“Teresa, you stay here. You’ll be safe with the guards at the door. Would you like Bess to stay with you?” Nancy asked gently.
Teresa’s face was set. “I am coming with you. Perhaps I will remember something more when I am there.”
“No one’s going anywhere till Nancy washes her hair and scrubs that skin dye off,” Bess said. “There’s a contract out for Teresa Montenegro, remember?”
Nancy and Teresa stared at each other. “Bess is right. You change back. Me, I will be all right as a blond American!” Teresa fairly pushed Nancy toward the shower.
Nancy didn’t think it was the time to point out that by then there was probably a contract on her too. She used a few precious minutes to wash the gel out of her hair and to try to scrub away the skin dye. If she looked more deeply tanned than usual, it couldn’t hurt much. She pulled on jeans and a shirt.
Then there was a knock on the door. Everybody froze.
“Takeoff time,” a detective’s voice whispered through the door.
They piled into the car. Nancy was still toweling her wet hair.
During the second wild ride of the night—out to the airport—Teresa sat wrapped in silence, gazing unseeingly at the lights of Washington across the river.
The limousine careened into the airport arrivals area. With Nancy in the lead, George, Bess, Teresa, and their escorts swept toward the novelty store.
The owner was in the shop, and he wasn’t in a good mood. “I’ve been over this twice already with other agents,” he snapped. “Why can’t you people get your act together? Yes, I was in the shop at the time you mentioned. But I’ve already said I can’t remember every foreigner who walks into this place. Or every native, either!”
“Please!” Nancy forced herself to smile at him. “I know this is annoying, but it’s terribly important.” She glanced over at Teresa, who was gazing as if hypnotized at the poster for the tennis tournament.
“It’s about her—her fiancé!” Nancy told the storekeeper in a low voice. “He’s been murdered, and we need to know everything we can about his movements. He bought postcards. He probably bought them here.”
“You mean the poor guy I read about in the papers? Is that the girl—Montenero or something—they’re talking about?”
He snapped his fingers. “Now I remember! There was someone in here buying postcards. I remember him on account of he stared at that poster just the way she’s doing. Kind of creepy. And it was weird the way he picked his postcards—just up and down one of the rows, as if the pictures on ’em didn’t really matter.”
“He was interested in the poster? Did he say anything about the tournament?” Nancy asked urgently.
“Nope. Just stared. And he touched it.” The shop owner scratched his head. “That was weird, too, come to think of it. Seemed like it was the poster itself he was interested in, not what it said. I had to tell him to take his big hands off it. We don’t let people mess the airport up with graffiti or anything,” he added smugly.
Take his hands off the poster . . . Nancy moved toward it as if hypnotized herself. Her eyes swept over it. Then, delicately, her hand reached out to touch one word. Semi-Pro.
The dot over the i seemed ever so faintly larger than the dot over the i in the word International, which was set in the same type.
Nancy’s index finger touched the dot, her nail scraped against it—and the dot came off in her hand.
She knew what it was even before she heard one of the agents breathe the word behind her shoulder. “Microdot!”
Chapter Sixteen
Nancy knew she would never forget that frightful night. The stretch limousine must have had a souped-up motor, because the ride away from the airport was a blurred montage of headlights, nightlit monuments, and the Capitol dome glowing like a beacon in the distance.
The federal agent at the wheel did not volunteer where they were headed. Nancy didn’t ask. She was well aware that if time hadn’t been so urgent, she and her friends wouldn’t have been allowed to go along.