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  By her third day in her new job, cartel operatives began receiving reports that the US Internal Revenue Service and Drug Enforcement Agency were in a panic about the worst cybernetic attack in history. Although the full extent of damage to their computer archives was being kept secret, rumor had it that data critical to several ongoing investigations had been completely destroyed. Even worse, their effort to restore the data from off-site archives was being circumvented by an aggressive new type of computer virus.

  Jorge Espeñosa was so thrilled that he had asked her to implement a new computer tracking and security program for all cartel accounts.

  Jennifer finished dressing, selecting a pink cotton blouse to go with her white cargo pants and sandals. Then, with one more glance in the mirror, she made her way down to breakfast.

  The north patio dining area was the most beautiful spot on the entire estate. In the midst of flower gardens rivaling those she had seen on a family trip to Lake Chiemsee in Bavaria, several outdoor tables protected by colorful umbrellas provided an atmosphere so inviting that Jennifer often found herself lingering over her meal, reluctant to finish.

  This morning several of the tables had been set with trays of fresh fruit, hot pastries, and a large assortment of cold cuts, breads, and cheeses. Don Espeñosa sat alone at a table set for three. Seeing Jennifer, he arose from his seat.

  "Come. Let's fill our plates. I'm afraid my other guest will be a bit late."

  Jennifer had grown accustomed to the buffet layout so favored by Don Espeñosa. Although he could order whatever he wanted, the drug lord most enjoyed making up his mind by looking at an assortment of food spread out before him.

  Jennifer filled her plate, but Don Espeñosa seemed distracted, taking just half a grapefruit. He sprinkled it with salt before digging out a slice with his spoon.

  "So who am I going to meet?" Jennifer asked.

  "Someone whose judgment I trust completely." Jennifer searched Don Espeñosa's face for a smile, but found none.

  "Mysterious."

  Jorge leaned back in his chair, lifting a cup of frothy cappuccino to his lips before responding. "I don't mean to be. As a matter of fact, I'm a bit nervous." Recognizing what he had just said, the drug lord smiled. "I don't believe I've ever said that before. You see? You confuse me. I'm not a trusting man, yet I find myself trusting you. My key people all tell me to go slow, that I'm behaving irrationally."

  Jennifer felt a flash of anger. "The same people who provided such great security for your accounts? I think they’re angry about me making them look bad."

  Jorge laughed. "That's exactly what I told them. Of course, I said it with a gun in my hand."

  Jennifer's mouth dropped open. "You didn't kill them?"

  "No, of course not. It just lets them know I'm not in the mood for an argument."

  "I make you nervous?"

  "A poor choice of words. You make me feel different. Unusual. It's why I wanted you to meet my associate, so he could form his own impression. I think you'll find him interesting."

  Suddenly, Don Espeñosa glanced up. "Ah, here he comes."

  As the don rose from his chair, Jennifer turned to see a very handsome young man walk out onto the patio. Dark hair, light skin, dressed in a mocha suit, he moved with easy grace and self-confidence.

  "Jennifer Smythe, I would like to present my good friend, Eduardo Montenegro."

  Jennifer stood, extending her hand, which was grasped and gently raised to Eduardo's lips. The touch, cool and soft on the back of her hand, matched the look in those beautiful dark eyes.

  So this was the one whose judgment Don Espeñosa trusted more than his own. So be it.

  Jennifer took a deep breath and centered. Then, with a small smile on her lips, she stepped across the threshold of those dark orbs and into the soul beyond.

  124

  Jennifer gasped, although she was so disconnected from her body the gasp impulse never arrived at her lungs. Something rubbed against her, sending her mind recoiling, struggling to find its way back to the light of her own body. But she was so deep in shock that she had lost the thread that could guide her back. She only knew that she had to get away from the horror she had mentally embraced.

  The thing touched her thoughts again, and once again she retreated, scrambling ever deeper into the darkness. In her panic, she began erecting barriers in her mind, wall after wall of them, each higher and thicker than the last. But instead of blocking out the thing that pursued her, her panic seemed to feed it, drawing it onward like a beacon in the night.

