Angel Face

ANGEL FACE [066-139-066-4.8] By: SUZANNE FORSTER Category: fiction romance Synopsis: They call her Angel Face. She is as beautiful as her killings are brutal. Her victims are doctors. Her list of targets is long. And Jordan Carpenter is next. The CIA has asked him to help capture her. Ensnare her. Beat her at her own game. It is a risky proposition, but he has no choice. Jordan, so used to saving others' lives, now must save his own. How could such a lovely woman possess such a diabolical mind? In pictures, she seems innocent and sweetly sensual. But in person, he's been told, she's seductive. Evil. Obsessed. Her face haunts him. Thoughts of her consume him. And the moment they touch, he knows he will never be free of her. This Angel. This innocent. This killer...

Last printing: 06/16/02 `<-;0' Titles by Suzanne Forster ANGEL FACE SHAMELESS COME MIDNIGHT BLUSH INNOCENCE HUSBAND, LOVER, STRANGER EVERY BREATH SHE TAKES THE MORNING AFTER ANGEL FACE SUZANNE FORSTER. BERKLEY BOOKS, NEW YORK If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book." This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. ANGEL FACE A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author PRINTING HISTORY Berkley edition / August 2001 All rights reserved.

Cover artwork by Franco Accornero. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission. For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York

10014. Visit our website at www.penguinputnam.com ISBN: 0-3185-425-18097-2 BERKLEY Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014. BERKLEY and the "B" design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 10 987654321

CHAPTER 1. WHEN you had hands as good as Jordan Carpenter's, you didn't need much of anything else. What man wouldn't want the ability to subdue a woman's pulse to a gentle flutter with nothing more than a touch. Or to make her throat tremble like a kitten's purr. It was said that he could whisper directly to the heart and make it do his bidding. And even if some of the claims were slight exaggerations, it was unquestionably true that he was gifted with "hand-mindedness." People stood in line to experience his touch and to watch him perform. He wasn't a masseur or a musician, although he'd always wanted to be the latter. His instruments were the scalpel and laser, and his stage the operating room. He was a mender of broken hearts, a master cardiothoracic surgeon, and the inventor of cutting-edge technology. And if his achievements hadn't put him on the map, his gunmetal hair and high-contrast blue eyes probably would have. Carpenter had fallen into the hands of the mythmakers. But as flattering as their stories were, the notoriety had made him a target. Some of his colleagues were openly envious and suspicious of his medical advances and the media attention that dogged him. And fame hadn't buffered him from the realities of everyday life, either. The eminent doctor had exactly the same problems every other bachelor did. His meddling kid sister, Penny, had dedicated herself to filling the void in his life by finding him the perfect woman, despite the fact that he was happy the way he was. His laundry was consistently tattletale gray, and the only thing he could cook was microwave popcorn. But none of those things compared to his immediate problem. The doctor was up to his eminent butt in bird shit. The yellow crested cockatiel his sister had foisted upon him was perched on the back of the kitchen chair where Jordan had thrown his workout clothes the night before. And even as the bird cocked her head at him and pretended total innocence, she lifted her tail. "No!" Jordan bellowed. There was already oyster white graffiti all over his favorite Lakers jersey. Feathers flew as he shooed the bird away and picked up the shirt with a look of abject male disgust. "This is sacrilege," he whispered. "I could duct tape your scrawny ankles and use you as a feather duster. The SPCA wouldn't touch me." He grabbed a rag from the sink and worked at one of the spots but only succeeded in doubling its size. The shirt was totaled. "You know, they make explosives out of this stuff," he informed the cockatiel as he stuffed his prized possession in the trash masher. "Maybe I should sell you to a munitions factory south of the border, huh? You'd like that?" Birdy was a fortieth birthday gift, another of his sister's misguided attempts to find him the woman of his dreams. She'd rounded up Sunday school teachers, librarians, nurses--lots of

nurses--and finally, in desperation, a twenty-something masseuse. So great was Penny's frustration after a decade of strikeouts, that she'd walked in one day and plunked the cockatiel down, cage and all, on his kitchen table. "You need female companionship!" she'd cried softly. He'd accepted the bird under duress, foolishly hoping that Penny might leave him alone. But he'd never intended to keep Birdy. He even played around with the idea of setting her free, but when he opened the cage door, he discovered she couldn't fly. Her wings had been clipped, and that realization had really gotten to him. He couldn't imagine it. Poor damn thing needed someone to ferry her around. A year later, he and Birdy were still the odd couple, and he was still her main mode of transportation. She especially liked sitting on his head when he took a sauna in the bathroom he'd converted. Right now, she clearly wanted to hitch a ride on his person, even at the risk of duct taped ankles. "Get on," he grumbled. She climbed aboard his index finger and began to sidestep her way up his arm, which brought a wince. He was wearing nothing but a T-shirt and sweatpants, and her claws were as sharp as fishhooks. Relief came when she reached his sleeve, got purchase in the soft, white cotton, and scuttled up onto his shoulder. She began immediately to nuzzle his hair and gently tap his skull with her beak. "I don't have time for a house pet," Jordan murmured, stroking her downy chest with his finger. "You know that, don't you? And even if I did, I don't like birds." His insults sent Birdy into ecstasy. Or maybe it was his raspy morning voice. Something made her go nuts whenever he growled at her. He wished it worked that way with women ... and maybe it did. He hadn't growled at one in a long time. An open box of sunflower seeds sat atop the kitchen TV. Jordan picked it up on his way to the front room, where Birdy's Victorian cage stood, door ajar, on a wrought-iron pedestal. Maybe if he put her to bed at night, she would stop redecorating the place. She wasn't crazy about the cage, though. She preferred her bird station, a fake cedar log with leafy branches and a rope ladder made out of twigs that dropped to the floor. Another thoughtful gift from Penny. Somebody ought to get his little sister married. The woman had too much time on her hands. Jordan filled the bird's basin and then took a quick look around for his pager, which was always disappearing. He swore Birdy dragged it off and hid it every chance she got, although he had yet to catch her at it. Last night he'd left it on the coffee table. Naturally, it wasn't there now. He had a backup at the hospital, but it was a different number, and the staff complained bitterly about having to call both. Not that he blamed them. It was frustratingly inefficient. He shook the couch cushions and gave up when the pager didn't fall out.

Dawn was misting the east windows of the roomy old house where Jordan had grown up. His parents had turned the place over to him when they'd retired and moved to Florida, and Jordan had changed nothing, except to add the bird furniture and, with Birdy's help, generally mess things up. Sunflower seeds littered the carpet like rice after a wedding, and a bottle of beer was still tilting on the edge of the coffee table, where Jordan had set it before passing out from exhaustion last night. Five surgeries back to back had taken their toll, but that was his schedule lately. Birdy cocked her head and peered at the front door with her alert gaze, making Jordan wonder if someone was outside. He hesitated, waiting for a knock. A shadow crossed one of the front windows. Someone was out there. He grabbed his blue work shirt from the couch and quietly approached the door. His gut told him to be cautious, that something was up, but maybe it was just the early hour. He didn't notice the figure lurking near the lilac bushes when he first opened the door. The rambling front porch appeared to be empty, but the hammock creaked as if someone had been lying in it. More likely, someone had bumped it, he realized. Jordan's gut tightened. "Who's there?" A tall, shadow-thin man in a nondescript gray suit stepped forward. Jordan quickly sized him up as something under six feet, whereas Jordan was just over, at six one. The other man was lighter, too, probably by twenty to twenty-five pounds. What struck Jordan was the soft brown felt hat he wore. It was pulled down so that it concealed his eyes and exposed only one side of his face, which was severely burned. The taut, shiny skin was ridged with waves that disfigured everything in their wake, including what Jordan could see of his mouth and nose. Inside the house, Birdy was echoing Jordan's question: "Who's there?" Jordan registered that as a milestone. Birdy had never spoken before. He hadn't taught her how on the theory that less was more when it came to cockatiels. "Is there someone inside?" the other man asked. It was an intrusion, and Jordan's narrowing gaze must have reflected that. "Who are you, and what do you want?" The other man was polite but firm. "May I suggest we go inside, Dr. Carpenter? I don't think you want your neighbors to hear this conversation." He'd already flipped open a badge holder that identified him as a CIA agent, and Jordan's first thought was that someone had died. But then, why would the CIA be notifying him? "We'll talk here." Jordan didn't want the man inside the house. He had a bad feeling about this, but he took the badge, which looked authentic enough. It was pressed with the agency seal and identified the agent as

Edwin Truitt, an officer of the CIA. Truitt's picture revealed little beyond the badly burned profile Jordan had already seen. "Is there someone else in there?" "I distinctly remember asking what you want." It would have been natural to be intimidated. Most people had a problem with authority figures, especially law enforcement, but Jordan was something of a figure himself, and he knew it was mostly image, mostly bluff. Everybody postured, even the CIA. From down the street, the squeal of bike brakes and the heavy slap of rolled newsprint told Jordan the morning papers were being delivered. The neighborhood was beginning to stir. Normally, this was his favorite time of day, the beginning. But he had a hunch this one would be a beginning like no other. The agent returned his badge to the place inside his coat where agents kept badges. When the man looked up, Jordan tried to get a glimpse of the other side of his face, which didn't appear to be burned. He seemed to be deliberately exposing the scars, and Jordan wondered if it was because he wanted to repulse and frighten people. Nice guy"The agency has a problem, Dr. Carpenter. We need your help." "The CIA needs my help?" The agent's focus tightened. He drilled Jordan with a look. This isn't a joke, he seemed to be saying. He'd come on bona fide CIA business, a frightening thought if any of what Jordan knew about the agency was true. Again, gut instinct told him not to open this door, not even a crack, but he was curious by now, and he probably didn't have a choice. "Go on," he said. "Very well, but first I need to tell you that national security is involved, Doctor. Anything we discuss this morning has to be held in the strictest confidence." Now Jordan was curious, and perhaps that was what the agent had intended. "Go ahead." "Good, I'll get right to the point. There's a serial killer at large, and she's targeting doctors--high-profile doctors like you. We've kept local law enforcement and the media out of it for the reason I told you, national security. That's why I'm here instead of the FBI. This is not your typical serial killer case. Our suspect is running around with enough information in her head to start a third world war." "And your suspect's a woman. Did I hear that correctly?" "Not the way you're thinking, Doctor. Erase from your mind the concept of mother, sister, lover, or friend. She's not that kind of female. They

call her Angel Face, and I've never run up against anything quite like her. I'm not sure the agency has, either ... " He went on, and Jordan fell silent as his visitor began to untangle a macabre knot of dysfunctional family life. Curiosity held him, but it was a surreal experience. Outside the covered porch, which hid two total strangers from view, the summer sky brightened and the birds began to serenade. A neighbor's back door slammed, and another newspaper thudded against a stoop. The world was awakening to a serene new day, and Jordan Carpenter was listening with a disbelieving heart to one of the darkest and most disturbing stories he'd ever heard ... and as a doctor, he'd heard a few. According to the agent, the CIA had extensive background on their prime suspect, an exquisitely lovely twenty-seven-year-old grad student who was raised in a foster home by a small-town doctor. She was heartbreakingly beautiful, even as a small child, and the widowed surgeon was obsessed with her. He never molested or beat her, but his methods of control were diabolical. He would question her incessantly about boys and accuse her of leading them on before she was old enough to know what that meant. He would buy the things little girls dream of and then break them to punish her. When she didn't jump to do his bidding, he would cause harm to innocent bystanders --his own elderly patients or her pets--and tell her it was her fault because she'd made him angry. He forbade her to date in high school, but she met a boy and fell in love. When they tried to run away together, a car accident put the boy in the hospital, gravely injured. He didn't live through the operation, and she understood why the moment she saw the surgeon. Her foster father had operated on her boyfriend. She knew then that he would never let her go, and she became desperate to escape. A bizarre turn of events gave her the chance. One day she found him in the throes of a heart attack. He told her to use the defibrillator paddles, and when the first charge didn't work, he ordered her to increase the voltage. She hesitated, and they both realized the balance of power hi their relationship had shifted. He raged at her, threatening to destroy everything she loved, and it cost him his life. He had modified the machine for his own purposes, and when she spiked the voltage, it stopped his heart with a brutal jolt of electricity. That was when she knew she could kill. And perhaps that was when Angel Face was born. "She's killed twice more since her foster father," the agent told Jordan. "Both doctors and both by inducing heart attacks."

"With the paddles?" Jordan was appalled, but he was curious, too. "Why hasn't she been apprehended, since you know so much about her?" "It isn't that simple. She was once one of the intelligence community's most valuable informants. Her source was a brilliant recluse who developed biowarfare applications and then attempted to sell them to the highest bidder. No one but Angel Face could get direct access to him, and once she did, he fell hopelessly under her spell, like everyone else. She's lethal, Doctor. She looks like an angel, but she's a fiend, a fiend with a heart-shaped face." "Did she kill her source, too?" "How did you guess that?" The agent gave him a sharp look. "Someone killed him, but the MO was different: poison." Jordan rubbed the back of his neck, pondering what he'd just heard. There was a part of him strangely fascinated with the agent's story, but he didn't want to be. "What is it you want from me?" he asked. "We want you to help us flush her out." "Me? Why?" "You're doctor number four. You're next on her death list." Jordan wanted to laugh, it was so absurd. Floorboards groaned under his feet. "Why would she want to kill me?" "Because she's fixated on you, like she was on all the others. You have to understand that she grew up in a torture chamber. She was under the total control of one godlike doctor, who made her feel responsible for his heinous acts, even the ones he committed against her. She survived the way many POWs do, by fantasizing." "Fantasizing about doctors?" Jordan asked. "It was a doctor who tortured her." "According to our profiler, she dreamed up her own godlike doctor, one who was powerful enough to stand up to her foster father and rescue her from the hell she lived in. That sustained her when she was a kid, but as she grew older, the fantasy became more romantic, and this doctor not only rescued her, he fell in love with her." "I still don't see what that has to do with me." "You will," the agent said edgily. "Trust me, you will." He drifted deeper into the shadows of the porch, talking as he went. "Her father had medical journals and magazines around, and she began to

fixate on the doctors she'd read about. But as the abuse worsened and she grew sicker, her fantasies turned into delusions. They became I more rigid and extreme. In time, her fantasy figure had to ; be perfect, flawless, a Christlike figure, and no one could live up to that." He gave the hammock a push and sent it rocking. : "When she came across someone like you, a media hero, : she saved every scrap of paper she could find. But eventually, no matter who the doctor was, she would discover a flaw, and that's when her fantasy turned paranoid. Her mind could only encompass extremes, and if her savior wasn't perfect, then he must be evil like her father. There was nothing in between." "Are you saying that she saw me as a savior, then discovered a flaw and now she wants to kill me?" The agent ignored the question. "Angel Face knew everything there was to know about evil doctors. They maimed, tortured, and killed the innocent. So when her saviors suddenly turned into her father, she had to stop them." He turned to Jordan. "You see how it works?" Jordan saw more than he wanted to. "Now someone has to stop her," the other man stressed. "You see that, don't you?" "Isn't that what they pay you to do? They pay me to , operate on people. Big difference." "That depends on whose life you want to save, Doctor. Someone else's or your own." "Maybe that's your reality. Mine is patients on waiting lists, dying before I can get to them to operate." "What about your colleagues? What about the doctors who've died?" "What doctors?" Jordan asked. "Who are they?" The < agent pushed, and he pushed back. It was becoming a shoving match. "I'm not at liberty to say, unfortunately. I came here to talk about you. And about her, Angel Face. She's an escape artist. She's eluded everybody we've put on her, our best people. We need something she wants, something that will bring her out in the open. That's where you come into it." The man's frustration was obvious. Jordan turned and contemplated the sunrise as if he was making a decision, but in fact he already had. "I'm sorry," he told his uninvited guest. "I've got a surgery schedule that's piled high through Christmas. I can't find time for the mundane things like sleeping and eating, and even if I could, paranoid delusions and death lists are way out of my line."

The expanding silence finally brought Jordan around. The other man's face showed no expression. It was held fast by the scarring, which gave him a creepy, reptilian look. Maybe that was why he exposed only the burned side, Jordan thought. It was his poker face. When the agent made no move to leave, Jordan added with faint irony, "It's too bad you had to come all this way. If you'd called--" "I don't call, Dr. Carpenter. And it was no trouble, believe me." He lifted his head and studied Jordan, his stare unnaturally bright. "You're an interesting man," he said. "Not too many high school dropouts go on to become world-famous surgeons. Still, you left a few skeletons behind, didn't you-- one by the name of Cathy Crosby?" Jordan's hand came up. He was reaching for the man. His heart rate was thunderous. "What is this? Some kind of cheap attempt at blackmail?" The crooked mouth almost smiled. "I thought I'd ask how she's doing, that's all." "Cathy Crosby is dead, and you know it." Jordan came across the porch, his voice a terrible whisper. The agent stepped back. "Yes, I do know it, Dr. Carpenter ... and so does she, Angel Face." "I'm telling you once to get off my property. Once, and then I'm going to throw you from here to the picket fence." The other man shrugged as if to say, No problem. Halfway down the steps, he glanced over his shoulder. "Just a friendly word of advice about Angel Face, if you'll permit me?" Jordan finally nodded. "She's an escape artist, but she's also a quick-change artist, and what changes is her face. You won't see the same woman twice." "That must keep things interesting." "Her father was obsessed with her because of her beauty, and he punished her because he couldn't have her. Angel Face grew up desperate to be someone else, anyone else. She tried to make herself into someone her father wouldn't want so she could

escape the abuse. She's still trying." He drew a legal-size envelope from inside his coat and tossed it onto the porch. "In case you change your mind." With that, he was on his way, moving swiftly down the steps, across the street, and out of eyeshot. Jordan stepped out onto the porch and picked up the packet. He didn't want it lying on the porch, but he wasn't changing his mind. And no blackmailing CIA agent with a story about an abused female serial killer was changing it for him. As soon as he got his bearings, he was going to call the CIA and follow up--or have his attorney do it. In fact, he might just call a former patient of his who was once highly placed in the intelligence community, Mitch Ryder had retired because of his health and turned to detective work. Yeah, maybe he'd give Mitch a call. Jordan came through the door with more force than usual, and Birdy's feathers ruffled in surprise. The packet landed in the wastebasket, unopened. He had a quadruple bypass and three angioplasties today. There were people whose lives depended on him to be sane and focused. He didn't have time for such nonsense. "Where the hell's my pager?" he muttered. "Fooled you, fooled you!" Birdy squawked. When did that bird learn to talk?

CHAPTER 2. SAMMY Tran pulled the earmuffs off his head and tossed them into the nippy air like a mortarboard on graduation day. He would have let out a whoop of joy but was afraid it might wake the dead, as he referred to the other research drones who worked in the Cognitive Studies lab. Too many of his coworkers were pasty-faced, bug- eyed zombies who labored around the clock and never saw the sun. Their idea of fun was beating the computer at a breakneck game of solitaire. Sammy's idea of fun was brain-tapping serial killers, and he'd just broken the bank. Brain-tapping was the catch phrase he'd come up with to describe a revolutionary new software program he was debugging for Smarttech, the biotech company where he'd been on staff since graduating from MIT a few years back. The program combined the biology of the latest brainmapping techniques with the psychology of FBI profiling by continuously compiling both kinds of data on a study subject and then reducing the input to linear correlations that could predict the subject's violent or antisocial behavior with a surprising degree of accuracy. So far, only prison inmates in controlled situations had been tested, but the program was intended for much broader applications. There was hope it would one day be used as routinely as drug testing. "Suuh-weet," Sammy murmured, imagining the newspaper headlines when the story broke: "Software Reads Killers' Minds! Predicts Homicide Before It Happens." He watched the activity on the computer monitor with the reverence of a NASA engineer watching a Mars probe. "Wait till it gets out that we can do sophisticated brain imaging with the equivalent of wireless components and cell sites. The old farts will never believe it." His gleeful chuckle had an F-you quality to it. He'd been ridiculed since he was a kid for his strange and morbid visions of the future. At a conservative institution like MIT, the rejection had been savage. Only here at Smarttech had his ideas been embraced and--much more importantly--funded. He was grateful and loyal. The researchers here even had their own cubicles, a perk reserved for the section chiefs in most labs. "Believe what, Sammy?" Sammy tried to swallow, but he'd dried up like leftover toast. Angela Lowe had just spoken his name in her soft, dulcet tones. She was the lone exception to his research drone observation. Angela was neither pasty-faced nor bug-eyed. She had the dreamiest chocolate mocha gaze

he'd ever seen. Kitten eyes, he called them. The way Sammy figured it, she must have been a cat in another life, because every once in a while he was struck with the notion that she was purring and making the delicate little throaty sounds cats made, at least mentally. "Love me, stroke me, feed me," was what she seemed to be saying with her wide, wistful gaze. He couldn't imagine why she was wasting away her days in a tomblike biotech company, but he was damn glad of it. "Take a look." He waved her over to the computer and beamed with pride as she peered at the screen. "Sammy? What does this mean?" Surprise radiated from her as she turned to him. She was clutching his earmuffs, which she'd picked up off the floor. They kept the temperature low in the lab because the clean rooms and many of the experiments required it, and his ears were already frosting over. But he kind of liked the way she was cuddling the lambswool cups. "Is that Angel Face?" she asked. "It looks like she's going to ... is she going to strike again?" Angela had that similarity to a kitten, too, Sammy realized. She was smart and quick, with a feline's natural cunning but none of the cruelty. "Sure looks like it," he said. "And soon, if the indicators are correct. We ran her through a heavy cycle of stress the last forty-eight hours, and now she's immersed in violent fantasies. That's how she reduces the stress, but they're not just any violent fantasies, they're revengeintensive. Check out her deep limbic system. It's on fire, and the focal intensity is on the left. She's dredging up old wounds and wants to wound back. Look at the left temporal lobe; it's way overactive." "Paranoia," Angela suggested, "uncontrollable impulses?" "Probably both. But now look at the basal ganglia. See here--" He pointed to another view, this one of the underside of the brain. It was a walnut-sized blue pool, again on the left side. "That looks normal," Angela said, "maybe even underactive." "Right! She knows she's just fantasizing, but her brain doesn't. It can't

distinguish the fantasies from reality. Just look at her pleasure center! She's groovin' on this stuff. It relaxes and energizes her at the same time. She could be having multiple orgasms. Oh, sorry--" Angela colored a little, and Sammy felt foolish. Not for the orgasm comment but for the apology. Biopsychologists didn't apologize to each other for using words like that. Bodily functions were all part of a day's work in the lab and had about as much personal meaning as sneezing. But somehow he could never put her in the same category as his coworkers. She was just different. Sammy had often thought that she didn't belong here, but he didn't know where she did belong. Maybe another place in time. She could have stepped from the pages of a children's storybook, but he had the feeling her story wasn't entirely idyllic. There was a wicked witch involved somewhere. "You ran the correlations, of course," she said. He nodded. "There's a ninety-five percent probability she'll take some kind of retaliatory action in the next seventy-two hours." The program didn't just spew out numbers. It attempted to predict when, where, and how the killer would strike again, based on the data that was fed into it. Sammy considered it the profiling technique of the millennium, and what set it apart was the real-time functionality of the brain imaging. The subject was prepped by drinking a radioisotopic mixture that looked and tasted like water. Once the substance was taken up by receptor sites in the brain, cerebral blood flow, as well as metabolic and brain wave activity, could be monitored in real time by wireless connections that transmitted signals back to the lab's monitoring equipment. And if necessary, the entire procedure could be accomplished without the subject's knowledge. Of course, medical ethics required that subjects be informed, but Smarttech was a biotechnology company with customers like the Pentagon and the CIA, and Sammy had discovered that different rules applied, depending on the contractor and the level of secrecy. With Angel Face, which was what he called the software program, as well as the simulated serial killer, the security had been ratcheted up as the work progressed, and there were probably some measures in force that he knew nothing about. "But that doesn't necessarily mean another strike, right?" Angela's voice had an agitated quality. She peered at the screen, and

her forefinger flicked near her temple. He'd caught her brushing imaginary hair from her eyes before and teased her about having an overactive cingulate, which was the seat of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Not that he seriously believed she had OCD, but something about the nature of his work seemed to distress her. Maybe he'd become too detached. Deeply disturbed brains shouldn't thrill anyone the way they did him. That was the dark side of medical research. It wasn't long before you lived for the abnormalities. "No, not necessarily," he explained. "She may get enough psychic reward from planning the strike. Serial killers often torment the target with verbal threats and acts of psychological terrorism. Most of them have a whole repertoire of fantasies and rituals they indulge in, and Angel Face is no exception. I guess we'll have to wait and see what happens." "But meanwhile you'll report this to someone, right?" She tore herself from the screen to ask him that question. "I'm going straight to the man," Sammy said. "This is Dr. Laird's baby. He designed the program. Now that it's up and running, he calls the shots." Dr. Ron Laird was one of the founding partners of Smarttech and the software's creator. He was an intense, brilliant, and highly inaccessible individual, whom Sammy had never met. Their relationship was limited to the phone, but they'd stayed in close contact as Sammy's work progressed, and once Sammy was sure this wasn't a fluke, he would call Laird and give him the news. "Congratulations." Angela handed him his earmuffs and graced him with one of her brown-eyed smiles. ' should mean good things for you," she said. Sammy nearly fumbled the muffs and then couldn't find his ears. He wondered if she had this effect on all mankind. "It will mean good things for Smarttech," he said modestly. "For me, it's on to the next project. Speaking of which, how's your study coming?" Her hands were now in the pockets of her white lab coat, which forced her to discipline any imaginary tendrils of hair with a toss of her head. In fact, her blackberry brandy tresses were loosely coiled at the nape of her neck and not a strand had yet pulled free. "Not nearly as exciting as yours," she said. "I get to stare at the

brains of geniuses and madmen and try to figure out which is which. So far, it's a tossup." They both laughed, but Sammy could relate. He'd been a guinea pig in a brain-imaging study as an undergrad, and one of the research team had only half-jokingly told him that he had the impulse control of a Jerry Springer talk show guest. Maybe that's why he had such an affinity for Angel Face's deep limbic system. "I'm enjoying it, though," Angela said. She'd settled herself on the edge of the long Formica countertop that served as Sammy's desk and was gazing through his cubicle door with a faraway expression. "Probably too much," she admitted. "I can get so engrossed I forget where I am. Sometimes it feels as if I've drifted into the subject's mind. Isn't that weird?" "Well, the idea is to be objective," Sammy reminded her dryly. Angela was a research assistant on a small double-blind experiment in which half the subjects had genius IQs, and the other half suffered mild psychopathy. They'd all consented to participate but weren't aware of the study's actual purpose, which was normal procedure and well within the bounds of ethical experimentation. Angela was equally naive so as not to bias the outcome in any way. She knew the subjects only by their ID numbers and the workings of their brains. The one thing she'd been told was that she was running essentially the same brain-imaging program that Sammy was. "I'm betting Tango Twenty-five is manic-depressive," she said, "based on the anterior cingulate activity, and Alpha Ten is either hyperactive or Einstein. I've never seen such a busy brain. And yes, I know I'm supposed to be a human EEG--a totally objective repository of data-- but how can you not be curious about these people?" Sammy settled back in his chair to more fully appreciate his visitor. ' bad you'll never get to meet more than their brains." "Not true," she informed him. "I start field interviews next week." "You're interviewing the subjects? How'd that happen?" He was surprised. In a typical double-blind, interviewers had minimal knowledge of the experiment and no contact with the subjects other than the interview itself. Usually they were premed or science majors, plucked from the nearest university. Angela had already formed opinions about the subjects, and it was going to be tough not to convey them during the interview. Even her body language could signal the answer she expected and influence the subject.

"I was surprised, too," she admitted, "but Peter pretty much insisted." "Peter Brandt? Isn't he out of the office on travel?" "Yes, but he sent me an E-mail saying we were shortstaffed, and I needed to take up the slack. How do you like my poker face? Think it'll work?" Her sudden blank expression made him smile. "Maybe our fearless leader thinks you don't get out enough," Sammy concluded. Peter Brandt was the company's other founder, and he was also Angela's mentor. Actually, guardian and protector were better words, in Sammy's opinion, but no one asked him what he thought about such things. Peter had brought her on board and given her a job in Cognitive Studies, which he personally ran. He'd also assigned her the genius study, which in Sammy's opinion, was poorly designed and probably wouldn't hold up under scrutiny, but maybe that wasn't the point. Maybe the point was to keep her busy. Many things about Peter and Angela's relationship baffled Sammy. It wasn't romantic as far as he knew, but he was virtually certain Peter was in love with her. And it wasn't fatherly, either. It was strange. "That would be the truth," she said. "I don't get out at all." Her smile turned rueful, and Sammy wondered, as he had for the zillionth time, where she went when she left the facility, what kind of life she led, and why he kept thinking that no one knew who Angela Lowe really was, not him, not Peter, and maybe not Angela herself. She was a serious soul and much too solitary, even by Sammy's standards. She didn't interact with anyone much and Sammy only minimally. She spent all her time buried in research, and yet Sammy had seen her do things he wouldn't have believed possible. Shortly after she arrived at Smarttech, there'd been an accident in the lab. One of the interns had swallowed some caustic lab chemicals on a dare and severely burned his throat. The paramedics didn't get there fast enough, and none of the efforts to save the kid's life worked. He would have suffocated if Angela hadn't performed an emergency tracheotomy with the tiny blade in a Swiss Army knife. Sammy had been astounded. He would not have been capable of performing the procedure nor would anyone else in the lab, he was sure. Since then, he'd noticed other things-about her that didn't compute. But the oddest thing that day was that Angela herself seemed surprised. Afterward, she looked at the miniature scalpel in her hand and dropped it like a hot rock. When asked how she knew how to perform an emergency tracheotomy,

she seemed dazed by the whole experience and said in the softest voice imaginable, "I have no idea." A sudden beeping noise made Birdy look up from her grooming. It was coming from somewhere in the vicinity of the living room couch. She cocked her head and, apparently overcome by curiosity, hopped to the end of her perch and nimbly negotiated the twiglike rope ladder that reached to the floor. Like radar, the beeps guided the cockatiel straight to Jordan's lost pager, which lay in relatively plain sight beneath the end table next to the couch. A string of words appeared on the digital display. Birdy tapped the screen with her beak, oblivious to the ominous tone of the text message. I KNOW YOU, BUT YOU DON'T KNOW ME. I THINK IT'S TIME WE MET. The sender's name came up next. It was Angel Face, which meant nothing to Birdy, of course. There was no way to know what the message might have meant to Jordan or if he would ever have a chance to read it. Birdy was already busy dragging the pager off to the secret place where she'd stashed several of Jordan's lost possessions. "Turn off the music. We've done all we can here." Somebody handed Jordan a towel for his hands. He wiped them absently and handed it back. The operating microscope came off his head first, and then he shoved up his surgical cap. The elastic was pressing a vein and had given him a fierce headache, but he hadn't noticed it until now. "Okay, close her up." He nodded to Dr. Teri Benson, the team's senior surgical resident. Jordan had been compared to Denton Cooley, the celebrated transplant pioneer, for a couple of reasons, one of which was his preference for operating room music. The other reason was his ability to focus, but Jordan knew what he was good at and what he wasn't. Despite all the talk about his hands, Teri Benson had the touch when it came to needles and thread. The delicate scars she left looked like lacework. "Let's get that rib spreader out of there," Teri said as she prepared to remove the device. "Carefully!" She called out instructions over the drone of the equipment and reports of the OR nurse, whose job it was to monitor the patient's stats. The procedure they'd just performed had been a long and grueling one. The patient was a sixty-two-year-old woman with a history of diabetes, and her aorta had blown out like a tire. The team had pulled out all the stops to save her, and they were exhausted now, every one of them, physically and emotionally.

Jordan was, too, but the ordeal wasn't over for him. He was facing the most difficult part, talking to the family. Whether the operation was a success or a failure, the raw emotion in the waiting room always ripped at him for some reason. Still, it was as much a part of his job as the surgery. In this case, there was only the woman's husband, and as Jordan walked into the lounge, still dressed in his surgical, cap and gown, he saw the man sitting on a couch in the corner, hunched over the coffee table. He looked as if he didn't know why he was there. His eyes were unfocused, his face ashy with fatigue. His hands had forgotten their purpose, too. One was half raised, as if he'd started to pick out a magazine at some point; the other was useless at his side. Jordan had seen this many times, the numbed grief that overtook the loved ones. They cycled through the entire grieving process again and again while they waited for news, and eventually their hearts gave out, too. By the time Jordan got to them, many of them had already resigned themselves to the worst. They'd given up hope. Or were afraid to hope. It seemed especially difficult for the men. They weren't used to being racked with emotion, and they didn't have the resilience to deal with it. Honestly, neither did Jordan. Something stopped him in the doorway of the lounge, and he didn't move for a moment. It was a powerful need to be in control, he realized. But it was too late for that now. There wasn't time to regroup. The man had seen him and stumbled forward. Hope quivered in his eyes, but fear held him in place. Jordan went to him quickly. "Mr. Jenkins." Ned Jenkins struggled to speak, and his jaw nearly cracked with the effort. He had something to say, and Jordan went quiet, listening out of respect. "I promised her she would never have to cook a meal or clean or do another piece of laundry," Jenkins said. "I told her I'd take care of all of that from now on. She wouldn't have to lift a finger if she just wouldn't die--" His voice went hoarse, and he ducked his head, trying to hide his tears. This was some kind of atonement for his wife's years of patient toil, and Jordan was the one who had to hear it. That was what tore him up, the things people said to expiate their pain, and yet somehow he knew

this tough old man had never been so vulnerable before. Ned Jenkins was coming apart, perhaps for the first time in his life. "If you really did make that promise," Jordan said quietly, "then you're going to be a busy man." Jenkins looked up. A wildness flared through his griefstricken eyes. "What are you saying?" "She made it." Jordan barely got the words out before the other man hauled him into a bear hug and wept like a baby. Jordan hugged him back, trying to hold him together, trying to hold both of them together. As Jenkins sobbed, and Jordan struggled with his own emotions, he began to understand why this was so difficult for him. He'd never loved anyone like Ned Jenkins had. He'd never felt anything this deeply. There was something missing in his life that Ned Jenkins had--a partner, a soul mate--and an existence that was rendered meaningless without her. Jordan's throat tightened when he tried to swallow. Now there was some irony for you. He wondered how many people might think they had reason to be envious of Jordan Carpenter when the person they ought to be envious of was Ned Jenkins. Jordan was.

CHAPTER 3. Jordan had one thing on his mind. Well, maybe two. He wanted a hot shower and a cold beer. It was late, going on ten, and he was just getting home from the hospital. His last surgery had run long, and there'd been pre- and postop rounds afterward. The heavy schedule had left him walking into walls, which was probably why he didn't notice that all the house lights were off until he was on the porch and had gripped the doorknob. He stopped, backed up, and checked out the situation. It was pitch dark inside the house, and even the porch light was out. He always left that on. His muscles went liquid from a blast of adrenaline. There was someone in there. Through the door's glass panels, he could see a flashlight moving in the darkness. He touched the knob again, and the door rocked open. It was unlocked. If he used his cell to call 911, he would have to wait until the police arrived. By that time, the intruder might be gone. Everything he owned was inside, and this looked like a burglary in progress. On the other hand, maybe someone would steal Birdy. Jordan's smile was grim. He didn't have that, kind of luck. "Jordan, please! Your sense of humor is totally inappropriate!" His grade school teacher's voice rang out in his head, as it often did at times like this. Miss. Davenport had never appreciated his gift for irony. Jordan slipped off his shoes and crept into the living room. He could hear music playing low, but he couldn't tell where it came from. It sounded like one of his Bruce Springsteen CDs. Fortunately, the hardwood floors were as slick and soundless as glass. Nothing creaked as he made his way through the living room, and nothing appeared to be disturbed, although the lack of light forced him to use other senses. The old place smelled faintly of lemon oil, floor wax, and dusty June heat, as it had for all the summers he'd lived there. He moved along the wall toward the kitchen door, wondering if that was where he'd seen the flickering light. An unfamiliar sound made him hesitate. Papers were rustling, and someone was swearing under his breath in the kitchen. Next to the fireplace was a brass bin of potential weapons.

Jordan unsheathed an iron poker. At least he had the advantage of surprise, although when he got there, the view from the kitchen doorway was not at all what he expected. It looked like there was a man crouched on the floor going through his trash. Jordan moved closer and got a whiff of floral fragrance. Correction: There was a woman on the floor going through his trash. "Huloooo! Anybody home?" Garbage flew like shrapnel as the woman screamed and leaped to her feet. It wasn't Jordan who'd spoken. It was Birdy, the idiot-savant cockatiel. But the intruder didn't know there was a talking bird in the living room. She took a wild swing at Jordan, and he caught her by the arm. There was a struggle for the flashlight, which Jordan easily won, but it was tougher subduing her long enough to shine the light in her face. They were both panting by the time he had her backed up against the refrigerator. The flashlight beam blinded her. She winced and turned her head away, but Jordan had already recognized the startled blue eyes and the long, amber pageboy. She had hair the color of apricots, he'd once told her. "Penny? What the hell are you doing?" "Jordan? Is that you?" His kid sister gasped with relief. "Let me go! I thought you were a burglar!" He released her immediately. "I thought you were. What were you doing in the trash?" "I knocked over the can. You have no electricity, big brother. Obviously, you forgot to pay the bill." "Shit--" "Shit!" "Birdy, pipe down!" Jordan barely had the expletive out of his mouth before the reigning queen of excrement herself was echoing it in her little bird croak. Maybe he was a little oblivious about everyday things, but it was only because of his preoccupation with work. Unfortunately, his sister had always thought he needed a keeper, and now

he would never get rid of her. Or the bird. "Galooreeeee days ... " There went Springsteen, rocking softly in the background. Apparently, Penny liked to raid the trash to musical accompaniment. Jordan had a portable, batteryoperated CD player on the countertop, and she'd probably bumped it when she fell. "There are more important things in life than light bills." Infallible logic in his book. "They barely make the list--" "And that," she cut in, "is why you need someone in your life. Someone who does care about light bills. If nothing else, have the bank handle it, Jordan, or your office staff--or even Bernard at the country club. He runs Pacific Electric. The point is you're an important man. Pull some strings." "No, the point isn't my importance, whatever the hell that means. It's my privacy. Can you spell privacy, Penny?" "Fine," she huffed. "I apologize for worrying about you and bringing you food so you won't starve. And while I'm at it, let me apologize for tripping over your garbage can because you don't have any damn lights in the house." It sounded like his meddling sibling was on the defensive, which gave him a moment's satisfaction. He couldn't see her with the damn lights out. "What's that in your hand?" "This?" She held up what looked like a large bubblepack envelope. "How would I know? It just flew out at me." "Hang on." Jordan traded his flashlight for the candles and matches he kept on top of the fridge. No one could accuse him of being unprepared for emergencies like earthquakes and unpaid light bills. And as long as he was there, he grabbed a beer. It was still cold, which either meant the electricity hadn't been off for long or Penny had brought him a six-pack of Kirin Lager. Maybe he could see his way clear to forgive her. He unscrewed the bottle cap and took a deep pull. He'd developed a taste for Japanese beer while he was over there studying valve repair techniques, which were generally trickier procedures than valve

replacements, but they were more effective, in Jordan's opinion. The Japanese surgical innovations were fine, but their beer was ambrosia. Exactly the tonic for a man's flagging spirits. When he had the candles going and the kitchen alight, Jordan saw that the envelope Penny held had been opened. He didn't need to ask if she'd gone through the contents. She'd found the CIA dossier on Angel Face, the serial killer. He cocked a shoulder. "You should be happy. You keep saying I need a woman in my life." "Jordan, darling, this is not a woman. This is a lust murderer. Even I draw the line at fixing you up with wanton killers." "Lust murderer? Does it say that in there?" Jordan grabbed for the packet, and Penny snatched it back. "Not until you tell me what's going on. Who is this Angel Face person, and why do you have a file full of information on her?" Jordan's next try got him the gold. Penny's concerns faded to a distant echo as he opened the envelope and pulled out the contents. There was a sheaf of CIA case notes, a videotape, a cell phone, and an eight-by-ten glossy of a woman. But not just any woman. This was an angel. Christ, how could she have killed anyone? Jordan's heart thudded with a hollow sound. That alone should have warned him something was wrong. He was an expert on hearts, after all. She had one of the most tender, heartbreakingly lovely smiles he'd ever seen. Her eyes were big and brown and trying hard not to be sad, but their wistful pull reached in and grabbed a man right where he lived. Penny was saying something, but Jordan didn't respond. He barely heard her. The picture had taken hold of his thoughts, and it wasn't letting go. He'd fallen into a focus as intense as if this were one of his most intricate surgeries, and the odds were mounting against him. Nothing about her looks and her reputation meshed in his mind, and he wasn't good with cognitive dissonance, a term one of his college professors lovingly applied to anything that was intuitively puzzling. If he stared hard enough, studied her long enough, maybe something would tell him how this woman could possibly be a killer. He couldn't imagine an evil thought would have a chance against all that radiance. She wasn't a classic beauty, but the innocence she projected was mixed with a ravishing sensuality. This angel could have seduced the devil right out of his horns and tail ... and maybe she had.

Lust murderer? "Jordan, you're not going to get involved in this, right? Whatever it is they want you to do, you're not getting involved." "Right," he said absently, "I'm not." "Not what?" "Not getting involved." "What are you smiling about then? Would you look at me, please?" Jordan knit his brows, trying to frown, but the smiled widened. "You look exactly like a fiend," Penny announced with an exasperated sigh. Her blond hair bounced as she shook her head. "You just do this to frustrate me, don't you? You won't date anyone I suggest, and then you go out and pick wildly inappropriate women." "Penny, I didn't pick Angel Face. She picked me. And she doesn't want to date me, she wants to kill me. I'm next on her death list." "Death list?" Penny tried to steal the envelope back. "Is that what the report says? I didn't get that far." The two of them staged another quick tug of war, which ended with Jordan releasing the file and Penny stumbling backward. Letting her read it was preferable to having her paw through his garbage again, Jordan reasoned. But as Penny skimmed the text, she clamped a hand over her mouth and looked up at him in alarm. For once in her life, Jordan's little sister didn't seem to know what to say. She read on, gaping at him, disbelieving. It was a moment or two before a grin dared to appear. "If you forgot to put down the toilet seat, she'd kill you, right? Maybe you should date her." "Get your nosy butt outta here, or you're going to be on my death list," Jordan growled. "And take your bird with you." Birdy squawked something from the living room that sounded like "Help, murder!" Jordan ignored them body. He was staring at the picture in his hand and

thinking about the call he'd received from his former patient, Mitch Ryder. Mitch was doing private eye work now, but his background in intelligence should have given him inside access. Still, even he hadn't been able to penetrate the CIA's shield far enough to get any information about an agent named Edwin Truitt or a serial killer called Angel Face. Jordan had told him to stay with it. Meanwhile, Jordan didn't know anything more about this woman than he had before, but he had a gut feeling about her, and someone might as well have told him that Bambi had turned into a bloodthirsty predator. That would have made as much sense. IF there was anything more sensual than watching a man lick a melting ice cream cone, she didn't know what it was. This particular man's style was to take lapping strokes, followed by a round of quick, delicate cleanup work. It was a pleasure watching his tongue swirl over the creamy rivulets and his jaw muscles tighten against the coldness. She could easily imagine the rich flavors bringing his taste buds alive, melting in the steam heat of his mouth, and then pooling to drizzle down his throat. Her own mouth became a hot little well at the thought. It was her educated guess that he lived through his senses, a passionate soul, but certainly not limited to the animal passions. A lover of music and language, she reasoned, and probably the more evocative periods of artistic expression, like the misty dreamscapes of the impressionists. Maybe it was fanciful on her part, but she was inclined to read sensitivity and compassion, even a hint of spiritual transcendence, into his luminous profile. And he definitely had an eye for beauty. Feminine beauty. She could see that by the depth of his PCS wave. The wheels of Angela's lab chair squealed as she rolled forward. Feminine beauty? Who was Alpha Ten looking at? She peered at her computer screen as if she might be able to see what the subject himself was seeing. Of course, that was impossible. She was looking at a multimodal display, which meant the screen was divided into quarters to allow several different scans of the same brain at once--a functional MRI, an EEG, a near-infrared spectroscopy and a 3-D SPECT image. She let out a sigh. This was not good. She was actually fantasizing about a brain. The SPECT, which was an acronym for single photon emission computed tomography, measured the brain's blood flow and metabolic activity, and the EEG measured its electrical activity. But even with a diagnostic tool as sophisticated as the former, Angela couldn't be certain the subject was actually licking ice cream or gazing at a woman. She didn't even know for sure that he was a man, except that

the size of his hypothalamic nucleus and the typically male way his brain processed information were pretty big clues. She would love to have known how the study subjects were chosen, especially this one, but it was a doubleblind, and that sort of information could cause bias. They'd probably taken IQ tests and personality inventories, but other than that, she could only guess what the selection critieria might be. What she did know was that the subject was ingesting something and enjoying it thoroughly. And there'd been studies documenting that when males looked at sexually attractive women, their PC3 waves took a nose dive. That bothered her. It bothered her a lot. Now she was jealous of a brain? She had to stop this daydreaming. She could feel herself becoming fixated, and she couldn't let that happen. She really couldn't. Not only was it bad for the study, it was bad for her. There were too many risks to getting involved with someone, even mentally, and not just for her, for them. It would be risky to admit having such thoughts. She knew how paranoid her fears would sound, even to someone like Peter Brandt, whom she trusted above everyone else at Smarttech, including Sammy. She was still trying to prove herself, and she owed it to Peter as much as she did herself to do well. He had given her a chance. He'd saved her life. She hit the Sleep button on her computer screen and was relieved when the images went dark. If only it weren't so lonely, the darkness might have soothed her for longer. It probably didn't help that the small cubicle she'd been assigned to was severely plain, furnished only with the computer equipment she needed to do her work, filing cabinets, and bookcases weighed down with texts and reference material. The books helped. She loved knowledge and had an unquenchable thirst for it. The more knowledge she gained, the more secure she felt in an unpredictable world. But the truth was, she was alone too much. There were no significant relationships in her life, and she was becoming attached to the mental life of her subjects. She actually worried about them. She knew Alpha Ten didn't eat right. Stop, Angela. Stop this nonsense. Control yourself. You must learn to control yourself.

Her response to the command was instant and automatic. She breathed deeply, drawing on the air in the pit of her belly, exhaling until she was empty, and inhaling to that same deep place. "Rain, rain, go away," she said under her breath. She chanted the phrase several more times. It was the mantra she'd used since childhood to force unwanted thoughts and images out of her mind. Moments later, she was back to normal, alert and calmer. She checked her watch and saw that it was still relatively early. It wasn't unusual for her to work around the clock for days on end, catching naps on the cot in her cubicle, but tonight she was going to do a little grocery shopping and go home. She had a sudden craving for ice cream. THE deli section had taken Angela captive. There was too much to choose from, and she wasn't past the cheese yet. There were hefty wheels and wedges, nut-encrusted rolls, and tiny golden roundlets. The sheer volume filled an entire display case, and in the next case, the sliced and rolled meats were beckoning to her. Beyond that there were tiered platters of salads, some with ingredients that would have stumped a Jeopardy contestant. She picked up wedges of Monterey Jack and Cheddar that would most likely end up in some kind of nachos, the mainstay of her diet lately. The bakery section wafted ambrosia-like, and Angela headed there next. She grabbed a loaf of poppy seed rye, tossed it in her cart, and wondered why she had. What an odd choice. She couldn't remember ever having eaten poppy seed rye. Puzzled, she returned it to the shelf and found herself scrutinizing the English muffins. She didn't eat those, either. It was bagels she liked. Wasn't it? A sense of uneasiness overtook her as she wheeled her cart out of the section. She glanced over her shoulder and wondered what she was looking for and why her stomach was churning. "Rain, rain," she murmured. Sometimes it felt as if her world would fly apart without those words, although she couldn't easily have explained how they'd come to take on such significance ... or even why she'd chosen them. All she knew was that they'd given her back some control, and for so much of her life, she'd had none. God, less than none. She'd been little more than a trained seal. She would kill before she'd give up control again. A strange sound hissed through her teeth, and her hands clamped tight on the cart handle. She felt nerves burn a jagged line up her arm and the intensity of it startled her. Angela barely understood the emotion she was feeling, except that she

knew it was rage. "Ma'am? Excuse me?" People were trying to get by her, she realized. A man's cart clanked up against hers, and somewhere in the store they announced a sale on creamed corn. Creamed corn? That wasn't what she'd come to the store for. It was ice cream, wasn't it? What aisle was that? The store had turned into a maze of bright lights and corridors. A child's cry broke through her confusion. It came at her from behind, but she couldn't get her cart around. It was frozen. She was frozen. For a moment, Angela lost track of everything but the lights burning into her field of vision and the sound hissing in her ears. She didn't know how long it took to turn, but when she did, she saw a young girl, holding her face. The red blotches where the child had been struck could not be hidden. A man who was probably her father was jerking her arm and speaking to her sternly. Tears streamed down the girl's face. She was more humiliated than hurt, but the fury that surged through Angela was volcanic. She didn't want to kill the man, she wanted to rip him to pieces with her bare hands, tear off the offending parts--his head, his arms--and leave him with nothing but a bloody trunk. She wanted to maim and mutilate. The need to protect the child consumed her. No, to avenge, she realized. She wanted revenge on the monster who'd hurt her, on all of them! "Could you move your cart, please? Ma'am? Could you--" Angela looked up to see a teenage boy, trying to get her attention. She was still frozen in the same place. She'd never moved. There was no crying child, no enraged father. It hadn't happened. She'd imagined it all, even the frightening need to mutilate and destroy. "Are you okay?" It was the boy again, but Angela couldn't answer him. They were coming back. Her fantasies were coming back. ANGELA was still shaking when she closed the door' of her studio apartment and locked it behind her. She hadn't yet furnished the main

room with anything but the basics, but plain as it was, she was glad to be inside. It felt safer here, although that was an illusion, too, she realized. There wasn't any safe place when the danger was inside you. The black linen jacket she wore didn't offer much in the way of warmth, but she kept it on as she crossed the room to the maple dinette that was her work space. It and the chairs were constantly piled high with books and research. This was her refuge, this table. It was a place where she could happily get lost, whether searching through a book or surfing the Web on the computer she never turned off. The first thing she did was sit herself down, confident that once she got back to work, everything would be fine. Even her screen saver helped. She'd had it made from a photograph in a frame that had caught her eye in a department store. She'd loved the heart-shaped arrangement of silver flowers instantly and had grabbed it, even though she had nothing to put inside it. The picture was one of those stock beach scenes of a man and woman roughhousing with a shiny black Labrador. Nothing special really, but it was always there when Angela needed a distraction. His dog, she'd decided. His beach house. Her love of life. She'd also decided they had probably just met that weekend. Something about the way the woman ran across the sand, barefoot and laughing, while the man caught her from behind, made Angela think they might be new lovers. The dog had dashed up to the man, a ball clamped in its jaws. His dog, she was certain. She had daydreamed away more hours than she cared to think about, imagining each new step in the couple's relationship. At least once they'd had a terrible fight and broken up, but the poor bewildered dog had had the worst of it, not knowing who to go to. Angela had watched over her screen saver family every step of the way, a guardian angel, determined they were going to be happy, even if they didn't know it. But for all her involvement, she had never been able to see herself in the picture on her screen. To most people it must have seemed a perfectly normal thing, loving, fighting, loving again. For her it was something to contemplate from a distance but too much to expect. A normal life was what other people lived. You've got mail.

Angela responded automatically to the computer's prompt. Along with the usual junk mail, there was another bad joke from Sammy. He sent her all kinds of corny stuff, trying to make her laugh. Maybe she was too serious, but it was Sammy himself who had her worried these days. His obsession with Angel Face was beginning to alarm her. He talked about the program as if it were a real person, and he did it so convincingly, Angela found herself getting caught up in his fantasy, too--only Sammy seemed to enjoy it. The thought of trying to control and predict a serial killer was a disturbing prospect to Angela, and it concerned her that he seemed to thrive on it. The program was supposed to be one of Smarttech's most heavily guarded secrets, and Angela had the feeling only Sammy really knew what was going on from a technical standpoint. She often wondered if he should be revealing as much to her as he had about Angel Face. That worried her, too, but Sammy was the veteran. He knew the company's ins and outs, and if he felt safe confiding in her, then maybe she should relax and take it as a compliment. But at the same time, she was going to keep her eye on him. Angela's screen was blinking at her now, ready to go. She positioned the arrow and clicked on Chat. Earlier that year she'd received an E-mail announcement of a chat room for runaways called girl gone, and she'd searched it out, thinking she might be of some help. Since then, she'd checked in almost daily and had become one of the room's regulars. Probably because of their extreme circumstances, the girlgone members tended to bond quickly but with a genuine warmth and caring that made Angela feel as if she'd found a family out there in cyberspace. Night after night she'd watched miracles performed on the screen, and it had made her realize that you could touch someone profoundly, even if all you had to give were words of encouragement. She'd made one friend in particular, a jaded, seen-it-all regular named runninwyld, who said little about herself but was the closest thing the room had to a referral service. No matter where you were, if you needed a place to stay, runninwyld could usually come up with something. Angela had once asked if she'd run a tourist bureau in another life, and runninwyld had come back with "More likely the travel agent from hell." It was the start of a fast friendship. Angela went by the screen name onlythelonely, mostly because she'd heard the Roy Orbison song on the car radio the day she opened her account.

