Kiss Me While I Sleep

Kiss Me

While

I Sleep

LINDA HOWARD

BALLANTINE BOOKS • NEW YORK

1

Paris

Lily tilted her head and smiled at her companion, Salvatore Nervi, as the maître d’ silently and with grace seated her at the best table in the restaurant; her smile, at least, was genuine, though almost nothing else about her was. The pale arctic blue of her eyes was warmed to a hazel brown by colored contact lenses; her blond hair had been darkened to a rich mink brown, then subtly streaked with lighter shades. She touched up the roots every few days, so no telltale blond showed. To Salvatore Nervi she was Denise Morel, which was a common enough surname for there to be plenty of Morels in France, but not so common that the name set off subconscious alarms. Salvatore Nervi was suspicious by nature, a fact that had saved his life so many times he probably didn’t remember all of the occasions. But if everything worked right tonight, at last he was caught—by his dick, as it were. How ironic.

Her manufactured background was only a few layers deep; she hadn’t had time to prepare more. She had gambled that he wouldn’t have his people dig any deeper than that, that he would run out of the patience required to wait for the answers before he made a move on her. Normally if a background was required, Langley prepared it for her, but she was on her own this time. She’d done the best she could in the time she had. Probably Rodrigo, Salvatore’s oldest son and number two in the Nervi organization, was still digging; her time was limited before he found out that this particular Denise Morel had appeared out of thin air only a few months before.

“Ah!” Salvatore settled in his chair with a contented sigh, returning her smile. He was a handsome man in his early fifties; his looks were classic Italian, with glossy dark hair and liquid dark eyes, and a sensuous mouth. He made a point of keeping himself in shape, and his hair hadn’t yet started to gray—either that or he was as skilled as she at touch-ups. “You look especially lovely tonight; have I told you that yet?”

He also had the classic Italian charm. Too bad he was a cold-blooded killer. Well, so was she. In that they were well-matched, though she hoped they weren’t an exact match. She needed an edge, however small.

“You have,” she said, but her gaze was warm. Her accent was Parisian; she had trained long and hard to acquire it. “Thank you again.”

The restaurant manager, M. Durand, approached the table and gave a deferential bow. “It is so nice to see you again, monsieur. I have good news: we have procured a bottle of Château Maximilien eighty-two. It arrived just yesterday, and when I saw your name, I put it aside for you.”

“Excellent!” Salvatore said, beaming. The ’82 Bordeaux was an exceptional vintage, and very few bottles remained. Those that did commanded premium prices. Salvatore was a wine connoisseur and was willing to pay any price to acquire a rare wine. More than that, he loved wine. He didn’t acquire bottles just to have them; he drank the wine, enjoyed it, waxed poetic about the different flavors and aromas. He turned that beaming smile on Lily. “This wine is ambrosia; you will see.”

“That is doubtful,” she calmly replied. “I have never liked any wine.” She’d made that plain from the start, that she was an unnatural Frenchwoman who disliked the taste of wine. Her taste buds were deplorably plebeian. Lily, in fact, enjoyed a glass of wine, but when she was with Salvatore, she wasn’t Lily; she was Denise Morel, and Denise drank only coffee or bottled water.

Salvatore chuckled and said, “We shall see.” He did, however, order coffee for her.

This was her third date with Salvatore; from the beginning she had played it cooler than he wanted, refusing him the first two times he’d asked her out. That had been a calculated risk, one designed to allay his caution. Salvatore was accustomed to people seeking his attention, his favor; he wasn’t accustomed at all to being turned down. Her seeming lack of interest in him had piqued his own interest, because that was the thing about powerful people: they expected others to pay attention to them. She also refused to cater to his tastes, as in the wine. On their two previous dates he had tried to cajole her into tasting his wine, and she had adamantly refused. He had never before been with a woman who didn’t automatically try to please him, and he was intrigued by her aloofness.

She hated being with him, hated having to smile at him, chat with him, endure even his most casual touch. For the most part she’d managed to control her grief, forcing herself to concentrate on her course of action, but sometimes she was so sick with anger and pain that it was all she could do not to attack him with her bare hands.

She’d have shot him if she could, but his protection was excellent. She was routinely searched before being allowed anywhere near him; even their first two meetings had been at social occasions where all the guests were searched beforehand. Salvatore never got into a car in the open; his driver always pulled under a protected portico for him to enter, and he never went anywhere that required him to make an unprotected exit from the vehicle. If such an exit wasn’t possible, then he didn’t go. Lily thought he must have a secure, secret exit from his house here in Paris, so that he could move about without anyone knowing, but if he did, she hadn’t spotted it yet.

This restaurant was his favorite, because it had a private, covered entrance that most of the patrons used. The establishment was also exclusive; the waiting list was long, and mostly ignored. The diners here paid well for a place that was familiar and safe, and the manager went to some lengths to ensure that safety. There were no tables by the front windows; instead there were banks of flowers. Brick columns throughout the dining floor broke up the space, interfering with any direct line of sight through the windows. The effect was both cozy and expensive. An army of black-suited waiters wove in and out among the tables, topping off wineglasses, emptying ashtrays, scraping away crumbs, and generally fulfilling every wish before most of them were even voiced. Outside, the street was lined with cars that had reinforced steel doors, bulletproof glass, and armored bottoms. Inside the cars were armed bodyguards who zealously watched the street and the windows of the neighboring buildings for any threat, real or otherwise.

The easiest way to take out this restaurant, and all its infamous patrons, would be with a guided missile. Anything short of that would depend on luck, and at best be unpredictable. Unfortunately, she didn’t have a guided missile.

The poison was in the Bordeaux that would shortly be served, and it was so potent that even half a glass of the wine would be deadly. The manager had gone to extraordinary lengths to procure this wine for Salvatore, but Lily had gone to extraordinary lengths to get her hands on it first, and arrange for it to come to M. Durand’s notice. Once she had known she and Salvatore were coming here for dinner, she had let the bottle be delivered.

Salvatore would try to cajole her into sharing the wine with him, but he wouldn’t really expect her to do so.

He probably would expect her to share his bed tonight, but he was destined to be disappointed once again. Her hatred was so strong she had barely been able to force herself to let him kiss her and accept his touch with some warmth. There was no way in hell she could let him do more than that. Besides, she didn’t want to be with him when the poison began to act, which should be between four to eight hours after ingestion if Dr. Speer was right in his estimation; during that time she would be busy getting out of the country.

By the time Salvatore knew anything was wrong, it would be too late; the poison would already have done most of its damage, shutting down his kidneys, his liver, affecting his heart. He would go into massive, multisystem failure. He might live a few hours after that, perhaps even a full day, until his body finally shut down. Rodrigo would tear France apart looking for Denise Morel, but she would have disappeared into thin air—for a while, at least. She had no intention of staying gone.

Poison wasn’t the weapon she would normally have chosen; it was the one she had been reduced to by Salvatore’s own obsession with security. Her preferred method was a pistol, and she would have used that even knowing she herself would be shot down on the spot, but she hadn’t been able to devise any method of getting a weapon anywhere near him. If she hadn’t been working alone, perhaps . . . but perhaps not. Salvatore had survived several assassination attempts, and had learned from each of them. Not even a sniper could get a clear shot at him. Killing Salvatore Nervi meant using either poison, or a massive weapon that would also kill any others nearby. Lily wouldn’t have minded killing Rodrigo or anyone else in Salvatore’s organization, but Salvatore was smart enough to always ensure there were innocents nearby. She couldn’t kill so casually and indiscriminately; in that, she was different from Salvatore. Perhaps that was the only difference, but for her own sanity, it was one she had to preserve.

She was thirty-seven years old. She’d been doing this since she was eighteen, so for over half her life she’d been an assassin, and a damn good one at that, hence her longevity in the business. At first her age had been an asset: she had been so obviously young and fresh-faced that almost no one had seen her as a threat. She no longer had that asset, but experience had given her other advantages. That same experience, though, had also worn on her until she sometimes felt as fragile as a cracked eggshell: one more good thump would shatter her.

Or maybe she was already shattered, and just hadn’t realized it yet. She knew that she felt as if she had nothing left, that her life was a desolate wasteland. She could see only the goal in front of her: Salvatore Nervi was going down, and so was the rest of his organization. But he was the first, the most important, because he was the one who had given the order to murder the people she’d loved most. Beyond this one aim, she could see nothing, no hope, no laughter, no sunshine. It meant almost nothing to her that she probably wouldn’t survive the task she’d set for herself.

This in no way meant she would give up. She wasn’t suicidal; it was a matter of professional pride that she not only do the job, but get away clean. And there still lurked in her heart the very human hope that if she could just endure, one day this bleak pain would lessen and she would again find joy. The hope was a small flame, but a bright one. She supposed that hope was what kept most people plugging along even in the face of crushing despair, why so relatively few actually gave up.

That said, she had no illusions about the difficulty of what she wanted to do, or her chances both during and after. After she’d finished the job, she would have to completely disappear, assuming she was still alive. The suits in Washington wouldn’t be happy with her for taking out Nervi. Not only would Rodrigo be searching for her, but so would her own people, and she didn’t figure the outcome would be much different if either caught her. She’d gone off the reservation, so to speak, which meant she was not only expendable—she’d always been that—but her demise would be desirable. All in all, this wasn’t a good situation.

She couldn’t go home, not that she really had a home anymore. She couldn’t endanger her mother and sister, not to mention her sister’s family. She hadn’t spoken to either of them in a couple of years anyway . . . no, it was more like four years since she’d last called her mother. Or five. She knew they were okay, because she kept tabs on them, but the hard fact was she no longer belonged in their world, nor could they comprehend hers. She hadn’t actually seen her family in almost a decade. They were part of Before, and she was irrevocably in After. Her friends in the business had become her family—and they had been slaughtered.

From the time that the word on the street had said that Salvatore Nervi was behind her friends’ deaths, she had focused on only one thing: getting close enough to Salvatore to kill him. He hadn’t even tried to hide the fact that he’d had them killed; he had used the deed to drive home the lesson that crossing him wasn’t a good idea. He wasn’t afraid of the police; with his connections, he was untouchable on that front. Salvatore owned so many people in high positions, not just in France but all across Europe, that he could and did act exactly as he pleased.

She became aware that Salvatore was speaking to her, and looking annoyed because she so obviously wasn’t paying attention. “I’m sorry,” she apologized. “I’m worried about my mother. She called today, and told me she had fallen down the steps at her home. She said she wasn’t injured, but I think I should go there tomorrow to see for myself. She is in her seventies, and old people break their bones so easily, don’t they?”

It was an agile lie, and not just because she’d been thinking about her real mother. Salvatore was Italian to the bone; he had worshipped his own mother, and understood family devotion. His expression immediately became concerned. “Yes, of course you must. Where does she live?”

“Toulouse,” she replied, naming a city just about as far from Paris as you could get and still remain in France. If he mentioned Toulouse to Rodrigo, that might buy her a few hours while Rodrigo searched in the south. Of course, Rodrigo might just as easily assume she had mentioned Toulouse as a diversion; whether or not the ploy worked was a crapshoot. She couldn’t worry about second-guessing the second-guessers. She would follow her plan, and hope it worked.

“When will you return?”

“Day after tomorrow, if all is well. If not—” She shrugged.

“Then we must make the most of tonight.” The heat in his dark eyes told her exactly what he was thinking about.

She didn’t dissemble. Instead she drew back slightly, and raised her eyebrows. “Perhaps,” she said coolly. “Perhaps not.” Her tone told him she wasn’t quivering with eagerness to sleep with him.

If anything, her withdrawal sharpened his interest, deepened the heat in his eyes. She thought perhaps her reluctance reminded him of his salad days, when he had courted his late wife, the mother of his children. Young Italian girls of his generation had very closely guarded their virtue, perhaps still did, for all she knew. She hadn’t had much contact with young girls from any country.

Two waiters approached, one bearing the bottle of wine as if a priceless treasure, the other bringing her coffee. She smiled her thanks as the coffee was placed in front of her, then occupied herself with adding rich cream to the brew and ostensibly paying no attention to Salvatore as the waiter made a production of uncorking the bottle and presenting the cork to be sniffed. In fact, her attention was sharply trained on that bottle and the ritual that was being played out. Wine connoisseurs were so earnest about these rituals; she didn’t understand it herself. For her, the only ritual pertaining to wine was pouring it into the glass and drinking it. She didn’t want to smell a cork.

After Salvatore nodded his pleased acceptance, the waiter, solemnly and with great awareness of his audience, poured the red wine into Salvatore’s glass. Lily held her breath while Salvatore swirled the wine, sniffed its bouquet, then took an appreciative taste. “Ah!” he said, closing his eyes in pleasure. “Wonderful.”

The waiter bowed, as if he were personally responsible for the wine’s wonderfulness, then left the bottle on the table and took himself off.

“You must taste this,” Salvatore told Lily.

“It would be a waste,” she said, sipping her coffee. “For me, this is a pleasant taste.” She indicated the coffee. “Wine . . . bah!”

“This wine will change your mind, I promise.”

“So others have promised me before. They have been wrong.”

“Just a sip, the merest taste,” he cajoled, and for the first time she saw the flare of temper in his eyes. He was Salvatore Nervi, and he wasn’t accustomed to anyone naysaying him, especially not a woman he had honored with his attention.

“I dislike wine—”

“You haven’t tried this wine,” he said, seizing the bottle and pouring a measure in another glass, then extending the glass to her. “If you don’t think this is heaven, I will never again ask you to taste another wine. I give you my word.”

That was true enough, since he would be dead. And so would she, if she drank that wine.

When she shook her head, his temper flared, and he set the glass on the table with a sharp click. “You will do nothing I ask of you,” he said, glaring at her. “I wonder why you are even here. Perhaps I should relieve you of my company and call an end to this evening, eh?”

She would have liked nothing better—if only he had drunk more of the wine. She didn’t think one sip would deliver enough of the poison to do the job. The poison was supposed to be supertoxic, and she had injected enough of it through the cork into the bottle to fell several men his size. If he left in a temper, what would happen to that uncorked bottle of wine? Would he take it with him, or would he storm out and leave it sitting on the table? As expensive as this wine was, she knew it wouldn’t be poured out. No, either another customer would drink it, or the staff would share it.

“Very well,” she said, seizing the glass. Without hesitation she carried it to her mouth and tilted it, letting the wine wash against her closed lips, but she didn’t swallow any. Could the poison be absorbed through the skin? She was almost certain it could; Dr. Speer had told her to wear latex gloves when she was handling it. She was afraid her night might now be very interesting, in a way she hadn’t planned, but there was nothing else she could do. She couldn’t even knock the bottle to the floor, because the wait staff would inevitably come in contact with the wine while they were cleaning up.

She didn’t bother to repress the shudder that rolled through her at the thought, and hastily set the glass down before patting her lips with her napkin, then carefully folded the napkin so she wouldn’t touch the damp spot.

“Well?” Salvatore asked impatiently, even though he’d seen the shudder.

“Rotten grapes,” she said, and shuddered again.

He looked thunderstruck. “Rotten—?” He couldn’t believe she didn’t like his wonderful wine.

“Yes. I taste its antecedents, which unfortunately are rotten grapes. Are you satisfied?” She let a hint of temper show in her own eyes. “I dislike being bullied.”

“I didn’t—”

“You did. With the threat of not seeing me again.”

He took another sip of wine, buying time before answering. “I apologize,” he said carefully. “I am not accustomed to—”

“Being told ‘no’?” she asked, mimicking him by sipping her coffee. Would the caffeine speed the poison? Would the cream in the coffee slow it down?

She would have been willing to sacrifice herself in order to take just one well-placed shot at his head; how was this any different? She had minimized the risk as much as she could, but it was still a risk, and poison was a nasty way to die.

He shrugged his burly shoulders and gave her a rueful look. “Exactly,” he said, showing her some of his legendary charm. He could be a very charming man, when he chose. If she hadn’t known what he was, she might have been taken in; if she hadn’t stood beside three graves that contained two close friends and their adopted daughter, she might have philosophically decided that, in this business, death was a fairly normal outcome. Averill and Tina had known the risks when they got into the game, just as she had; thirteen-year-old Zia, however, had been an innocent. Lily couldn’t forget Zia, or forgive. She couldn’t be philosophic.

Three hours later, the leisurely meal consumed, the entire bottle of wine now sloshing in Salvatore’s stomach, they rose to leave. It was just after midnight, and the November night sky was spitting out swirls of snowflakes that melted immediately on contact with the wet streets. Lily felt nauseated, but that could well have been from the unrelenting tension rather than the poison, which was supposed to take longer than just three hours before the effects began to be felt.

“I think something I ate isn’t agreeing with me,” she said when they were in the car.

Salvatore heaved a sigh. “You do not have to pretend illness in order to not go home with me.”

“I’m not pretending,” she said sharply. He turned his head and stared at the Parisian lights sliding by. It was a good thing he’d drunk all the wine, because she was fairly certain that he would have written her off as a lost cause in any case.

She leaned her head back against the cushion and closed her eyes. No, this wasn’t tension. The nausea was increasing by the moment. She felt the pressure increase in the back of her throat and she said, “Stop the car, I’m going to be sick!”

The driver slammed on the brakes—odd how that particular threat made him instinctively go against his training—and she threw the car door open before the tires had rolled to a stop, then leaned out and vomited into the gutter. She felt Salvatore’s hand on her back and another on her arm, holding her, though he was careful not to lean so far that he exposed himself to the line of fire.

After the spasms had emptied her stomach, she slumped back into the car and wiped her mouth with the handkerchief Salvatore silently passed to her. “I do beg your pardon,” she said, hearing with shock how weak and trembly her voice sounded.

“It is I who must beg yours,” he said. “I didn’t think you were truly ill. Should I take you to a doctor? I could call my own doctor—”

“No, I feel somewhat better now,” she lied. “Please just take me home.”

He did, with many solicitous questions and a promise to call her first thing in the morning. When the driver finally pulled to a stop in front of the building where she rented a flat, she patted Salvatore’s hand and said, “Yes, please call me tomorrow, but don’t kiss me; I might have caught a virus.” With that handy excuse, she pulled her coat around her and dashed through the thickening snowfall to her door, not looking back as the car pulled away.

She made it to her flat, where she collapsed into the nearest chair. There was no way she could grab her necessities and make it to the airport, as she had originally planned. Perhaps this was best, after all. Endangering herself was the best cover of all. If she was also ill from poisoning, Rodrigo wouldn’t suspect her, wouldn’t care what happened to her when she recovered.

Assuming she survived, that is.

She felt very calm as she waited for whatever would happen, to happen.

2

Her door was kicked open with a splintering crash shortly after nine o’clock the next morning. Three men entered, all with weapons drawn. Lily tried to lift her head, but with a low moan let it drop back to the rug that covered the polished dark wood of the floor.

The faces of the three men swam in front of her as one knelt beside her and roughly turned her face toward him. She blinked and tried to focus. Rodrigo. She swallowed and reached for him with one hand, a silent plea for help.