  A mental count had begun to tick down, starting at ten, each numeral thundering into her mind loud enough to explode her head. She didn’t have long. She didn’t know how she knew, but if she didn’t find her way back to her own head by the time that count hit zero, whatever was coming would pull her into a madness from which there would be no escape.

  …SEVEN…

  Jesus! Please help me. Please help me.

  SIX…FIVE…

  Mark had said something once…something about meditation.

  …FOUR…

  That’s crazy. No time to meditate.

  …THREE…

  No time. Just remember.

  …TWO…

  Jennifer pulled a memory forward, the feel of the alien couch on the Second Ship.

  …ONE…

  An amazing calmness swept her back, once again in her own head.

  A puzzled look had settled on the face of the handsome young man standing in front of her. Then the face, and the look, faded. As the patio swam up to meet her, she felt two powerful hands catch her shoulders. Then, for the first time in weeks, the sweet bliss of unconsciousness swept her away.

  125

  From the moment El Chupacabra stepped onto Don Espeñosa’s lush patio with its colorful native tile, bright umbrellas, and the elaborate buffet spread across tables in a manner that would have made the Mirage Hotel managers hot with jealousy, he knew. It wasn’t the lavish spread. Not the smell of orchids. Eduardo had been on this patio so many times that these failed to arouse his interest.

  It was the girl.

  Don Espeñosa rose from the table, his hand extended in greeting.

  "Jennifer Smythe, I would like to present my good friend, Eduardo Montenegro."

  Although he met the grip with his own firm clasp, Eduardo’s gaze was drawn past the drug lord to the young woman rising from her chair, the one Don Espeñosa had been so anxious for him to meet. Petite, not more than seventeen, her dark brown hair cut short and sexy, accentuating the line of her slender neck. Even in a casual blouse and pants her body called to him, young and supple with a hint of unusual strength and grace.

  Eduardo had always had a special hunger for such young women. They hadn’t yet learned if they liked to scream. With Eduardo, they all did.

  But there was something different about this one, something that drew him more than could be explained by the proud, upward-tilting chin, the narrow waist, and the firm little tits and ass.

  As Jennifer stood, Eduardo moved past the Don, gently grasping her extended hand and raising it to his mouth. The trick with a woman’s hand was to let your warm breath stroke the tiny hairs on its back, barely allowing your lips to graze it. When done correctly, the quick contrast of warm breath and cool lips raised goose bumps across her body.

  Eduardo lifted his gaze slowly, rewarded by the sight of the gooseflesh tightening on those slender arms. Gotcha. Then his eyes locked with hers.

  For a moment he was held by them, a gaze so intense that he felt as if he had been strapped into a chair and jolted with fifty thousand watts of juice. A force moved in his head and it wasn’t him.

  As a boy in Lima, in the madness and desperation that had taken his mother, she had turned to the old ways, searching amongst the lost souls of the poor for someone who could teach her the dark magic of the Incas. And as she pulled her young son from one rat-infested barrio to the next, she had found a native woman who taught her the Inca
rituals.

  Some scholars thought the Inca Empire had been built by their attainment of enlightenment, a knowledge of science akin to the Egyptians. But the Inca had built their empire on fear. They worshipped it. Their elaborately designed rituals produced fear beyond that ever achieved by any society before or since.

  Eduardo knew. After all, Inca rituals required a subject. And his mother had kept her own small subject close at hand.

  It was often said that when a man is first exposed to wickedness, he is appalled. But if he remains associated with that wickedness for long enough, he comes to accept it, then finally to embrace it. Eduardo had found the same to be true of fear.

  In those years of ritualistic torture at the hands of his mother, Eduardo had come to accept his own fear and to worship it in others. She had taught him well. He almost regretted killing the witch. Almost.

