The private jet was well appointed, the nurses dressed in regular clothes rather than scrubs, but Gates still felt the irritating sting of being under a doctor’s care. Two days out of the hospital and he was still annoyed by all the poking and prodding. He hated being hovered over.

He felt surprisingly good for someone who’d been shot. Then again, the doctor kept saying it was a miracle that the bullet had missed all the vital stuff. Essentially, he just had to heal from the surgery, the blood loss, and the shock to his body.

Piece of cake.

“So.” Dav stood in the doorway to the plane’s bedroom. “You’re insisting on this. Why?”

“We’ve been over it, Dav. Until Baxter and whoever else he’s working with can figure something out, it’s better for me to be away from here, away from you.”

“So you want me to take you to the Paris house and leave you there. It makes so much sense.” Dav’s dry answer said exactly the opposite.

“Dav, I work for you. I’m your security guru. It’s my job to be there and make sure you’re safe, not bring the target that’s on me to you too. You’ve got enough trouble dealing with the Central American faction and whoever’s lurking around, impersonating your dead brother and scaring Sophia, without my adding my crap to it.”

“We still don’t know that it’s your crap,” Dav pointed out. “Don’t look so belligerent.” Dav laughed. “I’ve no objection to a few days in Paris. However, we’ve got to stop in New York. That meeting with Goldman Sachs can’t be postponed any longer. I have a suite set up at the Waldorf. You can recuperate from this flight and prepare for the next one, tomorrow.”

“Yeah, yeah. I could just go on to Paris alone, you know.” He shifted. He was getting stiff spending so much time in bed. That reminded him of Ana, so he went after Dav again. “By the way, don’t think I haven’t heard about Carrie.”

Dav looked away, just a flicker of movement, but Gates saw it and knew he was on to something. “I don’t know what you mean,” Dav said, with bland unconcern.

Gates rolled his eyes. “The hell you don’t. I know you’ve been calling her, asking her out.”

Dav sighed, and Gates heard the puzzlement in it. “She won’t talk anything but business. Won’t meet with me. Especially after the gala.”

“Really? Why?”

Dav looked at him with an “it should be obvious” expression. “Sophia.”

“Oh. Got it.” Gates saw the problem immediately. He wished his challenges with Ana were that simple. He missed her with a need that ached like a sore tooth. “Give it time.”

Dav treated him to a long, thoughtful look. “Recent events have pointed out to me that I may not have time. Life’s precious, Gates.”

Gates gritted his teeth and sat up. The muscles in his gut protested, but he ignored the pain. “Look, Dav, just because I got shot doesn’t mean the world’s going to end tomorrow. I’m just saying that you should give it a week, try again when we go back. Maybe use a different approach.”

The pilot appeared, announcing their imminent departure.

“Right. Get comfortable, Gates.” Dav nodded to the nurses, who closed ranks to pull out the pillows he’d shoved in to support himself and helped him lie back. “Get some sleep if you can.”

“Think about it, man,” Gates offered as a parting shot.

Dav got the last word, however. “Advice from someone who’s had it work out so well. Thanks.”

“Fuck,” Gates muttered, allowing the nurses to fuss around him, anchor the equipment they’d insisted on bringing. As they buckled into the nearby chairs for flight, he closed his eyes, intending to ignore it all, get some thinking in.

Dav’s words reverberated in his mind. Life is short. Every time he closed his eyes, Gates relived the bullet’s impact. Behind his closed eyelids, he replayed it. The needle-sharp pain, the hot smell of singed flesh and fabric, the almost simultaneous crackling of the car door’s glass. Ana’s scream. Dav’s shout. Being lifted; Ana’s voice telling him she had him and to hang on.

It all came back to Ana. Every time.

She had him, she’d said it. She had his back. She wasn’t some frail flower needing or wanting protection. Instead, she was there for him. Now, to add to his nightmares, he could see her face as he essentially told her to get lost, that it had just been a fling.

The pressure of takeoff was nothing compared to the pressure in his chest, in his heart.

Ana. She was it. She was the real deal, not some weak fool to be dismissed.

With a soft moan for the pain in both sides of his chest, he twisted on the bed, feeling in his body the pain of his sheer bullheaded stupidity. What had he done?

He sensed the nurses bustling around, but paid them no heed. What could he do? How could he fix it? He’d well and truly screwed everything to hell, and he knew it.

