her. He did that. He intimidated and bullied. He threatened. He frightened. He used whatever weapon he had whenever he could. He was combative. He was driven. He did what he had to. And he had to find Allison.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Morgan thundered, slamming his fists down on the conference room table. Valenti didn’t bat an eyelash. “You can’t think I’d believe that.”
But the truth was that the male part of him—the part that fantasized about Allison Gracelyn naked and in his bed, the part that drove him to cool down at the gym, take icy showers, pace sleeplessly in the middle of the night, that part—was shocked and angry. Almost as if Allison had betrayed him with another man—when he had no claim at all on her, of course.
“You are lying to me. She’s a consummate professional,” Morgan flung at Windtalker2. “That’s not her style. That’s soap opera crap.”
Valenti raised her chin. Her dark eyes flashed at him. “She’s pregnant, there’s a problem with the baby and she thinks she might be miscarrying.”
For one more instant, he believed her, because he remembered how gently Allison broached the subject of his missing mother when he’d been assigned to Project Ozone and she had to get him a higher-level clearance.
“You were twelve,” she observed. “That’s a rough time in life, even without something like that.”
“No one can buy me by promising me information on my mother,” he had replied bluntly, raising the barriers around his heart. Of course he’d been asked that before. And would be asked again. But it was the first time Allison and he had discussed anything about his personal life other than his sister—whom Allison knew, of course, since Katie had gone to Athena Academy.
Allison’s lips had parted slightly, and he saw for the first time how big her brown eyes were, and how beautiful, flecked with gold and heavily lashed. He was startled, and flustered. The men he worked with had an office pool going that the Ice Princess was a thirtyseven-year-old virgin. She’d never dated anyone. There were secretaries who refused to work for her, saying she was too demanding. Which earned her the title of Queen Bitch in the eyes of many. Sexism was still rampant in the workplace. He was probably more sensitized to it because he’d heard stories from Katie.
Morgan read Allison differently. It wasn’t so much that she was cold or unreasonable; it was just that she didn’t give much back, and she needed her people to work as hard as she did.
But that one time, discussing his mother, remembering that her own mother had been murdered, he had felt as if he’d seen a part of her she was in a habit of concealing. As if a mask had slipped. Maybe she had a guy who knew how to take that mask off. Maybe they were having a kid together, and that kid was in trouble.
Allison as a mother. It had a certain…resonance.
“Rush,” Bill McDonough said from the doorway. Sweaty and unpleasant, he had loosened his dark blue tie and he looked twenty years older than he had fifteen minutes ago. McDonough shot Kim Valenti a glare that might turn a lesser woman to stone and jerked his head toward the hallway.
Morgan gave Valenti another look—a chance to change her story—but it was obvious she was done. He followed McDonough out, masking his distaste for Allison’s boss of three months—his boss’s boss. McDonough was crude around his female staffers, and he stole credit from his people for their decryptions and analyses.
“How’d it go?” McDonough asked him.
“It’s all bullshit,” Morgan replied. “You?”
“Same here.” He made a face. “Here’s the sum total of what we know—someone’s got a nuclear device and wants to kill the Great Satan. You know, I always wanted to be an astronaut.” He slid a glance at Morgan. “Think it’s too late?”
Before his mother had gone missing, Morgan had wanted to be a cowboy. He figured he still had time.
“Nothing new?”
“The terrorists are waiting for one of two messages. One is the code word to hit us. The other is to abort the mission. We don’t know what either code word is. I suggested this.” He said the most offensive version possible of “I’m having sex with your mother” in Farsi.
“You think it’s coming out of Iran?” Morgan asked. “I was thinking of Berzhaan.”
McDonough grunted. “I don’t think so. The Berzhaanis are too unorganized.”
The two men walked down the hall past the open pit of monitors, phones and codebreakers working on Project Ozone. McDonough had on too much aftershave, and he was a smoker. He smelled like the inside of a taxicab.
In the pit, there was a worried-looking general standing beside a harried-looking guy in a suit, both talking in low voices. Another trio, two men and a woman in a naval uniform, were paging through stacks of stapled printouts. The scene was noisy and appeared chaotic, but there was methodology in the madness, a through-line that the seasoned cryptanalysts of NSA knew how to find. A couple of crackerjack codebreakers gesticulated at a map of the Eastern seaboard with a dozen lights blinking—displaying potential targets for a nuclear attack.
Allison’s office door was closed. McDonough pulled a swipe card from his pocket and ran it through the panel beside the door. The lock unclicked.
“Her little escapade stinks like a dead hooker,” he said as he barreled in and flicked on the lights. “I was just in here, checking on things. This is what I saw.”
He crossed to her desk and pointed at her computer screen. Morgan stared down at the screen—to see himself in profile, staring down at the screen. He turned and squinted, searching for the camera.
“It’s a button cam on that picture frame—the one of her and her family when she got her black belt,” McDonough said.
Morgan couldn’t detect the camera on the black lacquer frame, which didn’t surprise him. The photograph itself was very familiar to him, showing a teenage Allison dressed in an all-black martial arts uniform, belt included, beaming from the center of a loving family. Her mother had still been alive. Marion Gracelyn was murdered ten years ago, when Allison was twenty-seven. Morgan had studied the picture before, wishing he could see Allison smile that broadly in person, catch her in a carefree moment.
Catch her, period.
He wondered if McDonough’s spycam had captured even one of the hungry, lustful gazes he, Morgan, had thrown Allison’s way when he thought she wasn’t looking. He should have guessed her own boss would be conducting illegal surveillance of her at the office. He wondered if McDonough actually was NSA. He had the codebreaking creds, but on the other hand, CIA employed lots of multilingual codebreakers, too.
“Watch what we’ve got. This was yesterday morning.” McDonough pulled a miniaturized remote control device out of his black suit trousers and clicked it. An image filled Allison’s screen—it was Allison at her desk, fingers racing across her keyboard as she frowned mildly at the monitor. She stopped typing and rested her hand on her chin. Clouds must have passed behind her window, dimming the light. Morgan could practically see the wheels of her brilliant mind analyzing strings of code as they blipped across her monitor.
Then her outside line rang and she picked it up.
“Yes,” Allison-on-the-screen said. Her face changed and she sat up straighter
