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foolish. She staredaround 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
    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,