by Leon, Judith
Joe gave her one of his warmest smiles, his old melting-women’s-hearts-on-contact one. “You don’t look much the worse for wear.”
“I’m just keeping the ice on for sympathy. I tried the ankle ten minutes ago and it’s better.”
He laid his warm palm on her thigh. Chills ran up the skin of her chest and throat.
He didn’t say anything, just let his hand rest there as his gaze searched hers.
Unable to bear the silence and aware of a sudden warmth that indicated, beyond question, sexual arousal, she said, “Really, I’m okay.”
Finally looking away, he slid his palm down toward her ankle. She’d been unconsciously holding her breath and now drew a deep one. Her feet were bare. He stood and went to the end of the sofa and took the foot with the bum ankle into his hands, rubbing the sole and then the arch.
She couldn’t bring herself to protest—if for no other reason but that the warming rub did somehow ease the pain. He was rubbing the other foot similarly when Cesare rejoined them with a tray of sandwiches, cut apples and pears, and a strong-smelling cheese. The moment of intimacy was over. She still felt agitated and breathless.
“I’ll get a beer,” Joe said. “Anyone else want one?”
“Yes,” Cesare said.
“I’ll pass,” she said.
Principessa leapt onto Nova’s stomach and settled down. “Sorry, love,” Nova sat up. “I’m starving. You’ll have to settle for my lap.”
Joe returned and she told them about the safe. Since Cesare had already told Joe that no incriminating evidence regarding Ebola had been present, Joe was much more interested in her recounting of the accident with Angela. “Man, you must have freaked those people out totally. When I saw you on the road, I thought I was hallucinating. The Sorokins will be talking about this birthday party for the rest of the girl’s life. Who, they will always wonder, was that strange female creature to whom we owe our daughter’s life? It was like a damn comic book—Sootwoman saves the day.”
He rhapsodized a bit about driving the Ferrari, and then they turned their attention to tomorrow’s op, getting into Ya Lin’s, their last chance at Lynchpin. It wasn’t much past four when Cesare’s cell phone rang.
“Cesare Giordano,” he said.
“No!” he exploded almost at once.
“No!” he said again.
She watched Cesare’s eyes widen, his face darken. Something was terribly wrong. He listened and listened until she felt like bursting with the need to know. Finally he hung up.
“Friends,” he said, “we’ve been overcome by a disaster. Interpol found the electrician informant. We know who Lynchpin is. It is Ya Lin.”
“I don’t get it. That’s good,” Joe broke in.
“Lynchpin is Ya Lin, but the date of the sale somehow got botched up. The informant gave Provenza the wrong date when he was interviewed. The date for the sale is, was, today.”
Nova jerked upright, spilling Principessa off her lap. “Today!”
“Shit!” Joe said.
Cesare nodded. “Today. The sale may already have happened. The local police are at this moment seeking a search warrant.”
Nova stood and tried the ankle. Some pain, but sturdy nevertheless. “We can be at Ya Lin’s in under twenty minutes.” She grabbed her khaki jacket, a jacket handy with pockets and able to hide a shoulder-holstered gun if the need should arise. They had arms in the SUV—Glocks for all three of them—and unfortunately the time of need was now.
Chapter 26
Joe, also wearing a jacket and armed with a Glock in a shoulder holster, again took charge of the driving. Cesare said he didn’t think they would need guns and so remained unarmed, but he didn’t try to stop her or Joe from carrying.
Nova took the backseat so she could keep her ankle elevated. She no longer limped, but the joint still twitched in pain if put under pressure.
“Call Provenza, Cesare,” she said as they turned from the side street onto the Amalfi Drive. “Find out whatever you can from SISMI’s surveillance. Find out where Lin has been all day. Is she at home now? Do they know if the sale actually took place?”
Cesare called and asked Nova’s questions plus a few of his own, including what SISMI expected of them. He did a lot of nodding.
Finally he rang off. “Provenza says he has someone talking right now with the people who have been doing surveillance on Ya Lin and he’ll get back to me.”
