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  Nimec nodded.

  "You sure you have the right party?" he asked Noriko.

  "Pretty much," she said. "I also dug up an open mailing envelope with a return address that matches the one in the book. There were some photos of a couple and two kids inside it. And a letter starts with a 'Dear Sis.' "

  "Okay." Nimec turned to look at Osmar. "Petaling Jaya… is it within driving distance?"

  Osmar shrugged. "Can go, yes, but it a few hundred kilometers," he said in rough English. "Be faster we drive back to ground station, take helicopter."

  Nimec thought in silence a moment. Then he reached for the cell phone resting in the molded-plastic cup-holder beside him.

  "Better let me have that number, Nori," he said. "I want to see if anybody's home before we come knocking on their door."

  The pair of men strode through the corridor after leaving their guns at the checkpoint, their eyes noting the button-sized lenses of surveillance cameras near the ceiling. Unlike commercially produced cameras, these miniature units were recessed behind the walls rather than mounted on visible brackets, and would have gone unnoticed by the average person.

  They reached the T-juncture at the end of the hall, but instead of immediately turning right as instructed, paused to scan the doorways in both directions.

  Midway down the corridor branching to their left was an office door marked SECURITY. The one who called himself Lombardi gave the other an almost imperceptible glance and they went over to it, walking side-by-side at an easy pace, nodding amiably to a woman who passed them going the opposite way.

  Two plainclothes security men were sitting at a bank of closed-circuit monitors when the office door opened inward from the corridor. They were not surprised, having seen the approaching detectives on their screens, and assumed they wanted information.

  "Can we help you gentlemen?" one of them said, swiveling to face the door.

  The man called Lombardi entered, followed by his partner. They let the door close behind them.

  "We're looking for the supervisor's office." He smiled, his hand casually tucked in his pants pocket. ' Thought it was supposed to be right around here somewhere."

  "Took a wrong turn," the security man said. "When you leave this office, hang a right and—"

  Lombardi's hand came out of his pocket holding his key ring. Before the security guards could register what was happening, he brought up its rectangular fob and quickly tugged back the attached chain with his free hand. This cocked the firing mechanism of the weapon, which was only three inches long and contained two.32-caliber bullets. He pointed it at the man facing him and pushed a button on its side.

  The slug that coughed from the tiny gun's bore would have been lethal at twenty yards, and the shooter was a mere fraction of that distance from his target. It struck the guard in the middle of the forehead and killed him instantly, slamming him back into the panel of monitors.

  The shooter pivoted toward the other guard. His face white with shock, he was reaching for the holstered weapon under his jacket. The shooter pushed the button and fired his second shot, striking the guard in the center of his face. And then the face was gone. The body sprawled backward, blood, bone fragments, and tissue spraying the screens and walls behind him.

  The shooter looked at his partner, gesturing toward the dead men.

  "Close," he said. "I only expected there to be one of them."

  The man near the door nodded.

  "Let's take their guns and get on with it," the shooter said.

  When she heard the phone ring at nine-thirty, she wondered if perhaps Anna had forgotten something in her rush to leave the house. The kids had acted up and been late getting ready for school, and Anna, who dropped them off every morning on her way to work, had made her exit amid quite a hustle and bustle.

  "Hello?" she said, picking up.

  A strange male voice. "Kirsten Chu, please."

  She hesitated, her heart suddenly banging in her chest. She'd been expecting a call from the police, which was the reason she hadn't volunteered to help out her sister and deliver Miri and Brian to their classrooms herself. The police, this had to be the police. Anna and Lin… and Max, of course.. were the only other people who'd know to find her here. And the person at the other end wasn't any of the latter.

  "Who's calling?" she asked in a cautious tone. Purposely offering no acknowledgment of her identity.

  "My name is Pete Nimec, and I'm—"

  She didn't even hear him finish the sentence, so completely overwhelming was the recognition that swept over her. Her heart beat harder, faster. She inhaled, feeling as if the breath had been knocked out of her.

