From: | Delphi@oracle.org
To: | C_Evans@athena.edu
Re: | U.S. Coast Guard Lieutenant, Nikki Bustillo

Christine,

We’ve gained information from the former senator. It seems he employed a hacker, known only as Diviner, to track down information about Arachne’s whereabouts. Diviner is our next lead.

We’ve tracked his signal to the Port of Miami, and Nikki Bustillo can help us there. I’ll have her use her contacts to find his location. I have a feeling he’ll be heading into international waters—with Arachne close behind.

I’ve got a few assistants in Asia who may be able to aid Nikki. She’s not worked with Oracle before, so see if you can send some Athena alum agents her way, for reassurance. She’s not one to trust easily.

D.

Dear Reader,

Like Nikki, I often wonder what it would be like to have sisters to have fun with, to cry with and to call upon for help. And also like Nikki, sisters of choice have appeared during times I’ve needed them, sometimes in the form of renewed relationships with long-distance cousins (Divas rule!) or new relationships with like-minded women whose company and intimacy add greatly to my life on a daily basis.

What intrigued me most while writing this story was how a woman like Nikki—strong and competent – would handle being a fish out of water in Hong Kong, a city and culture both familiar and utterly foreign to her young American mind. I wasn’t surprised to discover that in her times of need, it was her relationships with special women that brought her through.

That’s what makes the Athena Force series special for me. These books are about independent women who understand their greatest strength lies not just in their own courage, but also in the combined determination of a very unique sisterhood.

All the best,

Sandra

Without a Trace
Sandra K. Moore

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MILLS & BOON

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SANDRA K. MOORE

has been a technical writer, poet, martial arts student and software product manager, occasionally all at the same time. She lives on the Texas coast with her handsome partner and a moody tabby cat, and she hopes one day to ride a Ducati sport bike from Hong Kong to Stanley Village. Visit her on the Web at www.sandrakmoore.com.

To all sisters—by blood and by choice—in a challenging world.

Acknowledgements

This book could never have existed without the help so generously given by many people:

My thanks and my admiration go out to Petty Officer 3rd Class Sondra-Kay Kneen, who serves her country in the U.S. Coast Guard and has climbed through a bilge or two in her time.

Thanks to Elena Torres-Jovel, for her help with the Spanish.

I’m especially grateful for my patient editor, Stacy Boyd, who never fails to see what I’m trying—and failing—to get on the page, and who is so gracious when pointing me in the right direction.

And many thanks to Sharron McClellan, who gave Nikki such a wonderful big-sister-of-choice in Jess Whitaker.

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

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 1

Lieutenant Nikki Bustillo knew the shrimp boat her Coast Guard crew had just boarded for inspection was hiding something. It was as plain, she thought wryly, as the nose on her face.

She peered through the boat’s rear pilothouse door at the ragged Hispanic crew members lined up in the vessel’s stern. Yep. Definitely something wrong. Beneath the stench of day-old shrimp lay the almost overwhelming musk of fear. It emanated from the deckhands as strongly as the diesel fumes off the hot engines. This wasn’t about having a net with its turtle extraction devices sewn shut, which was an illegal technique that caught more fish but threatened endangered sea turtles.

No, these crewmen were scared to death.

“Problem?” Ensign Rich Mansfield, the boarding team’s rookie member, joined her in the trawler’s pilothouse.

“The Montoya is carrying more than dinner.”

Mansfield gave her a measured look. “How do you know?”

Nikki nodded at the fidgeting shrimper crew. “They look nervous to you?”

“Yeah. Sort of.”

The truth was, these men didn’t look any more nervous than any other crew Nikki’s command had stopped in the past three weeks along Florida’s coastline. But to put it mildly, they reeked of fear. Literally. The vessel was definitely carrying something besides shrimp. Cocaine was a good guess.

Mansfield hovered at her elbow as she thumbed through the vessel’s shoddily kept logs. She would’ve had the fresh-out-of-cadet-training ensign pegged merely as a nuisance, except back in February she’d received an encrypted e-mail message from someone called Delphi warning her to watch her back: somebody called Arachne was getting her jollies kidnapping Athena Academy students and alumnae, and Nikki’s name was on the wish list.

This Delphi had never contacted her before, but had known too many students—too many facts about too many of Nikki’s friends—for Nikki to doubt she knew what she was talking about. Behind that e-mail had come a visit from a former classmate, Dana Velasco, confirming Delphi’s assertion. Nikki had gotten the impression she—Nikki could only think of Delphi as “she”—was never wrong.

And Mansfield had a habit of pestering Nikki with a lot of questions she preferred not to answer.

He’d been particularly intrigued by her schooling. The Athena Academy for the Advancement of Women was unusual and he’d wanted to hear all about it. Fair enough. She’d given him the Cliff’s Notes version and moved on to her rapid-fire years at Florida State University studying literature, then to her decision to join the Coast Guard.

The truth was, the Athena Academy was the first place where she’d felt like she belonged. After an early childhood filled with seven raucous older brothers, she’d felt like an all-girls school was somehow coming home. Her orientation group, the Hecates, had consisted of four other girls, each unique, each talented and gutsy and strong. How could she possibly explain her sense of sistership with these women? Especially to someone she didn’t know. It didn’t seem…right…to share that with a stranger.

After graduation, she’d hoped to put her unique strengths to good use: her eidetic memory, her particularly fine eye-hand coordination and her martial arts skills. Those strengths and a late-blooming love of the sea had led her inevitably to the Coast Guard, where she’d screamed up the command ladder, making lieutenant at twenty-three.

Her ability to unerringly locate the bags of cocaine, heroin bricks and pot stashes? Well, that was just a little something extra given to her when her mom’s IVF doctor took a few liberties with her genetic material. It was why she could smell trouble in a man’s sweat, and why she’d chosen drug interdiction as her Coast Guard career of choice.

When Delphi told her back in February that she’d been targeted for kidnapping because of her special ability, Nikki had had to take a few days to get adjusted to that reality. Her parents, who’d simply wanted a daughter instead of an eighth son, had applied to the Zuni, New Mexico, fertility lab in an attempt to have one. As far as Nikki knew, the only special order her parents had placed was for gender. And nothing else.

But with the warning from Delphi concerning Athena students with “abilities,” Nikki had set about methodically reviewing the files of her fellow crew members, just to cover her bases. Then Mansfield had arrived a month ago and started hanging around her like a bad high school crush.

She regarded him now as he shuffled through greasy work orders and pay slips in a console drawer. Maybe he was just an Anglo with a fascination for Cuban women. Okay, so she was second-generation Cuban-American, born and bred in Arizona, but she knew her way around Spanish—vocabulary was a helluva lot simpler when you had a photographic memory—even if her pronunciation left a little something to be desired.

With Mansfield still at her elbow, she radioed her captain aboard the cutter Undaunted and let him know what was going down.

“Another hunch?” Captain Pickens’s voice growled in response.

“Yes, sir.”

“Go with it.”

“Yes, sir.” She turned to Mansfield. “Let’s see what they’ve got in the hold.”

She set two members of her boarding team to stand guard over the trawler’s captain and crew while the rest fanned out and started a search for drugs.

It had begun as a more or less routine stop. The ancient trawler, common to this part of the south Florida coastline, had looked a bit light as the Undaunted cruised into visual range. Normally the bottom paint of a fully loaded shrimp boat lay underwater. This trawler’s bottom paint showed a clear six inches out of the water, suggesting that the concrete ballast used to steady the trawler in rough seas had been replaced with something much lighter. Like cocaine.

When Mansfield yanked open the main hatch, fear musk—a cross between burnt coffee and battery acid—surged from the general vicinity of the shrimper captain.

“Got a problem?” Nikki asked the captain in Spanish.

He shrugged, looking sullen, though his gaze kept darting at the guardsmen disappearing into the hold.

“How long have you been piloting this vessel?”

