He was just about to pay his bill when his cell phone rang. Taking it from his pocket, he glanced at the number. It wasn’t one he recognized, but he answered it anyway.

“Turk, are you making our meeting?” asked Ginella as he said hello.

“Oh, Colonel, hey,” said Turk. “Meeting?”

“We’re planning the next few sorties,” she said. Her voice was pleasant but businesslike. There was no hint that they had been together the night before. “I was hoping to see you.”

“I got stuck with a few things,” he said. It wasn’t a direct lie, he thought; more like a slight disarray of information. “I didn’t think you guys needed me.”

“The flu has knocked us down badly,” she said. “I’d like to be able to count on you tomorrow.”

“Well—”

“We’ll brief the mission at 0600,” she said, her voice growing more officious. “I am counting on you. I did speak to Operations. And to your colonel.”

“Yes.” Turk wasn’t sure what to say. He did want to fly—he was developing a definite taste for the Warthog. It was just the situation with Ginella that was awkward.

Maybe this was her way of removing that. She was being completely official—yes, he thought, she’s trying to make it easy for me.

Great.

“If I’m not needed by the Tigershark people, I’ll definitely be there,” he told her.

“At 0600,” she told him.

“Got it.”

Turk spent the rest of the afternoon walking around the city. Around six he decided he would head back to the hotel and get changed before finding a place to eat. He thought it might be a good idea to find a dining companion.

Li came to mind. But he had no way of getting hold of her—he didn’t know if she even had a phone.

Maybe, he thought, he could just call her hotel and have the desk connect him to her room.

He couldn’t remember the name of her hotel. His description of it didn’t help the concierge downstairs at his hotel.

“Mi dispiace, Captain,” said the man. “But you have described nearly every hotel in Sicily. It even sounds a little like ours, though maybe not so close to the sea.”

“True,” agreed Turk. “How about a nice place for dinner, not too fancy?” he asked.

“I know just the place. Very quiet and out of the way.”

Turk nearly jumped. Ginella had come up behind him. She placed her hand on his hip.

It felt good, tempting even. But . . .

“I didn’t mean to startle you,” she told him.

“I—I didn’t know you were here.”

“I was waiting. They said you were out.”

She was in civilian clothes, a mid-thigh black skirt and a red top. Not quite see-through, the top gave a hint of lace beneath.

Which was pleasant.

He thought of objecting, but what could he say?

And why? Why object? Why not just . . . go with what felt good?

“I was—I kinda went for a walk to clear my head,” said Turk. “After everything that’s happened. You know?”

She nodded sympathetically, then leaned toward the concierge. “Can you make a reservation for two at il Bambino. Say in about an hour? No—make it an hour and a half.”

“Il Bambino,” said the concierge approvingly. “Very nice.”

They made love twice, once in a frenzy before dinner, Turk still damp from his shower, then again afterward, this time with even more desperation. Ginella silently urged him on, pulling him toward her. The second time she dug her fingers into his back so hard as he climaxed that he found tiny traces of blood on his sheets in the morning when he woke.

She was gone by then. There was no sign that she had been on the bed or even in the room. The scent of her perfume lingering in the sheets and on his chest was the only hint that she was there.

He called down for coffee, and took a shower for so long he was still inside when the coffee arrived. He got out, brought the tray inside, and showered again.

It wasn’t pathological, he told himself. He had wanted to have sex. The memory of it as he showered threatened to arouse him again.

Turk shaved and dressed. He jogged down the stairs rather than taking the elevator, trotting out to the lot after scoring his pick of the car pool.

Heading to the base for the mission briefing, he began rehearsing different things he might say to her to break off the affair.

He wouldn’t say them today, probably. But soon. Very, very soon.

11

Sicily

Kharon’s search for Rubeo’s hotel turned out to be much easier than he thought, though as always it was absurdly expensive. He called the man who had arranged to connect the USB device to the maintenance computers; the man called him back inside an hour, while he was still driving. For two thousand euros he learned the American civilians were staying at the Crown Prince, a fancy hotel a few miles from the base.

For another thousand euros he got the floor and room number.

Kharon reserved a room at the hotel without trouble. He studied the layout, and within a half hour had it memorized.

He walked through, placing a dozen miniature video cameras around, giving him a full view of anyone entering or leaving the hotel, and surveying each of the floors.

Sending the images directly to his laptop would have been too easy to trace, so Kharon routed the data through the hotel wireless out to the Internet, then through a set of servers, and had it post to a Web page hosted by a Polish provider. The page was encrypted, but it wouldn’t take a hacker with half the expertise of Rubeo to track it down and eventually decrypt it. For that reason, Kharon resisted the temptation to put extra devices on Rubeo’s floor, and didn’t set up anything to watch specifically for the scientist.

Finished, Kharon went up to his room and took a shower. He decided he would rest—he hadn’t slept for twenty-four hours at least—but once in bed flopped around, unable to sleep. In short order he rose and began stalking the room. Nothing on television interested him, and he was loath to use his laptop to connect to the in-hotel network. He finally decided he would work off some of his excess energy with a walk. Dressing, he went out to the hall and walked down to the elevator. He leaned on the button, then saw from the display above the door that the elevator was all the way downstairs in the lobby.

Better to walk, he decided.

The marble tiles that lined the hallway floor were old and worn, but there were no cracks in them that Kharon could see. This intrigued him—was the marble so thick or perfect that it couldn’t break?

Or was it fake? The overhead lights were not particularly bright. He was tempted to drop down and examine the material.

Marble always cracked. The hotel had to be at least fifty years old. The floor looked original—scuffed and worn, yet no cracks.

The stair treads were made of thick stone, some sort of granite, he guessed.

Obsessing over odd matters was one sign of fatigue. Another was his eyes’ reaction to the light—everything seemed brighter than it was.

There was no door on the stairway where it opened onto the floor above the lobby. Kharon shielded his eyes from the bright light reflected upward from the lobby chandeliers by the mirrored walls below. He started down the steps. Already he was tired—he’d walk once around the building outside, then return quickly and sleep.

He was three-quarters of the way to the bottom of the stairs before his eyes could fully focus. Two men were coming in from the main door to the right. One large and bulky, the other even taller but thinner.

Ray Rubeo.

Rubeo saw the face float above the steps. It transported him back some twenty years to his early days at Dreamland.