Her features, wracked with pain, leapt into his mind like an IMAX movie. She’d recovered quickly. She was well trained, well schooled in making her face show only what she wanted it to show. But he’d seen it. The same agony he felt now.

Somehow, he had to mend the breach. To make it right. Yes, that’s what he’d do.

He was about to open his eyes and demand his laptop when he felt the cooling change in the IV line still taped to the back of his wrist. His thoughts fogged, and his mind drifted away from its sharp focus.

 

“Thank you for coming, Agent,” the head of the Panel of Inquiry started the proceedings. They’d kept her cooling her heels for a day in DC. She’d spent most of the time in the CIA Headquarters, waiting, only to be sent back to her hotel for the night and called back the next day.

Seated next to her, Ana’s advocate noted the time on his legal pad. “Yes, sir. I appreciate your time and efforts,” Ana replied, taking her seat.

The four men looked slightly nonplussed by her thanks, but they opened files and began reading the pertinent details of the Inquiry into the record.

“On Monday, February fifteenth,” the man on the far left read. “The following events occurred which are the subject of this Inquiry.”

Reese, her advocate, wrote the names of the panel in order across the page. Ana tuned into the recitation only so much as necessary to be sure they were following her statement, which they were.

The flight had been long, and she’d slept for only a little while because she knew she had to. The data on Jack G. D’Onofrio wasn’t panning out. He didn’t have a shipping arm of his magazine business as far as she could tell. His main business was West Coast too, San Francisco, Oakland, Sacramento, Lake Tahoe, Las Vegas.

Nothing showed. The problem was, she knew something was there. He was too much a New Yorker to not have something on the East Coast. You didn’t leave your roots behind when you were a New York City boy. Not one who’d spoken with such pride about his roots to a total stranger at the gallery showing.

On her own pad, she wrote: D’Onofrio. New York? California. Gallery. Berlin?

Reese tapped her toe with his, signaling for her to pay attention as the executive agent presiding over the Inquiry spoke. “Is this your statement, Agent Burton? Are there any amendments you would like to include?”

“No sir,” Ana said, forcing her tone to be level, unemotional.

“So noted.” To the woman at the far right, he said, “Please address your attention to the additional statements as they are read into the record.” The woman selected a folder, began to read the statement Agent Beverly Stanley had made before she died.

To distract herself, Ana focused on D’Onofrio again, writing: Prometheus equals California. Moroni equals New York. Pratch equals Berlin. Artful Walls equals Miami.

Wait.

The shipper in White Plains had done all the work for Moroni. Moroni and another New York gallery had used the same shipper in New York for two paintings of Dav’s for resale overseas.

The designer, the one who had dated Dav, had mentioned Moroni.

“Agent, do you agree with, or have any comment on the statements as they’ve been read?”

Shit. She’d missed it. She glanced at Reese and saw the barest shake of his head. No.

“No, I do not.”

“So noted. Moving on. Please read into record the actions of Agent Thomas James Michaels with regards to this matter.”

Wait a minute. What did TJ have to do with this? He’d been peripheral to the situation in Rome, essentially coming in at the end to help clean up and cover up, making sure everything got explained away. Confused, Ana forgot the data on the art case and focused on the current recitation.

“Agent TJ Michaels has been on approved leave of absence for several months in which time he has sought out leads in regard to this case. Upon his return to duty, he presented evidence of significant mitigating factors, factors which may have skewed the data and led to the conclusions drawn by Agent Burton. His dedication to uncovering leads on the matter of the events of the fifteenth of February, in Rome, has been above and beyond the call of duty,” the executive agent intoned. “Whereas our Agency did not approve his actions, per se, he has provided substantial additional information that leads the Panel to believe that the data Agent Burton provided was, in fact, accurate as far as could be determined. His return to approved duty to continue tracking is part of the record, in as much as…”

My God, they were saying her analysis was right, that it wasn’t the killing factor.

Ana redirected her thinking, refocused on the statements. “Furthermore, Agent Michaels’s dedication to this pursuit has been noted and now sanctioned, facilitating the ability to investigate his leads.”

Sanctioned. That meant he’d found something, something related to all that translation he’d sent her.

Another buzzing hunch flitted into her brain and immediately disappeared when the executive agent said, “Agent Burton, do you have anything you’d like to add, regarding this matter?”

She cleared her throat, took a sip of water before replying, trying to recapture the thought. The present took precedence however, with the panel members watching her, and the thought, the hunch, was gone.

