Target

Back off. Of what? Her assailants had made a tactical mistake. They’d in essence told her she was correctly on the trail of something or someone big. Big enough to send in thugs to stop her and Oracle. Of course, the attack might have nothing to do with her investigation and could be related to some other pot Oracle was stirring. Except her gut said otherwise. The timing of an attack on her home computer and then an immediate attack on Oracle was just too big a coincidence to be random. She jumped to the next logical conclusion. Oracle had to be right. The Q-group was working with someone else. Someone who’d staged this attack on Oracle’s headquarters. But who?

She was startled just a few minutes later to hear the rumble of a truck not only coming up the street, but stopping in front of the house. She moved to the front window and peered outside cautiously. A man carrying a carpenter’s belt in one hand was headed up the sidewalk. She grabbed her leather duster coat and threw it on, hiding her knife in its folds as she headed out of the library.

“Can I help you?” she asked around the remains of the front door.

“I’m here to fix your door,” he replied impassively. “Wouldn’t want all your Greek antiquities to be exposed to the cold air and get damaged.”

Greek antiquities—Delphi. Whoa. It hadn’t been more than fifteen minutes since she reported the break-in to Delphi. And there was already a repairman here? She stepped back into the library and closed the door. Quickly she pulled out her cell phone and dialed Delphi’s emergency number again. She waited impatiently for the answering machine’s beep.

She said with quiet urgency into the phone, “Hi, it’s me again. I don’t mean to be dense, but a repairman already showed up at the house to fix the door. That seems awfully fast to me. I just wanted to verify that this guy is who he says he is before I let him in. Call me back—”

The line clicked. Someone had just picked up the phone. Another click as some sort of electronic device connected. And then a strangely modulated voice spoke in her ear. “If the repairman made a reference to Greek antiquities, then he’s legitimate.”

The voice was neither male nor female, human nor inhuman. Computer generated, or maybe run through a scrambler. Damn. No clue as to Delphi’s identity.

Diana blinked. “Uh, okay then. Should I stick around until he’s done and lock up, or may I leave?”

A pause, and then the strange, disembodied voice asked, “Do you have somewhere pressing to go?”

“Yes. I think I may have a lead on who’s backing the Q-group. Or at least I may know someone who has a lead.”

Another pause. “Then by all means, go ahead and leave. You don’t have much time to stop these people.”

Even through the filter of the electronic voice alterations, Delphi’s concern was clearly audible. A chill raced across her skin. It could not be a good thing if her employer, whose stock-in-trade was global-scale crises, was so worried.

Delphi’s urgency latched on to the back of her neck and clung to her with sharp talons as she drove back to her house. Fortunately, no one appeared to follow her or otherwise attempt to assault her between Alexandria and Bethesda. When she got home, she did a quick walk-through to verify that nobody had been inside since she left. The hairs across doorsills and other signals she’d left behind were still in place.

She retraced her steps to the kitchen and put a pot of coffee on to brew, then pulled out her thick folder of newspaper clippings on Gabe Monihan. She sipped at a mug of strong, hot coffee while she spread out copies of the Chicago Tribune for the week immediately following the October Q-group attack. Kim Valenti’s name appeared several times as the heroine who’d worked with FBI bomb squad member Lex Tanner to stop the terrorist’s plans. The headlines all shouted about the attempted terrorist bombing in Chicago and Gabe Monihan’s brush with death. Pictures of the presidential candidate splashed just beneath the headlines.

Lord, Monihan was a handsome man, in a clean-cut, All-American kind of way. The sort of guy she’d found wildly attractive until she got burned by a jerk who looked just like that in college. Three years she’d been desperately in love with Robert Danforth. She’d practically done his law school for him. And the bastard had dumped her cold the minute he made Law Review and graduated with honors. Told her she wasn’t wife material for a man with a bright future like him. Said she wasn’t classy enough—wouldn’t fit in at the country club. To hell with him and the snooty crowd he represented. Who wanted to fit in with a bunch of snobs anyway? At least she’d gotten her revenge. He was a lousy lawyer without her to do his reasoning for him. He’d crashed and burned at the high-powered law firm that hired him based on his—her—grades in law school. Served him right.

