Thursday 6:28 A.M.
The morning air was sharp and she wished she'd grabbed one of Adriana's
black knit shawls before going out. Could she pass for one of those
stooped Greek peasant women? she wondered. Not likely. She shivered and
pulled her thin coat around her.
The rain was over now, leaving the air moist and fragrant, but the
early morning gloom had an ominous undertone. They'd found the key to
open the first box, but the message inside still had to be translated.
What was it? What could possibly be in the protocol that would make
somebody want to kill her?
She stared down the vacant street leading away from the square, a
mosaic of predawn shadows, and tried to think.
Alex Novosty was the classic middleman, that much was a given. But then
she'd known that for years. Yes, she'd known about Alex Novosty all her
life--his work for the KGB, his laundering of Techmashimport funds. She
knew about it because they were second cousins. Fortunately their
family tie was distant enough not to have made its way into NSA's
security file, but around the Russian expatriate dinner tables of
Brighton Beach and Oyster Bay, Alex was very well known indeed. He was
the Romanov descendant who'd sold out to the Soviets, an unforgivable
lapse of breeding.
But for all that, he wasn't an assassin. For him to do what he'd done
tonight could only mean one thing: he was terrified. Very out of
character. But why?
The answer to that wasn't hard: He must be mixed up in Project
Daedalus, whatever it was, right up to his shifty eyeballs. But what
about Michael? What did Alex want from him?
The answer to that could go a lot of ways. When she first met Michael
Vance, Jr., she'd been smitten by the fact he was so different. Always
kidding around, yet tough as steel when anybody crossed him. A WASP
street fighter. She liked that a lot. He was somebody she felt she
could depend on, no matter what.
She still remembered her first sight of Mike as though it were
yesterday. She was taking notes on Etruscan pottery in a black
notebook, standing in a corner of the Yale art gallery on Chapel
Street, when she looked up and--no, it couldn't be. She felt herself
just gawking.
He'd caught her look and strolled over with a puzzled smile. "Is my tie
crooked, or--" Then he laughed. "Name's Mike Vance. I used to be part of
this place. How about you?"
"Vance?" She'd just kept on staring, still not quite believing her
eyes. "My thesis adviser at Penn was . . . you look just like him."
And he did. The same sharp chin, the same twinkle in the blue eyes.
Even when he was angry, as Mike certainly had been that day, he seemed
to be having fun.
Thus it began.
At first they were so right for each other it seemed as though she'd
known Michael Vance for approximately a hundred years, give or take.
She'd been one of his father's many ardent disciples, and after
finishing her master's at Penn, she'd gone on to become a doctoral
candidate at Yale, where she'd specialized in the linguistics of the
ancient Aegean languages. She'd known but forgotten that Michael Vance,
Sr., had a son who was finishing his own doctorate at Yale, writing a
dissertation about Minoan Crete.
That day in the museum he was steaming, declaring he'd dropped by one
last time as part of a ritualistic, formal farewell to archaeology. The
decision was connected with the hostile reception being given a book
he'd just published, a commercial version of his dissertation. As of
that day he'd decided to tell academia to stuff it. He'd be doing
something else for a living. There'd been feelers from some agency in
D.C. about helping trace hot money.
In the brief weeks that followed they grew inseparable, the perfect
couple. One weekend they'd scout the New England countryside for old-
fashioned inns, the next they'd drive up to Boston to spend a day in
the Museum of Fine Arts, then come back and argue and make love till
dawn in her New Haven apartment. During all those days and nights, she
came very close to talking him out of quitting university life. Close,
but she didn't.
He had put off everything for a couple of months, and they had traveled
the world--London, Greece, Morocco, Moscow. Once their parents even met,
at Count Sergei Borodin's sprawling Oyster Bay home. It was a convoca-
tion of the Russian Nobility Association, with three hundred guests in
attendance, and the air rang with Russian songs and balalaikas. Michael
Vance, Sr., who arrived in his natty bowler, scarcely knew what to make
of all the Slavic exuberance.
Shortly after that, the intensity of Michael became too much for her.
