Night Magic.

Karen Robards.

With love to the real "Puff"- my sister Lee Ann, who inspired this book.

And, as always, to Doug and Peter.

I.

Friday, October 2, 8 P.M.

He had maybe a minute to live.

Jack McClain felt a rush of terror override the drug that was dulling his body's responses. The accompanying adrenaline somewhat cleared his head, enough so that he could at least weigh his chances of avoiding being shot in the head at point-blank range. Conclusion: not good.

The bozos dragging him from the trawler's lantern lit cabin to the pitching, spray-wet darkness of the deck were the size of gorillas. Even at full strength, unarmed as he was he would have stood about as much chance of overpowering them as Texas Christian University's Horned Frogs had of defeating Alabama's Crimson Tide the year he had been the Frogs' star quarterback. In other word's, a s...o...b..ll's chance in h.e.l.l.

Which left his brains. He'd always prided himself on his brains. If only the squishy ma.s.s of gray matter were functioning normally...

The bow plunged into a trough left by a rolling wave and reared out again. His head swam. Nausea caused as much by the drug as the motion of the sea made his stomach churn. He staggered, nearly falling to his knees as his city shoes lost purchase on the slippery wood. The resulting yanks on his arms twisted behind him made him cry out.

The gorillas reached the railing. Thrown hard against the iron bar, McClain stared groggily down at the dark, choppy waters of the Atlantic. How many miles out to sea were they? It had been maybe an hour before that they had pa.s.sed beneath the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. Doing about seven knots, as they were, that meant they'd come... h.e.l.l, his brain wouldn't perform even that simple calculation. Forcing himself to concentrate, he tried again.

The trawler plunged again and his stomach plunged with it. G.o.d, he couldn't think. At least the rush of the wind drowned out Yuropov's blubbering. They'd crushed the knuckles of the Russian's right hand, one by one, with a pair of pliers. The man had screamed until one of their captors had slammed a rifle b.u.t.t into his face. After that they had heard only a sobbing punctuated by the bubbling of blood as Yuropov tried to breathe through the pulp of what had once been his nose and mouth. Which was probably a good thing, McClain had thought at the time. At least it kept the Soviet from spilling his guts about the microfilm concealed in a secret compartment in McClain's belt. If Rostov had had any inkling of the existence of a microfilm, he would have tortured its whereabouts out of one of them, if a simple strip search hadn't revealed it, which it probably would have. Rostov was a pro, after all. He was no stranger to secret hiding places, and the belt was a garden-variety money belt that didn't work half the time with the muggers it was designed to circ.u.mvent.

Yuropov's life wasn't worth a penny now that the Soviets had him back. Yuropov knew that as well as McClain did. Defectors weren't exactly popular with the Central Committee, and defectors who happened to be former KGB officers with the information that Yuropov had told him could be a.s.sured of a very long, painful death while the KGB used its innumerable wiles to find out exactly what beans he had spilled.

Behind him, out of the corner of his eye, McClain saw a white-soled deck shoe beneath the perfectly creased leg of a white canvas trouser. Colonel Andrei Rostov, KGB. A graduate of the Moscow State Inst.i.tute for International Relations, and formally a diplomatic attache at the Russian Emba.s.sy in Washington. Informally he was deputy to the Washington Rezident, or KGB chief. McClain had known Rostov, or at least known of him, for years. They were close to the same age, and for a while had been rising at about the same speed through the intelligence ranks on their respective sides. But Rostov had far outstripped him in the last few years.

A sharp dresser, was Rostov, which was unusual for a Soviet, and a d.a.m.ned good agent. Intelligent, ruthless, efficient. McClain had been like that once, before the monumental screw up of Budapest. Now he was nothing more than a boozed up, burned-out sh.e.l.l.

He couldn't believe he'd been careless enough to let them be taken. That he'd been entrusted to debrief Yuropov, the agency's prize catch, at all had come about through a combination of Yuropov's own request (McClain had met Yuropov briefly when both had been posted to West Germany at the same time years before) and a personal vote of confidence on the part of Hammersmith. Tim Hammersmith had his own a.s.s to cover as the newly appointed acting head of the foreign intelligence gathering arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, but he had stuck his neck out for McClain, who had worked for him before when both had had far more elite, deep-cover overseas a.s.signments. Now Hammersmith was paunchy and balding, the flame that had driven him burned down into ordinariness just as McClain's had. But he still retained his irreverent sense of humor, dubbing his group the Redbusters and playing a tape of the theme to the movie Ghostbusters with "Redbusters" inserted at appropriate spots at the conclusion of every staff meeting. The secretaries were going ape, vowing to strike if they were subjected to the song one more time, but McClain thought it was funny. Gave the whole intelligence gathering bit, which tended to be deadly dull routine, and dry as dust, a little comic relief.

