Jane Miller had the benefits of a fine education. Swiss boarding schools, a finishing school in France, university studies and travel in Madrid, Munich, Vienna, Paris.
Pleasure she took where she found it, from beautiful people of either sex. But no pleasure matched the thrill of a successful murder.
Brains, beauty, a gift for languages, and a relentless amorality sent her drifting in the half worlds of drug, vice, and crime. Her talent for killing proved to be not only pleasurable but extremely profitable.
Jane Miller could abide no master. She would answer to no one. To avoid falling under the thumb of any crime boss or spymaster she created an alter ego, an assumed identity.
Her studies had focused on European art history, particularly of the medieval period. In the millenarian and eschatological writings and esoterica of the Middle Ages she’d encountered the dread figure of Annihilax, the Exterminating Angel, who would snuff out the lives of kings and commoners in the End of Days preceding the Last Judgment.
Annihilax became her nom de guerre, her war name. As Annihilax she plied her professional assassin’s trade around the world, earning a place among the top-ranked assassins of the killer elite.
It was in Africa that she met her Waterloo, in one of the fractious mini-states of the Congo region. A mineral-rich province where the status quo was threatened by an upstart rebel leader and his horde of hungry, well-armed troops. A West European industrial cartel that controlled the lucrative mining concessions from the complaisant and infinitely corrupt provincial government hired Annihilax to eliminate the rebel warlord.
Posing as a freelance journalist, Jane Miller established herself in the provincial capital and began building her clandestine network of mercenaries and assassins. One of her contacts on the scene was Murad Ali, a Pakistani agent. He had lots of money and connections.
Jane Miller became his mistress. Murad Ali liked to talk, especially afterward in bed. She learned that he was a high-ranking officer in Pakistan’s all-powerful Inter-Service Intelligence, the military intelligence organization that not so secretly ruled Pakistan behind the scenes. Possessing the atomic bomb and seeking to augment its own stockpiles, the ISI had assigned Murad Ali to this war-torn Congo province to acquire yellowcake, a product of the region’s uranium mines that could be refined for use in atomic weapons.
Among his boasts, Murad Ali confided to Jane that he’d been one of the debriefing officers of Dr. Rahman Sayeed, late of Ironwood National Laboratory in Los Alamos. After being released from custody for time served while awaiting and during his abortive trial for espionage, Sayeed had returned home to Islamabad. He had indeed been guilty of atomic espionage against the United States, and told his eager auditors in the ISI all he had learned during his American sojourn.
Among the intelligence windfall was the intriguing revelation that he had not been the only atomic spy seeking to pry loose Ironwood’s secrets. Sayeed’s delvings into the computer files had detected the presence of a second, unknown master spy who’d been working for years subverting the system and downloading critically restricted data relating to the PALO codes, the digitized fail-safe overrides that could shut down via remote control the launch of any land-based nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile.
The identity of this master spy was unknown to Sayeed, although he’d confided the other’s existence to his lawyer Max Scourby. The idea being that if things went badly for Sayeed in his case, he’d have something to deal with to prompt the prosecution to lighten his sentence in return for the PALO espionage revelations.
As it had worked out, the government’s case had fallen apart under the weight of politics and a bad press, and Sayeed had not had to play the trump card regarding the PALO codes as a get-out-of-jail card. In due course he’d passed the information to his ISI debriefers. It was a tantalizing nugget but they were in no position to capitalize on the lead, and so it had lain fallow all this time.
Finally reaching the ears of Jane Miller during a bout of postcoital pillow talk as she lay curled up beside Murad Ali in his bed. He had no idea that she was Annihilax. He believed her cover story, that she was a freelance Western journalist covering the Congolese provincial turmoil. And a shameless slut, like all American women, which suited him just fine.
For once in her career Jane Miller had bitten off more than she could chew. Annihilax could not deliver on the contract to kill the rebel warlord. The warlord struck against the capital in a boldly unsuspected move, taking it and unleashing an orgy of looting, rape, and murder.
Thousands of refugees fled the city, racing for the safety of the border. Murad Ali had been slain by a rebel machine gunner, dying in the streets while Jane Miller watched. Like any other ordinary fugitive, she had to run for her life.
A river marked the border between the revolt-torn province and the relative safety of its nearest neighbor. It was there, in a hamlet on the wrong side of the river, that Jane Miller crossed paths with Carrie Voss.
Carrie Voss was an American relief worker for an international philanthropic organization helping feed the starving Congolese masses. She was an only child whose parents were both dead and who’d long ago lost contact with her few aging, distant relatives. She’d been caught up in the rebel onslaught and had to flee for her life. She was roughly the same age and physical type as Jane Miller.
Annihilax saw her opportunity and took it. She cut Carrie Voss’s throat and stole her identity papers. While making the river crossing, she was wounded by shrapnel from a mortar round. She woke up in a field hospital where she was being treated for her injuries. Passing for Carrie Voss, she was airlifted to safety and repatriated to the United States under her stolen identity.
A lengthy recuperation followed, including facial surgery to repair her damaged face and therapy for her wounded left leg. The left leg never healed properly and left her with a permanent limp, necessitating the use of a cane.
The world’s intelligence services believed that the assassin code named Annihilax — gender unknown — had died in the Congo. Jane Miller was reborn as Carrie Voss.
She had a purpose.
The thought of the PALO codes obsessed her every waking hour. They were the Holy Grail of atomic secrets; their possessor could alter the balance of world power. A goal worth pursuing.
She relocated to Santa Fe, using that city as a base of operations from which to make her forays into Los Alamos. As Annihilax she’d established a number of secret Swiss and offshore banking accounts that now supplied her with funds for her quest.
Intelligence was the key to all successful field operations. She learned everything she could about Ironwood and its key scientific cadre. Fortune had smiled on her with the advent of Dr. Hugh Carlson. Carlson, a much-married man, was currently between wives. Jane Miller had contrived to make his acquaintance at a fund-raising dinner for the Santa Fe Opera, of which he was a devotee. She was attractive, intelligent, and a master of sexpertise. Carlson fell hard and they were soon wed. He already had several grown children, and between them and the alimony payments he forked out to his ex-wives, he had no interest in starting a family, which suited Jane Miller’s purposes just fine.
She immersed herself in charitable work, especially the philanthropic Good Neighbor Initiative. This served several purposes. It allowed her freedom of movement, the ability to come and go at all hours of the day and night, under the pretext of having to attend to various good deeds and related chores.
Two, it was an invaluable intelligence-gathering activity. In the hospital charity wards, the battered women’s shelters, the substance abuse clinics, the halfway houses for probationary convicts, and so on, she received firsthand information about the criminal half worlds of vice and corruption throughout the county.