Moving Target

by Elizabeth Lowell

  At least, not before the Book of the Learned was found.

  Even if her emotions cringed at the thought of Erik as a murderer, her intelligence told her flatly that she had to follow her grandmother’s advice: Don’t trust any man.

  “Warrick didn’t even think the pages were real,” Serena pointed out, “so why would the House of Warrick hire a thug to watch me?”

  Chapter 32

  I didn’t say the House of Warrick hired anyone,” Erik said carefully.

  Except Rarities, of course, and he hadn’t said one damned word about it. He would keep his mouth shut on that subject until Serena trusted him in more ways than with her elegant neck.

  The longer he knew her, the more certain he was that the shit would hit the stratosphere when she found out he was, technically speaking, Warrick’s representative.

  “But no one else knew about the pages,” Serena protested. “Who else could it have been?”

  “Whoever gave you the pages knew.”

  “Hingham.”

  “Who?” Erik asked, even though he already knew.

  “Morton Hingham, my grandmother’s lawyer.”

  “Big office?”

  “Small. Just a secretary-receptionist.”

  “Who meets friends for lunch and talks about families, husbands, boyfriends, babies, and work.”

  “A client’s business is confidential.”

  “Yeah, it sure is supposed to be.”

  Serena thought of the blue-haired, lace-collared gentlewoman who was Hingham’s secretary and shook her head. “I’m not buying it.”

  “You don’t have to. There are other possibilities.” The mail room of a big auction house, for instance. Though he knew already how she had sent the copies, he wasn’t supposed to know. Besides, it never hurt to ask. Sometimes the answer changed in revealing ways. “How did you get the pages to Warrick?”

  “Delivery service.”

  “To his home in Palm Desert?”

  “No. To the House of Warrick in Manhattan.”

  “Where the mail room sorts all packages, security opens them, and then passes them—open, mind you—all the way to whoever is supposed to get them. Then that person asks other people for an opinion, and they talk to other people in the business, and in about two hours max the news of some fine sheets of Insular Celtic manuscript goes coast to coast and continent to continent.”

  “Surely the House of Warrick has more fabulous items come in every day.”

  “Possibly, but not through the mail room.”

  She compressed her lips. “But illuminated manuscripts are such a scholarly, narrow field. I can’t imagine them attracting that kind of wide interest.”

  Erik shot her a fast look of disbelief before he gave his full attention back to the multilane, high-speed shouldering match known as Interstate 5.

  “Money attracts wide interest,” he said succinctly. “The equivalent of a medieval shopping list on a ragged piece of vellum can go at auction for thousands of dollars. A single illuminated leaf can go for tens of thousands. The Hours of Saint-Lˆo sold for 3.6 million dollars and change, and that was years ago. A lavish fifteenth-century French manuscript sold for more than five million about the same time as the Hours.”

  “Five million dollars . . .” Serena let her breath out. “For a book nobody has ever heard of.”

  “That’s the whole point. Scarcity drives price. So does fashion. Right now, all things Celtic are in fashion, and therefore in unusual demand.”

  “But all I have is four leaves, not a whole book.”

  He thought of his own collection, where there were a few leaves of the Book of the Learned, plus copies of every page he had been able to trace through the marketplace. Then he thought of her grandmother’s tantalizing warning: If you decide to go after your heritage . . .

  The note implied that the whole book was intact except for whatever pages had been lost through the centuries. Even if only half was left, the idea of such a book was literally breathtaking. He wondered if Warrick knew. Then he thought about the shrewd old man and decided he probably knew. If he didn’t, he would soon. One way or another, Warrick found out everything that went on in the illuminated manuscript trade.

  Gently Serena eased her fingertip from Picky’s sandpaper tongue. He kept on sleeping. “What would the whole Book of the Learned be worth?” she asked, wiping her finger idly on her jeans.