"You can get more information out of him than anyone else I know, Jack. First, he seems to trust you. And people open up to you, for some reason I can't begin to fathom. Must be that ugly mug of yours." Hammersmith had grinned as he had told McClain of the plum a.s.signment that, if carried out successfully, would restore some of McClain's lost l.u.s.tre in the intelligence service. McClain knew that Hammersmith had had to lobby hard to get the a.s.signment for him, despite Yuropov's request. It was symptomatic of Hammersmith's basic softheartedness that he would do what he could to get his old friend and long-time subordinate back on the fast track. Burned-out agents were usually put out to pasture in some nice desk job; McClain himself had been stuck monitoring intercepts for the past three years. Rarely were they offered the chance of a come-back. But McClain knew he'd been an unusually effective operative. The agency was loathe to lose him to mediocrity unless there was no alternative. So it had come: his chance to work his way back to where he had been.

Hammersmith had been right. Yuropov had opened up. He'd spilled lots of little secrets over the six weeks that McClain had been handling him. Tonight, over linguine with clam sauce at a pricey D.C. restaurant, he'd parted almost casually with the granddaddy of them all, a secret so big that McClain had called Hammersmith from the restaurant to tell him they had to see him immediately. Without revealing what it was that Yuropov had given up (even public telephones were not proof against interception, as McClain well knew), he had then bundled Yuropov into his beat up Chevy Nova and lit out for Hammersmith's Gaithersburg home. Hammersmith wouldn't believe this one unless he got it straight from the horse's mouth.

Only they hadn't made it. A car running without lights had come hurtling out of nowhere on the dark twisty road. McClain had been driving the familiar route with only half his mind on the road. The other half he had given over to weighing the bombsh.e.l.l that Yuropov had dropped. The previous intelligence Yuropov had pa.s.sed along had proven to be right on target, but even so it was nearly inconceivable that a deep cover Soviet mole had managed to worm his way into a high-level position deep within the CIA itself.

The mole's codename was Bigfoot. If what Yuropov had said was true the mole's existence was a catastrophe of monstrous proportions. His ident.i.ty was unknown to Yuropov, although the information Bigfoot had pa.s.sed along was mind boggling in its scope, accuracy, and ability to compromise the entire U.S. intelligence apparatus. It had had to come from someone at the very top. Someone who had access to a broad range of secrets. Someone who was above the "need to know" basis for the dissemination of highly cla.s.sified information. But even more urgent than the possibility of Bigfoot's existence was the operation Yuropov swore the mole was even then in the process of carrying out: nothing less than the imminent a.s.sa.s.sination of the secretary of state.

According to Yuropov, Bigfoot had pa.s.sed the word to Moscow about a top secret summit to be held at an undisclosed location in the U.S. in two weeks time. The meeting was between Chinese and American leaders; its purpose was to execute a mutual defense treaty between the two superpowers. The Soviets perceived such a treaty as an extreme danger to themselves. The secretary of state, Franklin Conrad, was an archconservative known to be strongly in favor of it. Without his urging, it was felt, the waffling president would not agree to such a treaty. The solution, therefore, was obvious: eliminate the secretary of state. But Yuropov didn't know the exact details of the plot. Only that while the a.s.sa.s.sination had been approved at the highest levels in Moscow, the plan itself was being activated by Bigfoot.

McClain had been preoccupied with silently sifting through the possibilities when the car had overtaken them and crashed into the side of the Nova, slamming it into a ditch. McClain had put up a fight of course, but one of the thugs had stabbed a needle into his thigh, and that had been that. Now he and Yuropov were going to die, and there didn't seem to be a thing he could do about it. He had blown it... G.o.d, had he blown it. And he was about to pay with his life for the monumental sin of a few moments of carelessness. The worst of it was that he hadn't given Hammersmith a clue as to the nature of Yuropov's bombsh.e.l.l. So what Yuropov had told him would die with him. And no one in Washington would ever know about the danger to national security. Bigfoot would live long and prosper, the secretary of state would die, and the American-Sino mutual defense pact would be no more than a Soviet nightmare once again.

