“Ah, but you call yourself homely? That’s absurd. To a woman, being handsome is about making a woman feel like a woman. I think you understand what I mean.” Smiling, Jana folded her arms under her breasts, giving them an unnecessary boost.

“Well, we do tend to try harder,” Crane said.

“But how could you and I achieve mutual trust?”

Jana’s eyes, Crane noticed, had flecks of caramel, almost gold, in the iris. Her lashes were long and thick, like her hair. “Perhaps we would have to start by searching each other,” he said.

Jana lifted her chin and lowered her lashes. “Really?”

“If you wouldn’t mind.”

She held his eyes for a moment, then slowly turned her back, lifting the heavy hair from the nape of her neck with her left hand, exposing the thin zipper that ran like a snake down the length of her navy sheath. “Women, as you know, must be carefully and thoroughly searched.”

The third time Connie Carson woke, she didn’t feel nauseous. She was aware she was recovering in a hospital room and the cool white light no longer terrified her. Nor did the lack of feeling in her right arm, an absence so strong she’d been afraid to look down, sure she would see nothing but a stump.

But she was startled by a face peering down at her. Langer, she thought, the Ken-doll cop.

“Do you think you can stand? Move?” he asked hurriedly.

The quiet intensity of his voice flooded her system with adrenaline.

“You sure stirred up a hornet’s nest.” He looked around as if he anticipated action. “Come on. We’ve got to go.”

If she hadn’t needed all her strength to sit up and swing her legs over the side of the narrow bed, Carson would have said, that’s exactly what I meant to do. Her phone call, and Middleton’s response, must have grabbed somebody’s attention.

“Let me help.” Langer reached for her left elbow.

“I can, thank you. Does Dr. Ahmed know you’re—”

“Ahmed’s way too interested in you already. He’s not our friend.” Now that she was standing on her own, Langer tossed her a robe, then quickly grabbed her chart from the end of the bed and tucked it into a carryall. “He’s been on the phone to friends in Pakistan.”

The room didn’t spin exactly. It did a lazy half-circuit, an aborted pirouette.