Nikki asked the usual questions while her squad members poked through the compartments where the shrimp were stored. The captain muttered his answers, which she jotted down in a small notebook. The Montoya rolled gently as fat waves slid beneath her, and the sun glared off the water and steel.

After a few minutes, Mansfield was back, wiping sweat from his face and looking queasy.

“Nothing,” he said.

“You’ve been thorough.” She made it a statement, so he’d understand thoroughness was expected, no matter how bad the job stank.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Nikki narrowed her eyes at the shrimp boat captain. Burnt coffee assaulted her nostrils. The man was scared, and the strength of the scent couldn’t be just because he had more than his allowed catch aboard.

“Look again,” she told Mansfield.

“But—” He caught himself before protesting a direct order.

She leveled a measuring gaze at him. Maybe that was why she didn’t trust him. Because he couldn’t stomach the job. Hell, she knew what that was like, but it didn’t mean she’d cut him any more slack than her CO had ever cut her. “You’ll get used to it. Come on.”

Nikki gripped the edges of the storage hatch, took a deep breath, held it and leaned into the hold. Something hard touched her shoulder; Ensign Artie Jackson held out a heavy-duty flashlight, which she took. Light splashed over the dead shrimp and rusting steel hull. The plastic liner that held the shrimp was cracked and stained from years of use. Stifling heat pressed in on her, bringing a quick burst of sweat to her face and neck. From the looks of it, this shrimp wasn’t a fresh catch.

She let go the breath she was holding and sniffed.

The musk of coffee bored past the acrid, salty smell of dead sea creatures and washed over her in a hot wave. Nikki grit her teeth against nausea. Terror. Terror like nothing she’d ever smelled before. Terror and…grief?

She leaned away from the hatch and squinted into the afternoon sun. “Get me a rake or shovel or something!” The wind lifting over the trawler’s rail cooled her face.

Jackson handed her a shrimp rake. Nikki coughed hard a few times, then shook herself mentally. Get a grip. It’s just rotting critters.

The days-old dead sea life she could handle. It was what lay beneath that had her reeling.

She reached the rake down and scraped a bare spot inside the storage unit, then dropped through the deck hatch. A few minutes of hard work had cleared a broad swath, revealing another hinged hatch immediately beneath her feet. It was roughly two feet by two feet, with a pull handle. She would have smiled at her success, but the bitter scent of fear ratcheted her nerves another notch tighter.

Nikki stepped aside, pulled her sidearm, grabbed the handle and yanked the hatch open.

It was like looking into a mass grave. People in ragged, stained clothing lay piled on each other, huddled, clutching pillowcases or battered backpacks. One, a boy no more than thirteen, stirred and opened his eyes, squinting against the flashlight’s beam but too weak to hold up a hand for shade. The rest were still.

“Shit.” Nikki raised her head. “We’ve got refugees! Jackson! Take the captain and crew into custody. Mansfield, radio the captain. We’ll need a chopper.”

Nikki leaned in and grasped the boy’s hand. “I’m here to get you out,” she said in Spanish.

The boy struggled to keep his eyes open. “America?”

“Sí. ¿Cuál es tu nombre?”

“Eduardo.”

“Come on, Eduardo.”

Nikki tugged the boy through the hidden hatch. The child was weak and thin, as if he’d spent days in the boat’s bowels with no food or water. He could barely move and his skin felt like parchment. Nikki handed him up to Mansfield, who’d called in the mission and was ready to haul refugees onto the deck.

“Ninety miles isn’t that long,” Mansfield muttered, referring to the nautical distance from Cuba to Miami.

“No,” Nikki replied grimly as anger flash-fired in her stomach, “but I’m guessing these passengers weren’t meant to arrive.”

She kept count as they pulled out man after woman after child. Her boarding crew, in full-out rescue mode, worked quickly. Still, it was well over an hour to move the refugees out and give them water.

“One last check.” Nikki held the flashlight out to Mansfield, who blanched, green around the gills. “There may be more people down there. Are you going to do your job or not?”

Mansfield shook his head.

Nikki tamped down her anger-fueled disgust at his cowardice. “Never mind.”

She lowered herself back into the hold and played the flashlight beam over the paint-peeling sides.

“How’s it look, boss?” Jackson’s voice echoed hollowly in the now-empty hold.

“Gotta do it right.”

He grunted as she crawled methodically through the wretched space, which was only three feet high. No wonder the terror had been so great. The shrimper was a death trap—no air circulation, hotter ’n hell, with over a hundred and forty people crammed inside. Toward the stern, the shrimper’s internal bulkheads provided too many shadows and too much cover for Nikki to assume they’d found everyone.

The coffee scent still lingered, as it would for several more days. If the emotion was strong enough—the rage or terror or love—it made sort of an imprint, and the stronger the emotion, the clearer and more lasting it was. She concentrated on that smell rather than what was wafting off the floor she crawled across, avoiding puddles and slicks of human bodily fluids. The detritus of desperation.

And to starboard, deep in the stern, Nikki found the girl.

She might have been eleven years old, maybe twelve, huddled against the boat’s bulkhead, her jeans stained and her shirt torn. As the light splashed across the girl’s face, Nikki was struck by a sense of familiarity. But there was no way she could know this child. She touched the girl’s sweat-slickened hand, glad to find her alive. Barely alive.

“Got another one!” Nikki shouted back at the hatch. “She needs a medic!”

Nikki quickly pulled the child into her arms and started the laborious journey to the hatch. Ignoring the wetness seeping through her uniform, she concentrated instead on speed. The girl’s breathing was extremely shallow and her cold skin said she was in shock.

It took only a few more moments to lift the child—she weighed so little—into Jackson’s arms, then follow him into the pilothouse. Jackson’s bulging forearm looked obscenely strong next to the girl’s skinny limbs as he laid her carefully on a workbench Mansfield had cleared of clutter.

“Where’s the doc?”

“He’s got his hands full on deck.”

“He needs to be in here,” Nikki snapped. “Mansfield! Get the doc in here, now!” And when he hesitated, she shouted, “Don’t hang around, ensign!”

Mansfield jerked into gear and headed out onto the deck. Nikki dug through a gear bag for a space blanket, frustrated by the piles of supplies that got in her way. There! Shaking the blanket out, she turned to cover the girl, but Jackson cursed suddenly and started CPR.

“We’re gonna lose her!”

Nikki poked her head out of the pilothouse. “Doc! Get your ass in here now!”

She spotted the physician and Mansfield in the stern, bent over a woman whose arms flailed in some kind of delirious panic. Dammit.

“Lieutenant.” The desperate edge in Jackson’s voice brought her back. “She’s not going to make it.”

“She will. Keep working.”

“No, she won’t. Her chest is too damaged.” Jackson pressed two thick fingers to the girl’s carotid artery. “She’s gone.”

Nikki said nothing. How could she? There was nothing to say. She simply straightened the girl’s flimsy, once-white shirt and folded her arms over her stomach. Only then did Nikki see the bruises that necklaced her throat, spread across her collarbone and shoulders and blossomed beneath the blouse.

“Crushed,” Jackson murmured. “Internal damage mostly.”

“Wave action probably aggravated it,” Nikki said. “All that banging around down there. All the people.”

Do I know this kid? she wondered. The shape of the brow, the high cheekbones, the soft, full lower lip. The sense of near recognition was strong but Nikki couldn’t quite make the connection.

She mentally shook herself and held a tight rein on her frustration. She had work to do. She snapped her own jumpsuit straight and, leaving Jackson with the girl, headed out on deck.

“How many?” Captain Pickens barked as he came aboard. Undaunted had been lashed alongside the trawler and now nodded serenely, her boarding bridge deployed.

“One hundred and forty-one living.” Nikki’s throat tightened. “Three dead.”

“How long have they been at sea?”