  “More than the Hours of Saint-Lˆo. A hell of a lot more.” His voice was neutral. “If they prove to be real, those pages you have are among the rarest of the rare. Illuminated pages, much less whole manuscripts, from the first half of twelfth-century Britain are very unusual. In Britain, unlike what became known as France, the twelfth century was a time of political and social consolidation rather than surplus wealth, and surplus wealth is what drives the creation of art.”

  “So my pages are unusual even for their own time?”

  “As far as we know, yes. Especially in the choice of an illuminating style that was several centuries old at that time. But tomorrow someone could go into Great-granny’s old linen chest and pull out something that would put everything we have to shame. If it’s real.” Erik’s voice was sardonic. “Great-granny’s old linen chest has a way of coughing up some clever boy’s new forgeries.”

  Serena wanted to ask about the validity of her own pages again. She didn’t. There wasn’t any point. Erik didn’t know anything more about them now than he had after he looked at them for the first time.

  “So you think that lots of people might know about my pages,” she said.

  “Word of something new, Insular Celtic, and of that quality would go through the collecting world like a tornado through a trailer park. I’ll bet everybody who is anybody is pulling strings and passing bribes to get a look at your pages.”

  She frowned. “Not much help there. Anybody could have sicced that junkyard dog on us.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So how do we find out who did?”

  “When the right time comes, I’ll ask him myself.”

  She started to laugh, then realized he wasn’t joking. “That’s ridiculous. It could be dangerous.”

  “So is driving fender-to-fender at eighty miles an hour. Just part of living in the twenty-first century.”

  He switched lanes while the speedometer spiked to the other side of ninety. He held the pedal down even after he had passed the gravel truck that was spewing seventy-five-mile-an-hour stones from both uncovered trailers.

  He checked the mirrors. No one in the pack of cars behind him sped up suddenly to keep him in sight. So far, so good. In another mile or so, he would slow down to the speed limit and see if anything back there didn’t want to pass him.

  “I can’t ask you to deal with a man who is known to be violent,” Serena said.

  “You didn’t. I volunteered.”

  “But I can’t afford to hire—”

  “Forget it,” he cut in. “I would pay to spend time—a lot of it—with those pages. This way we both get something we want.”

  She glanced in the side mirror. There were a few beige cars on the road. None of them were close enough to read the license plate. But then, Erik was driving like his tires were on fire. At this speed, it was hard to read anything smaller than a billboard.

  “What about your boss?” she asked after a time.

  Erik blinked, wondering where her agile, all-too-clever mind had led her. He lifted his foot and slowed to the speed limit. It felt like he was crawling. “What about my boss?” he asked cautiously.

  “Won’t he be upset that you’re spending time on a project that has nothing to do with work?”

  “I’m a consultant. My time is pretty much my own.” All true, as far as it went. It just didn’t go far enough to cover the connection between the House of Warrick, Rarities Unlimited, and Erik North. Not that it mattered; there was no conflict between what Rarities wanted and what Serena needed. But he didn’t expect her to see it that way until she
trusted him. “Besides, my other boss is interested in manuscripts.”

  “He is?”

  “She is. Dana Gaynor.”

  Serena watched a black Ferrari doing about Mach 1 down the slow lane to get around them, but she didn’t really see the sports car. She was trying to figure out the connections. “What kind of business do your bosses have? Auction house? Gallery? Museum?”

  “No. They own the controlling interest in Rarities Unlimited.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Never heard of it?”

  She shook her head, then paused. “Wait. Didn’t I read something about Rarities a few months back? Someone had looted a site in the Yucatán, smuggled some gold artifacts to the United States, and someone from Rarities Unlimited found them and sent them back to Mexico.”

  “Close enough.”

  Actually it had been Shane Tannahill, gold collector extraordinaire, who had brought Rarities in on that one. People were always offering to sell him hot gold. They assumed that anyone who owned a casino was corrupt and wouldn’t give a damn about provenance. Shane was careful to reinforce that impression. He wanted people to look at him and assume the worst.

