Excerpt of The Cardinal Rule by Cate Dermody

Alisha planted a hand on a hip-height rock wall and vaulted it, coming down hard on a round stone on its far side. Her foot — bare; she'd kicked off the three-inch leather heels the instant she knew she'd been made — slipped. Her ankle twisted and she fell, so fast she had no time to think through the tuck and roll. A bullet sang over her head, slicing the air with a supersonic whine. Even in the midst of flight syndrome, one part of her mind focused on that unique sound, and she shot a wordless thanks toward the stone that had saved her life.

She was back on her feet before the thought was finished, running low to the ground. Her ankle throbbed with protest, not broken but displeased with the weight of speed. Alisha ignored the thrums of pain, focusing instead on the sounds around her. From behind were voices, angry men who wielded the guns whose bullets winged over her head. The wind shrieked as loudly as the bullets for a few seconds, battering her in her crouched run. She put her fingers to the ground when she needed the balance, letting the wind buffet her a few feet one way or the other. It lent her the randomness she needed to break any patterns that the gunmen might pick out of the predawn morning.

One other sound, even more critical than shouting men and bullets, thudded at bones behind her ears: the sound of the surf, smashing against cliff faces only sixty yards away. Sixty yards; fifty; forty. She might make it, if flinging herself off a hundred-foot cliff was considered making it.

Damn! Another bullet shrieked over her head and Alisha stumbled in her forward motion, forcing herself to make the clumsy action into another roll. Her ankle protested again as she pushed through to her feet, coming up at an angle from her previous trajectory. Her jacket and skirt were dark, warm brown that normally set off her skin tone, but in the predawn grayness, all that was important was that she didn't stand out against the dark like a beacon. A voice lifted in frustration behind her and she huffed a breath of relief. Thirty yards to go, and they'd lost her. More bullets whined, but they were off to the right, following the path she'd been on, rather than her new one.

The countryside was not meant to be raced over in darkness. Unkempt knots of earth seemed to leap up, lumps that felt as hard as tree roots against bare toes. Rough- edged stones scraped her feet, though those, at least, offered surprisingly little pain. Calluses built from years of yoga, practiced barefoot, provided remarkable protection for the soles of her feet. Panicked, early- morning getaways weren't why she practiced the ancient art, but for the moment, Alisha was grateful for any tiny advantage she had.

The ground fell away into divots that sent her tripping and scrambling forward. Bull in a china shop, she thought, but it didn't matter, so long as she stayed relatively quiet. The wind would hinder her pursuers as much as it knocked her about, throwing the sounds of her passage in directions she'd never taken.

Ten yards. The next thirty feet were the critical ones. To make the jump she needed all the momentum she could get: she couldn't afford to remain crouched, not with the thunderous waves below, ready to grab her and dash her against the cliffs. Alisha straightened up into a full-out run, long legs flashing with speed and urgency. Pain sizzled up the big nerve along the outside of her right ankle, the damage from the twist more profound now that she demanded everything from her injured body.

"There!" Triumph in the voice behind her. Alisha didn't dare take the time to look over her shoulder, not with twenty — fifteen — feet to go. Eyes lifted, hands straight with sprinter's concentration, she kicked on a burst of speed, trusting adrenaline to get her through the sharpness in her ankle that meant the sprain was worsening with every step. More shots rang out, the deadly chime of air itself protesting the way it was being torn asunder.

Ten feet. Five feet. She gathered herself, thighs bunched, gaze focused on a far point, dozens of feet past the body- shattering stones at the foot of the cliffs. Now, she thought, and gave her whole being over to the leap from the cliff's edge.

Alisha flew. ***

For a few seconds it was freedom, pure and glorious. Nothing in the world but herself and the cool early morning air. The wind screamed and cut away any sounds of pursuit, swallowing the howl of bullets chasing after her. It was as honest a moment as Alisha could remember, no one and nothing, not even gravity, holding sway over her. A single thought intruded: perfect. It was the thesis of yoga: a state of acceptance so complete that not even the next breath seemed important. Absolute purity for a few glorious seconds, before sheer adrenalized glee set in.

She hit reality in a dive, fingers laced together over her head, arms bent just slightly, enough that her elbows couldn't lock and shatter with the impact. The water was cold, breathtaking; for the first seconds it took all Alisha's effort to not inhale with the shock of it. But that would be her doom, and the data she carried would never make it back to her handler. She struck out blindly, kicking forward and deeper into the water. It would confound her hunters if she never surfaced, and, down deeper, she might slip between the currents that smashed water against the cliffs.

Her lungs burned as she kicked, panic setting into the hind part of her brain, the order to breathe! almost irresistible. Alisha kept one hand extended in front of her, still kicking as hard as she could, and fumbled in her skirt's waistband with the other. There were two discrete pouches there. One held what memory told her looked embarrass-ingly like a wrapped condom. Alisha curled her fingers around that one and brought it to her face, shoving it firmly into her mouth. She kept her mouth closed tightly over it until she'd fit it between her lips and her teeth, like a kid with an orange peel stuck in her mouth. It felt as ungainly and awkward, but it would save her life.