Anger came to a sudden boil in her stomach. “A man I questioned said three days.” Nikki was about to scrub her face with her hand, then caught a whiff of her fingers and stopped. “The fatalities were caused by the crush. Rough seas.”

Captain Pickens swore eloquently before saying, “Chopper’s on its way for the deceased.”

Nikki nodded.

Only the poorest chanced the ninety-mile crossing from Cuba to Florida in an open boat. Anyone who could scrape together a few hundred dollars bought transport aboard fishing trawlers like the Montoya or, if they had enough cash, in cargo planes that touched down on small private landing strips near the Everglades. No matter how the journey was made, it was always dangerous.

Nikki glanced around. On the shrimp boat’s deck, the refugees who hadn’t been escorted to the Undaunted sat crammed together in little groups, their clothing matted and sweat-darkened. The fear stench on deck had waned but beneath it lay the thicker musk of dread. They’d been caught at the edge of United States territorial waters. After processing, they’d likely be sent back, their life savings forfeited on a failed chance at a better life.

What would she do if she were in these refugees’ place? she wondered. Spend her savings for a one-way ticket to another country? Risk everything to cross the Florida Straits? Put her life in the hands of men who might take her out into a desert somewhere and kill her for the fifty dollars she carried, or who thought she was attractive enough to sell to the highest bidder?

Then she made the connection. The girl’s face, her features—they looked like the girl in the ancient photo her mom used to pull out and show her at Christmas. The one of her grandmother, who hadn’t survived the trip to a better life, either.

Nikki stifled a sigh, grabbed her clipboard and started the interviews.

Chapter 2

That evening Nikki settled back in her home office desk chair while staring at the e-mail messages coming in. One of them, sent from the mysterious Delphi, churned in state-of-the-art decryption software Dana Velasco had given her. While Nikki waited, she absently finger-combed her curly hair, damp from her long shower.

The dead girl’s face still flashed in her mind every so often, taking her unawares—while getting into her Jeep, when she opened her modest town house’s front door, while she stood under the pounding hot water. Her job could be a bitch sometimes, not for what she did or had to do, but for what she had to face.

In the meantime, maybe the e-mail from Delphi would take her mind off the girl.

Seconds later, the decryption software spat up a simple message:

Signal broadcast from 25° 37’ 33.94” N, 79° 38’10.18” W. What vessels passed through these coordinates on April 27 at 4:30 p.m.?

Stand by for contact.

Nikki sat forward as she read. Decrypted, but cryptic, just like the message back in February about watching her back.

So the signal had come through just two days ago. And that location was definitely within her jurisdiction, in the commercial shipping lanes just outside the Port of Miami. Ever thorough, she double-checked the lat-longs against the navigational chart hanging on her office wall for confirmation.

Staring at the chart’s looping blue depth lines, she frowned. Dozens of container ships, tankers, cruise ships and tugs passed through those lanes on their way to and from the Port of Miami every day. That bay was heavily trafficked at all hours.

Fortunately, she knew just who to tap. Two-Finger Jimmy owed her a favor or three. Time to pay up.

Nikki flipped through her mental Rolodex and pulled up Two-Finger Jimmy’s pager number. Jimmy Delano worked on the clerical side of the Port of Miami, which meant she and Jimmy went back a couple of years comparing notes on port traffic for Homeland Security. Last year she’d spent her off-hours helping him track down his niece, who had disappeared in Little Havana. After a week of searching, they’d found her on a ritzy yacht anchored near South Beach. She’d had a heroin buzz and a nasty case of VD. Considering she was only fifteen, the authorities had not looked kindly on the sleazy television producer who’d introduced her to high-dollar whoredom under the guise of making her a star.

Within minutes, Two-Finger Jimmy’s number flashed on her ringing cell.

“James!” she said.

“What have I done now?”

“It’s what you’re going to do for me.”

His voice dropped, got husky. “You know what I’d like to do for you.”

Nikki laughed. Two-Finger Jimmy had a jockey’s physique, was happily married to a woman roughly the size of a wall and was old enough to be her grandfather. “Yeah, I do know. You’d like to look through the port logs for a vessel that might have passed through a waypoint I’m going to give you.”

Jimmy chuckled. “That’s second on my list. How’ve you been?”

She shot the breeze with him for a few minutes before cutting to the chase and giving him the lat-longs and date and time information. “Think you can track down the ships that might have passed through those coordinates?”

“Are you kidding? I have technology on my side. You’re still filling out forms in triplicate, aren’t you? On a Smith-Corona?”

“Screw you,” Nikki retorted good-naturedly.

“Why, look here, chica, I’ve got the goods.”

She grabbed a pen and pulled a legal pad close. “Hit me.”

“You’ve got two ships going out and one ship coming in that could have hit that waypoint around that time. The one coming in was an oil tanker out of Saudi.”

“Talk to me about the ones going out.”

“One’s Maersk-Sealand—their regular shipment. The other’s an outfit called ‘SHA.’ S. H. A.”

“What were they carrying?”

“You don’t ask much, do you?” Two-Finger Jimmy huffed but Nikki also heard the speedy clicking of the typing technique that had earned him his nickname.

“Maersk-Sealand was routing long-haul trucks to Australia.”

“Sounds reasonable.”

“SHA was…” He trailed off, then grunted. “It’s hard to tell what these clowns were shipping. Uno momento.” His off-key whistling set in.

Not a good sign. It meant he was puzzled, and a puzzled Two-Finger Jimmy usually meant trouble.

“Textiles,” he said finally. “Handwoven.”

“Textiles?”

“Ye-a-ah.” He drew the word out nice and slow. “Big bolts of cloth.”

“I know what textiles are, James. Aren’t they going in the wrong direction?”

“Most textiles come in, but we do ship out occasionally. Problem is, this is about a half load.”

“Doesn’t sound very cost-effective.”

Jimmy grunted. “It’s not. SHA’s losing its ass on that container ship.”

“Nothing but big bolts of cloth?”

Keys clicked. “Nothing that shows on the electronic manifest. Hang on. Let me check the hard copy.” Papers fluttered. “Okay, a last-minute load. One container.”

“Contents?”

“Not listed.” Jimmy whistled. “Someone at SHA has been a ba-aa-ad boy. All container contents are s’posed to be logged and checked by customs twenty-four hours before loading. Looks like this one got loaded up after the rest of the ship’s containers were inspected.”

“Could that container have bypassed a customs inspection?”

“Only if money changed hands somewhere down the line.”

“Sounds like a snakehead’s involved,” she said.

“Human smuggling? Stowaways usually try to get in, not out.”

“True.” She thought for a moment. “What do you know about SHA?” she asked as she used Google to search the company name.

“They log about six, seven shipments a year. Small scratch. Manifest says they have offices in Hong Kong, Singapore and Istanbul.”

“Where’s this boat headed?”

“Itinerary says Hong Kong. Should take about four weeks to get there.”

Four weeks from April 27 meant the container ship would be in port in less than a month, give or take the weather.

Then a thought occurred to her. “Were any civilian passengers logged for this trip?” Sometimes adventurers would book passage on a commercial shipper as an alternative to flying. The signal Oracle picked up might have originated from a passenger.

Jimmy rummaged on the keyboard for a moment, then said, “One guy. An Alexander Wryzynski.”

Nikki scribbled down the name as he spelled it for her. “Thanks for the trouble, Jimmy. I owe you.”

“Anything for you, chica, anytime.” He clicked off.

Nikki’s smile faded as the search engine came up with about twenty-eight thousand incomprehensible listings for SHA.

SHA, she discovered, was a database programming tool used to encrypt data, so the vast majority of the search links led to either propeller-head sites or to database companies. Including shipping, transport and China in the search term brought up more programming links, only in Chinese.

The manifest had listed the SHA company as based in Hong Kong, with offices in Singapore and Istanbul. She tried a search with those cities and shipping, and dropped SHA. Bingo. A plethora of shipping companies, none of which were SHA. What shipping company these days didn’t have a Web site?

