His blue eyes flashed back a teasing amusement and assurance. “You’ll see.”
Seconds later they reached the end of the hallway and the awesome mass of silver-gray machinery—the floor-to-ceiling memory storage, the multitude of drives, disks, modems, and controls.
She stared with wonder at the machine, but then turned to her husband with her eyes narrowing in further confusion and a smile that clearly indicated she thought he was crazy playing at the corners of her lips.
He smiled and bowed dramatically. “You wanted to meet Catherine. Voila! I give you Catherine.”
Erin glanced from Jarod to the computer and back to Jarod, then started laughing. “A computer! I was jealous of a computer!”
“Ahhhh … not just any computer!” Jarod explained generously. “This lady is top of the line. She is programmed to think—and she is equipped with a marvelous sense of humor.”
“A sense of humor?” Erin queried dubiously.
Jarod nodded. “Umm. A sense of humor.”
Erin stared at the computer a minute and then frowned again. “But how could Catherine be here and in Russia?”
“Easy, my love—she has a counterpart. This lady is Catherine I—in Moscow we have Catherine II—or Catherine the Great as we call her. Both Catherines are sheer works of genius, true tributes to the brilliance of the human mind.”
Chuckling ruefully, Erin continued to gaze at the extensive keyboard. “My rival!” she murmured. Then she glanced back to her husband. “Jarod—should I really be in here?”
He smiled. “Access to this corridor is not easy—access to Catherine is even more difficult. She accepts commands only when she has been properly entered—and one enters her through an infallible system. She has special lights that pick up on fingerprints. See.”
As he explained, Jarod slipped by Erin and sat in the chair, setting his hand into the pit. Catherine whirred into action.
GOOD AFTERNOON, JAROD STEELE.
Jarod answered:
HELLO, CATHERINE.
The computer whirred again.
THE DATE IS JUNE 4. TIME, 3.02.48 PM. THE TEMPERATURE OUTSIDE THE UNITED NATIONS BUILDING IS A PLEASANT 80 DEGREES FAHRENHEIT, 26.7 CELSIUS. SLIGHTLY CLOUDY, 20 PERCENT CHANCE OF RAIN.
Erin laughed delightedly. “She’s wonderful!”
“Umm,” Jarod agreed. His laughing eyes met his wife’s. “Actually, Catherine introduced me to you.”
“Oh?” Erin lifted a brow.
“Oh. Yes.” Jarod pushed a number of keys, and she saw a file on herself suddenly appear across the screen. She was astounded by the things the computer “knew.” Details she had half-forgotten herself.
Erin set her hands delicately upon Jarod’s shoulders and then pinched him. “That isn’t fair!” she exclaimed. “You knew my whole life—”
“Ouch!” Jarod murmured, catching her hands with his and pulling them over his shoulders to kiss them. “No, sweetheart, I didn’t know everything. There was a lot I had to learn from you. And the learning, that marvelous sense of trust you gave me, was a part of my coming to realize how much I needed you to be a part of my life.”
Erin dipped low and brushed a kiss on top of his head. “Then I guess I’ll forgive you—and Catherine,” she said huskily, before frowning and stiffening once more.
“Jarod—you were watching me all the while, weren’t you? That night I collided with you in the bar … in the airport … on the train—”
“The bar,” Jarod interrupted, “was purely accidental! I’ll admit to the plane and the train.” He sighed a little sheepishly. “You see, Catherine knew that you were somehow involved—but not how. As soon as your name had appeared on the roster of those entering the Soviet Union, Joe had planned to use you as a carrier. ‘Mc’ was the code name for you in the computer.” He hesitated for a moment, then explained. “You see, Erin, there was another embassy man who had gotten involved with Joe. His name was Samuel Hughes.” He paused again as he saw her brows raise. “Yes, the man I told Gil about that day in my apartment. Sam wasn’t such a terrible man, just weak. Service to the government doesn’t always pay much, but espionage can. Anyway, Sam got involved with Joe, then started to get panicky. He wanted out and he was in a business a man couldn’t just quit. He had access to Catherine—so he started planting little clues in the computer. Your code name was one of them. He planned to have a fail-safe system for himself—and I suppose he must have told Joe that he wanted out—and that if anything happened to him, Catherine would be there to tell the world. But apparently Joe knew that Sam hadn’t given Catherine too much information—too much would have cooked his own goose, because the Catherines link up and someone with access would be sure to catch on.”
“Joe tried to make it look like the Soviets had gotten Sam. The U.S. couldn’t have said much if he had been caught in the act of espionage. And there was a while when I believed it might have been possible. Except that Sergei denied it. And under the circumstances, Sergei definitely wouldn’t have lied. By the time they found Sam, I knew he hadn’t been killed by the Russians, but by whoever was running Project Midnight.”
Erin shivered and closed her eyes. She had come close to a little too much, and been such a fool that she had fought the man who had always been trying to save her, even when logic had told him she was a suspect.
She felt her husband kiss the palm of her hand tenderly. “Forget it, Erin,” he said softly. “It’s all over now.” He was silent for a second and then changed the tone of his voice. “Anything you want to ask Catherine? You can think of her as a mystic! She does great things with the laws of probability.”
