Annja watched Vic as he pored over the various reports that were coming in from all over the city. Most of them were meaningless, and Vic had the task of deciding which ones should be taken seriously.

He looked exhausted. As the clock on the wall marked three o’clock in the morning, Annja poured a fresh cup of coffee and brought it to him.

He looked up and smiled. “Thanks.”

“You having any luck with this stuff?” she asked.

He took a swallow of the coffee and shook his head. “Not very much, no. It’s all a mass of paperwork, but very little else.”

“There’s got to be something, though, doesn’t there? Some little shred of information you’re not seeing?”

“That’s exactly what is most frustrating. The feeling that I haven’t seen something I should have seen. That and that damned clock ticking away.”

“You’re sure it’ll be today?” she asked.

Vic frowned. “Yeah. We have to figure they’ll try and set it off during the rush hour—either morning, or afternoon. That’s when the city core will be filled with the most people. And that’s exactly what they’re after—maximum casualties.”

“All those poor innocent people. Men, women, babies even. They just don’t care, do they?” Annja said.

Vic shrugged. “I’m not exactly feeling like I could accurately explain how their minds work. All I care about right now is stopping them. If I fail, I’m probably going to die, as well. We are at ground zero, after all.”

Annja smiled. “Yep.”

“You should leave,” he said.

She looked at him. “You keep trying to get rid of me. Haven’t you learned yet that I’m an extremely stubborn woman?”

Vic leaned back in his chair and kicked his feet up on the table. “I know you are. It’s part of your charm.”

“My charm?”

“Your allure.”

“I can accept that,” she said, laughing.

“When we get through this,” Vic said, waving his hand, “I’m going to take you out for a really good dinner.”

“I’d like that.” Annja watched him as he closed his eyes. “You never told me how you’re able to reconcile what you do for a living,” she said.

His eyes opened again. “You sure you want to kill the mood?”

Annja shrugged. “We’re in the bowels of the United States Embassy. I’d say the mood’s already been pretty well spoiled. This place doesn’t exactly rate on the list of the most romantic places on earth.”

Vic slid his feet off the table and took another drink of the coffee. “What the hell, right?”

She waited for him to start, watching as the memories seemed to crawl across his face.

“I was just out of sniper training. I’d been in special operations for a while. I’d seen some combat in a few places that were so far off the books they’ll never even be discussed. But being a sniper’s different. The combat is different.

“When you’re in a unit, you have guys backing you up. You depend on each other. You know your buddy has your back and you have his. There’s a sense of duty. You won’t let anyone kill your pal and vice versa. That drives you, that bond of brotherhood. It makes it easy to do things that you might otherwise find unacceptable.”

He polished off the cup of coffee Annja had brought him and crushed the cup in his hand. “Being a sniper is something else entirely. There’s no unit. It’s just you. You work alone. You’ve got your rifle and your wits. That’s it.

“The first time in the bush, it’s like all your worst nightmares come true. You jump at every sound, your heart thunders so much you swear people can hear you coming. They can’t, of course, but that’s what you believe. Until you learn to handle your fear, you’re not one hundred percent. And that’s a liability.

“I got my first mission profile about six years back. I was assigned to South America at the time. We still had a lot of drug activity down there and the administration wanted some solutions. Permanent solutions, if you please.” He stopped and looked at her with a sad smile.

“What happened?” Annja asked.

“I got dropped via chopper into Bolivia and made my way cross-country to a remote mountainside. I holed up there, living on hard routine for three weeks. Eventually, my target drove up to his vacation compound about a mile away from where I was, as the crow flies.”

Vic closed his eyes, probably seeing the whole thing all over again. “I watched that guy for two days. I learned everything about him. That’s what it’s like being a sniper. It’s close. Personal. You see your target like no one else. I watched that guy burp and fart and wink and smile. He was someone. Not just a target.”

“That must have made it tough to kill him,” Annja said.

Vic opened his eyes and looked at her. “That made it impossible to kill him. Until it was too late.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean when I finally had my crosshairs on his head, I couldn’t take the shot. I let him get in his car and drive away.”

“You missed?”

“I never shot my rifle. I never lived up to my mission parameters.”

“Well, you couldn’t really be blamed, could you? It was your first assignment, after all,” she said.

Vic shook his head. “I’ve blamed myself every day since then, Annja. Every day that I wake up, I see that guy’s face in my head. And I know that I screwed up.”

“You can’t ride yourself forever, though,” she said.

“I already have. You know what the target did after he left his vacation home? He drove to the house of a government official who’d been making trouble for the drug cartels. He killed him there.”

Annja frowned. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s not the worst of it. The worst part is that this official’s son was having a birthday party. This beautiful eight-year-old boy and all of his friends were having the time of their lives playing. And this guy walks in and kills not just the official but every child in attendance. It was a bloodbath.”

