Special thanks and acknowledgement are given to Justine Davis for her contribution to the Athena Force miniseries.

Chapter One

The satisfaction of a tight grouping in the ten ring on her shooting qualification was fading as Alexandra Forsythe sat cleaning her new Glock on her grandfather’s front porch.

Charles Bennington Forsythe was rarely jittery. That he was now acting as if he’d been mainlining double espressos for hours was a fact not lost on his granddaughter. When he resorted to pacing the farmhouse porch, she couldn’t hold back any longer.

“G.C.?”

Alexandra Forsythe used the nickname with affection and concern. As a child she’d made it up for this beloved man, who was more a father to her than her real one had been, even before his untimely death. “Grandfather” had seemed too distant, and “Charles” far too lacking in respect. The fact that G.C., her shortening of Grandfather Charles, had made her mother wince was merely a side benefit.

He kept pacing as if she’d not spoken, which began to make her jittery in turn. Normally she would not push him, having learned in her years as a forensic scientist for the FBI that patience usually paid off. But this was so uncharacteristic of him that she found she couldn’t just ignore his mood.

The afternoon breeze swirled her hair, and she shoved red-gold curls back from her face. Determined now, she quickly finished up on the Glock, put it back in the case, then got up from the cushioned wicker chair that sat near the porch railing. She leaned forward onto the rail, taking in the expansive view of Forsythe Farms.

This was the place she loved most, the place she considered home, and of late the only place she found peace. But peace was obviously not within her grandfather’s grasp this afternoon, and neither, apparently, was patience within hers. Not when G.C. was this edgy.

“You have two choices,” she said without preamble. “You can either tell me what’s chewing on you or I can go saddle Twill and he can beat it out of you.”

She’d finally gotten his attention. He turned to look at her, one corner of his mouth quirking.

“So, you’d like to see your old grandfather grovelling in the mud, would you?”

As she knew from personal experience, the big bay hunter was a handful, by turns all heart or all contrariness as the spirit moved him on any given day. But her grandfather had been a horseman for decades, and there were few he couldn’t handle.

“As if even Twill would have the nerve to toss you,” she said, in exaggerated outrage.

He gave her that smile that had always made her feel as if she could conquer the world. “Only because you’ve taught him to trust.”

“True. Now, if I could only get you to trust me with whatever it is that’s bothering you,” she said, looking at him steadily.

Her grandfather sighed. “I trust you,” he said. “You know that I always have.”

“But?”

“I’m not sure that what’s bothering me matters after all these years.”

She studied his face for a moment, saw the troubled look in his eyes and the furrow between silver brows that matched his still-thick mane of hair.

“It matters to you,” she said softly. “So it matters to me.”

His expression softened. “Inside with you, then. I’ll tell you over lunch.”

Their weekly lunch was a tradition Alex worked hard to maintain whenever she was at home. She’d gone through thinking she was going to lose her grandfather once before, and the awareness that he wasn’t getting any younger rarely left her mind. She didn’t like thinking about it, but there it was.

The only thing she thought about more was Justin. And that in itself bothered her. She wasn’t sure how she felt about her fellow FBI agent, wasn’t sure she wanted to feel about him at all. That he’d already assumed such importance in her mind was disconcerting enough.

But she couldn’t deny she was tremendously attracted to him; he was good-looking without being pretty, confident without being cocky, and smart without being a smart-ass. He also seemed determined to make their relationship exclusive, and she didn’t know if she was ready for that. She wished she could get him out of her head, at least for a while.

As was his wont, G.C. flipped on the noon news for background as they ate. No new disasters had struck the world, no one they knew had died, and the stock market had held steady. Alex had hopes this would cheer him, but then a clip of a politician flinging some charges G.C. strongly disagreed with set him off on a rant.

“He’s an idiot. Most of them are, anymore. Hasn’t been a decent senator elected since Marion,” he muttered as long-time cook and housekeeper Sylvia Barrett set bowls of her homemade sorbet in front of them.

“Speaking of Marion,” her grandfather began, then stopped. Finally he reached into his pocket and pulled out an envelope. Again he hesitated, enough unlike him to make Alex’s concern rise again. But finally he handed it across the table to her.

“And this is?” she asked, still focused on him rather than the envelope she’d taken from him.

“I’d like you to read it yourself and tell me what you think.”

Something in his tone and manner told her he was speaking to his granddaughter the FBI agent. This relieved her; she’d been afraid what he’d handed her was some sort of medical report she wasn’t going to like.

