Code Name: Dove

Nova checked the ledge—it wasn’t more than eight inches wide. Leaning out, she could see, about twenty-five feet to her left, a light from the library where the secret meeting was to take place.

She turned around and leaned her back and head against the wall. She held her hand to her stomach, which was now slowly turning over.

She had to spy on that meeting. Over two months with Jean Paul, and still nothing. If he was innocent and she got caught, her actions would be impossible to justify. Her cover would be blown. But if he was guilty, she couldn’t pass up the chance. And if he was guilty and she got caught?

“So don’t get caught, Nova,” she said sternly to herself. Risking her life was part of the job, especially when the fate of the world depended on whether she got on the ledge or not….

Dear Reader,

Welcome to Silhouette Bombshell, the hottest new line to hit the bookshelves this summer. Who is the Silhouette Bombshell woman? She’s the bombshell of the new millennium; she’s savvy, sexy and strong. She’s just as comfortable in a cocktail dress as she is brandishing blue steel! Now she’s being featured in the four thrilling reads we’ll be bringing you each month.

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From USA TODAY bestselling author Lindsay McKenna, we have Daughter of Destiny, an action-packed adventure featuring a Native American military pilot on a quest to find the lost ark of her people. Her partner on this dangerous trek? The one man she never thought she’d see again, much less risk her life with!

This month also kicks off ATHENA FORCE, a brand-new twelve-book continuity series featuring friends bonded during their elite training and reunited when one of them is murdered. In Proof, by award-winning author Justine Davis, you’ll meet a forensic investigator on a mission, and the sexy stranger who may have deadly intentions toward her.

Veteran author Carla Cassidy brings us a babe with an attitude—and a sense of humor. Everyone wants to Get Blondie in this story of a smart-mouthed cop and the man she just can’t say no to when it comes to dealing out justice.

Finally, be the first to read hot new novelist Judith Leon’s Code Name: Dove, featuring Nova Blair, the CIA’s secret weapon. Nova’s mission this time? Seduction.

We hope you enjoy this killer lineup!

Sincerely,

Natashya Wilson

Associate Senior Editor, Silhouette Bombshell

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MILLS & BOON

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JUDITH LEON

has made the transition from left-brained scientist to right-brained novelist. Before she began writing fiction some twelve years ago, she was teaching animal behavior and ornithology in the UCLA biology department.

She is the author of several novels and two screenplays. Her epic of the Minoan civilization, Voice of the Goddess, published under her married name, Judith Hand, has won numerous awards. Her second epic historical, The Amazon and the Warrior, is based on the life of Penthesilea, an Amazon who fought the warrior Achilles in the Trojan War. In all of her stories she writes of strong, bold women; women who are doers and leaders.

An avid camper, classical music fan and birdwatcher, she currently lives in Rancho Bernardo, CA. For more information about the author and her books, see her Web site at www.jhand.com.

No man, or woman, is an island. This book is dedicated with my profound gratitude to those colleagues and friends who, by reading and critiquing Code Name: Dove, taught me priceless, early lessons on the craft of writing.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am indebted for information on airplanes or flying, guns, security systems and spy craft to Rex Anderson, Peter Carroll, Jay Lindsay, Bob Mahon, Jerome White and Doug Winberg.

The book is dedicated to the following colleagues and friends who read all or part of very early versions of Code Name: Dove. To each of you, for your care and criticism and shared expertise, I am forever beholden: Shirley Allen, Terry Blain, Drusilla Campbell, Julie Castiglia, Mark Clements, Chet Cunningham, Barry Friedman, Phyllis Humphrey, Pete Johnson, Marian Jones, Janet Kunert, Peggy Lang, Mary Lou Locke, Bev Miller, Abby Padgett, Ellen Perkins, Christie Ridgway, Ken Schafer, Janice Steinberg, Marsha Stone, Jan Tuttle and Tom Utts.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Prologue

The cougar had already moved two of her young to a new hiding place. Suddenly she stopped, a third cub dangling in her mouth, one of her paws poised midstride.

