LITMIR.BIZ

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tangled by winter frost.

      She shrugged into a warm sweater and jacket, then on second thought shucked the jacket in favor of the red rain slicker and matching hat. Even though weather on this leeward side of the island might be mild, rainstorms could be lashing the windward coast—she’d learned this fast enough. Over her thick socks she pulled on gum boots. Bella glanced in the mirror and gave a wry smile. She looked more like a mariner in a fish commercial than a seasoned political reporter. She grabbed the bike, wheeled it through the courtyard, and began to pedal up the twisting dirt road that led to the cliffs on the far side of the little island, camera bag slung across her chest, the cold air sinking deep into her lungs.

      * * *

      An hour later Bella stood atop the cliffs holding her bike and breathing hard as curtains of mist swirled and rain drove in squalls. Waves boomed unseen on rocks far below the sheer cliff drop. Light began to fade, and she felt a sharp drop in temperature. She began to shiver as dampness crawled into her bones.

      Then suddenly, at four-thirty, just as Madame had said, a hooded, black figure in a swirling cloak materialized from the mist, walking along the headland, fading in and out of the shifting brume like a specter.

      Bella laid her bike down on the heath, removed her camera from the bag.

      Zooming in with her telephoto lens she watched him stop right at the cliff edge, his back to her. He pulled back his hood, revealing thick, shoulder-length hair, black as a raven’s feathers. Face naked to the driving rain, he stared out to sea as if a sentinel watching for a lost ship, his cloak flapping at his calves.

      Far below him waves crashed as the Atlantic heaved itself against the rock face, hurling icy spray up into the mist.

      Something strange unfurled inside Bella.

      He looked so alone, as if daring the elements to hurt him in some kind of bid for absolution. Yet in his shoulders there remained a subtle set of defiance.

      Bella clicked off a few shots, zoomed in closer. Her lens was powerful, state-of-the-art. Her two-timing ex-boyfriend, Derek, had helped her choose the camera a mere two weeks before the newspaper budget cuts that saw Bella being laid off. The announcement she was being axed from the political news desk while the paper held on to the unionized deadwood had come as a gut-punching shock to Bella. One minute she was a respected, up-and-coming reporter covering the run-up to the presidential primaries and the bombing of the Al Arif royal jet at JFK. Then in the blink of an eye she was cast out on the street, unemployed, wondering how in hell she was going to make her next rent payment without cutting into her minimal severance payout.

      Bella’s job, her success, defined her. And her sudden unemployment cut to the heart of her insecurities and self-esteem that came with having been abandoned as a baby. It was something she’d never been able to shake.

      Oh, she’d hunted for new work, but the tide had turned on print media. Papers were hurting. And there was a glut of journalists, just like her, pounding on doors.

      In desperation Bella had resorted to writing a blog for a website called Watchdog—theoretically an internet news portal, but one that had been scathingly referred to as “that conspiracy theorist site.” And because the blog gig was unpaid, she’d been forced to take housekeeping jobs to support her political writing “hobby.” It was about as low as a political sciences and journalism graduate could go.

      Derek, of course, had kept his photography job at the Washington Daily, courtesy of the boss’s daughter. He’d informed Bella of his infidelity the same day as her layoff. Bella didn’t know which had hit her harder.

      She’d show them, she thought as she watched her target through her lens, fingers going numb from cold, her teeth starting to chatter. This man was going to be her route back.

      But she had to be careful. She still didn’t know who had tried to kill her back home, or why. Or how this man from the abbey—the subject of her investigation—might be linked to Senator Sam Etherington, the man likely to be voted next U.S. president come the November election.

      Bella willed him to turn around now, show his face. Instead, he began to move farther along the cliff, making his way toward a narrow, black headland that jutted out into the sea. Bella left her bicycle lying in the heather and followed him on foot, at a distance. The mist grew thicker, the light dimmer, the air even cooler.

      Right at the very tip of the headland, he stopped again. A ship’s horn boomed out at sea and through the mist came the faint, periodic pulse of a lighthouse unable to penetrate the thickening darkness and fog.

      She snapped a few more frames, then stilled as he moved even closer to the edge. He stood there, as if daring gravity to take him over, suck him down into the crashing sea. She was reminded suddenly of a similar cliff, Beachy Head in England, where the suicide rate was surpassed only by the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, and where the Beachy Head Chaplaincy Team conducted regular patrols in an attempt to spot—and stop—potential jumpers. This was a similar cliff. No patrols. Just her observing him in the darkening gloom. A chill chased over Bella’s skin. She lowered her camera, half poised to run, stop him, help him. But he remained still as a statue, coat billowing out behind him, his hair now slick with rain.

      Slowly she raised her camera back to her eye, the shutter click, click, clicking as she struggled to tamp down a mounting rush of apprehension. Bella readjusted her telephoto lens, zooming in as close as she could go. But as she was about to press the button, he turned suddenly to face her.

      She sucked in her breath.

      For a nanosecond she was unable to move, think.

      He stared at her with his good eye, black as coal. An eye patch covered his left eye and the left side of his face was marred by a violent scar that hooked from temple to jaw, drawing the left side of his mouth down into a permanent, sinister scowl. But the hawkish, arresting features, the aquiline nose, the arched brows—they were burned into her memory after staring at so many photos of him before the explosion.

      It was him.

      Sheik Tariq Al Arif, the famed neurosurgeon, next in line to the throne of Al Na’Jar—supposedly dead from injuries sustained by a terrorist bomb blast at JFK Airport in New York last June—was alive. And she’d found him. Living in a cold, haunted abbey in France.

      Emotion flooded her chest as she clicked off a rapid succession of shots of his face. She had her story. It was right here. At least part of it. This was the beginning, the tip of the iceberg that could sink Sam Etherington’s bid for the White House—if she could just understand the rest.

      He glared at her as she shot off her frames, utterly still, his face wet with rain, everything in his posture warning her not to dare take a step toward him. And suddenly, as her pulse calmed a little, Bella saw not only hostility in his features, but pain.

      Slowly she lowered her camera, ashamed of her own hunger to expose him.

      Fog thickened around him, turning him to a shadowy phantom and she realized with a start it would be fully dark any minute. She needed to find the path through the heather, back to her bike, make her way back down the cliff before nightfall. But she hesitated—what about him?

      Did he walk back to that monastery, alone, in pitch blackness, so close to the treacherous cliff edge? Worry sparked through her.

      Then, almost imperceptibly, he seemed to move toward her. At first Bella thought it was a trick of the mist, then a spark of fear shot through her—how far would he actually go to keep his secret?

      How far would his powerful family go?

      The memory of her attack curled through her mind, and fear fisted in her chest.

      She was all alone here. If her body was found smashed and broken in waves below the cliff, it would be deemed an accident, blamed on the weather, a foolish young American caught by fog and nightfall too close to the edge.

      Bella started backing away, then she turned and hurried along the path to where her bicycle lay on its side in the heather.

      Picking up

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