From: Delphi@oracle.org

To: C_Evans@athena.edu

Re: The final showdown

Christine,

After Kwan-Sook’s death and Lilith’s new loyalty to Athena Academy, only one of Jackie Cavanaugh’s offspring remains unaccounted for: Echo.

She and I have yet to meet face-to-face, but I’ve gathered a lot of intel on her over these last few months. Her unusual abilities—Lilith said Echo could stop bullets!—have warped her, I think. She’s admitted to her sister that she wants to rule the world, that she believes she’s unstoppable. But I have every confidence in my team of Athena agents. We will take Echo down.

We’ll also retrieve the data she’s stolen and prevent her from destroying millions of lives. I’m betting on our success, with my career… and my life.

D.

Dear Reader,

I just returned home from a ceremony honoring the students and instructors at my daughter’s Tae Kwon Do studio. The instructors put on quite a show, demonstrating several martial arts traditions including Krav Maga, favored by many of our Athena Force heroes and heroines. It was exciting to see a young female Black Belt take on three attackers and make short work of them. She was a blur of ponytail and muscles, and her fierce, proud shouts echoed throughout the room. I was thrilled. I had imagined Allison Gracelyn fighting just like this, and here she was, lifted off the page for me just when it was time for me to say goodbye to her.

It has been such a privilege to write Disclosure. I can’t believe how fortunate I have been to explore the world of Athena Force, and to delve into the character of Allison, surely the most enigmatic of all the heroines (at least, to me!). Allison is a fighter and a leader, but the biggest battle she faces is a war of the heart.

It takes a lot of courage to admit when one is afraid, or lonely, or lost. I know it has been difficult at times for me to admit to feelings like that. I was afraid when I started writing Allison’s story. I wanted with all my heart to write a good book that would honor the fine work of the authors and editors who came before me in the world of Athena Force. Like the Tae Kwon Do artists at the ceremony tonight, I took deep breaths and made each move the best I could. It was a joy to tell Allison’s story of courage, while at the same time losing my fear and finding my bliss.

Be bold!

Nancy Holder

Disclosure

Nancy Holder

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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is a USA TODAY bestselling author who has published approximately eighty novels and two hundred short stories, essays and articles about writing. In addition to writing Son of the Shadows for Silhouette Nocturne, she is known for her tie-in work for TV shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Smallville, Hellboy and others. Please send letters to Nancy Holder, P.O. Box 26384, San Diego, CA 92196; or visit her Web site, www.nancyholder.com.

For Mr. Andy Thompson of Family Karate.

Thank you, sir.

Contents

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

Epilogue

Chapter 1

En route to the National Security Administration Fort Meade, Maryland

A dark, sharp wind threw autumn leaves against Allison Gracelyn’s windshield as she put through her call to Morgan Rush, who was already at NSA for the emergency meeting. After the open and cloudless big sky of the Arizona desert, the frosty Maryland night grounded her in reality—her world was a lowering, stormy place; her safety zone as narrow as a grave; the situation as out-of-control as a nightmare.

No. I’m in control. I have a plan, she told herself. I’m on my game. I can make this happen.

She unrolled the window of her sleek black Infiniti and held out her NSA badge toward the security guard, who stepped from his kiosk to take it. The chill bit into Allison’s ungloved hand. Beyond the kiosk, hidden by the night, the Men in Black patrolled the perimeter of the vast complex of the National Security Administration. The MIB were the crack security forces of “Crypto City”—suited up in black riot gear, armed with submachine guns and God knew what else. Not one of them would hesitate to open fire if given the order.

She knew at least one person who would gladly give the word. Her volatile new boss, Bill McDonough, was furious with her for having taken the day off with no explanation beyond the vague and unenlightening “personal business.” NSA was sitting on top of a time bomb—literally—and the terrorist threat level had shot from orange to bright red around the same time that Allison’s return flight to Washington took off from the airport in Phoenix.

Coincidence? She didn’t know yet. She didn’t know what her enemy was capable of. Lucy Karmon, a fellow Athena alum who’d been helping Allison with her “personal business,” had described Echo’s maniacal rage when Lucy had completed her mission to steal a spider necklace that contained a flash drive with the kind of information that could destroy the world as they knew it. “Wacko beyond bonkers. Way beyond. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

That same black-and-gold necklace had dangled from Allison’s neck on her return flight to the East Coast, hidden from view beneath a black turtleneck sweater. Allison had complemented the sweater with black wool pleated trousers and low-heeled boots, which was good, because she hadn’t had any time to change her clothes after she landed, and they would work well in an NSA meeting about preventing hundreds of thousands if not millions of deaths.

Allison had flown to Phoenix yesterday specifically to retrieve the necklace from Echo’s half sister, Lilith, to whom it had been bequeathed when Athena Academy’s greatest enemy, Arachne, committed suicide. Arachne had left behind three genetically enhanced daughters and three flash drives that held the keys to the empire of evil she’d created before her death. Lilith wanted no part of the evil that came with her inheritance, while Echo had murdered men, women and children—and would have murdered Lilith—to steal Lilith’s share as well as her own.

Still, a nuclear attack just didn’t seem like Echo’s style.

“Rush,” Morgan said, the deep timbre of his voice caressing Allison’s earlobe, the low, male rumble as pleasurable as running her cold hand along the warmed leather seat of her car.

“Yeah, hi, Morgan,” Allison replied, adjusting her earpiece, keeping her voice neutral. Even during a national security crisis, Morgan threw her off. She had a feeling McDonough had assigned Morgan to her task force—Project Ozone—to keep an eye on her. Surely McDonough had no idea what working in close quarters with Morgan did to her insides. Or maybe he did.

“Meeting’s set up in Conference Room A,” Morgan said. “I ordered you a latte with soy milk and two sugars.”

He remembered her beverage of choice. Any other time, she might have smiled.

“Thanks. I’m on site.” Which he might already know, if he was keeping tabs on her. “I’ll be up in five minutes.”

“Hold on,” he said. “I’m getting a red e-mail.”

“Okay.” Her adrenaline spiked. Red meant extremely urgent.

As she waited, she glanced at the time on her dash. It was 7:35 p.m. McDonough had called the meeting for eight. She’d been on the go for nearly twenty-four hours, but she could make another twelve or so before she started getting sloppy.

“We got some more,” Morgan continued. He was obviously referring to the team’s successful cracking of chunks of the heavily encrypted chatter between the unstable Middle Eastern nation of Berzhaan and the despotic nation of Kestonia. “Big stuff. You called it right.” His voice betrayed his anxiety.

Damn it, she thought. She didn’t want to be right about a probable nuclear attack somewhere on the Eastern seaboard in less than a month.

“Brief me first, my office,” she told him. She wanted to walk into that meeting fully informed.

“Will do. Something else is incoming,” he announced.

“I’m holding,” she said. She took her badge back from the guard, who waved her on to proceed. The white Jersey gate raised and Allison rolled onto the grounds of the most heavily guarded, mysterious facility in the alphabet soup of national and international intelligence agencies.

Allison heard the gentle ping signaling an incoming text message on her handheld.

SSJ: STAY OUT. U R COMPROMISED. CALL ASAP.

An icy chill washed up her spine. SSJ was Selena Shaw Jones, CIA, an Athena alum she’d sent to watch for intel at the headquarters of Oracle, the supersecret spy organization of which they were both members. Selena’s choice of words was telling. Employees stayed away. Spies stayed out.

“Okay, here it is,” Morgan began.

“Morgan, save it. I’ll be there soon.” She disconnected. A microsecond later, her cell phone flared to white noise. She had reached the perimeter of the NSA’s new and improved jamming field. She glanced at the handheld. Selena’s message had disappeared. Nothing else electronic would work, not her laptop, nor her PDA, nothing.

“Damn it,” she whispered, ticking her glance toward the central building, which rose into the night like a twinkling Rubik’s Cube. Compromised how? By whom?

Echo, she thought. She’s made her next move.