They drove in silence until they approached Lin’s property. Cesare checked with Provenza again and reported, “She is at home and has been all day. She had three visitors, the first very early, at seven-fifteen this morning. Provenza says the electrician is wavering, saying he’s now confused, and the sale really could be next Sunday, the twenty-second, not today. As for what we should do, Provenza says we should wait and let the local authorities go in with a search warrant.”
Joe glided the SUV to a slow, careful stop opposite Ya Lin’s gate. Through its fine wrought iron, Nova could see the mansion’s ornately carved front door where the same two guards who had accosted her and Joe stood on the porch. “Those guys look very businesslike to me,” she said. “What do you think, Joe?”
“I get the same feeling. Why should they be standing that way if they aren’t on alert? Why not sitting?”
More silent thinking in the SUV.
Finally Joe said, “If the sale has been made, the buyer will be getting away.”
“Right,” Nova agreed.
“Every minute that passes, the buyer would get farther away with the information to make a deadly virus that, if let loose, could kill thousands if not more.”
“Right.”
“So the sooner we know whether there has been a sale or not, the better our chances of catching him are. So you’re thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Right,” she said. “I say screw the warrant. Let’s go in there and do our own search. We play it from there.”
Joe opened his door at the same time she opened hers.
“Wait! Stop! Are you insane?” Cesare blurted out. “You must not do that.”
“Yeah, we must,” she said.
“It will be an illegal search. We can’t operate that way.”
“SISMI can’t.”
She felt Joe’s solidarity and knew her back was covered. They were of one mind. Letting the Ebola information get into the hands of terrorists, if there was any way to stop it, was unacceptable, and bureaucracy be damned. The potential risk was just too great.
They strode across the two-lane road together to the gate. Cesare hopped out, leaving Principessa in the van, and hurried to catch up with them. “What is it you’re going to do? What shall I tell Provenza?”
She gave Cesare full attention. He deserved that. “We’re going to get inside and confront Ya Lin. You can tell Provenza whatever you wish. Do you seriously think he’ll object? We’re just not going to wait. Tell him SISMI will be clean. They can lay it all off on the CIA if necessary. Or on Jane and James Blake. I don’t really care. Nice and neat isn’t the thing here, Cesare. My gut says, ‘Do it now.’ And I always listen to my gut.”
Joe went to the gate for pedestrian traffic, tried it and found it also locked. “The two heavies are both at the front,” he said. “Remember the place on the side? It’s completely exposed, but we can climb over the wall there easily enough. There’s the big tree.”
She patted her cell phone in her pocket and smiled to reassure Cesare. “We’ll keep you posted, I promise.”
Without looking back, she followed Joe as he trotted along the road beside the wall and then turned to follow along the wall’s west side. The big oak was easy to climb. Joe jumped the three feet from the tree to the flat, bricked top of the wall and turned to her. “How’s the ankle? Can you make it?”
“Sure,” she said, not sure at all.
She sprang off the branch, her ankle protesting as though someone had stuck a white-hot glowing steel rod into it. She landed beside him, and he hugged her to hi
m to steady her. He immediately released her, jumped the seven or so feet to the ground, and turned to look up at her. “Jump into my arms. Let me take the weight off the ankle.”
“Right,” she said.
He caught her in a tight embrace and they held each other just a heartbeat longer than necessary. She felt strength and comfort in that moment, the comfort of not being alone.
As they trotted back toward the front, she said, “I say we should take out the big guys so they don’t end up surprising us.”
“Roger.”
At the mansion’s front corner, they slowed to a walk and, side by side, rounded the corner and strolled casually toward the entry. When the two men spotted her and Joe, both stiffened and put their right hands inside their beautifully tailored suit jackets. Bald Head said in Italian, “You are trespassing.”
She and Joe walked up the steps to within striking distance, no more than five feet from both men.