She blinked away the memory, and Robert’s casual, blond good looks were replaced by Gabe Monihan’s serious, patrician visage on the page in front of her. Unlike Robert, the next president had dark hair, a rich, warm brown shade. And instead of blue eyes, Gabe’s were light brown, a dancing golden color that hinted at dry humor beneath the keen intelligence of the man.

Work, girlfriend, work. Someone was trying to kill Mr. Wonderful and she was supposed to be figuring out who it was. Quickly, she skimmed the portions of the articles she’d highlighted. There it was. Richard Dunst. That was the guy’s name. An ex-CIA agent suspected of doing arms deals with a group of Berzhaani rebels awhile back. He’d been part of the group that had taken over the UBC TV studios in Chicago to divert security attention from the airport. The newspaper article said he was being held in jail without bail under provisions of the Homeland Security Act.

She went to her computer, plugged his name into a search engine and sat back to wait. It didn’t take long. Only one recent hit. He’d been arrested in a raid of a suspected Q-group headquarters in Baltimore over Columbus Day weekend and was being held by federal authorities.

Which meant Dunst was here, in Washington. The CIA was probably debriefing him now that they’d caught up with him. Typing quickly, she poked around the federal prison database but didn’t find what she needed. And so, like any good Athena Academy graduate, she took matters into her own hands and engaged in a little quick extracurricular activity, hacking into the restricted portion of the federal prisoner database.

Bingo. He was being held at Bolling AFB, a gray and unobtrusive spit of land sitting in a curve of the Potomac on the south side of Washington, D.C., and home of the Defense Intelligence Agency. The prisoner database indicated only that Dunst was under investigation for possible un-American activities. Yup, the CIA was still working him over.

She needed to talk to him. ASAP. He wasn’t likely to give up any significant information to her in a single interview, but she had to try. He was her only potential link between the Q-group and the CIA. The more she thought about it, the more sure she was that the Berzhaani terrorists were behind any forthcoming assassination attempt on Gabe Monihan. And if they’d gained access to more CIA training and techniques, she bloody well needed to know it if she was going to save the President.

6:00 A.M.

She stared at the clothes in her closet, pondering the perfect outfit. She opted against her Army uniform. The idea was to get Dunst to talk to her, not put him off by coming across as yet another government flunky out to milk him for information. Even if that was exactly what she was. She needed to strike a tone that would put him at ease. Professional yet casual, with a touch of sex appeal.

She settled on a pair of tailored, brown suede slacks and a pale yellow turtleneck that hugged her figure in all the right places. She brushed her golden blond hair into soft waves around her face and reached for her makeup kit, which looked more like a fishing tackle box than anything else. But then between her work and real life, she wore so many different faces that maybe it wasn’t surprising she’d put a clown to shame with the array of cosmetics she used.

Today, she went for a classic look. A little eyeliner and understated eye shadow, enough mascara on her extravagant lashes to draw attention to her big blue eyes, a hint of blush over her flawless skin and coral lipstick to match the peaches-and-cream color of her complexion. This wasn’t a face she put on often. Her big sister, Josie, would call it her about-damn-time-she-cleaned-up face. Her mother, vacant soul that she’d been until recently, would have patted this cheek and called her such a pretty little thing. As if she wasn’t five foot seven and twenty-seven years of age. And Dad. Dad would flash her the dimples that exactly matched hers and nod in silent approval at this face. She sighed and sprayed on one of the expensive, elegant perfumes her sister was prone to giving her as gifts.

There. As good as she could manage on half a night’s sleep before the sun was even up. Hopefully, the look would work on Richard Dunst. She drove down to Bolling AFB, suffering through the early phase of the morning rush hour. Washington, D.C.’s streets were designed for horses and buggies, and she was firmly convinced everyone would get places faster if the residents went back to using horse-drawn conveyances. The many government agencies downtown staggered their work hours to ease the daily gridlock, but the result was a morning rush hour that stretched from before 6:00 a.m. to nearly 10:00 a.m. She eventually wound her way past the Jefferson Memorial and its now skeletally bare promenade of cherry trees to her destination.