Allison pulled her car over to the turnout. Her face prickled as she kept her speed slow and easy, hanging a U back to the gate. No one else was leaving, and she knew her Infiniti was a conspicuous ebony dot on several dozen surveillance cameras as she unrolled her window and stuck out her badge for the same guard who’d waved her through. She remained silent; she was a top-level NSA agent, and there was no need to explain her comings and goings unless requested.

The guard’s phone—a secured landline—rang as he took her badge. Her heart stuttered, her mind raced. Was it an order to detain her?

As he reached for the handset, she forced herself to look unconcerned. He swiped her badge and handed it back to her as he put the receiver to his ear. She left her window unrolled, on the chance that she might be able to eavesdrop. But he closed the door of the kiosk, sealing himself inside.

The Jersey gate had not yet raised.

Her gaze ticked toward the shadows, where the Men in Black patrolled. If she tried to bolt the gate, they just might shoot her.

Through the window, the guard’s eyebrows raised; his forehead wrinkled as he looked at her through the window. She did not react, merely gazed placidly back at him, although her heart was trip-hammering against her ribs.

Then the barrier went up, signaling permission to leave. Her hands shook on the wheel as she drove through. She took slow deep breaths and kept her face slack and expressionless, picking up a little speed as she neared the NSA-only on-ramp onto the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, because anyone would speed up a little. It would look odd if she didn’t. She fought the urge to floor it. She wasn’t safe yet. She could still be summoned back. Shot at if she didn’t comply.

She eased onto the on-ramp. Traffic was relatively heavy, and fat raindrops spattered on her windshield. She moved into “dry cleaning” mode—evasive maneuvers designed to reveal a tail, putting space around her car—in case she had to gun it and get the hell out of there.

With one eye on the traffic, she reached across to the passenger seat, where her leather briefcase lay facing her. She flipped it open and slid out her laptop. Using top-secret NSA data gleaned via the Oracle system, Allison had shielded her cell phone and wireless connections from eavesdropping with state-of-the-art sophistication; she should theoretically be immune to invasion, even this close to Crypto City. She popped the lid and punched in a macro, taking her eyes off the road long enough to scan the monitor windows showing a dozen views of Storage Unit #217 at OldAlexandria Self-Storage, just two short blocks from the new Oracle headquarters. The storage unit door was still bolted; her paint cans and tarps were undisturbed. Illuminated by a tiny light she had installed inside the otherwise empty paint can, the gleaming golden spider necklace still lay inside.

I’ll kill you before I let you have it, she silently promised Echo. It was a promise she fully intended to keep—even if the Eastern seaboard blew up before the month was over.

Chapter 2

After Allison assured herself that the spider necklace was still secure, she kept her eye on the flow of traffic as she speed-dialed Selena Shaw Jones.

“Blackmail,” Selena said by way of greeting. “I texted because I went straight to voice when I called.”

Allison was mildly shocked. She hadn’t even heard Selena’s incoming phone call. Morgan’s voice had captured her full attention.

“Go on,” she told Selena.

“Oracle snagged an e-mail ‘you’ sent to an FBI agent named Phil Matsumoto. Looks like Special Agent Phil’s in bed with Monya Kishinev.”

“I don’t know either name,” Allison said.

“Kishinev’s Russian mafia,” Selena filled in. “The message was sent to Matsumoto’s private home desktop, which is well-protected, but the sender cut through all the firewalls like a laser. If Matsumoto doesn’t wire seventy-five thousand dollars into your offshore account in the Cayman Islands, you’re turning him in.”

“The Caymans? That’s so last year,” Allison quipped, but she was shaken. Of course she hadn’t sent the e-mail. It was a setup, and she wondered if this Matsumoto guy would buy it. If he was stupid enough to jump in bed with a criminal, he probably would. Or maybe he was smarter than that; maybe he was an undercover good guy working Kishinev, flipping him to the Jedi side of the Force. Maybe now Matsumoto would reconfigure his targeting system to probe the wrongdoings of a dirty NSA agent initials AG.

“How does it look?” she asked Selena, as a flash of lightning blazed across the sky.

“Anything but clumsy,” Selena replied frankly. “It’s a totally professional job. If I didn’t know you, I’d believe you sent it.”

Allison grimaced. “Except I’d never be this obvious.”

“Agreed,” Selena said. “But that wouldn’t stop them from shipping you off to Leavenworth. Another one just popped in. Hmm, it’s to a CIA manager. James Wrobleski. Hold on, I’m reading up on him. Gotta love Oracle. It snags more intel than I can get at CIA.”

Allison didn’t say anything in reply. She did love Oracle. She had designed it, built it, nurtured it. But she couldn’t let Selena know that. Because right now, Selena didn’t need to know that. No one did besides the head of Oracle—code name Delphi.

Aka, Allison Gracelyn.

She flipped on her windshield wipers and watched the traffic. Two lanes over to the left, a grubby white panel van passed a BMW on the right, and cut back in front of it. The Beemer honked his horn and flashed his brights.

“Here we go,” Selena said. “Six months ago, three CIA agents and four Italian SISMI intelligence officials ‘allegedly’ kidnapped an Italian cleric in Rome. Our governments are denying it. Wrobleski is the CIA manager of the three agents and I’m willing to bet this is something very off the books that he has somehow managed to contain, workwise. I sure never heard about it. Your silence is worth eighty grand.”

A produce truck rumbled up abreast Allison’s passenger side, cutting off her view of the other right lanes. She dropped back and got behind it. In the next lane over, the white van was driving slowly about twenty feet ahead of her, and the trailing BMW was still angrily flashing his brights, insisting it yield so he could pick up speed.

“So do you know where this smear campaign is coming from?” Selena asked.

Allison remained silent. It had to be Echo, but Selena had no need to know that, not yet. The less Selena knew, the safer she would be. The safer she was, the easier to send her on a mission if need be; and Selena was one of the best field agents in Oracle. She had single-handedly defended the American embassy in Berzhaan from a terrorist takeover.

But would that be fair, to make someone fly blind straight into harm’s way?

This is not a fair game to start with. No one in Oracle is blind, she reminded herself. They agreed to work for the organization with their eyes wide-open. They knew some of it was going to be black bag ops. They knew they could die.

“Okay, asked and answered,” Selena said, signaling that she accepted Allison’s silence. At some point in their tenure as Oracle agents, nearly every single one of Allison’s operatives had asked Allison point-blank if she was Delphi. Allison had never confirmed it, nor had she denied it. She had merely remained silent, and no one had asked her more than once.

Her mind was racing. The Oracle mainframe would unpeel the layers of secrecy regarding any other threats and disinformation Echo was sending out in her name. Maybe if she personally watched the threads as they came in she would discover the pattern they wove. Trace them back, learn the location of the original signal and shut Echo down—if indeed she was behind this elaborate frame-up.

Allison’s cell phone pinged as a message came in on her other line. She glanced at the number as well as the time. It was Morgan, and it was 7:51 p.m. She stayed on the line with Selena.

“I wonder who ‘I’m’ blackmailing at the NSA,” she ventured. “I suppose I’m ensuring that at least one corrupt person in every intelligence agency will be gunning for me.”

She heard Selena’s staccato typing, popping like muffled gunshot through their connection. The Infiniti’s windshield wipers thwacked back and forth, an edgy metronome. The white van lumbered along in the rain.

“I don’t see anything, but it looks like you were right about Morgan Rush. His most recent message to McDonough is encrypted, but I’m running it through our code-crackers and your initials are part of the subject header.” Selena grunted with disapproval. “All the good ones are married, gay, or spying on you.”

Allison allowed herself a quick grim smile, appreciating the irony of such a statement from someone who was happily married and therefore, believed she had one of the good ones.

Another call came in. This one was Allison’s boss, Bill McDonough, and she let it go to messages.

“Oracle just gave me one more,” Selena declared. “No, wait, it’s about the Marion Gracelyn scholarship fund. Someone just gave it a big donation. Two million dollars. Anonymous.”

