Sandstorm (Sigma Force 1)

And Kara had kept her word.

Safia went to England with Kara for those two years. They studied together, as sisters, as best friends. When they returned to Oman, they were inseparable. They finished their schooling in Muscat together. All seemed wonderful until the day Kara returned from a birthday hunting trip, sunburned and raving.

Her father had not returned with her.

Killed in a sinkhole was the official story, but Reginald Kensington’s body had never been found.

Since that day, Kara had never been the same. She still kept Safia close to her, but it was more from a desire for the familiar than from true friendship. Kara became engrossed in finishing her own education, in taking over the mantle of her father’s enterprises and ventures. At nineteen, she graduated from Oxford.

The young woman proved a financial savant, trebling her father’s net worth while still at the university. Kensington Wells, Incorporated, continued to grow, branching into new fields: computer technology platforms, desalination patents, television broadcasting. Still, Kara never neglected the fountainhead of all her family’s wealth: oil. In just the last year, Kensington surpassed the Halliburton Corporation for the most profitable oil contracts.

And like Kensington’s oil ventures, Safia was not left behind. Kara continued to pay for her education, including six years at Oxford, where Safia earned her doctorate in archaeology. Upon graduation, she remained under the employ of Kensington Wells, Inc. Eventually she came to oversee Kara’s pet project here at the museum, a collection of antiquity from the Arabian Peninsula, a collection first started by Reginald Kensington. And like his former corporation, this project also prospered under Kara’s mantle, growing into the single largest collection in the entire world. Two months ago, the ruling family in Saudi Arabia had attempted to buy the collection, to return it to Arabian soil, a deal rumored to be worth in the hundreds of millions.

Kara had declined. The collection meant more to her than money. It was a memorial to her father. Though his body had never been found, here was his tomb, this lone wing in the British Museum, surrounded by all the wealth and history of Arabia.

Safia stared past her friend’s shoulder to the live-feed monitor, to the smoky ruin of her hard work. She could only imagine what the loss would mean to Kara. It would be like someone desecrating her father’s grave.

“Kara,” Safia began, attempting to soften the blow that would come, to hear it from someone who shared her passion. “The gallery…it’s gone.”

“I know. Edgar already told me.” Kara’s voice lost its hesitancy. She pulled out of the embrace, as if suddenly feeling foolish. She stared around at the others gathered here. The familiar tone of command entered her demeanor. “What happened? Who did this?”

To lose the collection so soon after rejecting the Saudis’ offer had clearly piqued Kara’s suspicion, too.

Without hesitation, the tape was once again played for Lady Kensington. Safia remembered the earlier admonishment about the secrecy of what the footage revealed. No such warning was given to Kara. Wealth had its privileges.

Safia ignored the replay on the monitor. Instead she studied Kara, fearing how this might devastate her. From the corner of her eye, she caught the final flash of the explosion, and then the monitor went black. All during the viewing, Kara’s expression remained unchanged, a marble relief of concentration, Athena in deep thought.

But at the end, Kara’s eyes slowly closed. Not with shock and horror—Safia knew Kara’s moods only too well—but with profound relief. Her friend’s lips moved in a breathless whisper, a single word, caught only by her own ears.

“Finally…”

2 Foxhunt

Sandstorm

NOVEMBER 14, 07:04 A.M. EST

LEDYARD, CONNECTICUT

P ATIENCE WAS the key to any successful hunt.

Painter Crowe stood upon his native lands, the land his father’s tribe named Mashantucket, the “much wooded land.” But where Painter waited, there were no trees, no birdsong, no whisper of wind across the cheek. Here it was the chime of slot machines, the chink of coins, the reek of tobacco smoke, and the continual recycling of lifeless air.

Foxwoods Resort and Casino was the largest gambling complex in the entire world, surpassing anything found in Las Vegas or even Monte Carlo. Located outside of the unassuming hamlet of Ledyard, Connecticut, the towering complex rose dramatically from the dense woods of the Mashantucket reservation. In addition to the gambling facility with its six thousand slot machines and hundreds of gaming tables, the resort was home to three world-class hotels. The entire facility was owned by the Pequot tribe, the “Fox People,” who had hunted these same lands for the past ten thousand years.

But at the moment, it was not a deer or a fox being hunted.

Painter’s quarry was a Chinese computer scientist, Xin Zhang.

Zhang, better known by his alias, Kaos, was a hacker and code breaker of prodigious talent, one of China’s finest. After reading his dossier, Painter had learned respect for the slim man in the Ralph Lauren suit. During the past three years, he had orchestrated a successful wave of computer espionage upon U.S. soil. His latest acquisition: plasma weapons technology out of Los Alamos.

Painter’s target finally shoved up from the pai gow table.

“Would you like to color out, Dr. Zhang?” the pit boss asked, standing over the table like a captain at the prow of his boat. At seven in the morning, there was only the lone player…and his bodyguards.

The isolation required Painter to spy upon his quarry from a safe distance. Suspicions could not be aroused. Especially not so late in the game.

Zhang shifted the pile of black chips toward the dealer, a woman with bored eyes. As the dealer stacked the winnings, Painter studied his target.

Zhang proved the stereotype of the Chinese as inscrutable. He had a poker face that gave no obvious tell, no idiosyncratic tic that denoted a good or a bad hand. He simply played his game.

Like he did now.

None would guess from the man’s appearance that he was a master criminal, wanted in fifteen countries. He dressed like a typical Western businessman: a sharply tailored suit in an understated pinstripe, a silk tie, a platinum Rolex. Still, there remained a certain austere aesthetic quality to him. His black hair was shaved around the ears and back, leaving only a crisp crown of hair on top of his head, not unlike a monk. He wore a pinched set of eyeglasses, circular lenses, faintly tinted blue, a studious countenance.

At last the dealer waved her hands over the stack of chips, showing her empty fingers and palms to the security cameras hidden in the black mirrored domes in the ceiling.