Silent Thunder

'You're wrong. I never enjoy depriving women of things they desire. I'm much too primitive.'

'Primitive?'

'From cave days man has instinctively provided for the female.' He smiled as he unwound the earphones. 'Or maybe it's not instinct but the knowledge that they'd be given what they want much more easily if they kept them happy.' He put on the earphones and powered up the player. 'She probably would have appreciated this terrible Euro-rap music far more than I do.' He yanked the earphones and turned off the player.

Hannah reached into the satchel and pulled out an assortment of personal items with Russian-language packaging, including toothpaste, floss, shampoo, and condoms.

She tapped the pack of condoms. 'Someone was planning on a busy stay here.'

'You'd be amazed at the effect a Russian accent can have on young American women. It surprised me.'

'I'm sure you used that as efficiently as you do everything else.'

'I'd be disappointed if I thought I had to rely on anything so trivial,' he said absently as he examined the iPod more closely.

He was right. His appeal was not surface shallow. He was totally adult, totally male, with a potent mixture of both the primitive he had mentioned and sophistication.

She lowered her eyes to the contents of the bag. 'You don't have that much of an accent anyway.'

'Nice jab. What else is in there?'

She pulled out a handheld GPS locator/mapping device, similar to the models used by hikers and campers. She switched it on. 'Conner used one of these. He had the worst sense of direction known to man. If this was used to navigate the user to a specific destination, it may still be in the memory.'

'Good thinking. What do you see?'

Hannah cycled through the options as she glanced through the menu screens. 'Damn. A big fat nothing. All previous destinations have been deleted.'

'Pavski has always been good at covering his tracks, and I'd expect the same from anyone he would hire.' Kirov took the device. 'Still, there's deleted and there's deleted. Just because the operating system doesn't recognize the data doesn't mean it isn't still in there somewhere.'

'How can we tell?'

'I'll give it a once-over with my laptop. If that doesn't work, I have many friends in low places.'

'Of course you do.'

'Anything else?'

Hannah turned the bag upside down and shook it. 'Nothing.'

Kirov leaned back in the car seat and surveyed the objects on their laps. 'Well, these should keep me busy this afternoon while I see what I can find out about this McClary fellow. We'll check into a motel and see what we can come up with.'

Hannah nodded. 'And I need to call Cathy back. She's left four messages on my voice mail.'

What the hell are you doing?' Cathy asked curtly when she picked up the phone.

'I'm doing what we said we were going to do. I'm trying to find out what happened to Conner.'

'I thought we were going to do it together.'

'We are. It's just that it's gotten… complicated.'

She was silent a moment. 'Does complicated really mean dangerous?'

'Ronnie and Donna need you. You can't-'

'Don't tell me what I can or can't do, Hannah. Conner was my husband.'

'I'm sorry.'

'And who the devil is Kirov?'

Hannah went still. 'How do you know about Kirov?'

'A United States congressman sat in my kitchen and told me, that's how. Your buddy Bradworth turned the screws on George to get him to talk to me. They said this man is using you to get what he wants, and he doesn't care if you get hurt or not.'

Tell me something I don't know, Hannah thought. 'Cathy, you have to trust me. I know what I'm doing.'

'Who is this man?'

'He knows the people who killed Conner. He's been after them for a long time.'

'Then why does he need you?'

'The Silent Thunder is at the center of it. I just don't know how yet.'

'Hannah, he isn't who he says he is.'

'What?'

'That's what George wanted me to tell you. George could see I wasn't hopping to do what he wanted, so he called me back this morning after talking to Bradworth and getting new ammunition. Bradworth said you think Kirov's real name is Ivanov?'

'Yes. That's not news, but I'm surprised-'

'Bradworth told George that his director received a phone call from an anonymous informant who said Ivanov was killed by Russian intelligence agents seven years ago.'

Hannah took a long moment to absorb that before speaking. 'Bradworth would have told me.'

'He said the call came in this morning.'

'Convenient. Too convenient. It's his way to smoke me out. He doesn't want me involved with Kirov.'

'I don't want you involved in this, Hannah.'

'I'm already involved. There's more going on here than Bradworth would ever tell us. I'm not going to come back until I find out everything.'

'You really think he's lying?'

'I don't know. It would be an awfully big coincidence that they managed to uncover this about Kirov-make that Ivanov-at this particular time after working with him for years.'

'But he said that-'

'Bradworth is CIA,' Hannah cut in. 'He could make black look white.'

'We're about to find out. George says the CIA has sent a team to try to recover Ivanov's remains, but Bradworth's almost positive the man you're with is not who he says he is. Talk to him.'

'I'm sure he can hear us now. Or he will, when this recording is played back for him.'

Cathy was silent. 'You think he bugged my line?'

'Yes. Good-bye, Cathy.'

Hannah cut the connection. Shit.

She wanted to call Bradworth and grill the hell out of him, but she knew that was exactly what he wanted her to do. He clearly didn't want her working with Kirov, and he'd do or say anything to get his way.

But what if it was true that Ivanov was dead?

Bradworth wasn't above a convenient lie to get what he wanted, but neither was Kirov. Who the hell should she believe?

She slowly rose to her feet.

Well, there was one way to find out. Maybe it was time to put her freakish brain to work.

Her photographic memory had earned her a good deal of attention, dating back to her elementary-school days, when a terrified second-grade teacher was convinced she was channeling the spirits of U.S. soldiers killed in combat. Actually, she was merely showing off, scribbling entire pages from the Letters from Vietnam book she'd seen her father reading the previous evening.

While she always insisted that her talent was insignificant compared to the powers of creativity and reason, it had served her well over the years. If she got a good look at something, she could usually bring it back.

But no one realized it wasn't as easy as just snapping her fingers, she thought ruefully.

She walked over to the desk and sat in the narrow, straight-backed chair. She'd have to concentrate and let herself drift back to the night she arrived in Maine, allowing the sights, sounds, and smells wash over her.

No, that wasn't right. She'd examined the dossiers of the captain and first officer that first night sitting on the pier, but she hadn't glanced through the others until the next evening. She'd looked over the rest of the files while eating dinner alone at a diner down the street from the maritime museum. Conner had wanted to talk to Cathy