Allison grunted. “Wondering how much of that is my newly laundered blackmail money.”

“Not seeing anything else on you directly right now,” Selena told her.

“Then I’m listening to my new messages,” Allison said, punching in her voice mail code.

“Allison?” Morgan queried. “I’m in your office.” That was all. That was a hundred percent Morgan—a man of few words, someone who believed that actions mattered and talk was, well, talk. Which was ironic, given his choice of occupation. He was a damned good codebreaker, alert to the nuances in several foreign languages including Farsi, Mandarin, some Polynesian languages and dialects and Russian.

She went on to the one from McDonough. His voice came in loud and clear, and he had a little bit more to say. “Rush said you were on your way up. Guard gate shows you left. Where the hell are you?”

Allison exited her message system and checked back in with Selena. “Anything?”

“Still doing my search,” Selena said.

“Then I’m putting you on hold again. Beep me if you need me.”

Allison pressed redial to call McDonough back. He picked up immediately.

“Bill, I have an emergency,” Allison began.

“This is an emergency,” McDonough thundered. “This is the biggest goddamn emergency in the world. You are here in two minutes or you have no job and you never have a job again and I give you to CIA for debriefing until you die.”

“Sir, with respect—”

“Respect? You have no respect! No respect for your teammates or your project or your country. Who the hell do you think you are?”

“Sir—”

“One minute, or I’m sending someone after you to haul your ass in here.”

“Yes, sir,” Allison said, disconnecting.

She pushed her foot down a little harder on the gas and went back to Selena. “My boss,” she said flatly. “Wondering why I haven’t shown up for our meeting. I guess that tells us I’m not blackmailing him.”

“No. So far Oracle has reported no evidence of Gracelyn-NSA corruption, you’ll be gratified to know.”

“Keep searching,” Allison told her. “Not that I’m hoping you’ll find any.”

She saw what Echo was doing—setting fires, wreaking havoc. Allison moved her tense shoulders, rubbing her forehead as a headache threatened. She was tired down to the marrow. Her day had already been very long and incredibly tense.

She had landed at Washington’s Dulles International Airport at one this afternoon, every cell of her body on extreme high-alert as she unclasped the spider necklace containing the precious flash drive and calmly placed it in one of the plastic bowls at the airport’s security checkpoint. Of course the guard who took the bowl had no idea what was in that necklace—the last third of Arachne’s vast web of off-the-books state secrets; corporate espionage capable of shutting down Wall Street; career-ending dirt on superstars; and life-ending intel on world leaders.

Echo already had the other two memory sticks; she needed this one to fully reweave her mother’s web. Echo would stop at nothing to get it; Allison half expected the airport guard to reveal himself as a plant, pull out an AK-47 and gun her down as she walked through the metal detector.

Once on board the jet, she put herself beside a window exit and monitored the other passengers for the duration of the flight. She skipped the champagne and went for the steak, storing up protein in her body, staying loose and easy so she could go from zero to sixty if she had to.

In the airport parking structure, she swept her Infiniti a dozen times for both bugs and bombs before she drove straight to Old Alexandria Self-Storage, two blocks away from the new Oracle headquarters, still located in Old Alexandria.

There she ran an hour-long soft recon on the storage facility, studying the security cameras, staring into the shadows. Popping some button cams when and where she could, making sure the wireless uplink to her laptop was solid. Once assured of that, she forwarded the feed to the Oracle mainframe.

She left the you-store-it to buy some supplies so her unit would pass cursory inspection—paint cans, a ladder, tarps. She did it alone; she told no one where she was and asked no one for help. She warred with herself about that decision as every step of the way she thought about the stupid little things that could happen: slipping on the newly washed floor in the paint store; getting hit by a car. But it was too late in the game to change her rules.

Returning with her purchases, she rented Unit #217 from the overly friendly, middle-aged man at the desk, surreptitiously adding more button cams under the ledge of the office counter as she filled out forms, paid cash and collected the keys.

She also installed a fully portable state-of-the-art laser security setup at #217, which she tied into the existing alarm system. It was identical to the system she had put in her town house in Old Alexandria, and at the new Oracle headquarters location.

Although Allison worked steadily, remaining focused, her nerves were screaming. She herself could task any number of satellites to track a target if she could lock onto it; she had to assume Echo had the same capability. Despite wiping down the necklace and the memory stick for homing devices, there was no way to be one hundred percent positive that even now, the flash drive wasn’t signaling Echo as to its location.

That was why Allison hadn’t hidden the spider necklace and its contents at the far more secure, brand-new Oracle headquarters. Keeping Oracle HQ off Echo’s radar was every bit as vital as retaining possession of the necklace. If Echo took out Oracle’s nerve center, she’d hamstring the organization. Allison knew Oracle was the only way to stop Echo; she had to keep the flash drive out of Echo’s hands, and she had to keep Oracle intact.

Two top priorities—three, if she counted Project Ozone—one woman juggling all of them.

She’d told Selena to go to the new town house location and watch for intel that revealed Echo’s next move. However, there were layers to Oracle’s intricate data mining programming that Allison had reserved for her own eyes only, and now she debated about the wisdom of that as well.

I’m spread way too thin, Allison thought grimly. And I’m playing a dangerous game with the lives of millions. Maybe it’s time to change strategies and get more of my own players on the board.

“Oh, no,” Selena muttered. “Damn.”

“Talk to me,” Allison ordered her.

“Abductions. Three girls. They were all conceived via the Women’s Fertility Clinic in Zuni,” Selena bit off.

“No,” Allison breathed, clenching her jaw. “No way.”

“I don’t recognize any of their names. Hang on, I’m pulling up Jeremy Loschetter’s file.” About half a minute went by. “Allison, he swore the full list was on that memory stick he hid in his shoe heel. But none of these names are on it.”

“He lied to us. Imagine that,” Allison said bitterly, feeling ill. She’d thought they were done with this, with the abductions of young women—with Loschetter, a loathsome human being.

“Oh, my God, Allison, I’m getting more pings. There have been seven domestic kidnappings that the FBI has gotten involved with in the last forty-eight hours. All girls. Their mothers were infertility patients at the clinic.”

Ignoring her tumultuous inner state, Allison processed the new information. Echo had still been in India when the kidnappings began. Was that why she had been so focused on stealing Lilith’s necklace? Did it hold more information about the technology Loschetter had used to genetically enhance eggs that had been harvested at the Women’s Fertility Clinic and place them into gestational surrogates?

Allison had no idea what was on Lilith’s memory stick. She couldn’t read it. She knew that Lilith had downloaded some files onto a laptop back in India, and she figured Lilith’s mother, Arachne, had programmed in a one-time-use code that she, Allison, had yet to crack. Allison hadn’t tried very hard. For all she knew, activating the stick sent out a beacon. That might have been how Echo had found Lilith in the first place. Maybe when Arachne had created the three drives, one for each of her daughters, she meant for them to find each other and work together to restore her empire.

Acting as Delphi, Allison had sent the twins Elle Petrenko and Samantha St. John to India to retrieve the laptop, but so far they’d come up negative. That could mean Echo had it—which might be how she’d known which girls to abduct—or it could simply mean that the sisters hadn’t located it yet.

“Go on,” Allison said tersely. She could feel her anger rising, and she forced it back down. She was the AIC—Agent in Charge. She had to stay calm, strategize, and proceed.

“I’m reading the FD-302 on one who was taken in San Francisco. She’s only five years old. Her name is Cailey. She’s just a baby.” Selena was angry, too. Allison knew Selena and Cole were trying to start a family of their own, probably through adoption.

FD-302 was FBI jargon for documents that could be used in a court of law as possible testimony, and therefore, were released over the Internet. The bureau was well-known for using the Internet as little as possible. Agents’ workstation computers didn’t even access the net; they had to use specially protected computers in another part of the building. That might explain why the files hadn’t shown up in the Oracle system before; the feebs might have released them in a batch because another agency had requested them.