She wasn’t faking. The night had been long and difficult. She had vomited several times, and had been seized by alternating waves of hot and cold. Sharp pains had stabbed through her stomach, leaving her curled in a fetal ball, whimpering with distress. For a while she thought her dose must have been lethal after all, but now it seemed the pains were abating. She was still too weak and sick to climb from the floor onto the couch, or even to phone for help. Once last night she’d tried to get to the phone, but her effort had come too late, and she hadn’t been able to reach it.

Rodrigo swore softly in Italian, then holstered his weapon and rapped out an order to one of his men.

Lily gathered her strength and managed to whisper, “Do not . . . get so close. I may be . . . contagious.”

“No,” he said in his very excellent French. “You aren’t contagious.” Moments later a soft blanket settled over her, and Rodrigo briskly wrapped it around her before gathering her into his arms and, with easy strength, rising to his feet.

He strode out of the flat and down the back stairs, where his car waited with the motor idling. The driver jumped out when he saw Rodrigo, and opened the rear door.

Lily was roughly bundled into the car, with Rodrigo on one side of her and one of the other men on the other. Her head lolled against the back of the car seat and she closed her eyes, whimpering in her throat as sharp pain once more daggered through her stomach. She didn’t have the strength to stay upright and felt herself slowly begin to topple. Rodrigo made an exasperated sound, but shifted around so she could recline against him.

Most of her consciousness was taken up by her sheer physical misery, but one clear, cold portion of her brain remained separate and alert. She wasn’t out of the woods yet, with either the poison or Rodrigo. For now, he was withholding judgment, but that was all. At least he was taking her somewhere for medical treatment—she hoped. He probably wasn’t taking her anywhere to kill her and dump her body, because killing her in the apartment and walking away would have been far easier. She didn’t know if anyone had seen him carrying her out, but the odds that someone had were good, even though he’d taken her out the back way. Not that he cared if anyone saw him, at least not much. She assumed Salvatore was either dead or dying, and Rodrigo was now the head of the Nervi organization; as such, he’d inherited a lot of power, both financial and political. Salvatore’d had a lot of people in his pocket.

She fought to keep her eyes open, to pay attention to the route the driver was taking, but her lids kept drifting shut. Finally she thought to hell with it and gave up the effort. No matter where Rodrigo was taking her, there was literally nothing she could do about it.

The men in the car were silent, not making even idle comments. The atmosphere seemed heavy and strained, with grief or worry or even rage. She couldn’t tell which, and since they weren’t talking, she couldn’t eavesdrop. Even the outside noise of the traffic seemed to fade away, until at last there was nothing.

The gate to the compound slid open as the car approached, and the driver, Tadeo, slotted the white Mercedes through the gap with only inches to spare on each side. Rodrigo waited until they were stopped under the portico and Tadeo had jumped out to open the passenger door before he shifted Denise Morel around. Her head lolled back and he realized she was unconscious. Her face was a pasty yellowish-white, her eyes sunk back in her head, and an odor clung to her—the same odor he’d noticed on his father.

Rodrigo’s stomach clenched as he fought to contain his grief. He still couldn’t quite believe it—Salvatore was dead. Just that fast, he was gone. The news hadn’t got out yet, but it was only a matter of time. Rodrigo wouldn’t be allowed the luxury of grieving; he had to move fast, consolidate his position and take up the reins, before their rivals moved in like a pack of jackals.

When the family doctor had said Salvatore’s ailment looked like mushroom poisoning, Rodrigo had moved quickly. He dispatched three men to take M. Durand from the restaurant and bring him to the house, while he himself, with Tadeo driving, took Lamberto and Cesare to find Denise Morel. She was the last person his father had been with before falling ill, and poison was a woman’s weapon, indirect and indefinite, depending on guesswork and happenstance. In this case, though, the weapon had been effective.

But if his father had died at her hand, she had then poisoned herself, too, instead of fleeing the country. He hadn’t truly expected her to be at her flat, since Salvatore had said she was going to Toulouse to visit her ailing mother; Rodrigo had taken that as a handy excuse. It seemed he’d been wrong—or at least the possibility of error was strong enough that he hadn’t shot the woman on sight.

He slid out of the car and hooked his hands under her arms, then dragged her out behind him. Tadeo helped support her until Rodrigo could slide his arm under her knees and lift her against his chest. She was of normal height, about five and a half feet, but on the lanky side; even though she was dead weight, he handled her easily as he carried her inside.

“Is Dr. Giordano still here?” he asked, and received an affirmative reply. “Tell him I need him, please.” He took her upstairs to one of the guest bedrooms. She would be better off in a hospital, but Rodrigo wasn’t in the mood to answer questions. Officials could be so annoyingly official. And if she died, then she died; he had made all the effort he was willing to make. It wasn’t as if Vincenzo Giordano wasn’t a real medical doctor, even if he no longer had a practice and instead spent all his time in the lab on the outskirts of Paris that Salvatore had funded—though, perhaps if Salvatore had called for help earlier and asked to be taken to a hospital, he would still be alive. Still, Rodrigo hadn’t questioned his father’s decision to have Dr. Giordano brought in, had even understood it. Discretion was everything, when vulnerability was involved.

He laid Denise on the bed and stood looking down at her, wondering why his father had been so besotted with her. Not that Salvatore hadn’t always had an eye for the ladies, but this one was nothing out of the ordinary. Today she looked awful, her hair lank and uncombed, her color as terrible as if she were already dead, but even at her best she wasn’t beautiful. Her face was a bit too thin, too austere, and she had a slight overbite. The overbite, however, made her upper lip look fuller than the lower one, and that alone gave her features a piquancy she would otherwise have lacked.

Paris was full of women who were better looking and had a better sense of style than Denise Morel, but Salvatore had wanted this one, to the point that he’d been too impatient to completely investigate her background before approaching her. To his astonishment, she’d refused his first two invitations, and Salvatore’s impatience had turned into obsession. Had his preoccupation with her caused him to relax his guard? Was this woman indirectly responsible for his death?

So great was Rodrigo’s pain and rage that he might have strangled her just because of the possibility, but beneath those feelings was the cool voice that said she might be able to tell him something that would lead him to the poisoner.

He would have to find out who had done this, and eliminate him—or her. The Nervi organization could not let this go without retaliation, or his reputation would suffer. Since he was just now stepping into Salvatore’s shoes, he couldn’t afford the least doubt about his ability, or his resolve. He had to find his enemy. Unfortunately, the possibilities were endless. When one dealt in death and money, all the world was involved. Because Denise had also been poisoned, he even had to consider whether the perpetrator could be a jealous ex-lover of his father’s—or one of Denise’s old lovers.

Dr. Vincenzo Giordano tapped politely on the frame of the open door, then stepped inside. Rodrigo glanced at him; the man looked haggard, his usually neat salt-and-pepper curls disordered, as if he’d been pulling at them. The good doctor had been his father’s friend since boyhood, and he’d wept unashamedly when Salvatore had died not two hours ago.

“Why isn’t she dead, too?” Rodrigo asked, indicating the woman on the bed.

Vincenzo took Denise’s pulse, and listened to her heart. “She might still die,” he said, rubbing a hand over his weary face. “Her heartbeat is too fast, too weak. But perhaps she didn’t ingest as much of the poison as your father did.”

“Do you still think it’s mushrooms?”

“I said it looked like mushroom poisoning—for the most part. But there are differences. The speed with which it acted, for one thing. Salvatore was a big, robust man; he wasn’t feeling ill when he returned home last night at almost one o’clock. He died just six hours later. Mushrooms are slower acting; even the deadliest will take almost two days to kill. The symptoms were very similar; the speed was not.”

“It wasn’t cyanide or strychnine?”

“Not strychnine. The symptoms weren’t the same. And cyanide kills within minutes, and causes convulsions. Salvatore wasn’t convulsive. The symptoms of arsenic poisoning are somewhat similar, but different enough to rule that out also.”

“Is there any way to tell for certain what was used?”

Vincenzo sighed. “I’m not certain it is a poison at all. It could be a virulence, in which case we have all been exposed.”

“Then why hasn’t my father’s driver become ill? If this is a virus that works within hours, then he, too, should be ill by now.”

“I said it could be, not that it is. I can do tests, with your permission examine Salvatore’s liver and kidneys. I can compare his blood analysis with that of . . . What is her name?”

“Denise Morel.”

“Ah, yes, I remember. He talked about her.” Vincenzo’s dark eyes were sad. “I think he was in love.”

“Bah. He would have lost interest in her eventually. He always did.” Rodrigo shook his head, as if clearing his mind. “Enough of that. Can you save her?”

“No. She will either survive, or she will not. There is nothing I can do.”

Rodrigo left Vincenzo to his tests and went to the basement room where his men were holding M. Durand. The Frenchman was already the worse for wear, with thin rivulets of blood trickling from his nose, but for the most part Rodrigo’s men had concentrated on punches to the body, which hurt more and weren’t as readily visible.

“Monsieur Nervi!” the restaurant manager croaked when he saw Rodrigo, and began weeping with relief. “Please, whatever has happened, I know nothing about it. I swear to you!”

Rodrigo pulled up a chair and sat down in front of M. Durand, leaning back and crossing his long legs. “My father ate something in your restaurant last night that disagreed with him,” he said with massive understatement.

An expression of total bewilderment and astonishment crossed the Frenchman’s face. Rodrigo could read his thoughts: He was being beaten to a pulp because Salvatore Nervi had indigestion? “But—but,” M. Durand sputtered. “I will refund his money, of course, he had only to ask.” Then he dared to say, “This wasn’t necessary.”

“Did he eat mushrooms?” Rodrigo asked.

Another look of bewilderment. “He knows he did not. He ordered chicken in wine sauce, with asparagus, and Mademoiselle Morel had the halibut. No, there were no mushrooms.”

One of the men in the room was Salvatore’s regular driver, Fronte; he bent down and whispered in Rodrigo’s ear. Rodrigo nodded.

“Fronte says that Mademoiselle Morel became ill just after leaving your restaurant.” So she’d been stricken first, Rodrigo thought. Had she been the first to take whatever poison they’d ingested? Or had it worked faster on her, because of her lower body weight?

“It was not my food, monsieur.” Durand was highly insulted. “None of the other patrons became ill, or had any complaint. The halibut had not gone bad, and even if it had, Monsieur Nervi didn’t have it.”

“What food did they share?”

“Nothing,” M. Durand replied promptly. “Except perhaps the bread, though I didn’t see Mademoiselle Morel eat any. Monsieur drank wine, an exceptional Bordeaux, Château Maximilien’s eighty-two vintage, and Mademoiselle drank coffee as usual. Monsieur did prevail upon her to taste the wine, but it wasn’t to her liking.”

“So they shared the wine.”

“A small sip only. As I said, she didn’t care for it. Mademoiselle does not drink wine.” Durand’s very Gallic shrug said he didn’t understand such peculiarity, but there it was.

But last night she had drunk wine, even if it was only a small sip. Was the poison so potent that one sip would threaten her life?

“Was there any wine left?”

“No. Monsieur Nervi drank it all.”

That wasn’t unusual. Salvatore’s head had been remarkably hard, with the result that he drank more than most Italians.

“The bottle. Do you still have the bottle?”

“It will be in the refuse box, I’m certain. Behind the restaurant.”

Rodrigo ordered two men to go search through the trash and find the empty Bordeaux bottle, then turned back to M. Durand. “Very well. You will remain my guest”—he gave a humorless smile—“until this bottle and the dregs have been analyzed.”

“But that can—”

“Take days, yes. I’m sure you understand.” Perhaps Vincenzo could get his answers faster than that, in his own lab, but that remained to be seen.

M. Durand hesitated. “Your father . . . he is very ill?”

“No,” said Rodrigo, rising to his feet. “He is dead.” And once more the words arrowed straight through his heart.

By the next day, Lily knew she would live; it took Dr. Giordano another two days to make the same pronouncement. She needed the entire three days before she felt well enough to get out of bed and take a much-needed bath. Her legs were so shaky she had to hold on to furniture to make her way to the bathroom, her head swam and her vision was still a little blurry, but she knew the worst was past.

She had fought desperately for consciousness, refusing the drugs Dr. Giordano tried to give her to ease her pain, give her sleep. Even though she had passed out during the drive over to what was obviously the Nervi compound, she hadn’t been drugged. Despite the excellence of her French, it wasn’t her first language; if she were sedated, her native American English might slip out. She had pretended to be afraid she would die in her sleep, that she felt she could fight the poison so long as she remained alert, and though Dr. Giordano knew that was medically ridiculous, he had nevertheless bowed to her wishes. Sometimes, he’d said, the patient’s mental condition meant more to recovery than the physical condition.

When she slowly, laboriously made her way out of the lavishly appointed marble bathroom, Rodrigo was sitting in the chair by the bed, waiting for her. He was dressed all in black, turtleneck and trousers, a dark omen in the white-and-cream bedroom.

Immediately all her instincts went to a higher stage of alertness. She couldn’t play Rodrigo the way she had Salvatore. For one thing, as wily as Salvatore had been, his son was smarter, tougher, more cunning—and that was saying something. For another, Salvatore had been attracted to her, and Rodrigo wasn’t. For the father she had been a younger woman, a conquest, but she was three years older than Rodrigo and he had plenty of conquests of his own.

She was wearing a set of her own pajamas, brought from her flat yesterday, but she was glad of the extra covering of the thick Turkish robe she’d found hanging on a hook in the bathroom. Rodrigo was one of those overtly sexual men who made women very aware of him, and she wasn’t immune to that facet of his personality, even though she knew enough about him to make her cold with disgust. He wasn’t innocent of the majority of Salvatore’s sins, though he was innocent of the murders that had moved her to vengeance; by chance, Rodrigo had been in South America at the time.

She struggled to the bed and sat on it, clinging to one of the posts at the foot for support. She swallowed and said, “You saved my life.” Her voice was thin and weak. She was thin and weak, in no shape to protect herself.

He shrugged. “As it happens, no. Vincenzo—Dr. Giordano—says there was nothing he could do to help. You recovered on your own, though not without some damage. A heart valve, I believe he said.”

She already knew that, because Dr. Giordano had told her the same thing that very morning. She had known the possibilities when she took the risk.

“Your liver, though, will recover. Already your color is much better.”

“No one has told me what was wrong. How did you know I was sick? Did Salvatore become ill, too?”

“Yes,” he said. “He didn’t recover.”

Some reaction other than, “Oh, good,” was expected of her, so Lily deliberately thought of Averill and Tina, of Zia with her adolescent gangliness, her bright, cheerful face and nonstop chatter. Oh, God, she missed Zia so much; it was an ache in the center of her chest. Tears filled her eyes, and she let them drip down her cheeks.

“It was poison,” Rodrigo said, both his expression and tone as calm as if he’d commented on the weather. She wasn’t deceived; he had to be in a rage. “In the bottle of wine he drank. It appears to be a synthetic, designer poison, very potent; by the time the symptoms occur, it’s already too late. Monsieur Durand from the restaurant said you tasted the wine.”

“Yes, one sip.” She wiped the tears from her face. “I dislike wine, but Salvatore was insistent, and he was becoming angry because I didn’t want to taste it, so I did . . . just one very small sip, to please him. It was nasty.”

“You are lucky. According to Vincenzo, the poison is so potent that had you drunk any more than that, if the sip hadn’t been very small, you would be dead.”

She shuddered, remembering the pain and vomiting; she had been that sick without actually swallowing any of the wine, just letting it touch her lips. “Who did this? Anyone could have drunk that wine; was it some terrorist who didn’t care who he killed?”

“I think my father was the target; his love of wine was well-known. The eighty-two Château Maximilien is very rare, yet a bottle mysteriously became available to Monsieur Durand the day before my father’s reservation at his restaurant.”

“But he might have offered the wine to anyone.”

“And taken the risk that my father would hear about it and take umbrage that this rare wine wasn’t offered to him? I think not. This tells me the poisoner is very familiar with Monsieur Durand and his restaurant, and the clientele.”

“How was it done? The bottle was uncorked in front of us. How was the wine poisoned?”

“I imagine a very thin hypodermic needle was used to inject the poison through the cork. It wouldn’t have been noticeable. Or the bottle could have been uncorked, then resealed if the proper equipment was available. To Monsieur Durand’s extreme relief, I don’t believe either he or the waiter who served you are culpable.”

Lily had been out of bed so long that she was trembling with weakness. Rodrigo noticed the tremors that shook her entire body. “You may stay here until you are fully recovered,” he said politely, rising to his feet. “If you need anything, you have only to ask.”

“Thank you,” she said, then uttered the biggest lie of her life: “Rodrigo, I’m so sorry about Salvatore. He was . . . he was—” He was a murdering asshole son of a bitch, but now he was a dead murdering asshole son of a bitch. She managed to produce one more tear, thinking of Zia’s little face.

“Thank you for your condolences,” he said without expression, and left the room.

She didn’t do a victory dance; she was too weak, and for all she knew there were hidden cameras in the room. Instead she climbed back into bed and tried to seek refuge in strength-restoring sleep, but she was feeling too triumphant to do more than doze.

Part of her mission was accomplished. Now all she had to do was disappear before Rodrigo discovered Denise Morel didn’t exist.

3

Two days later, Rodrigo and his younger brother, Damone, stood beside their parents’ graves at their boyhood home in Italy. Their mother and father were once more side by side in death as they had been in life. Salvatore’s grave was covered in flowers, but both Rodrigo and Damone had taken some of the flowers and put them on their mother’s grave, too.

The weather was cool but sunny, and a light breeze was blowing. Damone put his hands in his pockets and stared up at the blue sky, his handsome face drawn with grief. “What will you do now?” he asked.

“Find who did this and kill him,” Rodrigo said without hesitation. Together they turned and began walking away from the gravesite. “I’ll also put out a press release about Papa’s death; it can’t be kept quiet much longer. The news will make some people nervous, wondering about the status of various agreements now that I am in charge, and I will have to deal with that. We may lose some revenue, but nothing that we can’t absorb. And the losses will be short-term. The revenues from the vaccine will make up the difference, and more. Much more.”

Damone said, “Vincenzo has made up the lost time?” He was more of a businessman than Rodrigo, and it was he who handled the majority of their finances from his own headquarters in Switzerland.

“Not as much as we had hoped, but work is progressing. He assures me he will be finished by next summer.”

“Then he is doing better than I’d expected, considering how much was lost.” An incident at Vincenzo’s lab had destroyed much of his current project.

“He and his people are working very long hours.” And would be working even longer ones if Rodrigo saw they were falling behind schedule. The vaccine was too important to let Vincenzo miss the deadline.

“Keep me abreast of the situation,” said Damone. By agreement, because of security issues, they wouldn’t be together again until after the poisoner was identified and apprehended. He turned and looked back at the new grave, his dark eyes filled with the same pain and rage Rodrigo felt. “It’s still so hard to believe,” he said, almost inaudibly.