She felt herself being drawn into his orbit, and she wanted an orbit of
her own. The next thing she knew, he'd departed for the Caribbean; her
father had died; and she'd gone back to work on her own doctorate.
Michael. He was driven, obsessive, always determined to do what he
wanted, just as she was. But the tension that likeness brought to their
relationship those many years ago now made everything seem to click.
Why? she wondered.
Maybe it was merely as simple as life cycles. Maybe back then they were
just out of synch. He'd already survived his first midlife crisis, even
though he was hardly thirty. When they split up, she'd been twenty-five
and at the beginning of a campaign to test herself, find out what she
could do.
Well, she thought, she'd found out. She was good, very good. So now
what?
She was relieved to see the car was still parked on the side street,
actually a little alley, where she'd left it. Thinking more clearly
now, she realized she'd been a trifle careless, stashing the car in the
first location she could find and then running for Zeno's.
As she headed down the alley in between the white plaster houses, she
suddenly felt her heart stop. Someone was standing next to the Saab, a
dark figure waiting. She watched as it suddenly moved briskly toward
her.
Alex Novosty.
"What?" She couldn't believe her eyes.
"_Budetya ostorozhyi_!" He whispered the warning as he raised his hand
and furtively tried to urge her back.
"_Kak! Shto--?_" She froze. "How did you find the car?"
"The hotel. They directed us to a _kafeneion _near here, but then I
noticed your car. I thought . . ." He moved out of the shadows,
quickly, still speaking in Russian. "Just tell me where you have the
copies of the protocol, quickly. Maybe I can still handle it."
"Handle what?" That's when she saw the two other men, in dark
overcoats, against the shadow of the building.
"The . . . situation." His eyes were intense. "They want it back, all
copies. I've tried to tell them that killing you won't solve anything,
but--" He glanced back with a small shiver. "You must tell them Michael
has a copy, stall them."
"It's true. He does."
"No! Then say there's a copy back in your office. Just let me try and--"
"Alex, I'm not going to play any more of your games."
"Please," he continued in a whisper, "don't contradict anything I say.
Let me do the talking. I'll--"
"You're in it with them, aren't you?" She tried to push past. "Well,
you can tell your friends we're onto their 'project.' If anything
happens to me, Michael will track them down and personally take them
apart. Tell them that."
"You don't understand." He caught her arm. "One of their people was
killed tonight."
"The one trying to shoot Michael and me, you mean?" She was trying to
calm the quaver in her voice.
"He was killed by the KGB. I had nothing to do with--"
"Is that what you told them?"
"That's the way it happened. There was an argument."
"Over what?"
"Everybody wants you. It's the protocol." His look darkened. "Eva, they
are in no mood for niceties."
"Neither am I." She noticed the two men were now moving toward them.
One was taller and seemed to be in charge, but they both were carrying
what looked like small-caliber automatic weapons.
The protocol, whatever it was, was still in code. She didn't know what
she didn't know. How could she bargain?
It was too late to think about it now. Their faces were hard and
smooth, with the cold eyes of men who killed on command. My God, she
thought, what had Michael said about the _Mino-gumi_?
The Japanese mob.
The taller man, she was soon to learn, was Kazuo Ina- gawa, who had
been a London-based _kobun _for the _Mino-gumi _for the past decade. He
had a thin, pasty face and had once been first _kobun_ for their entire
Osaka organization, in charge of gambling and nightclub shakedowns.
Even in the early dawn light, he wore sunglasses, masking his eyes.
The shorter one was Takahashi Takenaka, whose pockmarked face was
distinguished by a thin moustache, an aquiline nose, and the same
sunglasses.
Alex, she realized, must have lied to them, covering up what really
happened out at the palace. Now he was bluffing for his life.
"You can just tell them I don't know anything about it." She felt the
cold air closing in.
"Eva, that's impossible. They know you were given the protocol. Now
where is it?"
He clearly wanted her to say it was somewhere else. But why bother?
"It's in the car. In my purse." She pointed. "Why don't they just go
ahead and take it? By the way, it's still encrypted."