still in the ignition. They’d arrived at wherever they were going.

“If this fellow’s a wannabe magic user, he might try some kind of crash course,” she suggested. “There’s a psychic fair Wednesday night at the Biltmore Hotel.”

“The one that had those strange fires last year?” Apparently the damage had been almost entirely external. Then again, almost every old building in the Quarter had some strange story to tell.

“That’s the one. There won’t just be readers there, there’ll be experts offering classes. Someone who wants to learn about manipulating energy, chances are he’ll show up.” That had been her first introduction to the magic community of New Orleans, anyway. “And on the chance that he might be looking for more victims, that would be the place.”

“I appreciate that advice,” said Butch. “But if you don’t mind me asking, Miss Cassie…”

Which was when she felt them. Rather, felt him.

Roy Chopin was like a walking car alarm of energy—and he was getting closer. They’d traced the damn call!

“Tsk, tsk,” said Faith, frowning, and hung up.

Then she headed deeper into the aquarium, mingling with the other visitors, and was around a corner before the detectives ever made it through the entrance, much less to the pay phones.

He loved that they were all frightened of Him.

He was, in fact, the talk of the Crescent City Psychic Fair! For a while He felt happy just sitting outside one of the ballrooms at the Biltmore, watching the people come and go, listening to their conversations. He could tell some of the psychics by how they dressed—tie-dyed shirts, multiple necklaces with different charms hung on them, gauzy, sparkly skirts. They were the ones who talked the most about Krystal Tanner—that’s what the newspapers called the other night’s human battery—and their fears about who might be next. He could tell the visitors by their dazed expressions as they scanned the fair’s program, and by their uncomfortably loud jokes, pretending that they were here as a lark when, really, each of them wanted to believe. And then there were the ones in-between, the ones He couldn’t be sure about.

Like that green-eyed blonde.

She was the same one who’d chased Him away from Krystal Tanner. She’d caused trouble for Him. And she wasn’t scared.

He felt stronger, when people were scared. He felt more real. So he didn’t like her. But was she a psychic? She didn’t seem to be attending any of the workshops, but neither had she paid for tickets—readings cost between five and twenty-five dollars, in five-dollar increments, depending on how skilled one’s reader was. She wasn’t even carrying a program, and almost everyone carried programs. Instead, she seemed to just be moving from one ballroom to the other, almost…patrolling.

As if someone like her could protect these witches from the likes of Him.

In any case, if she had no abilities, she was beneath His notice. Once He saw the detectives from the other night approach her, He decided it was time to slip into one of the smaller lecture rooms, to hear about “Chakras and Personal Energies.”

Maybe then, He’d figure out how to draw more fear out of these people. Soon, if He kept feeding, even the Master wouldn’t be able to contain Him.

Then He would be free.

Faith felt Chopin’s approach, but she decided not to turn until he said something. Why advertise that she could hear his footsteps and his strong heartbeat, could smell his unique scent of coffee, aftershave, motor oil and forcefulness on the hotel’s Freon-edged air?

“Don’t tell me you believe in this junk?” he demanded, as he leaned around her elbow.

Faith blinked at him, his suit coat rumpled, his tie loose, his top two collar buttons undone to show a tanned throat and a thatch of dark chest hair. He needed a shave and a haircut, and—to judge by the shadows under his intense eyes—a good night’s sleep. That extra edge of coffee—black, and lots of it—told her he was pushing himself too hard. If it was to solve Krystal’s murder, she liked that about him.

If it wasn’t, then she was still annoyed about him trying to catch her—as Cassandra—the previous evening, even if he hadn’t succeeded.

“I didn’t know you were a believer either,” she countered, then had to laugh at the face he pulled in reaction. “Hello, Detective Jefferson,” she added to Chopin’s more easygoing partner. She knew his real title was Detective Sergeant, but since Cassandra called him that, it seemed a good idea if Faith did not.

“Call me Butch, ma’am.”

Even better. “Okay, Butch. Are you two here officially?”

“We figured we’d take a look at the kind of folks Miss Krystal knew,” explained Butch, while Chopin looked on like a kid dragged to his sister’s school concert. His mouth was in threatening mode, and his jaw was definitely a dare. “Maybe track down that missing lover. Ask a few people if they saw anything. Do you know any of the psychics ’round here?”

“Sure. All three of my roommates are reading tonight.”

Chopin let his head fall back, relieved. “So that’s why you’re here. Keeping an eye on them, right?”

Which was true, but she didn’t like his tone. “That, and to maybe get a past-life analysis or have my aura cleansed. Were you two looking for someone in particular?”

“Yeah,” said Chopin. “The killer. Any suggestions?”

She had to remember that it was Cassandra who’d brought them here, not, as far as they were concerned, Faith. But it was surprisingly easy to hesitate, to glance around. “A few minutes ago I saw the guy who tended bar at DeLoup’s the night Krystal died. But I was talking to him at the time of her murder. And none of my roommates know who Krystal was dating. I believe them.”

“Here’s a thought,” suggested Butch. “We need to figure out more about why this fellow targeted a psychic. Why don’t I make the rounds, talk to some of these fortune-teller types, while Roy here trades you a cup of coffee for an overview of this little community. How would that work for everybody?”

If everybody was Faith and Roy, they just stared at him.

Chopin snapped out of it first, shrugging his rangy shoulders. His suit coat hung open to show the gun and badge on his belt. “Uh, sure. Couldn’t hurt, right?”

Yes, it could, thought Faith. But she wasn’t sure why. She didn’t sense any threat from this man. He was pure cop, and even if she’d been a suspect through her close knowledge of the victim, the evidence couldn’t be less incriminating. He wasn’t out to arrest her. He was…

Was he interested in her?

She’d smelled that shift of pheromones often enough in her life to know that yes, he was. But she also knew physical interest wasn’t exactly an on/off switch for most men, or quite a few women. Sometimes even inappropriate men, like a professor or a doctor, or even her boss, couldn’t help their body’s reactions. All she could hope was for them to guard their behavior. Most, like Greg the other day, did just fine.

Other than calling her cute on the phone, which could’ve just been teasing, Chopin was also keeping it cool. Distant. Although as she continued to hesitate, his brows drew together into a foreboding frown, like he was taking it personally.

“Sure,” she said. “I’ll tell you whatever I can, Detective Chopin.”

“You can call him Roy,” insisted Butch with a grin and a wave, veering off toward the first ballroom.

“That guy’s as subtle as an ax to the head,” muttered Roy, forcing an after-you gesture that was hardly sulky at all.

“I’m guessing you don’t get out much?” said Faith, preceding him toward the wide, curved stairway. The restaurant’s bar, the only place to get coffee, was off the lobby on the ground floor.

His presence, behind her, felt downright tangible. “Not that it’s any business of his or yours, but no, I don’t. I’m a little busy what with all the murderers and scumbags running around needing to get caught.”

“All work and no play…”

“Is exactly the sort of thing Butch would say. So how do you like your coffee, Miss Corbett?”

She didn’t bother requesting that he call her Ms. Corbett. She let him fetch the drinks, too. That sort of thing mattered to some guys. For her part, she waited at a little bistro table, her chair turned so she could watch the foot traffic to and from the stairway to the ballrooms and the psychic fair.

“So what can I tell you about the psychic community around here?” she asked, turning her back on the passersby when Chopin returned with the coffee. He was not a graceful man. She felt relieved when the drinks were on the table.

“How’d you get involved with this element?”

She blinked, unused to being taken by surprise. “Am I still a suspect, Detective? I was scheduled to go back to work tomorrow, after the memorial service, but if there’s any question…”

“No, you’re not.” Holding her gaze, Chopin leaned over the table, his presence all but enveloping her. “And it’s Roy.”

Faith considered him and the way his pulse and body temperature belied his cool attitude. “Oh. Well, if you’re asking for personal reasons…I mean, if you’re asking because you’re interested…” She didn’t quite have the guts to finish that sentence, unsure as she felt. “Anyway, you really should be clear about that, and not hide it behind official business.”

He sat back now, folded his arms, studied her. Then he nodded. “Yeah. Okay. Tomorrow’s my night off. Go out with me.”

She stared. For someone who telegraphed his emotions that strongly, he’d surprised her twice in just a few minutes!

Maybe he only telegraphed what he wanted to telegraph. The strength. The intensity. The threat. Things that would tell any suspect with a few brain cells to rub together that this wasn’t anybody to mess with. The other stuff, the more personal stuff, he hid that pretty well.

She only caught a whiff of regret when something in his intense eyes faded. “Or not,” he said, shrugging. “I just wanted to get that out of the way before—”

“Okay.” Now she’d been surprised three times. She hadn’t expected to be surprised by herself, though.

He blinked at her, then widened his eyes, raised those expressive brows. “Okay?”

“Tomorrow night. It’s a date.” Faith was so used to reading what other people gave off, it took her a moment to realize that the flip-flopping in her stomach came from her, not anyone or anything else. But that reaction, at least, wasn’t surprising.

She didn’t date. Being whatever she was—not knowing what she was—made things way too complicated. And now she’d said yes? To a homicide detective? One she was hiding things from?

But I’m only hiding Cassandra, she thought grimly. I’m only hiding that I’m not…normal.

What was she supposed to do, make every possible date contingent on a confession of her abnormalities? Magazines suggested that a person keep private problems like STDs or past relationships quiet until at least the second date…or before getting naked, whichever came first. Why was her own freakishness any different?

Now she could barely breathe past the butterflies. What had she done?

She’d taken a defiant stab at being normal, that’s what.

“Good,” said Roy, with a decisive nod. She could tell he was pleased, though he hid it well. “Now, could we move on to the important stuff? How long have you known these people? Not because you’re a suspect—but how well do you understand them?”

It was easier, talking about impersonal things like the New Orleans occult community. And the Big Easy definitely had a thriving occult community. Of course, Chopin—Roy—knew a lot already. He’d seen the Voodoo Museum and Marie Laveau’s tomb. He knew where the vampire bars were—not for true immortals, as far as Faith knew, but for wannabes marginally more Goth than Absinthe. Lord knew Roy couldn’t have patrolled Jackson Square without seeing the readers. But he’d never taken the time to learn what really motivated the psychics.

Until now. When in detective mode, he wasn’t a lousy listener.

Faith explained that none of them seemed to be cult members—an official cult had to have a leader, and the majority of psychics were self-taught. She clarified the more innocent reasons that readers often chose new names, and how careful most of them were to abide by the vice laws that—hopefully—kept people from being defrauded by cons like the old curse-removal ploy. She thought she did a pretty good job at not focusing too intently on the detective’s thick wrists while she talked, or the dark hair on the back of his wrists, or his big hands as he cradled his cup of coffee and stared intently at her, listening. She thought she managed not to breathe in his scent and think about their upcoming date too often.

Would he touch her?

Would he kiss her?

Did she want him to?

How ridiculous was it that she was freaking about something this basic at twenty-two years old! It was time to practice Krystal’s quiet breathing techniques.

“So upstairs,” he said, thankfully oblivious, “some of the readers as you call ’em only charge a nickel a pop.”

“Nothing that cheap,” said Faith. “It starts at five dollars….”

Roy grinned as if she’d said something cute. He looked a lot more approachable when he grinned, even if it was mocking. “Butch was right. You are an innocent. A nickel is five dollars, hon. And when I say that for some of those readers, you need a Jackson to get past the door…?”

She didn’t like being an innocent. It sounded too close to being stupid. “You mean a twenty? Got it.”

“So why the difference? I mean, it’s fantasyland either way. Do they actually think there’s something there?”

“It’s not fantasyland.”

He cocked his head as if waiting for the punch line.

“Really,” she insisted. “Some of the readers are so good it’s uncanny—”

“Look, Corbett, I’ve read reports. There’s all kinds of tricks people use to make it seem like they’re reading your mind when they’re just telling you what you want to hear. Now if Miss Cleo up there’s only charging a Jackson for it, I can live and let live—I mean, it would cost that much for a hand…uh, for, uh, other kinds of happy feelings that are less legal. If you know what I mean.”

He paused, examining her. “I honestly don’t know if you do know what I mean. I think I like that about you.”

She was pretty sure she did know what he meant, but it seemed counterproductive to say so. Especially when her tummy was flip-flopping just because he’d said he liked her.

Get a grip. You aren’t even sure you like him!

“So the amount they charge makes a difference to you?” she asked.

“The clients are asking to be duped. But what I want to know is, do these people honestly not realize they’re fleecing anybody?”

“Maybe you should get to know them better.” Faith couldn’t keep the ice out of her tone, and Roy visibly drew back. “If you did, you’d know that the majority of psychic readers are honest people trying to provide an honest service. They aren’t fleecing anybody. They decide what to charge based on who’s been practicing the longest and who has the best track record.”

“Come on. If everyone up there was really psychic, why wouldn’t they win the lottery instead of getting paid a few Jacksons at a time?”

“This is a psychic fair. It’s community outreach. Personal readings cost a lot more than a few Jacksons.”

“Not an argument in their favor.”

“And psychic abilities don’t necessarily work that way. How’s your eyesight?”

Damn, but he had expressive eyebrows. “Come again?”

“You’ve got pretty good eyesight, right?”

“Sure.”

“So tell me who’s standing in front of the Eiffel Tower right now.”

He snorted. “I couldn’t say.”

Faith folded her arms, trying to look severe. “I thought you had good eyesight. Were you conning me when you said you had good eyesight?”

“But,” he countered, clearly enjoying himself, “if I got on a plane and flew to Paris, I could describe anyone in front of the Eiffel Tower. Why wouldn’t one of those psychic types get on their imaginary plane and fly wherever they needed to go to get a good look at tomorrow’s lotto numbers?”

Which left Faith with nothing better than, “It doesn’t seem to work that way.” It sounded lame, even to her ears. “And then there’s karma.”

They scowled at each other. Then Roy tried a different angle. “So how good a rep did Krystal Tanner have? As a reader, I mean.”

“She was one of the best.” And she was. You’re so lonely, she’d told Faith during that first reading, and that without even touching her. Because you sense so much, you try not to sense anything at all. You haven’t found your soul mates yet—or they haven’t found you. You’re scared to let people know your secrets. So’s the woman who raised you…your mother…?

“Who else is considered good?”

Faith gave him a few names, most of whom were upstairs, several of whom were published. “Then there are some who don’t do the public fairs.”

“Name one.”

“Celeste Deveaux, I guess—she was a lousy fortune-teller, but she’s supposed to be an excellent medium. She doesn’t like doing readings for people whose grief is still fresh, so she avoids walk-in readings like this. There’s a witch who goes by Hecate who’s the real deal, but she’s out of state right now.”

He actually had his notepad out of his pocket, writing these down. “A witch. Great. Give me more.”

No, she thought, annoyed with his pushiness as well as his cynicism—and still, damn it, noticing his thick wrists. Then she had a truly bad idea. An unmistakably bad idea.

So why did it appeal so strongly?

You’re playing with fire. Don’t even think about it.

“Come on,” wheedled Roy, turning on the charm. He would never be a model, not with the tired eyes, definitely not with that nose. But something about him…“Someone. Anyone.”

By now, the alternative would have been to bite her tongue off. “She’s not well known, but I’ve heard rumors of someone in town who’s supposed to be very good. Very, very good. It’s a Greek name…Cassiopeia? No, that’s not it….”

He sat up. “Cassandra?”

She widened her eyes. He liked innocence? Well here was innocence. “That might be it.”

Roy was gritting his jaw so tightly as he shook his head that she feared he might break some teeth. Wow. He really didn’t like Cassandra, did he?

Better to know that now, she guessed. “Not that I’ve ever seen the woman. Apparently she keeps to herself.”

“Yeah, but you’ve heard something.” Like that, he was leaning over the table again, warm and demanding and coffee-scented. Practically leaning over her. Practically touching. “Tell me what you’ve heard.”

Caught now, she would have been glad for almost any interruption.

She still felt a cold horror wash through her as she recognized something—a footstep, a heartbeat—behind her.

The killer was here.

And he was feeding.

Chapter 5

Faith spun in her chair and stared at the red-carpeted lobby, where at least two people had just left the hotel. It had been him. She was sure it had been him!

“And now I’m talking to myself,” muttered Roy, behind her.

She didn’t bother stopping to explain. She slid off her bistro chair and took off out of the bar.

“Hey!” Roy yelled. But Faith was busy racing across the oriental rug of the lobby, putting her shoulder into the revolving door, stepping out into the spattering rainfall that was New Orleans in August. She looked one way.

Nothing.

She looked the other.

Nothing. Rather, there were plenty of people heading in both directions, umbrellas hiding their faces or heads bent against the rain. This was the French Quarter! Tourists wandered, enjoying the rain like they might a special effect in a theme park. Partygoers hustled, trying to keep their good clothes dry. A trumpet player on the corner ignored the rain to wail out a tune reminiscent of Al Hirt, with a hat by his feet for wet tips. The air was thick with the perfume of plopping raindrops on hot concrete, underscored by the scent of the nearby river, of ice cream and soft pretzels, of wisteria from a nearby courtyard. But whatever Faith had sensed inside had faded.

It didn’t make any sense.

She’d felt him going in this direction! It wasn’t like he could suddenly ditch his unique heartbeat, like someone pulling off a mask…was it?

“What the hell was that?” The words, immediately behind her, didn’t startle her anywhere near the way Roy Chopin’s hands, catching her damp arms, did.

Oh, God! Like an exposed power line.

Faith stiffened, but not in time to escape the sudden burst of energy that sizzled through her, the emotions, the images. Someone fed him home cooking on a weekly basis. He liked beer. He spent too much time around the jail and the station and on the streets. His underlying edge of violence was a constant problem for him. He’d had sex sometime in the last month but that’s all it had been, sex, he didn’t love the woman—

With a mew of protest, she wrenched away from him, spun to face him.

Then she saw how his eyes widened, how he raised his spread hands and took a step back as if to show her he was unarmed despite the belt holster. She smelled his sudden guilt and confusion. That’s when she realized how she’d hunched down into herself at his touch. Like some kind of frightened victim.

Deliberately she squared her shoulders, raised her chin, even if it felt like she’d snap something, forcing herself back into a posture she didn’t yet feel. So much for being normal.

Roy Chopin kept his distance, lowering his hands slowly, clearly meaning to convey how harmless he thought he was. He squinted against raindrops in his eyes. “You okay there, Corbett?”

But he was looking at her as if she wasn’t okay at all.

“I…I don’t like being touched,” she said, blinking back against the wet. Her voice sounded only a little husky from sheer mortification. There was a statement that would win dates, for sure. “You startled me.”

“I’m sorry.” The hands were by his sides again. He was starting to relax, to breathe again, hair dripping across his forehead. She’d scared him.

“No, I’m sorry. I know it’s weird.”

“I didn’t touch you till you were already out here,” he said. For a minute, she was confused. Then he said, “You just ran off. What’s up?”

He wasn’t just confused about her reaction to his touch. He was confused about how she’d bolted.

I sensed the killer. Then I didn’t.

“I thought I heard something,” she said, which was at least true, if lame.

He was feeding. The thought came to her again—but what had it meant?

The fear, when it hit, hit hard. Absinthe! Moonsong!

Evan!

She spun for the hotel again—but luckily, before she could put the icing on her embarrassment cake, Butch Jefferson came through the revolving door. “Now what are you two doing out here in the wet?” he demanded, the seriousness in his gaze contradicting his friendly tone. “Son, I got something upstairs you should see.”

Chopin gave her an after-you gesture, so they headed inside in detective-Faith-detective order.

It was a handwritten note. Someone had found it at the empty table where Krystal would have “read.” Their shout of alarm had drawn the attention of others.

Now too many bystanders clustered and whispered, while Butch and Roy studied the piece of Biltmore stationary without touching it.

“‘She was delicious,’” read Roy, frowning. “‘The next one will be even tastier.’”

The whispering of the psychics and guests and hotel staff became something closer to a group moan—a noise with too many words to retain any individuality, merely distress. But they were communicating the same fear, something Faith had already half guessed herself.

Hadn’t she suggested the killer might come here to scope out more victims?

“He’s a serial killer,” she whispered, giving voice to what the others were murmuring amongst themselves…kind of like she did with her informative calls as Cassandra.

“No,” said Roy firmly, standing. “There’s no proof of that. He’s just trying to get as much mileage as he can off of the one killing we do know about.”

“But—”

“This is a note, not a body,” he insisted, while Butch used tweezers to lift the page into a Ziploc bag from his pocket. These detectives came prepared. “Don’t buy into his game, Corbett. It’s what he wants folks to do.”

He was feeding, thought Faith again—and now it made sense. The killer had been high on the fear he’d created. That’s why he’d left the note—to create fear. That’s what she’d heard in his pulse, in his heartbeat.

She shivered.

Roy made a disgusted sound. “You’re wet. You want my jacket?”

“No.” She managed to stop him before he could shrug it off. “I should probably get my roommates home. It looks like things are closing up early, after this.”

“They were in the main ballroom the whole time, right? As long as they didn’t see anything suspicious, head ’em out.”

“Thank you for the coffee.”

Roy was frowning at the now-bagged note, holding it up to the light. He wasn’t even looking at her. But he said, “Seven okay?”

That took Faith by surprise. “What?”

He slid his gaze from the missive to her, mouth threatening again. “Tomorrow night. Date. Seven?”

Despite her attack of the heebie-jeebies out front? The only thing more embarrassing than the idea that this was now a pity date was the idea of him knowing she knew it was a pity date. “Okay,” she said, as they both turned to their own particular duties.

Butch looked immensely pleased with himself.

Faith had never been to a funeral before. She had no family besides her mother—no grandparents, no great-aunts or uncles, nobody whose passing would have required she attend their services. Since she and her mother tended to move every few years, she rarely made friends long enough to see one of them die. So she wasn’t sure how Krystal’s memorial service compared to other funerals.

But she knew she hated it.

The grief was palpable—grief from Krystal’s parents, who’d come to collect the body; grief from all her friends; grief from some members of the community who’d shown up without even knowing Krystal, just as a way of expressing their anguish and outrage over this murder in their city.

That last group made Faith wonder if perhaps moving every few years hadn’t been a good enough excuse for not attending funerals in the past, after all.

Butch Jefferson and Roy Chopin were there, too, though they stayed in back. Faith supposed they were taking note of who attended. She remembered from a criminal psychology class that some killers liked to see the results of what they’d done.

In any case, the detectives’ solemn distance seemed respectful, and Faith knew she could count on them to notice anything suspicious. She kept her focus on the people who needed her more. Her roommates. The family.

Once the last songs had been sung and the casket had been carried to a waiting hearse for its drive to Texas, Faith had to go home and shower before she could bear to go back to work.

“Welcome back,” greeted Greg with his characteristically vague smile, once he noticed she was there. “I’m afraid there’s a pretty good backlog of forms for inputting.”

“Gee, thanks. You need to make me take time off more often,” Faith teased weakly. But it felt good to settle in at her desk and take care of a good chunk of the work, her fingers clattering softly over the keyboard. It felt good to make progress on something and, more important, it felt normal.

As close to normal as her life got, anyway.

Not that it would ever stay that way.

“I thought you’d want to know,” Greg announced, after a lunch break that Faith had worked through. He sat on the corner of her desk, like he had before, and smiled at her over his wire rims. “We didn’t get any full prints off last night’s letter. Other than the prints of the woman who found it, that is. It goes to graphology next.”

He held up the see-through bag with the Biltmore note inside.

She was delicious….

“Can I see it?” When he handed the bag to her, Faith knew she’d have to stall in order to figure out how to do this as subtly as possible. “What do you suppose the handwriting analyst will find?”

Even forensic scientists who specialized tended to dabble in other areas of the job.

“Chances are it’s a man’s handwriting,” said Greg. “Although that’s never a hundred percent. The left slant could indicate low self-esteem, maybe a personality that’s trying to hide the truth about himself. The lower the t-bar, the lower the goals this guy sets for him—what are you doing?”

Faith had used his distraction to unseal the bag the slightest bit and take a whiff of the note. It was him. She was almost sure of it. She suspected that if she touched the note, she could be positive, but that would be far too suspicious.

Evidence, around here, was sacred.

“I was wondering if he used one of those smelly inks,” she lied.

Greg took the bag back from her and resealed it, but he smiled with bemused patience as he did. “The labs will also give us that, don’t worry.”

Faith returned his smile, glad he was so easy about things, and turned back to the computer—but Greg didn’t stand up. “Faith,” he said.

She turned back to him, surprised at this break from their usual patterns of conversation. “Yes?”

“I was wondering…would you let me take you out to dinner? We could discuss everything you’ve been through lately, make sure you’re in a good place….”

She stared at him. Her mother sometimes said that when it rained, it poured, and she’d just run into the perfect illustration. Two invitations for dates in less than twenty-four hours.

And one from Greg?

He was even older than Roy Chopin—by almost another decade!

“Never mind,” he said quickly, standing. “It was a bad idea.”

But was it? She’d liked how it felt when he touched her face the other day, the edge taken off his energy by his latex gloves. She liked how his hands always smelled of balloons.

On the other hand, it wasn’t like she could ask him to wear latex gloves on a date. And he really was old enough to be her dad. She may have desperately missed having a father figure growing up, but that didn’t mean she should date one.

“I’m sorry,” she started, past the uncertain ache in her throat.

“Forget I asked. Really.”

“It’s just that—we work together. It would be awkward.”

He nodded. “And I’ve kept you from work long enough. Will you come find me if the detectives working the Tanner case call? I want to give them an update on the prints we lifted.”

“Will do.” She wanted to say more—mostly, she wanted to apologize again. But she suspected that would only make it worse, so she went back to work, as if nothing was wrong. This was by no means the first date she’d ever turned down.

Just the first date she’d ever turned down with someone she genuinely cared about.

And instead she’d agreed to a date with Roy Chopin?

The minute she thought about it, butterflies started again. Was she an idiot? She might say something that told him she was less than normal. She might say something that told him she was Cassandra! Even if neither of those minor disasters took place, she had to worry about what would happen if he tried to touch her and she shrank from him like a beaten dog. Or what if he didn’t try to touch her? This was a date, wasn’t it? Shouldn’t there be at least minimal touching?

Faith had tried to date, in high school. It had been a disaster. Teenage boys were all about sex, and unlike most teenage girls, she’d been able to tell that from their scent, their temperature. She was intrigued by the idea of sex, but she’d barely managed the few kisses she’d tried without recoiling from heavy doses of Too Much Information. How could she ever manage more? By the time she’d started college, she’d pretty much given up.

Last year, her junior year at Tulane, she’d met a nice guy named Jesse. Jesse seemed to really like her, not just the idea of sex with her. He’d said they would go as slowly as she needed. They started just by holding hands. Once she got used to his presence, the contact didn’t open up a new screen in her head every time they touched. Then they moved onto a few careful kisses. She’d thought she was falling in love. For a few weeks it was as if the whole world had a glitter about it, as if she had a chance at normalcy, at human contact, at last. She’d even started looking forward to doing more than kissing….

Then he’d shown up for a date smelling like his study partner, smelling like fresh sex. When she’d accused him of cheating on her, then challenged his denial, he’d said there was no way she could tell that. He’d called her a freak….

It wasn’t long after that ugly breakup that she’d sought out the local psychics, hoping they might have some answers. Why was she the way she was? They hadn’t known. But at least they’d had a place for her. She’d dropped out of school after that semester—she could always finish her degree when she was sure what she wanted. And she hadn’t gone out with a man since.

Was she honestly going to end her drought with an example of walking attitude like Roy Chopin? Especially when she was hiding things from him? When she was turning down a perfectly nice, gentle Greg Boulanger?

And hadn’t she just told Greg she didn’t date people from work?

Faith took the coward’s way out. She called Roy at the station and left a message. Can’t make it. Thanks anyway. Faith.

Afterward, for the rest of the afternoon, she felt lonely. But she was used to feeling lonely.

Feeling like a freak of nature, though…when had that begun to matter? Either way, she didn’t want to go through it just now. Not this soon after Krystal’s funeral. The week had been hard enough.

After hanging up with the station, she phoned the apartment and suggested they all go to the movies to forget their troubles.

The movie wasn’t great, but it proved a decent enough distraction. When Faith and her roommates got back to the apartment, Evan said he’d come upstairs after he grabbed a smoke.

The apartment was a steal, for what they paid in rent. It had a second-story entrance off a cobblestone courtyard, French doors, plantation shutters and wrought-iron railings. Faith sometimes imagined that the rooms held memories, trapped energy and emotions from its previous tenants—a mother who had taken on surprising responsibilities, a son whose morality could have gone either way. Rumor had it the owner had a soft spot for the magical community, which was why he’d initially rented it to Krystal. He’d been at the funeral, a solemn Englishman with a dusky-skinned Creole wife, and Faith hadn’t sensed anything in particular off him, but she hadn’t gotten that close, either. Whatever his reasons for renting, Faith was glad for it. She loved the place. Inside was just as nice—marble floors, ornate moldings. There were two bedrooms and an office, which they used as a third bedroom, Evan’s. Absinthe and Krystal had shared a room. Moonsong and Faith had the other.

Like a boarding school. Like a dorm room at college—which Faith had never had, having commuted to school from her mother’s house.

Now Moonsong had decided to move in with Absinthe, where Krystal had stayed, and Faith wasn’t sure how she felt about that. It really had been an awful week, and as she fell back into the overstuffed sofa in their living room, she was aware of a dull ache deep in her chest. Was it guilt, for canceling her date? Was it maybe disgust at her cowardice?

Or maybe it was just disappointment for losing a chance at something so normal.

But you’re not normal, so how could the date have been?

It didn’t help when Moonsong pressed the play button on their blinking answering machine.

“So here’s the thing,” announced Chopin’s deep voice, and Faith sat up. “You say no, I gotta take no—I mean, I’m not a stalker or anything. But could I maybe ask why? Is this a let’s-reschedule can’t make it or a leave-me-alone can’t make it? Call me. Unless it’s the second one. Then, I guess, don’t. I’ll try your other number.”

But if he meant her last, lost cell phone, he would be out of luck. He recited what must be his cell phone number.

Then he said, “Oh. Uh, this is for Corbett.”

The machine beeped, and Faith was conscious of both Absinthe and Moonsong’s intrigued stares. What a difference there was between the two women—Absinthe’s eyes darkly lined and cryptic, Moonsong’s large and lustrous and hopeful despite wearing no makeup.

Before she could say, or even think to say “I can explain that,” the next message came on.

“Faith? Faith, baby, are you there? Pick up.”

It was Faith’s mother, Tamara. Her voice shook. She was crying.

Faith stood and moved dumbly closer to the machine, as if she couldn’t already hear every stuttering gasp in her mother’s breathing, every crackle on the recorder’s old tape.

“We need to talk, baby,” said Tamara. “Please.”

Faith had snatched up and was dialing the telephone before the machine beeped to indicate the end of messages.

“She sounded awful,” marveled Absinthe.

“Something’s wrong,” whispered Moonsong, thankfully not claiming that bit of blinding obviousness as a psychic impression.

“Shhh,” hissed Faith. She’d gotten her mother’s machine. It wasn’t her mother’s voice but that of her employer, Mr. Manning, but Faith already knew about that. Her super cautious mother had read somewhere that it was better to have a man’s voice on the answering machine.

“Mom?” she said, as soon as the message ended. “It’s Faith. Pick up. What’s wrong?”

The line clicked and Tamara said, “Faith?”

Taking a deep, openmouthed breath, Faith leaned back against the wall. Her friends exchanged thankful looks as well, at this obvious sign of Faith’s relief.

“Yes, Mom. That’s why I said ‘It’s Faith.’ What’s wrong?”

“Everything,” whispered Tamara. “Everything’s wrong. First the e-mails. Now phone calls. I need to talk to you, baby. I need to talk to you before they do.”

“What do you mean? Is someone harassing you?”

“We need to talk, Faith.”

“Mom, I’m right here. We’re talking.”

“No…alone. Face-to-face.” Faith was accustomed to her mother’s occasional hysterics, but this seemed legitimate. Probably. Maybe.

“Okay. I’m on my way.”

“Take a cab, baby.”

“I’ll take the streetcar, Mom. It runs twenty-four hours.”

“I wish you wouldn’t risk yourself like that….”

“See you soon,” said Faith, and hung up. She was twenty-two, for heaven’s sake. Her mother didn’t want her living away from home, and now she wanted to dictate Faith’s transportation choices? The streetcar was eminently safe. New Orleans couldn’t risk its tourist business by letting it be otherwise.

She didn’t realize she was scowling until Moonsong said, “You weren’t very nice.”

“Sometimes my mom drives me crazy.”

“As opposed to everyone else’s mom,” scoffed Absinthe, while Faith grabbed a lightweight rain jacket, just in case.

Chances were, Tamara had been frightened by shadows. A wrong number on the telephone. Misdirected mail. Someone watching her at the supermarket. She’d once quit a job and moved herself and Faith across the country because of some man who’d been staring intently at them every time they went to the supermarket. But there was still the chance that her fears, whatever they were, were legitimate this time.

Just as important, there was the chance Tamara was ready to confess whatever guilty secret Faith had begun to sense more and more over these past few years.

We need to talk, Tamara had said. Face-to-face.

Faith felt a sickening dread at whatever her mother might confess. But she also felt a certain excitement. Maybe now, finally, she’d know the answer. Maybe she’d understand.

“Don’t wait up for me,” she instructed her roommates, heading out.

“Don’t get killed,” countered Moonsong, her dark eyes big. “Couldn’t someone go with you? Evan maybe?”

“I’ll ask.” Faith shut the door behind her, turned on the stoop—

She realized they were there—heard them, smelled them—even before she saw who waited downstairs in the courtyard.

Evan was there, yes.

He was also surrounded by five menacing young men.

Chapter 6

Had someone mentioned gang activity in Storyville?

Several of the men looked up at the sound of Faith shutting the door. Their smiles gleamed into the night.

Evan looked up, too. To judge by the whites of his eyes as well as the rush of adrenaline she smelled, he was frightened.

“Go back in,” he pleaded quickly, loudly. “Call the—”

His words ended in a grunt as one of the boys drove a fist into his gut. Evan doubled over with a cry, crumpled to his knees.

Before she’d considered what she was doing, Faith vaulted the railing and landed into a crouch on the cobblestones of the courtyard, maybe ten feet below.

“You don’t want to do this,” she warned the intruders as she straightened. Now…how was she going to persuade them without touching anyone? “Get out while you can.”

The boys grinned. They seemed to be teens, but big teens with facial hair. A couple of them actually laughed. One swore in that way boys do, trying to sound tough. They were all wearing something green, like some desecration of St. Patrick’s Day, and they were a surprising mixture of races, like an old Benetton advertisement gone violently bad.

“Now her,” said a scraggly, tattooed white boy, the one who’d punched Evan. “Her, I could like.”

She could smell lust off him and several others, an ugly, dominating smell. They weren’t about to get out while they could. In fact, she sensed violent promise in the tightening of their muscles, the faint increase in their temperatures, the quick inhalations as they made the decision to attack.

Chances were, they would do more than touch her.

So Faith attacked first. She leaped and kicked the scraggly bastard right in the solar plexus. Between the sole of her shoe and his shirt there was no real contact—well, none except the blunt impact that shot up her leg, but that she could handle. She felt something give under her heel as the boy staggered backward.

He looked almost as surprised as she felt. Wow!

She’d taken kickboxing for one of her P.E. credits at Tulane, but only for one semester. She’d taken archery the semester before that, but that hadn’t made her Robin Hood either. How had she…?

Two others surged at her. She felt their heat behind her, heard their heartbeats. She knew where to strike and gave up wondering how. She drove the hard angle of her elbow into someone’s shirted gut. She barely felt it. Following through on that spin, she struck out again with a closed fist—

Right into someone’s nose. Skin to skin.

He was scared of looking weak, scared of being embarrassed by a girl. He thought Evan was strangely attractive, and for that Evan would have to die. He’d done something, crack maybe, not half an hour ago—

Luckily, the contact was brief. It hurt her hand, the pain in her wrist mingling with the backlash of his pain. Amazingly, the sensations somehow canceled each other out. The cracking sensation beneath her knuckles, his bellow—they washed away the unwanted images she’d gotten from that moment of touch.

It felt…freeing.

One of the intruders was backing away, eyes wide as if staring at a ghost. One stumbled with a cry. Evan, who’d tripped him while still on his knees, gasping for breath, said, “Hah!”

The other three fell on Faith.

Arms circled her from behind. Hands grabbed at her waist. A face thrust into her bare neck, too close, too intimate. Three at once. Contact everywhere. For a moment she was dizzy, overwhelmed. One had been molested as a child. One had recently forced himself on his little sister’s friend and her crying had pissed him off. One had already decided to kill her and Evan rather than leave witnesses—

Oh, God!

But when she struck out, as randomly as a blindfolded child swinging for a piñata, the images stopped.

The momentary overload stopped.

Suddenly she could focus on where they stood in relation to her, on what they were doing, on how they were moving—and how best to defeat them.

As if following a choreographed routine, Faith moved. The face pressed against her neck gave her an ear to bite into. She did that, hard, and felt her teeth break through skin. She tasted blood.

The boy reared back, screaming. Even as she spat out his blood she was already leaning forward, away from someone else’s bear hug. Her captor bent with her. When she quickly straightened and snapped her head back, her skull impacted his face with a crack that reverberated through her. It made her see stars—but he slumped.

Especially since she’d swung her fist down and backward too, at hip level. He’d been hard—she couldn’t think about that. But the way she drove his privates up into his groin, he wouldn’t be for long.

The Asian boy in front of her had the collar of her shirt and a handful of her hair. Now that Bear Hug had let go, she clasped her hands above this one’s arms and drew all her weight down, inside his bent elbows. As he was jerked forward by her weight, she head-butted his face.

Again, she saw stars. She didn’t care. It was as exhilarating as hurricane-force winds. Wild. Stupid. Wonderful.

Someone else came at her from the side—she heard his footsteps, his breathing, his heart, and knew exactly where he was. She spun and clapped her hands against both of his ears at the same time. A self-defense instructor had once said the move could break eardrums.

She thought she heard a muffled pop. She didn’t imagine his scream, or the wet smear on her palm. He was the one she’d already bitten.

She spat again at the memory, and looked for her next victim.

They were backing away from her now. At least one was crawling.

Evan rose to an unsteady crouch, then to his feet, so that the two of them could stand shoulder to shoulder and present a united front.

Most of the teenagers were muttering profane insults, which didn’t carry as much weight when someone backed away while saying them. But one guy, the Latino who hadn’t fought, just breathed out three stunned words.

“What are you?”

His words shuddered through Faith, more powerfully even than her own gasps for breath. Because she really didn’t know.

She didn’t know how she’d managed to fight like that. Not from just a semester of kickboxing, she didn’t. Not from an evening workshop on self-defense for women. And she sure as hell hadn’t inherited the skill from her mother.

Then the boys turned and ran, helping the one she’d hit in the balls and the one she’d kicked in the kneecap. Then the courtyard was empty again except for her, Evan…

And the sound of approaching sirens.

“You aren’t coming?” repeated Tamara Corbett, outrage in every shaking word. Her voice got softer, accusing. “You said you were coming, baby.”

From the sofa, Absinthe was saying, “They’re targeting us. First Krystal, now Evan and Faith.”

From the doorway, Evan was telling one of the patrolmen, “They said they were playing a new game. Bag the fag. If Faith hadn’t come out when she did—”

The second officer, a black woman, was asking Moonsong, “And that’s when you called 9-1-1?”

“I kind of got delayed,” said Faith into the phone.

“What could be more important than your mother?”

She went with the truth. “Some guys jumped Evan. I helped fight them off.” And I was really good at it! “We have to make official reports. Tomorrow we get to go look at mug shots.”

“Oh my God,” breathed Tamara.

“I’m fine,” Faith hurried to assure her. And she was. Sort of. Her head hurt from where she’d butted into people. Her hands were swelling, especially on the knuckles and the edge where she’d whacked that guy’s neck. One of her ankles felt sore, and one of her wrists throbbed. And yet…

She barely noticed. It was a clean pain.

Normal.

“You’re moving home,” announced Tamara. “Now. I’m calling a cab, right now, so you pack up your things—”

“No.”

“I won’t take no for an answer,” warned her mother.

“You’ll have to.” Even the cops looked at Faith when she said that. She smiled, shrugged, turned her back and lowered her voice. “I’m not moving home with you, Mom. I’m perfectly safe here.”

“Your roommate’s dead and you were attacked in your own courtyard!”

“I doubt they’re related.” No matter what Absinthe said. “The MOs are completely different.”

“Don’t talk as if you’re some expert on law enforcement. You’re a desk clerk!”

“Don’t minimize what I do.” Maybe it wasn’t what Faith hoped to be doing in five years, but it was a start. “And don’t pretend I’m a child anymore. I’m staying here, and that’s final. The two attacks aren’t related. Really. And the police said they’ll make more frequent patrols near us. We’re locking the courtyard gate when they leave. Anyway, that’s why I’m running late and why I wanted to know how important it is that we talk tonight. If it’s really that immediate, I’ll take a cab.”

Tamara snapped at the chance. “Bring a suitcase.”

“And once we’ve talked I’ll come right back, no matter how late it is. But if it will wait until tomorrow, why don’t I come over after work? In the daylight?”

For a long time her mother was silent. “Tomorrow will be fine.”

Faith wasn’t that surprised. Tamara had her faults, but not caring about Faith’s safety was hardly one of them. “You sure?”

“Yes, you come tomorrow evening, while it’s light. I’ll make pork chops.”

“Thanks.” Faith turned to see another man and woman appear in their doorway. These were NOPD detectives—she could tell by the world-weary looks and plain clothes. Not Roy or Butch. This was their night off. “I should probably go.”

“Wait. I won’t keep you, baby, I promise,” Tamara insisted.

“But…do you think there’s even a chance someone could have hired these men to attack you?”

The question came from so far out in left field, Faith had trouble processing it. “They attacked Evan. I just got in the way.”

“Never mind,” said Tamara quickly. “We’ll talk tomorrow night, then. You take care of yourself, promise?”

“Yes.”

“You promise.”

“Cross my heart,” Faith insisted. Then, after the requisite I-love-you’s, she turned to the detectives.

Roy’s presence hit the office like a storm front. As soon as he pushed through the doors, Faith’s head came up from where she’d been reading a poorly written form—some cops had handwriting second only to doctors. She was almost surprised that the other papers weren’t blowing off her desk.

“So I go by the department gym to lift some weights before shift,” announced Detective Chopin to her, as if they’d been in the middle of a conversation. He grabbed someone’s desk chair as he stalked by, whirled it in a circle, planted it in front of Faith’s desk and straddled it from behind. He braced his forearms across the chair back, leaned over them and fixed Faith with that deep gaze of his. “This beat cop from third shift’s working off his night. He says, ‘Wait till you hear this one. This little blond number, she takes down five gangbangers.’ He describes the whole thing. We’re both laughing, ha ha, at the idea of some cutie wiping the floor with these delinquents.”

Faith knew he was describing her, but she waited for the punch line, watching those eyes. And those wrists. And those fresh-from-the-gym arms. He’d showered after his workout; she could smell his fresh deodorant soap along with the coffee. His hair was still damp. She felt an internal fluttering again, half-push, half-pull. He made her uncomfortable, and she still wasn’t sure what to do with that.

Roy’s fake expression of amusement sobered, just like that. “Then he tells me the address,” he growled.

She shrugged.

“I say, ‘Hey, I think she’s the one who stood me up last night.’ He says, ‘That should be a relief.’”

“I didn’t stand you up,” Faith pointed out. “I called first.”

“Yeah, that makes it all better. You took down five gangbangers?”

“No, I took down three gangbangers. One of them wasn’t fighting us, and Evan knocked another one over.”

“Oh.” His taut nod radiated sarcasm. “Well, that’s different.”

“Why are you angry at me?”

“’Cause the way I read the report, you could’ve just stepped back inside and called 9-1-1.”

“And left Evan alone with them? That’s no alternative at all. He’s the one they were after.”

“I’m thinking not for long they weren’t.”

“You’re interrupting my work,” Faith announced, and turned back to her data entry.

“Bernie.” By thigh power alone, ignoring her rolled eyes at the strange nickname, Roy propelled the chair he straddled, a chair without wheels, against her desk. A metallic clang sounded, and a pen rolled off from the impact. “Appearance is everything to those guys. They aren’t going to like it that a girl beat them up.”

“Not my problem.”

“It will be when they try to even the score.”

She looked up at that. “Are you trying to scare me?”

He widened his eyes, like, duh. “Is it working?”

“No. Go away now.”

“I’m here to see Boulanger.”

“I could tell.” She gestured to her desk, the only thing separating her from his intensity and the corded arms under his T-shirt. “He doesn’t seem to be on my desk right now. Maybe you should try his office.”

“You’re cute when you’re a smart-ass, but I’m not sure I need the agony of dating someone who’s gonna end up on that slab back there.”

“Then it’s a good thing I stood you up, isn’t it?”

“You still haven’t told me why.” He spread his arms. “What’s not to like?” His mix of arrogance and self-deprecation made her smile, despite herself.

“Maybe you’re too pushy. Maybe you scare me.”

She’d meant the second comment to be teasing, but the truth of it struck her uncomfortably. The way Roy scowled, it didn’t strike him so well either. She remembered how she’d acted when he’d grabbed her in the rain. Damn.

“I don’t know what to do about that,” he said, leaning back in the chair, studying her. “It’s not like you can’t take me, right?”

She couldn’t help it. She eyed his broad shoulders, his pumped biceps, his big hands. Just thinking about trying to fight him off gave her the shakes.

But not in the same way fighting off gang members had. Not even necessarily in a bad way.

“I wouldn’t count on it,” she said, hiding her gaze by looking down at her paperwork.

“Looks like you did a job on your knuckles. So where’d you learn to fight like that, anyway?”

“Tulane.” And maybe from my Dad. She’d been thinking about it a lot, since the previous night. Could a person inherit her father’s fighting skills, without ever having met him? If her father could fight, why hadn’t her mom mentioned it before?

Luckily, Greg arrived. “Hey, Roy. What’s up? I didn’t know you were on this early.”

“I’m here to ask you about the note.” Roy stood. “And I heard Faith here was heading to the station on her lunch hour to ID the mug shots of a few of her victims. I thought I might walk with her.”

“And what,” challenged Faith, amused that he was telling this to Greg before he mentioned it to her. “Carry my books?”

“Yeah, and if my newspaper route pays off, maybe I’ll even buy you a soda. Grow up. It’s damage control because you’re a magnet for bad guys, is what it is.” He talked big, but she sensed his concern was real. That had to concern her, too.

“Do you mean just the gangbangers?” she asked. “Or do you know something else about the serial killer?”

Roy planted both hands on her desk and bent over them, his face uncomfortably close to hers. Coffee. Soap. “There’s no proof he’s a serial killer. If he were, we’d have to bring in the feebies, and I’m not going there without more than one body.”

Feebies were the FBI, whose jurisdiction included serial killers. Cops and the FBI weren’t exactly a model for interagency cooperation.

“He may have been at the psychic fair to scout victims,” Faith insisted. “He says he’ll kill again.”

“Which makes him a potential—” Instead of finishing, he rolled his eyes in defeat, straightened and nodded at Greg.

“Tell her, will you? The chance of this one whack-job going after her is a lot lower than the chance of an entire gang trying to recover their lost dignity.”

Greg, looking from one of them to the other, said, “Faith told me about the attack last night. You don’t think it’s connected to her dead roommate?”

“No, but I’m not above using it as an excuse to talk her into dating me.” Waving her away, Roy headed for Greg’s office. “All likely agony aside.”

“She doesn’t date co-workers,” Greg said.

“Are we co-workers?”

But then Greg shut the door. Not that it kept Faith from hearing, if she made the least effort. But since the only reason Roy was talking about her was to annoy her, he immediately changed subjects to something more important.

The killer’s note.

Faith went back to her data entry, but she worked slowly, quieting the sound of her fingers on the keys to better follow snatches of what was going on in Greg’s office. Apparently the handwriting analysis had shown that the writer might be mentally disturbed, but he hid it well. Roy said that was good news, but he was being sarcastic. He admitted that they’d questioned Krystal’s boyfriend from the previous year but had to let him go; he wasn’t the killer. They had no idea who the killer was.

“We got nothing,” Faith heard him admit. “Butch has resorted to listening to some psychic contact he’s got.”

“What, Cassandra?” Greg laughed. “I talk to Butch, too.”

“An anonymous contact is bad enough, but an anonymous psychic contact?” Roy swore crudely. “I say if they aren’t willing to meet you face-to-face, they aren’t worth it.”

“When you’ve exhausted all the possibilities…” Greg reminded him, a shrug in his voice.

“And in the meantime we’ve got a bunch of so-called readers who are either scared out of their wits or not scared enough, and a few hangers-on like that assistant of yours who swings either direction. Hey. Tell me something.”

As Roy lowered his voice, Faith’s fingers slowed to a stop on her computer keyboard.

Then he asked, “You ever talk to her mom? What’s up with that one?”

Greg said something about only speaking to Mrs. Corbett once, when Faith was out, but Faith couldn’t hear clearly anymore, not through the buzz of understanding that filled her head. Roy thought her mother was crazy? When had he talked to her mom?

But the answer to that was suddenly obvious. It must have been last night, when Faith cancelled the date. That must be why Tamara, in a panic, had called Faith.

Faith stood, torn in two directions. On the one hand, she couldn’t call Roy out on this without letting him and Greg know she’d overheard. So much for banter, bulging biceps and the possibility of him carrying her imaginary books.

On the other hand…

Damn. The only other alternative was to pretend she didn’t know about it, and that was no alternative at all.

She stalked to Greg’s office and hurled the door open, not bothering to knock, startling the hell out of the two men inside.

“You called my mother?”

Chapter 7

By the time Faith stepped off the St. Charles streetcar a few blocks from her mother’s Garden District residence that afternoon, she felt physically ill.

Not just because of the shouting match she’d had with Roy Chopin, one that had ended with them writing each other off for good. Not just because of how bad her behavior had made her look in front of Greg, who wasn’t just her boss but someone whose opinion she very much valued.

Not even because of the time she’d spent in the horrible atmosphere of the police station, turning pages of mug shots that carried energy of countless victims before her—though that had been its own ordeal.

She felt sick because, without knowing what her mother would confess, Faith had apparently read enough, subconsciously, to know she wouldn’t like it. She’d suspected that, avoided that, for far too long. Her increasing awareness of Tamara’s secrets was partly why she’d moved out.

And now it was time to face them.

The Garden District was the most elegant representation of old New Orleans, a showcase for mansions and arching oak trees. Moving there from Kansas City had been like stepping into a version of Gone With the Wind in which the north had lost. From the streetcar stop, Faith passed several stately homes—the Deveaux Villa, the Bernard House—before she reached the Manning Mansion, a showplace surrounded by iron fencing, fronted with Doric columns and accompanied by a cluster of historic outbuildings. One, which used to be the white-bricked carriage house, had been adapted to a separate residence at about the same time the Mannings had traded their four-footed horsepower for the kind that took gasoline.

That’s where Faith’s mother lived, where Faith had lived during her college years. Mr. Manning had old money and political clout, but he wanted to be an author…except, he had no interest in actually writing. Tamara was a talented writer. She sometimes wrote as Tammy Betts, but her favorite job was ghosting for clients such as Manning. When her agent hooked the two of them up, room and board in such a prestigious neighborhood had been one of Tamara’s main reasons for taking the job.

As long as Michael Manning’s historic murder mysteries kept selling, Tamara had one hell of a zip code. She still couldn’t understand why Faith didn’t value locale the way she did. But there were some things Faith had never understood, either.

Such as why her mother, clearly a talented writer, never took her own byline. And now, why a simple phone call from a police detective, on personal business, had thrown her into a panic.

“I told her who I was,” Roy had insisted, annoyance at her accusations turning into temper. “I asked if you were there. She said ‘no,’ I said ‘thanks for your time.’ What’s the big deal?”

“The big deal is, you scared her half to death!”

“I noticed. And I gotta tell you, someone who scares that easy is guilty of something.”

Which was exactly what Faith hadn’t wanted to hear, exactly why she couldn’t be reasonable with him, exactly why she’d pushed him into giving up on her.

Because she knew, in her heart, that it was true. Her mother was guilty of something—worse, something concerning Faith. She didn’t want to hear it. Not from anybody. The consequences…

Was it wrong to not want to know certain things?

“Consider that and the way you are,” Roy had said.

“What do you mean, ‘the way I am?’”

“That not-liking-to-be-touched business. Makes me wonder what happened to you, if maybe you got touched wrong. Makes me wonder if you even know it, or if you were so young, you forgot. Makes me wonder if your mom hasn’t forgotten squat, so she gets freaky when a cop calls. And that makes me wonder if she’s the sort of woman who brings home guys who don’t just abuse her but spread the joy. That’s what I mean. But hey, what do I know? I just do this for a living.”

And this from a man who’d never even met her mother! Faith had told him exactly what he could do with what he did for a living, and that had been the end of that.

Except for the fact that she couldn’t dismiss his accusations as easily as she could dismiss him.

“Mom?” she called, after unlocking the two dead bolts with her keys and opening the door. “It’s me, Faith.”

“You’re here early.” Tamara came out from the back office, looking relieved. She was a small woman with dark, curly brown hair and startlingly pale-blue eyes. The carriage house apartment was charming—exposed brick interiors, copper pipes running across the ceiling like some kind of modern art, regular panes alternating with stained glass in the windows. Tamara, who’d always had the skill of seeming to fit in anywhere, matched the home beautifully. “Is everything all right?”

Faith meant to say that sure, everything was great. But when her mother enveloped her in a soft hug, a mom hug, no way could she lie. Her mom was one of the few people in her life that Faith could touch easily, probably because she’d done it so often that she’d adapted to the sensations, like a person learns to tune out a permanent smell or a continuous noise. That made her Faith’s sole source for easy contact. Faith didn’t want to lose that.

“No,” she mumbled into Tamara’s shoulder. “I mean, I’m okay,” she hurried to add, when her mother drew back in alarm. “But everything else…”

“Your murdered roommate,” guessed Tamara. “And that horrible attack last night.”

Faith laughed. “Mom, I haven’t told you anything about the attack except that it happened. Why would you describe it as horrible?”

“Because anybody who would dare hurt my baby is by definition horrible.” Which was exactly why Roy’s accusations were so crazy…. Well, some of them. “Come into the kitchen with me. I’ll start dinner.”

“The detective who called you last night…” Faith hated even mentioning Roy, but she had to know. “Is he what scared you?”

Tamara, who’d been unhooking pans from the hanging rack, paused. Although Faith had long ago gotten in the habit of ignoring her mother’s vital signs, if only from courtesy, she now made a point to notice. Tamara’s pulse sped up. Her pale eyes darted to the left. “You know that a detective called?”

“Yes, Mom. He said his name was Roy Chopin, right?”

Tamara nodded, tightly, and continued to get out the makings for pork chops. “But he said you broke a date with him. He had to be mistaken. You wouldn’t date a—”

“A cop?” supplied Faith. “Why wouldn’t I? I work with them every day.”

“Which I still hate. You know their reputation around here.”

Faith had heard the rumors from the mid-90s. Better to be pulled over by a carjacker than a New Orleans cop, people had once joked. But she and her mother had lived halfway across the country back then. “The city’s been working to change that for a decade, Mother.”

Tamara turned to her, sweating slightly now. Not enough so that anybody without a hound-dog nose would notice, but still…“Faith! You know what those authority types are like, always asking questions, always prying into our business, always jumping to rude conclusions….”

“Like the conclusion that you’re hiding something?”

“Exactly!”

Why was it so hard to force the question out? Maybe because it was her mother. Maybe because Tamara was all Faith had left. No dad; he’d walked out when she was still an infant—walked out and then died. Not a single sister, brother or cousin. No grandparents, or aunts, or uncles. Without her mother…“Are you hiding something, Mom?”

“Faith!”

“Then why have you never told me more about my father?”

Tamara looked down. “Because he chose not to be part of our lives. He’s dead now. It would only hurt you to dwell on him.”

But instead of seeking safety in denial, as she had for most of her life, Faith was watching this time. Listening. Scenting her mother’s lies. And somewhere amidst those justifications, Tamara was definitely lying.

“Why did we move so often?” Faith asked.

Tamara clasped her hands together, shook her head. “This isn’t what I meant when I said we had to talk.”

“Were we running from someone?”

Now her mother said nothing. But her pulse, her temperature, her breathing…those spoke for her. Faith wasn’t sure she could stand what they were saying. But she couldn’t pretend them away, either.

“Is that why you never wanted my picture in the paper? Is that why you never published under your own name?”

“I was trying to protect you,” murmured Tamara as she stood, lost, by the still-cold stove. “Because you’re so…different.”

It was an excuse she’d used before. It had always sounded like a good one. Faith knew firsthand how people could react, when they recognized her strange abilities.

But now she heard that this, too, was a lie.

“No you weren’t,” she whispered. “Oh my God. You’re some kind of fugitive, and you made me a fugitive, and I want to know why. Mom, if you committed some kind of crime, maybe the statute of limitations is up. Or maybe we could find you a good lawyer.” But that wasn’t it—or it wasn’t all of it. Some of this led back to her father. “Did you kidnap me?”

“What?” But the guilt behind that protest was palpable.

“Maybe because my father abused me?” That would be an understandable reason, anyway, no matter how mistaken it felt.

“Nobody abused you, baby!” Tamara’s denial sounded honest, which was a mixed relief. But she’d only denied the abuse. The rest…?

“I can’t tell you the number of noncustodial kidnappings that come across my desk, Mom. Did you do that?”

“I—No!” Her truth there seemed more cloudy. As if the issue were more complicated than that.

“Oh my God. Am I even really your daughter?”

“Of course you are! I carried you for nine months. I was in labor for fourteen hours. I’ve told you about your birth—7:03 a.m., County Hospital in Chicago. You can’t possibly believe—Why are you even asking these things?”

Faith shut her eyes, shook her head. Some of her mother’s answers sounded true, heartfelt, but some of them were lies, and she couldn’t tell where the line lay. What good did it do to ask the questions when she couldn’t trust even her perception of the answers? This wasn’t why she’d come. This wasn’t accomplishing anything.

“Why are you acting this way?” demanded Tamara, her hands—smaller hands than Faith’s—fisted. “Why are you looking at me like that? You’re acting as if I’m some kind of criminal. I’m not! I gave you the best life I knew how.”

That, at least, was the truth. Faith worked to make her voice more gentle. “You said you wanted to talk. Why don’t you tell me what it is you wanted to say?”

But her mother—surely Tamara really was her mother, even if they didn’t look at all alike—her mother was too upset by now. The shrill edge to her voice showed no sign of softening. “I wanted to ask if you really knew that detective who called. If you really had a date with him. I thought he had to be lying, but clearly I don’t even know my own daughter anymore.”

That makes two of us. I don’t know my own mother.

“And the e-mail?” asked Faith.

Tamara scowled at the floor.

“You said last night, ‘first the e-mail, now the phone calls.’ You said you had to talk to me before they did. Who are ‘they’?”

Tamara looked up, blinked, and lied again. Blatantly. Deliberately. “I was upset about the detective’s phone call. I didn’t know what I was saying.”

And that was that. “Goodbye, Mom.”

Faith turned and headed for the front door.

After a pause, her mother came after her. “Baby, no! Stay for dinner. I’m sorry I upset you over nothing—you know how nervous I can get, but it doesn’t mean anything. Let’s have a nice evening together, catch up, maybe you can spend the night in your old room—”

Faith spun on her. “No!”

Tamara’s eyes widened.

“No, Mother. I’m not spending the night in my old room. I stayed there too long already. And I’m not sitting across a dinner table from you making small talk when this, maybe the most important thing in my life—”

“You’re exaggerating, baby.”

“Tell me why my father left us!”

And Tamara said, “I can’t.”

So Faith left. As she headed down the walk, she heard her mother weeping. She felt as if someone had reached inside her and torn her in half, as if she might never patch those two halves together. Half of her came from a father whose first name she didn’t even know. A man her mother would tell her nothing about except that he was dead. And the other half…

Was she even Tamara’s daughter? Or was it possible she was one of those children you heard about, snatched out of their baby carriage, stolen from a day care, grabbed off the street?

She practically ran to the streetcar stop, barely aware that the sun was still out, too upset to care about such mundane safety concerns. Not with her whole identity in tatters.

If she couldn’t get that information from Tamara, then Faith would have to find it the old-fashioned way. She would try to get a copy of her birth certificate, maybe her mother’s marriage certificate, assuming Tamara and her father had even been married. And maybe…

Faith climbed onto the streetcar and settled into one of the wooden seats, staring blankly at the mansions and estates and trees that lined St. Charles Avenue, and a name struck her. Deveaux. The old Deveaux villa.

Whether or not there was any relationship to the French Quarter medium didn’t really matter. What did matter was, Faith had a few resources that “the old-fashioned way” had never included. She might just be able to contact her father, even if he was dead. Because he was dead.

At least, she could try. If she knew a good enough medium.

And she was pretty sure she did.

Celeste Deveaux was a tall, mixed-race woman with caféau-lait skin, wavy black hair and warm brown eyes. When Faith first met her, a year ago, Celeste had been working as a psychic reader. She’d been lousy at it. Only after one of her clients died—shortly after Celeste had promised him a long and happy life—did Celeste eventually come to realize her skills lay in speaking to the dead.

Since then, she’d gotten such a good reputation that she could afford her own two-room parlor only three blocks off of Jackson Square. The back room, her “reading room,” was used for nothing except her one-on-one séances.

When she went in for a reading on Saturday afternoon, Faith had expected blue velvet or glittery stars or crystal balls. What she got was tasteful dark paneling, rich carpeting, three upholstered chairs and artistic black-and-white photography of angelic sculptures.

More importantly, she got a feeling.

The air in here practically vibrated. Faith had no doubt that something otherworldly happened here on a regular basis, anymore than she’d doubt the sun rose while watching it with her own eyes. Celeste was a legitimate medium.

So why weren’t her skills kicking in for Faith?

“Talk to me,” the older woman whispered into the ether, her dark eyes half-closed, unfocused. She swayed in her chair, her hands spread. “This here little girl wants to meet her daddy. She’s got some questions she deserves to have answered.”

Faith held her breath. She could tell Celeste was in a legitimate trance—her heartbeat had slowed significantly, as had her breathing and something harder to pinpoint…her brain waves? But that was insane. Even a freak couldn’t hear or smell or see brain waves…could she?

“I’m calling on Faith’s father to come talk with us, now,” insisted Celeste, sounding vaguely annoyed. “No, not you, chère. No, not you either. I’m looking for Faith’s daddy.”

Finally, Faith had to breathe. It felt like inhaling past a hole in her chest. So much for her brilliant idea.

Celeste’s heartbeat picked up, returning toward normal. Her own breathing deepened. She opened her dark eyes. “I’m sorry.”

Faith shrugged. “That’s the chance you take with psychic abilities, right? Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t?”

Unlike her own abilities, which seemed surprisingly consistent, another reason she thought she wasn’t psychic.

“For me, they usually work better than that.” Celeste stood and offered her brown hand. She wore many rings, some crystal, some silver, some copper, but the one she seemed proudest of was a simple gold wedding band. “I try not to use this room for anything but readings…don’t want to dispel the energy. How about we go out front while we try to figure this out?”

Faith didn’t take her hand. Between the fight with Roy, having to look at mug shots in the sludge-for-energy police station and the blowup with her mother, and now her disappointment with Celeste’s help, she felt too emotionally vulnerable.

But she followed to the front room, nevertheless, and sat where Celeste gestured, at a small consulting table.

“It’s a skill I inherited from my great-grandmother, So-lange,” explained Celeste, getting them some iced tea. “That witch was something—all my cousins and I inherited power from her. She’s the one who first lived in that house you mentioned, in the Garden District. My folks live there now.”

“So if it normally works,” said Faith, “why not this time? Can you think of any particular reason you wouldn’t be able to contact my father?”

“If he weren’t dead, for one,” suggested Celeste jokingly. Considering that Faith didn’t know anything about the man, though, even that was possible. “Or it could be us not having his name. Having a name, or an item that once belonged to him, that really helps.”

“I’m an item that once belonged to him.” God, but she sounded pitiful.

“Now none of that! There’s other reasons, too, good reasons. You’re what—twenty-two? That means the man could’ve been dead as many as twenty-three years. Most folks take longer than that to reincarnate, but you never know. If his soul’s busy elsewhere, I doubt even my great-grandmother could’ve found him.”

Celeste’s reasons made sense, but Faith could only imagine what kind of skeptical spin someone like Roy Chopin would put on them.

“Wait a minute, there,” challenged Celeste. “What’s with that face? You don’t believe me? I wasn’t going to charge you, girl, but if you start pulling an attitude on me…”

That, and the scolding expression Celeste wore, was enough to drag a smile out of Faith. “I was just thinking how easy it is for other people who don’t believe to dismiss what you do. Baseball players don’t always hit the ball, do they? And yet they’re still called baseball players. And sometimes a doctor’s patient dies—”

“Don’t I know it,” agreed Celeste.

“—but he’s still a doctor. It’s as if some people want to disbelieve.”

“Mmm-hmm.” Celeste took a sip from her tall glass of tea. “Does this ‘some people’ have a name?”

“He’s just some man I decided not to go out with.”

“I hope you didn’t pull away just because the poor boy doesn’t believe you’re psychic.”

“I don’t believe I’m psychic.”

Celeste considered that, as if weighing several items, then shifted in her chair. “First of all, don’t you make the mistake of tuning out anyone who can’t see what we see. I’ve been there and done that, girl, and it’s no good. My husband, he didn’t believe in my abilities when we started dating, but it was my pride got in the way, not his disbelief. Love’s the real power, not anyone’s ability to read thoughts or speak to the dead or see the future. Love’s the ultimate good.”

Love? That sounded so…gushy. “This isn’t the same thing. At most, maybe it’s chemistry. Or maybe just masochism. It’s done with, anyway.”

Celeste folded her arms. “Mmm-hmm.”

When in doubt, turn the subject back to the other person. “So, did your husband ever change his mind? About your abilities, I mean?”

“Sure he did, eventually. After we were already engaged. But what’s important is that he believed in me, and I believed in my abilities.”

“I don’t believe in mine. I mean, I don’t believe they’re psychic. I can feel things, hear things, smell things….”

“Sweetie, you’re the best natural psychic I know.”

“This from as bad a reader as you were?”

“Fake it till you make it, girl.” Celeste’s eyes brightened as she lit on an idea. “In fact—why not let yourself pretend you’re psychic, just for a while? You might be surprised by what falls into place. If you don’t want to out yourself, then let your inner psychic be someone else. Give her a different face. A different name.”

“Madame Cassandra?” suggested Faith, with a laugh.

“There you go, M.C.,” agreed Celeste, who’d heard Faith use the name at least once before. “For all you know—”

The door opened and another client came in from the shimmering August heat. He was a young man. Brown hair. Quiet eyes. Faith looked up at him, strangely drawn, as Celeste finished.

“—Madame Cassandra could turn out to be one of the most powerful forces in New Orleans.”

Then Celeste looked up at her visitor—and blanched.

Faith looked from the man to her friend, then back. There was nothing about him to warrant Celeste’s reaction or Faith’s discomfort. He seemed like the type the words “mild mannered” had been invented for. Sure, she sensed an edge of interest, of expectancy about him, but if this was his first visit to a medium, that would explain it. Right?

So what was niggling at her? What was she noticing without yet understanding?

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said softly. “I can come back when you’re done.”

“Get out,” commanded Celeste.

The client blinked, surprised. His heartbeat began to pick up, a normal reaction to her rudeness and yet…

“What is it?” he asked.

Celeste stood, pointed a ringed finger at the man. “Get the hell out of here!”

Then she swayed, not so much dizzy as…as altered. She’d just gone into an instant trance.

Watching, probably unable to tell the difference, the man took a deep, unnervingly satisfied breath. His pulse was beginning to race now, speeding with something close to pleasure—

And then Faith heard it.

Something strange about his heartbeat. Something that hadn’t been there seconds ago. Something she’d heard before.

In the bar. In the morgue. In the hotel lobby.

All that, and a scent she didn’t even want to identify.

“Your victims,” moaned Celeste, clearly channeling now. “Can’t you sense them, thronging around you? They’re crying for vengeance. They will have it, boy. Don’t you bring that shit into my place of business.”

Then her eyes snapped open, wide and ferocious. “They’re gonna take you down!”

The man took a quick step back, clearly startled to realize that Celeste wasn’t the least bit scared.

Faith, on the other hand—Faith was scared. Even before she recognized what she’d smelled as blood.

The faintest whiff of week-old blood. Krystal’s blood.

Even before that, Faith knew.

She was face-to-face with the killer.

Chapter 8

Faith leaped to her feet, sending her chair skittering wildly out behind her. Startled, the killer looked at her—and recognized her. The way his eyes widened, his breath caught, he might as well have announced it.

Then he spun and raced into the street. And there was no alternative.

She went after him.

The streets of the French Quarter were thick with tourists and vendors and performers this early in the evening, when there was still sunlight, but marginally less heat. The killer plowed through them, knocking over a woman in a sundress, pushing a man in a ball cap against a wrought-iron gate. In a flash, he’d vanished around the corner onto Chartres Street.

Faith dove through the holes he’d created. As she skidded around the corner, she caught sight of him again and ran faster. She also tried to memorize everything she could from the back. Caramel-brown hair. Green shirt. They pounded past a pretzel vendor. Past Toulouse, heading for Jackson Square. Maybe six feet tall, she thought. Wiry build.

Faith’s feet and her heartbeat created a percussive background to her sprint. But that wasn’t all she heard, and she could definitely recognize him now. That distinctive extra skip in his heartbeat. That scent—

Past St. Peters. She was already breathing hard, sweating. God, but it was hot out!

His scent was the same smell she’d first caught in the ceiling of the DeLoup bar, a scent of fear. He didn’t want to be caught. Go figure.

But if he really had something on him with Krystal’s DNA still present—something like Krystal’s hair, or the murder weapon—Faith would sell years off her life to catch him. When an old man taking a picture stepped inadvertently in front of her and she had to dodge around him, she grunted out a curse for those lost seconds. What she wouldn’t give for superspeed, instead of supersenses!

The killer shoved past a mime, sent balloons flying from a balloon-animal clown, and tore through the square. So did Faith, right past the statue of Andrew Jackson on rearing horseback.

She thought she might be gaining on him. But at the other side, her quarry dove under an open-top horse carriage, right between the front and back wheels. Faith wasn’t quite that foolhardy. She went over the carriage, past a couple who looked to be on a date.

“Hey!” protested the man.

“Sorry!” gasped Faith as she launched herself off the other side, landed running and dodged traffic across Decatur. Past that lay a wide bank of stairs up to the levee. Her quarry was already halfway up by the time she hit them. Beyond those, two separate stairways created a vee against the stone wall. The killer took the right set of stairs. Swinging around with the help of the railing, gulping mouthfuls of August air, Faith pummeled after him. She might be in good shape, but she was gasping for breath as she hit the top. There lay Washington Artillery Park and, past that, the Moonwalk overlooking the Mississippi.

And no killer.

Following her instincts, Faith hurried across the bricked walking path, her head pivoting in both directions, her keen senses alert. She knew this view pretty well. The iron benches. The old-fashioned lampposts. And beyond the walk, lapping at the levee’s tumble of stone blocks, stretched the wide expanse of the river, exuding its own impersonal power. The Mississippi spread out like a lake, barges and tankers making their slow way along her depths. Just to the south, calliope music danced from one of the riverboats at the Toulouse Street Warf.

But no killer.

“Damn!” she exclaimed, and kicked a beer can someone had left lying on the ground. It bounced down the levee and into the river, which wasn’t what she’d meant to happen. “Damn it!”

Somehow, he’d gotten away.

Faith got back to Celeste’s just in time to hear her friend say, “One other person. But she left, after he did. She, uh, goes by the name of Cassandra.”

Celeste was talking to a pair of street cops.

Oh, great! Faith quickly faded back onto the street, but not before she saw the officers exchange significant glances. Luckily, with her hearing, she was able to wander to a stand selling T-shirts and pretend to examine those while still listening. Allons Danse, read the first one she picked up, a zydeco shirt. Let’s go dance.

“Cassandra, huh?” asked one of the patrolmen, just as Faith could have predicted he would. “Would you mind describing her?”

Celeste said, “I would rather describe the killer, if you don’t mind.” And she said it with the kind of attitude that spoke at growing frustration.

“Like we explained to you,” said the other officer, “we’ll file your statement, but it’s not going to carry a lot of weight. You didn’t see this man commit any crime. He didn’t confess to anything.”

“He didn’t have to. His victims were right there with him!”

Still listening, Faith exchanged the first shirt for one with a cartoon crawfish on it. It read, Suck WHAT?

“Uh…yeah.” Now the first cop was clearly humoring her. “We’ll make sure to mention that in our report. You have yourself a nice day, Ms. Deveaux.”

He barely waited until the door closed behind the pair of them to burst out laughing. Putting down the shirt, Faith got the feeling there’d be another funny, ha-ha story to tell over free weights in the gym. Once the patrolmen rounded the corner, she went into Celeste’s shop.

“Oh, my!” Celeste flew to her feet as if levitated. “Are you all right? Did you catch the bastard? New Orleans’ finest is about as useful as a screen-bottomed bucket.”

“You told them Cassandra was with you?”

Celeste blinked, surprised by Faith’s vehemence. “I don’t know about you, but there’s plenty of folks around here who wouldn’t want their real names given to the police. If you heard, you could have come in and corrected me—”

“No!” Faith took a deep breath to calm herself down. The footrace through the heat and the crowd had tired her, and now this. “No, then I’d have to explain why you called me Cassandra, and then they’d know…It’s a secret. But I can’t let them connect Cassandra to me, not if I can avoid it.”

She paced across the room, turned around and paced back. The part of her that had always been drawn to the law hated this, hated not giving the police every bit of information she could, including the fact that she’d chased someone they wouldn’t believe was the killer in the first place. But to the part of her that had grown up with her mom, moving every few years and keeping a low profile, this came too easily. “Whatever you do, don’t describe me.”

“So what does Cassandra look like?”

“I’m not asking you to lie.”

“And I’m not saying I will. So what’s she look like?”

Faith considered it. “Black hair,” she admitted—that was a given, considering the wig she sometimes wore as a failsafe during her anonymous calls. “I like to pretend she’s a little shorter than me. She dresses like…like a gypsy, I guess.”

“You do have her down, don’t you?”

Faith considered her alternatives, then sank into one of Celeste’s chairs and leaned closer. “Do you remember last year, when the city manager’s assistant went missing?”

“That little redhead.” Celeste nodded.

“Krystal told me that she’d done a reading for her, not a week before she vanished, and warned her that her boss was dangerous. I said for her to go to the police, but she said a beat cop had been hassling her, acting like he’d take her in on vice charges. She didn’t trust any of them. So I asked around, checked out the different detectives, and called Butch Jefferson. I told him I had a psychic tip—which I did, it just wasn’t mine. And when he asked for my name, I said—”

“Madame Cassandra,” guessed Celeste, sitting back. Now she understood. “But they never convicted the city manager.”

Faith hadn’t realized how freeing it would feel, to have someone know all this. “Yeah, but he’s not the city manager anymore, either. There may be an old boy’s network around here, but it doesn’t mean a free ride. Once the detectives got close, he was finished. And Krystal and I were the ones who put them close.”

“So you’ve been a police contact for a year? Even before you started working in evidence?”

“Cassandra can point them in the right direction, but nothing she says is admissible in court. They can’t even get a search warrant based on it. I started wanting to do something legitimate, something as Faith. Now that I work so closely with the police, Detective Jefferson knows Faith, too. And I’d rather he not know we’re the same person.”

“And why is that? Would he be the ‘some people’ who wants to disbelieve in psychic abilities?”

“No, that’s his partner. But if anyone connects me to Cassandra, my credibility is shot. So’s hers. Especially since they think Cassandra’s getting this psychic information herself. I’ve kind of…well…”

“Oh, sweetie. Don’t stop now.”

“I might have told the partner that Cassandra was one of the most powerful readers in the city.”

Celeste’s smile widened. “And you thought you were lying?”

But Faith didn’t want to go there again. “So you’ll keep my secret?”

“I told ’em Cassandra was with me. As far as I’m concerned, that’s who it was. It’s not like they believe I saw the killer anyway. Or that I could know it was him.”

“How did you know? What did you see?”

“I didn’t see anybody—except him, I mean. That’s not how it works. I heard them. The loudest voice was Krystal’s.”

Faith hadn’t expected her breath to catch in her throat like that, her heart to squeeze quite that tightly. Krystal dead was bad enough. Krystal haunting her murderer…

Then something else distracted her. “But not just Krystal? Oh, my God. Who else?”

Celeste hesitated, studying her rings, then looked up with a new determination in her dark gaze. “Madame Cassandra, how about you and me go ask Krystal ourselves?”

Butch picked up on the second ring. “Jefferson here.”

“Hello there, Detective Sergeant,” drawled Faith.

Celeste widened her eyes, surprised by the fake Virginian accent. Standing across the counter from her, using her shop’s phone, Faith shrugged. She had to disguise her voice somehow, didn’t she?

“Well if it isn’t Miss Cassie!” greeted Butch, sounding as delighted as ever. “How’re you doing? I hear you had some excitement this evening.”

So Faith hadn’t imagined the patrolmen’s reaction to her fake name. “Not enough excitement for you and that partner of yours to bother with now, was it? Don’t you think my friend Celeste is important enough to rate detectives?”

Roy was saying something at the same time—something about “again?” and “feeding you now?”

After an echoing rustle—covering the phone—Butch whispered, “I’ll tell you if you give her a chance.” Then his voice got clearer. He was addressing her again. “We meant no disrespect to your medium friend, Miss Cassie.”

In the background she heard, “You’ve got to be shitting me.”

“It’s just that sometimes we have to, you know, delegate.”

“The problem with delegating is, sometimes you don’t get the whole message passed on,” Faith warned. “Did those nice officers tell you what a close look Celeste got at the killer?”

“The alleged killer,” Butch corrected her.

“They didn’t offer to have her see a composite sketch artist or anything.”

“The sketch artists cost money, Miss Cassie.”

Faith ignored the bark of laughter—not Butch’s—that followed his statement. Had she really considered dating that jerk?

“Here’s what she’s going to do, being such a good citizen and all,” she drawled, glancing back at Celeste. “She’s going to get one of the street artists to draw the man she saw, off her description. Then she’ll get that picture to you, just in case. Then when you catch the man, you can owe her a big apology. How’s that?”

“We appreciate any help,” Butch assured her. “If we catch the fellow, and it’s the man in her picture, then we’ll be happy to apologize.”

In the background: “Or arrest her as an accomplice.”

“Since you’re so appreciative, I’ve got more information,” Faith said. “You’re dealing with a serial killer.”

There was a long pause while Butch mumbled that announcement. Then he said, “I reckon you’ve heard tell of that note from the Biltmore, Miss Cassie, but that’s not enough—”

“He’s killed three people,” she insisted. “Krystal Tanner, and two others before her. The first one doesn’t seem to have been premeditated, but he liked the taste. That’s when he went after the second one. All three were women, Detective Sergeant. And all three may have been psychics.”

“It would surely help if you could provide their names.”

This was where psychic information so often fell short. Krystal hadn’t been sure. The first girl had died ten, even fifteen years before, and had been reduced to a bare wisp of lingering anguish. But the second…“The second woman’s name started with a P. Pamela, or maybe Patricia.”

Again, Butch passed on the information. Roy tried to whisper, but Faith didn’t need her keen hearing to hear him say, “Or Prudence or Peppermint Patty. Does she expect—”

“Tell your partner,” she drawled, finding a certain amount of freedom in her Cassandra persona, “that he’s a horse’s ass.”

Celeste covered her mouth with a ringed hand to stifle a laugh, and Faith pressed her lips together. This anonymity thing was more fun than she’d expected.

“Well tell your psychic friend,” called Roy at the phone, after Butch passed on the message, “that she’s a fake and a coward. If she really had information, she’d bring it to us in person so we could see if she’s legitimate. Instead, she’s just wasting our time.”

Faith gritted her teeth. “Two other women, Detective Sergeant. Both psychics. Both strangled. That shouldn’t be so hard to find. You take care now, all right?”

“You, too, Miss Cassie. And thank you kindly.”

She hung up. She didn’t think they’d been trying to track her this time—the noise in the background had been the bustle of the police station, not the drone of a car. Still, she meant to go out the back way, just in case.

“You’ve got a ride home, right?” she asked Celeste, glad to return to her usual voice. “He knows where you work, now.”

“I don’t think he’ll be coming back any time soon. He knows I can tell him what he doesn’t want to hear,” Celeste said. “What he killed some girls to keep quiet. But yes, I’ll have Ben pick me up. How ’bout you?”

“Supposedly I’m in greater danger from a gang from Storyville than I am from him,” said Faith. “But the sun isn’t down yet. I’ll hurry.”

“I’ll go by Evan’s stall and look at the picture you describe to him,” Celeste promised. “Then I’ll take it to the precinct.”

“Thanks.” Faith knew she should leave—she was fighting daylight and, just as important, the possibility that even now Butch and Roy were heading for Celeste’s shop. But a one-word thank-you seemed so…insignificant.

Maybe Celeste hadn’t been able to connect with Faith’s father. But she’d done something almost as magical. She’d connected with Faith.

“Get on with it,” insisted her new friend, seeming to understand.

So Faith slipped out the back, glad to hear the lock turn behind her.

Damn it. Damn it. DAMN IT!

He hadn’t enjoyed His run-in with the medium, even before that troublesome blonde had come after Him. Like those other psychics whose power He’d taken could be any threat to Him. Crying for vengeance? They should be crying for mercy!

And what was that about the powerful Madame Cassandra? If there was someone that powerful in the city, He meant to have her.

The Master had mentioned Cassandra, too. He said that she was the one He had to go after. But neither of them knew how to find her. And He needed more power first. He needed to drink more pain….

After a day of planning, calming down from the disturbing encounter, He went about doing just that.

The victim He chose had returned to the Moonwalk. That popular spot that had nothing to do with the moon, despite the fine view when it was full, and everything to do with former mayor Moon Landrieu. Some people thought that was power, having landmarks named after you. He and the Master both knew better. Power came down to making people do what you wanted them to do.

And right now, He wanted someone to die.

No matter who else this one was, she was a psychic. Hadn’t He seen her at the psychic fair? The fact that she’d been drawn to the river, where He felt the safest, just made His success all the more fated. At several places along the levee, wooden stairways angled right down into the water. That’s where she went, like a deer drawn to a salt lick. She wandered to the edge of the mighty Mississippi, sat on the wooden steps and stared out at the seemingly tiny buildings far across the river, the maritime traffic in between, the lit expanse of the Huey P. Long Bridge.

She didn’t seem to notice that He’d already broken the bulb of the street lamp nearest the head of the stairs. Maybe she thought it being Sunday night would protect her. Saxophone music from the Moonwalk and jazz from Jackson Square beyond filtered through the sultry, humid August night.

He crept down the stairs behind her.

If she heard Him, she didn’t react. Perhaps her thoughts were that heavy, this night. More likely, it was His magical protection, being in this safe place. He was barely a foot behind her when her head came up—

Which was all He needed.

He looped the red silk cord around the blonde’s throat and yanked, hard, upward, backward. She cried out, but not loudly enough to be heard over the saxophone and the jazz. People didn’t ever die as easily as He would like. Her feet kicked, one of them splashing into the lapping edge of the Mississippi. Her ringed hands clawed back, not at her throat—not like that fool the previous week—but toward His hands. It wouldn’t do her any good. He wore leather gloves with high cuffs. Her fingernails scrabbled uselessly, increasingly frantic.

He pulled harder, tighter, His forearms trembling. In the tension of the cord, He could feel the inexorable damage to her throat. And then—

Oh, God, yes! Amplification.

As she died, all her powers, all her abilities rushed into Him. It felt the way sex was supposed to feel. It felt like strength. It felt like control.

Yes! Yes, yes, yes…

Yes.

He sprawled backward onto the step, panting, physically and literally drained. If she could see Him now, she would probably say He was glowing, pulsing with energy, with dominance. That’s what she’d been good at, according to the program at the psychic fair. She read auras.

But that’s why He couldn’t stay, now—someone else might see the light He gave off! There were, after all, too many witches around here.

He quickly threw a handful of protective salt down, and sliced off a long hank of her hair, to add to His collection. He pocketed both the hair and the cord, in which He had captured her excess energy.

He considered rolling her body into the river…it would be so easy, and the Mississippi rarely gave up her dead. But no. If He left her, then the other psychics would know about it. They’d fear Him even more. And that’s what He wanted.

He was perfectly safe. There was a huge expanse of running water right beside her, to contain her, to protect Him.

Sated, satisfied, He climbed the steps back to the Moonwalk, made sure nobody was watching, then headed toward the riverboat landing. He could choose His own prey, now. That’s how strong He’d become.

Even the Master couldn’t control Him, now.

Nobody could. He could do anything He wanted.

And that’s how He liked it.

Chapter 9

The phone in the den screamed through the dark apartment.

Faith switched on her bedside lamp. She never fumbled for it; she could feel where it was, which Moonsong used to say was odd.

Light blossomed in her room as the phone rang a second time. Even as Faith padded into the hallway, then the den, she saw lights come on in Evan’s room and saw light spilling out of Absinthe and Krystal’s—rather, Moonsong’s—open door. They had only the one phone, which Absinthe was reaching for as it rang a third time.

At least Absinthe had pulled on a shorty robe; she tended to sleep nude. Faith wore boxers and a tank top. Moonsong, in a filmy white nightgown that contrasted mistily against her dark skin, hugged herself. Her eyes were as big as a heroine’s in an anime cartoon.

“Something awful has happened,” she whispered.

Absinthe looked strange, even vulnerable, without her heavy makeup. She broke that impression when she picked up the phone with the words, “It’s three in the fucking morning. What the hell do you want?”

“’Sup?” murmured Evan, arriving last in a pair of pj bottoms. He usually woke up faster than that. Then again, Faith had kept him up late the past two nights sketching a passing likeness of the killer, based on her keen observations.

Absinthe thrust the phone, stiff-armed, in their direction. “It’s for Faith.”

Faith’s first step was hesitant, then she hurried. You didn’t have to be psychic to fear phone calls this late at night. “Is it my mom?”

“No, it’s that anthropoid detective.” Absinthe passed over the phone and shuffled back toward her room, black-dyed hair spiking in strange directions. “Teach him how to tell time, will you? I’ve heard some simians are clever that way.”

Faith pressed the receiver to her ear. “Roy?”

It seemed too dark, too soon since she’d been dreaming, to call him Detective Chopin.

“You’ve got some sweet friends there,” he said. But surely he hadn’t called to gripe about Absinthe.

“Is something wrong?”

“No. Sort of. I shouldn’t have called.” He seemed to be overthinking each set of words, as if he were drunk or very tired. Or both.

Faith sank into the overstuffed sofa, waving the others away. Waving Evan and Moonsong away, at least. Absinthe had already given up on the lot of them.

At least, if he shouldn’t have called, this couldn’t have been an emergency. Right?

“Well, you did call,” said Faith. “And I’m awake now. So talk to me. What’s up?”

“I just…uh…” More hesitation on his end made her distinctly uncomfortable. She hadn’t thought of Roy Chopin as the kind of guy who hesitated so much. “I wanted to apologize, okay? For contacting your mother after you broke the date. For being a jerk when you called me on it.”

Faith pulled her feet up onto the sofa, drew her bare knees to her chest. Whatever had happened, it had upset him. “I was less than nice when I called you on it.”

“Yeah.” He snorted, but his amusement seemed short-lived. “It’s just…it comes with the job,” he admitted then. “Suspecting people. We call it the asshole theory. The longer you do the work, the more assholes you think are out there. Bad enough when I was in uniform, but now, working homicide—nothing shocks you. It twists how you look at the world. That’s why Butch thinks…”

Faith wasn’t sure what to say about something that sad—especially since he may have been right to suspect her mother. “What does Butch think?”

“It’s stupid. It’s about personal lives and balance. It doesn’t matter.”

Oookay. “So…you’re apologizing?”

“The words I wanted to apologize mean something else to you?”

Now that sounded more like Roy. “Then I forgive you.”

“Don’t dip too deep into your generosity fund there, Corbett.”

“Why’d you decide to apologize at three in the freakin’ morning?”

His heavy exhalation of breath was his only response. Again she thought drunk or exhausted. Or both.

Oh, god. This couldn’t be good. “Roy?”

“Don’t change, hon. And tell your roommates to be extra careful, okay?”

“Roy?”

“I can’t talk about the rest just now. Business as usual. You’ll catch the highlights at work tomorrow. By which I mean, today. Damn. I shouldn’t—”

“I’m glad you called,” Faith insisted, before he could dig himself in deeper. She’d worked with cops long enough to know that sometimes, they really couldn’t give more specifics. If it involved her personally, he could have said more. Since it didn’t…She would know soon enough.

“Sleep tight, okay?” he asked, his voice thick. “Be safe?”

“Sure. You too. Be safe.”

“As much as the job allows.” He hung up.

Faith settled the receiver into the cradle more slowly, more than a little unnerved, and not just because she didn’t know what to make of Detective Roy Chopin anymore.

Moonsong was right.

Something awful must have happened.

Roy had been right. Faith “caught the highlights” almost as soon as she arrived at work—the fact that some of the night shift were still milling around, running tests and going over clues from something that had gone down the previous night, was her first hint. Then Greg called her into his office as she passed, to break the news more gently than an excited tech might have.

“Your roommate may have been murdered by a serial killer.” He came out from around a cluttered desk and gestured to one of a pair of chairs. As they both sat, Faith was strangely reminded of her reading with Celeste. “Either that, or one skillful copycat. A second woman was strangled last night—her body’s in back right now, and night shift is still running the evidence. She was blond, like your roommate. And she was a psychic. Did you know someone named Nessa French?”

Nessa? Oh, God. Nessa. “Enough for us to say hi at parties,” Faith admitted, stunned. “We weren’t close.”

“At least there’s that.” Greg leaned nearer, his elbows on his knees, his posture carefully nonthreatening. His even breathing and casual heartbeat were remarkably comforting. For a science geek, he seemed surprisingly focused, for once.

On her.

“Are there any details you would like to ask about, before you start pretending it’s just another case?” he asked gently.

“She was strangled?”

“Yes. The weapon left similar marks to the one used on Krystal. We’re running tests to confirm if it was the same cord.”

Faith wondered if he realized it might be the exact same cord, complete with Krystal’s blood still on it. Probably. Greg had been doing this for a long time. Not much surprised him.

She tried to swallow past a rush of nausea and focused on the soothing regularity of his pulse, his breathing. “Did he take some of her hair?”

Greg’s pale eyes blinked from behind his spectacles. “Why would you—? Faith, when your roommate’s hair was taken, she was already in the morgue. That was some kind of souvenir collector, not a killer’s organ trophy.”

“But was some of this woman’s hair missing?”

After staring a moment, his brow furrowing as he considered the consequences, Greg nodded. “Yes. Some of her hair was gone.”

She considered it. “Has the FBI been called in?”

“They’re aware of the situation, but with only two vics, they’re just going to monitor for now.” He didn’t have to add that the vics were members of a subculture that didn’t carry a lot of political clout. As if, just by being psychics, Krystal and Nessa had been asking for trouble. “It’s still New Orleans’ jurisdiction.”

Which meant New Orleans would just have to solve it. “Did the killer leave a faucet on, near her?”

“No, she wasn’t found indoors. She was on the edge of the levee, beside the river. Rotten luck—you know how hard outdoor scenes are to clear. The detectives were there halfway through the next shift.”

Faith took a deep, shaking breath. “I think the river counts as running water.”

Greg’s heartbeat began to speed with interest at that possibility. “Wait, you think he deliberately left both bodies near some kind of water?”

“Running water,” she clarified. “I’m not sure what it means—”

“Witches,” he said softly.

“What?”

He sat back in his chair. “You must have heard the old superstition. My grandmother used to tell us stories about it, the same way she’d warn us not to walk under ladders or say the devil’s name three times. People once believed witches can’t cross running water.”

“So at least there’s something he’s afraid of.”

Greg stood, excited now. For Greg. He was almost cute, worked up like this. “I’d better call the station, tell them about the hair and the water. You know, Faith, you’re very good at this. If you finished your degree, I think you’d be an asset to the staff. That is…not that you aren’t already. An asset.”

Now he looked uncomfortable, which was also cute. Greg proved many of the generalizations about science nerds, but the city was damned lucky to have someone this smart. “You only meant to say that what I do now doesn’t take such specific skills,” she clarified for him. “Or pay as well.”

“But you do it with excellent skill,” he agreed, “and deserve to earn more.” He smiled, and it lit his bearded face, like sunshine through the clouds. He suddenly looked younger than she’d thought he was.

Then he stopped smiling, as if he feared being too forward. He was trying so hard not to cross the supervisor/employee line, Faith almost felt guilty for having drawn the line in the first place.

“Thanks, Greg. For everything. I’m…I’m sorry for the scene I caused, the other day. When I got mad at Detective Chopin in your office, I mean. It was unprofessional of me.”

“I admire Roy a great deal, but he could drive anyone a little crazy. Especially if you’re…dating?” He turned to examine a folder with feigned nonchalance, but his pale eyes sought her out over the top of his glasses.

“We’re not dating,” she assured him. But since she respected him, she wanted to be completely honest. “I’m not sure what we are.”

“Why don’t I just say that I hope everything works out for the best. How’s that for appropriately vague?” But his heartbeat and breathing, which had evened out as they discussed her education, were increasing again. Was he worried about something?

She hesitated, then asked, “Is there something I should know about him?”

“What do you mean?”

“I shouldn’t have asked. Never mind.”

Greg’s squint sharpened, and his shoulders went back. “Has he been bothering you?”

“No! He called in the middle of the night, but that’s probably nothing….”

“And he telephoned your mother when you broke a date,” Greg provided. He took a deep breath as he considered his options, then said, “This doesn’t leave the office, all right?”

Faith nodded, needing to hear what he had to say, half-afraid to.

“Roy Chopin is a stand-up guy and a first-class detective,” said Greg. “There are few people I’d rather have at my back. But I’ve heard rumors—and I stress that these are rumors—that he’s a little rough on the women he dates.”

Faith felt a chill of unease at the implications.

Greg’s eyes widened as he seemed to recognize the implications at the same time. “No! I don’t mean physical abuse, not that I’ve heard about. But he’s got a temper. My guess is, someone that big and that loud can get pretty scary, even if he doesn’t mean to be. If he’s a little jealous, maybe a little possessive…”

Like the kind of guy who wouldn’t take no for an answer? Who would call her mother when he got Faith’s answering machine, just because she broke a date? Who would call her at three o’clock in the morning?

He’d seemed almost sweet, but she wondered now what his mood would have been like if she’d been out at the time.

Damn.

“I shouldn’t have said that much,” said Greg quickly, efficiently. “You’re a grown woman, you can certainly handle your own dating life. And I like Roy.”

“I know,” said Faith, standing, trying to hide her uncertainty. “Stand-up. First-class detective.”

“Are you going to be okay?”

“Yes. Thank you.” Faith even dared to lightly touch his sleeve. “You’re a good guy yourself.”

He held her gaze for a moment—and she sensed feelings off him. The interest. The attraction. The dilemma over that attraction. “I care about you,” he admitted softly.

Before she could think of what to say, he shook off the moment. “I care for all of my staff,” he added, picking up a sheaf of files as a distraction. “Anyway, I thought you should know. About Nessa French.”

Since he seemed uncomfortable with praise and thanks, almost as uncomfortable as he was with what he clearly saw as an inappropriate distraction, Faith simply smiled her gratitude before returning to her desk.

Instead of beginning her data entry, she started work on a computer search. There were benefits to being able to access the NOPD’s records this way.

Crime: Homicide. She would also look up suicides and accidental deaths, just in case. Sometimes the investigating officers got it wrong.

Method: Strangulation. She also included choking, garroting, suffocation and hanging.

Extent of Search: Three years. She resigned herself to going back further if necessary.

Victim: Female. Psychic. Blond.

And after searching for all of that, she began hunting for victims whose first names began with a P.

The search took a lot longer than she’d hoped, especially since, for the sake of fairness, she made herself stop to work on her actual job now and then. She ate at her desk. She exchanged smiles with Greg as he went out to lunch and looked quickly away when—smiling amiably back—he bumped into the doorjamb. But by late afternoon, just as she was giving up hope, Faith found someone.

Penelope Lafayette had been eighteen four years ago when she was found strangled in her Algiers Point apartment, across the Mississippi from the French Quarter. There were clear discrepancies, which was why Faith hadn’t found her more quickly. Penelope had been strangled with what the coroner thought was a curtain string. She wasn’t a practicing psychic reader, instead working concessions at the Superdome. But one of the angles the Times-Picayune had brought out—Faith had double-checked the newspaper database on each possibility—was that this might have been some kind of satanic killing. They reported that Penelope had been involved with tarot cards, Ouija boards and witchcraft.

Faith made note of the woman’s name, intending to call Celeste as soon as she was away from work. If anyone could confirm Penelope’s identity, it would be someone who spoke to the dead for a living. It looked like Madame Cassandra might have to place another call to Butch Jefferson.

Then Faith hit a detour in the form of a call from a friendly sergeant at the 8th District police station. Three young men matching descriptions that she and Evan had given had been brought in. Could she come down to the station and pick them out from a lineup?

“Yes,” she agreed. “Of course.” But her heart sank. For one thing, she wanted to pursue the lead on Penelope Lafayette. For another…

Well, she didn’t necessarily like the police station.

Bad enough that the gangbangers had attacked Evan, had threatened her. The inconvenience of being an official crime victim was going to drive her crazy.

Or maybe it was just exacerbating how crazy she already was.

Faith had hated going through the mug shots the previous week. Every time she’d touched a page, she had sensed lingering emotions and ugly feelings. Almost every person who’d turned those pages had been in some way victimized. People who’d suffered rape or robbery, who’d seen killings take place. Emotions that powerful didn’t just go away. They stuck to what they’d touched. Worse, the whole station was just as highly charged. Except for the police and the lawyers, almost everyone who spent time there, perpetrator or victim, did so on what for them was a very bad day. It was like a stain that would never come out.

Faith promised to come right over, and she did—after stopping at a public phone.

“—about a voice, Butch, it’s in the eyes!” Having been sent back by the desk sergeant, Faith heard the now-familiar bellow easily above the cacophony of ringing phones, insistent voices and office machinery from copiers to typewriters. “That’s why she’ll never meet with you. She knows you’ll see that she’s full of shit.”

Faith rounded a corner and saw them, amidst the usual chaos. Butch Jefferson and Roy Chopin stood by a high-piled desk, having what could kindly be termed an animated conversation. Roy had his back to her, suit jacket off. His pinstriped shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow, almost completely hid his partner.

“I’m beginning to think maybe neither of you wants to be disillusioned, there,” he challenged.

“You have a suspicious nature, son,” protested Butch pleasantly. He wasn’t shouting at all, but now that she saw where he was, Faith could easily follow his voice. “Could be the lady just wants to do her civic duty while protecting her privacy. I say we give her that chance.”

“Bullshit. Reporters can’t act on anonymous tips—why the hell should we?”

“Because the girl was right.” Butch caught Faith’s eye around the barrier that was Roy’s waving arm, and he smiled. He had a great smile, cheerful and wise. If she’d ever had a grandfather, Faith could imagine him being just like Butch. Just not black.

Roy made a strangling sound of pure frustration. “It’s not like half the crazies in the city weren’t already calling him a serial killer. It’s not like she said he’s six foot two with a mohawk and lives at 2348 Marsais Street.”

“Am I interrupting?” asked Faith, intrigued.

Roy spun so fast, coffee slopped out of his cup.

“Not in the least, Miss Faith,” said Butch, his grin broadening while his partner glared at him. “Roy here and I, we were just debating the merits of anonymous tips.”

Cassandra. Faith struggled to keep her features only vaguely interested. They’re discussing Cassandra.

She said, “I suppose you’re getting a lot of those, huh?”

Roy looked strangely stiff. “Uh, yeah,” he said. Then he looked down at his coffee and his wet hand. He seemed confused for a moment before putting the cup on the corner of the desk and wiping his hands on his slacks. Plainclothes detectives, Faith knew, wore suits because they were supposed to present a professional image despite not being in uniform. Roy stretched the definition of the word professional. “Everybody loves a serial killer.”

Faith blinked at him.

He seemed to realize just how stupid that sounded, and changed the subject. “What are you doing here?”

“Now, son, that is no way to address the lady,” scolded Butch, but Faith wasn’t bothered. Roy was definitely big, just like Greg had warned. And he’d been shouting. So why didn’t he seem scarier?

“I got a call that they arrested some of those gang members. I get to do a lineup.”

“Ah.” Butch nodded. “Speaking of ladies doing their civic duty.”

“You want my advice?” asked Roy, then gave it without waiting. “They’re not boys. They may not have been boys even in Huggies. Think of them as perps. It’ll be easier to press charges.”

That’s when Faith noticed the charcoal sketch on the desk. It was the sketch she’d described to Evan. The killer looked even less threatening in two-dimensional black-and-white than he had when he’d hesitated in Celeste’s doorway—but Faith knew what she’d smelled, sensed and heard. It was him.

Celeste must have delivered it, just as she’d promised.

And now it sat on top of an open book of mug shots?

Butch must actually be using it, looking for matches. God, she loved Butch.

“You do still want to press charges, right?” asked Roy, through her distraction.

She started, then tried her damnedest not to look guilty. As far as they knew, only Celeste and Cassandra had seen the man in that drawing.

“If I can find the lineup room, anyway,” she said, tipping her face up toward Roy.

“Follow me,” he offered, and said over his shoulder at Butch, “If you can survive without me for a few minutes?”

“You kids take your time,” chuckled Butch, as if they were heading out on a date.

Roy rolled his eyes. “Yeah, ’cause serial killers are known for waiting around until we make a little time to investigate them. Get the address on the brother-in-law—we’ll head out as soon as I’m back.”

It was kind of cool, watching them together. Their affection was palpable. And now that she noticed…

Strangely, as long as she’d been focused on Roy, Faith had barely registered the disturbing undercurrents of leftover energy around here. In fact, as the detective walked her to the back room, she became aware of something else. Okay, two things. But the first was simply that she liked the view of his rangy body from the back. That wasn’t surprising. At least one woman there—who, by her dress, seemed to be under arrest for prostitution—was ogling him with blatant interest.

More important, Roy had such an assurance about him, such a mixture of aggression and confidence, that the misery of this place didn’t seem to touch him. Faith didn’t know a whole lot about auras. She was no Nessa, thank goodness. But from how she’d heard them described, she wouldn’t be surprised if Roy had some kind of natural, auric shield. If so, it was sizable. As Faith followed his cocky saunter, well within his personal space, the air felt neutral. Clean, even.

Several of the police officers stared as Roy and Faith passed. Only one person, a skinny guy with a yellow buzz, handcuffed to a desk, dared comment. And he barely managed to start—“Looky here, looky what walked in,”—before Roy turned on him.

“You got something to say?” he demanded, low. He took one threatening step toward the guy and leaned into his space, suddenly seeming bigger and wider than he ever had. His smile was pure predator. “Wanna share it?”

The skinny guy shrank back in his chair. “No sir.”

“I didn’t think so.” Roy extended his hand, an after-you gesture for Faith. She noticed he didn’t drop his eye contact with that particular offender until after she’d passed.

“How’d you learn to do that?” she asked over her shoulder, aware of his bulk close behind her. Her best way of dealing with that kind of scum would’ve been to ignore him. Roy’s way had been far more satisfying to watch.

He looked honestly confused. “Do what?”

Throw your personal energy around like a weapon. But that would sound way too psychic-y. “Get him to shut up?”

“That guy? He was just posing. Here you go.”

They’d reached the room that she recognized from dozens of movies and TV shows, with a two-way mirror and everything. But it was empty. Apparently she was early.

“So aren’t you going to say it?” he asked, shifting his weight, shoving his hands in his trouser pockets.

Say what? “Thanks for the directions?”

He rolled his eyes, shook his head, and bent nearer her. He did that a lot, when they talked. “No. I told you so. You believed the note. I didn’t. You’ve got to have heard about this morning’s vic.”

“Nessa.” She nodded. “I didn’t know her that well.”

“Thank God for small favors. Well, you were right, I was wrong. It’s a serial.”

Suddenly, Faith didn’t like the way that sounded. “It’s not like I made some big prediction or anything.”

“Actually…” He leaned back against the doorjamb, with a quick glance down the hall. Apparently they had a few more minutes. “Boulanger says you’re the one who noticed the missing hair and the running water. That’s not half-bad.”

“I can be observant.” Faith glanced toward the empty chamber beyond the mirror, wishing for a distraction.

“Yeah, but at least you’re observant of reality. The crackpot calls have already started to come in.”

“Crackpots?” Did he mean Cassandra? The very idea annoyed her.

“People claiming to be the killer—we have to follow those up. People claiming to know the killer. And then there’s my favorite, the psychics who claim to have otherworldly information about, of course, the killer.” He laughed, freeing a hand from his pocket to spread expressively. “The other night some broad who claims to talk to the dead says she’s seen him. Alive, mind you. And how’d she know who he was? His dead victims ID’d him.”

Faith stared at his obvious amusement. “Some of my best friends are psychic readers,” she reminded him coolly. “You know, you really are—”

An ass. But Cassandra had called him an ass just the previous night, hadn’t she? Better to minimize their similarities.

Roy waited, eyebrows arched in exaggerated expectation, clearly still amused.

“Very, very annoying,” she finished weakly.

He shrugged. “I get that a lot. But if it makes you happy, I’ll say one nice thing about the lady. At least the medium had the guts to identify herself and come down to the station, which is more than most of the crackpots will do.”

As opposed to Cassandra.

Was he calling Cassandra a coward?

Finally the lights came on in the chamber beyond the mirror. Blinds were pulled. A police officer came in and introduced himself to Faith, letting her know what to expect, then hurried out for another delay.

Roy took a step back—probably to go to someone’s brother-in-law’s house—then hesitated, his body pivoted toward the door, his head turned toward her.

“About this morning,” he said.

Faith waited, curious.

“When I first saw her…Nessa French…” He wasn’t smiling. “For a minute, she looked like you. That’s why I called, once we were done for the night. Logically I knew who she was, but still…”

He shrugged again, scowling.

Then he turned and left her to her lineup.

Between his departure and her surprise at his confession, the negative energy of this room swept onto her full-force. But this time, Faith didn’t let it drag her down. She took a deep breath and imagined her own auric shield, part swagger, part cynic. She had a job to do—ID the perps, then find out what Celeste could tell her about Penelope Lafayette.

It worked. Instead of drowning under all the previous instances in which someone in pain had stood right here, forced to stare at the people who’d hurt them or someone they knew, she was able to feel strong in herself. Neutral. Clean.

So that was the secret.

Maybe she could handle police stations after all.

Chapter 10

It was a lot easier to be Cassandra-the-anonymous-contact when she waited until Butch was off duty Tuesday. There were far fewer interruptions.

Even then, though, Faith couldn’t stop imagining what Roy would say if he were listening in. He would complain that Cassandra wasn’t specific enough. That Cassandra was a coward. That Cassandra was a fake.

Well…as an individual, Cassandra was a fake. She didn’t exist and Faith, who gave her voice, wasn’t really psychic. Not exactly.

But the information Cassandra passed on—that was always real. Like this time. She’d confirmed it with Celeste.

“One of the earlier victims,” she drawled, telephoning from the library on her lunch hour, “was named Lafayette. Penelope Lafayette, with a P? She died February 18, four years ago.”

She had to clench her fist to keep from offering the address. It wasn’t just that she thought the detectives should do some of their own work. It might sound too much like what she’d overheard Roy demanding, like describing the killer as six foot two with a mohawk, living at 2348 Marsais Street.

But, she thought with grim satisfaction, she did now have the address if he needed it.

“Miss Cassie, you are a wonder,” said Butch. “I will surely look up that child as soon as I get to the station. But I’m afraid I have an even bigger favor to ask.”

“You ask it, Detective Sergeant,” she said. “I’ll let you know what I can do.”

“Would you do me the honor of meeting with me?”

Damn. This had to be Roy’s doing. He’d been pushing for a face-to-face meeting from the start.

“Now Detective Sergeant, you know that’s not the kind of relationship we have. Let’s just keep ourselves long distance, shall we?”

“Aw, Miss Cassie. You know I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important, don’t you? That sketch your friend brought to the station for us, it was mighty helpful. But when I pulled some mug shots, I’m afraid Miss Celeste just couldn’t be sure of any matches. All I’m asking you to do is meet with me, look at the pictures and tell me if any of those boys is our killer.”

At the station? Faith thought. The energy there she could handle. The chances that she’d be recognized, on the other hand…

She managed to retain her Virginian drawl when she said, “I don’t believe I should do that.”

“You don’t trust me,” sighed Butch. “That’s it, isn’t it? What can I do to convince you otherwise?”

“Stop trying to guilt me into a meeting just to prove I trust you?”

He laughed. “You name the place, Miss Cassie. You name the time. You don’t even have to get close to me—I can put the pictures down and back off to give you space. You can choose any of them what looks like the man you saw, and put it separate from the other shots before you go. Then I can come in closer and see what you chose. Maybe we can just wave at each other.”

Now Faith laughed. He really did seem to be bending over backwards. Except…“I’m just a li’l ol’ psychic, sir, but it seems to me that my ID wouldn’t be enough to justify a search warrant, let alone an arrest.”

“No more than your anonymous tips have been, but they surely do point us in the right direction. Once we know who we’re looking for, you leave the justification to us. You could sure save us a mountain of time, all the same.”

Faith couldn’t believe she was even considering it—but she was. He was right about how much time it would save them, to have a name on which to focus their investigation. That was time in which another psychic might not die. How could Faith even consider weighing her anonymity over that? And was it even that great a risk? She did trust Butch, more than she trusted his partner anyway.

And besides…

That’s why she’ll never meet with you. She knows that you’ll see she’s full of shit.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the NOPD put this one to bed because of the help of someone Roy had called a coward and a crackpot?

“St. Louis Cemetery,” she decided, choosing a location in which it would be very, very easy to lose someone. “Thursday morning. Dawn.”

“Number One?” Butch asked. It was a fair question. There were also St. Louis cemeteries Number Two, in the Garden District, and Number Three, near the Fairgrounds.

“Number One, in the French Quarter.” And across the street from the 8th District police station. But the cemetery was much, much larger. “We’ll meet by Marie Laveau’s tomb.”

“You do know, Miss Cassie, that the cemeteries don’t officially open until 9:00 a.m., don’t you?”

She smiled. “And you do know, Detective Sergeant, that folks manage to get in all the same, don’t you?”

“I reckon I’m willing to risk a trespassing charge if you are, ma’am,” he chuckled. “And I surely do appreciate you taking our relationship to this next level.”

“You’ll come alone,” she instructed. “If I see anyone else there, especially that partner of yours—”

“I promised discretion, and discretion you shall get.”

So why, when Faith hung up and looked around, did she feel so uneasy? No other library patrons had come near the pay phones and bathrooms as she’d spoken to Butch. Nobody was watching her.

And she did trust him, on a gut level. He had no reason to betray her. It’s not as if she—Cassandra—were wanted for any sort of crime. Butch needed her help, not just on this case but on who knew how many other future cases with which she might assist?

And Faith might be able to see, hear and smell very well, but she didn’t get psychic hunches.

She decided what she was feeling was simple anxiety at leaving her comfort zone, the same cowardly feeling for which she’d broken her date with Roy. She shook her head and told herself to grow up.

It was time to get back to work.

And now she had to put together some kind of disguise for Madame Cassandra’s first and only appearance.

Faith had to tuck her gauzy skirt up into its waistband before she could scramble over the iron fence that surrounded the cemetery. The trick was to carefully stand on the top rail, so as not to impale yourself on the spike-topped bars. A ground fog cloaked the whole of the Vieux Carre, the French Quarter, that morning. The railings were slick with dew. But she dropped fairly easily onto the grass inside the fence. She just hoped that Butch, as an officer of the law, would manage an easier way in. It wasn’t the kind of climb you’d normally wish on your grandfather figure.

It wasn’t the most cheerful of locations, either. She’d chosen it because, unlike most of the other obvious landmarks in the area, this one should stay relatively private until 9:00 a.m. But she’d been thinking of the cemetery as a tourist attraction.

She’d all but forgotten it was also a cemetery!

Not just that, but the oldest and probably the creepiest cemetery in New Orleans. Especially with ground fog cloaking the architecture of death that spread before her.

Since much of New Orleans was below sea level, graves had to be kept above ground. The St. Louis cemetery had hundreds of raised tombs, crisscrossed by dozens of alleys and paths. There were wall vaults, multiple tiers of graves two and three levels high built from whitewashed bricks, most of which had lost the majority of their white. There were step tombs, partly buried, with stone slabs rising perhaps a foot above the ground; platform tombs, easily as high as they were wide; and the even taller sarcophagus tombs, as large as buildings. Some of the crypts had huge cracks running through them. Over two hundred years of hurricanes and heat waves would do that. Some tombs were no more than ruined lots of crumbling brick. Then there were all the monuments—weeping angels and oversize urns and lambs atop children’s graves—and rusting, ornate ironwork and railings. The place was such a labyrinth that tourists were warned to avoid it except in groups. It offered too much concealment for muggers and other ne’er-do-wells.

Like, Faith supposed, herself. Or maybe like Cassandra.

She loosened her gauzy skirt from her waistband so that it fell almost to her ballet shoes, drew on her elbow gloves and fastened across her nose the veiling she’d borrowed from Moonsong, whose main form of exercise was belly dancing. She was already wearing her black wig and a decent amount of Krystal’s old jewelry—the mystical jewelry that Krystal’s mother hadn’t wanted. She’d used Absinthe’s gothic eyeliner and mascara. Copiously.

She didn’t plan on letting Butch close enough to get a good look at her. But just in case, she had every intention of looking like someone named Madame Cassandra, not Faith Corbett.

And if Butch recognized her anyway…well, she’d default to simply begging him to keep her secret.

The problem with meeting at dawn, she decided as she made her way from one tomb to the next cloaked in the stillness and the mist, was that to get there early, she had to arrive before dawn. The sky wasn’t even graying yet. She had excellent eyesight, even in the dark, but still…

She kind of hoped Butch was armed. For his own safety.

Many of the tombs which Faith passed had flowers and votive candles, or offerings of food and hoodoo money. But none had more offerings than that of the notorious vodoun queen, Marie Laveau. Her vault stood twice as high as Faith, its plaster finish worn off the brick in many places, and it was marred all over with X’s that had been scratched into it by believers and amateurs alike. Legend had it that if you drew three X’s, or tapped on the tomb three times, or turned in three circles and made a wish, the long-dead queen might yet grant it.

Waiting nearby, in the shelter of another tomb across the alley from Laveau’s, Faith wasn’t particularly tempted to make a wish. She wasn’t sure what she’d wish for—and she definitely didn’t like entering bargains without knowing the price.

Luckily, even as the sky edged toward gray, she heard Butch coming. He wasn’t trying to be particularly quiet. In fact, he was softly whistling a jazz tune that she’d heard him whistle before.

Creepy as this place was, Faith appreciated his effort.

“Why, Detective Sergeant Jefferson,” she drawled, stepping out from her shelter when he got close enough. “Aren’t you prompt?”

He started, then grinned through the mist at her. “Miss Cassie, as I live and breathe. May I say that it is a pleasure to meet you at last.”

But he didn’t try coming closer. She appreciated that, too.

“You said you had some pictures for me to look at?”

“I do. It’s a mite bit dark, so I brought a flashlight, too. How about I leave them right here for a few minutes?” And he placed the folder he’d carried, as well as the promised light, on one of the platform tombs.

Then, as promised, he backed away.

“You are a gentleman, sir,” said Faith, stepping up to the ghostly white tomb and opening the folder. The elbow gloves, she thought, had been an excellent idea. Less chance of fingerprints.

Also, as she looked at one photocopied picture, then the next, then the next, she didn’t run as much risk of picking negative energy off of them as she had at the station.

Unfortunately…

“I’ve got some bad news for you, Detective Sergeant,” she said, closing the folder. “None of these boys is your killer.”

“Are you sure?”

“My night vision is excellent, and so is my recall. You’re looking for somebody else.”

And she backed away, though not as far as she’d started.

“Well, that is a shame,” said Butch. “But I do appreciate you helping us cross those fellows off the list. Have you gotten any more…?”

“Visions?” she supplied. “I suppose that’s as good a term as any. Nothing since yesterday, but I promise you, Detective Sergeant, I will keep my radar turned on. Have you learned anything more about poor Penelope Lafayette?”

“Not very much, but I will confess to you, Miss Cassandra, I’ve been working that lead alone so far. As you have so aptly noted in the past, my partner is something of a…” He searched for the right word.

For some reason, her nose itched. “I believe I called him a horse’s ass?”

“I would have used the word cynic, ma’am, as it does him more justice. But as soon as I can make some connection that he will believe, we will follow up on that excellent piece of information. If you—”

Faith heard it then, the softest of footsteps, and her head came up. She lifted a gloved hand. “Someone’s here,” she warned, straining for the sound of breathing, of a heartbeat. “You said you’d come alone.”

“I promise you, Miss Cassie, if anyone’s here, it’s not of my—”

But something clicked as he spoke, a soft, metallic sound. Twice. Three times. And Butch didn’t finish his sentence.

Someone shot him first.

Butch dropped to his knees, clutching a hand to his chest, looking surprised.

Faith cried out, more from shock than fear. She tried to step closer to him and spin toward the flash of muzzle flame at the same time.

Then she saw the muzzle of the gun pointed at her, and instinct took over.

She dove for cover, even as another shot exploded through the silence. Its echo ricocheted eerily among the crypts. She suspected they would muffle its noise from the nearby station.

Oh God oh God oh God. How had this happened? Why hadn’t she sensed the man’s presence, at least smelled him? She still didn’t smell him, but she could hear him now, the thrumming of his excited heartbeat, his footsteps crunching closer.

“Cassandra?” he whispered eerily, and her heart almost stopped. “I know you’re here.”

He wasn’t after her as Faith. He wasn’t even after the cop he’d just shot.

He was after the contact?

Beyond the whisper and the footsteps, she heard Butch moan.

The gunman had to already know where she was. She took a chance and screamed, “Butch, call for help!”

Then she scrambled to her feet and ducked around another tomb, even as the gunman’s footsteps sped toward her cry.

Butch only moaned again. She felt sick with the fear that, between pain and his gurgling breath, he couldn’t call for anything. It would be up to her.

And she didn’t have a gun. Or even a freaking phone!

The gunman—the serial killer?—came nearer.

Faith ducked around another vault, into the mist.

It was a game of cat and mouse—and she’d never wanted to be the mouse. But go figure, her one night of self-defense for women hadn’t taught her how to disarm someone. The basic rules concerning armed attackers were pretty simple. If they want something you can live without, give it to them and live. If they want more, like to take you to a secondary crime scene, better to run. Except for trained professionals, most shooters missed most of the time, at least from a distance of over five feet.

It occurred to Faith that the man creeping after her had hit Butch with his first shot, in the fog, from at least twenty feet away. That didn’t sound like an amateur.

But who?

In any case, she wasn’t leaving Butch.

Seizing inspiration, she tied her excess skirts into a knot and used the wrought-iron fencework around an oversize family crypt to clamber onto its stone surface. She slid onto its whitewashed roof, onto her stomach, and peeked over the edge. Her perch was maybe as high as a garden shed, maybe a garage.

She saw the gunman now, a man dressed in gray, wearing a stocking over his head and creeping in her direction. He still had a pistol in his hand. And damn it, she didn’t.

She had to get rid of him, not just for her own protection but to go to Butch!

Then Faith realized how she could solve both those problems at once. Butch had a gun!

If only she didn’t have to cross an entire alley, ten feet of open space, to get to it.

“Madame Cassandra?” The gunman had circled the tomb that first hid her. Now he was looking down the different paths she could have taken—still, thank goodness, looking at the ground. He was still hissing his words in a strange whisper, eerily unlike a human voice. “Come out and die.”

Faith peered over the edge of the crypt, judged the distance to its neighbor as a workable four feet, and carefully rose into a crouch. One…

She tried not to be scared.

Two…

It was only what, twelve feet to the ground? Thirteen?

Three! She ran. Jumped. Landed and dropped to her bare knees with the barest scuffling noise before, she hoped, he could see her. Then she listened.

His footsteps sounded farther away. “You can’t avoid me forever, Cassandra.”

Oh yeah?

She did it again. And again. The third time, she misjudged the distance. One of her feet slipped as she landed, and she scraped her shin. But she managed to clamber back up to safety, then to look over the edge of that tomb.

The sky had definitely lightened to gray, but it was overcast. Wisps of fog still drifted amidst the City of the Dead. The gunman was a ways down the alley, nearer Butch—she didn’t like that part—but not looking this far for her. She had to take the chance of sliding her feet off the crypt roof, then her legs, then—

Her gloved hands scrabbled at whitewashed plaster as she slid all the way off and dropped to the grass below.

“Even if you run, I’ll find you,” warned the gunman. From his voice, she could tell he was facing the opposite direction.

Faith took that chance and dodged across the alley. She pivoted behind another tomb, panted and began to work her way back. Closer to Butch. Closer to the gunman. Closer to Marie Laveau.

Now she knew what mice in mazes must feel like, with walls rising up on all four sides and too many tantalizing openings to all be a worthwhile choice. She still didn’t like being the mouse. But she tried to move as quietly as one anyway, listening to be sure of where the gunman was.

“Why, what an intriguing sketch,” he whispered hoarsely. He must be looking at the folder Butch had brought. “I wonder who drew it?”

She moved from one tomb to the next, pressing herself tight against whitewashed brick or crumbling plaster, listening, then moving again. Closer, then closer, by frustrating increments. Only when she realized that the crypt she’d pressed against was scratched with X’s did she know that she’d made it.

Now came the hard part.

To get to Butch, and to Butch’s gun, she had to distract the gunman. And to do that…?

“Did you run away, little psychic?” demanded the gunman, his whisper too damned close to Butch’s weak moans. “Then I suppose there’s nothing left for me to do except tie up loose ends, is there?”

Faith crouched, picked up the first thing she could grab—a large conch shell left by some hopeful petitioner—and threw it. Hard. Across the alley.

It clattered satisfyingly.

Even more satisfying was the sound of the killer’s footsteps jogging in that direction. While he did that, Faith circled Marie Laveau’s tomb, then ran to Butch and fell to her knees by his side. She swallowed back her own moan at the sight of all that blood.

His eyes drifted open, focused slowly on her face. The veil had pulled loose, in all her climbing and jumping. Her wig might or might not be straight. But she didn’t give a damn whether he recognized her or not.

All she wanted to do was to hold him, to call for help, to press her hands on the bleeding hole in his chest. But first, she had to get the gun on his waistband holster.

Luckily, he was wearing it.

She unsnapped the holster and withdrew the gun, which was much, much heavier than she’d expected. She’d never held one before. She hoped she could do it now.

“Safety, darlin’,” murmured Butch on a gurgling exhale. For a moment, she thought he meant for her to be careful. Then she realized he meant the button on the side of the pistol.

She slid it back, heard a click. The safety was off.

“Two…” He coughed. Worse, he coughed up blood. “…handed.”

“Where’s your cell phone?” she demanded. “I have to call for—”

Then she heard it—the thrum of the gunman’s heartbeat, which had been moving away from her, turned back. His amazingly silent footsteps were returning.

Butch was right. She didn’t have time for the phone. She used both hands, her left bracing her right, like she’d seen in movies, and she lifted the pistol to hold it, arms extended, over Butch’s body.

From the mist, she heard that same tiny series of clicks that had preceded Butch’s being shot—a hammer being pulled back?

She was in the open, wide open, and the gunman wasn’t. She had only one hope, and that was to shoot first. So she did.

Blindly. But straight at the clicks.

The pistol leaped in her hands. At the same time, with another explosion, she saw a flash of blue flame from across the alley. Rocks sprayed upward from only a foot beside her, but she wasn’t leaving Butch again. She shot at where she’d seen the flame. So this was what people meant by cover fire.

“We’re across the street from a police station!” she shouted. “Think they’ve heard us yet?”

To make her point, she fired again.

Then she heard footsteps. Running footsteps. Running away.

Leaving behind misery, gunsmoke and the lingering scent of…She sneezed. Was that cayenne pepper?

Desperate, Faith searched Butch’s coat pockets for his cell phone. She found it, tried not to fumble it with her stupid gloved hands, dialed 9-1-1.

Butch’s lips moved. If she didn’t have such excellent hearing, Faith doubted she’d have heard him whisper, “Taping you…Cassie….”

When she met his fading gaze, she saw recognition there…recognition, and the sweetest grandfatherly smile pulling at his bloodstained lips. This close, he knew damned well she was Faith. He was warning her to protect her identity.

“You’d better…get. N—” Butch choked. “Now.”

“Don’t worry about me,” she muttered, pressing a wad of her skirt to his wound as she held the phone to her ear with her other hand.

On a low, lingering breath, Butch sighed the name, “Roy.”

The operator asked Faith to state her emergency.

“Officer down,” she said, instinctively adapting Cassandra’s Virginian drawl. “Marie Laveau’s tomb in the St. Louis Cemetery. He’s been shot—Detective Sergeant Butch Jefferson has been shot. Send EMTs. Hurry!”

“Is the shooter still on the scene?” asked the male operator, with the kind of calm that only a trained professional could manage.

“No.” God help her, Faith hoped she wasn’t lying. But she might well have lied to get help here faster. “He ran away. Please hurry!”

“We’re already dispatching emergency teams, ma’am. Just stay on the line. Could you tell me your name?”

But Faith hung up. They had what they needed to know.

And Butch’s eyes, still open, couldn’t see anything anymore. Her skirt wasn’t stopping blood, because he’d stopped bleeding. She couldn’t hear his breath. She couldn’t hear his heart.

Oh, God. Not Butch….

Hearing sirens and shouts, Faith realized that she had a decision to make. She could either wait for the authorities and implicate herself seven ways to Sunday—in disguise, holding a gun, powder on her hands…or at least on her gloves. Or she could slip away, let the fictitious Madame Cassandra take the heat for the anonymous call, and escape to keep looking for the killer.

Butch had told her to “get.” She hoped this was what he’d meant.

She ran.

Gun, cell phone and all.

Chapter 11

Roy.

The last word on Butch’s lips had been his partner’s name.

After she’d gotten well away from the cemetery, from what would surely be a manhunt the likes of which New Orleans had rarely seen, Faith made her way across the backstreets of the French Quarter to the Mississippi. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe she needed the sense of eternity that the huge, slow river offered. Maybe she needed to decide what Butch had meant with his dying word.

Or maybe she just needed to sit at the base of the levee, water lapping at her feet, and stop shaking. Stop crying.

She stared at the bloody gloves she wore, gloves that had pressed against Butch’s wound, gloves that had fired a gun. Chances were, she’d left fibers from them all over the place. She stripped them off her arms, like stripping off another identity. She had to get rid of them. And the gun.

And Butch’s cell phone. Especially if it had some sort of global positioning satellite chip in it, she couldn’t risk keeping it with her for very long. But she had to do something first, and she had to decide how to do it.

Roy.

Surely Butch hadn’t meant that the gunman was Roy—had he? Could even he have recognized his partner, with that stocking over the man’s head? Faith couldn’t believe Roy was guilty, and not just because of how painfully her chest contracted at the very idea. She’d watched the gunman move, sly and nearly silent, like some kind of commando ninja—had Roy ever in his life managed to be silent? Roy had power to him, not grace. She thought the gunman had been smaller than Roy, too, though he hadn’t gotten that close to her. And she’d heard his heartbeat….

She blinked, belatedly recognizing something.

She’d heard the gunman’s heartbeat, rapid with excitement…and she hadn’t heard that strange skip she’d come to fear.

This may not be the same man who’d killed Krystal and Nessa. Was she now dealing with two killers?

She made her decision from plain, old-fashioned decency.

By now, the EMTs were probably arriving, probably trying to revive Butch. Would anyone have thought to call his partner yet? She doubted it. Not during the lifesaving efforts.

Roy at least deserved to be told.

Looking at the phone in her hands, Faith quickly figured it out. She’d been through four cell phones, all of which she’d managed to break or lose before giving up on them. This one was like her third. Press the button under Menu. Then Contacts. Then Roy at Home. Press the green button to call.

The phone rang, and she wondered how the hell she was going to do this. Any way she could, she guessed, as it rang again. She began to worry, on the third ring…

Then, with the rattle of a handset fumbled from a table, Roy’s voice answered with sleepy, affectionate annoyance. “What the hell are you doing calling this early, you old fart? How do you know I don’t have a girl with me?”

Faith’s breath caught with something close to a stabbing pain. He had Caller ID. He thought…

Well, it was obvious what he thought.

“Detective Chopin,” she half-drawled, half-whispered. He’d spoken with her as Faith too often, lately. But she’d learned this morning just how effectively whispers could disguise a person’s voice. “I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

His voice deepened to an immediate threat, sharpened by worry. “Who the hell is this?”

“It’s Madame Cassandra, Detective.”

“What the fuck are you doing with my partner’s phone?”

There was no way to do this except to do it. “He met with me this morning, to show me some pictures. There’s been a shooting, detective. He’s dead.”

Roy.

For a long moment, she heard silence on the other end of the line. Silence and a ragged, stunned breathing.

“The EMTs are with him at the St. Louis Cemetery, by Marie Laveau’s tomb,” she continued. “But it’s too late. Whoever it was had come for me. I am so sorry….”

“You—” His voice choked off. When he tried again, his words resonated with a darkness she’d never imagined. She heard shuffling now. The sound of someone trying to get up, get dressed, without hanging up the phone. “You’d better be joking, bitch. If this is real, if you set this up—”

“Listen to me,” she insisted. “You need to know something. Two somethings. Whoever shot him was not the serial killer—”

“And why the hell would I think it was?” He really didn’t buy that the killer had come after Cassandra. Damn.

“Also, Butch’s last words were concern for you.”

Then she hung up.

The phone rang in her hand, almost immediately, but she turned it off. He had to finish getting dressed, getting downtown, finding out that she’d spoken the truth.

In something of a daze, she tucked Butch’s cell phone into one of her gloves, then tied both gloves around the gun with multiple knots.

Then she threw the whole ugly trophy into the Mississippi, a river famed for never giving up her dead…or many of the living that went into it.

Goodbye, psychic contact.

Then Faith went home to get out of these awful, tragedy-stained clothes before the morning light made her too conspicuous.

“I don’t know which kind of psychic killer is worse,” said Moonsong at breakfast two mornings later. She put down the newspaper, which Absinthe, in a rage at the headline, had stolen from a neighbor. “Someone who kills psychics, or a psychic who kills.”

“If the psychic kills a cop, that’s definitely worse.” Absinthe stood at the refrigerator, staring inside as if some kind of better food would magically appear. “We need their protection. It was bad enough when they suspected us of being rip-off artists. Now—”

“Now they think we’re all in some big conspiracy to hide this Cassandra person,” finished Evan, who’d settled for dry cereal. “If you say you never heard of her, they ask why not? You were smart, Faith.”

Faith looked dully up from the Pop-Tarts she’d toasted and now couldn’t eat. She hadn’t eaten very much during the past two days, knowing full well that her secrets muddled the investigators’ understanding of the twenty-four hours before Butch had died, and watching the twenty-four, thirty-six, forty-eight hours after his death pass with no arrests. She’d had nightmares. She’d felt downright brittle at work. Luckily, Greg, who knew she’d known and liked Butch, had done what he could to make things easier for her. “Smart? How am I smart?”

“Not letting anyone know you’re psychic. You haven’t had the police hounding you at work, asking stupid questions you can’t answer.”

No, she thought. I’ve just had Butch’s corpse laid out in the back room.

“I’m not psychic,” she said.

“Oh, give it up.” Absinthe slid the plate with the Pop-Tarts away from Faith and to her own place. “Of course you are.”

“No. I’m not. I…” Faith searched for a way to explain it—hard to do, when she still didn’t understood herself. “I can smell things—that Moonsong spent time with a smoker last night, that Evan spent time with a pot-smoker last night and that Absinthe had sex the day before yesterday with someone who wore a lot of patchouli.”

Her three roommates were staring at her now, intrigued.

Absinthe said, “Hey, I showered.”

“Yes, you did. Twice. You used my soap this morning, after your run. I can smell that, too.”

“I ran out of mine. So sue me.”

“I can hear things,” Faith continued. “Evan’s heart is beating faster than Moonsong’s or Absinthe’s—he’s taking this more seriously than you two are. His breathing is more shallow, too.”

“You never explained it this way before,” he said.

“And if I touch you, any one of you, I can feel things.”

Absinthe took a bite of the Pop-Tarts. “Like, say…a psychic?”

Fine. Faith held out her hand.

The others exchanged significant looks. They knew how she felt about touching people. But of all of them, Absinthe was least likely to shy away from a dare.

She put her bare hand with its chipped black nails into Faith’s.

Sensations poured through the connection between them—more subtle than touching a stranger would have been, easier than if Faith hadn’t been braced against the touch, but still powerful.

“You’ve got a toothache,” said Faith. “There’s a tightness in your jaw from it. You’ve been eating a lot of peppermint lately—I can taste that. You…”

She concentrated.

Absinthe pulled her hand free, cocking her head, staring a dark challenge.

“You used to be anorexic,” decided Faith more softly, interpreting what she’d sensed. “A few years back, before you learned it was healthier to tell the world to go to hell. It left scars in your heart and your kidneys, and it weakened your joints, like the way a year of drought shows up in the rings of a tree.”

“I guess I was wrong.” Evan sat back from his cereal. “You’re not psychic at all.”

“I’m not! I mean—I know I’m something, I would never claim to be normal, don’t think I’m saying that. Being psychic would be normal compared to me. But it’s more like I’m hyperaware. Moonsong could touch your forehead and tell whether you have a fever. I can touch your forehead and tell if you have a hangover. Absinthe could smell if you’ve been in an herb garden in the past hour. I can smell if you’ve been in an herb garden in the past few weeks. It’s just…it’s like the volume’s turned up. But a psychic…”

They continued to stare at her.

“Okay, here’s what I can’t do. I’m not empathic, like Moonsong. I can’t tell whether Absinthe is pissed off or relieved that I just said those things about her. Her heart sped up a little, but that was it.”

Absinthe shrugged. “Like I give a shit.”

Moonsong translated, “She doesn’t mind. Oh. Well, she minds me telling you that. Sorry, Absinthe.”

Absinthe handed Moonsong a piece of Pop-Tarts. “Shut up, Goldilocks.”

“And I can’t look at a spread of cards the way Krystal would and tell you where your worst problems are coming from, or how things will resolve themselves. Even if I can sense that someone’s lying, because of the way their body changes, it doesn’t mean I have the slightest hint about what the truth is. And I can’t even begin to see the future.”

“Not all psychics can,” Evan reminded her. “Just clairvoyants.”

“But most have pretty good instincts. I don’t even have that.” If she had, maybe Butch would still be alive.

As if to prove several of Faith’s points, Moonsong said, “You’re really upset over Butch’s death, aren’t you?”

Faith nodded, but said nothing else. While the others finished their breakfast and headed out—Saturdays were big days for the tourist trade—she stayed home and felt…confused.

She wished she felt she could confess her involvement to her roommates, could let them know who Madame Cassandra really was. But Celeste, who’d called her that first morning after Butch’s death, had warned her to keep quiet.

“The partner of that dead detective, he came looking for Cassandra and he’s out for blood. Take my advice, girl. You do not want a piece of this.”

Poor Roy. “But he’s wasting time looking for Cassandra while the real killer’s getting free. Maybe if he just understood—”

“He won’t understand. I said out for blood, not exploring possibilities. When I told him I didn’t know anymore about you than your description—the black-haired gypsy description—the man picked up one of my statues and threw it into the wall and broke both of them—the statue and the wall. He’s got himself quite a temper, does Detective Chopin.”

Faith could imagine Roy doing just that. Considering how close he’d been to Butch, she could imagine him doing more. Celeste was right. She didn’t want a piece of it.

Which was too bad, since she already had a piece. Extra large.

“Besides,” Celeste had added. “Butch doesn’t think it’s a good idea.”

Did she mean…? “Celeste, you didn’t!”

“I’m a medium, girl. That’s what I do. He thinks his friend’s gonna need you as you, and that won’t happen if he knows you’re Cassandra.”

“But—”

“Okay, here’s another reason. You said the man who killed the detective was gunning for Cassandra, right? If word gets out that you’re Cassandra, then he’ll know where to find her. Now you lay low, you keep your mouth shut and you let them catch the real killer first.”

And so far, that’s what Faith was doing.

But she felt like an unforgivable coward. And worse…

Worse, she felt guilty. It didn’t help when Celeste insisted there was no Cassandra—there was, and she was Faith. The fiction of Cassandra was, at least in part, the reason Butch was dead. The fiction of Cassandra was the reason Roy had been stalking the French Quarter like a madman with a badge, risking his job and apparently not giving a damn.

Celeste had shrugged off his outburst. “I needed to replaster anyhow.” But if Roy lost his temper around the wrong person, the NOPD could be out two good detectives instead of one. And it would, at least in part, be her fault.

Advice or no advice, Faith knew what she had to do.

She stopped by work, despite it being Saturday, and looked up Roy’s address on the database. He might be working this case all hours—against all regulations, considering that the death of a partner should bar him from the investigation—but he still was used to working nights. It was Saturday morning, now. Unless he’d gone home with someone else, he’d be there.

She caught a cab.

She had no idea how much she would tell him. But she knew she had to tell him something.

And she couldn’t make the proper judgment over the phone.

Detective Roy Chopin lived in the Irish Channel, a narrow stretch of the city between the Garden District and the river. Other than how much fun St. Patrick’s Day was supposed to be in the area pubs, the neighborhood had a lousy reputation. Faith was surprised to see more than one of the faded old houses being renovated. It looked like even the Channel was starting to benefit from the magic of urban renewal.

Roy’s home was a turn-of-the-century shotgun house, long and narrow, painted blue with grayish-white trim. When the taxi driver dropped her off, he asked if she was sure she had the right place. This block didn’t look impoverished so much as…old. Most of the homes were bumpy with window air conditioners instead of central air. Cars sat in the driveways or on curbs or under carports, since shutting anything up in an old garage in this kind of humidity was asking for trouble. A white-haired old woman sat on the porch across the street despite the increasing heat of the day, eyeing Faith’s arrival with interest. Farther down the block, an old man walked his mutt. If Faith concentrated, she could hear the sounds of children’s cartoons or a shower turning on, smell someone cooking pancakes or squeezing oranges or smoking their first cigarette of the day. This was the sort of place where people had paid off their house and then kept the house in the family which, to Faith’s way of reasoning, made it safer than some of the snazzy newer developments with garages and central air.

The name Chopin looked to have been written on the mailbox longer than she’d been alive.

As the cab pulled away, she made her way under a magnolia tree and past a yard that needed mowing to the front stoop. She rang the bell.

And waited. While she waited, she looked around her.

A maroon-colored car sat on the oyster-shell driveway—oyster shells were the Louisiana equivalent of gravel. It was a big car, kind of square with little headlights, also probably older than her. It seemed to have been kept in good shape.

She rang the bell again and heard footsteps inside the house. Roy. He seemed to be moving slowly. She could hear when he reached the door, and then he hesitated for a long moment.

When the door unlocked and swung open, she could see that she’d woken him up. His jeans were zipped but not snapped. He’d pulled on what was clearly an unwashed shirt but hadn’t bothered buttoning it. His cheeks and throat and stubborn jaw were bristly with shadow and his eyes were sunken—but, at the moment, remarkably alert.

And he was holding a gun.

As distracting as the sight of his bare chest was—dark, hairy, naked—it was the gun Faith found herself staring at. It looked just like Butch’s gun.

After a moment of staring at her, Roy looked down at the gun, too, as if surprised to find himself holding it. Then he moved it to his other hand, flicked the safety on and tucked it into his waistband, in back.

He unlatched the screen door, brows furrowing. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to see how you’re—Why were you holding a gun?”

He snorted, shrugged one shoulder. “We still don’t know who killed Butch. I wasn’t taking any chances. I guess I’m just not that lucky.”

Oh, God. “You want someone to kill you?”

His smile was truly menacing. “I want someone to try. The same bastard who did Butch. I want him to give me an excuse.”

At least he hadn’t said he wanted Cassandra to give him an excuse. That was a good sign, right?

But everything else, all of this, felt like bad, bad signs. He smelled of beer—lots of beer—and exhaustion. She sensed a disconcerting energy about him, like he was vibrating, pulled so tight he might snap at any moment. Someone like him snapping would be a bad thing.

Now he held open the door. “You, uh, want to come in?”

Come into my parlor…. Faith had to concentrate to think clearly past the screaming memories of everything her mother and teachers and that one night of self-defense for women had taught her. What if she couldn’t trust him? Chances were, if she told him she was Cassandra, trust wouldn’t be high among their mutual feelings. Nobody knew she was here except the cabbie, and he’d driven away. Not only might Roy be able to take her—big as he was, armed as he was—he was a cop. If anybody could cover up a crime, it would be a homicide detective, right?

And yet…

The alternative would be not to go in. And that wasn’t really worth considering.

So Faith ducked under the arm holding the screen door open and walked past him, right through all that vibrating, angry, confused energy of his, past the smell of half-naked man and beer and sweat, and into his lair.

It was a surprisingly homey lair. The parlor had big, comfy sofas that she couldn’t imagine him buying, a large television that she could, and pictures, lots of family pictures, all over the walls. Some of them looked as if they dated from the 1800s. The clothing in different family groupings placed others in different generations. Some of them included pictures of Roy—him among a cluster of laughing teenage boys with a baseball cap and a bat. Him at what looked like a family reunion, his arms draped around two older women, a child hanging off his pocket. Him maybe ten years ago, standing straight, wearing a crisp uniform and carrying some kind of certificate.

Family. History. Home. He’d lived the kind of life she’d always dreamed of. She wondered if he’d ever guessed how lucky he was.

“I’m sorry for the mess,” he said now, extending a hand as if to pick up an empty beer can, then letting the hand drop to his side. Apparently he saw that picking up a couple of cans or magazines wouldn’t make enough of a difference.

“That’s okay.” She looked up at him, studied his deep-set eyes and his lined face and his jaw-clenching pain. Now that she was here, she wasn’t sure what to say.

Celeste—or maybe Butch—had been correct about the importance of keeping her secrets. I’m Cassandra would be the absolute worst choice.

“I was worried about you,” she said instead—which, thank heavens, was also true.

“Me?” He waved the idea away with one hand. As if on an afterthought, he took the gun out of the back of his jeans and put it on the coffee table. “Don’t be. It’s part of the job. We all know that going in.”

She could tell he was lying. She didn’t need psychic abilities to guess what the truth was.

“But Butch was special,” she said, pushing it.

He turned away with a jovial, “Who isn’t, right?”

“Yes, but Roy, Butch was special to you.”

When he glanced back his brows were together and he was glaring. He didn’t want her to push it. He wanted her to pretend with him that everything was okay. And he was so pretending. She could see the war on his face. He looked like he could cry, but he also looked like the kind of guy who would put a bullet in his head before he let himself give in to that. Nothing about Roy Chopin was delicate, not even now.

But he radiated pain, all the same, and Faith couldn’t stand it anymore. She had to reach out to him, even if it meant literally reaching. Bare-handed. Fingers spread.

His chin came up, mouth set, eyes desperate. She’d already warned him more than a week ago, hadn’t she? He knew she didn’t like to be touched. She’d worn shorts and a T-shirt. And there he stood, his shirt hanging open. No way could she hug him without skin on skin.

But she had to. It wouldn’t be that overwhelming, would it? In, out, quick hug in-between. She could handle that.

So she stepped forward and wrapped her arms around him—and an explosion of unexpected, overwhelming, seismic sensation.

The sensations hit almost as hard as the power of his embrace, closing tight and hard and permanent around her.

Chapter 12

She’d braced herself against the shock of this kind of contact. She’d known he would overwhelm her.

He did.

Like a stereo snapped on at full volume, a spotlight straight in the face, a splash into icy water—no, burning water, boiling. The intensity of sensations, of images, of touch scalded her. The force of him struck too hard, too fast for Faith to do anything but cling to consciousness.

Some part of her seemed vaguely aware that, on the outside, all Roy did was hold her. Hard. Tight. He dipped his head onto hers, his face in her hair, his breath a ragged sigh of completion, of need.

Things almost seemed still on the outside.

But oh, God, what he had inside!

His forearms wrapped behind her so that his hands touched her bare arms, each fingertip a conduit into untapped electric depths. Had she thought she couldn’t read emotion? His emotions arced through her. The tension in Roy’s taut body wasn’t just anger at his friend’s death, it was rage. The strain in his neck, the throbbing in his head, which he’d tried to deaden with beer, wasn’t mere guilt. He felt stupid for not having known where Butch was that morning. He felt incompetent. His burning stomach feared that he would fail to avenge his partner. His aching heart longed for his dead mentor’s advice. All of that burned through her so loudly that the usual disjointed details stayed peripheral. Baseball in the park. Corned beef and cabbage. Women. More than one. None of that changed anything. It was all part of him.

All of him hurt. And as if she’d touched a live wire, all of that hurt surged from him into her, so powerfully she almost cried out from his agony.

Except…

Except somehow, as he inhaled deep gulps of her, everything in him began to relax. Slowly. Incrementally. And in some weird feedback loop, she began to relax, too. His simple embrace became a blanket. A drug. Touching him…

She’d braced herself against it for good reason.

But touching him didn’t suck. Not at all.

Roy sighed, his breath hot in her hair. “You’re sweet, Corbett,” he muttered hoarsely, his body tensing in an effort to be a good guy. Decent. Stand-up. “Sweet and innocent. But—”

But she was so lost in him, she hardly heard. Having adapted to this much contact, adapted better than she’d ever hoped, she pressed her face to his bare chest and felt him, breathed him in return. Soft, curling chest hair and softer, tanned skin and a quickening of his heartbeat. Soap and beer and sweat and maleness. Something primal in her responded to that in a surprising rush. And then…

And then, bliss.

As if her eardrums had popped from the cacophony of him, leaving blessed silence—except that she could still hear his pulse, the catch in his breath, the funny gulpy noise when he swallowed. As if all her nerve endings had been burned away, leaving her invulnerable to pain, except that she could still feel him, feel the sudden clamminess of his skin as his body reacted to her closeness, feel the tightening of his grip, the tightening against her stomach, definitely feel the flip-flop of expectation as she recognized what his body was doing. His energy had surrounded and saturated her and now, surprisingly, she was safe there. Still overwhelmed. Dizzy even. But safe.

And without the extreme feedback from his touch, she found herself savoring every bit of it.

She lifted her face to his. “Kiss me.”

His eyes narrowed, like he was mad at her. “Look, thanks for coming out, but I don’t need pity sex.”

His body was saying otherwise, as did his scent, but she admired him for the effort.

“That’s…” Oh heavens, she could hardly breathe, he felt so good. “That’s not what I asked for.”

She might not know men, but she’d heard the one-thing-on-their-minds speech. What woman hadn’t? Roy was a basic guy. Everything in him seemed to be screaming, full-speed ahead. His body and hers were distracting him from the troubles of the previous few days. Maybe he didn’t need that, much less any more than that—but it was damned welcome, all the same. His breathing had picked up, along with his heart rate. She could feel extra warmth off his lips and his nipples—one of them under her ear—and, strangely, off his earlobes. And against her belly. She definitely felt heat there. But she could sense his suspicion, too. Basic didn’t mean stupid.

“Have you ever dived into cold water?” she asked, and her voice sounded strangely breathless to her. Actually, all of her felt strange. Altered. Especially her breasts and deep inside her, as if her insides were shifting. “And you don’t want to, and it’s so cold. But after you swim even a little, it starts to feel really good, and then when you get out it’s the air that feels cold—”

With a roll of his eyes and a groan, he gave up and kissed her. She didn’t think he’d understood her analogy, or even cared. She didn’t care either, not anymore.

Not as long as he kept on kissing her.

Understanding meant nothing compared to feeling. And oh, she didn’t want to ever get out of the water.

His lips were warm, warmer than the rest of him, and soft, and gentle. The press of them, searching across her own sensitive mouth, singed her, charred her in the heat of him. She loved this closeness, this meeting of bodies and beings. She wanted more, more, more.

The intensity of him everywhere, in her lungs, in her mouth, spiraled through her. She shuddered in his arms, gasped her astonishment and delight.

Roy pulled back, his eyes wide. “Did you just come? From kissing?”

She stared up at him, unsure of anything except that even as the shuddering sensations eased, she wanted those lips back. And if his lips wouldn’t cooperate—

Rising onto her tiptoes, she moved in on one of those hot, tantalizing earlobes.

“That is so hot,” he muttered—and buried his face into her neck. His hands slid down her bare arms to her bare thighs, just under the bottom of her shorts. He cupped her butt, and she loved the roughness of his palms against her rounded cheeks as he held her against him and ravished her neck.

There was no other word for what he was doing, either. Lips. Tongue. Teeth. Ravishing.

When he got to her ear, sensations exploded through her and she shuddered again. He laughed a devilish laugh and deliberately kept it up.

Full-speed ahead.

Faith couldn’t hold still. She wouldn’t want to if she could. She wrapped her arms up over his solid shoulders, behind his tanned neck. She held tight as she writhed happily against him, pressing into him with her breasts, her stomach, her thighs. She nuzzled and tasted his sexy ear. Then she rasped her cheek over his stubble and demanded his mouth back. He gave it, openmouthed this time, filling her, owning her. She let him. She’d never thought she could feel like this, never thought she’d be able to even do this.

She’d sure never thought it would be this instinctive, this natural, this necessary. But this was pure man-woman action, as basic as touch came. When her hands got tired of playing with the edge of trimmed hair against the nape of his neck—and he had great hair, thick and springy and soft—she started pushing at his shirt until she was able to peel it off his broad shoulders, down his bare arms, all the way off. The hair on his arms, which had so drawn her before, felt soft under her palms for the moment before he wrapped his hard arms around her again. So did the skin on his ribs, and the hair under his arms. Then she was playing with the nape of his neck again, all the warmer, all the happier for being submerged against all that bare skin.

“Liverons,” whispered Roy after a while, his breath tickling her ear and neck, making her shiver. With her hyperhearing, his panting already sounded like a roar, his moans a solid rumble, but she was distracted and he hadn’t enunciated.

“Huh?”

He narrowed his eyes in playful warning. “Lift. Your. Arms.”

She did—and like that, he’d peeled her T-shirt up out of her waistband and over her head and arms and away. She had no idea what he’d done with it, but he sure hadn’t held on to it for long. Almost immediately he was drawing his big, warm hands across her bare back—and unsnapping her bra with practiced ease. And she didn’t even care. Actually, she did care. She approved.

Now she could writhe against him bare-breasted. His chest felt even better this way. No wonder making out was so popular.

He started ducking his head awkwardly, nuzzling her shoulders. That felt nice enough, but her shoulders weren’t exactly where she wanted to be nuzzled. She hadn’t realized that her frustration was partly an echo of his until he growled, took her by both shoulders, and turned her bodily around to face away from him.

Before she could even protest, he’d drawn her back against his chest, his arms hard around her again—but now his hands were on her breasts. His kisses across her ear, her cheek, and onto her neck, gave him full view of what he was doing with her breasts, too. The pressure in his jeans, now against her butt, hardened and warmed perceptibly. Oh—so that’s what he’d wanted.

Faith loved that he wanted to see her breasts. They liked it, too. When she stretched her arms upward and back, to bury her hands into his hair again, the move lifted her breasts eagerly.

He muttered something like, “That’s what I’m talking about,” and did more wonderful things to her eager breasts.

She wriggled her butt into his crotch, and this time his groan resounded through her. And not just because of his mouth on her ear.

Because her groan joined it.

One of his big, rough hands left her bosom to slide down her front and vanish under the waistband of her shorts, under the edge of her panties, claiming another of her own hot spots. Groan was an understatement.

Explosions. Resounding, seismic explosions.

Thank goodness he was holding her up.

“So hot,” he muttered admiringly. “C’mere.”

“I thought I already was,” she rasped, her head lolling back against his chest. She felt lazy and happy and she hoped he’d do that again.

He laughed and turned her again and spread his arms, expectant. “Come here.”

Delighted to realize what he meant, she jumped him. He caught her under the thighs and pulled her up against him as she wrapped her legs around his waist, her arms around his neck. She began kissing him some more while he carried her. He generously returned her kisses.

Faith had never done this before.

She’d never been held like this, carried like this. She’d seen people act this way all the time, if not this naked. Guys carrying girls, friends with their arms around each other, easy hugs, horseplay. She’d always envied them such simple, happy physicality. She’d never thought she’d have that. Never.

Even if she hadn’t been looking forward to the sex, she might have gone through with it from sheer gratitude for this. She knew that’s where they were going—to the bedroom, for sex—without having to be psychic. But she was very much looking forward to it.

The kissing and the petting had sure proven better than she could possibly have imagined.

Roy turned and fell backward onto a bed, her riding him down. Then he rolled them both over so that she was on her back, looking up, and he was holding her down, his big body filling her world. “Now,” he mused, his voice thick and smug. “Where were we?”

And he started kissing her again.

For the briefest moment, she’d been distracted by new sensations—this was a guest room, not his bedroom. He knew the sheets were clean, in here. His mom sometimes visited to change them, even unused, despite his protests.

The kissing banished those unimportant details in a hurry. He gave her so much to feel, his fingers awkward in her hair, his mouth far less awkward on her breasts, the denim of his jeans rough as she slid her legs across them. His chest under her hungry palms, then his waist under her hungry palms, then the rough denim and whatever was in his back pockets hard under her palms as she tried to get a better feel of his butt.

Obligingly, he shucked off his jeans one-handed and kicked them away, then went back to massaging her breasts with his mouth.

Oh….

She’d enjoyed the feel of denim against the sensitive skin inside her legs, but she liked the feel of his warm, hard, hairy legs even better. And now her hands had access to his butt, covered only in a stretch of briefs. Between her legs, pressing the seam and zipper of her shorts almost painfully against her, strained something else his briefs stretched to cover.

For the first time since she’d initiated this, at least since she’d adjusted to the water temperature, Faith felt a flutter of uncertainty.

Today wasn’t just her first time being carried. She should probably tell him. Then again, was it any of his business?

Blindly, still kissing her, he caught one of her hands and drew it to his arousal. He groaned in obvious ecstasy as her fingers curled partly around him. As much as his underwear allowed, anyway.

She moaned her appreciation. She liked the feel of him, so hot and hard and ready for her. Necessary. Definitely a man-woman thing. She did ache for him where she was supposed to be aching.

But damn, he seemed big.

This might go more smoothly if she told him.

He drew up, drew back just far enough to slide his hot, dark gaze across her. She shivered, feeling it as tangibly as if he’d used his hands. Then he showed his teeth in a wicked grin of satisfaction and sank down on her again, all size and weight. He brushed those hot, soft lips against her ear and whispered, “Get naked.”

It occurred to her that he was a pushy lover. He hadn’t said please once. It also occurred to her that she didn’t mind.

She was too busy wriggling out of her shorts and panties, both at once, to complain.

“Ooh,” he said, or some similar sound of approval. He caressed her hip, then stroked his hand between her legs, explored a little with his fingers—

Her world ended. She didn’t actually pass out or anything, but the next thing she became fully aware of, as the spasms subsided and the rush in her head became a mere roar, was Roy, on his side, his head pillowed on his bent elbow, brushing hair out of her face.

“Damn, you’re easy to please,” he marveled.

“Kiss me.” See? She could be pushy, too.

“Yes, ma’am.” He leaned closer and did, and soon he was on top of her again, kissing her, cradling her in his arms. He was also pushing against her with his body, the hemmed flap across the front of his briefs taking over where the seam in her shorts had been. He was clearly ready to move on.

If she needed to be more ready herself, she wasn’t sure she’d survive the pleasure. Was she supposed to give him a go-ahead or something? Unsure, she pushed at the waistband of his briefs.

He had them off faster than she’d thought was possible, and now she could really hold him in her hand. Hot. Throbbing. Just a little moist. Supposedly designed to fit into her….

“Wait a minute,” he grunted, arching off her to fumble in the drawer of the bedside table. He kept his condoms in the kind of tin mints came in. Didn’t want to shock his mother when she went on her cleaning tangents.

Faith thought, the woman can’t be that stupid. But since she didn’t want to explain how she knew about him hiding the guest-room condoms, she didn’t comment.

Now or never, girl. “I, uh,” she said.

“Yeah?” He tore open the condom, slid it onto himself one-handed, turned back to her with a look of ravenous anticipation, and moved in to kiss her again.

“I ought to tell you something,” she managed to say before his lips covered hers. “Before…”

His lips stilled completely. So did he. He drew back, looking wary now. And pissed. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

She had no idea what to say. She could sense that whatever he thought, it infuriated him. His level of arousal just added fuel to the fire. But what was he thinking?

He saved her the trouble of asking. Sort of. “Which one? No, lemme guess. You’re fucking positive?”

Okay, now she was really lost. “Positive about what?”

He blinked, his anger easing as surely as his lust had a moment earlier. Now they were both confused. But at least he moved into looking hopeful. “HIV positive,” he clarified, as if it should have been obvious.

“No! Nothing like that!”

His relief was palpable. “Geez. Don’t scare me like that.” And he moved in to kiss her again. “I was clean on my last test, too.”

She said, “I’ve never been tested,” and he stopped again.

It would have been funny, if she didn’t want him on her, in her, so bad she felt hollow with the need of him. He swore a little more, settled back onto his elbow looking pissed, and said, “Great, that’s just great. Okay, then, hon. Give me the list.”

Clearly, casual sex was more complicated than she’d thought. “The list of…?”

“You know.” He waited, but since she didn’t know, he just got frustrated. “Any unprotected sex? Multiple partners? Partners at risk? Drug use?”

Was he still stuck on that? “You,” said Faith.

At least he got to be the one lost, this time. “Me, what?”

“You’re it. A list of one. You. Now can we…?”

And she’d thought he’d been thrown by the possibility that she was at risk for AIDS?

“You’re a virgin,” he said, eyes wide.

“Yeah.” She leaned closer and nibbled on his ear, but it wasn’t nearly as fun when he wasn’t playing, too.

Not that he pushed her away. But still.

“I actually used that word for you. ‘One of those virginal blond types,’ I said. At the time, I swear, I thought it was a figure of speech.”

She gave up on his ear and sank back, now pillowing her head on her bent elbow, her nose almost touching his. “Is this going to be a problem for you? Do you—” She hated to even give him the option, but hey, guys were people, too. “Do you not want to do this anymore?”

He laughed and encircled her with those hard, strong arms she’d already come to adore. “Damn, you are innocent, aren’t you?”

She reached down between them and encircled him and his condom with hungry fingers. “I’ve read books,” she warned, as his eyes drifted half-closed in a moment of gratitude.

“Oh, yeah?” He was getting cocky now. He had something of a swagger about his expression as he grazed his hand slowly, slowly down her front again. “Honey, this is nothing like reading.”

What he started to do between her legs, slowly, deliberately, sure proved that. His fingers didn’t exactly feel good, right away—not when he first moved his explorations inside. He did have big hands. But she loved lying cuddled in his arms so much, she didn’t care. She loved being able to run her hands over his chest, his arms, to cup his face and kiss him. She loved his burning gaze and his whispered, husky questions. “This okay?” and “Just tell me to back off….”

No way in hell was she telling him to back off. Eventually, initial discomfort gave way to real pleasure, even awe at how easily she began to accept him. Then he tried two fingers and, after her initial gasp, that was also good. Full…but full of promise, too.

“That’s right,” he breathed, hot and moist into her ear. He all but vibrated with the need to do more, but he was doing his damnedest to hide it. “Just take your time….”

Then he did something clever with his thumb, and time exploded. The next thing she became fully aware of, as her ability to breathe returned, was his arrogant grin.

“You don’t come like a virgin,” he noted. Was she still a virgin? She couldn’t tell anymore. She didn’t care.

“Then maybe you’re not the guy I need to—okay, I take it back,” she insisted, as his brows drew down in mock threat. “You’re exactly who I need.”

And he was. She needed his hands on her. She needed his body on her. So…“Are we waiting for something?”

He growled out a few choice words. “You know this is just sex, right?” He said it earnestly, his face close to hers. His hand slid comfortingly over her shoulder—she loved feeling so hypersensitive without the distraction of images and information. “I mean, it’s not a marriage proposal or anything. I want to see you again, that’s for sure—a date wouldn’t be a crazy place to start—but I just want to make certain—”

She pressed a hand to his mouth to shut him up. She really did love the feel of his lips, even under her fingertips. Especially when they were extra warm, like now. “You don’t have to Mirandize me,” she assured him. “I said I’m a virgin. Not a virgin from the 1950s. Nothing you say will be held against you in a court of law. Well…” She snuggled closer to him. “This might be held against you. But not in a court of law. I’m not an exhibitionist.”

He drew back from a deep, probing kiss. “And just how would you know if you were?”

“You’d have to Mirandize me to find out.”

“You’re cute when you’re a smart-ass,” he murmured, voice husky—but he did so between more deep, probing kisses. His thick thigh, between her legs, made a great focus for her writhing.

Between the kisses, and his hands, and his hard, hot body, she suddenly felt happier than she could ever remember. Giddy, even. “Let’s hear it,” she teased. “‘You have the right to remain silent….’”

“Yeah,” he warned, moving over her again. His eyes glittered at her with a potent mix of humor and desire. “Silent. You. Like that’s going to happen.”

She didn’t make a bet on it. Good thing, too.

As soon as he slid into her, slick and solid and absolutely necessary, she would definitely have lost.

Chapter 13

Roy slept afterward.

Wow, did he sleep. He worked a night shift, so Faith supposed that midmorning for him was like 4:00 a.m. for her. Add to that the fact that he’d sure earned some rest with her, and that he hadn’t been sleeping well since Butch’s death….

Well, it seemed important to let him sleep.

Even if part of her wanted to wake him up and demand he have sex with her again. Another equally powerful part of her wanted to slip out the front door, find a pay phone, call a cab and run. Not just back to the apartment, either. Her mother had taught her well, without Faith even knowing it. She could move unexpectedly to another state with surprising ease.

Then maybe Roy would never have to find out she was Cassandra. Or if he did, she’d be far, far away when it happened.

She lay beside him for the first hour, while he slept. At first, she couldn’t have moved if she wanted to. She definitely wouldn’t have wanted to.

Damn, but she loved sex! She felt lazy, and sticky, and kind of sore, and none of that mattered—at least, not in a bad way. For maybe the first time ever, she also felt like a real, physical human being. Corporeal. Touched. Fully, finally touched. And nothing that happened between them could ever take that away.

She owed this man for that. Big-time.

Eventually, her breathing and pulse finally eased to normal and she drifted back from her postcoital bliss. That’s when she found herself watching Roy sleep in the sunlight that filtered between his closed curtains. Watching him…and worrying.

First and foremost, she didn’t want him to find out she was Madame Cassandra. Not ever. But as long as he didn’t know, then he was making love to someone who was just as much a fantasy creation as the fictional psychic. Either way you cut it, this wasn’t good.

Also, who had killed Butch? Was Roy just being paranoid when he’d answered the door gun-in-hand? In one morning, he’d gone from being someone who intrigued her to someone she found almost indispensable. Oh, she wasn’t such a baby as to think she was in love with him. Not real love. Not yet. But she certainly understood, now, why so many people mistook sex for love. And Roy did have possibilities. If the man who’d killed Butch came after him, Roy and all his possibilities could be cut short, just as surely—

Faith pressed a hand to her mouth at the memory of Butch dying, dying even as she tried to hold his blood in. The killer came for Cassandra, she reminded herself, and she tried desperately to believe it. He had to have come for Cassandra.

It didn’t bring the comfort she’d hoped. Roy was a homicide detective, for God’s sake. It wasn’t a safety-first kind of job.

She didn’t like the fear she felt at that. She guessed she’d have to get used to it, if she wanted more chances to watch him sleep. And she did want that. Selfishly. Needfully.

The longer she lay awake, the more problems crowded through her mind. Who would the serial killer target next? What was her mother hiding? Why the hell was Faith such a freak?

Though not, she thought as her gaze caressed the sleeping Roy, quite as big a freak as she’d feared.

Roy turned to his side with a grunt and began to snore. She decided that was her cue to get up and to do something marginally more productive than worry.

His hand latched around her ankle before she was fully off the bed. His tired eyes cracked almost imperceptibly.

“Leaving…?” he slurred.

“Should I?”

“No.”

“Then I won’t. I’ll just…clean up.”

That seemed to satisfy him. His eyes closed, and within minutes the snoring resumed. Faith was able to slide off the bed, collect her clothes from there and the living room and find his bathroom.

She liked Roy’s old-fashioned, tiled bathroom—it smelled very much of him, of the unique mix of soap, antiperspirant, shaving cream, shampoo and hair gel that all went into his particular scent. It was fairly clean, although…

Faith touched the handle of the toilet brush in its plastic tube in the corner, and tried to put a word to what she felt. Mom. Apparently his family lived close enough to regularly drop by.

The one saving grace was that, as in the guest room, Mrs. Chopin seemed to clean up around here of her own accord, maybe even against Roy’s protests. But if they weren’t halfhearted protests, surely the woman would have stopped.

Oh well. So he wasn’t perfect.

Stepping into the warm spray of his shower, smelling Roy all around her and on her, remembering his touch, Faith guessed she could forgive the man a little domestic laziness. Especially since Evan did most of the cleaning in her apartment.

Once out of the shower and dressed, her hair toweled dry, Faith took a closer look at Roy’s home. It used to be his grandmother’s, she decided—half this furniture had to have been inherited, and she fancied that the old house still hoarded memories of him and his brothers and sisters as children, of his dad as a child, maybe even of his grandparents moving in right after World War II.

But she had to be imagining that part. She’d imagined having some kind of family history of her own so often, in childhood fantasies, it was easy.

She loved all the pictures, countless mix-and-match collections of parents and grandparents, brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews. Police uniforms seemed to be a running theme. She wasn’t quite as thrilled by the photographs of Roy with obvious girlfriends, but she supposed it spoke well of him that he didn’t tear them in half once the relationship was over. And considering how young he was in some of the pictures, at least some of those relationships had to be over.

The place was messy, but not dirty. Roy had magazines so old, some had headlines about Martha Stewart’s insider trading trial or Navy SEAL Thomas King’s rescue from Puerto Isla. Fighting back the weirdest urge to straighten up, Faith decided the clutter made the place…comfortable.

As opposed to the gun on the coffee table.

Moving on to the dining room, she found more recent mail and papers covering the Formica tabletop. Apparently, Roy brought his work home. There were official-looking reports with the crescent-star logo of the City of New Orleans on them; she put those aside as private, determined not to look at them…unless she had to. A stack of library books bore titles like Psychics Debunked, An Encyclopedia of the Psychic Arts and A Dictionary of Superstitions. Strips torn from a fast-food napkin marked several entries in that last book, so she took a peek. She found an entry about hair and one about running water—both of which corroborated what she’d already thought. But she hadn’t expected the third entry.

Red Cord: Protection. Power. Often used to hang or tie talismans. In Feng Shui, brings good luck. In ceremonial magic, can be used in initiation or as a belt to indicate either first-degree or third-degree status, dependent upon the group’s tradition.

This killer of theirs was certainly into protection, wasn’t he? Did that mean he was afraid? Was that something that could be used against him?

She moved on, increasingly involved. Past the library books lay an open folder with what looked like programs…

From local psychic fairs.

Where he’d gotten them, Faith couldn’t imagine. She supposed the NOPD had their ways. But Roy had a whole stack of programs from different fairs over the past six or seven years, most of them listing participating psychics, schedules of workshops, contributors, ads and more. He seemed to have already gone through them…and underlined the name Cassandra every time it showed up.

A few years back, someone named Cassandra Armstrong had offered her services in spiritual healing.

At a psychic fair across town, two years ago, someone named Cassandra McCoy was listed in the “special thanks” column.

A year later, someone named “Cass Kent” had provided a demonstration in Kirlian photography. Roy had put a question mark by that name, then written in “Cassidy” and crossed it off his list.

He’d even circled an ad for an occult shop which included the legend, “C. Bailey, Proprietor.” Beside that he’d scribbled, “Charles.”

Faith suddenly felt sick. Or hunted. Or both. Maybe that was just what being hunted felt like.

She shouldn’t be surprised. Hadn’t she come here thinking she might confess to being Cassandra? Because of her, Roy was wasting time on a false lead while Butch’s real killer was still out there. He was harassing other poor Cassandras, and a Cassidy and a Charles, in his search. She could save a lot of people a lot of trouble—but at the cost of what kind of trouble to herself?

She wished she were noble enough to do the right thing. She really did. But just now, after what had happened between her and Roy, she was too selfish and too cowardly to confess. Not yet. Not without…without thinking it through.

Her cowardice made her feel sick, too.

She heard movement from the bedroom, then Roy’s footsteps in the hall, and she pushed away the folder of psychic fair programs. She met him in the hallway instead, away from all the evidence of investigation.

His investigation into her.

He’d pulled on a pair of boxers, she guessed for her benefit. Suddenly, more than anything, she wanted to be touched again. She wanted to be sure he was still safe to touch, that she hadn’t dreamed how unfreakish she’d felt with him.

“Watch the morning breath—” he warned as she surged into his arms. Skin against skin. Full body contact. And she felt—

Instead of the usual shock, she felt a blissful completion. It hadn’t been a one-shot deal. She hadn’t dreamed it.

She didn’t give a damn about morning breath. She strained upward, demanding his lips, which he gave with enthusiasm. By the time they abandoned the kissing for air, Roy didn’t seem worried about morning breath either.

He looked vaguely dazed—but not unhappy about that. “So I’m thinking, you want to grab a quick breakfast before I report to work? For you that would be lunch.”

“Okay,” she said, clinging to him.

“Okay?” he challenged. “That’s it?”

She nodded. She supposed she should let go of him now, but she wanted to hoard this feeling. If he kept looking for Cassandra, she might not have many more chances…not that she deserved them.

“How old are you?” he asked, wary now.

“Twenty-two.”

With a moan, he lowered his head onto hers, as if he didn’t like her answer. “Christ, I could almost’ve babysat for you.”

That was intriguing enough to drag her out of her own fears, at least for a moment. If she was hoarding feelings, they might as well be good ones. “So…how old are you? Are you a pervert, or just a lucky son of a bitch?”

“I just turned thirty-one, which I think puts me in the gray area. That’s actually considered young to make detective, you know. Now suddenly I’m old.”

“You may have a few more good years left in you.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.” He kissed her again, quick and decisive, before going to shower. The casualness with which he did it—just kissed her, like any normal lover, just another way to say “Wait here” or “I’m coming back”—felt new and wonderful. And way too tenuous for her liking.

But that part was her fault.

“I brought work home,” he called back over his shoulder, vanishing into the bathroom. “Don’t mess with anything.”

“Not even your gun?” she teased.

He leaned back out the bathroom door. “No. And get used to calling that my weapon. My gun, you got pretty familiar with.”

Then, with a wicked grin, he vanished again.

She stood in the hallway for several minutes, listening to the water turn on, before she thought to go back into the kitchen.

Her life had just gotten really, really complicated, hadn’t it?

They didn’t make their breakfast-lunch; they’d gotten so busy kissing, Roy had to just drop Faith off with apologies before speeding away to work. But she saw him briefly the next day, at Butch’s funeral.

He was one of the pallbearers, in full dress uniform. Watching him move grimly through the solemn ceremony, Faith could barely breathe. The misery of the funeral, the stone faces with which the officers hid their lingering outrage, felt like standing in the middle of radioactive fallout. Butch’s death wasn’t just a tragedy—and even before she saw the grief in his children and grandchildren, Faith had known it was undeniably that. It was becoming something more, too. Something even darker. Something she knew she couldn’t stop even if she did confess to being Cassandra.

It was becoming a vendetta.

“I swear to God I’m not ignoring you on purpose,” Roy said, finding her after the ceremony. He looked very official in uniform. Martial, even. He would terrify her mother, looking like this, but not Faith. She guessed she wasn’t the first woman to find a uniform sexy.

“I know,” she assured him.

“Everyone’s working overtime,” he said. “We want to work the overtime.”

“I know. Don’t worry about me.”

“You know, Butch wanted me to take you out.”

She’d guessed that. He hadn’t exactly been subtle. “Did you want you to take me out?”

A smile played at his mouth for a minute, fleeting because of where they were, and why. But momentarily, wonderfully there. “Yeah. Still do. We’ll have to try it sometime, huh?”

They hadn’t dated yet, had they? Instead, they’d just…

Faith felt her body temperature rising at the same time she felt his, but this time they both looked away.

“Will you be okay getting home?” he asked. “We’re talking business….”

“I got here just fine. I can get home just fine.”

So with a last, awkward nod, Roy rejoined the other men in blue, all smiles gone. She tried not to liken the energy coming from them to a lynch mob. There was a cop-killer loose out there. And when someone killed a cop, nobody rested until there was an arrest.

Whether it was the right arrest or not.

Heading home from the funeral, Faith had the strangest feeling she was being followed. She paused several times, examining all the different passersby and tourists on the sunny street around her. But no matter how hard she listened, she couldn’t settle on any one sound or scent to support her unusual intuition.

She must be getting paranoid, she decided. Lynch-mob mentalities could do that to a person.

The next afternoon, at work, Roy came by to talk to Greg about the shell casings found at the cemetery. He nodded at Faith as he strode past her toward Greg’s office—that was all, just nodded. He looked tall and tired and determined, and she felt short of breath just watching him move. Once he was in Greg’s office, she had a hard time concentrating on her work.

She tried desperately not to listen in on their conversation about Butch. A normal woman wouldn’t be able to hear them behind closed doors. Then again, if she were normal, she wouldn’t be in this bind.

On the way back out, though, Roy crooked a finger at her as he passed. Still not looking at her.

Intrigued, she got up and headed out the direction he’d gone. He was waiting by the bank of elevators. He raised his eyebrows at her, feigned casual, and stepped with exaggerated nonchalance through the door into the emergency stairwell.

Pulse picking up, Faith went after him—through the heavy door and right into his arms. Sensory information washed over her, as usual. He’d had a po’-boy for breakfast. He was overdoing the coffee again. He wasn’t getting enough sleep. But the images washed gently. His embrace felt like homecoming.

“So are we co-workers or not?” he demanded, neatly turning her between him and the concrete wall, his gray gaze dancing across her lips as if maybe he wanted to kiss her as much as she wanted to kiss him. “’Cause if we are, and you’ve got some kind of rule against it, this could be trouble. One of these days, I really do intend to take you out on a real date.”

“My rule isn’t that strict,” she reassured him, and was rewarded by his mocking grin—for just a moment, before his kiss blinded her to everything else. She stretched her arms up over his shoulders, hanging on for dear life, tasting him, breathing him.

“Good,” Roy panted, after a few minutes of that. “That’s real good.”

“So about this alleged date,” she started. She saw his wince and felt him tense up, so she smoothly added, “I’m guessing until you get Butch’s killer, you won’t have a lot of free time, huh?”

“No,” he agreed. “Not much. I’m sorry, Corbett….”

But even as he apologized, she could tell he was anxious to be gone—if maybe after a few more kisses. Work to do. Vengeance to wreak. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be with her. It was that his need to be elsewhere won out.

“Well, until then, feel free to come by the apartment after shift some night,” she offered. Evan occasionally brought lovers home. So did Absinthe. Absinthe would hang a stolen Do Not Disturb sign on her doorknob when necessary, at which point Krystal—or now, Moonsong—knew to bunk on the sofa, or in Faith or Evan’s room. As Krystal had explained when Faith first moved in, it seemed safer than them going into unknown territory alone. At least at the apartment, the roommates outnumbered the visitors. “I have my own room now. The others won’t mind.”

In answer, Roy kissed her again. Deeply. With tongue. She shivered against him with pleasure at both the feeling of him and the memories his kisses evoked. When he drew back, all he said was, “Damn.”

He said it in an admiring tone.

Then he set her carefully back against the wall as if she might fall over, kissed the top of her head and trotted off down the stairs.

Cheered, Faith headed back to her desk.

Her mood changed when she heard what Greg was discussing with Officer Leone.

“—no blowback on his hands,” Greg was saying, “and all the casings are from one or more .38 Specials. There’s the very real possibility he was killed with his own gun. It wouldn’t be the first time. Faith. There you are.”

She tried to look alert and innocent, instead of lust-starved and guilty as hell. And it wasn’t the lust she felt guilty about. “I just stepped out…the bathroom…”

The bathrooms were by the elevators were by the stairwell.

“Run this through the database, will you?” Greg handed her a ballistics report and a disk. “And put a rush on it. The slug Mandelet took out of Butch is our only hope for finding a striations match. The others all hit stone.”

“They think it was Butch’s weapon?” she asked. She knew full well that it hadn’t been. But if all the casings were .38s, and only one of the bullets was in any shape to be matched, how would anyone prove that?

Nobody knew except Cassandra and the killer.

She was an idiot.

“Unfortunately, we don’t have any slugs to match it against,” said Greg. “Roy was just here talking to me. Thirty-six years on the force, and Butch never had to draw his weapon. Isn’t that something?”

Faith nodded, sick at her own stupidity. She worked with evidence. Panicked or not, she should have known better. When she threw Butch’s weapon into the river, she’d destroyed any sure chance of proving that it wasn’t the same gun that killed him.

Unless the .38 that had killed him had its own history.

“I’ll run this now,” she promised.

Greg continued to squint at her, his pale eyes increasingly concerned behind his wire-frame glasses. “Are you all right, Faith?”

She nodded, not trusting her voice.

“You know that you can come to me if you’re having any kind of problem, don’t you?”

His gentle sympathy just hurt all the more. She had to force a smile, a nod. “Thanks, Greg. But I’m fine. Really. I’ll run the ballistics check now.”

“Thanks.” And Greg and Leone continued toward the labs, talking about the line of fire in their crime-scene reconstruction. Greg only looked back at Faith once, respecting her space…but clearly concerned.

“All over the place,” Leone was saying as they vanished into the hallway.

Lying sucked, thought Faith darkly. If only she hadn’t insisted on staying anonymous with Butch and meeting him in secret. If only she hadn’t destroyed evidence….

And she’d gotten on her mother’s case about lying?

Faith walked home from work in the rain, dry under her Tulane umbrella. Again, she got the strangest sensation that someone was watching her. But whenever she slowed and looked around, she saw nothing out of the ordinary. Smelled nothing. Felt nothing.

This wasn’t the way her abilities generally worked.

Butch’s killer had been particularly silent, too, she thought. Or maybe that was just her guilty conscience talking. Either way, she vowed to be extra careful over the next few days.

“Have you noticed anything suspicious?” she asked the others when she got home. None of them did a very good business in the rain, so they’d rented videos. It was just the sort of group get-together Faith had always wanted roommates for.

“Anything suspicious like what?” asked Evan.

“Someone…lurking?”

They shook their heads.

“Maybe you should call your detective friend and tell him about it,” suggested Moonsong. “You know, people would be less likely to bother us if we have a police officer showing up now and then.”

“On the downside,” noted Absinthe dryly, “we’d have a police officer showing up now and then.”

“I already invited him to come by after shift, so I apologize in advance if he takes me up on it and wakes anyone.” In order to avoid their sit-up-and-stare interest, Faith went to the table to check for mail—and saw a Manila envelope.

From Dallas.

“He couldn’t be any noisier than Bud was,” said Evan. One of his old boyfriends really had gone by the name Bud, which was even more ironic when you remembered that he was gay.

Faith was hardly listening. She was picking up the envelope, tearing it open. She’d ordered this last week. After Butch died, she’d forgotten. But now…

Certificate of Birth, it read. State of Texas. County of Dallas. City of Dallas. Parkland Hospital.

Full Name of Child: Faith Ashley Corbett.

Her mother hadn’t lied, not about that anyway. Faith’s sex and date of birth were all spelled out. The form listed her weight and length at birth. There was a section where “Single Birth” was checked off, with “Twins” and “Triplets” left blank. Under “Mother” it listed Tamara’s name, residence, age, birthplace, occupation and even color.

But under “Father,” the form remained blank.

Name. Residence. All of it.

Absolutely blank.

More than ever, Faith suspected her father hadn’t left them. Not the way her mother had always insisted he had. Apparently, Faith had no official father.

This wasn’t something she could take care of over the phone. “I’m heading back out,” she said, folding the certificate to stuff into her slacks pocket and fetching her wet umbrella.

“Don’t you want to watch the movie?” asked Evan, but Moonsong’s gaze was more sympathetic. Moonsong understood something was wrong. She usually did.

“Maybe I’ll be back in time for the second feature.”

Faith went into the rainy French Quarter.

The St. Charles streetcar stop was across Canal from Bourbon Street. That was a walk of maybe twelve blocks, nothing Faith couldn’t manage even in the rain. It was a warm rain, this being August. She had hours of daytime left.

But if she’d been thinking clearly, it would have occurred to her that, in the rain, it was still dark.

It might have occurred to her to tell someone where she was going.

And it should have occurred to her, when she heard a dog crying in a close alley beside a dry cleaner, that it might be a trap. Then again, her ears weren’t easily tricked. It really was a dog’s sharp, ki-yi-ing cry, mixed with panicked growls, not some mimic. There was no way she could just ignore the sound of a creature in pain. So she detoured into the alley, around the large green Dumpster that blocked her view. She automatically strained her ears for the dog’s heartbeat to guess just how hurt it was—

And that’s when she heard the other heartbeats with it.

Slower than the dog’s agonized, racing pulse, but fast for humans…except for humans in confrontation mode.

Faith spun—but not before a semicircle of young men had already begun to form behind her, shoulder to shoulder, to force her farther back into the alley.

The drumming of the rain on the Dumpster must have masked the sound of their footsteps, their heartbeats. But now there was no mistaking them. They all wore some piece of green—a do-rag, a band around the arm or leg, in one case a tattered ribbon dangling from one guy’s long black braid.

They were all members of the gang from Storyville that had attacked Evan the other week. Three of them had been arrested, but now…

But now they weren’t all teenagers. And there were a lot more of them. Six? No—ten.

Blocking her way.

Faith spun back to the alley and, beyond the Dumpster, saw two more. Two boys from the first attack. The ones who hadn’t been arrested.

The scraggly white boy, the one with all the tattoos, held a small dog by the scruff of its neck, twisted its paw to make it ki-yi again. Beside him a familiar Asian kid with a soul patch grinned with satisfaction.

And threat.

Chapter 14

Twelve to one.

Faith didn’t have to be psychic to know she was screwed.

From here on out, all she could hope for was damage control. Preferably controlling the damage to her.

She didn’t have time to consider options. Since she’d rather handle two first, instead of ten, she bolted deeper into the alley.

Maybe they’d expected her to cower, or to vacillate. She’d definitely taken them by surprise. She could smell that much over the scent of sweat and excitement and of rain on concrete.

She shoved her umbrella in tattoo-boy’s face and wrapped an arm around the dog to protect it as she bodychecked his friend. That felt like plugging into two electric sockets at once—the dog’s terror and the thug’s malicious glee arced through her in a single, acidic jolt. Luckily the shock passed as quickly as their moment of contact did. She drove a knee up into the thug’s crotch and, as he bent with a gasp, again into his ribs. But those weren’t bare skin on bare skin.

He crumpled, wrenching the umbrella from her with his weight. At least he let go of the dog, which snapped at her with a panicked cry. She let it scramble, limping, for the alley corner, even as she tried to turn to meet the second of her previous acquaintances.

Between her rescue of the dog and tattoo-boy yanking her umbrella from her as he fell, she wasn’t fast enough. A wiry forearm caught her around the throat and pulled back, lifting her feet from the ground. She grabbed his arm with both hands to take her weight off her neck—

His friends had been taunting him about her since the last attack. He’d never hated anyone so much. They would make an example—

Faith kicked out and found a brace against the Dumpster’s rusty side. She pushed, hard.

He only staggered backward, his brace across her airway tightening. He’d been shot in the leg, once. His mother didn’t know what he was doing today. He liked the rain—

Struggling to concentrate, even to breathe, she drew her knees up toward her shoulders, then drove both feet back, hard, into the man’s knees. They were the best she could reach. He still didn’t let go.

Still, as in the previous fight, her aggression seemed to snap off a switch inside of her. She stopped reading the bastard, despite his sweaty skin against her throat and chin and under her scratching hands.

She could still feel his increased body temperature, could hear his racing heart and rough, wet breathing and smell him sharp in her nostrils.

But at least she had him out of her damned head!

She kicked backward again, still dangling. He bent, stumbled, then dropped hard to his knees. His arm across her throat loosened. As soon as her feet touched the littered concrete of the alleyway Faith pushed backward, holding the arm. She managed an awkward somersault over the boy’s bent form as he fell back. She was no gymnast. She ended up on her hip in the trash. But she was momentarily free of him.

She was also trapped beside a brick wall, her way blocked by him, tattoo-boy and the other ten men who now filled the mouth of the alley and advanced.

The dog, its coat matted and one leg dangling uselessly, was barking at them as if it thought itself much larger than it was.

Faith supposed she might give the same impression.

The idea made her laugh—which had the added benefit of surprising several of her assailants. But as the men closed in on her, their threat as obvious on their faces as in their smells, she feared that she wouldn’t be able to surprise them for much longer. Not this many of them.

The trick, she guessed, would be to see how many she could surprise—by any means necessary—before they overcame her. That, and to scratch, yank, bite and bleed as much evidence off them as possible on her way down. The only alternative would be not to fight, in hopes of simply surviving.

Another day, maybe she would. But for her, at this moment, that was no alternative at all.

They shuffled closer, past the Dumpster that would hide their actions from casual notice. They were talking big about what they meant to do, what she’d like—and what she wouldn’t.

“I guess you’ll know who to respect after this, bitch,” warned the biggest among them, a man older than her. He had a green design painted into his shaved hair. Apparently he was the leader.

So at least they meant to leave her alive, she thought. She reached slowly behind herself amidst the wet litter, seeking a broken bottle that she knew was there from the sound of raindrops on hollow glass. They would probably change their minds about her living, once she was done with them.

But she decided it was still better than giving up.

Faith’s fingers touched a jagged edge. She readjusted her hand to close around the smooth neck of the bottle instead. She didn’t like the idea of using it, particularly not since they’d be more likely to use it back on her. But it might be her only chance.

Maybe if she could take down the leader.

Maybe if she could go past him in the confusion.

Maybe…

“Is this a private tea party, or can anyone play?”

Faith was as stunned as the gangbangers when a golden-haired woman suddenly dropped into the alleyway, smack between her and the gang members. In reality, the woman must have dropped off a fire escape over their heads. But it seemed as if she just appeared, landing in an easy crouch, like an angel in boots and leather.

The dog backed farther into the corner, barking his confusion.

“Shit!” exclaimed one of Faith’s assailants.

The woman glanced almost imperceptibly over her shoulder. “You’re Faith Corbett, right?” she asked, then turned back to the gang members. “Not that I wouldn’t do this one just for the sheer enjoyment of it.”

In that brief glimpse, Faith thought the woman looked to be about her age. There was something strangely familiar about her. “Why do you ask?”

“I’m Dawn O’Shaughnessy. Nice to meet you. You hurt?”

“What the fuck is this?” demanded one of the shorter men, beside the leader. “This some freakin’ meet-and-greet? You just dropped into a whole world of trouble, bitch.”

Faith and the stranger—Dawn—ignored his posturing.

“No.” Leaving the bottle amidst the litter, where it would do less damage, Faith stood and brushed off her legs. That was one pair of slacks that wouldn’t see work again. “I’m not hurt. I can take at least half of them. I have before.”

Several of them began to protest that. Loudly.

“Won’t have to,” Dawn assured her. Her pose radiated confidence. Her thick golden braid, her skintight leather suit, the boots…even her breathing and her heartbeat remained even, unconcerned. Ready. “Maybe a third of them.”

Faith shook her head, confused.

Another woman, chestnut-haired, stepped out from the street beyond the Dumpster and walloped one of the gang members across the head with a piece of metal pipe.

“Three to one,” the newcomer explained, with a satisfied nod.

Two of the boys turned on her. At least five of them surged onto Dawn. And the others rushed Faith.

All at once.

It didn’t help that the dog kept barking, hobbling on three legs from one corner to the next. All Faith could concentrate on, at first, was the immediate—

A guy in a concert T-shirt tackled her to the asphalt. She hit her head, the impact jarring the world around her. She still managed to roll with his force, his weight, so that he was suddenly beneath her, where she could start punching him repeatedly across the face. Again. Again….

Big hands dragged her off, copping a feel. She drilled an elbow backward into the sound of breathing and felt teeth give under the blow. For a moment she was free of them—standing on her own two feet, nobody dragging her anywhere.

That’s when she saw how well the other two women were faring. The smaller one, with chestnut hair, was holding off at least three bangers with her metal pipe, and to judge from the blood, that’s not all she’d been doing with it. The blonde didn’t seem to need weapons. She moved in a slow, ready circle, hissing beneath her breath in words that sounded Asian to Faith’s untrained ear. When she struck, she struck hard and fast, kicking one boy right in the jaw, martial-arts style.

Two men already lay unconscious at her feet.

Someone grabbed Faith’s ankle and yanked her down into the wet garbage. It was the man who’d tried to strangle her. She kicked out at him, sending his kneecap into a world of pain, even as tattoo-boy got her pinned by the shoulders.

“You coulda just taken it, you stupid bitch,” he whispered over the frenzied barking of the hurt dog. He exuded a hatred that frightened her even worse than his words did. “Now we gotta finish it. Right here. Right—”

Then he slumped, unconscious, down onto her.

“Yeah,” muttered the woman called Dawn as, having dispatched this final threat, she dragged his inert form off Faith and rolled him against the brick wall. “Blah blah blah. Don’t these idiots know that they expend energy with all that bad-guy bullshit?”

Then she extended a helping hand.

Faith looked, dazedly, from her to the smaller, darker-haired woman.

That one dropped her metal pipe with a clang and swept her shoulder-length hair out of her face. “All done,” she announced.

She was right.

The remaining gang members had scattered. The dog had stopped barking to hobble closer to some of the forms that lay, insensible to the rainfall, on the alley floor. It snuffled them warily, looking from them to Dawn.

They’d won.

“We should probably head out ourselves, unless we want a lot of extra attention,” said Dawn, bending to make the offer of her hand even more obvious, more impatient. “I don’t know about you, but I’d prefer to stay under the radar just now.”

She had unusual, green-gold eyes. Something about them disturbed Faith…but she couldn’t ignore the woman indefinitely.

She took the offered hand—and the impressions that came with it.

A sterile environment—lots of white, lots of metal. Almost impervious to pain, to wounds. Powerful emotional shields…shields that had begun to crack. A circle of concerned women, strong women, seeking something. And a sense of closure, of triumph beyond the fight….

Something in Dawn seemed to say, At last.

And that familiarity!

As soon as she could, Faith released the woman’s hand. Faith tried to hide her confusion with a fleeting smile, but she didn’t need to be able to read people to know she hadn’t fooled either of them.

Quickly, she bent and gathered the hurt, wet dog into her arms, so that she wouldn’t have to shake the other woman’s hand. Not yet. Not so soon after…

Faith wasn’t sure after what. But touching Dawn had been more than enough sensory input until she at least caught her breath.

Holding the dog helped. It was quickly calming, in the cradle of her arms, which calmed her in return. Dogs were so simple. Hungry. Safe. Hurt. Safe. Friends.

It still cast wary looks toward Dawn, but otherwise it wiggled and licked raindrops off her arm, which calmed her even further.

Dawn stood slightly taller than Faith. The other woman, the one with the chestnut hair, was slightly shorter than her. That one smiled with a quiet grace that was almost as unsettling as Dawn’s touch.

“Pleased to meet you, Faith,” she said, her voice thick with an emotion Faith didn’t understand. “I’m Lynn White.”

She, too, had unusual eyes. And now, Faith recognized them.

From the mirror.

Her world bottomed out—even as Lynn finished the introduction.

“We’re your sisters.”

They left the little dog with a nearby veterinarian, who insisted on keeping it overnight to give it IV nutrients after he set its leg. He said it was a cocker mix, and from its level of malnutrition, it had probably been a stray for weeks.

Faith hardly paid attention as she guaranteed to cover the bill and collect the dog the next day.

Sisters?

By unspoken agreement, none of them broached that revelation until they’d found a secluded corner in a café where they could have some privacy. The delay had given Faith a chance to process the bombshell they’d just dropped on her…and to try to come to terms with how true it felt.

Her mother’s lifelong secrecy.

How very similar she and the others were in appearance—especially Dawn’s hair color, and their unique, green-gold eyes.

The sense of earnestness she read off both of them.

So, cradling her coffee between two hands, Faith didn’t bother arguing the idea, no matter how mind-boggling it was. Instead, she simply asked, “You’re my half sisters?”

Dawn and Lynn exchanged telling glances. “Not exactly,” said Lynn.

“You mean…my mom had more than one daughter?” The birth certificate had said Single Birth. Older? Younger?

“No, you’re her only child. As far as we know.”

Faith was out of options.

“Here’s how it is.” Dawn leaned across the table in her intensity. “You’re the product of artificial insemination. Tamara Hallwell may be your birth mother—”

“Corbett,” whispered Faith. “She’s Tamara Corbett.”

“—but she’s not your biological mother.”

“I know it’s a shock.” Lynn covered Faith’s hand in sympathy, before Faith thought to draw back. It happened again.

Sheltered life. Scholarship. The clicking of a computer keyboard. Recent betrayal by her father figure. Love…

Faith snatched her hand free, but not before she’d gotten that last, definite impression. Lynn White was in love with someone. But she was here, instead of with him. Out of concern for Faith.

“I’m sorry,” she said to her—her sister—at the same time as Lynn.

Lynn smiled her sympathy, instead of touching again. “I was pretty stunned when Dawn showed up and told me, too. But things were already a mess, at that point.”

“Apparently Corbett is the name your birth mother took after she ran off, pregnant with you,” Dawn continued. She had a more direct manner. “From what we can tell, she answered an ad to be a surrogate mother. She was implanted with three fertilized embryos, just like Lynn’s and my surrogate mothers were. But somehow she convinced the folks who hired her that she wasn’t pregnant. Gave up on the promise of a $50,000 payoff to do it, too.”

Faith shook her head, unsure what to even ask next. “Why?”

Lynn said, “You’ll probably have to ask her.”

“And your mothers?”

Again, her sisters exchanged telling glances.

“You’re the only one of us who got to have that,” admitted Lynn. “Dawn’s surrogate mother died in childbirth. She was young, a waitress who wanted the money to get her brother out of foster care.”

“Justin Cohen,” said Dawn. “He’s an FBI agent now. He’s one of the people who tracked me down.”

“Mine originally did it for the fifty thou,” admitted Lynn, “But…well, her story’s complicated. And our biological mother, the egg donor, never even knew about us…she only started to figure things out last year.”

“And then,” announced Dawn, grim, “they killed her.”

The rest of the story became something of a blur for Faith. It was almost too incredible to be believed. Almost, but not quite. Not after everything Faith had seen in herself. Not after what she’d sensed from these…

From her sisters.

It all traced back to the Athena Academy for the Advancement of Women, the most elite college-prep school for women in the United States. Founded almost a quarter of a century earlier, the school counted among its graduates some of the most successful women in government.

It also, against the best wishes of its founders, harbored an ugly secret.

“The name sounds familiar…wasn’t it in the news, last year?” asked Faith.

“We need to start a lot earlier than that,” said Dawn. “With Lab 33. It’s government sponsored and top-secret. When the school was created, about twenty-three years ago, its scientists fixed on the academy’s students as perfect egg donors for their experiments in genetic enhancement. The problem was how to get any of these students, who were underage and weren’t fools, to make a donation.”

“The lab planted two employees at the school, and chose a donor. They gave her something to cause symptoms of appendicitis. And on the way to the hospital…”

Faith listened in fascinated horror as the story unfolded. Eggs had been harvested from one of the Athena Academy’s best and brightest students, thirteen-year-old Lorraine Miller, under the guise of an appendectomy. Lab 33 then fertilized the eggs with sperm stolen from a clinic. The lab team ended up with nine viable embryos to implant into three surrogate mothers.

“They wanted disposable women,” said Dawn, a trace of bitterness under her matter-of-fact presentation. “Women who wouldn’t be missed if they were killed after giving birth.”

“So my mom…” Faith hesitated, but what else was she going to call Tamara Hallwell Corbett? The woman had given birth to her, had raised her. Tamara had kissed Faith’s boo-boos and braided her hair and told her about the birds and the bees. She was more her mother than this faceless Lorraine Miller person…wasn’t she? “My mom’s been on the run ever since, afraid Lab 33 would find out that she really did give birth.”

“Apparently,” agreed Dawn. “The scientists didn’t know you existed. A man named Jonas White kidnapped Lynn when she was born and raised her on his own, leaving her surrogate mother for dead. That left Lab 33 with me.”

Lynn’s face had darkened at the mention of Jonas White. The name sounded familiar to Faith, but she wasn’t sure why. She kept her attention on Dawn.

“You were raised by scientists?” Faith couldn’t begin to imagine it.

“Not completely.” Dawn held her gaze. “I had my Uncle Lee.” She said the name darkly.

“And,” said Lynn quickly, “she got to spend a year at the Athena Academy. Everything leads back to the Athenas.”

The previous year, Lorraine Miller Carrington had called an emergency meeting of her old Athena Academy friends. Keeping a sacred promise made during their school years, the women had heeded her call. But Lorraine, or Rainy, as her friends called her, never made the meeting.

“She was in a car accident,” explained Dawn, who seemed to know more of the story than Lynn did. “A rigged car accident. A special device made her fall asleep at the wheel, and her seat belt was rigged to fail. Once the Cassandras began to investigate—”

Faith raised her hand, momentarily silencing her sister. She could hardly breathe. “The who?”

“The Cassandras.” Dawn shrugged, seeing she would have to explain. “Every year the school takes in about thirty new students. They’re divided into five teams of six each, and they have friendly competitions against each other.”

“Like at Hogwarts,” supplied Lynn. “Slytherin versus Gryffindor.”

“But at Athena, each team picks a name from Greek mythology. Rainy Miller’s group chose Cassandra. Anyway…”

She continued her narrative, but Faith heard less of it than before. She caught the pertinent pieces. Rainy, an attorney who had struggled with infertility throughout her marriage, had realized that she was the victim of egg mining. An assassin had killed her before she could tell the others.

But they hadn’t counted on the determination of the Cassandras.

“One of them took down the assassin,” said Dawn, clearly conflicted. “But they still don’t know exactly who hired him. And they’ve been looking for us, for Rainy’s daughters, the whole time. At first they thought I was the only one who’d survived. But then I found Lynn, and we realized you might be alive and tracked you down. It wasn’t easy. Thank goodness Lynn’s a computer whiz.”

Lynn downplayed her role. “We can search records online that would have been impossible to access ten years ago. It helps that your mother kept her first name—and that it was an unusual one.”

“So you’ve been following me since yesterday,” said Faith softly.

“We had to be sure it was you,” explained Lynn. “We tried e-mailing, on a fictitious reason of course, through your mom, but she never responded. This isn’t the kind of news we’d want to give the wrong person, by accident.”

“I guess not.” Faith shook her head. “‘Hi. We’re the sisters you never knew. And you…’”

One of the points they’d skimmed past loomed into precedence now. Experiments in genetic enhancement.

Why else would they have needed stolen eggs? Stolen sperm? Disposable surrogate mothers?

Experiments.

Faith finished, “‘And you are a mutant freak.’”

Chapter 15

“‘Mutant freak’ might be a bit extreme,” said Dawn dryly. “I prefer ‘lab rat.’”

“Give her a break, Dawn.” Lynn reached out to pat Faith’s hand again, then caught her own hand back. She learned fast. “You’ve known your whole life that you had special abilities. You were trained in them. Even my godfath—I mean, even Jonas White knew I’d been enhanced, so he made sure I grew into my potential. But this has got to be a complete shock for Faith.”

“Special…” Faith shook her head, trying to digest it all. “What kind of special abilities do you have?”

“The scientists had nine embryos,” explained Dawn, like a soldier making a report. “They altered them so that three would have extra healing abilities, three would have super strength and agility, and three would have super intelligence. And they kept each set of three together. Since none of the surrogate mothers had multiple births, the experiments resulted in one of each. My ability is that I heal fast. Really fast.”

“You’ll have to see her do it sometime,” agreed Lynn. “It’s amazing.”

“And you?” asked Faith, of Lynn.

“Strength and agility.”

“White put that to good use, too,” said Dawn. Her tone left no confusion about her opinion of Jonas White.

That left Faith with…“But I’m not super intelligent. I mean, my grades have always been good, but I still had to study. I’m a college dropout. Something must have gone wrong with me.”

So she wasn’t just an experiment—she was a failed experiment?

“You mean you’ve never noticed anything that you’re especially good at?” challenged Dawn. “Just because you aren’t book-smart doesn’t mean the alterations didn’t take. Maybe you’re smart with money. Or languages.”

Faith shrugged. “No more than the next person.”

“Computers?” suggested Lynn, and Faith shook her head. “People?”

“I’m terrible with people! Mom never wanted me getting too close, because…” She hated to mention this part. It was probably related, probably a side effect of the failed experiments, which made her abilities even more embarrassing. Still, if she couldn’t tell these women…

“Because I read them,” Faith admitted.

Dawn said, “Come again?”

“My programming must not have taken correctly. I’m…hyperaware. I can hear your heartbeats, right now, and your breathing, and I can smell what you had not just for lunch but breakfast, and what kind of soap you used. And when I touch someone, I get weird flashes of information about them.”

“That might be exactly what they meant to accomplish,” Lynn assured her. “I have some similar abilities—really good eyesight and hearing. It sounds as if your senses are just as acute, but focused differently. Focused on people.”

“But how’s that make me intelligent?”

“The scientists can explain it better than me,” said Dawn. “But hello, which organ processes all those nerve responses?”

Faith studied the tablecloth, scowling. “My friends keep saying I’m psychic. I was beginning to think maybe…”

But there was no reason to go into the crazy notions she’d begun to entertain.

“Does it matter what you call it?” asked Lynn. “At least now you know it’s real. Now you know where it comes from.”

“Yeah,” muttered Faith. “A test tube.”

“And Lorraine Miller Carrington,” Dawn reminded her.

Faith nodded. Somehow, one little detail—trivial to her two sisters—struck her as the strangest part. How had she known?

“One of the Cassandras,” she said.

Once Faith reached her mother’s home, she couldn’t sit, couldn’t rest. It was just too much to take.

And yet she had to take it, didn’t she?

“You stole me?”

Her mother, hands clasped tightly in her lap as she sat on the designer sofa, did not deny it. She simply looked up at Faith with those remarkably pale-blue eyes, and she looked…broken. “I should have known you’d find out. Especially once I saw that you were…”

Her voice trailed off, and her eyes filled with tears.

“That I was a freak?” supplied Faith. Or, to use Dawn’s term, “A lab rat?”

“Don’t call yourself that. You’re different, yes. You’re special.”

“As in special education classes.”

“As in a beautiful, unique, talented woman who deserves to be cherished for exactly who she is. The way I’ve cherished you.”

Faith shook her head, still pacing. She’d come here as soon as she left her sisters at their hotel, with promises to get together the next day. She was afraid to stop moving. She was afraid of what her new knowledge would do to her head once she slowed down enough to process it all.

“You haven’t been cherishing me,” she argued. “You’ve been manipulating me by withholding the truth. You knew I was an experiment from the start. You knew it!”

“No! I knew something shady was going on. I knew you were a test-tube baby. But genetically engineered? How could I guess that? Those awful people didn’t tell us anything.”

“So you knew there were others?” Sisters. She had sisters!

“When I went in for my pregnancy test, I saw another woman leaving. An African-American. She was older than me, tall and very beautiful, and the way she looked at me…It’s hard to explain, but we had a moment of connection. I had to wonder…”

But Tamara didn’t tell Faith what she had to wonder. She just lowered her gaze to her hands and looked miserable. She’d been looking miserable since Faith had arrived with her accusations.

But she hadn’t once looked shocked.

Faith scrubbed a hand through her hair—and wondered if she’d inherited her hair from her dead mother or her nameless father. She needed to understand this. When in doubt, gather evidence. “How did you fake the pregnancy test?”

“I paid a woman for her urine,” Tamara confessed. “I put it in a test tube, like a tampon, so that it would stay warm until I substituted it for my sample. That was the early 80s. Labs weren’t as suspicious then as they are now. I told them I’d gotten my period, that I was sure I wasn’t pregnant. They told me to stay in town anyway, just in case, but I knew our only hope was to run. So I ran.”

“And left behind fifty-thousand dollars?”

“I hadn’t done it for the money! Baby, you have to believe that. I’d been alone for so long. I wanted a baby so badly.”

“Then why not do it the old-fashioned way?” A brief image of Roy Chopin flashed across Faith’s conflicted thoughts—Roy, and what they’d done together. She could tell that for him sex was definitely about recreation, not procreation. But surely it wouldn’t be that hard to trick a man, even someone as sharp as him. Provide her own condoms. Poke a few holes in them….

“I was so confused,” moaned Tamara. “There were no men in my life, and I doubted finding one would make things any easier. I’ll admit, when I first answered the ad, I wasn’t sure what I would decide. But as soon as I began to feel my body changing, as soon as I knew you were alive, inside me…”

Faith’s step slowed. She wanted to believe the yearning she heard in her mother’s voice. Her mother. At least Faith hadn’t been raised as some kind of killing machine in a laboratory, like Dawn had. At least she hadn’t been used by some master criminal under the guise of her supposed protector, like Lynn.

You’re the only one of us who got to have that, Lynn had said.

But how could that make up for all the secrets her so-called mother had kept from her?

The ache threatened to overwhelm her. She started pacing again.

“I suspected those doctors were up to no good,” said Tamara. “I was afraid they were dangerous. But the alternative would have been to let them have you, to let them have my baby.”

“Not your baby. Lorraine Miller’s baby. Some man’s…” Her sisters hadn’t mentioned if they knew whose sperm had been stolen to create them. “Someone else’s egg, someone else’s sperm.”

“My blood. My breath. My body to protect you. You became my baby even before your heart began to beat, and I decided right then, I wouldn’t let them have you.” Tamara’s chin came up. “And I don’t care who they send to turn you against me. I still won’t let them.”

“It’s not your choice anymore,” Faith reminded her.

“But it is still my business. You’re my business. You’re my daughter. It doesn’t matter what you inherited from those strangers. I raised you. I taught you.”

“To lie,” Faith challenged. And look where that handy habit had gotten her…her and Madame Cassandra. “To lie, and to hide. Thanks a lot.”

“It kept you safe.” Tamara was squeezing her hands, her eyes brimming with desperation.

Faith turned toward the door, unable to take more of this. Not yet. Not now. “It kept me leashed.”

Tamara took a deep breath. “You know where to find me, baby.”

But Faith, her throat tightening with emotion, pushed back out into the humid Louisiana night.

He didn’t like where she lived.

He let Himself back into the shadowy courtyard—He could do that, after all. He could come and go like a ghost. He could do things that no one knew about. He was so powerful now, He even crept up the stone steps to the front door, to look in.

But even though He was powerful, this was an apartment full of magic users themselves. So this time, after He peeked through the old-fashioned keyhole and didn’t see the one He was after, He crept back down again. Just in case.

The Master had found Madame Cassandra. The Master wanted Him to take care of this one, before she destroyed him. And He wanted to do it, too. He thought He was powerful enough to take her, now.

But that didn’t mean He must do it on her terms. Hers, or the Master’s.

He would do it in His own time. In His own way.

And once He’d stolen the life out of the greatest psychic in all the French Quarter—then not even the Master would be able to control Him.

After that, anything He did for the Master would be a favor.

Faith awoke and sat up in bed before she even understood why. For a moment, she felt only confusion. A few magazines, which she’d checked out from the library on her way home, slid off her sheets and onto the floor. They reminded her of what she’d learned, how much she still had to learn.

Lorraine Miller Carrington. Scandal at Athena Academy.

Had she really managed to sleep? She guessed the kind of day she’d had took its toll on a person’s strength. Even a genetically engineered superbeing.

And it’s not as if she’d slept well. Waking dreams had tormented her, dreams of gang ambushes and secret laboratories and serial killers with red cords and distinctive heartbeats.

But what had woken her now?

Her bare feet hit the marble floor as soon as she recognized the footsteps climbing the stone stairway outside. She was down the hallway and across the dark den even before she heard the knock, uncharacteristically soft, on the front door.

