The ties that bind may be the ties that kill as these extraordinary women race to beat the genetic time bomb that is their birthright….

Lynn White:

With enhanced senses and superspeed and strength, this retrieval specialist can breach any security—but has she been working for the wrong side?

DECEIVED by Carla Cassidy

Faith Corbett:

This powerful psychic’s secret talent could make her the target of a serial killer—and a prime suspect for murder.

CONTACT by Evelyn Vaughn

Dawn O’Shaughnessy:

Her superhealing abilities make her nearly invincible, but can she heal the internal wounds from years of deception?

PAYBACK by Harper Allen

ATHENA FORCE: The adventure continues with three secret sisters, three unusual talents and one unthinkable legacy….

Payback
Harper Allen

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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HARPER ALLEN

lives in the country in the middle of a hundred acres of maple trees with her husband, Wayne, six cats, four dogs—and a very nervous cockatiel at the bottom of the food chain. For excitement she and Wayne drive to the nearest village and buy jumbo bags of pet food. She believes in love at first sight because it happened to her.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Epilogue

Prologue

January

E-MAIL MEMO—URGENT & CONFIDENTIAL

To: Cassandras<Alexandra Forsythe, Darcy Allen, Tory Patton, Samantha St. John, Josie Lockworth>

From: Lt. Kayla Ryan

Re: Lab 33 assassin Dawn O’Shaughnessy

Phys. Description: 22, 5’7”, blonde, green eyes

Capabilities: Extraordinary strength, agility; possibly other enhanced capabilities

Skills (partial list): Weaponry, martial arts, hand-to-hand combat, stealth, B & E

Background: O’Shaughnessy conceived in vitro with egg retrieved from former Athena Academy student Rainy Miller, whose recent murder by Lab 33’s Lee Craig, code name Cipher, is being investigated by the Cassandras. Retrieval conducted by Dr. Henry Reagon under guise of an appendectomy. Actual purpose: genetic manipulation experiment headed by Dr. Aldrich Peters of Lab 33. Eggs fertilized with sperm from Navy SEAL Thomas King, whose sperm sample was stolen from a fertility clinic. Neither Rainy nor Tom King were aware of procedure carried out by Peters. Fertilized egg implanted in surrogate mother; child taken at birth to Lab 33 in New Mexico to be raised under Peters’s supervision. Subject has no knowledge of her true background; believes her black-ops instructor, Lee Craig, is her uncle.

Note: Subject actively working against the Cassandras; must be considered extremely dangerous.

Update: Subject has been told the truth about her parentage. Her failure to kill Thomas King as per Aldrich Peters’s instructions and her elimination of Dr. Carl Bradford to save Kayla and Jazz Ryan’s lives indicate that O’Shaughnessy is no longer an immediate threat. In fact, she has vowed to take down Lab 33 by herself. She will be given this memo and other documentation in the hope that learning more of the truth will encourage her to join forces with the Cassandras against—

The memo police lieutenant Kayla Ryan was holding—the memo she herself had written and securely e-mailed to her best friends, the Athena Academy graduates known as the Cassandras, and that she had updated only two days ago—had been torn in two at that point. On the back was a handwritten note, unsigned, asking Kayla to meet the writer at the Athena Academy gymnasium, which was usually deserted over Christmas break. Taking a deep breath, Kayla pushed open the double doors of the gym and saw a lithe figure pummeling the hell out of a workout bag.

She approached, noting the dampness darkening the honey-blond hair that had been secured into a thick braid, the sheen of exertion gleaming on the tanned midriff revealed between the low-rise sweatpants and the racer-back top. The only thing impossible to see was what was going on behind Dawn O’Shaughnessy’s gold-green eyes.

Kayla held up the scrap of memo. “You read this?”

A volley of punches slammed into the workout bag. Dawn stepped back. “I read it. It sums up everything you told me at your house a few days ago.” She paused. “It’s not every day a girl finds out her whole freakin’ life has been a lie.”

Kayla frowned. “You understand now why Samantha St. John had no recourse but to take down your uncle two months ago?”

“If I’d known then what I know now, I would have done it myself,” Dawn replied. “And I’d appreciate if you didn’t refer to Lee Craig as my uncle. He lied to me. He killed my biological mother. He let me go on an assignment to kill my biological father. What I felt for him is as dead as he is.”

Kayla’s gaze sharpened. When Kayla had told Dawn about her parentage three days ago, Dawn had shown no emotion. But now…. Unless she was mistaken, there were pinpricks of moisture glittering at the corners of those brilliant green eyes. I knew Lee Craig as the Cipher, she thought, the world’s most deadly assassin. But he was the only family Dawn had. Knowing he lied to her is tearing her in two—and until she deals with that conflict, she’s a ticking time bomb.

She kept her tone conversational. “There must be a part of you that wishes you could see him one more time, if only to ask him how he could betray you so terribly.”

Without warning, Dawn faced the workout bag again and exploded into action, her gloved fists a blur. Kayla started when the bag split asunder, the sand it was filled with pouring out in a stream and the chain securing it giving way, solid steel links spilling to the floor like broken teeth. She’d hoped to get through to the woman, Kayla thought. Instead she’d set off a powder keg.

Dawn looked down at the destroyed bag. “Yeah, I’d like to see Lee Craig once more. Because it should be him lying here. If there were any justice, his death should have come at the hands of the woman he raised to follow in his footsteps.” She backed away. “I’ll have to content myself with going after my darling Uncle Lee’s boss, Dr. Aldrich Peters…but for my own reasons, not the Cassandras’. I want payback.”

Compassion filled Kayla. “Payback won’t erase the pain. You should talk to someone—”

“No offense, Ryan, but I don’t need advice on how to deal.” Dawn’s expression was shuttered. “You and your friends think you know everything there is about me. Want a demonstration of something that didn’t make it into my file?”

Swiftly she reached down to her ankle. She straightened, and Kayla saw the small, snub-nosed automatic she was holding as Dawn flicked off the weapon’s safety and jammed the muzzle against her upper arm.

“No!” Kayla grabbed for the gun, but too late. The shot’s explosion echoed deafeningly. “Dammit—why?”

Even as the shocked question left her she was wrenching the weapon away and grabbing a nearby towel. “Stanch the blood with this while I get help.”

“I told you, I don’t need help with the healing.” Dawn looked down at the wound. “Already reconstructing,” she said, her smile oddly bitter. “Hurts like hell but that’ll pass, too.”

“Already recon—” Kayla’s horror turned into bafflement. “Your body’s knitting itself back together!” she gasped. “Your arm…it’s as if—as if—” In silence she watched as the last traces of the wound disappeared, leaving only a few smears of blood. “It’s as if you were never shot,” she said unevenly. “We guessed that Peters was doing genetic experiments, but this is—”

Dawn’s smile thinned. “Freakish?” she suggested. “When I believed my regeneration was a gift of nature, I thought it meant I was special. Lee Craig lied about that, too.”

“I wasn’t going to say that,” Kayla denied hotly. “Your impressive demonstration aside, I still think you should seek help with the healing process. You’ll never be able to move on till you do.”

“I’ve already moved on.” Dawn picked up a sports bag by her feet. “Like I said, I’m going to take down Lab 33.”

“The Cassandras have another assignment we’d like you to consider first.” She’d wanted to broach the subject less bluntly, Kayla thought, but from the start this meeting hadn’t gone the way she’d expected.

“Find someone else. Aldrich Peters is my business. He has been since the day twenty-three years ago when he played God with my genetic makeup.”

“Not only yours,” Kayla retorted. “We believe there was at least one other child born from Rainy Miller’s egg. A baby girl. She was kidnapped at birth, possibly because Carl Bradford leaked Peters’s plans to an interested party. Don’t you want to find your sister before turning your attention to Peters?”

“A sister like me?” Letting go of the sports bag, Dawn gripped Kayla’s arms fiercely. “Another woman who was manipulated by Peters the way I was?”

“We have no idea whether her abilities would be like yours,” Kayla explained swiftly, shaken by the raw emotion in the younger woman’s tone. “Or if she even has any. That doesn’t change the fact that, if she’s alive, she’s your—”

“So I’m still alone.” Dawn’s arms fell to her sides. “I guess it was crazy of me to hope…” Her movements stiff, she started to pick up the bag again, but Kayla stopped her.

“Hope what?”

Dawn faced her directly. “That I’d found someone to share the nightmares with. When I was working for Lab 33 I told myself I was on the side of the good guys, but that doesn’t change the fact that I was judge, jury and executioner. Lee was the only one who understood how I felt.”

“The only difference being, he carried out every assignment Peters gave him,” Kayla reminded her sharply. “He deliberately chose the dark side, Dawn.”

“And so did Aldrich Peters.” The younger woman’s features tightened. “The Cassandras want me to find my sister before I turn my sights on Peters. Fair enough, but if you’re hoping she’ll be able to help me in this healing process you say I need, forget it. I heal just fine all by myself.”

Without another word, she strode to the exit, her posture ramrod-stiff. Instead of following her, Kayla watched her go.

“That’s just it, O’Shaughnessy, I don’t think you will heal all by yourself this time,” she said under her breath. “If you don’t…” She glanced at the shattered steel chain, the destroyed workout bag. “If you don’t, neither you nor the Cassandras have a chance of walking away from this alive. And from what I know of him, that’s exactly what Aldrich Peters will be counting on.”

Chapter 1

September

Status: twenty-one days and counting

Time: 0900 hours

Any second now the man sitting across the desk from her could give the order to have her killed.

Dawn smoothed her palms on the gleaming leather of the skintight catsuit she was wearing, but as Aldrich Peters leveled an emotionless look at her she realized her mistake. She schooled her face to blankness, knowing there was nothing she could do to control the trip-hammer beat of her heart. After a long moment he bent his head again and resumed his perusal of Lab 33’s report on her.

