Thomas Hoover - Project Daedalus

But for all that, he wasn't an assassin. For him to do what he'd done tonight could only mean one thing: he was terrified. Very out of character. But why?

The answer to that wasn't hard: He must be mixed up in Project Daedalus, whatever it was, right up to his shifty eyeballs. But what about Michael? What did Alex want from him?

The answer to that could go a lot of ways. When she first met Michael Vance, Jr., she'd been smitten by the fact he was so different. Always kidding around, yet tough as steel when anybody crossed him. A WASP street fighter. She liked that a lot. He was somebody she felt she could depend on, no matter what.

She still remembered her first sight of Mike as though it were yesterday. She was taking notes on Etruscan pottery in a black notebook, standing in a corner of the Yale art gallery on Chapel Street, when she looked up and-no, it couldn't be. She felt herself just gawking.

He'd caught her look and strolled over with a puzzled smile. "Is my tie crooked, or-" Then he laughed. "Name's Mike Vance. I used to be part of this place. How about you?"

"Vance?" She'd just kept on staring, still not quite believing her eyes. "My thesis adviser at Penn was… you look just like him."

And he did. The same sharp chin, the same twinkle in the blue eyes. Even when he was angry, as Mike certainly had been that day, he seemed to be having fun.

Thus it began.

At first they were so right for each other it seemed as though she'd known Michael Vance for approximately a hundred years, give or take. She'd been one of his father's many ardent disciples, and after finishing her master's at Penn, she'd gone on to become a doctoral candidate at Yale, where she'd specialized in the linguistics of the ancient Aegean languages. She'd known but forgotten that Michael Vance, Sr., had a son who was finishing his own doctorate at Yale, writing a dissertation about Minoan Crete.

That day in the museum he was steaming, declaring he'd dropped by one last time as part of a ritualistic, formal farewell to archaeology. The decision was connected with the hostile reception being given a book he'd just published, a commercial version of his dissertation. As of that day he'd decided to tell academia to stuff it. He'd be doing something else for a living. There'd been feelers from some agency in D.C. about helping trace hot money.

In the brief weeks that followed they grew inseparable, the perfect couple. One weekend they'd scout the New England countryside for old-fashioned inns, the next they'd drive up to Boston to spend a day in the Museum of Fine Arts, then come back and argue and make love till dawn in her New Haven apartment. During all those days and nights, she came very close to talking him out of quitting university life. Close, but she didn't.

He had put off everything for a couple of months, and they had traveled the world-London, Greece, Morocco, Moscow. Once their parents even met, at Count Sergei Borodin's sprawling Oyster Bay home. It was a convocation of the Russian Nobility Association, with three hundred guests in attendance, and the air rang with Russian songs and balalaikas. Michael Vance, Sr., who arrived in his natty bowler, scarcely knew what to make of all the Slavic exuberance.

Shortly after that, the intensity of Michael became too much for her. She felt herself being drawn into his orbit, and she wanted an orbit of her own. The next thing she knew, he'd departed for the Caribbean; her father had died; and she'd gone back to work on her own doctorate.

Michael. He was driven, obsessive, always determined to do what he wanted, just as she was. But the tension that likeness brought to their relationship those many years ago now made everything seem to click. Why? she wondered.

Maybe it was merely as simple as life cycles. Maybe back then they were just out of synch. He'd already survived his first midlife crisis, even though he was hardly thirty. When they split up, she'd been twenty-five and at the beginning of a campaign to test herself, find out what she could do.

Well, she thought, she'd found out. She was good, very good. So now what?

She was relieved to see the car was still parked on the side street, actually a little alley, where she'd left it. Thinking more clearly now, she realized she'd been a trifle careless, stashing the car in the first location she could find and then running for Zeno's.

As she headed down the alley in between the white plaster houses, she suddenly felt her heart stop. Someone was standing next to the Saab, a dark figure waiting. She watched as it suddenly moved briskly toward her.

Alex Novosty.

"What?" She couldn't believe her eyes.

"Budetya ostorozhyi!" He whispered the warning as he raised his hand and furtively tried to urge her back.

"Kak! Shto-?" She froze. "How did you find the car?"

"The hotel. They directed us to a kafeneion near here, but then I noticed your car. I thought…" He moved out of the shadows, quickly, still speaking in Russian. "Just tell me where you have the copies of the protocol, quickly. Maybe I can still handle it."

"Handle what?" That's when she saw the two other men, in dark overcoats, against the shadow of the building.

"The… situation." His eyes were intense. "They want it back, all copies. I've tried to tell them that killing you won't solve anything, but-" He glanced back with a small shiver. "You must tell them Michael has a copy, stall them."

"It's true. He does."

"No! Then say there's a copy back in your office. Just let me try and-"

"Alex, I'm not going to play any more of your games."

"Please," he continued in a whisper, "don't contradict anything I say. Let me do the talking. I'll-"

"You're in it with them, aren't you?" She tried to push past. "Well, you can tell your friends we're onto their 'project.' If anything happens to me, Michael will track them down and personally take them apart. Tell them that."

"You don't understand." He caught her arm. "One of their people was killed tonight."

"The one trying to shoot Michael and me, you mean?" She was trying to calm the quaver in her voice.

"He was killed by the KGB. I had nothing to do with-"

"Is that what you told them?"

"That's the way it happened. There was an argument."

"Over what?"

"Everybody wants you. It's the protocol." His look darkened. "Eva, they are in no mood for niceties."

"Neither am I." She noticed the two men were now moving toward them. One was taller and seemed to be in charge, but they both were carrying what looked like small-caliber automatic weapons.

The protocol, whatever it was, was still in code. She didn't know what she didn't know. How could she bargain?

It was too late to think about it now. Their faces were hard and smooth, with the cold eyes of men who killed on command. My God, she thought, what had Michael said about the Mino-gumi?

The Japanese mob.

The taller man, she was soon to learn, was Kazuo Ina- gawa, who had been a London-based kobun for the Mino-gumi for the past decade. He had a thin, pasty face and had once been first kobun for their entire Osaka organization, in charge of gambling and nightclub shakedowns. Even in the early dawn light, he wore sunglasses, masking his eyes.

The shorter one was Takahashi Takenaka, whose pockmarked face was distinguished by a thin moustache, an aquiline nose, and the same sunglasses.

Alex, she realized, must have lied to them, covering up what really happened out at the palace. Now he was bluffing for his life.

"You can just tell them I don't know anything about it." She felt the cold air closing in.

"Eva, that's impossible. They know you were given the protocol. Now where is it?"

He clearly wanted her to say it was somewhere else. But why bother?

"It's in the car. In my purse." She pointed. "Why don't they just go ahead and take it? By the way, it's still encrypted."