Again Bald Head protested. “I told you yesterday, no photographers allowed. No one. Get out or I will—”
She and Joe charged. She slugged Baldy with her fist in the solar plexus. He doubled over, and she gave him a left uppercut to the nose, followed by a knee kick to the groin. He went down, the only noises being the uugh as he lost breath, the crunching of his nose and the thud as he hit the beautiful gray marble entry tiles. He might be able to take on paparazzi, but not a trained CIA agent.
Joe’s target crashed down beside Baldy. Nova lifted Baldy’s gun, a 9mm Beretta, a weapon she knew well, and tucked it in her slacks’ waistband at the small of her back. Joe also relieved the other guard of his gun, the same make of Beretta. They used the guards’ socks and belts to hog-tie them.
Joe tried the front door, conveniently unlocked. They strode inside and Joe closed the door behind them. The elegant interior decor ranged through various Chinese dynasties. “Direct approach,” she said.
“Agreed.”
From the second floor, reached by a curving marble stairway with gilded banisters, Nova heard the bang of a door closing or perhaps a drawer being shut.
“Miss Lin,” Nova called out, the sound feeling especially loud in the cavernous house.
She received no response, just another banging sound. They climbed the stairway. Another bang drew them down a long hallway to the door of a master bedroom the size of Nova’s entire La Jolla condominium. Ya Lin stood with her back to them. Three suitcases lay on a massive four-poster with carved teak headboards and footboards covered in dragons, the Chinese symbol for luck. Ya Lin turned from a chest of drawers, her arms full of lingerie. Seeing two strangers in her house, she screamed and dropped the silky garments.
“It’s okay,” Nova said in Chinese. “We’re not going to hurt you.” We should have hidden the guns.
“Who are you? Get out!” the actress said in English. Something about their dress, or perhaps Nova’s accent, had cued her to their native tongue.
Joe said, “Are you leaving?”
The beautiful woman’s eyes were large with terror, her hair unkempt. “I want you to get out of my house,” she screamed.
Nova pulled out her badge identifying her as Jane Blake. She doubted that Ya Lin would read a word of it. The woman was gripped by panic. “Ms. Lin, we’re government agents. We know you are a spy and that your code name is Lynchpin. And we know that you are in possession of dangerous information.”
Fear on Ya Lin’s face turned to bewilderment. “How can you be government agents?” And then Ya Lin broke into tears. “I am so so sorry,” she said. She searched Nova’s face as if Nova could somehow forgive her.
“What is it, Ms. Lin?” Nova said. She stepped closer to the weeping woman.
“I cannot believe what I’ve done. But how could I know? It’s insane. Crazy.”
Joe said, “We believe you intend to sell information about the Ebola virus to terrorists. Is this true?”
“They…they lied to me.” Ya Lin’s words now came out choked and through sobbing tears. “I swear it. And now we must get out of here, get out of Italy. Right now.”
Nova walked her to the bed and sat her down. “Ms. Lin, have you already made the sale?”
“Yes. This morning.”
“If you’re sorry, help us by telling us immediately who you sold the information to so that we can find and stop them.”
“Oh, no. It’s much too late. And that’s why I’ve decided to leave Italy, even though they claim I will be immune. So many people are going to die. And maybe they lied to me.”
A chilled hand brushed across Nova’s heart. This woman wasn’t just sorry she’d sold some dangerous information; Ya Lin was petrified.
Joe beat Nova to the question. “Why will people die?”
Ya Lin clenched her bedspread in both hands and looked at Joe. “They lied to me. I thought there was just supposed to be some disks, a laptop containing information on how to modify the virus, but along with those were vials of the virus, already changed. They told me no one would get paid if the package was opened before the sale. The man opened the package here. To be sure he was getting what he paid for, he said. Only then did I know that there were vials inside containing the virus.”
The chill over her heart spread to Nova’s guts and she held her breath as Joe asked, “Is that why people are going to die? Is that what you’re saying? He intends to unleash the damned virus.”
“He has already done it, I’m sure.”
