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He snatched his bag and coat and waded through the emerging passengers.

“I’m Joe Cardone.”

His words came out automatically, which was helpful since the thinking part of his brain suffered a brief short circuit. Her face was pretty and feminine, but her eyes were striking. Like a cat, his mind said as it jerked back into action. Green eyes with the merest, really no more than a subliminal hint, of almond shape. Twisted jade earrings the color of her shirt framed uncommonly fair skin.

Passengers streamed around Nova as she sized up her new partner. The flight had been long and bumpy, but the excitement of her newest mission hadn’t faded.

Agent Joe Cardone was good-looking, but young. Maybe her younger sister’s age, twenty-six. And while she might have expected him to be giving her a thorough going-over, too, he seemed to be captured by her eyes. She couldn’t resist a slight smile. She extended her hand. “Nova Blair. Glad to meet you, partner.”

His grip was warm and firm. He said, “We’ve got to hustle to make our connection. They’ve called the flight twice.”

“Let’s hustle then.”

They stooped to pick up her bulging bag at the same moment. She said, “I can handle it.”

She caught a frown from the kid, as if he felt she’d rebuked him. Let’s hope Mr. Cardone isn’t going to be uncomfortable taking orders from a woman.

“Yep,” he said, a cool edge on his words. “I bet you can handle it just fine.”

He spun on his heel and led the way at a fast clip. At the cockpit of their next flight, he paused. “Carrying?” he asked.

She shook her head. “No. You?”

“Never when I’m in my IBM disguise.”

“IBM,” she said, and smiled. “Interesting cover.”

Most seats already held warm bodies. They had a window and a middle seat in row twelve. The aisle seat was already occupied. Her partner shoved his overnighter and coat into the overhead bin, climbed over the man on the aisle, and sat in the window seat.

Nova stashed her things overhead, and slid past the man on the aisle seat and sat in the middle.

Nova listened as her partner quietly flipped through the pages of a magazine. She wondered why they had paired her with someone so young rather than an old hand. She guessed Agent Joe Cardone could not yet have had more than a couple of assignments. Perhaps this was his first.

Fairbanks met them with a light drizzle, a low, leaden sky and a chill wind. They deplaned and hurried across the tarmac, the wind licking up the edges of their overcoats. They had privacy enough now for her to talk freely to him.

“Any other luggage?” he asked right away.

“No,” she said. “This is it.”

“We’re supposed to meet our Company man at city hall. That’s where the FBI has set up its Area Command Center. He’ll drive us to the hospital.”

She frowned. “I don’t know when you were in contact last, but I called in from Seattle. I was told the terrorist is in really bad shape. He might not make it.”

They entered the main receiving area. From long habit, she did a thorough visual sweep of the room as she continued talking. “Also,” she continued, “the Alyeska man may be—probably is—the only survivor from any of the pumping stations. It’s questionable whether either will be around much longer. We’re to observe the FBI’s interrogation, absorb what we can since the terrorist is the hottest lead we have. Apparently there is evidence of foreign involvement, in which case the Company is going to be brought in and they want eyes and ears here right now. I say we don’t waste time picking up our man. I’ll rent a car and get directions. You call and tell our contact to meet us at the hospital.”

She sensed him tense. Just the merest straightening of his shoulders gave him away. And the slight smile he offered was stiff. She was quite sure that he wasn’t used to taking orders from a woman—or perhaps might resent it. Only time with him would tell. And whether it was going to be a problem.

Chapter 3

Fairbanks, 3:30 p.m.

Sunday, May 15

Nova brought up the car, a Ford Taurus. Within minutes she and Agent Cardone were speeding up Airport Boulevard toward downtown Fairbanks. She’d buckled her seat belt. Her partner hadn’t. The kid’s still sure he’s going to live forever.

She snatched a quick sideways glance. He was frowning as he studied the rental agency map. She liked his looks: a broad face with brown, alert eyes set wide apart, dark brown wavy hair. He stood several inches taller than she. Broad shoulders and chest. She usually characterized a man’s body by sport type: with Car-done she thought boxer.

He wore the low-key suit associated with an IBM representative, but he carried it with a cool confidence. There was something flamboyant about him. He put a finger to the map and smiled, and she knew at once it was the movie-star smile that had given her the flashy impression.

“Got it,” he said. “The hospital’s a few blocks south of this main drag.”