Her few days AWOL from Lab 33 last December had stretched into nine months—longer than she’d anticipated, but then, her assignment for the women of Athena Academy had resulted in locating not one lost sister, Lynn White, but a second sibling, Faith Corbett, who had also been a victim of genetic manipulation and who’d had no knowledge of her true origins. Together the three of them had been introduced to the man who was their biological father, Navy SEAL Thomas King…a meeting she hadn’t wanted to attend. What was I supposed to say to him, dammit, she thought as she waited for Peters to finish reading. “Hey, now I know you’re my dad I’m kinda glad I missed when I had you in my rifle sights a couple of months ago when I was working for the bad guys?”

At the time she’d almost been glad she had the excuse of returning to Lab 33 to explain her hasty departure. But as the complex’s steel doors had begun sliding closed behind her yesterday evening, cutting off her last glimpse of the arid New Mexican canyons and foothills, a sense of complete isolation had overtaken her. And with her first breath of the recycled air supplying the massive underground bunker, a Cold War emergency command center secretly built in the 1950s that had never been utilized, but for years now the site of Aldrich Peters’s shadowy organization, her time away had seemed suddenly unreal.

For a moment she’d felt a terrible certainty that it had been unreal. There was no such group as the Cassandras; she hadn’t found Lynn White and Faith Corbett, her biological sisters; she’d never learned the truth about her existence. She was a Lab 33 assassin. She answered to Aldrich Peters. She was in a nightmare where nothing had changed.

In near panic she’d whirled around with the half-formed notion of darting back through the closing doors. At her unexpected movement the nearest guard—a commander, as she’d noted from the dull red flashes on the collar of his field-gray uniform—had jerked his weapon up into firing position, at the same time scrambling clumsily away from her. Behind his face shield she’d seen his eyes, open so wide that rims of white circled his pupils.

They’re scared of me, Uncle Lee! A long-buried memory flashed into Dawn’s mind. I wanted to play tag with them, but they shouted at me to go away. One of them called me a freak. Am I, Uncle Lee? Am I a freak like they say? In Dawn’s memory, the six-year-old version of herself felt arms scooping her close, smelled the somehow reassuring mixture of harsh tobacco and gun oil, heard a voice whose undertone of anger she knew wasn’t directed at her. They’re the freaks, Dawnie. You’re special, and don’t you ever let the sons of bitches convince you otherwise. They’re scared because they know you’re stronger than everyone here, and I don’t mean just lifting-things strong. Your strength comes from inside you. You understand what I’m saying? Her sobs had subsided by then but she’d stayed in the circle of his arms, happy just to be held by him. I guess. But you’re stronger than the sunsa bits, too, right? The arms around her had tightened. For a moment she’d thought the unthinkable had happened and Uncle Lee was mad at her, but when he’d answered his tone had been filled with such pain that she would have gladly traded it for anger. Maybe once, Dawnie. Now I’m no better than they are. But I promise I’ll always stay strong enough to keep them from owning you—even if staying strong costs me everything I care for in this world.

Aldrich Peters laid aside a sheet of paper, the crackle as he did so sounding like a gunshot in the oppressive silence. Dawn didn’t flinch. Her nervousness had disappeared in the past few seconds, she realized. She supposed she should be glad it had, but all she felt was anger.

When the hell are you going to stop falling into the same stupid trap, O’Shaughnessy? she berated herself. Every memory you have of Lee Craig is tainted. Be glad you’ve got something truer than your memories of him to give you strength.

She had payback. No matter that Kayla Ryan had seemed to think revenge wouldn’t set things right for her. No matter that in the conversation she’d had with her sisters on the subject, Lynn and Faith had both agreed with Kayla. She had no intention of delivering Peters to justice. For one final time, she intended to be judge, jury and executioner herself.

She concealed a faint wince as the dull throbbing that signaled one of the headaches she’d recently been experiencing set up a low tattoo behind her temples. As if he sensed her momentary vulnerability, Peters slid the papers aside.

“You passed Section Eight’s tests with flying colors.” His austere features seemed carved in stone. “The lie detector, the bio-and neuro-feedbacks, the psychological workups by Drs. Wang and Sobie. Apparently you were telling the truth when you contacted me yesterday and said you wanted to take up your duties again.”

A rush of triumph raced through her. Of course she’d passed their tests. She’d grown up here, dammit, and there wasn’t a test invented that hadn’t been run on her. By the age of eleven she’d known how to bend them to her advantage without even try—

“I would have been shocked if you’d failed,” Peters added brusquely. “After all, if anyone could manipulate the results it would be you.”

Dawn fought to keep her regard steady. She’d underestimated him, she thought tensely. Whatever his tests and his experts told him, Dr. Aldrich Peters preferred to rely on his own instincts…and those instincts were telling him she was lying. With seconds to revoke her own death warrant, she needed to go on the offensive—now.

“Maybe I’m being paranoid, but I get the feeling you don’t fully accept my explanation for my disappearance from Lab 33 last winter,” she said, allowing anger to creep into her voice. “At the risk of sounding more paranoid, I also get the feeling you’re making up your mind as to whether I should even walk out of here alive. Am I right?”

The thin smile that appeared on Aldrich Peters’s lips did little to soften the remoteness of his expression. “I don’t call that paranoid, Dawn, I call that astute. You’re right, I’ve got serious doubts about your story of going into an emotional tailspin after your Uncle Lee was killed. Lab 33’s ultimate killing machine, the protégé Lee Craig was grooming to take his place, falling to pieces like any ordinary woman? I don’t buy it.”

“You don’t buy it because you’re forgetting one important fact.” She stood abruptly, placing her palms flat on his desktop. “I am an ordinary woman in many respects—ordinary enough to feel pain when the only family member I’ve ever known is torn from me and ordinary enough to know that I haven’t lived an ordinary life. I told you, losing my uncle was a shattering experience and I needed to come to terms with it.”

She exhaled. “I needed time to come to terms with who and what I am, too. As you just said, I’m not your usual twenty-two-year-old, am I? I’m a superwoman who’s almost indestructible, trained to use my special talents to clandestinely further the best interests of my country as Uncle Lee did. After he died I felt it was time to ask myself if I really wanted to take his place.”

“What conclusion did you come to?”

She answered him promptly. “That Lab 33’s the only game in town for someone like me. And as Uncle Lee always told me, at least I’m working on the side of the good guys.”

“Which leads me to my second question. Do you still believe we’re the good guys, Dawn, or have you taken your allegiance elsewhere during these past nine months? After all, despite your orders, Kayla Ryan is still alive. Carl Bradford, whom I can assure you was on our side, is dead. Why is that?” Peters’s tone held an implied threat. Slowly she let her palms slide from the desk and straightened to her full height.

“I told you. Bradford interfered with my assassination attempt. He kidnapped Ryan’s daughter, made it a federal case. Then he tried to kill me. I had to take him out. And killing Ryan would have brought on too much heat. I’m certain she and the others are no longer a threat to us. I’ve dedicated my life to Lab 33. I’ve demonstrated my loyalty time and again, and you still feel you have the right to ask me that?”

This was it, she told herself as Aldrich Peters held her gaze. Either she’d allayed his suspicions or she hadn’t—and if it was the latter, both of them would be dead minutes from now. Her plan of gathering as much information as she could over the next few weeks for the Cassandras before she made her move against him would have to be forgotten. But she wouldn’t be able to stop him from hitting the emergency button on his desk that would bring the guards pouring in, and she had no doubt that they knew her Achilles’ heel.

A woven-steel garrote had been part of the standard weapons issue for Lab 33 internal security for as long as she could remember…and for as long as she could remember, she’d instinctively known that particular weapon had been issued with only one opponent in mind. She could survive a bullet or a knife but, as she’d told Peters, she was an ordinary human being in some respects…one of which was that she couldn’t survive without oxygen.

So be it, Dawn thought with deadly calm. If I die, I die knowing I’ve taken him with—

Without warning the throbbing shot through her head again. As fast as it had come it faded, and as her vision cleared she realized something had disconcerted Peters. His next words revealed what that something had been.

“The last thing I expected to see in your eyes when I questioned your loyalty was pain, but apparently the psych profile Drs. Wang and Sobie prepared on you was accurate,” he said slowly. “This changes everything.” He leaned back in his chair. “It seems I misjudged you, Dawn. Welcome home.”

“It’s good to be back.” Her clipped reply betrayed nothing of the relief sweeping through her. You did it, O’Shaughnessy! she thought in fierce exultation. You lied through your teeth to Aldrich Peters and the bastard bought it. Now nothing can stop you from—

“Unfortunately, your little vacation couldn’t have been more regrettably timed.” Peters’s composure was firmly back in place. “You’re dying.”

The man was a consummate manipulator, Dawn thought in disbelief, but whether he knew it or not his days of manipulating her were over. “Either I’m cleared for duty or I’m not,” she said tightly. “But if you think I’m going to jump through any more of your psychological hoops, forget it. I’ve had enough of—”

“I broke it to you clumsily, but believe me, it’s the truth.” He shook his head with every appearance of regret. “To put it as simply as I can, your genes are breaking down. I’ve had my best people working on the problem for almost a year, but although we’ve isolated the triggering factor, we haven’t been able to perfect the reversal process.”

“Almost a year.” Her mind still processing his stunning news, Dawn seized on the one detail she felt able to deal with. “You mean you knew about this before I went AWOL and you didn’t inform me?”

“If I’d suspected you were thinking of taking some unauthorized R and R, I would have,” Peters countered. “Be thankful that the medicals and psychological evaluations the doctors here have subjected you to all your life drew our attention to this as soon as it started to show up. Lab 33’s always had your best interests at heart.”

“Lab 33 has always had Lab 33’s best interests at heart. And Lab 33’s best interests include knowing the inner workings of their human lab rat,” she answered flatly. “Spare me the hearts and flowers, Doctor, and cut to the chase. How much time do I have?”

“Worst-case scenario, twenty-one days. The degeneration of your genes is following a mathematically predictable time line that can be precisely charted.” The well-tailored shoulders of his suit jacket lifted in a shrug. “We don’t know exactly when the symptoms will start, but they should begin exhibiting soon. Unfortunately, we don’t know what they’ll be, either.” He hesitated. “About the only thing besides the time line that we know for certain from our experiments is that your death will be painful. In effect, your body will turn on itself.”

