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Killer Focus
Fiona Brand


When the line between crime and justice blurs… Her trust in her protectors shattered, Taylor Jones strikes out on her own to find out why someone powerful enough to circumvent the Witness Security Programme wants her dead. She was almost enjoying her quiet new life with a nice, normal guy courtesy of a new identity.Then her next-door neighbour turned up dead, a stray bullet barely missed her, and a former FBI agent knew she was right in the line of fire. Soon Taylor discovers a chilling connection between the South American cocaine trade, terrorism and a secretive cabal that began with the fall of Nazi Germany…whose influence reaches all the way to the White House. But even more frightening, she suspects her nice, normal guy may be at the centre of it all…A rare and potent mixture of adventure, mystery and passion that shouldn’t be missed. Romantic Times BOOK reviews on Touching Midnight







Praise for Body Work



“Body Work is the kind of book that sucks you into the pages and won’t let you go until the end. It’s edgy and different, with a strong hero and heroine who don’t fit the usual mould.” —Bestselling author Linda Howard



“Brand tells a disturbing, engrossing tale of

murder and madness, adding her own unique

touches of eroticism and humour.

An excellent read.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews



Praise for Touching Midnight



“Brand’s extraordinary gifts as a storyteller

are very evident here. This story is a rare and

potent mixture of adventure, mystery and

passion that shouldn’t be missed.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews


Also byFiona Brand



DOUBLE VISION

BODY WORK

TOUCHING MIDNIGHT



Watch for Fiona Brand’s upcoming novel



BLIND INSTINCT



Available April 2009




KILLER FOCUS


FIONA BRAND






www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)




Acknowledgements


Once again, thank you to Jenny Haddon, a former bank regulator, for her advice and the fascinating insight into the world of international banking, Claire Russell of the Kerikeri Medical centre, New Zealand, for supplying the medical details and for helping me find the right drug to fit the crime, and to Pauline Autet for kindly answering my questions about the French language and providing the perfect phrases. Heartfelt thanks also to my editor, Miranda Stecyk, and the team at MIRA Books.


For Dad




Prologue


Portland, MaineOctober 12, 1984



The powerful beam of a flashlight probed the darkness, skimming over breaking waves as they sluiced between dark fingers of rock. Hunching against an icy southerly wind and counting steps as she picked her way through a treacherous labyrinth of tidal pools, a lean, angular woman swung the beam inland. Light pinpointed the most prominent feature on the exposed piece of coastline, a gnarled, embattled birch that marked the beginning of a steep path.

Breath pluming on the chill air, she followed the track to the rotted remains of a mansion that had once commanded the promontory, and which had burned down almost thirty years ago to the day.

Memories crowded with each step, flickering one after the other, isolated and stilted like the wartime newsreels she’d watched as a child. The wind gusted, razor edged with sleet, but the steady rhythm of the climb and the purpose that had pulled her away from a warm chandelier-lit room and an ambassadorial reception to this—a mausoleum of the dead—kept the autumn cold at bay.

Thirty years ago, the man who had hunted her, Stefan le Clerc, had almost succeeded. The Jewish banker turned Nazi hunter had tracked her and her father and the Schutzstaffel, the SS officer who had been tasked with caring for them, through a series of international business transactions. Somehow le Clerc, a former banker, had broken through the layers of paper companies that should have protected them and found their physical address.

Dengler had shot him, but not fatally. In the ensuing struggle, le Clerc had turned the tables on Dengler, wounding him. Then he had shot her father at point-blank range. She had had no doubt le Clerc would have killed her if she hadn’t barricaded both Dengler and le Clerc in the ancient storeroom, where they grappled together, and set it ablaze.

The fire had been terrifying, but it had served its purpose. The two men and her father’s body had been consumed within minutes. In the smoking aftermath, any evidence of gunshot wounds the skeletal remains might have yielded had been wiped out by a series of substantial bribes. The weeks following her father’s death had been difficult but, once again, money had smoothed the way and, at eighteen years of age, she had been old enough to conclude all of the legal requirements and make arrangements to secure herself.

Ice stung her cheeks as she paused by a small, sturdy shed and dug out a set of keys from the pocket of her coat. A gust flattened the stiff oilskin against her body and whipped blond strands, now streaked with gray, across her cheeks, reminding her of a moment even further in the past.

Nineteen forty-four. She had been boarding the Nordika.

She shoved the key in the lock, her fingers stiff with cold. She had been…seven years old? Eight?

She didn’t know why that moment had stuck with her. After years of heady victory, then horror, it hadn’t been significant. The wind had been howling off the Baltic, right up the cold alley that Lubeck was in the dead of winter, and it had been freezing. Aside from the lights illuminating the deck of the Nordika and the dock—in direct contravention of the blackout regulations—it had been pitch-black. After hours spent crouching in the back of a truck, sandwiched cheek by jowl with the other children, the lights and the frantic activity had been a welcome distraction but hardly riveting.

And yet, she remembered that moment vividly. A crate had been suspended above the ship’s hold as she’d walked up the gangplank, the swastika stenciled on its side garishly spotlighted, the crane almost buckling under the weight as the crate swayed in the wind. The captain had turned to watch her, his eyes blank, and for a moment she had felt the power her father wielded. The power of life and death.

Slipping the shed key back into her pocket, she stepped inside out of the wind, pulled the door closed behind her and engaged the interior locks. She played the beam of the flashlight over the dusty interior of the shed, then reached down and pulled up the hatch door that had once been the entrance to the mansion’s storm cellar. Her flashlight trained below, she descended to the bottom of the ladder, crossed a cavernous, empty area, ducked beneath a beam and unlocked a second door.

Here the walls were irregular, chiseled from the limestone that formed a natural series of caves, some that led down almost to the sea. The beam of the flashlight swept the room. It was a dank and cold museum, filled with echoes of a past that would never be resurrected and a plethora of unexpected antiquities.

A dowry to smooth their way in the new worldand ensure their survival.

Moldering uniforms hung against one wall. For a moment, in the flickering shadows, they took on movement and animation, as if the SS officers they had once belonged to had sprung to life. Her father, Oberst Reichmann. Hauptmann Ernst, Oberleutnant Dengler, leutnants Webber, Lindeberg, Konrad, Dietrich and Hammel.

It was a terrible treasure house but, despite the fact that by right of her heritage she had become the custodian, she wasn’t locked in the past; the future was much too interesting.

Provided they were never discovered.

She’d studied the news reports over the years as one after the other of their kind had been cornered and killed, or imprisoned in various countries, but she was too disciplined to let emotion or bitterness take hold. She was nothing if not her father’s daughter.

Crouching down, she unlocked a safe. Her fingers, still stiff with cold, slid over the mottled leather binding of a book. Relocking the safe, she set the book down on a dusty table and turned fragile pages until she found the entries she needed. Names,birth dates, genetic lineage, blood types. And thenumbers the institute had tattooed onto their backs.

The older entries, written in an elegant copperplate hand, had faded with time. The more recent additions, the false names, IRS numbers and addresses, were starkly legible.

The documentation of the link they all shared was an unconscionable risk and a protective mechanism. They were all ex-Nazis and illegal aliens; the surviving Schutzstaffel were gazetted war criminals. Collectively, they were all thieves. They had stolen the spoils of war from a dozen nations to cushion a new life, and murdered to secure it.

Every one of them was vulnerable to discovery. The agreed penalty for exposing a member of the group or compromising the group as a whole was death.

She turned to the last section of the book, and the half-dozen names noted there, and added a seventh: Johannes Webber, now known as George Hartley. It was an execution list.

Slipping a plastic bag from the pocket of her coat, she wrapped and sealed the book, which was no longer safe in this location. She would make arrangements in the morning to relocate the rest of the items, and destroy those that couldn’t be moved.

Cold anger flowed through her as she locked the door of the shed and started down the steep path, hampered by the powerful wind and driving sleet. She hadn’t used the book for almost a decade. But then, as now, the need to use it had been triggered by a betrayal. Webber, the old fool, had talked.

After all these years, the Nordika had been located.

CancunOctober 14, 1984



She stepped into the foyer of a popular resort hotel, took a seat and waited. Seconds later, she was joined by a narrow-faced Colombian. Her Spanish was halting and a little rusty, but her lack of fluency scarcely mattered. Mendoza spoke English and he already knew what she wanted.

The conversation concluded, she got to her feet and left, leaving an envelope on the seat. She didn’t turn to check that the man had picked up the envelope. He was there for the money—a very large sum of money. Twenty-five percent now, seventy-five percent when the job was done. She had found that if she paid fifty percent up front, the hitter invariably took the money and ran. With the majority of the money on hold, greed guaranteed completion.



A street urchin trailed the blond gringa through the streets. She was easy to spot but not so easy to follow. Unlike most of the tourists who crowded the resort town, she checked her back every few seconds.

She entered a crowded market. Sidling close, he snatched at the large tote bag she was carrying. She spun, her fingers hooked around the strap, preventing a clean getaway. Surprised, he yanked. The strap broke and he stumbled back. She reacted with unexpected ferocity, lunging after him. Bony fingers closed on one arm, hard enough to bruise. A fist caught him in the cheek, the impact snapped his head back and made his ears ring, but he’d been hit worse, and for a lot less money. With a vicious jerk, he yanked the bag from her fingers, twisted free and darted down a side alley.

Automatically scanning the narrow streets for policia, he sprinted across the road, through a darkened, almost deserted cantina and out onto another dusty street. He could hear the gringa behind him, her heels tapping sharply on the cobbles. That was another thing that was different about her. Most women screamed and made a fuss, they didn’t chase after him.

Ten minutes later, as arranged, he met the man who had paid him to steal the gringa’s bag on the beach. Tito Mendoza was narrow faced and feral, with a reputation as a killer.

Heart pounding, avoiding Mendoza’s stare, he handed over the bag. Mendoza examined the contents, drew out a musty old book wrapped in plastic, then slipped his hand in his pocket and handed over a wad of bills.



The following evening, Mendoza stepped out of a dim, smoky bar and made his way through streets filled with strolling tourists. The beach was dark and empty, the absence of the moon making the night even darker.

He reached the rendezvous point, the shadowy lee of a rock formation, and settled in to wait, gaze drawn to the faint luminosity of the breaking waves, the empty stretch of sand. He was early, but with the money at stake, he didn’t want to leave anything to chance, and the Frenchman had a reputation for being exacting.

A faint vibration drew him up sharply. He could hear two men, not one, as agreed, and a primitive jolt of warning had him reaching for his gun.

The first slug caught him in the stomach; the second went higher. Mendoza clawed at his chest, his legs buckling. His gun discharged as he hit the ground, the round plowing uselessly into the sand.

Pain sliced through him as he was rolled over in the sand and the rucksack, which contained the book, was stripped off his shoulders. More pain as he was kicked onto his back. A spreading numbness in his legs, the fire eating into his chest and stomach.

Cold, dark eyes met his. Muerte. Death.

