“She wants you off the table. All the way off.”
“Good idea,” Hannah said instantly.
Archer and Barton ignored her.
“There’s a problem with that,” Archer said. Each word was clear, distinct. “April knows what it is.”
The other man grunted. “I’m supposed to clear up that problem.”
“I’m listening.”
This time Barton’s smile was genuine, if small. “I can see that. You sure you don’t want back in the real game?”
“Dead sure.”
“That’s what she said you would say,” Barton muttered.
Eyes narrowed, Hannah looked from one man to the other. She didn’t like the direction of the conversation. The thought of Archer going back to the covert life made her stomach twist. Len had loved it, but Archer said he hadn’t been strong enough to stay in the game. She hadn’t believed him at the time. Now, suddenly, she did. Archer simply wasn’t cold enough to play international chess with human pawns.
The memory of Summer teething blissfully on Archer’s knuckles went through Hannah like lightning through darkness. Len would never have allowed anything that close to him, even his own child. Yet Archer had smiled at his niece with a tenderness that still amazed Hannah. But it hadn’t amazed his family. They took his love for granted. And that was what it was. Love.
“Don’t want to play again, huh?” Barton asked. “Not even to get your brother’s killer?”
“I don’t need April to get Len’s killer,” Archer said in a level voice. “All I need is time. I’ve got it.”
“Right. Well, mate, I’m going to make your hunt easier.”
Hannah’s hand went over Archer’s wrist as though to keep him from moving one inch toward Barton. Her nails dug in hard. She didn’t want him hunting anything, especially a man dangerous enough to kill Len McGarry.
Archer ignored the pressure of Hannah’s nails on his wrist. He was focused on Barton’s shrewd, dark eyes.
“You’re probably thinking that Sam Chang ordered McGarry’s death,” Barton said to Archer.
He didn’t deny it.
“Sam’s spies eventually figured out that Pearl Cove was being sabotaged by the Aussies,” Barton continued. “The old bastard was beside himself. He had placed men everywhere but where he needed one most—in Len’s confidence.”
“I figured that out for myself.”
“Did you figure that Chang offered a million dollars to the person who brought him the secret of the rainbows?” Barton retorted. “Qing Lu Yin decided he would be the one. The cyclone was his chance. He got Len alone and started questioning him.” Barton shrugged. “Yin fucked up big time. McGarry died and took the secret of the rainbow pearls with him.”
Hannah closed her eyes and saw again Len’s body half beached, half floating, wholly dead.
“How did you find out?” Archer asked.
“Yin. Not directly,” he added quickly, sensing the change in Archer. “The word was passed back up the line.”
“By the Red Phoenix boys?”
The civilized voice didn’t fool Barton. What he was seeing in Archer’s eyes wasn’t a bit civilized. “Right.”
“Why should I believe them?”
Barton handed over the unsealed manila envelope. “They send you their apology on the death of your brother. They want you to understand it wasn’t a triad matter.”
Without looking away from Barton, Archer took the envelope and opened it. The cool, smooth surface of a glossy photograph met his fingertips. He pulled it out.
When Hannah gasped, he glanced down quickly. One look was enough. The color photo was Qing Lu Yin, right down to the black eye and oyster-shell gash on his chin. No possibility of a mistake, even though blood was everywhere and his severed head was tucked underneath his arm in the Red Phoenix Triad’s trademark execution style.
Archer pushed the brutal photo back into the envelope. “Apology accepted.”
The ruined shed sent thin, misshapen black fingers raking up into the late afternoon. Light the color of hammered bronze filled the air from the sea to the distant arch of the cloud-whipped sky. Wind swirled with just enough force to tug at the cloth of Archer’s tank top and press his shorts against his body. The air was the temperature of blood, neither hot nor cool.
