Chapter One

      “She’s dead,” Connor McGinnis whispered, though his eyes declared the words a lie.

      On the street below his window, the woman he was surveilling tugged her faded coat more tightly around her swollen belly and waited for the chance to cross the street. A light wind swept snow flurries in small white eddies down the street and threatened to whip the gauzy roosari from her head. Grabbing the scarf as it slid down to reveal the dark luster of her wavy hair, she tugged it back into place, but not before he got a look at her face.

      Her intimately familiar face.

      She looked tired and careworn, but there were no signs that she’d been injured. Of course, the crash had happened months earlier. She might have had time to heal from even a serious injury.

      Though how she’d survived the blast in the first place...

      He tamped down a maelstrom of conflicting emotions. Not yet. Emotions on the battlefield could be deadly. And if Risa was still alive, he was already engaged in a war he hadn’t known about only a few days ago.

      If Risa was still alive. He couldn’t quite bring himself to believe it yet, no matter what his eyes were telling him. He’d seen news footage of the wreckage found floating in the water off the coast of Japan. Even if someone had survived the bomb blast that sent the jet hurtling into the Pacific Ocean, no one would have come out of that crash unscathed. And Risa’s name was on the passenger manifest, which meant she’d gotten on the plane.

      He didn’t know how this woman could be Risa, no matter how much she looked like her.

      Except there were ways to fake passenger manifests, weren’t there? Ways to fool transportation security. It was one of the biggest nightmares facing national security agencies worldwide.

      Traffic cleared momentarily, and the woman started across the street. Her gaze darted around, right and left, in front and behind, as she made the short transit from one corner to another.

      Hypervigilant, he thought.

      Reasonable, he supposed, for a refugee from war-torn Kaziristan.

      Or for a woman hiding from her past.

      Stop. It’s not Risa. It can’t be.

      He was grasping at straws. Letting what he wanted get in the way of what actually was.

      That was a good way to drive himself insane. He had to keep his emotions out of the equation. Think logically. Deal in facts.

      If Risa had survived the crash, she’d have found a way to let him know.

      Wouldn’t she?

      He lost sight of the woman—the woman who couldn’t possibly be Risa—as she turned at the corner and walked under the narrow awnings of the storefronts below the shabby apartment he’d rented earlier that morning. He resisted the urge to run to the ground floor and follow her down the street. It wasn’t time to make that particular move.

      Not yet.

      If ten years of combat had taught Connor McGinnis nothing else, it had shown him the value of patience.

      * * *

      SHE WAS BEING WATCHED.

      Inside her apartment, the woman known as Yasmin Hamani locked the door behind her and paused in the entryway to listen. The apartment building was old, prone to settling with creaks and groans of aged wood and plaster, but she didn’t sense the presence of another living being within the walls of the small one-bedroom apartment. Still, she unlocked the drawer of the table by the door and withdrew her compact Glock 23, feeling instantly safer.

      These days, it was harder to carry a weapon than rely on her disguise to keep her safe. None of her shoulder-carry holsters fit comfortably anymore, thanks to the swell of her pregnant belly. And forget trying to work with any sort of waistband holster.

      She made a circuit of the empty apartment with the Glock in hand before she finally relaxed and put the weapon on the side table where she could easily reach it. She removed the roosari covering her hair, relieved to be shed of it for a while. She wasn’t Muslim, but the majority of the Kaziri refugees who lived in this section of Over-the-Rhine were, and she donned the head scarf as both protection and concealment.

      It was unlikely she’d run across anyone she’d dealt with during her years in Kaziristan, but a dead woman couldn’t be too careful. She couldn’t afford to stand out.

      The baby was fussy this afternoon, turning flips in her womb. Impatient, perhaps, to greet the world outside. Yasmin rubbed her bulging belly, smiling a little at the thumps of the baby’s kicks against her palms, strong and reassuring.

      The baby was her reason for everything she did these days.

      She eased into her desk chair, now used to the dull pain in the small of her back from carrying the tiny burden inside her. She typed in the complex password to her laptop computer and checked her email for any message from her former handler.

      Nothing.

      She sighed, leaning against the back of the chair. If someone had seen through her cover, apparently Martin Dalrymple didn’t know about it.

      Which meant what? That she was imagining things?

      Working in covert operations had a way of making a person see shadows where none existed. Operatives got used to paranoia. Expecting the worst, seeing threats everywhere you looked, kept you vigilant. And vigilance kept you alive. But she’d thought she was done with that life. She had started a new life, one that wouldn’t include dead drops and secret identities. One that included stability and trust. Love.

      She should have known better.

      The baby kicked again, reminding her that she hadn’t lost everything. The pregnancy had come as a shock, a complication her analytical mind had deemed an unacceptable risk.

      But her heart had wrapped itself around the tiny life growing inside her like a coat of armor, determined to keep the baby safe from danger.

      She would give her baby the life he or she deserved, no matter what it took. Somehow, she’d figure out a way to do it.

      But she didn’t think it could be here in Cincinnati.

      She sent a coded email message to Dalrymple, trying to be as oblique as possible so that even if someone managed to break the cipher, he’d still have to figure out what the hell she was talking about. While Dalrymple knew her well enough to understand what she was trying to tell him, there wasn’t anyone else in the world who knew her that