He stepped out of the elevator, and a moment later appeared in the final screen, standing inside his private alcove and pressing his pass key and thumb to the biometric lock.

Alpha walked into the kitchen and opened the freezer. On the top shelf were two bottles of vodka sheathed in ice rings. “Żubrówka,” read the labels. Polish vodka made from bison grass. The vodka tasted like warm velvet.

The tumblers to the front door slid back. Robert Russell’s heels clicked on the marble floor. The trespasser took off the balaclava, unzipped the jumpsuit, and waited. The disguise was no longer needed. It was essential that Russell not be frightened. His keychain held a panic button that activated the alarm.

Russell walked into the kitchen. “Jesus, you scared the hell out of me,” he exclaimed.

“Hello, Robbie. Care for a drink?”

Russell’s smile faded rapidly as the facts arranged themselves in his razor-sharp mind. “Actually, just how the hell did you get in here?”

He had barely finished the words when the trespasser, operational designation Alpha, brought the bottle of vodka and its ice sheath down on his skull. Russell collapsed to all fours, the keychain skittering across the floor. The blow left him stunned but not unconscious. Before he could call out, Alpha straddled him, grasped his jaw in one hand, his hair in the other, and wrenched his head violently to the left.

Russell’s neck snapped like a rotted branch. He fell limp to the floor.

It took all of Alpha’s strength to drag the body across the living room and onto the balcony. Alpha flung his arms over the railing, then grasped Russell’s legs, hefted the dead weight, and rolled the body over.

She did not wait to see Lord Robert Henley Russell strike the granite stairs 35 meters below.

2

KenyaAirways Flight 99 inbound from Nairobi touched down at London Heathrow Airport at 0611 British Summer Time. The manifest listed 280 passengers and 16 crew aboard the Airbus A340. In fact, the number was well over 300, with a dozen infants piled on their mothers’ laps and a handful of standbys clambering into the fold-down seats meant for flight attendants.

Seated in row 43, Jonathan Ransom checked his watch and shifted uneasily. Flight time had clocked in at exactly nine hours-thirty minutes faster than scheduled. Most passengers were delighted by the early arrival. It meant beating morning rush hour into the city or gaining a head start on the day’s sightseeing. Jonathan was not among them. All week departures out of Jomo Kenyatta International Airport had suffered lengthy delays because of an ongoing strike by local air traffic controllers. The previous day’s flight had arrived in London six hours late. The day before that, it had been canceled altogether. Yet his flight had arrived not only on time, but ahead of schedule. He wasn’t sure whether it was luck or something else. Something he didn’t want to put a name to.

I shouldn’t have come, he told himself. I was safe where I was. I should have played it smart and stayed out of sight.

But Jonathan had never ducked a responsibility and he wasn’t about to start now. Besides, deep down he knew that if they wanted to find him, there was no place too far away, no spot on the globe too remote where he might hide.

Jonathan Ransom stood a few inches over six feet. Dressed in jeans, chambray shirt, and desert boots, he looked lean and fit. His face was deeply tanned from months of working beneath the equatorial sun. The same sun had chapped his lips and left his nose freckled with pink. His hair was shorn to a soldier’s stubble and cut through with gray. His nose was strong and well shaped, and served to focus attention on his dark eyes. With his two-day beard, he could be Italian or Greek. A bolder guess might place him as a South American of European descent. He was none of these. He was American, born in Annapolis, Maryland, thirty-eight years earlier to a distinguished southern family. Even in the narrow seat, he appeared to control his space instead of allowing it to control him.

To channel his nerves, Jonathan gathered up the varied journals, articles, and reviews he’d brought to prepare for the medical congress and tucked them into his satchel. Most had names like “Diagnosis and Prevention of Tropical Infection” or “Hepatitis C in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Clinical Study” and had been written by distinguished physicians at distinguished universities. The last was printed on simple copier paper and carried his own name beneath the title. “Treatment of Parasitic Diseases in Pediatric Patients,” by Dr. Jonathan Ransom, MD. FACS. Doctors Without Borders. Instead of a hospital, he listed his current place of work: United Nations Refugee Camp 18, Lake Turkana, Kenya.

For eight years Jonathan had worked for Doctors Without Borders, the humanitarian relief organization dedicated to bringing medical care to areas of acute crisis. He’d taken his skills to Liberia and Darfur, to Kosovo and Iraq, and to a dozen places in between. And for these last six months he’d served as principal physician at the Turkana camp, on the border of Ethiopia and Kenya. The camp’s current population numbered upward of one hundred thousand persons. Most had come from the horn of Africa, displaced families fleeing war-ravaged regions in Somalia and Ethiopia. As one of only six physicians at the camp, and the only board-certified surgeon, he spent his time caring for everything from broken ankles to bullet wounds. But this year his crowning glory lay in another department. He’d delivered a hundred babies in 140 days without losing a single one.

At some point along the way, he’d become an expert on parasitic diseases. With the world community paying increasing attention to the problems of disease and poverty in developing nations, doctors with experience “on the front lines” were suddenly in vogue. Early in the spring, he’d received the invitation from the International Association of Internists (IAI) to deliver a paper on the subject at its annual congress. Jonathan did not enjoy public speaking, but he’d accepted all the same. The subject merited wider recognition, and the opportunity to address such an influential body didn’t come along often. It was an obligation he couldn’t shun. The IAI had paid his fare, booked the flight, and arranged his accommodation. For a few days he’d have a real bed to sleep on, with clean sheets and a firm mattress. He smiled. At the moment, the prospect sounded inviting.

It was then that Jonathan saw the police escorts and his heart did whatever it did when you couldn’t catch a breath and you felt paralyzed from the neck down.

Two blue-and-white Rovers belonging to the British Airport Authority drove alongside the aircraft, their strobes lit and spinning. In short order, two more vehicles joined their rank. Jonathan pressed his back against the seat. He’d seen enough.

Emma, he called silently, his heart roaring to life. They’ve come for me.

“They’ll be watching you. You won’t see them. If they’re good, you’ll never even be aware of it. But make no mistake, they’re there. Don’t let your guard down. Ever.”

Emma Ransom looked at Jonathan across the table. Her tousled auburn hair fell about her shoulders, the flames from the hearth flaring in her hazel eyes. She wore a cream-colored cardigan sweater. A sling held her left arm to her chest in order to immobilize her shoulder and allow the gunshot wound to heal.

It was late February-five months before Jonathan’s trip to London- and for three days they’d been holed up in a climbing hut high on the mountainside above the village of Grimentz in the Swiss canton of Wallis. The hut was Emma’s rabbit hole, her escape hatch for the times when things got too hairy.