And then a face staring down at her, his silhouette mercifully casting a shadow over her eyes. “Hello, Connie,” the face said. He spoke English, but with a thick accent that she knew she recognized, but couldn’t quite place. It was Indian. Maybe Pakistani. Just where the hell was she?

“Jean-Marc!” she said. To her own ears, her voice sounded normal, if distant, but the angle of the man’s head told her that she was wrong. “Save Jean-Marc!” she insisted. She tried to sit up, but that proved impossible the instant her wounds flashed again.

“Connie, you’re fine,” the face said. “You’re in a hospital. I am Doctor Ahmed. You’ve been in an accident.”

Fragments of a thousand accidents raced through her mind. How did she get to India or Pakistan? “Where am I?”

“You are in Tampa General Hospital. You were flown here by helicopter.”

“Tampa,” she said, testing the word. “Tampa, Florida.” It was coming back to her. The abandoned office. The dust. The closet.

“Is Jean-Marc OK?” she asked. But as her head cleared even more, the true imagery of that moment crystallized for her. There was no way he could have survived that blast.

“Ms. Carson,” another man said from off to her left. It was the other man who’d seemed unfriendly as she was climbing out of the Jell-o well. “My name is Detective Langer with the Tampa Police Department. I need you to answer some questions for me.”

She moved to look at him, but another stab of pain stopped her. “What happened?”

“There was an explosion,” Langer said.

Carson snapped, “I know there was an explosion. I was there. I meant what happened to me? Why do I hurt so badly?”

“You broke your right arm,” the doctor said. “In three places. And there are some burns.”

Her stomach flipped. “Bad burns?” she asked. It was the injury that she feared perhaps more than any other. The pain. The disfigurement.

“You’ll need some surgery.”

“But I need to talk with you first,” Langer interrupted. “A bomb like this, we need as much information as quickly as we can get it.”

“You can say no if you don’t feel up to it,” the doctor said.

“Actually, you can’t,” Langer said. “Not if you want to avoid obstruction of justice charges. Either one of you.”

All over the world, police forces drew their personnel from the same breed. “Then why don’t you stand where I can see you?” Carson said.

Langer turned out to be a Ken doll. Six-one with a head of thick blond hair, he wore khaki slacks and a blue knit shirt that made her wonder if her misfortune hadn’t pulled him off the golf course. “Tell me what happened,” he said.

It took all of two minutes to relate the facts. When she was done, she concluded, “Jean-Marc is dead, isn’t he?”