“Hmmmmm,” Erin murmured, thinking for a moment as she tried to join his lighthearted attempt to ease away from the past. “Of course! Ask her if we’re going to have a boy or a girl!”
Jarod ran the Probability Program and then typed out the question.
Catherine whirred.
PERCENTAGE OF MALES BORN IS SLIGHTLY HIGHER AT THIS DATE THAN FEMALES. HOWEVER, PERSONAL PERCENTAGE IS THAT OF ANY EXPECTING PARENTS.
50-50
Erin chuckled softly. “Well that certainly tells us!”
“I’m glad,” Jarod said softly. “I kind of like the element of surprise. I mean, the father gets to call everyone, and the exciting part is announcing a son or daughter, right?”
“I suppose!” Erin laughed. “But which would you prefer?”
He paused a second. “A healthy child,” he said softly.
Erin touched his cheek tenderly. “We will have a healthy child,” she promised quietly. She placed both her hands lightly atop his jet head and tilted it upward so that she could bend to nuzzle his forehead with her lips. From that angle she held his eyes, her own rich with understanding. “I love you,” she said.
“And I love you.”
They held together for a moment, then Jarod once more clutched her hands. “It’s a pleasant day,” he announced, “or so Catherine says—if you don’t mind a small probability of showers. You and Catherine have now met, and I think it would be a shame to waste a pleasant day.”
“I get your drift!” Erin chuckled. “Let’s get out of here!”
She turned and started to retrace her steps down the sterile white corridor. Jarod watched the natural sway of her hips and grinned as he turned back to Catherine to check out.
But before he could touch a key, Catherine whirred, and Jarod smiled as he read the message.
HAVE A NICE, NICE LIFE, JAROD STEELE.
Jarod glanced back to his wife, who had turned to wait for him, her silver eyes filled with dazzling mischief, her lips curled into a secret, tempting smile. He typed out a final message.
THANKS, CATHERINE. I BELIEVE I WILL HAVE JUST THAT!
He checked out of the computer and followed the blond beauty with the stunning silver eyes, catching her with an arm about her waist. They left the building and walked out together. The sun was shining through the clouds. Yes, he thought, we will have a nice … nice …
life.
A Biography of Heather Graham
Heather Graham (b. 1953) is one of the country’s most prominent authors of romance, suspense, and historical fiction. She has been writing bestselling books for nearly three decades, publishing more than 150 novels and selling more than seventy-five million copies worldwide.
Born in Florida to an Irish mother and a Scottish father, Graham attended college at the University of South Florida, where she majored in theater arts. She spent a few years making a living onstage as a back-up vocalist and dinner theater actor, but after the birth of her third child decided to seek work that would allow her to spend more time with her family.
After early efforts writing romance and horror stories, Graham sold her first novel, When Next We Love (1982). She went on to write nearly two dozen contemporary romance novels.
In 1989 Graham published Sweet Savage Eden, which initiated the Cameron family saga, an epic six-book series that sets romantic drama amid turbulent periods of American history, such as the Civil War. She revisited the nineteenth century in Runaway (1994), a story of passion, deception, and murder in Florida, which spawned five sequels of its own.
In the past decade, Graham has written romantic suspense novels such as Tall, Dark, and Deadly (1999), Long, Lean, and Lethal (2000), and Dying to Have Her (2001), as well as supernatural fiction. In 2003’s Haunted she created the Harrison Investigation service, a paranormal detective organization that she spun off into four Krewe of Hunters novels in 2011.
Graham lives in Florida, where she writes, scuba dives, and spends time with her husband and five children.
Graham (left) with her sister.
Graham with her family in New Orleans. Pictured left to right: Dennis Pozzessere; Zhenia Yeretskaya Pozzessere; Derek, Shayne, and Chynna Pozzessere; Heather Graham; Jason and Bryee-Annon Pozzessere; and Jeremy Gonzalez.
Graham at a photo shoot in Key West for the promotion of the Flynn Brothers trilogy.
Graham at the haunted Myrtles plantation, Francisville, Louisiana.
Graham and the Slushpile Band playing the Memnoch the Devil Ball at the Undead Con in New Orleans, 2010.
Graham with dear friend, actor Doug Jones.
Graham (third from left) with F. Paul Wilson, R. L. Stine, Jon Land, and other friends at the seventh annual ThrillerFest, held in New York City, 2011. The authors participated in the “Be Book Smart” campaign organized by Reading Is Fundamental, the nation’s oldest and largest children’s literacy organization.
Graham (seated center) with her local Romance Writers of America group in Broward County, Florida, 2011.
Graham (second from left) with fellow authors Stephen Jay Schwartz, F. Paul Wilson, and Barry Eisler participating in a panel at the Romantic Times Booklovers Convention, Los Angeles, 2011.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1984 by Heather Graham Pozzessere
cover design by Connie Gabbert
978-1-4804-0832-6
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
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New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
EBOOKS BY HEATHER GRAHAM
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
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