"Do svidaniya, Mr. Magic Dragon." The mocking use of his old codename along with the Russian's good-bye was barely audible over the sharp slap of a wave against the hull as the trawler heeled again. Rostov was directly behind him. McClain could see moonlight gleaming on the barrel of the pistol as Rostov raised it. It was now or never.

Terror and rage combined to give him a burst of superhuman strength; another sharp yawning of the trawler didn't hurt any, either. The gorillas' attention had shifted to Rostov. They expected no further resistance from McClain. With a sudden, desperate jerk, he managed to break free and launch himself in a low, fast dive over the rail.

"Nyet!" Rostov howled as McClain jack-knifed toward the frothy black water. A bright streak of light flashed across his peripheral vision. There was a m.u.f.fled thwack! and the sensation of a baseball bat slamming into his skull behind his left ear. Momentarily he blacked out. The shock of icy water closing over his head brought him to his senses as he disappeared with a splash beneath the waves.

He was not dead. That fact was born in on him as he sank deeper and deeper into the bone chilling turbulence of the sea. His eyes opened wide, trying vainly to see through the salty blackness that was as dense as oil. His head hurt like h.e.l.l, ached and burned just behind his ear. He could neither see nor hear nor breathe, but he was not dead. Yet. To live, he had to fight his way out of the undertow that sent him tumbling head over heels through the ocean's pitch dark middle. He must first have air; then he would take the business of surviving from there. He forced himself to touch the place behind his ear where the throbbing was centered. His exploring fingers found a shallow gash about three inches long that slanted sharply upward, slightly above and behind his ear. Rostov must have fired as he hurtled downward; the bullet had just creased his flesh. He'd done as much to himself shaving. Lucky. He'd been lucky.

Lungs burning, he tried to swim. It was impossible. The ocean had him in its grasp, tossing and tumbling him as a child would toss a ball. Blind panic caused him to thrash wildly. He felt himself sinking further. With a tremendous effort of will he forced himself to calm down and try again to swim. A shoe went; the small loss lightened him. He kicked off the other one and felt immediately more buoyant. His arms and legs made weak paddling motions that affected his plight not at all. But at least they seemed to keep him from plummeting further toward the bottom of the sea. He paddled, holding his breath until he could hold it no longer and then holding it some more, praying all the while that the sea would spit him up before he drowned.

A sudden upsurge caught him and he surfaced. Retching and gasping, he looked around. Not more than a hundred feet to his left the trawler chugged through the water; on its deck stood Rostov, scanning the waves with a flashlight. At each end of the boat his henchmen were doing likewise. They were looking for him, McClain realized. Taking a deep breath he dove down again, deep into the sea.

When he was forced to surface, the trawler was much farther in the distance. It was barely moving through the water. As McClain watched, blinking against the sting of the salt.w.a.ter in his eyes, he saw that it was moving around so that it would be between him and the sh.o.r.e. Of course, Rostov must hope that the shot had killed him, or wounded him so much that he would drown, but he could hardly take that chance. He would have to find him if he was anywhere to be found...

A beam of light swung in his direction. McClain knew that it was too far away to find him, tiny speck that he was in a vast black ocean of pitching waves, but then he heard the faintest sound of a shout and seconds later the trawler seemed to be turning in his direction. It was only then that McClain realized his white face must stand out like a beacon against the inky water. Gulping a lungful of air, he prepared to dive. But before he could do so, a huge wave washed over him and sent him crashing down head over heels into the ocean's depths to flail about as helplessly as a rag doll.

Through the blackness all around him, he realized that he could see cylindrical shapes of an even denser blackness. Squinting against the searing sting of the salt.w.a.ter, he tried to believe that his eyes were playing tricks on him. Even as his body tumbled, his eyes searched. Then the black shapes drew closer. McClain felt panic surge again. Sharks! Of course, the blood that must still be flowing from his head had attracted them. To be torn to pieces by these primitive feeding machines had been one of his secret nightmares since he had seen Jaws. He wanted to flail blindly, but he knew that if he did the motion would likely lure them to attack at once. He must not panic. Somewhere he had read that their noses were their vulnerable points. He would try to punch their noses with his fist, hoping to scare them off. As a defense, it was pitiable in its weakness, but it was all he could think of. Eyes straining to make out the shapes through the darkness, he clenched one hand into a fist, paddling with the other. Fear tasted sour on his tongue...