“I know.” The two brothers hugged, unashamed of their emotion, then got into separate cars for the trip back to their private airfield, where they would each take a corporate jet home. Rodrigo had taken comfort in his younger brother’s presence, in having what was left of his immediate family next to him. Despite the sadness of their purpose for being together, there had also been an ease of companionship. Now each returned to their linked but separate empires, Damone to watch over the money, Rodrigo to find their father’s killer and exact revenge. Whatever steps he took, he knew, Damone would support him.

But the fact was, he hadn’t been able to make any progress in finding who had killed Salvatore. Vincenzo was still analyzing the poison, which might give them an idea of its origin, and Rodrigo had been closely watching his rivals for any hint of knowledge that Salvatore had died, any aberration in their usual pattern of doing business. One might think their less legitimate associates would be seen as the most likely suspects, but Rodrigo didn’t eliminate anyone from suspicion. It could even be someone within their own organization, or someone in the government. Salvatore had had his fingers in many pies, and evidently someone had got greedy enough to want the whole pie to himself. Rodrigo just had to discover which one.

“Drive Mademoiselle Morel home,” Rodrigo told Tadeo after she had been there a week. She was steady on her feet now, and though she seldom left her bedroom, he wasn’t comfortable having a stranger under his roof. He was still busy consolidating his position—unfortunately, a couple of people had felt he wasn’t the man his father had been and were impelled to challenge his authority, which had in turn impelled him to have them killed—and there were some things a stranger shouldn’t accidentally see or hear. He would feel more comfortable when the house was once more a total haven.

It took only a matter of minutes for the car to be brought around and the woman and her few belongings loaded inside. After Tadeo had left with the Frenchwoman, Rodrigo went into Salvatore’s study—his study now—and sat behind the huge carved desk that Salvatore had loved. Vincenzo’s report on the poison, analyzed from the dregs in the wine bottle recovered from the restaurant’s refuse, lay in front of him. He had looked over the report when he first received it, but now he picked it up again and thoroughly studied it, going over every detail.

According to Vincenzo, the poison was chemically engineered. It contained some of the properties of orellanine, the poison in the deadly galerina mushroom, which was why he had first suspected mushrooms. Orellanine attacked several internal organs, most notably the liver, kidneys, heart, and the nervous system, but orellanine was also notoriously slow. Symptoms wouldn’t appear for ten hours or more, then the victim would appear to recover, only to die several months later. There was no known treatment or antidote for orellanine. The poison had also shown some relation to minoxidil, with the effects of bradycardia, heart failure, hypotension, and depressed respiration—which would help to render the victim unable to recover from the orellanine lookalike. Minoxidil worked fast, orellanine worked slowly; somehow the two properties had been combined in such a way that there was a delay, but of only a few hours.

Also according to Vincenzo, there were only a few chemists in the world capable of doing this work, and none of them worked in reputable drug corporations. Because of the nature of their work, they were both expensive to hire and difficult to contact. This particular poison, at such a potency that less than an ounce would kill a hundred-and-fifty-pound man—or woman—would cost a small fortune to produce.

Rodrigo steepled his fingers and thoughtfully tapped them against his lips. Logic told him the killer he sought would almost certainly be a business rival or someone seeking to avenge a past grievance, but instinct kept him looking at Denise Morel. There was something about her that nagged at him. He couldn’t identify the source of his faint discomfort; so far his investigations had told him she was exactly what she purported to be. Moreover, she, too, had been poisoned and very nearly died, which any logical man would say proved she wasn’t the villain. And she had wept when he told her of Salvatore’s death.

Nothing pointed to her. The waiter who had served the wine was a far more likely suspect, but exhaustive questioning of both M. Durand and the waiter had produced nothing but the information that M. Durand himself had put the bottle in the waiter’s hands and watched him take it, without detour, to the Nervi table. No, the person he sought was the one who had brought the availability of the bottle of wine to M. Durand’s attention, and so far there was no record of that person. The bottle had been bought from a company that didn’t exist.

Therefore, the killer was fairly sophisticated in the trade, with the means of procuring both the poison and the wine. He—for convenience’ sake Rodrigo thought of the killer as a “he”—had researched both his victim and his victim’s habits; he had known Salvatore frequented that particular restaurant, known when he had a reservation, and known with some certainty that M. Durand would of course hold this particular bottle for his very important customer. The killer also had the skill to present a believable facsimile of a legitimate company. All of this pointed to a level of professionalism that practically screamed “competitor.”

And yet, he still couldn’t quite disregard Denise.

It wasn’t likely, but this could still be a crime of passion. No one was beyond suspicion until he knew for certain who had killed his father. Whatever his father had seen in Denise, perhaps some other man had seen the same thing, and been just as obsessed.

As for Salvatore’s past lovers . . . Rodrigo mentally reviewed them, and all but categorically dismissed them from contention. For one thing, Salvatore had been like a honey bee, never staying long enough with one lover for any real connection to be formed. Since his wife’s death, some twenty years before, he had been amazingly active in the romance department, but no woman had come close to joining his wife in his regard.

Moreover, Rodrigo had investigated every woman who spent time with his father. Not one of them had shown any signs of obsessive behavior, nor would they have had the knowledge of such an exotic poison, or the means of acquiring it, much less the hideously expensive wine. He would investigate them again, just to be certain, but he thought they would all check out clean. However, what about the people in Denise’s past?

He had questioned her about that, but she hadn’t provided any names, merely saying, “No, there’s no one.”

Did that mean she’d lived virtuous and nunlike all her life? He didn’t think so, though he did know for a fact that she’d refused Salvatore’s propositions. Or did it mean there had been lovers but no one she considered capable of such a thing? He didn’t care what she thought; he wanted to draw his own conclusions.

Ah, there it was. Why wouldn’t she tell him about anyone in her past? Why was she so secretive? That was what bothered him about her; there was no reason for her not to give him the name of everyone she had been with since adolescence. Was she protecting someone? Did she have an idea of who could have put the poison in that bottle, knowing her dislike of wine and never dreaming she might drink some of it?

He hadn’t investigated her as thoroughly as he would have liked; first Salvatore had been too impatient to wait, and then their dates had been so noneventful—until the last one—that Rodrigo had basically put the matter aside. Now, however, he would find out everything there was to know about Denise Morel; if she had ever even thought about sleeping with anyone, he would know it. If anyone was in love with her, he would find the man.

He picked up the telephone and dialed a number. “I want Mademoiselle Morel watched at all times. If she moves an inch outside her door, I want to know about it. If anyone calls her, or she places any calls, I want the call traced. Is that understood? Good.”

In the privacy of the guest bedroom’s bathroom, Lily had worked hard to regain her strength. A thorough search of the room had revealed neither camera nor microphone, so she knew she was safe from observation there. At first she’d been able to do only stretching exercises, but she’d pushed herself hard, jogging in place even when she had to hold on to the marble vanity to keep her balance, doing push-ups and sit-ups and ab crunches. She forced herself to eat as much as she could, fueling her recovery. She knew pushing herself could be dangerous, with her damaged heart valve, but it was a calculated risk, as was almost everything else in her life.

The first thing she did once she was back in her flat was subject it to the same exhaustive search that the bathroom had received. To her relief, she didn’t find anything. Rodrigo must not suspect her, or he would have had the place bugged seven ways from Sunday while she’d been incapacitated. No, he would have killed her on just suspicion alone.

That didn’t mean she was safe. When he asked about her past lovers, she’d known she had only a few days to get away, because he would be digging deeper into Denise’s past and finding out there was no past.

If her flat had been searched—and she had to assume it had been—the searchers had been very neat. But they hadn’t found her stash of getaway items, or she wouldn’t be standing here now.

The old building had once been heated by fireplaces, which at some time after World War II had been replaced by radiators. The fireplace in her flat had been bricked over, and a chest shoved in front of it. She had put a cheap rug under the chest, not to prevent the floor from being scarred, but so she could silently move the chest about by pulling the rug. She pulled the rug away from the wall now, and got down on her belly to inspect the bricks. Her repair job wasn’t noticeable; she’d dirtied the mortar so it looked as aged as the mortar around it. There wasn’t any mortar dust on the floor, either, to indicate that anyone had tapped on the bricks.

She got a hammer and chisel, lay down on her belly again, and began gently tapping the mortar from around one of the bricks. When it was loosened, she worked it free, then another, then another. Reaching her hand into the cavity of the old fireplace, she pulled out an array of boxes and bags, each item safely wrapped in plastic to keep it clean.

One small box held her alternate identities: passports, credit cards, driver’s licenses, ID cards, depending on which nationality she chose. A bag held three wigs. There were distinctive changes of clothes, kept hidden because they were so memorable. Shoes were a different matter; she’d simply put the shoes she’d need in her closet, dumped in a pile with all her other shoes. How many men would pay any attention at all to a tangle of shoes? She also had a supply of cash, in euros, pounds sterling, and American dollars.

In the last box was a secure cell phone. She turned it on and checked the battery: low. Taking out the charger, she plugged it into a wall outlet and set the phone in the cradle.

She was exhausted, sweat beading her forehead. She wouldn’t go tomorrow, she thought; she was still too weak. But day after tomorrow, she would have to move, and move fast.

So far she’d been lucky. Rodrigo had kept the news of Salvatore’s death quiet for several days, which had bought her some time, but with every minute that passed, the danger grew that someone in Langley would see a photograph of Denise Morel, scan it into a computer, and the computer would spit out the report that, hair and eye color aside, Denise Morel’s features matched those of one Liliane Mansfield, contract agent for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Then the CIA would be hot on her trail, and the Agency had resources Rodrigo Nervi could only dream about. For practical reasons, Salvatore had been left in place with the Agency’s blessings; no one there would look kindly on her for taking him out.

It was a toss-up who would come after her first, Rodrigo or someone sent by the CIA. She would have a better chance against Rodrigo, because he would probably underestimate her. The Agency wouldn’t make that mistake.

Because it would look odd if she didn’t, and also because she wanted to see if she was under surveillance, she bundled up against the chill and walked to the neighborhood market. She’d spotted one guard as soon as she came out of her building; he was sitting in a nondescript gray car parked halfway down the block, and as soon as she walked out, he lifted a newspaper to cover his face. Amateur. But if there was one in front, she could assume there was also one in back. The good news was there wasn’t a guard inside her building, which would have made matters a bit more iffy. She didn’t want to have to go out a third-story window, as weak as she was.

She carried a cloth shopping bag into which she put some produce and fruit. An Italian-looking man—who didn’t really stand out unless you were specifically looking for him—meandered around in her wake, always keeping her in view. Okay, that made three. Three were enough to do a competent job, but weren’t so many that she couldn’t handle them.

After paying for her selections, she walked back to her flat, careful to keep her gait rather slow and laborious. She walked with her head down, the picture of dejection, and not the way anyone who was the least alert would walk. Her watchers would think she was completely unaware of them and, moreover, that her health was still so precarious she could scarcely get around. Since they weren’t extraordinarily skilled in surveillance, that meant they would somewhat relax their guard without realizing it, because she was such a poor challenge.

When her cell phone was fully charged, she took it into the bathroom and turned on the tap water to mask sound, in case a parabolic microphone was aimed at her flat. The chance of that was admittedly small, but in her business paranoia saved lives. She booked a first-class one-way ticket to London, disconnected, then called back and, under another identity, booked a flight out of London that left within half an hour of her arrival, headed back to Paris, where absolutely no one would expect her to go. After that, she would see, but that little maneuver should buy her some more time.

Langley, Virginia

Early the next morning, a junior analyst named Susie Pollard blinked at what the computer facial-recognition program had just told her. She printed out the report, then wove her way through a maze of cubicles to stick her head inside another cubicle. “This looks interesting,” she said, handing the report to a senior analyst, Wilona Jackson.

Wilona slid her glasses into place and swiftly looked over the document. “You’re right,” she said. “Good catch, Susie. I’ll kick this upstairs.” She stood, a six-foot-tall black woman with austere features and a no-bullshit attitude honed to perfection on her husband and five rowdy sons. Without another woman in the household for backup, she said, she had to stay on top of things. That carried over to her work, where she tolerated no nonsense. Anything she kicked upstairs was given proper consideration, or else.

By noon, Franklin Vinay, director of operations, was reading the report. Salvatore Nervi, the head of the Nervi organization—he couldn’t call it a corporation, though corporations were involved—was dead of an undisclosed ailment. The exact date of his death was unknown, but Nervi’s sons had buried him at their home in Italy before releasing the news. His last sighting was at a Parisian restaurant, with a lapse of four days between then and the announcement of his death. He had apparently been in perfect health, so the unknown ailment had occurred rather abruptly. It happened, of course; heart attacks or strokes struck down seemingly healthy people every day.

What set the alarm bells to clanging was the facial-recognition program, which said that, without doubt, Nervi’s newest lady friend had been none other than one of the CIA’s best contract agents in disguise. Liliane Mansfield had darkened her wheat-blond hair and put in dark contacts to hide her distinctive pale blue eyes, but it was undoubtedly her.

Even more alarming was the fact that, a few months ago, two of her closest friends and their adopted daughter had died at Nervi’s hands. All of the indications were that Lily had gone off the reservation and taken matters into her own hands.

She’d known the CIA wouldn’t sanction the kill. Salvatore Nervi was a disgusting example of humanity who deserved killing, but he’d been smart enough to play both ends against the middle and make himself useful, as insurance against just this sort of thing. He had passed along extremely useful information, and done so for years. That information pipeline was now lost, perhaps irrevocably; it would take them years, if they could at all, to develop the same relationship with the heir apparent. Rodrigo Nervi was notoriously suspicious, and not apt to jump at any partnership. Frank’s only hope in that direction was that Rodrigo would prove to be as pragmatic as his father.

Frank hated working with the Nervis. They had some legitimate business concerns, yes, but they were like Janus: everything they did had two faces, a good side and a bad side. If their researchers were working on a cancer vaccine, another group in the same building was working to develop a biological weapon. They gave huge amounts of money to charitable organizations that did a lot of good work, but they also funded terrorists groups that killed indiscriminately.

Playing in the pool of world politics was like playing in a sewer. You had to get dirty in order to play. Privately, Frank thought the end of Salvatore Nervi was good riddance. In the realm of his work, though, if Liliane Mansfield was responsible, he had to do something about it.

He pulled up her security-coded file and read it. Her psychological profile said that she’d been operating under some strain for a couple of years now. In his experience there were two types of contract agents: those who did their work with no more emotion than they would expend on swatting a fly, and those who were convinced of the good they did but whose souls, nevertheless, wore thin under the constant assault. Lily was in the latter group. She was very good, one of the best, but each hit had left its mark on her.

She had stopped contacting her family years ago, and that wasn’t good. She would feel isolated, cut off from the very world she’d worked to protect. Under those circumstances, her friends in the business had become more than just friends; they’d become her surrogate family. When they were hit, her tattered soul had perhaps taken one blow too many.

Frank knew some of his colleagues would laugh at him, thinking in terms of souls, but he’d been in this business a long time and he not only knew what he saw, he understood it.

Poor Lily. Perhaps he should have pulled her out of the field when she first started showing signs of psychological strain, but it was too late now. He had to deal with the situation that existed.

He picked up the phone and had his assistant locate Lucas Swain, who, wonder of wonders, was actually in the building. The fickle Fates must have decided to smile on Frank.

Some forty-five minutes later, his assistant buzzed him. “Mr. Swain is here.”

“Send him in.”

The door opened and Swain sauntered in. Actually, he sauntered everywhere. He walked like a cowboy who had nowhere to go and wasn’t in any hurry to get there. Ladies seemed to like that about him.

Swain was one of those good-looking people who seemed to be perpetually good-natured, too. There was a goofy smile on his face as he said hello and took the chair Frank indicated. For some reason, the smile worked in the same way as the walk: people liked him. He was a devastatingly effective field officer because he went in under people’s radar. He might be a happy man, he might have a walk that looked like the definition of laziness, but he got the job done. He’d been getting the job done in South America for the better part of a decade, which explained the deep tan and rock-hard leanness.

He was beginning to show his age, Frank thought, but then, weren’t they all? There was gray at the temples and along the hairline of Swain’s brown hair, which was kept cropped short because of an unruly cowlick in front. There were lines bracketing his eyes and on his forehead, creases in his cheeks, but with his luck, the ladies probably thought that was as cute as his walk. Cute. It was a sad day in hell, Frank reflected, when he was mentally describing one of his best male field officers as cute.

“What’s up?” Swain asked, stretching his long legs out as he relaxed, his spine curving so he sank down in his chair. Formality wasn’t Swain’s way.

“A delicate situation in Europe. One of our contract agents has gone off the reservation, killed a valuable asset. We need her stopped.”

“Her?”

Frank handed the report over the desk. Swain took it and swiftly read through it, then passed it back. “The deed’s done. What’s there to stop?”

“Salvatore Nervi wasn’t alone in the situation that ended with the death of Lily’s friends. If she’s on a rampage to get all of them, she could wreck our entire network. She’s already done considerable damage by eliminating Nervi.”

Swain screwed up his face and briskly rubbed both hands over it. “Don’t you have some irrascible rogue agent, forcibly retired under a cloud, with some special skill that makes him the only choice possible for locating Ms. Mansfield and stopping her killing ways?”

Frank bit the inside of his cheek to control a smile. “Does this look like a movie production to you?”

“A man can hope.”

“Consider your hopes dashed.”

“Okay, then, how about John Medina?” Swain’s blue eyes were full of laughter as he got into the spirit of deviling Frank.

“John’s busy in the Middle East,” Frank said calmly.

His reply brought Swain upright in his seat, all hint of laziness gone. “Wait a minute. Are you saying there really is a Medina?”

“There really is a Medina.”

“There’s no file on him—” Swain began, then caught himself, grinned, and said, “Oops.”

“Meaning you’ve checked.”

“Hell, everyone in the business has checked.”

“That’s why there’s no file in the computer system. For his protection. Now, as I was saying, John’s deep cover in the Middle East, and in any case, I wouldn’t use him for a retrieval.”

“Meaning he’s way more important than I am.” Swain had that goofy grin again, meaning he took no offense.

“Or that he has different talents. You’re the man I want, and you’ll be on a plane to Paris tonight. Here’s what I want you to do.”

4

After spending an entire day eating, resting, and doing light workouts to increase her stamina, Lily got up the morning of her departure feeling much better. She carefully packed her carry-on bag and shopping tote, making sure she was leaving nothing crucial behind. Most of her clothes were left hanging in the closet; the odd photographs of complete strangers that she had put in cheap frames and set around the flat, to give herself the appearance of a background, were left in place.

She didn’t strip the bed linens or wash the single bowl and spoon she’d used for breakfast, though she did take the precaution of thoroughly wiping the place down with oil-dissolving disinfectant, to destroy her fingerprints. That was something she’d been doing for nineteen years, and the habit was strongly ingrained. She had even wiped down her surroundings before leaving the Nervi compound, though she hadn’t been able to use a disinfectant. She had also always wiped her eating utensils and drinking glasses with a napkin before they were collected, and cleaned her hairbrush every morning, flushing the stray hairs that collected in the bristles.

