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He raced up the back steps to the kitchen door. The lock was so old and simple he didn’t even need a second lock pick to throw the tumblers. One did the job. He was inside in a few seconds. He padded across the marble tiles of the kitchen floor and glided down a short hallway. The front door was straight ahead.

Katie was visible on the porch, as were the restraining arms of her captors on either side of her. Alex waited, perfectly still, part of the shadows themselves. His mother stepped in front of the door, back a few feet from the opening.

“Go ahead, Katie,” Claudia ordered. “Call for him to come out. Feel free to tell him that my men are going to shoot you very painfully if he doesn’t.”

Katie whimpered a little and then shouted, “It’s a trap, Alex! Run!”

One of the men back-handed her viciously. Blood flew from her mouth in an arc that splatted on the white porch column as Alex lunged. In one blindingly fast move, he was at his mother’s back. His left arm went around her throat, and his right hand jammed a pistol to her neck, under her ear.

He growled, “We meet at last, mother mine.”

The men on the porch whirled and their weapons came to bear on him.

In his mother’s ear, he murmured, “You might want to explain to your thugs that my pistol has a hair trigger. Tell them how the impact of a bullet slamming into my skull will cause an involuntary reflex that makes my fists clench. Your brain will be sprayed all over the house along with mine. Shall we die together, Mother?”

Even he heard the acid in his voice when he said the word.

The woman in his arms went deceptively relaxed and then lurched violently, attempting to tear free of his grasp.

As if he hadn’t seen that one coming from a mile away. He tapped her almost gently in the temple with the barrel of his pistol. Just enough to daze her but not enough to knock her out cold.

“Tsk, tsk,” he chided. In the moment it had taken for him to subdue Claudia, Katie had managed to get herself turned around in her guards’ arms to face him. The voices were clamoring again in his head. He had a gun to his mother’s head. How fucked up was that?

Katie looked equal parts relieved and chagrined to see him. “I told you to run. To save yourself.”

“My mother. My problem.”

She stared at him closely. Worry blossomed in her big blue eyes.

Dammit, she knew him too well. She saw how hard he was having to fight to hold it together. She spoke slowly, carefully, as if willing him to hear her. “She’s not worth it, Alex.”

His mother stirred in his arms, rousing to full awareness once more.

He ordered grimly, “Call off the dogs, Claudia. I’d hate to have to kill this batch, too.”

“It was a tactical mistake to call my ops center, Alexei,” Claudia said calmly. “It was obvious that you would make a run at me like this. You didn’t seriously think I would not take precautions to protect myself, did you?”

As if on cue, a half-dozen weapons safeties disengaged behind Alex.Sonofabitch.She’d had an entire back-up team just sitting in the woods, waiting for him to show himself. Bastards had probably had him in their sights all along.

“Disarm him if you please, gentlemen,” Claudia said pleasantly.

Hard hands grabbed him, yanked the pistol out of his hands, and searched him roughly and rudely. He was manhandled back into the living room, along with Katie.

“Found this, ma’am,” one of the heavily body-armored men announced. Alex spied the flash disk of chemical weapons evidence in the guy’s palm.

“I’ll take that,” Claudia announced triumphantly. She moved over to the roll-top secretary’s desk in the corner and opened a laptop computer. The tableau of armed men and prisoners froze in time as the computer turned on and booted up. His mother plugged the flash drive into the computer and quickly opened the contents.

Photographs, the gas chromatograph readouts, and his own case notes flashed onto the screen. “I’ll be quite the hero for bringing in this evidence,” Claudia purred.

“Other people in the agency will know where it came from and who obtained it.”

“Of course they will. The loving son shared it with his thankful mother just before an unfortunate accident claimed his life and that of his girlfriend. So many enemies my poor son had. One of them finally caught up with him.”

He watched dispassionately as she typed out a quick e-mail, attached the contents of the flash drive to it and hit the Send button with a flourish.

“Was Cold Intent really only about revenge against my father?” he asked curiously. “Did you love him so much, then?”

“Love—“ she burst out laughing. “I hated his guts.”