  In some cases it was true.

  “Is that what Rarities does?” Serena asked. “Police the artifact trade?”

  “The people at Rarities Unlimited buy, sell, protect, and appraise art and artifacts. If you want to sell something, but your insurance company doesn’t want you to haul it from dealer to dealer and the best dealers don’t want to come to you, we have a clean room at Rarities. You bring your goods, we appraise everything if you want, and we send out invitations. Everyone involved knows there won’t be any robbery or rip-off under the roof of Rarities Unlimited.”

  “Bet Rarities charges a hefty fee,” she said.

  “Of course. It’s not called Charities Unlimited. The owners, Niall and Dana, make a damn good living. They earn it, too. Twenty-four/seven, fifty-two weeks a year.”

  Serena shrugged, not impressed. Long hours were the price of self-employment. “So if I wanted to sell my pages, I could use Rarities as a go-between?”

  Adrenaline kicked through Erik at the possibility that the pages might be for sale. Maybe Warrick wouldn’t want all of them, especially if he believed they were frauds. Or maybe he was just trying to drive the price down. It was shark-eat-shark in the art trade.

  “Yes. Do you want to sell?”

  “No,” she said instantly. “But you say that Rarities isn’t an auction house?”

  He loosened his grip on the steering wheel. It was just as well the pages weren’t for sale. If they had been, he would have been obligated to negotiate for Warrick to purchase them. Any man who condemned those pages as forgeries on first glance didn’t deserve to have them. Unless, of course, the canny Warrick knew something no one else did.

  Thinking about that possibility put a lemon-sucking look back on Erik’s face.

  “Selling is just one service Rarities offers,” he said. “Same for protection. If you have a valuable shipment, we’ll courier it. If you have something to sell, we’ll buy it from you or find someone who wants to. Rarities has an extensive client ‘wish list.’ If we find a match, we buy the item for our client.”

  “Buy, sell, appraise, protect.” Serena ticked off each word on her fingers. “Reputation must be an important business asset for you.”

  “It is for anyone—appraiser, gallery owner, dealer, whatever. If you have a reputation for being dishonest, your client list reflects that. So do your sales. If you have a reputation for being incompetent, the goods you’re offered reflect that.”

  “I can’t believe the art and artifact business is made up entirely of scholars and saints,” she said bluntly.

  “It isn’t. Getting the best price possible is part of the game. Lying or stealing to get your price isn’t.” Erik’s tawny eyes flicked to the mirrors. Except for the slate-green baby pickup that had appeared a few minutes ago, everybody was speeding around the sedately moving Mercedes. A guy doing the speed limit was passed by anything on wheels, including seventy-year-old grannies driving thirty-year-old beaters. “Making each object look as good as possible is allowed,” he continued. “Secret restoration isn’t. Taking the last three sales as adequate provenance for an object is allowed. Ignoring dubious provenance isn’t.”

  “Who enforces the rules?”

  “The people in the business, mostly. If the error is bad enough, various law enforcement types take care of it. Why? You thinking about breaking some rules?”

  “No. I just want to know what they are and if they apply to everybody in the game.”

  He smiled rather grimly. “I’ll bet you never believed in Santa Claus, either.”

  “Did you?”

  “Sure.”

  “And then you compared the opening of the average suburban chimney to the width of the average fat man’s ass and made up your own mind.”

  He gave a crack of laughter. “How did you know?”

  “You strike me as a bottom-line kind of man.”

  He thought of the twelfth-century pages that haunted him, the image of a sorceress with red-gold hair and violet eyes, and the pain of a man he had never met, never could have met, a man who had lived nearly a thousand years before.

  Yet Erik North had his medieval namesake’s precise handwriting, even down to the way he lifted quill from vellum with a slight upward flourish to the right. He was beginning to suspect that he had the other Erik’s dreams, too, the colored shadow of a dead man’s memories and emotions.

