Killer Focus. Fiona Brand

desk and paid to have the document scanned and saved to disk.

      An hour later, Taylor settled down at the computer monitor in her apartment with a carton of hot noodles and a double-chocolate brownie from the all-night bakery at the end of the block.

      Outside, the wind had increased to a steady howl. Hail rapped against the windows, a sharp counterpart to the clicking and humming of her computer as she slipped the disk into the drive and opened up the file that contained the articles she’d had scanned.

      Long minutes passed while she ate noodles and read through the articles again. The hail changed to sleet, the cold palpable as it reached through thick, lined drapes into the comfort of her sitting room, sending the temperature plummeting as she made a written prècis of the information. It wasn’t as fast as typing, but she’d found over the years that sometimes her brain worked better when she had a pen in her hand.

      Fingers stiff with cold, she left her desk to turn up the heat and strolled through to her bedroom to pull on a sweater. Taking a fleecy blanket from the end of her bed, she returned to the computer.

      With the blanket wrapped around her middle, she sat back down and noticed that at some point she had eaten all of the noodles and the brownie. Somehow, the fact that she couldn’t remember tasting a brownie that was justifiably famous for at least a ten-block radius seemed symptomatic of her life. She had had her cake, she just couldn’t remember eating it.

      Until those hours spent locked in the dark, Lopez turning her blood to ice every time he had injected what could have been a fatal dose into her veins, she hadn’t realized how empty her life had been, or how desperately she wanted to live, despite that emptiness. Coming that close to death had been like slamming into a brick wall. It had stopped her in her tracks, forced her to assess, to need more than a career that had somehow expanded to fill every waking hour.

      The change, radical as it was, hadn’t happened overnight. For a self-confessed workaholic from a dysfunctional family, trying to picture herself fitting into a scenario that involved a husband, kids, maybe even a house and garden, was difficult. For most of her adult life she had sidestepped the issue, denying that she wanted the family values that most people clung to. It was disorienting to discover that she needed them.

      Tossing the empty noodle carton and the paper bag that had contained the brownie into the trash can beside her desk, she accessed the Bureau Web site. She entered her code and password then dialed up a Bureau search engine, typed in a list of search words and stared at the list of hits.

      Great. Boring and weird.

      Huddling into the blanket, she began to read.

      At one in the morning, on the point of giving up, she found an article about a Colombian drug dealer and hit man, Tito Mendoza, who had been murdered for a book. Mendoza had been shot at point-blank range but hadn’t died immediately. The Costa Rican policia had questioned him at the scene, but he had slipped into a coma and died before they had gotten more than a few basic details. The newsworthy part was that he had claimed that aside from names and addresses, the book had contained other details: blood types, numbers that had been tattooed onto the backs of a group of German ex-nationals—Nazis—and an execution list.

      The report, though bizarre, meant nothing on its own. But coupled with the fact that Mendoza had been involved with Marco Chavez and that he had been murdered the same week the naval team who had dived on the Nordika had disappeared, suddenly, the implications began to pile up.

      In her research, Taylor had found out a lot of information she never, ever wanted to know, including the fact that SS soldiers had routinely had their blood types tattooed onto their chests. A practical solution for the battlefield, it had proved to be a liability after the Allies had invaded, because the tattoos had made them easy to identify.

      The tattoos Mendoza had mentioned didn’t sound like blood types—he had said numbers, not letters—but the connection was there.

      Maybe it was a leap to imagine the book had anything to do with the SS soldiers who had hijacked the Nordika, and even more of a leap to connect it to the missing naval divers, Lopez or the Nazi cabal Slater had mentioned, but it was a possibility.

      She saved a copy of the article and, out of habit, saved a copy to disk, which she labeled, dated and slipped into a storage box that contained copies of all of the archival information she had researched on Lopez. After the internal security leaks concerning the case, two of which had resulted in failed busts, and the more mundane fact that occasionally information had a habit of disappearing off the scope in the Bureau’s system, she liked to keep her own separate set of records.

      Stifling a yawn, she hit the send button and e-mailed a copy to her work computer.

      Just before she went to bed, she reread the article and made a brief note. The wintry chill seemed to intensify as she studied what she had written.

      Mendoza had had a book. The book had been important enough that he had died because of it.

      Three

      A week later, Taylor leaned back in her office chair and skimmed a page of Alex Lopez’s file. She’d studied the information found on Lopez’s computer after the unsuccessful raid on his estate at Winton on the West Coast until her eyes ached. Legitimate company accounts, tax legislation and a bunch of legalese about property-development trusts.

      The information, most of which had been supplied by an unnamed South American source eighteen months previously and which had formed the basis for the FBI’s investigation into Lopez, should have put her to sleep, but Taylor refused to be lulled by the familiarity of the material.

      She needed to find something—anything—that would provide a lead on a man who had killed almost everyone who had ever gotten close to him. The list had included Lopez’s own father; his business partner and father-in-law, Cesar Morell; and, at the age of twelve, his own bodyguard.

      Exhaustion, the product of another late night spent surfing government databases and the Internet, sucked at her as she read. Her mind began to drift, slide sideways.… She blinked, staring at the page, not seeing the words, suddenly on the verge of—

      A sharp thud jerked her head up.

      Mike Colenso, the agent occupying the adjacent desk, was rummaging through the box of files he had just dropped onto the floor.

      Stifling a yawn, she tried to recapture the moment. When the relaxed mood wouldn’t come back, courtesy of Colenso opening and discarding files, she went over what she’d just read. After skimming the page a second time, then a third, she stopped trying to force the knowledge. Whatever it was that had gotten her antennae twitching was obscure enough that she wasn’t going to find it by focusing harder. It was entirely possible that what she was looking for wasn’t on the page, but the result of information triggering her mind to make a connection.

      She checked her watch and set the file down. She would get that moment back, and now she was going to have to do it on her own time, not the Bureau’s. Marc Bayard, her boss and a newly appointed division head, had been saying for weeks now that she was too close to the case, that she had lost her perspective and needed to back off. In fact, this morning he had ordered her to back off.

      According to Bayard, the Lopez case had redefined her commitment to her job in “an unhealthy way.” The only reason she had been assigned to the Lopez task force in the first place was her connection to Rina Morell. He had assigned another agent in her place. He had been polite but he hadn’t pulled his punches. Her psychiatric report detailed post-traumatic stress disorder, insomnia, chronic fatigue, paranoia and evidence of obsessive behavior. Bayard had enough material to suspend her on medical grounds if she didn’t fall into line.

      She had argued the point on the “obsessive behavior.” Driven, maybe. Bayard hadn’t seen the distinction.

      She pulled out Lopez’s psychological profile and studied it. He was clinically organized and successful, but he had made significant errors in judgment, notably in underestimating the Morell family. Years ago, Esther Morell had outsmarted him, Cesar Morell