Payback

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ash—” Keifer sounded strained.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 3

Status: eighteen days and counting

Time: 0330 hours

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

This was now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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