Thank you to the usual suspects: Ed Gaffney, Eric Ruben, Deede Bergeron, Pat White, and Lee Brockmann. Thanks also—and always—to Steve Axelrod, who is a different kind of agent than are Decker and Nash, but a super one just the same.

A giant, glittering, sequin-covered thanks, complete with fireworks and a thousand-voice “Hallelujah Chorus,” to my editor Shauna Summers. Working with Shauna is a wonderful gift.

Thanks to Linda Marrow and everyone at Ballantine for getting this book into my readers’ hands as quickly as possible.

Thanks to Michelle Gomez for providing a mountain of information about Kaiserslautern, Germany; to Karen Schlossberg, for letting me borrow Eric on her birthday and at other inconvenient times; and to fellow author Alesia Holliday for being brave enough not just to climb into the minivan with us, but to treat us to a trip to Graceland, too. (Thank you. Thank you very much.)

Thanks to Tina Trevaskis for being way overqualified and incredibly awesome and reliable.

Thanks to Reserve Navy SEAL Chris Berman for giving my readers a chance to meet a real hero, and for those terrific calendars available at www.navysealscalendar.com. But my biggest thanks to Chris is for having the patience, kindness, and sensitivity (oh, he’s shaking his head now!) to take a large group of my readers—some who haven’t ventured down this path ever before—on a journey to physical fitness. I’ll be there in spirit when this group attends Chris’s Navy SEAL Women’s Fitness Camp (www.navysealswomensfitness.com) in California this June!

Thanks to the gang on the bb and to all my reader and writer friends, new and old.

When I write fiction, I can’t read fiction. It’s more than just a fear that I’ll end up sounding like someone else. It’s because I’m one of those readers who, when I start a good book, can’t put the darn thing down until I reach the end. (And then it’s 3:00 a.m. and I’ve written zero pages of my own book!)

But I can and do read nonfiction while I’m writing, and I’m particularly fond of WWII military history. During the course of writing Flashpoint , I went on a binge with the men of the 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne Division—both Able Company as well as Easy Company’s famous “Band of Brothers.”

Their exploits and sacrifices during WWII have nothing to do with Flashpoint and everything to do with my staying sane while writing this book.

With that said, a special thanks to Dick Winters and his men, to Tom Hanks and his men, to my son, Jason, for the great Christmas gift, and to Patricia McMahon for picking up that copy of Don Burgett’s Currahee! several years ago because it looked like something I might like to read someday.

Last but not least, thanks to my daughter, Melanie, for the wonderful poem and for making me so proud!

As always, any mistakes I’ve made or liberties I’ve taken are completely my own.

C HAPTER

O NE

LATE SPRING

MARYLAND

Before tonight, the closest Tess Bailey had come to a strip club was on TV, where beautiful women danced seductively in G-strings, taut young body parts bouncing and gleaming from a stage that sparkled and flashed.

In the Gentlemen’s Den, thousands of miles from Hollywood in a rundown neighborhood north of Washington, D.C., the mirror ball was broken, and the aging stripper on the sagging makeshift stage looked tired and cold.

“Whoops.” Nash turned his back to the noisy room, carefully keeping his face in the shadows. “That’s Gus Mondelay sitting with Decker,” he told Tess.

Diego Nash had the kind of face that stood out in a crowd. And Nash obviously didn’t want Mondelay—whoever he was—to see him.

Tess followed him back toward the bar, away from the table where Lawrence Decker, Nash’s longtime Agency partner, was working undercover.

She bumped into someone. “Excuse me—”

Oh my God! The waitresses weren’t wearing any shirts. The Gentlemen’s Den wasn’t just a strip club, it was also a topless bar. She grabbed Nash’s hand and dragged him down the passageway that led to the pay phone and the restrooms. It was dark back there, with the added bonus of nary a half-naked woman in sight.

She had to say it. “This was just a rumor—”

He pinned her up against the wall and nuzzled her neck, his arms braced on either side of her. She was stunned for only about three seconds before she realized that two men had staggered out of the men’s room. This was just another way for Nash to hide his face.

She pretended that she was only pretending to melt as he kissed her throat and jawline, as he waited until Drunk and Drunker pushed past them before he spoke, his breath warm against her ear. “There were at least four shooters set up and waiting out front in the parking lot. And those were just the ones I spotted as we were walking in.”

The light in the parking lot had been dismal. Tess’s concentration had alternated between her attempts not to catch her foot in a pothole and fall on her face, and the two biker types who appeared to be having, quite literally, a pissing contest. Not to mention the unbelievable fact that she was out in the real world with the legendary Diego Nash . . .

They were now alone in the hallway, but Nash hadn’t moved out of whispering range. He was standing so close, Tess’s nose was inches from the collar of his expensive shirt. He smelled outrageously good. “Who’s Gus Mondelay?” she asked.

“An informant,” he said tersely, the muscle in the side of his perfect jaw jumping. “He’s on the Agency payroll, but lately I’ve been wondering . . .” He shook his head. “It fits that he’s here, now. He’d enjoy watching Deck get gunned down.” The smile he gave her was grim. “Thanks for having the presence of mind to call me.”

Tess still couldn’t believe the conversation she’d overheard just over an hour ago at Agency headquarters.

A rumor had come in that Lawrence Decker’s cover had been blown and there was an ambush being set to kill him. The Agency’s night shift support staff had attempted to contact him, but had been able to do little more than leave a message on his voice mail.

No one in the office had bothered to get in touch with Diego Nash.

“Nash isn’t working this case with Decker,” Suellen Foster had informed Tess. “Besides, it’s just a rumor.”

Nash was more than Decker’s partner. He was Decker’s friend. Tess had called him even as she ran for the parking lot.

“So what do we do?” Tess asked now, looking up at Nash.

He had eyes the color of melted chocolate—warm eyes that held a perpetual glint of amusement whenever he came into the office in HQ and flirted with the mostly female support staff. He liked to perch on the edge of Tess’s desk in particular, and the other Agency analysts and staffers teased her about his attention. They also warned her of the dangers of dating a field agent, particularly one like Diego Nash, who had a serious 007 complex.

As if she needed their warning.

Nash sat on her desk because he liked her little bowl of lemon mints, and because she called him “tall, dark and egotistical” right to his perfect cheekbones, and refused to take him seriously.

Right now, though, she was in his world, and she was taking him extremely seriously.

Right now his usually warm eyes were cold and almost flat-looking, as if part of him were a million miles away.

“We do nothing,” Nash told Tess. “You go home.”

“I can help.”

He’d already dismissed her. “You’ll help more by leaving.”

“I’ve done the training,” she informed him, blocking his route back to the bar. “I’ve got an application in for a field agent position. It’s just a matter of time before—”

Nash shook his head. “They’re not going to take you. They’re never going to take you. Look, Bailey, thanks for the ride, but—”

“Tess,” she said. He had a habit of calling the support staff by their last names, but tonight she was here, in the field. “And they are too going to take me. Brian Underwood told me—”

“Brian Underwood was stringing you along because he was afraid you would quit and he needs you on support. You’ll excuse me if I table this discussion on your lack of promotability and start focusing on the fact that my partner is about to—”

“I can get a message to Decker,” Tess pointed out. “No one in that bar has ever seen me before.”

Nash laughed in her face. “Yeah, what? Are you going to walk over to him with your freckles and your Sunday church picnic clothes—”

“These aren’t Sunday church picnic clothes!” They were running-into-work-on-a-Friday-night-at-10:30-to-pick-up-a-file clothes. Jeans. Sneakers. T-shirt.

T-shirt . . .

Tess looked back down the hall toward the bar, toward the ordering station where the waitresses came to pick up drinks and drop off empty glasses.

“You stand out in this shithole as much as I do wearing this suit,” Nash told her. “More. If you walk up to Decker looking the way you’re looking . . .”

There was a stack of small serving trays, right there, by the bartender’s cash register.

“He’s my friend, too,” Tess said. “He needs to be warned, and I can do it.”

“No.” Finality rang in his voice. “Just walk out the front door, Bailey, get back into your car, and—”

Tess pulled off her T-shirt, took off her bra, and handed both to him.

“What message should I give him?” she asked.

Nash looked at her, looked at the shirt and wispy lace of bra dangling from his hand, looked at her again.

Looked at her. “Jeez, Bailey.”

Tess felt the heat in her cheeks as clearly as she felt the coolness from the air-conditioning against her bare back and shoulders.

“What should I tell him?” she asked Nash again.

“Damn,” he said, laughing a little bit. “Okay. O-kay .” He stuffed her clothes into his jacket pocket. “Except you still look like a Sunday school teacher.”

Tess gave him a disbelieving look and an outraged noise. “I do not .” For God’s sake, she was standing here half naked—

But he reached for her, unfastening the top button of her jeans and unzipping them.

“Hey!” She tried to pull back, but he caught her.

“Don’t you watch MTV?” he asked, folding her pants down so that they were more like hip huggers, his fingers warm against her skin.

Her belly button was showing now, as well as the top of her panties, the zipper of her jeans precariously half pulled down. “Yeah, in all my limitless free time.”

“You could use some lipstick.” Nash stepped back and looked at her critically, then, with both hands, completely messed up her short hair. He stepped back and looked again. “That’s a little better.”

Gee, thanks. “Message?” she said.

“Tell Decker to stay put for now,” Nash ordered. “They’re not going to hit him inside. Don’t tell him that—he knows. That’s what I’m telling you , you understand?”

Tess nodded.

“I’m going to make a perimeter circuit of this place,” he continued. “I’ll meet you right back here—no, in the ladies’ room—in ten minutes. Give the message to Deck, be brief, don’t blow it by trying to tell him too much, then get your ass in the ladies’ room and stay there until I’m back. Is that clear?”

Tess nodded again. She’d never seen this Nash before—this order-barking, cold-bloodedly decisive commander. She’d never seen the Nash he’d become in the car, on the way over here, before either. After she’d made that first phone call, she’d picked him up downtown. She’d told him again, in greater detail, all that she’d overheard as they’d headed to the Gentlemen’s Den. He’d gotten very quiet, very grim, when his attempts to reach Decker on his cell phone had failed.

He’d been scared, she’d realized as she’d glanced at him. He had been genuinely frightened that they were too late, that the hit had already gone down, that his partner—his friend—was already dead.

When they got here and the parking lot was quiet, when they walked inside and spotted Decker still alive and breathing, there had been a fraction of a second in which Tess had been sure Nash was going to faint from relief.

It was eye-opening. It was possible that Diego Nash was human after all.

Tess gave him one last smile, then headed down the hall toward one of those little serving trays on the bar. God, she was about to walk into a room filled with drunken men, with her breasts bare and her pants halfway down her butt. Still, it couldn’t possibly be worse than that supercritical once-over Nash had given her.

“Tess.” He caught her arm, and she looked back at him. “Be careful,” he said.

She nodded again. “You, too.”

He smiled then—a flash of straight white teeth. “Deck’s going to shit monkeys when he sees you.”

With that, he was gone.

Tess grabbed the tray from the bar and pushed her way out into the crowd.

Something was wrong.

Decker read it in Gus Mondelay’s eyes, in the way the heavyset man was sitting across from him at the table.

Although it was possible that the wrong he was reading was due to the four beef enchiladas Mondelay had wolfed down at Joey’s Mexican Shack twenty minutes before meeting Decker here.

But Deck didn’t trust Mondelay any farther than he could throw him. And something about the sound of the man’s voice when he’d called to set up this meeting with Freedom Network leader Tim Ebersole had made Decker leave early enough to follow Mondelay as he left work, and to trail him over here. But aside from the Shack, Mondelay hadn’t made any other stops before arriving at the Gentlemen’s Den. He hadn’t talked to anyone on his cell phone either.

Mondelay gestured for Decker to lean closer—it was the only way to be heard over the loud music. “Tim must be running late.”

Jesus, Mondelay had a worse than usual case of dog breath tonight.

“I’m in no hurry,” Decker said, leaning back again in his seat. Air. Please God, give him some air.

Gus Mondelay had come into contact with the Freedom Network while serving eighteen months in Wallens Ridge Prison for possession of an illegal firearm. The group’s name made them sound brave and flag-wavingly patriotic, but they were really just more bubbas—the Agency nickname for homegrown terrorists with racist, neo-Nazi leanings and a fierce hatred for the federal government. And for all agents of the federal government.

Such as Decker.

Even though Deck’s specialty was terrorist cells of the foreign persuasion, he’d been introduced to informant Gus Mondelay when the man had coughed up what seemed to be evidence that these particular bubbas and al-Qaeda were working in tandem.

Those insane-sounding allegations could not be taken lightly even though Deck himself couldn’t make sense of the scenario. If there was anyone the bubbas hated more than federal agents, it was foreigners. Although the two groups certainly could have found common ground in their hatred of Israel and the Jews.

So Dougie Brendon, the newly appointed Agency director, had assigned Decker to Gus Mondelay. Deck was to use Mondelay to try to work his way deeper into the Freedom Network, with the goal of being present at one of the meetings with members of the alleged al-Qaeda cell.

So far all Mondelay had given him were leads that had gone nowhere.

In return, Decker sat with him night after night, watching emotionally numb women gyrate unenthusiastically in one sleazy strip club after another where he was assaulted by crappy rock music played at brain-jarring decibels. He, of course, paid for the drinks.

Mondelay made the come-closer-to-talk gesture again. “I’m going to give Tim a call, see what’s holding him up,” he said as he pried his cell phone out of his pants pocket.

Decker watched as the other man keyed in a speed dial number, then held his phone to his face, plugging his other ear with one knockwurst-sized finger. Yeah, that would help him hear over the music.

It wouldn’t have been quite so awful to sit here if only the DJ played some Aerosmith every now and then.

Or if the strippers or waitresses in this place bothered to smile—Jesus, or even scowl, for that matter. But their perpetually bored expressions were depressing as hell. They didn’t even bother to be pissed at the fact that they were being exploited.

Mondelay sat back in his chair as whomever he was calling picked up. Decker couldn’t hear the conversation, but he could read lips. He turned his head so that Mondelay was right at the edge of his field of vision.

What the fuck is taking so long? Pause, then, No way, asshole, you were supposeda call me. I been sitting here for almost an hour now, waiting for the fucking goat head.

Huh?

Fuck you, too, douche bag. Mondelay hung up his phone, leaned toward Decker. “I got the locale wrong,” he said. “Tim and the others are over at the Bull Run. It was my mistake. Tim says we should come on over. Join them there.”

No. There was no way in hell that Mondelay had been talking to Tim. Decker had heard him on the phone with Tim in the past, and it had been all “Yes, sir,” and “Right away, sir.” “Let me kiss your ass, sir,” not “Fuck you, too, douche bag.”

Something was rotten in the Gentlemen’s Den—something besides Mondelay’s toxic breath, that is.

Mondelay wasn’t waiting on any goat head. He was waiting for the go ahead . The son of a bitch was setting Decker up.

Mondelay began the lengthy process of pushing his huge frame up and out of the seat.

“You boys aren’t leaving, are you?”

Decker looked up and directly into the eyes of Tess Bailey, the computer specialist from the Agency support office.

But okay, no. Truth be told, the first place he looked wasn’t into her eyes.

She’d moved to D.C. a few years ago, from somewhere in the Midwest. Kansas? A small town, she’d told them once when Nash had asked. Her father was a librarian.

Funny he should remember that about her right now.

Because, holy shit, Toto, Tess Bailey didn’t look like she was in small-town Kansas anymore.

“There’s a lady over at the bar who wants to buy your next round,” Tess told him as she shouted to be heard over the music, as he struggled to drag his eyes up to her face.

Nash. The fact that she was here and half-naked—no, forget the half-naked part, although, Jesus, that was kind of hard to do when she was standing there half-fricking-naked—had to mean that Nash was here, too. And if Nash was here, that meant Decker was right about Mondelay setting him up, and he was about to be executed. Or at least kidnapped.

He glanced at Mondelay, at the nervous energy that seemed to surround the big man. No, he’d gotten it right the first time. Mondelay was setting him up to be hit.

Son of a bitch.

“She said you were cute,” Tess was shouting at Decker, trying desperately for eye contact. He gave it to her. Mostly. “She’s over there, in the back.” She pointed toward the bar with one arm, using the other to hold her tray up against her chest, which made it a little bit easier to pay attention to what she was saying, despite the fact that it still didn’t make any sense. Cute? Who was in the back of the bar?

Nash, obviously.

“So what can I get you?” Tess asked, all cheery smile and adorable freckled nose, and extremely bare breasts beneath that tray she was clutching to herself.

“We’re on our way out,” Mondelay informed her.

“Free drinks,” Tess said enticingly. “You should sit back down and stay a while.” She looked pointedly at Deck.

A message from Nash. “I’ll have another beer,” Decker shouted up at her with a nod of confirmation.

Mondelay laughed his disbelief. “I thought you wanted to meet Tim.”

Decker made himself smile up at the man who’d set him up to be killed. Two pals, out making the rounds of the strip clubs. “Yeah, I do.”

“Well, they’re waiting for us now.”

“That’s good,” Decker said. “They can wait. We don’t want to look too eager, right?” He looked at Tess again. “Make it imported.”

Mondelay looked at her, too, narrowing his eyes slightly—a sign that he was probably thinking. “You’re new here, aren’t you?”

“He’ll have another beer, too.” Decker dismissed Tess, hoping she’d take the hint and disappear, fast.

Mondelay was in one hell of a hurry to leave, but he was never in too much of a hurry not to harass a waitress when he had the chance. “Whatcha hiding there, honey?”

“I’ll get those beers.”

Tess was just a little too late. Mondelay had already caught the bottom of her tray, keeping her from leaving. He tugged on it, pulling it away from her, and she let him, but not because she wanted to. She was still smiling, but she wasn’t a good enough liar to hide her discomfort completely. Decker had to look away, hating the fact that she was subjecting herself to this, for him.

Yeah, who was he kidding here? She was doing this for James “Diego” Nash.

“How long’ve you worked here?” Mondelay asked her.

The volume of the music dropped as the routine ended and the stripper left the stage. There’d be about ten minutes for their ears to recover before the next woman started to dance.

“Not very long,” Tess said. It was still noisy, but she didn’t have to shout quite so loudly anymore.

“You need to work on your all-over tan.”

“Yeah,” she said, cool as could be. “I know.”

“Let her get those beers,” Decker said.

“I’d throw her a bang,” Mondelay said as if Tess weren’t even standing there. “Wouldn’t you?”

