Day of Wrath

Helen opened her eyes in the darkness and lay staring up at the ceiling of her small bedroom.

When she was just thirteen, she’d set her heart on becoming an FBI agent. Her parents, her brother and her sisters, and even some of her teachers had tried to convince her that she was on a wild-goose chase.

But she’d persisted. She’d weighed every class, every hobby, and every interest by how far it moved her toward her goal — the FBI Academy at Quantico.

Once in the FBI itself, she’d clawed her way up and into the elite Hostage Rescue Team by sheer ability and hard work — disdaining the various affirmative-action shortcuts that had been dangled in front of her. To Helen, the way to smash the sexist bias of the Bureau’s old boy network was to prove it flatout wrong — not to give them a chance to fall back on the tired, old cop-out that women couldn’t make the grade without special help.

Her jaw tightened. There would be celebrating in some corridors of the Hoover Building once the news that she’d been yanked out of Moscow filtered through the rumor mill. And there were plenty of others like Mcdowell scattered throughout the FBI.

Of course, Helen knew that she had friends and mentors in the Bureau’s hierarchy, too. Men who trusted her. Men who would stand by her. But what could they do for her now? Incurring the wrath of the Russian government while solving an important case might have been acceptable.

Pissing off the Kremlin just to come up with a jumble of unintelligible clues — all leading nowhere — was another story.

On the surface, Charlie Spiegel was right. Their investigation had reached a dead-end. Every witness and every potential suspect they’d turned up had been murdered — first Grushtin, then the entire crew of that Russian tramp freighter, and now Serov.

And, with Alexei Koniev dead, she and Peter had not only lost a partner and friend, they’d also lost their access to anybody they could trust in Russian law enforcement. So what else could they do but slink home to America with their tails between their legs?

Helen sat bolt upright in bed and thumped her fist onto the mattress with a muttered, “No way!”

“Thought you were awake,” Peter Thorn said softly, pushing himself up to sit beside her.

Peter had visited the broom-closet-sized room offered him as temporary accommodations by the embassy staff just long enough to drop off his travel kit. Then he’d come straight to her own cramped quarters to help her pack. Several hours of steady work had left her life in Moscow jumbled up in cardboard boxes all over the floor. At her invitation, he’d stayed for the night.

Both of them were too drained and exhausted to make love, but neither wanted to leave the other’s side. And neither of them gave a damn anymore about the gossip that might race through the chancery building.

Helen turned her head toward him, seeing his eyes gleaming in the dark.

“You can’t sleep, either?”

“Nope.” Peter sighed. “I just keep running things over and over in my mind — trying to see where we screwed up.” Then he shrugged ruefully.

“And trying to avoid thinking about what happens next. Once we’re home, I mean.”

Helen sat silent, struck by a sudden sense of shame. She’d been thinking too much about herself. No matter where they stuck hen-whether in Mudville or the Hoover Building’s basement records office — she would still carry a badge. She would still be an FBI special agent. But Peter … Peter had lost everything.

The United States Army had been his home — his real family, in fact for all of Peter Thorn’s life. His father had been a career soldier, a highly decorated senior sergeant in the Special Forces.

Peter’s boyhood had been spent on military bases around the country and around the world. And, after his wayward mother abandoned them when he was eleven years old, he and his father had grown still closer — closer to each other and closer to the Army they both loved.

Now he was forty and faced with the prospect of … what?

Helen wondered. Retirement? Shuffling papers as a manager in some corporate hive? Living hand-to-mouth as a freelance counterterrorism consultant in a world crowded with other ex-soldiers chasing the same degrading contracts?

She felt tears well up in her eyes and turned toward him. “Oh, Peter …” she whispered brokenly.

His arms tightened around her. One strong hand softly stroked her hair. He kissed her forehead gently, brushing his lips across her skin. “It’ll be all right, Helen,” he promised. “We’ll see this thing through together. No matter what happens.”

“Side by side?” she asked.

“Come hell, high water, earthquake, or congressional committee,” Peter said flatly.

Helen felt her fatigue, her pain, all her doubts, and all her fears fly away — vanishing in a single, convulsive instant. Her lips met his fiercely and parted. Her body molded to his in a flowing, moving, pulsing rhythm that swept time and trouble aside.