He must have lost consciousness; when he came to, the Frenchman was leaning over him, his palm jammed over the wound in his chest. He could hear sirens, the babble of voices.

Xavier le Clerc’s gaze was fierce. “The book. Where is it?”

Mendoza coughed, pain spasmed. “Gone.” He couldn’t breathe; his mouth kept filling with blood.

“Who took it?”

Mendoza spat a name.

Faces appeared. The pressure on his chest eased, and le Clerc melted into the shadows. Someone, a doctor, set a bag down beside him. A uniform sent an automatic chill of fear through him. He recognized Franco Aznar, a senior detective. The questions started.

The doctor muttered something sharp.

Mendoza caught the phrases, collapsed lung,lacerated intestine. The numbness was spreading. He was a dead man; he had nothing more to fear.

Choking on his own blood, he began to talk.



Ten miles off the coast of Costa RicaOctober 21, 1984



The anchor dropped through murky blue-green water and lodged on the reef bed sixty feet below. The rope went taut, stopping the drift of the chartered launch as it swung south, pushed by the current and a stiff offshore breeze. In the distance a fishing boat moved slowly against the chop, reeling in a long line. Closer in, another charter boat trolled for marlin and tuna.

Lieutenant Todd Fischer eased a single scuba tank onto his back, buckled up, slipped the snorkel into his mouth and flipped backward off the railing. Seconds later, the other seven members of the naval dive team were in the water, leaving Rodrigo, the charter skipper, to man the launch. After pairing off, they replaced the snorkels with regulators and began the descent, following the anchor rope down.

Minutes of patient grid-searching later, the encrusted hull of the Nordika loomed where it perched on the edge of a deep trench.

The ship had broken into three pieces. The hull had snapped in two and everything above deck had sheared off and fallen into the trench. Todd’s interest sharpened when he noted the way the steel hull had ruptured. The blast pattern was unmistakable, indicating that the ship hadn’t foundered; it had been scuttled. There was no sign of the ship’s name, but near the stern three numbers were still visible. They matched the Lloyd’s Register number for the Nordika.

Removing the lens cover from his underwater camera, he began to take photos. The visibility was poor, but all he needed was proof that the Nordika was there. Archival records compiled from an eyewitness report and the shipping records at the Baltic seaport of Lubeck stated that the Nordika had disappeared on the sixteenth of January, 1944, allegedly hijacked by SS officers just weeks before the fall of the Third Reich. The unsubstantiated report had claimed that the Nordika had been bound for South America, loaded with passengers and an unspecified cargo. Intriguing as those facts were, it wasn’t enough to spark the interest of either the coastguard or the U.S. Navy. But a report from a civilian source that Nazi war criminals had been involved with drugs and gunrunning, liaising with U.S. military personnel and using the scuttled carcass of the Nordika as a drop-off point, had been enough to make someone in the admiralty curious.

Todd’s brief was to investigate gunrunning with a possible military link, and, crazily enough, the weird slant that there was a Nazi connection even after all this time. South America was a known haven, but Todd was no Nazi hunter. Despite the fact that their information had supplied him with documents dating back to 1943, his money was on drugs, and possibly weapons, attached to a buoy or a wreck that might or might not be the Nordika.

He moved through the ship, snapping pictures. After finding no evidence of any cargo, forty years old or more recent, he swam through the blasted area and into the detached stern. The four diesels were still bolted down in the engine room, the name Wiesen Bremerhaven still legible. He took more photos, checked the luminous dial of his watch, then swam back the way he’d come. From what he’d seen, the ship was quite possibly the Nordika. The tonnage was right, and the four Wiesen diesels matched the Nordika’s specs.

He passed through the hold and swam out onto the deck area. Thirty minutes had passed. At this level he could spend longer, but with nothing more to investigate there wasn’t much point. It was possible they would do a second dive down into the trench, just in case the stash point was farther down, but that wasn’t likely. According to the charts, the trench was more than two hundred feet deep. As a stash site, it was neither safe nor convenient.

He swam around the side of the Nordika, searching for his dive buddy, Verney, and the rest of the team. Verney had followed him into the cargo hold, but he’d disappeared shortly after. None of the other divers were in sight. Mathews, Hendrickson, McNeal and Salter were supposed to be grid-searching the reef. Brooks and Downey should have been checking along the edge of the trench. He glanced at his watch again. Thirty-five minutes had now passed. At this depth they were easily good for forty. Unless he’d given the order, the rest of the team should still be working.

A diver appeared over the lip of the trench and swam directly toward him. For a split second Todd was certain it was Downey, then something wrong registered; the neoprene suit and the gear were regulation, but the mask and the tank weren’t. Adrenaline pumped. It was possible the stranger was a diver from the charter launch that had been trolling in the area earlier. He couldn’t hear the sound of the launch’s engine, which meant they could have dropped anchor nearby, but recreational diving wasn’t compatible with game fishing, especially not this far out and with the visibility so poor.

The second possibility was that the diver was one of the bad guys, protecting their drop site. Instinctively, he depressed the shutter on the camera, then reached for the knife sheathed at his ankle. The diver veered off to one side. Todd spun in the water as a second diver swam up out of the trench. A hand ripped at his face mask. Salt water stung his eyes and filled his mouth: his oxygen line had been cut. An arm clamped around his neck. He slashed with the knife. Blood clouded the water and the arm released. With a grunt, he kicked free, heading for the surface. With a lungful of air he could make twice the distance with ease.

A hand latched around his ankle, dragging him back down. Jackknifing, he dove at the man, slicing with the knife. Blood and air erupted. He glimpsed the camera as it drifted down to the seabed, the strap cut in the struggle, and he registered that the other diver had also used a knife.

Vision blurring, he grabbed the limp diver’s regulator and sucked in a lungful of air. He had a split second to register a third diver, then a spear

punched into his shoulder, driving him back against the hull of the ship. Shock reverberated through him; salt water filled his lungs. Arm and shoulder numbed, chest burning with a cold fire and his throat clamped against the convulsive urge to cough, he kicked upward.

Sixty feet above, the ocean surface rippled like molten silver. Sunlight. Oxygen.

A sudden image of his wife, Eleanor, and small son, Steve, sunbathing in their backyard in Shreveport sent a powerful surge of adrenaline through his veins. He cleared the edge of the hull.

A split second before his vision faded, he spotted Mathews and Hendrickson, floating. Distantly, he felt hard fingers close around one ankle, the cold pressure of the water as he was towed down into the trench.



Shreveport, LouisianaOctober 21



Eight-year-old Steven Fischer dropped the ball.

“Aw, Steve. Didja have to—”

His cousin Sara’s voice was high-pitched and sharp as Steve stumbled to a halt. It was the middle of the day in his cousin’s backyard. Despite the fact that it was autumn, the sun was hot enough to fry eggs and so bright it hurt his eyes, but that wasn’t the reason his vision had gone funny. He could see a picture of his dad, staring at him, which wasn’t right. His dad was away, down south somewhere. Having another holiday on the navy, Granddad Fischer had joked.

This time he’d promised to bring Steve back a sombrero.

Fear gripped him. As abruptly as it had formed, the picture faded, like a television set being turned off, and the tight feeling in his chest was gone.

“I’m not playing anymore.” He stared blankly at Sara, who was looking ticked. He was going home. Something had happened. Something bad.



Shreveport, LouisianaNovember 20, 1984



Eleanor Fischer watched the coffin as it was lowered into the grave and fought the wrenching urge to cry out.

The gleaming oak box was filled with Todd’s clothing and a few mementos that had meant something to him. Silly bits and pieces she had hardly been able to part with: a snapshot of Todd, darkly handsome in full dress uniform; a wedding photo; a disreputable old T-shirt she’d tried to throw away half a dozen times and which he’d stubbornly retrieved from the trash can; his favorite baseball cap.

Knowing that the box didn’t contain his body, and that his remains would most likely never be recovered, didn’t make the grieving any easier. She still couldn’t accept Todd’s death; she didn’t know if she ever would. A part of her expected him to come home with some wild explanation as to why he and the rest of the guys had gone AWOL, wrap her in his arms and blot out the horror of the past month.

Jaw clenched, she dropped a white rose onto the coffin lid, and gently squeezed Steve’s hand to let him know it was his turn. Steve’s rose dropped, the stem broken, the petals crumpled, as if he’d gripped it too tightly.

Swallowing the sharp ache in her throat, she hugged him close in an attempt to absorb his pain. His shoulders felt unnaturally stiff, his spine ramrod straight.

Since the day he’d come home insisting that she find out where Todd was and check that he was all right, he’d been…different. He hadn’t wanted to play with any of his friends, or swim; instead he’d stuck close to home, staying within earshot of the telephone. When they had finally heard that Todd was missing, presumed dead, Steve had simply gone to his room and had sat staring at the wall, his focus inward.

The doctor had said that children coped with grief differently from adults, but he didn’t understand that Steve had known Todd was in trouble before they’d been informed he was missing.

Commodore John Saunders handed Eleanor Fischer the folded flag that had draped Todd’s coffin, his expression grim.

This was the second ceremony he’d officiated at this week, and there were six more to go. Eight men lost at sea, nine men lost in all, if you counted the launch skipper, and none of the bodies had been recovered. When that many men disappeared on a peacetime mission, it was difficult to stop the speculation, and so far the media had had a field day, calling the incident a bungled mission.

To compound the embarrassment, the civilian who had instigated the hunt, an old crony of Admiral Monteith’s, had also died, a victim of a heart attack after drinking too much at an official function. When the news had broken, Monteith had run like a rat, hiding behind his medals and his Boston connections and taking early retirement. He had refused to be questioned over the affair. Monteith’s secretary and his personal aide had also resigned, leaving the office in disarray. The file on the mission had been conveniently “lost” and had somehow never made it onto the Admiralty’s new computer system.

As far as Saunders was concerned, the whole affair had been a wild-goose chase from start to finish, and a waste of taxpayers’ money. And he had lost eight good men.

He would carry out an investigation. Regulations demanded that a proper reporting process had to be adhered to, but with Monteith’s defection, the likelihood that they would come up with any satisfactory conclusions was close to nil.

The launch had broken up on the rocks, and to date only a small part of the wreckage had been located. The life raft had been found farther along the coast, fully inflated and equipped, which had added to the speculation. Something had gone seriously wrong, and Saunders wasn’t buying into the accidental-drowning scenario.

Fischer had been a seasoned veteran, and so had every member of his team. They should have survived what had amounted to a recreational dive on a sunken wreck in calm waters. With no witnesses other than a fishing boat that had seen two launches in the vicinity, and no bodies or evidence beyond the wrecked launch and the life raft, there was little chance that answers would ever come to light.

But he did know one crucial piece of the puzzle that the press hadn’t stumbled on yet. Todd Fischer’s team hadn’t only been searching for a cache of drugs and guns; they had been hunting Nazis.