The undertow chose that moment to tumble him upwards. His head popped through the surface. For a moment McClain thought of nothing but filling his starving lungs as he sucked in great gulps of air. The lights that marked the trawler bobbed some three hundred feet away. Instead of cruising a straight line between where they had lost him and sh.o.r.e, or heading on out to sea where Yuropov would be handed over to a ship that would carry him back to Russia, the trawler seemed to be traveling in concentric circles. He was just to the north of its epicenter.

Rostov must have seen the flash of his face against the water when he had surfaced before. They were zeroing in on him with characteristically systematic efficiency. Rostov would not rest until he was sure that his target was dead.

Overhead the moon peeped from behind a moving ma.s.s of dark clouds. McClain instinctively lowered his face to the water, knowing that his skin would reflect the light and be visible to anyone who happened to look in his direction. Though being shot to death was preferable to some other deaths he could think of.

Suddenly a wave rolled over his head and he simultaneously felt the weight of a smooth, sleek body as it hurtled past his thigh.

"Oh, G.o.d," he prayed, unable to form a more coherent plea as he was sucked down into the ocean's belly again. The sharks would be near, he knew. The scent of blood would keep them from losing him despite the undertow's machinations. The pa.s.s of that body had doubtless meant that they were circling him, closing in for the kill...

He felt one brush his leg, and would have screamed if he had been anywhere else. Frantically he twisted about, trying to keep the aggressor in his view. Five or six of the black hulking shapes were circling him. He tried to swim away, knowing that it was useless, that he was as helpless against these predators of the deep as he had been against Rostov and his thugs earlier. At any moment one would attack. Those razor sharp teeth would tear off an arm or leg.

They were drawing closer together, sandwiching him between them, but made no move to hurt him as they carried him along with them. McClain's head burst through to the surface even as the truth dawned on him: He was not being menaced by sharks. They were dolphins, and, miracle of miracles, the creatures seemed to be intent on helping him.

Although he had never really believed them, he had heard tales of dolphins bearing drowning swimmers to sh.o.r.e. Still disbelieving, he grasped a shiny dorsal fin as a sleek powerful body surged past him, and was carried with it. Great rolling waves of salty seawater threatened to drown him anew as they engulfed his mouth and nose. Would the creature head for the depths again? But no, it was skimming along the surface, speeding away from where the trawler still bobbed in that pattern of ever widening circles, with its mates jumping and diving beside it and McClain being towed in its wake. Locking both hands in a death grip around the slippery fin, he concentrated on staying conscious and keeping his mouth and nose above water.

The salt.w.a.ter burned like kerosene in his eyes. He closed them and entrusted himself to G.o.d. And the dolphin.

Hours could have pa.s.sed. Or days. Or centuries. What brought McClain out of the trancelike state he had entered was the feel of the fin slipping through his hands as the dolphin unexpectedly dived. One moment he was being pulled through the water at what felt like light speed. The next he was floundering, sinking, swallowing what seemed to be half the ocean as he fought to keep his head above the waves.

Dog paddling, he saw a flash of light as the moon hit an arching, leaping curve already several hundred feet away. Then there was only a phosph.o.r.escent trail on the ocean's surface that shimmered like green wildfire in the moonlight. They were leaving him, he thought, panicking, leaving him to drown as they headed back out to sea...

"Hang on, buddy, we'll have you safe in a minute."

Something hit his back as he thrashed, then landed with a splash beside him. Turning his head, he saw the white doughnut shape of a life preserver bobbing in the water a few feet away. For a moment he thought that Rostov had found him after all. Then he realized that this was not the trawler. It was much smaller, perhaps a three-man fishing vessel. In any case, Rostov would certainly not be throwing him a life preserver. Narrowing his eyes into the beam of the flashlight, he saw that the two men leaning over the side were strangers. One was fair-haired, young, dressed like all the young in jeans and a flannel shirt. The other was older, grizzled. But they were almost certainly not Soviet, or any other kind of, agents.

Breathing a wordless prayer of thanks, McClain managed the short swim to the life preserver. They hauled him to the side of the boat, dragging him over the side. Then he fainted.