Cardone navigated, pointing and saying, “There.” At the hospital, an intensified wind propelled needle-like rain as they scurried from the parking lot toward the building entrance. A score of media types paced like hungry cats waiting for a press announcement feeding. Inside, she and Cardone shed their dripping raincoats. Cardone strode to the information desk. She followed.

A gray-haired matron sat waiting patiently to provide assistance to the lost. Nova’s partner flashed his Company ID. “We’re here to see the two patients brought from Pumping Station No. 6, and I’ll just bet you know where they might be.”

The matron beamed at Cardone, clearly captivated.

Apparently remembering suddenly that the couple asking directions was on solemn business, the woman smothered her smile. She said, “Isn’t all this such a dreadful thing.” She pointed to a schematic of the hospital. “You’re here, right in the center of this main floor. Take the elevators to your right. Go to the top. Fifth floor. The police and some FBI people are already up there. The nurses’ station is just across from the elevators.”

“Thanks.” Cardone unleashed another dazzling smile.

In the elevator, he punched the Up button. Nova caught her breath when the car took off like a startled racehorse. She had expected the usual hospital elevator—a tired nag. She checked the time. Four-fifteen. Generally a pretty quiet time in most hospitals.

Two uniformed policemen stood guard beside two rooms across from the nurses’ station. One man, tall and lanky, leaned against the wall next to his chair, arms crossed. The other, sporting a beefy, bloated face, sat studying a sheet of official-looking paper, presumably the names and descriptions of personnel allowed to see the patients.

Nova scanned the floor. Only one orderly. As she had expected, things were quiet.

Her partner outpaced her. She trailed him to the desk where a nurse in wild purple-and-blue pants and top sat filling in a chart. Both guards caught Nova’s attention and smiled. She smiled back.

Cardone flashed his ID. “Who’s the physician attending your two special patients?” He cocked his head to indicate the guarded doors.

“Dr. Graywing.” The nurse examined the ID carefully.

Cardone continued. “Can we talk to him?”

“She’s with another patient, but it shouldn’t be long. Anyway, you need to check in down the hall.” The nurse leaned forward and pointed to her right.

Nova walked with Cardone toward the muted sound of conversation in a room at the far end of the corridor. Three men had commandeered a waiting room near the corridor’s end. Institution-issue couches lined the walls, but a table and several straight-backed chairs squatted in the center. One seriously overweight and unshaven man stood in shirtsleeves taking coffee with knock-you-down aroma from a stainless-steel urn. Three sets of eyes examined her and Cardone, but quickly settled on her. “Afternoon, gentlemen,” she said.

A blond with a sharp nose, well-cut blue suit and horn-rimmed glasses spoke first. “CIA? Blair and Cardone?”

“Right,” Cardone said. “Agent Joe Cardone. And this is my partner, Agent Nova Blair.”

The blond shook hands, first with Cardone and then with her, and introduced himself. “David Stivsky, FBI. Been on the case from the get-go.”

He introduced the two other men. The hefty man, Jacobson, was a Fairbanks’ police lieutenant whose reassuring smile offset several unattractive chins. The other was an Alyeska man, from the office in charge of pipeline security. He was a sandy-haired beanpole named Duncan, and his expression seemed stuck on grim. He flipped open the log, checked their ID’s, and entered their names in the record.

“This is one helluva mess,” Stivsky said. He twirled one of the straight-backed chairs, sat and rested his arms over the back. “Three pumping stations and the terminal blasted to smithereens. Burning like they’re never gonna quit. I gather, since we were told to wait for you two, Langley has hard evidence these guys are foreigners.”

“A reasonable assumption,” Cardone said in a serious tone.

The men were getting into FBI-CIA turf issues and Nova had zero interest. Instead she asked, “Have you talked to either man yet?”

Stivsky scowled. “No. They were brought in by helicopter about oh-five-hundred. Pumping Station 6 is just north of here. Unfortunately the terrorist is busted all to hell. Been sedated since before arriving here. When he was first brought in, Wiley, the pipeline employee, talked to the doc, but he’s also been under sedation since before I made the scene.” The scowl deepened. “We’ve waited to have a go at ’em till you two arrived since waiting also made the doc happy.”

She nodded to Cardone. “Let’s see if the doctor is finished.”

“Is Dr. Graywing free yet?” Nova asked at the nurses’ station.

The nurse started to leave the desk. From a room along the opposite corridor, a slender Native American woman with glasses, salt-and-pepper hair and a doctor’s white coat entered the hall and bounded in their direction. The nurse pointed and said, “That’s her.”