She was uncomfortably aware she couldn’t do anything about the blood Dr. Giordano had drawn for analyzing, but DNA wasn’t used for identification the same way that fingerprints were; there was no extensive database. Her fingerprints were on file in Langley, but nowhere else; except for the occasional assassination, she’d been a model citizen. Even fingerprints were no good unless there was a file somewhere to match them to, and get a name. One slipup meant nothing. Two provided a means of identification. To the best of her ability, she tried never to provide even a starting point.

Probably Dr. Giordano would find it odd in the extreme if she called him and asked for the return of any leftover blood. If she were in California, now, she could claim she was a member of a weird religious cult and needed the blood, or even that she was a vampire, and probably get any remnants returned.

The ghoulish thought made her mouth curve into a wan smile, and she wished she could share that thought with Zia, who’d had a rich sense of the absurd. With Averill and Tina, and especially with Zia, she’d been able to relax and act silly occasionally, like a normal person. For someone in her line of work, relaxation was a luxury, and done only with others of her kind.

The faint smile faded. Their absence left such a huge void in her life that she didn’t think she’d ever be able to fill it. Over the years her affection had been given to an ever-shrinking circle, until finally there had been just five people in it: her mother and sister—and she no longer dared visit them for fear of bringing the danger of her job to their doorsteps—and three friends.

Averill had once been her lover; for a very brief time they had staved off the loneliness together. Then they had drifted apart, and she met Tina during a job that required two agents. She had never bonded instantly with anyone before the way she had with Tina, as if they had been twins meeting for the first time. They had only to look at each other to know they were thinking the same things at the same times. They had the same sense of humor, the same silly dreams that someday, when they weren’t in this line of work any longer, they’d get married and own their own businesses—not necessarily in that order—and maybe even have a kid or two.

Someday had come for Tina when, like helium balloons floating around in a closed room, Averill eventually floated across her path. Lily and Tina might have had tons in common, but chemistry was one thing that was different; Averill took one look at slim, brunette Tina and fell in love, and the feeling was mutual. For a while, between jobs, they had bummed around together and generally had a blast. They were young and healthy and good at their jobs; admittedly, being assassins made them feel tough and invincible. They were professional enough not to swagger, but young enough to feel the rush.

Then Tina was shot, and reality crashed down on them. The job was deadly. The rush was no longer there. Their own mortality stared them in the face.

Averill and Tina reacted to it by getting married, as soon as Tina was well enough to walk down the aisle. They set up housekeeping together, first in a flat here in Paris, then they bought a small house on the outskirts. They began taking fewer and fewer jobs.

Lily usually came back to visit whenever she could, and one day she brought Zia with her. She’d found the baby, abandoned and starving to death, in Croatia, just after Croatia had declared its independence from Yugoslavia, when the Serb army was already decimating pockets of the new country in the beginning of the bitter war. No one Lily had asked seemed to have any knowledge of the baby’s mother, or none they’d admit to, and they had even less interest. It was either take the baby with her or know she was leaving it to die a miserable death.

Within two days she loved the infant as fiercely as if she’d given birth to it herself. Getting out of Croatia hadn’t been exactly easy, especially since she was lugging a baby. She’d had to find milk, and diapers, and blankets. She hadn’t worried about clothes at that point, just some means, any means, of keeping the baby fed and dry and warm. She named her Zia, just because she liked the name.

Then there was the problem of getting paperwork for Zia, finding a forger good enough, and getting her into Italy. Once out of Croatia, caring for her was less difficult, the supplies Lily needed more readily available. The task of caring for her was never easy, though. The baby jerked and went rigid whenever Lily touched her, and often spat up almost as much milk as she swallowed. Rather than subject the infant to even more travel, when she’d had so few constants in her very short life, Lily decided to stay in Italy for a while.

She thought Zia had been only a few weeks old when she’d found her, though it was possible lack of food and care had made her smaller than average. After staying in Italy for three months, though, Zia had gained enough weight to have dimples on her plump little hands and legs, she was drooling incessantly as she began to cut teeth, and she looked at Lily with the openmouthed, wide-eyed expression of sheer joy that only the very young could achieve and not look like total idiots.

Finally she took Zia to France to meet Uncle Averill and Aunt Tina.

The changeover in custody happened very gradually. Whenever Lily had a job, she would leave Zia with them; they loved the baby and she was content with them, though it still broke Lily’s heart every time she had to leave her, and she lived for the moment when she returned and Zia saw her for the first time. That little face would light up and she’d squeal in delight, and Lily thought she’d never heard a sound so beautiful.

But then the inevitable happened: Zia was growing up. She needed to attend school. Lily was sometimes gone for weeks at a time. It was only logical that Zia spend more and more time with Averill and Tina, until finally they all realized they had to get some more papers forged, showing the couple as Zia’s parents. By the time Zia was four, Averill and Tina were Daddy and Mom to her, and Lily was Aunt Lil.

For thirteen years Zia had been the emotional center of Lily’s life, and now she was gone.

What on earth had caused Averill and Tina to get back into a game they were well out of? Had they needed money? Surely they had known all they had to do was ask Lily, and she’d have given them every euro and dollar she had—and after nineteen years of the very lucrative work she did, she’d had a hefty balance in a Swiss bank. But something had lured them out of retirement, and they’d paid with their lives. And so had Zia.

Now Lily had used up most of her savings getting that poison and setting up the situation. Good papers cost money, and the better they were the more they cost. She’d had to rent the flat, get an actual job—because not having one would have been suspicious—then put herself in Salvatore Nervi’s path and hope he took the bait. That hadn’t been a sure bet, by any means. She could make herself look very attractive, but she knew she wasn’t a beauty. If that hadn’t worked, she would have thought of something else; she always did. But it had worked, beautifully, right up until the moment Salvatore insisted she taste his wine.

Now she had one-tenth the money she’d had before, she had a damaged heart valve that, as Dr. Giordano had explained, would eventually have to be replaced, her stamina was laughable, and her time was running out.

From a logical standpoint, she knew her odds weren’t good. This time not only did she not have Langley’s resources behind her, the Agency would actually be working against her. She wouldn’t be able to use any of her known safe havens, she couldn’t call for either backup or extraction, and she would have to be on guard against . . . everyone. She had no idea whom Langley would send after her; they might simply locate her and have a sharpshooter take her out, in which case she had nothing to worry about, because there was no way she could protect herself from something she couldn’t see. She wasn’t Salvatore Nervi, with a fleet of steel-reinforced cars and protected entrances. Her only hope was not to let them locate her.

On the plus side . . . Well, there was no plus side.

That didn’t mean she’d walk out into the open and make herself an easy target. They might take her down, but she’d make it as difficult for them as possible. Her professional pride was at stake. With Zia and the others gone, pride was just about all she had left.

She waited as long as she dared before using her cell phone to call for a taxi to the airport. She had to cut it as close as possible, to limit the time Rodrigo would have to get people in place. At first the men tailing her wouldn’t know where she was going, but as soon as they realized she was headed to the airport, they’d call Rodrigo for instructions. The chance of Rodrigo already having someone—or several someones—on the payroll at the airport was at least fifty-fifty, but de Gaulle was a large airport and, without knowing exactly which airline she was taking or her destination, heading her off would be difficult. All they could do was follow, but only so far before security would stop them.

If Rodrigo had the passenger list checked, the jig would be up, because she wasn’t flying under the name of Denise Morel, or even her own name. She had no doubt he’d check; the only question was how soon he’d do it. At first, he might not even be suspicious enough to do more than have her followed.

By leaving so openly, and taking so little luggage, she hoped he’d be curious but not suspicious, at least not for the short amount of time it would take her to disappear.

If the gods were smiling on her, he wouldn’t be unduly suspicious even when his men lost track of her in busy Heathrow. He might wonder why she flew instead of taking a ferry or tunnel, but a lot of people flew the short hop from Paris to London, and vice versa, if they were short of time.

In the best possible scenario, he wouldn’t think anything of her trip for at least a couple of days, until she failed to return home. The worst possible scenario would be if he had his men grab her in de Gaulle airport, regardless of witnesses and possible repercussions. Rodrigo wouldn’t worry about either of those. She was betting he wouldn’t go to that extent; so far he hadn’t discovered she wasn’t who she said she was, because he hadn’t had his men storm her flat. In the absence of that knowledge, there was no reason for him to cause a public disturbance.

Lily went downstairs to wait for the taxi, standing where she could see the street but her watchers couldn’t see her. She had thought about walking the several blocks to a taxi rank and waiting in line, but that would have given Rodrigo time she didn’t want him to have, and also tired her. Once—only a little over a week ago—she could have sprinted the distance and not even been winded.

Perhaps her heart had sustained little damage, just enough for Dr. Giordano to detect the murmur, and this insidious weakness would eventually go away. She’d been very sick for over three days, eating nothing, flat on her back. The human body lost strength much faster than it gained it. She’d give it a month; if she wasn’t back to normal in that length of time, she’d have some tests run on her heart. She didn’t know where, or how she’d pay for it, but she’d manage.

Of course, that was assuming she was still alive a month from now. Even after she escaped from Rodrigo, she’d still have to evade her former employer. She hadn’t computed those odds yet; she didn’t want to discourage herself.

A black taxi stopped outside. Picking up her carry-on bag, Lily murmured, “Show time,” and calmly stepped outside. She didn’t hurry, didn’t in any way appear nervous. When she was seated, she took a mirrored compact out of her tote and angled it so she could watch her watchers.

As the taxi pulled away, so did a silver Mercedes. It slowed, a man darted over and practically leaped into the passenger seat, then the Mercedes accelerated until it was right behind the taxi. In the mirror, Lily could see the passenger talking on a cell phone.

The airport was about thirty kilometers out of the city; the Mercedes stayed behind the taxi all the way. Lily didn’t know if she should be insulted or not; did Rodrigo think she was too stupid to notice, or that she would simply not care if she did? On the other hand, normal people didn’t check to see if they were being followed, so the fact that her watchers were so blatant could mean Rodrigo still didn’t really suspect her of anything, despite having her watched and followed. Judging from what she knew about him, she thought he would do that until he discovered who killed his father. Rodrigo wasn’t one to let a loose end go untied.

When they reached the airport, she walked calmly to the British Airways desk to check in. Her passport said her name was Alexandra Wesley, British citizen, and the passport photo matched her current coloring. She was flying first class, she wasn’t checking any luggage, and she had carefully built up this identity, over several years, with numerous stamps on her passport showing she visited France several times a year. She had several such identities, prudently kept private even from her contacts at Langley, for just such emergencies.

Boarding for the flight had already been called by the time she went through all the security checks and got to the designated gate. She didn’t look around her, instead carefully studying her surroundings with her peripheral vision. Yes, that man there; he was watching her, and he held a cell phone in his hand.

He didn’t make any move toward her, just made a call. Her luck was holding.

Then she was safely on the plane, effectively in the hands of the British government. Her designated seat was next to the window; the aisle seat was already occupied by a stylishly dressed woman who looked to be in her late twenties or early thirties. Lily murmured an apology as she slid past the woman to the window seat.

Within half an hour they were in the air for the hour’s flight to London. She and her seatmate exchanged pleasantries, Lily using a public-school accent that seemed to put the woman at ease. The British accent was easier to maintain than the Parisian one, and she almost sighed with relief as her brain seemed to relax. She dozed briefly, tired from all the airport walking.

When they were fifteen minutes out of London, she leaned over and pulled her carry-on bag from underneath the seat. “I’m sorry to disturb you,” she said hesitantly to the woman beside her, “but I’ve a bit of a problem.”

“Yes?” the woman said politely.

“My name is Alexandra Wesley, perhaps you’ve heard of Wesley Engineering? That’s my husband, Gerald. The thing is—” Lily looked down, as if embarrassed. “Well, the thing is, I’m leaving him and he isn’t taking it at all well. He’s set men to following me, and I’m afraid he’ll have them grab me. He’s a bit abusive, set on having his way, and . . . and I really can’t go back.”

The woman looked both uncomfortable and intrigued, as if she didn’t like hearing such intimate details from a stranger but was fascinated in spite of herself. “You poor dear. Of course you can’t go back. But how can I help?”

“When we leave the plane, will you take this bag for me and go to the nearest public loo? I’ll follow you and take it back. It has a disguise in it,” she said quickly, when the woman’s face showed alarm at being asked to take a stranger’s bag in this age of terrorism. “See, look through it.” She quickly unzipped the bag. “Clothes, shoes, wigs. Nothing else. The thing is, they might think of that—that I’d disguise myself, I mean—and pay attention to the bags I take into the loo with me. I read a book on how to evade a stalker and it mentioned this. He’ll have men at Heathrow waiting for me, I know it; as soon as I step out for transportation they’ll take me.” She wrung her hands, hoping she looked suitably distressed. It helped that her face was still thin and drawn from illness, and that she was normally lanky anyway, making her look more frail than she was.

The woman took the bag from Lily and carefully went through every item. A smile broke over her face when she examined one of the wigs. “Hiding in plain sight, are you?”

Lily smiled back. “I hope it works.”

“We’ll see. If not, we’ll share a taxi. Safety in numbers, and all that.” The woman was getting into the spirit of things now.

If her seatmate hadn’t been a woman, Lily would have improvised, taken her chances, but this gambit slightly increased her chances, and at this point she was willing to grab at the least advantage. Agency men could be waiting for her, as well as Rodrigo’s goons, and they wouldn’t be as easy to fool.

Depending on how they wanted to play it, they could have her arrested as soon as she stepped off the plane, in which case there was nothing she could do. They usually played it much closer to the vest than that, though. If they could avoid involving the British government in what was essentially a housekeeping chore to them, then they would.

The plane landed and went to the gate with a minimum of fuss. Lily took a deep breath, and her cohort patted her hand. “Don’t worry,” she said cheerfully. “This will work, you’ll see. How will I know if they’ve spotted you?”

“I’ll tell you where the men are standing. I’ll look for them when I go into the loo. Then I’ll leave before you, and when you come out, if they’re still there, then you’ll know it worked.”

“Oh, this is exciting!”

Lily really hoped not.

The woman took the carry-on bag and exited the plane two people ahead of Lily. She walked briskly, looking at the signs but not staring at the people waiting at the gate. Good girl, Lily thought, hiding a smile. She was a natural.

There were two of them waiting for her, and again they made no particular effort to disguise their interest. Glee rose in her. Rodrigo still didn’t suspect anything truly unusual, didn’t think she would notice she was being followed. This might really work.

The two men trailed in her wake, staying about twenty or thirty feet back. Up ahead, her cohort went into the first public restroom. Lily paused just outside at a water fountain, giving her followers time to choose their positions, then entered.

The woman was waiting just inside and handed over the bag. “Is anyone there?” she asked.

Lily nodded. “Two of them. One is about six feet tall, largish, and he’s wearing a light gray suit. He’s standing directly across from the door, against the wall. The other is smaller, short dark hair, double-breasted blue suit, and he’s in position about fifteen feet ahead.”

“Hurry and change. I can’t wait to see you.”

Lily went into a stall and swiftly began her identity change. The severe dark suit and low heels came off; in their place went a bright pink tank top, painted-on turquoise leggings, stiletto knee-high boots, a fringed turquoise jacket, and a short, spiky red wig. She dumped the clothes she’d removed into the carry-on, and stepped out of the stall.

A huge smile lit the woman’s face, and she clapped her hands. “Wonderful!”

Lily couldn’t help grinning. She swiftly added blusher to her pale cheeks, a thick coating of pink lipstick, and dangling feathered earrings. Slipping a pair of pink shades over her eyes, she said, “What do you think?”

“My dear, I wouldn’t have recognized you, and I knew what you were about. I’m Rebecca, by the way. Rebecca Scott.”

They shook hands, each delighted for different reasons. Lily took a deep breath. “Here I go,” she murmured, and strode boldly out of the restroom.

Both of her followers involuntarily stared at her; everyone did. Looking directly beyond the dark-haired man who stood practically in front of her, Lily waved enthusiastically. “I’m here!” she squealed to no one in particular, though in this crowd that would have been difficult to determine. This time she used her own distinctly American accent, and dashed past her watchers as if joining someone.

As she went by the dark-haired man, she saw him jerk his gaze back to the restroom entrance, as if afraid that moment of inattention had allowed his quarry to escape.

Lily walked as rapidly as she could, losing herself in the crowd. The five-inch heels put her close to six feet tall, but there was no way she intended to wear them any longer than necessary. As she neared her departure gate, she ducked into yet another public restroom, and changed out of the eye-grabbing disguise. When she left that bathroom, she had long black hair and wore black jeans and a thick black turtleneck sweater, with the same low-heeled shoes she’d worn on the flight over. She had wiped off the pink lipstick, replaced it with red gloss, and exchanged the pink shades for gray ones. Her papers as Alexandra Wesley were stowed in her tote, and the ticket and passport in her hand stated she was Mariel St. Clair.

Soon she was on a plane headed back across the Channel to Paris, this time in coach. She leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes.

So far, so good.

5

Rodrigo was furious. He said, carefully, “How, precisely, did you manage to lose her?”

“She was followed from the moment she exited the plane,” replied the British voice on the phone. “She entered the public facilities, and never came out.”

“Did you send someone in to look for her?”

“After some length of time, yes.”

“Exactly what length of time?”

“Perhaps twenty minutes passed before my men became alarmed, sir. Then I had to wait until a female could be brought to the location to enter the facilities and search.”

Rodrigo closed his eyes as he tried to rein in his temper. Bumblers! The men following Denise must have become distracted and not noticed her leaving the facilities. There were no other exits, no windows or trash chutes or anything else. She could only have left the same way she entered, yet these idiots had somehow completely overlooked her.

The matter wasn’t terribly important, but inefficiency annoyed him. Until he got the answers he wanted about Denise’s background, he wanted to know exactly where she was and what she was doing. In fact, he’d expected to have those answers the day before, but the bureaucracy was being as inefficient as usual.

“One thing is puzzling, sir.”

“And that is?”

“When my men lost her, I immediately checked with Customs, but we have no record of her.”

Rodrigo sat upright, a sudden frown drawing his brows together. “What does that mean?”

“It means she disappeared. When I checked the passenger list of the inbound flight, there was no Denise Morel listed. She did get off the plane, but then she somehow disappeared. The only plausible explanation is that she got on another plane, but I have no record of her doing that.”

Alarm bells rang in Rodrigo’s head so loudly they were almost deafening. He went cold, frozen by the sudden horrible suspicion. “Check the records again, Mr. Murray. She must have done.”

“I have already double-checked, sir. There is no record of her entering or leaving London. I was very thorough with my search.”

“Thank you,” Rodrigo said, and hung up the phone. He was so enraged he was dizzy from the force of his emotions. The bitch had played him for a fool!

Just to make certain, he called his contact in the Ministry. “I need that information immediately,” he barked, not identifying either himself or the information in question. He didn’t need to.