Deck had been trying to pretend that a woman who was pole dancing on the other side of the bar had caught his full attention, but now he was forced to look up and appraise Tess, whom he knew had a photo of her two little nieces in a frame on her desk along with a plastic action figure of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He knew it was Buffy because Nash had asked her about it once, and she’d told them it represented both female empowerment and the fact that most people had inner depths not apparent to the casual observer.

Decker felt a hot rush of anger at Nash, who, no doubt, had been taking his flirtation with Tess to the next level when the call came in that Decker needed assistance. He wasn’t sure what pissed him off more—the fact that Nash had sent Tess in here without her shirt, or that Nash was sleeping with her.

“Yeah,” he said now to Mondelay, since they’d been talking about the waitresses in these bars like this all week. He gave Tess a smile that he hoped she’d read as an apology for the entire male population. “I would also send her flowers afterward.”

“Tell me, hon, do women really go for that sentimental bullshit?” Mondelay asked Tess.

“Nah,” she said. “What we really love is being objectified, used, and cast aside. Why else would I have gotten a job here? I mean, aside from the incredible health plan and the awesome 401(k).”

Decker laughed as she finally managed to tug her tray free and headed toward the bar.

He watched her go, aware of the attention she was getting from the other lowlifes in the bar, noting the soft curve of her waist and the way that, although she wasn’t very tall, she carried herself as if she stood head and shoulders above the crowd. He was also aware that it had been a very long time since he’d sent a woman flowers.

They were in some serious shit here. Whoever set up this ambush had paramilitary training.

There were too many shooters in position around the building. He couldn’t take them all out.

Well, he could. The setup was professional, but the shooters were all amateurs. He could take them all out, one by one by one. And like the first two he’d encountered, most of them wouldn’t even hear him coming.

But Jimmy Nash’s hands were already shaking from clearing that roof. A cigarette would’ve helped, but last time he’d quit, he’d sworn it was for good.

He washed his hands in the sink in the men’s, trying, through sheer force of will, to make them stop trembling.

It was that awful picture he had in his head of Decker gunned down in the parking lot that steadied him and made his heart stop hammering damn near out of his chest.

He’d do anything for Deck.

They’d been Agency partners longer than most marriages lasted these days. Seven years. Who’d have believed that was possible? Two fucked-up, angry men, one of them—him—accustomed to working alone, first cousin to the devil, and the other a freaking Boy Scout, a former Navy SEAL. . . .

When Tess had called him tonight and told him what she’d overheard, that HQ essentially knew Decker was being targeted and that they weren’t busting their asses to keep it from happening . . .

The new Agency director, Doug-the-prick Brendon, hadn’t tried to hide his intense dislike of Jimmy Nash, and therefore Decker by association. But this was going too fucking far.

Jimmy used his wet hands to push his hair back from his face, forcing himself to meet his eyes in the mirror.

Murderous eyes.

After he got Decker safely out of here, he was going to hunt down Dougie Brendon, and . . .

And spend the rest of your life in jail? Jimmy could practically hear Deck’s even voice.

First they’d have to catch me, he pointed out. And they wouldn’t. He’d made a vow, a long time ago, to do whatever he had to do, so that he’d never get locked up again.

There are other ways to blow off steam. How many times had Decker said those exact words to him?

Other ways . . .

Like Tess Bailey.

Who was waiting for him in the ladies’ room. Who was unbelievably hot. Who liked him—really liked him. He’d seen it in her eyes. She pretended to have a cold-day-in-July attitude when he flirted with her in the office. But Jimmy saw beyond it, and he knew with just a little more charm and a little bit of well-placed pressure, she’d be giving him a very brightly lit green light. Tonight.

He’d let Decker handle Doug Brendon.

Jimmy would handle Tess.

He smiled at the pun as he opened the men’s room door and went out into the hallway.

Tonight he would give Tess to himself as a present. Under normal circumstances, he would never get involved with someone from support. But these weren’t normal circumstances.

His current state of happiness wasn’t completely a result of the adrenaline charging through his system from clearing the roof. When Tess had called, he’d been looking forward to getting naked with a very lovely young tax attorney named Eleanor Gantz.

Who wasn’t likely to welcome him back anytime in the near future. He’d left her without a word of explanation when he’d heard Decker was in danger.

Although, truth be told, he couldn’t quite remember what she looked like—his memory was dominated by Tess Bailey in those half-unzipped jeans and nothing more.

Ouch. Who knew?

Jimmy pushed open the ladies’ room door, expecting to see her, live and in person. But she wasn’t there. Shit. He checked the stalls—all empty.

It sobered him fast and he stopped thinking about the latter part of the evening, instead focusing on here and now, on finding Tess.

He spotted her right away as he went back into the hall. She was standing at the bar. What the Jesus God was she doing there? But then he knew. Decker and Mondelay had ordered drinks.

And he hadn’t been specific enough in his instructions, assuming “Get your ass in the ladies’ room” meant just that, not “Get your ass in the ladies’ room after you fill their drink order.”

The biggest problem with her standing at the bar was not the fact that she was bare breasted and surrounded by drunken and leering men.

No, the biggest problem was that she was surrounded by other bare breasted women—i.e., the real waitstaff of the Gentlemen’s Den. Who were going to wonder what Tess was doing cheating them out of their hard-earned tips.

And sure enough, as Jimmy watched, an older woman with long golden curls, who looked an awful lot like the figurehead of an old sailing ship—those things had to be implants—tapped Tess on the shoulder.

He couldn’t possibly hear USS Bitch-on-Wheels from this distance. Her face was at the wrong angle for him to read her lips, but her body language was clear: “Who the hell are you ?”

Time for a little secondary rescue.

He took off his jacket and tossed it into the corner. No one in this dive so much as owned a suit and his was ruined anyway. He snatched off his tie, too, loosened his collar, and rolled up his sleeves as he pushed his way through the crowd and over to the bar.

“Oh, here he is now,” Tess was saying to Miss Figurehead as he moved into earshot. She smiled at him, which was distracting as hell, because, like most hetero men, he’d been trained to pick up a strong positive message from the glorious combination of naked breasts and a warm, welcoming smile. He forced himself to focus on what she was saying.

“I was just telling Crystal about the practical joke—you know,” Tess said, crossing her arms in front of her, “that we’re playing on your cousin?”

Well, how about that? She didn’t need rescuing. The Figurehead—Crystal—didn’t look like the type to swallow, but she’d done just that with Tess’s story.

“Honey, give her a little something extra,” Tess told him, “because she lost that tip she would have gotten.”

Jimmy dug into his pocket for his billfold and pulled out two twenty-dollar bills.

Tess reached for a third, taking the money and handing it to her brand-new best friend. “Will you order those two beers for me?” she asked Crystal.

The waitress did better than that—she went back behind the bar to fetch ’em herself.

Tess turned to Jimmy, who took the opportunity to put his arm around her—she had, after all, called him honey. He was just being a good team player and following her lead, letting that smooth skin slide beneath his fingers.

“Thanks.” She lowered her voice, turning in closer, using him as a way to hide herself—from the rest of the crowd at least. “May I have my shirt back?”

“Whoops,” he said. Her shirt was in the pocket of his jacket, which was somewhere on the floor by the restrooms. That is, if someone hadn’t already found it and taken it home.

” ‘Whoops?’ “ she said, looking up at him, fire in her eyes.

As Jimmy stared down at her, she pressed even closer. Which might’ve kept him from looking, but sure as hell sent his other senses into a dance of joy. It was as if they shared the same shirt—she was so soft and warm and alive. He wanted her with a sudden sharpness that triggered an equally powerful realization. It was so strong it nearly made him stagger.

He didn’t deserve her.

He had no right even to touch her. Not with these hands.

“Are you all right?” Tess whispered.

Caught in a weird time warp, Jimmy looked down into her eyes. They were light brown—a nothing-special color as far as eyes went—but he’d always been drawn to the intelligence and warmth he could see in them. He realized now, in this odd, lingering moment of clarity, that Tess’s eyes were beautiful. She was beautiful.

An angel come to save him . . .

“No,” he said, because for that instant he hated the idea of lying to her, and it had been a long time since he’d last felt anywhere close to all right.

Her eyes widened, and he knew that she’d spotted the blood on his shoe and the hole in his pants—number three on the roof had fought back—and assumed he’d been hurt. In truth, his physical health was the last thing he’d been thinking about.

But then Crystal put two bottles of beer on the bar, and Tess turned to thank her, and reality snapped back around. And she wasn’t angelic or even beautiful anymore—she was merely Tess Bailey from support, kind of pretty in an interesting way. Her smile was crooked and her nose was rather oddly shaped and her face was too round—she’d probably have jowls before she turned fifty.

Of course, right now the combination of interesting plus half naked made her look sizzling hot. And since right now was all that ever mattered to Jimmy, he pushed away the last lingering residuals of brightness that had momentarily dazzled him.

He was going to go home with Tess tonight. She didn’t know it yet, but it was a given. She wasn’t going to save him, though. At least not more than temporarily.

He was too far gone for that.

As for what he did or didn’t deserve . . . Real life was nothing like the movies, where villains were punished for their sins, and the righteous triumphed.

Which was damn lucky for him.

“Do you need me to get Decker?” When Crystal moved off, Tess’s full attention was back on him—her concern something he could have reached out and held in his hands.

“No, I’m fine,” Jimmy said, because she was looking at him as if he’d lost it. Crap, maybe he had for a minute there. “Really. Sorry.” He kissed her, just a quick press of his lips against hers, because he didn’t know how else to erase the worry from her eyes.

It worked to distract her—God knew it did a similar trick on him.

He wanted to kiss her again, longer, deeper—a real touch-the-tonsils, full fireworks-inducing event—but he didn’t. He’d save that for later.

And Decker always said he had no willpower.

“I’m really fine,” Jimmy said again, and forced a smile to prove it. “It’s just a scrape.”

He didn’t know that for sure—he hadn’t bothered to stop and look. Still, he’d managed to run back down the stairs. His injury couldn’t be that bad.

He looked out at the crowd, trying to get a read on who was shit-faced drunk—who would best serve as a catalyst for part two of tonight’s fun.

“Did you find a way to get Decker out of here?” Tess asked. He could see that he’d managed to confuse her. She was back to folding her arms across her chest.

“Yeah, I cleared the roof.” He wondered if she had any idea what that meant. He glanced back at the room. There was a man in a green T-shirt who was so tanked his own buddies’ laughter was starting to piss him off.

But Tess obviously didn’t understand any of what he’d said. “The roof? How . . . ?”

“I called for some help with our extraction.” Jimmy explained the easy part. “We’ll be flying Deck out of here—a chopper’s coming to pick us up—but first we need a little diversion. Have you ever been in a bar fight?”

Tess shook her head.

“Well, you’re about to be. If we get separated, if I can’t make it back over here, keep to the edge of the room. Keep your back to the wall, watch for flying objects, and be ready to duck. Work your way around to that exit sign—the one that’s directly across from the front entrance.” He pointed. “Behind that door are stairs. If you get there first, wait for me or Deck. Don’t open that door without one of us—is that clear?”

She nodded.

“Oh, and there’s one more important thing,” he said. “Will you have dinner with me tomorrow night?” You may feel a little pressure. . . .

Tess laughed her amazement.

“Don’t answer right away,” Nash said. “Give yourself time to think it over.”

He’d obviously caught her completely off guard. Good.

“Diego, I—”

“Heads up,” he interrupted.

Because here came ol’ Gus, right on cue, searching for Tess, wondering what the fuck was taking so long with their beers, impatient to send Decker to the parking lot where he’d be filled with holes, where he’d gasp out the last breath of his life in the gravel.

And here came Deck, right behind him, the only real gentleman in this den of bottom-feeders, ready to jump on Gus’s back if he so much as looked cross-eyed at cute little Tess Bailey from support.

“When I knock over that guy sitting there with the black T-shirt that says ‘Badass,’ ” Nash instructed her, meeting his partner’s gaze from across the room just as Gus spotted him with Tess. Gus reacted, reaching inside of his baseball jacket for either his cell phone or a weapon—it didn’t really matter which because he was so slo-oh-oh, and Deck was already on top of him, “lean over the bar and shout to your girlfriend Crystal that she should call 911, that someone in the crowd has a gun. On your mark, get set . . .”

Fifteen feet away, Decker brought Gus Mondelay to his knees and then to the floor, which was a damn good thing, because if it had been Nash taking him down, he would have snapped the motherfucker’s neck. “Go!”

Decker knew the drill.

After he relieved Mondelay of both his weapon and his cell phone and brought him, with a minimum amount of fuss, to an unconscious state, he was more than ready to vacate the premises as quickly as possible.

“Green shirt, two o’clock,” Nash shouted, giving Deck a target that was easy to spot, easy to hit.

After working together for seven years, he and Nash had the fine art of starting a bar fight down to a science. Find two angry drunks sitting fairly close together in the crowd. Knock into them both at the same time, taking them down to the floor, if possible. Come up loud, accusations flying, and start swinging.

Nash had an uncommon ability to determine a person’s flashpoint in just one glance. Man or woman, he could see ’em, read ’em, and play ’em to his full advantage.

That was no small skill to have in their line of work.

True to form, it was only a matter of moments before the fight between Green Shirt and Badass escalated into something even the bouncers couldn’t control. Tables were being knocked over, pitchers and mugs were flying, pool cues were being broken, chairs hefted and thrown.

It was a solid eight on a scale from one to ten—five being sufficient diversion for an escape.

Graceful as a dancer, Nash wove his way through the crowd, grabbing Tess Bailey as he headed for what Decker knew to be a fire exit.

Tess was still without a shirt, a fact that couldn’t have escaped Nash’s attention.

Instead of heading down and out, they took the stairs up, which was an interesting alternative.

Nash read his mind and answered the question as they continued to climb. “There’s an army in the parking lot, so I called for a budget buster.”

That was the Agency nickname for a helicopter extraction. Helos were expensive to keep in the air.

Nash had been pushing Tess in front of him, but now he stopped her from going out the door and onto the roof. “Get behind me,” he ordered as he handed her his shirt. About time—Decker had been on the verge of offering her his own T-shirt.

Although Tess didn’t seem to notice that Nash’s chivalrous action had come about ten minutes too late. In fact, she was looking at Nash the way women always looked at Nash, particularly after he gave her a smile and leaned in closer to say, “You were great down there.”

It was so typical. They weren’t even out of danger and Nash was already setting up the getting laid part of his evening.

Decker would have laughed, but this was Tess Bailey that his partner was messing with. Not only that, but there was something off about Nash tonight, something squirrelly, something . . . brittle. It was almost as if he were going through the motions, or maybe even playacting what was expected of him.

Deck could hear the sirens of the local police as they approached, called in to break up the bar fight. They were an additional diversion and added protection. With five cop cars in the parking lot, only the craziest sons of bitches in the Freedom Network would attempt a shot at the Agency helo that was coming to scoop them off the roof.

“We need to keep our eyes open—it’s been a few minutes since I cleared this area,” Nash told them, and just like that, Deck knew.

Something ugly had gone down when Nash cleared the roof of any potential shooters.

Decker would never know what had happened. He and Nash didn’t talk about things like that. Sure, Deck could try to bring it up, but the most he’d hear was “Yeah, I had a little trouble. It wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle.”

Except Decker wasn’t buying that anymore. Yes, without a doubt, his partner could handle any form of violence thrown at him and come out on top, or at least alive. But that was significantly different from the psychological handling that was required in this business. It was how Nash was handling the aftermath of violence that was worrying him.

“Here we go,” Nash said, firing another smile at Tess. The helo was out there. Deck could hear its thrumming approach. “Stay close.”

Nash met Deck’s eyes, and Deck nodded, his weapon drawn, too. They kicked open the door.

There was no one up there, no resistance. They were inside the helo and heading quickly out of the area in a matter of seconds.

It was impossible to talk over the noise from the blades, but as Decker watched, Nash leaned in to Tess, speaking directly into her ear.

She laughed, then moved even closer to say something back to him.

His turn again, and to whatever he’d said, she had no immediate response. There was a significant amount of eye contact though, particularly when Nash reached out and finished buttoning up that shirt he’d given her.

Maybe Nash would talk to Tess tonight—tell her the things he couldn’t put into words and say to Decker.

Or maybe he’d simply use her for sex until the scent of death wasn’t so strong in his nostrils anymore, until he thought he’d “handled” whatever it was that he’d had to do tonight to save Decker’s life.

Tess was watching Deck from across that helo cabin, and he made himself smile at her, hoping that she was using Nash as completely as Nash was using her, wishing she could read his mind and heed his unspoken warning.

But maybe she could, because she glanced at Nash, looked back at Decker, and made something of a face and a little shrug. Like, Yeah, I know exactly what I’ve gotten myself into, but really, can you blame me . . . ?”

No, he couldn’t. He just wished . . .

Decker wished Nash would take Tess home and talk to her about what had happened out on the roof tonight, instead of nailing her.

Although he knew damn well that his motives for wishing that weren’t entirely pure.

C HAPTER

T WO

TWO MONTHS LATER

AGENCY HQ, WASHINGTON , D.C.

Tess hung up the phone.

She couldn’t believe it.

Brian Underwood didn’t even have the balls to call her into his office and tell her the news to her face. He’d left a lousy message on her voice mail.

“Yeah, Bailey, it’s Brian. Sorry to make this a phone call, but it’s twenty-two hundred”—military speak for ten at night. Underwood had never been in the Armed Forces, but he liked people to think that he had—“and this memo just crossed my desk. I’ve got a busy day tomorrow and I didn’t want it to get lost in the shuffle, especially since I know you’ve been waiting on this info for a coupla weeks. Long story short, they turned you down for that field position. But hey, that doesn’t mean you can’t apply again in six months. There’s always next time, right? And in the meantime, your work with support is of vital importance. . . .”

If they hadn’t accepted her this time, when there were still two additional positions that needed filling ASAP, Tess knew she was never going to leave the support office. She would still be here when she was sixty-five, like Mrs. O’Reilly, four cubicles down. And while she could, indeed, appreciate the vital importance of her work, this was not the job she wanted—and it wasn’t the job she’d been promised when she’d signed on.

But Tess was never going to be promoted into the field.

Diego Nash had been right.

Somehow that made it sting even more. She didn’t want Nash to be right—not about this, not about anything. But most of all, she didn’t want to do so much as even think about him ever again.

Fool.

Not him—her. She was the fool. Not for letting him in that night. No, she knew exactly what she was getting—a one-night stand—when he’d asked to come up and she’d said yes.

