Running Scared

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “Here we go,” Smith-White said blandly. “A rather nice bit of jewelry, don’t you think?”

  First impressions flooded through Risa as she looked at the circular, hand-size brooch resting in a shallow box lined with black velvet. Celtic, no doubt about it. Fine. A sun symbol shaped in gold to hold a chief’s or Druid’s robes. Probably fourth to seventh century a.d. Possibly Irish. Possibly Scots. Gold with red champlevé inlay repeating the sinuous lines etched in the metal itself. Apparently intact.

  And she had never seen a gold brooch like it. Bronze, yes. Silver, yes. But never gold.

  She looked at her boss. From Shane’s expression, Smith-White could have been holding out a tuna sandwich, no mayo.

  Risa hoped that her poker face was half as good as Shane’s. It was all she could do not to snatch the pin from Smith-White and examine it more closely.

  “May I?” Shane asked, holding out his hand.

  “Of course. Would you like gloves?” Smith-White held out a pair. “Extra large, like your hands.”

  “I’d prefer not to,” Shane said. “That’s why I collect gold. High-karat gold doesn’t tarnish with brief handling. But you know your gold. If this won’t take any contact with bare skin . . .”

  Smith-White wasn’t about to say that he thought the gold was inferior. Nor was he going to remove his own gloves. Saying nothing, he dropped the spare gloves on the table.

  “Would you like me to lift the brooch from the tray?” Smith-White asked evenly.

  “Please,” Shane said.

  With no wasted motions, Risa snapped on her own surgical gloves. The less the surface of the gold was contaminated by handling, the easier it would be to answer questions in the lab. And she had a feeling there were going to be lots of questions.

  She only wished the answers would be what she wanted to hear.

  With narrowed eyes she watched Smith-White pass the brooch over to her boss. She looked at Shane, not at the object itself. Though she couldn’t point to any single change that came over him when he held the brooch, she knew that he would buy it.

  He glanced at her, saw that she understood, and didn’t know whether to be annoyed that she saw what no one else could or pleased because it saved time. He studied the brooch, turned it over with a deft motion of his hand, and passed the gold on to her.

  Even through gloves, the feel of the gold was almost hot against her skin rather than cold. An odd whisper of sensation went up her arm. She hadn’t felt anything like it since Wales. She hadn’t wanted to feel anything like it ever again.

  She pulled a jeweler’s loupe from her pocket and examined the brooch. At 10x magnification the integrity of the etched designs leaped into high relief. Curving, abstract in places, startlingly real when curves became bird heads and took flight in a series of diminishing inverted Vs. The spaces between repetitions of the central design flared bloodred with an enameling technique that hadn’t lost color or crispness to the passing centuries.

  “I’d like better light,” she said after a moment. “And, Mr. Tannahill, my job will be easier if you wear gloves in the future.”

  Only Risa saw the flicker of surprise on his face. She had never insisted before. Without a word he took the spare gloves Smith-White was holding out to him again.

  “May I?” she asked Smith-White, gesturing toward her work area.

  He waved his hand, giving her permission to examine the brooch under any light she wanted.

  On one of her worktables there was a bright, full-spectrum light framing an oversized ten-power magnifying glass on a swing arm. She used it when she wanted to have her hands free for drawing or taking notes while examining an artifact. What she wanted now was the binocular 10x to 30x zoom microscope that was on the second table. She pulled over her rolling chair, positioned the brooch, adjusted the zoom . . . and felt time flowing over her in a soundless rush that stole her very breath.

  An artist holding the brooch, dreaming the designs, incising the symbols in solid gold. Every stroke a prayer to the gods who ruled sky and lightning and sun-blaze, the burning wheel of life turning and returning, and man so small, so weak, so weary . . .

  Risa blew out a breath, shook off the waking dream, and forced herself to concentrate on the here and now.

  The artifact was handmade. Definitely. The irregularities were reassuring. They gave the piece a feeling of warmth where so much machine-made jewelry could be cold. The design was classically Celtic—a series of abstract, sinuous lines that “flowered” periodically into a three-part design that evoked bird heads. Throughout the circle of the brooch there were three such flowerings with three “leaves” each, and the second of each of the three leaves was intricately enameled in red glass. A zigzag of raised gold separated the enameled from the plain gold in a design that suggested both a wheel and an eye. The bird head on either side of the enameled design had a smaller version of the complex, three-part design cut into the metal itself.

  The long, tapering pin was decorated with the same design. Somehow the artist had managed to adjust the design so that the proportions remained balanced along the narrowing length of the fastening itself, all the way down to a point that was still keen enough to penetrate cloth. The complexity was staggering, as was the skill. The ancient artist had had only his own eyes and prayers, yet a modern curator needed a microscope to appreciate his work.

  The sound of Shane’s dainty Turkish coffee cup being returned to its equally dainty saucer told Risa that she had been quiet long enough.

  “Yes,” she said blandly without looking up, “a rather nice bit of jewelry. It’s in excellent condition. Rather too excellent for my comfort. Most items that have been around since the sixth or seventh century a.d. show more wear. A lot more.”