  He shoved the uncomfortable thought aside. He would stick with the ninety-five percent of himself that was boringly normal.

  He would have felt better about the decision if he hadn’t sensed laughter ringing down through the centuries, hadn’t seen Erik the Learned with his head thrown back and his tawny, bird-of-prey eyes alight with amusement at sharing the folly of another Erik as arrogant and selectively blind as himself.

  Chapter 33

  LEUCADIA

  FRIDAY MORNING

  The house is clean,” Wallace said into his cell phone. “Security a first-grader could get through. No alarm system. No wonder she locked everything in her van.”

  “So she has it with her.”

  “I followed them to the freeway. Ed picked them up on the tracker a few minutes later. Still on the freeway. They didn’t have time to stop off at a safe-deposit box.”

  “Stay with them.”

  “You still want both of us on it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I could use some more men.”

  “You’re being paid well enough right now for four men. Hire someone if you like, but don’t bill me.”

  “But—”

  Wallace was talking to himself. The client had already hung up. Nor could Wallace call back. He had tried tracing the number the first time the client hired him two years ago. He hadn’t succeeded then. He hadn’t succeeded at any time since.

  But the money came in on time, and for some jobs it came from overseas, untraceable even for the IRS.

  He didn’t know if his client was male, female, or walked on all fours; voice distorters had come a long way since the first ones. These days it took a pro to tell when one was being used. Wallace was a pro. So he stayed with the odds and thought of his client as a man. If it had been a divorce case, he would have gone with a woman.

  Wallace stuck a lump of chewing tobacco into his cheek and drove toward the freeway. He and his partner were getting triple time plus expenses. If the mysterious client wanted them to baby-sit at those rates, they would baby-sit. When it got down to the real job, the rates would go up. That was when he would earn every dime of whatever fee he negotiated.

  He was looking forward to it. Something about blood had always given him a hard-on like nothing else—even sex. He didn’t know why. He didn’t care. The rush was worth all the boredom that came in between.

  Chapter 34

  LOS ANGELES

&nb
sp; FRIDAY AFTERNOON

  Niall could have watched the transaction from one of the plush “viewing rooms” on the ground floor, which featured a one-way window into each clean room for those who didn’t trust anything except their own eyes. He preferred watching from his office. The view was much better. There were two walls of flat-screen color monitors that gave him a look at everything on Rarities Unlimited’s grounds except Dana’s private quarters. So far, she had refused to allow any fiber-optic cameras into her small home, saying that if he couldn’t protect her without spying on her, then she would bloody well just live dangerously.

  At the moment, she was quite safe. She was with Risa Sheridan in the clean room, explaining to a client why the gold necklace his wife had picked up at Quartzite, Arizona’s huge annual outdoor flea market was not only quite valuable but was probably part of a museum collection that had been stolen three years ago.

  Niall dialed up the audio and settled in to listen. And watch. Risa, like Dana, was always worth watching. It was like seeing two wolves in drag stroll through a field of lambs, picking out the next meal.

  “. . . technique is old, yes,” the unhappy client said, “but today’s jewelers often imitate ancient techniques, don’t they?”

  “They’re called replicas,” Risa drawled. “Some of them are quite well done. If they’re sold as ancient goods, then we call them forgeries. This isn’t one of them.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  Dana knew Risa well enough to understand the meaning of the casual flick of her hand through her short black hair. Risa was getting tired of telling the stubborn man with the Hollywood haircut what he had already suspected: his wife’s flea market coup wasn’t legally theirs, so it wasn’t going to make them rich.

  “McCoy,” Dana murmured into the nearly invisible lapel mike she always wore into a clean room for just these awkward moments.

  “Coming up,” Niall answered. He swiveled, hit an intercom button, and said, “Factoid. Now.”

  “Yo,” came the puffing answer.

  “You sound like you just ran upstairs.”

  McCoy made a guilty sound. “I was just, uh, checking around the departments.”