“I cut and pasted a list of the vics,” Selena said. “I’ll send your laptop a copy and CC Delphi. I’m calling Delphi now. I know she’s told us to refrain whenever possible—”

“She probably already knows this is happening,” Allison cut in. “I’d say if she doesn’t call you within half an hour, call her then.”

There was a pause. “Roger that…Allison,” Selena said. “But we have to move fast. If she can get back to me asap…” It was clear that she was struggling not to confront Allison about Delphi’s real identity. “I’ll keep on it.”

“Good. I’m going to make some calls. You stay at the town house. Make sure the mainframe is safe.”

“Oh, I will,” Selena said, grittily. “When I find who did this…”

“We will,” Allison promised her. “And they will know Athena justice.”

“They will,” Selena said feelingly.

Athena Academy for the Advancement of Women was the most elite, state-of-the-art prep school for women in the United States. The school was founded by Allison’s mother, Marion Gracelyn, to educate the cream of the female student crop not only in academic subjects but martial arts, spycraft and other Special Forces-style subjects. The ultimate goal was to groom women to penetrate the highest echelons of power and serve as a force for good in society. Marion’s foresight was paying off, and there was a special quality among the students and alumni—an Athena Force—that was changing—and saving—the world.

“Have you found anything on that force field that went up around Echo when Lucy attacked her?”

“Negative. Still working.” A beat. “There’s a lot going on.”

“I know,” Allison said. “But we’ll get it done, Selena. You can count on that.”

“Roger that,” Selena replied.

They hung up.

For a moment the bombshell fragmented Allison’s thoughts. More genetically enhanced babies. More mayhem. Faked extortion schemes. Echo’s legacy from her mother—a vibration field that deflects guns, knives, bodies and bullets. Too many things to keep track of. Not enough time. Not enough of anything.

Then piece by piece she pulled herself back together; in an almost Zen state, she rested her hands on the wheel. The windshield wipers droned. The rain spattered.

I’m the center of the storm, she reminded herself, using one of the oldest relaxation techniques she knew— which she had learned while a student at Athena Academy. Never tell yourself how powerful the problem is. Tell the problem how powerful you are.

Her heartbeat slowed. Then she rifled in her briefcase for one of the half-dozen prepaid handheld cell phones she routinely packed, along with the electronic device she used to distort her voice when “Delphi” made calls. This batch had been on sale at the local electronics store, probably because their cheetah skins were so last week.

She punched the number of the Oracle safe house where they were keeping Loschetter. Before the current crisis, Allison’s recruits had their own lives first, and then ran missions for Oracle. But some of them had made special arrangements so that they were free to guard Loschetter around the clock. The smarmy scientist had sold Teal Arnett, an egg baby and a current Athena Academy student, to Kestonian leader Vlados Zelasco at a nightmarish auction in Venice. Zelasco had spirited her to Kestonia where Athena alum Sasha Bracciali had rescued her. Another Athena Academy alum, Lindsey Novak, grabbed Loschetter. Now Loschetter belonged to Oracle, and they were keeping him incommunicado in a heavily fortified safe house in Arizona, not far from the southern rim of the Grand Canyon.

Her cell phone connected, ringing once.

“Athena Construction,” a woman answered. Allison recognized the voice of Katie Rush, and the image of Katie’s older brother Morgan popped into her head. He was probably as furious and baffled by Allison’s actions as Bill McDonough. She could see him now, pacing the way he did, running his long fingers through his prematurely salt-and-pepper hair—he was only thirtytwo—blinking his heavily lashed eyes of intense indigo, setting his hard, square jaw.

She had seen him agitated before, seen him fight to keep his temper when they decoded a gleeful e-mail sent from Berzhaan to a terrorist cell in Kestonia, announcing that some poor thirteen-year-old had earned a place in paradise by blowing himself up in a crowded open marketplace. Morgan had nearly wept at the loss of life, at the depth of despair and/or hatred that would prompt someone to do something like that. Instead he’d balled his fist and slammed it against the wall of the pit, startling half a dozen military brass who were there for a briefing.

Then and there, she fell a little bit in love with him, moving beyond her omnipresent lust for his magnificent body to a deeper connection. This is why we do the things we do, Morgan Rush and I. This is why our jobs are more important to us than our lives.

This is why I am Delphi. And this is why he can never know.

Her secrets would keep her alone for the rest of her life.

“I’m interested in building a house,” she said, knowing that her voice was being unrecognizably distorted by the device clamped over the mouthpiece.

“Delphi,” Katie said, and Allison detected the awe in her voice.

“How’s Loschetter?” Delphi asked. “Is there anything unusual about his demeanor?”

“Quiet, bored. He wants more DVDs,” Katie said with disgust. “He says his brain is atrophying. We can hope.”

“Katie, listen,” Delphi said. “In the last forty-eight hours, seven girls have been kidnapped. Girls conceived at the Women’s Fertility Clinic in Zuni.” She let that sink in. “They were not on Loschetter’s original list.”

“Oh, my God,” Katie murmured.

“Watch him. I’m going to send you some backup.” There were three Oracle agents guarding him at all times. “If someone’s stealing egg babies, it stands to reason they’ll want him. He knows more about genetically altering chromosomes than anyone else on the planet.”

“Roger that,” Katie said fiercely. “I’ll kill him before I let anyone take him.”

Delphi thought for a moment about the teenage suicide bomber in Berzhaan. Then she thought about Morgan Rush, Katie’s older brother. She could hardly imagine the grief and fury that would rage through him if anything happened to Katie.

“You…be careful,” Delphi blurted, and it was so out of character, so not what Delphi would say, that she hung up before Katie could remind her that she would rather die than fail at a mission. Delphi knew Katie would say it, because Katie had said it before. And Delphi had told her that she was proud of her commitment.

She set the phone on top of her briefcase and swallowed hard. She was getting too personally involved with her people.

Another image of Morgan came unbidden into her mind—in a pair of loose track shorts that revealed his muscular calves and thighs, and a damp, sleeveless T-shirt clinging to his pecs. He’d mocked her fumble during a recent tennis game on the agency courts. A second later, she’d power-slammed a tennis ball at him inches from his foot, a volley he couldn’t hope to return, and he had broken into full-bodied laughter, completely appreciative of how thoroughly she had just kicked his butt. She didn’t suppose he was laughing right now.

She blew out her breath and gave her head a shake. Morgan was off-limits, now and forever. The thought penetrated, despite all the other thoughts her busy brain was entertaining.

Allison began putting everything back in her brief-case—PDA, personal cell, laptop, distorter—then the produce truck switched lanes, revealing the white van again. The BMW took advantage of the hole in the traffic flow and shot back around the slow-moving vehicle. The van was definitely pacing her.

On your mark, Allison thought grimly.

Without signaling, with no warning, Allison cranked her steering wheel to the left and shot across two lanes of traffic, heading for the off-ramp. Horns blared. Brakes squealed all around her—and behind her—as the van barreled after her in hot pursuit.

Go.

Chapter 3

NSA Headquarters, Fort Meade, Maryland

McDonough proceeded with the top-level Project Ozone meeting in Conference Room A, but he dismissed Morgan from the urgent and critical sit-down, and ordered him to interrogate anyone who had ever met Allison, much less worked with her.

Morgan was extremely pissed about missing the meeting, but when he got past the red haze of anger, he had to admit that it made sense. Morgan had been “observing” Allison for McDonough ever since McDonough had signed onto Ozone, three months ago. It was a distasteful arrangement that Morgan would have ordinarily refused, except that it gave him more latitude to sniff around Allison, access her records and get his request for a wiretap turned down.

He fed McDonough enough tidbits to fulfill his job description, but he kept the good stuff for himself. Not that there was much. Spider files, incomplete. Someone named Arachne. Someone else named Delphi, or maybe it was a place. Those kidnappings of Athena students earlier this year. But never the full story. Allison kept the good stuff for herself as well, of that he was certain.

