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sparkling avalanche.
     
    A fter he learned that Betts Waring was planning a trip to Kenya, presumably to join her elusive adopted daughter there, the Assassin had four days to make his own plans.
    Betts would be spending a week in England to visit a half sister long unseen. The reunion would take her to the rural Lake Country. The Assassin briefly thought about following her to England, where probably she would no longer be needing the Blackwelder Organization to keep the still-avid tabloid press and fringe lunatics from hounding her. But unfamiliar territory, he realized, would leave him at a critical disadvantage. No, he had to make sure that Betts didn't board the London plane. If he didn't have control over subsequent events, if every move that Eden Waring made in search of her mother was not orchestrated by him up to the very moment he broke her lovely neck while watching life fade from her eyes, his chances of success diminished by every unforeseen occurrence.
    And Eden Waring did have, of course, certain abilities that had to be accounted for in his planning. An affinity for miracles, perhaps, including the most miraculous act of all: resurrection. He had killed her once, he was certain of that, because he never missed. Yet she lived. Inviting him to try a second time. An invitation that couldn't be refused.
    In spite of the success of his subsequent assignment, staging the death of Rona Harvester to look like an accident (thereby elevating the former First Lady, like MM and Princess Di, to elite status in the common people's pantheon of trash mythology:   he watched his Rona tapes nearly every day; loved a splashy funeral), his slate, obviously, still was not clean enough for Impact Sector. There had been changes in the high command, but the FBI remained paranoid about psychics. It was Impact Sector's responsibility to deal with them. The Assassin had no illusions about his doubtful standing. He would be welcomed back only if he made up for his galling failure.
    The Assassin was, in his covert profession, a genius:   he had killed thirty-seven men and one woman without leaving a single clue to his identity. Four months ago he had boldly taken both Betts Waring and her husband Riley hostage in anticipation of Eden's arrival at the lake house in northern California. Now, although he stood barely twenty feet from Betts in the first-class lounge, wearing a United Airlines captain's uniform, she had not shown the slightest awareness of him. This was another and possibly most important aspect of his genius:   the art of disguise. His face had been reduced to ruin by a splash of lye from his psychotic stepfather when he was twelve. Thereafter, unable to grow hair or eyebrows through scar tissue, with him looking like a poster child for defective genes, his high IQ was easily transmuted into psychopathology.
    Only the Assassin's eyes had been spared. In order to go out, even for a visit to the post office or pharmacy, he routinely devoted an hour and a half to building a new face for himself:   nose, ears, eyebrows, hair. For most of his adult years he had been a profitable club act in Vegas, doing female impersonations. A serious disagreement he'd had at the FBI's Sacramento field office, resulting in crippling injuries to two agents, had temporarily made it unwise for him to pursue his art in the limelight.
    He was sure that Impact Sector would square that account for him, once Eden Waring had unwittingly helped him clean the last trace of tarnish from his slate.
    The Assassin always worked alone. Betts Waring's itinerary had been a cinch to obtain from her travel agent's computer files. Offing Eden's adoptive mom would have been mere exercise for a man with his skills. On most assignments he preferred daytime, and crowds. A busy airport, in spite of the appearance of massive security, was ideal. Airport security was only as strong as the weakest link, and there were plenty of those, all working for just above minimum