Nova Blair held her breath. Until this moment the morning air on this fifteen-hundred-foot-high bluff overlooking Gunsight Canyon had been as still as death. Hoping to capture a photo that National Geographic itself would snap up in a millisecond, Nova had taken a gamble and eased out from her blind. She’d moved into the only position where she could get a shot not only of the mother carrying the cub but, in the same frame, the other two cubs playing just outside their lair. But only a few heartbeats ago Nova felt a cool caress across the back of her neck. And that stirring breeze had carried her scent to the mountain lioness.

The cougar turned her head in Nova’s direction then set her cub on the rust-red sandstone so typical of the Indian Country around Lake Powell.

Nova’s cover was blown. She had feared this might happen. She stuffed the Nikon into the soft-sided camera bag looped across her chest and under her jump harness. Smiling at the cat and speaking as she stood, she said, “Seems it’s time to make an emergency exit, but I still gotcha, you beautiful thing.”

Nova turned and dashed for the stone shelf one hundred feet away. It jutted finger-like into the space over the long drop to the canyon floor. The skittering sound of loose pebbles followed, the sounds of a cougar racing to catch her.

From the stony finger’s tip, Nova threw herself into the void, arms and legs stretched wide to gain stability. Below lay the canyon floor, seemingly barren but for a feathery lime-green trace of tamarisks along the lake edge. And beyond, the magnificent lake itself, azure-blue against vast miles of red sandstone buttresses, cliffs and palisades that eons of wind and water had carved here.

Nova pulled the rip cord of the base jump canopy, felt the sudden yank in her crotch and under the arms as the blue-and-white chute deployed, and began a gentle, controlled glide to the ground.

This morning her hike up to the blind she put in place yesterday, when the first cub had been moved, had taken two and a half hours. The trip down would take less than a minute, her ride to the airport and then the flight back home to San Diego maybe five hours and tomorrow she would develop some of the best photos ever taken of the American cougar in the wild.

“Beautiful,” she yelled, the words of joy whipped away from her mouth by the wind and carried down the canyon.

Chapter 1

Valdez, Alaska, 1:00 a.m.

Sunday, May 15

The fishing trawler Polaris sliced through heavy drizzle and a calm sea at the mouth of Port Valdez Bay. From the aft deck a man in black peered through the Arctic darkness toward the shore, a tight knot of excitement like a clenched fist in his chest. Along the shore the pipeline terminal lights stood out like diamonds against black velvet.

His face drooped on the right side, its nerves severed by an old wound. He stroked the damp, corpselike cheek and sucked another lungful from his cigarette. In ten minutes they would launch the Zodiacs. He snuffed the cigarette on the heel of his boot, jammed the butt into one of his flack vest pockets and entered the cabin.

Nine pairs of eyes fixed on him. These were The Founder’s elite— Earth’s Warriors. Every man here had trained in the special forces of various armies before their dedication to The Founder, but still two faces showed fear: the Nigerian, Kariango, and the Frenchman, “Slow Jack” Soustelle.

“You two look ready to piss your pants,” he said in English. “It’s time to fix that.” He strode to the forward bulkhead, fished out the key on the chain around his neck and opened the locked compartment. He removed a small, gray box that captured the men’s attention as though it were a priceless jewel. The Founder’s enforcer laid the box on the narrow central table, tilted the lid back and gently plucked the pencil-thin, pale yellow glass ampoule from its foam cushion.

He held it up so the men could see it. “Speed. Strength. Fearlessness. One smell of this and you’ll be ten times the men you are now.”

He scanned all their faces. “Ready?”

Dark-painted faces nodded. The men gave him grunts of eagerness. Slow Jack said, “Damn right! Bring on the coffee!”