So a little-known shipping company had sent a light load of handwoven textiles in the least likely direction for such goods to go, and taken on a single container of unknown contents that had bypassed U.S. Customs and Border Control.

It smelled as rotten as the shrimp she’d raked this morning.

Nikki blew out a breath. She had her mark. She fired off two words via e-mail to Delphi: Got it. Now she’d just wait to be contacted.

Delphi’s e-mail warning back in February had been followed up by a face-to-face visit from a former classmate, Dana Velasco. Dana had been two years ahead of Nikki and now test-piloted experimental planes for a major aircraft manufacturer. Oracle, Dana had told her, was an intelligence-digesting system run by someone known only as Delphi.

“I don’t know who Delphi is,” Dana had said over a crowd of lively teenagers as they walked down Calle Ocho in Little Havana, “but they’ve used Oracle to piece together puzzles intelligence agencies can’t manage on their own.”

“And Athena figures in how?”

Dana had only shrugged. “A lot of what gets pieced together has to do with the academy. And students like you.”

Students like you. Nikki sighed and kicked back in her office chair. Students like her, who’d been manipulated at the genetic level, unbeknownst to their parents.

Jaime and Teresita Bustillo hadn’t wanted much—just a girl. Seven sons had kept their upscale East Flagstaff construction business going, but they’d wanted one last chance at a daughter. That’s where the fertility clinic in Zuni, New Mexico, came in. The clinic, doctors assured her parents, could guarantee a girl.

They just hadn’t mentioned that the girl, conceived in vitro and implanted in her mother’s womb, would be born with a little something extra. That little secret would be kept until only a few months ago, when Delphi made her phone call and Nikki finally understood the details about where her “gift” had come from. Nikki, Delphi had made clear, wasn’t the only girl to have a special talent.

Another, Nikki knew immediately, was her best friend, Jessica Whittaker. Jess had been two years ahead of Nikki at the academy, but something had drawn them together. Maybe it was the fact they were both “egg babies,” even though they, at the time, had had no idea why they could do what they could. Maybe it was that Jess seemed like the older sister Nikki didn’t have. Whichever, as Nikki had grown up at Athena Academy, she’d found herself closer to Jess than even to her Hecate sisters.

Egg baby. Jess could breathe water and Nikki had a nose like a bloodhound. It was almost as if the scientists at Lab 33 had been splicing in the traits that humans longed for but didn’t have.

Which often made Nikki wonder if Catwoman really did exist out there. Or someone more brutal, more cunning, more…insane.

Her cell buzzed and Nikki caught it on the second tone. “Bustillo.”

“Girlfriend!”

“Dana!” Nikki replied, grinning. “¿Cómo estás, chica?”

“Hell, Nik,” Dana groaned. “My Spanish still sucks, okay?”

“You said you were going to practice.”

“Life’s short but the journey’s busy. Let’s eat.”

“Name the place.”

“That little club we didn’t get to check out last time I was there. In a half hour.”

Nikki hung up. The little club they’d missed was called Hoy Como Ayer, a few blocks away, and it deserved something much nicer than her gray sweat-pants and a ragged T-shirt. She dug through her closet until she came up with a red knit top and a short black skirt with a bit of flare to the hem.

Twenty minutes later Nikki sat in a corner table as far away from the little stage as she could get. A couple of youths unloaded gear from a lowered pickup truck outside; Thursday nights jammed with class acts from the finest musicians and singers working the circuit. According to Nikki’s watch, she had five minutes to wait for Dana and another hour before the night’s live music would start.

On the dot, Dana wound through the growing throng toward her table. Dressed in a flowing, flowery skirt and a solid black top, her dark hair loose on her shoulders, Dana looked striking—and totally unlike a turista.

“Hey, girl,” Nikki said as she rose to hug Dana.

“Have you heard from Jess?” Dana asked casually as she pulled out a chair.

“Not since a phone call before she left on vacation.” Nikki put a not-so-slight emphasis on vacation.

Dana’s impassive face said as much as Nikki had guessed already: Jess wasn’t on vacation, but doing something that was no doubt extremely dangerous. For the same Delphi that had contacted Nikki in February? Because she and Jess were both targeted for kidnapping because of their genetic mutations?

“Have you talked to Jess recently?” Nikki asked. As former classmates in the same year, Dana and Jess might have kept in contact more frequently than even Nikki and Jess, though Nikki doubted it. Her surrogate big sister always stayed in touch. Even when she had to be coy about what she was up to, like in their last conversation.

Dana shook her head as a waiter arrived. “No, I haven’t heard from her. What’s a mojito?”

“Better than a kick in the head,” Nikki muttered, irritated that Dana was being close-lipped about their mutual friend.

“I’ll have a mojito,” Dana told the waiter.

“Agua,” Nikki said to him.

“Spoilsport.”

Nikki merely nodded. They both knew Dana would take a sip, maybe two, from her drink and then leave the rest. Dana couldn’t afford to be off her game when she was on duty.

Whatever on duty meant for her.

After they ordered, Nikki grabbed a baked plantain chip and hit the spicy guacamole with it. “What’s up?”

“You found what we’re looking for.”

“Maybe.” Nikki relayed the information she’d gotten from Two-Finger Jimmy and finished up with, “So the SHA shipment to Hong Kong looks like the one you want. It’s carrying a passenger and a suspicious cargo container.”

Dana waited until the waiter served their drinks and left.

“Sounds like you’ve pegged it.” Dana sipped the mojito—a concoction of rum, lime juice and mint, among other things—and smiled broadly. “Can I get this to go?”

“Not in this town. What’s going on with the container ship?”

Dana twirled the mint sprig in her drink. “Athena needs you to track it. It has something we want.”

“Athena needs it?” Nikki frowned. “Is this related to our kidnapping conversation from a couple of months ago?”

“I can’t say.” Then after a moment, Dana added, “I’m not authorized.”

Nikki’s frown deepened but she couldn’t suppress the urge to lean on her friend. “Is it related to Jess’s vacation?”

Dana said nothing.

Nikki cursed inwardly. Dana’s silence meant yes, but the woman would never say. “Look, you can’t expect me to keep running your little errands without telling me something of what’s going on. I’m in danger, Jess is in danger.” And when her friend still kept quiet, Nikki added, “Throw me a bone here, Dana. Give me something or I walk.”

Dana leaned back in her chair, her face immobile, as if considering.

Nikki, thoroughly annoyed, tossed her napkin on the table. “Are you talking or am I walking?” She felt a slim satisfaction when Dana leaned forward.

“Last time we talked face-to-face, I told you about Arachne.”

“Yeah, crazy woman trying to kidnap Athena students with special talents.”

“I didn’t tell you that she succeeded. With some Athena students.”

Nikki’s breath caught in her throat. There was no telling what someone like Arachne might do with genetically modified children. Children. Nikki tried to ignore her own fear scent rising in her nostrils. “How many?”

“Two, plus one eager beaver who was instrumental in our blowing up a Lab 33 wannabe in Kestonia.” Dana’s sharp eyes must have picked up on Nikki’s face because she said quickly, “It’s okay. We got them all back, safe and sound.”

Relief swept like cool water through Nikki’s veins. It was one thing for this Arachne to try to kidnap a grown woman, and another thing entirely for her to target girls. And succeed, no matter how temporarily.

Nikki nodded. “Good.”

“But we’ve had other information come to light and that’s why I’m here. If you’re willing to serve Athena.”

Nikki’s chin lifted as anger swirled in her gut. Dana knew her better than that. Stung, she retorted, “There’s no ‘if’ about it. What do you want me to do?”

“The signal we had you track came from someone called Diviner. We don’t know who Diviner is, but we need him. Or her.”

“You’re sure the perp is human?” Nikki asked, thinking of Alexander Wryzynski.

