It rang five times before someone picked up. ?Hello??
?This is Jamaal 1-2-3.?
?One moment.? Shuffling papers. Taps at a keyboard. ?What seems to be the problem?? A slight accent. Perhaps Eastern European.
?I was seen.? Jamaal explained what had happened.
?I understand.?
The voice asked Jamaal a few questions. Who were the three men? Jamaal didn?t know. What did they look like? Early twenties. American. Two with dark hair, one with lighter brown hair and pale skin. He described their clothes.
?I wasn?t supposed to be seen. If the authorities learn that??
?It will be taken care of.?
Jamaal said, ?But it?s important that??
?I said it will be taken care of. You must go about your business. Forget the three men. Proceed as planned. Leave the rest to me.? He hung up.
The conversation?s abrupt end surprised Jamaal. He blinked, shrugged, hung up the phone. He stood there a full minute pondering his situation. His mission depended on his ability to blend into the scenery, where he would slowly go about collecting the materials he needed. And in a month or three or a year, when everything was in place, he would strike at the Great Satan for the glory of Allah. But if the American FBI or CIA knew an Arab had been smuggled into the country, they would scour the city looking for him. The witnesses had to be eliminated and quickly, before they could alert anyone.
All he could do was trust the voice on the phone and get on with his work. He shouldered the duffel and walked casually into the asphalt anonymity of New York City.
* * *
The man with the vaguely Eastern European accent had a name, but it didn?t matter what it was. He sat in a small room filled with filing cabinets and computers and fax machines and telephones. It didn?t matter where the room was. His office was the world.
He contemplated the problem of Jamaal 1-2-3.
It didn?t matter one iota to the man if Jamaal?s mission failed or not. What mattered to him was his own reputation and the fact that upset clients could be potentially dangerous. In this business, reputation was everything. He was a kind of broker. He made connections, put people with other people. Filled in gaps. He?d promised Jamaal?s organization a completely covert insertion. Now he had a mess to clean up. It was the bane of his profession that he had to rely occasionally on local people to execute the details of his operation. Now he had to send someone to make things right. Going local again would likely compound the problem. He needed someone good. He needed the best.
He picked up the phone, the special secure line, and dialed the number for the most dangerous woman in the world.
2
At that moment, in the middle of the night, the most dangerous woman in the world clung to the tiled roof of a villa in Tuscany, where she worked to circumvent the alarm system on a large skylight. If she could do that, she?d open the skylight, drop inside, and kill a Colombian named Pablo Ramirez.
For five years she had called herself Nikki Enders. This wasn?t her real name, of course, but she had a British passport and a ream of other paperwork that said she was Nikki Enders, and no one ever disputed her. She had a Swiss bank account that had millions of dollars of Nikki Enders?s money in it. Nikki Enders enjoyed a staggeringly expensive home in London, and another three-story house in the Garden District of New Orleans. She wished she could spend more time there. She also had a dozen passports in safety-deposit boxes scattered around the world and could stop being Nikki Enders at a moment?s notice.
But tonight, in Tuscany, Pablo Ramirez would run afoul of Nikki Enders.
Ramirez meant nothing to Nikki. Alive. Dead he was worth five million dollars. She didn?t know who wanted him dead or why. She didn?t care. This was simply Nikki?s job. She fumbled with a pair of alligator clips, squinted at the wires that connected the alarm system. She hated working in the dark.
The cell phone clipped to her belt vibrated against her hip. She flinched, reached back, and turned it off. She
