Silencing Eve

Korean assassin. It might be time to invest in a more discreet shoulder holster.”
    “I’m sure you’re equipped with other weapons.” Kendra tilted her head. “I’m good with dialects, but I’m having a tough time with yours. You’re clipping your consonants and slightly flattening your vowel sounds. Did the linguistic people at Langley teach you to do that?”
    “They may have.”
    “It’s very effective. I have no idea where you’re from.”
    “Good. I’ve made a few enemies over the years, and the last thing I want is for them to be able to find out anything about me.”
    “Then you’ve done a good job.”
    Catherine gave her a cool glance. “You’re doing quite an efficient job yourself. You’re laying out your credentials on display to show me just how good that judgment I challenged is.”
    Kendra smiled. “I thought it would save time in the long run. I don’t need your trust, but I need an open mind.”
    Catherine took a step closer. “So are you going to tell me what happened in Colorado?”
    “How much do you know already?”
    “Just what I read in the newspaper and the CIA records. Plus Joe’s rather cryptic reassurance that Eve is probably still alive, which makes this entire day rather surreal.”
    “That it is.”
    “Then talk to me,” Catherine said fiercely. “I don’t have many friends, and I don’t like the idea of losing one. I don’t like it so much that I’m on the edge of violence. I’ve got to know something.”
    “I’ll tell you everything I know. When the saloon exploded in that ghost town, the infrared scanners showed two people inside.”
    “Those recordings are always very accurate. The explosion was so powerful, it rocked the whole town. There’s no way anyone could have survived that.”
    “They didn’t. And we found the skeletal fragments and burned flesh.”
    “Am I missing something?”
    “Those two people were possibly dead already. But they weren’t Eve and Doane.”
    Catherine was silent. Let it be true, she prayed. “Are you sure?”
    “We’re still waiting on DNA, but I’m sure. I think each of those bodies was wrapped in thermal-reflective sleeping-bag liners to hold their body heat for the infrared scopes. I went down with the forensic team after they extinguished the fire and found traces of the reflective material at the site.”
    “But there were a dozen witnesses who saw Eve and Doane go into that saloon just a few minutes before that blast. How could they have gotten away without someone’s seeing them?”
    “Doane obviously knew the area very well. They were in a ghost town in the bottom of a small, bowl-shaped valley. Locals call it the punch bowl. It had been raining heavily, and the street was muddy. The strange thing was that it wasn’t flooded.”
    “Why was that strange?”
    “With water coming down from every side of the valley, it had no place to go. It should have flooded, unless … it was draining to someplace.”
    Catherine thought about it. “Like a cavern?”
    “Very good. There were fissures that ran behind the buildings. Water drained through them to a stream in an underground cavern. It feeds an even larger stream that runs down the mountain. We didn’t know about the cavern and the underground stream, but we used the water from that bigger stream to help put out the fire.”
    Catherine could feel the excitement surging within her. “You think Doane took Eve out the back and down into this cavern?”
    “It’s a twenty-foot drop, but the water is deep enough that it wouldn’t have been a problem. The fissure was so narrow that when Doane first got to the ghost town, it was easy for him to cover it with brush to hide the cavern. And the explosion completely covered up the fissures with debris, so we didn’t even know they were there until I looked for them later. Doane did a good job of covering his tracks.”
    “Do we know whose bodies were in there?”
    “Not yet. There wasn’t much left of them. We were lucky they weren’t vaporized. But the fact that it was so muddy gave me some interesting tracks outside in front of the saloon. An off-road vehicle arrived, and Terence Blick, a partner of Doane’s, stepped out of it. Then Blick walked around to the back, unloaded something heavy, and walked into the saloon with it.”
    “You got all that from footprints?”
    “I had a run-in with Blick a couple days before. I stopped to see if I could help a policeman he’d shot down, and I saw