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Madame Lambert looked out over the bare tree branches outside her nondescript office in a nondescript building near London’s Kensington Gardens. She was slim, elegant and ruthlessly chic, with creamy, ageless skin and cool, ageless eyes. She stared at the trees, looking for some sign of life. It was April, after all, time for things to come alive again.
But it always took longer in the city, where pollution slowed the natural evolution of things. And for some reason the trees and gardens near the offices of the Spence-Pierce Financial Consultants, Ltd., tended to die. If Madame Lambert were a more fanciful person she’d think it was a sympathetic reaction to the actual work they did. Spence-Pierce was nothing more than one of a dozen covers for the covert work done by the Committee, a group so steeped in secrecy that Isobel Lambert was still just learning some of the intricate details, and she’d been in charge for more than a year.
It was April, and time was running out. The Rule of Seven was in play, backed by Harry Van Dorn’s brilliant brain and seemingly limitless resources, and they still didn’t know nearly enough about what it was. Seven disasters, orchestrated by Harry Van Dorn, to plunge the world into chaos, chaos that would somehow be turned to Van Dorn’s benefit. But the whens, the wheres, the hows were still maddeningly unclear. Not to mention who—Harry couldn’t be doing this without help.
Whatever it was, it was deadly.
And it was the Committee’s job to keep deadly things from happening. No matter how high the body count happened to be.
She wasn’t feeling good about this, and she’d learned to trust her instincts. Peter was the best they had, a brilliant operative who’d never failed a mission.
But she had the unpleasant feeling that all that was about to change.
She sho
ok herself, returning to the spotless walnut desk that held nothing but a Clarefontaine pad and a black pen. She kept everything in her head, for safety’s sake, but sometimes she just needed to write.
She scrawled something, then glanced down at it. The Rule of Seven.
What the hell was Harry Van Dorn planning to unleash on an unsuspecting world?
And would killing him be enough to stop it?
2
Harry Van Dorn’s McMansion of a yacht was large enough that Genevieve could almost forget she was surrounded by water. The smell of the sea was still there, but she loved the ocean if she wasn’t on a boat, and she could easily pretend she was on some nice safe cliff overlooking the surf, rather than bobbing around in the middle of it.
Harry Van Dorn was both quirky and charming, there was no denying it, and he was focusing all that charm on her. His megawatt smile, his crinkly blue eyes, his lazy voice and rapt attention to her every word should have made her melt. Except that Genevieve didn’t melt easily, even beneath the warm Caribbean sun with a billionaire doing his best to seduce her.
The Tab had appeared, of course, cold with a glass of ice as well. She knew she ought to have insisted on Pellegrino or something equally upscale—the firm would never approve of something as mundane as soda pop—but she should have been on vacation, and for now she could let little things drop. She’d even kicked off her shoes as she stretched out on the white leather chaise, wiggling her silk-covered toes in the sunlight.
She knew how to make the most self-effacing man become expansive, and Harry was hardly a wallflower. The Van Dorn Foundation had never been under her particular purview—she’d been kept busy with the relatively simple concerns of several smaller foundations—but she found his worldview fascinating. It was no wonder he collected humanitarian awards by the bucketload—he’d even been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, though she thought it would be a cold day in hell before he got one. The profits from his overseas production companies were cut in half because he refused to let them employ child labor, and the workers received enough of a living wage that they didn’t have to send their children into factories and brothels. He still made a profit, Genevieve thought cynically, and his generous salaries were still only a fraction of what he used to pay the workers in the American factories that now lay closed and abandoned in the dying cities in the Midwest, but the humanitarian organizations ignored that part. Either ignored it, or knew that giving a billionaire an award was likely to make his charitable foundation feel even more charitable toward them.
His money came from everywhere—oil fields in the Middle East, diamond mines in Africa, investments so complicated she doubted even he understood them. All she knew was he made money faster than he could spend it, and his tastes were lavish.
But she had become used to billionaires in the past few years, and in the end there were all the same, even someone like Harry Van Dorn with his little eccentricities. She listened to him ramble on in his lazy Texas accent, telling herself she should just relax, that by tomorrow she’d be stripped of these clothes and her professional armor and be hiking through the jungles of Costa Rica, fending off mosquitoes and blisters. Compared to this plush cocoon it sounded like heaven.
She awoke with a start. Harry was still talking—apparently he’d never even noticed that she’d drifted off for a moment. She could thank her mirrored sunglasses for that—if Walt Fredericks ever knew his protégée had fallen asleep in front of a client she’d be out on her ass in a matter of hours. Though there was always the good possibility that that was exactly what she wanted.
And then she realized what had woken her. Not Harry’s lazy ramblings, but the feel of the boat beneath her. The unmistakable rumble of an engine, when this damn thing should be floating and silent.
“Why did they turn on the engines?” She broke through Harry’s discourse on tarot cards.
“Did they? I hadn’t noticed. I think they do that every now and then to check the engines. Make sure she’s in good running order. Sort of like a fire drill. They don’t usually do it until a few hours before we’re supposed to set sail, but I have no plans to go anywhere right now. Must be some sort of maintenance thing.”
She’d sat bolt upright. They’d been under the shelter of an overhanging deck when Harry had ensconced her on the chaise, but now the sun had advanced far enough that it was halfway up her legs. It was a reasonable explanation, but she wasn’t buying it.
She swung her legs over the side of the leather couch, slipped on her killer shoes with barely a wince and rose. “I hadn’t realized it had gotten so late—I’ve been so interested in your stories,” she lied with the talent she’d honed over the years. “I really do need you to sign those papers—I have a plane to catch. I’m due in Costa Rica tomorrow afternoon.”
“Nonsense. I wouldn’t hear of you leaving,” he replied. “We’ll have a lovely dinner, you’ll spend the night, and tomorrow I’ll have my private jet take you wherever you want to go.”
“I couldn’t—”
“And don’t think I have wicked designs on you,” he said with a wink. “I do, but my mama taught me to be a gentleman where ladies are concerned. This place has seven bedrooms, each with its own bath, and there’s nothing like sleeping in the rocking arms of the ocean. It’ll rock your cares away.”
“I don’t have any particular cares at this moment,” she said, lying through her teeth with utter charm. “And I couldn’t ask you to go to so much trouble.”
“No trouble at all.” He overrode her. “I have a jet and a pilot just sitting around with nothing to do— he’d love a chance to get out for a day or so. He can even wait for you while you do your business down there and bring you back, either here or to New York.”