“Yes, of course, but there is a problem.”

“You can’t find where this particular Denise Morel exists?” Rodrigo asked sarcastically.

“How did you know? I’m certain I can—”

“Don’t trouble yourself. You won’t find her.” His suspicions confirmed, Rodrigo hung up again and sat behind the desk trying to contain the sulfuric rage that blasted through him. He had to think clearly, and at the moment that was beyond him.

She was the poisoner. How clever of her, to also poison herself, but with such a small dose that she would be sick for a time but would survive. Or perhaps she hadn’t intended to sip the wine at all, but his father had insisted and she accidentally took a larger swallow than she’d intended. That part didn’t matter; what mattered was that, ultimately, she had succeeded in killing his father.

He couldn’t believe how she had fooled him, fooled them all. Her paperwork had been perfect, as far as it went. Now that it was too late, he saw with perfect clarity how it had worked. Salvatore had been lulled into carelessness by her apparent indifference to his advances, and Rodrigo, too, had allowed himself to relax after Salvatore’s first few meetings with her were so ordinary. If she had appeared eager for his father’s company, he would have been much more vigorous in demanding answers, but she had played them all perfectly.

She was obviously a professional, no doubt paid by one of his rivals. As a professional, she had other identities to use when she disappeared afterward, or perhaps she simply used her own real name, since Denise Morel was an alias. She had definitely been on that plane to London—his men had seen her there—therefore, one of the passengers listed was her. He simply had to discover which one, and follow the path from there. The task before him now—or rather, before his people who would be doing the actual work—was daunting, but he had a starting point. He would have them investigate every person on that plane, and he would find her.

No matter how long it took, he would find her. And then he would make her suffer far more than his poor father had suffered. Before he finished with her, she would not only tell him everything she knew about who had hired her, she would also die cursing her own mother for giving birth to her. This he swore on the memory of his father.

Lucas Swain moved silently about the flat that Liliane Mansfield, aka Denise Morel, had abandoned.

Oh, her clothes were still here, or most of them, anyway. Food still in the cupboard, a bowl and spoon in the sink. It looked as if she’d gone to work, or was just out shopping, but he knew better. He knew a professional job when he saw one. There wasn’t a fingerprint in the place, not even on the spoon left in the sink. The wipe-down was perfect.

Judging from the file he’d read on her, the clothes she’d left behind weren’t her type, anyway. The clothes belonged to Denise Morel, and now that Denise had served her purpose, Lily had shed her like a snake shedding its skin. Salvatore Nervi was dead; there was no reason for Denise to exist any longer.

What puzzled him was why she’d hung around for so long. Nervi had evidently been dead for a week or longer, but the landlord reported Mlle. Morel had taken a taxi this very morning. No, he did not know to where, but she was carrying a small bag. A weekend trip, perhaps.

Hours. He’d missed her by mere hours.

The landlord hadn’t let him into the flat, of course; Swain’d had to sneak in, then quietly spring the lock on Lily’s flat. The landlord had obligingly told him which flat it was, saving Swain from having to break in during the night and look at the records, which would have wasted time.

As it was, this was wasted time anyway. She wasn’t here, and she wasn’t coming back.

There was a bowl of fruit on the table. He selected an apple, polished it on his shirt, and bit into it. Damn, he was hungry, and if she’d wanted the apple, she’d have taken it with her. Curious, he opened the icebox to see what else she had in the way of food, and closed the door again in disappointment. Chick food: fruit, some fresh produce, and what was either cottage cheese or yogurt that was way too old. Why didn’t women who lived alone ever have real food around? He’d kill for a pizza, loaded with pepperoni. Or a grilled steak, with a huge baked potato dripping with butter and sour cream. Now, that was food.

While he pondered what his next step should be in locating his quarry, he ate another apple.

According to her file, Lily was very comfortable in France and spoke the language like a native. She supposedly had a talent for accents, too. She had spent some time in Italy and traveled all over the civilized world, but when she settled down for a rest, it was in either France or Great Britain, where she felt most at home. Logic would say she had got the hell out of Dodge, meaning she was no longer in France. That left Great Britain as the most likely place to start looking.

Of course, since she was very good at her job, she might have considered the same logic and gone someplace else entirely, such as Japan. He grimaced. He hated it when he outthought himself. Well, he might as well play it by the numbers and start with the most likely place first; even a blind hog sometimes found an acorn.

There were three common ways to cross the Channel: ferry, train, and airplane. He picked air, because it was the fastest, and she’d be wanting to put some space between her and the Nervi organization. London wasn’t the only G.B. destination she could have chosen, of course, but it was the closest, and she’d want to give any pursuers the shortest length of time possible in which to organize an interception. Information could be relayed instantly, but moving human beings around still took time. That made London the logical destination, which left him with two major airports to cover, Heathrow and Gatwick. He opted for Heathrow first, because it was the busiest and most crowded.

He took a seat in the cozy little parlor—no recliners, damn it—and pulled out his trusty secure cell phone. After punching in a long series of numbers, he pressed the send button and waited to connect. A brisk British voice said, “Murray here.”

“Swain. I need some info. A woman named Denise Morel may or may not have—”

“This is certainly a coincidence.”

Adrenaline surged through Swain, the kick felt by a hunter who has suddenly found the trail he’d been seeking. “Someone else has asked about her?”

“Rodrigo Nervi himself. We were told to follow her when she deplaned. I put two men on it; they tailed her as far as the first public facility. She went in, and never came out. She didn’t go through Customs, and I show no record of her taking another flight out. She’s a very resourceful woman.”

“More than you know,” Swain said. “You told Nervi all of this?”

“Yes. It’s my standing order to cooperate with him—up to a point. He didn’t ask to have her killed, just followed.”

But the fact that she had disappeared so thoroughly would have tipped Nervi off to her capabilities, which in turn would put her in an entirely new light. By now Nervi would have discovered there was no Denise Morel of this particular description, and worked out for himself that she was almost certainly the person who had killed his father. The heat on Lily had just been turned up a couple of thousand degrees.

How had she slipped away in Heathrow? A secure-access door? First she would have had to slip out of the restroom undetected, and that meant a disguise. A clever woman like Lily would have figured out how to do that, been prepared for it. And she would have had an alternate identification to use, too.

“A disguise,” he said.

“I thought the same, though I didn’t say so to Mr. Nervi. He’s a smart man, so he’ll eventually think of it, even though airport security isn’t his milieu. Then he’ll want me to look at all the film.”

“Have you?” If the answer wasn’t yes, then Murray wasn’t as sharp as he used to be.

“Immediately after my men failed to spot her when she left the facility. I can’t fault them, however, because I’ve been over the film twice and I haven’t spotted her yet, either.”

“I’ll be there on the next available flight.”

Because of travel time to the airport, the availability of seats, et cetera, that was some six hours later. Swain passed the time by catching a nap, but he was aware that every passing minute was to Lily’s advantage. She knew how they worked, what their resources were; she’d be building herself a tidy little hidey-hole, adding more and more layers to her camouflage. The delay was also giving her time to procure funds from some unknown bank account that he assumed she had. If he’d been in her line of work, he sure as hell would have had several numbered accounts. As it happened, he himself had a little liquid security deposited offshore. You just never knew when something like that might come in handy. And if it never needed to be used, well, it would make retirement a trifle more comfortable. He was all for a comfortable retirement.

As promised, Charles Murray was waiting at the gate when Swain finally arrived at Heathrow. Murray was of medium height, trim, with short iron-gray hair and hazel eyes. His bearing said he was ex-military; his demeanor was always calm and capable. He’d been unofficially on Nervi’s payroll for seven years, and on the government’s for a lot longer than that. Over the years Swain had occasionally dealt with Murray, enough so that they were fairly informal with each other. That is, Swain was informal; Murray was a Brit.

“This way,” said Murray after a brief handshake.

“How are the wife and kids?” Swain asked, talking to Murray’s back as he ambled along in the British wake.

“Victoria is beautiful, as always. The children are teenagers.”

“Enough said.”

“Quite. And you?”

“Chrissy is a junior in college now; Sam’s a freshman. They’re both great. Technically Sam’s still a teenager, but he’s out of the worst of it.” Actually, both of them had turned out pretty damned good, considering their parents had been divorced for a dozen years and their father was out of the country a lot. To a large degree that was because their mother, bless her heart, had steadfastly refused to make him the bad guy in their breakup. He and Amy had sat the kids down, told them the divorce was for a lot of reasons, including getting married way too young, blah blah blah. Which was all perfectly true. The bottom line, though, was that Amy was tired of having a husband who was mostly somewhere else, and she wanted to be free to look for someone else. Ironically, she hadn’t remarried, though she dated some. The kids’ lives hadn’t changed all that much from when he and Amy were still married: they lived in the same house, went to the same school, and saw their father just about as often as they had before.

If he and Amy had been older and wiser when they married, they never would have had kids together, knowing how his work would affect their marriage, but unfortunately age and wisdom seem to increase at about the same rate and by the time they were old enough to know better, it was too late. Still, he couldn’t regret having his kids. He loved them with every cell in his body, even if he got to see them only a few times a year, and he accepted that he wasn’t nearly as important in their lives as their mother was.

“One can only do one’s best, and pray the demon seed eventually morph back into human beings,” Murray observed as he turned down a short corridor. “Here we are.” He blocked the view of a keypad and punched in a code, then opened a plain steel door. Inside was a vast array of monitors and sharp-eyed personnel watching the ebb and flow of people inside the huge airport.

From there they went into a smaller room, which also had several monitors, as well as equipment for reviewing what the numerous array of cameras caught on film. Murray seated himself in a blue chair on wheels and invited Swain to pull up another one just like it. He typed in a keyboard command and the monitor directly in front of them glowed to life. Frozen on it was a frame of Lily Mansfield getting off the plane from Paris that morning.

Swain studied every detail, noting that she didn’t wear any jewelry at all, not even a wristwatch. Smart girl. Sometimes people would change everything except their wristwatch, and that one detail would trip them up. She was dressed in a plain dark suit and wore low-heeled black pumps. He thought she looked thin and pale, as if she’d been sick or something.

She didn’t look left or right, just walked with the rest of the crowd getting off the plane, and went into the first restroom she came to. A steady parade of women came out of the restroom, but none of them looked like Lily.

“I’ll be damned,” he said. “Run it again. In slow motion.”

Murray obligingly set the video back to the beginning. Swain watched her come off the plane carrying a medium-sized black tote, the kind that didn’t stand out because millions of women carried them every day. He focused on the tote, looking for any means of identifying it: a buckle, the way the straps fit, anything. After Lily vanished into the restroom, he looked for that tote coming out. He saw a lot of black bags of all sizes and shapes, but only one looked as if it might be that particular one. It was carried by a six-foot-tall woman whose clothes, hair, makeup all shouted, “Look at me!” But she wasn’t carrying just that tote, she was also hauling around a carry-on bag, and Lily hadn’t had one of those.

Huh.

“Run it again,” he said. “From the beginning. I want to see everyone who got off that plane.”

Murray obliged. Swain studied every face, and particularly noted what bags they carried.

Then he saw it. “There!” he said, leaning closer to the screen.

Murray froze the image. “What? She hasn’t come into view yet.”

“No, but look at this woman.” Swain jabbed his finger at the screen. “Look at her carry-on bag. Okay, let’s pay attention to what she does, too.”

The stylishly dressed woman was several passengers ahead of Lily. She walked straight to the restroom, which wasn’t unusual. A fair number of women from that flight did the same thing. Swain watched the video until the woman left the restroom—without the carry-on bag.

“Bingo,” he said. “She took the bag in; the clothes for the disguise were in it. Back it up some. There. That’s our girl. She has the bag now.”

Murray blinked at the fantastic creature on the monitor. “My word,” he said. “Are you certain?”

“Did you see this particular woman go into the restroom?”

“No, but I wasn’t looking for her.” Murray paused. “I could scarcely have missed her, could I?”

“Not in that get-up.” The feathered earrings alone would pull a second look. From the short red spiky hair to the stiletto boots, that woman was an attention-getter. If Murray hadn’t seen her enter the restroom, it was because she hadn’t. But no wonder Murray’s men hadn’t seen beneath the disguise; how many people, trying to hide their true self, would invite scrutiny like that?

“Look at the nose and mouth. That’s her.” Lily’s nose wasn’t exactly hooked, but it was the closest it could get and still be feminine. It was thin but strong, and oddly appealing when paired with that mouth, with the full upper lip.

“So it is,” Murray said, and shook his head. “I’m off my game, not to have seen it before.”

“It’s a good disguise. Smart. Okay, let’s see where our Technicolor cowgirl goes.”

Murray worked the keyboard, pulling up the necessary video to follow Lily’s progress through the airport. She walked for a while, then went into another restroom. And didn’t come back out.

Swain rubbed his eyes. “Here we go again. Just concentrate on finding those particular bags.”

Because of the swarm of foot traffic occasionally blocking the camera’s view, they had to watch the tape several times to narrow their list of possibilities down to three women, and track them until they could get a better view. At last they had her, though. She had long black hair now, and was wearing black pants and a black turtleneck. She was shorter, the stiletto boots gone. The sunglasses were different, too, and the feathered earrings had been replaced with gold hoops. She still had those two particular bags, though.

The cameras tracked her to another gate, where she boarded another plane. Murray swiftly checked which flight had left the gate at that particular time. “Paris,” he said.

“Son of a bitch,” Swain uttered in astonishment. She’d gone back. “Can you get that passenger list for me?” It was a rhetorical question; of course Murray could. It was in his hands a few minutes later. He skimmed down the names, noting that neither Denise Morel nor Lily Mansfield was listed, meaning she had yet another identity going.

Now would come the fun part, going back to Paris and going through this same process with the authorities at de Gaulle airport. The prickly French might not be as accommodating as Murray, but Swain wasn’t without a few resources.

“Do me a favor,” he said to Murray. “Don’t pass this information along to Rodrigo Nervi.” He didn’t want that bunch getting in his way, plus he had a natural dislike of doing anything to help people like that. Circumstances might force the United States government to occasionally look the other way about the dirtier parts of the Nervi organization, but he didn’t have to help them out one bit.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Murray blandly. “What information?”

It would be, of course, just as much hassle getting back across the Channel as it had been getting to London. He couldn’t get off one plane and get right back on another the way she had done; oh, no, it was never that simple. She had planned ahead; he was scrambling around behind her, trying to find an available seat. She’d known exactly what would confuse and delay anyone tracking her, of course.

Still, it was discouraging to find out he had another long wait before the next flight with an empty seat.

Murray clapped him on the shoulder. “I know someone who can get you there much faster than that.”

“Thank God,” said Swain. “Bring him on.”

“You don’t mind flying backseat, do you? He’s a NATO pilot.”

“Holy shit,” Swain blurted. “You’re putting me in a fighter?”

“I did say ‘much faster,’ didn’t I?”

6

Lily let herself into the sublet apartment in Montmartre that she had rented several months ago, before she had assumed the Denise Morel identity. The apartment was tiny, really more a studio than a true apartment, but had its own minuscule bathroom. She had her own clothes here, plus privacy and relative safety. Because the sublet predated Denise’s appearance, no computer search was likely to go back far enough to put her on any sort of list, plus she had concocted yet another identity: Claudia Weber, a German national.

Because Claudia was a blonde, Lily had stopped at a hairdresser and had the artificial coloring removed from her hair. She would have bought the products and done it herself, but removing color was much more complicated than adding it and she was afraid she might do all sorts of damage to her hair. An inch had had to be trimmed as it was, to get rid of the dry ends after the bleaching process.

But when she looked in the mirror, she saw herself again, at last. The colored contact lenses were gone and her own pale blue eyes looked back at her. Her straight hair was once more wheat blond, reaching just to her shoulders. She could walk right past Rodrigo Nervi and he probably wouldn’t recognize her—she hoped, because she might be doing exactly that.

Wearily she set her bags on the neatly made fold-out bed, then tumbled down beside them. She knew she should check to make certain the apartment hadn’t been bugged, but she had been pushing herself relentlessly all day and she was shaking with fatigue. If she could sleep for just an hour, that would make a world of difference.

All in all, though, she was pleased with how her stamina had held out today. She was tired, yes, but not gasping for breath, as Dr. Giordano had warned she would be if that heart valve was severely damaged. Of course, she hadn’t been unduly exerting herself, either; she hadn’t been sprinting. So the jury was still out on the heart thing.

She closed her eyes and in the quiet concentrated on her heartbeat; it seemed normal to her. Thump-thump, thump-thump. With his stethoscope Dr. Giordano could hear a murmur, but she didn’t have a stethoscope and as far as she could tell the rhythm was completely normal. So maybe the damage was minimal, just enough to produce a faint murmur. She had other things to worry about.

She drifted into a half-doze in which her body relaxed while her mind began to circle around the situation, probing and rearranging facts as she knew them, trying to find answers to the unknown factors.

She didn’t know what Averill and Tina had stumbled across, or what they’d been told, but it was something they felt strongly enough about to bring them back into a business they’d abandoned. She didn’t even know who had hired them. Not the CIA, she was almost certain. Probably not MI-6 either. While they didn’t live in each other’s pockets, the two governments and agencies maintained a strong degree of cooperation between them, and in any case, there were plenty of active agents available to them, so there wouldn’t have been any need to bring in two inactive ones.

In fact, she didn’t think any government had hired them; instead, it looked like a private hire. Somewhere along the way—hell, all along the way—Salvatore Nervi had stepped on toes, bullied, brutalized, and killed. Finding his enemies wouldn’t be difficult; sorting them out could take a year or longer. But who had gone to the trouble of hiring two professionals, albeit retired ones, to hit back? Moreover, who had known about her friends’ backgrounds? Averill and Tina had lived ordinary lives, had gone out of their way to provide that kind of life for Zia; they hadn’t exactly advertised their pasts.

But someone had known about them, known their capabilities. That suggested someone who had been in the business, too, she thought, or at least been in a position to know names. Whoever it was had also known not to approach an active contract agent, not to bring attention to himself or herself in that manner. Instead the unknown someone had picked Averill and Tina because . . . why? Why them? And with Zia to consider, why had they accepted?

Her friends had been young enough to still be in good physical shape—that was one possible reason for their selection that came to mind. They had also been skilled at what they did, coolheaded, experienced. She could see why they had been tapped, but what had swayed them to get involved? Money? They had been doing okay, not rich but not hurting for cash, either. A truly astronomical amount could have swayed them, but over the years they’d developed the same casual attitude about money that she had. From the time she’d begun her career, money had always been there. She didn’t worry about it, and neither had Averill and Tina. She knew for a fact that between them the two agents had salted away enough cash to live in relative comfort for the rest of their lives, plus Averill had been doing okay for himself with a computer-repair shop.

She wished one of them had picked up the telephone and called her, told her what they were considering. Their motivation had to have been strong and she wanted to know what it was, because then she’d know how to attack. Her revenge wasn’t complete just because Salvatore was dead; he was just the first act. She wouldn’t be satisfied until she found out what was bad enough that her friends had become involved, something that would make the entire world turn against the Nervi organization, and even the people in power who had been in Salvatore’s pocket would rush to distance themselves. She wanted to bring down the entire rotten deck of cards.