  “Not if they have been someone’s prized possession,” Smith-White said smoothly. “Think of the pope’s ritual items, sacred symbols in gold lovingly stored and passed from generation to generation, used only on occasions of highest ceremony.”

  Then how did they end up in your hands? Risa asked silently, sardonically. Doubtless Shane was thinking the same thing. Problem was, he didn’t care as much about provenance as she did.

  Saying nothing, Risa took another long look at the brooch. She made sure when she finally swung the lamp away that she gave the security camera a good, unimpaired view of the piece. She had a mountain of research to do and damned little time to do it in.

  She would have given a lot for the database at Rarities Unlimited.

  Casually she turned the brooch over to give the camera a shot at the other side—also beautifully incised—before she picked up the gold and returned it to Smith-White.

  He put the brooch in its velvet-lined tray, then left it on the coffee table for Shane to admire and, hopefully, desire enough to pay half a million dollars for. Minimum. Deliberately Smith-White refilled his tiny coffee cup and sip-sucked noisily in the approved Turkish manner until only the grittiest dregs remained in the cup.

  The guard shifted to his other hip.

  Risa waited and thought again about ruining her manicure on Smith-White. She glanced at her watch.

  So did Shane.

  Smith-White took the hint. He reached into the aluminum carrying case again.

  “This is another nice bit,” he said. “It’s a votive offering presented to a very, very powerful Druid or made at his behest for an important religious ceremony. My guess would be winter solstice, when those poor shivering bastards prayed for the sun to return on its appointed rounds.”

  He didn’t wait for Shane to ask for the object. He simply held out the stylized horse figurine in its velvet-lined tray. Shane picked up the figurine, then almost dropped it at the jolt of energy that sizzled through his hand.

  “The weight of gold is always surprising, isn’t it?” Smith-White said with a satisfied smile.

  Risa knew it was more than that. Shane had handled enough gold that its heft didn’t take him by surprise.

  But something certainly
had.

  When Shane glanced from the horse to her, she knew he would be buying it along with the brooch.

  Bloody hell, as Niall would say.

  With rapidly failing patience, Risa waited for Shane to pass the object over for her to inspect. Instead of simply giving it to her, he slid one hand under hers before he put the object in her palm with the other. She didn’t know which shocked her more—the heat of his hand or the bolt of sensation that went through her when the horse met her palm. She did know one thing: if he hadn’t been bracing her hand, she would have dropped the priceless figurine.

  A look at the infinite green of his eyes told her that he knew it, too.

  “Thank you,” she said in a husky voice.

  His smile said that it had been his pleasure.

  Without a word she got up and stalked over to her worktable. She held on to the horse with both hands the whole way. The original burning sensation had subsided, but the tingling of her palm went clear to the back of her eyes.

  It was Wales all over again.

  Dizziness like dark lightning, the soundless cries of people long dead worshipping gods who had also died . . .

  Ruthlessly she crushed the thought and the sense of time swirling around her in a silent storm. Letting out a breath, she focused the microscope on the horse.

  Like the brooch, the horse was handmade, probably cast through the lost-wax technique, incised with symbols, and undoubtedly Celtic. Unlike the brooch, it was of very early Celtic design, rather than late. The decorations didn’t cover the available surface. Instead, they were concentrated along the barrel of the horse. The major symbol was the wheel of the sun inscribed on both sleek sides of the figurine. Each wheel had three equally spaced smaller wheels etched around its rim. In place of hooves a sun wheel grew at the base of each leg. The effect was both elegant and powerful. Whoever had created the figurine had been an extraordinary artist as well as a skilled craftsman.

  He had also lived at least four hundred years before Christ and had been influenced by the culture archaeologists called La Tène, after the site where this particular style of art was first found and studied. The wheels/hooves owed more to a time two hundred years earlier, called Hallstatt after a different archaeological site.

  She made sure the hidden, overhead camera had a clear view before she walked back to the waiting men.

  “Remarkable” was all she said as she set the horse in its velvet-lined tray. “There’s almost no blurring of the incised design after twenty-five hundred years. It might have been made yesterday.”

  She only wished she could believe that it had. A fraud would have been easy to dismiss. But she was very much afraid that the artifact was as real as it was powerful.

  “Next?” she asked flippantly.

  Smith-White frowned. He had heard that Shane’s curator could be difficult, but this was the first time he’d encountered it personally. Saying nothing, he pulled a third artifact from the aluminum box.

  “Another votive figurine,” he said to Shane. “Excellent condition.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” Risa asked no one in particular.

  Shane cut her a sideways look out of stone green eyes before he took the figurine. This time he was prepared for the searing jolt of recognition and power. His hand didn’t so much as quiver. Even as he admired the astounding complexity of the designs incised on the obviously potent stag, he passed the gold over to Risa. The challenging look in her eyes told him that if he braced her hand again she would dump the artifact in his lap. Smiling slightly, he placed the stag on her palm.

  Other than a subtle jerk that only he noticed, she appeared to have no reaction. But the flare of her pupils told him that she had recognized the artifact on some primal level, just as he had.