Dana nodded. “We intercepted an instant message, definitely generated by a human. He, or she, thought he was talking to Bryan Ellis.”

“The congressman.”

“The congressman who tried to kill Francesca Thorne two months ago. He’s been charged with conspiracy to commit murder.”

“I remember Chesca. I ran into her once on the firing range.” Nikki frowned. “She didn’t say much but I could have sworn her eyes would cut glass. Like she could see right through me.”

“Quiet and thoughtful,” Dana agreed.

“And scary,” Nikki added.

“Bryan Ellis gave us Diviner as part of his plea bargain. When we made contact, we came away with the signal location, but that was all. I’ll look into Wryzynski. That’s the best lead we’ve got.”

“Where do I come in?” Nikki asked.

Dana pitched the straw into her drink and settled back. “Care for a trip to Hong Kong?”

Nikki regarded Dana for a moment. “I have leave coming up. Might be able to get a couple of weeks if I ask nicely.”

“Then you’ll do it.”

Dana was all business, even when she was being friendly. She knew about Nikki’s origins in Lab 33, just as she knew Jess’s. She also worked for the mysterious Delphi, who herself—or himself—was the mouthpiece for the more mysterious Oracle.

And all these pieces came together around the Athena Academy, where Nikki had found herself surrounded for the first time by women. Not just women. Like-minded women who were driven by a sense of purpose, and who weren’t afraid to sacrifice whatever it took to achieve a greater good.

Like the people on the shrimp trawler this morning, who’d been willing to sacrifice everything—homes, jobs, community—to bring their children to a foreign land for a chance at a better life. For the greater good of the family.

Nikki knew about the greater good of the family. She had her own family full of crazy, laughing brothers and loving parents. She had the Hecates and Jess.

She had Athena, which suddenly faced threats against it, threats against its students, past and present.

The waiter placed steaming platters of food in front of them, but neither woman touched her plate.

Nikki’s jaw clenched. “Arachne has it in for Athena.”

Dana’s silence spoke volumes. It just didn’t give details.

Nikki nodded, satisfied. For the moment. “Hong Kong.”

Chapter 3

The moment Nikki stepped into the Hong Kong International Airport terminal, she turned on the GSM quad-band phone Dana had given her. Not only was Delphi well-informed, Nikki thought, but she provided cutting-edge technology to her field operatives. A built-in scrambler kept messages safe.

Nikki snorted. Field operative. Yeah, that’s me.

Still smiling, she slung her backpack over her shoulder, preparing to shoulder her way through the throng flowing toward the illuminated sign that read Trains to city. A chirping sound started up and it took her a moment to realize it was her new phone. She slid sideways through the slipstream of travelers to a vacant spot by the wall.

Nikki answered the phone with, “Your timing’s good.”

“There’s a problem,” Dana replied. “We lost your contact.”

Nikki settled her backpack between her feet. “What do you mean ‘lost’?”

“Regina Woo’s been killed.”

Shock coursed through Nikki’s veins as she let her back make contact, hard, with the polished stone wall. She didn’t know Regina—she was another Athena student who’d graduated before Nikki arrived—and had had limited contact with her to set up their meeting, but…she was Athena. She was a sister. And having grown up in Hong Kong before moving to the States, she was a natural contact for this mission to find Diviner.

“What happened?” Nikki asked.

“She was ambushed leaving work late last night. It looks like a gang murder to the police, but we think the gang was reporting to someone else.”

“Who?”

“Triads.”

Well, hell. Nikki knew of the triads only by reputation. The gang specialized in cocaine and heroin export with side businesses in extortion and child prostitution. They also had a nasty habit of cutting off the fingers of members who’d disappointed them and giving a traitor the “Death By a Thousand Cuts.”

“What about the guy Regina hired to keep watch for the SHA vessel?” she asked. “Is he still working for us?”

“As far as we know.” Dana was silent for a moment. “Regina worked with several people. Let’s hope Johnny Zhao is one of the less…interesting…ones.”

“I don’t have a way of contacting him. I’ll have to meet up with him in port.” Nikki cursed inwardly. Meet up with a man whose face she didn’t know in a city she’d never visited and without her familiar Smith & Wesson 9 mm in her hand. This didn’t look good. Or feel good. She could be walking toward her death just as readily as Regina had. “I don’t like it.”

“What do you want to do?”

Nikki didn’t hesitate. “Finish the job.”

“You sounded unsure.”

“I was just stating a fact.” She lowered her voice as a tourist couple, English by their tweed slacks, walked by, gawking and dragging heavy suitcases. Nikki tried to keep the annoyance out of her voice as she said, “I couldn’t bring a firearm into the country and I’m stuck now without a weapon. Or a translator in case this guy doesn’t speak English like the rest of post-Brit Hong Kong. I don’t like it. These are facts, but they don’t mean I won’t finish what I’ve started.”

“I might be able to call in some backup from New Mexico—”

“Our window’s closing,” Nikki snapped. “The ship is due in tonight and I need to be on it as soon as I can get on it. I can’t afford to wait for someone else to fly in as backup. Our mark will have disappeared by then.”

“You’re right.”

“I’ll hook up with the contact if I can find him and go from there.”

“Call me tomorrow.” A pause. “If you get a chance.”

Nikki nodded. Dana actually meant if you’re still alive. “Will do.”

She snapped the phone shut.

Her first priority was to locate this Johnny Zhao guy, assuming he was still alive. He was supposed to be stationed at the container terminal, but as she didn’t know his face, she had no idea who to look for.

It’s easy, she reprimanded herself. Look for the armed Chinese guy in black hanging out in the shadows.

Right.

This mission would be a challenge, but she’d faced challenges before. Unbidden, the Cuban girl’s face surfaced in her mind. She ruthlessly shut the vision out of her head. Time to get moving. The sooner she hooked up with Zhao, the sooner she’d get her hands on a sidearm. Or a rifle. Preferably both.

She headed down the wide tunnel toward the trains, and a huge party of Chinese caught up to her, talking amongst themselves in complex, tonal Cantonese. As they swirled around her, dragging their luggage and waving at small children to catch up, Nikki caught the clean cotton scent of new clothes layered on warm flesh that exuded garlic, ginger and some other scent she couldn’t name. They closed around her tightly, enveloping her completely until her wide-open-spaces, American self felt almost claustrophobic, then hurtled forward to close around her as if she were a tree planted in the middle of a stream.

A hard bump knocked her elbow forward. Nikki instinctively rocked onto the balls of her feet, ready to fight.

A little girl in a pleated skirt and crisp white shirt shot her a half-fearful, half-apologetic smile as she sprinted past, her perfectly straight blue-black hair shimmering on her shoulders. A man who might have been the girl’s father cuffed her gently and guided her in front of him.

Nikki decided she was a helluva long way from home.

The wind kicked up and the scent hit her face-first: sea and salt mixed with diesel fumes and old fish. Now this felt more like home.

Nikki flattened into the shadow of massive metal containers stacked four high and hoped the security guard wouldn’t hear the water dripping from her wet suit. He walked briskly, his boots crisp on the pavement, and disappeared down past a line of containers laid out like a child’s carefully arranged toy blocks.

The Kwai Chung Container Terminal was a city that never slept. It gleamed at night, lit partly from its own high-powered floods and partly from the high-rises packed along the southwest shore of the New Territories. Of its nine terminals—Kwai Chung was the busiest container terminal in the world— Terminal Eight would accept delivery of the SHA shipment.

And it had taken a heckuva lot of cunning to get inside. Fortunately, no one had been watching the water for sneaky swimmers. The ladder bolted into the concrete pier was just as convenient for her as it would have been for a clumsy sailor, and the metal gate guarding it had yielded to some basic lock-picking.

Her goal was simple. Get aboard the SHA vessel and use her PDA to scan for a signal. If Diviner was on the ship, the signal strength would lead her to him. Then she’d contact Delphi.