Saunders’s ulcer burned every time he thought about the briefing for the mission. Monteith must have been senile.

He would make it his personal mission to ensure that that particular piece of information never saw the light of day. The media had already done enough damage. It was better that Fischer and his team were perceived as deserters than that the U.S. Navy was made into a laughingstock.


One

Present day



Lieutenant Commander Steve Fischer stepped into the records room of the Jackson Naval Air Station, Florida, and handed the clerk a list of the files he wanted to view. There were nine in all. Eight didn’t require a security clearance; one did. On request, he produced his ID and security clearance and waited for his details to be verified against the computerized register.

Several minutes later, the files were deposited on the counter, checked and signed off by a second records officer and Fischer was cleared to carry them through to the cramped work cubicles that ran the length of one wall.

Taking a seat, he placed the eight files he had chosen at random, and in which he had no interest, to one side, and selected the file labeled Akidron. In a recent overhaul of the filing system, Akidron had suddenly appeared. The reference number tied it in with a group of files containing material on operations in the Middle East, but the coincidence that Akidron spelled backward was Nordika had been enough to pique his interest.

He examined the security classification and a seal that had been put in place in 1984 and had never been broken, indicating that he was the first person to view the file since it had been taken out of circulation. The fact that the file had been off-limits for over twenty years and had a high security rating was notable but not unusual. Jacksonville was the center for the Southeast Command, which included twenty-one naval installations, among them Guantanamo Bay and Puerto Rico. With Cuba on their doorstep, a number of files contained sensitive material that could affect the security of the United States.

He broke the seal and opened the file. On the first page Akidron was reversed to spell Nordika.

He skimmed the pages that detailed the information supplied by George Hartley, a wealthy manufacturer based in Houston, and which had been passed on to Monteith. Hartley claimed that ex-Nazi SS officers, in league with Marco Chavez, head of a major Colombian drug cartel, were involved in smuggling arms and drugs. The arms were bound for terrorist and military factions in South America and Cuba, the cocaine was moving stateside. Military personnel were reportedly involved, although Hartley hadn’t been able to supply a list of names. When the divers had gone missing, an attempt to follow up on the details Hartley had supplied had been stalled by Hartley’s unexpected death. According to the coroner’s report, the fatality had been caused by a lethal cocktail of prescription medications and an excess of alcohol, and had been deemed an unfortunate accident.

Suddenly the lack of information available on the wreck of the Nordika and the disappearance of eight navy personnel made sense. Monteith had not only run from the scandal of the loss of an entire SEAL team and the ridicule that would result from a failed Nazi hunt, he had been afraid for his own life. Hartley had been executed, and Monteith had recognized that he would be next.

In a botched attempt to kill the affair, he had concealed all the evidence he’d obtained by renaming the file and closing it. He had banked on the fact that twenty years after the Nordika tragedy, there was likely to be little interest in a follow-up investigation. Monteith had died just eighteen months later, reportedly of natural causes.

The back of his neck crawling, Steve flipped through the last set of pages, which contained the mission brief and the orders issued to Todd Fischer and his men. The documents had been signed off by Monteith. As he turned the last page, an envelope attached to the rear file cover with tape that was cracked and perished by age detached. Glossy prints and a set of negatives spilled across the desktop.

The first photo—a splash of bright turquoise and the primary yellow of a mask and snorkel—was of himself at age eight, underwater, in the family swimming pool. The second was a shot of his best friend, Marc Bayard, the third of his cousin, Sara.

The fourth print was of Todd Fischer, sitting on the bottom of the pool, holding his breath and waiting patiently while Steve had fooled with the camera, trying to get a cool shot of his dad.

Chest tight, he picked up the print, careful to handle only the edges, and stared into a piece of the past he had never expected to find. He remembered the afternoon the photos had been taken as clearly as if it had been yesterday. It had been approximately two weeks before his father had disappeared. The weather had been hot and sultry and his dad had been home on leave, giving them snorkeling lessons and, when they’d pestered him, a lesson on underwater photography. Normally, they weren’t allowed to touch the camera, because it was an expensive piece of equipment and the shutter release was ultrasensitive.

In the next photo the luminous turquoise of pool water changed to cool blues and lilacs. Seawater. The absence of red and yellow tones in the coral indicated the depth as being from between forty to sixty feet, maybe a little more.

Through the murk he registered the focal point of the shot, the stern of a vessel and three numbers. The reason Monteith had kept the film, which should have been passed on to Eleanor Fischer, was now obvious. The numbers, remnants of Lloyd’s Register numbers, were familiar. Two years previously Steve had spent a few days in Costa Rica, chartered a launch and had found the wreck of the Nordika. Because of its remoteness, the site was not a popular dive location, but it was noted on the sea charts. He had dived on the wreck and had taken almost the exact same photo.

A set of prints depicting the cargo hold and the ancient diesels in the engine room followed. The sensation, as he flipped through the prints, was eerie as he viewed the same scenes he had photographed, only this time seen through his father’s eyes.

The next photo made the tension in the pit of his stomach escalate: a diver and, off to the side, the shadowy, encrusted shape of the Nordika’s hull. The final two snapshots were markedly different. The first was an off-center flash of a face distorted by a diving mask and a cloud of dark fluid—blood. The second, aimed upward, as if the camera had dropped to the sea bottom and the shutter mechanism had triggered, capturing the divers suspended above, one arching back as a spear punched into his shoulder.

Steve stared at the print. The snapshot was skewed, but the picture it had produced was sharp enough. He could make out the U.S. Navy marking on the wounded diver’s scuba tank, as well as the tattoo on Todd Fischer’s bare shoulder—the same tattoo that was visible in the holiday snap of his father sitting in the bottom of the Fischer family swimming pool.

For a split second the image of his father that he had “seen” more than twenty years before was superimposed over the print. He had never told his mother, or anyone, the full truth, that somehow in the last few seconds of his life Todd Fischer had reached out and connected with him. That he had experienced the moment of his father’s death.

The phenomenon had been singular and frightening. As the days following his father’s disappearance had passed and the search had continued, Steve had waited for news, aware that even if they did find his father it was too late. Todd Fischer had died on October 21, 1984, at approximately three o’clock in the afternoon.

The weeks of waiting for confirmation of what he had already known had burned deep. But just days after the funeral, when the press had published a leaked naval report citing Fischer and his men as deserters, Steve had been stunned. He had grown up with a number of calm certainties in his life. One of those had been that his father was a bona fide hero and a patriot. There was no way Todd Fischer would have deserted his family, his command or his country.

Shortly after the funeral, he had overheard his uncle discussing the fact that Todd had been working on something sensitive enough to hit a nerve with naval command, and the possibility of a cover-up. At eight years old, Steve hadn’t grasped the concepts of collateral damage and ex-pendability fully, but he had understood enough. Something had gone wrong and his father had been sacrificed. He could understand his father giving his life for his country—Todd Fischer had talked about that risk often enough—but he couldn’t accept that sacrifice going hand in glove with the disgrace of being labeled a traitor.

He hadn’t known all of the men who had died, but he had met some of them. They were mostly married with families. They hadn’t been any more expendable than his own father had been, and he was certain that in no way had justice been served.

Now, finally, he had proof. Instead of investigating the crime, Monteith, along with his personal staff, had covered the deaths up and walked out.

Extracting a notebook from his briefcase, Steve made a note of the personnel who had been involved, not only with the mission but with the reporting process, including the filing clerk who had authorized the closing of the Akidron file.

Maybe it was overkill, but Monteith, a decorated admiral, had been frightened enough by Hartley’s death to not only resign, but to commit an act of treason by concealing a threat to national security, and an indictable offense by concealing evidence of a mass murder. Steve could only put that fear down to two things. Monteith had obtained further information that wasn’t contained in the file, and he had been afraid for his own life.

Replacing the photographs and the negatives in the envelope, he slipped them into his briefcase along with the file, locked it and returned the remaining files to the front desk. After all these years the possibility that he could find his father’s remains was remote, but at least he had clarity on one point: Todd Fischer and the seven men under his command had been murdered while serving their country.

Frowning, the clerk counted the files, checked them against the register then recounted them. “Sir, there’s a file missing.”

He stared at the space Lieutenant Commander Fischer had occupied on the other side of the counter just seconds before. He was talking to air.

Fischer had already left.



* * *

Two days later Fischer walked into an interview room at the office of the Director of National Intelligence in Washington, D.C., and handed a copy of the Akidron file to Rear Admiral Saunders. The only other occasion he had met Saunders had been at his father’s funeral, although he was well aware of Saunders’s career path. Since 1984, Saunders’s rise through the ranks had been swift, moving from commodore to rear admiral with a raft of commendations and honors for active service in the Gulf. Following a stint in naval intelligence reporting to the Joint Chiefs, his career had shifted to another level entirely when he had been head-hunted by the Director of National Intelligence.

Saunders invited Fischer to take a seat and opened the file. Minutes later he placed the photos that had accompanied the file in a neat pile beside the open folder. The photos were dated, numbered and indisputably had come from Todd Fischer’s underwater camera. The first four photos were family snaps, the next ten, working shots of the Nordika. The final three clearly depicted a murder in progress.

Saunders’s jaw tightened at the frozen violence of the last two photos. He had known Todd Fischer personally, and liked him. He had never found it easy to stomach the actions that had been necessary to keep Monteith’s Nazi-hunting junket under wraps. The fact that Monteith had gotten his men to the scene, recovered Todd Fischer’s camera and sealed away evidence that would not only have cleared Fischer and his men of all charges but sparked a murder inquiry, was an unpleasant shock.

The even more unpalatable fact that he now faced public exposure for his actions in the Nordika cover-up was a very personal and immediate threat. He reported to the Director of National Intelligence, who advised the president and oversaw the entire intelligence community. When it came to matters of national and international security, the slightest miscalculation on his part could cost him his job. “I presume you have the originals.”

Fischer’s gaze was remote. “And the negatives.”

Saunders steepled his fingers and studied Steve Fischer’s tough, clean-cut features, the immaculate uniform. Todd Fischer had been competent, likable and damned good at his job. His son was in another category entirely. In anyone’s terms, Steve Fischer was a high achiever. He had cruised through basic training, completed BUDS without a hitch and graduated from the College of Command and Staff with honors. With a string of awards and medals for active service with the SEAL teams in the Gulf and Afghanistan, he had fast-tracked his way through the ranks. A lieutenant commander already, according to the assessments of his superior officers, Fischer would make commander by the time he was thirty-five. If a new theater of operations opened up, the promotion would be effective immediately. “What do you want?”

Fischer slid a letter outlining his resignation from the navy across the polished walnut of Saunders’s desk. “A job.”


Two

Washington, D.C. Eight months later



The barnlike chamber of the library was chilly, the central heating cranky and inconsistent, so that some areas were warm and others existed in a flow of icy air. FBI Agent Taylor Jones was unlucky enough to be sitting in a room with a windchill factor somewhere in the arctic range.