She had the fleeting thought that if Tina had told her about the job they were taking, if it had been something important enough to bring them out of retirement, she might well have joined them. She might have made the difference between success and failure—or she herself might be dead alongside them.

But they hadn’t mentioned a thing, even though she’d had dinner with them not a week before their murders. She had been going out of town on a job that would take a few days or a little longer, yes, but she’d told them when she expected to be back. Had they already known then, or had this job offer come out of the blue and needed doing immediately? Averill and Tina didn’t operate that way. Neither did she. Anything involving the Nervi organization required study and preparation, because the layers of security were so dense.

None of this was anything she hadn’t mentally gone over and over during many sleepless nights since they had been killed. Sometimes, when Zia’s cheerful little face formed in her mind’s eye, she wept with a violence that frightened her. In her grief she’d needed to strike back immediately, to cut off the head of the snake. She’d done that, focusing on nothing else for three months, and now she would concentrate on the rest of it.

First, she needed to find out who had hired Averill and Tina. A private hire meant someone with money . . . or maybe not. Maybe the need had been the motivating factor. Maybe this person had come to them with proof of something particularly nasty in which Salvatore was involved. With Salvatore, that could be anything; she couldn’t imagine anything so low and dirty that he would balk at it. His only requirement had been that he make money.

But Averill and Tina had both retained an idealistic core, and she could see them being so alarmed at something that they were moved to action, even though in their former occupations they’d seen so much that it was difficult to shock them. What could that have been?

Zia. Something that threatened Zia. To protect her, they would have fought tigers bare-handed. Anything involving her would explain both their urgency and their motivation.

Lily sat up, blinking. Of course. Why hadn’t she seen it before? If it wasn’t money that drew them back in, then what else had been important to them? Their marriage, their love for each other, Lily herself . . . but most of all, Zia.

She had no proof. She didn’t need it. She had known her friends, known how much they loved their daughter, known what was important in their lives. This conclusion was an intuitive leap, but it felt right. Nothing else had.

This gave her a direction. Among the Nervi holdings were several labs, engaged in all sorts of medical, chemical, and biological research. Since Averill and Tina had evidently felt this was something that had to be taken care of immediately, whatever it was had been imminent. But even though they’d failed, nothing unusual that had happened since then came to mind; no catastrophes locally. She couldn’t think of anything other than the usual terrorist bombings, which seemed to need no reason.

But maybe they hadn’t failed. Maybe they had succeeded in their mission, but Salvatore had discovered who they were and had them killed, to teach others not to interfere with the Nervis.

The target might not have been one of the laboratories, though they seemed the most likely targets. Salvatore had many properties, scattered all over Europe. She needed to search the back issues of some newspapers, to see if any incidents involving a Nervi property had been reported during the week between when she’d last seen her friends alive and their deaths. Salvatore had been powerful enough to keep media attention to a minimum, even black it out completely if he saw the need, but there might still be a small mention of . . . something.

Her friends hadn’t taken any trips immediately prior to their deaths. She had talked to their neighbors; Averill and Tina had been at home, Zia had been in school. So whatever was involved was local, or at least close by.

She would go to an Internet café tomorrow and do a search. She could do it now, but common sense told her to rest after such a long day. She was relatively safe here, even from the Agency. No one knew about Claudia Weber, and she wasn’t doing anything to attract attention. She’d had the foresight to grab something to eat at the airport, knowing she was in for a long session with the hairdresser, and she’d also bought a few snacks for tonight, plus enough coffee for tomorrow. She was set for right now. Tomorrow she’d need to shop for food, something best done early in the morning before all the best choices were taken. After that, she’d hit an Internet café and get started.

The Internet was a wonderful thing, Rodrigo thought. If one knew the right people—and he did—almost nothing on it was safe from scrutiny.

First his people had created a list of the rogue chemists available for hire who had the skill to create such a lethal poison. That last requirement had shrunk the list from several hundred down to nine, which was a much more manageable number.

From there it had simply been a matter of investigating finances. Someone would have received a large amount of money recently. Perhaps the person in question would be intelligent enough to put the money in a numbered account, but perhaps not. Even so, there would be evidence of an influx of cash.

He found that evidence with Dr. Walter Speer, a German national who lived in Amsterdam. Dr. Speer had been fired from a reputable company in Berlin, then from another in Hamburg. He had then relocated to Amsterdam, where he had been getting by but not making a fortune. Dr. Speer, however, had recently purchased a silver Porsche, and paid for it in full. It was child’s play to discover where Dr. Speer banked, and not much more difficult than that for the experts on Rodrigo’s staff to get into the bank’s computer system. A little more than a month ago, Dr. Speer had deposited a million American dollars. The conversion rate had made him a very happy man.

American. Rodrigo was stunned. The Americans had paid to have his father killed? That didn’t make sense. Their agreement was too valuable to the Americans for them to interfere; Salvatore had seen to that. Rodrigo hadn’t necessarily agreed with his father on their dealings with the Americans, but it had worked for a number of years and nothing had happened to upset the status quo.

Denise—or whoever she was—had effectively disappeared today, but now he had another link to her, to finding out who she really was and whom she was working for.

Rodrigo wasn’t a man who wasted time; that very night he flew in his private jet to Amsterdam. Locating Dr. Speer’s apartment was child’s play, as was forcing the lock on the door. He was waiting in the dark when Dr. Walter Speer finally came home.

From the moment the door opened, Rodrigo smelled the strong odor of alcohol, and Dr. Speer stumbled a bit as he turned to switch on a lamp.

Rodrigo hit him from behind a split second later, slamming him into the wall to stun him, then throwing him to the floor and straddling him, his fists delivering powerful one-two punches to the doctor’s face. Explosive violence stuns the inexperienced, throws them into such a state of confusion and shock that they are helpless. Dr. Speer was not only inexperienced but inebriated. He couldn’t manage anything in the way of self-defense, not that it would have done any good. Rodrigo was bigger, younger, faster, and skilled at what he did.

Rodrigo hauled him to a sitting position and thrust him against the wall, making sure that his head once more banged hard. Then he gripped the doctor’s coat and pulled him closer for a good look. He liked what he saw.

Huge red lumps were already swelling on the doctor’s face, and blood trickled from both his nose and mouth. His glasses had been broken and hung askew from one ear. The expression in his eyes was one of total incomprehension.

Other than that, Dr. Speer looked to be in his early forties. He had a shock of thick brown hair and was stocky in build, making him slightly bearlike. Before Rodrigo’s art work on them, his features had probably been ordinary.

“Let me introduce myself,” Rodrigo said in accented German. He didn’t speak it well, but could make himself understood. “I am Rodrigo Nervi.” He wanted to let the doctor know exactly with whom he was dealing. He saw the doctor’s eyes widen in alarm; he wasn’t so drunk that he was beyond all good sense.

“A month ago, you received a payment of a million American dollars. Who paid you, and why?”

“I—I . . . What?” Dr. Speer stammered.

“The money. Who gave it to you?”

“A woman. I don’t know her name.”

Rodrigo shook him so hard his head wobbled on his neck, and his broken glasses went flying. “Are you certain of that?”

“She—she never told me,” Speer gasped.

“What did she look like?”

“Ah—” Speer blinked as he tried to focus his thoughts. “Brown hair. Brown eyes, I think. I did not care how she looked, you understand?”

“Old? Young?”

Again Speer blinked, several times. “Thirties?” he said, making it a question, as if he wasn’t certain of his memory.

So. It had definitely been Denise who had given him the million dollars. Speer didn’t know who had given her the money—that was another trail to follow—but this confirmed everything. Rodrigo had known instinctively from the moment she disappeared that she was the killer, but it was good to know he wasn’t wasting time chasing down false leads.

“You made a poison for her.”

Speer swallowed convulsively, but a spark of professional pride lit his blurry gaze. He didn’t even deny it. “A masterpiece, if I do say so. I took the properties of several deadly toxins and combined them. One hundred percent lethal, if even a half ounce is taken. By the time the delayed symptoms are presented, the damage is so severe there is no effective treatment. I suppose one could try a multiorgan transplant, assuming there just happened to be that many organs available at one time and they were all a match, but if there was any toxin left in the system it would attack those organs, too. No, I don’t think that would work.”

“Thank you, Doctor.” Rodrigo smiled, a cold smile that, if the doctor had been more sober, would have frightened him senseless. Instead he smiled back.

“You’re welcome,” he said. The words were still hanging in the air when Rodrigo broke his neck and let him drop like a rag doll.

7

Swain lay in his hotel bed the next morning staring at the ceiling and trying to logically connect the dots. Outside a cold November rain was pelting the windows; he hadn’t yet adjusted from the much warmer climate of South America, so he was definitely feeling a chill, even though he was snug in bed. Between the rain and jet lag, he figured he deserved a rest. Besides, it wasn’t as if he was totally slacking off; he was thinking.

He didn’t know Lily, so he was hampered in his effort to figure out what she would do. So far she’d proven herself to be inventive, bold, and coolheaded; he’d have to be on top of his game to outthink her. But he did love a challenge, so instead of running around Paris flashing a photograph of her and asking strangers on the street if they’d seen this woman—yeah, like that would work—he tried instead to anticipate what she would do next, so he could get just that one half-step ahead of her that he needed.

Mentally he listed what he knew so far, which wasn’t much.

Point A: Salvatore Nervi had killed her friends.

Point B: She had then killed Salvatore Nervi.

Logically, that should be the end of it. Mission accomplished, except for the little detail of getting away from Rodrigo Nervi alive. But she’d managed that; she had made her escape to London, pulled that slick disguise switcheroo and then doubled back. She could possibly have gone to ground here in Paris, using yet another of her seemingly endless supply of alternate identities. It was also possible she’d left the airport, changed her appearance yet again, then returned and taken yet another flight out. She had to know that everything any passenger did in an airport, outside of the restrooms, was caught on some camera somewhere, so she would expect that eventually anyone looking for her would nail down the switches she’d made, and from there be able to run the passenger list and deduce the identities she’d used. She had been forced to do her quick changes to throw off Rodrigo Nervi and buy some time, even though that meant she’d burned three aliases and wouldn’t be able to use them again without raising all sorts of red flags that would get her caught.

With that time, however, she could have left the airport and assumed yet another name and appearance, one that hadn’t been caught on the airport cameras. Her paperwork was good; she knew some talented people. She’d be able to sail through security checkpoints and Customs with no problem. She could be anywhere by now. She could be back in London, snoozing on a red-eye flight back to the States, or even sleeping in the room next to his.

She’d come back to Paris. There had to be some significance in that. Logistically, it made sense; the flight was short, giving her time to land and get away before security could painstakingly go over and over the video to tell how she’d done it, then by process of elimination narrow the list of passenger names down to the one she’d used. By coming back to Paris, she’d also involved yet another government and bureaucracy, slowing the process even more. She could, however, have done the same thing by flying to any other European country. Though the London-to-Paris flight was just an hour, Brussels was even closer. So were Amsterdam and The Hague.

Swain locked his hands behind his head and scowled at the ceiling. There was a great big gaping hole in that reasoning. She could have gone through Customs in London and walked out of the airport long before there was any chance of someone watching the security tapes and figuring out which disguise she’d used. If she didn’t want to stay in London, she could then have simply changed her disguise and gone back a few hours later to catch another flight, and absolutely no one would have made the connection. She’d have been home free. In fact, that would have been a much smarter move than staying in the airport with all those surveillance cameras. So why hadn’t she done that? Either she didn’t think anyone would be able to pick up her identity switch, or she’d had a compelling reason for coming back to Paris at that particular time.

Granted, she wasn’t a field officer, trained in espionage; contract agents were hired for each individual job, sent in to perform a specific duty. Her file mentioned nothing about her being schooled in disguise or evasion techniques. She had to know the Agency would be after her for screwing up the Nervi deal, but it was possible she didn’t know the extent of surveillance in major airports.

He wouldn’t bet the farm on it.

She was too smart, too on top of things. She’d known cameras were watching her every move, though she’d thrown enough curve balls at them to keep them occupied for a while. And she might have decided that giving them more time, by leaving Heathrow and returning later, would give them a chance to . . . do something. He didn’t know what. Scan her face into the facial-recognition data bank, maybe? She was in the Agency’s data bank, but not anywhere else. If, however, someone had scanned her facial structure into Interpol’s database, the cameras at the airport entrances would then have been able to come up with a match before she could get to her gate. Yeah, that could be it. She could have been afraid Rodrigo Nervi would try to have her entered into Interpol’s data.

How could she avoid that danger? By having cosmetic surgery, for one thing. Again, that would be the smart thing for a woman on the run to do. She hadn’t opted for that, though; instead she’d come back to Paris. Maybe going into hiding and not coming out until after she’d had cosmetic alterations would have taken too long. Maybe there was some kind of time limit for something she wanted to get accomplished.

Such as? See Disneyland Paris? Tour the Louvre?

Maybe killing Salvatore Nervi was just the opening act, instead of an end unto itself. Maybe she knew the Agency’s best of the best—namely himself, not that she knew him from Adam’s house cat—was on the job, and it was only a matter of time before she was grabbed. That kind of faith in his abilities made him feel all warm inside. At any rate, say his thinking was on the right track: she had something she wanted to do, something so urgent that hours counted, and she was afraid she wouldn’t have time to do it.

Swain groaned and sat up, rubbing his hands over his face. There was a flaw in that logic, too. She’d have had a better chance of accomplishing whatever it was if she’d gone to ground and had the cosmetic surgery. He kept coming back to that. The only thing that made sense of her actions was if there was a metaphoric time bomb somewhere, something that wouldn’t wait a few months and had to be accomplished right now, or at least in a short period of time. But if there really was something along those lines, something that posed a world danger, all she had to do was pick up a phone and call it in, let a group of experts handle whatever it was rather than her trying to pull a Lone Ranger.

Scratch “world danger” as a motivation.

Something personal, then. Something she wanted to do herself, and felt a compelling urge to get done as soon as possible.

He thought about the contents of her file. Her motivation for killing Salvatore Nervi was the deaths of a couple of her friends and their adopted daughter a few months ago. She’d done the smart thing and laid her groundwork for that, taken her time, got close enough to Nervi to do the job. So why wasn’t she doing the smart thing now? Why was an intelligent, professional agent doing something so dumb it would ultimately get her caught?

Forget motivation, he suddenly thought. He was a man; he’d go crazy trying to figure out what was going through a woman’s mind. If he had to pick the most likely scenario, he’d say she wasn’t finished with the Nervi family. She’d struck them hard, but now she’d circled back for a killing blow. They had pissed her off big-time, and she was going to make them pay.

He heaved a sigh of satisfaction. There. That felt right. And damn if it didn’t provide motivation, too. She’d lost people she loved, and she was striking back no matter what the cost to herself. He could understand that. The reasoning was simple and clean, without all the why-do-this and not-do-that second-guessing.

He’d run it by Frank Vinay in a few hours when sunrise hit D.C., but his gut told him he was on the right track and he’d start nosing around before he talked to Vinay. He just needed to decide on a starting point.

It all went back to her friends. Whatever they’d been doing that got on Nervi’s bad side, that same thing would be her target as a sort of poetic justice.

He thought back to the file he’d read in Vinay’s office. He hadn’t brought any paperwork with him, because it could compromise security; unsanctioned eyes couldn’t read what wasn’t there. He relied instead on his excellent memory, which produced the names Averill and Christina Joubran, retired contract agents. Averill had been Canadian, Christina from the States, but they’d lived in France full-time and been completely retired for over twelve years. What could have spurred Salvatore Nervi to kill them?

Okay, first he had to find out where they’d lived, how they’d died, who their friends were other than Lily Mansfield, and if they’d talked to anyone about something unusual going on. Maybe Nervi was manufacturing biological weapons and selling them to the North Koreans, though again, if Lily’s friends had stumbled across something like that, why the hell wouldn’t they have simply called their old bosses and reported it? Idiots might try to handle things themselves, but successful contract agents weren’t idiots, because if they were, they’d be dead.

That wasn’t a good thought, because the Joubrans were dead. Uh-oh.

Before he thought himself in circles again, Swain got out of bed and showered, then called room service for breakfast. He’d elected to stay at the Bristol in the Champs-Élysées district because it had hotel parking space and twenty-four-hour room service. It was also expensive, but he needed the parking for the car he’d rented last night, and the room service because he might be keeping some very odd hours. Besides, the marble bathrooms were cool.

It was while he was eating his croissant and jam that something obvious occurred to him: the Joubrans hadn’t stumbled across anything. they’d been hired to do a job and either it had gone bad on them or they’d succeeded at it and been killed afterward when Nervi struck back.

Lily might already know what that something was, in which case he was still playing catch-up. But if she didn’t—and he thought that was likely, since she’d been away on a job when the kills went down—then she’d be trying to find out who had hired her friends, and why. Essentially, she’d be asking the same questions of the same people that Swain intended to interview. What were the odds that their paths would cross at some point?

He hadn’t liked those odds before, but they were looking better and better by the minute. A good starting point would be finding out what, if anything, had happened to any Nervi-owned facility in the week preceding the Joubrans’ deaths. Lily would be checking newspaper reports, which might or might not have any mention of a problem pertaining to the Nervis; he was in a position to go straight to the French police, but he’d just as soon they not know who he was or where he was staying. Frank Vinay wanted this kept as quiet as possible; it wouldn’t be good for diplomatic relations for the French to know that a CIA contract agent had apparently assassinated someone as politically connected as Salvatore Nervi, who hadn’t been a French citizen, but had nevertheless lived in Paris and had many friends in the government.

He checked in the phone directory for the Joubrans’ address, but there was nothing listed. No surprise there.

Swain’s good luck was that he worked for an agency that collected the most minute bits of news from all over the world, then cataloged and analyzed everything. Another bit of good luck was that the information highway in that agency was open twenty-four hours a day.

He used his secure cell phone to call Langley, going through the usual process of identification and verification, but within a minute he was talking to a person in the know, by the name of Patrick Washington. Swain told him who he was and what he needed, Patrick said, “Hold on,” and Swain waited. And waited.

Ten minutes later Patrick came back on the line. “Sorry it took so long, I had to double-check something.” Meaning he’d checked on Swain. “Yeah, there was an incident at a lab on August twenty-fifth, a contained explosion and fire. According to the reports, the damage was minimal.”

The Joubrans had been killed on August 28. The lab incident had to be the trigger.

“Do you have an address on the lab?”

“Coming up.”

Swain heard computer keys clicking; then Patrick said, “Number Seven Rue des Capucines, just outside Paris.”

That covered a lot of ground. “North, east, south, or west?”

“Uh—let me pull up a street-finder—” More clicking keys. “East.”

“What’s the name of the lab?”

“Nothing fancy. Nervi Laboratories.”

