How the hell would he fix it? Did he think he was some sort of magician? Could he could call down a spaceship from the sky and just beam her aboard? He sure as hell had the ego of a spaceship captain, so maybe he had some beatific trick up his sleeve.
All right, she’d keep going. She was no longer alone, and that knowledge surged the last vestiges of hope, and adrenaline, through her veins.
But if some miraculous intervention was going to happen, she had to give it time to develop. She couldn’t outrun these men for much longer. She had to hide somehow. But where?
Two hundred feet in front of her, another line of trees bounced in her blurred vision. The pale, smooth poles of towering bamboo clacked against each other in the wind, and beyond that a higher forest of palms. Height and cover were her only options.
She ran faster, with each step slapping liquid that she knew was her own blood. The line of bamboo loomed closer. Of all her possessions, her cell was the most precious, because without it she’d be untraceable by Shepard.
She jammed it sideways deep into her teeth, bit down hard on the rubber casing, and stuffed the passport through her torn blouse, into her left bra cup. Then she twisted sideways and slammed into the line of bamboo—squeezing between trunk after trunk as they whipped back and cracked her in the skull. But she made it through the grove.
Then there were endless palms. Tall, powerful, and thick—arching high up to the star-clustered sky with thick canopies of feathered black fronds. She squinted in the dark and slalomed between them, searching madly for one she could manage. And there it was—fat and gnarled at the base yet quickly thinning and leaning over about twenty degrees.
She jammed the pistol deeply into the back of her skirt, squeezed the cold barrel with her clenching buttocks, and launched herself up as high as she possibly could—wrapping her bare arms and legs around the trunk like a monkey as the impact smashed the breath from her lungs.
She hung on, gripping the slimy bark with her trembling knees as she pumped her upper body up. She hugged it with her arms and dug her broken fingernails in. She pulled her legs up and took a breath. Then again, and again, and again.
She never looked down and saw nothing but the knots and ridges of plant skin before her eyes as she gripped and pulled and scrambled again. Then the top of her head hit something. She looked up to see a circle of thick frond branches.
She thrust her hands up into the mess, gripped two frond roots, and hauled herself up. Her knees slipped onto something sturdy and hard. It held, but she did it once more. And then she was up inside a nest of dark fronds, and she was able to swing one leg over a root. She sat there, panting, hugging the tree, and shuddering.
Something clanged below her. She snapped her eyes down. It was the pistol, spinning slowly through the air, as it bounced off the trunk and disappeared.
Well, that’s bloody lovely. She cursed in her head as she heard the Koreans smashing through the line of bamboo.
She stopped breathing. She turned her eyes away from the ground, squeezed them shut, and became nothing but a lifeless slug of human flesh against the palm.
She heard Hyo’s furious voice below hissing orders, and the tromping of many boots and curses as the butts of weapons smashed jungle aside. They rushed closer and swarmed around the base of her tree. A vibration shivered up the trunk, and she knew they’d seen her. It was all but over.
But then they moved on.
How long should she wait? Five minutes, no more. They’d soon stop to listen and, hearing nothing in the brush out front of them, turn back. She counted the seconds off in her head and then slid back down.
By the time she hit bottom she was coated in sweat, and her bare thighs and arms were rent raw and stinging. She spat the drool-coated cell into her hand and looked around for the pistol in the brush. It was like searching for a carpenter’s nail in a pile of steel wool.
Forget it.
She could still hear them searching through the jungle out front, maybe half a kilometer on. Making as little noise as possible, she turned around and worked her way back toward the line of bamboo and the elephant grass field.
Just as she squeezed through the last pair of hollow shafts, she stopped to listen again. She heard nothing from behind anymore. The Koreans had frozen in place, listening.
Shit.
She carefully took a step in the dark, tumbled down a muddy slope, and crashed face-first into a pool of freezing, stagnant water.
“Cheoi-joge!”—Over there!—someone shouted.