When he heard sound behind him, he didn’t turn around. He knew it was Hannah. Everyone else was gone. He had made certain of it personally, searching every cottage, every shed, everywhere that was big enough to hide a human being. There was nothing but empty rooms, empty drawers, and bits of domestic debris that were already being blown away by the wind.
“Everything I’m taking is packed,” she said quietly.
He nodded but made no move to leave. He wasn’t ready to walk away from her. He never would be. But he would walk away just the same.
Soon.
Silently Hannah stared at the jackstraw ruins of the shed. Only the vault stood upright, and it gaped crookedly. There was nothing new for her here. Nothing old, either. Nothing that she wanted to take with her. Yet, like Archer, she found she couldn’t simply turn away and leave. Hands on her hips, she looked at what had once been the center of her life and the soul of her husband’s. She tried to find meaning in wreckage.
There wasn’t any. It was simply a pearl shed that had been destroyed by a storm.
So she watched Archer instead, hunger in her eyes and a tension in her body that made it hard for her to breathe. He had walked away from her before. He would walk away again. She would be free of the past, of Pearl Cove, and of Archer, who reminded her of Len. She would be free of everything except the certainty that she had made another terrible mistake.
What’s it like to love someone enough to die in his place?
Chills rippled over Hannah’s skin in primal recognition of the truth. Like two pearls of the same size and color, Len and Archer were similar. And very, very different. The layers of Len’s life that had accumulated in such pain and fury were uneven, pitted, flawed. The layers of Archer’s life were different. Not perfect. Just . . . beautiful.
And she had hurt him as cruelly as Len ever hurt anyone. You’re like Len! Damn you, you’re like Len! As cold a bastard as ever walked the earth.
No wonder Archer wanted to get away from her. In surviving Len, she had become just as savage as he was.
Bile rose in Hannah’s throat. Too late she understood the meaning of her dreams—Archer’s pain and her screams of denial that he could be hurt. Because if he could hurt, he could love. If he loved, she had used his vulnerability like a weapon against him. The same way Len had used her own vulnerability against her, a cat with a bird.
Protection and sex. That’s all?
Yes.
She had gotten her wish. Archer no longer threatened her with love. With vulnerability. Yet she was standing here, figuring it all out too late, vulnerable to her soul.
“Could Len get on any of the pearl boats by himself?” Archer asked, walking slowly toward the vault.
Swallowing past the constriction in her throat, Hannah forced herself to talk to the man who might have loved her, the man she had been too much a coward to love in return. “No. He had to be carried aboard.”
“Could he dive alone?”
“He needed a mechanical lift to get in and out of the water. He couldn’t reach the controls while he was on the lift.”
Archer nodded and never looked away from the side of the vault. The thick outer door hung on its hinges like a broken jaw. The smaller locker doors inside were open, as though to prove that nothing of value lay beyond. “What about the car?”
“He couldn’t handle it alone. Certainly not in the last two years. He was losing strength. It was slow, very slow, but it was real.”
In the slanting light, Archer’s eyes were almost gold. He measured the vault that had once held a king’s ransom in pearls and the key to a man’s dark soul. “Where would Len have hidden the Black Trinity?”
She shru
gged. “Somewhere in this shed.”
Silently he looked at the ruins.
“It’s gone, Archer. Accept it. I have.”
“If it had been anyone else but Len, I would,” he replied evenly. “But Len always had one more layer than anybody expected, one more move, one more trick.”
All of the lockers that were beyond the reach of a long-armed, seated man were closed. Even standing, the highest rank of lockers rose almost four feet above Archer’s head. The slanting sunlight picked out every nick and scratch with unnatural clarity. Several lockers in particular showed scratches. All of them were on the right-hand side of the vault.
The image of Len’s ugly, wicked ring flashed in Archer’s mind. Maybe Len had used it for more than slicing up a man’s face in a fight.
“You’ve opened all the drawers,” he said.