She studied the envelope for a moment. The paper was heavyweight, rich feeling. It was addressed to her grandfather here at the farm, in a bold, looping hand that looked familiar. There was no return name or address, only an Arizona postmark, which made her frown. Her forehead creased when she noticed that the letter had been postmarked ten years ago.

Her gaze flicked to G.C., who sat across the table from her with an expression she couldn’t read. He rarely used the mask honed by years in the upper echelons of power and the business world on her, and that he was using it now told her this was even more important than she’d guessed.

She slid out the folded pages. They were the same rich, ragg-heavy paper of the envelope. When she lifted the pages above the first fold, a familiar letterhead at the top of the page stopped her dead.

She knew now why the writing had looked familiar.

“Marion,” she murmured under her breath.

She glanced at her grandfather again, saw that he was quietly, expressionlessly waiting. She looked back at the words handwritten on letterhead from the United States Senate, further labelled in the upper corner as from Arizona senator Marion Gracelyn. The list of committees she’d served on during her tenure as junior senator ran a considerable length down the left margin.

Alex fought off the instinctive shiver a communication from the dead gave her and read. And reread the letter, her shock growing. Finally she lifted her head and stared at her grandfather. She’d wanted a distraction, and she’d gotten one in spades.

“She knew,” she whispered. “She knew someone was trying to kill her.”

Charles let out a suppressed sigh. “I was almost hoping you’d see something different there.”

She shook her head slowly. “It’s…right here. Three accidents, that close together, that weren’t really accidents? What else could it be?”

Charles nodded. His eyes were full of remembered pain as he gestured at the letter she held. “It’s as if she’s saying goodbye.”

Alex looked at the letter again. Looked at the closing line she had at first skimmed over in her shock at the other revelations the page held.

I don’t want this to sound like a letter from a foxhole, Charles, but I hope you know how much I love you and yours. We too often don’t tell the ones we should, and sometimes we leave it too late.

He was right, Alex realized. She’d been focused on the warning implicit in the letter and hadn’t recognized the tone of farewell until he pointed it out. Marion had not only known someone was after her, but had been convinced they were likely to succeed.

“What could have made her expect to be murdered?” Alex asked, forgoing the obvious next step, that Marion had been exactly right.

“More to the point, who on earth thought they could get away with murdering a U.S. senator?” Her grandfather’s tone was grim.

And why hadn’t this come out before now, all these years later? Alex wondered.

When Marion Gracelyn had been bludgeoned to death in a lab building on the grounds of her brainchild, Athena Academy for Women, it had been headline news for weeks. Speculation, both wild and informed, had flown around the country.

And if she’d been too young to know then, Alex certainly knew now what kind of pressure that type of high-profile case put on investigators. She’d borne the brunt of some of the frustration agents working such cases felt, when they wanted evidence processed immediately and everybody thought their case was more important than anyone else’s.

She could only imagine what it must have been like after the murder of a United States senator.

So why hadn’t this come to light? Why hadn’t the investigators back then put it together? In all the digging she knew had to have been done, how had this been overlooked, the fact that Marion had known someone was trying to kill her?

Once more she looked at the second page of the letter, which held the short, stark documentations of the three events that on the surface looked like accidents or to the mystics, a string of Mercury retrograde bad luck. An automobile malfunction, a fire at her home and the crash landing of the small plane she’d chartered to make it to D.C. in time for a crucial vote.

Taken individually, Alex might have thought the same. But when you looked at them all together, she thought, took into account that they had all happened in the space of two months, and added the final, grimmest fact, that Marion had indeed been murdered, there was no way to see it differently.

And Marion had known it.

“Why didn’t she tell me before?”

There was an undertone to her grandfather’s voice, an almost plaintive note that made a long-ago and long-forgotten suspicion resurface in her mind, that her grandfather and the late senator had perhaps been closer than she herself had then been aware of. And something she’d at first skimmed over made her look back at the first page of the letter, addressed, she only now realized, to “My Dearest Charles.”

She wondered, but she knew this was not the time to pursue that particular possibility.

“I don’t quite understand, G.C. Have you had this all this time?”

“Yes and no,” he said, his mouth twisting slightly. “I had it, but didn’t know it. Obviously, from the postmark it came around the time Marion was murdered. Sylvia found it tucked away in the back of a drawer, under some linens. Our best guess is that one of the staff, knowing we were all grieving, put it out of sight to avoid causing more pain at that time, and then forgot about it.”

