then raucous laughter: frat kids, probably Georgetown or GW.
A scuffling sound from the pavement behind her.
She turned to look, felt a sudden gust of air, and a hand was clamped over her mouth.
She tried to scream, but it was stifled beneath the large hand, and she struggled frantically. Roger so close. Maybe a few hundred feet away by then. Close enough to see what was happening to her, if only he’d turn around.
Powerful arms had grabbed her from behind.
She needed to get Roger’s attention, but he obviously couldn’t hear anything at that distance, the scuffling masked by the traffic sounds.
Turn around, damn it! she thought. Good God, please turn around!
“Roger!” she screamed, but it came out a pathetic mewl. She smelled some kind of cheap cologne, mixed with stale cigarette smoke.
She tried to twist her body around, to wrench free, but her arms were trapped, pinioned against the sides of her body, and she felt something cold and hard at her temple, and she heard a click, and then something struck the side of her head, a jagged lightning bolt of pain piercing her eyes.
The foot. Stomp on his foot—some half-remembered martial-arts self-defense class from long ago.
Stomp his instep.
She jammed her left foot down hard, striking nothing, then kicked backwards, hit the Mercedes with a hollow metallic crunch. She tried to pivot, and—
Roger swiveled suddenly, alerted by the sound. He shouted, “Lauren!”
Raced back across the street.
“What the hell are you doing to her?” he screamed. “Why her?”
Something slammed against the back of her head. She tasted blood.
She tried to make sense of what was going on, but she was falling backwards, hurtling through space, and that was the last thing she remembered.
1.
LOS ANGELES
It was a dark and stormy night.
Actually, it wasn’t stormy. But it was dark and rainy and miserable and, for L.A., pretty damned cold. I stood in the drizzle at eleven o’clock at night, under the sickly yellow light from the high-pressure sodium lamps, wearing a fleece and jeans that were soaking wet and good leather shoes that were in the process of getting destroyed.
I’d had the shoes handmade in London for some ridiculous amount of money, and I made a mental note to bill my employer, Stoddard Associates, for the damage, just on general principle.
I hadn’t expected rain. Though, as a putatively high-powered international investigator with a reputation for being able to see around corners, I supposed I could have checked Weather.com.
“That’s the one,” the man standing next to me grunted, pointing at a jet parked a few hundred feet away. He was wearing a long yellow rain slicker with a hood—he hadn’t offered me one back in the office—and his face was concealed by shadows. All I could see was his bristly white mustache.
Elwood Sawyer was the corporate security director of Argon Express Cargo, a competitor of DHL and FedEx, though a lot smaller. He wasn’t happy to see me, but I couldn’t blame him. I didn’t want to be here myself. My boss, Jay Stoddard, had sent me here at the last minute to handle an emergency for a new client I’d never heard of.
An entire planeload of cargo had vanished sometime in the last twenty-four hours. Someone had cleaned out one of their planes at this small regional airport south of L.A. Twenty thousand pounds of boxes and envelopes and packages that had arrived the previous day from Brussels. Gone.
You couldn’t even begin to calculate the loss. Thousands of missing packages meant thousands of enraged customers and lawsuits up the wazoo. A part of the shipment belonged to one customer, Traverse Development Group, which had hired my firm to locate their cargo. They were urgent about it, and they weren’t going to rely on some second-string cargo company to find it for them.
But the last thing Elwood Sawyer wanted was some high-priced corporate investigator from Washington, D.C., standing there in a pair of fancy shoes telling him how he’d screwed up.
The cargo jet he was pointing at stood solitary and dark and rain-slicked, gleaming in the airfield lights. It was glossy white, like all Argon cargo jets, with the company’s name painted across the fuselage in bold orange Helvetica. It was a Boeing 727, immense and magnificent.
An airplane up close is a thing of beauty. Much more awe-inspiring than the view from inside when you’re trapped with the seat of the guy in front of you tilted all the way back, crushing your knees. The jet was one of maybe twenty planes parked in