Catherine slowly opened her eyes.

No cave. No sleeping bag.

No cold.

A room furnished with rich Persian rugs, leather chairs, books …

A fire burning in a huge fireplace.

And a man in jeans and close-fitting black shirt standing before that fireplace, his body outlined by the flames. She couldn’t make out his features but they were framed by close-cut dark hair, and she got an impression of symmetry.

Beautiful, she thought drowsily.

Power.

Electricity.

Grace.

Energy.

All beautiful …

“Thank you.” He stepped forward, and she could see his face. “I think you’re beautiful, too, Catherine.” His brilliant blue eyes were glittering with humor, his lips curved in a smile, and his entire expression was alive with exuberant vitality. “But I don’t think either one of us prefers to rely on that particular asset.” He sat down in the leather armchair and stretched his legs out before him. “However, I admit I’ve been enjoying watching you since you entered into my life. You’re like a wonderful symphony with exquisite passages of pure serenity, then magnificent crashing drama.” He made a face. “Unfortunately, I seem to have become fascinated by you.”

Crazy, she thought hazily. All this was crazy.

“Not crazy,” he said. “Like almost everything else, it has a perfectly sane basis if you accept certain parameters.”

She closed her eyes. “I’m dreaming. I’m in the cave and sleeping. I will now wake up.” She opened her eyes.

No cave.

Fire, warmth, beauty. And that man was still here.

He shook his head. “I set the rules, Catherine. You called me, and I came. But you have to play my game. I didn’t really want to contact you. I thought it would be much better to work through Erin.” He chuckled. “But you wouldn’t stop, and I couldn’t resist you.”

“I called you?”

He nodded. “Richard Cameron, at your service. You were curious, and you thought that I was someone you should know about. So you kept turning it over and over in your mind, and you wouldn’t let me go.”

“Bullshit.”

“No, true.” He added softly, “Actually, I could have resisted you, but I didn’t want to. I thought it might be worth it to me to get to know you. You evidently thought the same, though not for the same reason. I’m delighted to meet you, Catherine Ling.”

“Cameron.” She tried to think, tried to reason. “A hallucination brought on by stress and my desire to—”

“Wrong. Take a step outside the box, Catherine. You’ve done it before.”

She was silent. Something was strange here that had nothing to do with dreams, and stress had never made her lose her mental balance. What else could it be? She went over the possibilities and came up with an answer. “Mental telepathy. We’ve been experimenting with it, and so have the Russians, Chinese, and half a dozen other countries. But if it’s mental telepathy, then you’ve brought it to a highly sophisticated level.”

“You have no idea. Very good, Catherine.”

“Two years ago, I was present at the testing of a young Italian girl who was the pride of the CIA think tank. They brought twenty-two agents to Rome to test her and teach us how to handle a possible mental infiltration. It turned out that she could read the minds of several of the agents, but I wasn’t one of them. And she couldn’t read those other agents from a distance of more than a football field. I take it that you’re not that close?”

“Correct.”

“And there have to be elements of hypnotic suggestion for you to have set up a scenario like this.”

“I wanted you to feel welcome. You’re accepting this better than I hoped.”

“I’m not accepting fact, only possibility. I know that mental telepathy has been tested and exists. It’s rare, but I’ve seen the experiments. But I also grew up on the streets of Hong Kong, where a belief in angels and devils is a way of life.”

“And which do you think I am?”

“You tell me.” She thought about it. “I think Erin believes you mean her well. She thought you might rescue her.” She was sifting through everything, trying to put the entire picture together. “Are you the ‘friend’ who asked Hu Chang to go after Erin?”

“I told him that it would please me. I left the decision to him.”

“Why didn’t you go after her yourself?”

“I couldn’t allow myself to do it.” He shrugged. “There are certain rules I have to go by.”

“Hu Chang said that you were the most dangerous man either one of us would ever meet. Why the hell couldn’t you go after Erin?”

“Rules.”

“But your rules didn’t keep you from sending Hu Chang out to do the dirty work.”

“No.” His lips twisted. “Unfortunately, that option is allowed and even encouraged. I just have to choose wisely and decide if it’s worth a possible death to accomplish the goal.”

“You decide? Yet you just said your hands were tied. Not consistent, Cameron. What government do you work for? What agency are you with? China? Russia? Great Britain? You sound American, but that doesn’t mean much. Kadmus was born American, and he works for everyone who has the cash to pay him. I don’t think Venable knows about you, or he would have told me. He doesn’t let me go in blind.”

“That’s good,” he said. “And Venable doesn’t know I exist. Though I think Caudell may have suspected at times. He knows there’s someone who was occasionally there before him.”

“Who do you work for?” she repeated.

“It’s an international organization with worldwide membership.” He smiled. “I assure you that you’ve never heard of it. I’m not going to interfere with anything the CIA is doing unless they interfere with me.”

“What do you do for them?”

“Too much and too little.”

“That’s no answer.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s a skill at which I’ve become an expert.” He was silent a moment, then added wearily, “Okay, I act as a sort of Guardian, troubleshooter, and executioner. In a way, our duties are similar in scope. I’m not going to go into details with you.”

“Is it some kind of commercial organization?”

“In many ways.” He held up his hand. “No more, Catherine.”

“Yes, there’s going to be more,” she said fiercely. “I’ll stop asking about your damn organization, but I have to know about Erin. She was being tortured because she wouldn’t tell Kadmus what he wanted to know about a man he was searching for.” She stared him in the eye. “Was that man you, Cameron?”

“I think you know it was.”

“Why does he want to find you?”

“Because I am who I am. Kadmus has been searching for me for a long time.”

“That’s vague as hell. And why did Erin feel she had to keep him from finding you?”

“Because she made a mistake, and she wouldn’t let us suffer for it.”

Catherine could feel her frustration rising by the minute. He was answering her, but the answers were totally unrevealing, and she knew if she delved any deeper, he would close up. “And yet you couldn’t go after her and get her away from that bastard?”

“I did what I could.”

“The hell you did.”

“It was a risk I wasn’t allowed to take,” he said quietly.

“You son of a bitch; I saw what he did to her.”

“And so did I. I was with her every time he touched her,” he said. “I taught her how to block out the pain. It was all I could do for her until I found the right person to go after her.”