And so it had languished there, hidden, for a decade, Alex thought. Only to surface now, when the case was as cold as a winter desert night at Athena.

“I suppose we need to step up the spring cleaning around here,” G.C. said, but the quip fell flat. And since she didn’t know what to say, Alex instead reread the details of the three incidents.

“She must have had some idea who was behind all this,” Alex said, almost under her breath. “Why didn’t she say so?”

“Marion was never one to make accusations without having specific proof,” Charles said, his voice level again.

Alex looked at him. “Do you have any ideas?”

“Obviously, her death wasn’t at the hands of the casual burglar the police wrote it off to,” he said.

“Obviously. But that leaves a host of other possible suspects, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” Charles agreed. “Marion made enemies as both a prosecutor and as county attorney.”

“And from what you’ve told me about her, some of them were near the top of the criminal food chain.”

He nodded. “And some were people who had a great deal to lose.”

“She took down a couple of politicians, too, didn’t she?”

“Yes. Powerful ones. And it wasn’t easy. In fact, that’s why she ended up running for office, when she saw how much housecleaning needed to be done.”

“Which means somebody with some dirt under the rug might not be too happy with her,” Alex speculated, thinking that the list of possible suspects was growing exponentially.

“And then, of course, there’s Athena,” Charles said quietly.

Alex’s breath caught. “Do you think it could be related to what happened to Rainy?” Alex and her best friends and Athena Academy classmates, the small, tight-knit group self-dubbed the Cassandras, had just gone through a nightmare of untangling a vicious-threaded mess of science corrupted and murder freely practiced. A nightmare that had begun with the loss of one of their own, Lorraine “Rainy” Carrington.

“It could have been, although the timing falls between when Rainy’s eggs were harvested and her murder twenty years later. I think it’s more likely that it’s connected to Marion founding Athena Academy. Opposition to the academy was…virulent, in some quarters. And it was her brainchild, her vision that brought it to life.”

Alex knew this. She’d always thought of Marion Gracelyn as a sort of unofficial aunt and a personal hero, but above all she’d been grateful to her for envisioning and making real the place that had changed Alex’s life—and the lives of countless other women—forever.

Thanks to Marion, Athena Academy existed, and women had chances that had been denied them for so long, chances to make the most of themselves in whatever field they chose…as long as they could excel to meet Athena’s stringent standards. Law enforcement, the military, science, athletics, whatever the discipline, it was open for Athena’s students, and in the relatively short existence of the school her graduates were already proving themselves all over the world.

“The Athena Factor,” Alex said softly, lost for a moment in the immensity of what Marion’s dream had accomplished. She’d been hearing the phrase more and more, as the power brokers of the world ran into the results of an academy devoted entirely to the advancement of women without interference from misguided or antiquated views and glass ceilings.

“Yes,” G.C. said. “But that’s the very thing some powerful people were afraid of. Sad to say that some still are.”

“Afraid enough to kill?”

Even as she said it, Alex shook her head ruefully. Of all people, she knew better than to question that.

“Just how bad was the opposition to Athena?”

“Startling,” G.C. said. “Or at least it seemed that way to me.”

“But you thought it was a good idea to begin with,” she pointed out.

“Yes. I’d wished there was something like it from the time you were five years old and I realized what we had on our hands.”

She blinked. “What you had on your hands?”

G.C. gave her the amused and proud smile that had warmed and encouraged her throughout her life. He’d made the absence of her late father so much more bearable, even through his own pain at having lost his beloved son.

“A girl who refused to see or set any limits,” he said, “no matter what anyone said.”

He didn’t say it, he never would, but Alex knew he meant her mother, who had seemingly spent her life trying to rein in her rambunctious, redheaded daughter. Girls don’t do that was the phrase she remembered hearing most. She’d have been crippled by it if she hadn’t been so stubbornly resistant, and if it hadn’t been for G.C. countering her mother’s negativity with his own brand of high-powered encouragement.

And, she had to admit, her brother, Ben, and his teasing that had goaded her on—intentionally, she later realized—to greater heights. If not for these things, she might have succumbed and become one of those women she had little use for, because they had little use.

Women like, sadly, her mother.

She jerked her mind out of that well-worn rut and back to the matter at hand. “What kind of opposition? From what quarters?”

