All The Queen's Men

All The Queen's Men

By Linda Howard

PART ONE

Copyright © 1999 by Linda Howard

Chapter One

1994, Iran

It was cold in the rough little hut. Despite the blankets hung over the one window and the ill-fitting door, to block the escape of any telltale light, frigid air still seeped through. Niema Burdock blew on her fingers to warm them, her breath fogging slightly in the one dim battery-operated light that was all Tucker, the team leader, allowed.

Her husband, Dallas, seemed perfectly comfortable in his T-shirt as he calmly packed the Semtex blocks into secure sections of his web gear. Niema watched him, trying to hide her anxiety. It wasn't the explosive she worried about; plastique was so stable soldiers in Vietnam had burned it as fuel. But Dallas and Sayyed had to plant the explosives in the manufacturing facility, and that was the most dangerous part of a job that was already hair-raising enough. Though her husband was as matter-of-fact about it as he would be about crossing the street, Niema wasn't that blase about the job. The radio detonator wasn't state-of-the art; far from it. This was deliberate, a precaution in case any of their equipment fell into the wrong hands. Nothing they were using could be traced to the United States, which was why Dallas was using Semtex instead of C-4. But because their equipment wasn't the best available, Niema had gone to great pains to make sure it was reliable. It was her husband's finger, after all, that would be on the switch.

Dallas caught her gaze on him and winked at her, his strong face relaxing from its normal impassiveness into a warm smile that he reserved only for her. "Hey," he said mildly, "I'm good at this. Don't worry."

So much for trying to hide her anxiety. The other three men turned to look at her. Not wanting them to think she couldn't handle the stress of the job, she shrugged. "So sue me. I'm new at this wife business. I thought I was supposed to worry."

Sayyed laughed as he packed his own gear. "Heck of a way to spend your honeymoon." He was a native Iranian who was now an American citizen, a tough, wiry man in his late forties. He spoke English with a Midwestern accent, the result of both hard work and almost thirty years in the United States. "Personally, I'd have picked Hawaii for my wedding trip. At least it would be warm there."

"Or Australia," Hadi said wistfully. "It's summer there now." Hadi Santana was of Arabic and Mexican heritage, but an American by birth. He had grown up in the heat of southern Arizona and didn't like the cold Iranian mountains in mid-winter any better than did Niema. He would stand guard while Dallas and Sayyed planted the charges and was occupying himself by checking and rechecking his rifle and ammunition.

"We spent two weeks in Aruba after we got married," Dallas said. "Great place." He winked at Niema again, and she had to smile. Unless Dallas had been to Aruba another time, he hadn't seen much of it during their honeymoon, three months before. They had spent the entire two weeks lost in each other's company, making love, sleeping late. Bliss.

Tucker didn't join in the conversation, but his cool, dark eyes lingered on Niema as if assessing her; wondering if he had made a mistake including her on the team. She wasn't as experienced as the others, but neither was she a novice. Not only that, she could put a bug on a telephone line with her eyes closed. If Tucker had any doubts about her ability, she wished he would just come out and say so.

But if Tucker had doubts about her, then turnabout was fair play, she thought wryly, because she sure as hell wasn't certain about him. Not that he'd said or done anything wrong; the uneasiness that kept her on edge around him was instinctive, without any concrete reason. She wished he was one of the three men going into the plant, rather than remaining behind with her. The thought of spending the hours alone with him wasn't nearly as nerve-racking as knowing Dallas would be in danger, but she didn't need the added tension when her nerves already felt stretched and raw.

Tucker originally had planned to go in, but Dallas was the one who had argued against it. "Look, boss," he had said in that calm way of his. "It isn't that you can't do the job, because you're as good as I am, but it isn't necessary that you take the risk. If you had to, that would be different, but you don't." An indecipherable look had flashed between the two men, and Tucker had given a brief nod.

Dallas and Tucker had known each other before Tucker put this team together, had worked together before. The only thing that reassured Niema about the team leader was that her husband trusted and respected him, and Dallas Burdock was no one's pushover-to the contrary, in fact. Dallas was one of the toughest, most dangerous men she had ever met. She had thought he was the most dangerous, until she met Tucker.

That in itself was scary, because Dallas was something else. Until five months ago, she hadn't really believed men like him existed. Now, she knew differently. Her throat tightened as she watched her husband, his dark head bent as he once again focused all his attention on his supplies and equipment. Just like that, he could tune out everything but the job; his power of concentration was awesome. She had seen that level of concentration in only one other man: Tucker.

She felt a sudden little ping of disbelief, almost a suspension of reality, that she was actually married, especially to a man like Dallas. She had known him for just five months, loved him for almost as long, and in so many ways he was still a stranger to her. They were slowly learning each other, settling down into the routine of marriage-well, as routine as it could get, given their jobs as contract agents for various concerns, principally the CIA.

Dallas was calm and steady and capable. Once she would have described those characteristics as desirable, if you were the domestic suburban type, but basically unexciting. Not now. There was nothing staid about Dallas. Need a cat out of a tree? Dallas could climb that tree as if he were a cat. Need the plumbing fixed? Dallas could fix it. Need to be dragged out of the surf? He was a superior swimmer. Need someone to make a difficult shot? He was an expert marksman. Need to blow up a building in Iran? Dallas was your man.

So it took some doing to be tougher and more dangerous than Dallas, but Tucker ... somehow was. She didn't know why she was so certain. It wasn't Tucker's physical appearance; he was tall and lean, but not as muscular as Dallas. He wasn't edgy; if anything, he was even more low-key than Dallas. But there was something in his eyes, in his characteristic stillness, that told her Tucker was lethal.

She kept her doubts about the team leader to herself. She wanted to trust Dallas's opinion of Tucker because she trusted her husband so much. Besides, she was the one who had really wanted to take this job, while Dallas had been leaning toward a diving trip to Australia. Maybe she was just letting the tension of the situation get to her. They were, after all, on a job that would get them all killed if they were discovered, but success was even more important than escaping detection.

The small facility buried deep in these cold mountains was manufacturing a biological agent scheduled to be shipped to a terrorist base in Sudan. An air strike would be the fastest, most efficient way to destroy it, but that would also trigger an international crisis and destroy the delicate balance of the Middle East along with the factory. A full-scale war wasn't what anyone wanted.

With an air strike ruled out, the plant had to be destroyed from the ground, and that meant the explosives had to be hand-placed, as well as powerful. Dallas wasn't relying just on Semtex to do the job; there were fuels and accelerants in the factory that he planned to use to make certain the plant didn't just go boom, but that it burned to the ground.

They had been in Iran five days, traveling openly, boldly. She had worn the traditional Muslim robes, with only her eyes revealed, and sometimes they had been veiled, too. She didn't speak Farsi-she had studied French, Spanish, and Russian, but not Farsi-but that didn't matter because, as a woman, she wasn't expected to speak. Sayyed was a native, but from what she could tell, Tucker was as fluent as Sayyed, Dallas nearly so, and Hadi less than Dallas. She was sometimes amused by the fact that all five of them were dark-eyed and dark-haired, and she wondered if her coloring hadn't played nearly as large a part in her having been chosen to be a team member as had her skill with electronics.

"Ready." Dallas hooked the radio transmitter to his web gear and shouldered the knapsack of plastique. He and Sayyed had identical gear. Niema had practically assembled the transmitters from spare parts, because the transmitters they had acquired had all been damaged in some way. She had cannibalized them and built two she had tested and retested, until she was certain they wouldn't fail. She had also tapped into the factory's phone lines, a dead-easy job because their equipment was of early-seventies vintage. They hadn't gotten much information from that, but enough to know their intel was accurate, and the small facility had developed a supply of anthrax for terrorists in Sudan. Anthrax wasn't exotic, but it was sure as hell effective.

Sayyed had slipped into the facility the night before and reconnoitered, returning to draw a rough floor plan showing where the testing and incubation was done, as well as the storage facility, where he and Dallas would concentrate most of their explosives. As soon as the factory blew, Tucker and Niema would destroy their equipment-not that much of it was worth anything-and be ready to move as soon as the three men returned. They would split up and each make their own way out of the country, rendezvousing in Paris to debrief. Niema, of course, would be traveling with Dallas.

Tucker extinguished the light, and the three men slipped silently out the door and into the darkness. Niema immediately wished she had at least hugged Dallas, or kissed him good luck, no matter what the other three thought. She felt colder without his bracing presence.

After making certain the blankets were in place, Tucker switched on the light again, then began swiftly packing the things they would take with them. There wasn't much; a few provisions, a change of clothes, some money; nothing that would arouse suspicion if they were stopped. Niema moved to help him, and in silence they divided the provisions into five equal packs.

Then there was nothing to do but wait. She moved over to the radio and checked the settings, though she had checked them before; there was nothing coming over the single speaker because the men weren't talking. She sat down in front of the radio and hugged herself against the cold.

Nothing about this job had been a picnic, but the waiting was the worst. It always had been, but now that Dallas was in danger, the anxiety was magnified tenfold. It gnawed at her, that internal demon. She checked her cheap wristwatch; only fifteen minutes had lapsed. They hadn't had time to reach the facility yet.

A thin blanket settled over her shoulders. Startled, she looked up at Tucker, who stood beside her. "You were shivering," he said in explanation of his unusual act and moved away again.

"Thanks." She pulled the blanket around her, uncomfortable with the gesture, considerate though it was. She wished she could ignore her uneasiness about Tucker, or at least figure out why she was so wary of him. She had tried to hide her wariness and concentrate only on the job, but Tucker was no one's fool; he knew she was uncomfortable with him. Sometimes she felt as if they were in a silent battle no one else knew about, those rare times when their gazes would accidentally meet and distrust would be plain in hers, a slightly mocking awareness in his.

He never put a foot wrong, though, never did anything that would bring their discord into the open. His relationship with all three of the other men was both easy and professional. With her, he was unfailingly polite and impersonal, and even that was a measure of his professionalism. Tucker respected Dallas and certainly wasn't going to disrupt the team or endanger the job by openly antagonizing his wife. That should have reassured Niema on a couple of levels-but it didn't.

Until he put the blanket around her shoulders, there hadn't been a word spoken between them since the others left. She wished it had remained that way; keeping Tucker at a distance, she thought, was the safest place for him.

He sat down, as relaxed and graceful as a cat. He seemed impervious to the cold, comfortable in a black T-shirt and fatigue pants. Dallas had the same sort of internal furnace, because he seldom felt the cold either. What was it about men like them that made them bum so much hotter than the rest of the human race? Maybe it was their physical conditioning, but she herself was in very good shape and she had been cold the entire time they had been in Iran. She didn't wish they were cold, too, just that the damn anthrax facility had been built in the warm desert, instead of these chilly mountains.

"You're afraid of me."

The comment, coming out of the blue, startled her more than it had when he put the blanket around her, but not enough that she lost her composure. His voice had been calm, as if he were discussing the weather. She gave him a cool look. "Wary," she corrected. If he thought she would hasten to deny her uneasiness, the way most people would do when cornered, he was mistaken. As Dallas had learned, to his amusement more often than not, there wasn't much that could make Niema back down.

Tucker leaned his dark head back against the cold stone wall and drew one leg up, draping his arm loosely over his knee. Unreadable brown eyes studied her. "Wary, then," he conceded. "Why?"

She shrugged. "Feminine intuition?"

He began to laugh. Laughter wasn't something she had associated with Tucker, but he did it easily, his dark head tilted back against the wall. The sound was genuinely amused, as if he couldn't help himself.

Niema watched him, one eyebrow tilted as she waited for him to stop. She didn't feel the least impulse to join in his laughter, or even to smile. Nothing about this situation was funny. They were deep in Iran on a job that could get them all killed, and oh, by the way, she didn't trust the team leader one inch, ha ha ha. Yeah, right.

"Jesus," he groaned, wiping his eyes. "All this because of feminine intuition?" A shade of incredulousness colored his tone.

Niema gave him a stony look. "You make it sound as if I've been attacking you left and right."

"Not overtly, at least." He paused, a smile still curving his mouth. "Dallas and I have worked together before, you know. What does he say about your suspicions?"

He was utterly relaxed as he waited for her answer, as if he already knew what Dallas would have said- if she had mentioned her feelings to him, that is. She hadn't uttered a word of misgiving to him, though. For one thing, she had nothing concrete to offer, and she wasn't about to stir up trouble without proof other than her feminine intuition. She didn't discount her uneasiness, but Dallas was a man who dealt in hard realities, who had learned to disconnect his emotions so he could function in the dangerous field he had chosen. Moreover, he obviously liked, trusted, and respected Tucker.

"I haven't talked to him about it."

"No? Why not?"

She shrugged. Other than not having proof, her main reason for not talking to Dallas about Tucker was that her husband hadn't been wild about her coming on this job anyway, and she didn't want to give him an opportunity to say I told you so. She was good at what she did, but she didn't have the field experience the others had, so she was reluctant to cause trouble. And, she admitted, even had she known she wouldn't be comfortable with Tucker, she would have come anyway. Something primitive in her thrilled to the tension, the danger, the utter importance of what she did. She had never wanted a nine-to-five; she wanted adventure, she wanted to work on the front line. She wasn't going to do anything to jeopardize a job she had worked hard to attain.