Tonight, the girlgone room was full, and runninwyld was telling everyone about the ultimate in ticketless travel. Apparently, the wealthy had terminals for their private jets and charters, and when the flights were empty or deadheading, they sometimes took on passengers for free. No ticketing lines, no security checks, no questions, just a damn fine ride to an exotic locale, according to runninwyld. The service was called Million Air, and Angela made a note of it, even though she had no immediate plans to flee the country. She watched without joining in as the chat room talk turned to a discussion of hot lines and which ones were legitimate. Again, runninwyld was the go-to girl, and Angela became more and more curious about her on-line friend. She was about to send her a private message that would show up only on her screen, but her friend beat her to it. runninwyld: quiet tonight, r u all right? Angela typed her answer in the little dialogue box that had appeared in the upper left-hand corner of her screen. onlythelonely: Tough day, but I'm fine. Can I ask a question? runninwyld: u can ask, i may not answer. ;) onlythelonely: I keep wondering why you've never told me your name or where you're at. I don't even know how old you are. running wild: that just occurred to u? i'm older than u might think, closer than u might want me to be ... and names aren't important. onlythelonely: Why so mysterious? Are you in trouble? Don't you trust me? running wild: trust is overrated, lonely, trust me on this, {wink} stick with anger and suspicion, you'll live longer, onlythelonely: You wouldn't tell me if you were in trouble, would you. runninwyld: take my advice, lonely, trust no one. it's not me who needs to worry about trouble, i can take care of myself, always have, nobody will." only the lonely: Have we ever met? Outside this room, I mean. Angela waited for an answer, but nothing came up on the screen. Automatically, she glanced up at the right- hand corner of the girlgone room and saw that runninwyld's name was no longer on the "who's

chatting" list. She'd left the room. Angela clicked the mouse and left the room, too, more curious than ever about her on-line friend, if she could call her that. That was the trouble with chat rooms and cyber encounters. You never knew exactly who you were dealing with. Of course, they didn't either, except in this case, Angela had the feeling runninwyld knew more than she was saying.

CHAPTER 4. Jordan watched the CIA video in total darkness. He'd found an electric generator in the basement that he'd built as a kid and his parents had stored all these years. It provided just enough juice to power the television and VCR, and that was all he needed. Tomorrow he would have the electricity turned back on, but for now the lack of light appealed to him. It brightened the shimmering TV screen and gave the impression that nothing else existed except one solitary man, totally transfixed on a woman-"A woman whose mission in life is to kill you, Carpenter." He reminded himself of that salient fact as he picked up a mug of coffee that was still too hot to drink, thanks to his gas stove. Interesting how he couldn't seem to hold on to the morbid reality of the situation, even after what he'd just seen. The CIA video had documented in stark detail how Angel Face had killed her own father. Her name wasn't used in the CIA material because she was too great a security risk, according to the agent, so Jordan had no choice but to accept the label they'd given her: Angel Face. But he was still struggling with the idea that she was a serial murderer. He'd watched her kill a man in cold blood, a doctor like himself, and it had shaken him badly. If he'd been in that examining room, he would have done anything to save the dying man's life, even if he believed him to be evil. There wasn't time for godlike judgments; there was only time to support and preserve life. Jordan had dedicated himself to that cause. He'd designed and patented medical devices, including modifications to the very heart paddles she'd used. The coffee was scalding, but he forgot and drank it anyway, barely aware of the burning stream. She'd killed with a device he used routinely to save lives, and yet when she'd whirled toward the hidden surveillance camera afterward, he'd seen her flying tears, her shell-shocked agony, and he'd been shaken again, this time to the core. His impulse had been to comfort her, and the longer he watched, the stronger the feeling grew. Now he was just angry. His hero complex was already engaged, and that was the last thing he needed. Like he didn't have enough lives to save. He had to pick a woman who wanted him dead. And yet it was more complicated than that, he knew. Infinitely more complicated ... because she hadn't always wanted him dead. According to the agent, she fixated on her targets and became romantically involved with them in her fantasies.

Had she fantasized about him? Her picture lay on his coffee table, and she gazed up at him in the flickering light. He could never have adequately described what it was about her that caught and held him, but then again, he'd never witnessed this kind of beauty before. When a young boy had dreams of angels, this was the face he saw. But it really wasn't the beauty, Jordan realized. It was the aura. Her energy seemed to come directly from some celestial source, like the sun or the stars. Or was it the killing that energized her? He rose with his coffee and walked to the generator, plunging the room into darkness with a flick of the power switch. The thought made him sick, but he couldn't totally dismiss it. She'd been psychologically tortured from earliest childhood, and her adult experiences didn't sound much better. That kind of abuse twisted your mind into something evil. It ate away your soul. Her dossier said she'd killed her father when she was seventeen, and that same year she'd been recruited by the CIA, who made her an offer she couldn't refuse. After all, they had the entire murder on tape. They'd had her foster father under surveillance for years, which was how they knew his methods of abuse. He'd done some questionable experimental work for them, and it was understood that he would treat their referrals, no matter how suspicious the injuries. Angel Face had been utilized as a courier and an informant on small jobs, allowing her to attend college at the same time. She'd majored in biopsychology, graduated with honors, and gone on to grad school, where she'd excelled. But she'd also excelled at getting the agency the information it wanted, especially from men. Conveniently, most of her sources became romantically obsessed with her. Eventually, the agency assigned her exclusively to male sources, and she took on whatever guise was necessary to become a part of the man's life, whether administrative assistant, personal trainer, or nurse. She was never required to have sex with her sources--unless she herself chose to--and it turned out not to be necessary, according to the records. Almost without exception they seemed content to worship her from afar. At some point, the agency realized they had a secret weapon in Angel Face, and they asked her to do the impossible. Adam was the code name for a brilliant recluse who was covertly developing biowarfare applications for sale to the highest bidder. No

one had been able to get access to him, but they were betting on Angel Face to change all that, and she did them proud. She was assigned to Adam for several months, and during that time he became as fixated on her as all the others had. But then Adam died mysteriously, and Angel Face disappeared. She went underground at times so deeply even the agency couldn't find her. It was then that the serial killings started, and since all of the victims were doctors who died of heart failure, a CIA psychologist theorized that something about Adam's death had triggered her sense of powerlessness. The only way she could regain it was to stalk and kill men who reminded her of her foster father. According to the dossier, she'd disappeared altogether a year ago, and the killing had stopped. But she'd recently resurfaced, and they had reason to believe she'd added names to her list, that there were new targets, including him. There was other information about her--school and medical records, entries from her teenage diary, but nothing that made Jordan feel any differently. His coffee was cold. That realization made him wonder how long he'd been staring out the front window. He wouldn't have been surprised to see the first glimmers of dawn, the pale pink glow that fringed the great oak in his front yard. He loved the neighborhood. He'd lived here almost forty years, and he'd been a doctor close to twenty. But lately he'd begun to think he needed a change. There were too many names on his waiting list, and he was spending too many hours in surgery. He was afraid of burnout, of making a mistake or of starting not to care, and he never wanted that to happen. There'd been some pressure on him to pick a potential successor as one way of lightening his load. He'd resisted the idea because there'd been no obvious choice, but it could be that he wasn't looking hard enough. Certainly Teri Benson showed great promise. Even Jordan couldn't deny her talent or her zealous passion for surgery. She reminded him of someone else at her age--of himself-and maybe that was the problem. They'd had an exchange recently that had been revelatory. She'd all but accused him of holding her back. She'd even implied that he was threatened by her and that it might be a male ego problem. Jordan had laughed at the time. He'd thought she was crazy and told her so, but now he wondered. He took another swig of the bitterly cold coffee and asked himself what he was doing. Suddenly it seemed imperative to pick a successor, even if

it was someone he didn't have total confidence in. What was he doing? It couldn't be because he was already well on his way to being obsessed after looking at little more than a picture of a woman's face, could it? Now, there was a great reason to alter his surgery schedule, and it was a pathetic comment on Jordan Carpenter's social life. Maybe it should tell him something that he was starting to feel like one of them, all the other suckers who'd come into contact with Angel Face. It didn't take him long to get the picture in question back into the bubble envelope it came in--and himself into the kitchen, where he poured the coffee dregs down the sink. He should have had a beer. Even warm, it was better than cold coffee, and he wouldn't have been up all night. The CIA agent had left him a phone number and a sophisticated cell phone that was designed for international use, apparently via low-earth orbiting global satellite links, according to the instructions. Jordan had also been instructed to use the agent's code name, Firestarter, whenever he called. It was all very seductive to an overworked, burned-out, egomaniacal male chauvinist pig of a heart surgeon. But Jordan would not be calling. BIRDY was already on the floor, searching for lost sunflower seeds, when the beeping started. This time she knew right where to go. She'd dragged Jordan's beeper to a bubble at the edge of the nearest rag carpet, where she'd stashed it with several other purloined treasures, including pens, pencils, paper clips, a TV remote, and last month's light bill. Mesmerized again by the beeper's bright green display, she began tapping on the screen as a message appeared. MEET ME TONIGHT AFTER ROUNDS at THE WINE BAR round THE CORNER FROM California GENERAL. YOU KNOW THE ONE I mean. YOU'VE BEEN THERE BEFORE. The initials that appeared were AF, but Birdy had already lost interest. She'd discovered a twist-off beer bottle cap and was happily making the sounds of a steel drum band with her beak. "DOCTOR?" "Devil," Angela responded without hesitation. Her eyes were shut, but she could hear the rustle of paper across the small room, the click of a ballpoint pen. "Angel?" "Sad."

"Sleep?" "Escape." A very slight pause. "Yes, escape." "Love?" "Learning ... I love to learn." "Hate?" "Gifts. I was given gifts when I was good. Dolls mostly. I still hate dolls." "Angela, if you would respond with just one word please. When I say a word, you say the first thing that comes into your mind, all right?" Angela nodded. She wasn't particularly comfortable with this exercise, but despite her qualms, the answers had come easily. Perhaps it would help after all. She hoped so. "Men?" "Fear. No, wait--" "Your first response." "AH right then ... fear." But Angela didn't fear all men. There were a few she'd learned to trust: Sammy, Peter Brandt. "Adam?" The word hung in the air. Angela's response was hesitation, a palpitation. "Angela, I said Adam." "Eve?" "Was that the first word that came to mind?" "Yes, I think so." "Very well then, let's end there." The pen clicked again, and a tablet slapped shut. Angela opened her eyes to the blue and maroon plaid walls of Dr. Mona Fremont's office. Her psychiatrist of the last year was seated across the room on a blue velvet couch that matched the one Angela was lying on. Her smile was reassuringly familiar, but Angela had sensed the

doctor's agitation when she'd arrived. She'd clicked her pen several times during their free association session and now she was absently flexing the metal stem of the eyeglasses she'd just removed. For as long as she could remember, Angela had been ultrasensitive to mood shifts in the people around her. Some emotions were so distinct they seemed to carry a faint scent. Sadness had always smelled damp and steamy. It was the fog that rolled in at twilight, or a wool coat, wet from the weather. Sudden anger was the snap of a hot iron. Resentment was dying flowers. Dr. Fremont was redolent of peppermint, the kind that burned your tongue. Angela had been surprised when the psychiatrist suggested free association exercises. Normally, they stayed with the more traditional talk therapy, and what Angela had wanted to talk about today was the terrifying violent impulses she'd felt in the grocery store. But when she brought it up, Dr. Fremont had quickly reassured her that it was normal for someone with a background like Angela's to feel sudden and unprovoked episodes of anger or even rage. It wasn't driven by a desire to hurt anyone so much as a way to let off steam, a release valve, she'd called it. And then she'd suggested they try something different. Angela hadn't been sure about the free association. As much as she wanted to be free of the panic that ticked inside her like live ammunition, she also feared allowing the doctor access to the recesses of her mind. Some things were best not remembered, she'd come to believe. Dr. Fremont settled the glasses on the cushion next to her and folded her hands in her lap. She was a pleasantlooking woman, probably in her midforties and roughly twenty pounds over what the insurance actuarial tables said was the ideal weight for a woman of average height. In fact, average would have described her in most ways, except for her clothing. She was head to toe in blue. Today, it was a silk blouse and slacks set, but Angela had never seen her when she wasn't wearing something blue, including the metal frames of her eyeglasses. Most people would have called it royal. What Angela saw was the hue of a peaceful brain. Blue was a good color. It meant less abnormal electrical activity. "Angela, how did you feel when I asked you about Adam?" "Adam?" Angela brushed at her temples, flicking away the strands of hair

that were forever drifting into her eyes. "Did you say that? I didn't hear you." The psychiatrist went quiet, gazing at her. Angela wondered if she were looking for some sign of evasion, an eyeblink or a shallow breath. But Angela merely gazed back. "Yes, I did say Adam. But you don't remember me saying it? Or your response?" "Did I respond?" There was something wrong here. Angela sat up slowly. She shook her head. "Doctor? Did I respond?" The psychiatrist moved on. "When I said doctor, you answered with the word devil. Tell me about that." Angela remembered that answer. "What came to my mind was the power they have ... and too often abuse." She could still hear the muted cries, the moans. "You don't believe that doctors do good, that they save lives?" "Not always; sometimes lives are sacrificed. They experiment. ... You must know that, Dr. Fremont. They experiment on their patients and call it research. Not all of them, of course. I didn't mean that you--" Dr. Fremont looked distressed. "I hope you don't feel that way about me, Angela. We try many things in here to help you gain insight into your behavior, but I never think of them as experimentation in a bad way. In fact, I was just going to suggest we try hypnosis. I think we have some fertile ground to work with here." They'd tried hypnosis before, and it had never worked. But that was more Angela's fault than the technique. There were certain things locked up inside her that would never come out. She had intentionally blocked those memories. No, that wasn't true. She'd done a great deal more than block them. She'd erased them herself because there were things she couldn't bear to remember. Didn't dare to remember. She had wiped out a part of her own memory using methods she'd learned in her grad school research that included hypnotic autosuggestion and psychotropic drugs, so of course standard hypnosis alone didn't work. How could she allow Dr. Fremont to unlock the door that she herself had locked and barred?

Angela looked up in surprise to see Dr. Fremont standing above her. She had a glass of water in one hand and a red capsule in the other. "I'd like you to take this," she said. "What is it?" "Something to relax you. It's very mild, but the more relaxed you are, the easier it will be to remember." "Why is it so important to remember?" Angela asked softly, although it was no longer quiet inside her mind. What if I don't want to remember? What if whatever's locked up in there is supposed to stay there? What if-- "Angela, it's difficult to make progress when so much is unknown ... to both of us. You do want to get well?" Angela nodded and took the capsule. "Good, because I have something else here that will help you talk more freely. If fear is the block, this will make the memories seem less frightening." She knelt beside Angela and opened her arm. Angela allowed her to swab the inner joint with alcohol and tap the vein to plump it. Neither doctor nor patient spoke, and with silence came the understanding that Angela had surrendered herself to this process, that she was forfeiting all other options. Her fate now lay in another's hands, a doctor's hands. That was a terrifyingly familiar feeling, and one that Angela had struggled with all her life. It made her want to stop the psychiatrist, yet something wouldn't let her. She did want to get well. She wanted that more than anything, and how could that happen if she didn ', finally, face her fears? There was a sharp prick, a searing stream of fluid, and Angela closed her eyes. Was she taking responsibility by allowing these drugs in her system, by giving up conscious control? Or was she evading it? She didn't have the answer to that, and it was too late now, anyway. The drug was rushing through her veins, carried by the force of her pounding heart. Whatever would happen would happen. "Rain, rain, go away," she whispered.

CHAPTER 5. WHEN a man approaching his fifth decade braved the world of women's bras and panties for the first time, he needed some moral support. Or a drink. They damn well ought to serve booze in this place, Peter Brandt thought as he gingerly picked up a spidery black wisp of silk and studied it. He didn't know what it was or where it went, which was probably just as well, since he couldn't imagine his wife, Barbara, wearing it anyway. Not on a bet. He wasn't alone in the lingerie department, but he was the only man, and the sales clerks were hovering like miniature rescue helicopters, anxious to ease his pain. Maybe he should have let them, but to have strange women describing the pros and cons of thongs and miracle bras was more than his forty-eight-year-old heart could handle. He didn't want to give away how uncomfortable he was. God forbid he should blush. He was already sweating. Moisture beaded his temples, which meant that even the plaster of Paris hair gel he'd used that morning wouldn't keep his naturally curly hair from springing into corkscrews. Maybe his glasses would steam up, too. That would be a nice touch. "Did you see our teddies?" one of the clerks called out to him. "They're on sale right over here." She was standing by a rack of skimpy things across the room, but Peter would rather have walked through a live minefield. He was nervous about looking past the next display case for fear what he might see. He thanked her with a quick nod and turned to a rack behind him, pretending to be engrossed with the silk nighties and robes. A luminous kimono and gown set in magnolia white caught his attention. It was done in a rich satin fabric, and the gown looked as if it were made of one large magnolia flower with petals so creamy and pink-tinged he couldn't keep his hands off them. He hoped no one noticed the way he'd brushed his fingertips over the fabric and stole a caress. It probably wasn't against the law to fondle the lingerie, but the images filtering through his mind ought to be. The gossamer softness brought a fantasy of pale skin and quickened breathing. And the unfurling magnolia elicited other images, including how beautiful its rich, milky tones would be against long, dark hair and misty, meadowlark eyes. The trouble was, Peter's wife didn't have pale skin, dark hair, or meadowlark eyes. It was another woman he was thinking of, someone completely off limits for several reasons, not the least of which was

that he loved his wife of twenty-five years. That, however, had never stopped him from also wanting Angela Lowe, his protegee at Smarttech. Angela didn't know how he felt. All of his efforts on her behalf had been strictly professional, but he'd been forced to go out on a limb for her in ways that had put his career--possibly even his life--at risk and he lived every day wondering if he'd made a mistake, wondering if she would revert and cause irreparable damage. And praying. Peter Brandt hadn't prayed a whole lot in his life, but he'd made up for that in the last year. "Isn't that set beautiful?" One of the clerks had found the courage to approach him, despite the force field he'd created. "It is," he agreed, "but I'm not sure it's right for my wife. Her birthday is today." There was no need to mention that he'd just walked off a plane at LAX and realized it. He couldn't go home empty-handed. "What size is she?" the clerk asked. Peter shook his head. He didn't know what size Barbara was anymore. Maybe he'd even stopped thinking of her in those terms, and that was sad. The love was still there, but the physical attraction that had brought them together had faded over the years. He assumed it was because of him that things had changed, and that compounded everything. His work was consuming, and the pressure had increased, now that they were nearing the completion of Smarttech's brain-tapping software. He'd been traveling for weeks, immersed in secret talks with customers and setting the stage for the upcoming launch. There were too many distractions and demands on his time, but none of them had distracted him from a fawnlike and totally unpredictable creature named Angela. For that he felt profoundly guilty and wasteful. All that longing directed where it could do no good. I have to get out of here, he thought. He could hear the clerk calling him as he turned and headed for the escalator, but he didn't respond. This wasn't one of his better ideas. Barbara wouldn't have been expecting lingerie, anyway. He would take her to one of her favorite restaurants and the theater for her birthday, maybe pick up a Limoges piece to go with her collection. Once he'd reached the parking lot and was safely inside his car, life quickly improved for Peter Brandt. Here he knew where everything went, what it was for, and most important, how it was supposed to make him feel. He was in the driver's seat, literally. Strange how he hated being out of his element, which was probably why he preferred spending time at the lab to all the traveling he was doing.

Still, someone had to sell the snake oil. His partner, Ron Laird, was the brains of the operation, so the day-today management and marketing had fallen to Peter. He consoled himself with the knowledge that if everything went well, Smarttech would soon be a Wall Street tsunami, and they would all be rich. That elicited his first smile of the day. The familiar hum of the Ford SUV's engine brought peace to his soul as well. It was unusually bright outside for June, so Peter popped on the Blublocker sunglasses he kept on the dash. He'd already dialed his office voice mail by the time he pulled out of the parking lot. Like most Southland business commuters, he used driving time to catch up on his messages. Fortunately, the caller ID function stored the incoming numbers, so he could select the messages he wanted. He went straight to one from Dr. Fremont, Angela Lowe's psychiatrist. She'd left it at ten that morning, and it was now two in the afternoon. "Mr. Brandt," the doctor said in her low, measured tones, "I saw Angela this morning, and I'm sorry to say I have some concerns. She's reporting anxiety, as well as violent impulses, so we did a free association exercise. Her responses were deeply hostile and directed at doctors, and when I questioned her, she justified her responses. If I had to put a label on her state of mind, I'd call it volatile. I don't consider her dangerous at this point, but I couldn't rule it out." She went on to say that she would be doing evaluations at the hospital the rest of the week and could be reached there. She also assured him that she would work Angela into her schedule ASAP. And then she apologized again. The shaking started somewhere below Peter's rib cage. He'd dreaded this moment yet known it was coming. He hit the Flash button, then speed-dialed the lab and got Sammy Tran on the phone. "Sammy, put Angela on, would you?" "Is this Peter? She didn't come in today. She's out in the field, doing interviews for that genius study." "Who told her to do that, for Christ's sake?" "She said you did. She told me you sent her an Email." "I'm on my way there, Sammy. If Angela calls in, tell her to terminate the interviewing and report to the lab. I want to see her as soon as possible." He flipped the phone shut and tossed it onto the passenger seat. He had

not told Angela to interview the experimental subjects. He wondered who the hell had. He wondered if anybody had. BIRDY was taking a nap in her cage when the pager went off next. She opened one eye, but only reluctantly, and then she was snoozing again. Apparently, the bright, shiny toy had lost its appeal for her, which meant that no one was going to see the incoming message, at least not in time to do anything about it. I DON'T LIKE BEING STOOD UP, DR. CRRPENTER. I WISH YOU HAD TAKEN ME SERIOUSLY. PERHAPS NOW YOU WILL. There was no way for the sender to know that her implicit threat wasn't being read, that in fact, none of her messages had been read. Maybe that was why she typed out her name in full, as if she wanted no confusion about who the offended party was: HOT sex this afternoon? Anybody?" Jordan posed the question in a purely conversational tone. He'd stopped at the nurses' station in the Cardiac Care Unit, and he knew what his odds were of getting anyone's attention if he asked for what he really needed. Not that he didn't need hot sex. But his first order of business that afternoon was tracking down Teri Benson, the senior surgical resident. "Only if you say please, Dr. Carpenter." One of the male orderlies batted his eyelashes. The charge nurse stepped forward, a rope-thin woman with wisps of gray in her auburn hair and an uncanny resemblance to Nurse Hatched. "I have genital warts and a set of brass knuckles. They're sewn into my bra." "Would you stop]" The male orderly shot her an outraged glare. "Shameless vixen would stoop to anything to lure a man. Don't listen to her, Dr. Carpenter. Cover your ears." "I'm holding myself back," Jordan assured him. "I have prostrate trouble," the orderly said hopefully. Jordan pretended to be torn between the two of them. "You're making it tough, but I'm going to need a rain check." He glanced at his watch. "I'm organizing a little search party for Dr. Benson. Anybody seen her?"

"I wouldn't be counting on her for hot sex," the charge nurse replied. "Unless you like working against a stopwatch." That got a big laugh and a few scathing comments about Benson's "anality," which Jordan doubted was a word. He already knew Teri wouldn't win any popularity contests with the staff. She put everyone to shame with her work ethic, him included, which might not have been a problem if she hadn't been so intolerant of her "underachieving" coworkers. She expected them to be as dedicated as she was, but what she saw as self-sacrifice they saw as naked ambition. Still, she was the standout among the residents in surgical rotation, and she had more experience because she wasn't shy about volunteering her skills. Benson was the one you could count on when another resident got sick or scared, which had made her the object of both awe and fear among her peers. And some of the surgeons, Jordan thought ironically. Not that he couldn't relate. He'd been a target himself. His surgical advances had put him in the spotlight, and medical hierarchies, by tradition, weren't fond of the nonconformist thinking that Jordan was always being accused of. He'd made himself some enemies along the way. He hated hospital politics because it never had anything to do with patient care or doctoring. It was about egos and/or money, and he hadn't always been the most diplomatic soul in making his feelings known. "Last time I saw her, she was coming out of Exam Three," Ratched said. "I thought that room was closed because of a plumbing leak." "It's one big mud puddle, but you know Benson. She probably snaked the pipes herself." "She snakes pipes?" The orderly was hopeful again. Ratched gave him a quelling stare. Jordan was already on his way down the hall. "I'll check it out," he called back. "Meanwhile, if you see her, tell her I'm looking for her--and her stopwatch." Jordan slowed down long enough to look through the windows of the surgeons' lounge, thinking he might spot Benson there. As he scanned the room, he saw something that brought him to a full stop. A woman's face was reflected in the glass pane. It was mirrored in such detail, he knew instantly who it was. And it was not Teri Benson. Jordan couldn't have mistaken the dark hair and porcelain skin. He knew those eyes, round and searching.

This was the woman in the CIA dossier. It was her ... behind him. Her image was still framed in his mind as he turned. But she wasn't there. There was only the normal hospital bustle. Jordan searched up and down the corridor. He saw a woman in silhouette, turning down a hallway. She was headed in the opposite direction of Exam Three, but he started after her. "Wait!" he called out. A team of paramedics blocked his way. They were rushing at him with a gurney, and he had to shove aside a supply cart to avoid them. The woman was gone before he could get himself free. But just before she disappeared from sight, she turned her head and looked at him. Looked straight at him with her hauntingly tender gaze. Jordan felt as if he'd been shaken by a cosmic hand. She might have been a quick-change artist, but he would have known her anywhere. The details of her face were so sharp he could have reached out and touched her. He searched the hallway, opening doors and interrupting examinations. He checked the stairs and the elevators. What the hell was going on? She had been in the hospital. She'd been right in front of him ... unless he was losing his mind. Jordan was getting some curious stares, but he didn't stop to explain. He wasn't sure he could have. He hadn't imagined the woman, but maybe he'd been burning holes in a picture for so long that anyone with dark hair and big eyes would have looked like her, even Teri Benson, who had both. He'd obviously overreacted, and meanwhile, he still didn't know where the hell Benson was. By the time he got back to the cardiac unit he'd let go of the incident and resumed his search. As it turned out, Exam Three had a Closed For Repairs sign and the resident was nowhere to be found. This seemed to be Jordan's day for losing women. The only thing going in his favor was the supply room across the hall. Someone had lifted his prized stethoscope that morning, the one his, parents gave him in medical school. He was deeply superstitious about the relic and never used anything else for rounds. He didn't really believe it had been stolen. No one in the cardiac unit pulled brainless stunts like that.

Jordan was certain the stethoscope would turn up eventually, and meanwhile he could either rip one off someone's neck or root through the hospital's stores. The supply room door turned out to be unlocked, which struck him as odd, but he had too many other concerns weighing on his mind to think of it as anything more than a stroke of luck. He could barely get into the room it was so jammed with medical equipment. It looked as if they'd moved most of the monitors from the leaking exam room in here while the plumbing was being fixed. He made his way around an EKG machine and pushed aside a ventilator. There were several boxes on a back corner shelf that looked promising. He could see the name of the medical supply company on them, but a bedside tray table and a defibrillator unit blocked his way. He was clearing a path when his foot caught on something heavy. Jordan plunged forward. There was nothing to grab but air, and he found himself down on one knee, hugging the tray table. It wasn't until he was clear of the debris that he saw what he'd tripped over. "Jesus--" A man's body was wedged between the defibrillator and the EKG machine. Jordan couldn't see his face. It was hidden by the equipment, but he was wearing the long white coat of a doctor and clutching a defibrillator paddle in one hand, almost as if he'd been using it on himself. Jordan felt a moment of cold shock, but there wasn't time to try and make sense of what a body was doing in the storeroom. The man's other arm was caught beneath his trunk. Jordan lifted him enough to free his hand, but there was no pulse, not even a faint one. The defibrillator unit was plugged into the wall, Jordan realized as he tried to move it. He yanked the cord and heaved himself against the machine, displacing it enough to see who he was dealing with. The young male doctor was a visiting surgeon from Tokyo University Hospital. Jordan had met Dr. Kensuke Inada for the first time briefly during rounds that morning. Inada had come to California General to observe and learn about some of Jordan's latest advances in valve repair, just as Jordan had visited the famous Tokyo hospital a few years back to pick up their innovations. Jordan had no idea how long Inada had been on the floor, but every second counted now. He checked his eyes with a penlight, but didn't find the dilation associated with concussion. The man didn't appear to be breathing, so Jordan probed his airway for blockage, then performed CPR, but got no response. It was possible he'd suffered a heart attack and reached for the paddles instinctively.

Sadly, they were probably the only thing that could save him now. But Jordan had to get him to the cardiac ER first, before the lack of oxygen caused irreversible brain damage. The supply room had no intercom. Jordan shouted for help, then ran outside and called again, but the hallway was deserted except for one ambulatory patient. He gave the startled elderly woman a reassuring nod as he sprinted past her, but that was all he could do. An abandoned gurney sat in the adjoining corridor. Jordan grabbed it, and this time his shouts were heard. Two interns, who probably hadn't slept more than four hours in as many days, were huddled over foam cups of coffee just down the hall from him. Jordan yelled at one of them to alert the trauma unit and the other to follow him back to the storage room. The dread that had gripped Jordan was now an icy trickle at the base of his skull, whispering constantly that something was wrong, that what he'd seen was no accident. If the defibrillator unit was wet from Exam Three, it could have shorted out, but that didn't explain why it was plugged in. Or what a visiting doctor was doing with the equipment in a normally locked storage room. Jordan thought of the woman in the hallway who'd disappeared. Could she have been the one in the dossier? A videotaped image screened through his mind like a clip from Psycho. Jordan had refused to believe she could harm anyone. It didn't matter that he'd watched her stop her father's heart or that the CIA called her Angel Face. He couldn't conceive of it. Now he was frozen with that realization. It stuck in his mind the way ice adheres to anything warm and human. He could still see her hauntingly beautiful face when he burst back into the storeroom. The breathless intern piled in after him, but both of them came to an abrupt halt. "What the hell?" Jordan whispered. There was no body on the floor. No sign of a body anywhere. The visiting surgeon had vanished, and the defib unit had been unplugged.

CHAPTER 6. Jordan'S office was quiet, but his head was a brass band. He hadn't been able to sit down at his desk or concentrate on anything but what the hell had just happened. What had happened? A body had disappeared, and there was currently a search going on for Dr. Inada. It was possible the doctor had spontaneously regained consciousness and left the storage room without anyone having seen him. But Jordan had other suspicions. There'd been no heartbeat, no respiration. He was either a miracle of science, or Jordan was in worse shape than he realized. He stared at the phone, paralyzed by the resistance he felt. His gut told him to call 911, but there was another number in his head, and what if that was the one he should be calling first? There were questions that had to be asked, but he didn't want to hear the answers. He didn't even want to dial the number, because that meant he was involved, to use Penny's word, and he didn't like being involved in anything he couldn't see, touch, feel, taste, or control. Especially control. He'd always believed that was the mark of a good surgeon. They assumed total control of their environment, and he was now mentally circling an environment that was not only outside his experience, it felt totally outside his control. He'd been a snow skier in his younger days, and he would never forget the feeling on a vertical slope when your center of gravity reversed, and your head became your feet. "Wipeout!" his friends had shouted while his body flipped end over end, tumbling like a rag doll's. There was no greater loss of control, and that was the sensation in his gut now. He was looking down the precipice, and he could see a body tumbling endlessly. If you change your mind, call this number and ask for-Jordan picked up the phone. The number was local, and it began to ring immediately. A woman answered. "How can I help you?" she asked in a pleasant voice. "I was told to ask for Firestarter." Jordan was instantly put on hold. He wasn't sitting at his desk now. He was standing beside it, counting intermittent beeps that pinged like sonar and were equally as ominous. "Dr. Carpenter? What can I do for you?" God, he sounded exactly like an insurance agent. Jordan felt a little

foolish. The man seemed so accessible, Jordan couldn't help but wonder about the brick wall that Mitch Ryder had run into. "Am I speaking to Edwin Truitt?" "You are. Go ahead and speak freely. It's safe." Easy for you to say, Jordan thought. It didn't feel safe at this end. It felt like someone's idea of a sick practical joke. There was nothing he liked about the situation he found himself in, but he'd already gone this far. "I'm calling from California General," Jordan said. "Something just happened here that I thought you should know about. A visiting surgeon was found in a storage room with no pulse and no respiration. There was a defib unit next to his body, and he was holding one of the paddles. I tried to revive him, but he didn't respond." "You found him, right? And you were alone?" "Yes, but there's more. I went for help and when I got back--" "I know what happened, Doctor." "What do you mean?" "The body was gone. It wasn't there when you got back." Jordan hesitated. He put people on medication when their hearts were beating this fast. "You already know about this?" No answer. It was so quiet, Jordan could hear the beep again, and among other things it reminded him that he still hadn't found his pager. "You could say we knew about it, Dr. Carpenter. You could even say we did it." "You did what?" "Cleaned up the scene. There was no choice." "What the hell does that mean?" Jordan couldn't believe what he was hearing. "A visiting colleague could be dead, and you're talking in movie spook lingo. What are you saying, Mr. Truitt, that you had something to do with what happened?" "Let me be clear about two things, Doctor. First, I gave you a code name. Use it. Second, we didn't make the mess. We just cleaned it up. As I said, there was no choice. We cannot allow her to fall into the hands of the local police or any other law enforcement agency." "Her?"

"Angel Face, of course." Suddenly Jordan was angry. He'd been about to tell the agent that he'd seen a woman who looked like Angel Face at the hospital, but that hardly seemed necessary now. "You can't allow her to fall into the hands of the police, but you can sit around and allow her to kill doctors?" "If I thought it would make me look less inept, I'd say yes, I'm letting her do it. The truth is, she's faster than we are. She even erased her own memory before we could get to her and do it for her. There's enough secret information in that head of hers to take out a chunk of the globe's population, but no one can get at it now, not even her." "What kind of numbers are you talking about?" "That's the worst-case scenario. The best is that no one dies a horrible death, but she brings down the current administration and some very key figures in the military industrial-scientific complex. Neither scenario is acceptable." Jordan wanted to know how she could be one step ahead of the CIA. "I couldn't have been gone from that storeroom more than five minutes," he said. "How did you know where to find the body? How did you get there so quickly? Did you have her under surveillance?" "We had you under surveillance, Doctor. I was tipped earlier today, probably by Angel Face herself, that she was going to strike again. I thought she was after you, not Dr. Inada. Obviously, that's what she wanted me to think." Jordan was being followed by the CIA? He hadn't seen any sign of it ... except the elderly woman with the walker. Cold air burned the back of his neck. He was sweating as he realized that a murder had actually taken place in this hospital. "She was here," Jordan said, but not for the agent's benefit, for his own. Maybe he needed to know he wasn't protecting her in any way. "I saw her, probably moments after it happened." "You saw Angel Face?" "I think so, yes. She disappeared before I could get to her." The agent was silent, breathing softly on the line. "That's interesting, Dr. Carpenter, but it's not much help to Dr. Inada." "What happened to him? Is he dead?"

"Yes, but it's been taken care of. You'll hear about his car accident on the news tonight." "My God," Jordan whispered. "Are you ready to help us now, Dr. Carpenter?" "Dr. Carpenter!" Jordan was vaguely aware of the clamor in the hallway outside his office. Someone was shouting his name, but the voice that tugged at him was the agent's. "I need an answer, Doctor." A candy striper opened his office door and poked her head through. "Oh, there you are! They're waiting for you in the OR. Your patient is prepped and ready to go." "Dr. Carpenter?" The agent's tone was low, insistent. Jordan's gut wrenched with indecision. The man wanted an answer, and he didn't have one. Worse, he was getting angry, and anger was heat. Surgery required icy logic, cold calculation, and total detachment. "I've got an operation to perform," he told the agent. "This is life and death. I'll get back to you." "No, this is life and death. One of your colleagues is dead, and you could have prevented it if you'd cooperated with us." "I'll get back to you." Jordan hung up the phone, ripped off his white coat, and flung it aside as he strode past the startled candy striper. He had little tolerance for no-win situations, and that's where the agent had put him. They were asking him to be the bait and lure a serial killer into their trap. Put his life and his surgery schedule on hold for whatever period of time that took: days, weeks, months. Obviously, they hadn't convinced him with the threat of his own death, so now they were trying to make him feel responsible for the death of a colleague. The hospital intercom system shouted his name. "Dr. Carpenter! Please report to the OR immediately." Jordan broke into a run. She killed someone. The angel with eyes so big and brown they could rip your heart out.

His downy innocent. His angel. She was a murdering, slaughtering killer. THE stamp-size digital recorder operated with such precision that no moving parts could be seen or heard. In fact, there were none, yet it could pick up conversations through walls, translate foreign languages, and had a battery life of days rather than hours. It could also detect whispers at twenty-five feet and analyze the voices of both callers for veracity. Firestarter smiled and unhooked his earpiece. According to the voice analysis of his last call, he was lying and the good doctor was telling the truth. Fortunately, he was the one with the surveillance equipment, and his only concern was with Carpenter's honesty. If the doctor wavered, Firestarter would know it. There was no such thing as personal privacy anymore, not even the privacy of your own thoughts. Nothing could protect you against microchips so tiny they were invisible to the naked eye and surveillance devices that could pick up a heartbeat or a brain wave at significant distances. And then there was nanotechnology, the wave of the future, with nanobots the size of human blood cells that could float the entire circulatory system and scan any part of the body in detail, including the human brain. Surveillance was too big--or in this case, too small-- to stop. And there was nothing that couldn't be surveiled. Nothing. He opened the middle drawer of his desk and took out a jar of old-fashioned cold cream, wondering why they called it cold. It felt warm to the touch as he scooped out a silver dollar's worth with his fingers and applied it in small figure eights to the ravaged side of his face. The taut skin felt as if it were on fire all over again. It was important to keep the area moist, his plastic surgeon had told him, and he didn't like the prescription creams. They smelled bad. He rose, whisked a tissue out of the box on the credenza, and blotted the extra cream, aware of his own reflection, gleaming in the glass of a framed lithograph on his office wall. Most people thought him grotesque. He could see the discomfort in their body language even when it didn't show on their face. He thought it was eerie and beautiful the way his face had healed. But then he thought everything about fire was eerie and beautiful. "What is it going to take, Doctor?" he asked the image in the glass. "What does it take to engage the great Jordan Carpenter?" This was turning out to be quite a contest, but then that was half the fun. The other half was winning. It was all a game, of course. And then there were games within games, spiraling down into ever more intricate

circles until nothing was real. And the best player of all was Angel Face. If the death of a colleague didn't do it, Firestarter was sure that she would come up with something even more interesting. In fact, he had unwavering faith that she would. THE driving pain in Jordan's chest woke him up. He was facedown on the steering wheel, unable to breathe. His rib cage was about to crack with the pressure, and his first thought was that he was having a heart attack. What else could it be? The man who put hearts back together actually had one himself. It was exploding in his chest. God had him beat in the irony department. What the hell did he do now? He needed a doctor. Gently, he pressed his hands against the dash and pushed, wondering if it was the last thing he would ever do. The pressure eased as soon as he sat up, and the pain followed. He could breathe easily, again. The only symptom left was a sharp tenderness on his right side. That surprised him until he noticed the position of the wheel spinner knob on his steering wheel. He wasn't having a heart attack. He wasn't dying. He'd passed out from exhaustion, slumped forward, and the knob had driven itself into his chest like a fist. The digital clock on his dash said it was three a.m. and he had a bypass scheduled for six. If he kept up this pace, he would have a heart attack or lose a patient through a stupid mistake. This couldn't go on. He'd known that for months, but he understood it now. Facing his own mortality even for ten seconds had made him realize what he'd been doing. He'd made it his personal responsibility to save every damn patient on his waiting list, as if he were the only one who could. How absurd when there were other doctors--gifted surgeons--who could get the operations on their schedule more quickly than he could and probably perform them more safely. No wonder Teri Benson saw him as an obstacle. If anyone had a reason to want him out of the way, it was her. Steven Lloyd, the other valve specialist on his team, would also benefit if Jordan were to share the wealth. And so would a few other surgeons he could think of. There would be rejoicing in the halls of California General if he stepped aside, Jordan thought ironically. He let himself out of the car. Freshly mowed wet grass clung to the soles of his shoes as he crossed the lawn to the front porch. It smelled green and fertile, like new growth. Tomorrow he was going to start reassigning as many of his cases as made sense. He would focus on the

high-risk valve repairs and replacements and the experimental procedures, instead of trying to do everything. The rest he would delegate. Good word, delegate. His house was ablaze with light as he approached the front porch. Jordan stopped, instantly wary. The other night it had been totally dark. Now this? He never left that many lights on. Something was wrong. He slipped up on the porch to look through the living room window--and froze at what he saw. The birdcage had fallen off its wrought-iron stand. It was lying on the floor, and Birdy had been caught underneath it. It looked as if the bird was dead. Jordan nearly broke down the door getting into the house.

CHAPTER 7. Jordan carefully lifted the heavy wrought-iron birdcage and set it upright. It was four feet high and weighed thirty pounds, easy. More than heavy enough to crush the life from a five-ounce cockatiel. He dropped to his knees next to the limp form and told himself to stop shaking. He never shook in the OR. He was precise and machinelike. But it wasn't personal then. It was plumbing, and he was a very skilled plumber. It had never been personal like this. And he'd never wanted to save anything as badly as he did this goddam bird. "I told Penny I didn't want a house pet--" He got out that much before his voice cracked. He couldn't feel a heartbeat in the cockatiel's chest, and he couldn't get enough control of his hands to compress the tiny area with any precision, but he had to try. Something inside him would crack wide open if he didn't have this pest of a bird to ferry around on his shoulder. Sprawled on his belly, he dug his thumb into the puffed chest cavity and swore under his breath. Christ, how were you supposed to do CPR on a bird? The sudden anguish he felt made him want to laugh, but there was a blade ripping through him, one of his own scalpels, and the breathtaking pain of it gave him no choice. He had to do whatever he could. What the hell did vets do? And why hadn't he ever watched that animal channel? He began the compressions, although faster than he would have on a human. Surely somewhere along the way he must have learned what a bird's normal heart rate was. "Come on, dammit. Work with me--" He growled at the lifeless bird, pleading and threatening the way you would with a loved one. It was ridiculous and futile, but he did it because he couldn't stand to hear the silence ... or imagine the loss of her public service announcements on the state of his being--"Hey, stupid, wise up!"--some of them as sage as they were goofy. He did it long after he knew it was hopeless. She was gone, but he couldn't let go. And then finally he stopped pressing, stopped talking, and just lay there, staring but not seeing, as unfocused and emptied of purpose as he could ever remember being. When he closed his eyes, he felt a void beyond his ability to describe.

He felt the hole in his heart that had always been there, but that he'd never allowed himself to acknowledge. Maybe that was why he saved lives. Why he worked so hard ... because of the innocent people he wasn't able to save ... because of the girl who loved him ... and this silly bird. A wipeout. The awareness came to him some time later that this was a wipeout, the worst of his life, the kind you didn't walk away from. "Bad bird! Get in your cage!" Jordan lay there, wondering if he was hearing things. It sounded exactly like the cockatiel, but it couldn't be. She was still on the floor next to him. "Hey, I'm talking to you!" This time he felt a convulsive tremor. He might never have made it off the floor if the sensation hadn't rocked him to his feet. He'd either heard a bird or he'd gone completely crazy. Jordan turned in circles, looking for the source of the noise. It took him awhile to figure out where she was, but finally he spotted her on the top shelf of the bookcase, teetering on the trim and peeping at him as if she couldn't imagine why he was acting so strangely. "Birdy?" "Fooled you," she croaked. "Fooled you, fooled you." Now he understood what it meant to see a ghost. He stared at the bird for ten solid seconds with absolutely no idea what to do. There was a dead bird on his carpet and another one who looked exactly like Birdy, clinging to the bookcase trim. Someone had to have put her up there. She couldn't fly. But regardless, it just didn't compute. It was surreal. It hit Jordan that he had to do something, and his reaction was automatic. He went over to the cockatiel and held out his finger as he'd done so many times before. She eagerly hopped on, then scuttled up his arm to his shoulder and began having her way with his hair, blissfully nuzzling and pecking. Relief nearly buckled Jordan's knees. This was Birdy.

She wasn't dead, and maybe he wasn't going to rupture like an artery under pressure. There was still the question of where the bird on the floor had come from, however. Jordan felt a whoosh of cold air behind him. Laughter rang in his ears and a woman's voice whispered, "Fooled you, fooled you!" He'd left the front door open, and it closed with a bang before he could get himself turned around. He had to move slowly with the bird on his shoulder, but if anyone had been there, they were gone. There was no one in the living room but him and Birdy. Jordan had begun to think he was dealing with another ghost when he saw the note on the floor. It was lying next to the dead bird and scrawled in black marker pen on butcher block paper were the words, "You're next!" Jordan made two urgent calls in the middle of the night. The first was to the Cardiac Surgery Unit, telling them there'd been an emergency. His six a.m. bypass would have to be rescheduled, and there would be a change in the surgical team. With the patient's consent, Jordan intended to have Teri Benson perform certain key aspects of the surgery, with Steven Lloyd supervising. Teri routinely opened and closed on Jordan's surgeries, and he'd passed the scalpel during procedures as well, including having her do the vein grafting for bypass operations. She'd shown extraordinary precision and control, and Lloyd was a brilliant surgeon and teacher. The patient would be fine in their hands, Jordan knew. But it was still one of the toughest calls he'd ever made. He was at war with his own overarching sense of personal responsibility and maybe his own ego. He'd never been a big believer in fate, but in situations like this, it helped to think that things happened for a reason. Maybe circumstances were forcing him to let go, and maybe that was for the best. His second call was easy. It was to the CIA agent. Jordan glanced at his long-lost pocket pager as he tapped out the agent's phone number. The pager was sitting on the couch next to him, and the last message that showed in its display was from Angel Face, telling him that she wished he had taken her seriously. She wished? He'd found the pager tucked under one of the living room rugs, along with his electricity bill and a remote that had been missing for weeks. "I'm ready," Jordan said as soon as Firestarter came on the line. "Tell me what you want me to do."

Jordan wasn't expecting the audible sigh of relief he heard. "What changed your mind?" the agent asked. Jordan was sitting on the couch, tilted over his knees, staring at the red, white, and blue hook rug beneath his bare feet. The entire house was still decorated in the early American furniture he'd grown up with. Even the smell of his mother's lemon oil lingered, although Penny might have had a hand in that. She'd threatened to hire him a housekeeper, but that wasn't Jordan's style, so she sneaked over and cleaned up every once in a while. Birdy was on the coffee table, making confetti out of a saucer of sunflower seeds. "Angel Face," Jordan said. "She's fucking with me. I want to fuck back." "What do you mean? She made an attempt on you? I need to know what happened, Doctor." But Jordan was in no mood to share. "Someone broke into my house. I think it was her. Just tell me what the plan is." "If you knew what the plan was, you would do things differently, and I want you to go about your normal life. You'll be paged and told what to do when the time comes. Meanwhile, you're on call. You understand that concept." "For how long?" "Indefinitely." Whatever vulnerability Jordan had sensed in the agent was gone, and apparently he was tossing out orders to make up for it. "I can't be on call indefinitely. I'm a surgeon. You don't open a chest and then excuse yourself to go catch a serial killer. There are lives--" "You still don't get it, do you? This is your life we're talking about. She's going to kill you." "She's going to try." He didn't like being pushed, but he wasn't reckless. He fully intended to free up his schedule, although he hadn't figured out how to explain that to his coworkers at the hospital, and he knew there would be questions. Perhaps he could say Dr. Inada's death

had been a wake-up call, as it had. Firestarter broke into his thoughts. "If you want to be around to open more chests, be sure you have someone ready to replace you at a moment's notice." "I'll be ready." "Good, and so will we. You'll have protection around the clock, starting now." "I want protection for my bird, too." "Your what?" Birdy's yellow head popped up and swiveled around to peer at Jordan. She seemed to know she was being discussed. "My cockatiel." Jordan wasn't happy about having to declare himself in front of her. She might get the idea that she mattered. Nevertheless, he intoned, "If anything happens to the bird, I come after you." Jordan zeroed in on the disconnect button and cut the agent loose. Now it was Birdy's turn. He offered the cockatiel her usual boarding platform, his fingers. He had returned her cage to its place when he cleaned up the living room, but now he chauffeured her over to her perch. He didn't want her anywhere near that wrought-iron death trap. "Don't go thinking anything has changed," he informed her as he deposited her on one of the branches. "I still don't like birds." He wasn't sure she bought it, but that couldn't be helped. He left her there, blinking at him, and went about his business. He had a female serial killer to catch. ANGELA opened her eyes to a sound unlike anything she'd ever heard. Her throat was raw and her jaw was painfully clenched. Who was making that terrible sound? It was all around her, the rattles and gasps of death. Someone was choking, clawing at the air, and she was on the floor of her bedroom, stumbling around on her hands and knees. She groped in the darkness, unable to see where she was or what she was looking for. Where was he, the man who was screaming? She had to get to him before anyone else did, her and only her. There was no one else who could save him. No one else who could silence him. Another wail ripped through her, but nothing came out of her mouth. It was all inside, all locked up inside. Her whole body spasmed, trying to

keep the screams from erupting. If they got out, it would all be over. Everything would be destroyed. She rocked back and forth, unable to do anything else. Her spine would break before it would let her move. Her fists were icy, bloodless knots. Something terrible had just happened, but she had no idea what it was. The words didn't work anymore. Dr. Fremont had taken them away. The words didn't work! SHE'S highly selective in her choice of victim, and her strikes are meticulously planned rather than random. The modus operandi and crime scene are consistent from strike to strike, in this case, a medical setting." Thank God she doesn't kill just anybody, Jordan thought, aware that his humor had gone from irony to gallows. Literally. It was the little things that counted when you were making up a death list. He used a yellow marker to highlight the next sentence in the profile he was reading. "She is highly organized, highly intelligent, obsessively ritualistic, and therefore, extremely dangerous." He kept reading, looking for the lust murderer part. The packet the agent had left made one thing abundantly clear. They weren't dealing with an amateur in Angel Face. Jordan had also gone to the medical school library and checked out everything they had on serial killers. He wasn't comfortable relying solely on the information he'd been given and wanted to weigh it against the scientific literature, but he hadn't found any discrepancies in her profile so far. According to the research, she was a mission-type killer, and in that regard, she was as rational and laserfocused as he was. His mission was to fix hearts, and hers was to rid the world of certain heart surgeons, it seemed. But why this one? He still didn't understand that. The agent had said she was looking for a doctor with the courage to stand up to her foster father, but when she discovered a flaw in her paragon, she felt betrayed and turned on him. What flaw had she discovered in Jordan Carpenter? He had so many, but the agent had mentioned Cathy Crosby. Jordan felt sick at the thought. That was twenty years ago, he told

himself. No serial killer would wait that long, even if revenge was her motive ... unless she was a child at the time, and had no opportunity to act. Still, there was no indication in the file that Angel Face knew Cathy or had ever had anything to do with her. His mind wanted to go there and grapple with that link until he could dismiss it, but he wouldn't let himself. There were too many other possibilities to be explored. Angel Face could be someone he'd operated on or the loved one of a patient he'd lost. Many of Jordan's procedures were experimental, and he had lost patients, but that didn't explain why she went after the other doctors. He picked up her eight-by-ten glossy to study it and felt his gray matter immediately begin to liquefy. Her eyes pulled like the tides. They were gentle and hypnotic, and when he was caught up in them, he couldn't seem to hold on to anything else, including the fact that she was a coldblooded killer. He would have to work on that. Eventually, her file recaptured his attention, and he continued reading. The lust murderer references he'd been looking for described the condition as manifesting differently in males and females. Men were more likely to engage in sadism, brutality, and mutilation, whereas women were more likely to become delusional and infatuated with their victims or believe their victims were in love with them. Both engaged heavily in fantasies, the most common of which was gaining total control over their victims before they disposed of them. It was the methods by which they gained control that had Jordan a little concerned. He had never performed certain exotic sexual acts at gunpoint--or any sexual acts, for that matter--and wasn't sure he wanted to. He glanced at her picture as he read, trying to fix in his mind that the innocent he was looking at had done the things he was reading. If there was evil in that fawnlike expression, and it seemed there had to be, he would spot it if he looked long enough. When he finished the dossier, he took a book from the pile he hadn't read and leafed through it, Serial Killers, the Insatiable Passion. But eventually he gave up. Even the profiler admitted that Angel Face didn't fall neatly into any of their categories. Most female serial killers were motivated by money, or much more rarely, by deviant sexual drives. This one had a mission to rid the world of evil doctors, and she was

motivated partially by romantic obsession. There was another name for that--erotomania --but erotomaniacs didn't normally kill their victims. They stalked them and occasionally threatened or killed the people who attempted to block them from the victims. Jordan stretched out on the couch and draped one leg over the back, his favorite veg position. He was still enmeshed in curiosity about her rituals, but he'd moved on to the woman herself. Her image was now fixed vividly and permanently in his head. He no longer seemed to have the option of hitting the Power button and letting the screen go dark, but he wouldn't have wanted that right now, anyway. He had too many questions, all kinds of questions, some of them intimate. He wondered what her tastes were, what kinds of food she preferred and if she slept normal hours and did normal things. Did she brush her teeth before going to bed, say her prayers? Why would he think that? But he had the strangest feeling she did. It was probably natural that he was also wondering about the more personal rituals, too, the ones women performed when they were all alone that were mysteriously feminine and sensual. Did she pluck her eyebrows? Shave her legs? Were there secret things she did that no one knew about, like use scent in private places? And the question that had begun to plague him above all others-Was she as soft and luminous in the dark as she was in the light? Of course, every once in a while he wondered why he didn't despise her for the monstrous things she did. Yes, he would have to work on that. God, yes. The bird she destroyed was in a baggie in his freezer. He'd saved it for evidence, and when he decided whether or not he trusted Firestarter, maybe he would turn it over to him. Meanwhile, he would have to make periodic visits to the ice box to remind himself what heinous acts she was capable of. As for what she wanted with him, besides to kill him, he would ask her that when the opportunity presented itself. And if he had his way, that would be soon. ANGELA briskly toweled off all evidence of the hot shower she'd just taken. Her skin was still pink and smarting from the brush she'd used to scrub her flesh, but she was calmer now and much more herself. At least daylight had brought with it some sense of control.

