SIMON FELT THE chill of his old friend Death creeping over him. He wasn’t a man who agonized over his choices; he identified them, analyzed them, and then made the best one and moved on. This choice, however, left the tang of bitterness in his mouth. It wasn’t that he regretted it, because he didn’t, couldn’t. But he didn’t like it at all, didn’t like being forced into it, even though he’d have made the same choice without outside intervention. He would protect Andie, period. That was his bedrock.

He took her back to the Holiday Inn and escorted her to her room; he had to see for himself that she was safely there and that no one had broken in. Then he framed her face with his hands and kissed her, long and slow, letting the taste of her and the feel of her soothe him.

“I have things to do,” he said when he finally lifted his mouth. He wanted to take her straight to bed and lose himself in the hot clasp of her body, but he was nothing if not disciplined. “Don’t wait up for me. I don’t know how long I’ll be.”

Her blue eyes darkened with concern as she stared at him. “Don’t go,” she said suddenly, even though she had no idea what he’d be doing. He’d noticed that her instincts, always sharp, had gone beyond sharpness into another realm, as if she knew things that she couldn’t possibly know. Was she even aware of how much time they spent staring into each other’s eyes, until he sometimes felt their separate identities blur? He didn’t think so. In most ways she was still very much of this world-a little crabby, a little impatient, a lot sexy-but every now and then she went away, not inside her head but somewhere out in the ether, and when she came back she always looked a little more radiant.

However it had come about, she read him better than anyone ever had, as if she had an inside track to his head.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he said, kissing her again. “Wait for me. Don’t let those FBI assholes talk you into anything before I get back. Promise me.”

Her brows snapped together and she opened her mouth to blast him for demanding a promise from her when he wouldn’t honor her request. He laid a finger across her mouth, his eyes crinkling at the corners in amusement. “I know,” he said. “Promise me anyway.”

She narrowed her eyes at him, then turned to look at the clock. “Give me a definite time. I’m not buying that ‘I have things to do, I don’t know how long I’ll be’ crap. Two hours? Five?”

“Twenty-four,” he said.

“Twenty-four!”

“It’s a definite time limit. Now promise.” Twenty-four hours wasn’t a stretch, either; he’d need every one of them. “This is important to me. I need to know you’re safe.” That got to her, because she loved him. She loved him. The unreality of it shook him, yet the rightness of it went straight to his core.

Because she loved him, she grudgingly said, “All right, I promise,” even though she didn’t like it one little bit. He kissed her again and left, standing out in the hall until he heard her chain the door and turn the deadlock. By the time he got to the elevator, he’d already placed the most crucial call of all.

“This is Simon,” he said when Scottie answered the phone. “I need a favor, probably the last one ever.”

“Whatever you need,” said Scottie promptly, because it was due only to Simon that his daughter was alive. “And it’s your call whether or not it’s the last one. I’m always here, for whatever you need.”

He explained what he needed. Scottie thought a minute, then said, “You got it.”

That taken care of, he began analyzing the situation more minutely. The two things you needed in order to kill someone were a weapon and the opportunity. All the other details fell into one of those two main categories. Getting a weapon was no problem; getting an untraceable weapon, and a good one, was easy if he had enough time, but time was the one commodity he didn’t have. Normally he would spend days working out the details, the logistics. This had to be done fast, then he would grab Andie and get out of the country while he could.

That pissed him off, too. He didn’t like being forced to leave his country, and he knew going into this that he might never be able to return. If he worked everything just right, maybe. Only time would tell.

If he’d maintained his apartment in the same building as Salinas, he wouldn’t have any problem, but he’d let it go months ago and relocated to San Francisco. Likewise he didn’t have time to establish Salinas’s routine, so he’d have to initiate the meeting. Drawing him out wouldn’t be a problem, because Salinas had already been trying to contact him about another hit. Now he’d never know what big scheme Salinas had going on, he thought, then gave a mental shrug because it didn’t matter. Salinas wouldn’t live to see it through. Somewhere in the world, someone would live another day.

He’d have to do a street hit, which greatly increased the risks. On the plus side was the weather, which was still cool enough that coats were needed. On the minus side was that he’d not only have to carry his weapon, but adding a sound suppressor to it greatly increased the weapon’s visibility by doubling the length.

Having to suppress the sound added all sorts of complications to his plans. To begin with, using a pistol meant he had to be close, and Salinas was always surrounded by his men. Because of how their mechanisms worked, a suppressor could turn a semiautomatic pistol into a single-shot weapon by preventing the slide from unlocking, but because a pistol meant close work, he had to have more than one shot available to him, in case one or more of Salinas’s men were trained well enough to function through the surprise and initial confusion. He’d need an advanced suppressor that overcame that problem, or he’d have to use a different type of weapon.

The more the sound was suppressed, the harder it would be for them to pinpoint the location of the shooter. He’d go with a smaller caliber weapon, he thought, a blowback design with a fixed barrel; they were more effectively suppressed. He’d never yet seen a real weapon that could be suppressed to Hollywood standards, but with all the street noise added in, the resultant sound wouldn’t immediately be recognized as gunfire. Most bystanders would have no idea they’d heard a shot, at least at first, because it was neither the soft “spit” of what they’d heard in movies, or the sharp crack of unsuppressed gunfire. When Salinas fell and his men grabbed for him, the bystanders would be confused, and they’d either mill around watching or they’d rubber-neck but keep walking. Salinas’s men would pay more attention to the walkers, figuring the shooter would be among them, trying to slip away. Instead he would be right there in the middle of them, under their noses.

Between now and then, however, he had a gargantuan number of tasks to accomplish.

A LITTLE AFTER noon, Rafael Salinas emerged from his apartment building, surrounded by his usual coterie of seven men. His driver was parked at the curb, motor running. One guy, his long hair tied back with a thin strip of leather, came out first, his head swiveling in all directions. He surveyed the street and the pedestrian traffic, though most of his attention was reserved for cars. Seeing nothing suspicious, without turning around he gave a brief nod of his head, and seven more men exited the building: Rafael Salinas walking in the middle of six men who used their bodies to block sidewalk traffic so Salinas could go in a direct path from the door of the building to the open door of his car. People stalled, tried to side-step, growled “Get out of the way!” or worse, all of which was ignored. One bent old guy with a cane lurched a little off-balance.

A bus rumbled by and there was a barely audible pop over the roar of the diesel engine. Rafael Salinas stumbled, his hand going out as if to catch himself. A second pop, right on the heels of the first, made several people look curiously around, wondering what that noise was. Salinas went down, a red spray arcing from his throat.