The Givenchy Code

by Julie Kenner

  “Plus, it fits one of the themes.”

  “Themes?”

  “The religious clues. The saints, the cathedral, the altar.”

  “Okay.” He nodded slowly, then added, “Yeah,” with a much more vigorous nod. “That makes sense.”

  “So, if we’re talking resurrection, we need a Bible, right? Does a Bible have at least eight hundred pages?”

  “Sure,” he frowned. “I think. It must—”

  I stifled a laugh. “You’re not sure.”

  He grimaced. “Don’t rely on me. Let’s find a Bible and look.”

  “Right.” I paused. “Um, new problem.”

  “What?”

  “The translation.”

  A grin played at the corner of his mouth. “English would be good.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Comedian. I mean there are about eight billion different translations of the Bible and even more editions. Unless we know which translation and which edition, the words or letters we need won’t line up the same.”

  He shook his head slowly, and I tried again.

  “You read Mark Twain in school, right?”

  “Sure.Huckleberry Finn.”

  “Right. And you bought some cheap paperback copy of the book, right?”

  “Actually, my dad had a really nice leather-bound edition from some collector’s set. I read that. Bent one page. Got read the riot act.”

  “Let’s say you bent page one twenty-seven. If you went to a bookstore and looked at page one twenty-seven of the paperback, the words on the page wouldn’t be the same, would they?”

  He frowned. “I never thought about it, but I guess not.”

  “That’s why in this type of code you always know the publisher, edition, all that kind of info.” I gnawed on my lower lip, thinking. “Maybe secret roi urn tells us that.”

  “The resurrection version of the Bible?”

  I shrugged. It certainly didn’t sound familiar, but I was fresh out of ideas.

  “Well, it could be—” He cut himself off, his brows pulling down into a V over his nose.

  “What?”

  “Not a Bible. The catechism.”

  “Ah…,” I said. I didn’t want to sound stupid, but, “What’s that?”

  “It’s like a reference book for Catholics. Very important to the faith.”

  “Oh.” I nodded slowly. “Well, that makes sense. A lot of the clues have been pretty Catholic oriented. Does it have different editions?”

  “I have no idea.”

  I sighed, exasperated. “Stryker, you’re not listening to me. We have to know which edition or else we won’t be looking at the right page, and we’ll be reading the clues entirely wrong.”

  “Not page,” he said. “Section.”

  He leaned back in his chair, looking perfectly content and absurdly proud of himself.

  “Okay. I’ll bite. What sections?”

  “The catechism is broken down by sections. Or maybe it’s paragraph numbers. I don’t remember. The point is that there are at least eight hundred of these sections, probably a lot more. And every catechism is uniform. Doesn’t matter how it’s printed—it could be an audiobook—and the words and section numbers are all going to be exactly the same.”

  That had to be it. “You’re brilliant,” I said, leaning across the table and giving him a big hug. “So where do we find one of these things?”

  “Where else?” he said. “Back at St. Patrick’s.”

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  60

  “I ’ve got a missal right here,” Paddy said, reaching under the counter and pulling out a red leather-bound volume, then handing it to Stryker. “But I don’t have a catechism on me, and we don’t keep one at the Information desk.”

  Stryker passed the missal back. “Appreciate the help, but it’s got to be a catechism.”

  “Oh, right. You’re on a scavenger hunt. Hmmm.” He stroked his chin. “Have you checked the gift shop? And if they don’t have it, there’s another shop outside. Just around the corner. Surely they’d have one.”

  “The gift shop’s a great idea,” Mel said. “Thanks so much.”

  She hurried off, and Stryker started to follow, tossing out a last-minute thank-you to Paddy for all his help.

  “No problem, boy,” he said as Stryker moved away. “You must be winning your game so far. That other fellow hadn’t even figured out what he needed to be looking for.”

  Stryker stopped dead, turning slowly back to face Paddy. “What other guy?”

  “Tall fellow. Dark. Clean-cut looking, but I can’t say I cared for the glint in his eyes.”