The Founder’s enforcer snapped the ampoule’s slender neck. There was a slight click, and then the smell of burned coffee quickly diffused through the cabin. He sucked in a deep breath of the drug and felt immediately the flutter of an accelerating pulse. The others followed his example. The drug was altering their bodies, their fight response heightening in a way that made them—short of death itself—invincible. A test bar of steel, half an inch thick, lay on the table. He picked it up and, bare-handed, bent it in two. The men murmured. He gestured toward the door. “Get the boats into the water.”

Thirteen minutes later he huddled with his men on stony ground fifty feet up from the shoreline, hidden under starlit darkness and four camouflage thermal blankets. The security system set up by the Alyeska pipeline oil partnership was ridiculously inadequate. A single fence, half a dozen cameras and only a token force of armed security guards. No motion detectors, no dead man’s entrance, no slalom barriers. Only a few feet away lay a dead-end cul-de-sac in the road near Loading Berth Five.

The drizzle thickened into cold, pelting sleet. Finally the red security truck appeared. He nudged Wyczek. The two of them shimmied free of the blanket, hugged the ground as they moved apart till they reached the pavement on opposite sides of the cul-de-sac. The truck entered the turnaround and circled. Wyczek rose. The dummkopf driver’s mouth dropped open in amazement. The man hit the brakes, fumbled at his holstered gun.

The enforcer bolted across the asphalt and, with his bare fist, shattered the window. He grabbed the door, ripped the thing off its hinges and tossed it aside, then pulled his combat knife. The driver turned. The enforcer slid across the seat and rammed his blade under the ribs, up into the man’s heart. “Terra eterna,” he whispered.

He holstered the knife and then grabbed the driver’s twitching body with both fists, yanked it from the truck and threw it like a rag doll to the side of the road. With his men, he piled into the truck bed.

Wyczek leaped into the truck cab and drove them back toward the terminal entrance. They turned right onto an access road to the upper levels, cruised past the Operations complex. The enforcer scanned for signs of danger.

“Still no alarm,” Slow Jack muttered.

Wyczek braked to a halt. With Slow Jack, Wyczek and two other soldiers, the enforcer hit the ground running. His Uzi chugging, Wyczek chewed up the Ops Center door. Another Earth Warrior lobbed in a satchel charge packed with C-4 explosive and shrapnel, and the enforcer tossed a matching satchel through a window.

A brief pause, then two quick blasts.

The windows blew outward, the door exploded. The pipeline personnel knew they were here now.

Yellow and red light washed upward into the night. Kariango and Soustelle had blown the microwave antennae linking the Ops Center to the twelve pumping stations. They had cut off the snake’s head. No way now could Valdez shut down the flow of oil or alert the outlying stations.

A brief vision of oil spilling across open tundra flashed into his head. Can’t be helped. He further reassured himself by softly uttering one of The Founder’s sayings, “If we must inflict some pain to the body to save it, so be it.”

It took only eight more minutes to lay the plastique and the white phosphorus grenades in the walls of the containment dikes. The Alyeska security force finally came to life and under a storm of gunfire, he and his men dashed for the truck. Kariango took a hit in the leg.

Wyczek raced the truck toward the beach. Under fire, all of them piled into the Zodiacs. Two more men took hits before they could get out of firing range. When they were, the enforcer yelled, “Throttle back!” Wyczek slowed to near halt and the enforcer hit the electronic detonator. A roar bounded across the water. Then another.

The sound was impressive, but the sight— Christ! Hundred-foot-high flames gouged like hungry tongues through the rain, licking the blackness. He clenched his fists. “Fantastish!” he whispered. His whole body vibrated. He sat transfixed.

Operation Viper had been executed flawlessly. Within the week he would report to The Founder in triumph. He shook himself and gave Wyczek the signal to get them out of here. As always, in a few hours he and the other men would hit “the pit” when the drug wore off, but the week-long depression was a small price to pay for this kind of thrill.

The Zodiacs streaked into the darkness.

Chapter 2

La Jolla, 7:00 a.m.