He only had to knock once before she had the door unlocked and open.

Detective Roy Chopin’s eyes widened at her quick response. Other than that, he looked wholly contained. Competent. Ready.

She could feel his exhaustion and his frustration with however his night had gone. She could also feel, as his gaze took in her boxers and camisole—and the legs and arms left bare—how quickly his exhaustion made way for a different kind of energy. He didn’t bother asking if she really meant her invitation to come by after shift. He didn’t explain how far after shift this was. He didn’t seem worried that he might appear too eager. He was just…here.

For her. One way or another.

One thing on their minds, she thought, relief making her giddy. Thank God.

“So,” he said, lowering his voice for the sake of her roommates as he came in, closed the door and locked all three locks behind him. “The night’s crap. A domestic call that went bad. A mugging that went worse. No more frigging leads on who did Butch than we had yesterday, and every twenty-four hours they get colder. You know your gate was unlocked?”

“No it wasn’t.” She grabbed his tie and tugged him in the direction of her bedroom. She walked backward. She wanted to watch him. He looked amused as he followed.

“What, I’m not standing here? Start locking the damned gate.”

“So what else was crap about the night?” It wasn’t that she wanted him to have had a bad night. But the sheer normalcy of it, contrasted against her last twenty-four hours, made for a welcome distraction.

Almost as welcome as the heat of him, the presence of him, the scent of him trailing her across the den.

“I’ve got a new partner, transferred in from Baton Rouge. Name’s Max. He doesn’t suck, but he’s not Butch, you know? What are you, Lucy Ricardo?” Now he was looking at the two twin beds while she shut her bedroom door behind them. “The innocence thing is refreshing, but damn.”

Then she turned back, wrapped her arms up over his shoulders and stretched up on her toes in hopes of a kiss. “Want to shock the censors and push them together?”

“That might be helpful, yeah.” Catching her against him, he covered her mouth with his. Along with his blunt scent and coffee taste and sexual energy, images flowed across her, more like a homecoming than an invasion. Domestic call. Mugging-turned-homicide. New partner—she loved that he was that straightforward. Exhaustion, rapidly fading to arousal. Concern for her. Suspicions about…

Then she’d made it past the flash of impressions and into the zone. The intensity of his breath scorched her. The wet demand of his lips engulfed her. His grip on her—weaving into her hair, sliding up her spine under her camisole—electrified almost every nerve ending in her. She pressed, hard, against his heartbeat and the sound of his breathing and the solidity of his body. She wanted him surrounding her, touching her, outside of her, inside of her, everywhere.

She wanted him to make her forget.

His tongue, filling her mouth, was a good start. She shuddered at the eager, demanding promise of him. Then she almost whimpered when he drew back, a smug gleam in his eyes.

“You’re not big on wasting time, are you?” he asked, and he scooped her up and dropped her onto her bed. While she caught her balance on the bounce, he easily lifted the bed table out from between the two twins and stuck it in a corner. He shrugged off his jacket and tossed it onto the chair. Then, with one shove, he pushed Moonsong’s old bed across the floor to bump into Faith’s.

From down the hall, Absinthe yelled, “Shut the hell up!”

“Sorry,” Faith called back. But even if furniture moving was a bit much at this hour, she wasn’t really sorry at all.

“We’re gonna be real popular,” promised Roy, laughter in his voice. He removed his belt holster and lay his weapon over the jacket.

“So,” she prompted as he tugged his tie loose. She’d never realized watching a man undress could be this…riveting. “Crappy night.”

“So Max and me are called to the old Charity hospital to talk to some gangbangers. We get there and the beat cop—first officer to respond—tells us, ‘they aren’t talking, but before everyone shut up, one guy let slip that some blond chick beat him up.’”

Oh. Faith’s discomfort suddenly had less to do with wanting Roy to finish undressing and more to do with wanting to know how much he’d learned about today’s ambush. She didn’t want him to connect her to it. The ambush, and her sisters’ involvement, had too much to do with the rest of her day’s revelations.

The ones she was trying to forget.

She drew her knees up toward her chest, almost like a shield.

“It’s déjà vu to the other day,” Roy continued, tossing the tie and starting on his shirt buttons. “Sure enough, the E.R.’s holding these three shining examples of America’s youth until we can talk to them. Turns out some woman called in a report about them being unconscious in an alley. But she did it anonymously.”

Lynn, thought Faith. Or maybe Dawn. One of them must have called while she’d been busy at the vet’s. Despite her discomfort with how Roy was looking at her at the moment—a lot more like a cop than like a lover—she felt glad. She liked that her sisters had the presence of mind to make sure the guys in that alley got medical attention.

“Dispatch sent a squad car to check it out,” Roy continued, shrugging out of his shirt now. He wore an undershirt, but she could see his chest hair over the top. She didn’t realize guys wore undershirts anymore. “Sure enough, someone beat down on these boys. But this time a weapon was used. That’s aggravated assault, which is why they called us. Max and me, we take over where the patrolmen stopped questioning them. Who’d they fight with? Do we maybe have some kind of gang war heating up? Like that. But they’re toughs. Now they aren’t talking, not even the guy who first said he’d been smacked down by a blonde.”

Then Roy paused, belt unbuckled but pants still zipped, his gaze dark and direct. “You wouldn’t know anything about this, would you, Bernie?”

“I didn’t assault anybody, if that’s what you mean.”

“Yeah.” His eyes narrowed with suspicion. “That’s heartfelt. Do you know something?”

She didn’t want to lie to him. She was such a hypocrite, considering how she’d blamed her mom for secrets. Even one more, to Roy, would be several too many.

She needed him. Tonight, at least. Now. If he left…

But he had the right to leave. So she compromised and said, “Maybe?”

He groaned, heartfelt—and sat on the expanded bed beside her.

Still wearing his damned undershirt and pants.

“This is serious, Faith,” he said. And it must be. It was the first time she’d heard him use her first name. “If they’re messing with you, you’ve got to file a complaint and get the bastards off the street. If you’re messing with them, I might end up having to arrest you, which would be damned embarrassing for everyone involved, meaning me.”

Desperate now, Faith considered her options.

She crossed her arms, caught the hem of her camisole and stripped it up over her head.

Roy stared at her topless form for a long, silent moment. Then, with a wordless noise of defeat, he bent over her and caught her mouth with his. Lecture forgotten, his hands went to the distraction she’d offered, and she arched into his warm, callused touch.

Yes.

In only a moment, he’d lost the undershirt. He was lying on top of her and she was wrapping her legs around his waist, wrapping her arms around his incredible bare torso, doing everything she could to encourage his nonverbal attentions. She felt like she hadn’t touched him, much less kissed him, in weeks instead of hours. She felt like she’d been stretched to the breaking point from waiting. And now…

Oh, now.

Her whole life had changed. The normalcy of him, of this—despite the fact that this, too, was a new development in her life—meant a hell of a lot more than whatever some top-secret laboratory might have done to her before she was born.

At least in the short-term.

And for now, tonight, short-term was all that mattered.

The next morning, when she reluctantly left her bed—and the nice, solid man in it—to take her shower, everything was great. Surprisingly great, considering how awful the previous day had been. Morning sex and lingering kisses, she guessed, could do that.

She thought she heard Roy’s cell phone ring while she was in the shower, but she tried not to listen in. She might have genetically altered superhearing, but that didn’t mean people didn’t deserve their privacy. And it wasn’t like Roy said much.

Then, when she got back to her room, clean and ready for the promised breakfast and ride to work, she was surprised to find him not only dressed but standing there, waiting.

Staring at her.

Something dark and hurtful sharpened his gaze. His mouth had definitely returned to threatening mode. And a sense of betrayal roiled off of his taut posture. Faith hesitated, confused. Why…?

Then she saw the small pile of clothes lying on her bed. Gauzy, gypsy clothes. With a black wig.

Roy shook his head only once before stepping forward and coldly snapping a pair of handcuffs on her. She supposed she could have made a run for it, could have fought him. Physically, she could have.

Emotionally, all she could do was stand there in shock.

“Faith Corbett, I’m placing you under arrest for the murder of Detective Sergeant Butch Jefferson.”

He jerked the cuffs, to make sure they were secure. Hard. Angry. “Or should I maybe call you Madame Cassandra?”

Chapter 16

Five hours later, they were still questioning her. They included Roy’s new partner, Max, who’d dragged himself in almost eight hours before his shift would actually start. Chief of Detectives Captain Frank Crawford was there. And there were a pair of dayshift plainclothesmen whom Faith had come to think of as Slick and Bubba. Slick was a thirtysomething black man, impeccably groomed right down to the gel in his hair and the pin in his tie. Bubba was, well…a bubba. With a gun.

None of them was the person she wanted.

“I’ll only talk to Roy,” she warned them, for maybe the dozenth time. Slick and Bubba, who were holding up the far wall, rolled their eyes at each other, patronizing. Idiots. Had she phrased that as a request?

“Ms. Corbett, as I’ve been telling you, Detective Chopin has been removed from this case for obvious reasons.” Captain Crawford stopped pacing long enough to rub a tired hand down his skinny face, radiating stress. Considering what bits of background noise dribbled into the supposedly soundproof room, Faith wasn’t surprised. The capture of even a suspected cop killer had lit a fire under this station. “He’s in no position to help you—”

Faith laughed. “I’m not asking for his help, Captain. I doubt he’d give it.”

She faintly heard Roy’s bitter voice, behind the one-way mirror. “She’s got that right.”

Of course, nobody else in the room heard it. “I’m offering him something, not the other way around. Information, you morons,” she added, for Slick and Bubba’s edification.

Captain Crawford said, “Well, if you’ll tell us, we’ll be happy to pass your information on to the detective who brought you in. A little cooperation will go a long way.”

But she’d recently learned the secret to surviving police stations. She had her sense of self firmly in place. “Yes, it will, Captain. So cooperate. I talk to Roy.”

“We put a lab rush on the clothing found in your room, Ms. Corbett, and even waiting for DNA results it doesn’t look good for you. Traces of blood. Gunpowder residue. Goodbye, job. Goodbye, clean record. Goodbye freedom—you’re facing serious time, or worse.”

Faith wondered if Greg Boulanger had run the tests, or if he, too, had been removed from the case. “No, I’m not.”

Okay, so she wasn’t quite as sure as she pretended to be.

The captain slapped a Manila folder onto the table in front of her. “We’ve got the sworn testimony of a citizen who saw a woman of your height and build, with black hair and clothes matching those found in your room, leaving the scene of the crime.”

Roy hadn’t mentioned that part. “Anything else?”

“As a matter of fact—” But Crawford stopped himself, eyeing her warily. “We’re the ones conducting this damned interrogation, Ms. Corbett, not you. So how about you start answering our questions? What did you do with Sergeant Jefferson’s gun?”

She said nothing.

“Who was involved in the killing with you?”

She said nothing. But she felt relieved they didn’t believe she’d acted alone.

Corbett slammed a hand down beside the folder, leaning over her now. “Why did you want Butch Jefferson dead?”

That, she couldn’t ignore. “I didn’t! Butch was a wonderful man. How could anyone want him dead?”

“Obviously someone did. Maybe you can shed some light on who that might have been?” Before she could stop him, the captain tapped her under the chin to make her look up at him.

He and his wife were in separate beds. They’d become strangers. His one real joy was his young son. He—

She swung her head away, pushing her chair back from him—its feet squealed on the concrete floor, and the handcuff that attached her to the table pulled taut. It was either that or head-butt the guy, which would be trouble. “Don’t touch me!”

Captain Crawford reared back almost as quickly at her reaction. “What the hell?”

It was Roy’s new partner, Max Leonard, who intervened. “We’ve already established that she doesn’t like to be touched, Captain. Ms. Corbett, sweetheart, he wasn’t trying to hurt you.”

Faith gritted her teeth, embarrassed by her reaction, angry that they’d gotten her to talk at all. She hadn’t said he was trying to hurt her, damn it. She just didn’t want…

Okay, so maybe she was feeling the stress after all. The booking process alone had resulted in a few too many casual, normally harmless touches. Time to practice Krystal’s quiet breathing.

“As Roy told me,” she said tightly, “I have the right to remain silent.”

“Let me give this a try,” suggested Max, drawing the captain back. Roy’s new partner seemed like a nice enough guy, stocky, balding, fighting a middle-aged spread. He wore a wedding ring and a Mary medal. Instead of looming over Faith the way Captain Crawford had or intimidating her with his ability to move around the room while she had to stay in her little chair, Max sat on the corner of the table and held her gaze. Not touching her. “I’m sure Chopin also told you that you have the right to an attorney, sweetheart. Are you sure you don’t want us to send for one?”

“No,” Faith assured him, dragging together the threads of her poise. “Not yet.”

Not until she’d talked to Roy.

She’d tried, after the initial shock of the arrest. Handcuffed in the back seat of his car on the way over, she’d tried to explain. He’d just turned up the volume of his radio, zydeco music blasting out the windows, so that he couldn’t hear what she had to say. To judge from the way he was treating her now, the Faith he’d made love to not an hour before the arrest could have been someone else. Or dead.

Faith understood his arresting her. If she’d been a cop and found the backpack, she would have arrested her, too—though how he’d found the backpack was a whole other issue. What her secrets had done to their budding relationship, though—that pressed on her heart like a ten-ton weight.

They were through. She got that, and she knew she’d brought it on herself, through her secrecy. She wasn’t looking for sympathy. But he had to hear the truth from her, or he might never hear it…and not knowing would be even worse for him.

The first thing any attorney with half a brain would tell her was not to talk. And she sure as hell couldn’t count on ever getting an audience with Roy if this went to trial.

One problem at a time; that was how she’d take things.

“Do you want another cola?” asked Max gently. “You need a bathroom break?”

“I’m fine, thank you.”

“See, Faith—can I call you Faith?” Max’s good-cop routine was almost as skilled as Butch’s had been. It would have been funny, if only it weren’t so damned effective. Everything about the interrogation room was set up to make her feel alone and helpless. The lack of windows. The industrial-white walls and low-watt bulbs. The rudimentary table and plastic chairs, with her chair farthest from the door. Even the one-way mirror, with the threat of who knew how many unseen people watching her through it, played its role in Faith’s intimidation. Against all that, a little niceness went a long, long way.

But not long enough to make her forget what she had to do.

“You don’t look like a killer to me,” Max continued, deliberately soothing. “Like you say, you didn’t want Butch dead. I believe that. If you wanted him dead, why would you have called in help for him? I’m thinking someone else did the shooting, someone you could help us catch. You kept it secret because it was maybe an accident? Maybe you got scared? But we can’t help you, sweetheart, until you tell us how it went down.”

“And I will,” Faith assured him. Four relieved exhalations followed her promise before she added, “As long as Roy’s here to hear it directly from me. Otherwise, I’m not saying anything.”

Crawford slapped a hand against the painted brick wall and swore. “That’s it. Clear out, boys. Maybe once Ms. Corbett has a chance to ponder her fate for a while, she’ll figure out that she’s not a guest here, she’s an accused murderer.”

Slick and Bubba headed out first, exchanging amused glances. An apologetic Max followed and, finally, Crawford.

Then Faith was alone, one wrist still handcuffed to the table, in the hell room. Alone with her secret weapon.

One of her secret weapons, anyway.

They had no idea that she could hear what they were saying on the other side of the mirror.

“So send me in, Cap.” Ironic, how comfortingly familiar Roy’s voice seemed, even now that they were on opposite sides of more than that wall. At least he’d heard her say she didn’t want Butch dead, whether or not he believed it. “If it makes her confess, where’s the harm?”

“The appearance of partiality is the harm, Roy! I shouldn’t have to tell you that.”

“I only look partial if I don’t burn her lying little ass with this.”

“Yes, because we all know that boyfriends who’ve been played for a sap are paragons of impartiality. No.”

Faith pretended to study her ink-smudged fingers, knowing that she was being studied in turn. She’d been okay with the physical contact when she’d been fingerprinted, but that’s because she’d been braced for it.

“So why isn’t she asking for a lawyer?” That was Max.

“She’s a blonde,” said someone who sounded like Slick. “Who says blondes have to make sense?”

“I’m not questioning it, I’m just counting my blessings,” said the captain. “I’ve known stupid public defenders, but we won’t find one in this city stupid enough to leave this arrest unchallenged.”

“And they’d be wrong!” Roy protested.

“Really, Detective? ’Cause I’m thinking it wasn’t a search warrant you had in your pants when you showed up at her door last night.”

Faith scratched her nose, just in case her lips twitched.

She would have heard Roy’s yell even without genetically engineered superhearing. “Screw that!”

“Hey, Chopin.” Maybe his new partner really was a good cop, and didn’t just play one for interrogations. “The captain’s just saying what the D.A.’s office will tell you. Calm down.”

“You’re talking like I tried to hide what went down. Don’t think I wasn’t tempted. But I’ve been a freakin’ Serpico on this one, Cap. I’ve been one hundred percent forthcoming.”

“Oh, really? You were boffing the suspect!”

“I didn’t know she was a suspect at the time!”

“And how do we know you wouldn’t have considered it if you weren’t boffing her?”

“Whoa, now.” Max again. “Let’s all calm down. Chopin, how about you take us through this one more time before we make a decision.”

Faith pretended to be distracted by toeing a worn spot on the floor. She wanted to hear this as much as anybody.

Roy groaned—but he talked. “It’s maybe seven-thirty in the morning. I’ve been there since two, two-fifteen. Corbett’s in the shower.”

“Alone?” That would be Slick again, giving Roy a hard time.

“Yeah, alone. She’s got three roommates and only one bathroom between ’em. Also, she’s got a job to get to.”

“Not anymore, she doesn’t.” Slick, again.

“Can the commentary,” the captain warned. “Let the man give his report.”

“So my mobile rings. I don’t recognize the number. I answer. And it’s another freakin’ anonymous contact, this time a guy. He says he’s got a tip.”

Faith bit her lip. So whoever knew about the clothes in her backpack was a man?

“I don’t recognize the voice—he’s whispering. But he says, ‘You and Cassandra have a good time last night?’ I ask what the hell that’s supposed to mean, and he says, ‘Check the backpack on her closet shelf.’ And he disconnects.”

“Well, that’s a comfort. Any rookie knows that evidence stuffed in a backpack and kept on a closet shelf counts as plain view.” Captain Crawford treated sarcasm as an art form, didn’t he?

“Except I don’t look in the closet right away. Sure, I’m curious, but I’m no idiot, and this smells like a setup. I pull on some clothes and I head out to the kitchen, where two of Corbett’s roommates—the guy and the black girl—are making breakfast. They say hi. I say hi. I figure the girl, Moonsong they call her, is the most gullible so I say, ‘This is a great place. You mind if I look around while I wait for Faith?’ And she says ‘Sure, do you want pancakes?’”

Slick laughed. “She offered you pancakes?”

“I say ‘yes, thank you,’ and I head back to Corbett’s closet. Part of me still thinks this is a joke, but…there it was. The girl said ‘sure,’ Captain. She’s lived there a lot longer than Corbett, and she said ‘sure.’ That’s consent.”

“She knew you were a cop?”

“I interviewed her after Krystal Tanner’s murder. In case she’d forgotten that, I had the badge pinned to my belt. We’re covered.”

Faith considered all that, her expression deliberately neutral. Poor, manipulated Moonsong.

“Good. Good work. But we’ll need more than that to make a case against Little Mary Sunshine in there. Max is right. She did call for help. She doesn’t look like a murderer, and don’t think that won’t count with a jury. And she has no record.”

“We’re setting up a lineup for the witness,” said Bubba.

“And don’t forget, her roommate’s the one who drew the sketch that Butch had with him when he died,” added Roy. “Whether or not it’s a picture of Krystal Tanner’s killer, it links Corbett’s roommate to Celeste Deveaux and to Madame Cassandra. That links Corbett herself. A, to B, to C.”

So they knew that, too. The number of people Faith had involved in her masquerade were starting to stack up, weren’t they?

Not for the first time in the five hours that had passed since her arrest, she considered what she was going to do once she got out—and she had to assume, had to hope she would get out, or she’d be lost. She’d alienated her lover, her roommates, even her mom…her surrogate mom, anyway. Even if the charges didn’t stick, she doubted she could or should keep her job for long—the air of suspicion would interfere too strongly with her work. It was almost a year since she’d dropped out of school.

Maybe her sisters showing up yesterday hadn’t been an accident—not in the universal scheme of things. Maybe it was time to get to know Lynn and Dawn. Maybe Faith should seek out the Athena Academy and the Cassandras, to learn about her biological mother…and help find whoever had hired her killer. Maybe it was past time to confirm who and what she really was.

Once she knew that the psychics of New Orleans were as safe as she could make them, that is.

The argument, outside the interrogation room, was going on too long. Soon she would have to use the bathroom, and she wasn’t looking forward to the logistics of that. “It was a man,” she said, loudly. “With a stocking on his head.”

Beyond the one-way mirror, all conversation ceased. She’d figured they had an intercom on.

“I don’t think he came to kill Butch. I think he came to kill me.”

The door cracked open and Captain Crawford stuck his head in. “You’re ready to talk now, Ms. Corbett?”

She fixed him with as cool a stare as she could manage. “To Roy Chopin, I am.”

Crawford narrowed his eyes and slammed the door shut.

Nobody on the other side of the mirror said anything for a moment, so Faith guessed it was all being conveyed with expressions. Then, finally, Crawford said, “Fine. But not alone.”

“I never said he had to be alone,” said Faith.

Now, when the four detectives filed into the room, Slick and Bubba looked unnerved. They didn’t know how she’d heard that. Max looked curious, and Roy…

Roy looked pissed.

“So I’m here,” he said, coolly spreading his arms. At some point across the morning he’d loosened his tie, unbuttoned his collar, rolled his sleeves up to his elbow. Only because she could hear his pulse, his breathing, could she tell just how angry he really was. “Talk.”

“It’s true,” she said, meeting his gaze. “I’m Madame Cassandra.”

His gaze narrowed, almost imperceptibly. His jaw hardened similarly. But he simply folded his arms, shrugged and said, “Tell me something I don’t know.”

She guessed telling her to go to hell wouldn’t count as a good interrogation technique. The point was to keep her talking, not to shut her up.

“Okay—the first thing you should know is that Madame Cassandra isn’t exactly a psychic. She’s a…a persona I made up when I tried being a psychic for a few days, about a year ago, back when I met Krystal and the others. I thought if I were psychic, that would explain some things….”

Roy never looked away from her. “Why would it matter?”

Faith shrugged. “By then, though, I’d gotten to know some of the French Quarter crowd. I liked them. They trusted me. So when they told me things they thought were important—things they’d overheard, or gotten through a reading—I started calling Butch to pass on the tips. In order to stay anonymous, I said I was Madame Cassandra, but Madame Cassandra doesn’t exist.”

“So who was with Roy in the cemetery last Thursday?” demanded Roy.

“I was. Faith. He saw past the costume. He knew me.”

The words squeezed out past his teeth. “And you killed him for that?”

Max put a hand on Roy’s arm. Roy shrugged it away, shaking his head at Faith in outraged disbelief. So much for holding back his anger.

“Of course I didn’t! Cassandra wasn’t a secret worth killing over, and I’m no killer. I was glad he recognized me. It was a relief.

“I didn’t lure him there either—yes, the location was my choice, but Butch is the one who insisted that we meet, so that I could look at some mug shots.” Holding Roy’s accusing gaze, Faith related everything she could remember about what had happened in the cemetery. How strangely silent the killer had been. How he’d called her Cassandra. How she’d made her way back to Butch. How he’d instructed her on the use of his weapon.

How Butch had smiled at her, and said Roy’s name…and died.

By the time Faith finished, even Slick and Bubba looked haunted. Even Max, who probably hadn’t known Butch very well if at all, had bowed his head.

Roy moved first, finally. He bent across the table, planted one hand to the right of her, one hand to the left of her, and leaned close enough that she could count the eyelashes surrounding his blazing gray eyes. His jaw had never looked so much like a dare. His voice was a hiss of menace.

“So why’d. You. Run?”

“Because Butch told me to.”

He shook his head, straightened and turned away, like he couldn’t stand to look at her. Maybe he couldn’t. It was Max who gently asked, “Why do you suppose Butch would tell you something like that, sweetheart?”

Faith frowned down at the worn table, on less solid ground here. “I’ve been wondering that myself,” she admitted, eliciting a snort from Roy. “Really. And it’s only been here at the station, surrounded by cops, that I’ve come up with a theory.”

The detectives waited. Even Roy turned back long enough to widen his eyes in exaggerated anticipation.

“Butch must have realized the killer was there for me, not him,” she said. “For Madame Cassandra, anyway—how would anyone know that was me? I didn’t tell anybody I was meeting Butch, but even if someone had found out through me, they would’ve known who I really was. The only way someone would have shown up at the cemetery thinking Cassandra would be there, instead of Faith, was if someone found out about the meeting through Butch.”

She looked up to meet Roy’s gaze, a chill of horror accompanying her full realization as she said, “Chances are, anyone he told about the meeting was a cop.

“Butch was protecting me and my identity as Cassandra from one of you.”

Chapter 17

Roy exploded. “So now you’re saying I killed Butch? Right down to the dying declaration. Great story, hon, just like all your lies.”

He cut himself off, shaking his head, raising his hands as if to keep from doing something with them that he’d regret.

“Of course I’m not saying that! I called you right afterward, didn’t I? I slept with you! You think I would have done that with someone I thought was a killer?”

“Yeah? Well, that makes two of us.”

“Butch probably wouldn’t have told you about meeting Cassandra because he knew you were such a cynic about her. He might have told someone else, though, someone more open to the idea. That’s why he wanted me to leave before the police arrived. He thought he’d tipped off the serial killer, and he didn’t want him—whoever he was—connecting Cassandra to me.”

“Did he tell you to take the gun, too?”

“No.” Faith took a deep breath, turning her attention from Roy’s rage to her own predicament. She’d done what she could to give him a little closure about his partner. Maybe someday he’d even realize that she hadn’t set out to keep secrets from him. But for now…enough was enough.

“I panicked,” she admitted. “I’d never seen anybody killed before, especially someone I cared about, not even Krystal. And someone had been shooting at me. And once I ran, I was kind of committed to going fugitive. Letting Cassandra go fugitive, anyway. So, I did what a fugitive does. I got rid of the evidence.”

“Where?”

“I threw it in the Mississippi.”

Four men groaned in unison. Outside the mirror, Faith heard cursing from the captain and a few other men who must be watching.

Well, she deserved that. “It was stupid, I know, but I wasn’t thinking clearly. I threw the gun, the gloves and the phone in the river, and I went home and stuffed everything I was wearing into my old backpack. I thought about throwing that away, too, but thought someone might find it in the trash, and if I burned it, someone might remember me burning something. So I figured I’d just wait until things quieted down, that it would be safest in my closet. I didn’t know there was blood on it.”

That’s when she heard something interesting happen with all four men’s heartbeats—a subtle quickening. A tightening of their bodies. With just one of them, she might not have noticed. Not even now that she knew her abilities were real, if artificially engineered. But four of them….

“There wasn’t blood on the clothes?” she challenged. “The captain lied?”

None of them admitted anything; they weren’t that stupid. But outside the room, where he thought she couldn’t hear, the captain said, “Half a year working evidence, and she thinks we can get lab results back that fast?”

Or that the police would always tell the truth in an interrogation. Damn! “What about the witness who saw Cassandra leave?”

“Saw you leave,” Roy countered with a finger stab at the air between them. He neither confirmed nor denied the witness, but he positively smelled of righteous fury on this one. “Saw you leave with evidence and an eyewitness account that could’ve caught Butch’s killer, assuming you aren’t the killer.”

“Have me take a lie detector test.”

“How’s three days in lock-up sound for a lie detector test? Spend enough time with the hookers and the druggies, I’m thinking you’ll be ready to tell us anything.”

“You’d be wrong.”

“Okay.” The door opened and the captain came in. “Chopin, you’re losing what little objectivity you had. I’m stopping this before you make a real threat and get her case thrown out.”

“You don’t have a case,” Faith admitted. It was time.

Roy’s eyes widened, and his parted lips took on new levels of mockery. “Oh, I think we do!”

Max stepped between Roy’s fury and Faith’s chair, where she was still handcuffed. “No offense, sweetheart, but we may need more than just your word to drop the charges of murder.”

Captain Crawford added, “Not to mention we just got your confession to obstruction of justice.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Hello? That story you just told? Leaving the scene of a crime? Destroying evidence?”

Time for her second secret weapon. “It’s not admissible.”

That shut them up, at least for a heartbeat or two. Faith suspected it was more her use of the lingo than the point she’d made, but she ran with it. “The search was invalid, so Roy didn’t have probable cause for the arrest.”

“Bullshit!” challenged Roy. Right. He’d been a freakin’ Serpico, whoever that was.

“Ms. Corbett,” interrupted the captain, “your roommate gave Detective Chopin permission to look around the place. That means he didn’t need a search warrant.”

“For the shared rooms, sure, but not for my bedroom, and definitely not for my closet, where I have a reasonable expectation of privacy.” Now the men exchanged sharp glances. Reasonable expectation of privacy was a solid legal term, and they knew it. They knew she knew what she was talking about.

Their very scents reflected their growing concern that she might be right.

“I may have brought Detective Chopin into my room, even into my bed, but I never gave him permission to go into my closet. So the search was invalid. Which means the arrest was invalid. Which means the confession was fruit of the poisonous tree. I’m officially asking for a lawyer now, but trust me, he or she will just confirm this. So will the D.A.”

The police stared at her.

“Michael Manning?” she reminded them, as if they might have forgotten who their district attorney was. “The one who publishes those great murder mysteries? My mother works for him. I interviewed him last year for an essay I was writing, about just this topic, and he was very clear on where the courts stand.”

The police still stared. Even Roy.

“That would be when I was still in college,” Faith explained. “When I was majoring in pre-law at Tulane.”

And damn, that felt good.

She wondered if her biological mother, Rainy Miller Carrington, had ever gotten this strong a sense of satisfaction from practicing law. She hoped so.

Maybe Faith’s choice of a major hadn’t been such a fluke, after all.

Not an hour later, they had to let her go. She’d called her roommates to reassure them of her fate and had picked up her personal effects before Captain Crawford intercepted her with the inevitable question.

“Ms. Corbett? Why in God’s name did you let all of us, yourself included, waste the whole morning if you knew your confession would be inadmissible?”

“I’m not your legal consultant, Captain.” Faith looked past him toward where Roy stood with Max. Roy wasn’t any less angry to see her walk. “I wanted Detective Chopin to hear the truth from me, and this was the only way he would. My apologies if that turned out to be a misuse of the city’s time—but I’m not the one who initiated the arrest.”

Then she headed out to the waiting room—and a surprising champion.

Greg Boulanger pushed to his feet from a plastic chair, his normally vague expression telegraphing relief. “Faith! Are you all right?”

She considered that. She was a genetically engineered lab rat. It was possible a police officer was gunning for her, especially now that the cops knew she was Madame Cassandra. She doubted even Greg could keep her job for her, not after she’d confessed to destroying evidence, whether that confession was admissible or not…if she didn’t resign, they’d just invent a reason to get rid of her. The authorities had to be able to trust their evidence technicians. She didn’t blame them.

Whoever was killing psychics was still out there. Whoever had killed Butch was still out there. Hell, whoever had ordered a hit on Rainy Miller Carrington was still out there!

The first and only man she’d ever slept with, a man she cared about, now hated her guts. And even before that, when he got an anonymous tip that she was withholding evidence in a murder case, he hadn’t questioned it. From what she could tell, he’d never once considered that the bag could have been planted.

It hadn’t been. But since she’d been in the shower, washing his touch and scent off of her even as he searched her closet, it would have been nice if Roy had at least wondered.

Maybe anonymous contacts were fine, in Roy’s book, as long as they didn’t claim to be psychic.

Was she “all right”?

“I’ve been better,” she admitted wryly, too overwhelmed by the detritus of her life to feel any of it as sharply as she knew she soon would. “What are you doing here?”

Greg pulled his glasses down on his nose to peer over them, his pale eyes insulted. “I’m your boss, Faith. When you didn’t show up for work, I called your apartment. Absinthe told me you’d been arrested, so I came to make sure you were all right, to see if you needed help with bail.”

Faith blinked at him, taken aback. That was so sweet. So…Greg. “You don’t think I’m guilty?”

“No.”

“Thank you,” she said, her throat tight.

His modest smile flickered across his usually solemn mouth, there and gone, before he shrugged off her gratitude. She recognized the feel of him pulling back. He’d been doing it ever since she’d told him she didn’t date co-workers.

“Well now that they’ve released you, can I at least give you a ride home?” he asked. “You’ve got to be exhausted.”

“I quit,” said Faith.

Greg stared, clearly taken aback. “What’s that?”

“Nobody’s going to want me working with evidence—”

“That’s not their call to make.” Damned if Greg’s shoulders didn’t square slightly, at the very possibility that anybody would try to fire her. Maybe still waters really did run deep. “You work for me, not them.”

“I don’t blame them. You shouldn’t either. Besides, I think it’s time I went back to school, finished getting my law degree.”

Greg’s brows had pinched together. His concern was touching. “And I can’t talk you out of this?”

“No. But what you can do,” she added, “now that I’m not working for you, is take me out for a late lunch. No matter what else I’ve got to work out right now…I’m starved.”

It took a long moment before understanding dawned in Greg’s eyes. When it did, his smile lingered longer. He wasn’t half-bad-looking, when he smiled.

He offered his arm like some old-fashioned gallant, an effect his beard enhanced. Since he was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, Faith smiled back and took it.

Only as they reached the Plexiglas door to the street did Faith feel someone’s attention, hot and accusing, on the back of her neck. She glanced over her shoulder as Greg opened the door for her.

It was Roy, arms folded, staring after them.

He wore a look of pure hatred. For the first time, he truly frightened her.

Faith quickly turned and hurried out of the police station, unsettled by his Jekyll/Hyde act. What if she hadn’t really known Roy after all? What if he’d only been keeping her alive for the sex? What if Butch’s dying declaration had been some kind of warning?

Roy.

No. She refused to believe it. But did it matter? She would have to be particularly careful around cops from now on, either way.

She would have to be particularly careful around everybody.

So this was what an actual date felt like. It had been so long since her Tulane boyfriend disaster, Faith had almost forgotten.

Greg surprised her with a playful side she’d never guessed he had—though perhaps she should have, considering the way she liked his balloon smell. He took her to lunch on one of the popular, two-hour Mississippi riverboat cruises. Faith hesitated only a moment when he suggested it. While Greg couldn’t discuss active cases, he could still help her plan her next move. And surely she could take two hours to recover from her morning!

So they boarded the Antebellum, a white, four-deck, stern-wheeler steamboat. They barely made it up the gangplank, to the sound of a steam calliope straight out of the Golden Age, before the copper bell rang out and the twenty-five-ton paddlewheel began to turn, churning the water of the Mississippi to push them away from the landing. In minutes, Greg had them settled at a window table in the second-deck dining room, where they could watch the harbor over lunch. The Antebellum provided indoor and outdoor seating, but it was still August. Even on the river, August in Louisiana was hot.

And Faith was hungry. She’d gone through two helpings of fried chicken, red beans and rice and a bowl of gumbo—as well as some French bread and several glasses of iced tea—before she noticed Greg’s bemused expression as he watched her.

She flushed. “I skipped breakfast this morning. I was busy getting arrested.”

By the man I slept with last night. And this morning.

“On the basis of some pretty flimsy evidence, the way I hear it,” said Greg. “I don’t want to pry, Faith, but…”

But he’d taken time off work for her. He’d been there for her, even moreso in the end than Roy. And she’d kept enough secrets for a lifetime. So, with the sound of the steam calliope playing outside, she repeated to Greg what she’d told the detectives.

Who Madame Cassandra was, and how Butch had died.

He looked stunned—but, being Greg, it was a quiet stunned. “You think the killer was a cop?”

She sighed, shook her head. “I have no way of being sure. All I know is, he’s someone who might have learned about the meeting from Butch…and Butch told me to run. If Butch actually knew the killer, you’d think he’d have named him.”

Then she remembered Butch’s last word. Roy.

No. Surely she would have sensed something. “Whoever he is, I’ve got to stop him. I don’t think I could leave town, knowing that my friends are still in danger.”

Greg looked concerned. “I’m really not sure what to tackle first. You leaving town, or you thinking you can take down a serial killer single-handedly.”

She thought of Lynn White and Dawn O’Shaughnessy, with whom she had dinner plans for tonight, and the interesting things they had to discuss. “I may not have to do it single-handedly. And I’m not leaving town for good. I like it here. My mother…”

But she still wasn’t sure what she thought of Tamara, after yesterday’s revelations.

“I’ve learned about some family I hadn’t known before,” she said, by way of excuse. “I thought it might be nice to go visit.”

For all she knew, Rainy Miller Carrington had parents. Siblings. Cousins. In any case, the woman certainly had a grave. Surely Rainy’s friends—the Athenas, the Cassandras—would be able to advise Faith of how much her family knew, maybe even make introductions.

“Family? That’s great!” Perhaps glad to steer the lunch conversation away from serial killers, Greg told her how he’d come from a fair-size family—always trouble, and always loved. Faith admitted little about her own discoveries, for obvious reasons, but she enjoyed listening. The jazz concert started, adding a great Dixieland flavor to the whole afternoon. It almost felt…normal. Especially for someone who’d been held on murder charges mere hours before.

Maybe she just had to take her normalcy in small doses.

While Greg talked, Faith tried to consider him as a date. He wasn’t bad-looking, for a science geek, with his curly black hair and his beard and his pale eyes behind his glasses. More important than that, he was nice. He cared about his people. He cared about his job. He clearly cared about his brother and sister.

He smelled of latex gloves and balloons, which she couldn’t help liking.

She considered it, and she felt guilty. With all that in his favor, why wasn’t she more attracted to him? Why, instead, did her thoughts stray back to the sheer physical release that she’d gotten that morning, naked and sweaty and gasping and open in every possible way—with someone else?

With a backpack full of evidence just beyond her closet door. Thinking of the backpack, Faith frowned.

“It’s not that bad,” Greg assured her, thinking she was reacting to his funny family anecdote. “My brother stopped wetting the bed eventually…whether we let him forget it or not.”

“No—I just had a really bad thought. The man who called Roy this morning. The anonymous contact. How could he have known about the backpack in my closet? How could anyone?”

Greg seemed to resign himself to this newest, dark turn in the conversation. “Your roommate Evan?”

It was possible. As Roy had told her early on—the first rule of investigative work was that everyone lied. But…Evan? Her Evan? She shook her head.

Greg nudged his glasses down, as he sometimes did when particularly serious. “You can’t imagine—Faith, you don’t think Roy made up the anonymous contact, do you?”

That was a more likely—and even worse—possibility. Especially if he’d started nosing around her room, the way she’d snooped around his place after their first time together. If he actually found the backpack, found the wig, he would need some reason to legally justify the search. He could call a friend, maybe his partner, and have them call him back. And then…

Strangely, now that she and Roy were over, Faith found herself hoping that was exactly what happened. Because the third possibility…

Her stomach clenched at the thought. Someone had left the gate unlocked, last night. “Or maybe someone else had been in the apartment. In my room!”

Wouldn’t she have smelled lingering traces of an intruder?

She’d been more than a little distracted when she’d gotten home last night. She hadn’t tried to smell anything. Now the idea that an intruder, maybe the killer himself, had been in her room gave her chills.

“I’ve got to call my roommates again,” she decided, pushing her chair back to stand—then looking, crestfallen, out the window. A wide expanse of the Mississippi lay between them and land. The Antebellum had left the French Quarter and the distinctive Huey P. Long Bridge well behind it; to judge from the narration she heard on outdoor loudspeakers, they were passing the site of the Battle of New Orleans. They easily had another hour of cruise before she could use a pay phone.

“May I use your cell phone? I’ll keep it short.”

“Sure.” He fished it from his pocket and passed it across the table to her. “Why?”

“I need to make sure my roommates are okay.” The signal line on his phone’s display wasn’t particularly strong, and the jazz band, though really good, was also fairly loud. “Would you mind if…?”

“Not at all. Want me to come with you?”

He’d been great, so far. But she didn’t need a bodyguard just yet. “No, stay in the air-conditioning. I’ll be right back.”

Easygoing as ever, Greg nodded and turned his chair to better watch the concert, signaling the waitress for more coffee.

Faith headed out onto the deck, which was marginally quieter now that the rooftop calliope had stopped tooting out its carousel melodies. She hurried up an open stairway, away from the sound of the jazz band but closer to the churning wash of the two-story paddlewheel not far beneath her. At least the signal was stronger here, standing by the outside railing. She dialed her home number, covered her outside ear with her hand to block out the worst of the noise, and waited.

The phone rang.

It rang a second time.

It rang a third time.

The line clicked as the answering machine picked up. It was Evan’s voice, following Tamara Corbett’s theory of safe answering machines. “Hi! You’ve reached our apartment, but you haven’t quite reached us. If you want to leave a message for—”

Faith disconnected, still nervous. Her roommates were psychics. There was a killer on the loose who murdered psychics and who might very well know his way around their apartment.

After only a moment’s hesitation, she dialed a new number.

“Detectives Division,” answered a tired voice, on the second ring. Behind him the distinct bustle of the station sounded almost as loud as the paddlewheel Faith was muffling.

“I need to talk to Detective Max Leonard, please.” Faith winced. Well, she couldn’t very well ask for Roy. Not the Roy who’d glared hatred at her as she left the station. Not the Roy who wanted to burn her ass.

Max had recently transferred from Baton Rouge, he’d said. If Faith had a chance at objectivity with anybody…

“Hey, Boulanger, comment ça va?” That was Cajun for “how’s it going?” Max must be reading the caller ID.

“It’s not Greg, Detective Leonard. It’s Faith Corbett. I have a favor to ask.”

“Really?” Max pitched his voice a little louder, stiff with the awareness of an audience. “How can I help you, Ms. Corbett?”

The expletives that sounded near him were unmistakably Roy’s. Faith ignored them and the distinct click once the expletives stopped, which meant Roy had picked up on another line.

“I’m worried about my roommates,” she continued, hating that she had to ask for help but unwilling to risk her friends. Especially if the killer was really after the fictional Cassandra. “They aren’t answering the phone. Hopefully they’re just working the Square, but it’s rare for all three of them to be out during the midday heat, and if somebody got into my apartment once, to see what I had in my closet…. I know you don’t owe me any favors, but since whoever was in the apartment might be the psychic killer—you know, since he called me Cassandra….”

She stopped talking in order to listen closer to the strange shuffling on Max’s end. When Max spoke, it was halting, as if he was going off someone else’s script. “Why is it you can’t check on them yourself, sweetheart? Are you afraid to go in alone?”

Okay, so his dose of niceness came with some condescension.

“I’m stuck on a riverboat.”

“A riverboat?”

“Greg took me to lunch. Look, I’m worried, and since the psychic killer is yours and Roy’s case, I was hoping you’d check it out. It’s simple behavioral psychology. If he’s been there once, he’ll go back. The only way to catch—”

But she didn’t finish her sentence.

She caught a whiff of danger on the air—of power, of lust, of evil—only as something dropped past her line of sight.

Something red.

The serial killer drew the cord taut, catching the phone, then yanking Faith’s chin up and backward. The dropped phone skittered away from her, over the side—and into the churning wash of the twenty-five-ton paddlewheel.

Chapter 18

If Faith hadn’t been on the phone, she would be dead.

As it was, the cord cut deeply against the underside of her chin. It cinched the heels of her hands, hands that had thankfully been against her ears, hard against her jaw. Hardened residue of dried blood bit into the skin of her wrists, her throat, and with it—

Nessa’s horror that she would never see her mom again….

Krystal’s surprise, her terror—and a sense of recognition. Chet?

Oh, God. The horrible, gargling noise from her own throat as she lost her breath mingled with a borrowed memory of the noises Nessa and Krystal had made, and Penelope Lafayette, and the nameless first victim. Faith was dying four times at once, sliced deep with the immediacy of what those poor women had gone through, telegraphed into her through their blood. But she knew how to stop it, this time.

At least, she knew how to stop the feedback.

She dragged downward with her hands against the red cord, keeping it from crushing her airway completely. She snapped her head backward.

Right into the killer’s face.

A blast of light, the pain of impact, blinded her momentarily. A cough wheezed out of her, with nothing to replace it. But like before, like when she’d fought the gangbangers, striking out somehow blocked the influx of images. Now, blessedly, it was just her, some guy and the churning paddlewheel below them.

Only one murder, hers, not the other four. Attempted murder. But damn it, she couldn’t breathe!

Faith swung her head back again, impacted his face, and the universe reeled.

The killer wailed wordless protest and pain, the sound wet with fresh blood. The rope dug deeper into her throat. Faith stomped down, hard, on the foot behind her, glad to feel her heel crunching across his toes. The rope dug deeper still. Faint with dizziness now, hurting and breathless, she slammed her head back a third time.

Blackness threatened her vision from the outside in. Blackness and nausea. But this time, the killer stumbled.

It was just enough for Faith to gasp a sharp, painful breath. She dropped to her knees, ducked her head, let her own body weight pull her free from under the slackened cord.

Numb hands still caught in it, she rolled on the deck to face her bent assailant. Brown hair. Quiet eyes.

The same man she’d seen at Celeste’s. The one Butch had been trying to ID when he’d died.

The serial killer.

His red cord had twisted cruelly around her hands, with her turn. She still didn’t let go. It wasn’t merely the best damned evidence she was going to get on the guy.

It was this bastard’s weapon of choice.

Still down, using her weight in their tug-of-war, she kicked at him. She wished her shoes were harder as she connected with his shins, with his knee, each impact lurching through her. She was losing the feeling in her hands, could see her fingers turning white from lack of blood. The killer wore protective leather gloves. He pulled the rope tighter, lifting her half off the deck with his strength. Despite the churning paddlewheel below, she could hear his distinct heartbeat now, the strange miss to its rhythm. His pheromones of conquest were turning rank with frustration.

“Let go,” Faith ordered, surprised to hear how raspy her voice sounded. And she pulled something that her repeated head butts into his face had given her. “Chet.”

His eyes widened. Faith could feel the bones in her hands crunching together under the twisted cord. Since kicking at him didn’t help, she slid her legs under her and rose, hard, right into him. He stumbled backward. She helped, with a full-body tackle.

He fell back onto the deck. She landed on top of him and his unusual heartbeat, on purpose. She tried to dig her elbows into his chest, her knee into his privates, but her now-numb hands stayed trapped.

Still playing tug-of-war with the murder weapon.

For a moment, she could feel wetness on her face. Spray from the huge blue paddlewheel slicing past, mere yards below them. Then the killer rolled with her, slammed her against the railing—and one of Faith’s legs slid under the rail, right over the edge of the deck.

Into the nothingness above the mighty Mississippi.

Damn it! If she had to be genetically engineered anyway, why couldn’t she have gotten the superstrength?

Well, she hadn’t.

But she’d gotten something. The killer—was his name really Chet?—thrust himself against her again in violence, in fear, in something even uglier. Faith’s hip slid over the sharp wooden edge of the deck.

She could feel the paddlewheel’s spray across her ankle now.

Using every bit of strength left in her arms, no longer able to tell she even had hands where the cord had cut off all feeling, Faith leveraged herself a few inches higher, drew the man closer and buried her bare face into his bare neck.

And bit his jaw, like the vampires Krystal had feared.

And now, now she got Chet.

He’d gone off his antipsychotic meds.

He’d been burning incense and scented candles. Their scent was almost as powerful on him as the scent of death.

He’d spent time in an institution, where they’d taken his shoelaces. Now he had a room at his mother’s old house. Someone took care of him. His—

Jealousy. Jealousy so sharp that it burned in her gut like a sympathy pain. Particularly jealousy of one person…the Master. A woman got naked for the Master once. She laughed at Chet when they caught him watching. “I’m psychic,” she’d said.

He needed to be psychic. Nobody would laugh at him again.

He needed her!

With a wordless wail, he shook Faith away from his neck and shoved her, hard, more precariously across the slick wooden deck.

Her other leg fell over the side of the boat. She lurched abruptly downward. Only her hands, tangled in the cord he held, and her shoulders against the bottom rail kept her from falling. From the deck below, she heard someone scream.

She held on in every possible way. “Who’s the Master, Chet?” It felt like talking past sandpaper. Her throat ached. She wanted to throw up.

But at least she got words from him. “Shut up!”

“Who was the woman? The one who laughed at you. Was she your first? The first one you killed?”

“Shut up! You don’t know anything!”

“I know everything!” Remembering Roy’s book of superstitions, Faith said, “This cord drains people of their energy, right? Well I’m draining your psychic energy, Chet. Right now. Every drop you got from Krystal. Every drop you got from Nessa. If you don’t let go, you won’t have any left at all.”

She was lying, but it worked.

“No!”

“They’ll put you back in the asylum.” God. She actually felt cruel, saying it. As twisted and evil as this man was….

But what was her alternative? “They’ll laugh at you.”

“Shut up!”

She tried to swing one leg back up onto the deck. “Going.”

Chet shook his head.

“Going,” she repeated. “Every bit of stolen power. I’ve got Penelope’s now, too. You’re just some weak, stupid boy again, Chet. Stop this before I get everything.”

Their gazes held, linking them just as tightly as the cord.

“Gone,” said Faith.

And with a howl of despair, Chet let go of the cord. He vaulted over the white railing and dropped.

Released, Faith dropped too. Body weight slid her downward. Wildly, she swung her arms at a rail-post and, with a lurch, she caught it with her elbows and hung.

Only then could she look. Had he dived into the river, into the deadly wash of the paddlewheel?

No. He’d swung lithely to the deck beneath her.

Swung, landed and started running.

She swung, too—just as she saw Greg racing up the stairs, horror on his usually inexpressive face. “Faith!”

One thing at a time. Faith wasn’t as graceful about it as Chet had been. Her hands were still bound, still deadened. But after two swings she arched through the air and landed, only slamming one hip against the second-deck railing. She barely had time to bruise a knee as she fell before she was up and running after the killer.

Trying to twist her hands free at the same time.

Like before, when the killer had fled Celeste’s, Chet’s main method of escape was to push past other people, using them as obstacles to her pursuit. He slammed an old woman against one of the dining room windows and sent a toddler sprawling perilously close to the boat’s edge—that cost Faith more time as she slowed, before she saw that the child’s mother had snatched him to safety.

By then, Chet was almost to the bow.

Faith tore after him, finally wrenching one hand free of the cord. Jazz music from the dining room, “When the Saints Come Marching In” taunted her with its jaunty familiarity. Chet didn’t have much choice of where to go. He skidded down the open stairway, rabbiting toward the bottom deck.

Faith slid down the painted railing for speed, landed on the polished wood floor, and kept after him. He was heading for the stern again, the stern and the turning, thumping wheel, which looked even larger from here than it had from above. He stopped before he got there and spun, his head pivoting from Faith to the river to Faith.

“Don’t do it,” she warned him, shouting over the churning wash. Feeling was starting to come back to her hands in agonizing throbs. She kind of wished it hadn’t.

He shook his head. His jaw was bleeding where she’d bit him.

“Even if you survive the wheel, the river will kill you. She won’t protect you, this time. She doesn’t give up her dead.” And we may never know who you were. Why you killed. Who your first victim was. We may never prove your guilt.

Or my innocence.

He shook his head again.

“I’ll give you back some of your power!”

Chet’s eyes widened, more disbelief than hope.

“I’ve…cleansed it now.” Wow, was she making this up. “Like running it through a filter. Now it’s not just power, it’s good power. It won’t…” She tried to put words to the sense of desperation, of need, that she’d gotten off of him. “It will last better than the other times. It will taste better.”

Chet took a quick step back. He was pressed against the rail now, paddles of the blue wheel rolling downward right behind him, like some wet, dizzying backdrop.

Slowly, Faith lowered the red cord with one stiff hand and reached out with the other. “Come on. Look, you don’t have to steal my energy. I’m offering it. That’s how powerful I am.”

And slowly, warily, the killer reached outward.

His gloved hand closed around hers. But if she concentrated—

He felt like pain. He felt like humiliation. Most frighteningly, he felt like a sucking void—there was a hole in him, a gaping, ragged hole where pieces of his humanity should have been, and they were gone. The parts that kept most people from killing just weren’t there.

Their absence had turned him vicious, pain or no pain. He wasn’t safe for the rest of society. Ever.

Maybe Chet saw something in her face as she fully comprehended that, comprehended that he could kill for reasons so foreign to her, he could never be predicted. That he would kill again and again. Or maybe this had just been a con. He spun and threw her against the railing, her head too close to the paddlewheel now.

And Faith…she went somewhere dark herself. She threw herself against him, wrenching her hand free of his, hurling them both down onto the deck. She caught him across the throat with one arm as she landed on him. And before he could fight back, she drew the cord slowly across his face, where he could see it.

His eyes widened in horrified recognition of who could take whose power now.

“Goodbye, Chet,” Faith rasped.

Then she slammed the flat of her hand into his nose, breaking it and knocking him unconscious.

Not an hour later, Faith sat in the open back of an ambulance at the Toulouse Street Wharf. Her feet dangled, and her hands and throat were bandaged. She’d already been photographed from all angles by the police crew to support a charge of assault. Luckily she had no damage that required disrobing. The bruises on her hip and knee were from swinging around a riverboat like Tarzan, not from Chet. Her hands and her neck, though…

They hurt. But nowhere near as badly as Krystal’s must have, or Nessa’s. The secondhand memories of what had happened to them clogged Faith’s throat, as surely as the swelling from her attack.

Faith sincerely hoped assault was not what they nailed this guy for.

She’d already watched one ambulance shuttle Chet off toward the Charity Hospital, complete with a police guard. Now she was watching Roy and Max—who still had the serial killer case whether or not Roy had gotten back onto Butch’s—as they interviewed fellow passengers. Watching, and eavesdropping.

They asked the standard questions. “Did you notice anything unusual?”

“Did you see the man any earlier in the cruise?”

“When did you see the blonde leave the dining room?”

Sometimes they tried to trip someone up, just to confirm their story. “So the girl pushed little Timmy out of the way? Oh, okay. Yeah. It was the guy who did that.”

Faith wasn’t completely comfortable with the direction some of the questions took—or their answers. The Antebellum had been nowhere near full, not for an afternoon tour on a workday in the blazing August heat. Chet had been surprisingly careful; nobody had seen him attack her, and people had only noticed the scuffle once Faith’s legs appeared dangling off the third deck. Even Greg had had to admit that he didn’t actually see “the suspect” initially attack Faith. He’d only seen them fighting.

“But come on,” he’d added loyally. “Either he was trying to push her off or to pull her back up. Which do you think’s more likely?”

“I wasn’t there,” said Roy bluntly. “So what happened next?”

What happened next, by all accounts, was that Faith chased the suspect down two decks, including one flight of stairs, and then broke his nose. The authorities’ best proof that Faith had been the victim of this encounter, and not the perpetrator, was her word and the ligature marks on her throat. And considering the circumstances of the morning, Faith didn’t expect the police to give a lot of credit to her word.

Roy and Max were still conferring over their notes when Roy muttered, “Told you she was a Bernie.”

“I apologize for not believing you,” said Max, easygoing as ever. Faith still didn’t know what a Bernie was.

“Timing’s awful suspicious, though.”

“You still thinking conspiracy?”

Roy shrugged. Sitting with the EMTs, across the wharf from the detectives, Faith sighed. Great. She and Greg had delivered a serial killer into the detectives’ hands—and they still suspected her.

“Why don’t I do the follow-ups,” suggested Max, but Roy shook his head.

“No way in hell. This one, I gotta hear.”

So they strolled over to her, as casual as if this sort of thing happened every day. Maybe for them, it did.

“Sorry we have to meet this way,” said Max. “We already had a patrol check on your roommates and they were fine.”

“That’s because the killer was on the Antebellum.” Faith’s scratchy voice sounded funny in her own ears. It still hurt.

“Yeah.” Roy withdrew his ever-present notepad….

Well, thought Faith, not always present. It would be a long time before she stopped thinking of sex when she thought about Roy Chopin. And that was a shame.

“About that,” he said. “Any idea how he ended up on the same cruise as you? Was it maybe…magic?”

Faith flipped him off.

“Enough of that,” chided Max. “Both of you. It’s a valid question, Ms. Corbett. If the accused really is the killer we’ve been after—and I’m not saying he isn’t—do you think he followed you onto the boat? Or was there any reason he would’ve known you’d be there?”

“Like what? I didn’t know I’d be there! It was Greg’s idea, but he didn’t know I’d go to lunch with him until, like, ten minutes before the Antebellum left dock. Neither one of us exactly called ahead.” Did she imagine it, or did she note a slight acceleration of Roy’s heartbeat when she mentioned her date with Greg? “If Chet followed me, he would’ve had to be waiting outside the station. I guess it’s possible he would know I was there, if he’s the one who called Roy this morning. But how would he know I’d be released?”

The detectives exchanged telling glances before Roy challenged, “So you’re saying this wasn’t a prearranged meeting?”

“That’s what it sounds like to me, Detective.”

“We need you to tell us again what happened,” said Max. “In as much detail as possible this time. Do you think you’re up to that, sweetheart?”

Roy rolled his eyes.

“I’m fine,” rasped Faith. “I was on Greg’s cell phone…”

They listened to her story with minimal interruption, like good detectives should, though she sensed Roy’s muscles tightening several times as he had to physically fight the urge to make snide comments.

“…by then, Greg had gotten there with the security guard. They handcuffed Chet, and we called back to shore. And that’s that.”

The detectives exchanged that look again. “You keep calling him Chet,” said Max.

“So?”

“So the guy doesn’t have any ID on him,” clarified Roy, each question like a shove. “No wallet. Just a pocket full of salt. So how do you know his name? Did he introduce himself, or were you previously acquainted?”

Oh, great. Faith had been wondering, since her sisters’ announcement the previous day, just how deeply her genetically enhanced sensitivity went. It unnerved her that she could guess someone’s actual name—something you’d think wouldn’t just come across with acute sight, hearing, or smell. But it sure wasn’t imagination this time. “I guessed.”

Even more unnerving was the intensity of Roy’s stare. He knows, she thought, and felt sick about it. He knows I’m a freak. Why wouldn’t he? He knew she was Cassandra, now. And he’d seen her respond to something no normal person could have heard, back in the police station.

She met his gaze in a silent dare, waiting for the disgust, waiting for the dismissal.

Waiting for him to turn away.

Instead, Roy continued in cop mode. “Well it will be interesting to see who he ID’s as.”

“Yes, it will. Do you at least believe he’s the killer?”

“We can’t discuss open cases,” hedged Max.

“You know that when the tests on that cord come back, my epithelials are a lot more likely to be on it than his are. He wore gloves. I was bare-handed.”

“Why don’t we wait until the tests come back to worry about that, sweetheart?” asked Max.

She nodded, and they finished their notes. Most of the other police had gone on, witnesses dismissed, evidence collected. The EMTs tried to talk her into going to the hospital, just to make sure none of her injuries were more serious, but Faith declined. She’d had enough people touching her for one day, and enough of small rooms.

Her hands hurt, but they would heal.

The rest of her…

Greg had waited, the whole time, though he’d stayed back while she was questioned—one of the first rules of interview work, apparently, was to separate the witnesses. Only when Max beckoned him over did he return to Faith’s side.

She looked from one man to the next. Greg, analytical and bespectacled, his mouth tight from the violence of the afternoon. Roy, exhausted from even less sleep than she’d had, pretending not to care. His jaw was still a dare, though, and his posture pure disapproval. And Max, the newcomer, least burdened by the subcurrents of everything that had happened, best able to stay objective.

“Chet’s the serial killer,” she told them in her wounded, rasping voice. “You know that, don’t you?”

“We only know what the evidence tells us,” said Max.

“Yes, but what do your instincts tell you?”

It was Roy who answered. “You’re the psychic, Cassandra.”

His words seemed especially taut. This time, Faith didn’t bother to argue it.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” said Lynn as her fingers danced across the keys of her laptop. The dresser’s mirror reflected the top of her bent, chestnut head. “But didn’t everything turn out for the best? The charges against you were dropped. The killer has been caught.”

“One of them,” Faith reminded her. “But it doesn’t feel…finished.”

“You’re the psychic,” said Dawn, from where she sat on one of the chairs by the window. “You should know.” Her posture was casual, one booted leg hooked up over the chair’s arm, but Faith knew that, even without an imminent danger, Dawn was keeping watch. The three sisters were in Lynn and Dawn’s hotel room. As soon as Lynn and Dawn had seen Faith’s injuries, when she’d shown up for dinner, they’d dragged her up here for an explanation.

It had been a long explanation. After that came Faith’s request.

“I’m in,” announced Lynn, and vacated the chair to sit on the bed behind it. “It was easy, with your password as a starting point. Apparently with all the excitement this afternoon, nobody got around to blocking you out of the system yet.”

“But nobody can see that I accessed it?” Faith took the chair. She’d unwrapped the bandages from her swollen hands, but they were still stiff and sore. She would have to type very slowly to see what needed seeing.

“You’re cyber-invisible,” Lynn assured her.

So Faith pulled up the files on that afternoon’s arrests, scrolling past larcenies and drug busts until she found the one she was looking for. “Here it is—Toulouse Street Wharf. They ran his prints and he turned out to be…Chester Elliott Simpson. Thirty. They’ve got him under psychiatric observation.”

There were even some initial notes by the admitting doctor. May suffer from paranoia-based delusional disorder. Thinks women are witches. Perceives safety in superstitions like salt/running water. Violence against women—rebellion against perceived powerlessness? Investigate childhood/familial history of psychiatric disturbance.

“Apparently he’s crazy,” translated Faith.

“I suppose that’s a start,” said Lynn. “So what will it take for you to believe it’s over?”

“Understanding why he did it.”

Dawn looked over her shoulder, here with them and yet somehow, sadly, apart. “Because he’s a nutjob doesn’t work for you?”

“And a life sentence without possibility for parole.”

Faith could see Lynn’s wry smile reflected in the dresser mirror. “Considering today’s legal system, that could take a while.”

“And finding Butch’s killer.” That was the biggest, she decided. Of course, everyone’s death was a tragedy beyond measure. Krystal had brought comfort to hundreds, through her readings and her otherworldly wisdom—Chet had killed that. Nessa’s possibilities were equally cut short. And Penelope Lafayette. And the mysterious first woman. But Butch…

By endangering his life every day, by reining in his younger, brasher partner, by keeping an open mind about advice from an anonymous contact who could have been anybody but had in fact been her…

The loss of Butch’s goodness would haunt Faith for the longest, she thought. And not just because, if Butch were still around, she and Roy might have had a chance.

Maybe.

“So which one do you want to start on first?” asked Dawn. She was clearly not the sort of person who hung back. Faith liked that. “Comprehension, conviction, or vengeance?”

“Start on how?”

Lynn leaned forward, her elbows propped on her knees, from her perch on the bed. “You know, Faith, one of the things that happened once Dawn told me where our abilities came from was, they seemed to get a little stronger. Or maybe it was just my confidence in them that increased. Have you noticed the same thing?”

“I knew his name was Chet,” Faith admitted—but then the possibilities inherent in that, in who she really was, fully occurred to her. “And I sensed some of his secrets even through gloves, when I concentrated. So heaven knows what else I can find out about him and his motives. If I just trust myself, I mean.”

Lynn shrugged. And Faith made her decision.

She turned back to the computer and hunt-and-pecked another command. “Here’s Chet’s address, in Algiers Point. And—yes! That was quick. The detectives already executed a search warrant, so if we disturb anything looking around, we won’t have tampered with evidence. Not that I suppose we can get inside….”

Lynn and Dawn snorted in unison.

“We can get inside,” Lynn assured her. “Even if Chester Elliott Simpson found out, I doubt he’ll be in any position to press charges for trespassing.”

“Breaking and entering,” Faith corrected her.

“Sis,” Lynn’s green eyes looked particularly mysterious. “I never have to break.

“I just enter.”

Chapter 19

Dawn declined to accompany her sisters on this particular reconnaissance mission. “I’ve got things to do,” she’d said, without telling them more.

So Lynn and Faith headed out alone. Luckily, Lynn had a rental car. They caught the Canal Street Ferry across the Mississippi to Algiers Point, a historic neighborhood opposite the French Quarter, and followed their printout map until they found—and deliberately passed—the Creole Cottage-style house listed as Chet Simpson’s primary residence.

“It’s barely a quarter mile from the ferry landing,” noted Faith. “He could walk that far no problem, and ten minutes later he’s at the Quarter. He doesn’t even need a driver’s license. No wonder he likes to think running water will protect him. It’s not just a common superstition. He crosses the Mississippi every time he comes back to his lair.”

The house was built on four-foot brick piers with a sharply slanting, continuous gable roof, a full-front gallery, and an exterior stairway to the second floor. It was dark.

“So you really think you might be able to sense something in there?” asked Lynn, turning the corner and driving on. She’d explained that they wanted to case the place before they actually stopped the car.

“I don’t know. But when I was in Roy’s house…he’s a friend…was a friend…” Okay, so Roy was complicated.

Lynn slanted an intrigued glance her direction, but said nothing. And she wasn’t even the psychic.

“It felt as if the house had memories. At the time I half figured I was imagining it, but now that I know I was engineered this way…maybe I can read this one, too. If we can get in.”

Lynn grinned. “Oh, we can get in.”

Not ten minutes later, the car was parked around the corner from Chet’s home and the two sisters were securely inside the front parlor, the door shut behind them.

“I learned to pick locks,” Lynn whispered, flexing her hands in their expensive gloves, “at a very early age.”

They stood in a front parlor, its double French doors framed on either side with ceiling-high shuttered windows. The ceiling showed exposed beams. The old fireplace had a wraparound mantel.

The TV set and stereo speakers, standing like a miniature Stonehenge, seemed almost blasphemous amidst the history of the building.

“You don’t need a light, do you?” asked Lynn.

“Nope.”

“Neither do I.”

The sisters exchanged smiles in this darkness that, somehow, their eyes could penetrate. That momentary connection helped remind Faith of what she was here to do.

To trust her instincts.

And whatever she was, to trust herself.

She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, laying the back of her hand on the mantel, to better connect with the home’s energy without leaving fingerprints.

Bustling. Searching. Frustration. She could smell the powder used in lifting fingerprints, could smell the luminol sprayed into a few key areas in the vain search for bloodstains. Mostly, she could feel Roy’s presence, smell his scent from where he’d stalked through here, pissing off the crime-scene unit with his often unnecessary suggestions, arguing with Max.

Then again, she was particularly familiar with Roy’s scent and his energy, for obvious reasons. “The police only left an hour ago,” she reported, surprised at how certain she felt about that little bit of information. “They found some things they could use, books and I think…yes, a flyer from the psychic fair. But they’re afraid it’s all circumstantial. They didn’t find the hair he took off his victims.”

The Creole floor plan led to rooms on either side of the parlor, to rooms behind those, and to an open porch, or loggia, in back. Every room had doorways into every other connected room. There were no hallways.

As Faith and Lynn slowly moved from one area to the next, Faith began to pick up on the house’s less recent history. “Some of it’s just…just a blur of normalcy. Several families were raised here since it was built. It almost feels as if the house resents having just one person living here, now. It was built for families….”

Stopping herself, Faith looked at her newfound sister. “Like some people are.”

Lynn returned her smile.

Faith went back to reading the house. “The parts that stand out seem to be the periods of extreme emotion. Here—” she pointed at a rocking chair. “This is where a woman was sitting when they told her that her husband had been killed. That was maybe thirty…no, thirty-five years ago, I think. And over there—” she pointed into the kitchen “—that’s where her daughter walked out on her, after a screaming argument. The mother thought the daughter was throwing herself away on some guy. The daughter thought the mother was trying to run her life.”

Amazing. It wasn’t so much that she could see or smell or hear the confrontations. It really was like imagining it.

Except whatever Lab 33 had done to her, the things she “imagined” were already true.

“And Chet?” prompted Lynn.

“He watched them. From here. He was really upset to see his sister go. His mother said…” Faith concentrated, feeling the emotions more than hearing the words, but some words seemed to just fit. “She predicted that things would turn out badly for her daughter. You know how people are—you’ll be sorry, or don’t come to me when he leaves you. Like that. Later, the boyfriend did leave the sister, and that made Chet afraid. He thought his mom predicted it, maybe made it happen.”

“Chet’s not all there, is he?”

“Not really, no. But I think that mainly comes out when he’s excited, or upset.” When his heart started its strange, irregular rhythm.

They headed up the stairs to find two large rooms with long, slanting ceilings, connected with a door in between. It was the far room that offered a door with outside stairs down to the porch.

“This was the girls’ room,” explained Faith, crossing it. It seemed to be used for storage now—unused exercise equipment, old vinyl record albums, boxes of belongings nobody meant to ever reclaim. “I think that was an old Creole tradition. Daughters get the indoor stairway because they aren’t supposed to be coming and going a lot. But the boy’s room has an outdoor entrance, to give them their privacy when they go catting around.”

“That’s awfully…” Lynn considered her words, then settled on, “sexist.”

“You said it. It was here…” Again, she touched the doorjamb, careful to use just the side of her hand. It felt as if the house was calling her toward something, toward a touch of familiarity, so Faith leaned her cheek against the wood for a deeper sense.

And with a hum of power, like that, the scene played out in front of her.

A preteen boy, Chet, banished to his sister’s room. But he wanted to know what was going on. He came to stand here, right here, and peeked through the doorway. He was surprised to see his big brother and his girlfriend Claudia in the bed, doing things they probably shouldn’t be doing in his mama’s house. His brother got away with everything, and it wasn’t fair. Still, it sure was interesting, what she looked like naked, what they were doing….

Until Claudia began to giggle. “I’m psychic, you know,” she told his brother, who until then was just grunting. “I can tell when we’re being watched!”

And she sat up a little, as much as his brother’s weight would let her, and she pointed right at Chet. Then his brother saw, too. He roared, and leaped out of bed, and ran at him. Chet had never seen him like…like that…and he was scared.

“Who am I, you little turd?” demanded his brother, pushing him down onto the floor, like always, planting a knee on his back. “You forget who I am?”

It was an old litany, one Chet knew by heart. “You’re…you’re the Master.”

“Damned right!”

Faith’s eyes opened. She pulled away from the doorjamb, scrubbed at her cheek with her aching bare hand as she wished she could scrub away the snippets of understanding that were still rolling into her mind, as if on some kind of delay. “She wasn’t really psychic at all.”

“What?” asked Lynn.

Faith recounted the vision, the borrowed memory, whatever it had been. The more she described it, the more upset she felt. “And what’s really tragic—for Krystal and Nessa and Penny, I mean—is she wasn’t even psychic. Chet was a mouth-breather. Claudia heard him.”

“And what about this brother? This Master?”

“I can’t see him,” said Faith—too quickly, even to her own ears. The silence, after her confession, echoed.

“Doesn’t that strike you as kind of odd?”

Faith didn’t have an answer for that.

“You were able to see Chet, right?” insisted Lynn. “You could see this Claudia person. Why can’t you see the brother?”

That’s when Faith knew why. She just hated to face it. “Maybe for the same reason I went so long without realizing how many secrets my mom was keeping from me. It was there all the time, and I didn’t see it until I was ready to see it. Because I don’t want to know.”

Lynn raised her eyebrows in the darkness and waited. Faith wondered how much her sister resembled Rainy Miller Carrington, at that moment.

“Or maybe I don’t want to see him because of what he did to Chet.”

“Which was…?”

Faith shook her head and took a step backward into the girls’ bedroom. The one where Chet had been exiled so often, accused of being just a girl himself. “I can’t do it, Lynn. I can’t look at it straight-on. I know the brother tortured him, but how far it went past normal big-brother bullying—I’m not sure, and I don’t want to see it.”

But there were some things she had to see, weren’t there? Understanding was more important than her cowardice. So Faith took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, strode into the middle of the boys’ bedroom—and concentrated.

“Chet hated feeling so powerless,” she announced, translating the swirl of impressions that registered within her as surely as sound and smell and temperature. “Then one day…it’s really hot out. They don’t have air conditioning yet. Claudia sneaks in before his brother gets home from…from his job? Or college classes. Since it’s so hot, she strips naked to wait for him. She’s been drinking, cold beer against the heat, maybe more than beer. She sees Chet peeking at her, and she’s bored, so she starts teasing him about being a little pervert, about her having psychic powers to control him…oh…”

Face it.

“The bitch is teasing him about his…his reaction to her being naked. She tells him she’s making it happen to him. Not like a natural response, but like witchcraft. Now he feels even more powerless. It scares him. He’s telling her to make it stop, and she just taunts him some more….”

Come on, Chester. You have to do what I tell you, or it’ll freeze that way.

“He’s so scared. He wants to shut her up, so he runs at her, and he’s pushing at her, trying to cover her mouth, but squeezing her throat works better. He’s so upset, he doesn’t realize she can’t breathe…or maybe he doesn’t care. And then—”

She had to pull back from the present-tense narration. It was too disgusting, too immediate. “He killed her. That shut her up, for good. It made him feel powerful. Manly, even. I think on some level he connected the two—her death, and the sexual rush he felt. But when his brother got home…”

What did you do? Oh my God, what did you do?! Why do I always have to clean up after you?

“His brother got rid of the body. Got rid of the evidence. Everything except…”

Faith looked down at her own hand, but now she was Chet, looking down at his. Skinny hand. Long fingers. And a shank of bleached blond hair that he’d twisted around his hand while trying to shut her up. He’d torn it free when his brother came in. Faith saw herself—saw him—slide it into his pocket where the Master wouldn’t see.

But where did he put it then?

She took a shuddering breath, returning to the present.

“Celeste Deveaux—she’s the medium I told you about. She said the spirit of the first victim was a ‘bare wisp of lingering anguish.’ That must have been Claudia.” Maybe with this new information they could learn her last name and bring her a final, last bit of peace.

“But here’s what I don’t get,” insisted Lynn. “Like I said. You can see Chet. You can even see the girlfriend. Why not the brother?”

Faith was ready to face that, too. “Because it’s someone I know. And I don’t want it to be him.”

“If you’re anything like Dawn and me, it’s not like you have that wide a circle of acquaintances.”

Faith scrubbed her hands across her pants legs, still trying to wipe them clean. “Not Evan, my roommate. He grew up in the Garden District, not Algiers Point. And he’s gay.”

“Check. Not Evan.”

“And…and I don’t think Roy.” Oh God, not Roy. But she felt sure she would know his scent, know his energy, even from memories trapped in the walls and ceiling and floors of an old house. Besides…“His grandparents were from the Irish Channel. Why would his parents have moved across the river? And I saw family pictures at his house. I didn’t see Chet there.”

“We can come back to Roy. Who else?”

And Faith knew. It was partly process of elimination, and partly a lifting of the veil of fear. Either she owned this skill of hers or not.

“Greg,” she whispered, real grief aching in her throat. “I don’t know how he was able to hide the truth from me, but it was my boss Greg, before he grew his beard.”

No wonder he’d gone into evidence. He’d gotten early experience, cleaning up his brother’s mistakes.

Then another terrible thought occurred to her. She knew where Greg worked! “We’ve got to get to the station before he destroys all the evidence against Chet!”

“That would be the evidence that will clear you, right? Come on!” The sisters hurried out of the house and ran down the block toward the corner, no longer as worried about being seen. But as they jogged around the corner, toward Lynn’s rental car, Faith’s step slowed.

The car looked shorter than before.

That was because of the four flat tires.

“Damn!”

“Okay,” said Lynn. “Don’t panic. This doesn’t seem like the best neighborhood. Was it a random crime, or something more personal?”

Faith tried sniffing the car—and sneezed, violently. Then again. Her nose burned and her already swollen throat ached. She had to back away from the car, eyes watering.

“What is this?” demanded Lynn, swiping a finger across one fender. But Faith knew what it was.

Cayenne pepper. Exactly what she’d smelled when Butch was killed!

That’s when she heard the faint metallic click, echoing down the block. Then another. “Lynn, down!”

Both girls hit the asphalt as a shot exploded into the night. Faith found herself up close and personal with hardened tar. Window glass rained down on top of her. She pulled herself over to where Lynn lay. Not my sister. Not my sister. “Lynn!”

“I’m fine.” Lynn shook glass out of her hair. “I move faster than you, remember?”

Faith tried to lean past the fender, but began to sneeze again. “Damn!”

“He knows what you can do,” guessed Lynn.

“He what?”

“Some people use pepper to repel guard dogs, or to throw them off a scent. Apparently he just…adapted it.” When Faith stared, Lynn explained, “I know security.”

Faith remembered sniffing the letter that Chet had left at the Biltmore, while Greg watched. But surely that wouldn’t have been enough! “Have you got a cell phone?”

“Of course I’ve got a cell phone. Who doesn’t have a cell phone? Oh.” When Faith extended her hand, Lynn gave her the phone.

This time, Faith didn’t dial through the detective division. She went straight to the source.

“Chopin here.”

“Don’t hang up,” she murmured. “If you’re able to record phone calls, start recording. You’re going to want to hear this.”

“Gee,” said Roy, drily. “You wouldn’t be some kind of anonymous contact, would you? Got more psychic hunches for me?”

“Either you’re a good detective or you aren’t, Serpico.” Well, whoever Serpico was, she’d gotten the impression he was one of the good guys. “Just listen for a few minutes. Oh. And, shots fired at Charbineau off Pelican, in Algiers Point.”

She could hear his swearing even as she pocketed the phone, raised her hands—and stood into the open, August night.

Lynn said a less-than-ladylike word herself.

“It’s okay, Greg,” Faith called. “It’s just me. Don’t do anything you’re going to regret.”

“Who says I’m going to regret it?” he demanded. But although he was still pointing the weapon at her, he wasn’t firing. Not yet.

Then again, he had a point. If he’d been able to hide his knowledge of the real serial killer, to murder Butch, to try to kill her—or Cassandra, as he’d thought she was at the time—and still keep all traces of guilt out of his breath, out of his heartbeat, out of his energy…clearly Chet wasn’t the only member of the family missing some piece of humanity. Why would he regret it?

“I thought we had a connection,” she said, and took a step closer to him, her arms still spread to show her harmlessness. “I know you’re just trying to protect your brother. It’s like you told me at lunch. Families can be a lot of trouble, but you still love them, right?”

Greg laughed. “And I thought you majored in pre-law, Faith, not psychology.”

“I minored in psychology, but that doesn’t mean I’m trying to play you. Didn’t I go out with you, as soon as I quit? Aren’t you the one I always went to, when I was upset about anything?”

Greg said nothing—until she took a step closer. Then he raised the gun, which had begun to sink. “I don’t have much to lose here.”

“Sure you do. I know you were trying to kill Cassandra in the cemetery, not Butch. That makes it an accident.” Actually, it didn’t. If he was trying to kill her, intent followed the bullet. But she wasn’t telling him that.

“You don’t know the NOPD! A cop killer is a cop killer.”

“And an accident is an accident. But deliberately shooting me here, right in front of the home you grew up in—you can’t excuse that one.”

“Who’ll know?”

Anyone listening to the tape Roy was hopefully making, for one. But Faith knew she couldn’t count on that. “My sister. You saw us go into the house, right? Maybe you were already inside, checking for whatever the police had missed. Then we came. That’s why you flattened her tires and waited for us.”

“Who says I’ll leave your sister talking?” demanded Greg.

Which was when Lynn stepped up beside him, grabbed his gun-hand, and said, “I do.”

Greg squeezed off one shot into the asphalt before Lynn wrenched the gun free with her superstrength. Then, looking wide-eyed from her to Faith, Greg turned and ran.

Faith took off after him. “Don’t lose the gun,” she shouted over her shoulder. “Do not lose that gun! Uh…weapon.”

“I didn’t plan to,” said Lynn, catching up more easily than seemed fair. “What’s the big deal?”

“Ballistics should be able to match it to Butch’s murder, that’s what,” Faith panted. “Hey, aren’t you supposed to be able to outrun me?”

“Why not tire the guy out first?”

Good point. And Faith, either because of her genetic engineering or just because she had almost twenty years on Greg, was no bad runner either. She and Lynn stretched full out, their footsteps quickly syncing with each other’s.

“We’re…passing the old…gas station,” Faith gasped, as they sprinted past the old historical site. That was for the benefit of the police, of course, not for Lynn. “I think he’s…headed for the…ferry.”

Sure enough, Greg had turned onto Seguin.

Worse, they could hear the clanging bells that announced the ferry’s imminent departure from the landing.

“Should we stop him?” called Lynn, barely winded.

“He’s heading…in a good direction….” So they kept running. The clanging got louder, and she heard a scraping noise—the ferry pulling up the skirt boards. Greg wasn’t taking the pedestrian stairway. He was racing down the car ramp, ducking past the gate arm.

“Hey!” yelled a guard. “Ferry’s departing! Stop—”

The sisters, pounding past him, seemed to surprise him into silence.

“Uh-oh,” said Lynn.

Greg leaped onto the ferry. And it really was departing, sliding out of its mooring and into the broad, dark river. Lynn picked up her pace, quickly outstripped Faith and launched herself outward, across the water—

Landing solidly on two feet.

“Faith!” she exclaimed, spinning and holding out her gloved hand.

The ferry was a good four feet from the ramp now, and drawing farther away by the second—five feet…six…

Hoping her genetic abilities went past sensory perceptions, Faith put on an extra burst of speed, hurdled the open space—

And landed with one skidding foot, then both knees.

The phone flew out of her pocket at the impact, skidded across the ferry deck, and arced out into the river with a solid plunk.

She regained her feet in time to help her sister chase Greg Boulanger around several cars and, finally, to tackle him to the floor. They wrestled his arms behind him until the security guard, already angered by their flagrant disregard for safety, made it to their side.

“You’ve got handcuffs, right?” panted Faith, both annoyed and admiring that Lynn was barely breathing hard. “You’d better use them, then call the NOPD…and let him know…to meet us.”

She held her breath for a moment, as the guard patted Greg down, but luckily the man didn’t disturb anything. Which was good, considering what Faith had just smelled.

Now she knew why Greg had gone to Chet’s house.

He had the locks of the victims’ hair, Chet’s souvenirs of his killings, in his left hip pocket.

Chapter 20

“Police stations,” said Lynn, “aren’t my favorite places.”

“Trust me,” said Faith. “It’s better on this side of the mirror.”

They stood, as unobtrusive as they could make themselves, with a handful of officers watching Max and Roy interrogate Greg Boulanger through the one-way mirror. Greg was seated in the same chair Faith had used earlier that day, handcuffed to the same table.

She felt fairly confident that, unlike her, Greg couldn’t hear them commenting. Especially since she and Lynn weren’t actually supposed to be watching this, and so were speaking in the barest of whispers. Luckily, they both had some version of superhearing.

“We know you’ve been covering for your brother, Greg,” growled Roy, on the other side of the glass. Sleeves rolled up and hair fingered off his forehead, he looked good doing it, too. “You let him into the morgue. You falsified evidence. And we’ve got the .38.”

“Which Faith Corbett gave to you.”

“No, which her sister gave to the patrolman who first met the ferry. Neither one of us touched it.” Roy was in Greg’s face now, full fury. “Yours are the only prints on it, Greg. And oh yeah—the freakin’ thing is licensed to you!”

“Someone stole it.”

“Then you committed a crime by not reporting it stolen!”

“Then I’ll pay the fine.”

One of the officers said to another, “He’s staying pretty cool.” She was right. What really surprised Faith was, Greg’s pulse and breathing remained steady throughout the interrogation. He was guilty—she’d stared down the barrel of the gun that had murdered Butch. She knew he was guilty.

But if she’d come upon this interrogation knowing nothing, even she would have been fooled.

“I don’t know what it is,” she murmured to Lynn. “Either it’s because he honestly feels no guilt, or because someone taught him. Or both.”

“Taught him what?”

“How to control his body reactions. This guy could pass a lie detector test without breaking a sweat.”

“Actually,” whispered Lynn, “that’s how you pass a lie detector test.” But she wrinkled her nose, teasing, as she said it.

Faith loved that she had sisters to tease her, now.

“Look, Chopin, the bitch may have you fooled,” said Greg. “But you need to know something about her, man. She’s a freak of nature. She hears things, feels things—even smells things that normal humans can’t even register.”

“Yeah,” said Roy, as if he’d already known that. Considering this afternoon, maybe he had. “And it makes her a real pistol in the sack.”

That got a reaction out of Greg, just as he’d meant it to. An almost imperceptible catch in his breath, a faint acceleration of his pulse. Greg controlled it with deeper breathing. In only a moment, he’d regained his balance.

But Faith had seen him falter, all the same. And she recognized the technique. “Oh my God.”

Then she recognized that the other police officers out here had noticed her—and were staring. Thanks, Roy.

“I’m sure that’s just an interrogation trick,” Lynn told them, shy but determined to defend Faith.

“Actually, no, I have been to bed with him.” Whether or not she was a pistol. Most of the male cops looked impressed. A few of the female cops looked jealous. “But what I meant was—my roommate, Krystal. She taught me the same techniques. They’re common, sure—controlling your body’s stress through your breathing, that sort of thing, but still. She also knew about my, er, heightened senses.”

Lynn nodded, following her.

“And Krystal had a lover sometime before her murder, even though we didn’t know she’d been dating anyone.”

“Would she have been gullible enough to sleep with Greg?”

“He fooled me, didn’t he?”

Captain Downs, who’d relieved Captain Crawford hours before, ducked into the room. “Folks, this isn’t supposed to be entertainment. Especially not for civilians. As for civilians involved with the case—”

Most of the police officers dispersed, but as she left, one—a pretty redhead—said, “The pistol’s got an interesting theory, Cap. You might want to hear it.”

Downs, a fifty-something black man with a salt-and-pepper flattop—shooed Faith and Lynn out before he raised his eyebrows and waited for the theory. So Faith explained how Greg might have dated Krystal. “Maybe they kept it quiet so it wouldn’t make things weird for us at work. I don’t know. It’s pure speculation. But think about it—Chet went years since killing his last psychic. Why did he suddenly notice Krystal Tanner?”

The detectives had already discovered the family connection between Chester Simpson and his half brother, Greg.

Captain Downs considered Faith for a moment. Then he said, “You’re not quite as big a pain as Crawford said you were, little lady.” And he went inside and tapped on the glass.

It was Max who came to the door—and Faith wished she didn’t feel disappointed. When the captain whispered their theory, Max nodded and went back to his interrogation. “Let’s talk about Krystal Tanner, Greg.”

Greg’s pulse sped.

“Now out!” ordered Downs. “If you want to wait for the detectives, you can go to the booking room.”

So they headed out to the desks. A drug addict twitched in one chair. Another chair was occupied by a man in a tuxedo—a man so drunk he kept swaying sideways, into an apparent hooker who kept pushing him back the other direction.

“Oh, this is better,” said Lynn with gentle sarcasm.

“Weirdly, I’m getting to like it,” admitted Faith. “Do you want something from the machines?”

But before she could force Lynn to choose between wrapped cupcakes and a candy bar, a disturbance from the hallway caught her attention. Faith’s step hesitated when she recognized one of the gangbangers who’d attacked her in the alley. Then another. Then a third. All three of them, as before, wore some piece of green. All three of them had their hands cinched behind their backs. And all three of them sported an assortment of abrasions, black eyes, bleeding noses and swollen lips.

Behind them came an irate desk sergeant, calling for the captain….

And Dawn O’Shaughnessy.

She nudged her captives forward, then folded her arms to wait, her eyes seeking out and finding Faith and Lynn.

Dawn actually didn’t show relief but, as Faith and Lynn hurried to her side, Faith sensed it off her all the same. Something in her heartbeat. Something in her scent.

Faith liked having sisters who worried about her—and sisters to worry about. “What did you do?” she demanded.

Dawn widened her eyes and, with a jerk of her head, indicated the gangbangers. Like it was obvious. “I dragged in some witnesses.”

“Witnesses to what?” asked Lynn.

Faith asked, “How’d you handcuff all three of them at the same time?”

“They’re called riot cuffs…kind of like those plastic thingies you get with your trash bags,” said Dawn. “Very portable. And these guys are witnesses to whoever it was wanted Faith here dead.”

Faith and Lynn stared.

Dawn rolled her eyes. “Damn, you’re innocent! If it was just revenge for the earlier fight, maybe they would’ve sent five, maybe six or seven guys. But twelve of them? The more I thought about it, the more I figured they were there to take Faith down. Professionally. So tonight I went looking, asked a few questions and persuaded these nice fellows here to tell us who hired them.”

She said to the captain, who’d come out in time for the last half of her story, “Call it a citizen’s arrest.”

“Or I could call it assault and battery,” suggested Captain Downs. But all three of Dawn’s prisoners reacted to that.

“That little girl didn’t beat up me!” “You don’t know nothing about nothing!” “I got these bruises earlier today!”

“So tell them—” started Dawn, but Faith interrupted.

“Captain, I’d like to file a complaint against these men for attacking me in an alley, yesterday afternoon. My sisters witnessed the whole thing. Would you please read them their rights, before we ask them anything else?”

The Storyville gang exchanged sullen glances, disliking the way their night had gone. Dawn cracked her knuckles. Lynn put her hands on her hips. Faith folded her arms.

Together, they made the boys very nervous.

Once they were officially advised that anything they said could and would be used against them in a court of law, the youngest gave in first. “Okay! Just keep these psycho bitches off me, man. It was this white dude, works for the city. Real Einstein type, with glasses, curly black hair. Maybe so tall—” He indicated. “With a beard. Like some animal growing on his face.”

He’d just described Greg Boulanger—and in a way that made Faith wonder why she’d ever considered dating him.

“And how did you know him?” asked Faith.

“The man did a little pushing on the side, no big deal,” said the boy with the nose stud. “A little C now and then. He said it was stuff he boosted off crime scenes. Anyhow, he comes to us and says blondie here was getting into too much of his personal business. Said we should shut her down.”

Captain Downs beckoned the redheaded cop over. “As soon as Chopin and Leonard are through with their suspect, we need him in a lineup. Now.”

“Merry Christmas, Captain,” said Faith, and turned to her sisters. “I think I’m ready to go home after all.”

Lynn wrapped an arm around her, carefully not touching bare skin. When Dawn would have hung back, Lynn caught her arm, too, and the three of them headed out of the station together.

“Now,” said Faith, “it feels like it’s over.”

“Except for finding out who hired the hit on Rainy Miller Carrington,” Dawn reminded them. Dawn was something of a workaholic, wasn’t she?

“And finding out if Thomas King is really our father,” added Lynn.

Faith stopped in her tracks. “Thomas King?”

“I admit, I can see the resemblance,” said Tamara Corbett, trying to peer past the enthusiastic cocker spaniel on her lap to consider the magazines and pictures Faith had brought. Wilbur, as they’d named the stray dog, kept trying to lick Tamara’s face. Despite her protests, Faith’s mom seemed to like that.

Especially now, with its leg in a cast, the dog needed a person. And Tamara had been too lonely for too long. Faith would have taken Wilbur back home to the apartment, if her mother had hated the idea. But this was clearly not hate.

In fact, any dog that could distract a healthy, middle-aged woman from the idea that she may have borne Thomas King’s child was a dog who had a permanent home.

“The Cassandras still aren’t a hundred percent sure. Neither are Lynn and Dawn,” Faith said now. She’d brought her sisters home for lunch, the previous day, while the dog was still staying with her roommates. Tamara had taken to them with as much love and sympathy as she was now giving Wilbur, but with a lot more respect. The way her sisters had responded to Tamara’s immediate acceptance made Faith all the more aware of how lucky she’d been, to grow up with a mother.

A mother who kept secrets, yes. But Faith had no moral high ground to stand on there.

“Once we know for sure,” she continued, drawing one of the magazines closer to her, “we’ll meet him together.”

This particular cover story was “Long Live the King,” written the previous year when the Navy SEAL who’d been presumed dead was discovered in a secret prison. He had thick blond hair, like Faith’s and Dawn’s. Unusual green-gold eyes, like all three of the sisters.

According to the Cassandras, he’d had sperm frozen for his wife, in case one of his dangerous missions left him unable to father children. That was the sperm bank from which Lab 33 had gotten their material.

“The Cassandras are those women from the Athena Academy,” said Tamara, and Faith didn’t have to use her abilities to sense her mother’s feelings of inferiority. The former prep school graduates who’d been Rainy Miller’s friends were all eminently successful—an FBI forensic scientist, a TV reporter and an Air Force test pilot, among other impressive careers. Once they’d learned of Faith’s existence, they hadn’t just answered Lynn’s e-mailed announcement. Several of them had already telephoned with their welcome and encouragement.

“They sound like very special women,” said Tamara.

Faith left the magazines, came around the table and gave her mother a hug. Her mother—and a very happy Wilbur. Their emotions flowed through her gently, familiarly. Now that she’d accepted her abilities, her control over them was increasing by the day. “So are you, Mom.”

“Me? Oh, baby, I’m nothing special. I didn’t even go to college. I never fit in.”

“But that’s why you were so good at keeping me safe all these years! I’m sorry I reacted the way I did, Mom. You may have saved my life with what you did. Without you I could have ended up being trained as a thief, like Lynn, or even an assassin, like Dawn. Or considering my abilities, probably a con artist. You know. Exactly the kind of person who makes life so hard for all my friends in the French Quarter. I would have hated that.”

Tamara let out a broken sigh, petting Faith’s hair. “Oh, I don’t know about that. You may have found you liked it. You always were something of a rebel.”

Faith wrinkled her nose. “I don’t know. Lately, I’ve kind of got a thing for the law.”

He was waiting not far from the streetcar stop.

Faith sensed him almost a block away, but that was because of Roy Chopin’s pushy energy. Especially when he was impatient. Apparently, this afternoon, he was feeling very impatient.

He leaned against the fender of his parked Malibu, arms folded, the picture of nonchalance. But everything in him sped up when he saw her coming. His breathing. His pulse.

She couldn’t tell if that was a good thing or not.

When he saw that she’d seen him, he raised his eyebrows in silent question, but he didn’t make a move toward her. Instead, she detoured over to him. “Are you stalking me?”

“If I were stalking you, I woulda been right outside your mom’s place. Or should I say, the D.A.’s place.”

Since that wasn’t an answer, Faith just folded her arms and waited.

“Your roommate Moonsong said you were here,” he offered. “You’re gonna have to watch that one. She’s way too trusting.”

Maybe she was. Faith’s roommates had been surprisingly understanding about her secret identity as a police contact. They thought it was exciting. “So you’re here because…?”

“I’m not sorry I arrested you.” His jaw was a definite dare, just now. It went with his scowl.

Faith leaned into his space—and damned if it didn’t still feel good there. Familiar. Challenging. “Then I’m not sorry I tore your arrest to shreds.”

He shook his head, his mouth pulling into a mockery of a smile. “Right. You’re cute when you’re a smart-ass.”

In the distance, Faith could hear the ding-ding of the trolley approaching. In another minute, she was sure Roy would hear it, too. “I’m more than just cute. And I’m more than just a pistol in the sack.”

His eyes widened. “Did I say you weren’t?”

“I’m just clarifying, here. You searched my closet.”

“On an anonymous tip. Last time I heard, you were in favor of those.” He considered his argument, then added, “And I found something.”

“Like that justifies anything.”

“Maybe not to lawyers, hon. But as far as the truth coming out, yeah.”

The way he said “lawyers” made her grin. “So you really came all the way out here just to tell me you weren’t sorry?”

“Yeah. That, and to ask you out.”

Her own heart began to race, and her stomach began to flip-flop. But it felt good. It felt…normal. “Really?”

“We got a lot to talk about. Greg and Chet both got indicted, largely because of you being such a stupid Bernie. I figured you might want to celebrate.”

“And have sex,” she guessed. Not that the idea made her ill, but there were some trust issues to get past, here, too. On both sides. No matter what his body was telegraphing.

“I wouldn’t rule it out, but I’m determined to cram a dinner down you sooner or later.” Now his head came up. He heard the trolley, too. And here it came, the dark-green car with dark-red trim, up the center of St. Charles Avenue.

“What’s a Bernie?” she asked—and he laughed, a sharp bark.

“I’ve been calling you Bernie all this time, and you don’t know?”

She shook her head.

“Like Bernhard Goetz, the guy who shot those muggers on the New York subway. A Bernie’s a ringer, Corbett. Someone who looks completely helpless, then turns around and kicks someone’s ass.”

The more she considered that, the more she liked it. The more she liked him for thinking of her that way. “And I’m a Bernie?”

“You went after a guy with a gun. Who’d already tried to kill you once.”

“Only because the alternative would have been to let him get away.”

“Agony,” predicted Roy, his gaze caressing her face. “This is what you offer me.”

But he was lying. And she knew it. She was genetically engineered to be able to read people, after all…and what she read, she liked. Roy was a good guy, and a good cop. Roy liked her. And Roy was someone she could touch with pleasure, instead of dread, which counted for a hell of a lot, too. Someone whose touch opened up whole new worlds for her.

People had dated for worse reasons. And yet…

She deserved better. And oh heavens, so did he.

“Maybe I do,” she warned him. “Maybe I am agony, just waiting to happen to both of us. You may have noticed that I’m not…”

Her throat closed before she could say it.

“Not…corrupt?” he guessed, his eyes bright, mouth mocking with amusement. “Not cynical, like me and my cop friends? Not helpless and needy?”

So she had to say it. “Not normal.”

The streetcar was close enough that Faith didn’t need super-sight to read its curved numbers or the placard that read St. Charles.

“So you’re special,” said Roy. “Woman-of-mystery, never-boring, one-of-a-kind special. This is a bad thing?”

“You don’t know the half of how weird I am.” Her melodramatic conception. Her super-sisters. Her ability to sense that, amazing though it seemed, he wasn’t lying now, as surely as she knew his eyes were gray. But he didn’t know. “You don’t know.”

“So how should I find out if you don’t give me the chance?”

Which, she realized with a rush of pleasant surprise, was exactly how normal people did it. Roy Chopin brought blessed normalcy to her life. And as for what she brought to his…

Well, maybe they could find out, at that.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll go out with you.”

She savored his relief. “Tonight? I know it’s short notice, but tonight’s my night off.”

The trolley was slowing now with a squeal of brakes. “I’ve got plans this afternoon with my sisters, but…Give me a call later today, and you’ll find out.”

“I would, but you keep throwing phones into the river.”

“Call me at home. Like a real date.” But it had been three days. And he was addictive. So instead of strolling back to the trolley stop, Faith rose onto tiptoes and offered a kiss, which Roy took with gusto.

Yes….

His lips were warm and real. His breath struggled in his throat, which seemed to be tightening with uncertain emotion. His hands pulled her possessively closer to the tall, hard, physicality of him, and when his tongue slid into her mouth, she shuddered her release.

Yeah, this was worth another try.

“Screw the streetcar,” he muttered breathily into her ear, making her shiver again. “I’ll give you a ride home.”

But at least one of them had to get better at delayed gratification. Shaking her head, Faith backed out of his arms. “Nope. A real date. Somewhere I can dress up.”

“Oh, now you’re high-maintenance all of a sudden?”

She jogged toward the streetcar. “You have no idea.”

Roy followed with his long stride, but when she looked over her shoulder, he seemed entertained. There was something to be said for increased expectations. “So where do you want to dine, Your Highness?”

“Greg took me on a riverboat.”

“Greg’s a sociopath.”

“One of many reasons I like you better.” The trolley rang its last warnings, and she heard it start moving, so she turned and ran full-out. She caught the streetcar and paced it as it picked up speed. She tapped on the door-glass, and the doors slid open. She jumped on board and flashed the conductor her monthly NORTA pass.

“You oughtn’t to be doing that, miss!” he scolded. “That’s dangerous. You oughtn’t get so close to the streetcar when she’s moving like that.”

But some days, Faith felt more sure of herself than others. She slid across an empty seat and hung out the open window to watch Roy’s retreating figure. “Call me!” she yelled.

And he held up one hand in a single, silent wave. She knew he would.

Maybe she was special, at that. Maybe it ran in the family.

“This is nowhere near as cheesy as I would have thought,” admitted Dawn, looking around the tasteful back room of Celeste Deveaux’s French Quarter parlor.

“Shh!” said Lynn. ‘Can’t you feel it?”

So the air in here didn’t vibrate just for Faith. That was a relief. Perhaps the best thing about having sisters was this sense of communion, of not being wholly alone in her abilities.

Like the ugly duckling realizing it really was a swan, after all. In Faith’s case, and Dawn’s, and Lynn’s, they were genetically enhanced swans, but that still counted, right?

“Don’t mind me,” murmured Celeste, her dark eyes half closed and unfocused. The sisters shut up. Celeste’s lips curved in a smile. She was used to people masking their uncertainties with humor. And Dawn in particular was uncertain about this.

But Faith’s sisters were only going to be in New Orleans another day. Shouldn’t they at least give this a try?

The medium’s expression turned solemn. “Talk to me, spirits,” she whispered, her hands spread. “I’m looking for a mother, these ladies’ mother, who never knew—”

She sat bolt upright, eyes closed.

The sisters tensed. Faith could hear it in their pulses, feel it off their body temperature, both of which created a strange harmony against the slower heartbeat and more shallow breathing of Celeste in her trance state. More important, Faith could feel…

Something. Someone. Between the sisters and Celeste.

“There’s a woman here,” murmured the medium. “A beautiful redheaded woman. I’m hearing an R, seeing rainfall…she says it’s her name. Do you know someone called…?”

“Rainy,” breathed Lynn.

“She says you’re her daughters. She says of course she knows you, now. How can…?”

“It’s a long story.” Faith searched the seemingly rich, intense air before them, seeking that sense of presence. How she would have loved to meet Lorraine Miller Carrington in life. She was certain her sisters felt the same. But maybe…“We’re so sorry we never knew her. We’re so sorry for what happened to her. We—”

“She’s happy,” insisted Celeste.

Lynn, beside Faith, caught a sharp breath of surprise. Lynn believed this was happening, too.

“She was murdered,” protested Dawn, clearly less willing to suspend her disbelief.

Celeste was swaying now, her voice a weaving of husky truths. “Everyone dies, baby. She says it’s not like she went anywhere. She’s so happy for everyone she loves, having the strength to go on with their lives. She’s…the woman’s laughing, saying names so fast I can hardly keep them straight. Darcy and Alex and Kayla. Tory and Sam and Josie. They kept their promise. She’s calling them your aunts, says she’s living through them as much as through you three, and that you’d better all get together.”

“We will,” said Lynn. “Of course we will.”

“She’s calling your aunts…” Celeste’s eyes opened with surprise. “Cassandras.”

Faith nodded. “I didn’t know that, when I chose the name.”

“Rainy thinks you did.” Celeste’s eyes closed again. “Where it counts. She says you three are Cassandras, too. She is so proud of you, so very proud….”

“But we haven’t done anything.” That was Dawn, but this time her challenge sounded more poignant. She might not want to believe this, but she was beginning to believe, all the same.

“You’re the one she wants to hug the most,” announced Celeste, turning to Dawn. “The others…Rainy says they’ve been getting some hugging. That makes her happy, too. But you haven’t yet. You deserve some. She says you’ve all done more than any mother could expect. If you do nothing else, ever, she couldn’t be more proud of the three of you. But you will do more. It’s in your blood.”

Lynn sat up. “Does she know who our father is?”

Faith held her breath. Was it Thomas King?

“She says even he doesn’t know it, yet. But stick together, and you’ll find him. Does that make sense? That seems to be what your mother’s most concerned about. She wants to be sure you three won’t forget each other, that you’ll meet with your aunts, that you won’t lose touch with the people who love you. Losing touch…that’s the only thing that makes this woman sad.”

Faith looked at her sisters, one to either side of her.

She held out her hands.

Lynn’s hand closed around hers first. Again, Faith got a rush of sensations—computer. Craftiness. Someone waiting back home. Possibilities.

Faith was better able to channel the impressions, now. Instead of it feeling like an assault, it became a bond. This was her sister. They should know each other.

Dawn hesitated a moment longer. Then, almost grudgingly, she caught Faith’s hand in a strong grip. Fighting. Training. Things to do. Loneliness.

Longing….

She caught Lynn’s hand as well, so that the three of them were truly connected.

“It’s a promise,” said Faith.

“A promise,” repeated Lynn.

Dawn only hesitated a moment. “A promise.”

Faith watched a tear of happiness slide from Celeste’s closed eyes—and knew the tear did not belong to Celeste.

PAYBACK

HARPER ALLEN

Published by Silhouette Books
America’s Publisher of Contemporary Romance

Special thanks and acknowledgment are given to
Harper Allen for her contribution to the
ATHENA FORCE series.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Epilogue

Prologue

January

E-MAIL MEMO—URGENT & CONFIDENTIAL

To: Cassandras<Alexandra Forsythe, Darcy Allen, Tory Patton, Samantha St. John, Josie Lockworth>

From: Lt. Kayla Ryan

Re: Lab 33 assassin Dawn O’Shaughnessy

Phys. Description: 22, 5’7”, blonde, green eyes Capabilities: Extraordinary strength, agility; possibly other enhanced capabilities

Skills (partial list): Weaponry, martial arts, hand-to-hand combat, stealth, B & E

Background: O’Shaughnessy conceived in vitro with egg retrieved from former Athena Academy student Rainy Miller, whose recent murder by Lab 33’s Lee Craig, code name Cipher, is being investigated by the Cassandras. Retrieval conducted by Dr. Henry Reagon under guise of an appendectomy. Actual purpose: genetic manipulation experiment headed by Dr. Aldrich Peters of Lab 33. Eggs fertilized with sperm from Navy SEAL Thomas King, whose sperm sample was stolen from a fertility clinic. Neither Rainy nor Tom King were aware of procedure carried out by Peters. Fertilized egg implanted in surrogate mother; child taken at birth to Lab 33 in New Mexico to be raised under Peters’s supervision. Subject has no knowledge of her true background; believes her black-ops instructor, Lee Craig, is her uncle.

Note: Subject actively working against the Cassandras; must be considered extremely dangerous.

Update: Subject has been told the truth about her parentage. Her failure to kill Thomas King as per Aldrich Peters’s instructions and her elimination of Dr. Carl Bradford to save Kayla and Jazz Ryan’s lives indicate that O’Shaughnessy is no longer an immediate threat. In fact, she has vowed to take down Lab 33 by herself. She will be given this memo and other documentation in the hope that learning more of the truth will encourage her to join forces with the Cassandras against—

The memo police lieutenant Kayla Ryan was holding—the memo she herself had written and securely e-mailed to her best friends, the Athena Academy graduates known as the Cassandras, and that she had updated only two days ago—had been torn in two at that point. On the back was a handwritten note, unsigned, asking Kayla to meet the writer at the Athena Academy gymnasium, which was usually deserted over Christmas break. Taking a deep breath, Kayla pushed open the double doors of the gym and saw a lithe figure pummeling the hell out of a workout bag.

She approached, noting the dampness darkening the honey-blond hair that had been secured into a thick braid, the sheen of exertion gleaming on the tanned midriff revealed between the low-rise sweatpants and the racer-back top. The only thing impossible to see was what was going on behind Dawn O’Shaughnessy’s gold-green eyes.

Kayla held up the scrap of memo. “You read this?”

A volley of punches slammed into the workout bag. Dawn stepped back. “I read it. It sums up everything you told me at your house a few days ago.” She paused. “It’s not every day a girl finds out her whole freakin’ life has been a lie.”

Kayla frowned. “You understand now why Samantha St. John had no recourse but to take down your uncle two months ago?”

“If I’d known then what I know now, I would have done it myself,” Dawn replied. “And I’d appreciate if you didn’t refer to Lee Craig as my uncle. He lied to me. He killed my biological mother. He let me go on an assignment to kill my biological father. What I felt for him is as dead as he is.”

Kayla’s gaze sharpened. When Kayla had told Dawn about her parentage three days ago, Dawn had shown no emotion. But now…. Unless she was mistaken, there were pinpricks of moisture glittering at the corners of those brilliant green eyes. I knew Lee Craig as the Cipher, she thought, the world’s most deadly assassin. But he was the only family Dawn had. Knowing he lied to her is tearing her in two—and until she deals with that conflict, she’s a ticking time bomb.

She kept her tone conversational. “There must be a part of you that wishes you could see him one more time, if only to ask him how he could betray you so terribly.”

Without warning, Dawn faced the workout bag again and exploded into action, her gloved fists a blur. Kayla started when the bag split asunder, the sand it was filled with pouring out in a stream and the chain securing it giving way, solid steel links spilling to the floor like broken teeth. She’d hoped to get through to the woman, Kayla thought. Instead she’d set off a powder keg.

Dawn looked down at the destroyed bag. “Yeah, I’d like to see Lee Craig once more. Because it should be him lying here. If there were any justice, his death should have come at the hands of the woman he raised to follow in his footsteps.” She backed away. “I’ll have to content myself with going after my darling Uncle Lee’s boss, Dr. Aldrich Peters…but for my own reasons, not the Cassandras’. I want payback.”

Compassion filled Kayla. “Payback won’t erase the pain. You should talk to someone—”

“No offense, Ryan, but I don’t need advice on how to deal.” Dawn’s expression was shuttered. “You and your friends think you know everything there is about me. Want a demonstration of something that didn’t make it into my file?”

Swiftly she reached down to her ankle. She straightened, and Kayla saw the small, snub-nosed automatic she was holding as Dawn flicked off the weapon’s safety and jammed the muzzle against her upper arm.

“No!” Kayla grabbed for the gun, but too late. The shot’s explosion echoed deafeningly. “Dammit—why?” Even as the shocked question left her she was wrenching the weapon away and grabbing a nearby towel. “Stanch the blood with this while I get help.”

“I told you, I don’t need help with the healing.” Dawn looked down at the wound. “Already reconstructing,” she said, her smile oddly bitter. “Hurts like hell but that’ll pass, too.”

“Already recon—” Kayla’s horror turned into bafflement. “Your body’s knitting itself back together!” she gasped. “Your arm…it’s as if—as if—” In silence she watched as the last traces of the wound disappeared, leaving only a few smears of blood. “It’s as if you were never shot,” she said unevenly. “We guessed that Peters was doing genetic experiments, but this is—”

Dawn’s smile thinned. “Freakish?” she suggested. “When I believed my regeneration was a gift of nature, I thought it meant I was special. Lee Craig lied about that, too.”

“I wasn’t going to say that,” Kayla denied hotly. “Your impressive demonstration aside, I still think you should seek help with the healing process. You’ll never be able to move on till you do.”

“I’ve already moved on.” Dawn picked up a sports bag by her feet. “Like I said, I’m going to take down Lab 33.”

“The Cassandras have another assignment we’d like you to consider first.” She’d wanted to broach the subject less bluntly, Kayla thought, but from the start this meeting hadn’t gone the way she’d expected.

“Find someone else. Aldrich Peters is my business. He has been since the day twenty-three years ago when he played God with my genetic makeup.”

“Not only yours,” Kayla retorted. “We believe there was at least one other child born from Rainy Miller’s egg. A baby girl. She was kidnapped at birth, possibly because Carl Bradford leaked Peters’s plans to an interested party. Don’t you want to find your sister before turning your attention to Peters?”

“A sister like me?” Letting go of the sports bag, Dawn gripped Kayla’s arms fiercely. “Another woman who was manipulated by Peters the way I was?”

“We have no idea whether her abilities would be like yours,” Kayla explained swiftly, shaken by the raw emotion in the younger woman’s tone. “Or if she even has any. That doesn’t change the fact that, if she’s alive, she’s your—”

“So I’m still alone.” Dawn’s arms fell to her sides. “I guess it was crazy of me to hope…” Her movements stiff, she started to pick up the bag again, but Kayla stopped her.

“Hope what?”

Dawn faced her directly. “That I’d found someone to share the nightmares with. When I was working for Lab 33 I told myself I was on the side of the good guys, but that doesn’t change the fact that I was judge, jury and executioner. Lee was the only one who understood how I felt.”

“The only difference being, he carried out every assignment Peters gave him,” Kayla reminded her sharply. “He deliberately chose the dark side, Dawn.”

“And so did Aldrich Peters.” The younger woman’s features tightened. “The Cassandras want me to find my sister before I turn my sights on Peters. Fair enough, but if you’re hoping she’ll be able to help me in this healing process you say I need, forget it. I heal just fine all by myself.”

Without another word, she strode to the exit, her posture ramrod-stiff. Instead of following her, Kayla watched her go.

“That’s just it, O’Shaughnessy, I don’t think you will heal all by yourself this time,” she said under her breath. “If you don’t…” She glanced at the shattered steel chain, the destroyed workout bag. “If you don’t, neither you nor the Cassandras have a chance of walking away from this alive. And from what I know of him, that’s exactly what Aldrich Peters will be counting on.”

Chapter 1

September
Status: twenty-one days and counting
Time: 0900 hours

Any second now the man sitting across the desk from her could give the order to have her killed.

Dawn smoothed her palms on the gleaming leather of the skintight catsuit she was wearing, but as Aldrich Peters leveled an emotionless look at her she realized her mistake. She schooled her face to blankness, knowing there was nothing she could do to control the trip-hammer beat of her heart. After a long moment he bent his head again and resumed his perusal of Lab 33’s report on her.

Her few days AWOL from Lab 33 last December had stretched into nine months—longer than she’d anticipated, but then, her assignment for the women of Athena Academy had resulted in locating not one lost sister, Lynn White, but a second sibling, Faith Corbett, who had also been a victim of genetic manipulation and who’d had no knowledge of her true origins. Together the three of them had been introduced to the man who was their biological father, Navy SEAL Thomas King…a meeting she hadn’t wanted to attend. What was I supposed to say to him, dammit, she thought as she waited for Peters to finish reading. “Hey, now I know you’re my dad I’m kinda glad I missed when I had you in my rifle sights a couple of months ago when I was working for the bad guys?”

At the time she’d almost been glad she had the excuse of returning to Lab 33 to explain her hasty departure. But as the complex’s steel doors had begun sliding closed behind her yesterday evening, cutting off her last glimpse of the arid New Mexican canyons and foothills, a sense of complete isolation had overtaken her. And with her first breath of the recycled air supplying the massive underground bunker, a Cold War emergency command center secretly built in the 1950s that had never been utilized, but for years now the site of Aldrich Peters’s shadowy organization, her time away had seemed suddenly unreal.

For a moment she’d felt a terrible certainty that it had been unreal. There was no such group as the Cassandras; she hadn’t found Lynn White and Faith Corbett, her biological sisters; she’d never learned the truth about her existence. She was a Lab 33 assassin. She answered to Aldrich Peters. She was in a nightmare where nothing had changed.

In near panic she’d whirled around with the half-formed notion of darting back through the closing doors. At her unexpected movement the nearest guard—a commander, as she’d noted from the dull red flashes on the collar of his field-gray uniform—had jerked his weapon up into firing position, at the same time scrambling clumsily away from her. Behind his face shield she’d seen his eyes, open so wide that rims of white circled his pupils.

They’re scared of me, Uncle Lee! A long-buried memory flashed into Dawn’s mind. I wanted to play tag with them, but they shouted at me to go away. One of them called me a freak. Am I, Uncle Lee? Am I a freak like they say? In Dawn’s memory, the six-year-old version of herself felt arms scooping her close, smelled the somehow reassuring mixture of harsh tobacco and gun oil, heard a voice whose undertone of anger she knew wasn’t directed at her. They’re the freaks, Dawnie. You’re special, and don’t you ever let the sons of bitches convince you otherwise. They’re scared because they know you’re stronger than everyone here, and I don’t mean just lifting-things strong. Your strength comes from inside you. You understand what I’m saying? Her sobs had subsided by then but she’d stayed in the circle of his arms, happy just to be held by him. I guess. But you’re stronger than the sunsa bits, too, right? The arms around her had tightened. For a moment she’d thought the unthinkable had happened and Uncle Lee was mad at her, but when he’d answered his tone had been filled with such pain that she would have gladly traded it for anger. Maybe once, Dawnie. Now I’m no better than they are. But I promise I’ll always stay strong enough to keep them from owning you—even if staying strong costs me everything I care for in this world.

Aldrich Peters laid aside a sheet of paper, the crackle as he did so sounding like a gunshot in the oppressive silence. Dawn didn’t flinch. Her nervousness had disappeared in the past few seconds, she realized. She supposed she should be glad it had, but all she felt was anger.

When the hell are you going to stop falling into the same stupid trap, O’Shaughnessy? she berated herself. Every memory you have of Lee Craig is tainted. Be glad you’ve got something truer than your memories of him to give you strength.

She had payback. No matter that Kayla Ryan had seemed to think revenge wouldn’t set things right for her. No matter that in the conversation she’d had with her sisters on the subject, Lynn and Faith had both agreed with Kayla. She had no intention of delivering Peters to justice. For one final time, she intended to be judge, jury and executioner herself.

She concealed a faint wince as the dull throbbing that signaled one of the headaches she’d recently been experiencing set up a low tattoo behind her temples. As if he sensed her momentary vulnerability, Peters slid the papers aside.

“You passed Section Eight’s tests with flying colors.” His austere features seemed carved in stone. “The lie detector, the bio- and neuro-feedbacks, the psychological workups by Drs. Wang and Sobie. Apparently you were telling the truth when you contacted me yesterday and said you wanted to take up your duties again.”

A rush of triumph raced through her. Of course she’d passed their tests. She’d grown up here, dammit, and there wasn’t a test invented that hadn’t been run on her. By the age of eleven she’d known how to bend them to her advantage without even try—

“I would have been shocked if you’d failed,” Peters added brusquely. “After all, if anyone could manipulate the results it would be you.”

Dawn fought to keep her regard steady. She’d underestimated him, she thought tensely. Whatever his tests and his experts told him, Dr. Aldrich Peters preferred to rely on his own instincts…and those instincts were telling him she was lying. With seconds to revoke her own death warrant, she needed to go on the offensive—now.

“Maybe I’m being paranoid, but I get the feeling you don’t fully accept my explanation for my disappearance from Lab 33 last winter,” she said, allowing anger to creep into her voice. “At the risk of sounding more paranoid, I also get the feeling you’re making up your mind as to whether I should even walk out of here alive. Am I right?”

The thin smile that appeared on Aldrich Peters’s lips did little to soften the remoteness of his expression. “I don’t call that paranoid, Dawn, I call that astute. You’re right, I’ve got serious doubts about your story of going into an emotional tailspin after your Uncle Lee was killed. Lab 33’s ultimate killing machine, the protégé Lee Craig was grooming to take his place, falling to pieces like any ordinary woman? I don’t buy it.”

“You don’t buy it because you’re forgetting one important fact.” She stood abruptly, placing her palms flat on his desktop. “I am an ordinary woman in many respects—ordinary enough to feel pain when the only family member I’ve ever known is torn from me and ordinary enough to know that I haven’t lived an ordinary life. I told you, losing my uncle was a shattering experience and I needed to come to terms with it.”

She exhaled. “I needed time to come to terms with who and what I am, too. As you just said, I’m not your usual twenty-two-year-old, am I? I’m a superwoman who’s almost indestructible, trained to use my special talents to clandestinely further the best interests of my country as Uncle Lee did. After he died I felt it was time to ask myself if I really wanted to take his place.”

“What conclusion did you come to?”

She answered him promptly. “That Lab 33’s the only game in town for someone like me. And as Uncle Lee always told me, at least I’m working on the side of the good guys.”

“Which leads me to my second question. Do you still believe we’re the good guys, Dawn, or have you taken your allegiance elsewhere during these past nine months? After all, despite your orders, Kayla Ryan is still alive. Carl Bradford, whom I can assure you was on our side, is dead. Why is that?” Peters’s tone held an implied threat. Slowly she let her palms slide from the desk and straightened to her full height.

“I told you. Bradford interfered with my assassination attempt. He kidnapped Ryan’s daughter, made it a federal case. Then he tried to kill me. I had to take him out. And killing Ryan would have brought on too much heat. I’m certain she and the others are no longer a threat to us. I’ve dedicated my life to Lab 33. I’ve demonstrated my loyalty time and again, and you still feel you have the right to ask me that?”

This was it, she told herself as Aldrich Peters held her gaze. Either she’d allayed his suspicions or she hadn’t—and if it was the latter, both of them would be dead minutes from now. Her plan of gathering as much information as she could over the next few weeks for the Cassandras before she made her move against him would have to be forgotten. But she wouldn’t be able to stop him from hitting the emergency button on his desk that would bring the guards pouring in, and she had no doubt that they knew her Achilles’ heel.

A woven-steel garrote had been part of the standard weapons issue for Lab 33 internal security for as long as she could remember…and for as long as she could remember, she’d instinctively known that particular weapon had been issued with only one opponent in mind. She could survive a bullet or a knife but, as she’d told Peters, she was an ordinary human being in some respects…one of which was that she couldn’t survive without oxygen.

So be it, Dawn thought with deadly calm. If I die, I die knowing I’ve taken him with—

Without warning the throbbing shot through her head again. As fast as it had come it faded, and as her vision cleared she realized something had disconcerted Peters. His next words revealed what that something had been.

“The last thing I expected to see in your eyes when I questioned your loyalty was pain, but apparently the psych profile Drs. Wang and Sobie prepared on you was accurate,” he said slowly. “This changes everything.” He leaned back in his chair. “It seems I misjudged you, Dawn. Welcome home.”

“It’s good to be back.” Her clipped reply betrayed nothing of the relief sweeping through her. You did it, O’Shaughnessy! she thought in fierce exultation. You lied through your teeth to Aldrich Peters and the bastard bought it. Now nothing can stop you from—

“Unfortunately, your little vacation couldn’t have been more regrettably timed.” Peters’s composure was firmly back in place. “You’re dying.”

The man was a consummate manipulator, Dawn thought in disbelief, but whether he knew it or not his days of manipulating her were over. “Either I’m cleared for duty or I’m not,” she said tightly. “But if you think I’m going to jump through any more of your psychological hoops, forget it. I’ve had enough of—”

“I broke it to you clumsily, but believe me, it’s the truth.” He shook his head with every appearance of regret. “To put it as simply as I can, your genes are breaking down. I’ve had my best people working on the problem for almost a year, but although we’ve isolated the triggering factor, we haven’t been able to perfect the reversal process.”

“Almost a year.” Her mind still processing his stunning news, Dawn seized on the one detail she felt able to deal with. “You mean you knew about this before I went AWOL and you didn’t inform me?”

“If I’d suspected you were thinking of taking some unauthorized R and R, I would have,” Peters countered. “Be thankful that the medicals and psychological evaluations the doctors here have subjected you to all your life drew our attention to this as soon as it started to show up. Lab 33’s always had your best interests at heart.”

“Lab 33 has always had Lab 33’s best interests at heart. And Lab 33’s best interests include knowing the inner workings of their human lab rat,” she answered flatly. “Spare me the hearts and flowers, Doctor, and cut to the chase. How much time do I have?”

“Worst-case scenario, twenty-one days. The degeneration of your genes is following a mathematically predictable time line that can be precisely charted.” The well-tailored shoulders of his suit jacket lifted in a shrug. “We don’t know exactly when the symptoms will start, but they should begin exhibiting soon. Unfortunately, we don’t know what they’ll be, either.” He hesitated. “About the only thing besides the time line that we know for certain from our experiments is that your death will be painful. In effect, your body will turn on itself.”

She’d taken on every conceivable enemy during her dangerous career. She’d gone up against those enemies, confident that she would be their final and ultimately unbeatable opponent. Was it irony or simple justice that her own final battle would be desperately waged and lost against herself?

Simple justice, O’Shaughnessy, Dawn thought bleakly. Justice was the only word that fit when the genes that had helped her become Lab 33’s killing machine were the very ones that would bring about her—

Her thoughts came to a halt as a terrible realization filled her. Her mind went blank with fear before it grasped a possible glimmer of hope.

“You said worst-case scenario is that I have twenty-one days,” she said through stiff lips. “What’s the best case?”

Aldrich Peters steepled his fingers on the desk. “Your survival, of course. And there’s a good chance we can achieve that, now you’re on board with Lab 33 again.”

It took the space of a heartbeat for her to comprehend what lay behind his smile. When she did, it took all her self-control not to jerk Peters’s silk tie into a noose and end everything there and then.

“You know how to reverse the process and you deliberately let me think it was hopeless?” Her hands clenched into fists at her sides. “Enough with the games, Doctor. Let’s get started with my treatment.”

Because the sooner I receive it, the sooner I can get word to the Cassandras that Faith and Lynn are probably facing the same genetic breakdown, she thought. Maybe I deserve to pay for my past that way, but they don’t. And even if it means I have to push my own personal agenda back a little, I’m going to make sure they won’t.

She wasn’t giving up the payback that was coming to her, but Kayla had been right—despite the fact that she barely knew them, despite the very different lives they’d led, her sisters were her first priority.

“Get one thing straight.” Peters’s voice was a whiplash. “If I choose to make you sweat a little to bring you back into line after your irresponsible disappearance, you’ll take it and like it. Yes, we can create a reversal serum, and yes, as a slap on the wrist I didn’t immediately reveal its existence to you. But I agree, the tit for tat stops here…because you’re leaving Lab 33 tonight on an assignment for me.”

She shook her head decisively. “No deal. I get the serum before I take on the job.”

“Getting the serum is the job.” A wintry smile crossed his features as he dropped his bombshell. “Our scientists are missing the final piece of the puzzle that will allow them to formulate the reversal serum. In fact, there’s only one man in the world who’s possibly cracked the puzzle.”

“Possibly?” she repeated blankly. “Dammit, you’re not sure?”

“That’s part of your assignment—to ascertain he’s made the breakthrough we believe he has.”

“Why not simply ask him?” she retorted. “Don’t scientists practically fall all over themselves to publicize their findings?”

“Most do.” Peters’s lips thinned. “Sir William London’s the exception, a paranoid megalomaniac who won’t reveal anything until he’s ready. He’s also the greatest genius the world has ever known in the field of genetics.”

“So I’m to break into the research facility where London works, steal his notes and bring them back for our people to use. Getting past a few security guards should be easy enough,” Dawn said in defeat.

A simple B & E she could live with, she told herself edgily. At worst she’d have to temporarily disable a guard or two, but she’d make sure no one got seriously hurt.

And if it hadn’t been a simple break and enter? If you’d been ordered to kill for the serum, would you have stepped over the line once more to save yourself and your sisters? The uncomfortable question came to her before she could thrust it away. She didn’t know, Dawn admitted. She’d made a vow never to carry out Aldrich Peters’s murderous orders again, but if the serum was all that stood between her sisters and a terrible death….

Pain spiked with sudden intensity behind her eyes. She fought against it as Peters pulled a sheaf of papers toward him with a frown.

“I should have made myself clear. Sir William is funded by the Defense Department in a joint venture with the British, and his laboratory’s inside a compound in the middle of the Arizona desert. It’s guarded by a crack team of military personnel headed by a certain Captain Des Asher—who’s not only London’s nephew, but a highly trained British Special Air Services officer. You’ll pose as a research assistant and get close to London that way.”

He held the papers out to her. “Study Asher’s military bio. He’s going to be your biggest obstacle, so assassinate him first.”

Chapter 2

Status: nineteen days and counting
Time: 2300 hours

She was going up against Des Asher naked. She couldn’t deny that there was a tiny ripple of excitement deep inside her at the thought.

With deliberate clumsiness, Dawn shifted the gears of the junker hatchback she was driving and was rewarded by the labored whine of an engine being pushed beyond its limits. She shifted again, this time correctly.

Of course, naked just meant without weapons. The most lethal piece of hardware anyone would find on her if she were searched was a nail file…and although she could remember an instance when, armed with little more, she’d taken out a couple of sadistic goons without even messing up the polish she’d been applying when they’d burst in on her, she didn’t think a nail file would raise any red flags as far as Des Asher’s people were concerned.

Especially not when it was being carried by Dawn Swanson.

“Swanson’s never done the horizontal mambo, way I see it. I mean, repressed? Chick’s a total man-hater, plus she’s a dweeb,” Carter Johnson had said with a grin two nights ago when she’d left Peters’s office and reported to Lab 33’s Identities Department. He’d extracted a glossy eight-by-ten photo from a file and passed it to her. “Check out your new hair, babe. Not that the big boss man told me any more than he had to, but with the rock-solid credentials I’ve created for you, I’m guessing this isn’t a simple in-and-out assignment where a wig would be enough. After we’re through here, you’ll be scooting that fine butt of yours over to Helga for the works—a bad cut, an even worse perm and a mud-brown dye job.” His grin widened. “I almost forgot the bottle-lens glasses we got for you to wear. Behind them your eyes look way magnified, but Carlos in Research and Development made them so they won’t affect your vision at all. Man, I love this job!”

Carter was one of Lab 33’s youngest employees, probably close to her own age. Much to the irritation of the older staff, he cultivated an indie-rebel air, wearing his hair in a spiky, bed-head style and using a skateboard to cruise up and down Lab 33’s endless corridors. But Dawn wasn’t taken in by his “Dude, where’s my wheels?” manner. He worked here. That meant two things: one, he had to be the best at what he did, which was creating false identities and the documentation to back them up; and two, he’d willingly sold his soul to Aldrich Peters—either for money or because of some crime he’d committed in the past that Peters had made go away.

Whatever the reason, Carter Johnson wasn’t the boy next door. He was part of an organization that made the Mafia look like pussycats. To complicate matters, he’d borne a grudge against her ever since she’d told him, in no uncertain terms, that she didn’t intend to date him until she had definite confirmation hell had frozen over.

She’d returned the photo to him. “Go back to the computer and reconfigure this. No perm. My hair stays the length it is. I’ll go with a temporary rinse and wear it scraped into a bun while I’m undercover as Little Miss Repressed. When I walk out of here, I’ll be Dawn Swanson, right down to the baggy science-geek sweatshirt, but that persona’s not going to come from clothes or a hairstyle, it’s going to come from me. If you’ve got a problem with that, we’ll go talk to the big boss, as you refer to Dr. Peters, together.”

She’d won that round, Dawn reflected now as she deliberately clashed the hatchback’s gears again. It hadn’t been until she’d reached the motel where she’d stayed last night and read the extensive bio prepared for her—a bio she’d later burned before flushing the charred scraps down the motel room’s toilet—that she’d realized Carter, with his own waspish sense of revenge, had gotten the last laugh.

Swanson lives, breathes and sleeps fruit flies and genetics, the typed pages had informed her. Since seventy-two-year-old Sir William London is the world authority on her chosen passion, Swanson hero-worships him to the point of having a kind of crush on him. Several of the contacts we’ve blackmailed to supply references on our fictitious lab technician will mention the poster that supposedly hung above her bed at her college dorm—the famous shot of Sir William taken just before he won his first Nobel Prize in ’58, when he was one of Oxford’s “crazy young men.”

In the margin, Carter had added a penciled note: Who knows, O’Shaughnessy, you might get lucky with the old geezer. Here’s hoping, girlfriend!

“And here’s hoping that when the Cassandras and I take down Lab 33, you spend the rest of your sorry life behind bars,” Dawn muttered. She narrowed her gaze as the hatchback’s headlights cut through the desert blackness to illuminate an unmarked secondary road up ahead. Although the slight rises and dips in the terrain made it impossible to see what lay ahead, the road had to be the turnoff to London’s small but highly secure laboratory complex. She felt a surge of anticipation run through her. Since sound carried in arid terrain such as this, more so at night, her little maneuvers with the gears hadn’t been premature. They’d insured that any sentry with ears sharp enough to catch the first faint sounds of a vehicle approaching wouldn’t have heard Dawn O’Shaughnessy driving with her usual speed and skill, but Dawn Swanson, a woman who preferred to be surrounded by test tubes and petri dishes instead of behind the wheel of a car.

Live the lie, Dawnie. Unbidden, the tobacco-roughened voice of Lee Craig broke through her concentration, so clearly that he might have been sitting beside her in the dark. That’s the first rule of deep cover. Forget who you are and become the identity you’ve taken on. It’s not always easy…but once in a while you might even find yourself wishing you didn’t have to go back to being the real you.

This time when she geared down there was no pretence in her mishandling of the car’s controls. As she made the turnoff the hatchback veered dangerously close to the crumbling verge of the dirt road before she corrected its course.

“Don’t worry, Lee,” she said savagely under her breath. “I’m living the lie, just like you did, you bastard. And like you, when my cover’s outlived its usefulness I won’t forget who I am and what my real agenda is. You took down my mother. I’m going to take out Aldrich—”

Her words were cut off by a gasp and the hatchback swerved again. Her responses hampered by the intense pain behind her eyes, Dawn’s corrective maneuver came a split second too late. She felt the rear end of the car slide off the road, felt the back tires fight for purchase on the sandy soil, heard them churning uselessly as they merely dug themselves deeper.

The hatchback stalled. The pain behind her eyes faded. Her hands gripped the steering wheel so tightly that her knuckles showed white in the greenish glow from the instrument panel.

It was time to face facts, she thought numbly. Lab 33’s scientists might not know what the symptoms of her gene degeneration would be, but she couldn’t fool herself any longer. She’d never had a headache in her life before now, just as she’d never caught a cold or contracted the normal childhood bouts of measles and mumps and tonsillitis. So the migraines she’d been experiencing with increasing frequency over the past few months had to be a first warning signal of—

Before her train of thought could reach its logical conclusion, she jerked open the driver’s side door and stepped swiftly from the car. Striding toward the back of the stalled vehicle, she planted her hands on her hips and glared at the deep depressions in the sand where the rear tires were now embedded.

But standing still was a mistake. Unwillingly she found her mind completing the deduction she’d tried to thrust aside. If the loss of her invulnerability to common human ailments was the first symptom of her genetic breakdown, what else would be taken from her before she returned to Lab 33 with London’s research?

In effect, your body will turn on itself. Peters’s words had filled her with dread at the time, but only now could she fully comprehend the horrific possibilities of his prediction. Her sight—would it slowly dim or would she suddenly be plunged into a world of darkness? Or maybe it would be her reflexes that would desert her at the very moment she needed them, or her hearing or her strength or—

Her lips tightening, she bent to grab the rust-specked bumper of the hatchback. She took a deep breath and heaved.

Even for her, it was a near-impossible effort. She felt the muscles in her arms scream in protest, felt her balance shift treacherously as the sandy soil beneath her feet crumbled. Sweat beading her brow and running down behind the heavy horn-rimmed glasses Carter had provided her with, she set her jaw in grim determination and began pivoting the rear of the car toward the road.

There was a possibility that the security measures guarding Sir William London’s laboratory included roving teams patrolling past the fenced perimeter of the facility. If even one of those teams came upon her now, not only would her Dawn Swanson cover be blown, but the enhanced abilities she’d always been so careful about revealing would be immediately exposed. She was taking an insane chance.

She didn’t care. All that was important right now was that she accomplish the superhuman task she’d set herself.

“This is what you are.” The barely intelligible words came from her in a strained grunt as she took another trembling step sideways, the tendons in her shoulders feeling as though they were about to pop. “No matter what you told Peters, you’ll never be an ordinary woman—not like Kayla, with her unshakable integrity, or the rest of the Cassandras, who’ve found support in one another. Your strength and abilities may have come from a test tube, but they’re all you have. And when they’re gone…”

Through the soles of her sneakers she felt the more stable surface of the road. Taking two last shuffling steps, she set the rear of the hatchback unceremoniously down onto its tires. Slowly she uncurled her grip from the bumper, her arms and back feeling as if they were on fire.

She ignored the searing sensation and straightened to her full height. Behind the glasses her eyes squeezed tightly shut. “When the abilities are gone, what’s left?” she asked in an uneven whisper. “Face it, O’Shaughnessy, nothing…and that’s why you’re terrified for the first time in your life. Not because of the pain you’re going to suffer if this process isn’t reversed, not because you could die, but because before the end comes you’ll be revealed for what you are—a lab rat whose enhanced sight couldn’t help her see the truth, whose strength only masked the weakness that allowed Aldrich Peters to manipulate her for so long, whose regenerative powers couldn’t heal her destroyed soul. Any one of the Cassandras is more of a superwoman than you are. A mother working two shifts just to bring in enough money to keep her children fed is more of a superwoman than Dawn O’Shaughnessy ever was.”

For a moment longer she stood there, her posture slightly bowed as if she were still carrying a crushing weight. Then she opened her eyes and thrust back her shoulders, becoming once again the implacable figure Kayla Ryan had confronted in the Athena Academy gym more than nine months ago.

“But of course, you’re not Dawn O’Shaughnessy now, are you?” Her voice was no longer uneven, but harshly flat. “You’re Dawn Swanson, and don’t you forget it…because like Lee Craig used to say, sometimes all that’s left is to live the lie.”

She turned on her heel. Wrenching open the driver’s side door, she slid in behind the wheel again, started the car and resumed the last few miles of her journey.

“I’m a biochem assistant. As long as the labs here aren’t run with the same inefficiency as security appears to be, I’m really not interested in how your people screwed up the paperwork on me.”

Dawn wondered if she was overdoing the pedantic monotone in her voice, but decided to keep going with it. Even if she hadn’t recognized Asher from the photo in his file, the ID tag on his uniform would have told her she was dealing with the man whose suspicions she most needed to allay. Just your bad luck he’s a hands-on kind of guy, she told herself, who has standing orders to be notified by the gate guards whenever a new employee shows up. Even worse luck that someone here made a mistake over my gender—unless this is another example of that little weasel Carter’s sense of humor.

But even Carter knew better than to pull something like this, she reflected. “William London certainly knew I was a female when he hired me,” she went on. “If you’ve got a problem with my name being spelled D-a-w-n instead of D-o-n, take it up with him. In the meantime, I’d like to settle in and start work.”

She shoved her glasses higher onto the bridge of her nose and gave him a sullen stare in keeping with the persona Carter had chosen for Dawn Swanson, but behind the lenses her belligerent gaze was unobtrusively taking a first real look at the man Aldrich Peters had claimed would be her most dangerous opponent on this assignment.

“Assassinate him first?” Thinking quickly, she’d shaken her head in sharp disagreement when Peters had issued the order in his office two days ago. “Sorry, Doctor, but when I’m working undercover it’s my neck on the line. That gives me a vested interest in the decisions I make. I’ll take out Des Asher if and when I feel the action’s warranted, but if I can complete the assignment without resorting to that, so much the better.”

Peters had raised an eyebrow. “You sound like a woman who’s lost her nerve. Or at least her taste for killing.”

“No, I sound like my Uncle Lee,” she’d replied evenly. “He’s the one who taught me any thug off the street can pull a trigger if he doesn’t care about losing his own life. A professional completes the assignment, gets out safely, and lives to work another day. I’m doing this my way.”

Aldrich hadn’t put up any further argument—most likely, Dawn guessed, because with her as the best Lab 33 assassin, he was forced to recognize the merit of her argument. So you owe me, buddy, she thought as she assessed the fatigues-clad SAS captain who had abruptly walked a few feet away from her and was now conferring with a soldier in the guard shack by the facility’s high barbed-wire gates. I’m not saying you’d have been a cinch to take out, judging from what I’ve heard about the combat training you Special Air Services types receive, but in a one-on-one between the two of us, my money would have been on me.

He didn’t really fit her preconceived notion of a Brit, she thought with a frown as, impatience showing in every inch of his more than six-foot frame, he bent his head over a logbook a subordinate had handed him. In his late twenties or early thirties, he was deeply tanned, for one thing—a legacy, she supposed, of his recent service in the Middle East, which had been all too sketchily described in the bio she’d read. Peters had shown irritation at the lack of detail Lab 33’s investigators had been able to dig up on Asher’s military career, but Dawn herself had felt a private sense of relief. If Peters’s people hadn’t managed to uncover what assignments the SAS had given Des Asher, there was a good chance her own activities during the months she’d been AWOL would remain undiscovered.

But besides the tan and the heavy biceps straining the rolled-up sleeves of his fatigues, there were other incongruities that bothered her. So far he’d shown none of the famed politeness she’d always associated with the English. His manner, as he’d taken her credentials from her and then thrust them back, had been decidedly dismissive, and although she was unable to catch his low-voiced conversation with the soldier by the guard shack, at least twice he’d uttered back-alley curses loud enough for her to overhear.

He didn’t like his job. The revelation came to her with the conviction of absolute certainty, and behind the glasses her gaze narrowed. No, it was more than that, she thought slowly, taking in the tight set of Asher’s jaw, the barely controlled anger displayed as he raked a hand through short-cropped, burnt-pewter hair. He hated what he was doing.

Which means we’ve got one thing in common, big guy, she thought as he handed the logbook to the guard and met her watchful gaze before she could avert her eyes. Too bad we’re working on opposite sides or I might have let you buy me a shot of Stoli and told you my reservations about this assignment before buying you a round of warm British beer and letting you fill me in on how you ended up in a dead-end job, baby-sitting your famous uncle.

On second thought, she told herself as Asher nodded curtly to a younger officer who had stopped his jeep in front of the guard shack and was glancing curiously in her direction, maybe it was better having him as an opponent. His antagonism would keep her focused, and right now that was what she needed most.

Her headache had returned. This time she couldn’t afford to give in to it.

“If the paperwork’s screwed, my people didn’t do it.” Without pausing to talk to the young officer exiting the jeep, Asher strode from the guard shack and came to a halt directly in front of her. He continued, his manner barely civil. “I’d advise you to contact whoever sent you here and get them to resubmit your information. Until you do you’re not getting past this gate.”

The hand he clamped onto her upper arm was like a band of iron…or maybe it was just that her headache had progressed to the point that every nerve ending felt raw. This attack was ten times worse—try twenty times, Dawn thought with a sharply indrawn breath—than those she’d so far experienced, but judging from those previous ones it couldn’t last much longer. All she had to do was ride it out.

Easier said than done, O’Shaughnessy, she told herself tightly. And it’s not ultrahelpful that Mr. Freakin’ Special Air Services has his damn hand welded to my arm right now. If he’d just ease up for a second so I could concentrate on shutting down the jackhammer that’s pounding away in my—

His hard tone broke through the thin veneer of control she was trying to establish. “Letting strangers into a restricted area when their credentials don’t check out isn’t the way I work. On your way, lady.”

Without warning, the pain soared to an unbearable crescendo inside her head, escalating its assault until it took all her energy just to stay upright. No one could endure this, Dawn thought in numb agony, no longer caring whether her face revealed what was happening inside her. She’d been trained to take pain, to resist pain, to rise above pain, and all that training didn’t matter a damn. She wasn’t going to get through this.

A long way away a voice was speaking, the low and deadly tones searing enough to dimly penetrate the haze of unconsciousness that was shutting down her senses. Faint hope stirred in her. Was the pain losing its grip? Was there still a chance she could win this fight? Drawing on reserves she’d thought were already exhausted, she focused on the voice with the desperation of a swimmer going under for the third time—going under and hallucinating, she thought hazily. Because that voice sounds weirdly familiar, O’Shaughnessy—so familiar that if I didn’t know better I’d say it was your own.

“Call William London and get this straightened out, dammit! Because if you don’t, I swear I’ll—”

“Ash! Put the gun down! Lady, back away from him or I’ll shoot you myself!”

The shouted commands came from the officer who’d gotten out of the Jeep. No longer standing by the shack, he was now only a few yards away and leveling his rifle at her, but as inexplicable as his actions were, Dawn barely registered them.

Her headache was gone. As instantly as if a switch had been turned off somewhere inside her head, the pain had simply stopped. Shaky relief filled her, but even as it did she stiffened in shock.

In her hand was a stilettolike piece of steel. The tip of it was pressed to Des Asher’s tanned throat, hard enough so that it was making an impression. She couldn’t even remember snapping the antenna off the hatchback behind her and lunging at him with it, but Asher had apparently reacted with almost the same speed as she’d displayed.

Because in his left hand was a heavy semiautomatic—a Sig Sauer P226, the weapon he would have been issued upon joining the SAS. The muzzle of the revolver was jammed into the space between her top left rib and her breast, aiming its load of nine-millimeter parabellum rounds toward her heart.

Glittering gray eyes stared down at her. “If you want to get out of this alive, put down that antenna and tell me again what you do for a living…and this time leave out the biochem assistant crap.” The words were scarcely above a mutter, but with his mouth only inches from hers she had no trouble hearing them.

She’d blown her cover. The realization tore through the fog clouding Dawn’s brain and icy clarity flooded in. What had happened just now? Why had she gone into attack mode for no good reason? She was a professional, dammit—she didn’t make mistakes like this! Had she lost her edge, as Peters had suspected she might?

But the answers to those questions would have to wait. All that mattered at the moment was that she was going to have to abort the assignment and return to Lab 33 empty-handed. With no chance now of Aldrich Peters reversing her degeneration in time, she’d as good as signed her own death warrant.

Not only mine, but Lynn’s and Faith’s, she thought with corrosive self-recrimination. Whatever’s happening to my cells will be happening to theirs, even if they aren’t displaying the same symptoms I’ve been experienc—

She blinked, her mind racing. Slowly she lowered the snapped-off antenna she was holding, and saw the man in front of her warily do the same with his weapon.

That was it—the reason she’d gone ballistic just now, that she’d allowed herself to forget everything Lee Craig had ever taught her about her profession. Aldrich Peters had predicted her body would begin to turn on itself, but her guesses about how that would unfold hadn’t gone far enough. Nothing she’d imagined could even begin to approach the horror of knowing that her personality—her impulses, her emotions, her very mind—was beginning to betray her.

She’d been raised to be Lab 33’s killing machine. She’d just seen a chilling example of what she could expect when the machine finally broke down.

Correction, O’Shaughnessy: you’ve just seen what’ll happen if it breaks down, she told herself sharply. Now that you know what the problem is, start acting like the professional you are and try to salvage the mission.

For the second time in as many minutes, hope replaced despair as a plan took shape in her mind. It just might work but there was no time to waste—she needed to get back into the skin of prickly, abrasive Dawn Swanson right away.

“Don’t you ever put your hands on me again.” She forced flat hostility to her expression. “I didn’t take seven years of self-defense classes just so I could allow myself to be manhandled, and I certainly didn’t accept this position with the renowned Sir William London thinking I’d have to file a sexual harassment suit my very first day!”

Anger darkened the gray eyes watching her. “Nice recovery, lady. It makes me wonder who the hell taught you to be so bloody slippery. Come on, you and me are going to have a cozy little chat in a quiet room.”

He had the height, but she had the superior agility. He outweighed her, outreached her and his Sig trumped her whiplike scrap of broken car antenna, Dawn thought—but damn, she’d like to take Des Asher on.

And you know what? she asked him silently, shifting her balance onto the balls of her feet and seeing him shift his in unconscious response. I’ll bet I could have you gasping for mercy before we were through. You’re good—I knew that when you had your weapon out and ready for me so fast a minute ago. But I’m the best.

She didn’t allow any of her thoughts to show on her face. Instead she turned to the younger man standing a few feet away, his weapon no longer at the ready but his tense posture an indication that he hadn’t taken himself off full alert.

“Lieutenant Keifer?” She took her attention from the nametag on his uniform—an American uniform, she noted briefly, unlike Asher’s British one—and met his eyes. He looked uncertain, she noted, which was good. “You heard what your fellow officer just said. I’ll be advising my lawyers to take a statement from you to support the legal action I intend to take. A ‘nice little chat in a quiet room’?” She turned back to Asher. “With no third parties present to monitor your behavior, I’m sure. Men like you who abuse their power to get their sexual ya-yas on would be pathetic if they weren’t so disgusting!”

The revolted shudder was pure Dawn Swanson, Dawn thought. So was the pinch-lipped expression she was favoring him with and the stance she’d taken up. The persona Carter had created that had so annoyed her two days ago was now her only chance of explaining away her insane actions. She met Asher’s narrowed gaze, her arms belligerently crossed over her baggy sweatshirt.

“I’m assuming ya-yas means shagging.” His smile was sharklike. “Hate to break your bubble, but save your worries for what’s going to happen after I’m through questioning you and I hand you over to the authori—”

“She’s right, Ash,” Keifer broke in. “Putting your hand on her was way out of bounds, and as for talking about shagging—” He lowered his voice. “A sexual harassment suit’s the surest way to shoot your career down in flames. Maybe England’s different, but that kind of thing is taken seriously here.”

Asher’s lips tightened to a line. “We’ve got rules about this in England, too. But when I attempt to escort an unverified visitor off the property and she comes within a hairbreadth of slashing open my jugular, all rules are off. After seeing the moves she’s got, my guess is she’s a bio-technician like I’m an interior decorator.” He turned his attention to Dawn. “Too bad for you that whoever you’re working for slipped up on the name. If we’d been expecting a woman, you just might have bluffed your way in.”

“The slipup over the name, Asher?” Faint color rose under the younger man’s tan. “I took the instructions verbally from Sir William. I just assumed—”

It was time for her to cut in, Dawn decided. “You just assumed the position had been given to a male. God, have I stepped into a time warp here?” She exhaled tightly. “Look—working with Sir William London is an honor I never thought I’d have the chance to experience. He’s a great man and a personal hero of mine. In fact—” she allowed her voice to soften and hoped the dreaminess in her eyes wasn’t obscured by the Lab 33 lenses “—when I was a student I used to have a poster of him over the bed in my dorm room. It was a picture taken in the 1950s, when he was one of Oxford’s ‘crazy young men.’”

“Not young anymore. Still crazy as a shi—” Asher didn’t complete his muttered comment. He gave her a patently disbelieving look. “Even if I was fool enough to buy that, what’s your lukewarm fantasy life got to do with this?”

“Ash—” Keifer sounded strained.

“My admiration for Sir William’s got everything to do with this. I’m trying to tell you that I’d rather not have him associated, even slightly, with an embarrassing legal suit. Pick up the phone, confirm my credentials with him, and let me get started on the work I came to do. For Sir William’s sake, I’ll forget what happened here.”

Without looking away from her, Asher spoke to the man beside him. “Do what the lady says, Keifer, but be sure you talk to the great man himself. If her story checks out, tell him from me that if he’d keep me in the loop like he’s supposed to, maybe balls-ups like this wouldn’t happen.”

He waited until Keifer set off at a trot for the guard shack before going on. “Your story’s going to check out, isn’t it? Whoever you are, you’re not amateur enough to suggest we talk to my uncle if you weren’t confident he’d back you up.”

Dawn feigned surprise. “William London’s your—”

“Stow the acting,” he interrupted. “It’s just you and me right now, so listen and listen good. I’m probably going to have to let you walk past that gate, but I know damn well there’s something wrong about you. The first tip-off was the bloody glasses, in case you’re interested.”

She injected a note of irritation into her voice. “My glasses? Is this another one of your insult—”

“I said stow it.” He smiled thinly. “A girl I used to know wore the same thick kind of lenses. She never took them off unless she was in bed.”

His tone was disarming and his manner more relaxed than it had been since he’d first spoken to her. Dawn wasn’t fooled. Des Asher was a dangerous opponent, and right now he was at his most dangerous. She opened her mouth to deliver a Dawn Swanson-type protest but he forestalled her.

“But you don’t want to hear the down-and-dirty details of my sex life.” His smile tightened. “Thing is, the gorgeous Maureen had been wearing heavy glasses for so many years that even when she took them off I could see a little indentation on the bridge of her nose. You’ve got a red mark where you keep pushing them up, but you don’t have an indentation. If I had to guess, I’d say you put them on an hour or so before you arrived here.”

She saw Keifer approaching, his face flaming. The Dawn/Don question had obviously been settled in her favor, she thought in relief. “With a man of science like William London as your uncle, you should know guesses are worthless without the proof to back them up,” she said evenly. “I’d say your proof just flew out the window, Captain Asher.”

“Hell, call me Asher. Sounds more friendly, seeing as how I just became your closest companion.” His smile vanished and his tone hardened. “I know you’re not who you say you are. Trust me, I’m going to be watching every move you make from now on, love.”

Chapter 3

Status: eighteen days and counting
Time: 0330 hours

It was a whole new ball game, Dawn thought with a grimace. A few hours ago she hadn’t felt the need to arrive here with a weapon that might be discovered in her luggage, but that had been then.

This was now.

“When I finally get my hands on Sir William’s notes and need to break out of here, I don’t want to be worrying that some recruit just out of basic training is going to be able to stop me because I suddenly don’t have the strength to rip a wet paper towel,” she told herself under her breath. “Since it seems to be a crapshoot as to how and when my abilities desert me, the sooner I level the playing field with a gun in my possession, the better.”

Which was why, she thought in resignation, she was clinging to a cinderblock wall like a fly right now, peering down through the darkness to the ground forty feet below.

“Correction,” she muttered, looking up for her next handhold. “A fly would have those handy sticky pads to keep it glued to this damned wall. Too bad when Aldrich was performing his Dr. Evil experiments on my genes he didn’t think to give me those. Just because I’d survive a fall doesn’t mean I want to have the experience.”

Toeing a sneaker into a shallow line of mortar, she disengaged the fingertips of her left hand from the similar mortar depression they’d been gripping. Her body began to unpeel from the wall, but before the gap between her and the cinderblock could widen past the point of no return, her fingers were curling deftly into another hold. Without allowing herself to pause, she kept climbing.

She needed a gun. Soldiers carried guns. Ergo, she thought with determination as she felt her knuckles scrape against the slight overhang of the building’s flat roof, it was only logical to go gun shopping in the one place where she could be sure of finding soldiers.

“A girl wants Manolos, she hits the designer shoe stores…” she muttered, suddenly pushing off from the wall with her feet. Her lower half swung out. As her legs reached the top of their arc she abruptly pulled her upper body as close as she could to the roofline before jackknifing her arms out and thrusting herself straight up into the air. Immediately she folded into a ball, her head tucked and her arms wrapping around her drawn-in legs. The cool night air rushed past her as she tumbled once in midair, then twice, and as she completed the second tumble she quickly unfolded.

She landed lightly on the top of the roof in a half-crouch, her feet a few inches apart and all her senses on full alert.

“…and if a girl wants a gun, she hits a barracks—preferably at a time when she figures everyone’s still asleep,” she continued, rising from her crouch and briskly dusting mortar powder from her hands. “No matter how suspicious Captain Asher is, even he won’t be expecting Dawn Swanson to go nosing around so soon.”

After finally getting past the gate and being handed over to the lab’s staff supervisor by an embarrassed Keifer, she’d barely taken time to unpack her suitcase in the room that had been assigned to her before putting her plan into effect. Aldrich Peters’s Lab 33 was undoubtedly malevolent, she’d mused as she’d climbed onto the toilet tank in the small attached bathroom, but she couldn’t fault its efficiency. Along with her fictitious bio, Carter had provided her with a thick sheaf of blueprints—the complete schematics for the research complex, which she’d committed to memory before destroying as she’d done the bio.

The bad news had been that the air ducts that served the combined lab section and civilian employees’ living quarters didn’t connect with those snaking through the ceilings of the military barracks and guardrooms. The good news was that the duct she’d wriggled into after sliding aside a metal grate in the ceiling of her washroom eventually joined up with a main artery that led to the roof. The barrack’s ducts did the same.

Unfortunately, Dawn thought dryly as she saw the bulky silhouette of the second vent rising from the tar-and-gravel roof ahead of her in the dark, the reason the two didn’t intersect at some point was that they were in different buildings. And although the buildings were only a couple of yards apart, the roof she’d needed to get to had been a good twenty-five feet higher than that of the civilian building—which was why she’d had to do her human-fly imitation.

“All the more reason no one would think to look for me in the military part, though,” she told herself in a murmur as she lifted the screened cover and boosted herself onto its edge. “If they discover I’m not in my room, which they won’t.”

The journey through this duct was as hot and tedious as her maneuverings through the first, but whereas the one servicing the lab building had been spotlessly dust-free, that wasn’t the case here. For the third time in as many minutes she found herself freezing to a halt as a sneeze threatened. Part of the problem was the baggy sweatshirt she was wearing, she thought in frustration as her nose stopped twitching and she allowed herself to breathe again. For a job of this type, normally she would wear something that hugged her like a second skin and didn’t get in her way. But it would have been too dangerously out of character for the Swanson chick, as Carter had referred to her alter ego, to have packed a catsuit or even a tight yoga top and pants.

“Oh, no, Swanson wouldn’t be comfortable unless she had something four sizes too large stirring up all the freakin’ dust in here,” Dawn muttered, her patience at an end as yet another sneeze tickled the back of her nose. As soon as it passed she wrenched the sweatshirt she was wearing up and over her head. A moment later the bunchy drawstring-waisted pants she’d had on were stripped off as well, leaving her clad only in a sports bra and formfitting boy-leg undies.

She could retrieve the Swanson duds on the way back, she thought as she continued at a decidedly speedier pace through the duct. Up ahead it branched into two sections, and without hesitation she took the left branch, which according to the schematics led directly to the enlisted men’s sleeping quarters.

Maybe she was being sexist, but no way was she about to risk dropping in on a roomful of female soldiers, she told herself as she inched her way cautiously across the ceiling tiles, making sure she distributed her weight equally over several at a time, instead of putting undue stress on one and chancing the possibility that it might give way and fall into the room below. In her experience, women weren’t only lighter sleepers but once awake, they came to total alertness a heartbeat faster than their male counterparts.

“Nice theory, O’Shaughnessy,” she breathed, gingerly sliding aside a tile. “Guess you’re about to find out if it holds water.”

According to Carter’s information, Asher had fourteen men and six women under his command—a far cry from the fifty battle-experienced soldiers he would have had in the SAS, she reflected, wondering again just how the man had blotted his copybook badly enough to end up here pulling down guard duty. But Des Asher’s past foul-ups weren’t her main concern at the moment, she reminded herself as she quickly scanned the double row of military-issue iron beds in the room below. Checking out how many of these beds were currently occupied and whether any of the occupants were awake was all she had to worry about right now.

The tight Dawn Swanson-type bun at the nape of her neck was secured with enough bobby pins to set off a dozen metal detectors. Sliding one free, she stealthily tossed it through the opening she was peering through.

The bobby pin bounced with a tiny ping! off a steel footlocker at the end of one of the beds. She held her breath.

Five of the beds were made up with military preciseness and were obviously empty. From the remaining nine came a muted chorus of snores. None of the blanket-covered lumps shot bolt upright, no one’s breathing abruptly changed tempo, no opened eyes suddenly gleamed in the faint glow coming from the red-lit fire-exit sign by the door.

With an acrobat’s agility, she dropped to the floor, immediately turning her landing into a head-over-heels roll that brought her to the shadowed side of one of the occupied beds.

At sixteen, she’d been as rebellious as any other teenager, Dawn remembered with a faint smile, although her acting-out against authority had taken a different form from a normal girl’s. Once during a working trip to London that had left her sitting alone, bored and sullen, in a hotel room for too many hours while Uncle Lee had carried out a mission, she’d defiantly presented him with a Polaroid of herself standing in a vault at the Tower of London with a penlight clamped between her teeth and one gloved hand resting on the crown jewels of England. As if to make the point that she wasn’t that different, a furious Lee Craig had punished her like any ordinary teen who’d come home late after a date.

He’d grounded her for two whole weeks. But after his death and before she’d come in contact with the Cassandras, she’d found he’d secreted the Polaroid as a memento in the hidden safe where he kept his emergency passports and contingency cash.

Past history, Dawn thought as she jammed the sidearm she’d retrieved from the footlocker—a Beretta M9 pistol, standard issue for a U.S. Ranger as she’d noted Keifer and the American contingent of William London’s guards were—into the waistband at the back of her briefs. All that little trip down memory lane proves is that I could have picked this padlock with my eyes closed and my hands tied behind my—

Two things happened at once to cut off her thoughts. One was the bolt of agony that shot home without warning in her brain…and the other was the mumbled voice of the soldier whose gun she’d just appropriated.

“Angel?” His query was slurred and thick with sleep. Through the haze of pain that had descended upon her she saw him stir restlessly. “Angel…howzabout…you know, babe…”

The intensity of the pain eased off a little, but her limbs still felt weak and rubbery. She cast an alarmed glance upward at the telltale opening in the ceiling. Could she trust her legs to make the leap? And even if she could, did her arms have the strength to pull her all the way to safety?

Her head still throbbed and the nausea that accompanied the migraines made her feel as if she were trying to move through molasses. In a few minutes the symptoms would probably fade, but she didn’t have a few minutes.

“Wassa matter, babe…don’t you wanna play?”

Was it her imagination or did his voice sound less slurred, as if he was slowly coming awake? She shot another despairing glance at her unreachable escape route and made up her mind.

“Of course I do, lover,” she murmured huskily, tiptoeing to the bed.

All she had to do was bring the edge of her hand sharply down on the precise point at the base of his neck that would insure his lapsing back into unconsciousness, albeit for a few more hours past reveille than he’d likely planned. Not the way most women demonstrate they’re not in the mood, she thought grimly. But I’m running out of time, so here goes.

She took a deep breath and quickly brought her rigidly held hand down in a chopping arc that—

He turned his head and opened his eyes at her. A slow, sexy smile lifted one corner of his mouth. She froze, the edge of her hand so close to his neck that she could feel the heat coming off him.

“You’re gorgeous, angel,” he murmured softly. “One of these nights I’m not going to let you leave just as my dream starts getting interesting…”

His eyes closed. His breathing deepened and became once again regular.

Dawn felt a stab of illogical outrage. He was asleep, dammit! The man had actually had the nerve to fall asleep while she was half-naked by his bed!

Reason rushed back. Thank your lucky stars Lover Boy did, O’Shaughnessy, she thought as she moved with quiet haste to the foot of the bed. She reached for the fifteen-round magazines of ammunition she’d left beside the footlocker, and then paused.

A short tangle of pitch-black hair brushed his forehead. Thick, spiky lashes fanned against his cheekbones. Whatever his dream was now, it was causing a faint smile to soften his well-cut lips.

The man was gorgeous. And she’d been living like a nun for the past nine months, Dawn thought in frustration, turning away.

“Not that my sex life’s ever been red-hot,” she muttered ten minutes later as she hoisted herself out of the air shaft and ran lightly to the edge of the barracks’ roof, the Dawn Swanson sweats tied in a bulky bundle around her waist. She removed the gun from her waistband before securing it and the ammo clips in the padding of clothing tied around her, and jumped. “There was that Roman god of a gardener last year in Milan when I was on the Italian job, and before him there was Alexei what’s-his-name in Moscow, who could toss back vodka all night and still show a girl why he was nicknamed the Russian bear,” she remembered, coming out of her landing roll. “Aside from them, the list is pretty skimpy.”

But numbers weren’t the point anyway. She made her way through the air shaft, her expression thoughtful. As fun as Alexei and the gardener had been, she had no illusions that they’d wasted any time dreaming about her after she’d disappeared from their lives. What would it be like to experience more than a one- or two-night stand with someone? What would it be like to know you were in his dreams, as the man she’d just left had drowsily asserted she’d been in his?

Pausing a few feet from the vent leading to her washroom, she shook her head decisively. “Way too much commitment. Still…it was kind of sweet to hear him say it.”

She was almost sorry she’d chosen Lover Boy’s footlocker to break into, she mused as she lifted the metal grate that overlooked the toilet and shimmied through the opening. She’d noticed a second sidearm in the locker, so hopefully he wouldn’t feel duty-bound to immediately report a weapon missing and would assume its absence was part of a practical joke by a buddy. Balancing on the porcelain tank, she hauled down the bundle of clothing, first removing the Beretta and its ammunition and shoving them out of sight in the vent for retrieval later. She replaced the grate, stepped down from the tank and glanced at her watch.

The whole excursion had taken twenty minutes. There was time for a brief catnap before she needed to start getting ready to report for her first day of work in Sir William’s lab. Stifling a sudden yawn at the thought, she lifted the unattractive brown robe that was part of her Dawn Swanson wardrobe from the hook where she’d hung it when she’d unpacked, wrapped it around her and unlocked the door to the bedroom. She took a step toward her bed and then stopped in shock.

The man sitting on the edge of it wore a shapeless sweater and a threadbare pair of gray flannel trousers. His bony feet, bare of socks, were jammed into odd-looking sandals with an assortment of straps and buckles. Half-moon reading glasses were perched on the end of a beaky nose, and his pure white hair looked almost as wild as Carter Johnson’s funky bed-head style. He looked up from the notebook he had been scribbling in, his expression thunderous.

“What the bloody hell have you been doing all this time in the loo?” he barked. “And where’s the damned poster of me I hear you keep over your bed?”

“You miss the point entirely,” Sir William London snapped impatiently thirty minutes later. “Von Trier’s ridiculous hypothesis aside, what’s to stop the gene from mutating further under controlled conditions? Nothing!” He slumped back onto the pillows piled up against the headboard of Dawn’s bed, the ergonomically molded soles of his sandals further disarranging the bedcover. “And yet it’s as inert as a bloody pudding,” he muttered disconsolately, “and I’ve already wasted two days trying to find out why.”

The first stage of her agenda, after arriving here, had been to get close to the famed Sir William, Dawn thought, still finding it hard to believe the turn of events of the past half hour. It seemed she’d already accomplished that, and with barely any effort on her part.

“I’ve been unpacking and arranging my toiletries, Sir William,” she’d replied to his querulous demand when she’d exited the bathroom and found him in her room. She’d walked unconcernedly to the bureau and picked up her horn-rims. “And although I used to have your poster over my bed when I was in college, I didn’t think it would be appropriate to do so here. What can I help you with?”

“I need to pick someone’s brains,” he’d growled. “Since yours was the only room with a light showing under the door, I thought I’d pick yours. Why in God’s name the rest of my staff need to sleep like logs all through the night when they know that’s when I like to brainstorm, I don’t know,” he’d added in irritation.

Aldrich will be over the freakin’ moon when I phone in my initial progress report later this week, Dawn told herself now. If anything could reassure him that I’m still the best at undercover assignments, this will.

She shut all thought of Aldrich Peters and Lab 33 from her mind and gave her attention to her unlikely companion. “More tea?” At his nod she walked over to the bed from the small desk where she’d been sitting, the battered thermos that Sir William had brought in her hand. Absently he held out a glass lab beaker, and she filled it before pouring some of the vile-tasting brew into a chipped mug for herself. “Of course there’s nothing to stop the gene from mutating under controlled conditions,” she said as she sat down again. “Since it hasn’t, someone’s obviously screwed up the conditions.”

“A typically glib Yank answer.” Under scraggly eyebrows, London’s regard was sharp with annoyance. “Who the hell would dare to—” He stopped abruptly, his scowl deepening.

Who indeed? Dawn thought wryly. For starters, just about anyone, if this lab was anything like the one she’d grown up in. All scientists, in her experience, were prima donnas. All lab technicians were underpaid. All maintenance staff were overworked and cut corners where they could. At least at Lab 33 everyone ultimately answered to Peters, which kept them toeing the line, but that wasn’t the case here.

A plan began to formulate in her mind. She pursed her lips Dawn Swanson-style, but before she could speak, London exploded. “That ass Hewlitt! He came to me straight from Von Trier’s facility. The bugger’s trying to sabotage my work!”

“Maybe.” She kept her voice calm. “Then again, maybe not. Tell me something, Sir William—the supervisor who showed me to my room this evening, Roger somebody?”

“Roger Poole? What about him?” The scowl was back on his face. “Roger’s been with me for years. He’s as loyal as a beagle, so if you’re trying to suggest he—”

“Loyalty’s not the issue,” she cut in. “Being a decent guy’s probably his biggest problem. You need someone taking care of the day-to-day running of your lab who’s not afraid to be disliked.” She shoved her glasses higher up onto the bridge of her nose and leaned forward, her expression tentatively eager. “I hope I’m not out of line, Sir William, but any slip-ups that are occurring in your lab certainly can’t be your fault. And you shouldn’t have to take time from your groundbreaking research to correct these problems. I know I was hired as a lab tech, but it’s obvious you need a pit bull a whole lot more than you do a beagle. Let me be your pit bull. Give me two days, and I promise your lab will be running like a well-oiled machine.”

“She’s not cleared for that kind of responsibility, Sir William.” The door to Dawn’s room crashed open and Des Asher, still in uniform, took a step across the threshold. His expression seemed carved from stone as he went on, directing his words at his uncle and ignoring her. “As head of military security here, I can’t allow her to be given free access to this facility.”

He turned to Dawn, his gray eyes cold. “You’re good. It’s only been hours since your arrival and already you’ve made your move. But I’m good, too. I’ve sent off top-priority queries on you to both Washington and Interpol, complete with your photograph. If you’ve ever gotten so much as a parking ticket anywhere in the world, I’ll know it.”

His smile barely lifted his lips. “If you have, you’d better hope it was under the name of Dawn Swanson. But I doubt it…because I’m beginning to think Dawn Swanson doesn’t exist at all.”

Chapter 4

Status: seventeen days and counting
Time: 0145 hours

As the angry whine got louder, Dawn spared a moment to gauge its nearness. She was cutting things a little fine, she judged, but her preparations were nearly in place. All she needed to do now was to splash the road with the volatile chemical she’d liberated from the lab earlier, make sure she had a match handy and then crouch down in the patch of sage that at this hour of night was nothing more than a slightly blacker shadow in the surrounding darkness.

Piece of cake. But she had no intention of telling Aldrich that. She didn’t want him thinking he could set up these last-minute meetings whenever he felt like it.

Her mouth drew to a straight line at the thought. Twisting the metal cap off the small glass container she held, she began sprinkling the gelatinous substance it contained onto the hard-packed dirt of the road. It took only a second to lay the wavering trail of clear jelly. When she’d finished she dropped the bottle into the hole she’d dug earlier in the soft earth by the shoulder of the road and then replaced the earth, taking care that no telltale trace gave away the bottle’s newly filled in grave. The chemical itself would be totally consumed when it burned, Dawn mused as she brushed a few twigs over the settled dirt. If anyone investigated this incident, which was unlikely, they would assume that a leaky gas tank from an earlier vehicle had left just enough gas on the road to be ignited by a stray spark struck by a piece of gravel. She half rose from her burial detail and listened. The whine now sounded like a hornet in a bottle. Her shadow melting in and out of the moonlight, she ran across the road.

This was insanity. Either that or another one of Peters’s tests, but whatever his reasons for insisting on a face-to-face progress report from her, they weren’t good enough—not when they jeopardized her cover and especially not when her phoned-in report had given him all the information she’d been able to provide at this early stage of her mission. Or at least, all the information she was willing to give, she amended with reluctant honesty.

“Of course I did nothing to arouse Asher’s suspicions!” she’d lied emphatically last night when, as arranged, she’d dialed the number that if traced would show as connecting to nothing more sinister than a bookstore specializing in used and out-of-print scientific volumes. She’d converted the anger in her tone to ice. “Maybe when I was just starting out in this game six years ago you might have had some justification in asking me that question, Doctor, but now it’s an insult. I told you, one of his people screwed up my cover name. He couldn’t handle that, so he took it out on me. His attitude only got worse when Sir William overrode him and gave me the supervisor position.”

That last was the mother of all understatements, Dawn thought, extracting a book of matches from her pants pocket before stretching out at the side of the road. She dug the inner edges of her sneakers into the dirt, kept her head down but her focus straight ahead and took her weight on her elbows.

It was the classic sniper position, and one that was second nature to her. She could wait like this for hours if she had to, but from the escalating decibels of the approaching whine the waiting would last only a few more seconds.

She didn’t want to hurt the rider, whoever he was. She couldn’t afford to damage the motorcycle. Precision was going to be key in this operation.

“When isn’t it?” she asked herself in a mutter. “If Mr. SAS hadn’t stormed into my room when he did yesterday morning, I get the feeling his uncle might have declined Dawn Swanson’s eager offer and kept his old chum Roger on in the position of lab supervisor. But if they have nothing else in common, London and his nephew seem to share the same determination to get their own way. It couldn’t have been more obvious that his insistence on giving me the run of his lab was just his way of jerking Ash’s chain. And talking about jerking chains…”

Transportation was one of the pesky little details Peters hadn’t seemed to consider when he’d insisted on this meeting tonight, she thought. Even though their clandestine rendezvous was to take place at a bar just outside the limits of the nearest town to London’s facility, it was still a jaunt of twenty miles. What had he been thinking—that she would simply hop in the hatchback, wave airily at the man who’d already warned her he suspected she was an imposter and drive off into the night before returning again hours later?

She tilted her head and listened. For the past few minutes the unknown motorcyclist had been tearing like a bat out of hell down the ruler-straight road just before the curve where she’d stationed herself. Now she heard him gearing down rapidly in preparation for the hairpin bend, his engine revs red-lining as noisily as they had the previous night when the loyal Roger Poole had been showing her to her quarters.

She’d fixed a Dawn Swanson expression of irritation on her features. “I was under the impression this facility was located miles from anywhere, not right next door to a motorcycle speedway. Half the staff on this floor must be awake with the noise.”

Roger had given an apologetic cough. She’d already learned that an apologetic cough was his one-size-fits-all reaction to most situations, and the thought had crossed her mind that he would be the perfect candidate to give lessons in being a real Englishman to Des Asher.

“I’m afraid we’ve just resigned ourselves to the racket. Really, it would be rude to complain.” He’d raked a hand through thinning brown hair. “After all, the chap riding that infernal machine is one of the military guards protecting our research from falling into the wrong hands. He must be on day duty this week, because he’s been roaring out of here for the past few evenings about eight and returning around now. I believe there’s what you Yanks call a ‘juke joint’ in the next town? Ah, here’s your room. Now, where did I put the blasted key?”

While Roger, coughing madly, had fished around in the pockets of his lab coat, Dawn had mentally filed away the information he’d given her. She hadn’t realized she would be using it so soon, she thought now, but since she’d been put in a position where she had to, she owed it to the hapless biker to do it right.

Stripped down to the essentials, this particular operation was simple physics, as so much of her training had been. Except this time instead of calculating the trajectory and velocity of a bullet, she’d had to figure out the path an experienced motorcyclist would take after swerving his vehicle to avoid a sudden wall of flames. She’d remembered the hairpin bend from her own drive here two nights ago, but until she’d arrived with her rope and looked over the location carefully, she still hadn’t known for sure whether it would do.

She’d been relieved to find the same dry and crumbling soil that had posed such a problem for the hatchback’s tires when she’d run off the road the night she’d arrived. It wouldn’t be like drifting into a feather bed but as a Ranger, the biker would know instinctively how to fall. Hopefully the worst of his injuries would be a bruised ego.

A single blinding headlight abruptly rounded the curve. Immediately emptying her mind of all else, Dawn focused on the swiftly approaching motorcycle. The biker, now that he had negotiated the turn and knew he had a straight run until the unmarked side road that led to his destination, wrenched back on the throttle to pour on more speed.

She struck the match she was holding and touched it to the chemical fire starter. Whoever he was, he was good. As the flames sprang up in front of him he reacted instantly, wrenching the Harley Sportster to one side with the obvious intention of going around the unexpected barrier. But as soon as the Harley’s tires hit the loose dirt it began fishtailing, despite the unknown rider’s efforts to keep it under control. “Dump it, buddy,” Dawn muttered under her breath. “You’re going to go down anyway, so you might as well choose your own moment.”

As if he’d heard her advice and reluctantly agreed with it, the Harley’s rider did just that. He’d long since eased off on the throttle and the rough terrain had further cut his speed, so the maneuver when he executed it was little more than a controlled stepping away from the falling bike. Jogging toward him, Dawn watched as he rolled like a paratrooper for a yard or so. He ended up on his hands and knees, shaking his helmeted head as if to clear it as she walked up behind him.

“But clearing your head is exactly what I can’t let you do, buddy,” she murmured regretfully as she stood over him. “I know I’ve already put you through the wringer pretty thoroughly, but…”

She slipped a stainless-steel cylinder from her back pocket as she spoke. As the biker began getting to his feet and pulling off his dark-visored helmet, she quickly twisted the cylinder into two parts. Reaching around him, she held the broken halves in front of his face.

The cylinder was one of Lab 33’s more benign gadgets. Although if it had been found in her luggage when she’d arrived it would have been dismissed by a searcher as a slightly oversize fountain pen, when the seal that kept it in one piece was broken it released a sickly sweet cloud of gas, similar in composition and effect to chloroform but much more predictable.

The hapless biker sank to his knees again, his helmet falling from his gloved hands. Taking care not to inhale the remnants of the gas, Dawn eased him to the ground.

“Believe me, buddy, if I could have worked this any other way in the time Aldrich gave me, I would have,” she told the unconscious man regretfully. “But you’ll come out of your little nap in a few hours. By then I’ll have returned your wheels and as far as you’re concerned, you’ll just have had a nasty spill that knocked you out for a—”

Instead of finishing her sentence, she inhaled sharply. Her mystery biker lay on his back, the moonlight shining full upon his face. Pitch-black hair brushed his forehead. His lashes were dense fans against his cheekbones. His breathing was regular and a faint smile softened his lips.

She felt a rueful answering smile tug at the corners of her mouth. On impulse she brought the tips of her fingers to her lips and kissed them.

“Wrong time, wrong place again, Lover Boy,” she whispered huskily as she blew her kiss toward him. “Maybe one of these days we’ll have a chance to get it right.”

Her smile disappeared as she checked her watch. Briskly turning away, she grabbed up the fallen helmet and hurried for the Harley without looking back.

“I owe you an apologetic cough, Rog, old chap,” Dawn muttered over the Harley’s rumble as she rode the heavy motorcycle into the dirt parking lot outside a long, low building. Peeling purple paint covered the rambling structure and its entry consisted of a spring-loaded wooden door with torn screening, but its slightly sinister air was dispelled by the glittering strings of Christmas lights that festooned it. “I figured your command of American-style English was a little shaky but it was spot-on, as you Limeys say. This here’s a juke joint, all right.”

She cut the bike’s engine and kicked its stand into position before using both hands to lift the full-face helmet off her head. She balanced it on the gas tank, shook her hair into some semblance of order and looked around her curiously.

The lot was full. Although there were some other motorcycles nearby, the majority of the haphazardly parked vehicles were cars, although not the usual run of modern sedans and SUVs. Pulled right up to the rambling wooden porch that ran the length of the dilapidated structure was an old black Buick. It had what looked like small chrome portholes along its sides, and the black metal visor protruding above its windshield must have been the last word in style some sixty or so years previously. A row over was a vintage truck, and beside it was—

“Oh my God,” Dawn breathed, her eyes widening as she dismounted the Harley and walked closer. “A ’55 Caddie ragtop. And she’s cherry…original paint job, whitewall tires that look like they’ve never had a speck of dirt on them, lemon-yellow leather interior. Elvis may have left the building, but I think I’ve found his car.” She tipped her head to one side as a blast of music started up from inside. A slow smile spread across her face. “And from the sounds of that wicked slide guitar, I think I’ve found his blues roots. Uncle Lee only played that old recording of RL Burnside’s ‘Snake Drive’ about a million times while I was growing up. He’d go nuts over this place.”

“He did.” Aldrich Peters moved out of the shadows and into the dim illumination of the lights. There was distaste on his aquiline features. One snowy-white shirt cuff brushed against the peeling porch railing, and he jerked his arm away as if he’d been burned. “What a dump,” he said in revulsion. “Your uncle used to say it was the only place west of the Mississippi that reminded him of the dives he frequented in that poverty-stricken backwater he grew up in. Since he couldn’t shake the Delta mud off his feet fast enough when he was given the chance to get out, I never understood the attraction.” He shrugged. “Still, when I realized how near it was to London’s lab I thought it would be a convenient contact location for us. Plus I learned that it’s off-limits to the lab personnel and guards.”

“Snake Drive” had ended. As Dawn walked slowly up the porch steps, she recognized the gritty growl of Reuben Glaser plunging into “Killer Blues,” another of Craig’s favorites, but this time recognition gave her no pleasure.

Too bad she couldn’t regenerate her memory as well as she could her body, she thought stonily. If that were possible, she would cut out all the sentimental recollections and replace them with ones that were less likely to keep tripping her up. She suddenly wished that Peters had chosen anyplace else—a deserted factory, even a graveyard, dammit—for this meeting.

But he hadn’t. He’d chosen this place, and if she knew him, he’d chosen it precisely because of its connection to Lee Craig. For some reason, he wanted her all misty-eyed and vulnerable, she thought with a cold inner smile. She could do that.

“I miss him, Doctor,” she said with a slight throb in her voice as she reached for the rusty handle of the screen door. She held it open, but Aldrich impatiently waved her through first. “Oh, I always knew we were in a risky profession and that every time he left on an assignment he might not return, but I guess I never really believed he could be beaten. I was in denial for a long time while I was AWOL from Lab 33.”

“Really?” Peters’s tone was suddenly silky. “So was I. But eventually we all have to face reality and deal with it, don’t we? Excuse me, waiter—could we be escorted to a table?”

His manicured fingers tapped peremptorily on the shoulder of a T-shirted man rushing by with a laden beer tray on one outstretched palm and a platter of ribs on the other. The man gave him a harried glance. “Sit anywhere you can find a chair, friend. Tell me now what your poison is and I’ll drop your drinks off when I go by again.”

Peters’s lips tightened. “A Manhattan, I suppose. Perrier for you, Dawn?”

“We’ll have two beers, whatever’s coldest, no glasses,” she said swiftly. “Those ribs as authentic as the music, mister?”

“Made to my dear departed mama’s recipe,” the man said and grinned. “Double portion?”

At her nod he raced off. Weaving her way through the jammed tables ahead of Peters, Dawn hoped the composure she’d assumed with the waiter had covered her sudden shakiness.

Aldrich Peters didn’t make small talk. His exchange with her just before he’d stopped the waiter hadn’t been idle conversation. She was as sure of that as she was that the jukebox was now blasting out Albert King’s version of “Born Under a Bad Sign,” but what she still needed to figure out was what had been behind his comment.

He’d admitted he’d been in denial for a time while she’d been AWOL. She was under no illusions that he meant he’d had trouble accepting Lee Craig’s death, so obviously there had been something else that Peters hadn’t immediately wanted to believe. But, as he’d just informed her, at some point during her absence he’d faced reality—faced it, and made plans to deal with it as expediently as possible.

Albert’s whisky-dipped rasp was pouring out of the jukebox, informing the patrons around her that if it wasn’t for bad luck, he wouldn’t have no luck at all. She knew exactly how the blues singer felt, Dawn thought numbly.

Aldrich knew she’d gone over to the Cassandras. This meeting had to be a trap…and she’d walked straight into it.

Chapter 5

Status: seventeen days and counting
Time: 0230 hours

“You eat like a farmhand.” His manicured fingers beating a tattoo on the oilcloth-covered tabletop, Peters flicked an irritated glance Dawn’s way as she finished the last of her ribs, then let his attention drift with seeming unconcern to the table next to them. Its occupants were leaving, but Dawn knew he wouldn’t say anything of importance until he was positive there was no chance of being overheard. It was a cautious policy she herself would normally follow, but the music was loud enough that she wasn’t overly worried.

She licked barbecue sauce from her fingers with assumed gusto and pushed her plate away. “You know I’m always ravenous. Besides, those ribs were fantastic.”

Attitude was everything, she thought. Whatever Aldrich had planned for her, as long as he believed she didn’t suspect him, she had the advantage. That had been why she’d plowed through the double order of ribs that, although as good as the waiter had promised, were now sitting in a lump in her stomach; why she’d listened to the music with every appearance of being completely absorbed by it; why she hadn’t dared allow the slightest trace of edginess to show in her manner.

She needed to look like a woman who could be taken off guard. When she’d convinced her assassin of that, he would strike. She intended to be ready for him, Dawn thought.

He would either take her in the ladies’ room, if she was foolish enough to pay it a visit, or he would wait until she and Peters walked out to the parking lot. If it were my hit I’d choose the latter, she decided promptly. In the washroom, an innocent bystander might blunder in. In the parking lot the killer can hustle me into the shadows, maybe make it look like I had too much to drink and he’s helping me to a car. So now the only question is, who did Peters pick to carry out this assassination?

It wasn’t just the only question, it was the million-dollar one, she realized after a momentary blankness. Lab 33 had plenty of covert operatives, a small army of guards, an indeterminate number of thugs whom Peters used for jobs that required little expertise, but there were only a few high-level assassins. One of those had been Lee Craig. Another was herself. She wasn’t sure who the others were.

Who assassinates the best assassin? she asked herself in confusion.

“You lied to me. Did you think I wouldn’t find out?” Peters’s harsh question broke through her racing thoughts with the explosive suddenness of a gunshot. She looked quickly up and realized that the patrons who had been seated next to them were now halfway across the room and heading for the exit. Peters followed her glance and then returned his gaze to her, his eyes coldly unreadable. “I’m waiting for your answer. Did you really think you could get away with it?”

Her first inclination was to buy time. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask him what the hell he was talking about, but even as she opened her mouth to say the words, she closed it again.

Buying time wouldn’t work. There wasn’t any left to buy.

“Honestly?” She arched an eyebrow and let a small smile lift the edge of her lips. “Yeah, Doctor, I guess I did think I could get away with it. But hey—can’t blame a girl for trying, can you?”

Her flippancy had gotten to him, she saw with satisfaction. At the side of one of his elegantly silvered temples, a vein throbbed faintly and the manicured fingers that had been tapping impatiently on the table now curled into his palms like fists. Peters’s steely control was one of his greatest weapons, Dawn told herself. She’d just disabled that weapon.

“So how’d I slip up?” She kept her tone light and lifted her beer bottle to her lips as she spoke, hoping to increase his anger. The tilted bottle had the added benefit of giving her the opportunity to swiftly scan the room, but nothing alerted her. She swallowed, then instead of setting the bottle back on the table, she casually kept her grip on it. “Did I say something that tipped you off when I contacted Lab 33? Or, wait—your suspicions were confirmed during that meeting we had in your office, weren’t they? I thought they might be, but when you gave me this assignment I figured I’d managed to convince you.” She shrugged, her expression wry. “So tell me, Doctor, why did you send me on this mission if you didn’t trust me?”

“Enough!” One of Peters’s clenched fists slammed down on the table and the pulse at the side of his temple sped up alarmingly, Dawn noted in cold detachment. Don’t go having a stroke on me, Doctor, she told him silently. My plans for you don’t include you dying from natural—

Her thought was cut short by a crash as the beer bottle slipped from her hand to the floor. She wasn’t aware of it falling. She wasn’t aware of Peters’s quick frown or the knowing grins of the patrons close enough to have heard the bottle smash.

All Dawn was aware of was the pain.

It felt as if sharpened steel bolts had instantly shot home behind her eyes, locking her into a world of unrelenting agony. It couldn’t even be called a headache anymore, she thought as she clamped her lips tightly shut against the screams that were rising in her. By definition, headaches were in a person’s head. They didn’t send piercing tendrils down every limb until it felt as if a cruel barb had been sunk deep into each fingertip and then hauled tortuously back. Headaches didn’t claw their way through a sufferer’s lungs, ripping and tearing until it wasn’t possible to take the shallowest of breaths. They didn’t feel like a knife-thrust to the heart, a jackbooted kick to the kidneys, vials of acid searing through every layer of skin.

This time the pain didn’t ebb in a few moments’ time. Like an endless ocean it kept coming, each wave crashing onto her with more force than the last. She had to stay conscious, Dawn thought disjointedly. She couldn’t remember why staying conscious was important, only that it had to do with some danger she was facing. She fought the blackness that was sucking her down.

“…were a fool to think you could keep up the lie. Worse than that, you jeopardized the security of Lab 33. I should abort this mission right now and deal with you the same way I’ve dealt in the past with others whose actions have verged on the traitorous. I’m giving you one final chance to tell me the truth—how long have you been experiencing the degeneration symptoms?”

The pain had gone. For a second Dawn could grasp nothing but that simple and miraculous fact—the pain was gone, completely and totally. Not even the faintest throbbing remained as proof that it had been tearing her apart only moments ago.

And Aldrich Peters hadn’t discovered her connection with the Cassandras.

Was there a link between the two? Maybe, she thought rapidly, because as soon as he spoke just now I was suddenly back to normal. Could stress be the trigger that sets the headaches off?

But this wasn’t the time to explore theories. Peters had suspected she’d been lying to him about her symptoms, not her loyalty. Had she said anything in this conversation that might have tipped him to the possibility that they were talking at cross-purposes?

You came close, O’Shaughnessy, she told herself with relief, but your responses could have applied equally to either situation. You asked him if you’d given yourself away with the phone call—and although you meant the call you made when you were ready to come back to Lab 33 after being AWOL, he obviously thought you meant your phoned-in report from London’s lab. When you wondered if you’d slipped up during your meeting with him in his office the day he gave you this assignment, he assumed you were talking about inadvertently revealing your symptoms. So we’re good here, right?

Wrong. He was still angry. He still wanted to know how bad the symptoms were. And if she told him the truth, there was a more-than-even chance he’d pull her from this mission rather than take the chance she could endanger Lab 33. He would weigh his options, assess the possible consequences and reluctantly decide to shelve his plans of stealing Sir William’s research.

I prefer my earlier scenario of him hiring a hit man to take me out tonight, she thought grimly. Whatever it takes, I can’t let him abort this assignment. Not only my life but Lynn’s and Faith’s depend on receiving the reversal serum.

“You’re right, Doctor—I’ve been lying through my teeth to you,” she said flatly. She saw a flash of fury behind the icy gray eyes watching her, and knew instinctively that she was walking across a minefield. She went on, realizing that a single misstep could cause everything to blow up in her face. “The symptoms started when I went AWOL from Lab 33…shortly after the time you say my blood tests revealed the first signs of gene degeneration. I didn’t worry about them at first—they were just mild headaches, and although I’d never experienced headaches before I certainly didn’t jump to the conclusion I was dying.”

“No,” Peters conceded coldly. “But after our meeting in my office last week you knew the situation. And yet you continued to hide the facts from me.”

“Because I didn’t have a choice!” She let a trace of fear bleed into her tone. “Don’t you understand, Doctor—I’m desperate! You’d just told me how vital it was that I retrieve London’s notes so your scientists could complete the serum for me. What was I supposed to do? Tell you I’d have to pass on the assignment that could save my life just because I was getting a few headaches?”

She shook her head. “With Uncle Lee gone, I’m Lab 33’s best assassin. As you said, Des Asher’s a formidable opponent and at some point he might have to be taken out. I couldn’t risk handing over a job of that magnitude to some yahoo with a forty-eight Special, dammit. I won’t hand over this job.”

She’d blown it, Dawn thought as she finished speaking and took a tense breath. Aldrich was studying her as he might study a specimen under a microscope—emotionlessly and assessingly, as if she had just revealed something fractionally interesting and he was wondering if it would be worth his while to pick up a scalpel and dissect her further. She’d had one chance to convince him to let her continue with the mission that would lift her and her sisters’ death sentences, and she’d blown it.

The jukebox had been silent for the past few seconds. Now it launched into another number, but Dawn barely heard it.

“Give me Bach any day.” It was the last thing she’d expected Peters to say, and she was caught unawares. She realized she was staring openmouthed at him, but before she could recover from her surprise he went on. “You really like this—this—” He winced. Reluctantly she helped him out.

“The blues?” She met his gaze. “Yeah, Doctor, I do. What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Just that you’re more like Lee Craig than I realized,” Peters answered remotely. “Not only in the so-called music you like, but in your reaction just now when you fought to have the responsibility of this assignment. As I recall, that was the topic of the conversation I had with Craig before he left Lab 33 on what eventually proved to be his final assignment. I couldn’t fault him then for his determination and dedication to the job and I suppose I can’t fault you now for showing the same qualities.”

“You’re saying you trust me to be able to complete the mission?”

Peters frowned. “If you give me your assurance that these symptoms you’ve been experiencing won’t interfere with your performance. You’re sure you had nothing to do with Asher’s suspicions of you?”

“I told you, the man’s a control freak. The screwup over my name when I arrived made him look bad and he’s trying to cover his ass by focusing attention on me.” Dawn kept her voice steady. “The headaches are the only symptoms I’ve had and if I ever need to explain them, I’ll just give Dawn Swanson a history of crippling migraines. There hasn’t been anything else that might have aroused Asher’s suspicions, I swear.”

Unless you count flipping into assassin mode while I was trying to convince the man I was nothing more than a lab tech, she amended silently. But since I’m pretty sure you would count that, Doctor, I don’t intend to share that particular anecdote with you.

“Very well.” His nod was brief. “I must admit you’ve made good progress in the short time you’ve been at London’s facility. If Sir William has taken a liking to you, as you say he has, it’s possible you might not have to eliminate him to get your hands on his work.”

“Very possible,” she agreed woodenly. She had a sudden vision of William London as she’d seen him the previous night, his white hair wildly unruly, his still-bright blue eyes excited with the realization that his theory might not have been wrong, his insistence on sharing his container of undrinkable tea with her. Despite his irascibility, London had a childlike quality about him, perhaps because his whole life had been devoted not to gaining the money and awards that had been a by-product of his genius, but simply to the pursuit of pure truth.

It would be incomprehensible to Sir William that someone might want to kill him for that truth. But the man sitting across the table from her would see no problem in giving such an order if he deemed it necessary…which was just one more reason to feel relief that Peters hadn’t chosen anyone else for this job.

“Well, then.” Peters pushed his chair back, taking care as he did so not to touch the sticky tabletop. “I believe this meeting is at an end. I’m glad we straightened out our little differences, Dawn.” He paused. “There is one last thing I should touch on. You asked me why I sent you on an assignment when I already had my suspicions about your capabilities. The plain and simple answer is that I had no one else to send.”

“But I’ve reassured you on that point,” she protested. “You know now that my symptoms won’t get in the way of my doing my job, so—”

“I wasn’t sure of that four days ago in my office. And during the months you were AWOL, I had no choice but to assume Lab 33 had lost its best assassin. I decided that’s not a position I will risk being in again.”

“You’ve chosen a replacement for me.” This was what he’d meant earlier when he’d said he’d been forced to face reality and deal with it, Dawn thought. It was a relief to know her fears that he’d set up a hit on her were wrong, of course, but something about his casual assumption that someone else could take her place with Lab 33 stung.

Which is totally insane, O’Shaughnessy, she argued with herself. You hate the fact that you were Aldrich’s favorite killing machine, so how do you justify feeling a sense of professional pique over his giving that title away?

It didn’t make sense. But she still felt an illogical spark of anger, and Peters’s reply only fanned it.

“Not yet, but I intend to. I’ve drawn up a short list of qualified candidates and I’ll be making my decision soon. None of them have your unique capabilities, of course, so I expect some of them won’t return from the test assignments I’ve given them.” He stood, his figure leanly spare in the immaculately cut gray suit. “But some are bound to succeed. Those who do will be the nucleus of Lab 33’s newly formed assassination squad—a squad that will answer to you.”

Dawn stood too, her legs feeling strangely rubbery. “I like the idea, Doctor,” she said, forcing a smile. “And the test assignments are a practical way of weeding out the excess candidates. What exactly are their assignments?”

Peters’s smile was characteristically brief, but for once it was shaded with real satisfaction. “Each assassin has been given the name of one of the Athena Academy graduates known as the Cassandras,” he said as he stood aside for her to precede him to the exit. “Their missions are to kill their targets or die in the attempt.”

The Cassandras had been warned, Dawn thought in relief an hour later as she waited for the feeling to come back to her limbs. She looked over her shoulder at the high-voltage fence she’d just scaled, still feeling the tingling residue of the electricity that had surged through her body and stopped her heart for a few seconds, but her thoughts weren’t on her surroundings. Kayla Ryan herself had answered the phone when she’d rung the emergency contact number from a gas station pay phone, and Ryan hadn’t wasted time in asking questions.

“I’ll get the word out immediately,” she’d said after a moment’s stunned silence. “Some of the members deal every day with threats on their lives. Sam St. John once told me that she simply assumes that at any given time some creep somewhere in the world has a price on her head, and she never lets down her guard. But a few of the others will have to be provided with round-the-clock security.”

“And my sisters?” she’d reminded Ryan, her tone curt with worry. “Aldrich may not know about Lynn and Faith yet, but we can’t assume he won’t find out and try to take them.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Kayla promised. Her tone softened. “And you take care of yourself, Dawn. I know this is how you wanted to handle the Lab 33 angle, but ever since the other Cassandras and I agreed to let you play this dangerous double game with Peters I’ve regretted our decision—more so since he sent you on this undercover assignment. You’re absolutely sure he doesn’t suspect you?”

“Not absolutely sure,” Dawn said. She sensed the other woman’s apprehension and tried to lighten it. “But like my Uncle Lee always said when I was worried, if it’s close enough for government work, why sweat it?”

She spoke unthinkingly. It wasn’t until Kayla didn’t respond to her that she realized what she’d said, and by then it was too late. She’d done it again, Dawn thought angrily. When was she going to stop remembering Lee Craig as if he had really loved her?

Before she could berate herself further, Kayla’s voice came over the line once more. From her tone it was clear that she wasn’t talking as a police lieutenant or a fellow Athena Academy student, but as a friend. “I told you once that Craig deliberately chose the dark side. I still believe that, Dawn. But I’ve also come to accept there was a part of him that he never relinquished to the dark. You were the part of him he kept separate.”

“Still trying to help me heal, Ryan?” Dawn gave a short laugh. “I appreciate the thought, but as I once demonstrated to you, it’s not necessary. If you really need to worry about me, worry about the damn SAS officer who’s been on my case since I showed up at London’s lab. Des Asher’s proving to be one major pain in the butt.”

“Really?” There’d been a smile in Kayla’s voice. “In my experience, that’s the only kind of man worth getting to know. After I deal with the current situation, I might just pull some strings and ask a contact of mine to fax me a photo of this Des Asher. I’d be interested to see what your major pain in the butt looks like, O’Shaughnessy.”

Well, for starters, Ryan, he doesn’t have pitch-black hair and a drop-dead gorgeous smile like Lover Boy, Dawn thought now as she slowly got to her feet. A reluctant grin tugged at the corners of her mouth. As usual, when it came to her, Kayla had it all wrong. If she’d been looking for a little R and R—which I’m definitely not, Dawn firmly assured herself—Mr. SAS would be her last choice. The man whose motorcycle she’d returned was much more her type, even unconscious.

Although he seemed to be coming around by the time I dumped the Harley by him and left, she thought, keeping to the shadows as she silently headed toward the dark shape of the lab and living quarters building a few hundred feet away. That phone call to Kayla was vital, but it definitely shot my schedule all to hell. I’d planned to be safely tucked up in Dawn Swanson’s bed by now.

But the hard part was over. She’d breached the perimeter fence, had given her body several minutes to repair itself after taking the volts that had slammed through it, and now only had to cross the grounds that some obliging landscape architect had apparently designed with her needs in mind. Clumps of ornamental grasses were artfully dotted here and there like living fountains, massive boulder arrangements lent a solid contrast to the grasses, and desert-loving shrubs and cacti provided enough cover for a herd of elephants to sneak up undetected.

I bet Ash took one pissed-off look at this when he arrived to take command and promptly sent out a high-priority requisition to Washington to have the whole freakin’ area bulldozed, she thought. Too bad for him his requisition was obviously turned down. Getting out earlier this evening was a snap and getting back in is going to be just as—

“It ever occur to you that you’re letting this damned baby-sitting detail get to you, pal?” Dawn froze into position behind a boulder as the unfamiliar voice floated faintly through the darkness. Actually, it wasn’t unfamiliar, she thought a heartbeat later. She’d heard it once before, a couple of days ago. She pictured the speaker—the Ranger officer whose boyish features had been tight with strain as he’d held his weapon on both her and Des Asher and who’d later sheepishly admitted to making the mistake over her name. She tried to recall his, but just then it was given to her.

“Yeah, Keifer, it’s occurred to me.” Asher’s speech was different from his uncle’s: harsher, less precise, and with a mid-Atlantic intonation to some of his words that implied he’d spent enough time in the past liaising with the American military that his accent had blurred. She realized he and Keifer were approaching her boulder as his voice gained in volume. “And I decided I don’t give a flying—”

She heard his footsteps halt. Keifer’s lighter step stopped too. “What’s the matter? You hear something, Ash?” he asked in a low tone.

Dawn held her breath. She heard Asher’s footsteps start up again, and exhaled in noiseless relief.

“I didn’t hear anything.” Wonder of wonders, there was an edge of wry amusement in Mr. SAS’s voice, she noted. “But if you can believe it, I thought I smelled barbecue sauce for a minute. That’s what I get for working through lunch and dinner, I guess.”

Barbecue sauce! Her cupped hand flew to her mouth and she breathed into it. God, she did have barbecue breath, she thought, appalled. Just the slightest trace, but apparently the damn man had a nose like a bloodhound.

“Another example of letting this assignment get to you,” Keifer said. “As the senior American officer here, Asher, I gotta tell you I think you’re riding everyone too hard—yourself, the men…hell, even that poor dweeb of a lab tech you nearly blew away a couple of days ago. What were you thinking, man?”

“I was thinking that posing as a dweeb of a lab tech would be one smart way to infiltrate this place,” Asher said shortly. “I was thinking that seven years of self-defense classes wouldn’t teach her the kind of speed and ruthlessness she showed. I was also thinking that if you looked real close, she wasn’t a dweeb at all. She was doing a good job of disguising her looks, but when the two of us were at each other’s throats I couldn’t help but notice.”

“If you say so.” There was patent disbelief in Keifer’s tone, but Dawn wasn’t reassured. This was bad, she thought tensely. Back at Lab 33 she’d assured Carter that her deception wouldn’t depend on his efforts but through her own, and in the past that had always been true. Her knack for assuming an undercover persona had never let her down before now, but if Des Asher had seen through Dawn Swanson, then obviously that knack was one more skill she could no longer take for granted.

Aldrich Peters had said she’d made good progress so far. But it wasn’t good enough—not when she had no idea which of her degeneration symptoms would next reveal itself, or how. She’d gotten close to Sir William, but she needed to get a lot closer if she was to find out where the obsessively suspicious genius concealed his research notes.

“…still say this latest idea you’ve implemented is taking things way too far.” Keifer was speaking again, and she realized he and Asher were now directly in front of her boulder. Their footsteps stopped again. “You’ve got razor wire, an electrified fence, guards at the gate and doing perimeter spot-checks. Our people and the lab staff know they have to follow procedure if they want to leave the compound, and they also know that this area between the fence and the walkways is off-limits after dark. I don’t see why you think you need—” He broke off abruptly. Dawn heard him exhale sharply. “That’s them, isn’t it,” he said in resignation. “They’ve only just arrived and already you’re putting the poor sons of bitches to work. Since I haven’t been formally introduced yet, I think I’ll just hustle my butt back to the unrestricted area, if that’s okay with you.”

Mr. SAS had a sexy laugh, Dawn thought in faint surprise. Too bad it was part of a package deal that included his crappy personality. Keifer appeared to be his one friend here, and even he seemed to have problems with Asher’s tight-ass personality—a prime example of which was his apparent insistence on increasing his guard roster without giving the newcomers a chance to settle in.

He’s going to have to walk them around the area, at least, she thought, sliding down into a more comfortable sitting position and crossing her arms over her chest in irritation. Even he can’t expect that all he has to do is snap his fingers and order them to get to work immediately. It’s a drag, but I guess I’ll just have to wait until he leaves with the poor—

“Slasher! Ripper! Come!”

Even before Dawn heard Asher snap his fingers and issue the abrupt order, her eyes had widened in appalled comprehension at the sound of eight running feet on the crushed-gravel path. Keifer’s description had been dead accurate, she thought hollowly as she peered far enough around the boulder to get a glimpse of the two black figures now sitting obediently at Asher’s feet. The new guards were sons of bitches…literally.

Sons of Doberman bitches.

“Good lads.” His back to her, Asher bent and scratched each dog briefly behind an ear. He straightened, and his voice took on an unmistakable air of command.

“Slasher! Ripper! Hunt!”

Chapter 6

Status: seventeen days and counting
Time: 0337 hours

The Dobermans leaped into action, torquing away from Asher’s side so quickly that gravel spurted up behind them. They made straight for the boulder, their fangs bared and menacing growls coming from their throats as they went for Dawn.

She glared at them.

As if they’d suddenly thudded into an invisible concrete wall, the two dogs fell backward into each other. They scrambled to their feet, took a few snarling steps toward her again and then stopped. Right on cue, both of them started shaking at once. Their growls were now fearful, their formerly pricked up ears flat to their heads and their stubs of tails plastered to their hindquarters. Very slowly, and without taking their eyes from hers, they began backing away.

Dogs didn’t just hate her, Dawn thought resignedly. They really, really hated her.

Even Peters didn’t have an explanation for her effect on them. Craig had given her a puppy for her fifth birthday and it had howled in despair for as long as she was in the room, only to revert to normal puppy behavior as soon as she was gone. The pup had been returned to the pet store, but the one that had replaced it had acted the same way, and so had the third. By then Aldrich’s scientific interest had been aroused, and he’d run test after test with dogs of all breeds and temperaments.

Even the pit bulls had crouched in fear at her five-year-old feet, Dawn remembered. Deciding that the dogs could sense something different about her, although he never did pinpoint what it was that alerted them, Peters had finally given up on the experiments and Lee Craig had brought her home a kitten.

“Fluffy liked me,” she muttered as she walked past the cringing Dobies and around the side of the boulder just as Des Asher came running toward it. He saw her and a look of alarm crossed his features.

“Slasher! Ripper! Stand down!”

“They already did,” she informed him. She fixed a Dawn Swanson scowl on her face. “I don’t see a bag in your hand. I suppose you thought if you walked your two mutts after dark you wouldn’t have to stoop and scoop after them. If I step in something the next time I can’t sleep and come out here to clear my mind, I’ll certainly know who to blame.”

Rule number one in bluffing, she reminded herself, was that no matter how outrageous the bluff, no matter how disbelieving the person you were trying to scam, you couldn’t falter. Even if they presented you with proof positive that you were lying, you had to keep to your story.

Works for politicians, she thought. No reason why it shouldn’t work for me. She began to walk past Asher’s solid bulk, but he sidestepped with the same instantaneous reaction he’d shown two days previously when he’d drawn his weapon. He faced her, his features hard.

“No.” His tone was flat. “We’re not playing it your way this time. Instead of spending the next half hour going round and round the mulberry bush, you’re going to cut the crap right now and tell me what the hell you’re doing in a restricted area at this hour of night.”

“What do you mean, a restricted area?” If there was one thing that pissed her off royally, Dawn thought in irritation, it was having to look up at a man. She was tall enough that the problem didn’t occur often and in heels she could go eye to eye with just about any male under basketball player height, but right now she was wearing Dawn Swanson’s scuffed runners and she was definitely having to tip her head back to talk to Asher. Six-five, she estimated. But a well-placed jump kick brings even the big ones down to size, buddy.

“You saw the signs. You would have had to walk right past them on your way here from the bughouse.” His frown deepened. “The lab and staff quarters building,” he corrected curtly.

She looked past him, ostensibly to search for the signs he’d mentioned but really to hide the fact that she’d nearly been startled into a grin. She’d overheard one of the guards using the term the day before, but hearing it come inadvertently from Asher was way better. She almost wished she didn’t have to use his slip-up against him.

Almost.

“In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not wearing my glasses. I’m probably not the only one on staff who takes them off to give my eyes a rest when I’m not working, so I suggest that if you really want to keep this area to run your overgrown pets in, you edge it with a small ornamental fence or something.”

His jaw tightened. “They’re not pets, they’re trained—”

“One more thing you should bear in mind, Mr. Asher,” she cut in, deliberately omitting his rank. “You may not respect Sir William and the work he carries on here, but the rest of the world does, myself included. Despite the fruit flies we use in our genetic experiments and the somewhat eccentric behavior of some of the scientists working with your uncle, calling this place the ‘bughouse’ is offensive. If it happens again I’ll have to lodge a complaint.” She gave him a dismissive nod. “I’ll try to watch out for the signs next time. Good night, Mr. Asher.”

Just for a moment she thought her bluff was going to work. He’d lost ground with his bughouse remark—for someone like Asher who kept such a tight rein on everything and everyone under his command, being tripped up by his own tongue was galling, and being put on the defensive by her must have been even more so. Perfectly executed feint and attack on my part, she told herself with an inner smile. Anytime you feel like losing another mini Battle of New Orleans with this here American, Captain, go right ahead and bring it on.

She took two steps past him, heard whining behind her, and knew her perfectly executed plan had just been shot to hell.

“What did you do to them?” His hand clamped around her upper arm. She felt her biceps tighten in reflex and quickly relaxed it, hoping he hadn’t had time to wonder why a lab tech had muscles like iron. But Asher was preoccupied. “The dogs—what’s the matter with them?”

Reluctantly she turned to face the animals. They’d found the courage to slink out from behind the boulder and were huddled at Ash’s feet, their gleaming bodies trembling so badly they looked like two cans of midnight-black high-gloss being violently shaken in a paint-mixing machine. Twin pairs of canine eyes met hers. Slasher—or maybe Ripper—attempted a growl. It ended in a strangled whimper. The second Doberman just bared his teeth, lifted his muzzle and howled.

“If I find you poisoned them with something smuggled out of the lab, Swanson, I’ll have you in lockup so fast you won’t know what hit you,” Asher grated. “And this time neither Keifer nor my gullible uncle will be able to save you. What did you give those dogs?”