She exchanged the wet towel for a dry one, which she tucked around her as she brushed her teeth and examined herself in the mirror. Her face was pale and pinched, her eyes shadowed with red. Maybe it was good that she had a busy day ahead of her. It would be like any other day, she'd decided, except that she would be continuing her field research instead of going into the lab. There were thirty subjects in her study, and she'd hoped to do three to four interviews a day, but already she'd run into problems. Peter had E-mailed the subjects' addresses and their appointment times, which he'd had his assistant arrange. Angela was supposed to go to their homes to interview them, but two of the four subjects had already been no shows, and one of the others hadn't followed the instructions. Twice he'd missed taking the brain cocktail that activated the sites under observation, which would probably invalidate his responses. Angela struggled with whether or not to report the situation to Smarttech. The last time she'd checked her voice mail, there'd been a message from Sammy, which she hadn't returned because she didn't want to be yanked off the interviews before she'd even started them. This was her chance to prove she could handle whatever they threw at her. She wanted to design and run her own studies one day, have them published in some of the scientific journals that she read by the stack--and make a difference. She also owed Peter a debt she could only pay back by doing well. He had faith in her, and she couldn't disappoint him. That was her reason for pressing on--that and the fact that she was interviewing Alpha Ten today.

CHAPTER 8. "M S. Monahan, I'd like you to meet Dr. Benson, Teri Benson, one of our most gifted surgical residents. Dr. Benson is your woman, so to speak." Judy Monahan gripped Teri's hand and gave it a good shake. "Dr. Carpenter tells me you're going to make me run like new, and I told him I'd rather have you than him, anyway. He's pretty, and probably handy with a saw, but can he sew a decent satin stitch?" That brought some chuckles, which eased the tension in the small private room where Judy Monahan and Jordan had been discussing her choices. Jordan had advised Teri to stay close, just in case, and that had turned out to be the right call. His fiftyish patient was a successful mutual fund manager, a staunch believer in equal opportunity for women, and Jordan had just given her the chance to demonstrate her faith. They were dealing with a smart, gutsy woman in Judy Monahan, which both reassured Jordan and increased his concern that everything go well. Judy was having a bypass, and it felt as if his patient's faith was at stake, along with her left anterior descending coronary artery. He stepped back to let Teri and Judy get acquainted, aware that it was still difficult to let go. He doubted it would get any easier over the next week or two, as he entrusted more of his caseload to other doctors' care. Fortunately, they'd been able to reschedule Judy's surgery for the following morning, and when Teri was finished chatting with her and answering her questions, Jordan suggested a cup of coffee in the surgeon's lounge. He was starting to feel the fatigue of his chaotic night, and he wanted to talk with Teri and then catch a nap before the only surgery that day he hadn't rescheduled, an intricate valve repair. Jordan's plan was to turn his more routine procedures over to Teri as time went on, and it was important that he get a sense of how she would handle the pressure. They were barely out of Judy's room when Teri stopped him. He sensed that she was trying to contain her excitement, but her hand was trembling as she touched his arm. "I don't know what made you change your mind about me," she said, "but I won't let you down. This is so important to me. More than you can ever know. Thank you." A fierce note crept into her voice. "Thank you." Jordan couldn't find an encouraging smile anywhere inside him, but maybe that was the exhaustion. He remembered the exhilaration of his first solo surgery. He'd been ecstatic at the news, but there had been fear, too, and that had turned out to be the leavening agent. Whether it was

your first surgery or your thousandth, it was never about a career milestone. There was too much at risk. That was what he didn't detect in Teri Benson, he realized. The one humbling emotion that told him she understood a beating heart did not mean success, it meant life. Fear. He didn't detect any fear. "BOMBS away!" Jordan dropped the book he was reading and sprang up from the couch. The crazy bird was off on a new jag. She piped up with that warning every time she had a nature call--and sometimes when she didn't. Jordan was certain she did it just to watch him jump. "They're building new munitions factories in Mexico as I speak." The gestapo-like menace in his tone was totally wasted. Birdy had already turned her back on him and was sharpening her beak on her cuttlebone. At least she'd gotten his attention. Nothing else had been able to. He'd been immersed in serial killer lore since he got back from the hospital that morning. Other than a short nap before the valve repair, he hadn't slept in thirty-six hours. Jordan stretched while he was up and rolled his neck. He still couldn't fathom what it was about this macabre situation that had him so transfixed. He'd been the object of media attention throughout his career. He'd even been stalked at one point by a hypochrondriacal patient. But nothing had ever dragged him away from his work for more than moments. Those things had been distractions, as this should be. So why was it haunting him so? Or was it her haunting him? He walked to the front door and opened it wide. The breeze that ruffled his storm-gray hair was fresh and damp from a spring shower he hadn't even noticed. Steam rose from the black asphalt street in front of his house. It was mid-June, and the wet season should have long since passed southern California by, but maybe they were having a late spring this year. Jordan hadn't noticed that, either. Somewhere along the way, saving lives had become more important than living life. He stared at the lilac bushes that bordered the old front porch. The clusters were drooping like lace gloves, heavy with white and lavender buds. Soon they would burst, and the perfume would stream up your

nostrils with enough sweetness to make you physically dizzy. All a man wanted to do when that happened was pick a bunch and give them to a woman, hoping to make her dizzy, too. Jordan felt a clutch of physical longing at the thought. God. What the hell was going on? It generally soothed him to wander outside and feel part of the environment he'd grown up in. Things had changed very little over the years, except that he and the trees were a bit taller, and cable lines had replaced the television antennas. There was comfort in the continuity. But the familiar sights and sounds weren't enough today. He was getting sucked into something he didn't understand, and maybe that was the powerful appeal of it. He wasn't running this operation. He wasn't doing the planning and orchestrating. He was the patient instead of the surgeon. Someone else was calling the shots. She was calling the shots. That was it. For once it wasn't him playing the fiddle. It was her, and he either danced or he died. She had him doing things no one else ever had dared. No one. But not out of fear, out of simple wonderment. That was worth a moment of his time, yeah. That amazed him. It totally amazed him. Jordan was about to shut the door when a car pulled up and stopped across the street. Curious, he watched as a woman let herself out of the driver's side. She visually checked the nearest house numbers, comparing them to a note she held. When she saw Jordan's number, she tucked the paper in her coat pocket and started across the street. Jordan had felt a flash of recognition the moment he saw her. He closed the door and stepped back, his mind on fire. She hadn't seen him, he was reasonably sure of that. And she didn't know that he'd seen her--not only seen her, but would be ready for her. Swiftly he made his way through the house to the kitchen and slipped out the back door without a sound. Fortunately, there were six- foot laurel hedges between him and the nearest neighbors, so no one could spot him sneaking around to the front of his own home. The woman was climbing the front porch steps, completely unaware of him as he came around behind her. He watched her steal a look through his living room window, notice her own reflection, and rearrange the dark knit cloche that concealed her hair. Her black raincoat fell nearly to her ankles and had a hood reminiscent of a medieval cloak. Finally she

rang the doorbell. She was carrying a briefcase and perhaps a clipboard, but that was as much as he could make out. Fortunately, the steps didn't creak under his weight as he crept up them. He didn't want to alert her or anyone else. Firestarter had promised protective surveillance, and if Jordan was being watched, he didn't want some CIA shadow jumping out of the bushes now. He wanted to get this woman in the house, where he could deal with her. As soon as she was within his reach, Jordan spoke in a low, hard tone. "Don't turn and don't scream. Just open the door and go inside. I'm right behind you." Her clipboard clattered to the porch, followed by her briefcase. She cried out, but he muffled the sound with his hand and forced her into an armlock to keep her from turning. Her heart was trying to leap out of her throat. Her face was damp, too, as if she'd been walking in the rain. This was a mortal woman in every way, and he was damn glad. His experience with angels was limited. Now he needed to get her into the house as quickly as possible. Pressure against the back of her knees tumbled her against him. It should have been easier to control her that way, but she was surprisingly strong for her size. She tried a head butt, but he saw it coming, and he used her own inertia to keep her off balance. Once he'd wrestled her inside and kicked the door shut behind them, she seemed to realize that it was pointless. He strengthened his hold on her anyway, clamping his arm tighter around her middle, and even more aware now of how small and fragile she seemed. He'd nearly lifted her off the floor, and his grip on her wrist was massive. Lose the hero complex, he thought, fighting any twinges of concern that he might be hurting her. She wasn't going anywhere until he was done with her. He wanted her to know that. He didn't want her to have any doubts about that, none at all. "What do you want?" she asked breathlessly. "Some answers. That's all, just answers." She nodded as if she understood, and he was strongly tempted to turn her around so he could get a look at her. He wanted that look. Damn, he did. But it was too soon.

He had to make sure she didn't have another sick game up her sleeve. Yesterday she'd suckered him royally, and he wasn't letting down his guard anytime soon. In fact, he was going to check her for weapons. He forced her arm just high enough to totally immobilize her and began to pat down the front of her raincoat. He'd dealt with naked bodies of all sizes and shapes on a daily basis. It was part of the job, but touching a woman through her clothing, especially with both of them breathing heavily, was a strangely disturbing experience. She might even think he was trying to rape her. "This is not an assault," he assured her. "It's a search." She let out a muffled cry, but he pressed on, patting her down thoroughly. When he was satisfied there was nothing in the pockets or the lining of her coat, he delved underneath the rustling material and came into contact with her silk blouse and slacks. He swept his hand up and down her body, aware of the heat pouring off her. Her belly was taut and her shoulders jerked as he brushed over her breasts. She began to tremble and moan, and his reaction was both male and protective. He didn't like roughing her up, but once again he fought off the noble impulses. The woman was a murderer. She killed in cold blood. She'd already proven she could outwit him and the CIA. If anyone needed protection here, it was him. He searched her even more aggressively, perhaps reacting against his need to protect her as he delved into the recesses of her armpits and slid his hand between her legs. It was the one place he had not gone, and her thighs locked like steel when she felt him there. But this time she was a moment too late. Maybe she hadn't meant to trap his fingers and press them up against her, but that's what happened. Sweat broke out on Jordan's brow and he hated himself for the bolt of lighting that burst inside him. He might as well be a goddamn rapist. "All right, all right!" He swore under his breath. "I won't touch you again. Let go of me." "Let go of yout She opened her legs, and he let out a breath that must have sounded explosive. They both went quiet for a moment, but hearts

were racing and nerves were sparking with strange and unpredictable force. "Turn around," he told her as he let her go. "But do it slowly and keep your hands in the air." It took her what seemed like days to do as he said. And when finally she faced him dead on, she scrutinized him as if he were the murderer. She rubbed the arm he'd pinned, fear and pain hollowing her pale face. He recognized the emotions, but not the woman. Who the hell was this? Fooled you, fooled you, someone whispered. He'd been certain when he watched her get out of the car. Now he wasn't. The severe black raincoat and knit cloche made her face look drawn and plain. She'd tucked all her hair up inside the hat, exposing chalky, blue-veined skin, the alabaster bones of a classical statue, and huge, wary dark eyes. If this was the woman in the picture, she'd not only inflicted some hell, she'd suffered some. Life had tried its best to beat her into submission, and now he could join the crowd. "Who are you?" he asked. She shook her head. "I've made a mistake. This is the wrong house." "No, you were looking for this house. I saw you check your directions." "I had an appointment. It was prearranged. Please, just let me go!" "Appointment with who?" "It doesn't matter. I've made a--" He reached over and pulled off her hat. She cried out as if he'd struck her, and ebony hair tumbled all over the place. But still he wasn't sure. "You said you wouldn't touch me," she whispered. This was not what he expected. Where was the evil? This was no avenging fury. She was scared silly, and with good cause if she wasn't who he thought. Every nuance of her body language, from her wary posture to her expressive eyes said, Let me go, please! She was imploring him to end his siege on her, an innocent bystander, and he only wished that he could. If he'd made a mistake, it was a bad one. But this could be a ploy on

her part, and he didn't trust himself to know the difference right now. He didn't trust his own instincts, and that was also a Jordan Carpenter he didn't recognize. He'd made a grievous error in judgment years ago, and he was still living with the consequences. He'd misread that situation, too, completely. He wasn't letting her out of his sight until he knew the truth; he was certain of that much. If she was Angel Face, there had to be some way to flush her out, something he could say or do. He searched his memory and realized he knew everything. He had enough information to put her on death row. She had stopped rubbing her arm, but she didn't look any less injured by what he'd done. Her eyes had gone dull, shadowed by an emotion he didn't understand, except that it resembled pain. It was almost as if he'd let her down. She knew him. This was no mistake. She knew who he was. He stared at her with physical force. "Let's stop pretending we don't know what this is about, all right?" "What are you talking about?" "I'm Dr. Jordan Carpenter, and you came here to kill me." "What?" "I know who you are, Angel Face. I know everything about you, even the things you can't remember yourself." Her expression had turned to one of mute horror. He couldn't tell if it was confusion or shock, but she had begun to back away from him. "I don't know what you're talking about," she said. "I'm doing interviews for a study. I was given this address, but there must be some mistake." "There was no mistake." She was looking for a way out. He moved nearer the front door in order to block her. One question ran through his mind over an dover again. Did he have the wrong woman? He should have checked her ID, but he'd been thrown off by his own physical reaction to the search, and by hers. He wouldn't have recognized her real name, anyway. It wasn't in the dossier.

"Be careful!" he warned. "Behind you!" She was inching away from him, unaware that she was about to hit the tree branch where the bird perched. She turned and let out a startled cry, which sent Birdy flailing for cover. The bird tried desperately to fly. Her mutilated wings fanned madly, grasping at thin air. It was painful to watch, but there was nothing anyone could do. By the time Jordan got there, Birdy was on the ground, shaken but apparently unhurt, and the woman had dropped to her knees. She was checking the bird for damage, for broken limbs or anything else, and he could hear the distress in her voice. Birdy was fine, but the woman was in some kind of agony, and Jordan remembered his reaction of last night when he'd found the cage turned over. He'd been prone on the floor, nearly senseless with grief. "What's wrong with this bird?" she asked. "What's wrong?" "Yes. Why can't it fly?" "The wings are clipped." She looked up, disbelieving. "Why would you ever do that to a bird?" He shook his head. "I don't know. So it won't fly away?" "But birds are supposed to fly. That's how they survive. It's how they protect themselves." Jordan didn't have time to explain that he hadn't done it, and he didn't like it any better than she did. She wasn't interested in his excuses. She was still bent over the bird, trying to comfort it, tremors running through her. "What if a cat got into the house?" she said in an agonized whisper. "This poor thing would be slaughtered--" When she looked up again, there were tears welling in her eyes. Jordan watched, stunned, as they spilled over and rolled down her face. He'd never seen such luminosity, such compassion. Except once. "It's you," he whispered. "You are her, Angel Face.

You killed your own father. You were an informant--" She sprang to her feet. Jordan saw her coat whip open and thought he'd missed a weapon. She was armed, but there was no time to react. She ripped something out of the lining, snapped it in two, and tossed it in the air. When he looked up, his field of vision exploded in blue-white fire. He could see nothing but a blinding burst of radiance. The stench that filled his nostrils smelled pungently of eggs, rotten eggs. Sulfur dioxide gas, he realized. There was no pain and no report. He hadn't been shot, but long before he could see again, he knew she was gone. He also knew he would find her. When he'd come around the house behind her earlier, he'd made it a point to get her license plate number. When his vision cleared, he found what she'd used to blind him. There was a burnt magnesium flare on the floor. It was about the size of a firecracker and charred black from the combustion. Firestarter had warned him that she was a quick-change artist. She changed faces, he said. He'd also called her an escape artist. Jordan could now verify that she was both, but she wouldn't get away from him again.

CHAPTER 9. "THEY'RE right behind you. They're trying to kill you, and this time they won't fail. They ' hunt you down wherever you go. They won't let you escape again. There are no second chances! Look what they've done already. They're everywhere, even in your computer, setting you up, luring you into traps. They give you drugs. They read your mind. They find the things you care about and use them against you. They used him against you. But why did you ever think it would be different? That he would be different? He isn't. He isn't. Oh God, he isn't. You should never have believed them. Never have come back. There isn't time to take anything with you, not even the picture, but you've always known it would be like this, that you would have to leave everything behind. ANGELA stood by a wall of windows, watching quicksilver Learjets taxi back and forth against a hazy blue sky. She'd been waiting in the terminal all afternoon with nothing but a half-empty canvas pack on her back and a heart full of cold certainty. The shaking had finally stopped, replaced by an emptiness that felt like calm in comparison. She had made a critical decision. She was going away, leaving the country. It was starting to come back to her, the dark corner of her life that she'd walled off. Right now, it was nothing more than hushed noises in her head--the whispering of ghosts--but it was enough to tell her that she was no longer safe here. There was nothing safe here, not the work she had filled her days with or even the people she had thought of as friends. "Ma'am? Sorry to keep you waiting this long. The flight to Mexico City is ready to board." Angela turned to the smiling face of the young woman who'd come to get her. The shiny jumpsuit she wore set her apart from any airline personnel Angela had ever seen. But then, this wasn't any airline. "If you'll just follow me," she said. Her graceful turn forced Angela to quickly reconsider the decision she'd made. She drew a breath and felt it sink to the pit of her stomach. This was it, her last chance to change her mind. THE number you dialed is no longer in service, and there is no new

number. Please hang up and try again. The number you dialed is no long--" Jordan hit the Talk button on his cordless phone and amputated the singsong voice midword. He was trying to call Firestarter, or Edwin Truitt, or whatever the hell the agent's name was, but he'd been getting that message repeatedly. The contact number no longer existed. Why? What had happened? He'd gone through the operator and even called the CIA directly. Whoever answered the phone had informed him the number was not an agency listing, and the CIA didn't use code names for their personnel. When he finally got an agent on the line, all the man would say was that the CIA didn't comment on ongoing investigations. He dropped the cordless on the couch and came to a stop in the middle of the living room. One of his mother's hand-knotted rugs was twisted in his bare feet, as if he'd been dragging it with him. Maybe his thoughts would slow down if he did. Birdy had been tracking his movements, too, and she looked wobbly enough to fall off her perch again. "The woman shows up at my place with a story about being lost." Jordan ran through the sequence of events aloud, in search of some coherent thread. "She poses as an innocent victim, then blinds me with a James Bond device and vanishes, possibly taking my CIA connection with her. "Any brilliant thoughts?" He queried the bird who was mute for once. The phone jangled on the couch. Jordan picked it up and saw the words "Private Caller" on the digital display. He hit the Talk button. "Dr. Carpenter, Mitch Ryder here. I think I found your missing person." "Mitch! Fast work. If anybody could do it, you could." Jordan had put the detective on Angela's disappearance. He knew Mitch's skills in that area because he'd consulted with him during the stalker incident and been so impressed with his expertise he'd referred him to the hospital's legal counsel, as well as to his own patent attorney. Jordan had one ace up his sleeve in this Angel Face mess, and that was her license plate number. After she disappeared from his house, the first call he'd made had been to Mitch. He'd left a voice mail message,

asking him to find out what he could about the owner of the plates. "Wish I had more for you, Doc," Mitch was saying. "But this haystack has no needle. Other than what I got through DMV, there's no history on this woman, financial or otherwise, and when someone goes to that much trouble to conceal information, there's usually espionage involved. I'm guessing the government, but it could be private industry." Jordan knew what government agency was involved, but he didn't say so. "Did you get anything at all?" "Yeah, and you might find this interesting. She lives in one of those attached rental units on Balboa Island. She went straight there after leaving your place, probably packed a bag, and that's when she made her mistake. She took a taxi to John Wayne Airport. There's a private terminal there called Million Air." "What's Million Air?" "It's where the rich guys keep their jets. Very few people know about this, but if you ask nice--and especially if you're a woman and you look nice--you can score flights to almost anywhere in the world, and there's no record of-it. Some of these pilots are deadheading, and they're happy to take on a passenger or two and make a little spare cash." "That is interesting, Mitch." Damn interesting. "Did she catch one of the flights?" "I asked that very question and got blank stares, but I think a little cash would loosen some tongues, if you know what I mean." "Sure, make a donation to the cause and bill me." Jordan continued jotting notes as Mitch gave him the details about the Million Air flights, and by the time the detective was done, Jordan had already formulated a plan. There was just one vital detail missing. "Did you get her name, Mitch?" "Oh, yeah, didn't I tell you? It's Angela Lowe. Her name is Angela Lowe, or at least that's the one she's using. She may work for a biotech company called Smarttech as a research assistant. I got that information from her apartment, although the company doesn't list her as one of their employees. There are no records on this woman anywhere, other than the driver's license, and I'm surprised to have found that." Jordan wrote the name down without any sense of recognition. It meant nothing to him, but obviously he had not expected it to. Her name had been left out of the CIA case files, and Firestarter had never

revealed it. Maybe that's why he'd thought it would be meaningful. Angela Lowe. He stared at the name, studied it. What kind of woman was this? he asked himself. She played tricks with dead birds yet was distraught over one with clipped wings. She'd brutally victimized three doctors and was working on her fourth, but he couldn't stop thinking of her as the victim. She had eyes like Bambi, for God's sake. They could destroy a man, those eyes. And had. She was as soaringly lovely as sun peeking through clouds ... with a soul twisted into as many knots as the rugs on his floor. What kind of woman was this? Mitch's voice broke into his thoughts, and Jordan realized he'd left the other man hanging. "I don't know why you're looking for this Angela Lowe," Mitch was saying, "but I'd be careful, if I were you. Nothing about this smells good to me, Doc. Nothing." Gold dust poured through the windows of the ramshackle bus as it shambled to a halt, springs creaking and groaning. They'd just come down a dirt hill so steep that Angela had grabbed a rusty guardrail to keep from falling out of her seat. She'd punctured her thumb and would probably need a tetanus shot, but that would have to wait until she found what she was looking for. "jdarse prisa!" the bus driver shouted at the passengers, urging them to hurry and disembark. "San Luis de la Paz. lprisa! Prisa!" Was that the right village? There'd been so many towns and villages they were all beginning to sound the same to Angela. The autobus had just trundled through mile after mile of the lower Bajio, Mexico's heartland, and the lush, fertile valley she remembered from her one other trip here had turned into a chain of valleys, one indistinguishable from the next. If she were wrong, she would be caught in this wild web of nature forever. All she knew was that San Luis, or a village like it, was a strong link to her unrecoverable past, and much about that time was as thick and gauzy as the dust cloud rising around the bus. She didn't know what had forced her to take refuge in such a primitive place. Those details were lost now, along with the year of her life that she'd erased. She hadn't been able to point and click with the specificity of a mouse, and she'd lost good data as well as bad. But this was where she'd fled to, and it was where she hoped to disappear again--if she could find the right house, the right person. Silver, that was the name that had come back to her. Just Silver. "jdarse prisa!" Angela a tissue to her thumb and let the other passengers go first, although no one seemed in any particular hurry, despite the driver's shouting. They were mostly farm workers of Indian

descent on their way to the valley's fields and orchards, and Angela found their stoicism admirable. Nothing flustered them, including a trip down the face of a cliff. According to the shy young woman who shared Angela's seat, the planting season was over, and harvest hadn't begun, but the crops needed to be watered and maintained. Angela wanted to know more about the young woman's life and whether there was any joy to be eked out of such obvious hardship, but her Spanish had given out. It surprised her that she knew any, but if she'd ever spoken it well, she'd erased that, too. As the dust settled outside, she saw an ornate hillside village that she vaguely remembered from her other time here. Its stucco and adobe dwellings were perched along twisting cobblestone streets, all of which ran uphill at a precipitous rake. San Luis de la Paz seemed to hover on the banks of an emerald river that overflowed the valley floor, where acres of avocado trees gave way to lavender amaranth bushes and cantaloupe vines looped like fleurde-lis. She took it all in with a sense of gratefulness and numb relief. This was the place. Thank God she was here at last. Now she could get off the bus. She'd taken the Million Air flight to Mexico City, where she'd caught the express train, El Constitucionalista, and taken it to its very last stop. From there she'd boarded this bus and severed her last tie to civilization as she knew it. She'd only been here once, and she couldn't have said for how long, but it had felt as if she'd escaped the insanity that chased her. Here she could drink in the sparkling clear air and be cleansed of all sins, no matter how unforgivable. Of the little she remembered about this place, what lingered over everything else was a sense of refuge and rebirth. Thank God that hadn't changed. PETER Brandt found his partner in the M-1.5 clean room, suited up in shock-white coveralls and a hood. Since Peter was responding to Ron Laird's urgent summons, he hadn't bothered with the full regalia, despite the company's stringent requirements. He'd slipped on a disposable frock and was still pulling on his bouffant hair cover as he hurried out of the air shower into the rigidly controlled environment. Ron had left a message on Peter's voice mail, telling him they had to talk as soon as possible--and any summons to a clean room invariably meant problems with some aspect of their work at Smarttech. Ron's latest passion was robotics that used components so tiny they couldn't be seen with the naked eye, but Peter had the feeling that company business wasn't going to be today's topic of discussion.

Ron was hunched over a microscope and adjusting the magnification when Peter tapped him on the shoulder. "What's up?" Peter asked, speaking over the constant whir of overhead ventilation. Ron peered at him through the hood's window. "Where is she?" was his muffled question. There was only one "she" in this company. Peter felt as if the air were being squeezed out of his lungs. He wished he'd worn a hood to conceal the dread that must have left him pale. "Is that what you called me in here about?" "Where the hell is she, Peter?" "She's been out in the field the last couple of days. I left her a voice mail, and she hasn't answered it yet, but she will. What's the big deal?" "The CIA's looking for her. That's the big deal." "Jesus, why? Do they know something?" "They didn't share that information with me, I'm afraid. But if they do, and if they get to her before we do, it's all over, Peter. You understand that, don't you?" "Only too well," Peter said bitterly. He didn't appreciate his partner's sardonic tone, especially since Ron bore his fair share of the responsibility for the first fuck-up with Angela. "What if she's gone into hiding again?" his partner asked. "If she's gone into hiding, she'll come back for me. She did before." "And if she's reverting?" "She's not reverting." But Peter wasn't at all sure of that, and if his partner knew how close he'd come to accurately predicting Angela's state of mind, he would have a team of detectives out looking for her. Peter had kept Dr. Mona Fremont's ongoing assessments of Angela to himself. He had never mentioned Angela's paranoia, her violent fantasies, or any of the other indicators that something was going wrong. In fact, Peter was scared shitless that Angela had had another psychotic

episode, and if that were the case, he would have to tell Ron at some point, because he didn't know how to save her this time. "I'll take care of everything," Peter said. "Just take care of this, will you? This one thing?" The two men exchanged glances, and Peter saw something in his partner's eyes that he hadn't expected. It looked like fear, and just seeing the two tiny white glints had more impact on Peter than anything Ron could have said. His partner was not a man who frightened easily. oliver.? Do you know anyone here in San Luis by that name?" The grizzled old woman shook her head, refusing to answer Angela's question or even to look at her. She hurried on her way, stumbling as she struggled to balance a heavy basket of fresh-picked pineapple on her shoulder. Angela held back an offer of help, knowing it wasn't wanted. The woman seemed frightened of her, and that came as a surprise. More and more sensory memories were triggered as Angela explored the village, but the strongest was her memory of the villagers as being quite friendly. Nevertheless, this one seemed determined to escape her. She huffed and puffed up the steep cobblestone street, balancing her heavy load. Angela was wondering what to do when the woman paused to catch her breath and stabbed a finger toward a black road winding through the green valley. It cut through a grove of avocado trees and disappeared. "El Rancho Alvarado" she called back to Angela, then continued on her way. "Plata." Angela didn't know whether she meant that Silver lived on a ranch or that there was some kind of silver ranch in the valley. Angela dimly recalled an adobe hut in the village with a dirty straw floor and no electricity or running water. She and another young woman had bartered themselves --hard labor for food. Could that have been Silver? They'd toiled in the fields alongside the seasoned workers, and they'd subsisted on the fruits and vegetables that were picked there, like the basketful the woman carried. Angela had been pushed to her limits, but she'd also been purged of all concerns except survival. Now she was just glad she'd packed light and worn her roomy khakis and sneakers. If there was a ranch house in the valley, it couldn't be seen through the trees, which made her think it was going to be a long walk.

She threw her backpack over her shoulder and began to pick her way down the same cobblestone street the old woman was climbing up. It led to the dirt road the bus had come in on, and beyond that, lower in the valley, was a man driving a donkey cart along a wandering, intersecting path that seemed to come from nowhere and go nowhere. Angela watched him turn onto the silver road the old woman had pointed to, and she took off at a run.

CHAPTER 10. THE cart jerked to a halt, raising the same clouds of golden dust that had enveloped the autobus. Angela slid off the back end and thanked the driver, a man whose cork black eyes brought to mind the mustachioed Emili- ano Zapata, leader of the Mexican revolution. She had a handful of new pesos left over from the train, but he seemed faintly offended when she offered them. She let it go, gracefully, she hoped. She had some things to learn about the local mores. She'd been wedged into a cart loaded with farming tools and equipment, including primitive wooden clubs and gleaming machetes, and she could remember using both. On the drive up, she'd had a flashback of a machete whistling through a forest of dead corn stalks, and the woman wielding it was brown from the sun and physically fit from her labors. The long hair, shimmering beneath a faded red bandanna, and the shy, dark eyes made her look like one of the natives. No one would have recognized her as Angela Lowe. It was coming back, Angela realized with a sense of dread. Whether she wanted it to or not, it was. She'd been sitting with her back to the ranch as they approached, and the image in her head was of a rambling old adobe hacienda, still proud, but beaten down by weather and time. Perhaps she'd worked at a place like that. What she could see from the back of the cart was fields rolling away from her in every direction, green with new growth. But the crop wasn't corn or wheat. It looked more like coffee. Small trees produced pods that looked like elongated oranges, with tinges of red and green on the skin. Surprisingly, the fruit looked close to ripe and ready to harvest. But now that the cart had stopped and she'd slipped off, she realized that this could not be the same place. The adobe hacienda was actually quite a grand plantation house with a red clay tile roof, graceful white colonnades, and manicured hedges. The oak double doors could have been taken from an early mission, and the house and surrounding gardens were gated off by the verdigris pillars of a wrought-iron fence. On one side, a terraced pathway led around to the back, and on the other was a lawn of cut grass with a net that looked like a badminton court. If Silver really was the friend who had worked in the fields beside Angela, it was hard to imagine her living in a place like this, unless she was on the household staff. Angela still didn't have a clear picture of the woman in her mind, although she could hear a voice, and it sounded like the one that had been coming to her in moments of stress or fear. It could have been her own voice--that inner guiding force that everyone has--but for some reason, she kept thinking it was Silver's, and that Silver was the one who had brought her down here the other time she'd had to disappear.

"Are there servants' quarters around the back?" Angela asked as she hauled her duffel from the cart. "Apartmento con cocina?" The driver opened the gate for her and waved her through, but he didn't seem to know what she was talking about, even when she asked specifically for Silver. Moments later, she watched him head off in his cart, lurching down a pitted road that led to several large tin buildings dotting the hillside. Warehouses or processing plants, Angela imagined. Now it was just her and the formidable house. There didn't appear to be anyone else around, and the place was so still, she wondered if it was occupied. She would have preferred to wait outside for a bit and get her bearings, but the cut on her thumb was throbbing and needed attention. A stone path led her through a lush hanging garden alongside the house and into a back courtyard, where lacy ferns drooped over gurgling fountains and boughs of blue wisteria swayed in the breezes. The arched doors hung open enough for Angela to see a small anteroom and another tiled archway. She gave the lion's head knocker a rap. "Entrar," someone called out. The voice sounded near, yet muffled, as if it were coming from a tunnel. Angela had just been invited to come in, and she did so, but cautiously. Beyond the archway was a darkened room lit with floor lanterns that threw billowing shadows. What stopped her were the grotesque masks and grinning life-size skeletons, some of them dressed up in fancy clothing and hats, even carrying purses in their bony fingers. She didn't know whether to be frightened or not. There was a long table heaped with offerings of flowers, liquor, and food. It was draped like a shrine, and Angela had the sudden realization that she was in some kind of burial chamber. That did frighten her. She stepped back and saw that there was a skeleton right next to her. Its leering smile and empty eye sockets made her drag in a breath. She wanted out of there. But when she turned to leave, a ghoulish figure appeared in the doorway. Angela reared back and hit the skeleton, sending it crashing to the floor. Terror fired her muscles. But the impulse that shot through her was to

attack. Not to run. To fight. She coiled, preparing, but with no conscious knowledge of what she was doing. It was all instinct. Gut instinct. A pure right-brained, limbic-driven response. It didn't surprise her that she knew how to defend herself or that it came automatically. As an informant she'd been an important commodity to Smarttech, and they'd provided her with basic training. But she knew how to counterattack, too. One perfectly placed kick could snap the neck and paralyze an opponent. She knew that. It was wired into her nervous system. This was more than a gut reaction. She knew how to kill. She had killed people. The impulse was instantly gone, but Angela could hardly breathe from the shock. She would have been an easy target at that moment. But her opponent was already ripping off the mask and trying to apologize. "Angela?" The statuesque woman shook out her wispy blond hair, feathering it with her fingers. "What are you doing here in Mexico? I thought it was Pedro, my superintendente. Forgive me for scaring you!" Angela gaped at the alarmingly lovely face, the breathless concern. "Silver?" Her racing heart wouldn't let her do more than whisper. She'd expected to remember everything the moment she saw her friend face-to-face, but Angela didn't know this woman. Only the confident demeanor was familiar. And the voice. "You don't remember me, do you? Oh, dear ... " Silver searched Angela's features regretfully, as if admitting that she held some personal responsibility for this dilemma. "There's a reason for that, and I'll explain later. First, let's get you a drink to calm your nerves." But Angela wasn't quite ready to be calm. She didn't know who she was dealing with. "Your eyes?" She struggled to get it right. "Were they ever another color? Silver blue?" "Oh, yes, of course! These are those disposable contacts. They're brown today, right?" Silver laughed out loud. "You can get contacts in San Luist "No, north of the border." Silver pulled off the black crepe paper cape she was wearing, revealing trim white shorts and a striped halter top.

"I'm in the States at least once a month on business," she explained. "My hair's different, too. It was dishwater before, as long as yours. Do you remember? I change it about as often as my contacts." Angela was starting to remember. Many things, including the realization that she had first met Silver briefly when they were both teenagers. Silver had been in trouble, and Angela had seen it coming. She'd warned her and probably saved her life. But that young girl had looked very different from this woman, or even the woman Angela had turned to when she needed help. Silver had always had the lean grace of an athlete, and that hadn't changed. She was bright and quick-witted. She radiated intelligence and compassion. Still, she'd changed dramatically in the last two years. Angela stared at her friend now, shaking her head, and both women said at once, "What are you doing here?" Silver popped up first. "Can you believe it? I'm a plantation owner." She threw out a hand, inviting Angela to check the place out. "This is yours? You own it?" "Yes, all mine. Well, I've got a silent partner, but I run things, and business is good. We grow addictive substances here: chocolate! Technically, the crop is cocoa! ANGEL FACE in beans, but ... " She shrugged. "Same thing. And that's enough about me." She peered at Angela searchingly. A ragged sigh escaped. "I'm in trouble, Silver. Again." The last time Angela had come to San Luis, she'd been running from shadows, a part of her past so terrible she couldn't bear to remember it. But there was also information, explosive information that could destabilize the government, maybe several governments, and make the country vulnerable to attack. That was the reason they'd watched her and monitored everything she did. When she'd returned to the States, Peter Brandt himself had told her she would be "on probation." It was a condition of her amnesty, but she'd never known who was watching her or what she'd been running from. Now it was different. There were flesh-and-blood men trying to silence her, and obviously they would stop at nothing, including luring her with her own weaknesses, with him. She wondered how they got him to cooperate. Sammy had always said the

genius experiment was badly designed and pointless, and now Angela had begun to question its purpose herself, and especially Peter's involvement. Maybe it was all a means to an end and never a legitimate study. Peter, the man who brought her back with a promise to rehabilitate her and give her the only thing she'd ever wanted, a normal life. He'd touched her frightened heart with his sincerity and made her believe he cared. He was friend, mentor, father figure. How she hated to believe this of him. And yet it was Peter who'd designed the experiment, put her in charge of it, and sent her out to do the interviews, using the excuse that they were short-staffed. Who else could have known that she was fantasizing about Alpha Ten, except possibly Sammy? Maybe they were tapping her brain. The thought made her skin crawl, although she must be too far away now for even the strongest signals to get through. Peter may even have known that she'd been fantasizing about Jordan Carpenter long before he was Alpha Ten in her study. That had started in her teens when she discovered him in her foster father's medical journals. She even had a collection of articles about him. It was nothing more than an adolescent fixation, but what if Peter had used it to set up her own study subject to trap her, perhaps even to get rid of her? Was that possible? She struggled to understand it, especially since Jordan Carpenter had accused her of trying to kill him and of killing other doctors. He swore that he knew everything about her, even what she'd had to erase. God, what did he know? And what a twisted irony if her guardian angel was sending her to her death and had picked a doctor to do it. No, no, she reasoned, that was too paranoid a fantasy even for her, and despite the sick logic of it, there were other things that didn't fit. Nothing in that theory could account for the look on Jordan Carpenter's face as he stared at her--as if he knew her, as if he were already half in love with her. In a different world he could have been the man she imagined would come into her life and change it ... but that was absurd now. And dangerous. "Real trouble," Angela said, aware that Silver had been observing her pensive mood. "Not anymore." The other woman waved her over. "You're here." Angela walked right into her friend's open arms, and they hugged until it hurt. They'd been frightened teenagers when Angela saved Silver's

life. A decade later, Silver had returned the favor. There had been only those two face-to-face encounters in their entire history, but they had taken incredible risks for each other, and a strong bond had been formed. At their first brief meeting, Silver had given Angela a card with a PO box on it, which Angela had used to contact her when she was in trouble. They may have exchanged E-mail addresses at some later point. Angela's memory was still frustratingly fuzzy about so many things. Her eyes were moist as she let Silver go, and she couldn't remember the last time she'd shed a tear, either. No, that wasn't true, she realized. She had wept over a bird with clipped wings. "Look at us," Silver laughed. "Aren't we a fine mess. Come on in the kitchen. I'll make us some chocolate Mexicano, and you can tell me what's going on." Angela balked. "I'd kill for chocolate of any kind, but first you have to tell me what's going on. What's the story on this room?" "Oh, you mean my gallery?" Silver nudged Angela aside and scooped the string of bones from the floor, rearranging them into a skeleton that she hung on a carved wooden stand. "I collect folk art," she said proudly, "and this is my Dia de los Muertos collection. You're familiar with the Mexican Day of the Dead? They're celebrated near our Halloween. You were still here then, remember?" No, Angela remembered none of that, and she was just as glad. "You can sleep at night with these skeletons and masks in the house?" "I couldn't sleep without them. They ward off evil spirits." She beckoned Angela to follow her as they walked through the halls and colonnades of the beautiful old house. "I guess you didn't know about my fascination with things beyond the grave." Angela actually knew very little about Silver. They'd first met when Silver showed up at her foster father's medical clinic with a gunshot wound, saying she'd been mugged. Angela had long suspected that some of her foster father's intakes weren't regular patients. They nearly always presented with bodily injuries that required inpatient surgeries she wasn't allowed to assist on, and inevitably there were complications.

Those patients died with alarming frequency, but their wounds were reported as accidents or not recorded in their charts at all. Earlier, on the day Silver arrived, he'd asked Angela to ready their small operating room, even though they had no surgeries scheduled, and a terrible foreboding came over Angela. She knew what was going to happen. His new intake, a young woman not much older than she was, would die from her injuries. The realization forced Angela into action. She didn't give Silver the sedative that was ordered. Instead, she hustled her out the back door of the clinic and told her to run, that someone wanted her dead. Silver hadn't asked any questions, but she had given Angela the card with the PO box on it. "One day you might need to run," she'd said. It felt as if Angela hadn't stopped running since. "Lead me to the chocolate," she told Silver now. The large, cheery kitchen was a welcome contrast to the muertos gallery. With evident pride. Silver pointed out that the house was over a hundred years old, and the floor was made of original oak planks, secured with black hobnails. Iron candelabra sat at either end of a long, narrow table that was overlaid with bright Mexican tiles, and in the far corner, a brick open-hearth fireplace was stacked high with split logs. Within moments, Silver had a pot of chocolate bubbling on the stove and the rich aroma permeated everything. Angela's mouth was watering, but her hand had begun to throb again. "I hate to stop you, but I'm going to need some help." She exposed the angry red cut on her hand, and Silver was quick to respond. "Here, stir the chocolate," she said, handing the wooden spoon over to Angela on her way out of the kitchen. "Back in a jiff. I have everything you need." Angela had barely given the chocolate one turn before Silver was back with a first aid kit the equivalent of a military medic's. She took out a syringe and a vial of liquid. "Want me to do it? I have ampicillin tablets here, too." "Thanks," Angela said, "but I can handle it. I did everything but prostate exams in my foster father's office. He didn't think that was

appropriate, although it never seemed to bother him that I had no formal medical training." Angela cleaned the cut and the injection area with alcohol she found in the kit, filled the syringe, and made quick, clean work of the tetanus shot. Meanwhile, Silver worked at the stove, adding milk, sugar, beaten eggs, and cinnamon to the chocolate. When the mixture was ready, she removed it from the fire and began to whip it with a large wooden spool, twirling the handle between her palms and working the chocolate into a high froth. Her skill and confidence even at making a hot drink, confirmed Angela's belief that she was in good hands. She'd never known exactly what Silver did or who she did it for. You didn't discuss such things in the intelligence business, even with friends. Silver could have been an informant like herself, or she could have been more, and it was Angela's right-brained hunch that she was more. Much more. "I kept thinking I might hear from you after you left here." Silver filled a large mug with steaming chocolate Mexicano and brought it over to Angela at the table. She also set out a plate of sugar-dusted cookies. "I wouldn't have known who to contact," Angela admitted. "I could remember almost nothing about the trip, except that I'd run away to Mexico, and that Peter Brandt had come after me." She held the earthenware mug to her lips and sipped gratefully, concentrating on how rich and delicious it was. Experience had taught her it was important to savor these moments when you were on the run because you could take nothing for granted. You might never have hot chocolate again. Silver had seated herself at the table, too, but she wasn't drinking her chocolate, and Angela couldn't imagine why. It was ambrosia. "Apparently, you also don't remember that you erased your memory while you were down here," Silver said. "And that I helped you." Angela set down her mug. "You helped me?" "Yes, you'd attempted to do it yourself with hypnotic suggestion and drugs, but it didn't take. You were having nightmares, and I knew about a powerful hypnotic plant, something right out of the rain forest and not even tested, but you agreed to try it. I made an infusion, and we

coupled that with autosuggestion, and the nightmares went away." It all went away, Angela thought, nearly a year of her life. "You know then?" she asked Silver. "You know everything, even the things I can't remember?" The other woman was quick to respond. "Not everything, only as much as you needed to tell me so that I could make it go away and stay away. You gave me some names, some dates." Angela started to shake. It hit her so hard she felt as if she were going to be sick. "Don't tell me," she said. "I don't want to know. It's coming back, and I'm petrified I won't be able to deal with it." "You'll deal with it just fine. You have more resources than you realize." "What do you mean?" "You learned a lot more than you may remember when you were here last. It was a crash course in how to survive mentally as well as physically, and you don't forget those things, Angela. I taught you a few tricks, too." Like how to kill? Angela thought. Had Silver taught her that? "You know how to take care of yourself," Silver assured her. But neither one of them actually knew what she would have to deal with, and Angela wasn't nearly so confident as Silver. Whatever she'd erased had the power to make her physically ill, and how much worse could it be than what she already knew about? How many women had killed their own fathers? She had begun to perspire profusely, perhaps from the tetanus shot. "They want me dead, Silver. I'm certain of it." Silver rose from the table and stood near the stove. She still hadn't touched her drink. "Does anyone know where you are?" "Not here in San Luis, but Mexico's a no brainer. It's where I ran last time." And she'd never had any intention of going back. There was nothing but heartbreak and horror waiting for her. But one day Silver had talked her into taking the bus to Cordoba, a larger city, to shop, and Angela had called her voice mail from a pay phone. She'd expected the number to be disconnected, but there were recent messages from Peter Brandt, begging her to come back. He'd promised she would be safe and have whatever help she needed--medical care, a job, a place to live-and he swore there was never any reason to run. "You were never in any danger, Angela," he told her in a tone so firm with conviction it was easy to be swayed.

"Come home now and let me help you. That's all I want is to help you." Eventually she'd agreed to meet him in Mexico City, even though ii was clear he believed she'd suffered a psychotic break. He swore it was in everyone's best interests that she be rehabilitated, especially hers, and there was never any plan to kill her. She'd been afraid to believe him, but she'd accepted his offer for one simple reason. She desperately needed help. Even she recognized that. "We may need to get you somewhere more isolated," Silver said, adding with a rueful smile, "if that's possible. Meanwhile, you're safe here." She picked up the pot of chocolate and came around to Angela's side of the table to give her a refill. "Is there anyone you should contact?" "No one I'm sure I can trust." Not even Sammy, she thought. "It's that bad, huh? Well, listen, I have a gun you can use, and I'll ask Pedro to keep an eye on things." "I don't need a gun or someone hovering, Silver." Angela didn't think she could stand being watched any longer. Silver topped off her cup and set down the pot. ' Tell me what you'd like to do then," she said. "Do you need to be left alone to think, do you want to talk and strategize? I'll be happy to put in my two cents, which is about what it's worth. Or shall I give you a pick and put you to work in the fields?" "The fields!" Angela clasped her hands, pretending rapture. But hard physical work did sound good. "I'll blister my palms and cleanse my soul." "I can also offer you your own personal calavera while you're here to keep the evil spirits away. Sometimes that comes in handy." Angela could imagine that it did. She actually could. If her Spanish was correct, a calavera was a skull. She and Silver exchanged smiles, one refugee to another. "SENORITA! isenorita!" Angela turned from the water bucket with a dripping, half-full dipper to see Pedro running toward her. He was zigzagging through rows of cocoa

trees and waving his hands in the air. "jentraz en la misidn!" he gasped, halting as he reached her. "Not safe here. You go! ; mision!" Angela had been working from dawn to dusk in the fields for the last three days, and her exhaustion was profound. "ila misidn?" she said in confusion. "The mission? Why should I go there?" "You go! Go now!" "What do you mean, it's not safe?" Angela didn't understand. She couldn't have been in San Luis long enough for anyone to have tracked her down. "Yes! Not safe. Silver say you go." "Wait! Pedro--" Angela made a grab for his shirttails, but he pushed her away and started back to the ranch house at a run. Bewildered, Angela watched him go. Silver had left early that morning for Cordoba to get supplies. The trip should have taken her all day, but maybe she'd seen or heard something and come back. Angela wondered if she might be waiting for her at the mission. "What did Silver tell you?" she called after him. "Did she send you here?" He didn't respond, and as she watched him get tangled in a tree branch and nearly rip his shirt off, she realized something that made her drop the water dipper: Pedro was terrified.

CHAPTER 11. ANGELA was soaked in a cold sweat by the time she got to the mission. She'd grabbed her backpack and run most of the way, only to find the pueblo church bustling with activity, which plunged her into further confusion. If she was supposed to seek sanctuary within the church, the timing couldn't be worse. Villagers milled outside, murmuring and fanning themselves. The women wore bright shawls and scarves, which told Angela it probably wasn't a funeral, but whatever the event, it appeared to be breaking up. A few dawdlers lingered around the fountain in the small town square, but most were already drifting toward the crumbling cobblestone streets that would take them home. Angela saw no sign of Silver anywhere, or anyone who looked as if he might be there searching for her, although it was unlikely they'd send someone obvious. They hadn't been able to fool her with Jordan Carpenter, but that had been dangerously close. Goose bumps stung the back of her arms and left her shivering. She'd moved into the cover of some trees to wait, and the breezes felt icy against her damp shorts and blouse, despite the late-afternoon heat and the pack she had clutched against her middle. Who would they send to do their dirty work? she wondered. Would Peter Brandt be forced to finish what he'd started? Would it be a faceless, soulless contract killer? Or the surgeon with pewter hair and razor blue eyes who claimed to know the unthinkable about her--what Angela herself didn't know--and who sliced right through her with his gaze? What would her executioner look like? And how would she die? She wanted to laugh, it all sounded so dramatic and delusional. If only she was crazy. If only none of this were true and just some figment of her imagination. She knew better than most how the brain played tricks, especially when you were pushed to the very brink. A short time later, when the crowd had cleared, she slipped through the mission's doors. It was dark and still inside. Only the glowing votive candles revealed that anyone had recently been there. Not knowing what else to do, she sat down in a pew at the back and waited. The air was hot and cold on her bare skin, and the wood beneath her burned like stone, but she was aware of nothing but the need to hold body and soul together. A terrible sense of destiny filled her. She had always known it would come to this. She'd been living under the sword for years, maybe all her

life, and waiting for it to fall had drained everything out of her. Now that it was falling, she didn't know if she had the strength to get out of its way. "Enciende un cirio y tomalo contigo al altar." Angela's head snapped up. Someone had spoken to her from the pew behind her. She couldn't tell if the hushed voice was a man's or a woman's. "What?" Angela got out. "I speak very little Spanish." "Don't turn around," the person whispered. "Just do as I told you." "What did you tell me? I don't speak--" "Light a candle and take it with you to the altar." "But why? Who are you?" "When you have the candle, kneel at the altar as if you were going to pray, but don't let the flame go out. Do you understand?" "Who are you?" "That's not important. I'm here to help. It is important that the candle keep burning." "I don't understand--" "Shhh, no more questions. There isn't time. When you kneel, a panel will open, and you'll see a passageway. It will lead you to an old mining tunnel. There were once hundreds of silver mines in the valley, and the tunnels still exist. Follow the passageway as far as it goes. At the end, someone will help you." "Where will the tunnel take me?" Angela hesitated, but there was no answer. "Don't let the flame go out," was all the whisperer would say. A breath of cool air told her the person had risen and gone. She caught a glimpse of robe disappearing through an archway that led to another part of the mission, but that was all she could see. Angela didn't know whether to follow the person or follow the instructions. Mines and tunnels could be death traps, but Silver had sent her here, and Angela couldn't believe Silver would knowingly put her in danger. They weren't friends in the usual sense, but their unspoken understanding was as old as the impulse to rescue a family member in peril. Neither could have escaped without the other's help.

