Safe Passage. Loreth White Anne

stilled.

      His baggy gray track pants had slipped low on her slim hips, exposing a tiny image on the smooth olive-toned skin near her hipbone. He bent closer.

      His breath caught in his throat.

      It was the stylized head of a jackal on the body of a man. Black and angular. Egyptian style. Bared teeth. Long, pointed snout. Ears like horns.

      Anubis!

      Scott’s heart thudded hard and quiet against his chest. This was too much to be coincidence.

      Dr. Skye Van Rijn bore the ancient Egyptian symbol hijacked by La Sombra the mysterious mastermind behind the vast and growing shadowy Anubis organization. A group that had begun colluding with international organized crime.

      But instead of a staff, the Anubis on her hip was depicted with a long, slim sword.

      Scott gritted his teeth, yanked up the blanket, dropped it over her, spun around and grabbed the heavy iron fire poker.

      He dropped to his haunches and jabbed the poker at the glowing logs. He thrust more fuel onto the rising flames, yanked the fire curtain shut, then slumped into the armchair beside the hearth.

      He stared at the mysterious woman asleep on the sofa opposite him. Calm and innocent in repose. But who would she be when she woke?

      One of La Sombra’s soldiers?

      He flopped his head against the back of the chair, closed his eyes. Little was known about La Sombra apart from the code name given him when he trained under Castro’s regime on the Isle of Pines.

      Authorities did not know his real name. Nor his nationality. And no one knew where The Shadow was based. It was believed he moved around, adopted different identities, and only those in his closest confidence knew it was he who called the shots. His cells, stationed around the world, were so tightly structured that none of the members knew who delivered the orders and who controlled whom.

      La Sombra was the genius who’d stepped into the confusion created by the demise of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. He began to consolidate a loose net of international terrorist groups that were spawned during the 1960s and 1970s. Groups that were left retarded or disenfranchised and directionless with the collapse of the Soviet empire. No matter the religion or ideals of these various groups, La Sombra had reinstated a flow of funds and given them common cause, a reason to unite and cooperate in a massive international web…to fight what he called the American Evil, or Western Imperialism.