It would take her time to walk back, and she sensed from the curtness of the message that she shouldn’t dawdle. Texting back that she would be there within the half hour, she rushed back down the steps and walked to one of the side streets until she hit a main thoroughfare, where she quickly snagged a cab.
In French as flawless as her English, she asked to be taken to the Louvre and then she held on as the cab sped off, weaving through traffic and the assorted circles at a breakneck pace. When the cabbie stopped with a screech before the museum in record time, she mumbled a thanks to God for arriving in one piece and paid the man.
Racing past the pyramid, she walked to the bridge near the Seine, down the stairs to the riverbank and hurried to the metal grate beneath the bridge. Once she felt confident that it was secure, she used a specially encoded magnetic card to enter the tunnel and rushed toward the elevator to the Lazlo medical compound. After clearing the palm print and retinal scan, she proceeded to the main level of the compound where Jacques, the larger of her two sparring partners, waited for her.
“Mr. Lazlo asked me to bring you to his conference room as soon as you arrived,” Jacques said in French with a polite bow.
“Of course,” she replied and followed Jacques to a wing of the compound she had yet to enter, wondering about the elusive Mr. Lazlo, whom she had met only once.
As he stopped at a door, Jacques placed his palm on another reader and with the same almost silent whoosh, opened the portal. “We’ve coded this door to allow you entry as well,” he added as he motioned for her to enter.
“Merci,” she said and walked in, expecting him to follow her into the lushly appointed conference room. Instead, the door closed silently behind her, leaving her alone in the space.
A large mahogany table filled the center of the area. Three of the walls were lined with matching bookcases, ornately trimmed with hand-worked moldings and filled with expensively bound leather volumes. An exceptionally large plasma monitor was mounted on one wall, and as she walked farther into the space, the lights dimmed slightly and the monitor snapped to life.
“Good afternoon, Dani. I trust you enjoyed your stroll this morning.” The voice came from a speaker phone in the center of the table.
Dani had heard the voice only about a half dozen times since that one fateful meeting by her hospital bedside, but it was familiar enough for her to recognize.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Lazlo. Given your message, I had hoped to be meeting with you in person,” she said as she strolled around the room, searching for whatever kind of surveillance equipment was being used to keep an eye on her.
“In time. But for now there is a matter of some urgency that requires your attention. That is, if you’re ready for a mission.”
“Not that I’ve minded your hospitality, Mr. Lazlo, but for months now I’ve been trying very hard to understand why you would want me to work for you.” As she spoke, Dani walked around the room, searching for the location of the hidden camera.
“I know what it’s like when SIS turns its back on you. I used to be one of them.” A dead tone filled his voice at the admission, causing a sympathetic sensation within her. She still felt dead inside.
“I’m surprised you feel you can rely on me. My instincts have been rather bad lately.”
“You believed the prince when he said he wasn’t using drugs anymore, correct?”
Dani dredged up the memories of that night from her last mission. Normally she would have turned over the prince and the man who had hired her to kill him—Silas Donovan—to SIS to handle, but Donovan had dangled an intriguing bit of info before her. Donovan had insisted that the prince knew who had murdered her parents nearly a decade earlier.
Dani had wanted that information badly. So badly that she had put her personal quest above the SIS mission.
“Dani?” Lazlo prompted at her prolonged silence.
“I didn’t think the prince would use the tainted cocaine I left behind that night,” she finally admitted, still feeling guilty that she had played a part in Prince Reginald’s death. She had believed he was clean and had hoped that having seen the error of his ways, he would reveal the names of those who had sold him drugs and possibly killed her parents.
She walked to the front of the room and paused before the plasma monitor. As she tracked her gaze along the sides of the bookcase beside it, she caught a telltale glint, almost like a speck of glitter against the dark wood. As she raised her finger to cover what she suspected was a fiber-optic camera, the image of her doing so appeared in the large monitor.
“Your admission of that is a good start. So, are you ready for an assignment?” Lazlo pressed again.
She nodded, and Lazlo began his report. “I need you to concentrate on the data I’m about to provide.”
With a curt bob of her head to acknowledge the request, Dani seated herself at the table in a comfy leather library chair. Immediately, a picture of Silas Donovan came onto the screen.
“You’re aware that Mr. Donovan paid them to assassinate the prince so Donovan’s nephew could instead inherit the throne of the European principality of Silvershire.”
As her gaze locked with that of the man in the photo, she remembered those cold eyes staring at her from behind his ski mask as Donovan had stood by, waiting for her to die after he had shot her. “Tell me something I don’t know, Mr. Lazlo.”
“We believe someone at SIS, or possibly even someone highly placed in the government sector with access to SIS, leaked information about you to the crime syndicate you were sent to infiltrate.”
Dani considered his comment but shook her head in denial. “You think someone official blew my cover as the Sparrow?”
“It makes sense that once the syndicate knew you were SIS and knew your family history, they would naturally ask you to take on the job for Mr. Donovan. They knew you had a score to settle about your parents.”
“And then they revealed my personal information to Donovan so he would eliminate me after I’d done all the dirty work? That’s quite convoluted.”
“Quite, my dear. But once your cover was blown, the crime bosses needed you gone and Donovan most likely wanted you silenced so you couldn’t reveal his role in the prince’s death.”
Dani mentally ran through all that had happened and unfortunately, the facts supported the unlikely scenario. Painfully, she acknowledged that she had possibly been betrayed by one of her own.
“What does all of this have to do with the mission you want me to undertake?”
“There have been a series of recent incidents—”
“What kind of incidents?” she challenged, annoyed by the obtuseness of Lazlo’s comments—until a series of photos flashed onto the monitor and Lazlo identified each of his murdered operatives.
“The last two have a similar MO—a close range shot to the head, just above the left ear, with a hollow-point bullet.”
“The killer is issuing a challenge to you that he can get close anytime he’d like,” Dani advised. “So that makes three operatives down in less than two months. Quite a personal attack on the Lazlo Group.”
“More than you can imagine,” he said in a way that raised the hackles on the back of her neck.
“We believe the first incident—which actually would make it four operatives attacked—may have occurred nearly three years ago. Different MO from all three of these kills, but the goal was the same—to disrupt an important Lazlo Group operation.”
“Which was?” Dani asked, although in her gut she suspected what Lazlo would say even before he