So where was the microfilm? What had George Persall done with it? If he had indeed passed it to Luis Marcel, who was his normal contact, then where was Luis? Had Luis decided to sell the microfilm to the highest bidder? That seemed unlikely. Grant knew Luis personally; they had been in some tight spots together and he trusted Luis at his back, which said a lot.
Government agents had been chasing this particular microfilm for about a month now. A high-level executive of a research firm in California had made a deal to sell the government-classified laser technology his firm had developed, technology that could place laser weaponry in space in the near future. The firm’s own security people had become suspicious of the man and alerted the proper government authorities; together they had apprehended the executive in the middle of the sale. But the two buyers had escaped, taking the microfilm with them. Then one of the buyers double-crossed his partner and took himself and the microfilm to South America to strike his own deal. Agents all over Central and South America had been alerted, and an American agent in Costa Rica had made contact with the man, setting up a “sting” to buy the microfilm. Things became completely confused at that point. The deal had gone sour, and the agent had been wounded, but he had gotten away with the microfilm. The film should have been destroyed at that point, but it hadn’t been. Somehow the agent had gotten it to George Persall, who could come and go freely in Costa Rica because of his business connections. Who would have suspected George Persall of being involved in espionage? He’d always seemed just a tame businessman, albeit with a passion for gorgeous “secretaries”—a weakness any Latin man would understand. Persall had been known to only a few agents, Luis Marcel among them, and that had made him extraordinarily effective. But in this case, George had been left in the dark; the agent had been feverish from his wound and hadn’t told George to destroy the film.
Luis Marcel had been supposed to contact George, but instead Luis had disappeared. Then George, who had always seemed to be disgustingly healthy, had died of a heart attack…and no one knew where the microfilm was. The Americans wanted to be certain that the technology didn’t fall into anyone else’s hands; the Russians wanted the technology just as badly, and every revolutionary in the hemisphere wanted the microfilm in order to sell it to the highest bidder. An arsenal of weapons could be purchased, revolutions could be staged, with the amount of money that small piece of film would bring on the open market.
Manuel Turego, head of national security in Costa Rica, was a very smart man; he was a bastard, Grant thought, but a smart one. He’d promptly snatched up Ms. Priscilla Jane Hamilton Greer and carried her off to this heavily guarded inland “plantation.” He’d probably told her that she was under protective custody, and she was probably stupid enough that she was very grateful to him for “protecting” her. Turego had played it cool; so far he hadn’t harmed her. Evidently he knew that her father was a very wealthy, very influential man, and that it wasn’t wise to enrage wealthy, influential men unless it was absolutely necessary. Turego was playing a waiting game; he was waiting for Luis Marcel to surface, waiting for the microfilm to surface, as it eventually had to. In the meantime, he had Priscilla; he could afford to wait. Whether she knew anything or not, she was valuable to him as a negotiating tool, if nothing else.
From the moment Priscilla had disappeared, her father had been frantic. He’d been calling in political favors with a heavy hand, but he’d found that none of the favors owed to him could get Priscilla away from Turego. Until Luis was found, the American government wasn’t going to lift a hand to free the young woman. The confusion about whether or not she actually knew anything, the tantalizing possibility that she could know the location of the microfilm, seemed to have blunted the intensity of the search for Luis. Her captivity could give him the edge he needed by attracting attention away from him.
Finally, desperate with worry and enraged by the lack of response he’d been getting from the government, James Hamilton had decided to take matters into his own hands. He’d spent a small fortune ferreting out his daughter’s location, and then had been stymied by the inaccessibility of the well-guarded plantation. If he sent in enough men to take over the plantation, he realized, there was a strong possibility that his daughter would be killed in the fight. Then someone had mentioned Grant Sullivan’s name.
A man as wealthy as James Hamilton could find someone who didn’t want to be found, even a wary, burnt-out ex-government agent who had buried himself in the Tennessee mountains. Within twenty-four hours, Grant had been sitting across from Hamilton, in the library of a huge estate house that shouted of old money. Hamilton had made an offer that would pay off the mortgage on Grant’s farm completely. All the man wanted was to have his daughter back, safe and sound. His face had been lined and taut with worry, and there had been a desperation about him that, even more than the money, made Grant reluctantly accept the job.
The difficulty of rescuing her had seemed enormous, perhaps even insurmountable; if he were able to penetrate the security of the plantation—something he didn’t really doubt—getting her out would be something else entirely. Not only that, but Grant had his own personal experiences to remind him that, even if he found her, the odds were greatly against her being alive or recognizably human. He hadn’t let himself think about what could have happened to her since the day she’d been kidnapped.
But getting to her had been made ridiculously easy; as soon as he left Hamilton’s house, a new wrinkle had developed. Not a mile down the highway from Hamilton’s estate, he’d glanced in the rearview mirror and found a plain blue sedan on his tail. He’d lifted one eyebrow sardonically and pulled over to the shoulder of the road.
He lit a cigarette and inhaled leisurely as he waited for the two men to approach his car. “Hiya, Curtis.”
Ted Curtis leaned down and peered in the open window, grinning. “Guess who wants to see you?”
“Hell,” Grant swore irritably. “All right, lead the way. I don’t have to drive all the way to Virginia, do I?”
“Naw, just to the next town. He’s waiting in a motel.”
The fact that Sabin had felt it necessary to leave headquarters at all told Grant a lot. He knew Kell Sabin from the old days; the man didn’t have a nerve in his body, and ice water ran in his veins. He wasn’t a comfortable man to be around, but Grant knew that the same had been said about himself. They were both men to whom no rules applied, men who had intimate knowledge of hell, who had lived and hunted in that gray jungle where no laws existed. The difference between them was that Sabin was comfortable in that cold grayness; it was his life—but Grant wanted no more of it. Things had gone too far; he had felt himself becoming less than human. He had begun to lose his sense of who he was and why he was there. Nothing seemed to matter any longer. The only time he’d felt alive was during the chase, when adrenaline pumped through his veins and fired all his senses into acute awareness. The bullet that had almost killed him had instead saved him, because it had stopped him long enough to let him begin thinking again. That was when he’d decided to get out.
Twenty-five minutes later, with his hand curled around a mug of strong, hot coffee, his booted feet propped comfortably on the genuine, wood-grained plastic coffee table that was standard issue for motels, Grant had murmured, “Well, I’m here. Talk.”
Kell Sabin was an even six feet tall, an inch shorter than Grant, and the hard musculature of his frame revealed that he made it a point to stay in shape, even though he was no longer in the field. He was dark—black-haired, black-eyed, with an olive complexion—and the cold fire of his energy generated a force field around him. He was impossible to read, and was as canny as