Rule number two in bluffing, Dawn thought wearily, was knowing when rule number one wasn’t working anymore. On the few occasions in the past when she’d reached an impasse like the one she currently found herself in, she’d had no compunction about resorting to a physical solution. Not that I have any compunctions this time either, she told herself. But going mano a mano with Slasher and Ripper’s master is out of the question, unless I want to kiss off any chance of getting Sir William’s research back to Lab 33.

She would simply have to Dawn Swanson her way out of the situation yet again, she thought without enthusiasm. God, she was getting tired of this particular alter ego.

So go ahead and dump the Swanson chick, O’Shaughnessy. As soon as the reckless little voice inside her head offered the suggestion, it seemed overwhelmingly attractive. Not that she could abandon her cover persona, Dawn thought glumly. Going undercover meant staying undercover, not popping in and out of character on a whim. That’s the beauty part, though—it’s not a whim, it’s a double bluff! the little voice argued. And there’s no freakin’ rule against double bluffs, is there?

Maybe there was in Aldrich Peters’s book, but not in hers, she thought slowly. A spark of excitement flared in her. She was going to do it, dammit!

“I didn’t give the mutts anything,” she retorted with a shrug. “I’m just the dog bogeyman, for some reason. If you don’t believe me, watch this.”

She lunged at the Dobermans. In panic they backed into the boulder, and at that point they forgot the last shreds of their training. She turned to Asher as his canine line of defense ran off yipping into the darkness.

“They sense something wrong about me,” she said offhandedly. “Dogs and SAS officers are supposed to be smart that way, right?”

He was staring after the Dobermans in disbelief, but at her question he turned back to her, his eyes narrowing. “Are you admitting that both the bloody dogs’ instincts and mine are correct, Swanson?”

She scooped her hair back from her face with her hands, continuing the movement to lace her fingers behind her head. “Why not,” she said carelessly, her voice losing the pedantic tone she’d been assuming. She rolled her shoulders to relieve the strain. “You guessed my big secret, Ash. I’m not Dawn Swanson, lab nerd—I’m the original femme fatale. Last I heard, I was rated one of the top three international assassins in the world, but I figure I got rooked. As far as I’m concerned, I’m in the top two.” She drew her eyebrows together thoughtfully. “Except since the guy above me died last fall, I guess that leaves yours truly as number one with a gun.”

His gaze was still on her. She returned his stare coolly, taking in the way the short spikes of his burnt-silver hair contrasted with the mahogany of his tan, and how the beach-glass aqua of his eyes couldn’t be completely concealed even behind the denseness of his half-closed lashes. He wasn’t in the same league as Lover Boy, she thought assessingly—one look at Des Asher and a woman’s thoughts didn’t veer immediately toward a vision of rumpled sheets and deliciously wasted afternoons. One look at him was enough to make any sane woman keep her guard up rather than let it down.

Even as the thought flitted through her mind, her guard fell completely away.

A few minutes ago she’d heard him laugh at something Keifer had said. His laugh had been surprisingly attractive; low with amusement and somehow giving the impression that it was a fleeting glimpse of the real man. So yeah, his laugh could be called sexy, Dawn thought dazedly. But his smile…

His teeth gleamed briefly white in the shadows. A corner of his usually grim mouth lifted. His aqua eyes were still half-hidden, but now instead of glinting coldly at her they seemed to draw her in.

She still didn’t think of wasted afternoons when she looked at him, she told herself unsteadily. Her thoughts were running more along the lines of hustling the man into her bed this very night.

Bad mistake, O’Shaughnessy. Real bad mistake.

She snapped back to sanity as he spoke. “Number one with a gun, Swanson? You sure you’re not just trying to impress the hell out of this poor Brit?” The laughter in his voice was reluctant, but it was still there as he continued. “Because I am impressed, love. See, I figured you for a small-time operator hired by someone a little higher up on the criminal food chain to infiltrate this place and report back on its security measures and procedures. I’ll admit I was pretty shaken by your moves when you and I got it on a couple of nights ago at the front gate, but I had no idea I was dealing with the female equivalent of the Jackal.”

Her instincts had been right, she thought in amazement…reckless but right. The truth was so fantastic that Asher found it easier to believe she was spinning him a story, and he’d been amused enough by what he saw as her outrageousness to play along. You could keep this up indefinitely, O’Shaughnessy, the daredevil voice inside her urged. Come on, isn’t it a whole lot more interesting playing ‘catch me if you can’ with the man rather than being stuck acting out the Swanson role?

It was more interesting. It was more interesting because it was more dangerous, she told her inner daredevil repressively, fixing a scowl on her face and opening her mouth to revert to a Swanson-style put-down.

So it’s more dangerous. Where’s the downside to that?

Dawn closed her mouth without delivering the put-down. Slowly she widened her eyes at Asher. She let the corners of her lips curve into a smile, and when she spoke there was absolutely nothing of Dawn Swanson in her purr.

“What happened between us at the gate, Ash?” She let the faintest trace of disappointment color her tone. “Maybe that counts as getting it on where you come from, but to a red-blooded American girl like me it barely rates as a warm-up to foreplay. Not that I’m trying to scare you or anything,” she added, examining her nails with assumed casualness.

This time his startled laugh wasn’t reluctant at all. Looking up from her nails, Dawn saw a slash of humor crease a tanned cheek as he replied to her veiled dare. “Don’t forget I’m SAS, Swanson. We don’t scare easily,” he informed her. “Know what our motto is?”

“Who Dares, Wins,” she replied without hesitation. “Us international assassins know everything there is to know about our opponents. And since we’re on the topic of what we know about each other, have you had any luck in getting that information on me you contacted Interpol and Washington about?”

He didn’t answer her immediately. The crease of humor in his cheek disappeared, although a ghost of a smile still played around the corners of his mouth. Without appearing to have shifted his stance in any way, there was an instant stillness in every muscle of his body, as if he had sensed a slight movement of the earth beneath his feet.

Or as if he realized that although they were still playing a game, the rules had suddenly changed, Dawn thought, watching him intently. They have, she told him silently. By asking about your inquiries into my background, I just confirmed there’s something I don’t want you to find out about me. Your response will tell me whether you’re going to end this now and act on that confirmation…or play the game a little longer to see if you can get anything more from me. The next move is all yours, big guy, so are you going to fold and walk away, or are you still in?

Mr. SAS was going to fold, she decided with an obscure feeling of let-down. The moment she’d asked about his inquiries to the authorities he’d gone on full alert…and with a man like Des Asher, full alert didn’t include playing games. Which was too bad, because matching wits with him during her time here might have been fun. She’d have won, naturally, but with his SAS training in strategy and maneuvers he would have been a worthy opponent.

She stifled a yawn, trying to work up enough interest to plan some sort of Dawn Swanson explanation for her behavior. A bad reaction to some headache medication? Delayed shock and fear from being set upon by Slasher and Ripper? she wondered without enthusiasm.

“Funny you should ask.” Asher’s voice broke into her thoughts. She looked at him swiftly, but the same half smile ghosted around his lips as it had a moment ago and the same wary watchfulness was in his eyes. He continued, his tone giving nothing away. “Until this evening I hadn’t gotten a single damn thing back from either Washington or Interpol in response to my inquiries about you. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. At first I figured I’d made a mistake about you.”

“Weird.” Dawn arched her eyebrows in astonishment and was sure she saw a flicker of humor momentarily overlay his wariness. “Because I’m beginning to think I made a mistake about you. Maybe we both shouldn’t have been so quick to jump to conclusions.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have,” Asher replied. “But as much as I’d like to shelve all my unworthy suspicions of you, something tells me I’d end up regretting it for a long time. No, I’ve pulled some less-than-smart moves in my career, but trusting you won’t be one of them. Whoever prepared your cover story slipped up, Swanson.” He rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. “Not that Swanson’s your real name, but I might as well keep calling you by it for now.”

He was trying a bluff of his own, Dawn thought with an inward smile. For an opening move in this preliminary skirmish, it wasn’t bad, either, but she doubted whether he expected her to fall for it. He was simply trying to get her off balance, plant a momentary worry in her mind that Carter might have overlooked a detail when he’d created Dawn Swanson.

But for all Carter’s faults, overlooking details wasn’t one of them, so she wasn’t worried. It wouldn’t hurt to let Asher think she was, though.

“What do you mean, they slipped up?” She frowned quickly and then just as quickly smoothed her brow, as if she hadn’t meant to let him see her consternation. The shaky little laugh that followed her alarmed question was the perfect touch, she thought as she fixed an uneasy eye on her opponent. “An international assassin like myself wouldn’t have anything less than the best backup team available. My people don’t slip up, Ash.” She paused long enough to nervously bite her lip. “But just for interest’s sake, what do you think they did wrong?”

Even before she finished speaking, he was shaking his head. “You disappoint me, love. I’m in this game for the same reason you are—because until you drove up in that wreck of a hatchback a couple of days ago and tried to slice me open with a car antenna, I was going out of my mind with boredom. I’m used to operating behind enemy lines, taking on assignments that never get written up in the official reports, making HALO drops over occupied territory. This particular posting doesn’t exactly compare—”

She couldn’t help interrupting. “HALO?”

He shrugged. “An SAS term. High Altitude Low Opening parachute jumps. Essentially, dropping like a bloody rock right up until the last possible second, which is the quickest and dirtiest way to get from a plane five thousand feet up to the ground where the fighting is. But what I’m trying to say is that for a minute there I thought you were going to make things interesting. Then you started overacting like crazy, Swanson—biting your lip, opening those big green eyes as wide as you could. Hell, I haven’t seen a performance like that since I was a five-year-old kiddie being taken to a Sunday afternoon pantomime by my dear old nannie.”

Sheer outrage robbed her of speech. Overacting? Dammit, had she been overacting when she’d infiltrated a certain Middle Eastern potentate’s palace dressed as a dancing girl and taken out the sheikh’s murderously corrupt son before he could sign a deal that would destroy the balance of power in that part of the world? Had she been overacting when she’d posed as a nun in the godforsaken jungles of a tiny but violent South American country, had allowed herself to be kidnapped by the group of terrorist thugs that had been slaughtering foreign civilians, and had then coldly dispatched the whole band of killers, one by one, during the night? Had overacting gotten her the position as secretary to a Swiss money launderer, enabled her to get close to the Russian Mafia hit man who’d been jeopardizing one of Aldrich Peters’s more lucrative operations, put her in place to carry out the half-dozen or more other assignments that had required her to play a part?

I don’t think so, Dawn seethed. And those jobs needed way more finesse than putting one over on Mr. SAS. He’s just trying to piss me off by—

By telling her the truth. Her outrage faded away, to be replaced by uncomfortable self-honesty. The man was right, damn him. She hadn’t given it her best shot. Her performance a moment ago had been amateurishly halfhearted because she’d assumed she wouldn’t have to work at conning him. She’d violated one of Lee Craig’s cast-iron rules.

Act like every assignment is your first, or else it could turn out to be your last, Dawnie. Never let yourself forget that laziness and arrogance can kill someone in our profession faster than a bullet.

Des Asher had said she’d disappointed him, Dawn thought wryly. He might be taken aback to learn that an assassin who had gone under the code name of Cipher would have said the same thing if he’d been alive to witness his former protégé’s most recent efforts.

She pushed all thought of Craig aside and concentrated on the frowning man standing in front of her. “Three things I want to get straight—firstly, I’m not real sure what a pantomime is, but I have the feeling I’ve just been insulted.” She exhaled tightly. “Secondly, I probably deserve it. I thought I could get away with treating this as a game. But with you as my opponent, I should be treating it as a war game, right?”

“Going up against me won’t be the walk in the park you seem to think it’ll be,” Asher agreed with a tight smile. “Even though I don’t buy your international-assassin story, I’m willing to accept you’ve taken on the best, and won. But I’d lay good money you’ve never taken on the SAS and beaten us. Don’t count on this being the first time, Swanson.”

“I’d lay good money you’ve come out on top in most of the confrontations you’ve been in, too,” she told him, her smile equally tight. “Ain’t gonna happen that way with me, buddy. So we’re on the same page here—bluff, counterbluff, no holds barred and may the best woman win?”

“Bring it on, love.” Asher’s tone was strained.

“You bet, sweetie.” Hers was just as edgy.

For a long moment gold-green eyes locked with aqua, the tension between them so thick Dawn had the impression that if she’d had a blade in her hand, she could have sliced through it. This was what she’d needed, she thought, feeling her senses sharpen and the blood quicken in her veins. Try as she might, she couldn’t completely eradicate her Lab 33 history and the training she’d received from Lee Craig, but in the months since she’d met the Cassandras and learned the truth about herself, the outlets that had in the past served as releases for her restless energy and instincts had been closed to her.

I guess you could say I’ve been itching for some real action, she told herself. Something tells me I’ve just found it.

“What was the third thing?” Asher’s question pulled her abruptly from her thoughts. She blinked at him.

“The third thing?”

“You said there were three things we had to get straight between us. I almost forgot to ask you what the third one was.”

Her blankness disappeared, and with it went some of the rigid tension that had been gripping her. War games were still games, Dawn told herself as she let a slow smile curve her lips. Playing with Des Asher was going to be fun.

“The third thing was you admitting you’d had a nannie, Ash.” She slanted a dubious look at him. “If I were you, I wouldn’t make that public knowledge. Not unless you’re totally secure in your masculinity, that is.”

“Oh, but I am.” Earlier in their conversation she’d injected a purring note into her voice and now he did the same; although with its undertone of roughness, Asher’s purr reminded Dawn of velvet over concrete. If I was a girly girl, I might even feel the tiniest hint of a shiver running down my spine at Mr. SAS’s bedroom voice, she decided. In fact, girly girl or not, I believe that’s exactly what I’m feeling right now.

“But you understand that kind of security, don’t you, love.” His glance swept briefly over her, from her sneaker-shod feet past the baggy sweatpants and top to the mud-brown of her hair. “Only someone with supreme self-confidence would have no problem with posing as a dweeb, as Jeff Keifer calls you. That god-awful shade of brown comes out of a bottle, right? My guess is you’re a natural blonde.”

“Wrong. Fiery red,” Dawn said promptly. She might have weakened to the point of having a shiver or two down her spine, she thought ruefully, but she hadn’t completely thrown all caution to the winds. She’d told him she was an assassin in such a way that she’d known he wouldn’t believe her; offering an important identifying detail like her true hair color went against all her professional instincts. But Asher was shaking his head.

“You’re too cool and controlled to be a spitfire of a redhead. You’re definitely blond. Not as light as platinum, but not a dark blond, either.” He studied her. “I’ll go with the color of wild honey. Is this a money wager or not?”

“Not.” Her reply came out more quickly than she’d intended. Dammit, the man had rattled her, Dawn thought in chagrin—her, Dawn O’Shaughnessy, who up until tonight hadn’t known the meaning of the word. “It’s not any kind of wager, for the simple reason that you’ll never get the chance to know if you were right or not. Sorry, big guy, but that’s the way it has to be.”

“You sure about that, Swanson?” The velvet on concrete was back in his voice again, but she was ready for it.

“Abso-freakin’-lutely, Ash,” she drawled. She glanced at her watch. “And now if you don’t mind, I have to turn back into a pumpkin. Dawn Swanson has to be at Sir William’s side again in two and a half hours, all bright eyed and bushy tailed and ready to crack the whip over his tea-swilling staff, so although it’s been swell, I’d better haul—”

“Understand one thing—he’s not part of your game, love.” The easy endearment did nothing to warm the sudden ice in his tone, and all Dawn’s senses immediately heightened. “My uncle may be a bloody-minded pain in the arse and being assigned to watch over him might be my idea of hell, but I have a certain affection for the old boy. He’s the genius everyone says he is, but he’s also childishly naive in many ways.”

“A lot of geniuses are,” she agreed curtly. “What’s your point?”

“My point is that within the space of a couple of days, you’ve duped him into thinking he can trust you.” Asher’s jaw tightened. “I’m going to make sure that whatever it is you’re planning, you won’t pull it off, Swanson.”

He moved quickly for a big man, Dawn noted dispassionately, but not quickly enough to take her unawares. As his hand shot out, she knew he intended to grasp her arm and she had time to react, but instead she let his fingers close over her wrist.

Maybe sometime in the future she would have to demonstrate her superhuman reflexes to DesAsher. To do so now would merely give him advance warning of what he could expect in a fight with her. But even if letting him trap her wrist was good strategy, there was no rule that said she had to be happy about it, she thought angrily.

“You’ve got ten seconds to say your piece and get your hand off me.” She kept her voice even and her gaze steady as she met his eyes. “Ten. Nine. Eigh—”

“Ten seconds is plenty,” Asher cut in. “Don’t get me wrong—I’m not averse to adding some interest to our personal war by bending the rules a little. We’re both professionals—we know how to handle ourselves. But Sir William’s a civilian. If any harm comes to him because of you, I’ll hunt you down, Swanson.” He released her wrist as swiftly as he’d grasped it. “And although I’ve got a fatal weakness for green-eyed blondes, don’t count on that stopping me from doing what I have to when I find you. Understood?”

He stepped back, as if he suddenly needed to put some space between them. “It probably would be smarter to take you in right now, and the hell with our strategic little game.”

“What game?” His right hand was by his side, Dawn saw. The movement could have been unconscious on his part, or it could have been calculated to put him within closer reach of his sidearm, the heavy Sig Sauer he’d drawn on her once before. It didn’t matter one way or another. This encounter was nearly at an end. “We never had this conversation, Ash. I was never here. Dawn Swanson’s been safely tucked up in bed for the past five hours, and if you try to say different, I’ll simply deny it.” She gave him a thin smile. “You’re already on shaky ground where I’m concerned. Keifer wasn’t too happy with the way you reacted at the gate when I arrived, and your dire warnings about me to Sir William got you nowhere. Maybe if your inquiries to Interpol and Washington had resulted in anything more than a big fat zero, your suspicions might be taken more seriously, but as it is…” She let her sentence trail off, but just as she was congratulating herself on having made her point, the crease she’d seen earlier reappeared in one tanned cheek.

“Who said my inquiries resulted in a big zero, love?” he asked softly. “I told you that up until this evening I hadn’t found anything on you. As of about two hours ago, that situation changed.”

“Changed?” Without glancing sideways, she let her peripheral vision widen to include the shadowy expanses of grounds to either side, but her reaction was mere reflex. Escape wasn’t an option. What she’d told Asher was true: she needed to be back in the persona of Dawn Swanson. As dreary as her alter ego was, being her for the next little while was the only way of remaining close enough to Sir William to find the notes she and Lab 33 needed.

“Remember having to submit to being fingerprinted before you were given your lab pass the night you arrived?” Asher’s grin was tight. “Dawn Swanson made her indignation bloody clear, as I recall.”

“I remember,” Dawn said shortly. “Indignant or not, I wasn’t worried about being printed. I’m not on file anywhere.”

“Dawn Swanson isn’t. But two years ago the Swiss police obtained a partial thumbprint of a certain Donna Schmidt. Seems Fräulein Schmidt was the personal secretary of a murdered Zurich banker who was later learned to have been into cartel money laundering in a big way. That’s probably why the Swiss weren’t as zealous in finding his murderer as they might have been…and why they didn’t pursue their inquiries into Fräulein Schmidt when they found she’d dropped out of sight immediately after her boss bought a bullet.” His focus on her suddenly sharpened. “But you know what I found most interesting about Donna Schmidt? The minute portion of her thumbprint that Interpol has on file is a dead match for yours.”

“Which doesn’t mean squat or we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” she answered with a shrug. “A partial print? Minute portion? Depending on how small it is, it could match up with half a million other prints in the world. You’re fishing, sweetie, but you won’t catch anything with bait as puny as that.”

“And it’s just a coincidence that Donna Schmidt and Dawn Swanson both sound like aliases for the same woman?” At her nod, frustration crossed his features. Then he gave a reluctantly brief smile. “Like I said, cool and controlled. For what it’s worth, I sent a reply to Interpol saying you couldn’t be Schmidt, that I had solid confirmation you’d been in the U.S. during the relevant time period.”

Although she’d kept her composure during all his other revelations, this latest one caught Dawn totally off balance. “But you don’t—not if you think my whole résumé’s a clever fabrication. Why didn’t you simply drop a dime on me to the Swiss authorities?” She saw his confusion and realized with irritation that she’d used a Lee Craig-ism. “Rat me out,” she elaborated. “Turn me in to them.”

The aqua eyes holding hers showed momentary amusement before they hardened again. “Because I don’t give a tinker’s damn that a money launderer for the cartels was executed or that you might have been the inside contact for his killer. I just give a damn about what you’re doing on my turf…which is why you’re coming with me now to the guard’s office where Keifer can witness my official interrogation of you. You still haven’t told me what you were doing out here, Swanson, and—”

The quiet of the night was suddenly shattered by the raucous sound of a motorcycle’s engine. Asher glanced with a frown in the direction of the main gate as the cycle’s throaty rumble was abruptly cut off, to be replaced by raised and furious voices.

Lover Boy had just arrived and was catching hell for coming in so late, Dawn realized swiftly. But as far as she was concerned, his timing was perfect.

“That bloody Reese and his motorbike. This is the second night this week he’s broken curfew and whatever his excuse is this time, he’s going on report,” Asher muttered as he began to turn back to her. “This place is supposed to be run along military lines, dammit, not—”

Already moving at top speed through the shadows, Dawn allowed herself a small smile. From the darkness behind her came an angry explosion of swearing. Mr. SAS certainly had an impressive command of basic Anglo-Saxon curse words, she thought as she heard his reaction to her disappearance. Any moment now he would realize he was wasting time and turn his efforts to something more productive, like making straight for her room, but by the time he arrived she would be in bed and feigning sleep.

As she’d told him, he wouldn’t be able to prove she hadn’t been there all along. She didn’t have to worry about any repercussions from tonight’s escapade.

All she had to worry about now was the fact that her partial fingerprint was apparently on file with Interpol. Which was odd, she told herself grimly…because four days ago her prints hadn’t been on file at all.

Chapter 7

Status: fourteen days and counting
Time: 1607 hours

“Marmite sandwich, Miss Swanson? They’re awfully good.”

Drop that last adjective and your assessment’s probably more accurate, Rog, Dawn thought with a mental shudder as Roger Poole eagerly thrust a dried-out triangle of two layers of bread encompassing a thin and gluey brown filling practically under her nose. Unwillingly she plucked it out of his hand, gingerly holding it between her thumb and middle finger.

“I’m a vegetarian,” she lied. “Sorry and all that, but—”

“How simply wizard, so am I!” Behind his taped-up glasses, Roger’s brown eyes goggled in kinship at her. “Then you’ll love the taste of this. It’s a yeast product. Very popular back home, you know.”

With a Dawn Swanson frown, Dawn handed the sandwich back to him. “Yeast is a living organism. I’m not the kind of woman who bends her principles just because they’re inconvenient.” Her own sandwich was on the cafeteria tray in front of her. As she picked it up and sank her teeth into the ham and cheese on rye she saw him look dubiously at her. “All soy,” she explained inelegantly, her mouth full. “Tastes just like the real thing.”

His dubiousness vanished, to be replaced once more with the puppy-dog adoration that Dawn Swanson apparently engendered in him. In fact, Dawn mused, most of the scientists and technicians sitting in the cafeteria right now were throwing similarly besotted glances her way. For some reason, the Swanson chick’s abrasive personality and determined dowdiness had the male contingent of Sir William’s lab vying for her attention.

They’re probably all picturing me in leather with a whip, she thought, washing her mouthful of sandwich down with a swallow of milk. Or maybe as a stern schoolmarm, with them as the bad little boys who haven’t done their homework. Oh, well, whatever floats their boats. She took another bite of her ham on rye and pointed the crust at Roger.

“The shipment of beakers that came in this morning—who authorized them?”

Hastily he choked down the minuscule piece of his own sandwich that he’d just bitten off, and went into one of his by-now-familiar coughing fits. “I imagine I did,” he said apologetically when he could talk. “Why, is there something wrong with them? I ordered from the same supplier we’ve always—”

“They’re fine.” She popped the crust into her mouth and looked longingly at the dessert lineup on the nearby serving counter before firmly forcing her attention back to him. “Just checking, is all. I like to keep tabs on everything, as you know.”

“Of course.” Roger set his sandwich aside. The cup in front of him held lukewarm water with a tea bag floating listlessly on top. With every appearance of enthusiasm, he jerked the string of the tea bag up and down while he spoke, not noticing that the water was barely changing color. “I must say, Miss Swanson, I’m terribly glad you’ve taken over the reins, so to speak. The supervisory position only fell to me because no one else wanted it, but I’d much rather be behind a microscope. I’m afraid I not only lack your head for detail, but I can’t seem to control the staff with as firm a hand as you do. Why, just yesterday Sir William demanded to know why he hadn’t been consulted about the extra personnel that had been hired. He hardly believed me when I told him we had the same number as always, but that you’d lowered the boom on the break times the technicians had been taking.”

“I went out the back door the first morning and saw every last man jack of the British staff sucking away on cigarettes,” Dawn said acidly. “I told them if they wanted to smoke themselves into early graves that was fine by me, but they could do it on their time, not Sir William’s. Plus I made sure they cleaned up the mountain of old butts they’d dropped. As I told Sir William from the start, I’m not here to win a popularity contest. I’m here to smooth out any problems that might hinder his work.”

She reached briskly over and took the tea bag from the bespectacled Englishman. “That’s as good as it’s ever going to get, Rog,” she said, not unkindly. “Now tell me, do you think Sir William’s pleased with me?”

“Pleased? Dear Lord, he’s ecstatic!” He blew unnecessarily on his cold tea. “When you discovered that the reason his mutation experiment had been compromised was because the cleaning staff had been wiping down the petri dishes with glass cleaner every night, he was beside himself. The experiment’s going well now, by the way.”

“Yeah, great,” she said distractedly. “But listen—how do I get close to him? I mean, there are things I need to discuss, but whenever I try to set a time for a meeting he simply tells me he can’t be disturbed and that I’m to do whatever I think best for the running of the lab. I suppose that’s a compliment, but there really are a couple of decisions I need his input on.”

“I had that very problem myself,” Roger commiserated. “But never fear—I finally found out that the one time of day you can be sure of pinning him down is just around teatime. He always retires to his rooms and has a proper British tea, with paste sandwiches and anchovy toast and on special occasions, baked beans and egg.” He glanced down at his unfinished meal and weak tea with a noticeable diminution of his earlier gusto and then looked up at her, his expression brightening. “I say—why don’t we drop in on him now? He’ll probably ask us to join him, but since it’s to help you I don’t mind fibbing and telling him I haven’t eaten yet.”

“Four o’clock is teatime? I thought this was a late lunch,” Dawn said, pushing away her chair and waving him back into his seat as he began to stand. “No, Rog, I wouldn’t dream of dragging you away from your marmot sandwich.” He coughed in quick consternation, but she rushed on, “I’ll find Sir William myself and talk with him. Thanks for the advice.”

She made her way to the lunchroom exit, not forgetting to glower meaningfully at a table of technicians who by her watch should have finished their meal break and been back in the lab a few seconds ago. Five pairs of thick lenses magnified five suddenly guilty gazes as they jumped to their feet, gathered up their trays and practically fell into one another as they deposited their litter in a nearby bin before hastily heading back to work.

Their reaction went unnoticed by Dawn. She’d been in place for over four days, she thought grimly, and except for her first night here when she and Sir William had had their nocturnal conversation, she’d barely laid eyes on him. And as for getting any closer to finding out where he keeps his notes, forget it, she told herself in disgust. If I don’t make some serious progress soon, I’m going to have to change my tactics. Time’s running out and I can’t count on my symptoms remaining in remission like they have for the past few days.

The possibility of her headaches returning was never far from her thoughts. Equally dangerous, though, was the likelihood that Asher might dig up another fragment of her Lab 33 past more damning than the partial print he’d already discovered, and make the decision to turn her in to the authorities.

She’d expected him to show up in person the night she’d escaped from him and made it back to her room, but instead he’d sent Keifer. The young lieutenant had obviously been uncomfortable with his mission; even more so when Dawn had answered his tentative knock at her door dressed in brown flannel pyjamas and with a drab robe firmly cinched around her waist. She’d squinted disgruntledly at him, as if he’d awoken her from a sound sleep, and at his halfhearted query as to whether she’d been out and about on the grounds during the past hour, she’d given him a full dose of Dawn Swanson indignation.

“Are you accusing me of conducting some kind of clandestine rendezvous with a man, Lieutenant?” she’d demanded, snatching her glasses from her robe pocket and angrily jamming them onto her face. “Because if you are, my opinion of you just sank as low as my opinion of Captain Asher. I might have expected this kind of harassing accusation from him, but not from—” She’d stopped and glared at him. “He sent you, didn’t he?” she’d asked furiously.

“The captain said he’d seen someone who might have been you roaming the restricted area a few minutes ago, yes,” Keifer had said awkwardly. “It was an honest mistake, I’m sure.”

“Are you?” Dawn had leveled a disbelieving look at him. “I’m not. I think your commander made a fool of himself the day I arrived, and since then he’s tried his best to make his ridiculous suspicions seem justified. From the first it struck me as odd that a senior SAS officer should be assigned to a lower-level posting like this, but now I’m beginning to realize there’s a reason he’s been shunted out of more active duty.”

This last had been merely the kind of cutting remark Dawn Swanson would have delivered, but to Dawn’s interest, it unexpectedly roused a defensive response from Keifer.

“I consider it an honor to serve in any capacity with Captain Asher,” he’d said stiffly. “I’m well aware of the details of his military career, and if the man has any fault at all, it’s that he’s gone above and beyond the call of duty at times.” He’d clamped his lips together, as if he’d said more than he’d meant to, and with a formal nod and an apology for disturbing her, had taken his leave.

Dawn’s curiosity had been piqued, but when she’d closed the door behind Keifer and sat down on her narrow bed, her own hidden history rather than Des Asher’s had been the main thing occupying her mind.

Accidents happened, she thought now as she turned down the hall that led past the lab to the staff’s living quarters. Not every eventuality could be foreseen. But Lee Craig, for all his faults, had been the best black-ops teacher a girl could possibly have, and he’d drummed into her the vital importance of leaving nothing of herself behind when she completed an assignment. For those missions that had necessitated her going undercover, naturally it had been harder to obliterate all trace of her often weeks-long presence at a given scene, but even then it had merely been a matter of caution and discretion. For instance, she reflected, take the glass she’d just drunk milk from in the cafeteria. Within minutes it would be entering a dishwasher and her fingerprints on it would be cleaned off. But when she’d taken consignment of the beakers that had arrived this morning, she’d been careful not to touch any of them. They would be here and possibly still unused long after she’d left, and plastering her prints all over them would simply give her one more thing to wipe down before she went back to Lab 33.

She would have sworn Donna Schmidt had been as scrupulously careful as Dawn Swanson, but apparently that wasn’t the case, she told herself in chagrin. In her persona as Fräulein Schmidt she’d possibly neglected to wipe a desk drawer or the space bar on her computer keyboard or maybe even one of the Spode china coffee cups she’d handed around during the many meetings between the Swiss banker and his business associates. It didn’t matter where the authorities had lifted the partial thumbprint. It just mattered that it was on file.

And it also mattered that Carter Johnson had assured her it hadn’t been.

It’s SOP—standard operating procedure—for those pencil pushers on Aldrich’s payroll to run us through the computers every once in a while, Dawnie. One of Lee Craig’s earliest lectures on tradecraft came back to her. Turning down the corridor that led to Sir William’s rooms, Dawn frowned but didn’t push the memory away. That’s how they justify making the big bucks, while us dumb schmucks who put our lives on the line are lucky if we get our expenses reimbursed. He’d winked, and a thirteen-year-old Dawn had winked back at him, feeling as if she and her beloved Uncle Lee were in an exclusive club of two. He’d ruffled her hair, but then his grin had disappeared and his tone had sobered. Standard procedure or not, when you’re about to leave on assignment, you insist the bastards make one last check on your cover identity, your prints, the whole enchilada. Shit happens, and even the best of us can get pulled over for a broken taillight or some pissant infraction like that. You don’t want to hand your license to some Smoky to call in, and then look in your rearview mirror to see the son of a-bitch holding his gun on you as he walks back to your vehicle.

Like everything Lee had told her, she’d taken that advice as gospel, Dawn thought. Before each mission it had become her own standard operating procedure to have Lab 33’s Identities Department give her one final assurance that her cover ID was clean, her weapons were untraceable and she herself didn’t exist as far as the outside world was concerned. She’d stood over Carter as he’d conducted his computer sweep with the sophisticated software that enabled him to tap into every data bank in the world, no matter how closely firewalled and guarded, and she hadn’t left his side until the program had run its course and delivered its all-clear message.

Or had she?

She came to a stop in the middle of the deserted hallway, her mind racing as she mentally replayed the scene: Carter seated in front of his computer but angled slightly away from it as he talked with her, only occasionally turning back to the monitor to type in a command. He hadn’t bothered to hide his boredom at what he obviously saw as an unnecessary precaution on her part, had even gone so far as to drag his skateboard out from under his desk and had been restlessly propelling it back and forth with one foot to emphasize his irritation. At some point he’d shot the board too far forward and it had gotten away from him, flying into the path of old Henderson from Lab 33’s counterfeiting department and nearly tripping him. She’d been the one to go over to Henderson and smooth his ruffled feathers before retrieving the skateboard, Dawn remembered. Her attention had only left the monitor for a minute or so…but a minute would have been plenty of time for Carter to hide any message he hadn’t wanted her to see, if that had been his ploy.

She was suddenly glad she hadn’t acted on her first impulse and used the clandestine bookstore phone number to contact Lab 33 the morning after Asher’s revelation. Yet another of Lee Craig’s truisms had been that information was only a valuable weapon as long as your opponent didn’t know you had it.

The door to Sir William’s suite of rooms was in sight. Slowly she began walking toward it again, her feet in their grubby Dawn Swanson sneakers making a squeaking sound against the tiled floor with every step she took. Had Carter deliberately tried to sabotage her mission? If so, why? He’d have to have one hell of an incentive to risk the consequences of Peters finding out, Dawn thought. I should know—it took one hell of an incentive, courtesy of the Cassandras, for me to go up against Aldrich. But if that little weasel’s playing two sides, somehow I don’t think his motive is to do his part in the fight against evil.

But was that really her motive? Hadn’t she agreed to help the Cassandras for her own reasons—reasons that primarily included the icy desire to extract some kind of payback from Aldrich Peters, some kind of revenge for the lie he’d made of her whole—

About to raise her hand to knock on Sir William’s door, she never completed the motion. Pain slashed through her head, immediately robbing her of her strength and her senses. It felt as if she was being bludgeoned—as if a giant pickax was being raised repeatedly and smashed down to sink into her very brain.

She fell to her knees, her head hanging limply between her braced and trembling arms. Nausea rose in her and she felt her stomach gather itself to violently eject the meal she’d so recently eaten.

“So the rumors are true…you aren’t invulnerable anymore. Interesting.” The harsh whisper—in her disabled state Dawn found it impossible to tell whether it came from a man or a woman—penetrated her consciousness just enough for her to attempt to look at the speaker. Her head felt as if it weighed a ton, her neck barely able to support it. Painfully she opened her eyes…and saw nothing but blackness.

“Blind, too?” Mockery tinged the voice. “The mighty Dawn O’Shaughnessy certainly has fallen, hasn’t she? I can hardly believe it.”

It was the voice’s mockery that lit a feeble spark in her. She was in danger, Dawn thought through the fog clouding her senses—mortal danger. The owner of the voice was amused to see her this way, which could only mean that he or she meant to take advantage of her temporary vulnerability. Dredging up the last of her resources, she wiped the back of her hand across her mouth and forced her lips to lift in a cold smile as pain stabbed unendurably through her.

“Don’t believe it. Because even in the state I’m in I’m still your worst nightmare.”

As she rasped out the last words she rose to her feet and blindly launched herself in the direction of the voice. Her grasping hands closed around a neck, and, operating on sheer desperation and will, she began to tighten her grip.

“You freak!” The voice was no longer a whisper; it was a strangled gasp. “Someone should have killed you a long time ago!”

The pain rose to its highest pitch. She had to hang on, Dawn told herself as she began to lose consciousness. Even if only for a few more seconds, she had to hang on long enough to vanquish this unknown, unseen opponent. Because if she didn’t—

She knew as soon as the searing agony went through her that her fears had been right. Whoever her opponent was, he or she was her mortal enemy…and this enemy knew her one vulnerability.

It was a race between her impaired regeneration abilities and her inability to draw oxygen past the blood that was pouring in a choking flood into her lungs, she realized dazedly. And whether she lived to fight again, or died in the next few minutes depended solely on the outcome of that race.

Her unknown enemy had just shot her in the throat.

Chapter 8

Status: fourteen days and counting
Time: 1642 hours

“Can you hear me, lady? If you can, say something, okay? Dammit, sir, she’s not responding. I think we should get her to the infirmary right now.”

She was flying, Dawn thought, a little ripple of delight passing through her. Now this was a superhuman gift worth having! Why in the world hadn’t Aldrich told her he’d given her the capacity for flight along with the rest of her enhanced abilities?

Maybe because you can’t fly, O’Shaughnessy. You’ve been lifted up into someone’s arms, you numbskull.

The caustic voice inside her head swept away her delight and brought with it a full awareness of the situation. Immediately she ran over the salient points in her mind.

One: she’d been shot. Two: she’d apparently survived and the wound in her throat had healed, judging from her unrestricted breathing. Three: her headache had vanished, which was probably why her regenerative powers had come back in time to save her; and four: she’d been found unconscious and lying on the floor by at least two people—whoever was now holding her in his arms and the person he’d just addressed as “sir.”

Those were the facts she knew. It was the ones she didn’t that could endanger her.

Had she healed before she’d been found, or had the process of regeneration been witnessed by anyone? And was the man who hadn’t yet spoken her would-be killer, interrupted in the act of watching her die and now having to pretend to have stumbled innocently upon her prone body?

“No need to have those quacks you military types call medics probing and prodding her if she doesn’t need it. It looks to me as if she simply keeled over outside my door and bloodied her nose in the process of falling. I might even have heard her hit the floor if I hadn’t been listening to the end of an Elgar symphony on the phonograph.” The irritated English accent was unmistakably Sir William’s, Dawn realized, which relieved her of one of her worries. His pronouncement had relieved the other. If his off-the-cuff diagnosis was fainting and a nosebleed, then he couldn’t have seen anything out of the ordinary…like someone trying to kill her.

Cold anger flared inside her. The killer had known her real name, had known of her abilities and the one way she could be killed. Who fit all those criteria? She thrust the question aside for the moment. Whoever her attempted killer had been, she would find him or her, and when she did, the owner of the mocking voice would learn he or she had picked the wrong damn woman to try to kill. Her would-be assassin didn’t know it yet, but he was as good as dead.

Her attacker’s death would have to wait, though. Right now she had a more immediate matter to deal with.

“But, sir—” The soldier who had her in his arms was trying to argue with Sir William. She felt like advising him not to waste his breath, but that fact promptly became self-evident.

“What’s it say on your name tag? Reese, is it?” Sir William gave an unimpressed grunt. “Right, then, Reese. Instead of standing there like a bloody statue, bring my lab supervisor into my rooms and set her on the sofa. She’s getting some color back into her face, so I think we can safely say she’s off the critical list.”

You might have known, O’Shaughnessy. She was almost startled into a smile. Of course you’re doing the fainting-damsel thing with Lover Boy. The poor guy seems fated to save your butt on a regular basis.

She’d been about to open her eyes anyway, but now she had a good reason, she thought in amusement.

“Where am I?” She intended to milk this situation for all it was worth. She let her lashes flutter upward, only realizing as she did that her glasses were sitting askew on the bridge of her nose. Hastily she pushed them straight and gave Private Reese her best helpless-female look as he lowered onto Sir William’s sofa.

Firm jaw. Indigo eyes. Those thick dark lashes and the sexy mouth she’d noticed on their two previous encounters. Dawn sighed.

“Damn, but you’re gorgeous, Reese,” she muttered.

The indigo eyes widened momentarily, then lit with faint humor. “The name’s Terry, and you’re obviously still delusional, angel.” He grinned at her.

“Is she lucid?” Sir William’s testy question broke the moment. Reese fixed a quick frown on his face and looked up at the older man.

“Barely, sir. But I think she’ll be all right in a minute or so. Should I call the infirmary anyway?”

“And have them put Miss Swanson on sick leave just when I’ve finally found someone who keeps my lab running smoothly so I can concentrate on my work? Not bloody likely, soldier.” Sir William glowered at Reese. “Although you’re a Yank, you report to my nephew, I suppose?”

“Lieutenant Keifer’s in command of the Rangers, sir, but Captain Asher’s in overall command of this facility, so yes, I guess you could say I ultimately answer to him,” Terry Reese answered with formal courtesy. “He’s really the reason I’m here right now. The captain wanted me to convey a message to you.” He hesitated. William London snorted.

“Spit it out, man. I doubt that any message Asher has for me is so top secret Miss Swanson can’t hear it. If he had his way, I daresay he’d rule me a security risk, and if I had mine I’d do away with half of those cumbersome regulations of his that always seem to be impeding me.”

Reese glanced down at her and then back at the scientist. “Then the captain’s latest pronouncement won’t come as a surprise, Sir William. As of immediately, he’s implementing a twenty-four/seven tracking of all personnel, including your people and yourself. That means that whenever you leave an area you’re supposed to log onto the nearest computer and input your destination, how long you anticipate being there, and what the reason is for changing location.” His smile flashed into a rueful grin. “All I can say is don’t shoot the messenger, sir. I’m just passing on what he told me to tell you.”

“Of all the damned cheek!” Sir William exploded. “You mean if I decide to go to the loo I’ve got to tell the whole world how long I think I’ll be? Not on your nelly, lad. Take a message back to my tight-assed SAS nephew. Tell him I have no intention of complying with his dictatorial pronouncements, and I’m specifically instructing my lab staff to ignore them, too. And if he doesn’t like it, he can damn well lump it!”

“Damn well lump it,” repeated Reese solemnly. “Yes, sir, I’ll tell him. But you don’t want me to let him know what happened to Miss Swanson, do I understand you correctly?”

“Captain Asher has a problem with me, so no, please don’t bother letting him know I fainted.” Dawn sat up on the sofa and swung her legs off. She placed her sneakered feet tightly side by side and clamped her knees together. Time to bring the Swanson chick back, she thought regretfully. Her absence up until now could be attributed to her temporarily dazed condition, but not even Terry Reese’s indigo eyes were excuse enough to continue acting out of character. “Luckily, unlike you I don’t have to have to answer to him, but to his uncle.” She gave the wild-haired old Englishman a stiffly apologetic nod. “I’m sorry for disturbing you like this, Sir William. By the time I remembered to have lunch I realized this would be a good opportunity to speak with you on some matters and I decided to eat later. I should have known better. Sometimes my blood sugar drops when I miss a meal.”

God, now the gorgeous Terry not only saw her as dowdy, but in need of regular hearty sustenance to avoid crashing onto her face, she thought with an inner amusement. She suddenly remembered her massive plate of barbecue ribs at the juke joint, the three Danishes she’d scarfed down for breakfast this morning, the more-than-adequate ham on rye she’d had for lunch, and her grin vanished. Hey, the days of Scarlett O’Hara starving herself to attract a beau are over, she thought in irritation. Besides, this is one undercover assignment where I can’t afford to indulge in any extracurricular activities, no matter how tempting.

“Then when I ask you out I’d better feed you.” Reese kept his tone low, but there was no chance of Sir William overhearing him anyway. The older man had moved impatiently to the door, obviously eager to have his reply to his nephew conveyed as soon as possible. Reese lifted one eyebrow inquiringly. “It also might help if I knew your name.”

She stared in disbelief at him. “Dawn,” she said flatly. “But since you’re a babe who probably has to fight off supermodels everywhere you go, I don’t think I’ll hold my breath for that date, Private Reese.”

“Seven o’clock tonight. East exit of the building. I’ll be waiting, angel.” He sketched her a sloppy salute, turned it into a snappy one as he passed Sir William, and left before she could think of a suitable Dawn Swanson put-down.

“Well, if you must pass out from hunger, you couldn’t have picked a better time and place to do so.” William London closed the door and turned energetically to Dawn. “You’re in for a treat, my girl—I was just about to sit down to a real English tea. Ever tried Marmite sandwiches?”

“Asher was a fairly inoffensive child. He was born to my youngest sister later in life and Daphne was rather taken aback to find herself a mother at forty, but as she’d hired a nanny for Destin she only needed to take three weeks away from her groundbreaking work on the Victorian poets, and her husband Charles didn’t need to ask anyone to fill in for him at Cambridge.” Sir William scowled. “But I must say that as a grown man Asher’s certainly turned into a bloody officious—”

“Destin?” Dawn interrupted. “Des isn’t short for Desmond?”

By the time she’d politely choked down two sandwiches and three cups of tea, she’d realized that her hopes of maneuvering the conversation around to where Sir William kept his notes was a lost cause. Reese’s message had incensed him, and all he wanted to talk about was his nephew and how Asher’s security precautions were hampering his work. It wasn’t wasted time, she reflected. The irascible Englishman had let down his guard with her during his tirade, and she had the added bonus of learning more about the man who had vowed to stop her from accomplishing her mission. Information on an opponent, no matter how trivial, was always worth having.

William London looked at her in surprise. “Desmond? Don’t tell me you don’t recall Tredhope’s lines. ‘Lo, t’was sweet night were Destin’s ally—for in the end, his love’s fingers prove’d rosy dipped in his blood; false lady be no friend.’ Edgar Tredhope? Minor but influential poet who died of consumption in the 1890s?”

“Nope, ’fraid not,” Dawn answered politely, hoping her inner thoughts weren’t showing in her expression. Well, well, she told herself, who would have guessed Mr. SAS was named after a character in a sappy poem written by a third-rate Victorian poet? Now all I have to do is think of some way to casually bring that up in conversation the next time we talk.

She glanced around the room, taking note of the features for future reference. Sir William had succeeded in converting a sterile and featureless room in a desert-based government facility into a fairly close approximation of an Oxford study. The armchair she was sitting in was comfortably shabby and the large velvet-curtained window behind his desk must have been demanded especially by him, since all the other windows in the facility were small. Books spilled from every available surface, and on the corner of the ancient oak table upon which the remains of their recent repast were spread, incongruously sat the small skull of some long-gone and hapless rodent.

London was shaking his head. “Good Lord, what kind of education do you colonials receive over here?” He poured himself another cup of tea, topped up hers before she could decline, and returned to his rant. “Of course, when he was five he was packed off to boarding school and I didn’t see much of him while he was growing up, but still, you could have knocked me over with a feather when I learned he’d gone into the military. Could have knocked his parents over with a feather, too,” he added thoughtfully. “Daph and Charles pride themselves on their liberal views, but to have a son wearing a uniform, especially a Special Air Services uniform? Not the kind of career they’d hoped he’d have chosen,” he mused, “especially after the fiasco he was involved in last year.”

Her antenna pricked up. “Fiasco last year?” she said carefully. “Is that why he was transferred to this particular posting?”

For the first time since he’d started venting, London hesitated. Dawn turned her attention to her tea to dispel any impression that she was waiting eagerly for his answer. Finally the old man spoke, his tone no longer indignant, but now pained.

“My nephew and I don’t see eye to eye on many things, but I refuse to believe he was responsible for what they say he did. The boy I once knew might have become a hard man but he’s not a murderer, and that’s what it was—sheer murder. I’m not talking so much about that group of thugs who called themselves a palace guard, although from what little I’ve learned they’d laid down their weapons and surrendered, so killing them was against all rules of war. But there were civilians involved, too—women as well as men. Their deaths are indefensible.” Under bushy eyebrows his gaze became steely, and for a split second Dawn saw a trace of his nephew’s implacability. “And the one man who didn’t deserve to live walked out of that bloodbath unharmed, by God, and at this very moment is instructing his high-priced legal eagles in the lies he’s put forward as a defense for his years of atrocities.”

There was only once incident that Sir William could be describing. Dawn’s mind fixed in revulsion on the scenes she’d heard sketchily described in news bulletins and insufficiently reported upon in the few articles that had been written for the papers before censorship regulations dammed up even those meager trickles of information.

Sir William had called it a bloodbath. From what little she knew, his description was an understatement. Hassad Al-Jihr’s long dictatorship over the tiny Middle Eastern area known as Bah’lein had been marked by years of torture, death and the disappearance of thousands of citizens, but those well-documented evils had been overshadowed by the events that had occurred during the defeat of his regime. While being held pending his trial on crimes against humanity, Al-Jihr was countercharging that the western liberation forces sent in to remove him from power had unleashed a savageness much worse than anything he’d been accused of. The handful of photos and reports that had briefly been made public seemed to bear out his incredible assertions.

She’d seen her share of violence, Dawn thought with a shudder, but even she’d been sickened by the pictures of slaughtered palace servants and their families. The unknown SAS officer allegedly behind the butchery had been dubbed by the world’s press as “The Wolf of Bah’lein.” It was a shock to learn she knew that wolf under the name of Des Asher.

Although, according to Sir William, she realized as he continued, she didn’t.

“It’s criminally unfair. Since no official charges have been laid against him, Asher hasn’t been allowed to defend himself and the damn fool is so loyal to his bloody SAS that he didn’t even lodge a complaint when some idiot at Whitehall tried to have him suspended. I raised merry hell when I heard about it, I can tell you.” London gave the same sharklike grin Dawn had seen tightening his nephew’s features. “So I made them an offer they couldn’t refuse, as I believe the phrase goes. At the time I was ready to jump ship and work exclusively for the Americans. I hate hamburgers and no one over here seems to know how to make a decent cup of tea, but when it comes to coughing up the money needed to properly fund research like mine, you Americans have it all over my penny-pinching countrymen. I’m on the verge of something unimaginably big—the reversal of genetic aging itself. Even the discoveries I’ve made so far could change the way our bodies regenerate from accidents or illnesses. Your government immediately recognized the importance of my research—and how dangerous it could be if it fell into the wrong hands.”

“You said there was a deal,” Dawn prompted after a heartbeat’s stunned silence. She needed to keep him talking, she told herself tensely. He’d just confirmed Aldrich Peters’s belief that this wild-haired, bad-tempered old man whom some had dismissed as past his scholarly prime had made a breakthrough that would undoubtedly win him his second Nobel Prize…and in the process, save countless lives. Including mine, Faith’s and Lynn’s, she thought exultantly. Sir William’s main aim seems to be aging-reversal, which for an elderly man isn’t surprising, but right now the regeneration process he’s already discovered is a whole lot more relevant to me. Dammit, his notes might even be somewhere in this very room!

“Ah, yes, my deal,” London said with grim satisfaction. “I told the bastards at home that I’d insist this be a joint British-American venture…but only if Ash was put in charge of security here, instead of being left twisting in the wind while the Bah’lein affair was sorted out. They had no choice but to agree.”

“You think when the facts come to light during Al-Jihr’s trial Asher will be cleared?” She couldn’t keep the faint note of skepticism from her voice. Sir William glared at her.

“Damn straight, as you say over here. And even if he’s never officially cleared I won’t believe he gave the order to murder those people. He’s no more capable of acting dishonorably than you are of—of—” He sputtered to a stop. She supplied the rest of his sentence for him.

“Of being a cold-blooded assassin?” she suggested quietly.

He looked suddenly tired. “You think I’m a fool who refuses to face facts, don’t you?”

She stifled the impulse to lean forward and clasp his hand. Dawn Swanson wouldn’t make such a gesture, she reminded herself. Normally she wouldn’t, either, but for some reason Sir William’s staunch defense of his nephew had moved her.

That’s touching, O’Shaughnessy—real touching. Go ahead and get all misty-eyed if you have to, but don’t forget why you’re here. The old man’s got something you want…and no matter what you have to do to get it, you’re not going back to Lab 33 without it.

Her inner voice was right, Dawn thought mutinously, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t offer some crumb of comfort to the troubled man sitting across from her.

“Of course I don’t think you’re a fool. My uncle always took my side in a fight, too,” she said swiftly. “He used to tell me that even if it cost him everything he cared about in the world, he wouldn’t ever stop fighting for me.”

She halted, her lips still parted from the rush of words that had poured from some part of her she’d thought she’d cut out months ago. And she had, she protested with inner vehemence. The day she’d learned Lee Craig’s real role in her upbringing, she’d unhesitatingly excised her lifelong adoration of the man who’d pretended to care for her.

He’d vowed to protect her the best way he knew how, she thought, angrily quenching the pain that welled up in her. Had he thought he was keeping his vow by killing the mother she’d never known?

“That’s how I feel about Asher.” London raked a bony hand through his white hair, disarranging it still further. “Not that he’d thank me if he ever found out about my little deal.” He laughed suddenly, and Dawn realized that the young Oxford genius in the famous photograph from so long ago still lurked below the surface of the respected and honored scientist he’d become. She pushed her own thoughts aside as he continued, an ironic gleam in his eyes. “He hates this assignment. Thinks of it as some kind of baby-sitting detail that he has to make the best of, which is probably why he’s driving me up the wall with all his intolerable security measures. It would be like rubbing salt into a wound to tell him I arranged the whole bloody thing. Here, take a look at this.”

He jumped from his chair with an alacrity that belied his years and hastened over to one of the oak bookcases that lined the wall. Dawn surfaced from her somber mood of a moment ago. Whether he knew it or not, William London had already discovered the secret of not growing old. He had the mercurial enthusiasms of a child, and under that testy exterior was a boyish sense of humor. She liked him, she thought slowly. If she’d met him under different circumstances, this odd companionship that seemed to have sprung up between them might have developed into friendship.

“Where in damnation is Jancwiez’s Drosophila melanogaster Magnus: A Revolutionary New Look at the Sex Life of the Fruit Fly?” muttered Sir William, running a finger impatiently along a row of volumes on one of the bookcase’s shelves. “I chose that particular piece of drivel specifically because I knew I’d never take it down to look through it, and yet now it’s not—ah, yes, here it is.”

Roger’s advice had paid off, Dawn thought as she watched London reach for the book. Even if she hadn’t had the chance to bring up the subject of his notes, the rapport she’d established with Sir William made it possible to suggest they make these teatime meetings a regular occurrence. As his trust of her solidified over the next few days, he might actually let down his guard long enough to voluntarily reveal where he kept the research he wasn’t yet ready to release to the world.

She hoped it worked out that way, she told herself uncomfortably. Because if it didn’t, her only option would be to break into his rooms during his absence and search for the information Aldrich Peters had ordered her to—

Her worried thoughts came to a halt as she stared at Sir William. He’d placed the book she’d assumed he’d wanted to show her on a table beside him, but he was still standing with his back to her, his reaching hand moving counterclockwise inside the bookcase where he’d found the volume. Her keen hearing caught the faint but unmistakable click of tumblers falling into place, and then the old man gave a grunt of satisfaction.

“Here we are.” He withdrew a slim metal box from the depths of the bookcase and turned to her. “I suppose Asher would have a fit if he knew about this photograph, too, but when he’s been particularly officious it reminds me that he wasn’t always that way.”

As he spoke he opened the folio-size box and extracted from it a small snapshot. She took it from him, but although she kept her focus on the picture of a very young Destin Asher seated on a pony and bending forward to pat the animal’s glossy neck, she was remembering another photograph, kept along with all else he valued, by a man who was now dead.

Sir William London and Lee Craig, the hit man known as Cipher, were two very different types. But it seemed likely that they had at least one trait in common, Dawn told herself. Just as Lee had secreted bearer bonds and cash and untraceable passports along with the picture of herself in his hidden safe, she was willing to bet that the photo of Ash wasn’t the only treasured thing his uncle kept in the metal box now sitting on the table in front of him.

She’d found out where Sir William kept his notes on the regeneration process. Now all she had to do was steal them.

Chapter 9

Status: nine days and counting
Time: 0101 hours

“Hey, O’Shaughnessy, what’re you wearing?” From the plastic bud nestled securely in Dawn’s ear came Carter Johnson’s voice. Dawn pressed her lips together in exasperation.

“Chanel No. 5. Eat your heart out, skater boy. Now put Kruger on again.”

“Sorry about that, Dawn.” The usually stolid-sounding tones of Hendrix Kruger were edged with irritation. “Five by five my end. How are you receiving me?”

“Same here. Five on the volume scale, five for clarity,” Dawn answered, keeping her voice low. “Tell that jackass standing beside you that if he pulls any more stunts, I’m aborting this operation right here and now.”

“One of my men is escorting the moegoe out as we speak.” Kruger had never lost his South African accent or the habit of lapsing into Afrikaans slang when annoyed, although circumstances had forced him to leave Johannesburg years before. Dawn knew from Lee Craig that those circumstances included being the alarm-by-pass member of a team that had pulled off a legendary heist of diamonds worth millions—a heist that should have eliminated the need for Kruger to practice his particular criminal specialty ever again, except for the fact that one member of his gang had hired a hit man to take out the others immediately following the caper.

Hendrix had escaped with his life, but not his share of the diamonds. Lee Craig had warned Dawn about him.

That big Aryan bastard’s got it in for anyone in our profession, Dawnie. He might say he doesn’t hold a grudge over the way things turned out, but take a look at his eyes sometime. They’re as cold as the grave—and I think that’s exactly where he’d like to put you and me if he ever has the chance. Keep it in mind when you work with him.

Like I don’t have enough to worry about right now, Dawn thought as she pulled on a pair of black leather gloves. She flipped up the turtleneck of the zip-fronted black top she was wearing so that it covered more of her neck, bent to adjust her pants over her ankles, and slipped on the thin, rubber-soled shoes that were another recent and clandestine addition to her Dawn Swanson wardrobe. Finally she cast a quick glance over the tools attached to her hip belt and then tugged a face-and-hair-concealing balaclava over her head.

“Locked and loaded, Hendrix. I’ll be in the air shaft for the next ten minutes, so when I get to the electrical room I’ll check in with you again.”

“Understood.” There was a faint hiss of static in her ear, and then all sound from the tiny bud ceased as her contact with Hendrix Kruger and Lab 33 temporarily broke off.

She’d been a busy girl in the four and a half days since her conversation with Sir William London in his study, Dawn reflected as she hoisted herself up into the now-familiar shaft. Her first order of business had been to dial the number of the antiquarian bookstore that connected her to Aldrich Peters and inform him she suspected she’d located London’s findings on the regeneration process. Peters’s reaction had been predictable.

“Get solid confirmation that he keeps his notes in the box. Then kill him and come back here with them.”

Her reply had been casual. “No problem, Doctor. It’s not the way I thought you’d want to play it, but you’re the boss. I’ll probably see you late tomorrow—”

“Explain.” Peters’s one-word command had been icy. She’d injected a faint note of surprise into her voice.

“The buyback, of course. I assumed that once our people had a chance to study William’s papers, you’d find a way to inform the government you’d sell them back to them. But you’ve got other plans, right? I mean, the feds might play ball with a thief, but not when a world-renowned Nobel Prize winner’s been killed while he was under their protection.”

There had been a moment of silence on the line. When Peters had spoken again his voice had been thoughtful. “You have a point. Since you’re the agent-in-place, what alternative do you suggest?”

“Well…” She’d feigned dubiousness. “I suppose I could screw something up in the lab one evening and then bring it to the old man’s attention. Knowing him, he’ll stay there all night trying to figure out what went wrong. But, hell, your way’s better, Doctor. The SAS prick who runs the security here does everything but land-mine the corridors after curfew each night. For one thing, there’s a video monitor in every hallway to record all comings and goings. The only reason the cameras aren’t live twenty-four/seven is because the old guy dug his heels in, said it was a gross violation of his staff’s privacy. Asher had to be content with them going on at midnight, but even if I didn’t have to worry about being seen on the monitors I’d still set off an alarm as soon as I tried to get into London’s rooms. The lock works on a facial-features scan, plus a number code as soon as you’re inside. I tell you, Des Asher’s precautions make Fort Knox seem like the petty-cash box at a church bazaar. I’ll pull off the job tomorrow afternoon when I have my next meeting with Sir—”

“The simplest solution would be to knock out the electrics and emergency power backup to the whole facility for the relevant time period,” Peters said crisply. “I’ll have Hendrix Kruger talk you through the procedure. You’ll need equipment and communications, so I’m afraid it’ll be necessary for you to make a brief trip to Lab 33 to collect everything. Shall we say the night after tomorrow? That will give Kruger time to gather information on the facility’s system so that he can brief you beforehand and we’ll schedule the actual operation for the night following your visit here.”

Which might explain why I’m so damned sleepy that even this freakin’ air shaft looks comfy to me right now, Dawn thought disgruntledly as she stifled a jaw-stretching yawn. Sneaking out last night and jogging cross-country to where Peters had one of his people stash that ultralight plane for me, flying the little sucker to Lab 33 and staying there long enough to be briefed by Kruger before flying back again and slipping into my room just before daybreak didn’t leave me with a whole lot of nap time.

Just ahead of her the duct branched into two, and she was fleetingly tempted to take the branch that led to the roof and eventually to the delicious Private Reese’s bed. She smiled ruefully to herself as she took the other branch. All other considerations aside, she would be drummed out of the female population of the world if she crawled under the covers with a babe like Lover Boy, only to waste the opportunity by promptly falling asleep.

Terry had surprised her. He’d been waiting for her at the east exit of the staff building sharply at seven o’clock on the day he’d spoken to her in Sir William’s study. She hadn’t shown herself, but instead had remained hidden behind one of the handy boulders dotting the grounds that she’d utilized previously. He’d been holding a second motorcycle helmet by its strap in his hand, and just for a moment she’d toyed with the reckless notion of giving the Swanson chick a night she’d never forget, but common sense had reasserted itself. After half an hour of waiting, Reese had looked at his watch with a wry smile, tossed the helmet to a red-haired female private who was going off duty, and with his lucky companion seated behind him on his Harley had peeled out of the gates a few minutes later. Dawn had wandered back into the building and had consoled herself with a couple of Marmite sandwiches in the cafeteria before heading back to the lab.

Since he hadn’t tried to contact her since, it looked like she’d blown it with Reese, she thought as she noiselessly slid aside the vent cover that gave access to the electrical room. Within an hour or so she would be leaving this place behind, so it was unlikely their paths would ever cross again, but she would never forget him.

“And not just because of those dreamy indigo eyes of his, either,” she murmured to herself as she set the vent cover aside, being careful not to strike metal against metal as she did so. “The man probably saved my life, showing up when he did. Although I guess it’s really Asher I should thank,” she added grudgingly, “since it was his message Terry was delivering to Sir William.”

Unconsciously her hand went to the back of her neck. Was it her imagination, or was there still a tiny raised area from the massive exit path of the bullet that had torn through her throat? Although her regenerative powers had come back just in time, maybe they were no longer capable of completely removing all traces of a wound. She felt a sudden chill at the thought but, with an effort, pushed her fears away. From what Aldrich Peters had said, Lab 33’s genetic team was only missing one critical part of the solution to her gene breakdown, so it wouldn’t take long for them to make the serum once they had William London’s notes in their possession. Instead of worrying about your symptoms, try figuring out who the shooter outside Sir William’s door might have been, she told herself sharply. He knew all about you, so he has to be someone you’ve gone up against in the past, someone who hates you enough to want you dead. The only other possible explanation is that he’s what you once were—an assassin who’s working for someone else. But whose hit list could you—

About to lower herself through the vent, she suddenly froze, words she’d read more than nine months ago searing their way through her mind.

Subject actively working against the Cassandras; must be considered extremely dangerous…

“No.” The instant denial came from her lips in an almost inaudible whisper. “The Cassandras couldn’t be trying to kill me. Not after they showed me the truth and persuaded me to work on their side. Kayla Ryan treated me as a friend, dammit—I can’t believe she was lying to me. I won’t believe—”

I promise I’ll always stay strong enough to keep them from owning you—even if staying strong costs me everything I care for in this world…. When the man she’d thought of as her uncle had made that vow to her, she’d believed him, Dawn thought slowly. She’d unquestioningly believed everything Lee Craig had told her, and some damned important things he’d told her had turned out to be lies. If she’d learned one bitter lesson from the experience, it had been that no one could be trusted.

And yet she’d given her trust to a group of women she hardly knew—a group of women who had sent one of their own to eliminate Lee Craig and who might well still see her as an enemy whom CIA agent Samantha St. John should rid them of. Again denial flashed instinctively through her. She forced herself to focus on the facts.

There was a hit out on her—a hit that had come chillingly close to success three days ago. The Cassandras had reason to want revenge for the actions she’d taken against them at the time when her loyalty had been to Lab 33. And except for Aldrich Peters and a handful of his people, the women who had professed themselves her friends were the only ones who knew she was here—Dawn had told Kayla where to look for her if there was an emergency.

And finally, the Cassandras included Sam St. John, a trained operative who was one of the few professionals whose lethal talents might prove to be a match for her own. They’d been a match for Lee Craig’s.

But now wasn’t the time to analyze the possibility that she’d been betrayed by those she’d trusted, Dawn admitted coldly to herself. She was in the middle of an operation that would require all her skill, nerve and attention, and if any of those necessary components were lacking during the next hour, there was a good chance Des Asher would have her behind bars before the night was over.

It’s almost a pleasure going up against Mr. SAS, she thought grimly as she gave a cautionary glance into the small anteroom below her before dropping silently to the floor. At least he’s never made any secret of the fact that we’re on opposite—

“Amber? With a sexy name like that, I bet you’re a real knockout, right? So, uh, what are you wearing, Amber?”

What she was hearing from the room just beyond her was so much like an echo of Carter’s earlier infantile query that for a split second Dawn was confused. Then she reacted.

“Kruger! Are you reading me, Kruger?” she asked hoarsely as she dodged down behind some metal shelving. “I’ve got a situation here, do you copy?”

“I copy, Dawn.” Hendrix Kruger’s accented voice sounded in her ear. “What kind of situation?”

“I’m in the outer entrance to the electrical room,” she answered tersely. “You know, the electrical room that isn’t supposed to have anyone in it at this hour? Well, guess what—it’s got an occupant, and from what I can hear, said occupant’s a lonely soldier on a phone sex line. I’m going to have to try again tomorrow night, dammit.”

Too late she realized how out-of-character her agitated pronouncement would sound to the South African. Hastily she tried to think of some acceptable reason for her decision to delay, but before she could, Kruger’s voice was in her ear again.

“Why not simply kill him now?” There was an edge of puzzlement to his tone, but it was shadowed with something else she couldn’t immediately define. “That’s what you assassins do, don’t you? You kill people. Then you wash the blood from your hands, fall into bed and sleep as soundly as if you had merely swatted a fly. That’s what your onkle Lee taught you. That’s what he did until the day his own blood ended up being spilled, am I right?”

She knew what was in Kruger’s tone, Dawn thought, a sliver of anger piercing her worry. It was hatred. Lee Craig had been right—Hendrix Kruger, Lab 33 criminal that he was himself, had been glad to see the Cipher killed and he would be equally glad to witness her death…as long as he could protest to Aldrich Peters that he had nothing to do with it. She controlled her sudden revulsion and answered him evenly.

“You got that right, buddy. Say, I never did hear what happened to that diamond-heist pal of yours who tried to have you bumped off. He got away with the whole score, didn’t he? Is he living the life of Riley in some tropical paradise, with servants and yachts and beautiful women, while you’re still working like a dog to make a dishonest buck, or what?” She heard the South African’s indrawn breath, and put a shrug in her voice. “But hey, that’s your business and you probably don’t like talking about it…just like I’m not real crazy when you talk about my business. You catch my drift, Kruger?”

“You talk like your uncle.” His voice shook slightly, and then steadied. “Yah, I understand. We stick to the job at hand from now on, agreed?”

“Agreed,” she answered flatly. “And like I said, we’ve got a problem with the job at hand. Aldrich Peters doesn’t want anything screwing up his chances of making a deal with the government after Lab 33’s finished with the material I’m here to steal, and killing anyone who crosses my path is the fastest way to screw up I can think of. I guess I’m just going to have to put Mr. Lonelyhearts temporarily out of action.”

“Don’t forget there is a time line on this op, Dawn,” Hendrix warned stiffly. “Every hour on the hour an outside probe automatically checks the systems. There is nothing I can do to circumvent that, so if the power is still down at two o’clock the secondary override response will be deployed. It’s now—” he broke off briefly, and Dawn realized he was checking a chronometer “—now 0114 hours.”

“And here I was thinking you didn’t care,” she drawled. “Don’t worry, I’ll be quick as a bunny.”

Once again the plastic disc in her ear went silent as Kruger abruptly switched his end of communications into receive-only mode. Rising from her crouching position behind the shelving, she moved to the door that led from the anteroom to the electrical control room. It was open a crack. Carefully she pushed it open a little more and peered through.

“A college student? Gee, it doesn’t seem right, you having to do this type of work just to put yourself through school. What are you taking?”

Dawn felt a twinge of compunction for what she was about to do. The young Ranger sitting at the electrical console with his back to her and his cell phone clutched to his ear had to be straight off the hay wagon if he was falling for the old “co-ed trying to get an education” ploy, she thought pityingly. On the other hand, she was probably doing him a favor, she reflected, opening the door enough to slip through. Not that she had firsthand knowledge, but it was her understanding that 1-900 calls racked up big bucks on a credit card pretty darn fast…and from what she’d heard of the conversation so far the poor guy certainly wasn’t getting his money’s worth.

“Nursing, huh?” Oblivious to her stealthy approach behind him, the Ranger sounded suddenly intrigued. “So are you wearing, like, a nurse’s uniform right now? You know, the white stockings, one of those cute little nurse’s caps—”

“I gotta hand it to you, buddy, you certainly have a healthy imagination,” Dawn said dryly as she lowered his unconscious body to the floor. “Tell you what—imagine that the karate chop I just gave you was a love tap, and maybe you’ll get a good dream out of this whole incident. Remember—hot nurses, white stockings held up with frilly garter belts, you’re the husky patient getting a sponge bath.” She retrieved his cell phone from where it had fallen beside him and started to tuck it in his pocket, but on impulse she brought it to her ear. “You still there, college girl?” she asked perfunctorily. “Don’t look now, but I think your tuition just got cut off.”

She terminated the call and dragged the Ranger to the far side of the room, propping his limp body against the wall before returning to the console he’d been seated in front of. She swiveled the chair he’d been using so that it faced the console. A bewildering array of knobs and dials and switches confronted her, and she took a deep breath.

“Tower, the pilot’s just had a heart attack and I don’t know how to fly this thing,” she said under her breath. “You’ll have to talk me down, do you hear? You’re gonna have to talk me—”

“I don’t copy you, O’Shaughnessy.” Kruger’s voice coming over the earpiece sounded confused. “Who had a heart attack and what do you mean, I must fly down? If you are calling for Lab 33 reinforcements, I should contact Dr. Peters before authorizing a team to—”

Besides being a vengeful jerk, the man had zero sense of humor, Dawn thought in disgust. She sat forward in the chair, surveying the console. “Don’t mind me, Hendrix, I just had a lapse into disaster-movie mode for a second. Now, what do I do to shut down the power to this place without a whole bunch of alarms suddenly going off?”

Sense of humor or not, when it came to his own specialty Kruger was the best, she told herself six minutes later. He’d walked her through every step of the complicated procedure as easily as if he’d been sitting beside her, his answers to her occasional worried questions patiently unruffled…up until now.

“Wait!” There was an edge of nervousness to his command.

She paused, the pair of wire cutters she was holding poised to snip through a final connection. “What’s the problem? You said cut the red one, right?”

“Repeat the sequence to me once more. Green, red, yellow—”

“Yellow, then two whites, a kind of mauve wire, and one that I guess I’d call tan.” She squinted at the tangle of wires. “Or maybe olive? Some kind of blah shade, anyway, but I’ll go with tan.”

“You described the wire after the two white ones as mauve.” For the first time since he’d started giving her instructions Kruger seemed less than confident. “Mauve is pale orange, yah?”

Dawn felt beads of sweat pop instantly out on her brow. “Negative, repeat, negative, Hendrix. Is this a language thing or a guy thing? Mauve is pinky-purple. Pale orange is freakin’ pale orange. Any other decorating questions?”

“Then the sequence should have been yellow, two whites, lilac and olive,” he said, his tone a clear indicator that he was mopping his own brow. “Lilac everybody understands. It’s like the flower. Cut the yellow wire.”

Gingerly she opened the jaws of the wire snips and released the casing of the red wire. Her jaw set, she moved the tool to the yellow wire, tightened her grip and paused.

“You’re absolutely sure this time?”

Kruger’s confidence had returned. “Of course I am sure, Dawn,” he said expansively. “Go ahead and cut.”

She held her breath and cut. At the exact moment the blades in her hand sliced through the wire, the brightly lit room plunged into blackness.

Chapter 10

Status: nine days and counting
Time: 0122 hours

“Did it work?” Hendrix Kruger’s query was tentative, and at it, Dawn snapped.

“Did it work? What the hell kind of question is that, dammit? Yeah, it worked—the lights are out, anyway.”

“…eight, nine, ten.” Seemingly oblivious to her irritation, he followed the last number with an expectant pause. “The backup system hasn’t come on?”

“Did you hear me say oh crap, what now?” she asked impatiently. “No, the backup system hasn’t come on, Kruger. That means the alarms are disabled as well, right?”

“For another thirty-seven minutes and eleven seconds,” he informed her. “Don’t forget, at two o’clock—”

“Yeah, at two o’clock all hell breaks loose.” She pulled on the night-vision goggles slung around her neck and adjusted the refracting lenses. The room became visible again, although everything around her looked greenish and ghostly, including the still-unconscious Ranger in the corner. “Since I won’t be needing your help for the rest of this operation, I’m closing down this comm-channel now. Been swell doing business with you, Hendrix.”

Not, Dawn thought with a grimace as she moved surefootedly past the Ranger and into the adjoining anteroom. She opened the door to the main corridor and glanced out before setting off with a frown toward the part of the building where Sir William’s rooms were.

Whether or not the Cassandras had betrayed her, they’d done her one massive favor: they’d given her a reason to break free of Lab 33 and the people she worked with there. Kruger was far from being the worst of the lot, but her interaction with him tonight had shown her just how alienated from her former profession she’d become.

“Which leaves me with the question of what I’m supposed to do with the rest of my life,” she muttered as she came within sight of her destination. “I don’t think I have what it takes to be a kindergarten teacher or a librarian, and with my résumé the federal agencies wouldn’t want to touch me with a ten-foot pole, much less offer me a job. But retiring at twenty-two sucks, dammit. I’ve got at least fifty more years to go before I’m ready to start lining up for early-bird bingo.”

And those fifty years depended on her movements in the next thirty minutes, she reminded herself as she came to a halt in front of Sir William’s door. Just inside was her only chance for survival—his notes on the regeneration process, secreted away in his bookcase safe. As luck would have it, when she’d shown up on some pretext yesterday afternoon London had been perusing them, and although he’d hastily gathered them up and returned them to the safe when she’d walked in, she’d seen enough to get the confirmation Aldrich had required. Dawn reached for one of the smaller items on her belt, a tool that would be enough to land her butt in jail if she were ever caught with it in her possession, and squatted down to work on the lock.

It was a tedious job, made more so by the unwieldy night-vision goggles. During her brief visit to Lab 33 the night before, she’d decided against using a penlight; her reasoning being that a beam of light, no matter how minuscule, would be too dangerously noticeable in a pitch-black building.

She cursed as the pick slipped for the second time in as many minutes. A penlight would help, but it would be visible if anyone happened by. So far she’d only had a near miss with two lab technicians who’d almost blundered into her in the corridor on her way to London’s office. Still, she couldn’t be too careful.

Presumably the military personnel had been roused to post extra guards while they tried to get the power up and running again, but at that time of night most of Sir William’s staff were asleep. In fact, the old guy was probably all alone in the lab right now, cursing the darkness and trying to figure out how his latest experiment got contaminated.

Behind the goggles her gaze darkened briefly in compunction. In the short time she’d known him, she’d grown to like William London and, despite his irascibility, she knew the feeling was mutual. Now she was about to betray him by stealing his research and handing it over to Lab 33.

“What option do I have?” Angrily she maneuvered the pick into the lock mechanism. “Walk up to him and say, ‘Oh, by the way, I happen to be a genetic mutant and I could sure use your regeneration method right about now, mind if I borrow these notes?’ Nice old guy or not, there’s a damn good chance his scientific curiosity would get the better of him and the next thing I’d know, I’d be waking up strapped to a table with a bunch of white-coated freaks shoving needles into me. So this is the only—”

Her muttered diatribe broke off as she felt the pick lift the tumblers inside the lock. Unconsciously holding her breath, she delicately turned the doorknob.

The door swung open.

Replacing the pick in her belt, she rose from her squatting position and strode into Sir William’s deserted study, making sure the door locked again behind her as she entered. It had seemed cozy and untidily comfortable the previous times she’d been here, she thought with a frown. But the greenish hue from the night-vision lenses robbed the room of its familiarity and turned its shabbiness into unsettling disorder.

“And if you were here to do a While You Were Out makeover that might actually be relevant,” she said under her breath as she circumvented the oak table with its resident rodent’s skull and made her way to the wall of bookcases. “But this is a B & E, in case you’ve forgotten. All you need to worry about is cracking that safe, finding the information that’s going to save the lives of you and your sisters, and getting the hell out of here within the next—” she glanced at her watch “—twenty-four minutes. So focus, dammit.”

Her time limit had dwindled to thirteen minutes when she finally set the folio-size box in which Sir William kept his treasures on the oak table. She took a moment to roll her shoulders free of the tense kinks that had settled in them during her unexpectedly prolonged efforts to break into the safe. Who would have guessed an eccentric old Englishman would even know such a thing as a Rose-Jackman Commander Mark IV existed, let alone have one installed, she thought in outrage. R-J’s are the crème de la crème of unbreakable safes, and most of the stuff London keeps in it could be stored in a discarded cigar box, for God’s sake. What do you wanna bet the ever-meddlesome Destin Asher insisted on the Mark IV?

But Asher hadn’t counted on a woman with super hearing listening for the Rose-Jackman’s normally inaudible clicks as she spun the safe’s dial, just as he hadn’t counted on her bringing down his whole security system so that the keypad and scan features of the entrance into his uncle’s study were useless. He hadn’t been the challenging opponent she’d anticipated he’d be, Dawn thought with passing regret as she set aside the photo of a young Ash on his pony. And she’d never had the opportunity to go one-on-one with him as she’d hoped.

“Not that I’ve got any doubts as to what the outcome of that little tussle would be,” she said out loud, leafing quickly through documents, newspaper clippings about Sir William’s investiture, older clippings about his Nobel Prize win. “But it would have been interesting to see how the SAS trains its men to fight. Being English, it wouldn’t surprise me if they stick to no hitting below the belt, no kicking, no—”

Experimental Results and Conclusions on Tissue and Life-Support Systems Regeneration in Humans. The title of the thick sheaf of bound and typewritten notes she was holding said it all. Dawn felt a curious tightness in her chest, and for one stricken moment she wondered if it signaled the onset of her symptoms. Then she gave a shaky laugh.

“You’re just excited, O’Shaughnessy, and for good reason. What you’ve got here is a revocation of three death sentences—yours, Faith’s and Lynn’s. No wonder your heart’s going pitty-pat.”

She glanced at her watch. Eleven minutes remaining. It was ample time to make her escape from the building, avoid the extra guards that would be posted around the temporarily out-of-order electrified perimeter fence, and be well on her way before the power came back on. She began to close the box preparatory to returning it to the wall safe, and then froze.

“…questioned him like you said, but the kid swears he doesn’t know anything more than he’s already told us. He’d been working in the electrical room yesterday, he found he’d lost the St. Jude medal he wears, and he went in there to see if it had fallen onto the floor by his workstation. When everything suddenly went dark he slipped and hit his head.”

The low voice was Keifer’s and it was coming from halfway down the hall. Impatiently Dawn removed the plastic communications device from her ear. Without the tiny blockage her enhanced senses could now pick up the sound of three pairs of booted feet heading her way.

“Oh, crap, what do I do now?” she muttered, echoing her earlier comment to Hendrix. The pace of the approaching boots was too sure and swift to be the sound of men picking their way through the dark, so Keifer and those with him obviously had a flashlight. They would see her as soon as she exited this room.

“Uh, Lieutenant?” If she didn’t get her butt in gear, there was a possibility she might get one final meeting with Lover Boy after all, Dawn thought as she recognized Reese’s voice. She pulled up her sweater, jammed Sir William’s notes into the waistband of her pants and hastily began shoving the rest of his papers into the box she’d taken them from as Reese went on. “Private Jones had a cell phone on him. I checked the last number dialed to see if he’d used it to call the guard shack when the power went out. Uh, it looks like he was on one of those phone-sex lines at the time whatever happened to him occurred, sir.”

“Bloody hell.”

Dawn’s heart sunk. The third man would have to be Mr. SAS, she thought, closing the box and hastening to the open safe at the back of the bookcase. That eliminated any hope that Keifer, Reese and Asher were only passing by Sir William’s study on their way to another part of the building. If Asher was heading this way, it wasn’t coincidence, it was because of his single-minded determination to carry out his mission of keeping William London’s work under his eagle eye. Any minute now he would come through the door and she would be caught like a rat in a trap.

Only if this rat tried to get out of the trap the same way she came in, she thought as she quietly closed the safe and gave the dial a random spin. Luckily, I don’t have to.

“He tells you he went into the electrical room to look for a religious medal when the truth is he went in there to get his rocks off. Lying about one thing means he’s probably lying about everything, Keifer.” Asher’s growl was disgusted. “Since Jones swore up and down he fell and knocked himself out after the lights went off, we’ve been assuming this power outage was a systems failure, but now we’d better proceed on the possibility he was coldcocked before the grid went down.”

“Sabotage?” Keifer sounded alarmed.

“That’s what I want you and Reese to look for evidence of,” Asher confirmed grimly. “How much longer till the outside failsafe kicks in, ten minutes?”

“Eight, sir.” The reply came from Reese.

“That’s too long.” Asher’s footsteps paused. Dawn crossed the study to the heavy velvet draperies and pulled them apart. A large, fairly narrow picture window stretched nearly from floor to ceiling. She grasped the window’s lever-style iron latch. “Keifer, take Reese and head on back to the electrical room right away. Here, you’ll need my flashlight. I’ll join you as soon as I tell Sir William what’s happening.”

Dawn paused in the act of easing up the latch. Her supposition had been wrong. Asher wasn’t coming in to check that the safe was secure, he was just here to let his uncle know what was going on, unaware of the fact that London wasn’t in his rooms. After a perfunctory check he would guess that the old man was in the lab, and leave.

Still, to be on the safe side I’d better follow through with my plan of leaving by the window, she told herself with a shrug. It’s only a two-story drop, and it’ll cut my escape time in half. She put slightly more pressure on the latch, not wanting to force it in case it gave way with a crash.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got a penlight.” There was faint impatience now in Asher’s tone. “If it was sabotage, I want to know as soon as possible, Keifer.”

Dawn didn’t listen to the Ranger lieutenant’s response. The damned latch was painted shut, she realized in exasperation. One quick jerk would release it, but the sound of screeching metal would be a pretty good tip-off to Asher that someone was in London’s study. She adjusted her grip and began to try again as Keifer’s and Reese’s footsteps receded down the hall and the jingle of keys came from outside the door.

The latch remained stubbornly in place. She heard the sound of a key turning in the door. The tiny beam of a penlight suddenly appeared at the threshold of Sir William’s study and SAS Captain Des Asher stepped into the room.

Immediately he headed for the adjoining bedroom, but as he drew level with the oak table he came to an abrupt halt, swinging the penlight’s beam across the carpet, up to the table, over to the bookcases. The bright pinpoint jumped suddenly to the velvet drapes at the window…but Dawn was no longer there.

Your freakin’ light’s nearly blinding me, buddy, Dawn thought testily from her vantage point near the ceiling. For your information, I’m wearing night-vision lenses and they’re magnifying that penlight until it’s like staring straight at an eclipse. How long do you intend to keep flashing it around, dammit?

As if he’d heard her complaint, Asher turned on his heel and continued on his way to the bedroom. She took the opportunity to quickly strengthen her foothold on the slim molding that ran along the top of the wall and brace her arms more rigidly on the smooth surface of the ceiling, but her adjustments didn’t make the position any more comfortable. It was with a feeling of relief that she saw the bobbing beam of the penlight precede Asher out of the bedroom.

This time she was ready for it, squinting through her lashes to cut the dazzle. Her half-closed gaze caught the expression of annoyance on his face as he passed diagonally below her, but it took a second for her to realize what had caused his frown.

Then she understood. The penlight’s beam faded from white to yellow to a dim amber, and died completely.

“Crap, what now?” Asher muttered in the dark.

He was a man after her own heart, Dawn thought with a rueful smile. He even reacted the same way she did. It was a damn shame she was going to have to take him down, but she’d run out of options. Her window of opportunity was dwindling to a handful of minutes, and she couldn’t afford to use them up waiting for him to find his way out of this room.

As she’d noted the first time she’d seen him, he had the longer reach and superior height. She had the advantage of surprise, and the best way to utilize that advantage would be to eliminate his edge over her from the start. Dropping down onto the desk takes care of the height thing and also puts me up close and personal with him right away, so his reach actually works against him, Dawn calculated. The last thing he’ll feel before he wakes up a couple of hours from now is the edge of my hand instantly numbing the main pressure point at the back of his neck. It’ll be quick and easy, O’Shaughnessy, so let’s rock and roll.

He was fumbling in one of the pockets of his fatigues, but his slightly bent position didn’t affect her game plan. She felt the familiar pump of adrenaline surge through her the way it always did before a burst of action, and then she was launching herself downward like a tensely coiled spring that had suddenly been released.

The thin rubber soles of her shoes made contact with the desktop. Asher’s head jerked up and for a fragment of a second she saw his eyes widen as he saw the goggles-wearing apparition that had materialized in front of him. Her hand started to slice through the air to make contact with the exact spot near the base of his skull that would instantaneously fell him like a tree crashing to the ground, and then all at once everything went terribly wrong.

“Arghh!” As the scream tore from her throat Dawn’s palms flew involuntarily to her face to shield her eyes from the supernova that had just burst into existence in front of them.

“What the—” Asher’s hoarse shout was almost as explosive as the searing greenish white light that streamed from his hand.

She couldn’t see! Acting on desperate instinct, she twisted her body into a semi-pivot, jackknifing her right leg close to her torso as she turned. As her spin reached its apex, her leg shot out heel first, aiming for the core of the agonizing light. She felt her foot connect like a sledgehammer with Asher’s clenched hand, and a burning image sketched its way in an arc across her tightly closed eyelids.

“—hell?” Asher finished in shock as he fought to keep his balance.

He’d broken open a phosphorescent light-stick, Dawn told herself. It hadn’t been a supernova, but dammit, it had appeared like one through the ultrasensitive lenses of the goggles she was wearing. Her kick had sent it flying from his grip halfway across the room where seemingly it had rolled to rest under a piece of furniture, because her closed eyelids were no longer seared with the image of a blazing core. But with the afterimage branded onto her retinas, it was still impossible for her to do more than lift her lashes just enough to see what Asher was doing.

Although the stick itself was somewhere out of sight, the room was filled with a sickly white light that hit her eyes like acid. Without thinking, she reached for the goggles to wrench them from her face.

“Right, then, you bastard.” Asher’s tone was savage. “Let’s get that bloody contraption off you and see just who the hell you are…and then we’ll proceed to the part about what you’re doing here, shall we?”

He hadn’t guessed her identity. The realization came to her with his words, forcing a lightning-swift decision upon her: to rid herself of the now-hampering goggles so her sight could return to normal at the cost of revealing her eyes to Asher; or keep them on and fight him without the benefit of total vision. He was going to know who’d stolen Sir William’s notes as soon as her absence from the facility was discovered anyway, she told herself, again reaching for the strap around the back of her head.

This business we’re in isn’t like a rigged horse race, Dawnie. Lee Craig’s voice flashed through her mind before she could push it away. There aren’t any sure bets. So the only way to even the odds in your favor is to have a contingency plan, because you never know when it might save your butt.

She was going to get out of here, no problem…but what if she didn’t? She needed to keep the Dawn Swanson persona intact, she thought in resignation. Which meant she was going to have to keep the freakin’ goggles—

“Kwa-sah!” The phrase exploded from her in a hissed whisper as Asher’s hand clamped around her left leg to pull her off the desk. Dawn’s mind instantly emptied to allow pure instinct to take over…instinct honed from childhood onward by years of dedicated training received from some of the most exacting masters of the art of battle. “Hai!” She grunted out the exclamation as she allowed her trapped leg to be jerked forward, at the same time using the SAS man’s grip as a platform from which to propel herself into the air. “Che-sah!”

As the last whispered syllables left her lips, the rubber sole of her right shoe smashed brutally into Asher’s chin, snapping his head back and breaking his hold on her. She didn’t wait for his reaction. Letting the upward momentum of her kick continue, she arched her body into a midair flip that took her backward past the desk. She landed lightly on the floor behind it and went unhesitatingly into a crouch, her outstretched fingers closing around the thick oak edge of the desktop. She rose again, this time using her momentum to tip the heavy piece of furniture forward and hurl it at an advancing Asher.

It should have crashed into him. Oh, you’re good, sweetie, she thought in reluctant admiration as she saw the big man throw himself sideways, the desk merely grazing his thigh as he hit the floor in a paratrooper-style roll. But right now you’re down. Sorry, but I’m going to take advantage of that.

She needed to get past him to the door. She knew it and he knew it, and as soon as she tried to rush him he would be ready for her, so she did the exact opposite of what she assumed he was expecting.

“Consider yourself under military arrest, mister,” Asher growled as she took a step back. “If you resist any further, I’ll be forced—”

She hit the wall beside him running, and kept running up it. Just as gravity started to claim her and she felt her rubber soles begin sliding down the wall again, she twisted her body so that she was no longer facing the ceiling, but for a second seemed to be defying all laws of physics and standing straight out from the wall.

But only for a second. Thrusting herself from the wall, she brought both feet up as her leap projected her within reach of him, intending to knock him back down as he struggled to his knees with a variation of her earlier kick.

“Hell, do you think I’m so bloody stupid that you get to use the same trick twice?”

Instead of trying to stand, he’d unexpectedly dropped to the floor like a man doing push-ups. Dawn heard his mutter but she was too busy attempting to correct her trajectory to take it in, now that the solid wall of Des Asher that she’d counted on to halt her wasn’t there. She failed. Her balance compromised, she landed awkwardly on the floor, tumbled once, and slid to a jolting stop against the leg of the round oak table just in time to see him spring to his feet and face her.

He’d outmaneuvered her. The realization disconcerted her for a moment, but disconcertion was a luxury she didn’t have time to indulge in, she saw immediately. Asher’s booted foot was already swinging in a brutal chopping arc toward her, with enough power behind it that if she allowed it to connect, it would send her halfway across the floor.

No hitting below the belt? No kicking? Boy, was I wrong about the training these SAS bastards get, she thought, illogically aggrieved. He fights like me, dammit!

She spun out of the way of his boot, feeling a rush of air as it passed over her. Now he was the one temporarily off balance, and she wasted no time in using his momentary vulnerability against him. Lightly jumping up, she again instantaneously assessed all the possible moves he might expect from her and chose the one he would consider least likely.

Her rush forward took her to within inches of him—which was a whole lot like running straight into the path of a Mack truck, Dawn thought as she experienced the fleeting impression of his muscular bulk looming over her before she back-slammed a braced elbow up and under his rib cage. She heard the harsh exhalation of his breath somewhere above her, but already she had grabbed the gleaming leather of his military-issue belt and was jerking him closer. Even as his hand began to clamp around her wrist she was twisting free and moving slightly to one side of him, using her grip on his belt to wrench him more off balance as she brought her knee crashing into the base of his spine.

No shame in crying uncle now, buddy, she told him silently as she heard the whistle of pain that escaped his tight lips. I know what you’re going through, believe me, because it’s happened to me once or twice in a fight. There’s a whole bunch of nerve endings right there, and every single one of those little suckers feels like it’s on fire, doesn’t it? So if you want to call it a day, I’ll understand. If you don’t, all your stubbornness is going to buy you is a couple seconds’ more punishment.

“Bloody hell, that does it!” Pain thickened his voice, and even with her inadequate vision Dawn could see the same pain carved deep into his features. His gaze blazed with fury, and like a bear tormented beyond endurance, he swung one big hand toward her, his knuckles bunched into a fist.

She had plenty of time to dodge back out of reach. She began to do so, felt something solid impede her and realized that with the goggles hampering her depth of field she’d miscalculated her location in relation to the oak table. Quickly she tried to change her step back into a slip sideways. It all took just a fraction of a second too long.

Asher’s uppercut hit her like a battering ram, catching her under the point of her chin. Her head snapped back on her neck with the force of his blow, and the sharp, coppery taste of blood immediately filled her mouth. She felt her feet leave the floor, felt herself start to fall backward, began windmilling her arms desperately to regain her balance.

“Nothing fancy, but it gets the job done,” Asher said, his voice hoarse with anger. “Although I wouldn’t want you to think that exotic crap you go in for is beyond me, you sorry son of a bitch, so before I finish this off by unsportingly pulling my gun on you, I’ll give you a demonstration.”

The words were still leaving his lips as he pivoted so that he was no longer facing her, but turned side-on toward her. At the same time he drew one booted foot close to his body, his palms now rigidly flat and held close to his chest. The leg he had drawn up shot out like a piston just as Dawn found stability. As it blurred toward her she stiff-armed it aside and lunged at him.

Now I’m mad, she told herself. My lip’s split wide-open, I nearly fell on my keister like a kid trying on her first pair of skates, and to add insult to injury, he has the nerve to let me know that he’s held off using his gun because it’s not sporting! The man’s un-freakin’-believable!

She drove her first punch directly into his solar plexus, her second and third finding the same target. As Asher doubled over, her gloved fists moved upward, one blow glancing jarringly off his right cheekbone. But by then he had her rhythm. Blood streaming from a cut over his eye, he waded in toward her and wrapped one heavily muscled arm around her shoulders, dragging her close to him as if they were engaged in some deadly and antagonistic kind of dance.

“Tea party’s over, mate,” he ground out. His mouth was only inches from her ear, and his breath felt warm against her skin. Dawn let herself go limp, felt his hold relax, and then brought her knee up in a deliberately unsporting move. Her aim was true but he twisted at the last moment, and her kneecap jarred achingly against his thighbone. Asher’s one-armed bear hug became crushing, his free hand going swiftly to the Sig Sauer strapped to his hip. “Like I said before, you’re under military arrest, not civilian, so don’t hold your breath waiting for me to read you your bloody rights. All I have to tell you is this gun’s pointed straight at you and my finger’s on the trigger, so put your hands on your head and slowly—”

He hadn’t needed to spell it out for her, Dawn thought angrily. She could feel the muzzle of his Sig jammed into her rib cage and if she flicked her glance downward she could even see it, his finger on the trigger as he’d promised. She could see his watch, too, the dial worn on the inside of his wrist, the little hand pointing at two, the big hand almost straight up, the sweep hand counting the few seconds remaining until—

Until her mission could be considered officially blown. The sweep hand’s countdown was at ten…nine…eight…Exploding into action, she made a grab for the gun, felt her gloved hand wrap around the crosshatched grip and began to wrest it away from Asher.

At the six-second mark it went off and a nine-millimeter parabellum slug tore through the outer wall of her heart.

Chapter 11

Status: nine days and counting
Time: 0159 hours

Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion, even to the passage of the bullet through her body, Dawn thought dazedly. She could feel it continue on its way, knew it had missed her spine by a hairbreadth, felt it punch through her back. Then it was out of her but still moving. Two wings of velvet briefly enveloped her and fell away—Sir William’s heavy draperies, she guessed, billowing out at the sides in reaction to the force of the projectile that had slammed through the center of them. At the same time she heard the icy sound of glass shattering as the window she hadn’t been able to open earlier was blown out. She looked down at herself. She could see perfectly now, she realized, which meant that the light-stick had finally sputtered and died, giving her this final split second of darkness.

This is the experiment Aldrich always wanted to conduct, the one experiment Uncle Lee threatened to kill him over if he ever tried to carry it out on me, she thought, seeing the dark stain spreading rapidly across her shredded sweater and the thick globules dropping to the floor, some of them spattering the edges of the sheaf of papers that had fallen from the waistband of her pants when she’d been shot. Peters wanted to know if I could survive a bullet to the heart. In a moment I’ll have the answer to his question.

“Dammit, man, it didn’t have to end this way!” Asher’s expression was appalled, his tone stricken. “What the hell were you thinking, going for my gun when I told you—”

She could feel it deep inside her. The process had already begun, her tissues beginning to knit themselves perfectly together again. The answer to Aldrich Peters’s question was yes. Lab 33’s lab rat could survive a shot to the heart. But could Lab 33’s lab rat escape the trap she was in…the trap that was about to spring shut right about—

Now! Dawn ordered herself sharply.

Even as she wrenched off the goggles and threw herself backward, time began speeding up again, fast-forwarding so rapidly that everything seemed to occur at once. The study was suddenly flooded with light. She had a freeze-frame’s glimpse of Asher’s drawn features, thought she saw a flicker of shock pass over them, and then she was falling through the cool night air, her arms outstretched and her body limp. She hit the ground with a jarring thud, but knew immediately that her lack of rigidity had saved her from any broken bones.

She’d taken the fast way down, she thought grimly. Mr. SAS was going to have to take the stairs. Her contingency plan could still be put into operation…if her mobility returned in time.

It was a pretty big if. She heard shouts, then the Klaxon-like bursts of an alarm. The military contingent of the facility had obviously gone to code red at the sound of a gunshot and any minute now they would be converging on this area. Sir William’s velvet drapes were hanging on the outside of the now-destroyed window, and while Asher was racing down the hall and taking the stairs three at a time to get to the body of the intruder he’d thought he’d killed, she had no doubt he would be barking out orders to whomever he passed.

She couldn’t wait any longer. Awkwardly she got to her feet, grimacing at the blade of pain that thrust through her but ignoring its warning. Yeah, I know I’m not healed yet, okay? Under the circumstances, Dawn thought light-headedly, it seemed eminently reasonable to have a dialogue with her own body; after all, she was going to be asking a lot of it in the next few minutes. But I don’t have a choice here. You want to end up with me being the poster girl for a bunch of curious scientists, monitors shoved up my wazoo and so many tubes coming out of me that I look like an octopus, go ahead and wimp out. If you don’t want that, you’re going to have to get me to my room, and pronto, dammit.

Her pep talk had the desired effect. Putting one foot clumsily in front of the other, she prodded herself into a stumbling run, clutching the edges of her destroyed sweater together to slow the telltale trail of blood she was leaving as she headed for the building she’d just left so precipitously. Veering drunkenly toward the nearest entrance, she suddenly realized what she was doing and hastily ducked back into the shadows.

Asher burst out of the building, his boots hitting the path so violently that gravel sprayed up behind him as he tore by her hiding place. With less speed than he’d exhibited, she forced herself to sprint up the same path, slipping in between the doors he’d just exited before they had a chance to swing shut.

Right in front of her were the stairs that led to the staff’s rooms, Sir William’s among them. Carpeted in a utilitarian beige, they appeared to rise ahead of her like the various base camps of an Everest ascent.

“And me without my Sherpa guide,” she muttered, exhaustion rolling over her like a fog. “Maybe I should take the elevator instead.”

But there was too much of a risk that it wasn’t working properly after the power outage. It would take time to get all systems back online, and although the elevators would be a high priority since a few of the scientists and technicians were wheelchair-bound, the odds were good that Asher’s people were working first on the security features that had gone down…like the hall video monitors.

As the thought occurred to her, Dawn glanced in alarm at the camera situated above her. It was still dead, the red light that would have been glowing if it was operational not yet showing, but the mere sight of it served as a stimulus to get her up the stairs. With the balaclava still obscuring her features, she wouldn’t be recognizable on camera…but the fact that her masked figure had entered Dawn Swanson’s room would damn her just as thoroughly.

“Talking about systems coming back online, it feels like mine are beginning to return to normal,” she said under her breath as she entered the hallway that ran by Sir William’s rooms. As she’d expected, Asher’s departure from the study hadn’t been so hasty that he’d overlooked locking the door behind him, and for the first time since the fiasco that had resulted in her obtaining and then losing Sir William’s notes, the full impact of her failure hit her.

She’d committed the cardinal sin of her profession, she thought bleakly as she turned down the corridor that led to her room. She’d let her emotions take over at the expense of the mission. There’d been a point during her fight with Asher when she could have turned tail and run, but since the day she’d arrived there had been a personal edge to their infrequent interactions, and tonight had been no different.

“Face it, O’Shaughnessy, you wanted to whip his ass,” she berated herself. She let herself into her room and went immediately to the window, taking care not to turn on the light. Searchlights crisscrossed the grounds and the voice of Lieutenant Keifer was clearly audible as he directed a group of soldiers to search the area nearer the gates. “Instead, you got blown away by Mr. SAS, and in the process you not only screwed up this assignment, you insured Sir William’s notes will be kept under even tighter security after tonight. With your anticipated life span now down to a week and two days, you’ve put yourself back at square one.”

No one likes screwing up on a job, Dawnie, but sometimes it happens. When it does, the best plan of action you can have is to make it to safety, regroup your resources, and figure out how you’re going to fix your mistake.

“More pearls of wisdom from a dead man,” Dawn said bitterly, turning from the window and entering the bathroom. She stripped off her pants, the balaclava and the ruined top, bundled them into a blood-soaked ball and a moment later had tossed them into the air shaft with the rest of her clandestine possessions, including the gun she’d liberated from Reese and had decided not to take with her tonight—another mistake that Lee Craig would probably have a handy bromide for if he were alive, she thought dismissively.

Clad only in a plain black bra and pants, she paused in front of the mirror. Yessir, step right up and see the amazing regenerating woman. Lightly she touched the edges of flesh and skin that had been torn apart less than five minutes ago and were now almost knit together, before twisting the washbasin’s taps on full blast and running hot water over a washcloth. The water swirling in the sink ran crimson, then pink and finally clear as she automatically scrubbed the drying blood away, her attention still on her reflection. Break her bones and she’ll bounce back. Shoot her full of holes and she heals right up. Is she a freak, a lab rat, a monster? Why, she’s all of those things, ladies and gentlemen, and a fool besides, because the one part of her that won’t heal is her heart—not the organ but the feelings she once had for the man who lied to her all her life. Come on, folks, let’s give the little lady a big round of—

“Shut up!” The washcloth fell unheeded as Dawn grasped the edges of the sink and brought her face to within inches of the mirror. “Shut up, shut up, shut up! I have healed! I’m perfectly fine! Sure, I loved you, you bastard—I loved you so much I used to pretend you weren’t my uncle but my real father! I loved you and I believed your lies and I thought—I thought—”

The woman in the mirror opened her mouth in a silent rictus of grief. Her gold-green eyes were red rimmed and her face was wet with tears. Behind her there seemed to be a ghostly image—an image of a man, no longer young, with lines of experience and regret on his face and shadows of pain under his eyes. Dawn reached out and touched the ghostly reflection.

“I thought you loved me, Uncle Lee.” Her whisper was agonized. “But that was just part of the lie, wasn’t it? Because even if I could somehow overlook everything else you were and did, I can’t overlook the fact that you killed my mother, Rainy Miller. Her death at your hands has to mean that you never felt anything at all for me, and knowing that has been tearing me apart, despite what I told Kayla Ryan…and despite what I’ve tried to tell myself.”

She let her hand fall away from the reflection. Her anguish hardened. “Don’t come back anymore, Lee. Your little lab rat doesn’t need you. Stay dead and stop haunting me, and maybe then I’ll be able to heal, you bastard.”

Gripping the sides of the sink, she let her head hang between her braced arms for a moment. When she looked up once more, there was no one reflected in the mirror but herself. She firmed her lips to a straight line, swiped the back of her hand across her tear-marked face and began to reach for the drab robe hanging on the back of the door.

“Exit O’Shaughnessy, enter Swanson,” she muttered. “God, couldn’t Carter have given her better taste in clothes, or at least—”

“Open the door!”

The shouted command coming from the hall outside her room was accompanied by a violent pounding. Dawn spun around. Only when she was facing the door did she notice she was holding a wickedly jagged shard of glass in her hand, the remains of the water glass she’d instinctively grabbed and smashed to use as a weapon.

“I know you’re in there, Swanson. If you don’t open this door immediately I’m breaking it down!”

The voice belonged to Des Asher. So, presumably, did the boot that crashed into the door a second later, rocking it on its hinges. He was the last person on earth she felt like confronting right now, she thought in trepidation, the last person she could afford to confront while the bullet hole he’d put in her was still healing; but a more important issue was, why was he here at all? There was a full-scale manhunt going on outside this building, a manhunt he himself had ordered, and with all his faults Asher wasn’t the type to let a subordinate shoulder his responsibilities for him.

“Last chance, Swanson.” She frowned. Beneath the grimness of his tone was an undercurrent of fear, but what did Des Asher have to fear from the Swanson chick, as far as he knew? Her question was answered right away. “If you’re okay, open the door and let me see for myself, because there’s a blood trail leading to this floor and I think it came from you.”

Damn. She’d been sure she’d stopped bleeding before she’d reached the top of the stairs, but apparently a drop or two had escaped her notice. Had she missed anything else? Tossing her impromptu weapon into the sink and shrugging into her robe, Dawn quickly checked herself in the mirror. The wound at the top of her ribs hadn’t completely healed, but in a few minutes it would have. Aside from that, there were no visible marks on her face or body from the fight, since she was physically incapable of sustaining bruises or abrasions. She peered closer, using her fingernail to scrape a minuscule fleck of crimson from her collarbone before giving her reflection a humorless smile. Maybe a confrontation with Mr. SAS was exactly what she needed to get herself back on track. Anger would focus her, remind her of who she was and what she was here for. It would be a welcome substitute for the weepy doldrums into which she’d so ridiculously fallen a few minutes ago. Anger would be a release, dammit.

She cinched the robe around her waist as she strode to the door. At the very moment she judged that the man on the other side was bracing himself to break it down, she flung it wide open. She gave him a quizzical glance.

“Take a look at yourself in the mirror. It may provide an answer as to where the blood trail’s coming from,” she said without preamble. “What’s going on outside and why was the power down a while ago? Are you here to give me the all-clear?”

Asher stepped into the room and slammed the door shut behind him. One eye was swollen nearly shut, but the other scanned her swiftly. “Take off the robe, Swanson. For God’s sake, I know it was you I shot in my uncle’s study. No one else has eyes that color. How you survived the free fall I’ll never know, but…” His voice trailed off. Doubt crept into his eyes.

She widened her gaze. “O-kaay,” she drawled sardonically. “And I’m supposed to have stabbed Colonel Mustard in the drawing room with a knife, right?” She pulled the robe closer around her, all too aware of the tight sensation near the top of her ribs that signaled the healing process was still going on. “Sorry, Asher, but this girl’s not in the mood tonight.”

She had to stall him a little longer. She was now almost positive the healing was complete, but she didn’t want to take the chance of him witnessing the final seconds of regeneration, especially since the memory of Kayla’s stunned reaction months ago still stung. She shrugged dismissively at him.

“I don’t have the first freakin’ idea what you’re talking about. You shot me? I fell? Is that what you told the guards outside combing the grounds?” Her gaze narrowed as the flaw in her reasoning struck her. “You didn’t, did you? Because if you had told them I was the intruder you caught in Sir William’s study, they wouldn’t be out there looking under bushes, they’d be here and I’d be staring down the barrels of a couple dozen guns.” She gave him a slow smile. “Why, Ash, honey—you really do care…or else you think there’s just a teeny chance you could be wrong and you’d be making a fool of yourself in front of—”

His voice was hoarse. “This isn’t possible. I looked straight into your eyes right after I shot you! It has to be your blood on those research papers I found on the floor. You have to be wounded, for God’s sake!”

Before she knew what he intended, he had closed the distance between them with a single stride, grasped the lapels of her robe, and wrenched the garment violently open. The belt around her waist gave way and the robe slipped from her shoulders to fall in a heap around her ankles.

Asher stared at her. Dawn bore his scrutiny with outward coolness.

“See anything that interests you, big guy?” she asked flippantly. She could afford the offhand attitude, she thought: a quick glance had shown her that there was nothing about the smoothly unblemished area of skin just below the curve of her bra to arouse his suspicions. The healing had run its course and whatever his speculations had been, the man standing in front of her would never be able to prove them. Not how I’d planned this evening to end, she thought in resignation, but better than it could have. I’m still in place as Sir William’s trusted assistant and the next time I lay my hands on his notes I won’t let anything or anyone stand in the way of my delivering them to Lab 33.

In fact, she was in a better position than she’d previously been, she told herself in satisfaction, because if Asher’s stricken expression was anything to go by, Mr. SAS’s faith in his own sanity was badly shaken. She couldn’t resist shaking him up a little more.

“Where’d the magic bullet enter me, Ash?” She looked down at herself curiously, at the same time nudging the bottom edge of her bra slightly upward over the swell of her left breast. “Here? Or was it higher?” She bit her lip innocently. “Hey, I know—maybe I jerked your gun just as you fired and your bullet went a little lower, like about here.” Negligently she slid a thumb under the narrow black strip of panty that traversed her hip and gave it a tiny tug southward. She looked up at him. “Or perhaps that’s only the way it happens in your dreams, sweetie. It kind of sounds to me like you have a problem shooting your gun off before you’re ready—”

“How the hell did you do it, Swanson—a bulletproof vest?” Under his tan Asher’s hard features were gray, and even before he finished the question he was shaking his head in negation. “I’m not thinking straight. Your sweater was soaked with blood, the same blood that was pouring from you on your way back here, so you couldn’t have been wearing a vest. But there’s not a damn mark on you, so…”

“So you’ve got the wrong girl?” Dawn suggested. “I know how disappointing this must be for you, Ash, I really do. Right from the start you’ve been so hot to pin something—anything—on me, and tonight you must have thought you’d actually caught me red-handed. Darn it all, I almost wish I was standing here with my life ebbing away, just to make you feel better about all this.” She turned slightly away from him and bent to pick up her robe. “Oh, well, qué será, será, as they—”

“Your back!” At the shock in his tone alarm bells went off in her mind and she spun around to face him, at the same time clumsily trying to force her arms into the sleeves of the robe. Asher grabbed the garment from her with one hand, his other gripping her upper arm. “Dammit, Swanson—the flesh is raw! It looks like—”

He froze, his disbelieving focus on her. “It looks like an exit wound,” he said slowly. “Except it can’t be, because there isn’t an entrance wound.”

Well, there was, but since it was the smaller by far of the two, it healed up a whole lot faster, Dawn thought hollowly. How could she have overlooked something so basic? she wondered, furious with herself. And how was she going to explain her way out of this?

Never apologize, never explain. For once she didn’t care that the maxim had been a favorite of Lee Craig’s, it was worth a try. She wrenched her arm from Asher’s grasp, tore the robe out of his hand and leveled a flat stare at him as she put it on and cinched it around her waist once more. “You’re losing it, Captain. I guess that’s not surprising, given your last mission, but either find some other way to work out the guilt that’s obviously eating you up or put your past as the Wolf of Bah’lein behind you and forget about it. Just don’t use me as—”

“Who told you about that?” At her mention of the nickname, a visible shock had run through him, as if she’d just thrown a switch that had sent an unendurable current through his body. He recovered immediately, but it was clear he was still more shaken than he wanted her to know. “Don’t tell me.” His words were clipped. “My bloody uncle, right?”

“Your bloody uncle who used his considerable pull to get you this baby-sitting job.” Her ploy was working, Dawn thought in relief. She’d lobbed the verbal equivalent of a hand grenade at Asher, and the shrapnel from its blast had temporarily blinded him to his issues with her. She was under no illusions she’d thrown him off for long, but all she needed was a few more minutes while her back healed. She pressed her advantage. “Oops, I guess I wasn’t supposed to let that one slip, either. Sir William seemed to think you’d be a little peeved he’d had to intercede to get your ass out of the sling you’d put it in, so he didn’t tell you that you were part of the deal he cut. Sweet old guy, isn’t he?”

“He’s a meddling bastard who knows damn well that what happened in Bah’lein and whatever my role might have been, the whole subject’s been ruled off-limits by an international court of law until Al-Jihr’s trial.” Asher’s jaw tightened. “Which is why this discussion between you and me is closed as of now, Swanson, even if you did bring it up as a smokescreen. I’m phoning down to the infirmary. I’ll let a doctor make the decision as to whether I throw you into a cell tonight after I arrest you, or cuff you to a gurney and—”

“God, we’re back to that again,” she said in a bored tone. Walking to the bed, she shrugged off her robe and sat back against the pillows. She waved a hand at the phone on the adjacent night table. “If you’re so determined to shoot what’s left of your military career down in flames, go right ahead. Better yet, I’ll dial the infirmary’s extension for you.”

Forestalling his move toward the phone, she flipped onto her stomach and reached for the receiver. Idly raising her legs and crossing them at the ankles, she punched in the number that connected the room telephones with the facility’s emergency clinic.

“It’s ringing.” She hummed a bar of “Rule Britannia” under her breath and frowned at her left index finger. “Broke a nail tonight, I can’t imagine how. Oh, wait, someone’s picking up.” With exaggerated courtesy she held the phone out to him. He snatched it from her and slammed it back onto the cradle.

“Right.” He exhaled sharply. “I’ve seen what I was supposed to see—the exit wound’s gone.”

“The imaginary exit wound?” She pretended to stifle a yawn. “If you don’t need to use the phone, Asher, I wish you’d let me get some sleep. I’m due to be in the lab in a few hours, and I’d really like—”

“Not this soldier, love.” Despite the endearment, his tone was hard. “The details of my last mission are classified, as I just said. But there’s no harm in telling you something about the one previous to it, although you don’t need to know specific names and locations. We were sent in to rescue hostages from an embassy that had been taken over. I volunteered to exchange places with the pregnant wife of a civil servant, and the rebels jumped at the opportunity to take a real live SAS officer as prisoner. I was kept in a cage for three months, beaten and tortured daily, and every time I fell asleep my captors would wake me up to tell me I could walk out a free man if only I’d let them videotape me denouncing my side and labeling my country and yours as evil forces. I walked out a free man, all right. I caught one of the bastards off guard one day, killed him with my bare hands, and used the gun I took off him to eliminate the others. But I never let myself be brainwashed into saying something I knew wasn’t true, and I’m not going to now.”

Abruptly he sat on the edge of the bed. Still lying on her stomach, Dawn felt his hand spread wide on her back and she tensed, ready to take whatever action was needed. “I know what I saw,” he said with ominous softness. “I don’t give a damn if it doesn’t make sense. How about we play a variation on the game of Truth or Dare we were playing the other night when I caught you skulking around the grounds after dark?”

“What kind of variation did you have in mind?” She hoped the terseness of her reply would conceal the anger building in her. The man had no idea how dangerous his implacability could prove to be. If Aldrich ever guessed that the SAS commander he’d once ordered her to kill now knew she wasn’t an ordinary woman, the head of Lab 33 would renew his order—and this time he would expect her to unquestioningly carry it out.

“More truth.” Asher still had his hand on her. “You know I don’t dare take something so fantastic to my superiors, so why not, Swanson? For example, my first question would be, how did you do it? How did you receive a bullet point-blank to your chest no more than fifteen minutes ago and not only survive, but show no signs of a wound now?”

For one reckless moment she was tempted to tell him. It had worked before, Dawn thought swiftly—she’d divulged her profession to him, and he’d found her assertions so fantastic he’d assumed she was spinning a tall tale. But then he hadn’t had the evidence of his own eyes to corroborate her story.

Now he did. And she had the feeling that no matter how incredible Des Asher might find her insistence that she was genetically capable of regenerating after being shot, some part of him would believe her. The risk factor was unacceptable…so she had to come up with another course of action that would derail his suspicions of her.

They were on her bed. She was already half-undressed and he was already touching her. It wasn’t rocket science, she thought edgily.

She was going to have to seduce Mr. SAS.

Chapter 12

Status: five days and counting
Time: 1321 hours

It had been four and a half days now, Dawn fumed as she loaded her tray in the cafeteria line, four and a half freakin’ days since her failed attempt to steal Sir William’s notes and the humiliating aftermath of that failure. She stacked a carton of milk precariously on top of a brimming glass of tomato juice, jammed two oatmeal-and-raisin cookies beside the slice of peach pie she’d already selected, and pushed her way back along the line to grab a second sandwich. She was burning off calories faster than she could supply them, she thought grimly, but it wasn’t action that was taking its toll of her energy, it was frustration.

Mr. SAS had proved impossible to seduce. She’d given it her best shot, but unfortunately her best shot hadn’t consisted of much more than a husky sigh and a languid stretch to unfasten her bra, because as soon as he’d realized she had no intention of answering his questions he’d abruptly stood up from her bed.

“Sorry, love, but you’ve screwed me over enough for one evening,” he’d said. “Normally I’m as willing as the next man to take advantage of the opportunity for a quick shag, but this is just a little too cold and calculated even for me. I liked you better when you were trying to kick the hell out of me. At least then your emotions were honest.”

He’d started to open the door to the hallway, but suddenly he’d halted. He’d turned back to face her, his eyes sharp. “Bloody hell, there’s a link, isn’t there—a link between what I saw happen to you tonight and the research you were trying to steal. You must want to get your hands on those notes pretty badly to have taken a bullet for them, am I right?”

From her prone position on the bed she’d given him a flat stare, not bothering to hide her fury. “Since it’s just you and me right now, yeah, Ash, I’ll admit it. I want those notes. I’m going to get them. You got in my way tonight, but that won’t happen again.”

“Don’t be so sure.” There had been the same coldness in his eyes as she knew was in hers. “From now on one of my people will be watching you twenty-four/seven. Your phone calls will be monitored. You’re never going to be alone with Sir William again, no matter how much he objects. After a while, whoever you’re working for will get tired of waiting for results, and he or she is probably going to blame their agent-in-place. If I were in your shoes, I’d start making plans for that eventuality.” He’d hesitated. Then he’d shrugged. “The rules have changed, Swanson. In the future if I catch you in a restricted area, I’m going to have to treat you like any other intruder, so conversations like the one we had a few nights ago are a thing of the past. But before we close all communications between us, I want to make two things clear. One is that I knew my uncle pulled strings to get me this posting.”

She’d been momentarily startled out of her anger. “You knew? But then why—”

“Why did I accept? Why did I let him think he’d put one over on me, why didn’t I cut him out of my life when I found out what he’d done?” Asher shook his head. “He did the wrong thing, but he did it for all the right reasons. He did it because he cared. I threw that into the equation, and I realized that although I hated what he’d done, I couldn’t hate him. He’s family. For better or for worse, he’s a part of me.”

She’d felt oddly unsettled by his words and she’d covered her discomfiture with a sharp laugh. “Lordy, Captain Asher, I do believe you’ve brought a tiny tear to my eye. Who would have guessed the Wolf of Bah’lein was such a softie at heart?”

She’d regretted the unpleasant gibe as soon as she’d uttered it, but it was too late to take it back. Asher’s expression became granitelike and his tone was equally hard as he answered her.

“You said it yourself—it’s just you and me here right now, so I’ll break every rule in the book and set the record straight this once. I didn’t do what they say I did, but I hold myself responsible for not guessing what that evil bastard Al-Jihr was planning in time to stop him. There’s definitely blood on my hands…even if it’s as invisible as the wounds on you.” He looked suddenly weary. “As for any tears in your eye, love, I don’t flatter myself that I put them there. It was obvious as soon as I walked in that you’d been crying your heart out.”

Her control snapping, she’d jumped from the bed, but even as she’d sprung toward him he’d closed the door behind him, leaving her alone in her room. Within minutes she’d heard the heavy tread of booted feet take up a position just outside her room, and early the next morning she’d heard another guard coming to take the place of the first one.

Asher had carried out his threat to the letter, Dawn reflected as she slid her laden tray onto an empty table, ignoring Roger Poole’s hopeful glance from across the cafeteria. Since that night, she’d had a permanent, albeit ever-changing shadow following her during her daily routine: waiting outside her room every morning, watching her from a corridor through the windows of the laboratory, staying a discreet distance behind her if she decided to take a stroll outside in the evening. If necessary, she supposed drearily, she could use her air-duct routes to make her way through the building at night, but they were useless unless she had a destination in mind, and she still hadn’t discovered where Sir William’s notes were now being kept. Even the old scientist himself didn’t know, according to a conversation she’d had with Roger yesterday.

“He’s rather miffed about it, but he sees his nephew’s point,” the Englishman had confided during a tea break. “The thug who attempted to filch his research hasn’t been caught and although security’s tighter than ever, what if he makes a second attempt? As long as Sir William’s as much in the dark as anyone else regarding the location of his notes, he can’t be forced to divulge that information to an intruder.”

“Although if I were Sir William, I’d rather be able to spill the beans if I was being threatened instead of having to say, sorry, old chap, haven’t a clue,” Dawn had replied impatiently. She’d caught Roger’s crestfallen look and relented. “Sorry, Rog, I’m sure it’s a good ploy.”

“A good precaution,” he’d corrected her with one of his apologetic coughs. “And I’m glad Asher’s taking precautions with your safety, too, by having you guarded around the clock. It’s well-known you’re the old man’s right-hand staff member, so it’s possible you could be targeted as well.”

His concern had made her uncomfortable. In fact, Dawn thought in chagrin, she was uncomfortable about the whole situation, which wasn’t like her. Yeah, she’d come here under false pretences and cultivated her friendships with Roger and Sir William and the rest of the scientists and technicians for her own ends. But her actions were justified, weren’t they?

Her brow furrowed in thought, she pushed her empty sandwich plate aside and reached for a cookie. The moral implications of what she was doing could be addressed sometime in the future, but right now she had more immediate worries, not least among them being how she was going to make her long-overdue phone report to Aldrich.

Since Asher had made good on his vow to have her watched, she’d had to assume he’d also kept his threat to have her calls monitored. The morning after her failed theft attempt, she’d made her way to one of the pay phones in the building and had begun to dial the number of the antiquarian bookstore that served as her contact relay to Lab 33 and Peters, but even as she’d punched in the first few digits, the young soldier who’d followed her from her room had closed the distance between them.

“Do you mind?” She’d injected a full dose of Dawn Swanson irritation into her tone. The private had remained standing where he was.

“Sorry, ma’am, but Captain Asher’s orders. We stick to you like glue, and if someone contacts you or you try to contact them we have to be sure from your conversation that you’re not making the call under duress.” He’d given her an embarrassed smile. “Real sorry, Miz Swanson, but I guess the captain’s being extracautious after all the excitement last night. You go right ahead with your call and pretend I’m not here.”

“Forget it,” she’d muttered, hanging up the phone and stalking away.

She’d tried every day since, with the same results, Dawn thought worriedly. Last night she’d even climbed up onto the toilet tank, intending to make her way through the air ducts to a pay phone, but then she’d remembered the hallway monitors and had realized the futility of her plan. But she couldn’t leave it any longer. Somehow she had to get in contact with Aldrich today.

…whoever you’re working for will get tired of waiting for results, and he or she is probably going to blame their agent-in-place…

She hadn’t needed Asher to put that particular fear into words for her. It had been in the back of her mind from the start, and with each day that passed, the knot in her stomach got tighter. Peters didn’t countenance failure, even from a trusted employee, and from one on tenuous probation, as she was, he could well see it as deliberate disloyalty.

Unless I can convince him that I meant to screw up my first attempt at getting the notes, she thought with sudden hope. She swallowed her mouthful of cookie without chewing, her mind working overtime on the idea. It might work, she decided. It would take all her persuasive skills, but it just might work—if she could get to a phone and contact Lab 33.

“You. Me. Food. Hot damn, I think I finally got that date with you I was hoping for.”

Jerked from her thoughts by the voice coming from beside her, she looked up quickly to see Terry Reese, a corner of his delectable mouth lifted in a wry grin. He was carrying a cafeteria tray, and, seemingly oblivious to the unhappy glare Roger Poole was directing his way, he set it down on the table and took the seat across from her.

“This time if you skip out on me, I’ve got orders to follow you,” he informed her as he twisted the cap off a bottle of sports drink. He shrugged. “Hey, it’s not how I planned to get to know you, angel. But like you told me in Sir William’s study a few days ago, my supreme commander seems to have it in for you.”

“No, he doesn’t,” she lied swiftly. “At least, maybe he does, but he certainly isn’t having me guarded for any reason other than my own protection.” She gave him a prickly Dawn Swanson look from behind her glasses. “Don’t tell me you soldiers are under the ridiculous impression you’ve been assigned to watch me because I’m under suspicion.”

“Nope.” Terry Reese sank strong white teeth into his BLT. He chewed and swallowed. “Everyone else believes what you just said, because that’s the official line—the captain’s told us that since you’re pretty damn close to the old English guy, you could be in danger of being snatched for any information you might have. I’m the only one who thinks that’s a crock, if you’ll pardon my French.”

“Sometimes French is the only language that’ll do, especially when you’re discussing Mr. SAS,” Dawn muttered. The indigo eyes watching her lit up with quick humor, and she gave Terry a reluctant smile. “Okay, you’re right. For reasons only known to himself, Asher’s convinced I blew the power the other night after coldcocking some husky private, broke into Sir William’s study, cracked the safe and was about to take off with some research notes when he walked in on me. Apparently I then engaged him in hand-to-hand combat that only ended when he pulled his gun on me.”

Terry nodded, his manner perfectly serious. “Lucky for you those horn-rims you wear didn’t get lost during the fight. That’s something most lab assistants don’t consider when they’re planning a violent crime.” His smile broke out again. “Now you’re handing me a crock, right?”

“I wish I was.” Dawn sighed, but inwardly she felt a faint stirring of excitement. Reese had unwittingly helped her out twice before. There was no reason why the old adage of “three’s a charm” wouldn’t apply to her gorgeous guardian angel, was there?

“But that’s insane.” The humor had left his eyes. “It’s no secret that the thief Asher surprised in London’s study was shot and fell out of a second-story window. How does Asher explain away the fact that you’re all in one piece, for crying out loud?”

Dawn looked down at the tabletop. “It was pretty humiliating,” she said in a low tone. “He—he insisted on checking for himself. His realization that there wasn’t a scratch on me didn’t seem to make any difference to his opinion, which is why you’re here right now, I guess.” She raised a drawn face to Terry. “The thing is, I was offered another job at the same time I heard of this position, and there’s a chance I could still get it. I’d like to. As much of an honor as it is working with Sir William, his nephew’s attitude toward me has made it impossible for me to continue on here.”

“That’s pretty damn understandable,” Terry said, his anger apparent. “So where’s the problem—just leave. After the way you’ve been treated, you don’t owe anyone anything in the way of notice.”

“I said there was a chance the other job’s still available,” she reminded him. “If it’s not, I’ll have to stick this one out, because I can’t afford to be unemployed. But with all my calls being monitored, I can’t phone the other lab to find out if they’ve filled the post or not. Sir William’s going to know I’m looking elsewhere for a job, and he’ll see that as a breach of loyalty and give me my walking papers.”

“Which would be okay if you had somewhere else to go to, but not if the alternate job’s been taken in the meantime.” Reese frowned. “You asked me once why I wanted a date with you, honey, when I could have my pick of supermodels. I still say you were giving me too much credit, but are you interested in hearing my answer?”

Not really, Lover Boy. On pins and needles waiting to see if her ruse had worked, Dawn had a hard time keeping her tart reply to herself. You’re a babe and actually a really nice guy, but my main concern right now isn’t us making beautiful music together, it’s getting to a freakin’ pay phone and talking my way out of a world of trouble with my boss. Either you can help me with that, or I’ve got to find another solution to my problem.

Her smile was slightly strained. “I remind you of your sister? That’s what most men tell me just before they pull out a wallet photo of the gorgeous girl who broke their heart. Don’t worry, Terry, I’m used to—”

“Will you shut up and give me a chance here, honey?” There was sharp frustration in his tone. “You don’t remind me of my sister, because I don’t have one. You remind me of a girl I used to sit behind in biology class. Mandy was the smartest kid in school and she had a wicked sense of humor, but I was a jock and all I knew was she wore glasses and didn’t treat me like a god the way all the other girls did. I never dated her, but guess what? All these years later, she’s the only one I remember from my high-school days. She had pride and class and independence, just like you do, Dawn. I guess I’ve grown up a little, because that’s what I look for in a woman now.”

“Oh.” Her response was inadequate, she knew, but her throat had constricted so tightly that for the moment it was all she could manage. Terry Reese was a simple, decent human being and she was using him—just as she’d used Roger, just as she’d used Sir William, just as she’d used everyone else here who’d made the mistake of offering her friendship. About the only person I haven’t manipulated is Asher, Dawn thought bleakly, but that hasn’t been for lack of trying, it’s just because the man’s the male equivalent of me…so closed off from everyone that it’s impossible to slip under his guard. But even Asher’s held on to a faint connection to the world through his uncle.

Who was she connected to? Not Lee Craig—not anymore. He was dead, but the severance between them went far deeper than death. She didn’t know about the Cassandras. In the past they’d seen her as an enemy, and for all she knew their position hadn’t changed. Which left her with an unthinkable, undeniable conclusion.

Aldrich Peters had created her. Aldrich Peters was her sole chance of survival. The man she hated with every fiber of her being was the only person she had a link to.

Which didn’t alter in the least her intention of killing him as soon as—

Darkness. Coldness. A terrible sound filling her ears, like the rage-thickened snarls of a dozen dying men. And pain…pain that transcended pain, that went beyond agony, that escalated past the point of sensation and became an element around her and in her, as pervasive as air, as choking as water, as searing as fire.

“…guess what I’m trying to say is that I think you’re pretty special, Dawn, and if I can help you out in this situation, I will. There’s a pay phone just down the hall from the cafeteria, isn’t there?”

She’d had another attack, Dawn thought dazedly. It was over now, and since Reese’s tone held no alarm it seemed apparent that he hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary while it had taken her over, but it had been the worst yet. I survived it, she told herself fearfully, and I just might be able to survive another of this magnitude. But they’re tearing me apart a little more each time they occur. I can’t hold out much longer against them.

“Between here and the lab,” she said through lips so dry they felt cracked. She moistened them and tried to focus. “Why?”

“You need to make a private call. I need to find out why the joker who was supposed to relieve me at one o’clock hasn’t shown up yet.”

“Maybe he hasn’t shown because it’s only quarter-to,” she began, but Terry shook his head.

“Your watch must be wrong,” he said as he fiddled with the knob on his and then extended his wrist toward her with a frown. “See—ten past already. While you’re using the ladies’ room next to the phone, I’ll probably wander back this way, see if my relief’s looking for me here. God, the losers they let into the military these days!”

“I think they let some pretty great guys in,” Dawn said, comprehending what he’d just implied to her. “And Reese—I’m sorry.”

“For what, honey?” He gathered up their trays and stood from the table as she pushed her chair back.

For stealing your gun, for ambushing you on your Harley, for seeing you a couple of minutes ago as just a gorgeous guy with a killer smile whom I could use. She gave a shrug as they exited the cafeteria. “For standing you up last week. It wasn’t very nice of me.”

“Don’t apologize, I probably came on a little too strong anyway, hitting you up for a date just minutes after you’d fainted.” Reese suddenly patted his pockets. “Which reminds me, I meant to give you this when I saw you. I picked it up in the hallway outside Sir William’s study when I left and realized it had to be yours. Now, didn’t you say you needed to powder your nose before heading back to the lab?”

Looking up from the object Terry had pressed into her palm, she saw that they were standing directly outside the entrance to the women’s washroom. Beyond it was a small alcove with a pay phone. Dawn responded to his conspiratorial wink with a wooden smile, entered the washroom, turned around and came back out into the hall again.

Her gorgeous guardian angel was halfway down the corridor, heading for the cafeteria. She was alone. She walked to the alcove and picked up the telephone receiver, but her stunned attention was still on the small gold object Terry Reese had found in the hallway after an unknown killer had come far too close to assassinating Lab 33’s ex-assassin.

A lapel pin in the shape of a small shield, it bore the Latin motto Audent Fortuna Juvat, which she recognized as meaning Fortune Favors the Bold…and below the motto was written Athena Academy.

Had the assassin who’d shot her truly been Samantha St. John, and had she inadvertently left her calling card?

“I see.” Was it her imagination, or had the frost that had been in Aldrich Peters’s voice for the first minutes of their telephone conversation thawed slightly? Dawn wondered as she gripped the receiver with tense fingers. He went on, and this time his tone left no doubt that the cold fury he’d displayed moments ago had abated somewhat. “You should have alerted me to your plan. I’m willing to overlook your breach of protocol this time…but only this time. Do we understand each other?”

“Yes, Doctor.” It wasn’t hard to keep her response subdued. She was on autopilot, Dawn thought as the sharp edges of the Athena Academy pin bit into the clenched palm of her free hand, but perhaps that was a good thing. She’d presented her case to Aldrich unemotionally, her earlier trepidation at his possible reaction no longer her prime concern, and apparently her cool manner had been more convincing than an impassioned explanation of her actions.

“Good. That being said, I commend you on a masterful strategy, Dawn, and one worthy of your late uncle. By deliberately aborting the first attempt to steal London’s papers—an attempt that as you say can hardly be laid at your door when Captain Asher is looking for a suspect with a gunshot wound—you’ve laid a highly pungent red herring across your trail. When you and the papers actually do disappear from the facility tonight, Dawn Swanson will be assumed to be a victim rather than the perpetrator. You’ve covered your tracks superbly.”

“I intend to spill enough of my own blood in my room to make it seem impossible for Swanson to have survived long after being forced to help her attackers locate the safe where the papers are now kept, and then apparently being taken as a hostage by them when they left,” she added tonelessly. “When the authorities don’t find her they’ll assume her body was dumped and buried somewhere in the surrounding desert. She’ll enter the books as missing, presumed dead.”

“And with a carefully chosen middleman brokering my deal to sell London’s research back to the government, my involvement in this mission never comes to light, Lab 33 receives a healthy influx of cash into its coffers and you escape the death sentence you’re living under,” Peters said thoughtfully. “All because Lee Craig taught his protégé how to play a double game so well.”

Dawn frowned. “I wouldn’t call it a double game, Doctor. That implies my loyalties are divided. It’s more accurate to say that I’m throwing up a smokescreen.”

“Which you’re also superb at,” he said without hesitation. “My apologies, Dawn, I’m afraid I have a shaky grasp of the terminology of your profession. Well, then, can I expect your arrival at Lab 33 within the next twenty-four hours, barring any unforeseen complications?”

“There won’t be any complications, unforeseen or otherwise,” she said with finality. “And if there are, I’ll take care of them the way Lee Craig taught me to.”

Even as Peters terminated his end of the call, Terry Reese rounded the corner from the cafeteria and began heading her way. Dawn raised her voice slightly. “I understand, Ms. McGrisken. I really couldn’t expect you to hold the position open indefinitely. Please keep me in mind if anything else comes up.” She hung up.

“I can see it wasn’t the news you were hoping for,” Terry said as he reached her. “I wish we had time to talk about what you’re going to do now, angel, but we’ve got to put some distance between us and this phone. I think I saw Mr. SAS in the cafeteria, and what’s worse, I’m pretty sure he saw me. Your next stop is the lab, right?”

“I’ll be there all afternoon.” She fell into step beside him, thankful for his assumption that her manner was due to disappointment over not getting the fictional job. When really I’m acting this way because I’m encased in ice, she thought with detachment. Except instead of feeling cold on the outside, the cold’s coming from deep inside me. I wonder if I’ll ever feel warm again…and I wonder if I’ll ever care whether I do or not.

Because right now she didn’t. Having ice in her veins meant she felt nothing over the Cassandras’ possible betrayal. It meant she could shut herself off from the events she would have to set in motion tonight. It numbed all feeling, gave her cold strength, turned her back into the woman she had been before her world had been ripped apart by an earlier betrayal.

You’ve been trying to be someone you weren’t, O’Shaughnessy, Dawn told herself, barely noticing Reese’s concerned glance as she left him and the soldier who had just arrived to relieve him at the door of the lab. She strode sightlessly past a group of scientists and technicians, coming to a halt at the back of the room where a row of wire cages lined the wall. You thought you could make amends for the things you did, maybe one day be accepted by the Cassandras as one of them. But you were raised to be the Cipher’s protégé, a genetically altered killing machine, Lab 33’s lab rat. You’ll never be able to put the past behind you, so you might as well accept what you are.

She unlatched the first wire door, lifting it open with one finger. The two creatures inside cowered momentarily at this unexpected interruption to their routine but excitement overrode their caution. They scurried to the threshold of the cage, hesitated for a second and then ran out along the table. Dawn wasn’t watching them. She was already unlatching the second cage, and then the third and fourth ones. Only when the tenth cage had been opened and its occupants released did she stand back and look at them as they scurried down the table and across the floor.

“It feels like freedom, doesn’t it?” Raised voices and a few nervous shrieks came from the room behind her, but she kept her eyes on the excited ex-prisoners and addressed her low words to them. “You think if you run fast enough and far enough they’ll never catch you…but you’re wrong, little brothers and sisters. You’ll never be free. You’ll never escape. And just when you think you have, those bars will come slamming down again, stronger than ever.”

It would take the lab a long time to round up all those rats and get them back in their cages again.

“And I know how long,” she said aloud. “Nine months, fifteen days and fourteen hours. It doesn’t take much time at all to put a lab rat back into her cage.

“All you have to make her understand is that it’s the only place she belongs…the only place where she’ll ever belong.”

Chapter 13

Status: four days and counting
Time: 0001 hours

Dawn Swanson was dead. Dead, buried and never to be resurrected, Dawn thought as she stared at herself in the full-length mirror on her bathroom door. “Ain’t gonna miss you, babe, that’s for sure,” she said softly. “You cramped my style way too much. And I really, really hated wearing your clothes.”

Not that the ones she had on were what she would have chosen had she a choice, she told herself with a grimace. She’d soaked the stains from the skintight zipped top she’d been wearing the night she’d been shot, but there had been nothing she could do about the blasted-out hole in the fabric at the top of her rib cage and the exit hole at the back, and try as she might, she hadn’t been able to totally clean the blood from the left sleeve. The former two problems she could live with. The latter she’d solved by hacking off both sleeves with a pair of scissors. Her shoulders were now exposed in the cutaway garment, but the impromptu tailoring had given her greater ease of movement.

Her army-issue boots laced up well past her ankles and had been filched a few hours earlier from the bedside of a sleeping female soldier, a feat she’d accomplished by using her air shaft mode of travel one final time. A quick detour to the men’s quarters on the way back had resulted in the bowie knife that was now strapped to her thigh, unwittingly supplied by a Ranger whose overheard nickname of “Blade” had suggested to her that he might have an interesting collection of unofficial weaponry in his locker. It was a supposition that had proved correct, since besides the bowie knife she’d relieved him of a wristband-mounted switchblade and—Freudians would have a field day with this one, she thought wryly—a short, scabbarded sword that came with its own spring-release back-holster.

All in all, the Swanson chick had definitely received last rites, along with her baggy sweats, her cumbersome bottle-lens glasses, and best of all…

“Is it true blondes have more fun?” she muttered to her reflection, taking in the honey-colored braid that started high at the back of her head and swung halfway down to her waist. Several shampooings had eliminated the brown rinse from her hair. “Or is that just an urban myth, like a woman’s favorite weapon is poison? The rest of this arsenal might come in handy, but give me a gun any day.” She checked Reese’s Beretta, shoved the pistol into the snug waistband of her black pants and pulled her top concealingly over it.

She looked like what she was, she thought assessingly—Lab 33’s assassin, the protégé who had inherited the position Lee Craig had so abruptly vacated when Samantha St. John’s bullet had taken him down last October. The woman in the mirror was leanly muscled, armed to the teeth and clad all in black. Eyes the arctic green of pack ice stared unblinkingly out of an expressionless face. She exactly fit the description that had been circulated in the urgent and confidential e-mail Kayla Ryan had shown her months ago.

Her immediate objectives hadn’t changed. She still needed to get Sir William’s notes to the scientists who could utilize them to save her life—hers and her sisters’, whether she could trust the women sworn to avenge their biological mother or not.

Crossing swiftly to the bathroom, she reached above the sink and felt behind the frosted glass shade of the light. She unscrewed the bulb enough to break the connection and the light went out. She moved back to the bedroom, stepping onto the bed to reach the overhead fixture.

Her actions in the lab this afternoon had been regrettable but not disastrous. She’d implemented a hasty plan of damage control. Sinking to her knees, she’d covered her face with her hands and let her shoulders heave in silent sobs, only raising her head when she’d felt Roger’s tentative arm around her.

“I’m sorry,” she’d gulped, throwing an appalled glance at the scurrying rats around her. “I don’t know why someone would do this! Ever since the break-in I—I—”

“You’re suffering from stress,” Roger had said with uncharacteristic fierceness. “And it hasn’t been helped by having an armed guard follow you around everywhere you go, either. Is it really necessary to have your people dogging Ms. Swanson’s every step, man? Can’t you see the toll it’s taking on her?”

His angry questions had been directed at Asher, who was watching her performance with an unreadable expression on his face. Aqua eyes held hers for a moment, and before turning on Roger.

“I see that something’s taking its toll on our Ms. Swanson,” he said evenly, “although I’m willing to bet my security precautions aren’t to blame. I’ll have one of my people escort her to her room where she can regain her composure.”

At that point Sir William had arrived on the scene. In the middle of his bellowing tirade against the loose rats and then his nephew’s high-handedness Asher had walked away, and a few minutes later Dawn, with a gruffly solicitous Sir William at her side and a guard ten paces behind her, had headed for her room.

“His methods are overbearing, I agree, but he means well,” the old scientist had said awkwardly as they’d paused outside her door. “When I learned he’d assigned a security contingent to you I thought it would reassure you, but I should have realized how unsettling it might be.” His veined hand had rested on hers and he’d lowered his voice to a confidential level. “I’m telling tales out of school again, I suppose, but maybe it will put your mind at ease if you understand why there’s no chance of any thugs coming after you for my notes. Asher’s locked them away in his own office safe. Knowing my nephew, he probably stands guard over them all night himself. Does that make you feel any better about this whole situation?”

“More than you know, Sir W,” Dawn said under her breath as she unscrewed the lightbulb and dropped it onto the bed. “I thought I was going to have to use you as my hostage to force Asher to lead me to the notes and hand them over. I didn’t want to do that, and the woman I was twenty-four hours ago wouldn’t have been able to, but to spell it out in terms you’d understand, I’ve regenerated. I’m back to who I was before I’d ever heard of a group called the Cassandras, much less put my trust in them.”

She passed by the dresser, swept her hand across its surface, and gave a good facsimile of a muffled and cutoff scream as assorted toiletries and a clock-radio crashed to the floor. Almost immediately she heard a sharp knock on the room’s door.

“Everything okay in there, ma’am?”

Unlike Reese and the hapless private whose phone-sex conversation she’d so abruptly terminated four nights ago, her guard this evening had looked to be in his mid-thirties, she recalled, and presumably his extra years had taught him extra caution. Although Terry had taken pains to assure her that Asher’s briefing to her guards hadn’t raised their suspicions about her, some of the more experienced Rangers had treated her like a possible hostile rather than a civilian in jeopardy, including the one who was even now unlocking her door.

“Stand away from the entrance, ma’am,” he ordered from the hall. “I’m coming in.”

Suspicious or not, he thought he was dealing with the Swanson chick, she reflected as she saw the door begin to open. He would take an unwary second to hit the light switch and then she would—

He stepped in, hesitated in the doorway as she’d predicted.

From her position behind it, she gave the door a powerful kick. It slammed against the Ranger, who stumbled back a pace over the threshold, and before he could recover his balance she leaped from her hiding place, wrested his weapon from him and brought its stock crashing down on his skull.

He crumpled to his knees to fall face forward on the floor. Swiftly she reached down to the pulse at the side of his neck.

It was slow but steady. He would live, although for the next forty-eight hours he’d have one mother of a headache, Dawn decided as she dragged him farther inside the room.

She stepped away from him, and as she did she caught a shadowy glimpse of her reflection in the dresser mirror. For a moment she felt oddly disoriented, as if she had nothing to do with the grim woman who had just taken out one of her own country’s soldiers so emotionlessly.

What the hell am I doing? Whose side am I on here? This is all—

The frantic voice inside her head was abruptly silenced as the ice that surrounded her choked it off. Dawn made her way to the door with a frown. She was on no one’s side but her own, dammit. Her affiliation with Lab 33 was a thing of the past and, if her assumption about the appearance of the Athena Academy pin was true, her alliance with the Cassandras had been broken by their actions, not hers. She would use both organizations for her own ends and then dispose of them before they could dispose of her. Her frown smoothed out into blankness and she edged a glance around the side of the door.

The video camera was mounted high on the wall at the end of the hall, its gleaming lens sweeping slowly from left to right and then back again as it scanned the width of the corridor. Taking only a split second to assess the speed of its tracking rhythm, she jerked her head back into the room and slipped the bowie knife from its sheath on her upper thigh as the lens swiveled her way again.

For the space of a heartbeat she waited. Then she made her move.

She stepped fully into the corridor, noting as she did so that the camera was temporarily pointed away from her. Her arm came up and her wrist bent back in a fluid throwing motion just as the lens was nearly facing her again. The bowie knife left her grasp smoothly and flew like the deadly missile it was straight for the camera’s lens.

It hit dead center, shattering the glass and penetrating the body of the camera. Like some lumbering beast that didn’t know it was mortally wounded, the camera kept slowly tracking back and forth, the knife’s wickedly long blade quivering from it.

Walking to the end of the hall, she grabbed the hilt of the knife and pulled it out of the camera before sheathing it again and pushing open the door to the stairs.

Ten minutes later, after disabling the camera on the ground floor in a similar manner and taking out the two soldiers posted at the entrance to the military building, noiselessly Dawn closed the door to Asher’s office behind her. Contrary to what his uncle had said, he didn’t stand guard over Sir William’s locked notes all night, she realized, remaining very still and letting her glance travel around the shadowy room. He didn’t have to.

Because the whole area, starting from where she was standing just inside the door, past the metal, paper-strewn desk six feet away and continuing right up to the steel safe that was positioned behind the desk, was crisscrossed with glowing red beams that looked like strands of silk from some radioactive spider. The place was wired to the max with infrared trip-alarms.

“Crap.” Her lips barely moving as she spoke, she made rapid calculations based on the scene in front of her. She took a shallow breath, tucked her braid into the neckline of her top so that it wouldn’t swing free and began contorting her slow way through the maze of infrared beams.

The summer she’d been fourteen she’d accompanied Lee Craig on a mission that had taken him to Prague. To her adolescent fury, as soon as they’d arrived he’d informed her that he intended to work the job alone and that he’d made arrangements for her to take specialized training during the time he would be occupied. Her fury had lasted only until he’d dropped her off at the small, family-run circus that was to be her home for the next two months.

“Papa Wisznewski thought those grueling eight-hour gymnastic sessions he put me through were to teach me how to walk the high-wire like I’d been born to it,” Dawn breathed as she carefully lowered her torso under a beam while balancing on one leg. She lowered herself full-length to the floor and kept her eyes on another beam only millimeters above her face as she slid below it. “Wonder what he’d think if he knew how I was putting them to use right now.”

By the time she made it to the desk she could feel a thin sheen of sweat coating her limbs and trickling down between her shoulder blades. She hesitated for a second, then began the last phase of her journey to the safe—a distance of only three feet, but bristling with a barbed-wire effect of red beams. Her worst moment came when, her head down and both her hands splayed out on the floor for balance, she felt her braid slip free of her collar. As it swung by her face she caught it in her teeth before it interrupted the path of one of the red lines of light.

Then her ordeal was over and she was standing in the blessedly clear area in front of the safe. Spitting the tail of her braid out of her mouth with a sense of relief, she hunkered down in front of the combination lock, laced her fingers together and stretched them out until her knuckles popped, and then got to work.

Compared to the high-end Rose-Jackman model in his uncle’s study, Asher’s safe had been about as hard to break into as a cigar box, she thought with a frown a few minutes later. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the infrared sensors that had made it so hard for her to make her way across the office in the first place, she would have suspected a trap…or at least considered the possibility that Sir William’s papers were secreted somewhere else. But they weren’t. They were right there in plain view as the safe’s door swung open.

“Bingo,” she whispered hoarsely as she grabbed them up and began to unzip her top to secure them next to her body.

The red sensors suddenly shut off, and as she turned quickly around, the room’s bright overhead lights went on.

“Checkmate’s more like it, love,” replied Asher from beside a filing cabinet near the doorway. He took his left hand from the light switch and closed the small metal door of an alarm panel, the Sig Sauer in his right hand never wavering from her. “I suppose I could have collared you as soon as you walked in, but it was a real education watching you beat the sensors. Besides, I’ve got a fatal weakness for green-eyed blondes, as I think I might have mentioned to you when your hair was a different color…especially if they’re wearing skintight black instead of baggy sweatshirts and pants.” His tone hardened. “You’re damn good, Swanson. Drop the papers, put your palms flat on the desk and spread your legs as wide as you can.”

“Sorry, I never go that far on a first date,” Dawn said with a cold smile. She shook her head. “I’ve got no quarrel with you, Ash, but believe me when I say if I have to take you down to get out of here with these notes, I will. All you have to decide is whether we’re going to do this the hard way or the easy way.”

“And all you have to decide is whether you want to risk another gunshot wound over a pile of papers that are absolutely worthless to you.” His grin was tight. “Hell, Swanson, did you take me for such a fool that you thought you had the real thing in your hand? The introduction’s the same, but after that it’s all scientific rubbish, cobbled up by the ever-obliging Roger at my request. Even the artistic blood spatters on the first few pages are faked. They’re not yours from the other night, they’re mine, courtesy of a deliberately careless shave the morning after your first robbery attempt. You’ve been set up. Don’t worry, though, you’re in good company. My uncle’s also under the impression that this is where his notes now are. I was counting on him letting the cat out of the bag to you, and it seems I was right.”

“This document’s a fake? You set me up?” Dawn heard her voice rise, but she was powerless to control it. Somewhere deep inside her a volcano seemed to be erupting, its furiously hot lava boiling over and melting the protective ice that had kept her together. She stared at Asher, trying and failing to read him. “You’re lying,” she said in shaky anger. “If these papers were worthless you wouldn’t have bothered with the security system.”

“And you would have waltzed in here, realized it was all too easy and guessed it was a trap,” he replied with a shrug. “The real document’s safely back in the Rose-Jackman in the old man’s study, which makes this a double-bluff, love. I thought you of all people would appreciate the irony of—”

“Without those papers I’m dead, damn you!” As she shouted out the accusation, Dawn hurled the bound pages straight at him. Instinctively he moved as they fluttered by his face, and that was all the advantage she needed.

The bowie knife sliced through the air and shuddered to a twanging halt, its razor-sharp blade gleaming cruelly and the first inch of its tip pinning the skin between Asher’s thumb and index finger to the wall behind him. As his hand spasmed in agony the Sig Sauer fell to the floor and Dawn closed the distance between them to kick it away, pulling Reese’s Beretta from her waistband as she did.

“I need the freakin’ notes, Ash,” she said harshly. “I intend to get them, and I’m taking these as well just in case. But if this really was a trap and these papers are worthless, you wouldn’t have left the real document lying unprotected in a safe I’d already cracked once. Who’s standing guard in Sir William’s study?”

Aqua eyes blazed at her. “You know what I’ve learned to appreciate about Americans?” Destin Asher asked, ignoring her question. His smile was a grimace of pain. “The colorful phrases you come up with for the most ordinary sentiments. Bite me. Now that’s one of my all-time favorites, love.”

His booted foot came up as he snarled out the last word, taking her unawares as his heel smashed the Beretta from her hand. Careless, O’Shaughnessy, Dawn warned herself. Whatever you do, don’t let his free hand get close enough to the handle of the knife to pull it out. But her body was ahead of her thoughts and already she was pivoting to deliver a high sideways kick to his left shoulder.

He feinted out of range, ducked up again and grasped her ankle as she tried to retract her leg. With both hands he used her momentum against her and flipped her backward into the air.

She crashed ignominiously onto her rump and stared up at him in shock. Asher, his right hand dripping blood from where he’d torn it away from the bowie blade, rushed toward her.

“What the hell do you mean, you’re dead without those notes?” he growled as he threw himself at her.

She rolled out of the way at the last minute and had the satisfaction of seeing him wince as his shoulder made violent contact with the corner of the iron desk. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” she grunted, rolling back and slamming a braced elbow into his ribs. She saw his Sig under the desk where it had slid when she’d kicked it from his grasp, and made a dive for it.

“Try me, Swanson.” Just as her fingertips brushed the gun’s grip, she felt him yank her away, his hand securing a hold in the bullet-shredded back of her top. She heard a tearing sound and then she was free. Asher dropped the strip of black fabric he’d been left with and clamped a hand around her left wrist as she stretched full-length on the floor for the Sig again. “Bloody hell, what are you packing in that scabbard you’re wearing, anyway?”

“Nothing, I’m just happy to see you,” Dawn ground out, releasing the button on the wristband she was wearing on her right arm and closing her fingers around the handle of the switchblade as it jumped into her hand. She flipped onto her back and brought the stiletto’s blade to his throat. Asher froze instantly, his face inches from hers.

“You’re a one-woman commando raid, love,” he said in a strained tone, his gaze slanting once at the knife and then meeting hers again. “Swords, knives, guns…and a whole bag of back-alley tricks when the weaponry runs out. It was the truth, wasn’t it?”

She didn’t bother to pretend she didn’t know what he was talking about. “The assassin thing?” she said through gritted teeth. “Yeah, it was the truth. And I’m telling you the truth now when I say that I’d prefer not to kill you if I don’t have to.”

“I don’t know how to break this to you, love, but you’re awfully damn close to killing me right now,” he gasped.

She didn’t allow the blade to shift. “Close only counts in horseshoes, Ash. And grenades,” she added dryly.

Incredibly, he managed a smile. “You don’t have any of those tucked away in a back pock—”

Two things happened at once to prevent him from finishing his sentence. The lights went out, not only in the room but outside in the hallway, Dawn realized as she saw the line of brightness under the door disappear. And from somewhere outside came a quick burst of automatic gunfire.

Slowly she withdrew the blade from the vicinity of Asher’s throat and heard him exhale.

“Not your arrangements?” he asked, his lips so close to her ear that his breath was warm on the nape of her neck. She shook her head in the dark.

“No, not mine,” she said. “But I’m pretty damn sure I know whose arrangements these new developments are…and if I’m right, we’re both in a world of trouble.”

Chapter 14

Status: four days and counting
Time: 1007 hours

Dawn began to get to her feet, but Asher’s tight grip on her arm stopped her. “Wait,” he directed her tersely.

The habit of command might die hard, she thought, but die it would. Circumstances had apparently made them temporary allies, but he needed to understand that she didn’t take orders from him.

“For what, teatime?” She let an edge of impatience shade her tone as she shook off his hand. “If I’m right and we’re under siege by the people I think we are, we’ve got to strike back immed—”

The lights went on again; not to their former level of brightness but with a dim yellow glow that created sickly shadows instead of a clear view of the room. It was better than nothing, Dawn conceded.

“It’s teatime now,” Asher said. He stood and crossed to the desk. Picking up the phone’s receiver, he listened for a second and then set it down. “There’s been a few changes made since you came close to crippling this facility four nights ago, although unfortunately a backup phone system’s not one of them. I gave higher priority to setting up the firewall precautions that now make it impossible to shut down the auxiliary power system when the main one’s tampered with. Anything else you’d like to challenge me on, Swanson?”

He was pulling rank on her, dammit. She gave him an unimpressed look. “You weren’t sure it was going to kick in, were you?”

“My heart was in my mouth,” he answered unhesitatingly. His teeth flashed briefly in the gloom, and she felt her own lips curve reluctantly up in response before she tightened them again.

“Ground rules,” she said sharply. “You cover my back, I’ll cover yours. We hunt in a pack, got it?”

“Not quite.” Asher bent to retrieve his Sig Sauer, but then paused. “Getting my gun, Swanson. Am I going to feel that pigsticker you like throwing so much between my shoulder blades as soon as I turn away?”

“We’re on the same side for now.” She strode to the wall behind the desk and pulled the bowie knife out with a tug. Without thinking, she wiped the tip clean on her pants before thrusting it into the sheath strapped around her thigh. She glanced up to see Asher watching her.

“I’d be more convinced by your offer of solidarity if it weren’t my blood you just cleaned from your knife,” he said dryly. Another short burst of gunfire came from outside and he grabbed up the Sig. “Sorry, Swanson, but I can’t trust you’re not on the side of whoever’s out there trying to take over this place. I’m cuffing you and leaving you here while I—”

“I was on Lab 33’s side once,” she interrupted him impatiently. “Now I think I’m on its hit list—just like you are and just like any of your people who try to stop them will be.”

“Lab 33?” Asher shook his head before she could answer. “Forget it, there’s no time. Just fill me in on the important things, like how many, their level of training and armament, what their objective is.”

“Probably no more than twenty if it’s the usual Lab 33 covert ops force, trained like you wouldn’t friggin’ believe, armed ditto,” Dawn said as she spied the Beretta in a corner and retrieved it. “I was sent here to steal Sir William’s notes on the regeneration process by a certain Aldrich Peters, and my guess is that he’s gotten tired of waiting for results and decided to take a less subtle approach. Since I didn’t deliver, I’m expendable.” She checked her weapon, avoiding Asher’s gaze. “You warned me of just such a contingency, as I recall. I should have given more weight to your advice.”

“You’re not the first to be left twisting in the wind when a superior decides not to back you up. I ignored the warning signs in my own situation, which is why I’m here,” he said curtly. “Right, then. We work as a team for now, Swanson, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to arrest you after this is over, understood?” As he spoke he flung open the door and flattened himself against the wall while she did the same on the other side of the opening. Acting as one they both moved into the doorway at the same time, Dawn crouched slightly down in front of him, her Beretta held in a two-handed grip; Asher behind and above her with his Sig at the ready.

“Try to arrest me, you mean,” she corrected as they moved from doorway to doorway down the hall to the entrance of the building. “I assume we’re heading to Sir William’s study?”

“One of your American bank robbers once said that he robbed banks because that’s where the money was. If your Lab 33 people are after my uncle’s notes, it stands to reason at least some of them are on their way to his room while the rest of them create a diversion.” Asher kept his tone low and raised a cautionary hand as they neared the end of the hall. Swiftly he looked around the corner and jerked his head back.

“Evers and Chase were on security detail at the entrance tonight. They must have been taken out already, damn—”

“By me, not Lab 33,” Dawn said, moving past him. She anticipated his response and forestalled it. “They’re alive, just unconscious in the bushes, okay? Come on, follow my lead.”

She hadn’t really expected him to, she thought without rancor as the two of them raced side by side through the dimly lit foyer and kicked open the doors to the outside, in unison holding back for a moment before rushing the exit and hitting the walkway in twin paratrooper rolls. Like me, he’s probably used to playing a lone hand when he can, she told herself as Asher, showing the same low profile as herself on the other side of the walkway, kept pace with her on their way to the building that housed the lab and civilian quarters. But with a Lab 33 black-ops team as our opposition, right now both of us could use a partner…and although I hate to admit it, Des Asher’s almost as good at this as I am.

“You’re almost on a par with me at broken-cover reconnoitering, Swanson.” Asher had crossed the walkway and was at her side, his whispered words of approbation accompanied by a distracted nod. “We’d better decide on a plan of action before we go in—”

“We see a Lab 33 team member, we kill him. There, now we’ve got a freakin’ plan,” Dawn said in irritation. She took a deep breath and forced a more even tone to her voice. “One thing we should get clear—don’t put yourself in danger for me, Ash. If you can prevent me from taking a bullet at no risk to yourself, be my guest. I don’t like getting shot any more than the next girl, but as you saw the other night, I can take a licking and still go on ticking.”

Her flipness was a cover for her sudden apprehension. The man had some idea of what she was, but there was a big difference between having some idea and knowing for certain. Face it, O’Shaughnessy, no one feels real comfortable around a freak, and that’s what you are—a freak, just like those Lab 33 guards said so long ago, she told herself.

“So I saw what I thought I saw the night I shot you?” His question was tense, and her heart sank. She concealed her reaction with sharpness.

“Your friggin’ bullet blew a hole in me and I healed right up? Yeah, that’s what happened, Ash.” She lifted her shoulders dismissively. “Aldrich Peters manipulated my genes before I was born in order to create a super-assassin, and one of my enhanced abilities is the capacity to regenerate after being wounded. I’m a lab rat…Lab 33’s lab rat, to be exa—”

“Don’t finish that sentence.” Without warning he pulled her toward him, so close that she could see the anger in his eyes. “You’re one hell of a fighter. You’re a risk-taker with nerves of steel, a covert ops expert who doesn’t know the meaning of quitting and a soldier who deserves a better leader than this bastard Peters you mention. You’re the most formidable opponent I’ve gone up against, not to mention the only one I’ve ever wanted to—” He stopped abruptly. Dawn exhaled.

“If you were going to say shag, then the feeling’s mutual,” she said. “It’s been driving me crazy since the first time I—”

He was already bringing his mouth down on hers. Mr. SAS kept shattering her misconceptions about the British, Dawn thought in surprise as she felt his tongue flick impatiently against her vulnerable inner top lip and then move deeper. She’d always thought the English were restrained, but there was nothing restrained about the way Des Asher was kissing her. Come to that, there wasn’t anything remotely restrained about the heat that immediately flared up inside her as she kissed him back, either, she admitted dazedly. Why didn’t we do this sooner, dammit? she asked herself as she felt his hands, hard and urgent, tugging at the zipper on her top and then pushing her bra up. With equal urgency she began unbuttoning his shirt before impatiently tearing it open and letting the tips of her fingernails bite lightly into his chest. It’s not like we haven’t had the opportunity. Hell, the man was actually in my bedroom a few nights-—

She pulled away from him, so suddenly that it took a moment for him to focus. “If you’ve wanted me since we met, how come you walked out on me the other night?” she demanded, yanking up the zipper on her top.

“I walked out because I didn’t fancy being used by you.” His eyes met hers steadily. “I’m not the hearts-and-flowers type any more than you are, love, but I had the faint hope it might mean something if we ever got together. I still have that hope. Am I a bloody fool to hang on to it?”

His directness was disconcerting. She blinked at him, her anger fading. “Probably,” she said quietly. “I’ve lied to you from the start, Ash, but I won’t lie to you about that.”

“Fair enough.” His wry smile belied the sudden shadow that crossed his features. He held her gaze for a heartbeat longer and then looked away, his manner once again coolly professional. “So you can take a bullet and keep going, is that what you’re telling me?”

Dawn nodded, not trusting her voice. Oh, I can heal from a bullet, all right, she told him silently, looking at the strong line of his jaw, the burnt-pewter of his hair against the tan of his skin, the broad strength of his shoulders. What I’m not sure of is how I’m going to get over what I just did. You’re the first man I ever met who’s as tough as me, but who sees past the toughness to the person I am underneath…or the person I might have been if Aldrich Peters and Lab 33 had never existed. And I’ve just warned you not to put your trust in me.

She thrust her thoughts aside with an effort. “Except to the throat,” she said, hoping her tone conveyed nothing of what she’d been feeling. “I can be killed if my air supply’s cut off, so if it takes too long for me to heal up enough to begin drawing in oxygen again, I’m in trouble. But since that’s only happened to me once before, I’m not worried.” She jerked her head at the building in front of them. “I go in low, you go in high?”

“Sounds good,” Ash said as another sharp burst of gunfire erupted from somewhere on the grounds. He half rose and paused, his glance at her unreadable. “You know, one of the lab rats that were so mysteriously released wasn’t found. It got clean away and made it to freedom. You might want to remember that when the time comes to make a decision, love.”

“I’ve already made—” Damn the man, Dawn thought as he swiftly stood and began a zigzag sprint toward the building’s entrance. She overtook him a yard away from the door and dropped into a crouching run as he kicked it open and they burst across the threshold. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a blur of red race over him and then race back to the middle of his chest.

“Five o’clock low!” she barked out, swinging the Beretta in her hand to her right and firing instinctively.

Both Asher’s and her rounds caught the darkly clad figure. The man fell instantly, obviously dead before he hit the floor. Dawn ran over to the body and knelt beside it.

“Thanks for the heads-up, Swanson.” Asher’s smile was brief as he relieved the dead man of his weapon. “You think the bastard realized he got the two-for-one special?”

“Maybe.” She scanned the shadows. “But I doubt he appreciated it. I recognize this shooter, Ash, so my guess was right—this is a Lab 33 operation, courtesy of Dr. Aldrich Peters.” She stood, her expression grim. “The stairs, or cover this floor first?”

“This floor. Then we won’t have to worry about any nasty surprises coming after us when we do get to the next level.”

He made the decision without hesitation, and just as unhesitatingly, Dawn followed his lead down the darkened hallway. This was the kind of situation his SAS experiences had trained him for, she admitted. Whereas she had more often been in the position of melting into the shadows to escape those searching for her, Ash was accustomed to taking the offensive in any search-and-destroy operation. Their talents were different but complementary, she thought with a frown. It was too bad that at some point they would have to go up against each other—

“Bloody hell!”

The reason for his whispered curse was immediately apparent. She shrank back against the wall, just out of sight of the open doorway to the cafeteria, the scene she’d glimpsed making her want to swear, too.

“I counted four gunmen,” she said in a low tone. “Dammit, Ash, they must have rounded up most of the lab staff and herded them in there. Roger…” She swallowed hard. “Roger’s on one of the tables, bleeding from the head.”

“And one of the female techs is lying dead or unconscious over in the far corner of the room.” Asher’s jaw tightened. “Any ideas on how we take out the Lab 33 contingent without risking further civilian casualties?”

“We need a diversion,” she answered slowly. “You provide it here by the entrance, I’ll go in from above.” She saw his momentary puzzlement and nodded upward at the almost-invisible air grate in the ceiling. “The ductwork. By now I know it like the back of my hand. Don’t ask.”

“I don’t want to,” he muttered, locking his fingers together to give her a boost up. “Dammit, that was next on my security to-do list.”

What she’d told him was true, Dawn reflected as she hoisted herself into the shaft, the ductwork was now as familiar to her as if it were her own personal and hidden freeway through the building. But the previous times she’d crawled through it she hadn’t been acutely aware that only a few feet of space separated her from an alert enemy below. Plus those other times you weren’t festooned with enough hardware to sink a battleship, she thought edgily, not to mention wearing a pair of thick-soled combat boots that’ll make a sound like a kettledrum against the metal walls if you put a single step wrong.

Dead ahead was one of the louvered grates that looked directly down into the cafeteria, marked only by the slight lessening of the darkness in the shaft from the half-power lighting coming from the room below. Scrunching forward on her elbows and knees, she maneuvered herself to where she could squint through it and found herself staring straight into the open eyes of Roger, still lying on the table.

There was no way he could see her. His glasses lay shattered on the floor a few feet away, and his eyes were so clouded with pain that she doubted he was even aware of his surroundings. As she watched, she saw his right fist come politely to his mouth, and he gave one of his patented apologetic coughs, this one ending in a spasm of choking.

A terrible anger filled Dawn. “Gonna get you out of there, Rog,” she said in a shaky undertone. “Hang on just a few seconds longer, pal. Me and Ash are going to take down every last mother of those bastards who did this to—”

A sudden burst of gunfire erupted suddenly from the direction of the cafeteria’s entrance. From her vantage point she saw the four Lab 33 guards jerk their weapons away from their captives and toward the doorway, and instantly she acted.

Shoving the grate aside and dropping down into the room, she landed on the table beside a barely conscious Roger and saw a flicker of dull hope cross his features. Then she was focusing her attention on the nearest Lab 33 operative.

He was standing with his back to her, but at the sound of her boots hitting the floor he whirled, bringing his rifle into firing position as he did. Supremely aware of Roger lying behind her in the operative’s line of fire and the frightened group of scientists behind him who could be hit by a stray bullet of hers, Dawn didn’t hesitate.

The bowie knife left her hand as the gunman’s finger began to squeeze his weapon’s trigger. It flashed toward him like a silvery bolt of lightning and found its target before he could get off a single shot.

“Jolly—jolly good, Miss Swanson. It is you, isn’t it?” Roger’s weak voice came from behind her as she placed a booted foot on the operative’s chest and pulled the knife from his chest. Dawn looked swiftly over her shoulder and saw the shy Englishman attempt a smile. “That’s the ticket. Right…right through the murderous heart of that son of a bitch, as you Americans might say…”

A spasm of choking racked him, and a look of apology crossed his face. Then his coughing abruptly ceased and his eyes dimmed in death.

Grief threatened to engulf her. She pushed the wave of emotion away and replaced it with cold determination. A quick glance showed her that Asher had now entered the cafeteria and had taken out another opponent already, but as she looked she saw one of the two remaining gunmen take aim at the SAS man.

This time the Beretta was her weapon of choice, but just as she brought it swiftly up to snap off a shot she felt a burning sensation at the side of her neck, as if some angry hornet had stung her. Ignoring the pain and the sudden trickle of blood, Dawn fired at her target and with savage satisfaction saw him throw his hands into the air as her bullet found its mark. She turned to face the fourth and final Lab 33 operative.

Despite the poor light there was no mistaking Hendrix Kruger’s blunt features. The South African expatriate’s pale blue eyes widened in quick alarm and then he moved more swiftly than she would have guessed he was capable of.

The woman he thrust in front of him as a human shield was one of the British lab techs whom Dawn had noticed during her time undercover as Dawn Swanson, but had never had the opportunity to speak with. Nearly fainting in terror, behind her glasses her mutely beseeching eyes held Dawn’s.

“It is true what the doktor says, then.” Kruger nodded judiciously as he realized she wasn’t about to fire. “Once Lab 33’s top assassin wouldn’t have let such a small thing as a bystander’s death stop her from taking out an enemy. But you have become soft, it seems.”

“I never would have sacrificed a civilian to save my own skin,” she said evenly. “I’m not about to now, either.”

Kruger opened his mouth, but whatever his intended reply would have been, it remained forever unspoken. Asher’s shot was deadly and accurate, and as the South African crashed to the floor, the terrified lab tech took a few stumbling steps and fell into the arms of a group of co-workers.

“Five down,” Asher said curtly as Dawn joined him in the doorway of the cafeteria. He saw her quick assessment of the gaping wound on his shoulder and shook his head. “A stray bullet tore me up a little, but it’s nothing that can’t be stitched together later. From the gunfire we’ve been hearing outside, I’d say there have to be at least ten shooters scattered around the grounds as a diversionary force to keep my people from reaching this building. If your original estimate of twenty is correct, we’re still outnumbered five to two.”

“I’ve been up against worse odds. I imagine you have, too,” Dawn replied with a shrug. She lengthened her stride as they neared the stairs to the second level, suddenly not wanting Asher’s keen awareness on her. “Rog didn’t make it,” she said, her voice sounding too harsh to her own ears. “His death is going to tear your uncle…tear your uncle…”

What the hell was the matter with her throat? she wondered angrily. Had Kruger’s badly aimed bullet nicked some vital cord necessary for speech? Because try as she might, she couldn’t get the rest of her sentence past the odd-feeling swelling that seemed to be blocking her voice.

“I’m sorry, love.” Asher’s grip on her arm brought her to a halt as they reached the top of the stairs. “He’d become a friend, hadn’t he? Don’t try to talk about it right now while it’s still so painful, but later if you want a shoulder to—”

Dawn wrenched her arm from his grip. “A shoulder to cry on, Ash? Give me a freakin’ break! I mean—” she made an all-encompassing gesture at herself “—look at me! Guns, knives—I’m not exactly the girlie-girl type who falls to pieces over every little thing, dammit. Rog was a nice enough guy and he didn’t deserve to die, but any friendship you thought I had with him was all part of my cover…just like the relationship I cultivated with Sir William and just like the one I tried to cultivate with you.”

“Is that what you tell yourself?” His smile was tight. “Not true. You’re no lab rat, you’re part of the human race, and you’ve got all the emotions the rest of us poor mortals have. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, whatever that bastard Peters may have tried to make you believe. Like I said, you’re going to have to make a decision at some point, but for your own sake, know who you really are before you make it.”

“I do.” She kept her voice low and jerked her head in the direction of Sir William’s door, now only yards away. “I’m a woman who’s itching to take out some Lab 33 thugs, with or without your help. Any friendlies in your uncle’s study besides the old man himself?”

He kept his attention on her. “I posted Keifer and Reese to guard his research. My uncle and my men, Swanson—so before we make our move I need to know how far you’ll go to get those notes for yourself.”

It took a second for her to understand what he meant. When she did, outrage filled her. “You’re asking me if I’d let you help me take out Peters’s men and then turn my gun on you and your people?”

“You said without that research you’re dead,” he reminded her in a tense whisper. “I have to assume that means you hope there’s still a chance you can deliver on your contract with Aldrich Peters and have him rescind the shoot-to-kill order he’s put out on you.”

“Dammit, I—” He’s got every right to ask the question, O’Shaughnessy, Dawn thought suddenly. A few minutes ago you told him not to trust you…and he shouldn’t. But at least you can set his mind at ease on this particular point.

“A man named Lee Craig taught me everything I know, Ash,” she said quietly. “He was an assassin and a liar and if he hadn’t been killed I would have had to take him down myself. But he lived by his own code, and for what it’s worth he passed that code on to me. I won’t betray an ally. Your men and your uncle are in no danger from me.”

“Your word as a geeky lab tech?” He gave her a wry smile and she felt some of the tension ease from her.

“May I be forced to hold my hand over a Bunsen burner flame if I’m lying,” she said with mock solemnity. She took a deep breath. “Ready?”

“As I’ll ever be,” he said, his smile thinning. “Let’s party, Swanson.”

They hit the door running, and without its security system in place it burst open instantaneously. Dawn got a split-second glimpse of the scene and threw herself into a roll, dimly aware that beside her Asher had done the same. They came up firing, each on opposite corners of the room, each choosing the nearest targets. She felt a searing pain claw its way through her right arm. Wincing, she tossed the Beretta into her left.

She’d been wounded, but she would heal, she thought as she aimed with cold deliberation at the black-clad operative who spun around from the open safe and began to bring his rifle into firing position. She didn’t know if she could say as much for Reese, whose prone body was lying half under the desk, and she was almost certain that wasn’t the case with Keifer. Ash’s friend looked more dead than alive. Her quick assessment of the scene as she’d entered had shown her Sir William as being the only non Lab 33 member unharmed, although from the pallor of his face as he strained against the gag stuffed into his mouth and the cords binding him to the chair behind his desk, his health situation could become critical at any moment.

The man in front of the safe was one she’d seen dozens of times in the underground corridors of Lab 33. His eyes widened in brief recognition. “You bitch, O’Shaughnessy!” he snarled as he began to pull the trigger of his assault rifle. “This is my lucky—”

“Day?” she suggested as her bullet smashed into him, driving him back against the open safe. He slid sideways along the wall, leaving a smear of crimson, before tumbling to the carpet.

“Two and two.” Asher’s voice was ice, but its coldness wasn’t directed at her. His angry glance swept over the bodies of the two men he’d eliminated, and then to Dawn’s lifeless opponents. “Our estimate was off by one. Too bad.”

She nodded, already on her way to Sir William. “I know. It wouldn’t have caused me any sleepless nights either if I’d been able to take down a few more of those bastards. And it sounds as if the situation outside is under control, too.” She squatted down by the old scientist’s chair. “Check on your men, Ash,” she said quietly. “I’ll take care of your uncle.”

Taking the gag off was her first priority, she realized, alarmed by the way Sir William’s eyes were bulging desperately at her. It was some kind of tough nylon material, so instead of trying to untie the knot she used the stiletto.

“Now for your hands and ankles,” she said as Sir William’s mouth worked soundlessly. “Don’t worry, your saliva’s just dried up, sir. Give yourself a minute to recover before you try to—”

“Watch out!” Sir William shouted hoarsely.

Dawn reached swiftly for the Beretta, lying on the floor beside her where she’d placed it. As her hand closed around it she saw a red pinpoint of light race up her arm, across her chest, and then up higher where she couldn’t see it…to the one vulnerable area on her body.

Fear tore through her. About to roll out of the line of fire, she saw that her only available option would place her directly in front of Sir William and put him in danger. Desperately she tried to see where the shooter had hidden himself, but as she glimpsed the barrel of a rifle protruding from behind the velvet drapes at the window, she knew her time had run out.

An unseen finger pulled an unseen trigger. A flash of muzzle fire lit up the dim room. And the round that had been fired caught SAS Captain Destin Asher as he made a flying leap to cover her.

“No!” Dawn was barely aware that she’d screamed out the denial. Asher crashed to the floor in front of her, but already she was on her feet and firing at the Lab 33 operative who had stepped forward from the curtains and was aiming at her. “You bastard, you killed my partner!”

Afterward, she never could recall exactly which of her shots took him down. She didn’t remember standing over him, firing the last of the Beretta’s fifteen rounds and then continuing to pull the trigger on an empty chamber. But at Sir William’s gentle reprimand, she came to, as if she had been shaken roughly from a nightmare.

“That’s enough, my dear. He’s dead. And we have men here to save.” She turned a blank stare toward the old scientist and saw him rise with difficulty from Ash’s body. His bushy eyebrows drew together in a scowl, but his faded blue eyes were bright with moisture. “My nephew’s badly wounded, but he’ll survive if he gets medical attention right away. So will Private Reese, although if Lieutenant Keifer pulls through it will be a miracle, I’m afraid,” he said heavily. “I’ll phone down to the infirmary.”

“The phones aren’t—” Dawn closed her mouth as Sir William began speaking into the receiver of the obviously now working instrument. She looked down at Asher.

Beneath his tan his skin was a muddy-gray, and under the hastily tied strip of cloth Sir William had used to stanch the wound seeped a dark flow of blood. But his eyes were open and he was watching her. “One…one of them called you O’Shaughnessy,” he rasped with difficulty. “It was good fighting alongside you, O’Shaughnessy. Think we might do it again sometime?”

Swiftly she bent down and touched her lips to his. She straightened and shook her head. “I don’t think so, Ash. You risked your life for me, and I’ll never forget that. But if I stuck around you’d just have to arrest me, and I can’t let that happen.” A few feet away from him on the floor was a familiar sheaf of papers. She walked over and picked them up, tucking them inside her top, before striding to the doorway.

“The truce between us is over,” she said tonelessly. “If we ever meet again, we won’t be fighting side by side, we’ll be fighting to the death against each other.”

Chapter 15

Status: nine hours fifty-eight minutes and counting
Time: 1402 hours

“I made an error in judgment, Dawn.” A trace of annoyance crossed Aldrich Peters’s aquiline features. “As I told you when you delivered London’s notes to me three days ago, I was wrong to doubt that you would accomplish your mission and doubly wrong to suspect you might have turned against Lab 33. But now that my people have come up with the serum that will save your life, we should look to the future, not the past.”

“Agreed, Doctor.” Dawn nodded curtly at a passing Lab 33 guard clad in the familiar gray-and-red uniform, noting the fear that darted in his hastily averted eyes. “But I can hardly look to the future if I don’t have one, and after what happened at Sir William’s lab I see that as a very real possibility. I’ve been talking with Drs. Sobie and Wang, and they tell me that the serum has no effect on an ordinary human being. That being the case, I took the precaution of setting up a blind control situation.”

Peters frowned. “I don’t understand.”

In front of them the hallway came to an abrupt halt at a pair of steel doors. She glanced upward at the electronic lens positioned there, pretended to hesitate just long enough for her retinas to be scanned, and then stood aside to let Aldrich Peters precede her through. The doors closed behind her as she and Lab 33’s director entered the extensive laboratory facilities of the complex.

“Carter’s going to be taking the serum at the same time I do. The hypos will be filled from the same sealed vial, and I’ll choose which one I get and which one’s injected into the director of your Identities Department. I think that’s fair, don’t you, Doctor?”

This was the moment of truth, Dawn thought, watching Peters’s reaction. Carter was too valuable an asset for Peters to gamble away. If his chilly gray gaze showed even a flicker of hesitation she would know that his plan to have her killed hadn’t been discarded but merely revised.

“To everyone but young Carter.” He sounded unperturbed, and she let out a breath she hadn’t been aware of holding. “If you believe there’s a chance I’ve given orders for you to be injected with a poison instead of a lifesaving compound, your paranoia doesn’t bode well for our relationship, Dawn.”

“See, I would have said that your attempted hit on me had taken care of the ‘not boding well’ thing already,” she drawled. “Like Uncle Lee used to say, it’s not paranoia if they’re really trying to kill you. Do we do it my way or not?”

It really wasn’t fair to Carter, Dawn thought a few minutes later as she and Peters entered the procedure room. Large and spotlessly gleaming, its walls and floors were of white tile and a bank of high-intensity lights flooded out even the faintest of shadows. Near the high ceiling a barrier replaced the white tile, and behind it she could see what looked like the full contingent of Lab 33’s scientific team, obviously gathered there to witness the procedure that would take place below. Behind a glass partition stood two stainless-steel gurneys. Strapped to one of them was the skateboarding head of the Identities Department.

Of course, if Carter for whatever reason had deliberately failed to reveal to her the fact that her partial thumbprint was on Interpol’s files, he deserved everything that was about to happen to him, she thought coldly as Peters conferred with Dr. Wang and Dr. Sobie. And although neither he nor Peters knew it, getting a harmless injection would be the least of his problems today.

Her phone call to Kayla Ryan three nights ago had been brief and to the point. “Tell your people that Lab 33 goes down in seventy-nine hours exactly,” she’d said tersely. “That’ll be just after nine, three nights from today. I’m on my way back there now and I’ll make sure that all the arrangements we agreed upon are in place for you and the authorities.”

“Slow down.” Kayla’s tone had held a burr of sleepiness, but her next words had proved she was anything but fuzzy minded. “What’s the matter? You sound like—” She’d given an uncertain little laugh. “Well, if you were anyone else I’d say you sound like you’ve been crying.”

Anger and doubt had warred in Dawn. Could Kayla and the others really have betrayed her? It just didn’t feel right, not when they’d obviously cared so much for her biological mother. Not when they’d tried so hard to find Dawn and her sisters. But she couldn’t take any chances now. “What you hear in my voice might be urgency—I’ve broken into a gas station and I’m using its phone to report in to you as I promised I would. When the Cassandras and their backup forces storm Lab 33 they’ll have no problem with the facility’s air locks and retinal scans—I’ll have disabled everything a few hours before. Having doors opening for them won’t alert the suspicions of Lab 33’s staff and guards, of course, because that’s what should happen. They’ll assume their retinas have been scanned or they punched in the right code for a lock. But the doors will open no matter who’s trying to get access, understand?”

“I understand.” All trace of sleepiness in Kayla’s voice had disappeared, but the caring tone remained. “Just remember, you aren’t in this alone any more. You’ve got allies.”

You don’t want to be my ally, Ryan, believe me. The last one I had ended up hating me. Clutching the receiver to her ear, Dawn had closed her eyes, trying to shut out the scene that had been replaying itself in her mind ever since she’d walked away from Asher: the disbelief in his eyes, the pain that had tightened his features, the coldness that had replaced all other expressions just before he’d lost consciousness and she’d slipped out the door while Sir William was still on the phone. Had there been another way to handle the situation? You know there wasn’t, she thought bleakly, not without revealing who and what you are to too many people…and in the process, revealing that Faith and Lynn are equal candidates for the kind of research that some shadowy government department would want to conduct on the three of you if your secret got out. If the price you have to pay to keep that secret to yourself is making the man who saved your life wish he’d let you die, then you’ll just have to pay it.

She took a deep breath, realizing she’d come dangerously close to saying something she might regret. “Sorry if I sound abrupt. It’s just that I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately, trying to work through that healing you said I needed to do. I still have mixed feelings about Lee Craig and sometimes I blame the Cassandras for the fact that I never had the chance to confront him with his lies. It’s silly, I know, but…” She’d let her voice trail off and had given a thin smile as Kayla had fallen for the bait.

“It’s not silly at all.” Kayla’s words had been sympathetic—falsely sympathetic? “And you’re right, it’s partly the fault of the Cassandras. Instead of giving you time to come to terms with the bombshell we dropped on you last December, we asked for your help in finding your sisters.”

“Lynn and Faith are going to be part of the raid, aren’t they?” Dawn spoke sharply, her edginess based on sudden fear. “I mean—” she tried to soften her tone “—if anyone deserves to be there when Aldrich Peters has to face the music, it’s them. He tampered with their lives, too.” Lynn’s super agility and computer knowledge and Faith’s extrasensory skills would be helpful.

But what’s more important, I’m going to have to tell them what’s happening to their genes and give them the reversal serum soon after they arrive, she thought worriedly. I hate leaving it to the eleventh hour like that, but I can’t confirm the Cassandras’ suspicions about my vulnerability by revealing that my sisters are facing a genetic crisis, too—not if Sam St. John is really trying to take me out.

“You couldn’t keep them away,” Kayla answered. “They both want to do their bit to bring down Lab 33. They told me if I was talking to you to send you their love, by the way.”

Her grip on the phone had tightened. “They’re doing well?”

“They’re doing fine.” There had been faint puzzlement in Ryan’s voice. “Why wouldn’t they be?”

“No reason, just sisterly concern.” Relief had flooded her at the knowledge that Lynn and Faith obviously hadn’t been suffering the debilitating symptoms she had. “I’d better ring off now, Kayla. As it is, Aldrich Peters is going to have some questions for me when I reach Lab 33, and I don’t want to arouse his suspicions any more than I have to.”

“I understand.” Kayla had hesitated. “Or maybe I don’t. You never did tell me what this last hush-hush mission for him was all about, just that you needed to complete it for your own reasons. One day you’ll have to fill me in on all the exciting details.”

She’d nearly lost it at that point, Dawn thought now as she waited for Peters to finish giving his instructions to the doctors. Either Ryan’s a way better actress than I would have thought, or the Cassandras haven’t betrayed me. If the pieces didn’t fit together so perfectly, I wouldn’t consider that the Cassandras could be behind the assassination attempt on me.

But the pieces did fit, not merely because the assassin had known her real name, had known her location and had been aware of her enhanced abilities, but that a professional-style execution had been attempted. That could point to Lab 33, but it could also point to the Cassandras.

The organization she’d given her life to had betrayed her—but could these special women truly be her enemies?

As Peters turned from the doctors and began walking toward her, Dawn reflected on the irony of one thing she was sure of—the one man who’d had no reason at all to take her side had risked his life for her safety.

“I’ve explained your decision to Dr. Wang and Dr. Sobie,” Aldrich said crisply as he rejoined her. “Being medical people, they’re not happy that you’re taking your treatment into your own hands, so to speak, but they confirm what you told me about the serum being harmless to young Mr. Johnson. We’ll do it your way, Dawn.”

“I’d like the room cleared. I’d also like a few moments alone with Carter to reassure him, so I’ll be turning off the speakers to the gallery until I actually begin the procedure,” she answered, with an effort submerging her thoughts of Asher and focusing her full attention on her immediate situation. “If you could close the door behind you as you and the others leave, Doctor?”

Her attitude was close to insubordinate and from Peters’s quick frown as he exited, Dawn knew he was irritated by it. She didn’t care. Her time at Lab 33 would be coming to an end within hours.

Her back to the watchers in the gallery, she approached the console that controlled the lighting, temperature and speakers for the room. With a swift twist of her hand she wrenched the speaker knob completely off, and then proceeded briskly to the glassed-in cubicle where the two gurneys, only one of them as yet occupied, waited.

“Dawn! What the hell’s going on?” Carter’s usually laid-back manner was nowhere in evidence. His voice rose higher, cracking nervously. “A couple of no-neck goons escorted me from my office, told me they’re acting on the boss man’s orders, and the next thing I know I’m being strapped down like a guinea pig. Get me out of here!”

“The guards weren’t acting on Dr. Peters’s orders, they were acting on mine.” Walking over to the nearby steel instrument table, Dawn felt an all-too-familiar stab of pain in her temples. She fought it back. The headaches had been coming with increasing frequency these past few days, but soon they would be a thing of the past. “He’s now approved my decision, however. Tell me, Carter, why didn’t you let me know my prints were on file with Interpol before I left on my last mission?”

As she spoke she picked up the membrane-sealed vial of serum lying on the table. She held it up to the light and then reached for one of the two hypodermic needles that had been laid out.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Carter’s denial was too swift. “Dawn, babe, tell me you’re not thinking of using that thing on me.”

Piercing the vial’s membrane with the needle’s tip, carefully she drew the plunger back until the hypodermic’s barrel was filled with the colorless liquid. Dr. Sobie had informed her that most of the mixture was a mild sedative, prepared that way so she would be totally relaxed while the serum did its work. Knowing that her mental defenses would be lowered for several hours had worried her until she’d hit upon the idea of disabling the sound system. It wasn’t a perfect solution; there was still a chance that Peters would actually enter the chamber and take the opportunity to ask a few pointed questions to which she might mumble an answer, but at least it eliminated the possibility of a half-asleep murmur being relayed to the gallery and giving her away.

As an added bonus, their privacy right now meant she could grill Carter.

She turned to him, her eyes on the tiny stream of liquid that spurted from the needle’s tip as she checked for air bubbles. “You did it for money, of course. You’ll do anything for money, Johnson—even work here. Who paid you to send me out with a flawed cover story?”

“I swear I didn’t know about the prints being on file, Dawn!” As the hypo drew closer to his strapped-down arm, his eyes fixed on hers with hysterical intensity. “You’ve got to believe me! I sent you out squeaky clean, and if someone later accessed my system and dirtied your file, I had nothing to do with it! He was just a voice on the phone and an envelope of money left on my desk afterward, dammit—I don’t even know who he was! I don’t deserve to be killed for walking away from my computer for half an hour, do I?”

Dawn stared at him. Weak defiance struggled with terror on his face, and the terror won. He really was despicable, she thought in disgust. He’d sold her out, and now he was justifying his actions by telling himself he’d had no option but to—

Her thoughts came to a halt. She focused on the hypo in her hand and revulsion washed over her. How different was she from Carter? For that matter, how different was she from anyone in this place, Aldrich Peters included? In front of her was a terrified man strapped to a gurney, who was convinced she was about to give him a lethal injection. She’d encouraged his erroneous belief so she could get the information she’d needed from him.

And that information had come just in time to stop her from making a terrible mistake. The voice on Carter’s phone had been male, not female. Not one of the Cassandras—it had to be one of Peters’s assassins.

“No, Carter, you don’t deserve to be killed,” she said, her voice not entirely even. “You probably deserve to be put in prison for the other things you’ve done, but if you’ll take my advice you might even escape that.” She set down the hypodermic, noting as she did that her fingers were trembling slightly, and began unbuckling the straps that held him to the gurney. “Aldrich is going to want to know why I didn’t give you the serum. Tell him that the mere fact he agreed to my demand convinced me he hadn’t set me up. Then go get your freakin’ skateboard, tell the guards at the gate you’ll be back in a few hours, and put as much distance between you and Lab 33 as you can. This particular gravy train’s about to be derailed.”

Despite his irritating mannerisms, Carter was no fool. He took one look at her eyes and nodded. “Okay,” he said slowly. “But why are you telling me? And what’s to stop me from telling Peters?”

“I’m telling you because I owe you—not only for what I just did, but for the information you just gave me. It was more important than you’ll ever know,” Dawn said. She undid the last strap and stood back from the gurney with a shrug. “And you won’t tell Peters because if you do I’ll hunt you down and kill you. Understand?”

“Totally.” Hastily Carter hopped down from the gurney. At the doorway he paused and looked back at her, some of his former insouciance already visible again in his grin. “Hey, Dawn—what you said about this gravy train? No problemo, I’ll just hitch myself a ride on another one. People like Peters are always looking for smart young employees like yours truly. Stay cool, babe.”

The Cassandras would be furious when they learned she’d given him a Get Out of Jail Free card, Dawn thought as she hoisted herself onto the second gurney and lay back, the lights above her bright enough that she saw nothing of the onlookers in the gallery above. And that wouldn’t be all they’d be furious about. Ryan, for one, would find it hard to forgive her for believing that the Cassandras could have assigned Samantha St. John to assassinate her.

But whatever it takes, I’m going to make it right with her, she told herself as she reached for the serum-filled hypo on the table beside the gurney. Kayla is a girlfriend worth keeping, and except for my sisters, I haven’t had the opportunity to make many of those.

She felt the sharp sting of the lifesaving serum as it entered her bloodstream, and almost immediately a drowsy lassitude began to overtake her, but her thoughts continued. Maybe Kayla or one of the Cassandras could find a job for her in the legit spy world. She would be a hunter, yes, but no longer a predator. It was possible she might even have a real life with friends, a home that wasn’t a laboratory, maybe a romantic interest at some point.

Asher. She would go back to him after this was all over and explain everything to him, she decided groggily. Odds were he would tell her to go to hell, but she would try anyway. Fighting alongside him felt right, and kissing him felt fabulous, she told herself with a slight smile. Maybe we really do have a chance at that future he was talking about. Once I eliminate that bastard Peters I’ll be able to—

The headache that had been growing all day suddenly exploded through her brain. Every nerve ending in her body seemed suddenly on fire. A tidal wave of pain towered over her, crashed down on her and gathered itself for a second agonizing assault, and then a third.

She could survive this, Dawn thought desperately. Soon the serum would begin working and she would never have to go through this again. The headaches would disappear for good, her symptoms would vanish forever, and she could begin deciding what she would do with the rest of her life.

Because her foolish dreams of a moment ago would never become reality. She’d forgotten one important detail.

Once she’d assassinated Aldrich Peters she would be a woman on the run. The Cassandras would have nothing to do with her, and Asher, if he ever met up with her again, would have no option but to turn her over to the authorities.

She would get the payback she’d wanted for so long…and she would lose everything else.

Chapter 16

Status: three hours fifteen minutes and counting
Time: 2045 hours

She was still unconscious. It felt as if her eyes had flown suddenly open, but they couldn’t have, Dawn thought hazily. Darkness surrounded her—the darkness of oblivion, the darkness of unconsciousness, so she was still under the influence of the heavy sedative that had accompanied the serum. Drs. Wang and Sobie had obviously lied about its strength.

“They work for Peters, so you should have expected them to, O’Shaughnessy.” She frowned as she felt her lips move and heard her voice—slurred but definitely her own. She couldn’t be totally out of it if she could speak. But then why couldn’t she make out the slightest glimmer of the harsh lighting that was suspended above her or the blank whiteness of the walls around her? She tried to raise her hand and felt it lift into the air.

Glowing green numbers came into her line of sight.

She shot bolt upright, panic sluicing through her as she focused her still-blurred vision on the luminous readout of her watch. What time was it? What time was it?

Eight forty-six p.m. The Cassandras hadn’t stormed Lab 33 yet. She half fell, half boosted herself off the gurney and collapsed in a heap on the floor, her legs rubbery. Feeling around in the dark for the edge of the steel table, she hauled herself upright, her mind racing.

She’d told Kayla to commence the raid at nine sharp. Ryan and the rest of the Cassandras were professionals; there was no way they would shave fifteen minutes off the agreed-upon time, so the pitch-blackness all around her wasn’t the result of either their attack or Lab 33’s response to it, and neither was the fact that she was all alone in a deserted operating room that should have been filled with doctors and scientists.

Only one man could have put her in her current situation, and that man was Aldrich Peters. But why, dammit?

Her coordination was still as bad as if she’d spent the past seven hours tossing back Cosmopolitans instead of lying motionless on a gurney. She lurched away from the steel table, banged her hip on the console that held the speaker and temperature controls, and slammed her face into something hard and invisible. It was the glass door of the cubicle, she realized, wincing and rubbing her forehead. She found the door handle, turned it and stumbled into the main part of the room, her head tender where she’d hit it. She took two more steps and then came to a sudden stop.

Her hours-long unconsciousness had come as a release from the unendurable pain she’d been going through. Now that pain was totally gone, and for the first time in days she wasn’t experiencing even the tiniest throbbing that signaled it was lurking somewhere at the back of her brain, ready to strike. The serum had worked. The degeneration of her genes had not only been halted, it had been reversed.

She fell again to her knees, but this time it was thankfulness that robbed her legs of strength. Her death warrant had been canceled…and as soon as Faith and Lynn arrived she would be able to cancel theirs, too.

Determination forced her to her feet again and propelled her unsteadily across the room. She reached the door, felt for the light switch, flipped it on.

Instantly her world went from blackness to blinding brilliance—white walls, white-tiled floor, the glittering steel of tables and gurneys. Shielding her eyes against the sudden light, she hurried back to the glassed-in cubicle, but stopped on the threshold in sudden disbelief.

There was nothing on the table—no hypos, no vials, no sign of the precious serum that had been there earlier. Everything had been removed. Everyone had gone. She had been left here alone like a rat in a trap.

“Which is exactly what this is!” Hastening back to the main doors, Dawn automatically glanced upward for her retinas to be scanned and then remembered it wasn’t necessary. They opened in front of her and she strode unsteadily through them into the hallway, her anger growing. “Even if I don’t understand what’s behind all this, I know a freakin’ trap when I see one. But whatever Peters has planned, he’s not going to live long enough to see it through, damn him. It’s going to be a pleasure to watch that bastard—”

The scream that tore from her throat overrode the rest of her sentence. Instantly her palms pressed to her temples in an instinctive but vain attempt to contain the agony that was shooting through her. The pain subsided for a moment and then came back stronger.

“All…a lie!” Her words came out thickly. She took a few staggering steps and fell to her hands and knees, dimly aware but past caring that a couple of Lab 33 guards were hastening down the corridor toward her. “I didn’t get the serum…he never intended for me to get—”

“It’s Dawn O’Shaughnessy, for God’s sake.” All she could see were the guards’ boots planted in front of her, but she could hear the apprehension in the voice of the one who had spoken. Revulsion was in the second guard’s voice.

“It’s the freak, you mean. What the hell’s the matter with her, it looks like she’s having some kind of fit. Hey, O’Shaughnessy!” A pair of fingers snapped in front of her face. “O’Shaughnessy, can you hear me?” The fingers disappeared and as if from a great distance away Dawn heard coarse laughter. “Totally gone, can you believe it? If a guy ever wondered what it would be like taking a hack at that prime piece, now would be the time. I’m thinkin’ that empty storage room by the elevators. You game, Lewinsky?”

“Why the hell not? I always thought she had it coming to—”

“Bad…mistake, boys.” She could move despite the pain, Dawn found as she got to her feet. She swayed, caught her balance, felt rage give her strength. “Even on my worst day…more than a match for you…” For a moment her head cleared. She smashed her fist into the first guard’s face and then whirled in time for her forearm to slam against the second man’s windpipe. He went down clutching his throat, his eyes bulging, and she turned her attention back to the first guard as he grabbed for the pistol on his hip. Her hand came down like a blade on the back of his neck, and even before his knees hit the floor she was behind him, her grip tight on either side of his jawline.

“One quick twist and you’re dead,” she grated as the pain inside her head intensified. “It’s what I was trained to do, do you understand…what I am!”

“Not anymore.” The arid tones of Aldrich Peters came from the end of the hallway. Looking quickly up from the man whose life she held between her hands, Dawn saw Peters set down a briefcase and reach into the pocket of his suit jacket. “The assassin you once were wouldn’t have hesitated to kill scum like that.”

His hand came out of his pocket. He raised it and fired the gun he was holding. The guard kneeling in front of her gave a violent spasm and then slumped sideways to the floor. Peters fired again and the guard who had been clutching his throat kicked once and went still. The Lab 33 director dropped the gun into his pocket again and picked up the briefcase.

“You see?” he said with an austere smile. “You’re not even worth the price of a bullet to me anymore, Dawn. You should have done yourself a favor and stayed unconscious a little longer.”

“The serum.” The hallway lights felt like knives stabbing at her eyes as she took a dizzy step toward him. “You lied to me! You said I would receive the serum, damn you, and then you left me to die!”

“What are you experiencing right now?” He sounded genuinely curious. “Wang and Sobie predicted excruciating headaches, maybe nausea. Were they right?”

Leaning against the wall for support, she ignored his question. “You know I need it to live, Doctor. Where is it?”

Peters looked disgusted. “Right here.” He patted the briefcase. “Please don’t insist on playing out this little farce to the bitter end, Dawn. I knew within days of your making contact with them that you’d aligned yourself with my enemies, and when you returned to Lab 33 professing your continued loyalty it was all I could do not to give the order to have you eliminated right there and then. But with or without your help my days at Lab 33 were coming to an end, thanks to the women of Athena Academy. Rainy Miller’s dearest friends. I saw a way I could use you, and by so doing insure my retirement fund received one final influx of cash.” He checked his watch before turning his cold expression once more her way. “You might be interested to know that the old man’s research created quite a heated bidding war between the parties I offered it to. It’s amazing the sums some of those groups of wild-eyed true believers can scrape up.”

“You sold the regeneration research to terrorists?” Again the pain behind her eyes rose to a crescendo, nearly causing her to lose her balance. “Sir William said that as the formula is now, it could change the way a normal human’s body heals after accident or illness. After a few years of accelerated testing your clients might well find a way to insure that every killer they send out is virtually invincible, dammit!”

“That’s not my concern.” Again Peters glanced at his watch. “The time, however, is. It’s nine o’clock, and according to the tap we put on that gas station telephone—one of several we installed along the route I knew you would have to take from London’s research facility—your friends should be arriving just about—”

A muffled explosion from some far area of the complex cut across the rest of his sentence. Aldrich’s eyebrows lifted fractionally. “Such militarily precise timing could only be Captain Asher’s doing. You did know that the Athenas contacted him to lend support to this mission, didn’t you? My sources tell me that your sisters went to see him in the hospital where he was being treated for the wounds he received during the action at London’s lab three nights ago. It seems he recovered far more quickly than expected. They asked him personally to join this fight.”

“If you know about Lynn and Faith then you know I want the serum as much for them as for myself, Doctor—and you also know I’ve been told the truth about my origins and theirs.” Dawn’s voice was flat with hatred. “You’ve torn our lives apart from the moment we were conceived, but I won’t allow you to destroy us anymore.”

“I don’t think you can stop me. I intend to walk out of here by an underground escape route that no one knows about but myself, and in your condition, there’s really nothing you can do about that.”

As briskly as a man heading for a business meeting, Peters turned on his heel and began heading down the hall, briefcase in hand. She willed her legs to stumble after him, but try as she might she couldn’t catch up before he turned down one of the smaller corridors branching from the main hallway. Her weakness wasn’t merely a by-product of the sedation, Dawn thought desperately, it had to be a precursor of the final stages of her symptoms. Aldrich is right, she told herself with grim determination. In this condition I probably shouldn’t even be capable of walking, let alone stopping him. But there’s one factor he hasn’t taken into consideration: how much I need to avenge myself on him. If I have to crawl through hell on my hands and knees to kill him, dammit, I’ll make myself do it. Pain lancing sharply through her head, she staggered into the smaller corridor, only to come to a halt.

It was a blind alley. No more than six or seven feet in length, it ended at a smoothly plastered wall. And it was empty.

During the past minutes the sounds of fighting had been coming closer, level by level. The shaft of the elevator was a perfect conduit for the shouts and gunfire that signaled the descent of the battle from the main entrance floor where the Cassandras and their FBI SWAT team would have gained access, down to the level directly above her. Now Dawn heard booted feet running down the hall she’d just been in and caught a glimpse of a cadre of Lab 33 guards speeding by, their weapons at the ready. In a few moments she would be caught in the middle of a pitched battle, she realized tensely. Peters hadn’t vanished into thin air—there had to be an exit from this odd cul-de-sac.

She felt the walls for any impression, any secret release mechanism. Nothing. Quickly she dropped to her knees and ran her hands over the carpeted floor. Her fingers found what she had been looking for: an almost-imperceptible division in the shape of a square sliced into the carpet’s short pile. She yanked on the fibers and the square lifted up to reveal a twisting set of stairs crudely cut into bare rock.

At any other time she would have dropped instantly into the opening, pulled the trapdoor closed above her and run down the stone steps after her quarry, but with her limbs feeling like lead and her vision blurring from the pain in her head, it took her precious minutes to make her shaky way down to level ground. Although level underground was a more appropriate term, she thought as she stared around her. All of Lab 33 was built below the surface of the arid and desolate area of New Mexican desert in which it was located, but this was even more subterranean than the rest of the complex. Despite the desert terrain above, it was dankly damp here, the tunnel she was in lit by sporadic bare bulbs strung along the ceiling.

“If I’m right, this eventually comes out on the far side of the canyon that’s beside the main entrance to Lab 33. Peters must have built this as an escape route if the time ever came that he needed one,” she said, anger giving her the strength to make her way along the tunnel. “But he never bothered to inform anyone else.”

From up ahead came the sound of a heavy door closing. Dawn clapped her hands to her ears as the noise echoed through her already pounding head, but she forced herself to go on. A second door slammed just as the first one came into view, and a fierce joy temporarily overrode her pain.

Her final target was almost within reach. Everything else—the battle raging through Lab 33, the Cassandras and her sisters, even the serum itself—was suddenly swept aside by the hatred that surged through her.

She wrenched open the door and stumbled through it into darkness. As it swung heavily shut behind her, she realized she was wading through shallow water and, disoriented, she moved forward, but instead of the rough rock that the rest of the tunnel had been carved from, her feet slid on a smoothly unstable surface. She banged into what felt like a glass wall.

A brilliant bank of lights above her went on, illuminating the glass walls of the cube that surrounded her. Aldrich Peters stood on the other side of the sealed glass door ahead of her.

She looked upward just as the first icy jets of water began spurting from the massive stainless-steel head above her.

“Do you understand now, Dawn?”

Swinging her gaze back to Peters, she saw he was watching her. His voice seemed to be coming from one of the top corners of the glass cube, but she didn’t bother to look. It was apparent there was some system that allowed an onlooker outside to communicate with whoever was in the glass cube, and presumably vice versa.

“That this is a trap? Yes, Doctor, I see that,” she said. “And one built just for this particular rat, am I right?”

“It’s been tested on others, but yes, it was built for you. Since the only sure way of killing you is by cutting off your supply of oxygen, drowning you has always seemed the most decisive method of eliminating you,” acknowledged the man standing on the other side of the thick glass. “Even as a child you showed frightening promise of the powers you would grow into…and even more frightening signs that you might one day reject Lab 33 and all it stood for and begin thinking for yourself. Your doctors at the time concluded that if that happened, there would be two people most at risk from you. One of those people was myself, of course.”

“And the other was Craig,” finished Dawn. The water had risen to her calves by now, and surreptitiously she glanced at the corners of the chamber where the glass walls met, hoping to discern some weakness. She had vowed she would take Peters down if it was the last thing she did, and she intended to keep that vow. There had to be some way she could escape, dammit.

“Don’t waste your final minutes.” Seemingly Aldrich had read her mind. “It’s all one solid piece of glass, not tempered but of a technology my own people came up with. No seams, no joins, no place where you can break through, and the doors are triple thickness. Don’t forget, it was made to withstand Lab 33’s lab rat at her full strength, and you’re hardly at full strength anymore, are you?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but instead unsnapped the clasps of the briefcase he was carrying, extracting from it the vial of colorless liquid she had last seen sitting on the table beside the gurney in the procedures room. “I didn’t totally trust the assessments of Wang and Sobie. I thought I needed to bring this along as bait to lure the rat into my trap, but the good doctors were right. In the end, the serum and the fact that it could save you and your sisters’ lives wasn’t what drove you to your own destruction—it was your desire to kill me. So I suppose I don’t need this anymore.”

His eyes met hers through the glass. He lifted the vial high and then opened his fingers, watching her intently as the container smashed into a thousand glittering shards on the rocky floor outside her prison. His gray eyes widened slightly. “Interesting. You’ve just seen your last hope of survival destroyed and yet you show no reaction at all, just as the psychologists predicted. I’m glad I allowed myself time to conduct this last experiment on you, Dawn. The results will be useful when I set up my next lab and set about choosing new candidates for another gene-enhancement program.”

She barely heard him. The leather of her catsuit was pressing wetly against her thighs now and her hair was plastered to her skull, soaked through by the splashing of the water pouring from the ceiling. Clumsily wading to one of the cube’s corners, Dawn ran her hands along the curved edges. Peters had told the truth about that, if nothing else, she thought tensely. It was sharply curved, with no join between the walls that could be weakened by a well-placed kick. She turned her attention to the huge showerhead installation above, ignoring his words as they filtered through the speakers.

“According to the doctors’ findings from the tests they ran when you returned to Lab 33, the pain in your head must be unendurable by now. It’s really too bad your old mentor Lee Craig isn’t here. He always told me it was him you would hate the most if you ever learned how he’d deceived you.”

