The words clenched her gut. “Impossible. That Emerald is at the bottom of the Atlantic. If you believed in all this crap, then you’d know that it was irretrievable. That’s why the Breastplate of Aaron could never be restored, even if it did exist. That’s why they call the Emerald, the Seventh Stone.”
“I have reason to believe that the Emerald will soon come into your possession,” he said. “This is the endgame, Professor Devlin, but you need not lose. Many pieces will fall, pawns, knights, bishops, even heads of state.” He picked up the black king and tumbled it deftly through his pudgy, gloved fingers. “I am offering you and your loved ones a reprieve.”
“A reprieve? You tried to kill me in the desert.”
“I don’t try,” he said. “I do.” He pointed the black king at her. “And you are alive.”
“You kidnapped Lucia.”
“I simply treated her to her favorite ice cream. I needed you to see your position clearly.” Contreras raised his eyes to hers. “I am doing this for the good of the world,” he said. “You have known the keen loss of a loved one by those who claim to want to change the world. I will create a world in which that will not happen again.”
If this prophet didn’t see the illogic in that, she wasn’t about to point it out to him. “So you will not hurt Lucia.”
“That’s where your third task comes in.” He slid the white pawn to the last row, removed it from the board and placed a rook in its square. “It’s simple, really. Bring me your sister’s journal. Once I have that, you’ll realize that I am the only one who can use the power of the Emerald and Turquoise to save thousands of lives.”
“Gabriella’s journal? Her research notes?” But the thug this morning had tried to steal Dad’s journal, not Gabby’s.
Contreras slammed his fist on the table. The chess pieces jumped. “I paid for that research. My company sent her to Colombia last summer to find new botanicals for potential cures. Hiding her results is nothing less than theft.”
What was he talking about? Yes, Gabriella had gone to the Colombia rainforest last summer to talk to the Muisca shamans and retrieve plants as potential medicines. She was the only one who could speak the local dialect. Dad had taught it to her. It was one of the far flung places he had explored searching for clues to the Breastplate. “So why did you send her down there again?”
“Down there?” He pursed his lips, and smiled. “Of course, she’s returned to Colombia,” he said. “She thinks she can find the specimens. She thinks she can stop me.”
That bad feeling in Christa’s gut burned with a vengeance. Contreras hadn’t sent Gabriella to Colombia this time. He’d been hunting for her. And Christa had just pointed him in her direction. “Gabriella has no connection to the Breastplate,” she said. Or so she had believed.
“Strange what people fear,” he said. “Airlines force passengers to remove their shoes, in a lame attempt to appease unfounded paranoia, when what people should fear is something simple, something they depend on every day, something that is in every home around the world. Every one of us is connected by it, right here in Princeton, for example, or even all the souls in the city of New York.” Contreras slipped his hand into his coat pocket, removed a brass flask. He unscrewed the cap that also served as a shot cup and poured a finger of the flask’s contents into it. “Drink this,” he said. the l’eau de vie.”
She stepped back. “No way.”
“If you do not drink this, you will be of no use to me, and neither will your niece,” he said. “It’s for your own protection.” He nodded to the bodyguard on the right, who wrapped his fingers around the butt of his gun.
The guard made a move to yank the gun from its holster. Lucia could get hurt. Christa snatched the cap from Contreras and drank. It tasted like plain water, with a sweet aftertaste lingering on her tongue. She handed the cap back and waited for an effect, but her mind was reeling so fast she could have drunk pure opium and not felt it.
“The poison intensifies the most primal emotions hidden deep in the human brain, violence, paranoia, delusions. It causes death in seven days,” he said. “If the world was created in that time, then surely it can be saved in that time.”
“Was that poison?” She felt sick.
“I’m here to save you, Christa.” Contreras screwed the cap onto the flask, let it drop into his pocket. “Lucia will stay with me for the afternoon. I will call you at six tonight. Give me what I want, and your niece will be home in time for dinner.” He beckoned to Lucia.
Lucia skipped over to the table. She stopped to pick up a knight that had fallen on the cold, hard ground. She searched for its spot in the wooden box and placed it in, turning it sideways to fit properly. She looked up at Christa. “Can you take me home now? I’m cold.” She hugged herself and shivered in an exaggerated way that would have been comical in other circumstances.
Contreras bent down, leaning his hand on his thighs, his face close to the child’s. It was sickening. “But I promised to buy you that special Barbie doll,” he said. “Don’t you want to come with me?”
Lucia pouted thoughtfully, look up at Christa. “Can I, Aunt Christa?”
Grab her and run. This might be her best, her only, chance. The thug slipped his hand pointedly inside his jacket. She knelt on one knee and hugged her, tight. Lucia’s soft curls brushed her cheek. “I love you, Lucia.”
“Love you, too, Aunt Christa. Can I get the Barbie now?”
