His lip twitched. "Good night, Caroline."

She turned her back on him, passed through the doorway and between the silent Warriors, and returned to her room. Two minutes later, she was back under the blankets, staring at the play of light across the ceiling and wondering dully if the war games had resumed on the other side of the house.

So it had been for nothing. All of it. Whether Melantha lived or died; whether she or Roger or Fierenzo lived or died or succeeded or failed—none of it mattered. From the very beginning Nikolos had had his plan in place for the Grays' destruction.

And there was nothing she could do to stop him. He was a Command-Tactician; and as Green Laborers and Warriors were the best in their fields, he was surely the best in his. He would have thought of every move that could possibly be made against him, and would already have a contingency in place to counter it.

She took a deep breath, fighting back the despair threatening to drown her. No, she told herself firmly. It hadn't been for nothing. They'd helped keep Melantha alive, at least for a few days, and they'd unearthed this vital bit of information about Damian and gotten Roger back to the outside world with it. That had to be at least moderately disruptive to Nikolos's neat plans. Maybe Roger was talking to the police or the Grays at this very moment, in fact, proposing or cajoling or arguing them into taking some kind of action.

Or maybe he wasn't, she realized with a sinking feeling. Roger, argue someone into action? Hardly.

That would require him to deliberately walk into a confrontation, and he avoided confrontations like the plague itself.

Or did he?

She frowned at the ceiling, the events of the past few days playing across her memory. Roger standing up to Ingvar and Bergan until the two Grays literally forced them off Greenwich Avenue at gunpoint. Roger driving past, around, possibly even through Green Warriors to get out of here and go for help. For that matter, Roger refusing to tell Sylvia or Torvald or Nikolos anything about Melantha in the first place.

Maybe it wasn't that he avoided conflicts because he wasn't man enough to stand up for himself.

Maybe it was simply that he avoided the petty and unnecessary ones, saving his focus for those that were important. Maybe she just hadn't seen him before in a situation where he had to take this kind of aggressive moral stand.

If true, it was something she'd never known about him. But then, perhaps he hadn't realized it about himself. The quiet routine of their normal lives didn't lend itself to heroics, after all. Maybe he'd never before had anything this important to measure himself against.

Throwing off the blankets, she got out of bed and crossed to the chair where she'd put her purse. A

little probing, and she came up with her pen and the pack of chewing gum she kept for the people in her office who seemed perennially in the throes of cigarette withdrawal. The bedroom curtains weren't thick enough to keep out curious eyes, but the bathroom window was made of frosted glass.

Taking the pen and gum in there, she closed the door and turned on the light.

There wasn't a lot of writing space on the silvery paper that came wrapped around a single stick of gum. But years of filling out real estate forms had given her plenty of practice in microscopic writing.

Roger: Damian Groundshaker, ready move on NYC—time unknown. Melantha not here. Sylvia Group Com in charge. Don't bring Grays. I love you, C.

She added their home phone number and laid her pen aside, gazing down at the note. There was so much more she wanted to say to him. So much more she needed to say. But there was no room for inessentials like love and hope and trust. Carefully, she refolded the paper around the gum and slid it back inside its outer wrapper. She would just have to hope that they would both make it through to the other end of this alive, and she could say it in person.

Turning off the light, she left the bathroom and returned the gum and pen to her purse. Then, one final time, she climbed wearily into bed. It was time to get some rest, and to prepare herself for the crucial day ahead.

34

"Well?" Fierenzo asked as the five of them stood beside a tall granite boulder on the edge of the steep hill. "Does it work, or doesn't it?"

"It works, I suppose," Jonah said, sounding a little doubtful as he peered between the trees with a compact set of binoculars. "I can see a corner of the main house, if that's really the Green estate we're looking at down there. If I can see it, we can theoretically get there."

"Pretty bumpy landing from this high up, though," Jordan added, sounding even more doubtful than his older brother. "I'd vote for someplace closer."

"Get too close and you're likely to run into a picket line," Fierenzo warned. "Anyway, there's not going to be any sliding, bumpy or otherwise. You're here to watch and listen and, if necessary, make it sound like we brought a small army with us."

Beside Roger, Laurel shivered. "But that's an absolute last resort," Fierenzo added, glancing at her.

"And only on Roger's direct order."

"Understood," Jonah said. "Be careful."

"Trust me," Fierenzo said wryly. "Okay, Laurel. Your turn."

A few minutes later Laurel was curled in a sort of fetal position inside the Buick's trunk, completely covered by the old emergency blanket Caroline kept back there, the outline of her body camouflaged by the various department store bags Fierenzo had scattered strategically around her. "You okay?" he asked, repositioning the bags one final time.

"I'm fine," her muffled voice came.

"Okay," Fierenzo said. "Remember, now, you're only supposed to listen for Melantha's voice. No calling out on your own. We don't want them spotting you, and we definitely don't want them identifying you."

"I know," she said. "Let's get this over with."

"Right." Closing the lid, Fierenzo headed for the passenger door. "And you two watch yourselves," he added to Jonah and Jordan. "I don't want some Green Warrior sneaking up and sticking a knife in one of you. Let's go, Roger."

Roger got behind the wheel and turned the car back down the winding road toward the main highway below. "You've been pretty quiet the last twenty miles," Fierenzo commented as he drove.

"I've been thinking about some of the things I've said to Caroline in the past few weeks," Roger admitted. "Some of the things I've thought even when I was smart enough not to say anything."

"What sorts of things?"

Roger shook his head. "Oh, I don't know. Sometimes she just doesn't seem to think, I guess. Or we're getting ready to go somewhere and she suddenly heads off to do something at the last minute that she could have done anytime that afternoon."

"Mm," Fierenzo said. "How long have you been married?"

"Four years," Roger told him. "Seems longer sometimes."

Fierenzo chuckled. "Trust me, you're hardly even started. She's a real estate agent, right? You need a certain amount of brainpower to handle a job like that, wouldn't you say?"

"Of course," Roger said. "I didn't mean—"

"She gets along well with people, too?" Fierenzo went on. "Mixes well at parties, puts strangers at their ease—that sort of thing?"

"Yes, that too," Roger agreed.

"Remembers anniversaries and birthdays and when each of her nieces lost their first tooth?"

"Uh... yeah, I think so."

"And she's better at all this than you are?"

Roger grimaced. "Probably."

"Well, see, there's your problem," Fierenzo said. "You just don't understand how your wife thinks."

Roger snorted. "Careful," he said, only half jokingly. "You get tossed into sensitivity training these days for saying things like that."