The morning air was sharp and she wished she'd grabbed one of Adriana's black knit shawls before going out. Could she pass for one of those stooped Greek peasant women? she wondered. Not likely. She shivered and pulled her thin coat around her.
The rain was over now, leaving the air moist and fragrant, but the early morning gloom had an ominous undertone. They'd found the key to open the first box, but the message inside still had to be translated. What was it? What could possibly be in the protocol that would make somebody want to kill her?
She stared down the vacant street leading away from the square, a mosaic of predawn shadows, and tried to think.
Alex Novosty was the classic middleman, that much was a given. But then she'd known that for years. Yes, she'd known about Alex Novosty all her life—his work for the KGB, his laundering of Techmashimport funds. She knew about it because they were second cousins. Fortunately their family tie was distant enough not to have made its way into NSA's security file, but around the Russian expatriate dinner tables of Brighton Beach and Oyster Bay, Alex was very well known indeed. He was the Romanov descendant who'd sold out to the Soviets, an unforgivable lapse of breeding.
But for all that, he wasn't an assassin. For him to do what he'd done tonight could only mean one thing: he was terrified. Very out of character. But why?
The answer to that wasn't hard: He must be mixed up in Project Daedalus, whatever it was, right up to his shifty eyeballs. But what about Michael? What did Alex want from him?
The answer to that could go a lot of ways. When she first met Michael Vance, Jr., she'd been smitten by the fact he was so different. Always kidding around, yet tough as steel when anybody crossed him. A WASP street fighter. She liked that a lot. He was somebody she felt she could depend on, no matter what.
She still remembered her first sight of Mike as though it were yesterday. She was taking notes on Etruscan pottery in a black notebook, standing in a corner of the Yale art gallery on Chapel Street, when she looked up and—no, it couldn't be. She felt herself just gawking.
He'd caught her look and strolled over with a puzzled smile. "Is my tie crooked, or—" Then he laughed. "Name's Mike Vance. I used to be part of this place. How about you?"