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held the knife.
    It was a switchblade, small enough to be folded inside the oversize buckle. The blade was two and a half inches long, a tiny tool, but she knew how to use it.
    She opened the knife, then held it in her right hand and waited.
    The two women left. The rest room was empty now. Pierce knew the feds would get curious after a while. They would send someone to check on her.
    Footsteps.
    Through the narrow opening in the stall door, she saw a woman enter the rest room—the same female agent she’d seen earlier. Number seven. Blond, young, her eyes wide and alert as she studied the room. A slight bulge in her belly—concealed weapon? No, something else. Something better.
    Pierce waited until the woman had moved directly outside the stall, then pushed the door open and grabbed her from behind, pressing the knife against her neck.
    "Shhh," she whispered, her voice nearly inaudible. The woman would be wearing a throat microphone sensitive enough to pick up almost any sound.
    Slowly she lowered her free hand and ran her palm over the smooth, slightly rounded contour of the woman’s belly.
    Pregnant, as she’d thought. That was helpful.
    She lowered the knife to the bitch’s abdomen. "Do what I say"—her words barely spoken aloud by lips pressed against the woman’s ear—"or your baby dies."
    She felt, rather than heard, the female agent’s sharp intake of breath, and she knew she had found the point of maximum emotional vulnerability she needed.
    Softly: "Tell them you’ve lost the target. The bathroom is empty." The woman hesitated. Pierce teased the round belly with the knife’s edge. "Tell them."
    "This is Kidder," the woman said in a low, husky voice directed at her throat microphone. "Have not acquired target. Rest room empty, target gone, repeat, target gone."
    Pierce plucked the earpiece from Agent Kidder’s left ear and heard a gruff male voice initiating a lost-command drill. There was a flurry of responses from other agents, but Pierce wasn’t listening anymore. She was applying sudden strong pressure to Kidder’s carotid arteries, shutting off the blood flow to the brain.
    The woman slumped. Pierce lowered her onto the toilet and quickly removed her own jacket, then peeled off the agent’s brown blazer and shrugged it on. She slipped out of her skirt and donned Kidder’s slacks. She fitted the earpiece in her own ear and secured the microphone to her jacket collar and the small transmitter to her blouse.
    The other agents had not yet thought to check on Kidder. They were preoccupied with finding the target. From the confused transmissions coming in over her earpiece, it was clear that they assumed she had left the rest room almost immediately after entering, disguised as one of the two women who had been gabbing at the washstand—one woman dark-haired like Pierce, the other possibly wearing a wig. Either of them could have been the target in disguise.
    The women had not been followed, and the full resources of the surveillance operation were now focused on reacquiring them. No one was watching the rest room.
    Pierce spoke into her lapel. "This is Kidder." Her voice, a throaty whisper, was indistinguishable from any other female voice. "Am in command of the target."
    The gruff voice snapped, "Location?"
    "Central exit doors. Lower level at arrival area B. Target has left the building, is proceeding toward taxis at curbside."
    "All squads, central exit ground level. Move ."
    While her pursuers converged on the taxi area on the ground floor, Pierce left the rest room, deposited the communication rig in the nearest trash can, and rode the escalator upstairs to the departure level. She took the first exit. Outside in the warm night, she saw a cab drop off a passenger and immediately hailed it, climbing into the backseat.
    As the taxi pulled away, she permitted herself a rearward glance and saw no one following.
    "Where to?" the driver asked.
    She gave the name of a hotel—the new meeting place