“Sir, my only addition is a note of gratitude that Agent Michaels has been so dedicated to uncovering the truth, and the reasons for the events of Fifteen February.”

Reese scrawled, Good answer, in big letters on his legal pad.

She ignored that, as well as the next reading as she made more notes.

TJ. Translations. Cheating spouses. Shipper? Freight?

Wait. Shipping. Another thought occurred. Yountz. Freight. San Fran. Prometheus?

Holy hell. Yountz had been at the gallery opening. D’Onofrio had been there as well. Most of the victims, all of the West Coast victims, had been at the opening.

Was Yountz connected too? Ana knew better than to discount the idea. She had a gift for data, and if her brain brought it up, there was something in all the stuff she’d read, something small and seemingly insignificant that had put the thought in her head.

Despite Rome, she never, ever forgot to check that sort of thing.

“And from your current supervisor, Special Agent Sarai Elizabeth Sinclair Pretzky,” the first panelist read, drawing Ana’s attention back to the proceedings. She’d never heard Pretzky’s full name; she wasn’t sure she’d even known her first name. “The following statement is read into record.”

Ana held her breath throughout the narration, barely hearing words like “dedicated” and “perseverance,” “unstinting work ethic,” and “grace and aplomb.” The overall sense of Pretzky’s addition to the proceedings was positive and as fulsome as anyone could be.

Reese bumped her elbow and wrote on the pad again. Good job.

As if she’d done a good job in order to be reinstated, like kissing up. Right. Thinking in those terms made her think about Davis, the pus-ball. She wondered if everyone thought it was all about skating by these days, until you had to cover your ass.

That sparked a thought, and she wrote, CYA? Who? Covering for whom? next to the listing for the Moroni Gallery. They had closed down immediately after the forgeries came to light. Neither McGuire nor Hines had been able to track the owners. By the end of the time they worked on the case, filing it as cold, they’d still had no leads on the owner’s whereabouts. Doing her own follow-up, she’d come up empty as well.

She scrawled the word Disappearances next to the Moroni owners’ names. She also wrote, HINES!!! as a reminder to call the man again. He still had not returned her calls, and she needed to know if he’d checked the shipper in White Plains. It hadn’t been in the notes, and McGuire hadn’t remembered anything about the shipper, but he said Hines had been the one to talk to the Miami gallery owner, as well as Moroni in New York.

Then there was Berlin. The Moroni crew had disappeared; Pratch was gone too. Had his disappearance been about money, or ass covering?

And where was the body? Did they need to be looking for the Moroni owners’ bodies, as well? She scribbled another note. Pratch—body? Moroni—body? Jane/John Does? Check Potter’s Field burials/timeline.

“I have the fitness reports.” Another panel member spoke up, this time the gentleman to the left of center. “Reading into the record,” he intoned. “Review of the mental fitness of Anastasia Elena Burton, and her capacity to return to duty.”

When he started reading the review from the shrinks, she shut it out. She’d read the files, knew what they had to say about her stability, the way her mind worked.

What she needed was for her mind to actually work, to make the leap from names on a page to a solid direction. It was there, she could feel it hovering in the back of her mind. She’d started to flip the pages back, review her list of names when the lead panelist cleared his throat, calling her attention to him.

“Therefore, Agent Burton,” the executive agent intoned, a hint of a smile playing about his lips. Had he figured out she was working? Did he care? “In the matter of Fifteen February, we, the Panel of Inquiry, do hereby absolve you of any wrongdoing or fault. The matter, while noted in your record, will not be assigned as a reason for demotion or delay of benefit or placement.”

Reese made a noise that was probably triumph, well muffled since the panel was still in session. Despite her distraction, or maybe because of it, Ana got the socked-in-the-gut feeling that goes with either great upset or great relief. Having her thoughts keyed into the art case had distracted her from being a sweaty, nervous wreck for the panel. Thank God.

“Oh, God. Thank you,” she whispered, letting it sink in. She was not at fault. Not at fault. Thank you, TJ. She would never balk over doing a translation or favor for him, ever again. Ever.

“Is there anything you would like to say, Agent?”

She took a bracing sip of water before she spoke, knowing her voice was going to be shaky, no matter what. “Thank you to the Panel of Inquiry for your hard work, and for this verdict.”

There, she’d gotten it out. The members of the panel nodded, closing folders and in all but one case, the executive agent, sitting back in their chairs.

