But the figure turned.
Slowly, with grace and without haste.
Toward him.
A gloved hand reached up and hooked fingers under the edge of a mask. Lifted, pulled it away.
In the weak lamplight the hair which spilled out from under the mask looked yellow, but the killer knew that it was not. He knew that it was as white as snow. Thick and lustrous, but paler than death. The face it framed was nearly as pale, except for a red mouth and eyes so dark they looked black. It was a beautiful face. Regal and cold and cruel. A face unused to smiles. A face like a death mask of some ancient queen, or a temple carving of a goddess of war.
The killer knew that face.
He held his pistol on her for five long seconds.
As always there was a fierce internal debate. His finger lay along the outside of the trigger guard. It would be so easy to slip it inside and take the shot.
The air between them seemed flammable, as if a word or even a thought could ignite it.
She lifted that proud head and looked down her patrician nose at him.
“Saint Germaine,” she said quietly. There was equal parts contempt and admiration in her voice. “Or do you prefer ‘Deacon’? I’ve heard that people are calling you that now.”
He kept the gun on her. “It doesn’t matter.”
It didn’t. Neither was his name, and he was sure that, as smart and as connected as this woman was, she would never know his real name. No one would.
“Deacon, then,” she said. “It’s less pretentious.”
He lowered his pistol and pulled off his balaclava. “And we wouldn’t want to be pretentious,” he said. “Would we, Lilith?”
Chap. 2
Deacon rose to his feet, his pistol still in his hand but the barrel pointed down. It made the statement he intended.
Lilith flicked her wrist the way a samurai would when shaking blood from a katana, and then slid the black-bladed knife back into its sheath. Without taking her eyes from Deacon, she knotted her fingers in the back of the dead man’s hazmat suit and with no apparent effort lifted his body off of the Styrofoam cooler and casually swung it up into the rushing water. It was an act that demonstrated a level of physical strength far in excess of what should have been possible for a woman of her size. A very strong man might have had difficulty lifting so limp and heavy a burden and tossing it aside so casually.
That, too, made a statement, and it was in no way lost on the Deacon.
He moved closer and stood a few feet from her and the cooler.
“Are you here for that?” he asked, then ticked his head toward the open door. “Or what’s in there?”
Lilith took some time answering that. Her expression gave little away, even to someone as practiced at reading expressions as Deacon. She nudged the cooler with the toe of her boot.
“Do you know what’s in here?”
“I might,” Deacon said. “Do you?”
Another pause. “No.”
“Ah.”
They both looked at the open door.
“That’s going to set off an alarm,” he said.
“I know.”
“If they think they’re being raided they’ll dump their hard drives and—”
“It’s an old burglar’s trick,” she said. “Set a smoky fire and watch through a window to see what people rush to save. A good man will save his family Bible. A blackmailer will save his cache of evidence. And a scientist—”
“—Will save his research. Yes, I’ve read Sherlock Holmes.”
Lilith gave him the tiniest sliver of a cold smile. Not at all friendly, but not as hostile as the flat, reptilian glare.
“Why were you waiting over there? You could have picked the door lock.”
“I wasn’t trying to get in. I wanted this.” He squatted down and removed the cooler’s lid. Inside were three aluminum cylinders packed into carved slots. Each cylinder was pressure locked with a tight metal cap.
“What is it?” asked Lilith. “A bioweapon? Some kind of germ warfare thing?”
“A performance enhancing synthetic steroid,” said Deacon.
She actually smiled. “’Performance’? What kind of performance?”
“Not the kind you’re thinking,” he said, returning her smile. “It’s the first generation of a formula that combines the select lean-mass-building steroids with a synthetic nootropic compound that significantly increases and regulates the hypothalamic histamine levels. In normal pharmacology these drugs are wakefulness promoting agents often prescribed to prevent shift-work sleepiness. This version is designed to build stamina and wakefulness to a point where the treated person won’t tire and won’t lose mental sharpness.”
“To what end? Super soldiers?”
“Hardly. Indefatigable factory workers.”
Lilith blinked. “Factory…?”
“These drugs are intended for use in third-world countries to increase the efficiency and output of unregulated factory workers. Shift workers who can work twenty-four or even forty-eight hours at maximum efficient output.” He sighed. “It’s a new tweak on legal slave labor because it’s for use in countries where there is no enforceable human rights presence and where governments are easily bought. Earlier versions of these drugs are already being used in Southeast Asia and some places in Africa.”
A sneer twisted her mouth. “The new face of slave labor.”
“Yes,” he agreed.
“You’re American,” she said. “Most of the companies that would use this sort of thing are American.”
“Many are, yes.”
She cocked an eyebrow. “Are you here with official sanction?”
He shrugged.
Lilith shifted to get a better look into his eyes. “Why do you care?”
She leaned on the word you.
Deacon didn’t answer. Instead he closed the cooler and replaced the lid. Then he took the container and placed it in the shadowy spot where he’d been crouching. It vanished from sight as if it ceased to exist.
“I didn’t see you in the dark over there,” said Lilith after a few moments. “Not until you pointed your gun at me.”
“Your back was turned when I raised my weapon. You could not have seen the movement.”
She shrugged.
“One of these days,” said Deacon, “I would like to obtain a drop of your blood.”
“To test?”
“Of course.”
“You wouldn’t understand the results,” she said.
“I might.”
“No.”
“Why are you so sure?”
Her tone was flat. “Because I’m not like you. Not like anyone you know. You’d see the numbers and the chemistry, and maybe if you had the funding you would run some tests on my DNA, and all it would do is confuse you. Maybe scare you.”
“Fear is seldom a deterrent,” he said.
“Wouldn’t that depend on what there is to be afraid of?”
“Generally not.”
She made a moue of irritation. A very French thing, although Deacon knew that she was not French. He did not know everything about Lilith’s heritage — and some of what he’d been able to piece together was apocryphal or at least doubtful — but he knew that her mother had been a Warsaw Jew who had died badly at Sobibor. Deacon had no information beyond wild rumors as to who her father was. The only other family member Deacon could reliably identify was a daughter whose real name, like Lilith’s own, was buried beneath layers of secrecy and obfuscation. Although he would never say so, to her or anyone, it was the fact of having one genealogical foot planted in horror and the other planted in obscurity that engendered within him small feelings of kinship for her.