Resting his elbows on the arms of his chair, G.C. steepled his hands in front of him and rested his chin on his forefingers. It was his pondering position, and as a child who adored her grandfather, Alex had long ago adopted it herself. She saw his eyes go distant, unfocused, knew he was remembering.

“Athena was truly Marion’s brainchild,” he said. “Her views on women’s rights were well-known. So, many were surprised when she opposed opening U.S. military academies to women. But she knew what they’d be facing, that they’d have to fight so much harder than the men at those institutions did.”

Alex nodded. “And it was hard enough for the men, without adding intimidation, harassment and the just plain not being wanted that women would face into the mix. I understand all that. But didn’t a ‘separate but equal’ sort of solution placate those opposed?”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But we found that many simply opposed women being prepared for any part in what was then a man’s world. Some almost violently so.”

“And one perhaps murderously so?” Alex said softly.

G.C. sighed. “It certainly seems possible.”

“Even probable.” Alex shook her head. “Although it’s hard for me to believe anybody could hate us that much.”

“I’m not sure it’s about hatred,” G.C. said, “as much as hanging on to a tradition, a way of life that’s all they know.”

“So was the Civil War,” Alex pointed out in a wry tone.

G.C. smiled at her as if she were an exceptionally clever student. “Point taken.”

Turning her attention back to the letter, she held up the last page.

“What’s with this?” she asked, pointing at the drawing in the lower left corner.

“I don’t know,” G.C. said, the tone of his voice telling her that he had spent more than a little time trying to figure out the meaning of the hand-drawn graphic that was almost cartoonish, yet at the same time quite ominous.

Only, she told herself, because it was a spider. A big, fat one, crouched in the middle of a web made small by the looming body of the arachnid.

“All I can tell you,” Charles said, “is that Marion was not a doodler.”

Alex looked at the drawing again. “So…this isn’t a casual scribble. It means something.”

“It did to her,” he confirmed.

Which meant it did to Alex, as well. Marion Gracelyn was Athena; it wouldn’t exist without her vision and effort. And anything that threatened Athena or anything connected to it threatened Alex, because Athena was irrevocably entwined in her life and her heart.

As was the case for all the Cassandras. They’d renewed their promises to each other and to Athena in the aftermath of the investigation that had begun with Rainy Carrington’s murder. She hadn’t expected to have the call come again so soon, but apparently it had. And she would respond.

Any and every Cassandra would always rally to Athena.

Chapter Two

“So, what do you know about working cold cases?”

Justin Cohen blinked, then drew back slightly as he stared at Alex across the table and the remnants of their lunch. He was in town from Phoenix for a week of seminars he’d been sent to attend, but their schedules were so chaotic that moments like this when they both had a few minutes of free time were pounced upon somewhat rabidly.

“Probably not as much as you do?” he suggested, sounding puzzled at the unexpected question. “I mean, you’re the forensics expert, and forensics is where more cold cases are broken than just about anywhere else.”

Alex stirred her glass of iced lemonade with the straw. “I’ve gone over and over what’s there, in our files. Nothing that led to a suspect at the time, but plenty to nail him once he’s found.”

His eyes—those stunning blue-green eyes whose image she’d been carrying around in her head since she was a teenager—narrowed.

“So you’re talking about a specific case, not just cold cases in general.” He didn’t make it a question, but she answered that way, anyway.

“Yes.”

“And a federal case, if we have a file on it.”

“Yes. Federal because of who was involved.”

“How cold a case is it, dare I ask?”

“A chilly decade or so,” she answered.

“Hmm. Well, I’ve heard of worse. It’s becoming more common as the technology advances. A guy I went through the academy with broke a thirty-five-year-old kidnapping case a couple of years ago.”

“How?”

“DNA,” Justin said. “But that was just the end result. He spent months before that talking to a lot of people, some of them old enough or sick enough that he had a lot of work to do sorting out what information was reliable. And going through every bit of paperwork and evidence with the proverbial fine-tooth comb. Over and over and over again. Until he found the guy to match the DNA to.”

Alex’s mouth quirked. “I was afraid of that.”

“You?” Justin scoffed in disbelief. “You’re not afraid of anything.”

The response warmed her, but still she told him silently, Oh, yes I am. I’m afraid of you, how you make me feel.

She knew her reaction was over the top, but the logical side of her mind kept insisting she was nurturing a childish fantasy she should have long outgrown.

The Dark Angel.