  Eduardo felt a sudden cold sweat dampen his skin. As hard as it was to believe, this girl had the talent his mother had tried so hard to attain, the ability to join minds with another. In his head he could feel her, her touch strong but soft, seeking to know him, but for what purpose?

  Rather than resist the intrusion, El Chupacabra opened himself wide. The girl’s powers were so strong he felt that he may not have been able to resist them anyway. Why not let her see the whole package?

  A sudden change in the intrusion pounded his head. She was scrambling now, no longer seeking to burrow more deeply, her efforts reduced to a desperate scramble to break the connection.

  Fear. Its glorious purity flowed from her mind into his, each wave so intense that it threatened to bring him to climax where he stood, amid the orchids and roses on Don Espeñosa’s private patio. When he was a teen he had first experienced that rush of sexual release as he plunged the knife again and again into his mother’s dying breast. It was as if he had been sprinting, his heart hammering in his chest, filling his arteries and vessels with a thunder that demanded release. He hadn’t felt anything this intense since that first kill, but here it was again.

  As close as he had come to all his special victims, seeking to immerse himself in the ritual of fear, those experiences now seemed empty. Here was pure, fresh terror, dripping directly into his mind in a way he’d never dreamed possible.

  Then it was gone. The girl, whose hand he still held, slumped toward the ground.

  Eduardo caught her as she fell, guiding her unconscious body back into its seat.

  “What the hell?” Don Espeñosa’s gasp of surprise brought Eduardo back to the present.

  “She fainted.”

  “I can see that. Why?”

  Eduardo turned his face toward the drug lord and grinned. “What can I say? I have that effect on women.”

  Don Jorge Esteban Espeñosa’s brow darkened momentarily, then his expression broke into a grin even broader than Eduardo’s. “Uh-huh. Well, you just keep your dick in your pants. This one’s mine. Besides, I brought you here to get your opinion of the girl, not to offer her up as Chupy bait.”

  Eduardo glanced at the girl slumped in the chair and shrugged. “What’s to say? I like her.”

  “I don’t give a shit if you want her. I want to know if I can trust her.”

  Eduardo studied Don Espeñosa’s angular face. “Trust her? Why?”

  Don Espeñosa signaled with his hand and a servant appeared out of the doorway. “Manuel. Señorita Jennifer está enferma. Llévela a su cuarto.”

  “Sí, señor.”

  As the servant lifted Jennifer in his arms to carry her back to her room, the drug lord nodded at Eduardo.

  “Walk with me.”

  For forty-five minutes, Eduardo walked with Don Espeñosa, listening intently to his description of how this girl came into his possession, how this teenage girl had hacked her way past the best security the cartel’s computer experts could provide to access his accounts, how she had hacked Bellagio security, and how, given the opportunity, she had turned her talents to frustrating the US DEA and IRS.

  It was clear that Jorge Espeñosa had developed strong feelings for this child prodigy. But he was, above all else, a paranoid schizophrenic who could never fully trust anyone. So he had called in El Chupacabra, a man known for his ability to see through the veneer with which people draped themselves, all so that the drug baron could feel safe in his decision to keep the girl, to put her to work for him, to eventually make her the first Señora Espeñosa.

  They had long since made their way out of the gardens, winding their way up one of the mountainous paths that led into the secluded north end of the estate. A black-and-yellow bird darted through the branches high above, its high-pitched keen giving testimony to its annoyance at the disturbance on the trail below.

  Eduardo stopped and turned to look directly into Jorge Espeñosa’s dark brown eyes.

  “So you want to know what I think of her?”

  “I do.”

  Eduardo paused. “You know me and my first impressions.”

  “Never wrong.”

  El Chupacabra smiled. “I hold my own.”

  “And your impression of the girl?” The tension in Jorge Espeñosa’s voice was palpable.

  “As I said, I like her. And yes, I’d like to fuck her. But we can’t always get what we want.”

  Don Espeñosa laughed, a little too hard, as if any other assessment from Eduardo would have been too horrible to bear.

  “I would, however, like to do some double-checking. Do you mind if I do some of my own digging into her background?”