They owed each other their lives. And Silver was the only person Angela trusted. Those were the thoughts in Angela's head as she walked up the center aisle. Silver had gone to Cordoba for supplies, but something must have happened to make her think Angela wasn't safe, and she'd sent word through Pedro. Still, Angela had gnawing doubts. If only she could talk with her friend. The candle wick crackled as she lit it. It caught fire immediately, and for a moment, the flame was all she could see. Kneel at the altar as if you were going to pray, the voice had said. The tiny torch flared, and wax melted into a hot pool, giving up a pungent smell. It permeated the air. She stared at the fire, trying to quiet her mind. Tell me what to do, she thought. Silence was her only answer, and the longer she stared, the more impenetrable it became. If there was a response out there, she couldn't hear it, but her thoughts had begun a drumbeat of their own. Go back to the ranch, talk to Silver first, it's not safe. She'd just set the candle back in the tray when a faint noise alerted her. It sounded like shouts in the distance, but they were getting louder. Someone was coming toward the mission--a man, maybe even more than one. She couldn't understand what they were saying, but their voices were angry, and they were getting closer. They might even be running. There was a thud against the mission door, and Angela panicked. The arch was the only other exit, and it was too far away, so she thrust her pack inside the passageway, slipped in behind it, and waited for the panel door to close behind her. When the men were gone, she would let herself back out. The candle flickered wildly as the panel slid shut. Angela cupped the flame with her hand, fearing it would go out. She couldn't hear anything through the door, but perhaps whoever entered had gone silent out of respect--if they had entered. The waiting was terrible. Finally, she began to count in thousands, trying to get some sense of how long she would be there, huddled in the dark. One thousand, two thousand, three ... When she got into the high five figures, she gave up and began rationalizing why the noises had nothing to do with her. It was probably a fight among the villagers or someone who'd come into the church to pray and then left. She'd entombed herself in this dark, dank hole for nothing.

None of that completely erased her fears, but finally the suspense got the best of her. Preparing herself for what might be waiting on the other side, she pressed the fingertips of her free hand against the rotting wood. With enough pressure she could slide it open. That was what she told herself, but it wouldn't go. She couldn't budge it. Carefully she set the candle down next to her, freeing up both hands. She pressed left and right, up and down, but the door wouldn't move. It had closed and sealed behind her. She was trapped. A moan of despair rushed out. As she sat back on her haunches, the guttering candle threw wild shadows. "No," she breathed, "no!" Angela watched in horror as the wavering flame nearly died. She bent and sheltered it with her hands. There was no way to relight it if it went out. Please, don't let it go out. But this time she was on the wrong side of the altar. The fading flame went cold, plunging Angela into the blackest depths she'd ever encountered. WAS that light? A pale beam quivered and was gone. It was mist more than light, and Angela thought she was hallucinating. She couldn't see her own hand as she waved it in front of her. The tunnel had enveloped her in absolute darkness. The air was so gritty and dank she couldn't breathe, and the passageway wasn't tall enough for her to stand up. She'd been down on all fours, crawling through dirt and rocks for what felt like miles. "... hundreds of silver mines in the valley, and the tunnels still exist ... " That was what the whispering voice had said. Hundreds. She would be lost in this hellhole forever. She fell against the wall and sank to a sitting position, resting against the pack she'd strapped on. She was too tired to worry about the filth or any of the other disgusting things that might be crawling around. She needed to think instead of striking out wildly. The darkness wasn't going to eat her alive if she stopped to catch her balance. But it did feel that way. It felt as if she would die in here. And maybe that's what they intended. A tremor hit her rib cage. It was as sharp and painful as an electrical shock, and it touched every raw nerve ending. But with the pain came some kind of release, and when the shaking had subsided, she was calmer.

Even her breathing had slowed, and the sound of it brought a sense of control. "Was that light?" she asked the void. Her hand moved slowly through space, in search of the shimmer of phosphorescence. The brain had stores of sensory memory and its own kind of tracking radar that came into play when normal vision was blocked. Angela could see nothing, but her concentration was so intense, she nearly missed the faint beam that touched her bare knee. It glimmered and was gone, but she had seen it this time. There was light coming from somewhere farther down the tunnel. She must be nearing the end. Maybe this wasn't a trap. Maybe she wasn't meant to die in here after all. She began to move again, scrambling awkwardly on all fours and wincing as the rocks stabbed her hands and knees. She hit a wall, and the tunnel took a sharp turn. There she saw light pouring through the wooden slats of an opening high above her. The climb was steep. The rocks that had cut her were now her only salvation. They served as foot- and handholds, but they were hard to find and so far apart she often couldn't use them. Mostly there was only crumbling clay. Angela hadn't realized she'd been that deep underground, and her strength nearly failed her before she got to the top. Her arms and legs ached, trying to hold her, and her chest spasmed, desperate for oxygen. She pushed and shoved at the barrier but couldn't move it, and there was nowhere to get solid footing. Terrified she was going to fall back down the shaft, she heaved up one last time with her head and shoulders, butting the wood. The slats flew open before she'd even hit them. A hand caught hers and pulled her up from the shaft. She was dizzy from the light and the blood rushing from her head. When her feet hit the ground, she crumpled in a heap and lay there, gasping, totally unaware of the shadow that had fallen across her body ... or the robed figure standing above her. WHERE are we going?" Angela asked, shivering under the blanket that had been thrown over her. Why am I cold when it's so hot and humid outside!

Her question was drowned out by the rattles and bangs of the old pickup truck that was lurching into the heart of a dense tropical jungle. Not that the driver would have answered her anyway. She'd refused to get in the truck until he explained in broken English that he was taking her to the sea where there would be el barco waiting, which she knew was Spanish for boat. But that was as much as she'd gotten out of him. She still hadn't caught a glimpse of his face, and all she could imagine was of Silver's death masks. His other responses, when he bothered to answer her, had been muffled by the hood of his robe. She'd been too exhausted from the tunnel, and too grateful to be out of it, to argue with him. He'd made no attempt to restrain or physically threaten her in any way. He only seemed to want to help, but a warning had flashed in Angela's brain after he'd put her into the truck and started off. "Don't ever let them take you to another location." She didn't know when or where she'd heard it, but she could almost imagine the voice of the person who warned her. It was someone significant in her life, someone who'd wanted to impress that message on her mind, perhaps above all others. She sensed that much, but the rest of it was as dark and submerged as the mine she'd just escaped. It was too late to heed the warning anyway, but it would keep her alert while she was regaining her strength. The side windows of the truck were broken out, and warm, wet air flooded through, pasting ribbons of dark hair against her cheeks. It carried the steamy fragrances of freshly drenched soil and rampant vegetation. Angela peered out at the dark tangle of trees and vines that enclosed the road in another kind of tunnel. The entire world was a deep emerald green, except for the occasional exotic bird or animal that appeared on a low-hanging branch. Angela could smell flowers, too, cloyingly sweet. Jasmine or wild orchids, perhaps, but she couldn't see them. The jungle hid far more than it revealed, she knew, and the thought of what might be lurking in its wild, rank interior made her chilly all over again. She pulled the blanket around her, wondering if she was getting sick. She'd given herself a tetanus shot at Silver's, but had she taken the antibiotic? She couldn't remember now. Besides that, the tunnel was probably a breeding ground for poisonous insects and snakes. If she was having a reaction to the shot itself, then it was just a question of

waiting it out. But if she'd developed an infection at the shot site or was coming down with some tropical disease, she would need medical help. The muscles of her arms and legs ached feverishly, and she was too fuzzy-headed to know how long they'd been driving, but it felt like days. The trip from San Luis to the Gulf of Mexico was probably around ten hours by road, and that seemed to be the direction they were heading. When she closed her eyes, it was with the solemn promise that it would only be for a moment. A quick nap would restore her strength and her ability to think. She would be able to deal with this once she'd had some rest, but the exhaustion was profound, and darkness was folding over her like a wave. THE child tried to hide the doll under her pillow, but her father saw it and ripped the pillow away. "What have we here?" he said. "This is the one you don't want me to break? This one is special?" She stared at him, terrified and knowing. Eloise was the doll with the crooked smile that she held in her arms at night and told secrets to. It was the only thing in her life that made her feel safe. "Do you know what you did wrong?" he asked. She didn't know. She never knew. He snapped off the doll's head and dropped it in the child's lap. Then he broke off the arms and the legs. "You make me do these things," he said in a tone of cold, crawling disgust. "You make me hurt things... " BRAKES locked and shrieked, propelling Angela forward. She fell against the dash and rocked back, tossed by the shuddering pickup truck. They'd hit something, she realized groggily, but she couldn't see what. There weren't any other vehicles, and it didn't appear to be an injured animal, so it must have been something on the road. The driver was already out of the truck and walking around the front. He disappeared from sight as he knelt to inspect the damage, but she could hear him muttering. "Christ," he said under his breath, "the tire's blown." He was up again, striding around to the bed of the truck. Angela closed her eyes, pretending to be asleep, but she was shaking from nerves that had nothing to do with the accident. Apparently there were tools in the back, because he was making a great deal of noise. A metal box scraped across the bed and clanged against the side. A short time later, she felt the pickup rise and tilt, which meant he was occupied with the blowout. Fighting dizziness, she let herself out and crept around the back of the truck. There were rusty gardening tools in the bed. She spotted a pick

and a large shovel. She chose the shovel, gripping it in both hands as she approached the driver from behind. He shifted his weight, and an impulse came over her that she could hardly control. The dizziness was gone. The lethargy was gone, replaced by a powerful surge of energy. She swung the heavy shovel up and brought it down on his head with a strength she didn't understand. His head snapped back, but his body slumped forward. Other than a faint moan, he fell soundlessly. She tossed away the shovel and stared at his sprawled form for some time, studying his breathing. When she was certain he was really unconscious, she knelt next to him. She checked the pulse in his neck first to make sure he was still alive, and then she pulled down the hood of his robe. The steel gray hair and handsome face told her she'd been right. Blown-out tires wouldn't normally inspire an Hispanic monk to speak in perfect English. Her driver was Dr. Jordan Carpenter.

CHAPTER. 12. Jordan's head felt like a grenade had discharged inside it. There was nothing left but throbbing, smoking nerve endings. As headaches went, this one was a grand mal. A groan forced out of him as he tried to sit up. He couldn't do it. Couldn't even move, but it wasn't because of the headache. His problems were bigger than that, he realized. He was tied up, blindfolded, and lying on the floor of what seemed to be a grass hut. He could smell the straw and bamboo. He was practically facedown in it. Someone had trussed him up like a steer in a rodeo event, and the last person he was with was--Christ--Angela Lowe. She couldn't have done this. Even if she'd knocked him out and tied him up, she wasn't physically capable of carrying him here by herself. It seemed more likely that she'd been knocked out, too. Maybe they were both being held hostage. High levels of stress, the kind that interfered with most people's thought processes, had always honed Jordan's. It was a skill he'd discovered in medical school and perfected as a surgical resident. Now he used it to scan his surroundings and detect anything that would help him identify his location. In the past he'd volunteered time to Doctors Without Borders, which had brought him down this way and given him some familiarity with the area. He could hear the rumble of ocean waves and smell the rank, steamy air, which probably meant they were somewhere near the Gulf of Mexico, where he'd been heading with Angela. It sounded like they were on the beach, but the constant chatter of birds and monkeys told him they weren't out of the jungle, either. They could be almost anywhere on the gulf, even the southern border near Belize. The dead air was moist and slightly cooler than the jungle, but still ungodly hot. Jordan's cargo shorts and cotton T-shirt clung to his body in patches, and the blindfold was making him sweat, but the robe he'd worn to disguise himself was gone, as were his shoes. A floral fragrance saturated every breath he took. It was rich and intoxicating, as heavy as a mist. But one marker stood out in Jordan's mind above all the others--the deep, throaty calls of mourning doves. The man he'd rented the truck from had said they were actually howler monkeys, and at night their forlorn cries could be piercing. Jordan moved and felt the iron strength of his bonds. Whoever tied him up knew what they were doing. The ropes were looped repeatedly around his wrists and ankles, and they were tight enough to cut off his circulation. It felt like his shoulders were being reamed with a hot drill bit. He

moved again, but there was no give at all. He still didn't think it could be Angela Lowe who'd done this. He didn't know too many women who were experts at knot-tying, but then he didn't know any female serial killers. "Oh ... you're awake." That was a woman's voice, close to him, whispering in his ear from behind him. He could feel her breath, the softness of her body, the warmth. She exuded incredible warmth. "Who are you?" he asked. "Nobody's going to get hurt." Her whispers lilted almost tauntingly. "I just want to ask you some questions." The voice was familiar, but it didn't sound like Angela. Or was it the words that were familiar? Hadn't he said them once? Still, he sensed it was her, and that she wasn't bound like he was. "Untie me." His own voice was so raw he had to whisper, too. "I can't do that." "The ropes, they're too tight." "Turn so I can get at your arms," she urged softly. She nudged him forward, and he tried to do what she wanted. Either he was delirious or she smelled like the lilacs on his porch at home. Wild lilacs. The kind that made him dizzy, and he was dizzy now. Jordan waited for her to loosen the ties. If he could get some play in the ropes, he might be able to twist his way out of them, but he couldn't figure out what she was doing back there. His hands were tied behind him, but it didn't feel like she was loosening anything. The answer arched his body like a bow. She tugged on his bound wrists, pulling them up by the tails of the rope. The pressure was wrenching. It forced a moan out of him and fire burned up and down his arms. Next he felt something press against his butt. Her shoe? It had the tread of a boot, and that made for an extraordinary image in his mind--her getting leverage by propping a foot against his backside. But leverage for what?

The ropes yanked again, harder this time, harder, harder, lifting his arms in the air. He got out a question. "What the hell are you doing?" "Just making sure you're comfortable, Doctor." A massive grunt brought Jordan up off the floor. She wasn't loosening the goddam ropes. She was pulling them tighter. TERI Benson was on a roll. Two coronary artery bypass grafts in a row without a hitch. Judy Monahan's bypass had gone off beautifully. The affected arteries were now clean as a whistle, and Judy had all but danced on her hospital bed in Recovery. Just now Teri and Steve Lloyd had finished a beating heart surgery, a procedure in which the operation is performed directly on a beating heart through a small incision in the chest. It was cutting edge stuff, but Steve Lloyd had relinquished the blade and let her handle most of it, and she'd done them both proud. He was so pleased he'd suggested a celebratory dinner before they were out of the operating room, although she suspected he would have seized on any reason. "Who needs Jordan Carpenter," he said now, winking at her as they discarded their gowns and gloves. "We have the dream team right here." Exactly Teri's thoughts. She wondered if he had any idea how much she wanted to shout that very sentiment to the heavens. She'd long felt that Carpenter was vastly overrated, but the glare of the spotlight on him seemed to have blinded everyone except her. "Only two solo flights," she said, appropriately modest, "but it's a start." "Could be the start of something big." He actually winked at her. How corny. Teri smiled at his obvious interest and pretended to be flustered, although if she was glowing from anything, it was from the thrill of victory. Steve was nice enough, but he didn't compare to the pure adrenaline high of open heart surgery. Nothing could. A moment later, they were standing side by side at the SICU sink, washing up. Teri had known for some time that he was attracted to her; however, there was one annoying little complication. He was married. Unhappily, of course, but Teri didn't think it wise to get involved for many reasons. She'd put him off while being careful not to discourage

him too much. It was a delicate balancing act for an ambitious woman in her profession, but she was learning to play that game nearly as adeptly as she was learning to excel at intricate surgical procedures. Soon she might invent a new procedure of her own and become as famous as Carpenter. Teri reached for a towel. "I hear Jordan had some kind of emergency," she said, hoping Steve would fill her in on the details. She'd heard from the charge desk that Jordan would be out for a couple of days on urgent personal business, but no one seemed to know what the urgency was all about. Teri had noticed that he was distracted lately, which wasn't like Jordan at all, and she'd been doing some investigating on her own. Nothing would have pleased her more than a Jordan Carpenter screw up, the bigger the better. "I talked to him briefly." Steve splashed water on his face, then grabbed a towel and began to dry off. "He was on his way to the airport, and he assured me there was nothing to worry about, but that's all he would say. Jordan and I don't discuss personal stuff, so I wasn't surprised. He asked me to take his calls and the valve repair that's scheduled this week, and he recommended you highly for any CABGs that couldn't be rescheduled." The glaring lights gave Steve's mahogany crew cut a spiky halo and his smile a slightly fiendish cast. "He didn't limit it to bypass procedures, Teri. He wants you on the valve team as well." "Really?" Teri was pleased, although she didn't understand Jordan's recent change of attitude regarding her, nor did she trust it. He'd never had confidence in her abilities, despite her efforts to be at the top of her game at all times. He clearly didn't see her as fellowship material, and she'd been overlooked at the awards dinner every year, snubs she could never forget. It didn't matter that he hadn't thrown roadblocks in her way. His humiliating lack of support had been the main obstacle to her ascendance. He didn't see her as his worthy successor, and for no good reason that she could tell, other than the typical ego problems that too many male doctors still harbored, especially surgeons. Most of them were arrogant bastards who didn't think women belonged in the OR, except as support staff. "So," Steve said, taking her wet towel and lobbing it along with his into a laundry bin. "How about that dinner?" "Tonight?" Why not, she thought. Who knew what could come of an alliance with the second most powerful doctor in the hospital. It wasn't part of her grand plan, it

just made everything so much easier, as did Carpenter's odd behavior and his disappearance. The key was being ready, and now that opportunities were finally coming her way, she was more than ready. This morning, she'd had an early appointment to get her hair cut, but not at just any salon. She'd gone to the one where Jordan's little sister had her goldilocks shorn. Teri had been doing reconnaissance on Jordan for some time, and as it turned out, his sis was quite a talker. Teri hadn't learned the details of Jordan's mystery trip, but she had picked up several bits of information that should come in handy as things unfolded. If Jordan Carpenter had finally seen the light with regard to her, he'd seen it too late, she vowed. And he would be sorry. It was cold and dark where he was going. Some people might call it a fall from grace. Others would call it a descent into hell. PENNY had a key to the place only because she'd refused to give it back to Jordan, A man who couldn't remember to pay his light bills didn't deserve privacy, in her opinion. Besides, somebody had to take care of the bird. Speaking of which, she gave the cockatiel a stern look. "You have had your last sunflower seed, my fine feathered friend." Birdy answered with a sharp little squawk as her favorite treat was whisked out from under her beak. "I'll be right back with some delicious Cockatiel Total Diet Seed," Penny said in a cajoling tone. She got tail feathers for her trouble. When Birdy was miffed, she scolded. When she was really miffed, she did a one eighty on her perch, and you got the rear view. But Penny didn't relent. She'd been meaning to talk with Jordan about nutrition anyway, his and Birdy's, so she might as well start with the bird. Jordan fed Birdy nothing but sunflower seeds, arguing that she liked them, which was just wrong. You couldn't let a kid live on candy because he liked it, although Jordan had made frequent attempts to subsist on malted milk balls when he was in grade school. Penny could have the cockatiel clean, sober, and firmly established on a balanced diet before Jordan got back from Mexico City, where he'd dashed off on some urgent business, according to his mysterious phone message. Then she would go to work on Jordan, a much bigger project. But Penny had never lacked for confidence when it came to knowing what was best

for people. And it didn't bother her that she might be interfering, because the interfered-with one was inevitably better off for it. A lost art, interference. She'd often thought there should be some way to make a living at it. "I'm going to spank you!" "Over my dead body," Penny informed the bird. "Over my dead body, my dead body--" She left the cockatiel chattering and headed for the kitchen with the sunflower seeds. On the way, she stopped and scooped up some dirty dishes from the coffee table. He'd also deposited a half-drunk cup of coffee on the corner hutch, and only by the grace of God had it not left a ring on their mother's prized golden maple furniture. The matching console was decorated with a still-moist banana peel. She made a face as she collected the refuse. At least he was getting some nutrition. "This place needs a good spring cleaning," she announced loudly from the kitchen, putting her absent brother and Birdy on notice that things were going to be different around the old homestead in more ways than one. Maybe she would dig in and surprise Jordan when he got back. She loved doing stuff behind his back for the simple reason that he couldn't stop her. "Revolting," she murmured, piling the dishes in the overloaded double sink. Their long-suffering mother had used the term to describe the state of her two children's bedrooms when they were growing up, and it had become Jordan and Penny's official greeting whenever they saw each other. "REVOLTING!" they would exclaim, competing to express the most horror at the other's revoltingness. Penny's gag reflex had won her the prize every time. But eventually they'd grown into bigger and better things, and a new adjective had been necessary by their teens: incorrigible. Jordan had reigned supreme with that one. He'd been the king of incorrigible. "Rrrrrrrrrrrruf," came a bark from the other room. Birdy was doing her dog imitation.

Penny resisted barking back. The cockatiel didn't need any encouragement, and besides, Penny was in the mood to let her thoughts drift and go where they would. She loaded the dishwasher with a sense of bemusement as she recalled her brother's wilder days. It used to annoy the spit out of her when the girls at school fawned over Jordan. Some of them were sneaky enough to befriend her just to get invited to the house, where the silly idiots would simper and giggle whenever Jordan noticed them. And he took full advantage, the fiend. Things had come too easily for her big brother, and that had worried Penny, who was closer to him than anyone else. He was smart and quick and square of jaw, with cobalt eyes rumored to induce fainting spells. It was a miracle he finished college the way women threw themselves at him. But Jordan was no saint. He took advantage of his mystique when he saw the riches it could bring him, cutting a swath through the female population with a recklessness that invited disaster. And when it struck, it was far worse than Penny could have imagined. Jordan briefly dallied with a neighborhood girl who'd been infatuated with him for years. She was too young and vulnerable, and he knew it, but when he broke it off. she became desperate and depressed. No one, including Jordan, realized how despondent she was until she took her own life. It was a brutal lesson in accountability, and for better or worse, Jordan was never the same. He couldn't drift anymore. He had to find a way to deal with the tragedy, and medical school became the outlet. He'd been accepted primarily because of his genius for inventing, but he threw himself into his studies, forgoing dating or anything that resembled a romantic relationship with a woman. His dedication made him the surgeon he was today, but his quest to save lives had caused Penny to wonder if he was trying to make up for one so needlessly lost. As quests go, it was probably a good one, but she worried that he would never have the love and intimacy in his life that everyone deserved. He seemed unable to resolve his guilt, and he was driven to fix the unfixable. "Jordan needs some lovin'," Penny advised Birdy as she returned to the living room with some Total Diet bird seed. "And you can tell him that for me." Penny considered taking Birdy home with her while Jordan was gone, but there went her excuse to drop in and snoop. No, this was too good an opportunity, and she hadn't yet given up on her own quest, which was to see that her brother had a fulfilling life, whether he wanted one or

not. She was certain there would be no lack of interested women if Jordan would only cooperate ... and there was that simply lovely dark-haired girl at the salon that other morning, "This could be fate," she mused. "We were next to each other at the shampoo bowls, this adorable young woman and I, and she asked if I was any relation to Dr. Jordan Carpenter. I have no idea how she knew me, but I didn't see any reason not to tell her that I was Jordan's sister, and it turned out that she was a doctor, too! A surgeon, I think she said. We didn't get to talk long, but I had the feeling she was quite interested in Jordan." "Here kitty, kitty, kitty!" "Birdy, pay attention. Do you love it? I may have found someone for Jordan. Or she may have found me." Birdy chattered away, amusing herself by alternately calling the kitty and barking like a dog. Penny was about to muzzle the bird when suddenly the cockatiel went quiet. "Who's there?" Birdy said. Penny glanced over her shoulder at the front door. She hadn't heard anyone on the porch, and the steps were known to creak loudly. She would have dismissed it, but Birdy had gone preternaturally still, and her behavior was so odd that Penny turned all the way around and looked at the door. What was wrong with the silly creature? She walked to the door and switched on the porch light before opening it. "No one there, see?" She waved her hand toward the empty threshold and gave Birdy a look that said, Happy now? Actually, Penny was relieved. The bird had her going, as did all the serial killer stuff Jordan was involved in. And now he'd run off somewhere. She didn't know what she was going to tell their parents if they called, but obviously she would cover for him. She always had. She was about to shut the door when she saw something in the mirror across the room. It was a reflection from the window behind her, a watery sensation of movement. It could have been nothing, a tree branch, or it could have been someone walking alongside the house. Damn, she hated this sort of thing. It seemed silly to call 911 at this stage. It probably was nothing, but where was Jordan, anyway? And why hadn't he done anything more than leave her a cryptic message before he took off, asking her to take care of the bird? A rustling sound caught her attention, and she was instantly on guard. She really had heard something this time, and it had come from out front. She peered through the open door, and then quietly let herself

out onto the porch. It could be anything, a neighbor's pet. Still, she was uneasy as she searched the darkness. "Who's there?" As she started for the steps, a runner darted from the bushes. He was headed for the front gate and obviously male by the way he was built and his spiky crew cut. Penny dashed down the steps to get a better look. Jordan had often accused her of being fearless, and he would have cited this move as proof, she knew. "Hey! What are you doing?" she called out. Something whipped past her and hit one of the porch columns with a sharp crack. Penny nearly fell over, trying to get out of the missile's way, and by the time she caught her balance, the runner was gone. He'd banged out the gate and melted into the darkness. "Heeeeeeeere's Johnny," Birdy called from inside. On the way back into the house, Penny saw what the man had thrown at her. There was a large rock near the doorway. She was lucky it hadn't hit her, although she doubted that was his goal. She would have been an easy enough target with the light from the house behind her. He was probably trying to keep her from seeing him because he didn't want to be identified for some reason. She would love to have known why.

CHAPTER 13. IT astounded her that she knew exactly how to interrogate a hostage. The steps were right there in her head: First render him helpless physically. Then work on his mind. Take control of every aspect of his existence. Keep him under surveillance at all times, and make him dependent on you for everything, even his personal hygiene. Feed him, clothe him, groom him and accompany him to the bathroom. The more private his needs, the more vulnerable and exposed he is. Insist that he follow your orders to the letter. Mete out punishment when he doesn't and rewards when he does. For maximum venerability, confiscate all of his property, including his clothing. Restrain him naked and use food and water as a reward. Starvation and thirst are powerful motivators. Angela stood above him, staring down at her prisoner and marveling that she could have subdued such a large, powerful man--and now an angry one. Her arms ached from securing the ropes, but keeping him down was imperative if she wanted to stay alive and in control long enough to carry out her plan. She not only knew how to restrain a hostage, she knew the desperate tricks they could pull. He wasn't naked, but he would be if all else failed. Getting him to the hut from the truck had been an exercise in willpower, gut strength, and the mechanics of movement. She'd found an old wooden wheelbarrow in the bed, and she'd leveraged her weight against the leg supports to get him into the tray, then she'd alternately pushed and pulled the barrow to the hut. It had seemed the most efficient way to move him, but the effort had exhausted her. She was still feverishly damp and weak. Stress, she told herself. Stress, hunger, and. the heat. The air was so thick with moisture it clung to her like a veil, and the back of her neck was constantly damp with perspiration. She couldn't be getting sick, but if she were, she would have to fight her way through it. Carpenter thrashed at her feet, straining to break his bonds. Thank God she'd tightened and reinforced the knots. And known how to tie them in the first place. Not grannies, they would loosen if tugged on. These had to be square knots. Right over left and under, left over right ... "Take off this blindfold," he snarled. "Get me out of these ropes and deal with me face-to-face."

"The way you dealt with me face-to-face? You, the man who sneaks up behind women, forces them into armlocks, and muzzles them?" "Not any woman," he retorted, "just one with an obsession for murdering doctors in cold blood, starting with her own father." Angela froze. He did know about her. But not what he claimed, not everything. That was impossible. Something inside her began to burn, an icy sensation just behind her ribs. It was hot enough to sear a hole through bone. And then the shaking began, so abruptly she had to lock her spine to keep the tremors under control. If he hadn't tipped his hand, she probably couldn't have done it. He'd done her a favor, she realized, because any sympathy she might have had for his pain was gone. When the shaking was over, there would be nothing left but cold purpose and determination. He had come down here to stop her, but he was the one who would be stopped. She would learn every detail of his mission, including whether or not he was associated with Smarttech, and she would settle for nothing less than that. The truth. She wanted the truth about everything, even the terrifying things she'd erased from her own mind. He'd said he knew what she couldn't remember. What else could that mean but that he was associated with the biotechnology community, probably involved in intelligence gathering or medical experimentation, like her foster father? He breathed out one last violent word and lay still, but he was not resting. He was thinking, calculating. "At least take off this blindfold," he said. "Do that, and I'll stop trying to get free." "Oh, now we're bargaining? I don't think so, Doctor." She laughed softly, a breathless sound. "You haven't got anything I want." "What do you want?" "To know what you want and why you followed me down here. You're not getting out of those ropes until you tell me everything." "Fine, just take off the blindfold and let me sit up. I can't talk this way." That was not the way it worked, but he didn't understand that yet. She

gave the orders now. Perhaps it was time to impress that on his mind. She took stock of her surroundings, looking for anything that would help make her point. A big stick, for example. There was plenty of wood around. The hut seemed to be made entirely of tropical hardwood, with a thatched roof of palm leaves. It was a rather large two- room structure, mostly open to the air with rolled shades, and the front looked out on a sparkling white beach and turquoise sea. Angela felt a cooling breeze and held up her hair, letting it rifle the tendrils clinging to her nape. She'd tied her blouse at the waist for ventilation and rolled up her linen shorts, but nothing really helped. She would love to have taken off everything and run naked to the water. The heat was that oppressive. It was an alarmingly primitive area, but she'd had little choice other than to come here. She'd'found a map in his pocket with directions to this place, which was described as an isolated refuge, equipped with a solar cell generator, hot and cold running water, and a two-week supply of food. At the time, she'd been in the middle of a tropical jungle with no knowledge of the area or its inhabitants. Her command of Spanish was limited, and she'd had an unconscious man in the truck. Any kind of refuge would have been an improvement. Now she gave in to an impulse and bent over to shake out her hair, aware of the rustling sound it made as she ran her hands through its brandied thickness. Anything to cool her scalp and bring down her temperature. The soles of her leather sandals scraped against the tile floor. They were loaners from Silver, and they were too big. "What's that noise?" he asked. "What are you doing?" "Sharpening knives, Doctor, in case I decide to operate. And by the way, I ask the questions from now on." She tossed back her hair and came up, cooler now, more in control. It was hard to image that he'd brought her to a place like this for any other purpose than to interrogate and dispose of her, and that was part of the reason she'd brought him here. She had a few questions to ask, and she wanted all of the advantages this place of humanity fered, including the psychological advantage of having turned the tables. The danger was that he'd told someone where he was going, that they knew his destination. Her first task was to get that information out of him, and she'd already decided how to go about it. The falling sun had gradually flooded the hut with amber light, giving

the rooms a rich, peachy glow as she crossed to the kitchen. Her shadow danced against a latticed wooden screen that separated the two rooms, one of the few attempts at decor. The others were equally earthy and charming. Scattered about were Mexican jaguar masks, sandy seashells, and leafy palms in clay pots, which probably needed no watering because of the humidity. A hammock had been hung outside on the diatchroofed veranda, and the living room and kitchen had rattan furniture with faded orange birds of paradise on the cushions. But Angela's thoughts weren't held by the ambience. She was looking for a certain eating utensil, and fortunately, the kitchen seemed to have everything. The hut was not well outfitted by accident, she was sure. It was too isolated for vacation purposes, which made it perfect for things clandestine. At any rate, she found what she needed in the first drawer she opened. The edge of the knife blade was blue steel and sharp, like his eyes. "What the hell are you doing now?" he called out. She returned to the living room, aware that he couldn't see what she was carrying, but he would find out about it the hard way if he didn't cooperate. She didn't plan to use the knife on him, but ... accidents happened. "I said I'm asking the questions now. What about that statement didn't you understand?" He mangled a word, but Angela caught it and it rhymed with witch. She emitted a resigned sigh. He was going to make this difficult. He was lying on bamboo mats in the corner of the living room nearest the door. It was as far as she'd been able to drag him, given his size. She should have been intimidated by that. If she knew anything about dead weight, he tipped the scale at better than two hundred pounds, and he was at least seven inches taller than she was, which would put him around six one. No small adversary, but somehow she knew in this one area, she possessed superior skills. He was a wizard in the operating room, and perhaps he had some intelligence experience, but she sincerely doubted he had ever done any of the things it was beginning to look like she'd done. "I don't think you did understand," she said in a tone that implied supreme calm and forbearance. She yanked tight the front of his T-shirt. "Don't move!" With two clean strokes, she sliced around the entire sleeve, leaving his

arm bare and untouched, except for one tiny nick. Why did it surprise her that she knew how to handle a knife? He shot up as far as the ropes would let him. "What the fuck?" Apparently, he'd felt the nick. "I just cut off the sleeve of your shirt. Speak to me in that tone again, and you'll lose another sleeve, and then I'll divide the rest of your T-shirt into squares and start cutting cake. You could be totally naked in no time." "Naked? Is that one of your sick rituals?" "Are you hard of hearing or just slow?" With a swift stroke, she opened his shoulder seam and the crew neck of his T-shirt flapped forward. "Want to go for the other sleeve?" The sound that escaped his clenched teeth was straight out of the jungle. If Angela hadn't been certain the ropes would hold him, she would have backed off, backed way off, and let him cool down. But that would signal intimidation, and too many men had tried to control her in that way, by frightening her. Too many, dammit. The other sleeve was history, she vowed. And then everything else would go, too, if that was the way he wanted it. He wouldn't even have Adam's fig leaf left. She couldn't get at him the way he was lying, so she made use of the wall for leverage and pulled him to his knees, supporting him until he was steady enough to stay upright on his own. She'd not only tied his hands and feet behind him, she'd looped them together, severely limiting his mobility. The blindfold made him even tipsier, but that worked to her advantage, too. She wanted him vulnerable in all ways. "The great Dr. Jordan Carpenter in naked bondage," she whispered in his ear, then blew lightly and watched him grimace. "I wonder what the medical community would think of their bright and shiny hero now." "Ask me if I care," he muttered. "The only thing between you and naked bondage is those safari shorts, Doctor. And if I were you, I wouldn't want me anywhere near your pants. I could miss." "They were wrong about you." "What do you mean?"

"You're a crazier bitch than they claimed." "Wrong answer." She sliced the other shoulder seam, and his T-shirt nearly fell off. He recoiled, and she tasted the sweetness of winning. Of justice. It fired the breath in her throat, and everything went hot for a second. The big man had flinched, and that was all she wanted, some respect. But something inside her had quivered, too, and the reaction had nothing to do with the thrill of victory. Angela was not quite prepared for what she'd exposed. She hadn't expected to have a thought about his physical body beyond defending herself against it, but now it was difficult not to have several thoughts. He was half-naked, seethingly angry, and really quite spectacular, especially clenched the way he was. Her gaze swept over him, on some involuntary mission of its own, and settled on his abdomen. That surprised her, considering all of the other things that could have drawn her eye. Movement, she realized. Those muscles were in flux, fisted with tension, yet rising to accommodate his breathing. Quick breathing, shallow and pent up. Movement. And body hair, too. Pointedly swirled, it cast shadows down his torso that made her think of the sea, of storms. In chains on his knees, the dashing doctor could have been one of Caravaggio's religious martyrs, a human landscape of naked light and shadow. It was a good thing he'd gone quiet, because she would certainly have hurt him--and not even intentionally--if she'd tried to use the knife now. It was useless in her hand. She was fairly useless, too, spinning like a top. He didn't get the credit for that, though. She was battling a fever, numbing fatigue, and wet heat. She'd had no food since that morning and didn't want any, but she should probably force herself to eat and regain some strength. She couldn't let him find out that she was weakening. A dragonfly whirred through the hut, iridescent jade, and landed on her hostage's blindfold. He jerked his head and nearly toppled himself but said nothing. Sweat sheened his temples, tiny pearls that would soon be tracing the strong bones of his face. The smell of trapped anger was powerful. It burned like locked brakes. But maybe he was weakening. There was one way to find out.

She drew deeply from the very pit of her belly, and then did it again, all in an effort to conquer her lightheadedness. Someone had taught her how to do that, she was virtually sure. She was also becoming aware of something else: A part of her had ice for blood and was totally fearless. But that part of her was locked up with the horrors of the erased months, and to release it would have been too dangerous. Since that time, she had held everything at bay with a few words, but she couldn't do that any longer. She would never get through this without the fearlessness. The knife blade came to life as she reclaimed her grip on the handle. "Let's see now, what comes after the shirt?" She pretended to ponder the issue. "Pants maybe? I'd hate to think what the mosquitoes are going to do to your bare--" He chewed a word into dust. "Excuse me?" "I said we'll do it your way. Ask your questions." "And you'll answer them?" "I'll answer them. What do you want to know?" "I want to know what you know about Angela Lowe." "Angela Lowe is you, right?" "Just tell me about her." She had begun to shake again, and even gripping the knife didn't help. There was a price for unlocking the power hidden in her psyche, and she would have to pay it now. She unlocked everything. Tell me what Angela Lowe has done, every sickening detail. Tell me who her friends are, if she has any, and which one of them wants her dead. Is it Brandt or Sammy? Is it Silver? Or someone she doesn't even know, a ghost she erased? Tell me if there's any hope for Angela Lowe, because she's breaking, Doctor. She's breaking faster than you are. "I have one condition," he said. "You don't get conditions." His head came up defiantly. "Then cut off my clothes and gut me with that knife, or whatever it is you plan to do, because I'm not saying another word until you take off this blindfold." It flashed through her mind that he wanted to see who and what he was dealing with. That would give him an edge, and it wasn't the kind of

concession she should make, especially at his suggestion. She also had another kind of flash, one that allowed her to imagine that he might want more intimate contact with her, contact only the eyes could make, but that was ridiculous. Gut him? she thought, marveling at his choice of words. She had to believe he was bluffing. He didn't think she was capable of that kind of violence. She wasn't capable. Even with a crucial part of her past missing, she knew she had never done anything like that and never could. It was almost as if he were talking about another person, someone not even human. Someone had been lying to him, she realized with true astonishment. They were trying to make him think she was a monster. Someone was lying. A drop of perspiration trickled and ran. She blinked, and her eyes felt the sting. Her gait was unsteady as she walked over to him and her hand wavered. A warning whispered in her head, but not soon enough to stop her. She shouldn't be using the knife. Someone might get hurt. The blade hissed near his ear, and he jerked back. His blindfold fell away, and Angela saw that he was bleeding. She thought she'd cut him, but it wasn't pain she saw in his gaze, it was confusion, rage, and disbelief. He was staring at her as if his eyes were playing tricks on him. Blue eyes, she realized. Excruciatingly blue. Like the earth from a million miles out. "Who the hell are you?" he whispered. Angela's dizziness returned with a vengeance, tilting her in space. What was he talking about? Who did he think she was? He had searched out every detail of her face that day at his house. He'd stared until she felt as faint as she did at this moment. And strangest of all, he'd looked as if he were falling in love with her, or half in love with her already. She hadn't imagined that. But now he didn't seem to recognize her. How could that be? THERE were no signs of global warning inside the Cognitive Studies lab. Sammy Tran could see his own breath. The weather in his own personal squirrel cage was a frigid ten degrees lower than usual, and the worst part was, he couldn't find his earmuffs. It felt like there were icicles hanging from his ears and a few other extremities. Hell, that wasn't the worst part. The worst part was she was gone.

Angela Lowe was still missing, and he hadn't been able to think about anything else. His work was going to hell on him, and that was why he'd lowered the temperature. The chill would distract him. He was desperate to keep his mind off his own infantile preoccupations and focused on what he had to get done before the sun came up again. He'd never taken Angel Face to her limits. Tonight that would change. Tonight he would blow the circuits on this video game he played for a living and prove that she could do everything that had been claimed and more. The program was addictive. The pure power of it thrilled him. He could control people's brains, their behavior. No one got to do that, not even God, if you believed in free will. No one but a lab rat named Sammy. He didn't care about the glory. He didn't even care about the power really. It was success, the intoxicating rush of success. Who would have believed it possible to control nearly every aspect of human behavior with the click of a mouse? That you could reduce humanity to a hard science? Sammy brushed his palm with the spines of an overgrown butch haircut. The hair made him look like a sea urchin, but he liked the way it tickled his skin and stimulated the sensory cortex. He had news for the nonbelievers. He could regulate emotion, modulate motivation, and or make people as horny as toads, if he chose. He could not only read minds, he could change them. He could also drive an innocent to the very brink of butchery. And he could stop her. Now that was power. Naturally there would be outraged hordes, decrying the morality of what Angel Face could do. But Sammy couldn't be concerned with that right now. He had to be concerned with making her work perfectly. That was his job. He had his hand poised on the mouse, ready to increase signal strength to the deep limbic system, when he heard papers rustling. It sounded like someone had opened a book. He left the program running and got up from his desk. It was a short walk down the hall to the next cubicle, and an even shorter trip in his mind because he knew exactly what he would find. Her cubicle was an empty shell, not a sign of life there except for the books that were piled in stacks and wedged between cheap metal bookends.

As always, there were one or two left lying open, as if she'd meant to get back to them but was interrupted with something more interesting. One would think she did nothing but read. Read and whisk imaginary hair from her face. He was always kidding her about her overactive cingulate, and how she was just one step away from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Pretty soon you'll be counting cracks in the sidewalk, Angela. She's fine, just taking some time off. That's what he'd been told. Bullshit! He kicked the back of her lab chair savagely, smashing it against the countertop. Anywhere else the sound would have exploded, but in the vacuum of the lab, it barely registered. Just like his life. Nothing registered. Nothing made a sound. Where in hell is she? And how could I have let her disappear from right under my `<-;0' nose?

CHAPTER 14. IT wasn't just the bloody knife in her hand. Jordan had no idea who he was dealing with at this point. She wasn't the frightened female in the San Luis mission or the guarded professional who came to his home, and certainly not the innocent in the picture. She was flushed with purpose and hot for some kind of action. Maybe a confrontation that would give her an excuse to carry out her threats. Hidden in her deceptively soft brown eyes was a wildness that made him think she must be high on something. Who the hell am I dealing with? The teenager in the video had been desperate, but this was a different kind of desperation, and he didn't know what to make of it. Having a man restrained and helpless had obviously empowered her, and if that was her game, then maybe she was capable of killing, simply for the feeling of power and control it gave her. God, he didn't want that to be true. Even tied up at knifepoint, he didn't. Maybe he was hallucinating because of the head wound. His skull throbbed, and his eyes didn't want to focus. Worse, the haunting cries that emanated from the jungle were beginning to sound human, like some tormented soul in need of rescue. "What did you hit me with?" he asked. "I could have a concussion or a skull fracture." "You could, but it'll have to wait." The cords in his jaw tightened. "For what? Until I'm unconscious?" "Until you answer my questions. You could be bleeding to death, and I wouldn't give you a Band-Aid--" "I am bleeding to death." The blood was running into his eyes, that's why he couldn't fucking focus. The insanity of it hit him, and he wanted to laugh. She'd knocked him out, tied him up, cut off his clothes, and stuck him with a knife, and he was trying to give her a break? Who was crazy here? Just let him get out of these ropes and they'd see how tough she was. It hadn't been easy tracking her down, and if it weren't for Jordan's Doctors Without Borders volunteer work, he would have been lost once he hit Mexico City. Fortunately, he had some experience with the area, and with Mitch's help, was able to make arrangements for transportation --such as it was--and accommodations. Mitch had scrounged him a copy of her driver's license photo, which Jordan used to find the taxi driver who took her to the autobus. He made the trip to San Luis the same way she did, by kamikaze bus, and once there, he bought himself a junker pickup, and greased a few more palms,

one of which had belonged to a mission worker, who loaned him the priest's robes. The hood had come in very handy, and Jordan had known the local policia would be less likely to interfere with a man of the cloth. Right now, his captor was nonchalantly wiping the blade clean on her shorts. He watched in mute disbelief as she snapped her wrist and stuck the knife deep in the wooden floor at her feet. It was vibrating like a musical saw. He was a surgeon, and he couldn't have done that without amputating a toe. "I nicked you when I cut off the blindfold," she announced. "Scalp wounds bleed like crazy, but you'll be fine. You should know that, Doctor." Crazy bitch, smug bitch. Take your pick, he thought. At least she was sweating, too. It wasn't rolling down her face in sheets like it was his, but her throat was moist, and her clothes were starting to catch and cling to her body when she moved. Her thin cotton blouse was getting especially friendly with the curves of her breasts, which moved so freely he wondered whether she was wearing a bra. If ever a woman needed support. She wasn't big, but she was jiggling, and it was damn distracting. He kept waiting for it to happen again when what he really wanted was some satisfaction. A pound of flesh ... or several pounds ... he wondered how much she weighed. That's how many pounds he wanted. A wail of anguish ripped through the hut, followed by a chorus of answering walls. Howlers. They were living up to their names, and Jordan could totally relate. The jungle was a cacophony of barks, squawks, shrieks, and hooting. Birdy would have had a field day imitating them. But there was one particular sound that disturbed Jordan. As far as he knew, only one kind of animal roared like that, roared incessantly: a big cat. "You can't keep me tied up like this." It was his voice of unimpeachable reason. "My kneecaps are ground chuck by now. My wrists and ankles have gone dead, and gangrene is nasty stuff, in case you didn't know." "Gangrene takes days to set in." "Not when you're hogtied and left to rot in a steam bath." It was true enough, although it cut no ice with her, obviously. She was looking at her fingernails, totally bored with his whining. The sun was low in the sky now, and it had been morning when she'd knocked him out.

That was at least five hours ago, but she didn't intend to let him go. She was going to ran with this ball until she scored, and she just might not let him go then, either. So be it, he told himself. She wanted to play for life and-death stakes, and he did that better than most, maybe even her. He'd made his reputation saving lives. She'd made hers taking them, but that would keep it interesting. "What do I know about you?" His voice had gone intentionally cold. "I know they call you Angel Face, and that you get your kicks by seducing doctors and killing them. It's some kind of sick revenge for what your father did to you, and it gives you the illusion of control." She was already shaking her head. "That's not true. None of it is true. My name is Angela Lowe, just as you said, and I work for a biotechnology firm. I've never killed anyone--" "You killed your father. I've got a videotape." Her flushed face was suddenly chalky. "A videotape? Where did you get that?" "The CIA. You worked for them as an informant." "No, never." "You weren't an informant?" "Not for the CIA. It was the biotech company, and only because they blackmailed me." "It says in your dossier that you wiped your own memory because you thought they were going to kill you for what you knew. You were trying to erase some biowarfare secrets given you by a source named Adam, but you threw out the baby with the bathwater, and now there's a period of time missing, possibly as long as a year." "Adam?" Her voice fell to a whisper. The constant whine of the insects drowned her out. He imagined them as big as birds. Maybe they were birds. He watched her carefully, aware that he might have found a chink in the armor. At the very least, he'd struck a nerve. "How can you be sure you didn't work for the CIA, unless you were bluffing about wiping your memory?" She was watching him now, perspiration beading on her skin. If he was right, she was trying to decide how much he already knew and how much it was safe to reveal.

"I wasn't bluffing," she said. "I've been tested, hypnotized, regressed, drugged, everything. It's all gone. I can remember nothing about the last year I was an informant and very little about the time I spent down here. What do you know about Adam?" She'd barely taken a breath, but he let the question hang. "You might have worked for the CIA and not remember?" "I don't know." A tense pause. "It's possible." She'd lost the fiery color that made him think she was high, but he was even more certain now that something was wrong. Her skin was pale and clammy, and the blouse stuck to her breasts like paper. She was even showing some signs of septic disorientation, which could be triggered by fevers that cycled between heat and chills. If she'd suffered an accident, he would have guessed shock. But there was also the possibility she'd contracted something, a tropical bug. Before he could diagnose her, he would have to get close enough to check her body temperature. "How did I kill them, the other doctors?" She spoke from the door of the hut. Apparently she'd been drawn there by the sun, which had set the darkening sky ablaze as swiftly as if a match had been struck. Everything happened fast here, Jordan thought. The cycles were intense and instantaneous. Life was not revered or held precious, but neither was death. They were both just events, facts of existence. As she turned back to him, waiting for his answer, Jordan understood that things could be both beautiful and unspeakably brutal in the jungle. Her question had not been an admission of guilt. She was asking for information, but he wondered about the jungle inside Angela Lowe. Inside himself. Inside everyone. "You did it with ventricular defibrillation paddles," he told her, "the same way you killed your father. And last week, my colleague, Dr. Inada." "I don't know a Dr. Inada. I've never heard of him. You must believe me." He picked up the urgency in her faint voice and wanted to help her. It was a reflex. He'd wanted to help her when all he had was the snapshot of a desperate girl. He was even struck with the fanciful thought that

there might be people you were born wanting to help, and meanwhile, you just went on living, waiting for them to appear in your life. "Kensuke Inada died at California General of massive heart failure," he told her. "I found him in a storage room, lying beside a v. defib unit. He had one of the paddles in his hand." She came toward him, but only as far as the knife in the floor, where she stopped in obvious distress. It seemed to mark a place beyond which she wouldn't go unless forced by extreme circumstances. "You said last week"? You think I killed someone last week? Then why didn't you call the police and turn me in?" Jordan could have given her the CIA's reason, that she was a threat to national security, but that wasn't his reason. Maybe he was still in denial about who she was and what she'd done. He'd been trying to save lives ever since Cathy Crosby's death, but he couldn't save this one, and he shouldn't even try. And yet, as he took in the twists of scarlet that had returned to her cheeks and the deadly weapon at her feet, he wondered if there was another reason. Maybe he had a fascination with the fact that she could kill him, and maybe he thought he deserved it. "Why didn't you turn me in?" she repeated. Her despair tugged at him. It mingled with his own and made his breath burn. "I don't know." The pain in his knees forced him to his haunches. He dropped down and swayed forward, and a dizziness engulfed him that couldn't have been timed better if he'd planned it. He had a concussion. He was going to black out. "Is something wrong?" she asked. He shook his head and plunged into spiraling free fall. "God," he whispered. The cut had started to bleed again. He could feel it trickling down his cheek and into his mouth, and the heavy metallic tang made his stomach roll with nausea. He must have been quite a sight. He closed his eyes, and the hut did a revolution in space. When he opened them, it flipped again. The next thing he felt was a cool washrag against his forehead.

She'd crossed the barrier and was mopping his brow. He didn't know whether or not he'd blacked out, but he was still sitting up. "Stay awake," she urged. "I think you have a concussion." "You think?" He would have laughed except for the pain. "Is your stomach upset? Would it help you to eat?" The thought of food made his gut churn, but it was one way to keep her close. "I haven't eaten since yesterday." "I'll get you something when I'm done here," she murmured and continued to bathe him. The rag soothed his face and throat with cool, sweet water. It ran the breadth of his shoulders and down his arms, and then she wrung it out and started on his chest and belly, stroking with the dark wings and arrows. The faint growl that formed in his throat was a sound of relief and raw, animal pleasure. A moment later, she'd propped his head against her shoulder and was concentrating on the blood that had caked near his eyes and mouth. When she was done with that, she pushed him lower, against her breasts, and began to clean the swollen mass on the crown of his head. He swallowed a hiss of pain. It was tender as hell back there, but he didn't want her to stop, not under any circumstances. "Don't fall asleep," she reminded him repeatedly. He had no such inclination. What guy in his right mind would want to miss a minute of this? When she was done with the head wound, she gently scrubbed at his hair and neck, and then started down his back. By the time she got to his armpits, she'd won him over totally. How could this woman kill anyone? he was asking himself. She had the gentlest touch, the gentlest nature he'd ever encountered. He could have kissed her breasts they were so soft. It was like nuzzling into dandelion fluff or downy clouds. If he did drift off to sleep, he would dream about brushing up against her nipples, feeling them against his cheek or his lips. God. Maybe she was more than one person. Not a premeditating killer. Not a quick-change artist. Just a multiple of Angela. And maybe he did have a concussion. Birds were chirping, singing wildly. Was that his head or the jungle? At some point, he stopped reveling in the attention long enough to notice what was happening to her. Her skin was hot, but he could feel her shivering, which confirmed that she was feverish. "It's you who's sick," he said. "You're running a fever."

"I'm fine." He couldn't summon the attention span to argue with her. She was working on his tied hands now, massaging his fingers to bring back the circulation. How could that be sexy? he wondered. Her fingers slipped through his; they curled and swirled and kneaded his palms. He was hard-pressed to remember anything ever feeling so wildly erotic. If she kept it up, he was going to have trouble with the size of his shorts. And there was something wrong with that, he told himself, something really warped. She played with sharp knives like they were flatware and oh, by the way, she killed people. He'd heard of the Stockholm syndrome, where hostages came to identify with their captors, but he thought it took longer. Another couple of days, and he'd be helping her plan her next strike, the sucker she was going to off after she killed him. He was losing it. That's what was wrong. Somewhere along the line, he'd surrendered his ability to detach. He couldn't get enough mental distance to figure out who she really was. Now he had to get himself free before she could work any more wiles on him. She wasn't a bitch, she was a witch. He couldn't let himself think about anything but that, and if she really was physically sick, that would give him an advantage. He removed his head from her breasts and breathed in. Oxygen to the brain, he thought, trying to rouse his nervous system from its stunned state. "Before you get me that food," he said, "I've got a more pressing problem." "What's that?" "My bladder; it's about to burst." She was up and gone before he could figure out what she was doing. For someone who was septic, she was quick on her feet. He heard her going through cabinets in the kitchen, and when she returned, it was with a small bucket and a towel. "Wait, what are you doing?" he said as she knelt in front of him. "You said you had to go to the bathroom." "Yes, but I meant, I thought--" "You thought I'd untie you?"

