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That wasn’t right. The voice—a man’s—was soft like Candido Branco’s but it was full of concern, not lust, not anger. She felt, instead, her father’s presence. The man who had loved her, whom she had adored and who had died so unfairly. Way too soon, and in a stupid, meaningless accident.

  Nova forced her eyes open. Saw pale yellow walls. But not her father. She saw the face of the Alyeska man.

  A great sadness of loss tightened her chest—through the years that crushing weight had caught her many times and she was always unprepared for it. She would never stop missing her father.

  And then suddenly relief washed over her in a warm flood. The terror wasn’t real. Childhood fears could be pushed again to the depth of her mind.

  She sat up and the Alyeska—what was his name? Yes, Duncan—scooted so he could support her back.

  “Do you feel dizzy?” a male attendant in white asked her.

  Her struggle with the assailant flashed in front of her in all its violence. God in heaven, she’d blown it! She looked at Duncan. “Where is he?”

  “Who?”

  “The assassin!”

  “He ran out that way.” Duncan pointed down the hall to her right. “Stivsky and Jacobson and your partner went after him.”

  The throbbing at the back of her head was growing hard to ignore. She put her hand to it. Mistake. Her palm came away covered with blood. Her skin crawled.

  The attendant put a heavy hand on her shoulder. “You should sit a bit longer. Are you sure you don’t feel dizzy? Someone’s getting a nurse and a wheelchair.”

  Sitting like a slaughtered lamb with an audience to observe her humiliation was unbearable. She put her bloodied hand to the floor, pulled her legs under her till she was on all fours and, feeling like a defeated prize-fighter, began to rise. The attendant and Duncan rushed to take an arm each. A wave of dizziness left her swaying.

  She clenched her fists. The dizziness receded, but the pain in her psyche did not. God help her, she’d blown it. The others simply had to catch the assassin. She’d still have to face her failure, but at least the Company would have a critical lead. The worst thing she could imagine now was that the assassin had killed both witnesses and then escaped.

  Maybe I was overconfident. Maybe afraid. Her psyche took another blow. It was true. There at that critical moment, fear had ruined her concentration. But the man had been so strangely, weirdly strong.

  A woman handed her a white towel. “For your head,” she said. Nova put the towel to the throbbing spot, then checked for damage. There had to be blood all over the back of her head, and a generous smear of bright red indicated she was still bleeding. A nurse arrived, pushing a wheelchair. “Let me take a look at that,” she said in a cheery voice as she took the towel from Nova’s hand. “Mmm. We’re going to need stitches. Come along, sit down, and I’ll take you to the emergency room.”

  “First I need to check what’s happened upstairs.” Nova pressed the elevator button.

  The nurse frowned. “You need to come to the ER with me. A doctor must check you out. You can’t just start wandering around.”

  The lady in white was missing the point. “I’m still on the job. First I have to check upstairs. Duncan, you explain to her.”

  Most of her spectators had wandered off. Only the male attendant, Duncan and the nurse stood gaping at her as though she were a sideshow freak. Mercifully, anger finally kicked in and pushed out her anguish. No use lamenting what she couldn’t change.

  What she could hope was that he’d failed. And hopefully she’d find the witnesses still alive.

  At the fifth-floor nurses’ station, a rain-drenched Joe was handed a towel by three nurses who informed him that both the terrorist and pipeline employee were dead, as were the two guards, that the desk nurse had merely been knocked unconscious, that the candy striper would probably never recover from what she’d seen, and that his partner was having her head stapled by Dr. Graywing in the third room down the hall, on his left.

  He thanked them, gave them a warm smile, then headed down the hall.

  When he knocked on the door, Graywing called, “Come in.”

  Nova Blair sat on an examining table, her back to the door and her head tilted slightly down so the long hair draped her face. Dr. Graywing was daubing the back of Blair’s head with gauze.

  At the sight of the wound, his anger rekindled. He was angry that by bad fortune Nova Blair had been the one to pursue the assassin. “Legendary,” his phone contact had said. Legendary for what? He moved to the other side of the room so he could see their faces.

