Killer Focus. Fiona Brand

off, as he had expected. It had been in rest mode, which meant that when Taylor had left the building to get lunch, she had left the computer on, the system open. Frowning at the uncharacteristic sloppiness, Steve withdrew a disk and a flash card from an inside pocket of his jacket and plugged it into the USB port. The flash card was larger than normal, about the size of a pocket calculator.

      He inserted the disk and waited for the program to install. Seconds later, he removed the disk, unplugged the flash card and slipped them both back into his jacket pocket. Taylor’s security breach in leaving her computer on and unprotected while she was out of the building had just been solved. There was nothing to copy; her computer was clean. Someone had gotten there before him.

      An hour later, he stepped into Taylor’s apartment. Pocketing the duplicate master key he’d had made several weeks previously, he closed the door behind him and thumbed on a penlight. He didn’t want to risk turning on a light in case Taylor’s mother, Dana Jones, had caught an early flight and was already in town, although it was more than likely she would go directly to the hospital.

      He moved soundlessly through the rooms in case one of Taylor’s neighbors had caught the evening news and was nosy enough to check out who was in apartment 10A when the tenant was on the critical list.

      The master bedroom was empty, the quilt a little wrinkled, as if she’d sat down on it that morning after the bed had been made. The quilt itself was plain, the bedroom furniture elegant but neat. No surprises there.

      He moved through a second bedroom. The lack of luggage in the spare room confirmed that Dana Jones hadn’t yet arrived. Given the weather conditions and the fact that even if she got a direct flight from San Francisco, it would take several hours to reach D.C., he didn’t expect her to fly in until the morning.

      The bathroom was cramped but spotless and contained the same clean, faintly sweet smell he had noticed in the bedroom and which he now identified as soap, not perfume. One towel was neatly draped over a towel rail.

      Checking the luminous dial of his watch, he moved through to the sitting room. Like the rest of the apartment, the room was tidy, except for one corner, which was occupied by bookshelves jammed with reference books and a large computer desk awash with papers, notebooks and a stack of files. If he had needed further confirmation of what Taylor did with her spare time, apart from a rigorous fitness program, this was it. She worked.

      And for the past few months, she had been busy. He’d had a tail on her ever since she had been discharged from the hospital after the hostage crisis in Eureka. Taylor’s personal connection to Lopez, and the fact that, since Rina Morell had disappeared into the Witness Security Program, Taylor was Lopez’s only link to his ex-wife, made her an automatic choice for surveillance. The fact that she had obsessively researched Lopez and the cabal, despite being first cautioned then pulled from the case, made her even more interesting. And now she knew about the book.

      Locating the Internet files she’d searched had been easy. On a previous visit he had bugged her computer with a highly illegal piece of spyware designed to mimic the security system she used. His electronic friend recorded Taylor’s online research and mailed to him the sites she had accessed and duplicates of any e-mail messages.

      The microfiche material was something else entirely. Other than the time periods and the newspapers she had been researching—information that was noted on the register held at the front desk of the library—he had no idea what she was reading unless she created a computer file and e-mailed it to her work address.

      Sitting down at the desk, he booted up the computer, inserted the disk and connected the flash card. A small window running percentages at the bottom of the screen indicated his copy program was complete. Removing the disk and flash card, he inserted a second disk into her drive. This one contained a powerful wipe program. Minutes later, her hard drive was clean.

      Retrieving the disk, he took a small tool kit from his pocket, unscrewed the back plate of the CPU and attached a tiny, state-of-the-art transmitter, which was designed to look like part of the hard drive. FBI technicians would go over her computer with a fine-tooth comb, but until he activated satellite transmission, they were unlikely to locate it.

      Six

      Jack Jones was tall, about six-two, lean and rangy, with dark eyes and hair, courtesy of a Sioux grandfather. His hair was streaked with gray at the temples, just like it would be if he were alive, which Taylor knew wasn’t possible. Jack Jones had been dead for more than twenty years.

      She forced eyelids that felt like they’d been glued shut wider, so she could continue to study her dead father. The fact that he was standing just feet away, staring out of a window, convinced Taylor that the bullet that had punched through her back and sliced and diced at least one lung had, most likely, been fatal. If she was in Jack’s company, she definitely hadn’t gone to Heaven.

      The only alternative to death was that she was alive and having a drug-induced vision, because to the best of her knowledge, Taylor didn’t have a psychic bone in her body.

      She turned her head and, like a switch flicking on, pain flared, burning in her chest and all down the back of her throat. She swallowed, trying to ease the dryness in her mouth, and the pain went ballistic.

      A sharp click registered. Someone dressed in white bent over her. “She’s awake and she’s not supposed to be.”

      There was a second metallic clink, a cool sensation running up her right arm.

      The next time she surfaced it was dark. A light glowed beside the bed, illuminating the fact that she was in a private room and her mother, Dana, was sitting beside the bed. Her chest still felt painful and tight; her throat was even sorer. A tube ran across her face: oxygen.

      Dana’s hand gripped hers. “Thank God. I thought I was going to lose you.”

      Taylor tried for a smile. Dana looked fragile, dark smudges under her eyes, the skin across her cheekbones finely drawn. “I’m hard to kill.”

      Although, if the way she felt now was any indication, she must have come close to dying. She was having trouble breathing. Speaking was even more difficult.

      With an effort of will, she tried to remember what had happened, but her mind was a blank from the time she had consciously registered that she had been shot until she’d woken up and hallucinated that Jack Jones had been standing beside her bed. “Which hospital am I in?” There were wires and tubes everywhere. A shunt ran into her bandaged right wrist, and to her left she could hear the beep of a heart monitor.

      “George Washington. They moved you out of ICU yesterday.”

      Yesterday. That meant at least a day had passed since she had last woken up. “How long since I was admitted?” She cleared her throat, suddenly ferociously thirsty.

      “Two days.” Dana leaned forward with a plastic cup and a straw. “You can have a few sips, but not too much. They don’t want you throwing up in case you rupture your stitches. And don’t worry about the back of your throat. The reason it’s sore is because they’ve had a tube down there.”

      Ice-cold water filled her mouth then flowed down her throat. She winced at the rawness, took another sip and watched as Dana replaced the drink on her bedside table.

      Two days. The amount of time that had passed explained why Dana looked so tired and rumpled; she would have caught a flight out yesterday. Dana had a key to Taylor’s apartment but, knowing her mother, she would have bypassed the apartment and come straight to the hospital. She had probably slept here last night.

      Dana’s hand tightened around hers. “The bullet broke a rib and punctured the bottom lobe of your left lung. They’ve got you strapped up so the rib doesn’t move. Luckily the bullet went all the way through so they didn’t have to dig it out. They did keyhole surgery to repair the lung, but unfortunately, you had a reaction to one of the drugs they used, which is why you’ve been out for so long.”

      The sound of footsteps in the hall was followed by the glimpse of a woman carrying a brightly colored plastic bag. Taylor had a flashback