Huddling into the warmth of her lined woolen coat, she scrolled the microfilm until she reached the date she was searching for and began to skim newspapers that had been published more than fifty years ago. Outside, the night was black, the wind fitful, driving sporadic bursts of rain against tall, mullioned windows. Somewhere a radiator ticked as if someone had just turned up the heat. The sound was comforting and oddly in sync with the yellowish glow of the lights, and walls lined with books that had moldered quietly for decades.

She made a note on the pad at her side then continued to scroll. A clock on the wall registered the passage of time. One hour, then two. The ache in her shoulder and wrist that had developed from hours spent making the same small movement over and over became more insistent. Taylor dismissed it in favor of sinking into the familiar cadences of sifting through information, and the well-worn comfort of being in utter control of her world. If the pain became sharp enough to interfere with her concentration, she would take a break and do a few exercises to free up the muscles.

Somewhere behind her a chair scraped on the tiled floor. The measured step of the only other occupant of the room, a thin man wearing bifocals, registered. The double click of a briefcase unlocking was distinct in the muffled quiet of the room.

A terrible alertness gripped her.

Eyes glued to the screen, she concentrated on controlling her breathing. Stay calm. Stay focused. The tightness in her chest and stomach, the sour taste flooding her mouth, were a mirage, leftover symptoms from a nightmare that had ended months ago. A nightmare she had worked hard to forget.

She had read the psychiatric reports on the effects of the four days she had spent as a hostage; she’d had the therapy. She had even gone back for further sessions so she could understand and control the anxiety attacks which, according to her therapist, were her mind and body’s remembered response to the experience. The way out was simple: instruct the mind that there was nothing to fear and so invalidate the body’s responses.

Inhaling again, she forced her focus outward, away from the coiled tension, away from the memories. Her gaze skated over shelves of books, a wooden stepladder, and snagged on her own reflection, white faced and strained, in a window.

Not a dim, claustrophobic shed with bars at thewindow. Endless shadows, the snick of a briefcase,the sting of a needle. The smothering paralysisas the drug anesthetized her body, leaving herformless, floating, eyes wide, staring into adarkness that shifted, reformed—

Stop.

Don’t let the mind go back.

It was late. Instead of working she should have gone home and eaten dinner. She was tired; her therapist had warned her that tiredness and stress were, in themselves, triggers.

As dangerous as briefcases and needles.

She drew in another controlled breath and checked her watch, anchoring herself in the normality of that small gesture. The hostage crisis was over, finished. Earl Slater was behind bars, Diane Eady and Senator Radcliff, the man whose property she had been held on, were both dead. She had escaped; she was safe. But Alex Lopez, head of a Colombian drug cartel, and the man who had drugged her with a powerful hallucinogen called ketamine hydrochloride, had gotten away.

Rain swept against the windows, and the sense of cold increased.

Don’t go back.

But in order to catch Lopez, she had to.

He was dangerous, a psychotic killer, and she needed him caught. When he had injected the first dose of ketamine he had stated that he would kill her, regardless of whether Rina Morell—Lopez’s former wife and a federal witness—handed herself over in exchange for Taylor or not. The only question was when.

Normally, that kind of rhetoric wouldn’t have shaken Taylor. Lopez was powerful and influential; if he had wanted her dead, she would be dead. But caught in the grip of a hallucinatory drug, her normal reasoning process hadn’t worked. She would never forget the experience, and she was going to make sure it didn’t happen to anyone else.

Apart from her own determination to capture him, her appetite for the hunt was further whetted by the fact that Rina Morell was a personal friend. The damage Lopez had done the Morell family was a matter of record now, but that didn’t alter the horror of the ordeal Rina and her parents had endured.

She registered a second click as the briefcase was closed. Jaw tight, she swiveled around in the chair and studied the owner of the briefcase who was strolling toward the front desk, the box of microfilm he had been studying tucked under one arm. He was midforties, about one hundred and forty pounds, six feet tall, give or take an inch. Height was always the most difficult detail to estimate.

She wondered what he had been doing here this late on a Sunday night, but the flare of curiosity was brief. It was automatic for her to notice people. The clinical assessment was part of the job, but for as long as she could remember she had been aware of the people around her, how they looked and what made them tick. Her mother’s standard complaint had been that she hadn’t produced an eight-pound baby girl, she had given birth to a cop. It had been a mild form of rebellion for Taylor to become an agent instead.

Still on edge, she returned to the screen. A heading caught her attention, drawing her once more into the past. None of the key search words she had noted down were included, but the name was familiar.

She flipped through the files in her bag until she found the relevant one. It contained research she’d done while she was recovering from the hostage situation and the depressive effects of the ketamine. Locked out of the office for a month on mandatory sick leave, she’d had nothing better to do than attend therapy sessions and try to break open the Lopez/Morell case, which had unaccountably stalled.

She’d combed FBI files, the Internet and microfilms of old newspapers for anything to do with Lopez who, aside from drugs charges, was wanted for illegal entry into the United States, collusion in the theft and sale of decommissioned missile components, fraud, grievous bodily harm and murder.

Lopez’s real name was Alejandro Chavez, and he had been living in the States under a false identity from the age of twelve, courtesy of a brutal series of mass murders in Colombia that had made it impossible for him to live in his own country. Marco Chavez, Lopez’s father, had orchestrated the murders to force his son’s release from prison. Marco had succeeded in obtaining a pardon for Alex, but with the public outcry surrounding the massacres and a number of death threats, Alex had been forced into hiding.

She was also searching for anything to do with Marco Chavez, now deceased, and—just to pull this one into the region of the seriously weird—international banking and Nazis. The Nazis, according to the testimony of Slater—one of the few arrests they had made in the case—formed the backbone of a secretive cabal that had bankrolled Lopez and his cartel.

She opened the file, found the reference and returned her attention to the microfilm, a Reuters report dated 1954. Noted Jewish banker and self-professed Nazi hunter Stefan le Clerc had disappeared and fears were held for his safety. His last known location, New York, had been established from a letter he had posted to his wife, Jacqueline le Clerc, who was appealing for any information about her husband’s whereabouts. Apart from the years he had spent in international banking, le Clerc had founded an organization that worked to reunite families separated during the war and help survivors recover family money and assets. He was also noted for his campaign to track Nazi war criminals, and had been searching for a group of SS officers who had escaped Berlin in 1944 just weeks before Hitler had committed suicide in his bunker.

According to le Clerc, the officers had hijacked a cargo ship, Nordika, from Lubeck and escaped, taking with them an enormous quantity of looted goods and a group of children with IQs that ranked them as geniuses, part of a research project designed to establish a superior genetic seed pool for the Reich.

Taylor didn’t know how common the name le Clerc was, but the fact that Stefan had been Jewish and in banking made the likelihood that he was related to the le Clerc who had surfaced in the Lopez case stronger.

Xavier le Clerc was a Jewish banker turned international thief. He was infamous for collapsing a Swiss bank that had had a large base of Nazi investment, then having the audacity to make a clean getaway. Interpol had an old sheet on him, but despite that he was still at large. It was suspected, although not proved, that Esther Morell, the wife of one of Lopez’s business partners and a former international banker herself, had used her connection with le Clerc to pull off a multibillion-dollar theft, emptying Alex Lopez’s main operating account. The money had since been recovered by the feds but after more than twenty years, any trail that might have led to le Clerc was gone.

She leafed through the information she had collected on Xavier le Clerc, and found the connection she was looking for. Xavier was Stefan le Clerc’s son.

She made a note, then read through the Reuters report on the screen again, double-checking the name of the ship, a second reference that made the article even more interesting.

Two weeks ago, she had found an article that had been printed in 1984, about the wreck of a ship purported to be the Nordika, which had been discovered off the coast of Costa Rica. A naval team that had dived on the wreck had disappeared and had been presumed drowned. There was no mention of any cargo, but the fact that Costa Rica wasn’t far from the coast of Colombia and was well within Marco Chavez’s sphere of influence had been enough to pique her interest.

The tie-in was tenuous. She wasn’t certain any of it would add up to anything productive, but she couldn’t ignore the picture that was building. The disappearance of the Nordika from Lubeck had been a wartime mystery that had stumped a lot of people, including Stefan le Clerc. Marco Chavez was known to have harbored German nationals after the war. Crazily enough, the pieces of that old wartime puzzle seemed to be fitting into the Lopez case.

She hit the Print button. While the article fed out, she repacked her bag, then walked through to the front desk and paid to have the document scanned and saved to disk.



An hour later, Taylor settled down at the computer monitor in her apartment with a carton of hot noodles and a double-chocolate brownie from the all-night bakery at the end of the block.

Outside, the wind had increased to a steady howl. Hail rapped against the windows, a sharp counterpart to the clicking and humming of her computer as she slipped the disk into the drive and opened up the file that contained the articles she’d had scanned.

Long minutes passed while she ate noodles and read through the articles again. The hail changed to sleet, the cold palpable as it reached through thick, lined drapes into the comfort of her sitting room, sending the temperature plummeting as she made a written prècis of the information. It wasn’t as fast as typing, but she’d found over the years that sometimes her brain worked better when she had a pen in her hand.

Fingers stiff with cold, she left her desk to turn up the heat and strolled through to her bedroom to pull on a sweater. Taking a fleecy blanket from the end of her bed, she returned to the computer.

With the blanket wrapped around her middle, she sat back down and noticed that at some point she had eaten all of the noodles and the brownie. Somehow, the fact that she couldn’t remember tasting a brownie that was justifiably famous for at least a ten-block radius seemed symptomatic of her life. She had had her cake, she just couldn’t remember eating it.

Until those hours spent locked in the dark, Lopez turning her blood to ice every time he had injected what could have been a fatal dose into her veins, she hadn’t realized how empty her life had been, or how desperately she wanted to live, despite that emptiness. Coming that close to death had been like slamming into a brick wall. It had stopped her in her tracks, forced her to assess, to need more than a career that had somehow expanded to fill every waking hour.

The change, radical as it was, hadn’t happened overnight. For a self-confessed workaholic from a dysfunctional family, trying to picture herself fitting into a scenario that involved a husband, kids, maybe even a house and garden, was difficult. For most of her adult life she had sidestepped the issue, denying that she wanted the family values that most people clung to. It was disorienting to discover that she needed them.

Tossing the empty noodle carton and the paper bag that had contained the brownie into the trash can beside her desk, she accessed the Bureau Web site. She entered her code and password then dialed up a Bureau search engine, typed in a list of search words and stared at the list of hits.

Great. Boring and weird.

Huddling into the blanket, she began to read.

At one in the morning, on the point of giving up, she found an article about a Colombian drug dealer and hit man, Tito Mendoza, who had been murdered for a book. Mendoza had been shot at point-blank range but hadn’t died immediately. The Costa Rican policia had questioned him at the scene, but he had slipped into a coma and died before they had gotten more than a few basic details. The newsworthy part was that he had claimed that aside from names and addresses, the book had contained other details: blood types, numbers that had been tattooed onto the backs of a group of German ex-nationals—Nazis—and an execution list.

