Excerpt of Straight through the Heart by Lyn Stone

McLean, Virginia

"So, she's either the hero of the hour or she's facing a rap for treason." Eric Vinland pursed his lips and doodled a little hangman's rope on his notepad next to the woman's name. He was conditioning himself to make the call of guilty if it came to that.

Damn, but he hated it when a woman got herself involved in something like this. Maybe the feeling harkened back to his early training that included looking after the "weaker sex," seeing that none of them came to any harm. Feminists today would rip him apart if he ever admitted that out loud. They'd be right to do that, too. Eric knew from experience that women could be every bit as capable, but also as greedy, sadistic and treasonous as men. "Comes down to him or her," he reminded himself. "By her own admission, she was there at the scene so that about sums it up," Jack Mercier, Eric's supervisor and the agent in charge of the investigation, agreed. "Let's go so you can determine if she was involved in the theft and establishing cover by killing Bergen, or if she's playing straight with us. You're a hell of a lot faster than a polygraph."

Eric scoffed. "You know as well as I do that she will have been trained to beat a lie detector."

Jack nodded. "Yes, but she won't be prepared for your powers of detection, will she? I wish you'd arrived sooner. Internet sources indicate those plans for the radar shield are already on the block and we need to find out who's doing the marketing. God help us if they decide to download the damned thing to a buyer. It'll be like freeware before we know it."

"Too valuable to risk that happening. The seller will want to deliver and collect in person on this one."

Eric understood the need for urgency. He regretted his delayed flight from Seattle, but it couldn't be helped. At least the investigation there had been successful even if it had run longer than expected.

He followed the boss out of the borrowed office at FBI headquarters, down the corridor to the interrogation room.

"You do the inquisition. I'll observe," Jack ordered. He ducked into the room adjacent to Interrogation that contained the viewing side of a one-way mirror.

When Eric entered the next door, his fellow agent, Holly Griffin, stood propped against the table, speaking to the suspect. "Okay, let's have it again. From the top, please."

Eric's quiet entrance raised no reaction in either woman. Holly kept her eyes on the woman, Agent Moon, who had hers shut.

He zoned in on the redhead seated on the far side of the table in the uncomfortable metal folding chair. He could read most people's minds like the Sunday funnies, but not this kid's. Not yet, anyway.

Her exhaustion was evident. The incident had occurred around midnight, and it was nearly dawn now. Her defenses should be way down.

She had her arms folded beneath her ample breasts, hands clutching her elbows so tightly her knuckles turned white.

She gave a huge sigh as she rocked forward in her chair. "Not another word without a bathroom break. I swear I've told you everything I saw, all I know, all I suspect."

Eric saw no point in torture. He gave Holly a nod when she looked over at him, and she promptly escorted the subject out. Holly, Will and Jack had been questioning her for a couple of hours now. Several empty soft drink cans sat on the table close to where the subject had been sitting.

Holly was the lone female agent in their group and married to Will Griffin, another of their number. Sextant was a tight unit of six, all with particular specialties. Holly's was profiling, combined with an amazing talent for organizing and analyzing gathered data. Though she denied having any extrasensory abilities, she was exceptional at filling in the blanks and hearing the unspoken.

Her husband, Will, was often blessed with remote viewing and occasional empathetic episodes. Joe Corda was psychic to some degree, though still identifying and learning to control what he could do. Clay Senate experienced visions of future occurrences, often hard to interpret, but always interesting to explore. Jack Mercier held it all together and made every attempt to develop scenarios utilizing whatever they were able to provide, however nebulous that input seemed.

Eric's powers had proved the strongest and most reliable so far. Telepathy was his thing, but he did have sporadic success in other areas.

His fellow agents were thorough, but he had the edge they needed to grasp everything in her pretty head, thoughts she would never speak aloud.

Since he could first remember, Eric had possessed that gift. He'd been hired for the elite Sextant team because of it. Made up of agents recruited from other government agencies, Sextant's mission was to subvert terrorist activities. His academic and professional credentials were very good, but he knew that his ability to read minds had been the kicker when it had come to his being chosen for Sextant. Sometimes he thought Mercier depended a little too heavily on that aspect of him. Eric tried hard not to resent that his other talents were underused.

"Anything yet?" Jack asked over the speaker.

Eric glanced at the mirror. "I'm in the room thirty seconds and you want a conclusion? I haven't even seen her eyes yet. Doesn't take telepathy to sense her exhaustion and frustration, though. Could be she's about to blow."

"Then ratchet up the pressure," Jack said calmly.

Eric nodded and sat down, resting his elbows on the tabletop, and waited, reviewing the little he knew about the subject thus far from her hastily retrieved files.

Special Agent Dawn Moon, five years with National Security Agency, age twenty-eight. Earned a degree at twenty-three, double major in criminal justice and psychology, a master's in the former, trilingual, but mathematically challenged. Eric smiled at the perfunctory, handwritten notation about that last subject.

No outstanding debts, he noted, so she must be able to balance her checkbook. She drove a three-year-old Mazda and lived alone in a modest apartment in one of the less- desirable sections of Alexandria. She had been on her own since age eighteen; her only living relatives were her father, who lived in Charleston, and a male cousin who taught at Galludet College in D.C.