Her lips quivered, trying to control some urgent impulse. He assessed it as a nervous smile, but maybe that was wishful thinking. "What I'm going to do," she said, "is unzip you and take you out of your shorts, and then I'm going to make sure you don't wet the floor." "Jesus," he muttered, agony in his voice. If she wanted to torment him, she'd picked exactly the right way. He heard the zing of his descending zipper and flinched. The next thing he felt were a pair of silken hands, touching him, releasing his partially swollen member. It wasn't unusual to be semihard when your bladder was full, but semi apparently wasn't enough for her. She was all over him, and he was huge immediately. This woman had more control over his body than he did. And then there were other complications. It was very difficult to urinate with an erection. You didn't have to be a doctor to know that. She was on her knees now and gazing up at him, the picture of downy, doe-eyed innocence. His downy innocent. A faint smile appeared on her lips. "I think we have a problem," she said.

CHAPTER 15. HE tossed a few kernels of buttered popcorn into his mouth and crunched down softly. He preferred dark places, and movie theaters were dark in a way that allowed you to be with people yet still be alone. You didn't get the usual horrified stares and whispers. The handful of others in the theater were mesmerized by the screen and seeing things far more grotesque than the solitary burn victim sitting in their row. Not that it would have fazed him greatly if they had been horrified. He was used to that by now. His own father had been openly disgusted and had accused him of heinous things, including setting the fire that burned him. The old man had long considered his only son and heir a disappointment, and there'd been no contact for years, except through the family attorneys, who were always threatening to cut him out of the will. That didn't faze him greatly, either. Fuck them all. The jumbo tub of popcorn got propped against his knee while he quenched his thirst with a Coke, which was probably swimming with enough sugar and caffeine to jump start his car. He had no issues with artificial stimulants. In fact, he thrived on them, including noisy, ultraviolent special-effects movies. Espionage thrillers were his favorite, but it amused him when the secret agents wore earpieces and paced the room while they talked on the phone. The hands-free devices looked like the microphones rock stars used, and they might as well have been. The potential for eavesdropping was enormous. Some time ago he had switched to secure E-mail. He rarely used phones at all anymore, except for the cell phones he had equipped with surveillance devices and GPS chips. He'd given Jordan Carpenter such a phone with instructions to use it if he should travel outside the United States. According to the satellite link, Carpenter was now in the Gulf of Mexico, and according to Firestarter's other sources, he'd followed Angela Lowe down there. Firestarter had known that Lowe was smart enough to try to cover her trail. She'd disappeared before. He'd also known that Carpenter wouldn't know to cover his trail, and his trail would lead to her. Could be this will work out fine, he thought, helping himself to another mouthful of popcorn. He chewed slowly, savoring the butter and heavy salt. Maybe it would only take one stone to get all the birds. That would be neat and tidy, although perhaps too neat and tidy for his taste. If there was one thing he loved, it was movie excess.

ANGELA walked outside with the bucket, spotted a nearby freshwater stream that emptied into the ocean, and tossed the contents. This was not polluting the earth, she told herself as she rinsed out the bucket upstream. This was contributing raw material to the flow of life. The water felt blissfully icy to her overheated skin. She splashed some on her face, savored the cool relief, and imagined herself lying placidly at the bottom of the streambed, as still as the smooth black stones while crystal clear water rippled over her. If her fever got worse, she would do that. She would submerge herself in the stream until she was as cool as a stone. Cree-cree-creee, kweeup kweeup kweeup, creecreecree ... Cackling laughter brought her head up, and as she gazed at the luxuriant green canopy overhead, she saw that the trees were teeming with life. There were vibrantly colored birds and winged insects and probably reptilian creatures that looked like branches and moved nothing but their mile-long tongues. A mother monkey diligently groomed one of her three wooly babies. It was twilight, and as the rest of life . for sleep, the jungle was coming awake. The raw beauty of Angela's surroundings filled her with awe. Behind her was a rain forest. In front of her, blue, blue waves lapped lazily on golden sands and the primal essences of the sea mingled with the exotic perfume of wildflowers. Orchids grew like clover here. How much more gorgeous could it get? A sigh escaped her. If only the circumstances were different and she could appreciate the scenery. But they weren't. This was a crisis of the highest order. It no longer surprised her that she seemed to know what to do in such dire circumstances, including how to handle a male hostage who had to relieve himself. She was starting to take her abilities for granted, even if he wasn't. He hadn't been able to urinate until she physically left the room, which touched off some interesting locker room language. She wrote it off as a minor crisis of the male ego, and when she returned, he'd finished his business and gotten himself free of the bucket and mostly back into his shorts. She didn't ask him how. The last thing she wanted was for him to realize that he'd had any effect on her. But in fact, he'd had plenty. Or at least a part of him had. She wouldn't have believed it was possible for a man to become aroused that fast, or that way, to put it delicately. A nightstick would have felt insecure in comparison. And it was all because she'd touched him. Touched him. Her hands had turned him into a giant.

Into heat and blood and sinew. But what had shaken her up the most was that he'd been helpless to hide his body's response. Helpless. His image stayed with her as she hesitated at the door of the hut a moment later, wondering what to expect. Finally, she set the bucket down and went inside. No!" she blurted. "Don't touch that!" He had rolled to his side and worked his way over to the knife she'd stuck in the floor. Again, instinct took over. She knew how to drop to the ground, roll, and lunge. She knew exactly how to come up again. And the instant she had the knife in her hands, she was on him. "Don't ever try that again." She grabbed his hair and pulled his head back, the blade at his throat. "I'll kill you! I swear I will." She vibrated with shock. It was her fault. She'd been careless, but he would damn well know there were severe consequences for taking advantage. He went utterly still, and she thought she had him. She had to assert control, regain dominance. And her readiness --her very rage to do that--astounded her. Her breath was shaking, her soul was shaking, but it wasn't fear, it was a surge of adrenaline. A need for retaliation had come alive inside her that she barely understood, yet it was as familiar as breathing. He moved, and she snarled like an animal, "I'll kill you." "Do it," he rasped. "Cut my goddamn throat, because if I get another chance at that knife, I'm taking it. And if I get a chance at you, I'm--" She yanked his head back as far as it would go and glared into his hot blue eyes. "Bastard!" she whispered. With two words he'd taken control. Do it. If a hostage didn't fear death, there was nothing to hold over his head. Threats were pointless, and it was the captor, not the hostage, who was stripped of his power. He'd called her bluff. She ought to kill him for that alone. Instead, she flung the knife away and sprang to her feet, walking, pacing, thinking that if he said one word, one bloody word, she would rip a death mask off the wall and beat him with it.

"Maybe we could talkt Sarcasm burned out of him as he struggled to get back to his knees. She ignored his efforts and pretended not to hear him. She didn't want him dead; she wanted him gone as if he'd never existed. He had called her bluff. He was winning. He was tied up, flat on the floor, and he was winning. "I know it's a foreign concept," he said, "but it has to be more productive than this." "I can talk; you can't. I thought we'd established that." "Then I guess you wouldn't care to know the most common trait of lust murderers?" She knew exactly where he was going with that one. Serial killers were almost universally pathological control freaks, but she was about to disabuse him of that notion. She hadn't gone into detail about who she was or why she was at his house partly because of concerns about security. Most of Smarttech's studies were classified secret or sensitive, and employees were not allowed to discuss them, but that hadn't been her chief concern. Angela had decided not to give Jordan Carpenter any more information than suited her purposes. Now it did. "I hate to disappoint you, Doctor," she said. "But I'm not a serial killer or a lust murderer. I'm a scientist, and until you assaulted me, I was involved in a double-blind study in which you yourself consented to participate." He was already shaking his head. "I didn't consent to participate in anything." "You couldn't have been included without your knowledge and consent. It's a remote brain imaging study, and each subject has to drink a radioisotopic solution to activate the sites under observation." "I don't know what the hell you're talking about. The only solution I drink is beer, and I could use one right now." There wasn't any possibility she had the wrong man. He knew too much about her, and he'd clearly been lying in wait for her when she got to his house. If he wasn't a legitimate study subject, then

he had to be part of the conspiracy against her, which was why she had him here--to get the truth out of him one way or another. "I could prove everything I've just said to you with one phone call," she informed him coldly, "but since you're the one who's tied up, I don't have to prove anything, do I? It's you who's going to talk, and I'm--" "And you're going to make me? How? Use defib paddles on me until I confess? You must get a real charge out of that." He almost laughed, and she whirled on him, furious. How could he joke about something like that? He'd wanted to believe the worst about her from the beginning. Apparently, it fascinated him to think she was a siren who seduced men and then stayed them. Perhaps she should give him what he expected. Angela's thoughts brought a frightening calm to her voice. "I'm not going to murder you, Dr. Carpenter, but when I get through with you, you'll wish I had." A tactical error, she thought. A very bad tactical error, and he had made it. She now had a mission that was far more interesting than making him cease to exist. She was going to make his existence intolerable. There were as many ways to torment a man as there were to please one, and some of them were the same. Even more interesting, she knew what they were. She knew how to make him sweat. Oh, God, yes, she did. She'd been taught and taught well by someone. But who? Brandt? Sammy? Silver? Someone she didn't remember? Who had trained her in the ways of erotic torture and taught her to get what she wanted from a man? Anything she wanted. "What are you doing? What the hell are you doing?" "Making sure you stay put, cowboy." Inspired, Angela had rolled him onto his belly, and she was untying his feet. One of his feet, to be exact. When she had it loose enough, she neatly crossed his ankles and cinched him back up. The next thing she crossed were his wrists. And the last thing she did was lash him to the nearest piece of furniture, a heavy rattan couch. She also pushed, pulled, and shoved him back to his knees, then propped him up against the couch so he wouldn't miss a minute of the action. She was trembling from sheer determination as much as from physical effort. But it was right about then that the adrenaline wore off and she

started to shake for real. Her arms and legs floated like phantom limbs, and the room went white and patchy, despite the darkening sky. Everything was giving out at once. Her body refused to support her, but she had to stay on her feet. Hurricane lamps had to be lit and shutters secured. There was a long and frightening night to get through, so why did it feel as if her greatest challenge at that moment was to return a bound man's angry glare? Crazy. "Are you hungry? Good," she croaked without waiting for an answer. "You can watch me eat." She steadied herself once she got to the kitchen and was thankful he couldn't see her sink to the floor. The half-size refrigerator ran off a solar generator, as did the other appliances. It wasn't cold enough to make ice, but the moment she opened the door and the bracing air hit her, she knew she needed to remain still. The chilly blast settled around her like a cloak. Eventually, it began to clear her head, but she couldn't spend her life in streams and open refrigerator doors. The cold was beginning to give her goose bumps. This wasn't exhaustion, exposure, or hunger. She was sick. Out of the range of his prying eyes, she examined herself. The cut on her hand had formed a seam that was the deep pink of normal healing. It didn't look infected, but something was making her feverish. Carpenter had already diagnosed that much, and if her immune system couldn't fight it off, she would have to find another way. Rain forests were pharmacies of natural medicines, but she didn't know what to look for. Silver could have helped her. What had happened to her friend? Bathed in waning light, Angela realized that the ruby and orange twilight had nearly played itself out. In moments it would be dark, and the sharp screeches and roars coming out of the jungle were sobering reminders that it wasn't safe. Most predators were nocturnal. They did their hunting after the sun went down. Why should the beasts of a Mexican rain forest be any different? Or the beast in the next room? A piercing cry made her jump. It was followed by a burst of staccato chatter that brought her dizzily to her feet. It sounded as if someone was laughing hysterically at her predicament, but it must be another denizen of the jungle. She imagined a spidery creature with eyes even

bigger than hers. A dozen or so hurricane lamps were clustered on a wicker trunk next to the front door. She made her way over there with a great show of strength, aware that her hostage was deeply and darkly interested in everything she did. Next to the lamps were a box of foot-long matches and a container of what smelled like kerosene. She went at the task with the resolve of a disaster survivor. The first lamp wouldn't cooperate, and her shakiness made it difficult with the others, but when she had several of them glowing, she took a moment to regain her strength. She was becoming increasingly fragile, which was difficult to hide with him watching her every move. Fortunately, the shutters gave her no trouble, but the front door had nothing more than a primitive chain lock. "Grab a chair from the kitchen," he said, anticipating her, "and wedge it up against the door." His tone was surly, but arguing would have taken too much energy. She needed her strength for better things. "And those yellow candles on the bookshelf should be lit. They're bug repellents." She did that, too. "Now, where's that food you were talking about?" "Coming right up." She sounded dangerously cheerful. And when she returned from the kitchen, it was with a large platter of exotic fruits and vegetables that she'd found in the refrigerator, along with some soft corn tortillas, spicy shredded meat, and a pot of simmering, aromatic black beans. She also found a peppery green salsa and a pitcher of something that tasted like sangria. Someone was going to feast tonight, and it wouldn't be the beasts. The fever had robbed her of an appetite, but she hadn't eaten in over twenty-four hours, so she had to be hungry. He was hungry, too. She made a point to put the platter on the floor right in front of him, and when he saw it, his throat convulsed and saliva formed a bubble at the edge of his lips. He was starving, she realized. His mouth was watering involuntarily, and she could hear his stomach rumbling from where she sat.

She felt pangs of concern, even of sympathy, but she steeled herself against them. Someone had taught her to do that, too, to get the information no matter what it took or who got hurt. You didn't get second chances in this business, they'd told her. When the first one came, you acted. This was her opportunity. He needed what she had, and she could break him with that need. The essence of pungent Mexican spices, of ortega chilis, and of cilantro floated up with the steam coming off the platter, and hunger stirred within Angela, despite her listlessness. She was desperately thirsty, and the ripe, juicy fruit made her throat constrict. There were mangos, crimson blood oranges, bananas, and exotic melons. Greedily she tore off a section of orange and licked the juice that dripped from its pulp. The sharp, sweet flavor stung her cracked lips and made her jaws tighten and burn. She sucked out the remaining juice and struggled to eat what was left of the section. Her shuddering body was in shock and barely knew what to do with the food, but she'd never tasted anything so delicious. The melons dripped juice, too. A stream of pale green ran down her arm as she nibbled on a slice of honey dew. Her swollen throat wouldn't allow for anything but tiny bites, and it was impossible to swallow all the nectar. Within seconds, her aching mouth had filled to the brim and run over, and even though she knew the juice was oozing in embarrassing ways, she wasn't fast enough to catch it with her tongue. Her lips trembled as she licked the sweetness from them and felt a cool trickle under her chin. She caught it with her fingers and discovered a pool of wetness in the hollow of her throat. Melon juice had formed its own spillway, and the crevice between her breasts had become its sluice. Dizzily she looked down and wondered what to do. It was not a pretty picture. Her blouse had come untied, and it was creeping off her shoulder. She wasn't wearing a bra because of the heat, and on one side, the gauzy material was stuck fast to a glistening breast. The other side was billowing like a sail in sultry trade winds. As far as she could tell, there was just one button holding the whole mess together, and her arm was wet and tacky up to the elbow. As she woozily assessed the damage, her eyelids drooped and a feeling of heavy, dreamy languor overcame her. She swayed forward and caught herself, afraid to look up, afraid the room would begin to spin. What she needed was a shower, but she couldn't seem to move, especially the way everything else was moving. The melon juice had hit her like liquor.

There wasn't much she could do but wait out the weak spell and pray this one would pass. Her head filled with a rush of noise, and she wondered if it was real or imagined. It sounded like rain on the roof or a flock of birds. Reduced to the coping skills of near infancy, she tried sucking the stickiness from her fingers. Cats managed to clean their entire bodies with their tongue, didn't they? Of course, cats didn't eat melons. She hadn't thought to bring any water, and the hut's water probably wasn't safe to drink, so she dipped her hand in the pitcher of sangria and looked up, dimly aware that he was watching. And had been watching all this time. She hadn't thought to bring napkins, either. She drew out her hand and let it drip. But really, what could you do with wet fingers besides wipe them on your clothes or put them in your mouth? And her clothes were wet enough. He didn't seem to appreciate her situation. In fact, his blazing eyes were fixed on her drip-drying hand, and Angela didn't know what to do with it. A snarl of frustration startled her, and she realized it was him, struggling to speak. The room began to sway, and she held on, mentally dropping anchor. Maybe it was her state of mind, but he looked as predatory as the creatures prowling outside the hut, and she probably would have felt safer with them. His jaw muscles were torturously knotted, and the way his throat was working, it looked as if he'd been trying to eat the fruit right along with her. But this wasn't just simple hunger. She had aroused an appetite for more things than melon, and he was a man of strong appetites. She'd seen that in the aurora borealis on her computer screen. His brain scans had signaled powerful drives and passions. She'd seen calm blue pools throw purple flares and his reward pathways pulse with crimson rivers. She'd been a witness to even his most private impulses, and if she'd read them correctly, the septal nucleus, which was the brain's arousal center, must be on fire right now. It had enthralled her. He was enthralling her, although his ever-darkening features were a stark contrast to his vibrant mind. The falling light was thick with rising disquiet. It crackled like wires in danger of shorting out. It was there in his stony jaw and his heavily corded biceps, and every sense Angela had was

engaged. She could see him, taste him in the stinging juice on her tongue, even smell him. "This is your specialty, isn't it? Turning men into drooling idiots?" His voice was raw, dry, accusing. She needn't have worried about making him want what she had. He wanted it badly. If he was hungry for anything right now, it was a sticky-fingered female in a wet blouse. He was devouring her with his mind, but he looked as if he didn't like the taste of this exotic feast very much. He didn't like it, only he couldn't stop himself. Angela had seen it before, this primal struggle that men went through. She'd seen it all her life. And it had spelled disaster. The men who wanted her were racked with conflict, and in some cases, they'd found it easier to make her responsible for their obsession with forbidden fruit. Her foster father had tried to make her responsible for everything, even the pain he caused others. And it had always struck her as tragic that society still encouraged its males to covet youth and innocence, even when it was off limits, and then tragically, some of them took it a step further. They blamed the victim. "What was I supposed to do?" they said. "She was irresistible." Irresistible. That word had been her cross. Perhaps they saw an angel, but they fantasized a harlot, and they punished her for both. That was why she'd changed herself and tried to make herself severely plain. She didn't know how else to escape the face, or the fate, she'd been born with. And now this man was looking at her the way they did. What does he see? Not a vision of irresistibility. Angela could barely look at herself, much less imagine how he found anything to be attracted to. Her skin was slick with juice and her clothing was pasted to her body. Dark hair was strewn all over her head. She looked like something that had crawled in from the jungly night, although maybe he liked his women that way. But in her secret heart, she must have been counting on him to see through her physical appearance to who she really was, and tell her he didn't believe any of it. She couldn't have killed those doctors. Such monstrous impulses were not hidden inside Angela Lowe. Other than her foster father, she had hurt no one. She wanted him to say all that and mean it. But he didn't. She felt a welling of despair that made no sense. She knew him so well, perhaps better than he knew himself.

How could she not have known that he would fail her, too? The platter of food nearly spilled as she shoved it aside. Once again, she was being punished for her looks when she hadn't even used them yet. She had not. She had not used her looks. But she would now. "You'd be better off killing me," he said, "because if I ever get loose--" She pulled her blouse away from her body, aware that she was dripping wet, and that a faint smile had settled itself on her quavering lips. She was shaking everywhere, deep inside, shaking with purpose. Her fingers tasted of tart, fruity sangria as one by one, she dipped them into her mouth and licked them clean, allowing herself to imagine cool things like dripping ice cream cones and icy grape Popsicles. She caught hints of melon and orange juice on her skin, too, and something that was making her even woozier, maybe the wine. Her mouth was watering copiously, but a strange lethargy had crept into her movements. Rather than fight it, she gave in and rocked her head in slow motion, languorously, like a cat. The sensation was rather pleasant, and it would have been so easy to drift off into dreamland. She dipped her fingers again, grooming herself with little noises of contentment. She was a cat, about to take a nap. "What the hell are you doing?" The cat started, blinked, and ignored the disruption. The inside of her paws were a little sticky, and they had to be readied so she could clean her throat and chest. Didn't he know that cats were fastidious creatures? Not until she was thoroughly good and ready, did she meet his eyes. She didn't flinch as his gaze burned into hers. This was what he expected, so let him deal with it. Let him deal with it until it hurt. And it would. It would hurt because she wasn't done yet. Locked with him in visual battle, she undid the remaining button on her blouse and let it fall from her shoulders. She felt the gentle caress of the night air on her skin, and the utter boldness of what she'd done. After a moment, she gathered up her blouse and wrung the wetness from it. Her naked breasts glistened and burned in the fire from the lanterns.

"You had better not let me loose," he warned harshly. Her intention had been to put the shirt back on, but that wasn't going to happen now. A raw power flowed between them that made her arms weak, useless. He glared at her for one incendiary second, and she watched his throat convulse again and his head rear back. She could only imagine the current that arced through his body. He was a man sentenced to the electric chair. A cord in his neck jerked like a spring under stress, and his thighs were shaking. His skin gleamed from the strain, but he wouldn't give in to it. He ravaged every naked inch of her with his eyes, brutally exposing her. A drop of perspiration rolled toward her breasts, and she stopped it with her fingers. "Never let me loose," he snarled. "Never."

CHAPTER 16. ANGELA swayed, certain she was going to faint. There was no way to avoid his frightening warning. And no way to respond. She was hot and thirsty, terribly hot. Only half aware of what she was doing, she dipped her fingers in the sangria and began to wash herself. The coolness against her scorching skin made her shudder. It was merciful relief to a body headed toward the boiling point. Her vision was beginning to blur at the edges, but somehow he held her where she was. There was a physical grip in his expression that wouldn't let her go. Curious, she glanced down and saw what he was reacting to. The sangria was dripping and running in streamlets over her breasts. She looked like a siren, emerging from the sea, and to her surprise, it was quite beautiful. She heard him groan, and her head came up dizzily. He'd averted his eyes, refusing to look at her, and the sound he made was as much torment as rage. Had she won? Had he reached the breaking point? This was the time to act, but there was a current running inside her, too. She picked up the platter and set it in front of him, offering the food, offering herself. Taste the melon, she thought. Taste it and know the real meaning of the word irresistible. She broke off a chunk of the fruit and felt its juice run down her arm. If he took a bite, he would never be able to stop, and then she would have him. She offered it to him and watched his throat spasm. He tried to refuse, but he couldn't. He was starving. Every nerve ending screamed at him to eat. "Bitch," he whispered. Angel, she thought. Angel ... taste the fruit and see. And he did. From her fingers. He got a small section of pale green melon between his teeth before his lips closed, catching her fingers. Angela felt a sound forming in her throat but it never got out. She didn't pull away, either, even though her stomach tumbled and fell. How strange and incredibly intimate it was, feeding a man, having her fingers in his mouth.

He swallowed hard, and she knew how painful it must be. He probably got little more than juice, but he was hungry, greedy. He wanted it all. She felt the sharp edges of his teeth, some gentle suction, and an enveloping warmth. His tongue lathed searchingly, making sure he got every last drop. Lord, the sensations he was creating in her already plummeting belly. He could have bitten her, but he didn't. Instead, he licked the juice from her fingers and then from his lips. Now is the time to stop. Now, while he still wants more. His jaw muscles sucked in as she drew back. He glared at her with hell's own eyes, but he opened his mouth again. He wanted more! She broke off another chunk of melon. Her hand wavered. No, Angela! Eat it yourself. Don't give it to him. Eat it and walk away. Leave him desperate for more. Make him beg. She was torn between wanting to feed him and wanting to break him, and part of her conflict was confusion. She didn't know what was pleasure and what was torture anymore. It all felt the same. But the voice in her head was drowning everything else out. You need his cooperation, you fool Feed his imagination, not his body. Feed his need! You know exactly what to do. The melon was crushed between her fingers and oozing down her arm. She caught the juice with her tongue and heard him groan out an obscenity. Not enough. It isn't enough. Go in for the kill! She studied the platter of food and dipped her finger into a mound of black beans that turned out to be so spicy they brought moisture to her upper lip. Fruit seemed the safer choice, she decided, handling the bumpy blood oranges and the smooth mangos in turn ... until the bananas caught her eye. She pulled one from the bunch, smelled it and rubbed it against her cheek, aware of how firm and cool it was. Her intention was to peel it, but as she began, she realized how quiet it had become. Even the howler monkeys had gone silent. She was inches from a fully aroused man. He was close enough to touch, close enough to break with a touch, and God how she wanted that. She wanted the victory that only his surrender could bring. He was a strong

and stubborn adversary, but he was also tied up. She could do anything she wanted, take total advantage of the situation. But something held her back: the angry desperation in his face. And it was desperation. She couldn't stare into that thrilling turmoil and not respond. Her poor, weak heart thumped so hard it made her woozy. Pounding blood rocked her forward. She reached out to steady herself. Cool. His skin was beautifully cool. Was that his arm she'd touched? She shuddered and inched closer, close enough to lay her head on his shoulder. He was as smooth and naked as the stones in the stream ... or was she dreaming? He made a rough, guttural sound, but she barely noticed. This was too good. He was like chilled wine, and she was burning up, the flame that lit the lanterns. She caressed herself against his chest, rubbed her flushed cheeks back and forth. Her breasts brushed over his bicep and even that was cool. How lovely it would be to bathe in this silvery pool and swim like a fish. "What do you want from me?" he rasped. "What the hell do you want?" He was ready to bargain, but Angela wasn't certain she had the strength to go through with it. She was at the breaking point, too. What she wanted from him was information and cooperation, especially that. She desperately needed his cooperation. But what chance did she have of getting it really? He was going to refuse her, and worse, he was going to laugh at her. Nothing would have surprised her the way he seemed to loathe her. Stop this nonsense! an inner voice raged. You don't need this man's love and devotion. You only need his help. The breeze had dropped off, and the air in the hut was hot and wet. She pushed herself away from him and gulped it in like water. If she could get some oxygen to her brain, maybe she could shake off the lethargy. There was nothing in life she cared about at the moment except lying down to sleep. And even though it felt like she would never wake up, that might be a blessing. Her blouse was damp and icy cold. She tugged it on anyway and couldn't stop shivering. "Who sent you down here?" she asked him. "How did you find out that I was in Mexico?" His silence confirmed her fears. This was going to be difficult. "Are you working with Silver? Did she help you set me up?"

He wouldn't even look at her, and that could only mean one thing. "I can't believe Silver would do this," she whispered. "Is she part of the conspiracy?" Angela had said the word aloud. There was a conspiracy against her, people who wanted her dead, only she didn't know how many or who they were. She was too tired and heartsick to hide her reaction. Tears welled and her throat ached with a fire that made her exhale sharply. It sounded as if she'd been struck, and he looked up. "Are you in it with her?" she asked him. "Angela, if that's what I'm supposed to call you, I don't know anyone named Silver. And I sure as hell don't know about any conspiracy to kill you." "Then why are you here?" "Because you have a death list, and I'm on it. You're killing doctors." She would have risen but wasn't sure she could stand. "Whoever told you that lied to you. There is no death list!" "And I'm supposed to take your word for that?" His contempt was withering. It took everything out of her. "They told you I wiped my own memory, right? You said it was in the dossier. I'm a threat to them. They want to get rid of me because of what I know." When he didn't respond immediately, she plunged on, despite the strange sound that was whirring in her ears. Someone was chattering and laughing hysterically, but she couldn't tell if it was jungle music or some demented creature in her head. She heard voices, too. There was someone talking to her, always talking to her. "I could have killed you at any point," she argued. "I could kill you now, but I'm sitting here explaining myself to you. Doesn't that prove I'm not a serial killer?" He scrutinized the way she was tilted over her crossed legs, the way her eyelashes drooped and her breasts clung to her blouse. "You don't want to kill me, you want me under your control. That's what you want, control." You're wrong, she thought. / want you to believe me. I want you to help me. I need someone like you on my side. There is no one else.

Someone had once told her that if what you wanted was vulnerability from others, you had to be vulnerable first. If you wanted revelation, you had to reveal yourself. Just moments ago when she thought Silver had betrayed her, she couldn't hide her pain, and he had responded. Would he help her if she let him see who she really was, all the carnage, the horror? No! He'll think you're insane. He already does think you're insane. They all do. God, who was screaming? And why couldn't she breathe? It felt like she was being burned at the stake. The skin on her body was blistering, and she didn't understand what was happening, only that she wanted to lie down and sleep. When she closed her eyes, what she remembered was how cool he was, how strong. His shoulder had been her pillow, and she wanted to rest there again. She swayed forward but caught herself. "What's wrong? Are you sick?" She couldn't see him clearly. He kept moving, blurring into surreal images. "Where are you?" she asked him. "Angela, untie me, for God's sake. I'm a doctor. I can help you. You're running a dangerously high fever. You need to bring it down as quickly as possible." He'll use your weakness against you! You will betray yourself! "I need the stream," she said, shivering. "I need the stones." "No! Don't go outside. Untie me! Angela--" But she was already struggling to her feet and pulling off her clothing. She was spurred by the frenzy that comes from survival. It was her last burst of energy. Her sodden blouse dropped to the floor, her shorts fell with a yank of the zipper, and her panties went next. The clothing lay on the threshold as she rushed out into the screaming night. Someone was yelling at her, but she paid no attention. She had to get to the stream. She would die if she didn't. THEY were lined up against the wall, six tall, steel- haired men, all of

them shirtless and wearing blindfolds. It was a firing squad, and she had the gun. Bullets cracked, and the air stank of gunpowder. Bodies were dropping. It was like blowing out candles on a cake. She was desperate to get them all while she still had enough breath! But as she fired on the last prisoner, his blindfold dropped, and she saw that it was a woman. They were all women. The dead bodies on the ground were her. Teri Benson awoke with a gasp, and the medical journal she was reading crashed to the floor. Her chest was tight, and her stomach rolled as she sat up. An anxiety dream, she reasoned, probably stress-induced. It could even be something as simple as too much coffee, except that she never touched caffeine. She rarely, if ever, experienced stress, either, despite the fact that every Tom, Dick, and Harriet on surgical rotation was eyeing her like a vulture and clearly expecting her to crack under the pressure. Her pocket pager was firing. She unhooked it from her belt, startled to discover that she'd slept through a prior page, seconds earlier. That had never happened before, but the beeping may have triggered the gunshots in her dream. It was midnight, and according to the digital display, she was being summoned to the Trauma Center for the first time that evening. But not the last, she was sure. Most heart attacks occurred during the early hours of the morning. This time of night it was usually the unwitting casualties of hot sex, vehicular accidents, or addicts who'd overdosed. Not career-making cases. Not heart valve repair. Nor bypass. Not hardly. By the time her feet hit the on-call room's floor, she'd whipped her shoulder-length hair back with a band, dabbed some baking soda on her teeth, and washed them with her tongue. She kept a box of Arm & Hammer beside the bed, along with a tube of cherry Chapstick, because it tasted good and because the hospital's air conditioning dried her out. She already had her shoes on, but she always took the white coat off and snapped the wrinkles out before she hung it up, no matter how exhausted she was. It was a matter of hygiene as much as professionalism. A massive keychain jangled at her waist as she dashed out the door and locked it behind her. Lately she was spending as much time in the on-call room as she was in her efficiency apartment, and she kept the huge canvas tote that held most all her earthly possessions there. Besides, it was the only way to get any privacy. She had no interest in letting the vultures know what she was up to. The journal article she'd been reading described the latest advances in valve repair and replacement, featuring Jordan Carpenter's revolutionary techniques. But far more interesting was a People magazine spread she'd

found that delved into his surprisingly checkered past. A neighboring teenage girl had allegedly killed herself over him after he ended their relationship, and in his medical school days, there was a mysterious feud with a wealthy classmate, but no reason was given for the dispute. And now he'd disappeared. Carpenter was still among the missing, and since they hadn't been able to reschedule his valve replacement for the following day, Teri would be assisting Steve Lloyd, who'd been making noises like he might ask her to take over. She intended to be ready. The corridor assailed Teri with hospital activity. By the time she hit the corridor the Trauma Center was on, she'd brushed off two interns and broken into a run. It bothered her that she'd fallen asleep. She rarely needed more than a couple of hours, and that was only after she'd done her extensive reading. She didn't like the idea of being unexpectedly stressed or fatigued, and she particularly didn't like the idea of having limits. That was for ordinary people. "What's the problem?" Teri asked as she dashed into the blue-lit room. Steve Lloyd was already there, suited up and ready to operate, should it come to that. "Pacemaker failure," an OR nurse shouted over the noise. As an intern called out the patient's vital signs and a respiratory technician held an oxygen mask to his face, Teri studied the fortyish man. His complexion was grayish, and she could hear by his breathing that fluid was accumulating in his lungs. The pump was failing, but he was clearly athletic, with the lean build of a runner. The heart did not discriminate, she'd learned. Based on her experience, it brought down the lean and wiry almost as often as the obese. "I got Dr. Garret," the pager nurse announced, referring to the on-call anesthesiologist. "He's on his way." "I'll go scrub up," Teri said, still studying the patient. Her coat was halfway off, but something held her in place. They were removing the man's clothing to prepare him for surgery, but they'd missed something. He wore an earring that was set with round black objects. They looked like pearls made out of metal, and the loop was inches from his shoulder, where the circuitry for most implantable heart-rhythm regulators was housed. Dr. Garrett burst through the door and was given a quick rundown by Lloyd of the man's condition. Neither doctor seemed aware that Teri was in the room, but she was very aware of both of them. "Have we got him on the monitor yet?" Steve Lloyd called out. "Could we

get him hooked up, please!" "Pulse is all over the place," someone shouted. "He's in v. fib." Lloyd started chest compressions. "Get the paddles ready, two hundred joules! Keep bagging him," he instructed the respiratory technician. Garrett was ordering the nurse to start an IV when Teri yelled over the din, "Wait! Get that earring off him first!" Lloyd glanced around at her. Garrett turned, too, and within seconds, the whole room was looking at her. Teri pushed through the startled cluster to get to the patient, who was only vaguely aware of what was going on at that point. "Magnets," she said, removing the earring and holding it up. "I think these might be magnets." She was next to an IV pole, and the clank of metal was audible as the earring adhered to it. No one in the room seemed to know what she was talking about, including Lloyd. Teri couldn't believe it, but she held her tongue. Was she the only doctor at California General who kept up with the medical research? They were about to perform a totally unnecessary operation. The patient's rhythms were already normalizing. "Magnet therapy can interfere with pacemakers and defibrillators," she explained. "Even those innocuous looking mattress pads people sleep on. Our patient doesn't need surgery. He needs to rethink his jewelry and get his pacemaker recalibrated." "You sound very sure of yourself, Dr. Benson." Teri gestured toward the monitor, where the lines tracing the patient's cardiac activity were perfection. One textbook QSR complex after another. They hadn't even needed to shock him to get the rhythms back. Steve Lloyd put on a stern face, but Teri could see that he was impressed. "I couldn't sleep, so I did some reading," she said. "There was a report in one of the journals. Good timing, I guess." She laughed and pretended to shrug it off. "Perfect timing for our friend with the pacemaker," Garrett said. "I think this calls for some chocolate pudding in the cafeteria," Lloyd

deadpanned. "My treat, Benson?" There were oohs and ahhs when Teri accepted. Lloyd gave the trauma team instructions for the patient's care and escorted Teri out with a flourish. Despite the mock gallantry, he seemed to regard her with renewed respect, and Teri was pleased. Physical attraction was not enough, although she would take whatever came her way. "Good work, Doctor," he said as they walked to the cafeteria, "but I'd lay off the reading and try to get some sleep if I were you. Six-thirty comes early, and you have a big day ahead of you tomorrow." She smiled. "An honor to assist you, sir." Laughter danced in his eyes, making him rather attractive, Teri decided. "I'll be doing the assisting, Dr. Benson," he advised her, "unless you'd rather not perform your first valve replacement operation." "Steve, are you sure?" Her voice was tremulous, and only partially for effect. It wasn't a valve repair, the great Jordan Caipenter's claim to fame, but it was one step closer. One huge step, and the mere thought made her quiver. "It's not me who has to be sure, Teri." She touched the sleeve of his coat. "I'm ready. I've assisted with hundreds of them. I've been ready for months ... years." "I suspect you are," he said, seeming delighted with himself that he'd made such an extraordinary discovery. "Do you know what, Dr. Benson? I think you and I are going to make ourselves some medical history one of these days." Great minds, she thought, except that he probably envisioned she would go down in the annals of medicine as one of his indispensable team members. She didn't think so. Teri Benson wasn't sharing her place in the history books with anybody. THERE was no way to stop her. She paid no heed to Jordan's shouts as she stumbled out of the hut, leaving a trail of wet clothes behind her. God, what a vision. No one would have believed it if he'd tried to describe the naked, pale-skinned nymph with flying black hair who'd just disappeared into the haunted jungle night. She kept murmuring something about a stream, but he didn't know what she was talking about. He hadn't moved since she left, and not just because he was corseted like Houdini and lashed to the furniture.

He was staring at the doorway and wondering how the hell he was supposed to save her, given her gift for bondage, not to mention knives and torture. Save her? Save her? She'd tormented him beyond all human endurance. She'd purposely starved him to the point of brain damage. She had him desperate for food, sex, and swift, terrible vengeance. He really was going to have to work on that ridiculous hero complex. "Free yourself, man!" Muttering, he twisted around to see what she'd done with the knife. That was the only thing he needed to think about at the moment. Nobody was going to get saved until he got himself out of this full-body straitjacket she'd strapped him in. He wouldn't have thought there was a rope tie in existence that could hold a good-sized man who sincerely didn't want to be held. He'd been pretty creative at knots in his youth, but this was inspired. She'd come up with configurations he'd never dreamed of, and it wasn't accidental. She knew exactly what she was doing. He spotted the knife across the room, stuck in a cane wastebasket that had toppled over with the impact. To get there he would have to drag the couch with him. The woman was perverse. His feet had gone dead, and pain radiated sharply from his kneecaps as he settled on his side. The only pleasure he got as he inched himself across the floor was imagining her in the jaws of some ferocious beast. He hoped that seconds before she was gobbled up, she would remember that she'd made it impossible for him to save her. Now that would be poetic justice: Angel Face, a remorseful midnight snack. The jungle was as wild after sundown as it was silent during the day. The roaring and screeching spurred him to hurry. She'd left the door of the hut open, and it sounded like someone was being eaten. The noises were not only getting louder, they were getting closer. With surgical focus, he blocked everything out but the knife. He had to get to it. Nothing else mattered. He'd hauled himself and the couch about halfway across the room when he came up against the cane coffee table. He used his head and shoulders to knock it over. Luckily, it was small and light enough to get one of the legs between his teeth. He bit down and with a hard toss, sent the table tumbling like a log. God, it felt good to make some noise of his own.

The path was clear, and the knife was less than three feet away. But when the racket was over, Jordan heard something that made him hesitate. A series of clicks turned his gut to ice. He was no longer alone in the cabin. He came around to a thunderous roar. Standing in the doorway of the hut was a massive golden cat. Its coat had marks like a leopard's, but it was bigger and more muscular. Obviously drawn by the scent of food, it eyed the platter that was still on the floor and the man who was conveniently netted like a deli ham. Wasn't it she who was supposed to be the midnight snack? Jordan found himself staring into neon green orbs with three-dimensional black slits. As far as he knew, jaguars were the only spotted cats that roamed the jungles of Mexico, and this was a big one. This was a beast. Another roar shook the grass hut. Its gaping black maw revealed fangs the size of meat hooks, but fortunately, the cat didn't seem all that interested in him at the moment. Big cats rarely attacked humans, he reminded himself, although there wasn't much comfort in that disclaimer. Under the circumstances, his survival strategy was simple. If he didn't move, maybe the cat would forget he was there, finish off the platter, and be gone. If he didn't move ... That was easier said than done when you wanted to scream, lift your skirts, and run like a woman. Maybe he was better off tied. Otherwise he would have been chased up a tree by now. Jaguars were good climbers, as he remembered, another useless bit of trivia for which he had no source. The food was gone instantly, including the fruit. The cat licked its chops, eyeing Jordan next. With a growl throttled deep in its chest, it came close enough to sniff . Jordan's hair, snarl menacingly in his face, and then whip around as if it had heard something of interest outside. Jordan suddenly knew what it was to be at the bottom of the food chain. A male, he observed as the jaguar presented its hindquarters. The females were the hunters, weren't they? If that were true, this one might not feel the need to drag home groceries for the little ones. He was hanging on to that thought when Angela appeared in the doorway,

looking as dazed and confused as the black-haired nymph who left. She was dripping wet, bedraggled, and utterly beautiful. Beads of water streamed down her naked body as she stood on the threshold, exactly where the jaguar had been. She and the cat were staring at each other, but she didn't seem to recognize the danger. "Hold still," Jordan whispered. "Don't look the animal in the eye. It's confrontational." She glanced up dizzily as if she'd just realized Jordan was there. God, he'd never seen anything so surreal. A naked woman and a massive jungle cat in a face-off. This was something out of Sheena. Jordan wasn't sure she understood him. She looked dazed, and he guessed that she was either in shock or delusional from the fever. At least she was alive. "Get out of the doorway," he told her with quiet urgency. "Blend into your surroundings, and the cat may get bored and leave. They can only see you if you move, and they rarely attack humans." Rarely. Well, she didn't move. She stood right there in the doorway. She was blocking the cat's way, and when the animal roared at her, she roared back. A thunderous cacophony. She jutted her head, dropped her jaw and let fly with very near the same volume and ferocity as the cat. Jordan watched in astonishment. She could not be going to confront that jaguar. That was suicidal. It was more than twice her weight, probably two hundred fifty pounds, and a savage natural predator. The cat snarled and crouched menacingly, as if readying itself to leap. Angela didn't attempt to imitate that pose. Instead, she walked over to the beast and bopped it on the nose with her hand, showering water everywhere. Jordan watched in amazement as the huge male cat made a squealing noise, darted around her and out the door. Was she crazy? Or was he? Because someone sure as hell was.

CHAPTER 17. ANGELA rushed over and knelt next to him on the floor. "Who did this?" she asked, apparently meaning the upended furniture. "Did the jaguar attack you? They rarely do that." "Yeah, I know," he said with as much irony as he could dredge up, given his situation. He was lying on his side, propped awkwardly by bound hands that had gone so numb he couldn't feel them anymore. And he still couldn't believe what he was hearing or seeing. She was naked. She was dripping wet. And his heart was clambering to get out of his body any way it could. Right now, his mouth was the preferred exit. "Untie me," he urged. "The cat may come back." She stared at him with the patience of a small child whose parent has just said something very silly. "If it does," she assured him. "I can handle it." He heaved himself around, maneuvering to get back to his knees. He didn't want her to help him. It was more than a matter of pride. He knew what would happen. His glands went on cruise control when she got near him. She did anyway, of course, embracing him with arms that were cool and wet and shivering, rubbing him with breasts that were aroused and tender from the elements. Her body was a delicate shade of blush pink, and the worst of it was, she was trembling. Trembling everywhere. He could hear it in her breath, feel it in her hands. How had she backed down a two hundred fifty pound beast? Shock, most likely. She was naked and soaked. The stream water may have brought her fever down too abruptly. By the time she got him to his knees, Jordan was wet and she was dry. Well, drier. Her hair was still dripping beads of water that seemed to be drooling all over the wonders of her feminine flesh. Droplets raced to the tips of her breasts and then hung there, clinging to rose colored nipples. No, she wasn't dry, but she wasn't a waterfall, either, and that gave him an idea, thank God. Hopefully, it would distract his drooling

hormones for a damn second. He did not need her staring with female satisfaction at another one of his resounding erections. "It was probably because you were wet, right?" he said. "Cats hate water." "Jaguars love water." She rose and gave him a sisterly pat on the cheek, which made him think of Penny. And Birdy. And the hospital. He'd made arrangements for Steve Lloyd and Ten Benson to handle his postop patients and take the surgeries he couldn't reschedule, but he hadn't planned to be gone more than a few days. How long had he been gone? A few years? It felt like it. "They love to swim and fish," she went on. "They're the most water-friendly of the big cats." "Good to know. Next time one attacks, I won't go hunting for my flippers." Now she was picking up the furniture, and he could have broken his neck, craning around to look at her. She'd picked up her blouse but hadn't bothered to put it on yet. And it wouldn't have covered the part of her that was pointing his way, anyhow. She would have to have an incredible ass, he observed, feeling slightly guilty at the salacious thought. News flash, Carpenter. She is not an angel. Admiring her backside is not sacrilege. When she'd righted the coffee table and put the platter on it, she came back, apparently to share some more jaguar lore. Her blouse was draped over her shoulder like an afterthought as she sank to her knees and rested her hands on her thighs. Uncanny how much she looked like that Disney movie mermaid. Even more uncanny how he never had a clue who this woman was going to be from one minute to the next. Please stand up, he thought. "You should never show fear to a jaguar," she informed him with quiet conviction. "They sense it immediately, and you lose their respect." "I'll remember that, too. Any other jungle etiquette while you're at it?" Apparently, there was plenty, because she went on, seemingly without the slightest awareness of his sarcasm. He wasn't sure she was aware of him. "Jaguars are the boldest of animals," she said. "If you're bold in

return, they'll accept you as one of them. If you act like prey, you'll be prey." "It's difficult not to act like prey when you're tied hand and foot." He got one of those long-suffering looks again. It seemed she did know he was there. "It has nothing to do with your physical stature," she chided. "It's your heart. You could be a child, but if you have courage and strength of character, those things will be honored." He hoped his expression conveyed true concern. "You're starting to sound like a Star Trek conventioneer." Nothing. No response. Not an eye blink. She missed not a beat of her Wild Kingdom lecture series. "They were worshiped in most ancient Indian religions," she continued. "Some of the tribes engaged in bloodletting, and the king would actually cut his own penis with a stingray's spine and collect the blood in a ceremonial bowl." "Ouch!" And Jordan thought his knees hurt. "Various other parts of the body were cut, too, and often quite gruesomely." That was announced with a certain amount of relish, he noted. "It was all part of their sacrifice to the jaguar god," she pointed out. "They believed it released human energy and balanced heaven and earth." "Where are you getting this stuff?" She hesitated as if she weren't at all certain "The Bajio is steeped in mysticism. I've been here before," Wet hair fell into her eyes, and she shook it back. All it took was a toss of her head, but when she stopped, a couple of other parts of her body didn't. Jordan couldn't take it anymore. "Aren't you going to put some clothes on?" She glanced down with a blink of surprise, but the expression on her face said she had no idea what he was talking about. She'd thought she was clothed. That's when Jordan knew something was wrong. She appeared alert and talked rationally ... well, rational was a relative term, but for a woman with jungle fever, she wasn't doing so badly. What tipped him off was her ashen complexion and the sweat that sheened her chest

and throat. She was in shock, which explained what she'd been able to do with the jaguar. Even badly injured shock victims had been known to perform superhuman feats with little awareness of what they were doing. That was Jordan's diagnosis, and it was the best he could do without any more information. "Come over here," he said. Another blink of those enormous eyes. He couldn't help but think about how vulnerable she looked at that moment. He liked her better in shock. "I want you to hold your forehead against my cheek, so I can check your temperature and your pulse. You look feverish, and I'm concerned about your blood pressure." She the back of her hand to her forehead. "I'm fine," she said, dismissing his concern with a waggle of her fingers. He almost believed her, but then she winked at him. The woman who came to his house and sobbed over Birdy's broken body? Wink? "Come here," he instructed. She rose to her feet with an exasperated sigh and dropped down right beside him. Her flushed face was pressed against his before he could prepare himself for such intimate contact. And then suddenly his whole body was alert for it. Contact. The more intimate the better. His poor biceps twitched like a hungry dog's tail. "Your forehead," he reminded her. "We're not here to dance." She actually laughed, but she was a hurricane lamp of radiant heat. The fever was coming back with a vengeance, but she couldn't feel its effects. Or her racing pulse. She was running on adrenaline from the shock and exhausting all her resources. When the adrenaline stopped pumping, she would collapse. There was an opportunity here, but his training wouldn't let him take advantage of it. Idiot, he told himself. This is the jungle. You're a hostage. She's a serial killer, possibly of the lust murderer variety. "Look at me," he told her. "I want to see your eyes." She murmured, "Okay," but kept rubbing her face against his, and then he felt her

breath at his throat and his heart began trying to stage another jailbreak. God, what she did to his crazed vital signs. "Let me go," he urged. "Angela, untie me now." "I can't let you go. I need you," she whispered, still nuzzling. She'd tucked her face into the hollow of his neck in the way of a child seeking comfort. "Need me?" It was hard not to like the sound of that. "I need you to believe me, I need you to help me ... " Maybe he'd hoped for a slightly different conjugation of the verb to need, but there was promise in the way she sighed out the words. Not that he was looking for fulfillment. Getting fulfilled by this woman would be suicidal. It rhymed with killed. Several low-pitched howls caught his attention, followed by a medley of throaty snarling, snapping, and mewling. It sounded like cats in love. Big cats. Anguish gripped his soul as he realized that the jungle was a metaphor for everything that was secret and libidinal in civilized life. Humans had the same urges and desires but didn't dare to whisper them. The jungle screamed them. Mating calls. Hungers at every level. An orgy. And guess who was trapped in the middle of it with a woman who refused to put her clothes on. Who didn't even seem to know she was naked. "Listen to me," he said sharply. "You're sick. What you need is medical help." There was a doctor's bag in his truck, but he was reluctant to tell her because he'd hidden something in there. "I'll be all right," she insisted. "All I need is to rest for a minute and your body is so cool and lovely." His body was a potter's kiln. What man's wouldn't be with an achingly beautiful creature melting and running all over him? Her voice was as delicately soft and fiery as her translucent skin. He could see the blue veins in her closed eyelids, in her gently rising breasts, and in the hand that had fallen across his bunched thighs. God, just get it over with, woman. Murder me now and put me out of my misery.

Another crescendo of howling and hissing echoed his sentiments. The mating animals were at it again. But Angela was as unaware of the primal noise as she was of his turmoil. After a few moments, she drowsily lifted her head and looked at him. "I'm fine now," she said. Her expression was sleepy and rather sweet, but she wasn't fine. Hot red spots the size of silver dollars dominated each of her pale cheeks, and there was a tranced quality to her eyes that made her look like an antique porcelain doll. God, how he wished she would cover herself or that he could get his damn hands free. "Angela," he said with what he hoped was enough conviction to break through her lethargy, "you must untie me. Get me out of these ropes, and I'll help you. I will help you." "I know," she said softly, "I know you will, but there's something else I have to do first." "What?" "This." She covered herself with crossed arms and settled back to look at him, regarding him with such complete and total absorption, he found it hard to breathe normally. He followed her gaze as it skimmed upward and lingered on his hair. Was she imagining how it would feel to slide her fingers through the iron waves? The softness would surprise her, he knew. His scalp prickled in anticipation, and deep in the pit of his belly something moved. It was a sensation primitive enough to make him think of the snakes that slithered over the jungle floor. Her gaze dropped to his eyes, and the sensation intensified. He wasn't controlling the responses anymore; she was. With a flick of her focus, she could make his gut quiver. Whether she knew it or not, she wielded a fantastic amount of power, enough to make him wonder if he'd misdiagnosed her. Maybe this wasn't shock; maybe there was something else going on here. As if reading his thoughts, she pressed a knuckle to her lower lip, dragging on its fullness as she moved her head back and forth, up and down. She murmured something he couldn't hear. A breast had been bared, and God, how he wanted to look, but her mouth had just come open and he was riveted by the erotic possibilities. Something needed to be inside that wet, beautiful mouth--now. A cool breath of air brought his head up instantly.