The gate guard at Bolling didn’t raise an eyebrow at her civilian clothing in concert with her military ID. Many of the Defense Intelligence Agency staffers headquartered here worked out of uniform. But the guard did raise a brow when she asked for directions to the prisoner holding facility on base. Its very existence wasn’t something most people knew about, let alone visited. He pointed to her right and rattled off a confusing series of street names and turns. Ah well. She’d find it. At least he’d given her a decent description of what the building looked like. She’d fake the rest.

A few minutes later, she pulled into a parking lot and climbed out of her car. She pulled the collar of her leather coat up around her ears. The Capitol had been in the grip of an arctic cold spell for a couple of days, and the deep freeze wasn’t showing any signs of letting up today, either.

She hurried into the brown brick, three-story building and was immediately confronted by a glass security wall. She signed a stack of forms and affidavits, submitted to a body search by a female guard, was metal detected, x-rayed and thoroughly scrutinized before she was allowed to pass through the glass partition. Then there was a delay while it was determined whether or not the prisoner in question was awake yet. Frankly, she didn’t care if it was a violation of Richard Dunst’s civil rights to disturb his beauty rest or not. She needed to talk to the guy. Now. Eventually, a combination of sheer insistence and winning charm got her the final signature she needed to interview Dunst, awake or otherwise.

She carried her documents to a second, double-doored security area watched by guards sitting behind bulletproof glass. One guard buzzed her through while the second guard met her on the far side and walked her down a hallway as sterile as a hospital. The floor was linoleum, the lights bright and fluorescent behind steel mesh covers. Gray steel doors flanked her on either side, pockmarked with heavy, shiny steel rivets.

The guard stopped in front of one such unmarked door and punched a lengthy sequence into the number pad beside it. A green diode lit on the pad’s face. Putting his weight into it, the guard pulled on the door. It slid open ponderously, its soundproof rubber stripping rubbing on the floor. She stepped into the dim room and blinked in surprise as the guard flipped on the lights. The walls were blindingly pink, an intense peppermint shade that assaulted the eye.

“What’s with the wall color?” she asked the guard.

“The shrinks-from-on-high say that Pepto-Bismol pink calms down prisoners. Makes ’em less likely to be violent.”

She rolled her eyes. “Too busy puking to fight with each other?”

The guard grinned, then said more seriously, “I’ll bring the prisoner to you here.” He pointed at the pair of surveillance cameras in opposite corners of the small room. “We’ll monitor the meeting with the audio feed turned off like you asked for. Dunst knows the rules. If his hands disappear from plain sight at any time, or he makes any move that might be construed as aggressive or threatening toward you, a guard will step in immediately. If you want a guard to come in, just look up at one of the cameras and nod. You sure you want to be left alone with this guy?”

“Yes,” she answered firmly. She needed Dunst to feel as though he could talk freely. Off the record.

The guard shrugged. “Don’t offer the prisoner any item whatsoever, not even a pen or a paperclip. This guy’s a trained killer. Got it?”

She nodded.

“Okay then. I think they’ve already got Dunst out and are searching him. I’ll be back with him in a couple of minutes.”

The heavy door swung shut behind the guard as he left her alone in the vaultlike interview room. She tried to imagine living boxed up in a place like this for the rest of her life. And shuddered. She’d go crazy, pink walls or not.

She’d been sitting at the steel table for about three minutes when, without warning, the room plunged into darkness. Inky, cavelike blackness without a hint of light. She waited several seconds for the backup power to kick in, but nothing happened. The room stayed dark. What was going on? The blackness and the walls pressed in on her, heavier and heavier, until she thought she was going to suffocate. She had to get out of here.

She felt her way around the table and stretched an arm out, groping for the door. A step into the void. And another. And then her hand encountered cold metal. With both hands, she felt for the door handle. Please God, let her not be locked in here. They’d told her they would lock her in here with Dunst once he arrived. She found the latch and pushed down on the thumb lever. Putting her weight into it, she leaned on the door. It moved. Thank God. It slid open to reveal another void of total darkness. Jeez. Didn’t they have any emergency generators or something in this place? Using the wall as a guide, she turned to her right and began to make her way down the hall toward the exit.