  “Fine.”

  “I’ll want to search her things.”

  “My people have already done that.”

  “That’s them, not me.”

  Stepping back slightly, Don Espeñosa studied Eduardo’s face. After a couple of seconds, he shrugged. “Do whatever you want, so long as it doesn’t involve laying a finger, or any other body part, on the girl. Like I said, she’s mine.”

  Eduardo smiled his most disarming smile. “Agreed.”

  The don turned and began leading him back down the trail toward the main part of the estate. High in the trees, El Chupacabra spotted, for the third time, two riflemen with sniper scopes.

  Would the don have been so foolish as to try to give a signal to his snipers if Eduardo had pronounced the girl unworthy? What kind of hold had this strange girl established over the drug lord?

  One thing was certain. He very much looked forward to finding out.

  126

  The gentle breeze kissed Jennifer’s cheek softly enough to nudge her toward wakefulness without startling her. She had almost forgotten how good it felt to wake up slowly.

  Carried up on the breeze, the thick fragrance of Don Espeñosa’s gardens brought her back to the present. With a start, Jennifer sat bolt upright in the bed. What had happened? How had she gotten here?

  She’d been at breakfast. Don Espeñosa had been there, introducing her to…to…

  A shudder started at the base of her neck and amplified until she had to clench her fists to stop the shaking in her hands. Eduardo Montenegro. She’d barely touched his mind, not nearly as deeply as she’d linked with the many others on which she’d used her special ability, but what she’d felt there had been so horrible it had almost caused her to lose her way back. The memory was so intense she felt the bile rise up in her throat and would have vomited if she hadn’t shifted her thoughts.

  Jennifer had delved into many minds, not the least of which was Don Espeñosa, the boss of the most violent and largest of the South American cartels. Although she had found it filled with cruelty, greed, and paranoia, there were parts of his mind that loved beauty, that longed for basic human affection, and in those parts Jennifer had comfortably roamed. Even playing on his greed and paranoia had presented little challenge to her abilities.

  But touching Eduardo’s mind terrified her beyond words. It was a blackness in which unthinkable thoughts and feelings squirmed and wriggled, each tendril seeking to pull her deeper into the abyss. In that
mind she had felt no hint of light.

  Once again the memory overwhelmed her. This time she failed to shift her thoughts in time, the heaves emptying her partially digested breakfast onto the sheets spread across her legs.

  “Perfect!” Jennifer muttered as she tossed the sheets into a pile, then headed for the bathroom to wash the acrid taste from her mouth and the filth from her body.

  Under the splash of water hot enough to send waves of steam rising from her skin, Jennifer tried to calm herself. But this time her concentration failed her. She’d heard of people so deep in shock that they couldn’t stop shivering, but until now she’d only imagined what that was like. Now, standing in Turkish sauna-style steam, she found herself shaking like the last leaf on a maple tree, the cold autumn wind tugging and twisting at the tiny stem that connected her to reality.

  In Arizona, on the rim of the Grand Canyon, the Hualapai Indians had built a stunning new attraction called The Skywalk. Balanced a mile above the Colorado River, tourists could walk across the massive glass walkway extending a full seventy feet beyond the canyon rim. Jennifer had never had the chance to visit it, to walk away from the edge with only a transparent layer between her small body and the canyon bottom a mile below. Now she felt as if she stood at its very center, not wanting to look, but with eyes drawn irresistibly toward the abyss.

  Jennifer turned off the water, walked out of the snail shower, and wrapped herself in a thick white towel. If anything, she felt colder now than when she had stepped in to warm up, the tremors in her hands having migrated into her core. She considered climbing back into bed, piling the covers atop herself as she curled into a fetal ball. But the thought of the mess in the sheets killed that idea.

  What she needed was something only the Second Ship could provide, that sweet sense of well-being she had experienced on the alien couch. Only now she’d gotten herself into a state where any memory threatened to pull the wrong one. She couldn’t bear that again. Not now. Not ever.