"Why not?" Tucker said again, and a hint of steel underlay the easiness of his tone. He wanted an answer, and she suspected he usually got what he wanted.

Oddly, though, she wasn't intimidated. Part of her even relished this little showdown, getting their animosity out into the open and going one-on-one with Tucker.

"What difference does it make?" She returned his cool look with one of her own. "Regardless of my suspicions about you, I'm doing my job and keeping my mouth shut. My reasons aren't any of your business. But I'd bet the farm your real name isn't Darren Tucker."

He grinned suddenly, surprising her. "Dallas said you were stubborn. Not much of a reverse gear, was the way he put it," he said, settling his shoulders more comfortably against the wall.

Because Niema had heard Dallas mutter something very close to that, after one of the few times they had gone head to head about something, she found herself smiling, too.

In that more relaxed atmosphere he said, "What makes you think my name isn't Tucker?"

"I don't know. Darrell Tucker is a good-old-boy Texas name, and every so often I hear a little bit of Texas in your accent, so the accent and the name fit- but you don't, somehow."

"I've traveled a bit since I left home," he drawled.

She clapped her hands twice in mocking applause. "That was very well done. A homey piece of phrasing, the accent a little heavier."

"But you don't buy it."

"I bet you're very good with a lot of accents."

Amused, he said, "Okay, you aren't going to believe me. That's fine. I don't have any way of proving who I am. But believe me in this: My priorities are getting that building blown and all of us safely home."

"How can you get us home? We're splitting up, remember?"

"By doing all my preliminary work right, by anticipating as many problems as I can and taking steps to counteract them."

"You can't anticipate everything, though."

"I try. That's why my hair is going gray, I sit up nights worrying."

His hair was as dark as her own, without a silver thread showing. His sense of humor was wry, tending toward the ironic; she wished he hadn't shown it to her, wished he had maintained the silence between them. Why hadn't he? Why now, of all times, had he suddenly breached the armed truce?

"We're in."

She whirled to the radio set as the whispered words came plainly through the speaker. Incredulously she checked the time; thirty minutes had passed since she had last looked. She had been so focused on her confrontation with Tucker that she had forgotten to fret.

Like a flash, she knew: That was why he had done it. He had distracted her, using the one subject he knew she wouldn't be able to ignore.

Tucker was already at the radio, slipping on a Motorola headset. "Any problems?"

"Negative."

That was all, just three whispered words, but they were in her husband's voice and Niema knew that for now, at least, he was all right. She leaned back and focused on her breathing, in, out, keeping the rhythm regular.

There was nothing Tucker could do now to distract her, short of physical violence, so he left her alone. She checked the radio settings, though she knew they were right. She wished she had checked the radio detonator one more time, just to be certain. No-she knew it was working perfectly. And Dallas knew what he was doing.

"Has Dallas ever told you about his training?"

She flicked an impatient glance at Tucker. "I don't need distracting. Thanks for doing it before, but not now, please."

A faint quirk of his brows betrayed his surprise. "So you figured it out," he said easily, and she immediately wondered if distracting her had indeed been his intention. Tucker was so damn elusive that even when you thought you had him read, it was possible you were reading only what he intended you to read. "But this is more in the way of reassurance. Do you know about his training?"

"That he took BUD/S? Yes." BUD/S was Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training: extensive, and so grueling only a tiny percentage of men who tried actually completed the course.

"But has he told you what that training entailed?"

"No, not in detail."

"Then take my word for it, Dallas can do things no ordinary man would ever dream of doing."

"I know. And-thanks. But he's still human, and plans can go wrong-"

"He knows that. They all do. They're prepared."

"Why didn't he want you to go in?"

There was an infinitesimal pause, so brief she wasn't certain she had heard it. "Despite what he said, Dallas doesn't think I'm as good as he is," Tucker said with wry humor.

She didn't believe him. For one thing, Dallas respected him too much. For another, that tiny pause before he spoke told her he had been weighing his response, and his answer wasn't one that had required any weighing.

Whoever he was, whatever he was hiding, Niema accepted that she wasn't going to get any straight answers from him. He was probably one of those paranoid spooks everyone read about, who saw spies and enemies everywhere, and, if you asked him if it was supposed to rain the next day, would wonder what you were planning that required bad weather.

Sayyed's voice whispered over the radio. "Trouble. Activity in the warehouse. Looks like they're getting ready to make a shipment."

Tucker swore, his attention immediately focused on the situation. It was imperative the warehoused store of bacteria be completely destroyed before a shipment was made. The warehouse was usually deserted at night, with guards posted outside, but now there was activity that prevented Sayyed from planting his charges.

"How many?" Tucker asked.

"I make it. . . eight. . . no, nine. I took cover behind some barrels, but I can't move around any."

They couldn't let that shipment leave the warehouse.

"Dallas." Tucker spoke the name quietly into his headset.

"I'm on the way, Boss. My charges are set."

Niema's nails dug into her palms. Dallas was going to Sayyed's aid, but they would still be badly outnumbered, and by moving, Dallas was risking exposure. She reached for the second headset; she didn't know what she was going to say to her husband, but she didn't have the chance. Tucker's hand shot out; he jerked the plug out of the radio set and tossed the headset aside, his dark gaze cool and hard as he met her stunned look.

She found herself on her feet, her shoulders braced, hands knotted into fists. "He's my husband," she said fiercely.

Tucker put his hand over the tiny microphone. "And he doesn't need the distraction of hearing you now." He added deliberately, "If you try anything, I'll tie and gag you."

She wasn't without some training herself, and Dallas, once he realized he couldn't convince her to play it safe and sit home like a good little wife, had been teaching her how to fight in ways her self-defense class had never covered. Still, her level of expertise in no way matched his, or Tucker's. The only way she could take him, she thought, was to catch him totally by surprise, from behind.

But he was right. Damn it, he was right. She didn't dare say anything that could break Dallas's concentration.

She held up her hands in a brief gesture of surrender and moved three steps away. The hut was so small she couldn't go much farther anyway. She sat down on a pack of provisions and tried to beat down the suffocating waves of anxiety.

The minutes crawled by. She knew Dallas was creeping toward the warehouse section, using every bit of cover available to him, trying not to take chances. She also knew that every passing second put the terrorists that much closer to leaving with the shipment of bacteria. Dallas would be balancing caution with expediency.

Tucker spoke into the headset. "Sayyed. Report."

"I can't budge an inch. The truck is almost loaded."

"Two minutes," Dallas said.

Two minutes. Niema closed her eyes. Cold sweat trickled down her back. Please, she found herself praying. Please. She couldn't form any words other than that.

Two minutes could be a lifetime. Time itself could be strangely elastic, stretching until every second was ponderous, until the second hand on her watch seemed almost motionless.

"I'm in position."

The words almost broke her control. She bit her lip until the taste of blood filled her mouth.

"How does it look?"

"Sayyed's got his ass in a crack, all right. Hey, buddy, how many charges did you get set?"

"One."

"Shit."

One wasn't enough. Niema had listened to them, knew how many charges Dallas estimated it would take to completely destroy the facility.

"Hadi?"

"In position. Can't help you much."

"Start pulling back." Dallas's voice was even. "Sayyed, arm all the charges."

There was another silence, then Sayyed's, "Done."

"Get ready. Throw the pack under the truck, then run tike hell. I'll lay down covering fire. I'm gonna give us Jive seconds to get outta here before I hit the button."

"Damn. Maybe you should make it six," Sayyed said.

"Ready." Dallas was still utterly calm. "Go!"

Chapter Two

The staccato thunder of gunfire blasted from the radio speaker. Niema jerked as if some of the bullets had hit her, her hands pressed hard to her mouth to hold back the scream that clogged her throat. Tucker swung around to face her, as if he didn't trust her to keep silent. He needn't have worried; she was frozen in place. There was an animal-like sound, cut short. "Son of a bitch! Sayyed bought it." "Pull out," Tucker said, but there was a renewed burst of gunfire that drowned out his words.

And from the tinny speaker came a sound that made the hair on Niema's neck stand on end, a kind of hollowed-out grunt, underlaid by gunfire and a thudding sound.

"Ah . . . shit." The words were strained, thin; she could barely recognize Dallas's voice.

"Hadi!" Tucker barked. "Dallas is down. Get him-"

"No." The word came on an exhalation, long and deep.

"Hang on, buddy, I can be there-" Urgency was plain in Hadi's voice.

"Save yourself. . . the trouble. I'm gut shot."

The world went gray around her. Niema fought back the shock, fought back the sensation of her entire body falling apart as the bottom dropped out of her stomach and her lungs seized, unable to pump. Gut shot. Even if he had been in the States, with a trauma unit nearby, the injury was critical. Here in these cold, isolated mountains, with safety and cutting-edge medical help days away, it was a death sentence. She knew this; her mind knew it. But she rejected it anyway, recoiling from the knowledge.

There were more shots, very close. Dallas was still shooting, still holding them off.

"Boss ..." The whisper floated around the hut.

"I'm here." Tucker was still facing Niema, his gaze locked on her.

"Is . . . Can Niema hear?"

Dallas had to be going into shock, or he would never have asked, would have realized she could hear everything. She had wired the switch open.

Tucker's gaze never wavered from her. "No," he said.

More shots. The sound of Dallas's breathing, shallow and quick. "Good. I. . . I've still got the detonator. Can't let them leave with . . . that shit."

"No," Tucker said again. "You can't." His voice was almost gentle.

"Take . . . take care of her."

Tucker's face was a mask, his gaze locked on her face. "I will." He paused, and said, "Do it."

The explosion shook the hut, sending dirt cascading down from the cracks in the ceiling, rattling the door on its frame. The blast wave hadn't passed before Tucker was moving, ripping the headset from his ears and tossing it down. He picked up a hammer and began methodically destroying the radio; even though it was old and obsolete, it was functional, and their plan was to leave nothing that could be used. Reducing the radio to rubble took half a minute.

That done, he pulled Niema away from the packs of provisions and swiftly began repacking them, redistributing what they would carry. She stood numbly in the middle of the hut, unable to move, her brain frozen with shock. She was aware of pain; there was a great, clawing pain in her chest, as if her heart were exploding, and even that was somehow felt as if from a distance.

Tucker thrust a heavy coat at her. Niema stared at it, unable to comprehend what he wanted her to do with it. Silently he bundled her into it, putting her arms into the sleeves as if she were a toddler, zipping it up, tucking her hair under the collar as an extra buffer for her neck. He tugged gloves on her hands, and put a warm fur hat on her head.

He pulled a heavy sweater on over his head, then shrugged into his own coat. As he was pulling on his gloves, a low whistle sounded outside the hut, and he extinguished the light. Hadi slid in the door, and Tucker turned the light on again.

Even in the weakness of the single light, Hadi's face was drawn and white. He looked immediately at Niema. "God-" he began, only to be silenced by a quick motion from Tucker.

"Not now. We have to move." He shoved one of the consolidated packs into Hadi's arms, and slung the other two onto his own shoulders. He picked up a rifle, took Niema's arm, and led her into the night.

Their transportation, an old Renault, had died on them the first night, and all of Tucker's mechanical expertise could not repair a broken axle. Hadi glanced worriedly at Niema. She hadn't faltered during the two days they had been moving; she was like a robot, keeping pace with them no matter how hard Tucker pushed them. She spoke when they asked her a direct question; she ate when Tucker gave her food, drank when he gave her water. What she hadn't done was sleep. She would lie down when he told her to, but she hadn't slept, and her eyes were swollen with fatigue. Both men knew she couldn't go on much longer.

"What are you going to do?" Hadi asked Tucker, keeping his voice low. "Do we split up as originally planned, or stay together? You may need help getting her out."

"We split up," Tucker said. "It's safer that way. A woman traveling with two men would attract more attention than a man and his wife."

They were traveling northwest, through Iran's most populated area, but that was the only way to get to Turkey, and safety. Iraq was due west, Afghanistan and Pakistan were to the east, the splinter nations left by the breakup of the Soviet Union to the northeast, the Caspian Sea to the north and the Persian Gulf to the south, through very inhospitable desert. Turkey was their only feasible destination. From here on out, Niema would have to wear the traditional Muslim chador.

They had traveled at night at first, the better to avoid detection if there was any pursuit, though it was possible Sayyed and Dallas were thought to be the only saboteurs. It was even possible, Tucker thought, that no word of intruders had gotten out. The facility had been remote, with only one phone line going in. Dallas could well have pushed the button before anyone got to the phone, assuming any of the workers thought to make a call anyway.

The building was charred rubble. Tucker himself had reconnoitered, leaving Niema under Hadi's worried and watchful eye. As always, Dallas had been thorough; what the plastique hadn't destroyed, the fire had.

That was the one time Niema had spoken without first being asked something. When Tucker returned she stared at him, her dark eyes fathomless, haunted, somehow hopeful. "Did you find him?" she asked.

Startled, keeping it hidden, he said, "No."

"But-his body . . ."

She wasn't clinging to an irrational hope that Dallas was still alive. She wanted his body for burial.

"Niema . . . there's nothing left." He said it as gently as he could, knowing there was nothing he could do to cushion the blow but trying anyway. She had been a trooper all through the job, but now she looked so damn fragile.