Something brushed against her in the dark. And instantly, a powerful blow slammed into her collarbones. A human arm contracted, snakelike, whipping around her neck and yanking her off balance. Scared out of her skin, she screamed as loud as she could. The piercing noise echoed weirdly, amplified to an almost inhuman pitch by the long hallway. A sweaty hand slapped over her mouth, cutting off the sound. It yanked her down violently. She crouched awkwardly, still wrapped in the man’s powerful grip.

A voice snarled in her ear in a bare whisper, “Shut up if you don’t want the bastard to kill you.”

No sooner had the words left her assailant’s mouth than a deafening explosion cracked. The hard body against hers lurched spasmodically and the arm around her neck went slack. The guy toppled over, knocking her to the floor with him.

“Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit,” the man now sprawled half on top of her chanted under his breath. “Can you shoot, lady?” he ground out.

“Yeah,” she gasped under his crushing weight.

“I dropped my pistol. I think it fell against the far wall. Find it, will you, so the prisoner doesn’t grab it.”

Prisoner. This was one of the guards. And someone must be trying to break out of the jail. She wiggled out from under him, which was no small feat. Crawling on her hands and knees and feeling around on the floor in the dark, her hands encountered something slippery and wet. A metallic smell announced that it was blood. She jerked her hands away. Who’d shot the guard beside her? And where was that blasted gun? On this highly waxed linoleum, the darn thing could’ve slid halfway down the hall.

And then she heard a rhythmic noise above the rasping breaths of the wounded guard. Slapping. Like feet hitting the floor. Running. Toward her from the direction of the cell block. In this dark, it was impossible to tell if it was another guard charging to the rescue or the prisoner making a break for it.

She froze, crouched by the wall, straining to gauge the running person’s distance from her. To tackle or not to tackle. That was the question. A door opened at the far end of the hall and a sliver of light spilled into the narrow space. Several voices shouted. They echoed so loudly she couldn’t understand a word. But they sounded furious.

Another shot rang out from the direction of the running man, and the door slammed shut once more, plunging the hall back into blackness, made all the thicker by the brief exposure of her eyes to light.

Acting purely on instinct, she reached out as the running footsteps approached. Something hard cracked into her forearm. Felt like a shin. A grunt and a thud. She dived for the guy, but he threw her off violently. She grabbed again, coming up with nothing more than a fistful of hair as he jerked away from her grasp. She wrapped her arms around whatever she could grab. Felt like an ankle. What must have been a fist connected with her left ear. She lost her grip on the guy’s leg, and heard him scramble off in the dark. Where were the damned emergency lights?

She couldn’t go anywhere for now, so she crawled back to the injured guard. Maybe she could help him, at any rate.

“Where are you hit?” she whispered.

Nothing. The guy must’ve passed out. Not good. She prayed it was pain that had knocked the guy out and not blood loss. His breathing sounded terrible. He was shot in the chest cavity, then. She felt around on his upper body, following the wetness on his shirt to a small, round wound under his left arm. Lucky shot. It had just missed his bulletproof vest and hit him in the armpit. She couldn’t tell the angle of entry in the dark to take a guess at the damage he’d suffered. Based on the sucking noises coming from him, his left lung was collapsed at a minimum.

She jumped as a barrage of shots exploded from the direction the prisoner’d just gone. Hopefully, the guards had just killed the jerk.

Meanwhile, the guy beside her sounded bad. It was damned hard to render first aid by feel without any supplies or equipment whatsoever. For lack of anything more to do in the inky dark, she put her hand over the hole and applied pressure to it. The sucking noise abated some.

It seemed to take forever, but the overhead lights finally flickered back on. Oh, God. There was blood everywhere. Her guard was breathing but unconscious, his face deathly pale. Probably a combination of blood loss and shock. She shouted for a medic and prayed someone heard her in the chaos that erupted as the doors opened and a SWAT team burst into the hall.

“I’m Army,” she cried out. “This guard’s been shot. Someone ran past me that way in the dark.” She gestured with her head.

An EMT took over care of the guard’s chest wound while another guard helped her to her feet.