She was a fool for thinking they’d actually connected. Somehow, something had happened to her brain after he’d kissed her in her kitchen. God, what a kiss. But sometime after that kiss and before the next morning, when she’d woken up, alone—and moronically surprised that he’d vanished with no word, no note—she’d fallen prey to Stupid Woman syndrome.

She’d slept with a man who was known as a player. She’d known that about him before she’d unlocked her apartment door. She’d accepted as fact that they were going to have nothing more than a fling.

And yet somehow she’d ended up thinking that this time it had been different. This time it had been meaningful. This time it had been special. This time he’d still be there in the morning—in fact, he’d be there for thirty-five years of mornings to come.

Yeah, right.

Fool.

And she was an even bigger fool for the way her heart still raced when the phone rang. What did she really think? That after two months of dead silence, Nash was suddenly going to call?

Flowers had arrived the very next morning. But they were from Deck. The card had a short message, in Decker’s own neat handwriting: “Thank you for going above and beyond the call of duty.” Tess knew his handwriting well. She’d processed many of his requisition sheets over the past few years. And in case she’d had any doubt, he’d signed it, “Lawrence Decker.”

On Monday, there was an email in her inbox that Decker had sent to the assistant director—a glowing recommendation that Tess be promoted to a field position. He’d written a brief note at the top of the copy he’d forwarded to her. “I’m not sure how much this will help.”

She’d sent a reply, just a short “Thank you,” but the email had bounced back to her—a sign that the system was freaking out again. It bounced a few days later, too, when she’d tried to resend.

At that point, she’d actually become scared, thinking that Nash and Decker might be dead. They hadn’t been into the office since that night. No paperwork had come through with their names on it either.

As the days continued to pass, she’d done some digging and found out to her shock that they’d left the Agency. Resigned. Just like that. They were gone and they weren’t coming back. Like most of their work in the field, their departure had been quiet. Covert.

Tess had dug farther, actually hacking into accounting, to find out that a rather substantial severance payment had been sent to Nash, care of a small hotel in Ensenada, Mexico, on the Pacific coast.

He was not just gone, he was gone . As in thousands of miles away.

And he hadn’t bothered to send her so much as a postcard with an insincere “Wish you were here.”

That had been a bad day, too. One of her all-time worst ever. Although today was coming pretty close to matching it.

It wasn’t even nine a.m., but Tess had to get out of here. She grabbed her purse from the bottom drawer of her desk. Most of her colleagues were still arriving, but her workday was over.

No. Correction. Her Agency career was over.

She took the framed snapshot of her nieces and her piece of the Berlin Wall—too small to be effective as a paperweight but heavy with importance and laden with history—her favorite pen, and her Jean-Luc Picard, Psyduck, and Buffy action figures from her desktop. That was all she wanted—the stupid lemon mints that Nash had liked so much could stay for the next naive recruit.

She took forty-five seconds to type up a letter, another ten to print it out.

Brian was already in his office, door closed, hiding from her. His administrative assistant, Carol, tried to intercept, but Tess wasn’t about to be stopped. Unlike Brian, she needed to deliver this message face-to-face.

She knocked and opened the door without waiting for his go-ahead. He was on the phone, and he looked up at her, the surprise on his broad face morphing instantly into recognition and guilt.

Yeah, he should feel guilty—making promises that he had no intention of keeping.

“Hang on, Milt,” he said into the phone, then put his hand over the receiver. “Bailey. You’re upset. Of course. Why don’t you take the day off?” He glanced toward the door, where his assistant was hovering. “Carol, will you check my schedule for this week and see when I have a spare twenty minutes to sit down and talk to Tess?”

Twenty minutes. This was her life, and he was going to give her twenty minutes of “Try again in six months” later in the week—when she knew for damn sure that right now he and Milton Heinrik were discussing nothing more important than a trade in their fantasy baseball league.

“I quit,” she said. She handed it to him in writing, too, and walked out the door.

KAZABEK , KAZBEKISTAN

Kazbekistani warlord Padsha Bashir had a firm grasp of the English language. He’d honed his language skills while attending college in the States. It seemed almost ludicrous that one of the most feared warlords in this country was an alum of Boston University; a member of the class of ’82.

Sophia stood impassively as the other women prepared her for this morning’s encounter, dressing her in a gown of sheerest gauze, brushing out the tangled knot of her just-washed hair. She didn’t bother to resist the dabs of perfume placed between her breasts and along her throat. She was saving her strength for the nightmare that was coming.

The gown was cool against her skin. It was not an unpleasant sensation.

Somehow that and the fact that the sun was up and streaming in through the palace windows made this seem even more surreal, and that much harder to bear.

But terrible things could happen in the sunlight. It had been a sunny morning, too, on that day when—

Sophia opened her eyes to escape the memory of Dimitri’s head rolling across the ornately tiled palace floor—or at least to try to escape the grisly image for a while.

If she survived this coming day, she’d surely see the gruesome sight of Dimitri’s mouth open in a silent scream the moment she fell asleep. It was a nightmare image she would remember forever, even if she lived to be a hundred and ten.

What had the floor, the room, looked like to Dimitri? Had he seen her in those last few seconds of his life as she gasped with horror?

Death by beheading came fast, but did it come fast enough?

Sophia couldn’t stop thinking about it.

And little wonder, since every time she came face-to-face with Bashir, he had that very same deadly sharp sword close at hand.

He placed it on the table near his bed, and, when she was led into the room, he would never fail to demonstrate to her just how sharp it still was.

His message was clear. If she failed to please him—this bastard who’d killed her husband—her head would be next to roll across the floor.

Two of the women moved the mirror closer so Sophia could see herself—as if she cared.

They’d dressed her in white again. With her blond hair and fair skin, in that nearly transparent gown, she looked like some kind of MTV version of a virgin sacrifice.

Virgin, hah. The truth was that Bashir liked women dressed in white because it contrasted with the red of their blood.

Sophia didn’t know if she would still be alive an hour from now. All she knew for sure was that she was going to bleed.

CASA CARMELITA , ENSENADA , MEXICO

Tess Bailey was back in his bed.

Although back wasn’t quite correct, since that one night Jimmy had spent with her had been in her bed, in her cozy little apartment with that kitchen with the cow wallpaper, out in Silver Springs, Maryland.

“Nash.”

But the difference between Tess’s bed and his didn’t matter now, because she was here and she was naked and she was warm and she was willing and God, God, God, he wanted her.

“I’m here,” she said as she kissed him, as she opened herself to him. “It’s okay, Jimmy, I’m here. . . .”

He pushed inside of her, nearly blind with need, and oh, holy sainted mother of—

“Nash.”

Jimmy opened his eyes to see Lawrence Decker standing over him. He sat up and his head nearly exploded, but he still managed to take in the fact that he was quite definitely alone in his hotel room bed, that the sun was streaming in through the window blinds, that the ceiling fan overhead was on high, that his mouth was impossibly dry . . .

And that if Deck had been an assassin, Jimmy would, without a doubt, be exceedingly dead right now.

It was not his finest hour.

“Hey,” Jimmy greeted him, his voice sounding rusty to his own ears. “You changed your mind about that vacation, huh?”

“Not exactly.” Deck glanced at the two empty bottles of tequila sitting on the bedside table. “You stopped answering your cell phone.”

“Ah,” Jimmy said. “My batteries ran out.”

“A week ago?”

“Yeah, well.” He shrugged. “You know how it is on vacation. You stop wearing a watch, stop charging the phone.”

He looked at Decker standing there in his T-shirt and those army green fatigues with all those pockets, looking almost exactly the same as he’d looked that day they’d first been introduced. And this is Chief Lawrence Decker, formerly of SEAL Team One. What was it about former SEALs, former Rangers? They had a look to them, an edge, that they never lost. It had been, what, seven and a half years since Deck left the teams, yet he still walked, talked, moved, stood, even breathed like a Navy SEAL.

“Or maybe you don’t know how it is,” Jimmy added.

When they’d worked together at the Agency, Decker never took vacations.

“Are you all right?” Decker asked. It was the closest he’d get to mentioning those bottles.

With his hair colored hair and his eye colored eyes, his pleasantly featured face, his relatively vertically challenged stature and bantam-weight build, Decker was the poster child for average.

“I’m great.” Jimmy swung his legs out of bed, pushed himself up—Christ, his head—and staggered into the bathroom.

“You don’t look great.” Decker raised his voice slightly to be heard from the other room.

Jimmy flushed the toilet and moved to the sink, splashing his face, drinking from a water bottle he kept nearby, swallowing some painkiller at the same time.

He winced at his reflection in the mirror as he supported himself with both hands on the edge of the sink. He looked—and felt—like walking road-kill.

Decker, always thoughtful, waited until he turned off the water to say, “I got a call from Tom Paoletti.”

And there it was.

The reason Jimmy had stayed here in Mexico for all these weeks.

Lawrence Decker was a man with a future—and he needed to move into that future unencumbered by ghosts from the past.

Jimmy turned away from the mirror, taking his towel with him into the bedroom, drying his dripping face. “I told you he’d call. Congratulations. When do you start?”

And what the hell took Tom Paoletti so long to call? But he didn’t bother to ask that because he already knew. He was what took Tom Paoletti so long. Pizza and beer. Thunder and lightning. Decker and Nash.

You couldn’t have one without the other.

Or so people thought.

But pizza went down just fine with tequila, too.

Decker, as always, didn’t miss a note. He caught Jimmy’s intentional you .

And gently volleyed back a plural. “He wants us to come to San Diego,” he said. “As soon as possible.”

Us. Jimmy sat on the bed, exhausted and still half drunk. “I don’t know, Deck. I’m a little tied up right now.”

Decker nodded, as if that weren’t the biggest load of bullshit he’d ever encountered. “I could really use you,” he said. “Tom’s looking to send a team of civilians into Kazbekistan.”

Kazbekistan. Yeah, right.

There was no way anyone from the West was crossing over the K-stan border without some seriously expensive equipment. Such as HALO gear—including an extremely high altitude aircraft to jump out of.

Decker was, no doubt, attempting the age-old practice of bait and switch. He knew Jimmy wouldn’t rest easy with the idea of Deck heading into the hotbed of terrorist activity known in the Spec Ops world as “the Pit” without someone to watch his back. But as soon as they got to Tom Paoletti’s office, Jimmy would find out that the job was really in Sandusky. Some dot com geeks with more money than God wanted to feel important and install a high-tech security grid in their corporate headquarters.

“Kazbekistan,” Jimmy repeated.

Deck nodded.

Jimmy laughed—softly, so his head wouldn’t split in two. “You are such a fucking liar. But yeah. Okay. I’ll go to Kazbekistan. You go get the plane tickets from Tom Paoletti. I’ll wait here.”

Decker’s response was to cross to the ancient television that was on and flickering, volume muted. He flipped stations until he found a cable news channel and turned up the sound.

English subtitles scrolled across the bottom of the screen as the anchor delivered the story in Spanish spoken too quickly for Jimmy to follow. The graphic behind the woman said Terremoto in crumbling letters. “. . . six point eight on the Richter scale, with the epicenter of the devastating earthquake just north of downtown Kazabek.”

Holy Mary, Mother of God. The death toll was going to be in the tens of thousands. Jimmy leaned closer.

“For the first time in five years,” the anchor—a hot bleached blonde with big lips—announced, “Kazbekistan’s borders are open to Western relief workers.”

“It would save time,” Deck told Jimmy, “if you just came with me to San Diego.”

KAZABEK , KAZBEKISTAN

Sophia had her eyes closed—it was always easier with her eyes closed—when the earthquake hit.

At first she, like Bashir and his men, thought they were under artillery attack.

It certainly felt like some kind of bombardment, the way the building shook and windows rattled.

Everything happened so quickly.

A half-dozen guards burst into the room.

Bashir shoved her roughly aside and she fell onto the tile floor, her head hitting with a jarring crack.

It felt as she’d imagined it would, only unlike Dimitri, she still had her head attached to her neck.

Bashir shouted to the guards as he scrambled for his clothes, ordering them to sound the alarms, and they rushed back out of the room. . . .

Leaving her alone with the warlord, whose back was to the table beside his bed. It was the same table upon which he’d put his sword after demonstrating to her just how razor-sharp it still was.

She’d lived through a massive earthquake before in Turkey, and unlike Bashir, who was convinced he had an enemy to repel, she began to suspect that was what this was. But bombardment or quake, it was the break for which she’d been waiting two long months.

Sophia grabbed the sword.

She didn’t have the upper body strength to behead Bashir with one mighty stroke, as much as she would have liked to do just that unto him. As he had done unto others.

Instead she lunged, throwing all of her weight into it.

Even so, she didn’t manage to run him clean through. Still, it stopped him, his scream of pain lost among all the other cries echoing through his palace.

He fell to his knees, and Sophia grabbed the bedcover and ran to the door. The entrance to Bashir’s chamber was usually guarded, but everyone—guards and servants alike—had fled. She wrapped the folds of fabric around her, turning it into a makeshift burka and hiding the blood on her gown.

She made it to the front door, where a crowd of people were pushing to get outside, where uncovered women were being turned back, despite the fact that a portion of the palace roof had already caved in.

Sophia covered her head and face and slipped out onto the street, into the dust rising up into the blue morning sky, and ran.

C HAPTER

T HREE

SAN DIEGO , CALIFORNIA

Tom Paoletti slid a photograph across the table in the conference room of his offices at Troubleshooters Incorporated. “Ma’awiya Talal Sayid.”

Decker picked up the photo as Jimmy sat forward to get a look. “When and where was this taken, sir?” Deck asked.

“Kazabek,” Paoletti told them in a voice that revealed his New England roots. “Today. About thirteen hundred local time.”

Deck passed the photo over, and Jimmy took a closer look at the man who was known to be a top al-Qaeda operative. “Is he . . . ?”

“Dead,” Paoletti finished for him. “Yeah. Courtesy of the quake.” He pushed more photos toward them.

Jimmy leaned forward again. None of the news stations had footage or even photos of the devastation in Kazbekistan—reporters from the West hadn’t been allowed into the country for years.

In these photos, the skyline of the city—an architectural blend of ancient and new—had been radically changed. The Kazabek Grande Hotel still stood, a testament to the Westernization of the tiny country in the late 1970s. But the office building next to it had partially crumbled. In the foreground of the photo, many of the older structures—homes similar to that of Jimmy’s longtime contact Rivka and his wife, Guldana—had been reduced to rubble. It looked like parts of Baghdad and Basra after the war in Iraq.

“I’m sorry—I know both of you have friends in Kazabek.”

Jimmy looked up into Paoletti’s eyes. The compassion and understanding he saw there was not feigned.

“The situation’s bad. Sewer pipes broke—water’s contaminated in most of the southern sectors. WHO’s trying to get involved—southern Kazabek’s an epidemic waiting to happen. Power’s out, cell towers—the few that were left—are down. And the local warlords are still killing each other and anyone who looks at them cross-eyed.” Paoletti smiled. “I’d make one hell of a travel agent, huh? Bottom line, this job is going to suck.”

“We’ve both been to K-stan before, sir,” Decker told him. “Conditions there have never been good.”

“Yeah. I served a short sentence there myself,” Paoletti said. “And you don’t have to sir me. We’re not in the Navy anymore, Deck.”

When Jimmy had walked into this office, nothing about this place had impressed him. The building itself was low-rent, the furniture ugly, and the receptionist’s desk empty. Tom Paoletti’s new company specialized in personal security, but at first glance it looked as if Troubleshooters Incorporated needed a little rescuing itself.

But then Paoletti—the former commanding officer of SEAL Team Sixteen—had come out of the back office and shook his and Deck’s hands, and Jimmy knew instantly why the man was a Spec Ops legend.

He had that same je ne sais quoi that Decker did—the same golden aura. It danced and glowed about him and proclaimed him a true leader of men. Of women, too, although Jimmy would bet big money that most women followed Tom Paoletti around for a different reason entirely. And this was despite the fact that, in another couple of years, he was going to be billiard-ball bald.

Deck’s still-thick head of hair wasn’t the only difference between the two men. In fact, besides that rare leadership quality they shared, they really weren’t that much alike.

Paoletti’s quietness was easygoing. There was a contentment to him, a sense of peace, a comfortable-inside-his-skin quality that could be found only in someone who—at least most of the time—liked the man he saw in his bathroom mirror each morning.

Decker’s watchful quiet, on the other hand, seemed to hold an undercurrent of danger. He was like a gunslinger from one of those old Westerns Jimmy had watched as a kid. Quiet and even polite, but with something in the way he sat or stood that let the world know this was not a man to mess with.

And if he was messed with, look out.

And yet, at the same time, Deck could, with very little effort, make himself completely invisible.

That was something Jimmy particularly admired, since invisibility in a crowd wasn’t high on his personal list of easy tricks.

He suspected it wasn’t on Paoletti’s either. But right now the man was silent, just letting Decker take a longer look at the photographs he’d given them.

Deck knew Paoletti from his years with the SEAL teams. In the rental car on the way to this meeting, when Jimmy had been speculating on the nature of this assignment, Deck had turned to him and said, “I’d sign on just to shine Commander Paoletti’s shoes.”

It was one hell of an endorsement.

“Where did these pictures come from?” Decker asked Paoletti now. “Who’s the photographer?”

“The client sent them to me,” he replied. “I can’t be more specific than that.”

“Understood.” Deck finally put the photos down on the table. “They’re looking for Sayid’s laptop.”

It wasn’t a question, but Paoletti nodded. He glanced at Jimmy, checking to see if he was up to speed.

He was, indeed. Al-Qaeda leader Ma’awiya Talal Sayid carried a laptop that was believed to contain a gushing fountain of information—maybe enough to clue in the West to the next terrorist target. Of course the key word there was believed .

“Does your client—let’s call them the Agency for short—have any proof that this mystical laptop isn’t just a rumor?” Jimmy asked. “Or that it contains more than the latest versions of Pac-Man and Solitaire?”

“Nope,” Paoletti told him, with a coolness in his eyes that let Jimmy know his easygoing friendliness was for Decker and Decker alone. Paoletti still hadn’t decided whether he and Nash would be buddies. Which was different from most people’s prejudgment. Most people filed Jimmy in their troublemakers folder before even meeting him.

“And let’s not call the client anything but the client,” Paoletti added. “They like it better that way.”

“Especially since you haven’t got your Cone of Silence up and working,” Jimmy said with a deliberate glance around the room, letting Paoletti know that he, too, hadn’t yet decided if he was going to climb in bed with the former SEAL. So to speak.

