LITMIR.BIZ

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it’s a false alarm, but I definitely smelled something when I came in.”

      She didn’t mention that her first impression had been cigarette smoke and that she had thought someone had been in here. Right now all she wanted was for him to make sure that during the night her apartment wasn’t going to go up in flames with her inside it. Little enough to ask, she told herself.

      He walked over to the switch and made the same sniff test she had made. She expected another comment about not smelling anything, but he didn’t make it. Instead, he walked into the kitchen, and she heard him open the circuit box. There were clicking noises, and the light in the kitchen went off.

      When he came back, he said, “Let’s take a look.”

      He placed the tip of the screwdriver into one of the tiny Phillips head screws and began to unthread it. When he had finished with the first screw, he took the other one out, slipping the plastic plate off the wall. There was no whiff of smoke from the rough cut opening behind it. There was only a tangle of wires, none of them smoldering.

      The manager put the screwdriver and the cover plate on the floor, carefully laying the screws on top of it. He bent so that he was on eye level with the hole in the wall. Then he reached into it with one finger, pushing around amid the wires.

      “Nothing hot. No smoke. I think that it probably—” His voice stopped, as his finger probed deeper into the hole. “What in the world?” he said, the words almost under his breath.

      Hearing them, Paige edged closer, anticipating a glimpse of a frayed or burnt wire. She couldn’t see anything, however, and other than bending down and putting her head next to his as he poked around in there, she wasn’t likely to.

      Almost as soon as she thought that, he inserted his thumb as well as his index finger into the hole, fumbling among the wires. And when he straightened, he brought something small and dark out of the opening. He laid it on the palm of his other hand.

      “Never seen anything like this before,” he said. “Not in a wall switch. Maybe they were going to put in a dimmer and then changed their minds. Cost overruns, maybe. They must have decided to go with a less expensive option.”

      He held the object he’d retrieved from the faulty switch out for Paige’s inspection. She didn’t need a closer look. She had recognized it immediately. What the resident manager had just taken out of the wall of her apartment was the latest version of a very sensitive listening device. At some time during the six months she had lived here, someone had bugged her apartment.

      SHE SPENT most of the night tossing and turning, everything that had happened running endlessly through her head. She replayed Steiner’s words, examining each of them, even trying to remember the expression on his face when he’d said them. And every time she did, she came back to the same comment. Something that hadn’t reverberated as strongly then as it should have.

      Of course, at the time she hadn’t known that the agency was bugging her apartment. She still didn’t know that, she admitted, trying to be reasonable. What she did know was that there had been a very sophisticated listening device planted in her wall, exactly like the state-of-the-art ones the CIA used.

      She couldn’t know how long the bug had been in place, but the light switch had started acting up after she’d moved in. Maybe a couple of months ago. Maybe a little less.

      And another thing she knew was that someone had been inside her apartment today. To put the device in her wall? Or to check on it because it had stopped working?

      Or had they been there for some reason totally unrelated to the bug. To search the apartment? To read her computer files? She hadn’t found any evidence of either of those things, but she knew that whoever the agency sent would be good at what they did.

      And “good at what they did” brought her back to the other significant thing that had happened today: Steiner’s summons and the comments he had made as she had been about to go out his door. This was a loose end that was never satisfactorily resolved. Since you were the last person to see him alive…

      She thought all the pertinent questions about that mission been asked back then. And as far as she knew, they had been answered to the agency’s satisfaction. Or at least to the satisfaction of anyone who had known Joshua Stone.

      Had a trusted operative disappeared in order to sell that nerve agent on the black market, as Steiner implied? There was no denying such a sale would have been a huge temptation for some people. Not for Joshua Stone. She would never believe that.

      Griff Cabot had believed that Stone had been captured by one of the opposing sides in the rebellion. If the Russians had taken him prisoner, they might have tried to arrange a trade, exchanging Josh for one of their own compromised agents. Washington usually agreed to such deals to get their people home, and Cabot would have done his best to influence them to make that decision. As far as Paige knew, no such offer had ever been made.

      The strongest likelihood, given the time frame, was that Josh had heard someone outside the cellar that night. He had gone to investigate and been captured by the rebel forces.

      Maybe they had taken him with them as they retreated from the Russian advance, intending to interrogate him later. Or maybe whoever had captured Josh hadn’t known about the theft of the toxin. Maybe they had simply killed him, leaving his body and the backpack he’d carried in the snow, never knowing what a valuable prize they’d lost.

      Whatever happened, Joshua Stone, the most experienced member of the External Security Team, had disappeared forever on that mission. And Paige Daniels, the novice, had escaped from Vladistan as Russian tanks rolled across its border. She had escaped, and Josh had not. Maybe, as she had always believed in her heart, because he had gone out into that dangerous darkness to protect her from whatever he had heard.

      Lying in her bed, eyes open and staring, the haunting images of that night played again through her consciousness. The same night he had made love to her for hours, until she had finally drifted into a deep and exhausted sleep.

      She hadn’t allowed herself to indulge in this particular exercise in futility in a very long time, but she didn’t deny those memories tonight. And they steeled her determination to prove Carl Steiner was wrong. She was as convinced today as she had been then that Joshua Stone hadn’t been a traitor.

      By bugging her apartment the agency seemed to be trying to implicate her in whatever they imagined Josh had done three years ago. And she knew she hadn’t done anything wrong on that mission. Nothing except sleep while someone took her partner. Nothing except survive when he hadn’t.

      Now someone in his own agency was trying to blacken Joshua Stone’s name. And there was no one from the External Security Team left to defend his reputation. No one but her.

      She had failed him once before. No one had ever seemed to blame her, but she had always blamed herself. And after three long years, she had discovered that the ghost of Joshua Stone was one she needed very badly to put to rest.

      Chapter Two

      Reactivated.

      Paige stared at the screen, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. As she tried to think what else that word could possibly mean, she fought a surge of emotion she didn’t want to feel, not after all this time.

      She had started her search as soon as she’d gotten into the office this morning, trying to discover what had set Steiner off. Something must have come to light fairly recently that had made him question Stone’s disappearance. Something that had made him call her in. Something that had made them plant a listening device in her apartment. Something.

      She had spent most of the day scanning page after page of the tedious situation reports that had come in about Vladistan during the last four months. Because of her work in Sector Analysis, she was already familiar with most of this material. And on closer examination she had found nothing that might be construed as having anything to do with Josh or with the nerve agent he had been carrying when he’d disappeared. The computers

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