Nikki peeled out of her wet suit to reveal a black long-sleeved shirt and the formfitting black pants she used for her martial arts training workouts. Her face she’d already smeared with grease, and her hair was swept back in a secure ponytail. The waterproof gear bag was slung on her back like a backpack.

She glanced around the corner of the container stack that hid her. The SHA vessel loomed at the pier’s edge, its massive dock lines—as big around as her waist—looped over the equally massive mooring cleats. Lights blazed on deck as dockhands moved back and forth, adjusting lines and checking the payload. A man in a hard hat and carrying a clipboard emerged from the bridge tower, shouted something to the workers, then headed down the boarding plank for the dock.

Getting aboard that vessel wouldn’t be anywhere as easy as getting into the terminal.

It would have helped if she’d been able to find Johnny Zhao, but he either wasn’t around or he was a ghost. She just hoped he wasn’t the kind of ghost who started out alive but was now dead. Or the kind of ghost who turned on his employer, killed her and then faded away.

Anger mingled with fear trickled through her muscles. If he’d killed Regina Woo—and if she could find him—she’d have his hide.

Nikki waited until she counted eight men leaving the vessel. If whatever was on board was important, it’d likely have security teams crawling all over it. She saw only one man still on deck, a pistol holstered at his belt, so perhaps the ship was running a skeleton crew.

The terminal’s security guard made another pass through the stacked containers. Nikki checked her watch. His schedule gave her about ten minutes to get up and out of sight.

She shimmied through shadows until she crouched next to the bow mooring cleat. The huge dock line arced gracefully up to the vessel’s scupper; the nearest big floodlight pointed away from the bow. Perhaps her unorthodox entrance would go unnoticed. Either that or everyone would see her grappling for purchase on the way up. Not pretty.

Nikki hopped onto the cleat and tested her footing on the dock line. Her soft shoe soles gripped the rough, twisted line, and its texture gave her plenty of purchase. The good news was that it wasn’t anywhere as difficult as dragging herself up a Coast Guard cutter’s wave-washed deck in high seas. In moments she had inched her way up to the scupper and hoisted herself over the rail and onto the deck.

Another minute of sticking close to shadows and moving silently had her sequestered near the containers still stacked aboard the ship. Above her, a crane’s giant hook hung in the air, abandoned, as if the five o’clock whistle had just blown. On the ship, the containers sat bunched together and tied down by massive cables, with little space for a smallish woman to slide between them. Still, she managed to squeeze in.

Hard-soled boots clanged on the steel deck, driving her deeper into the shadows. While she waited for the deckhand to pass by, she scanned the containers that hid her. Nothing out of the ordinary. She needed to get inside, where passengers—including Alexander Wryzynski—would be awaiting the captain’s permission to disembark.

Out of the corner of her eye, she noted a blip of black between the metal containers—someone had passed the gap where she hid. The better place to evaluate the situation would be up top, she realized, and pressing her feet and hands on opposite containers, she crept up between them, using leverage to keep herself suspended. Another blip of movement. Nikki froze. When the person disappeared, she crab-walked the rest of the way to the top.

Far enough from the ship’s deck lights to be in shadow even up here in the open, she could safely assess the situation.

The ship’s five-story bridge gleamed like a Hong Kong skyscraper. She counted six men walking purposefully past windows that were probably crew quarters. Another two, judging from their footsteps far below, paced the deck. Might as well assume another two, maybe three, in the engine room.

Were they all crew, or a security team, or what?

And where the hell was Johnny Zhao? According to her last phone call with Regina, he was supposed to meet them here.

Ten crewmen. One potential but notably absent ally. One unarmed woman.

That sounded about right.

Nikki stifled a snort and pulled her PDA from her gear bag. It fired up instantly.

“Wireless signal, come to mama,” she mouthed as she launched the signal probe.

The PDA registered two wireless signals: one from the terminal that looked like a wide area network, and one whose network name was complete gibberish. Not even random numbers and letters, but blocks, as if it used an alphabet unavailable to her PDA.

Is that you, Diviner? she wondered.

Her PDA faithfully monitored the signal without attempting to access the machine producing it. Dana had told her that Oracle believed the signal to be a sophisticated satellite hookup rather than part of a standard network. The gibberish seemed to confirm that.

The mystery signal was pretty strong, seventy-four percent. Nikki scuttled aft, toward the bridge, then paused. The signal strengthened a fraction to seventy-six.

Nikki stowed the PDA back in her gear bag. There was little chance she’d manage to get onto the bridge or into the hold unnoticed. Maybe she should try to arm herself first.

She slipped back between the containers and shimmied down to the deck. Moments of darting between big metal boxes, pausing to check for guards and sprinting across the occasional open area put her beneath the overhang of the bridge’s house and once more out of the light. She was ready to go inside, and the starboard door sat invitingly open about six feet away.

Shouts drove her to drop to her knees. A split second later, a bullet pinged off one of the containers. She lunged for the bridge door and spun around it—

And stopped short.

The guard’s eyes widened. Without thinking, Nikki swept her right arm down to block the gun hand he was raising, then snapped a front kick to his kneecap. It crunched. He went down. She snatched the firearm from his loosened grip, then threw all of her one hundred and twenty-five pounds behind a left cross to his cheek.

This guy weighs more than he looks, she thought as she dragged his unconscious body behind a mess of old tarps. She checked the weapon. A semiautomatic of undetermined make, though she suspected it might be a bootleg QSZ-92 liberated from the People’s Liberation Army. Eleven rounds out of fifteen.

The room was a storeroom from the looks of the gear thrown every which way. A single door led deeper into the bridge. She listened hard, but when she heard nothing on the other side, she opened it.

The scent hit her hard, the wet-penny smell of anger, the burnt coffee of terror. Concentrated, it nearly exploded in her nostrils, cloying and acidic.

What had happened here?

Nikki suppressed a cough and breathed through her mouth. The scent was concentrated from the small, dimly lit space, but several days old. Had it been fresh it would have put her on her ass for sure.

She’d ponder this one later, when she had time. Heart pounding from adrenaline rush, she slammed the door shut.

Outside, a man’s panicked cry was cut short.

Nikki thumbed the safety off the 9 mm and slipped back outside. It was a regular pattern: men would yell, go quiet, then guns armed with silencers would spit. Almost like they were hunting someone.

Or someone was hunting them.

The coffee smell was starting to be so strong, she thought a pot was brewing under her nose. No time to be scared, she reminded herself.

Nikki ran back to the stern and nearly tripped over a wounded crewman lying half-in, half-out of a pool of deck light. He screamed, shielding his head with his hands. Nikki quickly frisked him but found no weapon. Only a flesh wound in his thigh.

She tucked the semiautomatic in her waistband and tore a strip off the man’s untucked shirt.

He lowered his arms. “You American!”

“Do you speak English?”

The man nodded warily. “You’ve come to rob us.”

“Not exactly.” She ran the strip underneath his injured leg and cinched it tight above the wound. “What’s going on?”

“We are doing our job.”

“What job?”

“Guarding the ship.”

She knotted the strip and sat back on her heels. “Who’s shooting at you?”

“Triads.”

Nikki bit her lip. “These triad guys. Can they be identified by what they wear?”

He shook his head.

“Great. I bet there’s no secret handshake at the clubhouse, either.” At his puzzled frown, she said, “Forget it. Listen, where’s your passenger?”

The guard looked confused again. “I don’t know. We guard the ship from robbers. We’re not crew. That’s all.”

Well, hell. So much for getting information the easy way. “Stay put and don’t move.” She started to leave, but thought better of it. Instead, she leaned toward him and said softly, “I wasn’t here.”

And suddenly, lemons.

