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Nova snapped her sling’s metal ring, located over her diaphragm, to the carabiner of her harness line. “I bet you know, James, that if the good guys quit, it means the bad guys win. I hope you don’t quit. You’re good at what you do.”
“Easy to say,” he muttered.
And also true. Quitters are always the losers.
“PLEEZE!” Robin yelled.
Another carabiner, those cleverly designed metal loops that were staples for rappelling and mountain climbing, attached her harness line to a pulley on her traverse line. She checked it. It was secure. In moves she’d made hundreds of times, Nova climbed over the guardrail and onto the three-foot-square launch platform.
Charles Scott elbowed his way past Padgett. “Robin,” he yelled, “Stop that screaming.”
You jerk! A hateful memory of her stepfather, Candido Branco, flared into Nova’s mind. “Mr. Scott, she’s understandably afraid.”
“If she’d pulled herself the way you said, the rope wouldn’t have gotten tangled and she’d be okay. She needs to learn to pay attention to details.”
Her stepfather’s voice had always been soft, his words encouraging. Candido Branco had never spoken to her harshly. But then, there’s all kinds of abuse. I probably would have been less screwed up and my life would’ve been less screwed up if he’d just yelled at me.
A magnificent butterfly—electric blue and iridescent green, with bright yellow spots on each wing—landed on her hand as she double-checked the carabiner linking her to the pulley. I’m thirty-three and Candido is finally losing his control over me. I hope Robin gets over her father a whole lot sooner.
“Let me have your unipod a sec,” she said to Padgett, urgency and some disgust with both men putting a sharp edge to her tone. Padgett turned his back, and from his day pack she fetched a collapsible aluminum pole that he used to steady his camera while taking photographs. The camera platform at the tip end of the pole would make a serviceable hook.
She hurriedly extended the unipod to full length, let the sling harness and traverse line take her weight, then let herself off the sky bridge. The movement disturbed a flock of violet sabrewings. They burst in a shower of green and purple, flapping from the crown of a towering strangler fig ten feet away.
Nova started pulling toward the girl, Robin’s “I don’t wanna die” still ringing in her ears. There were lots of places to die. Lots of places and times already in her life where she had come close to dying. For her this beautiful place would actually be a good one.
A shriek cut the air. Nova’s head snapped in the girl’s direction. Robin now hung, rotating slowly, ten feet below the traverse line. Merciful God!
She had been saved only by her safety line from a fall that would surely have killed her. The harness line was still attached to the traverse line—but not to Robin. How could that have happened?
“Robin, Robin,” Charles Scott yelled.
Nova’s pulse beating loudly in her ears, she yelled, “Robin! Do. Not. Move. Do you understand?”
“I…I do.”
Pulling fast, her heartbeat pounding against her breastbone, Nova raced back toward the skywalk. Be calm! Be cool!
Training and discipline took over, her thoughts sped up and her senses sharpened. Now, in addition to the unipod, she would need a length of nylon rope, a rescue pulley and possibly a replacement carabiner.
That’s what safety lines are for. It will hold. It has to hold. Please, make it hold.
“Novaaa!”
Chapter 2
“So, Mr. Cardone, who’s so important you have to fetch him out of the middle of the jungle?”
The Huey’s flight engineer had left her place up front. She perched on the jump seat beside Joe. She’d removed her headset, looping it around the back of her neck, and was yelling over the beating of the chopper blades.
With Costa Rican permission, Joe, the flight engineer, and the Huey’s two pilots had come inland from the USS Reagan, stationed off Costa Rica’s Pacific coast.
“How long until we get there?” he yelled back.
“Ten minutes. You didn’t answer my question. Big secret?”
“Not really. At least who isn’t a secret. Why we want her is.”
“A her? Who is she?”
Joe pictured Nova. Dark black ponytail and bangs, delicate fair skin. Nondescript makeup and a nondescript “look.” That’s how she had struck him the first time he’d seen her. But there was nothing nondescript about those startling emerald-green eyes. He recalled the first time he’d seen her dressed for a seduction for the Company. Man, had he ever been one bowled-over Texas boy. She’d let her straight hair down to her shoulder blades and tucked it back behind one ear. A crimson red gown clung to every mouthwatering body curve. Dangling crystal earrings had glimmered in the ballroom light.
Jesus, she was the most incredible chameleon. Nova could disappear into the woodwork when she needed to, but dressed up she could morph into a movie star or Paris model. Code name: Dove. It fit her perfectly because she seemed so gentle and sweet, someone you could trust. But she was also as tough and professional a spy as he’d ever known.