“Christ,” Lily moaned as she scrambled up out of the pond, soaked from her scalp to her shredded feet but still clutching the cell phone. She charged over a berm, fell, got up again, and burst back into the field.
A gunshot echoed behind her, then another, but she ran flat out before realizing that she was heading right back for the temple.
“Linc!” she grunted. “For God’s sake!” But she heard nothing in her ear except a short-circuit crackle.
She took a hard right turn, and dove through the slicing green blades—unable to see anything but more and more of them. The shouts behind, and now to her right, were growing—the Koreans already smashing their way back through the bamboo into the grass.
Flashlight beams flicked through the blades. She heard Hyo yelling and felt the boots of his men pounding closer—like the hooves of frothing steeds hunting a fox.
The elephant grass ended, and Lily stumbled out into a wide-open space. Her heart fell into her guts. It was an enormous, circular meadow of ankle-high lichen. She kept running with everything she had left, but she was totally exposed. She wept hopelessly, turned her head, and glanced back.
Hyo and his men had entered the meadow. There were at least ten of them. They had stopped moving—arrayed in a line, their rifles raised like a firing squad. She turned back around and kept on, but her sprint had turned into a ragged jog, and she heard his voice.
“Miss Stone, you are finished,” he called out. “You will stop right now, or I will order my men to fire.”
“Then bloody well do it, you filthy scum!” she screamed over her shoulder.
She could almost hear the pleasure in his voice. “As you wish.”
Something thundered in front of her from the far side of the meadow. A powerful wind rippled through the lichen, and a pair of bright beams stabbed down from the black heavens.
Lily stopped running in wide-eyed shock and stared at a huge, bulbous shadow looming behind the lights. The cell phone fell from her hand as she stood there, gasping and drooling, as a Chinese Army Changhe Z-8 helicopter thundered into the meadow.
The engine sounds spooled down to a whine, and the blades stopped turning. A side door opened, a short stairway flipped down, and a man in uniform appeared. As if it were just a holiday jaunt, he started strolling toward her.
Lily stood there staring like a cornered rat, and as the man emerged into the aircraft lights, she saw that it was General Deng Tao Kung.
“Taeryeong Hyo,” he called to her captor and torturer. His tone was an admonishing, condescending rumble, and she couldn’t understand what he said next in Chinese. “You have taken undue advantage of my country’s hospitality and treated our guest poorly.” He looked at her with pity, put his fists to his hips, and switched to English.
“My apologies, Miss Stone,” he said. “Korean dogs have no manners.” He motioned toward the open door of the helicopter. “If you please.”
Lily fainted.
Chapter Thirty-One
Jenny Morgan didn’t know exactly what a female spy was supposed to look like, but she was doing her best.
She’d seen plenty of pictures of Valery Plame, the CIA’s modern Mata Hari, whose cover had been blown during the Bush years, so those exotic images served as a model. She didn’t own a trench coat, so she’d picked one up at Filene’s in Chestnut Hill—a light tan numb
er with big buttons, a wide belt she could tie off instead of using the buckle, and a short, sexy hem.
She’d also bought a light purple scarf, tortoise-shell sunglasses, and a lizard brooch with a nice long pin. She didn’t have a weapon, but that long silver pike clutched in her fist would do, at least for a getaway.
She’d chosen the rendezvous point herself: the Boston National Historical Park down by the harbor. It was one of Dan’s favorite places to chill, take in the salt air, enjoy a fat “gutter puppy,” his slang for a vendor hotdog, and watch the seagulls wheeling in the sun.
But most of all he loved “Old Ironsides”—the USS Constitution, that beautiful four-masted frigate that seemed to always remind him of why his country came first before anything else. One of their very first dates had been a tour of the ship. Maybe she should have known right there and then.
