Thirty Nights

The headache that had been threatening hit with jackhammer force, pounding at her temple, behind her eyes. As she looked out at the sleet that was being driven against the window, Gillian desperately wished she was back in New Zealand. Or Rio. Anywhere but here.

“I wonder why he waited all these years?”

“That’s simple.” The alcohol had him slurring his words. “I didn’t have anything the black-hearted devil wanted until now.”

“I see,” Gillian said, not really seeing anything at all. Bone weary, she’d intended to fly straight from Kennedy airport to her beach house in Monterey, where she could spend a restful few weeks recovering from both her cold and the rigors of her tour by sitting out on her deck, watching the whales migrate. She’d been sitting in the first-class lounge, drinking a cup of honey-laced tea that she’d hoped would clear her sinuses but hadn’t, waiting to board the flight home, when her father had tracked her down, claiming a life-or-death emergency.

He’d stubbornly refused to be more specific, but concerned enough by the uncharacteristic tremor in his voice, Gillian had immediately changed her plans, taking the plane to Boston instead. Only to discover that the problem wasn’t honestly life-threatening at all, merely career-threatening.

Then again, Gillian reminded herself wearily, her father’s work had always been his life.

“What does Hunter want, Father?”

He stared at her through blurry, glazed eyes. “Didn’t I tell you?”

“No.”

“He wants you, Gilly. The heartless, amoral bastard says that if I don’t send you to Maine to sleep with him for thirty nights, he’ll ruin me. He gave me seven days to get you there. That was three days ago. I’ve only got four days left before I’m ruined.”

He shook his head. Then, muttering something about devils and the lowest circles of hell, George Cassidy passed out.

3

Castle Mountain

TWENTY-FOUR HOURS PAST the deadline, Gillian still hadn’t shown up on the island. Frustrated and disgusted with himself for the way he’d been watching the clock, Hunter had driven to the think tank located a few miles from his house, where he’d tried, with scant success, to concentrate on work.

“I figured you’d be working at home today,” a familiar voice said.

Hunter glanced back over his shoulder and saw Dylan Prescott standing in the doorway. Dylan, the founder of the think tank, was extraordinarily brilliant and unrelentingly good-natured. His sister was police chief and he was married to a science fiction writer whose stunningly cool beauty defied every nerdy stereotype regarding the mostly male genre.

More important, Dylan was also one of the few individuals Hunter trusted without hesitation. They weren’t working in the same fields—Dylan’s area of interest and expertise was space and time travel—yet Hunter enjoyed running hypotheses by his friend. Invariably, the imaginative scientist would come up with a new twist that Hunter hadn’t considered.

“Why would you think that?”

Dylan shrugged. “I dropped into the Gray Gull for coffee this morning before coming here. Ben Adams mentioned something about having to pick up a guest of yours from the mainland on his mail packet.”

He was too polite to ask, and too good a friend to probe into personal matters, but Hunter knew Dylan was curious. Especially since Hunter wasn’t known to entertain all that many guests at his remote, well-guarded home.

It was his turn to shrug. “That’s up in the air,” he said vaguely.

Dylan gave him a probing look, then, knowing his friend well, apparently decided that there was no point in digging. “It’s just as well you’re here,” he said. “Since you’ve got a visitor.”

“Oh?” He wondered if Ben had actually brought Gillian here, instead of to the house as he’d instructed.

“It’s that GQ guy from State,” Dylan revealed. “He’s currently cooling his heels in the reception area.”

Hunter shook his head. A government bureaucrat was just what he needed to top off a less-than-perfect day. He cursed. Then, remembering that the government was paying the bills for his research, sighed with resignation.

“I suppose, since he’s come all this way, I’m going to have to see him.”

“I’ll go tell Janet to send him in, then,” Dylan said.

As the receptionist ushered the man into his outer office, it crossed Hunter’s mind that if Hollywood ever went looking for someone to cast in the role of a rising player in the high-stakes world of international diplomacy, James Van Horn would be perfect for the part. His hundred-dollar haircut and cashmere coat suggested the family wealth Hunter knew had made him a legendary undergrad at Princeton. The British accent he tended to affect was a reminder of his days at Oxford, and his shoes—wing tips, for God’s sake—were far more appropriate for walking the marbled halls of the State Department than wading through Castle Mountain’s snowdrifts.

“I wasn’t expecting you.” Annoyed by the intrusion, and even more irritated that the man wasn’t the woman he’d been expecting for the past twenty-four hours, Hunter didn’t bother with pleasantries.

“I suppose you wouldn’t believe that I was in the neighborhood and decided to drop in and see how the work was progressing.”

“Not on a bet.”

Without waiting for an invitation, he took off his coat, which he hung with precision on the coatrack, hitched up the legs of his wool suit slacks, sat down in a leather chair, crossed his legs, then ran his manicured fingers down a knife-sharp crease.

“I had business in New England.” Shoulders clad in a subdued gray pinstripe shrugged. “You weren’t that far out of my way.”

It was a lie and both men knew it. Hunter waited him out.

“So, are the rumors true?” Van Horn eventually asked.

“Which rumors are you referring to?”

“The ones circulating around Washington that you’re on the verge of finalizing the project.”

The project in question was an offshoot of the gene studies Hunter had been doing when George Cassidy had gotten him kicked off the MIT project. Simply put, he’d created a program in which he detailed the political and economic history of a region, plugged in sociological factors past and present, along with a genetic profile of the inhabitants obtained from DNA studies, then ran them through the computer. With the collected data, the program, in theory, was then able to predict how any given population would respond under various circumstances.

There was another, darker side to his research that Hunter fully intended to keep under wraps. If the detailed DNA model he’d created fell into the wrong hands, it could theoretically be used to clone a genetically perfected warrior lacking in any social or moral conscience. An assassin class.

While he disliked working with bureaucrats, Hunter wasn’t in any position to turn down much-needed funds. He’d always eschewed the money-raising circuit, but after that incident in Bosnia that had cost him half his face and a hand, he figured hostesses wouldn’t exactly consider him a plus at their fund-raising dinners or cocktail parties.

His current work was being funded by both the State and Defense Departments, Defense wanting the data in order to predict wars and to discover how to map winning battle strategies, while State was seeking to defuse international skirmishes before they blew up into full-scale wars.

“I still have some work to do,” he said obliquely. “The Middle East, for example, is still problematic.”

They also didn’t like him in that part of the world. He’d been shot at more times than he cared to think about during his stay in the region. And although he liked most of the population personally, he’d been warned on more than one occasion that he was considered a traitor for including various warring factions into his model. The trouble with that was that in too many parts of the world, people viewed as traitors tended to disappear. Or get blown up.

Hunter hoped like hell that he wouldn’t have to return to Lebanon anytime soon. Beirut might have once been the Paris of the region, but there were still neighborhoods that could only be described as shooting galleries.

Then there was Kosovo. Hunter sighed. Good luck keeping any negotiated peace in that place. And Bosnia. And Afghanistan. The list went on and on, and while he had uncharacteristically high hopes for the project, Hunter was also pragmatic enough to know that trying to halt any outbreaks of violence around the world was akin to attempting to plug a hole in Hoover Dam with a finger.

“The powers that be are getting impatient,” Van Horn warned.

“Tough. The work will be done when it’s done. And not a minute before.”

“They have to justify the expenditures to the budget committee. I doubt you’d enjoy being the target of a congressional investigation.”

Hunter lifted a brow. “Is that a threat?”

“Merely an observation.”