  “The assassin’s dead,” he said. “Suicide capsule I’d guess.”

  His partner didn’t say anything.

  Graywing shook her head and said, “Ghastly.”

  “How’s your head?” he said to Blair.

  Without moving she said, “It’s nothing.”

  Graywing clucked. “Not so. It is a deep, two-inch long scalp wound. She insists she won’t remain here for observation, but I’ve told her for the next twenty-four hours she must look out for signs of concussion. Drowsiness or nausea.”

  “How’d it happen?”

  Blair shrugged. “I took the elevator and managed to beat him to the first floor, but I couldn’t hold him.” She spoke softly, her answer dragging like a whipped dog. Very unlike the confident woman he’d met a couple of hours ago.

  “I suppose he just barged right past you?”

  Nova Blair raised her chin slowly. She straightened her shoulders and her hair fell back from her face. “There was a bit more to it than that.” Her eyes had taken on a glacial, emerald chill.

  He stuck his hands into his soggy suit pockets. “Sorry. I didn’t mean that quite like it sounded.”

  “Yes, you did. Exactly like it sounded.” She lowered her head again and Graywing clamped another staple. A sickening sound. He was glad he couldn’t see what the doctor was doing. His partner said, almost as if to herself, “There was something bizarre about him. I’ve never felt that kind of strength in any man.”

  A loud silence followed, as if the room was holding its breath. Agent Blair finally broke it. “You were telling us, Dr. Graywing, before we heard the screams, that there were three things Wiley said. First, that the terrorists had gas masks. Second, that Wiley smelled burning coffee. We’d like to hear the third. Agent Cardone, you’ll find my recorder inside my purse, on top. What was the third thing, Dr. Graywing?”

  The doctor let her gloved hands hover in the air a moment, obviously thinking, while Joe found and started the recorder. After a brief pause the doctor plunged ahead, stapling as she talked. “It was the oddest part. I regret very much he can’t tell you himself, because I’m not absolutely sure I remember exactly how he put it.”

  Joe said, “Do your best.”

  “Well, Wiley said when he was a kid he loved dinosaurs. He’d memorized most of their names. He said he swore that when the man in the gas mask ran past his door he yelled out the name of a dinosaur. Terratornis. You’re stapled,” she finally said.

  Nova raised her head, twisted around and the look of puzzlement on her face matched his own feelings perfectly. “A dinosaur name?” she repeated.

  “That’s what Wiley said. He said he thought Terratornis was a kind of dinosaur, and he was sure that was what the man yelled out.”

  “Well, it’s as good a lead as we’ve got,” Blair said. She stood and faced him with a new confidence in her eyes and said, “Let’s see what headquarters has to say about all this.”

  Chapter 6

  Langley, Virginia, 4:30 p.m.

  May 16

  After passing innumerable security checks with Agent Cardone beside her, Nova made it to the seventh floor of the modern white complex in Langley—the heart of the CIA. In a very few minutes she and Cardone would meet the Deputy Director of Operations.

  “Price’s office is to the right,” Nova said.

  “How’s your head?” Cardone asked with obvious concern. “Your hair does a grea
t job of covering the staples.”

  “Doing just fine, thanks.” Although her head still throbbed where the wound was, Nova felt sharp and focused.

  Everyone knew Claiton Price’s secretary, Cleo Jackson, by sight—always a colorfully dressed black butterfly in a field of blue, black and gray moths. She swept around her desk and hugged Nova. “It’s been such a long time since I’ve seen you, girl.” She held Nova at arm’s length. “As lovely as ever.”

  Nova hugged Cleo again. Their friendship had formed during six months when Nova had done her CIA training.

  “I saw the photos you did for Maximum Extreme,” Cleo added. “The ones of the guy sky-surfing. Woman, it looks positively crazy. Skydiving is bad enough. Trying to surf the wind is just…”

  “Just great fun.”

  “Would you ever let that sweet niece of yours do it?”