Eric mentally added that she was really very pretty in a girl-next-door way. If the girl in question was into crawling around dirty attics and basements. No makeup. No nail polish. Strictly business, this one.

She was dressed all in black, right down to her sneakers, and looked bedraggled after her wild adventure. Her hair was a mess, the curly red strands tousled and dusty, straggling out of the black scrunchie that held only half of it on top of her head.

He could picture her yanking off a hood, not bothering to fix it. That indicated a low vanity score. High in self- confidence, though, from what he had observed. He liked that mix, and it was not one he saw very often.

The only motive for a woman like Agent Moon to get embroiled in a treasonous act like this would be greed. That just didn't fit.

She returned a few minutes later, entering ahead of Holly. Without being ordered, Dawn Moon resumed her seat and immediately locked gazes with him.

That's when Eric first saw her eyes. They were probably the most arresting he had ever seen. Dark, fathomless and exotic. She really had the most amazing eyes. And a powerfully indignant glare.

He finally looked away, punched on the recorder that Holly had been using and identified himself as the interrogator and Agent Dawn Elizabeth Moon as the subject. He added the date and time. Then he began the questions. "What happened on the night of June 15 in the R&D lab of Zelcon Technologies?"

"I was concealed in the air-conditioning vent and I saw Agent Bergen do it," she said in a clipped, determined voice, not frazzled as it had been before. She had collected herself pretty well and in short order.

"Recap for me. I'm new," Eric drawled, watching her sigh with resignation at having to repeat the entire incident yet again to yet another stranger.

"At Bergen's orders, I was to gain entry to the R&D lab, collect proof that I had been there and get out without being apprehended. I should have been off the property by the time he arrived, but I was delayed coming in."

"By what?"

"A complication in getting past the patrol outside. I had to wait for one to stop, smoke a cigarette and carry on a cell-phone conversation before he resumed his rounds."

"When did you first see Agent Bergen that night?" Eric asked.

"When I was replacing the last screw in the vent panel after I had completed my assignment, established the vulnerability in security that Zelcon had neglected to address since our official walk-through and study of the building plans evaluation six months ago."

"And did you participate in that evaluation?"

"Yes." She paused, then took a deep breath and continued, her patience growing thin with all the repetition.

"Anyway, I heard voices and I could see through the vent. A minute after the two men entered the lab, Agent Ben Bergen stabbed the tech with a hypo, woke up the computer, plugged one of those little attaché gizmos into a USB port, copied some information, put the thing in his pocket and walked out." She firmed her lips as if holding in a curse.

Eric remained silent for a full ten seconds, attempting to connect with what she was thinking. Her face gave away a lot, probably distracting him. Attracting him, too, oddly enough. Her face, figure and attitude combined to stir something in him he really didn't want stirred at the moment. Certainly not by a potential suspect. He had to see past all that, get beneath her surface.

When nothing came through on the mental front, he threw out more questions. "But you did nothing to prevent the theft of technology that could be critical to our nation's safety? Isn't that your job, Agent Moon, enforcing national security? That's what you were there to assess, right?"

She calmly placed her hands palms down on the table-top as if she meant to rise, but she didn't. Instead, she spoke calmly, deliberately and in a professional manner. "He had brought in at least one hypo containing an obvious knock- out drug or poison and might have had more, or maybe other weapons for all I knew. I remained concealed because I was unarmed."

Eric picked up sincerity, but he got that from her tone of voice and expression. Nothing from her mind. There were none of the telling mannerisms of a liar present. However, she would know what those were as well as he did. As agents, they would have had virtually the same training, probably by many of the same instructors.

"Why unarmed?" he asked. "You were issued a weapon." She sighed. "As I have stated at least a dozen times, the vents are a tight squeeze. Inches count, and anything I felt was not needed, I left off. It's not as if I would have been shot if discovered. They would simply have held me until my reason for being there was verified. Please, will you tell me if that tech is dead?"

Eric continued watching her eyes, as open as he could get to receive visuals, feelings, words, anything from her.

He stood suddenly, fairly looming over her, blatantly attempting to intimidate. "What did you do then, inform your superior of what had just happened?"

"Paul Bergen was my superior!" She compressed her lips again and shook her head, then ran a hand through her hair, snagging out the scrunchie and tossing it aside. "To answer your question, no, I did not inform anyone at that time. I scrambled out of there as quickly and soundlessly as possible and followed Bergen."

"In your car? You do have communication equipment in your vehicle, do you not?"

"Yes. But I didn't call it in to the duty agent then. What could I have said that would be believed? I needed to find out more. Why Agent Bergen copied what he did and where he was going with it. I saw him deliver it and accept a briefcase. Then the man he delivered it to abruptly shot him two times in the chest, once in the head and took the case back. Then he left in a dark-colored Dodge. I got a partial on the tag."

"Where did this take place?" Eric asked.

"In the parking lot of an apartment complex just outside McLean. I checked to see if Bergen was still alive. He wasn't. Then I immediately phoned our director and waited there as he ordered me to do."