Free The Last Spymaster by Gayle Lynds Page B

for the gold bangle. Nothing.
    She dropped the chain into her pocket, put the photos into her purse, and went to the sink. As she checked the toiletries, sadness swept through her. There was something about a man’s soap and shaving lotion that always got her. Probably memories of Rafe, she decided, and turned away.
    Two newspapers from the day before—
USA Today
and the
International Herald Tribune
—were stacked on the floor beside the desk. The front section of the
Herald Tribune
was missing. Oxley helped her pull the squashed newspapers from inside the dummy, but none was from the missing section.
    She walked to the door, turned, and pondered the claustrophobic room. Despite the comfy-looking chair and TV, it was unnervingly sterile. She imagined herself to be Tice and felt a sudden oppressive futility. Tice had never really been here, she concluded. It contained little of him, despite his being locked up in Allenwood for three years and knowing he was sentenced to life.
    “Ready?” Oxley asked.
    She nodded, and they retraced their path through the gray prisonscape of cells, bars, electronic gates, and institutional hush. Outdoors, the long shadows of afternoon had spread across the antiseptic buildings and meticulous grounds. In the distance, the foothills of the northern Allegheny Mountains rose in deceptively soft shapes, blood-red in the waning light.
    “So what do you think?” Oxley asked as they walked back to her rental car.
    “Tice is a man who leaves little to chance,” she told him thoughtfully. “But I’m beginning to get a strong sense of him. One way or another, I’ll find him.”
     
    Omaha, Nebraska
     
    Over the past year the loading foreman had lost so much at the slots in Council Bluffs that his wife wanted a divorce. So when an anonymous offer came, sweetened with an advance of five thousand dollars in cash, he said a fast yes before his anonymous benefactor changed his mind.
    The shipment in question contained cutting-edge satellite phones developed for Uncle Sam. Impact-resistant and waterproof, they united accessories never found in one place. Among them were wireless e-mail and Internet access and highly sophisticated GPS readers—and all used scrambled signals that cloaked tracking.
    Plus, the sat phones could shoot megapixel photos or video with more than a million points of resolution—four times the quality of most cam phones. Officers could see what their soldiers saw and advise them instantly. On top of that, they were multiband, offering seamless mobility anywhere in the world. Military and government users could fly from Europe to the United States and Japan and China and Russia with a dozen stops in between and still never have to change phones or risk losing the data stored inside.
    When the big truck finished loading, the foreman left the bay open and gave his people a break. They hurried indoors to the coffeepot, while he strolled around to the driver and handed him a cigar. They stood there talking for fifteen minutes.
    When he returned, crates had been moved around, but nothing seemed missing. Best of all, his bowling bag was sitting on the lip; he brought it to work the days he planned to roll a few. He peered around the deserted loading area, then ahead at the security kiosk, where a guard—one of his gambling buddies—was waving a van out.
    He snapped open the bag. A smile spread across his face as he stared at the neat stacks of hundred-dollar bills. His heart light, he closed and locked the bay doors, then stepped out to where he was visible in the driver’s side-view mirror. As soon as he waved, the truck rolled off. He stood there watching, grinning, holding the bag tightly. No bowling tonight, he decided.He would make one last trip to the slots at friendly Harrah’s for old time’s sake. Then he would quit. After tonight, he would quit for sure.
     
    Seattle, Washington
     
    From where he sat at his computer, the traffic manager at the assembly factory sent