Paoletti laughed, getting both the Get Smart reference and Jimmy’s unspoken message, which was another point in his favor. “Yeah, well, we moved into this office two months ago and I haven’t had time to hire a receptionist, let alone set up some kind of shielded room.” He included Deck in the conversation. “I’m turning work away, Chief—I can’t keep up with the demand. Lot of people traveling overseas want an armed escort these days. Even domestically, there’s a huge call for additional security, evacuation plans, that type of assignment. And those are just the corporate clients. But this job . . . this one’s important. The client can’t send in their own, um, employees—the U.S.–K-stani relationship has deteriorated beyond repair and if those employees were discovered, there could be real trouble. I don’t think that’s news to either of you.”

It wasn’t. It had been more than three years since Jimmy had gone into K-stan with Decker on an Agency assignment. “And yet someone eliminated Sayid,” he commented.

“No. Mother Nature eliminated Sayid. His death was from internal damage, believed to be caused by a collapsing building,” Paoletti informed them. “He apparently crawled free and found his way to a hospital before he died. We have no idea where he was at the time of the quake, or if his laptop is still there in the rubble. Even if it is, it could be destroyed or damaged.”

“Which hospital?” Deck asked.

Paoletti shook his head. “We don’t even know that.”

Deck glanced at Jimmy, who sat forward to look more closely at the two pictures of Sayid. They were both the same photograph, but one had been cropped and enlarged so that the terrorist leader was in close-up. The original shot showed a long line of injured people in makeshift beds, really no more than pallets on the floor, in an ornately tiled room being used as a temporary hospital ward.

“This is the lobby of the Hôpital Cantara,” Jimmy told Decker. “Near Kazabek’s City Center.” He glanced at Paoletti, resisting the urge to bat his eyelashes. So do you love me yet?

“You’re that certain?” the former SEAL CO asked.

“I went there a few years back to get some stitches,” Jimmy told him.

Paoletti lifted an eyebrow. “I thought you Agency types were like the SEALs and stitched yourselves up.”

“In my large intestine,” Jimmy added. He often got dinged up out in the field, a result of playing hard and rough, but that time he’d been stabbed.

I can’t believe you call getting stabbed “dinged up.” Tess Bailey’s voice echoed in his head from that night, two months ago. He’d answered, There’s a big difference between getting dinged and stabbed. She hadn’t believed him, but it was true.

The barely noticeable ding Jimmy had gotten on the night Tess had helped him keep Decker from being gunned down in the parking lot of the Gentlemen’s Den was very different from the injury that had brought him to the Cantara hospital.

He’d been jumped. Three to one—odds he normally wouldn’t have blinked at, but one of ’em had a knife that Jimmy hadn’t seen until it was almost too late. He’d stopped the blade from going into his chest, instead catching it lower, in his gut.

That had hurt. But it hadn’t killed him. It had warranted that trip to the hospital, though. Which was serendipitous, since he could now give a positive ID to the location of Sayid’s body.

“I sat in that lobby for ten hours,” Jimmy told Paoletti. There had been that many people there who were more seriously wounded than he was. It was just another night in Kazbekistan. He tapped the picture. “This is L’Hôpital Cantara. No question in my mind.”

Paoletti nodded. “I’m putting together a team,” he said, “to enter Kazbekistan as earthquake relief workers, and to find and extract Sayid’s laptop.”

Decker nodded, too. “Who’s your team leader, sir? Starrett?”

A Texan by the name of Sam Starrett, also formerly of Navy SEAL Team Sixteen, was a major player in Paoletti’s new company, as was Starrett’s wife, former FBI agent Alyssa Locke, whose beauty was as legendary as her sharpshooting skills. Jimmy had hoped to meet the two of them today.

“Sam and Alyssa are both out of town,” Paoletti told them. Of course, “out of town” meant something a little different for his employees than it did for most people. “I was hoping you’d lead this team, Deck.”

Whoa. This wasn’t just a job offer—this was an open door. Paoletti was offering Decker a new career.

But Deck, being Deck, didn’t leap up and start doing cartwheels. He just nodded as if he were thinking about it, as if he might actually say no. He finally glanced at Jimmy before asking Paoletti, “What size team are you hoping to send over?”

“I’d like to send a battalion, but I just don’t have the manpower,” Paoletti said. Rumor had it he was recruiting as fast as he could. But recruiting took time. Background checks could be a real bitch.

Jimmy knew what his own background check had revealed. Nothing of substance. A name, a social security number, a date and city of birth. A two-word message: Access denied.

And just enough rumors to warrant that coolness in Tom Paoletti’s eyes.

He was actually surprised that Paoletti hadn’t asked to speak to Decker privately. Of course, there was still time for that.

“I’ve got two men who’ve worked with me for the past few months who are already en route to Kazabek—Dave Malkoff and Vinh Murphy,” the former SEAL CO continued. “Normally I would’ve asked for your approval as team leader before sending them out, but I couldn’t wait. Murph spent ten years in the Marines; Dave was with the CIA.”

“I know them both,” Deck said.

So did Jimmy. Murphy was cool, part African-American, part Vietnamese, with just enough Irish thrown in to make things completely confusing to anyone walking into a room and looking for a guy named Murphy. But CIA agent—former CIA agent, apparently, since he was now working for Paoletti—Dave Malkoff was a complete head case. He was a bundle of raw nerves in need of some serious decaffeination. And a new wardrobe. He made the MIB squad look colorful.

“Nash isn’t a big fan of Malkoff’s,” Decker told Paoletti, “but I’m okay with him. And Murph’s solid.”

“I’d also like to send along a computer specialist,” Paoletti told them, “but there’s a real shortage of skilled people. I got a call just this morning from a comspesh who’s had field training, but no experience. I know that’s not ideal. And I’ve never worked with her myself so I can’t vouch for—”

“Her?” Jimmy interrupted. Whoops. Deck was giving him a look. “Excuse me.” He threw in a little extra respect. “Sir. You’re actually considering sending a woman into Kazbekistan?”

Sending female agents into K-stan hadn’t been done without a great deal of angst five years ago, before the armpit of a country had had a regime change. And over the past few months things had gotten even worse there. Even the most basic of women’s rights had been flushed down the toilet.

“She wouldn’t be my first choice,” Paoletti said. “If I had a choice. Like I said, I haven’t worked with this comspesh, I haven’t even met her. But I’m pretty sure you both know her. She just left the Agency.”

A comspesh that he and Deck knew from the Agency who’d had field training? Oh, no. No, no.

“She worked in the support office.” Paoletti shuffled through the papers in front of him. “Her name’s . . .”

Not . . .

“Tess Bailey.”

Oh, shit.

Paoletti looked sharply up at Jimmy. “Problem, Nash?”

Had he said that aloud?

Apparently he had, since Deck was looking at him, too.

“No,” Jimmy lied automatically before his brain fully kicked in. There were a lot of problems with Tess Bailey joining the team, and only one of them related to the fact that he’d spent the night with her two months ago and then left town without calling, without emailing, without a single word.

“Well, actually yes,” he quickly countered. “She’s great. Don’t get me wrong, Tess Bailey is really, really great. Good person. Smart, resourceful . . . But like you said, she’s got no experience out in the field.” He looked from Decker to Paoletti. “None. Whatsoever.”

“Everyone’s got to start somewhere,” Decker pointed out.

“Yes. Yes, they do.” Jimmy turned to face his partner, giving him an SOS message with his eyes. Whose side was he on here? “In Kansas City. Or Lincoln, Nebraska. Lincoln’s a great place to start fieldwork. Not Kazbekistan.”

Christ, he was going to pop a vein. He forced himself to take a deep breath. There was no way anyone in their right mind was going to send Tess Bailey and her cute little freckles to K-stan, the country that bore the nickname “the Pit.” As in Shit Pit. As in the putrid stank of the worst side of humanity.

“Tom. May I call you Tom?” Jimmy didn’t wait for Paoletti to give him permission before continuing. “Seriously, Tom, this is a woman who grew up on a farm in Iowa. We’re talking Middle America. Cornfields and blue skies. And she looks it, too. She has no chance of blending in in Kazabek. I mean, she might as well walk off the plane waving an American flag and singing ‘Yankee Doodle.’ I’m telling you, she looks like she stepped out of a Disney movie.”

“I don’t know what Disney movies you’ve been watching,” Decker said, giving Jimmy a smile that was grimly amused. “But I disagree.” He turned to Paoletti. “I think Tess Bailey would do just fine. Like Nash said, she’s smart and resourceful. In my opinion, she’s ready for the real world. When did she leave the Agency?”

Jimmy clenched his teeth, squelching a sound of pain. Decker was screwing him. And on purpose, too, if he correctly read the meaning of that smile.

“Just today,” Paoletti reported. “Apparently she got passed over for a field position again. She’s been trying to break out of support for a while.”

“Maybe there’s a good reason she was passed over,” Jimmy pointed out.

Paoletti turned to look at him. “Is there anything specific you know about her that would—”

“Yes,” Decker answered the man before Jimmy could even open his mouth. “The reason she was passed over is that she’s damn good at what she does while sitting at a desk. She’s a hacker, sir. She’s practically hardwired into her computer. It’s poetic, what she can do. She was working as part of a tiger team while she was in college—that’s how she got recruited by the Agency. They were bluffing when they turned her down—I know this for a fact. It’s been the Agency’s experience that most women will settle for support, or even just keep following the rules and applying for fieldwork indefinitely, but apparently she called their bluff and walked. Good for her.”

Paoletti laughed his surprise. “I guess you like her for this slot.”

But Decker wasn’t ready to laugh about this. “Not so much for this particular job, sir. I’m with Nash—I’d rather not bring a woman into K-stan unless there’s no other choice. But you definitely want her as a permanent member of your team.”

Whoa, what was Decker saying? Permanent? Jimmy couldn’t imagine going to K-stan with Tess, let alone working with her on a permanent basis.

Although, wait. Breathe. He himself was only in for this one assignment. He was going to Kazbekistan because he’d told Deck he would. But afterward, he was going to disappear again—this time someplace where Decker wouldn’t find him.

“The Agency’s going to come back to Tess with an offer,” Decker told Paoletti. “And they’re going to do it soon. If you want her—and you do, believe me, sir—you better grab her while you can. Bring her in for an interview—fast.”

A buzzer sounded from the outer office, but Paoletti didn’t move. He just gave Deck a long, measured look. The buzzer sounded again. It was the doorbell. Without a receptionsist out front, the door to the street was kept locked. It sounded a third time before he finally spoke. “Are you involved with this woman, Chief?”

Deck looked surprised and then . . . embarrassed? He glanced at Jimmy before answering. “Did I say something that implied I was—”

“No, you didn’t.” Paoletti cut him off, looking at Jimmy, too, speculation on his face.

Jimmy tried to look only mildly interested—as if this conversation about Tess Bailey wasn’t making him want to squirm in his seat.

“And frankly,” Paoletti added, “I shouldn’t have asked. It’s not my business. You just seem to know her rather well, and it reminded me of . . .” He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

But it obviously did matter to Deck. “I worked with Tess, sir,” he said, “and I don’t fraternize.”

“This isn’t the Navy,” Paoletti pointed out. “I don’t have any rules about what my people do on their time off. And as far as I’m aware, the Agency didn’t have those kinds of restrictions either.”

“As a rule, sir, I keep intimate relationships separate from work.”

Unlike some asshole whose name just might be Nash. Or mud. The two were apparently synonymous. Decker’s message to Jimmy was loud and clear, even without the pointed look.

The office telephone rang. “Excuse me,” Paoletti said, and picked it up. “Paoletti.”

Jimmy took the opportunity to lean toward Deck. “I’d like to point out that, also as a rule, you never get laid.”

Deck didn’t bother to respond.

“Great,” Paoletti said into the phone. “I’ll be right there to let you in.” He pushed himself to his feet and dropped another bomb, this one of devastating proportions. “Tess Bailey’s out front. Her flight got in early.”

Jimmy didn’t so much as blink. Mentally, he’d jumped out of his seat and run right through the wall into the back parking lot—like Wile E. Coyote used to do on the Road Runner—leaving behind a hole in the shape of a desperately fleeing man. Physically though, he didn’t move an eyelash.

“That fast enough for you, Chief?” Paoletti smiled at Decker.

As the former SEAL CO vanished into the outer office, Decker turned and looked at Jimmy. His eyes were decidedly chilly.

“You didn’t call her after we left the Agency, did you?” Deck guessed correctly, although it was a mystery how he suddenly knew that. Because Jimmy was still not reacting to Tess’s unexpected appearance. Not at all. Nothing, nada, zip. No expression whatsoever. “You didn’t tell her where you were going, you just left town, no word.”

It was pointless to lie. “Yeah.” Crap, how was he going to handle this?

“You are such an asshole.” Deck was going to be no help. He was genuinely pissed at Jimmy.

It didn’t happen often, but when it did—look out.

“Yeah, I know.” He was an asshole. Had he really thought he’d simply never run into Tess again? Had he honestly believed it would be that easy?

“You know what I never do?” Deck said flatly. “I never find myself in the awkward situation of having to work with someone I’ve screwed, both literally and figuratively. Jesus, Nash.”

Jimmy could hear Tess’s voice in the outer office—her laughter as she responded to the lower rumble of Paoletti’s voice. Shit. Shit. Any second she was going to walk in here and . . .

“You don’t have to worry,” Decker told him. “Not right now, anyway. She’s a professional—she’s going to behave like a professional. It’s later, when she gets you alone—”

Oh, Holy Christ. “Don’t let her get me alone.” Jimmy broke down and begged.

“Fuck you,” Decker said, and actually meant it. He stood up, headed toward the door that led to the outer office. “I’m not just going to let it happen, asshole. I’m going to help set it up.”

“No, Deck, listen,” Jimmy said. “You don’t get it. . . .”

But what could he possibly say to make Decker understand when he himself didn’t even fully comprehend the reason he’d run so hard and fast from Tess?

But Decker wasn’t waiting for him to try to explain the inexplicable.

He was already gone.

C HAPTER

F OUR

Decker intercepted Tess and Paoletti before they came into the conference room.

“Hey, Tess,” he said, holding out his hand for her to shake. “How’ve you been?”

She was surprised to see him. Genuinely pleased, too, with a wide smile that was sincere. “Lawrence Decker! I didn’t expect to see you in San Diego.”

She took his breath away, she looked so good. Healthy, with high energy. Happy. As if she hadn’t spent the past two months pining away after Nash. Of course, maybe she hadn’t. Maybe she hadn’t even noticed when he’d left.

Her brown hair was cut short—even shorter than it had been that night she and Nash had saved his ass at that strip club outside of D.C. She was dressed more formally now in a feminine version of a business suit, a crisp white shirt buttoned nearly to her throat. It was a far cry from those half-undone jeans and nothing else, but okay, thinking about that was seriously inappropriate right now. Decker was certain that a perceptive woman could always tell when a man was remembering what she looked like naked.

And Tess was extremely perceptive.

“Yeah,” he said, thinking instead about Nash sitting in that conference room. “We just flew in this morning.”

She picked up on that we , and her expression changed. It was subtle—she was good at masking it—but her entire body seemed to tense. So much for hoping that she hadn’t noticed when Nash left.

God damn Nash. Deck promised himself to take the son of a bitch into the sparring ring as soon as possible—and beat the shit out of him, under pretense of physical training.

Of course, Decker would get equally thrashed, but maybe he deserved it, too. He should have said something to Nash three years ago, when Tess first came to work at support. Something like, “Hey, I really like this one.”

And then Nash would’ve kept his hands off of her.

Of course, so would’ve Decker.

Because Nash was right about one thing. Refusing to mix work and sex, and then working 24/7, pretty much meant a total lack of sex.

Decker was going to have to do something about that in the very near future.

Right now he turned to Tom Paoletti. “If you want, Nash and I could step outside for a while, let you talk to Tess privately.”

This was the equivalent of a job interview for her. He tried to imagine doing an interview with Emily in the room. Well, okay, bad example, because on some levels he’d been relieved when she’d moved out of their apartment. But still . . .

“No, let’s keep you part of this,” Commander Paoletti said, leading the way back into the conference room.

Deck watched as Tess braced herself. She took a deep breath, stuck a pleasant smile on her face, and . . .

Nash was on his feet, looking equally casual, hands in his pockets. He greeted Tess with a completely impersonal smile. “Tess Bailey. What a surprise.”

“I bet,” she said. “How are you? How was Mexico?”

As Decker watched, something flickered in her eyes, and he knew she’d just realized that she’d given something vital away.

Nash hadn’t told her he was going to Mexico. Which meant that she’d cared enough to look for him after he’d left.

Deck could see from the way Nash was standing, from his “Oh, uh . . . It was . . . uh, great,” that he’d picked up on that info, too.

He wondered if Nash had taken Tess’s seemingly innocent question one step further and realized that not only had she looked for him, but she was good enough to find him.

And intelligent enough not to pursue him.

“That’s . . . great,” Tess said. “You look like you got some rest. I’m glad.”

She really meant it. She really was glad.

Decker couldn’t have loved his partner more if he were his own brother, but never before had he wanted quite so badly to break Nash’s nose.

But then he looked over and realized that Nash knew she meant it, too. And the son of a bitch was actually shaken. Tess and Commander Paoletti probably didn’t notice it, but Decker sure as hell did.

And wasn’t that interesting? Nash. Shaken.

They all sat down, and Decker sat back and watched everyone’s body language as Paoletti—as easygoing and relaxed as ever—explained about the earthquake and the missing laptop. Tess—feigning casual comfort and sitting in a position that signaled she was interested in this job and open to all possibilities—asked questions and made comments that let them all know she was completely up to speed on both al-Qaeda and Kazbekistan, and entirely capable of holding her own as a member of the team.

Nash was very, very quiet. Normally never going for long without some comment or joke, he simply sat and listened while Tess answered Paoletti’s inquiries about why she’d left the Agency, about her training, about her background.

He was completely motionless and closed. Legs and arms crossed, shoulders tight. He looked as if he might explode, if someone held a burning match to him.

Tess had plenty of questions for Tom Paoletti, too, about Troubleshooters Incorporated.

“This team you’re building for this assignment in K-stan, is it a permanent grouping of personnel?” she asked. In other words, if she signed on now to work with Decker and Nash, would she be working with Decker and Nash forever and ever, amen?