Nikki sprang back and to the side. A knife whisked out of the darkness, caught the injured guard in the throat. She pounced. She grabbed the assailant’s wrist, still outstretched from his throw, and twisted down toward his body. He bent forward, his elbow locked up. She saw him winding up for a sweep-kick. As it approached, she palm-heeled his vulnerable elbow. The snap was followed by a grunt of pain, and the kick lost its momentum. She applied more pressure to his wrist, driving him face-first to the deck.

After that, it was dealer’s choice.

She chose the choke hold. In moments he’d passed out. She liberated another sidearm and a throwing knife. This guy she left in the open. His lemony triumph, always a sign of arrogance, had given him away before she saw him.

Nikki drifted into the shadows on the starboard side again, following the sound of the screams. They grew less loud, less frequent, as she threaded between containers. By the time she reached the bow, silence.

Somebody had made mincemeat out of the triads. Or the guards. Or both.

Nikki settled into a ball on the deck, making herself small and unhumanlike in shape to the careless glance. She eased the gun from her waistband. Then she took a long and careful sniff.

Nothing.

No coppery anger or coffeeish terror. No citrus triumph. Just sea air and diesel fumes wafting over the water.

It felt really, really wrong.

She adjusted her grip on the gun, consciously relaxed each major muscle. Loose, she thought. Stay loose.

In the silence, she finally heard the distinctive scrape of metal on metal, something unscrewing.

A silencer being removed. Or attached.

It was now or never, while he was distracted.

She leaped from between the containers as he spun to face her, her arm outstretched, pistol up and pointed into the man’s impassive face. Gotcha!

Only she was looking down the barrel of his gun.

Chapter 4

They eyed each other warily. Arms straight and stiff, guns unwavering, muzzles nearly pressed to cheeks.

Nikki forced herself to look past the gleaming barrel and into the eyes of the man who held her life in his trigger finger. In the shadows and half-light, wrapped in some sort of black fighting garb, he was every inch the dark warrior. He looked exactly like the kind of man who could take out well-armed guards, instill terror in grown men and kill without mercy.

His eyes, the only part of his face not concealed by his disguise, were black, calm.

No wonder I couldn’t smell him, she thought. He’s at peace.

Of course he’s at peace, another part of her retorted. He’s got two guns.

One aimed at her face, the other at her heart.

Nikki counted breaths. One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three. Lungs full, her life about to end, she remembered sunlight slanting down onto Athena Academy’s grassy courtyard and the neighing of the smelly horses she hated to ride. She thought of the dry dirt and mesquite surrounding the silver mine where she first truly understood what her gift could mean, when she’d smelled burnt coffee and then heard a scared girl’s voice echoing up through the earth.

She’d come all this way just to die.

A tendril escaped from her messy ponytail and arced down onto her forehead. The heady scent of fish wafted over the ship’s bow. If she listened carefully, she could hear the distant traffic—small cars and buses darting through heavy weekend traffic. With one long, slow sniff, she knew the vehicles’ diesel and gas fumes and the rotten eggs of a spent catalytic converter.

But from her killer, nothing but a hint of ginger and something akin to warm chalk.

“Can we talk about this?” she found herself saying.

His eyes remained unchanged and he didn’t speak.

She slowly stepped to her right, out of the horse stance that was starting to burn her thighs. He pivoted with her. Their guns remained aimed, deadly. She needed to get close enough to a railing to jump. Maybe in the dark he wouldn’t be able to hit her. With either gun. Right.

She backed up a step. He followed.

He stood now in a patch of dim light slanting down from the ship’s bridge. He seemed fuzzy, in-substantial. Almost like a ghost.

Her ghost?

“Johnny?” she chanced.

“You are of the goddess?” His lips and tongue made the plain English words sound exotic, slightly thick.

“Athena sent me, yes.”

His body betrayed no sudden tensing, no anxiety. If he was nervous, annoyed, or inwardly jumping for joy, Nikki couldn’t tell. His guns stayed steady, but his gaze flicked over her formfitting training pants and top. “You are very small.”

So are you, she wanted to retort, but didn’t. True, she was a little short—it made squirming through boat holds easier—but he wasn’t that much taller. Her automatic comparison of his physique to Jet Li’s might be unimaginative, but it was also accurate.

“The goddess sent more than one emissary,” she replied, but couldn’t keep the scorn from her voice when she added, “A taller one, no doubt.”

His right eye tightened at the corner. Was he laughing at her? Angry? Confused by the English word emissary? The wind shifted slightly and she caught the scent of a classic novel she’d picked up once in the Athena library. The copy had been decades old, with yellow, mildewed pages she’d been happy to bury her nose in.

It was the scent of regret.

“My contact said you were of the dark goddess. The dog. Not Athena. Heck-a-tee.”

Nikki smiled despite herself. “Yes. Hecate.”

“Is that the dog goddess’s name?”

“Are you Johnny Zhao?” she countered.

He inclined his head in something like a formal bow, his eyes never moving from her face. Still not trusting her.

“What happened to Regina?”

He abruptly dropped his gun hands to his sides. “An ambush outside her work.”

“You were there?”

“I wasn’t alert.” Zhao flicked on the safeties of both guns and disappeared them into the folds of his fighting trousers. “I let her out of my sight.”

“I doubt that was the problem.”

“She was my responsibility.”

“She hired you. I’d say that makes things work the other way around.”

His eyes narrowed. Nikki wished he’d lose the ninja garb because she wanted to see the rest of his face, not just hear his voice emerging from black gauze. But she didn’t need to see him to know that the regret was now rolling off him in waves. He was telling her the truth. He’d felt protective of Regina, that was clear in the light pine underlying the old paper scent. And he’d failed.

Nikki realized she was still holding the semiautomatic on him. She lowered it and was immediately surprised by how strained her shoulder felt. Damn heavy gun.

“Who ambushed her?”

“I don’t know yet. It was a professional hit. No clues and no calling cards.”

“Did she give you any information I can use?”

Zhao shook his head. “She told me only to keep watch over this vessel when it came into port.”

“I can do that now.”

“With my help.”

His matter-of-fact statement struck her speechless for a moment, then she said, “Maybe.”

“Honor demands I complete the mission.”

“Do you even know what the mission is?”

The corners of his eyes crinkled. Nikki knew that underneath his makeshift ninja costume he was likely smiling. She wished suddenly she could see his lips, and not to read them for tension or intent.

“I know you will need help. I am commissioned to complete the task. I’m responsible for—”

“Don’t,” Nikki said around her tightening throat. “She’s gone. Let’s move on.”

“I’m doing that. She paid me for a mission and I will complete it.”

Nikki recognized the universal male “ain’t gonna budge” look in his stance. Growing up with seven brothers was enough to teach her when she needed to bide her time, and now was that moment. She’d deal with him later, after she had a look around the ship. And since Hero here wanted to come along—and had great stealth skills—she might as well let him.

“What’s your background?”

He hesitated and for a moment she thought he’d ignore her question, but he finally said, “Hong Kong police.”

She stared. “You’re a cop?”

He shrugged, as if his occupation was of little interest to him and should be of less to her.

“So you know this vessel belongs to SHA,” she pressed.

“SHA is a front for the Wo Shing Wo.”

“Who?”

“A triad organization.”

Nikki frowned. “A guard I talked to thought the guys attacking the ship were triads. But if he was working for them…”

Her confusion must have been written on her face in capital letters because he said, “Triad means ‘mafia.’ Different groups inside the mafia fight for control. It’s the same with the triads. Hong Kong has more than fifty different factions. Some of them are street gangs. Some are organized. Wo Shing Wo. Fourteen-K. Sun Yee On.”

“We’ve landed in the middle of a gang war. Great.”

“There’s always a gang war.”

She thought she heard fatigue in his quiet voice. She understood. For every cocaine and heroin shipment her squadron intercepted, nine more got through. Sometimes it felt as if it’d never end.

Nikki mentally shook herself. “Which one would likely be trying to hijack this vessel?”

