Midnight rainbow

Chapter One

He was getting too old for this kind of crap, Grant Sullivan thought irritably. What the hell was he doing crouched here, when he’d promised himself he’d never set foot in a jungle again? He was supposed to rescue a bubble-brained society deb, but from what he’d seen in the two days he’d had this jungle fortress under surveillance, he thought she might notwant to be rescued. She looked as if she was having the time of her life: laughing, flirting, lying by the pool in the heat of the day. She slept late; she drank champagne on the flagstone patio. Her father was almost out of his mind with worry about her, thinking that she was suffering unspeakable torture at the hands of her captors. Instead, she was lolling around as if she were vacationing on the Riviera. She certainly wasn’t being tortured. If anyone was being tortured,

Grant thought with growing ire, it was he himself. Mosquitoes were biting him, flies were stinging him, sweat was running off him in rivers, and his legs were aching from sitting still for so long. He’d been eating field rations again, and he’d forgotten how much he hated field rations. The humidity made all of his old wounds ache, and he had plenty of old wounds to ache. No doubt about it: he was definitely too old.

He was thirty-eight, and he’d spent over half his life involved in some war, somewhere. He was tired, tired enough that he’d opted out the year before, wanting nothing more than to wake up in the same bed every morning. He hadn’t wanted company or advice or anything, except to be left the hell alone. When he had burned out, he’d burned to the core.

He hadn’t quite retreated to the mountains to live in a cave, where he wouldn’t have to see or speak to another human being, but he had definitely considered it. Instead, he’d bought a run-down farm in Tennessee, just in the shadow of the mountains, and let the green mists heal him. He’d dropped out, but apparently he hadn’t dropped far enough: they had still known how to find him. He supposed wearily that his reputation made it necessary for certain people to know his whereabouts at all times. Whenever a job called for jungle experience and expertise, they called for Grant Sullivan.

A movement on the patio caught his attention, and he cautiously moved a broad leaf a fraction of an inch to clear his line of vision. There she was, dressed to the nines in a frothy sundress and heels, with an enormous pair of sunglasses shading her eyes. She carried a book and a tall glass of something that looked deliciously cool; she arranged herself artfully on one of the poolside deck chairs, and prepared to wile away the muggy afternoon. She waved to the guards who patrolled the plantation grounds and flashed them her dimpled smile.

Damn her pretty, useless little hide! Why couldn’t she have stayed under Daddy’s wing, instead of sashaying around the world to prove how "independent" she was? All she’d proved was that she had a remarkable talent for landing herself in hot water.

Poor dumb little twit, he thought. She probably didn’t even realize that she was one of the central characters in a nasty little espionage caper that had at least three government and several other factions, all hostile, scrambling to find a missing microfilm. The only thing that had saved her life so far was that no one was sure how much she knew, or whether she knew anything at all. Had she been involved in George Persall’s espionage activities, he wondered, or had she only been his mistress, his high class "secretary"? Did she know where the microfilm was, or did Luis Marcel, who had disappeared, have it? The only thing anyone knew for certain was that George Persall had had the microfilm in his possession. But he’d died of a heart attack–inher bedroom–and the microfilm hadn’t been found. Had Persall already passed it to Luis Marcel? Marcel had dropped out of sight two days before Persall died–if he had the microfilm, he certainly-wasn’t talking about it. The Americans wanted it, the Russians wanted it, the Sandinistas wanted it, and every rebel group in Central and South America wanted it. Hell, Sullivan thought, as far as he knew, even the Eskimos wanted it.

So where was the microfilm? What had George Persall done with it? If he had indeed passed it to Luis Marcel, who was his normal contact, then where was Luis? Had Luis decided to sell the microfilm to the highest bidder? That seemed unlikely. Grant knew Luis personally; they had been in some tight spots together and he trusted Luis at his back, which said a lot.

Government agents had been chasing this particular microfilm for about a month now. A high-level executive of a research firm in California had made a deal to sell the government-classified laser technology his firm had developed, technology that could place laser weaponry in space in the near future. The firm’s own security people had become suspicious of the man and alerted the proper government authorities; together they had apprehended the executive in the middle of the sale. But the two buyers had escaped, taking the microfilm with them. Then one of the buyers double-crossed his partner and took himself and the microfilm to South America to strike his own deal. Agents all over Central and South America had been alerted, and an American agent in Costa Rica had made contact with the man, setting up a "sting" to buy the microfilm. Things became completely confused at that point. The deal had gone sour, and the agent had been wounded, but he had gotten away with the microfilm. The film should have been destroyed at that point, but it hadn’t been. Somehow the agent had gotten it to George Persall, who could come and go freely in Costa Rica because of his business connections. Who would have suspected George Persall of being involved in espionage? He’d always seemed just a tame businessman, albeit with a passion for gorgeous "secretaries"–a weakness any Latin man would understand. Persall had been known to only a few agents, Luis Marcel among them, and that had made him extraordinarily effective. But in this case, George had been left in the dark; the agent had been feverish from his wound and hadn’t told George to destroy the film.