Sunday, May 15

“Nova, love. There is a Mr. Right for you. Your problem is, you don’t try.”

Reginald Pennypacker wheezed out his words of criticism between breaths as he and Nova rounded the final curve of the path along the bluff where they ran each morning. First her daily run, then the cougar photos.

They slowed to cool-down speed for the last block, uphill to the white, red-tile-roofed condominium where they each occupied one of the two top-floor units. Nova’s lips turned up in a slight smile. Reginald Penny-packer, “Penny” as nearly everyone called him, was the closest thing she had to a best friend and confidant.

She was sorry her refusal to come to his party had him upset, but he’d never know the dark things Nova Blair had done. There’s never going to be a Mr. Right, because I’ll always be Mrs. Wrong. Murder. Prison. Her work for the Company. No, Penny would never know why all his attempts at matchmaking would fail.

She treasured this spectacular La Jolla coastline. The best part of their run was that it let her gauge the Pacific’s waves, smell her breath, feel her mood. Today the great ocean had the blues: flat, gray-blue water sloshed indifferently against the beach. The on-shore breeze carried the stink of seaweed. A perfect day for nitty-gritty slave labor in the darkroom. The magazine photo contest deadline was breathing down her neck. And then, there were the cougars. “I try. I keep my eye out for possibilities.”

“If you were trying, you’d come Saturday.” He used the hem of his red T-shirt to wipe beads of sweat from his forehead. “How can you say you can’t make my party and still claim to be on the lookout for a man? I told a widowed admiral and a filthy rich, recently divorced trial lawyer you’d be there. They weren’t going to come but I promised I’d introduce them to a world-class adventuress photographer. A dazzler with emerald-green eyes and onyx-black hair.”

Nova reflected with a photographer’s eye on Penny’s slender elegance. Thirty-eight. Built like a marathoner. Part Irish and part Afro-American, and fiercely proud of both heritages. He was the owner of La Jolla’s most exclusive beauty salon and he’d invited a “select group” of patrons and friends to a bash for his long-time lover’s birthday. He smiled. Apparently his temper had cooled. He yanked twice on her ponytail. “You really must show. So I won’t look like a fool.”

“Why would you tell them I’d be there? You know how my life works. I might be out of town. In fact, how about you just tell them I am out of town.”

A two-brick-high trim bordered the green lawn next to them. Nova purposely stubbed her toe against the trim, did a somersault and landed on her back on the lawn. Alarmed, Penny rushed to kneel beside her. She reached up and, grinning, tugged twice on his earring. “Better yet. Tell them I had a jogging accident and broke my leg.”

He shook his head, returned her grin and extended his hand to help her up. “See what I mean? You don’t try. You avoid.”

I don’t avoid. I’m just a realist.

Side by side, they trotted up the three-floor stairwell. At the top they stepped onto the balcony running the length of its west side. From behind four palm trees standing guard on the lawn, a glorious Pacific vista beckoned. They shook out their arms and legs. She took in a lungful of salt air.

“You don’t try, but when you make an effort to fancy up, Nova, you’re really…well, really mesmerizing. Great legs. Fabulous eyes. That jet-black hair. You should have men hanging around here like bees after nectar.”

“Don’t be silly, Penny,”

“Don’t be falsely modest, Nova.” He paused, scanned her face, then looked away. “I watch you. The men buzz around, all right.” He fluttered his fingers to mimic busy bees. “But when they zero in to land, you close up your little petals, like you’re afraid they’re going to steal something.”

His words brought a sudden pang, a quick rapier-thrust to her heart. Candido Branco had left no visible scars; her stepfather had always avoided making wounds that would leave traces on her skin. But the scars on her soul were another matter.

Penny planted both hands on the balcony rail. “I’ve known you nearly twelve years. You’ve not had one serious attachment. Not since— How many years is it now since the amazing Ramone took off?”