  That realization was as staggering as the densely inscribed designs on the figurine.

  She dreamed.

  She recognized.

  And she was running from it as fast as she could.

  Silently he vowed to find out why.

  Risa put the stag under the microscope. When the artifact came into focus, she didn’t know whether to celebrate the extraordinary beauty that lay on her palm or to put her head on the table and weep for all that had been lost to time and could never be known again.

  “Celtic,” she said huskily. “At least fourth or fifth century a.d. I’m looking at the beginning of the golden age of Celtic art, which culminated in the illuminations of the Book of Kells. The style of designs on this stag are closer to those of the Lindisfarne Gospels, at the beginning of the flowering of the illuminator’s art. It would be the work of a lifetime to decipher the complexities and interconnections of the symbolism on this figurine. And even after that lifetime I would enjoy only a fraction of the understanding, of the sheer emotional and intellectual impact, that someone from that time and place would experience in the stag’s presence. The context has been lost. So much . . . lost.”

  Smith-White heard the reverence in Risa’s voice and wondered if he hadn’t made a mistake by showing the stag third instead of last. To him, the armband had been the most spectacular of the lot, which was why he had chosen to show it last. The stag was a nice piece, indeed very fine, but the designs were so intricate that they were dizzying to the modern eye. As far as he was concerned, the armband was much more imposing.

  It remained to be seen if Shane’s curator would agree.

  After positioning the stag for the ceiling camera, Risa reluctantly returned it to Smith-White.

  “Again,” she said to Shane, “I have to point out how unlikely it is that gold work that detailed would retain its crispness through so many centuries.”

  “Noted,” he said.

  Before that line of discussion could continue, Smith-White pulled out the fourth and final artifact. “This is, quite simply, spectacular.”

  Risa wanted to argue, but there was no point.

  The piece was incredible.

  Shane mentally braced himself to take the armlet. The jolt came hard and deep, then eased. He had felt other instants of recognition with other artifacts, but nothing to match this; it was like grabbing a bare electrical wire.

  He stood and walked over to Risa, putting himself between her and Smith-White’s shrewd gray eyes.

  “Brace yourself,” he said too softly for the other man to hear.

  Warily she took the armlet. A flash of heat, a whirl of time, a rush of light-headedness, and then the present settled into its accustomed place.

  Except that the look on Shane’s face told her it had taken her longer to come back than the few seconds of disorientation she remembered experiencing.

  She didn’t object when he came with her to the worktable. She put the armband under the microscope and willed herself not to be drawn into its sinuous, potent designs. She told herself she was successful.

  The gooseflesh rippling up her arms told her she was lying.

  Designed for either muscular biceps or a very thin neck, the heavy gold band was perhaps three fingers wide and incised in such a way that light flowed over it as though the gold was constantly shifting, breathing, alive. Without magnification, the background designs had suggested the symmetrical basket-style decoration of the Snettisham hoard, but what caught the eye—and the breath—was the face that stared out at her through the mists of time.

  Almond-shaped eyes of blue enamel and jet pupils, eyes that were empty yet all-seeing in an eerie way. High brow fit to wear a crown. Thin shadow line for a nose, no mouth. The face—or perhaps it was a skull—dominated the dense designs it sprang from. The designs themselves were highly abstract, interlaced lines symbolizing geese. A thick-beaked raven bracketed either side of the head/skull.

  Raven of death, immortal geese, and man caught between, living through death to eternity.

  She would have sworn she hadn’t spoken aloud, but beside her Shane said, “Yes.”

  Risa grimly shook off the spell of the art. When she spoke, her tone was neutral. “The arti
st who created this was aware of every style from Hallstatt through all variations of La Tène and prefigured the avoidance of empty space in a design that became the hallmark of Celtic work as seen in the Book of Kells.”

  “Are you saying he was alive in the ninth century a.d.?” Shane asked.

  “Or she. I simply use the masculine form for convenience.” Risa made a swift movement of her hand before he could say anything more. “To answer your question, I would have to compare many artifacts, particularly ones that had been found in situ. Otherwise, dating is rather arbitrarily decided upon stylistic details. Unfortunately, styles remain static in one geographic area of the Celtic civilization and surge forward in another, which leads to all kinds of assumptions about age and source of a given artifact that are little more than educated guesses. Highly educated, granted, but still guesses.”

  “Could this be sixth century?”

  “Are you going to buy it?” she asked very softly.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think we should talk about provenance.”

  “We’ll get to that.”

  “Before or after the sale?” she shot back in a furious undertone.

  He didn’t answer.

  Rather bitterly she turned back to look at the gleaming armband that should have been malevolent but was simply, deeply powerful. Staring at it, she wondered why Shane bothered to pay her at all. Half the time he ignored her. The other half they fought like hell on fire.

  The longer everyone avoided the subject of provenance, the more certain she was that she and her boss were about to have their last battle. There was absolutely no way in heaven or hell that these artifacts weren’t stolen. The only question was when and where.

  And how many had died along the way.

  Chapter 28

  Las Vegas