"What are you doing?" He thought she'd blown on his lips, but it was her fingers. She was exploring his mouth with her fingertips. She'd barely touched him and yet she'd drawn sparks. It was the shower of gold when a blowtorch touched metal. Every damn thing she did drew sparks. Jordan had a flash of her rising above him and dangling one of her luscious breasts over his face, dipping down just enough that he could suckle a moment before she pulled up. Once again, heat surged into his groin. Heat and wild desire. If she didn't drive him mad, his own fantasies would. "Get me out of these ropes--" "I can't, not yet. There's something I need." Something she needed. Sweet Jesus. There was only one thing he needed. Her fingers fell away, and her lips replaced them. She kissed him with breathless ardor, but this time, he didn't respond. Despite the fact that her mouth was as sweetly agitated as his gut, he wouldn't allow himself to feel any part of it. He held back. He held on. He had to. "You can stop now," he told her with a low groan. "I said I'd help." "Yes, but you didn't really mean it." "I did--" She cut off his protest with another kiss, and he was helpless to stop her. He couldn't stop himself. His responses zinged back like rubber bands, stronger for having been stretched taut. "I meant it," he told her. "No, you didn't," she whispered through the chaos ringing in his ears, "but you will." It was all starting to blur. He couldn't separate the feelings, they were so intense, and yet he knew exactly what was happening the instant she began to touch him. He was going over the side. He was headed for a wipeout. Her first touch raised the hair all over his body. Her second sent him sighing and tumbling. It didn't matter where she touched him, just that she did. Her fingers were plumes, the velvet of rose petals. It was

impossible to describe the softness, but they were all over him and yet barely made contact. They feathered and flurried and sprinkled the sharpest kind of ecstasy. His body loved every breath and caress. Yes, God, yes, that was nice. He let out a moan, flinching as she tickled his belly. She fluttered her fingers down his torso, and his muscles knotted. It was unbearable, but he wanted more. Contact. Intimate contact. Touch me everywhere, even there. Yes, there! The breath surged out of him, and electricity rocketed through his groin. God, how he wanted her to relieve the pressure. He was going to blow out like a tire. "What the hell do you want from me?" he demanded harshly. "I want you on my side, but there's something I have to know first." "What is it? Ask me. Anything." "I have to know that you won't ever betray me." She rose above him with an urgency that took him by surprise. Her dark eyes bored into his, spiraling into depths he hadn't known were there. What in God's name? She was deadly serious about this. He half expected her to produce a stingray spine and a ceremonial bowl. "I won't." He would have promised anything, and she knew it. "That isn't enough, Jordan. I have to be sure, and there's only one way I can do that." Her voice raised goose bumps on the back of his neck. Her mouth was moving, but the eerie proclamation seemed to come from somewhere else, from above him, behind him, whispering and echoing, like the jungle. She was every one of its libidinal urges personified, and he couldn't resist her, even if it meant this was the last thing he ever did. "What do you need? Tell me what you need." She arched over him so precariously he thought she was going to tumble into him and knock them both over. She was surreal, unreal, hovering like a dream, and her breasts dangled just above his face. God, let this be a hallucination, he prayed. Let me wake up from this agonizing dream.

"Your soul, Jordan ... your mortal soul, as naked and trembling as the day you were conceived ... " It was a dream. It had to be. Who said things like that? Her voice was everywhere, surrounding him again. Her breasts brushed his face, and each caress made him throbbingly harder. Her voice, her breasts, her nakedness, they all whispered of a journey unlike anything he'd ever taken. His mouth watered. His throat ached. Somewhere an animal cried out, squealing a warning, and something inside Jordan echoed the haunting sound. The soul was a man's last refuge, but she already had everything else, why not that? And yet if he believed it was the life source and the only link to a higher power, then without it he would cease to exist. Was that too high a price to pay for the nirvana she promised? He was completely caught up in her spell. Completely. He didn't know dream from reality, real from surreal. He didn't know himself. Once he had doubted whether this woman could hurt someone. Now he knew she could do anything. The jaguar had been safe compared to her. "This is insane," he got out, but she was at him again. His jaw clenched against the riot of sensation she elicited. Her lips and fingers were exquisite and deadly. They brushed his body like charged air, sizzling with static electricity. Pleasure wasn't meant to be this strong. He was already a netted animal, a circus beast, but she wanted him cooperative at any cost. She was part seductress, part waif, part avenging angel, and by the time she was done with him, she'd brought him to a throbbing pitch. He looked down only once-- the instant she stopped--and saw his own bursting need. He was hot and swollen, hungry for conquest. He was engorged and glistening from excitement he couldn't control. She saw it, too. Gazing up at him, she spread his own moisture all over him with her fingers, as if preparing him for what was to come. Her mouth was slack and beautiful. Her lips were wet from her tongue, and her head rocked forward. He watched in awe as her eyelids quivered. She was in a trance, too, he realized. This ritual had completely taken over her body. Her throat convulsed, and he saw the future. She was going to deliver him with her mouth.

He recoiled as she bent toward him, but her ministrations were so gentle, he couldn't hold out. She caressed the length of his shaft with her cheek and showered it with little kisses. At the first stroke of her tongue, he felt the truth of what she could do to him. Her lips slid over him, and he let out a groan as their sweet, terrible heat closed on his shaft. She sucked and drew on him with such exquisite care he cried out her name, the name of his captor, his tormentor. "Give me what I want," she whispered. He was close to releasing, and he knew that was her goal. She wanted power over everything, including his bodily responses, but he wouldn't give her that. To the extent that he could control anything, he would control that. If he were to give in to this excruciating pleasure, then she would own his soul. "Give me what I want!" she cried. "Is this how you do it?" he snarled at her. "You humiliate your victims and rip away their control, then kill them? This is your sick ritual, isn't it?" Her head reared up. Her body was slick with perspiration and white as the moon. While Jordan watched, she rose without a word and went over to the cane basket where the knife was stuck. She pulled it free, and when she turned around, there was no doubt in Jordan's mind that she intended to use it. He braced himself. He had only one option left. One weapon. His mind.

CHAPTER 18. From the vantage point of his glass-enclosed loft office, Peter Brandt overlooked the entire Cognitive Studies lab. He could keep watch over the various operations that way without anyone knowing he was on the premises. There were surveillance cameras, of course, but he preferred the global view. Maybe it made him feel a little like a field general surveying his troops. Normally, he found that relaxing. Tonight, however, nothing could have relaxed him. A softly measured voice whispered directly into his ear, "It's too late, Peter." Peter instinctively modulated his own tone as he spoke into the headset he wore, but he would never master his partner's ability to sound sinister, especially over the phone. "I'll find her," Peter argued with urgency. "Give me some more time." "You had your chance." "What? A couple days?" "It's out of our hands now, Peter. We have to let them handle it." "Christ, you know what this means, Ron. You know what they'll do." "They'll do what we can't do. They'll find her. She isn't coming back voluntarily this time, Peter. You know that. In your heart you know that. It's out of our hands." Peter picked up a spherical crystal paperweight that was etched like a globe of the earth. Angela had given it to him last Christmas. Normally they didn't exchange gifts, but she'd found it somewhere, and she'd known about his penchant for such things. She was thoughtful that way. It was an exquisite piece, this globe. The etching made him think of snowflakes and their crystalline perfection. But every time he touched it, he had a sudden and terrible fear of dropping it. His fingerpads dug into the facets, but he was convinced it was going to pop out of his hands, no matter what he did. It was going to get away from him and be destroyed. "What happens now?" he asked.

"I don't know, and I don't want to know. Neither should you. Would you rather she brought down the company and everyone in it? This isn't about you and her anymore. You can't keep indulging your adolescent fantasies." The bastard would have to bring that up. Ron had never understood that this wasn't about some ridiculous old fart trying to recapture his youth with a young chick. This was about unlimited human potential. Peter was one of the few people who knew what Angela Lowe could do. The other was Ron Laird, and that's what confounded Peter. How could his partner let her be sacrificed? Peter's chest hurt. Dead center was the thud of a blacksmith's hammer, and it was the only thing he could feel. The rest of his body was hollow. Something had to be done, but arguing with Ron would serve no purpose. There would not be a fight tonight, Peter had decided. He'd already decided several things. He set the globe down carefully. There was only one flat surface the size of a nickel, and if you missed, it would almost certainly roll off the edge of desk and shatter on the limestone floor of his office. "Peter, if she talks, it's all over. You know that. She's a threat to too many people." "What makes you think she'll talk? What makes you think she remembers?" "She ran, didn't she? The shrink you sent her to said she was about to break. What do you need, newspaper headlines?" For all of about three seconds, Peter wondered how his partner knew what Dr. Fremont had said. The phones were tapped, of course. Everything was tapped around here, even brains. "She's one of our people, Ron. We should be allowed to handle this." It was a futile attempt, but Peter had to make it. "Listen, we don't know how much she remembers, if anything. Nobody knows. I'd like to bring her back and find out." "She stopped being one of our people when she became a threat to national security." Don't argue. You can't change his mind. You can't change anyone's. "So what do we do?" Peter's voice was as hollow as his body.

"Nothing, that's the beauty of it. We do nothing. It will all be taken care of ... like she never existed." The globe sparkled so brightly it was painful to look at. In his mind, Peter could see it rolling across the desk. He could hear it drop to the floor, and that's when he had to shut the image out. He was about to hang up when Ron spoke up again. "You haven't been answering your pages," he said. "That's not a good thing to do, unless you want me to make all the decisions myself." A dial tone told Peter he was free of the patronizing SOB. He'd come to despise his partner over the years, and not just for his condescending manner. Ron was trying to make it look as if the situation with Angela was all Peter's fault, when that was anything but the case. One day, judgment day, blame would be assigned, and everyone would know the truth. Meanwhile, Peter had made some decisions of his own. He'd cooperated long enough and probably for the wrong reasons. Now it had to be his way. He had not saved Angela Lowe for nothing. He walked to the glass that looked down on the lab. It was late, after midnight, but the lights were on in some areas, and a few stragglers were still working. The lab rats, he called them, smiling ruefully. Most of them worked around the clock on their experiments and left the lab only to shower, eat, and sleep. Their life was whatever hypothesis they were working on at the moment. Peter understood what drove them. He was one of them not so many years ago. In many cases, his most dedicated workers were avoiding a world they didn't understand in order to observe one they might have a chance of explaining. Lab rats were a strange, brainy breed who preferred the abstract to the real. They liked mysteries they could solve, and the human condition was much more manageable when you divided it into experimental chunks that could be analyzed on the computer monitor. Some people weren't good at life with all its confusing emotional and social demands, so they retreated to analyze it from a distance. Angela was one of them, for so many reasons, and it grieved him deeply that she would never have a place to heal, to fit in, even if it was with a group of misfits. She would have been safe here. That was his plan, to isolate and protect her. But it couldn't be done, and maybe he should have known that. She was his most ambitious experiment, and to understand her might have helped unravel the mysteries of extreme abuse.

Why some children survive and thrive despite it, and sadly, why most don't. Perhaps the experiment was always doomed to fail, but if that was the case, only he could end it. If she had to be stopped, he would stop her. No fucking government agency was going to wipe her from the record books as if she didn't exist. No, she was going out in a blaze of glory. He was about to turn away when he noticed the most brilliant of the lab rats, Sammy Tran. Sammy was peering at his computer screen with the intensity of a teenager caught up in a video game. It wasn't unusual for him to be here this late. Peter had found him asleep at his desk at all hours, but something about the man's body language caught his attention. The lab was freezing, but Sammy had just mopped his forehead with his sleeve, as if he were sweating. Peter's gut told him something was wrong, but he was already on overload and didn't need to borrow trouble. It was stress. Not Sammy's, his own. He was overreacting. Sammy was fine. Peter was reading his own reactions into his employee. Sammy had always been the calm before, during, and after the storm. There were plenty of people at Smarttech capable of cracking under pressure, but not him. The sky would fall before he would. Sammy was fine. With that he turned from the window to go. Swallowing was painful, mere breathing was painful, but pain had never been a reliable state from which to judge anything. The scientist in him was trained to be dispassionate and to discard theories that weren't valid. You could not cling to the patently false, no matter how much you wanted it to be true. Dreams and illusions were the antithesis of scientific progress. He had learned that in his lab rat days, and it had served him well. He did not like going outside the law, but better he than the government. Better he than Ron Laird or some other Philistine, who had no concept of the exquisite perfection of soul he was dealing with. How terribly, terribly sad, he thought, to waste such a gift "GET rid of the knife!" Jordan surged to his knees and roared at Angela with such force her legs buckled. Dizziness rocked her, but she had enough presence of mind to know that his behavior didn't make any sense. Nothing about it felt real. It was as strange and stark and fuzzy at the edges as a dream. A

sick-stomach dream, she used to call them when she was a kid because she would wake up from them dizzy and nauseous, with the smell of fear in her nostrils. "Get rid of it, goddamit!!" The knife slipped from her hand and fell to the floor. She tried to pick it up and stumbled. Her legs didn't want to stay underneath her. It felt like she was on a moving sidewalk and couldn't get off. One thing after another shocked her senses: the white rage in his face, the strangely gyrating room, her own nakedness. Her thighs and belly and even the dark triangle between her legs were totally exposed. A startled sound slipped from her lips. How? How? Dizziness made her drop to the floor, and an anchor took her down, spiraling down. Why was he shouting at her? She had only meant to cut him loose. She had tortured him enough. His voice was distant and muted now. She couldn't make out what he was saying, and there were other voices shouting at her, too. Someone was being slapped. She heard it, the sharp crack of a hand against tender flesh. Her face stung like fire. What had she done? Why was he shaking her? Peter, don't hit me! No, don't say that! I couldn't have hurt Adam. I loved him. Now her hands and feet were bleeding. She was crawling over a floor of broken dolls. Hundreds of dolls. They were in jagged pieces, as if someone had thrown them down and smashed them. There was blood everywhere. People were crying out for help, but she couldn't get to them. "Do as you're told, and no one will get hurt. " The jaguar roared at her, and she roared back. "Fooled you, fooled you," a bird shrieked. Why did he keep shouting at her? Her father was having a heart attack. He was already dead, and yet he kept shouting. "It's not working! More voltage, more pressure on the paddles, turn it higher!"

She did as she was told! Did as she was told! Who killed Adam? She did. Oh, God, she did. "When I say rain, rain, go away, you won't remember anything. It will all be gone. " "Wake up, Angela. It's all over. Everything's gone. You're safe. Safe!" But Angela couldn't wake up this time. Her yawning and spiraling mind took her to depths she wasn't supposed to go. The void had always been her place of refuge. Its darkness had protected her, but now everything was exposed, all the hidden corners and crevices, all the devastating secrets. Her mind plunged her into the miasma of her past and forced her to relive what she'd done. And what they'd done to her. SHE was lying on a rattan couch. Her hands were behind her, bound at the wrist. Her feet were tied, too. She tried to move them and felt the ropes. She also felt naked skin, her own, against the back of her hands, and that was all the feedback she needed. She knew immediately where she was and what had happened. There was no more screaming, no voices, no fever. Her head was clear and her body cool. Opening her eyes confirmed everything. She was now the hostage. He hadn't tied her well, but she wasn't going far without clothes. At least he'd covered her with a sheet. She didn't see him at first. The hurricane lamps had burned down, and in the deep golden haze, she could just make out a figure standing by the screen that separated the rooms. He was still bare-chested and wearing shorts, but he looked more like a beach partygoer than the roaring beast she'd been dealing with. He'd obviously showered or taken a swim, and he had a bottle of something in his hand. It appeared to be a beer. "Sleeping beauty awakens," he said. "Did I faint?" she asked. He nodded. "All I wanted you to do was drop the knife, but you went down, too. You're okay, though. I checked you out." She bridled. "I'll bet you did." "Hey, I'm a doctor. That's what I do." "A doctor bellows at his patients? He ties them up?" "I was trying the jaguar thing ... being bold."

He gave her a look from across the room that could have been a smile but involved little more than his eyes. Her heart came alert to the threat. She was naked and restrained, and no one knew that better than him. He didn't look bent on revenge at the moment, but he couldn't have forgotten what she did to him. She hadn't forgotten it. "My fever broke," she said, ignoring the rest of it for the moment. "A few hours ago with a little help from my fiends. I had a medical bag in the truck with some antibiotics in it. Somehow you missed it." She didn't think it necessary to inform him that if she'd been looking for it, she would have found it. He knew what she could do. "Don't you want to know how you got that way?" he asked. "Tied up? Let me guess. I conveniently dropped the knife in your lap and collapsed in front of you." "At least you haven't lost your sense of humor." He took a long drink from the bottle. ' me about Adam." It was no longer hot in the room. She was freezing. "What made you ask about him?" "He's all you talked about while you were unconscious. Adam. You must have mentioned his name a dozen times. Apparently, he was one of your casualties." A casualty, yes, Adam could be called a casualty. The dream had brought him back. But she couldn't talk about that. It would destroy her. Stiff-voiced, she said, "I'd rather not." The beer hit the nearest tabletop, and Jordan came across the room. "We're not negotiating this," he told her. "You're going to talk. You're going to tell me everything." "I don't remember Ada--him." "You sure as hell do. You said you killed him. You said you loved him. I heard you."

She drew up her legs to ward off the shakiness. This wasn't fair. It wasn't right. What did he actually know about her, except what he'd read in her dossier, and most of that was lies. What did he know about loneliness? For him it was missing your parents because they'd moved to another state. She was talking about the kind of isolation that separated you from everything human. She hadn't believed anyone could be lonelier than she was until she met Adam. Her heart had gone out to him immediately, but no matter how she tried to help, she made it worse, just like when she was a child. What did you call someone like that? A curse? An angel of death? When she tried to talk, her voice got tangled up on itself. Only one word could be clearly heard. "Poison." "You poisoned him? That isn't the way Angel Face does it." "Why do you keep calling me that?" The sheet slid down her chest as she tried to sit up. There was no way to stop it with tied hands. "There is no Angel Face. She's a software program." "What do you mean, a software program?" "The company I work for has developed a criminal profiling program that uses supercomputers and AIR software to crunch data from brain scans. It can predict violent behavior, but it's still in the simulation stages. Angel Face is a virtual serial killer. She's programmed to react to stressors like rejection and humiliation, but she's not real." "Angela, men have died. A doctor in my own hospital died. I found him myself. Someone is killing them, and if it isn't Angel Face, who is it?" "I don't know." Her voice cracked with an emotion she rarely allowed herself to express. "But someone is lying to you. There is no Angel Face, and I had nothing to do with the death of that doctor, or any other doctors." "Except your father, except Adam." "My foster father was a butcher, and Adam--" "What was he? Tell me about him." "Untie me first. I took off your blindfold when you asked." "Not quite the same thing." She ignored his mordant tone and came back with, "Do you really think I'm so dangerous that I have to be restrained?"

"I know you are." "Coward," she countered under her breath. Whatever impulse she may have felt to goad him further died when he walked over and took hold of the sheet that covered her. It had dropped so low her breasts were nearly exposed. His knuckles were warm as they brushed her skin, and the quickening she felt was almost painful. He startled her even more by drawing the sheet up to her chin. She hadn't expected that, or that he would hesitate long enough to study her, his hand still at her throat. She saw the simmering male interest in his gaze. He wasn't cool or disinterested. That was only a facade. Why wasn't he taking advantage of the situation? The question stayed with her. He could do anything he wanted with her, just as she had with him, yet he was covering her instead of exposing her. Maybe he was a better person than she was. Or maybe he wasn't as desperate. He must have seen the questions in her eyes, because he settled himself beside her on the couch, his hip brushing her thighs. It was too close for her, but if she tried to move, she lost the sheet. "I'm trying to understand," he said. "Help me understand." He seemed to sense her confusion. "You, Angela. I'm trying to understand you. Tell me you didn't do those things. Make me believe you didn't." He wanted to believe her. There was conviction in his voice: power, anger, frustration, fear--and conviction. It was amazing to hear. The huskiness alone made her heart leap wildly. "Why didn't you put my clothes back on?" she demanded to know. If she didn't break the tension, it would break her. "Your clothes were drenched with sweat and fruit juice." He got up to show her. Her shorts lay by the door, and he picked them up, dangling them from a finger. "You want them on? I'll be happy to put them on you." She shook her head, not conceding anything. "Why didn't you put something else on me then? Why did you leave me naked?" "You'll notice there's a sheet over you. It's dry."

She couldn't argue with that, so she chose something else. "Cut me loose, please. I was going to cut you loose. That's why I had the knife." "Tell me about Adam first." He crossed his arms and locked in on her, waiting. This was his only condition, he seemed to be saying. He wanted to know about Adam. Angela wasn't sure she could do it. She had never meant to hurt Adam, but it had happened, and she'd felt like a monster tormenting a helpless, wounded animal. How could Jordan, or anyone, understand how that felt? He hadn't lived her life or carried her crosses. It hadn't happened to him. "Talk to me, Angela. Give me a reason to believe you." His voice was low, hot, and persuasive. She prayed this wasn't just a ploy to get information out of her. It was one she'd used herself. "I lost an entire year, and I still can't remember most of it. Only the part about Adam. But I didn't kill anyone, not intentionally. I know that." "Just tell me what you remember." "He was a recluse." She spoke in a monotone, forcing all the emotion from her voice. Only when it was as numb as her mind could she go on. "He was a brilliant, selfeducated scientist, but he was also a survivalist who'd totally isolated himself from everyone. He lived in an underground bunker in the desert." She hesitated but didn't look over to see Jordan's reaction. "I was asked to get information about a smart chemical weapon he was working on, and I managed to get access to him by posing as a grocery deliverer. The instructions were to put the groceries in a shed on his property and leave immediately, but I pretended to hurt myself. That brought him out of hiding, and he trusted me immediately, sadly for him. "After the initial contact, I went back and told Brandt I couldn't do it, that it would be cruel to take advantage of him. I told him Adam was too vulnerable and confused. I'd never felt that way about any of my other sources, as if I were taking advantage of their naivete. But Adam was a frightened child in a forty-year-old man's body, making a weapon he thought would protect him

from his enemies, whoever he imagined they might be." "Brandt?" Jordan asked, clearly not familiar with the name she'd mentioned. Angela didn't stop to explain. She had begun to have her own suspicions of Peter Brandt, but she couldn't dredge that up, too, not now. "I finally agreed to maintain contact with Adam," she explained, "but only because I was compelled to help him. That's what I thought we were doing, helping him. I tried to make Brandt understand that with some human contact, Adam might come to see that his fears weren't real. And Brandt agreed, or so I thought. But once I had the information about the weapon, someone decided that Adam was too dangerous to live. And since I was the only person who could get close to him, Brandt implied that I would have to do it. I refused, of course." In the same low voice, she told Jordan all of that. And one more thing. "I think Adam became a symbol of the people I couldn't help as a child, the patients my foster father hurt and blamed on me. Adam was those people, and he was me, too. He was all the tortured people in the world." She sank into the cushions, unaware that she'd been holding herself so rigidly. Jordan prompted her by asking, "But you couldn't help him?" "Help him?" She had to believe he didn't know how that question ripped her open. "I foolishly thought I could restore his trust, and instead I delivered him poisoned groceries." "You knew they were poisoned?" "No, but I should have. I knew he was considered dangerous, and they wanted him stopped. Adam trusted me implicitly, and he wolfed down the food as soon as I brought it." Her throat caught fire. Tears welled, but she shook them away. "He died right in front of me, and there was nothing I could do to help him. I'll never forget the bewildered expression on his face as he looked at me, trying to understand how I could do such a thing. I confirmed every fear he had about the human race. No one could be trusted. "It was terrible. God, it was terrible." She could not go on, and Jordan didn't push her. Her head ached with fatigue. She had to rest. She needed sleep, just a short nap, and she was already tumbling into unconsciousness when his voice brought her

back. "If you're telling the truth," he said, "then you did nothing wrong, except what you were trained to do as an informant." Anger roused her. "I was an informant because they blackmailed me, and only because they blackmailed me. You saw the videotape of my foster father and me. They used it against me." "Who are they? he asked. "And who is Brandt?" God, he was cold. She'd just laid bare her soul to him, and he continued to question her like a criminal. "I don't know who they are. The powers that be, I suppose. Isn't that always who they are? Peter Brandt is my boss at Smarttech, the company I work for." "He's the one who wants you dead? Is that what you believe?" She turned away, refusing to talk to him anymore. She didn't care what he did to her or what anyone did to her. And if you didn't care, you couldn't be hurt. At least she'd learned that lesson. What confounded her was why she hadn't learned that her search was futile. Why she stubbornly held on to the fantasy that there must be at least one good man out there somewhere. God, how stupid was that? She continued to believe it could be him, and he continued to disappoint her. Someone should kill him for that. "If you're not the serial killer, who is?" he asked from across the room. "Who is Angel Face?" She shook her head. "Someone broke into my home, Angela. They left threatening messages on my pager, and when I didn't respond, they killed my colleague. If you didn't do it, who did? Who killed those other doctors? Who's trying to kill me?" She'd answered her last question for Dr. Jordan Carpenter. But he sensed that and came over to her. He knelt next to the couch. "Angela, don't stop talking. Help me; don't stop talking." "You know more about me than I do," she said bitterly. "You tell me." "I don't know enough, Angela. Not enough to defend you." "What do you mean?" She turned to him, afraid. Her heart lifted, but she

was afraid to believe what she'd heard. He'd said something about defending her. Was that what he'd said? Why? Oh, God, no--it was happening again. She could feel the tiniest quiverings of hope, the quick desperate thrust, and she couldn't let herself believe anymore. She couldn't.

CHAPTER 19. Jordan's black leather satchel sat on the coffee table. He pulled it to the floor and dug through the contents, searching for the cell phone he'd stashed in one of the pockets. If he couldn't raise Firestarter, then he would find someone else who would listen to him. That might be the smarter move, since Angela's story had raised questions in his mind about the agent's veracity. "What are you doing?" Angela asked. "Calling the CIA." "Why?" The hush in her voice made him hesitate. She was frightened. There was so much at stake. For her, everything. But there was no other way to go about this. He couldn't take her back without the cooperation of the authorities. It was too risky, and he wasn't leaving her here. "Because no one's heard your side of the story," he told her, "and I'm going to make sure they do. I'm going to explain why you couldn't have done what they're accusing you of and why they have to let me bring you back without the threat of apprehension or arrest." "Why I couldn't have done it?" "Yes, Angela. Help me make this call." "I've told you everything I can remember. Please believe me, I have." By then he'd found the cell phone and brought up the phone book function, where the agent's number was stored. He hadn't trusted himself to remember this time, especially since he might have gotten it wrong the last time he called. "Jordan, wait. Don't call them." All it took was one button to initiate the automatic dialing function, and Jordan had already hit it. She sounded almost desperate, but the phone had begun to ring, and he hadn't expected that. He'd expected to get a recorded message telling him that he was out of range, and the call couldn't be put through. It was hard to hear over the crackling on the line, but if nothing else, he had to hold on long enough to see if a connection could be made. "It will be all right," he told her, mouthing the words. "We don't have any choice in this."

"Jordan, they aren't going to believe anything you say!" Jordan held up a hand, warning Angela to be quiet as a man's voice came on the line. The greeting was disturbingly familiar. "Yes?" "You're there? Firestarter?" "You have the right number. Go ahead." It was the agent, and Jordan didn't know whether to be relieved or wary. For now he would play it right down the middle. If anyone was going to show their cards in this game, it would be Firestarter. "I have something you want," he said. "Where is she?" "In a safe place, and she stays there until I get what / I want." "What are you talking about?" "I'm talking about concessions." Jordan had done some research on the agency's chain of command after Fire- starter "disappeared" and had familiarized himself with names and titles. In the event he needed a future contact, he was going straight to the top. "I want a conference call with you and the deputy director for operations. Angela Lowe has an interesting story to tell, and I intend to see that she gets a fair hearing." "A fair what! Are you crazy?" Jordan could hear the scrape of chair legs from across the continent. Apparently, the agent had sprung from his seat. "You know that can't happen, and you know why," Firestarter said, steel reinforcing the soft menace in his voice. "Just tell me where she is, and I'll send someone there to bring her back. There's no need for you to do it." "There's every need for me to do it. She surrendered herself to me, and I'm not turning her over until I can guarantee her safety." "Oh, Christ, not you, too. What the hell has she done? She's fucked you up, hasn't she? And now you're going to fuck everything up."

"Nobody's fucked anything up but you. Why the hell didn't you answer your phone or return my calls? Listen to me. Angela Lowe was set up. She was set up by the company she works for, and I'm going to make sure she has a chance to tell her side." "Carpenter, don't be an idiot. Carpenter--" Angela was frantically shaking her head and trying to tell Jordan something, but the agent's voice had dropped several decibels. He'd begun to whisper secrets in Jordan's ear, such disturbing secrets that Jordan had no choice but to listen. It was also clear that he knew where Jordan was, at least generally, probably thanks to the satellite link. "This is all part of her plan," Firestarter said, "and she hasn't missed a beat. She lured you down there to kill you, man. It's not hard to dispose of a body in a Mexican jungle. People disappear without a trace, and she knew you would follow her. All her victims did. They became obsessed and walked away from their lives, just like you did." "That's bullshit," Jordan countered. "She had plenty of opportunities to kill me, and she didn't take them." "Of course not; that's not her game. She doesn't want the easy victory. She'll screw with your head until she's won you over. But it's your heart she wants. That's how she kills, remember? It's symbolic." Jordan remembered. His colleague had died of massive heart failure. "Once she has you eating out of her hand, the game is over. You're nothing, man. You're dead. It's all about control with her." Jordan's mouth curled in distaste. He had accused her of the very same thing, but hearing it from this unfeeling bastard made him sick. "I want a hearing and a guarantee that she won't be apprehended or charged with any crimes. If I don't get it, you'll never see her again." "You can't do that--" Jordan raised his voice, drowning the agent out. "She's regained her memory. She didn't kill her source. She didn't kill any of them. It's a setup, and I swear to you, she will tell her story." A sofa pillow hit the floor, and Jordan looked up to see that Angela's face had gone waxy white. She'd dislodged the pillow to get his attention, and she was trying to tell him something without being heard by the agent. "They'll kill me," she said, mouthing the words. "If they find out I remember Adam, they ' kill me. "

Jordan moved closer, but it was impossible to pick up what else she was saying with Firestarter in his other ear. And it was too late, anyway. He'd already told the agent she'd regained her memory and that she hadn't killed her source. Who else could Jordan have meant but Adam? She looked terrified, and Jordan didn't know how to reassure her that no one was going to hurt her. They would have to get through him first. He drew a cross over his heart, hoping she understood that he was making her a promise. But by that time, the agent had launched into a diatribe, and he was making accusations against Angela that Jordan couldn't believe and didn't want to believe. Among other things, he claimed she was a pathological liar. "And that's the least of it," he said, "she's been diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic by a board-certified psychiatrist!" "Who was the doctor?" Jordan broke in to ask. "How do I know you're not lying to me?" The agent was quick to respond. The psychiatrist's name was Mona Fremont, and she strongly believed that Angela was a danger to herself and to others. Since the law now required that such cases be reported, she had made Angela's records available to the agency. He went on to make other claims that Jordan couldn't refute and hadn't expected. Jordan felt as if he were carrying a pack on his back, and it got heavier with every step he took. After a time, he stopped pacing and simply stood there, listening. The need to rationalize what he was being told was powerful, but he had to resist it now. He'd never taken the case against Angela seriously, but to dismiss the agent's arguments would mean that Jordan was as insane as they claimed she was. The consequences were too grave. What if he'd been wrong all along? His heart was pounding as he turned to look at her, and she was clearly frozen with fear. Was that guilt? Did she know the damning things the agent was telling him? Firestarter believed Angela was an accident that had already happened. She was delusional and could revert to that state at any time, and she was too dangerous to be at large. But he no longer wanted Jordan to bring her back. He had another solution. Silent, Jordan heard the agent out. "It's not hard to dispose of a body in a Mexican jungle," Firestarter reminded him as the tense conversation came to an end.

"Who was that?" Angela blurted as Jordan hung up the phone. He dropped the cell back into the medical bag and continued to stare at the floor. "The agent who first contacted me about you." "What did he say?" Jordan's head came up slowly. "He wants me to kill you." The ropes cut into Angela's wrists. They burned until she gasped. "My God, you can't be serious." "He's very serious." "But that's murder. He's asking you to commit murder?" He barely reacted to the word. "When you're on a serial killer's death list, it's called self-defense, Angela. The agency can't take such extreme measures. They have no legal defense, but I do." "I don't believe this," she whispered. His eyes were blue and painfully hard. "He said you lured me down here to kill me." "That's not true. I didn't lure--" He was moving toward the couch, overriding her. "He claims you're lying about regaining your memory. It's all part of your game, and the Adam story is a ploy for sympathy. You fixate on godlike doctors, expecting them to be paragons. But when they turn out to be mere flawed humans like your father, you feel justified in killing them." "Jordan--" "He actually wanted me to believe that you felt pleasure when you killed my colleague, knowing I would be the one to find him." "But ... you didn't believe him." "He said you're a paranoid schizophrenic who imagines people are trying to kill you, and if I untie you, I'll never leave this hut alive." "Jordan, none of that is true!" Angela watched him kneel and pick something up. She couldn't tell what it was at first, but she saw a flash of silver and felt an answering flash of despair. He was holding the knife. No, she thought, no. She didn't really believe that he would hurt her, but a burning sadness gripped her. This was a man who saved lives. He wasn't a killer.

There had been so few things in her life she could take on faith. She had to be able to trust her instincts now. "Please, put that down," she said. "You're scaring me." Jordan laid the blade of the knife in his open palm, as if he were examining it. "Angela, if anything that man said about you was true, then--" He looked up and sent her imagination stumbling with dread. "Then I'm a monster and should be killed, is that what you mean?" Panic stirred as he started toward her. She still couldn't believe that he would hurt her, but her heart had gone so terribly quiet. It was impossible to take her eyes off him as he came across the room. He rolled the knife in his fingers and changed his grip on the handle. The blade shivered and dipped. Angela sucked in a breath as it disappeared, sheathed in a loop on the belt of his shorts. He had put it away. He had put the knife away. She should have been relieved, but something was wrong. His hand was shaking. Muscle tugged against bone in his clenched face. He looked almost angry. Yes, angry. "Jordan?" she whispered. "Christ--" He dropped to his knees beside her, shaking his head in disbelief. "A CIA agent is telling me to kill you, that I'll walk away a free man, a hero, because I stopped Angel Face." Harsh laughter stuck in his throat. He looked as if he couldn't believe what he was about to say, as if he couldn't believe anything. "He's telling me to kill you ... and all I want to do is hold you." Angela let out a tiny utterance. It was incomprehensible, but they both knew what it meant. He gave her a tug and caught her as she fell into his arms. "All I want to do is this," he said, "to hold you until we both stop shaking. And then I'm going to find that agent and make him tell me the truth, the whole goddamn story." Angela was half off, half on the couch and clinging to him with every ounce of emotional strength she had. She had no arms to hold him with, and it was a struggle to breathe the way he gripped her, but nothing had ever felt as sweet as this unexpected embrace.

"Just until we stop shaking," he told her again. She didn't understand how he'd come to the decision, and she wasn't sure he knew, either. Some needs were instinctive and difficult for the mind to comprehend. Moments ago, he'd been talking about killing her and he'd made it sound like his duty to mankind. Now he was holding her and shaking as hard as she was. No, she couldn't imagine what had changed his mind, unless he had the same crazy feeling she did, that somehow this was all inevitable; they were inevitable. "I hope I'm right about you," he said, gathering her even tighter. "I hope you are, too." She couldn't laugh, although that was what sprang up, laughter. It stung her throat. He swung back to look at her, and she told him the truth, as far as she knew it. "I don't know for sure what I've done, but I don't believe I could wantonly kill under any circumstances. I just don't." His expression was thoughtful, searching. "I hurt someone once," he said, "an innocent who didn't deserve it. I don't ever want to do that again." Angela found that remarkable. It sounded as if he were more concerned about hurting her than he was about his own welfare. "Is that why you're giving me the benefit of the doubt? Because you hurt someone?" She could feel him release her even before he actually let go. His arms tightened and a sigh of reluctance escaped him. Her heart picked up those two brief signals and knew he was about to take away the warmth and the strength, even the ray of hope, she'd felt in his arms. There was little she could do but let him settle her back on the couch. When he had the sheet in place, he tried to answer her question. "The agent should have told me to keep you here until he could send someone to pick you up. When he started urging me to kill you myself, I knew something was wrong." Angela was surprised. "You don't think the intelligence community does things like that? I was only on the fringes of it, but nothing would surprise me." He shook his head. "It was a gut feeling. He was selling too hard, pressuring me." "So it wasn't anything I said? I was hoping you'd decided to believe me. Probably foolish of me, right?" His eyebrow tilted. "Believe you, Angela? How can I do that when you

don't know what to believe yourself?" That brought a rueful smile to her lips. There was no faulting his logic, but she hadn't meant that. She'd meant believe in her. Saying so was out of the question, however. It was asking him to accept on faith everything she told him and ignore the mounting evidence against her. The risk of rejection was huge. She must have looked terribly forlorn, because he reached out to touch her arm. She liked him there, at her side, touching her bare arm almost possessively. Or was she fantasizing again, always fantasizing? "I guess that was the wrong answer," he said. "I guess so, yes." "I don't believe you could kill anyone, Angela. I have never believed that, not from the first." She struggled to speak. He had more faith in her than she did in herself. "Thank you." "There's no need to--" "Jordan, put your hand on my heart," she implored. "Feel how hard it's beating." He did, resting his hand on the softness above her breasts. "That's me. That's who I am. I can't prove my innocence, not even to myself, but you can hear that, can't you? You can hear what my heart is trying to say?" She looked away, devastated. This was costing her too much. "It's the only proof I have." His hand was light on her flesh. Light, but warm. "What is it you do to me?" A hint of wonder crept into his voice. "I left my life behind to come after you, patients who need me, my family, everyone. Can you tell me why I did that?" She wasn't able to do anything but shake her head. "It feels like nothing matters except you. Why is that? All I want to do is protect you from those bastards."

She struggled to sit up. "Untie me, please. I can't talk to you like this. Take off the ropes." His pressured sigh told her that was not a good idea. "You still don't trust me?" she asked. "I don't trust me." The logic of that eluded her. She was the one tied up. How could it be any worse if she weren't? But before she could make that argument, he was reaching for her shoulders to turn her around. She tried to anticipate him, but got flustered and went the wrong way. And that was when they touched. His hand brushed over the most sensitive part of her breast, and her hiss of surprise stopped them both. Excruciatingly blue eyes. She wasn't about to look at them. "What's happening?" He asked the question. He wasn't touching her breast, but his hand was still close enough to awaken every nerve ending. And the impulse to close the gap between them was overpowering. She didn't know what to do. Fortunately, he did. He took her by the shoulders, as he'd originally intended to, and turned her around. But when he touched her wrists, she let out another startled sound. There was no reason for it. He hadn't even begun to untie her yet. He'd done nothing to make her jump or make the air whistle softly through her teeth, but she did both anyway. Her skin was hypersensitive. It felt like she still had a fever and couldn't bear to be touched. Every point of contact seemed to tingle like a sweet little shock. "Are you all right?" "Yes." She fought not to react as he touched her again. If she didn't sit still, she would never get untied! "Am I hurting you? Rope burns or something?" "No, no, go ahead. I'll be fine." She should have known that his hands would give off this kind of energy. She'd seen it in her study. The deep blues and plumy reds of his somatosensory cortex had told her he was sensual and tactile. No wonder embarrassing little sounds were getting caught in her throat. When he

touched her, it sent signals zinging back and forth that only her pleasure center seemed to be able to read. Something hot tickled her palm. "Oh!" "What's wrong, Angela?" "I don't know." She shook her head. "I don't know." Gently he turned her around to look at her, and something unexpected. happened. Maybe it was her eyes. Maybe they pleaded with him to kiss her, maybe they didn't. But he glanced at her lips with such naked longing that she tilted toward him, offering them. He fought the wanting. She watched his jaw knot, and it thrilled her. "Angela, this is only going to complicate things." "I know, I know." She was backing off when he grasped her by the arms and brought her mouth to his. "Don't do mat," he warned. "Don't back away when I need to kiss you this badly." His mouth was as magical as his hands. The kiss brought up every feeling she had, and God, what feelings they were. Glorious and pounding. She rose up, and he brought her back, catching her in his arms. Their bodies melded with a hot rush of sensation. Her breasts flattened against his chest, and if not for a bit of sheet, their bare skin would have touched. Touched and sent fire into the night. When he released her, the sheet fell to her waist. "Beautiful," he whispered. "God, you are." Angela fought the ropes and moaned. She couldn't help it. The movement in the pit of her belly was too strong. Something powerful was tugging at her. It could sweep her under. "Untie me," she pleaded. "I don't think I can do that." The regret in his voice couldn't begin to compete with the hunger in his gaze. "So help me, God, I don't--" "Why not?" "Because I want you this way ... at my mercy."

She went very still. Even to breathe felt dangerous. This was the payback she'd been expecting all along ... he wanted his chance with her helpless to stop him ... and it felt as if she would surely thrill to every moment of being at his mercy ... if she lived.

CHAPTER 20. "IF you don't want me to do this, Angela, say no ... say it now." "Do this'?" "Touch you, make you moan ... make you mine." The inside of Angela's elbow was exposed because of the way her wrists were tied. Jordan brushed his fingers over the very pale, very tender skin. Angela's wrists twisted and tugged. She needed her hands. She needed them as she had never needed them before. How was she supposed to hug the drifting sheet to her breasts and to hide her face so he couldn't see the prickly heat creeping up her throat? How was she supposed to protect herself from a man who had just vowed to protect her? When that was one of the only things in life she'd ever wanted. Long fingers spun down to the inside of her wrist and swirled there, sending chills through her. Everything inside her that could curl up was curling up. Everything that could flutter, was. This would be the touching part, she thought. And he knew how to do it. Angela's body had already answered him, but her mind couldn't fathom the amount of control she'd given up. She didn't see how it was possible to let a man tie her up and do these things to her, not willingly, not the way her foster father had tried to control her every thought and move. Her first attempt to escape had been the night she ran away with Benjamin, her high school sweetheart. She'd taken back her life that night and vowed that no one would ever control her that way again. Of course, the car accident had brought the two of them back into the clutches of her father, and it had all ended in a desperate tragedy. She still felt responsible for Ben. He had trusted her. Adam had trusted her. And she had never meant to hurt either one of them. "Don't give me the choice," she whispered to Jordan. "I'm not capable of making it." His fingers stopped swirling, but Angela's stomach did not. It was light enough to float away. She was going to evaporate from the inside out and become nothing but vapor. There would be a cloud floating in the summer sky, and when people looked up, they would see traces of a woman's face. Angel Face, she thought with some irony. Jordan touched the ropes that looped her wrists, and her fingers furled.

She sensed that he couldn't, or wouldn't, make the decision. He was going to free her. And maybe that was exactly what she expected. But she did not want to be untied. She did not. Angela sat very still for a moment. What was she thinking? Everything about the realization came as a surprise. Control was the most precious thing she possessed. She had let her own father die to regain it. She had not killed him. But she had not saved him, either. The jungle had gone so quiet she wondered if it was listening to them. She chanced a look at Jordan, but he wasn't looking at her. He was still preoccupied with her curled fingers and the ropes that held her. "You want me to make this decision, don't you?" he said. "Yes, but why?" "It's about self-control, I think. You hold on to it so tightly it's beginning to suffocate you, but you don't know how to let go." He was right. So very right that it made her wonder about him. "Does it take one to know one?" she asked. A smile flickered, and Angela knew the pleasure of being right, too. He had done some thinking about this, she realized. "Some of us males hang on to our self-control like a badge of honor," he admitted. "It's not easy letting go of something you've worked that hard for. It goes against every law of survival." "But surviving isn't living," she pointed out. "It isn't. If you want the full experience, you have to take off the training wheels and ride." Yes, she needed to learn how to do that again, with someone like him, someone she could trust. God, how she prayed she could trust him. "Have you decided yet?" he asked her. "Have you?" "Do you mean have I decided for you?"

"Well ... yes." "You want to know if you can ever safely entrust yourself to anyone again?" he quarried. She gazed at him, so very impressed. "And how many people have entrusted their hearts to you?" His shrug was slow to come, perhaps even a little shy. Now she was impressed and touched. "A few," he said, "and like you, they all wanted to know they would be safe." "But there's never any way to know that for sure." "Not unless you take off the training wheels." / do want to know I'll be safe, she thought. / do want that. But I also want to know if I can moan. "Kiss me," she demanded softly. "Touch me." Make me, make me ... She fell toward him, and those were the last words either one of them uttered for some time, if they had uttered them at all. The rest was a spring flood. Everything drowned in the wake of his kisses. They pattered and splashed like soft rain. They poured. He filled her mouth and left it bereft. She felt him at her throat, spilling sighs all the way out to her shoulders. His hand was at the small of her back, accentuating the arch. His lips whispered to her breasts of forbidden pleasures. But the sensations were too strong. She had to catch her breath. "I'm not sure--" "Put yourself in my hands," he whispered. "I'll take care of you." Will you? Will you? He fell back to look at her, and she was struck by the way he touched her cheek and searched for something in her face; perhaps it was the secret to making a woman happy. But he already knew. Lord, did he. "Put yourself in these hands," he urged softly. "Do it."

His voice reverberated like a musical instrument. Its low, powerful tones told Angela what he wanted, but she couldn't let herself believe it. And then he actually held out his hands to her. Her wrists pulled against the ropes. They pulled against the riot of anticipation she felt. How could she do this? Make me, make me ... The sheet had long ago fallen away and bared her to the waist. She delicately thrust out her breasts, and the restraining ropes curved her body into a graceful arch. "Put yourself in these hands. " Trembling flesh on flesh. Burning heat on heat. She poured herself into his cupped hands. She put herself there, sighing at the thought of his fingers closing on her flesh. And when they did, her eyelids fluttered in wonderment, and her head fell back. He squeezed gently, sending a thrill through her that was paralyzingly sweet. She whimpered like a kitten. A soft growl rolled in his throat, and his hands climbed her body, questing, hungry. That was the moment it started: the swift and amazing transformation of Angela Lowe. She didn't know if she was coming apart or coming together, but she knew that none of these things had ever happened to her before. When their roles were reversed and he was her hostage, she'd tried to break his will, but he wouldn't let her. Now she understood why. It was too much. It felt life threatening. Her self-control was her last defense. "Touch you ... make you moan ... make you mine." He bent to her breast. What was she doing here, tied up and naked? Thrilling to every touch? A sudden tug on her flesh echoed the sharpness deep in her belly. His lips pulled on her in an urgent call to intimacy. They drew on her in a way that made her gasp for breath. She would have fallen over backward if he hadn't caught her and held her, but the power of his arms made her weaker. She didn't know how that was possible. She didn't know what to do. "/'// take care of you."

Will you, will you? She closed her eyes and felt energy, warmth. It shimmered down her body in a soft shock wave, and she knew it had to be his hands, hesitating at the curves of her waist before drifting lower. It was an exquisitely private caress. Angela squirmed against her bonds. Damn these ropes. The jungle was suffocatingly still. Was it listening? He was at her midriff, her belly button, her hips. He was everywhere, and the places he left behind ached as urgently as the new ones he found. He trailed sparkles across her skin with his fingertips. Maybe it shouldn't have surprised her that he could perform miracles with his hands, but there was only one miracle she could think about now, and that was the urgency between her legs. She was deeply grateful that he couldn't get there, not with her thighs and knees tightly compressed. Not with her ankles lashed together. It would have been the end of her. She was a firecracker. He could have set her off with a touch. One touch. And somehow he did. With just one. A finger stroke of fire. Somehow he got to her, and no amount of turning or twisting could stop him. Angela cried out as he touched her. It was a sound as aroused and desperate for relief as the blushing flesh he'd discovered. It was too tender there, too hot and throbbing for even the lightest caress. If he continued, she would surely, surely, break apart. And it wouldn't be pretty. "Let me go--" Her plea went unheard, and she didn't have the strength to say it again. She lost touch with what he was doing for a moment, and then she felt the sheet bell and float down to her ankles. There was nowhere to look but where he was looking--at her long, pale body, her tender pink nipples. If they didn't come apart, then she would. The pressure was mounting, and she was afraid the release would take her with it, like a hail of fire from an archer's bow. It was a beautiful vision, but it was frightening, too. The only thing she could hear was breathing, hers and his, hotly aroused from his teeth, and at her clenched loins.

The sheet fell to the floor, and she was exposed to her curled toes. At any other time the sight would have shocked her. She was bound hand and foot. But now it aroused her. Everything he did aroused her. How terrifying. "You can't!" She squealed as he climbed above her. Clearly, he could. He straddled her, gazing at the naked loveliness before him, then he bent low to bury his face in her curls and breathe in her female scent. From there he moved up and dusted each hip with a kiss, making a triangle out of her lower torso. Angela waited for him to follow the arrow back down to its lowest point. But he rocked up again and plucked lightly at the swollen buds of her breasts. Her body arched tighter with every inch of skin he aroused. "Too much," she whispered, "it's too much." She was taking that ride, and her bike had no brakes. Now he was down between her legs, and she was flying. His hands slid beneath her and lifted her to his mouth. Warm breath rifled dark curls, and a groan of pleasure slipped out of him as he dropped little kisses here and there, momentarily relieving the pressure. And then he began to use his tongue. Angela's spine flexed like a harp string at its highest tension. She swallowed a gasp as he took outrageously unfair advantage of the way her knees wobbled about. But, Lord, it was an amazing thing he did. Delving deeply into the tender nest, he created the wettest, softest, most scintillating chaos she'd ever known. Her head fell back and her body ignited. There was nothing she could do to protect herself from the rocketing pleasure. His mouth was the miracle. It was pure blue heaven, and she was an angel. But it was the groan in his throat that set her off as much as the feelings he elicited. Helpless, she answered with a sound that felt as if it had been hidden inside her forever, from a time before time. A moan. He made her moan in ecstasy. And no man had ever done that. She felt it come from the center of her being. And with it streamed feelings that were indescribable. If they'd been colors, they would have been the blue flames of the deep limbic or the pleasure center's crimson fires. If they'd been sounds, they would been the heart songs of the primeval forest. She cried, too. And every creature in the jungle knew what it meant, that sound. A sweet and terrible pressure broke her open, broke her in two, and even while she was crying out and whirling helplessly in its

power,, she fought against her bonds. She needed to be free. Her arms longed for contact with the man who had reduced her to this. "Jordan, untie me," she begged. "I'm not done." He's not done. Dear Lord. "But I need to hold you, I need you to hold me, please." "God, yes," he whispered. She drank in the smell of him as he brought her up and cushioned her head against his shoulder. And while he worked free the ropes at her wrists, she reveled in the textures of muscle and skin. He was a big man, a good man. She let out a sob as the restraints dropped away. Her arms were so stiff she couldn't move them without pain, and she was grateful when he draped them around his neck and gathered her close. Emotion filled her throat. "Just until we stop shaking," he told her. She curled into his shoulder. "I will never stop shaking." But she did eventually. He stroked her hair until she felt safe enough to shudder, probably with relief. She could almost have fallen asleep, but there was a vibrancy inside her that wouldn't close its eyes. "My ankles are still tied," she whispered. He glanced down at her with feigned shock. "We'd better take care of that." "Yes, we'd better," she agreed, "and quickly." To clear up any confusion, she added, "So you can make love to me. Properly." He sucked in a breath as if he'd taken a punch. But he had her untied and removed the rest of his clothing in mere moments, and even that was too long for Angela. She felt another of those half-moan, half-sigh sounds coming on, and it tugged at her deeply. She wondered if he felt the pull. His ragged breathing told her he felt something. Within moments, the ropes were gone, and her legs fell apart quite wantonly. That was only partly her idea. They were nearly as limp and

sore as her arms, but her only experience of pain was the anticipation she felt as he came down over her on all fours. God, that was thrilling. He was as fierce and predatory as the jaguar. If she'd had any thought of resisting him, it died with that one supremely deliberate act. She saw herself in his hungry gaze and couldn't look away. She was naked, as transparent as a newborn. But she was also a woman who ached for completion so deeply there was no way to hide it. He had already changed her, and she welcomed whatever else this wild ride brought. Make me, make me. It was her chant. "Make me yours," She said it with throaty need, and he responded with a powering need of his own. He cupped her face and stared at her until she felt penetrated to her innermost depths. And with a deep, drilling flex of his loins, she was. Penetrated. The fantasy was fulfilled and so was she. Penetrated. It was beautiful, beauty itself. She felt as if it had always been this way, and yet it hadn't happened all at once. When he'd come up against her, he'd felt like a blunt force, impossibly large. Only with gentle insistence and steady strength, had he found his way in. To her innermost depths. Done. He was in. And driving all the way to her center. They moved together. They moved against each other. Their bodies clashed and clung, learning a new language that was inarticulate but far more expressive than words. The sensations were so bright that everything else began to blur. Angela felt as if she were in crisis, as if her fever had come back, full force. And for one split second, the chaos became clarity. She understood why she'd met this man, why she'd brought him here, the why of it all. Everything was laid out for her in that one moment, and then she lost it to the tidal wave that engulfed her. Her vision was flung into the air and suspended there like sea spray, sparkling in the sun. When it crashed to the shore, everything she knew crashed with it. Chaos again. Beautiful, mindless chaos. From oblivion to clarity and back again, and the only thing left in its wake was a silvery stream of feeling, pouring through her open heart.