“No,” Paoletti told her. “Each team will be created from the larger pool of personnel, depending on the needs of the assignment and the preferences of the individual team leader.”

Tess looked at Decker, one eyebrow raised. “And you honestly want me on your team for this assignment?”

Decker shifted in his seat. “Honestly?” he said. “No.”

She blinked at him, then laughed, turning to look questioningly at Tom Paoletti.

But Deck wasn’t done. “No one in this room wants to send a woman to Kazbekistan. But we need a comspesh, and our choice seems to be either you or no comspesh at all.”

Tess nodded, meeting his gaze again. “I appreciate your honesty. As a woman, I’m not particularly happy at the thought of going there. On the other hand, I am completely thrilled at the idea of participating in such an important assignment. If we can locate that laptop and gain access to al-Qaeda’s plans . . .” She looked at Paoletti again. “If you’re offering me this job, I accept.”

Nash suddenly spoke up. “What about Mike Giacomo?”

“Gigamike?” Decker laughed. Nash despised Gigamike Giacomo.

“Yeah,” Nash said. “Sure, he’s an idiot, but no more so than freaking David Malkoff. Gig’s a comspesh and he’s male.”

“I don’t want him on my team.” Deck put finality in his voice.

There was silence then. Paoletti had definitely picked up on the tension in the room. But he just sat back, watching.

“There are steps we can take to ensure Tess is as safe as possible,” Decker continued.

“Yeah, except at night, because as an unmarried woman, she can’t sleep in the same room with us.” Nash was done being silent. “Depending on where we’re staying, there’s a chance she might even be housed in a different building than we are—”

Tess cut Nash off. “So I’ll go in as a married woman. Who’ll know that I’m not?”

“That’ll work only if you pretend to be married to one of us,” Decker pointed out. He looked at Paoletti. “But that’s a good idea. If we can get Tess a new passport and papers on short notice . . .”

Paoletti nodded. “I’ll get whatever documents we need.”

“Then one of us can pretend to be her husband and be with her at all times,” Deck said.

“It can’t be Decker,” Nash said to Paoletti, to Tess. “Too many of our contacts in Kazabek think he’s got a K-stani wife back here in the States.”

That was true. In the past, Deck had worked hard to establish an identity, a cover, on his frequent trips to K-stan. He’d created Melisande, his fictional wife, and it had helped him gain acceptance and trust. To show up now with a different “wife” would be the equivalent of tattooing the words “I am an agent of the U.S. Government” on his forehead. Even now, three years after his last visit.

“And it can’t be Dave Malkoff,” Nash continued. “No one in their right mind would believe Tess would marry him. Our cover would be blown before we even got out of the airport.”

Tess cleared her throat and crossed her legs. “I don’t know Dave, so I’m not sure whether you’re insulting me or—”

“Him,” Nash said quickly. “I’m insulting him.”

“Dave is lacking in certain social skills,” Decker told her.

“He’s a freak,” Nash said bluntly, going for truth over tact. “And he looks and acts like a total geek.”

“So what?” she argued. “People fall in love and get married for all different reasons. Maybe he’s great in bed. In my experience, just because a guy isn’t GQ handsome doesn’t automatically mean he’s not great in bed. And vice versa.”

O-kay. Decker didn’t dare look at Nash. And vice versa. He didn’t want to begin to speculate about the subtext of that message.

Tess broke the silence. “Well, I sure know how to stop a conversation cold, don’t I? My comment was inappropriate, and I’m sorry, but it really annoys me when people are judged on their appearance.”

“Dave Malkoff is a freak because he’s a freak,” Nash told her in that completely calm voice he used when he was hiding an emotional reaction. “He’s book smart, but if someone didn’t remind him to go home, he’d starve to death in his office. The fact that he looks like a geek is secondary to—”

“It can’t be Dave,” Paoletti interrupted the discussion. “Or Murphy. So we might as well get that idea off the table. They’re already en route to Kazabek. They’re out of the loop. They both spent significant time in K-stan before the borders were closed—I have no way of knowing what kind of cover they already have in place. I apologize for not having that information.” He looked at Nash, and he didn’t look entirely happy. “It’ll have to be you.”

Decker was watching Tess. She kept her face carefully blank.

Nash was noticeably silent again, too.

“Is that going to work?” Decker asked them both.

“If Tess is going, in order for her to be safe, it’ll have to work,” Nash said. He even managed to smile. “Won’t it?”

“I can make anything work,” Tess agreed. “Particularly for the short term.”

“Good,” Paoletti, standing up. “Figure out a cover story. Chief, with me in my office. Now.”

Tess sat at the receptionist’s desk in the outer office of Troubleshooters Incorporated, flipping through the packet of information on Kazbekistan that Tom Paoletti had emailed to her, waiting for Jimmy Nash to come out of the bathroom.

She’d already read it twice. And she’d done extra extensive research on the country, downloading info from the State Department and other Web sites for savvy travelers onto her laptop. She’d studied it all on the flight to San Diego.

She couldn’t believe how quickly this had happened. She’d called Tom Paoletti on the rumor that he was looking for people. He’d actually answered his own phone, they’d had a conversation, and she’d faxed over her resume. He’d called her ten minutes later to tell her he had a job he wanted her to consider and that there was a plane ticket waiting for her at Dulles so they could meet face-to-face.

At the time, he hadn’t mentioned Lawrence Decker or Diego “My name’s Jimmy” Nash.

And here came Nash now, his carefully polite smile—more suitable for strangers than people who had been naked together—perfectly in place.

This entire assignment had the potential to be one giant, embarrassing ball of pain. For both of them.

But particularly for her.

“I didn’t know you were going to be here,” she said point-blank. It seemed a far better route to take than avoidance. Ignoring the anvil that was hurtling down from the sky could only work for a limited time. And she didn’t want him to think she’d followed him here.

Especially since she’d already given away the fact that she’d gone looking for him, at least electronically, by asking about Mexico. Boy, for a Mensa member, she could be a total imbecile. She felt the need to explain that further. “I had no idea you and Decker were leaving the Agency. I was worried when you dropped off the map, so I checked around and found out . . . It wasn’t because I wanted anything else from you.”

“I know,” Nash said. She couldn’t tell if he was lying. “I also know you’ve wanted to go into the field for a long time, so . . .”

“Here I am,” she said.

“Yeah. Here you are.” He sat down across the wide expanse of the desk from her. “I’m sorry I didn’t call you.”

Tess rolled her eyes. “No, you’re not. You’re sorry that you’re forced to work with me now. You’re sorry you didn’t foresee that possibility. I’m into honesty, Nash, remember?”

“Yeah.” He met her gaze only fleetingly. “I, uh, do remember.” He laughed softly. “God, this is awkward.”

“Why?” she asked, and this time he really looked at her, with wariness and disbelief in his eyes, neither of which he tried to hide from her. “I’m serious,” she added. “Why should this have to be awkward?”

Apparently she’d rendered him speechless.

“I don’t know about you, but I had some really great sex that night,” she told him. “It was incredible. You’re very good in bed. I’m sorry if I implied otherwise when we were talking about Dave Malkoff—you just really pissed me off. And yeah, okay, it’s true, the first time was a little quick, but you more than made up for it later—”

“Tess, stop. Look, you have every right to be angry—”

“But I’m not,” she said. “I’m really not. I’m just . . . Yes, okay, I am , but not about what you think. I didn’t even realize it until Decker said you were here, until I saw you again.” She closed her eyes, wishing there was an easy way to explain. “I didn’t expect you to call me because we had sex that night, Jimmy. I expected you to call me because, well, I thought we were friends.”

Tess opened her eyes and he was staring at the floor, jaw muscles jumping. When he glanced at her, his eyes were filled with chagrin. If it was an act, it was brilliant.

“Are we really going to be able to do this?” he asked.

“I am,” Tess said. “I’ve wanted this for too long to walk away from it now. And unless you’re going to let Decker go by himself into a city that’s been labeled ‘the terrorist capital of the world’—”

“I’m not,” he said.

“Well, there you have it,” she said. “It looks like we’re going to do this.”

They were both silent then. Nash was looking at her now, really looking at her. He’d looked at her that same way, that night—as if he liked what he saw. And as if that surprised him.

They both spoke at the same time, both cut themselves off.

“I’m sorry,” Nash said. “Go ahead.”

“No, you go,” she said.

“I was just going to ask if there was any way we could be friends again.”

Yeah, right . “Well, that depends on your definition of friends,” Tess countered evenly instead of bursting into disbelieving and near hysterical laughter. “Because I was just going to say that there’s absolutely no way I’m ever going to sleep with you ever again. Not in this lifetime.”

He nodded. “Of course. I . . . I understand.”

Did he really? Tess doubted it. But there was no way she was going to explain that she couldn’t keep sex separate from her emotions—the way he did—without revealing that she’d fallen a little bit in love with him that night. She might’ve been able to keep her heart out of it if it really had been a casual encounter—just relatively superficial small talk, some laughter, and an orgasm or two—the way she’d expected. But Nash had talked to her. He’d said things she’d never expected to hear him say.

They’d connected.

Correction—she’d thought they’d connected. He’d merely played her. Although why he’d done that, she wasn’t sure. She’d made the first move—he had to know she was more than willing.

But maybe Jimmy Nash had gotten to the point where sexual conquests weren’t enough. Maybe he didn’t get off unless he knew he was going to break someone’s heart.

Although hers had only been cracked.

“So,” she said now. “Tell me what I need to know about you to pass myself off as your wife. Have we been married for long? What’s my name?”

“My cover was that I was unattached, so you can keep Tess,” he said. “It’s easier that way. Although you’ll be Tess Nash, of course, to drive home the fact that we’re together.”

“But Nash isn’t your real name,” she started to say, and as he glanced at her, she saw surprise and even wariness in his eyes. No doubt he was wondering if, as a comspesh, she’d had access to his Agency file. His real Agency file, not the one that proclaimed Access denied . She had, after all, tracked him to Mexico. That hadn’t been easy to do. “Never mind. Off topic. It’s inconsequential. I’m sorry, go on.”

She realized that he was more put off by her being here than he was letting on. And he was less rested and relaxed than she’d thought at first, too. He kept rubbing his forehead and the bridge of his nose.

“It’s been three years since I’ve been in Kazabek,” he said. “But I think it’s better to say we met just a few weeks ago.”

“Weeks?” And after knowing each other such a short time, they were already married?

“Yeah.” Nash didn’t seem to think that was far-fetched. “They know me in Kazabek as James Nash. I’m the director of a not-for-profit organization called People First,” he told her.

“James,” Tess said, “not Jimmy?”

My name’s Jimmy.

He met her eyes only briefly, and she knew he remembered telling her that, too. They had both been naked at the time.

“No.” He cleared his throat, went on. “The story is that I was hired by PF right out of college. Which, by the way, was right down Mem Drive from you. I went to Harvard.”

During the interview, she’d told Tom Paoletti that she’d attended MIT. “Really?”

“Yes, really. Is that so hard to believe?”

“No,” she said swiftly. “I just . . . I had no idea.” His file hadn’t mentioned Harvard, but of course, it wasn’t that sort of file. “When were you there? Maybe we could say we met in Cambridge, you know, and were friends for years before—”

“I was there right after I participated in that manned spaceflight to Mars,” Nash told her.

Tess stared at him. He was just such a good liar, it was hard to know what was truth and what was cover story. What was real and what was make-believe.

“Where did you really go to school?” she asked.

“Harvard,” he said. But then he added, almost gently, “Really is relative. The only really you need to be concerned with is the one that drives our cover story. Which is I went to Harvard, graduated fifteen years ago, worked for People First ever since.”

“You worked for the Agency for fifteen years,” Tess said aloud, and he paused. He was clearly wondering how she knew that, and she then realized that this wasn’t public knowledge.

“You told me,” she reassured him. He wasn’t the only one who knew how to lie.

But like most liars, he was extra suspicious. “When?”

“How should I know?” she said with an eye roll that expressed just the right amount of exasperation. “You came into support and sat on my desk only 854 times in the past three years. It was one of those times.”

If she’d been specific—May 14, 2002, at 3:30 in the afternoon—he would’ve known she was making it all up.

Instead he nodded. “Here’s the deal, okay? We met three weeks ago, in D.C.”

“Not while we were at school?” Tess asked. “It seems perfect—”

“It’s not. There’d be too many years of ancient history to keep straight. We met three weeks ago, while I was in town for a conference,” Nash told her. “People First is based out of Boston, but I travel a lot. Particularly to D.C. Where you live . . . doing what?”

“Working for a dot com?” It was what she probably would have done if she hadn’t been recruited by the Agency. “How about . . . After MIT, I worked for a dot com that peaked big, but then died,” Tess suggested. This was kind of fun. Or at least it would have been if she’d been playing this game with anyone but Nash. “It gasped its last breath a year ago. I’m so, so sick of computers, I decided to go back to school, right there in D.C. To law school.”

“Are you really sick of computers?” he asked.

Tess gave him a look. “Harvard?”

Nash nodded, smiled. “You’re good at lying.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I think.” Of course, coming from the Liar King, that was probably the highest praise.

They were both silent then. So exactly how did they meet, Tess the law student and James the head of a not-for-profit organization, three very short weeks ago?

That particular detail—three weeks and then, bang, a wedding—still seemed weak to Tess.

Across the table, Nash rubbed his forehead.

“Headache?” she asked.

“Yeah.” He smiled ruefully. “Hangover.”

Ah. “It might help if you drink some water.” She fished in her bag for the extra bottle she’d bought at the airport, slid it across the desk to him. “Here.”

She’d surprised him. “Wow,” he said. “I’m—” He shook his head. “Thanks.”

“How about if I was doing work-study as a legal assistant for a firm—you know, pro bono law for not-for-profit groups,” Tess said as he opened the bottle and drank. “Maybe one of our clients was People First. And that’s how we met.”

“No,” he said, wiping his mouth with his hand. “I mean, yes, that’s excellent, but let’s not have your firm connected with People First. It would be too easy for someone to check and see that there’s no record of . . . We could do it if we had more time to set it up, but we’re on a plane to Kazabek in just a few hours. Let’s say instead that you hadn’t heard of PF until you met me. What if . . . you had a meeting with a pro bono client who was attending that same conference. Your meeting was in the hotel bar.”

“But he didn’t show,” Tess said.

“Yeah. I walked in, saw you sitting there alone, and it was love at first sight. And here we are, three weeks later. Married.”

Tess looked at Jimmy Nash, with his perfect hair, his bedroom eyes, his broad shoulders, and his washboard abs—oh, she couldn’t see them now, but she knew they were there beneath his shirt. “Is anyone really going to believe that? We meet and we’re married in just a few weeks?”

“Yeah, and it’ll help explain why we don’t know each other all that well. That’s important, unless you want to spend hours on the flight memorizing brands of toothpaste and deodorant, favorite foods, favorite movies, whether you like anchovies on your pizza—”

“Definitely not—to both of those things. The memorizing and the anchovies.”

“I figured as much,” he said. “The anchovies, I mean.”

“I suppose you like them.”

“Absolutely. Live large, I always say.”

“Anchovies are small. And awful,” Tess pointed out. “And people don’t really get married after knowing each other for only a few weeks.”

“Sometimes they do. We’re going to Kazabek, Tess, not L.A. There’s not a lot of premarital sex happening there. People get married before they get busy—and likewise, people who want to get busy get married first. You know, women have been sentenced to death for adultery there—even women who were raped.”

Tess nodded. “I do know. I’ve read the packet of information on Kazbekistan that Tom Paoletti gave me.”

“Then you also know that their women’s rights movement has recently regressed about two hundred years,” he said.

“Yes, I do.”

“Whenever you’re outside, you need to be covered.” Nash had on that same concerned face she’d first seen in the car, two months ago, on the way to rescue Decker at the Gentlemen’s Den. He was using the same commanding officer voice. These were orders he was giving, not suggestions. “Down to your ankles and wrists and up to your neck.”

“So much for my budding career as a topless waitress.”

Nash was not amused. “I’m serious.”

“That’s very apparent.”

“Even if it’s a hundred degrees in the shade.”

“I’m clear on that,” Tess told him. She resisted the urge to salute.

“You’ll have to carry a scarf whenever you go out, too,” he said. “In case you’re stopped and asked to cover your head.”

“Yes, I read that. In the packet.”

“Some people don’t read the packet.”

“I did.”

“There are parts of the country where women have to wear a burka and veil,” Nash told her.

“Some parts of the capital city, too. And some women in Kazabek actually choose to wear burkas all the time. Or at least so I understand, after having read the packet,” Tess said.

“Think of this as a test,” he told her.

“You mean, a pop quiz on the reading material, or more of a ‘How long will it take before Nash drives me nuts’ kind of test?”

“This is your first time out there.” As if he had to remind her. “I’m going to be on top of you every minute. You don’t like it when information is repeated? Too bad. I’m going to make damn sure that you know everything you need to know to keep from getting hurt or, yeah, even killed. People can die in the field, Tess.”

She did know that.

“And if you want to have a contest to see who drives who crazy first,” Nash continued, “well, congratulations, you’re already winning.” He stood up. “Do you have other clothes with you? Because you can’t wear that to K-stan.”

“Yes, I know. These are interview clothes. I have a suitcase in the rental car.”

“You can’t take a suitcase to Kazbekistan.”

“Yes, I know that, too. I just wasn’t sure how many changes of clothing to bring, so—”

“Get ready to smell bad,” he told her. “Figure that your entire wardrobe’s got to fit in that shoulder bag you’re carrying. And don’t overload it, because you’ll be carrying my bag, too.”

Tess laughed. Of all the . . . “Look, Nash—”

“You should get used to calling me James.”

“James,” she repeated. “I know that you’re trying to frighten me off, but it’s not working. You may not know my brand of toothpaste or my favorite movie, but haven’t you caught on, maybe even just a little bit, that I don’t scare easily?”

“Colgate regular and it’s probably a toss-up between Moulin Rouge , The Philadelphia Story , and Casablanca ,” he reported, smiling briefly at the expression of surprise that she couldn’t keep from her face. “I was in your apartment, remember?”

Yeah, like she’d ever forget. “Snooping among my DVDs?”

“No, just keeping my eyes open.”

“While you snooped among my DVDs.” After she’d finally fallen asleep, he must’ve stopped to look while he was on his way out the door, because she’d been with him every other moment and they’d been nowhere near her entertainment center. Funny, she would have thought he would have been in an enormous hurry to escape before she awoke. Instead he’d stopped to look at her things.