  Stryker’s stomach roiled. Somehow, Lynx had learned about St. Pat’s. But how? Had he tracked Stryker and Mel? Or was he interpreting the clues, too? Whatever the answer, Stryker didn’t like it. The bastard was too damn close.

  Beside him, Paddy leaned in, then lowered his voice, a bit conspiratorially. “I’m rooting for you and your lady friend to win.”

  “Did you tell this other guy about the altar?”

  “Not me,” he said. “But I’d told your whole story to Evelyn. She works the counter with me. She took a liking to the lad and, well, I think she’s rooting for him and not you two.”

  “Tiffany’s,” Stryker said urgently. “Did she tell him about Tiffany’s?”

  “Yeah, son, I’m afraid she did.”

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  S tryker paced just inside the cathedral doors, his cell phone pressed to his ear. I sat off to the side, the catechism open in my lap and one ear cocked as I tried to decipher his half of the conversation. Not easy, and since I kept losing count, I finally gave up and just listened.

  “Absolutely,” Stryker said, his voice sounding perfectly calm and reasonable but his face reflecting a temper I hadn’t yet witnessed. He turned in his pacing and our eyes met. I looked back down at the catechism. Section552, two words out…there it was. Peter.

  “No, no, really. It’s not a problem. I’m just surprised, that’s all.” Another pause. “Exactly. He sent the thing, so why would he need to see it again?”

  I snuck a peek and decided that Stryker looked calmer. Good. I didn’t have to worry that he was going to start slugging passersby just for the hell of it.

  Section 9, word 15. I flipped pages, found the section, and tapped out fifteen words with my fingertip.Trent.

  Peter Trent.

  Didn’t mean a thing to me yet. I drew a breath and soldiered on.

  A few feet in front of me, Stryker was wrapping up. “Right. No problem. And thanks again for all your help.” Perfectly polite, perfectly calm. Then he snapped the phone closed. “Goddamn son of a bitch.”

  “Stryker!” I said, pointedly looking around. We were, after all, still in the church. “I take it we have a problem?”

  “She showed Lynx the plaque. Long story, he sweet-talked her, she mentioned the guy who bought it was named Lynx, apparently he has some sort of ID with that name on it, and so she showed it to him.”

  “Oh. Guess we shouldn’t have used his name, huh?”

  Stryker looked at his phone, hauled his arm back as if he were going to toss it, then sagged a bit as he obviously thought better of it.

  “But wait a second,” I said. “This could be good for us. His name really is Lynx? Can we check DMV records?”

  He shook his head. “She said it wasn’t official. Like a club identification card. He told her it was a nickname.” He met my eyes. “If we had all the time in the world—”

  “Right. I know.” With time, maybe we could have turned the tables, hunted him. But time had been our enemy from the get-go, almost as much as Lynx himself.

  I shook my head, determined not to dwell on our losses. All we had to rely on were my brains and Stryker’s skill. I wasn’t going to sap our strength by throwing bad vibes our way. “We’re just going to have to work with what we have.” I held my notebook up. “I’m actually making some progress on this.”

  “Good. I hope Lynx isn�
��t sitting on a bench somewhere doing the same thing. She said he copied it down letter by letter.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “Why does he even want the code? He doesn’t win anything by solving the codes. He only wins by…well, by killing me.” Nowthere was a lovely thought.

  “But you’re following the codes. If he solves the codes, he’ll find you.”

  I’ll admit he had a point, but something didn’t quite fit. “I don’t know,” I said, thinking aloud. “That seems like a lot of trouble. I mean, he hasn’t had any problem finding us so far. And at least two times, we weren’t anywhere near a clue. We were at the hotel once, and then we were at Starbucks. So how did he find us?”

  For a moment, Stryker’s expression didn’t shift at all. Then his eyes flashed with inspiration. I expected him to clue me in, but he said nothing. Instead, he moved slowly and deliberately out of the cathedral and down the steps to the street, his arm extended to hail a cab. When one pulled over, he turned to me. “In. Now.”