Her attention was temporarily diverted. “As you said a moment ago, the doctors who studied me when I was a child predicted there would be two people I’d want to destroy if I ever learned the truth—you and Craig, Doctor. You may have given the order for him to kill Rainy Miller, but he carried it out, knowing full well she was my biological mother. For that alone I wanted to—”

“Oh, no.” His voice was silky with malice. “I didn’t give Craig the order to kill your mother—he insisted on taking the assignment. That order was supposed to be yours to carry out.”

“Mine?” The cold water rising around her suddenly felt warm compared to the icy shock that reverberated through her at his casual revelation.

Of course Aldrich Peters was capable of ordering Lab 33’s lab rat to kill her own mother. He’d ordered her to kill the man she’d later learned was her father, hadn’t he? And although her mission to kill Thomas King had been aborted before she’d completed it, nothing would ever take away the guilt she felt over her actions. If she’d killed Rainy Miller and later discovered who her unknown target had been, how would she have been able to live with herself?

You wouldn’t have, Dawnie. That’s why I took on the assignment…because I once promised you I’d stay strong enough to keep them from owning you, even if it cost me everything I cared for in this world. Thing is, kid, all I cared about was you. Lee Craig’s voice had occasionally been in her head in the months since his death, but now it seemed to be reverberating through her whole being, Dawn thought wrenchingly, as if the man she’d once thought of as a father had a desperate need to communicate with her one final time. She pressed her hands to her ears and squeezed her eyes shut, but she couldn’t blot out his words or stop herself from seeing his face. But I knew one day you’d end up hating me…and that you’d have every right to. All I could hope for was that you wouldn’t end up hating—

“Damn straight I hate you, you bastard!” She didn’t know she’d spoken aloud until she saw Peters’s thin lips lift in chilly amusement. She tried to cover her confusion with a sneer. “If Lee Craig took over my assignment to assassinate Rainy Miller, it was because he was a stone-cold killer and not for any other reason. The shrinks were right. If he were standing here now I’d want to kill him just as much as I want to kill you!”

Still smiling slightly, Aldrich shook his head. “I’m afraid you misunderstood me. Lee was never in the equation at all, according to the psychologists. No, the other person they knew you would want to destroy was yourself…and it seems you’ve fulfilled their prediction.”

Dawn stared at him. Then she turned away, throwing her snarled words over her shoulder at him. “You’re crazy, Doctor. Instead of using up your breath telling me more of your lies you should save it for running. Because I’m going to get out of here—and when I do it’ll be payback time at long last.”

She directed her attention to the ceiling again, but this time it was harder because her headache was blurring her vision. Dimly aware that she was no longer standing but keeping herself afloat by paddling, she tried to propel herself upward so that she could reach the metal conduit from which the water was gushing. She missed, and slid underwater as she fell back. Taking a deep breath, she tried a second time, and then a third and a fourth…

“Gonna…gonna see him die.” This was better, Dawn thought minutes later. She didn’t even have to jump anymore, all she had to do was put out her hand to touch the conduit. She was pushed under by the deafening torrent of water and languidly she kicked herself to the surface again, her face upturned to the glass ceiling. Her nose bumped against it. Yeah, any minute now she would be standing in front of Peters, deciding how she was going to take the bastard down. Strangling? She frowned. Too crude. She was Lab 33’s assassin, after all, and she had a reputation to consider. A gun would be too fast—the moment would be over before she could savour it. She giggled suddenly and watched the bubbles float from her mouth with glee. She’d freakin’ drown him, that’s what she’d do! It would be perfect justice, perfect revenge, perfect…payback.

But first she needed to rest for a moment, and what better place to rest than here at the bottom of this incredible cube that looked as if it had been carved from ice and filled with a square of ocean. Where had she seen such a color before? It looked like beach glass, like aquamarines, like Des Asher’s eyes just after he’d taken a bullet for her and just before he’d watched her walk away from him. He’d hoped they could have a future together, she thought hazily. What he hadn’t understood was that she couldn’t have a future—not with him, not with anyone, because she was Lab 33’s assassin and Lab 33’s assassin had one last hit to carry out.

A hit in which she was both the killer and the target.

“No!” A violent convulsion seemed to run through her body, and her legs, bent beneath her as she lay on the bottom of the water-filled chamber, jackknifed suddenly, shooting her up to the surface. Except there wasn’t any surface anymore, Dawn thought frantically. The cube was almost full. All that remained was a sliver of space between the water and the ceiling.

She arched her neck, dragged in a shallow lungful of oxygen and felt herself sinking again. Through the wavering distortion of the water she saw Aldrich Peters’s spare figure still standing on the other side of the glass.

He wants to make sure you die, O’Shaughnessy. Kind of funny, wouldn’t you say—since according to him your death warrant was signed when he dropped that vial of serum. You think he knows something about your so-called gene-breakdown symptoms that you don’t?

He’d said she had destroyed herself. His words had made no sense then, but now everything became chillingly clear—his knowledge of her symptoms, the information her subconscious had betrayed to the doctors who had assessed her upon her return to Lab 33 twenty-one days ago, Peters’s anticipation of each move she’d made since she’d woken up in the procedures room tonight and gone hunting for him.

There was nothing wrong with her at all. Nothing genetic, at any rate. Just that for the past nine months she’d been methodically tearing herself in two by trying to put her Lab 33 legacy behind her while still justifying her cold-blooded desire for vengeance against Aldrich Peters. Her apparent symptoms—the crippling headaches, the loss of her abilities—had been merely the outward manifestations of her inward self-destruction. The psychological tests that had been run on her upon her return had predicted those manifestations to Peters…and his devious mind had immediately seen how he could use them to coerce Lab 33’s lab rat into one final assignment.

But I’m not a lab rat anymore and I’m opting out of this experiment as of now, Dawn told herself forcefully. I’ll hand the sorry son of a bitch over to the authorities, dammit, and then go after the things I really want—like a life, a future working with the real good guys and getting to know my sisters, and maybe—just maybe—the chance to look into Des Asher’s sexy aqua eyes once more.

She shot to the surface. Dragging in a meager breath of air, she felt energy tingling like an electric current through her veins, not only recharging her strength but doubling it—no, quadrupling it.

“Getting outta here? Piece of cake,” she muttered with wry amusement before letting herself sink to the bottom once more. Her boots made contact with the floor. Her body settled into a half crouch. Her mind shut out the man standing beyond the glass barrier, the water surrounding her, the fading oxygen in her lungs…but before her concentration became totally Zen-like, she allowed herself to notice that there was no longer the slightest flicker of pain in her head. The symptoms had gone for good.

And she and Peters had both underestimated what she was capable of. In front of her was thick glass. Dawn stared at it and visualized a spider’s web of cracks radiating out from a single point in it, visualized the cracks shattering open, saw in her mind’s eye the whole wall crashing outward and the roomful of water bursting out in a mighty flood.

She reached inside herself and found a woman strong enough to make all those visualizations reality.

“Kwa-sah!” The phrase exploded from her at the same time as her leg shot stiffly out from her body, her boot heel aiming for the very point in the wall where she had imagined the initial weakening. As her boot smashed into the glass the impact ran jarringly through her whole frame, but she didn’t feel it. “Che-sah!” The spiderweb of cracks she had seen in her mind’s eye were now there in front of her calm gaze, spreading rapidly from the epicenter of her kick. Her arms extended in front of her, palms flat. Dawn moved through the water and effortlessly pushed at the glass wall.

Her prison shattered and fell away from her.

Glittering shards exploded outward, propelled by an overwhelming rush of water. She held her balance for as long as she could, but then her feet slid out from under her and she was carried along with the flow, her concentration broken by a dizzying sense of joy and freedom.

I did it, Uncle Lee! Did you see me—I did it! Not the way you would have, because from now on I’m choosing my own path, my own life. But I did it, and part of the strength I needed came from you. So your little Dawnie says thank-you, Uncle Lee. Thank you…and goodbye.

The water on her face wasn’t just water, it was mixed with tears. Lying on the rocky path where she’d been deposited by the now-spent contents of the tank, she dashed the tears away and with them went the last of her destructive hatred against a conflicted and complicated man who in his own way had loved her more than she’d ever known.

She could never completely erase her Lab 33 past, she thought with regret. But at least she’d put it to rest.

“You…you think you’ve won…”

Her thoughts had been so far from Aldrich Peters that at the sound of his voice Dawn whirled around in shock, immediately ready to defend herself if necessary. But it wasn’t necessary, she saw, nausea rising in her as she took in the sight of him.

Dozens of spearlike shards of glass protruded from his crawling figure and some had sliced horrifically into his face. The water on the cavern floor around him was tinged a sickly pink, and from the paper-whiteness of his complexion it was obvious that most of his blood was now running over the wet rocks he was dragging himself across. He gave her a ruined facsimile of his former chilly smile, the nerves on one side of his face obviously severed.

“But you haven’t, Dawn.” Glass had also pierced his throat, and his voice was little more than a wet whisper. “I may not get out of here alive, but neither will you or the Athenas.”

He was crawling toward his briefcase. Suddenly apprehensive, she strode forward and kicked it out of his reach, but too late she saw that his objective had been the small, plastic-encased rectangle lying near it. Peters’s hand closed around the rectangle. Dawn heard a tiny clicking sound as his blood-smeared thumb pressed down on a button.

“Maximum…maximum body count.” He didn’t struggle as she snatched the unit from him. “I wanted to wait until the Athena women and the military and law enforcement agencies backing them were at full strength inside the complex. I would imagine even the stragglers have arrived by now.”

“What is this?” It looked like a remote control, she thought impatiently, but it damn well didn’t turn on a television. Aside from the button Peters had pushed, there was a numerical keypad and a digital readout—Her stomach clenched. “It’s an explosive activator! You intend to blow Lab 33 and everyone in it sky-high, for God’s sake!”

The readout showed four digits. Even as she focused on the angular red numbers, they changed from 21:01 to 21:00.

Dropping to her knees, she shoved the activator in his face, her expression etched with strain. “How do you stop the freakin’ countdown? How do you stop the countdown, dammit?” she screamed.

“It can’t be stopped once it’s started.” Now that he was no longer physically exerting himself, Peters’s voice had more strength. “I calculated that after watching you die I would need twenty-two minutes to make my way to the helicopter waiting outside for me. I saw no reason to add a cutoff feature.”

“Then where’s the device?” The activator read 20:21. Dawn tasted sharp fear at the back of her throat. She grabbed Peters’s shredded lapels. “You’re dying—you have nothing to gain by taking others with you! Tell me where you planted the explosive!”

With a touch of his former icy arrogance, he pushed her away. “Nothing to gain? When covert government agencies that once funded me have denied their involvement and politicians whose predecessors used Lab 33’s resources now pretend to be so appalled at our methods of operation that they support a group of women who want to take me down? Oh, I have something to gain, Dawn—I’ll die knowing that my betrayers will pay for what they did to me.”

“You want payback,” she said hollowly. “So buy it with my blood, Doctor. Tell me where you planted the device in order that I can defuse it, and I swear I’ll carry out the death you planned for me.”

His fading gaze held cold amusement. “You’re wasting your breath. Just as the activator can’t be halted, neither can the device my people created be defused. Even if it could, you’d never be able to get to it. Despite its destructive power it’s tiny…tiny enough to be implanted into a healing bullet hole on a man’s body.”

Her grasp on his lapels slid away. He slumped backward onto the rocky floor, a final gout of blood streaming from his side. “I guessed that the Athenas would enlist him in their battle, and that he would accept in the hope that he could retrieve London’s research before it was sold. For a hefty sum, the doctor who attended his wounds at the hospital was willing to bend his Hippocratic oath and insert a small object in Captain Asher’s bullet-torn arm before suturing it.”

Aldrich Peters’s voice faded. “You betrayed him, Dawn. You’re the last person he’d trust now…and he’ll kill you before he lets you get anywhere near him.”

Chapter 17

Status: eighteen minutes three seconds and counting

Just ahead of her was the last curve in the rock-hewn corridor before the steps that led up to the lowest level of Lab 33. Dawn lengthened her stride, her leather catsuit molding wetly to her body and her soaked boots squelching soddenly with each pounding footstep as she ran. Aldrich Peters was dead. Once that fact would have filled her with dark satisfaction, but now it meant nothing to her. All her thoughts and energies were directed toward one impossible goal—to somehow get to Asher in time, somehow explain the situation to him, somehow figure out a way to stop the explosive implanted in him from going off and killing hundreds of people.

Her sisters. Kayla Ryan and whichever Cassandras might be with her today. Asher’s forces and scores of women and men from all strata of law enforcement, from the lowliest part-time sheriff’s deputy to the SWAT teams.

But that part of it wasn’t her problem. Her problem was exactly as Peters had stated it with his final breath.

“Asher sees me as the enemy,” she muttered as she took the curve. “No matter what the Cassandras have told him, he knows I wasn’t up-front with them about my agenda and he’ll dismiss their trust in me as misplaced…which it was,” she added honestly. “How the hell am I going to convince him I’m on the side of the angels for real this time, when in the past I’ve—”

She skidded to a halt as she turned the corner and saw the figure of a man blocking the stairs. Then he walked out of the shadows and she recognized him.

“Reese!” The last time she’d seen Terry Reese he’d been unconscious on the floor of Sir William’s study, but although she was relieved to see his injuries had been minor enough that he’d been able to join in the fight against Lab 33, this wasn’t the moment for catching up. “There’s no time to explain now, but I need you to help me find Ash—”

“How did it feel killing Aldrich, angel? Bet it was a real rush.” He took a step forward, bringing his right hand from the side of his body. “Just like it’s going to be a rush for me to kill you.”

Dawn froze. The sword he’d been concealing was now held in front of him, his two-handed grip on the hilt relaxed. He was used to the weapon, she thought tensely. And in such close quarters, dodging that gleaming blade would be impossible.

“Listen to me, Reese,” she said rapidly. “Whatever Asher told you about me, I’m not the same woman who walked out on him three nights ago. I’m on your side, dammit, and if I don’t—”

“With Aldrich gone and his organization destroyed, stepping into your position’s not in the cards anymore.” Reese gave no sign of hearing her. “But the man who takes down Lab 33’s top assassin will be able to name his price anywhere in the world. That’s even better than having to work my way up through the ranks like Peters intended.”

…some of them won’t return from the test assignments I’ve given them…those who do will be the nucleus of Lab 33’s newly formed assassination squad…each assassin has been given the name of one of the Athena Academy graduates known as the Cassandras…their missions are to kill their targets or die in the attempt… Aldrich Peters’s words from their meeting at the juke joint echoed in Dawn’s mind, and she drew in a hissing breath.

“I get it,” she said flatly. “You were as much undercover at London’s lab as I was, weren’t you? Maybe you killed a Ranger who was being transferred there and took his identity, but how you got in place doesn’t matter right now. You were the killer in the hallway who shot me in the throat, and when you heard Sir William coming to the door you took on the role of my savior—gorgeous Terry Reese who came by just in time.” A thought struck her. “The partial thumbprint of mine that was on file. Your doing?”

“I came back here on a day off from playing soldier and beefed up Interpol’s data on the mysterious Donna Schmidt,” Reese said tersely. “A good assassin takes every opportunity to unnerve his target, and I knew you’d go crazy wondering how you’d been so careless as to leave even a partial print at a scene. I lifted it from a glass you’d used in the cafeteria, by the way. But having a fake Athena Academy pin made and then giving it to you later was even more satisfying. I knew from the briefing Peters gave me on you that you’d allied yourself with them, and when you let the lab rats out I really thought I’d pushed you over the edge.”

His grip tightened on the sword. “I intend this to be an honorable kill, Dawn—one superb warrior pitted against another. That’s why I didn’t try again after our encounter in the hallway—because I realized I didn’t want to take you down when you obviously weren’t at your peak.”

“What about when you were playing dead in Sir William’s study a few nights ago?” she asked with disgust. “How honorable was that?”

A flicker of anger marred the handsome features. “Peters should have trusted me to take you down. When the attack began, I realized he’d double-crossed me as well as you, and at that point my allegiance to him was voided. Since the Lab 33 gunmen didn’t know I wasn’t a real Ranger, it was easy to deliberately let myself be knocked out by one of them, all the while knowing they were no match for you. As I say, our confrontation will be an honorable one. There’s a sword identical to mine in a niche in the rock wall by your right hand, and I’ll give you the opportunity to—”

“What is this, freakin’ King Arthur?” Dawn exploded in irritation. “Sorry to wreck your big moment, Lover Boy, but I really don’t have time for this crap.”

The gun she’d collected from Aldrich’s body was tucked into the back of her belt. Before Reese could begin to raise his unwieldy weapon she shot it out of his hands and then pulled the trigger twice more. The drop-dead handsome fake Ranger dropped to the floor—not dead, as was evidenced by his screams of pain, but with both his shinbones shattered.

“You know, being the world’s top assassin isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, Reese,” Dawn said, tossing the out-of-ammo gun aside and stepping swiftly over him. “But it still kind of frosts my pumpkin having wannabe’s trying to take me out.”

Another agonized scream was his only answer, but already she was up the rough-hewn stairs and pushing open the trapdoor. As she began racing down the hall, she checked the remote in her hand—13:59. Dammit, she’d wasted four whole minutes—minutes she couldn’t afford to waste.

“And it looks like another freakin’ roadblock up ahead,” she muttered worriedly as she bypassed the elevator and sprinted for the service stairs to the next level. “A last-ditch stand of Lab 33 guards battling against—”

Battling against a single Navy SEAL? Dawn frowned. The uniformed man holding off the guards was an incredible fighter, but the sheer number of his opponents was wearing him down. She’d intended to bypass the skirmish if possible, but she couldn’t leave an ally in the hands of the enemy.

“Got your back, buddy!” She yelled out her intention to the SEAL just as the guard coming up behind him raised the stock of his rifle to slam it down onto the man’s skull. The guard pivoted to face her instead. A moment later he was out cold on the floor and she was using his weapon as a battering ram against her half of the Lab 33 contingent as her SEAL partner, his back against hers, grimly took on the ones on his side.

“Hey, buddy!” Dawn slammed the butt of the rifle into a guard’s stomach. As her opponent doubled over, she dealt him a karate blow to the back of his neck. “When we’re finished with this sewing circle here, I’ve got to find Des Asher. He’s an SAS guy, tall, tanned, probably leading a mixed group of SAS and Rangers. You seen him?”

Out of the corner of her eye she saw her comrade drive a knee into a guard’s groin before planting a pile-driving punch on his chin that snapped the Lab 33’s man’s head backward. “Main level,” the SEAL grunted as he turned his attention to the next guard coming at him. “Still some pockets of heavy resistance in the entry area, although most of the lower floors have been secured. You one of the Athena women?”

“You might say—dammit, hold on a minute.” Dawn expediently dispatched the two guards who were rushing her by waiting until the last moment and then ramming their heads together. They both fell to their knees and two swift kicks took them out of the fight for good. “You might say that,” she continued. “Name’s Dawn O’Shaughnessy. I used to work for Aldrich Peters’s organization, but don’t hold that against—”

“Dawn?” The SEAL threw a startled look over his shoulder at her, and for the first time since she’d come to his aid she saw his face.

Her own eyes widened. “Dad?”

“Watch your left!”

At Thomas King’s quick warning Dawn saw the woven-steel garrote that was about to come looping down around her neck. Automatically she fought off the guard who had attempted to strangle her, her mind not on the physical confrontation but on the man fighting alongside her who had the same green-gold eyes and honey-blond hair as she did.

For crying out loud, O’Shaughnessy…you called him Dad? she thought in embarrassment. You’ve only seen the man twice before in your life, and that’s counting the time you had him in the crosshairs of a high-powered rifle. Sure, when you found Lynn and Faith, the three of you sisters had a meeting with the man who’s your biological father, but even though he seemed glad to meet us he had to feel a little awkward being confronted with a trio of daughters he’d never known existed—especially since he already has a wife and a teenage son. And now you’ve gone and made him feel uncomfortable all over again, dammit.

The guard slumped heavily to the floor. She turned to take on a new attacker, and then realized that the Lab 33 contingent had been wiped out by her and her father.

She fumbled for the remote activator, which she’d tucked in her belt when she’d entered the fray. “Guess I was out of line there, King,” she said curtly. “Calling you that, I mean. I’m sure you’d prefer I addressed you by your rank or your last name.”

“You just saved my life, Dawn.” Thomas King put a finger under her chin, gently forcing her to meet his gaze. “I’d say that gives you the right to call me anything you want…but Dad sounded just fine to me.”

Dawn started to blink away the stupid moisture she could feel behind her eyes, but stopped when she saw the same mistiness in her father’s identical green-gold gaze. “Sounded fine to me, too,” she said huskily. Wishing she could hold on to the moment and knowing she couldn’t, she glanced down at the remote in her hand—10:50. Another three minutes and ten seconds had ticked by.

Panic shot through her. “Dad, I need your help. I’ve got to find Des Asher and I’m just about out of time. Can you run interference for me in case any more of those freakin’ Lab 33 mothers try to stop us?”

“Gladly. But Dawn?” Without wasting precious moments asking for details, King stiff-armed the door to the service stairs open and kept pace with her as she took the stairs three at a time. “Stow the potty-mouth while you’re with your pop, okay? After watching you in action I’d probably be taking my life in my hands if I tried to paddle my little girl’s backside for trash-talking, but as a father I’d feel duty-bound to make the attempt.”

“You’ve got to be freakin’—” He wasn’t kidding, Dawn realized as she saw King’s loving but tough expression. She swallowed. “Yes, Dad,” she said meekly. “Stowing the potty-mouth directly, sir.”

She’d spent most of the past six months feeling as though her insides were made of ice, she thought as she flew up the last flight of stairs. But uniting with her father had melted one of the two final frozen chips that remained. Whether or not she had the chance to thaw the last one depended on what happened in the next—tensely she glanced down at the readout in her hand—eight minutes and thirty-nine seconds.

“Those sons of bitches don’t give up easy, dammit.” King’s blunt comment came as he and Dawn paused on the threshold of the door leading from the service stairs to the main level hallway. He caught Dawn’s expression. “One of the perks of fatherhood and rank. I get to swear a blue streak when I feel it’s warranted—and I’d say this warrants it.”

He was right, Dawn thought as she briefly surveyed the scene, searching for a glimpse of aqua eyes, her ears alert for the sound of a British-accented command. The Cassandras and their allies had obviously seized Lab 33, but in this hallway there still remained a few dozen hard-core fanatics who refused to surrender. It was no longer a battle but a vicious brawl, with boots and fists being preferable to gunfire in these close quarters where friend and foe were so tightly jammed together.

“He’s not here.” She heard a strained tremor in her voice and fought to control it.

“He wouldn’t be.” King gave her arm a fatherly squeeze. “Despite what it looks like, this is just a mopup operation. As one of the leaders, Asher’s more likely to be overseeing things in the reception area near the entrance to the complex.”

“What Aldrich liked to call the Great Room.” She nodded. “But to get to it I’m going to have to wade through this.”

“Piece of cake,” Thomas King said confidently, not noticing the second quick glance his daughter threw his way. “We’ll collect a bodyguard detail as we go. Just watch what happens if those bastards try to slow you down.”

She didn’t know what the hell he meant, Dawn thought as she followed him into the melee, but she was willing to trust his judgment. A scar-faced man wearing the dull gray-and-red of a Lab 33 guard saw her and immediately reached for the garrote clipped to his belt. Thomas King reacted.

“Runner coming through!” he roared, propelling Dawn ahead of him and body-blocking the guard’s lunge at her. “Athena team and allies, get your runner through! Don’t let the enemy delay her!”

Throughout the crowd Dawn saw determined faces turn her way; one of them belonging to a woman of about her own age, with icy blond hair and icy blue eyes. Samantha St. John finished off the guard she’d been grappling with and instantly began making her way to their side. But Sam St. John wasn’t the only recognizable figure coming to her aid, Dawn realized unsteadily. A few feet ahead was Kayla Ryan, the tough police lieutenant already clearing a path by the most expedient method possible—by using the butt of a rifle to smash aside any Lab 33 guard foolish enough to get in her way. Lynn and Faith were a little farther off, but they too were making sure that she had clear access.

“You’re delivering a message? Who to?” St. John’s query was curt as she slammed an elbow backward into the rib cage of a guard who was about to impede their progress.

“Des Asher, the SAS—” Dawn began, but Sam cut her off.

“SAS hunk?” she suggested, her brief smile robbing her of her ice-queen demeanor for a moment. “Saw him not more than five minutes ago in what they call the Great Hall. He was about to start questioning captured hostiles to find out if there were any booby traps around this place.”

“There’s one, and it’s a hell of a lot closer to him than he knows,” Dawn said tersely as she glimpsed a knot of Lab 33 uniforms being held at bay by her phalanx of bodyguards. “Like right under the stitches in his bandaged arm. He doesn’t know it, but he’s carrying an explosive device on his own body that’s going to bring this whole place down within minutes if I can’t somehow defuse it.”

Sam St. John’s naturally fair complexion went chalky. Then her eyes blazed with a cold blue fire. “Get her through faster!” she commanded. “And I mean now!”

The bodies in front of them began to part as the Cassandras and their allies redoubled their efforts. Dawn found herself able to break into a jog and then a run, leaving her father and Sam St. John behind her, still doing their part in the fight. Kayla gave her a thumbs-up as she sped by. She caught a glimpse of Lynn and Faith, who shot worried but encouraging glances her way as she flashed past them.

Then she was out of the fighting and sprinting into what had once been Lab 33’s so-called Great Hall, the massive room with soaring ceilings she’d always thought looked more like a bad imitation of Grand Central Station than an impressive reception area for the few highly select, ruthless clients that Aldrich Peters meant it to impress.

It looked even more like a train station now. The marble antique statues that had dotted the room had been toppled from their pedestals during earlier fighting, and those same pedestals were being used by men and women issuing orders through microphones. Stretcher bearers were swiftly loading ambulances with wounded, most of them Lab 33 guards, and several of the costly silk-covered sofas upon which Peters had once received thuggish-looking warlords had been pushed together to create a hasty triage area, their upholstery stained now with blood.

Dawn took it all in with a glance. Her gaze dropped to the remote, and cold terror washed over her—4:01. “There’s no way in hell I’m going to find him in time,” she said through numb lips. “And even if I do, I still have to convince the man to hustle over to that triage area, have a field surgeon extract the Lab 33 device, and then try to defuse it. It can’t be done, dammit!”

“Bloody hell!”

The growled oath was easily audible over the noise and confusion around her. Adrenaline pumping suddenly through her, she whirled in the direction of the familiar voice.

Asher was on his knees beside a convulsing guard, trying to force the man’s clenched jaws open. The guard gave one final shudder and went limp.

“Some of the bastards have suicide pills. Get that information out to the other interrogators, will you.” As he rose to his feet, Asher directed his words to a Ranger beside him. The Ranger nodded and ran over to another group.

She’d found him, Dawn thought swiftly, but there wasn’t time for explanations or cooperation. There might not even be time to carry out the plan she’d begun to formulate while being escorted down the hallway by the Cassandras, but it was the only option remaining to her.

“In-and-out operation, O’Shaughnessy. You’ve done them before,” she said under her breath, taking a second to judge distances and note the exact position of the bandage on Asher’s upper arm. “Only difference is, this time the stakes are a hell of a lot higher.”

The night she’d walked away from him she’d predicted that the next time they met, it would be as opponents. Her prediction was about to come true.

She burst into action. Racing by the triage table, she snatched a scalpel out of the hand of a surgeon who was about to use it on a wounded guard. His outraged shout drew the attention of others, but all Dawn cared about was that Asher wasn’t alerted to her presence.

An angry aqua gaze turned quickly in the direction of the commotion and immediately fixed on her as she ran at top speed toward him. The incredulous expression on his face turned almost instantly to cold fury, and Dawn’s heart sank.

“Oh, crap,” she muttered, launching herself at him.

“I should have believed the evidence of my own eyes instead of Kayla Ryan’s assurance that you were on our side,” Asher growled, sidestepping her attack and making a grab for the scalpel in her hand. “What’s your cover story this time—you’re a surgeon with a shaky cutting hand?”

She feinted, dropped back a step and hooked her foot around his ankle. He turned his fall into a roll and was on his feet again before she could do more than slice the bandage on his bare arm.

“It’s not what it looks like,” she snapped. “You’ve got a freakin’ explosive device just under the skin of your arm, Ash, and if I don’t get it—”

“Come on, love, surely you can come up with something better than that. Your acting was better when you were trying to get me into your bed.” His fist kissed her chin, his punch only missing its aim because she’d dodged to one side. She took the opportunity to slash again at the dressing on his arm, and this time it parted completely, revealing the neat sutures that snaked from his bicep to his shoulder.

“You’re pissed off because you thought we had something going,” she said in disbelief. “Dammit, you’re taking this personally!”

“Bloody right I take it personally when a woman’s trying to rip open my hide.” His scowl turned to a grimace as she drove an elbow into his ribs. Before he could retaliate, the scalpel flashed in her hand again and the first few inches of sutures parted. “Not that I believe you, but if there really is a device, what in damnation do you intend to do with it?”

“Run like hell,” Dawn grunted as she grappled with him. “If I’m still in one piece when I get outside the complex, I’m going to throw it into the canyon.” She heard a clatter by her feet and instinctively looked down. The activator had fallen faceup. Its display read 1:01, but even as she watched it changed to 1:00. Abruptly she stopped fighting Asher and looked into his angry eyes.

“I’m telling you the truth, Ash,” she said hoarsely. “I know I lied to you about everything else, but you’ve got to trust me on this or we’ll all die when that readout reaches zero.”

His gaze held hers for a split second. His jaw tightened. Then he was running for the entrance like an Olympic sprinter, leaping over obstacles and shoving bystanders out of his way.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” He’d had a head start of a few dozen feet on her, and Dawn screamed the question at his back as she sped up behind him, the remote she’d retrieved from the floor in one hand and the scalpel in her other.

“What does it look like? I’m running like bloody hell!” he growled, not bothering to turn his head.

She pulled alongside him. “And then you’re going to throw yourself off the cliff into the canyon?”

“Not how I’d planned to spend the evening, but yeah, that’s the general idea.” He reached inside his tunic and pulled out an ID hanging by a chain around his neck. The Rangers who had been about to stop them at the barrier that had been set up by the entrance jumped out of their way. Asher went on, his voice strained. “How we doing on time?”

“Thirty seconds left. Turn right where the tunnel opens up to the outside. You trust me enough to dive into thin air?”

“You fought alongside me, O’Shaughnessy.” They burst out of the concealed entrance to Lab 33 and swerved right. “You’re my partner. And like I said, I hoped we might have some kind of future together. So, yes, I trust you.”

“Then shut up and stop running, dammit,” she said furiously, sticking her foot in front of him.

He fell heavily to the ground. Swearing savagely, he began to rise again, but she pushed him back. “This is gonna hurt,” she muttered, slicing down the length of his sutures.

“Damn you, O’Shaughnessy, it’s reading nine seconds! Let me up!”

“This is going to hurt more,” she said curtly as she pried open his healing wound and probed inside it with her fingertips.

“Six seconds.” He was obviously reading the remote beside them. “Five.”

“Got it!” Her fingers closed around a flat, wafer-thin disc, oddly heavy for its size. Her grip on it slick with his blood, she jumped to her feet.

“Four.” His tone wasn’t totally even. “I hope you don’t throw like a girl, O’Shaughnessy. Three.”

Dawn wound up like a major-league pitcher. “I hope I don’t throw like an Englishman. What the hell you Limeys see in cricket is beyond me.”

“Two.”

Her arm whipped forward. Her wrist snapped straight. The disc left her grasp like a fastball.

“One!”

“Oops, I dropped it. Nah, just kidd—”

“Zero!”

Somewhere in the dark well in front of her that was the yawning mouth of the canyon, Dawn saw a small, intensely bright dot of light. Confusion flickered in her and then she understood. Even as she dived for the dirt beside Asher and averted her face, yelling at him to shield his eyes too, the night lit up with a searing brilliance that turned everything to day and the canyon itself seemed to explode.

Her hands were clapped to her ears. A shock wave of sound bypassed them and punched against her eardrums, making the ground beneath her tremble like a jelly mold shaking on a plate. It receded, came back even more deafeningly a second time, receded again. Through her tightly squeezed eyelids she could see every pebble and stone in front of her where she lay, their shapes seeming to burn themselves onto her retinas.

And then it was night again.

Gingerly she removed her palms from their protective clasp over her ears and raised her face from the dirt. Beside her she saw Asher do the same. His mouth moved.

“What did you say?” She realized she’d yelled the question only as she saw him wince. She shook her head, felt her eardrums pop as the pressure in them released, tried again. “What did you say?”

“I asked if you were okay, love.” The searchlights that the Cassandras and their allies had set up outside the entrance to Lab 33 had swung in their direction, and it was possible to see the tension fading in his eyes. A glint of humor replaced it. “But I suppose if you weren’t, you’d pull your handy-dandy healing stunt and be as good as new in a couple of minutes, right?”

Dawn nodded. There was something wrong with her throat again, she thought in irritation. And now the tightness seemed to have spread to the vicinity of her chest, somewhere around her heart. It hurt, dammit.

But in a good way, she thought after a moment’s reflection.

“Ash, about me walking away from you the night you took the bullet for me,” she said, but he didn’t let her finish.

“Ancient history, love.” There was no trace of his usual growl in his tone. He reached for her hand, playing idly with her fingers as he continued. “The government is going to want to debrief you, probably for a few days. You have any plans after that?”

“I was thinking of taking a little vacation,” she said unsteadily, her eyes on his and not on the soldiers who were starting to run their way. “I thought Europe, maybe a side trip to the Middle East at some point?”

“As good a place to start as any,” he agreed. “The terrorists who bought my uncle’s regeneration research from Peters will be trying to assemble a team of geneticists to work on the refining process. I assume you wouldn’t say no if I asked you to come along with me to help find the bastards after I hand in my commission to the SAS?”

His fingers were stroking her palm as he posed the question. The damn man was always trying to get the tactical advantage, Dawn thought, which was something she would have to watch out for in the future. She tightened her hold on his hand just enough so that he’d feel it.

“You assume wrong…but I wouldn’t mind having your help while I track them down. Do we have a freakin’ deal or not?”

He let out a breath. “Dammit, are you this bossy in bed, O’Shaughnessy?”

“Better believe it, buddy,” she said promptly as the military contingent raced up to them and she and Ash got stiffly to their feet.

A corner of his mouth lifted slowly. “Then we’ve got a deal, love,” he said for her ears only.

“Let me through, she’s my daughter!”

“And our sister!”

Dawn looked past the soldiers and saw Thomas King’s broad shoulders pushing their way toward her. Behind him came Faith and Lynn, and behind them was a dark-haired man who seemed equally intent on reaching her. She recognized FBI Agent Justin Cohen, whom she’d met once at Kayla’s home. His eyes met hers as they all drew closer, and to her surprise she saw a gleam of sudden moisture in them.

“And in a way, my niece,” he said huskily, as King released her from a bear hug and Faith and Lynn flung themselves at her. “I believe that my sister, Kelly, was your surrogate mother. I’ve spent my life searching for the truth about what happened to her, only to learn she was another casualty of Aldrich Peters’s manipulations. Now that I’ve found you it’s like having a little part of her back in my life again. Like she didn’t die for nothing.”

“You’ll tell me all about her?” Dawn said unevenly, clasping Justin’s strong hands. “What she was like, the things she used to do, her dreams?”

He nodded, his grip secure on hers. “That’s a promise. But for now all you need to know is my sister was a strong woman who always tried to do what was right.” He released her and stepped away. “In many ways, you’re a lot like her,” he said quietly.

Dawn actually felt tears well up in her eyes. “I’m glad,” she said. She turned toward Tom King and Lynn and Faith, and a tear crept down her cheek.

“Hey sis, no waterworks today. I think there’s been enough of that for all of us,” Lynn said and pushed a friendly fist lightly into Dawn’s shoulder.

“We’ve got a lot of getting to know each other to do still,” Faith added. “I foresee a lot of flying in everyone’s future.” Faith’s extra-sensory abilities didn’t really include foretelling the future, and they all laughed. Tom wrapped an arm each around Lynn and Faith and the three of them moved aside, gesturing for Dawn to join them when she could.

Justin turned away and slipped into the press of people, but not before stopping to embrace a red-haired woman Dawn realized was another Cassandra, FBI forensic scientist Alexandra Forsythe. Alex and Justin exchanged a few intimate words, and then Alex walked toward Dawn along with Kayla Ryan and Sam St. John. Alex flicked a sideways glance at Asher and then raised an eyebrow at Dawn. “Saving the world is nice, but it’s even better when you get the guy as well, huh?”

“Damn straight,” Dawn said promptly. She grinned and then sobered. “It was a group effort. The Cassandras and their allies did good, didn’t we, ladies? Working together turned us into a force to be reckoned with. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a gorgeous and stubborn hunk of man to get stitched up again.”

She moved to Asher’s side. Kayla looked at Sam and Alex, her expression quizzical. “A force to be reckoned with,” she said slowly. “Athena Force. You like?”

Dawn nodded. Sam spoke for all of them. “I like. Athena Force. Kinda kicks ass, doesn’t it?” She smiled. “Just like its members.”

And as Dawn bullied her way through the crowd, a wryly smiling Asher following close behind her, she just made out Kayla’s words. “You got that right, girlfriend,” Kayla said. Dawn could feel the women’s gazes on her back. “Just like its members.”

Epilogue

“You may now kiss the bride.” The white-cassocked Church of England priest beamed indulgently as the handsome groom, Captain Destin Asher, formerly of the SAS, kissed his beautiful new wife, Mrs. Dawn Asher, née O’Shaughnessy.

“Darling, everyone’s watching.” Pulling away from the prolonged kiss, the bride blushed and gave her husband’s hand a squeeze. For a moment it seemed as if her groom was wincing, but his expression turned into a smile as he faced the small gathering assembled in the room.

“Since there won’t be a reception and Dawnie—” there was a slight rustle near the hem of the bride’s exquisite lace wedding gown and Asher seemed to wince again before he went on “—Dawn and I will be leaving Venice immediately for our honeymoon in the Azores, a few words of appreciation are in order. First I’d like to thank Sir Giles Anthony, Britain’s man in Venice and a close friend of my uncle’s, who unfortunately couldn’t be here today, for offering us the use of his beautiful palazzo in which to celebrate our special day and the fleet of gondolas that brought us and our guests here in style. Sir Giles, my adorable wife and I will never be able to thank you enough for—”

“Unfriendly at three o’clock, Ash! Get the freakin’ padre out of the line of fire!”

Destin Asher’s adorable bride reached under the masses of tulle and lace billowing around her. Her hand came back into sight holding a wicked-looking knife. As the guests’ shocked gasps turned to screams, she threw it at the tuxedo-clad man by the door who was raising his automatic rifle to his shoulder.

His aim jerked up, and a deadly line of bullets thudded into the delicately hued painting on the salon’s ceiling. Wrenching the blade from his arm with a cry of pain, the man began to raise his weapon again.

“Everybody down!” Dawn jerked her attention Asher’s way at his shouted warning. Clad in a dove-gray morning suit, he reached behind the lectern the priest had been standing at before he’d been knocked aside and leveled the Sig Sauer he’d retrieved over the heads of the guests. “Lady, get down, dammit!” He fired off a round and the gunman at the door suddenly clutched his elbow and dropped his rifle. A few pink feathers drifted onto the upturned face of a woman wearing a towering pink hat who’d fainted dead away.

“Crap, Ash, he’s escaping!” Dawn began to race toward the door, but halfway there she tripped on the train of her gown, sliding a few feet on her face before scrambling to her feet again. “Help me off with this freakin’ thing,” she said as her groom ran to her side.

Seed pearls scattering wildly in all directions, Asher ripped her bodice open, revealing a virginal white corset with push-up cups. Impatiently grabbing a handful of tulle, Dawn tore the dress down over her hips and stepped out of it.

“Take a picture, it’ll last longer, buddy,” she snapped at a gaping male guest. “Come on, Asher, the bastard’s getting away!”

“He’ll have transportation waiting down by the canal,” he replied as they left their wedding guests huddled on the floor and sped out into a hallway. “No, love, take the stairs to the roof garden.”

“What, are you crazy?” Despite her protest, Dawn complied, shouldering past Asher and reaching the landing a step ahead of him. “We should be following the mother, not going in the opposite direction.”

“That’s exactly my point.” Tearing off his suit jacket as he ran, he headed up a second flight of stairs. “From the roof garden we can see which way his waiting vaporetto heads when it takes off. By the way, couldn’t you find those in white?”

He pushed open the door at the top of the stairs as he spoke, his glance dropping briefly to her feet. She made a face. “The combat boots? Okay, I know they don’t go with the merry widow and the frilly blue garters, but I figured they wouldn’t show under that ridiculous meringue of a dress. Besides, I knew if your plan worked out there was a chance we’d be involved in a situation where combat boots would be more appropriate than satin pumps. Over by those tubs of flowers—that must overlook the front of the building, Ash.”

She sped to the ornamental railing and looked down the three stories—technically four, Dawn thought, since they were on the roof—of the ancient palazzo. The beauty of Venice was spread out all around them, but her eyes were focused on the line of gondolas and motorized vaporettos bobbing in the canal just feet from the front door of the palazzo.

“After six months of always finding ourselves one step behind those bastards who bought your uncle’s research from Peters, this fake wedding was a stroke of genius,” she said, her attention fixed on the scene below. “Like you guessed it might, it drew one of them out of the woodwork hoping to take us both down when we didn’t have our guard up. Where’d you get the actor who played the priest, Ash? He was so convincing that if I didn’t know better I’d swear he was the real thing.”

“Do I still get to take those frilly blue garters off later tonight?” Asher said musingly, leaning over the railing and not looking at her. “Keep the boots on, too, love. It’s a kinky look, but it suits you.”

His tone was too smooth. Dawn frowned, momentarily taking her gaze from the canal. “He didn’t even have to refer to the book of services for the words to the marriage ceremony, I noticed. He was pretty freakin’ good, Ash. Where’d you find him?”

“There’s our man!”

Ignoring her question, Asher pointed to a figure stumbling onto the cobblestoned walkway that lined the canal. Another figure leaped from one of the moored motorboats, grabbed the first man by the arm and hustled him onboard. A moment later she heard the sound of not one but two powerful engines coughing to life.

“Now for the fun part,” Asher said briskly as he threw one leg over the railing and then the other. He stood on the small ledge and gave her a tight grin. “That second vaporetto’s our chase vehicle, love. You up for a quick dip?”

“Are you freakin’…oh, why not. It’s faster than running down all those stairs again.” Dawn hoisted herself over the rail and looked at the man standing beside her. “He was a fake priest, right?”

“Bloody hell, O’Shaughnessy—just jump!” Asher grinned, grabbing her hand and leaping with her off the ledge.

COUNTDOWN

RUTH WIND

Published by Silhouette Books
America’s Publisher of Contemporary Romance

Special thanks and acknowledgment
are given to Ruth Wind for her contribution
to the ATHENA FORCE series.

For my son Ian,
who helped a lot with this book.
Thanks, kiddo!

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Prologue

Tuesday, October 5

It was night and snowing when Kim Valenti parked at FBI headquarters in Chicago. Snow came in through the window of the stolen car—a 1971 gold Buick Skylark—that she’d hot-wired at the parking lot of the UBC television station. She’d be glad to get somewhere warmer.

Before she got out, she checked her face in the rearview mirror. If there was blood showing, she would draw attention to herself, and someone would be concerned or alarmed, which would cause more delays. She couldn’t risk losing any more time.

There was a bomb ticking away at the airport. Somewhere. Due to detonate in exactly—she checked her watch—seventy-nine minutes.

In the mirror, she saw that her lip was swollen. She’d have a black eye tomorrow. A few scrapes, but no damage that would make her stand out too much in a law enforcement agency.

She got out of the car and hid the gun she’d also stolen in the small of her back, tucked into the waistband of her jeans. The weight of it was comforting and cold. Her cell phone was in her hand, the cord around her wrist.

Snow fell more heavily now, and she was half-frozen from the drive through the Chicago streets in a broken-down car with a shattered window.

In spite of the cold, her torn and battered ear throbbed. She wished it would have frozen. At least that would make it stop hurting. Without breaking stride, she scooped a handful of snow from the hood of a nearby car and pressed the icy ball to torn cartilage.

As she approached the front doors of the FBI building, a group of men erupted into the parking lot, rushing toward cars and vans. They shouted directions to one another, pulled on gloves, carted cases and rifles.

All headed, no doubt, for the television station. Kim ducked into the shadow of a truck, watching, her mouth hard. She could tell them that their rush Ruth Wind 9 was futile, but they wouldn’t listen to her now any more than they had earlier.

No, if she had any chance of success, there was only one man for the job—Lex Tanner, FBI explosives expert and a compatriot she’d believed in before this morning.

She spied him toward the back of the group, carrying a metal suitcase. His dark hair was cut very short, the nose surprisingly recognizable from the pictures she’d seen, and he was quite tall. At least six-four. Rangy, lean and muscled, with shoulders big enough to shelter her from the wind.

As he neared her spot, she stepped out of the shadows. “Lex Luthor, I presume?”

He started, narrowing his eyes and sizing her up. Recognition washed over his features. “Valenti?” He looked more alarmed than pleased. “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been calling all afternoon.”

“Long story. Right now, I need you to bring your little bomb kit and come with me to the airport.”

“I can’t. I’m on my way to UBC. There’s a terrorist—”

“Yeah, yeah—” she waved a hand “—never mind. That’s not the problem.”

“They’ve stolen a bomb they’re threatening to detonate—”

“It’s not at the station.”

“They’ve got hostages.”

“I know.” She took a breath. “Look, I don’t have time to explain everything, but the drama at UBC is a smoke screen—the bomb is at the airport.”

“It’s not there! Don’t you get it? We’ve been over it a hundred and forty-seven times.” His exasperation might have been understandable if they’d been strangers.

If he hadn’t seen that she was extremely skilled. If he didn’t know better.

If she hadn’t proved herself by trusting his instincts, sight unseen.

If, if, if. She shook her head. She could stand here and argue, wasting time, explaining, or she could—

She pulled out her gun, using her body to shield it from the sight of the others, and poked the barrel into his ribs. “I didn’t want to do it this way, but you won’t listen.”

“What—?”

She glared at him. “Don’t make me hurt you, Luthor. I liked you until today.”

“This is crazy.” He glanced toward the men entering their trucks.

“Don’t even think about it.” She jabbed the butt into his ribs, harder. “I am dead serious.”

“You’re going to fuck up your career doing this.”

Kim met his eyes. They were extremely blue. She’d read somewhere that extremely blue or green eyes showed a highly sexual nature.

Furious was more the word at the moment.

Oh, well. “Get in the car and I’ll explain.”

“You won’t shoot me. I know you won’t.”

“I won’t kill you,” she said. “But I will hurt you if you don’t come with me. Now.” She pushed harder.

He resisted. “Explain.”

She met his eyes with an icy lift of her own eyebrow. “Walk.”

He glanced over his shoulder. No one was looking at them. Kim nudged him. “I tried to go through channels, but none of you has given me the respect I deserve, and because of that, people may die unnecessarily.”

“If I go against orders, I’ll be fired.”

“I’m not talking anymore.”

For an instant longer, he resisted. His nostrils flared in fury.

“It’s killing you to have to listen to a girl, isn’t it?”

“No, I—”

“My mother was a nurse in Vietnam. Did you know that? She was taken hostage once for three days, and it’s something that has given her nightmares the rest of her life.”

“Why the hell would I care, Valenti?”

“Because you can trust that I am very, very sincere when I say that I hate the whole hostage game. I would do anything to free hostages—but I won’t let other people die. Do you understand?”

He narrowed his eyes, the jaw still mulish. Damn. She really did not want to hurt him. She would if she had to, but it would be messier and she needed him.

“Luthor, I’ve had a very bad night. My ear is killing me. There are a couple of bastards at that television station who may or may not kill hostages, but there are law enforcement officials on scene to deal with them. They also don’t have a bomb at the station, and that’s what I need you for.”

“How is it, Kim, that you’re so much smarter than the entire federal law enforcement community?”

She blinked. “I don’t know, Lex. You tell me. Maybe I’m just smart. One thing I know for sure is that I do know what I’m talking about because—by the way did I tell you I speak Arabic fluently?—I overheard them talking at the television station. There is a bomb or a suicide bomber headed for the airport or at the airport, and people will die if we don’t go now. I don’t know how to defuse a bomb. You do.”

“You finished?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s go. You can explain the rest in the car.”

Chapter 1

One day earlier—Monday, October 4

Somehow, Kim Valenti fell asleep next to her lover. It was not something she ordinarily allowed. Maybe it was the long days trying to break a troublesome code. Maybe it was the cold, nearly winter night. Maybe just general weariness. Whatever.

She slept.

Hard.

And as often happened these days, the nightmares came. Jason, laughing and joking, his big hands and goofy smile—suddenly beheaded. A casualty of war. He’d been a professional soldier, after all. Sometimes soldiers died in the line of duty.

The dream yanked her out of sleep, her hands raised, her legs thrashing, a yell of protest on her lips. This time, her lover caught her in his sturdy arms.

“Hey,” Marc said quietly. “You okay?”

Blinking, shuddering as if she’d nearly fallen off a cliff, Kim wiped her face. “Yeah.”

Kim’s mother, Eileen, had been plagued by nightmares throughout Kim’s childhood, and the children had learned never to awaken her in the usual way, by grabbing a shoulder or an elbow. If she fell asleep on the couch after work, they’d simply stand beside her and call her name quietly until she stirred. To do otherwise was to risk a sharp fist to the face as the soldier she’d been reacted to a threat long past.

Now that she’d lost a son to war, Eileen said she never dreamed at all anymore. Kim had wearily confessed one night, over plates of pasta, that she’d taken it on for her mother. She had regular nightmares about her brother Jason. Her mother had squeezed her shoulder. Sorry, sweetheart.

“Argh!” Kim said, rubbing her eyes. “It’s this damned code! It’s driving me nuts!”

“You’re having nightmares about codes?”

She shook her head. “Not exactly.” She couldn’t discuss it. Her brother’s death was something she didn’t talk about, and the code was something she wasn’t allowed to discuss with a civilian.

The two things were feeding into each other tonight: Jason, dead in Iraq two years ago, and the Arabic code running through her mind. Endless ribbons of delicate, graceful lettering flowing across the back of her eyelids. Over and over. Almost clicking into place, then sliding away from her.

Kim swore. She wasn’t going to be getting any sleep tonight. Even less if she didn’t get rid of her lover.

“We’re not supposed to be doing this anyway,” she said, easing away from him. “No sleeping over.”

He groaned, and buried his well-chiseled face into the pillow. Glossy black hair splashed over the white linens. His shoulders, round and smooth, stuck out of the sheet. “Don’t make me go.”

“You know the rules.”

Marc faced her. “What would it hurt if I slept over just once?”

“Nyet, nope, not a chance.” She rolled away, slid into the robe she’d left at the foot of her bed. As she tied it, she tried to soften up her line a little bit. “You don’t want this to get serious any more than I do. We’d make each other crazy in a week.”

He rubbed his perfectly grizzled jaw. “I know, I know.”

She liked Marc just fine. He was a safe, warm companion, who made her laugh. They’d dated off and on for more than two years, and neither of them saw anyone else, particularly, but they didn’t intend to be serious. No one in his life knew she existed, and no one in hers knew he did. They kept company, sometimes made love, kept each other on track about getting too serious. They were both very ambitious and had no intentions of getting sidetracked from their careers into something as ordinary as love and marriage.

If he’d had a few more brains, he might have been good long-term material, but his IQ just about matched his job: he was a model for a major men’s clothing line. Beautiful to be sure, but not someone she felt she could trust for the long haul. It was the perfect arrangement for the short haul.

Marc buried his face. Made a noise. Kim slapped his very nicely shaped butt. “Get moving.”

“C’mon. Have a heart.” He reached out a big hand with elegantly manicured nails that somehow managed to look rugged anyway. “I’m tired, Kim. Really. It’s cold out there. This bed is so comfortable.”

She headed for the bathroom. “Nope. You’ve got to get moving because I’ve got to work.”

“Work? It’s nearly midnight. Won’t it wait until morning?”

“No. Do you want a shower?”

“No, thanks.” Reluctantly, he tossed the covers off and stood up, stretching. Kim allowed herself to admire him. Too bad he wasn’t brighter, she thought wryly. He was Italian, handsome, kind, and she had no doubt he’d be a good father. And she could look Ruth Wind 17

at him for hours. Trouble was most women could, and he’d age well. She suspected he would be married many times as the years went by.

Just a gut feeling.

He put on his jeans and wandered over to put his arms around Kim. He kissed her neck. “Thanks for a great evening. You know I’m crazy about you.”

She patted his hands, allowed the kiss. “Yeah, yeah, Spinuzzi.”

Against her neck, he asked quietly, “Did you have a good time, Kim?”

It was unexpectedly vulnerable. Kim cursed inwardly. One of these days, she was going to have to remember that men were not as tough as they wanted women to think they were.

She turned and kissed him. “Always, Marc. I enjoy your company, and you’re a great guy. We’re just not couple material and you know it.”

He squeezed her shoulder and nodded. “You’re right, you’re right. Go take your shower and I’ll call you in a few days.”

“Thanks.”

After a hot shower, Kim made a peanut butter sandwich and a cup of hot chocolate and carried them into her study.

“Alone at last,” she breathed, tugging her thick hair into a knot at the nape of her neck. She settled her cup and slid her chair up to the computer. Code rolled relentlessly through the back of her brain. Insistent, incoherent. Strings of garbled letters, Arabic and English, back and forth. She squeezed her eyes shut and let go of a sigh.

As a code breaker for the National Security Agency, Kim was trying to decrypt a group of e-mails suspected to have originated with a terrorist network called Q’rajn. The NSA had intercepted dozens of missives over the past few weeks, and the flurry had turned into a blizzard of e-mails the past three days. Kim, along with her partner, Scott Shepherd, had been working for weeks nonstop to find the key. With the increased activity, there was increasing dread.

Something nagged her tonight, a sense of something glimpsed out of the corner of her eye, something visible only in peripheral vision. She wanted another look at the code, to see if that jarred anything loose.

Her study was a plain room with open desks and two computers. The blinds were drawn. It was quiet so late. Her neighbors were largely young professionals like herself, with jobs in the local “alphabet agencies”—CIA, NSA, FBI—or the military installations in and around Washington, D.C., and Baltimore.

While she waited for the computers to boot, Kim ate her sandwich and admired the view of her kitchen from the office chair. A large jade plant stood on the windowsill, and on the wall behind the table was an enormous red-and-black Navajo blanket. It had been a gift from her mentor and reminded her of the time she’d spent at the Athena Academy for the Advancement of Women in Arizona. Athena educated girls ages ten to eighteen, at a state-of-the-art facility where girls trained in academics, martial arts, languages and other leadership skills.

Kim was proud of her little condo. Few women in her traditional Italian family lived on their own, even when they were twenty-five, as Kim was. Even fewer lived outside the enclave in Baltimore known as Little Italy. Not one of them had purchased real estate, not on her own.

It was one of the first goals Kim had made and met. The modern, two-bedroom condo was not particularly notable, though she loved the big windows and the master bedroom loft, but it was all hers. All modern convenience and post-turn-of-the-century architecture, which she’d decorated in a bright, coral-and-turquoise Southwestern theme. Some locals thought it was kitschy—so “last year,” as one friend had said—but for Kim, it was a reminder of the things she’d learned in the harsh and beautiful world of the desert. So much of who she was came from those days outside of Phoenix.

As she waited for her computer to load various programs and go through the virus checks, she switched on the radio that sat on the corner of her desk. The dial was tuned to a world music station that played a variety of Latin, African and European selections. The switches helped keep her awake.

Usually.

When the computers were up and running, she clicked on the icons to download e-mail on both machines.

Kim had three e-mail addresses—one for personal mail on her home computer, one for NSA-related material, which had a dedicated line the government paid for.

A third address was used strictly to receive e-mail from a top-secret, outside agency, called Oracle. It was located on her personal machine, to avoid any cross-contamination from work.

On the work computer, she dialed into the government network, where she would be able to explore the files connected to the current case. It was sometimes laborious signing in, but tonight the computer whizzed through the screens, the layers and layers of security designed to thwart hackers.

Most of them, anyway. No system was entirely safe, no matter what the government wanted to believe. They did their best. It was a fairly tight system, and whenever a weakness was discovered, computer security experts were on the spot to fix it.

On her home computer, the personal e-mails sorted into one folder. Twenty-seven, which was a lot for her in one day. She frowned. She’d check them in a minute, but first she switched IDs and asked the computer to fetch her Oracle e-mails. Maybe they’d have something to help crack this code.

Oracle was a special computer system developed to track information gathered from FBI, CIA, NSA and military databases, to be then cross-checked and matched. Created in the days before Homeland Security, it had been developed to help avoid disasters like Pearl Harbor and the 1993 Trade Center bombing, events that might have been prevented had key information been shared between agencies.

Kim had been recruited through AA.gov, a Web site connecting Athena Academy grads and students. She assumed Oracle was run by someone within the school network, and she knew there were a handful of operatives in key organizations—such as Kim and her work with the NSA—but all were protected by a cloak of anonymity. No one knew the agents. No one outside of Oracle knew it existed. It worked beyond the map of security in the U.S. government.

After Homeland Security had been created, Oracle had theoretically become obsolete.

Theoretically.

In fact, Oracle had not disbanded because it provided a fail-safe for the other organizations. Although she didn’t know the particulars, she knew Oracle agents were able to get a fix on problems and provide evidence to thwart troublesome activities before the agencies involved were able to act. It was not infallible any more than any other device, but it helped prevent information from slipping between the cracks.

The folder for Oracle mail was labeled simply Delphi. It only received e-mail sporadically, and always from the same place. Tonight, it showed one new message.

Tonight, Kim fervently hoped for some information about Q-group, and she clicked on the folder. The e-mail read:

To: Ariadne@orcl.org

From: Delphi@orcl.org

Subject: q’s

1. Intelligence reports Q’rajn definitely tied to Berzhaan. CIA has tracked operatives overseas. FBI reports activity within the United States, links to Berzhaan terrorist community.

2. Two names emerging in connection with current activities: Fathi bin Amin Mansour and Hafiz abu Malik Abd-Humam, both natives of Berzhaan.

-Mansour is prodigiously intelligent. Advanced degrees from Oxford in chemical engineering and European history. Mother and two brothers killed in guerilla raids by the Kemini rebels four years ago, for which he holds the West responsible. He is connected to several bombings. His whereabouts are unknown. See attached photograph, taken in London, 2001.

-Abd-Humam is an associate of Mansour’s father, a professor without overt terrorist ties. Appears to be a devoted family man, religious but not overtly so. He has protested Western (particularly U.S.) involvement in Berzhaan politics and has written papers supporting self-determination for his country. His connection is not yet known. There are no known photos at this time.

Delphi

The attached photo showed a man in his early fifties, impeccably dressed in a dark business suit. His face was dominated by large, dark eyes and an intense expression, and Kim imagined that he generally received more than a cursory second glance from most women.

Kim copied the e-mail into a word-processing program, removed all header information and printed a copy. Then she destroyed the e-mail, both through the delete key and a more sophisticated function designed to erase it entirely from the hard drive. If she were investigated or hacked, there would be no trace of Oracle on her computer.

Taking the paper from the printer, she sipped her hot chocolate, thinking. Maybe the names themselves would offer a clue toward the code pattern.

Were there possibilities in the names? Abd-Humam was a common surname, but it had religious overtones: servant of the high-minded. Mansour was a very common name. She scowled, trying to remember. She was fluent in Arabic, as well as Italian, French, and—through a lovely triangle of events the year she was twelve—Navajo. But one didn’t remember everything.

With a pad of paper and a pencil, she scribbled more notes, played with possibilities, fixed the English, then the Arabic letters in her mind. Something for the wheels to spin around as she slept.

She rubbed her eyes wearily. Q’rajn was a very dangerous organization, as they’d proven more than once with all the usual—though no less horrifying—earmarks of fanaticism: suicide bombings and death threats and displays of bravado in villages across the Middle East. They always faded away before they could be captured, though the CIA had been lucky in nabbing a key player last summer. He’d not given up much information, but his background and connections had provided some genuine leads and links to terrorism in Berzhaan.

“Okay, let’s try something else,” she said aloud, and keyed in her code to open the work files, and ran sample lines from several e-mails through a mechanical translator: Arabic to English, English to Arabic. Arabic and English combined, one sentence in one language, the next every other word, the next the first language, just to see what might turn up.

Computers at the NSA were busy running the encrypted material—dozens of intercepted e-mails—through programs of various sorts, checking logarithms and structures and known patterns. It was also checking another series of possibilities that Kim had programmed.

Nothing so far.

She slumped in the chair and picked up a bottle of eyedrops from the desk. Leaning back, she dropped Visine into her dry eyes. The shift in position eased the tight muscles in her neck and she stayed there a minute, her chin pointed at the ceiling. Her eyes were closed. The room was quiet.

The agency was sometimes too crazy for her. At home there were no ringing phones, no jokes between members of the team, no one having a low, fierce argument with a spouse over a cell phone connection.

Around her, Kim heard only the breathing of her computers and above that a respectful female voice reading the headlines on the radio. It was the fourth time she’d heard the news since dinner, so she didn’t pay a lot of attention, but kept one ear open for anything new or notable. With such a blizzard of encoded e-mails, she was uneasy. Something was coming.

The newscaster said, “Fourteen people were killed when a train derailed near Munich this afternoon. A terrorist cell in the Sudan claimed responsibility.”

Kim straightened and growled at the radio, “Bastards.” All the innocents who had been slaughtered by terrorists the past couple of decades disturbed her. It was one of the reasons she’d wanted to work with codes in particular. By breaking them down, there was a chance she could stop violence before it happened.

Arabic and English sentences, written white on a black background, tumbled through her brain. What was she missing? It felt as if the key were just out of reach, just beyond her peripheral vision.

“Look to the middle of things,” said a voice in her memory. It was the voice of her first mentor, Arthur Tsosie, a Navajo who had served the United States as a code breaker in World War II.

Arthur had been stable master at the Athena Academy where Kim had gone as a shy and awkward twelve-year-old. Lonely away from her big family, but also determined not to let on that she wasn’t just as tough as the other girls, Kim had often retreated to the stables. Arthur, coming upon the bereft and weeping little girl who missed her family, had befriended her. The old man had provided a pocket of retreat for her when things had become too overwhelming.

And his stories of his adventures as a code talker, told in his lilting, soft tenor, had lit a passion in Kim that had never abated. When she proved to be gifted with both maths and languages, becoming a code breaker had been the obvious choice.

Arthur had always delivered his tidbits of knowledge while caring for the horses. Memories of him were now accompanied by scents of straw and dusty sunlight. She could see his hands, the color of pecans and gnarled into knots so the fingers looked like branches, grasping the currycomb as it moved through a pale blond mane. “The trick to seeing anythin’,” he’d say, “is to remember it’s not what it is on the outside. Code, woman, friend, dog—it’s all the same. Look through the top to the middl-a things.”

Look through the top.

Often that meant simply letting go of perceptions as they stood, to allow new angles to enter her brain. Kim let the reams of code float over the surface of her closed eyelids. The e-mails were exchanged in Arabic, or at least in Arabic script. The messages had almost certainly begun in the Arabic language, as well, although the words were now nothing recognizable in any language the computers could read.

The quirky dots and swirls of Arabic lettering moved on her eyelids, a dance. Along with computers that had been running the cipher text through programs all day, Kim and her partner, Scott, had been manually trying various approaches to decipher the code.

The Arabic letters turned into a swirling, Jasmine-and-Aladdin cartoon script, the dots exaggerated. She slammed her feet to the floor, jolting herself back awake.

“Damn,” she said. “Damn. Damn. Damn.” A sense of urgency built in her chest.

Solve the code.

The answer was right there. She could feel it. What was she missing?

Kim focused on the computer screen and punched some buttons on her keyboard to bring up the program running in the background.

From the radio on her desk came a somber female voice. “President James Whitlow endured questions from the press today regarding the Tom King-Puerto Isla scandal. Many Americans are beginning to question the connection between Puerto Isla and the current unrest in Berzhaan.”

To wake herself up, Kim said aloud, “Unrest in Berzhaan. There’s an unusual situation.”

The unrest wasn’t unusual, but some blamed the United States, or at least the current administration, for the trouble in the small Middle Eastern country. It didn’t matter to Kim whether the assessment was correct or incorrect—her concern was that there were terrorist cells that were determined to punish what they saw as the evil empire of the United States and make a statement by whatever means necessary.

With presidential elections coming up and the general unease about the world situation and the scandal of Puerto Isla hanging over the President, the situation offered too many opportunities.

Again she felt the urgency, that hollow sense of dread. Break the code.

On the radio, the announcer went on, “In other news, presidential candidate, Gabriel Monihan, appeared at a packed rally in New York City this afternoon, part of a ten-city election blitz that began yesterday in Washington, D.C.”

A window on Kim’s work computer popped up. In a blue box with red lettering, she read:

LEXLUTHOR: How’s the code chopping?

Kim grinned. Alexander Tanner was an FBI bomb-squad expert in Chicago who had assisted her with a case two months ago, when a young hacker used bomb schematics to encrypt messages through the upper reaches of government. Privately, Kim had been impressed with the kid, a bored seventeen-year-old with too much time on his hands and a brain that needed challenges. Lex had been the first to spot the schematics while working an unrelated case and had e-mailed Kim to ask her advice over whether the coding could be done.

Their cooperation—an NSA employee and an FBI agent—would have been unheard of several years ago. Animosity had been more the game in those days. But reporter after reporter had turned up examples of situations that could have been defused by real communication between agencies and the pressure to cooperate had become too powerful to resist. The top-level security agencies in the country were—at least officially—encouraging interdepartmental communication, including this connected link of instant messaging within the various agencies.

It was working. Sort of. The animosity between various agencies, the secretive and jealous ways they guarded their sources, the eternal race to see who would solve which problem first, would never entirely disappear.

Although she’d never met Lex in person, Kim liked his sense of humor and his breezy ways—such as using the name of a comic-book supervillain as his instant-messaging handle.

She typed:

WINDTALKER2: Hey, guy! Still chopping. You’re out late.

LEXLUTHOR: The same could be said of you.

WINDTALKER2: Trying to crack this baby. Feels big.

LEXLUTHOR: Yeah? Wanna brainstorm?

WINDTALKER2: Might be getting too scattered to think now. A.M.?

LEXLUTHOR: No can do. Big meetings.

Kim was overtaken by a yawn. She typed:

WINDTALKER 2: All right. How come you’re working so late?

LEXLUTHOR: Politicians up the wazoo in Chicago this week. Green candidate today. Prez appearing tomorrow. Monihan on Thursday.

WINDTALKER2: Bomb scares?

LEXLUTHOR: Dozens. Every lunatic in the greater metro area has a plan for saving the world. Gotta check ’em all. Been over the courthouse twenty times. The airport at least 452.

WINDTALKER2: 452? That would take a little time.

LEXLUTHOR: Well, maybe it was only six times. FELT like 452.

WINDTALKER2: Any bombs anywhere?

LEXLUTHOR: Nope. Real bombers don’t call ahead.

WINDTALKER2: Ah.

LEXLUTHOR: Hey. I looked up your picture on the company site.

WINDTALKER2: That’s creepy, Luthor.

LEXLUTHOR: Somebody told me you were hot.

WINDTALKER 2: It was probably me. I am hot, and don’t you forget it.

LEXLUTHOR: Kinda short. But then, I’m kinda ugly, so I guess we’re even.

WINDTALKER2: Short is a state of mind.

LEXLUTHOR: <clearing throat delicately> I might be in your area next week. You up for a cup of coffee or something?

WINDTALKER2: Hold on.

LEXLUTHOR: What are you doing?

WINDTALKER2: Checking out YOUR picture. What if you’re really ugly?

LEXLUTHOR: No fair going to the academy photo.

She opened a second window on the computer and ran a search for Alex Tanner, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Chicago, then clicked on the first link. Which was the Academy photo.

Kim grinned. It showed a serious-looking young man, about 21, skinny and with a nose almost too big for his face.

WINDTALKER2: <SNICKER>

LEXLUTHOR: Damn. I’ve put on a few pounds since then.

WINDTALKER2: Good thing.

LEXLUTHOR: We’re all geeks at 21. Check this link out: www.oaksidetelegraph.com/article00364.htm

WINDTALKER2: Yeah, yeah, Luthor. It’s probably a link to Heath Ledger.

But Kim clicked on the link, which took her to a newspaper site, and a headline that read, “Bomb Squadron Safety Record Vetted.” Beneath it was a photo of a man in a black T-shirt that showed off very nice shoulders, a good chest and excellent arms.

Kim raised an eyebrow. His hair was cropped to show a well-shaped head, high cheekbones and, yep, that aggressive nose. Which was a lot sexier on a thirtysomething face.

And he had that mouth, a Denzel Washington mouth, with an overbite and a full lower lip that looked very sexy.

Kim had a weakness for lips like that.

WINDTALKER2: Okay.

LEXLUTHOR: Okay, what?

WINDTALKER2: Okay, you won’t shame me. I’ll have coffee next week.

LEXLUTHOR: Not sure I can handle the exuberance, babe.

WINDTALKER2: Babe? What century are you?

WINDTALKER2: Hang on….

WINDTALKER2: Something coming up on my decryption.

The computer was making a soft, double beep that meant something had been noted in a special file. When she opened it, she frowned.

WINDTALKER2: Hmm. Odd.

LEXLUTHOR: Que?

WINDTALKER2: It’s an odd signature file.

LEXLUTHOR: Not my area, kiddo. I’ll let you get to it.

WINDTALKER2: K-O.

LEXLUTHOR: Next week.

“What am I missing?” she asked herself, peering hard at the screen.

And if she didn’t find the answer, who was going to die because of it?

A small musical noise told her an e-mail had arrived in her personal in-box. It brought the total to twenty-eight, and Kim remembered she’d meant to check the box. Her eyes burned and she knew she needed to get to bed if she was to have any brain at all the next day, but her little sisters were always wounded if she didn’t respond, so she dutifully opened the folder marked “Family.”

“Shit!” she said aloud.

There were two messages from her mother. One was—Kim sighed—an e-mail hoax that had been around for years, about people flashing their headlights erroneously.

The other…

TO: kvalenti@rsme.net

FROM: eileenvalenti@dearbornhosp.org

SUBJECT: Sunday dinner

Hi, honey. I’ve been on the phone all day and the girls finally stole it from me. Don’t forget, next Monday is the Columbus Day parade and your sisters’ hearts will be broken if you don’t show up to watch them tap dance on the police float. I was going to have our big meal that day, but nobody wanted to shift the tradition, so we’ll just do it Sunday, as always. Try to come for both, huh? Bring a friend if you want. Maybe your big handsome partner??

Love,

Mom

Below the message from Eileen was a list of twenty-seven e-mails, repeated over and over down the length of the window. Each carried her sister Lynda’s e-mail address, lyndavalenti2@rsme.net, and the same subject line: LOOK WHAT I FOUND ONLINE! A paper-clip icon sat beside each one.

“Lynda, Lynda, Lynda,” Kim said, and opened her virus protection software to isolate and examine the virus. “How many times I gotta tell ya not to open attachments, kid?”

When the box was cleared, she examined the isolated virus. It turned out to be a relatively benign form that simply replicated and sent e-mails to every address on an account. Not such a big deal if the infected computer was the personal machine of a teenage girl, but costly and damaging if it was the mainframe of a big corporation.

The fact that she did have a teenage sister was one of the reasons Kim kept her e-mail accounts so rigidly separated.

She sent her sister a warning message with instructions to remove the infected files from her own computer. In capital letters, she typed:

DO NOT OPEN ATTACHMENTS. EVER. Love, Kim.

Something jiggled in her brain, right at the edge.

The answer.

It was there, then gone, like a phantom.

“Get some sleep, Valenti,” she said.

Please.

Chapter 2

Tuesday, October 5

The following morning, Kim glared at the computer screen at work. They still had not made significant progress. Whatever clue was niggling at the edge of her brain had refused to come forth.

Her partner, Scott Shepherd, dropped down beside her, a sheaf of papers in his hands. “Anything?” he asked. His eyes looked as red as her own probably did, and she offered her bottle of eyedrops.

“That bad?”

“Three-day-bender bad.”

“Real men don’t use eyedrops. We just belt some bourbon and make it look authentic.” He rubbed his eyes. “The whole place needs new monitors, however. The refresh rate sucks.”

Kim leaned back and pointed at the screen with the eraser end of a pencil she’d been chewing on. “What do you make of this signature file? It shows up on all of them, invisible in the e-mail itself, but running in the background.”

He frowned at the screen, stroked his chin where he’d worn a goatee until joining the NSA. “I see it, but it’s not bringing anything up for me right this second.”

Rolling her tired shoulders, she stood. “I feel like we’re so close. It’s driving me crazy.”

“I know.”

She pushed her chair under the desk, smacked his arm. “C’mon. Let’s get on the treadmills for a half hour, talk it out. Maybe there’s something we’re missing.” She stretched the muscles of her back, hard.

“Sounds good.” He dropped the papers on her desk. “I pulled these up. Maybe there’s something else here.”

“Last one on the treadmills is a rotten egg.”

In the women’s locker room, Kim stripped out of her day clothes, a straight blue skirt, white blouse, stockings and low-heeled pumps. It was great to shed the uniform for stretchy shorts, a sports bra with a T-shirt over it, her comfortable Nike running shoes. She tugged her dark hair into a scrunchie and tucked her earrings into her pocket.

Exercise would help clear the cobwebs. She tossed a towel over her shoulder and made her way into the fitness center.

There were few people around. Although the NSA worked around the clock, this was generally a lull period. Scott had claimed a treadmill in the empty line, and she took the one beside him. She punched in numbers to get to a moderate jog and found her pace, then said, “So what’s going down? If you were a terrorist, what would you be targeting?”

He shook his head. His jaw was grim. “The elections are a possibility.”

The presidential elections would be held in a few weeks, and there had been a great deal of controversy over the incumbent, President James Whitlow. “Who’d be the best target?”

“I’d kill the young, handsome one,” he said.

Kim chuckled. “Personally dislike the guy, huh?”

“It’s the tragedy factor—an old guy gets blown up, even if he’s a president, it’s not as big a deal as when a charming and handsome younger guy gets it.”

“Good point.” Kim nodded. “Then again, terrorists have little love for the president, and it’s plain he’s not particularly effective at home or abroad.”

“Especially in Berzhaan.”

“Right. All the more reason terrorists might target him. Or maybe to get people to vote the way they want them to, as with Spain and maybe this new Munich thing. Get them to vote for Monihan.”

Scott made a derisive noise. “I’m still having trouble taking Monihan seriously.”

Kim wiped a lock of hair out of her eyes. “What’s the matter, Shepherd? He’s prettier than you?”

“Nah. I’m serious here. He’s too young, and the only reason he’s so popular is because all these women are swooning over his pretty face.”

“So, you’ve got to be old and ugly to be a good president?”

He shot her a grin. “Adds dignity.”

Kim rolled her eyes. “And Whitlow is so dignified.”

“He’s a statesman of the old school, you gotta admit.”

“Mmm. The who-cares-where-the-money-comes-from-as-long-as-I-get-elected school.” Whitlow was suspected of accepting money from a drug lord in Puerto Isla, and worse, sending in a SEAL force, which was then demolished, to cover it up. “Whitlow’s finished.”

“Maybe. Unless they kill Monihan.”

They ran in silence for a moment. Feet thumped rhythmically against the rubberized mats, and the motors whirred quietly. Kim felt her breath going deeper, expanding her lungs with oxygen—oxygen that then enlivened her brain cells.

“They’re planning something big,” Scott said grimly. “I feel it in my gut.”

“Me, too. If we don’t break this code, what are we going to find out in the worst way?”

“Exactly.”

“It’s a pretty sophisticated network,” Kim said. “So we’re looking at high-level planning.”

“It’d be nice if terrorists were as stupid as criminals, but they wouldn’t get far in the modern world.”

She grinned.

They ran in companionable silence for a while. After a few minutes, Kim felt a click of endorphins, and the stress seemed to drain out of her body in a rush, as if someone had pulled a plug in her toe. “Ah,” she said, and blew out hard. “Better.”

She glanced at Scott, who had sweat pouring down his rugged, well-cut face. “Admit it,” she said. “This feels pretty good.”

“Yeah, Valenti, you’re as smart as you are good-looking.”

“Sweet-talker.”

He blotted his face. “So they say.”

“The secretarial pool swoons when you walk through, Shepherd, along with half the cryptographers.” She gave him a sidelong grin. “Male and female.”

“Why do you keep ribbing me about this, huh? I think you have a secret crush on me.”

“That’s true. And you know me, I’m so mild mannered, I can’t come right out and say it.”

He laughed. “Mild mannered. Yeah, right.” He punched the controls. “Climb some hills?”

“You bet.” She punched in the incline numbers and grinned. It was the reason she liked working out with him—he was extremely competitive and pushed her to better levels. The hills were a point of pride. He’d grown up in Colorado, in a little ski town, and boasted terrific lung capacity. Kim had gone to prep school in Arizona, running the scorching mountain paths around Phoenix, and boasted her own great lungs.

They’d been in some grim contests. “Six,” she said, referring to the level of incline on the treadmill.

He nodded. They ran, breath coming too hard now for brainstorming or any other kind of conversation.

As her body sweated, her brain awakened, ran a thousand algorithms, trying to fit the pieces together. It wasn’t exactly a one-two-three process, a conscious thing, but a running stream of numbers, letters, patterns.

“Seven,” Scott said.

Kim punched the up arrow on the treadmill and leaned forward the slightest bit to accommodate the greater incline. The numbers and patterns kept whirring in her head. Once her brother Jason had asked her how she came up with the answers to number problems so fast, and she’d considered it seriously for a minute. The best analogy she could think of was a visual of a bike lock with spinning wheels. She just saw them, and they whirred until the right number appeared.

Her brain had always run patterns, looking for the ways things fit together. In the second grade, she’d been doing the newspaper Scramble every morning, and always got it right, even if she didn’t necessarily know the word. By fourth grade, even her very traditional Italian father was forced to admit his daughter was something of a math whiz. They’d had to hire a tutor to keep up with her.

Her thighs started to burn the slightest bit, and her breath came harder. Next to her, Scott lifted an eyebrow. His athletic arms, bared by a serviceable gray tank, were shiny. “Eight,” she said.

“Nine,” he countered.

She didn’t even bother to look at him, just pushed the arrow one more time. Sweat poured down her spine in a wash, and she wiped it off her forehead. Her feet clumped hard on the rubber matting, a fact she usually hated. Tonight, the sound was lost in the heavier pounding of Scott’s tread.

The patterns whirred in her mind, and she stared into the middle distance, not seeing the white-painted cinder-block wall with its poster citing heart-rate targets, but a stream of code. Ordinarily, e-mails were a less difficult form of code to crack, because certain elements, such as headers and addresses, remained constant, and once the code could be cracked there, it fell wide open.

Not in this case. The agency had collected hundreds of e-mails over the past several weeks, as many as fifty in a single day, but in spite of their best efforts with computer algorithms and sophisticated code-breaking software, they’d made no headway.

“What…” Kim gasped, “are we…missing?”

“Network,” he growled. “Some network angle.”

Her breath was growing ragged, and her thighs were burning. She ran five to seven miles a day, as well as lifting weights and practicing kung fu for strength, but the hills were always killer. Licking salt from her upper lip, she slid a glance toward her partner to see how he was holding up.

Sweat soaked his shirt and his streaky blond hair, but Kim only needed that one glance to know he’d hit his stride. Back straight, breath heavy but even. It was easy to see him running up some forested mountain trail at ten thousand feet, his powerful body in perfect condition. Like an ad for a sport drink.

“Uncle,” she said, and pushed the arrows to bring the incline down to a more normal level.

“Thank God,” he said. “I thought it was going to be me this time.”

“Damn,” she said, and blew out a heavy breath. “One of these days, Shepherd, I am going to kick your high-altitude butt.”

“Yeah, yeah, Valenti.”

She wiped her face. As if the towel wiped away a layer of confusion, the answer to the signature was suddenly plain.

“It’s a virus,” she said.

Chapter 3

Scott wiped his face with a towel. “What is a virus?”

“That’s what the signature is, a virus mark. It’s using the virus to encode the messages, the same way a virus works to infect computers.”

“I’m not following.”

“It’s a lot more confusing to say it than it is in action. When you get a regular e-mail virus, it comes in through your e-mail program, right? Then goes out through the addresses in your address book.”

“Okay.” He lifted the towel to his mouth.

“This is working the same way. The guy writes his message, adds the signature line, and it goes through the e-mail systems, bouncing here and there and everywhere, gaining a layer of corruption—in this case, encryption—with each bounce.”

“Jeez. So how do they decode it?”

“There’s obviously a key at the other end.”

A slow grin broke on his angled face. “Let’s go find it.”

It was the break they’d been looking for. Within twelve hours, Kim and Scott had broken down the e-mails and sorted them into two piles so that they could each run decryption possibilities.

The most logical place to look was the source of the virus itself. Most encryption was “private-key,” that is, it used the same key to encrypt the message as would be used to decrypt it. While there was such a thing as “public-key” encryption, where the encoding key was different from the decoding key, it was very slow and would be too noticeable for an e-mail virus. By examining the virus, they were able to crack the code itself.

Which left another layer: the e-mails had been written in Arabic and had to be translated into English so the bulk of the messages could be read by the team.

Even then, there were missing pieces of information, but pointers clearly indicated there was trouble on the way. It looked as if it would be centered around Chicago.

“We’ve gotta call Dana,” Kim said.

“You want me to make the call?” Scott asked.

Kim gave him a glare. “No way. He can be a bastard all he likes, but he can’t stop me.”

Scott lifted a shoulder. “Why subject yourself to such a jerk? He’s old school, no point in banging your head against the wall.”

“Because dealing with me means he learns, over and over, that women are in this organization to stay.”

“Suit yourself.” He waved a file. “I’ll get this copied.”

Despite her bravado, Kim had to brace herself before she picked up the phone. Dana Milosovich was a fifty-something CIA diehard, who thought women should be secretaries, whores or wives. Not operatives. Not code breakers. He had not forgiven Kim for an incident last spring, when she’d beaten him to the draw on an important case.

Too bad.

On the other end of the line, the phone rang. “Milosovich.” His voice was as gravelly as five miles of bad road, no doubt from decades of smoking contraband Cuban cigars.

“Hello, Dana. It’s Kim Valenti, from NSA. You have a minute?”

“A short one.”

“Thanks for your graciousness.”

“Don’t mention it. What is it?”

“We’ve been following some suspicious e-mail activity related to the Q’rajn. My partner and I broke the code this morning and it appears to be pointing to plans for a terrorist attack in Chicago.”

“Yeah?”

“Looks like a bomb. Maybe a truck, something to do with the bridges over the river or a freighter on the lake. They’ve created a virus code to encrypt the e-mails, which we’ve broken, but on top of that, the cell is using another layer of code substituting one group of activities for another. We haven’t entirely sorted that part out, but we’re pretty sure the site is Chicago.”

“We’re way ahead of you, Valenti. Our operatives have been following the same cell. They’re Berzhaanian rebels, and were planning to stage an event to draw attention to the situation in their county.”

Kim scowled. “Right, but we—”

“Two key members of Q-group were killed in Berzhaan yesterday. We feel certain they’re no longer an immediate threat, and in fact recommended that Homeland Security step down to a level-yellow alert.”

“What were their names?”

“Whose names?”

Kim pressed the eraser end of a pencil into the spot between her eyebrows. “The Berzhaanians who were killed.”

“Oh, let’s see. Ahmed bin Hoshel and Sabrout Al Javid El Thakur.”

Not her guys, but she paused and double-checked her notes before she spoke. No. Not the same names she had received from Oracle, but she couldn’t reveal that source. “Hmm. They may very well have been leaders in Berzhaan, but the e-mails we’ve examined have all originated within the U.S. It’s a different cell.”

“You don’t know that. They could have coded it from anywhere.”

“Not exactly,” Kim returned. Patiently, she thought. “There are ways to track addresses, but it’s more a matter of a pattern of exchange. The IP addresses are American. It looks like it’s out of the Chicago area somewhere, as well.”

“Is that so.” He coughed, a rattly, gray sound.

“Don’t know how to help you, missy.”

“I’m asking you to check out the possibility of a terrorist attack in Chicago.”

“It’s done. The FBI has been over the city with a fine-tooth comb. Without a lot more information, I don’t see why we need to be wasting more man-hours and causing more unrest.”

Kim could read between the lines: there was a lot riding on this election, and the incumbent Whitlow needed things to appear stable, even if they weren’t. “Look, Milosovich, I know you don’t like me, but how’re you going to feel when a bunch of civilians get blown up because you want to piss in my cornflakes?”

“Give me something a little more substantial, and we’ll get right on it, sister.”

Scott came back, dropped a file on his desk opposite hers and raised an eyebrow. Kim rolled her eyes. “How about I give you names?”

“What names?”

“Two people associated with the terrorist cell we think is planning this attack on Chicago. They’re based just outside of the city.”

“Let me have ’em.”

“Not without a guarantee that I can have some cooperation.”

“What do you want?”

“Whatever you’ve got on these men.”

A short pause. She heard him rattling something. Maybe a canister of pens. “All right. Let me have ’em.”

With some reservations, Kim said, “Fathi bin Amin Mansour and Hafiz abu Malik Abd-Humam.”

Milosovich broke into a ragged, wet chuckle. “That loser? Abd-Humam is running a tire store downtown. He’s been here since his college days. Fathi Mansour…don’t know him.”

“My intelligence says he’s a professor with no known terrorist ties. But we both know that doesn’t mean anything.”

“I’ll look into it, see what we’ve got, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. I’m telling you the cell was castrated when the leaders were killed in Berzhaan.”

“Hope you’re right.”

“You know, Valenti, your arrogance pisses me off. I’ve been doing this since before you were born. You hotshot kids come in here with all your jargon and think you can save the world in five minutes flat, but it doesn’t work like that.”

Kim struggled with an array of answers, from the unprintable to the compassionate. He was an old man on his way out. He knew it and resented it. She could understand that, but not at the risk of human lives. “I’m sorry to have taken up so much of your time, Mr. Milosovich,” she said finally. “You’ll let me know if you turn anything up.”

“You got lucky once, that’s all,” he said. “You broke a code.”

“Well,” she said slowly, her nostrils flaring, “if it was lucky, then it was three times, because that’s the number of codes I’ve broken since I arrived at the Agency.”

“Whatever.”

“Great comeback. You know, I’m trying to be patient with you, respect what you have to teach me. But you have to respect my knowledge, as well. Computers are here to stay, and just because they scare you, and you’ve got your voice-mail password stuck to your desk and you don’t know how to collect e-mail without somebody setting the program for you, don’t take it out on me. I’m trying to help you!”

“I don’t want your help.”

“Fine. Whatever.” Kim hung up and let go of a howl. “He drives me insane!”

Scott chuckled, stapling a sheaf of papers together. “Better call the FBI before he gets to them.”

“I have a better idea.” Kim opened the Instant Messenger box.

WINDTALKER2: Hey, Luthor, are you there?

No answer. After five minutes, Kim reluctantly picked up the phone. She dialed his desk directly, but an electronic voice answered and said simply that her party was away from his desk. “Damn.” She punched in the key to be connected to a central number.

A woman answered. “Federal Bureau of Investigation, Margaret speaking.”

“Hi, Margaret. Kim Valenti from the NSA here. Is Lex around anywhere?”

“Not at the moment. You want his voice mail?”

“No, thanks. I need to share some concerns I have over a possible terrorist alert in Chicago. Who’d be my best bet?”

“I think you’re probably all right, Ms. Valenti. We just had a call from the CIA about the same thing.”

“I’m sure you did,” Kim said as evenly as possible. “All the same, I’ll feel better if I talk to somebody on the bomb squad. Who else?”

“I can put you through to Agent O’Brien.”

“Thanks.”

“Hold please.”

“O’Brien here,” said a voice with the edge of a Spanish accent. The juxtaposition made Kim smile. She explained who she was and what her mission of the day was, but before she could finish, O’Brien interrupted her. “Right. I just took a call from the CIA, an agent Milosovich. He said your guys have been killed, so it’s not a problem.”

Kim rubbed her temple. “Not my guys. His guys. My cell is located somewhere in the Chicago area, and they’re planning something big. That is a problem.”

“With all due respect, Agent—”

“Valenti.”

“With all due respect, Agent Valenti, we’ve been over the city like dogs the past couple of weeks, sniffing out every corner.”

“He told you I’m high-strung and prone to exaggerate.”

“Words to that effect.”

“Right. Is Lex Tanner around?”

“Nope. They’re at the airport, going over it one more time, double-checking security standards. It’s unofficially code orange, but we don’t want to alarm the public.”

“Can you have him call me when he gets back?”

“Will do.”

Kim was about to hang up when O’Brien said, “Hold up. Tanner just got here. I’ll put you through.”

“Thanks.”

She listened to the sound of Vivaldi piped through the lines for a minute, then a man said, “Tanner here. What can I do for you?”

Kim had never had a phone conversation with him. All their business had been conducted via instant messaging or e-mail. For five-tenths of a second, she was startled by the unexpected richness of his voice. Humid with the blurred edges of somewhere south. Deep South.

“Hello?” he repeated.

“Hey, Lex Luthor,” she said, recovering. “Kim Valenti, at the NSA. How’re you doing?”

“Darlin’!” The genuine pleasure in his voice was unmistakable. “I’m doing just fine now that I’m talking to you. What’s up?”

“I’ve got a problem. Hoping you can help.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“We have intelligence that shows a Q’rajn cell in the burbs of Chicago, and they’re utilizing a virus to encode their e-mails. We broke the code and my partner and I are pretty sure they’re targeting Chicago in some way.”

“Yeah, well—”

“Damn it!” Kim swore. “Not you, too.”

“Hold on. No need to get ugly, now. I just heard from your buddy at the CIA who said they caught your guys.”

Gritting her teeth, Kim said, “First thing you need to know is that Milosovich is so not my buddy. He’d love to see me fall face-first in a mud puddle. Second, they’re not my guys. They’re Milosovich’s guys, and he wants to think my guys were castrated by the fall.”

“And you don’t think they were.”

“No. Those guys were in Berzhaan and they’re undoubtedly all part of the same twisted terrorist sect, but my group is here, on American soil.”

“All right. What’s your intelligence say they’re going to do?”

“It’s not that clear. A bomb. Maybe the airport or an airplane.”

“We’ve been over the airport five thousand times.”

“I know. Believe me, I wouldn’t insist if I weren’t pretty sure.”

He sighed. “Valenti, my hands are tied, babe.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Sorry. Old habit.” She could hear a tapping sound, fast and tinny. “Look, it sounds like Milosovich and you have some bad blood, all right, but he’s a good agent. And he’s got a lot of seniority.”

“And I don’t.”

“Exactly.”

“Okay. Look, what if it’s not the airport? What if it’s along the route to the airport, or somewhere one of the candidates is going to speak? Bridges, television stations—” She paused, trying to brainstorm. “Wherever. You know your city.”

He said, “Hmm.” And in spite of her concern and irritation, she felt it on the back of her neck. Velvety, rich. “A question—why target the candidates anyway?”

“Because they can? Because it causes trouble? Terrorists don’t need a clearly defined reason to do things—they just want to create fear and confusion.”

“I see your point.” Again that background noise of quick tapping.

Kim said, “What is that noise?”

“Sorry.” The sound ceased. “I have a bad habit of tapping a pen.”

“No big deal.”

“Look, Valenti, you’ve done me favors, and I’ll see what I can do, all right? But maybe you oughta look at the intelligence in another way, too. Maybe it’s not pointing where you think it is—and that would be tragic, too.”

“You’re right. I’ll go over it again. Let me know what you find out.”

“Will do.” He dropped his voice, and his next words were even richer, darker, like chocolate. Laced with espresso. “We still on for next week in your neighborhood?”

“I’ve gotta tell you, Lex, your voice didn’t hurt the cause any.”

“Yeah? You like it?”

Kim smiled. “Call me if you find anything, Luthor.”

“I’ll be talking to you.”

Scott, sitting at his desk, raised his head when she hung up. “You’ve got that gleam in your eye, Valenti.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, and stood up. “I’m going to take some personal time. I’ll be back later.”

Chapter 4

She drove home and without taking off her coat, she fired off an e-mail.

To: Delphi@orcl.org

From: Ariadne@orcl.org

Subject: need help

Give me everything you have on Chicago, the campaigns, anything the Chicago set might have done previously. Not making a lot of progress through usual channels. Advise.

Ariadne

Still wearing her coat, she went to the kitchen, opened a vacuum-packed envelope of tuna and ate it leaning on the counter. From the other room came a soft beep and she walked back.

To: Ariadne@orcl.org

From: Delphi@orcl.org

Subject: re:

-Intelligence from CIA shows infiltration at Chicago UBC television station, CIA might have a man in there.

-Three moving vans were stolen last week in southern California. Home-move type, not professional.

-Quote keeps showing up in unrelated material: Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because Allah has guarded them. Surah 4:34

-Reference to Cristopho in materials CIA intercepted. Columbus? Clue to city or holiday? Check. As always, act independently if necessary. Oracle will back you.

Delphi

Kim narrowed her eyes, punched in a thanks. A man at the Chicago UBC affiliate—at least it was a place to start. Her gut was screaming that Chicago was the place, the time not far distant. Not even as far away as Columbus Day, which was Monday, either. The flurry of e-mails was so intense, the deal had to be going down soon.

And if she couldn’t figure it out, somebody would die. Kim intended to do whatever was necessary to prevent that.

She picked up the phone, punched in some numbers. “Shepherd,” she said when Scott answered, “I’m going to Chicago. Let the boss know for me.”

“Whatcha got?”

“A hunch more than anything else. Not a lot more. Can you cover for me for a day or two?”

“I don’t like it when you do the maverick thing, Valenti. Too nerve-racking.”

“I know. But it’s the way I was trained.”

“This doesn’t have anything to do with an FBI agent named Tanner, does it?”

“No. Why?”

“He left a message.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Kim made a noise of annoyance. “Are you gonna tell me what it is?”

“‘Checked it all. Everything is A-okay. Don’t worry.’”

A ripple of something she didn’t stop to identify raced through her—a twitchy mix of longing and regret. He hadn’t taken her seriously, either, and it was far more disappointing coming from him. Her sharp response was a warning.

She’d do well to leave the man alone. Completely.

“Nope,” she said. “Tanner is as clueless as all the rest of them. You’re the only one who ever believes in me. This trip is to check out a gut-level idea.”

“Your mysterious source.” Scott tsked. It wasn’t the first time she’d received information through Oracle. She simply let him think whatever he thought about it. “All right, Valenti, I’ll cover for you, but you keep that pretty ass out of trouble, will ya?”

“I’ll do my best. If you need me, I’ll have my cell phone with me.”

“Stay in touch.”

When she hung up with him, she looked up the number of the Chicago UBC station and called to speak with the personnel manager, a man named John. She identified herself as a member of the NSA, and said she was tracking some information regarding a case—would she be able to check the files tonight? He agreed warmly, said he’d be in that evening to train a new cameraman, and she could stop in at her convenience.

She changed into jeans and warm boots, but left her hair in a knot at the base of her neck. Into a small duffel, she threw a change of clothes and her makeup bag. From a rack on the back of her closet door, she chose a small shoulder purse, and tucked in her wallet, cell phone, and at the last minute, her NSA security badge. Within an hour, she was at the airport.

The ticket had been purchased at the last minute, so Kim wasn’t surprised when she was pulled out of the security lines for additional screening—and not just the usual, extra hand-wanding, but a full, focused search of her belongings and the body search by an appropriate female guard. The girl was skinny as a praying mantis, her elbows like knots. Her blond hair was tightly pulled back from her extremely young—and serious—face.

Kim joked, “All clear? For once, I remembered to not wear an underwire bra.”

“Wait right here.” The girl picked up a phone, punched in a number.

Scowling Kim said, “What is—”

“Better if you just follow directions, ma’am.” She turned away and said something into the phone, looking at the NSA badge with Kim’s picture.

Kim felt passersby giving her the curious eye. Odd how it made her feel guilty.

“I’m afraid there’s an additional problem, ma’am,” the girl said. “You’ll have to follow me, please.”

“Sure, but—”

“High alert this week and you have a lot of red flags.”

“Last-minute ticket, I know. It’s just that I work for—”

The woman flashed Kim’s confiscated badge. “National Security Agency. I know.”

Kim scowled at the rudeness and rolled her eyes. She looked younger than she was, she knew that. No point in antagonizing the woman further—it would just lead to more delays. “Will this take long? I’m worried about missing my flight.”

“There’s another one at 3 p.m. if you miss this one,” the woman said without looking at Kim.

“Great.” It wasn’t. It would mean getting to Chicago after dark, maybe not to the television station until the evening news. With an effort, she breathed in. Out. No point in getting upset. It wouldn’t hurry anything.

At an office with a window overlooking the concourse, the woman stopped and shoved open the door. “Here we are. Have a seat, ma’am.”

A tall, bearded black man in a Transportation Security Administration uniform waved Kim into the chair. The woman escort handed over Kim’s bags and badge, then exited.

“I’m sorry about the delay,” the man said. “I need to verify your identity.”

“No big deal.”

As the man dialed the telephone, Kim fidgeted, irritably wiggling her foot until she realized it would make her appear to be nervous. Which she was, though not because she wanted to blow up the airport.

The airport. Why had the FBI in Chicago paid so much attention to the airport? Airports were so heavily guarded since 9/11 that there had to be an easier way for a terrorist to accomplish goals of instilling fear. Why bother? Narrowing her eyes in thought, Kim decided the FBI must have had some intelligence they weren’t sharing.

The man hung up the phone. “I’m afraid we have to hold you for twenty minutes, just until they can fax a photo to your boss.”

“I’ll miss my flight.”

“Sorry, ma’am. When it goes to orange, it gets a lot tighter around here.”

Tamping down her annoyance, Kim folded her hands around her knees. “I appreciate that, but I’m bewildered. Why the trouble today? I’ve flown a dozen times under similar circumstances recently.”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“If I get through the security clearance will you tell me?”

He nodded. “That’d be all right, I guess.”

The fax went through with a series of beeps and bleeps. Kim stared through the window over the concourse at the streams of humanity bustling through the hallways. She puzzled over the challenge of clearing millions and millions of passengers every day. Millions.

And it wasn’t as if criminals hadn’t proven they were willing to do anything to reach their objectives. Q’rajn wanted to punish the U.S. for its involvement in Berzhaan. Other rebels wanted other things, and anyone with an ax to grind, a pound or two of plastic explosives and a death wish could do it. For terrorists of the ilk they were all trying to fight, life was as thin and cheap as paper.

Watching the crowds, she tried to imagine she was the one trying to decide who was a terrorist and who was an ordinary citizen. A tall man in a business suit looked like a physician, hurrying toward an important surgery. The turban on his head marked him as a Sikh, something Kim knew from her studies at Athena Academy. Exotic, but likely not dangerous.

But how would the ill-educated girl who’d carted Kim up here know that?

Odd, but sitting in the plastic chair in the office of the head of security made Kim feel guilty.

“It’s a pretty rough job, the security of airports,” she offered.

The man, his hands steepled in front of his mouth, raised weary brows. “That’s understating the situation, I’d say.”

“It’s impossible, really, isn’t it?”

He shook his head. “Never give up.” The fax machine spit out a piece of paper and the man leaned forward to swipe it off the tray. “Looks like you’re good to go, Ms. Valenti. Sorry for the delay.”

Kim shrugged and took the things he held out to her. “So, I assume it was the late booking that caused so much trouble, but what else? I’ll try to avoid it next time.”

He scratched his nose. “Not sure you’ll be able to do anything about it. The girl—er—thought you looked Arabic.”

“Ah.” She met his eyes.

He held her gaze for a second, then lifted a phone. “I’ll call your gate to have them hold your flight.”

Kim hitched the bag over her shoulder. “Thanks.”

On the concourse, she headed for her gate, glancing up over her shoulder at the two-way window. Something niggled—there was something they weren’t telling her. What could it be? What information had gone out that she’d not yet seen?

As she walked, she took the cell out of her bag and punched in the numbers to Scott’s desk. The phone rang at the other end as she reached the deserted gate.

An impatient flight attendant stood irritably at the door to the flight. Kim handed the woman her boarding pass. “Sorry. Got stuck at security.”

“Not your fault.” The woman gave her back the small piece of pass. “Have a good flight.”

Scott’s voice mail picked up. “Shepherd,” Kim said, hurrying down the ramp, “run the files again and see if there are any references to women, then get back to me. I’m getting on the plane right now, so I have to turn off my phone, but leave a message.”

Chapter 5

By the time she dropped her bag on the bed in her Chicago hotel room, Kim was famished, grumpy and grimy. After a quick shower, she tucked her badge into her purse, bought a sandwich from the small deli in the hotel lobby and sat down to eat it with a cup of coffee by the windows.

She bit into the sandwich and took a single moment to appreciate it. A fantastic Reuben, layered with film-thin pieces of corned beef, fresh, crispy sauerkraut, melted Swiss cheese and just a smear of thousand island dressing. Some things in life were worth appreciating. A great sandwich after a long day was one of them. The coffee, she discovered, was excellent, too.

Right after Jason was killed, Kim had gone through a period of dullness, where the world had felt as if it were a long way away from her. None of it had sharp corners or bright colors or any real detail, as if she were viewing it all through watery glasses. Everything was muted, turned down—sounds, sights, tastes, feelings.

One night, she had a dream that her brother slapped her. “Wake up!” he cried in the dream. “It’s all right there, everything I can’t have!”

And she spent the next days in agony, finally beginning to feel by first acknowledging that her brother was never coming home. She owed it to him to be alert and aware of life—eating a sandwich, dancing, making love. Whatever.

As she ate, watching snow drift slowly, lightly from the dark sky, she turned her cell phone back on and checked for messages. There were two.

One was from Lex Tanner: “Valenti, I got this number from your partner.” Kim bent her head, hiding a smile over the pleasure of hearing his voice again. That honeyed, rich drawl! “Sorry about earlier. Don’t hold it against me, huh?”

She moved to the next message, which was from Scott. “Hey, I got the information you wanted. There’s only one reference to women, a quote from the Koran,” he said. “‘Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because Allah has guarded them. Surah 4:34.’”

Kim frowned. The same quote Delphi had sent her. Women, unseen parts… She narrowed her eyes, waiting for something to click. How would they use women? Considering the general attitude of Q’rajn, a conservative Muslim group, Kim didn’t see them using women as warriors.

Still, it was another piece of the puzzle. Too bad she didn’t know where it fit.

She finished her sandwich and tossed the cup and napkin into a trash bin, then headed out. She had other hunches to check out tonight. Maybe something at the television station would help the quotation make sense.

It was a cold, blustery evening. An icy wind blew off the lake, carrying a threat of snow. Kim huddled into her coat and wished for a warmer hat.

Winter. Ugh. With a swift sense of longing, she remembered the Arizona desert, clear and bright through the winter. It could be quite cold at times, but the air was never heavy, and what snow fell would be gone the minute the sun came out.

Not like winter in the East and Midwest, where the wind was bitter and the snow could lie on the ground for months, gaining layer after layer after layer of grime and disgustingness. She should have brought a warmer coat.

Tucking her chin closer, she hailed a cab to take her to the UBC station. The cabbie, a large-eyed man with an Iranian accent, said, “Terrible night out, isn’t it?”

Kim shivered. “I hate this weather.”

“Do you mind if I listen to the news on the radio?” he asked, his dark hand on the radio dials.

“Not at all.” She leaned back and let the headlines wash over her. As they crossed a bridge over the river, she admired the shimmer of light on the water, the tall buildings stretching up toward heavy clouds.

“Several protestors refused to disperse and were arrested this afternoon in front of President Whitlow’s campaign headquarters,” said a sober male voice. “Approximately one hundred activists gathered to voice disapproval of rumored U.S. involvement in Berzhaan politics.”

Kim rubbed a spot between her eyes. Would the terrorists target a demonstration? It was certainly a place to kill and wound a lot of people. Would there be others this week? She made a mental note to check which special interest groups were most vocal in the Windy City, and see if they’d been granted permission to demonstrate.

“Presidential candidate Gabe Monihan is expected to raise large crowds in Chicago tomorrow. The popular candidate will speak at 10 a.m. tomorrow at Loyola University. Traffic along the route is expected to be extremely heavy.”

The taxi driver snorted. “That means it will not move,” he said.

Kim chuckled “I’m sure.”

The television station appeared to be very quiet, which Kim supposed was not surprising, considering it was nearly 9 p.m. It seemed odd to find it so empty after the high security at the airport. If Kim was a terrorist, she’d pick news venues every time, but she couldn’t think of a single staging in a news station ever, in any country.

Hmm.

She paid the driver, hitched her duffel over her shoulder and went inside. A single woman sat in a bulletproof cubicle that seemed absurdly well lit in the dim quiet of the waiting room just beyond. She pressed a button and asked Kim, “May I help you?”

She flashed her NSA badge. “I called a couple of hours ago. I’m meeting John from Personnel.”

“Right. Just one minute.” The girl picked up the phone and spoke into it. She put it down and pushed a buzzer. “Go through the double doors at the end of the hallway and John will meet you.”

Kim found herself in a long hallway, hushed and empty. Discreet spots cast a thick amber light that left pyramids of shadow along the path.

She paused, struck by a sense of extreme uneasiness. The hair along the back of her arms rose the slightest bit. It was like the low growl of a dog who heard something before the humans in his realm—she stopped and listened carefully.

What was causing her discomfort? A sound just out of range? A scent that shouldn’t be there? Something more primeval? Her training had taught her to respect such ripples of warning.

She listened intently. The low rush of air blowing through furnace vents, a slight, faraway humming that sounded more or less electronic. Nothing else. It was a television station, after all. The walls had to be soundproofed.

The only scents were the slightly chemical odors of carpeting and glue and other industrial materials, the faint dustiness of forced-air heat, her own hair releasing a ghost of damp lemony conditioner.

Nothing.

Something.

She turned in a circle. Maybe it was just the shape and depth of the shadows, the extreme stillness.

The bang of swinging doors sent a jolt through her, and she forced herself not to show it.

“Ms. Valenti!” said a man coming through the doors at the far end of the hallway. He looked oddly out of place in his Dockers and pale orange button-down shirt, as if someone had cut him out of an ad in a Seattle newspaper and pasted him into the wrong background. The haircut, the glasses, even his body language were too casual for this area. “I’m John Hallam,” he said, extending his hand. “I’m afraid I don’t have much time to talk to you—we thought you’d be here much earlier.”

“My apologies,” Kim replied. “But I—”

“Right this way.”

His handshake was cool and strong, in contrast to his youth, but she picked up a distinct sense of nervousness. “Thanks,” she said. “Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

“Let’s do that in the office, shall we?” He gestured for her to proceed ahead of him through the doors, and Kim stepped into a dark, open space crisscrossed with wires and cords and hulking shadows of equipment she didn’t recognize. The ceiling stretched high into an area of steel girders, and Kim saw light shining from over a wall. Faintly, she heard voices.

At a second door, John paused. “They’re about to go live for the news, but we have a few minutes. I thought you might want to meet some of the anchors.” He smiled. “People generally do.”

What could she say? Not me? So she smiled and shook hands with a trio of toothy, small, ultraclean people, noticing the facade of desk and backdrop against the cavernous, overarching darkness stretching above. Unease made her look around again.

Nothing. A cameraman fiddled with knobs on his machine. A bank of monitors showed six different screen shots. One was animated—she assumed it was the actual broadcast stream.

“Have any of you had threats or any reason to suspect trouble with anyone on the set?” she asked suddenly.

“No!” The young woman’s eyes flew open. “John, is there a problem? Should we have guards again?”

“Again?” Kim echoed.

“Last summer—” the blonde began.

“One minute!” cried a stagehand or whatever he was called, a man with a thick beard and liquid eyes, rushing through with jeans and a loosely flapping shirt. He looked more like Chicago, Kim thought distractedly. Mixed race. Ethnic, anyway.

“John!” the blonde prompted, even as she straightened the front of her red suit and adjusted her mike.

“We’ll talk about it later, Amber.” John grabbed Kim’s arm and hustled her toward another set of doors on the other side of the set. His hand settled at the small of her back, a firm pressure propelling her out of the room.

The hackles rose on her neck as they stepped through the doors. Kim instinctively took stock of her surroundings, noting exits—few—ceilings—high—windows—zero. It was like a fortress. It was curiously empty, as well. She would have imagined a television station to be a bustling, busy place, full of minions running around.

“Is it always so quiet around here?”

“Usually,” John said. “The nuts and bolts of television are pretty straightforward—you need a good crew, but not a large one particularly.” He opened a door halfway down a quiet corridor and waved her in ahead of him. “This is where we keep the personnel files.”

He flicked on the overhead light, and cool green neon flooded the room. There were no windows, only a low ceiling of acoustic tile. The walls were white, with a pair of motivational posters. The carpet was industrial brown and orange, endlessly forgiving and impossibly boring. A bank of television screens ran down one end, and John turned them on. They showed a series of different shots—a commercial frozen in place, a public-service announcement screen, and a logo for UBC. The last showed a live feed of the anchors they’d just left.

“If you want to spread out on the tables, you’re welcome to do it.” John unlocked the file cabinet closest to the door and swung open a drawer. “I’ve got to get back out there, but you should be able to find whatever you need right here. New-hires to the front, the rest alphabetized.”

“Thanks.”

“If you need anything, just dial 0 on that phone, and you’ll get the receptionist. She’ll find me.”

“Got it,” Kim said, and frowned as she looked around. The sense of things being a little off-kilter still hung at the back of her neck. She disliked the setup of the room at the end of a corridor, the lack of exits, the grim lighting. Maybe it was just the fact that there were no windows.

John still hung by the door, peering intently at one of the screens. Kim saw there were dots of perspiration on his top lip. “Big night, huh?” she ventured.

“What? Oh. Yeah, we have a new cameraman. I’m worried about it.”

“Go to it, then. I’ll be fine.”

He frowned at the screen, hurried out without answer. Kim looked at the bank of pictures to see what had bothered him, but nothing much seemed to have changed. Still the same three static pictures and the live feed of the news team. The woman was laughing as they made a switch, and suddenly a commercial blared into the room.

Kim winced and raced over to see if she could turn it down. There were several knobs and buttons and she experimented until she found the right one, turned it low, but not off. To avoid a repeat, she found the same buttons below each of the screens and turned each one down.

Still feeling uneasy, she went to the door and stepped into the hallway. There was an exit sign about five hundred feet down the corridor. At least she knew how to get out if she had to. Moving her head on a neck still prickling and somewhat stiff, she listened in the hallway, but there was no sound.

Going back into the office, she tugged open the drawer and started looking through the files, one at a time. Each one contained background information, a résumé if one had been submitted, photos obviously taken in the same spot with the same camera for some kind of station ID and whatever notes anyone had made on them. There were seven new-hires dating back one year. None appeared to be out of the ordinary. Two cameramen, including the one John was fretting over tonight, a nervous-looking redhead with freckles head to toe and big golden eyes. A fifty-five-year-old woman hired to do secretarial work, who looked far younger than her age. Three support staff for the dining room.

John himself.

“Interesting,” she said aloud, and flipped through his file. He’d been hired five months ago to take the place of the former station manager. An impeccable pedigree: a navy brat who had attended UCLA, done his time in the trenches as a reporter, and then drifted to the managerial side of the line. He’d come to Chicago via Florida.

A soft, almost subvocal whispering had been nagging her for several moments before she realized it. Kim lifted her head, frowning, and looked at the television screens. The news was back on, and it must be a sober story indeed, because the cheerleader was looking pretty grim. The camera angle was odd, too, and Kim shook her head. The cameraman was going to be in trouble.

Something wasn’t quite right. She frowned and looked at the screens again. The whispering continued, but Kim could see nothing to account for it. The blonde was reading the news. The commercials stayed frozen.

Then the sibilant whispering sank in. She jerked up her head. A single word of the whisper penetrated suddenly—the Arabic word for woman. Her head jerked up and she stared at the television screens, listening intently. The lyrical rise and fall of the language was unmistakable, even in whispers, but she couldn’t quite catch any other distinct words.

She peered at the screens. Where was it coming from? Moving to the bank of screens on the wall, she turned up the volume beneath each one. Silence greeted her on the first three. On the fourth, she heard a nonnative speaker brutalizing Arabic with harsh accents and dropped rolls. Maybe American, maybe German. Kim frowned and put her head down, listening closely. American. A man.

Two men spoke in quiet, hurried Arabic.

“We only have two choices,” the first—nonnative speaker—said. “Monihan will be at the airport and we can take care of that then. We only have to secure the station until Mustafa accomplishes his mission at the airport.”

“Her mission,” snickered a second voice, this one a native Arabic speaker.

Her mission. Kim glanced at her watch. Two hours till the plane arrived at the Chicago airport. What was happening then? What did they have planned? It seemed an odd time for a bombing if a terrorist wanted to take out as many people as possible. She strained to hear what else the second speaker said, but the voice was softer, more liquid, and Kim couldn’t hear it.

She raised her head. Where was the mike that was picking up the conversation? She glanced at the monitor, trying to tell if there were labels of any kind to guide her if she went back to the other room. The main screen said Camera One, predictably. Not much help. She’d have to take her chances.

From the set came a scream, and Kim jerked her attention back to the first screen. As she watched in horror, the set flooded with men who carried guns, running in what almost looked like formation. Quickly, she tried to count them: maybe five? Six?

From the midst of them came a dramatically tall and elegant man, obviously the head honcho. Kim recognized him immediately: Fathi bin Amin Mansour, the prodigiously intelligent Berzhaanian with degrees from Oxford. The man whose brothers and mother had been killed by Keminis four years ago. The man who was connected to several bombings.

The man she had been worried about leading a terrorist cell in Chicago.

He headed imperiously for the news desk, where the anchors cowered, stunned. One of the foot soldiers yanked the blond woman out of her chair on the set and shoved her roughly aside. She screamed, and her hands flew up protectively around her face, but another soldier simply shoved her to one side, out of sight of the camera.

“Damn,” Kim whispered.

Mansour settled himself in the center chair and gestured with one long-fingered hand at the camera, which came closer and focused in on a face that would have been handsome without the light of fanaticism burning in his eyes.

In crisp, British-accented English, he said, “We have overtaken this television station on behalf of the people of Berzhaan, to protest the American involvement in our country’s affairs. We have footage to show that the CIA has been involved in arms sales to the Kemini rebels, in order to keep our country in a state of unrest.” He cued someone in the room, and a fuzzy video began to play.

Kim ceased listening and ran to the doorway and closed the door silently, turning off the light. Little chance they didn’t know she was there, since it had only been ten minutes since she’d sashayed across the set. They’d come after her, but maybe she could figure something out in a minute or two. She tucked her hair under her collar.

On-screen, Mansour continued to talk, listing demands. A camera shot spun around and showed a line of station employees sitting in terror at one side of the set. A dark man with Arabic features stood over them, his face impassive, an assault weapon held loosely in his hands.

Behind them yawned the darkness of the cavernous studio. Kim glimpsed a man with a curiously expressionless face—this must the nonnative Arabic speaker—headed for a set of doors. With a jolt, she realized it was the doors toward the hallway that led to this office.

He was coming for her. And he didn’t look as if he’d mind breaking a neck or a head or anything else.

Kim poked her head into the hallway, trying to gauge whether she had time to make it to the exit. But even as she stuck her head out, she heard the doors to the studio swoosh open. She dived back into the office, where at least the darkness could lend some surprise.

Through the crack, she could see down the hallway. He was a tall man with a shaved head and hard-looking eyes. He wore combat boots, and a desert camouflage shirt, and Kim wondered if he was military in some way. There was something wrong with his face, but she couldn’t quite pin down what.

She had no doubt he was headed for this office and her. She looked around for a weapon and prepared to take him down.

Chapter 6

With the light off and the door closed, Kim had at least a small advantage. She found a flashlight on top of a filing cabinet and tested it for heft and swing, then took a spot by the door. Poised. When he came through the door, she’d knock him down and make a run for the back exit.

The door opened slowly. Kim heard her heartbeat in her ears, and her breathing was too loud. She tried to make it more shallow, tried to imagine he was a horse, trying to find her by scent and sound, and raised the flashlight over her head. As he came into the room, she began to swing it downward.

The man anticipated her move and caught Kim’s wrist before she could bring the full weight of the flashlight onto his head. The grab was awkward but fierce. Kim centered herself in a split second and used her body weight to pull him off balance. Swinging her elbow hard in an arc, she whirled and managed to yank her arm free.

He flipped sideways and countered with a body slam, hurtling her into the wall behind her. Air whooshed out of her lungs and her shoulder took a hard blow from a picture frame. She shoved him, gaining enough space to lift her elbow and shove it into his solar plexus. She ducked down and started to spin away—

But not quite fast enough. The man whirled with her and caught a thick handful of hair. He yanked upward and Kim found her body airborne, with nothing to grab except his arms, and she clung there as hard as she could, but he was much larger. With what seemed to be little effort, he slammed her downward into the conference table. Her cheekbone smashed into the wood, and for a moment, she was stunned. He grabbed her throat with both hands.

Kim gasped and with a sharp gesture flung her hands upward between his, then slammed her arms against the insides of his. His grip on her throat was broken, and Kim turned to scramble away, but he slammed her head against the table again, and she felt something cut into her upper ear with a vicious bite.

With a roar, she kicked backward, connected with what seemed to be his hip or upper leg, but there was no purchase on the slippery wood of the conference table. Before she could get away, he’d grabbed her hair, and slammed her face down again. Her lip and tooth hit the edge of the table and she tasted hot blood.

With a rebel cry, Kim kicked again, holding on to his arms to keep him off balance. Her left heel connected with his knee, and she kicked again, this time catching him in the gut, sending him off center enough that she could slide in his grasp, turn over on her belly and scramble across the polished surface of the table. He grabbed her foot. She kicked with the other and felt—heard—her heel crack against bone. Nose? Cheekbone? Chin?

“Bitch!” He grabbed her again, one hand around her neck, the other on her arm. She slid like a skater across the table. His hand scratched her neck. If he managed to get a hold on her in this position, there would be little she could do to keep him from strangling her to death.

With a cry, she turned toward him, catching him off guard enough that she could rear backward and, bracing herself with his arms, she slammed her forehead into his face. Something in her eyebrow gave as she connected with his jaw.

It knocked him, hard, and she did it again, slammed her forehead as hard as she could into his face. She hurt him. With a low guttural grunt, he let her go, and she stumbled backward.

It gave her a second to spring free. She bolted for the door.

Footsteps and voices in the hallway made her swing back toward the table, leaping instinctively for the top of the table, then to the file cabinets she’d been working from. No Expression was behind her, recovered, grabbing her ankle. She kicked at him and at the same time, banged a fist into the acoustic tile overhead and sucked in a breath when it flew out of its grid.

With a single, hard leap, she scrambled into the opening, disappearing into the dark. The man caught her ankle, but she kicked free.

Arabic exploded into the room as she pulled herself out of sight into the space above the ceiling. A bullet pinged through the tile to the right of her body, and she swore silently. She’d have to move.

It was very dark, and the gridwork felt unsteady, swinging faintly under her weight. Kim braced herself and prayed the whole thing didn’t come down. If she stepped wrong, she’d put her foot through the ceiling tiles. The good thing was that none of her pursuers could follow her—the whole ceiling would come down. It was very dark. She gripped a single girder and inched along the length of it, feeling for the dividing wall she knew would have to be there. As silently as possible, she made her way through the darkness, feeling her way with feet and hands. Spiderwebs brushed her face. Light glowed over a wall to her left and she made her way toward it.

Two more bullets shattered the tiles behind her. One struck something close by and plaster dust scattered down on her. She winced instinctively. The movement made the metal beneath her foot give dangerously. Kim prayed that the metal would hold, that she was at least over another set of offices or in the hall.

A bullet whizzed through the air at her back. Shedding caution for speed, she hauled herself through the darkness, swinging from one set of girders to another.

She made it to what she assumed was the edge of the cavernous sets on the other side of the news desk. Crouching against a concrete support wall for a minute, she tried to get her bearings. Her eyes were adjusting to the dimness. Spears of light from bullet holes shot through the darkness, illuminating more than seemed possible.

She listened intently. The droning voice of the Arab at the news desk continued on, explaining terms and conditions of the hostages’ release. No other voices. No more bullets.

Easing to a standing position, she peered over the wall and saw the loafered foot of a male hostage. The pale khaki sock pierced her. She imagined him putting it on this morning in his ordinary, carpeted bedroom, thinking it was going to be an ordinary workday. She wondered if he had a child, or a wife who was waiting for him at home, her heart in her throat as the news of the hostage situation came in.

There was something trickling down her neck, and Kim put a hand up to wipe it away. Her sleeve came away smeared with blood. She swore. The ear hurt, but the blood was going to make it tough to look normal when she tried to get into a Chicago FBI station without the ID that was lying in her pack back in the conference room.

No help for it. She had to get out.

It was impossible to know exactly what was planned for the airport, but if Kim didn’t get over there and at least try to figure it out, people would die. This diversion was meant to draw attention away from the planned bombing at the airport. If she didn’t get out of here, warn someone, a bomb would blow up a presidential candidate and anyone who happened to be in his realm. She wasn’t going to let that happen.

Against her right breast, her cell phone suddenly buzzed. She slammed a palm over it, trying to muffle the sound, but the noise burst out of her jean-jacket pocket like a beacon to the shooters below.

Without taking time to silence the phone, Kim leaped for a girder, and grabbed on, swinging her body around and up. There was just enough light reflected from the open room that she could make her way along the girder toward what she hoped would be the back of the studio—and an exit.

Blood from her ear dripped onto her neck. She wiped it away again. Shouting came from a distance. Below her, Kim heard scrambling, hissing directions. A bullet pierced her sleeve. She gasped, dropped back against the support wall. Lucky shot or could they see her?

She melted closer into the shadows, imagining herself to be a shadow, and waited. There was a sense of movement, but no more bullets. Suddenly, she realized she could see slightly through the hole the bullet had left. A sign on the wall, dimly lit. She moved her head slightly, brought it into focus—a tiny figure of a woman. The sign was for the restrooms.

Which meant she wasn’t at all where she thought. Breathing slowly, deeply, to keep herself calm, she waited until she saw the men moving along below her, then began to ease along the wall. If she judged correctly, she could go into the area above the ceiling of the waiting room, then get out through the main doors instead of the back. It didn’t make any difference as long as she could get out.

From somewhere, she could hear a television playing. Absurdly, it was a television commercial for cleaning products. In her mind’s eye, she saw the dancing scrub brush transforming a dirty bathroom into a clean one. Too bad, she thought, that there were no scrub brushes for the world of wars and politics.

An unexpected and piercing pain caught her right through the middle of the chest. A flash of her brother, grinning.

With a jerk of her head, she shook the picture away. Later. Later she could do whatever screaming she’d like to be doing now. Right now, she had to get the hell out of this television station.

Feeling her way along the wall, she came to another break and eased herself upward to look over the edge again. It was very dark, which meant it was another room with acoustic tiles. How far down from the top of the concrete divider to the ceiling tiles on the other side? She’d have to land carefully or risk putting a foot through the soft material.

She pulled herself up and over the wall, putting all her weight on her arms, then lowering herself slowly, slowly until she felt the tiles against her toe. Hushed voices came up through the acoustic ceiling she stood over. She took a slow, quieting breath.

A flash of light blasted into her eye and she jerked her head in alarm. It was coming from a few feet to her left, a triangular break in the corner of a tile. Bracing herself on the girder, she eased herself down and stretched her body along the ceiling, careful to distribute her weight so an elbow or knee didn’t break through. She peered through the triangular break.

Directly below her were three men, one dark and bearded, with a checkered scarf around his neck and head. He carried an automatic rifle. Another man, older and more routinely dressed in an ordinary shirt and pair of gray slacks, stood to his left. Both of them faced John, the station manager, in his pastel orange shirt. He spoke in Arabic to the other two. It was he who’d been mangling the language.

“Did you find her?” he asked.

“No.”

“Keep someone at the doors. She has to come out sometime.”

One man headed to the back of the station.

Kim took a breath and quietly let it out.

“We’ve had an affirmation that Mustafa and Nuri are in place on the way to the airport,” John said.

“Very good.”

Kim wondered how far it was to the door. If she dropped silently out of the ceiling right by the door, she might be able to make a break for it. Thick sweat pooled over her forehead and dripped into her eye. She blinked hard and rubbed it away with the sleeve of her jacket.

John and the older man moved toward the doors that lead to the studio. The other one, the one who carried the gun, stayed behind, his body posture proclaiming loudly that he was a soldier, used to being a guard.

Perfect.

In the darkness above him, Kim counted to three hundred to allow the other men a chance to clear out completely. Then, noiselessly, she eased the tile out of its mooring, praying he wouldn’t suddenly feel a gust of wind or hear something to tip him off to look up.

He appeared to notice no difference. Kim pulled her body tight into a crouch. It would need exactly the right timing to take him down and avoid getting shot. She waited until he was directly below her. With a cry, she launched herself into the air and catapulted onto his shoulders, knocking the rifle out of his hands.

He fell. The gun flew toward a bank of easy chairs. Kim felt him rearing, grabbing for her legs. She gripped his back ribs with her knees and jabbed the point of her elbow into the long muscle at the base of his skull. Her aim was true: he cried out and collapsed.

A quick search produced a pistol tucked into the small of his back. Kim took it, checked the safety and tucked it under her own coat.

The fight had taken only seconds, and in spite of her yell, the sound of their struggle, it appeared to have drawn no attention.

She bolted out the front doors.

Chapter 7

Snow had begun to fall more heavily in the time Kim had been in the station. How long had it been? She glanced at her watch, found the face cracked, but the display still appeared to be working. She’d been in the station for less than an hour. Snow was already piling up in corners.

In the distance, she heard sirens begin to wail, and realized they were no doubt headed for the station. In no time, the place would be surrounded. She had to get out of there or face getting stuck in the bureaucracy of police questions. The hostages were in danger, there was no question about that, but there was more danger if she didn’t get to the airport.

She dashed through the parking lot, checking for an old-model car that she could hot-wire quickly. In the back row, she found what she sought: a 1971 Buick, an old yacht of a car. The door was locked, but Kim pulled out the pistol and used the butt to break the window. She was in.

Three minutes was her record. It took three and a half to hot-wire this one. The sirens whooped closer, into the neighborhood, but not the parking lot. Kim drove the yacht out onto a dark side street that appeared to loop into a residential neighborhood. The vision in her right eye was smeary, and she rubbed it again, trying to clear the viscous fluid.

Now, how the hell would she get to FBI headquarters?

The first order of business was obviously to get herself out of the general area of the station. The chop-chop-chop of a helicopter broke the night, and a cordon of police cars screamed into the parking lot of the UBC station. Their lights turned the sky the pink and blue of cotton candy. Snow glittered down, magically.

As always, Kim thought, Nature was oblivious to the concerns of humans. On Christmas Eve, when this sparkly little snow would be appropriate, she’d bet money it would be dry and sunny.

Kim glided down the street without her lights until she came to an apartment complex on a hill, just a block from the station. She pulled in and parked facing the station, so she could keep an eye on what was going on while she made her calls. A river of police flowed in and surrounded the station like a moat of red lights.

From her jean-jacket pocket, she took her cell phone. The screen showed a waiting message coded from Scott at his desk; the call that had come in while she’d been up in the ceiling. It had only been ten or fifteen minutes. She hoped he was still there and punched in the numbers.

He answered immediately. “Shepherd.”

“Thank God you’re still there.”

“Where are you, Valenti? Chicago is crawling with terrorists. Have you seen the news from the UBC station?”

“Uh…yeah.” She wouldn’t bother to explain right now. “Scott, there’s trouble and I need your help.”

“Got it.”

“First, I need you to alert the FBI and Chicago security that there is a bomb in the airport somewhere. It’s unclear which candidate is targeted, but it’s one or the other. They won’t believe you, but at least its worth a try. Ask for Lex Tanner. Tell him I said it.”

“All right. What else?”

Snow drifted in through the broken window, piling in little tufts on her thigh. Kim brushed it off and turned the heater on a little higher. “I need directions from the UBC office to the FBI office downtown.”

“Holy shit, Kim—”

“No time, Shepherd. Just need the information.”

“All right, give me a second.” She heard him keyboarding in the background.

Her eyebrow stung suddenly, and she scratched it gingerly. With a scowl, she turned the rearview mirror down to look at herself.

Good grief. Blood was smeared all the way down the side of her face and neck. The ear was a mess. The immediate bleeding appeared to have halted, but it was crusty and black with blood, and it was swelling rather impressively, along with her left eye. The cheekbone was going to be downright ugly. Dirt clung to her hair in wisps, and there were scratches and smears and marks all over her.

It was the ear that hurt. And made her look like a refugee from a boxing match. With the fingers of her free hand, she touched it lightly, and even the slightest pressure hurt like crazy. “Ow,” she whispered.

“Here’s the directions,” Scott said. “You ready?”

“Yes.” She absorbed the directions by repeating each one. She thanked him.

“Kim,” he said in a serious voice. “Please be careful.”

“I will, Scott. I promise.” She hung up.

Leaving the engine running, she opened the car door and scooped up a small, thin handful of snow. It melted against her hot face, feeling good. In the back seat was a tumble of odds and ends. Kim grabbed a discarded T-shirt. “Sorry, dude,” she said aloud to the owner of the car, and used it to wipe away the blood and snow water. When her face looked relatively clean, she grabbed one more handful and rubbed her neck and face one more time.

“Showtime,” she said, and put the car in gear.

It was night and snowing when Kim parked at FBI headquarters in Chicago. Snow came in through the window of the stolen car—a 1971 gold Buick Skylark.

Before she got out, she checked her face in the rearview mirror. If there was blood showing, she would draw attention to herself.

There was a bomb, ticking away at the airport. Somewhere. Due to detonate in exactly—she checked her watch—seventy-nine minutes.

In the mirror, she saw that her lip was swollen. She’d have a black eye tomorrow. A few scrapes, but no damage that would make her stand out too much in a law enforcement agency.

She got out of the car and hid the gun she’d stolen in the small of her back, tucked into the waistband of her jeans. The weight of it was comforting and cold. Her cell phone was in her hand, the cord around her wrist.

Snow fell more heavily now, and she was half-frozen from the drive through the Chicago streets in a broken-down car with a shattered window.

Her torn and battered ear throbbed. Without breaking stride, she scooped a handful of snow from the hood of a nearby car and pressed the icy ball to torn cartilage.

As she approached the front doors of the FBI building, a group of men erupted into the parking lot, rushing toward cars and vans. They shouted directions to one another, pulled on gloves, carted cases and rifles.

All headed, no doubt, for the television station. Kim ducked into the shadow of a truck, watching, her mouth hard. She could tell them that their rush was futile, but they wouldn’t listen to her now any more than they had earlier.

No, if she had any chance of success, there was only one man for the job—Lex Tanner. She’d believed in him before this morning.

She spied him toward the back of the group, carrying a metal suitcase. His dark hair was cut very short, the nose surprisingly recognizable from the pictures she’d seen, and he was quite tall. At least six-four. Rangy, lean and muscled, with shoulders big enough to shelter her from the wind.

As he neared her spot, she stepped out of the shadows. “Lex Luthor, I presume?”

He started, narrowing his eyes and sizing her up. Recognition washed over his features. “Valenti?” He looked more alarmed than pleased. “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been calling all afternoon.”

“Long story. Right now, I need you to bring your little bomb kit and come with me to the airport.”

“I can’t. I’m on my way to UBC. There’s a terrorist—”

“Yeah, yeah—” she waved a hand “—never mind. That’s not the problem.”

“They’ve stolen a bomb they’re threatening to detonate—”

“It’s not at the station.”

“They’ve got hostages.”

“I know.” She took a breath. “Look, I don’t have time to explain everything, but the drama at UBC is a smoke screen—the bomb is at the airport.”

“It’s not there! Don’t you get it? We’ve been over it a hundred and forty-seven times.”

She pulled out her gun, using her body to shield it from the sight of the others, and poked the barrel into his ribs. “I didn’t want to do it this way, but you won’t listen.”

“What—?”

She glared at him. “Don’t make me hurt you, Luthor. I liked you until today.”

“This is crazy.” He glanced toward the men entering their trucks.

“Don’t even think about it.” She jabbed the butt into his ribs, harder. “I am dead serious.”

“You’re going to fuck up your career doing this.”

Kim met his eyes. They were extremely blue. She’d read somewhere that extremely blue or green eyes showed a highly sexual nature.

Furious was more the word at the moment.

Oh, well. “Get in the car, and I’ll explain.”

“You won’t shoot me. I know you won’t.”

“I won’t kill you,” she said. “But I will hurt you if you don’t come with me. Now.” She pushed harder.

He resisted. “Explain.”

She met his eyes with an icy lift of her own eyebrow. “Walk.”

He glanced over his shoulder. No one was looking at them. Kim nudged him. “I tried to go through channels, but none of you has given me the respect I deserve, and because of that, people may die unnecessarily.”

“If I go against orders, I’ll be fired.”

“I’m not talking anymore.”

His nostrils flared in fury.

“It’s killing you to have to listen to a girl, isn’t it?”

“No, I—”

“My mother was a nurse in Vietnam. Did you know that? She was taken hostage once for three days, and it’s something that has given her nightmares the rest of her life.”

“Why the hell would I care, Valenti?”

“Because you can trust that I am very, very sincere when I say that I hate the whole hostage game. I would do anything to free hostages—but I won’t let other people die. Do you understand?”

He narrowed his eyes. Damn.

“Luthor, I’ve had a very bad night. My ear is killing me. There are a couple of bastards at that television station who may or may not kill hostages, but there are law enforcement officials on scene to deal with them. They also don’t have a bomb at the station, and that’s what I need you for.”

“How is it, Kim, that you’re so much smarter than the entire federal law enforcement community?”

She blinked. “I don’t know, Lex. You tell me. Maybe I’m just smart. One thing I know for sure is that I do know what I’m talking about because—by the way did I tell you I speak Arabic fluently?—I overheard them talking at the television station. There is a bomb or a suicide bomber headed for the airport or at the airport, and people will die if we don’t go now. I don’t know how to defuse a bomb. You do.”

“You finished?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s go. You can explain the rest in the car.”

Chapter 8

Lex started the car and turned on the heat to warm it up, but he didn’t immediately put the car in gear. “Before I get my ass fired, how ’bout you tell me everything you know?”

“Fair enough.” Kim gave Lex a rundown of the evening, the players, everything she knew. He listened, asking questions for clarification now and then.

Without a word, he then picked up his cell phone and called in the details. “I’m going to check it out,” he said into the phone, and put the car into gear.

She’d done something to her ankle—probably sprained it jumping from the ceiling—and sitting down now without any need to focus on driving brought the pain out. To join the ones in her face and ear and shoulder.

Tomorrow would so not be any fun.

“There’s aspirin in the glove box,” Lex said.

“How did you know?”

“You keep groaning.”

“No, I don’t.”

He looked at her.

Kim opened the glove box. “How embarrassing.”

“Don’t worry about it.” He flipped on the radio. “Pretty rough in there tonight, huh?”

“I don’t want to talk about it. If any of you had just listened to me, I wouldn’t have had to try to figure it out on my own. I could be back at the NSA, drinking coffee, basking in saving the day like Nancy Drew.”

He chuckled.

Kim’s head jerked up. “It’s not funny.” She hit his arm hard.

“Ow. Ow!” He grabbed her hand when she did it again. “Ow! Quit it. That hurts!”

“It’s supposed to.”

“You don’t hit like a girl at all.”

“No kidding. I have four brothers.” She blinked at the snow outside the windows. “Three,” she amended. “They showed no mercy, trust me.”

He put a small red light on top of his car and headed up the freeway. “How much time do we have?”

She looked at the digital display. “About thirty-four minutes.”

He raised his brows. “Cutting it a bit close, aren’t you?”

“Go to hell, Luthor.”

He winked. “Just kidding. I’ll get us there.”

Traffic was light because of the late hour, but the weather slowed it down. Kim saw a car that had slid into a median. “Must be getting pretty slick.”

“Yeah, but I’ve been driving here since I was twenty. This ain’t nothing. Trust me.”

And it did seem as if he knew what he was doing, smoothly swooping down the dark, snowy highway, his big hands confident on the wheel. He smelled like cedar, she noticed, and she liked his profile. It was hawkish without too much exaggeration.

“What happened to the fourth brother?” he asked.

“That’s pretty straightforward,” she returned. “Some might even say rude.”

He didn’t apologize. “I don’t see the point of beating around the bush. You lost a brother. I asked what happened. It’s the normal response.”

“Yeah, I guess.” She blinked. “He would have said, ‘Get over yourself.’”

Lex grinned. “My kind of guy.”

“He was a soldier in Iraq. He was taken hostage by some rebels and they beheaded him, then gleefully sent the pictures home.”

He made a noise of sympathy and horror. “Brutal.”

“Yeah. Well, that’s war for you.”

“I’m sorry. Was he older, younger?”

“One year older. He was a good soldier. He really loved it.”

“How’d your mother feel about that?”

“She nearly killed him when he enlisted.”

“I can imagine. A combat nurse sees a lot of damage.”

Kim nodded.

He switched lanes, glanced at the clock, shifted. “We’ll be there in about five minutes.”

“Good.” The adrenaline of the evening was draining away, leaving her achy, exhausted and ready for a stiff vodka and a hot bath. Taking in a deep breath, she focused away from her body. Lex was handy, something to focus on.

Or so she told herself. It wasn’t as if it was a hardship. There was drama in his face. His right eyebrow was sharply arched, very dark. His eyes were a little larger than normal, much bluer. His nose was aggressive, his mouth wide, the lips sensual, with the upper just a little bigger than the lower. A sign of generosity in love.

He glanced at her. “You all right?”

“Fine.”

“I have three sisters,” he said. “All older.”

“Oh, God. I should have known. You were spoiled rotten, too, weren’t you?”

“You better believe it. Damn!” He downshifted suddenly, and Kim’s attention jolted forward. There were lines of red brake lights ahead, coming too fast through the swirling snow.

Lex downshifted, braked lightly, glided to a stop. “No way,” he muttered. “Hold on. We’ve got to go around.”

He nosed across the lanes, the flashing light giving them access to small breaks in the sea of vehicles. He edged through, all the way across six lanes, then onto the shoulder, which was largely clear.

Kim looked for the accident, and there it was, of course: a tangle of cars, none looking seriously damaged, blocking every single lane. Drivers were out of their cars, some shouting at each other, gesturing, some on cell phones.

“Gonna be some missed flights tonight,” Lex said.

“I’m surprised how much traffic there is so late,” Kim replied. The anxiety in her chest trebled.

“It’s a busy airport.”

“Let’s just get there.”

The clock on the dashboard said 11:32 when Lex slid into the departure area and left the car. “C’mon.”

Kim dashed out behind him, wincing at the bright lights inside after so long an evening. They hurried toward the security lines, where a short line of people waited to go through the X-ray machines. A woman in a wheelchair blocked their way through a narrow area, and they paused, waiting for her to get through.

Lex glanced at Kim. “You look like hell, Valenti. That’s gonna be a shiner and a half tomorrow.”

“Won’t matter if we don’t find the—uh—package, will it?”

The number of milling human beings was not huge, not as it would have been at noon or at 6 p.m. It was enough, though. More than enough for a cataclysm. The guard, a young woman with a long yellow braid, waved the wheelchair woman through. Kim flashed on her ordeal at the Baltimore airport earlier today.

Only today?

It seemed years ago.

Lex obviously knew his way around. He lifted his hand at the girl with the braid. She didn’t flirt, as Kim might have suspected. Her eyes were trained on a television playing by a bank of telephones and vending machines. The screen showed an aerial shot of the UBC station, surrounded by police cars.

Kim’s ear throbbed. She put a hand up to cover it protectively.

Lex waved her through ahead of him, leading her down a hallway. “You really do look terrible,” he said. “No offense.”

“I assure you that however terrible the appearance, the reality is quite a lot worse.”

He quirked his lips, holding open a door for her to go through ahead of him. “I’ve got a claw-footed bathtub at my place. You could soak up to your ears.”

She winced. “Don’t say ear.”

“What?”

“Never mind.” She shook hair out of her eyes. “Where’s Monihan landing? Do we know that?”

“Concourse E. There’s a special area for VIP landings like this.”

“Where’re we headed, then?”

“Cameras. We can get a look at the airport as a whole, see if we can get a handle on who or what we might need to explore by looking at the waiting areas.”

“Hmm. Very smart.”

He grinned. The teeth were large and white. A dimple flashed in his left cheek.

Wretched thing. “I’ve done this once or twice,” he said.

She glanced at her watch—11:41.

“Chill, sweetheart. Getting tense gets you nothin’ but jittery.” He tapped his temple with one finger. “Cool and sweet leaves the brain intact.”

“Whatever.”

Lex knocked and was given access to a large room behind a heavy steel door. Banks of television screens showed dozens of views of the airport—security lines at the mouth of each concourse, gate areas, hallways, restaurants and bars, bookstores and shops. Kim stared at the vastness of them, the numbers of places to look, the dizzying number of people. Even a glance at each one would take way too long.

“Now what?”

“Now, darlin’,” he said, “you access that brain of yours and see if you can see anybody who might fit a pattern. Don’t get too caught up in what you think you know. Let your gut talk to you.”

“Gotta narrow it down,” she said, blinking her grainy eyes. “Anybody have any Visine or anything?”

A guy in a security uniform grabbed a bottle from his desk. He tossed it at her. Kim dropped her head back and let the drops cool and soothe her overheated eyes.

Lex swore.

Kim glared at him, blinking. “What?”

But he wasn’t looking at the screens. With one long-fingered hand, he reached out and lifted up the hair that covered the side of her face. He whistled. “They’ll call you Cauliflower Kim after this,” he said with a grin. “You’re tough, ain’t ya?”

She tilted her head away, and he dropped her hair. She looked back to the screens. “Couple questions. Is the president gone?”

“No. Air Force One is on the ground,” said a man with wild grizzled eyebrows and a serious paunch. “Not here, though. He’s flying out of a private airfield twenty miles away. Standard procedure.”

“Good. How about Monihan?”

“He’ll dock here.” The man pointed to the end of the screens, then waved a finger around to the gates—most of them empty—that were close by. “These gates are pretty close. He’ll come in on the lower level. This is upstairs.”

Lex frowned.

Kim said, “I think we’re probably looking for a man and a woman, or maybe two women.”

“That narrows it down.”

She peered at one gate after another. Anxiety ratcheted up in her gut, burning through her esophagus.

Or maybe that was hunger. She rubbed her diaphragm. “Why can’t we just clear the airport?”

“Presidential edict,” the security boss said. “After what happened in Spain, we’re trying not to overreact to terrorist demands. Ever.”

“I hardly think closing the airport is overreacting. Not when there’s strong evidence that a suicide bomber could be ready to kill hundreds of people.” She turned to meet his eye. “Is it?”

He lifted a shoulder. “It’s not my call, unfortunately.”

One of the other security guards cleared his throat. “All right, so if they got a bomb through security, how could they do it? We’re x-raying, searching, swabbing, everything. How could they?”

“I don’t know that answer,” Kim said.

“Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” Lex said. Again she noticed the timbre of his voice. Rich. He put his hands on his hips as he examined the screens. “The trick is just to work around the paradigms.”

“What’s that mean?” the kid asked, offended. “What else can we do?”

“Nothing,” Lex said. “Don’t be offended. It’s just a way of looking at reality.”

Kim peered at one screen after another, seeing nothing at all amiss. A man in a shiny, waterlike robe and a binding around his head caught her eye. He strode with an arrogant lilt toward one end of the concourse. A small girl danced along beside him, and a woman with a child on either side was just behind. Her gut said, no.

And it made her feel faintly ill to be profiling like that, anyway, looking for Middle Eastern sorts of faces—a vast region and a vast number of people and countries. Only a handful had caused trouble for the United States.

Behind her, Lex said, “A paradigm is just a way to think about things. Like before 9/11, nobody questioned the wisdom of agreeing to the demands of a hijacker. It was the smart thing to do, right?”

“Sure,” said the kid.

“The reason those hijackers could overtake the planes was because they worked with that paradigm. Now, the paradigm has shifted—you never give in to a hijacker—and because of that, nobody can hijack a plane. The passengers won’t allow it.”

Kim felt an inkling itch through the back of her brain. “So, to get a bomb through security, somebody just has to think outside the box.”

“Exactly.”

She turned back to the screens. “I think we might be looking for a woman,” she said, and quoted the phrase they’d found repeatedly in the e-mails, “‘Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because Allah has guarded them. Surah 4:34.’”

“What does that mean?”

“It was in the e-mails we decoded. It’s from the Koran.” She frowned. “Something happened earlier today that made me feel there was some intelligence about women that might not have been passed on.” She lifted an eyebrow. “By accident, I’m sure. We know all information is equally available to all agencies.”

“Mmm. All right, then.” Lex stood beside her. “Let’s look for women in that general area who might be suspicious in some way.”

They all peered at the screens. There were cameras showing various angles of the concourse, in grainy black-and-white. The women Kim spotted all looked perfectly ordinary—businesswomen in slacks and button-up blouses; mothers in stretch jeans; students showing three inches of skin between shirt and pants. She saw a gathering of Muslim women, plump and shrouded, but they had enough babies and children between them that she doubted seriously they were hiding anything. So far, mothers had not been big suicide bombers.

Nothing looked out of place. Kim rubbed her eyes again, exhaustion burning down her spine. She looked for women who moved oddly, not like a woman.

And suddenly, she said, “Look.” She stabbed a finger to a woman in a straight black skirt and loose print blouse with long sleeves. Her head was covered by a traditional scarf. On her feet were plain Keds.

All perfectly normal, except the fact that she carried a leather case. Kim said, “What’s she doing with a laptop?”

“Dammit,” Lex said. “I just figured out a possibility. C’mon.”

Kim rushed after him. They ran, Lex carting his heavy case, Kim behind him nonetheless. The ankle hurt, but she was trained to ignore pain. It was a long run, through the main sections of the airport, then into security at the concourse. The guards waved them through.

On the concourse itself, they slowed to a normal walk, to avoid alerting the possible terrorists, but Kim felt sweat trickling down her back.

“I thought laptops were x-rayed,” she said.

“They are. It won’t be the laptop itself that’s the bomb—it’ll be used as a power source. A spark of electricity will set it off. You can use almost anything—a phone, a razor, but the more current, of course, the better the spark.”

Kim felt queasy. How did people blow themselves up? Actually do it? “That still doesn’t answer the question of how they got the bomb through security.”

“I don’t know. We’ll have to use our instincts.”

The gate they’d spotted on the monitors was a long way down the concourse, close to the outskirts where the private jets landed. But this plane was packed, headed for Los Angeles, and the area was crowded. Kim watched a slim blond mother chase her cherubic toddler around a suitcase. A young man walked slowly beside his grandmother, who hung on to his arm for support.

Kim had a sudden flash of body parts flying. “Let’s find this bastard,” she said.

“There she is,” Lex said. “By the window.”

Kim slowed. “I see her.”

“Let’s go easy. She’s probably not alone.”

She made a sweeping examination of the area. A lot of the usual suspects. Businessmen in khaki pants and polo shirts. Families headed for Disneyland. California types in pastel. She thought about John at the UBC television station, and looked carefully at the men of his ilk. But he’d looked perfectly ordinary. Nothing written across his forehead that said, “I’m a traitor who colludes with terrorists.”

If only it were that easy.

The woman behind the desk picked up the microphone, and in a too-loud address over the PA system, she announced, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to our service to Los Angeles tonight. We are about to start preboarding, so…”

People shifted, started gathering their belongings, and the hair on the back of Kim’s neck stood up straight. This would be the time to do it. This plane boarding; Monihan’s plane coming in. Her watch said 11:53.

“We don’t want her to plug that laptop in,” Lex said. His eye was on the woman, sitting with the computer in her lap. For some reason, Kim noticed how long and graceful her fingers were, wrapping around the edge of the black plastic. Beautifully shaped oval nails, smooth pale skin.

“Let’s go. We aren’t going to know who her backup is until we act anyway.”

The woman shifted her position as they approached, her attention fixed intently upon something in her hands. The door to one hallway was to the left, the milling passengers spread out all around them. She wiped her brow with a sleeve, and the truth slammed Kim.

“That’s not a woman.”

“Damn. C’mon.”

Kim started to run, but in that instant, she caught sight of two other men, headed for them. She tried to reach the one with the laptop, but everything happened at once.

A burly, mustachioed man barreled into her, his arm capturing her arms close to her body so she could not swing. The unmistakable nose of a gun jammed into her ribs. She froze.

Lex bellowed, “Clear the area!”

The area exploded. People started screaming, running, banging into each other. Suitcases fell over. The PA system announced a different flight.

Using the momentary distraction, Kim dropped her body straight down and whirled in a circle, making herself a snake who slid out of her assailant’s grip. She was ready for his gun, grabbing his wrist as she sank, and managed to shove it away from her body just as he fired. The bullet skidded over the skin of her side in a burning hot line, and she heard someone grunt behind her.

The screaming of terrified passengers, businessmen and families trebled. A man tripped on a suitcase right in front of her and slammed down, face-first. His glasses shattered, but Kim had no time to help him.

Struggling with the man who was so much stronger than she, she had to be fast. She slammed her captor’s hand against a nearby chair. The gun skittered away on the waxed floor beneath a bank of chairs. The terrorist grabbed her, his fingers digging into her neck, and she slammed her head back as hard as she could, connecting with something hard—chin or teeth—then used her elbow to knock the wind out of his lungs.

He fell backward with a grunt. Kim yanked herself free, and slammed the butt of her own gun against the back of his head. He slumped into unconsciousness.

Breathing hard, she looked around for the “woman” with the laptop. Nowhere to be seen. “Damn!”

Lex had subdued his captor and breathing heavily, looked toward Kim. “Where did the woman go?” she cried.

He pointed. “Ladies’ room.” He wiped a hand over his face and winced. His right hand was bloody and he looked at it with anger. “Goddammit,” he growled.

It was only then that Kim saw the injury, a bullet hole through the lower section of his palm. She yanked off her coat and ran toward him. “Here. Wrap it up.”

“There’s no time!” He shoved her toward the ladies’ room. “You’re going to have to dismantle the bomb. Let’s go.”

“Right.”

There were several women cowering inside the restroom, but Kim didn’t immediately see the one she was looking for. Pressing her finger to her lips for silence, she jerked her thumb over her shoulder to indicate they should all get out quietly. With whispers and murmurs and more commotion than Kim would have liked, they did so. She ducked to see under the stalls. In the back, she spied the Keds she was looking for.

Glancing back at Lex, who moved behind her with his hand—dripping blood—held above his head, she pointed to the stall. He nodded.

With a smooth movement, Kim dived under the metal wall, and grabbed the terrorist above the ankle. It was surprisingly thin.

He yelped, and tried to yank away. Kim held tight. A spate of Arabic poured from his mouth, babbling and incoherent. Kim slid all the way into the stall, and using her body to trap him between the wall and her arm, she cried, “I’ve got him!” and unlocked the stall door for Lex.

“Haul him out here.”

Kim shifted her weight, flung the boy toward the floor. She landed on top of him, trapping his arms beneath her wrists. Lex opened his silver case. Blood dripped off his elbow to splash to the floor.

“Where is the bomb?” Kim asked in Arabic. He was much younger than she first thought—a boy of perhaps seventeen, and he was weeping, tears pouring down his smooth brown cheeks. Was he afraid? Or was it shame? Shame at being dressed as a woman, apprehended in a women’s toilet?

Cruel to give a boy such an assignment, Kim thought.

A cruelty that paled in comparison to making him blow himself up, she supposed, and shoved her arm against his throat hard. “Where is the bomb?” she cried.

He jerked his chin downward. “Breasts,” he said in English.

Kim scrambled backward, shoved open the blouse he wore to expose the bra beneath. It was an underwire model, heavily stuffed with a thick, breast-shaped plastic. The white nylon fabric of the bra against the boy’s smooth young skin gave her a pain.

What kind of world killed off its young like this, as soldiers and martyrs?

“What do I do?” she asked Lex. “Take it off of him?”

“Please,” said the youth in Arabic. “I do not want to die.”

For a minute, Kim’s gaze flew to his face. His plea moved her.

Lex said behind her, “He’s lying.”

She looked over her shoulder. “What?”

“It’s a time pencil. He’s buying time.”

The boy spit at her, and Kim had to scramble to avoid losing hold of him. At the idea that the bomb could explode at any second, she felt suddenly, faintly ill, and had to physically fight the urge to leap away from him. A shudder violently shook her spine. “What do we do?”

“See where the bra comes together? Insert this pin there, very slowly.”

Kim held the boy with her knees. He jerked, and she slammed his arms down hard. In Arabic, she said, “If you move, and I live through you blowing us up, I’ll tell everyone you peed your pants you were so scared.”

He spit again. Instinctively, she hit him, and he slumped backward, at least dazed, if not unconscious.

“Take the little tube there, and ease it out,” Lex said.

Very gently, Kim gripped what looked like an eyebrow pencil and eased it out of its spot. On the end was a little cap. “This?”

“Yeah. Easy.” Lex leaned in. “Hold your boy.”

Kim braced herself more firmly against the kid, and Lex very gently touched the pencil cap. He took a breath, moved it ever so slightly, then let go of his breath. “That was the moment we could have blown.”

“Thanks for telling me.”

“Anytime. Now,” he said in that smooth, low voice. “You gently wiggle the cap free, and there’ll be a wire underneath, which we’re going to cut.”

“All right. But our explosion moment is passed?”

“Not exactly.”

“Oh.” Kim eased the cap upward, spied the wires beneath. “Now what?”

Lex braced the cap in his fingers and lifted his chin to the bomb kit. “Cut it.”

“Do I die here?” she asked, taking the scissors from the kit.

“Not if you do it right.” His eyes were a vivid blue, and twinkling enough that she thought he might be teasing her. “That’s what I’m here for, remember?”

“Right.” Kim squeezed her eyes shut, opened them, cut the wire, and whooped, pulling it free from the bomb.

Kim slumped in relief, and wiped sweat from her upper lip. “How did he get that through security?”

“Paradigms,” Lex said simply. “What guard is going to pat down actual breasts? And metal detectors react to bras all the time. The underwires and hooks and clips. It’s understood. We’re not prepared—who would be?—for people who blow themselves up.”

His face was as white as the porcelain surrounding them. Blood had pooled beneath his elbow in a sticky, spreading mass. “That’s bad.” She stood up and yanked the belt out of her jeans, then knelt and tied it around his arm. “We need to get you to the hospital.”

“I’ll be fine in an hour or two.” He held out his good hand. “Where the hell is everybody, anyway?” He coughed. “Let me use your phone to call security.”

She pulled it out of her pocket, and handed it over to him. The Arab boy was breathing harshly, but he’d survive. Lex took the phone and punched in some numbers, and Kim stood up to get a thick pile of paper towels from the dispenser on the wall. She carried them back to where Lex slumped against the wall, and dropped some on the ground to absorb the blood there, and then sandwiched the gory hand between two layers of towels and pressed hard from both sides.

“All clear,” Lex said into the phone, and gave directions to their location. “We need medical assistance. I’ve been shot—not seriously, but it hurts like hell.”

His eyes were on Kim’s face. They were as blue as a teacup her mother had once brought home from a fair. She looked away, down to the hand pressed between her palms.

“Hey,” he said.

Kim raised her face. “Hey, yourself.”

“Good work.”

“You, too.”

It was impulsive and probably foolish, but she did it anyway, gripped his hand between hers. Kissed him. And didn’t pull away immediately. His free hand came up behind her head and caught her, and his lips opened with a little growl, inviting her in. She tasted sweat—hers or his, she wasn’t sure—and a faint hint of cloves, which must be him. Close up, she caught a hint of Indian spice. “Curry?” she said, pulling back.

“It’s in the leather. I practically live in an Indian restaurant nearby my apartment.” He tugged her down to him again.

His lips were as richly generous as they looked. His tongue swirled against hers, sending a jolt of thick excitement down her spine. Abruptly, she pulled back. “Bad idea.”

He looked at her. “Is it?”

“We’re just reacting to the danger.”

“Maybe.” His voice was gravelly, that Southern drawl like honey on her neck. “Maybe we’re just reacting to each other.”

“It’s been a long night,” Kim said, suddenly aware of her headache. She sat down on the floor with a thump and pressed her palms to her temples. “A long damned day.”

“You need to let them look at you at the hospital, too,” he said. “We’ll ride together.”

Kim realized it was over, finally. “God, I’m tired.”

“Good job, kiddo,” he said. “You saved the world tonight.”

“Maybe not the world.”

“A big piece of mine.”

Kim took a breath, but at that moment, security swarmed in and there wasn’t a chance to say any more.

Chapter 9

At the hospital emergency room, they were separated. Lex was wheeled into one examining room. Kim went to one in another direction. Sitting in the sterile white room, with fluorescent light turning the air a faint green, she discovered she was a long way beyond exhaustion.

All at once, the day caught up with her, and she fell backward on the table like a drunk who’d had one too many. Her head spun. Her ear throbbed, her ankle ached, her face felt as if it had been a punching bag—which she supposed it had been. Even her teeth ached.

She had awakened—she glanced with effort toward a clock on the wall, since it was too much effort to raise her wrist—nineteen hours ago. Since then, she’d gone to the office as usual. Flown to Chicago. Fought off a creepy man with no expression who’d very nearly killed her, jumped a terrorist, stolen a car, kidnapped an FBI agent and defused a bomb.

Her stomach felt positively hollow. She was hungry. Starving. Her stomach was making little hollow noises like a tired puppy. With effort, she lifted a hand and put it over the grumbling.

She must have drifted off, her feet swinging free at the end of the table, because the next thing she knew, a warm female voice was saying, “Ms. Valenti, can you tell me where you’re hurting?”

“What?” She opened both eyes, but it was too bright, so she closed one. “Ear,” she said, and added thickly, “Starving.”

The woman, a plump blonde with exotic blue eyes, chuckled. “Let’s see,” she said with a frown, and searched her pockets, coming up with a banana and a chocolate bar. “Want them?”

“Banana,” Kim said, just as her stomach growled again.

The woman laughed again. Such a lilting, pleasant sound. “Why don’t you have both? I might want to give you some painkillers.” She lifted Kim’s hair to look at her ear. “Ooh, that hurts a lot, I betcha. You need some stitches, I suspect. Where else?”

One by one, Kim let the doctor check out her injuries, large and small. Black eye, torn ear, bruised face, cut lip, burn where the bullet had buzzed by her skin, sprained ankle. She devoured the banana, then the chocolate bar, and happily accepted a painkiller with a glass of water. Somebody could get her to the hotel and she could pour herself into bed.

With a Do Not Disturb sign on the door.

As she cleaned up Kim’s ear, the doctor said, “You’re all over the news, you know—big heroes, the pair of you.”

“It was him, not me.”

“Oh, no, you don’t. Wait till you see the news.”

Kim remembered the situation at the television station. “Did they get the hostages out?”

“Yeah. No worries. A SWAT team took the station about an hour and a half ago. Two of the terrorists managed to escape, but none of the hostages were hurt.”

“That’s good.” She thought about asking for the details of which ones had escaped and decided to let it go for tonight. Enough already.

“Hang on, this will pinch a little.” A needle the size of the Eiffel Tower arrived at the edge of Kim’s peripheral vision and she closed her eyes tight. The pinch was not pleasant, but immediately afterward, a blessed numbness spread through the ear.

Kim let go of a breath. “Oh, that’s good. It was really hurting!”

“It’s pretty battered.” The distant sound of scissors, and Kim assumed the doctor was starting the stitches. “Wait’ll you see the video they’re running of you.”

“Me?” Kim said. “Where did they get video of me?”

“It’s from the television station. You dropped out of a ceiling and knocked out a terrorist with a gun, just like a movie or something.”

“Oh. That.”

The doctor laughed. “That! It’s pretty exciting stuff. You were brave.”

“I’m very well trained.”

“So what!” The doctor leaned her face around to look Kim in the eye. “I saw what you did. It was tough.”

“Thanks.”

Lex appeared in the threshold. His hand was bandaged. “You’re a hero,” he said.

“That’s what I was just telling her,” said the doctor.

“Yeah, yeah. You’re the hero, Mr. Luthor.”

“As in Martin Luther?” the doctor asked, peering over her half glasses.

“No, that would be Lex Luthor, the archvillain in Superman,” Kim said.

The doctor laughed appreciatively, but went back to stitching up Kim’s ear. Kim looked at Lex. He looked pale and drawn, but maybe he always looked like that—how would she know?

“You’re all set,” the doctor said, gathering up her tools and stripping off her gloves. “Keep it clean and dry and go see your doctor back home in five to seven days.”

“Thanks.” Kim slid off the table. Looked at Lex. “Is someone going to take me to the hotel now?”

“Well—”

“What does that mean?”

He drew her out into the hallway. His bandaged hand was caught in a sling, making it look as if he were saying the Pledge of Allegiance. “There are hordes of reporters waiting for you there.”

“I don’t care. I’ll just blow them off and go to my room.”

“It’s not that. I don’t think you’ll be safe there.”

“Safe from whom?”

His lips quirked upward. “La-ti-ta. From terrorists, sweetheart.”

“Oh.” She blinked. “Can’t we find me a hotel somewhere else?”

“We could. But it’s easier to guard my place, and I’ve got a spare bedroom.”

“No,” she said. Overwhelmed with weariness, she said, “I just can’t stand that weirdness. I’m sorry.”

“Weirdness?”

“Yeah.” They were standing in a waiting area. Gray-and-white tiles ran in a long pattern beneath their feet. She stuck the envelope with her pills in her jeans pocket. “There’s this—tension—between us. And I like it, don’t get me wrong, but I’m just too wiped—”

“Hey.” He caught her jaw in two fingers of his good hand. “None of that. Swear.”

“It’s not just you, you know.”

A faint smile made crow’s-feet show around his eyes. “You mean you might sneak into my bed in the middle of the night and ravish me?”

His eyes were practically neon. She thought again of that study that said intensely colored eyes meant high sex drive. The thought sent pings of wishfulness through her belly. “Maybe.”

He grinned more broadly, dropped his hand. “I’d probably live through it.”

Tension rose in her neck, and she wanted to slap someone. Which would be worse? Media blitz with possible terrorists lurking to blow her away in her room, or sleeping at the apartment of a man she liked? “Oh, never mind,” she said irritably. “Let’s just go.”

He gestured with an open palm. Bowed slightly. “To my castle, then, my lady.”

Kim rolled her eyes. “What planet are you from, Luthor?”

He chuckled. “There’s a car waiting for us.” He led the way toward the entrance. Before they arrived, however, it was plain the media interest was not only grouped at her hotel. A swarm of camera-toting reporters was clustered around the hospital entrance. Lights shone from trucks.

“I’m so not in the mood,” Kim growled.

“Just give ’em that look, honeypie, and you’ll be safe.”

She glared up at him. “Isn’t it ‘sugarpie’?”

“Either one’ll do.” He pushed the doors open and the reporters swarmed, buzzing out questions, shoving microphones forward, running cameras. Kim put up her hand against the glare of one bright light, and grimaced at the cameraman who held it.

The questions rained down:

“Do you think there are more terrorist attacks planned for Chicago?”

“Ms. Valenti, tell us how you learned to fight like a commando!”

“Tell us about the Athena Academy.”

“Hey, Tanner, is it serious?”

“Is there a connection between tonight’s actions and the unrest in Berzhaan?”

At this last question, Kim stopped dead on the sidewalk. “Uh, yeah.” She tapped her forehead in frustration. “You might have picked that up since they told us that at the television station!”

“Don’t worry about them,” Lex said, his good hand at the small of her back.

She ducked into the back seat of an unmarked sedan that screamed GOVERNMENT CAR in every detail: the navy blue color, the crisp new smell inside, a blandness so overt as to be suspicious.

It was warm and dry. That was what mattered.

The young marine driving turned around to make sure they were settled. “Anything I can get you two before we head out?”

“Can I get my bag from the hotel?”

“We already took care of that for you, ma’am. It might not get to Mr. Tanner’s place till morning, but you’ll have your things.”

“I really wanted my toothbrush.”

“Don’t worry,” Lex said, “I’ve got spares.”

Dryly, she said, “Of course you do.”

As the car pulled away from the hospital and the crowd of reporters, both Lex and Kim fell back against the seat, heads back. Kim closed her eyes. “Even my eyelashes hurt,” she said.

“I bet.” He touched her hand, and it wasn’t threatening. It was…nice. She didn’t move hers away. “I bet you’re starving, too, aren’t you?”

“The doctor gave me a banana.” She paused, dug up the rest of the words from some deep well. “Chocolate bar, too.”

“Gosh, all of that?” His thumb moved on her inner palm, slow and comforting.

His hand was large and competent, not clammy. Kim let her index finger explore the hair on his wrist. “Yeah, it wasn’t really enough,” she admitted. “I could eat a cow.”

“I probably have some steaks in the freezer. Wouldn’t take long to thaw them out.”

Kim groaned. “Oh, God, Luthor! Who could cook at a time like this? We’re both exhausted. Fast food will do. There’s a McD’s right there, have the guy stop.”

“Fast food, Valenti?” He gave her a mocking shake of the head. “Forget it. I don’t put that stuff in my body.”

She raised an eyebrow. “What, you eat organically or something?”

He nodded. “Since 2000.”

“Does that mean you chant and do yoga and wear hemp underwear?”

His chuckle was ragged. Loose and sexy. His thumb moved over her palm. “You want to see my underwear?”

“Not today.” Her stomach growled. “Okay, Mr. Perfect World, make the man stop for me so I can get a chemical burger for my poor belly.”

“We’re almost at my apartment. Trust me—I have much better food there.” His fingers looped through hers. “Fast food is one of my geeky issues, all right? We’re all allowed.”

Kim turned her head to look at him in disbelief. Yep. Same guy. Same chiseled profile. Strong jaw. Gorgeous cheekbones. He had a bullet wound in his hand and had saved the airport from a terrorist bomb. “Fast food,” she echoed. “You don’t eat fast food.”

He took a breath, turned his head to look back at her. Both of them sprawled with their heads against the seat, and when he looked at her, his face really was very close. Light flashed over the bridge of his nose, flickered over his irises, shadowed now with the minklike eyelashes. “My mother is an activist. She pounded it into my head.”

“Ah. Your mother did it.” She rolled her eyes. “That makes it all better.”

“Watch it, Valenti.”

“Or what?” Her nostrils quivered with suppressed laughter. “You’ll slap me?”

His mouth was only inches from her own. She felt his breath brush her lips when he said, “I’ll kiss you again.”

“I kissed you, remember?”

He didn’t move anything except his index finger, which swirled around and around the heart of her palm. A light swirling movement that might have been annoying if it hadn’t been so arousing. “So you did,” he agreed.

She turned her head away.

The apartment was in a prewar-era building, six brick stories. Kim was dismayed, but let go of a sigh of relief when she saw the elevators.

“What’s that about?” Lex asked.

“My ankle is honestly killing me. I didn’t want to climb any stairs.”

It was a beautiful building, garnished with art deco touches throughout—fan-shaped light covers in the hallways, ornate giltwork on the elevator sculpted into women and serpents. “Pretty tony stuff for an FBI agent,” she said, following him into the box. The doors slid shut.

“It belonged to my grandmother,” Lex said. “She knew I loved the place.”

“Nice.” She was trying to keep her weary brain out of the gutter, trying not to like everything about him so damned much. His hands, lean and long, looked capable and strong. Prickles of gold and reddish hair bristled on his chin, and she thought she’d like to watch him shave. It was even more intriguing that some of the details of his life didn’t sync with the profile of a rough-and-ready bomb expert.

Like the apartment itself. It smelled cool and, faintly, of the curry he’d said he loved. In her experience, men were at best minimalists when it came to decorating. It was lucky when there weren’t dirty socks piled up in armchairs and six years of bacterial growth in the toilets.

This was not minimalist at all. There were overstuffed armchairs with textured upholstery rivets in swirls around the arms, and big ottomans, and a couch that looked as if it could comfortably seat twelve, piled high with pillows in green and gold. It had obviously been furnished by a woman, but there were manly touches, too, things Lex must have added—large vintage travel photos of cars, boats, planes. A newspaper framed with headlines about D-day. “God, that’s a beauty,” she said, leaning forward to look at it.

“Yeah, I found it at a Goodwill. Ain’t that something? C’mon in the kitchen, sweetheart. I’ll get you a beer.”

“Oh, yeah. I would sell my soul for a beer,” she breathed.

“Not necessary. I’ll just give you one.” He tossed his keys on the counter of the kitchen, flicked on the overhead light. “Dark okay?”

“I don’t care.”

He pulled out a couple of brown bottles and opened them with a church key. Kim looked around. The floors were made of very tiny tiles, a little old and discolored in places, but mostly very well kept. “This is fantastic.”

“Thanks.” He lifted his bottle with his left hand and took a long, serious swallow. Kim remembered he’d had a hell of a day, too. It showed in the hollows beneath his eyes. “She did a lot of work before she died, but I’ve done a lot, too. Some of the stuff is remodeled back to the original styles, but some of it is the real thing. Notice the bathroom, will you? I’m too beat to give you the grand tour tonight.”

“I’m too tired to appreciate it.”

He stood up. “Food, though. We need food.”

“Lex, really, it doesn’t matter.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not going to let you go to bed without supper.” He stuck his head in the fridge. “Ah, here we go.” He slapped a container of cracked olives and a brick of cheese on the counter. “This’ll tide us over while I make an omelet. Faster than steak. How does that sound?”

“You can’t cook with that hand.”

“Honey, if you weren’t here, I’d do it. You may as well let me give you some of it, too. Open the olives. I can’t do that part. And you’re going to have to slice the cheese.”

She whisked the lid off the plastic container. The smell of honest-to-goodness Italian olives made her groan. She put one in her mouth and closed her eyes at the burst of flavor. “Oh, the real thing.”

“Yeah, you’re an Italian girl, aren’t you?” He grinned. “My Nana, she’s the one who had this apartment, she was Sicilian. It’s her buddy’s granddaughter who runs the deli around the corner.”

“That’s where you got that nose.”

“The deli?” He shoved the cheese, a knife and a plastic cutting board toward her.

“Ha. The grandmother.” She picked up the knife. “Thin?”

A nod. He took out other things: a carton of organic eggs, goat cheese, tomatoes with green vine still attached. “It’s weird that you eat organically, Mr. Luthor. It’s just so not in keeping with your tough-guy image.”

He quirked a dark brow. “Do you know what they do to chickens?”

She grinned. “I’m not sure whether I should answer yes or no. If I say yes, and I know but still use regular eggs, I’m a bit of a slime, huh?”

“Nah.” He put a blue bowl down on the tiny tiles of the counter. “But I’d recommend never mentioning it in front of my mother.”

“Oh, shit!” She slapped her forehead. “I need to call my mother.”

“It’s two in the morning!”

“Three on the East Coast. But if she saw me on television jumping a terrorist, she won’t sleep until she hears from me.” She pulled out her cell phone and punched in the speed dial #1, and put the phone to her ear.

“Aw, that’s cute, Valenti. Momma’s #1.”

She flipped him off and ducked her head away as her mother said in her ear, “Kim?”

“I’m fine, Mom. Totally fine.”

“What were you thinking? You don’t have to be a cowboy! You could have been killed.”

Kim ran a thumbnail along the seam of her jeans and let her mother say all the things she needed to say, all the stuff that she needed to get out because the worry had made her crazy. When she paused, Kim said, “Are you done?”

“Yes. Thanks.” She took a breath. “Who’s the good lookin’ man you were at the hospital with?”

“How’d you know about that?”

“It was on television. Not ten minutes ago. CNN.”

“We were on CNN?” Kim scowled, pointed over Lex’s shoulder to the television sitting on a counter in the corner. “There was video at the hospital?”

“I just said that!” A murmur in the background. “Your father says he looks Italian.”

“Yeah, well, he’s part Sicilian, but don’t get your hopes up. These Chicago Sicilians are all connected to the mob, I hear. He’ll probably cut off my feet or something.” She looked at Lex and pressed her finger to her lips.

He mimed zipping his mouth shut and turned on the television.

“Mom,” Kim said, “Kiss Dad for me. I’ve been up for way, way too long.”

“Call when you get home, baby.”

“Will do.” She flipped the phone closed and set it on the counter. “How much cheese?”

“A couple of ounces. A little extra to nibble.”

Kim followed orders, and when he got to the eggs, she held out her hand. “You want me to do it?”

He grinned. “Nope.” With a flourish, he took an egg from the carton and cracked it smartly against the edge of a red ceramic bowl, then deftly opened it with one hand.

“Nice.” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a slither of black fur slide around the corner. “Hey! A cat!”

“That’s Velvet.”

“Very original.”

“He came with the apartment.”

“Here kitty, kitty, kitty,” Kim called softly, holding out her hand. The cat was enormous, all black with yellow eyes, and his body was covered with thick shiny fur. He settled in the doorway and looked at her. “He’s a very Egyptian cat, isn’t he?”

Lex glanced at the cat. “Huh. So he is. I never thought about it, but you’re right—he should be guarding a pyramid.”

“Will he mind if I pet him?”

“No,” Lex said. “He just likes you to chase him around some.”

“Ah. How very like a man.” She made quiet, coaxing noises, little girl noises, and approached the cat. He arched his back, trotted away, came back, rubbed her leg. “Hey, guy.” He started to purr.

“Don’t get any ideas, now,” Lex said, stirring eggs vigorously with a fork. “He sleeps with me. Non-negotiable.”

Kim laughed. “I had you pegged all wrong. I figured you to be a big-dog, bloody-steak kind of guy.”

“Pretty cliché,” he said, and added with a wink, “Baby.” He jerked his head toward the stove. “I need your help for a sec.”

Kim let the cat go and moved to the stove. “What?”

Their bodies were very close. His aggressive, beautiful nose and lush mouth were right in front of her. His right hand was still clasped in the sling close to his chest, but his other hand came up around her neck. “I just wanted to kiss you again,” he said.

“Easy,” Kim said.

“Right.”

The first time, Kim had been buzzing from adrenaline. This time she decided the buzz was from exhaustion. She got lost for a minute, tasting the plumpness of that lower lip, the suggestion of tongue just behind it. She drifted into it, their heads moving, their bodies still.

He lifted his head. “Nice.”

“We really shouldn’t be messing around like this. We’re too tired. The situation is too charged.”

He raised his eyebrows, nodded. “You’re right,” he said, sounding as if he meant the opposite. “Now, would you put that skillet on the stove for me, darlin’?”

“Skillet?” she repeated. “You mean the frying pan?”

“Don’t get smart with me.”

She moved the pan and stepped back, watching as he poured the eggs into the pan and swirled them around. His elbow and forearm were stringed with muscle, and she liked his competence in the kitchen. She liked him.

Brilliant, Valenti, said a voice in her head. An FBI bomb expert. Great life expectancy there. She’d be far better off with Scott, fellow cryptologist, or even Marc. Models didn’t ordinarily get blown up in the line of duty.

How had she gone so far over her head with this guy without even noticing? She didn’t let herself get tangled in men. She steered clear of anyone who might snare her.

And look at her. Mooning over this man.

An FBI bomb expert who was part Italian.

Who kissed exactly the way she’d always imagined Brad Pitt might, that lower lip so lusciously plump.

An FBI bomb expert with the life expectancy of a street cat, who was part Italian, who kissed like a gigolo, with eyes like neon sapphires, who cooked.

“I had a cat at Athena Academy,” she said to distract herself.

“Yeah?”

She stuck her hands in her back pockets. “His name was Hop-A-Long because he lost a leg to a coyote when he was a kitten. Arthur, my mentor, saved him by banging the coyote on the head.”

“Did the coyote die?”

“No. He dropped the kitten and ran away.”

With a circular gesture, he sprinkled goat cheese over the surface of the firming eggs. “Cat’s name should have been Lucky.”

“He was a lifesaver for me.” She stepped forward with the spatula from the counter and handed it to him. “I was pretty lonely when I first went there.”

Gracefully, Lex flipped thin egg over the filling. “Hold that thought a minute. This is ready.”

“Want me to lift the pan?”

“Please. This is tricky.”

Together, they managed to get the omelet on the plates, and settled in to eat. Lex poured big glasses of milk. “Dig in, honey,” he said.

When he sat down, she saw that he had massive circles under his eyes. “Thank you, Lex,” she said. “It was very nice of you to cook. Did they give you drugs at the hospital, too?”

He nodded, displayed a bottle. “Will you open it? Childproof.”

She did, and took out her own envelope. They popped their pills.

“So you were lonely at school?” he prompted.

“Oh, yeah. I forgot.” She took a bite of omelet and it was very good. “Mmm. Very nice.”

“Thanks. The cat. Being lonely.”

Kim looked at him. Unusual that a man really did want to know something about a woman, rather than just wanting to tell all about himself. “Well, I have a big, close family—not just brothers and sisters, but cousins, aunts, uncles, everybody in the neighborhood, who know me, and my whole family—my whole history.”

He smiled and nodded appreciatively.

“And then I landed in this exclusive boarding school, and I was really happy to be there, but I was pretty young for my age, and they all seemed so glamorous and together and tough.” She made a soft noise. “I was very, very lonely, and Hop-A-Long helped.”

“D’you have a pet now?”

“It wouldn’t be fair—I’m not at home enough.” Her hunger took over and she fell into eating the perfectly cooked omelet. In companionable, exhausted silence, they ate.

Dangerous, Kim thought. His kitchen, with the art deco designs in the tiles. His scent of cloves and man, which was surely the perfume of a devil or a demon. “My grandma,” she said, spearing a piece of egg on her fork, “would say Sicilians are all dogs who eat out of their pans.”

He chuckled. “Would she?”

“I gather this is some evil mark of culture, but I never quite got it. Why Italians would hate other Italians.”

He drank his milk, nodded.

“And anyway,” Kim said, “it’s no secret that Nana fell in love with Johnny Bacino when she was sixteen. He was practically right off the boat from Sicily and he broke her heart.” She lifted a shoulder. “So, forever after, Sicilians were dogs.”

“Tough woman.”

“She’s that.”

“Mom’s mom or dad’s mom?”

“My dad’s.” She took another bite of omelet. “This is the best omelet I’ve ever eaten, Lex.”

“Way better than McD’s, huh?”

She nodded. “My mom isn’t Italian. She’s Irish. My dad met her in Vietnam, brought her home.”

“A nurse, right?”

For a second, Kim hesitated. It seemed she was talking an awful lot. It wasn’t really like her. But what did it hurt? It wasn’t as if she was telling state secrets. “Yeah, a nurse. She works oncology now.”

“Vietnam to cancer. She’ll get her wings in heaven, all right.”

“My father wanted her to stay home, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She caused wars in Baltimore’s Little Italy, I can tell you. So independent and fierce, she made everybody mad.”

“So you come by it honestly.”

“I guess I do.” She blinked, feeling the warmth of food in her belly, the comfort of finally stopping after such a long day. There was a pleasant buzz at the base of her neck, and she blinked again, more slowly.

Her body jerked, and she realized she’d very nearly keeled over right into her plate.

Lex caught her arm. “Hey, you all right?”

She stood up. “I have to go to bed right now.”

In an instant, Lex was beside her. “Come on.”

“I’ll shower in the morning,” she said, swaying as she turned toward the hallway she’d seen.

“That’s fine.” He took her elbow, led her down the hall and opened a door. He flipped on the light. A small bedroom with two narrow windows was revealed. The bed was covered with a green-and-white spread. The blinds were open and Kim noticed vaguely that it was still snowing. Lex moved to close them and she shook her head. “Leave them.”

She sank down on the bed and started taking off her shoes. One landed with a thump. Then the other. She stripped off her socks.

Lex said, “I’ll put a toothbrush in the bathroom and bring you some towels—”

He said more, but Kim was tilting sideways, and his voice melted into a meaningless wash of sound as sleep rose up and claimed her.

Chapter 10

Wednesday, October 6

Kim awakened one toe at a time. She couldn’t immediately remember where she was. The bed was deep and comfortable. She’d made a nest of pillows and blankets around her, as was her habit, and one foot hung over the edge of the bed.

Opening one eye, she saw an uncurtained window, with snow falling past it.

Chicago.

Oh, yeah.

Lex.

She took a breath, started to throw off the covers, and groaned. Sore muscles cried out from every corner of her body—arms, ribs, neck. Her ear woke up and started to throb. Kim put a hand to it. Who knew a freaking ear could hurt so much?

With effort, she sat upright and tossed the tangles of covers from her body. Through the window she could see that it was still snowing, swirls of big fat flakes. After a minute, she stood up to stretch out the stiffness. Her ankle immediately protested, and she limped a little as she crossed to the window to check out the weather. She blinked. “Good grief.”

It must have snowed all night. Drifts half covered the cars parked on the street. There wasn’t a soul anywhere that she could see. No traffic. It was a side street, but it didn’t look as if there’d been any cars along the street for quite a long time.

Her clothes were wretchedly twisted and uncomfortable. She straightened out her bra, shook down her jeans, thinking about how fast she’d passed out last night. Her mouth tasted like an alien died in it.

Coffee. A shower.

The room, now that she could see it, was as marvelous as the rest of the house. Clean lines. Simple stuff—blond wood with a little bit of a curve. On one wall hung a beaux arts painting of a woman in a green gown. A dresser, a night table and a bed were the only furnishings. It was small, but on a bright day, it would be very appealing.

A pile of towels was on the dresser, and Kim spied a note on top. Lex’s handwriting was spare and slanted, oddly elegant.

Hope you slept well. There is coffee in the pot—just hit the button. Feel free to take a shower and help yourself to whatever you need. I thought you might need fresh clothes, too, so try these (would you believe they belong to my sister?). ? Lex.

She chuckled and picked up the clothes—a pair of yoga pants and a T-shirt. They looked as if they’d fit all right. Much better than leaving on her wrinkled, crumpled, old clothes.

Gathering everything to take with her, she padded out into the hall, dark and cool. Diamond-shaped tiles paved the length of it, dramatic in black and something lighter—maybe ivory. Light fixtures were frosted glass in the shape of fans.

What a place! It had to be worth a fortune.

She found the bathroom at the end of the hall, remembering what he’d said last night about noticing the room. It was fantastic. Ivory-colored porcelain fixtures had a carved pattern of lines around them, on the big deep bathtub, repeated in the sink and even the toilet. Wall tiles were a rich teal, edged with long, narrow rectangles of black. A divider of glass brick between the toilet and a shower area created a sense of light and space.

“Wow,” she said aloud. Lex had set out a brand-new toothbrush on the sink. She unwrapped it and brushed gratefully, then turned on the taps for the shower. As the water heated, she stripped out of the old, tangled, slept-in clothes and let them fall on the floor, taking inventory as steam began to curl down from the ceiling.

Her body was definitely banged up. A bruise the size of a dahlia bloomed over her ribs and side. Her ankle was black-and-blue, swollen.

Only then did she look at her face. It wasn’t as bad as she’d feared, but it wasn’t pretty. There was a cut on her eyebrow where she’d hit the table in the conference room, with small black-and-blue marks around it. A bruise bloomed on her cheekbone. Her lower lip was a little swollen. A look of general weariness tugged down her features.

She lifted her hair to look at her throbbing, hot ear. Very ugly. Puffy, multicolored, laced with stitches. “Jerk,” she growled, thinking of the man who had attacked her in the conference room. His face with its curiously masklike expression flashed over her memory. She shuddered.

The glass-brick shower was an open stall, and Kim felt strangely vulnerable in it, as if she were on display. And yet, it was delicious, too. His soap smelled like cloves—that’s where the scent came from!—and there were good bottles of shampoo in hotel-size samples in an open-weave plastic container in one corner. The teal-and-black tiles reflected through the glass brick, danced on the water.

She washed. Thought of Lex, kissing her last night.

Thought of that luscious lower lip, his long fingers spiraling circles over her palm.

Thought of him in his bed somewhere not very far away. Did he sleep nude?

Thought of him nude, wet, here, kissing her.

She moved the water temperature to cold and let it shock her. Quit it, she told herself. He was way too right for her. Which made him all too wrong. She knew what happened when women fell in love with a man—little bits and pieces of them disappeared until the dreams and ambitions were memories and dust. She saw it over and over again.

After her shower, she dressed in the T-shirt and yoga pants—which left about an inch and a half of tummy uncovered—and combed out her wet hair. She left the curls to air-dry on her shoulders and wandered into the kitchen. In spite of the cloud cover, the room was light and airy feeling, with windows on two sides. A back door she’d missed last night appeared to open onto a small, rooftop patio area. Planters, empty now, were piled with snow, and a table with a closed umbrella stood by a wall.

“Jeez,” she said aloud, and turned on the coffeemaker. She wondered again what the place would cost if he’d had to buy it instead of inherit. And who had been pissed to be left out of that inheritance?

As she waited for the coffee to brew, she picked up her cell phone to check for messages. It was, predictably, dead, since she’d forgotten to plug it in. And even if she’d remembered, the charger was in the backpack she’d left behind at the television station. She made a mental note to see if they could get that backpack mailed to her.

Ugh. No cell phone. No computer, no way to contact the outside world. It made her feel twitchy. A laptop sat on the counter, but she wouldn’t dare open it. Not without permission. She could use a landline phone, but although she saw a modem line, she didn’t see an actual telephone. Maybe it was in his bedroom or something.

Eyeing the laptop, she did have to wonder if he’d ever talked to her from this spot. It was connected via modem to the outside world.

“Good morning,” he said from behind her.

Kim jumped and put a hand to her heart. “You scared me!”

“Sorry. The smell of that coffee brewing went right under my door into my head and woke me up. I had to come find it.” He stood in the doorway, shirtless. Spiky short hair bristled over the top of his perfectly shaped head. A grizzling of beard covered his angular jaw. His sweats rode low on his hips, showing a part of his lower abdomen, and it was slightly round, taut.

She looked away. “It’s almost ready.”

“Cups in that cupboard right above the coffeemaker there. I’ll be right back.”

From the cupboard, she took two hefty mugs, black with purple interior, and set one on the counter for Lex. The other she filled midstream from the pot, unable to wait.

She wanted him to be wearing a shirt when he came back.

He wasn’t.

And if he’d looked good to her in a photo, or dressed in a leather jacket last night, or standing outside the hospital, his head dotted with snow—well, it all paled by comparison. Shoulders, hard and round; chest scattered with exactly the right amount of dark hair, silkily and artfully spread between his dark nipples; that smooth belly.

She aimed for a disdainfully arched brow. “Go put some clothes on, Luthor. You’re half-naked.”

He touched his chest with his good palm. “Making you nervous?”

Snow light caught along one rib. Kim wanted to taste the round line with her tongue. “No,” she said.

“Liar,” he said with a smile in his voice.

Kim met his eyes. “It would just be a bad idea.”

His eyes, even sleepy, were electrically blue. “What would be?” He stepped closer, and Kim found her back against the counter. His gaze moved down her face, lingered at her mouth, moved lower. It felt as if he were touching her, and in reaction, her hips softened. She forced herself not to react, not to do anything but meet his eyes with a steely glance of her own.

“Having sex,” she said, and was pleased by how level she sounded.

“Maybe I was just thinking about kissing you,” he said.

“No, you weren’t. And anyway, that’s probably not a good idea, either.”

“Oh, well,” he murmured.

And did it anyway.

It was so smooth, so easy that Kim couldn’t even bristle. One minute he was standing in front of her, the next he bent fluidly and slanted his mouth over hers and kissed her. She winced a little, and he whispered, “Sorry,” then more gently kissed her. His whole body seemed to take part, coaxing her body into it. His mouth opened and invited her to come exploring. His hands moved slowly on her back, which she discovered was arched, pressing her bare lower belly into the bareness of his lower belly, and he noticed it, too, and moved, back and forth. A large, lazy snake of an erection rose and nudged into her thighs. Kim made a soft noise.

“Kissing is good, hmm?” he said, and bent his head lower, to kiss her neck. Lazy hot tongue coiling circles around her throat, lazy hand curling up her body, lazy nudging of his cock against her leg.

It was crazy, but he felt really good. He smelled exactly right, too, and his tongue, moving on her throat, made a ripple of arousal rise up her spine. He slid his hand beneath the shirt, stroked her side. “Should I stop?”

“Probably.”

“You’ll have to sound more definite than that, sweetheart.”

His hand rose beneath her shirt, hot, smooth palm sliding up her side, her ribs, heading upward for the breasts that were primed and tingling in anticipation of the contact of bare palm, nude fingers. Instead of pulling away, as she sensibly should have, Kim found herself pressing closer.

He moved with deliberate laziness. Slow hands, Kim thought, and welcomed the touch of his full lips when he raised his head to kiss her again. His tongue swirled into her mouth, his fingers teased her nipples to fierce points, and he rubbed closer to her thigh.

Kim touched his erection, stroking it with her fingers, testing the size and heft of it. “Very nice,” she whispered, and he was kissing her again, deep and long.

“It’s all yours, honey.”

He slid his hands beneath her T-shirt, pushed it upward and Kim lifted her arms to let him take it off, glad when he made a cheered and satisfied sound over her breasts. Delighted when he bent his big head and sucked a nipple into his mouth. He knew how to do that right, too, slow and probing, then a little harder.

It was crazy. It was too fast. She had to sometimes work with this guy, but she didn’t care. She wanted him. Now, today, this minute.

A sound like a ping or a rubber band or something—

“What—?”

Lex knocked her sideways and something crashed on the counter behind her. The glass in the kitchen door shattered into the room. Kim hit the floor, covering her head and eyes instinctively.

“Stay down!” Lex yelled, and scrambled, crab-like, across the kitchen floor.

Kim stayed plastered to the floor for a few seconds, her hands over her head. The tile floor was cold on her naked torso, and she felt her ear begin to throb again. Another bullet blazed into the kitchen and slammed into the tiles near the door to the hallway. Absurdly, Kim felt protectively furious over the beauty of the apartment and wanted the shooting to stop before it hurt something precious.

She sized up the direction of the shooting, then scrambled behind the island where they’d been sitting last night. “Can you see the shooter?”

Lex, plastered along the kitchen wall, peered through the door. “Can’t see anything through the snow. Gotta be right across the street, though. There’s nothing else.”

“Or he’s right on the roof.”

“Snow is deep. We’d be able to see footsteps.”

Without her shirt, Kim felt exposed and foolish. The T-shirt lay where Lex had dropped it a few minutes before, on the threshold to the other room, a good twelve feet away. Huddling beneath the lip of the counter, she crossed her arms over her breasts, but it wasn’t much help. Flesh spilled over, and she still felt stupid, crouching beneath the table, half-naked.

In sudden decision, she scrambled over the floor toward the counter—

Bullets pinged into the room over her head, so close she heard the whiz across her skin.

“Valenti!”

Kim swore and dived back to the safety of the breakfast bar. She glared at Lex, who was, she had to admit, also half-naked. It wasn’t quite the same. His injured right hand was held close against his chest, and he was reaching into the drawer with his left and pulled out a revolver.

Another shot zinged into the room. He slammed back against the wall and squatted. “They have to be on the roof. Direct line of sight into the room from the roof across the street.” He had the gun in his hand and squatted to send it spinning across the floor toward Kim. “You’re going to have to see if you can get a shot from the window over there. I can’t shoot left-handed.”

Keeping one arm over her breasts, Kim picked up the gun.

“Jesus, Valenti. Stop trying to cover yourself and see if you can get this guy.”

She glared at him.

“I won’t look.”

“Fine.” It wasn’t like she looked bad naked, anyway. Cocking the gun, she edged around the island and into the shadows, out of sight of the back door. There was a window over the sink, and creeping along the counter, she could probably see out without being seen.

Cautiously, she moved low to the ground and paused in front of the sink, then lifted herself slowly until she could see out of the bottom of the window. The snow was lighter, but it was still hard to tell. “I can’t see anything,” she said.

“The angle is a little sharper. Edge to your right a little bit.”

Kim eased her body to the right, gun at the ready. “Thought you weren’t looking,” she said, her eyes on the horizon.

“Not at your breasts.”

“Liar,” she said, and halted. Was that a head? It moved, and a bullet pinged into the kitchen through the door. Kim straightened, steadied her hands, and fired through the window.

“Yeah!” The target went down. “Gotcha, you son of a bitch!”

Lex bolted out the door, and Kim held her position as he dashed out into the knee-deep snow, his back bare, his black head shining in the quiet snow light.

No shots rang out. Kim stayed where she was, arms straight and ready to fire, until he waved an arm. All clear. Keeping her eyes on the window her bullet had broken, she felt along the counter for her T-shirt. Remembered it was on the floor, and she turned, careful not to step in broken glass with her bare feet, and picked up the shirt.

Lex came in behind her, and she tucked the shirt around her breasts. Dots of snow hung in his hair, and his shoulders were wet. “They’re gone.”

Kim clicked the safety into place and lowered the gun. “I’m pretty sure I got somebody.”

“Yeah. There are reinforcements on the way.”

“Good.”

His eyes were hot and blue as he reached out and took hold of the T-shirt. Kim resisted for a moment, then let it go, dropping her arms.

“Now I’m looking,” he said, holding the shirt in his hand. He didn’t touch her, and Kim felt a ripple down her back that pulled her shoulder blades down, lifted her breasts higher.

“I see that,” she said.

“You have the most beautiful breasts I’ve ever seen.” His nostrils flared. “Can we start over?”

She lifted the gun. “Not until this is evened up a bit.”

He raised his hands in mock fear. “What do you want, darlin’?” That elegantly arched eyebrow lifted. “Your wish is my command.”

“Lose the sweats.”

“I might be a teeny bit aroused, darlin’.”

Kim blinked, slowly. “All the better.”

Lex skimmed the sweats off his body and kicked them aside, and lifted his hands to the sides, as if to say, “There it is.”

Beautiful, she thought. That lower belly, so taut and smooth, curving down to a very aroused appendage. She moved forward, put the gun on the counter, and touched it. It leaped a little, and she smiled. “Nice.”

“Glad you approve, darlin’.”

“We don’t have time to have sex, you know,” she said, and her heart was pounding as she stroked the silky casing.

“I know.” He bent his head and captured one nipple in his hot mouth. He rolled it, hard, across his tongue, and Kim made a noise.

“Maybe if we did it very fast,” she whispered.

“No, baby,” he said, putting his naked body against hers, yanking her hips to his. In a very low, quiet, gravelly voice he said, “We’re going to have the best, hottest, longest, sexiest sex either one of us has ever had.”

“When?”

He rolled her nipple between his fingers, ran his tongue along her lower lip. “Not today.”

She didn’t want to wait. He filled her head like a fog, and she stroked his cock, reached lower and cupped him in her hand. “After the police come?”

“No.” His tongue moved on her mouth, into her mouth, and his hands were on her breasts, weighing them, thumbs brushing over her nipples. “I think we have to wait at least a week or two.”

Her tailbone was melting, she’d swear it was, and she could feel that he was trembling with desire. “Why?”

“Because anticipation is worth it.”

“Okay,” she said, and backed away. “Remember, though. You’re the one who said it.”

He rested vivid eyes on her face, and Kim saw something flash there. Heat, yes. Desire, absolutely. But something else, too. Richer, deeper, warmer. “I’m not gonna make it easy for you to just walk away from me,” he said.

“Why would I walk away?”

“Because,” he said with a little smile as he climbed back into his sweats, “that’s what you do.”

Kim pulled the shirt over her head. There wasn’t really an answer. “Better call your boys. I’m going to go get dressed.” She paused. “See if somebody has a charger for a Sanyo phone.”

Chapter 11

The streets in the main part of the city were much clearer than they were on the side streets, so it was only an hour before the FBI crew arrived. Lex had already gone across the street to the roof opposite his apartment, and although he found footsteps and a smear of blood, the shooter had disappeared.

“Any clues to who it might be?” Kim asked when he returned. She paused in the act of sweeping up shattered glass from the tiny tiles in the kitchen.

“Obviously, they figured out who I am.” He lifted a shoulder. “I’m guessing it’s the same group. If there’s a DNA match in the national database, we’ll know more.”

He displayed the sample of red snow he’d picked up in a cup.

When the rest of the crew arrived, they brought with them Kim’s things, and she was relieved to be able to put on her own clothes. After the discussion of this morning’s shooter, a short, blocky man asked Kim if she’d talk to him about the events last evening. She gave him as much detail as she was able about everything.

At the end, he said, “What led you to the television station, anyway? We didn’t pick up on that at all.”

“Tip,” Kim said simply, and shrugged. “A good one, obviously, so I’d like to protect my source.”

The man nodded, flipped his notebook closed.

Lex and his compatriots measured and taped and tapped the scene. Kim felt impatient, but the news of the weather was grim: the airport was shut down, which meant there was no point in trying to get out of Chicago today. The city phone lines were jammed, but Kim finally got her cell phone to operate and caught Scott at NSA headquarters. “Shepherd here.”

“Hey, Scott. It’s me.”

“Damn, Valenti, what’d I tell you about playing maverick, huh?”

“It’s not like I had a choice. Once the terrorists overran the television station, I pretty much had to do whatever I could to get out.”

“I know. You looked like hell on the news this morning, though. Pissed off, too, huh? You were pretty rude to those reporters.”

It was one thing that her mother had seen her last night, because the senior Valenti had been trolling for information. “What news did you see?”

“Honey, you were on every national news program in the country. I saw you on CNN, but Mary and Jo saw you on Good Morning America.”

Kim couldn’t think of anything to say. “I’m sorry, Scott. It must seem like I’m grandstanding. You worked just as hard as I did to crack this code.”

“C’mon, you know me better than that. I know you better than that.”

“Ugh.” She rubbed the spot between her eyebrows and realized suddenly that she still really didn’t feel all that great. “I’ll get out of here tomorrow, but in the meantime, we should stay on this. Mansour got away, and he’s obviously the ringleader. Another guy we need to find out about is a creepy dude who slammed me into a table a few dozen times.”

“I’m on it. Mansour is the one who lead the siege at the station last night. He’s been tangled up in arms deals and a few other things over the past decade. I’m bringing up all kinds of interesting links.”

Kim realized there were a half-dozen FBI agents standing around, pretending not to listen. “Whatever you do,” Kim said, with a grin in their direction, “the FBI in Chicago is out of the loop.”

“Ha, ha, ha,” said an agent standing nearby, a burly blonde who’d have given Scott a run for his money in the Adonis department.

Casually, she moved toward the living room and looked out the window. “I don’t think they’re done yet, and we probably need to check Columbus Day connections—parades, celebrations, whatever.”

“Columbus Day?” Scott echoed with skepticism. “Yeah, if the terrorists were Native American, maybe.”

Kim made up a lie to cover her Oracle connection. “I overheard them talking about Columbus Day. And there have been moving vans stolen.”

“All right.”

“And you know, anti-American sentiment might lend itself well to Columbus Day, if you think about it. It commemorates the discovery of America, right? Not quite as patriotic as Fourth of July or anything, but not out of the realm.”

“I’ll see what I can find out.”

“Thanks. I’m sure I’ll get on a plane in the morning. I’ll call and let you know.”

A short pause on the other end of the line. “Are you still with that guy?” Scott asked.

“What guy?” Kim asked.

“The one with you at the airport last night.”

“Yeah. They hustled me out of the reporters’ spotlights. I’m safe.”

Another noisy pause.

“What?” Kim prompted.

“Can you go in another room or something?”

She raised her brows. “Sure.” She carried the phone into the bedroom she’d slept in last night. “Okay. I’m alone. What’s up?”

“Are you really okay?”

“Well, I had my ass kicked last night, and somebody tried to kill us this morning, but other than that, yeah, everything’s fine.”

“He’s not hustling you, is he?”

“Shepherd, cut the caveman thing, all right? I’m not your girl, and it’s never been like that between us. Don’t even go there.”

“I’m not. I wasn’t.” He cleared his throat. “Just worried about you.”

“That’s sweet, but I can take care of myself.”

“I know.”

“Look, I’ll talk to you tomorrow, okay?”

“Yep. If you want a ride, let me know.”

Kim frowned. “I left my car at the airport, but thanks.”

When she hung up, she stared at the phone for a long moment. Had she missed signals from her partner? It would be a shame to have to break up this partnership. It worked very well.

No. He was just being a guy. Lex probably threatened a lot of men.

A whispered memory went through her mind: We’re going to have the best, hottest, longest, sexiest sex either one of us has ever had.

But not today. And that, in her opinion, was a very good thing. She thought she might have too many aches and pains, for one thing. For another, he was flat-out dangerous to her peace of mind.

She was going to have one hot affair with Lex Tanner, there was no question about that.

But she had to be careful how it progressed, or her carefully guarded heart was going to be snared right along with her body.

Once the mess had been cleaned up, and nearly everyone had gone—except the guard stationed outside, Kim and Lex were left alone in his beautiful apartment. Her things were delivered and it seemed the worst might be over for the moment.

He turned on the television. “You look beat, Valenti,” he said. “Let’s find an old movie to watch and make some sandwiches, what d’you say?”

The idea was unexpectedly welcome. Kim rubbed the spot between her brows that held tension. “That sounds good, but I’m wondering if you’d mind if I got online for a few minutes, just to check a couple of leads.”

“Not at all, especially if you share them.” He glared at the taped-over window, where a cold breeze tried to push inside. “Let’s go to my office. Much warmer.”

Kim padded behind him, bundled in a sweater and socks. “What do you think is going to happen next?”

He lifted a shoulder. “Considering the elections are only a couple of weeks, I’d say it’s safe to predict violence somewhere along this continuum, wouldn’t you?”

“Yeah. The trouble is, where? When? With what?”

“Damn terrorists,” Lex drawled. “So unpredictable. Can’t they get a planned agenda, like any decent criminal?”

“Very funny. You have any bright ideas, smart guy?”

“Sit,” he said, pulling out a green leather office chair on rollers. Like the rest of the apartment, there was a thirties bohemian flair to this room. Rolltop desk, made of oak, shelves filled with books, a stained-glass lamp.

“Now this room looks like you,” Kim said.

“And this is a room,” he said with an inclination of his head, “that I indeed furnished myself. It used to be her parlor.”

“You’ve got good taste, Luthor.”

He winked. “You better believe it. Now, I’ll leave you alone. Internet icon to the left there.”

“Thanks. Not everyone likes sharing a computer.”

“I got nothing to hide, sweetheart. And you don’t strike me as a snoopy weird woman, either.”

“You never know.”

He was on his way out. “Oh, yeah, you do. I’ve got excellent instincts.”

Kim signed on to the network, then pulled up her personal files. If Scott found anything between now and the time she got home, he’d send it here. She’d also be able to track some of her work e-mails.

But the important thing was to check the Oracle. It was dicey to sign in through a remote server, but she went to AA.gov and slipped through a back door and electronically “knocked.”

A white box popped up.

DELPHI: Who’s there?

Kim responded with a formalized script:

VISITOR: Ariadne

VISITOR: Password: Hop-A-Long

VISITOR: Weight, 117

VISITOR: Arabic, French, Spanish, Navajo

VISITOR: NSA

Kim waited for a moment. The box closed and a second one opened, and she went through the same dance with no prompts. The box closed, and a third one opened, this one a soft blue.

DELPHI: Good job, Ariadne. We saw you on the news.

VISITOR: I had a lot of help, but thanks. Now what? Any more info?

DELPHI: Mansour escaped the television station along with an arms dealer named Richard Dunst.

VISITOR: Someone tried to kill me this morning. So there is still a plot afoot.

DELPHI: We have no clues at this time.

VISITOR: Was the footage of the CIA dealer selling arms to Keminis a true one?

DELPHI: Unfortunately, yes.

VISITOR: Thanks.

DELPHI: Reporters will be panting like dogs, Ariadne. Be cagey.

VISITOR: Will do.

Signing out of the live communication, Kim went to the Web site for her home service and signed in to check e-mails on her personal account very quickly. There were two from her mother and four from her sisters. Kim wrote short notes to each of them:

I’m safe. Love you lots. See you this weekend for supper and the parade, okay?

She shut down the browser, went to the history functions to erase her steps, and ran a quick check to be sure he had no key-recording software. None that was known, which was the best you could ever do. The passwords and script were changed if she used them even once, so they were safe anyway, but it was always better to be cautious.

When she wandered out of the office, she found Lex in the kitchen, pressing wood putty into one of the bullet holes. “I’ll get the glass replaced tomorrow,” he said. “But some of these holes are going to be tough to fix.”

“I was very worried about your beautiful apartment,” Kim said, talking an olive out of the bowl on the counter.

“Were you?”

She laughed. “Crazy, huh?”

“A bit.”

They loaded a tray with pickles, more cracked olives, cubes of cheese and the not-quite-as-fresh-as-it-could-be half of a French loaf, and some wheat crackers, and carried it all into the living room.

“I’m afraid to eat on that couch,” Kim said, eyeing the shimmery, velvety grain.

“Yeah, it’s fancy-shmancy,” Lex agreed, munching on a pickle, “But I have it outsmarted.” He lifted the top of a table and took out a pink-and-green striped sheet. Shaking it out, he tossed it over the couch. “Voilà!”

“Cool.” Kim collapsed happily, and made a plate to balance on her thighs. The ottomans were big and comfortable, the pillows just right for creating nests. “I’ve never been to a guy’s house that had such comfortable stuff.”

“Well, these things came with the apartment, but I’ve always prided myself on comfortable. My old couch was really great.”

“But I bet it was plaid. Brown plaid or orange plaid or red microfiber.” She lifted a finger. “No. Leather. You might be a leather kind of guy.”

“You’re gonna have to work on your little problem with stereotypes, girl.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. It was kinda soft stuff—dark blue, for your information, with white-striped pillows.” Only he said it “pillas,” which cracked her up. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“I do,” she said. “You’re right. I do stereotype men. But most of you deserve it.”

“You’ve just been hanging around those Washington types too much. Too many politicians and law enforcement folks.”

“And what are you, if you’re not law enforcement?”

“I’m the bomb squad, man!” He said it with an exaggerated drawl, and popped an olive in his mouth. “I’m bad. I’m cool. I’m all that.”

Kim laughed. “Yeah, yeah, whatever.” He flipped through channels, pausing for reasons Kim couldn’t discern, racing through when she would have halted. “How’d you end up on the bomb squad, anyway?”

He wiggled his stocking feet. Clicked the remote. “I was a firebug as a kid. I got in trouble a couple of times, and the sheriff was gonna lock me up, but a judge put me in a probationary program for restless kids.”

“Ah, so you discovered the good in your evil?”

“Not exactly.” The cat jumped up on the couch and plopped down between them, purring loudly. “I ran into a kid who built bombs. Better than fire.”

“Good grief.”

“Yeah, that’s what my mama thought. She yanked me right out of there, put me in this weird school in the Blue Ridge Mountains where everybody’s parents were hippies, and I’d have done anything to get out of there, so I promised I’d never set another fire or plant a bomb again, and I didn’t.”

“Thank God.”

He tapped his forehead. “The bomb stuff stuck, though.”

“And so did the organic eating. You said it was your mother.”

“It was. She was a Chicago hippie, went down South to reform it or something, and met my daddy, who was already reformed, and fell madly in love with her right on the spot. Took her a little while to fall back the other way.”

“Are they both still alive?”

“Yep. Along with three sisters who spoiled me rotten.”

“Mmm. Now that doesn’t surprise me in the slightest.”

He took her hand. “Hey, now. Be nice.”

Kim gently slid her hand out of his grasp. “I am. But you can’t hold my hand right now. I’m too tired and cranky.”

He chuckled and leaned back against the couch. “Me, too.” He flipped channels, and abruptly sat up. “Hey, look! There you are!”

The grainy video showed a man with a rifle standing guard at the UBC station, and Kim dropping suddenly out of the ceiling to his shoulders. She subdued the gunman, then bent over and took his pistol. When she stood up, there was blood on her face, trickling from her eyebrow and lips, but smearing her neck and chest.

“Eww,” she cried. “That’s gross! Why do they keep showing it over and over again?”

“Because, sweetheart,” he drawled, “you look very tough and very hot.”

Kim rolled her eyes. “Please.”

“It’s true. Not a man out there who isn’t thinkin’, hey, that’s my kind of girl.”

“Girl?”

He cut her a mischievous look.

Kim let it pass.

“How’d you learn to do so much, anyway?”

“The Athena Academy,” she said simply.

“I’ve heard of that. The school for girls in Arizona?”

Kim raised her eyebrows. “You’ve really heard of it?”

“It’s been in the news a little bit lately, hasn’t it? A murder.”

“Oh. Yeah. Very sad stuff.”

Lex looked at her intently. “How is it different, this school?”