Allison Gracelyn was doing something she didn’t want anyone to know about. Correction: didn’t want NSA to know about. In Morgan’s book, that was six kinds of wrong.

Morgan deliberately set up shop for his interviews many conference rooms away from the Ozone meeting. He kept his black suit jacket on and his dark gray tie crisply knotted. The visiting brass didn’t need to know NSA had forgotten to microchip Agent Double-O Gracelyn or that she was on the lam.

His black double shot went untouched. He had snagged a sandwich from the conference room but hadn’t stopped to take a bite. After a few interviews, the air smelled like mustard and roast beef, and Morgan chucked it in the trash can.

Nobody had anything to tell him, and so far, an hour into interviewing, he had no feeling that anyone was omitting information in order to protect her. She wasn’t made of Teflon; she was just…boring. Again, wrong. Allison was not boring. She was a busy woman; yesterday’s personal leave day was one of many (but not beyond agency guidelines, and he’d kept track.) Not showing up in the midst of a high-alert was bad, but hanging a U and then going incommunicado was inexcusable.

The clock was ticking, and he was getting more and more pissed off. Why the hell didn’t she at least call in? Who the hell did she think she was?

He tapped his government-issue black pen on his legal pad and gazed up at his next interviewee, Kim Valenti, who came in and sat across the mahogany laminate conference table. Like him, she wore a simply, nicely tailored black suit—in her case, with a skirt. Like Allison and him, she was a cryptanalyst, and one of the best at the agency, which why she was with Ozone. She and Allison were good friends; on many occasions, when Morgan had been in Allison’s office, IM’s had come in through the internal NSA net from Windtalker2, which was Valenti’s handle.

“She called you earlier today,” Morgan said to Kim Valenti. He knew that because he had downloaded and examined both women’s phone logs.

“Yes, she did,” Valenti said after a beat, as if weighing how much to say to him. His bullshit-ometer ratcheted up two notches. What was she hiding?

“What did you two talk about?”

“It was personal business,” she replied, crossing her legs at the knee and settling back, as if she had all the time in the world, and no cares at all. She was cool, she was steady.

Morgan knew her body language didn’t mean a thing. His colleagues at the NSA might think he was simply an extremely proficient codebreaker, but he’d run a few covert ops for his government strictly off-the-books. More than a few. He had done terrible things on behalf of the free world, risked his own life countless times, sent willing men to their deaths. No one suspected, of course. He made damn sure they didn’t. How did the saying go? The better the spy, the better the lie.

“You know she’s missing.”

“I know she’s not here,” Valenti countered.

“I can hook you up to a polygraph,” he reminded her. “I can hand you over for interrogation. Your head will spin.”

Valenti gazed at him steadily. “She had some personal business, just like I said.”

Morgan balled his fists, tamping down his irritation with her screw-you attitude, because that wouldn’t get him anywhere. Allison’s comings and goings had been worrying the agency for years. That concern had mushroomed in the last twelve months. He himself had moved from concerned, to highly suspicious, and finally to wondering what game she was running on her own. For all her unflappable demeanor, she was a loose cannon, and he knew more than most that a weapon with the safety off could be used against you in a heartbeat.

He had the scars to prove it.

Inside and out.

“Ms. Valenti, foreign nationals of unknown origin are plotting to blow up a significant target in your country in less than a month,” he said. “If that occurs, thousands of people will die. Until we resolve that, there is no such thing as personal business. We’re here to protect those people, and until they’re safe, we don’t belong to ourselves. So whatever, why ever, she’s wrong.”

Her eyelids flickered. He watched her struggle with a sharp retort, and he wondered if he’d gone too far.

“Standing down a little,” he informed her. “I actually do know we’re not living in Nazi Germany.”

It worked. She moved her shoulders and tapped her fingers twice on the desk. “Okay. She’s pregnant.”

Or maybe she had just been making him sweat a little, payback for trying to intimidate her. He did that. He intimidated and bullied. He threatened. He frightened. He used whatever weapon he had whenever he could. He was combative. He was driven. He did what he had to. And he had to find Allison.

“Oh, for God’s sake!” Morgan thundered, slamming his fists down on the conference room table. Valenti didn’t bat an eyelash. “You can’t think I’d believe that.”

But the truth was that the male part of him—the part that fantasized about Allison Gracelyn naked and in his bed, the part that drove him to cool down at the gym, take icy showers, pace sleeplessly in the middle of the night, that part—was shocked and angry. Almost as if Allison had betrayed him with another man—when he had no claim at all on her, of course.

“You are lying to me. She’s a consummate professional,” Morgan flung at Windtalker2. “That’s not her style. That’s soap opera crap.”

Valenti raised her chin. Her dark eyes flashed at him. “She’s pregnant, there’s a problem with the baby and she thinks she might be miscarrying.”

For one more instant, he believed her, because he remembered how gently Allison broached the subject of his missing mother when he’d been assigned to Project Ozone and she had to get him a higher-level clearance.

“You were twelve,” she observed. “That’s a rough time in life, even without something like that.”

“No one can buy me by promising me information on my mother,” he had replied bluntly, raising the barriers around his heart. Of course he’d been asked that before. And would be asked again. But it was the first time Allison and he had discussed anything about his personal life other than his sister—whom Allison knew, of course, since Katie had gone to Athena Academy.

Allison’s lips had parted slightly, and he saw for the first time how big her brown eyes were, and how beautiful, flecked with gold and heavily lashed. He was startled, and flustered. The men he worked with had an office pool going that the Ice Princess was a thirtyseven-year-old virgin. She’d never dated anyone. There were secretaries who refused to work for her, saying she was too demanding. Which earned her the title of Queen Bitch in the eyes of many. Sexism was still rampant in the workplace. He was probably more sensitized to it because he’d heard stories from Katie.

Morgan read Allison differently. It wasn’t so much that she was cold or unreasonable; it was just that she didn’t give much back, and she needed her people to work as hard as she did.

But that one time, discussing his mother, remembering that her own mother had been murdered, he had felt as if he’d seen a part of her she was in a habit of concealing. As if a mask had slipped. Maybe she had a guy who knew how to take that mask off. Maybe they were having a kid together, and that kid was in trouble.

Allison as a mother. It had a certain…resonance.

“Rush,” Bill McDonough said from the doorway. Sweaty and unpleasant, he had loosened his dark blue tie and he looked twenty years older than he had fifteen minutes ago. McDonough shot Kim Valenti a glare that might turn a lesser woman to stone and jerked his head toward the hallway.

Morgan gave Valenti another look—a chance to change her story—but it was obvious she was done. He followed McDonough out, masking his distaste for Allison’s boss of three months—his boss’s boss. McDonough was crude around his female staffers, and he stole credit from his people for their decryptions and analyses.

“How’d it go?” McDonough asked him.

“It’s all bullshit,” Morgan replied. “You?”

“Same here.” He made a face. “Here’s the sum total of what we know—someone’s got a nuclear device and wants to kill the Great Satan. You know, I always wanted to be an astronaut.” He slid a glance at Morgan. “Think it’s too late?”

Before his mother had gone missing, Morgan had wanted to be a cowboy. He figured he still had time.

“Nothing new?”

“The terrorists are waiting for one of two messages. One is the code word to hit us. The other is to abort the mission. We don’t know what either code word is. I suggested this.” He said the most offensive version possible of “I’m having sex with your mother” in Farsi.

“You think it’s coming out of Iran?” Morgan asked. “I was thinking of Berzhaan.”

McDonough grunted. “I don’t think so. The Berzhaanis are too unorganized.”

The two men walked down the hall past the open pit of monitors, phones and codebreakers working on Project Ozone. McDonough had on too much aftershave, and he was a smoker. He smelled like the inside of a taxicab.