Yeah, right. Mentally Swain translated the name into French.

“Need anything else?”

“Yeah. The street address of Averill and Christina Joubran. They were retired contract agents. We used them occasionally.”

“How long ago?”

“Early nineties.”

“Just a minute.” More clicking keys. Patrick said, “Here it is,” and recited the address. “Anything else?”

“No, that’s it. You’re a good man, Mr. Washington.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The “sir” verified that Patrick had indeed double-checked Swain’s identity and clearance. He put Patrick’s name down in his mental file of go-to people, because he liked that the man was cautious enough that he didn’t take anything for granted.

Swain looked out the window: still raining. He hated that. He’d spent too many hours in the steaming tropical heat after a sudden downpour had drenched him to the skin, and the experience had given him an intense dislike of getting his clothes wet. It had been a long time since he’d been cold and wet, but as he remembered, it was even more miserable than being hot and wet. He hadn’t brought a raincoat with him, either. Hewasn’t even certain he owned one, and he didn’t have time to go shopping.

He checked his watch. Ten after eight; shops weren’t open yet, anyway. He solved that problem by calling down to the front desk and arranging to have a raincoat in his size delivered to his room and charged to his account. That wouldn’t prevent him from getting wet this morning, since he couldn’t wait for it to arrive. At least he would be in the rain only going to and from his rental car, not slogging through miles of jungle.

He’d rented a Jaguar because he’d always wanted to drive one, and also because only the more expensive cars had been available by the time he got to the rental office last night, even though he’d crossed the Channel “much faster” than usual, thanks to Murray’s NATO friend. He figured he’d write off the usual amount of a rental on expenses and eat the rest of it himself. He’d never seen a rule he didn’t like to finesse, but he was scrupulously honest on his expenses. He figured his ass was more likely to be raked over the coals because of money than for any other reason. Being fond of his ass, he tried to spare it unnecessary stress.

He left the Bristol behind the wheel of the Jaguar, deeply inhaling the rich leather scent of the upholstery. If women really wanted to smell good to men, he thought, they’d wear perfume that smelled like a new car.

With that happy idea lingering in his mind, he plunged headlong into Parisian traffic. He hadn’t been in Paris in years, but he remembered that the bravest and most foolhardy won the right-of-way. The rule was you yield to traffic on the right, but screw the rule. He deftly cut off a taxi whose driver slammed on the brakes and screamed Gallic curses, but Swain accelerated and shot through a gap. Damn, this was fun! The wet streets raised the unpredictability factor, adding to his adrenaline level.

He battled his way south of the Montparnasse district to where the Joubrans had lived, occasionally consulting a city map. Later in the day he would check out the Nervi lab, eyeball the layout and more obvious security measures, but right now he wanted to go where he figured Lily Mansfield was most likely to be.

It was time to get this show on the road. After the merry chase she’d led him the day before, he couldn’t wait to match wits with her again. He had no doubt he’d win—eventually—but all the fun was in the run.

8

Rodrigo slammed down the phone, then propped his elbows on the desk and buried his face in his hands. The urge to strangle someone was strong. Murray and his band of merry idiots had evidently gone both blind and stupid, to let one woman so thoroughly make fools of them all. Murray swore he’d had experts look at the airport video, and none could tell where Denise Morel had gone. She had effectively vanished into thin air, though Murray was gracious enough to admit that she must have used a disguise, but one so clever and professional that there were no visible similarities for them to track.

She could not be allowed to get away with killing his father. Not only would his reputation suffer, but everything in him demanded vengeance. Grief and wounded pride roiled together, giving him no peace. He and his father had always been so careful, so thorough, but this one woman had somehow slipped under their defenses and dealt Salvatore a nasty, painful death. She hadn’t even given him the dignity of a bullet, but had chosen poison, a coward’s weapon.

Murray might have lost her, but he, Rodrigo, hadn’t given up. He refused to give up.

Think! he commanded himself. To find her he first had to identify her. Who was she, where did she live, where did her family live?

What were the usual means of identification? Fingerprints, obviously. Dental records. The last wasn’t an option, because he would need to know not only who she was but who her dentist was, and at any rate, that method was used mainly for identifying someone already dead. To find someone alive . . . how to do that?

Fingerprints. The room where she’d slept while she was here had been thoroughly cleaned by his staff the day she went back to her flat, destroying any prints, nor had he thought to lift a print from any of the drinking glasses or silverware she’d used. Her flat was a possibility, though. Feeling faintly heartened, he contacted a friend in the Parisian police department who didn’t ask questions, just said that he would take care of it immediately himself.

The friend called within the hour. He hadn’t gone over every inch of the flat, but he’d checked the most obvious places and there were no prints at all, not even smudged ones. The flat had been thoroughly wiped down.

Rodrigo swallowed his rage at being so completely thwarted by this woman. “What other means are there of finding someone’s identity?”

“None that are guaranteed, my friend. Fingerprints are of use only if the subject has previously been arrested and his prints are in the database. It is the same with every method. DNA, as accurate as it is, is good only if there is another DNA sample to which it can be compared so you can say, yes, these two samples did or did not come from the same person. The facial recognition programs will identify only those people who are already in the database, and is targeted mostly toward terrorists. It is the same with voice recognition, retina patterns, everything. There must be a database from which matches can be made.”

“I understand.” Rodrigo rubbed his forehead, thoughts racing. Security video! He had Denise’s face on security video, plus much clearer pictures on her identity paperwork and the investigations he’d done. “Who has these facial-recognition programs?”

“Interpol, of course. All the major organizations such as Scotland Yard, the American FBI and CIA.”

“Are their data banks shared?”

“To some extent, yes. In a perfect world, speaking from an investigational standpoint, everything would be shared, but everyone likes to keep some secrets, no? If this woman is a criminal, then Interpol might very well have her in their data banks. And one other thing—”

“Yes?”

“The landlord said that a man, an American, was here yesterday asking about the woman. The landlord didn’t get a name, and his description is so vague as to be useless.”

“Thank you,” said Rodrigo, trying to think what this meant. The woman had been paid in American dollars. An American man was looking for her. But it followed that if this man had been the one to hire her, he would already know where she was—and why search for her anyway, when she had completed her mission? No, this had to be something totally unconnected, an acquaintance perhaps.

He disconnected the call, a grim smile twisting his lips, and punched in a number he’d called many times before. The Nervi organization had contacts all over Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, and were expanding into the Orient. As an intelligent man, it behooved him to make certain one of those contacts was very conveniently placed within Interpol itself.

“Georges Blanc,” said a quiet, steady voice, which was indicative of the man himself. Rodrigo had seldom met anyone more competent than Blanc, whom he’d never met face-to-face.

“If I scan a photograph and send it to your computer, can you run it through your facial identification program?” He had no need to identify himself. Blanc knew his voice.

There was a short pause; then Blanc said, “Yes.” There were no qualifications, no explanation of the security measures he might have to sidestep, just that brief affirmative.

“I will have it to you within five minutes,” Rodrigo said, and hung up. From the file on his desk he took the photo of Denise Morel—or whoever she was—and scanned it into his computer, which was properly safeguarded with every security measure known. He typed a few lines, and the photograph was on the way to Lyon, where Interpol was headquartered.

The phone rang. Rodrigo picked up the receiver. “Yes.”

“I have it,” said Blanc’s quiet voice. “I will call you as soon as I have an answer, but as to how long it will take . . .” His voice trailed off, and Rodrigo imagined him shrugging.

“As soon as possible,” said Rodrigo. “One other thing.”

“Yes?”

“Your contact with the Americans—”

“Yes?”

“There’s a possibility the person I’m seeking is an American.” Or had been hired by an American, thus the payment in United States dollars. While he didn’t think the United States government had anything to do with his father’s murder, until he knew for certain who had hired the bitch, he intended to keep his cards close to his chest where they were concerned. He could have gone directly to his American liaison and asked the same favor he was asking of Blanc, but it was better, perhaps, that he approach this from a more oblique angle.

“I will have my contact check their data banks,” Blanc said.

“Discreetly.”

“Of course.”

9

Despite the cold rain blowing in under the protection of her umbrella, Lily kept her head high so she could see what was going on around her. She strode briskly, pushing herself to see how her stamina held up. She was gloved, booted, and wrapped against the chill, but she left her head uncovered so her blond hair was visible. If by chance Rodrigo’s men were looking for her here in Paris, they’d be looking for a brunette. She doubted Rodrigo had followed her path back here, though, at least not yet.

The Agency, however, was a different matter entirely. She was almost surprised she hadn’t been detained in London as soon as she got off the plane. But she hadn’t been, and she hadn’t spotted a tail, either when she’d left de Gaulle airport or this morning.

She began to think that she might have been incredibly lucky. Rodrigo had kept Salvatore’s death secret for several days, then released the news only after Salvatore’s funeral. There hadn’t been any mention of poison, just that he had died after a brief illness. Was it possible the dots hadn’t been connected?

She didn’t dare let herself hope, couldn’t afford to let down her guard. Until she’d finished the job, she would stay alert for trouble from every corner. After the job—well, she really had no idea. At this point, all she hoped for was survival.

She hadn’t chosen an Internet café close to her sublet studio, because for all she knew there might be a trap on any online requests for information pertaining to anything about the Nervi organization. Instead she had taken the Metro to the Latin Quarter, and opted to walk the rest of the way. She had never used this particular Internet café before, which was one of the reasons she’d chosen it. One of the basic rules for evasion was to not follow a set routine, not be predictable. People got caught because they went where they were most comfortable, where things were familiar.

Lily had spent quite a lot of time in Paris, so that meant there were a lot of places and people that she would now have to avoid. She’d never actually had a residence here, instead staying with friends—usually Averill and Tina—or at a B and B. Once, for about a year, she’d rented a flat in London but gave it up because she’d spent twice as much time traveling as she had at the flat and it was just an added expense.

Her theater of work had been primarily in Europe, so going home to the States hadn’t happened very often, either. As much as she liked Europe and was familiar with it, truly settling down there had never occurred to her. If she ever bought a home—a very big “if”—it would be in the States.

Sometimes she thought longingly of retiring as Averill and Tina had, of living a normal life with a nine-to-five job, of staying in a community and becoming part of its fabric, knowing her neighbors, visiting with relatives, chatting on the phone. She didn’t know how she had come to this, to being able to snuff out a human life as easily as most people would step on an insect, to being afraid to even call her mother, for God’s sake. She had started so young, and that first time hadn’t been easy at all—she’d been shaking like a leaf—but she’d gotten the job done, and the next time had been easier, and the time after that easier still. After a while the targets had become less than human to her, an emotional remoteness that was necessary for her to be able to do the job. Perhaps it was naive of her, but she trusted her government not to send her after any of the good guys; it was a necessary belief, the only way she could work. And still she had become someone she feared, this woman who probably couldn’t be trusted to enter normal society.

It was still there, that dream of retiring and settling down, but Lily recognized it as just that, a dream, and unlikely ever to happen. Even if she got through this situation alive, settling down was something normal people did, and Lily was afraid she herself had become less than human. Killing had become too easy, too instinctive. What would happen to her if she had to deal with the same frustrations every day, a nasty boss or a vicious neighbor? What if someone tried to mug her? Could she control her instincts, or would people die?

Even worse, what if she inadvertently brought danger to someone she loved? She knew she literally wouldn’t be able to bear it if anyone in her family was harmed because of her, because of what she was.

A car horn beeped, and Lily started, jerking her attention back to her surroundings. She was appalled that she’d let her thoughts wander, instead of keeping herself alert and focused. If she couldn’t hold her concentration, there was no way she’d be able to successfully pull this off.

She might have squeaked under the Agency’s radar so far—she hoped—but that couldn’t last. Eventually someone would come for her, and she thought sooner rather than later.

Looked at realistically, there were four possible outcomes for this situation. In the best-case scenario, she would discover what it was that had lured Averill and Tina out of retirement, and whatever it was, would be so horrible that the civilized world would distance itself from the Nervis and they would be put out of business. The Agency would never use her again, of course; no matter how justified, a contract agent who went around killing assets was too unstable for the job. So she’d win, but be unemployed, which threw her back to her earlier concern about whether she could actually live a normal life.

In the next-best-case scenario, she wouldn’t find anything suitably incriminating—selling weapons to terrorists wouldn’t be bad enough, because everyone knew about it anyway—and would be forced to live out her life under an alias, in which case she’d be unemployed, and back to the question of whether she could hold down a regular job and be Jane Citizen.

The last two possibilities were bleak. She might accomplish her aim, but get killed. Finally, worst of all, she might get killed before she got anything accomplished.

She would have liked to say the odds were fifty-fifty that she’d have one of the first two outcomes, but the four possibilities weren’t equal in probability. She thought there was something like an eighty percent chance she wasn’t going to survive this, and that might be an optimistic guess. She was going to try like hell for the twenty percent, though. She couldn’t let Zia down by giving up.

The Latin Quarter was a maze of narrow cobbled streets, usually teeming with students from the nearby Sorbonne and shoppers who came for the odd boutiques and ethnic stores, but today the cold rain had thinned the crowds. The Internet café, however, was already busy. Lily surveyed the café as she closed her umbrella and removed her raincoat, scarf, and gloves, looking for an unoccupied computer where she was least likely to be observed. Beneath the lined raincoat she wore a thick turtleneck sweater in a rich blue that darkened the shade of her eyes and drapey knit slacks over low boots. An ankle holster carrying a .22 caliber revolver was strapped around her right ankle, easily accessible in the low boot, and the drapey fit of the trousers hid any telltale line. She had felt horribly defenseless during the weeks when she hadn’t been able to carry a weapon because of those damn searches every time she got close to Salvatore; this was better.

She located a machine situated at such an angle that she could watch the door while she was there, plus it was as private as she was likely to get in this particular café. It was, however, being used by a teenage American girl who was evidently checking her e-mail. It was usually easy to spot Americans, Lily thought; it wasn’t just their clothing or style, it was something about them, an innate confidence that often edged into arrogance, and had to be irritating as hell to a European. She herself might still have the attitude—she was almost certain of it—but over the years her style of dress and outward manners had changed. Most people mistook her for Scandinavian, given her coloring, or perhaps German. No one, looking at her now, would automatically think of apple pie and baseball.

She waited until the teenager had finished with her e-mail and left, then slid into the vacated seat. The rate per hour here was very reasonable, doubtless because of the hordes of college students. She paid for an hour, expecting to take at least that long or longer.

She began with Le Monde, the biggest newspaper, searching the archives between August 21, when she had dinner with the Joubrans for the last time, and the 28th, when they were murdered. The only mention of “Nervi” was of Salvatore in connection with a story on international finances. She read the article twice, searching for any detail that might indicate an underlying story, but either she was in the dark concerning financial matters or there was nothing.

There were fifteen newspapers in the Parisian area, some small, some not. She had to research all of them, covering the archives for those seven days in question. The task was time-consuming and sometimes the computer would take forever to download a page. Sometimes the connection was broken and she would have to log on again. She had been there three hours when she logged on to Investir, a financial newspaper, and hit the jackpot.

The item was just a sidebar, only two paragraphs long. On August 25, a Nervi research laboratory had suffered an explosion and subsequent fire that was described as “small” and “contained,” with “minimal damage” that would in no way affect the lab’s ongoing research in vaccines.

Averill had specialized in explosives, to the point of being a true artist. He’d seen no point in wanton destruction when, with care and planning, it was possible to design a charge that would take out only what was needed. Why blow up an entire building when one room would do? Or a city block when one building would do? “Contained” was a word often used to describe his work. And Tina had been skilled at bypassing security systems, in addition to being talented with a pistol.

Lily couldn’t know for certain it was their work, but it felt right. At least this was a lead she could follow, and hope it went down the correct path.

While she was online, she pulled up what information there was on the research laboratory, and found precious little more than the address and the name of the director, her pal Dr. Vincenzo Giordano. Well, well. She typed his name into the search engine and came up dry, but then she hadn’t really expected he would have his home phone number published. That would have been the easiest way to locate him, but it certainly wasn’t the only way.

Logging off line, she flexed her shoulders and rolled her head back and forth to loosen the tight muscles in her neck. She hadn’t moved from the computer terminal in over three hours and every muscle felt stiff, plus she really needed to use the facilities. She was tired, but not as tired as she’d been the day before, and she was satisfied with the way her stamina had held up during the brisk walk from the Metro.

The rain was still falling when she left the café, but had slowed to little more than a drizzle. She opened her umbrella, thought for a moment, then struck out in the opposite direction from which she’d come earlier. She was hungry, and though she hadn’t had one in years, she knew exactly what she wanted for lunch: a Big Mac.

Swain second-guessed himself again. He was getting damn tired of doing that, but couldn’t seem to help himself.

He’d located the Joubrans’ old address, and found that the space had evidently been cleaned up, cleaned out, and either rented or sold to another family. He’d had a vague notion that he might break in and see what he could find, but that would have been useful only if no one else had moved there in the meantime. He had watched a young mother welcome a babysitter—her mother, from the resemblance—and two preschool children erupt out of the door into the rain before she could stop them. The two adults had, with much clucking and shooing, rounded up the two giggling curtain-climbers and got them indoors; then the young woman had dashed out again, clutching an umbrella and bag. Whether she was going to work or going shopping didn’t matter to him. What mattered was the residence was no longer empty.

That’s where he second-guessed himself. He’d also planned to question the neighbors and the proprietors of the local markets about the Joubrans, who their friends were, that kind of thing. But it occurred to him that if he beat Lily to the punch with those questions, when she did come around, someone was bound to tell her an American man had asked those same questions just the day before, or even a few hours before. She wasn’t stupid; she’d know exactly what that meant, and go to ground somewhere.

He’d been chasing around after her the day before, trying to catch up, but now he had to adjust his thinking. He was no longer necessarily behind her, which was good only if he knew what her next move would be. Until then, he couldn’t afford to alarm her or she would disappear on him again.

Through channels—with Murray dealing with the French—he knew that Lily had flown back to Paris using the identity of Mariel St. Clair, but the address listed on her passport had turned out to be a fish market. Just a little humor on her part, he thought. She wouldn’t be using the St. Clair identity again; she had probably slid effortlessly into yet another persona, one he had no way of finding. Paris was a big city, with over two million inhabitants, and she was far more familiar with it than he was. He had only this one chance where their paths might intersect, and he didn’t want to ruin it by jumping in too fast.

Disgruntled, he drove around the neighborhood getting the lay of the land, so to speak, and more than casually studying pedestrians as they hurried up and down the streets. Unfortunately, most of them carried umbrellas that partially hid their features, and even if they hadn’t, he had no idea what disguise Lily might be using now. She’d been just about everything except an elderly nun, so maybe he should start looking for those.

In the meantime, maybe he should take a look at that Nervi lab, eyeball the outward security measures. Who knew when he might need to get inside?

