Her cell phone connected, ringing once.
“Athena Construction,” a woman answered. Allison recognized the voice of Katie Rush, and the image of Katie’s older brother Morgan popped into her head. He was probably as furious and baffled by Allison’s actions as Bill McDonough. She could see him now, pacing the way he did, running his long fingers through his prematurely salt-and-pepper hair—he was only thirtytwo—blinking his heavily lashed eyes of intense indigo, setting his hard, square jaw.
She had seen him agitated before, seen him fight to keep his temper when they decoded a gleeful e-mail sent from Berzhaan to a terrorist cell in Kestonia, announcing that some poor thirteen-year-old had earned a place in paradise by blowing himself up in a crowded open marketplace. Morgan had nearly wept at the loss of life, at the depth of despair and/or hatred that would prompt someone to do something like that. Instead he’d balled his fist and slammed it against the wall of the pit, startling half a dozen military brass who were there for a briefing.
Then and there, she fell a little bit in love with him, moving beyond her omnipresent lust for his magnificent body to a deeper connection. This is why we do the things we do, Morgan Rush and I. This is why our jobs are more important to us than our lives.
This is why I am Delphi. And this is why he can never know.
Her secrets would keep her alone for the rest of her life.
“I’m interested in building a house,” she said, knowing that her voice was being unrecognizably distorted by the device clamped over the mouthpiece.
“Delphi,” Katie said, and Allison detected the awe in her voice.
“How’s Loschetter?” Delphi asked. “Is there anything unusual about his demeanor?”
“Quiet, bored. He wants more DVDs,” Katie said with disgust. “He says his brain is atrophying. We can hope.”
“Katie, listen,” Delphi said. “In the last forty-eight hours, seven girls have been kidnapped. Girls conceived at the Women’s Fertility Clinic in Zuni.” She let that sink in. “They were not on Loschetter’s original list.”
“Oh, my God,” Katie murmured.
“Watch him. I’m going to send you some backup.” There were three Oracle agents guarding him at all times. “If someone’s stealing egg babies, it stands to reason they’ll want him. He knows more about genetically altering chromosomes than anyone else on the planet.”
“Roger that,” Katie said fiercely. “I’ll kill him before I let anyone take him.”
Delphi thought for a moment about the teenage suicide bomber in Berzhaan. Then she thought about Morgan Rush, Katie’s older brother. She could hardly imagine the grief and fury that would rage through him if anything happened to Katie.
“You…be careful,” Delphi blurted, and it was so out of character, so not what Delphi would say, that she hung up before Katie could remind her that she would rather die than fail at a mission. Delphi knew Katie would say it, because Katie had said it before. And Delphi had told her that she was proud of her commitment.
She set the phone on top of her briefcase and swallowed hard. She was getting too personally involved with her people.
Another image of Morgan came unbidden into her mind—in a pair of loose track shorts that revealed his muscular calves and thighs, and a damp, sleeveless T-shirt clinging to his pecs. He’d mocked her fumble during a recent tennis game on the agency courts. A second later, she’d power-slammed a tennis ball at him inches from his foot, a volley he couldn’t hope to return, and he had broken into full-bodied laughter, completely appreciative of how thoroughly she had just kicked his butt. She didn’t suppose he was laughing right now.
She blew out her breath and gave her head a shake. Morgan was off-limits, now and forever. The thought penetrated, despite all the other thoughts her busy brain was entertaining.
Allison began putting everything back in her brief-case—PDA, personal cell, laptop, distorter—then the produce truck switched lanes, revealing the white van again. The BMW took advantage of the hole in the traffic flow and shot back around the slow-moving vehicle. The van was definitely pacing her.
On your mark, Allison thought grimly.
Without signaling, with no warning, Allison cranked her steering wheel to the left and shot across two lanes of traffic, heading for the off-ramp. Horns blared. Brakes squealed all around her—and behind her—as the van barreled after her in hot pursuit.
Go.
Chapter 3
NSA Headquarters, Fort Meade, Maryland
McDonough proceeded with the top-level Project Ozone meeting in Conference Room A, but he dismissed Morgan from the urgent and critical sit-down, and ordered him to interrogate anyone who had ever met Allison, much less worked with her.
Morgan was extremely pissed about missing the meeting, but when he got past the red haze of anger, he had to admit that it made sense. Morgan had been “observing” Allison for McDonough ever since McDonough had signed onto Ozone, three months ago. It was a distasteful arrangement that Morgan would have ordinarily refused, except that it gave him more latitude to sniff around Allison, access her records and get his request for a wiretap turned down.
He fed McDonough enough tidbits to fulfill his job description, but he kept the good stuff for himself. Not that there was much. Spider files, incomplete. Someone named Arachne. Someone else named Delphi, or maybe it was a place. Those kidnappings of Athena students earlier this year. But never the full story. Allison kept the good stuff for herself as well, of that he was certain.
Allison Gracelyn was doing something she didn’t want anyone to know about. Correction: didn’t want NSA to know about. In Morgan’s book, that was six kinds of wrong.
Morgan deliberately set up shop for his interviews many conference rooms away from the Ozone meeting. He kept his black suit jacket on and his dark gray tie crisply knotted. The visiting brass didn’t need to know NSA had forgotten to microchip Agent Double-O Gracelyn or that she was on the lam.
His black double shot went untouched. He had snagged a sandwich from the conference room but hadn’t stopped to take a bite. After a few interviews, the air smelled like mustard and roast beef, and Morgan chucked it in the trash can.
Nobody had anything to tell him, and so far, an hour into interviewing, he had no feeling that anyone was omitting information in order to protect her. She wasn’t made of Teflon; she was just…boring. Again, wrong. Allison was not boring. She was a busy woman; yesterday’s personal leave day was one of many (but not beyond agency guidelines, and he’d kept track.) Not showing up in the midst of a high-alert was bad, but hanging a U and then going incommunicado was inexcusable.
The clock was ticking, and he was getting more and more pissed off. Why the hell didn’t she at least call in? Who the hell did she think she was?
He tapped his government-issue black pen on his legal pad and gazed up at his next interviewee, Kim Valenti, who came in and sat across the mahogany laminate conference table. Like him, she wore a simply, nicely tailored black suit—in her case, with a skirt. Like Allison and him, she was a cryptanalyst, and one of the best at the agency, which why she was with Ozone. She and Allison were good friends; on many occasions,