Now she sat on a wooden slat bench just in front of the museum, with the fading sun behind her, the evening breeze rustling the water, and the last of the day’s tourists heading for homes and hotels. She looked at the enormous old vessel tipping languidly in the wash—her slick black flanks and cannon ports, polished elm fittings, and towering white masts— and she felt a pang of jealousy. Where did she fit on Dan’s totem pole of admiration? Had she ever been at the top? Or just somewhere farther down, beneath fast cars, sailing vessels, the army, and the CIA? Was she no more than an afterthought? Or the tip of his spear that he’d never confess?
Well, maybe she was about to find out.
After breaking into his storage locker, she’d mulled over the whole thing for a couple of days, feeling a mixture of guilt, resentment, and excitement. It wasn’t her business to stick her nose into his, but it was way past unfair for him to keep her in the dark for so long. She’d looked at that message, and the telephone number she’d copied into her cell phone from his diary over and over again, wondering what would happen if she made the next move.
“Need to find me? Call the Civil War President.”
That morning, she’d made her decision.
Yes, I need to find you, and you need to find me. Otherwise, we’re both going to be finding a lawyer.
For some reason, she’d chosen to make the call outside of the house. Maybe she was getting paranoid, but that would be Dan’s fault too. She’d gone out into the backyard, where the rain had washed away her finger scars from the stone garden, and tapped out the numbers with a trembling finger.
“Hello?” A youngish–sounding man answered.
“Hello, Sir. I’m looking for Mr. Lincoln.”
“Yes, this is Lincoln. May I ask who this is?”
“This is Jennifer Morgan. My husband told me to call this number if I needed him.”
There was a silence, and then the man said, “I see....Is this an emergency?”
“It might be,” Jenny said. “For him.”
“One minute, please.”
Then there was a much longer silence, some footsteps and rustling, and the man named Lincoln came back on the line. “Mrs. Morgan, I’ll call you back in ten minutes at this same number you called from. Is that all right?”
“Yes.”
Jenny hadn’t moved from the garden. She just paced, feeling her heart rate up a tick, and was somehow thrilled to be tasting even a small portion of Dan’s game. Maybe, for the first time ever, she had an inkling of why he was addicted. She jumped when her cell buzzed again.
“Mrs. Morgan?” It was Mr. Lincoln again.
“Yes, I’m here.”
“Would you be willing to meet privately?”
Now Jenny’s heart really started to hammer. “What do mean by privately?”
“I mean one-on-one, but it’ll be in a public place of your choosing.”
She thought for a moment as her palms went slick and she touched her chest. “All right. How about Boston Harbor? Down by the Constitution?”
“That’ll be fine. Can we say four o’clock this afternoon?”
“Yes.” Jenny found herself nodding at the phone. “How will I find you?”
“I’ll find you. What’s your favorite book?”
“Excuse me?”
“A favorite book, Mrs. Morgan. Something you still have in your house.”
“Umm...Sophie’s Choice.”
“Please carry it with you, in your right hand.”
“Okay, but if for some reason you can’t find me, can I—” She stopped when she realized he’d hung up.
She felt a bit silly now, in her femme fatale getup, sitting there clutching the book in her lap, and looking at her wristwatch every ten seconds. People were still walking by—parents with kids licking ice cream cones and some tourists chattering in some Scandinavian language—but the flow was definitely thinning.
A young man approached from the left, wearing a leather jacket and a baseball cap. She stiffened and tried not to stare, but he passed her right by.
What’s this Lincoln guy going to look like? A frock coat and a stovepipe hat?
A couple of young navy sailors walked by, probably from the Charlestown Navy Yard off to the left. They were wearing those new, blue digital camouflage uniforms that Dan always made fun of.
“The whole point of navy whites was so they could spot you if you went overboard. With those getups on, you’re nothing but shark bait. Nobody’ll see you, for Christ’s sake. Somebody in the Pentagon must have an uncle in the rag trade.”
