LITMIR.BIZ

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      This time he waited out the silence. The elevator gave a discreet ding and came to an almost imperceptible stop. In response to another voice command from Corbett, the door opened onto a sparsely but elegantly furnished foyer.

      “I can’t believe I let you talk me into taking her,” Corbett said in a tight voice as he stepped from the carpeted elevator onto gleaming marble.

      Adam kept silent while the other man went through the biometric security measures required for entry into his private quarters. “You could always go by your lonesome,” he said as he followed Corbett into the immaculate and tastefully appointed apartment. And he was struck by the silence. He wondered, not for the first time, whether the man ever felt lonesome.

      Adam knew he was one of only a very few human beings in the world Corbett Lazlo trusted enough to let his hair down with, but most of the time even he had no clue what his best friend might be thinking—or feeling. He knew the emotions were there, but they were like rustlings in the shadows, unseeable and unknowable.

      Corbett made an unintelligible, though vehement, remark, which Adam could only assume was in Hungarian, Corbett’s parents’ native tongue. He tossed the towel onto a chair as he made his way to the kitchen. Adam, close behind, heard him mutter, “You’re forgetting the reason I’m attending this bloody party in the first place—the only reason.”

      “Ah, yes—Mum and Dad. Right. The M.P. and his lovely lady will be attending, I take it? What about Edward? Too busy with Josh and Prudence’s wedding to put in an appearance, I suppose.”

      Corbett took two bottles of Perrier out of the stainless steel refrigerator and handed one to Adam. He cracked the other open, drank deeply, then smiled and shook his head. Adam knew he still found it hard to believe his favorite nephew—and one of his best agents—was about to marry the daughter of the British prime minister. “Oh, he’ll be there. My brother never misses an opportunity to cozy up to the haut monde. My parents naturally will be expecting me to bring a date. And I mean, a believable date. If I don’t, for the next six months I can look forward to a parade of nubile British damsels toddling in and out of my life, each one more lovely and mind-numbingly youthful than the last. The strain of keeping—” he swept the hand holding the Perrier in a vague arc “—all this…” He let it trail off.

      “Your secret life,” Adam finished for him, nodding as he drank. On a different sort of day he knew it would have been dark-brewed German beer, but not today. Not tonight. “Yeah, I can see how that could complicate one’s social life a bit. Doesn’t have that effect on mine, but then, I’ve never minded the occasional white lie. One thing you don’t need to worry about with Lucia, though, isn’t it?”

      After a long pause with no reply, Adam leaned one shoulder against the doorframe. “You underestimate her, you know. You trained her yourself—you should know what she’s capable of. She’s as good as any agent we’ve got.”

      Corbett drank the rest of the water in his bottle before he replied. He waved the empty bottle again in a rough half circle, frowning. “Field ops isn’t what I recruited her for. You know that. She has one of the most brilliant minds I’ve ever run across. When it comes to computers—God, I can’t begin to understand the things she knows. The things she can do. It would be crazy to risk all that in the field. Insane.”

      “Yes, it would be insane,” Adam said softly, meeting the other man’s eyes over his own raised bottle. “To risk…all that.

      “But,” he added quickly, as Corbett’s frown darkened, “no worries, in any case. We’ve got our best people on it, and—” he glanced at his watch “—they’re probably in place, or getting there as we speak. Time I was, as well.” He set his own empty Perrier bottle on the curved marble countertop and gripped the other man’s shoulder as he passed him. “Later, mate. I’ll let myself out.”

      As Adam paused in the foyer to listen to the security system engaging behind him, it occurred to him that it sounded a bit like a cage or prison door locking. These days, with the whole agency more or less under siege, that pretty much described it, he supposed. And what a bit of irony that was, considering how near to the real thing Laz had once come, way back when, during that unpleasantness with British SIS.

      Sixteen years ago. God, had it really been that long? Sometimes it seemed like yesterday; then at other times, another lifetime. Hard to believe, now, that anyone in his right mind could have believed Corbett Lazlo guilty of being a double agent. It had been a frame-up, of course, and a damn good one, but still. Even more incredible that he’d been brought up on charges, convicted and sentenced to life in prison for treason, and might be there still if Adam hadn’t taken the gamble of a lifetime. Some would have said he was a crazy man to have given up his own job and risked everything to save his best friend.

      That’s the way some people—most people—had seen it at the time, anyway. For Adam there had never been any question of a gamble or risk. Stack up loyalty to the service against loyalty to the best friend he had in the world and the man to whom he owed his life many times over… Hell, it was no contest.

      Using all the Secret Service tricks and contacts at his disposal, Adam had managed to whisk Laz out of Britain just in time to avoid those slamming prison doors. The two of them had put together an organization of agents, a handpicked few initially, only the very best, people they could trust with their lives. And their first job had been to unravel the conspiracy against Corbett Lazlo and prove his innocence. The latter they’d done in short order. The former…well, that case was still open. And still unresolved.

      Sixteen years later that handful of agents had become the Lazlo Group, the most prestigious private-security agency in the world, with a stellar international reputation. Most often they were called in as a last resort, when all conventional means had failed. The Group could be trusted not only to get the job done, but also to be discreet about it. And in exchange for guaranteed results, they commanded top dollar for their work, no questions asked. These days Laz was the acknowledged leader of the group, Adam his right-hand man and still his closest friend. Friend? More like a brother. Closer than any brother—damn sight closer, for sure, than that prick Edward ever was to him. Hard to believe those two sprang from the same loins. Vain as a bloody peacock, that one, even if he did do a decent job for the Group as the moneyman.

      Although Laz often consulted with Adam before making decisions about assignments or new agents, Laz’s was the final word. As it had been when he’d recruited Lucia Cordez right off the campus of UC Berkeley. And, as usual, he’d been right; the girl was brilliant. And not just with computers. She had the makings of a first-rate agent, and the fact that she was drop-dead gorgeous didn’t hurt, either. Fact was, her looks gave her access to places and people not every agent could reach.

      Well, they would, if Laz wasn’t so bent on keeping her locked up in his ivory tower, too bloody dense to know he was crazy in love with her. And vice versa.

      On the other hand, probably just as well the pair of them were as blind as wombats when it came to matters of the heart, Adam thought as he rode the private car down to the subbasement where, via secret corridors, he would switch to the public elevators in order to access the building’s street floor. Otherwise one or the other of them was bound to notice Adam was crazy in love with the girl himself.

      Lucia stalked across the courtyard, which still glistened with the misty rain that had fallen earlier in the evening. Though, to be honest, to call her progress stalking was perhaps overstating it a bit, given that she was wearing strappy sandals with four-inch heels and a gown that limited her stride to something more mincing than regal.

      To her extreme annoyance, her escort kept pace with her without compromising his natural elegance one iota.

      “I don’t see why you should be upset,” Corbett drawled in an undertone as, in a seemingly natural gesture, he placed one hand on her back just below the edge of the silver fox stole she wore, wrapped tightly against both nervous shivers and Paris’s December chill.

      “You might have mentioned

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