Zhao blew out a breath, making the gauze wrapped around his mouth plume slightly. “Sun Yee On. They’ve got the upper hand on the streets these days.”

“What are they into?”

“The usual. Child slavery, prostitution, drugs. Every vice money can buy.” He paused. “They’re behind, though.”

“Behind?”

“The growth sectors are identity theft and online extortion. It’s why the Wo Shing Wo will dominate in another year or two. Markets are changing. The Wo Shing Wo are much more active online.”

“Por dinero baila el perro,” she muttered. The dog dances for money. “But what are they looking for here?”

“The scouting group was small. How many did you subdue?”

Subdue. Like she’d sung them to sleep. “Two.”

“That makes twelve in all. A local group controlling the dockyard. What we need is its red pole.”

She looked at him.

“The enforcer in charge,” he qualified. “To question him.”

“Let’s make sure the ship is secured then,” she said. “Maybe he’s hiding somewhere and I need to have a look around, anyway.”

“For what?”

“A passenger who might be the source of a satellite signal.” Nikki stuck the semiautomatic in her waistband so she could rummage through her gear bag. She pulled out the PDA and fired it up. The signal was weaker here at the bow but still in the low seventies. Diviner hadn’t moved.

“Passengers normally have cabins just below the bridge deck,” she continued. “But I don’t know how he’s getting his signal out through all that metal.”

“Let’s go look.”

She headed back through the cargo containers, slipping easily between them. Zhao followed silently. Aware of him but unable to smell or hear him, her hackles rose. She felt like a mouse being stalked. In moments they’d arrived back at the door where she’d surprised a guard.

Nothing moved inside, so her first victim was still out cold. When Zhao slipped around the corner and headed toward an inset doorway, clearly expecting her to follow, Nikki tried to shrug off her annoyance. He’d been all over this vessel before she’d even shown up; no sense in getting bent out of shape over his take-charge attitude.

A good leader uses all the resources at her disposal, she reminded herself. Even if it means following sometimes. The thought still rankled.

In moments they’d threaded through crew recreation quarters littered with porn magazines, tools and mechanical devices broken open for repair, and headed up onto the second deck. Nikki checked the PDA. The signal was dampened within the steel house. The bridge structure acted as a giant Faraday cage, creating enough radio interference that a signal couldn’t enter nor leave. It was why radio antennae were mounted outside the house.

And why it didn’t make sense that Wryzynski, or Diviner, or whoever, would be generating that satellite signal from inside.

The second-floor galley and dining area was empty but for the three subdued triads Zhao had left there. The third deck’s whitewashed hallway ought to have been lit, but only a dim stairwell light gleamed from the far end. Several closed doors lined the hall, their inset jambs creating darker shadows that marched at regular intervals down both sides. They quickly searched each cabin, but came up empty.

Zhao was nearly through the doorway to the bridge deck when she caught the burnt coffee. She tapped his arm. He stopped instantly. She waved him back into the narrow metal stairwell, surprised when he obeyed.

Someone ahead, she motioned.

His dark eyes studied her for a moment and Nikki was suddenly thrown back years, staring into her best friend’s eyes while they stood at the mouth of an abandoned silver mine near the Athena Academy’s desert campus. Nikki had just equated the scent of burnt coffee with a child’s fear, fear that emanated from the bottom of the mine shaft. The experience had left her physically ill, weak and retching. Her claim to knowing someone was lying down that shaft had sounded crazy even to Nikki at the time, but Jess had simply prepared to rappel into the shaft.

Jess had believed her experience was real; she’d trusted her to do what had to be done.

Something like that trust was reflected in Zhao’s eyes now.

Nikki motioned toward the doorway. She reached for the L-shaped handle and paused, aware that Zhao suddenly had semiautomatics in both hands. In the half dark, she could see only the outline of his head and the fabric covering the bridge of his nose. She was struck by his stillness, by how he emanated nothing—no scent, no pent-up energy, no aggression. The guardsmen she worked with exuded machismo and nervous energy in the moments before action, but Zhao seemed almost absent from her psychic space.

She’d love to know how he did that. Her own nerves whined like a dentist’s drill.

He was waiting for her to make a move.

Nikki inhaled, drawing the air deep into her diaphragm for strength. A heartbeat, then she twisted the knob and jerked the door open to expose the darkened bridge lit only by ghostly green and orange instrument lights.

A bullet winged high and pinged off the metal doorjamb. She dropped and rolled inside. Almost immediately she crashed hard against something that gave—a man’s legs. He cried out as he went down. His gun exploded in her ear and clattered on the floor. She shoved him off her prone body and sprang up to straddle his torso. He struggled like a landed fish but stopped when she pressed her pistol’s nose to his cheek.

A click and overhead fluorescents glared. Nikki’s assailant lay cowering beneath the pistol’s muzzle, hands spread wide. The dull gray coveralls spattered with grease said he worked aboard. His frenetic gaze said he was panicked.

She leaned on the gun, pressed its muzzle into his cheek. “Don’t move!” she shouted.

The man started shouting back, spittle flying from his lips. What was he saying? His arms flailed, hitting her randomly and hard. She struggled to get her knee on his elbow, then had to defend against a sudden strike toward her neck.

“Help me out here, Zhao!”

A black-booted foot pinned the man’s windmilling arm to the floor and a flood of lilting, diving words spilled from Zhao’s mouth. The man beneath her abruptly quit fighting.

Nikki, breathing hard, warily leaned back, though she kept the gun on her assailant. “What the hell did you say to him?”

“That you are a crazy American woman and I cannot control you, so he should be still before you lose your mind and kill him.”

“Great.”

“What?” he asked as he retrieved the man’s gun from the floor. “It worked.”

Nikki caught the scent of freshly cut grass. Zhao was teasing her.

She let her smile freeze into a grimace and leaned again toward the man she sat on. He turned his face away, clearly afraid now.

“You’re right,” she admitted. “What does he know?”

Zhao spoke at length with him. During the exchange, she heard Wo Shing Wo mentioned several times, then the conversation seemed to get darker. Wet pennies emanated from Zhao and the man seemed to be trying to make himself smaller, as if afraid of being struck.

“What’s going on?” she asked after Zhao stopped speaking.

He turned toward her then and she saw beneath the black gauze the hard planes of his face. “This man manages one of the Wo’s operations. He’s the Chou Hai—a liaison officer.”

“Yeah. And?”

Zhao’s tone was stiff. “He is to prepare this boat to go to Vladivostok with its cargo.”

“Of what?” And why do I have to keep prompting you? she thought. Cooperate with me.

Angry copper surrounded her, nearly stealing her breath.

“Children. For sex slaves.”

“Damn pervert,” Nikki snarled. She grabbed the front of the man’s coveralls in her fist. “Full cargo? How many children is that?” Her voice rose. “Dozens? Hundreds? How many? Tell me!” She shook him hard, then shoved him back against the floor, away from her as if he stank.

In fact, he did. Mostly of fear. But not of shame or remorse.

Johnny’s hand covered her shoulder. “It’s a large operation. The mainland has plenty of unwanted girls to sell to the highest bidder.” His voice was hard and low. “We’ll shut these bastards down right now.” He then said something to the man, who covered his face with his hands.

Nikki guessed Johnny didn’t have to flash his badge for this guy to know he was in deep trouble.

“What about the passenger?” she asked, pulling herself back to the task at hand.

Another long conversation, and then Johnny said, “He doesn’t know anything about who was coming in on this boat.”

“But the signal’s here. My mark is aboard somewhere.”

Johnny shook his head. “A few passengers came aboard, but they left en route. He’s very clear about that. The rest is just the loaded containers and the crew to sail.”

So was Diviner a crew member? And if he or she was aboard, where?

Frustrated, she yanked open a window hatch, stuck her PDA outside and hit the search button.

The PDA blinked blankly at her.

Diviner was gone.

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