“Agent Burton, I have been instructed to inform you that while your current assignment is ongoing, a number of urgent openings await you when you can wrap up your part of the investigation in progress.” He looked down at his notes. “Five teams have requested either a person of your capabilities or you, personally.” He smiled at her openly now. “These include several international postings, as well as a domestic case or two. While we, the panel, only felt it necessary to read three or four recommendations into record, I want you to know that there were at least twenty-seven letters of varying length that lent support to your skills and dedication to the Agency, and the security of the United States on a global basis.”

“Yes sir, thank you, sir.” Ana was stunned by the fact that so many people had taken time to post something positive. In her experience, more people were apt to focus on the negative, especially within the Agency.

“Very good. Unless my fellow panelists have anything further to add?” He looked up and down the line. “No? Very well, this Panel of Inquiry is dismissed at—” He checked his watch, stated the time, and brought down a gavel on the tabletop. “Good luck, Agent Burton.”

“Thank you, sir,” she said, standing in respect as the panelists filed out. The last panelist detoured to drop a fat manila envelope on the table in front of her.

“Some of those potential postings,” she said, tapping the CONFIDENTIAL seal. “Handle with care.” The woman nodded to Ana and to Reese, then left through the same door the others had used, leaving her alone with Reese.

“Congratulations,” he said, offering a handshake. “You’re cleared for return to serious duty,” he nodded at the envelope. “Any idea where you want to go?”

She shook her head, which was swimming with all her ideas, hunches, and thoughts on the current case. “I haven’t dared consider anything. I’ll look at everything later, but my mind is pretty full of the case I’m working right now.”

Reese frowned. “It’s a cold case,” he said dismissively. “Pass it off to someone else and get yourself out of there.”

“No, I need to finish it out, wrap it up if I can.”

Reese shook that off. “You heard the executive agent. He didn’t say finish it; he said wrap up your part of it. Move on, Ana. The less time on your record in the dead zone, the better.” He gathered his notepad, settled it in the pocket of his briefcase. “By the way, the pay-grade shift and increase that was frozen will be reinstated and paid retroactive to the freeze. Expect a nice bonus in your check this month.”

He waited expectantly for her to get her own belongings, walked out to the main part of the building with her. “Good luck, Agent,” he said, holding out his hand to shake hers in parting. “It’s been a pleasure to assist you in clearing this matter off your record.”

Ana stood a moment, watching him walk away, stroll down the sidewalk in the bright DC April sunshine. All is forgiven, all is forgotten? She wondered about that, wondered about the fraud case and her San Francisco colleagues all through the ride back to the hotel. The fat envelope full of options weighed heavy on her mind, but she didn’t open it.

She didn’t want to go there quite yet.

Kicking off her shoes, she lay on the bed, thinking. What was the connection she was missing? Where did all the pieces fit?

She was still wondering when she fell asleep.

 

Hours later, she woke in darkness. Her mouth was dry, her head hurt, and all she wanted to do was go back to sleep. Her dreams had been a welter of images, from Gates’s face in the mirror behind her, passionate and loving, to the grisly visual of Beverly Stanley’s burned and broken body on the cold steel in the morgue in Rome.

Superimposed over all the images were the photos of the tortures in New York, and the executions in San Francisco.

“Ugh,” she grunted, going to the bathroom to splash water on her face. She had to book a flight to New York, follow Davis’s lead to the shipper there. “What is it about that that’s bothering me?” She puzzled over that as she went online, booked her flight for the next morning. “What, what, what?”

She paced the floor for a few minutes. “Only two centers of killing,” she said, finally getting a handle on one thing that was bothering her. “But two different methods.”

She opened her connection to her office e-mail and felt her heart rate pick up at the multiple pings of incoming e-mail.

A frisson of excitement hit her in the gut when she saw the subject line, SEARCH RESULTS. That was the first e-mail she opened.

Ana skipped through all the legalese to get to the results listed three paragraphs down and got a hard shock.

Whose case? She scanned further down, saw TJ’s name and stopped cold. What the hell? TJ?

It was connected.

She grabbed her phone, found TJ’s number.

“Come on, answer, damn it,” she muttered, opening the other e-mails one by one. The data was still incoming, but as the searches overlapped, the shipper came up sixty-one percent of the time in relation to the numbers called before and after the art fraud was discovered. Ana was not surprised when a second shipper came up in San Francisco.

“Two of them. Two shippers. Same fraud. Two different killers. Separate but equal, damn it,” she said, continuing to pace as the phone rang and rang. “Answer the damn phone, TJ.”