She’d taken on every conceivable enemy during her dangerous career. She’d gone up against those enemies, confident that she would be their final and ultimately un-beatable opponent. Was it irony or simple justice that her own final battle would be desperately waged and lost against herself?

Simple justice, O’Shaughnessy, Dawn thought bleakly. Justice was the only word that fit when the genes that had helped her become Lab 33’s killing machine were the very ones that would bring about her—

Her thoughts came to a halt as a terrible realization filled her. Her mind went blank with fear before it grasped a possible glimmer of hope.

“You said worst-case scenario is that I have twenty-one days,” she said through stiff lips. “What’s the best case?”

Aldrich Peters steepled his fingers on the desk. “Your survival, of course. And there’s a good chance we can achieve that, now you’re on board with Lab 33 again.”

It took the space of a heartbeat for her to comprehend what lay behind his smile. When she did, it took all her self-control not to jerk Peters’s silk tie into a noose and end everything there and then.

“You know how to reverse the process and you deliberately let me think it was hopeless?” Her hands clenched into fists at her sides. “Enough with the games, Doctor. Let’s get started with my treatment.”

Because the sooner I receive it, the sooner I can get word to the Cassandras that Faith and Lynn are probably facing the same genetic breakdown, she thought. Maybe I deserve to pay for my past that way, but they don’t. And even if it means I have to push my own personal agenda back a little, I’m going to make sure they won’t.

She wasn’t giving up the payback that was coming to her, but Kayla had been right—despite the fact that she barely knew them, despite the very different lives they’d led, her sisters were her first priority.

“Get one thing straight.” Peters’s voice was a whip-lash. “If I choose to make you sweat a little to bring you back into line after your irresponsible disappearance, you’ll take it and like it. Yes, we can create a reversal serum, and yes, as a slap on the wrist I didn’t immediately reveal its existence to you. But I agree, the tit for tat stops here…because you’re leaving Lab 33 tonight on an assignment for me.”

She shook her head decisively. “No deal. I get the serum before I take on the job.”

“Getting the serum is the job.” A wintry smile crossed his features as he dropped his bombshell. “Our scientists are missing the final piece of the puzzle that will allow them to formulate the reversal serum. In fact, there’s only one man in the world who’s possibly cracked the puzzle.”

“Possibly?” she repeated blankly. “Dammit, you’re not sure?”

“That’s part of your assignment—to ascertain he’s made the breakthrough we believe he has.”

“Why not simply ask him?” she retorted. “Don’t scientists practically fall all over themselves to publicize their findings?”

“Most do.” Peters’s lips thinned. “Sir William London’s the exception, a paranoid megalomaniac who won’t reveal anything until he’s ready. He’s also the greatest genius the world has ever known in the field of genetics.”

“So I’m to break into the research facility where London works, steal his notes and bring them back for our people to use. Getting past a few security guards should be easy enough,” Dawn said in defeat.

A simple B & E she could live with, she told herself edgily. At worst she’d have to temporarily disable a guard or two, but she’d make sure no one got seriously hurt.

And if it hadn’t been a simple break and enter? If you’d been ordered to kill for the serum, would you have stepped over the line once more to save yourself and your sisters? The uncomfortable question came to her before she could thrust it away. She didn’t know, Dawn admitted. She’d made a vow never to carry out Aldrich Peters’s murderous orders again, but if the serum was all that stood between her sisters and a terrible death….

Pain spiked with sudden intensity behind her eyes. She fought against it as Peters pulled a sheaf of papers toward him with a frown.

“I should have made myself clear. Sir William is funded by the Defense Department in a joint venture with the British, and his laboratory’s inside a compound in the middle of the Arizona desert. It’s guarded by a crack team of military personnel headed by a certain Captain Des Asher—who’s not only London’s nephew, but a highly trained British Special Air Services officer. You’ll pose as a research assistant and get close to London that way.”

He held the papers out to her. “Study Asher’s military bio. He’s going to be your biggest obstacle, so assassinate him first.”

Chapter 2

Status: nineteen days and counting

Time: 2300 hours

She was going up against Des Asher naked. She couldn’t deny that there was a tiny ripple of excitement deep inside her at the thought.

With deliberate clumsiness, Dawn shifted the gears of the junker hatchback she was driving and was rewarded by the labored whine of an engine being pushed beyond its limits. She shifted again, this time correctly.

Of course, naked just meant without weapons. The most lethal piece of hardware anyone would find on her if she were searched was a nail file…and although she could remember an instance when, armed with little more, she’d taken out a couple of sadistic goons without even messing up the polish she’d been applying when they’d burst in on her, she didn’t think a nail file would raise any red flags as far as Des Asher’s people were concerned.

Especially not when it was being carried by Dawn Swanson.

“Swanson’s never done the horizontal mambo, way I see it. I mean, repressed? Chick’s a total man-hater, plus she’s a dweeb,” Carter Johnson had said with a grin two nights ago when she’d left Peters’s office and reported to Lab 33’s Identities Department. He’d extracted a glossy eight-by-ten photo from a file and passed it to her. “Check out your new hair, babe. Not that the big boss man told me any more than he had to, but with the rock-solid credentials I’ve created for you, I’m guessing this isn’t a simple in-and-out assignment where a wig would be enough. After we’re through here, you’ll be scooting that fine butt of yours over to Helga for the works—a bad cut, an even worse perm and a mud-brown dye job.” His grin widened. “I almost forgot the bottle-lens glasses we got for you to wear. Behind them your eyes look way magnified, but Carlos in Research and Development made them so they won’t affect your vision at all. Man, I love this job!”

Carter was one of Lab 33’s youngest employees, probably close to her own age. Much to the irritation of the older staff, he cultivated an indie-rebel air, wearing his hair in a spiky, bed-head style and using a skateboard to cruise up and down Lab 33’s endless corridors. But Dawn wasn’t taken in by his “Dude, where’s my wheels?” manner. He worked here. That meant two things: one, he had to be the best at what he did, which was creating false identities and the documentation to back them up; and two, he’d willingly sold his soul to Aldrich Peters—either for money or because of some crime he’d committed in the past that Peters had made go away.

Whatever the reason, Carter Johnson wasn’t the boy next door. He was part of an organization that made the Mafia look like pussycats. To complicate matters, he’d borne a grudge against her ever since she’d told him, in no uncertain terms, that she didn’t intend to date him until she had definite confirmation hell had frozen over.

She’d returned the photo to him. “Go back to the computer and reconfigure this. No perm. My hair stays the length it is. I’ll go with a temporary rinse and wear it scraped into a bun while I’m undercover as Little Miss Repressed. When I walk out of here, I’ll be Dawn Swanson, right down to the baggy science-geek sweatshirt, but that persona’s not going to come from clothes or a hairstyle, it’s going to come from me. If you’ve got a problem with that, we’ll go talk to the big boss, as you refer to Dr. Peters, together.”

She’d won that round, Dawn reflected now as she deliberately clashed the hatchback’s gears again. It hadn’t been until she’d reached the motel where she’d stayed last night and read the extensive bio prepared for her—a bio she’d later burned before flushing the charred scraps down the motel room’s toilet—that she’d realized Carter, with his own waspish sense of revenge, had gotten the last laugh.

Swanson lives, breathes and sleeps fruit flies and genetics, the typed pages had informed her. Since seventy-two-year-old Sir William London is the world authority on her chosen passion, Swanson hero-worships him to the point of having a kind of crush on him. Several of the contacts we’ve blackmailed to supply references on our fictitious lab technician will mention the poster that supposedly hung above her bed at her college dorm—the famous shot of Sir William taken just before he won his first Nobel Prize in ’58, when he was one of Oxford’s “crazy young men.”

In the margin, Carter had added a penciled note: Who knows, O’Shaughnessy, you might get lucky with the old geezer. Here’s hoping, girlfriend!

“And here’s hoping that when the Cassandras and I take down Lab 33, you spend the rest of your sorry life behind bars,” Dawn muttered. She narrowed her gaze as the hatchback’s headlights cut through the desert blackness to illuminate an unmarked secondary road up ahead. Although the slight rises and dips in the terrain made it impossible to see what lay ahead, the road had to be the turnoff to London’s small but highly secure laboratory complex. She felt a surge of anticipation run through her. Since sound carried in arid terrain such as this, more so at night, her little maneuvers with the gears hadn’t been premature. They’d insured that any sentry with ears sharp enough to catch the first faint sounds of a vehicle approaching wouldn’t have heard Dawn O’Shaughnessy driving with her usual speed and skill, but Dawn Swanson, a woman who preferred to be surrounded by test tubes and petri dishes instead of behind the wheel of a car.

Live the lie, Dawnie. Unbidden, the tobacco-roughened voice of Lee Craig broke through her concentration, so clearly that he might have been sitting beside her in the dark. That’s the first rule of deep cover. Forget who you are and become the identity you’ve taken on. It’s not always easy…but once in a while you might even find yourself wishing you didn’t have to go back to being the real you.

This time when she geared down there was no pretence in her mishandling of the car’s controls. As she made the turnoff the hatchback veered dangerously close to the crumbling verge of the dirt road before she corrected its course.

“Don’t worry, Lee,” she said savagely under her breath. “I’m living the lie, just like you did, you bastard. And like you, when my cover’s outlived its usefulness I won’t forget who I am and what my real agenda is. You took down my mother. I’m going to take out Aldrich—”

Her words were cut off by a gasp and the hatchback swerved again. Her responses hampered by the intense pain behind her eyes, Dawn’s corrective maneuver came a split second too late. She felt the rear end of the car slide off the road, felt the back tires fight for purchase on the sandy soil, heard them churning uselessly as they merely dug themselves deeper.

The hatchback stalled. The pain behind her eyes faded. Her hands gripped the steering wheel so tightly that her knuckles showed white in the greenish glow from the instrument panel.