The report, though bizarre, meant nothing on its own. But coupled with the fact that Mendoza had been involved with Marco Chavez and that he had been murdered the same week the naval team who had dived on the Nordika had disappeared, suddenly, the implications began to pile up.

In her research, Taylor had found out a lot of information she never, ever wanted to know, including the fact that SS soldiers had routinely had their blood types tattooed onto their chests. A practical solution for the battlefield, it had proved to be a liability after the Allies had invaded, because the tattoos had made them easy to identify.

The tattoos Mendoza had mentioned didn’t sound like blood types—he had said numbers, not letters—but the connection was there.

Maybe it was a leap to imagine the book had anything to do with the SS soldiers who had hijacked the Nordika, and even more of a leap to connect it to the missing naval divers, Lopez or the Nazi cabal Slater had mentioned, but it was a possibility.

She saved a copy of the article and, out of habit, saved a copy to disk, which she labeled, dated and slipped into a storage box that contained copies of all of the archival information she had researched on Lopez. After the internal security leaks concerning the case, two of which had resulted in failed busts, and the more mundane fact that occasionally information had a habit of disappearing off the scope in the Bureau’s system, she liked to keep her own separate set of records.

Stifling a yawn, she hit the send button and e-mailed a copy to her work computer.

Just before she went to bed, she reread the article and made a brief note. The wintry chill seemed to intensify as she studied what she had written.

Mendoza had had a book. The book had been important enough that he had died because of it.


Three

A week later, Taylor leaned back in her office chair and skimmed a page of Alex Lopez’s file. She’d studied the information found on Lopez’s computer after the unsuccessful raid on his estate at Winton on the West Coast until her eyes ached. Legitimate company accounts, tax legislation and a bunch of legalese about property-development trusts.

The information, most of which had been supplied by an unnamed South American source eighteen months previously and which had formed the basis for the FBI’s investigation into Lopez, should have put her to sleep, but Taylor refused to be lulled by the familiarity of the material.

She needed to find something—anything—that would provide a lead on a man who had killed almost everyone who had ever gotten close to him. The list had included Lopez’s own father; his business partner and father-in-law, Cesar Morell; and, at the age of twelve, his own bodyguard.

Exhaustion, the product of another late night spent surfing government databases and the Internet, sucked at her as she read. Her mind began to drift, slide sideways.… She blinked, staring at the page, not seeing the words, suddenly on the verge of—

A sharp thud jerked her head up.

Mike Colenso, the agent occupying the adjacent desk, was rummaging through the box of files he had just dropped onto the floor.

Stifling a yawn, she tried to recapture the moment. When the relaxed mood wouldn’t come back, courtesy of Colenso opening and discarding files, she went over what she’d just read. After skimming the page a second time, then a third, she stopped trying to force the knowledge. Whatever it was that had gotten her antennae twitching was obscure enough that she wasn’t going to find it by focusing harder. It was entirely possible that what she was looking for wasn’t on the page, but the result of information triggering her mind to make a connection.

She checked her watch and set the file down. She would get that moment back, and now she was going to have to do it on her own time, not the Bureau’s. Marc Bayard, her boss and a newly appointed division head, had been saying for weeks now that she was too close to the case, that she had lost her perspective and needed to back off. In fact, this morning he had ordered her to back off.

According to Bayard, the Lopez case had redefined her commitment to her job in “an unhealthy way.” The only reason she had been assigned to the Lopez task force in the first place was her connection to Rina Morell. He had assigned another agent in her place. He had been polite but he hadn’t pulled his punches. Her psychiatric report detailed post-traumatic stress disorder, insomnia, chronic fatigue, paranoia and evidence of obsessive behavior. Bayard had enough material to suspend her on medical grounds if she didn’t fall into line.

She had argued the point on the “obsessive behavior.” Driven, maybe. Bayard hadn’t seen the distinction.

She pulled out Lopez’s psychological profile and studied it. He was clinically organized and successful, but he had made significant errors in judgment, notably in underestimating the Morell family. Years ago, Esther Morell had outsmarted him, Cesar Morell had worked with him, but only under duress, and their daughter, Rina, had come close to bringing him down.

Lopez was also eccentric. Amongst a list of known traits, it was noted that while he used computers in his business, he didn’t trust them. In a way, that was understandable, since Esther Morell, in partnership with Xavier le Clerc, had relieved him of billions of dollars through a series of electronic transactions.

A pen rolled off Colenso’s desk and dropped onto the floor, but this time the elusive feeling that she was about to get something didn’t vaporize.

Taylor stared at the sentence she’d just read. That was it.

So far they had gleaned zilch from Lopez’s computer files. In a nutshell, he didn’t store his information on any electronic system they’d found. They had assumed that he had the information stored on a computer somewhere. It was possible he had an encoded system and they simply hadn’t found it, but what if he stored information in another way?

Feverishly, she turned pages. Mendoza had had a book, and there had been a mention of a book in Earl Slater’s testimony.

She found the page and ran her finger down the margin until she located the piece she was looking for. According to Slater, Lopez had recently retrieved a book from a bank vault in Bogotá. Slater didn’t know what the book contained, just that it had been important enough for Lopez to make a trip to collect it. It was possible it had been a rare antique, an easy asset to liquidate when he’d needed—

Colenso’s chair creaked as he rocked back and propped his expensively shod feet on the desktop. He jerked his head toward the file she was reading. “Thought Bayard pulled you off the case.”

“He did.” She indicated a pile of paperwork occupying one corner of her desk. “In theory I’m working on operation Update the Filing System.”

His gaze sharpened. “You’ve found something.”

Several heads turned. Taylor closed the file. “Maybe. Nothing that isn’t already on file.”

And nothing that she was prepared to talk about yet.

The fact that there had been a serious leak connected with the Lopez case—in effect, a mole in the Bureau—made her wary. According to her own private snooping, the information leaks were exclusively related to the Lopez case. That meant Lopez had either corrupted someone in the FBI, or else he had managed to hack into the Bureau’s information systems. She trusted everyone in the office…to a degree.

Colenso looked disgruntled. “You’re giving me that schoolmarm look again.”

“Get used to it. I’ve applied for Bayard’s old job. You could be looking at your new boss.”

“After what happened on the West Coast?”

Colenso’s amused expression set her teeth on edge. Taylor picked up a file detailing Slater’s successful prosecution and tossed it onto his desk. After “what happened” in both Eureka and Winton, she had zero tolerance for assholes. Someone had hemorrhaged information, compromising the operation on more than one occasion, with the result that Lopez had slipped the net. She had been caught off guard and taken hostage on the heels of the last spoiled operation. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but my mistake was the only investigative break we had.”

His hands shot up in surrender. “I hear you, Yoda.”

A reluctant smile twitched at her mouth. Lately, she’d gotten a lot of wisecracking about “the force,” courtesy of her crusade against the “evil empire”—Lopez.

Gail, one of the clerks from administration, sorted through the bundle of mail she was carrying and dropped a letter onto Taylor’s desk.

Frowning, Taylor retrieved a paper knife from her drawer and slit the envelope. A business card slid out, and for a moment her mind went utterly blank. There were no words, just a crude symbol in the shape of a jaguar’s head stamped onto the card. The stamp lacked detail, it was the kind kids bought from bargain outlets and toy stores, but the fact that it was a jaguar’s head made her skin crawl.

Lopez had had a jaguar tattooed on the back of one of his hands. The tattoo was no longer visible. He’d had it lasered off years ago, but Taylor had seen a grainy photo of it.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Someone just sent me a calling card. A jaguar’s head.”

Feeling light-headed and a little strange, she turned the card so Colenso could see it, then slipped it back into the envelope so as not to further compromise any prints.

Colenso frowned. “It’s got to be a prank.”

“I’m not laughing.” The thought that it could have been Lopez made her freeze inside. If it was a bona fide calling card, the precursor to a hit—

He shrugged. “Sorry, wrong word. I’m not trying to trivialize it, but I’ve never heard of Lopez or the Chavez cartel using mafia tricks.”

Taylor dropped the envelope into a plastic bag, her mind automatically going over the list of people, aside from Lopez, who could hold some kind of grudge against her. Slater’s ex-wife and his hooker girlfriend. A number of Lopez’s security staff who had been arrested in Eureka following the bust on Senator Radcliff’s place, and who were presently standing trial. It had to be someone who knew about Lopez’s tattoo and who knew that she would recognize the significance of the jaguar’s head.

It could have been sent by Lopez.

The probability sent a shaft of raw panic through her. Until that moment she hadn’t realized how much she never wanted to see Lopez again. As badly as she needed him caught, as totally as she had immersed herself in his case, she realized Bayard was right: the personal cost was too great. She didn’t want back into a hell she’d spent months crawling out of.

Colenso touched her shoulder. She stared blankly into his concerned gaze, unaware until then that he had gotten up from his desk. “Stay there. I’ll get you something to drink.”

Minutes later he handed her a polystyrene cup of coffee. The hot liquid burned her mouth and was so sweet she could barely drink it.

Colenso propped himself on the edge of her desk as she sipped, his presence obscurely comforting because he blocked her off from the rest of the office, giving her time to recover. The last thing she needed was a cataloged report of an anxiety attack in the office. Bayard would have her out the door so fast she would be spinning.

Colenso studied the typed address label on the envelope, which was visible through the plastic. “If the card is from Lopez then it’s manna from heaven. It could be the lead we’ve been waiting for.”

But Colenso didn’t think so.

The thought slid into her mind, as sharp and acid as the sugar-laced coffee, and suddenly Colenso’s uncharacteristically PC behavior made sense. He was soothing her because he didn’t believe the card was a serious threat.



* * *

Three days later, Bayard handed Taylor the forensics report on the envelope and the card. The envelope, the card, the ink and the stamp were all locally available items, most likely purchased in D.C. Whoever had sent the card had been professional enough to wear gloves, because the only identifiable prints besides Gail’s and Taylor’s had belonged to post office personnel. The postmark was local and the address was a computer-generated label that had been affixed to the envelope. The stamp showed no traces of saliva and because the envelope was of the self-sealing variety it hadn’t yielded any, either, so there was no DNA.

Given that the envelope had been posted in D.C. on the same day Slater and the minor felons involved in the hostage situation had been sentenced, Bayard suspected that it was a hoax, most likely perpetrated by a family member or an associate of one of the felons. Without conclusive evidence of a death threat, he could no longer justify the around-the-clock security on her apartment or the escort to and from work, but she had options. She could scale down her hours until she felt better. If she wanted time off, she could have it on full pay. A holiday—a change of scene—could be just what she needed.

Taylor refused both offers point-blank. The “until she felt better” part had grated. She wasn’t sick and she needed to work. The last thing she wanted was time alone. Without her job, she was an emotional amputee.