Nothing left. He saw the words hit her, saw her reel with the shock. She hadn't asked anything since, not even for water. His own stamina was so great he could go for long periods before he was aware of thirst, so he couldn't rely on his own needs to remind him of hers. He set a time limit: Every two hours, he made her drink. Every four, he made her eat. Not that there was any making to it; she accepted whatever he gave her, without protest.

Now it was time for them to split up, as planned, but instead of Niema going with Dallas she would now be staying with him, while Hadi made his own way out of the country.

Tomorrow they would be in Tehran, where they would blend in with the population. Tucker would then make secure contact and, if there was no trouble, acquire transportation. Another day after that, and they would be just across the border from Turkey. He would abandon the vehicle and they would walk across during the night, in a remote location he had already scouted. Hadi would cross over at another point.

Hadi scratched his beard. Neither of them had shaved for two weeks, so they were decidedly scruffy. "Maybe I could scrounge around tomorrow when we get to Tehran, find a pharmacy, buy some sleeping pills or something. She's got to sleep."

They had stopped for a brief rest, sheltered by the lone remaining wall of a small mud house that had long since been abandoned. Niema sat a little way off to the side, alone in a way that went far beyond the slight distance between her and them. She didn't fidget. She just sat. Maybe if she cried, Tucker thought. Maybe if she let some of it out, exhausted herself, she would be able to sleep. But she hadn't cried; the shock had gone too deep, and she hadn't yet recovered from that enough for tears. The time for crying would come later.

He considered Hadi's suggestion, but didn't like the idea of drugging her, in case they had to move fast. Still.. . "Maybe," he said, and left it at that.

They had rested long enough. Tucker stood, signaling that the break was over. Niema stood too, and Hadi moved forward to help her over some loose, unbaked mud bricks. She didn't need the help, but Hadi had become as protective of her as a mother hen.

He stepped on a loose board. It tilted up and dislodged some of the bricks just as Niema stepped on them, shifting them out from under her feet. She staggered off balance, slipped, and landed on her right shoulder in the rubble.

She didn't cry out, her training not to make any unnecessary noise still holding. Hadi swore softly, apologizing as he helped her to her feet. "Damn, I'm sorry! Are you all right?"

She nodded, brushing at her clothes, her shoulder. Tucker saw the slight frown knit her brows as she brushed her shoulder again, and even that much expression was so alien to her face these past two days that he knew immediately something was wrong.

"You're hurt." He was beside her before he stopped speaking, pulling her away from the rubble.

"Did you jam your shoulder?" Hadi asked, frowning with concern.

"No." She sounded puzzled, no more, but she twisted her neck to look at the back of her shoulder. Tucker turned her around. There was a small tear in her shirt, and blood was welling from it.

"You must have fallen on something sharp," he said, and thought maybe the damage had been done by a shard of brick, but then he saw the rusty nail protruding about an inch out of a rotten board.

"It was a nail. Good thing you had a tetanus booster." He efficiently unbuttoned her shirt as he spoke. She wasn't wearing a bra, so he only undid the first few buttons, then pulled the shirt off the injured shoulder.

The puncture wound was purplish and already swelling, sullenly oozing blood. The nail had gone in high and right of her shoulder blade, in the fleshy part just beside her arm. He pressed on it to make the blood run more freely. Hadi had already opened their meager first-aid kit and extracted some gauze pads, which he used to mop up the blood as it ran down.

Niema stood motionless, letting them tend to the wound, which Tucker supposed was minor in relation to the concern both he and Hadi were showing. Any wound or injury that caused a delay was dangerous, because it would force them to stay in Iran even longer, so their concern was based in logic; but the biggest part of it, Tucker admitted, was the male instinct to protect the female. Not only was she the only woman with them, but she was already wounded, emotionally if not physically. Add in the fact that she was a lovely young woman who had quickly endeared herself to the team with her guts and wit, and of course they were jumping to protect her.

Mentally, he knew all the reasons, instinctive as well as personal. On a gut level, he knew he would move mountains to prevent anything from adding to the load of pain she already carried. He had promised Dallas he would take care of her, and no matter what it cost, he would keep that promise.

Sunlight gleamed on her bare shoulder, turning her skin to pearl. She had a pale complexion, despite the darkness of her hair and eyes. The elegant slant of her collarbone was exposed, and even as he applied an antibiotic ointment to the wound, Tucker couldn't help admiring the graceful structure of her body. She was remarkably feminine, despite her rough clothing and the fact that she wore no makeup, her hair wasn't combed, and all of them really, really needed a bath. She looked so female and elegant, he had constantly been surprised by her toughness.

"She looks like someone you want to put on a pedestal and keep from ever getting dirty or hurt," Dallas had said, before Tucker had ever met Niema, when he was putting the team together. "But she'd kick you in the teeth if you tried." He'd said it with intense male satisfaction, because she was his, and Tucker had shaken his head in wonder at seeing Dallas Burdock so obviously, unabashedly in love.

Tucker plastered a large adhesive bandage over the wound, then drew her shirt back up onto her shoulder. He would have buttoned the garment for her but she did it herself, her head bent over the task, her fingers slow.

Her reaction time was way off, dulled by shock and fatigue. If anything happened that necessitated quick action, he didn't think she could function. She had to get some sleep, he thought, one way or another.

He motioned for Hadi to step aside with him. "I'm not going to push her any further. According to the map, there's a small village about fifteen miles north of here. Think you can liberate some wheels for us?"

"Is the Pope Catholic?"

"Don't take any chances. We can't risk any pursuit. Wait until late at night, if necessary."

Hadi nodded his assent.

"If you aren't back by dawn, we'll move on."

Hadi nodded again. "Don't worry about me. If I don't make it back, just get her out."

"I plan to."

Hadi took some food and water with him and soon was out of sight. Niema didn't ask where he was going; she simply sat down and stared emptily at nothing. No, not emptily, Tucker thought. That would be easier to bear than the bottomless well of suffering reflected in her eyes.

The day wore on. He spent the time constructing a meager shelter for them, something to block the sun during the day and the wind at night. As they worked their way out of the mountains, the temperature had risen, but the nights were still damn cold. They ate, or at least he did; Niema refused more than a couple of bites. She drank a good bit of water, though, more than usual.

By nightfall, her cheeks were a little flushed. Tucker felt her face and wasn't surprised to find it hot. "You're feverish," he told her. "From the nail." The fever wasn't especially high, so he wasn't worried on that account, but her body didn't need this fresh assault.

He ate by flashlight. The fever robbed her of what little appetite she had, and she didn't eat anything that night; again, she drank a lot of water. "Try to get some sleep," he said, and obediently she lay down on the blanket he had spread out for her, but he watched her breathing for a while and knew she didn't sleep. She was lying there staring into the shadows, aching for the husband who wasn't there and never would be again.

Tucker stared at her back. She and Dallas had been circumspect in their behavior, refraining from public displays of affection, but at night they had slept next to each other, with Dallas spooned protectively around her and his big arm draped around her waist. She had slept like a baby then, utterly secure.

Perhaps she couldn't sleep now because she was alone and could feel the chill on her back. It was a simple thing, the kind of routine married couples seemed to develop so easily: the comfort of human warmth in the night, the sound of a loved one's breathing. Perhaps it was the trust, the intimacy, that meant so much. Intimacy didn't come easily to Tucker, trust even less so, but he knew it had existed between Niema and Dallas. Dallas's death had left her bereft, and she no longer found comfort in the night.

Tucker sighed inwardly. The sigh was for himself, because he knew what he had to do, and knew the cost.

He got a bottle of water and silently went to her, lying down behind her on the blanket and placing the water nearby. "Shhh," he murmured when she stiffened. "Just go to sleep." He curved his body around her, giving her his heat, his strength. Pulling a second blanket over them to keep out the cold, he anchored her to him with his arm around her waist.

He could feel the fever inside her; the heat emanating from her body wrapping around them both like a third blanket. Still, she shivered a little, and he pulled her closer. She lay on her uninjured left shoulder and held her right arm very still so as not to jar it.

"The fever's fighting the infection," he said, keeping his voice low and soothing. "There's aspirin in the first-aid kit, if you get too uncomfortable, but unless the fever gets a lot higher I suggest letting it do its job."

"Yes." Her voice was thin with fatigue, listless.

He stroked her hair, his touch gentle and tried to think of some way to occupy her mind. Maybe if she could just stop thinking she could sleep. "I saw a solar eclipse once. I was in South America." He didn't get any more specific than that. "The weather was so hot the air felt sticky. Cold showers didn't do any good; I was sweaty again as soon as I got toweled off. Everyone wore as little clothing as possible."

He didn't know if she was listening; he didn't much care. He kept that soothing, gently monotonous tone, his voice just barely above a whisper. If he could bore her to sleep, so much the better.

"It had been on the radio that there would be a solar eclipse that day, but the heat was so miserable no one much cared. It was just a little village, not the type to attract any eclipse chasers. I had forgotten about it myself. It was a sunny day, so bright the light hurt my eyes, and I was wearing sunglasses. The eclipse slipped up on me. The sun was still shining, the sky was blue, but all of a sudden it was as if a cloud had passed over

the sun. The birds all stopped singing, and the village pets hid.

"One of the villagers looked up and said, 'Look at the sun,' and I remembered about the eclipse. I told them not to stare, that it would blind them if they looked too long. The light was eerie, if you can imagine dark sunshine. The sky turned a really deep shade of blue, and the temperature dropped at least twenty degrees. It kept getting darker and darker, but the sky was still blue. Finally the sun was completely covered, and the solar halo around the moon was . . . spectacular. On the ground we were in a strange, deep twilight, and everything was quiet, but overhead the sky glowed. The twilight lasted for a couple of minutes, and during that time the entire village stood still. Men, women, and children; none of them moved, or spoke.

"Then the light began to come back, and the birds started singing again. The chickens came off roost, and the dogs barked. The moon moved on, and it was as hot as it had been before, but no one bitched about the weather anymore." Two days later everyone in that little village was dead-massacred-but he kept that to himself.

He waited. Her breathing was too shallow for sleep, but at least she wasn't as stiff as she had been before. If she relaxed, her body might take over and let itself sleep.

Next he told her about a dog he'd had when he was a kid. There was no dog, but she didn't know that. The dog he made up was a Heinz 57, with a long,

skinny body like a dachshund and a curly coat like a poodle. "Ugly little bastard," he said comfortably. "What was his name?"

Her voice startled him. It was low, almost hesitant. Something painful grabbed his chest and squeezed. "She," he said. "I named her Fifi, because I thought that was what poodles were named."

He told her tale after tale of Fifi's exploits. She'd been an amazing dog. She could climb trees, open most doors by herself, and her favorite meal had been-God, what was some kid's cereal?-Fruit Loops. Fifi slept with the cat, hid shoes under the couch, and once really did eat his homework.

Tucker embroidered on the fictional Fifi for half an hour, keeping his voice to a melodic rhythm, pausing every so often to check Niema's breathing. It got slower, deeper, until finally she slept.

He let himself sleep, but lightly. A part of him remained alert, listening for Hadi's return, or for any suspicious sound. He woke completely several times, to check on Niema and make certain her fever wasn't getting higher. She was still too warm, but he was satisfied there was nothing critical about the fever, just her body healing itself. Still, to be on the safe side, he roused her enough each time that she could drink a little water. As he had suspected, once she let herself go to sleep nature got the upper hand, and though he woke her easily enough she went right back to sleep the moment she closed her eyes.

The hours passed and Hadi didn't return. Tucker was patient. People slept soundest in the hours before dawn, and Hadi would probably wait until then. Still, every time he woke from his doze, Tucker checked his watch and considered his options. The longer he let Niema sleep, the stronger she would be and the faster she would be able to travel. He couldn't, however, afford to wait too long.

At five o'clock he turned on the flashlight and drank some of the water himself, then gently roused Niema. She drank the water he held to her mouth, then snuggled against him and sighed drowsily. "Time to get up," he murmured.

She kept her eyes closed. "Not yet." She turned to face him, and slipped her arm around his neck. "Mmm." She nestled closer, pressing her face into his chest.

She thought he was Dallas. She was still drowsy, her mind dulled by the hard sleep, and perhaps she had been dreaming about him. She was accustomed to waking in her husband's arms, to cuddling even if they didn't make love, and given the short time they had been married Tucker bet there hadn't been many mornings when Dallas hadn't made love to her.

He should shake her completely awake, get her fed, check her shoulder, and have her ready to move whether or not Hadi returned. He knew exactly what he should do, but for once in his life Tucker ignored the job. He tightened his arms around her and held her, just for a moment, something in him desperately hungry for the feel of her hugging him in return.

No, not him. It was Dallas she was holding, her husband she was dreaming about.

It cost him more than he wanted, but he took a deep breath and eased away from her. "Niema, wake up," he said softly. "You're dreaming."

Slumberous dark eyes opened, as black as night in the dim glow of the flashlight. He saw the dawning of awareness, the flare of shock in her eyes, followed by horror. She pulled away from him, her lips trembling. "I-" she began, but no other words came.

