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on his face. The other man dropped his gun and voluntarily went down, hands on the back of his head.

"Dammit!" Cole screamed. "Are you hurt? Lucia?"

"No," she said calmly, and walked forward. "If you call an ambulance, you can probably save this one. I think I missed his heart."

Cole - normally so cool and insouciant - looked shocked. She raised her eyes to his, and saw him flinch a little. Seasoned FBI, and he flinched. But then, he didn't know her, did he?

Nobody did.

"Better call it in," she said. "I'll check the rest of the building. These can't be the only bad guys in the place."

"I'm going to hell for this."

"Yeah," she said grimly. "I'll save you a seat."

Chapter Thirteen

There were, in fact, seventeen other people in the building. She didn't have to shoot any of the others; intimidation worked well enough. She herded them into an unused freezer room and locked them up tight.

She was sitting against the door, listening to them batter at it, when Cole came to find her. He'd wiped some of the blood off his face, but that was a broken nose, no question, and it was beginning to swell. He'd have black eyes, too. That had been a hell of a first punch.

"What are you going to say when they get here?" she asked, when he was seated on the concrete with her, back against the door.

"Planning on throwing myself on the mercy of my superiors," he said. "Fuck, Lucia. I ought to know by now that if you're involved, it ain't exactly a fact-finding mission. I mean, I've heard enough stories."

"Stories," she repeated. She felt tired, liquid, as if her body might just drip away.

"You know."

"I don't."

"Is it true what they say about what happened in Prague?

"What do they say happened?" The door behind them rattled with a particularly violent kick. It felt good, rather like a massage.

"Two dozen terrorists, a cache of nerve gas, and you were the only survivor."

"It's not true." It wasn't. There was Gregory Ivanovich, after all. Turncoat and torturer and savior and traitor. God alone knew what he was now, but she had no doubt he knew where she'd gone during the past week, and what had happened to her.

Cole made a doubtful sound. "You should have declared first, by the way."

"Declared what? I'm not FBI. The government doesn't pay me. And in the kind of work I used to do, declaring yourself was stupid." Which was as close as she intended to get to reliving the past, even with Cole. "If I'd taken the time to chat, they'd have killed me. You also."

He sighed and dabbed at his bleeding nose. "Man. I'll be lucky if I get a posting in Antarctica after this."

"Cheer up," she said. "I think you just averted a major terrorist act. Also, there seems to be a clean room behind that door. Biohazard suits hanging from hooks in the airlock. You might have even found the source of the anthrax."

As the sirens came closer, they sat in silence, surveying the big white room with its drums of chemicals and - most ominously - pressurized tanks marked with Poison labels.

"So," Cole said. "If I get my ass fired over this - "

"Always a place for you at Callender & Garza, my friend. Provided we're still open, since we've shot more people in the past couple of days than the KCPD has shot in a couple of years. It might pose a problem."

He shook his head. "You'll be okay. You're a survivor."

They both froze at a sound outside, from the direction of the door, and without any discussion got to their feet and moved to stand on either side of the single doorway to the room.

A hand holding a gun crossed the threshold.

"Freeze!" Lucia yelled, and spun away from the wall. Cole did the same, bracketing the newcomer from an obtuse angle, taking a low line.

"Police!" the other man screamed at the same instant, and Lucia held off on the trigger just by a split second as she recognized the ragged, unshaved, red-eyed face of... Detective Ken Stewart. "Drop the guns, dammit. Drop them!" he ordered.

"FBI," Cole said calmly, and showed his badge and credentials without wavering his aim. "Detective Stewart, right? KCPD?"

"Yes." Stewart stopped trying to cover both of them, and focused solely on Lucia. "Drop it!"

"Jesus! Drop yours!" she retorted hotly. "You know who I am!"

He cocked the hammer on his gun, an unnecessary and theatrical gesture. "First shot cripples you for