Lazlo's Last Stand. Kathleen Creighton

I can—” He broke off, swearing under his breath, to glower at Adam. “Fill me in. How’s Lucia? Is she—”

      “She’s fine—a bit shaky, but she’ll be okay. She’s here, by the way—out there in the waiting room. Worried sick about the shooter, if you can believe it. Worried she’s killed him. Thinks you’re gonna be cranky with her if she did.”

      Corbett jerked and managed to whisper, “Good Lord,” through the resulting hiss of pain.

      “Yeah,” Adam said, refraining from any comment that could be construed as sympathy. “I told her it was him or her—not too much she coulda done but what she did.”

      Corbett’s mouth tightened and his eyes got the stony look Adam knew all too well. “What’s his condition?”

      “They won’t tell me much, given I’m not family. All they’ll say is, he’s in surgery. I’m thinkin’ it’s probably too soon to tell if he’s gonna make it.”

      “Damn. Bloody mess…” Corbett lifted a hand to scrub at his face. Finding himself still tethered to the monitor, he tore the wires from his arm and chest in a rare fit of temper. “We should have had transport there on the spot, dammit. We should have gotten him out of there before—did we at least get an ID? Do we know who the bastard is?”

      Adam cleared his throat. He’d had happier moments facing a dentist’s drill. “Sorry, boss. Didn’t have time to go through his pockets. Lucia had her hands full just tryin’ to stop the blood. If they’ve ID’d him—” He broke off, swearing, as his words were drowned out by sounds of a commotion of some sort drifting in from beyond the curtain. “What the bloody hell—”

      The voice, now risen to clearly audible levels, was French accented, harsh and strident, almost as deep as a man’s but somehow unmistakably female. It bulldozed right over the attendant’s murmured response. “I want to see him. Now! He’s here—I know he’s here!”

      “Whoa, someone’s not a happy camper.” Adam tweaked aside the curtain to have a look, but the speakers weren’t visible from where he stood. He threw a glance over his shoulder. “Maybe I should go—” He broke off, due to the fact that the man he was speaking to appeared about to take a header off the gurney.

      “Laz? Here, mate, what—” He managed to get to him just before he toppled over, while out in the lobby the woman, whoever she was, ranted on.

      “Tell me how he is, damn you! Don’t tell me you cannot! I am telling you, I am his family. I am his mother!”

      “Are you all right, man? Crikey, you’ve gone as white as a sheet. Here—lie down.” Bloody hell, Adam thought. If it was his heart after all… “I’ll get the nurse.”

      “Help…me up, dammit. Got to see…” Corbett’s grip on Adam’s arm would have done a croc proud.

      I know that voice.

      It couldn’t be. Just wasn’t possible. But there was no mistaking it, even after almost twenty years. Corbett could hear its echoes resounding through the halls of the emergency wing, strident, raw, crackling with emotion.

      Her voice.

      “You will pay for this, Corbett Lazlo! Everything you care about, whatever means the most to you, I will destroy. If it takes the rest of my life, I swear I will…make…you…pay!”

      He told himself it wasn’t her, but he had to see with his own eyes.

      With one arm across Adam’s shoulders and the other across his ribs, he managed to stand erect. Dark splotches were floating through his field of vision. He shook his head to clear it…concentrated on breathing deeply. Evenly. Relax…tensing up only makes the pain worse.

      Bloody hell. He’d never felt so feeble and woozy. Somewhere in the distance he could hear Adam swearing at him, but he couldn’t spare the energy it would take to tell him to can it. He needed every ounce of strength just to take those first steps.

      Out in the emergency entrance, the woman’s voice had quieted to a raspy, throaty sound, like a lioness purring. And Corbett remembered that one, too, as clearly as if it had been yesterday….

      Murmuring words of love to me in a tangle of sweaty sheets on a stolen afternoon in the hot little room in Montmarte… Saying my name in a way no one else ever has, before or since, giving it the French pronunciation: Cor-bay…

      Speaking of betrayal, as we sat together on a rooftop in London, watching the fog swirl around the chimney pots, with that particular intensity in her voice and in her eyes, that hint of violence and danger that made me wonder sometimes whether she was not quite sane. “I give you fair warning, mon cher. I love with passion and I hate the same way. Do not ever make me hate you….”

      He’d been young then, and had laughed off both of them—the words of love and the warnings—and he’d known in his heart it was the danger that made her so irresistible.

      Just as he knew in his heart now that it was not only possible, it was true. The voice was hers. He knew it even before he heard the words that erased all possibility of doubt.

      “Yes, that is right. I am Cassandra DuMont. His name is Troy DuMont. He is my son. Now will you tell me where… Yes, yes, I understand he is in surgery….”

      Corbett didn’t hear the rest. The initial shock of hearing her voice, recognizing it, had blocked the significance of her words from registering on his consciousness. Now, as he pushed through the double automatic doors into the triage area, he found himself face-to-face with the woman he’d tried so hard to expunge from his memory. He’d even thought he’d succeeded. Hoped he had. Now he knew how foolish he’d been to even try. Knew he should have paid more attention to the things she’d said to him, both the love words and the warnings.

      Because suddenly, as if a curtain had been torn down, he saw everything clearly. All at once he knew. All the months of watching mission after mission end in near disaster, of trying to track down moles and trace vicious threats delivered via e-mail, of seeing his agents picked off one by one—even that mess years ago that had gotten him branded a traitor and booted out of British SIS, and would have seen him locked up in prison for the rest of his life—he knew who was responsible for it all.

      Cassandra.

      And there was worse than that. Much, much worse than he could ever have imagined.

      “He’s my son!”

      Cassandra DuMont had a son. A son who had tried three times to kill him and, but for Lucia and a state-of-the-art Kevlar vest, would have succeeded. A son now fighting for his life only a few floors away. A son who appeared to be at least nineteen or twenty—certainly no younger. And that could only mean…

      He’s my son.

      Corbett stood frozen while the doors to the E.R. area swished shut behind him, still dazed, caught in a nightmarish web of shock and disbelief. And it was in that moment that she turned and saw him.

      It was odd, but with everything that had come crashing down on him in the past few minutes, his brain still managed to register the fact that she was beautiful. Odd, too, that he could notice how much she had changed, and yet was so much the same. The same tall, voluptuous body, the same golden curls, the same big—slightly protuberant—blue eyes. But the years and the thirst for vengeance had taken their toll, too, and in that instant just before she recognized him, he felt a flash of sorrow for the loss of the passionate but somehow naive young girl he had known.

      “You!” She shrieked the word and lunged at him, as if she meant to kill him on the spot, with only her bare hands. Adam managed to intercept her before she could reach him, and she stared wild-eyed past the restraining barricade of his arm like a crazed animal through the bars of a cage. “You did this,