In the pit, there was a worried-looking general standing beside a harried-looking guy in a suit, both talking in low voices. Another trio, two men and a woman in a naval uniform, were paging through stacks of stapled printouts. The scene was noisy and appeared chaotic, but there was methodology in the madness, a through-line that the seasoned cryptanalysts of NSA knew how to find. A couple of crackerjack codebreakers gesticulated at a map of the Eastern seaboard with a dozen lights blinking—displaying potential targets for a nuclear attack.

Allison’s office door was closed. McDonough pulled a swipe card from his pocket and ran it through the panel beside the door. The lock unclicked.

“Her little escapade stinks like a dead hooker,” he said as he barreled in and flicked on the lights. “I was just in here, checking on things. This is what I saw.”

He crossed to her desk and pointed at her computer screen. Morgan stared down at the screen—to see himself in profile, staring down at the screen. He turned and squinted, searching for the camera.

“It’s a button cam on that picture frame—the one of her and her family when she got her black belt,” McDonough said.

Morgan couldn’t detect the camera on the black lacquer frame, which didn’t surprise him. The photograph itself was very familiar to him, showing a teenage Allison dressed in an all-black martial arts uniform, belt included, beaming from the center of a loving family. Her mother had still been alive. Marion Gracelyn was murdered ten years ago, when Allison was twenty-seven. Morgan had studied the picture before, wishing he could see Allison smile that broadly in person, catch her in a carefree moment.

Catch her, period.

He wondered if McDonough’s spycam had captured even one of the hungry, lustful gazes he, Morgan, had thrown Allison’s way when he thought she wasn’t looking. He should have guessed her own boss would be conducting illegal surveillance of her at the office. He wondered if McDonough actually was NSA. He had the codebreaking creds, but on the other hand, CIA employed lots of multilingual codebreakers, too.

“Watch what we’ve got. This was yesterday morning.” McDonough pulled a miniaturized remote control device out of his black suit trousers and clicked it. An image filled Allison’s screen—it was Allison at her desk, fingers racing across her keyboard as she frowned mildly at the monitor. She stopped typing and rested her hand on her chin. Clouds must have passed behind her window, dimming the light. Morgan could practically see the wheels of her brilliant mind analyzing strings of code as they blipped across her monitor.

Then her outside line rang and she picked it up.

“Yes,” Allison-on-the-screen said. Her face changed and she sat up straighter in the chair. The room darkened perceptibly as her eyes widened and her lips parted. She looked…frightened.

“I’ll get the cash,” she said. “Give me time.” Then she hung up, pushed back her chair, turned off the lights and left her office.

“Then she leaves,” McDonough said, as the footage continued, the room cast in an eerie night-vision luminescence. “That was yesterday morning, before she took today off for personal reasons…and has been MIA ever since.”

Morgan thought a moment. “Any corroborating calls come in while she was gone?” He could comb back through the phone log himself to check.

“Nothing on my camera. I listened to all her messages, in-house and her secured outside line. I’d say that woman has no life except she clearly does, maybe working for the same guys who are trying to blow up the United States in time for Thanksgiving.”

Listening to her messages involved some protected speech issues, but Morgan stayed focused. He was intrigued by what he’d seen, but he knew there could be a logical explanation. He simply had no idea what it might be.

McDonough glanced at him. “As far as I’m concerned, that bitch has made her move, and it’s time for the bat signal, Batman.”

Morgan kept his face impassive, and McDonough laughed mirthlessly.

“Yeah, I know about you. You’ve gone deep for the people of these United States. Risked everything. Almost gotten killed a couple of times. I know you want to do this. Go ahead and volunteer. I’ll back you up.”

Morgan doubted McDonough would backup his own mother, but he wasn’t about to say no. He wanted to go after Allison so badly he could taste it.

“If you don’t go get her, I’ll send someone else who doesn’t have a hard-on for her,” McDonough continued.

Morgan nodded once, hopefully out of camera range.

McDonough nodded back. “You have everything you need?”

“I do.”

“Then stop wasting time.” McDonough lifted up his hand, snapped his fingers and pointed at the door. Morgan bristled at the lapdog-style command, but kept his irritation to himself.

Without another word, Morgan left Allison’s office.

McDonough stuck his head into the hall. “Call me. Check in. I don’t want to have to send someone after you next.”

Morgan kept walking.

As he strode past the conference room, Valenti rose from her chair and joined him in the hall.

“What are you going to do?” she asked, catching up.

He turned his head. The door to Allison’s office was closed and McDonough was nowhere to be seen.

“What makes you think I’m going to do anything?” he asked.

She pursed her lips and raised her chin.

“Just tell her to come in,” he said. “It’s not too late. McDonough will back off.”

Her expression never wavered. Morgan gave his head an angry shake.

“You’re wasting my time,” he said, and then he guessed that maybe that was the idea.

He took off.

Chapter 4

Allison flew down the off-ramp, gutterballing it as close to the shoulder as possible, and hit the turbo through a very yellow light. It was red before she was halfway across the intersection. More horns blared and she flicked her vision from the rearview mirror to the crimson taillights crowding her windshield. The grubby white van hadn’t shown yet, but in this day of cell phones and satellites, that didn’t mean a thing. For all she knew, her Infiniti had been painted by Echo herself, who was observing her nemesis via satellite as she flushed her out.

There was a nondescript strip mall up ahead. Allison scanned for entrances and exits where she might dump the car if she needed to.

A motorcyclist swerved around her and failed to maintain his speed. She braked hard, keeping her eyes on him in case he was trying to box her in. Her laptop and cell phones crashed to the floor on the passenger side. Sloppy. The motorcycle flipped her off and streaked away in the rain.

Making a command decision, she turned off her lights and shot into the alley behind the strip mall. There were no overhead lights, and the alley was narrow, bordered by two one-story brick buildings on her right and a quartet of oversize aluminum Quonset huts on her left.

She eased the car around an overflowing Dumpster, then glided around the far corner of the building. Leaning forward, she craned her neck and peered through the windshield.

The van was crossing the intersection.

She leaned down and grabbed up her personal phone, a more subdued black than the cheetah print prepaids. Punched in Selena’s number.

“Yes, Allison,” she said.

“I’m being pursued. White van.” She gave her the license plate number.

“Checking. Is there anything I can do?”

“Negative.” “Staying with you.” Selena’s voice was taut with anxiety, but she kept on task.

The van pulled into the strip mall. It did not go into the alley, but advanced slowly down a straggly row of cars parked in the gravel lot, the majority of them clustered near Allison. A quick glance revealed that the building beside her was a bar.

Allison backed up slowly, reluctantly shifting her attention from the white van to check the alley behind her via her side mirror, which she cranked to a sharp angle.

Harsh white headlights blazed at the entrance of the alley. She froze. If she backed up any farther, the lights would brush her car. If the driver was working with the van, they’d have her.

“I’m exiting my vehicle,” she informed Selena, then she grabbed up the spill of her phones and her laptop and crammed them into her briefcase, feeling for her hat and gloves in her pockets in case she didn’t get to come back. She got out, leaving her umbrella; too much to carry. Her Glock was unloaded and locked in the trunk, a precaution required for entry onto NSA property. She sidled around the side of the vehicle, her destination the trunk.

She looked from the headlights to the other side of the alley. Above the buildings, a stand of evergreens rocked in the increasing downpour. Lots of places to hide, if you were on the run…or if you were a sniper.

Parallel with her, the back door to the bar opened. Allison jerked away from her car and melted farther back into the shadows.

A twenty-something man in jeans, a knitted cap and a sweater emerged. Cursing, his head down, he jogged a large wheeled black plastic trash can toward the Dumpster.

Allison slipped into the opened door and found herself in a small hallway, facing another opened door that appeared to lead into a small, dingy kitchen. The braided odors of wet wool, hamburger grease and beer wafted toward her.

On her left, the hallway extended into the bar proper, and she heard someone shout, “Hey, shut that damn door! It’s frickin’ cold out there!”

“Allison, what’s your status?” Selena asked her.