The sob burst out of her as if it tore from her chest. She rolled away from him and lay on the blanket, her entire body heaving. She made a long, low, keening sound, chopped by the convulsive sobs that ripped out of her throat. The dam of her control, once breached, collapsed entirely. She cried until she gagged, until her throat closed and no more sound came out. She cried until he thought surely the spasm of grief had to ease, but it didn't. She was still weeping when he heard the sound of a vehicle approaching in the dark, cold dawn, and he stepped out to meet Hadi.

PART TWO

Chapter Three

1999, Atlanta, Georgia

Delta Flight 183, Atlanta to London, was full. The first-class passengers had already boarded and made themselves comfortable, choice of reading material or drink, or both, in hand. The flight attendants had taken coats and hung them in the closet, chatted with those passengers inclined to be friendly, checked with the cockpit to see if the guys up there needed anything.

Congressman Donald Brookes and his wife, Elaine, were taking a vacation, the first in so long Elaine could scarcely believe Donald had agreed to the downtime. He had regularly put in eighteen to twenty hours a day on the job since first being elected fifteen years before. Even after all this time in government, there was a thread of idealism in him that insisted he give the taxpayers their money's worth, and more. She had gotten accustomed to going to bed alone, but she always woke when he came to bed, and they would hold hands and talk In the early days they hadn't been on anyone's A list, so she had spent a lot of evenings alone with the kids.

Things had changed somewhat. Donald was chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Relations, and now they were A list; as often as not they were at some function somewhere, but at least they were together.

Oh, there had been times when they had gone back home to Illinois, when Congress was in recess, but though the pace slowed then, Donald had used that time to catch up with his constituency. They hadn't been on a real vacation since he was first elected.

Elaine looked forward to days of sleeping late, ordering room service, and leisurely exploring London. Five days in London, then a short hop to Paris for another five days, then Rome and Florence. It was her dream vacation.

Two rows behind them, Garvin Whittaker was already absorbed in the papers from his briefcase. He was CEO of a cutting-edge software firm that had exploded in value over the past seven years, edging toward fifty billion. Not in Microsoft's league, but then, what was? When his current projects hit the market, Garvin figured the firm would double in value within five years. At least, he hoped it would; he dreamed it would. He was biding his time, building his market and strength, taking care not to tread on any giant toes. But when he judged the time was right, he would unveil the operating system he had developed, a system so streamlined and simplified- and so bug free-it would leave everything else out there in the dust.

In the first row was a UN delegate from Germany, holding his icy drink against his head and hoping his headache would abate enough that he would be able to sleep on the long flight. In seat 2F was a World Bank official, her brow puckered as she studied the Wall Street Journal. Growing up, she had always dreamed of being something romantic, like a brain surgeon or a movie star, but she had learned that money was the most powerful kick available, far more potent than any drug. She traveled all over the world; she had dined in Paris, bought clothes in Hong Kong, skied in Switzerland. Life was good, and she intended to make it even better.

A career diplomat was in seat 4D. He had been ambassador to France in the Bush years, but since was relegated to more minor roles. He was newly married, to a Chicago socialite whose family's wealth provided considerable clout; he expected to be ambassador again soon, and not to any Podunk country no one could find on a map.

In the coach section, Charles Lansky wiped sweat from his brow and tried not to think of the impending takeoff. He didn't mind flying, once the plane was airborne, but he was sick with fear during takeoff and landing. After a brief stopover in London, he was flying on to Frankfurt, which meant two takeoffs and two landings. Only a vitally important meeting could have induced him to endure so much.

College students on a tour of England, Scotland, and Ireland crowded onto the plane, each of them carrying the ubiquitous backpack packed with essentials: a bottle of Evian, a portable CD player, a collection of fave CDs, makeup if the student was female, a handheld computer game if male; perhaps an item or two of clothing. They were tanned, healthy, as alike as Teddy Roosevelt's teeth but still young enough to be convinced they were unique.

The usual assortment of business people and holiday-goers filed in, milled around, eventually took their seats. One young lady anxiously clasped an overnight bag on her lap, until the flight attendant told her it needed to be stowed and offered to find a place in the overhead bins for the bag. The young lady shook her head and managed to stuff the bag under the seat in front of her, though it was a tight fit and she then had nowhere to put her feet. Her complexion was pasty, and she was sweating despite the air pouring out of the overhead vents.

Finally the giant L-1011 pushed away from the gate and taxied out to get in line for takeoff. Seventeen other aircraft were ahead of them, inching toward the runway One of the pilots came on the intercom occasionally to give the passengers updates on their expected takeoff time. Most of the first-class passengers had already removed their shoes and put on the black travel socks provided in the gift bag Delta gave each first-class passenger on overseas flights. Magazines were thumbed through, books were hauled out, a few people already snored.

Finally it was Flight 183's turn. The big engines roared and the plane gathered speed and it rolled down the runway, faster and faster, until finally lift exceeded drag and they were airborne. There was some mechanical rumbling as the wheels lifted and folded and tucked into the belly of the aircraft. Flight 183 arrowed into the blue sky, steadily gaining altitude for the flight pattern that would take them up the east coast until, somewhere near New York, they would swing out over the Atlantic.

Thirty-three minutes into the flight, over the mountains of western North Carolina, Flight 183 disintegrated into a fiery ball that spewed flaming pieces of fuselage upward in a slow-motion arc, before the trajectory peaked and the pieces fell back to earth.

Chapter Four

Washington, D.C.

The two men sat companionably at a nineteenth-century walnut desk; the wood shone with a velvety sheen, and the top was inlaid with rose Italian marble. A handsome chessboard, topped with hand-carved pieces, was between them. The library in which they sat was masculine, comfortable, slightly shabby; not because Franklin Vinay couldn't afford to spruce it up, but because he liked it the way it was. Mrs. Vinay had refurbished it the year before she died, and he found comfort among these things she had chosen for him.

She had also found the chess set at an estate sale in New Hampshire. Dodie had loved estate sales, Frank remembered fondly. She had kept the gift of enjoyment her entire life, finding pleasure in many small things. She had been gone ten years, and not a day passed that he didn't think of her, sometimes with lingering sorrow but more often with a smile, because they were good memories.

As always, he and John had flipped a coin to see who made the opening move. Frank drew white and had opened aggressively, if conventionally, by moving the pawn in front of his king two spaces forward. Sometimes he preferred the more popular moves, because sometimes doing the expected could be the most unexpected thing to do.

Frank knew he was a very good chess player. That said, it was difficult for him to best John at the game. The younger man was as analytical as a computer, as patient as Job, and, when the time was right, as aggressive as George Patton ever dreamed of being. In chess, as well as in his chosen field, that made John Medina a dangerous opponent.

Kaiser, an enormous German shepherd, snoozed contentedly at their feet, occasionally emitting puppylike yelps incongruous with his size as he chased rabbits in his dreams. Kaiser's peacefulness was reassuring.

The house had been swept for eavesdropping devices that morning and again that night when Frank arrived home. Electronic noise prevented their conversation from being picked up by a parabolic mike, should anyone try to eavesdrop using that method. The security system was state of the art, the door locks the strongest available, the windows protected by steel bars.

The house, which from the outside looked like the ordinary house of a moderately prosperous man, was a fortress. Even so, both men knew fortresses could be breached. Frank's 9mm was in his desk drawer. John's weapon was in his belt holster, tucked into the small of his back. Frank's position as deputy director of operations, CIA, made him a valuable commodity in the espionage community; for that reason, very few people knew where he lived. His name wasn't on any deed or any utility record. Any calls to or from his private number were routed through several switching stations that made them untraceable.

For all that, Frank thought wryly, if any hostile government was given the choice between snatching him or snatching John Medina, he would be the one left behind.

John studied the board, idly stroking the rook while. he pondered his next move. Making his decision, he lifted his fingers off the rook and moved his queen's bishop. "How are my friends in New Orleans?"

Frank wasn't surprised by the question. Months, even a year or more, might go by without seeing John, but when he did, John always asked certain questions. "They're doing well. They have a baby now, a little boy born last month. And Detective Chastain is no longer with the NOPD, or a detective; he's a lieutenant with the state."

"And Karen?"

"Working in a trauma unit, or she was until the baby was born. She's taken a leave of absence, for at least a year, I think, maybe longer."

"I don't expect she'll have any trouble returning to her job when she's ready," John said, his tone mild, but Frank knew him well enough to read the request-or perhaps it was an order-underneath the tone. While he was formally John's superior, in truth John was pretty much autonomous.

"Not at all," Frank said, and it was a promise.

A couple of years before, both Karen's father and John's father had been murdered in a plot to cover up Senator Stephen Lake's hired killing of his own brother in Vietnam. In the process of uncovering the plot, John had become an admirer of both the plucky Karen and her tough-as-nails husband. Though they never knew his name, since then he had made a point of smoothing certain obstacles out of their way.

"And Mrs. Burdock?"

That question too was expected. "Niema's fine. She's developed a new surveillance device that's almost impossible to detect. The NSA has borrowed her for a couple of projects, too."

John looked interested. "An undetectable bug? When will it be available?"

"Soon. It piggybacks off existing wiring, but without causing a drop in power. Electronic sweeps can't find it."

"How did she manage that?" John nudged a pawn onto another square.

Frank scowled at the board. Such a small move, but it had moved the game in a different direction. "Something to do with frequency modulation. If I understood it, I could get a real job."

John laughed. He was a surprisingly open man, during those rare times when he could relax with people he could trust, and who knew who he was. If he liked you, then you were never in doubt of his friendship, perhaps because the majority of his life was spent in danger, in deep shadows, answering to different names and wearing different faces. He treasured what was real, and what was reliable.

"Has she remarried yet?"

"Niema? No." The pawn's position had him worried, and he continued frowning at the board, only half his attention on his answer. "She doesn't see anyone on a regular basis. She dates occasionally, but that's all."

"It's been five years."

Something in John's tone alerted Frank. He looked up to see the younger man frowning slightly, as if he were unhappy to learn that Niema Burdock was still single.

"Does she seem happy?"

"Happy?" Startled by the question, Frank leaned back, the chess game forgotten. "She's busy. She likes her work, she's very well paid, she has a nice home, drives a new car. I can take care of those things, but I can't direct or know her emotions." Of all the people for whom John was an anonymous guardian angel,

Niema Burdock was the one he followed the closest. Since he brought her out of Iran after her husband was killed, he had taken an almost personal interest in her well-being.

In a flash of intuition, a leap of reasoning that had made Frank Vinay so good at his job, he said, "You want her yourself." He seldom blurted out his thoughts in such an unguarded way, but he was, abruptly, as certain of this as he had ever been of anything. He felt faintly embarrassed at making such an observation.

John glanced up, eyebrows lifted quizzically. "Of course," he said, as if it were a given. "For all the good wanting does."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm scarcely in a position to become involved with anyone. Not only am I gone for months at a time, there's always a good chance I won't come back." He said it coolly, unemotionally. He knew exactly what the risks were in his profession, accepted them, perhaps even sought them.

"That's true of other professions: the elite military teams, certain construction workers. They marry, have families. I did."

""four circumstances were different."

Because Frank hadn't worked in black ops, he meant. John was a specialist in those missions that never saw the light of day, financed by funds for which there was no accounting, no records. He took care of what needed to be handled without the government becoming involved, to preserve deniability.

Frank had been considering broaching a subject with John, and now seemed like a perfect time. "Your circumstances can be different, too."

"Can they."

"I don't plan to die in harness; retirement is looking more and more attractive. You could step into my place without ever losing a beat."

"DDO?" John shook his head. "I operate in the field; you know that."

"And you know that you can operate wherever you choose. You're a natural for the job. In fact, you're better suited for it than I was when I took over. Think about it for a while-" The phone rang, interrupting him, and he broke off. The call wasn't unexpected. He lifted the receiver, spoke briefly, then hung up. "An agent is bringing the report over."

The chess game was forgotten, the real reason for their meeting taking over. Since Flight 183 went down the week before, the FBI and NTSB had been combing the rugged Carolina mountains collecting fragments, trying to piece together what had happened. Two hundred sixty-three people had died, and they wanted to know the reason. There hadn't been any unusual radio traffic; the flight had been routine, until the plane fell from the sky. The flight recorder had been found and preliminary reports said that the pilots hadn't indicated anything was wrong. Whatever had happened had been instant, and catastrophic-and therefore suspicious.

From one of his untold shadowy sources, John had heard whispers there was a new type of explosive device that airport X-ray machines couldn't detect, not even the CTX-5000 machines such as were used in Atlanta. He notified Frank, who quietly set about getting all the information available on Flight 183 as soon as NTSB and the FBI gathered it.

The crash site was difficult to work. The terrain was mountainous, heavily wooded, without easy access. The wreckage was strewn over an enormous area. Bits and pieces, both metal and human, had been found in treetops. Teams had been working nonstop for a week, first gathering the human remains and turning them over to forensic specialists for the almost impossible task of identification, then searching for even the smallest piece of the aircraft. The more pieces they found, the more complete the puzzle would be, and the more likely they were to discover what happened.

Fifteen minutes later an agent knocked on Vinay's door, rousing Kaiser. John remained in the library, out of sight, while Frank, with Kaiser beside him, collected the report.