When he woke again he was in an ambulance, bouncing up and down as it rushed toward a hospital. Bending over him were the intent faces of paramedics. As his eyes opened, one of them fastened a clear plastic bag half full of liquid to a hook over the bed. McClain saw that the tubing led down to a needle that disappeared into his arm. His head felt like it was about to explode. Attempting to lift a hand toward it, McClain was surprised to find that he was restrained by a strap that crossed over his arms and chest and held him to the bed.

"What," he began.

"Just lie still, man." The paramedic was black, with dark brown eyes that gleamed at him over a white surgical mask. McClain could barely hear him over the screaming of the siren. "You're going to be okay. You got lucky. The bullet wound's just a graze. What you're suffering from is basically exposure, but it won't kill you. Can you tell us your name, give us the name of somebody to call? You know, next of kin?"

An answer was on the tip of his tongue. Then a lifetime of caution and training a.s.serted themselves. No one in the agency, not even Hammersmith, knew of the existence of his mother and sisters. They were safer so, and he would not compromise them now. Rostov clearly had a strong suspicion that he was not dead; an all-out search and destroy effort would be mounted. Of course, Rostov might think he was at the bottom of the ocean, but Rostov was a careful man. He would do his utmost to make sure. And the fishing boat that had picked him up had very likely summoned an ambulance with a ship-to-sh.o.r.e radio. Being the man he was, Rostov had probably been monitoring the air waves.

"Where..." Funny, he couldn't seem to talk. His tongue felt like it was swollen to about three times its normal size, and he couldn't manipulate it well enough to form words. The paramedic frowned. McClain could see the deepening of the creases between his brows.

"Lie still, man," he said again, impatiently. Since he could do nothing else, McClain lay still as the man taped a gauze pad to the wound behind his ear. His mind worked, he was glad to discover. Slowly, painfully, but it worked. And what it was telling him was that there was every chance that Rostov was even now hot on his trail.

McClain knew he had to survive, had to get the word back. It was a matter of national security- and personal pride- as well as a way to make up for the blunders he had made. And a matter of his life, which he was kind of surprised to find he valued so greatly. But McClain also knew that Rostov would give his own life to stop him. Rostov was more machine than man; he let nothing stand in the way of getting the job done.

The ambulance screeched to a halt. Immediately the doors were jerked open from the outside and McClain, in his mobile bed, was bundled out. He could just make out the words Bethesda Naval Hospital Emergency Room on the brick wall as they wheeled him toward it. Just before he disappeared into the bowels of the emergency room, a nondescript brown Volvo screeched to a stop behind the ambulance. McClain craned his neck in time to see two men get out. Men in ill-fitting suits and bulky overcoats who stared after him as he pa.s.sed through the hospital's brightly lit portals.

There were only a few people in the emergency room. A mother with her child in fuzzy, footed pajamas cuddled on her lap, an old couple, a man clutching his arm. McClain was wheeled straight on through another set of swinging doors. Doctors in white coats and nurses in white uniforms bustled around him as he was pushed into the treatment area.

"s.h.i.t!" McClain was glad to find that his tongue was functioning again. As he was wheeled into a curtained cubicle, his escort dropped off until he was attended by one intern and one nurse. Which made what he had to do that much easier, he thought. He'd been in the game long enough to recognize KGB men when he saw them, and his still sluggish brain had finally picked up on what had bothered him about the two men in the Volvo: they were vintage KGB. Just as he had hypothesized, Rostov must have been monitoring the ship-to-sh.o.r.e air waves in case another boat picked him up. Unless he got out of the hospital fast he would be dead.

The nurse unfastened the straps that held him to the stretcher.

"Thank you," McClain said politely, sitting up and pulling the IV needle from his arm.

"You mustn't!" The nurse tried to push him back, but he shoved her aside. "Doctor!"

There was no time to be polite. As the young intern came to the nurse's aid, McClain socked him in the jaw. Under normal circ.u.mstances the man would have dropped like a stone. As weak as McClain felt, he was relieved to see the fellow go staggering back, then lose his footing and fall.

"Help!"

The frightened nurse called for reinforcements, lunging for the call b.u.t.ton beside the bed. McClain lurched to his feet and staggered toward the rear of the treatment ward, shouldering past hospital personnel who were running to the aid of the nurse. The nurse emerged from the cubicle, shrieking and pointing after him, just as he burst through the door that led from the emergency room into the hospital proper. Immediately to his left was an open elevator. It was empty, McClain was relieved to see. He stepped inside, sagging against the wall and pushing the b.u.t.ton for the top floor. The doors closed just as two white-coated interns, the nurse he had run out on and the KGB men erupted into the hall.