Allison didn’t answer. Dripping, she took a few steps into the hall, and then a few more, jerking when the man with the trash can reentered the door behind her. He was with a young woman carrying a flowered umbrella. She was dressed in a puffy down jacket and skintight jeans.

“I’ll get my stuff,” he told her. “I have to tell Andy they didn’t empty the damn Dumpster again. I swear.”

“Hurry,” she pouted prettily, running a hand through her blond hair. “The movie starts in twenty minutes.”

Had the woman driven that car into the alley? If so, that was excellent news, because she was harmless. Allison turned and walked up to her.

“Did I block you?” she asked her in a friendly, relaxed manner.

“Yeah, but it’s no problem,” the woman said. “We’ll be backing out.” She smiled questioningly at Allison’s coat, then at Allison. “Get caught in the rain?”

“Yeah,” Allison said, arranging the coat over her shoulders. “I probably look like a drowned rat.”

“Kinda,” the woman replied, wrinkling her nose.

“Hey, dude, what is your problem?” the same protesting voice yelled above the noise. “Shut the damn door!”

“What’s going on?” Jeans asked Allison, craning her neck. “It’s not the cops again, is it? Man, Bobby gave one girl with a fake ID a beer, and—”

It might be that. Or “Dude” might be looking for her.

Allison pushed around the woman and flew back out the door like a shot. The light from the door spilled over the alley, against a metal door ten feet away cut into the large Quonset hut. She hurtled herself at it, grabbed the knob and jerked. It opened. She darted inside and shut it after herself, feeling for a locking mechanism, finding none, moving on into the darkness.

She smelled oil, dust and dirt; her hand brushed against something serrated that felt like a large saw. The building was some kind of storage facility for machinery parts. She crept forward carefully, trying to keep herself moving in a straight line. Most buildings had two doors, an entrance and an exit. If she could find the way out…

“Allison, where are you?” Selena said in her ear.

Allison disconnected her and put the earpiece in her coat pocket. There was nothing Selena could do for her right now except distract her.

She snaked her arms through the coat sleeves as she tiptoed on the balls of her boots through the darkness. Her ears were primed for footfalls, voices, but she heard only the rain and the occasional clink when she ran into something. Dark shadows formed from darker shadows, retinal artifacts of her heightened anxiety and nothing more. Half a dozen times, she grabbed at objects as her knees or elbows or her briefcase collided with them, shutting her eyes tight, holding her breath.

With a pang of regret over her Glock, she tried to remember if she had taken everything else of value out of her car, if she had collected all the prepaids when her briefcase had fallen onto the floor.

It seemed an eternity before the toes of her boots pressed against the opposite wall of the building. She felt with her hands for a door, moving methodically to the right; then a sliver of light drew a line across the tips of her shoes.

Target acquired.

As she found the doorknob, an image of her mother flashed through her head. Allison had never meant to see the morgue photos, but she had by accident, and they’d been gruesome. Marion Hart Gracelyn had not died well. Fear rose inside her. She didn’t want to die like that.

Then Morgan’s face filled her mind, laughing exuberantly when she beat him at tennis. He rarely laughed. She doubted he would be laughing now.

She took a deep breath and turned the knob as soundlessly as she could. The door cracked open, the pressure making a soft puh that reminded her of a silencer. Rain sheeted down ping-ping-ping like spent cartridge casings.

Then she heard a noise behind her. Someone else had just entered the building. If they had a flashlight and a gun, she was in trouble.

She crossed the threshold. Stopped. Took stock, shivering beneath the downpour as she edged past the doorway, preparing to take out whoever walked through the door.

Then she realized she wasn’t alone in the alley.

A stuttering streetlight strobed the scene, allowing Allison to piece together her surroundings.

Damn it.

Drenched by the rain, a tall, husky man loomed at the right end of the alley. He was wearing a bulky coat over a suit. He looked straight at her…and then past her, toward the other end of the alley.

She slid her glance to the left.

Equally tall, the man there was heavier, and bald, and dressed in an overcoat as well.

Bareheaded in the downpour, they began walking toward her. Adrenaline raced through her veins. She stayed light, got ready.

A flashlight flared from the exit of the Quonset hut. The man carrying it was at least six-four and darkskinned, and his eyes were hooded as he saw her and held up a wallet. He must be showing her his ID, but she couldn’t make it out in the dim light.

He said, “Allison Gracelyn, we’d like to speak to you.”

“You are?” she asked steadily, not at all surprised that they knew her name. FBI? CIA? NSA? Echo’s lackeys?

“CIA. We just have a few questions. Come with us, please.”

Her heart jackhammered. No way.

She gazed left and right as the two other men continued striding toward her, blocking her escape routes. She wondered if their heavy coats concealed weapons.

“We can talk here,” she said. Her skin sizzled with anxiety as her body prepared itself for flight or fight. “What would you like to know?”

“We just have a few questions,” he answered smoothly. “It’s nothing unusual.”

The bald man reached her first. His heavy hand clasped her shoulder.

“Please, Ms. Gracelyn, let’s go.”

She kept her bicep loose as she said to the man facing her, “Unless you’re FBI, and you have a warrant, you have no jurisdiction here.” She glared at the bald man. “And I can have you arrested for battery.”

“We only want to talk to you,” the dark-skinned man repeated.

The hand on her shoulder dug in then. Her mind raced through possible moves to take all three of them out as quickly and efficiently as possible. If they were field agents, they had some martial arts training. Given the shape they were in, she probably had more. But her karate master had warned her to never, ever underestimate her opponent.

Then the bald man surprised her. He circled behind her, and the hard pressure of a weapon indented her back.

“This is a Magnum .357,” he said. “You know what it can do.”

“Christ, Wilcox.” It was the third man, the husky one, who had been silent until now. “What the hell are you doing?”

“She has to come in. She’s in some deep shit,” the bald gunman—Wilcox—informed him.

“Hey, I don’t know anything about that. Beck just said to pick her up,” the husky man argued. She could hear the anger in his tone. “This isn’t what we were told to do.”

She noticed that the dark-skinned man wasn’t talking. Was he in on it, then?

“It wasn’t what you two were told to do,” Wilcox declared. “I have orders to bring her in or shoot to kill.”

“From Beck? No way,” the dark-skinned man insisted, siding with the husky man. So he wasn’t in on it. “You must be doing this for someone else.”

She tried to remember whom she was supposed to be blackmailing at CIA. Wrobleski? She ran through the implications of dropping his name to see what happened.

The dark-skinned man reached inside his coat pocket.

“Raise your hands above your head,” Wilcox growled, “or I’ll bust your ass for obstructing justice.”

Infuriated but impotent, the man did as Wilcox ordered.

“Wilcox is going to kill me,” Allison said, as calmly as she could. “He used you to track me, and he can’t let you survive.”

“Shut up,” Wilcox said, grabbing her and pressing the barrel against the back of her skull.

“I’ve drawn my weapon,” the husky man announced.

“It’s not loaded,” Wilcox said derisively. “Check it.”

The millisecond of distraction was the best she was going to get. If she died, she died two seconds sooner, that was all. She rammed sideways into Wilcox with an elbow strike hard to his chest, then immediately whirled around with her right hand around the gun. With a grunt she pushed back hard on his wrist. At the same time, she executed a very high jump-front kick, her toes leveraging beneath Wilcox’s chin and snapping back his head.

Incredibly the weapon hadn’t discharged. As Wilcox tumbled backward, his head smacked the cement in the alley with a loud crunch.

Not completely to her surprise, the dark-skinned man charged her from behind. She executed a backhand chop into his face with the gun as he began to wrap his arms around her torso. Then she whipped back around to face him, pushing forward with a knife hand strike between his ribs as she kneed him hard enough to drop him. With a grunt, she slammed her foot against his windpipe. Three times in the last two seconds, she could have killed him. But she didn’t. He was only unconscious as his eyes rolled back in his head.

