Her mother strained to overcome her grogginess and raise herself. She wore a frilly, rose-colored nightdress. It had bunched around her knees, but as she lurched to her feet, its hem dropped toward her ankles. She pivoted in confusion, mustered strength, and shuffled toward a closet. 'Help me get dressed.'

There isn't time!' Tess grabbed her arm. 'We have to get out of here!' The room was thick with haze now. Both women coughed. 'For God's sake, mother, let's go!'

With a hand on her mother's back, Tess urged her toward the bedroom's open door.

But only when they reached the shadowy hallway did Tess stiffen with complete understanding. Dread flooded through her.

Jesus, she thought.

First the phone stops working?

Then the mansion's on fire?

It isn't a coincidence! It's not accidental!

They did this!

They think I know too much! They want to kill me!

Craig's right! Why didn't I listen?

It was her mother's turn to insist on moving forward. 'Hurry!' She shoved at Tess. 'What's the matter! Why did you stop?'

Dear God, Tess thought, what if they're in the building?

Smoke detectors wailed. In the bedrooms. In the corridor. In the vestibule, the kitchen, and other locations downstairs. Their combined unnerving shriek made Tess want to clamp her hands across her ears.

But her panicked mind alerted her. No! They wouldn't just start a fire and run! They'd want to make sure I…!

What if they're in the house?

They'll try to stop us from getting out! They'll want our deaths to seem like an accident!

But if they have to, if we try to escape…!

They'll kill us before the fire does!

Tess, why are you stopping?' Her mother frowned, at the same time pressing the sleeve of her nightdress against her mouth, breathing stridently through it. 'What's wrong! The smoke's worse! We'll suffocate if we don't-!'

'Mother?' As Tess's premonition worsened, a fierce startling thought controlled her. 'Whatever happened to father's handgun? Do you still have it?'

'I don't understand. Why would you-?'

Tess whirled toward her mother. 'Just pay attention. After father died, did you keep it? Do you still have his handgun?'

Her mother coughed. 'Why does it matter? We have to-'

'The handgun, mother! What did you do with it?"

'Nothing. I left it where he always put it, the same as I left his other things.' Even after six years, renewed grief strained her mother's already fear-strained features. 'You know I couldn't bring myself to part with anything he owned.'

Smoke swirled behind them. To the left, in the vestibule below the staircase, the darkness was interrupted by a flicker as if from a hesitant strobelight.

The fire!

Tess cringed. She gripped her mother's shoulders. 'In the other bedroom?'

'Yes. That room's exactly the way it was the day your father said good-bye to me and went to Beirut.'

Tess fervently kissed her mother's cheek. 'God bless you! Hurry! Follow me!'

'But we need to…! I still don't understand!'

'I don't have time to explain! All you need to understand is I love you, mother! And I'm trying to save your life!'

'Well!' Her mother strained to breathe. 'That's good enough for me.'

With a terrified glance toward the flickering flames in the vestibule, Tess jerked her mother's hand and urged her toward the right along the hallway. 'Just pray, and do everything I tell you.'

She reached a farther door to her right and banged it open. In the darkness, she fumbled along the inside wall to find the lights witch.

'Before you… There's something I'd better tell you,' her mother said.

'Not now!'

But as Tess flicked the switch and the overhead light gleamed, Tess knew what her mother had wanted to explain. She blinked in astonishment.

This bedroom was the one that her father had used when he came home late at night after emergency meetings at the State Department, so he wouldn't disturb Tess's mother when he undressed to go to sleep.

But now the bedroom resembled the dilapidated interior of Miss Havisham's house in Great Expectations. Six years of dust covered everything, the carpet, the bed, the end tables, the lamps, the phone, the bureau. Cobwebs clung to the corners and dangled from the ceiling, making Tess flinch as if she were about to enter a nest of spiders. The rapid movement of the door she'd shoved open had caused dust to swirl, the cobwebs to sway, creating a haze that was emphasized by the smoke spewing out of the air-conditioning vent.

'Mother!'

'I tried to tell you.'

Horrified, Tess rushed ahead, each frantic footstep raising dust.

She swung her arms, clearing the cobwebs, repelled by their stickiness.

'I left everything the way it was.' Her mother struggled after her, coughing. 'The day I learned that your father was dead, I took one final look at this room, closed the door, and never came in here again. I told the servants to keep that door closed.'

With increasing revulsion, Tess noticed that even her father's slippers, layered with dust, remained beside the bed. She was too distraught to ask her mother what on earth had made her turn this room not into a shrine but a crypt. But the smoke was denser. All she had time to care about was…

She yanked open the top drawer of a table next to the bed, fearing that her father might have taken his pistol with him when he went to Beirut. But exhaling sharply, she saw that the handgun was where he always kept it.

Her father had been an operative in Marine Intelligence when he served in Vietnam. That was where he'd met Brian Hamilton, a Marine general supervising 'Eye' Corps. After the war, her father had joined the State Department, belonging to its little-known Intelligence division. Later, after Brian Hamilton had retired from the military, he too had joined the State Department, in the diplomatic division, eventually convincing Tess's father to switch from Intelligence to diplomacy. But Tess's father had retained his nervous habits from Vietnam. Although he seldom went armed when on an assignment in a potentially dangerous foreign country, he'd made sure to keep a handgun in the house where he could easily get to it in case someone broke in at night.

The weapon was made in Switzerland, a SIG-Sauer 9mm semiautomatic pistol. A compact short-barreled handgun, it held an unusually large number of rounds in the magazine, sixteen, and unlike most other pistols, it had a double action, which meant that it didn't need to be cocked to be fired. All you needed to do was pull the trigger.

Tess knew all this because when she was twelve, she'd happened to see her father cleaning the gun and had shown such curiosity that her father had decided she'd better be taught about it so she'd respect it and, more important, stay away from it. After all, she'd been a tomboy. She hadn't been repelled by guns the way many girls her age might have been, and she took to target shooting as easily as she'd developed expertise in basketball, track- and-field, and gymnastics.

Frequently, when her father went to a range to practise his marksmanship, he'd invited her to come along. He'd taught her how to take the weapon apart, clean it, and reassemble it. He'd instructed her in the proper way to aim – both hands on the pistol, both eyes open, both front and rear sights lined up. But the main trick, he'd said, was to focus your vision not on the sights but rather on the target. The sights would seem blurred as a consequence, but that was okay, you got used to it. After all, the target was your objective, and you had to see it clearly. Any time the sights were in focus but the target was blurred, you were aiming wrong.

After an equally thorough explanation of how to load the magazine, insert it securely into the handle, and pull back the slide on top of the pistol so that a round was injected into the firing chamber, her father had finally allowed Tess to fire the weapon.