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of morphing into a full-blown migraine.
    All he could think about was getting back to his office.
    Nelson W. Michaels, traitor .
    He could not get that sickening thought out of his head, and it made him feel weak and shaky. He couldn't understand why murder would be required to shut up Lisa Jensen when he had sold only innocuous bits and pieces of harmless information. That was all. It wasn't like he had trafficked in nuclear weapons or anything truly dangerous. that.
    That's what he told himself. He was scared to death and hoped it would make him feel better. It didn't work. Nelson W. Michaels was miserable.

Chapter 6
    Tony sat on the park bench watching the fat fuck waddle away and couldn't make up his mind whether he should laugh his damn fool head off or puke his guts out. It had been so easy to acquire the information he wanted that if he actually gave a crap about his adopted country, he would have been appalled.
    All it had taken to select his mark was a little judicious Internet research into the personal lives of a few likely Pentagon candidates.
    It was amazing how so much of people's private lives was out there in the breakdown lane of the information superhighway just waiting to be discovered if you knew where to look. And inside of two days, he had narrowed down the list of potentials to three, eventually settling on Nelson W. Michaels as the most likely stooge.
    A "chance" meeting at Pimlico, where Nelson spent an inordinate amount of his free time, a little friendly commiseration over mounting gambling debts, a few innocuous e-mails, and within weeks Tony had the man dangling expertly on his hook.
    Nelson was valuable to Tony because as a purchasing special-ist at the Pentagon, he had unfettered access to the information Tony needed. For his part, that information had seemed harmless enough to the midlevel bureaucrat that he had agreed to part with it for a measly ten thousand dollars. Tony had been prepared to go much higher if necessary. He had chosen wisely, however, when he selected Nelson to bribe and had gotten off cheaply, not that it mattered to Tony either way. It wasn't his money.
    Nelson's briefcase rested on the ground next to Tony's feet, exactly where the Pentagon staffer had left it. Tony passed the time observing the pretty American girls, all of whom appeared self-absorbed and shallow, pressed from the same mold. He watched with the emotionless dead eyes of a shark and chuckled thinking about the just completed rendezvous. To say Nelson had been nervous would be an understatement. The fact of the matter was that Nelson had been about ready to shit his pants in terror and had done a lousy job of hiding it.
    For a few minutes, Tony had thought that maybe the frightened amateur was going to stroke out right there on the bench.
    He pictured Michaels holed up somewhere counting his unmarked bills, thanking his lucky stars for the good fortune of meeting a man who had been willing to pay him so much money for such harmless information, and he chuckled again.
    He wondered what Nelson thought about the fact that Lisa Jensen was dead. He must have heard by now; even in a building as massive as the Pentagon, the news that an employee had been killed probably didn't crop up every day. It had to be the talk of the building.
    The automobile accident had been a stroke of luck. Eventually the authorities would discover Jensen had been murdered. For now, all the damage the beer truck had inflicted on her body was probably still masking the gash he had hacked into her jugular, making the injuries appear as nothing more than additional tragic damage attributable to the severity of the accident.
    But in the meantime, Nelson would be left to wonder whether Lisa's death had been a fortuitous accident or whether Tony really had been able to make their problem disappear that quickly. He pictured Nelson trying to puzzle out how Tony had managed to engineer a horrible car wreck and chuckled a third time, and when he