Frank had requested two copies of the report, and on returning to the library he gave one to John. He sank back into his chair, his brow furrowed as he read. The report wasn't reassuring.

"Definitely an explosion. That wasn't really in doubt." People in the area had reported hearing an abrupt boom and seeing a bright flash. Whether or not anyone actually had seen anything was open to speculation, since the plane had gone down in the mountains where there wasn't a good line of sight in any direction. People generally didn't go around staring at the sky, though if the afternoon sun had glinted off the plane and caught someone's attention at just the right moment it was possible to have seen the actual explosion. More than likely, though, on hearing the noise, people had looked around, seen the smoke and arcing debris, and their imaginations took it from there and convinced them they had seen one hell of a fireball.

Rumors had immediately started that Flight 183 had been shot down by a missile. Congressman Donald Brookes, the House chairman of Foreign Relations, had been on Flight 183. Someone had to have wanted him dead for some reason, though all the reasons popping up on the Internet had been farfetched, to say the least. Proof of the plot, the missile theorists said, was that Congressman Brookes, who lived in Illinois, was reportedly going on vacation but for some reason was on a flight originating in Atlanta, instead of Chicago. That was obviously suspicious. Even after it was revealed that the Brookes's oldest son lived in Atlanta and they had visited him for a couple of days before leaving for Europe, the bring-down-a-plane-to-get-one-man theory persisted.

There was, however, no evidence of a missile. The pattern of rupture in the metal, plus the burn patterns and residue on the pieces of fuselage, all gave evidence that Flight 183 had been brought down by an internal explosion that had literally ripped the plane apart, blowing out a huge section of the fuselage and all of the left wing.

Preliminary chemical analysis indicated plastique. They had not, however, found any evidence of a detonator. Even in such a catastrophic explosion, microscopic and chemical evidence would have remained; if something existed, then it left its print.

"To have done this much damage, the bomb had to have been sizeable; the machines in Atlanta should have detected it." Frank was deeply worried; all luggage for the flight had been inspected, either by machines or humans. If, as John thought, the device was undetectable by their current technology, then they had a big problem on their hands.

Every piece of luggage, both checked and carry-ons, would have to be hand searched, but airlines weren't the only ones vulnerable. The possible applications of such a device were staggering. It could be used in mail bombs, to destroy federal buildings- any public building, actually-disrupt transportation and communication. No one in America paid much attention to the security of bridges, either, but let a few of them come down and traffic would grind to a standstill.

The explosive could have been disguised as something else and slipped through the machines in Atlanta. The system failed occasionally; nothing was foolproof. There should still, however, have been evidence of the detonator. They should have found a radio, or a mercury switch, or a simple timer-anything by which the explosion could be triggered. The detonator was actually how most bombs were spotted, because they were more easily detected when scanned.

John rubbed his lower lip and tossed the report onto Frank's desk. He had been most interested in the chemical analysis. The explosive found had some components in common with plastique, but there were some anomalies. "I'm thinking R.D.X." R.D.X. was cyclonite, or composition C-l. By itself it was too sensitive to handle, so it was usually mixed with a plasticiser, which would give it some of the same chemical elements as plastique. R.D.X. could be molded into any shape including shoelaces.

Frank looked up. "How? You know how luggage and packages are thrown around; an unstable explosive would have detonated on the ground."

"But what if it wasn't originally unstable? What if the compound deteriorates, and sets off a chemical reaction that causes it to explode? If you know the rate of deterioration, the explosion could easily be timed."

"Something that starts out as stable as plastique, but deteriorates and becomes its own detonator? Son of a bitch." Frank closed his eyes.

"There's always the chance some lone sociopath in a lab somewhere cooked this up, but what I'm hearing is that it came out of a top-secret lab in Europe."

"IRA?"

"I'm sure they would be standing in line to buy, but I haven't picked up any hints that they bankrolled the development."

"Who, then?"

"Take your pick; we aren't short on candidates." Terrorist groups proliferated all over the world. There were at least twenty-five hundred known organizations; some came and went, others had thousands of members and had been around for decades.

"And they'll all have this new stuff."

"Only if they have the money to buy it." The terrorist organizations might cooperate with one another, but it wasn't one big happy brotherhood. A new explosive would be a big moneymaker, closely controlled for as long as possible so there would be only one producer of it. Eventually, as happened to all new technology, everyone would have it; by then the means of detecting it would also have been developed. It was like a chess game, with moves and countermoves.

"If it's in Europe, and big money is behind it, then Louis Ronsard is our man," John said.

That in itself was a large problem. Ronsard was a shadowy Frenchman who gave his allegiance to no one group; he was the conduit, however, for many, and he had made an enormous fortune providing what was needed. He probably wasn't behind the development of the explosive, but he would be the logical person to approach as a middle man, one to handle payments and shipments-for a fee, of course.

Ronsard could be picked up, or eliminated; he wasn't in hiding. But his security was extremely tight, making a capture far more difficult than an elimination. Even if he were captured, John doubted he would give up any useful information. Sophisticated interrogation techniques could be countered by intensive training and mind control. Added to the problem of Ronsard was that he had powerful friends in the French government. He had been left alone, for all of the above reasons, but also because he was neither the source nor the user of all the nasty things he provided. He was the conduit, the controller, the valve. Eliminate him and another conduit would take his place.

Finding the source was the key, but John also had to discover to whom other shipments had already been delivered. To do that, he had to get to Ronsard.

Chapter Five

John Medina never stayed in the same place twice when he came to D.C. He had no home, literally. A home base gave anyone looking for him a starting point, and the thing about homes was that eventually, if you had one, you went there. So he lived in hotels and motels, condos, the occasional rented house-or a hut, a tent, a cave, a hole in the ground, whatever was available.

A condo was his preferred living quarters. They were more private than hotels, and, unlike a motel, had more than one exit. He didn't like sleeping in a place where he could be cornered.

The hotel he chose this time had wrought-iron balconies outside each room, which was what had made him decide in the hotel's favor. He had checked in earlier, checked for bugs, studied the security, then gone to meet Frank Vinay. Now, when he walked through the lobby to the elevators, no one who saw him would recognize him as the man who had checked in.

Disguise wasn't difficult. When he checked in he had been wearing glasses, had gray hair spray on his hair, cotton in his cheeks to fill out his face, and he had walked with a definite limp. He had also used a nasal Rochester, New York accent. His clothing had been the kind bought at a discount department store. There was no sign of that man now; he had removed the glasses and washed his hair, exchanged the gray polyester slacks for jeans, the plaid shirt for a white oxford, and the green windbreaker for a black jacket so exquisitely tailored it disguised the bulk of the weapon he wore and still looked fashionable.

He had hung the do not disturb sign on his door to keep hotel employees out. Most people would be surprised to find out how often during the day, while they were gone, the hotel staff was in and out of their rooms. Housekeeping, maintenance, management- they all had a master key and could get into any room. Plus there were professional thieves who hung around hotels and noticed the businesspeople-when they left, how long they were gone, etc. A good thief could always get into a locked room, so getting into a room was nothing more than a matter of picking out the target, hanging near the desk to find out how long someone was staying, then discreetly following to see which room the person entered. Next morning, call the room to see if anyone answers. Then go on up, and, to be on the safe side, knock on the door. If there's still no response, go in.

A DO not disturb sign at least gives the impression someone was in the room. He had also dialed a certain untraceable number and left the phone off the hook, so if anyone called, he-or she; thieves were not gender specific-would get a busy signal.

Hanging on the inside door handle was a small battery-operated alarm. If anyone ignored the sign and opened the door anyway, an ear-piercing siren sounded, which was certain to attract attention. John turned off the alarm by pressing a button on the small remote he carried in his pocket. The alarm was just a gadget, but it amused him and would startle the hell out of anyone trying to get in. He wouldn't have bothered with it if he hadn't left his computer in the room.

The room was as he had left it. He scanned for bugs anyway, as a matter of routine, and thought of Niema's undetectable device. Technology was a leapfrog affair; something new was developed and for a while that side-whatever side it was-had the advantage. Then a countermeasure was developed and the other side had the advantage. Niema's bug would give them the advantage now, but technology couldn't be kept secret forever and eventually the bad guys-the terrorists and spies and hostile governments-would have the bug, too. It could be used against him, used to capture or kill him. Niema would probably be pleased if she knew her invention had led to his death. She wouldn't know, however; very few people would. He had no family, no network of friends or coworkers. Those people who worked with him didn't know who he was.

He didn't have to hide his identity with Frank Vinay, of course, or with Jess McPherson, an old friend of his father's. It was a relief to be able to drop his guard, those rare times when he was with one of them, and just be himself.

Sitting at the desk, he disconnected the call, then booted up the laptop and hooked it to the phone line. A few typed commands had him inside one of the CIA's data banks. He was one of the few people left in the world who still used the MS-DOS operating system, but when he was working he vastly preferred it over any system that required a mouse. A mouse was great for Net surfing or playing games, but he'd found that, when he was working, a mouse slowed him down. He could type in the DOS commands much faster than he could take his hand off the keyboard, guide the mouse, click, and go back to the keyboard. In his world, seconds shaved off operating time could mean the difference between whether he got the information he needed and got out safely, or if he was caught.

There was a wealth of personal information on Louis Ronsard-his parents, where he lived growing up, his school records, his friends, his extracurricular activities. Louis hadn't been a deprived child; his father had been a wealthy industrialist, his mother a well-born beauty who had doted on her children- Louis, the oldest, and Mariette, three years younger.

Louis was attending the Sorbonne when his mother died of ovarian cancer. His father was killed five years later in an accident on the Autobahn while on a business trip to Germany. Louis had taken over the reins of the family business, and, for reasons unknown, gone renegade. From that time to the present there was precious little personal information to be had about him, though he was far from a recluse.

Ronsard owned a heavily guarded estate in the south of France. He employed a small private army to ensure his security; to be hired, one had to meet stringent standards. The Company had planted one of their own, to no avail; the agent hadn't been able to discover anything useful, because his own activities were so regulated. He was still in place, though; John made a note of the agent's name and cover.

There was a recent photo; Ronsard was a striking man, with slightly exotic features and olive skin. He wore his dark hair long, usually secured at the nape, but for social occasions he left it loose. In this photograph he was emerging from some banquet, clad in a tuxedo, with a glowing blonde on his arm. She was smiling up at him with adoration in her eyes. She was Sophie Gerrard, briefly Ronsard's lover, but no longer in contact with him.

There was a long list of Ronsard's lovers. Women found him very attractive. His liaisons never lasted long, but he was evidently considerate and affectionate before his roving eye landed on some other lady.

There was a diagram of the mansions' grounds, but nothing of the house itself. Ronsard entertained occasionally, but the affairs were very exclusive, and the CIA hadn't yet been able to get anyone inside as either a guest or domestic help. True, Ronsard hadn't been at the top of their to-do list, so little effort had been expended on doing so.

That was going to change, however. Ronsard had just moved to the top of the list.

John maneuvered his way through a few more files, checking on Ronsard's known finances, who had designed and installed the mansion's security system, if there were any existing wiring plans. He found little information; Ronsard had either wiped his records, or they had never existed in the first place.

When he finished, it was two a.m. He stretched, suddenly aware of the kinks in his shoulders. He had another meeting with Frank the coming night, and maybe they would have more information on the crash. Until then, he could relax.

He showered and fell into bed. He had the warrior's knack of quickly and easily falling asleep, but tonight he found himself staring at the ceiling where the tiny red light on the smoke alarm blinked on and off. He didn't have to wonder about his sleeplessness; he knew the reason.

Niema.

Dallas had been dead five years. Why hadn't she remarried, or at least dated someone steadily? She was young-only twenty-five when Dallas died-and pretty. He hadn't let himself ask, these past five years, hadn't let himself personally check on her, but this time he had figured enough time had passed and it was safe to ask, to find out she had a hubby and a kid or two, and had gone on with her life.

She hadn't. She was still alone.

Had she changed? Put on weight, maybe gotten a few strands of gray in her hair? A lot of people began to go gray in their twenties. Did her big dark eyes still look so deep a man could drown in them, and not care?

He could see her. She would never know. He could satisfy his curiosity, smile a little at the physical pleasure seeing her gave him, and walk away. But he knew he wouldn't see her; some breaks were better made cleanly. He was still who he was and did what he did, so there was no point in daydreams, no matter how pleasurable.

Knowing that was one thing; turning off those desires was another. He would do what he had to do, but what he wanted to do was hold her, just once, and let her know it was him she was kissing, him making love to her. Just once he wanted to strip her naked and have her, and once would have to be enough because he couldn't dare risk more.

But he had a snowball's chance in hell of having that "once," so finally he turned off the daydream, rolled over, and went to sleep.

John arrived at Frank's house as he had the night before, in a car with blacked-out windows. He backed into the attached garage, the doors of which slid up as he approached and down as soon as his car was inside. He had spent the day digging out more details about Ronsard, trying to plot a course on getting inside Ronsard's mansion and getting the information he needed; nothing had immediately presented itself, but eventually it would.