It seemed unfair somehow that she ended up being escorted into a room and interrogated herself. A crime-scene investigator examined her hands under a magnifying glass and picked tiny fibers off her palm with tweezers.

“As I suspected,” the guy announced after examining the fibers closely.

“What?” Diana asked.

“A wig. This is fake hair. Won’t get any DNA from it.”

Nonetheless, the guy took away the bits of hair she’d grabbed for analysis. Finally, after she’d given the same statement to no less than four different people, a man in an expensive suit stepped into the room. Not a beat cop in threads like that.

“Captain Lockworth, I’m Agent Flaherty. Thank you for answering our questions so patiently. How are you doing?”

She noticed he didn’t say who he was an agent of. Fine. She could play that game, too. “I’m all right. Ready for a few answers of my own.”

He perched a hip on the corner of the room’s lone table and smiled pleasantly. “Fire away.”

“Who raced by me in the dark?”

“A prisoner trying to escape. Name’s Roscoe Dupree.”

The guy watched her intently as he said the name. As if it was supposed to mean something to her. In fact, it did tickle at the edge of her memory. She’d heard that name somewhere before. “Did he get away?” she asked curiously.

“Unfortunately, yes. But I have every confidence we’ll pick him up soon. And what did you say brought you here today?”

Her mind snapped back to business. “I’m here to speak to Richard Dunst. It’s a matter of great urgency. While I realize you’ve just had an escape and things are crazy around here, I still really need to speak to him.”

“That would be difficult, Captain. Roscoe Dupree is Richard Dunst.”

Memory flooded her. Of course. Roscoe Dupree was yet another name for the man known as Dunst. He’d used the Dupree identity in Berzhaan when he’d dealt with a Berzhaani rebel group that was trying to overthrow the government there. He’d worked under the Dunst name when he obtained a bomb and gave it to the Q-group to use to kill Gabe Monihan in Chicago. And he’d escaped? Today of all days? Could Dunst, a trained killer, be involved in the plan to assassinate the next President of the United States on this, his inauguration day? Surely that was no coincidence. Not good. Not good at all.

“What can you tell me about how he escaped?” she asked the agent urgently.

Flaherty shrugged. “We don’t know for sure.”

She took a calming breath. No sense making this guy any more suspicious than he already was. “I’d like to hear your best guess,” she asked quietly. “It’s important. National security important.”

He looked her in the eye and she held his gaze for a long moment. She saw him weighing her words. Weighing her. This guy smelled like FBI all the way. And clearly, he didn’t trust her completely. But she saw with relief the instant when he decided for reasons of his own to answer her question. Frankly, she didn’t care what game he was playing as long as she got what she needed.

“Dupree—Dunst—got a knife and a disguise—presumably to wear once he got out of here—from somewhere. Overpowered a guard in the hallway while en route to the interview with you. Took the guard’s gun and ran down this hallway, briefly impeded by you.”

“How’d the power go out? Doesn’t this place have emergency power of some sort?”

Flaherty’s jaw rippled. “We don’t know yet how both the primary and backup power systems went down.”

“How did Dunst get out the door? Surely it fails to a locked mode in a facility like this.”

An outright clench tensed Flaherty’s jaw this time. He gritted out, “The lockdown mode on the exit Dunst used never engaged properly. He ran up, pulled the damn door open and shot his way out.”

“How’d he egress the area? Surely you’d have caught him by now if he were on foot. How did a getaway car get through the front gate?”

“Good question. We’ve got film but the license plate was intentionally obscured.”

Just like the car the guy who broke into her house used. She asked sharply, “Did they use a black plastic garbage bag over the plate? Drive a late model silver sedan? Four doors? Foreign make?”

The guy lurched to his feet. Paced a lap of the tiny space and came back to the table, planting his palms on it and leaning toward her aggressively. “And just how in the hell did you know that? Are you working with Dunst? It’s pretty damned convenient that you showed up at this ungodly hour, insisting that Dunst be dragged out of his cell and brought out here.”

She reared back in shock. “I am not working with Richard Dunst! I’m here because I believe he’s involved in a conspiracy to kill Gabe Monihan. I want to nail this bastard!”