The elevator began to ascend with a speed that made his stomach lurch. Halfway up, he pushed the emergency stop b.u.t.ton. With any luck the goons from the KGB would imagine him, hurt and panicking, thinking he could hold them at bay while marooning himself in an elevator. While they waited for the elevator to be restarted and brought up, he would have time to escape. Goons at the level his present pursuers appeared to occupy were not selected for their intelligence, in his experience. With luck, it should not occur to them that he might be able to escape from an elevator trapped between floors.

If only he weren't so d.a.m.ned weak, McClain thought as he jumped up, once, twice, three times before managing to grab the edge of the trapdoor in the ceiling of the elevator. Wincing, panting, he nevertheless succeeded in pulling himself up and through it, dislodging the door at the same time. He caught the metal door just before it could go skittering over the edge of the roof. If it had fallen, it would have landed with a crash on the concrete floor four stories below, and that crash might clue an alert listener in on what he was trying to do.

Thank G.o.d it was a double shaft. Now all he had to do was pray he had the strength to catch himself and hang on. Trying not to think of the four-story drop below him, he peeled off his thick, soaking wet athletic socks and wound them around the palms of his hands. Then, taking a deep breath, he jumped from the roof of the car toward the concrete block wall. He fell like a stone, but managed to catch hold of the steel cable of the adjoining elevator as he did so. The pain in his hands was excruciating even with the meager padding of the socks, but he hung on, wrapping his body around the cable and using his blue-jeaned legs to stop his precipitate slide before his hands were sliced to the bone. The strategy worked, and his downward rush stopped abruptly.

Panting with the pain in his hands and his head, praying that loss of blood would not cause him to lose consciousness and fall, McClain clung to the cable with one hand and the entire rest of his body while he loosened his belt with the other. Fastening the st.u.r.dy leather so that it encircled the cable as well as his waist, he grasped the cable again and stretched his legs out until his bare feet were braced against the rough cement block wall. He would catwalk down. Willing himself to ignore the terrible burning behind his ear, he gripped the steel cable with desperate strength, lowering himself down the shaft with an efficiency sprung from years of training and some weekend rappeling. If only he wouldn't pa.s.s out- or the elevator belonging to this particular cable wouldn't hurtle down from the heights before he could get out of the shaft...

He made it. Opening the emergency access door, he staggered out into the deserted bas.e.m.e.nt. His wet jeans left a trail of drips on the terrazzo floor. He could only hope that the trail would dry before anyone who could connect it to him found it. It was a short walk to an unlocked side door which led to a set of outside stairs. He climbed them and found himself on a sidewalk facing the hospital parking lot.

Unbinding his hands and tossing the soggy, lacerated socks behind a convenient bush, he examined his hands for an instant under the bright glare of the streetlights around the parking lot. He had suffered the equivalent of rope burns across both palms. Blood beaded slowly along a razor-blade thin slice in the exact center of the burns. Minor damage, was his a.s.sessment. He would live. He would definitely live. Wrapping his arms around his bare chest (the paramedic must have discarded his shirt in the ambulance, because he couldn't account for its loss otherwise), McClain stood shivering in the cold night air as he weighed the possibilities.

He felt surprisingly good. An adrenaline rush, he supposed, that came from meeting danger and surviving. McClain discovered that he was whistling through his teeth, and grinned as he recognized the tune "Ghostbusters." Hammersmith and his ridiculous tapes.

Moving swiftly toward the parking lot, he surveyed its contents with detached a.s.sessment. Like many hospital parking lots, this one was almost half full of unattended cars. Like taking candy from a baby, he thought, and for the h.e.l.l of it selected a candy red Corvette to hot wire. He deserved some pleasure out of this G.o.dawful day.

II.

Sat.u.r.day, October 3, 12:45 A.M.

Clara Winston yawned. It was late, past her usual bedtime of eleven P.M., and she was dead tired. She had stayed up to finish some last minute editing on her newest book. A Summer Kiss was one of her better efforts, she thought. Light, frothy, romantic, with believable characters. She didn't want to be immodest, but she thought that it was really very good. As she ran her eyes over the last page of her ninth romance, she felt that indefinable tingle that always accompanied the completion of another book. Now she had a few months of leisure coming...