Frank opened the door, an abstract expression on his face that was evidently due to the sheaf of papers he still clutched in one hand. Frank never quit working, it seemed, not even at home; he simply changed locations. While Dodie was alive he had made a real effort to put his job aside and just be with her, but more often than not he had become lost in his thoughts and she would laughingly shoo him into his office. Now, with Dodie gone, Frank often worked sixteen hours a day.

"I was just getting coffee," he said to John. "Go on into the library and I'll bring it in there."

John stopped in his tracks and quizzically regarded his old friend. Frank wasn't a domestic person; he tried, but he didn't have a coffee-making gene in his body. John had quickly learned, after Dodie's death, that if he wanted coffee in Frank's house he'd better make it himself if he wanted it to be drinkable.

Seeing the look, Frank said irritably, "I didn't make it, Bridget did." Bridget was his housekeeper, an Agency employee who had looked after Frank and Dodie since Frank became DDO. She went home after serving Frank his supper and cleaning up the kitchen, assuming he was eating at home that night; she must have made the coffee and put it in a thermos to keep it hot

"In that case, yes, I'd like a cup." Grinning, John strolled out of the kitchen, with Frank's muttered "Smart ass," following him.

The door to the library was open. John walked in and stopped just past the threshold, his mind blank for a moment except for a silent, savage curse. Damn Frank and his meddling!

Niema Burdock rose slowly out of the chair where she had been sitting, her face pale in the mellow lamplight. Her eyes were as big and dark as he remembered; darker, narrowing as she stared at him and said one word, tight with disbelief: "Tucker."

John forced himself to move, to step inside the library as casually as if he had known she was going to be there. He closed the door; let Frank make of that what he pleased. "Actually," he said, as if five years hadn't passed, "you were right. Tucker isn't my name. It's John Medina."

He was never at a loss; he had been trained not to panic, not to lose focus. But this was a shock, the impact of her sudden presence as powerful as if he had been punched in the gut. He hadn't realized, he thought, how hungry he had been for the sight of her, otherwise why blurt out something he had kept from her five years ago?

Almost no one who met him knew his real name. It was safer that way, for both parties. So why had he told her, this woman who had every reason, if not to actually hate him, to at least avoid him? She had heard him tell her husband to, in effect, kill himself. She had been standing there staring at him with her eyes black as night, her face paper white with shock, when he told Dallas to press the button that would end his life as well as complete the mission. That wasn't something a woman forgot, or forgave.

She was almost as pale now. For a moment he hoped she hadn't heard of him before. It was possible; he was in black ops, his name whispered among people in operations, but she worked on the technical side and would seldom, if ever, come into contact with field operatives.

Her throat worked. "John Medina is ... just a legend," she said, her voice strained, and he knew she had indeed heard of him.

"Thank you," he replied casually, "though I don't know if I like the word 'just.' I'm real enough. Want to bite me to prove it?" He sat down on the edge of Frank's desk, one foot swinging, his posture totally relaxed despite the tension screaming through him.

"I thought pinching was the proven method."

"I prefer biting."

Color tinged her cheeks, but she didn't look away "Your eyes were brown," she accused. "Now they're blue."

"Colored contacts. Blue is the real color of my eyes."

"Or you're wearing colored contacts now."

"Come look," he invited. As he had expected, though, she didn't want to get that dose to him.

She gathered her composure and sank back into her chair. She crossed her legs, her posture as relaxed as his. Maybe more so; her movement riveted his attention on her legs, on the few inches of thigh she had revealed. He hadn't seen her legs before; she had worn pants, and often those had been modestly covered by the chador. They were very nice legs: slender, shapely, lightly tanned. She still looked to be in very good shape, as if she worked out regularly.

Abruptly aware of the response of his body, John snapped himself back under control. He glanced up and found her watching him, and automatically wondered if she had crossed her legs to distract him. If so, it had worked. He was irritated at himself, because sex was one of the oldest, most hackneyed distractions, and still he had let himself slip.

Frank opened the door, breaking the silence between them. He carried a tray on which there was a large thermos of coffee and three cups, but no sugar or cream. "Have you two introduced yourselves?" he asked smoothly, glancing at John so he could take the lead in giving Niema whatever name he chose.

"He says his name is really John Medina," Niema said. Her voice was cool and calm, and once again John had to admire her poise. "Five years ago I knew him as Darrell Tucker."

Frank flashed John another glance, this one full of surprise that he had so quickly revealed his true identity. "He goes by a lot of names; it's part of his job description."

"Then John Medina may be an alias, too."

"I can't give you any comfort there," Frank said with wry humor. "I've known him most of his life, and he's the real McCoy-or Medina, in this case."

John watched her absorb that, saw the quick suspicion in her eyes that Frank might be lying, as well. She wasn't a naive, trusting little soul, but neither was she experienced at completely hiding her thoughts and emotions.

"Why am I here?" she asked abruptly, switching her gaze to John.

Frank drew her attention back to him. "We have a ... situation." He poured a cup of coffee and handed it to her.

"How does that involve me? Could I have some cream and sugar, please?"

The simple question rattled Frank, unused as he was to domestic duties. He gave the tray a panicked glance, as if he hoped the requested items would materialize.

"Ah... I-"

"Never mind," she said, and composedly sipped her black coffee. "I can drink it like this. What's this situation?"

John restrained a bark of laughter. As he remembered very well, she always drank her coffee black. This was just Niema needling Frank a little, getting back at him for setting her up for such a shock. She had always been able to hold her own with the team, and the realization was still as surprising now as it had been then, because she looked like such a lady.

Frank looked at him as if asking for his help. John shrugged. This was Frank's little show, let him run it. He had no idea why Niema was there, except as Frank's heavy-handed attempt at a little matchmaking. He probably thought John needed some R and R, and since he had admitted being attracted to Niema-well, why not? Except Frank hadn't been in Iran, and he hadn't watched Niema's face while he ordered her husband to kill himself, or he would have known why not.

'Ah . . . we're very interested in the work you've been doing. An undetectable surveillance device will be invaluable. As it happens, we have an urgent need for it now. You know more about the device than anyone, since you designed it. You also have some field experience-"

"No," she interrupted. "I don't do fieldwork." She was pale again, her jaw set. She got to her feet. "If that's the only reason you wanted to talk to me, I'm sorry you wasted our mutual time. A phone call would have sufficed, and you could have saved yourself the trouble of bringing me here." She paused, then murmured ironically, "Wherever here is."

"You haven't heard all the details," Frank said, shooting another quick look at John. "And you are, might I add, an employee of the Agency, not a freelance contract agent."

"Are you going to fire her if she turns you down?" John asked interestedly, just to pin Frank down and make him squirm some more.

"No, of course not-"

"Then we have nothing more to discuss," she said firmly. "Please have me taken home."

Frank sighed, and gave up. "Of course. I apologize for the inconvenience, Mrs. Burdock." He wasn't a man accustomed to apology, but he did it well.

John let him reach for the phone before he interrupted. "Don't bother," he said easily, abandoning his lazy sprawl against the desk. "I'll drive her home."

Chapter Six

Niema got into the car and buckled her seat belt. "Shouldn't I be blindfolded or something?" she asked wryly, and she was only half joking. The garage door in front of them slid up and he pulled out, then turned left onto the street.

Tucker-no, she had to get used to thinking of him as Medina-actually smiled. "Only if you want. Don't tell me they blindfolded you to bring you here."

"No, but I kept my eyes closed." She wasn't kidding. She hadn't wanted to know where the deputy director of operations lived. She had lost her taste for adventure five years ago, and knowing where Frank Vinay lived came under the heading of information that could be dangerous.

Medina's smile turned into a grin. He was really a very good-looking man, she thought, watching his face in the dim green glow of the dash lights. In the past five years when she remembered him it had been in terms of what happened, not in how he looked, and his face had faded from her memory. Still, she had recognized him immediately, even without the heavy stubble of beard.

Seeing him was a bigger shock than she had ever thought it would be, but then again, she'd never imagined she would see him again, so there was no way she could have prepared for it. Tucker-no, Medina-was such an integral part of the worst thing that had ever happened to her that just hearing his voice had thrown her five years into the past.

"I should have known you were regular CIA, instead of a contract agent." In retrospect she felt like a gullible idiot, but then things were always clearer in the mind's rearview mirror.

"Why would you?" He sounded interested. "My cover was as a contract agent."

Looking back, she realized that Dallas had known, which was why he had urged Medina to stay behind rather than risk capture. And Dallas, an ex-SEAL accustomed to top security clearances and need-to-know, had kept the information to himself, not even telling her, his wife. But she worked for the Agency now, and she knew that was how things were. You kept things to yourself, you didn't tell friends or neighbors what you did for a living; discretion became second nature.

"Dallas knew, didn't he?" she asked, just for affirmation.

"He knew I wasn't a contract agent. He didn't know my real name, though. When I worked with him before, he knew me as Tucker."

"Why did you tell me? It wasn't necessary." She wished he hadn't. If even half the rumors she had heard whispered about the elusive, shadowy John Medina were true, then she didn't want to know who he really was. Ignorance, in this case, was safer than discretion.

"Perhaps it was."

His voice was reflective, and he didn't explain further.

"Why did you have a cover with us? We were a team. None of us were out to get you."

"If you didn't know my real name, then, if any of you were captured, you couldn't reveal it."

'And if you were captured?"

"I wouldn't be."

"Oh? How would you prevent it?"

"Poison," he said matter-of-factly.

Niema recoiled. She knew that some operatives, back in the tense Cold War days, had carried a suicide pill, usually cyanide, that they were to swallow rather than allow themselves to be captured. To know that John Medina did the same made her feel sick to her stomach.

"But- "

"It's better than being tortured to death." He shrugged. "Over the years, I've pissed off a lot of people. They would all like to have a turn removing my body parts."

From what she had heard about his exploits, he was understating the case. It was even rumored he had killed his own wife, because he discovered she was a double agent and was about to expose a highly placed mole. Niema didn't believe that particular rumor, but then neither had she believed John Medina was a real man. Not one of the people who talked about him had ever met him, seen him, or knew anyone who had. She had thought him a kind of... urban myth, though one restricted to intelligence circles.

She couldn't quite take in that not only was he real, but she knew him. And even more astounding was how accepting he was of everything entailed in being who he was, as if his notoriety was simply the price he had to pay to do what he wanted.

"Given your circumstances," she said with asperity, "you shouldn't have told me now, either." The fact that he had made her suspicious.

"Actually, I was so surprised to see you that I blurted it out without thinking."

The idea of him being taken off guard was so out of character that she snorted, and stretched out her left leg. "Here, pull this one, too."

"It's true," he murmured. "I didn't know you were going to be there."

"You had no idea Mr. Vinay wanted me to ... whatever it was he wanted me to do? And you just happened to show up? How likely is that?"

"Not very, but unlikely things happen every day."

"Does he expect you to talk me into taking the job?"

"Maybe. I don't know what he was thinking." Irritation colored his voice now. "I suspect, though, that he's working two angles. You'll have to ask him what those angles are."

"Since I'm not taking the job, whatever it is, it doesn't matter what the angles are, does it?"

He grinned suddenly. "I don't think he was expecting to be turned down, especially not so fast. Not many people can tell him no."

"Then he needed the experience."

He said admiringly, "No wonder Dallas was so crazy about you. Not many people stood up to him, either. He looked as tough as he was."

Yes, he had. Dallas had been almost six-four and weighed two hundred and thirty-five hard-muscled pounds. His biggest strength hadn't been his body, though, as superbly conditioned as it was; his mind, his determination and focus, were what had made him ... extraordinary.

She had never been able to talk about Dallas to anyone. For the past five years her memories of him had stayed bottled up inside; they hadn't been married very long, hadn't known each other very long, so they hadn't had time to develop a circle of friends. Because of their jobs they had traveled a lot; they had gotten married in a hurry in Reno, had that wonderful honeymoon in Aruba, then Dallas had been gone for six weeks and she had been in Seattle working on surveillance for Customs. With one thing or another, they hadn't even met each other's families.

After Dallas's death she had gone to Indiana and met his folks, held hands, and cried with them, but they had been too shocked, still too involved in the whys and hows to reminisce. She had written to them occasionally, but they hadn't had time to develop a relationship before Dallas's death, and after he was gone neither party seemed to have the spirit to develop one now.

Her own family, her nice, normal suburban family in Council Bluffs, Iowa, had been sympathetic and , caring, but neither were they completely able to hide their disapproval of her and Dallas being in Iran in the first place. Her entire family, parents, brothers Mason and Sam, sister Kiara, wanted nothing more than the familiar routine of nine-to-five, marriage, kids, living in the same town from cradle to grave, knowing everyone in the neighborhood, shopping at the same grocery store every week. They hadn't known what to do with the cuckoo in their nest, hadn't had any idea of the restlessness to see more, the urge to do more, that had driven Niema to leave her hometown and seek out adventure.

She had paid penance for the last five years and lived alone with memories that no one else shared. She might whisper Dallas's name in her thoughts, or sometimes when she was alone the grief would well up and she would say his name aloud, an aching, unanswered cry, but she hadn't been able to talk about him with anyone.

But Medina had known him, had been there. He would understand. He was, of all people, the only one who would fully understand.