  “Maggie?” Nova envisioned Maggie leaping from a plane, her heart pounding, her imagination soaring at the enormous great fall ahead, her skyboard stuck to her boots. “Maggie’s a lot like me, Cleo. She’ll do what she wants to do, whether it would scare the daylights out of me to have her do it or not.”

  “Well then, I just hope neither of you gets splattered onto some farmer’s field.”

  Cleo finally seemed to notice Nova’s partner. “Agent Cardone?”

  “Right,” he said. Nova could only imagine what Joe Cardone might be thinking. He’d probably never before been anywhere near the DDO’s office, and he must be wondering why a contract agent was close friends with the top dog’s secretary.

  Cleo pulled her smiling lips into a serious line. “The Deputy Director is expecting you both. I’m sorry, my dear, that once again when we meet it’s over bad news. How long do you think they will keep you today after you leave here? Could we find time for coffee?”

  Nova looked at Joe. “We should know our schedule pretty soon, shouldn’t we?”

  Claiton M. Price sat in his chrome-and-black-leather swivel chair with his back to the office door.

  Price stood, circled the desk and stuck out his hand to her.

  Nova smiled, took the DDO’s hand, and shook it. It was a firm, cordial and hearty handshake.

  “It’s a true delight and pleasure to see you again,” he said to her.

  Price then shook hands with Cardone. “Good to meet you, Agent Cardone. I understand you prefer Joe rather than Joseph.”

  “Yes, sir. A pleasure to meet you, sir.”

  Price retraced his path and eased into his chair. She heard the leather creak. “Please, sit,” he said indicating the pair of chairs in front of his desk. “I understand you’ll be debriefed later about Fairbanks. What I want to do now is put you into the broad picture with respect to Operation Jacaranda. Our government is facing a formidable threat to our sovereignty. To be a bit more precise, four of the Big Five nations are being blackmailed.

  “In general, here’s the situation,” Price continued. “Over a year ago, a Transoceanic jetliner crashed in the Pacific. You may have read that no cause was determined. What hasn’t been reported is that a madman—he’s thought to be part of a larger terrorist organization—somehow incapacitated the crew and the plane crashed because it ran out of fuel. We know because a fax the President received almost simultaneously said the plane was downed as an attention-getter.”

  “How many people on board?” she asked.

  “Three hundred and sixty.”

  The number stamped itself into Nova’s brain as if delivered with a branding iron. Three hundred and sixty innocent people had perished. In every project she accepted for the Company, real people had been affected. Not some governmental agency or because of some theoretical governmental need.

  Price leaned back and laced his fingers together. For a moment he studied her carefully. The man knew very well what it would take to involve her. She felt her new partner shift in his seat, as if impatient to get on to the details.

  Finally, Price continued. “The author of the letter—he calls himself The Founder—has sent other faxes to the President stating irrational demands. The first was that the President must lobby Congress to pass a bill introduced by Senator Legnett to shift the country entirely from gas-driven to electricity-driven cars. You are familiar with the bill in question?”

  She nodded. So did Cardone.

  “The Founder threatened that if this bill didn’t pass, other planes would go down.”

  Cardone leaned forward. “As I recall, the Transoceanic flight was lost last August. And in late September—or was it early October?—a spate of plane crashes occurred.”

  “Quite correct. It was in September. Within two weeks, two good-size liners and nineteen smaller planes crashed. We believe all, except seven of the smaller crashes, were caused by The Founder.”

  For a moment, Nova couldn’t breathe. The room had fallen deathly silent. She looked at Cardone and found him looking back at her. To her knowledge, the magnitude of this kind of devastation on a repeated basis was unprecedented.

  Price continued. “This bastard informed the President that the air crashes were ‘just punishment.’ After its first defeat, Senator Legnett reintroduced the legislation and it also didn’t pass on a second vote.”

  “I remember the vote,” she said.