Well, Nova wasn’t really full-time CIA as he was. A contract agent, Nova served only when she chose to and when called in because one of her special talents or gifts was needed. Sometimes she was called upon because of her beauty, but mostly it was when the Company needed someone with an unsurpassed ability to win trust. Within the inner circles of the agency, she was famous for “spinning silken threads of either trust or desire.” She’d rescued the daughter of an Argentinean diplomat by winning over the hostage taker’s mistress. She’d convinced a Saudi prince that she was a doctoral student studying falconry, and by doing so, obtained information that enabled the Company to prevent the bombing of a disco in Malaysia.
“Nova Blair,” he yelled back to the chopper engineer. “She’s a world-class photographer. Also a tour guide for an action/adventure travel company.” CAT was a legitimate travel company and also a CIA cover, the one Nova used most often.
The flight engineer grinned. “My name’s Katie Donovan. And I’m a damn good dancer. You guys staying on the ship tonight? We’ve got a party planned.”
He gave Katie Donovan one of his better smiles. Quite a few women had complimented him on that smile. “Sorry,” he yelled. “After I get Nova, it’s back to the Reagan to jet off ASAP.”
“I’m sorry, too.” She paused a moment, then, “Does she know you’re coming?”
Now there was a good question. She didn’t. In fact, he’d been told by Langley that since his last job with her, Nova had twice turned down assignments. In Germany, she’d fallen hard for Jean Paul König, a charismatic German politician with the looks of a movie star, but when the mission was over, she’d decided König wasn’t right for her.
In Joe’s opinion, she’d been seriously let down. Hell. He’d caught her with tears in her eyes after making her parting speech to König, and Nova definitely wasn’t the crying type.
He hadn’t pressed her for details. Nova just might be the most private person he’d ever known. And she owned some very deep and dark secrets, some he knew having to do with the stepfather she refused to discuss. Those secrets must be the explanation for why such a beautiful, intelligent, talented woman undertook the dangerous and sometimes murderous things she did for the Company.
He thought it unlikely that Langley knew about her genuine affection for König. He wasn’t about to break her confidence and tell them; Nova’s private business was her private business. But the Company was clearly aware that the assignment had put her off working for them. “Look, we need her for this assignment,” he’d been told when his controller had awakened him in his D.C. condo at three-twenty this morning, “and we need her now. You’ll be going to Italy. To the Amalfi Coast.”
“If she’s burnt out, maybe you should get someone else,” he’d replied, pleased that she’d quit Company work, a dangerous business mixed up with the scum of the earth.
“You’ll get your briefing in Italy. Time is of the essence here. The bottom line is that fast and accurate translation is the key, and it may have to be done on-site. For that we have to have someone who can translate and speak fluently in Russian, Italian, Chinese and, of course, English, and who is intimately familiar with the lingo involved in virus research. The Italians don’t have any one person like that. We have Nova, and we’ve told them we’d get her for them.”
He’d been surprised. “Nova knows about viruses?”
Now irritated, the Company man had muttered, “You’ll get your briefing in Italy, Cardone. All you need to know now is that Nova is uniquely qualified, that’s she’s needed urgently for this assignment, and a fucking lot of lives are at stake. I’d say, conservatively, millions of lives. Your job is to get her to do it. Get her involved again for the Company or expect to feel big heat from higher up. All the way higher up.”
Joe yelled to Katie over the helicopter’s racket. “No. She doesn’t know I’m coming. And if she’s like most women, she’ll probably be pissed when I show up.”
Grinning, Katie Donovan tilted her head, eager for his explanation.
“The last time I saw her we were about to spend a nice weekend together when I got called away. The usual thing, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And about the last thing I said to her was that I’d call. I didn’t.”
“Oh yes. You are in big trouble.” Katie used his shoulder for support as she pushed to her feet. He liked it. The feel of a woman’s hand. “We should be about there.” She made her way forward.
He gazed out the starboard door over the rolling sea of green, the earthy-smelling warm wind hitting his face, thinking, Why didn’t I call? He had intended to. But his next assignment kept him fully occupied for the first ten days, and when he finally caught his breath, he remembered how Nova, who was five years older, always treated him like a kid brother.
And König was an urbane sophisticate, quite the opposite of a Texas-ranch-raised, ex-Naval aviator jock. Calling Nova had suddenly struck him as stupid. Besides, they led crazy lives. When could they ever realistically get together? So at first he’d put off calling her, and then finally he’d quit even planning to.
Now he was going to have to pay the price.
But then, maybe not. Nova wouldn’t really have expected a call. What a monumental ego you have, Cardone. She would have assumed that his saying he would call was like a Hollywood producer saying, “We’ll do lunch soon.”
Nova Blair was one woman who wouldn’t be sitting around waiting for some man to call her.
Chapter 3
Nova halted on her traverse line immediately above Robin. The terror-stricken girl was still rotating, but more slowly now. Pale, she was gazing up at Nova.