The memory of Athena’s midnight intruder, the boy the Cassandras had dubbed with that incredibly romantic nickname, kept getting in the way of her looking honestly at the man he’d become, who had so quickly become part of her life—mostly because he simply refused not to be.

But that boy, so passionately dedicated to finding out the truth about his sister Kelly’s death back when Alex was still in school, had fired all their imaginations and been so deeply etched into her mind that…

It suddenly struck her that he knew more about cold cases than she did on a very personal level.

“You never gave up on your sister’s case,” she said. “You became an agent because of it.”

He never liked talking about the reason he’d joined the FBI. She never doubted the death of his sister was the reason, but that kind of obsession was too Mulderish, he’d joked.

But she knew it was true. She knew he’d been driven, some even said possessed, so much that she’d been a little concerned about what would happen, what he would do when his quest was finally over. And last year it had ended, as triumphantly as it could for him. But he seemed to have settled nicely into the life he’d carved for himself by sheer force of will and determination.

Perhaps in the process of his quest, he’d found his true calling. She hoped so.

After that moment’s inner acknowledgment of his success, she went on. “Even when everyone told you there was no case, that she had simply died in surrogate childbirth, you kept on. For nearly twenty years.”

He sat there for a long moment. Alex guessed he was thinking, as was she, of the huge, frightening mess his sister had been devoured by—the mess she and the Cassandras had recently exposed. Since it had directly involved Athena, the Cassandras had vowed not to stop until the truth was uncovered. When it finally had been, the ramifications were so broad she still had trouble taking it all in.

“That was personal,” he said at last.

“So is this,” she said.

“What? Your federal cold case is personal?” He seemed surprised.

“It is. It’s connected to Athena.”

“Isn’t everything you do?”

His tone was wry, but he was grinning. Justin had come to know a great deal about Athena and the kind of women it turned out in the past year and a half. He knew what the school meant to all who attended, and Alex knew he’d come to appreciate the strength of the bond between the graduates and their alma mater.

“Yes,” she said without embarrassment. “But this is different. It’s not just the school. This has to do with the…creator of Athena.”

His brow furrowed. “Allison’s mother?”

He’d met Allison Gracelyn during the unravelling of the mystery surrounding Lab 33 and its genetic experiments, the motive behind Rainy’s murder. Rainy had found out that the lab had used her for an experiment, back when she’d been an Athena student. And when her adult investigation had threatened to expose them, they’d killed her. Alex felt the usual pang the thought of Rainy, and how much she missed her, brought on. But she buried it for now; there was another Athena murder to unravel.

“Yes,” she said. “Marion Gracelyn. Senator Marion Gracelyn.”

His forehead cleared. “Ah. Hence the federal investigation.”

She nodded.

“Didn’t they determine she’d interrupted a burglar?” he asked.

“That’s what they said,” Alex agreed, her voice neutral.

“But you’re not buying it.”

“I never did,” she said. “There was no reason an ordinary burglar would have broken into Athena.”

He considered that for a moment. “Can’t argue with that,” he agreed. “It’s too far out, too isolated, and there wasn’t enough to steal—except maybe some hard-to-fence lab equipment and computers—to make it worthwhile.”

She smiled, grateful he had so quickly seen the facts. His eyes widened, and she thought she heard him suck in a breath.

“Whatever brought on that smile, tell me so I can do it again. And again.”

Alex fought down the heat that threatened to rise in her cheeks. He always managed to do that to her. He was so…blunt, sometimes, about how much he wanted her, and wanted her to feel the same way. It was such a change from Emerson Howland’s cool, unaffected manner. It was taking her a while to adjust, to trust that it was real.

She pushed thoughts of her former fiancé away, along with any effort to respond to Justin’s unexpected request. She knew she was going to have to quit putting it off soon, but now was not the time. She had too much on her plate right now.

“There’s new evidence,” she said.

He seemed reluctant to accept the change back to the original topic, but at last nodded at her to go on. She told him about the letter. And again he wasted no time with trying to explain things away.

“So she knew someone—or maybe plural—was after her. And those supposed accidents were just failed attempts.”

She nearly smiled at him again, but stopped in time; she wasn’t ready for another round of dealing with his ardency just now.

“Exactly,” she said.

“How long’s the list?” he asked.

“Of suspects? Lengthy. I was thinking I’d start with the ones here.”

“Here? You mean in D.C.?”

She nodded. “There are a few of them who didn’t want to see Athena even exist, let alone succeed.”

“Which it has, and then some. It’s a ...