Part 2 (1/2)

She spoke quietly too, now, but made sure there was no interest or emotion in her voice. Just stating obvious facts to move the conversation forward. ”You know someone who has vital information.”

Carston nodded.

”You can't take him or her out, because that would let others know that you are aware of them. Which would expedite whatever course of action you would prefer not to happen.”

Another nod.

”We're talking about the bad stuff here, yes?”

A sigh.

Nothing worked the department up like terrorism. She'd been recruited before the emotional dust had entirely settled around the hole where the Twin Towers used to stand. Preventing terrorism had always been the main component of her job-the best justification for it. The threat of terrorism had also been manipulated, turned and twisted, till by the end she'd lost a lot of faith in the idea that she was actually doing the work of a patriot.

”And a large device,” she said, not a question. The biggest bogeyman was always this-that at some point, someone who truly hated the United States would get his or her hands on something nuclear. That was the dark shadow that hid her profession from the eyes of the world, that made her so indispensable, no matter how much Joe Citizen wanted to think she didn't exist.

And it had happened-more than once. People like her had kept those situations from turning into ma.s.sive human tragedies. It was a trade-off. Small-scale horror versus wholesale slaughter.

Carston shook his head and suddenly his pale eyes were haunted. She couldn't help but shudder a little internally as she realized it was door number two. There were only ever two fears that big.

It's biological. She didn't say the words out loud, just mouthed them.

Carston's bleak expression was her answer.

She looked down for a moment, sorting through all of his responses and reducing them to two columns, two lists of possibilities in her head. Column one: Carston was a talented liar who was saying things he thought would motivate her to visit a place where people were better prepared to dispose of Juliana Fortis forever. He was thinking quickly on his feet, pus.h.i.+ng her most sensitive b.u.t.tons.

Column two: Someone had a biological weapon of ma.s.s destruction, and the powers that be didn't know where it was or when it would be used. But they knew someone who did.

Vanity carried some weight, s.h.i.+fting the balance slightly. She knew she was good. It was true that they probably hadn't found someone better.

Still, she would put her money on column one.

”Jules, I don't want you dead,” he said quietly, guessing her train of thought. ”I wouldn't have contacted you if that were the case. I wouldn't want to meet with you. Because I am certain you have at least six ways to kill me on your person right now, and every reason in the world to use one of them.”

”You really think I would come with only six?” she asked.

He frowned nervously for a second, then decided to laugh. ”You make my point for me. I don't have a death wish, Jules. I'm on the level.”

He eyed the locket around her neck, and she suppressed a smile.

She returned to her light voice. ”I would prefer it if you called me Dr. Fortis. I think we're past the point of nicknames.”

He made a hurt face. ”I'm not asking you to forgive me. I should have done more.”

She nodded, though again, she wasn't agreeing with him, she was just moving the conversation along.

”I am asking you to help me. No, not me. To help the innocent people who are going to die if you don't.”

”If they die, it's not on me.”

”I know, Ju-Doctor. I know. It will be on me. But who's to blame won't really matter to them. They'll be dead.”

She held his gaze. She wouldn't be the one to blink.

His expression s.h.i.+fted to something darker. ”Would you like to hear what it will do to them?”

”No.”

”It might be too much even for your stomach.”

”I doubt it. But it doesn't really matter. What might happen is secondary.”

”I'd like to know what is more important than hundreds of thousands of American lives.”

”It's going to sound horribly selfish, but breathing in and out has sort of trumped everything else for me.”

”You can't help us if you're dead,” Carston said bluntly. ”The lesson has been learned. This won't be the last time we'll need you. We won't make the same mistake again.”

She hated to buy into this, but the balance was s.h.i.+fting even more. What Carston was saying did make sense. She was certainly no stranger to policy changes. What if it was all true? She could play cold, but Carston knew her well. She would have a difficult time living with a disaster of this magnitude if she thought there was any chance she could have done something. That was how, in the beginning, they'd roped her into possibly the worst profession in the entire world.

”I don't suppose you have the files on you,” she said.

CHAPTER 3.

Tonight, her name was Alex.

She'd needed to put a little distance between herself and DC, and she'd ended up in a small motel just north of Philadelphia. It was one of half a dozen that lined the interstate on the way out of the city. It would take any tracker a while to search all of them, even if he first somehow narrowed down her position to this part of town. She'd left no trail to even get a hunter to Pennsylvania. Regardless, she'd be sleeping in the bathtub tonight as usual.

There was no table in the small room, so she had all the files laid out on the bed. Just looking at them exhausted her. It had not been a simple matter of having Carston FedEx them somewhere.

The information was ready, Carston had told her. He'd been hopeful that she would meet with him, and he would have brought the files with him if he'd been expecting her. She insisted on hard copies, and he agreed. She gave him the delivery instructions.

The difficulty was breaking the connection on both ends.

For example, she couldn't just have Carston dump the files into a trash can and hire someone to pick them up for her-it was too easy for people to keep an eye on that trash can. The watchers would see the person who picked the files up and then follow that person. That person could take the files to a separate drop spot before she came near them, but the eyes would already be there. Somewhere along the line, the package had to be out of the observers' sight long enough for her to perform a complex little sh.e.l.l game.

So Carston had, as instructed, left a box for her at the front desk of the Brayscott Hotel. Mr. Green was ready. He thought Carston was a friend who had stolen back those family heirlooms from the violent ex, who was surely following him. Mr. Green had given her the code so she could remotely watch the hotel's video surveillance feed from an Internet cafe miles away. Just because she hadn't seen people following Carston didn't mean they weren't there, but he appeared to simply deliver the box and walk away. The manager did a good job of following all her instructions, most likely because he knew she was watching. The box went into the service elevator and down to the laundry, where it was transferred to a maid's cart, delivered to her room, and then put into her inconspicuous black suitcase by the bike messenger to whom she'd given the key card and five hundred dollars. The bike messenger had taken a circuitous route, following the instructions she'd given him over a cheap prepaid phone that she'd already disposed of, and eventually dropped the box with a confused salesperson at the copy store across the street from the cafe.

Hopefully, the watchers were still back at the hotel, waiting for her to walk through the front door. Probably they were smarter, but even if there were ten watchers, there wouldn't have been enough to follow every stranger who walked out of the hotel. If one had attached himself to her messenger, he would have had a hard time keeping up. She could only cross her fingers that no one was watching now.

She'd had to move fast. That next hour was the most dangerous part of her plan.

Of course, she'd known there would be some kind of tracking device hidden in the materials. She'd told Carston she would scan for a trick like this, but perhaps he'd guessed that she didn't have the tech to do that. As quickly as possible, she made a set of colored duplicates. It took fifteen minutes, much too long. The duplicates went into the suitcase, and the originals into a paper bag that the girl at the counter gave her. She left the box in the garbage there.

The clock was really against her now. She'd climbed in a cab and had the driver head toward a rougher part of DC while she looked for the first place that would give her the privacy she needed. She didn't have time to be picky, and she ended up having the cabbie wait for her at the end of an unsavory alley. It was the kind of behavior he would definitely remember, but there was no help for it. They could be watching her already. She hurried to the bottom of the dead-end alley-what a place to be caught!-stepped behind a dumpster, and cleared a spot on the broken asphalt with her foot.

The sound of movement behind her made her jump and spin around, her hand on the thick black belt at her waist, her fingers automatically seeking the thin syringe hidden farthest to the left.