they were in the business of thwarting international kidnappers among other things. There was something more, he’d bet his life on it.
“Other than the fact that the older daughter of one of the most influential men in the entire free world has been kidnapped,” Joshua parroted back, then waited to be filled in.
The pause on the other end of the line made him uneasy. It stretched out until it was as thin as a piano wire.
The feeling did not leave once his uncle began speaking again.
“Jane Kiley’s dead.”
He knew Jane. A small, thin woman with lightning-fast hands, a sharp mind and a smile that rivaled a sunrise. She knew her way around horses and tanks, an odd combination that came in handy. He felt an instant sense of loss. He also sensed that there was more.
“I’m guessing not from natural causes.” It was said for form’s sake. They wouldn’t be talking about it if the causes had been natural.
“There was a car bomb.”
Joshua could feel his gut tightening in sympathetic response. “Part of the case?”
“The case was closed,” Corbett said flatly.
Joshua could hear his uncle weighing his words in the silence that followed. Corbett was known to be closemouthed about almost everything. Information—any information—was released on a need-to-know basis. Even about something like this. Joshua didn’t have to be told that Corbett already had the right people working on this.
“Be careful, Joshua.”
The warning took him aback. That was a first, Joshua thought. His uncle never troubled himself with the risk factors. An assignment was gone over, assessed, then left up to the chosen agent to successfully execute. No mention was ever made of being careful.
Until now.
This was serious, Joshua thought to himself. Really serious.
“Not to worry,” Joshua told him buoyantly. “Today is not a good day to die,” he said, paraphrasing an ancient Cheyenne saying. “I’m on my way.”
“Of course you are.”
The connection terminated after Corbett’s last uttered syllable. Joshua was on his own.
He hurried into his clothes, into his holster and weapon and out the front door as if the devil was after him.
Because he very well might be.
Forty minutes later found Joshua Lazlo sprinting across the private airfield to one of his uncle’s private jets. The moment the pilot saw him approaching, he began to go through the necessary checklist, the end of which would allow him to take to the air. They had only a short transatlantic hop ahead of them, since the first destination would be London. He was to meet with the prime minister and the man’s chief advisor and oldest friend, George Montgomery, to personally obtain all the information that was available.
Clarence Murphy stood just within the plane’s entrance, waiting as Joshua took the steps up to the plane two at a time. The carryall that he kept perpetually packed and ready to go in his closet was slung over his shoulder.
Taking the carryall from him, Murphy stepped back, waited until he was on board and then closed and latched the door.
“No need to get a stitch from running,” Murphy told him. He gestured toward a seat, then took the one opposite it, buckling up. “It’s not like we can leave without you, seeing as you’re the reason for this quick hop.”
The dossier that Corbett had promised was on the seat, waiting for him. Joshua picked it up before sitting down. Buckled into his seat, he crossed his leg over his thigh and rested the folder on it.
“No,” Joshua contradicted as he opened up the dossier and scanned the pages within the black folder. There was a wealth of information waiting for him, all neatly cataloged and arranged by year. “The prime minister’s daughter is.”
Chapter 3
The first thing he noticed was how vivid her hair was, even through a telescope at this distance.
Joshua wiped away another large, fat raindrop that seemed to fall on him in slow motion, and refocused on his target. Prudence Hill was a redhead and the tabloids really must have had it in for her, he thought, trying to ignore the pregnant promise of a downpour. He gazed intently into the back window of the run-down farmhouse from his vantage point some one hundred yards away.
The pictures he’d seen on the covers of the same rags that had given her infamy of a sort made her look austere, frightening, with definite wicked-witch-of-the-west attributes. The headlines screamed as much, as did the nickname the magazines had all summarily bestowed on her: Pru the Shrew.
But if the woman he was looking at actually was the British prime minister’s headstrong, outspoken daughter, then somewhere along the line, someone had made a big mistake. Not only that, but someone definitely needed to spring for better cameras for their photographers, because the only resemblance the gagged, bound young woman in the cluttered back bedroom of the isolated, dilapidated building had to the woman in the tabloid photographs that had been taken was that they both had red hair.
Beyond that, the difference between the two was like that between a butterfly and a moth. They both had wings and they both flew, but one was beautiful and graceful while the other plain and shunned. The woman he’d sometimes seen portrayed on the tabloid covers beneath unflattering adjectives had dull, lifeless hair, dowdy clothing and a body that wouldn’t give a person the slightest pause or merit even a first glance, much less a second. That wasn’t true of the woman in the white jogging shorts and baggy but clingy T-shirt. And from what he could see, she had unconditionally killer legs.
Her profile was to him and, despite the duct tape, he could see that her face, though flushed, was more than passingly attractive. He couldn’t see her eyes, which to him had always been one of the most important weapons in a woman’s arsenal, but he suspected that there was fire in them.
Which would make her beautiful, not school-marmish. The tabloids loved her for her sensational comments and hated her for her attitude toward them, which was pure contempt. As to the discrepancy in appearance, he had a feeling that whoever was in charge of reviewing the final copy probably did what had been covertly done in the past: taken her head and pasted it onto someone else’s body, making sure they used the most unflattering photo of Prudence they could find.
If he’d been armed with nothing more than their photos, he’d never have found her.
But it had taken more than just flashing around her photograph, obtained from the prime minister’s assistant, to locate the missing young woman. It had taken the combined backing of a crack team in Paris, Lucia with her almost magical capabilities with the computer, and luck.
He never underestimated the power of luck. Because luck had Mr. Merriweather Wilson walking up to the guard at 10 Downing Street ten minutes after he, Joshua, had been ushered into the prime minister’s presence. Wilson, he was told, began innocently enough by saying that he had something he believed belonged to the prime minister’s older daughter.
The moment the words were out of his mouth, Wilson had instantly been taken into a basement room within the historical residence
