"Look, I have questions for this guy, too. And obviously so does Norton. But we both know it's more than that for you. He's stolen from you, and now he's trying to use you."

"Don't you think I know that?"

"Then let Norton handle him. There's no reason why you have to go."

"I need to talk to Tavak. If there's even a possibility he was telling the truth in his message to me, I would—"

"I know. I know. I just don't want you to get hurt."

She made a face. "Funny thing to say to a woman after she's just been picked off by a high-powered rifle."

"You know what I mean."

"I do know, Simon. And I appreciate it. But I have to do this, and I need you to finish plugging the data leaks in our system and find any backdoors Tavak set up. I promised to bring Norton back up to a hundred percent immediately."

"How are you going to pull that off?"

"Beats me. But I have a long plane ride to think about it."

"What can I do to help?"

"I don't trust the info Norton is feeding me about John Tavak. I want you to tap into the CIA and Interpol and see what you can find out."

"That's not going to be easy. It would take an Einstein to get past the firewalls they've put up against security breaches." He added slyly, "Who do you think I am? John Tavak?"

"I hope not. I don't need another Tavak to deal with. Just do your best."

"And my best will be superb," Simon said. "Anything else?"

"I still haven't heard from Dr. Carson at Allie's foundation about his opinion on the information regarding the cell regeneration that Tavak sent me. I told him to contact you while I was in flight."

He shook his head. "And you're going without even knowing if that cure has even the slightest possibility of being legitimate?"

"I'm not going to have regrets about not moving fast enough. There's no time." Not for Tavak. Not for Allie. "One last favor. Allie. Watch over her. Try to keep her from worrying about me."

"Did you tell her you were leaving?"

She shook her head. "I'll call her from Cairo. I thought maybe you could—"

"Coward."

"Yes." Her pace quickened. "What could I say? Raise her hopes about a cure when Tavak may be playing me for a sucker? Tell her I'm going to throw in with a criminal on the faint chance that he can help her?"

"No, she'd feel guilty as hell." He paused. "Because we both know you're doing something crazy."

"Crazy or not, I'm doing it." She stopped and turned to face him. She had to steady her voice. "Allie's showing signs of fading. I won't let her go. I don't care if it's a wild-goose chase. There's nothing I won't do to keep her alive."

"Rachel."

"And don't look at me like that. I don't want pity. I want help. Give it to me, Simon."

"You've got it." He cleared his throat. "I'll take care of her as much as she'll let me. But in that gentle way, she's as tough as you. I don't know which one I'd dread most being up against."

"Me," Rachel said. "E-mail me anything you can find out about Tavak." She took her garment bag from him, turned away, and headed for the security gates. "Or I'll call you from Cairo."

ARDMORE UNIVERSITY

11:20 A.M.

The news was blaring on the radio when Detective Finley drove onto the campus.

Dammit, the local media was playing the event like any other campus shooting, the work of a random psychopath. Hundreds of parents had converged on the campus to take their children home, and although the school was still open, classes were running at only a 70 percent attendance level.

Finley didn't think there was anything random about the shooting. There had been only one shot. One target. When the shooter thought he'd put Kirby down, he'd gotten the hell away without anyone seeing him.

Definitely not your typical blow-the-hell-out-of-everybody-and-everything-and-finish-with-the-gun-in-your-mouth campus attack. When had schools replaced postal-sorting facilities as the rampaging psychopath's venue of choice?

Finley parked in front of the large white trailer that served as the Ardmore University campus police headquarters. He hopped up the three short steps and opened the door into a sterile reception area. Before he could speak to the receptionist, Gonzalez appeared in a doorway.

"I just came from the hospital," Finley said. "Rachel Kirby checked herself out."

"What?"

"Against doctor's orders. No one seems to know where she is."

Gonzalez sighed. "Great. I'm not doing any better. Come back and take a look."

Finley followed him down a narrow hallway to a dim A/V center, where two security officers watched a bank of a dozen monitors. Every few moments, each monitor changed to a different view of the campus.

Gonzalez motioned to one of the officers, a petite young woman with round wire-rimmed spectacles. "This is Tricia Denton. She was here when Rachel Kirby was shot. And, no, she's not a witness."

Finley shook her hand. "You didn't see anything?"

"Not until Dr. Kirby fell." Tricia gestured to her control panel. "I was able to pan and zoom every camera in the area, but I couldn't find the shooter."

"He probably blended in with the students coming and going. We'll need to comb through each one of your feeds. You do record them, don't you?"

"Each video-camera feed goes to an array of hard drives. It's automatically kept for forty-eight hours, but within that time we can preserve any recordings indefinitely."

"Tell me you did that."

"Of course. The minute we realized what had happened, we locked all the recordings down." The woman and Detective Gonzalez shared a quick look.

Trouble. "So what's the problem?"

Gonzalez grimaced. "The recordings are gone."

"What?"

"They're gone. Wiped clean."

Finley turned back to Tricia. "How?"

"I don't know. We lost six camera feeds from three different hard drives. Only in the area where your shooter was."

"The recorders were sabotaged?"

Tricia bit her lip. "If they were, someone sure knew how to cover their tracks. The machines are in a locked closet at the end of the hall. The closet door and the recorders don't appear to have been tampered with. And the recorders work fine—it's just that we're missing everything from a few hours before and after the shooting. Whoever did it had to know just what machines to target."

Finley cursed under his breath. "Who has access to that closet?"

Gonzalez answered. "Only the head of campus security. I've already talked to one of our tech guys, and he's clueless as the rest of us. He's familiar with this system, and he says no one could have done this without some high-level know-how. He says that even the company that designed it might have a problem pulling this off."

Finley pulled out his phone. "Okay. Then let's have somebody take a closer look at those machines. If it really takes high-level know-how, there can't be that many people capable of it. Let's figure out who could have done it and where they could have learned."

"Gotcha."

"And let's look at the camera feeds that were knocked out. If nothing else, it tells us where the shooter didn't want us to see. We'll focus our canvass on those areas and see if anybody saw something."