Fighting for breath, Hannah forced herself to think of the present, not the corrosive past. She couldn’t afford to make another mistake like Len. She simply wouldn’t survive it. She knew it as certainly as she knew that it hurt too much to breathe right now. “Everything that was beyond Len’s reach, I opened.”
Remembering Len, Archer wondered just how much had truly been beyond his half brother’s grasp. “The handles are too big for the lockers.”
“Len’s design, not mine.”
“What about the locksmith? That many combination locks must have needed maintenance, especially in the tropics.”
“Len did it.”
“How did he reach the top locks?”
“He didn’t. I did.”
Archer turned toward Hannah. “How?”
“On a ladder.”
“No, how did you open the locks?”
“He only had me work on one,” Hannah said, pointing toward the vault. “The center one.” Even as Archer spun toward it, she added, “But I already checked that locker. The Black Trinity wasn’t in any of the trays.”
Ignoring the closed lockers, he grabbed one of the lower trays at random and pulled it all the way out. The tray was almost as long as his arm. He measured the tray against the depth of the vault, then mentally added on the thickness of the open doors.
“Too short,” he muttered. “But not by much.” He pushed the tray back in place and measured other drawers that were waist level or lower. They were all the same size.
Two inches too short.
He grabbed a flashlight and shined it into the hole where a tray had been. Nothing showed but the thick steel sheathing the vault. He pulled out more trays, put his arm between the multiple rails, and felt around. There was no hint of a hidden seam, a hinge, a panel, a button, a lever, anything that might open a compartment that held more pearls. No matter which rank of trays he tried, he didn’t find anything but blood-temperature steel.
No sign of wires, either, which was a relief. Not that he had expected Len to risk a booby trap so close to his delicate Black Trinity. Len had hated explosives. He had learned the hard way that even C-4 degraded and became unreliable in the tropics.
One by one, Archer replaced trays and closed the locker doors. When everything but the outer door was sealed up, he simply stood and looked at the rank of lockers.
“What?” Hannah asked. The intensity in Archer was almost tangible.
“The vault has a false back.”
“How do you know?”
“The drawers are about two inches too short for the depth of the vault, even when you figure in the shielding.”
Silently she watched while he went over the exterior of the vault and then the interior locker doors with his fingertips.
“You’re looking too high,” she said finally. “Len couldn’t get to the top two ranks of lockers.”
“That’s what he wanted everyone to believe.”
“How would he get up there to unlock everything?”
Instead of answering, Archer reached into his pocket, took out his key chain, and removed Len’s heavy ring. Ignoring Hannah’s hoarse sound of surprise, he put the ring on his right index finger, where Len had worn it. Then he crouched down until he was about the height of a man in a wheelchair. Reaching above his head with his right hand, he grabbed a handle and did a one-armed chin-up. The locker handle creaked but held. He moved on to the next handle.
She simply stared at the naked strength of him as he chinned himself again. “Do you really think Len could do that?”
“Easier than me,” Archer said through his teeth. “He wasn’t hauling as much weight—in his lower body. He would have smiled—every inch of the way at how—he was fooling the world.”
Breathing hard with the effort, Archer grabbed another handle and kept on pulling himself up.
“But the top center locker was empty when I looked,” she objected.
He didn’t waste breath replying. Sweat gathered and ran down his spine as he dragged himself up the face of the vault until his eyes were level with the top rank of lockers. On the way up, he noted the marks on several of the lockers along the right side. He found out how the gouges were made when his right hand slipped and raked over the vault. Steel screeched over steel, leaving new marks.
“What’s the—combination?” he asked.
“Ummm.” Hannah gathered her wits. The sight of Archer pulling himself up the vault hand over hand was as unnerving as the sight of a dead man’s ring on his hand. “Eight right, twenty left, thirty right, one left.”
He started to work, lost his grip, swore, and went back to it.
“Brace yourself on your feet,” she said.
“He—didn’t.”
