sight of Sophia that same unfathomable smile. It roared into the crowded streets of Rome, leaving Nina standing there, utterly lost, as police sirens rose in the distance.
THIRTEEN
Maryland
The house overlooking the Potomac River had once been Victor Dalton’s vacation retreat. Since the divorce, it had become his home, and his ex-wife had made it very clear that he was lucky to have kept even that. A small part of him couldn’t really blame her for the angry separation—he had, after all, been caught on video in flagrante with a woman who was not only someone else’s wife at the time, but also turned out to be the mastermind behind a terrorist plot against the United States.
The rest of him, however, still burned with fury at the injustice. All his achievements as president had been obliterated from the public mind by that one lapse of judgment, and he had been hounded out of office. The holder of the most powerful position on the planet could not be a man whose defining moment was rated NC-17.
Sitting alone in his kitchen, Dalton clapped down his glass with a bang that echoed like a gunshot. As it faded, the thought occurred that his Secret Service bodyguards—even disgraced presidents were still entitled to protection for ten years after leaving office, though his team was considerably smaller than that of his more honored predecessors—probably wouldn’t even bother to leave their surveillance trailer to investigate the noise. Though they were always stone-faced and professional in their duties, he was sure they mocked him behind his back.
He knew exactly who was to blame for his expulsion from power: Nina Wilde and Eddie Chase. He had personally awarded them the Presidential Medal of Freedom for their role in saving New York from nuclear attack—and they had repaid him by plastering the Sophia Blackwood video all over the Internet. Merely thinking about them made his jaw clench with involuntary anger.
And to make matters worse … they had somehow survived the events in Japan.
At least Takashi was dead. That was one small diamond in the mound of shit. The Group would endure his loss, of course, but it would cause them considerable disruption.
The Group. Another silent snarl. They had helped put him into the White House, and could have kept him there; they possessed the influence to have swayed the media and other politicians back behind him. But instead they had left him to flounder in the Washington piranha tank.
Bastards! Well, they’d regret that decision. It was a shame he didn’t dare let them know that he had been a part of that payback … but he valued his freedom, and his life even more.
He swallowed the last slug of bourbon, then stood. It was approaching midnight, and the habit of late nights and early mornings developed in years of public office was hard to break, even with no work waiting for him the next day. He shook his head. Victor Dalton, unemployed! The word was like a personal insult. But nobody would touch him, even former friends who should by all rights have been offering him board seats and lucrative consultancy posts failing to return his calls. “Cocksuckers,” he muttered, heading upstairs.
In his bedroom, Dalton disrobed and went into the adjoining bathroom. He was supposed to wear a panic button on a thong around his neck at all times, but the damn thing only got in the way while he was washing, so he put it with his watch on a shelf and pulled the curtain on the shower cubicle. A quick burst of hot water and creamy suds helped ease his tension a little. He toweled himself down before donning a bathrobe, then reached for the panic button.
It wasn’t there.
He stared at the shelf. His watch was exactly where he had left it, but the teardrop-shaped device was gone. No sign of it on the floor. Confusion growing, he returned to the bedroom, wondering if it had somehow fallen and bounced into there …
“Lookin’ for this?” said a voice.
Dalton froze in petrified shock. Eddie Chase, bearded and scruffy, sat casually in a chair, the panic button in one hand—and a silenced gun in the other.
It took a couple of seconds for Dalton to force out any words. “How—how did you get in here?” he croaked. “How did you get past the Secret Service?”
“By being bloody good at what I do.” There was dirt on the Englishman’s dark clothing: he had crept and crawled through the grounds to reach the