It was time to face facts, she thought numbly. Lab 33’s scientists might not know what the symptoms of her gene degeneration would be, but she couldn’t fool herself any longer. She’d never had a headache in her life before now, just as she’d never caught a cold or contracted the normal childhood bouts of measles and mumps and tonsillitis. So the migraines she’d been experiencing with increasing frequency over the past few months had to be a first warning signal of—

Before her train of thought could reach its logical conclusion, she jerked open the driver’s side door and stepped swiftly from the car. Striding toward the back of the stalled vehicle, she planted her hands on her hips and glared at the deep depressions in the sand where the rear tires were now embedded.

But standing still was a mistake. Unwillingly she found her mind completing the deduction she’d tried to thrust aside. If the loss of her invulnerability to common human ailments was the first symptom of her genetic breakdown, what else would be taken from her before she returned to Lab 33 with London’s research?

In effect, your body will turn on itself. Peters’s words had filled her with dread at the time, but only now could she fully comprehend the horrific possibilities of his prediction. Her sight—would it slowly dim or would she suddenly be plunged into a world of darkness? Or maybe it would be her reflexes that would desert her at the very moment she needed them, or her hearing or her strength or—

Her lips tightening, she bent to grab the rust-specked bumper of the hatchback. She took a deep breath and heaved.

Even for her, it was a near-impossible effort. She felt the muscles in her arms scream in protest, felt her balance shift treacherously as the sandy soil beneath her feet crumbled. Sweat beading her brow and running down behind the heavy horn-rimmed glasses Carter had provided her with, she set her jaw in grim determination and began pivoting the rear of the car toward the road.

There was a possibility that the security measures guarding Sir William London’s laboratory included roving teams patrolling past the fenced perimeter of the facility. If even one of those teams came upon her now, not only would her Dawn Swanson cover be blown, but the enhanced abilities she’d always been so careful about revealing would be immediately exposed. She was taking an insane chance.

She didn’t care. All that was important right now was that she accomplish the superhuman task she’d set herself.

“This is what you are.” The barely intelligible words came from her in a strained grunt as she took another trembling step sideways, the tendons in her shoulders feeling as though they were about to pop. “No matter what you told Peters, you’ll never be an ordinary woman—not like Kayla, with her unshakable integrity, or the rest of the Cassandras, who’ve found support in one another. Your strength and abilities may have come from a test tube, but they’re all you have. And when they’re gone…”

Through the soles of her sneakers she felt the more stable surface of the road. Taking two last shuffling steps, she set the rear of the hatchback unceremoniously down onto its tires. Slowly she uncurled her grip from the bumper, her arms and back feeling as if they were on fire.

She ignored the searing sensation and straightened to her full height. Behind the glasses her eyes squeezed tightly shut. “When the abilities are gone, what’s left?” she asked in an uneven whisper. “Face it, O’Shaughnessy, nothing…and that’s why you’re terrified for the first time in your life. Not because of the pain you’re going to suffer if this process isn’t reversed, not because you could die, but because before the end comes you’ll be revealed for what you are—a lab rat whose enhanced sight couldn’t help her see the truth, whose strength only masked the weakness that allowed Aldrich Peters to manipulate her for so long, whose regenerative powers couldn’t heal her destroyed soul. Any one of the Cassandras is more of a superwoman than you are. A mother working two shifts just to bring in enough money to keep her children fed is more of a superwoman than Dawn O’Shaughnessy ever was.”

For a moment longer she stood there, her posture slightly bowed as if she were still carrying a crushing weight. Then she opened her eyes and thrust back her shoulders, becoming once again the implacable figure Kayla Ryan had confronted in the Athena Academy gym more than nine months ago.

“But of course, you’re not Dawn O’Shaughnessy now, are you?” Her voice was no longer uneven, but harshly flat. “You’re Dawn Swanson, and don’t you forget it…because like Lee Craig used to say, sometimes all that’s left is to live the lie.”

She turned on her heel. Wrenching open the driver’s side door, she slid in behind the wheel again, started the car and resumed the last few miles of her journey.

“I’m a biochem assistant. As long as the labs here aren’t run with the same inefficiency as security appears to be, I’m really not interested in how your people screwed up the paperwork on me.”

Dawn wondered if she was overdoing the pedantic monotone in her voice, but decided to keep going with it. Even if she hadn’t recognized Asher from the photo in his file, the ID tag on his uniform would have told her she was dealing with the man whose suspicions she most needed to allay. Just your bad luck he’s a hands-on kind of guy, she told herself, who has standing orders to be notified by the gate guards whenever a new employee shows up. Even worse luck that someone here made a mistake over my gender—unless this is another example of that little weasel Carter’s sense of humor.

But even Carter knew better than to pull something like this, she reflected. “William London certainly knew I was a female when he hired me,” she went on. “If you’ve got a problem with my name being spelled D-a-w-n instead of D-o-n, take it up with him. In the meantime, I’d like to settle in and start work.”

She shoved her glasses higher onto the bridge of her nose and gave him a sullen stare in keeping with the persona Carter had chosen for Dawn Swanson, but behind the lenses her belligerent gaze was unobtrusively taking a first real look at the man Aldrich Peters had claimed would be her most dangerous opponent on this assignment.

“Assassinate him first?” Thinking quickly, she’d shaken her head in sharp disagreement when Peters had issued the order in his office two days ago. “Sorry, Doctor, but when I’m working undercover it’s my neck on the line. That gives me a vested interest in the decisions I make. I’ll take out Des Asher if and when I feel the action’s warranted, but if I can complete the assignment without resorting to that, so much the better.”

Peters had raised an eyebrow. “You sound like a woman who’s lost her nerve. Or at least her taste for killing.”

“No, I sound like my Uncle Lee,” she’d replied evenly. “He’s the one who taught me any thug off the street can pull a trigger if he doesn’t care about losing his own life. A professional completes the assignment, gets out safely, and lives to work another day. I’m doing this my way.”

Aldrich hadn’t put up any further argument—most likely, Dawn guessed, because with her as the best Lab 33 assassin, he was forced to recognize the merit of her argument. So you owe me, buddy, she thought as she assessed the fatigues-clad SAS captain who had abruptly walked a few feet away from her and was now conferring with a soldier in the guard shack by the facility’s high barbed-wire gates. I’m not saying you’d have been a cinch to take out, judging from what I’ve heard about the combat training you Special Air Services types receive, but in a one-on-one between the two of us, my money would have been on me.

He didn’t really fit her preconceived notion of a Brit, she thought with a frown as, impatience showing in every inch of his more than six-foot frame, he bent his head over a logbook a subordinate had handed him. In his late twenties or early thirties, he was deeply tanned, for one thing—a legacy, she supposed, of his recent service in the Middle East, which had been all too sketchily described in the bio she’d read. Peters had shown irritation at the lack of detail Lab 33’s investigators had been able to dig up on Asher’s military career, but Dawn herself had felt a private sense of relief. If Peters’s people hadn’t managed to uncover what assignments the SAS had given Des Asher, there was a good chance her own activities during the months she’d been AWOL would remain undiscovered.

But besides the tan and the heavy biceps straining the rolled-up sleeves of his fatigues, there were other incongruities that bothered her. So far he’d shown none of the famed politeness she’d always associated with the English. His manner, as he’d taken her credentials from her and then thrust them back, had been decidedly dismissive, and although she was unable to catch his low-voiced conversation with the soldier by the guard shack, at least twice he’d uttered back-alley curses loud enough for her to overhear.

He didn’t like his job. The revelation came to her with the conviction of absolute certainty, and behind the glasses her gaze narrowed. No, it was more than that, she thought slowly, taking in the tight set of Asher’s jaw, the barely controlled anger displayed as he raked a hand through short-cropped, burnt-pewter hair. He hated what he was doing.

Which means we’ve got one thing in common, big guy, she thought as he handed the logbook to the guard and met her watchful gaze before she could avert her eyes. Too bad we’re working on opposite sides or I might have let you buy me a shot of Stoli and told you my reservations about this assignment before buying you a round of warm British beer and letting you fill me in on how you ended up in a dead-end job, baby-sitting your famous uncle.

On second thought, she told herself as Asher nodded curtly to a younger officer who had stopped his jeep in front of the guard shack and was glancing curiously in her direction, maybe it was better having him as an opponent. His antagonism would keep her focused, and right now that was what she needed most.

Her headache had returned. This time she couldn’t afford to give in to it.

“If the paperwork’s screwed, my people didn’t do it.” Without pausing to talk to the young officer exiting the jeep, Asher strode from the guard shack and came to a halt directly in front of her. He continued, his manner barely civil. “I’d advise you to contact whoever sent you here and get them to resubmit your information. Until you do you’re not getting past this gate.”

The hand he clamped onto her upper arm was like a band of iron…or maybe it was just that her headache had progressed to the point that every nerve ending felt raw. This attack was ten times worse—try twenty times, Dawn thought with a sharply indrawn breath—than those she’d so far experienced, but judging from those previous ones it couldn’t last much longer. All she had to do was ride it out.

Easier said than done, O’Shaughnessy, she told herself tightly. And it’s not ultrahelpful that Mr. Freakin’ Special Air Services has his damn hand welded to my arm right now. If he’d just ease up for a second so I could concentrate on shutting down the jackhammer that’s pounding away in my—

His hard tone broke through the thin veneer of control she was trying to establish. “Letting strangers into a restricted area when their credentials don’t check out isn’t the way I work. On your way, lady.”

Without warning, the pain soared to an unbearable crescendo inside her head, escalating its assault until it took all her energy just to stay upright. No one could endure this, Dawn thought in numb agony, no longer caring whether her face revealed what was happening inside her. She’d been trained to take pain, to resist pain, to rise above pain, and all that training didn’t matter a damn. She wasn’t going to get through this.

A long way away a voice was speaking, the low and deadly tones searing enough to dimly penetrate the haze of unconsciousness that was shutting down her senses. Faint hope stirred in her. Was the pain losing its grip? Was there still a chance she could win this fight? Drawing on reserves she’d thought were already exhausted, she focused on the voice with the desperation of a swimmer going under for the third time—going under and hallucinating, she thought hazily. Because that voice sounds weirdly familiar, O’Shaughnessy—so familiar that if I didn’t know better I’d say it was your own.