“I meant what I said about packing light,” Nash told her now. “You really are going to be carrying my bag.”

“Isn’t that overdoing it a little in terms of following Kazbekistani customs?”

He lifted the bottle she’d tossed to him, toasting her before he finished off the last of it. “I’ll be carrying our water.”

Ah. Bottles of water would definitely be much heavier than clothing.

“Go and get your suitcase, Mrs. Nash,” he said. “I’ll help you figure out what to bring.”

Mrs. Nash.

Hearing that from his lips was just too weird.

C HAPTER

F IVE

Decker watched Nash watch Tess Bailey browsing in the airport bookstore.

Nash looked up, feeling Deck’s gaze.

Decker shook his head in disgust, and Nash played dumb. “What?”

It was only because he asked that Decker answered. “You’re an asshole. Two months—and you didn’t call her once. And now you get to pretend to be her adoring husband?”

Nash was going to share a room with Tess, which by nature would generate intimacy. Add in the adrenaline inherent in a dangerous mission, plus the romance of being in an ancient, foreign city . . .

“It’s a tough job,” Nash said, trying to turn it into a joke, “but someone’s got to do it.”

“Yeah, well, do more than pretend, and I’ll beat you until you bleed.”

Nash looked at him.

“Yes,” Decker said. “I am serious.”

“Well, I’m not,” Nash said. “I was just kidding. I’m not going to take advantage of her. I mean, not that she’d let me.” He looked over at Tess. “Although, holy Mother of God, I forgot just how hot she was.”

Decker shook his head. Hot. Tess Bailey was beautiful and brilliant. She was funny, and enthusiastic, and brave. She was so much more than merely hot.

And Nash had walked—no, run—away from her.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Decker asked.

Nash met his gaze only briefly. It was hard to tell if that was because he was uncomfortable with the direction their conversation was going—they didn’t talk like this, not about things that mattered—or if it was because he couldn’t keep his eyes off Tess. “That was a rhetorical question, right? I mean, you don’t want me to make a list or anything. . . .”

“I thought you didn’t mess with women who worked support.” Decker knew this was senseless. Talking about it wouldn’t change what had happened.

“I didn’t,” Nash said. “I mean, I never did before. It was just . . . It was that one crazy night.”

Wait a minute. “One night?”

“Yeah.”

Decker could feel his blood pressure rising. “You had a one-night stand. With Tess Bailey.” Fuck. He’d thought Nash’s fling with Tess had been going on for a while. “That night at the Den.”

“Yeah,” Nash said. “I mean, well . . . You saw her.”

“Yes,” Decker said. “Yes, I did.”

“How could I say no?”

Jesus, Nash was practically drooling as he watched Tess.

Decker got right up in his face, but he kept his voice low. “I meant what I said before, douche bag. You so much as touch her again, and I will beat the living shit out of you.”

Nash was amused. “Shit, Deck, you sound like I slept with your girlfriend.” He stopped laughing and actually looked shocked. He did a double take, looking from Deck to Tess and back in disbelief. “Did I sleep with your girlfriend?”

Okay, now they’d managed to dive headfirst into territory Decker didn’t want explored. “No. Forget it, all right?”

He turned away, and Nash let him go. But then he followed. “I swear to God, I didn’t know.”

Decker gave up. “Look, she wasn’t my girlfriend. She’s not my girlfriend. She’s never going to be my girlfriend.”

“She could be.”

“No,” Deck said. “Even if . . .” He laughed his disgust. “I’m her team leader now.”

“To hell with that.”

Decker just shook his head.

“I’m sorry.”

“Life goes on,” Decker said.

Nash was back to watching Tess. He sighed. “Shit.”

“Tom Paoletti gave me an additional job to do while we’re in Kazabek,” Decker told him. “He asked me not to mention the details to anyone else—including you.” That got Nash’s full attention.

“That figures,” he said. “I could tell he didn’t really like me.”

“Give him time,” Decker said. “He’s naturally got some questions about you.”

“So that’s what the closed door was about. This secondary assignment, and him asking you questions—like are you sure you can trust me?” Nash’s laughter sounded remarkably real. If Decker didn’t know him so well, he would have been certain that Nash didn’t give a damn.

But Deck knew that it bothered him. Nash pretended that he found it all amusing, but he was particularly sensitive to some of the nastier rumors that circulated about him.

“Yeah,” Decker said. “I told him that as long as we paid you enough, you wouldn’t flip to the other side.”

“Screw you!” This time Nash’s laughter was real.

Decker smiled. In truth, Tom hadn’t asked the trust question that everyone usually always asked about Nash. He hadn’t had to—he was a smart man who knew he’d gotten enough of an answer when Deck had told him he didn’t keep secrets from Nash, that anything Tom told Decker would find its way to Nash’s ears, no exception.

Well, okay. Maybe Deck would keep it secret if Tom wanted to throw Nash a surprise birthday party. But probably not, because Nash hated being surprised.

So if Tom didn’t like that, well, Deck wished him luck with the new company and this mission, but . . .

Tom had told him to chill out and sit back down.

“He asked me to look up a guy named Dimitri Ghaffari,” Decker told Nash now. “See if he and his American partner are good candidates for recruitment to Tom’s team. We don’t have a name for the partner—in fact that could be something Ghaffari made up to build his reputation. It rings of urban legend: Ghaffari and his rich American backer.

“Tom doesn’t know much about him, but Ghaffari’s name has come up often enough over the past few years. Apparently he did import/export out of a home base in Kazabek. Business has tanked since the K-stani government deteriorated.”

The warlords who were running most of the country these days wanted to keep the West out, and people like Ghaffari had made a living bringing it in.

Ghaffari could well be looking for work, and his loyalties no doubt would be on the side of those who supported capitalism.

“He might’ve been killed in the quake,” Nash pointed out.

“Yeah.”

“Everyone we know in Kazabek might’ve been killed in the quake.”

“Yeah.” That was a sobering thought.

“This assignment already blows,” Nash said.

“Yeah,” Decker agreed. But if that laptop was real, and there was even the slimmest chance that it was somewhere in the rubble, with even just the smallest portion of its hard drive intact . . .

“You have any nickels on you?” Nash asked. “We’re flying in to Ikrimah, and, well, I usually have enough time to pick up a few rolls of nickels from the bank.”

Decker dug through his pockets. He had only a few mixed in with the pennies and dimes. He gave them to Nash. “Maybe the bookstore has an extra roll.”

“Ah.” Nash managed to smile. “Good idea.” He looked over at Tess again, but then caught Decker watching him. “I honest to God didn’t know about . . .” He shook his head.

“There was nothing to know,” Decker said, and went to help Tess find a book to read on the flight.

KAZABEK , KAZBEKISTAN

The first aftershock had caught her unprepared. Sophia had forgotten how intense it could be, much like another earthquake itself.

After escaping Padsha Bashir’s palace, she’d found her way to the old Hotel Français, near City Center, where she had lived with her parents when she was barely ten years old, an entire lifetime ago. The hotel had been crumbling and in ill-repair even then, and she’d heard two months back—before she’d foolishly accepted Bashir’s invitation to that ill-fated luncheon where Dimitri had been served his final meal—that the Français had shut its doors. The old wreck had been sold and was scheduled to be either restored or demolished in the very near future.

But Sophia had lived in Kazabek for long enough to know that the very near future could be any time between the end of the year and the end of the decade. It wasn’t likely to be sooner, because, in K-stan, changes of that magnitude took time.

And sure enough, the building was still standing. Part of the roof had decayed, but as she made a slow circuit of the rambling place, she could see that the walls weren’t cracked—at least no more than they had been before.

The basement door was locked, but locks had never been a challenge for her. She opened it without doing any damage. No one would know she’d gone inside.

The entire hotel was empty, all of the furnishings and wall hangings missing, and all the towels and the maids’ uniforms that had lined the little corridor by the laundry room gone.

On the first floor, outside what had once been a restaurant, she found the ladies’ washroom. Comprised of two small rooms, one a former sitting area, now empty, the other filled with sinks and stalls, it had a door that locked, a cool tile floor, and most important, windows way up high on the interior wall, looking out over the center courtyard. If she burned a candle in there at night, the light wouldn’t be seen from the street.

If she had a candle.

The water, amazingly, still worked. It came, with a gush of rust and slime, from the faucet of one of a row of sinks that lined one mirrored wall.

Sophia let it go until it ran clear and then she drank. She washed using the soap still in the glass globes—apparently not everything had been taken from the hotel. The soap was thick and congealing from age and evaporation, but she used it to wash not just her torn and bleeding feet and the most recent cuts on her arm where Bashir had reminded her of the sharpness of his sword, but all of her. Everywhere he or one of his horrible friends ever touched.

She even washed her hair, wanting to be rid of the perfumed scent of the palace.

She had virtually nothing but the nearly transparent white gown and the sheet—she washed those, too—that she’d wrapped herself in after killing Bashir. No real clothes, no passport, no papers, no money, no food. No friends who would be willing to help her.

Because Bashir’s nephews would seek revenge. The entire city would be searching for her, eager for the reward. It would be a big reward—the kind that could turn her friends into her worst enemies. With her blond hair, she had to be careful. She’d be easy for anyone to spot.

After checking that the door was locked, she wrapped herself in that wet sheet and lay down on the tile floor, exhausted and needing to sleep.

And, for the first time in months, able to sleep.

She may have had nothing, but she had water and she had her freedom.

Mere hours ago she’d been little more than a prisoner, a slave to a man she despised. Compared to that, she was now far richer than her wildest dreams.

WORLD AIRLINES FLIGHT 576, SAN DIEGO TO HONG KONG

Tess looked up from her book to see the flight attendant standing in the aisle of the plane with a tray of champagne flutes.

The only seats available at such short notice on this intercontinental flight had been in first class. What a shame.

Tess smiled and shook her head—no thanks—and, ignoring the murmur of voices around her, returned her attention to her book.

It was a somewhat anemic spy thriller that had been written during the Cold War. The hero was a James Bond type who reminded her a little of Jimmy Nash. He was tall, handsome, and extremely skilled, clever with a dry wit. But like most fictional secret agents, this character never, ever whined and complained to his support staff.

It was remarkable how often authors left out those particular moments—the scenes where the superagent comes striding into the office, scowling at everyone and demanding to be told why no one had let him know before he went to Turkey that his credit card had expired last week.

Yeah, Tess would’ve liked to read the scene where Miss Moneypenny pulls the e-memo titled “See Me NOW About Your Credit Card’s Impending Expiration” from James’s email box, prints it out, and hands it to him, then tartly asks him what more he would like her to do to keep him informed, especially when he’s too busy wining and dining some babe in a black leather catsuit to read his blasted email.

She looked up as Nash returned from the bathroom and, with a smile, slipped past her into the window seat. The difference between no Nash and Nash was like night and day, and she had to force her gaze back to the open pages of her book. Reading with him sitting beside her was a challenge. The man had an enormous presence.

He could a fill an entire room—let alone the small first-class cabin of a commercial airliner—with just a smile.

It was similar to the way he’d filled the car that night, as he’d driven her home.

She’d left her own car in the parking lot at the Gentlemen’s Den, and wouldn’t be able to pick it up until morning. That bar fight Decker and Nash had started had escalated, and the entire street was blocked with police and emergency vehicles.

The helicopter that scooped them from the roof of the strip club had brought them to Agency headquarters, where Nash had quickly claimed the keys to the last of the loaner cars in the lot.

“Come on, I’ll give you a lift,” he’d told her.

But Tess had hesitated before climbing in. “Don’t you have, like, other things to do?” she’d asked. “Debriefings . . . ?” Didn’t Decker need him?

But Nash had smiled his best smile. And the combination of that smile plus the white tank-style undershirt—she still had on his dress shirt—that hugged his chest and showed off his muscular shoulders and arms actually made her heart skip a beat. Her response to him had been both tacky and clichéd, but true.

So she’d gotten into the car. Accepted the ride. With her eyes wide open.

Tess couldn’t remember what they’d talked about on the way to her apartment. Nash was good at keeping a conversation going, though, at keeping it light and easy.

There had actually been a parking space open in front of her building. Was it possible he’d arranged that, too? Or maybe he was just born lucky. He’d parallel parked the way he did everything—with confidence and skill.

“I’ll walk you up.” He didn’t ask, he told her. Tess looked at him, and he smiled very slightly. “That way you can give me back my shirt.”

She didn’t want or need any excuse to let him come up.

But she just smiled back at him as they got out of the car and went up the steps, as she unlocked her apartment door and led him inside.

“Can I get you something besides your shirt?” she asked, unfastening the buttons as she went into the kitchen, starting at the bottom and working her way up. “Beer, soda . . . ?” Condom?

Was she really going to do this?

“A beer would be great.” Nash, tall, dark, and almost unbelievably gorgeous, followed her.

Yes, she was .

The apartment’s last tenants had redone the kitchen with a cow motif gone mad, and he clashed with the kitschy wallpaper and stenciled cabinets. It was like seeing James Bond in bed with the cast from Oklahoma!

“Cute,” he said as he looked around him.

“Yeah, right,” she said, reaching into the refrigerator for two bottles of beer. “Try living with it.” She twisted off the tops. “I eat out a lot.”

Not quite the truth, unless out could be defined as the takeout she ate at her desk at work, eyes on her computer screen.

Still, as far as comparisons went, she was closer to Bond than Aunt Eller. And after she handed him one of the beers, she proved it.

Because she also handed him his shirt, taking him completely by surprise for the second time that night.

Her audacity made her own pulse race, but really, they both knew damn well why he’d come upstairs. And if she’d had any doubts at all, they were erased by the look that was now in his eyes, and by his smile.

It was a real smile, not one of those loaded-with-meaning player smiles that he’d been giving her most of the night.

“I don’t like playing games,” she told him. “Let’s be honest about what this is, okay?”

Nash laughed. “Thirty seconds ago I knew what this was,” he admitted. “I have to confess that I don’t anymore. I . . . I really like you, Tess.” He looked away from her as he laughed again, as if his words had surprised him as much as they’d surprised her. Surprised and maybe even embarrassed him.

Of all the things she’d expected him to say . . .

Tess put her beer back down on the counter and reached for him, and then, God, his arms were around her and she was kissing Diego Nash.

Who really liked her.

“Tess,” he gasped as he kissed her harder, deeper, again and again, as he pressed her closer to him, so that she couldn’t miss the fact that he was fully aroused. “You don’t know how badly I’ve wanted to do this. How much I need . . .”

There was a desperation to both his mouth and hands that she hadn’t expected, a clumsiness broadcasting a lack of control that thrilled her. She’d imagined that making love to Nash would be exquisite, but that it would be something he would do to her. She imagined he’d remain cool and almost aloof, as much a pro at this as at everything else he did, while she was the one who would come undone.

Instead he nearly broke the zipper of her jeans, swearing and apologizing until she shut him up by kissing him again. He even tripped over his own pants in his haste to remove them while she led him down the short hall to her bedroom.

She didn’t have to remind him of their need for a condom, but she did have to help when he fumbled with it, and then . . .

The sound he made as he filled her made her laugh aloud, but then he kissed her hard, harder, as he drove himself into her again and again and again. It was only because she was so turned on by the raw, nearly mindless intensity of his passion that she came, too, in a hot rush, when he climaxed.

“Earth to Tess,” Nash said, and she realized he’d reached past her and taken two glasses of champagne from the flight attendant’s tray, and was now holding one in each hand. God only knows how long he’d been attempting to get her attention, while she’d been thinking about . . .

“Sorry,” she said, nearly dropping her book as she reached to take one, trying not to let their fingers touch, but unable to prevent it. Oh, God.

He toasted her before taking a sip. “Here’s to us.”

“To . . . ?”

“It’s our one-week anniversary.”

Ah, yes. That. “To us,” she echoed.

“That must be a really good book,” he said.

“Yeah.” She took another sip of the wine. It steadied her enough to be able to smile at him somewhat vaguely—the kind of smile someone would give someone else when they were completely engrossed in a book.

Nash had gotten a pillow and blanket from somewhere, and after polishing off his champagne—tossing it back like a glass of whiskey—he settled back in his seat. “Wake me when we start our approach into Hong Kong.”

He was going to sleep now, thank God.

Tess lifted her book—and realized she’d been holding it upside down. Perfect.

Nash didn’t have his eyes closed yet—damn it. But he wasn’t laughing at her. “I know what you’re thinking about,” he said.

Okay. Don’t panic. Unless he was a mind reader, he couldn’t possibly know. “Really?” she said, praying he truly wasn’t a mind reader.

“Your first time out there,” he said. “Heading to Kazabek. It’s okay to be scared. It’s normal.”

“Ah.” He’d thought she was thinking about their assignment. “I’m ready for this, you know.”

He nodded, just looking at her.

So she asked him, “Were you scared? Your first time out?”

“I was too young and stupid to be scared,” he told her—a real surprise. She hadn’t expected him to say anything at all. Let alone that.

But then he closed his eyes, which was exactly as she’d expected, exactly as she’d intended.

Didn’t it figure that, as desperate as she’d been just moments ago for him to stop looking at her like that, she now wished for the exact opposite.

“How old were you?” she asked.

His eyes opened and he gazed at her for several long moments before he spoke. “First time People First sent me to Kazabek was in . . . it must’ve been 1997. I was twenty-eight.”

“That’s not what I meant,” she said.

“I know,” he said, and closed his eyes.

C HAPTER

S IX

IKRIMAH , KAZBEKISTAN

Will Schroeder climbed onto the bus.

Jimmy could not believe it.

He was definitely on some kind of weird bad luck streak.

He’d slept through most of the flight to Hong Kong. The flight here to Ikrimah had also been relatively uneventful—considering he was sitting inches away from Tess Bailey the entire time.

During the last few hours of the trip, he and Tess had drilled procedures and done a whole lot of worst-case scenario type war-gaming. He was now as convinced as he’d ever be that she knew what to do and where to go if Godzilla attacked Kazabek and they were temporarily separated from each other in the panicking crowd. She also knew what to do in the event of a permanent separation—such as if Godzilla went and stepped on him.

And he’d repeated, ad nauseam, the importance of checking for the all-clear signal anytime she returned to their K-stani home base. Deck usually used a short length of rope hanging innocently from the knob of the main door. Tess should never walk in, even to an area that otherwise seemed secure, without checking to make sure that that rope was there. Checking for it needed to be an instant habit, and she assured him she would not forget.

But never once, during all the hours that they’d spent talking, had Jimmy leaned in close and told her, “Hey, you know what? Decker has a thing for you.”