Dr. Graywing looked questioningly at Nova and Nova’s new partner but addressed her nurse. “So who do we have here?”

After the doctor examined their credentials herself, Nova said, “We’d like to talk to you before we see your patients.”

The doctor glanced at her watch. “The pipeline employee is sedated, but should be able to talk in, say, half an hour. I can’t let you see the one that’s presumed to be a terrorist. He’s in critical condition.”

“I know that, but still, we have to see him.” Nova put a little bite into her words. “As you can imagine, it’s urgent.”

“You simply can’t talk to the terrorist until he’s in better shape,” she said, lacing her words for the first time with a sharp edge.

The nurse was absorbing their every word. Nova said, “Could we find a more private place?”

Dr. Graywing briskly led them back toward the waiting room. She stopped in front of a door that led to a space hardly larger than a closet. The room held a desk and chair, charts and some posted work schedules. Graywing waved her arm for Nova and Cardone to enter, followed them in, and closed the door. She leaned back against the desk and looked at Cardone with the same charmed sparkle in her eyes that Nova had seen in the woman at the reception desk. “It’s a miracle either of these men is alive.”

Nova fingered through her purse, extracted her mini-recorder and started taping. Graywing saw the recorder and halted. “This won’t bother you, will it?” Nova asked.

Graywing shifted position slightly. “Not at all.” Again looking at Cardone, she continued. “The presumed terrorist is, as I’ve explained, in critical condition. He fell down a shaft on the pumping station site. Broken neck. Broken right leg. A concussion. He was unconscious when he arrived and is only barely conscious now.” The doctor’s brow wrinkled in a sign of minor impatience. “Actually, I’ve told all of this to your three colleagues down the hall.”

Cardone countered with an easy grin. “We appreciate you bringing us up to speed.”

“Well…” Graywing took in a deep breath and plunged ahead. “Everyone seems to feel he was left behind because his colleagues couldn’t locate him before they took off. As I said, you’re not going to get anything out of him for some time. If ever.”

Graywing’s gaze shifted, met Nova’s briefly with a challenge, then went back to Cardone. Nova let the challenge pass—for the moment.

“The pipeline employee—his name is John Wiley—he’s in better condition, but he’s been sedated. He’s the only survivor from any of the three pumping stations.” Graywing gave Cardone and then Nova a questioning look. When they said nothing, she continued. “I don’t know about the other two stations, but all of the personnel at Number 6 were shot in the head. Really nasty. The medic told me they were almost all in bed. It was as though they’d been put to sleep, then shot. Wiley’s alive only because he has a steel plate in his head. The bullet simply grazed it.”

“That is a break,” said her partner.

Dr. Graywing smiled at him. “I presume you’re going to question the man, and I want to warn you, he’s still very confused—”

Nova cut in. “The FBI has the lead here, Doctor. They’ll be in charge of the questioning. We’re simply observers, and I’m sure they expect us to keep pretty much out of the way. But if we have questions, I’ll be the one asking.”

Finally she had Graywing’s full and surprised attention. Agent Cardone’s lips pulled into a thin line. He crossed his arms and stared at the wall. A notion that the kid might be a bit touchy about his status in their relationship again crossed Nova’s mind.

Dr. Graywing’s ears flushed pink. “I, yes…well,” she stammered. “I stand corrected. Please forgive me, Ms. Blair. Mmm. Let me say, I had a chance to talk to Wiley briefly. He said three things I thought might be of interest.” The doctor hesitated.

“Yes,” Nova said.

“First, even though it was nearly one in the morning, Wiley was awake, reading in bed in the company residence quarters, when he heard a noise. Then someone ran past the door to his room wearing a gas mask. So the first thing is, it looks like they did use some kind of chemical to incapacitate the workers, all eighteen of them, then took their time going to the rooms to dispatch them one by one before blowing up the place.”

Graywing shook her head. Nova shared her feelings. Eighteen men dead at Number 6, shot like cattle. More at the other two stations.

“The second thing Wiley mentioned was burned coffee. The smell was the last thing he remembered.”

“That’s odd,” said Cardone.

Nova said, “Maybe it has something to do with the chemical agent that was used on them.” That struck her as plausible and a piece of information possibly useful for forensics. She’d have to make sure they started looking for traces of drugs in Wiley’s blood and tissues immediately. “And what was the third thing?”

The doctor opened her mouth. The sound of two gunshots penetrated the small room followed by blood-chilling shrieks.