“Call William London and get this straightened out, dammit! Because if you don’t, I swear I’ll—”

“Ash! Put the gun down! Lady, back away from him or I’ll shoot you myself!”

The shouted commands came from the officer who’d gotten out of the Jeep. No longer standing by the shack, he was now only a few yards away and leveling his rifle at her, but as inexplicable as his actions were, Dawn barely registered them.

Her headache was gone. As instantly as if a switch had been turned off somewhere inside her head, the pain had simply stopped. Shaky relief filled her, but even as it did she stiffened in shock.

In her hand was a stilettolike piece of steel. The tip of it was pressed to Des Asher’s tanned throat, hard enough so that it was making an impression. She couldn’t even remember snapping the antenna off the hatchback behind her and lunging at him with it, but Asher had apparently reacted with almost the same speed as she’d displayed.

Because in his left hand was a heavy semiautomatic—a Sig Sauer P226, the weapon he would have been issued upon joining the SAS. The muzzle of the revolver was jammed into the space between her top left rib and her breast, aiming its load of nine-millimeter parabellum rounds toward her heart.

Glittering gray eyes stared down at her. “If you want to get out of this alive, put down that antenna and tell me again what you do for a living…and this time leave out the biochem assistant crap.” The words were scarcely above a mutter, but with his mouth only inches from hers she had no trouble hearing them.

She’d blown her cover. The realization tore through the fog clouding Dawn’s brain and icy clarity flooded in. What had happened just now? Why had she gone into attack mode for no good reason? She was a professional, dammit—she didn’t make mistakes like this! Had she lost her edge, as Peters had suspected she might?

But the answers to those questions would have to wait. All that mattered at the moment was that she was going to have to abort the assignment and return to Lab 33 empty-handed. With no chance now of Aldrich Peters reversing her degeneration in time, she’d as good as signed her own death warrant.

Not only mine, but Lynn’s and Faith’s, she thought with corrosive self-recrimination. Whatever’s happening to my cells will be happening to theirs, even if they aren’t displaying the same symptoms I’ve been experienc—

She blinked, her mind racing. Slowly she lowered the snapped-off antenna she was holding, and saw the man in front of her warily do the same with his weapon.

That was it—the reason she’d gone ballistic just now, that she’d allowed herself to forget everything Lee Craig had ever taught her about her profession. Aldrich Peters had predicted her body would begin to turn on itself, but her guesses about how that would unfold hadn’t gone far enough. Nothing she’d imagined could even begin to approach the horror of knowing that her personality—her impulses, her emotions, her very mind—was beginning to betray her.

She’d been raised to be Lab 33’s killing machine. She’d just seen a chilling example of what she could expect when the machine finally broke down.

Correction, O’Shaughnessy: you’ve just seen what’ll happen if it breaks down, she told herself sharply. Now that you know what the problem is, start acting like the professional you are and try to salvage the mission.

For the second time in as many minutes, hope replaced despair as a plan took shape in her mind. It just might work but there was no time to waste—she needed to get back into the skin of prickly, abrasive Dawn Swanson right away.

“Don’t you ever put your hands on me again.” She forced flat hostility to her expression. “I didn’t take seven years of self-defense classes just so I could allow myself to be manhandled, and I certainly didn’t accept this position with the renowned Sir William London thinking I’d have to file a sexual harassment suit my very first day!”

Anger darkened the gray eyes watching her. “Nice recovery, lady. It makes me wonder who the hell taught you to be so bloody slippery. Come on, you and me are going to have a cozy little chat in a quiet room.”

He had the height, but she had the superior agility. He outweighed her, outreached her and his Sig trumped her whiplike scrap of broken car antenna, Dawn thought—but damn, she’d like to take Des Asher on.

And you know what? she asked him silently, shifting her balance onto the balls of her feet and seeing him shift his in unconscious response. I’ll bet I could have you gasping for mercy before we were through. You’re good—I knew that when you had your weapon out and ready for me so fast a minute ago. But I’m the best.

She didn’t allow any of her thoughts to show on her face. Instead she turned to the younger man standing a few feet away, his weapon no longer at the ready but his tense posture an indication that he hadn’t taken himself off full alert.

“Lieutenant Keifer?” She took her attention from the nametag on his uniform—an American uniform, she noted briefly, unlike Asher’s British one—and met his eyes. He looked uncertain, she noted, which was good. “You heard what your fellow officer just said. I’ll be advising my lawyers to take a statement from you to support the legal action I intend to take. A ‘nice little chat in a quiet room’?” She turned back to Asher. “With no third parties present to monitor your behavior, I’m sure. Men like you who abuse their power to get their sexual ya-yas on would be pathetic if they weren’t so disgusting!”

The revolted shudder was pure Dawn Swanson, Dawn thought. So was the pinch-lipped expression she was favoring him with and the stance she’d taken up. The persona Carter had created that had so annoyed her two days ago was now her only chance of explaining away her insane actions. She met Asher’s narrowed gaze, her arms belligerently crossed over her baggy sweatshirt.

“I’m assuming ya-yas means shagging.” His smile was sharklike. “Hate to break your bubble, but save your worries for what’s going to happen after I’m through questioning you and I hand you over to the authori—”

“She’s right, Ash,” Keifer broke in. “Putting your hand on her was way out of bounds, and as for talking about shagging—” He lowered his voice. “A sexual harassment suit’s the surest way to shoot your career down in flames. Maybe England’s different, but that kind of thing is taken seriously here.”

Asher’s lips tightened to a line. “We’ve got rules about this in England, too. But when I attempt to escort an unverified visitor off the property and she comes within a hairbreadth of slashing open my jugular, all rules are off. After seeing the moves she’s got, my guess is she’s a bio-technician like I’m an interior decorator.” He turned his attention to Dawn. “Too bad for you that whoever you’re working for slipped up on the name. If we’d been expecting a woman, you just might have bluffed your way in.”

“The slipup over the name, Asher?” Faint color rose under the younger man’s tan. “I took the instructions verbally from Sir William. I just assumed—”

It was time for her to cut in, Dawn decided. “You just assumed the position had been given to a male. God, have I stepped into a time warp here?” She exhaled tightly. “Look—working with Sir William London is an honor I never thought I’d have the chance to experience. He’s a great man and a personal hero of mine. In fact—” she allowed her voice to soften and hoped the dreaminess in her eyes wasn’t obscured by the Lab 33 lenses “—when I was a student I used to have a poster of him over the bed in my dorm room. It was a picture taken in the 1950s, when he was one of Oxford’s ‘crazy young men.’”

“Not young anymore. Still crazy as a shi—” Asher didn’t complete his muttered comment. He gave her a patently disbelieving look. “Even if I was fool enough to buy that, what’s your lukewarm fantasy life got to do with this?”

“Ash—” Keifer sounded strained.

“My admiration for Sir William’s got everything to do with this. I’m trying to tell you that I’d rather not have him associated, even slightly, with an embarrassing legal suit. Pick up the phone, confirm my credentials with him, and let me get started on the work I came to do. For Sir William’s sake, I’ll forget what happened here.”

Without looking away from her, Asher spoke to the man beside him. “Do what the lady says, Keifer, but be sure you talk to the great man himself. If her story checks out, tell him from me that if he’d keep me in the loop like he’s supposed to, maybe balls-ups like this wouldn’t happen.”

He waited until Keifer set off at a trot for the guard shack before going on. “Your story’s going to check out, isn’t it? Whoever you are, you’re not amateur enough to suggest we talk to my uncle if you weren’t confident he’d back you up.”

Dawn feigned surprise. “William London’s your—”

“Stow the acting,” he interrupted. “It’s just you and me right now, so listen and listen good. I’m probably going to have to let you walk past that gate, but I know damn well there’s something wrong about you. The first tip-off was the bloody glasses, in case you’re interested.”

She injected a note of irritation into her voice. “My glasses? Is this another one of your insult—”

“I said stow it.” He smiled thinly. “A girl I used to know wore the same thick kind of lenses. She never took them off unless she was in bed.”

His tone was disarming and his manner more relaxed than it had been since he’d first spoken to her. Dawn wasn’t fooled. Des Asher was a dangerous opponent, and right now he was at his most dangerous. She opened her mouth to deliver a Dawn Swanson-type protest but he forestalled her.

“But you don’t want to hear the down-and-dirty details of my sex life.” His smile tightened. “Thing is, the gorgeous Maureen had been wearing heavy glasses for so many years that even when she took them off I could see a little indentation on the bridge of her nose. You’ve got a red mark where you keep pushing them up, but you don’t have an indentation. If I had to guess, I’d say you put them on an hour or so before you arrived here.”

She saw Keifer approaching, his face flaming. The Dawn/Don question had obviously been settled in her favor, she thought in relief. “With a man of science like William London as your uncle, you should know guesses are worthless without the proof to back them up,” she said evenly. “I’d say your proof just flew out the window, Captain Asher.”

“Hell, call me Asher. Sounds more friendly, seeing as how I just became your closest companion.” His smile vanished and his tone hardened. “I know you’re not who you say you are. Trust me, I’m going to be watching every move you make from now on, love.”

Chapter 3

Status: eighteen days and counting

Time: 0330 hours

It was a whole new ball game, Dawn thought with a grimace. A few hours ago she hadn’t felt the need to arrive here with a weapon that might be discovered in her luggage, but that had been then.

This was now.

“When I finally get my hands on Sir William’s notes and need to break out of here, I don’t want to be worrying that some recruit just out of basic training is going to be able to stop me because I suddenly don’t have the strength to rip a wet paper towel,” she told herself under her breath. “Since it seems to be a crapshoot as to how and when my abilities desert me, the sooner I level the playing field with a gun in my possession, the better.”

Which was why, she thought in resignation, she was clinging to a cinderblock wall like a fly right now, peering down through the darkness to the ground forty feet below.

“Correction,” she muttered, looking up for her next handhold. “A fly would have those handy sticky pads to keep it glued to this damned wall. Too bad when Aldrich was performing his Dr. Evil experiments on my genes he didn’t think to give me those. Just because I’d survive a fall doesn’t mean I want to have the experience.”