Annja felt her throat grow tight. “My God.”

“You ask me how I reconcile what I do? I don’t have to reconcile anything. I have the memory of my failure always fresh in my mind when I go out and take down a target. If I hadn’t frozen, if I’d done what I was trained to do that day back in Bolivia, those children might still be alive. They might be in high school now. They might have girlfriends and boyfriends. One of them might have discovered a cure for cancer. Instead, they’re dead because I couldn’t pull the trigger and end the life of a truly heinous piece of garbage.”

Annja heard the ticking of the clock and nothing else. She felt as if the world had stopped turning. Vic’s eyes bore into hers with such intensity, she found it difficult to return his gaze.

He took a calming breath and looked away. “Sorry.”

Annja placed her hand over his. “No. I should be the one apologizing for bringing it up. I shouldn’t have forced you to relive something like that. It was inconsiderate of me to do so.”

“You didn’t know. Don’t worry about it,” he said.

Annja leaned back. “Did you ever get him?”

Vic nodded. “When I found out what had happened because of my incompetence, I went into the bush and stalked him. It took me four weeks to get close to him again. But this time, I didn’t hesitate. I put a bullet right through his temple and dropped him dead.”

“At least you made sure he never lived to do more damage,” Annja said.

“He’d done more than enough already,” Vic said. “But it was closure of a sort. I could sleep again after that. The memories, though, they don’t go away. I don’t know if they ever will.”

Annja slid her hands behind her head and sighed. “And now you stalk a new target.”

“Yeah. And time’s ticking away.”

The door opened and an analyst walked into the room. “Gutierrez?”

“Yeah?”

The analyst handed him a slip of paper. “Just got a report in from one of our assets in the Chinese embassy.”

Vic read the transcript and frowned.

“What is it?” Annja asked.

“The Chinese ambassador has left Manila.”

“Is that unusual?”

Vic shrugged. Ordinarily, maybe not. But given what’s coming, it looks a little suspicious.”

“You think the Chinese are involved in this?”

“I don’t know.”

Annja frowned. “What would they have to gain from nuking Manila? That doesn’t make any sense. They’d be outcasts at the United Nations, and the whole world would ostracize them.”

Vic shrugged. “Ours is not to reason why. Ours is simply to figure out and stop things from taking place.”

“I guess,” she said.

“Come on.”

Annja stood and followed him. “Where are we going?”

“The communications room.” Vic led her back to the bubble and into the mass of confusion that seemed to envelop the entire room.

A full team of people still worked and every one of them looked as exhausted as Vic. He headed over to one desk run by a young sergeant who looked to be only twenty years old.

“You heading up the cell-traffic surveillance?” Vic asked.

He nodded. “As much as we can pluck out of the air given what we have for interception equipment.”

“Is it good stuff?”

“Fair, I guess. It’s not latest NSA generation, but it handles the workload pretty well.”

“Can you pinpoint cell-phone traffic originating in the Chinese embassy for the last twelve hours?”

“That could be a lot of phone calls.’

“Yes, it could be,” Vic said.

The sergeant typed away on his keyboard. After a minute of typing in search parameters, he leaned back. “Looks like there were twenty calls placed within that time frame.”

“That’s it?” Annja asked.

The sergeant grinned. “The Chinese are a little paranoid about people using cell phones inside their embassy. Some folks don’t care and do it anyway. Mostly, they’re the higher-ups who think they’re untouchable. That works out pretty well for us since the intel is top-shelf stuff if they get lazy.”

Vic studied the screen of the times and durations of the phone calls. “What about destinations? Can you narrow down those calls that were made to phones here in Manila?”

“Sure.” The sergeant typed a few more keys and then waited for the results to scroll across the screen.

Vic pointed. “There. What’s that one?”

The sergeant highlighted it and a new screen came up. “The call originated in the office of the secretary for domestic exports.” He grinned. “That’s one of our favorites. We think he’s actually with the intelligence bureau out of Beijing, here running Chinese assets throughout Southeast Asia.”

“Where did the call go to?”

“Hang on, I can get a grid reference.” He typed a few keys and a map of Manila showed up on his screen. “There. Somewhere in this area. The best I can pinpoint it is to about a hundred yards square.”

Vic studied the screen. “What’s there? Anything of importance?”

“You’ve got the shopping mall, a Jolly Bee restaurant and the Imperial Hotel.”

“Hotel?” Vic asked.

“Uh-huh.”

Annja looked at Vic. “You think?”

He shrugged. “It’s worth a shot. What else do we have to run down?” He looked back at the sergeant. “I think we’re going to need your help for a few more minutes.”