  "Dear God, that's the name," she said, the words springing from her mouth on their own. "You're Max's friend, aren't you? The one he wanted me to call?"

  A beat of silence. "Yes, I am. I—"

  "How is he?" she interrupted. Worry had swept chillingly through Kirsten's initial excitement. If Max were all right, why wouldn't he be calling?

  "Kirsten, we need to meet. I have to speak with you in person, find out what's happened to him. To both of you."

  "You mean you don't know…."

  "No, Kirsten. I don't. No one's heard from him."

  She clutched the phone, her hand shaking around it. Her entire arm shaking.

  "Then how.. how did you get this number?"

  "I'll explain all that later. I promise. Right now it's just urgent that we get together. I'll come to you there. It's probably best if you stay put."

  Kirsten breathed.

  What reason was there to trust this man? This name Max had mentioned once in a moment of urgency? This voice? The truth was that she hardly even knew whether Max was the person he'd seemed to be…

  Except that wasn't true. She did know. Maybe not everything about him. Maybe not as much as she should have known. But as she'd told Anna just days ago, she loved him….

  Had loved him long before he'd put his own life at risk to save her…

  And what was love, always, always, but a leap of faith?

  "All right," she said. "I'll be waiting."

  * * *

  The supervisor at the encryption facility — the name plaque on his office door read Charles Turner — was shaking his head as he pored over the court papers he'd been issued.

  "I must tell you, this is rather atypical," he said, glancing up at the two detectives standing before his desk.

  "How so, sir? I checked the subpoenas myself to make sure they crossed all the t's."

  "No, please, don't misunderstand me," Turner said. "The papers are fine. But normally I get advance notification from the officers coming for the codes. They're stored on compact disc in our vaults, you understand, and there's a rather stringent checkout process. Going through it at the last minute, well, I'll have to drop everything, Detective Lombardi…"

  "We're really sorry for the inconvenience," the man standing in front of him said. "But this is our first time dealing with a matter of this type as officers."

  Turner sighed and rose from his desk, looking annoyed and somewhat flustered.

  "You may accompany me to the data-storage wing, though only authorized personnel are allowed in the vaults. You'll have to stay out in one of the waiting areas while I track the disk you want."

  "Will it take very long?"

  "It shouldn't," Turner said. "The corporation whose key-codes are being requested isn't one I recognize offhand, but the disks are catalogued on our electronic database. I can rush everything through in half an hour, maybe a little faster."

  "That'd be fine with us."

  Turner harrumphed, and came around the desk toward the door.

  "Lead the way, sir," the detective said, falling in behind him.

  The men had left Penang State, southeast of the Malaysia-Thailand border, shortly after they'd received the call from Luan. That had been some hours ago, at dawn, and they'd been driving their van down the main coastal highways to Selangor ever since. The trip would
have been lengthy under the best of traffic conditions, but there were herds of beachgoing tourists jamming the roads near the bridge and ferry terminals to Georgetown, and the delays had stretched miserably in the hot, beating sun. The men in the van had, furthermore, wanted to keep a moderate speed so as not to risk being pulled over by police. The kris tattoos on their hands would bring about an instant search, and once that happened their problems only would be starting. If the police found their weapons, they could look forward to many hours of painful interrogation, followed by many years of being locked away in prison holes. And that would be a far cry from the reward they were expecting for the successful completion of their task.

  The Thai had promised them a fortune.

  A fortune in greenbacks for capturing a woman and delivering her to him in Kalimantan.

  They had joked crudely about her physical attributes when they received the call. And in spite of their grindingly slow progress, it would not be long before they saw the object of Luan's desire for themselves. They were already better than halfway down through Perak, and would be crossing into Selangor within a couple of hours.

  With luck, Kirsten Chu would be at the address they had been given. And if not, they would gladly wait there for her to arrive.