That was all she had when it was over, an opened heart. But it was more than she could ever remember having before. Jordan lay above her, his hands buried in her hair and his chin resting on her forehead. A vibration ran through him, and because they were still joined, she vibrated, too. It didn't seem possible that two human beings could be this close. Nothing like it had ever happened to her before, and it was so new and precious, she was afraid it might not happen again. He rocked back to look down at her, but she was suddenly shy. "What's wrong?" he asked. "Nothing, I'm fine, it's just--" His expression turned quizzical, and finally she blushed. "It's just that we're, that you're--" She glanced down. "You know." "Inside you? Wasn't that where you wanted me to be?" Her body answered him. It tightened in the very area they were speaking of, and she saw what it did to him. He let out a sharp breath, and his blue eyes darkened dramatically. "It feels like somebody wants me to be there," he said. Heat rolled into her cheeks, which must be glowing by now. He didn't seem to realize how awkward this was for her, lying beneath him, still intimately joined but without the blind intensity that had brought them together. This was the moment when people took stock of each other and wondered what had possessed them. She wasn't thinking that, but she was thinking. "It just hit me that only moments ago we were enemies," she explained. He settled back and looked at her, really looked, as if he, himself, would give anything to know it all, the whole story of Angela Lowe and her various guises. He wasn't the only one. "What are we now?" she asked. "I don't know," he answered. "But I don't think enemies quite tells the story." Lying beneath him, she wondered if he was the one. If all of her crazy

dreams and fantasies were not so crazy after all. The others may have been figments of her desperate need, but it suddenly seemed possible that he was not. That was the realization that she'd had during her vision, but she was afraid to let herself believe it now. She wanted it too much. THEY'D found a cot in the closet and set it up. Now they were cuddled on its lumpy gauze mattress with nothing but mosquito netting draped around them, but neither one of them could sleep. There was too much ground to cover and so little time. The sense of urgency Angela lived with was subtly different now. She had protected herself by holding things at bay--memories, people, anything that could threaten her existence--but that was as sterile an environment as the lab she worked in. Now she was flooding with life and feelings. She wanted to know everything there was to know about Jordan Carpenter, and together, maybe they could both risk knowing more about Angela Lowe. Angela had done her best to answer his questions, but the one he'd just asked was more personal than he may have realized. "Why me?" he'd wondered as he lay facing her, his expression shadowed by flickering lamplight. "Why would your company use me to set you up?" "Because they ... they believed I was infatuated with you, and had been since childhood." "That doesn't compute, and I'll tell you why in a minute. First things first, were they right about the infatuation?" She shrugged, embarrassed. "Back in those days, I had a tendency to hero worship, yes. I may have read an article or two. And maybe I kept a scrapbook, but you weren't the only doctor to grace the pages." "You had other heroes?" "You and Dr. Ruth, yes." That elicited a smile, but his tone was serious. "You don't think it's strange that you and Angel Face could be twins? If the dossier is true, your histories are identical." "Our histories aren't identical, Jordan. It's my history. Someone stole my past, and they're using it to frame me." "But who? Firestarter? And why would he do that if he was really part of a conspiracy to silence you?" That was a question that confounded her, too. Every time she thought she

had an answer, it raised another question. They should have wanted her dead. As far as she knew, that was the fate of informants who became a threat. It made no sense that they would frame her for serial killings and risk giving her a voice in court. Why hadn't they just killed her? Unanswerable questions. Jordan must have heard the sigh that welled because he began to smooth her tangled hair. There was more than a touch of irony in his voice when he spoke. "I hate to say it, but the lust murderer story is a lot more plausible." "And I hate to disappoint you, but I am not, and have never been, a lust murderer." "There is nothing about you that disappoints me." He gentled her mouth with a tender touch. "Can I ask one last question?" "Maybe ... if you make it one I can answer." "Have you ever made love before?" What made him think she could answer that one? "Was that a yes or a no?" he prompted. "I don't think so," she said, shaking her head. "Normally, people remember that, Angela." "Yes, but in my case, there's that blank spot." The hmmm he made had a reflective tone to it. He had little choice but to believe her, except that it was all so strange she could hardly fault him for wondering, especially given what had happened while he was tied up. She'd been sick out of her mind, but still she had known how to get information out of a hostage. That had come from somewhere. "No men in your life?" he asked with some care. "Nothing romantic?" She was hesitant. "Well, one, but I was very young." "Was it Adam?" "Oh no, not Adam. He and I were kindred spirits but not lovers. It wasn't like that. I never got involved in that way with any of the sources, as least as far as I can remember. It was very odd. All I had to do was talk with them, talk from the

heart, and they would tell me anything." She still felt guilt about that. About taking advantage of people's trust, no matter who they were or what the reason. That might be the unpardonable sin, worse even than what her foster father had done, because she had done it. Jordan hugged her as if he could absolve her of any and all crimes, and they fell silent for a while. Angela was just drifting off when he whispered again, "Can you tell me about the one time? Sorry--I'm sorry, I can't seem to get it off my mind." "His name was Benjamin. He was the boy I ran away with in high school, the one who died on my father's operating table. We were very much in love, or thought we were. We ran away to get married, but neither one of us had had any experience with sex and didn't really know what we were doing." A sad smile surfaced. "We mostly kissed." The breath he let out sounded very much like a sigh. "I didn't know that was so important to me," he admitted. And she was glad it was. She hadn't been able to look at him before this. Now she did, smiling through the sudden sting of tears. He drew her close, and for a moment she felt perfectly safe and warm in their small, protected space. It was a rare feeling, one she never wanted to forget. But suddenly, without warning, he was pulling her tighter, squeezing her possessively, and she knew something was wrong. You couldn't hang onto anything too tightly, she'd learned, not feelings, not even the people. Life had a way of ripping everything you loved apart. "Angela, we're going back. You know that, don't you? I have to take you back." His hands closed in her hair and clasped her to him. Buried in the warmth of his shoulder, Angela couldn't answer him. And what would she have said, anyway? / can't go back. Something terrible will happen if I do. Somewhere in the distance, a big cat roared its displeasure, and Angela shuddered. She might not have fared so well if she'd come up against a jaguar now. The cat would have smelled her fear immediately.

CHAPTER 21. "DR. Benson, those sutures need to be done right, not fast. Take your time." TeRI hesitated, the threaded suture needle in her gloved hand. Steve Lloyd had been on her case since the valve replacement procedure began four hours ago, and she was getting rattled. The chief of cardiac surgery and several prominent visiting surgeons were in the gallery, observing, and this would have been a perfect opportunity for Teri to shine if Steve hadn't been questioning everything she did. Bastard, she thought. He was strutting his stuff at her expense. Not that it should have been a surprise. She'd been sandbagged before by male doctors who pretended to support her goals and then sold her out when it suited their purposes. What embittered her most was that she'd had to learn to think like a man to beat them at their own game, and generally speaking, she didn't like the way men thought, particularly male surgeons. They were elitists at heart. Sexist pigs, every one of them, and it infuriated her that she hadn't seen this coming. A bead of sweat escaped her surgical cap, rolled down the side of her face, and dropped directly into the stainless steel well of the aortic valve annulus that had just been placed in the patient's heart. "Bull's-eye," someone chortled. "Contamination!" Steve Lloyd shouted. "Irrigate with cefazolin solution!" Ten glared at the OR nurse, who should have been mopping her brow, and mouthed the words, "You're so fired." "Benson! Watch what you're doing! That suture won't hold!" Lloyd was yelling at her again. Teri couldn't see what he was talking about. One of the sutures might be pulling a little, but it was a simple enough matter to reinforce it. Why was he making it sound like the prosthesis was going to fall out of the patient's chest? "Potts scissors," she told the nurse, holding out her hand. Teri was so tightly focused on the suture in question that she didn't feel the pressure of the instrument against her hand, and the nurse said nothing to alert her. The room fell silent for the space of an indrawn breath, and the next sound heard in OR Five was the clatter of the scissors hitting the floor. It sounded like the apocalypse.

Teri looked up in confusion. Was this some kind of conspiracy against her? Were these people trying to screw her up? "Benson, maybe I should finish up," Steve Lloyd suggested. "No! I can handle this. Look, it's just one suture--" Another pair of scissors was handed to her, and Teri grasped them firmly. But it took her a minute to get her bearings. Her glove had slipped and she was tugging it back on when a hand came down on her shoulder. "You just contaminated yourself, Doctor," Steve Lloyd said. "Get out of the way. I'm taking over." Teri was too dumbfounded to say anything. She should have let the nurse adjust her glove, it was true, but the likelihood that she'd contaminated anything was small. Worse, she couldn't comprehend what was happening. There was no precedent anywhere in her head that had prepared her for this. She'd never entertained fears of failure. She'd never rehearsed for it, and she didn't know what to do. "I'm taking over, Benson." Lloyd physically pushed her aside and moved into her position. "Hit the sinks and get out of those scrubs. You're done here." Forced out of the circle, Teri looked up at the chief of surgery and his visiting doctors in the gallery, all males, of course. She saw in their faces an expression she personally despised: pity. That and the smug validation of their old boys' club belief that women weren't cut out to be surgeons. One of her goals had been to help break her gender out of the ranks of pediatrics and gynecology. She wanted to prove that they were as capable as men in any branch of medicine. That made this failure doubly crushing. "Hit the showers, Benson," Lloyd ordered. Every eye in the bleacher section was on her, and Teri felt a wave of humiliation. Fortunately, it was rage that carried her out of there. Rage and a desire for retribution that was like being reborn. So long, Dr. Lloyd, she thought as the doors slammed shut behind her. It's been good to know you, asshole. No one was going to trash Teri

Benson like that and live to gloat with the boys about it. HE was completely caught up in her spell. Completely. He didn't know dream from reality, real from surreal. He didn't know himself. Once he had doubted whether this woman could hurt someone. Now he knew she could do anything. The jaguar had been safe compared to her. Jordan found himself replaying those thoughts as he watched Angela bathe in the stream not far from the hut. She'd looped a tablecloth around herself like a sarong because the towels in the hut weren't large enough, and she was suddenly preoccupied with modesty, even after what they'd done. They had answered the insistent drumbeat pounding inside them. Jordan didn't know how else to describe it. They had pounded back. He'd facetiously found himself thinking of it as the call of the wild, but nothing could have been more apt. It was an irresistible call, and God, it was wild. The rain forest had elicited everything that was feral and sensual within them. Their mating dance had lasted throughout the night, and it had been as primitive and imperative as the animals'. It had also been indescribably beautiful, and in some strange way, as natural as the sea and the sun. And this morning, Jordan had awakened to a calmness he'd never felt before, a tranquillity beyond imagining. He had never thought of himself as a spiritual man, but this was what that must feel like, he thought, when it was right. It had frightened her. He sensed that. Maybe it had frightened him, too. And now she must think the tablecloth would dampen the sensuality, her sensuality, but all it did was raise awareness of her long legs and full breasts to a religious experience. She'd picked a place in the stream where the water came up to her knees, and she was kneeling down with the material bunched up around her hips. Her goal seemed to be to keep the tablecloth dry and wash herself at the same time, a tricky feat, but she was determined. She rubbed water over her face and arms and splashed herself daintily. It was impossible not to smile. Jordan should have gone inside and given her some privacy, but he couldn't miss this. He just couldn't. He also couldn't imagine what she was hiding that he hadn't seen, touched, tasted, and intimately visited in some way. But this was different, he knew. This was afterward, and she was shy afterward. He was coming to know things about Angela Lowe, and her shyness was one of them. She was so many different things. God, she was.

She glanced over her shoulder at him, apparently checking to see if he was still there. He guessed that she wanted to shed that cloth in the worst way and sink into the stream, but she wouldn't let herself as long as he was there. Maybe she was self-conscious about her body, and that would be a terrible shame, because she was lovely. The things that were supposed to move on her body, did, thank God. She was a normal, flesh-and-blood woman, but in her own mind probably too heavy or too skinny or something else he couldn't even guess. Maybe she didn't like how her thighs weren't body builder hard. He wished she knew how much he liked her body. She might not be toned like an Olympian, but she was more real and vulnerable and passionately tender than any model he'd seen in a magazine lately. Perfection wasn't what men were looking for, anyway. They wanted exactly what she had, a responsiveness to life that expressed itself in everything she did. She took the risk of opening the cloth and trying to keep it on while she splashed herself. Her back was to him, and he could see nothing except the shimmer of her long, dark hair and the hopeless struggle this was becoming for her. She knew it, too, and finally she heaved a sigh and stood. There were some large rocks on the near side of the stream. She angled herself toward them, allowing him no more than a three-quarter view of her, and it was there that she removed the cloth. As she tossed it onto the rocks, she glanced at him again. It was the most guileless, hopeful glance he'd ever seen. It turned him inside out, that sweet expression. She was part embarrassed, part resigned to the situation, and part surrendered to his male opinion of her beauty. He hoped she could see it in his eyes. She was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. She dipped down again and began to wash herself, splashing until she was thoroughly drenched. Before she was done, she soaked her hair and tossed it back, letting the water stream over her. But when she reached for the towel, still in a semicrouch, something apparently caught her eye, possibly her own reflection. The towel stayed where it was, and so did she, peering into the shallow depths. The water barely rippled as she stretched herself over its surface and submerged. She momentarily disappeared from sight, but he could see a pale form, floating on the bottom. Her hair flowed on the surface, becoming part of the current. He wanted to join her. He'd never wanted anything quite that much, but it felt like that would be an intrusion. She needed time to cleanse and reconnect with herself, maybe. He didn't know. He didn't understand female needs any better than the next guy,

but he had intruded on her enough already, just by watching. She rose up finally, dripping, and he remembered how she'd returned to the hut last night, naked and wet and breathtakingly bold, enticing him while he was restrained. What a wild creature she'd been then. So different than this strange, shy mermaid, but both of them attracted him. His body was already hardening, despite the excesses of the night before. It was trying to get him laid again when what his mind seemed to want was to gather her up in his arms and hold her. Surely that would ease his pain, because there was an ache in him that felt like no amount of doctoring could ever fix it. He was under her spell, totally, hopelessly. He was completely out of his mind. Was this what she did to all men? More than once he had wondered how he was supposed to save her. and this morning was no exception. He wasn't worried about jaguars. He could have backed one off with a look. He was worried about tonight, tomorrow, the future. They couldn't stay here. They had to go back. He had no idea how he was going to exonerate her, and if he was to get brutally honest with himself, he couldn't have explained why he wanted to. Because she could reach for his soul with her eyes? Because she brought out the hero complex in him, as she apparently did all men? That poor sucker, Adam, would never have believed she could hurt him. He would have eaten straight strychnine from her fingertips. Jordan's mind reflected back to the moment when she'd whispered that she needed nothing less than his mortal soul to be sure he wouldn't betray her. What was that besides a bargain with the devil? And a losing bargain, at that. Maybe he could write it off to delirium, but should he? If he was going to take her word over the CIA's, then he had to believe that someone was trying to frame her, kill her, or both, which meant they would probably come after him, too. Everything considered, he had a fair amount at risk-- his credibility, maybe his sanity, and most likely his life-- and all for a woman who couldn't remember whether she was a serial killer or not. She swore he'd been nothing more than a study subject to her, that his name was not on a death list, that she in fact had no death list. And he believed her. Only he didn't know how to justify his belief. He didn't know how to justify any of it. That sounded crazy. It probably was crazy, but that realization didn't seem to count for much at the moment. If he made the wrong decision, he could pay for it with his life, but he

didn't give a damn. He didn't put any value on the consequences, because it felt like there was something more important here, something he barely understood. Belief, perhaps. Believing in another human being, believing in himself and his gut. There was a part of him telling him to take this woman's side. Was that his heart, the pump he'd made a career out of repairing? He knew what hearts could do, they could circulate blood to nourish the body and brain, but could they tell you what was good or bad? It was like a mechanic suddenly believing the engine that ran the car was also capable of driving it. And yet he could feel a tugging in his chest that pulled him toward her, told him to help her, that she needed help more than anyone he'd ever known. "Water's great. You should go in." He'd been so lost in his thoughts he hadn't realized she'd walked up to him. She was wrapped snugly in the cloth and looking radiantly alive. Her face was rosy pink and so was the rest of her. "You have beautiful thighs," he told her. Her smile lit up the sky, and he had his answer. That was why he was going to do it, for something as simple as this, a smile. He wanted to see her do that again. And he wanted to give her many more reasons to. the landing field looked like something commandeered by guerrilla forces, the kind who liked to ransack the fort after they'd routed the enemy. The tower had no windows that weren't broken and seemingly no equipment, although there were no airplanes, either, so perhaps equipment wasn't necessary. "Are you sure this is the right place?" Angela didn't want to appear ungrateful for Jordan's help, but she couldn't imagine making it off the field, much less getting all the way home. "Has to be, according to the map." He turned the pickup truck toward a hangar that stood across the rotting tarmac, although stood was optimistic. Rusted tin sheeting hung on a tilting metal frame that looked as if it were vertical only by the grace of the rain forest gods. The heat and humidity had wreaked havoc here, too. Angela found it difficult to breathe, the air was so hot. She wished they'd thought to bring something from the hut to drink. They had a long journey ahead, and she doubted there would be a beverage service on the charter. She told herself the hot tickle in her throat was from thirst, not fear.

She was leaving behind the sense of refuge and rebirth she felt when she first arrived. But this was the right thing they were doing, better than running to the farthest ends of the earth and never returning, which had been her plan. "I have a plane chartered and paid for, so it had better be the right place." Jordan was saying. "Of course, we were supposed to fly out yesterday." While they were driving, he'd told her about his private detective friend who made arrangements for the hut and the plane. As a precaution, the detective had found a place for them to stay when they got back to the States. The rickety pickup bought by Jordan himself had broken down twice, giving Angela the opportunity to demonstrate mechanical skills she didn't know she had. She'd deduced by the noise the engine made that it was the fan belt. Jordan, the expert on hydraulics, insisted it was the water pump and patched up that instead. When the truck immediately broke down again, she tightened the fan belt, and he thanked her grudgingly for her help. Angela jumped as the hangar door gave out an ungodly screech and began to roll up, creaking and shuddering loudly. It was the kind of racket that caused pain deep in your jaw and made you want to cover your ears. But she'd already caught a glimpse of some dirty sandals on the other side of the door, and she had a bad feeling they might belong to their charter pilot. She grabbed her battered backpack and let herself out of the truck. Jordan went to help raise the door, and as it rolled up, Angela was greatly relieved to see a relatively normal-looking older man, whose grease-spattered face and grimy overalls suggested that he'd been working on the small aircraft parked in the hangar. Not a guerrilla, she noted. He didn't even appear to be Hispanic. "You the folks who chartered a plane to California?" The man's lips flattened against a mouthful of strong white teeth. It might have been a grin, but Angela wasn't sure. "You're out of luck," he said cheerfully. "That plane's long gone." He was grinning. "This is an emergency." Jordan said, "a dire emergency. The lady and I have to get to California as soon as possible." "I could maybe get one of you there in my Piper Arrow." He checked out Angela with an eager glance. "Let's see now. She couldn't

weigh very much, could she, even with that suitcase she's carrying. All righty then, I'll take you both, but that'll be--" His grin brightened, rivaling a tooth whitener commercial. "Let's say five grand, shall we? Twenty five hundred each?" More evidence for Angela's no-good-men theory. He looked normal, but looks couldn't be trusted. "The charter was prepaid." Jordan dug through his pockets, apparently searching for the paperwork. He turned to Angela, but she couldn't help him. She'd found nothing but a wallet and car keys when she went through his clothing. "I don't know anything about a prepaid charter." The other man chuckled, growing chummier by the moment, "but if you need to get to California today, I'm your man. I even take American Express." He wiped his face with his forearm, smearing grease to his eyebrows. "You get my point, I guess. I'm your only man." Angela and Jordan exchanged glances. His expression said exactly what she felt. They were in a Mexican jungle, driving a pickup that wouldn't make it another mile. What choice did they have? "When do we leave?" Jordan asked. "Soon's I get my baby here fixed." The pilot pointed to his plane, which was sitting on blocks in the hangar. It didn't look much more travel-worthy than the pickup. "What's the problem?" Angela asked. "Timing," the pilot muttered. "Is that anything like a fan belt?" she asked. "I might be able to help you with that." Angela found the exchange amusing. Jordan did not. He gave the man his American Express card, watched grimly as the transaction was processed, then went to get what few belongings he and Angela had from the truck. It was high noon, and the sun was straight overhead. There was no relief anywhere from the sweltering heat and humidity. At

least the hut had been surrounded by trees, Angela thought. There'd been some shade and an ocean breeze. This was brutal. Angela had found some clean clothes in one of the dresser drawers at the hut. She tugged at the neck of her T-shirt, watching Jordan pull off his shirt and mop his brow with it. When he was done, he artfully arranged the white cotton on his head like a desert nomad. She considered trying the same trick, but thought better of taking her shirt off. She'd probably done enough stripping this millenium. Staring at his broad back, she realized what was happening, and her thoughts grew pensive. They were leaving, and she was already feeling the loss of something she never had. Him. Her one good man. She didn't understand why he'd agreed to help her, and more, why he would be willing to put himself in such jeopardy. If a CIA agent had said the damning things about Jordan that had been said about her, she might not be so quick to help, especially if Jordan were the prime suspect for multiple murders and he was believed to be after her. But what haunted her most now that they were actually going back was the premonition that she might somehow be the cause of his death and that they would have been right about her. Jordan was on his way back to her, and the sunlight had turned his hair ice white and made his eyes as blue as the blazing sky. He wasn't capable of killing, she told herself. But she knew that wasn't true. Anyone was, if pushed far enough. Anyone. What would' he do if he found out the truth? she wondered. The only thing she had not been able to tell him.

CHAPTER 22. "JORDAN , let me come with you, please." Angela's voice cut into him. Her emotion was so raw it hurt to hear. She was sitting at the desk in the Long Beach hotel room that had been reserved by his detective friend, Mitch Ryder. Her pensive gaze was misted with dnts of blue and green, reflections of the floral print sundress she wore. Mitch had given them his assurance that the hotel was secure, but Angela wasn't convinced. She wasn't afraid to stay there alone, but for some reason she didn't want Jordan to go. "You're the one who's vulnerable," he told her. "They're after you, not me." "I can't just sit here and wait while you confront a CIA agent named Firestarter. I'm frightened." A khaki jacket hung on the back of the bar stool where Jordan stood. He slipped it on, surprised at the fit. There'd been a satchel full of clothing and supplies waiting for them when they checked in, as well as a rental car. Mitch had even been able to scrounge up Jordan's pager, tiny, annoying device that had saved more lives than Jordan could count, Jordan had decided on the spot that the detective was underpaid. "Nothing will happen to me," he assured Angela. "I'm just going to have a little talk with the agent, that's all." "Then why do you need a gun?" "Because Mitch thought it would be smart, a precaution." The SIGPro nine-millimeter she spoke of was on the coffee table that fronted the room's one homey touch, an overstuffed couch. Like most males, Jordan had been intrigued by guns in his youth, and he still knew most of the makes, but he'd never carried one. Fortunately, Mitch had made sure there was a weapon in the satchel, and he'd given Jordan a crash course in gun safety before Jordan left for Mexico. A banging noise startled both of them. Jordan vaulted the couch and swept up the gun. He was halfway to the front door when he realized what it was. The room had a tiny kitchenette with a refrigerator. "The icemaker," he said. "It just dumped the tray." "God, that was terrifying." Angela rose and crossed a bedroom just big enough for the king bed, small couch, and writing desk. There was a bathroom the size of the closet, and strangely enough, the drapes and bedspread were done in a similar bird of paradise fabric as the grass

hut in Mexico. Maybe Mitch had connections with a hotel franchise for runaways. Angela hesitated at the bed, as if she wasn't quite sure where to go next. Jordan slipped the handgun inside his jacket. Quietly, he came up behind her, although something kept him from touching her. He didn't want to startle her again. "Would you rather I left the gun with you?" he asked. "It wouldn't do me any good. I've never shot one." Now he reached for her and turned her around. "If anyone knows how to use a gun, you do, Angela. I'm sure of that." She gave him a stricken look. It was almost as if he were accusing her of something. "I didn't mean that--" "It's just that I can't remember." "I know, I know, I should never have said it." This was not the woman who cut off his shirt in the jungle. This was the one who was desolate over Birdy's clipped wings. The problem was, he was never quite sure who he was dealing with, and right now he didn't need the confusion. "Angela, it's going to be all right. Let me go. Let me help you." "Jordan, please tell me why you're doing this." "I've asked myself that very question." She tugged on his lapel. "It's important! I have to know. Too many people have been hurt." This was not the time for his trademark irony, he realized. She was palpably sad, and he had helped make her that way. "I wish I could tell you." She nodded, resigned. But he couldn't stand to see her so unhappy. He touched her mouth, and the softness made his voice drop low. "When I first saw your picture, I knew I'd seen you before, but I couldn't figure out where. And then I realized it wasn't just me," he told her. "I wasn't the only one who'd seen you before. I was in the company of every eight-year-old kid who had ever stared up at the clouds and caught

a glimpse of heaven." "Heaven?" "When little boys dream of angels, this is the face they see, Angela. Do I need a better reason for doing anything?" Her breathing lost its rhythm. "What a lovely thing to say." "I guess you could blame it on Firestarter. He supplied the picture." "The one in my dossier? But I thought he told you I was a serial killer." "He did. He im that on me very strongly." "And that made you think of angels?" The moment seemed to call for a shrug. "It did." "Lucky me." She laughed, and they were in each other's arms, holding on, holding on. If only we could hold on, he thought. But she broke away abruptly. "Call me the minute you talk to this Firestarter person. Use a pay phone if you have to." A hesitation. "What kind of an operative would call himself Firestarter?" "One with half his face burned off, I guess." "And he did it himself? He started the fire?" Jordan didn't have an answer for that. "Avoid the phone unless there's an emergency," he told her. "The same with the pager, but don't hesitate to call me if you have to." He took her hands, actually intending to leave this time. But she was sighing, fighting tears. She seemed much more concerned for him than she was for herself, but he had to wonder what was really frightening her. He hoped to God it wasn't the same foreboding that had taken hold of him. He was haunted by what he might find out when he met with Firestarter. THE tiny refrigerator was stocked with Thai takeout, bottled iced tea, and fresh fruit, compliments of Mitch Ryder, but Angela couldn't make

herself sit down and eat, even though she should have. Her stomach was empty, her thoughts were mired with fear and guilt, and that quiet voice of certainty in her head had deserted her. In its place were howler monkeys from the jungle, shrieking warnings. A remote sat atop the TV. She clicked on a news channel, knowing she wouldn't listen. Maybe the noise would help distract her from worrying about what could go wrong. "Give up what you can't control. Mental battles are wasted effort. You're only fighting yourself." Another bit of wisdom from her anonymous mentor? She couldn't seem to absorb anything right now. There were times when the entire world shouted at you to do the right thing, and you still did the wrong one. It was a question of perception, theirs versus yours. Everyone had a blind spot, a crucial truth they couldn't see. Or wouldn't. She returned to the desk, drawn by the silent phone. It was too early to expect a call from Jordan, but the waiting was already unbearable. Meanwhile, he'd warned her not to leave the room under any circumstances or call out unless it was an emergency. If she needed anything, she was to contact the desk and have them get it for her. But all she wanted was to call her apartment and get her messages. Surely he hadn't meant that. They'd been accumulating since she left for Mexico, and if anyone from Smarttech had called, she needed to know. It would help her know what to expect. She turned away with a sigh, aware that she had to do something. Right now, her idea of torture was exactly this: being stranded in a sterile hotel room, waiting for disaster to happen. She was somewhere in Long Beach, but other than that, she had little sense of what was going on. She didn't even know how much danger they were in, but her mind kept filling in the blanks with gruesome details. The room wasn't big enough to pace, and eventually she found herself in the bathroom, confronted with her own stumbling dread in the mirror. This was the face of an angel? Then how could it have been the cause of so much pain and devastation? She didn't understand what Jordan saw when he looked at her, what they all saw, or why this horror kept happening. Her agitation was so great it made her want to crawl out of her own skin. "Rain, rain, go away," she whispered.

There was some transformation taking place inside her. She could feel it, another tiny fissure in the barrier that walled her off, but this one was deep. Poison fumes were seeping through the crack, forming nightmarish figures, all of them male. There was a knife in her hand and she was stabbing at bodies, sprawled bodies, all of them seemingly dead. But it was the screaming that horrified her most. These weren't cries of pain. And it wasn't the victims. It was her. She was crying for justice, for blood. A sound caught in Angela's throat. It was mute agony. This was what she'd been afraid to tell Jordan. It was what she'd been desperate to keep at bay, the revenge fantasies. Desperate because she loved them, because they fed her twisted soul. She was cursed, fatally cursed. She had the face of an angel and the mind of a monster, and the man who raised her had done this to her. He had made her into a creature as demented as he was. Her legacy was terrifyingly violent nightmares, impotent rage, and a desperate need to be anybody but who she was. "Do as you're told, and no one will get hurt." Angela picked up a washrag and began to scrub at her face. Moments later, she'd scoured away all traces of makeup and yanked her hair into a tight knot. Laughter burned her throat, but she couldn't release it. It wasn't until she'd completely obliterated the face that other people saw that she could stop the rout. This was no angel. This was a freak. She looked like a freak of nature, and that was exactly what she wanted. When she went back to the phone and lifted the receiver, her anxieties had been replaced by a numbing sense of mission. The number she dialed was her own. There were three voice mail messages, two from Mona Fremont and one from Peter Brandt. Mona reminded her she'd missed a session and then called again the next day, urging her to make another appointment. The psychiatrist had sounded almost frightened. The next message was from Peter Brandt. "Angela, don't under any circumstances go to the lab," he warned. "It isn't safe. Come to my home. Come here as soon as you can. We have to talk." The call had come in that morning, and something in his tone raised

Angela's hackles. It was a quality she'd never heard before. Peter Brandt was lying. FOG was rolling in low over Long Beach harbor, thick, sodden waves of it. It looked like a silvery comforter that had drifted down to settle upon the earth. Jordan pulled the jacket around him and was glad to have one. It wasn't unusual weather for the beach, even in the summer, but tonight of all nights, he wanted visibility. There were things that had to be cleared up. Had to be said. The low tide gave off pungent, sinus-clearing smells that were rank with seaweed and dying marine life. He could make out row after row of sailboat masts and a cruise ship, festooned with banners advertising harbor brunch cruises. Across the way, there was a yacht club and restaurants, all set against a fuzzy skyline dominated by the majestic Queen Mary. He was curious why the agent had chosen this area to meet, but the obvious answer was the weather. A fog bank drove even the diehards away from the beach. They wouldn't be disturbed here. Jordan checked his watch. He hadn't been waiting long enough to be concerned yet. Firestarter was only ten minutes late, but something about this place gave him the creeps. Heavy fog dampened everything, even the noise level. It was too quiet. He'd spotted a pay phone nearby, and the urge to call Angela had been strong. But he had nothing to tell her yet, and the only thing that could reassure her now was information. He'd made the call to Firestarter when they landed in Los Angeles. And then he'd made one other call from a pay phone at the airport, aware that it was risky, but he'd wanted to let at least one person at California General know he was back. He'd decided against calling anyone on the administrative or nursing staff, and he'd avoided his colleagues as well, including Steve Lloyd, the second man on his team. There would have been too many questions he wasn't ready to answer. All he wanted to do was check on his surgery schedule and his patients. Unfortunately, he hadn't been able to get through, so he'd left a message and hoped to God he hadn't chosen the wrong person. Up to now, he'd barely allowed himself to think about what was happening at the hospital. He'd gone from one extreme to the other; hyperresponsible and believing the place couldn't run without him to disappearing from its corridors with barely a wave good-bye. How the hell had that happened? And what the hell was he doing in a foggy harbor

meeting CIA agents? He hoped his valve team was handling things, especially Teri Benson. And he hoped Judy Monahan had made it. He had no idea how his sister was doing, either. Or the damn bird. He'd been gone less than a week all told, but it felt like years. It also felt like he might never get back. He gave a symbolic shudder and looked around, wondering where the hell Firestarter was. That's what a foggy night did to you. It set you up to think that something had to go wrong. TERI Benson's bad day got worse that night. She hadn't been able to leave the hospital after the valve replacement surgery. She'd had a full day of following up on patients, evaluating new intakes, updating charts, and putting on the best performance of her life. She had to pretend that everything was fine while her guts were being eaten out by maggots and fanged insects. Conducting evening rounds was the worst. By then everyone knew of her humiliation at Steve Lloyd's hands, including the students she instructed, and they were pointedly silent. It was as if they were embarrassed for her, and that had nearly destroyed her. But she'd kept up, kept on, while they talked about her behind her back. Did they think she couldn't hear the whispers, the laughing? The entire Cardiac Care Unit was having a field day at her expense. By the time she got home that night, she had a prioritized list of ways to butcher Steve Lloyd like a squealing pig. Plotting his death and the disposal of his parts was the only thing that made her feel human. She'd planned to write the list down and expand on it when she got home. She'd planned to wallow in blood and gore, but she was robbed of even that satisfaction. Waiting for her in her voice mail box was more bad news. Jordan Carpenter was back. He'd left an odd message asking her to check on his surgery schedule for the following week and make sure that whatever couldn't be reassigned was rescheduled. He also wanted her to look in on his postop patients and see that they were getting the care they needed. But he ended by swearing her to secrecy. He needed a few more days to finish his business, and meanwhile, no one else was to know he was back. What the hell was he up to? Some new breakthrough? He would probably win the Nobel for this one, lucky bastard. The very idea enraged Teri. How many women had ever won the Nobel or any other prestigious award, for that matter? Medical science was just one

more old boys' club. Women weren't encouraged or recognized and never had been. Jesus, I hate them all, she thought. But it was Carpenter she hated the most. There had been others at other hospitals, but he was her nemesis at California General. If he'd given her the respect and support she deserved, Steve Lloyd wouldn't have dared to treat her like an idiot child. None of them would. Moments later, standing in her modestly furnished, discount-house wonderland of a living room with the cordless phone at her ear, Teri called the service that Carpenter used. His message had caught her off guard, but it could be this was the opportunity she'd been looking for. In fact, he might have blundered right into her hands by choosing her to confide in. She was the only one who knew he was back in town. Maybe it was Jordan Carpenter who was the idiot child. ANGELA had no trouble getting into the Smarttech labs. No one had changed the parking lot's combination code, and her ID was accepted when she swiped it at the door. Of course she wasn't requesting entry into the high- security areas or any of the clean rooms. All she had to do was get to the glass bubble without anyone spotting her. She'd been inside the lookout tower many times, which was how she'd come to think of Peter Brandt's office. The issue now was how to search his room without being spotted by the night shift. She wasn't greatly concerned about the security guards or the surveillance cameras. She knew how to avoid those, but like most labs, Smarttech had researchers who didn't go home except to visit. Angela was one of them. She knew what it was like to be so involved that even an act of God or nature couldn't have made her look up from her computer screen. With luck, none of night shift would look up, either. What startled her most was the state of her boss's office. It was hermetically clean. His desk was neater than she'd ever seen it, which was an immediate red flag. This was not Peter; he was a brilliant slob. It was a good-sized room, and to avoid being seen, she had to go over most of it on her hands and knees. When that became painful, she pulled off her backpack and switched to a crouch. But she found nothing that would tell her what Peter Brandt had in mind when he left the message on her phone. The place had been wiped clean, not unlike her memory.

She wasn't able to gain access to his voice mail or E-mail, but she did break into a locked file cabinet, using the wire handle from one of the Thai takeout cartons. That turned out to be a dead end, too, although she hadn't expected anything else. Security was tight at Smarttech, and Peter would never keep anything compromising in a locked cabinet. This one contained personnel folders, which appeared to be routine job application and evaluation forms, including her own. Frustrated, she settled back on her haunches to think through her next move. If she didn't go back to the hotel, she might miss Jordan's call, but the waiting had been maddening. It had pushed her to the edge, and she couldn't risk that. She stared at the credenza against the wall, but there was no voice telling her what to do this time. Only as she rose to get up did a ribbon of white leap out at her from the blur. She wasn't even sure what had caught her attention, but as she scanned the credenza, she spotted, what looked like something jammed in the shredder. There was a glass window that revealed whether the machine was full. This one looked empty, except for that ribbon. She gingerly pried the teeth loose with the same wire handle that had opened the file drawer and then she coaxed free the handwritten note jamming the works. It was riddled with teeth marks but mostly legible. She didn't recognize the handwriting, but the message was chillingly blunt. "If you don't take care of the matter we discussed, I will." That was all she could make out, but she knew in her gut the words referred to her. There were times when you just knew, and this was one of them. The rest of the note had been shredded and dumped, except for the paper ribbon she'd spotted, which had one mangled initial that looked like a capital letter, an F or possibly an S. Angela stared at it in confusion. It was part of the signature, and the first name she thought of was Sammy. But he would never write such a threatening note to his own boss. Her psychiatrist's last name started with an F, but Mona had nothing to gain by Angela's death. And there was Silver, who lived on a cocoa plantation half a continent away. Silver had said she visited the States frequently. She was away on some kind of trip when Angela was sent to the mission by Pedro. Angela's mind began to spin. She tried to get to her feet and was nearly knocked over by the force of her thoughts. They were whirling so furiously she couldn't get her balance. She was reeling. That cold and deliberate machinelike persona was gone.

What was Adam's real name? She had to find out Adam's real name. Maybe he wasn't dead after all? She'd begun to shake, and her heart was beating too hard. The agent had told Jordan to kill her. Someone wanted her dead. Or they wanted Angel Face dead, whoever Angel Face really was, and they just thought she was Angela. Could it be a bizarre case of mistaken identity? There were so many possibilities, Angela couldn't make any sense of it. She still didn't understand why anyone would want to frame her. Why not just kill her if they wanted her out of the way? She found her backpack and crept from the office. There was an emergency exit stairway where the sweep of the video camera fell slightly short. She had never consciously thought much about the company's security measures during her time here, but she'd obviously been paying attention on some level. "Angela!" Her name came sailing down the corridor, straight at her. She was on the first floor now, but she couldn't turn and run the other way. It was Sammy, and he was rushing toward her. She halted, not knowing what else to do. "Angela, where have you been?" He scrutinized her as if she'd been in an accident and was standing there bleeding right in front of him. "Are you all right? What's happened to you?" She remembered her reflection in the bathroom mirror, the pinched expression, the chalky skin, and frozen eyes. She had scrubbed herself raw, and that must be what he saw now. The blue jeans and man's T-shirt she'd changed into were large and ill-fitting "I haven't been well," she told him. "I just came in to pick up some things, and I have to go." He blocked her way when she tried to get around him. "I'll go with you to your office," he insisted. "There's something you have to see." There was only one thing Angela had to do, and that was get out of the building, but if she brushed him off and headed for the exit, he would surely report her, even if only for her own good. If he knew anything about her situation, then he probably thought she was breaking down again. "Come on," he said, waving her with him. "You won't believe this."

"Sammy, what is it?" She wasn't going anywhere until he explained. "Your study. I filled in for you." She followed him into her cubicle, startled to see her equipment going full blast. "What are you doing on my computer? Running my study data?" He looked startled. "Someone had to do it, Angela. You've been gone for days. And while I was at it, I checked your E-mail, too. There was one marked Urgent from someone named '.' You probably ought to take a look. She wanted you to meet her." "What?" Sammy was right. Angela couldn't believe it. Without her password, he would have had to hack into her E-mail account. That was frightening, but she didn't have time to confront him. She had to get out of the building! "Wait, Angela, look, look at these images. This dude's brain is about to explode." Now he was pointing at her computer screen. There were multiple images up there, a SPECT, an MR], and an EEG, all of the same brain and all showing abnormal amounts of activity. Angela had never personally witnessed this phenomenon before, but it had a name: firestorm. "My God, who is that?" she whispered, but she knew. She knew. "He may have gotten too much juice," Sammy said. "I hope to hell somebody's got him in a straitjacket." Angela wasn't sure whether Sammy meant the radioisotopic solution the subjects drank or the constant bombardment of electrical and magnetic signals, but it sounded like something had gone wrong with the study. She broke for the door, terrified that Sammy would try to stop her. "Hey, come back!" he said. "Where are you going?" This time she listened to her impulses and kept running, but she couldn't block out Sammy's voice. "For Christ's sake, stay away from him! He's dangerous! Stay away from Jordan Carpenter!" Angela kept running, running and praying no one would seal off the lab

before she got out. As the sliding door rolled shut behind her, she sprinted for the corridor. Terror drove her faster and faster. She was afraid to look back and see if Sammy was behind her, but she knew she couldn't let him catch her. She no longer trusted him. How had he known about Jordan Carpenter?

CHAPTER 23. EMPTY beer bottles littered the concrete sidewalk that spanned the boat docks. Jordan picked one up and lobbed it into a nearby trash can, shattering the hush the fog had created. He'd been waiting too long. The agent was over an hour late, and he wasn't answering his phone. Jordan had already left three messages. He would give the man five more minutes, and then he was gone. His intuition had been right. This was a bad move. He should have set the terms for the meeting, picked the time and place. It was more than the tide that stank in Long Beach harbor. At least his pager hadn't gone off. That meant Angela was okay, unless something had happened that she couldn't call. That thought chilled him to the bone. He wasn't going to let himself go there. A shrill ring brought him out of his festering thoughts. He'd parked the car on a side street, and he was on his way back there when the cell phone rang. Jordan had barely hit the Talk button before a voice was hissing at him through the receiver. "There's one born every minute! You should have killed her, Carpenter. She suckered you good, you fool." It was Firestarter. Jordan wanted to snap the man's neck with his bare hands, but a high-pitched tone alerted him. His pager was going off. He dug the thing out of his pocket and saw by the digital display that it was his answering service. Not Angela, but he had to take it anyway. "I'll get back to you," he told Firestarter, disconnecting the agent with savage pleasure. He sprinted back to the dock to use the pay phone. He was reasonably sure that Firestarter could trace him on the cell phone and possibly even listen to his calls, and he wasn't taking any more chances. It wasn't clear why the answering service hadn't contacted either Steve Lloyd or Teri Benson, who were supposed to take Jordan's calls, but it was probably just a glitch. Somebody didn't read a notation. The service answered immediately. There was an emergency, he was told. A new patient, on his waiting list for scheduling, was having chest pain. The patient was minutes away from Jordan's Belmont Shores office, so the service had arranged for the man to meet Jordan there. He arrived just moments after Jordan did, an older man, who'd managed to

drive himself there without any help, but he was obviously in great pain. Jordan started him on 325 milligrams of crushed aspirin and checked his vital signs. His symptoms were classic. He was suffering chest pains, radiating arm pain, cold sweats, weakness, and dizziness. His pulse was erratic, and his face had a bluish tinge. In all his years of practice, Jordan had never lost a patient to bad judgment, but tonight could mar that record, and he knew it. It wasn't just that his focus was off, his whole attitude had changed dramatically in the last few days. It was only beginning to dawn on him how dramatically. There was now something more important to him than his quest to save lives. One life. One woman. He was so obsessed with protecting her it was hard to muster the right doctorly concern for a stranger, even for this patient who was suffering in his office. That had never happened before. He'd always been able to subjugate his needs to the patient's, and he'd always believed a dedicated doctor should do that. "Let's get your shirt off," Jordan said. "I'm going to take some blood and get you hooked up to an electrocardiogram. Then we'll see what's going on." Jordan took a quick medical history while he helped the man undress, and was surprised to discover that his patient was a semiretired surgeon. Doctors were often the worst patients. They knew what could go wrong, but this one was in too much pain to care. Unfortunately, Jordan didn't have the man's records available. These days his private practice was limited to pre- and postop surgical care. He generally did his intake evaluations at the hospital and had duplicate files sent here to the office, but that hadn't been done in this instance. In fact, he didn't recall having done the intake, but considering the last couple of days, that wasn't surprising. If he called the hospital now for the information, he might as well hold a press conference and announce that he'd returned. He couldn't risk it. He needed anonymity until he'd dealt with Firestarter. Jordan hadn't hooked up an EKG in awhile. That was done by trained technicians, but within moments he had all the electrodes in place. He was adjusting the settings when the man suddenly doubled over in a choking fit. He clutched himself and slid off the examining table, coughing and gagging.

"Help me!" he rasped. "Help me, it's my heart!" He collapsed on the floor, and Jordan dropped down next to him. The man appeared to be unconscious. His pulse was thready, and Jordan immediately began chest compressions. Lean and release, lean and release, twenty- five pounds of pressure. But as he rocked up and down, forcing life back into the failing heart, he was gripped with foreboding. Fear? That had never happened before, either. Fear and doubt didn't enter into his thinking when he was working on patients. There was a computer-like feedback loop that took over. He processed facts and made decisions accordingly, maybe too coldly. He'd been criticized for his machinelike efficiency, but Jordan didn't lack for compassion. Losing a patient was devastating, but there was no room for fear when you were trying to save one. An AED unit sat next to the EKG. Jordan had come to loathe the sight of defibrillator paddles, but they were his only option now. The chest compressions weren't working. Fortunately, this particular unit came equipped with a voice activation option so that Jordan could operate it by himself. He got the machine going, applied the conductive gel pads to the patient's chest, and positioned the paddles, one near the sternum, the other outside the nipple. "Two hundred joules! Execute!" he shouted. The unit responded instantly. At the first jolt, the man's body jumped off the floor, but there was no change in the pattern. "Three hundred joules! Execute!" Jordan sent another charge through him, and the heart hesitated its mad flight. It had been stunned into submission. If it fell back into its normal pattern, the patient would make it. Otherwise-- Jordan tried another jolt and another, but the frozen organ wouldn't budge. He couldn't bring it back. His patient had gone into massive cardiac arrest. The man was gone, and the EKG was a screaming red line. Jordan didn't even have to look at it. It pierced his brain like a bullet, leaving him as frozen and unresponsive as the heart. He couldn't move. The paddles were gripped in his hands as if they were attached to him. It was only as he shook them off that he saw it. Something was wrong. A red warning light flashed on the AED unit and the

number of joules displayed was nearly twice what Jordan had ordered. It may not have been heart failure, he realized. The paddles may have killed him. Jordan was thunderstruck. Call an ambulance, he told himself. Get him to a trauma unit. There's nothing more you can do here. Call now! As he reached for the phone, he saw that the message light was blinking. He held off answering it long enough to call 911, even though the thought hammering in his head, the hope, was that it might be a message from Angela. A moment later, he was faced with the truth of that premonition. It was her. "It's not so difficult to kill, is it?" she whispered over the line. "You might even get as good as me. Still love me?" Fooled you, fooled you! The words echoed in his head, and her laughter made him physically ill. The phone receiver crashed into the cradle. Fluorescent lights flared brightly, rendering the room shock white as he turned around. The tightness in his chest made him feel as if he were having a heart attack. She suckered you good, you fool. Firestarter's snakelike hiss came back to Jordan. It cut into his thoughts and forced him to face the unthinkable-- that Angela had something to do with this. That she was Angel Face. The sound that caught in his throat didn't even resemble laughter. It was cold, burning cold. That was unthinkable. He couldn't go there any more than he could imagine her hurt, dying, unable to answer the phone. He needed to move, walk, think, but there wasn't time. He had to continue the compressions, keep the oxygen flowing until the paramedics arrived. Where the hell were they? He had a Code Blue on the floor of his office! And whose voice had he heard? Not Angela's. It could not have been her. He had to find a way to make his brain work. He had to cling to the only thing sanity would allow him to believe. There weren't any other options now. Someone, that bastard agent, was trying to plant suspicions that were beyond comprehension.

What the hell did Firestarter want him to think? That Angela had rigged the equipment and set him up to execute the next victim on her list? Was that what the agent was implying? Beyond unthinkable. That was impossible. A shadow fell over Jordan's splayed hands, and he looked up to see a woman standing in the doorway of the exam room. His bream nearly scalded him, and it was all he could do not to lose the rhythm of the compressions. The dark hair, the dark eyes, completely threw him for a moment. She could have been-No, she looked nothing like Angela Lowe. "What are you doing here?" Jordan's voice rose over the EKG's signal. It was Teri Benson in his doorway, and her hesitation confused him. She looked like a spectator at an accident scene. Her expression was a strange mix of excitement and repulsion, and it gave him the creeps, but whatever else was going on, she was still a doctor. Why wasn't she down here helping? "The service called me," she explained. "They said there was an emergency. What happened?" Jordan didn't mince words. "Either the defib unit malfunctioned, or I did. He got too much juice and his heart gave out." "Malfunction? What do you mean?" "Never mind that now. The paramedics are on their way. Take over for me until they get here, will you? There's something I have to do." She was acting so oddly, he expected her to protest, but she replaced him on the compressions without missing a beat, and she asked all the right questions about the patient's condition. He had to believe she was going to be okay, but maybe the pressure was getting to her. "Teri? Can you handle this?" "Yes, go!" He reached for his jacket and realized the gun was still there, hidden inside. As he slipped the jacket on, a thought flashed into his consciousness, one terrible unbidden thought. He should have killed her when he had the chance. There wasn't time to analyze where it had come from.

His nerves were firing like machine guns, and his brain was dangerously overtaxed. There was only time to heave the thought violently out of his mind and go in search of her. IT was a sobering moment of deja vu for Jordan. His house was ablaze with light when he drove up, exactly like the night he found the dead bird on the floor. He'd driven back to the hotel after the tragedy in his office, but Angela was gone, and when he searched his mind, trying to imagine where she might be, he had a sudden flash of insight. It would end where it had started: his house. How could he have forgotten that on the same day she collapsed, sobbing over a bird, she had also pulled a flare from her coat and blinded him? Maybe he was a fool. And maybe it had to end here so that this time he could see her for exactly who she was. He wanted her to be innocent, his innocent, and he wanted to save her, possibly so that he could save himself. Maybe that was all that had mattered to him, who he wanted her to be. The truth was, he had no idea who she was. And he was beginning to wonder who he was. One thing he did know. He had won the battle with his hero complex. It was dead on the floor of his office, along with the patient he'd lost and any illusions he may have had that he was capable of saving anyone. It felt like there was nothing left to save at this point, nothing worth saving. Everything he believed was in question. His mind and heart were fatigued to the point that any more pressure would snap them. And it hadn't taken an act of God or nature to bring it about. It had taken only one woman. She was standing in the living room, her back to the door when he came in. Her eyes narrowed with shock as she turned around, and her pale face flinched tight. You could almost see tendons pulling like drawstrings. He had thought once that it hurt to look at her she was so beautiful. It hurt now, although no one would have called her beautiful. She looked as if she were about to rip apart. This was the woman he'd surprised on the porch of his house. Her features were as stark and as bloodless as that creature's. She'd scrubbed herself raw and exchanged the sundress for a pair of Levi's and a man's T-shirt. The backpack she'd dragged through the jungle was slung over one arm. He didn't know why she'd gone to such lengths, but he could guess. She didn't want to be Angela Lowe.

She hated who she was. Or what she'd done. She hated something. Jordan's heart was twisting at the sight of her, but he knew what emotion could do to him. Any kind of sympathy right now would be suicidal. He had to wall it off. The only thing that mattered was the truth, whatever it took to get there, but he lived in holy fear that it would be brutal. "Stay where you are," he said as she started toward him. She hesitated, confused. Even to talk seemed difficult for her. "Jordan? There's s-something I have to tell you." "Stay there!" She halted, but the shock of it seemed to uncork her. Suddenly she was babbling, and he wouldn't have been able to make sense of it, except that he'd heard it before. She was going on about the experiment, telling him it was flawed and that he shouldn't drink something. "Angela, we've been through this already--" "No, you don't understand. Something's gone wrong." "I'm not part of any experiment. I never have been." "Jordan, listen to me! Your brain is being tapped right this moment. I just saw the scans, and they're abnormal." "Abnormal scans? Of my brain?" What was she talking about? This was as crazy as he'd ever heard her, even when she was delirious in the jungle. "It is! I swear, Jordan, right now as I'm standing here." Her hand flew up and she whipped at hair that wasn't there. "I just came from Smarttech," she rushed to explain. "They have supercomputers and multiple imaging technology that scans brain activity. It's all done remotely. I told you about it, remember, the brain-tapping experiment? Subjects can be studied without their even knowing, but that's not the point. There's something wrong." He would play along for now, he told himself, humor her. "And what is wrong?"