Kim chuckled. “In every possible way. I had to learn languages, weapons, survival training, as well as maths and sciences.”

His eyebrow arched in a way that was becoming familiar. “Is that where you learned Arabic?”

She nodded. “It’s an interesting place, established by a woman who wanted to see other women be placed in high positions through the government—and she found ways to discover the most talented women—” she gestured toward herself with one arched brow “—such as myself, and bring them to the Academy to be educated.”

“You are very talented,” he said.

“Thank you.” With a shift of one shoulder, she went on, “In that environment, I was very ordinary. The women who are recruited are extremely intelligent, athletic and always talented in some specific way. They search everywhere for these women.”

“And besides becoming cryptographers, what do they do?”

“A lot of things. Tory Patton is an Athena grad.”

“The reporter?”

“Yep. One of my friends, Diana, is with army intelligence, and our friend Selena works for the CIA. She’s married now, but I still see her.”

“Does marriage interfere with friendship?”

“Sometimes.”

He leaned his head against the couch and looked at her. The jeweled eyes were shadowed, exhausted, and Kim knew she must look the same way. “You’re pretty cool, Valenti,” he said.

“You, too, Luthor.” Impulsively, she bent over and kissed his very kissable mouth. “I think I could like you.”

His smile was slow and liquid. “Oh, honey, you’ll like me. I guarantee it.”

“Don’t be so arrogant, Tanner.”

He bent his head and touched his nose to her shoulder, a gesture that caught Kim off guard. It was tender and somehow boyish. “I’m not arrogant. We’re just a good match, that’s all.”

“How can you possibly know that in one day?”

He picked up her hand, saying, “Just for purposes of illustration, all right? Don’t get testy on me.”

His palm was hard and smooth, and she didn’t have any desire to take her hand away. “All right,” she said. “I’m listening.”

“Look how our hands fit together.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“What about this?” he said, and leaned in closer to her mouth. “Can I kiss you?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“See, our mouths,” he said so close to her lips that she felt the shaping of the words, “are exactly right.” He pressed in, closed the space between their lips. His upper went between her upper and lower; her lower was sandwiched between his. His lips were plump but not squishy, firm but not too hard. He kissed close, then let her go, then kissed again. “See?”

“Yes,” Kim whispered.

“And if I,” he said, still kissing her in between words, “put my hand up here on your face, like this—” he cupped her jaw, his long fingers shaping themselves to her cheekbone, the tips resting near her eye “—then it adds something for both of us.”

“You should stop this,” she whispered.

“Probably,” he agreed, but didn’t. He just kept kissing her softly, just using his lips, soft and firm. Tender. Little plucking kisses, tight little nibbles of suction on her lower lip, with just a hint of teeth behind, his fingers exploring gently.

Kim relaxed under the sweetness and lifted her own hand to his face. Lean, chiseled, edges of bone strong beneath her fingertips.

“Wow,” he said, not pulling away, his eyes closed. “Wow.”

Kim felt herself drifting into his touch, falling under a spell that would leave her weak and sleeping right next to him all night long in this dangerously seductive apartment on a snowy autumn evening.

Not good.

She pulled back, all the way. Stood up, moved away. “Sorry,” she said, pushing her hair from her face. She was aware that she must look quite aroused, her face flushed, her nipples standing at attention beneath the soft T-shirt. “I don’t want to do this now. Not tonight. We’re too—”

Lex was on his feet. “Shh. It’s okay, honey. I’m sorry.” His hands were on her shoulders, soothing, easing. “It’s okay,” he repeated. “Let’s sit down and watch movies. I promise I won’t do anything else.”

“We’re tired. I don’t trust emotions going crazy under these circumstances.”

“You’re right.” He patted her arms, which was an oddly reassuring gesture, and went back to the couch. “I’ll build a pillow wall, okay?”

Kim laughed softly.

“C’mon,” he said, cocking his beautiful head. “You’re safe, Valenti. I promise. Let’s just watch TV.”

She sat down.

Chapter 12

Thursday, October 7

Kim supposed she should have been prepared for the siege of reporters, but she wasn’t. They were lying in wait when they emerged from his building the next morning, pushing microphones and cameras into their faces.

“What’s next for Q-group?”

“Pretty new girlfriend you’ve got there, Lex!”

“You have any leads on Mansour?”

“How’d you break the code, Kim?”

“Is the romance between the two of you heating up?”

“How does it feel to be a hero?”

Kim elbowed through, but the last question irked her. She glanced at Lex, and he nodded. She halted. “First of all, I haven’t done anything by myself. There’s been a team of various agents working on this problem for weeks. My partner at NSA, Scott Shepherd, was instrumental in breaking the code, and Alex Tanner—” she gestured to him “—disarmed the bomb at the airport. I’m not the hero,” she said firmly. “That’s all.”

“Ms. Valenti, I appreciate your modesty,” said a young woman, and Kim paused, simply seeing a hungry young reporter, her own counterpart, “but your courage at the television station is well documented.”

Kim shook her head. “I’ve been trained. Like a soldier or police officer, I was just doing my job.”

“Like your brother Jason?” said a male voice, booming into the fray.

“My brother was far braver than I’ll ever be,” Kim said with frost in her voice. “But this has nothing to do with him.”

“So you don’t want to get revenge on the terrorists who killed your brother?”

Lex started to move between her and the reporter, who was obviously pleased at hitting a soft spot. Kim waved Lex back and met the reporter’s gaze. “If you don’t get anything else from this clip, get this,” she said in hard tones. “An eye for an eye doesn’t work. If I want to kill terrorists for killing my brother, then I’m no better than they are. We’re trying to prevent violence, not add to it. And last night, that’s what we did.”

The reporters roared, but Kim ducked into the car without any further comment.

“Well done,” Lex said in the car.

Grimly, Kim looked at him. “Not really. I’ve just invited a thousand reporters to pursue me for quotes.”

He winked. “You can handle it.” As the car pulled neatly through the parting bodies, he added, “You might want to come up with a few pat statements. This isn’t going to go away for a while.”

“Good suggestion. Thanks.”

The car dropped Lex off at the FBI offices first. “Well,” he said, “this is my stop.”

“Looks like it,” Kim said with a faint smile.

“I’d really like to kiss you,” he said, quietly, so only she could hear, “but we don’t want to add any fuel to the fire.”

“I’m kissing you now,” she said, and met his eyes.

Vividly blue eyes, full of a mercurial glitter and heat. “I will be in touch,” he drawled, “and I do mean in touch.”

“Go,” she said. “Here come some more reporters.”

And in fact, she ran into reporters twice more before she made it safely inside the NSA offices—at both the Chicago and the Baltimore airports, she had to wave her way through gnats of them. It was easier at Chicago, where she discovered she was a VIP who was whisked through security, directly to the gate, and settled into first class on the airplane.

“Nice,” she said to the attendant who brought her a cup of coffee and a newspaper.

“The airport is very grateful, Ms. Valenti.”

Settling into the thick, wide seat, Kim smiled to herself. There were worse things than first class. Was this just a one-shot deal? She hoped it would last a little while. Where could she go that she’d always wanted to visit and hadn’t because the flight was too awful? New Zealand! Yes.

She smiled to herself. If only she could take the time.

Her cell phone was recharged, and while she waited for the plane to board, she called Scott. “Hey,” she said when he answered his desk phone. “I rethought your offer of meeting me at the airport. Reporters have been crawling all over me.”

“I’ll be there. When do you land?”

“One o’clock this afternoon. Have you picked up any other details or information since yesterday?”

“I’ll fill you in when you arrive.”

He sounded odd. “Is everything okay, Scott?”

“Sure.” Which meant no.

“I guess we’ll talk about that when I land, too.”

“Nothing to talk about.”

“Whatever you say. I’ll see you in a couple of hours.”

She gazed out the window as they flew, watching snow-blanketed fields and forests move into view, then out. It felt as if something had changed in her life during this brief period of hours. Was it the test of her physicality? She’d been well trained, but had never been forced to fight hand-to-hand before. In spite of the battering her body had taken, she was exhilarated at the feeling of power it gave her. She’d faced men several times her size and managed to not only hold her own, but get away and vanquish one of them.

She thought of her brother Jason. Saw him, in her mind’s eye, giving her a thumbs-up. Reporters be damned, she thought. Her truly private thoughts couldn’t be touched.

And what thoughts would those be? a voice said in her mind.

Kim resolutely stared at the wintry landscape and refused to think of Lex Tanner with his beautiful eyes and beautiful body and hot, hot ways.

She wondered how long it would be before she would see him again.

Kim counted her blessings that no one without a boarding pass was allowed to enter the gate areas these days. It meant she went unaccosted until she hit the baggage claim area, and there was sturdy, blond Scott, burly enough to be a bodyguard. “Hey, gorgeous,” she said. “Thanks for picking me up.”

He scowled, touched her forehead. “You really took a beating.”

She shrugged. “I’m all right.”

“Whatever you say, sweetheart. I’ve got a car outside—do you want a ride to yours? I can help fend off the crowds.”

“Perfect.” It would also give her a chance to set the record straight.

The crowd of reporters was waiting outside the airport, and Kim wondered how they knew to be there. Was it like ants or bees or something, some subvocal method of communication? How did they know where and when to show up?

“Kim, we hear you acted without orders to go to Chicago. Tell us about that.”

“Is it true there was a breakdown of communication between agencies?”

“Kim, can you give us the inside on the breach between the NSA and the FBI on this case?”

She paused on the sidewalk. “I’ll answer a few questions,” she said, “then you gotta let me get back to work.” She pointed to a woman wearing a slim gray suit with red piping.

“Ms. Valenti, can you talk about the communication problems between agencies?”

“There was no breakdown,” she said distinctly. “My partner, Scott Shepherd—” she pulled him by the arm to stand next to her “—and I cracked the code and we decided to check out some things in Chicago, just in case. As you know, we worked smoothly with the FBI once I got there.” She looked at the group. “Next? You.”

A youthful man stepped forward. “Do either of you have any inkling of what the terrorists are planning next?”

Pleased that Scott had been included, Kim gestured for him to answer. He said simply, “They’re terrorists. That means they do the unpredictable. We have some intelligence, but we’re not at liberty to share that just now.”

His cell phone went off, as if on cue, and he put his hand on Kim’s back. “Sorry, we gotta go.”

A little tangle of roared questions followed, but they ducked out and got into Scott’s car. “Nice,” Kim said. And something about the word made her think of Lex. A sensory snapshot of his long, devilish kisses last night wound through her mind. A sudden, narcotic sensuality burned through her chest, pooled at the base of her spine. How did he do that? How had he washed into her mind like that?

Scott put the car in gear. “You, too.” He glanced at her. “Jeez, what put that look on your face? I don’t think it’s me, though I wouldn’t mind it.”

She made an effort to clear her features. “What are you talking about?”

“Nothing.” He joined traffic. “The boss wants to see you the minute you get in. I already got yelled at for letting you go alone—not that I had any choice—but you’re going to hear about it, too.”

“Scott, are you pissed at me?”

He turned into the long-term parking area. “Where’s your car?”

She directed him to the right section. “Answer me.”

“It’s not pissed off, Valenti.” He turned, followed the row to the end, turned again. In front of her car, he paused and looked at her. “It’s just that I’ve been waiting for you to wake up and notice that there’s somebody right in front of you who’d try just about anything to get your attention, and you fly to Chicago and fall in love.”

“Who?” she said with a scowl, and at the stoniness of his handsome face, she opened her mouth. Closed it. Said, “You?”

He glanced at her. Said nothing.

“I’m sorry, Scott. I never picked up on that at all.”

“I don’t want to talk about it right now.”

“You’re the one who brought it up.”

He glanced in the rearview mirror. “We’re gonna hold up traffic.”

She opened the passenger-side door. “Let’s go have a margarita later, huh?”

He nodded.

She slammed the door and stomped over to her car.

Men. Honestly!

Chapter 13

As Kim came into the office, a gaggle of her co-workers cheered. They stood up at their desks and clapped, whistled, whooped. Kim rolled her eyes, tried to wave them down, then—when they wouldn’t stop—she took an exaggerated bow. “Thank you.” She looked for Scott, but he wasn’t in the room.

Her superior, Grant Long, a trim, sixtyish man with silver hair, gave her a smile as she entered his office. “Scott said you wanted to see me, sir.”

“Come in, Kim. Sit down.” He folded his hands gravely, and she felt a ripple of nervousness as she settled in a gray leather office chair. “First of all,” he said, peering at her face, “how are you? You look pretty battered.”

“It looks worse than it feels,” she said. “I’m well trained. I can hold my own.”

“I know your history has lent you a certain cachet in some circles, Valenti. And you should be proud of your background at the Athena Academy. But—”

“Sir, I’d just like to explain that there wasn’t really time to—”

“Agent Valenti, you’re one of the best code breakers I’ve got, but you have got to learn to go through channels.”

“I honestly tried, sir. I called Agent Milosovich at the CIA. He wouldn’t take me seriously—”

Long shook his head. “No excuses, Valenti. You know better. Everything breaks down if you don’t follow the chain of command.”

“What was I supposed to—”

“Follow the chain of command,” he repeated.

“I see.” Stung, Kim glanced away for a moment, thinking of all the lives that had been saved by her actions, and the cost she’d paid personally in physical injury. It wasn’t that she felt that she was better than anyone else, just that sometimes, “proper channels” didn’t move fast enough.

Trying not to show her resentment or hurt, she raised her head. “You’re right, sir. I’m sorry. In the future, I’ll pay more attention to protocol.”

“My eye you will.” He stood, and Kim stood with him. “You’ll get in over your head one of these days. You very nearly did this time.”

Kim bowed her head. “It was a real possibility,” she said, and met his eyes. “But I believe in what I’m doing, sir.”

“I know you do.” He held out his hand. “Good work, Valenti.”

She took a breath, accepted the handshake. “Thank you, sir.”

“There is one more thing,” he said, not letting her go.

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ve been promoted. Congratulations.”

Her eyes flew open. “Really?”

He grinned. “It was excellent work, distinguishing you from your peers brilliantly.”

Kim thought of Scott. “And my partner?”

“Er…no. Not yet. You’re being recognized for independent action. And probably because the case is so visible.”

“I see.”

“He’s an excellent agent. No worries. He’ll move up in no time.”

“But he’s still my partner, right?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Kim nodded. “Well, thank you, sir. Very much. I’m honored.”

“You’re welcome. Now go see if you can find Mansour before he plants another bomb somewhere.”

“I’m on it.”

The first thing she did was find Scott. He was in the copy room, peering at a page of tiny code, shaking his head, and Kim knew how to find him by the way a girl in the secretarial pool was mooning toward the open door.

“Shepherd,” she said. “Mama’s tonight? My treat since you covered my ass so well.”

His lips turned down happily. “Yeah. I’ll go for that. Come here and take a look at this. I think we’ve got a variation of the e-mail virus happening here. See what you think.”

Kim took the sheaf of papers. It was e-mails in Arabic, once again, but Scott had highlighted some imbedded code. “I think you’re right,” she said. “Let’s get on it.”

“Cool.”

She gave him back the papers and said, “You know, the blonde at the end over there has been sighing over you for six weeks. Maybe you ought to put her out of her misery and ask her out.”

His mouth quirked up at the corners. “Implying what, Valenti?”

She spread her hands. “Come to your own conclusions, babe,” she said.

He went to the door. “The blonde on the end?”

“The very one.”

“She’s gorgeous, but maybe a little too young for me.”

Kim winked. “She’s twenty-five. Just looks young.” She slapped his arm with the papers. “I’ll leave you to it.”

Mama Rosa’s was a storefront trattoria in suburban Washington, D.C., not far from the job. Kim had discovered it shortly after coming to the NSA and loved it for the traditional Italian foods she missed—she could feast here without having to deal with the hassle of family. It was agreeably low lit, with snowy tablecloths and plenty of bread and the smell of roasting garlic mixed with basil thick in the air.

Kim breathed in the scent deeply. It smelled of home. Of raviolis and fresh affection and hearty food. Even Mama—aka Rosalie—who hurried forward when she spied them at the door, could have been an auntie with her lush bosom and pretty shoes. God forbid comfort should come before sex appeal when it came to shoes. Kim eyed the black, high heeled sandals with something akin to awe. Rosalie had to spend ten hours a day on her feet.

The woman swept them both into an affectionate wave of perfume and oregano, giving them a beneficent smile before she realized Kim was a little battered. “Baby! What happened to you?”

Kim waved a hand. “Oh, you know. Work.”

“You shouldn’t be working at such job,” she said, and tsked. “Oh, well!” She kissed Kim’s cheek and patted Scott’s face. “I’m so happy to see you! Such a nice couple!”

Scott winked. Kim shrugged. Rosalie would believe what she wanted. It was impossible to get it through the woman’s head that Kim and Scott, two young, attractive, single people, could be anything but wildly in love.

“Your table is open tonight. Settle in and I’ll get you some wine!” She bustled off without waiting for a reply.

Scott grinned, a dimple flashing in his left cheek. “She doesn’t believe in platonic relationships between men and women, does she?”

“Maybe. Probably not.” Kim shrugged again, spread her napkin in her lap. “It’s more that she can’t believe a nice girl like me isn’t married yet. She’s afraid I’ll end up on the shelf.”

He chuckled.

Mama brought back red wine and poured generous measures into both glasses, in spite of the fact that Scott had protested on various occasions that he didn’t drink. She would also not allow them to order, but said she’d bring the best of the evening.

“I love this place,” he said, pushing his wineglass toward Kim. “But you’ve really gotta take me home with you someday.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I’m sorry, but you think the marriage pressure is strong here? You haven’t seen anything.”

He lifted a shoulder. “I can handle it.”

Kim shuddered. “You have no idea.”

When he lowered his gaze, she realized—once again—that she’d been thoughtless. His mother had died a year or two before, which left him essentially orphaned.

Truth was, she knew he’d love her family—the whole, complicated lot of them—and they’d love him back. Her brothers, two older, one younger, would love his size and strength and manly good looks. Her sisters, both younger by quite a lot, would swoon in girlish crushes. Her father would grill him for financial stability, and her mother would feed him and be delighted at his enormous appetite.

“Maybe,” Kim said. “You could bring a girl along.”

He grinned. “I bet that could be arranged.”

“No doubt.”

When the salads came, Kim buttered hunks of bread and gave him one. “All right, partner mine,” she said, raising her eyebrows, “do we want to talk about the caveman stuff while I was in Chicago, or are we going to forget it happened?”

Scott winced. “Sorry. Let’s forget it.”

“Are you sure? Because I don’t want this to come up again at some future point and bite me in the butt. If you have an issue, let’s get it out.”

He was quiet for a minute, and watching him, Kim wondered why she never had been attracted to him romantically. He was drop-dead gorgeous, healthy, smart, sexy…everything. But she’d never thought of him like that at all.

As he seemed to mull over his answer, her heart sank. She’d never wanted him as a lover, but she hated to lose him as a partner. They worked extremely well together.

Finally, he lifted his head. “I did want you, at least sometimes I’ve wanted you. But I’ve always known you didn’t think of me that way, and maybe it’s just male ego wanting it to go the other way.” His sideways grin was very, very cute. “I mean, jeez, Valenti, you’re the only girl who doesn’t like me.”

She laughed. “Thank God I’m here for balance.” She took a very, very tiny sip of wine. “All right, then, let’s figure out what we’ve got with Mansour. Any more ideas about the next targets?”

“I’m thinking bridges. There were a couple of exchanges that made me just think we might need to look at trucks, transport, something like that.”

Kim remembered the e-mail from Oracle before she left for Chicago. “Right. I had some intelligence that made me think the same thing. So where? What bridge or bridges?”

“Where are our candidates going to be over the next week?”

“We should check that. Also see about events, travel plans, maps, that kind of thing. There are huge crowds showing up in both camps, but the Secret Service is there ahead of us in the venues, so that’s less worrisome than it could be.” She paused in the act of nearly biting into her bread. “I did collect a lot of information on the Columbus Day parades. It would be easier if people celebrated on either Sunday or Monday, but that’s not the case.”

“There are a couple of places that might be worth looking into more closely. Denver, for one,” he said. “There’s always a protest, which might lead to some chaos.”

“Have we notified the Secret Service about all the possibilities?”

“I sent it all over this afternoon. Haven’t heard back yet. Maybe you’ll get something from your mysterious source.”

“I don’t have a mysterious source!”

“Yes, you do. How long do you think I can work with you without knowing that?”

“It’s your imagination, Shepherd.”

He gave a disbelieving roll of his shoulders. “Whatever.”

Mama brought out two heavy ceramic plates with sogliola alla mugnaia, steaming hot and fragrant, served with Mama’s trademark, hot fresh fettucini tossed with butter and herbs. The scent of basil arrowed through Kim’s middle, making her stomach growl. “It’s been a long time since lunch,” she said, digging in.

For a minute, they focused respectfully on the food. “You still need to bring me home, Valenti. I’d like to hang out with your family.”

“Get a date, and we’ll go on Sunday, how’s that?”

“Perfect.”

“Let’s sleep on the bridges and things. Maybe something will bubble up.”

They ate in companionable silence for a while, then Scott said, “I hear you got a promotion.”

“Yeah. Go figure.” She looked at him warily. “Are you mad?”

“When did I turn into some petty loser who takes offense at your accomplishments, Kim?” He scowled at her over his water glass. “Seriously. You’ve been very weird.”

“Sorry. You’re right.” She poked her fork into the pasta. “I’m not sure what I’m thinking.” But as had happened this morning, as she bent her head, she was assaulted with a vision of Lex, lean and long and dark, bending in to kiss her. She thought of him naked, standing in the kitchen aroused and hot. Her body flushed.

“You gotta stop thinking of that guy around me,” Scott said. “You should see your face right now.”

“Really?” She straightened, brushed hair away from her cheeks. “Sorry.”

He shook his head, smiling slightly. “Don’t be. It’s good to see you fall.”

Kim frowned. “I’m not falling.”

“Whatever you say, Valenti.”

Chapter 14

By the time she made it to the enclave of her condo that night, Kim was tired. Definitely not in the mood for the reporters she found, clustered like beetles around her apartment. With grim determination, she simply powered through them with one hand up, refusing to talk or answer the usual volley of questions.

She was also not in the mood for the message she had waiting from Marc. “You could have let me know,” he said petulantly. “I didn’t need to see you on the news with some guy. I mean, I know we don’t have any claim, but, jeez, Kim, you were obviously hot for the guy.”

Aloud, to the voice mail, she said, “You dope,” and pressed the button to go on to the next message. It was from her mother. “Call me, Kim. You know me. I just need to know you’re okay and home safely.”

The last message was from Lex. “Hey, darlin’,” he drawled, “we didn’t officially exchange phone numbers, but I used my considerable influence to find your unlisted number. Give me a call.” He left his number. Kim scrambled to find a piece of paper fast enough, then played the message again to be sure.

Hard to believe, looking around, that it had only been two nights away from home. That three nights ago, Marc had been here and she’d never met Lex Tanner.

At least in the flesh.

And what flesh it had turned out to be.

Frowning, she kicked off her shoes and took the bag upstairs to unpack. He was pretty dangerous to her peace of mind—and her goals—if everyone she met kept saying how smitten she obviously was. How to rein it in?

“Good question,” she said to the mirror, leaning forward to examine the damage more closely. Her eye was going to have its worst day tomorrow, she figured, when the bruises turned green and yellow streaked with red. Of her facial injuries, it was by far the most gory looking—and it hurt the least. Her lip, now, which had been cut on the inside and only looked a little swollen—it hurt.

Her ear was hot, ugly and painful. Tenderly touching the edges, she vowed to make Ugly Face pay if she ever ran into him again. She’d had a lot of injuries in her time, but this ear thing was one of the worst. It seemed that everything jarred it.

She unpacked her bag, threw the dirty clothes in the laundry and headed down to the kitchen for some tea when the phone rang. Checking her caller ID to make sure it wasn’t Marc, calling to check on her, Kim saw another name she recognized. Victoria Patton was a reporter for UBC and a fellow Athena student who had been a little bit ahead of Kim in school. Kim had admired the dark-haired, vivacious Tory from afar, but hadn’t run in her circle.

She picked up the phone, intrigued. “Hello?”

“Hi, Kim. I’m sure you’ve had a million phone calls, but this is Tory Patton. We were at the Athena Academy together, though you might not remember me.”

“Tory! Of course I remember you.” Kim chuckled. “I had a terrible case of hero worship on you.”

“Congratulations on your coup in Chicago. That was excellent work, and you made us all look terrific.”

“Thanks. I had a lot of help.”

“Right.” Tory paused. “Kim, I’d really like to do a story on you. Is that possible?”

Kim had seen Tory’s work—a reporter based in New York, she’d covered a number of huge stories over the years, not the least of which had been coverage last year of the only man to survive a hostage situation in the Central American country of Puerto Isla. The man had been a Navy SEAL, and his return to the U.S. had led to Tory breaking the truth to the country about President James Whitlow’s campaign contributions from drug runners. “I’m honored, of course,” Kim said, “but I hardly think I can give you the kind of story you’re used to.”

“You’re modest, Kim. That’s not a bad quality. But you’re not seeing how dramatic and interesting this is.”

“I don’t want to talk about my brother, okay?”

“No problem. You have a right to your privacy.”

“All right, then. How do you want to set this up?”

“I can fly in first thing tomorrow, if you like.”

Kim frowned. “How long will it take?”

“An hour, maybe. I’ll bring a cameraman, and we’ll tape the whole interview and then cut and paste.”

For a minute, Kim hesitated. “All right.”

“You’ve done a lot of good, Kim. We’re very proud of you.”

Kim’s ear suddenly ached, and she put two gentle fingers to it. “Thanks.”

“All right. What time is good? Noon?”

“Sure. I’ll see you then.”

The phone had not been on the hook more than three seconds when it rang again. Checking caller ID, Kim saw it was a Chicago number and her heart jumped. She grabbed the phone, took a breath and said, “Hello?” in her best voice.

“Ms. Valenti?” said a woman’s voice.

Damn. She was tempted to say, “Wrong number,” but felt so idiotic about jumping for a phone call from a man that she just sighed with irritation. “Yes.”

“My name is Lucinda Orange. I’m from the Chicago Tribune. I’d like to interview you for my column.”

“Not tonight.”

“All right. When would be good?”

“I don’t know. Maybe never. I don’t know why I’m this big celebrity today.”

“You don’t know.” It wasn’t a question, exactly, more like the droll recitation of an older sister. “Can I tell you?”

“Sure. Whatever.”

“You’re young, beautiful, tough, smart, and you looked like Angelina Jolie coming out of that ceiling. Every man in the audience had a hard-on—but that’s not what I want to write about. I want to write about you for all the young women who are going to think you’re fantastic.”

Kim couldn’t help it—she snorted in appreciation for the frank language. “All right, Ms.—what was your name?”

“Lucinda Orange.”

“Ms. Orange, what kind of column do you write?”

“Commentary on women’s lives and issues.”

“And what’s your angle?”

“You mean are you going to look good or bad in print?”

“Yeah.”

“Good, Ms. Valenti.” The woman laughed in a throaty, pleasant way. “I admire you. That I can promise you.”

“All right. I’ll give an interview, but I need to do it when I’m fresh. Call me tomorrow at ten, at this number.” She gave her the office number.

When she hung up from the call, she picked it up immediately and called her mother. “Hey, Ma,” she said.

“Kim! How are you, honey? You looked terrible on TV.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“You know what I mean. You were obviously injured, and you know that worries me. What happened?”

A thudding headache began at the base of Kim’s neck. “You know, Mom, I’m really tired. I can’t face another long catalog of the whole thing tonight, but I promise I’ll let you look me over head to toe on Sunday, okay?”

“Fair enough. Are you going to bring that gorgeous creature you were with last night? Lex, is it?”

“Mom, he lives in Chicago.”

“But he’s Italian, isn’t he? That would make your father so happy, and you have to admit, he’s a very nice-looking man.”

“Yeah, and he works for the bomb squad! Not great life odds there.”

“Oh, please,” her mother said dismissively. “No worse than a firefighter or a policeman or a sol—” She halted.

“Or a soldier,” Kim said. “Exactly.”

“Bomb squad is definitely better than combat soldiers.”

Kim silently rolled her eyes. “Ma, enough. I’m tired. I am not bringing him to dinner on Sunday. I am, however, bringing my partner, Scott, because he’s missing his family and he needs some love and attention. He is not husband material. Tell my father.”

Eileen chuckled. “All right, baby. You go get some sleep and I’ll see you on Sunday. Love you.”

“Love you, too. Kiss my dad.”

She hung up and rubbed her eyes. What day was it, anyway? When could she sleep in? It was Thursday. Not so bad. One more day.

The phone rang again. Kim groaned. Looking at caller ID, she saw it was—again—a Chicago number, but this time she picked up the number she’d written down for Lex and checked it. Bingo.

Her heart leaped, flipped, squeezed. Something. It hurt. “Don’t do this, Kim,” she said to herself. “Don’t make him into something he’s not, some beautiful perfect guy.”

On the fourth ring, she picked it up. “Hello?”

“How you doin’, darlin’?” said a rich, deep, Southern voice.

As if she were Pavlov’s dog, Kim’s tailbone went soft. “I’m all right, Lex. How are you?”

“Had better days. I can’t stop thinking about you.”

She fell on the couch, covered her forehead with an arm. And she did something she almost never did with a man—she let down her guard. A little bit. “I know what you mean.”

“You thought about me?”

“Yes.”

“What did you think about?”

“Oh, no, you don’t. I’m not going to sit here and feed your ego, Mr. Tanner.”

“If I feed yours first?”

She laughed, suddenly transported to last night, when his long fingers had been entwined with hers. “Well, if you like.”

“I’ve been thinking about the way your shoulders look when you’re tense and worried.”

“Oh.” Not what she’d expected.

“And when you were all worn out the night before last, one eyelid drooped more than the other.”

“That’s what you’ve been thinking about?”

“And you snore. You snored before you hardly hit that bed.”

“How is this feeding my ego, exactly?”

“It’s not,” he said slowly. “But it’s all true. I was thinking about those things.”

“Don’t get mushy on me, Tanner.”

He laughed. The sound was low and wicked. “What do you want to hear, darlin’?”

“No, it’s your turn. I was thinking about you, too. I was thinking about how—” Suddenly there were too many things in her head. The clarity of his eyes. The softness of his mouth. “You have a mouth just like Denzel Washington, you know that?”

“Is that right. Nobody every told me that before. He’s such a big-time movie star, I guess that’s good, right?”

“It’s good.”

“You like my mouth, then?”

“I do.”

His voice dropped an octave. “You know what I’ve really been thinking about, sugar?”

“I bet I can guess.”

“Your bare breasts when you had that gun in your hand. Hottest damned thing I ever saw in my life.”

“Mmm. Thought you weren’t looking?”

“You knew I was lying, even then.”

“Yeah.”

“When can I see you?”

“I thought you were going to be here next week for something.”

“I don’t want to wait that long. How about this weekend?”

Kim thought of his body, his vivid blue eyes—and she also felt a slight sense of panic. Too fast. Too much. “No.”

His laughter was the last thing she expected. “I’m hanging up now, Kim. Don’t worry.”

And he was gone.

Chapter 15

Friday, October 8

Before she went to work the next morning, Kim checked e-mail from Oracle and found a message waiting.

To: Ariadne@orcl.org

From: Delphi@orcl.org

Subject: Lead on-site planning

Several sources are pointing to the possibility of a plot to destroy a bridge with a truck bomb. Major speculation that the target is either Golden Gate or Brooklyn Bridge, but some leads point to George Washington. Thanks to usual jealousy, some information has been withheld from certain agencies, which makes the connection to GW less obvious.

Security to all major bridges nationwide has been increased, but thanks to current policies designed to keep the public in a state of fear and off the current administration’s involvement in Puerto Isla and Berzhaan, no one is taking the bridge threat seriously. Very important to discover which bridge is the target and take steps now to prevent it. Strong evidence suggests bombing slated for the upcoming Columbus Day weekend. Be advised—level four warning.

Possible helps: Valerie Kane at CIA, 202-555-9016; Karl Gibson at New York City Police, 212-555-3173. Both have files on Mansour and truck thievery.

Good luck.

Delphi

Kim had often wondered if Delphi had lost someone in the Puerto Isla debacle, when President Whitlow had sent in a SEAL force to rescue hostages who had turned out to be American drug runners. The SEALs had nearly all been killed, a massacre that should never have happened. The subject seemed to make Delphi particularly touchy.

One thing was clear: the Oracle group wanted Whitlow out of office. Now.

Kim made notes on the information, and stopped on the way in to work to buy a latte for herself and Scott. He was in the parking lot when she arrived, looking fresh and athletic in spite of the cold, gray day. She handed him his paper cup of nonfat, triple venti latte. “Jeez, Shepherd, you look like ‘Rocky Mountain High’ all by yourself.”

He grinned, looking like his normal self. “Thanks. I found some things.” He waved a sheaf of papers. “I think we’re looking at an event within just a few days.”

Kim nodded. “Me, too.” She let him hold the door for her as she pulled out her ID. They passed through security and took an elevator to their floor and carried their briefcases into a small conference room. “I’m going to grab a couple of things from my desk,” Kim said.

“Yeah, I’m gonna drop this coat, then check e-mail.”

“Ten minutes, back here?”

“Right.”

Kim flipped her monitor on, then hit the icon to collect e-mail. While she waited for it to download, she hung up her coat, shook down her sleeves, flipped through the in-box that had collected a surprising amount of material overnight. Most of it was fact-checking documentation, hard-copy printouts of various electronic communications. A co-worker had stuck in a newspaper cartoon showing President Whitlow as a Fidel-type politician smoking a cigar called Berzhaan.

There were several e-mails, all related to the intelligence gathered through the Q-group e-mails. Kim printed out the new e-mails collected from the cell overnight—seven of them, which was quite a lot for a twelve-hour period—and took them to the small conference room. Since they’d broken the code, the e-mails were intercepted, translated, then deciphered before Kim received them. She insisted upon receiving the originals, as well, not content to trust others with translation.

As she waited for Scott, she highlighted phrases that seemed important.

“Hey, gorgeous,” said a voice from behind her.

The voice. Kim spun around, sure she wasn’t hearing correctly.

But there he was. Lex, cleanly shaved, dressed in black slacks, black long-sleeved shirt, tie.

He looked very, very good.

Kim stood up. Her hands felt awkward, so she tried to put them in the back pockets of her jeans, but she was wearing a skirt. “Lex! What are you doing here?”

“Been assigned to help.”

“Us?”

“This case. They’re thinking it’s a whole lot of explosives. Fourteen moving vans have been stolen in the past three weeks.”

“Moving vans.” Kim blinked, trying to imagine what a moving van full of explosives could do to a bridge.

From behind him, Scott hustled in, carrying a box of files. “Hey,” he said, lifting his chin toward Lex. “You the new guy? Oh—hey. You’re the FBI guy.”

Next to Scott’s hale outdoorsy look, Lex looked ethnic and lean, a coyote next to a big fluffy St. Bernard. “Lex Tanner,” he said, extending a hand. “You must be Scott.”

“Good to meet you.”

Kim let go of a breath she didn’t know she was holding. “Let’s see what we’ve got.” She sat down and pulled out her notes. “We’ve got moving vans. Bridges. Mansour is still on the loose, with pretty serious financial backing.”

“Have we figured out who is bankrolling this guy anyway?”

“Not yet. He’s anti-CIA and -U.S.A. and anti-Kemini, so I’d put my money on the usual suspects. Islamic extremists, disgruntled rich Berzhaanians who want the Keminis squashed.”

Lex scowled. “But the Chicago cell seems to be richer than usual. The kind of money which usually only comes from two kinds of vice, either drugs or arms deals.”

Kim thought of the nonnative Arabic speaker at the television station. “There was definitely a non-Arab at the station. He’s one of the guys that got away with Mansour. The station manager was also involved somehow, so there’s an American connection.”

Scott swore.

“Where there’s money to be made,” Kim said with a shrug, “there’s bound to be people wanting to make it. It’s something we can research a little more.” She shifted gears. “Scott, did you decide which of the e-mail-loop guys might be Mansour? Maybe we can figure out some clues to his whereabouts from that.”

“You might want to take a look. You’re better at some of the subtle stuff.” He pulled out a yellow tablet with scribbles on it. “I do have some ideas on the bridge that might be targeted, however. The three that seem to generate the most interest from terrorist types are the famous ones—” he ticked them off on his fingers “—Golden Gate, Brooklyn and George Washington.”

Kim nodded, pleased that she wasn’t the one to bring up the George Washington Bridge.

“I also looked up whatever major bridges might be targeted in the heartland—over the Missouri and Mississippi, any bridges along Interstate Highways, any arteries into military bases, that kind of thing. A couple important ones came up—the 1-40 Mississippi River Bridge in Memphis; the Houston Ship Channel Bridge, the Seattle I-90 to Mercer Island.”

He pulled out pictures of the bridges, spread them in a row across the top of the table. “This is where you come in, Tanner, and why I requested you. How do you blow up a bridge? Which of these bridges is a good target and which ones aren’t worth the trouble?”

Lex stood up, poked one of the pictures. “The Memphis bridge is a beauty,” he drawled. “But she’s built to withstand a level 7 earthquake, so she’d be hard to bring down completely.”

“Earthquakes in Memphis?” Kim said.

“One of the most dangerous fault lines in the country is right through that Mississippi farmland.” He lifted a shoulder. “It’s not as unstable as the San Andreas, but it’s serious.”

“Does that kick out the Golden Gate, too, then?” Scott asked.

“I wouldn’t rule it out, just because it’s so symbolic, so visible, but she’d probably hold up—she’s been retrofitted to withstand an 8.3,” Lex said.

“How do you know this stuff?” Kim asked.

“This isn’t the first time terrorists have made noises about American bridges. I’ve made it my business to find out what I can,” Lex said. “There are ways to bring almost anything down if you have enough explosives—but some bridges are more interesting than others.”

“Right.” Kim frowned. “Terrorists want the most bang for the buck, right? So, the busiest bridges? The ones that would disrupt commerce most severely?”

Scott said, “But think about 9/11. It was a hit designed to take out a lot of people, but also to strike at the country’s ideology.”

“True.”

“So—it’s Columbus Day weekend, right? Maybe they’ll hit parades or parades going over bridges, something like that.”

“By that reasoning, then I like the George Washington bridge,” Kim said.

“Hmm.” Lex nodded agreement. “That’s a possibility. It also has a double tier structure, which would make it easier to do real damage—the vehicles on the lower level blow, which blows upward, then the weight comes down and knocks things loose in a downward motion.”

“And it’s New York again,” Kim added. “The double whammy.”

“Right.” Scott frowned. “That’s just a guess—we don’t want to put all our eggs in one basket, just in case it isn’t right.”

“No, I think it might be the George Washington bridge. Just a gut feeling,” Kim said.

Scott said, “Oh, yeah? Your secret source backs me up, huh?”

Kim shook her head and rolled her eyes. “Keep telling you…”

“Secret source?” Lex asked, perking up.

“He’s full of it,” Kim said.

“Nah, Lex. She has like a secret identity, and there’s some big secret society.”

“Is that right?” Lex watched her a little too closely.

Kim grabbed a stack of papers. “I guess my secret is out—I’m really the Green Flashlight, cousin to the Green Lantern. In my off-hours, I wear a skintight—”

“Ooh, I like that idea.”

“—gown with green shoes, and it gives me special powers so I can go out and bring back Truth, Justice and the American Way.” She rolled her eyes. “Please.” Glancing at the clock, she saw that it was nearly noon. Tory would be arriving soon and Kim wanted to look her best. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, gentlemen, I’ve got a media interview to take.”

Scott chuckled. “I’ll make the phone calls to the CIA this time, huh?”

“With my blessing,” Kim said. “Can you imagine what he’ll be like now that I was right again?”

“Maybe he’ll lighten up.”

“Right. Lex, of course you can take the FBI. I’ll call the guy on the NYPD.”

“What guy?” Scott asked.

“The old policeman, the one in New York City.” Too late, Kim realized she’d taken that information from Oracle. Heat threatened to spill into her face, and she could not give herself away like that. Covering as fast as she could, she shook her head. “It must not have been you I discussed this with. Maybe it was Diana. Last night on the phone.”

Lex and Scott both sat at the table and just looked at her, the Snow White and Rose Red of big tough guys, one so blond and sturdy and outdoorsy Colorado, the other dark and lean and severe. “No secret society, huh?” Lex said.

“No secret code?” Scott added.

“Don’t be ridiculous.” She grabbed her papers and took off. “See you guys later.”

Chapter 16

Kim first dialed the policeman in New York City, Karl Gibson. She asked for him, gave her name and was put through immediately. He picked up. “Gibson.”

She introduced herself and explained the situation. “I’m looking for any clues, any ideas, any information that might help us piece together where these guys are gonna strike next.”

“All right. What can I tell you?”

Kim was not entirely certain why Oracle had told her to call the policeman, so she winged it. “Have you arrested or had contact with any Berzhaan rebels or Keminis or anything related to them in the past few weeks?”

“We did,” he said. “We had a tip that there was a group centered around a tire shop near the George Washington bridge. We paid ’em a visit and found a whole lot of explosives.”

“Really. A tire center?”

“Yeah. Let’s see if I can get you the name.”

Kim waited, pencil poised above her paper. He said, “Here it is—Hafiz abu Malik Abd-Humam.”

“Very good. So did you arrest a group there?”

“We got a couple of guys,” he said, “but they’re peons and they’re not about to talk.”

“You didn’t get the owner?”

“No. He was out of town. We recovered a shitload of explosives though, I’ll tell you that. Most of them were packed into a single moving van. Could have taken out a sizable building.”

“Or a bridge?”

“Oh, yeah. No problem.”

“All right, thank you. I’ll keep you posted on anything that seems to feed into it.”

She hung up and frowned. Who else had talked about tires? She flipped through her notes, through the paragraphs sent via Oracle. Nothing.

She knew it was somewhere. She just had to remember.

A small electronic noise alerted her to incoming e-mail. Kim switched screens and found a note from Scott.

Check this out.

He included links to articles on earthquake preparedness, bridge stability and a lengthy article on the Coronado bridge.

I’m thinking we need to look more into this one.

Kim wrote back:

Maybe. Let me do some more translations.

She picked up the file of original, decoded documents, which were all in Arabic, and began to sort through them, dividing them into stacks according to who wrote them.

Her phone rang. “Agent Valenti,” said the receptionist, “there’s a camera crew here to see you.”

“Sure.” Kim brushed hair from her face, wondering just how bad she’d look on camera. She glanced around at the room, and realized this part could be embarrassing. “Put the woman on the phone, will you?”

The phone changed hands. “Tory,” Kim said. “Let’s try to keep this as low-key as possible, all right? I don’t want a lot of resentment between me and the rest of the staff.”

“You want to meet us down here instead of up there? I’d be happy to do that.”

For a minute, she was very tempted, then she thought of Scott and Lex, and the need to include them in the interview. “No, that’s all right. We’ll meet you in the conference room.”

She popped her head in Scott’s office. Both Lex and Scott were bent over something spread out on the desk. “C’mon, gang,” she said. “It’s showtime. The UBC crew is here.”

“What are you talking about?” Scott said with annoyance.

“Television. They want to do a story, and this woman is a graduate of the Athena Academy, too, so I know she’ll do a good job. C’mon. Let’s just get it done and get back to work.”

Scott took a comb out of his pocket. “Is she cute?”

“Very.”

“Excellent.” He smoothed his hair.

Lex was grinning at Kim. “What?” she asked.

“You’re gonna look real cute.”

“Don’t be sarcastic. There’s nothing I can do.”

He sidled up to her. “You look hot to me, honey.”

“Sigh,” Kim said. “Let’s go.”

Just as they came into the hallway, Tory and her cameraman came from the elevator. Kim had seen Tory at Athena as a teen and on television many times, but it was still startling to see her tiny, neat beauty in person as an adult. Dressed in a white suit with a red blouse, Tory looked as crisp as a new dollar bill. “Kim!” she said warmly, coming forward to hold out her hand. “I’d say you look wonderful, but you’d know it was a lie.”

Kim chuckled. “I’m not a big makeup kind of girl. Do you want to do something about the face?”

Tory firmly shook her head. “Not at all. You’re fine.” She turned and introduced her cameraman. “This is Jay.”

“Nice to meet you,” Kim said, shaking her hand.

“That was really something, you at the television station,” he said with a flirtatious smile.

Kim thought of what the columnist told her—that she was a male fantasy. “Thanks. Let’s go to the conference room, shall we? My partner is there, along with Lex Tanner, who was critical in defusing the bomb at the airport.”

“Excellent,” Tory said. “And don’t mind Jay, he flirts with all the hot women.”

Jay laughed and followed them into the room. Kim introduced everyone, watching as Scott straightened, ready to charm his way into the tiny brunette’s long-term memory. Jay had competition in the flirting department. “Cool it, Shepherd,” she said in his ear. “I think she’s involved with someone pretty seriously.” She’d heard rumors that Tory was dating Bennington Forsythe, the playboy brother of another Athena grad, Alexandra.

The cameraman checked light levels and set them all up around the conference table. Tory said, “I’m mainly focusing on Kim if you don’t mind, guys. I’ll do a clip with each of you, but it makes a better story if she’s the main hook.”

“But they were instrumental!” Kim protested.

“Fine with me,” Lex said.

“She did the work,” Scott added. “Do you want us to clear out then?”

“Up to you.”

“Let’s go,” Lex said, and they left.

Kim gnawed her lip for a minute. “I didn’t do it on my own,” she said. “I’ve had tons of help.”

Tory clipped a mike to Kim’s blouse. “I know. I also know you’ve distinguished yourself.” She grinned. “Love that video of you coming out of the ceiling.”

Kim chuckled. “Seems to be a favorite moment.”

“Let’s get started.”

Putting a hand to her tummy, Kim said, “I’m nervous, I think.”

“All right. We’ll just start the cameras and shoot some footage, and we can talk about Athena Academy to start with. Just talk, just as we’ve been doing. How’s that?”

“Okay.”

Tory gave Ben the signal, and the camera started rolling. “Tell me, Kim,” she said, “what was it like for you to leave home and go to the Athena Academy?”

“I was very excited,” Kim said. “But also terrified. It was a very long way from home, and I’d never been away from my very large family. But I was also very excited at the things we were studying—languages and math and all the physical activities. Girls were not really encouraged to be very, very physical in my neighborhood, and I loved that part of Athena.”

Tory smiled, and Kim realized her nervousness was gone. “Good,” Tory said. “Let’s talk about the Chicago bomb.”

Kim nodded. The interview covered much the same ground as the questions that had been asked and answered till now, though Tory gave it a better, more sophisticated spin.

When it was over, Kim shook her hand again. “That was relatively painless.”

“Good. I’ll give you a call when it’s going to air. I think we have some good material.”

“Thanks.”

“I’ll go film a little with the boys, then, and talk to you soon.”

Four hours later, Kim was twittery and jumpy as the clock crept closer and closer to 5:00 p.m. and the time they would quit and then Lex would—what? Go stay in a hotel nearby? Try to go out with her? Come to her apartment? She didn’t know.

As she sorted through code and e-mails in the original Arabic, trying to piece together some usable picture of what the terrorist cell had planned, her mind circled around and around and around the fact of Lex. Lex and the fact that he was in town. And she didn’t know what was going on tonight.

That was the trouble. No, the fact of him was the trouble. A man who wasn’t going to ever take no for an answer, who was so alluring and intriguing and different from anyone she’d ever met that she was—for the first time in her life—in danger of actually falling in love.

And he knew it. How did he know? Was he so used to seducing women of all ilks that he just knew which buttons to push? Was she falling for a very sincere player?

And wasn’t sincere player an oxymoron?

“Oh, good grief, Valenti,” she muttered to herself in exasperation at about three in the afternoon. She pushed away from her desk and marched to the ladies’ room, refusing to even glance toward the room where Lex was working with Scott on bridge schematics.

In the bathroom, she turned the tap on cold and put her hands under it, rinsing them over and over as she lectured herself. This was exactly what she did not want to do: work herself up into a lather over a man. Start letting him take over her thoughts. Invade her work time. Claim her life, inch by inch.

Kim glared at herself in the mirror. “Stop it,” she said aloud.

But she examined her lips closely, wishing they were more shapely. Her mother had a beautiful, perfect mouth. Why hadn’t she gotten it? Certainly she wished the black eye wasn’t so bad. It looked awful today. She smoothed her skirt, backed up and looked at her butt in the mirror. Definitely not little.

She realized what she was doing and halted.

Insane. She was insane. Maybe the only answer was just to sleep with him and get him out of her system. Then she could go back to Marc and her ambitions and stop mooning.

“Get a grip. He’s only a guy.”

But she was still tense three hours later when she closed the door to her condo and automatically clicked the alarm system on. Before she moved farther into the apartment, she kicked off her shoes, then holding the mail in one hand, she padded into the room, shedding keys, coat, purse. It was good to be home, in the silence of her sanctuary, where there was no lure of Lex, no hammering awareness dragging on her all day.

God, he had the pheromones of a rock star.

Standing beside the trash can, she sorted through the mail, tossing circulars and flyers from mortgage lenders into the trash, sliding the credit card and cell phone bills into a folder on the small table by the kitchen window.

It was then that she spied the wire. A blue wire running along her windowsill.

A wash of foreboding poured down her spine. Dropping the mail on the table and without touching it, she followed the thin blue wire to see where it would go.

It snaked down the wall, along the floor, to the window in her study, then along the floor again, out of the study, up the wall toward the loft bedroom. Kim felt sweat start to prickle beneath her blouse. Grimly, she raced up the stairs and found what she knew she would: the bedroom windows were wired, too.

And the front door. And the back door, and every window in the condo.

The bomb was barely out of sight—simply sitting on the floor behind the small table next to her front door—wired into her home security system. She’d armed it herself when she came in. They’d wanted her to know she was trapped.

Kim swore.

She was about to pick up the telephone when she realized that the burglar alarm was wired into the phone. Could a ring set it off? She grabbed the phone and turned it over. For a long moment, she stared at the line that connected it to the wall, wondering if it, too, was booby-trapped. If she just turned off the ringer, maybe that would be safer. Her upper lip was sweating. She clicked the switch to the off position.

From behind her came a shrill, electronic ring. Kim startled so hard she nearly dropped the phone, and her biological reaction was a jolt to the heart so fierce it felt as though someone jammed a lance through it.

Her cell phone. Ringing in her purse. Kim grabbed it, saw by caller ID that it was the office calling. “Hello?” she barked.

“Kim, thank God,” Lex said. “Did I catch you before you got home?”

“No, unfortunately.” She took a breath. “If I unplug the phone line, will it arm the bomb attached to my security system?”

“Fuck.”

“My sentiments exactly.”

“Turn off the ringer on your phone immediately. And can you see your front walk? Nobody should ring the doorbell.”

“I don’t know if I can disconnect the doorbell.”

“No! Don’t.” He cleared his throat. “I’m going to walk you through disarming it. Don’t worry.”

She chuckled bitterly. “I’ll do my best.”

“Walk me through it. Tell me everything you can see.”

Kim told him about the windows and doors, the thin blue wire trussing her into her house like a doomed turkey. Told him about the wires trailing up the wall to her security system. “And the wires go into a white boxlike package, very neat, sitting beside the wall, near the front door.”

There was a little pause from his end. “Okay. This is a little different scenario than the bomb we had at the airport.”

“I get that.”

“It’s hard to know if this is wired to time or to movement. Don’t touch it, but tell me what you see about where the lines go into the box. Usually, the initiator is close to the top.”

“There’s nothing, really,” Kim said. “Just a smooth box.”

“Hold on a second.” He covered the receiver and Kim could hear the garbled sound of conversation—Lex asking a question, getting an answer, asking another question.

He came back on the line. “Tell me the layout of your apartment.”

“Front door opens into a living room that’s a good size. Stairs go up to my bedroom, which has an open loft that overlooks the living room. There’s a bathroom upstairs.” She took a breath, eyed the bomb. It looked so innocuous. “Back downstairs, you go into the kitchen, and there’s a second bedroom-study off the kitchen.”

“How much of a wall between the living room and the back study?”

Kim lifted a shoulder, her spirits sinking as she guessed what he was going to have her do. “Pretty serious walls, actually. The main crossbeam, then two smaller walls. The study is also in a little area that juts out from the rest of the apartment, so it’s just a single-level roof.”

“Okay. Let me think a second here.”

Kim waited. Her arms ached with tension. With the need to act. She didn’t want to blow up her condo. She liked it. There had to be a better way. “Lex—”

“I want you to prepare an area in the back room as if there was a tornado. Couch cushions, pillows, that kind of thing, all right?”

“Lex, I don’t want to blow up the apartment. It’s my home.”

“I can appreciate that, Valenti. But you have no idea what this bomb could do, and I’m not taking chances. Insurance will repair the condo.”

“But—”

“Get the pillows.” It wasn’t a request.

She put down the phone and followed orders, carrying cushions and pillows into the back room. Then, before she picked up the phone, she took down paintings, and gathered all the knickknacks from her Arizona youth, and put them under the desk in the study.

“Done,” she said, picking up the phone. “Now what?”

“You say the whole house is wired, every window?”

“Yeah.” Outside, there was a commotion, and Kim looked out to the parking lot to see police cars, fire trucks and all her neighbors being herded away from the area.

Kim felt faintly ill and looked down at the bomb. How had Lex known there was a problem here, anyway? “Can’t you send one of those bomb squad guys in here?”

“If you open the door, the bomb blows. Sorry.”

She swallowed. “This is scaring the shit out of me, Luthor.”

“I want it to. Fear will make you careful.”

“Let’s get it over with.”

“You see the scenario here—the bomber was pretty sure you’d go out the front door, so that’s where the device is located, but it’s keyed into the security system, so it will blow if the perimeter is disturbed.”

“Right.”

“Go to your study, get into position as well as you can—cover your head, all that—then open the window with a long handle. Maybe a broom? Then dive under your desk.”

“I don’t know if I can open these windows with a broom. They’re aluminum, with a pretty tight fit and no lip to speak of.”

“What happens with your alarm if you break a window? Does the alarm go off or do you have to move the window physically?”

“I would guess it goes off if the window breaks. I haven’t tried it.”

“Work with me, Kim, dammit. It’s not funny.”

“I’m not trying to be funny. I don’t know the answer to your question! That was honest.” She rubbed a spot on her chest, realizing that her heart was rushing, speeding, tumbling over itself. “Is this going to kill me?”

“No. Not if you don’t take chances.”

“No, I’m not going to die because I need to collect on a debt you owe me,” she said, and headed into the study.

“Is that right?”

“Yeah.” In the study, she shoved her second desk against the far wall, and put a cushion beneath it. She banged her hip, hard, and swore. “I’m in the study, everything is ready. I can try breaking the window with a…” She looked around, picked up a hefty candleholder made of iron. “An iron candlestick.”

“Can you throw it? You can’t be standing up and swinging it. It’s gotta have heft enough that you can do it from beneath the desk.”

“No, I can throw it.” A ripple of anticipation or terror or both went through her as she imagined the explosion. “Now what?”

“Get a broomstick, too, something long enough that you can use it to shove open the window if breaking the window doesn’t work.”

She dashed into the kitchen, grabbed the broom, dashed back in. “Can we get this over with now?”

“Yep. Get in position beneath the desk. Cover your head, throw the candlestick and put your knees up, tuck your head down with your hands—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Kim said. “Tornado position. I got it.”

“Keep the phone on, will ya?”

“Sure. Are you ready?”

There was a pause. “I hate this.”

“Not half as much as I do.”

“You’re gonna be fine, Valenti. Get ready. Tell me just before you’re going to throw the candlestick.”

Kim tucked herself beneath the desk, settled her cushions around her properly, with a sofa pillow on her shoulders, the phone in one hand. Her heart was racing.

“Okay, Lex, I’m putting down the phone now. I’ll count to three as loud as I can so you know when I’m throwing it. Then…uh…I hope I’ll be talking to you in a minute.”

“Got it.”

Kim braced one more cushion in place, then picked up the candlestick, and counted aloud. “One! Two! Three!” She threw the candlestick in a hard arc, ducked backward and pulled the pillow over her head.

The bomb exploded.

Chapter 17

The explosion was louder than anything she’d ever heard. The sound was physical, carried in shock waves through her condo, slamming into walls, ceilings, rooms, reverberating at a decibel that threatened to shatter her eardrums. And it wasn’t fast, as she’d expected, but seemed to vibrate through her head, arms, chest, teeth, a sound sucking everything else out of the world, for a very long time. A sense of pressure squeezed her body, all of it, and something slammed down overhead with a hard crack. The desk buckled over her, slamming into the sofa cushion over her head and shoulders, shoving her into an even tighter ball. Her head and face squeezed into a pillow, and for a second she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, and she thought with panic that it would be so ironic if she escaped being crushed or blown to bits but then was smothered in a pillow.

Don’t panic.

Deal with the facts.

Can’t breathe.

Why?

Pillow.

Move it.

Can’t get my head turned.

Use your hands.

Arms are trapped, too tight.

Move your knees a little.

She tried pushing her knees down and the pillow shifted infinitesimally, enough that she could wiggle her head to the side, and slide her nose and mouth into a breathing hole in the dark, tight spot, and gulp in some dusty air.

“Lex?” she cried as loud as she could. “Can you hear me?”

The tinny sound of the phone came through the darkness, but she couldn’t really hear it. With fierce effort, she tried to move her right arm against whatever was trapping it. She’d put the phone down right beside her knee—surely she could move that far.

But although she could move her fingers, the arm was smashed hard against her side. “Lex, I can’t make out your words, but I’m safe. Stuck, but safe.”

It couldn’t have been more than a minute or two before she heard noises beyond her tight dark world. A dog barked distantly, and she heard a shout, then others farther away. A siren howled.

“Here!” she cried. “I’m in here!”

She realized in the dense darkness that her ear was really hurting again. Damn it. Her knee was getting a cramp.

Shouldn’t she be able to see some cracks of light somewhere? Was it only that the pillows and cushions were blotting everything out, or was the darkness a sign of something more ominous? She thought of earthquake victims, buried in rubble for days.

Breathe.

Not that she was afraid of that happening now. The whole of the NSA knew exactly where she was. The complex had been surrounded by police and rescue personnel before the bomb even blew. She would not be here longer than ten minutes, a half hour at the outside.

Still, it was sobering to imagine.

Something dripped on her shoulder. Water? Where was water coming from? Oh, probably fire hoses. There was probably fire from the explosion. Of course they would have to put it out.

A sense of tightness grew in her chest and she focused on taking a long, slow deep breath, letting it out very slowly and easily. Stay calm. There was plenty of oxygen. She was not buried under tons of rubble. It was just the desk and maybe some house debris. She was not, as far as she could tell, injured.

A sound came from the phone, a tinny faraway sound. “I’m okay!” she tried to cry out, but it came out as a croak. Her throat was dry. “I’m okay!” she tried again.

Now her knee was really cramping and she tried to ease her position a little, pushing it to one side, moving her shoulders, trying to see how much movement she could get. Very little. She was in a more or less fetal position, with her knees bent, her arms gripping the cushion, her face sandwiched between the cushion she’d placed on her shoulders and the one in her chest. By easing the knee to the left slowly, she managed to get a little more space for breathing. A centimeter at a time, she eased her head to the right, pushing as hard as she could toward the faintly less-dead air space. She opened her eyes as wide as she could, and there was still no light.

A dog barked more urgently, and she heard an identifiable voice that didn’t seem faraway. Maybe they’d made it to the back room finally. “Here!” she cried.

“We know you’re there, Kim,” a man’s voice said. It seemed very close. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes! I’m fine.”

“Good. Don’t do a lot of moving, all right? There’s a logistical problem with a roof beam and we’re trying to get you out, but everything is pretty delicate. We don’t want to get too much movement until I tell you to, okay?”

“Okay.”

“It might take a little while, but you’re safe. Trust me.”

“I’m okay.”

“Good. Hang in there!”

The sense of panic rose again. A roof beam. Don’t move.

Breathe, she told herself. Just breathe through it.

Don’t panic.

It was hard to say how long she stayed crouched there. There was comfort in hearing the voices of the men on the other side of her darkness. Hearing the scrape and rattle and shouted directions, some of which she could make out and some she could not. There was discomfort in the tightness of her position, and an annoying drip of water coming through some crack she couldn’t identify, and the pain in her injured ear.

And it was very difficult not to panic when she could not move a muscle. She didn’t like closed places. Never had. Everyone had their difficulties, their weak spots. This was hers.

It was like a coffin. The most horrifying thing she could imagine was being buried alive. She hated the stories of people who’d been buried by mistake, not dead—

Stop.

—and they died there, the wood of the coffin scraped raw by fingers that could do no good.

Breathe.

She forced herself to bring her attention back to her breath. In. Out. She was not dying. She was not buried alive. There were people right on the other side of the wooden desk who knew she was there and were working to get her out.

Breathe. In. Out.

In the darkness, she thought of her brother Jason. It seemed she could almost smell him. Was he afraid at the end? Was he in some awful little prison cell before they decided to kill him, knowing what his end would be, or had they just grabbed him out of his truck and killed him?

“Don’t get all dramatic, Sissie,” Jason said in her ear. She felt his hand on her back, right between her shoulder blades. “It’s all good. It’s all good.”

“We’re in!” said a voice—a real voice—outside her enclave. “Kim, can you hear me?”

“Yes. Yes!”

“We’ve got to get a winch over here—there’s a beam sitting right on the desk and we’ve got to drag it off. All right?”

She wanted to scream. She didn’t. She swallowed hard and said, “Okay.” Better than being dead. Better than being a hostage. Better than being an earthquake victim, buried beneath a thousand tons of debris in South America or Indonesia.

The oddly warm sense of a protective hand between her shoulder blades came back. “That’s it, honey,” said her brother’s voice. “You’re doing fine. Think of good things. Think of that day we found the frog palace at the pond behind Muller’s store.”

“Good idea,” she said aloud. She called up the day—bright gold and green; summertime, leaves making dappled shadows on the grassy ground behind a small grocery. It was a waste area in the midst of the city, filled with trees and junk and the secret pond. Teenagers went there at night to have sex, and children chased tadpoles in the daytime. That afternoon, it was only she and Jason, humidity and heat enveloping them like a suit of armor. The frog palace was sitting at the end of the pond, beneath the trees—a little building some eccentric had built, with open rooms and puddles of water through it, and pagoda-style towers and roofs. It was freshly painted, the tips bright red.

“I thought of the frog palace whenever things got hard,” he said, and his hand moved, easy and smooth, on her back. “Love ya, Sissie.”

With the comfort of that hand, she drifted. It wasn’t sleep, exactly, but it was a place of softness and no fear, a release of all things dark and sorrowful. It could have been moments or hours when she heard a new voice.

“Kim. Kim! Kim, can you hear me?”

“Lex?” she croaked. Then again, louder. “Lex?”

“I’m here. We’re going to pull the beam off now. You should be outta there in a hot second, darlin’.”

“Thank God,” she said, but wasn’t sure if he could hear her. Her throat felt raw. Dry.

There was a sound of engines, and a groaning. Shouts. And suddenly, the pressure over Kim’s body eased. She couldn’t see any lights, but she could suddenly breathe.

And move. She straightened, and kicked the pillow by her leg, and a sharp light blasted into her little cave. She winced, put a hand up to block it, but she didn’t wait for anyone to pull her out, she fell forward into the air, sucking in a huge lungful, grateful to move her limbs.

Pinpricks of pain rushed through her arms and legs, her feet and hands, as the feeling came back. She tried to stand up, stumbled as her legs refused to hold her, and then there were hard, strong arms around her. “Hold on there, honey,” Lex said. “I got you.”

She leaned on him, grateful for the solidity, and gritted her teeth. “I am so claustrophobic,” she whispered. “Excuse me.” She stumbled away, and threw up. It was impossible to say what she threw up on, since there was nothing recognizable around her.

Lex stood beside her. “I think we need to get you to the hospital and get you checked out.”

Kim scowled at him. “Don’t be ridiculous.” She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth. “I’m nauseated because I’m so relieved to get out, but I feel fine.”

He smiled, his hands on his hips, and nodded in a funny way. “I appreciate that, Valenti, but you’re at least gonna need a couple of stitches. You’ve got a few cuts, you know, just here and there.”

“Do I?” She touched her face. Felt the smear of blood. “I had a pillow on my head.”

His nostrils flared. “Good thing.” He held out his arm, as if he were coaxing a small child. “Come on. Let’s get you to the hospital. There’s an ambulance over there.”

Kim felt dizzy, and put her hand on his arm. “Okay. I guess that would be good.”

He made a soft noise and gently cradled her head, kissed her temple. There was fierceness in the gesture, restraint in his strong palm and fingers. “God,” he whispered.

For one minute, she just let herself rest there, leaning on the hard rectangle of his forearms, his hand on her head, his breath warm on her face. Finally she said, “I have a headache. Do you have any ibuprofen?”

He made a noise between exasperation and a laugh. “Here’s your ride, honey,” he said, and helped her into the ambulance.

Chapter 18

When Kim finally emerged from the emergency room, where she’d been x-rayed and stitched and washed up, Lex was sitting in the waiting room. He was slumped against the wall, his head back, his eyes closed. A magazine was open on his lap.

Kim halted for a moment, stung by the coyote beauty of his lean face, the high cheekbones and strong nose. He probably had been a very gawky teenager. The thought made her feel tender.

“Hey,” she said, touching his knee.

He startled awake. “Oh! Hey!”

She smiled gently. “We gotta stop meeting like this, Luthor.”

He peered at her with concern. “How are you?”

“No great damages. A few stitches.” The ear—which had been torn open again, along with a six-inch gash along the top of her scalp from a sword of metal that had just missed her temple—was definitely sore. She had a headache still, but they’d given her some drugs to take before she went to bed. “Nothing broken. No concussion.”

“Good.” He stood. “Are you hungry?”

“Starving. I haven’t had a meal since—” she frowned, thinking back “—a tuna sandwich at lunch.”

“Can you hold on for about a half hour?”

“Sure, what’s up?”

He raised his brows, took her hand. “The reason I knew there might be a bomb at your house is because—”

“They got Scott.” Her stomach dropped. “Is he dead?”

“No. He’s in critical condition, in intensive care. I thought you’d want to see him.”

“Yeah.”

In silence, they rode up in an elevator. Lex reached for her hand, but Kim couldn’t bear it. Slid her hand out of his grasp.

“It’s not you,” she said.

“It’s okay.”

The hallway they entered was deeply hushed. Somewhere, someone wept quietly, and Kim could hear the soft beeping and breathing of machines. A guard sat outside Scott’s room, a paperback novel in his hands. Lex flashed his badge. “This is his partner.”

“Only one of you can go in at a time.”

Kim opened the door. A nurse in a pale blue scrub suit was recording vitals on a clipboard. She looked up as Kim entered, and gave her a grave smile. “He’s resting right now,” she said very quietly. “He won’t know you’re here.”

“I’ll know,” she said, and moved to the bed.

Scott was nearly unrecognizable. His face was black-and-blue and swollen, with cuts and scratches and stitches. One hand was bandaged in a way that made the bile rise in her throat. “Did he lose his hand?”

The nurse glanced toward the door. “You look like you were with him when it happened.”

“Not exactly. Two different bombs.”

The nurse had kind blue eyes and sturdy shoulders. “He lost the hand.”

“What else?”

“Skull fracture, broken ribs, crushed pelvis.” She paused. “Internal injuries.”

“Such as?”

“Lacerated liver, lost spleen…we had to induce a coma to keep his brain from swelling too much.”

Kim asked, “Is he going to live?”

“It’s a good sign that he’s made it this long,” the nurse said levelly.

“Thank you.”

The nurse hung the chart at the foot of his bed. On the way out, she squeezed Kim’s arm, just above the elbow. “Don’t stay long.”

When she’d left, Kim bent over him and pressed her lips to his battered face. “I’m here, Scott,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I thought I was doing the right thing, giving credit where credit was due.”

The monitors blipped steadily. Heart rate, respiration, blood pressure. Something dripping from an IV attached to his arm. The stump of his arm lay against the white blanket, somehow obscene.

“You better not die. I’ll be back here in the morning to read to you. We’ll get these bastards, Scott, I swear it.”

Behind her, Lex said, “C’mon. Let’s go get some sloppy fast food and get you off your feet.”

Kim squeezed Scott’s hand, and let herself be led away.

Instead of fast food, however, they went to a hotel, where their floor was heavily guarded. “Orders,” Lex said. “We can get room service.”

“We’re not in the same room, are we? Do you know what that would do to my reputation?”

“Not the same room.” His nostrils flared as he pushed open his door, and pointed. “But I made sure they were adjoining.”

“You don’t expect sex, I hope.”

“Not even.” He opened his side of the door, and gave her the card key to her room. “Go round and open that.”

When Kim went to her room and opened the connecting door from her side, he said, “I won’t sleep if I don’t know you’re safe.” And very gently, he touched her face. “Are you all right?”

Kim ducked her chin. “Fine. I keep telling you I’m fine, except that I’m starving and I want a shower to wash off all the crud.”

“Let’s order and then you can have a shower.”

“Did anyone think to get me some clothes to change into?”

Lex grinned, and pointed to a suitcase placed before the dresser. “One of the female officers went shopping for you.”

She shrugged out of her coat, flung it on the bed. “Is my condo completely destroyed?”

He hesitated. Then nodded. “’Fraid so.”

“At least I’m not dead.”

“What do you want to eat, darlin’?” He picked up the phone. “Cheeseburger? Fries? Pizza?”

“Food. I just want some food. With meat. Fat. Cheeseburger is probably excellent.” She was practically swaying where she sat, and made herself stand up and open the suitcase. As Lex asked for room service and started ordering food, she picked out a simple turquoise T-shirt and some sweats. No bras, but there were panties in several small sizes. Bless her, whoever she was. Good job.

The shower helped. As the dirt and sweat and stickiness washed away, she could let the day go, too. In the shower she could cry a little, let flow the tears for Scott and the trauma of being trapped and the loss of her home. She could do it privately in the shower, where no one would feel compelled to make her feel better or tell her it was okay.

It wasn’t okay.

When she emerged she didn’t bother to wipe the steam off the mirror. She didn’t want to know what she looked like. She simply pulled on the clothes, brushed her teeth and towel-dried her hair, then combed it so it fell in ringlets.

Lex had obviously not heard her emerge. She saw him through the open connecting door, sitting in the chair by the window, bent over with his head in his hands—a posture of utter despair or exhaustion.

She went toward him, padding quietly over the rug in her bare feet, and was nearly upon him when she somehow gave herself away. He raised his head. Met her eyes.

There was no need for words. Kim went to him, put her arms on his shoulders and sank down on his knee so he could wrap her up, pull her close to him. “That was bad,” he said hoarsely, and pressed his face into her shoulder.

Kim smoothed her hand over his back, laid her cheek against the top of his head. His short cut bristled into her cheek. “It’s over now.”

“Not in my head. I just keep seeing it blow, over and over and over.”

“How did you see it blow? I thought you were at the office.”

“I was on my way to your apartment when the news came about Scott, so I got on the phone with you immediately. I wasn’t more than five miles away.”

“Why didn’t you talk me through defusing that bomb?”

He raised his head abruptly. “Did you see your partner, Kim?”

“Yeah, but I defused the other one.”

“I was with you. I knew what we were dealing with. All I knew about this one was that one just like it had blown the front of Scott’s apartment across the street.”

“Oh.”

He took a breath, blew it out. His hand spread over her tummy. “I just…I know it’s…I just couldn’t have stood it….”

“I get it.” Kim put her hand around his jaw. Whiskers poked her fingers. “Thank you,” she whispered, and bent her head, and pressed her lips to his.

With a little explosion, her heart said, oh, good. He tasted of peppermint gum and salt, and he made a noise as she opened her mouth and let him in, his clever, hungry tongue, and his hand gripped her shoulder tight.

Kim said lightly, “Ow!”

He pulled back in a rush, and she grinned. “The shoulder is sore.”

“Oh.” His eyes slid down. “Where should I put my hands then? Show me a place that isn’t sore.”

“How about—” she guided his hand to her left breast “—here?”

“That works for me,” he said, and pulled her down to his mouth again.

Me, too, Kim thought, arching into his palm, feeling the need for release building up, burning in her as he dragged a thumbnail over her nipple. She pressed closer, opened her mouth to the full thrust of his tongue, and pressed her thigh closer to the erection that was nudging her leg. He made a low noise, pushed his hand under her shirt, to bare skin.

A sharp knock sounded on the door. “Room service.”

They parted, but slowly, dazedly. “I don’t think we can do this, can we?” he asked.

“Let’s eat and then see.”

“I don’t want—”

“Luthor, stop it. I’m not a delicate little flower.”

He laughed. “Believe me, I know that.” He pushed her off his lap. “Then let me get that, will ya? I’m starving.”

They ate their supper and watched reruns of Cheers on television, and drank root beer out of the soda machines down the hall. It helped. Kim felt the shaky sense of disorientation leave her as food and her senses grounded her in the now.

Conversationally, she said, “You know, I have no idea where I’m going to live!” And then, “Oh, shit! I’ve got to call my mother right this minute.” She hopped up, fully intending to go get her purse, and thus her cell phone, but both had, of course, been blown up. “I don’t have a cell phone anymore.”

“You can use mine.”

“That’s all right. I’ll use the landline. I just—” She took a breath. “I guess it’s just sinking in, a little at a time. I don’t have stuff anymore.”

He gave her a sympathetic look, which was better than trying to offer condolences. He forked a dark green, dewy piece of steamed broccoli and admired it. “You had a big pile of knicky-knacky things under a table in your study. They’re okay.”

Kim nodded. “Cool. Thanks.” She went to the other room and dialed her mother. “I’m fine, Mom,” she said.

“What happened this time?”

“Oh, so you haven’t seen the news today. Good. There was…um…a bomb in my apartment.”

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” her mother exclaimed. “You’ve got to find some other work, girl.”

“We’ll talk about that another day. I’m too tired tonight. I just wanted to give you the number where I am and let you know you shouldn’t worry. Write this down,” she said, and read her the number and room number of the hotel. “I’ll be here for a little while, at least a few days. I’m probably not going back to the apartment.”

“Come stay here.”

“Mom. No way. Put you guys all in danger? I don’t think so.” She remembered that she’d promised to bring Scott there for dinner on Sunday, and the thought made her ache. “My partner was badly injured, Mom. Can you tell Nana to put him on her prayer lists? Scott Shepherd.”

“Sure, baby. So how are you staying safe?”

“They have guards all over. The man who was in Chicago is here, too, right next door.”

“Oh, that’s good! Lex, right?”

How did she remember things like that? “Yeah. Don’t get any ideas. I’m not marrying anybody, all right?”

“Okay, baby, don’t get all excited. You can have your private life.”

“Ha! What’s that, a new ploy?”

Eileen laughed. “Keep me posted, honey, okay?”

“Will do, Ma. Love you.” She hung up and realized there was one more call she had to make. This was somewhat delicate, but she had to call Marc. She should have called before this, in case he’d seen the news coming in from Chicago yesterday, but it would be unforgivable to leave it now. For a moment, she dithered over what to say to Lex, then finally decided on the truth.

She walked to the doorway between their rooms. “I had a sort of boyfriend and I have to call him. It’s nothing serious, but it would be rude of me not to let him know I’m okay.”

Lex half smiled. “Okay.”

“I just thought I should tell you. In case the sound of the conversation is…well, intimate.”

His smile broadened. “Okay. Thanks.”

Kim waited a minute, then didn’t know what she was waiting for, and turned around and went back to the phone. She called Marc’s number and it picked up on the third ring. “Hi, this is Marc Spinuzzi. I’m away on assignment in Peru until October 20. You may leave a message with my agent at 555-0931 if you have urgent material, otherwise, leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

He checked messages when he could, mainly to keep the voice mail from overflowing. When the tone sounded, Kim said, “Hi, Marc. You probably haven’t seen the news, but sooner or later you’ll hear that I’ve been mixed up in some high-profile events. I just wanted to let you know that I’m okay. I lost my cell phone, and my apartment is…um…messed up, so I didn’t want you to worry.”

She couldn’t think what else to say. He was a good guy, but he wasn’t her guy. Anymore. “Take care,” she said, and hung up.

When she padded back into the other room, Lex had put his plate aside and was stretched out on the bed, his head propped up on pillows. “Everything okay?”

She nodded.

“Why don’t you go to bed, Valenti? You’re dead on your feet.”

For a long moment, she looked at him. “Can I lie down beside you? Just for…companionship?”

Without a word, he opened his arm, made a space. Kim fell into it, settled her head on his shoulder and let go of a breath. “Thank you.”

Beneath her ear, his voice rumbled. “No problem.”

The round of his shoulder was exactly perfect for her head. Kim rested her palm over his ribs. “Once again, I would really love to make love to you, but my body is too exhausted.”

“There’s time. Go to sleep.”

“I just wanted you to know—”

“I know, Kim. Sleep, sweetheart. You’ve had a long day, and I’ve got your back.”

Only then did she close her eyes. “Thank you,” she whispered. As she drifted off, a television commercial about scrubbing bubbles came on, and the song entered her drifting state. There was something she should be remembering, something important, something to do with those bubbles.

Whatever it was, was lost as she fell into the ocean of sleep, where nothing hurt and no one was critically injured and no one had died.

But only a minute into her sleep, she jolted awake, pulling away violently from the warmth and comfort of lying with Lex. “What am I doing?” she said, more to herself than him.

The sudden movement made her feel dizzy, and she swayed. Lex took her arm. “Hey. You okay? What’s going on?”

She waved her hand. “I can’t sleep with you. It’s one of my rules.”

“Rules?”

Blinking, she nodded. “To keep things from getting too complicated. No sleeping together.”

“I see.” He sounded amused, and she glared at him.

“What?”

“Sweetheart, you are so wiped out, you can’t even see straight. I’m not gonna bother you, but I think considering all you’ve been through the past few days, would it be so bad to just let go and let someone hold you?”

Kim wasn’t sure. He made it sound so reasonable and obvious. But was there a trick in it? She couldn’t think of one. She continued to peer at him, half-blind with exhaustion.

He slid down, pulled her arm, and she fell, like a stage hypnotist’s subject, into a slump against his body. His arms went around her, making her feel safe and comfortable, and she really just couldn’t think of a reason not to sleep with him.

As in sleep-sleep, not sex-sleep.

His body was lean and he smelled just right, and she put her hand on his flat belly. “You’re kind of skinny, you know.”

“Yeah. I eat and eat and it never gets better.”

“It’s all right. It’s not a bad thing. I was just noticing.” She traced the edge of his rib. “Is being skinny for guys like being plump for girls?”

He covered her hand with his own, spread his fingers over hers. “Pretty much.”

“That was so awful today,” she said in a hoarse voice. “Being trapped, like a coffin, like dying. I kept telling myself that it would be worse to be at the bottom of a building after an earthquake, and I thought of my brother getting beheaded, which was really a whole lot worse, and it didn’t help.”

“Your brother was beheaded?”

“Yeah. In Iraq.”

“I’m so sorry, Kim.”

“Thanks.” She nestled closer, taking comfort and relief in the feel of his rib cage, his warmth. “I’m not there now,” she said.

“No.” His lips pressed warm against her temple. “You’re safe now.”

In her dream, Kim was kicking something, fighting her way out of a big sack of darkness. She could not breathe. Her voice made no sound. She flailed awake, screaming, sitting straight up.

Into a disorienting darkness she didn’t recognize.

“Hey, hey, hey,” said a voice, and a hand was on her back. “You’re safe, honey. You’re safe.”

Lex. Hotel.

“Sorry,” she whispered, and got up to get a drink of water.

In the bathroom, she turned on the light and reached for the water glass, wincing as she caught sight of her face, bruised and battered and swollen and discolored. “Cute, Valenti,” she said, and drank deeply.

“You all right?” Lex called.

She stared at herself in the mirror. “Yeah, sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.” She padded out into the bedroom. “I’ll go sleep in the other room.”

“Kim.”

“What?”

“Come here.”

For a minute, she hesitated. “I still don’t want to make love, Lex.”

“Will you let your guard down just one tiny bit, darlin’? I am not the bad guy.”

She took a breath, let it out. Walked silently to the side of the bed. “What?”

He tugged her hand and she tumbled into the bed. “Lex, I—”

His mouth covered hers, that full, beautiful mouth. Kim felt something in her let go, and her arms lifted, went around his shoulders. “That’s it,” he whispered, and pressed their bodies together. She loved the way he felt, long and lean and strong, his big hands sliding down her hips, up again.

She didn’t object when he tugged upward on her T-shirt and skimmed it over her head, and pressed his naked chest to her breasts. “That feels good,” she whispered.

“Oh, yeah.” His hands moved on her, smooth and easy. Kim opened her hands and stroked the glossy skin of his back, opening to the thrust of his tongue in her mouth.

“I changed my mind,” she said, and wrapped her legs around his hips, and rocked against his erection.

“It’s not necessary,” he said over her lips. “What you need is the touch. It grounds you back here on this planet, in this life.”

“Really.” There was enough light that she could make out the ghostly edge of his cheekbone. “Is this bomb squad lore?”

“It is.” He moved against her subtly, clasped her breast in his hand. “You can eat, too.” Bent his head to her nipple and nibbled lightly. “Anything physical.”

“Seems like having sex would be the best, then.” She pushed her hands into the back of his sweats, smoothed her hands along his butt. “Nice,” she whispered, and kissed his shoulder, his neck. Lingered along his earlobe. “We can have that longest, best, sweatiest sex another time. Maybe tonight, I’d settle for the regular, ordinary kind.”

“Regular?” he said with a smile in his voice. “Not with me, Wind Talker.”

“Show me.”

He slid her pants from her, and her panties, and Kim spread her legs for his long fingers to glide inside and coax her to ripeness, when she said, “Now, please,” and he came home, the heft and length of him spearing her to the earth, to the physical, to the now. She was grounded in sweat and tongues and tangled legs, centered in the crush of his chest and his beard scraping over her chin, and the slow, fierce thrust of him inside of her, aligned by a violent orgasm that split through her, scalp to toes, and radiated from their joined bodies to her elbows, her knees, made her clasp him hard to her body, biting into his shoulder. He came then, too, rocking hard against her, his voice guttural and deep against her ear, as rich as fertile earth.

Kim breathed against him for a long time, taking pleasure in the ease of his shoulders, the familiarity of his breathing on her ear. “Not regular,” she said at last. “But lovely.”

“Mmm,” he said, and she could hear him floating away. His lips moved on her neck. “Mmm.”

She chuckled. “Get off me before you fall asleep and squash me.”

“Okay. In a minute.” He moved against her, squeezed her bottom. “You have the sweetest little body. I loved finding out you were so curvy.”

“Thank you.”

“The pleasure was mine,” he said, and sighed, moving away.

Kim shifted, started to stand up. He grabbed her arms. “No, you don’t.”

“I was just going to the bathroom.”

“No, you’ll go to bed in the other room, and I want you here.”

Kim felt a pang. “I don’t sleep over,” she said. But she didn’t pull away when he steadily pulled on her body, tugging her down to him, close to his body, tucked in his arms.

“You are tonight.”

She thought about moving, but it suddenly seemed too much trouble to disentangle herself from the net of his arms and legs. His body, damp and long, cradled her perfectly and he tucked her close like a stuffed animal. “I guess it won’t hurt just this once.”

Lex was already asleep.

She smiled. How like a man. Funny how little she minded this time.

Chapter 19

Saturday, October 9

In spite of the fact that it was Saturday, Kim and Lex arrived at the agency by eight. There were few regular personnel around, but a core group of FBI, CIA and NSA operatives had gathered in the conference room. Their job was to focus on and discuss the current situation with the Berzhaan terrorist cell.

As they walked down the hall, Lex paused at Scott’s desk. “I’m going to see what he was tracking down yesterday. He seemed pretty sure of some site possibilities.”

“Sure.” Carrying a latte from Starbucks, Kim popped her head into the conference room. “Do I have time to make a phone call to the hospital? I want to find out how my partner is doing.”

Agent Rosen from the Washington branch of the FBI, a tall, craggy-faced man in his fifties, nodded gravely. “We’re just getting everyone up to speed. Take your time.”

“Thanks. I won’t be long.” She dropped her things on the desk, glanced at a small pile of pink reminder notes, most dealing with various e-mail files she needed to examine for the case and picked up the phone to dial the hospital.

Scott’s condition was critical but stable, the same as the night before. She gritted her teeth, thinking of his missing hand, and wanted to kill someone.

Which wasn’t the answer, either. Mansour was seeking revenge for his lost family, killing because those he loved had been killed. If she wanted to kill in revenge, too, when would it ever end? Someone had once said, if you keep following an eye for an eye, pretty soon everyone is blind.

She wanted to stop the violence. Stop the maiming and injury of innocents. Not create more.

Quickly, she opened the e-mail files that had been flagged and skimmed them. There was a lot of work to be done today. First, she’d go to the meeting, see what the team had come up with, then she would come back and sort through this material.

Picking up the file she and Scott had assembled yesterday, she went to the conference room and entered quietly, sliding into an open chair that was as far as she could get from Lex. The one thing she didn’t want was a rumor mill churning out gossip about the two of them.

She counted seven agents altogether, two women, five men. Kim had worked with three of them before. She didn’t recognize the others. Agent Rosen had tacked a giant map of the United States on the wall and was busy sticking bubble-head pins in various locations.

When he turned around, he spied Kim and said, “Good, we’re all here now. I’ll introduce you all. This is Kim Valenti, who originally broke the code and tracked the terrorist cell to Chicago.”

A ripple of interest and respect went around the table. Kim lifted a hand. “My partner, Scott Shepherd, also broke the code—though I do wish I hadn’t said so publicly.”

“We’re all very sorry to hear of his injuries. How is he this morning?”

She shrugged. “About the same. Not good. Let’s get these guys, huh?”

Rosen introduced the rest of the group, assembled for their expertise in various areas. Lex was the explosives expert, Kim the cryptographer and linguist. Others on the team included a structural engineer, a security officer and an expert on the culture and religion of the country of Berzhaan.

Rosen was reviewing the information collected thus far—the same material Scott, Lex and Kim had been reviewing the day before. He was reviewing the possible targets, and sticking pins in them. “There are any number of large parades taking place on Monday, which is Columbus Day, and we don’t really know exactly what this cell might do, or if there are multiple targets. Thanks to Agent Ramirez—” a small dark man nodded “—we’ve pinpointed the most dramatic parades in various cities. We’re particularly interested in those where the clash between Italian and Native American communities is pretty fierce, year after year, because security will be focused on keeping the peace with that, and a suicide bomber can do a lot of damage in a big crowd.” He pushed pins into the map, narrating aloud the spots: “Denver, Seattle, Minneapolis.”

Kim scribbled notes.

Rosen continued, sticking pins into cities where there were important military or transportation bridges: Coronado Bay in San Diego, Houston Ship Channel Bridge, Bay and Golden Gate Bridges, George Washington. “Any others you can think of?”

“How about the Lenny Zakim Bridge in Boston?” said the structural engineer. “It’s pretty dramatic, and well-known.”

“Right.” He stuck a pin in.

There was more discussion about the various possibilities, until the map was bristling like a porcupine. “Obviously, we’re going to have to narrow this down some. Let’s go back through the materials we have and see what stands out.”

Kim glanced at Lex to see if he would share anything from the thick file in front of him. He shook his head minutely and shifted his eyes toward the door. She understood the message: they would discuss it alone.

“I have a giant pile of e-mails that came in over the past twenty-four hours,” Kim said. “I’m wondering if it might be better to see if we can track down the headquarters of this group before they make their move.”

Rosen nodded, as did several others. “We know they were in Chicago. Any indications of other locales?”

Dee Hazzard, the cultural anthropologist said, “We’ve been tracking a man out of Portland, John Hallam. He spent much of his youth in the Middle East with his father and has known ties to a rebel sect connected to the Keminis. He was arrested twice in connection with various criminal activities both in the U.S. and abroad. He resurfaced unexpectedly three days ago, in the hostage situation at UBS.” She pulled out his picture and held it up.

Kim recognized the manager of the station the night Mansour took over. “He escaped that night, with Mansour and Dunst, didn’t he?”

“Yes. But we think he’s taken an Islamic name, Afzal Abd-Al-Aziz.”

Kim wrote the name down. “Hmm. He thinks well of himself—the name means superior and servant of the powerful. ”

“One of our agents thinks he might be living with a woman in Brooklyn.”

“Can’t we just go in there, then?”

“Not just yet. The woman is the daughter of a highly placed Saudi businessman who is easily offended, and the feds don’t want to cross him unless we have to.”

“Even if a bridge gets blown up?”

The woman shrugged a little.

Lex spoke up. “Shepherd had gone through a lot of material over the past week. He felt the terrorists were going to hit in several spots, but the main one will be the George Washington Bridge, on Columbus Day.”

Hazzard nodded. “It has the biggest American flag in the country. We need to get extra security up there.”

Something was bothering Kim about the entire discussion. What was off-kilter? “It’s almost like they’ve drawn us a map, don’t you think?”

Rosen pursed his lips. “That’s not uncommon.”

“True, but I think we’re dealing with someone here who is a lot smarter than the average bear. He’s determined to make a statement, and he’s not going to take a chance that we’ll figure it out before he gets there.”

“So, you think it won’t be a bridge?”

“I don’t know. I just think we need to be wary about jumping to conclusions.” She thought of Scott, thought of the hostages at the television station, of the men with their assault weapons. “These guys really want to do some damage—where can they do the most? Where will it be the most dramatic?”

“Excellent questions.” Rosen looked at his watch. “Let’s get busy and meet back here late this afternoon. No detail should go unnoticed. And in the meantime, I’ll get a man to alert the police in every city in the country that has a Columbus Day parade, both tomorrow and Monday. They need to be aware of moving vans, correct? Anything else that’s come up in the intelligence?”

“Denver is always a hot spot,” Kim said. “My partner is from there, and a reference to the American Indian Moment alerted him to the possibility of parades being targeted. AIM uses Denver as a showcase for their political objections to Columbus.”

“All right, let’s get to work, see what we can find out, turn up on all of this,” Rosen said. “I want a list of all the parades in the country, and anything unusual about any of them.”

“So, it’s bridges and Columbus Day now?” one agent asked. “How can we cover all those possibilities in one day?”

“We can’t,” Rosen said. “Let’s just do our best. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

Chapter 20

Back at her desk, Kim settled for a minute and stared at the computer screen. What were they missing? What link would lead them to the true targets in time to stop any violence?

“Look through the top to the middl’a things….”

Lex dropped into the chair beside the desk. “Hey. I don’t think it’s the bridge, either. Let’s toss it back and forth for a minute, d’you mind?”

“No.” She threw a pencil down on top of the papers. “Hallam—the American from the television station—is obviously a mastermind, and he’s mixed up with a very wealthy Saudi woman. Maybe that’s where the cash is coming from.”

“No doubt that’s at least some of it. It’s also seems that this—” he consulted his notes “—Richard Dunst is selling arms in Berzhaan. Arms deals are always worth a bundle.”

“That’s all fine, but it’s not solving the immediate problem, which is—where are these guys?”

“I don’t buy the Brooklyn connection,” Lex said. “It’s all just too pat.”

“I know. Like somebody is standing there, waving their arms saying, ‘Look over here! This is where we’re going to strike!’ They aren’t that obvious.” She flipped through some of the e-mails on her desk, skimming the highlighted information. “We have so little on Mansour, and he’s the real mastermind here.”

“What do you have?”

Kim punched a button on the computer and called up a file. She knew most of it, but didn’t want to miss anything. She reiterated the information Oracle had sent. “This is where we need to focus,” she said. “Mansour is going to take something down this weekend, and he’ll be smart about it.”

“I’d love to get my hands on the bastard.”

Kim thought of Scott, thought of being beneath the desk, nearly smothering, thought of the hostages in the television station. “He’s very dangerous,” she agreed. “We need to get him.” She tucked her hair behind one ear. “You can use Scott’s computer—let’s see what we can gather about Mansour himself, and see if we can get inside his mind.”

“Is there a profiler on this case?”

“That’s Hazzard,” Kim said.

“All right.” He rolled up the papers in his hand and popped her lightly on the hand. “Talk at you later.”

The first thing Kim did was to head for AA.gov, the Athena Academy Web site, and hope she could get some information that way. Because her home terminals had been destroyed, she didn’t know how to get in the back door without leaving the agency. The footprint technologies were so high for security reasons that Kim could not—as she had from Lex’s apartment—access the Oracle site. Instead, she posted an innocuous note on the Athena bulletin board.

TO: All

FROM: Kim Valenti, Class of 199—

SUBJECT: Need info on Fathi bin Amin Mansour Urgent—need anything anyone can deliver on above named Berzhaan native. Educated in England, now in U.S. Present at UBC television hostage situation, suspected of other plots. Currently on the loose.

She added her phone number and e-mail address, and hoped it would be enough to attract the attention of Delphi, who could then perhaps call or give further instructions.

In the meantime, she sorted through the information and read the file for Mansour one more time. The information from Oracle was included:

Mansour is prodigiously intelligent. Advanced degrees from Oxford in chemical engineering and European history. Mother and two brothers killed in guerilla raids by the Keminis four years ago, for which he holds the West responsible. He is connected to several bombings. His whereabouts are unknown. (See attached photograph, taken in London, 2001.)

Kim flipped through the rest—a transcribed text from the television station takeover, a dossier from Interpol, showing connections to Chicago.

Nothing they didn’t already know.

Lex suddenly appeared. “Want to know where the candidates are speaking this weekend?”

Kim raised her eyebrows. “Sure.”

“Baltimore and Washington, D.C.”

“Damn.” She chewed the inside of her cheek. “I really oughta take myself off this case right now. My partner was nearly killed. My apartment has been blown up, and now my little sisters are on that parade route.”

“You can’t get off the case now, Valenti. We need you.”

“I know.” She rubbed her face, flipped another page over on the dossier in front of her and stared at the transcript of her conversation with Karl Gibson, the police officer in New York City. A lost piece of information slid into place suddenly. “Hang on,” she said to Lex. “I think I just figured something out.” Urgently, she dialed the number for Gibson. When he answered, she said, “Hello, Mr. Gibson. Kim Valenti from the NSA. Quick question—what was the name of the tire shop you raided near the George Washington bridge?”

“Hold on. I can get that for you in two seconds.”

Kim waited.

“Here it is—Hafiz’s Tires.”

“Thank you very much, Mr. Gibson. You might have saved the day.”

“Hope so. It’d be the easiest save ever.”

She chuckled, put the phone down and picked it up again. “This is probably too easy,” Kim said, “but you never know.” She flipped her Rolodex and punched in some numbers.

A hated voice at the other end of the line said, “This is Dana Milosovich. Please leave your number at the sound of the tone. If this is an emergency, dial 326.”

“Damn.” She couldn’t technically call it an emergency.

“What’s up?” Lex said.

“I’m looking for the name of a tire shop owned by one of the terrorists in Chicago.” She picked up the piece of paper. “Any chance you know of a Hafiz Tires?”

Lex raised his brows. “I actually do. It’s not far from the UBC station. Why?”

“We need to see if there’s a Hafiz Tires in any of our targeted locations, especially in Baltimore and D.C.” She nodded toward a chair by her desk. “Sit down. The fastest way to do this is the Internet.”

Into Google, Kim typed “Hafiz Tires,” and entered it.

A list of six matches came up. “There it is,” she said grimly. “Hafiz Tires on—” she rolled her eyes “—President Street.”

Lex was already on his feet.

“The parade goes right by there,” Kim said, standing. “Let’s take a look.”

Lex stuck his head in the conference room. “We’ve got a lead to check out. Have backup ready for our call.”

Kim drove since she knew the area. Traffic on the freeways was not heavy, and they made good time into town, but as they moved into downtown Baltimore their luck thinned. The Inner Harbor area, always popular with tourists, was doubly clogged. “This didn’t used to be such a huge thing,” she said, tapping her fingers against the steering wheel. “Past couple of years, everybody in the neighborhood has gone all out—breakfasts, spaghetti dinners, Sons of Italy and all the beauty queens.”

“It’s pretty crowded.”

Someone honked behind her, and Kim made a gesture with her hands. “I can only move as fast as the traffic, buddy.”

Lex chuckled. “Getting a little aggressive out here in the old neighborhood, sister.”

“Ha, ha.” Spying an alley, she made a sudden decision. “I bet I can get us out of this car in three minutes.” She turned into the narrow alley, which looked like a dead end. When she eased by a cluster of Dumpsters, however, there was a second alley off to the right. “Aha!” she cried in satisfaction. “One of my brothers used to have a girlfriend who lived in that building,” she said, and pointed to a series of windows. The alley opened into a lot behind a small grocer’s, packed with cars. From the other side, it would have appeared to be full, but Kim eased into a spot next to an SUV. “Victory,” she said. “And we’re not even stuck here.”

“Good work.”

“We’re going to have to hike a little ways,” she said, climbing out of the car. A chill wind bit through her coat. She shivered a little, then zipped it up.

“You’re the boss.” He zipped up his coat, too, and pulled a cap out of his pocket, tugging it down over his ears. As they came out onto the street, with a view of the harbor barely visible through breaks in the buildings, he said, “Nice.”

“It can be.”

Kim turned, turned again, led them down side streets that were less crowded. The area was noisy with voices and children, anticipation. They passed a restaurant advertising a pancake breakfast, and the line was still into the street. Kim inhaled. “That smells great.”

They took a left onto President Street. About a block down, Kim suddenly stopped, looking at the building on the corner. “This is it.” It was painted a sunny yellow, and had been neatly painted with the name of the shop in English with Arabic flourishes and a little icon of a small man smiling and rolling a tire along. “Hafiz’s Tires. This wasn’t here the last time I was in the neighborhood.” The showroom area was dark, and a sign in the window said Closed For The Holiday Weekend. She looked up at the multipaned windows. A light was on inside. “Someone may be in there.”

“Come on,” Lex said, and they walked quickly around the corner, toward the back of the shop.

Kim moved along behind Lex as he went into the alley. A window faced the alley and Lex started to make a leap for the windowsill, then swore and held up his injured hand. “You’re going to have to look.” He knelt, making a step out of his leg, and Kim climbed on it, reached for the ledge, and slowly pulled herself up to peek in the window.

What she could see was a garage area, wide-open, with three men clustered around something in the middle of the room. She recognized two of them—one was Mansour; the other was Ugly Face, from the television station. Another knot, mostly younger men, Berzhaanians by the look of them, stood to one side, smoking. A moving van, painted yellow, was parked in one of the bays. Her stomach flipped.

Kim lowered herself. “It’s our guys, all right.” She brushed off her palms. “And I think they’ve got a bomb in there.”

“How many of them?”

“Three, plus four foot soldiers.” She described the scenario inside.

He met her eyes. “Call for backup.” He reached behind himself and pulled out a pistol.

Kim got out her cell phone and quietly relayed what they’d found and the need for stealth.

“They’re on the way.” Her breath came out of her mouth in puffs of fog.

Lex moved from foot to foot, his injured right hand tucked under his coat. The tip of his nose had grown red with the cold. “If there are any armed bombs in there, this could get ugly,” he said.

“Just don’t send me to a corner to cover my head with pillows,” she said, her eyes on the front of the building.

“Are you going to forgive me for that?”

“Probably,” she said. “Eventually.”

“That sounds promising.”

Kim looked at him. “You know, I saw what the bomb did to Scott, but he didn’t know it was there. He pulled the door and got blown up. I would have appreciated the chance to try and disarm the one in my condo.”

“I know. But let me tell you, darlin’, I wouldn’t have been able to disarm it. The first rule in dealing with bombs is to know your limits.”

Kim nodded. Maybe she was being a little touchy. “This is really too close to home for my tastes. My sisters are going to be in that parade on Monday, and these guys might have killed them. That makes me very angry.”

“I can understand that.”

She looked around, from the treetops glowing against the sky, to the hint of water in the air from the harbor. “Why here, anyway? Why this parade, why not something more important?”

“Your problem, Valenti, is that you’re expecting terrorists to be reasonable and think like the general population. Fanaticism is the opposite of reasonable.” His jaw tightened. “I remember when there were always a bunch of Irish kids getting killed. And the Rwandans in the lake…how many people were slaughtered in that debacle? A lot.”

Kim nodded.

“So you just say to yourself, these guys aren’t reasonable, and you do your best to keep them from doing any damage.”

“Right.” She took a breath. “Well, Superman, you ready to get the bad guy?”

“Don’t do anything stupid, all right? I don’t want to have to kick your ass when we’re finished here.”

She gave him a sideways smile. “No promises. If anybody bumps my ear, they’re dead.”

For a long moment, he looked down at her. “Ah, hell, Valenti, why’d you have to go and get under my skin, huh?” He looped his arm around her neck and kissed her, hard.

Suddenly, the idea of him getting hurt in there was not acceptable. “I’ll check on backup.”

He let her go. “Do it.”

Kim dialed the office and put the phone to her ear, stepping away to look around the building.

Suddenly, the side door opened. Kim simultaneously slammed the folding phone to its off position and dived behind the corner of the building, gesturing fiercely to Lex. She put her finger to her mouth.

Three of the younger men spilled out, their backs to Kim And Lex, talking quietly among themselves, as if it were just an ordinary day and they were going out to get some food for the transmission crew. She could only catch a word or two, their voices thinning as they walked away.

Maybe, she thought, there was no bomb. Maybe it was a headquarters of some sort, a rendezvous place.

Lex pushed around her and grabbed the door before it closed entirely.

She nodded. She eased in first, slipping behind the truck. The three men in the center of the warehouse were helping a young man, a boy, really, into a vest with bulging pockets.

She looked over her shoulder just as one of the young men who’d left stepped back in and charged at Lex.

Jumping out of sight, Kim looked around the immediate environment for a weapon. A heavy steel bar was propped against the wall and she grabbed it. She peeked around the truck in time to see the youth on the ground, unconscious or dead, and Lex dashing into the open, yelling at the top of his voice, gun trained on the startled terrorists. Lex knocked one down and away from the boy before he could move, his gun pointed at the sober-eyed Mansour, who raised his hands.

None of them saw Kim, coming from the other side as Ugly Face drew a gun. She was not at all unhappy to have to slam him with the bar across the shoulders. He fell hard and the gun skittered across the concrete floor. She knelt and grabbed it, just as Ugly started to clamber to his feet. With a sharp kick to the chest, she knocked him down.

He dived away from her, and remembering the struggle in the television station, Kim took no chances. She slammed the butt of the gun down on his head, and he collapsed, unconscious.

“Hands on your head!” she cried to the boy in the loaded flak jacket. Slowly, he obeyed, his eyes sullen and liquid. In Arabic, she added, “And, boy, don’t you move one muscle, do you hear me?”

His nostrils flared, but he stood there without moving.

And then backup arrived in force.

Ugly Face looked as if he had a concussion. Mansour would not meet her eyes.

She’d get to that in a minute.

First, with her eyes on the truck in front of her, she strode over to Lex. “Cell phone, please.”

He pulled it out, his own eyes on the mountains of explosives wired to the truck. He sighed as Kim punched in numbers. “Good God.”

Kim dialed the office and asked to be put through to the team leader. “Agent Rosen,” she said. “Better get some teams nationwide to check out all tire chops called Hafiz’s Tires. Pronto.” As she spoke, the third man in the trio was boring holes through her with dark, angry eyes. “Hafiz, I presume?” she said to him.

He spit on the ground at her feet. Kim smiled faintly. “You have no idea how glad I am to bring you down. And how pleased I am that you could not martyr yourself killing innocents.”

“There are no innocent Americans.” The comment came from Mansour, standing next to Hafiz with calm dignity, his large eyes liquid and fierce in a well-cut face. “All bear the guilt of murder in Berzhaan.”

“You know,” she said, tucking her hair away from her face, “I am sorry for your loss, Mr. Mansour. I can see it caused you terrible pain, and I’m sorry you had to endure it. I’ve lost someone, too, and sometimes his face keeps me up at night.” She frowned. “But can you tell me how you killing my sisters will bring yours back? How is it ever going to make anything better?”

Maybe she’d hoped for a flicker of repentance, or guilt, or sorrow. “Ask your country,” he said. “Ask them when they will stop funding rebels to kill our wives and daughters and sisters. When they stop, we will stop.”

Kim shook her head. She glanced at the third man, the stiff-faced man she’d struggled with at the television station. “And you—may you burn forever, wherever it is.”

He didn’t bother with a reply, and the police led the trio and the young boy away.

Lex said beside her, “Nice try. Now, let’s get to work.”

“What kind of bombs do we have today? Bomb caps? Time pencils? Plastic? What?”

He grinned. “C’mon, little girl, let me show you.” His eyebrow wiggled.

Chapter 21

Election Day

After a dinner of homemade raviolis and at least a quart of red wine, and rolls as fluffy as cotton candy, and bowls of buttered carrots and green beans, Kim sat on the couch in her mother’s living room and tried to keep from groaning.

On her right, Lex had no such qualms. He sprawled, all six foot four of him, limbs akimbo, across the couch, rubbing his belly every so often. “Mama Eileen, that was so good.” He reached out and snared her hand as she was about to pass, and kissed her knuckles. “Thank you.”

Kim gave him a look. “No,” she said to forestall the next question. “I will not marry you.”

“What if I cooked like your mama?”

“Not even then.”

On her left, Scott chuckled. He was very thin, and had not fully recovered his strength after being in the hospital for nearly three weeks, but he was on the mend. The doctors expected it would be at least a year before he was back to his former health, but Scott had vowed to make it six months. She believed he could do it.

A graphic came on the television they were all watching. “It appears we will not have to hold back our prediction of who will be the next president of the United States,” the anchor said. “After tallying votes in just six states, incumbent president cannot hope to surpass the electoral votes now amassed by opponent, Gabriel Monihan. The race goes to the new president of the United States of America, President Gabriel Monihan.”

Kim jumped up and did a little dance around the room. “Whoohoo! The bastard is gone!”

“Kim!” her mother said.

She laughed and kissed her sisters on the cheek. “Cut it out!” cried Jenni.

“You‘ve never heard that before, huh?”

Behind her, Lex whistled and clapped, and she gave him a kiss on the cheek, too. Then Scott, who looked disgruntled said, “We can’t have a president who is that young. It’s just not right.”

Kim grinned and kissed him, too. “You’ll just have to be the most handsome president ever, not the youngest.”

He winked.

“In other news,” the announcer said, “terrorists suspected of nefarious activities within the U.S. have been arraigned in Washington, D.C.”

Kim turned to see the photo of the elegant Mansour flash over the screen. Video of him in orange prison clothes, his hair too long, made her sad. “He had so much potential,” she said. “And how did he use it? Killing people, destroying the world instead of trying to make it better.”

Eileen jumped up, wary as always when the subject turned to terrorism and soldiers. “Anyone want coffee?”

“Let me help you,” Scott said, and hauled himself to his feet.

Behind Kim, Lex said quietly, “Come sit down, honey.”

The pain was finally starting to emerge, like a splinter working its way to the surface—for the past few weeks, Kim had been overflowing with grief for her brother, Jason. It was healthier than the bottled-up agony she’d felt before that, but it still wasn’t comfortable, and something about Mansour always made her think of her lost, beloved brother.

She sat down and rested in the circle of comfort Lex provided. “It gets easier,” he said. “I promise.”

“I know,” Kim returned and put her hand on his long and sexy thigh. “Thanks.”

“No problem,” he said, and settled his hand in a comforting way over her once-torn ear. It was protective and sweet and she appreciated it.

“You’re all right, Lex Luthor,” Kim said.

“You, too, Wind Talker.”

TARGET

CINDY DEES

Published by Silhouette Books
America’s Publisher of Contemporary Romance

Special thanks and acknowledgment
are given to Cindy Dees for her contribution
to the ATHENA FORCE series.

This book is dedicated to women everywhere
who work in their own way—as mothers, professionals
or role models—toward making this world a safer place
for all our children. Thank you for your vision
and your quiet heroism.

Contents

3:00 A.M.

4:00 A.M.

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6:00 A.M.

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12:00 P.M.

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5:00 P.M.

6:00 P.M.

7:00 P.M.

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11:00 P.M.

12:00 A.M.

1:00 A.M.

2:00 A.M.

3:00 A.M.

Diana Lockworth lurched bolt upright in bed. She blinked, disoriented, at the blanket of darkness around her. Something had ripped her from a deep, dreaming slumber to full consciousness. But what? Even the street outside was quiet, deserted at this hour. Silence pressed against her eardrums. Nothing.

Sheesh. She was letting work get to her again. But then paranoia was the logical price of sitting around day after day hunting for conspiracies for Uncle Sam. At least Don Quixote had real windmills to joust with. She tilted at shadows and innuendoes, vague rumors and possibilities. Maybe that was the problem. The reason her predictions had gone sour lately. She’d moved so far away from concrete reality in her thinking that she could no longer tell the difference between the possible and the actual.

She flopped back down on her pillow in disgust. The telltale whirl of disjointed thoughts in her head did not bode well for getting back to sleep anytime soon. Crud. She propped herself up on an elbow to plump her squashed eiderdown pillow. And heard a noise. Either the biggest mouse in the history of mankind was in her house, or else someone had just bumped into something in her living room.

Intruder. Autonomic responses programmed into her relentlessly since she was a child kicked in. Adrenaline surged through her veins, sending her brain into high gear and preparing her body to fight. She rolled fast, flinging herself off the far side of the bed. Counted to sixty in the thunderous silence. Nobody opened her door. But no doubt about it, someone was out there. She could feel it.

She reached up onto her nightstand for the telephone, her hands shaky, and dialed 9-1-1. She whispered into the receiver, “There’s someone in my house.”

The 9-1-1 dispatcher efficiently asked her address, name, physical description, and current location in her home. He was in the middle of telling her the police would be there in under five minutes when Diana heard another noise. The distinctive metallic squeak of her computer chair as someone sat down in it. She heard a faint, rapid clicking. Typing! On her computer full of sensitive and highly dangerous material.

She pushed upright, the phone forgotten, her bare feet silent on the hardwood floor. On bent knees, she moved catlike to the bedroom door. She opened it inch by cautious inch. A fast spin out into the hall. Empty. She plastered herself against the wall and tiptoed toward a blue glow emanating from the computer workstation in her living room. She leaped forward, surging into the living room on a wave of fury and fear.

One male, dressed in black. A ski mask over his face. He jumped to his feet and spun to face her in a fighting crouch. Wiry body. Hands held open and ready at shoulder height. Weight centered and balanced. A trained martial artist. Fortunately, so was she. In Krav Maga, the deadly system developed by Israeli Defense Forces for street fighting. Dirty, deadly street fighting.

She settled herself before the intruder. He rocked on the balls of his feet, noncommittal about attacking. She didn’t want this guy to flee. She wanted to know who he was. Why he was poking around on her computer. She needed him to stand and fight.

“You think you can take me?” she taunted. “Think again. You’re not man enough.”

The guy snarled audibly. Excellent.

“Go ahead. Try me,” she urged.

Another growl, but no attack.

She laughed derisively. And that did it. The guy came in with a fast roundhouse kick aimed at her face. Impressive in a Bruce Lee movie, but completely impractical in a real fight. She ducked under it easily. While he was still regaining his footing from the kick, she stepped in and stiff-armed him in the sternum. He staggered backward. But to his credit, he came out swinging. Fast hands. She blocked three quick jabs, but took a glancing hit from the fourth on the nose. Pain radiated outward from it, making her eyeballs ache. She blinked fast to clear the involuntary tears oozing from her eyes. And as she did so, she lashed out with her foot toward his knee. A solid hit. The guy cried out. Staggered. But righted himself and charged.

He was too close. She couldn’t avoid the tackle. They both went down on the floor. She got an elbow between them, but the guy was pissed off now. He went for her neck with his gloved hands. She heaved and came around hard with her elbow. And clocked him in the jaw. The guy reeled back. A mighty shove and he was off her. She jumped to her feet.

“Who do you work for?” she demanded.

The guy’s only answer was a nifty back-bend-and-jump-to-his-feet move. Damn. She should’ve stood on his head while she had him down. He launched at her with a flurry of kicks and punches that forced her to give ground. She banged into the coffee table. Knocked it over. Stumbled over it and righted herself barely in time to get a hand up as his foot came flying at her face with lethal intent. She grabbed his ankle and yanked, using the momentum of his kick to propel him into the sofa. But she was off balance herself and crashed to the floor flat on her back. She rolled, pulled her feet under her and shoved vertical. And felt faintly nauseous as the room spun around her. She saw double images of her assailant bouncing off the cushions and spinning to face her. She huffed hard a couple times to clear her head and focus.

His gaze flicked over her shoulder for an instant. Toward the front door. Either he had a partner who’d just walked in and she was hosed, or the jerk was contemplating getting out of Dodge. With a wordless shout, he charged her. But at the last second, he veered left. She dived for him as he ran past and wrapped her arms around his legs. They fell hard, his heels jamming into her gut until she nearly barfed. He kicked furiously, twisting and wriggling frantically. She hung on as best she could, but he slipped through her grasp. He jumped up and took off for the door. She pushed up and gave chase, bursting out onto her front porch. There! To the left. A sprinting figure.

She charged after him, the concrete sidewalk rough and cold beneath her bare feet in Maryland’s January chill. He screeched to a stop by the door of a car. Ripped it open and jumped in. The car peeled away from the curb. She dived between two parked cars as the getaway car sped past, both to take cover and to get a closer look at the vehicle. Silver, midsize foreign sedan. The license plate was covered with something black. Maybe a plastic garbage bag. It rippled as the car accelerated away from her into the night. Helplessly, she watched the vehicle turn onto River Road. Her Bethesda home had ready access to major highways in several directions, no telling where her assailant had gone. The bastards had gotten away.

And she was standing in the middle of the street on a freezing January night, with snow on the ground for God’s sake, in nothing but a cropped T-shirt and soft cotton short-shorts.

In the two more minutes it took the police to arrive, she hurried back inside and threw on a pair of slim black jeans, a bra and a slightly longer and less tight T-shirt that nonetheless hugged the slender curves of her body. She pulled her wavy, shoulder-length blond hair back into a ponytail and checked the spot on the back of her head where she’d hit the floor. No goose egg forming. She examined her eyes in the bathroom mirror, and the aqua-blue rings of her irises were identical in diameter. No concussion, then. Her nose was a little red, but that could be as much from the cold as the glancing blow it had taken.

A chiming noise sounded. The doorbell. She moved carefully through the living room so as not to destroy evidence and opened the front door.

“You reported an intruder in your house, ma’am?” the officer asked tersely.

She nodded and stepped aside to let the pair of policemen inside. Quickly, she relayed what had happened.

“And you fought him off?” the guy asked, sounding surprised.

“That’s right.”

“Are you injured, ma’am?”

She shook her head in the negative and flinched as her nose twinged. She’d been clocked worse than that by her big sister in a boxing ring more times than she could count.

“I’m Officer Grady and this is my partner, Officer Fratiano.” The pair of big men stepped into the room. “Tell us exactly what happened again, and this time include every detail you can remember.”

The poor cops scribbled busily until she was done with her trained observations, and no doubt they had a good case of writer’s cramp. Grady moved around the room, notepad in hand, walking through the events she’d described. And then he looked up at her, skeptical. “I’ve never seen a victim of an attack who could describe it in such perfect detail. Your account jives exactly with the evidence. Almost too exactly.” He paused and then added slyly, “That usually indicates the crime scene was a setup.”

The guy thought she was lying about the intruder? She frowned and looked around the living room. It did look shockingly undisturbed given how violent a fight had just taken place in it. The upended coffee table and a few sofa pillows on the floor were the extent of the damage. She explained carefully, “I’m an Army Intelligence officer. I’m trained to notice details, even under duress.”

“Mind if we have a look around, ma’am?” Grady asked dryly.

“Not at all,” she answered coolly. Jerk.

Grady wandered down the hall toward her bedroom while the second officer checked her computer for fingerprints with a special flashlight. Fratiano looked up at her regretfully. “Do you have long fingernails?” he asked.

“Yes,” she answered cautiously.

He nodded. “That explains why there are no complete fingerprints on your keyboard. You don’t leave full prints when you type, and your intruder didn’t leave any, either.”

“I told you he was wearing gloves. Of course he didn’t leave any prints,” she retorted. The beginnings of desperation tickled the back of her neck.

“What kind of gloves did he have on? It’s not like you can type in most gloves.”

She thought back to the sight of his hands coming up to fight. “They looked like driving gloves. Thin material. Maybe Lycra or very fine leather. Can’t you check the keyboard for fibers or something?”

The cop nodded reluctantly. “But we usually don’t call out a full-blown evidence collection team for a simple B and E when nothing was taken and nobody was hurt.”

“Look,” she explained patiently. “I’m not your usual random victim. I work for the government. I uncover conspiracies and predict terrorist activity. I have enemies. No break-in to my home, particularly when my computer is the target, is a simple B and E.”

“Then I’d suggest you call the Army Criminal Investigation Division—”

“Hey Vinny!” Officer Grady shouted from her bedroom. “Come have a look at this!”

Cripes. She winced. He found her wall of pictures. She hastened after Officer Fratiano to explain herself before they hauled her in as a stalker. She rounded the corner into her bedroom and sure enough, the two cops were gaping at her massive collection of pictures of Gabe Monihan, President-elect of the United States. She had literally hundreds of pictures of him pinned up on the wall of her bedroom opposite her bed, the entire space wallpapered with images of him. They were taken mostly in the final months of last year’s Presidential campaign—the months leading up to and immediately after a thwarted terrorist attack at Chicago O’Hare airport that he’d nearly been caught in the middle of. The planned attack, a suicide bombing, had occurred just a couple weeks before the Presidential election, and many pundits credited sympathy votes for Monihan’s election. Monihan and the incumbent, now-outgoing President James Whitlow. Had both been in the area to campaign. Reports had it that Monihan’s presence there had been a bonus for the terrorists, but his death was not their goal. She had other theories on the incident, however.

“Are you some kind of sicko, lady?” Grady demanded.

She schooled her voice to patience. “I told you. I’m a conspiracy theorist for the government. I’m investigating the attack on Monihan last October. These pictures are part of my research.”

“Research. Right,” Grady growled. “Then you won’t mind if we photograph all…this?”

“Go right ahead,” she replied evenly. But her gut churned at the way they were blowing her off. They thought she was a kook who staged an attack on herself to…what? Get attention? Get caught? She supposed it fit the profile of the kind of person who’d build a shrine to a famous politician in her bedroom.

God, she hated not being taken seriously. It was endemic to her work that people routinely thought she was crazy. But that was her job. To cook up crazy ideas and build contingency plans to respond to them. First the army thought she was nuts, and now these cops. Did the entire flipping Establishment feel that way about her? Did she have some sort of tattoo on her forehead that identified her to the authorities as a weirdo? At least the army had the excuse of the notorious Lockworth name as a reason to doubt her. But these cops didn’t know her from Adam. What was it about her that inspired such antipathy? It wasn’t as if she tried not to fit in. Well, okay. She rebelled against the system sometimes. But that was just because they all made her so mad!

In a decidedly rebellious frame of mind, she stood by silently while Grady and Fratiano painstakingly photographed her wall of pictures. They took their sweet time finishing the job. Finally, Grady said casually, “Any chance we could take those pictures with us?”

“No!” she answered sharply. “I told you. They’re part of an ongoing investigation I’m conducting. Get a warrant if you want to seize any of my stuff.”

Any pretense of pleasantry between them gone, the police left quickly after that. Some help they’d turned out to be. But, she did take Officer Fratiano’s advice and give Army CID a ring. A night sergeant took down the information about her break-in and, after she assured him no classified information had been stored on her home computer, seemed totally unimpressed by her urgency over someone attempting to break into said computer. When the guy asked which of her files had been accessed, she jolted. That was a darned good question. She promised to check out her system and get back to him on it. In turn, he suggested she come down to the CID office in the morning and make a written statement.

She hung up the phone and sat down at her computer. As always, a sense of joy and adventure at connecting to the vast electronic universe of the Internet tingled through her fingers. She checked out her basic operating system first. Yup, the code had been tampered with. The guy had been trying to gain access to her encrypted notes on dozens of possible conspiracies. And that would be why they’re encrypted, buddy. The new commands the hacker had inserted into her system were spare. Elegant. Coldly logical. This guy had a distinctive flair for his work. A strong signature to his programming style. Unfortunately, she didn’t know the individual to whom it belonged.

In the hacker community, certain computer programmers became cult celebrities. They had legions of fans who followed their exploits with breathless awe and emulated their spectacular break-ins. She cultivated relationships with informants and outright criminals in this cyber underground as part of her work gathering intelligence off the Internet.

She highlighted the intruder’s code, then cut and pasted it to a new file. She’d have to show it around. See if any of her cyber pals recognized the work. In the meantime, it was wicked late and tomorrow was a big day. January 20. Inauguration day for her favorite poster boy.

She climbed into bed wearily and reached for the lamp beside her bed. “G’night Gorgeous,” she mumbled at the wall of pictures of Monihan.

She closed her eyes gratefully and let her mind drift toward sleep.

She was just on the verge of slipping into unconsciousness when a sound jolted her rudely to full awareness. An insistent electronic chirping. Now what? Surely she didn’t have an alarm clock set somewhere in the house for this insane hour. Reluctantly, she sat up in bed. If it was a smoke detector in need of a battery, she was going to rip the damned thing right off the ceiling.

She padded out into the living room and stopped cold at her fully lit computer screen and the bold announcement across it in large letters that she had an incoming e-mail. When in the Sam Hill had her Internet server started announcing incoming messages like this? She was bloody well turning the new feature off this instant. Irate, she sat down at her computer and pulled up her Internet server. She went to the mail screen and gaped at the address of the e-mail’s sender. Delphi@oracle.org.

Holy…freaking…cow.

Oracle? To her home address?

And Delphi? Personally?

An involuntary shiver passed through her. Oracle. An idea. A database. A secret organization. Her secondary employer and the tool of a shadowy figure known to her only as Delphi.

She’d been recruited for her ultrasecret work for Oracle and Delphi straight out of her army intelligence training. Although, she always suspected it was more her attendance at the ultraexclusive Athena Academy for the Advancement of Women than her position in the government that earned her the nod from Oracle. Her first mission for Delphi had been to plant the Oracle computer program in the army’s vast computer network, where it collected data on everything from crop patterns in Africa to political unrest in Europe, terrorism threats to DOD research programs, and anything else that might prove useful to Delphi.

She didn’t know if Delphi was male or female, a person or a computer program, or maybe just another layer of protection shrouding in mystery the identity of the person or persons behind Oracle. At any rate, Delphi took inputs from a wide variety of government and nongovernment sources and analyzed the staggering mass of information, combing through it all for hints of possible threats to the United States. The ultimate conspiracy theorist, as it were.

And tonight, Delphi had something to tell her.

Since when had her secret employer started contacting its agents personally in the middle of the night? Not that she ever had any contact with other Oracle agents to compare notes, but it certainly had never happened to her before. Hastily, she opened the e-mail from the mysterious Delphi.

Have been working on the database and it came up with a rather alarming bit of information. Could you please look into it immediately?—D

Attached was a reference number for the particular analysis Delphi wanted her to check out.

She assumed “immediately” meant this very second. What in the world could be so urgent? Thoroughly alarmed now, Diana accessed Oracle’s database, or at least the superficial levels of it available over the Internet, and plugged in the reference number. She waited, tense, while the system retrieved the analysis in question. Most of the assessments the Oracle database had fed her recently were bogus, and her repeated proposals of these eventually unfounded threats to her superiors had earned her a host of rumors that she’d lost her edge completely. But this one…Straight from Delphi? Did she dare believe it, if this “bit of information” turned out to be yet another wildly off-the-wall speculation?

The threat analysis popped up onto the screen. She scrolled down through the lengthy write-up to the end where the thumbnail summary of the problem was traditionally placed. Tonight, this section was surprisingly short. She scanned the words quickly. And lurched upright in her seat at the report’s terse conclusion.

A person or persons will attempt to assassinate President-elect Gabriel Monihan within the next twenty-four hours. You must stop them.

4:00 A.M.

A rather alarming bit of information, indeed! Urgently, she paged through the rest of the report, scanning the facts and assumptions the massive Oracle database used to arrive at its conclusion. Of course, large sections of the analysis were not transmitted to her here. They were deemed too sensitive to transit the Internet where they risked being intercepted. If she wanted to read the full text, she’d have to go down to the Oracle office and do it in person. But, at a glance, the logic looked sound. Not that she seriously expected anything else. Despite its recent flubs, the program was a masterpiece of computer software engineering.

She grabbed her black leather duster, a nearly ankle-length coat that billowed menacingly when she strode along a windy street. It made her feel like a gunslinger straight out of the Wild West. Plus, it had great pockets that stored a host of doodads and gadgets. Heck, it could swallow up an automatic rifle if it had to. Not that a desk jockey like her needed that feature often, of course. The coat also helped her blend into the gothic subculture of hackers and society dropouts from whom she got some of her best intelligence tips. Best of all, it drove her ultraconservative boss at the Defense Intelligence Agency crazy. And that was all the reason she needed to wear it.

She climbed into her sporty German coupe and backed out of the driveway. She steered down the winding, tree-lined streets of Bethesda, Maryland southward toward Alexandria, Virginia and its Old Town neighborhood where Oracle made its home.

Rock Creek Parkway and the gorgeous park it wound through was deserted at this time of morning with only a few delivery trucks and graveyard shifters on the road. And that was probably why she spotted the piece-of-shit sedan tailing her about a quarter-mile back. She’d lay odds it was Army Intel. The driver’s movements were so precisely according to the Army training manual that it couldn’t possibly be anyone else back there. Besides, no self-respecting FBI agent would be caught dead in a gutless heap like that. And surely the intruder from her house wasn’t so brash that he’d follow her this soon after his getaway. He’d been worried about getting caught. No way would he expose himself openly again. Especially if her hunch about his identity was correct.

She could weed out anybody else by process of elimination. She had no other major investigations open. Every thug she’d helped catch in recent memory was safely behind bars. The other conspiracy theories she was developing at the moment involved political or economic forces that had no human face. But, she’d spent the last three months on the Internet day and night, slowly worming herself inside a terrorist organization known as the Q-Rajn, or Q-group. After that bunch had nearly killed her Athena Academy classmate and NSA code-breaker pal, Kim Valenti, she’d been put on the trail of the Q-group as well. Kim had cracked a code the terrorists were using and foiled a suicide bombing the group was planning in Chicago, but was nearly killed herself in the process. Immediately after the incident, Delphi had assigned Diana to take over the hunt for Q-group and search for any possible reason the terrorists might want to kill Gabe Monihan. Personally, she thought the link between the Q-group and Monihan was tenuous at best. Until tonight. Now, all bets were off. And despite recent busts of local Q-group headquarters in several states, they were still capable of mounting a break-in at her house. And they were certainly capable of trying to kill the President-elect of the United States.

The Q-group was comprised of ex-patriot citizens of a tiny country called Berzhaan, which made up for its small size by brewing bucketloads of international political upheaval. The Q-group was devoted to overthrowing the current regime in its homeland. Historically, they operated only on Berzhaani soil. But all that had changed last October, when they’d taken over a Chicago news station as a diversion and then attempted to set off a bomb at Chicago O’Hare, one of the busiest and highest profile airports in the world. The Q-group had claimed that the attack was an effort to stop U.S. aid to rebels in Berzhaan who wanted to overthrow the country. But she’d never bought that explanation. Why wouldn’t these guys just protest on the steps of the United Nations or hold press conferences demanding a change in U.S. foreign policy? No, they’d had some other goal in mind.

And that’s what she’d been trying to pinpoint for the last couple of months. She’d found a chat room on the Internet where she believed these guys reported to their superiors, received instructions and obtained the money and resources for their activities. Of course, an elaborate series of code words and phrases was employed, so a perfectly innocuous chat about World Cup Soccer scores or a visit with family members might actually be a discussion of which target had been chosen for their next attack. But gradually, she’d been able to identify different combinations of meaning until the hidden subtext of the chats was becoming clear to her.

In fact, she’d turned her attention to ferreting out the real identities of the terrorists in the last few days. It was painstaking work, tracing the electronic transmissions backward through layers of Internet servers to their points of origin. But, once she nailed down the home server for each terrorist, she’d be able to approach that server’s operator with a warrant and obtain the actual customer account information, complete with names, addresses and credit card numbers. Given another couple of weeks, she ought to be able to name everyone in the Q-group’s American network.

Except, if Delphi was right, she didn’t have that long.

Her gut instincts screamed that the Q-group was not only behind the break-in at her house, but also any attack that might be imminent against President-to-be Gabe Monihan.

She rolled down Massachusetts Avenue and its stately rows of foreign embassies, and took surface streets toward Route 1, which ran south past the Pentagon and down into Alexandria, passing through the Old Town section of that Virginia suburb. She watched her rearview mirror carefully as she turned onto the wide semihighway. Yup, the sedan behind her made the turnoff. Damn. She couldn’t lead anyone to Oracle’s doorstep! Not the Q-group, and definitely not the Army. Oracle existed outside of the government, outside of private enterprise, outside of any system, in fact. It was a force unto itself and needed to stay that way, buried deep where nobody but a select few even knew of its existence.

The good news was she had a fast and maneuverable car and her followers did not. She approached a major intersection in the multilane road and turned off it at the very last second, crossing a couple of lanes of traffic at high speed to do so. The street was deserted so the maneuver wasn’t dangerous per se, but it was darned hard to miss. If her tail was going to stay with her, he’d have to pull a similar stunt and point himself out to her in spectacular fashion. The Army training manual on a one-car pursuit said he’d go ahead and make that highly visible turn if it was more important not to lose the quarry than to be stealthy. In her experience, Army Intel wasn’t too hung up on stealth and generally adhered to the brute-force theory of doing business.

Her car held the sharp swerve of the turnoff beautifully. The tail didn’t follow her. Which meant one of two things. Either he had a partner vehicle she hadn’t spotted and had handed off the pursuit, or he had some other means of tracking her. And as soon as the second option occurred to her, she knew without a shadow of a doubt that it was correct.

Change of plans. She caught a red light, so she turned right on red and sped away from the next intersection. She proceeded several blocks into the tall office buildings of Fairfax, Virginia. City ordinances in Washington, D.C., prevented any buildings from being taller than the U.S. Capitol’s dome or the various monuments that defined the D.C. skyline. So, the necessary vertical sprawl of a major city had spilled over to this side of the Potomac. She drove until a stoplight was kind to her and turned yellow just ahead of her. She punched the accelerator and shot through the light as it turned red. She made a couple more quick turns, reversing direction and heading back west toward the Potomac River that dissected the metropolitan area in half, north to south. If a tail was still back there, the guy was better than she was.

She pointed her car toward the Beltway, the eight-lane highway that ringed Washington and its environs. Somewhere along its perimeter, she’d no doubt find a truck stop.

Why in the world was the Army following her? There’d been rumors for years that she was on her way over the edge to la-la land. Yeah, she’d made a couple of bad calls the last few months. Or more accurately, the Oracle database had made a couple of colossally bad calls. The kind that embarrassed the Army big-time when, one after another, the theories were proven wrong. She’d been eating a steady diet of crow for about the last three months. But that still didn’t explain why the Army was following her now. The only reasonable explanation she could think of was that her bosses had finally had enough of her. Maybe they were building a file of documentation to use to pull the plug on her!

Right. And now who sounded paranoid and delusional? She needed a vacation. Bad. Or maybe a new job.

Unfortunately, she couldn’t breeze into her boss’s office and resign her commission just like that. It was a lengthy process that could take months or be denied altogether, especially in a critically undermanned field like hers. Which was to say only a handful of other people in the Army did what she did, and Uncle Sam wasn’t about to let any of them go.

The traditional intel community valued slow and steady legwork. Gradual, careful case building. Unassailable logic. Hard evidence. But she was a maverick. She speculated on the unknown. She guessed, for God’s sake. The brass couldn’t abide her style of doing business. It wasn’t that she objected to traditional intelligence collection. She just believed both methods of thought were necessary to build a balanced picture of threats in the world. Maybe it wasn’t so surprising after all that someone in the Army saw fit to keep close tabs on her.

She pulled into a sprawling truck stop and got out of her car. She knelt down and peered underneath the back end of her car. Nothing. Okay, maybe she really was losing her mind. She moved around to the front and laid down on the cold ground to peer underneath her car’s front axle. And saw it. A round, metallic disk about the size of her palm. Shiny in contrast to the vehicle’s black metal frame. The bastards had put a tracking device on her car. She pulled a screwdriver out of the tool kit in her trunk and pried the radio transmitter off the bottom of her car, then strolled past a semi with California license plates, unobtrusively popping the magnetic locator beacon onto the underside of its front bumper as she walked by. There. That should keep the Army busy for a while. Cheerfully whistling Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyrie,” she made her way back to her car.

She took a circuitous route through Old Town, passing the pub where George Washington used to go to hoist an ale and the shop where Paul Revere’s silver had been sold when it was new. And, of course, the ice-cream shop that made the best hot fudge sundaes this side of the Potomac. She turned down a tree-lined residential street of narrow town houses, dating back some two-hundred-fifty years. After one last check in her rearview mirror to make sure no one was behind her, she turned into a driveway beside one of the historic homes. A tall, iron security gate swung open silently. Only one Oracle agent at any given time was allowed into the town house that acted as their headquarters. Agents were required to park behind the house. Had another agent already been inside, the gate would not have opened and she’d have had to come back later. Delphi was nothing if not fanatical about secrecy.

She parked her car and hurried up the steps to the back door. A simple key lock got her inside the enclosed porch. But then the real security measures started. A retinal scanner checked her eyeball with a tiny red beam of light. Next, she entered a security code into a number pad and swiped one of her normal-looking credit cards with its secretly embedded computer chip. Last, she announced her name and password sentence to a state-of-the-art voice recognition system. And finally, a heavy steel door disguised as a regular porch door unlocked, granting her access to the interior of the house.

She stepped inside, moving quickly past the kitchen and down a narrow hallway toward the front of the house. Tonight she needed the full Oracle database. And that was housed in the library.

She stepped into a large room that dominated the entire front half of this floor. It was lined to the ceiling with shelves crammed with books on every subject under the sun. She’d love to just sit in here for a year or so and do nothing but read. Stripping off her duster, she dropped it into the nearest chair and moved to the desk at one side of the room. An innocuous-looking computer monitor and keyboard stood on top of it. And in fact, it was innocuous. This system was purely for controlling access to the actual Oracle mainframe. In and of itself, it had no real functionality.

She booted up the computer and entered the triple passwords required to get into its operating system. Then, she placed her hand flat on the system’s perfectly normal-looking mouse pad, which proceeded to light up and scan her palm print. The computer screen announced that she was, indeed, Diana Lockworth. A quiet swish on the other side of the room heralded the slow glide of a pair of bookcases as they slid backward on hidden tracks and then moved to the side behind the other bookshelves. A computer terminal and a half-dozen monitors lined the secret alcove. The Oracle mainframe.

Diana moved over to the hidden computer terminal and logged on. She typed in the reference number of the threat analysis Delphi had sent her and, in the blink of an eye, the computer displayed the full text of the report on the center monitor. She read it quickly.

Oracle had made a careful analysis of the tactics used by the Q-group in its Chicago attack and determined that the plan had to have been developed by…holy cow!

She blinked in disbelief. The CIA? No way. That bunch would never stage a terrorist attack against Americans, and certainly not on their home turf.

Except this was one of the great strengths of Oracle. It was dispassionate. It ignored the beliefs and value judgments that humans injected into their analyses and it looked purely at facts. Of course, the flip side of that coin was the intuition and leaps of logic the human mind could make that Oracle could not. Reluctantly, she conceded the point to the computer. Technically it was possible that the CIA had trained the Q-group terrorists. The idea made her gut clench, but she read on.

The Q-group attack closely matched a training scenario the CIA had developed more than a decade ago that had proven to be highly effective and difficult to neutralize. Oracle was 97.4 percent certain that this very scenario was the basis for the Q-group’s tactical plan in Chicago. Lovely. She read on grimly.

Furthermore, the original CIA scenario was not aimed at taking over an airport or large public space. It was designed to assassinate an individual, specifically a political figure protected by a team of highly trained bodyguards along the lines of a Secret Service detail. An extravagant explosion with maximum loss of life was used to cover up the true target of the attack.

Like Gabe Monihan. No wonder Oracle thought he was going to be killed! She continued reading, her jaw tight. If, in fact, the Q-group’s mission in Chicago had been to kill Monihan and not to protest U.S. involvement in Berzhaan, which was almost a certainty according to Oracle, they were 89.9 percent likely to try again within a year. The Q-group was extremely motivated by patriotism and zealotry, and Oracle noted that such people rarely gave up if a first attempt at a goal that furthered their cause failed.

She scrolled down to the next page. And jumped as a sound intruded upon her concentration. She frowned. Nobody else should be here if she was in the building. The noise came again. It sounded like something hitting the front door. Was someone knocking on it? Who in the world would be at the door at this hour? A nosy neighbor? The Army? The CIA? Q-group?

She stood up to check it out. Then leaped for the library door as a massive sound of rending wood came from the vicinity of the front hallway. She looked out and saw splinters of wood lying on the floor, and great cracks splitting the wood trim around the door.

Ohmigod. Somebody was forcing his way into the building!

She raced for the desk and smacked the button on the access computer that closed the book panels, then jumped for the library door again. A ponderous swishing noise began behind her. Hurry, hurry! she begged the panels. She should’ve brought her service pistol with her. But who’d have guessed there’d be a break-in here of all places? She slammed the library door shut and locked it as a great tearing sound on the hallway side of it announced the failure of the front doorjamb.

Someone tried the doorknob at her hip.

“Over here,” a male voice called out.

She checked behind her. The panels were about halfway closed. She threw her shoulder against the wood door to bolster it against whatever assault was about to come. She gasped as a sharp object burst through the wood beside her head. An ax! That answered how they’d gotten inside the front door so easily. Brute force, indeed. A second ax blow thumped through the door near the doorknob. This interior door wasn’t made to withstand an assault like this. It would splinter into matchsticks in a matter of seconds.

She certainly didn’t need to get a finger cut off or her head cleaved in two in a fruitless attempt to hold the door together. She backed away from the door as axes chewed through it like cardboard. The secret panels began their ponderous slide forward into place. She looked around frantically for a weapon. Nothing. She tipped over a delicate Queen Anne chair and stomped on it, breaking off a leg and scooping it up in her hand. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.

An arm reached through a jagged hole in the wood for the lock, and she jumped forward, bashing it with her makeshift club. A howl of pain and the hand withdrew. Diana jumped as she heard three sharp spits in quick succession. Crud. A silenced pistol.

The bookshelves behind her shut with a soft pop. And the hallway door exploded inward.

She backed away from the entrance quickly, her hands heading skyward, as four masked men burst into the room. She dropped the chair leg and, hands on top of her head, announced immediately, “I’m unarmed.”

She stood motionless as two of the men headed for the computer at the desk and the other two rushed over to her. They grabbed her arms and yanked them behind her back, slapping on a plastic restraint and pulling it painfully tight around her wrists. She stood passively as one of the men frisked her roughly and thoroughly. But she did flinch when one of the men across the room pulled out the computer’s component tower from its cabinet inside the desk and took out a baseball bat. He swung violently at the computer. Pieces of plastic flew everywhere. Another swing and the tower split open. A third swing and pieces of circuit board and wire went flying. A swift yank and he pulled the entire hard drive free of its mooring.

He grunted, “Got it. Let’s go.”

A voice snarled in her ear, “Back off, bitch.”

And then something hard and heavy smashed into the back of her head.

5:00 A.M.

Something scratchy rubbed her cheek. She moved her head slightly and groaned as pain throbbed outward from a point at the back of her skull. Man, that hurt. She sat up carefully. Her wrists were tied together behind her back. It felt like a set of plastic handcuffs.

Dang, her head throbbed something fierce. How long had she been out? She looked at the mantel clock at the far end of the room. Ten minutes, maybe. Oh, Lord. Oracle! She whipped her head around to check the bookshelves. Piercing pain shot down her neck. Oww. The panels that hid the Oracle mainframe were still intact. Thank God.

The first order of business was to get her hands free. She climbed awkwardly to her feet, a bit of a trick with her hands tied behind her back. Cautiously, she stepped into the hall. The entire front door frame hung askew, the wood and metal ripped out of the walls. She headed for the kitchen, praying it actually contained some kitchen implements, like, oh, knives.

She found what she needed in a drawer beside the sink. Turning to face away from the drawer, she fished around with her fingers until she grasped the handle of a paring knife. It took some maneuvering, but she worked the blade between her wrists and sawed at the tough plastic until it burst free. She rubbed the circulation back into her hands and hugged herself to stretch her aching shoulder muscles. First order of business: clear the building and make sure the intruders were gone.

Scooping up the biggest butcher knife in the drawer, she ran upstairs and checked the conference room and equipment lockers that took up most of the second floor. She’d never been to the third floor, but she went up there and cleared the plush offices and single, small bedroom that turned out to be housed there. Empty. And interestingly enough, the computer workstations in them were undisturbed. The intruders had specifically targeted the computer in the ground-floor library. Had the Oracle Agency been breached? Its security broken? How else could anyone have such specific targeting information on where Oracle could be found?

She sat down at the desk in the largest office, facing the street. The phone still worked. She dialed the emergency number she’d memorized years ago but had never had occasion to use. Until now. The direct contact number for Delphi. Her curiosity to hear the voice of her employer almost overrode her urgency to report the break-in. The phone rang once. A second time. And then the receiver clicked.

An answering machine intoned a standard “leave your name and phone number at the beep” message. The female voice sounded like the same one the phone company used to announce its various automated messages. Drat. No help at all in learning more about Delphi.

She left a quick message describing the break-in and declared her intention to stay here and guard Oracle until help arrived. She hung up, staring at the dark, blank computer screen before her. Who were those four men? They were all tall, fit and strong. Efficient. Focused tightly on their mission. Pros for sure. She closed her eyes and replayed the break-in again in her head, allowing the tiny details to flow past her mind’s eye. These men were distinctly different from the guy who’d broken into her apartment. She compared the two attacks. The man at her house had been slighter of build. Trained in classical martial arts. He’d relied on speed and skill rather than sheer brawn.

And then her memory registered something new about his masked face. The skin around his eyes had been nut-brown. Not Caucasian. But the men in the library, at least the two who jumped her, showed glimpses of fair skin. One of the men had pale blue eyes. Caucasians for sure. She’d been certain the first attack at her home was the Q-group. But this second attack? It didn’t have any of the hallmarks of having been executed by the same people. Then who in the world were the second intruders?

A snippet from the Monihan report popped into her head. The Q-group bombing had mimicked a CIA exercise. Was it possible? Had a group of CIA agents just broken into Oracle’s headquarters? An ex-CIA agent had been in Berzhaan a year or two back, making deals with some Q-group rebels. He’d been caught working with a Q-group cell in Baltimore just after the Chicago O’Hare incident. In fact, Kim Valenti had been part of the raid resulting in his capture. What was his name?

She turned on the computer in front of her, accessed the Internet and typed the access codes for Oracle. Nada. It was locked down tighter than a drum. The destruction of the access computer in the library must have triggered some sort of alarm. She turned off the computer on the desk in front of her and headed downstairs, back into the library. The access computer in there was a shambles. She went over to the mouse pad and tried to activate the secret panels. Nothing. There had to be some other method to get to the Oracle terminal. But darned if she knew what it was.

She needed the identity of the American agent who’d worked with the Q-group, but it was at home, along with her cell phone with Kim Valenti’s phone numbers in it.

As she waited for someone to show up to guard Oracle or at least fix the front door, something else came back to her. One of the men said something to her right before he knocked her out. She frowned and tried to remember the growled threat. He told her to back off. In a distinctly American accented voice. Since the Q-group was comprised entirely of Berzhaani natives, that pretty much ruled out the Q-group as the second set of attackers.

Back off. Of what? Her assailants had made a tactical mistake. They’d in essence told her she was correctly on the trail of something or someone big. Big enough to send in thugs to stop her and Oracle. Of course, the attack might have nothing to do with her investigation and could be related to some other pot Oracle was stirring. Except her gut said otherwise. The timing of an attack on her home computer and then an immediate attack on Oracle was just too big a coincidence to be random. She jumped to the next logical conclusion. Oracle had to be right. The Q-group was working with someone else. Someone who’d staged this attack on Oracle’s headquarters. But who?

She was startled just a few minutes later to hear the rumble of a truck not only coming up the street, but stopping in front of the house. She moved to the front window and peered outside cautiously. A man carrying a carpenter’s belt in one hand was headed up the sidewalk. She grabbed her leather duster coat and threw it on, hiding her knife in its folds as she headed out of the library.

“Can I help you?” she asked around the remains of the front door.

“I’m here to fix your door,” he replied impassively. “Wouldn’t want all your Greek antiquities to be exposed to the cold air and get damaged.”

Greek antiquities—Delphi. Whoa. It hadn’t been more than fifteen minutes since she reported the break-in to Delphi. And there was already a repairman here? She stepped back into the library and closed the door. Quickly she pulled out her cell phone and dialed Delphi’s emergency number again. She waited impatiently for the answering machine’s beep.

She said with quiet urgency into the phone, “Hi, it’s me again. I don’t mean to be dense, but a repairman already showed up at the house to fix the door. That seems awfully fast to me. I just wanted to verify that this guy is who he says he is before I let him in. Call me back—”

The line clicked. Someone had just picked up the phone. Another click as some sort of electronic device connected. And then a strangely modulated voice spoke in her ear. “If the repairman made a reference to Greek antiquities, then he’s legitimate.”

The voice was neither male nor female, human nor inhuman. Computer generated, or maybe run through a scrambler. Damn. No clue as to Delphi’s identity.

Diana blinked. “Uh, okay then. Should I stick around until he’s done and lock up, or may I leave?”

A pause, and then the strange, disembodied voice asked, “Do you have somewhere pressing to go?”

“Yes. I think I may have a lead on who’s backing the Q-group. Or at least I may know someone who has a lead.”

Another pause. “Then by all means, go ahead and leave. You don’t have much time to stop these people.”

Even through the filter of the electronic voice alterations, Delphi’s concern was clearly audible. A chill raced across her skin. It could not be a good thing if her employer, whose stock-in-trade was global-scale crises, was so worried.

Delphi’s urgency latched on to the back of her neck and clung to her with sharp talons as she drove back to her house. Fortunately, no one appeared to follow her or otherwise attempt to assault her between Alexandria and Bethesda. When she got home, she did a quick walk-through to verify that nobody had been inside since she left. The hairs across doorsills and other signals she’d left behind were still in place.

She retraced her steps to the kitchen and put a pot of coffee on to brew, then pulled out her thick folder of newspaper clippings on Gabe Monihan. She sipped at a mug of strong, hot coffee while she spread out copies of the Chicago Tribune for the week immediately following the October Q-group attack. Kim Valenti’s name appeared several times as the heroine who’d worked with FBI bomb squad member Lex Tanner to stop the terrorist’s plans. The headlines all shouted about the attempted terrorist bombing in Chicago and Gabe Monihan’s brush with death. Pictures of the presidential candidate splashed just beneath the headlines.

Lord, Monihan was a handsome man, in a clean-cut, All-American kind of way. The sort of guy she’d found wildly attractive until she got burned by a jerk who looked just like that in college. Three years she’d been desperately in love with Robert Danforth. She’d practically done his law school for him. And the bastard had dumped her cold the minute he made Law Review and graduated with honors. Told her she wasn’t wife material for a man with a bright future like him. Said she wasn’t classy enough—wouldn’t fit in at the country club. To hell with him and the snooty crowd he represented. Who wanted to fit in with a bunch of snobs anyway? At least she’d gotten her revenge. He was a lousy lawyer without her to do his reasoning for him. He’d crashed and burned at the high-powered law firm that hired him based on his—her—grades in law school. Served him right.

She blinked away the memory, and Robert’s casual, blond good looks were replaced by Gabe Monihan’s serious, patrician visage on the page in front of her. Unlike Robert, the next president had dark hair, a rich, warm brown shade. And instead of blue eyes, Gabe’s were light brown, a dancing golden color that hinted at dry humor beneath the keen intelligence of the man.

Work, girlfriend, work. Someone was trying to kill Mr. Wonderful and she was supposed to be figuring out who it was. Quickly, she skimmed the portions of the articles she’d highlighted. There it was. Richard Dunst. That was the guy’s name. An ex-CIA agent suspected of doing arms deals with a group of Berzhaani rebels awhile back. He’d been part of the group that had taken over the UBC TV studios in Chicago to divert security attention from the airport. The newspaper article said he was being held in jail without bail under provisions of the Homeland Security Act.

She went to her computer, plugged his name into a search engine and sat back to wait. It didn’t take long. Only one recent hit. He’d been arrested in a raid of a suspected Q-group headquarters in Baltimore over Columbus Day weekend and was being held by federal authorities.

Which meant Dunst was here, in Washington. The CIA was probably debriefing him now that they’d caught up with him. Typing quickly, she poked around the federal prison database but didn’t find what she needed. And so, like any good Athena Academy graduate, she took matters into her own hands and engaged in a little quick extracurricular activity, hacking into the restricted portion of the federal prisoner database.

Bingo. He was being held at Bolling AFB, a gray and unobtrusive spit of land sitting in a curve of the Potomac on the south side of Washington, D.C., and home of the Defense Intelligence Agency. The prisoner database indicated only that Dunst was under investigation for possible un-American activities. Yup, the CIA was still working him over.

She needed to talk to him. ASAP. He wasn’t likely to give up any significant information to her in a single interview, but she had to try. He was her only potential link between the Q-group and the CIA. The more she thought about it, the more sure she was that the Berzhaani terrorists were behind any forthcoming assassination attempt on Gabe Monihan. And if they’d gained access to more CIA training and techniques, she bloody well needed to know it if she was going to save the President.

6:00 A.M.

She stared at the clothes in her closet, pondering the perfect outfit. She opted against her Army uniform. The idea was to get Dunst to talk to her, not put him off by coming across as yet another government flunky out to milk him for information. Even if that was exactly what she was. She needed to strike a tone that would put him at ease. Professional yet casual, with a touch of sex appeal.

She settled on a pair of tailored, brown suede slacks and a pale yellow turtleneck that hugged her figure in all the right places. She brushed her golden blond hair into soft waves around her face and reached for her makeup kit, which looked more like a fishing tackle box than anything else. But then between her work and real life, she wore so many different faces that maybe it wasn’t surprising she’d put a clown to shame with the array of cosmetics she used.

Today, she went for a classic look. A little eyeliner and understated eye shadow, enough mascara on her extravagant lashes to draw attention to her big blue eyes, a hint of blush over her flawless skin and coral lipstick to match the peaches-and-cream color of her complexion. This wasn’t a face she put on often. Her big sister, Josie, would call it her about-damn-time-she-cleaned-up face. Her mother, vacant soul that she’d been until recently, would have patted this cheek and called her such a pretty little thing. As if she wasn’t five foot seven and twenty-seven years of age. And Dad. Dad would flash her the dimples that exactly matched hers and nod in silent approval at this face. She sighed and sprayed on one of the expensive, elegant perfumes her sister was prone to giving her as gifts.

There. As good as she could manage on half a night’s sleep before the sun was even up. Hopefully, the look would work on Richard Dunst. She drove down to Bolling AFB, suffering through the early phase of the morning rush hour. Washington, D.C.’s streets were designed for horses and buggies, and she was firmly convinced everyone would get places faster if the residents went back to using horse-drawn conveyances. The many government agencies downtown staggered their work hours to ease the daily gridlock, but the result was a morning rush hour that stretched from before 6:00 a.m. to nearly 10:00 a.m. She eventually wound her way past the Jefferson Memorial and its now skeletally bare promenade of cherry trees to her destination.

The gate guard at Bolling didn’t raise an eyebrow at her civilian clothing in concert with her military ID. Many of the Defense Intelligence Agency staffers headquartered here worked out of uniform. But the guard did raise a brow when she asked for directions to the prisoner holding facility on base. Its very existence wasn’t something most people knew about, let alone visited. He pointed to her right and rattled off a confusing series of street names and turns. Ah well. She’d find it. At least he’d given her a decent description of what the building looked like. She’d fake the rest.

A few minutes later, she pulled into a parking lot and climbed out of her car. She pulled the collar of her leather coat up around her ears. The Capitol had been in the grip of an arctic cold spell for a couple of days, and the deep freeze wasn’t showing any signs of letting up today, either.

She hurried into the brown brick, three-story building and was immediately confronted by a glass security wall. She signed a stack of forms and affidavits, submitted to a body search by a female guard, was metal detected, x-rayed and thoroughly scrutinized before she was allowed to pass through the glass partition. Then there was a delay while it was determined whether or not the prisoner in question was awake yet. Frankly, she didn’t care if it was a violation of Richard Dunst’s civil rights to disturb his beauty rest or not. She needed to talk to the guy. Now. Eventually, a combination of sheer insistence and winning charm got her the final signature she needed to interview Dunst, awake or otherwise.

She carried her documents to a second, double-doored security area watched by guards sitting behind bulletproof glass. One guard buzzed her through while the second guard met her on the far side and walked her down a hallway as sterile as a hospital. The floor was linoleum, the lights bright and fluorescent behind steel mesh covers. Gray steel doors flanked her on either side, pockmarked with heavy, shiny steel rivets.

The guard stopped in front of one such unmarked door and punched a lengthy sequence into the number pad beside it. A green diode lit on the pad’s face. Putting his weight into it, the guard pulled on the door. It slid open ponderously, its soundproof rubber stripping rubbing on the floor. She stepped into the dim room and blinked in surprise as the guard flipped on the lights. The walls were blindingly pink, an intense peppermint shade that assaulted the eye.

“What’s with the wall color?” she asked the guard.

“The shrinks-from-on-high say that Pepto-Bismol pink calms down prisoners. Makes ’em less likely to be violent.”

She rolled her eyes. “Too busy puking to fight with each other?”

The guard grinned, then said more seriously, “I’ll bring the prisoner to you here.” He pointed at the pair of surveillance cameras in opposite corners of the small room. “We’ll monitor the meeting with the audio feed turned off like you asked for. Dunst knows the rules. If his hands disappear from plain sight at any time, or he makes any move that might be construed as aggressive or threatening toward you, a guard will step in immediately. If you want a guard to come in, just look up at one of the cameras and nod. You sure you want to be left alone with this guy?”

“Yes,” she answered firmly. She needed Dunst to feel as though he could talk freely. Off the record.

The guard shrugged. “Don’t offer the prisoner any item whatsoever, not even a pen or a paperclip. This guy’s a trained killer. Got it?”

She nodded.

“Okay then. I think they’ve already got Dunst out and are searching him. I’ll be back with him in a couple of minutes.”

The heavy door swung shut behind the guard as he left her alone in the vaultlike interview room. She tried to imagine living boxed up in a place like this for the rest of her life. And shuddered. She’d go crazy, pink walls or not.

She’d been sitting at the steel table for about three minutes when, without warning, the room plunged into darkness. Inky, cavelike blackness without a hint of light. She waited several seconds for the backup power to kick in, but nothing happened. The room stayed dark. What was going on? The blackness and the walls pressed in on her, heavier and heavier, until she thought she was going to suffocate. She had to get out of here.

She felt her way around the table and stretched an arm out, groping for the door. A step into the void. And another. And then her hand encountered cold metal. With both hands, she felt for the door handle. Please God, let her not be locked in here. They’d told her they would lock her in here with Dunst once he arrived. She found the latch and pushed down on the thumb lever. Putting her weight into it, she leaned on the door. It moved. Thank God. It slid open to reveal another void of total darkness. Jeez. Didn’t they have any emergency generators or something in this place? Using the wall as a guide, she turned to her right and began to make her way down the hall toward the exit.

Something brushed against her in the dark. And instantly, a powerful blow slammed into her collarbones. A human arm contracted, snakelike, whipping around her neck and yanking her off balance. Scared out of her skin, she screamed as loud as she could. The piercing noise echoed weirdly, amplified to an almost inhuman pitch by the long hallway. A sweaty hand slapped over her mouth, cutting off the sound. It yanked her down violently. She crouched awkwardly, still wrapped in the man’s powerful grip.

A voice snarled in her ear in a bare whisper, “Shut up if you don’t want the bastard to kill you.”

No sooner had the words left her assailant’s mouth than a deafening explosion cracked. The hard body against hers lurched spasmodically and the arm around her neck went slack. The guy toppled over, knocking her to the floor with him.

“Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit,” the man now sprawled half on top of her chanted under his breath. “Can you shoot, lady?” he ground out.

“Yeah,” she gasped under his crushing weight.

“I dropped my pistol. I think it fell against the far wall. Find it, will you, so the prisoner doesn’t grab it.”

Prisoner. This was one of the guards. And someone must be trying to break out of the jail. She wiggled out from under him, which was no small feat. Crawling on her hands and knees and feeling around on the floor in the dark, her hands encountered something slippery and wet. A metallic smell announced that it was blood. She jerked her hands away. Who’d shot the guard beside her? And where was that blasted gun? On this highly waxed linoleum, the darn thing could’ve slid halfway down the hall.

And then she heard a rhythmic noise above the rasping breaths of the wounded guard. Slapping. Like feet hitting the floor. Running. Toward her from the direction of the cell block. In this dark, it was impossible to tell if it was another guard charging to the rescue or the prisoner making a break for it.

She froze, crouched by the wall, straining to gauge the running person’s distance from her. To tackle or not to tackle. That was the question. A door opened at the far end of the hall and a sliver of light spilled into the narrow space. Several voices shouted. They echoed so loudly she couldn’t understand a word. But they sounded furious.

Another shot rang out from the direction of the running man, and the door slammed shut once more, plunging the hall back into blackness, made all the thicker by the brief exposure of her eyes to light.

Acting purely on instinct, she reached out as the running footsteps approached. Something hard cracked into her forearm. Felt like a shin. A grunt and a thud. She dived for the guy, but he threw her off violently. She grabbed again, coming up with nothing more than a fistful of hair as he jerked away from her grasp. She wrapped her arms around whatever she could grab. Felt like an ankle. What must have been a fist connected with her left ear. She lost her grip on the guy’s leg, and heard him scramble off in the dark. Where were the damned emergency lights?

She couldn’t go anywhere for now, so she crawled back to the injured guard. Maybe she could help him, at any rate.

“Where are you hit?” she whispered.

Nothing. The guy must’ve passed out. Not good. She prayed it was pain that had knocked the guy out and not blood loss. His breathing sounded terrible. He was shot in the chest cavity, then. She felt around on his upper body, following the wetness on his shirt to a small, round wound under his left arm. Lucky shot. It had just missed his bulletproof vest and hit him in the armpit. She couldn’t tell the angle of entry in the dark to take a guess at the damage he’d suffered. Based on the sucking noises coming from him, his left lung was collapsed at a minimum.

She jumped as a barrage of shots exploded from the direction the prisoner’d just gone. Hopefully, the guards had just killed the jerk.

Meanwhile, the guy beside her sounded bad. It was damned hard to render first aid by feel without any supplies or equipment whatsoever. For lack of anything more to do in the inky dark, she put her hand over the hole and applied pressure to it. The sucking noise abated some.

It seemed to take forever, but the overhead lights finally flickered back on. Oh, God. There was blood everywhere. Her guard was breathing but unconscious, his face deathly pale. Probably a combination of blood loss and shock. She shouted for a medic and prayed someone heard her in the chaos that erupted as the doors opened and a SWAT team burst into the hall.

“I’m Army,” she cried out. “This guard’s been shot. Someone ran past me that way in the dark.” She gestured with her head.

An EMT took over care of the guard’s chest wound while another guard helped her to her feet.

It seemed unfair somehow that she ended up being escorted into a room and interrogated herself. A crime-scene investigator examined her hands under a magnifying glass and picked tiny fibers off her palm with tweezers.

“As I suspected,” the guy announced after examining the fibers closely.

“What?” Diana asked.

“A wig. This is fake hair. Won’t get any DNA from it.”

Nonetheless, the guy took away the bits of hair she’d grabbed for analysis. Finally, after she’d given the same statement to no less than four different people, a man in an expensive suit stepped into the room. Not a beat cop in threads like that.

“Captain Lockworth, I’m Agent Flaherty. Thank you for answering our questions so patiently. How are you doing?”

She noticed he didn’t say who he was an agent of. Fine. She could play that game, too. “I’m all right. Ready for a few answers of my own.”

He perched a hip on the corner of the room’s lone table and smiled pleasantly. “Fire away.”

“Who raced by me in the dark?”

“A prisoner trying to escape. Name’s Roscoe Dupree.”

The guy watched her intently as he said the name. As if it was supposed to mean something to her. In fact, it did tickle at the edge of her memory. She’d heard that name somewhere before. “Did he get away?” she asked curiously.

“Unfortunately, yes. But I have every confidence we’ll pick him up soon. And what did you say brought you here today?”

Her mind snapped back to business. “I’m here to speak to Richard Dunst. It’s a matter of great urgency. While I realize you’ve just had an escape and things are crazy around here, I still really need to speak to him.”

“That would be difficult, Captain. Roscoe Dupree is Richard Dunst.”

Memory flooded her. Of course. Roscoe Dupree was yet another name for the man known as Dunst. He’d used the Dupree identity in Berzhaan when he’d dealt with a Berzhaani rebel group that was trying to overthrow the government there. He’d worked under the Dunst name when he obtained a bomb and gave it to the Q-group to use to kill Gabe Monihan in Chicago. And he’d escaped? Today of all days? Could Dunst, a trained killer, be involved in the plan to assassinate the next President of the United States on this, his inauguration day? Surely that was no coincidence. Not good. Not good at all.

“What can you tell me about how he escaped?” she asked the agent urgently.

Flaherty shrugged. “We don’t know for sure.”

She took a calming breath. No sense making this guy any more suspicious than he already was. “I’d like to hear your best guess,” she asked quietly. “It’s important. National security important.”

He looked her in the eye and she held his gaze for a long moment. She saw him weighing her words. Weighing her. This guy smelled like FBI all the way. And clearly, he didn’t trust her completely. But she saw with relief the instant when he decided for reasons of his own to answer her question. Frankly, she didn’t care what game he was playing as long as she got what she needed.

“Dupree—Dunst—got a knife and a disguise—presumably to wear once he got out of here—from somewhere. Overpowered a guard in the hallway while en route to the interview with you. Took the guard’s gun and ran down this hallway, briefly impeded by you.”

“How’d the power go out? Doesn’t this place have emergency power of some sort?”

Flaherty’s jaw rippled. “We don’t know yet how both the primary and backup power systems went down.”

“How did Dunst get out the door? Surely it fails to a locked mode in a facility like this.”

An outright clench tensed Flaherty’s jaw this time. He gritted out, “The lockdown mode on the exit Dunst used never engaged properly. He ran up, pulled the damn door open and shot his way out.”

“How’d he egress the area? Surely you’d have caught him by now if he were on foot. How did a getaway car get through the front gate?”

“Good question. We’ve got film but the license plate was intentionally obscured.”

Just like the car the guy who broke into her house used. She asked sharply, “Did they use a black plastic garbage bag over the plate? Drive a late model silver sedan? Four doors? Foreign make?”

The guy lurched to his feet. Paced a lap of the tiny space and came back to the table, planting his palms on it and leaning toward her aggressively. “And just how in the hell did you know that? Are you working with Dunst? It’s pretty damned convenient that you showed up at this ungodly hour, insisting that Dunst be dragged out of his cell and brought out here.”

She reared back in shock. “I am not working with Richard Dunst! I’m here because I believe he’s involved in a conspiracy to kill Gabe Monihan. I want to nail this bastard!”

Flaherty stared at her in silence. She knew the technique. Guilt makes people babble to fill the silence. She used the moment to think hard. Flaherty was right about one thing. Dunst must have had inside help to slip him the weapon. He also needed technologically advanced help from outside to hack into the building’s electrical system. How else would both systems have failed at once? This building was undoubtedly hooked into the DOD power grid, which was hardened against all manner of attacks from without. It was a favorite target of hackers, and a damned hard one to get into.

Inside help. High-level hacking. Getaway car in place. Prison locks tampered with. And the whole thing precisely timed and executed. Not the work of a few radical yahoos. Somebody smart, powerful and knowledgeable planned and executed Dunst’s escape. She seriously needed to run all this through Oracle’s analysis program.

Flaherty’s cell phone rang, and he listened briefly before pocketing it again. “The getaway car was just found. It was abandoned down by the river. Apparently our man got away by boat.”

Damn. Dunst was free. She looked up at the agent. “Am I free to go, now? This escape just increased my workload for today dramatically.”

“Not a chance, lady.”

She winced. Time was the one thing she couldn’t spare right now. But she also couldn’t afford to get combative with this guy if she wanted to get out of here anytime soon.

He fired a question at her aggressively. “How long have you been working for the Q-group?”

She lurched. “Q-group? Me? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Answer the question,” he snapped.

How was she supposed to respond to an absurd accusation like that? It was a Have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife-yet sort of question. “I do not work for the Q-group,” she stated emphatically.

“Then why is your e-mail address plastered all over the Q-group chat room?”

She stared in undisguised shock. Who was this guy? How in the world did he even know what her e-mail address was, let alone that she’d been visiting Q-group hangouts online? And how was it that he was here, now, at an obscure prisoner facility, questioning her? Alarm bells clanged wildly in her gut.

Flaherty commented smoothly, “Army pay doesn’t go too far in an expensive town like this, does it? A nice car, a nice house, nice clothes—” he eyed her sleek suede pants pointedly “—they all cost big bucks. How does a girl like you do it?”

He was accusing her of going over to the enemy for money? Betraying her country in the name of designer fashion? She answered the guy’s slimy innuendo through gritted teeth. “I have a trust fund. A big, fat one from my grandfather.”

The agent crossed his arms. “Ah, yes. Joseph Lockworth. Former director of the CIA. Pretty handy to be related to someone like that who can hide the family skeletons.”

A memory surged forward in her brain, unbidden.

Crouching at the top of the stairs in her flannel nightgown, clutching Lammy, her precious stuffed lamb. She’d hauled that poor toy with her everywhere in those first days after The Incident.

Something bad had happened to Mommy. One day she was her laughing, smiling, soft-smelling self and gave the best hugs in the world. And the next day, she got all sad and had a funny look in her eyes all the time. And stopped hugging.

Men in suits kept coming to the door. Daddy tried at first to make them go away, but they never did. They yelled at Mommy sometimes and asked her questions that made her cry. One time, Gramps came over and yelled at Mommy, but he stopped after a while. He said he supposed every family had a skeleton in the closet. He said he’d do his best to cover up this one.

For weeks after that, she’d been terrified of closets. She kept expecting a dead, bony body to jump out of one at her. Her big sister, Josie, was terribly brave and didn’t mind opening closet doors, which was the only way she ever got clean clothes to wear. Daddy was too sad to notice whether or not she wore the same thing to school three days in a row.

“How much is Q-group paying you?” Flaherty barked.

She enunciated each word clearly. “I…do…not…work…for…Q-group. I work for Army Intelligence and I’m trying to apprehend those bastards. Now, are you going to charge me with something or may I get out of here and go try to track down the killer you just let escape before he kills someone?”

“You do not have jurisdiction to pursue an escaped fugitive, Captain. You get near the Dunst investigation and screw it up, and I’ll hang you from the highest tree I can find. You got that?”

She glared at him. “Yeah, I got it. And here’s one for you. You get in the way of my investigation of Q-group and a possible plot to assassinate the President-elect, and I’ll see you hanged. You got that?”

Flaherty met her glare for several long seconds. He curled his lip in an ugly sneer. “Get out of here. And don’t even think about leaving town.”

7:00 A.M.

She wasted no time getting the hell out of Dodge before Flaherty changed his mind and decided to hold her indefinitely under the Homeland Security Act or some such loophole-ridden law.

She pulled away from the building in her car and fumbled in her purse for her cell phone. With shaking hands, she started to dial the emergency phone number to Delphi. And as she did so, the gray-white bulk of DIA headquarters, with its bristling array of antennae and satellite dishes on the roof, loomed in her windshield. She didn’t dare make the call from here and risk having it intercepted. Delphi was adamant that his or her existence must never be revealed to anyone.

She guided her car off base and relaxed a bit when Bolling’s guard shack disappeared from her rearview mirror. She headed south on the Anacostia Parkway for a few minutes, then turned onto a random side street and stopped in the first parking lot she came to. The apartment complex around her was disreputable looking at best and a multibuilding crack den at worst. She locked her car door and dialed Delphi’s phone number.

The electronically altered voice she now recognized picked up immediately. “What did Dunst say?” Delphi asked without preamble.

How in the world did Delphi know that was where she’d been? Was Delphi involved with Dunst somehow? Diana asked carefully, “How did you know I went to talk to him?”

An electronic chuckle. “You are not the only person in the world who can tease information out of a computer. Your military ID number was logged into the Bolling AFB holding center’s computer record of visitors. It was an easy matter once Oracle got that hit to search the holding center’s list of prisoners and figure out who you were there to see. Good thinking to track down the connection between the CIA and Q-group.”

She warmed at the compliment from her employer. She hadn’t been getting too many of those recently from her Army superiors. “That’s why I’m calling you. Richard Dunst escaped about thirty minutes ago.”

The silence on the line was deafening. Finally, Delphi asked grimly, “What do you propose to do next?”

“It’s time to warn Monihan.”

“Agreed.”

“Except,” Diana added, “we don’t have time to go through all the red tape of convincing the Secret Service I’m not a kook and should be taken seriously. I need to cut to the chase and get word directly to Monihan’s security detail. I was hoping you could help me with that.”

A short pause. “I’ll see what I can do. I’ll be in touch.”

Diana disconnected the call and pulled back out into traffic. She made her way across Washington toward home. She needed a shower and new clothes. Her sweater and slacks were covered in blood.

She made reasonably good time across town since she was traveling against the inbound flow of people. Man, it felt good to pull into her driveway. Some morning it had already been.

She stepped out of a quick shower and pulled on a pair of faded jeans and a skinny little black sweater with just enough angora in it to make it delicious against her skin. She was bent over, head upside down, toweling her hair dry when the phone rang. Groping around on her nightstand, she found the phone and stuck the receiver under the towel.

“Hello?”

The digital voice of Delphi said briefly, “You have an appointment with Gabe Monihan in twenty minutes. He can give you five minutes. He’s at the Mayflower Hotel. Go to the concierge desk and identify yourself, and they’ll ring upstairs for an escort.”

The line disconnected. Gabe Monihan himself? She’d only been hoping to talk to one of the guys on his security detail. Dang, Delphi was good.

Then the rest of the phone message hit her. Twenty minutes? At the Mayflower? That was downtown—a good thirty-minute trip on a normal day. Crud. She jammed her feet into a pair of soft leather boots, grabbed her purse and flew out of the house. For once in her life, she succumbed to putting on makeup in the car. No way was she walking into a meeting with the President-elect of the United States without at least a little mascara on. She turned the heater on high and blew it at her face to at least dry the hair around her face. Its natural waves formed a golden halo by the time she hit Connecticut Avenue.

She broke every speed record she’d ever set and thankfully didn’t run into any speed traps en route. She managed to careen into the parking garage beneath the ritzy Mayflower Hotel with two minutes to spare. She jumped out of the car, raced up the stairs rather than waiting for an elevator and all but skidded to a stop in front of the concierge desk exactly on time. Had it been anyone but Delphi who put her through the last twenty minutes’ worth of panic, she’d have had some choice words for him right about now.

“May I help you, ma’am?” a suave man in a suit asked her pleasantly.

“My name’s Diana Lockworth. I’m here to see Gabriel Monihan. I have an appointment,” she huffed between gulps of air.

The concierge picked up a phone. “Miss Lockworth is here for an appointment.” A pause and the guy hung up. “Someone will be down to get you.”

She had just enough time to register the gilded marble opulence of the lobby before a burly man in a boring suit stepped off an elevator. Even if she’d seen this guy just walking down a street somewhere, she’d have pegged him as Secret Service. He had the alert stare that never stayed in one place, the calm assurance, the bulge under the armpit and a tall, fit physique that couldn’t add up to anything else. He walked up to her, eyeing her up and down, no doubt checking for places to hide a weapon and not scoping out her female attributes.

“Miss Lockworth, come with me.”

She followed the guy to an elevator, watching as he pulled a key out of his pocket and inserted it in the keyhole on the button pad inside the door. He pushed an unmarked floor button and the doors swished shut quietly. As he put it away, she noticed the key was attached to what looked like a thin, steel lanyard that disappeared somewhere inside his pant pocket. Yup. Secret Service all the way. They took being careful to levels of paranoia she couldn’t even imagine.

And so she wasn’t surprised when the elevator door opened and she was whisked a short distance down a hallway into a room that had been converted into a full-blown security checkpoint. She and her purse were x-rayed, her drivers’ license and military ID run through a computer, and her right thumb fingerprinted on an electronic pad. Eventually, after she checked out clean, another Secret Service agent showed her through an adjoining door into a large suite.

Large being the operative word. The place sprawled like her grandfather’s mansion in Chevy Chase. Desks, computers and phones that jarred against the sleek, tasteful decor of the place were swallowed up like minnows in the belly of a whale. Clusters of people stood in various parts of the main room. Several more Secret Service agents sipped coffee by the wet bar. A pair of men peered at a sheaf of papers one of them held, apparently discussing what was written on it. At least six closed doors ringed the room.

The place was quiet, but energy fairly crackled through the space. The about-to-be most powerful man in the world was behind one of those doors. She could feel his presence. Maybe staring at his pictures all over her bedroom wall for so many weeks had created some sort of psychic link between them. Whatever it was, it zinged all the way to her fingertips.

The Secret Service agent handed her off to a secretary who spoke quietly into a wireless headset. A door behind the secretary opened, and a face she recognized from heavy media coverage of it stepped out. Except it wasn’t Gabe Monihan. It was Thomas Wolfe, the charismatic senator from California who’d been Gabe’s rival through the primaries and had become his vice presidential running mate at the Democratic convention.

Wolfe was daunting in person, tall and rail thin, in an intense, ascetic way. His hair was black shot through with silver and combed back from a high, sloping forehead. His eyes glowed with even more intensity than the Secret Service agent’s had, giving away the zealotry of the man’s personality. No surprise he’d been one of the most feared federal prosecutors in America before entering politics.

Diana blinked as Wolfe stepped forward and held a hand out to her. He crushed her hand in a bony, powerful grip. “Miss Lockworth. What can I do for you this morning?”

“Uhh, I’m here to meet with President-elect Monihan,” she replied, startled at this insanely high-powered meet-and-greet. It had been impressive enough that Delphi got five minutes of Monihan’s time on less than an hour’s notice, but Wolfe, too?

Wolfe cast a quick look around the huge suite and took her by the arm, leading her away from the secretary’s desk. He steered her over by a window and all but hid her behind a potted palm tree. “The President-elect is extremely busy with last-minute preparations for his inauguration. What is it that brings you here today? I’m sure I can help you with it.”

There was something about this conversation that didn’t feel right. Maybe it was the way he’d intercepted her, or the furtive way he’d looked around the suite before tucking her over here in this corner. But her suspicions were definitely aroused. She answered Wolfe smoothly, “It’s a personal matter, and I’m afraid I really must speak directly with Mr. Monihan about it.”

Wolfe’s cold gaze bored into her. “What sort of personal matter? How did you get in here? You’re not here to try some tawdry extortion scheme, are you?”

Extortion? She blinked in shock. What ever gave the guy that idea? “Absolutely not, sir! I’m an Army Intelligence officer and I’m here on official business.” Although in jeans and a sweater, with half-dry hair, she had to admit she hardly looked the part. Nonetheless, she was distinctly disinclined to tell this guy another word about her business with Gabe. Whoops. President-elect Monihan. She had to quit thinking about the guy by his first name like that. He was about to be her commander-in-chief, for goodness’ sake.

Wolfe exhaled sharply. “We do not have time around here for people like you to play games. If you won’t speak to me about your business, then Gabe Monihan certainly doesn’t need to hear about it. I think it’s time for you to leave, Miss Lockworth.”

He reached out to take her arm, but she stepped back quickly. And crashed into the potted palm. She landed on her behind with a thud. Fronds waved wildly overhead, but fortunately the whole thing didn’t tip over. A big pile of dirt whooshed out onto the floor, however, and several assorted aides and flunkies rushed over to clean up the mess and drag her up off her rear, which was wedged firmly between the palm’s trunk and its pot.

She reached out and took the first hand that appeared in front of her eyes. Heat and electricity shot up her arm and down her spine. The hand tugged, and she popped free and onto her feet. She looked up into a gorgeous pair of amber eyes. Amusement danced in their golden depths.

Oh my God. Gabriel Monihan. In the flesh.

“How’s the coconut hunting?” he asked dryly, his whiskey-smooth voice sending a whole new round of tingles shooting down her spine.

“Not good,” she replied deadpan. “Turns out it was only a homicidal date palm. Not a coconut in sight.”

The amused glint in the President-elect’s gaze faded as he looked over her shoulder at Wolfe. “I’ve heard those date palms can be downright pushy. They horn in all over the place where they’re not needed or wanted.”

She blinked. What was up with that edge in his voice? The heavy double entendre? Clearly, it was aimed at Wolfe. For the barest instant, Gabe’s gaze went a hard, crystalline gold. And then he was all pleasant smiles again. “And who might you be, ma’am? I’d venture to guess you know who I am.”

She smiled back at him. “I’m Captain Diana Lockworth, Mr. President-elect. I have an appointment with you. Or at least I did. My five minutes on your schedule just expired.” And as she tried to turn her wrist to look at her watch, she realized Gabe was still holding her hand. And just what was the etiquette of holding the President-elect’s hand, anyway?

He tucked her hand under his arm and turned to walk toward a door on the far side of the room all in one smooth movement. Well, there you have it. You tuck your hand under the President-elect’s elbow and let him lead you wherever he wants to.

She became aware of waves of hostility fairly slamming into her shoulder blades. Must be Wolfe back there, glaring a hole in her head. Gabe led her into a combination living-dining room. It was much smaller than the first room. Much more intimate. Only a few Secret Service agents lounged around the margins of this space.

“Have you had breakfast yet, Captain Lockworth?”

“No, as a matter of fact, I haven’t, sir.” And as soon as the words left her mouth, her stomach shouted its protest at being ignored.

“Dine with me.”

It wasn’t exactly a command, but the words were uttered by a man who clearly was used to getting what he wanted most of the time. Okay. All of the time.

She replied, “Are you sure? I know how busy you must be today, getting ready for the inauguration and all….”

He shrugged. “That’s what I have speech writers for. It’s their job to panic. Besides, we finalized the inaugural address last night. I don’t have a blessed thing to do today except go talk to a judge at two o’clock.”

“Well, you do have to look pretty and smile nicely for the cameras. Maybe have a little lunch. Go to a parade. Oh, and become President of the United States,” she retorted. Dang it! When was she going to learn to stop and think before she just blurted out the first thing that popped into her head?

He laughed aloud. “You make it sound like I’m taking some sort of monastic vow for the rest of my life. It’s not a prison sentence, you know.”

Every head in the room swiveled at the sound of his laughter. From the surprised expressions on people’s faces, she gathered it wasn’t a sound they’d heard much lately.

She grinned back at him, enjoying the sparring. “Monastic vows? I should hope not. A good-looking guy like you ought to—” She broke off sharply. Holy cow, she’d done it again. She felt heat creep up her cheeks in a telltale blush. The curse of her fair skin.

“Ought to what?” he asked wryly.

“Nothing, Mr. President-elect,” she mumbled. “Never mind.” She ventured a peek up from her crisply starched napkin. Yup. Grinning like the Cheshire Cat, he was.

“Call me Gabe.”

Uh, right. On a first name basis with the man who was about to be President.

The butler saved her. He served her a bowl of fresh strawberries just then, ladling clotted cream over the dewy red globes. She ordered an omelet stuffed with the works in a muted voice, while Gabe ordered French toast with extra syrup.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured. “You must think I’m a complete bumpkin.”

“Not at all,” he replied smoothly. “I think you’re charming.”

She smiled reluctantly. “I don’t deserve that, but thank you.”

His gaze met hers for a moment, but then slid away as the butler stepped between them to pour coffee. Whoa. That had been a definite spark of interest in his eyes. Of course, it wasn’t as if he was an old man or anything. For Heaven’s sake, he was only thirty-eight. Younger than Jack Kennedy by seven years when he took office. Business, Diana. Business.

“Uh, sir, I came here today because I believe your life may be in danger.”

Gabe’s fork paused for the barest instant before it continued its path to his mouth. He responded utterly casually, “Of course my life’s in danger. Do you have any idea how many enemies I inherit with this job? At any rate, let’s finish breakfast before we talk about anything serious.”

She frowned. For all the world, she’d swear he’d just blown her off. Except he looked her square in the eye and nodded reassuringly the moment the words left his mouth. Now what was that all about? But it wasn’t as if she was about to tell the next Commander-in-Chief he couldn’t eat his breakfast in peace. He didn’t want to talk with wagging ears around, maybe?

She studied him surreptitiously as she ate her fluffy omelet. Her bedroom wall didn’t do justice to him in the least. The pictures didn’t capture his energy, the sense of purpose that radiated from him. This was a man on a mission. Not that it was any surprise. Everyone knew about his past. His alcoholic father died in a fiery car crash when Gabe was eleven. Rumor persisted that the wreck had been a suicide to escape crushing gambling debts that were coming due. Gabe had stepped up to the plate and become the man of the house, working a paper route before school and mowing lawns after school to help support his devastated mother. In his spare time he’d still managed to get straight As and quarterback his high school football team to the State Championship. The All-American boy.

Their backgrounds weren’t so different. She’d lost her mother to a drug-induced haze, he’d lost his father to booze. Although where his old man had died, her mother had just languished in a clinical depression so deep and so irreversible she might as well have been dead. So how was it he came out of the experience as bright and shiny as a gold coin, while she came out of it running in the opposite direction from the very system that embraced him?

“That’s a pretty grave look on your face, Captain Lockworth. Am I going to have to solve world hunger for you after breakfast?”

One corner of her mouth lifted reluctantly into a smile. “Oh, that you could. And please, call me Diana.”

His gaze waxed serious for a moment. “I wish it were that easy to solve world hunger. But even the office of President can’t put a dent in that particular problem.” He wiped his mouth and laid the linen napkin down on the table beside his plate. “But maybe I can fix your problem.”

“Actually, I’m the one trying to fix your problem,” she replied.

One sable eyebrow lifted. “Indeed?” He got up from the table and came around to hold her chair for her, cutting off the butler who’d stepped forward to do the same service.

She took the hand he offered her and stood up. When was the last time somebody helped her up from breakfast in such gallant fashion? She thought about it for a second. That would be never. And there weren’t even any paparazzi or reporters around to justify the display. Was he actually one of those guys who did such things out of a natural impulse to do so?

He led her away from the table and over toward a wall of floor-to-ceiling glass windows that lent a panoramic view of Connecticut Avenue below. “Great view, isn’t it?” he said rather more loudly than necessary.

Not especially. It was just a gray street on a cold day with dirty cars hurrying by, along with a few pedestrians bundled up to their ears. “Uh, yeah. Great.”

Under his breath, he asked, “So who harbors this dark plot to assassinate me that you’re so worried about?”

She had no idea why they were practically whispering, but she mimicked his tone. “I’m convinced the Q-group rebels who tried to bomb Chicago O’Hare were not there just to make a statement about U.S. involvement in Berzhaan. I’m convinced that was a smoke screen to hide the real target of their attack—you.”

A pulse abruptly throbbed in Gabe’s temple and his eyes blazed. He put his hand on her elbow and reached for the sliding-glass door in front of them. With her peripheral vision, she caught the alarmed jump of the three Secret Service agents across the room. But then Gabe’s fingers closed on her arm in a painful vise that left her no choice but to step outside with him or have her arm wrenched out of its socket.

She stumbled to a stop as a biting wind swirled around them. Gabe pulled the door shut behind them and pointedly turned his back on the room behind them. Worried about lip-readers, maybe? He demanded, “How in the hell do you know the Q-group was out to kill me that day?”

She pivoted until her left shoulder touched his right shoulder, her back squarely to the room behind them. “I can explain that to you in more detail later. What’s important right now is that they’re going to try again. Today.”

Eavesdroppers and lip-readers forgotten, he turned to stare down at her in shock. He bit out a single terse command. “Start talking, lady.”

8:00 A.M.

She took a deep breath. “The database I use to gather and compare intel made a definitive match between the tactics used in Chicago by the Q-group cell there and an old assassination training scenario. Of a single target. One that’s surrounded by bodyguards and heavy security. And it was developed by the CIA.”

The full brunt of Gabe Monihan’s intelligence bored into her as his gaze went nearly black. “Do you have any proof that the CIA was behind the attempt on my life?” he bit out.

“None,” she replied quickly. “Nor am I making that allegation. However, as you probably know, Richard Dunst, an ex-CIA agent who’s been known to mess around in Berzhaani politics, was involved in the Q-group attacks last October. I think he may have trained the terrorists who attacked you. He’s a trained killer himself.”

Gabe’s gaze narrowed. “And?”

Perceptive guy. He assumed, accurately, that she had to have more news than that to have asked for five minutes of his time today of all days.

“And Dunst escaped from the detention facility at Bolling Air Force Base a little over an hour ago.”

“Jesus.” Gabe ran a distracted hand through his hair. “Does Owen Haas know this?”

“Who’s Owen Haas?”

“The agent-in-charge of my security detail.”

“Ah. Actually, I was expecting to speak to him this morning when I asked for a meeting. And no, he doesn’t know, yet. But I’ll be glad to tell him everything I know.”

Gabe stepped forward and grabbed the wrought-iron railing in front of him, gazing down at the street below.

“Sir, if you don’t mind my asking…” She hesitated to interrupt his intense concentration.

“Ask,” he ordered tersely.

“Do you have any idea why the Q-group might have tried to kill you last fall?”

He frowned. Shook his head. “None.”

She asked, “What’s your policy on Berzhaan? Have you said something specific that would inflame the Q-group?” She’d read everything she could get her hands on about Gabe’s stance on Berzhaan, and nothing she’d run across had struck her as inflammatory enough to cause the Q-group to come after him. If anything his policies promised to be significantly more to the Q-group’s liking than Whitlow’s had been.

“I’ve argued against sending American troops there. I’m in favor of economic and educational aid sent to them via a neutral government of the Berzhaani people’s choosing. Nothing that should’ve sent the Q-group tearing over here to off me.”

“What about the Secret Service? Do they take this threat seriously?”

He exhaled sharply. “Oh, they took the Q-group seriously, all right. Except every last one of the terrorists who staged the Chicago attack is safely behind bars. The Secret Service considers the threat neutralized, and so did I until about a minute ago.”

“I’ve been tracking more Q-group sympathizers online for a couple of months now. The FBI caught their cell in Chicago, but that’s far from the last of the Q-group’s operatives. I’m convinced they’ve got another cell here in Washington that’s going to attack you today.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re exactly right,” he said quietly.

She frowned. “I don’t mean to be impertinent, but if that’s the case, then why are we standing out here alone having this conversation with our backs to the door so no one can read our lips?”

He looked at her in surprise for an instant, and then spit out a single word. “Wolfe.”

Okay. There must be a leap of logic in there somewhere, but she’d missed it. “What about Wolfe?” she asked cautiously.

“He’s convinced I’m not fit to be president. That I’m suffering post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the attack and won’t be able to make rational decisions regarding national security or foreign policy.”

Yikes! She recalled abruptly the cold exchange of looks over her head between the two men while she sat in the potted palm.

“I need you to do me a favor,” Gabe asked abruptly.

“Of course. You’re the Commander-in-Chief….”

He cut her off with a sharp, short hand gesture. “Not yet, I’m not. I’m asking this of you, personally. Not because you’re about to work for me.”

“Anything,” she replied promptly. “You name it.”

“Don’t tell anyone about your suspicions.”

“But—”

“No buts,” he interrupted firmly. “If Wolfe gets wind of the fact that I think the Q-group’s going to try to kill me, he’ll eat me for lunch. He’ll go to Congress so fast it’ll make your head spin and insist that I’m crazy. Not Presidential material. I barely dodged that bullet right after the election. Did you know the bastard actually went to the Supreme Court and asked them under what circumstances he could have me removed from office or block me from taking office?”

Whoa. No wonder there’d been such a glacial chill between the two men.

“And he’s your second in command why?”

“I needed the votes to get elected. The party was split between him and me, and our respective constituents would be damned before they’d vote for the other guy. It was the only way to cobble together the numbers we needed to win the White House.”

She looked up at Gabe candidly. “For what it’s worth, he tried to waylay me when I first got to the suite this morning. Insisted that I tell him my business instead of you. Said you were too busy getting ready for the inauguration. I refused to talk to him and he was in the middle of throwing me out when you fished me out of the palm tree.”

Gabe nodded in stony silence as if that information didn’t surprise him. Their gazes locked in silent communication and understanding flowed between them. Oh yes. She knew exactly what it was like to be wrongly accused of being crazy. She knew exactly how the injustice of it twisted and roiled like a serpent in Gabe’s gut, galling him to no end as long as he was helpless to combat the charge.

Finally, she broke the charged silence. “Will you at least tell Agent Haas to be on his toes, today?”

“I will,” he promised solemnly. “But you’ve got to do something for me, as well.”

“Besides go against my better judgment and keep the plot against you to myself?”

He reached out and took both of her hands in his. “Be careful. These Q-group guys are the real deal. They’re serious terrorists.”

His golden gaze was mesmerizing, his touch pure seduction tracing down her spine. Whether his attraction to her was genuine or just a slick politician’s blatant manipulation, she couldn’t tell. And at the moment, her pounding pulse didn’t care. “Of course.”

His hands tightened on hers. “Thank you. I’m sorry you got sucked into this mess.”

She smiled back and said lightly, “Last time I checked, it’s my job to investigate conspiracies. And I’m the one who came to you.”

He released her hands, but his fingers trailed across her palms as though he was reluctant to lose the physical contact with her. His withdrawal left her feeling cold and vulnerable, all of a sudden.

He fished in an inner pocket of his suit coat and emerged with a business card. “Here’s my personal cell phone number. I’ll be carrying my phone with me today.”

She took the card and commented, “Remember to turn off the ringer while you take the oath of office?”

He smiled. “Thanks for the tip.” His smile faded slowly, leaving a residual glow between them. More seriously, he added, “Keep me updated on any new developments.”

She pulled out one of her own cards and scribbled her cell phone number on the back of it. And was just reaching out to hand it to him when something caught her attention over his shoulder. Something that didn’t belong there. Something that set off an alarm in her head.

A window in a building across the street had just slid open a few inches, and something was coming out of it. Something circular. Made of blue-black steel. A metallic gleam caught the dull morning light.

Holy shit.

She dived for Gabe, tackling him around the waist with the full weight of her body, driving him down to the ground in a single heavy fall. In the millisecond it took her to register that she was lying full length on top of him, something incredibly heavy landed on top of her, squashing her flat and forcing all the air from her lungs.

Gabe grunted beneath her, as well. Three Secret Service agents plastered themselves on top of her and Gabe, acting as human shields for their charge. One of the men ordered tersely, “Don’t move, either of you. We’ll neutralize the threat before we try to get you inside. It’s too damn exposed out here to move you.”

As the seconds ticked by and no gunshots were forthcoming from across the street, she became more and more aware of the intimacy of her situation with Gabe. She was learning some fascinating things about the next President of the United States. He was in hard, athlete’s condition underneath his conservative suit. His body actually filled out the suit’s broad shoulders, not bulky pads. She also learned she fit against him perfectly, their legs intertwining as if they’d been lovers for years. And when she shifted her weight a little, his stomach contracted into a rock-hard washboard beneath her belly. Up close, his eyes could blaze brighter than the noonday sun, incinerating her from the inside out.

“Sorry about that,” she murmured.

His mouth curved up into a wry grin. “No need to apologize for reacting to what I assume was a threat to my life?”

She answered brightly, “Actually, I always throw myself at hot guys like this.”

His chest shook beneath hers, creating the most amazing sensation in her breasts, which were smashed against him in a blatantly sexual fashion.

One of the Secret Service agents growled, “Stay still, you two.”

Gabe replied dryly, his gaze still locked on hers, “Diana, allow me to introduce you to Owen Haas. He’s the agent-in-charge I told you about earlier.”

“Pleasure to meet you, Agent Haas,” she responded politely.

“Is that your belt buckle or your pistol digging into my side?”

The guy scowled and didn’t reply. Which was just as well. He needed to concentrate on his job at the moment. The guy was jammed up against her left side closely enough that she could hear the chatter coming over his earpiece. A team of Secret Service agents was clearing the offices across the street room by room. So far, no assassin.

Gabe smiled up at her and commented conversationally, “You know, I haven’t been this crushed since my last football game.”

“And were there cheerleaders in that pile, too?”

Ah, the delicious feel of a chuckle tantalizing her chest again. “No such luck.”

She retorted, “You wanna talk about luck? Lucky will be no paparazzi getting a picture of this. Can you imagine the headlines the tabloids would cook up for the five of us?”

Gabe opened his mouth to reply when Agent Haas interrupted. “Ma’am, Agent Willis, he’s the guy on top of you, is going to roll to your left and take over covering my position. I need you to stay on top of the President-elect for a little while longer. We’re going to bring out bulletproof shields before we let him get up. Got it?”

Oh, hurt her. Make her lie some more on top of the sexiest guy she’d met in nearly as long as she could remember. “Sure, Agent Haas. Consider me plastered to the boss.”

A phalanx of burly men rushed out onto the balcony, door-size riot shields in hand. They quickly formed a wall of polycarbonate resin and flesh between Gabe and that window across the street.

Owen Haas’s voice growled from above her, “You can get up now, ma’am.”

A strong hand on her upper arm lifted her to her feet. She looked up wryly at Agent Haas. “Aren’t you at least going to offer me a cigarette after that, Owen? I mean, it’s practically time to take you home to meet my parents.”

Coughs and snorts sounded all down the line of agents. The giant man scowled down at her, not amused. As Gabe climbed to his feet, Haas hustled his charge inside the hotel room. The agent’s shoulders sagged in relief when Gabe was safely behind closed curtains and bulletproof windows. She felt a flash of sympathy for the Secret Service man.

“Is the threat neutralized?” she asked Haas seriously.

“Yeah. It was a secretary emptying an ashtray out the window. Her boss came in to work unexpectedly and she didn’t want to get caught smoking in the office.”

Diana couldn’t help grinning at how shocked the poor woman must have been when an armed team of Secret Service agents burst into her office to arrest her for sneaking a lousy cigarette. She remarked dryly, “I bet she never smokes again in a Federal office building with that kind of response to it.”

The Secret Service agent’s smile disappeared as quickly as it appeared.

She looked up at Haas. “Hey, I’m really sorry if I gave you a fright.”

The guy’s gaze softened slightly, from granite to, oh, cement. “Don’t sweat it. I’d rather have you tackle the President-elect and be wrong than do nothing and me be out there right now scraping his brains off the windows.”

“You take care of him,” she said quietly. “Stay sharp today.”

The guy gave her a long, hard look. Finally, he answered, “I will, ma’am. Count on it.”

One of the other agents escorted her out of the suite. As she passed through the main room, she felt several pairs of eyes following her progress toward the exit with open antagonism. She glanced around casually. Yup. Wolfe was over in the corner, in a huddle with several men. As his gaze drilled into her, she looked away hastily from what appeared to be a strategy-planning powwow of some kind. Lord, she didn’t envy Gabe the backstabbing and political maneuvering that was going on inside his own administration. What a lousy way to have to enter office.

She sure hoped he had someone he could trust to watch his back.

9:00 A.M.

She sat in her car and stared at nothing. Now what? She was supposed to save the President-elect’s life, but she didn’t have the foggiest idea what to do next. Dunst was missing. A Q-group cell was out there somewhere, getting ready to kill the amazing, wonderful man upstairs. How was she supposed to find either target in this city of millions? Her only connection to Q-group was the Internet, and it was a tenuous link at best. Anonymous e-mail addresses and a series of seemingly innocuous messages.

Unfortunately, it was all she had.

She started her car and headed back up to the street. She guided the vehicle west toward the funky chic of M Street in Georgetown and an Internet café located there where she had a standing expense account. Several of her best informants liked to hang out there and wreak havoc upon “The System.” Of course, at this time of day they’d be home in bed after surfing the Web all night, or they’d be at grindingly mundane day jobs that masked and financed their alternate lives.

She parked the car and glanced in her rearview mirror yet again. Still no sign of any tails. But then something else caught her attention in the mirror. Her own face. She couldn’t walk into the Chaosium Café looking like this! She’d wreck her reputation as an antiestablishment chick in two seconds flat. Fortunately, her clothes looked the part. Although, she could not believe she’d just seen the next President of the United States in sloppy jeans and a shabby sweater. It pushed even her sense of flaunting propriety.

She dug in her purse for a wet wipe and scrubbed all the classy makeup off her face. She layered on heavy black mascara and eyeliner, dark brown lip liner followed by a coat of maroon gloss and white powder over the rest of her face. In broad daylight like this with her fair skin, the vampire-wannabe look was particularly glaring.

She dug around in the bottom of her purse and came up with a small tin of gel hair paint. She dipped out a little of the red goop and smeared it through a strand of hair down the left side of her face. Then, she pulled the rest of her hair back into a severe ponytail, put on a pair of so-ugly-they had-to-be-cool horn-rimmed glasses, and her goth, cyberpunk look was complete.

Hard to believe she’d been sprawled all over the next president of the United States less than an hour ago. Harder still to believe that someone who looked like this might be responsible for saving the guy’s life today.

After what had happened to her mother, to her whole family, truth be told, a person would think she’d know better than to dive into deep waters full of big, hungry sharks. Her mother had tangled with bad guys who’d sabotaged her work and made it look as if her incompetence had resulted in a man’s death. She’d resigned from the military and suffered a mental breakdown, existing in a nearly catatonic state for twenty years. She supposed she ought to be grateful the bastards who’d drugged her mother hadn’t killed her outright, but living with the empty shell of her mother for so long had been worse in some ways than losing her completely.

It had torn apart her family. Josie had sided with their mother, Diana with their father in the first months after what they now knew to be sabotage to halt her mother’s research on stealth technologies for military aircraft. When their father finally sent the girls away to a boarding school, the destruction of the family had been complete. Although she loved her sister, she’d never been able to understand Josie’s fanatical loyalty to their clearly crazy mother. Maybe it was because Josie was older when The Incident happened, while she’d only been four. Josie had many more memories of their mother from before the drugs that she didn’t have. Practically her only recollections of her mother until last year were of a gaunt, ghostlike woman only tenuously in touch with reality.

At least at the Athena Academy she’d found a measure of acceptance. The girls and staff there were unanimously too bright to blame her and Josie for their mother’s problems and gave both girls a chance to find a place for themselves. Beautiful, outgoing, confident Josie had fit right in at the Academy. But, unlike her big sister, she’d struggled to find an identity that suited her.

She’d envied her older sister. Wanted to be just like her. But she never quite measured up to the standards Josie set. It didn’t take long for her to head in a completely opposite direction rather than compete with her and lose every time.

If Josie joined a team sport, Diana quit sports altogether. If Josie decided makeup and fashion were important, she threw out every stitch of decent clothing she owned. If Josie studied French, she studied Arabic. If Josie went to swimming camp, she went to horseback-riding camp. And the hell of it was she still ended up just like her big sister. A pale, unsuccessful shadow of her, but just like her. Both military officers, both beautiful women in their own right, both highly intelligent, both with wildly promising futures. Of course, unlike Josie she did her damnedest to hide both her beauty and her brains most of the time, and she was rapidly throwing away her career and her future.

But she couldn’t break away from her family completely. Last year, when Josie set out to clear their mother’s name once and for all, Diana had come running to help Josie. She’d even taken a bullet for her big sister when the same guy who’d sabotaged their mother’s work went after Josie’s research as well.

Was she doomed to repeat her mother’s fatal mistake and take on forces too big for her to handle? Was she headed down the fast track to her own destruction by tangling with the Q-group all by herself?

She pushed the car door open and stepped out. A couple of pedestrians looked away from her hastily. It was amazing how a change of makeup could make her completely invisible to respectable people. Maybe that was why she had so little respect for most of them in return. She stepped inside the surprisingly quiet Internet café. A half-dozen guys dressed in varying degrees of grunge lounged at the coffee bar to one side of the room. Most of the computer terminals were empty at this time of day. The coffee server waved a hello at her and she waved back. Damn. None of her regular hacker buds were here.

She made her way to the back of the room and picked a terminal facing the entrance. She logged on quickly, using the Arabic handle she’d hidden behind to infiltrate the Q-group chat room. No new activity in the chat room since yesterday afternoon. That was odd. They yacked up a storm most evenings. But last night had been completely silent. Like maybe they were all away from their computers. Maybe breaking into her house and getting into position for today’s assassination attempt.

She highlighted the e-mail handle she believed belonged to one of the cell’s leaders. It translated roughly from Arabic to English as “Glory Seeker.” She attempted to trace it back to its source and immediately ran into a firewall, a blocking command by Glory Seeker’s Internet server that prevented her from seeing any further into the source of the transmission. Quickly, she typed in a protocol to circumvent the firewall. No problem. She sailed right past the routine antihacking protection.

She dug into the server’s memory, searching for any trace of Glory Seeker and his point of origin. And hit another firewall. A big, fat honking one this time. She tried her protocol again and it bounced like a Super Ball. Hmm. Time to pull out the big guns. She uploaded a program one of her hacker pals had written a few months back that purported to bust through any firewall anywhere.

She watched the spinning hourglass icon on the computer screen as the program did its magic. This sure was taking a while. It was taking way too long, in fact. At this rate it’d be next week before she got the name of a single Q-group member. She needed more computing power. Or more hacking power, to be precise.

While the firewall buster continued to batter away at the barrier to her progress, she pulled out her cell phone. “Hey, Dynamo, Die Hard here.”

A sleepy voice complained, “Do you know what time it is?”

“Yeah. I’m sorry I woke you up. But I’ve got an emergency. The mother of all hacking jobs for you.”

The voice perked up to vaguely human standards. “Anybody done it before?”

She couldn’t help but grin. It was all about status. Be the first guy to break into an unbreakable system and your fame was assured within the secret world of hackers.

She replied, “Nope, it’s a virgin system. A bunch of virgin systems. I’m at the Chaosium. Can you be here in ten minutes?”

“Are you kidding?”

“No, I’m not kidding. It’s really an emergency. I’ll owe you huge if you help me out.”

“How huge?” the guy asked, distinctly interested now.

She laughed. “Not that huge. No sexual favors from me. But hey,” she added casually, “Don’t sweat it. I’ll call CrystalMeth. I bet she can get what I need if you can’t.” It was a dirty trick. Dynamo and CrystalMeth were ex-lovers and archrivals. They hated each other’s guts.

“I’ll be there in five,” Dynamo announced with a definite fire in his pants now.

She repeated the call a half-dozen more times, pleading and wheedling the best hackers she knew into coming down and helping her out. True to his word, Dynamo walked into the café, in his pajama bottoms and a Def Lepperd T-shirt in five minutes flat. She stood up to greet him and leaned over his shoulder as he settled in and signed on at a terminal near her. Several more of the hackers trickled in over the next couple of minutes. They looked startled when they took note of the team she’d assembled. It was a who’s who of East Coast hackers.

She told the late arrivals, “I’ve got eight more hackers online. They’re signed in and waiting for you guys to join them.”

“Jesus,” Dynamo exclaimed. “Are we taking over the Federal Reserve today or what?”

CrystalMeth, the only other woman in the room, retorted, “Been there. Done that. Got the T-shirt.”

The woman also was on probation because of that particular stunt. Before the pair could erupt into a full-blown spat, Diana directed everyone, “Log on to your most powerful server while I tell you what’s up. Time is of the essence, here.”

“What’s so urgent?” Dynamo asked as his fingers flew across the keyboard.

“I need to find some guys. Track them back to their points of origin, break into their servers and get actual, real-world identities on all of them. And I need it done like yesterday.”

One of the other hackers spoke up. “That’s kid stuff. It’s time consuming, but any garden-variety hacker could do it. Why all this firepower, Die Hard?”

She’d promised Gabe she wouldn’t tell anyone what was afoot. Besides, these guys wouldn’t believe her if she did tell them. Not to mention they might very well refuse to help her. “I can’t give you the details, but this is no-kidding save-the-world stuff. The sort of stuff that could get all of your records cleared.”

That got their attention. Well over half of them had had runins with the law. She had no authority to promise such a thing, but she’d bet Gabe did.

She gave them the address of the known Q-group chat room and assigned a user of the room to each of them to track down. In a matter of minutes the café had gone silent except for the clacking of keyboards as eight hundred-word-a-minute typists body-slammed their way through the Internet.

“Hey, Die Hard, mind if I ask a friend to help us?” CrystalMeth called out.

Diana replied quickly, “Not at all. In fact, all of you, invite anyone you want to jump in.”

Before long, word had gone out literally all over the world, and hundreds of hackers jumped on the bandwagon. Most of them would be no help at all, but with that many operators at work, somebody was bound to stumble across back doors into the right server systems.

She jumped as her own computer beeped. The firewall protocol had worked! She was inside the next layer of protection surrounding Glory Seeker. She typed in a few commands and scanned the code scrolling down her screen. Wow. Nice program architecture. But permeable, nonetheless. She started to type in a set of instructions to get past it. And noticed something funny. The original code at the top of her screen was degrading. Literally eroding before her very eyes! Crud. Somebody was counterhacking.

She typed furiously. She had to get in the final command before the entire grid imploded in her face. She stabbed the Enter button on her keyboard and prayed she’d been in time. The hourglass icon blinked steadily for several seconds.

And a new set of code scrolled down her screen. Bingo.

Reading fast, she identified the type of encryption this layer of security used. She’d seen something like it before. Casting back in her memory, she recalled the command set to bypass it and typed fast. Again, the code started to erode. Whoever was chasing her through this server was good. Damned good.

A fork in the path of the logic loomed ahead. She had to choose one direction or another. And fast. The counterhacker was right on her heels. Abruptly, one of the forks in the path started to erode as she watched. Well, that made the decision easy. She dived in front of the erosion, down the disappearing pathway, racing across cyberhighways like the wind.

Hunched over the keyboard, her fingers fairly flew across the keys as she flung commands into battle like electronic warriors against her foe. She paused just long enough to send a couple of commands designed to confound whoever was tracking her, and then she went back to work attempting to break the encryption. She entered the final command. And sat back to wait. If she didn’t miss her guess, this was the last layer of protection inside this server. If she’d sent the right commands, and if she’d been in time to beat the countermeasures, she ought to see names, addresses, phone numbers and credit card information on her screen when the hourglass went away.

The wait was agonizing. Each second that ticked by was one closer to Gabe’s possible death. The idea of all that vibrant energy, that intelligence, that sex appeal, being snuffed out made her faintly sick to her stomach. She had to get through.

The computer screen went dark. Her heart dropped into her feet. Damn!

But then a small, rectangular window opened in the middle of her screen. Would the server administrator please enter a valid password?

She sagged in relief. A simple password block? No sweat. She typed in the standard protocol for bypassing a password request. This shouldn’t take more than a minute or so. She couldn’t believe how many people thought their computers were actually safe because it took a password to get to the data. Every twelve-year-old hacker wannabe in the world knew how to get past that.

The screen flickered. And lit up.

Hot damn! She’d done it. A system administration screen opened in front of her. Quickly she entered the handle, Glory Seeker, into a search field. And moments later, the screen began to erode. Data melted off of it like butter off a hot knife.

C’mon, c’mon, she urged the search engine. Just a name. A lousy name, and then the whole damn server could implode for all she cared.

The search window began to melt.

But then a name flashed up in the reply box. For no more than a second. But it was enough. Tito Albadian. In New Jersey. And then it was gone.

Rapidly, she accessed the Social Security administration and broke into the system through a back door she could drive a Mack truck through. No record of a Tito Albadian in New Jersey. She frowned. Maybe she was looking in the wrong place. She tried the Immigration and Naturalization Service and got an immediate hit. She called up a copy of the guy’s work permit. Using an illegally obtained police code, she requested a picture of this Albadian guy.

A laser printer behind her spit out a sheet of paper.

“I’ve got a name, folks,” she announced. “Could a couple of you help me look for known associates of this guy?”

Every pair of shoulders hunched higher around their ears. Hackers were nothing if not competitive. Over the next several minutes, assorted curses and crows of triumph were heard. Finally, Dynamo shouted out, “Gotcha!”

Diana moved over behind him as he traced a credit card number to a driver’s license in California and called up a picture of the owner. “Way to go!” she congratulated him.

He sat back, rolling his shoulders. “Man, that was close. I had a counterhacker on my heels the whole way.”

