Chapter One

Although she heard the bell, Marlie was so deeply engrossed in the comic book she was illustrating that the sound didn't really register in her brain. She sat tailor-style at her white drawing board, black charcoal pencil in hand, surrounded by a bank of computer equipment, some ivory, some ebony, all Macs. She drew Angelina Avenger with her eyes blazing and her guns drawn as she confronted a top-ranking CIA agent about his part in a global oil conspiracy.

Her pencil hollowed the lines of Angelina's cheekbones, accentuating her haunting beauty and steely inner toughness. She employed the eraser to perfectly arch her heroine's auburn eyebrows. Angelina might be the most kick-butt crime fighter in the comics, but she never neglected her grooming. The woman was serious trouble in high heels.

Quite unlike Marlie.

She glanced down at the rumpled black track suit that she'd never once run track in. It was two o'clock in the afternoon and she realized she'd been toiling for almost nine hours without a shower or anything more to eat than her morning bowl of Froot Loops, and only her trusty tweezers knew for sure the last time she'd plucked her eyebrows.

The doorbell played the Mission: Impossible theme again.

Irritated by the interruption, Marlie sighed, laid her pencil down, and pushed back from the storyboard.

Maybe it was UPS with a box of free author copies of her twenty-eighth comic book "CIA Zombie Recruits," the upcoming March issu