  “What? Where are we going?” But I wasn’t really arguing. I’d decided early on in this little adventure to trust Stryker. I wasn’t going to stop now.

  “We need to keep moving.”

  I dutifully shoved all my papers and things into my bag, then climbed in. He followed, his jaw tight and his entire body more tense than I’d seen before.

  “Stryker? What’s going on?”

  “He’s tracking us.”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it. I had a sudden mental picture of Lynx as Elmer Fudd tracking Bugs Bunny. “You mean like a hunter? In Manhattan? You’re joking.”

  “I mean like the military. With a GPS tracking device.”

  “Oh.” Well, that was a horse of a different color. I turned the idea over in my head, deciding that I really didn’t like the idea of being tracked. Nope. I didn’t like it one little bit.

  I shifted in my seat, trying desperately to make what Stryker said not be true. “Does that mean one of us has to have something with the GPS thingamabobbie in it?”

  “Yup. That’s exactly what it means. The question is what.”

  “Well, that’s absurd.”

  He ignored the comment. “It’s not the coat, because he found us before we found it.”

  He reached over and grabbed my bag, unceremoniously dumping my personal stuff all over the backseat. I’d shoved my new Givenchy shoes in my tote, too, and now they bounced to the floorboards.

  “Hey!”

  “It’s got to be something one of us is carrying around. Something Lynx or the PSW powers that be could have loaded with a chip.” He started poking through the debris.

  “Do you mind?” I snatched a tampon and my birth control pills away and shoved them back inside.

  He looked at the bag.

  “Don’t even ask,” I said. No way was I watching him rip apart a tampon in a search for a microchip.

  I thought the side of his mouth quirked, but I wasn’t sure. “Cell phone?” he said.

  “I’ve had it off since the last time I used it. It’s running out of juice.” I pulled it out and switched it back on, just in case there was a message. “It can’t be the phone, anyway. He couldn’t have put a chip in it. And in the movies, they can only do that triangulate location thing when the phone is on, which it hasn’t been for a couple of hours.” I know a lot about the spy business from movies.

  “It might already have a chip. Some phones do now.”

  “Not this one. It’s ancient. At least three years old.”

  “The original clue.” He reached for the brown paper note, now pretty crumpled. He smoothed it on his thigh and held it up to the light.

  I gaped. “You’re kidding, right? How small can those tracker things be, anyway?”

  “Pretty small. But as far as I know, not as thin as a paper fiber. I thought there might be a chip glued onto a corner. Something small and brown so that we just hadn’t noticed it.”

  “Is there?”

  “I don’t see a damn thing.”

  He put the paper down and started fingering the rest of my stuff. I snatched up the CD just as he reached for it. “This, maybe?”

  “I don’t know…” He frowned. “I’ve never heard of a tracking chip in a CD, but I suppose it’s theoretically possible. I hate to destroy it.”

  “I copied the file to the laptop,” I said. “We should be safe.”

  “I’m still nervous about destroying the disc. What if there’s something on there that didn’t get copied? Something key?”

  “Okay. That makes sense.” There had to be a solution, though, and when I glanced out of the cab, I realized what it was. I tapped the Plexiglas, then leaned forward. “If you make your next left, you’ll see a Kinko’s. Could you pull up in front for a second?”

  “Sure thing.”

  When the cab pulled over, I took my purse and the CD and ran inside. I have to confess I was feeling pretty clever, and I hummed a bit as I got back in the car with Stryker.

  “What did you do?”

  “Sent it by FedEx to Mr. and Mrs. Johnson at the Plaza. We never officially checked out, so I’m sure they’ll hold it for a couple of days.”

  “Not bad,” he said. “I can do you one better.”

  “Yeah?”

  He held out his hand, now balled into a fist, then opened his fingers. The watch dropped down, dangling from its chain, the end of which Stryker still held on to.

  I stared at him, my mouth hanging open. We’d never taken the gears and things out.