“Same thing’s happening to me over here, too,” CrystalMeth spoke up. “But I’ll beat the bastard.”

One by one, the hackers, some working alone and some working in teams, broke into Internet server systems all over the world and harvested names and faces from the participants in the Q-group chat room. In all, fourteen faces printed out on the printer to go with the handles of the Q-group chat members. Undoubtedly, not all of these guys were part of an active Q-group hit squad. Some of them were innocent people, just looking to connect with a few immigrants like themselves and going about their lawful daily lives. But some of them were here in Washington, right now, planning to assassinate Gabe Monihan. Of that, she had no doubt.

Diana picked up the sheaf of printed photos and took them over to the copier machine in the corner. Quickly she made a duplicate set of the pictures and stapled them together. She put a yellow sticky pad on them and scribbled the name, Owen Haas. How she was going to get the pictures to him, she had no idea. But she had faith he’d know what to do with the pictures once he got them. He was a sharp cookie and hadn’t missed her veiled warning to him that someone was out to get Gabe Monihan today.

What she really needed to do now was run these names and pictures through the Oracle database. It was plugged into computer systems that these hackers didn’t even dream existed. She scooped up both sets of the pictures and her purse and headed for the door.

“You guys are the best. I won’t forget this,” she called out as she exited the café.

And was grabbed around both upper arms by a pair of powerful men, one on either side of her.

She struggled in the men’s grasps to no avail. “Hey!” she shouted. “What do you think you’re doing? Let go of me!” It was women’s self-defense 101. Make a very loud stink if someone tried to snatch her. Most kidnappers, rapists and murderers weren’t looking for a troublesome public confrontation.

Several people on the sidewalk were staring at her, and a couple of passersby looked as if they were reaching for cell phones. Three cheers for civic-minded citizens!

“Sorry ma’am,” one of the men intoned, deadpan. “We can’t let you go.”

“Why the hell not?” she shouted back at him, still trying to draw attention.

“You’re under arrest.”

10:00 A.M.

“I’m what?” Diana exclaimed.

“You’re under arrest, ma’am.”

“And you might be who?” she demanded of the men holding her.

“Army Criminal Investigation Division. If you’ll come with us, ma’am. We need to ask you a few questions.”

She cursed under her breath. She so did not have time for fun with CID right now. Gabe would be inaugurated in a scant four hours. “Look fellas. Can I take a rain check on this? I’ll be happy to talk to you later this afternoon. But right now I have extremely urgent business to take care of.”

“That’s what we’d like to talk to you about ma’am,” one of them replied stolidly.

She cursed under her breath. Their questioning could take hours. She thought fast and yanked back hard on the guy’s hands. She didn’t break their grip on her, but in the ensuing tussle, she managed to drop one of the photocopied sets of pictures on the ground and kick it behind them. It was the best she could do. Maybe someone inside the café would see Owen Haas’s name on the photos and get them to him somehow. It was a long shot, but it might be all she had.

Capitulating abruptly, she walked forward rapidly, all but dragging the Intelligence officers away from the Chaosium Café and the sheaf of papers on the ground. She stuffed the remaining set of pictures into her purse.

“Where to, boys? Do you have a safe house around here somewhere or are we going for a ride?”

The poor guys seemed confounded by her abruptly cavalier attitude. “Uh, our car’s right here.”

They stopped beside a black sedan and put her in the back seat.

She groused, “Sheesh, aren’t you going to handcuff me or anything? I’m a pretty dangerous character, you know. Us desk-jockey analysts are real beasts.”

The driver rolled his eyes at her in the rearview mirror but didn’t rise to the bait. She caught the other guy eyeing her surreptitiously and grinned. “Whatchya staring at, Sergeant? Haven’t you ever been inside an Internet café before and seen how the other half live?”

The guy glared. “I’m a captain, not an enlisted schmuck.”

She leaned back in her seat. “Dunno that I’d be casting aspersions on enlisted personnel, Captain. They’re the backbone of the Army. They outnumber commissioned officer schmucks by something like twenty-five to one.”

The guy scowled at her openly. She definitely had him off balance now. Of course it probably helped that she was in full punker makeup, and he knew she was an officer. The guy was no doubt having a hard time reconciling the two in his mind. The car pulled to a stop in front of the Pentagon and the two men escorted her inside. They took her in the same side of the building the airliner had hit on 9/11 and downstairs to an anonymous-looking office. Several men at desks glanced up at her and did double takes as she walked past. She wasn’t exactly standard Army issue at the moment. The pair who’d arrested her sat her down at a table in the middle of a one-each interrogating room and pointedly locked the door. She looked around. It came complete with the big, two-way mirror, a surveillance camera and a tape recorder.

She sat impatiently through a reading of her rights. She duly waived the right to counsel and leaned back in her chair. “Okay, gentlemen. What’s this all about?”

“You reported a break-in at your house earlier this morning.”

She frowned. And they were arresting her because of it? “That’s correct,” she answered aloud.

“Was anything stolen?”

“No.” She hadn’t been a rebel most of her life for nothing. She knew full well to volunteer absolutely no information whatsoever under questioning. The headmistress at the Athena Academy had often been unable to pin pranks on her because of her gift for silence during interrogation.

“Were you injured?”

“No.”

“You reported that the intruder was attempting to use your computer. Did you have any classified information on your computer?”

Taking classified information home from work was a felony. She answered that one firmly. “No.”

“Was any data stolen?”

“No.”

“Why did you report the break-in?”

She stared at the officer pointedly, making it clear that she didn’t deign to answer patently stupid questions. The guy reddened slightly.

The second officer dived in. “The Bethesda police reported finding a disturbing collection of pictures of Gabe Monihan in your bedroom.”

She stared back at him as he left the statement hanging between them.

“Care to comment on that?” he asked.

“No.”

“Are you obsessed with Gabe Monihan?”

Wouldn’t these guys have a field day if they knew she’d spent a piece of this morning plastered all over the man in question? She answered the query. “No.”

“Are you stalking him?”

“No.”

“Fixated on him?”

“No.”

As much as she wanted to shout at these guys that they were wasting her valuable time, that would give them power over her. If they knew she was in a hurry, they’d slowball this little interview until it was too late for her to do a damn thing to save Gabe.

She waited for the next inane question.

“Then why have you been illegally accessing information via the Internet pertaining to President-elect Monihan’s personal life?”

She blinked. Huh? Now how in the world had they figured that out? She would readily admit that she’d broken into all kinds of private information about Gabe’s life, college transcripts, medical records and the like, but she’d been searching purely for a reason that the Q-group wanted to kill him. Besides, the guy’s life was as squeaky clean as they came. She hadn’t found a speck of dirt on the man, except that he’d flunked French 101 three times in college.

The real question, though, was how did these guys know about it? Had a wiretap been authorized on her home computer? Except the Oracle database had protection protocols built into it that would detect something like that on any system it was using. Just within the last few hours, she’d had Oracle open and running on both her home and work computers and no alarms had gone off. They couldn’t possibly be tapped!

She leaned forward in her chair. “Do you have any evidence to back up your ludicrous accusation that I’m accessing information illegally, or do I need to call my lawyer and document this interview for a harassment and libel lawsuit?”

“Do you deny the charge, then?” one of the men asked.

“I damn well insist on seeing the evidence upon which you’d make such an accusation,” she retorted. It wasn’t exactly an outright denial, but hopefully the indignation of her tone made up for that minor omission.

“We’re not at liberty to divulge our sources, ma’am,” one of the guys replied.

Sources? Now there was an interesting word choice. In the intelligence community that both she and these men came from, that particular word almost invariably meant a human source. More times than not, an informant. Had they gotten a tip that she’d been poking into Gabe’s personal affairs?

If the Secret Service or the FBI had actually traced hack-ins of Gabe’s records to her, they’d have already come to her home with a search warrant, seized her computer, filed charges against her immediately and arrested her outright. She knew enough hackers to whom that very sequence of events had happened for her to be dead certain of how it went down.

But these guys, despite their initial statement of arrest, had yet to charge her with anything and apparently had not been to her home themselves. And that meant her computer probably had not been seized. Which meant these guys had nothing but a tip of some kind to go on. They were on a fishing expedition.

“Why did you aggressively evade a surveillance detail upon you earlier today, Captain Lockworth?” one of the men fired at her.

So. It had been the Army tailing her toward the Oracle office in Alexandria earlier. “I had no way of knowing if it was the Army or the forces of evil following me. It’s my job to lose enemy surveillance if I become aware of it, is it not?”

No answer to that one.

“You expended extensive military resources on a wild-goose chase.”

She was tempted to tell them they should have sent someone competent to do the job, then. But she bit back the comment. No sense being more antagonistic toward these guys than she had to be. Not if she wanted to get out of here any time soon.

She asked casually, “So how did you guys catch up with me if I lost you?” Might as well let them toot their own horns for a moment to appease their bruised egos.

“There’s been a police APB out on your car all morning.”

Wow. She’d rated an APB? “And why did you think it was that urgent to talk to me, again?”

“We believe you may pose a threat to the safety of the President-elect of the United States.”

She’d laugh if that weren’t so absurd. “Me? A low-level intelligence analyst from DIA? What the heck kind of threat do I pose to anyone? I go to work every day, sit in my office, read a lot of paperwork, write reports and go home. Where in the world did you get the notion that I’m a threat to Gabe Monihan?”

“Again, I’m not at liberty to divulge our sources.”

An informant pegged her as a threat to Gabe, too? The timing of it all was mighty damned suspicious. It certainly lent credence to the idea that she’d been shaking the right tree by investigating the Q-group. Look at the garbage that was falling out of it. Somebody’d sicced these guys on her to back her off of the investigation.

“May we have a look at the papers you put in your purse as you were coming out of the Internet café?”

She retorted coolly, “May I see a copy of your search warrant?”

The men scowled. After a pregnant silence, the two officers exchanged glances, got up and left the room. Great. How long was she supposed to cool her jets while they came up with Plan B? She glanced at her watch. Time was a’wasting, here. Vividly aware of the camera and the two-way mirror, she forced herself not to fidget. She painted an expression of saintlike patience on her face and sat quietly in her chair, even though her insides were fairly bursting to get out of here.

One of the men stepped back into the room a few minutes later. “Things will go better for you if you tell us what you’re up to, Captain Lockworth,” he said kindly.

“You can lose the good cop-bad cop routine, buddy. And furthermore, I’m not up to anything.”

“Then why are all those pictures of Monihan plastered all over your bedroom?”

“They’re in my bedroom because it was the largest blank wall in my house to put them where I could see them all. I have the pictures in the first place because I’ve been investigating the attack against him in Chicago last October. Under official orders to do so, I might add.”

“Is that so? Care to share any details of this investigation?” the guy asked. Damned if he didn’t sound genuinely surprised.

“Obviously my superiors deemed that you don’t have the security clearances to hear the details of my work, or else you’d already know the details. Given that, I’m certainly not going to tell you what I’m working on.”

The guy stared at her, frustrated.

She sighed. “Look. I don’t know who put you on this assignment. But you’ve been given a bum steer. I’m no more a stalker than you are. Somebody’s got it in for me and is using you and your partner as patsies to harass me. Unless you guys have warrants and hard evidence to back you up, I’m not talking to anyone. And this is turning into a big waste of your time and mine. So, are you going to charge me with something or not?”

The guy shrugged. “That’s above my pay grade to decide.”

“Tell you what. You let me make a phone call and I’ll see if I can bring this Mexican standoff to an end.” She held her breath, praying the guy would take the offer.

“Who are you going to call?” he asked suspiciously.

She thought fast. Who had the clout to call these guys’ bluffs and spring her out of here fast? It had to be somebody who wasn’t in her chain of command. Somebody who wasn’t trying to sabotage her career. The perfect person came to mind. “I’m going to call my grandfather.”

“He some kind of lawyer or something?”

She managed to keep a straight face. “Yeah. Or something.”

The guy left the room. And came back in a minute later with a telephone in his hand. He plugged it into the wall socket and set it on the table in front of her. He pointedly did not leave the room. Whatever.

She dialed the Pentagon operator. “Would you mind ringing up Joseph Lockworth for me? That’s right. The former director of the CIA. You may need to patch the call through the operator at Langley. Tell him his granddaughter, Diana, urgently needs to speak with him.”

While the operator put the call through, her poor interrogator stared, slack jawed.

She put her hand over the receiver and said to him sympathetically, “I’m sorry, man. Like I said. Somebody’s using you to screw with my career. You’ve been caught in the middle of some political maneuver designed to mess with me. I just hope the fallout from this doesn’t take you down with it.”

While dismay blossomed on the guy’s face, a deep, familiar voice came on the line. “Diana! How are you, kiddo?”

“Hiya, Gramps. Actually I’ve been better. Something weird is going on. Army CID has picked me up and is detaining me. They’re making wild accusations about me stalking Gabe Monihan. Is there any chance you could look into this and get me out of here? They’ve got me locked up in the basement of the Pentagon.”

Her grandfather asked drolly, “Are you stalking Monihan?”

She burst out laughing. “Not hardly.”

“Glad to hear it, pumpkin. Put me on the line with whoever’s breathing over your shoulder. I assume they’ve got someone listening in to whatever you say?”

“Of course. Here he is.” She thrust the telephone receiver into the surprised hand of her interrogator. She watched in high amusement as the guy introduced himself as Captain Hammersmith and stammered out a series of names and Criminal Investigation Detachments. When he’d worked his way up the chain of command to four-star generals, he finally stopped speaking. A short pause and then a crisp, “Yes, sir.”

The guy hung up the phone. “Your grandfather asked me to tell you he’s sending a car and driver around front to pick you up. He said that by the time his driver can get here, he’ll have you ‘sprung from the pokey.’”

She sighed in immense relief.

“Uh, if you’ll excuse me, I need to make a couple calls to my superiors.”

“To warn them about the shit that’s about to roll downhill and land on their unsuspecting heads?” she asked helpfully.

“Yeah. Something like that.”

She grinned openly as the guy hastily exited the room.

True to his word, her grandfather had her out of there in under fifteen minutes. In fact, it was an impressive display of string pulling. But she wasn’t going to stick around long enough to rub it in. Gabe’s would-be killers were still out there, somewhere.

With a last admonishment to stay the hell away from Gabe Monihan, her two interrogators left her standing alone on the steps of the Pentagon. Dang, it was cold today! She pulled her leather duster more tightly around herself, huddling into its not-quite-warm-enough folds.

Before long, a black luxury sedan pulled up and a driver in a chauffeur’s uniform stepped out. “Miss Lockworth?” he asked.

She didn’t recognize the guy. Not her grandfather’s usual driver. But then, maybe the CIA had assigned Jens to a real job in the agency. She gave him grief about his plush assignment every time she saw him.

She stepped forward, smiling. “That’s me. I’m Diana Lockworth.” She held out a friendly hand. The driver looked surprised, but took the offered handshake. “Darryl,” he mumbled.

“Hi, Darryl. Let’s blow this Popsicle stand, shall we? I need to get downtown. Down near the Mall and the parade route for the inauguration,” she said, referring to the long grassy section of the city that stretched from the Lincoln Memorial all the way to the Capitol Building.

“Coming right up, ma’am,” he replied. He held the door for her as she climbed in and shut it firmly behind her. As he pulled away from the curb he asked, “Would you like some music, ma’am?”

“No thanks,” she replied. “I need to do a little thinking.”

The driver nodded silently. She was surprised when a blacked-out privacy glass came up out of the back of the front seat, closing her off from any further conversation with Darryl. Gramps must have a new car to go along with the new driver.

As they headed toward downtown Washington, D.C., she had no specific destination in mind. She just knew she had to head down to where Gabe was going to be in a few hours. For that’s surely where the Q-group would be, as well.

She replayed the interrogation by the Army Intelligence officers in her head. Who was the informant? Had the two intelligence officers revealed anything to her, said anything, that would give her a clue as to who’d set her up like that?

Was there a chance the incident was connected in some way to the Q-group and its assassination attempt on Gabe? The idea was ridiculous. Except the timing of it was just so blasted suspicious.

Who could be working against her like this? Or maybe the question was better stated, Who inside the government was working against Gabe Monihan like this? An image of a high, sloping forehead under black-and-silver hair and piercing, furious eyes popped into her head. Was it possible? Had Thomas Wolfe set her up? She wouldn’t put it past the man. He’d struck her as having nerves of ice and steel. And she had no doubt he was capable of arranging her arrest, or at least detention.

Of course, Wolfe undoubtedly hadn’t done the dirty work himself. He’d probably had a flunkie call CID and make the accusations against her. She could probably track down the phone records of the call and find out exactly who’d made the call. Where was Oracle when a girl really needed it?

She might not have Oracle here, but she could certainly try to think like Oracle. Okay. Her dislike of Wolfe aside, who else inside the government might have a reason to stop her from foiling an assassination attempt on Gabe? For whoever that person was, she’d lay down good money that he was behind, or at least involved in, the upcoming assassination attempt. Of course, the very idea of an assassination attempt from inside the government was outrageous. But that was her job. To imagine the outrageous and then plan for it.

Any person out to kill Gabe would have to be very high up in the government to benefit from Gabe’s death. They’d need to have passionate opinions about certain foreign policies that lay in direct opposition to Gabe’s. They’d have to have access to the intelligence community. How else would an old CIA scenario have turned up with a bunch of terrorists, and how else could Army Intel have been sicced on her so quickly?

She ticked off the list of requirements for the ringleader of any plot to kill Gabe. High-level government official. Ultraconservative or ultraliberal politics. Access to the intelligence community. Wealth enough to finance the historically destitute Q-group. Access to resources in the form of high-tech equipment or training.

She mentally noted every possible suspect, even if her head said they couldn’t possibly be the right person. And stopped cold as a particular name came to mind. One that fit every criteria to absolute perfection.

Joseph P. Lockworth. Former Director of the CIA.

Gramps? No way.

She reminded herself to think like Oracle. No value judgments. Just the facts. Let them speak for themselves. And she was riding in his car this very second. Had she just handed herself directly into the clutches of the enemy?

11:00 A.M.

She reached for the door handle and tested it. Locked. Don’t panic. It was probably a standard security procedure to lock all the doors from the driver’s position. She looked outside. And noticed they were headed farther north than was necessary to get to the Mall, where she’d asked to be dropped off.

“Hey, Darryl,” she said into the intercom on the panel in the back of the front seat. “Can you just drop me off right here? This will be perfect.”

If anything, the car sped up more.

Good Lord. Was she being kidnapped? By her own grandfather? Maybe the intercom just wasn’t working. She tried the button marked Up and Down for the partition. Nothing.

“Darryl,” she said louder into the intercom. “Stop right here.”

Still nothing. Crud. She couldn’t see him through the black glass partition. She banged on it with the flat of her hands and shouted, “Darryl! Stop the car!”

Nada.

Oh yeah. She was definitely a prisoner in here. She looked outside. They were well north of the Mall and traveling east. Fast. She banged on her side window, but nobody could hear her over the traffic noise, of course. She had to get out of here! But how? For all she knew, the window glass was bulletproof, and nothing she did would break through it. She tested the upholstery at the back of the seat. Maybe she could tear through to the trunk and kick her way out of there. The seat cushion pulled away to reveal a steel wall between the passenger compartment and the trunk. Maybe she could access the door lock itself. Tear off the inside door panel and manually release the locking mechanism of the door. She pried at the door lining and broke a couple of fingernails but didn’t budge the panel. She might be able to pry it off using some sort of tool, though.

Okay. Plan A was to try to break out a window and escape that way. Plan B would be to try to take apart the door.

Now for something heavy and hard to bust the glass with. Even if it wasn’t bulletproof, the window would still be made of tempered safety glass, and it took a hefty blow to damage that stuff significantly. She gazed around the interior of the car. Her purse was too soft. Her shoe was too light. She could wrap her leather coat around her fist and try to punch it out, but she doubted she had the strength to succeed. She opened the minibar contained in the back of the front passenger seat. Bingo. Bottles of liquor. She tested them and pulled out a magnum of champagne. The bottle had a thick, heavy bottom and a chunky body. The weight of the liquid and the pressure of the carbonated beverage outward upon the glass bottle might just give it enough smashing power to break the window. If not, she was about to make a really big mess for nothing.

She pulled the sleeves of her leather coat down over her hands to protect them and herself from flying glass. She picked up the champagne bottle by the neck in both fists, closed her eyes and swung it with all her might at the right rear passenger window.

Her arm jarred all the way to the shoulder and a tremendous crashing noise of breaking glass filled the air. She jumped in icy shock as cold champagne drenched her. But a basketball-size spiderweb of fractured glass had appeared in the window. Hallelujah!

The car swerved violently and lurched forward again as if the driver had just stomped on the accelerator. Gave Darryl a fright, did she? Quickly, she lay down on her back on the seat, feet up. Using the heels of her boots, she kicked out the shattered glass. It bent outward in a sheet, and finally, under repeated blows from her foot, gave way. A cold wind rushed into the interior of the car. The vehicle slowed abruptly.

Uh-oh. Darryl was on to her.

She leaped up and ducked through the window. Her eyes watered ferociously and her hair whipped all around her face. She grabbed onto the roof of the car and sat on the edge of the door frame while she maneuvered a foot out the window. The pavement sped by underneath her at a good thirty miles per hour, but the vehicle was decelerating fast. She swung her second foot through and jumped clear of the car.

She landed on her feet in a blessedly empty turn lane, but the impact and her momentum knocked her off balance. She tucked and rolled, flinging her arms over her head to protect it as her fall sent her tumbling end over end for a good twenty or thirty feet. She lay on the ground in a ball, stunned. Still alive. Amazing. Lucky as hell, too. Thank God for the tough leather coat.

Brakes squealed ahead of her. She looked up in time to see the big Cadillac heave into a tire-screaming J-turn and stop facing her, like a bull getting ready to charge. The white flash of the license plate below the radiator looked like a fleck of foam dripping from the silver-toothed maw of the beast. The powerful engine shifted into gear. Here he came. She forced her aching body to unfold and pushed painfully to her feet, looking around frantically for cover. A couple car horns blared as cars passed her and swerved around the Cadillac, which was now facing the wrong direction. She was out in the middle of a six-lane street. No time to dive for cover behind one of the parked cars at the edge of the concrete expanse. She crouched at the ready. She’d wait until the last second and leap to the side. If Darryl was any good, he’d swerve to hit her. And then she’d have to leap back out of the way in the other direction. Fast.

It was a plan, at any rate. And it wasn’t as if she had time to think up anything better. The black monster bore down upon her, gathering speed and momentum, building up deadly power. She saw Darryl’s face through the car’s windshield as he drew close. It was devoid of emotion, displaying only the utter concentration of a pro. He was out to kill her, all right.

She head faked left and right like a basketball player trying to go around a defender to score a basket. But the car just came on, straight at her. She waited until the car was no more than a hundred feet away and jumped hard to the left. As she’d expected, the car swerved at her, like a heat-seeking missile tracking its target.

Fifty feet.

Darryl would expect her to jump back to the right at the last second. She glimpsed his hands changing grip on the steering wheel, in fact, readying himself to yank the car back the other way.

Twenty feet.

Acting purely on instinct, she jumped again. Farther to the left. Out of his way a second time. The car lurched and Darryl tried to correct for the sudden and unexpected movement. But he wasn’t in time. The sleek metal door brushed against her side as the car went barreling past. Damn, that had been close. Bullfighters could have their job, thank you very much.

The Caddie’s brakes squealed again. She had to give the guy credit for being persistent. Time to split. She took off running, scooping up her purse where it had rolled to a stop in the street not far from her. She looked up and saw a wall of oncoming traffic. Crud. A stoplight had changed and sent three lanes of cars barreling toward her. She dived out of the way between two parked cars. Fortunately, the oncoming traffic blocked the Caddie from driving across the lanes of traffic in pursuit.

“Hey, lady! Are you all right?” someone called out.

No time to stop and chitchat with bystanders. She took off running down the sidewalk. She was in a business district. Plain concrete buildings that had seen better days lined the street. She ducked into the first decent-size doorway she came across. An office-supply store. She raced toward the back of it, ignoring the startled cries of the employees. She slammed through the swinging doors marked Employees Only and into the storeroom. Looked left and right and spied the loading dock to her right. She ran for it. Out onto the chest-high cement platform. A running leap off it, and her left ankle gave out as she hit the ground. She turned it into a perfectly executed parachute-landing fall, rolled, and popped back onto her feet. The ankle felt okay. Off and running again. She raced down the dirty alley and came out on a one-way street. The traffic was heavy. She sprinted along the sidewalk, waiting for an opportunity to dive across the broad avenue.

A shout behind her. The deep baritone of Darryl’s voice. Traffic or not, she jumped out into the street. A car stomped on its brakes and swerved, narrowly missing her. She darted across the next two lanes of swerving, honking cars and ducked as a metallic pinging sounded behind her. Bullets on metal. The bastard was shooting at her!

Time to change the rules of engagement, here. She had to get off the street. She took the first left turn to the south and put on an extra burst of speed. God bless the Army’s stringent physical fitness standards, and God bless all those years of sports at the Athena Academy. A right turn, down another block, and another left turn.

She looked over her shoulder, panting. No sign of Darryl. She looked around fast. And jumped into a dark little Greek restaurant. She made her way, huffing, past the mostly empty tables. Too early for the lunch crowd.

The manager looked up and surprise lit in his eyes. Reacting to her unsavory punker getup, no doubt.

“Where’s your bathroom?” she asked breathlessly.

He pointed over his shoulder toward the back of the place. Perfect. Beside the kitchen. She stepped into the dim bathroom. She ran a sinkful of water and rinsed the streak of red out of her hair. Paper towels painfully, albeit effectively, rubbed off her heavy makeup, leaving her skin reddened, but mostly back to its normal hue. She dug around in her purse for yet another of her punker accoutrements. A can of black aerosol hair spray. Normally she’d just do the tips in black or maybe a lone streak of black, but today she laid it on all over her head. She didn’t have time to make it look nice as she covered her golden blond hair with the black spray. There. At a glance, she’d pass for a brunette.

She coughed at the cloud of aerosol propellant around her head and zipped her purse shut. Pulling out a black silk scarf she usually tossed around her neck, this time she wrapped it around her head for a total profile change.

She stepped out of the bathroom and the manager about gave himself whiplash double-taking on her. As she ducked through the door into the kitchen, he belatedly lurched and shouted something at her in Greek. The chef looked up in surprise, but merely watched, bemused, as she rushed past him toward the back exit.

She popped out into a narrow access alley and ran lightly down it until she reached the street. Slowing to a quick walk, she stepped out onto the sidewalk. Now, it was all about stealth. About blending in. As she moved toward Capitol Hill the crowds grew thicker. She thought she glimpsed Darryl well behind her, once, but she couldn’t be sure. He was too far away to see clearly. Which was good news. With her new disguise, he very likely couldn’t make her out in the crowd, either. Especially since he’d be looking for a pale-skinned blonde with stark makeup and that telltale blood-red streak in her hair.

She slowed down her pace to blend in with the leisurely crowd of tourists beginning to make their way toward the Mall and the Inaugural Parade. She guessed she was still ten blocks from the Capitol, whose dome peeked out above the buildings ahead. She crossed a street and turned the corner and happened to catch sight out of the corner of her eye of a man in a camel overcoat shifting to the far side of the street behind her.

Alarm bells went off in her head. That was a standard surveillance move for someone working as part of a multiman team to tail a target. Was it just some random guy crossing the street, or God help her, had someone managed to pick up her trail again? She doubled back abruptly and dived into a recessed storefront with multiple glass display windows. Using the glass as a makeshift mirror, she watched for the telltale shift of a pedestrian across the street in the middle of the block. There he went. A guy with a long, gray ponytail in a black leather jacket. Dammit.

She ducked into the jewelry store beside her.

A female clerk eyed her colossally bad hair-dye job as she approached the counter. One of the woman’s hands slid unobtrusively under the counter. Reaching for the silent alarm.

Diana sighed. She still looked completely disreputable, apparently. She reached—slowly—into her purse and pulled out her wallet. She flashed her military ID card at the clerk and spoke in her most professional tone of voice. “I’m an intelligence officer with the Army. I’m helping provide security for the inauguration, and I’ve got a bit of a problem. There are some men moving down this street whom I need to follow. Is there a stairwell inside this building, maybe a fire escape, I could use to get to the offices upstairs? I’d be tremendously grateful if you could help me.”

The woman weighed her words for a moment. “Is that a disguise you’re wearing?” she asked.

Diana grimaced. “Yes. Horrible, isn’t it? But it was the best I could do when I spotted these jokers.”

The clerk came out from behind the counter. “Follow me.”

Diana followed the woman into a small back room with a desk, a coffee machine and a door that looked as though it led to a bathroom. Diana frowned as the clerk stopped near a metal locker and stooped down inside it for a moment. Was she reaching for a weapon? Diana tensed in preparation for disarming the older woman.

The clerk emerged with a cardboard box. “Lost and found. Is there anything here you could use?”

Diana sagged in relief. “Bless you.” She rooted around in the assorted items of clothing and came up with two scarves, one a vivid cobalt blue, and the other a pattern of assorted brown tones. “These are perfect. I’ll return them when I’m done with them.”

The clerk shrugged. “No need. They’ve both been in there awhile. The fire escape is this way.” She led Diana to a heavy-looking metal door and punched in a code on the number pad beside it. The door buzzed and the clerk opened it. “Good luck.”

Diana looked the woman in the eye sincerely. “Thanks. I really appreciate your help.”

And then she was off, racing up the stairs to the building’s second floor, and as she had hoped, a long office complex that spanned the entire block of stores below. Unlike the jewelry store, the fire doors onto this floor were not locked. She walked quickly all the way to the far end of the building and stepped into the corner office. A man wearing a white shirt and a sloppy tie looked up from his desk.

“Can I help you?” he asked in surprise.

“Yes. I need to look out your window for a moment.”

“I beg your pardon?”

She moved past the guy as she flashed her military ID yet again. “I’m doing security for the inauguration and your office has the view I need for a minute. I’ll be out of here in a flash.”

She plastered herself against the wall beside the window that looked down on the street she’d just left. She watched the ebb and flow of humanity below, and sure enough, after a minute or so, three people stood out from the normal movements of the crowd. The man in the camel coat, the guy with the ponytail in leather, and…Darryl. Sonofagun.

The man in the camel coat turned the corner, and she shifted over to the office’s other window. Yep, standard search pattern in progress for a lost target. Straight out of the government training manual. Who were these guys? More CIA trained terrorists, or no kidding government types this time?

All three men were Caucasian. Not one among them looked even remotely Berzhaani. Not Q-group material, then. Somebody else. But who, dammit?

“May I use your phone?” she asked the guy at the desk.

“Um, sure,” he said cautiously. Man. Even mostly cleaned up, she still exuded some vibe that made people think she was trouble.

She leaned across his desk and dialed zero. Asked the operator for a taxi company. Got a dispatcher on the line. She held her hand over the phone and asked the poor guy whose office she’d invaded for the street address of this building. He told her quickly, as if he was relieved at the idea of getting rid of her. She relayed the address to the dispatcher. Twenty minutes, the guy said.

“Make it ten and I’ll double the fare and throw in a tip for you,” she said into the receiver.

“Done,” was the prompt reply.

She put down the phone and smiled gratefully at the office worker. “Thank you so much for your help, sir. You have no idea how valuable your assistance has been.”

“No problem,” the guy said, warming up to her dazzling smile.

“One last favor, if I might. Could you tell me how to get out of this building?”

He gave her directions to the elevators down to the main lobby. She made her way to the ground floor of the building and lurked inside, partially hidden behind a big, fake fig tree. At least it wasn’t a palm tree, this time. She kept a sharp eye out for her three tails, but saw none of them. Good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, they’d moved on past this area in search of her.

Ten minutes later on the nose, a Yellow Cab pulled up out front. Using the muted brown scarf to cover her head and shoulders, she hurried outside to the cab and jumped in. “Thanks for getting here so quickly,” she told the driver.

He nodded in the rearview mirror. “Where to?”

She thought fast. If the Q-group was trying to make a political statement, they’d do it in front of the largest possible crowd, which meant the Mall and its teeming thousands of tourists. “As close to the Mall as you can get me,” she answered.

“Which end?”

Good question. The blasted thing stretched forever. How was she supposed to figure out where they’d mount their attack along its length in the next hour? Well, it wasn’t as if she had any choice but to just start looking. Gabe’s motorcade would probably enter the Mall from 15th Street beside…

“Take me to the Washington Monument.”

“You got it.”

“And could you drive conservatively so you don’t call any attention to us?”

The guy’s eyebrows went up in surprise, but he nodded. After all the rush to get here, he probably figured she was in some giant hurry. She was, but it was more important at the moment that her tails not spot her.

The foot traffic was heavy, and various streets were closed such that the cab could only drop her off a block north of the towering spire of the Washington Monument, but that was close enough. She paid the guy double the fare plus an extra twenty-dollar bill for his dispatcher and watched him pull away. She walked quickly until she hit the back of the crowd that was lining up ten people or more deep along Madison Avenue to watch the parade, which was due to start any minute.

A sea of faces spread out before her, stretching a mile or more to her right and wrapping all the way up Capitol Hill and around the Capitol building itself. The east end of the Mall was filling up fast with people, there to watch the inauguration ceremony and listen to Gabe’s inaugural address on the huge platform that had been erected on the Capitol steps.

Where would she go if she were planning to assassinate the President-elect, and when would she do it? Gabe would be standing still in the open when he took the oath of office and gave his inaugural speech. It would be easy to use a high-powered rifle and take a shot at him then. Except he’d be surrounded by bulletproof podiums and antisniper measures galore. The less likely option was to hit him in his limousine, which was heavily armored and protected by Secret Service to the hilt. He’d be invincible in the vehicle. C’mon, Diana. Think like a killer. How would she do it?

Everybody would believe he was safe inside the limousine. If the Q-group could pull off killing him there, the psychological blow to the country would be even greater. It would deliver a message that nobody was safe anywhere. After listening to these guys talk on the Internet for the last couple of months, that sounded exactly like the sort of logic they’d use. Okay. The limo it was. Now, where along the parade route would she try it?

She started to walk. Madison Avenue was a one-way street with traffic traveling west under normal circumstances. But today it was closed and the parade would move east along it. The cold air burned in her lungs and she breathed out a cloud of condensation as she walked quickly along the perimeter of the crowd, looking for something. She didn’t know exactly what she was looking for, but it had to be here, somewhere. Some spot that was better than the next to make the hit. Some feature that made it the perfect place to kill a president.

The crowd continued to swell around her. Lord, there were a ton of people out here. She was so insignificant among them. One among tens of thousands. How was she supposed to make a difference? She couldn’t do it. She was going to fail. Desperation settled around her, constricting her lungs until panic began to set in. Relax. Breathe. The brain shuts down when panic hits. Keep thinking. But the demons had her in their grip. She fought to no avail against the drowning sensation that worsened with every step she took. The Smithsonian’s massive American History Museum loomed on her left, taking up a full city block. She walked even faster, nearly running past the Natural History Museum, which was no less enormous. The red brick of the original Smithsonian building loomed across the mall, ugly and factorylike.

Nothing jumped out at her. She had no earthly idea where Q-group was going to make its run at Gabe. Being out here wasn’t doing any good. A man jostled her. She looked up. Focused on his face. Round. Ruddy. Caucasian. Not her man.

Maybe instead of trying to find a place, she should look for the Q-group members themselves. She had their pictures in her purse. She looked around frantically, focusing on each face until they all blurred into a sea of disembodied features.

Gabe was going to die.

She had to get help. Tell someone! Not a policeman in sight. In the far distance, she heard a band begin to play. Oh, Lord. The parade was starting. By sheer force of will, she beat down the impulse to run screaming. She had to do this. For Gabe. She fixed his face in her mind. His intelligent, compassionate, laughing eyes. And gradually, her pulse calmed. Her breathing slowed down until the steel bands around her chest loosened. Better. Now think!

She looked up at the buildings clustering around the Capitol ahead. If the Q-group had snipers and high-powered rifles there, she couldn’t do a damn thing about it. There were so many potential perches for a gunman atop the many buildings in the area or behind an office window, she’d never find the killer in time. She’d have to leave that one up to the Secret Service and the FBI, who were much better suited to foil that sort of plan than she could ever be.

Besides, the Q-group attack in Chicago relied on direct application of force. Blowing up Gabe’s car would be much more their style.

She looked around, trying to orient herself. In her panic, she’d lost track of where she was. Over there. The West Building of the National Gallery of Art loomed well ahead on her left. A huge banner down the side of the building announced an exhibit of paintings celebrating freedom and its many faces. The banner looked like a stylized American flag, and the thing was a good three stories tall. It would make a great backdrop for a video shot or a photograph.

Bingo. That was where they’d do it! They’d splatter Gabe’s brains all over a giant American flag. What could be more ironic or make more of a political statement than that?

She took off running toward the building, scanning faces as she went.

Somewhere nearby, among these throngs of people, was a small team of men intent on killing Gabe Monihan. And she had only a little while left to find them.

12:00 P.M.

She reached the National Gallery of Art and its enormous banner. The sidewalk in front of the great structure was crammed with people packed in shoulder to shoulder. Nobody could move over there, let alone maneuver into position to kill anyone. No, the Q-group would have to operate on this side of the street with the relatively open Mall behind them.

The first band passed, a high-school drill team complete with a line of half-frozen girls in hot pants trying to smile and remember their routine. A sheriff’s posse from somewhere in Pennsylvania passed by on fractious horses. They didn’t like the cold any more than their riders did.

She scanned the sheaf of papers clutched in her hand and went back to watching the crowd. She moved slowly now, methodically observing everyone on this side of the street. She’d swept the area once and was making a second pass through. The faces in the pictures were burned into her brain, and this time she was trying to imagine them with disguises, either in the form of facial hair or clothes obscuring part of their features as she checked out the crowd. She had to spot one of them soon or Gabe was history.

The gnawing sense of doubt was growing in her gut again. She hadn’t done enough. She hadn’t cracked the code soon enough, hadn’t warned the right people in time. Gabe was going to die a horrible, bloody death because she’d let him down. For the third time, she scanned the crowd in front of the art gallery. Nada. Her panic, held at bay for the moment, notched up a little higher.

She was a screwup. Always had been. Her teachers always moaned about how she was wasting her potential. What they didn’t know was that her “potential” was a lie. She was not smart, competent Josie, who could fling a supersonic jet through the sky with perfect precision, who handled every crisis in her life exactly correctly, who never screwed up when the chips were down. She was the afterthought little sister. The tagalong who basked in the reflected glow from her illustrious sister but never shone on her own. And man, was she about to blow it big-time.

She jumped when her cell phone rang in her purse, emitting an electronic version of the George Thurgood classic, “Bad to the Bone.” She dug it out and looked at the caller ID. “Private Call,” it announced. She clicked it on and put it to her ear. “Hello?” she said cautiously.

“Hi, Diana. It’s me.” She about dropped the phone as the dulcet tones of Gabe Monihan’s voice caressed her ear.

“How’s it going?”

She forgot to breathe. “Uh, i-it’s going,” she stammered. “I’ve stirred up a real hornet’s nest if that counts for anything.”

“Where are you?” he asked.

“I’m in front of the National Gallery of Art along your parade route. I think this is where the Q-group will try to hit you.”

“Lovely,” he commented lightly. His truncated comments struck her as odd. As if maybe he couldn’t talk in the company he was in.

“Can’t talk much right now?” she asked.

“Exactly,” he said pleasantly.

“Got it. Fine, you just listen and I’ll do all the talking. I think I’ve uncovered the identities of the men who comprise a Q-group cell. They look to have been based out of New Jersey for the last year or so. I think they’re the ones planning to kill you today.” She paused in her recitation. “Lord, I hate even hearing those words said aloud.”

“Ditto,” he agreed.

“At any rate,” she rushed on, “I got detained by Army Intelligence for stalking you…isn’t that a laugh…but my grandfather sprang me. His driver tried to kidnap me, but I got away.”

“Your grandfather?” Gabe asked incredulously.

“Long story. I’ll tell you about it later. The thing is, I tried to get a copy of the pictures of the guys I’ve identified as the Q-group cell to Owen Haas. I doubt he received them, however. I expect it’s too late to get them to him now, since I’d guess you’re getting ready to move.”

“I’m in the car now,” Gabe replied.

“Are you sure I can’t talk you into telling anyone that these turkeys are going to try to hit you again?”

“I’ll be happy to do it after I take the oath. But not until then.”

She huffed in frustration. “I was afraid you’d say that. If you get a moment alone, tell Owen to keep an eye out for six to eight men of Berzhaani descent. They all look to be around thirty years old or so. Middle height, medium builds. It’s not much for him to go on, I know. But they’re out here, somewhere. I can feel it in my gut.”

“Me, too.”

Now that she thought about it, he did sound tighter than a high-tension wire. But she only knew that because she’d heard him this morning when he was relaxed and open by comparison. The guy hid his stress well. Heck, he had good cause to be stressed out, even if there weren’t a bunch of guys hanging around trying to kill him. He was about to take on one of the toughest jobs on the planet.

“How are you holding up?” she asked.

“Okay. I’m not crazy about giving big speeches, truth be told.”

“And you’re a politician?” Surprise made her voice higher than usual.

“I never was much for campaigning. I enjoy the work, but I’m not fond of what goes into getting the job in the first place.”

“Not much for kissing babies?” she asked sympathetically.

“Actually, I like that part,” he replied. “The worst part of it is having to shake hundreds upon hundreds of hands when every last person in the crowd wants to impress you with their firm grip. My hand gets so sore I can go days at a time unable to pick up a pen.”

“Wow. And you had to feed and shave yourself, too.” She added, “You can’t imagine the visual image I’m getting right now of Owen Haas feeding you cereal while shaving you.”

Gabe’s rich laugh filled her ear. “Thanks. I needed that.”

She asked, “So aren’t you supposed to be doing something important and Presidential right about now?”

“Nah, Justice Browning will tell me what to say. I just repeat after him, and voilà, I’m President.”

“How about your speech? Are you going to get through it okay?”

“I’ve got the whole thing memorized. Besides, all I have to do is read it off a teleprompter.”

“Here’s a tip for you from my high school speech teacher. Wave your arms around a bit and pound your fist on the podium a couple of times. It’ll make you look passionate and will stir up a bunch of patriotic zeal in everyone’s chests. Then they won’t care so much what you actually say.”

He sounded genuinely amused. “Wave my arms and pound the podium, huh? I think I can handle that. Any advice for me on running the country?”

“Don’t get me started,” she warned laughingly.

“Are you busy tonight?” he asked, shifting topic abruptly.

“Not particularly. Why?”

“Are you going to be at any of the inaugural balls?”

She blinked in surprise. “I’ve got a ticket to the military ball, but I hadn’t decided if I was going to go or not.”

“I’ll save a dance for you if you’ll come,” he said winningly. As if he thought she might actually say no. Yeah, right. Not.

She stammered, “Uh…okay. In that case, I guess I’ll be there.”

“It’s a date,” he said lightly. The man actually sounded relieved. As if she’d turn down a gorgeous, smart, funny guy like him? Let alone the fact that he was going to be President of the United States. What was he smoking?

“Well, I suppose I’d better keep you alive if I want my dance, then, shouldn’t I?”

He laughed aloud. “I’ll let you go. Wouldn’t want to stop you from doing that. Give me a call if there are any new developments.”

“Okay,” she answered.

“Promise?” he asked.

“I promise,” she replied firmly.

“Thanks, Diana.”

“You’re welcome, Gabe.”

She disconnected the phone. And then stared at it. Whoops. She’d just committed a huge breach of protocol. She’d called the President-elect of the United States by his first name.

The reality of the crowded street pressed in around her. Face upon face. But no sign of her quarry. Looking for the Q-group cell out here was hopeless. She simply couldn’t do it alone. Who could she call in to help who wouldn’t arrest her or just take her for a complete kook? There had to be someone.

And then it hit her. Kim Valenti. Her old classmate from Athena Academy, an NSA agent stationed here in the Washington area, had been the woman who’d exposed the Q-group plot in Chicago and caught the suicide bomber at the airport, defusing the bomb with help from an FBI bomb squad member. She’d lay odds Kim was working the inauguration in some capacity today. She might even be in the immediate vicinity.

Diana opened her cell phone again and thumbed through its stored list of phone numbers to Kim’s cell phone number. She dialed it and waited impatiently for it to connect.

“Kim Valenti,” a voice answered professionally at the other end of the line.

“Kim. Diana Lockworth, here.”

“Diana! Long time no hear. How are you doing?”

“I’ve been better. Look, this is kind of an official call. Do you happen to be in D.C. right now?”

“Yeah. I’m on the Mall. Plastered up against a family from Idaho and some truck driver who, if he doesn’t get his elbow out of my ribs pretty quick, is going to lose it.”

Diana sighed in relief. “I’m on the Mall, too. I need to talk to you. Now. It’s urgent. National security urgent. Is there somewhere we can meet?”

Kim sounded surprised but answered evenly, “I’m at the Capitol. How far down are you?”

“Across from the West Building of the National Art Gallery. On the Mall side of the parade route.”

“Got it. Stay put right there. I’ve got access to a guy in a golf cart and he can run me down there. I’ll shift a guy to cover my position and I’ll see you in five minutes.”

“Roger,” Diana answered, all business. “I’ll back away from the crowd and be on the grass behind the bystanders. I’m wearing a long, black leather coat and my hair’s dyed black. I’ll put on a bright blue head scarf.”

“You’re in disguise?” Kim asked, surprised.

“Yeah.”

“I’ll be there in three minutes.”

The line went dead in Diana’s ear. Thank God. Now maybe Gabe stood a chance of walking away from this day alive.

True to Kim’s word, a golf cart came tooling down the Mall toward her in three minutes flat. Her old friend jumped out of the cart.

Diana rushed up to her. “Thanks for coming down here.”

“What’s up?” Kim asked. “And by the way, your hair looks like hell. Josie would knock you on your butt if she saw what you’ve done to it.”

Diana grinned. “It’ll wash out. Look. This is going to sound crazy, but I have reason to believe that somebody’s going to try to kill Gabe Monihan within the next few minutes.”

“Why?” Kim replied tersely.

Diana replied equally tersely, “No time to explain it all. It’s a long story, and I’ll be happy to tell you the whole thing later. Let’s just say I have access to—” How to describe Oracle and Delphi delicately? “—to unorthodox sources. But they’re impeccable. Please just trust me on this. The bottom line is that the Q-group has another cell here in Washington and is going to try to kill Gabe Monihan again. Today.”

“Again?” Kim asked sharply. “Monihan was not the target of the attack in Chicago. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“I’ve approached Q-group from another angle since you tangled with them in Chicago and Baltimore. My source—”

“Ah.” Kim cut her off. “I have a feeling we may have a similar source.”

Diana stared at her. Did this mean Kim was part of Oracle, too? Kim cocked an eyebrow at her, and although they were sworn not to discuss it, Diana felt certain she knew the answer.

Diana continued hastily, “I’ve got pictures of the Q-group members who I believe will make the hit. They’re out here somewhere. I think they’re going to try to kill him in front of that gigantic flag banner over there.” She pulled the sheaf of pictures out of her purse and thrust them at her old friend.

But instead of reaching for the pictures, Kim reached for the walkie-talkie hanging off her belt. “I’ve got to divert the motorcade.”

Diana lurched. “No!”

Kim paused in the act of putting the radio to her mouth. “Excuse me?”

“The inauguration’s got to go ahead as planned.”

“Why?” Kim asked, frowning.

“Gabe was adamant about it. He’ll kill me if he isn’t sworn in on time.”

Kim retorted incredulously, “Gabe? As in Gabriel Monihan?”

Uh-oh. “Yeah,” Diana mumbled. “Like I said. Long story.”

Kim put the radio back in its clip slowly. “Okay, then. So what does he want you—us—to do?”

“Find these guys and stop them.”

Kim looked at her watch. “He’s due through here in about ten minutes. We don’t have time to distribute the pictures to the security team and fine-tooth comb our way through the crowd.”

“Take a look through those pictures and then let’s get moving. I figure they’ve got to be on this side of the street because the other side is too crowded to maneuver in.”

Kim looked to the north. “I think you’re right. Let’s space out about fifty feet and start walking the line.”

Diana nodded. “I’ll call you on my cell phone if I spot them and you can call me if you see them first.”

Kim nodded shortly and moved off. Diana did the same. There was something bracing about having somebody else out here helping who didn’t think she was completely nuts. But it didn’t put more time on the clock, and it didn’t mean that the two of them would find these turkeys in the next nine minutes and thirty seconds.

As she walked the line of people, Diana did a rare thing. She said a prayer and willed whatever greater beings might be listening to lead her to the terrorists.

Her phone rang, and she slammed it to her ear. “Hello?”

Kim spoke abruptly, “It’s me. We’re running out of time. I’m going to run ahead and work the crowd starting at 7th Street and heading toward the Washington Monument from there. You’re in charge of this area up to that point. We’ll cover more of the parade route that way. When you hit 7th Street sprint ahead to 13th Street and pick up the search a block or so ahead of me.”

“Got it.” Good idea. By leapfrogging past each other, they’d cover a lot more ground in the next few minutes. They wouldn’t hit the whole route by a long shot, but they’d look at a significant chunk of the crowd. It was better than nothing.

Yeah, but was it good enough?

The sounds around her blurred and dulled, fading into the background of her mind, so intense was her concentration on finding one of the faces burned into her mind. She had to succeed. She had to spot one of these guys. Five minutes to go. No sign of anyone from Q-group. She’d reached 7th Street. She spotted Kim in the crowd, about half a block ahead of her, walking quickly along the Mall, scanning faces with intense concentration of her own.

Diana took off running, moving ahead of Kim. She kept going until she was about a block ahead of her colleague. She slowed to a walk and took up the search again. She took a moment to pull out her phone and hit the auto dial, but resumed the search with the phone plastered to her ear.

“Go ahead,” Kim bit out over the phone.

“I’m working the crowd in front of the Natural History Museum. Search up to that spot and then leapfrog me.”

“Roger,” Kim replied.

Diana disconnected the line and stuffed the phone in her pocket. She spared seconds long enough to glance at her watch. Two minutes until Gabe’s motorcade was due to pass through here! Her urgency bubbled over into panic that she barely managed to hold in check. Every second counted now. She walked faster. Pushed herself to scan the sea of faces around her faster.

Faintly in the distance behind her, she heard cheering. Oh, God. Gabe was coming.

Her phone rang.

“Yes?” she panted, running now through the crowd.

“I’ve got you in sight. I’m going on ahead to the American History Museum. Turn around when you reach it and head back for that flag banner.”

“Okay,” Diana panted.

Strains of band music wafted to her. Definitely a military brass band. Probably the Marine Band. And it was drawing near. Her heart sank. It would be right in front of the Presidential motorcade. She was almost out of time.

Just a few more seconds. She raced forward now, trying frantically to stay ahead of that inexorable line of black limousines.

But it was useless. The first limousine pulled even with her. She spared a glance at it over her shoulder. She didn’t recognize any of the Secret Service agents jogging along beside it. Where was Owen Haas?

Then she glimpsed a long line of limousines behind the first one. Of course. Gabe wouldn’t be in the lead car. It would undoubtedly be full of Secret Service agents. Then there’d be carloads of hangers-on—incoming cabinet members, high roller contributors to Gabe’s campaign and Gabe’s mother, of course.

She had maybe another thirty seconds or so before Gabe’s car went by.

She pressed forward through the screaming crowd, dodging miniature flags being waved wildly. The crowd cheered deafeningly around her. She tried to scan individual male faces, but they blurred together in her panic. It was no use.

She looked ahead, trying to spot Kim in the crowd. She couldn’t see her friend through the throngs of people pushing toward the street to see the incoming President. Diana swerved away from the parade route, farther out onto the Mall itself, to get clear enough of the heavy crowd to move.

A movement caught her attention just ahead. A moped. But that wasn’t what had captured her notice. It was the second moped coming in from her left as if it planned to join the first moped. She scanned the grassy field in front of her. There! A third moped.

She broke into a full run, heading straight for the oddly moving conveyances. She had to get a look at the guys on those bikes!

The crowd ahead of her moved, swelling back toward the Mall. The first moped was forced to put its brakes on and wove through the mass of bodies, seeking a route forward. It was just the break she needed. She put on an extra burst of speed and drew near enough the moped to catch a glimpse of the driver’s face.

Bingo!

She’d seen that face in her sheaf of pictures.

She veered toward him, running flat out, as fast as her body could possibly go. Her legs went numb and her lungs burned like fire as she sucked in the cold air. But she ignored the pain and ran as if her life depended on it. Or rather, as if Gabe Monihan’s life depended on it.

1:00 P.M.

She was close enough now to see that she recognized both of the drivers of the other mopeds as well. She’d done it. She’d found the Q-group cell and correctly guessed their point of attack. Now she just had to stop the bastards. And she only had a few seconds to do it. No time to pull out her cell phone and call Kim for backup.

Which guy to jump? Probably only one of them would launch the actual attack on Gabe. If she picked the wrong guy to take out, Gabe could be killed anyway.

A wave of noise reached her ears, a traveling cheer growing louder in volume by the second. Oh, God. That would be the crowd yelling as Gabe’s limousine drove past. She estimated the sound was only a few hundred feet behind her. Two of the men in front of her abandoned their mopeds, leaving them where they landed on the ground, and shoved forcefully into the crowd. Another hundred feet and she’d be upon the third moped.

The third guy, wearing a brown coat, looked to his right. A name popped into her head to match his picture. Tito Albadian. Glory Seeker. The probable leader of the Q-group cell.

She glanced to the right, as well, and saw one of the now-on-foot terrorists nod at him. Albadian stopped his scooter and got off, dumping it on the ground. Eighty feet to go until she was on him. As he turned to push into the crowd and she got a look at him in profile, she saw the brown backpack slung over his shoulders.

Weapon! her intuition screamed.

Albadian was the one. He had to be stopped!

Zeroed in on her target now, she dodged pedestrians as she barged forward. A clear space opened up in front of her and she burst into a run. Fifty feet to reach him. He made it into the front row of parade watchers and started to slide the backpack off his shoulders.

She wasn’t going to make it. Time slowed to a stop around her as her brain shifted into a weird, out-of-time existence and her life flashed before her. A childhood dominated by fear and embarrassment. The backlash of that embarrassment taking the form of rebellion and anger. A flash of clarity as she abruptly saw her increasingly troubled military career for what it was. A strike back at the establishment that destroyed her family.

Thoughts drifted through her brain randomly as her body continued to move forward of its own volition toward Albadian. Why did she measure her life by its failures and not its successes? Why did she still blame her mother for being sabotaged by criminals out to stop her research? And why in the world was she sticking her neck out like this today, blatantly risking her life for a man who was the very symbol of everything she’d despised for most of her life?

Pow! A body slammed into her from the left, tackling her and driving her to the ground like a professional linebacker. Ooompf. The air rushed out of her flattened lungs as pain plowed into her like a bulldozer. She stared at the grass from a range of approximately one inch. So much for out-of-body experiences.

What the hell had just blasted into her like that? Or rather, who? Was there a fourth terrorist out here that she hadn’t spotted? Someone with the Q-group cell must have spotted her closing in on their man. A surge of fight-or-flight adrenaline roared through her and she heaved upward, throwing the attacker off her back. He was tenacious, though, and hung on as she struggled in his grasp.

She managed to half roll over in his grip and froze, stunned, as she caught sight of dark blue and a flash of brass. A uniform. This guy was a police officer!

She stopped struggling and shouted over the din of the crowd as it started to yell around them, heralding the imminent arrival of Gabe’s limousine, “You’ve got to let me go! Monihan’s almost here!”

“No crazy’s getting near him on my watch, lady,” the cop snarled back.

“You don’t understand,” she cried frantically. “I’m trying to save him!”

“I was told to be on the lookout for a bunch of nutcases trying to pull something today. You just cool your jets and hold still.”

He leaned on her arms, expecting to subdue her by virtue of superior weight. Not a chance. This was exactly the sort of situation her Krav Maga training was designed to handle. She countered the guy’s attempt to pin her and reversed the move, landing the cop on his back hard, with her knee planted solidly on his solar plexus. Normally she’d finish him off with a chop to the side of the head, but she didn’t have time and the poor guy was a police officer. She left him gasping on the ground, jumped up and turned around facing the parade.

Where had Albadian gone? She searched over heads frantically, trying to spot his brown coat and dark hair.

There. Near the front of the crowd. She shoved toward him, ignoring the squawks of protest as she elbowed people aside. The yells around her grew into a roar. Crud. The first in another line of black stretch limousines came into view in front of her. Five more people to get past.

She all but picked up the woman in front of her and moved her aside in her panic to get to that backpack. She banged a tall, lean teenager aside. Three more people between her and her target. She could almost dive for that backpack.

A second limousine cruised past.

“Hey lady. Quit pushing back there,” someone growled at her.

She’d apologize after Gabe was safe. She popped the complainer in the back of the knee, knocking the joint out from under him and jumping past him as he partially collapsed.

A third limousine pulled into sight. This one had Secret Service agents at each corner of it, walking beside it briskly. She recognized Owen Haas at the back left corner of the car. Gabe.

She gathered herself to jump at Albadian and watched in horror as he cocked his arm back. And threw the backpack. It sailed up in a brown nylon arc, flying straight for the side of Gabe’s limousine.

“Bomb!” she screamed at the top of her lungs.

In slow motion, she saw Owen’s head turn toward the sound of her scream. He registered the pack flying at him. He dived and made a catch any NFL receiver would be proud of, and in one move, rolled, popped to his feet and flung the pack under the front end of the limousine behind him.

“Satchel charge!” he roared as the next limo in line came to an abrupt halt.

A single thought pierced her panic. What a brilliant move. The backup limo’s engine block and heavy, armor plating would absorb a tremendous amount of the explosion and protect not only Gabe, but the crowd, from the worst of the blast.

All four doors of the backup limousine opened, and men in suits poured out of the vehicle, stumbling and falling over each other in their haste to get away from the metal death trap their car had just become.

And then the backpack blew, sending out a blinding flash of light from under the car. A millisecond later, a tremendous orange fireball erupted, throwing the limousine’s front end straight up in the air. The vehicle paused for an endless second, balanced vertically on its back fender like a rearing stallion. Then it slammed down to the ground with a tremendous crash, sending debris outward in all directions.

Burning fuel sprayed the crowd in a deadly blossom of orange, and shrapnel ranging in size from tiny slivers of glass to entire doors flew out into the crowd. Flames enveloped the vehicle and a wall of heat and concussion slammed into her, flinging her backward into a screaming mass of human flesh.

The wall of bodies collapsed behind her, and she fell softly on top of a stack of humanity at least four people deep. Oh, Lord. Somebody was going to be crushed! She scrambled forward on her hands and knees, despite the heat scorching her face from the inferno in front of her.

Dear God, please let Gabe be okay. And please let everyone have gotten out of that ruined hull of a limousine alive.

She looked left at Gabe’s limousine. A dozen Secret Service agents lay all over it, using themselves as human shields. A noble sentiment, but wasn’t the thing armored already? But then, she knew from the balcony earlier that Secret Service agents were all about putting their bodies between their charge and harm. The Presidential limo’s engine revved powerfully and it accelerated away from the chaos behind it, laying down twin trails of rubber as it peeled out. Thank God. Gabe’s limousine was unhit enough to get out of here.

One of the grim Secret Service agents clinging to the rear trunk of the vehicle, his arms splayed out across the rear window, looked her way. She’d swear it was Owen Haas. But then the vehicle tore out of sight.

Noise registered in her consciousness. Screaming. Lots of it. Bystanders by the hundreds screaming in panic. Injured people moaning and crying out. Stunned and bloody people staggering around shouting the names of lost loved ones. A handful of overwhelmed police officers trying to control the crowd by bellowing over the top of the entire din.

And then motion registered. People moving, surging backward, running away from the site of the disaster. She looked around, trying to get her bearings. And caught a glimpse of just the right shade of brick brown. Her head whipped in that direction. But it wasn’t the bastard who’d done this. It was a man stumbling past her, his shirt partially burned off, its tatters covered in blood.

She scanned the crowd quickly. Where was Albadian? He’d been right up front, not far from the blast. He had to have taken some sort of damage. As people streamed away from the street, scattering in a starburst of panic across the frozen Mall, she cast her gaze back toward the explosion site.

There. Climbing to his feet. Staggering toward one of the abandoned mopeds. The dark-haired terrorist in his brown coat.

She looked around for the cop she’d dropped seconds ago. No sign of the guy. There was no sign of any policeman anywhere near her. And the few uniforms she saw were either too far away or heading straight for the burning limousine behind her.

Albadian righted one of the mopeds. Twisted the throttle frantically. No! He was going to get away! She took off running toward him. Below the high-pitched screaming of the crowd, she heard the low cough of the moped as its engine caught and turned over. It revved up, sounding more like a chain saw than a motor vehicle. She dived for it, and her hand grazed the rear fender as the moped jerked forward. But it lurched away from her hand. Damn!

She hit the ground hard, knocking the breath out of herself. She sucked hard, dragging air into her lungs by main force. She rolled on her side, looking around frantically. Over there. One of the other mopeds. She pushed painfully to her feet, her chest as sore as if an anvil had just landed on it. Even with adrenaline flooding her body, she still had to forcibly order her feet to move toward the motorized bike.

She finally got a full breath of air and picked up speed, darting for the moped. Bending down, she heaved the conveyance upright and flung her leg over it. Where was the starter switch on this thing? She fumbled around with the controls and managed by some miracle to get it going. She twisted the hand throttle and it leaped forward, nearly unseating her. Whoops! She regained her balance and looked up.

Over there. She located the chain saw-like sound of Albadian’s moped off to her left, heading toward the Capitol Building. She pointed her scooter that way and clumsily got into motion. The moped bumped over the frozen, dead grass, but she hung on grimly, gunning the thing after Albadian.

As she figured out the balance of the moped she opened up the throttle, racing across the Mall. The screams and sirens diminished behind her as her quarry raced toward the Capitol. The wind generated by her flight was arctic, and her cheeks went numb in a matter of seconds. Even inside her gloves she lost most of the feeling in her fingers.

Albadian veered to the south side of the Mall, clearing the worst of the crowds and popped out onto Constitution Ave., which ran east-west, paralleling the south side of the Mall. The bulky white marble structure of the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum flashed past as she opened up her moped’s throttle all the way. She accelerated to nearly thirty miles per hour. Probably by virtue of her weighing less than the guy she was chasing, her moped not only kept pace with Albadian but began to gain on him bit by bit. Another couple of miles and she’d have him.

Albadian raced east around the south end of the Capitol building. People milled about like a herd of agitated and confused sheep down here, unsure of whether to head toward the fireball in the distance to help or whether to run like hell from the point of the attack. She had to slow down to nearly a walking pace to weave through the thronging pedestrians choking the streets. Fortunately, so did Albadian.

She almost missed him when he cut left on 1st Street SE toward the Library of Congress, but a tiny gap opened in the crowd and she glimpsed the red moped. Honing in on her target again, she raced north, toward the Supreme Court building. The steep uphill slope slowed him down and she spurted closer to him, but then her moped hit the hill and she lost most of the ground back. C’mon. Go! She leaned down low over the handlebars to improve her aerodynamic drag. She inched a little bit closer.

Albadian looked back over his shoulder at her as if he’d heard her back here and realized he was being chased. Crud. He turned to face front, crouched low, as well. She gritted her teeth against the frigid windchill and prayed her numb fingers wouldn’t slip off the handles. Albadian’s driving became erratic, filled with the desperation of a man running for his life. But then, her gut seethed with the implacable fury of a woman who’d just witnessed an attempt to murder someone she cared about. It was about an even match.

Albadian swerved around yet another milling crowd of people, and she did the same, temporarily losing sight of him. She gunned the moped past the pedestrians and searched frantically. Over there. Heading east. She yanked the moped to her right.

Cripes! Her rear tire slipped on a patch of ice, shooting out from underneath her. It was a miracle she managed to stay atop the bike. But, as she straightened out the front tire, the back end fishtailed wildly beneath her. She fought it like a bucking bronc and managed, barely, to bring the cantankerous moped back under control. Definitely not designed for snow-and-ice operations.

She looked up. Damn. She’d lost valuable ground on Albadian.

Of all things, her cell phone rang in her pocket. She couldn’t spare a hand to answer it just now. Whoever it was would have to wait. She had a terrorist to catch before she could take any calls.

She had to do something to break this stalemate. Their mopeds were too evenly matched for one of them to win this contest. As her target led her down one street after another, she kept an eye out for something, anything to help her.

She blinked in shock as Albadian turned down a set of stairs, for goodness’ sake, and rattled down the icy descent. Grimly, she pointed her bike after him and bumped and jarred her way down the staircase after him. He shot out into a residential street, and she did the same. A car swerved wildly to miss them both, its horn blaring behind her. Man, that had been close!

What the hell was she doing? She was going to get herself killed out here! But it wasn’t as if the idea of giving up this insane chase was gaining any foothold against her grim rage. She was going to take this guy down if it was the last thing she did.

Albadian turned down a narrow alley and slid on a patch of loose gravel. Warned by his skidding recovery, she took the turn carefully and picked up several yards on him. But as he blasted past a row of trash cans, he reached out with his left hand and knocked over the last one, spewing trash all over the asphalt in front of her.

An empty milk jug exploded beneath her front tire, but she crashed through the mess without slowing down significantly. She shot out into the street, praying like crazy that no oncoming vehicle would wipe her out. Thankfully, there wasn’t any traffic.

This guy was insane! But then, that sort of went without saying. He’d just tried to kill the soon-to-be most powerful, and arguably best protected man in the world. Maybe fanatic was a better word for Albadian. Soon-to-be-dead fanatic if she had her way. As her frustration grew, so did her rage. She was going to rip this guy’s head off when she caught him.

Apparently, Albadian had a death wish of his own, however, and he led her ever deeper into residential side streets yet to be cleaned off after the snow several days ago. A packed sheet of ice covered the streets, and both mopeds slid all over the place. It was going to be a miracle if they both didn’t break their necks on this damned skating rink. Even Albadian was forced to slow down on the ice, and their slow-motion chase began to take on a Chaplin-esque quality as he fled for his life and she chased him determinedly at something like fifteen miles per hour. And even that speed was suicidal in these conditions.

She knew this area. There was a police precinct house just ahead. Hmm. Ignoring the ice, she leaned low over the handlebars, opening up the throttle and urging the moped forward with every ounce of horsepower it had. Horsepower. She remembered abruptly that the police station in front of her was also the headquarters for a mounted police unit. She toured it a while back…

It was worth a shot. As Albadian went straight through the intersection in front of the police station, she swerved to the right just shy of it, shooting down a short alley beside the building. She roared around back, startling the heck out of several horses tied at a hitching post beside the building. A cop lounging in front of a heater by the back door lurched to his feet as she burst into view.

She dumped the moped on the ground, more thankful than she could imagine to get off the damned thing in one piece. She raced toward the biggest horse of the bunch, a long-legged chestnut that looked like a Thoroughbred-Quarter Horse cross. Perfect. She needed the fastest horse they had.

She shouted at the cop, “I’m Army Intelligence, and I’m chasing the guy that just tried to blow up Gabriel Monihan. Follow me!”

And with that, she yanked the big, red horse’s reins free from the wooden rail they were looped around and flung herself aboard the animal. The stirrups were too long, but she didn’t care as she jammed her feet into them awkwardly and reined the horse sharply out of the alley.

The horse’s cleated shoes clattered on the hard ice, but dug in sure-footedly as she buried her heels in his ribs. He leaped forward, his haunches bunching and stretching beneath her, shooting her down the alley like a cannon. She careened out into the street.

Thank God. She glimpsed a streak of red and brown about a block ahead of her. She’d lost valuable time and distance, but she estimated this horse could do close to thirty miles per hour over this ice, and Albadian could only pull off about half that speed and hope to live.

She’d have one shot at this. Her horse would have one, maybe two, all-out sprints in him before he’d tire, and Albadian probably had plenty of gas left in his tank.

She gave the horse his head, lying low on his neck like a jockey and urging him forward with shouts of encouragement. The horse pinned its ears back, and accelerated as if he’d been shot out of a cannon. That would be his Quarter Horse ancestry showing through. But then, he stretched out into the fluid gallop of his Thoroughbred ancestors and gobbled up the gap between her and Albadian with an impressive display of power.

Albadian looked back over his shoulder and gaped in shock. Glaring, he turned to face forward again. He accelerated to a beyond stupid pace on the ice.

But still the powerful horse gained on him. In a full-out run, now, the animal was pushing thirty-five miles per hour, and continued to gain steadily on the moped. As if he sensed what her target was, the beast stretched his neck out even lower, his head pumping up and down with his effort to overtake the moped.

His nose almost touched Albadian’s back now.

But she also felt her horse beginning to strain, his muscles beginning to tire as oxygen debt and fatigue set in.

“C’mon, just a little more, fella,” she urged her mount.

As if he understood her, he put on one last burst of speed and pulled up beside Albadian. Without stopping to consider the insanity of what she was about to do, she kicked her right stirrup free and let go of the reins. And slid off the left side of the horse.

She wrapped her arms around Albadian’s neck and tackled him like a steer she intended to wrestle to the ground. The force of the impact knocked over the moped, slamming them both to the ground. They rolled over and over, and she hung on for dear life as they tumbled down the icy street.

“Bitch!” Albadian gasped.

“Bastard!” she snapped back.

He threw an elbow backward at her, and she absorbed the blow with a grunt, too mad to feel the pain that should’ve accompanied the shot to her ribs. She let go of his neck with her right hand, making a fist in front of his face with the tip of her thumb sticking out. She jabbed it up and back, into his right eye socket.

He howled with pain and fury and heaved beneath her, struggling to throw her off. He fought like a maniac on crack. She slammed her forehead forward into the base of his skull, nearly knocking herself loopy in the process. She blinked hard as she saw stars. That blow should have knocked him out cold, but still he fought on. She hung on grimly, but began to doubt her ability to subdue this lunatic.

And then she felt his coat go slack in her arms. The bastard had unzipped it and was slipping out of it! She let go of the soft fabric and rolled to her knees, popping to her feet at the same instant Albadian did. She could see it in his eyes. He was going to run. Dammit.

“Don’t even think about running away from me,” she bit out. “I ran the Boston Marathon last year and finished in the top fifty women.” It was a blatant lie, but what this asshole didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.

It worked. Instead of fleeing, he dropped into a half crouch, his lips pulled back from his teeth in a snarl a pit bull would have been proud of. This was more like it. Unless this guy was a Krav Maga master, she had him. Not even the traditional martial arts stood up well to the vicious, dirty style of street fighting. She was going to hurt him now.

In a blindingly fast move, his hand jerked. But not toward her. He whipped it behind him. And whipped it back out in front of him—with a handgun in it. Pointed directly at her face.

“Die, you bitch.”

2:00 P.M.

Gabe had slammed into the limousine’s seat cushion as somebody landed on top of him. Jeez. That was the second time today someone had tackled him like a damned linebacker. And this time it wasn’t a gorgeous, sexy blonde who made him think completely inappropriate thoughts.

But then a tremendous explosion had sounded outside the car. Really damn close.

“Are you hit?” someone barked in his ear.

“I don’t think so,” he’d managed to gasp, in spite of the Secret Service agent crushing him.

“Go, go, go!” a voice had shouted from outside the car, right behind him. That sounded like Owen Haas. The limousine had jerked beneath him, accelerating like an Indy race car. Who’d have thunk one of these tanks had it in them? The vehicle squealed around a corner. And around another.

The earpiece of the guy on top of him had vibrated with a cacophony of voices shouting through it. Men down. Civilians hit. Screams for emergency response vehicles. Jesus Christ. What happened back there?

He hadn’t wanted to distract the grimly silent man on top of him, but as the car screeched around a third corner and the earpiece went relatively silent for a moment, he’d taken the opportunity to ask, “What the hell just happened?”

“Satchel charge got tossed at your car. One of the guys, Haas, I think, picked it up and tossed it under the backup vehicle before it blew.”

“A satchel charge?” he’d asked incredulously. “As in a bomb?”

“Yup. One of the agents on scene is estimating it was a standard military load.”

“What does that mean?” Gabe had asked tersely, already not liking the sound of it.

“Twenty pounds of C-4,” the agent answered.

Mother of God. Someone had just lobbed twenty pounds of high explosives at him? “How many people are hurt?” he’d bitten out.

“No damage assessments yet. One of the guys says he counts about fifty people down on the ground. So far, most of them seem to be alive.”

Fifty? Fifty? Fifty Americans injured or killed because some crazy had it in for him? Deep in his gut, anger had begun to simmer. “I assume you guys know what to do next with me?”

The agent answered dryly, “Yes, sir. We practice scenarios like this all the time. We’ve got it under control.”

“Fifty people down damn well doesn’t sound under control to me,” he’d snapped. He’d paused. Taken as deep a breath as the two-hundred-pound man on his back allowed. “I’m sorry. Stopping nutcases isn’t your responsibility.”

The agent replied shortly, “It is when they’re coming after you. At least we did the most important part of our job. You’re alive.”

“Thanks,” Gabe replied seriously.

“Thank Owen Haas. He’s the guy who dived for that charge and lobbed it away from your car.”

“I will. The moment I see him.” And then a horrible thought had struck him. “He is okay, isn’t he?”

“If you look up over your right shoulder, sir, you’ll see him through the back windshield.”

Gabe had looked up, startled. Haas was plastered across the back of the car. “Is he hurt?” he’d asked his bodyguard in alarm.

“I dunno,” the agent answered.

“Well, hell’s bells. Stop the car, man, and find out! If he’s hurt, we’ve got to get him to a hospital!”

“Sorry, sir. The prime directive is to get you under cover and safely secured. Haas would have my head on a platter if I stopped this car for him right now.”

Gabe had subsided underneath the agent. The guy was right. Haas was absolutely single-minded in his pursuit of keeping Gabe safe.

The car drove for what seemed like forever while those first few minutes after the blast ran through his head over and over.

He closed his eyes yet again. Jesus. Fifty people. Diana had been right. She said the Q-group would try to nail him today. Good Lord! Was she hurt? When he’d called her, she said she was on the parade route near the National Art Gallery, searching for the terrorists. That was right near where the bomb had gone off. Had she found the terrorists? Was she one of those fifty people lying hurt or dead on the ground?

“I’ve got to make a phone call,” he grunted. “Any chance you could get off of me so I can do it?”

“Sorry, sir. You can’t make any calls right now. But, FYI, the protocol in a situation like this is to notify and lock down the current president. The members of both the old Cabinet and your Cabinet will be scattered and taken to secure locations, and NORAD will be notified to raise the DEFCON status. Like I said, everything’s taken care of.”

“It’s a personal call,” Gabe replied wryly. “But thanks for the information.”

“Sorry. No calls. Not until you’re off the streets.”

“And how long is that going to take?” he asked sharply, none too pleased at being told he couldn’t call Diana to check on her.

“A couple more minutes, sir. We’re almost there.”

Where in the hell “there” was, was anybody’s guess. These guys knew what they were doing and had all sorts of contingency plans for situations just like this. It was their show until they deemed him safe. And until then, he was only along for the ride. Little more than precious cargo. Hell, he wasn’t even President yet.

The bastards had tried to kill him before he took the oath of office. Why were they so damned worried about him becoming President, anyway? It wasn’t as if he had any big agenda where Berzhaan was concerned, other than doing what the Berzhaani people had been screaming for the U.S. to do already. What was it about him that had these guys so pissed off?

The limousine made another sharp turn but this time it decelerated after it straightened out. The engine noise echoed as though they’d just driven inside a building of some kind. Then it stopped altogether.

“If you’ll just stay put and stay down for a moment, sir, we have to secure the area before we move you.”

Thankfully, the big agent got off him. Gabe drew his first deep breath since this whole thing started. The passenger door opened briefly as the agent slipped outside. Gabe caught a glimpse of what looked like an oversize garage, dim and concrete.

He lay there for perhaps a minute. A guy could get damned paranoid after someone tried to kill him a second time. First Chicago, and now this. It didn’t help to have these fanatical Secret Service agents hustling him around as though the sky was about to fall on his head, either.

The car door opened abruptly, and despite himself, he jumped.

Owen Haas stuck his head in the door. “It’s all clear, sir. If you’d please come with me.”

He sat up, grateful to be vertical. As he slid toward Haas, he asked, “How’re you doing, Owen? Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine, sir,” came the implacable reply.

Right. As if the guy would admit it if one of his limbs was falling off and he had a sucking chest wound. What had he been thinking to even ask? Gabe followed the agent across the expanse of gray concrete toward a lighter gray door. A half-dozen agents ranged around the space, which was probably a small warehouse of some kind, their guns drawn. The sight of their weapons in hand reminded him sharply of the gravity of the situation.

An agent opened the door as he and Owen reached it. He reached out to touch its surface as they hustled past it. It felt like stainless steel. In a warehouse? Clearly this wasn’t any ordinary warehouse they’d brought him to.

Haas, already starting down the staircase that descended away from the door, looked back over his shoulder. “Hurry, sir,” the agent said quietly.

He picked up the pace, practically running down the steps to keep up with the Secret Service agent. Lightbulbs mounted high on the wall in mesh cages lit the way at regular intervals. The stairway went on forever, down and down and down. Where in the world were they taking him?

Finally, they reached the bottom, and another stainless steel door. Haas reached for the doorknob. “Stay here, sir. I’ve got to go check on our train, and then I’ll be back to collect you.”

Gabe frowned. Train? And then it hit him. The Metro! They’d just gone down into the D.C. subway system.

Four agents closed ranks around him in a tight formation on the tiny landing. It was a good thing he wasn’t claustrophobic or he’d be flipping out right about now. The door burst open, and he jumped, along with the Secret Service men. He’d never seen this bunch so edgy. And that was saying a lot. They made tense a way of life.

“This way,” Haas directed the phalanx of men.

Carried along in the agents’ midst, he was swept out into the dim light of a subway station, miraculously cleared of anyone except a line of police officers. They must’ve been sent down here ahead of time to clear out the civilians.

A sleek, white subway train sat at the platform, completely empty. Haas and company hustled him onto the train and made him lie down on the floor. They all stood around him, facing outward, their weapons still drawn, while he got a cockroach’s-eye view of their shoes.

The train ride was short. It proceeded down a straightaway for just a few minutes, and then it angled off sharply.

“You can sit up now, sir,” Owen told him. The agent held a hand down to help him up.

He stood up and looked outside the window. He’d never seen any subway tunnel that looked like this before. It was narrow and dark, its walls barely wider than the train. “What is this? Some sort of maintenance tunnel or something?”

Haas nodded grimly. “Something like that.”

Gabe grabbed the metal pole beside him as the train lurched, slowing down abruptly. It stopped and the doors slid open. A tiny platform, only big enough to hold maybe a half-dozen people stood before the opening. Another stainless steel door gleamed dully at the back of the cement platform.

Haas stepped forward and keyed in a code on a number pad beside the door.

The other Secret Service agents stepped aside to allow him to proceed. They were finally starting to relax a bit around the gills. He stepped forward and followed Haas into a room that could practically be a carbon copy of the Situation Room at the White House. Television screens lined the walls, and a dozen clocks announced the time in different capitals around the world. A large conference table dominated the center of the room, and telephones ranged all around its highly polished surface.

Haas walked around the table to the far end of the compact briefing room and stopped beside a closed door. “There are quarters this way if you’d like to clean up or rest a little.”

He probably looked like hell. But he didn’t give a damn at the moment. “Can I make a phone call now?” he asked Owen.

“To whom?”

“Diana Lockworth. The woman who had breakfast with me this morning. She was at the parade and I want to make sure she’s all right.”

Haas spoke a little less emotionlessly than usual. “I think she may have been the one who shouted the warning to me that the bomb was incoming.”

That wouldn’t surprise Gabe. She’d struck him as highly intelligent and highly competent. It would be like her to have found the Q-group cell in that crowd of tens of thousands. But it also confirmed his worst fear. She’d been at ground zero when that bomb went off, and without the benefit of an armored car to protect her. He swore violently under his breath.

Haas’s eyebrows shot up at his rare outburst. “You’ll have to use a land line, sir. We’re too deep for a cell phone to work.” Haas stepped to the table and picked up one of the phones. He spoke quietly into it and then handed the receiver to Gabe. “The White House operator is standing by to connect you if you’ll give her the number.”

Gabe took the receiver Haas offered him, but paused when the big man spoke again.

The agent pitched his voice in a low murmur for Gabe’s ears alone. “She knew something about that attack, didn’t she?”

Gabe nodded once in silence.

Haas murmured, “I’d like to talk to her when you’re done, sir. I want to know everything she can tell me about what happened up there.”

Gabe nodded again. He’d entrusted his life to this man, and the guy’d just saved it. If he couldn’t let Owen in on his secrets, who else could he trust? Gabe pulled out his cell phone and read Diana’s number off its display to the operator. He waited impatiently while the call went through.

In a moment she announced, “I’m sorry, sir. All the circuits are busy. I’ll keep trying until I get through and then I’ll ring you back.”

“Thank you.” It figured. Everyone and their uncle was calling relatives to make sure loved ones were okay.

The phone rang on the table and he picked it up eagerly. “Diana?”

A deep male voice replied, “Sorry. It’s James Whitlow. You all right, son?”

For once, the term “son” didn’t sound like an insult coming from his soon-to-be predecessor. Always before, President Whitlow’s incessant use of the term had set his teeth on edge.

Gabe answered the guy’s question. “I’m fine, Mr. President. How about you?”

“As well as can be expected in the circumstances. I’m going on television in a few minutes. You’ll be able to see it as soon as they’ve got the bomb shelter up and running.”

Gabe looked around in surprise. So that’s what this place was. This facility had been mentioned in one of the dozens of briefings he’d gotten over the last couple of months to bring him up to speed on the nation’s security apparatus. As he recalled, this bunker was pretty outrageously outfitted. He could run the country from down here. For a long time.

Gabe asked, “Do you want to contact the families of the dead with condolences, or shall I?”

“The FBI won’t have a complete casualty list for another several hours, and then notifications to the next of kin will have to be made. It’ll be tomorrow before the condolence calls can go out. Looks like you’re stuck with the job.”

Gabe winced. It certainly wasn’t a duty he was looking forward to, but it was appropriate that he make the calls. After all, it was him the attackers had been after when they killed the bystanders. At least Whitlow wasn’t going to try to usurp this one last Presidential duty.

The president interrupted his grim thoughts. “My press secretary wants me to tell the nation I’ve spoken with you on the phone and that you’re completely unharmed and in good spirits. Any messages I can pass along?”

“Tell them my prayers are with the people injured in the attack, and that I share your determination to apprehend whoever did this.”

“I will.” There was a brief pause while he spoke to somebody nearby. Whitlow came back on the line. “As for your inauguration. How do you feel about rescheduling it for early this evening in the rotunda of the Capitol Building? My Secret Service people say that building can be made secure, but it’s still big enough for the press to be there and holds enough guests so it doesn’t look like we’re running scared. My people think the inauguration needs to be televised live so there’s no doubt about the handoff of power having happened in a smooth and timely manner. Wouldn’t want any crazy rumors to get started about your presidency before you’re even in office.”

Right. As if there hadn’t been rumors swirling around him ever since the first Q-group attack, compliments of his erstwhile running mate, Thomas Wolfe. “That sounds fine. I’ll pass the suggestion on to my people and have them get back with your people. But I don’t anticipate any problems with it.”

Ah, the joys of changing administrations, particularly when there was a change of political party involved. It had been a tough campaign, and the outgoing president had been bitter throughout the transition phase.

Gabe asked, “Where will you be during the swearing in? I assume our security teams want us in separate locations?”

“I’ll stay here in the White House until you’re sworn in. And then the job’s all yours, son. This mess reminds me of why I’m glad to be retiring from politics.”

Gabe mentally snorted. Come tonight, Whitlow would have to be peeled out of the Oval Office with a crowbar, kicking and screaming the whole way. As it was, he had no doubt his predecessor was tickled pink to get an extra five hours on the job.

Gabe hung up the phone and turned to Owen Haas. “For lack of any of my other staff or advisors, I guess you get to be ‘my people.’”

Haas grinned, although it looked more like a crack in concrete than an actual facial expression.

Gabe continued. “Whitlow’s people want to hold my inauguration in the Capitol Rotunda at seven o’clock this evening. That okay with you?”

Haas shrugged. “Works for me. I’ll need to get a detail of men over there to start clearing the building ASAP.”

Gabe looked over at the other Secret Service agents huddled in a far corner of the room. “Would one of you guys call the White House and let them know the plans for tonight are a go?”

A burly blonde peeled away from the group and reached for a telephone. Haas gave a couple of short orders and several of the men sat down at other phones. Soon, they were in deep conversation with their people. Funny, but he didn’t have a blessed thing to do. He sat down at the end of the table and noticed a small slide-out tray under the table. He pulled it open. An elaborate TV remote controller sat there, along with various writing utensils and a pad of paper.

He pulled out the remote and pointed it at the wall of monitors. One of the televisions blinked on, startling Haas. Gabe grinned at the disgruntled agent. “Down, Tonto. I just want to see how the news networks are spinning the attack.”

Haas scowled and went back to his phone calls.

Gabe stared at the television screen as it replayed in slow-motion, full-color detail the last few moments prior to the attack. The voice-over and a digital arrow added by the network pointed out a blurry object sailing through the air, frame by painfully slow frame, toward his limousine. Hell of a move Owen made there. Gabe flinched as the satchel charge blew up the backup limousine in vivid living color. Good God, that was a hell of a blast! He watched the ensuing carnage in dismay, gruesome even after being edited for home viewing.

And Diana had been caught in that?

Holy Mary, Mother of God. He picked up the phone. Instead of a dial tone, a female voice said immediately, “White House secure operator. May I help you?”

“This is Monihan. Any luck getting through to that phone number I gave you?”

“Not yet, sir. We’ve gotten through to the phone once and it rang, but there was no answer. As soon as the party you’re trying to contact picks up, we’ll forward it through to you.”

“Thanks.”

Dammit, where was Diana? Why wasn’t she answering her phone? What had happened to her? His gaze swiveled back to the screen. He stared at the bloodied and torn bodies of dozens of victims lying on the ground in various stages of triage and evacuation. He was about to be the President of the United States, for God’s sake, and he couldn’t find out what had happened to the courageous, feisty, funny woman who’d been willing to sacrifice her life for him?

He picked up the phone again.

“What can I do for you, Mr. President-elect?”

This operator was slick. He replied, “I need the names of the victims of the bombing. One name in particular. Who should I speak to?”

“At the moment, that would be the Chief of the Washington Metro Police Department. By this evening, the Director of FEMA—the Federal Emergency Management Administration, and the Director of the FBI should have that information.”

“Connect me to the Chief of Police.”

Without comment, the operator patched him through.

“What?” a voice snapped in his ear without preamble. The poor man sounded harassed beyond belief, and Gabe felt a twinge of guilt for bugging him. But he was really worried that Diana hadn’t answered her phone. If she’d indeed been the one to shout the warning to Owen, she’d saved his life. He owed her. Big-time.

“This is Gabe Monihan. I’m sorry to bother you, but do you have an initial casualty list yet?”

The police chief sputtered. “Uh, forgive me, sir. Didn’t mean to be rude, there.”

“You’re authorized under the circumstances. I’d be more worried if you weren’t short with me. How’s it looking?”

“The fire’s contained. Six dead and about sixty injured. Some minor, some severe. Probably gonna lose another couple more before it’s all said and done. Good thing your man tossed that bomb under an armored car or we’d be looking at a whole lot more casualties. We still have some injuries trickling in to area hospitals. No suspects yet. We’ve got imagery of the bastard—pardon me—the perpetrator. It’s at the FBI lab now getting digitally enhanced so we can make out a face and put out an APB. We’ll get him, sir.”

“I’m sure you will,” Gabe replied smoothly. “I had a friend at the parade and I have reason to believe she was very near the blast site. Could you check her name against the casualty lists for me?”

“Of course, sir.”

“Her name’s Diana Lockworth.”

There was a short pause. “Her name’s not on my list. Either she wasn’t hurt or she hasn’t been reported through the hospitals to us, yet.”

“But she’s not one of the known dead?” Gabe asked.

“No. We’ve got names on all of them. Next of kin are about to be notified.”

Gabe sagged in his chair in relief. Thank God. “Let me know if there’s anything you need from me.”

The police veteran grunted. “A small tactical nuclear strike up the ass of this SOB when we find him?”

Gabe chuckled. “You got it. Keep up the good work.”

He hung up the phone as frustrated as before. Where in the bloody hell was Diana?

3:00 P.M.

Diana stared at the tiny black bore of the pistol pointed at her. Hard to believe that nearly instantaneous death could come out of something so small.

And then behind her, she heard the sound of hooves clattering on the hard ice. The police officer. The horse was coming at a dead run judging by the rapid, staccato sound of it. Albadian’s head jerked up.

Now!

She took two running steps and dived for the gun. Both her hands wrapped around the guy’s forearm and shoved upward with all her might. The force of her body slamming into his knocked Albadian’s feet out from under him on the icy street and he crashed to the ground. She collapsed on top of him, maintaining her death grip on his wrist. At all costs, she must not let go!

Four black, equine legs scrambled to a stop beside her, and she shouted in warning, “Gun!”

A male voice behind her bellowed in response, “Freeze!”

With all due respect, she wasn’t going to let go of Albadian’s wrist until that gun was completely out of his hands. The terrorist continued to struggle beneath her and she hung on grimly. He tossed her back and forth, shaking his arm furiously to dislodge her.

Something heavy landed on top of her, pancaking her against Albadian. Another pair of hands came up beside hers, grasping Albadian’s wrist powerfully.

The cop shouted, “Drop the gun! Now!”

Although the command didn’t seem to impress Albadian, the arrival of two more cops on horseback and the sound of sirens drawing near finally took the starch out of him. He went limp beneath her. Neither she nor the cop on top of her moved, however, until several more policemen came running up, weapons propped in their fists in front of them.

Someone stepped up and plucked the gun out of Albadian’s hand. The first cop rolled off her, and she followed suit, rolling onto her back, breathing hard. Lord, that had been a close call.

She looked up and blinked as a pair of pistols pointed at her this time.

“Hands over your head, lady,” a policeman ordered.

She complied promptly. “My name is Captain Diana Lockworth. I’m Army Intelligence, and that’s the guy who just threw the satchel charge at Gabriel Monihan. If one of you would like to reach into my left coat pocket, my wallet is in there with my military ID.”

One of the cops did as she suggested gingerly, then stepped back to open the wallet. He announced, “There’s a military ID in here. Defense Intelligence Agency building access card, concealed weapons permit.” He looked down at her sharply. “You packing?”

She snorted. “I wish. Do you think I’d have been wrestling around hand to hand with that jerk if I were?”

The cops grinned. One of them held a hand down to her and helped her to her feet. “Care to tell us how you know who this guy is?”

“I saw him lob the backpack at Monihan’s limousine. Speaking of which, is Gabe—I mean President-elect Monihan—okay? Did he get away safely?”

One of the policemen replied, “Nobody knows a damn thing. His limo drove away from the scene so it wasn’t hit too bad, and there’ve been no calls to the cops for an escort to any hospitals. He’s probably fine.”

She closed her eyes. She’d done it. Gabe was still alive.

A cop interrupted her profound relief. “And how did you end up chasing this guy?”

“He had a moped. I grabbed another moped one of his accomplices abandoned at the scene and took off after him. But we were on identical machines and I couldn’t make up the gap between us. When he hit the ice and had to slow down to almost walking speed, I remembered your precinct was ahead of us. I swung in to your parking lot and snagged a horse that could go full speed or close to it on the ice. By the way, I need to thank whomever I borrowed the horse from.”

One of the cops smiled. “Give him a few minutes. When he’s checked Red over and knows his horse is okay, he’ll be friendlier—especially after he finds out why you took his baby.”

Diana nodded solemnly. “His horse is responsible for capturing this guy. I couldn’t have done it without Red.”

She turned around and caught the tail end of a policeman carefully reading Albadian his rights off an index card. Good. These guys were going by the book every step of the way on this arrest. She watched the mob of armed policemen finish trussing up Albadian until he could barely move. They taped plastic bags over his hands so they could be swabbed for exposure to explosives later, then they handcuffed his wrists and shackled his ankles. Finally, they tucked Albadian carefully into the back seat of a squad car.

“We’re going to need a statement from you, ma’am.”

Diana turned to the policeman and laughed. “You, and the FBI, and the Secret Service, and every television network in creation. No problem.”

She started as her cell phone rang again and fumbled for it in her pocket with frozen fingers. She pulled it out hastily and flipped open the phone.

A male voice spoke urgently in her ear without preamble. “Diana? Are you all right?”

“Gabe? Is that you? Are you okay?”

Gabe’s rich voice replied urgently, “I’m fine. Are you all right? Tell me you weren’t hurt in that blast.”

“No, no, I’m fine. I just got knocked down. No injuries. And you? You didn’t get hurt at all?”

He laughed, sounding vastly relieved. “I was sitting in an armored car. It didn’t mess up a single hair on my head. I think the only injuries I sustained were when a three-hundred-pound Secret Service agent landed on top of me and wouldn’t get off me for about a week.”

Diana laughed aloud in her relief. “He was just doing his job.”

Gabe groused lightly, “Well, it wasn’t nearly as much fun as having you plastered all over me.”

Diana blinked, startled. She replied soberly, “Well, I’m just glad you’re safe.”

He replied equally seriously, “And I’m glad that you’re safe. I’ve had the White House operator trying to call your cell phone for the last half hour, and when you didn’t answer, I was really worried.”

“Uh, well, I was a little busy. I just chased down the guy who lobbed the satchel charge at you. With the help of a dozen D.C. police officers, we just arrested him.”

“I’ll tell Owen.”

She heard Gabe’s voice faintly over the open phone line as he told his security chief the news. She heard exclamations in the background from several people.

Gabe came back on the line. “Owen wants to talk to you. Right away. He wants to know everything you know about what just happened and who did it.”

That was understandable. “I’m with the Metro police right now. They want me to go down to the station and make a full statement to them. I expect it’ll take a couple of hours.”

She waited while Gabe relayed that information to Owen Haas.

Gabe came on the line again. “Owen doesn’t want to wait that long. I’ve still got to get inaugurated today, and he wants a complete threat assessment ASAP so he can take whatever precautions are necessary.” Murmured voices in the background interrupted him, and then he said, “Owen will take care of it. He’s going to call the cops and explain to them that they’re going to have to wait for their statement.”

“I’m at Owen’s disposal. I’ll do whatever I can to help protect you.”

Gabe answered quietly, “Thanks. I wish I had more friends like you.”

Abashed, she changed the subject. “Is Wolfe there with you?”

“Lord, no. In a crisis like this, they separate us so at least one of us will survive whatever attack comes.”

Of course. She asked, “So how am I supposed to link up with Owen to brief him?”

“Just a sec.” Gabe went off-line again and came back. “He says to have the police drive you to your home. Owen will have one of his guys pick you up there in two hours. He’s got some security arrangements to finish up for…later, and then he’ll have time to talk.”

“Does he know where I live?” she asked in surprise.

Gabe answered dryly, “If he doesn’t, he will soon.”

She laughed. “Big Brother’s watching me, huh?”

Gabe laughed back. “Something like that. These Secret Service guys have nutty access to information when it pertains to a threat against the Presidency.”

Gee, sort of like Oracle.

“Speaking of information, Owen says he wants to know if you had anything to do with a set of pictures he was faxed a few minutes ago of a bunch of guys.”

“What sort of pictures?” she asked cautiously.

“He says they’re computer printouts of fourteen guys, all in the twenty-five to forty or so age range. Some of the pictures look like they came off driver’s licenses. One is marked as a student ID. A couple are immigration photos.”

The sheaf of pictures she’d dropped in front of the Chaosium Café. Her hacker buddies had come through for her. They’d figured out who Owen Haas was and sent the pictures to him.

“That’s the Q-group cell, or most of it I think, that attacked you today.”

Gabe swore quietly and relayed the information to Owen, but came back on the line quickly. “Owen says he’ll have a guy at your house in one hour. Can you be there that soon?”

She looked at the policemen milling around her. “The trick is going to be getting the cops I’m with now to release me.”

Gabe retorted, “Owen will take care of that. You just be home in an hour.”

She replied lightly, “For you Gabe, I’ll move Heaven and Earth to be there.”

Silence greeted that remark. Oops. Had she overstepped her bounds? Her and her irreverent mouth. “I’m sorry. That was a joke. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable, sir. I’ll be ready in an hour.”

Gabe retorted quickly, “You didn’t make me uncomfortable. And for God’s sake, please don’t start calling me sir. I like Gabe a whole lot better coming from you. And Diana?”

“Yes?”

“I’m looking forward to seeing you again.”

Well, okay then. It was her turn to stammer and stutter into a loaded silence. Finally, she managed to choke out, “I’d better get going if I’m going to be home in time to meet Owen’s man.”

She hung up reluctantly and stared at the phone for a moment after its glowing face went dark. She shook herself out of her reverie and looked up at the nearest police officer. “Who’s in charge around here?”

The cop pointed to a man in a suit and she strode over to the detective in charge. “Hi, my name’s Diana Lockworth. I wanted to give you a heads-up that within the next couple minutes, a Secret Service agent named Owen Haas is going to get in touch with you or your superiors. He’s in charge of Gabe Monihan’s security detail, and he needs to speak to me right away. I realize you guys need a complete statement from me, but Haas is going to pull rank and declare some sort of Presidential Security necessity to talk to me first.”

The detective sighed in resignation. “I probably should’ve expected that. But I’ve got to have a statement out of you in the next twenty-four hours so I can charge Albadian. If Monihan’s people screw that up…” He scowled in frustration and didn’t finish the remark.

She felt sorry for the guy. He was just trying to do his job and handle this case perfectly so there’d be no chance of Albadian slipping through the justice system’s fingers. She asked, “Would a tape-recorded statement from me work for you guys?”

“As a preliminary statement, yeah, it would.”

“How about this, then?” she proposed. “You guys can give me a ride back to my house where I’m supposed to meet Haas’s men, and I’ll tape a verbal statement in the car on the way there.”

The detective nodded. “That would work. Hey, Frankie!”

Another policeman walked up to them. “Yeah?”

“This lady’s going to need a ride to her house, and I need you to go with her and take a taped statement from her en route.”

The cop frowned at the highly irregular procedure.

The detective’s cell phone rang, and he pulled it out. He glanced up at Diana. “Right on cue. It’s the Chief of Police.”

She listened to the detective’s end of the short call, and sure enough, he was given orders to delay interviewing her and get her home right away. Good thing she’d given him the heads-up and an alternative plan. He didn’t waste any time arguing with his boss and probably earned brownie points when he mentioned he planned to get a taped statement from her in the car en route. In a matter of seconds, Frankie had scared up a pocket Dictaphone and led her toward one of the clustered police cars blocking the street.

She passed by a squad car and glanced at it. She jumped as Albadian glared out at her. Through the glass, he mouthed, “You’ll die, bitch.”

She nodded back at him grimly. She might at that. But not today.

4:00 P.M.

The police got Diana across town in record time, but it was a breeze with the streets so deserted. Everyone was no doubt plastered to their TV sets or flat-out hiding from further possible terrorist attacks. Some brave new world it was turning out to be. She made a brief statement into the tape recorder her police escort shoved under her nose. She started her narrative at the point of seeing Albadian moving through the crowd with a backpack and thinking it looked suspicious. She might eventually tell the police how she recognized Albadian and how she knew to look for him in the first place, but first she needed to talk to Owen Haas and Delphi, and let them determine how much got released to whom about this threat to the President-elect.

When she got home, she had about a half hour before Owen’s man was due to arrive. Thank goodness. She couldn’t wait to get this awful black dye out of her hair. She jumped into the shower and turned the temperature up as high as she could stand it. As she thawed out, she edged the temperature up higher and higher until her skin turned pink and her bathroom filled with thick steam. Although she could stay in there happily for an hour, duty called. Three vigorous shampoos later, she stepped out of the shower, blond once more.

She dried off, blow-dried her hair quickly and dressed in a tailored wool pantsuit and matching turtleneck. The pale blue fabric had a touch of Lycra in it and followed the contours of her body closely. It was one of her favorite outfits. It was fully classy enough to see the President-elect of the United States in, but it was still comfortable, and just sexy enough to give a girl confidence. She put on a touch of makeup for good measure. She might not get to see Gabe when she talked to Owen this afternoon, but she wasn’t taking any chances. She was going to look her best for once.

Five minutes early, a knock sounded on her front door. The Secret Service must subscribe to the same definition of what constituted being on time as the Army did. If you weren’t five minutes early, you were late. She opened the door. And started in surprise. She’d expected a burly, serious Secret Service agent in a conservative suit, but instead her older sister stood there, looking better than any woman had a right to in a long, red coat.

Diana gaped. “What are you doing here?” she finally managed to say.

“Well, gee, you don’t have to sound so thrilled to see me!” Josie exclaimed. “The family’s been frantic about you. When Gramps’ car got to the Pentagon and you were already gone, he got all worried about you. Then that bomb went off downtown, and the phone lines are all jammed, and you didn’t answer your phone—let’s just say Mom and Dad are panicked. They sent me over here to check on you.”

She’d been gone when her grandfather’s car had reached the Pentagon? Then who…? “I didn’t know you were in town,” Diana mumbled, stepping back from the door to let her sister inside before Josie ran her over and forced her way in.

“Diego had a couple meetings at the Pentagon and I had some shopping to take care of, so I took a couple of days’ leave and came with him. Mom wanted to visit Gramps so she tagged along. They’ve got some…catching up…to do.”

Now there was a delicate word for it. Her mother and grandfather had a huge rift to heal between them. He’d never been able to accept Zoe Lockworth’s clinical depression and had railed at her irresponsibility for wallowing in it for years. Now that the antidote had been found, Joseph Lockworth had some serious crow to eat with his daughter-in-law, and she had some serious forgiving to do.

Fortunately, she and Josie had already worked out most of their differences. When she’d flown out to California to help Josie, and got shot in the process, it had gone a long way toward reminding them what was most important among families. She just wished she could’ve helped Josie complete clearing their mother’s name. Heck, she just wished she could do something noteworthy all by herself for once without Josie coming to the rescue.

Diana commented lightly to her sister, “As you can see, I’m just fine. You can report back to the clan that I’m alive and well.”

“Thank God,” Josie replied fervently. “What a mess. Did you see it on TV? What do you think happened?”

Diana bit her lip and said nothing. Hopefully, Sis would interpret her noncommittal shrug as ignorance.

Josie barged into the living room, shedding her coat as she went. “We need to talk.”

Oh, Lord. Not now. The Secret Service guy would be here any second. Diana said with thin patience, “Look, Sis. I’m expecting someone in just a few minutes. Can’t this wait?”

Josie plunked down on the sofa and crossed her elegant legs. “You can’t keep running away from Mom forever. You’re going to have to talk to her sometime.”

“I have talked to her. We’re fine. She’s better and I’m glad.”

Josie rolled her eyes.

Damn. She never was any good at BSing her older sister. Josie had always been smarter, wiser, more in control in family situations.

“Diana, when are you going to stop running away from everything that’s the slightest bit difficult in your life? You’ve got to grow up and be responsible sometime.”

Right. As if she wasn’t being responsible by busting her butt and putting her neck on the line to save the next President’s life. That’s why she’d been chosen for Oracle and was one of the leading conspiracy theorists in the country. Because she was so freaking irresponsible. Thing was, it was all so secret she couldn’t tell anyone, not even her well-meaning family, about it.

“When are you going to get off my back and let me be my own person?” Diana sighed.

Josie’s perfectly plucked eyebrows arched. “I’m not on your back and you know it. And when haven’t you been your own person? You’ve always done exactly what you wanted to.”

How wrong Josie was. Most of her adolescence had been shaped by doing the exact opposite of her older sister. It had never been about rebellion. It had always been about struggling to come out from behind her sister’s giant shadow. The true rebellion came later. When the strictures of an Army career started to grate on her.

“Tell me something, Jo. Do you ever get tired of the Air Force? Tired of all the rules and regulations and people telling you what to do all the time?”

Her sister frowned. “No, not particularly. Why do you ask?”

Diana remembered that flashback of her life on the Mall, the shocking realization that she rebelled within the Army because she was still angry over what the Establishment had cost her—the love of a mother, a unified family living under one roof, a normal childhood.

Diana answered belatedly, “I was thinking about everything that’s happened to the two of us, and I wondered why you came out of it so calm about what happened to Mom while I…well…while I didn’t.”

“What ever gave you the idea I was calm about Mom’s problems?” Josie exclaimed.

Diana stared. “You mean you weren’t okay with it all?”

Josie snorted. “I was terrified. And furious, and frustrated and a hundred other things. But I couldn’t change it and neither could Mom. So I accepted it.”

And maybe that’s where the two of them were so different. Josie could accept the inevitable, while she’d fight against it until she bloodied herself trying to change it. Which category did Gabe fall into? He had Josie’s refinement, her controlled elegance, her ability to fit in and play by the rules. But he was also a politician. The mother of all politicians, in fact, to have run for his country’s highest office. Surely somewhere beneath that polished exterior, he secretly wanted to change the world or else he wouldn’t have chosen to pursue that particular job.

“What’s going on with you, Die Hard?” Josie asked.

Diana smiled at the old nickname from their Athena Academy days. She used to hate the name. But this past year had seen a lot of healing between the sisters. Now she used it proudly as a computer handle. She opened her mouth to reply when a knock at the front door saved her from having to skirt the truth. Which was just as well. Josie was so sharp, she’d know for certain something big was going down.

Diana stood up to answer the door. Over her shoulder she said, “That’s the guy I was expecting.”

“Great!” Josie said brightly. “I can’t wait to meet your latest—uh…”

It was a long-standing source of friction between her and her family that Diana managed to dredge up the scum of the earth on a routine basis, and then proceeded to date it. She grinned to herself. This should be fun. Wait till Josie got a load of a Secret Service agent. Please let this guy be built like a linebacker and have one of those severe crew cuts so many of them seemed to favor.

He was and he did. Grinning to herself, Diana opened the front door wider so her sister could get a good look at him.

“There you are! Come on in,” Diana said to the agent warmly, as if she’d known this guy a long time. “I’ve just got to go grab my coat. I’ll be back in a second. This is my sister, Josie. Don’t let her interrogate you.”

The agent threw her a surprised look, but nodded stolidly.

Diana broke into a wide grin as she stepped around the corner and heard her sister’s startled voice murmuring a polite greeting. Served Josie right for meddling in her private life. Of course, if Josie found out she had a crush on the soon-to-be President of the United States, her sister would have a stroke. It would almost be worth spilling the beans to good ole Jo just to see it.

Diana grabbed a cream-colored cashmere dress coat from the back of her closet. It had been an extravagant gift from her mother last Christmas, but she hadn’t worn it yet. When Josie had pressed her on why she never wore the gorgeous designer piece, she’d claimed it didn’t fit her fashion style. But, as Diana tore off the tags and slipped her arms into its sleeves for the first time, she admitted it had probably been more about avoiding what the coat represented—a peace offering from her mother. Today she was just thankful she had something this nice to wear for Gabe.

She froze as she caught sight of her reflection in the full-length mirror. She hardly recognized herself! She looked…grown up. Fully as sophisticated and elegant as Josie. The kind of woman a President might want to meet. What was she doing? She wasn’t about to change for any man, not even Gabe Monihan. She started to turn around, to head for her closet and her black leather duster. Hesitated. If she chose to look this way of her own volition, wasn’t that okay?

Screw it. For once, she was going to put her best foot forward. No more hiding her beauty and trying to look like something her sister wasn’t. Today she wanted to be pretty. And if that happened to be because she was hoping to see a guy she had the hots for, so be it. She turned and headed for her living room. Besides, this look would shock Josie even worse than the clean-cut Secret Service agent waiting for her. And shocking her big sister was still one of the most gratifying things Diana did in life.

Sure enough, Josie stared in outright disbelief as she rounded the corner into the room. Even the Secret Service agent did a double take. Well, sheesh. It wasn’t as though she looked that bad the rest of the time! The Secret Service agent collected himself and headed for the front door. Still staring, Josie picked up her coat and accompanied them outside.

As she slid into the front seat of the agent’s car, Diana waved cheerily at Josie. She called out, “Say hi to Mom and Dad for me. Lock up when you leave.”

The agent pulled away from the curb, and Diana grinned. She hadn’t seen Josie that off balance since Diego proposed to her on New Year’s Eve in front of the whole family.

She turned to the agent beside her. “So. Where are we going?”

He didn’t answer her question directly. Instead he said, “May I see some picture identification that proves you’re Diana Lockworth?”

She dug in her purse and pulled out her military ID and driver’s license. The agent glanced at them while he drove and then passed them back to her. She replied, “I don’t mean to be rude, but could I see some ID, as well? I’ve already been kidnapped once today by someone who wasn’t who he claimed to be.”

The agent’s head whipped her way. Fortunately, they were stopped at a red light and he didn’t drive off the road. He passed her his Secret Service ID card in turn. His name was Trent Tilman. She returned his ID card without comment.

He asked briskly, “Am I correct that you have a Top Secret security clearance with a Special Background Investigation?”

She did, and that SBI clearance had been a bear to get, given her family’s checkered past. Aloud, she answered, “That’s correct.”

“You’re going to have to sign several security documents when we get where we’re going regarding not revealing where I take you.”

“Fair enough.”

The conversation lapsed, and the agent drove in silence. He wound his way through a good chunk of Washington, D.C., and surprised her by turning into an alley that ran between a couple of vacant warehouses. She was even more surprised when he reached up to his sun visor, activated what looked like a garage door opener and proceeded to drive inside one of the big buildings. Was this guy on the up-and-up, or had she done it again and gotten into a car with someone out to kidnap her or worse? The muscles across her shoulders tightened abruptly.

She looked out the windows at the dim, cavernous space. Only a few narrow cement columns broke up the expanse, and steel girders disappeared into the gloom high overhead. Not good. She had zero options to make a break from this guy and get under cover. He’d shoot her down like a fish in a barrel with that weapon bulging under his coat in his right armpit. At least there was just the one guy in this empty shell of a building.

A sudden flurry of movement made her jump. A half-dozen men jumped out of the shadows, pointing guns at their car. Crud.

Agent Tilman turned off the ignition and sat still with his hands on top of the steering wheel. He murmured over at her, “Put your hands on the dashboard.”

“What’s going on here? Are we being robbed, or are you just kidnapping me?”

Tilman grinned. “Neither. It’s standard procedure in a high-threat situation for the Secret Service to treat everyone who approaches as a hostile until positive ID is made.”

“So you recognize these jokers?” she asked.

“Oh, yeah. If they weren’t in the Service, I’d be shooting as we speak and ramming through the door with my car.”

She replied dryly, “Duly noted.”

She stared out at the grim-faced men advancing on their car like a SWAT team. Some welcoming committee. But then, she couldn’t blame these guys for being tense after the last couple hours. Someone had just tried to assassinate their man.

An agent opened her door and ordered her to get out of the car. Slowly. She complied, handing over her identification very carefully. This time, the agent carted off her various IDs and disappeared. These guys weren’t any more talkative than Agent Tilman, and she stood stock-still by the side of the car for several interminable minutes. She certainly didn’t want to give any of these guys a reason to pull the trigger. Finally, the guy with her papers returned and nodded to the others. The guns went down, and all the tense shoulders in the area—including hers—relaxed noticeably.

Agent Tilman strolled up to her. “You passed muster. If you’ll come with me, Agent Haas is anxious to speak with you right away.”

He led her over to a door and opened it to reveal a long staircase. He descended it quickly and she followed close on his heels. But when he stopped at the matching door at the bottom without opening it, she nearly bumped into him.

He turned around to face her. “You’ll need to put this on.” He held out a black cloth eye mask like a traveler might use to help them sleep.

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“No, ma’am. You’ll have to be blindfolded for the next part of this.”

His tone of voice was implacable. She sighed and took the mask. She slipped it on, and started as hands touched her face, checking the security of the stupid thing. The hands withdrew, but then one of them took her firmly by the elbow. “This way.”

She stumbled forward. A rush of air blew against her face as the door squeaked open. Sound echoed around her as she stepped into what must be a very large space. Underground? What was this place? But she had no more time to consider it as Agent Tilman tugged her forward. She stumbled again as he led her into some sort of enclosed space. And then he guided her down into what felt like a hard plastic chair. It lurched. A vehicle of some kind!

They rode smoothly forward for several minutes, swaying occasionally as the conveyance rounded corners. And then it hitched to a stop.

“Let’s go,” Tilman announced.

She stood up, disoriented in the dark until he took her by the elbow and led her forward. Out the door, and into another enclosed space this time. A door opened and they stepped through it, and then her ears popped as some sort of pressure seal closed behind her. Where in the world were they now? She walked down what felt like a short hallway, and into another room. And then, without warning, the blindfold was lifted away from her face. She blinked, squinting into the bright, artificial light.

And Gabe smiled down at her. “Welcome to the bunker, Diana.”

Her impulse was to step forward and fling her arms around Gabe’s neck, but she dared not. For one thing, his security detail would tackle her. Plus, he was nearly the President of the United States.

Instead, she merely sighed, “Thank God you’re safe.”

He murmured back, “Thank God you’re safe.”

How long they stood there, staring at each other, she had no idea. It was an eternity, but not nearly long enough. Finally, reluctantly, he looked away. “Owen needs to talk to you. I’ve still got to be inaugurated, and he needs to know everything you can tell him about any threats I might face when that happens.”

She nodded gamely. Gabe led her into a small adjoining lounge sporting a couple of sofas, a television and—hallelujah—a coffeepot. She helped herself to a mug of its contents and sipped at the industrial-strength brew, reveling in the caffeine jolt that flowed through her veins.

Agent Haas motioned her onto the far end of the leather couch he sat on. She perched on it gingerly while Gabe sat across from her on the arm of the matching sofa, his golden eyes burning with intense intelligence. Man, he was gorgeous. Not only was he a hunk, but he was a brilliant one. A killer combination. She dragged her mind back to business as Owen asked her to start at the beginning.

The Secret Service agent interrupted with occasional questions. At the end of it, Owen sat back and stared at her for several seconds. “And you tracked down all this information about the Q-group by yourself?”

She frowned. “Mostly. I had help from some computer hackers who’ve probably earned a clean-up of their police records.”

He leaned forward abruptly. “Good work. I’m going to go fax those pictures you sent me to the FBI and the police. We’ll get APBs out on these guys and have them in custody in no time.”

Gabe spoke up. “Maybe we should send those pictures to the media, too.”

Owen nodded. “The FBI can take care of that. They love a good, media-blitzing manhunt. If all goes well, we’ll have these jerks in custody before you have to leave for your inauguration.”

She looked up at Gabe in consternation. “You’re not showing yourself again in public, are you?”

He shrugged. “I have to go out sometime. I can’t serve my entire presidency here in this bunker. May as well start this job the way I plan to continue doing it. And I don’t plan to hide for the next four years.”

“Gabe. These guys tried to kill you today!”

“Yes, and you stopped them. You’ve already apprehended one of them. We’ll get the rest of them soon enough. And then I’ll be perfectly safe.”

She frowned. And looked over at Owen Haas. “There’s more.”

The agent’s brows slammed together. “Like what?”

“My research indicates that the Q-group is being used as a front for someone else. Someone who’s pulling their strings. I’m not convinced that Gabe will be safe, even if you nail every Q-group guy my hacker buddies and I tracked down on the Internet this morning.”

If possible, Owen frowned even harder. He uttered a single, short word. “Who?”

If only she knew. But so much had happened to her so fast that she was having trouble processing it all. Her gut said there were connections she was missing. Hints and tidbits were right in front of her, and she wasn’t putting them together. She’d hoped Owen might see something she’d missed. But he looked as frustrated as she felt.

She sighed. “I don’t know who could be pulling their strings. Obviously, there’s a connection to Richard Dunst. A third party broke him out of jail. That says to me he’s working for the same person or persons who are controlling the Q-group. Dunst is a flunkie.”

Owen nodded his agreement at her analysis.

The three of them stared at each other in silence.

“Have either of you eaten since this morning?” Gabe asked suddenly.

Owen and Diana both blinked at the abrupt change of subject. “No,” Diana answered aloud while Haas shook his head in the negative.

Gabe stood up. “Let’s grab a bite to eat. I think better when my stomach’s not gnawing a hole in my gut. Besides, I’ve always wondered what nuclear bunker food would taste like. How about you?”

Diana grimaced. “Are you kidding? I’m in the Army. I know exactly what thirty-year-old C rations taste like. Not to mention what they do to your gut.”

Gabe laughed and held out his hand. “Come have lunch with me. I’ll bet one of the White House chefs is hiding down here, somewhere.”

She stood up, grinning. “I sincerely hope so.”

Lunch turned out to consist of poached salmon, tossed salad and fresh snap peas—just where a person got those at this time of year in a bunker far below Washington, D.C., she had no idea. It was a far cry from C rations, but then the company was a far cry from an infantry battalion, too.

As good as the food was, her appetite was off. She was missing something important. She could feel it. And if she didn’t figure out what it was in the next couple of hours, Gabe would still be in danger.

“Are you sure you want to be President?” she asked him skeptically.

He shrugged. “It’s not like I have any choice at this point.” He paused, then added, “And even if I did, I’d still want the job.”

“Why?” she asked curiously.

“Because I can do some good in the next four years. Maybe I can make my country and my world a little better place. And that’s a worthy thing to do with a lifetime.”

So. Beneath all that charm and social polish lurked a reformer. A doer. Like her. The discovery was comforting not only because it was a good trait for a President to have, but because it also meant that, at their cores, they were like-minded people.

Gabe surprised her by asking, “If you had a chance to run for President, would you do it?”

She flinched. “My family’s got some pretty ugly skeletons in the closet. I don’t think they’d hold up to public scrutiny very well.”

He snorted. “Like my family’s skeletons aren’t a nightmare? If you’ve got enough character, you can overcome all that stuff.”

She leaned forward. “Is that how you did it? How you got past all the garbage in your background? You compensated by displaying extraordinary amounts of character?”

The question gave him pause. “Can’t say as I’ve ever thought of it in those terms,” he finally replied. “But I guess that’s what it boils down to. If I do my best to do the right thing all the time, I believe the public will see it and respect me for who I am rather than judging me by my family and its past indiscretions.”

He could say that. He only had a gambling, alcoholic father who’d had the good grace to die in his past. She was stuck with a military scandal that had disgraced her mother and even sent her into an asylum. Even though Josie had cleared their mother’s name last year with her own stealth technology research, the stain lingered.

She replied, “At any rate, I think you’ll make an excellent President. The American people chose well.”

“Thank you,” he said simply. “For the record, if you ran, I’d vote for you.”

She started. “I’d be a lousy President! I’m too much of a rebel to deal with the Washington establishment peaceably for four years. And don’t get me started about world leaders and their antics.”

Gabe laughed. “Yes, but you’d step up to the plate and do what you had to in a crisis. Today is a good case in point.”

“Nonetheless, I’ll leave the job to you.”

The smile faded from his face. “This is a hell of a way to come into office. I start by killing a half dozen of the very citizens I’m supposed to be serving and protecting.”

She reached across the table and squeezed his hand sympathetically. “You didn’t kill anyone. A terrorist named Tito Albadian did. It’s not your fault.”

Gabe sighed. Eventually, the tight grasp his fingers had on hers loosened.

She had to do something to lighten the mood. To distract them both from the day’s events. She asked drolly, “So. How much longer are you going to be a slacker and dodge starting your new job? Honestly. Your first day of work and you’re already hours late. This won’t make a good impression on the taxpayers at all.”

Gabe smiled, a hint of gratitude in his twinkling eyes. “I’m scheduled to take the oath of office at 7:00 p.m. in the Capitol Building. We’re going to break into the evening television programming and do the deed without any advance announcements. Security around it will be insanely tight.” As her brows drew together in a frown, he added, “Really. I’ll be safe. In fact, why don’t you come to the inauguration and you can keep an eye on me yourself. I’ll put your name on the list of approved guests.”

She nodded. If all went well, she’d take him up on that invitation. But after the kind of day she’d had so far, she couldn’t predict if the next few hours would go well or not.

“Who all’s going to be there?” she asked.

“Key members of the government, mostly. A few handpicked guests and none of the public. The media will be there in force, of course. We need to make it clear that there’s been a smooth transition of power today, and live TV coverage will get that message out the most effectively.”

Crud. Seven o’clock? That didn’t give her much time to figure out what was niggling at the back of her brain so tantalizingly. Maybe if she ran it all through Oracle one more time, the computer would see what she could not.

She looked up, startled. Gabe stood beside her, holding a hand out to her. She took it silently, and he tugged her to her feet, standing intimately close to her.

He murmured, “Thank you for shouting that warning to Owen. And thank you for your persistence and courage. I’m not sure I’d be alive right now if it weren’t for you.”

Damned if she didn’t feel a blush stealing into her cheeks. “Uh, my pleasure,” she mumbled abashed.

Gabe chuckled. It was a sexy sound. Private. Personal. “I highly doubt it was pleasurable chasing down a terrorist single-handed,” he murmured.

She replied, “Well, I’d never have met you without the help of the Q-group.”

Another chuckle rumbled through Gabe. “I never thought I’d say this, but thank goodness for the Q-group, then.”

She grinned up at him. “May I quote you on that?”

He matched her broad smile. “Don’t you dare.”

Her humor faded. “Gabe, I’d love nothing more than to spend the rest of the day down here with you in your cozy little rabbit hole, but I need to do more research. I’ve got a really bad feeling about all this, but I can’t put my finger on what’s bugging me.”

He stared down at her intently for a moment before nodding. “Your intuitions have gotten you and me this far in one piece. Go track down whatever’s bothering you. And let me know if there’s anything I can do to help. But you stay safe. Okay?”

She reached up to touch his cheek with her fingertips. “Okay. You, too.”

“That’s a deal.”

But, as she donned the blindfold once more so Agent Tilman could take her back to the surface, and blackness descended upon her, she had a sinking feeling it wasn’t going to be that easy.

5:00 P.M.

She dumped her cashmere coat on the couch and went directly to her computer the second she walked in her front door. She cranked up the Oracle database, praying the morning’s lockdown on the system had been lifted by now. The computer monitor blinked for a few seconds after she tried to sign in, and then the Oracle welcome screen flashed up before her. Thank goodness.

She went to the data-entry screen and typed as quickly as her fingers would go, throwing in everything that had happened to her today in as much detail as she could remember. Her hands ached by the time she finished, and daylight was fading from the living room. Night came early at this time of year.

She punched the command that started the Oracle database processing the new inputs. An analysis could take anywhere from a few minutes to several hours, depending on the complexity of the computations her entries triggered. She’d seen the logic algorithms for the database once, and had been blown away by them. Whoever’d invented this system was a bona fide genius.

She wandered into the kitchen to pour herself a cup of stale coffee from the pot she’d brewed so long ago this morning. At this point, she didn’t care if it tasted like battery acid. She was beat. And she suspected this day wasn’t over, yet.

To kill time while Oracle did its thing, she flipped on the television and was assaulted immediately by images of the day’s near miss on Gabe. She switched the channel quickly. She didn’t need a blow-by-blow replay of the horror she’d gone through. She lurched as the next channel flashed up a picture of one of the Q-group members her hacker buddies had tracked down that morning. She sat down in front of the TV to hear the whole report. Apparently ten of the fourteen suspects had already been apprehended, and a massive manhunt was underway for the remaining possible terrorists. An FBI spokesman said tips were coming in from all over the East Coast and the Bureau had confidence it would have its men in custody within a matter of hours.

Now she could only hope that she and her buddies had fingered the right guys. She shoved down the moment of doubt. She’d read these guys’ e-mails to each other for months, and there was no doubt in her mind that this was the cell that had planned today’s attack on Gabe.

Her computer beeped. She set down her mug and turned off the TV, hustling over to the computer. She sat down at the console eagerly to read the analysis. As shock paralyzed her mind, she skimmed faster and faster, catching key phrases as they leaped out at her.

…no significant correlations have been identified…random occurrences…day’s other events bear no relation to any threat to the Presidency…

This was a very different analysis from the one she’d seen in Oracle’s main database this morning. Even if the Q-group threat had been successfully neutralized, as sure as she was sitting here she was certain there was still someone out there gunning for Gabe. How could Oracle have reversed itself so radically like this in a matter of hours? Last night, Delphi personally had been convinced Gabe was in huge danger. That whoever was after him would not give up until he was dead. And now, everything was hunky-dory? What in the hell was going on?

She stared at the computer screen in dismay, her mental wheels spinning, until she became aware of a vague noise behind her. Someone was knocking on her front door. Insistently. She stood up, went to the front door and opened it numbly.

Her mother stood on the porch, shivering in the bitter chill.

“Come on in, Mom.”

“Hello to you, too,” her mother replied mildly. “Did I come at a bad time?”

“Actually, yes. I’m in the middle of a crisis.”

“What sort of crisis?”

Diana winced. Her mother only wanted to be part of Diana’s life and be the kind of parent Diana had deserved for all those empty years. And Diana wanted to let her, get to know her as an adult. But the timing sucked. Except…what was she going to do if her mother turned around and walked out this second? She didn’t have the foggiest idea what to do next. Even Oracle had given her nothing but a dead end.

“Can I get you something to drink, Mom?”

“No, thank you.” Her mother sat down on the sofa resolutely. “Tell me about your crisis.”

Even at the worst of her depression, Zoe Lockworth had always known when one of her girls was in trouble. It was some sort of maternal sixth sense.

“I can’t talk about it, Mom. It’s classified.”

Her mother pursed her lips. “Are you sure you’re not just avoiding me?”

Diana huffed in exasperation. “Why does everyone in the family keep accusing me of that?”

“Maybe because it’s true, honey. Look, I know I wasn’t there for you when you were young, and I take full responsibility for that. I chose to do dangerous work, and I chose to put myself in harm’s way even though I had a family to think about. But I’m here for you, now. I’d like to help.”

The fight went out of her in a rush. What was the point of being mad? It didn’t change anything that had happened. In comparison to everything that had happened to her today, her childhood was starting to look pretty bland. She sat down on the other end of the couch and asked her mother, “Was your work really that important?”

Zoe shrugged. “It seemed so at the time. We were trying to save the lives of thousands of pilots by coming up with stealth technologies to protect them. I suppose you’d have to ask pilots like Josie and Diego if the research was ultimately worthwhile.”

Diana’d already heard her sister’s opinion on that, and the answer was an emphatic yes. “Yes, but was your sacrifice worth it all?”

Zoe shrugged. “I’ve made my peace with what happened to me. I lost a chunk of my life in the name of serving my country. I’m just grateful I didn’t lose my life altogether. What I can’t forgive myself for is the sacrifice you girls and your father had to make. Nobody asked you if you were willing to lose your mother for twenty years.”

They’d been over this ground before. Her parents just assumed that, because she and her sister were in the Armed Forces, they’d understand the idea of serving one’s country. Of sacrifice and loss in the name of freedom. Of the price military families paid alongside their active-duty members. Josie bought into the idea hook, line and sinker. But Diana had trouble swallowing the concept. There came a point beyond which families shouldn’t suffer the same way their military members did.

Although, she had put her neck on the line for Gabe today. Hadn’t hesitated to do so, either. Like her mother, she’d dived into this mess without a second thought for herself. Why was that? Was it just that she hadn’t found something—or someone—important enough to die for until now? At the end of the day, was she as dedicated as her mother had been? Maybe to different causes, but both in the name of defending their nation.

Startled, she asked her mother slowly, “Did you hesitate to get into such dangerous research?”

Zoe laughed ruefully. “I have to confess I leaped before I looked. I was well into the work before it occurred to me that there might be menacing forces opposed to what I was doing. But even if I had known in advance, I’d have done it anyway. I was one of only a handful of scientists who could do the research. And the need for stealth technology was bigger than me. More important than me. I did what I had to do.”

Diana froze, stunned. If someone asked her if she’d considered the risks of saving Gabe, she’d have answered the exact same way. For the first time, she got it. Zoe was absolutely driven by her most fundamental belief in right and wrong. And Dear God, Diana was stuck with the very same set of beliefs. Was she destined to wreck herself on the rocky beaches of her morals the same way her mother had?

A chill chattered down her spine. This must be how her mother had felt once she discovered the dangers stalking her. Even if Richard Dunst or his superiors were out there waiting for her at this very moment, she still had to do this. She had to save Gabe from them or die trying.

She eyed her mother speculatively. What the heck. Her mom had been a highly intelligent scientist in her day, an expert at computer analysis of problems. “I’ve got a work-related question for you, Mom.”

Zoe blinked at the abrupt change of subject. “I’ll do my best, but it has been a long while since I did any research.”

“If you were to put a set of data into a sophisticated database that has always been accurate in the past, and you suddenly got back a set of completely garbled analyses on that data, what would you do?”

Zoe laughed. “I’d recheck my data. You know what they say. Garbage in, garbage out. Computers are really just huge calculators, and databases are just big sets of mathematical formulas that get applied to your data. Those formulas never change once they’re entered into the computer. The computer will do the exact same thing to your data every time you enter it. So if your output is wonky, you’ve got to suspect the input.”

“I’ve rechecked the data entered. It’s accurate. Late last night, the database analyzed a similar set of data and came up with completely different conclusions than it did just now.”

“Well, then I’d check the database itself for bugs. Go to a backup version of it and reload the data.”

Good idea. “And what might cause a bug—a big one—in a database?”

Zoe shrugged. “It could be something as simple as a maintenance technician or data-entry specialist making a mistake and hitting the wrong key. Or, it could be something as sinister as someone tampering with the database intentionally.”

The sight of four men leaping into the library at the Oracle safe house this morning flashed into her mind. Oh, yeah. The secret of the Oracle database’s existence was definitely compromised. Why not the database itself?

Diana leaped to her feet abruptly, causing her mother to jump up in alarm, as well. She gave her mother a big hug and commenced herding her toward the door. “Thank you so much. You’ve been a huge help. I’m glad we talked. We have much more in common than I ever realized. We must talk more. Very soon. Right now I’ve got to run.”

Her mother paused in the doorway, frowning. “Are you all right?”

She gave her mother a genuine smile. One of the few she ever remembered giving her mother. “For the first time in a very long time, I’m definitely all right. I know what I have to do, and I know how I have to do it. I’ll give you a call as soon as this is all over.” Of course, her poor mother had no idea what “this” was.

On impulse, she gave Zoe another hug. “I’ve got to go now. I’ve got a ton of stuff to do and not much time to do it.”

She closed the door in her mother’s disbelieving face and whirled, heading straight for the phone. She dialed Delphi’s emergency phone number for the fourth time in one day. That had to be some kind of record. The usual answering machine picked up her call and she waited impatiently through the bland message.

“Hi, this is Diana Lockworth. I need an access password to get into the guts of the Oracle database. I don’t need to have access to rewriting any of the code, but I need to take a look at it. No time to explain—”

The electronically altered voice interrupted her. “I’m here. What’s this all about?”

“I don’t have time to go into all the details, but I think the Oracle database has been compromised. I need to look at the program, itself.”

“That’s an alarming accusation,” the voice said emotionlessly.

Diana retorted, “No more alarming than four armed men bursting into the Old Town facility and making off with what they think is the hard drive holding the database.”

“We’ve already had a look at the database today, and it’s fine.”

Diana snorted. “I just tried to use it, and I got complete gobbledygook out of it. Something’s wrong with Oracle, I’m telling you.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. But I do know the database should’ve gone nuts over the information I put into it about the ongoing threat I’m convinced exists to Gabe Monihan, and it came back with a null threat assessment. The damned thing all but called me stupid!”

A delicate pause. “You neutralized the threat earlier.”

Diana gnashed her teeth as urgency nipped at her heels. Her gut was screaming at her that she was losing time. Time she couldn’t afford to waste if she was going to save Gabe. “Look. You hired me. Do you trust me or not? I know we caught one terrorist but based on what I saw earlier today, I’m certain someone’s still out there gunning for Gabe, and they’re going to try to kill him again within the next couple hours.”

“Of course, I trust you. And who do you think is going to make this assassination attempt?”

“That’s what I was hoping Oracle could tell me.”

“One moment.”

Diana fidgeted while the line went silent. Her boss was either putting out an APB on her at this very moment, or hopefully retrieving the access code she needed to get inside the Oracle database proper.

“Enter this number into the log-in screen when you choose the system maintenance option.” Delphi read off a long string of numbers that Diana scrawled down hastily. “That will get you into the code. You’ll have read-only access. You will not be able to make any system changes.”

“Fair enough. That’s what I needed.” In response to the tacit vote of confidence the sharing of that access code represented, she said, “And thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Call me if you need any further assistance. It is imperative that Monihan be kept safe.”

Diana hung up and all but ran into the living room to sit down at the computer. She pulled up the appropriate access screen and entered Delphi’s number into the correct field. Her screen went blank briefly, and then page after page of detailed, complex computer code began scrolling down her screen. Crud. This was going to be like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Time to think like a hacker. If she were going to tamper with a system of this size, how would she do it? She’d head for a low-level subroutine connected to the analysis portions of the program and she’d bury the smallest possible command she could in it that would foul it up.

She made her way to the analysis subroutines and frantically waded through the dense programming language. She couldn’t help but be impressed by the elegance of the program. It was the single most intelligent piece of computer work she’d ever seen. She’d give her right arm to meet whoever’d designed this database.

And then she saw it. A bland little command sequence that didn’t have quite the same feel as the rest of the code around it. She read the three-line instruction again. Her internal warning antennae wiggled wildly. She followed the instruction set to where it led elsewhere in the database and found another innocuous bit of code that didn’t feel right. It led to another. And then to another. All these little pieces of code were linked together, a huge set of tiny monkey wrenches scattered throughout the cogs and gears of the mighty machine that was Oracle.

Over the course of the next couple minutes, she traced the spiderweb of commands and found them inserted all over the program. She didn’t begin to understand precisely how these commands were screwing up the Oracle database, but there was no doubt the system was completely corrupted.

Something about this code tickled the edges of her consciousness. And then it hit her. She recognized the programming style of the commands. The spare, coldly logical technique of the programming was identical to the instructions the intruder in her house had put onto this very computer last night!

She opened the file of code she’d copied out of her computer’s operating system and compared it to the lines of commands in the Oracle database. It was as clear as day. The same person had done both bits of hacking.

On a hunch, she called up a screen view of the code where the signature of the programmer was entered beside each line of code they’d written. She stared in shock. Her own name stared back at her.

The hacker this morning. Had he entered this code from her home computer? It made sense.

Somebody knew she was an Oracle agent. Why else would both her computer, and now the Oracle database be attacked by the same person on the same day? If her identity was compromised, how many other Oracle agents were exposed and in danger? And if the very heart of the Oracle agency had suffered an attack like this, was the entire agency at risk?

As alarming as that was, she had more important fish to fry at the moment. Somebody who could afford to hire a frighteningly smart hacker was trying to stop her or even kill her. From doing what? It could only be one thing. The only project she’d been working on for weeks now was the link between Q-group and Gabe Monihan. Whoever’d hacked into her computer and into Oracle was out to kill Gabe. And they were very close on not only her heels, but his.

The bad feeling in her gut exploded into panic, roiling and bubbling nearly out of control. She typed a hasty note to Delphi outlining her discovery and finished it with a warning that Delphi himself or herself could be in danger.

Now what?

She sat back and stared at her computer for a couple seconds. C’mon brain. Come up with something smart! The next step was to find out who was behind the Q-group and Richard Dunst.

For lack of anywhere else to begin, she typed into her computer the familiar name of the Q-group’s primary chat room. It should be deserted, since most or all of its members would either be arrested by now or running for their lives.

The screen blinked. Seventeen members were present in the chat room.

Seventeen?

She signed in quickly, using her usual fake e-mail address and Arabic ID for this chat group. She scanned through the discussion, a disjointed conversation about European soccer scores. Translating the coded phrases in her head based on what she’d figured out the last couple months, she stared in shock.

Someone she’d never seen in this room before was giving this new group of people a crisp set of instructions.

On how to kill Gabe Monihan.

6:00 P.M.

Diana read frantically through the posts, looking for key phrases that meant something entirely different than their surface meaning. There. A soccer score from the Bristol Capitols. That was a reference to Washington, D.C. A mention of a soccer game date a couple of weeks from now. She reversed the date and gaped—01-20. January 20. This person was ordering another hit on Gabe today? Her blood pressure lurched upward significantly.

She flinched at a request for who was going to be at the upcoming game so they could get a block of tickets together. Four, no six people responded to that bit. A six-man team was volunteering to kill Gabe? Her blood pressure pounded up another few points.

The chat host, a total stranger to this room called Disco-Duck, replied that he thought he could only get tickets for one or two guys. A bunch of people clamored to be the ones chosen to go. What kind of handle was DiscoDuck, anyway? She’d lay ten-to-one odds no teenager today had ever heard of the song from the 1970s by that name. Not a kid, then. Someone older. Probably was a teen or young adult in the seventies. That would put this guy in his fifties at the youngest.

Had the mastermind behind the Q-group and Richard Dunst finally shown himself?

Quickly, she opened another chat screen and prayed some of her hacker buddies were online. They were.

She typed in, Hey guys. I need you to do another trace like you did this morning. This one’s possibly more important than the last one. Anyone up for it?

A reply from a top-notch hacker who went by the handle, Fantasy Man, was forthcoming almost instantly. How could it be more important than the last batch? Those idiots were out to kill the new president. What’s more important than that?

She typed back tersely, Finding the idiots’ boss.

Fantasy Man retorted, Who are you, anyway? Why were you tracking down criminals for the FBI? Are you some sort of undercover agent or something?

Crud. She’d worked for years establishing a cover with these guys, worming her way into the good graces of the best and most dangerous hackers on the East Coast. If she confessed to being Army Intelligence now she’d spook them off for sure. But they were also highly intelligent people. Would they smell a rat if she gave them anything less than the complete truth? Ultimately, if they turned their hacking skills on her, they’d find out everything there was to know about her, anyway. Heck, for all she knew, they already had. She sighed. She had no choice.

She typed carefully, I’m not FBI. I’m not a cop, either. I’m a conspiracy theorist for the military.

The cursor blinked steadily, winking at her for long seconds as she waited for a reply. C’mon, guys. Help her out here. She couldn’t do this alone.

Finally the reply popped up. You’re sure you’re not a cop?

Positive, she typed back immediately.

Was that arrest scene real this morning, or did you stage it to make it look like you’re on our side?

She typed in an abbreviation to indicate laughing. I’m better than that. If I’d wanted to stage a scenario to convince you I’m legit, I’d have done a whole lot better than those pathetic losers.

Who were those guys who hauled you off?

She didn’t have time to get into this. DiscoDuck could go offline at any moment. Army Intelligence. Long story. I managed to talk my way out of it. Hey, and thanks for getting those pictures to Owen Haas. He says thank you, too.

Fantasy Man replied, Is that Haas guy really in the Secret Service?

She smiled. These poor hackers were having a hard time wrapping their brains around the idea of having helped stop an assassination attempt on the President-elect. It went just enough against their principles to help the government that they weren’t sure they liked what she’d had them do. But, they also didn’t condone murder. It was a heck of a moral pickle for them to find themselves in. She grinned to herself. It was good for them.

She typed rapidly, Look, I’ve found the guy who gives the orders to the Q-group. His handle is DiscoDuck, and he’s online right now. I’ve got to track down who he is. Immediately. Are you in?

Another lengthy pause.

Please, please, please play ball.

And then Fantasy Man typed back, What server is he using?

She sagged in relief over her keyboard and typed in the necessary information. In a matter of minutes, a half-dozen hackers had joined the hunt, circling in on their prey as a group. With so many hackers coming at him from so many directions at once, DiscoDuck didn’t stand a chance.

But what was odd was the guy seemed to have taken no precautions to protect himself from this sort of attack. Apparently, he wasn’t overly familiar with the power of the Internet and what a good hacker could do with it.

Just a couple of minutes into the hunt, Fantasy Man fired off a message that he’d found something. Diana headed to the Web address he specified to take a look. She frowned as lines of programming code scrolled down her screen. He’d run into a firewall, a barrier between the Internet and a private computer network. And it was a big, nasty firewall. As tough as anything she’d ever seen.

The rest of the hackers joined them, and everyone began flinging their strongest, most creative protocols at the electronic security system. This was what hacking was all about. Except this firewall wasn’t going down without a fight. The server they were assaulting began throwing back counterhacking commands, and it turned into a pitched battle to defend her own computer while trying to break into the other guy’s.

In desperation, she pulled out a couple of government protocols she’d been careful never to reveal to her hacker friends, since they were designed to get into the very systems these guys most loved to invade—government computer networks. Implacably, her special protocol chipped away at the firewall in front of her.

The way her protocol was bulldozing through the layers of protection in this firewall, she’d almost guess this was a government network they were breaking into.

And then she was in.

She stared in stunned disbelief as a round logo popped up on her computer screen on a navy-blue background. Holy cow. The Central Intelligence Agency? DiscoDuck was operating from inside the CIA computer network?

She typed furiously, trying to narrow down the search parameters. Maybe get a directorate within the CIA from which the e-mails were coming, or even capture the name of this operator. But her break-in must have triggered some sort of warning. Within a matter of seconds, DiscoDuck signed off, severing the connection to the Internet and her search.

The other hackers reacted with varying degrees of disgust and dismay.

She typed quickly,

Hey, thanks anyway, guys. I owe you.

Fantasy Man typed back dryly,

Nah, that Monihan guy owes us. And we’re not going to let him forget it, either.

Diana grinned. She’d relay that message to Gabe the next time she saw him.

The other hackers backed away from the firewall, and she pretended to do the same, as well. Once they’d all cleared out, she opened up a file she’d never used before. It was written by an FBI computer programmer for the purpose of intercepting and opening e-mails when the Bureau did surveillance on members of the government who’d come under suspicion. She seriously was not supposed to have a copy of this program, and she’d never even hinted at its existence to her hacker buddies. They’d have a field day with it if they ever got their hands on it.

She loaded the program and watched it run.

It took a few minutes, but eventually, an e-mail log to Disco-Duck popped up on her screen. She gazed down through the mail headers of hundreds of e-mails dating back for nearly a year and nothing out of the ordinary caught her attention. Damn. She didn’t have time to open all these up and read them!

The e-mail intercept program indicated that these were the nonencrypted files available. Would she like to see the encrypted messages, as well? She typed in an immediate yes command.

This program didn’t decrypt the mails themselves, but she could at least look at the captions the authors had attached to their posts.

Another long list of message titles scrolled down her screen. And immediately, something odd leaped out at her. The same word kept appearing, over and over. Safe. Safe? What the heck did that signify? Was this person involved in a safety program of some kind? Maybe it was a code name for a CIA operation DiscoDuck was involved in?

But then she got that niggling feeling in the back of her head again that she was forgetting something important. She closed her eyes and wiped her mind blank. She let the word safe float across her mind’s eye. She visualized it in various fonts and scripts, trying to place it in the context of books, newspaper and magazine articles, or even on a computer screen.

And suddenly it came to her where she’d seen it before. In small, unobtrusive print at the bottom of a title page in a book. Above the phrase, “The Society for the Advancement of Free Economies.” A California-based small press that had published several of Thomas Wolfe’s political and legal treatises. From what little she’d read of his deadly dull books, they professed nothing overly radical or alarming. He’d argued in the one book she’d managed to slog partway through that terror could only be effectively fought with terror and lawful societies would never defeat lawless societies, or something like that. Prophetic words a decade ago. And completely ignored, apparently, given recent past history. Could that be the same “S.A.F.E.” that DiscoDuck’s e-mail referred to?

The more she thought about it, the more convinced she became that she was on the right track. Safe wasn’t a word at all. It was an acronym for an organization or operation of some kind.

She stared at her computer speculatively. So DiscoDuck and this S.A.F.E. operation came out of the CIA, huh? Well, it made sense. Whoever was controlling Dunst might have known him from his CIA days. And the Q-group’s operation in Chicago had CIA training stamped all over it. For that matter, the break-in at the Old Town Oracle facility had classic CIA operation stamped all over it, too.

Abruptly, she recalled Oracle’s analysis last night that indicated someone highly placed within the government was probably behind the attacks on Gabe. Was this the person she’d been searching for? She pulled up the list of names Oracle had generated of people in positions of power who might have had access to the information that had been passed on to Gabe’s attackers. Who on that list was in the CIA?

Two names leaped out at her. Collin Scott, an assistant Director of Operations and…Joseph Lockworth. Surely not. Her brain rebelled against the idea of Gramps killing anyone. Except he’d been Director of the CIA. Of course, he’d ordered people killed on his watch. Why not order an incoming President killed?

Darryl and his Cadillac from hell had picked her up immediately after she contacted her grandfather. After he’d offered her a ride in his private car. Could it be? Had her own grandfather set her up to be killed?

She thought back to the times he’d bounced her on his knee, doing the same horsey-riding rhyme over and over for her. How he’d convinced her father to send her and Josie into the Athena Academy, which had probably saved both of them from ruined lives. How he’d come to visit them a couple of times a year, dropping in at the Academy without notice, pulling them out of their classes and taking them out to lunch at some outrageously expensive restaurant. He hadn’t replaced their mother, but he’d by golly kept a close eye on them and done whatever he could to help them after his daughter-in-law failed them.

For that matter, most of the arguments she ever remembered Gramps having with Mom had to do with Josie and her. The one thing that had stuck in his craw was that Zoe would abandon her children. Gramps was a stickler for family taking care of family. That couldn’t all have been an act. It just couldn’t. He wouldn’t set up his own granddaughter to be kidnapped or murdered.

DiscoDuck had to be this Scott guy.

But then the question arose of how in the world an active member of the CIA could get away with setting up Gabe Monihan to be killed. The Agency monitored its employees with nearly paranoid intensity. And that perennially beleaguered agency most certainly knew better than to let one of their own fool with American politics.

It made no sense at all that someone in the CIA would try to assassinate the incoming President, especially since his policies were bound to be more friendly to the intelligence community than the last administration’s. This DiscoDuck had to be a rogue operator within the CIA.

Not that it mattered right now. What mattered at this very moment was saving Gabe from whatever DiscoDuck had just orchestrated over the Internet.

She went back to the Q-group chat room and scrolled through the discussion over the last few minutes while she’d been occupied tracking down DiscoDuck.

He said a pickup game of soccer was going to be played up on the hill overlooking the lake. She translated in her head, Capitol Hill. Overlooking the Reflecting Pool.

She read on. He said they were meeting at around six-thirty to warm up and would start playing for real around 7 p.m. Those times didn’t take a rocket scientist to decipher and figure out what he was talking about.

This guy knew every last detail of when and where Gabe was going to be inaugurated tonight! How could that be? Gabe said the whole thing was a huge secret. So who’d leaked it? And how had DiscoDuck gotten his hands on the information? He had to be highly placed within the CIA, just like Oracle had forecast, to know what he did. And if that was true, it meant he was smart, powerful, and had frightening resources at his disposal.

She shoved down the panic threatening to choke her. She had to figure out who this guy was! Who all knew about tonight?

Gabe, obviously. His security detail. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court who’d swear him in. Key members of Congress and various government agencies—enter Disco-Duck. The local police. The FBI. No doubt, members of the media had been notified so they could get cameras and crews into place to cover the inauguration. Technical support types at the networks who’d break into the evening programming with the live feed.

Crud. The list of people in the know was too big to help her narrow down DiscoDuck’s identity at all.

She looked at her watch. It was after six now. These turkeys were going to meet at 6:30 p.m. to warm up. As in getting into position to kill Gabe. Some warm-up.

She shut down her computer and headed for her bedroom, or more to the point, for the safe in her bedroom that held her sidearm. Grimly, she donned a leather shoulder holster and threw her black leather duster on over it. She dialed the combination for the small safe in her closet and pulled out her rarely used pistol, a sturdy 9 mm Beretta she’d owned for years. It might not have the most firepower in the world, but its clip held fourteen rounds and a fifteenth in the firing chamber, and it never jammed. She grabbed both her spare clips of ammunition, threw them in her pocket and headed for the door.

Time to go to an inauguration.

7:00 P.M.

The Capitol was brightly lit when she pulled up a block north of it—as close as the police barricades would let her go—and parked her car. The glowing Rotunda thrust up into the night sky, a proud symbol of America in the crystalline chill of the evening. Stars glittered above and her breath hung in the air in thick clouds. She glimpsed the shadow of a pair of military choppers circling overhead just before she heard their distinctive thwocking. She’d bet there were fighter jets higher up, out of earshot, providing cover for this particular piece of real estate, too.

Ten-to-one at least one of the choppers up there was using high-resolution cameras to watch everyone and everything moving on the ground down here. From the height they were currently circling at, those cameras would be able to see ants scuttling along, if it weren’t too cold for such creatures tonight.

Ducking her head and shoulders back inside her car, she doffed her shoulder holster and emptied her pockets of ammo clips. She tucked the pistol under the front seat, out of sight. No way was she getting that baby inside the Capitol building. She could see the ground security from here, armed policemen with roving attack dogs pacing the steps in front of the Capitol.

The line waiting to get inside was blessedly short and she was only half-frozen when she stepped inside the majestic edifice. She checked her watch. Six-fifty. She had ten minutes to figure out what DiscoDuck and his cronies were up to and stop them.

She scanned the setup. A small stage had been erected on the east side of the spacious Rotunda, and rows of chairs for about a hundred people laid out in front of it. A podium stood on the stage, no doubt bulletproof, and a pair of clear, glass teleprompter panels stood on narrow poles to each side of it. A number of people were already seated in the chairs, many of whom she recognized as prominent politicians.

She scanned the exits. Every one of them was heavily covered with layers of armed guards either blocking it or carefully screening each person who entered. She looked up. The various balconies that ringed the Rotunda were also occupied by a mishmash of uniformed guards and plainclothes, men in suits. She recognized a couple of the men as Secret Service agents from the warehouse this afternoon.

Where in the heck was DiscoDuck’s threat supposed to come from? She didn’t see any way anyone was getting in from the outside to kill Gabe. She noticed a movement from the direction of the Senate chambers. A group of silent men in conservative suits stepped into the Rotunda and fanned out. More Secret Service. She recognized several of the men in this contingent from the bunker.

She had to give Owen Haas credit. He’d done a great job locking down this site and securing it against any potential threat. He’d anticipated everything she could think of and more.

So how was it DiscoDuck thought he or his people could get access to Gabe?

She ticked off all the usual sources of threats. Sniper. Bomber. Close-range shooter. Attack from above. Attack from a bystander. Haas and his team were positioned to stop every last one.

She looked at her watch again—6:53 p.m. The crowd was being asked to take its seats. She hung back at the margin of the small crowd, still searching warily.

She was overreacting. Haas had this thing under control. Everything was going to be perfectly fine. She should just sit down and enjoy watching Gabe become President. A Secret Service agent herded her, last in line, toward one of the rear seats. The guy’s eyes moved constantly, checking outward from the subtle cordon they’d formed around the stage.

Reluctantly, she took her seat, at the end of the last row. A group of dignitaries filed out on stage and took their places. A burst of light exploded, and she started horribly, almost diving for the floor out of sheer reflex. The television cameras had just gone on. Sheesh, she was a mess.

Several news anchors scattered around the room began to speak into microphones. In the otherwise silent space, their words swirled and echoed around her, disconnected from the people uttering them.

“In just a few moments, President-elect Monihan will be sworn in as President of the United States…After a day of terror in our nation’s capital, the wheels of democracy will finally turn, and a new president will be sworn in…We’re standing by for the delayed inauguration of Gabriel Monihan, which will go ahead in spite of a day of death in Washington….”

There was a rustle as everyone stood up, and she followed suit belatedly. Over the heads of the rows of dignitaries in front of her, she glimpsed Gabe and an elderly man in a long black robe stepping into the doorway behind the stage. Almost time. In a matter of minutes, Gabe would be President, and her theories would be proven—thankfully—to be unfounded. And then she and Gabe could each get on with their lives. She was going to miss him. In the short time she’d known him, he’d made a huge impression on her. In fact, she suspected he’d left a mark on her life that would never go away. This experience had shown her it was possible to curb the rebel in her, to channel it in a positive and useful way to help her fellow man instead of fighting against the system all the time.

Owen Haas, standing beside Gabe, put a finger to his ear. Undoubtedly getting a last all-clear report from his men before he let his charge step out into the lights, alone and unprotected.

She glanced over her shoulder at the other agents in the loose ring of men converging around the stage. They, too, scanned the edges of the room. So well honed a team were they that they barely looked at one another as they moved as one through the echoing chamber.

She frowned.

The Secret Service agents weren’t looking at each other.

Where better to mount an attack on Gabe than from within the very force meant to protect him?

Dunst was a master of disguise. He was ex-CIA. He’d be familiar with the standard security procedures a group like the Secret Service would use. If he took out one of the Secret Service agents—one who looked like him—replaced the guy and stepped into the cordon, none of the other agents were likely to notice. They were too busy looking elsewhere for threats to look at themselves.

She scanned the agents ranged around the floor of the Rotunda. He wouldn’t be here. These men were too closely spaced, and one of them would notice a substitution at a glance. She looked up at the agents roaming the balconies above. They were operating widely spaced from each other at their various perches.

One of those guys would be a cinch to take out. As long as someone took his place and made the radio calls at the right times, nobody would notice a thing.

She looked even higher. Somewhere up there, on the very top balcony around the Rotunda, she had no doubt a team of snipers was spaced out. If one of those guys were taken out and replaced by Dunst…

She turned around fast and bumped into a Secret Service agent practically right behind her.

“It’s time for the swearing in, ma’am.”

“I have to go,” she gasped. “There’s a sniper in here. He’s going to try to kill Gabe.”

The guy glanced up. “There are several snipers in here, ma’am. They’re here to protect President-elect Monihan. I can assure you, they won’t hurt anyone unless they need to.”

He didn’t get it. He thought she was some random chick who’d spotted one of the government snipers and was panicking.

“I have to go,” she insisted.

The guy gave her a hard look. “If you leave now, you won’t be let back into the room.”

“That’s okay. I’ve got to get out of here,” she insisted desperately. “Now.”

The guy shrugged.

She raced for the nearest exit. A phalanx of security guards stepped aside to let her out. As she slipped past the men, she looked back over her shoulder at the Secret Service man standing by the door.

“Tell Owen Haas or Agent Tilman that Diana Lockworth says one of their snipers has been taken out and replaced by Richard Dunst. Gabe Monihan is in grave danger. They have to get him out of here!”

And with that, she took off running.

She headed for the nearest staircase, flashed her military ID at a startled Capitol police officer, and ran up the steps as fast as she could. They ended three stories up, on a floor of small offices devoted to Congressional staffers. Not high enough to get into the Rotunda yet. She turned left, back toward the center of the building and its giant dome. She darted down the dimly lit hallway, looking for another staircase.

There. An unmarked door about where the wall of the dome should start. It was either the staircase she sought, or she was about to jump into a janitor’s closet. She shoved on the door, and it opened to reveal another staircase winding up into the dark, narrow and steep. She raced up it, panting in her panic and exertion.

She burst out the first door she came to and lurched to a stop high above the floor of the Rotunda. Only a carved stone railing stood between her and a plunge to her death. A man to her left jolted. She looked at the guy’s face. Definitely not Dunst. She looked right at the other Secret Service agent now moving toward her. Not Dunst, either.

She bolted back into the stairwell and continued her desperate flight upward. But now, footsteps pounded after her. Her feet flew over the cast-iron steps and she clattered up them two at a time, her knees pumping like pistons. God bless stair-climber machines and all the hours she’d spent on them in the last decade.

Another landing as the stairs ended. She burst out onto a narrow ledge even higher up the side of the dome. The Secret Service agents on this level were a good third of the way around the dome from her, but coming at her fast. Her pursuers must have radioed ahead. She took off running toward the nearest agent. He reached for his left armpit. Gun! She held her hands out, well away from her sides to indicate she wasn’t armed. And got a good look at the guy. Not Dunst.

He hesitated in the act of pulling out his pistol, and she turned around and reversed direction. The other agent on this level was closing fast on her. African-American guy. Clearly not Dunst. Except now she was trapped between the two men!

A doorway appeared on her right. She darted through it.

A narrow, curving hallway with a sloping ceiling. She sprinted along it, frantically looking for a way higher. There was one more balcony above her, more a maintenance catwalk than an actual balcony. That’s where the snipers would be, and where Dunst had to be.

Lots of footsteps pounded behind her now, and men’s voices shouted, echoing in the oddly shaped space. Fighting off vertigo from the crazy slant of the walls in the near total darkness, she pushed forward. She must have run halfway around the giant dome when finally, a narrow staircase appeared on her left.

She skidded to a stop and leaped for it, scrambling on all fours for the first few steps until she regained her balance and got her feet under her again. She raced upward, her shoulders brushing the walls. Her legs burned and her lungs screamed for oxygen. But Gabe was down below, vulnerable and possibly lined up in Dunst’s gun sights already.

She burst out onto the catwalk. Its iron railing looked pitifully flimsy to protect against the tremendous fall to the floor far below. She raced to the left, her footsteps rattling on the iron grillwork that formed the floor of the catwalk.

There! A man, lying prone, cradling a deadly looking rifle with a sight nearly as big as the barrel of the weapon. The barrel of the weapon poked through the iron railing and was trained on the crowd below. The sniper jerked, looking up at her in surprise as she barreled down on him. The nose was too narrow, the cheeks too high for Dunst. He sat up, wrestling to get the gun out from between the iron rails and turn it on her.

She vaulted over the guy’s legs and kept on going. She raced around the perimeter of the dome, much smaller up here than down lower. And spotted the second sniper. She wasn’t close enough to see his face.

As she ran toward him, he hunkered down over his rifle as if he was going to shoot. He glanced up at her once, his gaze pure malevolence directed at her. She saw his face from a range of about thirty feet. Richard Dunst.

His face turned back to his weapon, and his eye went down to the telescopic sight.

“Nooooo!” she screamed.

She put on a burst of superhuman speed, her gaze riveted on his trigger finger.

It squeezed in slow motion, depressing the trigger in its housing. She jumped for the rifle. But as she sailed toward it in midair, a blinding flash of light exploded from the end of the barrel. A blast of sound slammed into her a millisecond before she landed on the rifle. Too late!

The hot metal barrel crashed into her ribs, driving the breath out of her like an iron fist. She gasped in pain as she twisted to face the man scrambling to his feet above her. Screams erupted below, floating up eerily into the rafters.

The bastard had just shot Gabe and she hadn’t been in time to stop it. Tearing agony swept over her, along with rage. Red-ringed, rip-someone-apart rage that boiled over, totally out of control. She rode the wave and surged upward, tackling the bastard around the legs. He went down hard, snarling as he plowed a fist into her jaw.

Oblivious to pain, oblivious to anything except her need to hurt this man, she reached for his neck, wrapping her fingers around his throat. He thrust his hands up between her forearms and gave a vicious outward chop, forcing her to release his throat or break both her elbows.

He jabbed for her eyes, and she grabbed his fingers, twisting them brutally. He roared in pain and jerked his knee upward. Fortunately, she didn’t have family jewels in the same sensitive spot as a man, but the blow dislodged her from on top of him nonetheless. She rammed her elbow into his ribs as she rolled off of him, reveling in the grunt of pain that drew. But he countered with an openhanded thrust to the side of her head that made her see stars as pain exploded through her head.

This guy was no amateur thug that a few well-placed blows could drop. He was a trained killer, and furthermore, he understood that he was fighting for his life here. She, on the other hand, had only revenge on her mind. Survival wasn’t of great importance to her at the moment as long as this asshole went down.

She rolled to her knees and lunged forward, grabbing the guy’s ankles as he turned to flee. Oh, no. He wasn’t going anywhere. They were finishing this right here. Right now. He turned and kicked viciously, his toe connecting with her throat. She gagged, choking for air, and getting none. Her grasp loosened, and he yanked free of her arms. He scrabbled away from her, swearing. Quickly going light-headed, she grabbed the railing beside her and dragged herself to her feet. She looked up at Dunst.

His lips drew back from his teeth in a grimace of fury. He reached inside his coat and came out with a pistol in hand. She stared at the bore of the weapon. Too far to reach it. And there was nowhere to dodge it. The sloping wall crowded her on the right, and to her left was a drop of many stories to a marble floor. He’d better hit her heart, because with her last breath, she was going to take the bastard with her when she went.

She flung herself forward, into the coming shot, with the intent to grab Dunst and twist over the railing with him as she went down.

The shot rang out.

She felt nothing. No impact. No burning pain of supersonic lead ripping through her body.

As she flew through the air toward Dunst, a look of infinite surprise crossed his face.

And then she hit him, a bone-grinding impact of body on body. But instead of resisting her, he collapsed, going as limp as a rag doll beneath her. Instead of carrying them over the balcony, her roll to the left slammed them into the iron railing harmlessly.

Damn!

She blinked, focusing on Dunst’s face, inches from her own. His eyes were glassy. She smelled something metallic.

And then she noticed the neat, kidney-colored hole in the center of his forehead. He’d been shot? By whom?

She became aware of shouting around her. Male voices. Nearby. Adding to the chaos of sound floating up from below.

A hand landed on her shoulder from behind. Pulling her roughly away from Dunst. A pistol thrust past her nose, pointed in Dunst’s face. A foot hooked under Dunst’s shoulder, rolling him onto his side.

And she stared at the hand-size piece of skull ripped away from the back of his head. A spreading pool of blood and brain matter dripped through the iron grillwork floor. Dunst was dead.

She looked up numbly at the man beside her. Agent Tilman.

“You okay?” he bit out.

She blinked. Was she okay? She had no idea. “I guess so,” she mumbled. And then her brain kicked into gear again. Oh, God. Gabe! “That bastard shot Gabe!” she cried out.

Tilman’s jaw rippled with the same adrenaline-enhanced fury still roaring through her. “He better not have.”

“I’ve got to see him,” she declared. “Be with him in case…” She couldn’t finish the thought. He had to live. She leaped to her feet and took off running for the stairs, Tilman on her heels.

Somewhere in that interminable flight back down all those stairs, she started to breathe again. Vaguely she registered Tilman shouting into his radio behind her. Something about clearing a path and letting the two of them through. She raced past a dozen Secret Service agents and FBI men who plastered themselves against the walls of the narrow stairwells to get out of her way.

Finally, she reached the ground floor and ran for the Rotunda at full-tilt. She skidded out onto the marble floor.

A crowd of civilians were herded into one corner, filing out of the Rotunda toward the House chambers. Gun-toting men roved the space, and a cluster of news reporters chattered excitedly into microphones, huddled by the far wall. But then she spotted what she was searching for. A cluster of paramedics and Secret Service agents bending down over a prone form on the floor. Gabe.

She tore across the space between them and shoved through the mass of bodies.

And lurched to a halt as he grinned up at her jauntily.

“Hey, gorgeous,” he said lightly.

She looked down. His shirt was open, revealing a bulletproof vest, which was also opened to reveal a four-inch purple spot low on his right side. She fell to her knees as Gabe sat up. Thank God he was all right. A cold wash of realization passed over her. When had this become so damned personal? For surely the sick-to-her-stomach, weak-kneed relief coursing through her was much more than professional concern.

“What in the hell were you doing out here?” she bit out.

“Owen almost had me out of here. I’m afraid I wasn’t going willingly. I had a feeling you were behind all the commotion.” He paused. “I was worried about you,” he confessed.

“I was too late,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

He smiled. “There’s nothing to be sorry for. It was your scream that caused Owen to dive on me. You saved my life. Again.”

A grim voice spoke from somewhere above her head. “I don’t mean to intrude, sir, but I need to talk to the lady. Now.”

She looked up.

Owen Haas loomed above them, his expression furious. He glared at her and gritted out from between clenched teeth, “Maybe you’d care to explain to me how you always happen to know exactly when and where these damned terrorists are going to attack. Are you their person on the inside?”

8:00 P.M.

Diana lurched. His words struck her like a fist in the face. “I beg your pardon?”

Gabe spoke up with quiet authority beside her. “Why don’t we take this conversation somewhere more private?”

She climbed painfully to her feet, the aches and pains of her fight with Dunst abruptly registering with her conscious mind. She felt as though she’d been run through a meat grinder. Maybe a little stretching and twisting was in order to work out a few of the kinks. Except then she tried it. Oww. So much for that idea. That jerk really got some good licks in on her before Tilman shot him.

A paramedic helped Gabe to his feet and a wall of Secret Service agents closed in around him as their charge went vertical. She caught the brief grimace on his face as he started buttoning up his shirt. Even through a bulletproof vest, a slug from a high-powered rifle could break a rib. He had to hurt at least as bad as she did right about now.

“This way,” Owen bit out.

“No. Wait,” Gabe ordered.

Owen’s head whipped around. “We need to get you to safety, sir.”

“We need to let the American people know I’m alive and unharmed,” Gabe countermanded quietly.

“This is a matter of your security,” Owen growled back with quiet intensity.

“This is a matter of national security,” Gabe replied impassively. “I insist. I’ll take responsibility for whatever happens to me.” He turned to face her and asked casually, “Could you tie my tie for me? I’m lousy at it without a mirror.”

She reached up, in minor shock, and retied the red silk tie around his neck. The act was intimate and felt extremely odd in this giant room with all these people standing around, watching. She felt naked. Exposed. Like her feelings for this guy were right out in the open for everyone to see.

Gabe watched her intently as she performed the service for him, his amber gaze never leaving her face. An unmistakable heat built between them, or maybe that was just the blush burning her cheeks. She tugged the knot into position under his chin and adjusted his collar slightly. He pulled his suit coat closed, and she smoothed the lapels. Dang. She couldn’t keep her hands off this guy, not even in front of a crowd of people in the Capitol Building of all places!

“There,” she murmured, “You look perfect.”

“It’s the makeup they made me wear for the cameras. I actually feel like I’m going to puke.”

“I can imagine. But you’re holding up great.”

He shrugged. “It’s not like I have any choice. This reminds me of something I heard Ronald Reagan say many years ago about being President. He said he couldn’t imagine anyone being a successful President without being an accomplished actor. I’m beginning to see what he meant.”

She smiled up at him reassuringly. “Just keep up the act for a few more minutes. Then you can go somewhere private and fall apart.”

Diana started as Gabe’s hand closed on her elbow. “Come give me moral support,” he murmured.

As if Gabe Monihan needed moral support! The guy had just faced a second assassination attempt in a single day, and he seemed totally unconcerned by any danger to himself right now. Although, that was part and parcel of being President. He was supposed to be strong and steady in the face of a crisis. And it didn’t hurt that Richard Dunst’s brains were splattered all over the walls upstairs. That particular threat was pretty darned neutralized at the moment.

Owen was not a happy camper, but he motioned his men to follow her and Gabe as they struck out across the floor of the Rotunda.

The cameramen facing Gabe figured out what was happening before the news anchors with their backs to him did. The lights swung away from the talking journalists as Gabe strode into their midst. She gazed up at him in shock as all the stress and discomfort of having just been shot melted away from his face.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sorry to interrupt you, but I’d like to make a brief statement.”

The reporters all stammered their permission to go ahead.

She blinked as the monolithic eyes of the cameras pinned black stares on them, and she shrank back as much as she could from Gabe in the press of Secret Service agents hemming her in. This was Gabe’s show, and she had no interest in being seen beside him on national TV.

He began to speak, confident and relaxed. “I wanted to let the American people know that, yet again, I am fine. Thanks to the quick thinking and tremendous skill of my security team, I am safe and sound.” He grinned boyishly. “I promise we will get this inauguration done one way or another, tonight. I’m thinking about dragging Judge Browning into a men’s room and taking the oath right there, just to get it over with.”

A chuckle from the hovering press corp.

Gabe continued, “The important thing is for the American people to remember that no matter what heinous crimes terrorists attempt to perpetrate on this nation, they will never bring down the democracy that has made this nation strong. No act of terror has ever brought down a democratic government, and no act of terror is about to do it now.”

A reporter shouted out of the crowd, “When are you finally going to become President?”

Gabe grinned. “Well, we’re going to take a little while to regroup and get all the right people back together, and then we’ll try this thing again. You know what they say. The third time’s a charm.”

She simply could not believe how calm he was being about all this. She was a complete wreck, and she wasn’t even the target of the killers.

As a chorus of jumbled questions got shouted at him all at once, he raised a polite hand. “I’m sorry, folks. I can’t take any more questions just now. I’ve got a little business to take care of, but I’ll be glad to speak to you at the press conference I’ll be holding tomorrow.”

Whether or not a press conference had been on his schedule, there surely was one now. She had visions of his staff seeing this live interview and scrambling away from their televisions frantically to arrange an impromptu press conference.

Gabe turned away from the cameras and took her elbow again, moving swiftly with her across the space back toward the abandoned stage where he was supposed to have become President. Owen and his men closed in on the two of them, confining them in a tight cordon of big, protective bodies that moved them onto and across the stage.

“So why aren’t you dragging Justice Browning into some office and doing the deed right now?” she asked under her breath.

“He’s having a little trouble with his heart at the moment. Apparently, he’s not used to getting shot at. The medics were worried about him and sent him to a hospital for observation for a couple hours.”

“Too bad.”

He nodded. “It would’ve been nice to get it over with. But I’d feel funny anyway, taking the oath of office while a dead man is lying in the rafters over my head. Even if he did try to kill me.”

She could understand that. She refrained from looking up at the team of police taking pictures of the corpse on the catwalk overhead and allowed herself to be herded, along with Gabe, through the small doorway behind the stage.

She looked over the shoulders of the agents behind her at the crowd of reporters. “Are you sure you shouldn’t have stuck around and answered a few of their questions?”

Owen answered brusquely for him. “That’s what press secretaries are for. Right now, you two are getting under cover and we’re going to have a talk.”

The Secret Service agent hustled them down a short hallway and into a small office. Glaring sternly at her, he pointed at a chair in front of the desk. She sat down in it while he perched on the edge of the desk. Lord, it felt like being hauled down to the principal’s office to be chewed out. Except this was a thousand times more serious than any accusation she’d ever faced at the Athena Academy.

As worried as she was by Owen’s inexplicable leap of logic, she still waited him out. It never paid to look overeager in stating her case, no matter how innocent she was.

Owen sighed heavily. “Start talking.”

She was vividly aware that Gabe stood in the corner off to her right, watching her silently. She respected both of these men immensely and had no interest in playing games with either one of them. And so, she started talking.

“Owen, I don’t know where you got the idea that I’d do anything or associate with anyone who would hurt Gabe. I’ve been busting my butt for weeks trying to break into this Q-group, and today they finally stuck their heads up high enough for me to get a position fix on them. I have access to a top-secret, high-tech database to help me analyze their movements, and because of that, I’ve been able to stay only a step or two behind these jokers.”

“How did you know Dunst would be on that catwalk?”

“It was the only hole in your security. You had everything else covered. But you weren’t looking within your own ranks for a threat.” She added hastily as a black scowl crossed Owen’s face. “It’s not like you should’ve expected a threat from the inside. I only thought to do it because I know Richard Dunst.”

Gabe’s brows slammed together right along with Owen’s.

Surely Gabe didn’t take that the way it sounded. Surely he trusted her more than that! She corrected herself. “I don’t know him as in being acquainted with him. I only meant Dunst was one of the people I’ve investigated and I know his MO. He was caught in a Q-group takedown three months ago, and his escape from Bolling was just too timely to be coincidence. He’s a disguise artist and a trained killer. Speaking of which, has the agent he replaced been found yet?”

Owen shook his head in the negative. “The FBI is searching the upper floors now.”

What was going through Gabe’s mind? He was standing there motionless, his expression completely unreadable. Did he believe these accusations Owen was flinging at her? Surely not! But why wasn’t he leaping to her defense, then? Of course, it wasn’t his job to defend her. It was his job to stay out of Owen’s way and let his security chief rake her over the coals. Besides, Gabe was about to be President of the United States. He couldn’t afford to let his personal feelings enter into any decision he made.

What had Gabe said a few months back in response to a press question speculating about a decision he might make? Something to the effect that, he’d rather base his decisions on facts than speculation. She ought to be pleased he’d extended that philosophy to this situation. Except all she felt was hurt and abandoned by his sudden, cold reserve.

She turned back to her accuser. “Owen. You saw me jump on Gabe this morning on that balcony. Did that look like a calculated move to get into his good graces? Or did that look like the reflex of someone fighting like crazy to keep Gabe alive?”

Owen’s expression waxed thoughtful. She caught a movement out of the corner of her eye and was dismayed to see Gabe cross his arms across his chest. Was that more comfortable for his bruised ribs, or was that a defensive gesture of rejection? Oh, God. Why did the people who were supposed to care about her always leave her?

She continued in a rush. “Weird stuff has been happening to me all day. My house got broken into at oh-dark-thirty this morning. An FBI agent I’d never met before made wild accusations against me. Out of the blue, some Army Intelligence guys picked me up for questioning. Some wacko posed as my grandfather’s driver and tried to kidnap me. I’m telling you, somebody’s freaked out by my investigation of last October’s attempt on Gabe’s life and is trying like hell to stop me.”

“Who?” Owen barked.

She threw up her hands. “I wish I knew! But I can tell you this. Whoever it is, he or she or they are also behind the attempts to kill Gabe today. You agreed with me in the bunker this afternoon that a third party was pulling both the Q-group’s strings and Dunst’s. When the Q-group failed, Dunst was sent in to finish the job.”

“You can’t know that for certain. Unless you’re working for them, of course.”

“Sure, I can. I was in the Q-group chat room on the Internet a couple hours ago when the order was sent out to kill Gabe.”

Both men lurched at that one.

“I’ve got transcripts of it at home on my computer. A bunch of my hacker buddies were there with me, trying to track down the identity of whoever gave the order.”

Owen still looked suspicious. Okay. She could see where that sounded bad. But dammit, those hackers had provided vital assistance with her investigation!

“I’m not kidding,” she argued desperately. “I’m way deep inside this conspiracy, and someone knows it. If anything, I’m a security risk to Gabe because they’re coming for me next, and I could draw them to him. But I am not now and never have worked with these jerks. I swear.”

She looked back and forth between the two men. Neither one’s facial expression gave away a thing.

She continued to hammer away at the stone wall that was the two men. “Let me ask you a question, Owen. Who tipped you off that I was working with the Q-group? Did it come from within the Secret Service or from outside it?”

He frowned at her implication. “My organization is not compromised,” he declared forcefully.

“Oh yeah?” she challenged. “Then why was I able to trace whoever gave Dunst the order to kill Gabe to CIA Headquarters in Langley? There’s a rat somewhere in the government. And he or she has to be high up. How else did Dunst know to be here, tonight? If the CIA’s compromised, why not the Secret Service? It would explain how the bad guys knew so much of Gabe’s plans today, particularly the details of when and where he was going to be inaugurated this evening.”

Owen leaned back, as if he could distance himself from her ugly words. She wished she could do the very same thing, but neither one of them had any choice in the matter. Each in their own way, he and she were both committed to keeping Gabe alive, no matter what the risk to themselves.

He bit out, “The tip about you came from within the Service. And yes, it was from high up.”

Damn! Another major government agency with possible corruption at the very top! What was going on around here?

“Please, Owen. I need a name.”

He glanced over at Gabe, who nodded tersely, and then back at her. He hesitated a moment more, and then said reluctantly. “Porter. Alex Porter. He’s Deputy Director of the Secret Service.” Owen added angrily, “He’s a good man, dammit.”

That remained to be seen. She stood up, too agitated to sit still any longer. “Look Owen, if you don’t trust me, kick me out of here. But for God’s sake, don’t arrest me. I’ve got to keep tracking down the third party who controlled Dunst and the Q-group while the trail is fresh, or he’ll slip back below the waterline and we may not ever get another chance at him.”

Gabe stepped forward. “Diana, I don’t want you risking your life alone like this. It’s too big for you. Turn the investigation over to Owen’s men or the FBI.”

She wheeled around to face him and said with terrible urgency, “There’s no time. I’ve got months’ worth of details stored in my head, and I could never share all those quickly enough with someone else to do any good. By the time I brought anyone up to speed on all this, it would be too late. Even if all you did was bring on board a support team for me, they’d still move too slowly. It has to be me who tracks this person down. And I have to do it now.”

Gabe looked over at Owen and the two exchanged a long look of silent communication. In the palpable struggle of wills that ensued, Gabe came out on top, for Owen finally turned away and nodded shortly at her. He said bitterly, “Go.”

She spun and headed for the door, but stopped with her hand on the knob. “Thank you,” she said earnestly to Owen. “I swear, I’ll do my best not to let you down.”

He scowled. “Stay away from President-elect Monihan.”

She nodded once. She paused just long enough to take one last, heartbreaking look at Gabe. Lord, she was going to miss him. She closed her eyes against the pain and stumbled out of the room.

How she made it outside and to her car, she had no idea. But she knew she was going to find DiscoDuck and pluck every last feather out of his worthless hide.

Too many coincidences had happened to her today. Too many seemingly unrelated occurrences that all added up to a big fat scheme to stop her investigation and to discredit her. This latest indignity of planting doubts about her in Owen’s and Gabe’s heads was the final straw.

It was time to go on the offensive. And she knew just where to start.

9:00 P.M.

Diana punched Delphi’s phone number into her cell phone as she drove. Shoot, at the rate she was using this number today, she ought to put it on her speed dial. Delphi picked up on the first ring and didn’t bother to say hello. Obviously had caller ID.

“I saw you on TV with Gabriel Monihan. Can I assume you had some part in foiling the latest assassination attempt?”

“Yes. Richard Dunst is dead.”

“Then Monihan is safe.”

“No,” Diana replied sharply. “He’s not.”

A pause while Delphi digested that. “Now who’s after him?”

“Dunst’s boss. The same person or persons who were using the Q-group to get to Gabe. They’re still out there.”

“And do you know who they are?” Delphi asked tersely.

“No, but I plan to find out. That’s why I called you. I need an address. The guy’s name is Captain Hammersmith, and he’s with Army CID. I don’t know his first name. He’s stationed here in the D.C. area. Maybe attached to the Pentagon.”

“That should be plenty to track him down with,” Delphi said mildly. “Let me put it into Oracle.”

Diana drove west, vaguely in the direction of the Pentagon while Oracle did its thing. And in a few minutes, Delphi was back.

“You’re correct. He’s attached to the CID unit at the Pentagon. Here’s his home address.” Delphi rattled off an address in Fairfax, Virginia, not far from the Pentagon. “Keep me informed as to what you find out.”

“Will do,” Diana replied. She punched the address into her car’s nifty navigation computer, and a map to her destination popped up on its display. For once today, she wasn’t under some horrible time crunch, and she drove at a sane speed to Captain Hammersmith’s home. She composed in her mind the speech she wanted to give him and practiced it a few times as she searched for his house. Ah. There it was. A modest ranch. With the cost of living in this area, it was hard to make a military man’s pay go far.

She got out of the car and walked up the front sidewalk, which was neatly shoveled clear of snow and ice.

A young woman answered her knock on the front door.

Diana spoke politely. “Mrs. Hammersmith? Is your husband at home? I urgently need to speak to him about a military matter.”

Mrs. Hammersmith looked surprised, but invited her in. One of the men who’d questioned her that morning rounded the corner into the front hall, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. He blurted out, “What are you doing here?”

“I have a question for you. And it’s a matter of national security.”

Hammersmith glanced at his wife. “Step in here.”

He guided Diana into a small den off the front hallway and closed the door behind her. As soon as he turned around, he lit into her. “How dare you show up at my house like this!”

Diana weathered the tirade in silence. When he subsided, she said quietly, “Are you done yet?”

He blinked.

“Look, I’m not kidding. Twice today I’ve barely managed to stop people from killing Gabe Monihan. But I still haven’t tracked down who’s behind these bastards. I need your help to do it.”

He glared at her. “You’re delusional.”

She yanked out the personal business card Gabe had given her that morning with his cell phone number scrawled on it. “Go ahead. Call him. Ask President-elect Monihan if I’m delusional or not.”

Hammersmith stared hard at the small rectangle of white and said nothing, his mouth pressed into a thin, white line.

“I don’t need you to believe me, Captain,” she said shortly. “All I need you to do is tell me who gave you and your partner the order to pick me up. Who tipped you off about me?”

The guy looked up at her and back down at the card in his hand. Silently, he handed the card back to her, his expression defiant.

She threatened with cool savagery, “I’m not leaving your house until you tell me, and you seriously don’t want to catch the heat I’m going to bring down on your head if you don’t cooperate. My grandfather was just the first of the big guns I can aim at you. You’ve gotten tangled up in something so much larger than you, I doubt you can even imagine it. You might as well just give me the name, because I am going to get it out of you one way or the other.”

She saw him weakening. C’mon, Hammersmith. Break already. Time’s awasting here.

She lightened her tone of voice to one of patient understanding. There was nothing like having to do a one-woman good-cop bad-cop routine. “Look. You can give me the name voluntarily, or I can call in someone way, way above you in your chain of command to give you an order. If you’d like, I can start with Gabe Monihan and let it roll downhill from there.”

Hammersmith huffed hard. “Fine. A guy named Smith called us. Colonel Al Smith. He’s an aide to General Pace.”

“General Eric Pace? As in the Army Chief of Staff?” she asked carefully. Holy cow!

“Yeah. Satisfied now?” he snapped.

“Yes, I am. Thanks. I’ll mention your cooperation to President Monihan when this is all over.”

“You do that.”

Not a happy camper. But she didn’t have time to care. Time to move on to her next interview. She left his house quickly and repeated her call to Delphi, this time obtaining the home address of FBI Special Agent Ronald Flaherty. He’d be a much tougher nut to crack if she didn’t miss her guess. The guy was a veteran agent. No way would she be able to bully him like she just had Hammersmith.

She pulled up to his house, a rambling colonial on a tree-lined street only ten minutes or so away from her home. Nice place. She walked up to the wide, covered front porch and rang the doorbell, huddling deep in her leather duster. Man, it was cold tonight. Of course, some of the chill was probably coming from inside her gut. First, a high-level Secret Service supervisor fingered her, and then someone attached to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. She dreaded hearing who’d sicced Flaherty on her.

Agent Flaherty himself opened the front door. He took one look at her and growled, “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Look. I’m sorry to bring work to your home like this. But I need to speak with you for a minute. I have a question for you. It won’t take long. I promise. It’s a matter of national security.” That phrase usually got to men like this, whose lives revolved around the idea of protecting that national security.

Flaherty snarled, “Call me in the morning. At my office. And don’t ever show up at my house like this again, or I’ll arrest your ass so fast it’ll make your head spin.”

Damn. He wasn’t going to cooperate. She’d been afraid of that. She stepped forward aggressively, shoving her hand forward, still cloaked inside her coat pocket. She jammed the barrel of her Beretta into his ribs. “Don’t do anything sudden, eh, Ronald?” she purred.

His eyes widened in shock then quickly narrowed in calculation.

“Ever heard of a combat system called Krav Maga?” she asked casually. “Don’t try what you were just contemplating. At this point, I really don’t give a flip if I blow your head off or not.”

Apparently he heard the menace in her voice of someone who wasn’t lying and who could, in fact, follow through on that threat to kill him. The fight flickered out of his eyes.

“I respect your wish to protect your family. So why don’t you step outside onto the porch with me?” she suggested quietly. She stepped back a pace to give him room to join her. His gaze dropped to the front doorknob.

She smiled coldly. “I’m telling you. Don’t try it, my friend. I only want to ask you a question, and then I’ll leave.”

Flaherty stepped outside and pulled the front door closed behind him.

She gestured toward the porch swing off to her left. “Have a seat.”

Flaherty did as she directed. She moved around to his right side, partially behind him, in the best position to subdue him if he pulled any stunts. The way his eyes widened as his gaze followed her, he apparently recognized what she’d done. It was the move of a pro. Now that she’d established her seriousness with this guy, maybe they’d get somewhere.

“Who are you?” he asked.

It was undoubtedly a delaying tactic to stall her and distract her. But she was willing to give the guy that information on the assumption that he’d report her visit to the very superiors who’d set him on her. She wanted them to get the message that she was closing in on them.

“I work for Army Intelligence, and I’ve been investigating the terrorists who’ve been trying to kill Gabriel Monihan for the last several months. After they showed themselves today, I’m inches away from nabbing them. I’ve got names already, but I’m going to nail everyone in this conspiracy and put them all away for good. And I need your help.” There. That should put the fear of God in whoever it was she was chasing.

Flaherty snorted. “That’s nuts. If there was a conspiracy to assassinate Monihan, we’d have heard about it and investigated it ourselves.”

She retorted, “Since when do all the branches of the government, particularly the intelligence agencies, share their toys and play nicely with the other children? Even with the Department of Homeland Security in place, you know as well as I do that interdepartment rivalries are alive and well within the government.”

Flaherty made a derisive sound of agreement.

“Are you getting cold, Agent Flaherty? I figure in another ten minutes or so, frostbite’s going to hit and your fingers are going to start to freeze. You know, you could lose your field qualification if you lose the tip of your shooting finger.”

He didn’t show any reaction to that one. Not that she’d expected him to. She spent a couple of seemingly endless minutes just standing there beside him in silence, letting him soak up the cold without distractions from her. She had a coat on. She could be patient. And silence was a hundred times more unnerving than a steady stream of conversation.

Finally, when he was shivering violently, he broke the stalemate. His teeth chattered when he snarled, “What question is so goddamned important that you’d drag me out here at gunpoint to ask it?”

“Who called you this morning and gave you instructions to detain me and interrogate me?”

His lips, black in the scant light out here, curled into a sneer. “Why the hell do you want to know that?”

He was delaying again. “Like I said, Agent Flaherty. It’s a matter of national security.”

“Bullshit,” he spit out.

“I’m not particularly interested in your opinion on the subject. I want that name. Now.”

“Go to hell.”

She sighed. And leaped forward lightning fast, wrapping her right forearm around his throat and half lifting him off the seat with a vicious choke hold. With her left hand she grabbed his ear and, twisting it hard, forced his head to stay locked in a position that severely restricted his breathing.

She murmured conversationally in his ear, “This is a basic Krav Maga choke. You know, those Israelis are mean bastards. They don’t care much if they kill the occasional punk in the name of doing their job. If I crank down this hold and shift it a bit, like this—” she tightened the hold across his throat and windpipe fractionally “—I can cut off your breathing altogether.”

He gurgled beneath her arm and tried to struggle, but when she yanked hard on his ear, the shooting pain of it forced him to subside as it had been designed to do. She left the killer hold in place a few seconds more for good measure, then eased up with her arm enough for the guy to draw a partial breath.

“Now where were we?” she murmured. “Ah, yes. You were about to tell me who gave you the order to mess with me this morning.”

He drew in another rattling breath but said nothing. She started to tighten her grip around his throat again.

“All right, all right!” he gasped.

“Talk,” she commanded in his right ear.

“Janelle Parsons.”

“Who’s she?” Diana demanded.

“Works in the office of the Director.”

Crud! What was this with high-level orders to yank her chain? “What did she say to you, exactly?”

“She said there was a loose cannon bombing around town causing problems. I was to detain you and question you, and arrest you if you gave me the slightest reason to do so.”

Diana let go of him and stood up. He leaped off the swing and dropped into a defensive position before her. Didn’t want her to get an arm around his throat again, did he? “So why didn’t you arrest me?” she asked.

“You saved that guard’s life,” he answered simply. “And I didn’t have due cause to arrest you other than some order from on high to harass you.”

Dang. Under other circumstances, she could’ve liked this guy. Been honored to work with someone decent like him. Aloud, she said, “Thanks, Agent Flaherty. I appreciate the information. I’m sorry I had to rough you up to get it. But it truly is a matter of national security, and time is of the essence. When this is all over, I’ll be happy to sit down with you and tell you all the gory details.”

He stared at her in open disbelief as she politely excused herself and moved off the front porch. Of course, she wasn’t dumb enough to turn her back to him at any point, and she kept her hand in her pocket and on her pistol. She slid into the front seat of her car and backed out of his driveway fast, peeling away into the darkness while he still stood on the porch, staring at her. Whether or not he’d call the police and get an APB put out on her was anybody’s guess.

She pointed her car toward home and her computer. She had a bunch of names to run through the Oracle database, assuming it wasn’t completely corrupted. The tampering she’d found had all been in analysis subroutines. Hopefully, the fact-correlation routines were still functional, and she couldn’t wait to see what they said.

She parked in the alley behind her house, backing into the neighbor’s driveway in case Flaherty had, in fact, called the police. She could bolt out of her house and drive away fast if someone came knocking on her door. She made her way through her yard cautiously, keeping an eye out for any company. After scanning every dark corner of the yard and finding nothing, she slipped into her kitchen. Without turning the lights on, she moved into the living room. She closed the front blinds and then moved over to her computer and turned it on.

She had a couple of incoming e-mails and she glanced through the addresses. Mostly from her family. They could wait. Nothing from the office or Oracle. She accessed the Internet and booted up the Oracle database quickly.

She entered the names she had—Alex Porter at the Secret Service, Colonel Al Smith at the office of the Army Chief of Staff and Janelle Parsons at the FBI. The computer searched for several minutes, looking for significant connections between the three people.

A response popped up on her screen. “Please enter more data to narrow the search parameters.”

Damn. On a hunch, she typed in, “Find name of Richard Dunst’s last supervisor at the CIA.”

A cursor blinked for a few seconds and then came back with, “Collin Scott.”

She typed back, “Find Collin Scott’s supervisor when Dunst worked for him.”

That name came back up almost instantly. She stared at it in dismay. Joseph Lockworth. Holy cow.

She went back to her list of names in the original search and added the names, Collin Scott and Joseph Lockworth. On a hunch, she threw in the names of the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well. Flunkies at JCS didn’t do much on their own. She’d bet someone higher up had told Colonel Smith to make the call to Captain Hammersmith and friends.

Oracle took longer to think about her list of names this time. And that meant it was probably on to something. While it analyzed whatever it had come up with, she went into her bedroom and threw on a pair of warm, lined wool slacks and a turtleneck-sweater combination. No sense freezing to death tonight. And even with her coat on, that stint on Flaherty’s porch had chilled her.

The computer beeped in the living room and she hastened out to see what it had come up with.

A detailed analysis scrolled down the screen. Most of the individuals on her list could be placed at various conferences, retreats, or meetings together steadily for the last three years. Oracle wasn’t talking two or three meetings. It listed fourteen dates where at least four of the people on her list were in the same place at the same time. Now what were the odds of that? She read further. Oracle placed the chances of these meetings being random coincidence at less than ten percent. Maybe not enough to convict someone on, but it was enough for her.

She typed in, “Who else was at most of these meetings?”

The screen blinked while Oracle compared the various lists of attendees. And then a list of a dozen names appeared. She scanned down through it. Quickly. Nine of the names were high-ranking members of the federal government. Good Lord. Even the Army Chief of Staff himself made the list, General Eric Pace. The last three people on the list were prominent businessmen—according to Oracle two were CEOs of major corporations, and the third was a finance banker. Whoa. If this was the group behind Q-group and Dunst, no wonder they’d nearly succeeded in killing Gabe. Frankly, the real shocker was that they’d failed. So far, she reminded herself grimly.

She glanced further into the analysis and stared in dismay as another name caught her attention. One of the speakers at nearly half the conferences was another name she knew all too well. Thomas Wolfe. Gabe’s own Vice President? Could it be? Was he involved in a conspiracy to kill Gabe and take the Presidency for himself? The very thought sent a chill racing down her spine.

She read on. Most of the conferences this gang had been at together had to do with national security issues, and three of the conferences were sponsored by the Society for the Advancement of Free Economies. Bingo. S.A.F.E.. She’d found the connection. Triumph surged through her. DiscoDuck’s encrypted e-mail files had contained multiple references to the word safe in the mail titles. Now she had a positive link between the Q-group, Richard Dunst and this S.A.F.E. bunch.

Quickly she typed in the society’s full name and asked for information on it. Founded a dozen years ago. Established its own small-press publishing house a few years back. Followed the teachings of…there he was again…Thomas Wolfe. Believed that terror would choke the global economy if left unchecked. Argued that terrorism was the greatest threat to the future of mankind since the beginning of history. Okay then. So this was a conservative group. Probably in favor of use of force against terrorism, given their strong opinions about it. Then why in the world would they propagate terror of their own and try to kill Gabe Monihan? It didn’t make any sense. She was missing something.

She stared at her computer screen, seeing nothing but a blur before her eyes. Now what was she supposed to do? She forced her numb brain back into gear.

Four of the names on her list worked at the CIA. Maybe that was the center of this group’s operations. It was worth a try. She picked up the phone on the desk beside her computer and called Delphi one more time.

Yet again, her employer picked up the phone immediately and asked without preamble, “What have you got?”

“I’ve got a list of names. I tracked down everyone who passed down warnings about me to the various underlings who harassed me today, and I ran those names through part of the Oracle program that’s still working. I’ve come up with a list of twelve people who appear to have been meeting each other regularly for the last several years. They’re all high rollers. You can access the analysis yourself. I saved it into the threat assessment file on Gabe that you sent me last night.”

“How very interesting,” Delphi said cautiously, if the toneless electronic drawl of Delphi’s altered voice could be described as having any emotion at all. “What do you plan to do next?” her employer intoned.

“I’m going to start visiting these turkeys and see what I can shake out with a few pointed questions directed at them.”

“Do you think it’s a wise idea to shake the bushes quite so directly? Perhaps a subtler approach might be best.”

Diana gaped in surprise. Her boss had never before offered any suggestions about how she should proceed with an investigation. But then, she’d never threatened to rattle the very foundations of the federal government, either. She asked Delphi cautiously, “What sort of approach do you recommend?”

“Write up a report on your findings to date. Make a few official inquiries about the purposes of all those meetings and see what you get,” Delphi suggested.

Diana frowned. A written report? That would take days! Go through channels? That was the whole purpose of Oracle. To skip all that bogged-down bureaucracy! What in the world was going on? Why, all of a sudden, was Delphi backing off of this investigation? Was Delphi scared of the list of names she’d come up with? It was Delphi personally who’d green lighted this investigation. Told her to give it all she had and nail whoever was behind this assassination conspiracy!

“Is everything all right?” Diana asked cautiously. Surely, Delphi had a good reason for all this sudden caution.

“Of course,” Delphi replied quickly. “But before you proceed, I’d like to talk this over with you. Let’s get together and form a plan of action before we go any further.”

“Uh, okay,” Diana mumbled, shocked to her core at the suggestion that she should meet Delphi in person. “When and where?”

“At the Old Town facility. In, say, a half hour?”

Diana answered quickly, “I’ll be there.”

She stared at the phone as she hung it up. Son of a gun. She was finally going to meet Delphi and find out who was the mysterious mastermind behind the Oracle Agency.

10:00 P.M.

It was strange to pull up to the Oracle town house in Alexandria and see lights on inside. Always before when she’d come here, the place had been conspicuously empty. She went through the usual routine of opening the automatic security gate and driving around back to park. A black Cadillac was parked behind the house, the kind a dignitary might travel in when they didn’t want to be blatantly obvious in a limousine. Delphi must already be here. A tingle of anticipation raced across her skin. She was dying to finally find out who was in charge of Oracle.

She went through the tedious security protocol at the back door and let herself into the house. As always, the homey, old-fashioned kitchen struck her as incongruous in this high-tech hideaway.

She walked down the hallway toward the library and called out, “Hello?”

Nobody answered her. She opened the library door and stepped inside. A desk lamp illuminated the space softly. Wow. Someone had been busy in here today. The computer on the desk was replaced, the Queen Anne chair she’d demolished replaced with a similar chair. A new door even hung in the door frame. Had she not been here herself to witness the violent break-in, she would never have guessed the incident had happened. She backed out of the library. The front door frame showed signs of its repair in the unstained wood trim nailed up around it. But otherwise, it, too, looked completely unharmed.

She headed up the stairs and called out again, “Hello! Anyone home?”

Still no answer. Delphi was probably up in one of those plush offices on the third floor. She walked down the second-floor hallway toward the staircase to the third floor. The large conference room that sat over the library was dark, but the door was open. For some reason, she got the feeling she was being watched. Was somebody in there? Why wouldn’t they have answered her if they were?

Sheesh, she was really getting paranoid. But after the day she’d had, she supposed she was entitled to being a little jumpy. Sure enough, a glow came from the top of the third-floor stairs. Delphi must be up there.

She put her foot on the first step, and all hell broke loose around her. Three masked figures burst out of the conference room behind her, while two more came barreling down the stairs. All five attackers leaped on top of her, grabbing her limbs with unbelievable strength.

She fought for all she was worth, but it did no good. All five of these assailants were trained professionals who knew exactly what they were doing. Fingers dug into pressure points in her shoulders and groin, effectively immobilizing her. Excruciating pain shot outward from the four points as her muscles went slack. In a matter of seconds, her hands were tied behind her back, her ankles lashed together, and a dark, cloth bag pulled down over her head.

Trussed up like a pig ready for roasting, she was hauled quickly downstairs and back along the first-floor hallway to the kitchen. A door squeaked open, and she was wrestled downward again. A basement? She’d never noticed before that this place had one. It smelled of dirt and mildew. The way the faint shuffles of movement were echoing, the place had a low ceiling, too. Must be an old root cellar or something.

She was flopped down onto…a bed? That’s sure what it felt like. It felt like a mattress over a hard surface of some kind. A cotton sheet rubbed against the back of her hands. She registered faint surprise beneath her fury and terror. What was up with that? It was pretty darned civilized for a kidnapping or worse.

As she got over her initial shock at the attack, her brain began to function more clearly. How did these people get into this building without leaving telltale signs of a break-in? And then a terrible thought struck her. Had Delphi been taken, too? What had these people done with her employer? Was he or she trussed up like this somewhere else in the house?

This team had to be linked to S.A.F.E. somehow. Whether or not they were CIA operatives sent out to kidnap her or worse didn’t really matter. Her Oracle search of the shadowy bunch from S.A.F.E. had obviously triggered some sort of alarm and provoked this attack on her and Oracle.

Self-preservation began to kick in. Were they going to kill her? Clearly they didn’t plan to do it right away or she’d already be standing at the Pearly Gates. Crud. They probably meant to pick her brains first. Not good. She knew way too much about Presidential security and Oracle for that to be anything but very bad news. Quickly, she reviewed her training on resisting interrogations. She wouldn’t be able to get away with playing dumb for these guys. Probably would have to go the “I know nothing; I’m just the hired slug following orders” route.

The pistol was plucked out of her shoulder holster, and her pockets searched. But, tied up as she was, her captors couldn’t easily get her coat off her, and they left her duster on. Hallelujah. That meant she still had a few options. But not yet. Later. If and when they left her alone.

Out of curiosity to see how her captors would react, and in order to get some sort of dialogue going with them, she opened her mouth and let out the loudest, most piercing shriek she could muster up. In the low, enclosed space, it echoed impressively, paining even her ears.

Someone leaned down beside her and whispered gruffly, “This place is soundproof. Yell all you want.”

Diana jolted. If she didn’t miss her guess, that was a female voice. So, S.A.F.E. was an equal opportunity employer. Well, ducky for it.

The whispering voice said, “You’re going to be detained here overnight. Someone will be here in the morning to talk to you. Until then, I suggest you try to get some rest.”

Her hands were untied and retied high over her head. Someone actually put a pillow under her head while they were repositioning her, too. Since when did kidnappers give a hoot for their victim’s comfort? Confusion swirled even more deeply around her.

Her feet were untied and retied to opposing corners of whatever they had her lying on. All in all, she wasn’t particularly uncomfortable except for the stuffy bag over her head.

“Any chance you could lose the bag over my face?” she asked in a normal speaking voice.

“Sorry, no. Got to protect our identities,” the woman whispered. “Wouldn’t want to have to kill you.”

Diana would swear that was humor infusing her captor’s voice. Okay. This was, bar none, the weirdest kidnapping she’d ever heard of. If these people were so confident that they could joke around with her, then they must have Delphi in custody, too. If that was the case, that probably meant she was just a little fish they weren’t all that interested in. No wonder they could afford to make her comfortable and joke with her. Damn. Damn, damn, damn.

There were a few more rustles in the direction she’d come from, and then what little light seeped in around the edges of her bag disappeared. Complete darkness closed in around her. And then silence. She held her breath and strained to listen for even the faintest sound of breathing. She wouldn’t put it past her captors to park someone in the dark nearby to keep an eye on her.

But as hard as she listened, she couldn’t hear any evidence of anyone else down here. Furthermore, she didn’t feel anyone’s presence. Did she dare make her move now, or should she wait a couple of hours until the coast was definitely clear? Were it just her in trouble, she’d wait. But there was Delphi to think about. Who knew what was happening to her boss? She had to go now.

She wriggled and squirmed, working the decorative belt buckle at the right wrist of her duster around to the side. It took some fancy wiggling of her elbows, but she managed to point the buckle at the cloth strip securing her wrist. How many times she stabbed the sharpened tip of the buckle through the fabric, she had no idea. But eventually, she felt frays begin to tickle her wrist, and the cloth began to weaken. She yanked on it hard a few times. Not quite there. A few more good pokes, and another mighty jerk of her arm, and her hand ripped free. Thank God.

She tore the bag off her head and looked around. It was nearly pitch-black in the cellar, but her eyes were fully adjusted to the dark from inside the bag. The room looked empty. She was lying on an old table with a mattress laid across it. Assorted odds and ends of furniture filled the corners, and cardboard packing boxes were stacked along the far wall.

She rolled on her side and quickly examined the bonds tying down her left wrist. By straining against the ropes around her ankles, she was able to reach the knot that held her left wrist down. It took a few minutes to pick loose the knot by feel, but eventually she got it. She sat up and had her feet free in under a minute. She eased to her feet, relieved to be off that table. Now to go rescue Delphi.

She headed for the stairs. She’d heard one of the steps creak as her captors left earlier, so she took her time, easing her weight slowly onto each step. There. The squeaker. She backed off it fast, and waited several seconds, holding her breath for some reaction to the first, faint squeak of noise it had made.

Nothing.

Stepping over the squeaky step, she glided up the stairs to the basement door. Crouching on her hands and knees, she peered out from under the crack at its bottom. A single pair of black leather boots sat at the kitchen table. Facing the door, dammit. But at least they were narrow and small boots. The woman, then.

She wasn’t going to be able to surprise this lookout. And if they got into a noisy fight, the others would come running. She could probably burst out of here and get out the back door before the other attackers got here. But then, she’d have to leave Delphi behind. And that went against every fiber of her being.

She turned over other possible options. None of them were good.

A chair scraped. Diana lurched back from the door and plastered herself against the wall. Heels tapped quietly on the floor as the woman walked quickly out of the kitchen.

This was her chance! After a quick peek under the door to verify that the room was empty, Diana tested the doorknob. Unlocked. Pretty confident, her captors were. She opened the door quickly and spun out into the kitchen low and fast. She was alone. She moved to the drawer where she’d fetched a knife this morning and did the same again, arming herself with a couple butcher knives and a paring knife stuck in her boot.

She raced down the dimly lit hallway, stopping before the library door. Closed. She eased past it, running up the stairs as lightly as she could. Her heart pounded a mile a minute, and her breath came fast and shallow. The second floor was still dark, and the third floor still glowed with light.

She glided up the third-floor stairs, her knife held out before her.

Murmurs of sound came out of the front office. Its door was cracked open about one quarter of the way. She glided forward along the wall. The voices were too quiet to make out the words, but it surely didn’t sound like a forced interrogation.

The desk and its high-backed leather chair, situated facing the window, were occupied. She caught a glimpse of silver hair over the back of the chair. Delphi, maybe? A couple chairs in front of the desk, between it and the window were also occupied. Black-clothed figures lounged in the chairs. Her captors. Minus their masks.

She gaped in disbelief. She recognized every one of the women she saw. They were all old classmates of hers from the Athena Academy. They were part of S.A.F.E.? How was that possible?

And then the truth hit her, a sledgehammer blow right between the eyes. S.A.F.E. hadn’t kidnapped her at all. Oracle had.

Delphi had set up the meeting with her to deliver her to this team of her fellow Oracle agents. A single question screamed across her brain. Why? What had happened? Why had Delphi turned on her? Unless…

Of course. Her signature next to the altered Oracle programming code. Delphi thought she was part of the plot to kill Gabe. But who’d pointed it out to Delphi? Surely someone had. With everything else that had gone on today, there was no way Delphi had been randomly sitting around browsing through Oracle’s programming code. Who could turn Delphi on one of his or her own agents?

It had to be someone Delphi trusted implicitly. Someone in a very high position of power. Someone who knew Diana very well. Well enough for Delphi to believe out of hand. Like her grandfather.

Oh. My. God.

One of the agents shifted in her seat inside the office, and Diana lurched back to awareness of her surroundings. She had to get out of here.

She headed back toward the stairs, but heard footsteps below her. Headed this way. Crud. She turned and raced on silent feet toward the back of the house. She slipped into the small room there and closed the door noiselessly. She waited behind the door as the footsteps climbed the stairs and headed away from her. Toward the meeting in the front office.

She was poised by the door, just about to sneak out of the room, when another set of footsteps froze her in place. They headed downstairs. She strained to hear them, and thought she heard them descend the first-floor stairs, as well. So much for that escape route.

She locked the door—a pitiful defense against the highly-trained team of operatives outside, but it would slow them down a little. Buy her a few seconds, maybe. She took stock of the room she was in. A bedroom. Furnished not like a room someone lived in, but rather a resting spot for someone who’d worked too long or too late. But the bed had sheets and blankets, and that’s all she cared about.

She tore the bedding off the bed and used a knife to saw through the bedspread as quietly as she could. It took several minutes, but eventually she had enough thick lengths of bedspread and wool blanket to reach nearly to the ground. At least she hoped it would reach. She tied the strips of cloth together and measured them one last time. Her improvised rope should get her within ten feet or so of the ground. No problem.

She tied the end of her blanket rope to the foot of the bed nearest the window. The bed wasn’t heavy enough to hold her weight and would slide over toward the window, but the double-bed’s frame shouldn’t come out the window after her. At least that was the plan.

She checked the window for an alarm and found the inconspicuous metal disk at the side of the frame. She didn’t have the tools to disarm it readily. No help for it. She’d just have to go fast.

She gathered up her blanket rope in her arms and flung up the window sash. As she’d expected, a loud, high-pitched alarm whooped through the house. She tossed the blanket out the window and climbed out after it before the thing had even finished unfurling. She grabbed onto it and began to shimmy downward fast, hand over hand.

It gave an ominous lurch as the bedframe gave way and slid over toward the window with a loud scraping noise of wood on wood. Shouts erupted from inside the house, audible through the open window.

She slid down the blanket to the next knot, burning her hands on the scratchy wool. She shifted grips to the next strip of cloth and slid down that, as well, ignoring the raw pain in her palms.

One more knot to go.

She slid down the last length of cloth, checking her descent only enough to break her fall. And then she let go. She executed a parachute-landing fall as she slammed into the asphalt, carrying her momentum through the rolling impact and popping back up on her feet all in one movement. She leaped into her car and hit the gate opener clipped to her sun visor. The back door opened and the women raced outside. Time to go.

She hit the accelerator. The gate started to open as she backed her car around in a tire-squealing J-turn and pointed it toward the driveway. She watched in horror as the gate, not quite fully open, reversed direction and began to close again.

She stood on the gas pedal of the German sports car. It shot forward as the gap in front of her narrowed. She bolted through it, wincing as metal scraped horribly against her right rear door. But thankfully, her car made it through the gate.

She bounced out into the street and slammed the steering wheel into a hard right turn. Her back end skidded out and she bumped a car parked across the street with her left rear fender, but her tough little car righted itself and straightened out, accelerating like a bat out of hell. She tore away from the Oracle house, slowing down only when she turned corners, so as not to leave telltale tire marks.

She watched her rearview mirror in a panic. No sign of a follower. That Caddy couldn’t begin to keep up with her coupe, assuming it had even gotten out of the driveway anytime soon after her. The way that gate had been closing, they’d have lost precious seconds waiting for it to open again.

She made it out to a major highway and slowed down to a reasonable rate of speed. No sense getting pulled over by a policeman right now.

And then the delayed reaction to being kidnapped and escaping hit her like a ton of bricks. Adrenaline still screamed through her body, ordering her to defend herself from the life-or-death peril she’d just experienced. Her hands started to shake, and then her large muscles. Her legs trembled until she could hardly keep her foot on the accelerator, her knees were knocking together so uncontrollably. God, she felt cold. She shivered all over. Probably another side effect of the scare she’d just had. She drove blindly for several minutes, trying to breathe normally and bring her pulse down below, oh, two hundred beats a minute or so.

And as the adrenaline slowly drained away, making rational thought possible, the anger finally set in. How could Delphi have turned on her? Her own employer! A person who’d handpicked her to serve her country in a very special way!