When she walked out of Bayard’s office, the field room was abnormally quiet and no one glanced up, which was also unusual. She had known several of the agents for years, attended most of the departmental parties and done her share of hanging out at bars; the camaraderie had always been one of the best aspects of the job.

She had heard about the rumor that was circulating, that she had lost her grip, that someone down in records was running a book on the odds that she had mailed the card to herself.

Her stomach burned as she reached her desk. She checked her watch. It was after one, and she hadn’t stopped for breakfast. Instead of sitting down, she shrugged into her coat and buttoned it against the wave of cold that was going to hit her the second she walked out of the building.

Colenso rocked back in his chair. “How did it go with Bayard?”

“The card was sent the same day Slater and his hired muscle were sentenced. He thinks it was one of them.”

“Makes sense.”

She hooked the strap of her handbag over one shoulder. “Want to go get some lunch?”

Colenso tapped his watch. “I ate an hour ago. Besides, if I don’t get these notes written up, Bayard’s threatened to send me out with Tripp.”

Taylor glanced across the office, more than willing for some light relief to stave off her own growing conviction that Bayard was right and that she really was losing her grip. Martin Tripp was sitting at his desk, staring at his computer screen as if it were about to suck him into cyberspace and he wouldn’t mind the journey one little bit. Tripp, in his late forties, was a genius with computers and equipment, but he was also notorious for his bumbling in the field. Personally, Taylor thought he had a lot more potential than anyone had ever given him credit for. She glanced at Colenso with his sharp suit jacket and edgy haircut. At least Tripp had his ego under control. “He’s not so bad.”

Colenso glanced at Tripp and lifted a brow. “You’ve never been on a stakeout with him.”



Rico Casale hunkered down on the roof of one of the older brownstones that lined the street just down from the Bureau’s building. The brownstone was low enough that he got a good view of most of the street. With the aid of a pair of high-powered binoculars, he could just see the back entrance and the employee parking lot.

The roof of the brownstone also had the virtue of a water tower, a jumbled series of maintenance sheds and a waist-high parapet. It was cramped, and the parapet meant he couldn’t use a tripod because the angle to the street below was too acute, but there was enough cover that he could remain hidden while he observed, even from buildings that overlooked his position. These days, after the Washington sniper, he couldn’t be too careful. People were a lot more observant and a lot more suspicious. If he was spotted this close to the FBI building, it was game over.

A scattering of rain turned a miserable day even grimmer, but he was wrapped up warmly, with a padded coat, a woolen beanie pulled down low on his head and thick woolen mittens on his hands.

Crouching lower to avoid the worst of the rain and find an angle that would shield the lenses of his binoculars, he took time out to jerk the sheet of plastic he’d brought with him more securely over the rifle he had assembled more than an hour before.

Long minutes passed as he scrutinized the FBI building. He shifted, easing stiffened muscles and wiping moisture from his face. It was possible she wouldn’t come out today, but she had yesterday and the day before. She might not eat at the same place or even walk in his direction, but so far she hadn’t shown any signs of deviating from her pattern. He took a break to sip hot coffee from a thermos and checked the time. If she was going to eat lunch today, she was late.

A split second later, the door slid open and Taylor Jones stepped outside.

Tipping out the remains of his coffee, he slipped the binoculars into his knapsack, tugged the plastic sheet off the Remington and eased the butt of the rifle against his shoulder.

He swore beneath his breath. Jones had finally left for lunch, but today she had taken a route that angled away from his position, which meant he had to move, and fast.

With fingers stiffened by the icy wind, he disassembled the rifle and repacked the gun in a guitar case that had been customized to store the weapon. Seconds later, he slipped through the janitor’s door and took the stairs to the ground floor.

He emerged out of the back entrance of the building, threaded his way down a service lane and out onto another, smaller street. Within minutes, his knapsack stowed in the trunk of his car, and his coat, beanie and mittens stripped off to reveal the business suit he was wearing beneath, he entered a second office building and took the lift to the sixth floor.

Within seconds of entering the room he had rented earlier in the week, he had reassembled the gun, locked it onto its tripod and trained it on the street below.

Taylor strolled into view, huddled against the wind. She disappeared momentarily beneath a shop awning, then reappeared, head down, walking directly into the crosshairs.


Four

Taylor paused by a Chinese food stall called Chen’s, which was set up on a street corner just two blocks from the office. The stall was hemmed in by high-rises and situated in the protective lee of a large department store but, even so, the wind whipped her coat around her legs as she surveyed the stainless-steel bins of dishes.

Gray clouds were a solid mass above. In the few minutes it had taken her to walk from the office, the temperature had plummeted, the weather unseasonably cold for spring. The steady trickle of water from a gracefully weeping fountain set to one side of the department store didn’t make her feel any warmer. “Nice day.”

Chen shrugged. “Last I heard the forecast is for sleet.”

A faint pattering of rain started as she ordered fried rice and spiced chicken. Huddling in closer beneath the small shelter, Taylor flipped up the collar on her coat and waited while he packaged her selection. The coat was pure wool, and lined. It would protect her for a while, but if it poured she was going to get soaked. “Sleet, great. I love cold—”

The raucous honking of a car horn cut her short. A taxi was stuck in traffic only feet away, slewed at an angle as a delivery truck double-parked. Wincing at the sustained assault on her ears, Taylor shifted to the other end of the counter, far enough that the steel wall of the take-out stand cut the direct blast of the horn.

Simultaneously, a tiny projectile sliced past Chen’s head, bounced off the booth, ricocheted off the hot plate and embedded itself in the fountain. He blinked and went back to shoveling rice.

Taylor cocked her head to one side and stared at the punch mark in the back of the booth. It glinted in the dim light as if freshly made. She hadn’t noticed it before and, cumulatively, she had spent a lot of hours staring at the back of Chen’s take-out stand.

She continued to study the punch mark, then shook her head. The job was getting to her. To anyone else it would just be a dent; to her, the dent looked like it had been made by a bullet.

She dragged her gaze from the dented steel and

made herself watch the pedestrians hurrying by. Ordinary, everyday people: a businessman trying to talk into a cell phone; a woman struggling with an umbrella as the rain thickened and the wind turned gusty; a mother with two children in tow, all of them clutching bags filled with shopping.

The children, huddled close to their mother, and the nostalgia of gaily colored bags stuffed with bargains from the spring sales spun her back to her own childhood. Hot blue San Francisco skies, winters without snow, windblown beaches and walks in Golden Gate Park.

Looking back, the years she’d spent in a cramped apartment a stone’s throw from the Pacific Ocean with her parents had seemed bright and happy, although she now knew that normality had been a sham.

Her father, Jack Jones, had always been an arresting, larger-than-life figure. When he’d been home from his “sales” trips, she had spent every spare second trailing after him. She could see why her mother, Dana, had fallen in love with him, and why she’d been so angry when she’d found out he was a cheap, two-bit con artist with a gambling addiction instead of the traveling salesman he had claimed.

The betrayal had cut deep. Dana had worked in international banking and her career had depended on a squeaky-clean reputation. She and Jack had fought for months. Then one day, Jack had slammed out of the apartment and had never come back. Two months later he had been killed in a hit-and-run accident.

The rain turned to sleet, stinging her cheek and sizzling off Chen’s hot plate. Abruptly she grinned. At least she was alive and still kicking. Icy weather or not, she got a warm feeling inside every time she thought about the fact that not only had she escaped Lopez, but so had Rina. Now safely hidden on the Witness Security Program and settled into a relationship, Rina finally had a shot at happiness.

Brushing ice off her cheek, she finished the sentence the car horn had interrupted. “At least sleet makes us appreciate fine weather.”

Chen fastened a lid on the fried rice and handed her the containers. “Hey, I could live with sunshine every day. It’s good for business.”

Still smiling, Taylor searched in her purse and counted change. Something zinged past her cheek. Frowning, she lifted a hand to her face. Her gaze caught on another dent in Chen’s take-out stand. Adrenaline kicked. She was already moving when something punched into her back, shoving her forward. The containers of food spilled from her fingers. Blinking, she gripped the edge of the counter. The reason the dents looked so fresh and shiny was because they had just been made.

Chen’s voice penetrated. “What’s wrong? What’s happened?”

Taylor felt like she had once when she’d come around from being knocked out, disoriented and a little shocky, only this time she hadn’t been hit on the head. Her chest felt numb. “Call an ambulance. I’ve just been shot.”

She was still standing, but her knees had turned to jelly and she was having trouble breathing. Disbelief gripped her.

The card. The jaguar’s head.

Lopez, his voice flat. “I will kill you…it’s onlya matter of when.”

Not when. Now.

“Get down…just in case—”

Chen was screaming. Around her, people were dropping to the pavement. The day was fading. Weirdly, she couldn’t hear the traffic anymore. Funny, but she’d never thought it would feel like this, heat where she’d been hit, a cold numbness all around—a weird pastiche of sensations as muscles went into spasm and her legs folded.



The next bullet sliced a gash in Chen’s arm and ended up in the bottom of the pool surrounding the fountain.

The sleet thickened, coating the sidewalk and turning the city gray. Chen pushed to his knees and peered over the top of his counter. People were still lying on the sidewalk. He could see the long dark hair and outflung arm of the woman he’d just served. After she’d fallen over the counter, she’d slid down onto the sidewalk and didn’t appear to be moving.

In the distance sirens wailed. Someone must have called the police and, hopefully, an ambulance. He clutched his bleeding arm, wincing at the pain, his attention drawn to the sleet-covered outline of the woman’s arm. She hadn’t moved in a while. No matter how fast the ambulance came, he didn’t think they were going to be in time.



Rico stepped out into the street, bracing himself against the icy wind. The guitar case bumped against his left thigh as he strode toward his car. A short, thickset man stepped out of a doorway, pausing to turn up the collar of his coat. The eye contact was brief and electric. Aldo Fabroni.

He ducked his head and walked on. As he strode down the street he could feel the older man’s stare boring into his back. He swore beneath his breath and controlled the panicked impulse to break into a run. He couldn’t get into his car, because that would give Aldo an opportunity to approach him and another point of reference to identify him, which meant he had to take the subway. He couldn’t afford to stop a cab, not while he was carrying the gun and with a homicide one street over.

Rico couldn’t believe it. He usually worked out of L.A., which was why he’d been chosen for this particular job. The client had wanted to make sure the hit was untraceable. In this business, secretive as it was, it was sometimes possible to trace the triggerman by asking around to find out who was available in the area to do the work. He had been the perfect choice for an East Coast job. Until Aldo.

He rounded a corner and stepped directly into the wind. Sleet pounded his face and froze his fingers. Shielding his eyes, he broke into a run, the ice-laden air shoving into his lungs hard enough to hurt. The sirens were closer.

As he dodged around pedestrians, he studied the street to orient himself. This wasn’t his city, but he had done his homework. There was a subway entrance a block away.

Seconds later the subway sign came into view. When he reached the entrance, he slowed to a jog, grabbed the railing and slipped, almost losing his footing and the guitar case.

