“Charity! Where are you, girl?”

Mrs. Lambert’s sensible boots made a clomping sound on the library’s ancient hardwood floor. Charity could follow every step she was making. She was checking the periodicals room, the reading room. A discreet knock on the lavatory door.

There was only one place left to check.

“Wipe that grin off your face,” she said in a fierce whisper, hopping over to her missing shoe, straightening her skirt, combing her hair out with her fingers. Nick obediently assumed a serious expression, biting his lips not to smile. His eyes were full of amusement, though.

It was quite all right for him to be amused. He’d be leaving soon. Charity was going to spend the rest of her life here, and Mrs. Lambert was the biggest gossip in town.

Charity even had a morals clause in her contract, which had amused her when she’d signed it, the idea of infringing the morals clause of her employment contract as remote as the thought of flying to Pluto.

Nick cleared his throat and she leaped to cover his mouth with her hand. His eyes gleamed at her. The devil.

“Not a word,” she said fiercely. “Not one word!”

When she dropped her hand, he mimed zipping his mouth. His smiling mouth, the scoundrel.

“Charity, my dear. Where on earth are you?” The boots clumped closer.

Charity checked her skirt, smoothed it out, fanned herself quickly in an attempt to cool down and winced at the thought of her kiss-swollen lips, and of being naked under the skirt. She was sure the smell of hot sex surrounded her like a cloud.

Well, there was nothing for it but to brazen it through. She lifted her head and took in a deep breath.

Showtime, she thought and opened the door, closing it quickly behind her.

“Why Mrs. Lambert,” she said. “What a pleasant surprise. What can I do for you?”

Vassily Worontzoff’s mansion

Thursday evening, November 24

The instant Nick walked up the granite steps and walked through the huge door of Worontzoff’s crib—palace would be a better word—every hair on his body stood on end.

There was no visible reason for it. No reason at all why his blood was running cold. No reason for the adrenalin dump.

Everyone streaming up the steps and into the house was elegant and wealthy. Solid citizens. Culture mavens.

The buzz of well-bred voices echoed around the huge foyer, mixed with the murmur of well-trained servants taking coats, offering drinks, pointing toward a big reception hall.

Nick recognized the governor of Vermont, two senators from big states, a high-tech tycoon, and a famous movie director. Everyone else looked like they were famous. Average age fifty, average income several million dollars per annum on up.

This was it.

He was in the belly of the beast.

This was when Nick shone. He was at his best in extremis, close to the heart of the danger. He’d been here before, often. It was the whole point of being undercover, to get close to the unprotected center, as an insider.

It was when that internal mechanism he’d been born with revved up, the one that gave him the moniker Iceman. It was like a sixth gear and once it kicked in, his thoughts, sight, and hearing were enhanced. He was preternaturally aware of his surroundings, his entire body turned into a quick-response machine. He could be cool and calm on the outside while on the inside, his head was working its way through the complex geometry of betrayal.

While all the smug, self-satisfied elegant folk were eating Worontzoff’s hors d’oeuvres and drinking his French champagne, congratulating themselves on being invited into the great man’s home, Nick took stock.

Ninety-five percent of the people here were as clueless as lambs right up to the moment of slaughter. They had no idea what they’d walked into.

They thought they were among their own kind. They weren’t. They were with monsters.

It was amazing to him. How people could be around predators and not feel that they were different.

One elderly gent with an ebony cane topped by a silver orb took a drink off a tray offered by one of Worontzoff’s minions. He didn’t notice the barbed-wire tattoo visible under the snowy white cuff or the slight bulge under the left armpit of the man holding the tray. No doubt the goon had a backup in an ankle holster and a knife in a hip sheath. Not to mention a garrote in the fancy cummerbund.

He was an operator, no doubt about that. Steel gray crew cut, knife scar along the jawline, in his fifties and fitter than any twenty-year-old could ever hope to be.

And Clueless Geezer happily lifting a drink from the tray Crew Cut held, unaware that with one word from Worontzoff, Crew Cut would rip his throat out. Jesus.

Nick knew, though. He’d been around people like Crew Cut all his life and every sense he had was on high alert.

So he walked around with a hand to Charity’s back, not as a gentleman would, to guide her gently and stake his claim, but because he was ready at any moment to shove her to the ground and pull out his Glock at the first sign of danger.

“Charity! My dear, so good to see you.” Nick stiffened as Worontzoff pulled himself away from a little gaggle of politicians, rich men, and journalists across the room to limp slowly toward Charity.

Nick could see the men and women Worontzoff had been talking to craning their necks to see who could possibly be more important than they were.

Nick had watched Worontzoff through his spotting scope and had studied hundreds of photographs. The photographs didn’t do Worontzoff justice.

He wasn’t tall—Nick was a full head taller—but he had an animal, magnetic presence that turned heads and stopped conversations. If you didn’t look at his hands, he could even be considered a handsome man, with a leonine head of graying blond hair, light blue eyes, and high Slav cheekbones.

He made a beeline for Charity in his odd gait, ignoring everyone who tried to engage his attention as he crossed the huge room.

Charity was pink with pleasure, since she was so obviously the center of the Great Man’s attention. There was a little buzz of Who is she? and then Worontzoff was right in front of her, bending to give her a little buss on the cheek.

Nick’s jaws clenched but there was nothing he could do about it without looking like a boor. It was a fatherly kiss, though there was absolutely nothing fatherly about Worontzoff’s face when he straightened.

“My dear, you’re looking positively radiant! More beautiful than ever. What have you been doing?”

The tone was coy, but the glance he shot Nick was sharp as a saber. He knew perfectly well what she’d been doing and why she was glowing.

Charity held on to Nick’s arm. “Vassily, I’d like to introduce you to my friend, Nicholas Ames.”

Worontzoff smiled right into Nick’s eyes. They were clear as glass and just as cold. “Well, Mr. Ames, it is indeed a pleasure to meet you. Any friend of Charity’s is a friend of mine, as the saying goes. You will forgive me if I don’t shake hands with you.” He held up one shattered hand, mottled red and crisscrossed with scars. “I had…a little run-in once with a prison guard.”

Don’t worry, you fuckhead. I wouldn’t shake hands with you, not even with a gun to my head, Nick thought.

Whoa.

This was bad. Being undercover means believing. You have to believe your cover story with every fiber of your being. You eat, drink, and sleep your cover story. You never, ever break cover, especially in your head.

Nicholas Ames, New York businessman, would be absolutely delighted to meet a famous man, someone he’d never meet ordinarily. Stockbrokers lived off contacts and this was a good one. If nothing else, Nicholas Ames could dine out on having met a contender for the Nobel.