temple. She carefully wiped her eyes and retied her modest and respectful head scarf against the stiff winter breeze. She refocused on surroundings of ancient stone and ancient, eternal flame. Stone walls defined the courtyard, covered with moss and lichen, their once-square edges crumbled into softness. Built against those walls, low, dark religious cells waited for the return of the pilgrims who had once flocked here. Before her, a square shrine stood stolid against the years, precisely fenestrated to reveal the eternal flame within. This, the Temple of Ashaga just outside Berzhaan’s capital city of Suwan, held the muted awe of generations. A quiet place; a revered place.
Just what she’d wanted. Needed.
Then…why wasn’t it helping?
Because it definitely wasn’t helping.
Selena deliberately turned to matters more directly at hand. Distraction. Berzhaan had wedged itself between the tumultuous Middle East and acquisitive Russia, swapping between freedom and occupation too many times in the last century. The changes made for a country in turmoil, seething with unrest and jam-packed with diplomatic complications that filled Selena Shaw Jones’s hours and let her tumble into bed exhausted, knowing she was doing her best to keep terrorism away from the little boy down below as much as from those children in the States. If only Razidae would let her build the network between their countries that would allow the communication, intelligence gathering and local counter-terrorist education that it was her job to establish….
A faint noise caught the edges of her attention. Was that—?
No. She was on edge, that was all. She’d had no way to know when Cole would return, and no intention of waiting him out in their oh-so-empty condo. She’d asked for this overseas assignment to get perspective on her life. And while she’d already earned Ambassador Dante Allori’s highly relieved respect with her ability to translate the most delicate political statements and to quietly, politely persist in her efforts to woo reluctant Prime Minister Omar Razidae, she still failed miserably in her own personal goals.
There he’d been. Her husband, kissing a beautiful woman right out in Constitution Park.
Big deal, she’d told herself. He was a CIA field officer—Jason P. JOXLEITER in the CIA’s eyes, and his friends got a kick out of calling him Jox. He was a field officer down to the silly all-caps assigned surname, and that meant putting up a front—wherever he was, whomever he was with—to suit his cover.
Except he was supposed to be out of the country. And while he never told her details of an assignment, she always knew his location. Always overseas and never with the CIA’s Foreign Services Bureau that worked U.S. turf, and she always knew just where. Then if something went haywire in the world, she knew whether to worry. It was the one stable thing in their relationship, the one thing she could always count on.
Not this time.
And how many other times had he lied? How many times had he used CIA guile against her?
Another harsh sound scraped up from the small village at the bottom of the hill. Selena turned into the wind to look down upon the picturesque area, frowning at the gusty blast that obscured any additional noises from below. After a moment in which she saw nothing out of place, she turned back to the temple, walking slowly around the shrine. She put her hands up to one of the openings, feeling the mild heat through her finely stitched black leather gloves.
It wasn’t enough to warm her. The depth of her feelings frightened her, kept her from thinking clearly.
Ironically, if the sounds she’d heard had actually been gunshots, she would have felt perfectly able to deal with them—the Athena Academy had given her that much, and more: her cache of fluently spoken languages, her self-confidence, the background to excel at Harvard Law School and then as an FBI legate assigned to situations as tricky and demanding as Berzhaan’s. The accomplishments to be tapped as an Oracle agent. Selena knew how to handle herself in court, behind a translator’s smooth detachment and in the field.
What she couldn’t seem to do was stop the way her throat constricted into tight pain at the thought of that moment in the D.C. park.
A sudden report on the wind stopped her short; she looked up from the rock-strewn path to narrow her eyes at the village below. There was no mistaking it this time. Weapons fire. Automatic weapons. Behind the house nearest to Selena, the young boy darted out across the rocky, close-cropped land to crawl between the crooked slats of a goat pen a hundred yards behind the house. The four goats there parted to accept him as if used to his presence.
An abrupt burst of activity at the back of the stone-walled house followed—the quick flurry of what looked like a woman trying to exit until rough hands hauled her back in, her shriek of protest clearly audible as it rode the wind up the hill.
Trouble. Not ordinary domestic trouble, no indeed. Kemeni rebels? And if it was, was this a calculated large-scale action, or a handful of overeager rebels causing trouble?
There was no telling. Turmoil gripped this country like a lover. Kemeni rebels—supposedly backed by the U.S., although Selena knew better—increasingly threatened Prime Minister Omar Razidae’s government. Russia had become keenly interested in this territory; they, too, were wrongly convinced that the U.S. treated with Razidae with one hand and fed arms and money to the Kemenis with the other. The Q’Rajn terrorists, convinced of the same, wanted the States out of Berzhaan altogether and had taken their fight to U.S. soil to face recent defeat at the hands of two of Selena’s Athena Academy classmates.
And then there was everyone else in the world, keeping an eye on Berzhaan’s undeveloped oil resources.
All the while, the people of Berzhaan struggled to survive, caught in the middle. And down the hill from Selena, a small boy cowered behind his unconcerned goats, probably not realizing they were truly no cover at all.
Selena did a quick weapons check. Sturdy Beretta Cougar .45 DAO in her pocket holster, several slim knives secreted at ankle, waist and right collarbone—where she could dip into her sweater from the neckline and acquire steel before any threatening agent even thought to consider whether she might be anything more than the sleek, tailored American she appeared to be. Then she headed down the hill, striding firmly in spite of the footing but not drawing attention to herself by running. As she moved, she pulled a hair band from an inner pocket of the coat and reached beneath the silk scarf to gather her long, layered hair at the nape of her neck. She drew her Beretta, holding it down at her side where the folds of the coat obscured it and she could easily keep it hidden if her concerns were for nothing.
She didn’t expect to keep it hidden.
As she neared the base of the hill and angled for the stone house, the boy darted out from behind the goats and ran into her path, babbling in his native language so quickly—with a young child’s creative use of words—as to challenge even her excellent Berzhaani language skills. She put a finger to her lips and then his, startling the child, and in that moment of silence she said, “Slower, bibcha.”
His eyes widened with surprise all over again; his gaze darted over her from head to toe, taking in her attire and her head scarf, her appearance—dark blue-green eyes, razor-cut chestnut bangs emerging from the scarf and all-American features—and trying to reconcile it all with her use of his own language. She crouched before him, her gun still lost in the black leather folds of her coat. “Tell me,” she said. “Why are you frightened?”
He touched the bright red leather piping on the front edge of the coat, following it briefly with his finger as if to confirm this was indeed something out of his ken—but his round, light tea-colored little face with its pointed chin