She hadn't resisted letting him drive her home; her guilt wasn't his fault. Maybe she needed to talk to him, to put this part of the past behind her. She might have already done it, had she known how to contact him, but after they reached Paris he had vanished.

Lacing her hands in her lap, she stared out the windshield as the dark streets wound by. She wondered if Dallas would love her now, if he would even recognize the woman she had become. He had fallen in love with a gutsy young woman who'd had a taste for adventure. Those days were over, though. She was through taking risks.

"I never thanked you," she murmured. "For what you did."

His eyebrows lifted in surprise, and he slanted a quick look at her. "Thank me?"

She got the impression he wasn't just surprised, but astounded. "For getting me out of Iran," she explained and wondered why she needed to. "I know I was a liability coming out." Basket case was actually a better description. Long patches of those days were lost from her memory; she couldn't remember leaving the hut at all. She did remember walking through the cold, dark mountains, her emotional misery so intense that she hadn't felt any physical pain.

"I promised Dallas."

The words were simple, and ironclad.

It hurt to hear Dallas's name spoken aloud. In five years, not a day had gone by that she hadn't thought about her husband. The terrible pain was gone, replaced sometimes by an ache, a loneliness, but mostly she remembered the good times she'd had with him. She regretted that they hadn't had more time together, that they hadn't had the chance to learn all the little things about each other. Hearing his name brought back the ache, but it was softened now, gentled into something bearable, and she could hear the regret in Medina's voice. What time hadn't softened was her own guilt, the knowledge that Dallas wouldn't have been on that job if she hadn't wanted to take it.

And perhaps she wasn't the only one who felt guilty. Medina, under whatever guise, struck her as a man who would do what was expedient and then forget about it, but he hadn't. He had taken care of her, just as he had promised Dallas, when leaving her to freeze to death in the mountains would have been much easier. She couldn't imagine what had motivated him, but she was deeply grateful all the same. "Do you think I blamed you?"' she asked softly. "No. I never did."

Again she had surprised him. Looking at him, she saw the way his jaw tightened. "Maybe you should have," he replied.

"Why? What could you have done?" She had relived that night a thousand times on the hard journey to accepting reality. "We never could have gotten him out of the plant alive, much less out of Iran. You knew it. He knew it too. He chose to complete the mission and chose a quick death over a slow, terrible one." She managed a crooked smile. "Like you with your cyanide pill."

"I'm the one who told him to push the button."

"He would have done it no matter what you said. He was my husband, and I knew when I married him that he was a damn hero." She had known the type of man Dallas was, known that he would feel he had to complete the job at all costs, and that cost had included his life.

Medina fell silent, concentrating on his driving. She gave him directions on the next turn; she lived in McLean, on the same side of the river as Langley, so the commute was easy.

Once before she had sat beside him as he drove through the night, and he had been silent then, too. It was after Hadi had "liberated" a 1968 Ford Fairlane from the Iranian village, and they had driven into Tehran together. Then Hadi had split off, and she and Medina had gone on alone. She had been feverish and aching, battered by grief and guilt, barely functional.

Medina had taken care of her. When the nail wound in her arm became infected, from somewhere he procured a vial of antibiotic and gave her an injection. He made certain she ate and slept, and he got her across the border into Turkey. He had been there during the first awful paroxysm of grief and hadn't tried to comfort her, knowing that weeping was better than holding it in.

All in all, she owed this man her life.

Blaming Medina would have been easy, much easier than blaming herself. But the inner steel that had attracted Dallas to her in the first place made it impossible, after his death, for her to do anything but face the truth: When Medina approached her and Dallas about the job, Dallas wanted to decline. She was the one who wanted to take it. She could tell herself that the job had been important, and it had been, but there had been others Medina could have recruited if she and Dallas had turned him down.

Yes, Dallas had been very good at explosives. She was very good with electronics, whether it was putting together a functional radio or detonator or bugging a phone line. But other people were also good at those things, and they would have done the job just as well. She had wanted to go, not because she was indispensable, but because she craved the adventure.

As a child she had always been the one to climb highest in the tree, to tie bed sheets together and use them to slide down from a second-story window. She loved roller coasters and white-water rafting and had even toyed with the idea, during high school, of working on a bomb squad. To her parents' relief she had instead begun studying electronics and languages, only to find that her expertise took her farther away from home and into more danger than she ever would have gone with the local bomb squad.

Niema knew her own nature. She loved the thrill, the adrenaline rush, of danger. She had been seeking that thrill, though in pursuit of a legitimate goal, and she had gotten Dallas killed. If not for her, they would have been looking for a home on the North Carolina coast, as Dallas had wanted.

If not for her, Dallas would still be alive.

So she had given it up, that high-voltage life she had so loved. The cost was too high. Dallas's last thought had been for her, and that knowledge meant too much for her to carelessly put her life in jeopardy again.

Medina pulled up to the curb just past her driveway, then reversed into it so the car was heading out. House key in hand, she got out of the car. Dallas had also parked so the car was heading out, too, a simple precaution that allowed for faster movement and made it more difficult to be blocked in.

Funny how she hadn't thought about that in years; she simply pulled into the garage, as millions of other people did. But Medina's method of parking brought so many things back to her in a rush: the sudden alertness, the clarity of her senses, the quickened pulse. She found herself looking around, examining shadows and searching with her peripheral vision for movement.

Medina had done the same thing, his surveillance much faster and routine.

"Damn it," Niema said irritably and marched up the sidewalk to the curved archway that sheltered her front door.

" 'Damn it,' what?" He was beside her, moving silently, positioning himself so that he reached the archway first. No assailants lurked there, not that she had expected any. She just wished she hadn't noticed what he was doing.

"Damn it, I spend half an hour with you and already I'm looking for assassins in the bushes."

"There's nothing wrong with being alert and aware of your surroundings."

"Not if I were Secret Service, or even a cop, but I'm not. I just fiddle with gadgets. The only thing likely to be lurking in my bushes is a cat."

He started to reach for her house key, but she stopped him with a look. "You're making me paranoid. Is there any reason for all this?" she asked as she unlocked the door herself and opened it. Nothing sinister happened; there were no shots, no explosions.

"Sorry. It's just a habit." She had left a couple of lights on and he looked inside, his expression interested.

"Would you like to come in? We didn't get around to drinking any of the coffee at Vinay's house." Until she heard the words, she hadn't known she was going to invite him in. They weren't exactly on easy terms, though to tell the truth she was surprised at how easy it had been to talk to him. Still, he was John Medina, not a steady, reliable, respectable bureaucrat who had just taken her out to dinner.

He stepped inside, his head up and alert, his gaze moving around, absorbing details, watching as she opened the hall closet door and disarmed the security system. She had the sudden impression that he could describe everything he had seen in that brief sweep, and perhaps even tell her the security code.

She started to close the closet door and he said, "Humor me. Reset the alarm."

Because he had good reason to be acutely security conscious, she did.

Niema had bought the house three years before, when a hefty raise had given her the means to buy instead of rent, even with the outrageous property values around D.C. It was too big for one person, with three bedrooms and two-and-a-half baths, but she had justified the size by telling herself she would have space for her family to come visit, though they never had, and that the three bedrooms would make it easier to sell if she ever decided she wanted something else.

The house was vaguely Spanish in style, with arched doors and windows. She had painted the interior walls herself, choosing a soft peach for most of the house while her furnishings were dark green and turquoise. The carpet was an undistinguished beige, but it had been in good shape, so instead of replacing it she had covered it with a large rug in a geometric pattern of greens, blues, and peaches. The effect was cool and welcoming, feminine without being fussy.

"Nice," he said, and she wondered what conclusions he had drawn about her by seeing the way she had furnished her house.

"The kitchen is this way." She led the way, turning on the overhead light. She loved her kitchen. The room was long, with a bank of windows on the right wall. A long, narrow island topped with a mosaic of blue and terra-cotta tiles provided a wonderful work area for any cooking project, no matter how ambitious. Small pots of herbs grew on the window sills, lending their fragrance to the air. The far end of the room was a cozy breakfast nook, the small table and two chairs flanked by lush ferns.

She began making coffee, while Medina went to the windows and closed all the blinds. "Doesn't it get old?" she asked. "Having to always be on guard?"

"I don't even think about it now, I've done it for so long. And you should close the blinds anyway." Hands in his pockets, he strolled around the kitchen. Pausing in front of the block of oak that held her knife set, he pulled out the chef's knife and tested its edge on his thumb, then returned it to its slot. His next stop was the back door, the top half of which was glass; he closed the blinds there too and checked the lock.

"I usually do. I don't believe in inviting trouble." As soon as the words were out, she realized her own lie. Trouble didn't come any bigger than John Medina, and inviting him in was exactly what she had done.

"You need a stronger lock here," he said absently. "In fact, you need a new door. All anyone has to do is pop out one of these panes of glass, reach in, and unlock the door."

"I'll see to it first thing in the morning."

The dryness of her tone must have reached him, because he looked over at her and grinned. "Sorry. You already know all that, right?"

"Right." She took down two cups from the cabinets. "The crime rate in this neighborhood is low, and I do have the security system. I figure if anyone wanted in, they could break any number of windows and get in through them, not just the ones in the door."

He pulled one of the tall stools away from the island and propped one hip on it. He looked relaxed, she thought, though she wondered if he ever truly was, given who he was and what he did. She poured the coffee and set one cup in front of him, then faced him across the tiled island top. "Okay, now tell me why you drove me home, and don't say it was for old time's sake."

"Then I won't." He seemed to be lost in thought for a moment as he sipped his coffee, but whatever distracted him was quickly gone. "How undetectable is this new bug you've developed? Tell me about it."

She made a face. "Nothing is totally undetectable, you know. But it doesn't cause a fluctuation in voltage, so an oscilloscope can't pick it up. If anyone swept with a metal detector, though, that's a different story."

"Frank seemed excited about it."

Niema was immediately wary. "It isn't that big a deal, because like I said, it's good only in certain situations. If you know how someone routinely sweeps for surveillance devices, then you can tailor the bug to fit. Why would he even mention it to you?" The bug had useful applications, but it was far from being an earth-shattering discovery that was going to change the face of intelligence gathering. Why would the deputy director of operations even know about it, much less call her to a meeting at his private residence?

"I asked how you were doing. He told me what you've been working on."

Her wariness turned into outright suspicion. Okay, it was feasible that Medina would ask about her, but that didn't explain why Vinay would know anything at all about her, much less anything about her current project.

"Why would the DDO know anything about me? We work in totally different departments." The vast majority of CIA employees were not the glamorous operatives of Hollywood fame; they were clerks and analysts and techno nerds. Until Iran, Niema had craved the thrill of fieldwork, but not now. Now she was content to work on the electronics side of intelligence gathering and come home to her own house every night.

"Because I asked him to keep tabs on you."

The bald admission astonished her. "Why would you do that?" She didn't like the idea of someone constantly checking up on her.

"I wanted to know if you were all right, plus I never lose track of someone whose expertise I might want to use again."

A chill ran up her spine. Now she knew why he'd driven her home; he wanted to draw her back into that world she had walked away from when Dallas died. He was going to figuratively wave a shot of whiskey under an alcoholic's nose, lure her away from the straight and narrow. He couldn't do it unless she still had the old urge to find that adrenaline rush, she thought in growing panic. If she had truly changed, nothing he could say would entice her away from the safe life she had built.

She thought she had changed. She thought the hunger for excitement was gone. Why, then, did she feel so panicky, as if the smell of adventure was going to make her fall off the wagon?

"Don't you dare ask-" she began.

"I need you, Niema."

Chapter Seven

Damn it, why hadn't she remarried? John thought savagely. Or at least gotten herself safely involved with some steady, nine-to-five bureaucrat?

He had stayed away from her for a lot of very good reasons. His job wasn't conducive to relationships. He had brief affairs, and nothing resembling an emotional attachment. He was away for months at a time, with no communication during those times. His life expectancy sucked.

Moreover, he had thought he would be the last person on earth she'd ever want to see. He was staggered to realize she didn't blame him for Dallas's death, had never blamed him. Even though she had never trusted him, she didn't lay that at his door. It took a person of excruciating fairness to absolve him of all blame as she had done.

He had learned not to agonize over the choices he had to make. Some of them were hard decisions, and every one of them had left their mark on his soul, or what was left of it. But other people seldom saw things the same way, and that, too, he'd learned to shrug off. As his father's old friend Jess McPherson once said, he was hell on people. He used them, exploited them, and then either betrayed them or simply disappeared from their lives. The very nature of his job demanded that he not let anyone get dose enough to touch him emotionally. He had forgotten that once and let a woman get close to him; hell, he had even married her. Venetia had been a disaster, both professionally and personally, and in the fourteen years since he had been strictly solo.

Several times during the past five years he had been relieved that Niema Burdock probably hated his guts. That put her safely out of his range and killed the occasional temptation to get in touch with her. It was better that way. He would just check on her now and then, make certain she was all right-after all, he'd promised Dallas he would take care of her-and that would be that.

He had expected her to find someone else. She was young, only twenty-five when she was widowed, and both smart and pretty. He had wanted her to find someone else, because that would put her forever out of reach. But she hadn't, and he was through with being noble.

He wasn't giving her any more chances.