Breathing hard, he steadied himself and took the stairs as quickly as he could with the awkward weight of the case. A train pulled out, gathering speed, as he reached the platform.

He checked the displayed timetable. He was going to have to wait.

Clenching his jaw, he strode into the men’s washroom, grabbed a wad of paper towels, dried his face and hair and wiped down his suit jacket. With any luck Aldo hadn’t recognized him. If he ever asked him about it, Rico would simply say he had made a mistake; he hadn’t been to D.C. in years.

When Rico exited the men’s room, a familiar figure was staring at the timetable.

His stomach sank. He put on a smile. Finally, his acting classes were good for something. “Hey, Aldo. What are you doing here?”

“I could ask you the same thing.” His attention dropped to the case. “No, don’t tell me. You’re in town for a concert.”

Rico assessed the hard greed in Aldo’s expression. He was a two-bit drug dealer and a fence, small potatoes all around, but he wasn’t stupid. “How much?”

Aldo named a figure. Rico’s stomach bottomed out.

Aldo grinned. “Don’t worry. For that price your secret’s safe with me.”


Five

Steve Fischer stepped into the FBI building. It was just after four-thirty. The office was still open, but a lot of people had left early, eager to avoid the evening rush hour and worried that the escalating blizzard might create further delays.

Dusting sleet from his jacket, he stripped off his gloves, slipped them in his pocket and produced his ID. “Cold night.”

The security guard checked his face against the photograph then waved him through. “Yes, sir.”

He took the elevator, stepped out into the corridor and found the office he wanted. The door opened as he approached, which meant he didn’t have to use his card and PIN number, which would record his presence in the office. He had a working agreement with the FBI, but Marc Bayard wouldn’t tolerate interference in his investigation, old friendship or not. A woman and a man stepped out. Colenso and Burrows.

Colenso held the door. Burrows gave him a speculative look, but it was more female than curious. She had only recently transferred into D.C. and was still working out who was who, while Colenso had briefly met Steve during the hostage situation in Eureka last year.

The door closed behind him. Aside from a light in one of the end booths, the field room was empty. Walking through to an interview room, he took a seat and waited until the occupant of the booth left. Seconds later, the lights went out and the door clicked closed, signaling that he now had the office to himself.

Strolling to Taylor Jones’s workstation, he sat down at her computer. The screen flickered the instant he touched the mouse. The computer hadn’t been switched off, as he had expected. It had been in rest mode, which meant that when Taylor had left the building to get lunch, she had left the computer on, the system open. Frowning at the uncharacteristic sloppiness, Steve withdrew a disk and a flash card from an inside pocket of his jacket and plugged it into the USB port. The flash card was larger than normal, about the size of a pocket calculator.

He inserted the disk and waited for the program to install. Seconds later, he removed the disk, unplugged the flash card and slipped them both back into his jacket pocket. Taylor’s security breach in leaving her computer on and unprotected while she was out of the building had just been solved. There was nothing to copy; her computer was clean. Someone had gotten there before him.



An hour later, he stepped into Taylor’s apartment. Pocketing the duplicate master key he’d had made several weeks previously, he closed the door behind him and thumbed on a penlight. He didn’t want to risk turning on a light in case Taylor’s mother, Dana Jones, had caught an early flight and was already in town, although it was more than likely she would go directly to the hospital.

He moved soundlessly through the rooms in case one of Taylor’s neighbors had caught the evening news and was nosy enough to check out who was in apartment 10A when the tenant was on the critical list.

The master bedroom was empty, the quilt a little wrinkled, as if she’d sat down on it that morning after the bed had been made. The quilt itself was plain, the bedroom furniture elegant but neat. No surprises there.

He moved through a second bedroom. The lack of luggage in the spare room confirmed that Dana Jones hadn’t yet arrived. Given the weather conditions and the fact that even if she got a direct flight from San Francisco, it would take several hours to reach D.C., he didn’t expect her to fly in until the morning.

The bathroom was cramped but spotless and contained the same clean, faintly sweet smell he had noticed in the bedroom and which he now identified as soap, not perfume. One towel was neatly draped over a towel rail.

Checking the luminous dial of his watch, he moved through to the sitting room. Like the rest of the apartment, the room was tidy, except for one corner, which was occupied by bookshelves jammed with reference books and a large computer desk awash with papers, notebooks and a stack of files. If he had needed further confirmation of what Taylor did with her spare time, apart from a rigorous fitness program, this was it. She worked.

And for the past few months, she had been busy. He’d had a tail on her ever since she had been discharged from the hospital after the hostage crisis in Eureka. Taylor’s personal connection to Lopez, and the fact that, since Rina Morell had disappeared into the Witness Security Program, Taylor was Lopez’s only link to his ex-wife, made her an automatic choice for surveillance. The fact that she had obsessively researched Lopez and the cabal, despite being first cautioned then pulled from the case, made her even more interesting. And now she knew about the book.

Locating the Internet files she’d searched had been easy. On a previous visit he had bugged her computer with a highly illegal piece of spyware designed to mimic the security system she used. His electronic friend recorded Taylor’s online research and mailed to him the sites she had accessed and duplicates of any e-mail messages.

The microfiche material was something else entirely. Other than the time periods and the newspapers she had been researching—information that was noted on the register held at the front desk of the library—he had no idea what she was reading unless she created a computer file and e-mailed it to her work address.

Sitting down at the desk, he booted up the computer, inserted the disk and connected the flash card. A small window running percentages at the bottom of the screen indicated his copy program was complete. Removing the disk and flash card, he inserted a second disk into her drive. This one contained a powerful wipe program. Minutes later, her hard drive was clean.

Retrieving the disk, he took a small tool kit from his pocket, unscrewed the back plate of the CPU and attached a tiny, state-of-the-art transmitter, which was designed to look like part of the hard drive. FBI technicians would go over her computer with a fine-tooth comb, but until he activated satellite transmission, they were unlikely to locate it.


Six

Jack Jones was tall, about six-two, lean and rangy, with dark eyes and hair, courtesy of a Sioux grandfather. His hair was streaked with gray at the temples, just like it would be if he were alive, which Taylor knew wasn’t possible. Jack Jones had been dead for more than twenty years.

She forced eyelids that felt like they’d been glued shut wider, so she could continue to study her dead father. The fact that he was standing just feet away, staring out of a window, convinced Taylor that the bullet that had punched through her back and sliced and diced at least one lung had, most likely, been fatal. If she was in Jack’s company, she definitely hadn’t gone to Heaven.

The only alternative to death was that she was alive and having a drug-induced vision, because to the best of her knowledge, Taylor didn’t have a psychic bone in her body.

She turned her head and, like a switch flicking on, pain flared, burning in her chest and all down the back of her throat. She swallowed, trying to ease the dryness in her mouth, and the pain went ballistic.

A sharp click registered. Someone dressed in white bent over her. “She’s awake and she’s not supposed to be.”

There was a second metallic clink, a cool sensation running up her right arm.

The next time she surfaced it was dark. A light glowed beside the bed, illuminating the fact that she was in a private room and her mother, Dana, was sitting beside the bed. Her chest still felt painful and tight; her throat was even sorer. A tube ran across her face: oxygen.

Dana’s hand gripped hers. “Thank God. I thought I was going to lose you.”

Taylor tried for a smile. Dana looked fragile, dark smudges under her eyes, the skin across her cheekbones finely drawn. “I’m hard to kill.”

Although, if the way she felt now was any indication, she must have come close to dying. She was having trouble breathing. Speaking was even more difficult.

With an effort of will, she tried to remember what had happened, but her mind was a blank from the time she had consciously registered that she had been shot until she’d woken up and hallucinated that Jack Jones had been standing beside her bed. “Which hospital am I in?” There were wires and tubes everywhere. A shunt ran into her bandaged right wrist, and to her left she could hear the beep of a heart monitor.

“George Washington. They moved you out of ICU yesterday.”

Yesterday. That meant at least a day had passed since she had last woken up. “How long since I was admitted?” She cleared her throat, suddenly ferociously thirsty.

“Two days.” Dana leaned forward with a plastic cup and a straw. “You can have a few sips, but not too much. They don’t want you throwing up in case you rupture your stitches. And don’t worry about the back of your throat. The reason it’s sore is because they’ve had a tube down there.”

Ice-cold water filled her mouth then flowed down her throat. She winced at the rawness, took another sip and watched as Dana replaced the drink on her bedside table.

Two days. The amount of time that had passed explained why Dana looked so tired and rumpled; she would have caught a flight out yesterday. Dana had a key to Taylor’s apartment but, knowing her mother, she would have bypassed the apartment and come straight to the hospital. She had probably slept here last night.

Dana’s hand tightened around hers. “The bullet broke a rib and punctured the bottom lobe of your left lung. They’ve got you strapped up so the rib doesn’t move. Luckily the bullet went all the way through so they didn’t have to dig it out. They did keyhole surgery to repair the lung, but unfortunately, you had a reaction to one of the drugs they used, which is why you’ve been out for so long.”

The sound of footsteps in the hall was followed by the glimpse of a woman carrying a brightly colored plastic bag. Taylor had a flashback of a woman with two children and other shoppers huddled against the cold. “Was anyone else hurt?”

“The guy who owns the take-out stand got grazed, but that was all.”

Despite the fact that Chen had gotten hurt, relief channeled through her. There had been women and children on the street and at least three shots had been fired, maybe four if Chen’s injury had happened after hers. “Did they get the shooter? Who’s got the case?”

“The city police department picked it up, but when they realized you were an agent, they let the FBI step in and take over. And no, they haven’t caught anyone yet.”

A nurse stepped into the room, his gaze sharp as he took in the fact that she was awake. After a few routine questions, a check on her pulse and blood pressure and the drip feeding into her left arm, he made a note on the chart clipped on the end of her bed and left.

A metal trolley rattled in the corridor outside. With stiff movements, Dana got to her feet. “It’s after eight. I need to get something to eat and freshen up. I’ll be back in an hour or two. Is there anything you need?”

Taylor didn’t know when she’d be able to wear them, but she needed some real clothes and some toiletry items. Her hair felt stiff, as if it hadn’t been washed in days—which it hadn’t—and her teeth felt fuzzy.

She gave Dana her list. “Have you talked to Bayard since you’ve been here?”

Dana’s jaw firmed. She didn’t like Marc Bayard or the FBI. Over the past few months Bayard had questioned her on a number of occasions about her involvement with Lopez and the fact that, years ago, she had been implicated in the theft of money from Lopez’s account. Dana hadn’t voluntarily had anything to do with either Lopez or the theft. Her association with Esther Morell had made her an unwitting pawn, but that hadn’t made the interviews any less unpleasant. “Don’t worry about Bayard, or your job. You don’t have to go back after this.”

Taylor’s reaction was knee-jerk. Uh-uh. No way was she not going back.

Without her job she would die.