  She was, after all, one woman who was very much worth it.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  VARIOUS LOCALES

  SEPTEMBER 29/30, 2000

  "Is there some kind of problem, Mr. Turner?" the man calling himself Lombardi asked from where he sat in the waiting area.

  Holding the court papers, a puzzled expression on his face, Turner glanced at him as he returned through a doorway he'd entered just moments ago.

  "The name of the corporation simply doesn't show on our database," he said, approaching his chair. "I don't know what to make of it."

  Lombardi rose and sidled up to him, studying the papers over his shoulder.

  "I'm no expert at this high-tech stuff, but could be it's just misspelled," he said.

  Turner shook his head. ' The computers will essentially correct for that sort of error by searching for approximate matches. In this case, nothing came up."

  Lombardi grinned.

  "Then I guess those papers are fake and the company doesn't exist," he said.

  Turner looked at him. "I don't understand…"

  Lombardi reached under his jacket and drew the Beretta he'd taken from one of the murdered security guards.

  "Oh, I think you do," he said, and rammed the handle of the weapon upward into Turner's nose, shattering his septum and sending tiny slivers of bone into his brain. Turner dropped instantly to the floor, his eyes rolling up in their sockets, dark blood spouting from his nostrils. He spasmed twice, emitted a labored gurgling sound, and died.

  Lombardi gestured to the other man as he got up off his seat. Then both went around the body and passed through the entry to the vault area.

  A short while before the ringing of the doorbell startled her into alertness, Kirsten had slipped into a doze on the sofa, a kind of syrupy exhaustion having settled over her in the late morning, and stayed with her as she'd done some routine chores — washing the breakfast dishes, straightening up the living room, and gathering the kids' toys from around the apartment and garden and hauling them back into their bedroom closet.

  Afterward, sitting down to listen to some light jazz on the stereo, hoping it would calm her mind, she had been surprised at how fast her eyelids had started getting heavy, and thought it quite incredible that she could be simultaneously clipping along full-steam on nervous energy and feeling so mentally fatigued that her brain almost seemed immersed in a pool of thick, lukewarm glue. It was a little like the way she'd felt as a university student studying for final exams, living for days and nights on coffee and chocolate.. only many times more intense.

  And now the sound of the buzzer had practically sent her bouncing off the couch, still half out of it, yet conscious of her nerves revving up to speed again.

  She glanced at the clock on the wall opposite her. Could Nimec have arrived already? Under average circumstances it would have been highly unlikely he could have made it in so short a time… but he'd explained that he would be returning to the UpLink ground station in Johor, and would probably travel from there into KL by helicopter. Which had also told her a couple of things about him beyond the obvious fact that he was in a hurry. One, he was at least as concerned about Max as she was. And two, he had the sort of clout with Max's boss to pull some major strings, maybe even worked for UpLink himself—

  Bzzzzzzzzz!

  She crossed the room to the door, straightening her blouse, smoothing her skirt down with her hands. Whoever was out there was really leaning on the bell.

  "Yes?" she said, reaching for the doorknob. "Who is it?"

  "Johor police," a man said from outside. He was speaking Bahasa. "We want to see Kirsten Chu."

  "Excuse me?" she replied in the same language. The blunt, gruff quality of his voice had surprised her as much as his response.

  "It's about her call," he said. "We need to ask her some questions."

  Kirsten didn't move, hardly even breathed. She was still holding the knob, her fingers suddenly sweating around it.

  The Singapore cop with whom she'd spoken had said the Johor authorities would be in touch.. but she hadn't expected them to just show up at the door. Wouldn't they want to phone and make an appointment, if for no other reason than to spare themselves a needless trip in case she wasn't home?

  And does he really sound like a police officer? she thought.

  Her pulse fluttering in her temples, she raised the spyhole cover, peered outside….

  And felt her stomach turn to ice.