"Your brain scan has all the signs of a firestorm: high cingulate excitation, abnormal temporal lobe activity, and a depressed prefrontal cortex. That triad of symptoms are precursors to violence, Jordan. Deadly violence." He wanted to tell her that one of them was nuts, and it wasn't him. He almost wished it was shock this time. He wasn't a psychiatrist, but he'd already diagnosed her as delusional and dangerously agitated. It would do him no good to remind her that he hadn't been drinking any kind of cocktail, that he'd been in the jungle with her for three days. He had the feding she would ramble on about experiments until dawn if he let her. "It's not clear what the problem is--toxicity from the chemicals, overstimulation of the sites." She peered at him from haunted eyes. "Jordan? What's wrong?" Jordan had been gripped with an electrifying thought. It had just occurred to him that she might not be crazy at all. This could be another way to distract him, and he'd had plenty of experience with how she worked and how lethally distracting she could be. "You believe me, don't you? Don't you?" She implored him with her voice and her clutched hands. "Come with me to Smarttech. I'll show you what's happening. The experiment has to be stopped!" She had to be stopped. She had started toward him, but Jordan didn't want her within arm's length. His memories of bondage in the jungle, of knives and snarling beasts, were too vivid. "Angela, a patient died in my office tonight. He was a doctor." She hesitated, stunned, and he had a vision of her stumbling into the bird perch again. Where was Birdy? Maybe Penny had taken her home. Jordan's temples had begun to throb, and his mind was fuzzing at the edges, but he wanted to know where the damn bird was. He couldn't lose everything all at once. He was losing his mind. Wasn't that enough? Angela couldn't seem to find words, so Jordan kept talking. He had to do this. He had to rip her apart so he could see who she was. What eight-year-old kid didn't know that? If you didn't take things apart, there was no way to know how they were put together. How many hearts had he taken apart and put back together? How many lives had he saved? How many had he lost?

One. Tonight. "I said a patient died in my office, and when I called nine one one, there was a message from you on my machine." She was wary now, shaking her head. "I didn't leave you a message." His voice went cold. There was nothing he could do to re-create her sickly soft tone as he repeated what she'd said. " "s not so hard to kill, is it? Pretty soon you'll be as good as me.' " "I didn't say that! I didn't call! Someone must have patched that together. They have my voice on tape. Jordan, I'm being framed. They want me dead! You know that." "You and I both know that makes no sense. Think about it, Angela. Think. Why would the CIA bother to frame you for serial murders if their goal was to kill you? Not very efficient, even for them." "It's not the CIA! It's Smarttech. Oh, my God," she whispered. "You don't believe it, do you?" She was caught by sudden racking emotion. Her expression contorted, fighting whatever was happening inside her, but a tear slid over the sharp bones of her cheek. Jordan watched her rub it away, and even though he could feel his own heart clench like a fist, the pain barely touched him. His mind was somewhere else, strangely removed from everything that was happening. Instead of going crazy, he'd gone sane. More than sane, he was unmoved, immovable. Maybe the gods had decided to grant him one last second or two of his famous detachment, and along with that, a flash of clarity. She might not have a weapon, he told himself, but she was armed. Her tears were deadlier than any gun. She looked up at him, achingly desperate. Her fingers flew up, searching for invisible strands of hair. Impulsively she approached him. "I said stay where you are!" "Jordan, please--" "Stay there!" He pulled the gun from inside his jacket.

His only plan was to keep her where she was. Otherwise, he would have to physically restrain her until he could get the police here. And he didn't want that. He knew better than to allow himself anywhere near her. "Jordan, no!" She flinched as he turned the gun on her. He clicked on the laser sight and held the SIGPro steady. The red beam moved up her body, and she gave out a strangled cry. She might as well have turned the gun on him the way that sound cut through him. What was this doing to her? It was not a question he could afford to ask himself, but it slugged its way into his thoughts. To be held at gunpoint by the man who had vowed to save her? What kind of damage was that doing? But Angela could feel nothing at that moment. Something had sealed off inside her when he turned the gun on her, a wall as impenetrable as the one that had protected her memory. She'd had a premonition that he was going for a gun even before he reached into his jacket, and she had pulled her backpack around as a shield. But now as she clamped the pack to her chest, her hand touched metal. There was something in the front zipper pocket. She could tell by the handle that it was a weapon, a revolver. She had no idea how it got there unless-Unless someone had thought she might need to defend herself. The ramifications of that were unbelievable. Who could have done it besides Sammy? He'd said several things that had struck her as bizarre, especially his warning about Jordan. Did he want her to find the gun and force Jordan's hand? "Jordan, don't," she implored. "They do want me dead, and they want you to kill me. Please believe me. They even planted a gun in my purse." She unzipped the pocket to show him. Here! This was her proof! They were trying to set her up. "See?" Her voice hissed softly, but all Jordan saw as her hand came out of the pouch was the black silhouette of deadly metal. He saw the pistol grip of a .380 caliber semiautomatic, the Cyclops eye of the barrel and a diabolically beautiful killer, reaching for her weapon. His first thought was to shoot the gun out of her hand. He yelled at her to stop, begged her to stop, but by that time, a powerful involuntary impulse had sparked motor nerves. He couldn't stop himself. There was never a conscious command from his brain to shoot. He

wasn't even aware that he'd squeezed the trigger, but the gun went off. With her huge, startled eyes frozen in the halo of a tiny red dot, the gun went off. THE evening air was heavy with the scent of lilacs and warm breezes gently wafted the rich perfume into every nook and cranny of the old covered porch. Lacy white petals fluttered and lifted, stirring up more sweetness and memories of better days. Days not blurred with pain and regret. Jordan stood in the darkness, recalling nights he'd slept out here in a hammock when he was a kid and summer afternoons when his parents sat in the yard in aluminum lawn chairs, sipping lemonade and fanning themselves with the newspaper. How he missed those times. And what he would have given to revisit them, if only in his mind. But the comforting images were lost in the creak of wooden steps. The front porch stairs announced a solitary figure, and Jordan felt his stomach turn when a beam of moonlight illuminated the man's face. The burn scars seemed even more grotesque than he remembered, but the agent still led with them, as if he'd vowed to make sure that was what the world saw. Jordan came out of the shadows. It was a calculated move. He wanted Firestarter out, too. He wanted to see the man's face, but the agent didn't accommodate him. "You said it was urgent," Firestarter said. "It had better be." "She's dead." Jordan's voice was low and hot. He didn't know how to put the agony in it that should have been there. He barely knew how to speak to this man. "Angela Lowe is dead." "Did you do it?" Yes, I did it, you murdering scum. Happy now? "She was here when I got home tonight. She had a gun in her backpack, and when she pulled it out, I shot her." The agent nodded. "Self-defense, then. You're fine. Everything is fine." Everything was not fine. Jordan could barely conceive of things being less fine. "I have some questions." "There isn't time. Where's the body?"

Jordan wondered if his stare was as drill-bit hard as it felt. He could have cut the man's heart out without instruments. "I'll tell you when you answer my questions and not before. Is that clear, you cold-blooded bastardt' There was a flicker of surprise on the agent's part. Jordan sensed more than saw the hitch in his neck, the faint scowl. Score one, Carpenter. He wanted to get the man turned around so he could see him. The burns were like a mask, concealing his identity. "Angela Lowe swore that I was part of an experiment," Jordan said, "something she called '-tapping.' She swore it right up until the moment she died. What was she talking about?" The agent snorted impatiently. "How would I know? The woman was certifiably crazy. She lived in a fantasy world, and she wove one around you. That was how she wormed her way into your life. You didn't believe any of that, did you?" A smart son of a bitch like me? Jordan thought. Hell, no, I didn't believe her. Any more than I believe you. "She talked about remote sensing and wireless technology, about the subjects drinking a brain cocktail every morning." "And how fantastical does that sound? She was a classic paranoid. I'm surprised she didn't claim you were abducted by aliens." "Not so fantastical at all." There was a wicker tea table on the porch where Jordan had left a set of drawings. He retrieved them to show the other man a device that could have passed for a portable TV set, except for the innovative antenna loop. In simple terms, it created its own magnetic field and could measure magnetic and electrical flux at ultralow levels with extreme accuracy. "I developed this device myself while I was in medical school," he told the agent. "It's basically a remote sensor for monitoring the electrical impulses of the heart. I also wrote a paper that suggested adaptations. One of them was for the brain." Firestarter waved the papers away. "Maybe she read about your work. She was a medical groupie, and you were one of her heroes. She collected every article she could find about you." "The paper was never published. I was concerned about the potential for misuse if the idea fell into the wrong hands." "What the hell is this?" Firestarter demanded angrily.

"You're defending a serial killer? I'm not answering any more questions. Tell me where the goddamn body is, Carpenter, or I'll call in reinforcements." "That sounds like a threat." The agent came at Jordan, snarling from the scarred side of his face. "Here's another one, in case you have any doubt. You just killed a woman in cold blood, and you're going to need the agency's help. With my testimony, you won't go to jail. In fact, you'll be a hero. Without my testimony ... well, shit happens." Jordan laughed, and God, it felt good. He laughed long and hard. He laughed until the other man raged at him and demanded to know what the fuck was going on. "Any shit that happens will be happening to you," Jordan said. "Did it ever occur to you that I might not need your testimony?" "What do you mean? Of course you need my testimony." The two men locked gazes, and Jordan had a fleeting sense of triumph, but mostly he felt pity. His opponent was a fool in so many ways. The silence grew as they both waited. Waited for the moment that Jordan had been anticipating all night. And then it came. "Not if I'm alive, he doesn't." It was a woman's voice, soft and seductive. Firestarter gave out an audible gasp as he realized who it was. He whirled toward the front door as she appeared on the threshold, her hair as long and dark and liquid as a jungle night, her eyes sparkling like stars. Angela Lowe made a very compelling ghost. Hushed with victory, she was as lovely as Jordan had ever seen her. "Here's the goddamn body," she said, looking directly at the agent. Jordan didn't want to think about how close he'd come to actually killing her. He'd been aiming for the gun, not her, with the crazy thought that he could shoot it out of her hand. But she dropped to her knees, and suddenly it was her face in his sights.

Two things impinged on him at once in that shadowland where life-and-death decisions are made. One was something Angela herself had said about the experiment, and the other was a woman's face appearing in his doorway. A second ghost. She was there and gone before he could see who it was, and maybe she'd never been there at all. He would never know, but it had all happened in a split second--the ghost, the gunshot--infinitely less time than it took to lose a patient in surgery. And infinitely more devastating. "Jordan! He has a gun!" Angela's warning came too late. Firestarter had pulled a weapon, and he was holding it on Angela. It was a wild bluff to get Jordan to disarm. Jordan thought about jaguars and boldness. He thought about how close he'd come to killing someone he was trying to save. "I'm not dying alone here tonight," the agent vowed. It was a stalemate, but Jordan played it out, calculating the odds of putting a bullet through the agent's brain before he could squeeze the trigger. In the seconds it took him to make his decision, he saw a flicker of movement in his peripheral vision. The other ghost. She'd floated through the doorway of his living room and come up behind the agent, a soundless, weightless apparition draped in black. Jordan couldn't take his eyes off Firestarter, but he could see that this ghost had significantly improved Jordan's odds. She had a gun in her hand. Angela spotted the woman seconds after Jordan did and let out a cry of surprise. "Silver!" Firestarter whirled as if beset by demons, and Jordan saw his chance. This time he had the agent in his laser sight. And he didn't miss.

CHAPTER 24. "LONG time no see, Ron," Jordan said softly. He got little more than a growl from the man as he collapsed on the floor, clutching his bleeding hand. Jordan hadn't shot him through the head for good reason. Dead men couldn't talk, and this particular CIA agent had a lot more talking to do. Jordan had been aiming for the gun, but his first round hit the agent's hand, which achieved the same result. The second lifted his hat and sent it flying. That was when Jordan realized who he was dealing with. His old rival from medical school was finally recognizable once the unscathed side of his face was exposed. Angela was still stranded across the room. "Come over here." Jordan beckoned her to his side while he kept the gun trained on the agent. She fell into his outstretched arm with enough enthusiasm to force a grunt out of him, and when he pulled her close, whatever had been holding him together through it all threatened to give way. He wanted to take her in both arms and hold her until the shaking eased. And maybe he could, he realized. They had some pretty interesting backup. Their dark ghost of a visitor had an all-business Austrian Clock in her hand, and it was trained on the agent. "Who the hell is she? Jordan asked Angela under his breath. "A friend, I'd like to think," Angela said. "Silver and I go way back." "Ron and I go way back, too." Jordan indicated the man on the floor. "This could be a high school reunion." Silver smiled from across the room. The sleek black turtleneck and jeans she wore accentuated the metallic flecks in her pale blue eyes. But the black knit cap made her look a little too much like La Femme Nikita. Jordan had trouble imagining her as anyone's friend, much less Angela's. Although there was a side of Angela-"Feel free to holster the weapon," Silver told Jordan. "I can handle things from here on out." "I'm sure you can," he said, "but I have some questions for the man. And if he doesn't answer me, I'm going to shoot him again, probably several more times. I'd hate for you to get caught in the crossfire." Silver nodded and stepped back. She winked at Angela as if to say,

Interesting choice in men. "Nasty burn, Ron." Jordan was unsparing in his sarcasm. "Playing with matches again? You nearly burned down the dorm at school, more than once as I remember." "Kid stuff." The other man scoffed, but he touched the facial scars with a sense of pride that was almost childlike. "As for my face, it was an unfortunate accident with some flammable chemicals, a lab accident." "Not unfortunate enough," Jordan muttered. Laird held out his oozing hand. "The heroic heart surgeon is going to let his gunshot victim bleed to death? How will that play at the press conference?" Jordan smiled. "Hey, congratulations on your career transition from amoral doctor to amoral CIA agent." "He isn't CIA." Silver's cool remark brought a startled glare from Firestarter. "And who the fuck are you?" "I am CIA," she informed him. "But ten years ago I worked for your company as an informant, although I wouldn't expect you to remember that. Or that someone from Smarttech decided to have me die on an operating table when I tried to blow the whistle on the assignments I was being given." "Smarttech?" Angela spoke up as if she hadn't heard correctly. Silver extended her hand. "Angela, I'd like you to meet your boss and one of the founders of Smarttech, Ron Laird." Angela's surprise was audible. She'd never mentioned Laird to Jordan, and apparently she'd never come face to-face with him, but then she'd only been at Smarttech a year, and it was Brandt who'd mentored her, not Laird. Any contact with Laird during her informant years was unlikely, too. She would probably have reported to a security type, so while she was obviously on Laird's radar screen, he was not on hers. As Silver continued, things began to fall into place for Jordan. "I guess you could say that I've been interested in you and your company

for some time now," she told Laird. "The way you subvert government contracts for your own gain and covertly conduct biowarfare research, not to mention silencing your informants and their sources when they become inconvenient." "You have no proof," Laird shot back. "No proof of anything." Angela quietly contradicted him. "I have proof that you're running unethical experiments. And that you used me to kill a source you believed was going to sell you out. I remember it all, Dr. Laird, everything I wiped from my mind so you wouldn't silence me." Laird was fearless. He was smug. "What's unethical about tapping my own brain? I was your favorite subject, Angela--Alpha Ten. The rest of the images were simulations, and the people you interviewed were students who thought they were part of a study on innate intelligence, whatever the hell that is." Angela's voice was faint with disbelief. "Did Peter know about that?" "Peter's been too busy marketing Angel Face to properly supervise your work, so it fell to me." "But Peter must have known. He sent me E-mail instructions --Oh, God, that was you." Jordan released Angela and approached Ron Laird. The longer he listened, the more he began to grasp the extremes this man was capable of. Not that he was completely surprised. Ron had been suspended from both medical school and his residency in neurobiology for questionable conduct. He had never become a practicing physician but had gone into research instead, a frightening thought with his Machiavellian mind. Jordan knelt to look at him, maybe with the thought of staring him in the eye and probing the dim recesses of another man's soul, if that was possible. It was hard to believe that his erstwhile friend had always been this way. Something must have happened to turn him so calculating and inhumane. "You helped yourself to my remote sensor idea, didn't you," Jordan said. "The one I shelved because I was concerned about misuse. You wanted to buy the rights with your family's money, and I refused, so you lifted it. Now you're using it with your AIR software and your supercomputers to invade people's most basic right to privacy-- their own thoughts. That's the experiment Angela's been talking about, the one I didn't believe existed."

"Maybe the rough design was yours," Laird admitted, "but I've spent a small fortune of my own money on research and development, and now I've got government backing. Whatever it takes, they'll fund it. There wasn't the technology to do it back then. There is now, because of me. Think about it, Jordan. Angel Face is a criminal profiling program that can stop crime--violent crime. And that's just one of its applications. It has unlimited potential, and I'm the only one who could have developed it. Don't you see that?" Jordan saw exactly what he feared. Laird didn't know what he'd done, or he didn't care. This wasn't about the good he could do, no matter what he told himself. It was about the glory. He wanted recognition so desperately he couldn't see the profound ethical questions his work had created and how flagrantly he'd abused his power. In someone else's hands, and tightly regulated, perhaps Angel Face could be useful, but never in his hands. Laird was the criminal who had to be stopped. But Jordan had a more immediate concern. There were still missing pieces, too many to make sense of the other man's motives. He posed a scenario to Laird. "Let's just say for the sake of argument that you wanted Angela dead because she was in your way, and you wanted me to kill her because / I was in your way. Two birds, so to speak. Why would you also frame her for serial killings she didn't commit?" Laird looked sorely tempted to explain. The dark side of genius, Jordan thought, was unmitigated ego. He wanted to share his grand plan. He wanted to gloat. "You've got me stumped," Jordan prompted him. Laird's quick headshake probably took all the restraint he had. "I'm saying nothing more until I talk to my attorney." "I hope you've got a good one," Silver muttered. "I hope you've got a whole team of them." Laird's laughter held a sneer. "What are you, anyway, a punk field agent? I have connections at the highest levels of government. You're not taking me down. Nobody's taking me down." "You're already down," Jordan pointed out. Laird turned on him instantly. His voice was low and trembling. His eyes were blindingly bright. "You smug bastard," he said, "who got you into Phi Chi? Do you think a research nerd like you, who survived on scholarships and handouts, had a chance with a crowd like that?

I was the reason they accepted you. I was the reason you got lucky with all those perky sorority bitches, Carpenter. My family, my name." Jordan had never felt the depth of this man's hatred before. He did now. And it all seemed to stem from their college years. It was true that Ron had taken him under his wing and introduced him around, but Jordan had known why from the beginning. Ron wanted to pick his brain, copy his work, and be on hand to take advantage of his friend's academic prowess. He used Jordan, but he also resented him. "I would have made it, Ron, with or without you. And whatever you did for me didn't give you the right to steal from me." "Why not? Why the hell not? You stole, from me. You stole fucking everything I had. Did I ever tell you how many times my own father asked me why I couldn't be more like you? It was always after you'd been at our house for dinner or whatever. I'd get one of his famous speeches about how disappointed he was in me, and it finally dawned on me that he always would be. I didn't have ' potential.' I wasn't going to be a bright, shiny hero like you." Jordan understood more all the time. Maybe he understood it all. "You wanted Angela out of the way, and you wanted me to kill her so you could have a ringside seat while they dragged me through the mud, right?" Laird's eyes told the truth. Yes, they said, / I wanted to bring you down any way I could. If I couldn't be you, then I wanted to ruin you. Angela was just a means to an end, Jordan realized, and that end was him, Jordan. Laird had never been able to control his youthful jealousy and rage. He'd carried it all the way into adulthood. It wasn't even greed that motivated him. It was recognition and revenge. He was still nothing more than a kid, seeking his father's approval. "Why haven't I been allowed to call my attorney?" Laird struggled to get to his feet. "This is a violation of my rights." Jordan hauled him up and took him over to the wall phone by the kitchen door. "Call!" he said, pressing the gun barrel to his temple. He was strongly tempted to pull the trigger, but he had the feeling Laird's very public trial was going to be a lot more interesting and less merciful. "Wait! There's something I need to know." Angela came up behind them. Laird turned his frightening countenance on

her, but she stood her ground. "Who is Angel Face?" she said. ' me who she is. You owe me that much." "I owe you nothing. You'd be dead by now if not for me." "Bullshit," Angela said softly. Apparently she wasn't feeling particularly grateful. "There never was a female serial killer, was there? You invented her and her victims, and you tried to frame me for killings that never happened." Laird laughed at her. "You're crazy, and I can prove it. Your own psychiatrist will testify to that." Jordan struggled to understand what Angela was saying. "Killings that never happened? But those doctors died, Angela. Somebody killed them." "They died," she said, "but no one killed them. I can't prove it, but I'm certain of it." "Dr. Inada, the visiting surgeon? The patient in my office tonight? I took their vital signs," Jordan insisted. But something stuck in his mind. When Inada's body disappeared, Firestarter had told him the CIA had to cover up the killings because Angel Face was a threat to national security. The authorities could not be allowed to find out how the doctors had died. Inada was going to have an accident, Firestarter had assured Jordan. His death would be accidental as had all the other victims' deaths. Jordan didn't know what to make of Angela's theory, and she obviously couldn't explain it. He looked from Ron Laird to Angela to Silver, but he found no answers to his dilemma there. There were no killings? There was no Angel Face? SOMETHING was terribly wrong with Angela, but she couldn't imagine what it was besides exhaustion, so she'd decided to ignore it. The jittery vibrations would disappear with some sleep, she was sure, and right now, she needed her energy to deal with Silver, who'd just dropped Angela off at her apartment and was due back at task force headquarters. "Hang on a sec! There's something I need to show you." Silver stopped, but with great reluctance. She was on her way out of the apartment when Angela beckoned her back. "Please? It will only take a minute."

It had been a marathon night. No one had slept, and the entire morning had been taken up with police reports and interviews. The Angel Face case had gone straight to the top echelons of law enforcement, and both Angela and Jordan had told their story to various CIA and local officials. Ron Laird had been detained by a task force for questioning. Peter Brandt had been picked up for the same reason, as had Sammy Tran. When Angela and Jordan were finally dismissed this morning, Jordan had gone straight to the hospital to take care of things there, and Silver had offered to chauffeur Angela back to her place. The last thing on Angela's mind when she walked in the door was E-mail, but the computer screen, glowing in the dim light of the kitchen, had reminded her of something. "This won't take long," she promised as Silver joined her at the dinette table, "and it could be important." She clicked the Mail icon, and her E-mail queue appeared. Relieved, she saw that the message Sammy told her about was still there. Nothing would have surprised her at this point. "I met a woman in a chat room for runaways," she explained. "She went by the name runninwyld, and she was the room's unofficial godmother, a font of information about everything, except herself, so I don't know a whole lot about her." Angela brought the E-mail up and read it aloud. "I'm closer than u think, lonely. Write back as soon as u get this. I have information that's vital to your safety." She pointed out the dateline to Silver. "This came in yesterday while Jordan and I were on our way back to the States. It sounds like she knew something about my situation, but I never discussed it with her." Angela stared at Silver expectantly. Her friend had gone mysteriously silent. "Is something wrong?" Silver's arms were folded, and she was clearly holding something back. "What is it?" Angela asked. "Have I stumbled onto some state secret?" The other woman shook her head with weary resignation. "You met runninwyld six months ago in a chat room called girl gone, right?"

"How did you know that?" Maybe this was it, Angela thought, still trying to explain her nerves. She'd been picking up weird vibes from Silver. There'd been so much going on she hadn't noticed the other woman acting strangely. "And you asked her if she was in trouble?" "I did, yes, the other night." Angela was beginning to wonder if her theory about Angel Face was wrong. "Is it runninwyld? Is she the serial killer?" Again, Silver shook her head. "What then? How do you know about her?" Silver touched Angela's arm. "I am her, Angela. I took the name to keep in touch with you and to keep an eye on you. In fact, I formed the chat room myself and then E-mailed you an anonymous invitation to come and visit, if you remember." Angela did. The invitation had come camouflaged in a list of new chat rooms that were being formed. She'd responded immediately, thinking she might find some kindred souls in the room. "Silver, I got an instant message from runninwyld, welcoming me when I signed in the room. Why didn't you just tell me it was you?" "I wanted to, but when you came to San Luis that first time, and I helped you erase your memory, I also planted the suggestion that you wouldn't remember me. I was on the run, too, and I didn't know who my enemies were any more than you did. I figured there was a good chance you'd go back to the States, and I was playing it safe. You couldn't talk about what you didn't know, including me. But after you left, I got concerned about your safety, and I came across a CIA contact through some informant friends of mine, so--" "You told the CIA about me?" "Only hypothetically. I didn't trust them, either." "But you do work for them now?" "It's fair to say that I work for them on a consulting basis," she admitted, "but that's not the point. At that time, the agency had reason to believe that Smarttech was involved in biowarfare research, and they gave me free rein to snoop, which included staying in touch with you. They knew nothing about the Angel Face software, and I never came across anything, either. Laird managed to keep that totally under wraps until he made the mistake of trying to trap you and Jordan Carpenter in the

same net." "Was I under surveillance?" Angela asked. "Is that how you knew I was at Jordan's last night?" Silver smiled. "You would have been if I'd been able to find you. I staked out Jordan's place thinking you might go there, and I got lucky. Laird's been on watch and observe status for some time now, but like most sociopaths, he has a sixth sense for self-preservation. When you showed up in San Luis and told me someone was trying to kill you, he was my first suspect. I got permission to put him on my to-do list, and I was at my station in Cordoba, doing some computer work on him, the morning Pedro sent you to the mission." "Laird was behind that?" "No, Jordan was. He bribed my loyal foreman." Silver stretched out the stiffness in her arms and shoulders. "How about some coffee before I crash?" "Is Jordan in trouble?" Silver was doing neck rolls. "No, but your boyfriend's pretty creative." Her boyfriend. Angela wished. But she wasn't going to get into that right now. She got up to fix the coffee, aware that Silver was fighting exhaustion while she was still strangely hyper alert. Something was wrong. She should have been a zombie after what she'd been through. It was probably the adrenaline in her system and the need to get some closure. Silver had been in on the questioning of Laird and the others, and Angela wondered how much she was permitted to talk about it. "Did they get anything more out of Laird?" she asked as she presented Silver with a steaming cup of Frenchpressed Colombian. "Do we know who Angel Face really is?" Silver took a sip and fluttered her eyelids, probably at the strength of the brew. "Laird still refuses to talk, but Peter Brandt is more than willing, and from what the task force has been able to piece together, your theory is right. Angel Face doesn't exist and never did. From what we know now, Laird went through this year's death records and found three doctors who'd died in accidents, and then he claimed that they were actually victims of serial killings." "For Jordan's benefit?" "Exactly. He did it to convince Jordan that Angel Face meant business, and that he was next on her list. Then he explained the accidents away by saying the CIA had to clean up after each strike in order to keep

Angel Face out of the hands of local authorities." "What about the other two doctors?" Angela asked. "They weren't accidents." "They weren't doctors, either. They were actors, paid by Laird to fake heart attacks, again for Jordan's benefit." "What? The visiting surgeon from Tokyo University?" Silver nodded. "A thirty-something Asian actor who couldn't pay his rent. Don't forget Ron Laird is a doctor, himself. He knew how to dummy up medical credentials. The actors were prepped with drugs that mimicked arthymias, and Jordan's office equipment was rigged to look as if his patient had gone into cardiac arrest right there in the exam room. The paramedics who showed up were paid off, too." Silver actually smiled. "That's where we got lucky. One of Jordan's residents showed up just as the paramedics did, and she spotted them for phonies right away. Apparently, they carted the patient off without any attempt to resuscitate him." Angela was incredulous. "Did Laird really think he was going to get away with this?" "He might have if Jordan had been more cooperative. Jordan took the bait with Inada, but when he refused to leave you for dead in the jungle, Laird had to come up with another strike, something symbolic." "What do you mean?" "He counted on Jordan being as obsessed with you as he was with saving lives. Laird's plan was to twist those two obsessions and turn them against him. He did that by making Jordan believe you'd set him up to kill his own patient." Angela was afraid she might be ill. "I pray he doesn't get away with this." Silver agreed. "He's a crazy, slippery son of a bitch." "Is there anything I can do?" Angela sincerely wanted to help. She would have done anything. "There are a couple things working in our favor. One is your psychiatrist, Dr. Fremont." "Really?" At one point she'd been on Angela's list of suspects.

"She's okay, Angela. She contacted the agency when you disappeared, and we've been working with her ever since. She claims the more time she spent with you, the more she came to believe you and not Brandt. She's volunteered to testify against Smarttech when this comes to trialAngela was still uneasy. "I wasn't seeing Dr. Fremont by choice. Peter insisted I get help." "Brandt convinced her you were paranoid, and I think to some extent he thought you were. Remember, he knew nothing about Angel Face, except that it was a software program. It's not clear what else he knew about Laird's scheming, or when he knew it, but we'll get to the truth." Silver sipped the coffee and shuddered, possibly with pleasure. The light from the kitchen window tipped her wispy blond hair with icicles, and made her look like a genie with special powers, despite her fatigue. "This stuff will keep me awake for years," she said. "You don't happen to have a thermos, do you?" Angela's phone rang before she could put her hands on a thermos. It was Jordan, and her stomach began to flutter the moment she heard his voice. He'd called to check on her and let her know when he'd be done at the hospital. "I didn't wake you, did I?" he asked. Angela wove the phone cord through her fingers, aware that she was smiling and tilting her head. "No, I haven't been to bed yet, but that's where I'm headed next." "I'll bring the mosquito netting." The mere suggestion of sensual male laughter steamed up the phone lines. It made Angela's heart race, but her reaction was closer to panic than excitement. Suddenly, intimacy with Jordan Carpenter seemed threatening. This was the real world and not a tropical jungle in Mexico. And she wasn't delirious. "Thanks, but I'll make do with a comforter," she assured him. "And a nice long nap, say twenty-four hours. I'll be fine. Are you ... fine?" "I could sleep standing up," he said, still with that sexy laughter in his voice. "All right then, sleepyhead.

Don't bop any large cats on the nose unless I'm around to save you." "No bopping, no." Angela--" "Yes?" "Don't let the flame go out." With that and a promise to call back, he was gone, and Angela was still vibrating from the few moments of contact they'd had. She wasn't entirely sure what had happened. She was anything but tired, and she wanted to be with him. Today. Tomorrow. She wanted forever. Silver was on her way out the door again. "Rain check on the coffee, okay? I have to get back." "Wait! There must be a thermos around here somewhere." Angela set down the phone and went after her friend. For some reason, she didn't want to be alone. Silver seemed to understand. "Listen" she said, "you go see Dr. Fremont again and give her a chance to explain, okay? She's on your side." "I'll think about it," Angela promised. It was nice that Dr. Fremont didn't think she was paranoid, but she was feeling a little paranoid right now. What she needed more than anything was to take a breath and clear her head. There'd been too much insanity for too long. Far too long. And some sleep wouldn't hurt, either. She had a sense of profound fatigue beneath the wakefulness. Unexpectedly, Silver pulled Angela into her arms and hugged her. "He's a good guy," she whispered. "Don't be thinking you don't deserve him or something silly like that." Angela was startled, but she hugged her friend back. He was a good guy. Her one good man. She ought to be ecstatic, but for some reason her throat was aching. It was so tight she could hardly swallow. Jordan found Teri Benson in the on-call room.

She was throwing things in a duffel bag and talking to herself in low, angry tones. He couldn't make out the words, `<-;0' but he could imagine. The cardiac unit was still buzzing about her humiliation in the OR, and most of them weren't unhappy that Teri Benson's halo was bent. Her stethoscope wasn't in great shape, either. It was in the refuse bin, hanging onto the side by a chrome ear tip. Not by accident, he suspected. "Got the day off?" he asked. "Or a year." She stuffed a box of opened baking soda in the bag. "I'm leaving California General." "And possibly medicine?" She looked up with a stricken expression that told him he was right. "How did you know that?" she asked. "I've been there. I made some world-class mistakes when I was a senior surgical resident, and I figured I'd better leave before they threw me out. The thing is, every doctor makes mistakes, Benson. Big ones. Sometimes you lose patients. And sometimes it's your fault." "This is not about what happened in the OR." "Then what's it about?" She threw some more things in the bag, making it clear she didn't want to talk. But Jordan had decided he wasn't leaving until she did. Finally, she shot a glance his way. She looked so distressed he wanted to reach out and steady her. "Dr. Carpenter," she blurted, "you don't know how badly I wanted to let you take the rap for what happened in your office last night. I kept thinking, He screwed up! Finally!" Maybe this wasn't a good time to tell her how many people were saying the same thing about her? Jordan would have chuckled, but he didn't want to upset her any more. "You're human, Doctor. We all are, and humans can be petty and envious." "Or they can be deadly, like Ron Laird." She shuddered.

"And I was only a couple steps behind him. I've been waiting like a vulture for you to make a misstep, any misstep. Do you know that I actually debated whether or not to report the paramedics?" There'd always been tension between him and Teri. He just hadn't realized it was so tense. "But you did report them," he said. "Actually, you saved my behind, if you want to know the truth. Based on your description, the police picked up one of the paramedics, and it looks like he's going to be a key witness." Jordan had seen Teri that morning down at City Hall being interviewed by various members of the task force, and that was part of the reason he'd come looking for her now, to thank her for her presence of mind in a crisis. He'd left his office last night believing a patient might have died because of his negligence. She could have taken advantage of that with little risk to herself. If the truth came out, she could easily have claimed she'd been fooled, just as Jordan had. But she didn't. That showed a functioning conscience and more strength of character than she wanted to admit. "Leaving medicine won't solve your problem," he told her. "It will if I'm in it for the wrong reasons. If I want to be a famous doctor, I should look for work on a soap opera." "How about a good doctor, one who saves lives?" "That would be you," she said pointedly. "Me, I want to kill people, especially the ones who block my career path." She sighed heavily and tossed aside the sweater she'd been folding and refolding. "I owe you an apology." Jordan toughened his stance. "You owe me nothing, but you do owe medicine something. Don't run from this, Benson. Learn from it." "Yeah, yeah, I appreciate the pep talk, but nothing has changed. I'd still love to steamroller you flat on my way to top, and as long as I feel that way, I don't belong here." Jordan rolled his eyes, hoping to give her the full effect of his skepticism. "Think you might have wanted me out of the way because I was in your way? You didn't imagine it, Teri. There were times when I was blocking your path. Delegating has never been my strong suit, but this mess taught me something, too. Talent needs room, and you're a talented surgeon." He hesitated, surprised at how difficult it was to say what needed to be said. "I don't want you to go, Doctor.

I need your help here." "Oh, my God," she whispered. She cleared her throat, but couldn't seem to get her voice back. "You'd be willing to trust me after what I just told you?" "I trust you because you did tell me. If you want to change my mind, you'll have to come up with something better than homicidal fantasies. We all have those." He had no intention of letting her respond, and she didn't seem to know what to say, anyway, especially when he pulled the stethoscope from around his neck and offered it to her. "Looks like you're going to be needing one of these." Now she was completely bewildered. Jordan had found the instrument in an opened desk drawer, along with a note from Angel Face, telling him to meet her in the storeroom across from Exam Three. Apparently, it was supposed to have led him to the dead body, which as it turned out, he had no problem finding on his own. Jordan had turned the note in as evidence but not the stethoscope. He'd never been a big believer in fate, but it could be that was starting to change. For some reason, he hadn't been able to relinquish the instrument. Maybe this was the reason. "That's the one your parents gave you, isn't it?" Teri asked. "The stethoscope of legend? I couldn't possibly take it." "Good, because I'm not giving it to you. It's on lifetime loan. Use it and make us all proud. Make yourself proud." Still she didn't touch the stethoscope. "Are you leaving?" Distress flooded back into her weary features, and Jordan was touched. That was new, too. He'd never particularly cared what people thought, which was probably why he'd stepped on so many toes. "Cutting down," he told her. "I want more time for research and a few other things." He smiled, probably giving himself away. He wanted time for a sleepyheaded ex-lust murderer. A beeping signal emanated from Teri's coat pocket. They both knew what it was and laughed.

Gingerly, Teri took his offering and draped it around her neck. "You know this makes me feel even lousier, don't you?" "It's supposed to make you feel obligated," Jordan shot back. "Go to work, Benson! Your pager's going off."

CHAPTER 25. "LOVE ? " "Children and kittens, anything innocent." "Hate?" "The abuse of anything innocent." "Doctors?" "Better than the alternative, I suppose." "Dr. Fremont, please keep your answers to one word. That is the object of these free-association exercises." Angela smiled, pleased at having the last word. She'd decided to turn the tables on her psychiatrist and play the free-association game with her. The doctor had been a good sport about it, and Angela had liked her answers. They could have been her own, she realized. The gnawing sense of dread Angela lived with had eased greatly in the last twenty-four hours, and she'd decided to take Silver's advice and have a session with the doctor. The more closure she could get, the better, obviously. Dr. Fremont's blue-framed glasses picked up the light from the window as she left her desk and came to sit by Angela on the couch. "I'm so glad you're here," she said. "I know your trust has been shaken in everyone, including me, and I'm grateful for a second chance." Angela was touched and found herself wanting to extend a hand to the other woman. But suddenly it felt like the space between them had become the Grand Canyon. It wasn't a lack of trust on Angela's part. It was something else she couldn't put into words, her own sense of inadequacy perhaps. Somewhere in the dark inner forest lurked the fear that she might be rejected. Or worse, that she would be accepted and wouldn't know what to do. "I'm glad I'm here, too," she said and fell silent. "What else shall we talk about today?" In fact, Angela's session was nearly over, but there were several things still unresolved in her mind where the Angel Face case was concerned, and she knew Dr. Fremont was working with the task force. "Do you have any idea what will happen to Peter Brandt?" she asked.

"I understand he's been offered immunity to testify against Laird, and he'll probably take it. His main role in the company over the years has been damage control. Laird got them into scrapes, and Peter got them out." Angela had always had that sense of it, too. "Silver told me that Peter knew nothing about Angel Face." "He didn't," the doctor affirmed. "Laird told him a whole different lie. He said the CIA was after you because you were a national security risk, and if Peter didn't deal with you first, they would. He had Peter believing that you were as dangerous as Adam, that you could bring down governments." "Because of the information Adam gave me?" "Yes, but it was all a lie. Adam's design was flawed. Laird secretly tried to re-create the weapon using his formula, and it didn't work. Adam wasn't killed because he could supply third-world regimes with deadly weapons. He was a loose cannon who could rat on Smarttech at any time, and since Laird never knew how much Adam had told you, you had to go, too." "Was it Peter who held him off?" "For a while, yes. Peter didn't discover how Adam died until after you disappeared. He was appalled and demanded that all research in biowarfare be suspended. He told Laird you were off limits. He was going to find you and rehabilitate you himself. He argued that you were a classic survivor personality, and the company could profit by studying you. But the truth was, he was in love with you, Angela. Hopelessly." Angela didn't feel like much of a survivor presently. She felt sad. "Peter never intended that you be harmed," Dr. Fremont added. "His plan was to relocate you and change your identity, which meant, of course, that he had to give you up." "Wouldn't it have been easier for him to turn Laird in?" "People don't do what's easy, Angela. They do what they have to, and apparently Peter Brandt and Ron Laird knew too much about each other. Peter couldn't bring down Laird without bringing down himself."

"And Sammy, what happened to him?" "Sammy's been questioned and released. His only crime was overzealousness. Your disappearance had him so concerned he broke into your E-mail account and found the appointment schedule for your field interviews. He went to several of the addresses looking for you, including Jordan Carpenter's." Angela ought to have been grateful that people cared enough to take such risks for her, but her heart was burdened, and the reason had nothing to do with the case. It was deeply personal. "Now let me ask you a question, Angela. What about your doctor? Is everything all right with you and Jordan?" Dr. Fremont was a perceptive woman. This was really what Angela had come to talk about. "No, everything isn't all right," she admitted. "What's the problem?" "The problem is he's wonderful, Dr. Fremont. He's perfect. I couldn't ask for more. But he deserves more." The psychiatrist sat forward, concerned. "What do you mean?" "I'm still haunted by violent fantasies and may be for the rest of my life. I can't look in a mirror without wanting to scrub away this face. How can I expect him to love and accept me as I am, if I can't?" "You don't believe he loves you as you are?" "He doesn't know who I am. He's in love with a picture of who I was." "Which doesn't mean he doesn't love you, Angela, or that he couldn't love the woman he comes to know." Angela stared at the blue plaid pattern in the carpet, wondering if she could go on. This part was hard. Too hard. It cut straight to the heart of her. "Yes, perhaps he could come to love me, but it would be the wrong kind of love--" She floundered for an example. "He has a cockatiel with clipped wings. It's a beautiful thing, but it can't fly. It has to be carried everywhere, taken from room to room. What if he came to love me like that?" Angela looked up, her heart breaking. "I can't fly, either, Dr. Fremont.

And I don't want to be loved that way, out of duty or pity." "Maybe it isn't either he feels, Angela. Maybe it's compassion?" Angela shook her head. She couldn't settle for that, and Jordan shouldn't, either. She wanted love and passion. She wanted fire and joy, but first she had to find those things within herself. She had to be able to look at herself in the mirror and believe that the world would not be a better place without her. She had caused so much pain. "NO , I don't understand. Tell me again why you can't be with me, Angela. Make me understand this time." The midafternoon heat had expanded to fill the porch of Jordan's house until it felt like a physical presence. What little breeze there was seemed to get trapped in the lush foliage. Leaves rustled soothingly, but the air could not escape. The sliding rocker Angela sat in whistled softly with each push of her feet. Jordan wasn't even sure she knew she was rocking. It looked like one of those mindless repetitive motions meant to keep certain feelings at bay. He stood by the porch railing, next to the bunch of lilacs he'd foolishly picked in honor of her visit. "I have work to do," she said, "work on me. I don't know how else to explain it. I feel unfinished, and before I can be of any use to anyone, especially myself, I need the missing parts." He considered that for a moment. "You could be talking about the sensor I shelved because I was concerned it would be misused. As it turned out, I should have followed through on it myself." "Yes, it's exactly like that, only I allowed myself to be misused, and it happened not because of who I was but because of the way I looked, this face." She touched the back of her fingers to her mouth. "I have to make my peace with that before I can go on." "You couldn't do that here?" It was a moment or two before she spoke. "I can't." He could hear the heartache in her voice, and his throat tightened, especially since she couldn't seem to look at him.

"Did you know that after awhile, a bird with clipped wings stops trying to fly?" "God, Angela." She said nothing to that, just glanced at him with an expression of such sweet anguish that it left him speechless, too. "I'm coming back," she said. "I don't know when that will be. Or if you can wait, but--" He understood. Or he was trying to understand. "You have to try those wings, see if they work." She rose and came to him. He pulled her close, and she whispered, "I love you, Jordan." "I love you, too. Stay with me." "I can't ... " "Angela!" She stepped back to look at him, and her chin began to tremble. "Do one thing for me?" she asked. "Sure, anything." "Don't let the flame go out." He steadied her as she knelt to pick up her backpack. By the time she had it on and securely arranged, she also had herself under control again. There would be no tears, no histrionics. But Jordan felt his heart twist with both pleasure and pain as she flicked back some imaginary hair. It was a lovely, frantic gesture, and futile, of course. No matter what else about her might change, no matter who she discovered she was, he hoped she never stopped doing that. "Say good-bye to Birdy for me." "I will. I'll do that." Jordan would have no problem keeping his promises. He could explain to the bird why she'd had to leave, and the flame would not go out. Never. But a part of him died when she turned and walked away. This was what Ned Jenkins must have felt when he thought he'd lost his wife.

It was what Jordan had been missing in his life--a partner, a soul mate--someone he cared about so deeply that to lose her would render life meaningless. "Good-bye, Birdy ... good-bye ... " Jordan was roused from his thoughts by the melancholy refrain. It was Birdy herself, he realized, croaking softly from the living room. Jordan had no idea how long he'd been sitting on the porch steps, but the sun was lower in the sky and the ache in his shoulders made him sit up and roll the stiffness out of them. Feeling as if he'd aged several decades, he got himself up and went to the kitchen in search of a box of sunflower seeds. Penny could eat the bag of Total Diet cockatiel food herself. It wasn't always the body that needed to be fed. Sometimes it was the soul. By the time Jordan reached the kitchen, he'd realized what he was facing. His crystal ball had cracked, and he couldn't see the immediate future beyond an endless blur of minutes. Not days or hours. He was going to feel the emptiness minute by minute. He was going to miss her that much. A summer afternoon in June, one year later ... "Varoooom varooorn varooom." The noise of revving engines came from the living room. Jordan ignored the din. It was Birdy, hinting that she wanted to go for a ride in the car. "Not this trip, Birdy." He dropped one last pair of jeans in his suitcase and zipped up the bag. Two pair of blue jeans, one pair of khaki Dockers, a replacement Lakers jersey, and three crewneck tees. Not a suit in sight. He wasn't going to a conference or educational seminar. There was an annual summer music festival in Ojai, and he'd always wanted to go. Maybe he'd even pick up a guitar and learn some tunes, give Springsteen some competition. Jordan grabbed his bag from the bed, his V-neck sweater from the chair, and carried them into the living room. "The baby-sitter will be here any minute," he told Birdy. "You be nice to her now." "Dead meat," Birdy chirped with an innocent twitch of her tail. Jordan felt sympathy for the poor woman. He'd hired her through a pet-sitting referral agency, and she had impeccable credentials, but the cockatiel had picked up some choice language lately, especially with Penny not around to correct her. Jordan had realized one day that the way to stop his little sister from fixing him up was to fix her up. He'd introduced her to the echocardiologist on his valve team, and now he was lucky to get a call from either one of them.

Love changed everything. He wasn't sure why it had taken him forty years to figure that out. He'd also discovered that problems didn't go away just because you were an expert at avoiding them. Nor did pain. That was the point at which he'd stopped burying himself in work and braved the fire-breathing dragons--loneliness and grief. He'd learned to cry that day. A bowl of fresh fruit sat prominently on the dining room table, and Jordan snapped off a bunch of grapes for Birdy. Since Penny's departure, he'd been paying more attention to her diet and his own. He drank less beer now, ate more grilled fish, and spent more time in the hammock on the front porch. Sometimes he even slept out there. Birdy was halfway through her grapes when a tap at the door brought her head up. "Come on in," Jordan called. He threw his sweater over his shoulder and reached for his bag as the door swung open. But that was as far as he got. He couldn't see the woman on the threshold. The sun was too bright, but he was pretty sure she wasn't the babysitter. "Jordan--" If he'd been blindfolded and tied up on the floor of a jungle hut, he would have recognized that voice. "What took you so long?" That was all he could say, and all she could do was lift her shoulders helplessly and coax back hair that wasn't there. As his eyes adjusted to the brightness, he could see that she was wearing mostly black, still her favorite color, apparently. But there was a bloom in her cheeks and a directness in her gaze that hadn't been evident before. Neither one of them could seem to move, so they spoke to each other from across the room. "I was so afraid you wouldn't be here," she said. "Where was I going to go? What else was I going to do?" "Did you get my letters?" He nodded. "Three of them. I still have them." Memorized, he thought. The first time she'd written about her progress in dealing with the damage done by her foster father. She'd checked herself into a clinic that dealt with post-traumatic stress disorder, and Dr. Fremont, who consulted on her case, arranged for her to see the surveillance tapes of

her father's death. They'd revealed that her father intended to take his own life when he summoned her to the examining room, and what happened next was a form of cop suicide. He wanted her to kill him and bear the responsibility for the monstrous things he'd done. The tapes made the abuse stark and real. She'd been controlled and manipulated in ways that were subversive beyond a child's ability to comprehend or withstand, and seeing them helped her to accept that she was responsible to herself first and to her own healing. The second letter dealt with her deep aversion to her looks, a difficult and resistant disorder called facial dysmorphia. But with the steady support of her therapists and daily group sessions, she had begun to see a woman who deserved compassion instead of self-hatred. "I can look in the mirror now without wanting it to be someone else," she'd written to Jordan. "Sometimes I even wink." He'd received her last letter a couple of weeks ago, and she'd expressed a strong desire to return to the real world and to see him again, if he was willing. But she had been vague about a date, and the tone had seemed faintly impersonal. That's when he had the first inkling that her feelings might have changed, along with all the other changes. He'd found it difficult to write back. In fact, the letter was still half finished on his dresser. Her gaze had dropped to his bag, and he felt compelled to explain. "A music festival," he said. "It was something to do." "Did you miss me at all? Is it silly to ask that? I have to." "Miss. you?" The pain that caught him nearly knocked him off his feet. "Angela, every minute. There are over five hundred thousand of them a year, did you know that? And I had to live through every one of them without you." He was angry, too, he realized. He had suffered without her, and he didn't like suffering, no matter what he might have learned from it. Women seemed to handle that stuff so much better than men. Losing and finding themselves. He wasn't discounting her ordeal. She had suffered, too, all her life, more than he ever had or ever would. But her suffering wasn't solely because of him, and that pissed him off. He wanted to be the absolute center of her universe, her sun. God, what colossal ego.

Men were stupid, selfish bastards, he decided. And men in love were worse. They needed a woman's every thought to be of them, her every response to be about them. Or at least he did, with this woman. But then again, he'd been without her for a year, and he wanted to make up for every empty minute, which meant every new minute had to be filled to the breaking point with her presence. He never got a chance to tell her any of that, however, because something totally unexpected happened before he could. Even Jordan was surprised by the tiny yellow missile that flew over Angela's head and shot through the open door. She ducked and looked up. "What was that? A bird?" "My bird," Jordan said. "Birdy?" She gaped at him. "Birdy can fly?" "I let her wings grow back." "Oh, Jordan! Oh, my God." She clasped her hands and nearly doubled over in her acute distress. Jordan thought she was going to collapse again, the way she had when she first discovered the clipped wings. He was at her side in seconds. He couldn't let her go through that again. Of all people, he had been sure she would understand. "Every time her wings beat the air, I thought of you," he tried to explain. She shook her head, struggling to speak. "I'm not upset that you did it. Please don't think that. I'll never be able to tell you what it means to me. But Jordan, now she's gone." No one knew the fiery pain of loss like Jordan did. He took her in his arms and held her. "I'm beginning to believe this is the risk we take every day," he said, smoothing her hair. "There aren't any guarantees that you won't lose what you love. That's why you have to make it all count." "But not Birdy--" She wrapped her arms around him and squeezed tight, clinging and sighing, feeling the terrible joy of that moment. Of love without guarantees. But God, it was better than the alternative.

"There's a good chance she's coming back," he whispered. "She's pulled this once or twice before." Angela drew back to look at him, making it clear from her knitted brows that she meant to hold him to that statement. She shook her head, then quickly nodded, perhaps realizing her mistake--and almost made him dizzy. She only had to show up to make him dizzy. It was also clear that they couldn't be this close, couldn't stare into each other's eyes this way, without kissing. Bird or no bird. Their bodies came together, their lids drifted almost shut, their hearts were pounding like mad, at least his was, and she let out a soft gasp. "Duck!" Jordan pulled her down with him as a feathery UFO buzzed them on its way back inside. "Shut the door!" Angela laughed, tugging at him. "Before she does it again." They tumbled inside, crazy with relief and happiness. And once the door was safely shut, the runaway bird on her perch, and their world intact, they had that kiss. They had several kisses, each one sweeter than the last. Jordan wished they were in the jungle. He wished he had some rope. God, how he wanted this woman ... at his mercy. He was sure as hell at hers. "You're beautiful," he observed. "Is it okay to say that?" "It's okay. I don't mind how I look all that much anymore." Her smile hinted of the struggle she'd had. "It doesn't even feel like a curse." "Now, there's progress." He searched the big eyes and the soft mouth, aching to kiss her again, but not at the risk of discounting her efforts to recover. "I don't think I understood what you were going through until I got your letters. Each one was like opening the page of a kid's pop-up book. Things kept appearing before my eyes that I hadn't seen before. This is who she is, I remember thinking. This is the real Angela. I almost couldn't fathom the pain ... or the joy of that journey." She nodded, her eyes bright with tears. "I read them all," he said, "many times, but the last one was different." "Yes, I know it was. I wasn'tsure how you would react to my coming back

or if you wanted me to. I guess I was trying to prepare you, and then you never wrote back. I was crushed, Jordan. I was almost afraid to come here today." Maybe it was people in love who were stupid, not just men. "Despite that," she pointed out, "you do realize that I kept my part of the bargain. I came back." Her voice was so clear and steady he wondered how she did it. She had come back, and now she was declaring herself, no hesitation, no equivocation, and no evidence of fear, despite her protestation. He wasn't certain he could have been so forthright if their situations had been reversed and he was returning after a years's separation. But then, there was just this one thing in all of life that frightened him. Her. "Does it feel to you like the flame's gone out?" His fingers detected a skittering pulse in the softness of her throat. Perhaps not as calm as she sounded, he realized. "No," she said, "it doesn't." A dark tendril of hair fell onto her face. She didn't brush it away. Neither did he. "It will never go out," he said. When he spoke next, his voice was almost harsh. "It burns for you and you alone, Angela. I want it to be your warmth on a cold day, the kindling fire in your blood, the passion that sparks your imagination. I want it to be whatever you need it to be, and as long as I'm alive--" She put her lips to his fingers. "As long as we're alive," she vowed, "it will never go out."