  As I watched, he pried the back open with his knife, then used the same blade to force the interior gears out. I found a tissue in my tote, and we laid the pieces in my lap and poked through them.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “I know this is right,” Stryker said. “It has to be. Lynx started shooting right after we found the watch. There’s got to be a connection.”

  He held the watch in his hand, turning it this way and that before finally focusing on the ball at the top. About the size of a nice pearl, the gold ball topped the winding stem. Stryker looked at it, then me. Then he grinned and dropped the whole watch onto the floorboard of the taxi. He leaned over and smashed the blunt end of his pocketknife against it. The thin metal plating split apart. And there, among the remnants, was a tiny electronic chip.

  Chapter

  62

  “T hat son of a bitch,” Stryker said slowly, knowing he should be furious, but somehow only able to feel relief.

  “Stryker?” Mel had pulled her arm away, and now she was studying him from the other side of the cab. “Are you okay?”

  “He was tracking us, all right,” he said. He picked the chip up carefully, then laughed. “This is a GPS device. Tiny little thing, isn’t it?”

  Mel looked wary, but nodded. “And this is amusing because—”

  “Because we found it before he found us.”

  “That’s true,” she said. Her forehead creased. “Um, shouldn’t we get rid of it, though? I mean, is it still transmitting?”

  “I sure as hell hope so,” he said. “And I know just what to do with it.”

  He leaned forward to give the driver a new address, then settled back in the cab. “Time to send our friend Lynx on a bit of a goose chase.”

  Beside him, Mel smiled, clearly enjoying the joke as much as he did.

  “It’s too bad we didn’t find it earlier, though. Now Lynx has the clue,” he said.

  “Maybe. But it only matters if he solves it.”

  “And you don’t think he will.”

  “Not fast enough anyway.”

  “Have you solved it?” he asked.

  “Almost,” she said.

  “Then don’t let me keep you from finishing,” he said. “We may have just won a battle, but I still have a feeling we’re running out of time.”

  Chapter

  63

  >http://www.playsurvivewin.com<<<

  PLAY.SURVIVE.WIN

  WELCOME TO REPORTING CENTERr />
  PLAYER REPORT:

  REPORT NO. A-0004

  Filed By: Lynx

  Subject: Game progression.

  Report:

  Target tracked to Fifth Avenue area. Unable to fix location.

  Target departed without incident.

  Clue located, but uninterpretable.

  Tracking device too sporadic to be truly effective. A disadvantage, but not an insurmountable one.

  Assistance necessary; possible source of aid located. Persuasive tactics will be applied.

  >End Report<<<

  Send Report to Opponent?>>Yes<< >>No<<

  The apartment lacked a quality. Walls that smelled of mildew. Laundry on the floor. Absolutely no window coverings. And the subtle stink of dishes left too long in the sink.

  A lack of self-respect, Lynx thought. That’s what it came down to. Warren Voight lacked class. He had brains, maybe. That remained to be seen. But class? Self-respect?

  No.

  Good. A man who lived like this—who didn’t respect his apartment, his belongings or his surroundings—well, a man like that was easy to control.

  All Lynx had to do was wait.

  He dusted the couch with his hand, scattering a flurry of cracker crumbs. This wouldn’t do. He picked his way to the linen closet, found one clean towel, then went back and draped it over the couch. He sat on it, settling in to wait.

  He was prepared to wait all night, on that couch, facing the door. He had no choice, after all. No other options.

  He’d tracked his quarry to the cathedral, but the sporadic nature of the GPS meant he’d gotten there just a bit too late. No matter. He’d used his own skills and followed the path cut by Stryker and the bitch. Right down the avenue to Tiffany’s.

  Yes, he’d simply done what he did best. Played the game. Played the charming friend. Pulled the information slowly and completely from that old hag at the church and the ripe little bitch at Tiffany’s.

  So easy.

  The clue itself, however…

  He opened the paper on which he’d written his notes, spreading it open on his knees. Secret roi urn? Rebecca? The series of numbers?