But she would run like hell if he simply asked her out. He would have to play her gently, like taking a world-record trout on gossamer line, never letting her feel the hook that was reeling her in until it was too late for escape. On his side was her own nature, the adventurousness she seemed determined to bury, and a very real situation that needed to be finessed. Weighed against him was the fact that, despite the uneasy bond forged between them in Iran, she didn't trust him; he'd always known she was smart.

Frank had asked her to his house on a bogus excuse, in a well-meant but awkward attempt to do a little matchmaking. Well, maybe it had worked. And maybe the excuse wasn't so bogus after all. John's mind raced, weighing risks and benefits. He decided to go for it.

"Delta Flight 183 was sabotaged. The FBI labs have turned up traces of explosive, but no detonator. The stuff seems to be a new, self-detonating compound, probably based on RDX and developed in Europe."

She put her hands over her ears. "I don't want to hear this."

John moved around the island and took her hands down, holding her with his fingers wrapped around her slender wrists. "Anything in Europe goes through an arms dealer named Louis Ronsard. He lives in the south of France."

"No," she said.

"I need you to help me get into his files and find out where the stuff is made and who has already gotten a shipment of it."

"No," she said again, but with a touch of desperation in her voice. She didn't try to pull away from him.

"Ronsard is susceptible to a pretty face-"

"Good God, you want me to whore for you?" she asked incredulously, dark eyes narrowing in dangerous warning.

"Of course not," he snapped. No way in hell would he let Ronsard, or anyone else, have her. "I want you to get an invitation to his villa so you can put a bug in his office."

"There are probably a thousand people in this city alone who could do that. You don't need me."

"I need you. Of those thousand people who could do the work, how many of them are women, because I can guarantee you no guy is going to catch Ronsard's interest and get invited to his villa. How many? Twenty, maybe? Say a hundred. Ronsard is thirty-five; how many women out of that hundred are roughly his age? And out of that number, how many of them are as attractive as you?"

She jerked on her wrists. John merely tightened his hold, while taking care not to hurt her. She was so close he could see the velvety texture of her skin. "You speak French-"

"I'm rusty."

"You'd pick it up again in no time. I need someone who's young, pretty, speaks the language, and has the skill. You meet all the qualifications."

"Get someone else!" she said furiously. "Don't try to tell me you couldn't find a contract agent who met all your criteria, someone who wouldn't know your real name. You make it sound like I'm some Mata Hari, but I've never done any undercover work at all. I'd probably get us both killed-"

"No you wouldn't. You've been on other ops-"

"Five years ago. And I just did technical stuff, not any role-playing." She added coldly, "That's your forte."

He let the slam roll off his back. After all, she was right. "I need you," he repeated. "Just this once."

"This once until something else comes up and you decide you 'need' me again."

"Niema..." He rubbed his thumbs over the insides of her wrists in a subtle caress, then released her and stepped away to pick up his coffee cup. He had pushed her enough physically; now was the time to back off and give her back control of herself, so she wouldn't feel as threatened. "I've seen you work. You're fast, you're good, and you can build a transmitter from pieces of junk. You're perfect for the job."

"I went to pieces on the last job."

"You had just heard your husband die." He didn't mince words and saw her flinch. "You're allowed to be a little shell-shocked. And you kept up anyway, we didn't have to carry you."

She turned away, absently rubbing her wrists.

"Please."

Of all the words he could have used, that was the least expected. He saw her spine stiffen. "Don't try to sweet-talk me."

"I wouldn't dream of it," he murmured.

"You're so damn sneaky. I knew it the first time I saw you. You maneuver and manipulate and-" She stopped, and turned back to face him. Her throat worked, and her big dark eyes looked haunted. "Damn you," she whispered.

He was silent, letting the lure entice her. Danger was as addictive as any drug. Firemen, cops, special forces personnel, field operatives, even the emergency department staff in hospitals-they all knew the rush, the incredible thrill when your senses are heightened and your skin feels as if it won't be able to contain all the energy pulsing through your muscles. SWAT teams, DEA agents-they were adrenaline junkies. So was he. And so was Niema.

He did what he did partly because he loved his country, and someone had to be in the sewers taking care of the shit, but also because he loved walking on the knife edge of danger, continually poised on the brink of disaster, with only his skill and his wits to keep him alive. Niema was no different. She wanted to be, but she wasn't.

"Do you know how prevalent terrorism is?" he asked conversationally. "It isn't something that happens in other countries; it happens here, all the time. Flight 183 is just the latest episode. In 1970,

Orlando, Florida, was threatened with a nuclear device if it didn't cough up a million bucks. In 1977, Hanafi Muslims took hostages in the D.C. City Council offices, and a couple of other places. In 1985, the FBI caught three Sikh Indians sent over here with a list of assassination targets. There was the World Trade Center bombing. Lockerbie, Scotland. Hell, I could give you a list three feet long."

She bent her head, but he had her undivided attention.

"We catch most explosives because of the detonator, not the explosive itself. If the bastards have come up with an explosive that begins as a stable compound, then degrades and becomes unstable and detonates, we have a big problem. One bridge taken out can foul shipping over the entire eastern seaboard. A blown dam threatens our entire power grid. Airplanes are particularly vulnerable. So I need to find out where the stuff is being manufactured, and Ronsard is my best bet. I'll find out some other way, eventually, but how many people will die in the meantime?"

She still didn't respond. He said briskly, as if she had already agreed to work with him, "I'll be there under a different cover, using an identity I've been building for quite a while. I would take you in with me as an assistant or a girlfriend, but Ronsard doesn't issue 'invitee and guest' invitations. You have to get invited in separately."

"No. I won't do it."

"Once we're in, I'll have Ronsard introduce us. I'll pretend to be smitten. That'll give us an excuse to be together."

She shook her head. "I'm not going to do it."

"You have to. I've already told you too much."

"And now you have to kill me, right?"

He put his hands in his pockets, his blue eyes alive with amusement. "I wasn't thinking of anything quite that James Bondish."

"That's what this whole thing sounds like, something out of a James Bond movie. You need someone trained in cloak-and-dagger stuff, not me."

"You'll have time to brush up on basic handgun skills. That's all you'd need, though if everything goes right, you won't even need that. We get in, you place the bug, I get into his files and copy them, and we get out. That's it."

"You make it sound as easy as brushing your teeth. If it were that easy, you would already have done it. He-what was his name? Ronsard?-Ronsard must have a pretty good security system."

"Plus a private army guarding the place," John admitted.

"So the job would be a lot trickier than you're trying to make it sound."

"Not if it goes right."

"And if it goes wrong?"

He shrugged, smiling. "Fireworks."

She wavered. He saw it, saw the temptation in her eyes. Then she shook her head. "Get someone else."

"There is no one else with quite your qualifications. The fact that you haven't been active in five years is a plus, because no one is likely to know you. The intelligence community is a fairly small one. I can build you an identity that will stand up under any investigation Ronsard does."

"What about you? You haven't exactly been inactive."

"No, but I go to a lot of trouble to make sure no one knows what I look like, or who I am. Trust me. My cover is so deep sometimes I don't know who I am myself."

She gave a little laugh, shaking her head, and John knew he had her.

"Okay," she said. "I know I'm going to regret it, but... okay."

"John," Frank Vinay said carefully, "do you know what you're doing?"

"Probably not. But I'm doing it anyway."

"Ronsard isn't anyone's fool."

John was relaxed in one of the big leather chairs in Frank's library. He steepled his fingers under his chin while he studied the chessboard. They had resumed the game that had been interrupted two days before, when an agent brought over the preliminary report on the crash of Flight 183. "You're the one who brought her into it," he pointed out.

Frank flushed. "I was being an interfering fool," he grumbled.

"And a sneaky one, or are you going to tell me you didn't have it in mind that I'd be a lot more willing to step into your shoes if I had an incentive to retire from field ops?" He moved a knight. "Check"

"Son of a bitch." Frank glared at the board for a minute, then looked up at John. "You have to retire some time, and I can't think of a better place for you to use your expertise than in my office."

" 'Some time' isn't now. Until I'm compromised, I can do more good in the field."

"Taking Niema Burdock into the field might make that sooner rather than later. For one thing, she knows who you are. For another"- Frank gave him a shrewd look-"could you leave her behind if necessary?"

John's eyes went flat and cold. "I can do whatever I have to do." How could Frank ask him that, after Venetia? "And Niema is probably the best choice I have available. I wouldn't use her if she wasn't. I need someone else in there with me, and she's the one most likely to get an invitation from Ronsard."

"What if he doesn't fall for it? What if he doesn't invite her?"

"Then I'll have to do what I can, but the risks go up. With her, I have a good chance of getting in and out without being detected."

"All right. I'll arrange for her to have an unspecified leave." Frank nudged a bishop into place.

"That's what I thought you'd do," John said, and moved a pawn. "Check and mate."

"Son of a bitch," Frank muttered.

"I'm crazy," Niema muttered to herself as she rolled out of bed before dawn. Yawning, she dressed: sweat pants and a T-shirt, then socks and athletic shoes. "Certified loony."

How had she let herself be convinced to help Medina on this job, when she had sworn she'd never let herself be sucked back into that life? Hadn't losing Dallas taught her anything?

But Medina was right about terrorism, right about the applications of such an explosive, right about the innocent people who would die. He was right, damn it. So, if she could help, then she had to do it.

She went into the bathroom and washed her face, then brushed her teeth and hair. The face that looked back at her from the mirror was still puffy from sleep, but there was color in her cheeks and a brightness to her eyes that made her hate herself. She was looking forward to this, for God's sake. Dallas had died, and she still hadn't learned anything.

"Niema! Get a move on."

She went rigid. Not quite believing what she'd heard, she opened the bathroom door and looked out into her bedroom. No one was there. She crossed over to the hall door and opened it. Light, along with the smell of freshly brewed coffee, spilled down the hall, coming from the direction of the kitchen.

"What in the hell are you doing in my house?" she snarled, stomping toward the kitchen. "And how did you get in?"

Medina sat at the island, a cup of coffee in his hand. He looked as if it were nine A.M. instead of four-thirty, his eyes alert, his lean body relaxed in black sweat pants and black T-shirt. "I told you that you needed a new lock on the back door."

"What about the alarm? I know I set the alarm."

'And I bypassed it. With a pocketknife and six inches of wire. Have some coffee."

"No thanks." Furious, she contemplated dumping the coffee on him. She had always felt safe in her house, and now, thanks to him, she didn't. "Do you know how much I paid for that alarm system?"

"Too much. Get a dog instead." He stood up from the stool. "If you aren't going to have coffee, let's take a little run."

Thirty minutes later, she was still matching him stride for stride. Talking while jogging wasn't easy, but they hadn't even tried. They had run down the street to the park half a mile from her house, then along the silent path lit only by the occasional street light. The mood she was in, she almost hoped someone tried to mug them, not that muggings were a common occurrence in this neighborhood.

Gravel and dirt crunched under their pounding feet The early morning air was cool and fragrant. She was still breathing easily and there was still plenty of spring in her legs. She loved the feel of her muscles bunching and relaxing, and gradually she began to cool down and concentrate on nothing but the running.

Beside her, he ran as if they had just started. His stride was effortless, his breathing slow and even. Dallas had run that way, she remembered, as if he could go on at this pace for hours.

"You run like a SEAL," she said, irritated that she was panting a little.

"I should," he said easily. "If I don't, then I wasted the toughest six months of my life."

She was so surprised she almost stopped. "You went through BUD/S?"

"I lived through BUD/S," he corrected.

"Is that where you met Dallas?"

"No, I was a few classes ahead of him. But he ... ah, recognized some of the stuff I did the first time we worked together."

"Did you use your real name during training?"

"No. The Navy didn't do me any favors, either. They agreed to let me take the training only if I made the physical conditioning cut, and then I was in only as long as I could make the grade."

"What was the criteria for being accepted into the class?"

"A five hundred yard swim using a breast or side stroke, in twelve and a half minutes or less, then a ten minute rest, then forty-two pushups in two minutes. There was a two minute rest after the pushups, then fifty sit-ups in two minutes. Another two minute rest, then eight pull-ups, with no time limit. After a ten minute rest, then came a mile and a half run, wearing boots and fatigues, in eleven and a half minutes. Those were the minimum requirements. If a guy wasn't in a lot better shape than that, he didn't stand much chance making it through the real thing."

He had said all of that without gasping for breath. Impressed despite herself, she asked, "Why did you do it?"

He was silent for about fifty yards. Then he said, "The better I was trained, the better my chances were for staying alive. There was a particular job where I needed every edge I could get."

"How old were you?" He couldn't have been very old, not if he was a few classes ahead of Dallas, which meant he had begun black ops work at an early age.

"Twenty-one."

Twenty-one. Not long out of his teen years, and already so dedicated to his job that he had put himself through BUD/S, a training program so tough only about 5 percent of the men who began it made it all the way through. Now she knew why he and Dallas had been so much alike in so many ways.

"How much longer are we going to run?"

"We can stop whenever you want. You're in great shape; I don't have to worry about that."

She began slowing. "Are we likely to have to run for our lives?"

He dropped into step beside her. ""You never know."

That was when she knew she was crazy for real, because she wasn't scared.

Chapter Eight