Aware that the husky man still presented a potential threat, she aimed the gun at him, left hand under the palm of her right as she distributed the weight of the weapon in a tripod formation. As he raised his hands over his head, she took a few steps away from both the supine men, in case they tried to sweep out an arm or a leg and take her down.

“Tell me who sent you,” she said.

“I swear, I don’t know what’s going on,” he insisted, staring down the barrel. “We were told to bring you in for questioning.”

“By running me off the road?” she demanded.

He shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Her lips parted at his genuine confusion. She was in bigger trouble than she realized. “You aren’t driving a white van?”

“No.”

Damn it. “Who is Beck?”

“Our boss, CIA. I have to tell you, we’re wired,” he added.

“I’m betting your buddy had you disconnected,” she observed. “So he could have a little more privacy when he killed you. Someone forced me here,” she continued.

“Not us,” he insisted.

“Then how did you know where to find me?”

“We were sent,” he replied. “That’s all I know.”

Then something swooped off the roof and drove her to the ground, slamming her facedown in a puddle. She heard a snap as excruciating pain roared through her head to the backs of her eyes, and she tasted blood.

It was a fourth man, landing so hard on her back that she expected her spine to crack in two. A haze of gray dotted with red swam in front of her eyes. She forced herself to stay conscious.

“Who the hell are you?” Husky shouted.

The .357. Allison realized she had landed on top of it. Then she heard footfalls as the husky man charged the jumper.

Her attacker’s weight shifted and she took immediate advantage, contracting her torso, quickly snaking her hand into the space and gripping the gun. She rocked, attempting to leverage herself onto her side so she could get a knee under herself and lift her body off the ground.

She heard a snick snick snick: Husky, still trying to make lemons out of lemonade with his unloaded gun. She wondered if he really was CIA. He didn’t seem smart enough.

The weight on top of her shifted again. She scooted out and got to her feet, to discover Husky using standard martial arts techniques against the jumper, a skinny Caucasian in a catsuit, who was employing a variant of Krav Maga, favored by Israel’s Special Forces.

Allison leaped to her feet, charging forward at the two grappling men, and brought the .357 down on top of the jumper’s head. He went slack and collapsed against the cement. His face was gaunt. By his cheekbones and haircut, she judged him to be Eastern European—possibly Kestonian.

Husky stared at her. She stared at him. Blood and rain gunneled down his face.

She showed him the gun, aiming straight at him. He looked scared as he panted and kept his hands where she could see them.

“Start over,” she said.

“Our manager is Jack Beck,” he replied. “Swear to God, I didn’t know it was a setup. I don’t think Jack does, either.” He stared at the gun through a curtain of rain. “But you’re right,” he said. “They should have heard this. They should be coming for us.” He grimaced. “Wilcox played us.”

“I think he’s working for someone in CIA,” she said. “I think you’ve got someone real dirty close to you.” She was willing to bet Wrobleski outranked Beck, probably was his superior, and he was doing bad deeds on company time, with company equipment, funds and personnel.

“Come in and talk to us about it,” he ventured.

She shook her head. “Another time, maybe. What does your vehicle look like?”

“Black Town Car,” he replied.

Then she spied her briefcase, her gut clenching as she realized she hadn’t closed it properly. The laptop was poking halfway out, and there was a cell phone lying in a puddle beside it.

He looked down at them, too.

“You tell them I’m clean. I’m being set up. When you wake up,” she said to Husky, as she executed a side spinkick and clocked him hard against the temple.

As she whirled around, she watched her own blood spatter the corrugated aluminum siding in the weirdly strobing overhead light. It was from her nose.

She dropped down to her haunches; threw the phone and the laptop back into the briefcase; and soaked up blood with the arm of her coat as she sprinted around the building into the next alley.

Her car was where she’d left it, and she saw no one else in the alley. Most importantly, no black Town Car. She unlocked the door of her Infiniti, fingers crossed that no one had pressed a bomb or tracking device to the undercarriage, slid in and gunned it.

Grabbing tissues from a box in the glove compartment, she mopped up her face, grimacing when she touched her nose. She was pretty sure it was broken. She was panting and shaking as she crashed back down from the extreme high of her adrenaline rush.

The white van was gone. It would have blocked her getaway from her end of the alley if it was still here. Maybe the wheelman figured the leaper was gone too long and abandoned him. Maybe Husky had lied and CIA decided to wait until she left the parking lot before they attempted another interception.

The better scenario had the white van freaked and gone, and the CIA arriving to see what was going on and staying to do a mop-up, giving her time to put some distance between her and them. Maybe they’d ID the roof jumper, trace him back and discover…what? That a genetically enhanced woman named Echo was after a memory stick?

A memory stick the CIA would love to possess themselves? Did Oracle really want them to know that?

I can’t trust anyone.

She grabbed the nearest phone out of her briefcase— cheetah print—and dialed Selena.

“Allison,” she said, “God, are you all right?”

“The van,” Allison replied. Her voice was ragged and muffled, as if she had a head cold. She pulled around the corner of the bar and straightened out, glancing in the rearview mirror to see if her luck was still holding.

“Nothing on the plates. Allison, you sound—”

Without warning, a red pickup truck backed out of a parking space in front of Jade’s Bar. Allison hit the brakes but it was too late. Metal squealed on metal as she hit the rear wheel well. Her air bag did not deploy, but she was jerked, hard. Pain shot from the center of her nose and radiated like electric wires all over her face.

“Damn it, damn!” she yelled.

She backed up and swerved around it, flooring it out of there. She looked in her rearview mirror, to see a man run out of the bar. He was joined by another man, taller, wearing a ball cap, racing toward her in the rain, waving his arms over his head.

“Allison?” Selena shouted.

Allison gritted her teeth and kept driving straight, noting no fishtailing, no swerving. That meant she was still in alignment. Despite the impact, her car was in better shape than she was.

“Selena, you need to do something for me,” she said. Then she hesitated. No one else in the world knew where that flash drive was. No one, except, perhaps Echo.

If I get picked up—or killed, God knows what will happen to that flash drive next.

“There’s a storage facility.” She grabbed more tissues and pressed them beneath her nose. It hurt like hell. “I’ve got it wired and you’ll need the code to get in. It’s on the mainframe, in a file labeled with the nickname of my favorite horse back at Athena Academy. You know that name. You’ll need it to decrypt a disarming protocol. Don’t try to go into the storage facility until you’re absolutely sure of that protocol.” Because you will die.

“Roger.”

“There’s a paint can in the library where you are now. It’s a duplicate of one in the facility. Both are labeled with the color of my eyes. Take the one from the library to the storage facility and exchange it for the one you find there. When you get to the facility, disarm the alarm system. The protocol will also initiate a pre-recorded visual feed of the storage unit for the caretaker and anyone else who’s watching. It will mask your entry, the swap and your exit.”

“Understood.” Everything Allison had described was SOP for covert ops, so no surprises yet for Selena.

“Once you retrieve the can, don’t open it. Repeat, do not open. Box it up and ship it to Drop Point Alpha.”

Allison was referring to their post office box in Athens. As bizarre as it sounded, the more out in the open they were about receiving their supplies, the less likely the bad guys would be able to locate and intercept them.

“Drop Point Alpha, Roger that. Is the can wired to explode?”

“Not by me,” Allison said. “But I don’t know if the contents are wired. Use extreme caution. Don’t hold onto it, Selena. Get rid of it asap.”

“Roger that,” Selena said.

“Call my cell phone when you’ve done it.”

“Will do,” Selena replied. “Are you hurt? Do you want me to meet you somewhere?”

“No,” Allison said firmly. “Do exactly what I just told you. Do it like the world will explode if you don’t do it.”

“Are you coming in?” Selena asked her.

“No. I’m going deep. I’m going to have to ask more of you to put Oracle first. Anyone who can make special arrangements to free up their time should do it. Spread the word.”

Selena was quiet for a moment. “Understood.”

“I’ll be in touch.” Delphi disconnected and raced through the dark, sharp wind.

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