Not possible. Good God! “How?” Nova asked. “Where? Please, Ms. Lin. Take a deep breath. Be clear. Tell us everything you know.”
The actress let go of the bedspread, took a breath, pressed her palms to her eyes and then clutched her hands together in her lap. Collected, at least a bit, she said, “I cannot tell you who he really is. We only met in person this one time. I’m sure the name, Mohammad Kanzi, is not his own. Before he left he said that he was going to save me by telling me what was going to happen. He said that today he was going to inject a brave volunteer with the disease and the volunteer would become contagious by late this afternoon.”
Nova tried to listen to Ya Lin and at the same time absorb the stunning meaning of what the woman was saying. Upon contact with the virus, an infected person became moderately contagious within two hours, and fully, devastatingly contagious within six. She knew from the files supplied by Provenza that the CDC had a limited supply of vaccine against Reston, but there was no antidote. And because so few infections by this strain had been recorded, no one know the actual survival rate. Once infected, you either survived or death came to a victim horribly within days.
“He said they were going to make this volunteer a carrier. I don’t exactly know what that means, except he can go around giving it to other people for days and days. Hundreds of people. Maybe thousands.”
A carrier! Nova imagined a faceless man walking in St. Peter’s Square, surrounded by hoards of tourists. They’re going to create a carrier! No, if Ya Lin was right, they had already created one. Thousands of people might be killed! “You’re quite sure he said they were going to create a carrier?”
“Yes. Oh, yes.” Ya Lin wiped tears, rubbed her eyes.
Joe asked, “When did he leave?”
“I think, yes, no, I don’t know. Early this morning. I should have left at once, but I didn’t believe it was true. Not really. Not until I started running a fever.”
If Ya Lin had started running a fever then, clearly whatever she had taken was having an effect. It might be a vaccine. Nova had once been vaccinated against cholera and she had run a fever as her body started making protective antibodies. Running a fever was not uncommon after all sorts of vaccinations. And why would the buyer have lied to Ya Lin? He really would have nothing to gain by doing so. Nova decided that it was, in fact, likely that he had given Ya Lin a vaccine.
Joe pulled his cell phone out and punched a number as he walked toward the room’s windows. He started talking to Cesare.
Nova crossed her arms to ward off the chill
spreading over her skin now. People in Rome would get on buses and trains and then planes, and if they were infected, they would be a hazard to every other person they met. This nightmare would spread like a wildfire in a high wind after a hundred-year drought.
Maggie. She snatched her cell phone from her pocket and punched in Star’s number.
The usual long wait for the international connection became a wait that felt like infinity. Be home, be home, Nova repeated in her mind, over and over.
Finally the number rang. Star’s answering machine came on. No! Please no!
“This is the McDonald residence. Please leave a message. For Maggie’s friends, Maggie is in Italy and won’t be back for three weeks.”
“Star, this is Nova. It is urgent that I reach you. It’s about Maggie, and though I’m sorry to have to scare you, it’s life and death. I want you to call me the second, not the minute but the second, you get this message. You have my number.”
She punched in her mother’s number. During another long agonizing wait, Joe had finished his explanation and was now listening to Cesare. Ya Lin had picked up and packed her lingerie and was throwing slacks into a suitcase.
Finally Nova heard her mother’s voice. Thank heaven.
“Hello, sweetheart. It’s so good to hear your voice.”
“Hi, Mom. I love hearing yours, too. I’m calling because I urgently need to get in touch with Star. Do you know where she is right now?”
“Yes. She and William are on the boat in Catalina, along with the boys.”
Nova imagined Star snorkeling or hiking or sailing. It might be quite some time before she checked her messages. “I’d also like to get in touch with Maggie. Do you, by any chance, know how to contact Maggie or the Robertsons in Italy? Perhaps you know the name of the tour group they are with.”
“No, dear. Sorry. Are you still in Costa Rica?”
“No. That tour is over. And I wish I could talk longer but I’m with another group and right at the moment I’m really busy. I will call back later.”
“You sound terribly stressed. Is anything wrong?”