Toeing a sneaker into a shallow line of mortar, she disengaged the fingertips of her left hand from the similar mortar depression they’d been gripping. Her body began to unpeel from the wall, but before the gap between her and the cinderblock could widen past the point of no return, her fingers were curling deftly into another hold. Without allowing herself to pause, she kept climbing.

She needed a gun. Soldiers carried guns. Ergo, she thought with determination as she felt her knuckles scrape against the slight overhang of the building’s flat roof, it was only logical to go gun shopping in the one place where she could be sure of finding soldiers.

“A girl wants Manolos, she hits the designer shoe stores…” she muttered, suddenly pushing off from the wall with her feet. Her lower half swung out. As her legs reached the top of their arc she abruptly pulled her upper body as close as she could to the roofline before jackknifing her arms out and thrusting herself straight up into the air. Immediately she folded into a ball, her head tucked and her arms wrapping around her drawn-in legs. The cool night air rushed past her as she tumbled once in midair, then twice, and as she completed the second tumble she quickly unfolded.

She landed lightly on the top of the roof in a half-crouch, her feet a few inches apart and all her senses on full alert.

“…and if a girl wants a gun, she hits a barracks—preferably at a time when she figures everyone’s still asleep,” she continued, rising from her crouch and briskly dusting mortar powder from her hands. “No matter how suspicious Captain Asher is, even he won’t be expecting Dawn Swanson to go nosing around so soon.”

After finally getting past the gate and being handed over to the lab’s staff supervisor by an embarrassed Keifer, she’d barely taken time to unpack her suitcase in the room that had been assigned to her before putting her plan into effect. Aldrich Peters’s Lab 33 was undoubtedly malevolent, she’d mused as she’d climbed onto the toilet tank in the small attached bathroom, but she couldn’t fault its efficiency. Along with her fictitious bio, Carter had provided her with a thick sheaf of blue-prints—the complete schematics for the research complex, which she’d committed to memory before destroying as she’d done the bio.

The bad news had been that the air ducts that served the combined lab section and civilian employees’ living quarters didn’t connect with those snaking through the ceilings of the military barracks and guardrooms. The good news was that the duct she’d wriggled into after sliding aside a metal grate in the ceiling of her washroom eventually joined up with a main artery that led to the roof. The barrack’s ducts did the same.

Unfortunately, Dawn thought dryly as she saw the bulky silhouette of the second vent rising from the tar-and-gravel roof ahead of her in the dark, the reason the two didn’t intersect at some point was that they were in different buildings. And although the buildings were only a couple of yards apart, the roof she’d needed to get to had been a good twenty-five feet higher than that of the civilian building—which was why she’d had to do her human-fly imitation.

“All the more reason no one would think to look for me in the military part, though,” she told herself in a murmur as she lifted the screened cover and boosted herself onto its edge. “If they discover I’m not in my room, which they won’t.”

The journey through this duct was as hot and tedious as her maneuverings through the first, but whereas the one servicing the lab building had been spotlessly dust-free, that wasn’t the case here. For the third time in as many minutes she found herself freezing to a halt as a sneeze threatened. Part of the problem was the baggy sweatshirt she was wearing, she thought in frustration as her nose stopped twitching and she allowed herself to breathe again. For a job of this type, normally she would wear something that hugged her like a second skin and didn’t get in her way. But it would have been too dangerously out of character for the Swanson chick, as Carter had referred to her alter ego, to have packed a catsuit or even a tight yoga top and pants.

“Oh, no, Swanson wouldn’t be comfortable unless she had something four sizes too large stirring up all the freakin’ dust in here,” Dawn muttered, her patience at an end as yet another sneeze tickled the back of her nose. As soon as it passed she wrenched the sweatshirt she was wearing up and over her head. A moment later the bunchy drawstring-waisted pants she’d had on were stripped off as well, leaving her clad only in a sports bra and formfitting boy-leg undies.

She could retrieve the Swanson duds on the way back, she thought as she continued at a decidedly speedier pace through the duct. Up ahead it branched into two sections, and without hesitation she took the left branch, which according to the schematics led directly to the enlisted men’s sleeping quarters.

Maybe she was being sexist, but no way was she about to risk dropping in on a roomful of female soldiers, she told herself as she inched her way cautiously across the ceiling tiles, making sure she distributed her weight equally over several at a time, instead of putting undue stress on one and chancing the possibility that it might give way and fall into the room below. In her experience, women weren’t only lighter sleepers but once awake, they came to total alertness a heartbeat faster than their male counterparts.

“Nice theory, O’Shaughnessy,” she breathed, gingerly sliding aside a tile. “Guess you’re about to find out if it holds water.”

According to Carter’s information, Asher had fourteen men and six women under his command—a far cry from the fifty battle-experienced soldiers he would have had in the SAS, she reflected, wondering again just how the man had blotted his copybook badly enough to end up here pulling down guard duty. But Des Asher’s past foul-ups weren’t her main concern at the moment, she reminded herself as she quickly scanned the double row of military-issue iron beds in the room below. Checking out how many of these beds were currently occupied and whether any of the occupants were awake was all she had to worry about right now.

The tight Dawn Swanson-type bun at the nape of her neck was secured with enough bobby pins to set off a dozen metal detectors. Sliding one free, she stealthily tossed it through the opening she was peering through.

The bobby pin bounced with a tiny ping! off a steel footlocker at the end of one of the beds. She held her breath.

Five of the beds were made up with military preciseness and were obviously empty. From the remaining nine came a muted chorus of snores. None of the blanket-covered lumps shot bolt upright, no one’s breathing abruptly changed tempo, no opened eyes suddenly gleamed in the faint glow coming from the red-lit fire-exit sign by the door.

With an acrobat’s agility, she dropped to the floor, immediately turning her landing into a head-over-heels roll that brought her to the shadowed side of one of the occupied beds.

At sixteen, she’d been as rebellious as any other teenager, Dawn remembered with a faint smile, although her acting-out against authority had taken a different form from a normal girl’s. Once during a working trip to London that had left her sitting alone, bored and sullen, in a hotel room for too many hours while Uncle Lee had carried out a mission, she’d defiantly presented him with a Polaroid of herself standing in a vault at the Tower of London with a penlight clamped between her teeth and one gloved hand resting on the crown jewels of England. As if to make the point that she wasn’t that different, a furious Lee Craig had punished her like any ordinary teen who’d come home late after a date.

He’d grounded her for two whole weeks. But after his death and before she’d come in contact with the Cassandras, she’d found he’d secreted the Polaroid as a memento in the hidden safe where he kept his emergency passports and contingency cash.

Past history, Dawn thought as she jammed the sidearm she’d retrieved from the footlocker—a Beretta M9 pistol, standard issue for a U.S. Ranger as she’d noted Keifer and the American contingent of William London’s guards were—into the waistband at the back of her briefs. All that little trip down memory lane proves is that I could have picked this padlock with my eyes closed and my hands tied behind my—

Two things happened at once to cut off her thoughts. One was the bolt of agony that shot home without warning in her brain…and the other was the mumbled voice of the soldier whose gun she’d just appropriated.

“Angel?” His query was slurred and thick with sleep. Through the haze of pain that had descended upon her she saw him stir restlessly. “Angel…howzabout…you know, babe…”

The intensity of the pain eased off a little, but her limbs still felt weak and rubbery. She cast an alarmed glance upward at the telltale opening in the ceiling. Could she trust her legs to make the leap? And even if she could, did her arms have the strength to pull her all the way to safety?

Her head still throbbed and the nausea that accompanied the migraines made her feel as if she were trying to move through molasses. In a few minutes the symptoms would probably fade, but she didn’t have a few minutes.

“Wassa matter, babe…don’t you wanna play?”

Was it her imagination or did his voice sound less slurred, as if he was slowly coming awake? She shot another despairing glance at her unreachable escape route and made up her mind.

“Of course I do, lover,” she murmured huskily, tiptoeing to the bed.

All she had to do was bring the edge of her hand sharply down on the precise point at the base of his neck that would insure his lapsing back into unconsciousness, albeit for a few more hours past reveille than he’d likely planned. Not the way most women demonstrate they’re not in the mood, she thought grimly. But I’m running out of time, so here goes.

She took a deep breath and quickly brought her rigidly held hand down in a chopping arc that—

He turned his head and opened his eyes at her. A slow, sexy smile lifted one corner of his mouth. She froze, the edge of her hand so close to his neck that she could feel the heat coming off him.

“You’re gorgeous, angel,” he murmured softly. “One of these nights I’m not going to let you leave just as my dream starts getting interesting…”

His eyes closed. His breathing deepened and became once again regular.

Dawn felt a stab of illogical outrage. He was asleep, dammit! The man had actually had the nerve to fall asleep while she was half-naked by his bed!

Reason rushed back. Thank your lucky stars Lover Boy did, O’Shaughnessy, she thought as she moved with quiet haste to the foot of the bed. She reached for the fifteen-round magazines of ammunition she’d left beside the footlocker, and then paused.

A short tangle of pitch-black hair brushed his forehead. Thick, spiky lashes fanned against his cheekbones. Whatever his dream was now, it was causing a faint smile to soften his well-cut lips.

The man was gorgeous. And she’d been living like a nun for the past nine months, Dawn thought in frustration, turning away.

“Not that my sex life’s ever been red-hot,” she muttered ten minutes later as she hoisted herself out of the air shaft and ran lightly to the edge of the barracks’ roof, the Dawn Swanson sweats tied in a bulky bundle around her waist. She removed the gun from her waistband before securing it and the ammo clips in the padding of clothing tied around her, and jumped. “There was that Roman god of a gardener last year in Milan when I was on the Italian job, and before him there was Alexei what’s-his-name in Moscow, who could toss back vodka all night and still show a girl why he was nicknamed the Russian bear,” she remembered, coming out of her landing roll. “Aside from them, the list is pretty skimpy.”

But numbers weren’t the point anyway. She made her way through the air shaft, her expression thoughtful. As fun as Alexei and the gardener had been, she had no illusions that they’d wasted any time dreaming about her after she’d disappeared from their lives. What would it be like to experience more than a one- or two-night stand with someone? What would it be like to know you were in his dreams, as the man she’d just left had drowsily asserted she’d been in his?