“You hanging in there?” Nova said, wishing with an aching heart that she could be the scared one, not Robin. “Pun intended,” she said, forcing a reassuring smile.
Robin actually smiled back, but with thin, white lips. “Yep, ha-hanging in there.”
“I’ll attach a rescue pulley to your traverse line. Then I’ll let down a rope. Put the rope under your arms, and together we’ll haul you back up. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Using the unipod, Nova pulled the girl’s carabiner, dangling at the end of Robin’s harness line, across the short space between the two traverse lines. The carabiner was fine, but somehow Robin’s thrashing had been enough to yank the metal ring off her harness.
Nova clamped the rescue pulley onto Robin’s traverse line. She fed one end of the thirty feet of half-inch nylon rope through the rescue pulley and tied a figure-eight knot. Feeding out rope, she said, “Put the loop under both arms and make sure the fit is good and tight.”
In less than a minute, Robin was ready. Nova ran the rope under both of her arms and across her back. “Here’s how we do this. I’ll count to three. When I say three, you pull yourself up on the security line as much as you can. That takes weight off the rope. We’re both dangling. I don’t have any real leverage. But if you pull yourself up on the security line while I’m pulling on the rope, we will hoist you back here. Okay?”
Robin nodded.
Please let this work right! “Okay. One, two, THREE!”
Nova pulled, and took in at least a foot and a half. “Good,” she yelled. “Perfect! Okay. Again. One, two, THREE!”
Nova took in another foot and a half.
“It’s working,” Robin called out.
Charles Scott yelled, “You’re doing it!”
It took maybe ten minutes, but finally Nova had Robin face-to-face. She immediately refastened a thick nylon strap on Robin’s sling harness to the carabiner of the harness line.
“You okay, hon?” Nova asked, squeezing Robin’s hand, elated and relieved.
“I have never been so scared in all my life.”
“You’re going to have a great story to tell your friends.”
Robin grinned. “Yeah.” The smile faded quickly. “I am so sorry to be such a wimp. My dad’s furious. I can never please him. I try, but I just can’t do this stuff.”
“Here’s a guarantee. Trust Bruce and me and yourself, and when you leave here ten days from now, you’ll be amazed. I know you want to please your dad, but the person you most want to please is you. I promise, you will have learned that you can always do more than you first believe. Just don’t give up.”
“If you’d said that an hour ago, I’d have laughed out loud.”
“Right!”
Robin’s brow wrinkled in a frown. “What’s that sound?”
Nova hesitated, listening, as she, too, heard a thrumming. “Helicopter,” she said.
They searched the sky, and within seconds a gray-green military-type helicopter—a Huey, Nova noted—appeared, moving directly toward them.
“Oh, it’s coming our way,” Robin said, her voice again in a quiver.
“It’s not going to shake us out of these slings. We’re fine.”
The blissful stillness of the jungle, already assaulted by the chopper’s blades, suddenly crackled with the sound of bullhorn being turned on.
Just wonderful, Nova thought. This cannot be good news. Why in the world would anyone come out here in a helicopter?
“I’m from Cosmos Adventure Travel,” rumbled a voice over the loudspeaker. “My name is Joseph Cardone. I need to speak to Nova Blair.”
Joe! My God! If Joe was here for her, whatever was brewing must be serious.
Her tour folks were pointing her way. The helicopter edged overhead. She and Robin swayed.
For a second, Nova was transported to a street in Germany and Joe was kneeling beside her, his face ashen. He’d just saved her from being run over, maybe even killed. She remembered the strength of his hands, the rich chocolate of his brown eyes, that football quarterback body.
She briskly hand-signaled the helicopter to back off, afraid the downdraft might break branches or topple nests. The pilot responded, lifting the craft higher but still keeping it above them. Joe, holding the bullhorn, stood inside the starboard door.
“Hey, Nova!”
She recognized his voice and her heart—which was already pumping from the adrenalin rush of the rescue so hard she could feel it in her throat—sped up still more. The goddamn idiot never called.
She gave him a thumbs-up of recognition.
“CAT needs you to do something. Urgent. No time to get a Jeep out here. You should turn over the tour to Bruce, collect your stuff, and then we’ll pick you up from the hotel’s deck. Say, ten minutes?”
How about, say, never! How dare they assume she’d jump when they called! She couldn’t have made it clearer that she no longer intended to work Company jobs. She gave a thumbs-down.
“Bruce,” she called out. “You can pull Robin across now.”
Robin started moving away toward the far side of the canopy.
From the sky, “We’ll pick you up. Ten minutes. Okay?”
She looked up at him, happy to see him and furious at the same time. She wanted to climb up there and ask him what he’d been doing lately. Again, she gave him the thumbs-down.