  “After that second negative vote, through an astonishing piece of luck, authorities at Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona found a bomb in time to prevent the dam from being blown all over the northern Arizona desert. The Founder—or as he is affectionately addressed by most agents tasked to stop him, The Fucker—claimed responsibility.”

  “Is Senator Legnett implicated?” she asked.

  “Not yet. Though you can be sure the intelligence community now knows more than God does about Senator Legnett.”

  Price frowned, then added, “Britain, Germany and France are dealing with similar threats. To date the Japanese remain untouched. Most likely The Founder simply can’t place operatives in Japan. There seems to be no end to the demands. The most recent is that President McBride increase our donation to UN family planning programs from three hundred and thirty million to two billion dollars per year.”

  “Extraordinary,” Cardone said, shaking his head. “This madman doesn’t want money. He doesn’t want his terrorist brethren released. He doesn’t want the government to give North Dakota and Utah back to the Native Americans or for all Protestants to leave Ireland. He wants Americans to drive fuel-conserving cars and promote birth control?”

  “Quite so. To put it bluntly, The Founder states that he feels the world is woefully fucked up, and he is going to unfuck it. Which brings us to your assignment—Operation Jacaranda. There’s a young German politician, Jean Paul König. He’s riding the crest of the resurgent German ecology movement. He once belonged to the Greens, but he’s now the foremost proponent of his own aggressive brand of ecological politics. Six days ago, a Company contact in East Germany was found dead. Cause undetermined. But she had passed a message suggesting that König’s German Homeland Party was in some way involved in an ‘accident’ at one of the French nuclear plants. Need I say, one of The Founder’s faxes referred to this ‘accident.’

  “There’s not a breath of serious scandal in König’s dossier and the man certainly isn’t alone in objecting to nuclear power, so a connection between König, the plant accident and The Founder must be considered unlikely. But since our asset’s report is presently the only real lead we have, we must pursue it full-throttle.

  “Nova, we want you to get close to König. You and Joe can make contact as a team. A writer and photographer. You utilize your genuine, and may I say formidable, photographic skills. We’ve arranged for it to appear as if you two have been working together for several years. Joe works for you, Nova, as your assistant. He also writes articles built around your photos.”

  “Isn’t it more usual that a writer would hire a photographer?” Cardone interjected, his tone stiff. “Shouldn’t she be working for me?”

  Surprised that
Cardone would dare to challenge Price himself, Nova stared at the agent. Apparently he had been so intent he hadn’t thought before speaking. Clearly a strong emotion had been running his mouth—most likely ambition. And then there was also that thing about her being a woman. Maybe that was it. Or just that her performance in Fairbanks had certainly left a whole lot to be desired.

  “You need to keep in mind that our analysts believe the way to this man is through Nova,” Price said to Cardone, his voice having taken on a decidedly chilly tone.

  She turned her attention back to Price. Cardone, she noted, had the good sense to remain silent.

  “Wait, are you suggesting that I seduce him?” she asked, the steel in her voice leaving no doubt as to her feelings on the subject. “You know, I don’t do seduction.”

  “Charm him, Nova. As only you can do,” Price said, capitulating. “This is your great gift. That way you have of winning trust. How far you take it will, of course, be up to you.”

  Price shifted his gaze to Cardone and added, “We want König’s attention on Nova. Our psych analysts feel that if anything can disarm König, it’s a woman with genuine talent, such as her photography. And what Nova has in addition is a seeming fragility that disarms the susceptible male. And our psych profilers are convinced König is susceptible.”

  Cardone turned to face her, giving her a thorough inspection, head to toe. She could almost feel him touching her—not undressing her, as men often did with their eyes when she took the time to dress up and look nice—but tracing her face and clothes as though trying to discover the magic she possessed that Price seemed to be talking about.

  She was her usual self, the self that Penny said she wore to make herself invisible. Very little makeup and plain black slacks and a forest green shirt. But Penny was right. When she got dressed up, some strange chemistry happened between her and most men she met. And if getting next to this König was the assignment, dressing up would certainly be part of the strategy. She smiled. Her new partner was in for a big surprise.