Pausing a few feet from the vent leading to her washroom, she shook her head decisively. “Way too much commitment. Still…it was kind of sweet to hear him say it.”

She was almost sorry she’d chosen Lover Boy’s footlocker to break into, she mused as she lifted the metal grate that overlooked the toilet and shimmied through the opening. She’d noticed a second sidearm in the locker, so hopefully he wouldn’t feel duty-bound to immediately report a weapon missing and would assume its absence was part of a practical joke by a buddy. Balancing on the porcelain tank, she hauled down the bundle of clothing, first removing the Beretta and its ammunition and shoving them out of sight in the vent for retrieval later. She replaced the grate, stepped down from the tank and glanced at her watch.

The whole excursion had taken twenty minutes. There was time for a brief catnap before she needed to start getting ready to report for her first day of work in Sir William’s lab. Stifling a sudden yawn at the thought, she lifted the unattractive brown robe that was part of her Dawn Swanson wardrobe from the hook where she’d hung it when she’d unpacked, wrapped it around her and unlocked the door to the bedroom. She took a step toward her bed and then stopped in shock.

The man sitting on the edge of it wore a shapeless sweater and a threadbare pair of gray flannel trousers. His bony feet, bare of socks, were jammed into odd-looking sandals with an assortment of straps and buckles. Half-moon reading glasses were perched on the end of a beaky nose, and his pure white hair looked almost as wild as Carter Johnson’s funky bed-head style. He looked up from the notebook he had been scribbling in, his expression thunderous.

“What the bloody hell have you been doing all this time in the loo?” he barked. “And where’s the damned poster of me I hear you keep over your bed?”

“You miss the point entirely,” Sir William London snapped impatiently thirty minutes later. “Von Trier’s ridiculous hypothesis aside, what’s to stop the gene from mutating further under controlled conditions? Nothing!” He slumped back onto the pillows piled up against the headboard of Dawn’s bed, the ergonomically molded soles of his sandals further disarranging the bedcover. “And yet it’s as inert as a bloody pudding,” he muttered disconsolately, “and I’ve already wasted two days trying to find out why.”

The first stage of her agenda, after arriving here, had been to get close to the famed Sir William, Dawn thought, still finding it hard to believe the turn of events of the past half hour. It seemed she’d already accomplished that, and with barely any effort on her part.

“I’ve been unpacking and arranging my toiletries, Sir William,” she’d replied to his querulous demand when she’d exited the bathroom and found him in her room. She’d walked unconcernedly to the bureau and picked up her horn-rims. “And although I used to have your poster over my bed when I was in college, I didn’t think it would be appropriate to do so here. What can I help you with?”

“I need to pick someone’s brains,” he’d growled. “Since yours was the only room with a light showing under the door, I thought I’d pick yours. Why in God’s name the rest of my staff need to sleep like logs all through the night when they know that’s when I like to brainstorm, I don’t know,” he’d added in irritation.

Aldrich will be over the freakin’ moon when I phone in my initial progress report later this week, Dawn told herself now. If anything could reassure him that I’m still the best at undercover assignments, this will.

She shut all thought of Aldrich Peters and Lab 33 from her mind and gave her attention to her unlikely companion. “More tea?” At his nod she walked over to the bed from the small desk where she’d been sitting, the battered thermos that Sir William had brought in her hand. Absently he held out a glass lab beaker, and she filled it before pouring some of the vile-tasting brew into a chipped mug for herself. “Of course there’s nothing to stop the gene from mutating under controlled conditions,” she said as she sat down again. “Since it hasn’t, someone’s obviously screwed up the conditions.”

“A typically glib Yank answer.” Under scraggly eyebrows, London’s regard was sharp with annoyance. “Who the hell would dare to—” He stopped abruptly, his scowl deepening.

Who indeed? Dawn thought wryly. For starters, just about anyone, if this lab was anything like the one she’d grown up in. All scientists, in her experience, were prima donnas. All lab technicians were underpaid. All maintenance staff were overworked and cut corners where they could. At least at Lab 33 everyone ultimately answered to Peters, which kept them toeing the line, but that wasn’t the case here.

A plan began to formulate in her mind. She pursed her lips Dawn Swanson-style, but before she could speak, London exploded. “That ass Hewlitt! He came to me straight from Von Trier’s facility. The bugger’s trying to sabotage my work!”

“Maybe.” She kept her voice calm. “Then again, maybe not. Tell me something, Sir William—the supervisor who showed me to my room this evening, Roger somebody?”

“Roger Poole? What about him?” The scowl was back on his face. “Roger’s been with me for years. He’s as loyal as a beagle, so if you’re trying to suggest he—”

“Loyalty’s not the issue,” she cut in. “Being a decent guy’s probably his biggest problem. You need someone taking care of the day-to-day running of your lab who’s not afraid to be disliked.” She shoved her glasses higher up onto the bridge of her nose and leaned forward, her expression tentatively eager. “I hope I’m not out of line, Sir William, but any slip-ups that are occurring in your lab certainly can’t be your fault. And you shouldn’t have to take time from your groundbreaking research to correct these problems. I know I was hired as a lab tech, but it’s obvious you need a pit bull a whole lot more than you do a beagle. Let me be your pit bull. Give me two days, and I promise your lab will be running like a well-oiled machine.”

“She’s not cleared for that kind of responsibility, Sir William.” The door to Dawn’s room crashed open and Des Asher, still in uniform, took a step across the threshold. His expression seemed carved from stone as he went on, directing his words at his uncle and ignoring her. “As head of military security here, I can’t allow her to be given free access to this facility.”

He turned to Dawn, his gray eyes cold. “You’re good. It’s only been hours since your arrival and already you’ve made your move. But I’m good, too. I’ve sent off top-priority queries on you to both Washington and Interpol, complete with your photograph. If you’ve ever gotten so much as a parking ticket anywhere in the world, I’ll know it.”

His smile barely lifted his lips. “If you have, you’d better hope it was under the name of Dawn Swanson. But I doubt it…because I’m beginning to think Dawn Swanson doesn’t exist at all.”

Chapter 4

Status: seventeen days and counting

Time: 0145 hours

As the angry whine got louder, Dawn spared a moment to gauge its nearness. She was cutting things a little fine, she judged, but her preparations were nearly in place. All she needed to do now was to splash the road with the volatile chemical she’d liberated from the lab earlier, make sure she had a match handy and then crouch down in the patch of sage that at this hour of night was nothing more than a slightly blacker shadow in the surrounding darkness.

Piece of cake. But she had no intention of telling Aldrich that. She didn’t want him thinking he could set up these last-minute meetings whenever he felt like it.

Her mouth drew to a straight line at the thought. Twisting the metal cap off the small glass container she held, she began sprinkling the gelatinous substance it contained onto the hard-packed dirt of the road. It took only a second to lay the wavering trail of clear jelly. When she’d finished she dropped the bottle into the hole she’d dug earlier in the soft earth by the shoulder of the road and then replaced the earth, taking care that no telltale trace gave away the bottle’s newly filled in grave. The chemical itself would be totally consumed when it burned, Dawn mused as she brushed a few twigs over the settled dirt. If anyone investigated this incident, which was unlikely, they would assume that a leaky gas tank from an earlier vehicle had left just enough gas on the road to be ignited by a stray spark struck by a piece of gravel. She half rose from her burial detail and listened. The whine now sounded like a hornet in a bottle. Her shadow melting in and out of the moonlight, she ran across the road.

This was insanity. Either that or another one of Peters’s tests, but whatever his reasons for insisting on a face-to-face progress report from her, they weren’t good enough—not when they jeopardized her cover and especially not when her phoned-in report had given him all the information she’d been able to provide at this early stage of her mission. Or at least, all the information she was willing to give, she amended with reluctant honesty.

“Of course I did nothing to arouse Asher’s suspicions!” she’d lied emphatically last night when, as arranged, she’d dialed the number that if traced would show as connecting to nothing more sinister than a bookstore specializing in used and out-of-print scientific volumes. She’d converted the anger in her tone to ice. “Maybe when I was just starting out in this game six years ago you might have had some justification in asking me that question, Doctor, but now it’s an insult. I told you, one of his people screwed up my cover name. He couldn’t handle that, so he took it out on me. His attitude only got worse when Sir William overrode him and gave me the supervisor position.”

That last was the mother of all understatements, Dawn thought, extracting a book of matches from her pants pocket before stretching out at the side of the road. She dug the inner edges of her sneakers into the dirt, kept her head down but her focus straight ahead and took her weight on her elbows.

It was the classic sniper position, and one that was second nature to her. She could wait like this for hours if she had to, but from the escalating decibels of the approaching whine the waiting would last only a few more seconds.

She didn’t want to hurt the rider, whoever he was. She couldn’t afford to damage the motorcycle. Precision was going to be key in this operation.

“When isn’t it?” she asked herself in a mutter. “If Mr. SAS hadn’t stormed into my room when he did yesterday morning, I get the feeling his uncle might have declined Dawn Swanson’s eager offer and kept his old chum Roger on in the position of lab supervisor. But if they have nothing else in common, London and his nephew seem to share the same determination to get their own way. It couldn’t have been more obvious that his insistence on giving me the run of his lab was just his way of jerking Ash’s chain. And talking about jerking chains…”

Transportation was one of the pesky little details Peters hadn’t seemed to consider when he’d insisted on this meeting tonight, she thought. Even though their clandestine rendezvous was to take place at a bar just outside the limits of the nearest town to London’s facility, it was still a jaunt of twenty miles. What had he been thinking—that she would simply hop in the hatchback, wave airily at the man who’d already warned her he suspected she was an imposter and drive off into the night before returning again hours later?

She tilted her head and listened. For the past few minutes the unknown motorcyclist had been tearing like a bat out of hell down the ruler-straight road just before the curve where she’d stationed herself. Now she heard him gearing down rapidly in preparation for the hairpin bend, his engine revs red-lining as noisily as they had the previous night when the loyal Roger Poole had been showing her to her quarters.