It took an act of pure faith to exhale the last air in her lungs out in a salt-tainted burst of saliva. This time, like every time, there was one frozen moment of sheer animal terror as she dragged air in through the cleared pores of the filter, a moment when she expected the technology to fail and for water to flood her lungs.

This time, as it had every time, the breather worked. Damp, salt-flavored oxygen rasped into her lungs. Alisha swallowed a silent gasp of relief and kicked forward into the cold water, panic fading into confidence of survival.

With the diminishing of fear came memory. Alisha managed a very faint smile around the awkwardness of the breather. It was the breather — or one like it — that had gotten her into the spy business in the first place. The breather, and Marsa Alam, a village on the Red Sea.

She'd noticed a slight man with an American accent wandering the beach almost daily. He looked dapper, but was far too old — at least in his forties! — for the nineteen-year-old Alisha to be interested in. They'd nodded politely at one another, and to her relief he hadn't seemed to be interested in conversation beyond exchanged hellos. She was there for the scuba diving, not making friends with expatriate Americans.

It was her last day in Marsa Alam when he approached her, diffidently, carrying two of the breathers. "They work like this," he'd said, and showed her how the ungainly little package blossomed into a piece of Bond-like technology. "Try it," he'd offered, and even a decade later, Alisha had to fight off a grin that always threatened laughter when she remembered that moment. He might as well have added, "The first hit is free."

When she'd surfaced two hours later, a little dizzy — the breather, he told her, only provided enough oxygen for about sixty percent lung capacity — she'd wanted to know where on earth she could get one of her own.

"Langley," he said, very mildly, watching Alisha with careful, honest consideration.

And that was it, Alisha thought ruefully, not for the first time. They'd had her at hello.

Alisha broke the surface when she was no longer struggling for every inch of distance against the current. The water was cold, too cold to stay in much longer, and her suit — the jacket long since abandoned, the silk shirt so plastered to her body it might as well have been skin — had no thermal capabilities. She owned clothes that did have such capabilities, but they were hanging safely in her closet at home. She'd used them to stay warm in Russia and in the Andes, but hadn't considered the practicality of deep-water diving in them. Even bringing the breather along had been a last-moment decision. She hadn't expected anything to go wrong.

Which was a thought she didn't want to pursue. She spat the breather out and lay on her back in the ocean, gasping for deeper breaths. The water was startlingly calm, dawn stretching across it in a brilliant white-gold shaft. It was midsummer; any other time of year, and the ocean- diving stint would've killed her through hypothermia. She'd been lucky. Stupid, she chided herself, and lucky.

She lifted her wrist out of the water, sunlight glinting off her watch and picking out the individual silver links that made up the bracelet-like band. It looked delicate and expensive in the morning light, which was half-true: Alisha'd seen its like crushed by a bulldozer and come out barely scratched. She pressed a fingernail into a subtle indentation on its outer edge, sinking six inches back into the water before she was able to drop her hand and restabilize herself.

"Cardinal requires extraction." Frustrating words, implying failure. She shook her head, pushing the thought away. There would be time for it later. "Coordinates as follows." She read off the GPS coordinates at the bottom of the watch face and closed her eyes with a tired sigh, waiting for the men in black to swoop down and scoop her up.

The helicopter that dragged her out of the water was a SH- 60B Seahawk, the same kind that had brought a vomiting Jack Ryan out to the U.S.S. Dallas. Alisha lay in a puddle of seawater on the metal floor, eyes half-shut against the morning sun, and wondered just how many moments of her life mapped to the spy movies she'd watched growing up. "Not this one, at least." She sat up with a groan, putting the heel of her hand over one eye.

"Not this one at least, what?"

"I don't get sick like Ryan does."

Brief silence — as much silence as could be had in a helicopter — held reign, before she heard Greg chuckle. "The Hunt for Red October. I'm occasionally astounded that we're able to communicate at all."

Alisha managed a half smile, without opening her eyes. "You know me too well." Sometimes she thought it was true. The man sitting across from her was the same one who'd brought her in to the CIA ten years earlier, Gregory Parker. Slight, beginning to bald through his brown curls, with bright eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, he hadn't changed significantly since he'd first approached her on the beach. Alisha slid her hand away from her eyes to study him. A little more gray in the hair, perhaps, and deeper lines around his mouth, but by and large, he was unchanged. "I know you well enough to know you don't get sick," he agreed. Polite banter; they had a whole helicopter ride to discuss what had gone wrong with the mission. Alisha was grateful for the respite, however brief, while she warmed up and dried off.

"I get sick." Her argument lacked conviction even to her own ears. "Every time I visit my sister's kids. No mere mortal could stand up to the array of germs those three carry." She shivered, twisting her hands back to wring her hair out. Greg leaned forward with a blanket and she wrapped it around her shoulders, lowering her head to her knees. "Thanks."