She smiled as she remembered his disdain and looked at her watch again—four on the button. It was starting to get chilly, and almost everyone was gone, except for one woman who had just come out of the museum gift shop carrying a small shopping bag. Jenny glanced at her briefly—lightweight tan coat over a gray business suit, glossy, short brunette cut, and photo-gray glasses gone dark from the sun. She looked away again, hoping the woman would just pass by. But she strode up to Jenny’s bench and took a seat at the other end.
Oh no, The last thing I need now is company.
“Nice day today,” the woman said as she placed her bag on the bench.
Jenny just grunted and kept her gaze fixed on the Constitution. If she was really impolite, maybe the woman would take a hint. But she didn’t.
“I like that novel,” she said. “William Styron’s one of my favorites.”
Again, Jenny said nothing. For pity’s sake, please go away! she pleaded in her mind, but the darn woman kept on talking.
“You have much better literary tastes than your husband, Mrs. Morgan. He seems to only read about fast cars and firearms.”
Jenny snapped her head around and stared. The woman smiled slightly and pushed her sunglasses up onto her head. She had large hazel eyes and manicured eyebrows, but no other makeup except for a hint of lip gloss. Something about that face looked very familiar, but...
“You’re not Mr. Lincoln,” Jenny whispered.
“No, I’m his boss, which, in effect, makes me your husband’s as well.”
A current of panic jolted through Jenny, and she gripped the paperback with both hands. Why would Dan’s boss be here, unless...She felt a painful hitch in her chest.
“Is Dan all right?”
“Oh, of course, he’s fine.” The woman smirked “I mean he’s out of contact, but he’s always fine.”
Jenny realized her knees were shaking, but she had to ask. “Alex too?”
“Alex too.” The woman nodded. “Healthy as a thoroughbred colt.” She got up, moved a couple of feet, and sat closer to Jenny. “I’m Diana.” She didn’t offer her hand.
“Nice to meet you...I think,” she said. “I’m Jenny.”
“Yes, I know.” Diana Bloch leaned back, hiked her elbows onto the bench back, crossed her stockinged legs, and bounced a heel in the air. It was a very “male” posture. She turned her face away and looked out at Old Ironsides. “It’s such a beautiful ship. We�
��ve actually met before.”
“We have?” Jenny stared at her profile. She was pretty in a strong-jawed, angular, way.
“Yes. Starbucks”
“Oh my God,” Jenny gasped.
“I apologize for that.” Diana turned her face back again and looked at her fully. “I didn’t enjoy having to manipulate you, but I had little choice I’m afraid.”
“Well, you’re certainly good at it,” Jenny said in a tone that wasn’t a compliment. “But why?”
Diana recrossed her legs the other way, turned to Jenny, and dropped her voice to a cooler murmur. “I will tell you. Actually, I need to tell you. But understand that this is a national security issue.”
Jenny’s pulse started beating in her neck. Did she really want to hear any of this? “Well, I can certainly keep a secret. But what do you want me to do? Cross my heart?”
Diana sniffed, then glanced at her lap. “I don’t happen to have a bible on me. You can swear on Sophie’s Choice.”
Jenny looked down at the book where her fingers were trembling on the cover. “Okay, consider it done.”
“That’s meaningless, of course.” Diana removed her sunglasses from her head and chewed on the stem. “But I’m a reader of souls, and I think I can trust yours. There are very few people I can talk to about this. The reason I did what I did is that we have a problem in our organization.”
You’re coming to me with a problem? Do I look like an espionage therapist? “What sort of problem?” she asked.
“Someone on the inside of the firm is apparently working for someone on the outside. A person or persons without our best interests at heart.”
Jenny swallowed, looked around, edged a bit closer to Diana, tipped her face down, and looked at her over the top of her sunglasses. “Do you mean, like, a traitor?”
Diana just smiled, mirthlessly.
“Don’t tell me you thought it was Dan.”
“Jenny, a person in my position can never trust anyone fully. We’re not like the civilian court system. In our game, you’re always guilty until proved innocent, and that has to be tested on a regular basis. I’ve been going through this process with everyone, so I used you to help me with Dan.”
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