She stopped long enough to scribble her thoughts on her yellow pad. “Time for a new warrant,” she muttered, sending an e-mail to Pretzky as she waited for TJ’s voice mail to pick up. They needed all the data on that shipping company.

An e-mail popped up from TJ. She hung up the phone just as the message picked up.

She quickly wrote back.

She paused, trying to think how to carefully let him know what was going on without saying it straight out.

She waited for ten minutes, checking the e-mail over and over, but there was nothing from TJ.

She continued pacing. Should she call Gates, let him know what the search had turned up? Odd how quickly she’d come to think of him as a kind of partner, an equal. She’d never had—or let—anyone be in that position before.

“If I hadn’t slept with him, if he hadn’t treated me the way he did, would I call him?”

Before she could decide, her phone rang. She checked the number: Pretzky.

“Burton,” she said by way of greeting.

“Pretzky here, how’d it go?”

Warmed by the interest, Ana smiled. “It went okay, thanks. I’m clear.”

“Good. You deserved no less.”

“Thank you for all you did,” Ana said, wanting to say more, but unsure how to do it. Relief was coursing through her in a delayed reaction. Talking to Pretzky brought it home. She was free. She was reinstated. She had jobs waiting.

“Never mind the thanks,” Pretzky replied, oblivious to Ana’s relief. “I’m calling because we’ve had another incident.” Pretzky sounded pissed, now. “We’ve also got another body in the building. Probably isn’t related, but no one from this division’s died in,” she paused, to count, “the four years I’ve been here, except one guy who got hit by a bus. This was a hit.”

“Who was it?” Ana gripped the desk, willing it to be a fluke, unrelated.

“Guy named Perkins from IT. He’s been dead a few days. Probably killed soon after our computers got hit and you had that deep search. They found him with crack cocaine. He’s got some tracks, but the ME’s saying they’re probably post mortem. Nothing about it adds up. It was an execution-style hit, rather than an OD. Bullet to the back of the head.”

“Just like the others in California, in the art fraud case.”

“Exactly. Ties in with another like-crime in Vegas as well.”

Excitement flared in her gut. She remembered Perkins now. He’d been up on their floor, right after the hacking incident. She reminded Pretzky. “Remember? It was weird because he said he’d come up to help, but he was up on our floor, not down with Monroe and Talmadge, the IT guys that got us shut down. I think it’s connected.” Ana was sure, and her tone reflected it. “Besides that, we got another complication. I got three case-connection warnings via e-mail on our art-fraud case, intersecting in some searches and warrants on another case.” She read the file number to Pretzky; her boss returned the favor with the case number from Vegas. Also cold, also unsolved. “I’m positive mine’s a cross with a case from my colleague in Rome, TJ Michaels. Problem is, he won’t answer my calls.”

“I’ll check from here, let you know. There’s something else, though. You put all the files and notes from this case in the locked filing cabinet, right?”

“Of course. We agreed on that as a safety measure.”

“They’re gone.”

“Wait, did you say ‘gone’?” Ana’s voice rose to a stressed squeak. “As in missing, totally not there?”

“Exactly. It had to be an inside job because no one can get in here without authorization, even the cleaning people. I’ve got Pearson reviewing the surveillance tapes and the visitor logs, but so far we’ve got nothing.”

Ana opened the files on her laptop. “I’ve got a lot of the data scanned into my computer, including the old case notes from Agents McGuire and Hines. Should I contact them?”

“I think you’d better, see if they kept copies. Also, I got Agent TJ Michaels’s boss on the phone—he claims Michaels is off on sabbatical, not on a case.”

“The Inquiry Panel said he was pursuing leads on the Rome case, on his own recognizance, but that he’d gotten sanction to pursue.”

“Have you discussed that data from Davis, the info on your shipper, with any of the victims?” Pretzky asked now.

“Not yet. I was working on a flight to White Plains, and got the e-mails about the case crossovers. Then you called.” Ana didn’t say she’d been trying to decide if she could call Gates.

“I see. You hear anything from Davis?”

“Davis? No, should I have?”

She heard the worry in Pretzky’s voice when her boss replied. “He was supposed to contact you, let you know that he’d found two more victims who used the shipper you’re checking on. What the hell is the name of it? I hate calling it ‘the shipper.’”

“Ark Shipping Inc.” Ana read the data. “There’s a probable sub-corp, D’Or Shipping.”