* * *

The next time she woke up Jack Jones was standing just inside the doorway, as large as life, a faithful rendition of the graying-at-the-temples version she’d seen at her bedside the previous day.

Whether it was the sedative effect of the painkillers or the possibility that she was hallucinating, Taylor didn’t blink. She stared at his jaw and at eyes a lot like her own, and for a split second she was ten again and the loss was wrenching.

As a child, she had imagined Jack Jones walking back into her life in a dozen different ways. She and Dana would be told that there had been a mistake; he hadn’t died, someone else had. Or, he had been revived in hospital—or even the morgue. Better still, his death, the funeral—the stark emptiness—had never happened. They had been part of a nightmare and one day she would wake up.

Years had passed; she hadn’t woken up.

She met his gaze. The pressure banding her chest buttoned off as she adjusted to the cold fact that Jack Jones was very much alive. That for over twenty years he had chosen to let her believe he was dead. “How did you get in here?”

“Taylor, I’m sorry—”

“How did you get in here?”

He lifted his shoulders. “I said I was your uncle.”

She gasped for breath. The deep, gritty pain in her chest edged through the haze of the painkiller. “Where did you go?”

Why did you do it? Why didn’t you call? Ever?

Jack didn’t confuse her question with the fact that she had woken up while he was in her room before. “Florida. The Keys. I’ve got a fish-and-dive charter business down there.”

Another surge of emotion hit, this one more controllable. Years ago, after Jack had left, Dana had struggled to make ends meet. For a while they had been dirt-poor. The fact that her father had made a new life for himself in the sunny state of Florida didn’t make being abandoned any easier to take. “Dana saw your body.”

“That wasn’t me. I was walking down the street when a guy got hit by a truck. I gave him first aid at the scene while we waited for the medics to arrive, but I couldn’t find a pulse. His head was injured, his face practically gone. He was the same height and general coloring, so I swapped my wallet with his and walked away. I figured I was only going to get an opportunity like that once.”

She locked on to the final part of Jack’s statement, a cold, uneasy suspicion forming. “Why did you need another identity?”

“I’ll get to that in a minute.”

She studied his appearance. The haircut was cool and he was tanned. He was wearing expensive shoes and a quality coat. His hands were scarred and calloused, but if he worked with boats and fishing line, that was to be expected. Evidently, Jack Jones was doing all right. “How did you find out about me?”

He stepped farther into the room. “I’ve kept tabs on you. I knew you were an agent. I saw the late news the day you got shot and caught a flight out.”

“Why?”

“I was worried about you. I didn’t like the way the shooting panned out, so I checked with a contact.”

The unexpected statement and the complete lack of expression that went with it made her stomach tighten. “What do you mean, you checked with a contact?”

His eyes were cold and very direct. “I used to be a hit man. That was the reason I left—not because I wanted to, but because I had to. I worked out of L.A., which is why I think I can help you now.”

For a split second she didn’t register any part of his statement other than the fact that her father used to kill for a living. Suddenly it all jelled: the gun collection, his disappearances. Thinking back, she had never entirely bought into the concept that he’d had a gambling addiction. “Did Dana know?”

“No.”

She reached for breath. For the first time she had an insight into the way her mother must have felt when she’d found out the man she had married was a con artist, only he wasn’t, he was worse than that. “Is Jack Jones even your name?”

“As a matter of fact, it is.”

If that was the truth, he was lucky. Jones had to be as common as Smith. Together with Jack, his name was the identification equivalent of being invisible.

He checked the door again. “I don’t have much time. The point is I think I can locate the shooter.”

“How?”

“Contacts. Leverage.”

Taylor felt herself go cold inside. “You’re still in the game.”

“No. I’m out, and it wasn’t a game. I got caught up in it when I was a kid, then I met Dana and we had you. I tried to leave but changing careers wasn’t an option.”

He mentioned a couple of organized-crime high-flyers, one now deceased, another who had done time for what amounted to little more than a misdemeanor and was now back in business.

Taylor stared at the lean, hard planes of his face. So, okay, her father had been a hit man, working for a crime syndicate. It was difficult to take. She was in the business of shutting down people like him. “Who’s your contact?”

He grinned quick and hard and for a moment she almost expected him to say, That’s my girl. “Sorry.”

“I could have you arrested and subpoenaed.”

“And lose the only chance you’ve got at finding out who pulled the trigger? I don’t think so.”

The ache in her chest intensified. “What can you tell me?”

“I don’t have a name yet. I know he’s not local, and that he hasn’t been in the game for long.”

“Who hired him? Lopez?”

“Who else?”

Now it was real.

She had used Lopez’s name to shock him, but he hadn’t shown any reaction at all, which told her more than she wanted to know about her own father.

He checked his watch. “When you’re discharged from here you need to get out of town, disappear for a while. Give me time to find him.”

He pulled a business card from his wallet. “I know you won’t want to contact me, but I’m going to leave this with you anyway.” He crouched down by her bedside cabinet, took out her purse and slipped the card inside one of the side pockets.

He straightened, the movement fluid for a man in his fifties, but then, not much about Jack Jones looked either old or decrepit. He had a toughness, an edge she recognized, and the reality of what her father was finally sank in. “Did you ever kill anyone?”

The glance he gave her was sharp and utterly neutral. “Be in touch.”


Seven

A week later, Taylor took a seat in Bayard’s office. The fact that she had made it up the front steps of the building, albeit with Dana’s help, was a major triumph given that she still felt as weak as a newborn baby.

Bayard shook Dana’s hand, his expression controlled. Colenso and Janet Burrows, who had been assigned her case, looked uncomfortable, and Dana was distinctly unhappy. She had tried to convince Taylor to wait until she felt better, but Taylor had insisted on the meeting. She was the victim of a professional hit. After months of having her credibility questioned it was finally clear that she wasn’t crazy and she wasn’t paranoid. She had answered Colenso’s and Burrows’s questions, provided a statement and waited as long as she could. Now she needed answers. And she wanted back into the investigation.

Janet leaned forward and poured coffee from the tray set on Bayard’s desk as Colenso ran through the ballistics report. Two slugs had been recovered, both from the fountain. The caliber of the bullets emphasized the fact that some kid high on meth with a Saturday-night special hadn’t just wildly discharged a gun into lunchtime shoppers and randomly hit her in the back. The larger caliber was usually associated with hunting weapons and sniper rifles, a much more exclusive club of killers.

Janet offered Taylor coffee, but she refused. She didn’t need food or drink. The way her heart was pounding, a shot of caffeine would finish her off.

Colenso slid a set of black-and-whites across the desk. A window in one of the photos was circled with black marker. An arrow indicated the trajectory.

Sixth floor, which would have given the shooter plenty of angle. “Have you got details of the tenant?”

Janet handed Bayard a cup, then set the coffeepot down. “The room was supposedly rented to an advertising firm. They never moved in. I checked the address and telephone number. The address was false, and the telephone was a cell phone that was only used for that one call.”

Bayard opened the file in front of him. These days he spent more time working budgets and politicians than he did taking part in investigations, which in Taylor’s opinion was a criminal waste. In the intelligence world, Bayard was a shark. He also had a formidable knowledge of every agency the Bureau liaised with, and a prosecution rate second to none. When it came to cutting through red tape and getting results, Bayard reigned supreme. It had been his quick action and commitment to keeping his people safe that had gotten her out of Eureka alive. If she trusted anyone’s opinion, it was his.

He slid a document across the desk. “We’ve gone over that room with a fine-tooth comb. So far, we have fifteen different sets of prints, but only three of them are traceable, and two of those belong to employees of the cleaning firm the building uses.”

Taylor skimmed the top page, which was a list of National Crime Information Center fingerprint identification reports. The two cleaners were female, one with a conviction for shoplifting, the other for prostitution. The third file belonged to Pedro Alvarez, and outlined a ten-year-old conviction for car theft. According to the information, Alvarez was now twenty-seven, which would have made him seventeen at the time he was charged.

“We’re talking to Alvarez.”

But the chances that they were getting anything

were low. Taylor didn’t need Bayard to tell her that the jump from teenage car theft to professional killing was huge. Which brought her back to the scenario that she had been shot by a professional, in which case the likelihood that he would have left any prints was close to zero.

She set the file down. “What about Lopez?”

The calling card had arrived the same week she had been shot. There was a direct connection. There was no way Bayard could dismiss it this time.

“We’re doing everything we can at this point.”

Her jaw compressed. “I can help. You need—”

“No.” Bayard’s expression was impassive.

She forced herself to calm down. “So where does that leave me?” He wanted her out of the office, on sick leave. It was even possible he would move her sideways in order to cut her ties to the Lopez case. Given what had happened, his logic was impeccable, but the thought of having to transfer out of D.C. made her head throb. She had been in line for a promotion. If she transferred to a field office, that opportunity would dissolve.

Dana touched her hand. “We’re leaving. She’s not supposed to get upset.”

Taylor stared at Bayard’s jaw. “I need to know about my job.”

Colenso set down his coffee cup. The clink was oddly loud in the silence of the room. Janet looked embarrassed.

Bayard slid another document across the desk. “I’m sorry. We’re running the paperwork now. The U.S. Attorney’s office and the U.S. Marshal’s office are both on my back. You’re too valuable to the prosecution for Lopez’s case to risk. They want you safe. All we need is your permission.”

The paperwork was instantly recognizable. Witness Security.

Dana’s hand tightened on hers. For that split second Taylor needed the anchor.

Lopez hadn’t killed her, but he had come close. He had taken out her career.



Out on the sidewalk a freezing wind swirled, tugging at the lapels of her coat as Dana attempted to hail a cab. With every breath icy air stabbed into Taylor’s lungs, cutting through the codeine and turning the low-key solo in her chest into a full-blown concerto.

Dana’s expression was taut as another taxi cruised by. “Damn, why won’t one stop? I don’t want you out here.”

Taylor’s cell phone buzzed, a welcome interruption. She needed something to do besides dwell on the fact that this was the first time since the shooting that she had been out on a city street, stationary and exposed.

The voice was low, modulated and instantly recognizable. “Rina.”

Mexico. Sun. Heat. Dry air that didn’t hurt to breathe.

She hadn’t ever seen a photo of the farmhouse Rina’s partner, J.T. Wyatt, had bought. She wasn’t even supposed to know where they were, but Rina had described the sprawling hacienda, mountains in the distance, a lush green river threading the dry landscape. It was a long way from cold weather and gray streets. “What’s wrong?”

The only reason for Rina to ring was if something had changed. Technically, she wasn’t supposed to ring at all.

“We’re pregnant.”

The day turned hazy. She caught snatches of Rina’s voice. “Hadn’t planned it… Had wanted to wait until Lopez was caught, but it happened, despite precautions—”

A baby.

Longing, unexpected and powerful, tightened the vise squeezing her chest. She blinked, cutting off the emotion. She didn’t want to need that—not yet. What she needed was to be happy for Rina.




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