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who had fallen overwhelmingly in love with her and wanted to marry. The free spirit in Grady just couldn't do it. Not at age twenty-one. Now she saw Clint only on occasion; like most men, he wanted to see her more often.
     
    To top off her complicated life, she lived with Jill, her immediate boss.
     
    Researching scientist/author Michael Bowden came as a blessed relief from her normal work and schoolwork. In just a couple of days Grady had made copious notes on Bowden and the Amazon jungle, and in doing so had made one promise to herself: when Sam went to the Amazon to find Michael Bowden, she would use her best moves to ensure she boarded the plane with him—Devan Gaudet notwithstanding.
     
    Her work area was in a large room with over twenty cubicles, each with at least an eighteen-inch computer screen, some with two or even three. Most of one wall was glass and beyond the glass was a large array of computer equipment. In addition, the complex held a large conference room, a lunch-room complete with cooking facilities, and a dorm-like sleeping room.
     
    The place was a self-contained fortress. Indeed, all the office's perimeter walls were lined with Kevlar beneath studs laid over a heavy concrete wall. The windows in the outer walls—small openings above head height—were covered over with a so-called bulletproof plastic material. The place didn't have a true name; the people who worked there just called it "work" or "the office."
     
    It secretly pleased Grady that Harry often picked the corner of her cubicle as a parking spot when Sam was in the office. He'd returned less than an hour ago, and she'd not seen him yet.
     
    Her phone rang. That would be Sam, ready to be briefed on Bowden.
     
    "We have some people coming in and I want you to brief them."
     
    "Really? Nobody ever comes here."
     
    "Sometimes the CIA does. Scotland Yard does."
     
    "Sheesh. When?"
     
    There was a long silence.
     
    "I know. It's a secret and it'll happen when it happens."
     
    * * *
     
    The sound of cell doors slamming had become commonplace for Benoit Moreau. She did not live in squalor or misery, but the modern, antiseptic prison felt desolate. On her cell walls she'd hung art torn from magazines: photos of the Swiss Alps, the Pyrenees, and a picture of the Tour de France. There was also a picture of herself so that she would not forget what she was supposed to look like.
     
    Benoit mostly lived in her mind and not in her cell. She had an exceptional ability to visualize what was not, but what might be, and consequently she never gave up. In the words of a writer of the New Testament, with which she had become familiar as a child, she knew both how to be abased and how to abound. It was a tribute to her otherwise questionable character that she did not allow the trampling of her personal pride to dismantle her psyche. She had thought long and hard about how she'd gotten here, and she dwelled particularly on the men she had bedded and duped along the way. Of them, she was really interested in only one, and she determined that she would find her way back to him. Life, she decided, was the sum total of many small choices and she had made many bad ones to get to this place.
     
    Before her life with DuShane Chellis and his company, Grace Technologies, she had been a rising executive, before that a student with many honors, including being named prenier, graduating avec mention particuliere du jury, and having her examination paper published in Le Monde. A series of jobs in the computer industry and related medical applications had resulted in her rapid rise. She had acquired a reputation as a smart, aggressive young woman who could get things done. Born Bernice, she called herself Benoit, a man's name.
     
    On a bright full-moon night in December she met DuShane Chellis at a party. Attending the event had been an afterthought, and when she arrived, there was a buzz—people were talking about the consummate executive who was building a