She’d fixed a Dawn Swanson expression of irritation on her features. “I was under the impression this facility was located miles from anywhere, not right next door to a motorcycle speedway. Half the staff on this floor must be awake with the noise.”

Roger had given an apologetic cough. She’d already learned that an apologetic cough was his one-size-fits-all reaction to most situations, and the thought had crossed her mind that he would be the perfect candidate to give lessons in being a real Englishman to Des Asher.

“I’m afraid we’ve just resigned ourselves to the racket. Really, it would be rude to complain.” He’d raked a hand through thinning brown hair. “After all, the chap riding that infernal machine is one of the military guards protecting our research from falling into the wrong hands. He must be on day duty this week, because he’s been roaring out of here for the past few evenings about eight and returning around now. I believe there’s what you Yanks call a ‘juke joint’ in the next town? Ah, here’s your room. Now, where did I put the blasted key?”

While Roger, coughing madly, had fished around in the pockets of his lab coat, Dawn had mentally filed away the information he’d given her. She hadn’t realized she would be using it so soon, she thought now, but since she’d been put in a position where she had to, she owed it to the hapless biker to do it right.

Stripped down to the essentials, this particular operation was simple physics, as so much of her training had been. Except this time instead of calculating the trajectory and velocity of a bullet, she’d had to figure out the path an experienced motorcyclist would take after swerving his vehicle to avoid a sudden wall of flames. She’d remembered the hairpin bend from her own drive here two nights ago, but until she’d arrived with her rope and looked over the location carefully, she still hadn’t known for sure whether it would do.

She’d been relieved to find the same dry and crumbling soil that had posed such a problem for the hatchback’s tires when she’d run off the road the night she’d arrived. It wouldn’t be like drifting into a feather bed but as a Ranger, the biker would know instinctively how to fall. Hopefully the worst of his injuries would be a bruised ego.

A single blinding headlight abruptly rounded the curve. Immediately emptying her mind of all else, Dawn focused on the swiftly approaching motorcycle. The biker, now that he had negotiated the turn and knew he had a straight run until the unmarked side road that led to his destination, wrenched back on the throttle to pour on more speed.

She struck the match she was holding and touched it to the chemical fire starter. Whoever he was, he was good. As the flames sprang up in front of him he reacted instantly, wrenching the Harley Sportster to one side with the obvious intention of going around the unexpected barrier. But as soon as the Harley’s tires hit the loose dirt it began fishtailing, despite the unknown rider’s efforts to keep it under control. “Dump it, buddy,” Dawn muttered under her breath. “You’re going to go down anyway, so you might as well choose your own moment.”

As if he’d heard her advice and reluctantly agreed with it, the Harley’s rider did just that. He’d long since eased off on the throttle and the rough terrain had further cut his speed, so the maneuver when he executed it was little more than a controlled stepping away from the falling bike. Jogging toward him, Dawn watched as he rolled like a paratrooper for a yard or so. He ended up on his hands and knees, shaking his helmeted head as if to clear it as she walked up behind him.

“But clearing your head is exactly what I can’t let you do, buddy,” she murmured regretfully as she stood over him. “I know I’ve already put you through the wringer pretty thoroughly, but…”

She slipped a stainless-steel cylinder from her back pocket as she spoke. As the biker began getting to his feet and pulling off his dark-visored helmet, she quickly twisted the cylinder into two parts. Reaching around him, she held the broken halves in front of his face.

The cylinder was one of Lab 33’s more benign gadgets. Although if it had been found in her luggage when she’d arrived it would have been dismissed by a searcher as a slightly oversize fountain pen, when the seal that kept it in one piece was broken it released a sickly sweet cloud of gas, similar in composition and effect to chloroform but much more predictable.

The hapless biker sank to his knees again, his helmet falling from his gloved hands. Taking care not to inhale the remnants of the gas, Dawn eased him to the ground.

“Believe me, buddy, if I could have worked this any other way in the time Aldrich gave me, I would have,” she told the unconscious man regretfully. “But you’ll come out of your little nap in a few hours. By then I’ll have returned your wheels and as far as you’re concerned, you’ll just have had a nasty spill that knocked you out for a—”

Instead of finishing her sentence, she inhaled sharply. Her mystery biker lay on his back, the moonlight shining full upon his face. Pitch-black hair brushed his forehead. His lashes were dense fans against his cheekbones. His breathing was regular and a faint smile softened his lips.

She felt a rueful answering smile tug at the corners of her mouth. On impulse she brought the tips of her fingers to her lips and kissed them.

“Wrong time, wrong place again, Lover Boy,” she whispered huskily as she blew her kiss toward him. “Maybe one of these days we’ll have a chance to get it right.”

Her smile disappeared as she checked her watch. Briskly turning away, she grabbed up the fallen helmet and hurried for the Harley without looking back.

“I owe you an apologetic cough, Rog, old chap,” Dawn muttered over the Harley’s rumble as she rode the heavy motorcycle into the dirt parking lot outside a long, low building. Peeling purple paint covered the rambling structure and its entry consisted of a spring-loaded wooden door with torn screening, but its slightly sinister air was dispelled by the glittering strings of Christmas lights that festooned it. “I figured your command of American-style English was a little shaky but it was spot-on, as you Limeys say. This here’s a juke joint, all right.”

She cut the bike’s engine and kicked its stand into position before using both hands to lift the full-face helmet off her head. She balanced it on the gas tank, shook her hair into some semblance of order and looked around her curiously.

The lot was full. Although there were some other motorcycles nearby, the majority of the haphazardly parked vehicles were cars, although not the usual run of modern sedans and SUVs. Pulled right up to the rambling wooden porch that ran the length of the dilapidated structure was an old black Buick. It had what looked like small chrome portholes along its sides, and the black metal visor protruding above its windshield must have been the last word in style some sixty or so years previously. A row over was a vintage truck, and beside it was—

“Oh my God,” Dawn breathed, her eyes widening as she dismounted the Harley and walked closer. “A ’55 Caddie ragtop. And she’s cherry…original paint job, whitewall tires that look like they’ve never had a speck of dirt on them, lemon-yellow leather interior. Elvis may have left the building, but I think I’ve found his car.” She tipped her head to one side as a blast of music started up from inside. A slow smile spread across her face. “And from the sounds of that wicked slide guitar, I think I’ve found his blues roots. Uncle Lee only played that old recording of RL Burnside’s ‘Snake Drive’ about a million times while I was growing up. He’d go nuts over this place.”

“He did.” Aldrich Peters moved out of the shadows and into the dim illumination of the lights. There was distaste on his aquiline features. One snowy-white shirt cuff brushed against the peeling porch railing, and he jerked his arm away as if he’d been burned. “What a dump,” he said in revulsion. “Your uncle used to say it was the only place west of the Mississippi that reminded him of the dives he frequented in that poverty-stricken backwater he grew up in. Since he couldn’t shake the Delta mud off his feet fast enough when he was given the chance to get out, I never understood the attraction.” He shrugged. “Still, when I realized how near it was to London’s lab I thought it would be a convenient contact location for us. Plus I learned that it’s off-limits to the lab personnel and guards.”

“Snake Drive” had ended. As Dawn walked slowly up the porch steps, she recognized the gritty growl of Reuben Glaser plunging into “Killer Blues,” another of Craig’s favorites, but this time recognition gave her no pleasure.

Too bad she couldn’t regenerate her memory as well as she could her body, she thought stonily. If that were possible, she would cut out all the sentimental recollections and replace them with ones that were less likely to keep tripping her up. She suddenly wished that Peters had chosen anyplace else—a deserted factory, even a graveyard, dammit—for this meeting.

But he hadn’t. He’d chosen this place, and if she knew him, he’d chosen it precisely because of its connection to Lee Craig. For some reason, he wanted her all misty-eyed and vulnerable, she thought with a cold inner smile. She could do that.

“I miss him, Doctor,” she said with a slight throb in her voice as she reached for the rusty handle of the screen door. She held it open, but Aldrich impatiently waved her through first. “Oh, I always knew we were in a risky profession and that every time he left on an assignment he might not return, but I guess I never really believed he could be beaten. I was in denial for a long time while I was AWOL from Lab 33.”

“Really?” Peters’s tone was suddenly silky. “So was I. But eventually we all have to face reality and deal with it, don’t we? Excuse me, waiter—could we be escorted to a table?”

His manicured fingers tapped peremptorily on the shoulder of a T-shirted man rushing by with a laden beer tray on one outstretched palm and a platter of ribs on the other. The man gave him a harried glance. “Sit anywhere you can find a chair, friend. Tell me now what your poison is and I’ll drop your drinks off when I go by again.”

Peters’s lips tightened. “A Manhattan, I suppose. Perrier for you, Dawn?”

“We’ll have two beers, whatever’s coldest, no glasses,” she said swiftly. “Those ribs as authentic as the music, mister?”

“Made to my dear departed mama’s recipe,” the man said and grinned. “Double portion?”

At her nod he raced off. Weaving her way through the jammed tables ahead of Peters, Dawn hoped the composure she’d assumed with the waiter had covered her sudden shakiness.

Aldrich Peters didn’t make small talk. His exchange with her just before he’d stopped the waiter hadn’t been idle conversation. She was as sure of that as she was that the jukebox was now blasting out Albert King’s version of “Born Under a Bad Sign,” but what she still needed to figure out was what had been behind his comment.

He’d admitted he’d been in denial for a time while she’d been AWOL. She was under no illusions that he meant he’d had trouble accepting Lee Craig’s death, so obviously there had been something else that Peters hadn’t immediately wanted to believe. But, as he’d just informed her, at some point during her absence he’d faced reality—faced it, and made plans to deal with it as expediently as possible.

Albert’s whisky-dipped rasp was pouring out of the jukebox, informing the patrons around her that if it wasn’t for bad luck, he wouldn’t have no luck at all. She knew exactly how the blues singer felt, Dawn thought numbly.

Aldrich knew she’d gone over to the Cassandras. This meeting had to be a trap…and she’d walked straight into it.

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