Contreras reached for Lucia’s tiny fingers with his gloved hand. He coaxed her from Christa’s embrace. He stood and walked towards the Rolls Royce, Lucia skipping beside him. He helped her into the back seat, then followed and drew the door closed with a sickening thud. The thug got in the passenger seat. The Rolls Royce crawled off, crushing the dead leaves beneath its tires. Lucia’s empty swing teetered in the chilling gust.
CHAPTER 21
Percival clutched Christa’s translation of the letter in his hands. God commanded Salvatierra to destroy the Breastplate. Absurd. God sent a storm to maroon him, keeping him alive just long enough to tell the tale of the seven sacred gemstones scattered around the world. All to usurp the power of the golden Breastplate designed by God, according to the Bible, a book fraught with mathematical impossibilities. A man attacked his house this morning, for this? Thaddeus had no right to ask him to protect this letter and tattered journal “with his life.” What if the children had been here? He had to distance his family from this mad situation before one of them got hurt.
First, he had to warn Gabriella to return home immediately. He tried her satellite phone again. Still no answer. It could be the tree canopy. Satellite coverage in the Colombian rainforest was spotty at best. Is that why Contreras had sent her on this last-minute expedition? To ensure that she wouldn’t be here to receive the package from her father? But even if Contreras was somehow connected to this quest for the Breastplate gems, how would he know the letter and journal was arriving this morning? The man wasn’t some James Bond villain with a worldwide network of spies.
Contreras’s life goal was to find medicinal cures from rainforest plants, granted for financial more than altruistic motives. That’s all. Gabriella wasn’t in danger. He couldn’t fathom the idea. Truth be told, it was a miracle that a beautiful, intelligent woman like Gabriella had married him. It still felt like a dream when he woke up next to her. He could feel the weight of that other shoe suspended above him. When it dropped, it would crush him. He closed his eyes and felt her soft curls in his fingers. In his mind, he breathed in the beguiling scent of exotic blooms that always shanghaied his focus when she walked into the room.
He shook his head. He had to stay focused. If Contreras was the “prophet” who accosted Christa in the desert, then he was the one who sent his thug here this morning to appropriate the Turquoise. A man like Contreras didn’t rule his pharmaceutical empire by giving up. That thug could return at any moment. It was time to call the authorities. Working outside the law was the Devlins’ way, not his.
But there would be an investigation, questions asked, the letter and journal perhaps confiscated as evidence. That could end any chance of saving Thaddeus. Gabriella would never forgive him. .
He heard the front door slam open. What an idiot! He hadn’t locked it. He grabbed the gun. Footsteps, running toward the library. He crouched behind the desk. Christa skidded across the threshold.
“Percival!” she shouted.
“Good God, Christa.” He stood. His hand holding the gun was trembling. He laid the pistol on the corner of the desk and stepped away from it. “I could have shot you.”
“It’s Contreras, Baltasar Contreras.” She crossed to the desk, turned on the laptop. “He’s the Prophet. He took Lucia.”
“Slow down, Christa. What’s this about Lucia? She’s not with you?”
“We’ve got to contact Gabriella.”
“I tried her satellite phone. No luck.”
“I blew it. I told Contreras she went to Colombia.”
“But he knows that. He sent her there, thinks she’s on the verge of finding a botanical cure for cancer or something. Where’s Lucia?”
Christa pawed through the papers on the desktop. “Contreras took her. I’ll tell you everything, but we’ve got to find out what Gabriella was up to.”
“Took her?” His throat tightened so quickly he could barely speak. “What are you saying?”
She crossed over to him and grabbed him by the wrists, her grip surprisingly strong. “Lucia is safe, for now.”
His knees buckled. A sharp buzz zinged through his brain. He had to hold it together. He had to be strong, for Lucia. He grabbed the gun. “I’m going after her. If he hurts her, I’ll kill him.” This couldn’t be him talking. He’d never even shot a gun before this morning. He put down the gun, snatched up the phone. “I’m calling the cops.”
She grabbed the phone from his hand. He almost slapped her. His impulse for violence was frightening, and enticingly empowering. “We can’t call the police, Percy,” she said, holding her eyes steady on his. “Contreras will know. He has connections.”
Think. Christa was right. It could put Lucia in more danger. “That FBI agent, the one who rescued you in the desert. The Bureau handles kidnappings.”
“Fox,” she said. “Agent Fox. I thought about that, all the way back here. But Fox didn’t arrest Contreras in Arizona, probably because he couldn’t prove anything, but I don’t know for sure. Contreras and Fox have a history. I just don’t know if we should trust him.”
Christa with intense mixed emotions about a man was never a good sign. She hadn’t said what this Fox looked like, but it wouldn’t be the first time a dashing man had blindsided her brilliance. Christa had rappelled into a sea cave, camped with lions in the Serengeti and could list the Egyptian dynasties in order, but, like Gabriella, relationships were one foreign territory she hadn’t had much chance to visit. “Then whom can we trust?”
“Gabriella. Contreras didn’t know that Gabriella went to Colombia. It may be our only advantage. We’ve got to reach her before Contreras does. Damn it. No new emails from either Gabby or Dad.”