  Never mind how he'd sounded, none of the men standing in the walk outside — she could see four or five of them through the little two-way mirror — looked anything like police investigators. Their hair was long, their clothes sloppy, and their eyes…

  Even had they been wearing bright silver badges and starched blue uniforms, their eyes would have given them away.

  "Come on," the one nearest the door said. "Open up."

  She pulled away from the spyhole and inhaled shakily.

  "Just a minute," she said. "I need to put something on.

  The man slammed the door with his forearm.

  "Forget the games," he said. "Open it."

  Her fingers harrowing her cheeks, Kirsten took a step backward across the living room.

  ''Open up!9' the man said, beating the door again, hitting it so hard she was afraid it might fly off its hinges.

  Terrified, her breaths coming in sharp little bursts, Kirsten whirled and plunged through the apartment.

  An instant later the door crashed open behind her.

  The entryway through which the intruders had left the waiting room led to a short passage, which itself gave into another small, boxy room that was bare except for a computer workstation on the right, and a wall-mounted biometric scanner across from it beside a reinforced steel door.

  "Lombardi" went straight over to the scanner. This was the part of the job that made him uptight. He'd been telling Turner the truth when he remarked that he was no technical wizard, and felt it would have been easy enough to steer the supervisor back into the room at gunpoint, force him to let the system take his readings, and in that way gain access to the vault. But the concern was that Turner might have triggered some discreet alarm had that been done. Caine's instructions had been explicit, and they'd been warned not to deviate from them under any circumstances.

  Standing before the scanning unit, Lombardi raised his left hand to the level of the cameras designed to image his facial and iris characteristics, turning it so the artificial star-sapphire ring on his fourth finger would be visible to their lenses. Then, keeping that hand perfectly motionless, he placed his right hand flat on the machine's glass opto-electrical pad. Ordinarily this would both activate the unit and take readings of his fingerprint and palm geo
metry, which would then be converted to algorithms and matched to stored employee-identification data. But by an arcane process he did not quite understand, the specific star pattern on his ring would key a match with a simple data-string buried in the system mainframe's hard drive, which caused — or, according to Caine, was supposed to cause — the normal image-recognition sequence to be bypassed.

  Lombardi held his breath and waited, one hand up, the other on the unit's clear glass interface, staring at its eye-level VDU. A red light had begun to glow beneath the glass, indicating the scanner had been activated by his touch… but if all was going as planned, the readings of its thermal sensors would be ignored by the computers.

  Five seconds went by.

  Ten.

  He waited.

  And then the words CLEARED TO ENTER appeared in the middle of the screen.

  He exhaled, heard the faint click of the vault's lock mechanism retracting, and turned to his partner, who was already working open the heavy steel door.

  They were in.

  Kirsten ran toward the back of the apartment, hearing the door burst open behind her, hearing the men who'd been outside come pounding through the living room at her heels. She had only a vague notion of what to do, but it was all she had, and there was no choice except to go with it. If she could make it to the back door before they caught up, get into the building's central parking court, then maybe—

  Suddenly a hand reached out from behind and snatched the sleeve of her blouse, pulling at her, yanking her backward. She stumbled, and almost lost her balance, but somehow managed to keep her legs underneath her, keep moving, carried by her own forward momentum. She twisted sharply as her pursuer tried to get his other hand around her, heard a loud ripping sound, and then was free of his grasp, racing across the room again, scrambling toward the door, a ragged streamer of cotton dangling from her arm.

  "Hey!" he shouted. "Stop, you bitch!"

  Kirsten was within several feet of the back door now, the kitchen on her immediate right, the hallway leading to the bedrooms on her left. She lunged ahead, shooting her hand out in front of her, reaching for the doorknob, thinking she might make it, thinking she really might, when the man whose grip she'd managed to escape a moment earlier sprang at her in a flying tackle, the full weight of his body whumping into her, his arms clamping around her waist.