After an unhealthy and extremely satisfying lunch, Lily took the SNCF train to the suburb where Averill and Tina had lived. By the time she arrived there, the rain had stopped and a weak sun was making fitful efforts to peek through the dull gray clouds. The day wasn’t any warmer, but at least the rain wasn’t making everyone miserable. She remembered the brief snow flurry the night Salvatore had died, and wondered if Paris would see more snow this winter. Snow events didn’t happen in Paris all that often. How Zia had loved playing in the snow! they’d taken her skiing in the Alps almost every winter, the three adults who’d loved her more than life itself. Lily herself never skied, because an accident could put her out of commission for months, but after they’d retired, both her friends had taken to the sport like fiends.

Memories flashed in her mind like postcards: Zia as an adorable, chubby three-year-old in a bright red snowsuit, patting a small and extremely lopsided snowman. That was her first trip to the Alps. Zia on the bunny trails, shrieking, “Watch me! Watch me!” Tina taking a header into a snowbank and emerging laughing, looking more like the Abominable Snowman than a woman. The three of them enjoying drinks around a roaring fireplace while Zia slept upstairs. Zia losing her first tooth, starting school, her first dance recital, showing the first signs of changing from child to adolescent, getting her period last year, fussing with her hair, wanting to wear mascara.

Lily briefly closed her eyes, shaking with pain and rage. Desolation filled her, the way it often had since she’d learned they were all dead. Since then she could see the sunshine but hadn’t been able to feel it, as if its warmth never touched her. Killing Salvatore had been satisfying, but it wasn’t enough to bring back the sun.

She stopped outside the place where her friends had lived. There was someone else living in the house now, and she wondered if they knew three people had died there just a few months before. She felt violated, as if everything should have been left the way it had been, their things untouched.

That very first day she’d returned to Paris and discovered they’d been murdered, she herself had taken some of the photographs, some of Zia’s games and books, a few of her childhood toys, the baby album she had started and Tina had lovingly continued. The house had been cordoned off, of course, and locked up, but that hadn’t stopped her. For one thing, she had her own key. For another, if necessary she would have torn the roof off with her bare hands to gain entrance. But what had happened to the rest of their belongings? Where were their clothes, their personal treasures, their ski equipment? After that first day she had been busy for a couple of weeks finding out who had killed them, and beginning her plan for vengeance; when she’d returned, the house had been cleaned out.

Averill and Tina had each had some family, cousins and such, though no one close. Perhaps the authorities had notified those family members, and they had come to pack up everything. She hoped so. It was okay if family had their possessions, but she hated the idea of some impersonal cleaning service coming and boxing things up to be disposed of.

Lily began knocking on doors, talking to neighbors, asking if they’d seen anyone visiting that week before her friends were murdered. She had questioned them before, but hadn’t known the right question to ask. She was known to them, of course; she’d been visiting for years, had nodded hello, stopped for brief chats. Tina had been a friendly person, Averill more aloof, but to Zia there’d been no such thing as a stranger. She’d been on very friendly terms with all the neighbors.

Only one had seen anything that she remembered, though; it was Mme. Bonnet, who lived two doors down. She was in her mid-eighties, grumpy with age, but she liked to sit by the front window while she knitted—and she was constantly knitting—so she saw almost everything that happened on the street.

“But I have already told all of this to the police,” she said impatiently when she answered the door and Lily posed her question. “No, I saw no one the night they were killed. I am old; I don’t see so well, I don’t hear so well. And I close my curtains at night. How could I have seen anything?”

“What about before that night? Any time that week?”

“That, too, I told the police.” She glared at Lily.

“The police have done nothing.”

“Of course they have done nothing! Worthless, the lot of them.” With a disgusted wave of her hand she dismissed a small army of public servants who every day did the best they could.

“Did you see anyone you didn’t know?” Lily repeated patiently.

“Just that one young man. He was very handsome, like a movie star. He visited one day, for several hours. I hadn’t seen him before.”

Lily’s pulse leaped. “Can you describe him? Please, Madame Bonnet.”

The old lady glared some more, muttered a few uncomplimentary phrases like “incompetent idiots” and “bumbling fools,” then barked, “I told you, he was handsome. Tall, slim, black-haired. Very well dressed. He arrived by taxi, and another came for him when he left. That is all.”

“Could you guess his age?”

“Young! To me, anyone under fifty is young! Don’t bother me with these silly questions.” And with that, she stepped back and closed the door with a bang.

Lily took a deep breath. A young, handsome, dark-haired man. And well-dressed. There were thousands who met that description in Paris, which abounded with handsome young men. It was a start, a piece of the puzzle, but as a stand-alone clue it meant absolutely nothing. She had no list of usual suspects, nor a selection of photographs she could show Mme. Bonnet and hope the old lady could pick out one and say, “This one. This is the man.”

And what did this tell her, really? This handsome young man could have hired them to blow up something at the Nervi lab, or he could have been no more than a friendly acquaintance who happened to visit. Averill and Tina could have gone somewhere else to meet the person who hired them, rather than letting him come to their home. In fact, that would have been more likely.

She rubbed her forehead. She hadn’t thought this out, but she didn’t know if it could be thought out. She didn’t know if it mattered why they’d taken the job, or what the job was. She couldn’t even be certain there was a job, but it was the only scenario that made sense and she had to go with her instinct on that. If she started doubting herself now, she might as well pack it in.

Deep in thought, she walked back to the train platform.

10

Georges Blanc believed strongly in law and order, but he was also a pragmatic man who accepted that sometimes there were difficult choices and one just did the best one could.

He didn’t like providing information to Rodrigo Nervi. He did, however, have a family to protect and an older son who was in his first year at Johns Hopkins University, in the United States. The tuition at Johns Hopkins was almost thirty thousand American dollars every year; that alone would have beggared him. But he would have managed, somehow, if Salvatore Nervi hadn’t approached him over ten years ago and genially suggested that Georges would greatly benefit from a second, very generous income, for which he would have to do nothing but share information now and then, and perhaps do some small favors. When Georges had politely refused, Salvatore had kept smiling, and had begun reciting a bone-chilling list of misfortunes that could befall his family, such as his house burning down, his children being kidnapped or perhaps even physically harmed. He told how a gang of thugs had broken into an old woman’s house and blinded her by throwing acid in her face, how savings could disappear like smoke, how automobiles had accidents.

Georges had understood. Salvatore had just outlined the things that would happen to him and his family if he refused to do what Salvatore demanded. So he had nodded, and tried over the years to limit the damage he did with the information he passed on and the favors he did. With those threats as motivation, Salvatore could have had the information for free, but he had established an account for Georges in Switzerland, and the equivalent of twice his yearly salary was paid into it every year.

Georges was careful to outwardly live on his Interpol salary, but pragmatic enough to dip into the Switzerland account to pay for his son’s education. There was a healthy amount in the account now, having accumulated for ten years and drawn interest as well. The money was there; he wouldn’t use it to buy luxuries for himself, but he would use it for his family. Eventually, he knew, he would have to do something with the money, but he didn’t know what.

Over the years he had dealt mostly with Rodrigo Nervi, Salvatore’s heir apparent, and now heir in fact. He would almost rather have dealt with Salvatore. Rodrigo was colder than Salvatore, smarter, and, Georges thought, probably more ruthless. The only advantage Salvatore had had over his son was experience, and more years in which to accumulate a devil’s list of sins.

Georges checked the time: one pm. With the six hours’ time difference between Paris and Washington, that made it seven AM there, just the right time for reaching someone on a cell phone.

He used his own cellular phone, not wanting a record of the call on Interpol’s records. Marvelous inventions, cell phones; they made pay phones almost obsolete. They weren’t as anonymous, of course, but his was secure against eavesdropping and far more convenient.

“Hello,” a man said after the second ring. In the background Georges could hear a television, the modulated tones of newscasters.

“I’ll be sending you a photograph,” Georges said. “Would you please run it through your facial-recognition program as soon as possible?” He never used a name, and neither did the other man. Whenever one of them needed information, he would call on a personal phone, rather than going through channels, which kept their official contact at a minimum.

“Sure thing.”

“Please send all pertinent information to me by the usual channel.”

They each rang off; conversations were always kept to a minimum as well. Georges knew nothing about his contact, not even his name. For all he knew, his counterpart in Washington cooperated for the same reason he himself did, out of fear. There was never any hint of friendliness between them. This was business, which they understood all too well.

“I need a definite answer. Will you have the vaccine ready by the next influenza season?” Rodrigo asked Dr. Giordano. There was a huge report on Rodrigo’s desk, but he was concerned with the bottom line, and that was whether the vaccine could be produced in the volume needed, before it was needed.

Dr. Giordano had a hefty grant from several world health organizations to develop a reliable vaccination against avian influenza. Theirs wasn’t the only laboratory working on this problem, but it was the only one that had Dr. Giordano. Vincenzo had become fascinated with viruses and had left his private practice behind for a chance to study them, becoming an acknowledged expert and seen as someone who was either a remarkable genius or remarkably lucky in working with the microscopic nasties.

A vaccine for any strain of avian flu was difficult to develop, because avian flu was fatal to birds and vaccines were made by growing the influenza virus in eggs. Avian flu, however, killed the eggs; therefore, no vaccine. The developer of a process for producing an effective, reliable vaccine against avian flu would have a huge cash cow.

This was, potentially, the biggest moneymaker in the entire Nervi corporate structure, more lucrative even than opiates. So far avian flu itself was following dead-end paths: The virus would pass from an infected bird to a human, but it lacked the means of human-to-human infection. The human host would either die or get well, but without infecting anyone else. Avian flu, as it was now, was still incapable of causing an epidemic, but the American CDC and the World Health Organization were greatly alarmed by certain changes in the virus. The experts were betting that the next influenza pandemic, the influenza virus against which humans had no immunity because they’d never come in contact with it before, would be an avian influenza virus—and they were holding their breaths with each successive flu season. So far, the world had been lucky.

If the virus made the necessary genetic changes that would enable it to jump from human to human, the company that could make a vaccine for that influenza would be able to name its price.

Dr. Giordano sighed. “If there are no more setbacks, the vaccine can be ready by the end of next summer. I cannot, however, guarantee there will be no more setbacks.”

The explosion in the lab last August had destroyed several years of work. Vincenzo had isolated a recombinant avian virus and painstakingly developed a means of producing a reliable vaccine. The explosion had not only destroyed the product, it had also taken out a huge amount of information. Computers, files, hard copy notes—gone. Vincenzo had started again from scratch.

The process was going faster this time, because Vincenzo knew more about what worked and what didn’t, but Rodrigo was concerned. This season’s influenza was of the ordinary variety, but what about next season? Producing a batch of vaccine took about six months, and a large quantity of it had to be ready by the end of next summer. If they missed that deadline and next season the avian virus made the genetic mutation it needed to jump from human to human, they would have missed the opportunity to make an incredible fortune. The infection would flash around the world, millions would die, but in that one season the immune systems of those who survived would adjust and that particular virus would reach the end of its brief success. The company that was ready with a vaccine when the virus mutated was the company that would reap the benefits.

They might be lucky once again, and the avian virus wouldn’t mutate in time for the next influenza season, but Rodrigo refused to rely on luck. The mutation could happen at any time. He was in a race with the virus, and he was determined to win.

“It’s your job to make certain there aren’t any more setbacks,” he told Vincenzo. “An opportunity such as this comes once in a lifetime. We will not miss it.” Left unsaid was that if Vincenzo couldn’t get the work done, Rodrigo would bring in someone who could. Vincenzo was an old friend, yes—of his father’s. Rodrigo wasn’t burdened by the same sentimentality. Vincenzo had done the most important work, but it was at a point where others could take over.

“Perhaps it isn’t once in a lifetime,” said Vincenzo. “What I have done with this virus, I can do again.”

“But in these particular circumstances? This is perfect. If all goes well, no one will ever know and, in fact, we’ll be praised as saviors. We’re perfectly positioned to take advantage this one time. With the WHO funding your research, no one will be amazed that we have the vaccine. But if we go to the well too many times, my friend, the water will become muddied and questions will be asked that we don’t want answered. There cannot be a pandemic every year, or even every five years, without someone becoming suspicious.”

“Things change,” Vincenzo argued. “The world’s population is living in closer contact with animals than ever before.”

“And no disease has ever been studied as thoroughly as influenza. Any variation is examined by thousands of microscopes. You’re a doctor, you know this.” Influenza was the great killer; more people had died in the 1918 pandemic than during the four-year Great Plague that had devastated Europe during the Middle Ages. The 1918 influenza had killed, it was estimated, between forty and fifty million people. Even in normal years influenza killed thousands, hundreds of thousands. Every year two hundred and fifty million doses of vaccine were produced, and that was only a fraction of what would be needed during a pandemic.

Labs in the United States, Australia, and the U.K. worked under strict regulations to produce the vaccine that targeted the virus researchers said would most likely be dominant in each influenza season. The thing about a pandemic, however, was that it was always caused by a virus that hadn’t been predicted, hadn’t been seen before, and thus the available vaccine wouldn’t be effective against it. The whole process was a giant guessing game, with millions of lives at stake. Most of the time, the researchers guessed right. But about once every thirty years or so, a virus would mutate and catch them flat-footed. It had been thirty-five years since the Hong Kong influenza pandemic of 1968–69; the next pandemic was overdue, and the clock was ticking.

Salvatore had used all his influence and contacts to win the WHO grant to develop a reliable method of vaccine production for avian influenza. The selected labs that normally produced vaccine would be focusing on the usual strains of viruses, not the avian virus, so their vaccines would be useless. Because of the grant and Vincenzo’s research, only the Nervi labs would have the know-how to produce the avian vaccine and—here was the important part—have doses ready to ship. With millions of people worldwide dropping like flies from the new strain, any effective vaccine against it would be priceless. The sky was literally the limit to how much profit could be made in a few short months.

There was no way to produce enough to protect everyone, of course, but the world’s population would benefit by some judicious thinning, Rodrigo thought.

The explosion in August had threatened all of that, and Salvatore had moved swiftly to control the damage. The ones who had set the explosion had been eliminated, and a new security system installed, since obviously the old one had huge flaws. But despite all his efforts, Rodrigo had never been able to discover who hired the husband-and-wife team to destroy the lab. A rival for the vaccine? There was no rival, no other laboratory working on this particular project. A general business rival? There had been bigger targets that could have been selected, but were ignored.

First the explosion, then three months later Salvatore was murdered. Could the two be linked? Over the years there had been many attempts on Salvatore’s life, so perhaps there was no connection between the two events. Perhaps this was simply a very bad year. And yet . . . the Joubrans had been professionals, the husband a demolitions expert and the wife an assassin; Denise Morel was probably also a professional assassin. Was it beyond the realm of possibility that they’d been hired by the same person?

But the two events were very different in nature. In the first, Vincenzo’s work had been deliberately targeted and destroyed. Since it was no secret he was working on a different method of producing influenza vaccine, who would benefit from that destruction? Only someone who was also working on the same project, knew Vincenzo was close, and wanted to steal a march on him. Undoubtedly there were private laboratories that were trying to develop an avian flu vaccine, but who among the many researchers would not only know how close Vincenzo was but have the financial wherewithal to hire two professionals to stop him?

One of the regular sanctioned laboratories that produced influenza vaccines, perhaps?

Killing Salvatore, on the other hand, in no way affected Vincenzo’s work. Rodrigo had simply stepped into Salvatore’s place. No, his father’s murder served no purpose in that arena, so he couldn’t see a connection.

The phone rang. Vincenzo got up to leave, but Rodrigo stayed him with a lifted hand; he had more questions about the vaccine. He picked up the receiver. “Yes.”

“I have an answer to your question.” Again, no names were used, but he recognized Blanc’s quiet voice. “There was nothing in our data banks. Our friends, however, came up with a match. Her name is Liliane Mansfield, she is American, and she is a contract agent, a professional assassin.”

Rodrigo’s blood ran cold. “They hired her?” If the Americans had turned on him, matters had just become enormously complicated.

“No. My contact says our friends are greatly disturbed and are themselves trying to find her.”

Reading between the lines, Rodrigo interpreted that to mean that the CIA was trying to find her to eliminate her. Ah! That explained the American man who had been to her flat searching for her. It was a relief to have that mystery explained, as well; Rodrigo liked to know who all the players were on his chessboard. With the vast American resources and extensive knowledge they must have about her, they were far more likely to succeed before he did . . . but he wanted to personally oversee the solution to her breathing problem. She breathed, therefore she was a problem.

“Is there any way your contact can share their knowledge with you, as they receive it?” If he knew what the CIA knew, he could let them do the legwork for him.

“Perhaps. There is one other thing that I thought would be of great interest to you. This woman was a very close friend of the Joubrans.”

Rodrigo closed his eyes. There it was, the one detail that made sense of everything, that tied it all together. “Thank you,” he said. “Please let me know if you can work out this other matter with our friends.”

“Yes, of course.”

“I’d like a copy of all the information you have on her.”

“I will fax it to you as soon as I am able,” Blanc replied, meaning when he returned home that night. He would never send information to Rodrigo from the Interpol building itself.

Rodrigo hung up and leaned his head back against his chair. The two events were connected, after all, but not in any way he’d imagined. Vengeance. So simple, and something he understood with every cell in his body. Salvatore had killed her friends, so she had killed Salvatore. Whoever had hired the Joubrans to destroy Vincenzo’s work had set in motion a chain of events that had ended with his father’s murder.

“Her name is Liliane Mansfield,” he told Vincenzo. “Denise Morel’s real name, that is. She is a professional assassin, and she was friends with the Joubrans.”

Vincenzo’s eyes widened. “And she took the poison herself? Knowing what it was? Brilliant! Foolhardy, but brilliant.”

Rodrigo didn’t share in Vincenzo’s admiration for this Liliane Mansfield’s actions. His father had died a very painful, difficult death, robbed of dignity and control, and he would never forget that.

So. She had accomplished her mission and fled the country. She was perhaps out of his reach now, but she wasn’t out of the reach of her own countrymen. With Blanc on the job, he would be able to stay abreast of their search for her, and when they were closing in on her, he would step in and do the honors himself. With great pleasure.

11

When Rodrigo received the faxed papers, he stared for a long time at the picture of the woman who had killed his father. His machine was a color printer, so he received the full impact of the skillfulness of her disguise. Her hair was wheat blond and very straight, her eyes a piercing pale blue. She was very Nordic in looks, with a strong, lean face and high cheekbones. He was amazed at how changing her coloring to dark hair and brown eyes had softened her face; her facial structure had remained unchanged, but one’s perception of her was definitely altered. He thought she could have walked into the room and sat next to him, and it would have taken him a moment to recognize her.

He had wondered what his father had seen in her. As a brunette, she had left Rodrigo cold; his reaction to her as a blonde was very different. It wasn’t just the normal Italian reaction to blond hair, either. It was as if he was truly seeing her for the first time, seeing the intellect and strong will so evident in those pale eyes. Perhaps Salvatore had been more perceptive than he himself was, because his father had respected strength as he’d respected nothing else. This woman was strong. Once she had crossed his path, it was almost inevitable that Salvatore would have been attracted to her.