style="font-size:15px;"> “You…be careful,” Delphi blurted, and it was so out of character, so not what Delphi would say, that she hung up before Katie could remind her that she would rather die than fail at a mission. Delphi knew Katie would say it, because Katie had said it before. And Delphi had told her that she was proud of her commitment.
She set the phone on top of her briefcase and swallowed hard. She was getting too personally involved with her people.
Another image of Morgan came unbidden into her mind—in a pair of loose track shorts that revealed his muscular calves and thighs, and a damp, sleeveless T-shirt clinging to his pecs. He’d mocked her fumble during a recent tennis game on the agency courts. A second later, she’d power-slammed a tennis ball at him inches from his foot, a volley he couldn’t hope to return, and he had broken into full-bodied laughter, completely appreciative of how thoroughly she had just kicked his butt. She didn’t suppose he was laughing right now.
She blew out her breath and gave her head a shake. Morgan was off-limits, now and forever. The thought penetrated, despite all the other thoughts her busy brain was entertaining.
Allison began putting everything back in her brief-case—PDA, personal cell, laptop, distorter—then the produce truck switched lanes, revealing the white van again. The BMW took advantage of the hole in the traffic flow and shot back around the slow-moving vehicle. The van was definitely pacing her.
On your mark, Allison thought grimly.
Without signaling, with no warning, Allison cranked her steering wheel to the left and shot across two lanes of traffic, heading for the off-ramp. Horns blared. Brakes squealed all around her—and behind her—as the van barreled after her in hot pursuit.
Go.
Chapter 3
NSA Headquarters, Fort Meade, Maryland
McDonough proceeded with the top-level Project Ozone meeting in Conference Room A, but he dismissed Morgan from the urgent and critical sit-down, and ordered him to interrogate anyone who had ever met Allison, much less worked with her.
Morgan was extremely pissed about missing the meeting, but when he got past the red haze of anger, he had to admit that it made sense. Morgan had been “observing” Allison for McDonough ever since McDonough had signed onto Ozone, three months ago. It was a distasteful arrangement that Morgan would have ordinarily refused, except that it gave him more latitude to sniff around Allison, access her records and get his request for a wiretap turned down.
He fed McDonough enough tidbits to fulfill his job description, but he kept the good stuff for himself. Not that there was much. Spider files, incomplete. Someone named Arachne. Someone else named Delphi, or maybe it was a place. Those kidnappings of Athena students earlier this year. But never the full story. Allison kept the good stuff for herself as well, of that he was certain.
Allison Gracelyn was doing something she didn’t want anyone to know about. Correction: didn’t want NSA to know about. In Morgan’s book, that was six kinds of wrong.
Morgan deliberately set up shop for his interviews many conference rooms away from the Ozone meeting. He kept his black suit jacket on and his dark gray tie crisply knotted. The visiting brass didn’t need to know NSA had forgotten to microchip Agent Double-O Gracelyn or that she was on the lam.
His black double shot went untouched. He had snagged a sandwich from the conference room but hadn’t stopped to take a bite. After a few interviews, the air smelled like mustard and roast beef, and Morgan chucked it in the trash can.
Nobody had anything to tell him, and so far, an hour into interviewing, he had no feeling that anyone was omitting information in order to protect her. She wasn’t made of Teflon; she was just…boring. Again, wrong. Allison was not boring. She was a busy woman; yesterday’s personal leave day was one of many (but not beyond agency guidelines, and he’d kept track.) Not showing up in the midst of a high-alert was bad, but hanging a U and then going incommunicado was inexcusable.
The clock was ticking, and he was getting more and more pissed off. Why the hell didn’t she at least call in? Who the hell did she think she was?
He tapped his government-issue black pen on his legal pad and gazed up at his next interviewee, Kim Valenti, who came in and sat across the mahogany laminate conference table. Like him, she wore a simply, nicely tailored black suit—in her case, with a skirt. Like Allison and him, she was a cryptanalyst, and one of the best at the agency, which why she was with Ozone. She and Allison were good friends; on many occasions, when Morgan had been in Allison’s office, IM’s had come in through the internal NSA net from Windtalker2, which was Valenti’s handle.
“She called you earlier today,” Morgan said to Kim Valenti. He knew that because he had downloaded and examined both women’s phone logs.
“Yes, she did,” Valenti said after a beat, as if weighing how much to say to him. His bullshit-ometer ratcheted up two notches. What was she hiding?
“What did you two talk about?”
“It was personal business,” she replied, crossing her legs at the knee and settling back, as if she had all the time in the world, and no cares at all. She was cool, she was steady.
Morgan knew her body language didn’t mean a thing. His colleagues at the NSA might think he was simply an extremely proficient codebreaker, but he’d run a few covert ops for his government strictly off-the-books. More than a few. He had done terrible things on behalf of the free world, risked his own life countless times, sent willing men to their deaths. No one suspected, of course. He made damn sure they didn’t. How did the saying go? The better the spy, the better the lie.
“You know she’s missing.”
“I know she’s not here,” Valenti countered.
“I can hook you up to a polygraph,” he reminded her. “I can hand you over for interrogation. Your head will spin.”
Valenti gazed at him steadily. “She had some personal business, just like I said.”
Morgan balled his fists, tamping down his irritation with her screw-you attitude, because that wouldn’t get him anywhere. Allison’s comings and goings had been worrying the agency for years. That concern had mushroomed in the last twelve months. He himself had moved from concerned, to highly suspicious, and finally to wondering what game she was running on her own. For all her unflappable demeanor, she was a loose cannon, and he knew more than most that a weapon with the safety off could be used against you in a heartbeat.
He had the scars to prove it.
Inside and out.
“Ms. Valenti, foreign nationals of unknown origin are plotting to blow up a significant target in your country in less than a month,” he said. “If that occurs, thousands of people will die. Until we resolve that, there is no such thing as personal business. We’re here to protect those people, and until they’re safe, we don’t belong to ourselves. So whatever, why ever, she’s wrong.”
Her eyelids flickered. He watched her struggle with a sharp retort, and he wondered if he’d gone too far.
“Standing down a little,” he informed her. “I actually do know we’re not living in Nazi Germany.”
It worked. She moved her shoulders and tapped her