“D’Or? That means gold. Gold shipping? That’s original,” Pretzky scoffed. “Ark? That’s weird too. Not like they’re moving paintings or anything else two-by-two.”

Ana hadn’t put it together that way, but Ark was a biblical reference. Gold. Gold Ark. It was worth a try. She pulled up her favorite search engines and entered gold ark in one search field, gold ship, and then gold box in the others and hit SEARCH.

“What else?” she asked Pretzky. “You don’t sound like you’re finished.”

“I’m not,” Pretzky said. “We got word from Berlin that Pratch’s remains may have turned up.”

“You’re kidding, right? Why now, I wonder?”

She heard the phone ring on Pretzky’s end, and her boss said, “Hey, gotta go. Call you later.”

Pretzky hung up so fast there was no time for Ana to say good-bye.

Nothing obvious pulled up on her search, so she checked e-mail again, but there was nothing from TJ. Checking the time, she called McGuire in New Orleans. He answered on the fifth ring.

“Hello?” The gruff voice was hard, insistent. “Who is this?”

“Agent McGuire, it’s Agent Burton. I’m calling about the cold case again, the art fraud—”

He cut her off. “Yeah, yeah. I know. You’ve hit on something, for sure, Burton. I’ve had visitors.”

“Visitors?” She’d been afraid of something like this.

“Couple of thugs, aiming to rough me up, or worse.”

“Oh, my God. Are you okay?”

“I’m good, but they’re not. One’s in the morgue. Gotta say my aim’s not off by much, even if I am an old fart. The other’s in jail, but he ain’t got much to say. Got hired by phone, had my address.” He gave a short barking laugh. “Guess their boss didn’t tell ’em I was armed and dangerous.”

“I know I told you we’d had more action on the case, Agent. This isn’t acting like a cold case now. It’s had me hopping, but I didn’t feel like anything substantial was moving,” she admitted. She hadn’t either, certainly not on the case, even though everything else seemed to be shifting and going straight to hell right under her feet. “Then all hell broke loose over the weekend, but even then, it didn’t seem related.”

“I think you better reconsider that, missy,” McGuire advised, his voice still gruff. “And be careful.”

“I will, as much as I can. Have you been in touch with Agent Hines? I’ve been unable to reach him at his office or on his cell.”

There was a short pause. “Yeah, tried to call him, got no answer. His office says he’s on vacation.”

“You don’t think so.” She knew the answer, but she wanted to hear him say it.

“No.” The pause was longer. “No, I don’t.”

“Shit. Okay, listen, I’ll keep you posted. If you get any more visitors, give me a call.” She gave him her cell number. “You should know too, I just heard they found Pratch’s remains.”

“There’s something to throw you off the scent,” McGuire said, stopping Ana in her tracks. “Right on time.”

“You think it’s a diversion?”

“I think someone wanted him found, wants you to focus some time in Europe on that, rather than on this,” McGuire snapped. “This is getting crappier and more convoluted by the minute. I think you need to send someone to find Hines, you get me?”

His implication came through loud and clear. Crap, crap, crap. This was the last thing Ana needed in an already brutally tangled case. Partner or not, McGuire was pissed and thought Hines was involved.

“I’m gonna say this once, missy,” McGuire said slowly, reluctance plain in every word he spoke. “I’m going to tell you that Hines is a top marksman. Sniper, if you get me. You watch out, you hear me?”

“Got it,” she said, feeling the curl of fear in her belly. A sniper. A perfectly placed shot at the Agency garage. A shot in the dark at her apartment. A shot in the dark at the Opera? That one still didn’t make sense, not in terms of the case. Why would Hines target Gates? She’d figure it out later; for now she needed to get off the phone, get busy. “Thanks, McGuire.”

“Call me if there’s a change, will ya? I’m staying locked and loaded until I hear from you.” He paused a minute, and he said, “Thank God I sent my grandkids away for a week or so.”

“Yeah, I’m glad of that.” Ana’s imagination was too vivid to contemplate what might have happened if the thugs aiming for McGuire had found his grandchildren instead. “I’ll call. The minute I hear anything,” she reassured him, and they hung up.

Ana set her phone down, so that she could use both hands to rub away the goose bumps that rose on her arms. She left the phone and the bed, intending to get water from the mini-bar. She’d taken two steps away from the bed when her phone rang.

Expecting Pretzky, or TJ, she checked the number.

It was Gates.