There had been a moment, on the flight to Hong Kong, before he’d slept off the last of his hangover, that would have been perfect. But had he used the opportunity to bring up Deck?

No, he had not.

And once they’d gotten off the plane here in Ikrimah, a hundred miles from Kazabek, there had been no time to say much of anything at all.

Ikrimah was a nightmare. The situation had gotten dire since the last time he’d been here. This was the second-largest metropolis in K-stan, and it was filled with people who wore their hopelessness and fear deeply etched into their faces.

Their very lean faces.

These people were starving. But they hadn’t been rocked by an earthquake, so all of the aid was going straight to Kazabek.

Or maybe it wasn’t.

Only half of the supply crates that Tom Paoletti had procured seemingly out of thin air—the man definitely had some powerful connections—had made it through. According to the airline, the others were “still in transit.” Talk about a royal pain in the balls. Unless they got really lucky and the gaping cracks in the Kazabek Airport runways got patched in the next few days, they were going to have to return to this airfield, way out here in terrorist country, later in the week to pick them up.

Of course, “still in transit,” was corporate code for “Oops, we screwed the pooch and have absolutely no idea where on this vast planet your missing luggage might be.” A trip back to Ikrimah was probably not going to be necessary.

Because, ten to one, the crates had already been appropriated by the K-stani warlords who ran the local black market.

Vinh Murphy, who with Dave Malkoff had met them at this airport, had been in charge of getting the surviving supplies to the bus. But as they passed through the open-air terminal, Jimmy managed to lose yet one more crate. It was marked “Rice,” and he misplaced it in Nida’s vicinity.

The burka-clad K-stani woman had set up her jewelry stand right there on the sidewalk, where she’d done business every day for the past five years since her husband had died. She had four impossibly small and solemnly obedient children assisting her today, instead of her usual three.

Jimmy quickly picked out a beautifully crafted bracelet and then a necklace, paying for them both in American money and in rice. He knew things were bad in K-stan when Nida didn’t argue as much as she usually did, insisting that he was paying too much. Instead her eyes filled with tears, and she slipped a matching pair of earrings into his bag.

He had had to run to catch up to the others. They were in the process of lashing down their supplies on the roof of the ancient rattletrap of a bus that would ferry this latest contingent of relief workers south to the capital city of Kazabek.

Finally they were on board and ready to go—only three hours behind schedule, which was pretty damned miraculous.

That was when Will Schroeder, known in some circles as the Antichrist, made the scene.

Jimmy saw Schroeder’s familiar red hair from where he was sitting with Tess, way in the back, as the prick lugged his duffel bag up the steps and past the driver.

“Oh, shit,” Jimmy said, and three or four of the God Squad—devoutly religious men and women who bounced from one disaster site to another—turned to give him the profanity stare.

Yeah, yeah, he was going to hell. Tell him something he didn’t know.

Deck was across the aisle and up four rows, sitting next to Murphy. He spotted Will Schroeder, too, and turned invisible.

That was always amazing to watch. Jimmy wasn’t exactly sure how Decker did it, but he definitely became less . . . there. There was no other way to describe it. He took up less space—he actually got smaller. He slumped, hunched, contracted—whatever he did, it was freaking effective. It was possible that he somehow slackened the muscles in his face, too, and that, combined with pulling his hat down over his eyes, was the final touch. His own mother would have looked right past him.

Jimmy did the only thing he could do—he ducked down and hid behind the nearest woman. Who happened to be Tess.

Who also appeared to understand the situation without any kind of spoken explanation. She leaned back, effectively hiding him from Will’s view, and pretended to be asleep, draped against him. All he had to do was turn his head a little, and his face was buried in her hair.

Hair that, despite the endless hours of relentless travel, still managed to smell unbelievably good.

The bus moved forward with a hiss of releasing brakes, and they were on the road.

An extremely potholed road, over which they lurched and bumped. Tess braced herself with one hand high on his thigh.

“Sorry,” she said, pulling back as if she’d been burned.

It was not the first time she’d put her hand in that particular spot.

Don’t think about that night. She was sitting much too close for him to start entertaining memories of the way she’d given him back his shirt while they were standing in her overly dairy-cowed kitchen. Now was definitely not the time to recall just how desperate he’d been to lose himself in her, how mind-blowing it had been to do just that.

Because although Tess was willingly letting him hide behind her, she was trying to do it by touching as little of him as possible.

Jimmy risked a look toward the front of the bus.

Sitting beside some unrecognizable, bland little relief worker who was wearing Decker’s shirt, Murphy was a human monolith at rest. He was about as nonplussed as Stonehenge.

Jimmy would bet his entire stock portfolio that Murph and Will Schroeder had never been introduced. Because Murphy—who could have been the love child of Tiger Woods and Andre the Giant—wasn’t the kind of guy you could meet and then forget.

Dave was up toward the front of the bus, a few seats behind the driver, no doubt because he’d gotten food poisoning during his stopover in Turkey—what a typical Dave Malkoff thing to do. He probably thought the bus wouldn’t lurch so much if he sat near the front.

Dream on, Dave. This was K-stan, where fixing the shock absorbers was the dead last thing on the local bus company’s maintenance priority list, just beneath fixing the bullet holes in the windows.

Will Schroeder was sitting several seats behind Dave—whom he apparently didn’t know, or didn’t recognize.

Which wasn’t really that absurd a possibility. Jimmy himself hadn’t recognized Dave when they’d come face-to-face at the baggage claim area just a few hours ago.

Dave had, apparently, taken his departure from the CIA as an opportunity to embrace his inner grunge rocker.

His hair was shaggy and long enough in the back to be pulled into a ponytail. He hadn’t shaved in at least a week. He wore jeans and a T-shirt that said “Bite Me,” neither of which fit his wiry frame particularly well, but both of which were a radical change from the Joe Friday designer line of cheap-as-shit black suits that he’d worn as his uniform in the past.

If Jimmy hadn’t known about the food poisoning, he would have guessed that Dave was completely stoned. He was sitting with his head lolled back and his body boneless—totally relaxed. In fact, he’d even smelled a little like the local weed. It was freaky.

Who are you and what have you done to Dave “Puckerfactor Five Thousand” Malkoff?

It was either Twilight Zone time, or weird Dave had created one damn good cover.

“Who is he?” Tess asked, her breath warm against his neck. She was talking about Will, of course. “Red hair, right?”

From his hiding place behind Tess, Jimmy could see only the back of the evil one’s head, but it sure seemed as if he were planted in his seat. He’d taken out a book and was reading.

He maneuvered his mouth closer to her ear. “He’s a Boston Globe reporter. His name’s Schroeder.”

She nodded. “Does he know you?”

“Yeah. He knows I’m no relief worker—Deck, too,” Jimmy told her. “But then again, neither is Schroeder.”

It was entirely possible that half of the people on this bus were reporters. K-stan had a no media, no cameras rule that was strictly enforced, and everybody and their CNN reporter brother were using this admittance of Western relief workers as a way into the country.

Of course, the fact that they were letting in relief workers from the West at all was a sign of just how terrible the situation was in Kazabek.

Tess shifted so that she could speak to Jimmy even more quietly. In fact, her lips brushed his ear as she spoke.

“Even if he sees you, he won’t blow your cover, because if he does, you’ll blow his,” she concluded, quite correctly.

His turn to put his mouth near her ear. He resisted the overwhelming urge to lick her. “Yeah, but once he sees we’re here, he’ll be on us like a dog in heat. He’s probably come for the disaster story, but it won’t take much for him to realize there’s something bigger going down.”

“So he not only knows you’re not a relief worker . . .” Tess said.

“Deck and I were sent to Bali shortly after the nightclub bombing,” Nash told her. “We, uh, interacted with Schroeder there. He’d have to be an idiot not to know that we were working for the government. And he’s no idiot.”

Tess was silent for a moment. He could feel her breathing, feel her thinking. Finally she turned her head, her mouth again touching his ear. Christ, was she doing that on purpose?

Maybe she was. And maybe tonight . . .

But, “Sorry. The bus keeps . . .” She pulled back a little. “Do you really think we’ll be able to get off this bus without him seeing you?” she asked. “Once we disembark, I won’t be able to hang all over you like this. Public displays of affection are a big no in the streets—or so I read in my information packet on Kazabek. You know, the one you didn’t really expect me to read?”

“You’re so funny,” he murmured.

She laughed softly, and he was rocketed back in time to her bedroom. She was beneath him, out of breath, her legs still wrapped around him, her eyes dancing. . . .

“So what’s the plan?” she asked now.

They would get to Kazabek, hire a truck to take them to Rivka’s house, unload their equipment, have a little dinner, and then go into their bedroom and . . .

And not jump each other.

How could he be thinking about sex after that conversation he’d had with Decker outside the airport bookstore? Forget the threat of a beating—that was inconsequential. What mattered was that Decker had a thing for Tess. And despite his claims that it was too late for any kind of relationship between them, Jimmy was determined to make things right.

He wouldn’t be jumping Tess tonight or any other night. Even if she begged him to. Which was about as likely as Elvis parachuting out of an alien spacecraft, onto the fifty-yard line of the Super Bowl and breaking into “Burning Love.” No, if Elvis came back, he’d definitely start the gig with “Heartbreak Hotel.”

“We’ll wait for him to get off the bus first,” Jimmy told Tess. “Most people are always in a hurry.”

“And we’re not?”

He knew she was thinking about that laptop computer, potentially filled with all that information about impending terrorist attacks, sitting somewhere in the rubble.

“Sometimes you get farther by watching and waiting.” Jimmy laughed. It was funny—that was usually what Decker said to him. But really, the last thing they wanted was a reporter—this reporter—figuring out why they were here. And it wasn’t as if they could just make Will Schroeder disappear.

Well, actually, they could. He could. Quite easily, in fact. Too easily.

Tess once again was quiet, as if she’d picked up on his sudden change in mood, and the bus bounced its way toward Kazabek. It seemed impossible that anyone could sleep on this thing, but her silence stretched on and on for five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen.

But then Jimmy realized she wasn’t asleep. She was looking out the window. The sun hung in the brilliant blue sky, making the desolate, rocky hillside strikingly beautiful. Of course, not everyone saw it that way.

“You love it here, don’t you?” Tess said softly, and he looked down to see that she was watching him now instead of the scenery.

“Yeah,” he admitted. He was only answering a simple question. He wasn’t sure why it felt as if he were giving her a piece of his soul.

The bus swayed hard to the right as the driver swerved to avoid a deep hole in the dirt road.

“Hold on,” Jimmy said as his arms tightened around Tess, as he held her even closer to keep her from hitting her head on the hard back of the seat.

She braced herself, too, her hand briefly on his thigh again, before she grabbed the seat in front of them.

“Careful,” he said, the warning as much for himself as it was for her.

KAZABEK , KAZBEKISTAN

Jesus.

Jesus. As Decker stared out the bus window, he could feel Murphy leaning closer to look over his shoulder.

Up toward the front of the bus, Will Schroeder from the Boston Globe had put his book down.

After interminable hours on the road, even the five relief workers from Hamburg had stopped their relentless singing of German folk songs as they, too, gazed out at the devastation.

Kazabek—at least this northernmost part of the city—had become piles of rocks and crumbling mortar.

The streets were barely passable, and the bus had to slow almost to a crawl.

Grimy children stared at them from perches atop the ruined buildings, while their parents dug through the rubble that had once been their homes.

In a former marketplace, bodies were laid out, lined up row after row after row.

Another open square had been turned into a temporary hospital, with tents set up to protect the wounded from the hot sun. But there were nowhere near enough tents or medical personnel, and people sat or even lay right on the hard ground, dazed and disoriented, some still covered with blood.

And then there was nothing but block after endless block of devastation.

Murphy saw it at the exact second Deck did—four men running from a side street, shouting and gesturing toward the bus.

Murph got to his feet, already opening the bag that held the arsenal of weapons he’d somehow acquired in Ikrimah, readying to repel an attack.

Dave Malkoff, too, was up and over by the bus driver, prepared to launch out the door, if necessary. Decker hadn’t even seen the man move.

“Don’t slow down,” he heard Dave instruct the driver, who kicked it into a higher gear.

But then Nash stood up from his seat in the back. “Stop the bus!” he called out both in English and the local K-stani dialect. “They’re saying they’ve uncovered a school!” He was by an open window and had no doubt been able to make out the words that the men had been shouting as they drove past. “It was buried under debris. Another building fell and . . . They’ve finally dug through and part of the school’s intact. There are children inside—still alive! They need this bus!”

Decker stood then, too. “Dave!” he shouted.

Everyone was talking at once, so he didn’t hear what the former CIA agent said to the driver. All he knew was that the bus skidded to a stop and was put into reverse. With a whining of gears, they began backing up.

When he glanced again toward the front of the bus, he saw that Dave Malkoff had commandeered the driver’s seat.

“Gather up all your gear and take it with you,” Nash was shouting over the babbling. “God willing, they’re going to need every seat.”

Murphy was already pulling duffels and backpacks down from the overhead racks.

The bus jerked to a stop, and Decker saw exactly what three of the men chasing them were carrying in their arms.

Injured children.

Will Schroeder was standing in the aisle, looking from Nash to Decker, a lopsided grin on his face. “Well, isn’t this a happy surprise,” he said.

“Get your ass off the bus and help these people,” Deck ordered the reporter as he pushed past him.

“Right,” Will said, following him out onto the dusty street. “Because that’s what we’re all here to do. To help these people. Except Nash. We all know why he’s here.” He turned to Nash, who was right behind him. “Hey, Jim. Fuck anyone’s wife lately?”

Nash ignored him, catching Decker’s eye. “I’ll set up triage.”

“Good.”

Nash pushed past Schroeder to help organize the milling relief workers into teams. “Anyone with a medical background,” he shouted above the chaos. “First aid training included. Follow me.”

“Murph!” Decker called for the big former Marine. “Find our supplies!” If those kids had been buried since the quake, they had to be in desperate need of water.

Tess was thinking along the same lines, and as Murphy broke open a crate filled with bottled water, she was right there. She hefted four whole cases and started toward the cleared entrance to the school, staggering slightly under the weight.

“Yo, Red,” she said to Will Schroeder, who was still standing by the door of the bus, just watching the activity. “Yeah, you! Make yourself useful.” She dumped two of the cases of water into the reporter’s arms.

Decker wasn’t too far behind them with more water, but as he approached the entrance, Tess was already coming back out.

The look on her face was one he knew he would remember all his life.

“They can hear a tapping sound,” she told him. “There are more kids alive, I think probably in the basement. But in order to get to them . . . God, Deck, I think we’re going to need a hundred body bags.”

C HAPTER

S EVEN

“It’s another girl,” Tess said.

Khalid murmured his thanks as he took the body from her and laid it tenderly on the worn boards of the wagon bed, making sure the child’s face was covered.

“Amman probably made it down into the basement,” Tess said, as she’d said each time she’d made another terrible delivery out here from the ruined school building. God, it was hot in the sun—even hotter than it was inside the school.

“But he may not have,” the Kazbekistani boy said, just as he, too, said each time.

She looked into his eyes. She was more tired than she’d ever been in her life, but he was beyond exhausted. He’d been here since the quake hit, helping first by clearing the rubble and now by transporting the dead through this relentless heat to a mortuary that had been set up in a park down the street. It had been far more than forty-eight hours since he’d last slept.

Although he was at most sixteen years old and slight of stature and build, to call Khalid a boy wasn’t quite accurate. He’d told her he’d been working to help support his family since his father had died three years earlier.

Khalid’s English was remarkably good. He’d learned it at school, when he was younger, he’d told her one of the times she’d brought the body of yet another little K-stani girl out to his waiting wagon. He’d attended this very same school, where she’d been assigned the difficult task of removing bodies from the rubble, where he’d come searching for his little brother, Amman.

The relief workers were no longer allowing family members near the ruins of the building—the parents’ understandable grief at finding their children’s bodies was hampering the rescue effort that was still under way.

Khalid had gotten around that by pretending to be just another volunteer—and one with a horse and wagon at that.

“Enough of the floor is clear now,” Tess reported, knowing that he wanted desperately to be inside that school, to see with his own eyes the progress that was being made. “They’re about to cut a hole through to the basement.”

It was hoped that most of the nine hundred children who attended this school had been led down to safety in an old bomb shelter when the earthquake first hit.

“And they’re sure that doing this won’t bring the rest of the building down on top of them?” Khalid asked.

“Yes.” Tess was able to answer with complete certainty. “I know the men who’ve taken charge of the rescue operation. If anyone can get those kids out safely, they can.”

Another relief worker appeared, his arms filled with another awful burden.

Khalid moved to meet him, taking the body from the man’s arms. He flipped back the shroud to check the child’s face, covered it again, glanced at Tess, shook his head slightly. It was another girl. “Thank you,” he told the man.

“Well, you’re not at all welcome.” It was Will Schroeder, the reporter, his red hair dulled from the relentless dust. He looked as shell-shocked and exhausted as Tess felt, sweat making paths down the sides of his grimy face. But unlike the female relief workers, he was wearing shorts and a T-shirt.

Khalid took a step back, as if Will had struck him. “I beg your pardon, sir.”

“No, kid . . .” Will wearily rubbed his forehead with the back of his forearm. The surgical gloves he was wearing were far from clean. “I meant . . . This is not the time or place to be so goddamn polite. Don’t thank me for handing you a dead seven-year-old.”

“Forgive me, sir,” Khalid murmured, placing the child next to the others. “It is our way.”

Dear Lord, there were so many of them. None were Amman, but every one of them was someone’s little brother or sister, someone’s precious child.

Will was gazing at the back of the wagon, too. “Look at that. You know, your way is totally fucked.”

There was an answering flash of anger in Khalid’s dark eyes. “Perhaps you would prefer if I acted more American. ‘Who did this awful thing?’ ‘An earthquake, sir.’ ‘Who caused this earthquake?’ ‘God, sir.’ ‘Find where God lives—we must invade! A preemptive strike before He does this to us, too!’ ”

Will laughed his disgust. “Oh, that’s sweet. Go on and throw stones—”

Tess stepped between them. “This isn’t helping. We’re all being pushed beyond our limits—”

He spoke right over her, glaring at Khalid. “—because we all know you and your country have so much to be proud of!”

“Not so much as you !”

“For God’s sake, both of you! This isn’t about politics—it’s about dead children !”

Khalid turned away, but Will was still practically quivering with anger.