Setting the proofs aside, she turned off the light and headed down the stairs. Puff, the gigantic ball of gray fur that ruled her with a rod of iron, greeted her at the foot of the stairs and weaved meowing about her ankles as she walked down the hall toward the bathroom of the small, two-story former carriage house that she had converted into her personal residence some four years before. Even with a mother as loving as Clara's was, one needed one's privacy, and there was no way to dislodge her mother from the big house that had been in the Jolly family for generations. Not that she would want to, anyway. Emily Jolly Winston Crawleigh Hays Seidel was Jollymead. A dyed-in-the-wool Southern belle who at age fifty-two had gone through four husbands and was working on landing number five, her mother was the last of a vanishing breed. Clara loved her dearly, but she could not live in the same house with her. Not unless she wanted to go insane. Besides, as she'd told her mother four years before, she needed privacy to work. Emily had been unconvinced- in her view Clara didn't need to work, she should instead direct her energies toward finding a suitable husband- but Clara had been adamant, and in the end she had won out. The carriage house was hers. Compared to the fading magnificence of the porticoed big house it was small and insignificant and even a little shabby, but Clara loved it anyway. She had converted the entire upstairs into an office. Keeping the two sides of her life separate had seemed a good idea. Downstairs she lived, slept, and ate. Upstairs she worked.

"You just ate an entire can of seafood dinner!" Clara protested at the bathroom door, determined to ignore Puff's protestations of starvation. The greedy monster yowled, pressing against her insistently. Clara sighed. "Look at Amy and Iris! You don't see them begging for seconds!"

The two cream and gray Siamese cats she referred to, a gift from her aunt on Clara's twenty-ninth birthday, were sitting side by side on the braided kitchen rug, daintily washing themselves after their evening meal. Puff spared their slender shapes not so much as a glance. Instead he sank his needle sharp teeth into Clara's pink terry mule, as if to chide her for comparing his majestic Persian girth with their Oriental slenderness.

"Youch! Stop it, Puff!" Clara glared down at him, shoved him aside with her leg, marched into the bathroom and locked the door. Living alone as she did, locking the bathroom door would seem an unnecessary precaution. But not if she hoped for a moment's peace. That dratted cat could open any door that was not securely locked. To keep him out, every cabinet had to have a childproof catch on it. She'd even had to slide a ruler through the twin handles of the side by side refrigerator after he'd learned to open that. Come to think of it, maybe she should have left the refrigerator alone. For a while there, he hadn't been yowling at her every time he felt the need of sustenance in addition to his daily (gigantic) meal. He'd been opening the refrigerator and helping himself, once even knocking a carton of milk over so he and Iris and Amy could have a drink.

The cat was a menace, no doubt about it, Clara told herself as she tied a scarf around her head to keep her shoulder-length, baby fine blonde hair out of her face. Rubbing a thick white cleansing cream into her skin, she grimaced at her reflection. Puff had been with her for ten years now, and for all his many faults she loved him dearly. But since the vet had told her to put him on a diet... Clara rinsed the cream off with warm water and followed it with a splash of cold to close her pores. She just wished the vet could try putting Puff on a diet. Be firm, she silently mimicked the instructions she'd been given. The man obviously had no conception of the lengths to which Puff would go to get what he considered a decent meal.

"Yowl!"

Clara sighed. Now he would howl until she came out. She'd ignored the rattling of the door as he'd tried to jimmy it open with his paw, but his yowling was something else. The deep throated cry was as grating as fingernails across a blackboard. But she would ignore that, too. Fixing her eyes firmly on her reflection, she smoothed moisturizing cream into the soft white skin of her face and neck. Her complexion was her one real claim to beauty, and she took care of it. Good skin made up for a lot of beauty failings, she thought, looking resignedly at her overlong nose, mismatched lips and pointy chin. The proper use of cosmetics camouflaged the rest. Her ordinary blue eyes took on a lovely sparkle when carefully framed by tangerine eyeshadow, charcoal-brown liner and deep brown mascara. And her straggly eyebrows acquired elan when cunningly filled in with a taupe pencil. In fact, when she had the time and motivation to effect the transformation, she could be quite an attractive woman. But when she was just schlepping around...

"Yowl!"

Clara grimaced and turned away from her reflection, knowing that she could ignore the howling no longer without going mad.

