Connie Hall: Flashpoint

From: Delphi@oracle.org

To: C_Evans@athena.edu

Re: demolitions expert, Lucy Karmon

Christine,

I think we’ve cornered Arachne. With the information from Diviner’s computer hacks, we’ve pinpointed a potential home base in Cape town, South Africa. It’s tricky politics down there, but Lucy Karmon has what it takes for this mission. Your recommendation was spot on.

Not only does she know the land and the people from her years in South Africa with her mother, but she’s got a history of breaking the rules, especially when she feels the end is justified. This is one of those times. As you know, we’ll do anything to take down Arachne’s web.

I’ll make contact with Lucy today.

D.

Dear Reader,

What a blast it was writing such an exciting, nonstop, action-adventure as Flashpoint. The story had a fluid movement that kept me glued to the keyboard, and the words just flowed. When it came to the ending, I actually suffered a week of depression, because I didn’t want to let Lucy or Nolan go.

It was so exciting to watch their love story unfold amid the danger they both faced. And what a neat setting for them to fall in love! Africa, with its unforgiving harshness and its alluring beauty. It truly is a melting pot of all cultures, and that’s what made researching Cape Town so special to me. There is no other place on Earth quite like it.

I can never do Africa the justice it deserves—no written word can—but I hope I’ve painted enough mental pictures to pique your interest. Maybe one day you’ll journey to Cape Town and think of Lucy and Nolan during your own adventures.

Hope to see you there!

Best wishes and happy reading,

Connie Hall

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Award-winning author Connie Hall is a full-time writer. Her credits include six historical novels and two novellas written under the pen name Constance Hall. She’s written two action-adventure novels, Rare Breed and Flashpoint. Currently, she is working on The Guardian for Silhouette Nocturne. Her novels are sold worldwide.

An avid hiker, conservationist, bird-watcher, painter of watercolors and oil portraits, she dreams of one day trying her hand at skydiving. She lives in Richmond, Virginia, with her husband, two sons, and Keeper, a lovable Lab-mix who rules the house with her big brown eyes. For more information, visit Connie’s Web site at home.comcast.net/~koslow or e-mail her at koslow@erols. com.

Special thanks to Natashya Wilson, Stacy Boyd

and all the editorial staff at Harlequin,

all Bombshells in their own right.

As ever, thanks to Anne and Camelot.

Couldn’t live without you guys. And to

Norm and the boys, for your support and for never

complaining about the number of hours I spend at

my computer. You’ll always be my heroes!

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Epilogue

Tijuana, Mexico, Twenty years ago

The icy cold of the operating room soaked through the flimsy sheet, oozed through the hospital gown and bled right down to Jan Strafford’s bones. Her teeth chattered from the cold. Odd thing was, she was sweating all over. Must be a case of nerves.

Muzak played from a speaker in the ceiling. Was it Beethoven? She’d hate “Für Elise” for the rest of her life. She could see windows in the ceiling and an observation gallery beyond the windows. Was it empty—no, wait. A shadow loomed across one window, but she couldn’t see the person. The person must have been sitting in the last row of the gallery, beyond her view. She felt like a specimen being opened for a biology lab, for one special student.

The smell of disinfectant clung to her nostrils like a cloying fog. Why had she agreed to this? Why had she watched that HBO documentary on plastic surgeries gone bad? She could end up maimed, or worse. The doctor had reassured her facial reconstruction was a breeze, an outpatient procedure. But it wasn’t him lying on the table, shivering, sweating every second. The hell with it. She was desperate. She owed several powerful men large sums of money. This was her way out.

A door opened and the nurse anesthetist entered the room carrying a menacing-looking tray. Overhead fluorescent lights gleamed off the glass drug vials and syringes. The end of a rubber tourniquet hung over the tray’s edge. The nurse wore a clinical blank face, a lot like her white coat. Not a hint of compassion in her expression.

Jan felt her palms sweating as she dug her fingers into the sheet covering. The gold charm bracelet she had insisted upon wearing during the operation clanked against the metal gurney, the Victorian ornaments rattling like bones. She’d had the bracelet since her twelfth birthday and never took it off. It was her talisman, her good luck charm. Boy, she needed it now.

“I must see both arms, por favor.” The nurse looked at the veins on the inside of her arms, then the backs of her hands. She grunted under her breath, grabbed Jan’s right arm and tied a tourniquet around her bicep.

“Relax, señorita, just a little stick,” the nurse said.

Jan glanced up at the shadow above her head. It seemed to grow darker and larger, a monstrous thing, many legs spreading all across the observation windows.

Just as the shadow began to emerge in the gallery window, she felt the prick of the needle, the metal forcing its way into a vein. Her last coherent thought was she’d never look the same again. Then searing fire coursed through her mind.

Puerto Isla

Lucy Karmon, still clutching the remote detonator, stared through the special fiber-optic scope at the burning meth lab below her. Pieces of the structure mushroomed into a spectacular cinder cloud, two hundred feet of it, masking the night sky.

On the ground, the rebels responsible for supplying Puerto Isla with everything from black tar heroin to Jamaican sinsemilla ran for their lives. Some men, their clothes aflame, dove into a stream at the bottom of a ravine.

Mesmerized, she watched the symphony of destruction opening up before her. This is where she thrived, in the middle of uproar, mayhem, a world on the brink; a world she created and controlled. It touched a chord within her, an odd inner peace, a place that she desperately craved. Her mind settled into the calm and grew still. She observed the fallout, the wind shift, the added perk that she’d taken out the van and old Pontiac Bonneville parked near the building. Mission accomplished. Target annihilated. But what could she have done better? Less fallout, perhaps. That equaled less C-4. Maybe she should have used Danubit or Semtex explosive. But she’d been correct in avoiding TNT. Too volatile and subject to the high humidity on the island.