She started the stopwatch in the dashboard of the car and punched Delphi’s number into her cell phone. Furious, she slammed the instrument to her ear.

The line picked up and Diana didn’t wait for anyone to speak. She snapped, “Very cute. Care to explain why you tried to kidnap one of your own agents tonight?”

At least Delphi had the good grace not to deny it. “You’ve become a possible threat.”

“To whom?” Diana exclaimed. “I’m out here busting my butt to save Gabe Monihan’s life, like you ordered me to I might add.”

Delphi replied patiently, “You tampered with the Oracle database. We checked the logs, and the changes came from your home computer.”

“The hacker who broke into my house last night inserted that code! I’d never turn on you or Oracle, I swear.”

Silence met her impassioned declaration.

Diana said slowly, “Tell me something. Did someone call you, too? Put a bug in your ear that I’d lost it? Who called you?”

The silence that greeted her question was eloquent. Someone had called Delphi. Dammit. “Was it my grandfather?” Diana demanded.

Time was up. Thirty seconds. All she could afford to talk to Delphi without her phone being traced. She couldn’t stay on the line any longer waiting for Delphi’s response. And maybe she didn’t need to hear it anyway.

She disconnected the line and tossed the cell phone on the seat beside her.

Time to go have a little conversation with good old Gramps.

11:00 P.M.

Her grandfather had sold his Chevy Chase estate a couple years back and usually stayed in some posh hotel when he came to town these days. But, as had been his habit for all the years he worked in the CIA, he kept to no set routine and changed hotels every time he came to town. She had no idea where he was staying this time.

She dialed Josie’s cell phone number. “Hey, Jo. It’s me.”

Her sister sounded inordinately grumpy. Must have interrupted a romantic interlude with Diego. “Diana. It’s after eleven. What do you want?”

“Where’s Gramps staying?”

“The Shoreham in Rock Creek Park. Why?”

“He and I need to have a little talk tonight.”

“Now?” Josie asked in surprise. Abruptly, Sis sounded at full alert.

“Don’t ask,” Diana said sharply.

“I’m asking,” Josie retorted. “What’s up?”

“I think he turned me in. Called my boss and said I’ve lost it and gone over the edge.”

“Have you?” Josie asked seriously.

All the frustration built up over years and years of wrong and negative assumptions about her flared up and finally bubbled over. “Why is it everyone in this family thinks I’m such a screwup? How long am I going to have to be Superwoman before you people get off my back and accept the fact that I’ve grown up into a responsible adult?”

A long silence met that outburst. Long enough to startle Diana. Was her sister actually seriously considering the question? By rights, they ought to be in the middle of a screaming match right about now. Maybe both of them had done some growing up recently.

Finally, Josie said slowly, “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I still do think of you as my baby sister who’s in need of protection.”

“Protection? Me?” Surprise coursed through Diana.

“You were so little when Mom went away. And you never knew her. You didn’t remember how much she loved us. I had the memory of that to sustain me, but you didn’t. I felt so sorry for you. I tried to make it up to you. To love you the way she would have. But you always pushed me away. You wouldn’t let me.”

Remorse slugged Diana, a heavy fist straight to the gut. Is that what Josie had been trying to do all along? She’d always thought Josie was trying to smother her. To keep her little sister from shining as brightly as she did. She’d thought it was sibling rivalry, for goodness’ sake! Could she have been wrong for all those long years of simmering ill will? She stammered, “I didn’t know. I thought you resented me. Were trying to boss me around.”

“Good Lord, no! I was trying to be a substitute mother to you. But I was too young. I didn’t know how to do it. You were so hurt. So shut down. You closed me out. You closed everyone out.”

The words were daggers to her heart. She had closed everyone out. In her pain and loss and misunderstanding, she’d pushed away the one person who’d reached out to her in shared pain and loss. And it must have been so much more difficult for Josie. She’d really known their mother. Remembered her. Suffered an even greater loss. But, in spite of that, she’d still reached out to Diana.

In return, she’d mistaken generosity for dominance, love for resentment. And she’d rejected Josie. Rejected everyone. Revelation broke over her in a cold wave. She was still rejecting everyone. Even a great guy like Gabe who’d opened himself up to her. Reached out to her. Trusted her with his life.

She mumbled, “I didn’t know. God, I’m so sorry….” Unable to speak anymore, she disconnected the line. What a mess she’d made of everything. And she’d never realized it. What a selfish brat she’d been. She’d been so busy feeling sorry for herself, she’d never looked beyond her own suffering to see the pain she’d caused the people around her.

Was she doing the same thing now? Was she so caught up in herself she wasn’t seeing the bigger picture? Did it really matter if she tracked down this S.A.F.E. organization—if it even existed at all? Was she Don Quixote, tilting at windmills in her own elusive chase after glory?

Maybe she should just give it up. Stop pretending she was capable of saving Gabe single-handedly. That’s what the entire Secret Service was for. They could handle the job.

Her phone rang, startling her out of her funk. She picked it up. “Hello?”

“Hey. It’s me.”

Gabe. What in the world was he doing calling her now? “Are you all right?” she asked in quick concern.

“I’m fine. I was worried about you. You seemed pretty upset after Owen raked you over the coals. I’m sorry about that.”

“He was just doing his job. I can’t blame the guy.”

“Still, he was pretty rough on you. You put your neck on the line for me today and I really appreciate it.”

Was that all he felt for her? Gratitude for her work? Had she blown it with him, too, and somehow shut him out as she did everyone else? Soberly she replied, “I was just doing my job. No different than Owen.”

Gabe chuckled. “I don’t know about that. I’d say you’re quite a bit different than Owen.”

His remark startled her into a laugh. She retorted, “Well, I should hope so.”

Gabe replied quietly, “That’s much better. I needed to hear you laugh.”

He’d needed it? Needed something from her? Aloud she said, “Well, then, did you hear the one about the boy who got the bicycle after he had sex for the first time?”

Gabe laughed again. “I don’t need a laugh that bad.”

They lapsed into silence for a moment.

She said hesitantly, “Thanks for believing in me today. Not many people would have. They’d have figured I was some sort of nutcase.”

“I suppose you are a nutcase.”

“What?” she blurted out.

“You like me, don’t you? I figure you have to be a little bit crazy to do that.”

“Gabe Monihan, you’re one of the most eligible bachelors in the entire world. Women are swooning over you by the thousands in case you hadn’t noticed.”

He snorted. “They’re swooning over my job description. You’re the first woman I’ve met since I ran for President who looked at me and really saw me.”

She stammered, flustered at the compliment.

He said earnestly, “Just promise me you won’t change after I become President.”

“You’re not sworn in, yet?” she exclaimed.

“Nope. Owen’s really wired tight. He’s worried that someone way up in the government may be a crazy bent on taking me out. He’s got me locked down. Again.”

She said seriously, “I have to agree with Owen on this one.”

Gabe absorbed that in silence. Did he think she was crazy after all? She took a deep breath. She had to stop looking for reasons to push people away. She’d be engaging in long bouts of silence, too, if someone told her a close associate of hers was out to kill her.

She said lightly, “Well, look at it this way. A day’s delay in taking office will make for an interesting footnote in the history books about you.”

“Gee, thanks,” he said dryly. “There’s nothing like being reminded that my every word and move for the next four years is going to be recorded and commented on for generations to come.”

She couldn’t help but chuckle. “Hey, you’re the numbskull who volunteered for the job.” Lest he take offense she added quickly, “You’re going to be a great president.”

“Why’s that?”

She answered sincerely, “Because you care. Because you want to make the world a better place. Because you’re decent and honorable and will do the right thing.”

A long pause. Then he said quietly, “I think that’s about the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about me.”

“So, are we taking turns embarrassing each other tonight, or what?” She laughed softly. “I think it’s your turn, now.”

“Tell you what. I’ll take a rain check on that. I have confidence that in the next few months, I’ll have ample opportunities to embarrass you.”

Months? As in he wanted to see her again? For months? Whoa. “Okay,” she managed to choke out.

“So what are you up to right now?” he asked her.

“Well, I thought I’d try to track down some of those high-ranking crazies who might be out to kill you. I’m on my way to see my grandfather.”

“Joseph Lockworth, right?”

“How did you know he’s my grandfather?”

“Owen ran a background check on you after breakfast this morning. He mentioned it to me.”

“Oh.” She cringed. He’d heard all the gory details of her checkered past, eh? So much for him ever respecting her.

Gabe added, “I didn’t ask to hear the details. I’d rather learn about you myself. From you directly.”

If only she were half that noble. She cleared her throat. “In the interest of being honest, I should tell you that I’ve done quite a bit of research into your life over the course of trying to figure out why the Q-group was so determined to kill you.”

“Did you find anything in my past that bothers you?” he asked cautiously.

“Well,” she drawled, “there was that whole French 101 debacle in college. You really are hopeless at foreign languages.”

He laughed. “I plead guilty as charged.”

“In the interest of honesty, I should also tell you that my past won’t stand up to scrutiny nearly as well as yours does. I was…a bit of a rebel in my youth.”

“Well, whatever went into making you the person you are today is fine with me.”

“Okay. You’ve embarrassed me, now. I guess that makes it my turn again.”

He laughed. “I can’t wait. Unfortunately, I’ve got to go now. We’re going to have yet another planning meeting to set up an inauguration for me. I think we’re going to bag trying to do it publicly and just do it at the White House. One of the official photographers can film it and then we’ll release the film to the public tomorrow.

“Sounds like a plan,” she replied earnestly. “At this point, I don’t think the nation cares about a fancy ceremony. They just want to get you safely installed in office.”

“Agreed. My cabinet and a few key advisors are going to assemble in a couple of hours to witness the oath.”

A chill of foreboding trickled down her spine. Why was she still so bloody sure that he was in mortal danger? It was a certainty lodged deep down in her gut, and no matter what she did, she couldn’t shake it. “Well, I’d better let you go to your meeting. I wouldn’t want to keep the nation waiting.”

“Take care, Diana.”

“You, too, Gabe. Be careful.”

She set down the phone gently. She had no choice. She had to see this thing through. For him. And for herself if she was ever going to have a chance at love. She had to push through the fear, the vulnerability he provoked in her. Resolutely, she picked up her phone and asked a mobile operator to connect her to the Shoreham.

“Joseph Lockworth’s room, please,” she told the hotel operator.

“One moment please.”

The phone rang a couple times, and then her grandfather’s deep voice answered. “Lockworth, here.”

He answered that as if he expected this to be a work call. But he was retired. Of course, if he was involved with S.A.F.E. he might answer that way if he expected the call to be one of his partners in crime.

“Grandfather. It’s Diana. We need to talk. Now.”

“Do we, indeed?” he answered. “About what?”

Gramps was definitely in full CIA Director mode. She answered coolly, “About a man named Richard Dunst. He used to work for you. And about the Q-group. Do they work for you, too? For S.A.F.E?”

“Well, now. We do need to talk, don’t we? I’m a little tied up at the moment. I’ll call you in a few minutes and we’ll meet. We have a lot to talk over.”

A lump of lead formed in her stomach. He didn’t deny it. She’d been right. He was involved in S.A.F.E. Was he the one who decided Gabe Monihan shouldn’t be President? That S.A.F.E. somehow had the right to pick and choose the nation’s leader? Had he sent that hacker to her house to frame her? Then fingered her to Delphi, too. Why? Who was this S.A.F.E. group that they could turn a man against his own flesh and blood? Especially her grandfather, to whom family loyalty was so important? Did they have something on him? Some hook to blackmail him with?

He’d delayed setting up a rendezvous with her. He needed time before he met her, eh? Why? Who was he frantically calling right now? What was he doing before they met? Arranging another kidnapping, maybe? Her murder this time?

She glanced up at a road sign overhead listing upcoming exits. Langley, Virginia. Home of the Central Intelligence Agency. Was it also the headquarters of S.A.F.E.? Her jaw tightened. There was one sure way to find out.

She steered her car onto the exit ramp and followed the unobtrusive signs pointing the way to CIA headquarters. She pulled up at the front guard shack. “I’m Diana Lockworth. I’m here to meet with my grandfather, Joseph Lockworth. He told me to meet him at the front reception desk.” She flashed her military ID and DIA identification for the guy.

He put a parking pass inside her car on the dashboard and waved her through.

One hurdle down.

She pulled into the parking lot, which was surprisingly crowded for this time of night. But then, after the day’s double terrorist attacks, the CIA probably had every analyst on staff at work tonight trying to track down leads on the men who’d done it and who was behind them. Was there someone inside right now, equally furiously covering those very tracks?

She parked her car and walked toward the white, modern structure, vividly aware of the cameras and guards watching her progress toward the building. She stepped into the brightly lit glass foyer, with its modern art and the eloquent wall of anonymous stars, one for each agent who’d fallen in service of his or her country. Of course, she didn’t even make it to the CIA seal on the floor before she was directed in no uncertain terms to a visitor’s reception area. Crud. She had to get into the building somehow. Fortunately, her job gave her occasional exposure to people who worked over here in the Spook House. She needed the name of someone who worked here, and who might conceivably be here, working late tonight.

A couple names of people she’d dealt with in the last few months popped into her head. Except she hesitated to call on anyone she’d worked with on her Q-group investigation. She wouldn’t put it past her grandfather or whoever was sabotaging her research to have gotten in contact with all of her recent colleagues.

Samantha St. John.

The petite, Slavic beauty was one of Josie’s best friends from Athena Academy. Sam worked for the CIA as a linguist—and undoubtedly more, although they’d never spoken about that aspect of her work. Of course, Sam traveled a ton and might not be here, but it was worth a try.

Diana stepped up to the receptionist, if the cold-eyed man sitting behind the counter could be called that. “I’m here to see Samantha St. John. Could you ring her office for me?”

“Is she expecting you?” the man asked coolly.

“No, she’s not. But it’s a matter of some urgency.”

The guy gave her a condescending look that said everything that passed through this building was a matter of some urgency. Nonetheless, he typed briefly in his computer and then dialed an extension on his phone. He spoke into his wireless headset, a quiet murmur Diana couldn’t hear. Which was impressive since she was standing only a foot away from the guy.

He looked up at her. “She’ll be right down.”

Hallelujah. Now maybe she’d get to the bottom of what and who S.A.F.E. was and stop it once and for all.

12:00 A.M.

Diana spied Sam’s arrival before she could actually see her by the way people’s heads were turning at her passage. Sam was one of those women who was so strikingly beautiful that people couldn’t help but stare at her.

“Diana! What a surprise! What brings you here at this hour of the night?”

She smiled warmly at Sam. Ever since she’d gotten together with Riley McLane, Sam had been a different woman. Warmer. More open. It was good to see. Made a girl kind of wish she could find a guy like that for herself. Diana sighed. She had found a guy like that. There was just the small problem of him becoming President of the United States at any second.

Diana replied, “How about we go up to your office? This is actually a business visit. I have something…sensitive…to discuss with you.”

Sam arched one eyebrow questioningly but made no comment as she signed Diana in and got her a visitor’s badge. “This way,” she said.

Diana followed her classmate across the giant CIA seal inlaid in the floor and down a long glass-enclosed hallway beside a courtyard. They went upstairs, past a series of unmarked doors, and through another anonymous door into a cluster of glass cubicles. Sam wound her way through the maze of people and desks to a tiny office in the back, thankfully with solid walls. She picked up a stack of files off the second chair in her office and offered it to Diana.

Diana closed the door behind her and sat down.

“What’s up?” Sam asked.

Diana frowned. Now wasn’t that a good question? Aloud she answered, “I don’t know how much to tell you. If I say too much, I could put your life in danger. But, I need your help, so I owe you some sort of explanation.”

Sam grinned. “Sounds interesting. And I can handle a little danger.”

Diana grimaced. “This could be a lot of danger. I’ve already had my house broken into today, been arrested, been kidnapped and nearly shot twice.”

Sam’s eyebrows zinged up and her demeanor abruptly became serious. Focused. Intense, even. Sometimes Diana forgot just how smart Sam was behind all that exotic beauty. Diana continued. “Here’s the thing. I need to break into an office in this building and search it for some information. ASAP. That’s what I need your help with.”

Sam didn’t bat an eyelash. It confirmed Diana’s suspicion that she was a covert field operative for the CIA in addition to her overt duties as a linguist. No simple desk jockey reacted that calmly to a suggestion that she assist in a breaking-and-entering job.

“Whose office?” Sam asked.

“A guy named Collin Scott. Have you heard of him?”

Sam laughed. “It’s kind of hard not to have heard of him around here. He’s the number two guy in the Plans Section. Why on earth do you want to break into his office?”

“I have reason to believe he’s involved with a secret group called S.A.F.E.”

Sam chuckled. “I’m sure he’s involved with a number of secret groups. That’s his job.”

“How many of them are trying to kill Gabe Monihan?”

That sobered up Samantha in a hurry. “You think Collin Scott’s trying to kill the next President of the United States?”

Diana closed her eyes for a moment. Spoken aloud, it sounded absurd to her, too. “I don’t have time to go into the entire investigation I’ve done. But I think Scott is involved in a clandestine conspiracy of a few high-ranking government officials and civilians who want to kill Gabe.”

“That’s preposterous,” Sam retorted.

“So go with me to his office and see if we can find any information on this S.A.F.E. bunch.”

Sam asked thoughtfully, “What does it stand for?”

“Society for the Advancement of Free Economies.”

Sam stood up. “Honey, I’d love to help you, but I just can’t. Not on this one.”

Diana nodded in disappointed understanding. As she recalled from their martial arts training at the Athena Academy, Sam was as fast as greased lightning in a hand-to-hand fight. “I didn’t think you could help me, but it was worth a shot.” She stood up facing her old friend. “Just keep an ear to the ground, eh? If you hear anything about this S.A.F.E. group, could you give me a call? And be careful. They’re dangerous.”

She leaned forward to hug Sam. And chopped her across the back of the head beneath the back of her skull. Hard. Enough to knock her out. She caught Sam as she sagged, unconscious, and lowered her to the floor. God, she hated having to do that.

She taped Sam’s hands and feet behind her back using a roll of wide masking tape she found in Sam’s desk drawer. She put a couple strips of tape across her mouth, too. She taped Sam’s trussed hands and feet behind her to the legs of her desk, as well. That should keep her immobile for a few minutes. Working fast before Sam woke up, Diana tore off a strip of clear, cellophane tape from another roll of tape in Sam’s desk and pressed it hard against the pad of Sam’s thumb. She tore the tape off quickly and held it carefully, sticky side out. She grabbed Sam’s ID badge and fished in Sam’s pocket for the access card she’d used to get into this office area. Got it.

Last, she opened up the employee directory she found in Sam’s desk and thumbed through it until she found the name, Collin Scott. She noted his office number and located it on the map inside the back cover of the book.

She clipped Sam’s ID badge to her collar, picked up a stack of files off Sam’s desk and headed out. Here went nothing. A breaking-and-entering job inside one of the most secure buildings on the planet. If there was any doubt about her having completely lost her mind, this sealed the deal.

She walked back through the cubicles briskly, not looking at the people working at desks inside them. Out the door and into the hall. She oriented herself quickly and headed left. Up one more floor and down another long hall. Then, around one more corner. Bingo. There was the office she was looking for. She tested the door. Locked.

She pulled out Sam’s access card and swiped it through the magnetic lock pad. She started violently as a two-inch square pad lit up on the face of the lock and a voice intoned, “Right thumbprint, please.”

Diana pressed the piece of tape against the pad.

A green light flashed and the door lock clicked.

Holy cow. It had been a total long shot to try Sam’s access code here, but Diana wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. She stepped inside, closing the hallway door behind her. A secretary’s desk dominated the center of the room. A single door stood behind it. Colin Scott’s private office. With another elaborate electronic lock beside the door. No wonder it had been so easy to get into this outer office.

She took a look at the number pad beside this door. Similar to the one outside, except when she swiped Sam’s card this time, nobody asked for her fingerprint and the lock didn’t open. She pulled out her pocketknife and, using the screwdriver attachment, unscrewed the stainless steel cover over the guts of the electronic lock. Who’d have thought that her electrical circuitry class at the Athena Academy would ever come in so handy? She traced the circuit quickly and identified the wires that had to be crossed to open the system. Once she did that, though, she had no doubt it would trigger an alarm somewhere else in the building. She gave it two, maybe three minutes until someone would bust in here, guns blazing.

She organized herself quickly for the break-in. Her target would be any paper records Collin Scott had in his office. They were what she’d use if she were running a conspiracy to kill the President. Electronic files were just too easy to break into. He’d probably have a filing cabinet of some kind. And it would be locked. Agency policy was that all desks were cleaned off and all papers put under lock and key every night. The infamous policy had actually cost employees here their jobs.

She’d need a sharp, tough metal object of some kind to bust into the filing cabinet. She would never have enough time to pick the lock before security got here. She looked around the outer office. Perfect. A gold-plated shovel from some groundbreaking ceremony or other. It laid in a glass cabinet in the far corner. She snatched it out of its case and hurried back to the lock. Her other time constraint was Sam waking up and calling security. And that could happen any second.

Ready or not, here she went. She set her watch alarm for two minutes. And went to work. It only took a couple seconds to slice through the pair of wires, strip their ends and twist them together. A touch with the tip of her knife to the right switch, a spark, and the door lock clicked open. And the clock was ticking.

She leaped into the office, looking around for a filing cabinet. Bingo. In the corner behind the desk. She raced over to the two-drawer console. Top or bottom drawer?

Definitely a top-drawer kind of operation.

She smashed the shovel into the side of the cabinet. It dented and made a hell of a lot of noise, but didn’t give. Again. Paint chipped away and the dent got bigger. It took another half-dozen blows before the metal finally weakened and gave way. A tiny slit appeared in the cabinet. She slammed the shovel into it and pried the hole larger. One more big heave, and a piece of metal the width of the shovel peeled back to reveal the sides of several files stuffed with paper. Most of them were red. Probably indicated they were classified. She took the extra several seconds to widen the hole to the entire height of the drawer.

Then, frantically, she knelt by the cabinet and started pulling out files as fast as she could. She read the tabs at the top and tossed them aside by the fistfuls. Come on, come on. It had to be in here, somewhere. Please God, let the file not be in the bottom drawer.

The pile of papers lying all over the floor behind her grew, and the seconds ticked by. A quick glance at her watch. Thirty seconds to go. Oww! Slashing pain ripped through her left hand. She’d cut her hand at the base of her little finger on the ragged edge of the hole. No time to do anything about it. She continued yanking files out and tossing them aside.

Twenty seconds to go.

And then, without warning, there it was. A thick, red file marked Classified. The Initials S.A.F.E. were typed on the white label glued to the top tab. No time to look at it. She had to get out of here. She stuffed the file inside her coat and froze. A beeping sound came from the outer office. Someone was using the keypad to enter it from the hallway beyond.

She leaped to the inner door to the office, scooping up a clock from Scott’s desk on her way past. It was embedded in a grapefruit-size marble sphere. She stuck her arm out the door and slammed the marble piece down on the door lock to the inner office. Sparks flew and sizzled as she slammed the door shut. Good Lord willing, this door failed to a locked position. She tested the knob and it wouldn’t turn. Now she could only hope the security man outside had no quick way to override the fried lock. And then, of course, she had to figure out how in the hell to get out of a third-floor office of a supersecure facility like CIA headquarters.

Fists pounded on the door. She ignored them. Then a male voice shouted through the door. She ignored that, too. She turned on the overhead lights to better see any possible escape route, since it was no longer a secret that she was in here. No man-size ventilation shafts opened up onto this room. Just a couple small registers. The window didn’t open. She tested it with her hands. Not glass. It was no doubt made of tough, bulletproof polymers. She might conceivably be able to break it out of the frame, but the fall to the concrete below—or rather, the landing on it—ruled that out as an option. Bookcases lined both of the other walls of the office.

She was so hosed.

She was not going to get out of this one alive. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t get done what she’d come here to do before she went down in flames. She sat down at Collin Scott’s desk and pulled the S.A.F.E. file out of her coat. Working hard to ignore the heavy pounding on the door, she read as quickly as her eyes would travel across the pages.

In the very front was a CIA analysis of a legal treatise written by one Thomas Wolfe a decade ago, predicting the rise of global terrorism and criticizing the open society America maintained. He argued with great mental agility that the only way to defeat terror was with terror. He claimed that as long as law-abiding societies were constrained by law in their fight against terrorists, they were doomed to failure. The CIA analysis found the arguments sound.

Diana frowned. A lot had changed in the last decade. The rise of huge, powerful terror networks worldwide, 9/11 and the American overthrow of entire governments in response to terror. Huge armies of American soldiers had been thrown into the fight, along with billions upon billions of dollars of resources. Was Wolfe’s premise still valid? If she lived more than the next couple of minutes, she’d have to spend some time thinking about that one. She thumbed on to the next document.

Transcripts of a conversation Collin Scott had at a Defense consortium with a couple of the men on her list of S.A.F.E. suspects from Oracle. They expressed concern at the direction the United States was going with terror policy or its lack thereof.

She read on, tracing the evolution of S.A.F.E. from a loose bunch of like-minded people to a cautiously organized interest group to a conspiracy committed to action.

The pounding at the door became even louder. Heavier. As if they were using a battering ram of some kind. The entire wall began to shake, and a picture of Collin Scott shaking hands with a giant yellow duck wearing a polyester leisure suit fell to the floor with a crash. DiscoDuck. Collin Scott had to be DiscoDuck.

She skipped most of the rest of the file and moved close to the bottom of the stack of notes and documents. She stared in dismay at a note in the margins of a meeting transcript. “If Monihan and Wolfe win the election, Monihan must be removed from his position so that Wolfe may assume leadership of the nation.”

She stared in horror. There it was. Her proof. This group was behind the assassination attempts on Gabe.

She thumbed through the pages again, noting names wherever she spotted them. Janelle Parsons. Al Smith. And then another name started popping up. At least she thought it was a name. Freedom One. Whoever this Freedom One person was, he or she was clearly the engine that drove formalizing S.A.F.E. from a loose association of individuals into a full-blown conspiracy.

But who was Freedom One?

She thumbed through page after page, but nowhere was an actual name ever attached to that mysterious entity. She read further. Whoever he or she was, Freedom One was definitely the leader of this motley crew of sickos. Orders came down to the rest of the group from Freedom One. The purse strings were controlled by Freedom One, and operations like the two Q-group attacks were largely planned by Freedom One.

She turned one of the sheets of paper over and began to write down on it every name she came across in the file. With a few exceptions it almost perfectly matched the list Oracle had given her. She ran across more names. Two in particular caught her attention. Richard Dunst and Tito Albadian. Bingo. Proof that her hypothesis had been correct. Both men were flunkies of S.A.F.E. and operating on that group’s orders.

And then a name she’d dreaded seeing started to pop up in documents dated just a few months ago. Joseph Lockworth.

She closed her eyes against the pain of a betrayal so deep, so close to her heart. She looked through the documents regarding him, but found no reference to any blackmail or coercion of her grandfather. Apparently, he’d approached someone in the group and expressed identical views to S.A.F.E.’s. Freedom One had dispatched several group members to approach him separately and see if he was S.A.F.E. material. It appeared Gramps had passed muster, because his name was included in all the most recent correspondence.

She jumped as her cell phone rang. She looked at the number on its face. Unknown Caller. She put it to her ear. “Hello?”

“Hey there, Diana. It’s Sam.”

Wow. She had sure gotten loose fast. But then, Diana expected no less of an Athena Academy girl. “Hi, Sam. Are you okay? I’m so sorry about bonking you like that.”

“No problem. I walked into the blow on purpose.” Sam had let her knock her out on purpose? Aloud she gasped in shock. “Why?”

“You’re an Athena girl. We stick together. You had to have some absolutely dire need to get into Collin Scott’s office or you wouldn’t have come here at all. I thought I’d give you a chance to find what you were so sure you would. But, while we’re on the subject, would you care to tell me what it was you were looking for so desperately?”

“Have they assigned you to be the hostage negotiator here?” Diana asked dryly.

Sam answered equally dryly. “Something like that. I’m supposed to distract you while they figure out a way to get through that door.” Diana heard a squawk of voices in the background at that one. Apparently, the real hostage negotiators hadn’t wanted her to share that tidbit of information. Not that it took a rocket scientist to figure it out.

Sam commented, “You really did a number on the lock.”

“Thanks. It’s all that wholesome Athena Academy training, you know.”

Sam laughed. “So. Can you tell me why you did something this crazy?”

Diana sighed. No harm in being honest, now. And, she could stand to do a little stalling of her own. She glanced around the room and found exactly what she was looking for. A fax machine.

She tucked her cell phone between her shoulder and ear while she dialed up Oracle’s fax number. She started feeding documents from the S.A.F.E. file into the machine while she spoke to Sam.

“I found the file on S.A.F.E. It’s all here in front of me. These guys are certifiable. They follow the writings of Thomas Wolfe from some years back when he argued that the only way to defeat terror is with terror. He proposed that the U.S. can’t win that war unless we resort to lawless violence ourselves. I’ve identified about a dozen guys in S.A.F.E. at a first glance through these documents. Wanna hear their names? It’s a Who’s Who of high rollers and big dogs. I figure I need to tell someone before the yahoos with you bust in here and kill me.”

“Sure,” Sam said cautiously.

Diana kept feeding papers into the fax machine, but rattled off her list of names at the same time. She finished her recitation and Sam was silent for long seconds. Finally her classmate breathed, “Are you serious?”

“As a heart attack,” Diana replied. “Do you think I’d be dumb enough to pull a suicide move like this if I weren’t certain of what I was going to find and that it was worth dying or going to jail over?”

She had about ten more pages to send to Oracle and Delphi. She needed to stall the crew outside just a few more seconds. Quickly, she asked Sam, “So, how many security thugs does a break-in to Collin Scott’s office rate?”

“A couple of dozen,” Sam answered.

Diana commented, “If I were the suspicious type, I might make note of who all responded to the break-in that weren’t strictly required to do so. Could be a second, lower layer of S.A.F.E. types. With four CIA agents known to be in the group, it would make sense that there are more where they came from in this spy palace.”

“A most interesting observation,” Sam said thoughtfully. “Duly noted.”

Five more pages to go. “Sam. Do me a favor. If I don’t make it out of this alive, tell Gabe Monihan thank you for me. For everything.”

“As in almost President Gabe Monihan?” Sam choked.

“Yup. Long story.” She fed the last sheet of paper into the fax machine. Thank God.

Sam murmured under her breath, as if she didn’t want the agents around her to hear what she said, “Diana, your grandfather is in the building. Said he wants to talk to you. But if he’s one of them…”

Diana whirled, dropping her cell phone as a panel of one of the bookcases slid open behind her. A concealed door!

A man’s silhouette loomed in the space.

And before she could dive for cover behind the desk, Joseph Lockworth stepped fully into the room.

1:00 A.M.

The file of S.A.F.E. documents crashed to the floor and Diana dropped into a defensive crouch. What a hell of an irony it would be if her own grandfather killed her.

He held his hands out carefully away from his sides. His empty hands.

She straightened cautiously but continued to stay light on the balls of her feet and at the ready. He might be silver haired and eighty years old, but she held no illusions about Gramps being an easy takedown. He’d been one of the toughest covert field agents in the entire OSS and its later iteration, the CIA.

Her grandfather said easily, “Hi, kiddo. How about we have that talk, now?”

She stared in surprise. “Now?”

“I think this is as good a time as any, don’t you?”

She laughed without humor. “I don’t have much else to do, I suppose, except go out there and die.”

He waved a casual hand at the door. “Don’t worry about that bunch. I can handle them.”

Her eyes narrowed. “And what’s your price for that little trick going to be?”

She started as her grandfather laughed heartily. “You’re good for an old man’s heart. A real chip off the old block, you are. Just like your mother.”

“My mother?”

He nodded. “You two are both stubborn and wild and opinionated, and maddeningly lovable.”

She had a hard time imagining her haunted, silent mother being any of those things. “I’ll take your word for it. I’ve never seen that side of my mother.”

“And it’s a damned shame. But now that she’s better, you mark my words. She’s a pistol. She’s going to make your life a living hell.”

A genuine smile spread across her face. “I’ll look forward to that.”

Gramps nodded. “Yup. Just like her.” He changed subjects abruptly. “So. What’s this about S.A.F.E.? How did you find out about that?”

She sure as heck wasn’t telling him about Oracle. That was the last thing S.A.F.E. needed to find out about! “I did it the old-fashioned way. Months of investigation and legwork, and a bit of deductive reasoning. It took me a while to make the connection between Dunst, Q-group and S.A.F.E., but it all fell into place today. Along with the identities of S.A.F.E.’s members and their true agenda.”

He shook his head. “How’d you make the connection?”

That she was willing to tell him. It wouldn’t hurt S.A.F.E. to realize they couldn’t hide any longer, now that the rock they’d been hiding under had been turned over. “I analyzed the Q-group attack on Monihan last October. It matched up with a CIA training scenario too perfectly to be coincidence. So, it was an easy leap to figure Richard Dunst was training them. He was using his former CIA agent status to do a bunch of illegal arms deals with the Q-group in Berzhaan. It was in the news when Q-group took over that TV station in Chicago. When they tried to blow up Gabriel Monihan.”

Gramps nodded. “I actually fired him from the CIA before I retired.”

“When Richard Dunst got broken out of jail this morning, it was clear that someone with a whole lot of power and resources helped him. And that wouldn’t be the Q-group. They’re a shoestring covert op all the way.”

“Sound reasoning.”

“So, it became clear that a third party was in the picture. Someone pulling both Dunst’s and the Q-group’s strings. And that’s when I went looking for S.A.F.E. I intercepted someone on the Internet instructing Dunst to kill Gabe Monihan this evening. Again, it had to be someone with inside access to the highest levels of the government. I tracked down the e-mail address of the guy giving Dunst orders, and funny thing, I ran smack-dab into a CIA firewall on the Internet.”

“So, you put two and two together and fingered Dunst’s old boss at CIA, Collin Scott. And you just waltzed in here, broke into his office and found…what?”

Diana gestured at the papers scattered all over the floor at her feet. “I found it all. The entire S.A.F.E. dossier. And lest you think you’re going to get away with this, I’ve already faxed the entire file to the authorities.”

Her grandfather stared down at the papers in shock.

And then a slow smile spread across his face. He looked up at her in jubilation. “You did it!”

She blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“You broke open S.A.F.E. We’ve been after these bastards for going on two years, and you did it in a single day! Simply amazing. Congratulations!”

“Who exactly has been going after S.A.F.E. for two years?”

“A group of…concerned citizens. A few people, highly placed in the government complex have been aware of a subtle force at work behind the scenes, pushing events in…dangerous directions. I’ve been helping them investigate who’s behind it all.”

That was a convenient story. “Not to be rude, Gramps, but you could easily be changing your tune to try and dodge the ton of bricks that’s about to land on S.A.F.E. Why should I believe a word of what you just said?”

He grinned broadly. “Bravo. You really are a Lockworth through and through.”

Okay, this conversation was just getting strange. She was barricaded in the CIA building, about to get thrown in jail for the rest of her natural life if she was lucky, and her grandfather was crowing about her calling him a liar.

“Tell you what, Pumpkin. I’ll make you a deal. I’ll get you out of this building in one piece—not under arrest—if you’ll go for a ride with me. I want to take you to meet someone.”

“To meet whom?” she asked cautiously.

“Someone you’ll believe when he tells you I’ve infiltrated S.A.F.E. on his behalf in order to expose it and take it down.”

“Why would I believe anyone you take me to?”

“Oh, I think you’ll believe this person.”

“And why should I trust you? You could just as easily take me to some deserted spot so more of S.A.F.E.’s thugs can kill me and feed me to the sharks. I’m not getting in any car with you.”

He nodded. “I commend your caution. You’d make a hell of a field operative. Good instincts. I’m going to reach into my pocket and get my cell phone. I’m going to do it nice and slow. Okay?”

She nodded once. And watched him like a hawk as he did exactly what he said he’d do.

“May I dial it?” he asked.

Another short nod.

He held the instrument to his ear for a moment. “Hello, it’s Lockworth. There’s someone here I’d like you to speak to. She’s reluctant to get in a car with me and go for a ride. Rightly so, I might add.”

He held the cell phone out to her. There was an outside chance it was a stun weapon of some kind. If she put it to her ear, she could be zapped and dropped. But, she was also curious just whom he could call on who would convince her to go with him.

She took the phone. Held it near her head but was careful not to touch her ear with it. “Hello?” she said cautiously.

“Hello. It’s Gabe.”

Her jaw dropped.

“Diana? Are you there?” His voice came as if from a great distance. Her grandfather was working with Gabe Monihan? Had Gabe played her for a fool all along?

“Diana? Talk to me. Are you okay?”

“Uh, yes,” she managed to mumble.

“What’s going on? What’s your grandfather talking about? What does he mean that you won’t get in a car with him?”

“Is my grandfather working for you?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact he is. And that’s classified information, by the way. Please don’t reveal it to anyone. He’s working on something extremely important for me.”

Gabe knew about the existence of S.A.F.E. or something like it and was using Gramps to smoke it out? And all of a sudden, the pieces started falling into place. This was the real reason why Gabe had insisted on it not being publicized before the election that the Q-group attack in Chicago last October had been aimed solely at him. Why there was so much enmity between him and Wolfe. Why he’d been so willing to trust her—another Lockworth—on sight.

Good grief. Did this also mean that Gabe hadn’t felt any instant connection with her as she’d thought? Was his easy familiarity nothing more than an extension of his acquaintance with her grandfather? Had she read a great deal more into their bantered exchanges than was really there? Had he merely tolerated her as a favor to Gramps? Had she made a colossal fool of herself?

“Diana?” Gabe spoke worriedly in her ear. “What’s going on?”

“I’m sorry. I’m a little busy at the moment.”

“Doing what?” He asked that in a way that suggested he’d push until he got an answer.

“Well, I broke into the office of a high-ranking CIA official a few minutes ago. I’m barricaded inside it right now, and there are a couple of dozen security types outside who are jonesing to kill me. They’re trying to figure out how to break down the door as we speak.”

Gabe gave a snort of laughter.

But when she said nothing, he added in dawning dismay, “You’re kidding, right?”

“Sorry.”

“Jesus H. Christ, Diana. The CIA? What were you thinking?”

She laughed ruefully. “Well, the good news is I found out who’s been trying to kill you. I just faxed the entire dossier on the conspiracy to my superiors. If I live more than a few more minutes, I’ll ask to have it all sent to Owen Haas.”

“And the Attorney General, it sounds like,” he bit out.

“There’s only one problem,” she said.

“Only one?” he retorted. “It’s sounds to me like you’ve got several problems at the moment.”

She replied impatiently, “I’m not talking about me. I’m talking about you. I couldn’t find out who’s in charge of the whole conspiracy. It has to be someone way up in the government, though, based on the kind of information and resources they seem to have access to. You watch your back.”

“That’s what both of you Lockworth’s have been doing for me.”

“So Gramps is really on the up-and-up when he says he’s been investigating this bunch for you?”

“Absolutely,” Gabe answered firmly.

No hesitation. And that was a definite ring of truth in his voice. Well, okay then.

“So, are you President, yet?” she asked lightly.

“No,” he laughed. “But soon. Less than an hour.”

“Sheesh,” she groused teasingly, “Who’d have guessed this nation elected such a slacker? It’s about darn time you took the reins.”

“We’ll get there. One step at a time. Although, if you’ve busted this shadow group as wide-open as you say you have, my job just got a whole lot easier.”

“Not to mention that you might live to do your job now,” she added.

He waxed abruptly serious. “Exactly. I can’t thank you enough. So. What can I do to help you out of your current predicament?”

“I do have a way of getting into messes, don’t I?” she asked ruefully.

“Indeed.”

“Actually, Gramps seems to think he’s got it covered. How about we give you a call back if we get into a jam?”

“All right. But you call me if you need help, all right? I owe you an enormous debt.”

She winced at his words. Is that what she was to him? A debt? Her stomach roiled, more nauseous than it already was. She hung up the phone and handed it back to her grandfather.

“It seems I owe you an apology, Gramps.”

He waved a dismissive hand. “Put that thought right out of your mind. You were doing your job. I completely understand. And frankly, if you hadn’t been cautious with me, I’d have chewed your butt.”

She had no doubt he would’ve, too. No wonder her mother had been wild and stubborn with this man for a father-in-law.

“Exactly how were you planning to walk me out of here past all those guys out there?” she asked.

“That’s the thing. We’re not going past them.” He nodded at the hidden door.

“Surely those guys out there know about that connecting door. They’ll have agents posted outside the adjoining office.”

“Well,” her grandfather drawled, “I had a little chat with the Director when I got here, and he arranged for there not to be agents on the door that opens to a separate hallway that runs behind the adjoining office.”

“We’re going to escape?” she asked in disbelief.

“Yup. Just like the good old days.” He was grinning like a mischievous six-year-old.

“What about the security cameras? The hallways are lined with them!”

“Not being monitored for the next—” he glanced at his watch “—four minutes. It really is time to go.”

“If those guys in the outer office figure out what we’re doing, they’ll shoot to kill! If—and that’s a big if—we manage to make it out of the building, they’ll put out an APB on us so fast it’ll make your head spin.”

“Nah. Think how foolish they’ll look when they finally get into this office and there’s nobody inside. You’ll have vanished into thin air. They can’t very well put out an APB on an invisible woman.”

Her eyes narrowed. “They won’t put out the APB because you’re going to take down Collin Scott, and they won’t want to draw any more attention to him and the reason for what happens to him than they have to.”

“Ah, my girl, you’d be a natural in the agency. Can I possibly tempt you to transfer over here from Defense Intelligence?”

“Not on your life. You can keep all these political games and maneuvering. They make my head hurt.”

He guffawed. “And that’s why you’re a conspiracy theorist, right? You like to think about simple, straightforward things.”

She grinned back at him. “Exactly.”

He knelt down and began picking up the scattered S.A.F.E. documents. “We’d better take this stuff with us, don’t you think?”

She knelt down and began helping him. “Definitely. We wouldn’t want there to be an unfortunate accident with a paper shredder.”

In a few seconds, they’d gathered up all the papers and stuffed them back into their red file.

“Better stick that under your coat,” her grandfather advised. “If someone sees you leave the building with a red file, you could get into big trouble.”

She replied dryly, “That will be the least of my problems if we’re stopped on the way out of the building.”

“True. Here. Put this on. Just in case we run into anybody in a hallway.” Her grandfather held out a light brown wig to her. It was a chin-length pageboy-shaped thing, not terribly different from her own hair, but its smooth shape and chestnut color were enough off that nobody would give her a second glance.

She tucked the last of her wavy, golden locks under it. “How do I look?”

“Not nearly as pretty as my granddaughter,” he replied.

“Let’s get out of here.”

She followed him to the hidden panel and stepped through it into a darkened office. Light and noise came from the other side of the door as some of the security team from next door spilled over into the outer office of this suite. She and Gramps moved quietly across the carpeted floor, toward another door on the opposite side of the office. Yup, just as she’d thought. Her grandfather moved with the grace and stealth of a cat. The old guy must have been something else in his prime.

She waited in the shadows behind him as he opened the second exit silently. He glanced both directions down the hall, then gestured for her to follow him. They slipped outside. She walked beside him, moving purposefully, but without undue haste that might draw attention to them.

They wound down hallway after hallway, moving ever farther from the front door and the fiasco behind them. They went down an elevator and stepped out into a small vestibule.

“If each of us doesn’t swipe an ID card as we leave, it’s going to set off an alarm. We’ll have to run for my car once we get out of here,” he instructed in a low murmur.

“I can do you one better than that,” she murmured back. She fished Samantha’s ID card out of her coat pocket and dangled it from her fingers.

Gramps shook his head admiringly. “Lockworth, through and through.”

They duly swiped their ID cards and stepped out into a dim parking garage. Perhaps twenty feet away, a limousine lurked in a dark shadow, its long, sleek shape menacing. Pantherlike.

They moved over to it swiftly, and the rear passenger door opened from inside as they approached it. Someone was inside waiting for them? Startled, Diana ducked into the vehicle and slid across the leather seat to make room for Gramps, who was close behind her.

“Let’s go, Jens,” he said into an intercom before the door was even fully closed.

The vehicle pulled out smoothly while Diana’s eyes adjusted to the dark interior, lit only by a few small running lights along the floor. Not only was there one someone inside the limo, there were five someones.

She jolted as a voice said out of the darkness, “Hi, honey. Are you all right?”

“Mom? What in the world are you doing here?”

“You know us Lockworths. We stick together. I was with your grandfather when you called his hotel room. As soon as the call came in that you’d just gone into the CIA building, and we realized you were probably in trouble or about to be in trouble, wild horses couldn’t have stopped me from coming along.”

So that explained how Gramps had gotten to the CIA building minutes after she broke into Scott’s office. She leaned forward and squeezed her mother’s hand. “Thanks. That means a lot to me.”

Her mother’s startled gaze met hers and tears abruptly filled her mother’s eyes. The lady never had been slow on the uptake. Zoe saw her overture for what it was. And dang it if her own eyes didn’t start to fill with tears, too. Twenty-five years without a mother. And now she finally had one who’d worry over her and fight her battles beside her. The lonely little girl inside her was feeling better by the minute. As though she was growing up.

“I’d do anything for you, you know,” her mother whispered. “I love you so much, sweetheart.”

“I love you, too, Mom.” That was the first time she could ever remember saying that. And it felt good. Really good. As if her heart was opening up and blooming like a big, bright, overblown sunflower.

She sniffed surreptitiously and said as briskly as she could manage under the circumstances, “We have a lot of catching up to do once this whole mess is taken care of. Gramps tells me you were quite a hellion in your day. I want to hear all about it.”

Zoe gave her a watery smile. “No way am I telling you everything. I wouldn’t want to give you any crazy ideas.”

One of the other people spoke up. “As if breaking into CIA headquarters wasn’t crazy enough.”

Diana’s head whipped up. She knew that voice. Allison Gracelyn, daughter of one of the Athena Academy’s founders, Senator Marion Gracelyn. When that eminent lady passed away several years ago, Marion’s son, Adam, took her place on the Athena Academy’s board of directors, and Allison had become a consultant to that same board. What in the world was she doing here?

Diana glanced at the other occupants of the car, now that she could make out their faces. Allison’s father, Judge Adam Gracelyn, another Athena Academy board member. Beyond him was a gray-haired man she’d never met, but who could only be Charles Forsythe, the billionaire who helped fund the formation of the Athena Academy. His portrait in the front lobby of the school was of a younger man with thick, dark hair, but the patrician features and burning intelligence in those dark eyes left no doubt as to his identity.

The last man wore a military uniform. She gaped as he leaned forward slightly and came into clear view farther down the long bench seat from Forsythe. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff himself, General Bart Snyder. What the heck was he doing with this bunch? Everyone else had a strong connection to the Athena Academy that her grandfather had also helped found. But why was Snyder along for this little joyride?

The limousine pulled out of the CIA building’s parking lot, sailing past the armed guard patrolling the gates on high alert. Looking for her, no doubt. She managed not to slink lower in her seat—the windows were blacked out, after all—but it was a struggle not to dive for the floor and hide her face.

Her grandfather broke the silence that descended over the vehicle as it accelerated into the night. “Diana, I think you are familiar with, if not acquainted with, everyone in the car, are you not?”

Yikes. That was his business voice. “Yes, sir,” she replied crisply, putting on her military professional voice, as well.

Gramps turned to the vehicle’s other occupants. “Our girl, Diana, was kind enough to retrieve a very interesting dossier for us this evening. It’s the classified S.A.F.E. folder out of Collin Scott’s office.”

Without exception, everyone in the car lurched at that news, and there were general exclamations of surprise and, if she wasn’t mistaken, pleasure. And why was it, exactly, that he would mention something so sensitive in this car full of government outsiders with no security clearances, with the exception of General Snyder, of course?

Allison Gracelyn spoke up. “Diana, have you had a chance to look through the file, yet?”

“I’ve glanced at it,” she replied cautiously.

“Are there names?” Allison sounded tense. Urgent.

Diana nodded. “All except the leader of the whole conspiracy. That person is only referred to as Freedom One in the various documents. It may have been above Scott’s pay grade to know who that person is.”

“And is there evidence to tie S.A.F.E. to the assassination attempts on Monihan?” Allison asked tersely, leaning forward intently in her seat.

Diana’s gaze whipped over to her grandfather in no little surprise. How in the world did a consultant for a girl’s prep school know about that possible connection? He nodded his permission to answer the question, a tacit endorsement of Allison’s right to ask it.

Nonetheless, Diana replied to the woman carefully, “I’m afraid that’s a matter of national security. I’m not aware of your need to know that particular information, so please forgive me if I decline to answer the question.”

General Snyder chuckled. “I’m authorizing you to answer the question, Captain.”

She nodded crisply at her boss. General Snyder might be way up the chain of command from her, but he was certainly able to give her that authorization to answer the question.

She looked down the length of the limo’s interior at Allison. “Yes, there is direct evidence linking S.A.F.E. to the assassination attempts on Gabe Monihan. There’s a planning document in the file outlining the details of the attempt to kill him last October. There are also records of funds transfers to Tito Albadian. And it’s clear that Freedom One planned the bombing earlier this afternoon. There are payments to and correspondence with Richard Dunst. There can be no doubt that he worked directly for S.A.F.E. and was poised to be the backup assassin if the Q-group attack at the inaugural parade failed.”

Allison sat back in her seat with a grim, but satisfied, look on her face.

Forsythe spoke up from the other side of the car. “They’ll crack. If we bring in all the people we do know about and interrogate them hard enough, someone will give up the identity of this Freedom One character.”

Diana retorted, “Yes, but will it be in time to save Gabe’s life?”

Her grandfather replied cryptically, “That’s what we’re on our way to find out, now.”

Judge Gracelyn, Allison’s father and husband to the woman whose brainchild the Athena Academy was, commented, “It’s only fitting that you be with us after you saved Gabe’s life twice today.”

Now what did that mean? She was damned confused, here. And this wasn’t exactly the kind of crowd with whom she could just blurt out a demand to know what in the hell was going on. “Where are we going?” she asked carefully.

“You’ll see soon enough,” her grandfather answered.

Great. Now they were all grinning at each other as if they had some hilarious joke between them that she wasn’t part of. Or maybe was the brunt of. She crossed her arms with a huff and leaned back in her seat. The grins got even wider, dammit!

Pointedly, she turned her gaze to the window and stared outside as the limousine wound through the northwest streets of downtown Washington, D.C. After the day she’d had, she severely didn’t feel like dealing with anybody laughing at her right now.

Her grandfather asked the group in general, “Anyone have any guesses as to who this Freedom One person is?”

Allison Gracelyn said wryly, “That is the question of the hour, is it not?”

When no one else spoke up, Diana said into the silence, “Whoever it is has to be extremely highly placed in the government and work close to the office of the President.”

“Why do you say that?” Allison asked.

“Freedom One knew about the second inauguration attempt for Gabe today at the Capitol Building. Admittedly, a fairly wide circle of people were aware of that ceremony, but it still was far from public knowledge. Yet, Freedom One had the details in enough time to send Richard Dunst over to the Capitol Building to kill Gabe.”

Allison nodded her agreement with the analysis.

The atmosphere in the car grew noticeably more tense as everyone jumped to the next logical conclusion. And whoever that person was, he or she was still on the loose. And potentially still capable of ordering another assassination attempt on Gabe Monihan.

The same sense of impending doom that had filled her all day surged anew. Her worry for Gabe was a tangible thing, swirling within the limousine’s interior to join the controlled panic now filling the enclosed space.

The limousine decelerated smoothly. Diana looked outside, curious to see where they were going. She gaped as the vehicle made a left turn into a driveway famous the world over. They were at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The White House.

2:00 A.M.

For it being two o’clock in the morning, the place was lit up like a torch. Of course, under normal circumstances, an inaugural ball would be in full swing. But today had been anything but normal.

The limousine stopped, and a uniformed guard leaned down to peer in the window. The driver turned on an overhead dome light, and Diana blinked at the sudden light.

“Who’s in the vehicle?” the guard asked.

Her grandfather leaned forward. “The Athena party.”

The guard looked down at a clipboard in his hand. “Ah yes. Delphi and associates.” He stepped back and waved the driver through.

Delphi? One of the people in this car was Delphi? She managed not to gawk in open shock, but it was a close thing. Which one? Her curiosity raged, but their limousine pulled up under the East Portico and came to a stop before she could demand to know which one of them was her secretive boss.

A uniformed military officer opened the door at her elbow and held out a gloved hand to assist her from the vehicle. She stepped out into a rush of blessedly warm air blowing down from a vent in the porch ceiling. The entire party was handed smoothly out of the car.

A social aide in a white ceremonial uniform with Air Force insignia on it handed her a comb and held up a palm-size mirror. “Would you like to fix your hair, ma’am, before you go inside?”

She peered into the tiny mirror. Good thing she couldn’t see more of her face. She looked like hell. She repaired her hair and handed the comb back.

A suited Secret Service man she’d never seen before said, “If you’ll come with me, ladies and gentlemen. They’re expecting you inside.” He slipped white cotton gloves over his hands and opened the double French doors that led directly into the East Room.

Who was expecting them? Were they all going to attend Gabe’s inauguration? Her heart leaped in consternation at the thought. She wasn’t at all sure she was ready to face him yet. Her thoughts and feelings were a jumbled muddle where he was concerned, and she needed some time, some distance, to sort them out before she could face him again with equanimity.

But as she stepped into the room full of people, her thoughts were swept aside as foreboding slammed into her with all the force of an Abram’s tank. Gabe wasn’t President, yet. And S.A.F.E. wasn’t finished, either.

She stumbled along in the middle of the group of Athena dignitaries and General Snyder into the spacious and gracious East Room. Its butter-yellow walls were warm and inviting after the deep cold of the night outside. Several hundred formally dressed people milled around the sumptuous room.

Dear God, she could smell it. The malice seething below the surface of someone in here. She caught a fleeting frown that crossed her grandfather’s features. She leaned close to him and murmured, “You can feel it, too, can’t you?”

He nodded infinitesimally.

“How about you and I take a little stroll around the room,” she suggested sotto voce. “You take the right, and I’ll take the left.”

“Done,” he replied through clenched teeth.

“I’ll be back in a minute, Mom. I want to take a quick look around.”

Her mother smiled knowingly at her. “Protective of him, are you? I’m sure the Secret Service has it well in hand this time.”

She didn’t have to ask which “him” her mother was referring to. She rolled her eyes, embarrassed, and turned away from Zoe. Using her intelligence training, she melted into the crowd of people, which was a bit of a trick given how violently underdressed she was. This crowd must be the guests who’d been invited to the mother of all inaugural balls, the White House Ball. They would be top officials from the incoming administration and the very largest donors to Gabe’s campaign coffers. She recognized many of the faces in the room. A few people gave her strange looks at her casual attire, but she ducked her chin and slid past those people as unobtrusively as she could. No time to explain herself just now.

She started as a heavy hand landed on her shoulder from behind. She whirled, her hands coming up defensively.

“Agent Tilman,” she exclaimed under her breath. “How’s everything going?”

“I was about to ask you the very same thing. I figure it can’t be a good thing that you’re here.”

She smiled humorlessly. “I was just talking with Gabe earlier about how trouble does seem to have a way of finding me.”

He shrugged. “Maybe you just have a good nose for finding it. Smelling anything interesting this evening?” he asked lightly.

“Actually, I am,” she replied with quiet significance.

His gaze snapped to hers, questioning. Concerned. “Come with me.”

She nodded and fell in beside him as he politely elbowed his way out of the room. It was a whole lot easier to move through this dense crowd with a grim-looking linebacker at her side. They stepped out into a broad, elegant hallway, stretching away from the East Room all the way across the ground floor of the stately building.

As soon as they were clear of the East Room, Tilman’s stride stretched out to a near run. It was all she could do to keep up with him without breaking into a trot. He turned a corner and stabbed a button for an elevator. One of the doors in front of them slid open immediately. He dragged her inside the small cubicle.

As soon as the door closed, he asked tersely, “What have you got this time?”

She answered grimly, “Less than before. I think someone very highly placed in the government may try to have Gabe killed again. Maybe not tonight. Except…”

“Except what?” he prodded.

“Except I’ve had this gut feeling all evening that it would happen before he became President.”

“We’re big believers in gut feelings in the Service. And a whole lot of us have been getting gut feelings, too. Do you have any idea at all what’s planned?”

She shook her head regretfully. “None.”

“He’s about to be sworn in.”

She asked, “How many people is he exposed to?”

“No more than two dozen. He’s in the Situation Room, now. No assassin could possibly penetrate it.”

Her intuition jelled into screaming certainty all at once. No assassin could penetrate that group unless Freedom One was in it, and Freedom One had decided to personally knock off Gabe. And that’s exactly what was about to happen.

“Who’s there with him?” she demanded urgently.

The elevator came to a stop and they stepped out into a narrow corridor. Tilman turned to face her. “His new cabinet. The Joint Chiefs. A couple members of the Supreme Court.”

She said around the tightness in her jaw. “That may do it. Within that bunch may very well be the final assassin.”

Tilman’s jaw sagged for an instant before it snapped shut and fire lit in his eyes. “Let’s go,” he bit out.

They took off running down the hall, shoving aside everyone and everything in their path. They skidded to a stop in front of a closed door guarded by a pair of burly men. “Let us in,” Tilman snapped.

“Nobody’s supposed to go in or out,” one of the agents protested. “Haas’s orders.”

“Monihan’s in danger. There’s a killer in there and this lady may know who he is.”

The men’s faces registered shock as the roster of people in the room passed through their minds. But, to their credit, they didn’t waste time arguing about the absurdity of Tilman’s claim. One of them punched a number code in the keypad beside him and Tilman shoved the door open. Diana leaped past him and burst into the room.

Startled faces turned toward her. There was Gabe at the far end of the room, in an open space beyond a long conference table. His left hand rested on a Bible and his right hand was raised in the air. An elderly, black-robed figure stood in front of him, holding the Bible. Justice Browning. Thomas Wolfe stood just behind Gabe. And as Tilman had said, members of Gabe’s inner circle ranged around him in a loose arc.

In the millisecond it took her to register all that, several faces in the room registered her identity, as well. Gabe’s eyes lit in pleased surprise followed by alarm. He knew full well what her bursting into the room like this meant.

Owen Haas leaped to the same conclusion as Gabe did when he saw her and Tilman come bursting through the door. She watched, as in slow motion, his elbow came up and he shoved aside the new Secretary of State to take a step forward toward Gabe. His face creased into lines of grim determination. He didn’t know where the threat was going to come from, but he was as certain in that endless instant as she was that it was going to come. Please, God, let Owen be in time to get his body in front of Gabe.

And then she registered the only two other faces in the room whose expressions shifted away from surprise to something else. They both darkened in displeased recognition of her. Thomas Wolfe. And General Eric Pace, the Army Chief of Staff.

And both of them reached into their coats.

Which one of them was it? Which one was Freedom One? She couldn’t take out both men. There wasn’t time and they stood too far apart, Wolfe on Gabe’s right and Pace to Gabe’s left. Like Owen Haas, she took a slow-motion step forward, preparatory to leaping for one of the men.

Eric Pace’s name had only shown up once, on a list of frequent attendees to defense conferences along with some of the known S.A.F.E. members. Wolfe’s writings, on the other hand, were the foundation of S.A.F.E.’s work. He’d opposed Gabe in a bitter primary campaign, much of it centered around their wildly differing views on dealing with terrorism. He’d tried to unseat Gabe after the election on the grounds of mental unfitness for the job—to steal the Presidency. He’d waylaid her this morning and attempted not to let her see Gabe, as if he already knew who she was and what she’d been there to warn Gabe about.

She leaped for Eric Pace.

The leader of S.A.F.E. would never make himself as obvious a target as Wolfe had.

She flew through the air, tackling the barrel-chested general, slamming him into the ground and landing squarely on top of him. He fought beneath her, twisting and turning in an effort to throw her off. She hung on to him grimly. It was like wrestling a bear. A big, strong, angry one.

Without warning, a deafening sound echoed in her ears, so loud it took her a moment to identify it as a gunshot. A huge jolt of force exploded between her and Pace.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Gabe stagger as something or someone struck him.

And then all hell broke loose, people shouting and Secret Service agents diving all over the place. Gabe went down under a pile of agents, and she was abruptly crushed by several men, herself.

“Gun!” one of them shouted practically in her ear.

“Blood!” another one of the men on top of her yelled.

“Someone’s hit! Medic!”

Good Lord willing, the bastard had shot himself in the gut. The other people in the room were shoved back, and the chaos resolved itself into two piles.

A voice bellowed beside her, “I’ve got the weapon.” That was Agent Tilman. “Hold him down!”

The pile around her squirmed and heaved as Pace fought like a madman beneath her. It felt like the time she rode a wild bronc and nearly broke her neck. Her lungs started to burn, and she was having trouble breathing. With all these two-hundred-twenty-pound jokers on top of her, it was no wonder.

She turned her head, searching for a pocket of air in the smothering pile of wool suits and brawn. And came face-to-face with Eric Pace. At a range of about two inches. His eyes blazed with insane fury.

“Freedom One, I presume?” she managed to gasp.

His eyes glazed with manic intensity. “You bitch,” he snarled. “You have no idea what you’ve just done.”

“I believe I’ve prevented you from assassinating the President of the United States.”

“You’ve weakened our nation. You’ve made us vulnerable to terrorism. I was going to win the war against it, going to protect this nation the way it ought to be protected. But you’ve ruined it all.”

“I think…that’s a decision…for the people…of this nation…to make at…the polls.” She forced the words out of her flattened lungs.

Dang, she was having a hard time breathing.

“I’ve got his arms,” someone shouted.

Pace gave a violent heave beneath her and she felt his legs kicking out beneath hers. Spittle flecked the corner of his mouth.

“Give it up, Pace,” she ground out. “It’s over.” She dragged air into her protesting lungs. She blinked a couple times to clear the pinpoints of light dancing in front of her eyes. She was starting to feel light-headed. “S.A.F.E. is finished.”

Pace froze for an instant, staring at her in shock. Didn’t think anyone knew about his secret little conspiracy, did he? Surprise, surprise.

Apparently, that brief moment of advantage was all the Secret Service needed to finally subdue him. Someone bellowed that they had his legs immobilized. The guy on top of her blessedly rolled away from her. Hands lifted her roughly to her feet as she was yanked away from Pace. She took a staggering step back as a phalanx of Secret Service agents rolled Pace over, jerked his hands behind his back and slapped handcuffs on his wrists. They dragged him none too gently to his feet.

Gabe and Thomas Wolfe stood shoulder-to-shoulder, and Wolfe mopped at his forehead with the handkerchief he’d pulled out of his coat. Gabe snarled, “Why, Pace? Why me?”

The general growled back, “You’re weak. This country needs a man like Thomas Wolfe at the helm. This was all about putting him into power, where he belongs.”

Gabe’s gaze snapped to his vice president.

The look of stunned disbelief on Wolfe’s face had to be legitimate. He stared in shock at the Army general and then turned to face Gabe. “I had no idea. No idea whatsoever that he was planning something like this. Of course, I’ll step down. I’ll tender my letter of resignation first thing in the morning.”

The guy sounded completely shell-shocked, as if he could be knocked over by a feather right about now.

Gabe said shortly, “Don’t send me any letters, yet. We’ll talk about this tomorrow.”

Wolfe nodded, his gaze bewildered.

Agent Tilman, who still held her elbow, jolted beside her. And looked down. “Jesus, Miss Lockworth. You’re bleeding.”

She looked down and saw a large bloodstain spreading down the right side of her sweater.

Gabe leaped past Owen Haas. “Where’s that medic?” he shouted.

His arms went around her, and he picked her up, carrying her over to the conference table. He laid her down on it gently.

She looked up at him in blank surprise. “I’m shot,” she said rather obviously. But it was the only thing that came to her mind.

“Everything’s going to be okay,” he murmured reassuringly. “Don’t worry.”

Hands raised her sweater and eased her slacks down to her hips. Something wet and cold that burned like acid was pressed against her side. “Ouch!” she exclaimed, lurching with unpleasant surprise.

A gray-haired man that eyed her side like a doctor commented, “Well, we know her lung isn’t collapsed if she can yelp like that.”

He swabbed at her side, tossing away several bloodied gauze pads. She lifted her head, twisting her neck to look down at her injury, but the doctor ordered her to lie back down and stay still.

The doctor fussed around for another minute or so, smearing a cream of some kind on her skin. It numbed the growing burning sensation a fair bit, and she sighed in relief. The sound of tape tearing accompanied the doctor pressing a thick wad of gauze against her side. After he’d finished bandaging the wound tightly, the doctor pronounced, “It’s just a graze. She’s going to be fine.”

Gabe leaned down over her and his palms came to rest on her cheeks. “Thank God,” he said fervently.

She gazed up into his worried eyes. She reached up and smoothed away the lines of worry from his brow. And smiled. He smiled back.

Owen Haas cleared his throat from over Gabe’s shoulder, breaking the spell of the moment. It probably wasn’t proper Presidential protocol to sprawl all over the Situation Room briefing table making goo-goo eyes at the commander-in-chief.

She sat up, wincing at the sudden, sharp pain in her side. Gabe’s hand was right there on her elbow, steadying her.

She flashed him a look of gratitude. Then she demanded, “Are you President yet?”

He laughed aloud. “Not yet.”

“Well, good grief, Gabe Monihan, let’s get on with it. You can procrastinate like nobody I’ve ever met before.”

Laughter filled the room.

Gabe held her arm solicitously, helping her gently to her feet. Her side stung sharply, but she wasn’t going to lie around on some table while he became President, darn it.

“Let’s do it, Wendall,” Gabe said.

The elderly man in the black judge’s robe stepped forward. “Now where were we?” he asked drolly.

More chuckles sounded around the room. But they faded away, and a solemn silence enveloped the space. Gabe took the Bible out of the Justice’s hands and turned to face her. He cleared his throat. “Diana, it’s traditional that the first lady holds the Bible for her husband when he’s sworn in. My mother was planning to do it this afternoon, but the day’s events have been a little much for her. Would you do me the honor of holding it for me?”

Her eyes opened wide. That wasn’t the sort of request someone made of some random hot babe they wanted to have a casual fling with. She looked up questioningly into his eyes. “Are you sure?”

He gave her a smile that melted her heart right there on the spot. “I get feelings about things sometimes. I just know when they’re right. And you’re the one for the job. I’m sure.”

She had no idea whether or not he was talking about simply holding the Bible or much more. But it was clear he intended to give them a chance to find out. And so did she. “It would be my great honor to hold the Bible for you, Gabe.”

He held out the book. Their fingers brushed as she took it from him, and as he laid his palm on the leather cover, he flashed her an intimate smile.

And then, standing by her side, Gabe raised his right hand, vowed to uphold and defend the Constitution, and became President of the United States.

CHECKMATE

DORANNA DURGIN

Published by Silhouette Books
America’s Publisher of Contemporary Romance

Special thanks and acknowledgment are given
to Doranna Durgin for her contribution
to the ATHENA FORCE series.

Thanks to William Sanders and Robert Brown
for wicked cool gun trivia, and to Judith Byorick
for finding the inadvertently silly bits and to
Evanescence for providing Selena with a theme album.
And big thanks to Catherine Mann, for making sure
I got the Predator details down right!

Dedicated to survivors everywhere.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 1

Berzhaan.

What a mess. Political unrest from within, political pressures from without, a country seething with unreleased social tension and unspoken dangers.

It was exactly what Selena Shaw Jones needed. Distraction.

She stood on the crest of a rubble-strewn hill in Berzhaan and knew herself for a coward. She stood amidst the revered ruins of the Temple of Ashaga and knew she should have been at home, working things out with Cole. She shouldn’t have retreated like a wounded child, unable to face the truth. It wasn’t a reaction typical of her—of the controlled, perfectionist FBI Legal Attaché who traveled the world to develop counterterrorism programs in other countries and to create teamwork between those countries and the United States. Of a woman with extensive experience and training in dangerous situations, from fraught negotiations to firefights.

Emotionally, unexpectedly wounded. And no idea how to deal with it. So Selena had indeed retreated, all the way across the ocean to the brand-new legate office in Berzhaan’s capital, Suwan. So brand-new that her support staff had not yet arrived, and she spent most of her time with the U.S. ambassador, strategizing ways to build trust with a wary Berzhaani prime minister—or with the prime minister himself, attending flashy government functions to establish her presence here.

The rest of the time she spent learning the lay of the land—figuratively and literally. It was one reason she’d come to this shrine of ruins. The other…she’d heard this was a peaceful place. A contemplative place. A place where even a distressed Special Agent might sort out her thoughts.

She looked back down the steep hill she’d just ascended, a challenging obstacle course of rocks both large enough to climb over and small enough to turn an ankle. Below, the village of Oguzka looked peaceful, unchanged by its proximity to the shrine. No tourist attractions, no shacks lining the road offering trinkets to rich Europeans and Americans. Just families, going about their lives.

As it should be. One of Selena’s jobs was to keep things this way, wherever she went.

The house closest to the foot of the hill boasted a large backyard, unenclosed. A dormant garden covered nearly a third of it. Goats stood idly in a pen at the back, and the stone-walled house boasted a tidy, weed-free exterior. Peaceful. A little boy darted around the side of the house, young enough to stumble every third step and also young enough that he didn’t care. He played with a string of scrap material, letting it flutter in the wind.

Selena’s eyes burned, unexpected and startling, almost as unexpected as the sudden closing of her throat.

He was the reason she’d come.

He was also one of the reasons she’d run.

Family. Children. Plans and hopes and visions of a future with Cole that included cribs and baby mobiles and a thousand pictures of that first crawl, that first step, of a plump little mouth forming those first words…

Selena whirled away, taking a few abrupt steps toward the temple. She carefully wiped her eyes and retied her modest and respectful head scarf against the stiff winter breeze. She refocused on surroundings of ancient stone and ancient, eternal flame. Stone walls defined the courtyard, covered with moss and lichen, their once-square edges crumbled into softness. Built against those walls, low, dark religious cells waited for the return of the pilgrims who had once flocked here. Before her, a square shrine stood stolid against the years, precisely fenestrated to reveal the eternal flame within. This, the Temple of Ashaga just outside Berzhaan’s capital city of Suwan, held the muted awe of generations. A quiet place; a revered place.

Just what she’d wanted. Needed.

Then…why wasn’t it helping?

Because it definitely wasn’t helping.

Selena deliberately turned to matters more directly at hand. Distraction. Berzhaan had wedged itself between the tumultuous Middle East and acquisitive Russia, swapping between freedom and occupation too many times in the last century. The changes made for a country in turmoil, seething with unrest and jam-packed with diplomatic complications that filled Selena Shaw Jones’s hours and let her tumble into bed exhausted, knowing she was doing her best to keep terrorism away from the little boy down below as much as from those children in the States. If only Razidae would let her build the network between their countries that would allow the communication, intelligence gathering and local counterterrorist education that it was her job to establish….

A faint noise caught the edges of her attention. Was that—?

No. She was on edge, that was all. She’d had no way to know when Cole would return, and no intention of waiting him out in their oh-so-empty condo. She’d asked for this overseas assignment to get perspective on her life. And while she’d already earned Ambassador Dante Allori’s highly relieved respect with her ability to translate the most delicate political statements and to quietly, politely persist in her efforts to woo reluctant Prime Minister Omar Razidae, she still failed miserably in her own personal goals.

There he’d been. Her husband, kissing a beautiful woman right out in Constitution Park.

Big deal, she’d told herself. He was a CIA field officer—Jason P. JOXLEITER in the CIA’s eyes, and his friends got a kick out of calling him Jox. He was a field officer down to the silly all-caps assigned surname, and that meant putting up a front—wherever he was, whomever he was with—to suit his cover.

Except he was supposed to be out of the country. And while he never told her details of an assignment, she always knew his location. Always overseas and never with the CIA’s Foreign Services Bureau that worked U.S. turf, and she always knew just where. Then if something went haywire in the world, she knew whether to worry. It was the one stable thing in their relationship, the one thing she could always count on.

Not this time.

And how many other times had he lied? How many times had he used CIA guile against her?

Another harsh sound scraped up from the small village at the bottom of the hill. Selena turned into the wind to look down upon the picturesque area, frowning at the gusty blast that obscured any additional noises from below. After a moment in which she saw nothing out of place, she turned back to the temple, walking slowly around the shrine. She put her hands up to one of the openings, feeling the mild heat through her finely stitched black leather gloves.

It wasn’t enough to warm her. The depth of her feelings frightened her, kept her from thinking clearly.

Ironically, if the sounds she’d heard had actually been gunshots, she would have felt perfectly able to deal with them—the Athena Academy had given her that much, and more: her cache of fluently spoken languages, her self-confidence, the background to excel at Harvard Law School and then as an FBI legate assigned to situations as tricky and demanding as Berzhaan’s. The accomplishments to be tapped as an Oracle agent. Selena knew how to handle herself in court, behind a translator’s smooth detachment and in the field.

What she couldn’t seem to do was stop the way her throat constricted into tight pain at the thought of that moment in the D.C. park.

A sudden report on the wind stopped her short; she looked up from the rock-strewn path to narrow her eyes at the village below. There was no mistaking it this time. Weapons fire. Automatic weapons. Behind the house nearest to Selena, the young boy darted out across the rocky, close-cropped land to crawl between the crooked slats of a goat pen a hundred yards behind the house. The four goats there parted to accept him as if used to his presence.

An abrupt burst of activity at the back of the stone-walled house followed—the quick flurry of what looked like a woman trying to exit until rough hands hauled her back in, her shriek of protest clearly audible as it rode the wind up the hill.

Trouble. Not ordinary domestic trouble, no indeed. Kemeni rebels? And if it was, was this a calculated large-scale action, or a handful of overeager rebels causing trouble?

There was no telling. Turmoil gripped this country like a lover. Kemeni rebels—supposedly backed by the U.S., although Selena knew better—increasingly threatened Prime Minister Omar Razidae’s government. Russia had become keenly interested in this territory; they, too, were wrongly convinced that the U.S. treated with Razidae with one hand and fed arms and money to the Kemenis with the other. The Q’Rajn terrorists, convinced of the same, wanted the States out of Berzhaan altogether and had taken their fight to U.S. soil to face recent defeat at the hands of two of Selena’s Athena Academy classmates.

And then there was everyone else in the world, keeping an eye on Berzhaan’s undeveloped oil resources.

All the while, the people of Berzhaan struggled to survive, caught in the middle. And down the hill from Selena, a small boy cowered behind his unconcerned goats, probably not realizing they were truly no cover at all.

Selena did a quick weapons check. Sturdy Beretta Cougar .45 DAO in her pocket holster, several slim knives secreted at ankle, waist and right collarbone—where she could dip into her sweater from the neckline and acquire steel before any threatening agent even thought to consider whether she might be anything more than the sleek, tailored American she appeared to be. Then she headed down the hill, striding firmly in spite of the footing but not drawing attention to herself by running. As she moved, she pulled a hair band from an inner pocket of the coat and reached beneath the silk scarf to gather her long, layered hair at the nape of her neck. She drew her Beretta, holding it down at her side where the folds of the coat obscured it and she could easily keep it hidden if her concerns were for nothing.

She didn’t expect to keep it hidden.

As she neared the base of the hill and angled for the stone house, the boy darted out from behind the goats and ran into her path, babbling in his native language so quickly—with a young child’s creative use of words—as to challenge even her excellent Berzhaani language skills. She put a finger to her lips and then his, startling the child, and in that moment of silence she said, “Slower, bibcha.”

His eyes widened with surprise all over again; his gaze darted over her from head to toe, taking in her attire and her head scarf, her appearance—dark blue-green eyes, razor-cut chestnut bangs emerging from the scarf and all-American features—and trying to reconcile it all with her use of his own language. She crouched before him, her gun still lost in the black leather folds of her coat. “Tell me,” she said. “Why are you frightened?”

He touched the bright red leather piping on the front edge of the coat, following it briefly with his finger as if to confirm this was indeed something out of his ken—but his round, light tea-colored little face with its pointed chin looked about to crumple.

“There, now,” Selena said, fairly brusquely, fighting her natural inclination to soothe him—it would only release those tears, and then she’d learn nothing. “When a brave young man such as yourself runs to greet me, I must listen. What have you to say?”

The boy hovered on the edge of tears for another moment—and indeed, one slipped out to track its way down the baby fat of his cheek. But he pressed his lips together and then said, “Bad men are in the house. Don’t go in there! Auntie told me to run and hide, just like we practiced.”

“I saw you.” Selena couldn’t stop herself from wiping away that single tear where it had trickled out partway down his face. “You hid very well. Do you think you can do it again?”

“With Spotty and Eleny?”

She could only assume these were two of the goats.

“Farther,” she said. “In the temple, where the pilgrims used to sleep when they stayed there.”

He shook his head, flinching at the sound of breaking pottery from within the house. “I’m not allowed—”

“This once, you are,” she told him.

“Mama said—”

She put her finger to her lips again, and gave him a slow, reassuring smile. “I’ll tell her it was my fault.”

He returned a solemn, dark-eyed look, lower lip protruding slightly with the effort of his decision. Selena all but held her breath, waiting, knowing he might well be unable to trust her, as much as he’d been willing to warn her. The Beretta felt solid and familiar in her hand, and just as suddenly as if it could not possibly belong there while she spoke to this child.

Abruptly he bit his lip and nodded. “Will you hide, too?”

“Yes.” She stood; the wind tugged at her open coat. She wished she could pull off her sweater to give him—he wore only a thin wool jacket over his own baggy, loosely knit sweater—but to do so would reveal her knives and her gun, a revelation likely to break the tenuous connection between them. “But I’m going to hide somewhere else, somewhere I can get help for your people.”

This made no sense, of course. But she hoped he would grab for the reassurance without working through the logic. She didn’t give him much time to think about it, not as a muted cry reached her from the still-cracked back door. “Go now!” She pointed up the hill. “As fast as you can! Someone will come for you when it is safe.”

This time. For this child truly to be safe, Selena would have to accomplish much more than this chance, unexpected interference with one besieged house.

After the briefest hesitation, the boy sprinted away, his barely coordinated limbs putting much effort into the action. So young…

Selena smoothed her scowl away and reached for focus. She was on the job now, albeit in a fashion never formally acknowledged. She eased up to the side of the house, up to the small window with open shutters on the outside and a film of curtains covering the glass from the inside. She winced as something else within the house broke, something wooden and splintering this time, followed by another cry of fear. The window showed her little…a gash of sunlight over the floor where the front door had been left open, a chair overturned against the wall, a bread plate smashed near the entrance to a back room. No one in sight. Great. She’d have to slink around and hope another window would reveal how many intruders had—

A stutter of automatic weapons fire sounded from down the street. More than just this one house at stake. And from within, a woman screamed, a full-bodied shriek of fear and denial. No more time. Start with this house, worry about the rest later. She moved swiftly to the front corner of the house, confirmed that no one waited out front and made it to the doorway itself. A quick peek-retreat revealed the main room of the house to be abandoned. From within the room beyond, a man shouted harsh demands for cooperation and the sharp slap of hand against flesh struck Selena’s ears. Bastard. Of course he was going to rape her. Of course. And in this society where the conservative chador was no longer required by law but still often used by custom, rural women still paid every price for rape above and beyond the violation of the act itself.

Selena did another peek-and-duck, still saw nothing, and eased into the house with silence as her shield, her coat whispering around her in swirling folds of leather. A quick glance through the doorway beyond showed her a tiny bedroom, one man in Kemeni green and tan colors pressing a diminutive woman into the corner while his loosely gripped Abakan Russian assault rifle—Abakan…strange choice—pointed at the floor, his avid gaze riveted on the bed. There a second man crouched over a wildly flailing woman, struggling to shove aside the copious material of her modest chador robes. As Selena retreated, taking a deep breath, her gun held two-handed and ready, another resounding slap marked the man’s impatience.

Selena surged around the door frame and shot him in the ass.

He cried out in shock and tumbled to the floor. The woman scrambled back against the wall at the head of the bed, frantically rearranging her clothing, and the second man, caught in flat-footed surprise, started to raise his badly positioned Abakan rifle. The woman he’d squashed into the corner let out a deliberate, ear-piercing shriek, her only remaining weapon.

It bought Selena an instant, and an instant was all she needed to drill the man twice, her finger steady on the long pull of the double-action trigger. Once in the knee, once in the right biceps, and then the woman in the corner gave a fierce cry of triumph and leaped for the rifle. Selena caught a glimpse of the look in her eye and instantly targeted the woman even as she shouted a warning—and reassurance. “Leave the rifle—I am your friend!”

The woman hesitated long enough to realize she was in Selena’s sights, but as she straightened with the Abakan carefully held by the stock alone, she leaned sideways to spit on the floor. “My friend,” she said. Unlike the other woman, she did not wear a chador, only a colorful punjabi and matching hijab scarf. Her thick, woven shawl lay crumpled on the floor in the corner. “American. If you had not been supplying the Kemenis, they would not now be in a position to act—or desperate enough to send out men like this.” She kicked the man in his bloody knee, eliciting a scream. She didn’t wait for Selena’s reply, but went to the woman on the bed, leaning the rifle against the headboard with a frightening familiarity.

Selena lowered her gun but didn’t holster it, not with the stutter of gunfire echoing in her memory. These two pathetic so-called freedom fighters weren’t the only problem this village had. Moving swiftly and not at all gently, she patted them down for weapons, glad for her gloves. Rank sweat and bad beer and gun oil stung her nose. Stepping back from them with a new collection of knives and two more handguns, she piled the stash on the foot of the bed. “Do you have rope? Can you tie them until an army unit arrives?”

The woman looked as though she wanted to spit again. “What makes you think Razidae’s army cares? What makes you think they will come?” She caressed the cheek of the other woman, a soothing gesture.

Selena reached into a pocket for the familiar feel of her cell phone. “Because I’m going to call them.”

She’d have preferred to call in American troops, but she’d already gotten a glimpse of the reception they’d endure. So she made the call, a short, concise conversation with the American Embassy, informing them of the situation. “Let Razidae’s people know,” she told the embassy warden’s assistant. “And keep me out of it—it’s the last thing any of us needs. I’ll be gone by the time they get here.”

“They’re on alert,” the man told her. “They won’t take long.”

“Neither will I,” Selena assured him.

But she didn’t leave immediately. She selected one of the knives from the bed, the one with the dullest gleam of an edge when she held it up to the light from the room’s single small, high window. The one that would hurt the most—and the one her chosen victim, the man still scrabbling around on the floor trying to find a way to clamp both hands to his bleeding buttock at once and not leave himself entirely vulnerable from the front, had been prepared to use on these women.

She crouched before him, the Beretta held in a deceptively casual grip in the hand that rested on her knee, and gave the knife a speculative look before she turned her gaze on the man.

“Woman,” he said. “American. You are nothing to me. Your people betrayed us.”

Kemeni, all right, even if his tan and green clothing hadn’t given him away. Kemeni, and convinced that the recently deceased Frank Black had been working with the States when he’d supplied the rebels with arms. Instead, Black had done so at the behest of Jonas White, a man who liked to play whole countries as if they were game pieces, and whose name popped up in connection with far too many successful black market ventures.

“My people were never behind you,” Selena told him. “And fortunately for my ego, you’re nothing to me, either.” Except a source of information. “Are you just out to curdle some cheese here, or is there some purpose behind this attack?”

“Our business is not for your ears.”

“Shouldn’t have shot you in the ass,” Selena muttered. “I scrambled your brains.” She gave a meaningful heft of the knife, eyeing various parts of his body in the most obvious way. And then she slid her eyes over to the woman who comforted her sister.

The man took note. His expression grew more stubborn.

“Well, maybe you aren’t Kemeni after all,” she said.

“The Kemenis have honor and purpose—of a sort, anyway. But these women have more honor than you.”

The man’s face darkened; his lips worked. “I spit on your—”

Selena prodded him with the knife in the vicinity of his bloody butt cheek. “Don’t,” she warned him. Then she held the knife out to the woman in the punjabi. When the woman hesitated, Selena gestured with the knife, affirming her intent.

The woman’s fingers wrapped around the hilt to grow white at the knuckles, a grim determination taking over her expression. “No one need know how he died,” she said softly. “They need not know it was I.”

“Might as well pin it on me,” Selena told her. “Although if he answers my questions, perhaps you could settle for scarring him in some way that he would never admit came from a woman’s hand.”

The woman only smiled.

“You cannot expect me to take this seriously!” the wounded man shouted.

Selena had to give him credit. For a man bleeding badly from his tush, his bleeding partner offering nothing but the sullen silence of someone who hopes not to be noticed, he had courage.

Or perhaps he simply truly didn’t understand his situation.

Selena gave him a beatific smile. “I expect you to take it very seriously.” She used her gun to tick off points on the fingers of her other hand. “Point—I speak seriously kickin’ Berzhaani. Point—I’m very good from this end of a gun. Point—Did you see me sweat when I took you boys down? Now take a moment to think. Think hard. What sort of American woman are you likely to find here in the heart of Berzhaan with all these things in her favor?”

Someone to take seriously, that’s who.

He didn’t want to think about it. He wanted to hold on to his self-righteous rage and scorn, glaring at her from deep-set eyes just made for the expression.

“Did the Kemenis send you?” she asked.

He didn’t answer directly—but he looked away. It was enough.

“I gather they didn’t send you to behave like this in particular.” She tapped the muzzle of the Beretta thoughtfully against her knee. The motion kept his attention on the weapon—helped him to realize that this was no lady’s pistol, but a gun of sturdy heft that fit comfortably in her equally sturdy hands. That she wielded it without a second thought. “But here you are, causing trouble in an otherwise unremarkable location. The shrine is fascinating, but not a political touchstone.” And the Kemenis, suddenly bereft of their American benefactor, were desperate. Desperate enough to make a real move on the country’s power base? Her eyes narrowed; for the first time she let a glimpse of her anger show through. “But this is close enough to Suwan to cause alarm…close enough to draw off troops in response.” And I’ve just initiated that by calling in. And now the capital would be more vulnerable to terrorist action.

Again he looked away, trying to hide the subtle retreat with an uncomfortable shift to relieve pressure on his wound.

“You’re a sacrifice,” Selena said. “Contributing to a larger goal….”

Suwan…the embassy…the capitol. One or all of them, the real targets.

He glared again, and the curl returned to his lip as he opened his mouth to say something crude.

She smacked her pistol against his shin, a casual but precise blow that struck the crucial nerves there, numbing his leg with excruciating pain and with very little effort on her part. He made a wordless noise of surprise and gaped as his eyes watered, mouth quickly pursing for more imprecations.

“Don’t,” she said sharply. “Just…don’t.” She exchanged a glance with the woman who now held the knife, saw the uncertainty rising there and straightened.

“I’m not sure,” she said to the woman, “but it might well be that his humiliation is complete without any extra scarring, especially if he were cast out at your doorstep in a pretty bundle for the National troops. It’s entirely up to you, of course. I’m afraid I have to leave now.”

The woman in the chador leaned toward the other, murmuring something worried.

“A boy,” said the first woman. “Did you see—?”

Selena nodded. “I sent him up to the shrine to hide, with the promise I would take all blame for it. I’m sure he’s waiting for you there.”

“Thank you,” said the woman in the chador, sitting for that moment like a queen on her throne instead of a nearly violated woman on her thoroughly rumpled bed. But she could not hide a quivering twitch of her mouth or the tears of relief welling in her eyes.

Selena thought it was her cue to leave. That and the distant sound of helicopter blades thumping the air. She emerged from the house with caution, the automatic gunfire still clear in her memory—but either no one else had intended to come to this far end of the town, or the arriving troops had caught their attention. She made it to her Russian Moskvich sedan without incident, folding herself into the driver’s seat with the Beretta in easy reach. She hoped to swing around the village and make it into Suwan without any trouble—but if trouble came along, she’d be ready for it.

She had to reach the embassy. She had to warn the ambassador…and she had to warn Berzhaan.

The Kemenis were rising.

Chapter 2

Colin Jones slung his duffel through the door of the modest D.C. condo he shared with Selena. Modest by choice and lifestyle as opposed to financial restrictions, even here in this area of off-the-chart living expenses. But…

Maybe that would change soon, if Selena became pregnant as they hoped. Maybe their silk plants and collection of sleek sight hound statuary would make way for the real things. Green, growing things. Warm loyalty and four-legged companionship to round out a home that also held the laughter of a family.

Not that it would be easy. He and Lena had already experienced enough rocky moments to be realistic about what lay ahead and even then she hadn’t known half the things he’d kept from her in recent months. Things he wouldn’t tell her, things he couldn’t tell her. Decisions she’d never understand…some decisions he didn’t like to think about. But she hadn’t known those things, and she’d recommitted to the marriage, recommitting to each other…and immersing themselves in a few brief weeks of passion-filled nights before duty called and Cole had gone off on a long-term assignment, hoping Selena would soon find a posting nearby.

But as he took his first step into the condo, he knew Lena wasn’t here. Damn. He’d all but felt her arms around him, her hands sneaking beneath his waistband to tug up his shirt and—

Nothing but frustration at the end of those thoughts.

The silence of the apartment surrounded him. The stuffy air, scented with undisturbed spice candles. The faint layer of dust settled over the empty table next to the door where their mail tended to pile up when they were home. A glance into their small living room showed no sign of legal briefs, no sign of Lena’s latest fiction favorites. Just the cream and maroon tones of the rug, curtains and furniture—a color scheme that had been a compromise between her desire for cool and clean decor and his own need for bold.

The kitchen…not a crumb on the counter. The bedroom…neatly tidied, not so much as a stray sock or one of those hair scrunchies Lena tended to lose track of—and though Cole was much more casual about such things than she, Lena had never obsessed about tidiness, either. Not when she was relaxed and happy. A glance back at the living room revealed the very same quilt square on the wall as had been there two months earlier.

Left not long after I did, did you? For she had an entire collection, and rather than spread them out over the austere walls she rotated them on a monthly basis—while the rest of the walls remained uncluttered, a testament to their struggle to merge their styles. The casual, assertive operative who approached life in the fast and loose lane, and the FBI legate with a lawyer’s precise, compartmentalized brain.

Not for the first time, he wished he could see her in action—in real action—to get a glimpse of that side of her. The side that would expose the ferocity of her will and her ability to take whatever the situation pitched at her.

It had to be there. Somewhere. It had to be, or she wouldn’t still be alive.

He tore himself away from his thoughts to realize he’d left the door open. Cole nudged the duffel aside so he could close himself in. And with Lena out there somewhere, putting this door between them definitely left him closed in.

It’s not like this has never happened before. Time to find the note, the one they always left each other. Time to disabuse the uneasiness growing somewhere in the pit of his stomach, spreading to become tension between his shoulder blades. Lena’s notes always gave him ease, made his inward tension relax to match his outward appearance.

He knew the things people said of him; he cultivated those things. He sowed the seeds for his own reputation as the laid-back charmer who took each mission on the fly, improvising his way to last-moment success. Even Lena bought into it, not truly realizing how important she was to him, in how many ways…all the little things, like her notes. They were the one place she cast aside her lawyer persona for pure silliness—catching him up on the gossip around their condo, informing him how much their silk plants had grown since he was last home, drawing him stick figure versions of her latest adventures in D.C. living. And of course…the challenge of finding the always-hidden note in the first place.

Except…there it was, right out on the kitchen counter, one corner tucked beneath the gleaming white toaster. A sheet torn carefully from a five-by-eight pad of lined yellow paper, inscribed with a few sentences in her neatest hand.

Cole—had an unexpected call to Berzhaan. Things are pretty tense there. I’ll let you know more as I can—check your e-mail.

No stick figure. No silliness. Only a sweeping S. Something’s wrong.

But she couldn’t possibly know—

Very wrong.

Selena blew past the clean, modern outer ring of Suwan, where the post-Soviet restoration efforts prevailed. Approaching the center of the city, she maneuvered through the now-familiar streets into ancient Berzhaan, an area full of impressive stone architecture, and of old fortress walls that came from nowhere and disappeared into nothingness, no longer anything but pieces of their former glory. The streets turned cobbled, the alleys narrowed, and the thick feel of history hung in the air. Here, some of the oldest buildings had given way to Soviet manpower, leaving in their wake impressive new buildings of state. The capitol building was one such; the American embassy a much smaller version of the same, several blocks away.

She drove the Moskvich around the back of the embassy, returning it to the motor pool with a haste that drew the curiosity of the young Berzhaani who took the keys, and entered the embassy through a back door for which few had the special high-security key card. A glance at her watch confirmed her tardiness for her two o’clock appointment with the ambassador and the prime minister. She kicked her pace into a jog, soundless over the luxuriously thick carpeting, and went straight to the ambassador’s office in spite of her appearance, pulling off her head scarf along the way. The details of the embassy—trappings both American and Berzhaani—flashed past in a familiar blur, barely noticed.

Had anything been changed, that she would have noticed.

She pulled up short outside the open door of the ambassador’s outer office. Bonita Chavez looked up from her desk with disapproval deepening the lines of features that had been generous before middle-age and now seemed entrenched in making themselves even more obvious. She glanced at the classy silver and oak clock on the wall. “You’re late.”

Stern or not, Bonita didn’t worry Selena; along with her duties as the ambassador’s civil service admin, she seemed to have taken on mother-hen duties. Beneath her current frown lived worry, not anger, and Selena already harbored affection for her.

“I ran into a little trouble.” Selena stepped into the office. “Can I go in?”

“He’s waiting for you. You can rest assured he knows you’ve arrived.” Bonita’s gaze raked her up and down, looking for telltales of Selena’s “little trouble.”

“All one piece,” Selena told her, opening her coat wide for quick inspection and, as she’d intended, causing Bonita to bite her far-too-crimson lipstick against a smile. Selena forced herself to walk across a carpet of stunning workmanship—she always had to force herself to walk on the beauty of Sekha-made carpets—and rapped her knuckles against the dark, heavy wood door of the ambassador’s inner office before pushing it open.

Ambassador Allori looked up from his computer monitor. “Do I guess correctly that you had something to do with that call that came through the embassy, requesting troops at Oguzka?”

“The Kemenis—”

“Yes, yes.” He cut her off, frowned at his monitor and tapped a key in response, and simultaneously swept a stiff sheet of paper off his desk to hold out to her.

“You’ll find this of interest, I think, though you hardly have time to read it. You don’t have time to change, either—I doubt Mr. Razidae will be disposed to notice. But you’ll want to wash your face. It’s got someone’s blood on it. Not yours, I presume.”

Bonita! She’d seen it, surely. She’d let Selena go on in without alerting her to clean up, and with an admirable lack of telltale expression at that.

On the other hand, perhaps it was done as a favor. Allori could hardly refute the evidence that her delay had been for significant reasons.

“No, sir.” She took the paper, recognizing the letterhead of the embassy warden. “Not the least bit mine.”

He gave her a moment to glance at the text, which bore the header Surge in Kemeni Rebel Activity:

The Department of State advises American citizens in Berzhaan to take prudent steps to ensure their personal safety in the coming days. Remain vigilantly aware of surroundings, avoid crowds and demonstrations….

Selena could not help a soft snort. Too late. Already been there, done that.

If Allori heard, he gave no sign of it. No doubt he, too, knew the value of keeping American personnel at an official distance from such…demonstrations. “I’m glad you’re back,” he said, which was as close as he’d get to referring to the Oguzka activity. “Now…we leave in less than fifteen minutes. Can you be back here in ten?”

Selena returned the warden notice to his desk and murmured, “See you in eight, Mr. Ambassador.” She turned on her heel, using her long legs to full advantage and mounting the back stairwell in twos and threes rather than waiting for the elevator to the third floor embassy staff housing. Selena’s chosen apartment, tucked in a back corner, caught sun through two windows and offered an amazing view of the Caspian Sea. Probably a mistake, given the way it reminded her of Cole’s eyes.

Sometimes the lake shone an impossible blue, and sometimes the undercurrents turned it a murkier blue-green, but she didn’t take time to check today’s color. For that matter, she didn’t even take the time to remove her coat. She eyed the bathroom mirror, removing the faint smear of blood to which Allori had referred. She removed her knives, knowing she’d have to face a metal detector at the capitol, and then dumped a few extra clips for her Beretta into her coat pocket. The gun and clips would be left at the capitol building’s sign-in desk, but given what she’d already encountered today, she didn’t intend to go out on the street unprepared.

As for the rest of it…she brushed a damp washcloth futilely over a smudge of…something…on her khakis, and ran it over her leather and nylon mesh hiking boots to remove the dust of the day. She applied a quick, light coat of foundation and a subtle smudge of kohl around the outer edges of slightly tilted eyes, knowing it would echo the look to which the prime minister was accustomed. She tackled her hair, pulling a brush through the tangles the wind had left beneath the scarf, giving herself a critical stare. Time for a cut. If she let it grow too far below her shoulders, the strong, lean bones of her face seemed stronger, leaner…she preferred to keep it short enough to square up her jaw and soften a strong chin with its hint of a cleft.

Three minutes remaining and she counted herself ready to go, except for a quick glance at her automatically downloaded e-mail as she closed her laptop up, her briefcase already to hand.

She wished she hadn’t.

E-mail from Cole.

Finally.

She knew she’d stopped breathing. Forced herself to begin again. There was no way to look at the message now. No way to look at it until she was through with work for the day.

The next one down in the list was another matter. Delphi.

Delphi was Selena’s contact at Oracle, and Oracle…

Oracle was a name Selena never said out loud. The elite intelligence-gathering organization predated Homeland Security, and now quietly provided backup. Oracle crossed agency lines to garner intel, a cross-check system designed to prevent terrorist disasters…and then they acted on it when no one else could or would. Selena suspected her invitation to join Oracle’s clandestine efforts was another legacy of her days at the Athena Academy. The organization, its methods and goals…it tasted strongly of Athena.

Alerted by the subject header—Kemeni—as much as the sender, Selena accepted that she’d be late to the ambassador’s office and opened the e-mail. Even so, she had time for no more than a glance.

A glance was all it took.

Chapter 3

But the e-mail warning hadn’t stopped Allori, only delayed them a few more crucial moments while he listened to Selena’s concerns. And then he’d issued a few quick orders and they’d headed for the Berzhaan capitol.

Late, late and later.

With one careful finger, Selena rubbed the bridge of her nose, not sure if she should have had lunch or if she actually regretted having breakfast. The scene in the lobby of the Berzhaan capitol building momentarily swam in her vision—but the moment passed and then the situation was all too clear: if they’d arrived on time, they would have gotten here before this busload of excited but respectful college students. Their bright winter coats would have proclaimed them foreigners if the quick whispers in English hadn’t; Selena heard all manner of accents, from American to Canadian to British. They clustered around the reception desk, trickling through the weapons detector arch one by one.

She and Ambassador Allori weren’t the only displaced arrivals. Off to the side, two smiling Berzhaani women—modern women in neat business suits and modest heels, uncovered by either chador or hijab—watched the procession with patience, while a tall Berzhaani man in a designer casual jacket over silk had a distractedly pleased expression. He was worth a second look, sleek and groomed and all cutting edges, his dark complexion giving him the same smoldering good looks that had earned Omar Sharif a generation and more of worshippers. He caught Selena’s gaze and raised an eyebrow; the gesture revealed more than he probably ever imagined. Regardless of his trendy appearance, her directness had surprised him, and to some extent offended him—but he saw nothing wrong with letting his gaze linger on her in return, judging her too-casual dress and her edgy red-piped, black leather coat, appreciating her long legs and the way that same tailored coat revealed her figure.

She gave him the slightest of nods, turned away with an ease that probably also offended him and considered the best way to discreetly cut the line.

She didn’t have to. The uniformed man behind the standing height lobby desk glimpsed Selena through the crowd, and then spotted the slightly shorter ambassador. He raised a hand high, gesturing to the familiar guard at the security arch. With practiced ease, the guard created a break in the line and then nodded at the ambassador. Selena followed, automatically sorting through the young people they pushed past, hunting potential threats.

There weren’t any, of course. Just a slew of impressed and curious expressions. Who are they? Why are they getting special treatment? One bold young man gave her the same appreciative once-over she’d just gotten from the Berzhaani man near the entrance, albeit with none of the finesse. The visual equivalent of hey, baby.

Selena smiled at him, a knowing smile, and it startled him into a blush; he hadn’t expected to get caught. Blond hair, blue eyes; he could have been Cole a dozen years earlier. Except Cole wouldn’t have been caught.

Wrong. Cole had been caught.

A young woman poked the bold young man’s arm in silent vigor, blushing even harder than her friend…and sweetheart? Selena thought she saw a flash of jealousy in those wide-set eyes. She turned away, back to business, leaving the young woman a little space for dignity—and already methodically pulling her briefcase shoulder strap free, stripping herself of her gun and ejecting the clip to hand it over to the guard along with the extra magazines. As an afterthought she pulled the knife from the special inside sheath she’d had sewn into the coat. “Sorry,” she said. “I meant to get that one before we left.”

She thought she heard a stifled noise from her bold young admirer. Bit off more than you could chew, eh? She met the amusement in the guard’s eyes as he placed her things in a small lockbox and set them aside for retrieval upon exit, and then performed a quick scan on her black leather satchel briefcase. Within moments they’d passed through the security check, where one of the capitol’s nameless gofers met them with a smile and apologized for the delay as if Selena and Allori hadn’t been late in the first place. As the young man escorted them toward the prime minister’s office, he nodded at a hallway that led in the opposite direction. “We’re hosting a casual reception this afternoon. The college students, as you saw. And others to meet them, from the government and some of our own learning institutions.”

Selena glanced down the hall in question, finding a bustle of people in dignified dark green jackets such as their escort’s, pushing serving carts into position and pouring water into crystal glasses. A brief, loud argument between one of the capitol’s gofers and a cook took over the hallway just long enough for a woman in an exotic punjabi trouser-dress to intervene. The events coordinator. Selena had seen her before, though she’d never been in that part of the embassy herself. The chaotic nature of the event troubled her; she wished she knew more about it.

But then, she wasn’t here as the ambassador’s bodyguard.

Allori himself showed no sign of worry on his face—a round face made even more so by the extra weight he carried. He smiled at their escort. “I recall reading about the reception. Excellent idea.”

Their escort nodded. He, too, was of dark complexion, an olive cast as opposed to the rich brown tones of the Berzhaani in the lobby. Small, unimposing and unremarkable, he played his role with quiet perfection—drawing no undue attention, making or taking no easy offense. “If the young people of other countries see how forward-thinking we are…then we will have no need to change their minds when they are older.” He stopped beside an open door and gestured them in. “The prime minister begs your pardon, but was unable to avoid tending other matters. He’ll be with you as soon as possible.”

Selena didn’t need a translation. You were late, and he had to move on to other things. She nodded her thanks and followed Allori into the room—a lush room, the floor soft with a Sekha carpet over the wall-to-wall beneath, the wood accents of ceiling and trim dark and gleaming. A neat serving cart of wrought iron sat against the wall, offering everything from ice water to the finest leaf tea. Allori set his briefcase on one of the round-bottomed chairs and helped himself to some tea, fixing it in familiar ritual as Selena prowled the edges of the small room. He said, “You must have had an interesting morning. You’re as jumpy as I’ve ever seen you.”

She frowned at him. The room was undoubtedly bugged, and he was too experienced to have forgotten it.

He looked up from the steeping tea, the corners of his eyes crinkled slightly. Did she or did she not, he seemed to ask, want the prime minister to have terrorism on his mind—as well as the need to cooperate while countering it?

Selena sighed, closing her eyes in apology. The truth was, she was jumpy. And she had good reason. Following Allori’s lead, she spoke frankly. “I wish you’d taken my warning a little more seriously.”

“A warning with no specific source?” He waved her off.

“It’s my job to gather just such warnings,” she reminded him, arms crossed even with the briefcase dangling from one hand.

“Yes. Of course it is. And I’ll consider it later this afternoon, by which time you should have even more information for me.”

“You yourself showed me the warden’s notice—”

He dangled the tea egg a few times, then laid it neatly aside. “And I’ve taken it into account. Bonita’s packing her bags as we speak. We’ll make do with a skeleton staff for now.”

“Ambassador—” Selena rubbed the bridge of her nose again, right above the little bump Cole liked so much. Don’t think about Cole. Fatigue washed over her in a startling rush, turning her stomach. She closed her mouth on indiscreet words, a reiteration of the warning from Oracle—the alarming intel from the CIA, along with other military and agency listening posts with which an FBI legate such as Selena should have no direct connection. Word that the Kemeni rebels were indeed desperate in the wake of their lost faux U.S. support—that they had to grab power now, or concede it forever.

There were reports of skirmishes, of dead Berzhaani citizens and one major bombing. The Kemenis had acted as if jabbed with a cattle prod, from quiescence in the shocked wake of Frank Black’s death to powerful intent.

Selena doubted the cheerful college students had so much as a clue of Berzhaan’s suddenly increased unrest. She herself knew only through Delphi—and the luck to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time this morning. Off to the shrine to seek peace of mind, and she’d found only violence.

“Selena?” Allori set his teacup in the saucer, brow drawing together. “Are you quite all right?”

And just like that, she wasn’t. Just like that, her stomach spasmed beyond even her iron control, and she blurted “Excuse me!” and bolted from the room, briefcase clutched in her hand. She remembered the bathroom as a barely marked door down the hall and only hoped she was right as she slammed it open. Thank God. Most of the room was a blur but she honed in on an open stall door, grateful for the lavish, updated fixture—

Better than a hole in the floor. Been there, done that.

And when she leaned back against the marbleized stall wall, marveling at the sudden violence her system had wreaked upon her, the thought flashed unbidden and unexpected through her mind: we were trying to start a family.

No. Not here, not now. Not with Cole half a world away and an even bigger emotional gap between them. She knew he hid things from her; she’d thought she could live with that. Maybe not. Selena clenched down on her thoughts the same way she’d tried to clench down on her stomach and stumbled out to the pristine sink to crank the cold water on full and splash her face and rinse her mouth. She raised her head to find herself in the gilt-edged mirror, deathly pale, deep blue-green eyes bewildered—and then those eyes widened and she dashed back to the toilet.

When she lifted her head again, her trembling hand numbly reaching to flush the toilet, she didn’t have the strength to make it to the sink. She reeled a clumsy length of tissue from the dispenser and sat against the marble partition, overwhelmingly grateful for the impeccably clean nature of the capitol. She scrubbed her mouth and chin and then the thought came again: we were trying to start a family.

Maybe they had.

Selena, only remotely in touch with the members of her divorce-torn family, had never had any heartwarming chats about pregnancy. Not with friends, not with her sisters-in-law, not with her coworkers. But she’d never gotten the impression that morning sickness—whenever it came—was quite this vigorous. Violent, even.

Maybe she’d just eaten the wrong thing for breakfast. Or maybe she’d finally have to admit to herself that in spite of her cool, collected self-image, once her emotions hit a certain amount of turmoil, her digestive system often did the same.

She had to know. To know. First chance, she’d hit the little store that catered to the diplomatic staff and she’d get herself one of those little sticks and she’d pee on it. It didn’t matter that her period was a little late; that meant nothing. She was notoriously irregular when she traveled. Not until she had the little stick would she know for sure.

And then what?

She climbed to her feet, heading for the sink on wobbly legs. There she repeated the rinse-and-spit routine, unable to get the acrid taste of her sickness from the back of her throat. When she dared to look at her image again, she found that it reflected what she felt: she looked stronger, less green. This particular storm, whatever the cause, was over.

And then what?

What if she was pregnant in a strife-torn Berzhaan, her estranged husband not even knowing he was estranged? Theoretically he was still deeply undercover in wherever it was that he’d gone, unable to do more than send a sporadic e-mail or two. Theoretically.

Except she’d seen him in D.C.

Kissing someone else.

And now he’d sent her e-mail from his home address—and she hadn’t even had time to read it. But just looking at it confirmed that the one stable, steady thing they’d had between them in their four years of unspoken secrets and long absences was no longer stable or steady at all. That maybe it never had been.

No, no reason for emotional turmoil, not in the least.

Usually she and Cole managed to maintain steady communication when their jobs separated them. But this particular assignment had been a dark one, dark enough that if something happened to him, she’d learn only that he’d died in an auto accident while traveling. The dark assignments came along now and then, especially with the contract employees like Cole. With a two-year re-up on contract employees, the CIA station chiefs were willing to push them to the edge of burnout. It had damaged Cole and Selena’s marriage, in spite of their mutual understanding of the unique stresses in each of their careers. It had damaged Selena’s trust in Cole, watching him switch ably from role to role, ducking questions and hiding nightmares until she couldn’t help but wonder if their marriage was just one of the many parts he played.

Not that it surprised her. In her world, families didn’t stay together. People went their own ways when relationships became difficult, whether beset upon by emotional or logistical problems. She and Cole had overcome all manner of logistical difficulties—long-term assignments in different countries, frequent travel, the occasional international crisis. Recently she’d even thought he’d been lost…and afterward, they’d renewed their commitment to one another. Made up in a big way, celebrating the things they loved about one another, the ineffable chemistry that Selena’s ordered mind had never come close to explaining.

Even now she could feel it. Leaning against this sink with her throat burning and legs still weak, she could close her eyes and see the way he looked at her, remember the way he touched her…and yearn for him.

She just didn’t know if she could forgive him. Live with him.

And then what?

If she was pregnant…she’d have to stay here long enough to stabilize this new legate’s office, in spite of the unrest. And then she’d have to go home…she’d have to tell Cole. To decide if she trusted him, or if she’d merely contribute to the long line of broken branches in her family tree.

And if this is any taste of things to come, I’ll have to carry around a barf bag wherever I go.

The water still trickled. She scooped another handful into her mouth, held it and spit it out. Her eyes stung, sympathetic to her throat. It wasn’t until she coughed, short and sharp, that she stiffened—and realized that the uncomfortable tang wasn’t coming from her abused throat, but from the air she breathed.

Tear gas.

Trickling in from the street outside? From somewhere in the building?

Damn. Damn, damn, damn.

Selena jammed used tissue into the trash, grabbed her briefcase and took a deep, steadying breath, pulling herself away from the emotional wallops of the what-ifs and dropping back into the calm, cool world of black and white—of this end of the gun versus the other.

Except she didn’t have a gun, and she didn’t have her knives.

Maybe she wouldn’t need them. Listening at the bathroom door revealed only silence, and she peeked out. The smoke hung thickly in the abandoned hallway. Selena ducked back inside, took another deep breath—this one to hold—and eased out into the hallway, running silently to the waiting room she’d left so precipitously only moments before.

Empty. Allori’s teacup lay broken on the floor, tea soaking the priceless carpet.

Son of a bitch.

The door leading to the prime minister’s office stood slightly ajar, and Selena made for it, her chest starting to ache for air. But breathing meant coughing, and coughing meant being found.

She didn’t intend to be found until she understood the situation. If then.

Razidae’s office proved to be empty, as well, the luxurious rolling office chair askew at the desk, papers on the floor, the private phone out of its sleek-lined cradle—and the air relatively clear. Selena closed the door, grateful for the old, inefficient heating system, and inhaled as slowly as she could, muffling the single cough she couldn’t avoid.

All right, then. The building was full of tear gas, the dignitaries were gone—and Selena had somehow missed it all.

They could have blown the building out from under you while you were throwing up and you wouldn’t have noticed.

Unless Allori and Razidae had simply gone to check out the tear gas and any attendant ruckus. In which case they could be caught up in it. Whatever it was.

Think, Selena. She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes and calmed the chaotic mess of her mind. She could call for help from here—Razidae’s private line might have an in-use indicator at his secretary’s desk, but it wouldn’t show up on any of the other phone systems, so she wouldn’t give her presence away by picking it up.

But there was no point in calling until she understood the situation. No doubt the authorities were already alerted. If she were near an outside window, she might even hear sirens—but Razidae’s office was in the protected interior, the only other exit leading to his secretary’s office. No, no point in calling. At least, not yet. But she would take this office as her possible home base, with its private phone line and its private location. Razidae was a prime minister who came prepared. All his resistance to U.S. overtures of assistance with Berzhaan’s counterterrorism program hadn’t been because of his denial that the problem existed. Rather that after years of having his country pulled this way and that, sovereignty lost, he wanted to maintain Berzhaan’s independence in all aspects of administration.

Selena couldn’t really blame him. But she wished he’d been a little more receptive. Maybe they’d have prevented this day’s events.

You still don’t know what’s going on.

Well, then, she told herself. Let’s find out.

Selena laid her briefcase on the desk, thumbed the token combination lock and flipped the leather flap open. She’d left her laptop behind in favor of her tablet PC, and the briefcase looked a little forlorn…a little empty.

Not much to work with. No Beretta, no extra clip, no knives…

Maybe she wouldn’t need them. Maybe by the time she discovered what had happened, it would actually be over.

Nonetheless, she took a quick survey: cell phone, battery iffy; she turned it off and left it behind. A handful of pens, mostly fine point. She tucked several into her back pocket. A new pad of sticky notes. A nail file, also worthy of pocket space. Her Buck pocketknife, three blades of discreet mayhem, yet not big enough to alarm the security guards. It earned a grim smile and a spot in her front pocket. A spare AC unit for her laptop, which garnered a thoughtful look and ended up stuffed into the big side pocket of her leather duster. A small roll of black electrician’s tape. A package of cheese crackers—

Selena closed her eyes, aiming willpower at her rebellious stomach. I don’t have time for you, she told it. Without looking, she set the crinkly package aside, and then surveyed the remaining contents of the briefcase. A legal pad and a folder full of confidential documents. She supposed she could inflict some pretty powerful paper cuts. A few mints and some emergency personal supplies she wasn’t likely to need if she was actually pregnant.

No flak vest, no Rambo knife, not even a convenient flare pistol.

Then again, there was no telling what she might find with a good look around the capitol. Almost anything was a weapon if you used it right.

Selena jammed the rejected items back in her briefcase, automatically locking it. She tucked it inside the foot well of Razidae’s desk and checked to see that she’d left no sign of her presence—except there were those crackers….

She made a dive for the spiffy executive wastebasket beside the desk, hunched over with dry heaves. Mercifully, they didn’t last long. And afterward, as she rose on once-again shaky legs and poured herself a glass of the ice water tucked away on a marble-topped stand in the corner, she tried to convince herself that it was over. That she could go out and assess the situation without facing the heaves during an inopportune moment. That it was over, because over meant she’d eaten something that didn’t suit her and not that she’d added pregnancy to this volatile mix of Cole’s infidelity and Berzhaan’s turmoil.

She dumped the rest of the water into a lush potted plant that probably didn’t need the attention, wiped out the glass and returned it to its spot. She very much hoped that she’d creep out to find an embarrassed guard and an accidentally discharged tear gas gun. Then she could stroll up with her pens and her pocketknife tucked away, as calm and cool as though she hadn’t been heaving in Razidae’s wastebasket moments before.

A stutter of muted automatic gunfire broke the silence.

So much for that idea. Selena’s heart, already pounding from her illness, kicked into a brief stutter of overtime that matched the rhythm of the gunfire. “All right, baby,” she said to her potential little passenger, pulling her fine wool scarf from her coat pocket and soaking it in the pitcher. “Get ready to rock and roll.”

But as she reached for the doorknob, she hesitated. She could be risking more than her own life if she ran out into the thick of things now. As far as she knew, whoever had pulled the trigger of that rifle didn’t even know she existed. She could ride things out here with her lint-filled water and her cheese crackers.

Or she could be found and killed, or the building could indeed blow up around her, or whoever’d fired those shots could succeed in their disruptive goal, and Selena and her theoretical little one could be trapped in a rioting, war-torn Berzhaan. She closed her eyes, her mind suddenly full of images of frightened students and dead capitol workers and a dead Allori. She closed her eyes hard.

It really wasn’t any choice at all.

Chapter 4

The smoke settled toward the floor in the long hallway. Selena’s eyes watered above the damp scarf, but not so much that she couldn’t see. The hallway was all hers. She hoped it stayed that way.

If she did this right, she’d complete her prowling unseen; she’d have an idea where Ambassador Allori had ended up and how Prime Minister Razidae had fared. She’d find the college students and even the arrogant Berzhaani businessman from the lobby.

And she’d find the Kemeni rebels.

Steady there. She didn’t know the Kemenis were behind this.

Yes. I do.

On this side of the five-story capitol, the prime minister and his cabinet members generally went about their business, addressing the problems of a nation with a tumultuous past. On the other side, ceremonies and social functions filled a dining-ballroom so grandly exotic it would have suited a Russian czar—and, given the country’s past annexation, might have once done just that. The kitchens, the maintenance, even a detention area…all on that side of the building. Somewhere.

With some fervency, Selena wished that just once, she’d had a chance to glimpse a blueprint of the capitol. The CIA probably had one…but they hadn’t shared, and though she had a request in with Oracle, Delphi hadn’t yet come through. For now, Selena was on her own.

All too literally.

She decided to start with the lobby. Moving carefully through the halls, silently over the carpet on her rubber-soled lightweight hikers…she spent long moments listening before she turned corners, stifling the constant impulse to cough and keeping a firm mental control over her unhappy but quiescent stomach. She found signs of struggle—pictures knocked askew, a coffee cup shattered against the wall, stains splashed across creamy paint…even a smudge or two of blood, a handprint where someone had reached out for support. As an undertone to the tear gas, the equally acrid smell of gunpowder grew stronger.

When she peered around the final corner and into the unfolding delta of the lobby, she winced. The faint haze of remaining tear gas couldn’t hide the aftermath of the struggle, wasn’t strong enough to cover the visceral smell of blood and death. One guard sprawled before the security arch, his face missing. Selena couldn’t see the other, though she heard noises from behind the standing desk where he’d been. Still alive?

Behind the desk…that’s where her gun had been stored, in its own lockbox. She took a step around the corner, exposing herself. She might as well be as naked as she felt; she was just as vulnerable. She eyed the semiautomatic pistol in the dead guard’s hand. Any thoughts she had of going for the weapon vanished as she saw the slide jutting back. He’d emptied it at someone.

Or maybe just at the bullet-riddled wall on his way down.

She could still grab it. She might find ammo if she could locate the security office. But she’d prefer her own familiar weapon, so she took a few more silent steps toward the counter and the rustling noises behind it, the occasional grunt. Her hand dipped into her pocket, her fingers twisting in the cords for the laptop AC adaptor. David and Goliath.

She figured she was stamped as David in this particular scenario.

As she reached for the sleek granite desk edge, fingertips hovering and ready to support her as she leaned over, a man popped up from the other side. His bearded face reflected astonishment; he dropped a handful of booty and scrambled to bring up his rifle, catching the muzzle brake on the inner structure of the desk. Selena jerked her hand from her pocket, whipped the chunky little AC adaptor over her head once to gather momentum and slung it against the man’s temple. Down he went, falling with a strangely soft landing.

Selena pushed off against the desk, levering herself up to crouch atop it, ready to follow through—to scrabble over the rifle if she had to. But the man lay awkwardly on top of the dead guard from whom he’d been pilfering, the rifle out of reach.

And David wins again. Selena didn’t let regret for the dead guard slow her down. Time to grab a weapon—the Abakan rifle, an obvious if puzzling Kemeni favorite, or the lockbox with her gun, or the guard’s gun…she didn’t care. But shouted alarm warned her; she looked up in time to see green-and-tan-clad figures rounding the corner out of the hallway opposite her own approach path. She instantly dived for escape back the way she’d come, just barely rolling into the movement as she hit the floor. Gunfire exploded into the silence; wood chips and plaster spit through the air. Selena rolled with purpose until she hit the wall and scrambled to her feet, shouting, “Grenade!” as she flung the adaptor in their direction.

They didn’t stop to think why she’d warn them; they only reacted to the word, flinching and ducking as the adaptor bounced at their feet. It only took them an instant to realize the black device was not a grenade, not even a unique new American grenade—but by then Selena had thrown herself around the corner and driven out into a long-legged sprint. On her way past a stairwell she slammed the door open hard enough to hit the wall behind it but never hesitated, retracing her steps to make the next turn before they gathered themselves to charge the hallway in her wake. In moments she found the waiting room from whence she’d come, hesitating only long enough to leave the door open just the way she’d found it the first time. She dashed through to the prime minister’s office, grabbed her briefcase against the faint possibility that they’d trace her steps this far and headed out to his admin’s office. There she quickly rifled the desk drawers, ignoring the keyboard and flat panel screen monitor that had been slung across the room as well as the tea spilled across the desk. She hoped for but didn’t expect to find a weapon and found more reasonable treasure instead: a ring of keys.

Enough time spent; the echoes of frustrated shouts came faintly through the waiting room on the other side of Razidae’s office. Selena ran out into a hall that ran parallel to the one she’d just left, heading for the set of stairs that logic told her would be opposite those on the other side and taking them two at a time when she found them. All the way to the fourth floor, where the secondary residences filled the space. Guests, dignitaries, distant family members…here they lived. A fumbling game of find-the-key finally netted her entrance, and she eased halfway into the hall, not ready to commit herself yet. She didn’t think the Kemenis would be up here just yet—they hadn’t had enough time to secure all the public space—but she took nothing for granted. She hesitated, taking her breathing back down, listening and watching.

If anyone hid here, they were—quite wisely—still hiding. Selena let the door close behind her, making sure it latched as silently as possible, and then turned in the direction that would take her back above the ballroom, moving at a more cautious and sedate pace.

She had no doubt there’d be plenty of time for more running later.

Chapter 5

“No,” Cole said into the phone, more firmly than he should and less firmly than he wanted. “I just got back. I’ve got something going on here, and I’m not going anywhere until it’s settled.” He wrapped the damp towel around his neck, a match to the one tucked around his hips, and barely listened to the persistent voice in his ear. Given the frequency with which Selena checked e-mail, he should have heard from her by now. He should have had an answer to his simple, straightforward question.

What’s wrong?

“No,” he said again, this time with a sharp shake of his head that his caller would have known to heed had he seen it. “Even if you couldn’t do without me on this, you owe me. You’d never have uncovered that budding little problem without me—hell, you’d never even have known about it. And who else do you have who can switch-hit with the FBI so easily? So back off, Sarge.”

The man wasn’t a sergeant. But in an organization where rank was rarely assigned, the nickname served its purpose.

“Yeah, okay.” Cole pulled the towel away from his neck, idly rubbing it across his still-damp chest, and glanced into the living room where he’d left the television on. Special news flash, generic sort of logo that meant whatever had happened was either too new or too unimportant to have its own catchy headline name. “I’ll be in touch at this number. It goes where I go, right? But don’t be surprised if I answer from Berzhaan.”

That got a little snort of disbelief, a warning to watch his ass if he even looked at that part of the world, and an abrupt sign-off that left Cole looking at his phone in bemusement. Berzhaan wasn’t vacationland, but the FBI wouldn’t have sent Selena into a war zone.

Especially not now. Not when he had a marriage to fix—and needed the chance to do it.

Except he looked up from the phone to find a map of that small country on the television with a dramatic arrow pointing at Suwan; the image flipped to an imposing building with barricades all around it, emergency and military vehicles beyond that, and an ambulance speeding away from the outside edge of it all. Berzhaan was the special news flash. Berzhaan and a sudden surge of violence across the country, killing people, destroying their livelihoods. “No one knows the Kemenis’ exact goals or what drove them to this move just when their arms dried up…” And the building was the Berzhaan capitol, only a few blocks from the embassy out of which Selena worked. The embassy that had apparently been evacuated as soon as the siege of the capitol began.

Then where’s Selena?

Selena pinned her hopes on finding a master key on the stolen key ring, and sighed with relief when the fourth key she tried snicked neatly into the well-lubricated lock of the room at the end of the guest quarters hall. No one answered her quiet knock, but she found the room littered with signs of use and tried the next door down.

This room looked ready for guests—or at least, ready to be ready. There were no flowers on the table in the suite’s first room, and when she found the bedroom she didn’t see any dents on the pillow. But it was clean and ready for whatever final touches were deemed appropriate for its next occupant.

She didn’t intend to stay here long. Sooner or later the Kemenis would do a room-to-room search, rounding up anyone they might have missed the first time through. She’d give them enough time to settle down…but not so much they’d entirely have their act together. And even though her inclination to rush down and check out the situation drove at her, she forced herself to brew a cup of tea from the supplies in the kitchenette. Her stomach hadn’t been more than grumbly, but tea might well calm it further.

And then she sat cross-legged on the floor on the opposite side of a plush chair, giving herself a good view of the double-locked door while remaining discreetly tucked away, her briefcase at her side. She sipped tea and she considered the situation and how little she knew of it so far. Kemenis. They seemed to have based themselves in the public part of the capitol. The ballroom, perhaps, where the students would have been. She still needed to discover their intent. If they were holding hostages, to what purpose? What demands would they make…and how soon would they start killing people to achieve those demands?

For the Kemenis had never demonstrated a reluctance to kill people.

Quiet moments later, Selena set aside the tea, pulling her knees up to briefly rest her forehead there. Her stomach felt better…soothed. Her mind still whirled with unanswered questions—was she actually, truly pregnant? So hard to tell with her whimsical cycles…Had Cole actually, truly faked an assignment to have an affair? So hard to tell with his astonishing ability to play the moment…to play people.

But it shouldn’t have been. She should have just known. And he was sending e-mail from their home computer, returned sooner than expected. Not surprisingly—he obviously hadn’t had far to travel. Selena pulled her phone from the leather pocket on the side of her briefcase and turned it on. Its pale blue LED screen informed her she had voice mail, and that she had less than half the battery life left. She stared at it, tempted.

No. She’d wait until she had answers to her other questions—the Kemenis’ intentions, their manpower.

Answers it was just about time to find out.

In her hand, the phone vibrated. Selena jumped, chided herself for being nervy and checked the incoming number.

Cole. Of course it was Cole; the message was probably his, too. It’d been forty-five minutes, maybe even an hour since the Kemenis had made their move on the capitol. By now CNN had a live feed going. He’d be expecting to find her at the embassy…and he’d be wrong.

The phone gave another hopeful vibration, and this time Selena thumbed the on button, resolutely putting the phone to her ear. “Hello, Cole.”

“Selena!”

She’d never thought to hear Cole frightened. Of anything. But the fear tinged his voice even through this staticky satellite connection. Cole’s voice. It was a wonderful, smooth low voice that triggered a flush of the very emotions she’d been trying to avoid—along with the usual warmth she felt in his presence.

The very reason she had to run so far away in order to sort out her feelings.

She’d always responded to him that way—the first day she met him, the day they’d gotten married, and each and every time he turned that smile on her. With effort, she managed to avoid blurting out her suspicions about being pregnant—because he really didn’t need to know it. Not now, when she was trapped in a building under Kemeni siege. For whatever he’d done, whatever potential affairs he might have conducted, she knew he cared. Right there in his voice, she could hear how much he cared. She just wasn’t sure if he cared in the way that she needed—or if he even could. He was so good at filling so many roles…maybe he simply couldn’t limit himself to one relationship role.

You believed he could when you married him. That he had.

“Lena?”

Selena blinked. Battery time. Don’t waste it. “Listen,” she told him, moving up to her knees so she could react more quickly if anyone came to the door during this time she couldn’t hear them as well. “I’ve got to save this battery, so I only have a moment. I’m in the Berzhaani capitol building.”

He swore a blistering oath, but cut it short. “What’s your situation?”

“At liberty. As far as I know, I’m the only one. I’m about to go down and scope it out, but I think Allori, Razidae, the staff and a whole busload of college students all picked the wrong day to be here.”

“Fits what I’ve heard.” Cole swore again, more softly this time. “Any chance you can get out?”

“I don’t know yet. I doubt it. They know I’m here.” Selena hesitated, hunting the best words. Businesslike words. Orderly words. “What have you heard? What do the Kemenis want?”

“Razidae’s resignation,” Cole said promptly. “Along with all his advisors, support staff, any capitol employee who ever touched the hand of an American in peace and all dogs who’ve wagged their tails at Americans. The cats can stay, because everyone knows they’re notoriously fickle anyway.”

Selena closed her eyes, touching the bridge of her nose. “And the threat? When do they start killing people?”

“That part’s not clear. At least, not as it’s coming over CNN. The truth is, no one out here knows what’s really going on in there. They issued that short statement of demand, and—”

“Then I’ll find out,” Selena said. What the hell were the Kemenis up to? The other members of Razidae’s government would never step down, not even to save Razidae’s life. Those were the prime minister’s own well-known instructions, leaving the Kemenis very little to gain even if they survived. From the tone of Cole’s voice, he felt very much the same. She told him, “I’ll call you back as soon as I can. Stay off the landline.” It was more secure…he’d understand that.

“I’ll be here.” Cole hesitated. Even through her own unexpected relief at this reassurance—she’d rather have no one else handling details on the other end of the phone with her life at stake—Selena could practically see him wrestling with himself. She wasn’t sure if he lost or won when he spoke again. “Lena, I know you’re upset about something—”

At home, he meant. At him. What had given her away? How unfair that he could be so certain of her when she couldn’t manage the same in return.

“—and I know we can’t go into that right now. But don’t forget…” He hesitated, trailing off in a way that meant he was hunting for better words. “Just don’t forget how much I love you.”

She hadn’t expected it. She didn’t know what to say. She let noisy static fill the air between them—wasting time, wasting battery power, but too surprised at the way her heart snatched those words to do anything else.

“I mean it,” Cole said, growing fierce. If he’d been there, he’d have pulled her close by now. He’d be looking down at her, arctic-blue eyes intense with the meaning behind his words, close enough for her to see that quirky dark blue spot on his left iris. “Whatever upset you, whatever goes on there, don’t you dare forget how damn much I love you!”

She couldn’t get her voice above a murmur. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

“Good,” he growled. “Now go save the day, will you? I’ll be waiting by the phone.” And he cut the connection before she could.

Selena flipped the phone closed, turning it off; her movements came automatically, and she gave them no thought at all. Instead she dropped her forehead back down on her knees.

…how damn much I love you!

It was a lifeline. He knew she’d run, if not why. He knew the peril she faced—if the Kemenis found her, they weren’t likely to escort her to captivity. She’d already caused too much trouble. Come back to me, that’s what he meant. What he wanted.

She gave herself the moment…let herself feel what his voice did to her—what his emotions did for her. Selena, orderly and logical and everything in its place…unless she was with Cole. Unless he sparked the unpredictable in her as he so often did. In the outside world, she wore her precision like a shield; in their apartment, she was just as likely to strip in one room so she could surprise him in another. Like the evening the week before he’d left, when she’d walked into the bedroom during his workout, bare as bare came, and straddled him on the exercise bench.

He lost all the air in his lungs in a surprised gust of exhalation, both arms dropping away in mid butterfly-curl, his chest beautifully exposed and ripe for touching. She moved against him, sighing happily, and by then he was hissing through his teeth, his hands fumbling free of the weights and only making it as far as the bench press bars, which he clutched in helpless reaction.

They’d only been gym shorts. They hadn’t lasted long.

Selena ached to think of the moment, in her heart as well as her body. For as physically sweet as it had been, the memory only hammered home what he meant to her. What he gave to her.

Spontaneity. Unpredictability. Outrageous daring. And right now, if she was going to survive, she needed to find it all within herself, too.

Chapter 6

Selena took her outrageous daring back into the fray, leaving her briefcase under the bed and rinsing her teacup so as to leave as few signs as possible that she’d been here. She found a service elevator and tucked herself against the front wall beside the door. When the old doors clunked open on the first floor, she eased a hand over the open door button and held it there, giving any curious terrorist passing by plenty of time to check out the conveyance.

But no one approached. No one so much as grunted out a demanding question. Selena edged around the opening to find an empty hallway with a decidedly more utilitarian look than the other areas of the capitol she’d seen so far. The painted walls needed a new coat of their flat eggshell color, and the carpets needed cleaning—or better yet, replacement. A rolling cloth laundry bin sat at a haphazard angle against the wall, and the thick, steamy smell of food permeated the air. Roast lamb overlaid by all the spices of baharat—cloves and cinnamon and cumin and the sting of curry powder.

She held her breath, waiting to see how her stomach might react to the invasion of odors, but either the tea had done the trick or she’d gotten the problem out of her system. It was undoubtedly coincidence that as she held her coat closed with one hand, it rested low over her flat belly. Flat for now?

Stop that.

She stepped out into the hallway, moving swiftly to the first inset door to consider what she’d seen along the way. A door at the end of the hall with a mop and bucket sitting outside it. Double swinging doors not far from her current position, which seemed to be—she peeked inside to be sure—a linen closet, full of napkins and silky-fine linen tablecloths. Not of any particular interest. The maintenance closet and the kitchen, on the other hand…

She listened, heard nothing but the ping of a water pipe, and headed for the swinging doors, quickly scanning the interior through the small windows before she invited herself in.

Fancy. Lots of gleaming stainless steel, a bank of gas stoves against the wall, a column of ovens butted up against them. Cutlery, pots and pans and obscure devices whose purpose Selena could only guess.

Bullets riddled it all. Blood smeared the floor, thick trails leading to a walk-in freezer. Food sat half-prepared, congealing over cold burners.

Selena raised a critical eyebrow. If she were going to stage a government takeover, she’d want to make sure her people had food available—not to mention a place to prepare it. As it was, she hoped the Kemenis had brought MREs along, because otherwise everyone would get pretty hungry before this incident was over. And a hungry terrorist was a cranky terrorist.

Still, no assumptions. Perhaps whoever ran this show wasn’t all that stupid after all, but had merely encountered a minor rebellion he’d had no choice but to quell.

Selena walked the kitchen, stepping over the blood trails…walking through them would only betray her presence here when someone inevitably came back to see just what could be done about the food situation. She helped herself to a lovely little paring knife, something she could stick through her belt without worrying about inadvertent stab wounds. By all means, no inadvertent stab wounds.

Ice pick. Oh yeah. No easy place to put it; with regret Selena jabbed it through the bottom of her coat pocket, leaving the knobby handle within easy reach. Corkscrew? Too bulky. For now.

Besides, she could always come back. A good iron frying pan upside the head did as much harm to a terrorist as to anyone.

A scuffle of sound alerted her, sending her up against the wall beside the double doors. When it came again she pinpointed it to the freezer, and immediately realized that not everyone thrown in that convenient storage had been as dead as assumed. She opened the door with much caution, ready for any survivors who might assume she was Kemeni.

In the glare of a naked lightbulb, a man stood tottering on his feet, his whites splashed with the blood of others and liberally soaked with his own. The impressive fillet knife he clutched wouldn’t have done him much good against Kemeni rifles, but he held it with much determination regardless. The equally determined look on his face faded to confusion as he took in the sight of Selena in the doorway, all her borrowed weaponry in concealment, an American woman in informal clothing who should be screaming at the sight of the grotesquely piled dead before her. Men in kitchen whites, men in green jackets.

Selena didn’t scream. She said in Berzhaani, “You’d best sit before you fall. I’m not going to hurt you.”

“The Kemenis have already done that,” the man said. Short, stout enough to fill out his whites without slopping over the edges, he carried a cynical air and a nose generous enough to have provided for two men. He eyed her, taking hold of a shelf to steady himself. Before him, the pile of dead; around him, shelves of the highest quality food products, arranged in meticulous sections. “Are you a crazy woman, coming here? If they don’t have you, why don’t you run?”

“They know of me,” she said, letting her voice take on an absent tone. “They just don’t know where I am. I’d rather they not find out—just as I’m sure you’d rather they not know you still survive.”

He made an emphatic gesture with his free hand. “I do believe we are allies, whoever you are—the enemy of my enemy.”

“That last part’s accurate enough,” she murmured. “Are you badly hurt? There’s not much I can do for you…tablecloths, maybe.”

“I know only that I’m not dead.” He glanced at the others from the kitchen, and sorrow flickered across his features, settling in at the flare of his substantial nostrils and the press of his lips. “I have been shot in the arm, which does not work very well. Otherwise, I am only cold.”

“Tablecloths should help with that. We could raise the temperature—”

“And sit here in the middle of rotting food and the decomposing bodies of my friends?” He shook his head, sharply. “They brought their weapons in through the kitchen, you know. Mutaa turned out to be one of them. They came running in here and he handed out rifles like kitchen treats. And who are you again?”

“Someone who wants to get us out of this mess.” Selena knew he wouldn’t quite be able to understand, and he didn’t. She left him with a baffled and wary expression. “I’ll be right back.”

Retrieving a pile of tablecloths from the linen closet took only moments. She brought him as many as she could carry, and used several to cover the dead. The others she draped carefully over the man’s shoulders, and then she found a plastic crate full of cabbage and flipped it upside down, disregarding the rolling cabbages. “Here. Sit.” And as he complied, looking more bemused than ever, she asked, “Have they been here since they did this? Have you heard them checking out this area at all? Did you overhear them say anything about their purpose?”

He raised a hand, along with both eyebrows. “Ai, ai,” he said, the Berzhaani equivalent of hold your horses. “They came, they killed, they left. I’ve been in here with the others since then. I’ve heard nothing. And they did not take the time to explain themselves before they killed.”

Selena tucked her lower lip in her teeth for a thoughtful chew. Not helpful. Not helpful at all. She’d gained a few useful little defensive weapons here, but no information to speak of. She knew from Cole that the Kemenis were demanding Razidae’s resignation, but she still had no idea what the terrorists truly wanted. Oftentimes the public demand and the private intent didn’t match very neatly…and until she knew the Kemenis’ true goals, she couldn’t assess the situation properly. Act on it properly.

She found the man watching her with some curiosity, and saw his dawning realization that she wasn’t merely calculating her best options for escape.

Not yet, anyway. Someone had to stop this. And just like this morning at the shrine village, Selena didn’t see anyone else around with the means. Just me.

She’d jammed several spotless linen napkins into the cargo pocket of her coat, where they cohabited with the ice pick handle. Now she pulled them out and crouched beside him. “This’ll hurt.”

He grunted as she took his arm from beneath his tablecloth cloak and propped it against her leg, shaking a napkin out and efficiently rolling it into a tube. “It already hurts.” But he winced as she tied the tube around his wound, not taking the time to remove the white chef’s uniform shirt that showed the blood so well, and admitted, “That hurt more.”

She grinned at him, finding herself drawn in by his cranky charm. “My name is Selena.” She knotted the ends of the napkin, barely long enough as they were. “I’m a pushy American from the embassy and I’m going to do something about this situation. Would you like to help?”

He eyed the bandage as she released his arm, opened and closed his fist with enough vigor to make himself wince and carefully tucked the limb away beneath the tablecloth. “I am Atif. How do you think I might help you?”

“Who knows this section of the building better than you do?” Selena shrugged. “My guess would be no one.”

“And in that you would be right.” He gave his co-workers a pensive look and closed his eyes in resignation—an acceptance that his part in this crisis wasn’t yet over. “What is it you need to know?”

“I think the Kemenis probably have everyone gathered in the ballroom, or at least one of the function rooms nearby. I need to check them out. Quietly.”

He smiled. Partly it looked gleeful, as though he had just the right answers for her. And partly the expression looked…predatory.

And so Selena found herself in a small, barely lit corridor sandwiched between the ballroom—currently in dining-room setup, Atif explained—and the hallway behind it. The corridor ran the length of the function rooms, providing discreet entry for maintenance, food service and even the occasional escaping Berzhaani diplomat who’d had enough of Western arrogance. The divider between the corridor and function rooms was a flimsy one, but it was enough. Selena counted the function rooms by the seams where outside light leaked through, just as Atif had instructed. And she kept an alert ear out for any indication that she wasn’t the only one inhabiting the narrow warren. It took no key to enter this place, only the knowledge that it existed.

Not far from the kitchen, Selena herself had merely opened the door Atif had identified for her, discovering what looked like a linen closet but what was in truth an exchange area. On one side, used dishes, burned-out table lights, candle stubs…some of them still waited for cleanup. On the other, shelves for supplies and trays and pitchers. And out the back, beyond the thick black curtain…this lovely little corridor.

Atif’s brow had wrinkled slightly as he told her of the hidden access, and now that she was here, Selena had no doubt why. Each room had a number of tiny spy holes, no doubt so the servers could keep an eye on the needs of the diplomats and functionaries without intruding into their events. Selena peered through one into a small empty room meant for one-on-one discussions, and considered how easy it would be to observe such proceedings—or better yet, to observe the private discussion between two officials from another country who thought themselves alone. Was there a similar arrangement in the room where she and Ambassador Allori had habitually waited for the prime minister? Selena routinely and discreetly swept such waiting rooms for recording and listening devices…but she couldn’t check for warm bodies lurking in narrow passages.

From ahead, a voice rose in sudden but short-lived fright, muffled enough to come from outside her little personal hallway. Selena moved quickly toward it and found the peephole by its light. With her own breath loud and revealing in her ears, she put her eye to it.

Bingo. A function room crammed with people. She found Allori; she found Prime Minister Razidae and his deputy prime minister, Amar bin Kuwaji—all under the careful eye of a tan and olive green dressed guard. The Kemenis must want the entire government to step aside, or they’d just kill Razidae. Regardless, she doubted Razidae would survive. He was the most significant unifying leader this country had had for generations, and as long as he lived, the people would rally around him. Any Kemeni government would hold only temporary rule.

The others, they’d keep as leverage. As a way to induce Western and European countries to pressure Razidae’s people into stepping aside.

The others.

As if those lives could be summed up so simply. There they were—the two chaperones who’d accompanied the students. The woman Selena had seen in the lobby, but not the man. A handful of diplomats who’d been unlucky enough to choose this day to conduct their business. The glamorous but modest events coordinator. Three young women in green jackets.

And the students.

Terrified, pale…they huddled together against the walls and around the few small round tables available. One girl had her legs crossed so hard Selena was sure she’d wet her pants before she had a chance at a bathroom. Two other girls comforted a third who cried softly, and when they looked across their friend’s bowed shoulders, their expressions turned grim. And there, in the corner—the young man who’d given Selena such an openly appraising look and the girlfriend he’d annoyed, holding each other with a desperate affection.

The hostages had none of the small comforts this opulent room was meant to provide—no water, no finger sandwiches, no veggie plates with exotic dips arranged on expensive glass and silver serving ware. They weren’t being attended, feted, or even being fed the propaganda they’d come to hear. Their lives, in an instant, had turned into terror.

Dammit. It wasn’t right. These were young people; they hadn’t even started their lives. They had nothing to do with Berzhaan’s problems; they had done nothing to offend the Kemenis. They were here to broaden their horizons, to learn acceptance of this very culture. They had not, like Selena, willingly accepted a career that on occasion turned her into a target and at the least kept her in restless countries with high incidents of terrorism. They hadn’t made those choices at all.

Like Selena, pregnant though she might be. Or like Cole. God, she wished he were here. And she realized the sudden irony of it, that she would trust him with her life but not with her heart.

As these young men and women were now counting on Selena.

They just didn’t know it yet.

She wished she could give them some reassurance, some sign…you’re not alone. But it wasn’t time for that…far from it. By the time they knew she was here—working for them, fighting for them—things would probably be over one way or the other.

Selena closed her eyes against the sight of them, fighting a terrible wash of anger. She’d get nowhere with a paring knife and an ice pick if she didn’t use her anger wisely—drawing on it for strength when she needed it, leaving it behind when her thinking had to be crystal-clear. Her entire purpose as an FBI legate was to fight terrorism. It was why she was here.

She’d just never faced it on such a visceral level before.

Surprise. Get over it. Move on.

And that’s exactly what she did. She’d found the hostages; she’d seen that Allori looked as composed as ever and Razidae remained alive. For the moment there was nothing she could do for them. Now she had to find the terrorists.

She didn’t have far to go. The next little peephole showed her just what she was up against. Just who. And as startled as she was to find the American fugitive, Jonas White, in deep discussion with a small grouping of the men sprawled around the room—cleaning weapons, holding weapons, staring fiercely at nothing in particular, and even in a few instances bleeding—her gaze skipped over the aging international player and settled on none other than the man from the lobby. The one who’d stepped from the cover of GQ, handsome and finished and sleek. Dark hair, sharp aquiline lines to his face and a broad-shouldered body made obvious now that he’d discarded his jacket and wore only the silk T-shirt; it followed every plane and long line of muscle, highlighting the elegance of his carriage. And his eyes…they flashed at Jonas White’s words, a dark and simmering glower. Eyes to die for.

Except Selena didn’t intend to.

She did step back a moment, taking a deep breath. Jonas White was one thing. He was a player, a man who liked to wield power and who liked to win—but a man whose most important considerations were his own skin and his own interests. His presence here no doubt represented some last-ditch effort to rescue his faltering influence and rebuild the empire that his adopted daughter, Lynn, had destroyed when she learned the true nature of his activities. And though Jonas was not to be underestimated…

It was the Berzhaani man who worried her. The one who’d been in the lobby…the one who’d probably started this whole mess, killing the guards so his people could storm the building. Unlike Jonas, this Kemeni leader burned with purpose. He’d see this crisis through to the end, and Kemeni interests would come before his own. Selena wouldn’t be surprised if she’d been looking at the reclusive Tafiq Ashurbeyli himself. It would take a man such as this to drive the Kemenis to such risky action when they were in fact close to defeat in the wake of Frank Black’s death and Jonas White’s financial collapse.

What had White told Ashurbeyli? Not the truth—not that he’d been behind Frank Black all along. But somehow he’d tied their fates together.

Just call me fate. Selena smiled grimly in the dimness of the corridor. Because I’m the one you’re about to meet. Together.

Having absorbed the implications of the room’s occupants, she returned to the peephole. She found the door leading to the function room that held the hostages. Guarded, of course. She had no doubt the main exit from that room was guarded, as well, and she’d already seen the interior guard. The hostages had nowhere to go unless she could cause enough diversion to get them out through this corridor. The ceilings were high and original; the heating ducts primitive and usually merely grates between the rooms. The same factors meant there would be little opportunity to beard the terrorists in their chosen den. She had no intention of revealing she’d discovered this passage until she had no choice.

Well, then. Perhaps she’d have to nibble at them from the edges. They might know she was here, but they wouldn’t know about her Athena Academy background. They wouldn’t know she hadn’t run to the darkest, most distant corner of the building to tremble and wait out the crisis.

But before she took any action at all, she needed to relay the details of the situation to someone on the outside. Cole. And to judge by the impact his voice had had on her the last time, she’d best get her head together before she made that call.

Cole crossed his arms and stared at the kitchen phone. Glared at it, truth be told. He’d already snatched it up once on the first ring, only to find himself at the other end of a useless conversation with someone at the FBI. Someone apologetically informing him that Selena might be involved in the current Berzhaani crisis. “Of course she is,” Cole had snapped, adding the instant follow-up, “What’re you doing about it? Has HRT been called?”

And the young man on the other end of the line had fumbled his words; Cole clearly hadn’t followed the script. Then he’d admitted he didn’t have any information about the Hostage Rescue Team and he couldn’t tell Cole even if he did. Typical. Cole had darkly warned the young man that they’d best stay out of Selena’s way. And then he’d hung up, leaving the line free for Selena.

He uncrossed his arms long enough to stalk from one end of the apartment to the other, then dropped for a quick series of push-ups. It didn’t do much to ease his explosive tension; he grabbed his cell phone and considered calling the special agent who’d recently borrowed him from the CIA. It’s not what you know, it’s who…

But he didn’t yet have anything to say, not really. And the woman wouldn’t be at liberty to reveal any information even if she had it. Nope, he wasn’t sure the FBI connection was the way to go, no matter that they signed Selena’s paycheck. And the CIA? Not likely to be any better. They might well have a special ops team on the way; they might even be working with the military to get the SEALs sent in. They might well be engaged in a turf war with HRT.

That didn’t mean anyone would tell Cole.

He considered the phone in his hand, one hand rubbing the back of his neck. There had to be someone he could contact…strings to pull, favors to call in. He had plenty of both…just not anyone in a position to siphon him this particular information.

He flung himself into the creamy leather recliner opposite the television—on, but muted. The UBC station had only been repeating the same old phrases, the very same words they were running across the bottom of the screen. But now…now they switched to an image of Tory Patton. Tall and elegant, sleek black hair sweeping the length of her chin, green eyes piercing even across thousands of miles of satellite feed. Tory Patton. More than just a pretty star reporter face. She, too, had been to the Athena Academy.

Selena said little of her former schoolmates even when pressed, but Cole had no trouble seeing her fierce loyalty to them; he had no trouble spotting her pride these past few months. Athena grads Kim Valenti and Diana Lockworth had each saved President Gabriel Monihan from assassination attempts. Air Force Captain Josie Lockworth, Diana’s sister, had done recent breakthrough work on the Predator spy plane. And then there was Tory herself.

He wondered if she’d take a call from a man who had an inside scoop on this story.

But first he needed his scoop. Call me, Selena. Call.

Trust me.

Distraction almost did her in.

Selena stopped to look into the hostage room on her way out of the not-so-secret passageway and almost betrayed herself with a curse. For just as she peeked, several guards stepped into the room, grabbing Deputy Prime Minister bin Kuwaji one to an arm and dragging him toward the door without giving him a chance to fully catch his balance. The man Selena had privately identified as Tafiq Ashurbeyli stepped into the doorway, just far enough to snap a command. The rebels stopped long enough for bin Kuwaji to reclaim his feet, their expressions resentful. Then they marched him out the ballroom door—and, when Selena hurried back to the ballroom peephole, she was just in time to see the deputy PM being hustled through the double-doored entrance.

This can’t be good.

Selena hesitated. Any influence she had would be used up in one great big splurt of glory if she was caught following them—and she was very likely to be caught. And meanwhile she could stay out of sight, taking the long way back to the prime minister’s office and his private phone, where she could pass along what she knew. She had a preliminary insider’s view of the situation no one else could provide.

Unless, of course, she died before she made that phone call.

Make the call. She tendered mental apologies to the deputy prime minister, hoping the best for him. And she was halfway back down the corridor when something bumped the wall, making a loud noise in a small space.

As in, I’m no longer alone.

She wasn’t ready for a confrontation. The Kemenis knew she was here, but they didn’t yet know how much of a problem she intended to be. They hadn’t placed a high priority on locating her—or else the ballroom would have been empty, and the rebels would have been out combing the building for her. Instead here came a clueless clod of a Kemeni, probably confident he wouldn’t run into anyone within this serving corridor. They were two trains on the same track, heading for a wreck.

She would have rolled her eyes if she’d had time. She didn’t. She fumbled for the recessed push-ring for the thin door to the adjacent function room and slipped through, closing it as quickly as she could while remaining silent. Even so, there was the slight snick of the door settling back into place—little more than reinforced wallboard, it had no latch, just a snug fit—and if he was closer than she’d thought, he could well have seen the brief spear of light shafting into the corridor.

Be careless, she thought fiercely at him—but she reached into her pocket and withdrew the ice pick, fitting it through the center of her fist so the knob settled into the natural depression between the wrap of her thumb and index finger. It wasn’t a kubotan, but it would do.

She barely settled herself into place against the wall beside the door when she heard blunt fingers scrabbling against the inset latch on the other side. Great. Just once, she wanted a careless one. She slid down to crouch against the wall as he pushed the door open to scan the interior of the room.

Selena drove up from beneath, whipping her arm up from the elbow to slam the side of her wood knob-enhanced fist into the man’s temple. Right on cue, his eyes rolled back; he dropped heavily to the floor. “Shhh!” she hissed at him. “Be quiet!”

But she didn’t hesitate to see if the noise had been noticed. She shouldered his assault rifle and dragged him back into the corridor, closing the door firmly behind them. Without much care for his already insulted head, she grabbed his ankles and hauled him toward the kitchen, stopping frequently to listen for other incursions. At the converted linen closet she hesitated even longer, listening hard before sticking her head out to do a quick visual check, then quickly hauling her prize off to the kitchen.

Atif looked up, startled and concerned, as she entered the walk-in cooler, but his expression cleared by the time she’d closed its substantial door. “Already!”

“He got in my way.” Selena let her annoyance show.

“At least he doesn’t have a radio—they won’t be expecting to hear from him. And they’re just getting their routines squared away, so if I’m lucky they won’t notice he’s missing for a while.” She found a cone of butcher twine on a shelf near the door and yanked off a furious length of it.

“He’s not dead?” Atif looked at the terrorist in surprise. “He looks so nicely limp.”

“He’s a deadweight, but he’s not dead.” Selena tested the butcher twine and tossed it away, then spied an industrial-size roll of cling wrap. She smiled. Atif followed her gaze, and then he smiled, too. Within moments Selena had the man wrapped in enough layers of clingy plastic to all but immobilize him, with separate, twirled wraps around his wrists and ankles. She dragged him off toward the back of the cooler—“We need to leave room for more,” she told Atif, who only smiled—and propped him up against the back shelves just as he opened bleary eyes. “Behave yourself,” she told him, putting herself squarely in his unfocused vision.

“You…” The rebel couldn’t seem to wrap his brain around the nature of the person who’d taken him down so neatly. “No woman tells me—”

“Okay,” Selena said readily, and handed the assault rifle to a surprised Atif. “Then he’ll tell you.” She hadn’t meant to leave the rifle here, but Atif had no other weapons…and he was wounded. If Selena brought more disabled rebels this way—or if someone thought to check this cooler—Atif would need the rifle more than she.

She’d just have to get another.

“And be quiet,” she admonished the rebel as Atif fumbled the rifle with his wounded arm and finally got it pointed in the right direction. “Because there’s plenty of cling wrap, and if you make a fuss, Atif is going to wrap up your face. I very much imagine that would make it difficult to breathe.”

Atif looked intrigued by the thought, his expression just a little over the top. Selena’s heart went out to him. He was hurt, he was surrounded by his dead friends, and he was doing his very best to rise to the unexpected role she’d assigned to him.

“I won’t be long,” she told him.

“But where—?” Even with the rifle, he clearly preferred to have company in his guard duties. Still, he didn’t wait for her to respond. He cleared his throat and straightened his shoulders. “Never mind. Of course I should not know.”

“I’m trying to help.” Selena nudged the cling-wrapped terrorist as he started to tilt; the man didn’t acknowledge her. To all appearances, his intense embarrassment had inspired him to pretend she wasn’t there at all. “That’s enough, don’t you think?”

Atif gave her a canny eye. “I’m not so sure. Over the centuries, many people have tried to help my country. The Russians, for instance. They almost helped my culture into oblivion, as I’m sure you’ve seen. And lately, there are many Westerners trying to help themselves to our oil.”

“Can’t argue with that.” Selena headed for the door, pulling back on the heavy lever as quietly as possible and then listening through the crack she’d made. “In this case, all I want to do is help myself right back home, and help these Kemenis into a nice strong cell. After that, it’s up to you.”

Atif nodded, short and dignified. “Then I think we can work together well. Bring me back more Kemenis, and I will entertain them with lectures on fillet methods.” He eyed his current prisoner. “I am prepared to provide a practical demonstration.”

After that, Selena simply had to take the time to find Atif’s fillet knife—and indeed, he appeared more imposing once he had it. Imposing and assured. So she left him that way, and took the stairs back to the fourth floor, heading for the opposing stairs in a series of forays with plenty of time to listen for Kemeni activity between movement. Back down the stairs she moved even more cautiously, and on the first floor she barely missed a patrolling Kemeni duo. Shortly after that she slipped back into Razidae’s office, closing the outside doors to both the waiting room and the admin’s office, so when she entered the office again, she had double doors on both sides.

She took a deep breath. Sat in Razidae’s chair. Listened.

Silence.

Just watch out for that alluring sense of false security, she told herself. That’s all it would take—one moment of carelessness. She was literally surrounded by the enemy, and the enemy had proven to be ruthless. For where, she wondered, were the capitol staff? She’d found none of the security personnel; none of the support personnel. None of the maids or maintenance people.

Maybe some had escaped—but why let them go and slaughter the kitchen staff?

She doubted any lingerers had been left alive. They didn’t have the leverage value of the chosen hostages, but they were too problematic to release. They’d have been able to give numbers and weaponry and any other tidbits they might have overheard.

The Kemenis’ own countrymen, innocent of any wrongdoing…slaughtered.

Maybe I’m wrong.

She didn’t think so. She took another breath and picked up the phone. Be there, she thought at Cole. She might be mad at him, she might even not want to be married to him anymore, but she was definitely counting on him.

Chapter 7

Be there, be there, be there—

“Cole!”

“Where else would I be?” he asked, playing off the relief in her voice. The distance made him sound a little tinny, albeit without the static of the cell phones.

“Leading your own rescue effort?” Selena took a deep mental breath, surprised by how much hearing his voice meant to her. She was here, she was tough, she was doing what needed to be done…but she was grateful for the emotional anchor all the same.

That’s not how you felt when you took this post.

As if she could afford to get tangled up in such thoughts just now.

“You all right?” he asked, and he didn’t sound quite as cool anymore.

“Just…distracted.” And far too acutely aware that this might be her only chance to get tangled up in such thoughts at all. “I’m in the PM’s office…I don’t think they’re hunting me yet.” Yet. When they realized one of their men had gone missing, they might start taking her more seriously. She needed to finish her recon before then. “You ready for details?”

This time he was the one who sounded distracted. “Yeah…hold on…okay, shoot.”

“Let’s not use that phrase,” she said dryly. “Here’s what I’ve got so far—the hostages are in a function room east of the ballroom. They’ve got a whole busload of college students, their chaperones, a handful of diplomats…and they’ve got our ambassador.”

“Allori?”

“That’s the one. And they’ve already made it clear they have Razidae. They’ve got bin Kuwaji, too.”

His voice suddenly held an odd distance. “And…?”

“You have something more important going on there?”

“Selena,” he responded, an understanding warmth beneath the response that meant get real. Then he added, “Is there a television in that office?”

“Here?” She glanced around the room, not expecting to find any such thing in this dignified place of historic decor and presence. And so she almost didn’t recognize it when her gaze swept past, a classy little flat screen tucked on the bookshelf between two rows of books. With the phone still tucked at her chin, she tugged the center desk drawer open, surprised when it yielded. No remote control, but she found it in the next drawer over. “So there is.”

“How’d you assess them?” Cole asked, his voice strangely flat.

“In terms of intent?” Selena hunted for the power button. “They left a cooler full of dead people who didn’t need to die. They had the lobby guards killed and the place full of tear gas in the time it took me to—” Barf my guts out. No, not that. Cole was no dummy. He’d start counting weeks, too. “I had water running in the bathroom. By the time I stuck my head out, it was all over. And Cole—I’ve seen their leader. Jonas White is there and there’s no way he didn’t have something to do with this, but this man is…he’s a hawk. I think it’s Tafiq Ashurbeyli.”

“Great,” Cole muttered. “He’ll kill them all just for having seen his face. You have that TV on yet?”

“Getting there.” Selena scowled at the strange little remote and started pressing buttons at random. The television powered up, the volume already low, the station already tuned to UBC’s ubiquitous international news.

Selena didn’t need volume to understand what was happening to bin Kuwaji. “Damn…they just took him from the ballroom. I saw them.”

UBC’s live cameras showed bin Kuwaji standing in the dark cavern of the building’s main entry, gleaming white pillars on either side. He held himself with stiff dignity, and his expression showed not fear so much as acceptance. “No.” Selena said. “It’s too soon! They just got here—no one’s had any time to respond to—”

Bin Kuwaji’s head exploded in a spray of blood and brain, and he crumpled. Oh, my God. Those fools. Berzhaan’s current Powers That Be would kill them all before they let the Kemenis go after this. From this isolated office, Selena had heard nothing. But right outside this very building, right this very moment, a man had died.

Making a point no one in the world would now doubt. The Kemenis were ruthless, and they wanted this government—this progressive warm and fuzzy, West-loving government—destroyed past reclamation.

“You saw.” Cole’s words came not as question so much as confirmation. “These are the people you’re dealing with, Lena. Be damned careful. If nothing else, we’ve got a conversation going unsaid between us…and I want the chance to have it.”

“Conversation…” Not the wittiest response, but Selena found herself unable to tear her eyes from the screen where a rebel had exposed himself just enough to nudge bin Kuwaji’s body the first step of a long roll down the capitol’s entry stairs. Arms flopping, body limp, the deputy prime minister landed at the base of the stairs and lay there. The UBC camera panned back, showing the barrier of police and military vehicles between the capitol and the law enforcement personnel, all of whom had made some initial move toward bin Kuwaji, only to hesitate at the thought of exposing themselves. Someone ran back behind the long line of uniforms and flashing lights, spurred to action on an unknown errand. An air of helplessness pervaded the scene.

“You ran,” he said. “From me. We need to talk about it. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to do that with an ocean and half a continent between us.”

“How—” Too much to take, all at once and from all sides. How did he know? And could she have saved bin Kuwaji, if she’d thought to follow him? She thought so, but at what price? Her silence, perhaps, if she’d been hurt or killed before passing along what she knew.

“Your note, among other things. A feeling. I know you, Selena.” Cole let the silence stand a moment. “Now’s not the time, but it’s foolish to pretend there’s nothing going on. Better to say it’s there and put it aside—as long as you believe I love you. Believe it, I mean.”

Believe? There was more to it than that. He could very well love her with all his heart, but that didn’t mean his idea of love was the same as hers. Some men had no problem loving more than one woman…but Selena wasn’t made that way. And yet Cole waited, and she couldn’t linger here, and now was indeed not the time because if they started talking about them, she’d never keep her silence about her recent fatigue and illness and what it might mean. “I do—”

With a click, the phone went dead. Selena toggled the flash button, hunting a dial tone.

Nothing.

Cut lines. Time to—

The door from the waiting room swung inward. The man she’d described as a hawk stood there with gun in hand. He looked so relaxed and self-assured she had no doubt he considered himself to be in full control.

And why not?

He didn’t say anything right away. He eyed her as she stood behind the desk, not foolish enough to make any sudden moves—just standing, trying to avoid the whole deer-in-the-headlights impersonation. He looked her over from head to toe and nodded, approving. Then he gestured at the phone. “Very nice, but did you really think we wouldn’t have people monitoring the lines from the security office?”

No point in lying; she responded in the Berzhaani language he’d used. “I didn’t think this line showed up there.”

He shrugged with one casual shoulder, as if to say and you were wrong. “Who did you call? Your embassy? They already know the situation here, of course.”

Along with the rest of the world. He’d made sure of that when he’d executed bin Kuwaji on the steps. And she still had no reason to lie. “My husband.”

His voice matched the rest of him—cultivated. Smooth. Offering a hint of darkness. He smiled, and didn’t look amused at all. “You don’t strike me as the kind of woman who goes running to her husband for help.”

She imitated his one-shouldered shrug. “You don’t strike me as the kind of man who does errands.”

That did amuse him; his deep-set eyes widened slightly with his whimsy, one brow quirking. “I saw you come in. When my men described a Western woman in a long black coat…well, you can imagine there aren’t many such here in the capitol. Very smooth, your work in the lobby.” He lifted the hand that wasn’t already occupied by his gun; her AC adaptor dangled from it. “A shame you had to give up all your weapons when you arrived.”

She made a scornful noise. “Says who?” She didn’t glance down. She knew the drawer was still open; she knew it held a thick sheaf of papers. Her fingers rested on them. Not your conventional weapon…

Then again, not your conventional situation. And while taking down Tafiq Ashurbeyli might be the perfect antidote to this crisis, right now she’d settle for getting out of this room unscathed—and unimprisoned.

He tossed the adaptor aside, a dismissive motion. “You have been valiant. I understand the desire to fight for your people—it is, after all, why I’m here—but you can accomplish nothing more. Come with me. Join the others. We will not take retribution for those things you have done…until now.”

In other words, if she made him work for it, their next encounter wouldn’t be quite so civilized. She looked him in the eye, her voice lowering. “I’ll make you the same offer. You’ll accomplish nothing here, no matter how many people you kill. Release the hostages. Come with me. I’ll make sure you’re not killed before you make it to the bottom of those same steps you covered with bin Kuwaji’s brains.”

“Ah. You saw that, then.” He nodded at the flat-panel television.

“I saw,” she said flatly. “I wasn’t impressed. If you’re worth anything, it’s only that you’re worth stopping.”

He laughed. He laughed, and she snatched the moment. She whipped the thick stack of paper at him edgewise; the pages separated and fluttered at him like manic birds on the attack. He flung up an arm to protect his face, off balance, and Selena dived beneath the line of his gun, rolling to come just beside him, snapping her leg around behind his knee.

Tafiq Ashurbeyli, Kemeni rebel leader, went sprawling. His gun skittered across the floor; he hit hard, grunting with the impact. The gun didn’t go far, not on the thick carpet. Papers settled around them, their susurrus the only sound in the room.

Both of them lay stretched out on the carpet; neither could reach the other. In that instant, they froze in place, hesitating in an uncanny moment of locked gazes—of mutual respect, equal determination and the acknowledgment of an enemy worth fighting.

But not for long. Selena’s gaze flicked to the gun and back to Ashurbeyli; it didn’t take a genius to see who was closer to the weapon and who would reach it first. He would. Selena scrambled to her feet as Ashurbeyli scrambled for the pistol, both of them slipping on loose papers, and she glanced over her shoulder just long enough to see him bringing the weapon to bear as she ducked around the door.

She thought he’d been smiling.

Chapter 8

Now it’s personal. Now he knew her face, and she knew his. Now each knew the mettle of the other. There was no going back from that…no changing it.

And it changed everything.

Except for what Selena did next: she hid. She crawled into the best hole she could imagine and, with the patience of a big cat stalking prey, she lay low. She nursed her rug burns, considered the apparently quiescent state of her stomach and floundered back and forth about the cause of its former rebellion. Pregnant? Bad food choice? Pregnant…? That quickly took her nowhere and she flushed the inner debate to instead contemplate what she knew of the capitol’s layout. Maintenance closets, kitchen supplies, laundry…

Escape.

No, not yet. After bin Kuwaji’s death, the hostages were in more peril than ever. Not so long ago, not so far away, the Russians had gassed a theater full of innocents in pursuit of terrorists. Selena knew the mood of Berzhaan’s leadership…their need to take a stand. She was the only wild card factor standing between these innocents and another hostage disaster.

She turned her attention back to the situation at hand. The basement laundry was particularly easy to contemplate, surrounding her as it did. Silent machines with their round glass doors and mounds of partially processed sheets and tablecloths stood guard as she stretched out on a sturdy shelf behind stacks of freshly cleaned towels. Washcloths at this end, bath towels at the other, bound for the fanciest of the bathrooms and the abruptly unoccupied guest rooms. Should she be discovered, Selena was perfectly positioned to bring this tall set of heavy-duty shelves down on whoever found her—but only one rebel had come to look, and his eyes didn’t even hesitate on her.

So she relaxed, quiet and darned near to comfortable, pleased with the amount of space she had to herself. Cole would fit here, too. Right here. Right up against her, where he’d no doubt nibble her ear and clamp his hands firmly on her bottom and pull her close. Very close. Very…ohsoright.

She closed her eyes, adding in a big sigh. Tempting thoughts. Tempting to think about how well she and Cole suited one another in so many ways, now when she was forced to depend on him. It removed the doubts caused by that which he had no idea she’d seen. Him. The woman. The kissing. When he wasn’t even supposed to be in the country, for God’s sake.

Except that part didn’t matter. She could trust him to handle this situation. He’d make the right calls; he’d spread the information he had. And it was her job to keep feeding details to him. She had her cell phone; she hadn’t wanted to use it because of the hinky satellite connections and the insecure nature of the beast—some poor confused city woman might get an earful through her baby monitor. She had no doubt it would go dead at the worst possible moment. Didn’t they always?

So she wouldn’t call for a while. Not until she had information worth calling for. Her laundry hideout wasn’t it. Her generous collection of bleach didn’t do it, either. Nor would the ammonia-based products she hoped to find in the maintenance closets, the mop decoys, fire extinguishers…not newsworthy goodies. But useful, oh yes.

For now she didn’t plan to collect the material in a single spot. It’d be too obvious to anyone who saw it. But she’d bring it all within proximity of the kitchen.

In the kitchen, she planned to cook up trouble.

After forty-five minutes, the ruckus caused by her escape slowly faded. No more voices shouting along the hallways, no more running footsteps…they had enough to deal with, really, given the repercussions of bin Kuwaji’s death. Posturing, imparting ultimatums, perhaps brandishing a second, less valuable hostage as a reminder for the looming security forces to keep their distance. The busy, busy day of international terrorists at work.

They probably wouldn’t threaten Allori or Razidae just yet. Poor bin Kuwaji had been their sacrifice, just to show they meant business. Now they’d hold the other two back for more desperate moments.

Or so Selena thought. But Ashurbeyli was canny—canny enough to have escaped being photographed all these years. Canny enough to get into this high-security building and take out that security while rounding up hostages. So she wouldn’t underestimate him. She’d just…

Guess.

Reassuring. She slipped down from the shelf, inspected her chosen gallons of bleach and made sure the lids to each moved freely. Good enough. She very much hoped to find ammonia in the maintenance closets, and from those two alone she could manufacture several types of mayhem. But she wasn’t ready to leave evidence of her plotting just yet, so she left the bleach where it was.

She knew where to find it.

The basement also yielded a lovely maintenance area. The cordless drill held promise, but someone hadn’t charged the battery pack. Selena plugged the thing in; it might yet be useful. Metal shelves, their lower legs rusting slightly on the clammy, unpainted concrete floor, held a variety of paints and shellacs. Selena acquired a hammer, hefting it lovingly. She tucked a pair of pliers away just on principle, and gathered several fire extinguishers for easy retrieval. A number of them already waited in the kitchen, but one could never have too many fire extinguishers. She hauled one along with her, and on her way past the kitchen collected a chunk of dry ice from a special storage freezer, dropping it into a towel sling along with the nearly empty giant mayo jar she’d put it in.

Selena moved past the first floor quickly, for the terrorists were most active here. On the third floor she raided a cleaning closet for ammonia and crept back down to the basement to store it with her bleach, tucking it thoughtfully away under a pile of dirty towels. She quietly sacked a few guest rooms and came away with a planter full of decorative marbles.

Sometimes the old tricks were still the best.

After stashing her remaining goods in the guest room she’d chosen, she spent some quiet time on each floor—observing the terrorist activity, confirming that they did only occasional sweeps through the upper floors, concentrating their firepower on the first floor. She heard a pair of men tromping up the stairs to the roof, and a moment later a second pair coming back down, relaxed and chattering about how the various women they’d used compared to the ones they hoped to marry.

So. They were watching the roof. She would expect no less from the man she’d encountered in Razidae’s office. He probably had at least one other pair of men up there, their watch schedule staggered with the ones who’d just changed shifts.

But for those floors between top and bottom…Selena had the impression those sweeps were just for her. They lacked urgency but the Kemenis seemed to be looking for something—someone—as opposed to simply walking their rounds.

They didn’t find her.

At least, not until she ventured back into the kitchen area.

There, a little rummaging in a back corner netted her a huge can of oven cleaner, and she was beginning to feel downright well equipped, and ready to check on Atif in the freezer. But she’d set her hammer down to do the rummaging, and when she looked up from the list of warnings and ingredients on the can, it was to discover a young man in dark olive and tan stopping short in shocked recognition of whom he’d encountered.

It could have been all over right then. The man—and young he was, barely any older than the college students he helped hold hostage—could have and should have shouted for help. He could have and should have shot Selena as she slowly rose to her feet. Hammer out of reach. Distinctive Abakan rifle pointed this way. Best chance…fake it.

She gave him the slightest of shrugs, and a feeble sort of oh-well-you-caught-me smile, all the while thinking of the Abakans, and how so many of the Kemenis had what the Russians used only as an elite troops rifle—a rifle that was widely considered user-unfriendly, and effective only in the hands of an expert. The pistol grip was uncomfortable, the angle of the magazine awkward, and the operation of the thing was far from intuitive.

She doubted the young man before her truly knew how to use it—how to accommodate its odd recoil characteristics, especially when in two-round-burst mode. On the other hand, she didn’t really want to find out. Not at point-blank range, and not when even a wide miss would draw the attention of every other Kemeni in the building. So she gave him the smile, and when he hesitated, she said clearly in his own language, “Please don’t shoot.”

He absorbed her use of his language easily. He might have even been prepared for it. He lifted his chin, looked down along his nose at her as though he just might possibly be taller than she was—wishful thinking, at that—and said, “Ashurbeyli wants you.”

“I’ll just bet he does.” He’d probably expected her to be flushed out in that first forty-five minutes of intensive searching—as much as he’d seen of her already, he probably still hadn’t thought she’d be able to hole up and hold her ground without breaking like a frightened rabbit the first time someone stomped into her hiding place and glared around. Now…every hour that passed, his resentment of her would build—because the longer it took to get her, the more obvious her challenge of him. Woman to man. Immodest Western woman to self-appointed manlier-than-thou terrorist leader.

The look on the young man’s face changed, becoming what he probably thought to be canny. “Alive, he said. But nothing more.” He eyed her from head to toe, a clumsy parody of the way Ashurbeyli had assessed her.

Selena refrained from rolling her eyes. So it had occurred to him that he could now taste a Western woman. It wouldn’t even count as brutality, because Selena herself had already been tainted and exposed by her bold and unacceptable ways. What an astonishing and unexpected development that this should enter his mind.

Looking at the way his pants scrunched up under the belt high on his waist and the rolled cuffs at the bottom, she thought she might be able to wear them. But the shirt was a better bet, oversize enough so that although she and the young man had about the same shoulders, there should be plenty of room for her breasts. And it was the olive-green color she coveted…after all, she’d need to ditch this coat soon. No doubt every one of them knew to look for it.

He frowned, an exaggerated scrunch of brow. He sensed her mind was elsewhere…and couldn’t fathom it. Selena ever-so-subtly lifted her chest, letting her breasts push against the fine fabric of her black turtleneck.

He took a step forward. He probably didn’t even realize it. His too-big pants bloomed with the evidence of his intent, and he probably realized that with much acuity.

Overconfidence. A wonderful thing. She let herself look trapped. She let herself look frightened, and took advantage of the chance to make her chest heave with her panicked breath. He’d quit watching her face at all. He took another step, and the Abakan’s muzzle with its oddly shaped self-cleaning muzzle brake drifted away from Selena.

She still didn’t want the rifle to go off. But she wouldn’t mind quite as much if it did.

As he hesitated on the verge of the step that would put him within range, she put deliberate revulsion into her voice. “You have no right to touch me.”

His expression flickered into empowered outrage. “You are in my country! You play your political games with my people! You should have stayed where you belonged!” He took those last few steps in a rush, eager with assumed victory.

Selena dropped into a balanced crouch, thrusting the oven cleaner in his face and spraying with steady aim. By the time she hit the crouch, his victory had turned to boyish cries of pain. Only a youngster, at that. It wasn’t hard to take him down, levering him around her hip as she bounced back up to her feet.

He landed hard, air knocked from his lungs with a grunt, cries of warning silenced—at least, until he caught his breath. She wrenched his rifle away and tossed it aside, and as the air whooped back into his lungs he rolled in pain, his hands clamped over the lye-infested chemicals she’d sprayed in his eyes, Selena targeted the nearest sink. She’d rinse his eyes, bundle him up, and stick him in—

Out of the corner of her eye she saw movement, and she had only enough time to think how stupid she’d been, that she should have been prepared for a second Kemeni. This one was bigger, heavier and wasted no time—he slammed into her hard, knocking her back against the gleaming tile wall. She groped for her pocket as he literally picked her up off her feet and flung her against the wall again. Her vision turned to sparks and darkness, and still she hunted her pocket. He backhanded her, knocking her aside; she crumpled to the floor.

But she found the pocket. And as he lifted her up to start all over again, she pulled the ice pick free and jammed it into his ribs, aiming for the heart.

He grunted when the wooden knob hit his ribs and twitched off the blow to shove her back against the wall, one hand pulling back to hit her again.

Die, dammit!

Incredulous, Selena withdrew the ice pick to try again, but suddenly understood—he was a big man, a huge man, and even if she’d hit his heart, even if she’d holed his lungs…the holes were very small indeed. He could do plenty of damage before keeling over, and he might well cause enough ruckus to bring others—and enough damage to Selena that she could no longer continue this self-appointed mission.

With a snarl, she took his next blow, another to her already burning cheek and brow. This time she rolled with it, though it stunned her all the same.

She drove the ice pick home at the base of his skull.

He stiffened. Selena squirmed, still trapped, her vision prickling back to show her the stunned astonishment on his face and the already dead look in his eyes. She wiggled the ice pick around just to be sure. He spasmed and went utterly limp, collapsing so suddenly she had no chance to find her feet; she went down with him. But she bounced back up, staggering and mad about it. Shake it off.

When she had her balance she stood over him and glared down. “You really shouldn’t have pithed me off.”

The young Kemeni’s groan came right on cue, but before she dealt with him, Selena yanked the rifle away from the dead terrorist and went to the double swinging doors, glancing out the small windows. She saw no one. Maybe she’d gotten lucky…but she wouldn’t count on it. She wouldn’t dawdle. She hauled the unresisting boy to the kitchen sink and shoved his head under cold running water. He quickly realized the benefit of it and stayed there on his own while she grabbed a kitchen towel and soaked it. When she pulled him away from the sink and aimed him at the cooler, she stuffed the towel into his hands and said, “Keep that over your eyes.”

He readily complied. Definitely one whipped terrorist. Not that Selena blamed him…she didn’t know if he’d taken corneal damage from the lye in the over cleaner, or even if he’d inhaled the fumes, soon to choke on the fluids of his damaged lungs. But while she’d offer him what ease she could, she couldn’t make herself be sorry. Not when she remembered the look in his eyes as he attacked her. Not when she had reason to wonder how many people he’d slaughtered in this one day alone.

Now he was out of that game.

She pulled the cooler door open with some caution—and a good thing, too, because Atif met her with a steadily aimed rifle. He quickly lowered it. “I was hoping that was you. You’ve been busy, I see.”

“Exercise keeps one young,” Selena told him. She prodded her captive into place beside the man already so carefully bound in plastic wrap, and proceeded to restrain his ankles and wrists—except she left his hands in front of him so he could hold the towel to his distinctly reddened face. Just for a moment she pulled it away; he looked at her through the slits of his swollen eyelids and she doubted he could actually see her. “If you cause trouble, any trouble at all, you lose the towel and I truss you up like a roast lamb. You got it?”

In testament to his misery, he only nodded.

When she returned to the kitchen, she checked the double doors again, found them still clear and dragged the dead terrorist’s bulk into the cooler, leaving him well to the side of Atif’s decently covered friends. He nodded firmly at that arrangement, and then again at her face. “Are you hurt?”

“Just my feelings.” Selena ran careful fingers over her cheek and the edge of her brow line, finding puffy, hot skin and a trickle of blood. The hefty one must have been wearing a ring. Jerk. “They made me feel downright unwelcome.”

Atif snorted. “And have you brought more weapons?”

“Let’s just see.” She pulled the bolt back on the first rifle, found it sticky, and took a much closer look. “We’re both lucky you didn’t pull the trigger on this one, kid. They didn’t give you much training on this thing, did they?” She wasn’t expecting an answer; she didn’t get one. She pulled the magazine out of place and handed it to Atif, then pulled the oval pin on the side of the stock to release the joint there and folded the stock back on itself. Storage and transport configuration—and in this case, a signal that the weapon wasn’t to be used, at least not until it was thoroughly cleaned. She set it aside to inspect the second weapon, which proved to be in much better shape. “There we go,” she murmured. Not much in the way of ammo, but she had an idea just how she’d use it.

Atif watched as she took a moment to remove the shirt from the dead terrorist, doffing her coat and pulling the shirt on over her turtleneck. “Lemon juice,” he advised as she pulled the shirt out to inspect the blood dot she herself had created. Amazingly small…all the bleeding had been internal.

“If they’re close enough to wonder about it, they’re already too close.” The olive-green shirt over her khaki cargo pants would merely allow her to draw less attention at a distance. They presented a color combination the terrorists were well trained to see as friendly—at least until they noticed her hair and the fact that she sported breasts. This particular shirt went a long way to hide those pesky giveaways, as ill-fitting as it was.

She would have cleaned up the mess in the kitchen, but the terrorists had already created plenty of their own blood trails and her own efforts barely added to them. So she left it alone, and rummaged in the cooler for things she’d seen here earlier. Butcher twine, very nice. Candle stubs and matches she’d find in the entrance to the service corridor.

“May I ask,” Atif said, clearly prepared to ask regardless, “your intent? You are just one woman. They are many men. You cannot defeat them all.”

Selena tucked away the twine in a thigh pocket, and yanked the ice pick free of the dead terrorist, squinching her face up in matter-of-fact distaste. Stay strong, stomach of mine. She cleaned the pick and threaded it between her belt and her hip. “You’re right. I can’t defeat them all. I’m not sure that’s my job.”

“Then—?”

“Keep them off balance. Keep them distracted from the hostages. Make it personal to Ashurbeyli, so he loses perspective.” Check. Been there, did that. “Make them think I am important, so they’re caught off guard when the real rescue comes along.” And there’d better be a real rescue. She had to count on Cole…had to believe he’d see to it, whatever he had to do. Meanwhile…she looked around the room, from the dead Kemenis to the live ones. “Three down. And the rest to go.”

Chapter 9

The condo closed in around Cole. It surrounded him with Selena, with her belongings and her style and even her scent. And with UBC muted, it surrounded him with memories of her voice on the phone. He wasn’t used to the uncertainty he’d heard from her only hours earlier—uncertainty that underscored the problem between them.

He’d been on assignment; he’d come back. Somewhere in between, something had hit her hard.

He just needed the time to find out what. The chance.

He understood her request that they use the hardwired phone—it didn’t crackle with static, nor drop every other syllable in a whimsical verbal word game. They wouldn’t be overheard by those baby monitors—or by the various intelligence communities of the world. But if he only could leave—

What then, Jones?

Nothing, that’s what. He’d called his office; he’d been shuffled all the way up to the deputy director himself. He’d passed along what he knew, the tidbits Selena had given him, and he’d been admonished to do the same with any further information she gave him. But what had he learned? Nothing. What had he gathered by way of reassurance that the CIA would immediately share this information to best benefit Selena? Nothing. And if there was one thing Cole had learned in his years of covert operations, it was that the various intelligence agencies jealously guarded their information. They talked a good game, and on some levels the situation had improved immensely—his recent assignment had proven that much—but cooperation was a boon, not the norm.

Call the State Department.

Yeah, he could do that. And they’d play the same games with him, and he’d still have no assurance they wouldn’t lose Selena in the big picture.

He caught sight of Tory Patton, gesturing at the Berzhaan capitol building, her classically beautiful features tight with concern. The bottom of the screen held a scrolling tally of the damage and death tolls caused by the terrorist activity since it had kicked off in the village of Oguzka.

Go to the news station. Call UBC, spill everything he knew…dangle his inside source. That would light a fire under the CIA, the State Department and even the FBI. It would bring the troops circling around, forcing them to share intel…forcing them to act.

And he’d give it about thirty seconds before the CIA came and lit a fire under him. They’d haul him away for questioning, and he wouldn’t be here to answer that phone at all.

Everyone else had their eyes on the student hostages, knowing that along with a tragedy, it’d be a publicity nightmare if those kids were hurt. They had their eyes on Razidae and Allori, both men that the region—and their countries—couldn’t afford to lose. It was Cole’s job to keep his eyes on Selena. To make things happen in a way that included her best interests. For neither the U.S. nor Berzhaan might realize it right now, but she was their best chance of coming out of this mess with survivors. She just needed the right kind of backup….

Cole paced behind the couch, down the hallway to the bedroom where her scent tortured him, a precise turn on his heel to stalk back to the living room where her beloved quilt squares reminded him of her well-hidden sentimentality. Complex, that was Selena. And every bit of her had called to him on that evening they’d met four years earlier—some state function he didn’t even remember now, because all he could think of was the way she’d smiled at him and how he’d been so certain she’d had hidden fire under that cool, lean exterior.

He’d been right, too.

He realized he’d hesitated by the couch, that he ran his fingers along the cool leather. Not so long ago she’d stopped a similar pacing jag by pulling him right over the back of the couch and into her arms. He groaned at the thought, resting his forearms on the couch back and dropping his forehead between them. Dammit!

Go ahead. Torture yourself. Think about the way she’d been lurking under the comforter with her eyes closed and only a thin cotton camisole and sporty briefs covering freshly bathed skin. Think about the play of lean muscle covered with just enough padding to make her soft to the touch. Think about how she’d drawn him close and wrapped herself around him and whispered something about making babies he’d just barely had the remaining concentration to hear. Think about how she’d taken him so fast and hard that even now the memory dazed him.

Yeah, go ahead, do that. Get lost in it.

In how much you’re afraid of losing her.

Slowly, he pounded his head against the couch. Not hard enough to do damage…but hard enough to interrupt himself. To try to get his thoughts back on a track that would do him—and Selena—some good.

When he looked up, there was Tory Patton.

Don’t go to the news station.

Go to the reporter.

And go to her not as a reporter, but as a graduate of Athena Academy, and a former classmate of Selena’s. For the Athena graduates didn’t lose touch. They might go on to their individual achievements, but first and foremost, they were women of Athena.

And like Tory Patton, they had strings to pull. Influence to wield. And a noted track record for saving the day.

Selena crouched in the back stairwell, head tipped back. Thinking.

Unlike the posh main stairs in the front part of the building, this set was made of painted steel and concrete—and not recently painted steel at that. Tubular railings ubiquitous to stairwells everywhere, stained and worn texturized concrete…your standard ugliness.

Gunfire would echo magnificently.

She’d sacrifice the rifle, but it had little in the way of ammo—and like any soldier untrained in the use of this particular weapon, she found it unwieldy and a little counterintuitive. Not a combination she wanted to depend on in a tight spot. If things went right, she’d gain a few moments with the hostages—and maybe even an extra moment or two to cause inconvenience for the Kemenis.

That would be nice.

So yeah, she’d sacrifice the rifle.

But for now, she sat in the stairway, head tipped back, thinking. Making sure she had a clear idea of her purpose here. Given that she didn’t intend to leave the embassy—an excursion that would no doubt be more dangerous than staying here—and that she didn’t intend simply to hide in the basement, and that she’d already passed along what little she knew to Cole…then what could she hope to accomplish?

Free the hostages?

That, she knew, was thinking a little too positively. There were too many of them, too many Kemenis, and too few places to hide. The service corridor was a godsend, but the terrorists obviously already knew about it; she couldn’t lurk there in safety or stash the hostages there, either.

Reassure the hostages.

A definite possibility, especially if things went to plan here in the stairwell. She didn’t expect to draw anyone off their assigned post, but those who lingered in the ballroom…they were another story.

Nibble away at the edges of the terrorists. Another possibility. She’d already managed a few small bites. As long as she remained only an irritant, she didn’t think Ashurbeyli would divert too much effort to finding her. Why should he? He still had the control; he still had the hostages.

Stay alive. Now there was the question. She didn’t think he’d have her killed outright, not at this point. No, he’d want to talk to her. Perhaps mistreat her. Make the point of his superiority, and salve the insults she’d already reaped on him—though she wasn’t sure if he’d figured out the three men were missing. With all the rotating shifts and various patrol sweeps they were doing, it might well take time.

Stay alive. It hit her in an entirely different fashion. Not the analytical lawyer’s approach to defining a problem, but the very personal, core reaction of a woman not ready to die. Not ready never to see the man she loved…or to learn if she’d be able to live the rest of her life with him. Or even to learn if her illness, her fatigue…if it had been more significant than a passing moment. Much more.

That fatigue washed over her again; she let it. A glance at her watch startled her and relieved her both. No wonder she was tired—she’d reached the far end of a long day in which she’d lost what little food she’d eaten. She’d started the day fighting terrorists, transformed herself back into her FBI legate persona, and now here she was facing terrorists again, disoriented by the lack of windows in the interior rooms and hallways in which she’d been spending time.

After this, she’d have to retreat to that laundry room and take more than a few moments’ pensive rest. She’d have to grab real sleep. A few hours, that’d be all…and then she’d take to the prowl again, hoping to find the building quieter. Maybe even finding a moment to call Cole—though after this she’d have to use her cell phone and chance being overheard. The phone lines were obviously not an option.

So. First step. Reassure the hostages. Second step…get something to eat. She’d need to check in with Atif in any event. Third step…a few hours’ sleep.

Selena set the rifle on full automatic and leaned it against the railing halfway up the steps she’d chosen. Not only would the noise echo impressively from here, but she might even get lucky with a stray bullet if anyone from the roof came charging down in response. Quickly now—no telling when one of the Kemeni guard pairs might come through, and once she started work she’d be unable to dash away without leaving bits and pieces behind—she tied the rifle in place with butcher twine. A nice five-pound bag of dried beans hung beside it, and she used a second piece of twine to tie it to the trigger, leaving just enough slack so there was no tension between the two.

And then she set up the candle stubs, carefully positioned to burn through the twine holding up the bag. If everything went right—no drafts, no shifting—when the twine burned through, the rifle would discharge at least a handful of rounds before recoil broke the twine holding it in place.

If nothing went right, she’d give them a reason to hunt for her without gaining anything in return. That would suck.

Selena double-checked the setup, nudged the candles into better alignment and pulled the matches from the thigh pocket of her cargo khakis. The match flared to life against the worn concrete step, and once she touched it to the second candlewick, she hesitated only long enough to see that the flame was a good height…and then she ran. Down, down, down—ice pick in one hand, hammer in the other, hoping she wouldn’t run into anyone but ready to leap if she did.

Sometimes luck ran her way.

She threw herself against the wall at the first-floor exit just as the rifle discharged. A long, painful burst of sound, far too distinct to be taken for anything but automatic rifle fire, far too loud to be missed.

Selena smiled, a wicked little smile that would have raised Cole’s eyebrows all the way to his hairline. Already she heard shouting, even through her ringing ears. But as she pivoted around, reaching for the door bar, she caught a glimpse of movement. She had time for nothing more than half a gasp as she flattened herself beside the hinges and then the door slammed open, whipping back at her so she turned her face and sucked in her breath, pressing the small of her back against the cold concrete wall, turning her feet sideways—all to make herself as thin as possible.

The door bar smacked into her hips, hard enough to bruise but not hard enough to break. She snatched it, just enough to make the door hesitate before starting to swing close.

No one else came through. And those who had clattered swiftly up the stairs, leaped over the landing and turned to continue upward.

Now she had time to curse. Silently but fervently, her pulse knocking around her body with frighteningly reckless speed. Too fast…not just adrenaline, but a tired body desperately trying to rise to the challenge. She knew herself…she knew she was pushing too hard.

No help for that.

She let the door close most of the way, caught it again and peeked out into the first floor, that back corner she’d come to know so well. Sound still came tinnily through her offended ears, but she didn’t hear anyone else—just the growing ruckus up the stairwell. Selena took a deep breath and a big chance, and she ran for it. Down the side hall to the little false-backed closet, down the dimly lit corridor to the room that held the hostages. Nothing much had changed, aside from the establishment of one corner as a bathroom area—blocked with chairs, draped with tablecloths and as far from the people as they could make it. That, and it seemed to her that there’d been something shoved up against the other side of the wall. Blocking the servants’ door?

She spied upon the table-filled ballroom beyond that, discovering that it held only one man. One disgruntled, impatient man who glared out the entrance closest to the main lobby—the closest set of stairs lay in that direction. With complete disregard for the history and the value of the building, he vented his anger by repeatedly stabbing an oversize survival knife into the wallpaper-covered plaster. Left behind and soooo unhappy.

Good. Because he wasn’t paying any attention at all to the hostages.

Selena backed off, slipping out into the private function room where she’d not so long ago clocked her first Kemeni conquest on the noggin and dragged him away. She didn’t want to startle them by appearing out of nowhere—distracted or not, the guard in the ballroom would hear such a reaction. He’d definitely hear it if she had to shove aside a table to get there. Then, too, the fewer people who knew about that passage, the better. Surely Prime Minister Razidae knew of it, as well as the events coordinator, but the others…if they learned of it, they might be tempted to try for doomed escape.

No, if they were going to escape, Selena wanted to be in on it. But she didn’t think escape was their best option, not just yet. Not until she’d picked off a few more terrorists; not until she’d heard more from Cole. If he could help her arrange a diversion from the outside…

For now, she’d settle for talking to them. Letting them know they weren’t alone.

Selena checked the hall, ducked into it long enough to reach the hostage room entrance and hesitated there the mere instant it took to confirm the hostages were still alone.

She entered the room with a finger already to her lips, a plea for silence.

They froze, expecting any arrival to be Kemeni—and then Allori jumped to his feet, his astonishment turning instantly to concern. “Selena!”

He’d kept his voice to a whisper, but it acted as a release for the others; their voices tumbled over one another, low exclamations of surprise and pleas for help that accumulated to significance. Selena glared a warning, putting a demanding hand out to hush them, ready to run right out on them if she had to.

“Silence!” bellowed the guard in Berzhaani, and even the students understood the intent of it.

Allori, bless his heart, stood where he could look into the ballroom, and he gave Selena the slightest shake of his head. No, the guard wasn’t actually coming this way. Not yet. She kept her hand raised, her expression full of warning, and then when they stood, silent and hesitating on her next move, she pointed at the college student with the steadiest demeanor and directed him with a gesture: watch the guard through the door.

He wasn’t the most mature of them; he even looked to be the youngest, still short and slight, his need to shave still questionable and his chin too weak ever to truly firm up. But though he might have paled a little, he didn’t hesitate. He put himself in line of sight of the guard and sat in the closest chair, and then he gave her the same slight nod Allori had given the moment before.

Selena nodded back, and then she gestured the others closer, a finger still on her lips.

The bold young man from the lobby was the first to speak up, though he remembered to keep it low. His girlfriend stood close beside him, a tentative hand at his arm. “I saw you in the lobby.”

“And I saw you.” Selena looked them over, found none of them injured, all of them scared. “Have they allowed you to talk?”

Razidae said, “Yes. At about this level. We should be all right unless something alerts them.”

Allori got right to the point. “What’s your situation? What can you tell us?”

“They know I’m in the building.” Selena gave her sore face a rueful touch. “Tafiq and I…well, it’s personal now, Dante. I don’t honestly know how much longer I can evade them. But I’ll do what I can, while I can. I’m in touch with Cole.”

Who’s Cole? The question stood loud on everyone’s face except Allori’s—and Razidae’s, who knew it didn’t matter, so long as Cole represented help. “I’ve briefed him on the situation on the inside. He’ll keep an eye on our best interests. The important thing—the reason I risked exposing myself here—is that you should all know you’re not alone. I’m here, and I’m working to get you out. Berzhaan and the States are working on getting you out.” Probably not together, not to judge by Selena’s own initial reception here in Berzhaan. “Be patient.”

“What about that man they took?” The girlfriend, so close to Selena, looked her straight in the eye. “He was important, wasn’t he? What happened to him?”

“Amar bin Kuwaji,” Razidae said softly. “Yes, he’s my deputy prime minister. Was my deputy, I should think.”

Selena met his gaze and nodded. “I’m sorry.”

“They used him to prove their intent?” Allori asked, immune to the little gasps of dismay around them. He didn’t wait for Selena’s confirmation before giving a little nod. “Yes, they would have. Eventually, another of us will be used the same.”

“Not if I can help it.” But Selena felt with keen guilt her inability to save bin Kuwaji, and her words reflected more determination than expectation.

The petite events coordinator caught her gaze. “You came through the hall. Do you know about—”

Selena nodded sharply, cutting her off. “It was the best choice. They know about the other, as you’ve probably guessed.” The students didn’t, to judge by their expressions. Imagine that, the Kemenis had been discreet as they’d blocked the wall. She came down on her next words hard. “And you should all wait here until I say otherwise.” After that she looked deliberately from one student to another, waiting for acknowledgment by each. The two businesswomen were quick to comply.

Razidae took longer. Long enough that she said, “Please, sir. Trust me. You know as well as I the mood of these people. They’re desperate—and they’re being guided by Jonas White.”

“I’ve heard of him.” Razidae ran a finger across his thick mustache. “If I’d known he was anywhere near Berzhaan—”

“None of us knew. And I’m still not sure what he’s up to. But if he’s behind this, he’s put the Kemenis into a desperate situation—a last stand. Provoking them is the last thing any of us can afford. If things go badly, they have nothing to lose.”

Allori glanced toward the ballroom. “I must agree, Mr. Prime Minister. If we act—when we act—it must be a coordinated effort. Selena is the only one of us in a position to represent our best interests to the outside world. We need to do everything we can to preserve her ability to do so.”

Razidae grunted, eyeing Selena. “Then you shouldn’t have come here.”

“I had to.” She shrugged. “Tell me you weren’t already plotting the best way to slip some of you out. It would have tipped the Kemenis into action—I had to let you know I was here.”

A sturdy girl with skin the color of a sleek brown seal and scarf-hidden hair pushed her way toward Selena. Scared, like all of them. But still thinking. “And who are you?”

Selena regarded her in return, and offered up a slow smile. “I’m a Kemeni collector,” she said. “And I’m in the right place at the right time.”

At that she got a few tentative smiles. Good. She’d done what she’d come for.

“This has to be off the record.” Cole held the cell phone tightly, too tightly, and paced the length of the apartment. The flicker of the television provided the only light, inconsistent and often disconcerting.

Tory Patton laughed, light amusement that came short enough to reflect the nature of her current story. “That’s what they all say.”

But then, she didn’t know much of Cole. None of the Athena alumnae did; he was too often gone, too often buried in secrecy. Tory had no reason to leap to compliance at a phone call from Cole. Not as UBC’s star reporter, and not as the graduate of a school that taught its students to think for themselves.

“Listen.” He stopped, cleared his throat to remove the growl and tried again. “Listen. I didn’t dig up your private number on a whim. I need help, but it’s got to be off the record.”

“So that’s two favors just to start.” She wasn’t making it easy.

Then again, he hadn’t expected her to. He hadn’t yet invoked Selena’s name, and he wouldn’t do it until he knew for certain he wouldn’t compromise her. Tory had to suspect this call was about Selena, but she wouldn’t take it for granted. For all she knew, Cole was at work a single border away, and not calling from D.C. at all. “Do it,” he said. “Hear me out. You’ve got nothing to lose. Not even air time—they’ve gone to commercial.” Silence hesitated between them, and he knew he was doing this wrong. Desperately, he added, “Please.”

Another moment of expensive international silence. “I’ve got another fifteen minutes before my next spot,” she said, and he could hear her stretch, completely at ease with her situation at the edge of hostilities. “You can have a couple of them. Off the record.”

He didn’t bother with introductory details. She knew them; she was reporting them. “Selena’s in there.”

This time the silence turned electric. He wished the camera was still on her, that he could read her reactions across the miles. Finally she swore, so softly he barely heard. “I was afraid of that. I wasn’t able to reach her at the embassy, and now they’ve closed up shop. No one’s been willing to confirm, though—they figure the Kemenis can watch the news as well as anyone, and they don’t know if everyone in the building was rounded up. You know for certain?”

“I’ve talked to her. We were on the phone when they killed bin Kuwaji.”

“That’s pretty certain.”

“Unfortunately, we were cut off. I’m waiting for her call. I damn well wish it’d come by now.”

“I hear you there,” she said. “She have any intel?”

“Some. Going for more. I’ve passed it along, and I’ve been patted on the head and told to wait like a good little husband. No one’s talking to me—not even my own people. I have no idea if the agencies are sharing, or who’s planning to take action…or if they’re keeping her welfare in mind at all. Here’s the thing, Tory—I want someone in on this who will keep her in mind.”

“I hear you there, too. But I’m still waiting to hear why you called me.”

Cole couldn’t help it; he snorted. “Because I know you can help. You know it, too. You think Selena hasn’t told me about the Cassandras? I know she wasn’t one of them, but she was still Athena, and you’re wasting time by making me spell it out. You’ve got connections, and Selena needs them. You’ve got someone by President Monihan’s side, for God’s sake.”

“Yes,” Tory mused. “I guess we do. And I’m sorry. I did want you to spell it out. I’m not in the habit of taking anything for granted. And of course I’ll do everything I can to help. In fact…”

After another moment’s silence, Cole couldn’t stand it anymore. All his cool under fire, gone. All his seat-of-the-pants success, useless. This one wasn’t up to him.

At least, not alone.

So he broke the silence with his impatience. “What?”

“Mmm,” she said. “Not on this phone. We’ve said enough, I think. Can you get out here?”

“Yes,” he said instantly. He had no idea how, but he had enough of his own favors to call in—he wouldn’t wait for a commercial flight. “I’m at liberty.” Not strictly true, but he didn’t much care. “I’ll be there.”

A twelve-hour flight he had yet to snag. But he repeated himself. “I’ll be there. I’ll call you.”

But he didn’t know whether he’d be there in time. If Berzhaan grew impatient, if the Kemenis lost their temper, if Jonas White meddled once too often…

Hold on, Selena. Just hold on.

Chapter 10

Selena hesitated in the servants’ corridor, crouching behind the black curtain, hammer and ice pick in hand. Listening.

Hard to hear anything over her stomach growling. Not that she trusted its hunger; for all she knew it would turn on her as soon as she fed it.

Still. She needed food to stay on top of her game, so food it was. And she’d spent enough time with the hostages that those Kemenis she’d diverted from their ballroom ease were probably trickling back down to this floor. They’d be mad, no doubt about it.

Tafiq would know just who had set up the rifle. He just wouldn’t know why.

He’d want to know why.

He’d have his people scour the capitol, hunting for signs of her presence, signs of that from which she’d diverted them. He wouldn’t find anything—but only because she hadn’t actually put any of her half-formed plans into play. She needed to talk to Cole first.

She needed rest.

She peeked out into the supply closet. No sound of searching. Did he realize he’d already lost several men to her? She’d be surprised if they were that well organized—a place for every terrorist and every terrorist in his place.

God, woman. You really do need sleep. How long ago had this day started, anyway?

She edged up to the door. Heard nothing.

Last week. This day started last week sometime. Last year, maybe. And if she let herself slow down now, she’d lose her edge. She couldn’t allow herself to slow until she was ready to crash. Nice, safe laundry room. A few hours. That’s all, just a few hours.

Selena slowly turned the latch, nudged the door open. Only silence. She opened the door another inch, just enough to peer out, not really enough to see anything, her hand still resting loosely on the latch—

The door jerked forward, out of her grasp. Without its support Selena fell, and she turned it into a roll, the hall a blur of olive and khaki all around her. Shouts erupted; hands landed on her, pinching and pulling and grabbing—

But not shooting.

Alive. They want me alive for now.

She wouldn’t make it easy for them. She squirmed, striking out with her feet, lashing out with both the hammer and the ice pick; the aggressive shouts changed to pain and alarm. Still they came at her. She found her way to her knees. Someone snatched her hair; she lost the ice pick in his arm. She surged to her feet, now thinking only about staying alive and escape and the exit beyond the blood-smeared kitchen floor. Escaped, she wouldn’t do the hostages any more good…

Can’t do them any good in Tafiq’s hands, either.

She went for it. She wielded the hammer like an old war ax and kept them at bay—were there only three of them?—and when she spotted an opening she went for it, pure fullback style.

And then suddenly she slammed into the wall. The hammer fell to the floor from her numbed arm and she looked up, bewildered and somewhat betrayed, to discover a fourth man holding his Abakan by the muzzle. He’d not been allowed to shoot her but he’d found a way to use the rifle on her nonetheless, and now suddenly her arm began to hurt, a deep, hot throb that told her just how hard he’d hit her.

Another figure stepped into the suddenly quiet tableau, a stained hallway full of panting combatants and their wounded prey, finally brought to stand. Great. Just what I need. Tafiq Ashurbeyli, only moderately more ruffled than the last time she’d seen him. Still fully in command of the situation. Of himself.

And now of her.

Ashurbeyli spoke into a quiet punctuated only by the heavy breathing of his men and Selena’s own gasps, as much in pain as for air. “You should have run when you had the chance.”

“Probably,” she said. She didn’t shrug, because it would have meant moving her arm. At least it was the right arm…at least she was left-handed. “Gave you a chance to find a decent use for those silly Abakans. Damn, you didn’t have to hit me that hard!”

Ashurbeyli looked around at his battered men, at the blood splattering the walls from one of her particularly good hammer blows. Someone lay on the floor behind him, moaning in pain. “I think we did. Yes, you should have run. But I consider it our good luck that you didn’t.”

“More than luck that you were waiting for me here.” She tested her ability to make a fist, found it distinctly wanting. Otherwise she remained still. Nonthreatening. Giving them no reason to hit her again.

Though she was excruciatingly aware that they weren’t likely to need a reason.

Ashurbeyli merely smiled. Handsome…beyond handsome, with the sheer charisma of his presence. But predatory, oh, yes. And far too knowing. “Perhaps it was.” He gestured at his men with paired fingers, and two of them stepped forward, hovering in overeager readiness as Ashurbeyli stepped in and gestured that she should raise her arms and submit to a search.

Resigned, she did just that. More or less, since her right arm had no intention of functioning just yet. The novelty of being searched by men had worn off long ago, and she barely paid attention other than to note Ashurbeyli was just as thorough as he needed to be, hands following her every curve—but he didn’t linger, didn’t take advantage. He retrieved the paring knife from her belt and the pens and Buck knife from their most recent cache in her back pocket, handing them off to a third Kemeni who stepped forward just at the right moment.

They worship him.

That would make it harder. Foot soldiers who believed…foot soldiers who were dedicated to both their leader and their cause.

She wouldn’t waste her time exploring potential rifts between them. She’d give him the respect they felt he deserved, and now and then they might just see her as a person instead of a blank-faced Enemy Barbie.

It wouldn’t be hard. He was a man who commanded respect.

He stepped back, having discovered everything worth taking, his hand hesitating only once—on the lower curve of her left breast, where the tiny blood dot from the ice pick interrupted the olive-green of her borrowed shirt. He met her gaze long enough so she knew they’d talk about it later, and then stepped back. “Take her to the ballroom. Don’t harm her further unless she gives you reason—but I don’t think you’ll do that, will you?”

This time Selena did shrug. It was a painful facade of movement, hiding her fear and awareness. She’d be blind in the ballroom, unable to call Cole, unable to feed him information…unable to keep the hostages out of the line of friendly fire.

And mostly unable to hear the reassurance of his voice, the voice of a man who spent his time successfully doing exactly what Selena had just failed to accomplish. Seat of the pants. Casual, confident, ops-on-the-fly. What she wouldn’t give to hear that voice right this moment, breaking up this little party and turning it into his own.

Damn. I’m in trouble. But she wasn’t quite ready to admit—even to herself—that she was scared. So she shrugged again. “I’ll be good,” she said. “This time.”

Ashurbeyli shook his head, a sharp, short motion. “It’s too late to think beyond that,” he said. “Your fate, I’m afraid, is thoroughly sealed.”

She glared back at him, glad for the arrogance that had sparked her back into anger. “That makes two of us, buddy.”

He might have hit her. One step and he could have smacked her head back against the wall. For a moment, she thought he would. And then, oddly, he inclined his head ever so slightly in her direction and then strode away.

She had to admit, they could have been nastier about that walk to the ballroom. Perfect opportunity to snatch her arm and yank her around, and she didn’t think she’d stay on her feet if that happened. But one of them aimed his rifle at her midsection in a most casual manner while the other, the bigger of the two, clamped a hand at the back of her neck and guided her to the long hallway that paralleled her recently abandoned false corridor.

She tried to shake the impression he could pick her up like a puppy and snap her neck. She tried to forget him altogether. If it had only been the two of them, she’d have found the right moment to make a break for it. The closer they came to the lobby, the better her chances of diving out that door to freedom, even if it meant rolling right down all those stairs.

But it wasn’t just the two of them. The entire ballroom contingent followed, and only two of them broke away to continue whatever guard duty they’d been about before she distracted them. And handcuffs…there were handcuffs, of course.

So Selena walked unresisting, arm throbbing, taking in the details of the men and their reactions to one another and to her, and all the time wondering how they’d been so ready for her.

You took too long with the hostages, that’s how.

Maybe. They’d had time to disarm her little distraction, to search the area and realize it was nothing more than a distraction. They’d had time to trickle back to the ballroom, or to rush to all the potential exits on this floor and make sure no one was on the way out—or in. But to be waiting for her in silent ambush, at just the right spot? It’s not as if she’d left muddy tracks to follow or even a handy little blood trail.

They took her to the main ballroom entrance just off the lobby, offering her a tantalizing glimpse of freedom—the ornate capitol doors with their hidden armor and the bright-as-day grounds, halogen lights shining through the tall, narrow windows fronting the lobby. An unexpected inner voice full of primordial fear shrieked run! runrunrun! She stiffened enough to draw her escorts’ attention…and she didn’t run.

At the moment, she was still alive. Still had the opportunity to work the situation. The chance to do some good.

Running would end all that. Ashurbeyli might want her alive, but the Kemenis would never let her near those armor-core doors.

They pushed her into the ballroom and shoved her in a posh padded chair in the haphazard group of chairs and tables that had been shoved aside to make way for pallets and blankets. On the way she got a glimpse through the open door to the next function room, and she caught the shocked reaction of one of the students. Don’t give me away! she thought fiercely, although it hardly mattered now if the Kemenis knew she’d spoken to them.

Just instinct.