"All right, Puff!" Gritting her teeth with exasperation, she retied the belt of the pink terry robe so that it was cinched even more firmly about her middle, opened the door and marched toward the kitchen. Puff, the maddening creature, purred like a motor as he followed sedately behind. He was getting his way again, and Clara had to shake her head at herself. It was a good thing she didn't have any children, she thought as she extracted the milk from the refrigerator and poured a modest amount into Puff's bowl. She couldn't even control a too-fat cat!

With his motor running at high speed, Puff settled himself in front of his dish and attacked the milk with greedy laps. Amy and Iris, Clara was glad to see as she returned the milk to the refrigerator and shut the door, were already curled up on the rug together, fast asleep. If only Puff were as well mannered as they.

A sharp knock sounded at the kitchen door. Clara started, and turned to stare. Who on earth would be knocking on her door at this time of night, so far out in the country? Her mother had left on a Carribbean cruise with her latest conquest two days before. Mrs. Mullins, the woman who kept house for her mother, was away too. The antebellum tobacco farm that was Jollymead was located along a narrow road that wound through the horse country of Virginia without ever going anywhere in particular. There was nearly half a mile between Jollymead and its nearest neighbor. So who could be- The knock sounded again, louder this time, impatient. Amy and Iris sat up, staring at the door. Puff even looked up briefly before returning his attention to his milk.

Clara crossed to the door, hesitated, then pulled the blue gingham curtain aside so that she could look out. A man's face stared back at her. A strange man, with short blond hair, looking at her expressionlessly through the gla.s.s. A man in a beige raincoat, who was holding something in his hand.

"Miss Winston? Claire Winston?"

The words were m.u.f.fled, coming from the other side of the door, but Clara had no trouble recognizing her nom de plume. As Claire Winston, she was a fairly well-known author of romances, and since she had started putting her address in the backs of her books so that fans would know where to write her she had received a few impromptu visits as well as letters. But this man didn't look like a romance fan- not by any stretch of the imagination. A spurt of fright caused her to drop the curtain and back hurriedly toward the kitchen phone. As much as she hated to bother Mitch so late at night, she wanted the sheriff out there in a hurry.

Gla.s.s shattered; shards flew across the kitchen to land with a clatter on the lovingly restored brick floor. A blackgloved hand shot through the top half of the door, groping for the k.n.o.b below. Gasping at the horror of it- she didn't have enough breath to scream- Clara dropped the phone and ran for the bedroom, which had a st.u.r.dy, lockable door, another phone, and a can of mace. The cats scattered as she did. There was a tremendous crash as the door was flung back on its hinges. Her heart was pounding so fiercely that she could feel each panicked beat. She was going to make it, she was going to make it, she was go- She stumbled over something and fell to her knees just a foot short of her bedroom. Even as she crawled frantically forward, nails digging into the plush mauve carpet, a protesting yowl told her what the something had been. Curse you, Puff! she swore silently just as a hand closed painfully over the back of her neck and hauled her to her feet.

She screamed- ear splittingly. Only to have the sound cut off by a slap so vicious that it sent her head snapping back and weakened her knees. Silenced, stunned, terrified, barely aware of the taste of blood on her tongue from a cut lip, she was forced into her bedroom by a grimly silent monster in the shape of a man who was twisting her arm behind her back as though he meant to break it. The pain shot through her body like hot swords, but even worse than the physical agony was the mental. Who was he? What did he want with her? Oh, G.o.d, was he a rapist? A killer? What could she do?

She thought about trying to kick backwards at him, then thought again. She was not even sure she could kick that far in her present bent position, and even if her foot made contact with his leg she doubted that it would hurt him. Her slippers were soft terrycloth. In retaliation for the attempt, he might very well break her arm. He pushed her through the bedroom door, his grip on her arm tightening brutally as he forced her to her knees beside the bed. Tears formed in her eyes and clogged her throat. She was in so much pain...

"Search the house. Everywhere," he said over his shoulder in a cold hard voice with the faintest hint of an accent that she couldn't, in her agony, quite place. It was then that she realized he was not alone. Crashes of overturning furniture told her that his confederates were tearing her home apart.

"You will tell me where he is and I will let you go." Her captor was leaning over her, holding her arm in a vice grip. Bright shafts of agony shot along her nerve endings. Then he slackened his grip a degree, leaving her almost gasping in relief.

"Who- who?" The word was a squeak, but Clara was surprised she could talk at all. Her arm was twisted so viciously that she cried out.