“I’m not pining for Ramone Villalobos. The man did a lot for me. I was—” She started to say, Headed for big trouble, but switched. “He introduced me to travel and photography.” She didn’t add that he’d also recruited her for the CIA. “Unfortunately, I foolishly thought he loved me when he was just having a good time.”

Penny straightened, crossed his arms. “I worry about you now and again, love. Maybe I better shut up, though, before I say something I’ll regret.”

An eerie feeling raced through her, hot and electric, a feeling that Penny was about to hand her the key to the dark rooms of her past. She felt her pulse quicken at the base of her throat. “No, don’t shut up on me.” Penny would say words that would explain why she was unable to trust. No. She knew why she couldn’t trust any man. But Penny would say words that would tell her how she could trust again and then she’d be free from the past. “Say what you’re thinking.”

His gaze flicked to her face, apparently checking to see if he should continue. He plunged ahead. “I don’t get it. You meet lots of men on the tours you lead. You’ve never once said you’ve slept with one. Maybe you just wouldn’t tell me that.”

He paused, still searching her face. She waited, afraid to interrupt.

“I can’t imagine leading the macho, high-adventure tours you do and not meeting men by the planeload. You think you’re honestly open to offers?” He grinned. “You’re thirty-three and not getting any younger.”

Oddly, as suddenly as the mysterious feeling had hit, it fled; she felt as though she’d taken a six-floor drop in an elevator. Penny didn’t have a magic key after all. “I don’t know. Maybe not.”

“Come to my party Saturday. You can practice opening up and I’ll critique your man-baiting techniques.”

She threw him a look of mock horror. “That sounds perfectly awful.”

Penny turned toward his door, then looked back. “Just say you’ll come and deliver a few nice words to the good admiral and the wealthy attorney.”

She smiled. “Okay, okay.”

“Saturday. At eight.”

“I’ll be there.”

She moved toward her door, but Penny was still plotting. He stopped, his hand on his doorknob. “Wear emerald-green. That skimpy flowy silk that matches your eyes.”

“Yes, yes. I promise.”

“And I’ll do your hair. Something flashy. Black hair can be so dramatic.”

Penny hated her ponytail.

“This is going to be a great party.” Penny glided toward his door.

As he disappeared into his condo, Nova fished her key from the pouch Velcroed to her wrist. Sitting like a Sphinx on the chaise lounge next to the door, Divinity waited, staring northward along the sweep of the Pacific. Nova scooped up the white Angora, kissed the top of her head. One sapphire-blue and one emerald-green eye stared back. Now here was someone a woman could rely on.

“Hi, sweet thing. Penny insists I need a man. Anyone worthwhile drop by?” She draped the cat over her forearm, unlocked the door, felt a buzz saw of purring on her wrist. As she dropped the key onto the entry table beside the door, the state of the room snagged her attention.

“Diva, dear, our home looks a mess.”

Her dark wicker furniture was arranged so dining was done Oriental fashion around a low table in front of the living room picture window. Ten overstuffed green-and-blue lounge cushions reclined in crazy disarray on the carpet or against furniture or walls. Last night’s birthday dinner for ten-year-old Maggie had been a hit, especially Nova’s own gift: a 3-D video game.

She could almost feel Maggie’s small hand in hers. She loved all three of Star’s kids. When they called her “Auntie Nova” she felt like putty. But in Maggie she saw her own tender self before fate had set her feet on this…this bizarre life path.

She rearranged the pillows. When they were in place, things felt right. The condominium was the part of the world over which she had absolute control. And keeping things neat, even too neat according to her sister, gave her that sense of control that she had never felt for too many years of her childhood. She retrieved Diva from the couch and, sauntering down the hallway toward the bedrooms, glanced at the telephone answering machine. No messages.

In the master bedroom she spilled Divinity onto the comforter. The cat became a white puff of fur against the pattern of white, green and yellow swirls. A swath of sun suddenly lanced through the bay window. Two quick sets of sit-ups and push-ups, then she stripped. She took her shower hot and steamy.