They left her to her own company and took up already established positions around the room. She didn’t mistake their casual ease to mean they’d stopped paying attention to her. A quick count tallied one rifle and three automatics pointing in her general direction. She sighed, slumped in the chair with every appearance of resignation and tried to consider her options. Not that she had any. And not that she could think in the first place, given the throb of her arm and her general disgust with the situation. She flexed the arm, testing…pushing.

It bent. Barely, but fingers, hand and arm all moved at her command. Not broken, then. Not terribly useful, but no jaggedy edged bones messing with nerve and blood vessel. She wouldn’t bleed to death internally without even knowing it. She’d just hurt a lot. Even through the layers of her turtleneck and borrowed shirt, her hand hovering over her biceps could feel the heat of the swelling.

Her stomach growled.

Knowing Berzhaani would never serve her better. “Hey,” she said. “You fellows have anything to eat?”

They froze in group disbelief that she’d asked.

“Look,” she said, “Tafiq might well decide to starve me, but then again maybe not. He might actually want to talk to me, in which case it would be good if I wasn’t too faint from hunger to speak respectfully to him.”

She didn’t think they’d go for it. She thought she might as well put her head down on the closest table and catch some sleep while she could. She looked across the long, narrow room with a gaze so tired as to be entirely neutral. Most of them had camped out on the padded carpet of the raised section spanning the front of the room. A long table snugged up against the back wall, shoved there and now covered with supplies, including a stack of black hand-held controls of some sort and a pile of sturdy travel cases meant for electronics jarringly adjacent to prayer rugs. The cases left her puzzled, but the rest of it only reinforced her first impression—that they’d come prepared for the long haul.

At least, they’d come prepared with supplies. Looking at the faces of the men sprawled in chairs and on the floor, Selena wasn’t sure they’d also come prepared for the emotional drain of holding the entire building hostage. Only eight hours in, and already she saw signs of strain and tension. How would they feel after a few sessions of Salat in this far-from-holy place—or worse yet, a few missed sessions? And sooner or later they’d realize the futility of this takeover. They’d get tired and careless and they’d leave an opening for the forces hovering outside in wait for just such a moment.

Not what she’d normally expect of any crew run by Ashurbeyli—except that the Kemenis had been at the end of their collective rope before this had even started, their funding cut, their people hounded.

And where was Jonas White? Off rifling government offices? It wouldn’t surprise her. Ashurbeyli defied the Berzhaani government openly and brazenly, taking what he wanted, while Jonas White hid behind false names and front men and slunk around gathering secrets to use against anyone he could.

She looked over at the men; they looked back at her. Oh, well. She sighed, put her head down on the table and prepared to go hungry. But one of the men cleared his throat and said, “There’s that batch of bad MREs. They’re not halal.”

Another snorted. “Filth for filth.”

Oh, yeah, Selena thought. Bring on the filth.

And the filth was good. The filth went down quite well. Selena made a series of reality checks, but at this point her stomach didn’t seem inclined to object. Just a bad day after all? She patted her tummy low between her hip bones, once again tugged through the series of conflicting emotions that came with the thought of pregnancy. All the overwhelming not nows, somehow balanced by that tiny little hope that it might be true.

Because she did want a child. And she wanted a child with Cole. But…not now.

Hard truth…she didn’t know what she wanted. She just knew the hope of it made her ache in so many ways she couldn’t begin to count.

And Cole…Dammit. Why? Try as she might, she couldn’t reconcile his presence in the park with his CIA position. By definition, Cole’s work was done on foreign soil. And foreign soil was exactly where he should have been—not right under her nose in D.C. Kissing.

Gah. She trusted him completely…and not at all. No way to start a family—no way at all. Not unless she wanted to continue the streak of the Amazing Divorcing Shaws. Grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles…siblings. A divorce-enabled clan.

Selena growled a little under her breath. When she realized what she’d done she swiftly checked the Kemenis, but they were busy showing each other pictures and telling exaggerated stories of their family loyalty to the Berzhaan that should be. Not so busy they didn’t have an eye on her, but a little growling was apparently only to be expected.

She shoved the MRE trash aside, licked a last crumb of cookie from the corner of her mouth and cradled her head in her arms. Athena training had started her young…endurance courses, survival in the White Tank Mountains of Arizona…they’d taught her she could do more than she thought she could. Always. Always one more sit-up, one more mile, one more day. But now, with this very long day and several terrorists behind her, drained by illness and lack of food, she thought she’d just take advantage of the quiet moment she’d been given.

And then she’d find some way to get Allori, Razidae and the kids to safety. Poor, scared kids. They were holding up well….

But then, to judge by the Kemenis’supplies, this had only just started.

“—hadn’t expected you’d trust us enough to sleep so deeply.”

Say what? Selena opened her eyes, got an up-close-and-personal view of the tabletop, and discovered her head had slipped from her arms, her cheek mashed against the surface, her breath misting the lamination with each exhalation. She blinked, took a deep breath and lifted her head with as much dignity as possible. “You said you wanted me unhurt. I didn’t think they’d dare defy you.”

Besides, they probably figure they’ll get their chance later.

She didn’t know how long she’d slept, but to judge by the crick in her neck and her grumpy frame of mind, it had been a while. She rubbed the side of her face, swept her hair back and stretched as though she didn’t have a care in the world. Huge mistake, because she had plenty of cares—and as soon as she moved her battered arm, pain swelled in protest. She couldn’t help but wince.

His expression remained unreadable. “You’re right about that much. They won’t touch you until I say they can.”

Until. Not if. Great.

“I would apologize for keeping you waiting, but I see you’ve made good use of the time.” He nodded at the MRE trash as he reached for a chair, putting it opposite her and so close that their knees nearly touched.

“No problem,” Selena said, carefully bending her arm so as to get a glimpse at her watch—5 a.m. A nice little nap at that. “I’m sure you keep pretty busy with all your terrorist things. You know, phone calls to Berzhaan to make threats, phone calls to various embassies to make threats, strangling puppies and boiling rabbits….”

The corner of his mouth twitched. Ire or amusement, she couldn’t tell—and that imposing set of features gave nothing else away. Not even a smudge of fatigue…how unfair. She decided he must have had a nice nap, too, and felt better immediately.

Quite abruptly, he asked, “Who are you?”

She grinned. Her face had stiffened, but she grinned anyway. “Can’t figure me out at all, can you?”

“American woman,” he said. “You came with Allori, and the guards knew you. You speak Berzhaani as fluently as I’ve heard from any foreign tongue. No doubt you’re from the embassy…one of their CIA plants, perhaps.”

Selena snorted with such expressive spontaneity that he suppressed a smile and said, “No, then. Their loss, perhaps.”

“Thank you. For that, you can call me Athena.” She hadn’t thought ahead…it had just come out. But she supposed there was no harm in it. In fact, it bolstered her—made her think of the strength she’d found at the Athena Academy…the way the young women there never gave up. “And for the record, I also speak Russian, Euskara, Portuguese and probably any other language you care to name offhand.”

“Athena.” This time he downright smiled, as dry as it remained. “Appropriate.”

She didn’t respond. She let the silence stretch between them, tight as it was. Until he finally broke it, quite matter-of-factly. “You’re going to help me,” he said, and sat back in the chair as though it were a done deal, his knees still close to hers. He’d changed, she suddenly realized—he no longer wore his expensive suit, but blended in with the others in Kemeni chic—an olive-green military sweater that he wore like a cover model, and khaki cargo pants not unlike her own.

Quite reasonably, Selena told him, “No, I’m going to stop you.”

He smiled, a tight expression but this time true amusement. “Unlike your government, you say what you mean. If you continue to do so, you might not find your death so unpleasant after all.” He nodded at her, and his expression hardened. “What did you do with the man who once wore that shirt?”

She’d told Atif…if they get close enough to see the blood, I’ll already be in trouble.

And she was.

“Does it matter?” she asked, thinking of Atif hiding in the cooler. Leading Ashurbeyli to the body would lead him straight to the injured cook. “He doesn’t need the shirt anymore.”

“And the others who have gone missing? Are they all dead?”

After a moment, Selena shook her head—a minute gesture. And then to forestall the next question, she raised an eyebrow at him. “You imply otherwise, but my country has been perfectly honest with you. We never supplied you with arms. We never supported the Kemenis with one hand and Razidae with the other. So when your funding dried up, that wasn’t us, either.” She nodded at the spot where she’d earlier seen Jonas White, a little huddle of chairs next to which still sat the remains of a substantial meal. “Where’s Jonas White? Why don’t you ask him about the way your supplies and funding dried up? Ask him about Frank Black, who also used the names Richard Dunst and Roscoe Dupree, especially when he was doing White’s dirty work. Ask him, why don’t you, about those ridiculous Abakan rifles. Why do you think you have them? Because he got his hands on them and needed to unload them, and he did it in a way that let him jerk the Kemenis around.”

He sat straight up, his expression shifting from indulgent to furious before she finished forming the last word.

Oops. Went too far.

He slapped her. Backhanded, heavy…powerful. And then he sat back as though he hadn’t lost his temper at all, the only signs of it lurking in his flared nostrils and the fire banked in his eyes. “Be respectful, or pay the immediate consequences.”

“You want respect?” Selena found her hand on her cheek, the existing bruise reawakened, blood trickling anew. “Then earn it. Let those kids go. They don’t have anything to do with your problems.”

“They represent countries who have interfered with us. They’ll stay.” He flicked a hand in dismissal. “Now. You work for the United States. You work with Razidae and his government. You understand them both. You can make them understand how serious we are. Make this real to them. At the moment they simply play games with us. They watched bin Kuwaji die, and yet they don’t take us seriously.”

“Oh, they take you seriously all right,” Selena said readily. “Let me guess—Berzhaan won’t even respond to your communication. The U.S. is stalling and pretending not to.”

Ashurbeyli pressed his lips together. Hard. Sensuousness thinned to nothing. “Essentially.”

“It’s like this,” she said, and then hesitated, her thoughts tugged by awareness of the chaos on the other side of those halogen lamps—the discord between the countries involved, the struggle for control. Berzhaan capitol, U.S. personnel, hostages scattered across a handful of national lines.

She thought, too, of Cole, still waiting to hear from her…no doubt imagining the worst. And probably close to being right. As long as she’d been able to reach him, he served as her secret weapon. Her off-site backup. The man she trusted to cut through red tape and national barriers to get her the information she needed and to pass along the inside intel she provided, tidbits that would help keep them all safe.

The deep voice she’d counted on to fill her ears and bolster her confidence. She didn’t need it; she could depend on herself.

But she wanted it.

Ashurbeyli hadn’t so much as cleared his throat…just the slightest rise of a single eyebrow. But it was enough to rivet her attention back where it belonged.

She said, “Berzhaan won’t deal with you. They’ll sacrifice all of us before they let this country fall into Kemeni control. I can’t believe you don’t know that. And Berzhaan won’t ask for help from the States. The U.S. is planning something anyway…several somethings, probably. Things they can put into play and apologize for later. They’ll claim it’s for Razidae, but they can’t afford the bad juju of losing those kids.”

“Juju,” he repeated.

She ignored that and added thoughtfully, “In fact, I really wouldn’t touch the kids. There’s not much you can do to rile up the U.S. more than picking on kids.”

He tipped his head to send a sardonic look her way. “So you’d have me believe Berzhaan is prepared to let you all die, and your United States is playing quiet but ready to spring. That we’re doomed either way. That if I take you to that front door and add your blood to bin Kuwaji’s, no one will be moved by the death of a woman.”

Selena wanted to swallow hard. She wanted to bite her lip. She wanted to make a run for it right then and there.

But she cleared her throat and said, “Essentially, yes. The success of your action here rests on the belief that someone with influence will bend to your demands. That’s not the case. Berzhaan will either wait or have the Elite Guard storm the place, and the States will pick their moment and mow you down with SEALs.”

He simply stared at her. Not startled, not angry. Just watching. Waiting to see if she’d hold on to those words.

But she’d meant it, every bit of it. She gave him the slightest of smiles, as though none of it was any concern of hers. In truth, she knew herself in the presence of a man so strong that little she could say would affect her fate one way or the other. He already knew his ultimate plans for her. With words, she might change the exact events that got her there…but only with action would she save her own life.

And the hostages. Those frightened children. Hadn’t she gotten into the counterterrorism racket just precisely to prevent this sort of situation?

She just had to pick her time. She had to hope she lived long enough to find that time.

Ashurbeyli nodded, a precise gesture. “I see. This is your final assessment of the situation? Are you certain you wouldn’t like to try some fancy Western lies to talk your way out of trouble?”

She snorted. “I don’t lie very well. And frankly, I’m surprised you expected anything different.” She hesitated, considering him—wondering just what he had expected, and what he truly hoped to accomplish here. “And U.S. policy is spread all over the news, every day. We’ve dedicated ourselves to taking down groups like yours.” She didn’t hide her regard, looking at him much as he’d looked at her. Thoughtfully. With much assessment. It seemed to amuse him. The byplay in general seemed to entertain him, a fact for which she was mighty grateful. As long as he stayed amused, he wasn’t likely to throw her to his men. Just a matter of time. A matter of time, too, before another hostage died. But for now, she’d try to ride that thin balance of being useful and annoying and, yes, of being amusing…and just possibly, making a point. “Who talked you into this, anyway? White? What did he dangle in front of you? Something better than those rifles he provided? Better than the nonhalal MREs?”

His eyes narrowed. Ah, struck a nerve. He leaned forward; she had to steel herself to avoid reaction. Knee to knee, sheer charisma carrying between them like a direct connection…if only this man had thought to dedicate himself to good… With the first heat of the conversation, he said, “Those rifles came from your people. From the United States.”

She raised a skeptical eyebrow. “You’re kidding, right? Abakans? It’s a Russian rifle.”

He waved away the words. “Exactly. No ties to the States.”

“Not only that, it’s a terrible rifle for basic troop use.” Selena crossed her arms, unable to suppress a wince but not hesitating over it. “No, those rifles came from Frank Black. The recently deceased Frank Black. At least, that’s the name you knew him by, and far from being a U.S. rep, he actually spent his dearly departed days running errands and playing evil henchman for Jonas White. We’ve learned quite a lot about Frank Black lately, as it happens. It was Jonas White who gave you those nasty rifles, Jonas White who diverted those MREs your way. And then he lost his empire because sometimes life is good and just, and he came looking for a new power base.” She nodded at him. “That would be you. If you’re successful. But you won’t be.”

He stood so abruptly that the chair scooted away behind his legs. “That’s enough.” But he scowled, a definite and outright scowl over her words about White.

“Bring him in for a little conversation, just the three of us,” Selena suggested. “See how hard he sweats.”

“The time for talking is over.” Ashurbeyli looked at the door separating the ballroom from the function room, and Selena instantly knew what he was thinking. Another hostage…

“No,” she said, her cool calm dissolved into desperation. “Not yet. Not until you understand how you’ve been used—”

“Does it matter how we got here? We’re here, and we want what we want. Worthy goals. Martyrs for our cause will find their own reward.” He looked over his shoulder, a single glance, as he headed for his men. “I think you’ll appreciate my choice.”

Selena didn’t find it likely.

She found it even less likely a moment later, when—after some minor fuss from the hostages—he returned flanked by two of his men, Atif the cook in tow. His hand clamped around Atif’s bloody white sleeve in a cruel grip, his pistol pushed solidly between the cook’s shoulders. Atif wouldn’t meet her eyes; at first she thought he was embarrassed on top of his fear. He kept his gaze on the floor even when he spoke to her. “I heard the distraction you made.” His gaze flickered, didn’t make it all the way up and returned to his toes. “I thought it my chance to escape.”

Selena had looked at Ashurbeyli with respect and even a certain understanding of his motives if not his methods. Now she looked at him with disgust. “Pick on someone your own size, why don’t you?”

She wasn’t expecting his wry grin. “You underestimate him, just as you underestimate the Kemenis. How do you think we had arms and supplies waiting inside this building? Surely you already considered that we entered through the kitchen—it was one reason the casualties there were so regrettably high. They hadn’t yet had time to run, but we couldn’t let them spread panic.”

Selena blinked, surprisingly pained. “Atif?”

He closed his eyes, a desperate gesture. “I thought I could keep down the bloodshed. I let the guns in, packed in fruit boxes. I opened the door, yes! I thought it would make the inevitable easier.”

“But you weren’t so sure that you didn’t have your hideout planned,” Ashurbeyli observed. “And you were quick enough to offer up our Athena here, weren’t you?”

This time Atif looked up at her, nakedly honest in his self-acceptance. “I know what I am. A weak man. I was trying to save my own life. Again.”

She met his gaze. She understood his fear…she understood why he would waver before the Kemenis. He was, as he had told her, a cook. Not a Jackie Chan fighting cook, just a man who hadn’t wanted to be involved in any of this in the first place. She said, “It doesn’t seem to have worked out as you hoped.”

“No.” His face was tight with fear. “If I had stood my ground, I would at least have died in honor.”

Ashurbeyli shook his head, short and tight. “And now you will simply die. You may hope it still counts for something.”

Selena thought…in some small way, perhaps it would. For Ashurbeyli had still asked her about his men…and that meant that Atif had not given up the kitchen cooler stash. As a hideout, it still had some value. And while one man was dead and the youth disabled, the third could have reinforced the terrorist efforts and was best kept out of the game.

Not so weak as all that. Just not quite strong enough.

She found her eyes hot with fury and frustration and sorrow. “You helped me, too,” she told him. “That still matters.” He stood ever so slightly taller, and Ashurbeyli, as if realizing this encounter wasn’t quite turning out as expected, shoved him onward, glancing back at Selena as if despite himself. She gave him a hard, unforgiving gaze, and then she crossed one leg over the other and looked away as if he were no matter at all.

His voice came harshly over his shoulder, directed at his men. “Watch her. She’s probably prone to pointless gestures.” But then he hesitated, and he looked again at her, this time more thoughtfully. “But bring her close to the door. I want to make sure she can hear.”

Incredulous, she dropped her foot to the floor. “Why?”

“Because,” he said, and his voice was as harsh as she’d heard it, “it’s time you realized the hopelessness of your own situation.”

She didn’t have time for any kind of response, hopeful or not. Three of the Kemenis left their rest and descended upon her, and would have lifted her by the arms had she not snarled and smacked their reaching hands away with such purpose as to make it clear she’d have it out here and now if that’s the way they wanted it—when she knew Ashurbeyli wasn’t quite ready for that. Hadn’t quite seen in her eyes the defeat he wanted to see. And indeed, he looked back again to give a short shake of his head, even as he escorted Atif out of the ballroom.

The three men stepped back slightly. Of varying olive-dark complexions, one in a yashmagh and the other two bareheaded, two with short beards and one clean shaven…she doubted they had much in common other than their defiance and their loyalty to Ashurbeyli. Years of rotating occupation had left Berzhaan a country of scattered influences and little cohesion…and had led to this moment, this incident. Atif’s death.

Soon, her own. And that of the hostages, if she didn’t manage to deal with things. For as she’d told Ashurbeyli, she had little confidence that Berzhaan would prioritize anything but stopping the terrorists…and that any attempt at rescue made by the U.S. would be hampered by their need to work around Berzhaan. She hadn’t even mentioned the difficulty of coordinating the different agencies involved.

Up to me.

And that meant she had to hold it together through whatever came next.

Chapter 11

Ashurbeyli’s men must have blocked the capitol’s doors open, for his voice carried clearly to where Selena stood in the ballroom—not close enough to the door to make a break for it, not with one man’s hand resting on her shoulder where he’d feel every shift of her weight and the other resting his pistol muzzle in her ribs. “Good morning!” Ashurbeyli said, his voice ringing clearly over the sprawling steps that led down to the courtyard, the halogen lights and the military vehicles ringed by press from around the world. Midwinter and still full dark as they approached 6 a.m., but Selena had no doubt that the right people were watching. Or that they would be, for the cameras were running, and this footage would find a worldwide audience.

Tory Patton might even be out there. Selena hoped so. It would take someone with Tory’s heart to make this story as real to the world as it was to Selena.

As it was to Atif. First traitor, then Selena’s silent partner in counterterrorism, then traitor again—but beneath it all, a man who had simply been caught up in something bigger than he was. Bigger than he was ever meant to be.

Ashurbeyli said, “Yesterday I made a very clear point here on these very steps—I can still see the bloodstains. No rain will ever be enough to wash them away, just as it cannot wash away the damage done to my country by those who have occupied and interfered with us over the years. Our current government is weak, and too open to the influence of those people who have previously enslaved us—or to those who would exploit us for the resources we have chosen to leave in the earth.”

The oil.

And of course he was right. Everyone wanted that oil, and no one had qualms about taking every advantage of a people in turmoil to get it.

That was the hell of it. Ashurbeyli was wrong, so wrong, in what he did. But he was no fool. He had a clear vision of what his country faced, and that behind every proffered friendship lurked self-interest of some kind—including her own work here. She’d come to make his people safer, to start a partnership in counterterrorism. Her genuine drive to keep innocents safe from the random cruelty of terrorism didn’t mean the United States didn’t have its own agenda behind the FBI Legate programs—for once they became entwined, once Berzhaan depended on the States to help train their own, disentangling wouldn’t be so easy. And in the end, Selena’s mandate to stop the trouble here was a mandate to keep it from spreading to U.S. soil.

She closed her eyes and wished she could close her ears. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t care. I wouldn’t have saved those women yesterday morning…I wouldn’t have stayed in the capitol when I could have tried to run. I would have stayed hidden in that room instead of coming down where I could be caught.

She cared, all right. But that didn’t mean those like Ashurbeyli wanted her here. Or that they were wrong to resent the interference of outsiders, no matter the motive.

The cold ridge of the gun muzzle prodded her ribs, demanding her attention. “Listen to him.”

She didn’t think she’d missed much. He’d either paused for effect, or he was repeating himself…the words flowed well enough. “Since then, we have heard nothing from our own government, and nothing from those of the people we hold.” Did he have Atif in front of him, shielding him? Or did the snipers—for there were surely snipers—simply have orders to hold fire, fearing for the remaining hostages’ lives should Ashurbeyli go down those steps himself? “We imagine that you think us weak—that we won’t carry out our plans. Or that you think us unprepared, that we don’t have the resources to wait.”

God, he was good. No hesitation in his voice, no stumbling over words. Conviction ringing out to the world.

“You will find we have the strength to carry out these plans, and the resources. We have warm clothing if you should find a way to cut off the heat. We have drinking water enough to raise the level of the Caspian Sea. And we have hostages enough to continue killing one each day for quite some time. We have the prime minister.” And they wouldn’t kill Razidae unless they couldn’t avoid it, for keeping him alive would keep everyone hopeful—and would keep every involved nation from storming the capitol at once. “What we want is for this absurd charade of friendly interest and false intentions to end. We want the government which has allowed things to come this far to admit defeat and to leave this country to those who will keep it safe. We want them to step down—every last lowly advisor. And until that happens, people will continue to die.” There was a pause; some dramatic gesture, Selena imagined. Ashurbeyli’s voice held a smile when he continued, albeit a cold one. “I don’t refer to those inside this building. I refer to those out in the turmoil you have created for us. You who think you can find some way to control us for your own gains. Right this moment, you’re killing my people. Berzhaan’s people. So we invite those responsible to resign, and we invite the rest of you to go away.”

And all this while, Atif waited to die.

Ashurbeyli seemed to think he’d made as much of his point as he was going to. “This man is a traitor to his government, and yet still too weak to be one of our own. He is my gift to you. The next hostage to die will be someone you cry over.”

The scuff of leather soles against marble steps, a quick, futile protest—

Selena flinched at the sudden, resounding blast of the gun, muffled as it was by the back of Atif’s skull. Nothing came close to describing gunfire in close proximity, nothing. Nothing came close to describing the aftermath, as she listened to the sodden thump of Atif’s body hitting the first stair, rolling down to the second…the image of bin Kuwaji came to mind, flopping his way downward to lie on the long, narrow landing until someone took the risk to acquire his body.

Closing her eyes only made it worse.

Ashurbeyli found her there. “And what do you think? The drinking water enough to raise the level of the sea—was that perhaps too far?”

She glared at him in unabashed fury. “You went too far when you stormed in here yesterday afternoon! You went too far when you shot a man for being less complicated than you! And then you blame everyone else for the turmoil of your country—that’s one hell of a case of self-delusion you’ve got going, buddy.”

“Ah,” he said, looking at her with an understanding that turned her fury to cold wariness. “You think that man was someone to cry over. And you would be the one to do it.”

She hesitated, uncertain whether to admit to it—to show the weakness, or to get right in his face about it. Two men flanked him and blood splattered them all, a pattern so distinctive she could almost tell who’d been standing where. She could certainly tell that Ashurbeyli had pulled the trigger.

And two men flanked her, still jamming the gun in her ribs, only far enough away so they weren’t impeding Ashurbeyli’s conversation.

She got in his face anyway. “Yeah,” she said. “I damn well would. Because of the two of us, I’m the only one with enough humanity to care!”

She grunted as the pistol barrel rode her ribs, bruising them, and Ashurbeyli raised a hand that put an instant stop to the rough treatment. “Leave her,” he said. “Put her back where she was, and two of you will watch her at all times. See to her needs, and have her ready to move if Mr. White or I choose to speak to her in the back room. Soon enough you will see her die. Until then, we will not mark her.” Touching her for the first time since he’d searched her, Ashurbeyli lifted Selena’s chin in his hand, a proprietary gesture with complete awareness. “These marks already here will be perfect, I think. Not so much as to disguise her identity, but enough to heighten the poignancy of her death.”

“Oh, please,” Selena said. “Now you’re going too far. Too much.”

He shook his head, maintaining his firm grip. She somehow stopped herself from biting his fingers. “I’m afraid,” he said, “that you underestimate the reaction of those with enough humanity to care. The stories they will tell about you…” He tsked. “A tragedy, really.”

This time she jerked her chin free to glower back at full force. “There’s a tragedy coming, all right.”

She didn’t have to say anything more; she saw his eyes darken. Not irked at her implication so much as at her continuing challenge…but she had to give him that much: he had patience. He had his schedule and his plans, he had other things to do and he had the patience to make her wait for her tragic end—to make it happen at a time and in a way that would do him the most good.

Even for that, she had to respect him.

But she still intended to stop him.

Cole stepped out into the gusty, spitting rain of the old runway. He pulled his shearling coat closed against the Berzhaani winter, a duffel bag slung over his shoulder and the cell phone—the silent cell phone—within easy reach. Selena called this his McCloud coat, reminiscent of the fictional Texas cop who’d been transplanted to New York City, and teased that he’d chosen it to disguise his adaptable and quick-thinking nature with a laid-back image. Cole thought he’d chosen it because it was warm and he liked the rough-out leather, but a second thought made him reconsider. Made him realize she was right, that he’d done it almost without thinking.

If she knew him so well, what had set her off? Sent her away to this turmoil? She’d as much as admitted he was right about that—but he hadn’t even been home to put his foot in it. He’d been a lot closer to her than he’d expected, but she hadn’t known that. She should have. He should have let her know; it was their long-standing agreement. But things had developed too quickly, too quietly…and she hadn’t. And even if she’d somehow found out, it was hardly cause for…for…

This.

He shivered and turned his collar up. Nearly half a day in a noisy Lockheed Starlifter, keeping company with nine cargo pallets and one other passenger who was no more eager to introduce himself than Cole, and he’d come halfway around the world, from one winter to another. This small airstrip had made the pilots work for a landing, and the crew had given him no more than an amiable wave as they prepared to unload cargo—relief supplies for besieged villages, support gear for the small remaining military presence here. Berzhaan allowed no more than that, and gave the U.S. access to this landing site only for the relief supplies.

They definitely didn’t want the States in on the hostage crisis.

“Sir?” One of the energetic young men engaged in unloading the Starlifter moved away from the rear fuselage to approach Cole beside one of the four underwing turbofan engines, now silent. Even with the efficient bustle at the tail of the plane, after the extended noise of their travel, the whole airstrip seemed silent.

Cole’s cell phone seemed especially silent. Selena, where are you?

Knowing Selena, she was simply busy. Or she’d very wisely taken the chance to grab some rest.

Except she should have called by now regardless—if she could—and he knew it. He couldn’t talk himself out of knowing it.

“Sir?” the private repeated. “Can I help you?”

It was a polite way of asking whether Cole had any real business being here, and of warning that without a good answer, he could expect to be removed. Remarkably polite, under the circumstances. Cole eased his duffel to the ground. “I’m waiting for my ride,” he said.

“CIA. Would you like to see ID?” Sometimes he carried it…most times he didn’t. But this trip, he’d use it to pull as many strings as he could.

The private gave a short nod, and Cole opened his jacket to the cold and fished the ID wallet from his inside coat pocket. Carefully. Letting the young man see that he did indeed have a pistol, a 9 mm Browning Hi-Power Mark III in a belt holster that wasn’t meant to be the least bit hidden but which was carefully placed opposite to the direction in which he fished for the wallet.

The young man gave it a careful look, eyebrows rising at the sight of the eagle-topped shield, and returned it. “Would you like me to check on your ride?” His tone was perfectly respectful, but Cole understood his intent. To get Cole off this airfield, and away from military turf.

Cole shook his head. “Not just yet.” If Tory couldn’t make it, she’d send someone for him. Their arrangements, made as soon as he’d snagged his transportation, had been quick but thorough. She was, he thought, quite a bit more habitually circumspect over the phone than he’d expected from her.

The young man shifted into conversational mode, obviously planning to stay for a while. He’d been sent, then; he had his orders. It made Cole wonder with just what kind of cargo he’d kept company. The private said, “You’ve been in the air a while. You hear about the second hostage?”

The second hostage? There were at least twenty-five of them as far as Cole knew. The second hostage…what?

Then he knew. His pulse hammered into overload and his shoulders stiffened and he said sharply, “They killed someone else?”

Taken aback, the young man frowned, expressively dark eyebrows bold in a face with such little hair atop. Cole had to stop himself from grabbing the fellow up and shaking the words free—he’d be useless to Selena if they detained him, or even if the cargo handlers all piled atop him with such force as to break every rib he had. But nor could he quite find the words to demand answers; his tongue tangled around things unsaid until he finally spat out, “Who?”

The soldier’s eyes widened in sudden comprehension. “You know someone.” The thought froze his expression, and then he shook himself free of it and said, “Sorry, sir. I don’t know much. But it was a man—”

He said other words, but Cole didn’t hear them. Too busy dealing with the sudden loss of strength all the way down the back of his legs and the flip-flop in his stomach. His heart, formerly pounding, now just raced in relief. He realized the soldier had hesitated, waiting for some indication from Cole, and he shook his head ever so slightly. Then he reached down for his duffel, just to be doing something. Cool, Jones. Real cool.

But this wasn’t one of his assignments. This was Selena. The heart she carried under her controlled exterior had grabbed him the first time they met, had grabbed him hard. And she’d shown him that heart over and over again…right up until the moment she called him from hiding, quite typically refusing to leave that besieged building. The difficulties of their marriage, the thing that had almost torn them apart…

That same heart. Living apart from one another so frequently had turned them into the very kind of family that Selena feared…a broken family in physical fact, even if not emotionally. When they’d reconciled, it had been with the awareness that they’d have to try harder than ever—and that inevitably, something would have to change. Cole would have to take a Langley-based position or find work elsewhere altogether; Selena might simply travel with him for a few years, or she, too, might stay stateside. They just hadn’t had a chance to come to any conclusions when he’d been called away.

So it had often happened. Things got left unsaid, and then when they rejoined they became too caught up in relearning each other’s every favorite touch to tackle practical things until again, they received the call to arms. These past few years…the fears and chaos of the world had not been kind to schedules that had previously been workable. And now he could only hope they’d have the chance to change that.

“You okay, sir?”

Cole realized he still crouched by the duffel and straightened. “Just thinking,” he said. “Any change in their demands?”

“I didn’t hear the little speech the guy said before—well, you know—but I think it was just the expected stuff—do things our way or more people will die and next time you really won’t like it.”

“Time frame?”

Because Selena still hadn’t called. They could still have her.

The guy shook his head. “Haven’t heard they gave one. They didn’t last time, either. Just showed up with a hostage—bing! Time’s up!”

Great.

Cole closed his coat, squinting into a renewed gust of misty rain as he caught sight of the dark, boxy sedan headed their way. It couldn’t have looked more out of place on the airstrip, and he very much expected it to be his ride. Enough so that he gave his unofficial escort a nod and stepped out to meet the car. The back door opened as the car stopped; the driver even kindly popped the trunk. Cole tossed his duffel into a space otherwise full of camera accessories and shoved it closed before diving into the refuge of the vehicle.

Even as he closed the door, Tory Patton murmured something to the driver; the car swooped away from the plane and across the tarmac, affording Cole a view of scattered hangars and a small control tower through the rain-streaked windshield. He shifted his attention back to Tory, who had also chosen the back seat—he presumed so they might talk. She looked just as she did on camera—calm, elegant beauty, set off by a natural poise—even with her hair tucked under a Sherpa-style hat with tassels hanging from the ties. “Brr,” she said. “I haven’t been warm since this started.” She looked at him with something akin to surprise. “Only a day. Seems longer, doesn’t it?”

“A lifetime,” he said. “You told me to get here—I got here. Now let’s talk about what you wouldn’t say over the phone.”

One winged eyebrow rose. “Wow. And here I thought you CIA guys were so good at finesse.”

“I can finesse with the best of them—when we’re not talking about Selena. You don’t want to talk in front of your friend?” He jerked a thumb at the driver. “Then stop the car and we’ll get out.”

“Mmm.” She pressed her lips together over the thoughtful noise and then shook her head. “Not a problem, or he wouldn’t be here.” She raised her voice slightly. “Isn’t that right?”

The driver didn’t so much as cast a glance at her; he turned between two hangars as if he knew just where he was going—and it didn’t necessarily seem to be off this airstrip. “I’m sorry, Tory,” he said, his voice full of studied innocence. “Did you say something?”

“So convincing,” she told him, but turned back to Cole with a more serious expression darkening her brown eyes. “Here’s the situation as I know it—and for the sake of argument, let’s just say I’ve got the real scoop.”

He nodded, short and impatient. “Just skip past the part where the CIA has a couple of SEAL teams on standby, desperate for intel. And the part where the Berzhaani don’t want us here and damned sure don’t want those SEALs going in—they’d rather see the hostages go down than find victory in U.S. assistance. Razidae is the only one who showed signs of softening on that stance, and he’s out of commission. So we’ve got relief troops here waiting to swap hats and turn into peacekeepers. Just tell me what I don’t know.”

She pursed her lips slightly, thoughtfully. “That certainly limits the conversation. How about this—in exchange for some of the relief we’ve offered their Kemeni-damaged areas, Berzhaan had given us a little space to work from—and the air force already had a special Predator team in the area. They’ve been keeping an eye on things south of here, a certain much-traveled border where we’re hunting a certain well-traveled terrorist leader.”

Afghanistan. Of course.

“They’ve pulled the Predator back in—they’ve already done one pass over the capitol. We’ve got some of that intel the SEALs need—some close-ups of the roof, with all the hidey-holes and exits. They’re still analyzing what they gathered up, and they’ll be headed back for a second pass. I thought the operators might be just the contacts you need—the wild cards who’ll not only keep Selena’s best interests in mind, but who have the ear of the people on the other end of the intel.”

Whoa.

She waited with patient amusement, watching him process what she’d said. The car eased to a stop, almost unnoticed, slotting in between several others of a similar make beside one of the smaller Quonset buildings.

Of course. The Cassandras. They’d actually come through.

“Josie Lockworth.” He said it, and he shook his head, barely believing it. “You’ve got Josie Lockworth and her modified supersneaky remote-control spy plane here.”

“Well, in point of fact the air force has her here. But what I have is ID giving you access to the building—not, mind you, that I think that would stop you, but we might as well do this the easy way—and Josie’s got a keen interest in talking to you. For that matter, in keeping you close by in case you hear from Selena again. Have you?”

He didn’t quite hear her last question, still full of relief at just how very thoroughly Tory Patton had come through for him. For her Athena classmate. He said, “I’m going to owe Selena an apology…I once implied she was exaggerating about the Athena grads.”

Tory smiled. It had a secretive look to it. “Ah, she said you could be a charmer.”

“She—you’ve talked?” Great deduction, Jones.

Her smile told him all he needed to know. Oh yeah. Women. She shrugged, a motion almost lost in her quilted coat. “You didn’t answer my question. Have you heard from Selena?”

The answer sucked any vestige of the light moment from the air. “No. And I should have.”

“Yes,” she agreed quietly. “You should have.”

Cole shook it off. As best he could, which wasn’t entirely convincing even from his own point of view. “She knows how to take care of herself. She lost the landline the last time we talked…there’s no telling what’s up with the cell. She’ll get in touch.” He cleared his tight throat. “When she can.” His throat had clogged right up again; he coughed, and then he held out a hand. “We haven’t been properly introduced. I’m Cole Jones. And I’m very grateful for your help.”

Worry lurked around her eyes, but her expression softened as she took his hand. “Tory Patton,” she said. “And I’m glad you thought to call me. We’ll all do what we can to see that Selena walks out of that building.” She released his hand, tucked a lock of hair back into her hat. “Now. Do you want to go meet another Cassandra?”

Hours passed. Selena prevailed upon her Kemeni guards—a new set, as guard shifts changed over for the third time—to escort her to the ladies’ room, giving her the chance to establish she was on her period. It wasn’t a lie that would hold up, but it took some of the eagerness out of their eyes; as men who considered themselves righteous warriors fighting for a righteous cause, they leaned too hard on their spiritual beliefs to casually break the law against being intimate with a woman in her menses. In fact, they’d probably have to perform ablutions before their next Salat just for touching her.

They fed her more of the excess standard MREs—beef chili macaroni, the one that tasted good even cold. Even for breakfast. They allowed her water. She got glimpses of the hostages in the next room as they now occasionally made escorted trips to the facilities and shared rudimentary meals—was once even able to exchange a meaningful glance with Dante Allori—enough for her to send him a fierce message. I’m not hurt. I haven’t given up. Not yet.

Other than that, they tolerated very little movement on Selena’s part. She sat at her table, thinking about anything but the previous day’s illness…trying not to wonder if it would happen again. She eyed the haphazard pile of cell phones along the wall—every one belonged to a hostage, and they’d all been turned off after the constant, plaintive ringing irritated the Kemenis beyond endurance. She sneaked in isometric exercises, she wiggled her toes, she quietly flexed her stiff arm. She would have preferred an ice pack, even in the chill of an obviously faltering furnace.

And every now and then such practical things made way for a burst of adrenaline from nowhere—demanding action, demanding escape, demanding anything but this waiting. It seized her with a strength akin to panic until she resorted to deep breathing, looking anywhere but at the terrorists…because if they knew how close she hovered to giving in, they’d come bash some sense into her. Or they’d simply shoot her outright.

That would be the smart thing to do.

She drew a deep breath, hearing again the shot that had killed Atif. Yeah, shooting her outright would be the smart thing.

But somehow, when Ashurbeyli walked through the door only moments later, she didn’t launch herself at him. Her pulse pounded through her body, but she schooled herself back to the cool demeanor for which she was known, only one leg twitching to give away her impulse. It twitched again as Jonas White followed Ashurbeyli, looking well rested and refreshed enough to hold a press conference. She’d never guess his age at over sixty; his round face held deep grooves from nose to mouth and impressive scowl lines ridged his forehead, but his hair remained dark—just enough gray at the temples to deny a dye job. Unlike everyone else in the room, he’d clearly been getting enough food—and if he was worried about the success of this crazed new venture, it didn’t show in his body language.

Perhaps just a little, right around the eyes.

Ashurbeyli caught her watching White and sent her a grim little smile that meant she hadn’t been forgotten. He exchanged a few more words with his men, low murmurs that Selena dearly wished she could hear. They all seemed satisfied enough. She wasn’t sure why…several hours had passed since Atif’s death and there’d been no indication of change in their situation. The Kemenis were as they’d been, patient and prepared and not, somehow, quite as concerned as the situation demanded.

Then again, maybe he’d been smart enough to expect such delays…even the failure to gain the control over Berzhaan that he sought from this strike. Maybe he knew he’d have to go to the extreme of killing some college kids—or Razidae himself. Hell, for that matter, maybe he’d made contingency plans. There were any number of grand gestures at his disposal, and most of them involved death. If he had a Javelin anti-tank missile or two—even one of the old Dragons—he could take out a big chunk of Berzhaani troops right on the street, not to mention reporters from around the globe. Or maybe he’d just bring this building down around them while he made his escape in the mess—and in the resulting chaos, the Kemenis could strike elsewhere and strike hard. Strike with success.

Maybe he planned to bring this building down around them.

The thought sent chills up her spine, coalescing around every previous doubt she’d had. Those moments wondering what the Kemenis thought to accomplish, Ashurbeyli’s calm lack of reaction when she’d said as much. Her incredulity that he hadn’t figured out the futility of this pathetic coup attempt all on his own.

But he’d known better all along. He had another purpose here, a true purpose—and she had to figure out what it was. She glanced over at the careless pile of black devices. Remotes? Ashurbeyli might well have turned this place into a death trap. She had no doubt he’d do it if he believed it would lead to a successful coup. Or that he’d sacrifice every single hostage in the process, perhaps even many of his own men.

She had no doubt Jonas White would urge him on.

Something must have shown on her face. Ashurbeyli lifted his head from his conversation and looked at her with sharp attention. A few more words to his men and he straightened, reaching into his pocket as he moved toward her. So casual. He caught White’s eye along the way and White moved away from his own, less intense conversation—by necessity, as he didn’t seem to speak Berzhaani.

Indeed, Ashurbeyli made his opening comments to her in English. “You seem to be faring well enough,” he said, an oddly innocuous opening. “Not too lonely, I hope. We really must keep a better eye on you than on the others.”

“I’m fine, thank you,” Selena said in her polite diplomatic party voice. “And have you and Mr. White been having a nice chat? Did he perhaps explain those Abakans?”

Jonas White cleared his throat with annoyance. “No need for that,” he said, “since I didn’t have anything to do with them.”

Selena nodded wisely. “Sticking to the story, are you? Haven’t you figured out it’s best to come clean now? Because your Kemeni associates are going to be really, really upset at you when they learn that you’ve lied to them—lied to their faces. In their own way, they’re much more honorable than you on your best day. And you’ll hardly be able to hide your interest in their oil when the time comes, although I imagine you’ve already got a new henchman lined up to front your activity in that sector.” She frowned slightly, thoughtful. “Then again, none of it matters, since this whole hostage business is going to blow up in your face.”

She used the words quite deliberately—and she saw in White’s eyes a flicker of smug reaction.

Oh God. Couldn’t it have just been my overactive imagination?

A wave of queasiness washed over her.

No, no, NO.

But White didn’t notice. He squinted at her, far too thoughtfully critical for her tastes. “Who is she, Tafiq?”

“She had no identification,” Ashurbeyli said, watching White more carefully than he did Selena. Good. Maybe he’d see that she’d actually made White uneasy. As much as he hid it, she made him uneasy. Ashurbeyli shrugged, the most insouciant of gestures. “We have not cared enough to find out. It matters only that she no longer interferes.”

“Oh, I think it matters more than that.” White narrowed his eyes at her. No dummy, he. He couldn’t afford to have her continue what she’d started, filling Ashurbeyli’s ears with the truth. “If you prefer to keep her as a pet, then ask the others. Someone here must know her.”

Yes. But he wouldn’t talk.

“Or take one of those sniveling kids and carve off a few inches of skin. She’ll tell us. It’s not that hard, if you really want to know.”

Her stomach did a lazy flip-flop at the thought. She wasn’t here to risk the lives of the people she’d stayed to save. Ashurbeyli cocked his head slightly; he’d read that answer on her face.

“Would you care to save us the trouble?” he asked. “Athena?”

“Of course.” She didn’t hide her irritation. “Because it’s really not worth that kind of trouble. My name is Selena Shaw Jones. I work at the U.S. Embassy. If I were of any real importance, you’d have known who I was from the start, don’t you think?”

“Perhaps,” Ashurbeyli murmured. “Perhaps not. It is, of course, a pleasure to have a name for you. Selena.”

But she didn’t like the thoughtful speculation in his eye. Or that barely perceptible nod, as though he’d made a decision. A reluctant decision…and not one that was likely to bode well for her. Best to take his mind off it. She turned the conversation around. “And did you get what you came for?”

He affected surprise, but she thought she saw a smile. Appreciation. As though beneath the surface, he enjoyed their sparring—perhaps even sought it out. “My English fails me. I can’t imagine what you mean to say.”

Selena’s mouth quirked in skeptical reaction. “Mmm,” she said, making plain her disbelief. But she didn’t argue it; she gestured from herself to White and said, “This. Between us. Me pushing his buttons, exposing his lies for you.”

White’s heavy brows drew together; those formidable frown lines gathered on his forehead. But Ashurbeyli waved him off. “Please, Jonas, do not concern yourself. Do you think I can’t tell she’s trying to disturb our alliance?” He turned his near-black gaze on Selena and added in Berzhaani, “You only help me. Such suspicions have no impact on this moment, but I will see to them afterward.”

White’s scowl only grew deeper. “Tafiq.”

Ashurbeyli turned to him with ease. “It is of no matter, Jonas. A crudity unsuited to your language.”

“Loosely translated, it means ‘don’t bend over to get the soap,’” Selena told him, smiling serenely at White’s narrow-eyed reaction.

“Ah,” Ashurbeyli dug into his pocket, a pretense of sudden memory. “There was another reason I came.” He pulled out his hand and extended it in her direction, closing the space between them until it entered that realm of intimate with which he seemed so comfortable. When he uncurled his fingers, he revealed a dull gold ring in the center of his palm. A wedding ring? “For you,” he said. “Because I chose him on your behalf.”

Atif’s wedding ring.

Chapter 12

Atif’s wedding ring.

She didn’t know why it had such a sudden, profound effect. He had been a traitor—twice a traitor, even as he’d hidden Selena’s captured terrorist cache.

And just a man, trying to survive. Not deserving to face terrorists, not at the back of the kitchen, not on the capitol steps.

Selena’s stomach flipped again, a slow, lazy roll. The blood drained from her face, leaving it tingly. Leaving it as suddenly green as she felt.

“I need—” she said, and clapped a hand over her mouth.

Ashurbeyli, stranger and terrorist, understood immediately. It mattered not that he reacted to keep this room clean—for some of his men were forced to pray here so the hostages weren’t left unattended in the next room, and her illness would defile it. It mattered not that the apparent kindness had nothing to do with Selena’s comfort at all. All that mattered was that he reacted in the first place. Even as Selena bent double, clamping down on a gag, Ashurbeyli swiftly produced the key to her cuffs, released her from the chair, and gestured at the door. She didn’t know if he meant for her to go all the way to the bathroom or simply as far as the hallway. She didn’t care. He’d stop her if she went too far.

She staggered out toward the hallway, hesitated on another gag right beside the pile of phones—and then let herself fall so she could scoop one up, her mind caught in a surreal place of lightning thought and total disconnect from her roiling stomach. She didn’t know if she’d been seen and she didn’t wait to find out, not with bile eating at the back of her throat. She flung herself down the hall the short distance to the bathroom. The main facilities for the ballroom, its anteroom surrounded her with equal opulence. She barely saw it; barely heard the Kemenis who followed her as far as that anteroom while she went through the second swinging door to the bathroom itself.

But by then she found the spell passing. She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth, waiting. Only the faintest unease from her stomach remained, giving her no clue as to the origin.

Except the obvious. She’d fought, she’d killed, she’d been captured, she’d spent many tense hours fearing for her safety—and possibly her child’s—and preparing for an assault she considered inevitable. The ring was a final insult, a reminder of Atif’s death and Ashurbeyli’s all-too-casual attitude about it. Such evoked revulsion would make anyone ill, pregnant or not.

From outside the door came a brief spate of conversation, Berzhaani too muffled for her to catch. Standing in the stall door, eyes darting around the room, Selena responded to sudden impulse. She produced a truly outstanding series of visceral noises, flushing the toilet even as she ran out of the stall to examine the room—prowling under the enclosed sink counters, running her hands over everything she found. Hunting for sharp or pointy or anything else that inspired her imagination. As her eye fell on the demure tampon dispenser, the toilet ceased its noise and she went back for another round of Oscar-worthy retching, her heart pounding just as fast as if she’d actually ended up sick.

Because she thought she’d seen…

She flushed the toilet and went straight to the tampon dispenser, her fingers scrabbling at the bottom flap—the thin aluminum that kept people from reaching up inside to grab the product, yet flipped aside so the purchases could descend. It was askew, all right. Crooked and damaged, as though someone had tried to reach up in there. Someone caught unaware at a fancy dinner, and without the proper Berzhaani coin…Selena could well imagine it.

But she tugged to no avail. Desperate, watching the door, she wiggled the flap back and forth, felt the weakness, felt her injured arm fail her—and knew she could never rip it loose by hand. Nice, thin aluminum…probably jagged at that. She ran back to the stall and flushed again, engaging in a quick tug-of-war when the loose handcuff tangled with the toilet handle.

Ah.

Back to the dispenser, she scrabbled at it, hunting a handhold and gouging her fingers, but finally getting enough purchase so she could cram the end of the open cuff into the small space she’d created between flap and body of the dispenser. She wiggled the cuff fiercely, working it toward the secure end of the flap, and—

“Are you done?” A harsh demand, not Ashurbeyli—though she thought she heard him in the background.

“Please,” she said, and keeping her voice weak and breathless came without any effort at all. “Please, give me a few more minutes.” She couldn’t believe they’d left her alone this long. After all she’d done to them, they still couldn’t take a woman as a serious threat?

Don’t look a gift horse, eh?

“Hurry!” the man demanded.

She thought it was his pride speaking. Not great duty, lurking outside the bathroom door. Worse if he had to come in. “Please,” she said, adding a tremulous note to her voice. And then, “Oh, no, I—” and back to the retching noises it was, only this time she couldn’t reach the toilet for the convincing sound of flushing. She stretched out a leg and reached the closest sink, batting the faucet on with her pointed foot. And never, during all of it, hesitating in her efforts with the handcuff-turned-prybar.

Quite suddenly, the metal flap came loose. Selena grunted with surprise, almost losing her balance, and barely took the time to examine her prize. Eight inches long, two inches wide, and a satisfactory edge of partly sheared metal—and now it had to be hidden.

She yanked up her shirttails with one hand, flipped the cell phone open with the other, and headed for the toilet stall to once again flush the toilet. Even then she left the water running, and went to spit in the sink a few times. She knew Cole’s number so well she barely had to look to dial it, and then tucked the phone under her chin—not an easy task with today’s slick little phones and her arm crying protest over all the activity—as she went to work securing the strip of metal at her waistband, tucked between her turtleneck and the borrowed shirt.

Above the running water and the rustle of material and her own quick breathing, Selena could barely hear the ring of Cole’s cell. But ring it did, and by God he picked it up. His greeting came across as wary—he’d seen the caller ID. But Selena rushed right in. “Cole! It’s me.” What to say, as fast as possible, the most crucial information?

“Selena! Are you—”

“No!” she said, giving him no more than that, checking herself in the mirror for signs of the hard-won tool. A tampon tool. It would scandalize Ashurbeyli even to think about it. “Listen! Check what you can see of the building, I think they’re going to—”

The bathroom door slammed open. Not the guard, but Ashurbeyli, suspicion on his face turning to fury. He slammed her against the edge of the sink; she felt the metal strip slice her skin but oh, please, not too deep and the phone went spinning away over the tile. Ashurbeyli backhanded her hard enough to bounce her off the sink, hard enough to send her sprawling after the phone, her arm in agony and her vision a swirl of image and darkness. She sprang back to her feet in an instinctive, animalistic survival reaction right down to the snarl in her throat—a snarl that died as she heard the unmistakable clatter of rifles coming to bear, shoulder sling hardware clinking against metal, safeties going off—

Selena froze. She checked herself and she froze, only slowly taking in the full view of three Kemenis in the ladies’ room, ready to shoot her down. In the center spot stood Ashurbeyli, his face a study in tight fury—and, she realized with astonishment, betrayal. He hadn’t expected that she’d try to pull anything over on him, not in the one moment of compassion he’d offered her—offered anyone—since this started. She felt an absurd impulse to apologize, but instead she pressed careful fingers to her heavy, burning cheek—the other one this time—and gestured at the other two. “Hey,” she said, hoping against hope that the warm blood seeping against her side didn’t soak through the shirt or her waistband. “Blame them. The gagging was real, but they still should have seen me grab that phone.”

Astonishingly, he did not have her shot on the spot. More astonishingly, he actually nodded, taking a visible breath to regain his control. “They will regret that they didn’t.”

I might live past this moment after all.

Or not, for anger still tightened his features. He gestured at the phone. “And who, may I ask?”

Ah, back to being civilized. Or at least a veneer thereof. “Same as last time. My husband.”

“Such devotion.” His words came mockingly. He spoke sharply to one of the other men, who retrieved the phone from the stall in which it had come to rest. Selena gave a heartfelt prayer that it would be broken, but from the look on his face, it was not. From the look on his face, it worked perfectly fine as he instructed it to redial the last call.

Cole’s relief upon answering came audibly enough that Ashurbeyli moved the phone away from his ear in reaction. “Selena!”

“No.” Ashurbeyli smiled tightly, his eyes holding Selena’s gaze as she started to tremble in reaction—to the danger, to the pain. Her arm throbbed so hard she thought she’d be better off if it exploded; at this rate, blood clots from deep bruising were as much a danger as the rifles still pointed her way. She tried to hide her puzzlement—what the hell was Ashurbeyli up to?

In another moment, as he moved closer to her and tipped the phone so she might hear, his face so near hers as to once again seem intimate, she understood. Control. He was regaining the control she’d lost, and Cole would pay the emotional price. She already heard it in his voice—the strain in his words, the great effort it took to keep his voice calm. “Who is this?”

“Exactly who you’re afraid it is.” Ashurbeyli reached over to smooth Selena’s crooked collar; he ran a finger—oh so gentle—over her bruised cheek, along the line of dried blood left over from her initial capture.

“What can I do for you?” Desperately trying to keep it impersonal, to hide that he was her husband. Selena listened to his struggle with a sudden awe at how much this man loved her. Whatever he’d done in D.C., he loved her. She tried to turn her face away from Ashurbeyli, to hide the sudden sting of tears.

Firmly, he took her chin and restored her former position, inches away. He couldn’t miss the shine of her eye; he certainly wouldn’t miss that sudden emotional tremble in her chin. She just damn well hoped he somehow missed her complete resolve to live through this, to destroy the Kemenis and their hopes of a takeover in Berzhaan. To see Cole again and figure out what had happened…to fix whatever had gone wrong. Somehow.

Whatever he saw, he smiled again. Just for her. “If you want to see your lovely wife again, you can accomplish an immediate capitulation to my demands.” But it wasn’t why he’d called. Not really.

“I’m not in a position to do that,” Cole said. There was a spate of rustling; Selena thought Ashurbeyli wasn’t the only one who had an audience listening in. “But I’d be glad to pass that word along.”

“You do that.” Ashurbeyli paused, as much for drama as anything else. “But don’t worry overmuch about it. We both know Berzhaan’s ministers are too blind to do what’s best for their country, and the interfering Western world is too cowardly to stand behind the support it once gave us—or even to interfere with us now.”

“Then—” Cole broke off his own words, puzzled.

“I called because I wanted to talk to the man who commands such devotion from such a fierce warrior as your wife. Quite remarkable, isn’t she? She could almost be one of us.” Selena jerked in reaction; he raised an eyebrow of warning. “I wondered if you could possibly deserve such a woman. Where are you now? What do you do with yourself? Are you as strong as she is? Those are the questions that run through my mind as I watch her this moment, under gunpoint at the hands of my men. But most of all I wanted to make sure you know that you no longer have her. I do.”

Selena barely heard Cole’s tight whisper, coming through in a moment of ironic perfect cell phone clarity. “You bastard.” But she heard the pain of the words, and she made a sudden snatch for the phone.

Ashurbeyli expected it, of course. He shoved her back, gave an imperious gesture. The Kemenis swooped in and grabbed her up, snatching her arm so roughly she cried out at the explosion of agony, her knees giving way, her vision gone black as her world narrowed down to that single point of pain. Ashurbeyli said something she couldn’t make out, a satisfied sound, and snapped the cell phone shut.

When they dragged her away, she quite gratefully passed out.

“Selena? Selena!” Cole’s fingers clenched around his phone, his mind so full of tumult he couldn’t think, could barely breathe. He fought the hands which tried to take the phone away even as her pained cry echoed in his mind, over and over and—

“Cole!” An unfamiliar voice, but one full of understanding along with the command. Diego Morel. “You’ll break it, man—we need to get that number!”

Numbly, Cole tried to release the device; by then his fingers were cramped into place. The hand in question gently removed them as Josie Lockworth said, “Besides, she might try to call again. That’s the only contact number she’s got.”

True. He blinked, floundering for coherent thought, and heard only Selena’s cry. Get it together. You can’t help her like this.

Already, the others were thinking ahead. “Did she say anything the first time? Anything we can use? The damn building’s so stout we can’t get reliable infrared…even the SEALs are blind right now.”

Which he knew. It was just a reminder, a way to pull him back to sensibility. He blinked, looked around…reoriented himself to the interior of the Quonset hut where Tory had dropped him off, staying only for quick introductions before heading back out to do her job. Cold, stark…one end of it filled with bunks, a single bathroom sans shower the only permanent structure other than the shabby office beside it. Beside that, a big chunk of Quonset wall was obscured by a ground control system set within a 30-foot trailer—a bank of machinery with pilot and sensor operator stations that might have been taken for an early Star Trek set. From there, Air Force Captain Josie Lockworth and independent contractor Diego Morel flew Josie’s newly modified Predator UAV, an unmanned surveillance craft with big bite in the form of Hellfire missiles.

Cole had seen images of the Predator before, and now that it sat before him in person, it did nothing to change his impression of a big flying spoon. Twenty-seven feet of flying spoon…no bigger than a single-engine Cessna.

But effective. Maybe even the chance that Selena needed. For this particular flying spoon incorporated Josie’s acoustic improvements, making it even stealthier than before. And since they didn’t have Berzhaani permission to run recon flights over the besieged capitol, they’d need all the stealth they could get.

“What did she say?” Josie asked, even as Morel took possession of the cell phone—albeit only long enough to set it on one of the small round tables that served as the commissary, well within Cole’s reach. “She had time for a few words when she first called—she would have chosen the most important ones.”

For an instant, Cole could only look at her, still numb. Brain definitely not functioning. He saw only concerned smoky hazel eyes, personable features under bobbed brown hair, flight suit cinching in her figure. He’d been flummoxed to find her here, knowing the Predator—even unmodified birds—took time to bring into play. Time to pack it up in its “coffin,” time to transport, time to set up. More than two days’ worth of time, and the hostage crisis was only a day in the making. She’d cleared up his confusion in a matter of words. “We were here already,” she’d said. “There’s been so much alarming intel coming out of this region that it was worth risking Berzhaan’s displeasure to bring the modified Predator in for its first operational flight. But it’s still a test article, so Diego Morel—” she’d nodded at a man who looked as out of place as Cole himself, a big, lean fellow in jeans and a worn leather jacket “—is along as the sensor operator.”

All fine with Cole. Anything was fine with Cole, as long as it helped Selena. He’d taken Morel’s firm handshake in an absentminded way, but that had changed quickly enough as he caught the look in the other man’s dark eyes and realized, startled, that Morel understood. That in some way he’d been there, done that—and a quick doublecheck of the way he looked at Josie was enough to tell him with whom.

And now the two exchanged a concerned glance, one full of unspoken words—is Selena’s husband going to pull it together?—and it was enough to shock Cole back into thinking mode. “She didn’t have time for much,” he said, finally answering Josie’s question. “She said we should check the outside of the building. She definitely had something in mind, but that’s when—” and he stopped, because he couldn’t bring himself to say the words and because they knew them anyway.

“Check the outside of the building.” Josie nodded. “Then that’s what we’ll do.”

Cole gave the white and gray craft a skeptical glance. “Does this thing see well enough to check things out in detail?”

“If we risk a lower altitude—luckily for us, the cloud cover is on our side. It would be easier if we knew what we were looking for, but—”

Morel finished Josie’s thought. “If she chose those particular words as the most important ones she could say, we’d damn well better not let them go to waste.”

Cole nodded and wondered if he looked as lost as he felt. He’d been in the middle of so many operations just like this one—which is to say, grasping for information, lives on the line…sometimes even his own. But never had they involved Selena. He had no idea he’d struggle so hard to find his usual easy confidence.

But he’d find it, because she was counting on him. “We have to trust her,” he said. “If we look hard enough, we’ll find it.”

All too soon, Selena opened her eyes, waking to a world of discomfort spiked with pain. Her arms, twisted behind her and once again cuffed…ow, dammit. It wouldn’t be so bad if her badly bruised biceps hadn’t been twisted along with the rest of the arm. Or, if upon opening her eyes, she hadn’t seen just what they wanted her to see—the current guard sitting directly across from her. When he saw her eyes open he greeted her with a mongrel smile that was as much sneer as anything else.

She sneered back.

Okay, not the wisest thing to do. Wisest would have been to close her eyes again. But she wasn’t in Obi-Wan Kenobi mode just now. She was in the mood to quit playing games and kick ass all the way out of here.

Like that’s going to happen.

It might have happened already if it hadn’t been for the hostages. People she couldn’t leave, because they were the very reason she’d come in the first place. People who—

Suddenly aware of whispers and rustling, of rank, fearful sweat in the air and the indefinable feel of bodies sharing the space nearby, she popped her eyelids up again, and this time turned her head. The gaze she met first was Ambassador Allori’s.

“Charming expression, my dear,” he murmured, sitting on the edge of his chair with his elbows propped on his knees. His tie was long gone, but his suit coat remained against the chill. “Perhaps you should teach it to me so I can use it during my next negotiations. Which, I hope, will be far from here.”

Her response—her recently formed conviction that none of the hostages were meant to leave this building alive regardless of the outcome for the Kemenis—stuck in her throat. Given their recent conversation, at the very least Ashurbeyli considered his chances of success to be remote and was fully prepared for that contingency. Because besides Allori, the students watched her closely, their faces a collage of emotions. Fear, awe, concern, fear, fear and fear.

“Are you okay?” one of them asked, a girl of indefinable ethnic background. American by the accent, reasonably calm to judge by her voice. She added quite sensibly, “Because you look like crap.”

Selena took a more careful assessment of her circumstances. She was with the others now, that much was obvious. But she was the only one cuffed, and she’d been placed closest to the guard who sat in the opening between this function room and the ballroom. One corner held neatly stacked litter from what scant food they’d been allowed; another still held their makeshift latrine, though they’d now thoughtfully been provided with a mop bucket. Even though they’d also been taken to the bathroom occasionally, the faint underlying odor of urine made it clear the bucket was in use. The air held the definite chill of an ancient and faltering heating system left to its own devices; the students all wore what coats they’d come with, and some of the girls huddled together for warmth. Many of the boys had stepped up to fill the role of comforter.

Selena knew from experience that it was a great way to avoid feeling one’s own fear.

That she was here, with the others…she didn’t take it as a good sign. Ashurbeyli had been truly offended by her attempt to contact Cole, and if it resulted in more limited access to the Kemenis, it meant she had less chance to find out what was going on. But at least the guard was letting them talk. And a glance at her low waistband showed no sign of blood, no telltales from the metal strip—nor any sign that it had been taken from her. As blurry as those last moments in the bathroom had been, it didn’t seem as though she’d missed anything important. The last thing she remembered, Ashurbeyli had hung up on Cole.

Cole. She tried to imagine what he’d heard from his end of the phone. The initial interruption, Ashurbeyli’s baiting words, Selena’s own perfectly timed cry of pain before Ashurbeyli cut the connect.

Big mistake. She should have left it alone. Even thinking about being on the other end of that phone—about how she’d feel if it was him in the hands of terrorists…

You might have run from him, girl, but not nearly as far as you thought.

Even though in the end it might be too far. Too many miles, too much danger between them.

Selena reoriented her thoughts with much determination. She shook her hair back and looked at the young woman who’d spoken and who’d probably given up on an answer. “I’m as okay as the rest of you. Is everyone all right?”

Allori drew her attention to Razidae, a man who defined the very meaning of the word grim. “He does not feel his government will negotiate in any manner.”

“I’ve already told Ashurbeyli they won’t. I’m not expecting any grand gestures from the States, either—Berzhaan is likely to tie their hands.”

Allori shook his head. “I just can’t understand what they’re trying to accomplish. They’ve always been smarter than this.”

“I think they are smarter than this.” Selena held his gaze long enough to give her words extra meaning…things she didn’t want to say out loud if Ashurbeyli listened in. Allori’s eyes widened slightly. He might not have even her vaguely guessed details, but he realized there were indeed layers to this operation.

“What about that man?” the same girl asked. The others had moved a little closer, just as interested in the answers but letting her ask the questions. “The cook.”

Surely they realized he was dead. Surely they’d heard the gunshot. A glance at Allori confirmed it, but on that group of young faces she saw nothing but naive hope. Selena sighed and tipped her head back against the wall against which she’d been sloppily positioned. “His name was Atif,” she said. “He was helping me. He’s dead now.”

“Helping you?” The young man who’d stared in the lobby snorted, loudly enough to draw a quelling look from the guard. He immediately subsided. “They said he betrayed you.”

She nodded. “That’s true. He did both. People aren’t always simple.”

Keep that in mind.

He met her words with a scowl, opened his mouth—and then glanced at the guard and shut it again.

“My name is Selena,” she told them. “Tell me yours—all of you. Tell me where you’re from.”

Still the scowl. “And how is that going to help?”

“Get us out of here? It won’t. But it’s a way to pass the time.” And to get their minds off their possible—no, probable—fate. Unless Selena could do something to change it. Unless she could figure out exactly what the Kemenis had planned—and then stop them.

The girl with the questions took up the introductions, pointing to them all. Selena, well versed in putting names to faces and remembering them, paid only partial attention, nodding in the right spots. The girl’s name was Rosa, said the Spanish way with a soft s. And the staring boy was Craig, and his girlfriend Marianne, and then there was Toby and Guy—very French, Gee—and Celina and Pam and Agatha….

And others, which she’d remember when she needed them. She made small talk with them, asked how they’d come to be visiting here, and all the while kept catching Allori’s eye. She wanted his assessment of the situation.

“Did you really call outside?” Rosa asked, quite suddenly. Everyone else stopped their quiet chatter, eager to hear that she had, that help was on the way.

Selena shifted, trying to straighten out the cramp in her lower back. Maybe she really was getting her period. Just what she needed.

Except its arrival would mean she could quit worrying about risking more than just her own life. Its arrival would take her off the hook with Cole, leaving things between them less complicated. Leaving her the space to stay with him for the sake of that relationship, and not to blur the decision with what might be best for a child.

Then why did she feel that sudden flutter of disappointment? Absurd disappointment, under the circumstances. Crazy.

Then crazy she was.

She took a deep breath, glanced at the guard—did he even understand English?—and said, “I called someone who can help.”

As one, they held their breath; hope leaped to every face. She shook her head. “He can’t overcome the mandates of the Berzhaani government. He’s not Superman. But he can make sure that those who are addressing this situation keep us in mind.” She looked at the guard again, and this time spoke right to him—just in case he knew a smattering of English after all. “Frankly, I’m surprised the Kemenis found it so upsetting. You’d think they’d want both governments in a frazzle about our welfare. Then the Kemenis will get what they want.”

Ashurbeyli’s voice from the ballroom startled the students, but not Selena; she’d half expected it. “He doesn’t speak your language,” Ashurbeyli said, sounding bored. “But noise irritates him, so you might well want to keep it down. As time goes by—as we see no signs of concern or cooperation from Berzhaan—it will become harder to keep my men from taking their pleasures and frustrations out on you all. After all, if it does not matter to your people, why should it matter to mine?”

The students paled, every one of them. Their chaperone paled. Even the events coordinator blanched.

“Oh, great,” Selena said, responding in Berzhaani.

“Scaring a bunch of kids. Big tough terrorist.”

He gave a dark laugh, but returned to his murmured conversation with Jonas White.

Selena fought the impulse to scratch her cheek where a trickle of dried blood itched with sudden ferocity—and then she fought the impulse to check her watch as habit overrode, for the instant, her otherwise constant awareness of the ache in her restrained arms.

Enough of the gesture got through for Allori to give her a grim smile. “It’s been just over a day. It’s just the beginning.”

Selena lowered her voice, mindful of Ashurbeyli in the next room, and mindful of Ashurbeyli’s warning about the guard. It had not, she thought, been an empty threat. Nor were the words flying back and forth between Ashurbeyli and several of his men, for the snatches she heard of the quickly escalating conversation seemed to center around Ashurbeyli’s easy treatment of Selena thus far. It was a startling challenge in the face of their loyalty to him, and a hot personal insult. There would be fallout. But she couldn’t concentrate solely on her eavesdropping. Not when she had the opportunity to touch base with Allori. “Dante, what do you make of them? They’re prepared in every way—they knew this could be an extended situation. But they don’t seem particularly concerned about the outcome.”

“Noticed that, did you?” Allori gave the ballroom a pensive look, no happier about the shouting than Selena. “If I had to guess, I’d think they’ve got a backup plan. I might even say they’re just as happy to go to that plan.” He eased off the chair, moving closer, and crouched nearby to lower his voice even further. “I would go so far as to venture that it’s something dramatic—and that it wouldn’t bode well for us.”

Selena tipped her head back against the wall again. “We’ve both been in this part of the world too long. I’m sorry to say I agree with you.” But she didn’t say the word bomb out loud; she suspected it might be one of the few English words their friendly guard actually knew. “I had Cole on the phone just long enough to tell him to warn anyone who would listen to take a closer look. I didn’t have any time to explain why.”

“Your husband.” Allori raised his brow in mild surprise. “That’s who you called.”

Selena didn’t hesitate. “He’s the only one I trust to use the information to protect us—at least as much as anyone can.” But she stopped short at the end of her words, feeling her own surprise at her deep confidence in him. It seemed some part of her had always known…had never run away at all, but only come along for the ride.

The question was whether she’d ever get a chance to convince the rest of her.

Allori said, “You don’t talk about him often. But I’m given to understand that he’s in a position to act on your information?” He’d know of Cole’s CIA status, of course—it was in her own profile.

“Like I said…as much as anyone can. He works the field.” She kept her tone light, but Allori would catch the implications—that Cole was not in the directorate hierarchy where he could better wield any influence. Without planning on it, Selena added, “I have some friends…if he thinks to hook up with them…”

Allori nodded. “Yes. I might know who you mean.”

“You read my file pretty carefully.” She grinned, a wry and painful expression. A lock of hair pulled at her skin, glued there by the blood. She ducked her head, trying to rub it free without provoking the bruises. In the next room, the conversation had died to voices low and intense, and the tone of it made the skin of her spine tighten in warning.

“I did,” Allori said. “Did you think you got the position by chance, when you applied so late into the decision process? Not that the decision itself was mine, but I kept myself apprised.” He made as if to free the hair at her face, and the guard instantly came alert.

“Back away from her,” he said, jabbing his rifle at them in punctuation. “You’ve talked enough.”

Allori understood as well as Selena, even though his grasp of the language didn’t approach fluency. He immediately raised both hands slightly in capitulation and backed away, reclaiming his chair.

“Doesn’t matter,” Selena muttered, returning to her own efforts without acknowledging the scariness of the guard. He scowled at her, terrorist pride offended. “I’ll get it.”

And she did, but when she looked up, Ashurbeyli filled the doorway.

The others shrank back. They’d seen Ashurbeyli escort two other hostages from this room, and both had died immediately thereafter.

Ashurbeyli fingered a handcuff key and he rested his hand on the grip of his holstered semiautomatic—and he looked only at Selena.

Chapter 13

Cole stood behind the high-backed Predator sensor operator’s chair, looking over Diego Morel’s shoulder as the Predator’s live feed satellite link fed them high-altitude images of Suwan. Morel’s impatience at the intrusion went noted, but made no difference at all. In many ways, Morel was Cole’s opposite. He had the dark, smoldering bad-boy thing going on. Cole counted more on the blond carefree wiseass thing, and he knew it—he’d cultivated it.

It wasn’t doing him much good at the moment. And even though he’d regained his equilibrium after Selena’s call—and the call from the terrorist that had followed—he had nothing to which he could apply his skills. Gathering intel. Evading detection. Being in the middle of the enemy when they didn’t even have a clue. None of that applied right now. If the SEALs couldn’t close in on that building, neither could he.

Except…

Unless…

He knew someone he could call, someone from the CIA’s Office of Technical Services. A master of disguises. It might take a while to put himself into play, but Cole would use the time as best he could…looking over Morel’s shoulder. Driving the man quietly and understandably mad as he waited for the Predator to quit the relative safety of its twenty-five-thousand foot cruising altitude and ease down for a closer look at the building about which Selena had been so concerned.

He wished he’d had the chance to tell her where he was. Who he was with. Who else was working on her side.

Soon enough.

He left the sensor station and the quick murmur of discussion that immediately took place. No question as to the subject of it—they were worried about him. Whether he’d hold up, and whether he’d get in the way. Well, he was back on his feet, now. They’d figure it out.

Soon enough.

Selena knew she was in trouble when Ashurbeyli uncuffed her. She saw it, too, in the intensity of his gaze, felt it in the stiffness of his movement. He’d let things get personal; he’d let the reaction of his men get to him. He’d let himself stray from wisdom to reaction, from professional to personal—and probably didn’t even know why.

She knew. She’d gotten the best of him. It was why he uncuffed her—to prove the point. To show both his men and the other hostages that he wasn’t worried about her. To show himself.

She’d be elated at the freedom—at the opportunity, if she thought he’d actually give her one. But he kept one hand on her back, just below the join of her neck and shoulders. From there he could feel every tension; every telegraphed intent. She’d never take him by surprise. And meanwhile she could no longer trust him to make the most logical decision from the Kemeni point of view—or from any point of view at all. He vibrated with intent, and in the brief moment he allowed her to meet his gaze before pushing her onward, his dark eyes held warning.

She hadn’t been forgiven.

She knew then that he intended to prove his point in a more personal way than she’d first anticipated. In the only way a man felt he could prove absolute dominance over a woman. And she’d thought she was as ready as any woman could be—and suddenly she knew, with the intense pounding of her heart and the suddenly watery nature of her knees and her nearly irresistible gut fight-or-flight punch of fear, that no one could really be ready at all.

It’s not worth dying for.

She breathed deeply. Slowly. Tried to move as though she had no idea what lay ahead.

He guided her out to the hallway, giving her no chance for so much as a glance at Allori. Instead of heading in the direction she feared—toward the doors and the death spot at the top of the stairs—he turned her to the right. Down the long hall of the function rooms. The first room still held the neatly rolled prayer rugs; not long from now, they would hold men in prayer.

Ashurbeyli wouldn’t be one of them. He took her right past the improvised prayer spot and into the smaller room beyond. A one-on-one room. Small round table, comfortable chairs, not much else. Private.

A shiver ran down Selena’s spine; the small hairs on her arms stood up. She cursed her own reaction, knowing Ashurbeyli couldn’t have missed it.

You always knew it could and probably would come to this if you were caught.

With as much cool command as he’d shown from the beginning, Ashurbeyli pushed her up against the wall just inside the door and kicked the doorstop free, nudging the door closed with the same foot. Then he stepped back—not far, but no longer close enough to brush constantly against her—and his hand fell away.

Selena didn’t move. She turned her face to the side and let her chest press against the wall, her hands away from her sides and turned against the wall. She wanted no mistakes in body language here. He wanted to be in charge? Let him. Until she had an opportunity…let him.

“Jonas and I have been in discussion,” Ashurbeyli said. She couldn’t discern anything of his mood from his conversational voice. “We both have interests outside this building, as you might imagine. Letting this situation drag out benefits no one. We think it’s time to provoke some response. And here you are…official enough so you’re not an innocent, but even in those Western clothes, woman enough to garner a response of outraged shock. I’m afraid you’re just the right person to take out to the steps this time.”

Dammit, no! Not so soon. And even so…that’s not what this was about. He hadn’t brought her here simply to tell her he intended to kill her. She took a deep breath, faintly tainted with the smell of smoke in the old wallpaper. “Of course White wants me dead. He doesn’t want you to hear what I have to say about him.”

Calm, cool answer from the FBI legate. What about the quiet cry of dismay from somewhere deep inside, the protest from a woman who wasn’t nearly done with life? Who might even have another life slowly growing within…

Selena swallowed that more personal reaction. It wouldn’t get her anywhere with this man. He respected the warrior in her.

Ashurbeyli rustled in movement. “Perhaps he doesn’t, indeed, want me talking to you. You may be assured it’s something I’ll deal with when the time is right.”

“Assured?” She almost turned to look at him, but stopped the impulse as the side of her face left the wallpaper, settling back into place. “I don’t actually give a damn if White leads you around by the nose, as long as you’re not killing people. Oh, wait—too late. How many have already died for this failure?”

“‘Fail’ is not a term we’re interested in.” His cold tone punctuated the truth of those words.

“That’s why you want to kill me,” she said, and couldn’t believe the assertion in her voice. Surely it was someone else’s voice coming from her mouth—because as cool as she’d always been in a crisis, Selena was far from ready to die. The tension in the room made her think of Ashurbeyli’s gun, and she trusted the instinct that told her he’d raised it. Time to rise to the challenge, then. To meet his expectations of her, formed at that very moment they’d locked gazes in Razidae’s office. Slowly—almost laughably so—she turned around to face him. She put her back to the wall, kept her arms slightly raised in spite of her burning injury and again met the intensity of his gaze. “Because you especially don’t want to fail at the hands of a woman.”

He hissed something from between clenched teeth and in one swift step he was upon her, pressing up against her, his gun jammed into the soft flesh under her jaw, one knee shoved between her thighs. “That,” he said, “will never happen.” He couldn’t help but feel the gallop of her heart, just as she felt his. She forced herself to stay relaxed even as every wiry muscle in his body tightened, his free hand gripping her so high on her waist that it brushed the bottom of her breast. She could only pretend that he’d be too occupied to detect the excessive stiffness of her waistband caused by the thin metal panel. It might even be true.

She instantly discarded the ploy about having her period. He wouldn’t hesitate to check. Nor did she turn her face aside, not even as their noses brushed. But she kept her voice low. “You have to know I’ve been prepared for this moment since long before I walked into this building.” As if anyone truly could. “You don’t have to believe me…I wouldn’t. But just imagine how you’ll feel when you don’t leave me broken.”

He stared back, black gaze impenetrable, his breath on her cheek, the pistol sight jabbing into her skin along the inside edge of her jaw. “Careful,” he said, and he, too, kept his voice low. His breath whispered against her cheek. “You’ll oblige me to prove your lie.”

Relax. Relax. Give him nothing to react to. Nothing to fight back against. No excuses. She had to stay cool enough to play her way through whatever happened, no matter how she felt about it. She had to buy that chance at potential escape—and yet if she made him feel any more scorned, he’d probably just as soon kill her on the spot. She made her voice as honest as she could. Damned honest. Raw. “We’ve had an interesting skirmish, you and I. I would very much prefer—I would be grateful—if you left me this much honor before you take me out to those steps.”

And there, pressed against her with his body as brutally honest as her words, he took a sudden sharp breath. He raised his hand, letting one finger just barely graze the line of her jaw. And he smiled. “It was not an honorable thing you did, phoning out when I left you your privacy.”

“No.” She cleared her throat as her voice caught. “It was a desperate thing.”

Because he’d already defeated her. He’d prevailed. He heard those unspoken words…or maybe, this close to her, he saw them in her eyes.

Quite suddenly, he stepped back. Selena sagged against the wall, caught completely unaware by the weakness in her knees. But she instantly straightened. And she said, “Just for the record…I’m not giving up.”

Again, the dark smile. “I don’t expect you to.”

Selena took a deep breath as she stepped back out into the hallway, Ashurbeyli’s hand again resting low at her neck, his gun still at her ribs. Together, they headed for the lobby, the front doors, and death.

I’m not giving up.

“Cole.” Morel’s voice came flatly, and Cole jerked his attention from the coffee he’d been trying to make palatable, abandoning it on the table to return to the ground control station tucked in the trailer against the back of the hangar. No need to duck around the Predator’s long, graceful wings, almost twice as wide as the bird was long; it was out in the air, and Josie sat in at the pilot’s station beyond the flung-wide trailer doors, headset in place and deft hands at the stick and throttle.

“Just let me get a good approach arc,” she said, attention focused on the screen. “We want to keep this in view as long as possible. I’m going down lower, Diego.”

“Too low,” Morel said, watching her.

“We’ve got plenty of cloud cover. It’s worth the risk,” Josie said shortly, and didn’t receive any argument. A glance at Morel’s screen showed the Predator’s video feed zooming, refocusing, and then hunting to reacquire target. Dizzying. Cole recognized the capitol building, though. It had been the focus of his life for—was it only just over a day, now? Amazing. Seems like forever. He wanted to ask “What?” but restrained himself.

Or maybe he just didn’t want to know.

Soon enough Josie put the Predator right where Morel needed it, and he went tight with the view. An excellent image, grainy as it was. Far too easy to see that the Kemenis had put someone else out on the top of those steps, still hiding behind their hostage and the thick capitol door.

Far too easy to see that the hostage in question was a woman. Paradoxically dressed in Kemeni colors, but nonetheless a woman. Tall, lean, touched by elegance, dark chestnut hair swept back from her face to make the bruises clear.

His voice came in a mere whisper of breath and sorrow. “Selena.”

No! We need more time.

They’d brought Selena out to their death steps. No doubt the Kemeni leader even now shouted out his demands and delusions; Cole could be sure of it just from the way Selena’s right eyebrow quirked. He was in her ear.

Until now he’d only hovered behind the pilot and sensor-operator stations. He’d restrained himself—and there hadn’t been that much to see, just endless circles while Josie and Diego murmured back and forth about altitude and risk and exposure, all the while trying to get good clear pictures of the roof and the building exterior in response to Selena’s words. But now he clamped a hand on the back of Josie’s substantial station chair and let the fingers dig into the high backrest. “Do something.”

Josie exchanged a quick glance with Morel. “A distraction?”

“You’ll expose the Pred,” Morel said instantly.

“You’ll reveal our activity to the Berzhaani government before we’ve resolved this crisis. We might give her an opportunity to escape, but at the expense of the rest of this operation.”

“A hellfire would do it,” Josie said, as if they were carrying on two different conversations—or maybe just two at once.

But Cole had focused in on Selena’s hands. They weren’t quite natural; not quite right. The grain of the image kept him from seeing the fine details of her striking face, from reading the undertones of the expression there. But her hands…she held them in front of her, even though she didn’t seem to be restrained. She fiddled with her olive-green shirt, a garment that hung off her straight shoulders with room to spare, and she held herself stiffly—she held herself in a way that told him more than any stranger would know. “She’s hurt,” he murmured.

“No blood,” Morel said instantly, his eyes narrowing; it wasn’t an argument, but contributing observation.

“They’ve been hitting her, no doubt about that.”

“They were probably hitting her back,” Cole said, no doubt in his voice. “It’s upper body somewhere. The way she’s standing—whoa, wait. Did she spot you?”

For Selena had ceased fiddling with the shirt, her head still slightly cocked in the way to let Cole know someone was shouting in her ear, and now quietly held her hands in front of her, low at her hips, fingers moving.

“She’s not looking at us,” Morel said, a frown in his voice.

Josie spoke with assertion. “She knows there’s someone out there. The SEAL team, for one. Berzhaani teams. She’s talking to all of us.”

“Two-ten, seven,” Cole said abruptly, even as Selena repeated the signs. “Twenty-seven.”

Morel adjusted the view as the Predator arced in closer, giving them a new angle of those hands. “Hostages or terrorists?”

“Terrorists,” Cole said, no hesitation. “She’s going to give us the most tactically important information first.” And just how much would she have the chance to say? How long would the Kemeni leader shout in her ear?

The expression that flitted across her face in grainy technical magic made it look as though she wondered the same. With restraint, she turned her hand over, cupping it as though cradling an apple. Normally a gesture made high, the hand signal was nonetheless clear enough. Josie murmured it out loud. “Booby trap,” and then turned to look at Morel. “It’s what she was trying to tell us on the phone. ‘Check what you can see of the building, I think they’re going to booby-trap it.’”

“It’s a layered operation,” Morel agreed. “Everything I’ve heard about Ashurbeyli…he’s got to know he can’t win this one—at least, not as things stand on the surface. So we’ve got to figure out the layers. Check that building until we find what she thinks we should.”

“More than that.” Josie gave Cole a sharp look. “We’ve got to pass the information along.”

Numbly, Cole nodded. “It’s why she gave it to us,” he said. “We’re the ones who have to find a way to make sure she isn’t caught in the middle. Or—” he stopped in surprise, realizing he’d fallen into the mind-set of taking them for granted—”or I do.”

Josie’s look came even more sharply. “You had it right the first time. Don’t forget it.”

He held her gaze, then lifted his chin in a slight gesture of assent. But he kept silent about his own plans.

For he had no intent of just sitting here. Watching. Leaving Selena’s fate entirely in the hands of others.

The video screen drew his attention again, and he realized he was still making assumptions. Everyone else to appear at the top of these imposing stone steps had died within moments. Don’t you let him kill you, he thought at her, not caring if the internal ferocity made it through to his expression. For this mission, the cool and irreverent Cole Smith—station name Jason P. JOXLEITER, CIA field officer and Jox to his friends—had been cast aside. This time, he’d draw deep. This time, it was personal. But—don’t you let him kill you!

She might have heard him. She’d gone back to fiddling with her shirt, and the slight stiffening of her posture made him think the Kemeni leader was winding up his words of rhetoric and delusional rationalization. Cole didn’t need fine pixel resolution on the image to recognize that subtle change in her expression.

Selena, about to make her move. You go, babe. But his heart hammered into overtime, and his fists clenched, and he couldn’t help but add an anguished inner prayer. Please. Oh, please…

Ashurbeyli kept his hand tangled in the hair at the base of Selena’s neck, exposing only his wrist to the inevitable sniperscopes pointed his way. The rest of him hung behind the stout wooden door, a wood with a reinforced armor core. Dammit, she thought at all those inevitable, lurking snipers—at least one SEAL team, against Berzhaan wishes or not, and probably the Berzhaani Elite themselves—then shoot his wrist! She tried to tell them with her eyes, with her anger and her willingness to follow through on such a thought. Son of a bitch, anything but going down without a fight. She couldn’t be so straightforward as to give them another hand signal…there was a good British signal that would do the trick, but it took on meaning at throat level. Ashurbeyli would see it.

So as Ashurbeyli wound up his meaningless demands—demands she was now almost certain he’d never expected to be met—she reached into her unbuttoned shirt and eased the thin metal panel from her waistband. She had to clear the snag in her turtleneck—the one that had cut straight through to skin—but it gave her a chance to confirm the exact location of the jagged edge.

That’s me. The Jagged Edge. My new superhero name.

His voice fell away, a welcome respite. He pulled her head back into the cold muzzle of his pistol.

Dead, one way or the other. Might as well be the other. Go down fighting.

His fingers tightened in her hair—

Selena spun. She pivoted around his grip instead of trying to break it, slashing the metal upward, slicing into his wrist; the gun fell away. Her elbow slammed back into his gut. When he jerked over the pain, fingers still clutching her hair, she met him with another sweep of metal—scoring his handsome face, his charismatic features. He staggered back a step.

His fingers loosened.

Yes!

Selena tore free. She couldn’t reach the gun, but she could kick it away, and it clattered down those stone steps behind her, flashing dully in the midday sun in the very corner of her vision.

The lobby lay open before her, cleared on Ashurbeyli’s orders; he’d wanted no one exposed to weapons fire. Selena kicked into high gear, all her pains forgotten. Ashurbeyli’s hand scraped down her back as she bolted, grasping for her shirt—losing it. I warned you! she cried, but her mouth stayed clamped shut and determined, and the words never made it past her lips. Through the security arch, past the inner lobby, headed for the nearest corner as shouts of anger followed. Déjà vu, but this time she couldn’t duck through her old path—Ashurbeyli had that figured out. She sprinted for the next corner and turned it, and she wished fervently for a nice escape hatch to appear in the floor because from here she couldn’t go anywhere but in circles.

Elevator.

Great, a nice closed-in little box. Wherever the door opened, there’d be someone waiting.

Unless it didn’t go anywhere at all. She angled for it, coming in at such speed that she bounced off the wall even as she slammed her hand against the elevator button. Old…slow. Maybe too slow. Selena grabbed up the elegant metal ashtray-topped cylinder beside the elevator in anticipation of head bashing and headed for the nearest doorway, pushing it open, considering a quick foray out the window—until a glance reminded her that the first-floor windows were thoroughly covered by decorative but sturdy iron bars.

Great. Trapped.

The elevator dinged. For an agonizing moment Selena hesitated, weighing the time she’d need against the sound of pounding feet, the shout as her pursuit split up at the previous hallway, the bang of doors slammed open and the crash of things knocked aside as men bounded in and out of those rooms, checking for her. They’d find her here, no question about it. They were mad and they were thorough, and she’d bet Ashurbeyli was leaving men at the corner of each cleared hallway so she couldn’t double back. Eventually he’d run out of them, but for now she had nowhere to go but up.

She dashed out to the elevator; the doors had closed again but the car sat there, waiting patiently for its next summons. With swift care she replaced the ashtray right where it had been, fitting it into the indentation in the carpet. She hit the elevator button even as she used a foot to sweep a stray fallen clump of ashes into dust across the carpet, and when the doors opened she jumped right in, not hesitating to climb atop the narrow, waist-high railing that lined the inside of the car.

Nowhere to go but up.

The brake-and-cable service panel, of course. The doors shut behind her and the elevator sat waiting further instruction. Foot time again; Selena used her toes to push every button available and let the elevator sort out which way to go first—to the basement or the roof. Someone hit the closed doors and she flinched—but she couldn’t tell if someone had seen her, or if the brass doors had simply been a convenient target of anger.

If they’d seen her, her clever hiding place would turn into a literal dead end. But if she waited, it’d be too late. So she went for it, stretching for the offset panel in the ceiling. Her injured arm wouldn’t reach up over her shoulder, not at that angle; she gave a snarl of impatience and twisted around, walking the handrail until she could reach up with the other arm and nudge the panel out of place. The elevator lurched on the way downward. One floor to the basement, and she had to assume someone would be there to meet it even if the odds were low. Dammit, where’s a ladder when you need one? Or maybe even a nice pile of terrorists to climb.

She leaped for the opening—and with only one hand making a solid landing, slipped to sprawl awkwardly across the floor.

It was, she decided, a moment to leave out of any future report. But she scrambled to her feet—and, out of time, tucked herself back up against the front of the elevator. If anyone waited, they’d have to come in to find her. The old elevator jerked to a stop; the doors cranked open. Selena held her breath, listening.

If any Kemeni waited, they did the same.

And the doors closed.

She didn’t hesitate. The first-floor button wasn’t lit, but someone could push it at any moment, especially if that someone happened to notice the elevator already on the move…and no more sign of Selena on the first floor. Up to the handrail, and this time she balanced there like a cat, her gaze locked on target. Grab the edge of the opening. Get the good elbow up. Haul ass. She took a moment, took a breath—

Took a leap.

Got it.

Her arm screamed a protest; she gasped in pain. But she held on, and she forced the other arm to do more than its share. A few swings back and forth and all that damn free-weight work came in handy—Cole spotting her, the look on his face telling her exactly what was on his mind and it sure wasn’t adding another round of reps and focus, Selena—she heaved herself up and locked her elbow over the edge. A moment of distinctly inelegant scrambling and she pulled her legs up through the opening, rushing to replace the hatch panel just as the elevator came to a stop at the first floor and damned if those doors didn’t open after all. The car quivered as several Kemenis rushed in, jostling each other in the small space.

Really, she thought at them, as still as could be and breathing shallowly through her mouth while her lungs cried out for big gulping inhalations, if I was down there, I think you’d have seen me by now.

Apparently they came to the same conclusion. They tramped out, leaving the elevator free to continue upward. Selena grabbed those big deep breaths she’d been starving for and eyed her new territory—four stories of empty air pierced by the elevator cable. Narrow spears of light leaked in at each floor where the exterior elevator doors closed imperfectly; high above, the cable drum rotated to pull them upward, the motor grinding with a desperation that spoke of its age. A tempting series of wooden rungs ran up to the roof, set in a channel that might just be deep enough to hold her and let the elevator slide by. “Ah,” she murmured out loud, too taken by the absurdity of the moment to stay completely silent, “I’ve been shafted.”

Hurt like hell, just as she would have expected. Aching face, stinging scalp—she checked for blood where Ashurbeyli had gripped her hair, but didn’t have enough light to tell for sure. Her side still stung, and her arm flirted with the kind of explosion more common to potatoes in the microwave.

Great. One battered, possibly pregnant, intermittently nauseous, barely armed FBI legate against the world.

Well, against all the Kemenis in this building. Might as well have been the world.

But her focus had changed. She wasn’t alone in this any longer, not entirely. Cole was out there, doing his best to take her part. The SEAL team—and she knew there was one out there somewhere—had to have seen her signals, and that meant they’d realize she knew of them, could work with them. And now she’d become all but certain the situation was much more complex than a batch of rustic terrorists grabbing hostages to make petulant, impossible demands. They weren’t concerned enough about the capitulation to those demands. They killed hostages to make a point as much as to get what they wanted; Selena wondered if Ashurbeyli wasn’t using those deaths to build exactly the impression he wanted to…that of a narrow-viewed terrorist sticking to impossible demands beyond all reason.

That particular path had become well-trodden in recent years.

She wasn’t quite sure of his true intentions, or of his methods—what, exactly, he hoped to gain if she’d guessed right, if White’s timely flinch had been confirmation—if he blew the building as she suspected he would—or when he even planned to do it. She was sure only that there was more here than met the eye. And while she’d started out with the hostages as her first priority—finding a way to free them, to keep those kids safe until Ashurbeyli’s people were neutralized—now she wasn’t sure but if helping those on the outside to storm the place might be the very last thing she should do. She needed to understand the situation. She needed to thin their ranks, disrupt them from the inside…and figure them out.

Jonas White.

He’d be a weak point. He was a man used to running things from a distance. Even now he spent much of his time away from the Kemenis, no doubt in one of the more luxurious apartments the capitol building had to offer.

“Jonas White,” she murmured…and then gave a sharp shake of her head. Not quite yet. It would cause too much of a stir, and the last she’d seen he’d been in the ballroom, anyway. So…add one more thing to the list. Identify the room he was staying in. If timing allowed…have a nice conversation with him there. Until then, she’d cause what trouble she could. No more innocuous gunfire up the stairwell; if she pulled a trigger, someone would be in her sights. Ashurbeyli would be furious…but she imagined her status was already shifted to kill on sight.

“Learn to be invisible,” she whispered, crouched on the top of a moving elevator car. Advice to herself. Wise advice, as impossible as it was. Probably the only way she’d stay alive.

Best to get moving, then. She had a lot to accomplish before she died.

Chapter 14

The elevator stopped at the third floor, submitting to another inspection. When it lurched into motion again, it headed downward—and Selena stepped neatly onto the wooden rungs of the four-story shaft, letting the elevator drop away below her. She climbed up past the fourth floor and right up past the noisy hoist mechanism to the roof access. The access panel that sat on the roof like a small squatter’s shack, offering a railed platform at the edge of the shack. She climbed onto the platform, wiping her filthy hands on her shirt. When she peered through the louvered door, she found an empty roof under a low, nickel-gray sky with individual clouds scudding quickly past, driven by capricious winds. Rain smattered briefly against the worn shelter. From the north.

Anyone up here on guard duty was most likely sheltered to the south of a roof structure. Maybe even this one.

We’re playing for keeps, now, she reminded herself. Whatever safety margin Ashurbeyli’s interest had once given her had not only disappeared, it had now marked her for death. She’d embarrassed him one too many times.

You can always go crawling back. Beg for forgiveness. Submit. Admit you were a fool and that you know better now.

She considered it a moment, and in the dim, indirect light filtering through the louvers, gave a firm shake of her head. Nope. Still a fool. Still trying to save the day.

Her current goal was simple enough—return to the guest room she’d appropriated. Gather up what little of use remained in her briefcase. See if there was enough left of the cell phone battery to call Cole.

And for pure luxury, maybe she’d have a chance to wash her face, use the bathroom and see just how deeply the metal strip had cut into her side. Maybe there’d even be a token first aid kit in the closet. She suppressed a sudden sardonic snort. Yeah, that’s what she needed…a Band-Aid. Wouldn’t that just fix everything.

But first she had to get from here to the stair access. She had a vague idea in which direction the stairs were located, and a sneaking suspicion she’d find Kemenis on the way. It’d just be too easy if she didn’t, wouldn’t it? Just as it would be too damn easy if this old, rickety door didn’t creak like hell when it moved.

Well, we can change that.

She left the door long enough to eye the currently quiescent elevator mechanism, gauging the distance between them, carefully testing the strength of the railing without actually committing herself to leaning on it. It shifted, but it held. What’s one more chance? Slowly, she stretched out to the massive hoist, just barely reaching the nearest part. Cold metal met her fingertips. Cold, greasy metal.

The hoist gave a clunk, startling her; Selena jerked back onto the platform and fell smack on her ass—but she looked at her fingers and smiled, and she didn’t even bother to get to her feet as she smeared heavy grease into the hinges of the access door.

Moments later she slipped silently through the smallest possible opening, squinting against the sudden wind and cold and occasional spit of rain. Rain is your friend, she told herself. No doubt the Kemenis were squinting, too.

Like the elevator shaft access, the closest stair entry jutted out of the roof, a much sturdier hut made of brick. Not the one she wanted, though—she’d head across the roof to the other side of the building, where a second brick structure waited—one that she would exit much closer to her room. But she had a choice—tiptoe over and hope no one spotted her, or spot the Kemenis first and do something about them.

She could almost feel the impact of 39 mm bullets into her back. She pulled the metal strip from her waistband and headed for the closest stair access, putting her back to the wind. They’d be on the other side, sheltered. And she’d really, really like to have one of their guns. Best chance she had for one, all things considered.

On the other hand, the element of surprise notwithstanding, she didn’t think much of the odds right now. Time to improve them a little. She reached the back of the brick structure, peeked around to check the side, and sprang up to grab the roof overhang.

Her right arm still wasn’t doing its share. No surprise. But the dovetail of small decorative limestone blocks at the corner gave her plenty of footing, and within seconds she swung a leg over the edge and rolled to the roof. Wind gusted in her ear, obscuring the sound of her own movement. She crawled over to the south edge of the gritty roofing. After all this, you’d better be there.

Ah, yes. Two of them, bundled in warm parkas that clashed with their yashmagh headgear. One of them checked his watch, and Selena’s mouth dropped open slightly as they set the rifles aside, aimed themselves southward to face the Ka’aba in Arabia and knelt in prayer. Compromised prayer—there’s no way they didn’t need ablution, and no way to perform it in this place—but she supposed they were doing the best they could.

And how could she jump them in the middle of prayer?

Oh, just do it. They’re terrorists, for God’s sake. She inched closer to the edge, bringing her feet up under her, ready to leap. She targeted the smaller one, figuring he’d be easier to stun, judging the rifles easier to kick aside from that position.

Except of course she couldn’t do it. She rolled her eyes at herself as the wind cut through her clothes and she silently hit the heel of her hand against her forehead, but she couldn’t do it.

But as soon as they straightened, the moment they reached for the rifles…

She dropped down on them. She kicked out at the jaw of the big guy as she landed on the smaller one, taking them both down. The small one grabbed at her; she slashed at his wrists where the gap of jacket and glove left them exposed and then she grabbed up his rifle by the muzzle, swinging it to around to connect with the other man’s face. There was enough momentum left to pivot around at the small one as he scrambled to his feet—to connect hard enough that the man fell back hard, cracking his head against the limestone brick corner of the stairwell hut. He went limp, sliding down to leave a smear of blood on the light stone.

The second man roared a Berzhaani curse and she snapped around to face him. “Temper, temper,” she told him, which only made him snarl. If he had a hand weapon, it was buried beneath his coat; he rushed her, aiming to crush her up against the brick wall. She dropped down into a balanced crouch, slashing across both his knees with her improvised blade. It wasn’t sharp enough to cut the tough khaki but it startled him and he leaped back. Selena stayed down, flipping the rifle around to bring it up to her shoulder. No more games. No more leaving men stashed around to recover and go back into action. Not if she was the one with the gun.

As soon as the rifle came into position, she snugged it back against her shoulder and fired.

The rifle responded in its unique two-stutter setting, firing off two rounds before the kickback of the first threw her out of position. The man cried out in surprise as tiny feathers puffed from the new holes in his jacket, and he staggered backward and—

Damn. Who knew the edge of the roof was so close?

Selena let the rifle tip down to rest against the gritty surface, wiping rain from her brows and lashes and giving her suddenly upset stomach a moment to settle.

As if it would. As if she’d killed men so frequently before, and could so casually walk away from this one.

But she had no time to linger. No telling when the relief watch would come up—Ashurbeyli probably had a frequent rotation going in this weather. She turned to check the smaller man, found him staring blankly at the scudding clouds.

Two. I killed two of them.

And she’d deal with it later as she could. For now she wouldn’t leave this body around for easy discovery. Let the replacement watch wonder why the roof was deserted—let them waste manpower searching the building for delinquents. She frisked the remaining Kemeni, unable to find a hand radio—if they’d had one, it had gone over the side with the first man. She hunted for and found a handgun, grimacing at the clumsy Luger. A quick check revealed five of seven 9 mm rounds left in the magazine. More than she’d had…not nearly enough. She made sure the safety was set and jammed the semiautomatic in the back of her waistband, reminding herself she couldn’t count on it to come free as neatly as her Beretta under the same circumstances. No pause for breath or to wipe her lashes clear again; she dragged the second man closer to the edge and then crouched to roll him off. With any luck, no one from inside had any idea. Those on the outside…let ’em speculate.

She headed across the roof, fully intent on hitting the stairs and heading for temporary respite—but stopped short as she passed the abandoned assault rifles. Just because she didn’t want them herself—the Luger was a better tool for her purposes and she needed to travel light right now—was no reason to leave them lying around for Ashurbeyli. First one, then the other—she whirled around for momentum, flinging them off the roof in wide flight arcs that would no doubt surprise someone as they landed. She hoped a news camera wouldn’t catch them tumbling down—no doubt Ashurbeyli had at least one television tuned to an international news station.

But it wouldn’t change anything if he did see. It just meant she had to get off this roof, and now. Selena ran across the flat expanse, her footsteps crunching…until a flicker of movement in the low clouds caught her eye, stopping her short. She looked upward, examining the clouds, unable to squelch a foolish surge of hope that help might actually be on its way. For an instant she envisioned a stealth-enabled chopper, swooping in to drop SEALs on the roof, taking advantage of the opening she’d just provided.

But no. Of course not. Just clouds.

She cursed at the delay and ran for the stairs.

Cole skirted the edges of the airfield grounds, heading for the ratty, weed-infested strip of ground at the fence line. Old airfield, old fence…leaky, leaky security, especially to a small group of U.S. forces who were doing their best to be inconspicuous. He eyed the fence again. His Leatherman would provide a quick enough exit—and if push came to shove, the shearling coat would protect him in a trip over the top of that barbed wire. But for the moment, he waited quietly along the back wall of the shabby maintenance building closest to the fence.

Not that he was truly worried about being followed—not from here. Just…

Habit.

Seth—CIA Technical Services officer, and someone Cole knew well enough to think of in terms of his real name instead of his station name—would send a taxi to meet him on the road to the airstrip. Seth spent his time devising strategies and disguises to exfiltrate foreign agents when their situation became too precarious, and to allow high-profile foreign officials to make meetings with their CIA case officers. In essence, he helped people move from place to place with disguises that were the stuff of Mission Impossible.

Just what Cole needed. With the loyalty and understanding Cole needed, as well. It’s not agency business, he’d said. And at Seth’s silence over the phone, on the other side of the small hangar from Josie and Diego Morel, Cole had asked if Seth was watching UBC along with everyone else in this corner of the world. And Seth had seen, of course. That was Selena.

He didn’t have to offer any more details. That was Selena. Because there had been only one woman on UBC to capture the airwaves with her narrow escape—to capture hearts with her daring. Cole closed his eyes, wishing he couldn’t see it so clearly—the look on her face as the terrorist pulled her head back slightly, into the gun Cole knew was there. The uneven nature of the image as Morel compensated for the Predator’s movement. And then Selena in action, all swift, wicked consequences. He didn’t know what she’d used against the man, only that it glinted of metal. That she’d freed herself and run, showing the world her heart. Reminding Cole of what he’d always known, of how bright and hard her soul burned beneath the coolness of her poised exterior.

Reminding him how much he had to lose.

And now Seth knew, too. And Seth had sent a taxi—although Cole doubted it was merely that—and Cole needed to make his great escape so the man wasn’t kept conspicuously waiting.

Not that he didn’t trust Josie and Diego, who could probably walk him straight out to the road with no challenge. Just that the fewer people who knew, the better. Need To Know. Great operational policy, and one he’d had to keep, even with Selena.

He found a seam in the high chain-link, a spot already half separated. The wire cutters on the Leatherman swiftly created a gap big enough for a medium man of agile nature, and Cole trotted away into the brushy winter wood that had crept up on the place. Nothing grew strongly or tall in this rocky land, it seemed, except the unrest that had brought Selena here and now might kill her.

He intercepted the taxi easily enough, not surprised to find that the driver spoke perfect English. They ascertained that Cole’s departure had been clean, and then started off in a series of routine course changes meant to expose anyone following. It was a process that might normally take hours…but Cole didn’t have hours. Selena didn’t have hours. He said as much; the man only nodded. The flushing process wasn’t for Cole or Selena…it was meant to protect Seth. It could be shortened under duress…but not eliminated.

His cell vibrated in his pocket. Cole fumbled for it, thinking Selena!—and found himself caught off guard by Diego Morel’s deep voice. “Damn good thing I thought to get your number,” Morel said, “if you’re going to pull spook tricks on us. I thought we were on the same side.”

“We still are, as far as I know.” But Cole winced at the phone. “I’d say call it habit, but—”

“Yeah,” Morel said. “I guess I wouldn’t just sit around on my ass watching UAV footage if I had an option to move in, either.”

“I don’t,” Cole said, because this was a cell phone and enough had been said already. “I’ve got a meet with Tory.” And now he’d have to see if she’d cover him—not because Morel would check, but because someone else just might. Not that his unofficial status here was a threat to anyone, just…

Habit.

“Okay.” Morel responded easily enough so Cole knew he’d gotten the drop it vibes. “Look, you left too early. You missed a good show.”

“On television?” Cole said, purposely inaccurate.

Again, Morel let it slide. Better than that, he played right along. “Action scene,” he said. “Gorgeous woman on a roof, taking out a couple of bad guys and getting away clean.”

Cole stiffened with hope. “Down the fire escape?” He didn’t even know if the building had one, or if the Russians, during the occupation in which they’d built that stolid structure, had deemed them necessary. But he figured Morel would get the message. Did she escape them? Is she free?

“Nope.” Now the deep voice held regret. “Back inside. Woman with a mission, you know? But there’s more to it. We took a close look at the setting and found some devices up there.”

Devices. Cole had a crystal-clear image of Selena at the head of the Death Stairs, cupping her hand in the signal for booby trap. “Enough to be significant?”

“Hard to tell until we watch it again—” study and analyze and enhance, he meant “—but I’d say not. Only to that immediate area.”

So there might be more.

Or not. Selena could simply have been trying to warn off a roof approach.

“I’ll share the tape,” Morel was saying. “But I thought you should know. Plus the news about the hot action babe, of course.”

“Of course,” Cole murmured, wishing he’d seen it with his own eyes—but it was time to quit watching.

It was time to start playing the game.

He wasn’t going to answer.

Selena wasn’t prepared for the heavy wash of disappointment as Cole’s phone did the little double ring that meant it was switching to voice mail. She let her head drop to her knees, shifting back against the bed that hid her from anyone who came to the bedroom door, and thumbed the phone off.

Here she was, back where she’d started not so very long ago. In the guest suite where she’d left her briefcase and in which she hoped for a chance to clean up and ponder her purpose here.

Save the hostages.

Simple enough. Except she was no longer sure just how to go about it. If the building was as compromised as she thought, the Kemenis were only waiting for someone to make a rescue effort. A little token resistance, a hasty retreat, and the building would become the weapon. Dead hostages, dead SEALs or Berzhaani Elite Guards or both. In which case she needed to…

For a moment, Selena’s mind went blank. Utterly blank, clogged up by fatigue and reaction and not a little despair. I’m one person. One. What can I do against an army?

Except maybe she wasn’t just one person. Maybe she was two. Maybe she had within the smallest spark of life, tugging at her body just enough to turn her stomach inside out now and then. A little piece of herself…a little piece of Cole.

Then protect it. Run. Or hole up somewhere.

But holing up wouldn’t do her any good if the Kemenis had plans for this building. And as for running…

If she had a child, one day she’d be answering questions. And she needed to be able to look her child in the eye when she answered.

Because she could do quite a lot against an army. She might not destroy them, but she could pester them. She could make things difficult. She could distract them.

So she dredged up the trailing end of her thoughts and put her mind back to work. If the building was compromised and the Kemenis planned a hasty retreat, then she needed to locate that avenue of retreat and block it. Or simply block all of the first-floor exits other than the main doors at the Death Steps. Something—anything—that would at least slow them down. And she’d have to make sure they knew it. She’d gain nothing if they initiated a plan to bring the building down and then found out they couldn’t escape.

The problem was…if she was wrong, if her intuition had sent her in the wrong direction, misled by stray comments and an adherence to logic and reason the Kemenis might well have chosen to ignore, then she couldn’t waste time with exits. She needed to concentrate on thinning their ranks by any means possible, on making it easier for any rescue teams to swoop in and save the day.

She didn’t think she had the time to do both. Or even the physical wherewithal—not with kill-on-sight almost certainly hanging over her head. No second chances from here on out.

Selena snorted into the afternoon gloom. Second chances? She’d had them. She’d been caught; she’d gotten away. She’d been hurt, but not badly. She’d been betrayed, and overcome it. She was going on third chances…maybe fourth.

You’ve given them hints. You’ve given them help. And now she’d just do her best. She couldn’t do it alone, but she’d do her best.

The phone gave a plaintive beep. She’d disconnected it, but left it on…and now the last vestiges of the battery were trickling away. No time even to berate herself; she hit Redial and waited for Cole’s phone to ring, hoping against hope that this time he’d answer it. Who else could he be talking to?

He’s trying to fix this. Of course he was. He wouldn’t just sit around the apartment, not all this time. He was here, somewhere. Or on his way. And he might only be one man…but so was she only one woman. Neither of them had a reputation for taking no as an answer.

Still, she bit her lip when the phone gave that little double ring and switched to voice mail. She bit it hard. But she was ready, talking right over another low battery beep. “It’s me. Battery’s dead, babe—this is my last call out. First thing…I don’t know for sure, but I think the Kemenis have a surprise planned for anyone who comes in—I think they’re planning a grand exit, and that what they’re asking for here isn’t really what they want—they sure don’t expect to get it.” Beep. One more warning, maybe two, and she’d be cut off. “The other thing…why I left. I saw you. In D.C. And…you weren’t alone. I couldn’t get the answers I needed then. Desk work…it wasn’t distracting enough. So yeah, I ran. But—” beep “—I’ve had a lot of thinking time on my hands here, and I need you to know…I know we still have to talk, but whatever happens here…as far as I’m concerned, I’m already on my way home again.” She thought about the potential life they might well have started together and hesitated. Not too long, or the voice mail would cut her off, thinking her message completed, so when she spoke again her thoughts were unformed. “There’s something else. I think. That is, I could—”

And of course the phone cut off. She stared blankly at it, surprised to see it become splashed by tears. And then she snorted. Hadn’t she already decided Cole didn’t need to know? At least not until she emerged from this building safe and sound. Not unless.

She used a few more precious moments on silence and composure. She thought about all the things she wished she’d said, and planned out all the things she would say if she ever had the chance to look into Cole’s striking blue eyes again. She gathered memories in around herself, a collection of reasons she would and could do this thing set out before her. She thought of the hostages. Just kids. Someone’s children. Innocents whose lives should never be torn apart by the grownups fumbling through this world.

She closed her eyes, drawing up an image of Cole. Making it so detailed, so realistic, she almost believed she could also make it real. Those blue eyes, startlingly pure. One eyebrow set slightly higher than the other, giving him a somewhat amused look unless he replaced it with a downright scowl. The square line of his jaw—it, too, went a little crooked when he smiled, and especially when he smiled at her.

Dammit, she could see him, she could all but touch the smooth lines of his back, all but feel the hard curve of his—

No. Don’t go there.

But it was too late, for she’d remembered the habitual taste of him, the lingering sting of the curiously strong mints he popped just to see if he could get steam to come out of his ears. Along with the memory of touching him came the image of how he reserved certain expressions just for her. The one that meant, “Get over here, woman, so I can put my hands on you,” and the questioning, understanding silence when she turned pensive. The muted glee in his eyes when he pulled her leg and got away with it. But mostly the deep, clear blue of his eyes, so close to hers, when they came together. He always lost himself in that instant, and even if he recovered enough to turn the lovemaking light and playful, for that instant he was nothing but a startled gasp…totally, completely hers.

And now he was at the other end of a voice mail message. She didn’t even know where—somewhere between here and home? Out there with the news cameras? Holed up in a hotel? Unless she had it all wrong and he was still at home. Waiting. Not assigned to this area, no authority to change that—not even enough to fake his way through.

In a way it was a reassuring thought—because if Cole were here, he’d be forced into the very role he played best—full-speed nap-of-the-earth flying his way through barely known terrain.

Making his way toward her.

Chapter 15

Selena pulled herself together, took a few moments for a luxurious wash. She checked her side and discovered it could use a stitch, and then used the duct tape from her briefcase to make a patch for herself. Peeling either shirt down over her arm proved too painful to make it worth the effort, so she snatched a few prestocked anti-inflammatories from the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, gulping them down along with a handful of the crackers from the kitchenette staples. Knockoff saltines with an odd texture and an odder taste, but they sat well enough in her stomach. She took the chance to pull her hair back into a stubby braid and fasten it with a hair tie from her case, and then she scared up the several pens she’d left behind last time.

The pad of sticky notes also fit nicely into her thigh pocket.

The Luger, during a quick disassembly and inspection, turned out to be not quite a Luger at all. Not with this rough machining. Not with this clunky interface of parts. She stared at it, dumbfounded. Jonas White again, foisting inferior goods off on the Kemenis…it made sense. More sense, in fact, than the notion that White had helped to arm the Kemenis with what had become an expensive collector’s item—or that he’d found any quantity of these discontinued pistols to pass along.

She’d have to be careful with this one. No telling how well it actually worked.

Finally ready to go, she glanced up in the mirror of the bedroom dresser and stopped short, startled by her own paleness, and startled by the extent of the bruising across her face. Her lip, subtly lopsided with swelling; one eye half-closed, surrounded by purpling and accented with a small cut. The remains of the dried blood trail still lingered, a mere shadow of what it had been. The other side of her face sported a simpler landscape, one big bruise accenting her strong jawline and blooming in colors from deep purple to vivid yellow.

No wonder Ashurbeyli had thought she’d trigger the pity factor from those who watched the Death Steps.

She watched herself straighten, determined inside and out. She’d show Ashurbeyli the pity factor, all right. Time to hit hard and move fast. She’d take the stairs when she went, and she had five bullets to use along the way, along with a number of weapons they wouldn’t expect. She gathered them to her, filling her briefcase with the clear planter marbles and dumping the remainder in the hastily emptied mayo jar with the dry ice. She wasn’t ready for it, not quite yet, but now a simple tightening of the lid would give her a five-to-ten-minute fuse—shorter if she stuck the jar in a basin of warm water. For now, she stashed it in a pillowcase padded with towels, and added it to a small handheld fire extinguisher she set next to the briefcase at the door. After a careful inspection of the hallway, she made a swift journey down the rooms with her passkey, entering each room long enough to fling open the curtains and turn on the lights. If events drew out until after dark, the upper floors would be a fishbowl from the outside. It might not be possible to tell where the terrorists were, but it would be clearly evident where they weren’t.

She returned to her gear, draped the briefcase shoulder strap over her head and across her shoulder like a satchel and grabbed up the fire extinguisher. Monoammonium phosphate…almost as good as pepper spray. The leather case bumped heavily against her hip as she checked and entered the stairs, a constant reminder running in the background of her thoughts. Hit and run. No time for fear. No time to think of Cole or—

No. Hit and run.

The next floor down seemed as empty as the previous one. Abandoned.

As she hesitated upon reentering the stairwell, she heard voices. A few moments of listening told her enough—a pair of men on their way to the roof. They’d no doubt realize the current pair of guards had disappeared. Can’t have that. Not yet. The missing guards represented opportunity to any rescue teams, although—Not yet, she thought at the SEALs, and at the Berzhaan Elite Guard. They were all still too vulnerable to the potential hidden Plan A, rescuers and hostages alike. Even if they’d been forewarned by her hand signal.

And meanwhile…

She waited for the right moment, popping out of the doorway as the ascending Kemenis gained the landing. The leading man cried out as she jammed a pen at his eye. It skidded off bone and into the eye itself, and by then he was shrieking and batting blindly at her—but it didn’t stop her from releasing the fire extinguisher in the face of the second man. The first stumbled backward and down the stairs; the second had the presence of mind to claw for his gun instead of his tightly closed eyes, and she turned the metal cylinder into a weapon, smashing first his hands and then up into his chin—and then whirled so the heavy briefcase slung out enough to slam into him, knocking him down after his friend.

They moaned together, blinded and dazed, and she hesitated only long enough to snatch the most accessible handgun. Another “Luger”—surprise, surprise. She ejected the clip and left the pistol behind. Hit and run. She didn’t dare discharge the gun at them inside the stairwell for all to hear. It didn’t matter whether the men could pull themselves together and eventually make it back to the ballroom. She’d damaged them, and she’d damaged the Kemenis. Two down, two injured…twenty-three to go.

She didn’t take the time to go through the second-floor rooms, not yet. Not with the injured Kemenis possibly drawing attention to the stairs. She went all the way down to the basement, trading off caution for speed and for once hitting it lucky—no interference. She made it to the laundry room and found her bleach and ammonia stash, and then she hit the maintenance room up for a screwdriver, quickly sharpening it with a rough flat file before tucking it away in her back pocket.

It was when she stopped to contemplate the potential of the flammable fluids that she saw it. Innocuous, looking like nothing more than an industrial-size can of fruit with the label stripped, sitting on the floor by the solvents.

Except it hadn’t been here before.

Eyeing it as though it might uncoil and strike at her, Selena dropped out of hit-and-run mode long enough to walk quietly up to the container and peer inside.

Ooh, yeah.

Plan A. C4, neatly tucked away with a remotely activated electronic detonator snugged into its Silly Putty surface.

Plan A, confirmed.

There had to be more to it—something to make this whole game worth it. The risk of taking the hostages, the risk of lingering here with the whole world watching.

Rescue teams come in, building blows, Kemeni escape…to what?

To go accomplish their original goal. With the spotlight on the destruction and death at the capitol and the Kemenis assumed dead in the initial chaos, who would stop them from storming wherever they pleased?

Selena aimed a disdainful look at the bomb. “You guys are really getting on my nerves.” And then she bent and pulled the detonator free, carefully depositing it in a damp, inconspicuous back corner where cement met block wall. “You just do your thing right there. Make a nice little boom.” They’d have no way to know the detonator sat elsewhere than the explosive compound. It wouldn’t start so much as a fire.

Not that it truly mattered. She had no doubt there were more of these little goodies scattered throughout the building. Maybe not enough to bring it down, but enough to make it close.

Gah. Bombs. She’d rather be facing wannabe Kemenis in a small village outside a beloved shrine, saving people one by one. Fighting people—and not faceless bombs.

Ashurbeyli. He was the face of these bombs. A man with heartfelt aspirations and no idea that he’d crossed the line a long, long time ago.

She felt the screwdriver in her pocket, thought of the havoc waiting in the laundry room, thought of a man blinded on the stairs…wondered if Ashurbeyli hadn’t dragged her over the line along with him.

And decided it was worth the price if it meant saving the people huddled on the floor above her. Berzhaan’s fate…something else again altogether. Even if the Kemenis failed, the country had a long struggle before it…just as its people had struggled through the past.

But if you’re going to be crossing lines, you’d damn well better not do it for nothing.

No. More like all or nothing.

She took a deep breath and left the now harmless C4 where it was. A quick circuit of the basement turned up another bomb in the furnace room, next to the giant fuel-oil tank. She disarmed it, not certain the fuel oil would do anything but burn sullenly even if it were ignited, and tossed the detonator out through the high, small hinged door used for the hose from the fuel truck. She even eyed the door as a possible escape route; if she could reach it, she could certainly fit through it…but there were a few large kids who wouldn’t, and neither Razidae or Allori had a chance.

So she left it behind, and gathered up her chaos supplies, going to lurk by the stairs for a good hard listen before exposing herself to trouble in the stairwell. At the faint scuff of noise that reached her, she hung back, letting her burdens settle to the ground as she pulled both the screwdriver and the Luger, waiting…

Just one of them, not having learned enough to be cautious in his exit. She instantly yanked her plan to jam the gun in his ribs and shoot; without a second man to deal with, she could afford to give him a good hard rap on the head, just below the temple.

Only in afterthought did she realize it was the first time she’d seen one of them alone. Either she’d messed with them enough to throw off their habits, or they were changing according to Ashurbeyli’s plans—and the former was infinitely preferable to the latter. She didn’t need Ashurbeyli changing the game, not now.

She crept into the kitchen without further incident. She no longer considered it a home base, or even safe. In fact, a glance at the cooler showed the door left open, and a stolen moment revealed the prisoners gone. Bound to happen, once they found Atif. They’d probably searched the whole kitchen again.

She unloaded her plastic gallon bottles on a set of shelves just inside the door, and more carefully removed the jar of dry ice, tucking it out of sight on the same shelves. “Wait there—I’ll be back.”

And wouldn’t it amuse Cole to find her talking to inanimate objects.

Hit and run. No time for thoughts of Cole, remember?

Just enough time to grab some butcher twine and wrap the strong stuff from the door exit handle to the handle of the nearby stove, over and over until it was stout enough to withstand any amount of yanking. Except as she prepared to do it, she thought twice. Would she be trapping the Kemenis in, or potential rescue out?

After a moment she dropped the twine and retrieved her remaining pen and the sticky notes. Blue with cute little flowers along the bottom edge, gifted to her by Bonita to amuse them both with its inappropriate nature. Selena doubted that Ashurbeyli would be amused at all…but she’d intended to tweak him with notes all along. She wrote in carefully legible Berzhaani, “Are you sure the bombs will go off?” and posted it to the door, hesitating only long enough to see that it would stick. Where else…?

The exit at the back corner of this side of the building. She put up the same message, deemed it too risky to cross to the other side of the building on this floor, and headed for the second floor. Her briefcase thumped against her hip, but she fought the impulse to leave it behind. Too useful in too many ways. She dug her stolen keys from the front flap, heading for the guest-room doors. These were the most opulent rooms; there weren’t as many of them. She expected to find offices on the other side of the hall, above the prime minister’s own office area.

She also expected to find at least a Kemeni or two, keeping track of things this close to their ballroom headquarters. Otherwise an enterprising SEAL could very well slip in, drill a few holes in the right spots, and snake in a few cameras for a perfect view of the terrorist setup and activities. But in the offices she found no one at all.

Ashurbeyli. Up to something after all?

Nothing she could do about it. Cause a little chaos, make things easy for those on the outside, try to time her heavy hits so she didn’t trigger anything but stood ready to react in case Ashurbeyli did.

Just a little bit of Mission Impossible. Your mission, Selena, should you decide to accept it…

Had she ever had any choice? Yes, she’d had options…but had she ever had any choice?

Not that she could live with.

She started in on the guest-room windows. Hit and run.

Don’t think about Cole.

Cole couldn’t believe it. He settled into the taxi and stared at the phone, which insisted he’d missed a phone call in the short time he’d been talking to Diego Morel. Primly, it indicated the call had been from Selena. From her own phone.

Take a breath, buddy. Listen to the message and then call her back.

He took that deep breath and recalled the message, letting the driver worry about his route and his evasions and spotting demeanor hits—the telltale driving behaviors—that would mean they’d been followed. He slumped down in the seat to create the illusion of privacy and put the phone to his ear. Listened to her initial warning about the Kemeni. Heard and stopped breathing at her next words. I saw you. You weren’t alone.

She’d seen him in D.C. She’d seen him playing out a role for the FBI, a sudden unexpected scenario in which he’d been loaned out to the feebs so he could follow through on an inadvertent terrorist connection he’d made during his overseas station work. It didn’t matter that his role in the ongoing operation had been completed, or that the woman posing as his lover had been whispering tactical observations into his ear instead of sweet nothings. He couldn’t tell Selena the details—not now, not later. And he wouldn’t blame her if she didn’t believe the little he could tell her—only that he’d been on the job—not when he’d broken their most basic rule by not updating her on his change of location.

He’d meant it to be a surprise, knowing he’d be home long before she expected. He’d meant it to delight her.

Instead it was one of the biggest mistakes he’d ever made. He’d sent her running in confusion. He’d sent her here.

Cole closed his eyes against the consternation of the images his mind so freely provided him—the look on Selena’s face upon spotting him. The way she would have held back any true emotion until she reached their apartment. How deeply he must have hurt her in the wake of their recommitment, their efforts to start a family. And if some small, wistful voice within wished that she could have trusted him just a little bit more, he had but himself to blame. He’d set her up for that mistrust by failing to let her know he was in D.C. in the first place.

And now here she was. Trapped in a building full of bombs and terrorists and a group of hostages she would never abandon. She was too committed to her work, to the soul of it—and she didn’t tackle her work from a distance. She absorbed the land to which she was assigned; she respected the people.

Deep beneath that cool and organized exterior, she hid more heart than most people ever wished they had. The very reason he’d been able to hurt her so deeply with one apparently simple decision. Deeply enough to send her…

Here.

Where she’d somehow forgiven him, not even understanding the hidden circumstances. Or where she’d somehow found the strength to trust him in spite of himself.

And then he realized the most important thing of all: he couldn’t call her back.

The capitol building’s second-floor quarters showed more signs of occupation. Some of these people, Selena realized, had to have made it out of the building. She couldn’t search the private area on the other end of the embassy’s first floor, but she’d seen no signs of other dignitaries in the function room holding the hostages. Out to a late lunch, perhaps—such business meetings were common enough in Suwan. She could only hope they weren’t all dead, killed in the chaos when the building fell to the Kemenis.

Don’t say that. Fell to the Kemenis is not something to say inside this building right now.

Not when she was waiting for it to fall for real.

She swept open the curtains of a particularly well-appointed and lived-in suite, darkly aware that if Ashurbeyli watched enough television he’d realize what she’d done and send someone around to reverse it; she could only hope he wouldn’t make such a target of any of his men.

And then the toilet flushed.

She froze—but only for an instant. In the next moment she’d plastered herself up against the wall between the bedroom and living room, mind racing and body still.

Not to mention the Luger wannabe out and ready.

She didn’t wait to register identity as the man strolled by; she jammed the gun in his back and made a warning noise between her teeth, a short sharp sound. He reacted before she could say anything else, pivoting around to smack the gun away with a hammy hand. Jonas White. And he would have had the gun, too, if she hadn’t been left-handed—and if she hadn’t been expecting the move. She could have shot him—should have, said a grim little voice in her head—but she evaded the blow and pushed her back to the wall, lending strength to the kick she landed. Her foot sunk into his gut and he doubled over, giving her a perfect view of his comb-over.

He staggered backward and somehow maintained his balance—impressive, from a man in his sixties. Selena didn’t follow through. She kept the pistol on him and, as he seemed to be gathering himself for another assault, said flatly, “I just got another clip for this baby. I can easily spare a bullet or two for you.”

It stopped him cold.

That, too, impressed her. He’d never lost his presence of mind. He’d never come near to losing his temper. He merely straightened, smoothing the front of his tan cashmere sweater where her foot had smudged and wrinkled it. If he rubbed his aching belly on the way, it wasn’t noticeable. “I thought Ashurbeyli had you well under control.”

She shrugged. “He thought he did, too. You really should spend more time with your new allies—then you’d already know you were both wrong.”

He smiled slightly, a self-assured expression with no humor to it. “I’m actually quite good at managing my friends from afar. But then, you already know that, don’t you?”

Selena smiled back at him. “I know you weren’t any good at all at managing your daughter from afar.”

She’d gotten him with that one; his small eyes narrowed. But he nodded at her, acknowledging the score she’d made. “Eventually not,” he said. “I should have known any daughter of an Athena bitch would betray me one day.”

She laughed, short and sharp. “I do believe she was just returning the favor.”

“And here you are. One might even think you Athena girls have an obsession with me.”

“You’ve had a high profile lately,” Selena told him.

“At least, for those of us who know where to look.” She raised an eyebrow at him. “That would be under the slimiest pile of compost in the heap, in case you didn’t see that coming.”

His face twisted, sour. “Thought I’d leave you the pleasure of saying it.”

“I appreciate that.” She gestured at the nearest chair, to the side and behind him—an armless, arch-backed Victorian thing meant more for show than for sitting on.

“Have a seat. Relax. And give thanks that you just came out of the bathroom, because you’re not going to have access for a while.”

He glanced back, found the chair and carefully backed toward it. He seemed to contemplate the notion of snatching it up to throw at her, but she gave him a bored look and he sat, carefully placing his hands on his stout thighs. “That gun looks familiar.”

She snorted. “It should. I have to admit it, you’re pretty good at finding a use for weapons no one else wants to bother with.”

“The Kemenis are needy, not picky. But don’t confuse me with their suppliers. That was Frank Black of the United States, I believe.”

She rolled her eyes. “Please. Do you want me to gag you? I can just go straight to searching this place if you’d prefer. Or better yet, I can prop you up in front of that window with your face plastered against the glass. Someone’s trigger finger is bound to slip once you’re recognized.”

White glared at her, a little more slow to regain his composure this time. Selena gave him the moment, moving into the room to sit on the couch across from him. She crossed her legs and rested the gun on her knee so he was looking right down the barrel. “Here’s the thing,” she said. “I know why you’re here. You’re playing the Kemenis—goading them into this takeover with promises of support, but we both know it’s for your own benefit. First, you’ll have a sanctuary. Second, you’ll be in the perfect position to sink your pointy little claws into their oil fields.”

White snorted. “It’s been a long time since anyone called anything of mine ‘little.’”

“Nonetheless.” She let the word sit there a moment. “What I don’t understand is why the Kemenis are here. Why they chose this ill-conceived plan.”

“What does it matter?” He gestured at her, but returned his hand to his thigh as she instantly raised a warning brow. “You’re already looking the worse for wear. You’re not going to make it out of here alive. Why don’t you go spend your remaining moments trying to escape, instead of badgering a poor old man?”

“Because this is so much more fun,” Selena told him. “Now, of course I understand why the Kemenis have made their move. We’ve already established that you goaded them into it.”

He only smiled. This time he looked more pleased with himself, but no more likely to talk about it.

“What I don’t understand is why they’re here. Making demands we both know will never be met. Hanging around just waiting for the inevitable rescue attempt in which they all die. Oh, the hostages might die, too, and maybe a SEAL or two. But what does it gain them?”

“Eternal happiness after death?” White suggested.

“Some of them, maybe,” Selena acknowledged. “But not Tafiq Ashurbeyli. There’s more to him than that. I’m surprised you’ve been able to fool him for this long. Maybe that’s why you’re spending so much time in hiding.”

A shrug. “I need my rest. I’m old.”

“So you’ve said. I suspect it’s the one truthful thing you ever say.” She shifted on the couch. At any time someone could come to check on White—maybe even Ashurbeyli. At any time, another hostage could die. Or a rescue attempt might be launched, or better yet, the building could blow up. Not as thoroughly as it might have before she’d spent time in the basement, but there was no such thing as a little bit dead.

If White had the same awareness of impending danger, he didn’t show it. He watched her, his stare unnervingly blunt. He let her lead the conversation, with no evident concern over where it might go.

She said, “I know about the bombs.”

That did surprise him, but only for a moment. He said, “Tafiq really should have killed you when he first had the chance.”

“He tried,” she reminded him dryly. “So here’s what I’m thinking. The Kemenis plan to blow this place, literally and figuratively—I found a couple of the bombs, by the way. So they’re using this siege not as the end goal, but as a means to their true goal. Failing to win over the Berzhaani government at this stage not only won’t come as a disappointment, but it’s pretty much expected. So from here they go on to do something else. Unless, of course, we can stop them right here.” She tipped her head at him. “‘We’ not being you and I, of course. ‘We’ being the good guys.”

“Of course.” He’d finally found something meaningless upon which he could comment.

“So let’s say taking over the capitol is Plan A. Just to give it a nice neat name. And let’s say the bombs and the true goal are Plan B.”

“Just to give it a nice neat name,” he said, but his voice had gone dry as he anticipated her logic.

“And then, because you’ve been playing these kinds of games for a very long time—as you say, you’re old—let’s assume you’ve got a Plan C. That you don’t take the Kemenis’ success for granted, and you’ve got your ass covered.”

“My,” he said. “I am clever, aren’t I?”

“The point I’m reaching,” she told him, ever so gently, “is that under the circumstances, it might be in your best interest to discuss Plan B with me, and then to move right along to Plan C.”

He snorted. “And you won’t stop me?”

“I’ll be busy.” She pointed at the floor, indicating the story below them. “Kemenis, hostages…saving the day.”

“Ah, yes. Of course.” He nodded, and fell into silence.

Selena sighed. At any time… She eyed the curtain rod; she eyed the tiebacks for the sweep of material framing each window. She eyed Jonas White.

His scowl proved he was, indeed, a clever man. He understood the threat—that she was sizing up her options to tie him at the window, in full, exposed view of anyone out there with a rifle.

And in looking at her face, he understood that she’d do it.

Definitely teetering on the line, Selena.

But she’d do it. And they both knew it.

“It’s different,” she said softly, “when you manage things from up close and personal.”

Chapter 16

Selena left Jonas White cursing, tied to the chair and spewing venom about her betrayal. “Don’t tell me,” she’d asked, sticking a note to the wall behind his chair, “that you didn’t expect it.” Had a nice chat with your friend. Love, Selena.

From between his teeth he’d said, “There was a certain implication that I would be free to carry out Plan C.”

She shrugged. “You’re not dead yet. And you’re not strung up at the window for target practice. Don’t even try to tell me you don’t still intend to escape to your Plan C.”

She didn’t know what Plan C was; she didn’t really care. She’d been glad enough for the curtain ties, and she’d found his belt useful, as well. As much as he planned to escape, she planned to send someone up here to fetch him when all was said and done. And meanwhile, she didn’t have time to waste.

Because now she understood. She understood Ashurbeyli’s apparent lack of concern over the passage of time with no response from Berzhaan; she understood why he was perfectly willing to wait, hauling a hostage out now and then to make his points.

And where he’d been spending all his time.

He had a computer expert. In fact, he had more than one. Men she’d never even seen, because they’d immediately gone to work on the far side of the first floor, extracting secrets and data and personal information and removing hard drives wholesale. And other men who’d rifled through offices hunting hard copy—intel on everything from discreet love affairs to babysitter contact info to secrets of state.

And now they were only cleaning up the loose ends, digging as deeply as they could while they waited for an excuse to execute Plan B. Havoc, inside and out, to cover their escape. They’d go underground, but not for long—and when they emerged, it would be with carefully targeted strikes on the very people who now refused to respond to their requests.

White himself had helped concoct the scheme…but once forced to participate in order to prove his good intentions, had also quickly made other arrangements.

Selena had to give Ashurbeyli points all around. He hadn’t fully trusted White; he’d wanted him just as committed as the Kemenis. And he hadn’t relied on a simple one-layer strategy. He’d presented himself as an angry man leading angry terrorists attempting little more than a blunt, violent coup. And supposing it had worked, she suspected he would have taken it gladly. But he’d thought beyond that. He’d found a way to win if Berzhaan startled the world with capitulation, and he’d found a way to win if they came in after the hostages. She had no doubt that if both the U.S. and Berzhaan sat on their hands, showing the slightest inclination to let the situation turn into a replay of four hundred and forty-four days in Iran, Ashurbeyli would simply choose his own time to trigger the bombs, his diversions and his escape.

He hadn’t counted on Selena, of course.

Neither had White, who ceased cursing at her only because she gagged him. She couldn’t risk his interference, not now that she was certain of Ashurbeyli’s plans.

What she had to do was take control away from Ashurbeyli. Instigate her own distraction, round up the hostages and herd them toward the nearest safe exit. Let Ashurbeyli play catch-up—and meanwhile, she’d be going after the electronics. Or aiming the nearest SEAL—whom she could only hope wouldn’t fail to take advantage of the moment—toward the ballroom, even while warning them about the impending diversion tactics on the outside.

She forced herself to stop as she reached the first-floor stair landing, and the exit door that waited there, her hands already on pen and sticky notes. Breathe, Selena. You can’t do it all. Prioritize. Hostages. Even if she managed nothing else, the hostages would be safe. The Kemenis could be dealt with in a cleanup operation, their plans exposed and their people on the run.

Always the optimist.

Not really. In reality, she had a very good idea of her chances…or lack thereof. She just had no intention of letting that stop her.

She headed for the fourth exit, her sticky note ready and the Luger in hand.

Do you really think those bombs will go off?

After an amazingly swift transformation, Cole left Seth’s chosen meeting spot—an ugly little room behind a whorehouse—and headed for the capitol as a Berzhaani—his skin tinted, his bright hair covered by a modest green turban over a kalansuwa cap, dark contacts concealing his blue eyes. Most important were his layers—the bottom layer a black, tight T-shirt with U.S.A. in white lettering on front and back. A T-shirt of last resort, should he be caught up in a firefight. The second layer—Kemeni khaki and olive-green. They’d know he wasn’t one of them if they got a good look, but it would be up to him to remain no more than a glimpse of movement.

On top of that, a taupe dishdasha tunic brushing the tops of his feet. Black leather kuffs, feeling more like slippers than shoes and not really meant for this weather—but Seth hadn’t had a lot of time to prepare. Over it all, a distinguished camel hair overcoat—all in all a little old-fashioned for a city as modern as Suwan, but nothing to attract attention. Especially not when anyone on the street had to duck against the sudden spurts of windy rain.

And then there was the mustache, tickling beneath his mildly altered nose—from straight to slightly hawkish, building on the already thin bridge to allude to classic Berzhaani features. He wasn’t even sure Selena would recognize him if she saw him, although the disguise was meant not to hide his personal identity so much as his origins.

He also came equipped with press credentials for a tiny Berzhaani newsrag that existed solely as a front for CIA activities, and with his very own personal assistant and diversion master—someone Seth had recruited in the time it took Cole to reach the meet. Cole knew the field agent only by his station name of Hank P. STUNTLY, but he only had to meet the young man to recognize that gleam in his eye. No question why Hank would opt in on this unofficial action, in spite of the danger and the risk of reprimand. He was hunting for a way to get close to the action.

Just outside the press and military zone—a cordoned-off block in each direction—Cole stopped to pull out his phone. A Berzhaani man standing on the corner of chaos, checking in with someone in his life. Not an unusual sight—although the current unrest extended far beyond the capital, and only the most jaded ventured out on the streets this day. Seth had offered a quick summary as he performed Cole’s transformation, concise words detailing Kemeni outbreaks all over Berzhaan, starting with the one by the Temple of Ashaga that had kicked off the day’s activities and drawn away Suwan’s most experienced antiterrorist unit.

Cole heard the details, and he heard the big picture as well—the Kemenis had committed everything to this takeover. They’d drawn on rough, marginal manpower, throwing them out as unwitting sacrifices to trained troops. They’d left Berzhaan’s people harried and wounded and dead, risking alienation at this time when they’d need popular support after the planned takeover. Ashurbeyli, going public for the first time, proved himself no fool; already he’d lauded the innocents as martyrs and heroes for the cause, arrogantly postulating that they would have chosen their paths had they known what security and independence it would bring Berzhaan.

It was a well-planned operation…much better planned than the capitol takeover itself. He would have assumed Ashurbeyli to be a tactical fool, except…

Except for those bombs on the roof.

They spoke of something else going on under the surface, simply because Ashurbeyli hadn’t used them as a threat. Hadn’t said, “Don’t even think of a rescue attempt, because we’re ready for you.” No, he’d kept them tucked away in the shadows of the roof corners. He had plans for them…but just what, Cole hadn’t yet guessed.

He’d just be ready for it, whatever it was.

He dialed the number for Josie’s phone, one he’d memorized shortly after arrival. When she answered, he said, “Thought I’d let you know I’m here. See if you two had any news.”

“You’re there?” she said. “We don’t see you.”

He refrained from glancing upward. “I don’t see you, either, but I know you’re there.”

She laughed, though it didn’t last long. “We’ll leave it at that, then. Any news?”

“Not yet. By the time I have any, I don’t think I’ll be reaching for the phone.” Beside him, Hank grinned, quite easily inferring Cole’s meaning. “Thought I’d check on your end.”

“Good move. You should know that we’ve spotted some interesting activity in your neighborhood. We haven’t confirmed its nature…but we’re okay to play along if necessary.”

Meaning they’d gotten authorization to bring the Predator’s Hellfire missiles into play. Good news…and bad. Things were escalating, and Cole didn’t have any kind of handle on the situation inside.

Not yet. But he would. Because Selena had given him her trust, more trust than he even deserved.

He intended to prove that she hadn’t made the wrong decision.

Selena followed her “safe” route back to the kitchen area—up a story and over, avoiding the activity on the first floor. She kept the fake Luger out and ready, having paused long enough to combine her available rounds into one magazine and make sure there was one in the chamber.

But she met no one. And while she couldn’t complain…

She could wonder.

If they were drawing in on themselves, it wasn’t good. It could only mean they didn’t care if their domain was invaded—that perhaps they even waited for it.

She needed to shake them up a little.

She eased out into the hallway, down to the intersection where the long hall ran behind the function rooms, and she watched. Waited. Saw no one.

No, that can’t be good.

She wrote them a short note—in Berzhaani, as they’d all been—and snaked her hand around the corner to press it to the wall. Selena was here.

And then, on this side of the corner, Are you sure you’re going to go Boom?

If anyone saw the notes, she hoped they’d sow doubt and delay and a little bit of chaos. And if no one saw them…

Well, she’d be out a pad of sticky notes.

Cole closed in on the capitol, flashing his credentials at several soldiers along the way. One of them made enough fuss that he thought he’d have to get creative, but Hank—who spoke Berzhaani fluently as opposed to Cole’s firm grasp of related but distinctly different Russian—made what turned out to be a big fuss of getting the man’s name and rank and a few personal tidbits. All for the purpose of giving him a few shining lines in the article they’d be writing, naturally. Eventually the man let them through to the press area, uttering dire warnings about the dangers of getting too close.

Well, who knew. Maybe Cole would end up writing an article. The CIA-run paper served many different purposes, but in order to justify its existence it also had to report the news. And like Cole, many reporters had already crossed this line past which the general public wasn’t allowed, angling for shots of the remaining blood on the rain-washed steps, hunting dramatic camera angles in front of the besieged but still imposing building.

Tory Patton was one of them, of course. As Cole approached, she unclipped her collar mike and handed it to a young woman; they put their heads together for a moment until Tory nodded, satisfied. Even in this weather she looked elegant; the chill brought a natural flush to her cheeks, and under a fedoralike rain hat, her bobbed hair was just tousled enough to remind viewers she was out in the field. Beneath her lined raincoat, her flak jacket was barely evident.

Her gaze landed on him as he approached, remaining professional but not quite welcoming. Cole affected his best Berzhaani accent, polished by recent coaching. “Miss Patton,” he said. “I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to offer my admiration of your work.”

“Thank you,” she said, genuinely enough—but her gaze took in his somewhat conservative attire and reflected a hint of surprise. Behind her, another news crew moved into place, and she gestured that they should take the conversation aside.

“You expected me to say something else,” he guessed, moving with her. Hank hovered behind him, making it clear he wouldn’t be joining the conversation.

She gave the smallest of shrugs. “It shouldn’t surprise you to hear how often I’m told my career and behavior is inappropriate. Often not in so many words, but any journalist knows how to say things between the lines, don’t you think?”

“Absolutely.” His fervency startled her, as he’d meant it to. “Even though I must admit my own work is hardly worth note.” He flashed her his press pass, displaying the name of the paper. If she was as tuned in as he thought she was, it would mean something to her.

Her eyes narrowed. “Some people prefer to remain behind the scenes.”

“Exactly so. Sometimes one hears more that way.” He eased closer, as if they could have privacy in this bustling place—a street lined with armored personnel carriers and equipment trucks, heavily patrolled by both soldiers and cameras. The pavement in either direction held not only vehicles, but field tents. Not so obviously, somewhere in or on the buildings behind him—three-and four-story structures as old and older than the capitol—he knew the SEALs were lurking. Watching. Ready.

She let him close the distance between them, but something in her posture made it very clear that she was making a deliberate choice, and that she was quite ready to change her mind at any time. He lowered his voice and dropped the accent. “I hear, for instance, that our eyes in the sky have spotted some potential activity moving in.”

Someone else might have gasped at the sudden change in his demeanor; Tory took only the smallest of surprised breaths. “What are you doing here?”

“Did you really think I’d wait out there in that nice safe hangar, watching a video monitor?”

“I hoped,” she said. “Do you really think Selena needs something else to worry about?”

He gave a sharp shake of his head. “She doesn’t know I’m here. Not yet.” It wasn’t an answer to the question, but it was as much as he’d give her. Of course Selena didn’t need to worry about him. But that’s not why he was going in there. He was going in there to help.

“And just exactly what do you hope to accomplish?”

“Aside from giving you a heads-up on possible incoming action?” Cole looked over at the capitol building with its stained steps and its stolid facade and thought good question. “I’m playing it by ear, Tory. Maybe you’ve heard…it’s what I do best. But at the least I hope to get inside there and make a difference when it counts.”

“Inside,” she said flatly, tipping her head down so her hat caught a sudden gust of wind against the brim.

“Inside.” He tipped his head at Hank. Hank P. STUNTLY, waiting and ready. “I’ve brought along a little diversion. But if you can think of anything that might help…”

She considered him, and a subtle gleam entered her eye. “A couple of minutes from now I can have my crew take a special interest in getting cameras pointed at those steps.”

He smiled, and the mustache tickled like the dickens. “And everyone else will assume you actually see something.”

“Even the Berzhaani soldiers,” she said, her own smile a satisfied one. “They’ve gotten used to reacting to us.” But then she held up a finger. “There’s a catch, of course.”

Damn. Just when he thought he’d navigated around the potential. He waited, as patient as he could be with those steps right there in front of him, giving him a tangible setting over which to superimpose the images of Selena that had been burned into his memory. Bruised. At gunpoint.

Striking back.

He raised his brow at Tory, waiting.

“An interview, of course,” she said. “We’ll black out your face, wobble your voice—”

He gave a sharp shake of his head. “Not possible.”

She capitulated too quickly to have truly expected his agreement. “Then when you leave the Agency. Whenever that is. Until then, a print interview. It’ll be good for Newsweek.”

“On one condition.” He looked at her, his expression searching and totally beyond serious. “You have to come up with a really cool code name for me.”

A tiny laugh escaped between her teeth. “I think I can guarantee you that much.”

“All right, then.” He glanced at his watch. “Give me a few minutes.”

She grew more serious. “Do you even know—”

He smiled at her, showing her the same confidence that always put people at ease. “I’ll find a way in.”

And he did. Several of them, in fact.

None of them were ideal. An old fire escape leading to the roof, which might or might not be guarded at this point. A simple climb on decorative brick outcroppings to reach the second floor, where the windows lacked iron bars but would yield to his clothing-protected elbow if the ones within reach happened to be locked. They might be security wired, of course, but Seth had said the security systems had been taken down in the initial invasion. There was also an exit leading from the back corner, but Cole didn’t expect it to be open, or to be easily vulnerable. The SEALs might well use it once the time came.

He decided to try for the roof. It meant running in close to the building, behind the thick shrubs—and then exposing himself to view while he leaped up to catch the raised lower rung of the switchbacking fire escape. But Tory wasn’t his only diversion…just his most subtle one. Cole waited until movement at the front of the building—people pulling inward, toward the center—caught the attention of newscasters and soldiers alike. All except for the two men who watched the back of the building, standing imperturbably at the corners. Cole nodded at STUNTLY, who gave him a cocky little grin and quite casually sauntered toward the back of the building.

Within moments, he’d goaded the soldiers into giving chase, drawing them away. “Good luck,” Cole muttered after him, already in motion—but he knew that Hank also wore layers; all he needed was an instant out of sight to turn himself into someone else. With the discipline of experience, Cole left Hank’s fate in his own hands and ducked behind the shrubs—big, bushy, evergreen, and—as usual—prickly. He hesitated there, assessing the leap to the fire escape, when something caught his eye—and then caught his full attention.

Detonator?

He crouched by it. Yes, an electronic detonator. Meant for use with a remote.

“I’ll bet you weren’t here before the trouble started,” he said to it. “In fact…you’re barely damp. How did you—”

A small hinged door just above the ground, that’s how. A wooden door, still open, set into the concrete blocks of the basement. An opening just barely big enough…

Crouching behind the shrubs, Cole shucked the overcoat and tossed it through the door. The dishdasha followed, leaving him in his Kemeni outfit—and in serious trouble if he was spotted that way. He flipped the door up and backed through it, a dignified butt-first entrance that almost left him hanging like Pooh Bear in the honey tree. A little wiggling, a little contortion…a little brute force. He scraped his shoulders through, landing lightly on his feet in the basement of the capitol.

Hang on, Selena. Here I come.

Selena crouched in the not-so-secret corridor, ready for instant retreat. She’d come all the way to the end of it to spy on the ballroom, and knew herself to be acutely vulnerable.

And still, already the risk was worth it. Already she’d seen enough to confirm what Jonas White had told her…and to confirm her own suspicions that the Kemenis were getting ready to pull out. Not only had her navigation through the capitol been too easy since her return from the basement, but right there, right now, she saw the fruits of their labors. One after another, gathered hard drives were being tucked away for hard travel in the antistatic, airline- and gorilla-proof cases. A stack of CD jewel cases found less luxurious accommodations, while a handful of USB key chain drives quickly disappeared into special wrapping. Ashurbeyli watched the process with satisfaction…and rightly so. He gave a few quick orders…for Ashurbeyli, he was practically jovial.

They’d come prepared. They had the experts they needed; they had worked under the cover of the hostage crisis. Selena had seen those cases from the start and not realized their true significance. They even had a big wheeled dolly, festooned with bungee cords in waiting.

And there on a table, almost obscured by a stack of jackets and other soon-to-be donned outdoor gear, sat the detonator remotes. Selena’s fingers twitched. I’ve got to get those remotes…

Sure. If I was invisible and my arms were nine feet long and there wasn’t a table between here and there…

Well, she knew how to distract them all, maybe even enough for an opportunity at the remotes. But probably not enough to gather up both the remotes and the hostages, and right now the hostages came first. She had to get them out of this bloody arena before the building came down on them—or, if she hadn’t found all the charges in the basement, blew up from beneath them. She looked at the remotes with longing—and then realized the importance of Ashurbeyli’s recent words, the orders to bring in refreshments. Kaliber. Fayrouz. Non-alcoholic malt drinks—luxuries to terrorists on the move, but trendy items a well-stocked kitchen would provide. And, apparently, a nice treat to buoy the Kemenis before they made their climactic shift to Plan B.

And most importantly, the shortest route to grabbing the drinks was through the servants’ corridor.

Or maybe the most important part was the perfect opening for Selena’s diversions.

Either way, she couldn’t be caught here. She backed swiftly away from the door and moved down the corridor, finding pleasant irony in posting herself outside the entrance closet in the same spot from which she’d been ambushed not so long ago. She found herself a nice stout cast-iron frying pan, and as the Kemeni errand boy exited, his expression distracted and his eyes on the kitchen, she pounced from the side with a sharp knee to his stomach and a solid follow-through thwak of frying-pan-meets-skull.

Too hard, probably—he wasn’t dead, but she wouldn’t put eventual dying beyond him; a quick prod to his head revealed a certain unnatural mushiness. “Occupational hazard,” she told him, although she hadn’t meant to hit him so hard and couldn’t help a scowl of self-blame. It didn’t slow her down…she couldn’t afford to let it. She dragged him into the kitchen and tossed him in the open cooler, not bothering to secure him. Within a few moments he’d be a moot point, and she didn’t expect him to be functional within that time.

In quick succession, she found a serving cart and a couple of basins; she rescued one of Atif’s abandoned tablecloths and snapped it out to cover the cart—too big, but that was the point. The bottom shelf was completely obscured, and so was the basin in which she put an inch of warm water and then the dry ice jar. She found a giant plastic canister filled with sugar and dumped the sugar, filling the canister halfway with bleach. It went beside the basin, and next to it, the gallon of ammonia.

She centered the second basin on top of the tablecloth, dumped in several scoops of ice from the machine tucked beside the cooler and went hunting the drinks. Kaliber sported a beer-bottle shape; Fayrouz had more of a wine-cooler look, and Selena grabbed one for herself, taking a moment to gulp down a fizzy, fruity apple-raspberry malt. Until it hit the back of her throat, she hadn’t realized just how thirsty she’d become. Stupid, she chided herself. She hadn’t made it this far to go down in a dehydrated faint.

Dropping the can opener beside the ice-filled basin, she checked her presentation—bottles in ice, nasty tricks securely hidden below—and then smiled as she tucked her empty bottle amidst the others. Her subtle but wicked heads-up to Ashurbeyli—likely to be seen, but not soon enough to do anything about it.

After a quick check of the hallway, she took her goody cart back up the servants’ corridor, just as pleased to see that the errand boy had left the diminutive door to the ballroom ajar. She made no particular effort to hide her approach, and she hesitated just before the opening to duck down and screw the lid tight on the dry ice jar and make quick work of dumping the ammonia into the bleach. Holding her breath, she gave the cart a shove and closed the door behind it. Less than five minutes. The intensely cold dry ice, sitting in its warm water bath, would sublimate quickly to gas…and the gas took up much more volume than the hard, cold chunk of ice with which she’d started. When the gas volume overcame the integrity of the glass jar, it would do so with a violent explosion of glass shards and brittle decorative glass marbles.

Customized Selena-bomb.

But the chlorine gas generated by the bleach and ammonia hit first. It didn’t take long for the coughing to start, for the confused exclamations as Kemeni eyes began to sting, irritating noses and throats and eventually lungs. Eventually even damaging eyes and nose and lungs…eventually, perhaps, even turning lethal. Someone made a cranky comment about the man who’d been sent to provide for them even while reaching for the bottle opener and a bottle of Kaliber, but the source of the irritation remained obscure, and the men had no idea they were gathering around it.

In the midst of it all she heard the noise of new arrivals. They burst into the room looking for Ashurbeyli, voices sharp. Within a few words and a few angry gestures and the glimpse of light blue paper, Selena had caught the gist of it: they’d found her notes. The seeds of doubt had been well sown.

Ashurbeyli grasped the situation with his usual stark acumen—and then startled Selena by looking around, examining the room as if he’d suddenly find her there. It was enough to make her move away from her little peephole, although she told herself she’d only done so because it was time. Her eye had felt the first faint sting of gas, and several of the thirsty Kemenis were now doubled over with miserable coughing as the sharp voices rose to true alarm. Ashurbeyli was the one to point at the empty bottle in the bin; Ashurbeyli was the one to shout warnings as he backed swiftly away from the cart.

But Ashurbeyli was too late.

Chapter 17

The glass jar exploded with a noise as sharp as the deadly shards that arrowed through the room. Selena ducked reflexively, and ducked again as planter marbles thunked against the wall only inches away. Men cried out in surprise and pain; someone cried out in pure fury.

Ashurbeyli.

He knew who to blame.

The noises of fear and surprise rose from the next room, too. The hostages. They were her first priority now. She took a final glance into the ballroom and discovered more havoc than she’d even imagined—men with their legs slashed and bleeding, too stricken by the chlorine gas to react quickly to the more visible wounds made from flying glass. At least half of them were down, and the other half fully occupied with the wounded.

Not Ashurbeyli. He glared fiercely at the chaos as he plucked a giant splinter from his chest. He barked a few short orders, but he didn’t look at the men around him reaching for their comrades, reaching to stem the flow of blood, pulling one man from the soaked carpet where the serving cart had overturned. He looked around as though expecting Selena to materialize from thin air…as though he not only expected it, but gladly anticipated it, his fists balled into white-knuckled weapons.

You lose, she thought at him. Although…not quite yet. Not until she had the hostages. Not until she could at least warn the Berzhaani what he’d really been up to here at the capitol.

She took one last look at the doorway between the ballroom and the hostages, discovering their guard staggered against the doorjamb, bleeding from a rapidly swelling lump just below his eye. Cold flying marble, oh yeah. In another moment he wouldn’t be able to see out of that eye at all.

In the moment it would take her to reach the function room.

She followed the wall to the next peephole, and confirmed what her ears had told her—the hostages were poised on their feet, exclamations loud between them and fear running high—especially as the guard waved his gun at them, shouting at them to shut up and sit down. He must have been more rattled than he realized, for he used Berzhaani words, totally incomprehensible to most of those scared people. So they froze, waiting for the situation to become clear…waiting, to judge by the pale, strained expressions, to die.

They’re just kids.

But Selena saw more than the kids. She saw broken, ruined families; she saw a country plunged into irreparable turmoil. Berzhaan’s prime minister about to die in the rubble of his own capitol.

And the door wouldn’t open.

The table. The Kemenis had shoved a table in front of the passage, and she’d forgotten it. Adrenaline kicked in, hammering at her; with no room to step back for a kick, Selena threw her good shoulder into the door, feeling the wallboard give way and bulge out. Someone shrieked, startled and too panicked to hide it even if it meant her life, and when Selena looked again the guard was striding forward, blinking wildly from his watering, swollen eye but full of purpose and totally focused on the table-trapped entrance door.

“Stupid ass,” she muttered. “You should have just shot me through the wall.” And she shoved the Luger knockoff up against the wallboard, waited for him to block her view of everyone else and pulled a trigger so stiff it might as well be nonfunctional. There’d have been no maintaining her aim if she hadn’t had the gun jammed up against the wall for support.

The gunfire rang painfully loud in her little enclosed space in spite of the mild silencing effect of the wall, and she couldn’t help but flinch. When she found the peephole again, the guard had fallen out of view, and the hostages were scrambling to the other end of the room.

Not Allori. Allori shouted something to Razidae and the two men rushed forward, flinging the table away from the door in a synchronized effort. Selena all but tumbled out. She tripped over the downed guard and barely had her balance back when the ground rocked profoundly beneath her; her ears recoiled from a sharp basso reverberation of sound. She stared toward the ballroom, aghast—surely they hadn’t triggered their bombs, not when they weren’t anywhere near the exits!—and then realized the explosion had come from outside the building, back near the always-crowded little parking lot, the old carriage barn and the amazing grounds and gardens.

Not the building bombs at all—but whatever diversion the Kemenis had planned. But the timing…

The timing couldn’t be right.

She held up a quick hand to Allori, a silent signal to wait, and it was he who turned on the hostages, his arms held wide to stop the rush they’d been about to make at her. A few steps put her in position to look through the doorway, and still, all she saw was chaos—fervently renewed packing, men festooned with field bandages…one man clearly down for good, a thick puddle by his upper leg. They’re not ready. Whatever was going down out there, the Kemenis weren’t ready at all.

Before Ashurbeyli could spot her, she drew back. They had to have heard her pistol shot, as enclosed as it had been. They’d chosen to ignore her. They’d chosen escape over revenge.

That would certainly explain the dark, furious flush she’d seen on Ashurbeyli’s hawkish features. He knows I’m here somewhere. He’d chosen to complete his mission rather than to hunt her down…but then, he had probably never guessed that she was just beyond the door.

She turned on her heel, facing the hostages as she pulled her increasingly heavy briefcase off her shoulders—now they were in skirmish, and the thing would be more of a liability than potentially useful.

Two days of threats had trained the hostages well; after their initial noisy reactions, they’d silenced, staring mutely from a wide variety of complexions all turned pale and pasty. She stabbed a finger at the bedraggled events coordinator. “You know the way out,” she said in Berzhaani, not even bothering to make it a question. “You lead them. Take them out through the kitchen and go right around to the front. There are soldiers there, and they’ll protect you.”

More noise stuttered through the shouting in the next room—noise that froze them all, and hushed even the Kemenis in their hasty evacuation.

Gunfire. Automatic weapons fire. The three-burst stutter of a well-trained soldier, not the double-burst of the Abakans.

Rescue.

SEALs or Berzhaani Elite, Selena didn’t know. And she didn’t want to chance it either way, regardless of the extensive training each group underwent in how to not shoot the wrong people. She didn’t want the hostages in the middle of it. She grabbed the nearest student by the arm and sent her at the corridor, pinning the events coordinator with her most commanding gaze. “Go!” she said. “They won’t try to stop you now—just get out of the way!”

A glance at Allori told her he saw her lie—that he, too, knew the Kemenis might well try to stop the hostages, to use them as shields. But she didn’t want them timid, she wanted them running like hell.

Another explosion from the grounds rocked the building and the hostages suddenly moved as one, their silence broken. They rushed the door with their fears released into action—only to get bottled up at the exit, sobs and anxiety and “Hurry up, dammit!” filling the air.

Razidae wasn’t one of them. He stood in the middle of the room—prudently near the wall adjoining the ballroom so as not to be visible to the Kemenis, but he stood there nonetheless—his white dress shirt rumpled, his dignified thagiya cap askew and his dignity entirely intact. Selena turned to him in annoyance, suddenly quite certain that he didn’t intend to go anywhere at all. When a Kemeni popped through the door with mayhem on his mind, she reacted almost absently. She scooped up the briefcase, whirled it around once like a sling, and let fly; it hit him with the force of a medicine ball and bounced off to spew decorative planter marbles across the floor. Selena leaped over them to slam into the Kemeni with the same brute force, too tired for finesse when she could slam the fake Luger across the side of his head and fling his weapon away. She couldn’t help but give the gun an appreciative glance. “At last,” she told it. “Something you’re good at.”

“You should give it to Allori,” Razidae said, speaking loudly over the growing pop of gunfire now centered in the lobby area. The Kemenis who weren’t packing or bleeding—and even some of those who were bleeding—had gone out to hold off the rescue. To Selena’s startlement, he held out his hand. “Or to me.”

“You don’t want this,” she assured him. “It’s a piece of crap. And please, don’t tell me you’re going to stay here to greet the cleanup crew. You need to get to safety along with everyone else. More than anyone else.”

“I do want it,” Razidae said, and jerked his head at the diminishing number of hostages, all of whom were completely focused on escape. “And you should be the one to go with them.”

She found herself speechless and glanced at Allori to confirm what she suddenly thought she understood. Razidae didn’t want her there when the Berzhaani Elite crashed the scene. He didn’t want a woman holding the only captured weapon, and he didn’t want her there at all.

Allori gave her the slightest of nods.

Selena stabbed a finger at the Abakan she’d tossed across the room, and at the pathetic Luger knockoff not far from it, by the side of the first man she’d taken down. Acquiring either meant entering the potential line of fire from the doorway. “You want one? You’ve got your choice. I hope you know how to use them.”

Razidae stiffened. “Now is not the time—”

“No,” she snapped. “It’s not. You can’t help pull this country back together if you’re not alive.”

“Nor can I do so if I cannot command the respect of my people.”

She couldn’t believe this argument, this moment. She didn’t want to believe this argument. She gave Razidae a cold look and said, “It’s a good thing I was really risking my neck for those kids, or I might be seriously peeved that you’re throwing away all my work. As it is, I don’t have any problem with the notion of working with—let’s see, who’s next in line now that bin Kuwaji is dead?” She didn’t expect an answer. She said it only to buy thinking time, hovering over the decision to end this argument with a good stout blow to Razidae’s head. With Allori’s help, she could drag Razidae out of this place before it came down on them all. “Weren’t you paying any attention to the conversation in there?” she asked, indicating the ballroom. “They’re going to take this whole building down. If you wait here, you’re going to go down with it.”

“The Elite are here,” he said, as calmly as though gunfire didn’t blot out half his words. “They’ll deal with the situation.”

Selena took a chance, glanced through to the ballroom, and hesitated at the surprise of seeing the last limping Kemeni heading out the exit opposite her, hauling one of the equipment cases and leaving in his wake the detritus of apparent defeat—furniture overturned, several bodies on the floor, the scent of blood in the air.

There was no sign of the remote detonator triggers. The table where they’d been was conspicuously bare. A forlorn chunk of dry ice steamed on the floor beside it, showing no signs of the havoc it had wreaked. In the background, the firefight surged in ferocity; Selena could well imagine the first line of fleeing Kemenis laying down cover for those who escaped with the computer drives and data.

Another Kemeni ran up to the room, stopping just short of entering to stare at Selena as though stunned. She raised her gun in a knee-jerk reaction, but froze in midmotion, taken back. That looks like—

But it didn’t. Black mustache, piercing brown eyes, olive skin…he wore the most modest of green turbans and Kemeni colors, but he stood there on the balls of his feet, every bit as frozen as she, compact and graceful and so familiar—

“Cole?” She hadn’t intended to speak at all, and yet there somehow it was. Cole was in D.C. She’d left him behind, never intending to put herself in a situation where she wouldn’t see him again—or where her last message to him was a voice mail message in which she never even told him they might have managed to start a family after all. And yet there was her one-word question, hanging between them with a longing she hadn’t known she could feel, never mind express.

I must be going crazy. Cole was blue-eyed and fair-haired and his nose not quite so—

“Cole?” she asked again, this time barely a whisper. Nothing loud enough to carry over the noise of the firefight raging in the lobby and beyond, but somehow he gave the slightest of nods anyway. He pulled off the turban to reveal bright, sun-streaked hair; he yanked at his shirt. Underneath the apparent buttons of the military-like blouse, Velcro quickly gave way, leaving him in a tight black T-shirt with U.S.A. printed in bright yellow. Selena’s instinct gave way to sudden, overwhelming recognition—she knew those shoulders, had watched those muscles flex with weight work, had seen that chest sheen with sweat as he pulled her close.

The mustache and brown eyes and olive skin tone remained, at wild odds with his hair. He took a step toward her, apparently and suddenly oblivious of the turmoil around them, and Selena held up a sudden hand. One more step and she’d lose perspective and control; she’d run to him and she might even do it with the slow-motion effects of a love story in full play. So instead she stiffened, and she restricted all her longing to her eyes. “The Kemenis have Razidae’s hard drives. And they have remote detonators—this building’s rigged.”

He understood. He reversed that step, a precise movement so typical of a man who always knew exactly how to put his body where he wanted it. His gaze stayed locked on hers as he gave the smallest of nods, and as he turned to go—chasing after the Kemenis, leaving her to play her own part—he lifted a fist to his chest with thumb, forefinger, and pinky extended, their own simple addition to the covert ops signals they both knew.

Selena returned it. I love you, too.

Now live through this, dammit, so I can prove it.

Total heart-body disconnect. Selena felt it happen. The better part of her turned away from the ballroom with Cole, following in his footsteps as he moved toward the fighting with such apparent ease that it almost looked as if he drifted. What remained looked back into the function room, finding herself under scrutiny by both Allori and Razidae. Allori, at least, seemed to understand what he’d seen, accepting that somehow the Cole Jones of whom he’d only read had made his way to Berzhaan—and that for the sake of Berzhaan, Selena had denied herself that full reunion.

Razidae only had the physical perspective to see Selena herself, and he watched her with impatience. Selena returned it, opening her mouth to suggest, again and rather more acerbically, that he take the exit the other hostages had left open for him—except Razidae’s eyes widened with alarm she couldn’t ignore. Selena whirled to find the second room entrance—the one through which Ashurbeyli had escorted her with such intent not so long ago—filled with the graceless form of Jonas White, his arm extended in a way that could only mean one thing. Gun!

And not one of the fake Lugers with which he’d supplied the Kemeni, either—something stocky and clean-cut and reliable. Selena doubled back on herself in a catlike leap that took Razidae down. He fell unprepared, hitting the floor hard; a chair tumbled out of his way as it took a glancing blow. Selena rolled to her stomach, coming up with arms extended to take aim at White, her injured arm automatically trying for a support position it couldn’t sustain. But it didn’t matter that she wavered. She hadn’t even finished the movement when the ear-numbing blast of White’s .45 battered her.

Allori staggered back, astonishment on his face and instant blood on his faintly pinstriped dress shirt. Backward and down, smearing blood along the wall as Selena hesitated, lost in surprise and fatigue and that sudden sinking feeling that things already gone wrong had just gone worse. Hesitated just long enough for White to close in on the wounded ambassador and smile wolfishly at Selena. The retreating gunfire in the background gave her the sudden bizarre regret that they were alone—no unpredictable hostages to get in White’s way, no fervently dedicated Kemenis making sure things evolved in their own best interest. Not even any of the rescuers, who’d obviously made rounding up the terrorists their understandable first priority.

White didn’t have to say anything. He merely raised an eyebrow, his gun pointed directly at Allori’s head. And even though Allori, stunned and speechless, had the wherewithal to shake his head at Selena, she quietly put her own gun on the floor and nudged it away from herself. “It pretty much sucks anyway,” she told White. She didn’t mention that she’d already taken a quick glance to calculate the distance to the Kemeni’s gun so recently tossed aside; a lunge from this sprawling position, a few rolls, and she could put her hand on it. Or that her fingers had closed around several of the decorative marbles scattered in the wake of that encounter.

White laughed. “As a weapon, it’s sorely lacking,” he agreed. “But it was much better when you were holding it, wasn’t it? Now the only question is whether when I shoot you, I aim to kill or just to take you down.”

“I don’t suppose you’re taking votes.”

He laughed again. Not because she’d been particularly funny, but because of the victory dancing in his eyes. In moments he’d escape, heading for his Plan C, and he’d once again leave death and destruction in his wake. “No,” he said. “I don’t suppose I am.” And he shifted the gun until she was looking right down the barrel.

Selena gave White a look of purest annoyance, just as though her heart weren’t pounding so hard as to reverberate through the floor beneath her. “Be that way,” she said, and whipped a side-hand marble at him from her awkward spot on the floor. It smacked into his kneecap—dammit, I was aiming higher—and so startled him that he leaped away from the pain. She gathered herself, lunging for Allori; she rolled sideways across the carpet, snagging the dead Kemeni’s discarded pistol along the way. Gunfire echoed in the room—but White had expected her to go for her own gun, and filled the carpet with deadly holes. By the time he corrected himself, Selena crouched by Allori’s side, her weapon pointing steadily at White.

And it was all perfect, until Razidae stepped in. White was poised to run, until Razidae stepped in. But step in he did, hurling himself at White as though to save the day. Thinking, perhaps, of the headlines, of the influence—however temporary—that such an action would give him in the wake of this terrorist disaster. But Razidae had more heart than training or experience, and White almost gladly stepped into his rush, evading Razidae’s blow to jam the .45 in his chest with such profound impact that the prime minister stopped short. Stopped short and instantly realized his error.

The return of White’s grin probably had something to do with his sudden wisdom.

White looked at Selena, an eyebrow raised in question—your move? Selena scowled back. “I should have tied you at that window.”

“Your mistake,” White acknowledged. He looked between Razidae and Allori, a recognition of the stalemate between them. “But since you didn’t, I’ll just take my prize and leave.”

Selena raised her chin, unable to hide her alarm. “You don’t need him.”

“Because you’re going to let me walk away?”

Reluctantly, she amended, “You don’t need him once you leave this room. So how about you use him for cover and then make a final defiant gesture by shoving him back in the room?”

White smiled again. She’d really come to dislike that smile. He said, “You aren’t the only one I have to worry about. This building is crawling with heroic men and their guns. No, Mr. Razidae will be coming with me.”

“Then I’ll be coming after you.”

“And leave your wounded ambassador?” White shook his head; Razidae looked both bemused and offended to be bantered over. “And here I had you pegged as the loyal type.”

Allori, until now silent, tipped his head to look at White, maintaining every bit of his dignity. “Which is exactly why she’ll do as I suggest and go after you.”

He didn’t, in fact, have the authority to order Selena to do one thing or another. But if he was inclined to make the suggestion…she was inclined to follow it. After she checked him over more carefully than she could while crouching beside him and playing games with White. She gestured at the hallway exit, a mere tilt of her chin. “The sooner you go, the sooner I can catch up with you.”

Dragging Razidae, his .45 pressed firmly against the man’s skull in defiance of a censuring expression that had controlled this country for years, White did just that. He backed up to the exit to the hallway that ran along the front of the function rooms, opposite the servants’ corridor. And then he stepped neatly into the hall, taking his VIP hostage with him.

Selena had half hoped White would shove Razidae back into the room anyway, a decision to jettison baggage so that he could move more quickly toward his escape. White didn’t, of course. She muttered a scorching phrase under her breath and turned instantly to Allori and the growing splash of blood on his shirt. She set quick fingers to the small pearl dress buttons and ignored his surprise and his visible impulse to object. “The sooner I can assess this, the sooner I can do what’s necessary,” she told him. If he understood all the possibilities in “what’s necessary”—the sooner I can get you to help, the sooner I can run after White, the sooner I can watch him die—he didn’t let on. He allowed her to open the shirt, exposing a thickly haired chest, and then to peel it back until she found the source of the blood.

And sighed in relief. She got up long enough to yank a tablecloth free, and to pull the knife from the dead Kemeni’s belt. She ripped a long strip from the fine white cloth and flipped the rest of it down to a rectangle in quick folds. When she knelt again, she pressed the pad up under his arm, and helped him forward so she could tie it in place. “It’s in and out,” she said. “I think it skipped along the outside of your ribs.” He had enough meat that she wasn’t sure, but she’d heard no air and he certainly hadn’t coughed up any blood. “If you can stay on your feet long enough to get out of here—”

He snorted and winced, but met her eye. “I’ll crawl if I have to.”

She tightened the bandage and tied it off, wincing as he closed his eyes and grunted against the pain. But when he looked at her again she said firmly enough, “You’ll have to crawl fast. The Kemenis have remote detonating devices for the bombs they’ve planted around the building.”

He echoed her scorching phrase of not so long ago. “You’ve seen—?”

“Better than that. I took two of them out of the mix. But they’ve got remotes for a lot more than two.” She pointed at the corridor entrance. “So crawl very fast. When you hit the end of the sneaky little passage, hang a left to the kitchen. Ignore the blood all over the floor—it’s been there awhile. And the kitchen door should be open for you. If you circle left, you’ll come around to—”

“The front of the building. I heard you the first time, when you told the others.”

“Good.” She stood, then put out her good arm.

He didn’t pretend he didn’t need the help up—or that he didn’t need a moment to recover when his face went pasty white. But he put the time to good use. “In spite of what I said…consider coming with me. The rescue boys are in on this one, whether they’re ours or Berzhaan’s. They can grab White.”

“They don’t even know he’s here.”

He gave her a wry once-over. “You’re not in much better shape than I am.”

“I beg your pardon,” Selena said. “I’m not bleeding.” Anymore. But she took in his expression—the one that told her he wasn’t fooled, that he understood her right arm wasn’t exactly working right and that one eye was half-closed and that the rest of her had been bashed around into creaky shooting pains—and she nodded reluctantly. “If the cavalry shows up, I’ll step aside. But until I know they’ve got him in their sights…”

She wouldn’t even have given him that much, not if it hadn’t been for the potential family member within her. Too small to see, too small to feel, and yet so hugely a part of her—potential or not. But she did, and Allori nodded in reply, understanding it was the only concession she’d make—and knowing that if Razidae died, in many ways the terrorists would prevail even if they didn’t emerge from this building alive.

He pushed himself away from the wall, holding himself with stiff determination. “I’ll see you on the steps,” he said. “Alive.”

“Works for me,” Selena said, watching until he entered the corridor.

And then she went hunting.

Cole slipped quickly through the halls, his skin crawling with the awareness that a T-shirt labeled U.S.A. didn’t keep him from being a Kemeni target, or even a victim of friendly fire. If he was a SEAL or one of the Berzhaani Elite, he wasn’t at all sure he wouldn’t shoot first and figure out the identity of this strangely garbed interloper later. Possibly much later.

Seth had shown him simplified blueprints of the capitol, enough so he knew to cut away from the Kemeni trail—the ejected shell casings, the smears of blood, the occasional body—and to take a cross hall to the back of the building, fully intending to come up on them from the back.

The problem, of course, was that being behind the Kemenis very much meant being in the line of fire from the good guys.

Unless he guessed wrong, and the Kemenis had another route in mind altogether—maybe up to the roof, or doubling back to the other side of the capitol, or ducking down through the basement. But the recent explosions had been on that side—Hellfire missiles courtesy of Josie Lockworth, if Cole didn’t miss his guess, probably aimed at approaching Kemeni allies—and so was all the attention. Nope, this side looked good for a quick escape, if not quite so clean as planned.

A sporadic exchange of gunfire gave way to shouting as Cole skimmed along the wall of his final approach, and it made him hesitate. They’re negotiating? They’re this close to an exit and they’re negotiating? Gut instinct told him they were up to something else.

Like preparing to blow the building—but making sure the rescue teams were trapped inside when they did. It meant setting off the right bomb first. Which could well mean stalling, in spite of the risk.

With the utmost care, Cole risked a peek around the corner. Just beyond the turn, an open door led into the stairwell, and the Kemenis had crowded into it; they seemed to be tearing through their baggage in search of something. The remotes? And…was that a Post-it note stuck to the door? Apparently so, for even then an anonymous hand ripped it away, crumpling it before throwing it back out in the hallway.

Cole knew that the stairwell landing held an exit to the outside—it was the same door he’d seen on approach to the building, and all the stairwells included exit doors. Why don’t they—

A few exchanged gunshots answered the question for him. They hadn’t left because they had a welcoming committee on the outside. And they couldn’t return to the hallway, not with the team of Berzhaani Elite that Cole had glimpsed taking up position in the hall—close enough to take an instant shot at anyone who reappeared from the stairwell, but off at enough of an angle so no one in the stairwell had any chance of targeting the team.

Great. So they’re trapped. Time on their hands and they’re trapped. And they have those remotes. And Cole hadn’t had time to brush up on the local lingo. He sorted through his Berzhaani and filled the gaps with Russian, making sure he was good and clear of anyone’s line of fire before he revealed himself to either set of combatants. “Don’t shoot,” he told them, just as a good submissive opening line. “I want to let you know I’m here.” Actually, he thought he’d probably said I announce me, but it was close enough.

Someone from the stairwell instantly fired at the sound of his voice, chipping huge chunks of wallboard from the corner.

“Hey, I said don’t shoot,” Cole protested. “I’m too busy hiding to mess with you.” Okay, lying was sometimes a good thing.

“Who?” demanded one of the Elite, a voice full of annoyance and fired up with battle. “SEAL should be at the lobby!”

“Not SEAL,” Cole said. “American…in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Great. He was pretty sure that had come out as American accident.

The Berzhaani response was instantaneous—a chorus of voices telling him to get lost. Succinct, to the point, and laced with English curses he certainly understood. Cole grinned, sardonic humor in the midst of life and death. He couldn’t blame them a bit. “Listen first,” he said, or maybe listen one. Dammit. “They have bombs. You know of the—” roof, what was roof, dammit? “—building top? There are more—they have…” He rolled his eyes at himself and tried again. “They have set-offs. You have to get them or—”

The building rumbled and shuddered around them, a deep sound so profound it thumped like a hollow drum in Cole’s chest. The structure shook and crackled and glass broke; Cole instinctively ducked down under the feeble protection of his own arms, wondering how many they’d set off and where those bombs had been and how long they all had until this sturdy old building crumbled down around them. In the next instant he realized that it must have been those bombs on the roof, with all their force escaping up and out and little of it directed at the capitol’s supporting structure. Those in the most danger would be the Elite just outside the building, the ones bottling the Kemenis up in their stairwell. The Kemenis had chosen this first detonation with care—something to take everyone aback, to give them the opportunity to—

Gunfire erupted anew. The Kemenis were blasting their way out of their dead end, seizing the moment to overcome outside forces battered by falling brick and shattered glass. The Elite in the hallway responded in kind, moving up to take their shots until Cole’s ears rang with the intensity of the exchange.

No fools, the Kemenis—outgunned, they rushed the Elite, taking the battle to close-quarters fighting. Cole took another look around the corner, as flat against the wall as he could be—and found himself in the perfect position to spot the lone Kemeni lurking behind the dubious cover of the stair riser, weighing two remotes in his hands.

Decisions, decisions. Cole lifted his Hi-Power, breaking cover to take careful aim—because of course he’d had every intent to “mess with” the Kemenis from the start. Two men lurched between him and his target, lurched away…revealed the man having made up his mind, setting down one remote detonator in favor of the other.

Cole squeezed the trigger. The man jerked back, his eyes wide and surprised, and the remote tipped out of his suddenly feeble grip. For an instant it seemed as if no one noticed at all—and then the fighting seemed to hesitate, everyone at once feeling the balance of things change and tip and—

Get the remotes. For the Elite seemed focused on the Kemenis themselves, and suddenly the Kemenis were no longer a team, but individuals squirting off in every which direction. Cole dodged his way through the chaos of fists and knives and sporadic gunfire and dived into the stairwell, catching up against the back of the stairs and abruptly too intimate with the man he’d just shot. It’d been a solid hit; the man only now began to stir, coming out of the initial daze of the impact in the center of his chest. “Be still,” Cole told him, recovering to an awkward crouch. “Help will come.”

Maybe, maybe not. But no need to kick a man when he was already down and getting a close look at death. Cole hunted for the small black remotes the man had dropped, gathering them up with a quick glance to confirm they each needed both hands for triggering. Safety devices. Something ironic about that. He dumped the injured man’s small canvas bag on the floor and used it for collecting the remotes. Four, five…six. Was that it?

This little nook had so isolated him from the chaos that Cole started when a man jumped down to block the way out; he jerked back, smacking his head on a low stair. “Dammit—”

The man before him glared with the tight, barely leashed fury of a man thwarted beyond his own imagination. “Leave those.” His voice sounded so constrained, so close to the edge of explosion, that Cole couldn’t imagine how he’d spoken at all. In perfectly fine English, to boot.

And he sounded familiar.

Cole shook his head, a careful gesture in the face of the man’s gun. “I don’t think so. And I wouldn’t hang around, if I were you. I believe by now they’re probably quite willing to shoot you in the back.”

And the man across from him—so close to him in this tight space, a man out of place with his honed, hawkish features and perfect brooding eyes—gave a little start, looking at Cole with sudden recognition.

Cole narrowed his eyes as disbelief warred with the sudden startling urge to lunge forward and rip this man apart. “We do know each other.”

The Kemeni’s face flashed through emotions too quickly to decipher. Wariness, jealousy, hatred—?

And Cole knew for sure. The voice on the other end of the phone. The man who’d hurt Selena. His throat tightened down; his words came out strained. “Where is she?”

Ashurbeyli—it had to be Ashurbeyli—grinned at him, an expression that barely looked sane. “I don’t know.”

“Then,” Cole said, shifting his weight ever so slightly, “there’s no reason I should let you live, is there?” And he lashed out with a foot from his crouching position, kicking the gun away, giving himself the chance to raise his own weapon and squeeze off a shot—but not before Ashurbeyli grabbed a too-familiar black box from his front shirt pocket and clasped it in both hands.

Cole fired anyway, an ill-aimed shot that hit Ashurbeyli just beside the join of neck and shoulder and flung him backward. And then the floor shook beneath him as muffled thunder detonated above his head—right above his head, somewhere here in the stairwell—and he flung himself out from under the stairs, scrabbling forward with his world narrowed to the chunks of concrete suddenly falling around him and ow dammit on his leg and then a serious crack on the head so his world grayed out and he had no point of reference at all; he might as well have been swimming or floundering through snow or navigating through black space or—

Cole opened his eyes. He sat against the wall inside the building, one of a dozen men similarly arrayed with legs outstretched, similarly dazed. Warm blood ran over his face and into his slightly open mouth; he sputtered, quite suddenly alert. His mustache sat askew, and Cole reached up to tug it off, learning that he hadn’t quite regained his motor skills as he clumsily hit himself in the face.

A man crouched beside him, the red cross on his white armband as unmistakable as such symbols come. “This is over,” he said. “You will be fine again.”

“I’m fine now,” Cole said, and brought his legs in so he could stand—and stared stupefied at the Aircast on his lower leg. “Huh. I’ll be damned.”

“Maybe not just yet,” the Berzhaani medic said dryly.

“But I can see to it if you do not keep yourself quiet. I have others, worsely wounded than you, who need attention.”

“Crutches,” Cole said. “I’m not done yet. My wife is still here somewhere.”

“The only women are with the hostages, and the hostages are free.”

Cole glanced down the hall—one direction and then the next, noting the arrival of the first stretchers, the clear intent to evacuate everyone from this compromised old building.

The obvious missing face. Ashurbeyli.

“I need crutches,” he insisted. “And I need them now.”

Chapter 18

Selena caught up with White at the front corner of the building just as a second explosion rocked the building. It gave a deep groan, eerily human, and a crack split the plaster along the wall, tectonic building plates drifting apart. White shoved Razidae up against the corner and propped him there by leaning against his throat, his hammy hand wrapped around the prime minister’s larynx with just enough weight to make breathing difficult. Selena ducked into the nearest function room, a small room on the end of the row, and let her gun peek out the door.

“You stupid bitch,” White said, and for the first time he sounded tired of this game. “Do you really think I won’t kill him?”

“I really think you won’t kill him yet,” she corrected. “And wouldn’t you be better off to use him for cover? Because it’s only going to take me a tiny little look to pinpoint you in my sights.”

White snorted. “As if that matters. By the time you manage the trigger on that useless gun, you’ll be pointing at your foot.”

Well. Yeah. Some truth to that. But she scoffed. “Oh, please. Doorjamb…stabilizer. Get it?”

And all the same…she really didn’t want to shoot the prime minister by mistake. She reached into her pocket for the marbles she’d jammed there, wondering if the same trick would work twice. Fingered them and considered it. Risky.

“Jonas White!”

She froze. Ashurbeyli’s voice. But he was out of this now, long gone with his men…with any luck, already dead. A man with his own kind of honor, too uncompromising to exist in this world and allow others to be safe.

But Jonas White cursed, only confirming what she thought she’d heard. Ashurbeyli’s voice. And Razidae, sounding defeated for the first time, murmured, “Inshallah,” abandoning himself to God’s hands.

“Where is she?” Ashurbeyli demanded, much closer now. Selena wished she dared to look; as it was she could only imagine it—White in the corner, threatening Razidae. Ashurbeyli coming up on them from the adjacent hall. Former allies, eyeing each other with blame and dislike. “And did you think you could get away with your betrayal?”

“Make up your mind,” White responded with irritation. “Do you want to get your hands on our meddling FBI agent, or do you want to posture and threaten me?”

“She was right.” Ashurbeyli didn’t sound quite like himself, and he’d stopped just around the corner. Still out of her sight. “You had your own agenda all along. These guns—” and he said it with an emphasis that made Selena think he had gestured with one of the guns in question “—they came from you. You lied to us from the start…made us think the United States was backing us. Gave us inferior weapons—and then came to manipulate us into saving your own faithless hide by risking our own!”

“That sounds just about right. Now get over it. Do you want me, or do you want the American woman? Because if you leave me alone, you can have her.”

“What—?” No, he definitely didn’t sound like himself. His voice had a ragged quality; his mind wasn’t so quick as it had been.

“She’s in that room just around the corner. If you can take her, she’s yours. If you let me go on my merry way. Otherwise I’m afraid we’ll be forced into a distasteful standoff right here, and I note that my gun is properly aimed.”

Then he’s not aiming at me—

“Go, then,” Ashurbeyli said, his words thick with disgust. “I think in fact that you are the worst thing I can do to the Western capitalist—”

“—dogs,” White completed for him. “Yes, yes, I know. We’re all infidel scum. But you and I can still come to this agreement. I leave her to you, and you leave me to my own fate. It is, I might add, a limited time offer.”

A moment passed in which they must have come to some unspoken agreement, for just as Selena eased around to peek into the hall, White said, “Good, then,” and gestured her way with the gun. Behind him, Razidae struggled for breath, pale beneath his normally robust complexion.

Ashurbeyli came around the corner, not as wary as he might have been. Staggered around the corner was more like it, with blood covering the side of his shirt and flowing fast enough to make the material gleam. He saw her; saw her gun, and raised his own at her in what seemed like a token gesture. His face had paled; his intensity had faded into mere determination.

And White watched. Like a greedy voyeur, he watched. As Razidae attempted protest, White shifted his weight just enough to make the man choke, closing his fingers so they dug into Razidae’s windpipe.

Ashurbeyli, his finger tightening on the trigger but then holding fast, said the last thing she expected. “I met your husband.”

Cole! She didn’t have enough nerve to ask what had happened. Not at first. Too busy fighting all the stupid things fear did to her—the greased, wobbly knees, the watery spine, the sudden inability to breathe. And when she finally managed to open her mouth, he cut her off.

“I just buried him under that bomb. And before I left him there to die, I let him know I was coming after you.”

Horrified, she met the triumph in his gaze, holding the connection…a request for truth between enemies at the end of the battle. She saw there his triumph, and saw also his sorrow…and then a brief flicker of something that she suddenly recognized as regret. “No,” she breathed, but it was still more question than belief—more hope than knowledge. “You didn’t.”

He closed his eyes—briefly, but still long enough to make him vulnerable, and she didn’t think he’d intended to do it. And though her finger tightened on the heavy trigger of her gun, she didn’t pull it. She told herself she wasn’t quite ready to upset the balance of the moment, not with White standing poised to crush Razidae’s throat. She told herself it was too risky. But when Ashurbeyli opened his eyes, the regret shone the strongest. “It’s a shame,” he said, and shifted his gun, weary enough to allow the telltale; weary enough to let that warning slip through.

Selena dived aside, followed by the thunderous report of not one but two guns. A fiery trail plucked her sleeve, running up her forearm; she fell heavily against the wall behind the door, her stupid fake Luger raised and ready. Still on her feet; still ready for whatever came next. Her other hand finally escaped her pocket, still curled around the marbles. Still ready—

Ashurbeyli fell through the door and thumped to the carpet. His mouth moved in a few soundless words, and then he died.

White. As Ashurbeyli came for Selena, White had betrayed him. Shot him in the back.

Selena’s fury took her by surprise. She opened her mouth to voice it…and then she thought again. White thinks Ashurbeyli shot me. She’d certainly hit the wall hard enough, convincingly uncontrolled.

And now she let herself fall hard to her knees, hitting the door so it slowly swung closed—at least until it ran into Ashurbeyli’s body. She slid down the door, a dramatic scrape of cloth against wood.

White laughed, damn him. Selena let herself settle so her head rested just against Ashurbeyli, her vision barely clearing the edge of the door. White, if he looked, would see only the top of her head. But White had already turned to Razidae, gloating, jamming the gun back into the prime minister’s chest and pulling him out of the corner.

Selena felt for the gap beneath the door, the way it rode high over the plush Sekha carpet. Plenty of room, oh, yes. And she had plans even if this didn’t work, but if it did she’d find it ever so sweet. One by one, she rolled the marbles out under the door, swiftly adjusting for distance until she had placed scattershot hard round objects in Jonas White’s path. Acme marbles. Perfect for foiling the overconfident bad guy.

Out he stepped, harshly pushing Razidae before him. And it was Razidae, already off balance, who hit the marbles first, whose foot shot unexpectedly forward. He fell hard just as White’s own foot skittered aside, and White took the brunt of it as they hit the floor.

Selena poked her gun around the edge of the door and said in her drollest tone, “Doesn’t it just suck when you get nailed by a trick a cartoon character would use? I’m the Roadrunner, by the way. You must be the Coyote. So we already know how this ends, don’t we?”

White’s face, already florid from his fall, went to dusky purple rage. He jerked his gun to bear, ready to empty the magazine at her right through the door.

She didn’t give him the chance. She braced the ill-made semiautomatic against the edge of the door and she jerked the trigger back. By the time she hauled it back down into position in the wake of the jarring recoil and trigger pull, White stared at her with two small, dull unseeing eyes, his shirt torn by her bullet, the bleeding already stopped.

For a moment, Selena rested her head against—good God, against Ashurbeyli. That made her straighten fast enough, all the painful way to her feet. A step forward, and she nudged the gun away from White’s curled fingers, and she looked down on him and said softly, “Beep, beep.”

Cole sat outside among the hostages and the injured soldiers and knew only one thing for certain: Selena wasn’t one of them.

Two things: no one would give him any crutches.

Three things: no one would go back into the building to look for Selena until the exterior had been secured. The Predator’s missiles had scarred the hell out of the back parking lot and the old coach building running along the perimeter of the grounds, scattering the approaching Kemenis—some of whom had holed up to take potshots at soldiers. One of the hostages had been wounded on the way out, and now no one could approach the building, not until the military dogs just now hitting the scene had declared the area clean.

Cole glared at the Aircast on his leg and considered hopping. He’d spotted a pair of crutches near the triage area…he knew he could reach them. The only question was whether he could reach them unseen.

They knew she was in there. They knew. Ambassador Allori, only recently loaded into an ambulance, had told them as much. Prime Minister Razidae, stumbling around the end of the building to be met by a squad of soldiers and a roar of delight and approval, had also told them as much. She’d stayed behind for Razidae, to rescue him—and she had. But as far as he knew, she’d gone down in an old-fashioned gunfight. He wasn’t entirely sure—he’d fallen, the shooting had started, and he’d left the scene at top speed, anticipating no survivors.

Or so he said. But Cole wasn’t willing to take him at face value. He wouldn’t have taken any man in Razidae’s position at face value, not when the man had so much of that face to lose. Bad enough that Selena had been fighting his battles; he wasn’t likely to admit he’d left her behind to do so.

Crawling. Crawling was an option, too.

All the while the capitol building groaned and grumbled and coughed smoke, threatening fiery collapse—close enough to this streetside staging area to loom, just far enough away to eliminate danger if it disintegrated. And Cole watched with a stunned disbelief alternating with complete panic, going from numbness to a fierce pain that overwhelmed the pounding of his head and the sharp ache in his leg—and then back again to numbness.

Razidae was wrong. Razidae was lying. Lying.

Cole rested his head on fisted hands. You’re not doing her any good like this. He had to pull himself together. And if he couldn’t go into that building after her, he’d find someone who could. Who would. One of the SEALs. The whole damn SEAL team, if it came to that.

If he could find them.

The triage area boasted a complete mix of personnel—Berzhaani medics, International Red Cross volunteers, American military support personnel with a distinct and careful paucity of actual soldiers and the inevitable border of reporters and cameras along the perimeter, crowding each other for the best shot.

The SEALs would be staying out of sight. Bad enough that they’d been here, lurking, against Berzhaan’s wishes. Bad enough that Cole himself had been found inside the building; he’d already been promised the debriefing from hell.

It didn’t faze him. He was already there, tortured by the moments ticking by and the flames licking from the top windows and the precise, clear memory of Selena signing that she loved him as she went back to guide the hostages to safety—and eventually to face not only White, but Ashurbeyli. Of the look on her face, her well-protected heart and soul right out there for everyone to see.

For Cole to see.

Oh God.

Noise rumbled around him, the nonstop diesel hrum-hrum-hrum of rescue vehicle engines. The hostages cried in pain and relief, the various in-charge people shouted out orders he didn’t bother to understand. But for a sudden instant, it all seemed to stop—as if everything and everyone held their breath at once—and then let it out again to be twice as noisy. But—and Cole lifted his head to see—with the addition of vigorous pointing.

Pointing at the lone figure standing in the black, cavernous opening of the capitol’s double doors.

Crutches! Crutches, dammit!

One of the former hostages, a self-possessed young blond man with a wide-eyed young woman usually clinging to his side, appeared beside Cole. He held out the crutches Cole had been recently eyeing, and nodded at the stone steps, his expression unusually knowing. “Here,” he said. “Go to her.”

Cole had had no idea he could get to his feet so quickly, and he snatched the crutches away with such possessive ferocity that the kid grinned. Across the abbreviated lawn between the street and those Death Steps, across the sidewalk at the foot of the steps—

She was still there. Holy moly, she was still there. She stood there—swayed there—poised between movement and utter collapse, and therefore going nowhere. That strong, lean face was bruised along every striking line; her eye still half-closed. Blood soaked one tattered sleeve and she held the other as stiffly as he remembered.

She was beautiful.

She was alive.

She looked down at him with the same incomprehensible relief he felt taking over his own features.

He opened his mouth to say Wait, I’ll come help you, or on second thought after a wise glance at those steps, Wait, let me get help.

Selena shook her head. Not the short, sharp gesture he expected from her, but a more careful movement—the movement of someone trying desperately to keep herself in one piece. Quite clearly—a voice stronger than any he expected to come from that exhausted shell of his wife—she said, “No. Stay there. This is one set of steps that I fully intend to walk down.”

It might just have been the hardest thing Cole had ever done…but he waited. He watched her careful descent, he ached and bled for her, and he waited. And when she reached the bottom, he didn’t care about all the cameras aimed their way, all the commentary suddenly building to applause and cheers. He put his arms around her and he said, “Welcome home, Lena.”

Welcome home—and everything that it meant between them.

And barely standing on her own, she lifted her head from his shoulder and whispered, just for the two of them, “Home for good.”

“Beep, beep?” Cole asked again, his mouth close to Selena’s ear and his breath a delicious tickle. Carefully, achingly, she eased closer to him. The bed wasn’t theirs and it wasn’t entirely comfortable; nor was this tiny room on base at Ramstein in Germany—where they’d both been flown, treated and released, and now faced the first rounds of debriefing. The bed wasn’t theirs…but they were together in it. Spooned in the luxury of simply being together. Cole kissed Selena’s neck and added, “You really said that?”

“Mmm-hmm.” She curled her hands over his arm where it pillowed her head, stroking down to meet his hand and clasp it lightly. “Lightly” was their watchword. Selena was stitched and bruised and even cracked in a place or two, from the initial damage to her face and arm through the battering she’d taken in the bathroom and the final insult of the bullet that had deeply furrowed her forearm. Cole’s concussion had been declared mild; his leg rested heavily in a cast on which she’d already written a lewd suggestion.

His free hand traced a path over the curve of her hip, one of the few freely touchable places available. He settled his hand and tugged her back slightly, sighing down her neck as her bottom made contact with an obvious but gentle arousal. “And that Post-it note I found? You really wrote ‘You lose’?”

“Mmm-hmm.” She kissed his arm. Lightly, oh yes. Her face still looked like a battlefield.

He rested his head on hers, taking a deep, slow breath that came out in a sigh and meant he’d been reveling in the scent of her hair. After a moment he said, “I’m done with fieldwork for a while, you know. Possibly forever.”

“Because of the cameras.” She’d wondered. Even in her weary, painful daze, she’d been aware of the cameras recording her every step on the way down to Cole. Her statement about walking down the Death Steps had already been splashed across international headlines. And though the stills showed mostly the back of Cole’s head, the broadcast cameras had captured his distinctive profile and the bright gold glint of his hair.

He shrugged, his chest moving against her shoulders. “I’d do it again. No-brainer. Besides, they’re asking me to consider training recruits at the Farm. After my leg heals, maybe some of the survival camps. Maybe Tory can get her interview after all. And it strikes me as a good thing for a father to do.”

“But—”

But he wasn’t. They weren’t. The little pee-on-a-stick kit had been smugly certain of it. Selena’s fatigue, her illness…just the results of stress set off by bad food and followed up by way too much in-her-face death. She’d cried at that, as she hadn’t cried in the past horrible days.

“No buts.” He gently rubbed her stomach, avoiding the three stitches that closed the wound there. “We’ll get there. And it’s better this way.”

She didn’t immediately absorb the statement, still lost in the thought of his job changing…and of her own. “The CIA called me today, you know.”

He stilled, his soothing gestures coming to a standstill. She missed them immediately.

“Not to worry,” she said. “They want me for Langley. They need a new chief in counterterrorism interrogation and analysis. I guess I impressed them.”

Cole’s laugh was short and quiet. “Honey, you impressed the world.”

She’d impressed someone, anyway. The CIA hadn’t been the only one to come calling. Delphi herself had called, on a secure cell phone that had been hand delivered only moments before. The women of Athena Academy, she had said, were fulfilling their promise—Selena among them. And it was time to pull together in a more organized fashion, pooling their talents across agency lines to prevent incidents just such as the one Selena had survived. As soon as Selena returned to the States, she and certain other Athena graduates would gather to meet Delphi for the first time—and to formally initiate the organization that Delphi called Oracle.

“Langley,” Cole repeated after moments of mutually quiet thought. “There’d be travel, of course.”

“Some,” she agreed, distracted enough to purr as he stroked her side, hand gently following her curves, fingers tracing the interesting features along the way—skimming the side of her breasts, her ribs, the hip bone that wouldn’t be quite so obvious once she got another good meal or two on board.

“Still,” he said. “A good job for a family woman.”

“What did you mean?” she asked suddenly. “That it’s better this way? That I’m not pregnant?”

His silence came through as uncomfortable guilt. They hadn’t talked about this, not yet. Selena hadn’t felt the burning need, not after she’d delved so deeply into her true feelings. Facing terrorists tended to peel away the superficial layers of feelings to get straight to the core, and she’d found her answers there. Her trust.

But they hadn’t talked about it, and they’d still need to do that. Cole took a deep breath and said, “I know what it did to you, seeing me in D.C. I screwed up when I didn’t tell you I was on my way back, and I don’t know that I can ever give you any details. With what we’d just been through…Well, I know you, honey. There’s this part you hardly show anyone else…the part that cares so deeply you can hardly stand it.” He kissed her neck where it joined her shoulder. “I shook that part up pretty badly. If we’d come off this incident to find you pregnant, we’d have stayed together for the sake of the baby—you know we would have.”

She stirred to protest. “We would have stayed together anyway.”

“I know,” he said, and touched her with his lips again, so light she barely felt it. “The point is, we get to show ourselves the truth of that. We get to make that decision every day, for ourselves, until we put that stupid decision of mine behind us. And also to the point,” he said, matter-of-factly, “we get to keep trying to make that baby.”

Selena laughed. “Mmm-hmm,” she said, and tipped her head back to grin wickedly at him. “We win.”

ISBN: 1-55254-715-9

ATHENA FORCE 7-12

Copyright © 2005 by Harlequin Books S.A.

All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the editorial office, Silhouette Books, 233 Broadway, New York, NY 10279 U.S.A.

All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

® and TM are trademarks of Harlequin Books S.A., used under license. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Carla Cassidy

Carla Cassidy is an award-winning author who has written more than 55 books. In 1995 she won Best Silhouette Romance of 1995 from Romantic Times Magazine for Anything for Danny. In 1998 she also won a Career Achievement Award from Romantic Times Magazine for Best Innovative Series, and her 1998 release, Pregnant With His Child, was both a nominee for Best Silhouette Romance from Romantic Times Magazine and a RITA nominee in the Best Traditional category.

She has been a professional cheerleader, an actress, and a singer/dancer in a show band before settling into her true love…writing.

Carla loves to order items she’ll never use from catalogs and believes all exercise should be banned. She lives in the Midwest with her husband, Frank, and their dogs, Sabra and Spooky. She believes the only thing better than reading a good book is creating a good story.

Evelyn Vaughn

Evelyn began writing stories as soon as she was able to hold a fat pencil and spell out words. She’s been at it ever since.

Fourth in a family of five children, Evelyn has lived in Virginia, Illinois, Arizona, Louisiana and finally Texas. She currently lives in Texas with her 17-year-old, one-eyed cat and her sweet-tempered cocker spaniel. She recently bought a house with a great yard, largely for the cocker spaniel, but she loves it, too.

In her alternate life, she teaches writing and literature at Tarrant County College in the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex.

Harper Allen

Hey—the girl can’t help it. If Harper Allen seems to feel more at home writing about life on the wild side, it’s only because she’s following that old literary maxim: Write what you know. Growing up in a blue-collar motor city, and with comments such as “Does not play well with others” on her grade-school report cards, it was pretty much a given that she would end up creating loner heroes, tough heroines, and gritty settings. Harper’s characters have always been real people with real flaws, desperately struggling to find the love that will redeem them.

But there’s a kinder, gentler side to Harper. Underneath the motorcycle leathers (I was going how fast, officer?) and the rose tattoo (don’t ask—there was a bet, she won, that’s all you need to know) beats the heart of a true romantic. The day she met the man who eventually became her husband, she told her sister, “Get out of the way, that one’s mine.”

Okay, okay. Really she said, “I’ve just met the man I’m going to marry. How long do you think it’ll take him to figure it out?”

She’s a sucker for stray dogs (they’ve got four), abandoned kittens (six, and they’re pretty darn big cats now), and not-so-cute little kids who aren’t the first ones picked for the volleyball team. Her idea of a great date with her husband is going to a baseball game. Her idea of a great baseball game is any one in which the Red Sox win (a hopeless romantic, did we say?).

While her work as a reporter in the criminal court system gives her books a darker edge, and her Irish ancestry lends them a touch of Celtic mysticism, first and foremost each one is a story about a man and a woman falling in love and holding on to that love—and for that Harper need look no further for inspiration than her own life.

So what happens to bad girls when they grow up? Just ask Harper—if they’re lucky, they get to write about it and the story has a happy ending. Because the best romances always do.

Ruth Wind

A passionate hiker and traveler, there is nothing Ruth Wind likes better than setting off at dawn for a trip—anywhere! New people to meet, new sights to see. Her favorite places so far include the Tasman Sea off the coast of New Zealand, the aromatic and pungent streets of New York City, and the top of her beloved Pikes Peak. Between books, she’s currently planning trips to India, China, and a long rest in the damp and misty United Kingdom.

Explore her columns on rambling around France and Scotland, working the marathon to the top of Pikes Peak, and many topics about the writing life at www.ruthwind.com or www.barbarasamuel.com. She loves to hear from readers at awriterafoot@gmail.com

Cindy Dees

Cindy Dees started flying airplanes while sitting in her dad’s lap at the age of three and got a pilot’s license before she got her driver’s license. At age 15, she dropped out of high school and left the horse farm in Michigan where she grew up to attend the University of Michigan.

After earning a degree in Russian and East European studies, she joined the U.S. Air Force and became the youngest female pilot in the history of the Air Force. She flew supersonic jets, VIP airlift, and the C-5 Galaxy, the world’s largest airplane. She also worked part-time gathering intelligence. During her military career, she traveled to 42 countries on five continents, was detained by the KGB and East German secret police, got shot at, flew in the first Gulf War, met her husband and amassed a lifetime’s worth of war stories.

Her hobbies include professional Middle Eastern dancing, Japanese gardening and medieval reenacting. She started writing on a one-dollar bet with her mother and was thrilled to win that bet with the publication of her first book in 2001. She loves to hear from readers and can be contacted at www.cindydees.com.

Doranna Durgin

Doranna Durgin spent her childhood filling notebooks first with stories and art, then with novels. After obtaining a degree in wildlife illustration and environmental education, she spent a number of years deep in the Appalachian Mountains. When she emerged, it was as a writer who found herself irrevocably tied to the natural world and its creatures—and with a new touchstone to the rugged spirit that helped settle the area, which she instills in her characters.

Dun Lady’s Jess, Doranna’s first published fantasy novel, received the 1995 Compton Crook/Stephen Tall award for the best first book in the fantasy, science fiction and horror genres; she now has fifteen novels of eclectic genres on the shelves and more on the way. Most recently, she’s leaped gleefully into the world of action-romance. When she’s not writing, Doranna builds author web sites, wanders around outside with a camera and works with horses and dogs—currently, she’s teaching agility classes. There’s a Lipizzan in her backyard, a mountain looming outside her office window, a pack of agility dogs romping in the house and a laptop sitting on her desk—and that’s just the way she likes it. You can find a complete list of books at www.doranna.net along with scoops about new projects, lots of silly photos and a link to her SFF Net newsgroup. And for kicks, Connery Beagle has a LiveJournal (journal name: connerybeagle) presenting his unique view of life in the high desert—drop by and say hello!

Coming Next Month

If you enjoyed the eBook you just read, then you’ll love what we have for you next month!

ON SALE IN DECEMBER 2006

VEILED LEGACY by Jenna Mills, Silhouette Bombshell

DANGEROUS LOVER by Maggie Shayne, Silhouette Intimate Moments