Death is Forever

her loathing of the world she’d run from for seven years, but most of her anger came from even older memories of being shut out of the enigmatic world of spy and counterspy that consumed so much of her father’s life.
    “Did Blackburn show you any identification?” Windsor continued.
    “Just himself. To a T, I believe you said. Should I believe what he told me?”
    “Baby, I can’t—”
    “Yes or no,” she cut in. “One word.”
    “It’s not that easy. I’ll be in L.A. tomorrow. We can talk about it then.”
    Erin looked at the phone as though it had grown fur. “You’re coming to L.A.?”
    “Don’t sound so shocked. I haven’t seen you for almost a year.” His voice changed, becoming harder. “Just to make sure I don’t miss you, stay put in the hotel room. Have room service take care of the food. Rest up. Do you hear me, baby?”
    “Yes,” she said, understanding that Windsor didn’t want her to leave the room. “But I don’t like it.”
    “I’m not wild about it myself,” he said flatly.
    There was a three-beat pause before she said, “All right. I’ll be here when you get here.”
    “In your room.”
    “In my room,” she said between clenched teeth.
    There was the sound of air rushing, as though Windsor had let out a relieved sigh. “Thanks. It means a lot to me. I love you, baby.”
    Before she could answer, her father was gone. Throughout her life, he’d told her many times that he loved her, but for the past seven years he hadn’t waited to find out if she loved him in return.
    Slowly Erin hung up the phone and wandered restlessly around the room, turning on lights against the darkness beyond the closed drapes, wondering why her father had insisted she stay in the room.
    Maybe he’ll tell me tomorrow.
    Maybe not.
    Matthew Windsor had spent his entire life in the forest of mirrors that nation-states created to mislead one another. Discretion was as natural as his heartbeat. Most of his life had been lived in places he couldn’t admit to having been, not to his wife or his daughter, perhaps not even to the son who had also become an officer of the CIA.
    She understood the necessities of her father’s work, but she resented his job deeply, not only because of what it had done to her but also because of what it had done to the intelligent, thoughtful, loving man she knew her father to be. Secret wars meant secret lives, and secret lives made human trust impossible.
    Erin wanted to trust her father, just as she wanted to trust the rest of the world. But trusting everyone wasn’t a very bright way to live and could be a very painful way to die. She’d been lucky once.
    Next time she might not live to learn.

9
Beverly Hills One day later
    Late-afternoon light burned through the west-facing windows of the hotel suite. As the shafts of sunlight flowed across the rosewood tabletop, thirteen rough crystals shimmered to life. Erin Windsor stood very near the table, bent over her camera equipment, totally focused on the stones. She was consumed by the pure colors, entranced in a dazzling new world seen through the extreme close-up lens of her camera.
    She’d spent the day totally focused on the mysterious, breathtaking crystals, waiting for her father. More than once she’d despaired of capturing the subtle play of light and the violently pure colors, the flashing glitter and fathomless shadows, the tiny rainbows chained among the curved hollows that high magnification revealed on the surface of the stones. When she turned the diamonds just so, light fragmented across the table. When she turned the stones another way, light glowed from within like flame burning within ice. When she turned them yet another way, light pooled and shimmered as though the crystals were alive, breathing.
    “Are you really diamonds?” she muttered in a combination of frustration and curiosity.
    The afternoon light changed, deepened, becoming a golden torrent. The crystals burst into flame.
    For an instant Erin froze over her camera, transfixed by the changed stones. They were a song sung in silence, inhuman in their beauty, the translucent tears of a rainbow god.
    Suddenly she didn’t care if the crystals were diamond or YAG, zircon or quartz. She worked like a woman possessed, triggering the camera, shifting stones, composing shots, reloading film, driven by the stones’ savage beauty and her own equally savage need to capture the instant when crystal and light became lovers, each transforming