“You think this isn’t about politics?” he asked. “Look at that wagon,” he ordered Khalid, raising his voice. “Just look at it! What do you see? Don’t you notice anything special about your cargo? Or is it just another load to carry, another chance to earn a fast buck?”

“Stop that!” Tess took off her gloves, took his arm, trying to tug him back toward the school and away from Khalid. “He’s a volunteer, and you know it! It’s costing him to help—he still needs to feed that horse, and on what, God only knows!” She stepped closer to Will, lowered her voice. “Show a little compassion. His brother’s somewhere in that school.”

Will pulled free. “Well, he doesn’t have to worry. His brother’s probably safe in the basement.” He turned to speak directly to Khalid. “We just uncovered the basement door. And the bodies of about twenty more girls who were locked out .” He spat the words. “Because God forbid they occupy the same fallout shelter as the boys, use up all the air, eat all the supplies . . .”

Dear God.

“Look at that wagon,” Will told her again. “Those are mostly girls.”

He was right. Tess had carried out body after body, and they were nearly all . . . Dear God.

“Someone told me that out of nine hundred kids in this school, only about sixty were girls. They were taught in their own special classroom, carefully segregated from the boys. Their parents paid nearly three times as much for them to attend and considered themselves lucky that their daughters were getting any kind of education at all. Lucky, yeah.” Will laughed, but it was a terrible sound. “The teachers brought the boys into the basement and goddamn locked the door on the girls.”

With one final accusing look at Khalid, he headed back toward the school.

Tess felt sick. “They couldn’t have done that.”

Khalid didn’t say anything, but the look on his face told her that they, indeed, could have.

“Dear God.” She followed Will more slowly into the school where the stench of death just kept growing stronger in the late afternoon heat. Twenty more bodies, he’d said. All girls.

Tess was dripping with sweat. It was running in a stream down the backs of her legs, soaking through her clothes. Local rules, the same ones that kept boys and girls from sharing a classroom—or a shelter during an earthquake—dictated that women be covered at all times. She couldn’t so much as roll up her long sleeves.

The heat and the news that Will had just shared made her light-headed, but her discomfort, she knew, was nothing compared to that of the women waiting just down the street for that next wagon, about to find out that their children—their daughters—were dead.

“Hey.”

Tess looked up to see Nash coming toward her. He was moving fast, as if he thought he might have to catch her. Truth was, she was feeling faint.

“You okay?” he asked, concern in his eyes.

She started to nod yes, but couldn’t do it. “I think I might throw up.”

“Yeah,” he said, taking her arm and pulling her out of the path of traffic. “I know the feeling. You just heard about that locked door, huh?”

She nodded, searching his eyes. “Is it true?”

“Come on, sit down. Here . . .” Nash led her all the way back outside, to an area beneath a sheet someone had set up to provide shade. “Sit,” he ordered, pulling her down onto a pile of concrete blocks. “Where’s your water bottle?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. He just turned, shouting, “Dave!”

“I just had some,” she told him.

“You need more than some.” He knelt in front of her, pulling her shirt up and out of her pants and fanning the fabric so that air moved against her body. “Look at you. You’re boiling over. You need to be pouring water down your throat pretty much continuously in this heat. Desert rations are—”

“Minimum one and a half gallons a day,” she finished for him. “I know. I read the packet.”

Nash didn’t laugh. He didn’t even smile. “Did you do the math, too? Because that works out to about a bottle every hour. Come on, Tess, use that big brain that’s in your head. You should be carrying around a bottle of water—and you know it.”

“Yeah, well, guess what? I’ve been carrying around other things,” she retorted hotly, glad for the anger that surged through her, knowing that without it, she might’ve started to cry.

And Nash knew it, too.

It was pretty remarkable. On him, the dust and the sweat actually looked sexy. It made his dark hair appear as if he were going gray, which, when it finally happened for real, was only going to succeed in making him even better looking than he already was.

Which was saying something.

If he was tired, if he felt like crying, too, he didn’t let it show. He had a haphazardly bandaged gash on his right forearm that must’ve hurt something fierce, and a scrape on his cheek.

It must’ve hurt . . .

I get dinged up a lot. She heard an echo of his voice from that night he’d come up to her apartment. They’d talked about things she hadn’t expected him to talk about. He’d told her how he’d gotten injured on the roof of the Gentlemen’s Den. He’d been stabbed in the leg, although he brushed it off as inconsequential, calling it “getting dinged up.” He’d told her—although not in so many words—that he often got dinged up. On purpose.

Tess was no expert, but she suspected that Jimmy Nash used physical injuries to drown out emotional pain.

She touched his hair, his cheek, knowing that even though he didn’t show it, this day had to be as hard for him as it was for the rest of them. “What happened to you?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I tripped and . . . It was nothing.”

He was on the verge of a full-scale retreat, but Tess stopped him by putting her arms around him. She knew she wasn’t supposed to, and she certainly didn’t want to give him the wrong idea, but she couldn’t help herself. She needed the contact. The comfort. And she knew that, as much as he pretended otherwise, he needed it, too.

Jimmy Nash tensed for only a fraction of a second before he put his arms around her and held her just as tightly.

He smelled good. How on earth did he manage to smell good? And, oh, God, it felt so nice to be in his arms again. He’d put his arms around her on the bus, but it hadn’t been like this.

She wasn’t in love with him—she was smarter than that—but in that moment, she knew the truth. She could have loved him. Big-time. He was a fool for having thrown that away.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, as if he could read her mind. But she knew he was probably apologizing for countless other things. The heat. The horror. The injustice.

“She okay?”

It was Dave. Jimmy let go of her to take two bottles of water from him. “Thanks.”

“She’s fine,” Tess said, forcing a smile as—shit! Some of her tears had escaped—she quickly wiped her eyes.

“She heard about the door,” Jimmy told Dave as he opened one of the bottles and handed it to her.

Dave looked at her as she sipped the water, sympathy in his eyes. He had a face that didn’t quite match his long hair, kind of like Tom Hanks in Castaway . “Don’t go back there,” he told her. “It’s grim. It’s . . .” He shook his head. “We can move them in stages. I’ll bring them out here, you can take them the rest of the way to the wagon.”

“That’s not necessary,” Tess said.

“Yes, it is,” Dave said.

He was gone then, as quickly as he came, leaving Jimmy sitting in the dust in front of Tess, watching her drink her water.

“So it is true,” she said. “That the door was locked.”

He nodded. “Do yourself a favor and don’t go back there.”

“I’m not a child,” she told him. “You don’t need to protect me.”

“I know. I also told Deck not to go back there. He doesn’t need to see this either,” Jimmy said. “And believe me, I don’t think of him as a child.” He looked away from her, over toward Khalid and the wagon, as if he were deciding whether or not to tell her something. But when he spoke, all he said was “You know, you and Decker have a lot in common.”

The high-pitched whine of the floor being cut made it impossible for her to respond to that. Jimmy pushed the water bottle up toward her mouth, tucked a stray piece of hair behind her ear.

But then he moved back. He was looking at something over her shoulder, and she turned to see Will Schroeder watching them as he went past.

“He knows who we are,” Tess said.

Jimmy didn’t try to speak over the noise. He just nodded.

The saw finally shrieked to a stop. “Why is Decker doing that? Why can’t we just open the basement door?” she asked.

“There’s a fallen beam leaning up against it,” Jimmy told her. “It could jeopardize the structural integrity of the building if we move it. At least that’s what Murphy said. I had no idea, but he’s some kind of engineer.” He laughed. “Who would’ve guessed? You learn something new every day, huh?”

You do, indeed.

Tess had learned quite a bit that very afternoon. She’d learned that although there was a great deal of bad in the world, there was also good. And it sometimes came from the most unexpected places.

She’d followed Jimmy at the Ikrimah airport terminal and watched him approach a Muslim woman who had a blanket on the ground covered with some of the most beautifully crafted jewelry she’d ever seen.

Jimmy had selected a bracelet. Tess didn’t speak the language, but she understood the conversation just from watching. The woman told him that the rice was too much payment for what he was buying.

He picked out a necklace then, too, giving the woman that roll of nickels he’d gotten from the bookstore in the San Diego airport. Tess had puzzled over that for a long time on the flight. What on earth did Jimmy Nash want with forty nickels?

Now she understood.

Those coins were what this woman used to make her jewelry. She must melt them down and . . .

Jimmy had asked the woman something, gesturing toward one of the children. The woman pulled the child closer—a dark-haired little boy who couldn’t have been more than four years old.

As Tess watched, Jimmy greeted the boy, even shook his hand. He then passed out candy bars to all of the children. He had only three, but none of them complained about having to share the treat.

“He is my sister’s child,” Tess heard the woman said to Jimmy in heavily accented English, glancing back at the littlest boy. “He doesn’t speak American. His mother is very sick. He doesn’t know it, but he will soon be my child.”

“Doesn’t he have a father?”

“His father died in the same factory explosion that killed my husband.”

“I’m sorry,” Jimmy told her. “Just what you need—another mouth to feed.”

“He is a gift from God,” she said quietly. “With a very small mouth.” The smile she gave him was tremulous. “And I now have rice enough to fill it. Bless you for your kindness and charity.”

“There’s no kindness or charity here,” Jimmy told her, almost as if she’d insulted him. “Just fair payment.”

But Tess and the K-stani woman both knew otherwise.

Jimmy was looking at Tess now, eyes filled with concern in that face that he’d gotten dinged up, probably on purpose. “You okay?” he asked. “You kind of zoned off for a second there.”

“Yeah. Yes. I’m fine. I was just thinking about . . .” She didn’t want him to know that she’d seen him giving away that rice. He would be embarrassed. And he would also think she’d been following him, which she had been. Sort of. Not the way he’d think, but she would end up embarrassed, too. She stood up. “I should get back to work. You should, too.”

“Yeah.” He just stood there, looking at her, as if he were going to say something more. But he didn’t.

“This sucks,” she finally said. “I never imagined anything could be this bad.”

“Yeah, well, welcome to Kazbekistan,” Jimmy said. “I don’t suppose I could talk you into catching the next flight home?”

“Not a chance,” Tess said.

His smile touched his eyes. “Yeah, I didn’t think so.”

Sophia was getting robbed.

The pawnshop owner put the ring down on the counter. “Two hundred. That’s my final offer.”

“Kind sir.” Sophia kept her voice even, low, respectful. Disguised. She’d done business with him before—months ago. She was grateful now for the burka and veil that covered all but her eyes. He was a bastard and a thief, and if she could have, she would have gone somewhere else. Anywhere else. But his was the only shop open. Probably for this very reason—so he could have his turn thieving from the thieves who had used the quake’s aftershocks exactly as she had.

Sophia had used the second aftershock to steal a robe and burka, some pillows and blankets, jewelry, food, candles, and even a nifty little pair of his and hers handguns from an undamaged house in a well-to-do neighborhood.

The Kazbekistani family who lived there all ran outside when the walls again began to shake, so she’d slipped in through the open back door. As they’d stood in the street with their neighbors, talking, shouting, a baby crying, dogs barking, she’d helped herself to things they probably wouldn’t even notice were gone.

Well, except for this ring. “The value of this ring is a thousand times that.”

“Two hundred,” he said again. “Take it or leave it.”

Sophia needed cash, lots of it, if she was going to buy the false papers and ID cards she’d need to get out of Kazbekistan.

But she needed, even more, for her head to remain attached to her neck.

If she caved in to this pawnbroker’s insulting offer, he would know how truly desperate she was. She might stand out in his mind. Yes, she was wearing a heavy veil, but her eyes were blue. And while blue-eyed Kazbekistanis were not unheard of, they were certainly noteworthy.

And if word of a blue-eyed thief got back to Padsha Bashir’s nephews, they’d know she was still in Kazabek. The only reason she hadn’t fled into the mountains was this ridiculous sense of hope—that the Western relief workers flooding the city meant that the American embassy would soon open its long-closed doors. That old friends might finally return and provide the help she desperately needed.

But each time she checked, the doors to the old embassy building in Saboor Square were still boarded shut.

Without another word, Sophia took the ring from the counter, pulled the burka’s heaviest screen over her eyes, and went out into the street.

Tess was already sleeping in the back as Jimmy climbed up and into the driver’s seat of Khalid’s wagon.

She was asleep sitting up, leaning back against the hard wooden sideboards, Dave Malkoff’s head in the softness of her lap, her hand in Dave’s hair.

Dave had his eyes closed, too. His food poisoning was significantly more severe than he’d let anyone believe, and Jimmy couldn’t help feeling respect for the man. Dave had worked tirelessly all day, without a single complaint, as they’d dug more than six hundred surviving boys out of that basement bomb shelter. He’d just stepped aside, dropped to his hands and knees, and quietly communed with the dust and dirt when necessary.

In the past, when Jimmy had done the food poisoning tango himself, he’d been able to do little more than lie in bed and moan. So, okay, yeah. He was impressed. And a little jealous of that hand in the hair thing. Jealous and impressed. By Dave Malkoff. It was surely a sign of the coming apocalypse.

Vinh Murphy climbed up beside him, and the ancient cart creaked and groaned under the big man’s weight. “Yo, Nash, you really know how to drive this thing?”

“Yes, I do.”

Murphy looked at him and laughed. His eyes actually twinkled—a giant Asian-African-American leprechaun. “Yeah, right.”

Murphy had two basic modes. Silent and watchful, which played to most of the world as just this side of comatose, and amused. It was hard not to laugh, too, when Murphy was laughing, probably because he wasn’t ever mean-spirited. Murphy didn’t laugh at anyone—he laughed at the world around them.

“You know, Khalid had no trouble believing me,” Jimmy told him.

“Khalid is, like, twelve years old. Besides, he wanted to go to the hospital with his brother,” Murphy pointed out. “You could’ve told him you were the Queen of England, man, and he would’ve kissed your ring and asked you for a knighthood.”

Khalid had wept with joy when Amman had been carried from the basement with nothing more serious than a sprained wrist and a bad case of dehydration. He’d needed to go to the hospital to get checked out, but the little boy wouldn’t stop clinging to his brother’s neck.

Jimmy had suggested Khalid trust him to drive his horse cart to Rivka’s house, where they were planning to stay. Khalid could go to the hospital with his brother and pick up both horse and cart the next morning.

The boy had extracted a number of promises from Jimmy. He promised to feed and care for the horse and to lock up the cart in Rivka’s yard. He also promised that he’d handled a horse and cart before.

“Okay, James,” Decker called softly to him now from the back of the wagon. “We’re good to go.”

“Yeah, James,” Murphy said. “Pedal to the metal, man. I told Angelina I’d try to call her tonight, and cell towers are still down in this part of Kazabek. I’m hoping something’s been restored in the wealthier part of the city.”

“Don’t count on it.” Jimmy smacked the reins loosely against the back of Khalid’s horse, Marge. As in Marge Simpson. Hooray for satellite TV.

Marge glanced back at him in mild annoyance, but otherwise stood there.

Come on. He’d seen it done this way in the movies. Jimmy tried again. “Giddyap.”

The horse’s ears flickered. He—Marge was a gelding, go figure—didn’t even bother with the WTF look this time.

Murphy knew when it was not a good idea to laugh.

“So, okay,” Jimmy said. “Maybe I was exaggerating a little.”

Murphy turned toward the back. “Maybe we should wake up Tess. She’s from Iowa—”

“She hasn’t lived in Iowa since she was ten,” Jimmy said. “And believe it or not, there are a lot of people in Iowa who’ve never even touched a horse.”

“She told me she was from Greendale. That’s farm country.”

“Yeah, but she lived in town,” Jimmy told the big ex-Marine. “Her father worked at the public library. Right on Main Street. Not a horse in sight.”

Although she did have both a swing and a porch to swing from on that house in Greendale. God. Green-freaking-dale, Iowa.

“Maybe she had friends who had—”

“Let’s let her sleep.” Jimmy handed the reins to Murphy and climbed down from the cart. He could do this. How hard could it be?

He hadn’t been lying completely when he’d told Khalid he knew a thing or two about horses. He and Deck both had gone in for special training after horses had proven a handy mode of transportation for the Spec Ops teams during Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. They’d both learned how to ride, as well as how to care for horses.

The cowboy who’d taught the class had told them that A) horses were smart, and B) they would immediately know it if you were inexperienced. They’d then proceed to dis you totally.

Jimmy approached dead on and looked the horse in the eye. “Stop fucking with me,” he said. Then he said it again in the local dialect.

The horse was not impressed.

Jimmy resisted the urge to lift his shirt and flash Marge a glimpse of the sidearm he had tucked into the top of his pants. Murphy had scored a whole bagful of weapons in Ikrimah and had distributed them to the entire team. A quick look at the old 9mm was often enough to get stubborn humans to shake a leg.

The horse shook his head to dislodge a fly.

Maybe this thing needed a running start. Jimmy had seen Khalid leading the horse. He grabbed the horse’s bridle in a likely looking spot and pulled.

Okay. Now they were moving. Of course, Jimmy was walking, too, which sucked. It was probably twelve miles to Rivka’s. It would be bad enough to have to sit on that hard bench up front, holding the reins. Especially when he wanted to be in the back, with his head in Tess’s lap.

He got them up to speed and attempted to climb back into the moving cart.

Which wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to do, especially after all those hours spent clearing rubble.

Of course, the horse made it easier by courteously coming to a full stop.

“Shit.”

Murphy gave the reins a try.

Nada.

Again.

No movement.

Jimmy heard Deck sigh from his seat in the back of the cart. Or maybe he didn’t hear it. Maybe he just imagined it. Whatever the case, it was motivating.

He climbed out of the cart.

“I think he’s tired,” Murphy said.

“No kidding.” Jimmy returned to the eating end of the horse and got the wagon rolling again.

They lurched and squeaked and clopped past Will Schroeder, who was sitting by the side of the road with his duffel bag, his head in his hands.

He wasn’t alone. Jimmy realized there were quite a few people who had been on that bus from Ikrimah sitting there, looking shell-shocked after having helped recover the bodies of those children from that school.

They were probably all reporters, most of whom had never seen the aftermath of an earthquake in a third-world country up close and personal like this. At best, they’d stood on the fringes of the destruction with their news cameras and reported death tolls in hushed tones, without really comprehending what those numbers meant.

Today it had been spelled out for them quite clearly.

Picking a path through the rubble and ruins, Jimmy led the horse and wagon down a street he barely recognized but knew had to be Rue de Palms.

“Okay, Marge,” he murmured to the horse. “I guess I’m going to walk it with you.”

Twelve miles wasn’t all that far.