The instant the last tumbler clicked, Archer let himself down the same way Len would have, hand over hand, fast, breathing hard. When he had his feet under him again, he looked at the wall of closed lockers and rubbed his shoulders until his breathing leveled.
“Right,” he said after a minute. “By the time Len opened that locker, he wouldn’t have been feeling up to much more in the way of monkey tricks.” Sweaty hands closed around a handle that would have been within easy reach of Len. Then Archer stopped cold. “No good. I was pulling handles all the way down and nothing opened. Shit.”
“One at a time,” Hannah said.
“What?”
“You were only pulling on one handle at a time. Try two.”
Archer looked over his shoulder and gave her a smile. “Right. Now, let’s pray that Len really wasn’t feeling tricky when it came to this point. There’s an infinite number of ways he could have mixed and matched open doors to make another combination.”
“He wasn’t really left- or right-handed. Not after the accident. He trained himself to do everything with both hands.”
Archer knew that Len had trained himself to be lethally capable with hands, feet, and head long before he had met Hannah. But there was no need to remind her of that unhappy past. It would soon be gone. All the way gone. And Archer would be gone with it.
“Step back out of the shed,” he said.
“But—”
“He could have booby-trapped this,” Archer cut in, overriding her objections.
“Then you walk off and I’ll open it.”
He gave her a disbelieving look.
She gave it right back.
“All or nothing,” he muttered.
He bent over and pulled two waist-level handles that would have been convenient to Len.
The lockers opened, revealing rows of trays. Empty trays. But Archer already knew about them. Breath held, he stood and listened, listened, listened for the sound of a hidden mechanism releasing. He wasn’t worried about a booby trap anymore. If there had been one, he wouldn’t have had to wait and listen. It would already have happened.
Silence.
He let out a soft, rushing curse and reached for two more waist-high locker doors. Before his fingers closed around them, he heard a faint sound. Then another.
Click. Click.
“Archer,” Hannah said urgently.
“Yes.”
Click.
Scraaaaape.
Intently he watched the vault. But it was Hannah who spotted the faint line where a panel was trying to open. She jumped forward, stuck her fingers in the gap, and pried. Nothing budged.
“Here,” Archer said, handing her a slender metal bar.
She jammed the bar into the opening and pulled back sharply. More metal scraped on metal. Shifting her grip, she yanked again.
A waist-high panel swung open, revealing several long, narrow drawers. There were no locks, no combinations, no handles, nothing but a perforated disk to indicate how the drawers might be opened.
Hannah looked at Archer. “Now what?”
“This, I hope.”
After a few tries he fitted Len’s odd ring to the disk on the middle drawer. The fit was tight enough to make a kind of handle. Gently he pulled back. A shallow drawer opened. Inside, resting on edge, was a long, flat jeweler’s case.
Hannah made an odd sound. “Is it . . . ?”
“Go ahead. Find out.”
With fingers that trembled, Hannah lifted out the box. Very carefully she pried up the lid. Archer watched her face rather than the box itself. Her look of relief, excitement, and wonder told him everything he needed to know. Wordlessly she turned and handed him the Black Trinity.
Silently he examined the gleaming, unearthly beauty of the unstrung necklace lying within the box’s deep channels. He had expected the color match to be as good as humanly possible. He hadn’t expected to be overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of the triple strands. It took his breath away.
Storm and rainbows. Excitement and serenity. Radiant midnight and suspended dawns. Secret dreams and impossible miracles. The Black Trinity had them all.
“No wonder Len expected this to heal him,” Archer said in a low voice.
“If beauty could heal, he would have been whole,” Hannah agreed.
“No.” He closed the box and held it out to her. “He had beauty. It didn’t heal him.”
“What do you mean?”
“You, Hannah. He had you.” Again Archer put the box in her hands. Again she wouldn’t take it. “This is the best of Pearl Cove. Of Len,” he said. “Take it and leave the rest behind.”
Pearl Cove Page 39
