Whirling in his chair, he turned to face the door—then froze when he saw the figure blocking the exit—bomb in hand.
“Who the hell are you? What are you doing here?” he demanded with the arrogance of a man who thinks he’s the one in charge.
“I’m one of your children, Dr. Cortez. Don’t you recognize me?”
A jolt of fear flashed in the doctor’s eyes as he reached for the telephone.
The assassin’s reflexes were excellent. He leaped across the room, kicking Cortez away from his desk, toppling his chair and spilling him onto the tile floor. The doctor lay stunned for a moment, then reached to clasp the back of his head. His palm came away covered with blood.
The intruder moved farther into the room, staying out of the man’s reach, the bomb held up like a football ready for a touchdown pass.
Cortez’s gaze flicked from his bloody hand to the intruder’s face, to the bomb with its fuse burning steadily down toward the payload.
“Don’t,” he whimpered.
A fierce explosion cut off his plea. Ending two lives—and thirty years of diabolical scientific research.
Six months later
Grace Cunningham picked up her briefcase and walked into the closet-size room that held the copy machine.
She hated hanging around after her stint in this office was finished. But, if anybody asked, she had a good reason to be here. The last time the great man who’d hired her to organize material for his autobiography had mislaid some of her notes, he’d cost her hours of work. This evening, she wanted her own copy of the research summary.
He’d left her at nine, as he always did, and she had no illusions about why. He was using her as a cover to meet another woman. And they weren’t working on his book. Unless he was planning a chapter on “sexual conquests.”
But as a junior research assistant with a day job at the Smithsonian, Grace wasn’t in a position to complain.
Everybody in her office kept telling her how lucky she was to score this assignment. She didn’t bother filling them in on the level of stress.
She’d thought he was taking his honey farther down the hall. But when intimate laughter drifted through the wall from the adjoining office, Grace went rigid. She didn’t want to hear what was going on in there, but she couldn’t turn off the lurid pictures that suddenly flashed into her mind.
The client was a man of immense power in the capital of the free world. A guy who worked behind the scenes in ways the public couldn’t even imagine. Although a few knew his name, they felt his influence. Only in his late fifties, he was starting to worry about his health.
Grace had seen the woman—a blonde much younger than her lover. Young enough to flatter his ego.
Her low, throaty voice drifted through the closed door. “I have an idea you’ll want to try.”
Grace’s insides clenched. Her mother hadn’t raised her to listen in on a scene like this.
She turned off the copy machine and then the light as a man wearing a business suit stopped in the corridor outside the next-door office and gave the closed door a smirking look. Obviously he knew what was going on in there, too. Feeling her face redden, she took a step back into the shadows, hoping he hadn’t seen her and wouldn’t think she was eavesdropping. Every muscle in her body tensed as she listened to the sound of rustling clothing and panting breath through the connecting door.
Each minute that ticked by felt like a century. Finally she heard the moans of a man reaching orgasm.
Thankful that her unwanted stint as a voyeur was over—she went still when the cry of satisfaction changed to a loud gasping sound of pain.
The man she’d seen in the hall ran through the office where Grace was standing and charged through the connecting door into the room where the lovers were closeted. He was shouting something that sounded like, “Ridgeway is down! Repeat. Ridgeway is down!”
Obviously the guards had gone into panic mode. Seconds later, more footsteps came pounding down the hallway.
The door between the two offices was open, giving Grace an excellent view of what was going on inside. She pressed her fist against her mouth. A few moments ago she’d been embarrassed by the sounds of lovemaking. Now she was grappling with something far worse.
Armed bodyguards kicked open the hall door and shoved their way into the office where the man lay unmoving on the beige carpet.
“Get a doctor,” one of them shouted into the microphone at his collar. “He’s unconscious. Get the defibrillator.”
A man holstered his weapon and sprinted into the hall, reappearing moments later with a plastic case. Someone else started CPR.
Grace shrank into the shadows, her heart pounding as she stared at John Ridgeway, head of the Ridgeway Consortium, one of the most prestigious think tanks in DC. This morning he’d been advising the president. Now he was lying gray and unconscious in a back office of the consortium’s downtown headquarters.
Oh God.
Her gaze bounced around the room, and she saw Ridgeway’s sex partner crouched in the corner, pulling up the bodice of her black dress to cover her small breasts.
The woman’s gaze met Grace’s for a couple of frantic heartbeats, then flicked to the right before settling on the bodyguard bearing down on her. Grace knew her name. It was Karen Hilliard.
The man grabbed Karen by the elbow and pulled her roughly to her feet.
“What the hell did you do?” he demanded, thrusting his face into hers.
She raised her chin. “Nothing. I haven’t done anything. Let me go.”
The man’s hold on her arm tightened. “You’re kidding, right?”
More footsteps came rapidly down the hall, and an older man with thinning dark hair and unstylish horn-rimmed glasses entered the scene of chaos. Grace recognized him at once. Ian Wickers, Ridgeway’s chief of staff.
“What’s happened?”
“Looks like a heart attack.”
“Will he pull through?”
“Don’t know. The doc’s on his way.”
Wickers turned to the guard who held the woman in place. “Take her to the secure room in the basement.”
“Yes, sir.”
The man hustled Karen out. After they were gone, Wickers addressed the room at large, his voice clipped and commanding. “Archer, zip up his fly.”
One of the bodyguards kneeling over the unconscious man unceremoniously maneuvered his limp penis back inside his underwear and zipped up his pants.
Wickers kept talking. “Mr. Ridgeway was alone when he had a heart attack. I’m not going to have a scandal cloud the reputation of the consortium.”
“Yes, sir,” came a chorus of agreement.
From her hiding place in the next room, Grace watched the unfolding drama, her heart thumping. When her knees threatened to give way, she leaned back against the wall, grappling with her own disbelief.
It had all happened so fast. Too fast. She should have done something. But what?
Her brain threatened to shut down. But she forced herself to take deep breaths and stay cool.
One salient fact leaped out at her, grabbed her by the throat and wouldn’t let