Chapter 4

Nova beat her partner into the hall. Both guards were sprawled on the hospital’s white linoleum floor, blood and tissue splattered on the walls behind where they’d stood.

Bile rushed upward, to burn the back of Nova’s throat. She swallowed it down. The acrid scent of gunpowder assaulted her. With their feet pounding in rhythm, she and Cardone reached the reception desk together. Stivsky and company were close behind. The nurse lay facedown over her records, unconscious or dead.

The doors to the two hospital rooms gaped wide. Nova wanted to stop, to check the rooms—the witnesses were priceless—but high-pitched screams still warbled from the mouth of a young volunteer dressed in pink and white. The girl looked with horror into Nova’s eyes as she pointed toward the exit door next to the elevator.

Nova was closer to the door than Cardone. She yanked it open, peered inside the stair shaft to see if anyone was there, then burst onto the landing, Cardone at her heels. From below came hollow sounds of someone running down metal stairs. She and Cardone poked their heads over the handrail. She glimpsed the back of a dark-haired man dressed in white as he exited from the stairwell onto the next floor down.

Wordlessly she and Cardone bolted down the steps, their headlong descent sending metallic echoes clanging up and down.

She trailed Cardone through the fourth-floor door into the corridor and saw the man in white halfway to the double doors at the corridor’s end, walking fast. They gave pursuit. Nova guessed that Stivsky would be on his way to the first floor to secure the exits. The man in white heard her and Cardone. Without looking back, he sprinted for the doors, overturning a cart.

“Watch out, idiot!” the surprised orderly yelled.

Side by side she and Cardone streaked after the suspect, avoiding the cart and people hugging the walls. They barged through the double doors. The corridor diverged.

“Split,” they said simultaneously.

Cardone took off to the left. She sprinted right and burst through the second set of double doors, nearly flattening a pregnant woman against the wall. Rooms lined the hallway on both sides, but it was unlikely the man would hide. He wanted out.

Halfway down the hall she passed another stairwell. The door was just closing. The assailant would be heading for a first-floor exit. An elevator stood four strides beyond the stairwell. The door yawned, revealing a skinny, bearded kid. Jeans. Plaid shirt. He moved with glacial slowness toward the opening. Nova leaped inside, shoving the kid out the door with one hand and hitting the first-floor button with the other.

“What the hell!” he protested.

She could have cooked a five-course gourmet dinner in the time it took the door to crawl shut.

Her mind said that if this elevator moved like the one they’d taken up, chances were good, very good, she would descend faster than the bastard could run. She flexed the fingers of her right hand, wishing her gun was nestled in it. Unfortunately the Walther was at home, snugly tucked under her mattress.

At last. A final moan from the elevator and a slight bounce. The doors retracted with agonizing slowness. She bounded into the hall and from inside the stairwell heard a clanging of running feet. Good! She was ahead of him.

The stairwell door flew open. The man in white bolted into the hall twelve feet away and headed right for her. His hands were empty: apparently he’d holstered his gun. He looked as big as a pro linebacker. I’ve thrown bigger many times, she told herself.

Upstairs he hadn’t seen her. He’d probably think she was just a civilian in his way. She set her feet, bent her knees. He swept past. She grabbed his right wrist, twisted it out and back, letting his momentum add to the force that should bring him to the floor in a hammerlock.

He pivoted on his right foot with the direction of her movement and with his left fist, delivered a forward punch. She dodged it, but his arm wrenched free.

Now he faced her—stubby black hair, amazed dark eyes, thick lips open. She was clearly an unexpected obstacle in his path to the exit. He followed up with a smooth, left-footed roundhouse kick. Right at her face.

She blocked it—barely. His foot slid off her shoulder. Cold prickles raced up her back. He was equally skilled—and much stronger. Sure, he was bigger, but there was something abnormal in his strength.

Before he could set his left foot squarely, Nova lunged and grabbed his left wrist. She wouldn’t get another chance. Kicking out at his right foot, she prayed he’d go down.

The unstoppable bulk anticipated her. He finessed her kick and used his weight as leverage to twist his wrist free. He planted his left foot, swiveled his back to her and, with his right foot, back-kicked her in the solar plexus. She felt as if she’d been hit by a rocket. Breath whooshed out from her lips. Pain streaking through her belly, arms flailing, she lifted astonishingly, unnaturally, high off the floor as if in a Kung Fu movie, and flew backward toward the wall.