Of course, this all came back to Thaddeus and his damn obsession. “I don’t give a fig about the Breastplate, or, frankly, your father, at this point.”
“You’ve got to,” she said. “Contreras wants the Turquoise and Tear of the Moon Emerald from the Breastplate. He thinks I can get them.”
“The Turquoise and Emerald! The Breastplate of Aaron!” He was shouting. He didn’t care. “Those damn stones are more legend than truth.” He paced away, then back. “From an artifact that your father has spent years trying to find. Lucia’s life depends on that?” He reached for the gun. “That’s impossible. I’m going after her before your father’s damn obsession destroys us all.”
“Percy, wait.” She grabbed his arm. “It may be the only thing that can save us.”
He shook her off. “I thought you’d finally come to your senses, Christa, when you left your father and started your career here in Princeton. You can’t believe all this nonsense.”
“I can’t deny what I’ve found.” She reached for her daypack and shoved it to him. “Go ahead. For Lucia’s sake. See what we found in Arizona, in a cliff dwelling that’s been buried for five centuries.”
He grabbed the pack and unzipped it. It smelled like sand and metal. He yanked out the metal object. What the hell? “You found this, in Arizona,” he said, “an armillary sphere.” Early astronomers had used them, mathematically inspired models of the known universe. This had no place in an ancient Native American village.
“Copernican, mid to late sixteenth century,” she said. She gestured towards the translation. “Luna, the Spanish astronomer from Salvatierra’s letter. He brought it into the desert. Joseph believes it’s a clue to where Luna hid the Turquoise. Contreras wants us to puzzle it out. That Turquoise could help save Lucia’s life.”
“I’m a mathematician, not an astronomer,” said Percival. He scrutinized the symbols, the structure and mechanics of the brass spheres. All he could see was Lucia, alone and afraid. He resisted the impulse to dash the damn sphere through the window. “Gabriella has nothing to do with the Breastplate. She swore off helping your father in his obsessive quest years ago. She knew it was destroying him and that it might destroy us.”
“Contreras took off with Lucia the minute I let slip that Gabriella was in Colombia. It’s not the Emerald nor the Turquoise that topped his demands. You know what Contreras’s priority was? Gabriella’s journal,” Christa said. “He was furious that Gabriella had kept her findings from him. We’ve got to figure out why and what the hell it has to do with the Breastplate. Lucia’s life depends on it.”
CHAPTER 22
Christa sensed, rather than saw, the being just beyond the library window. A shadow emerged from the decayed, fetid leaves beneath the trees in the side yard. She crouched and squinted. It was there all right, but it wasn’t exactly corporeal. It looked more like the wind had pinched the black from the storm cloud and stretched it into a specter-like being. A faint scent, sickly sweet yet ashen, the smell of death masqueraded, seeped in through the drafty panes. The specter could be a hallucination, a side effect of whatever Contreras gave her to drink. She was an idiot to have left Lucia in the hands of that mad man. She had to focus, find Gabriella’s journal to buy Lucia precious time.
A pounding thundered on Percival’s front door. “Hunter,” a man’s voice bellowed.
She yanked aside the heavy velvet drapes. The specter spun away. Its whirlwind cracked off a barren maple branch and hurled it to the earth. Keep it together. Specters weren’t real. Beyond, no cars were parked on the street.
“It’s Donohue,” Percy said, his voice quick with relief. Donohue was the retired Colonel from next door, Army, Special Forces. He could kill with his thumb. The man refused to call Percival by his given name, even after she pointed out that his namesake was a courageous knight of the round table. “Gabriella told me to trust him and call on him in case of emergency. This is damn well an emergency.”
“I’ve got a message,” Donohue called, “about Gabriella.”
Percival practically sprinted towards the front door.
“Percival, wait,” she called. Percy must have misunderstood. Gabriella would never trust the military. Dad had drilled that into them. She quickly swiped the pistol into the desk drawer and shoved the sphere in between the Greek vase and Zimbabwe stone carving, hiding it in plain sight.
Colonel Donohue rumbled into the library like a Sherman tank through the gates of a ravaged French village. He was a big man, powerful and dark in his trench coat. His eyes strafed the room. When Percival had first moved in with Gabby and the kids, the Colonel was downright intimidating, grumbling like distant artillery when the kids’ ball rolled into his disciplined platoon of boxwoods. His wife, Eleanor needed rest, he’d bark. Eleanor was a recluse, with a self-imposed sentence in solitary after their only son was killed in Iraq. She gazed out the w
indow, in her disheveled bedclothes, at the kids as they played, too pitiful to be creepy. Then, as weeks passed, Donohue began dropping by with little toys and books. From Eleanor, he told them, barely managing a stiff lip, those kids, they’re getting her out and about again.
Churchill, his poodle, skittered around his master’s feet, sporting a red and green striped doggie sweater, one of a plethora that Eleanor had knit in her confinement. Churchill yapped in excited anticipation.
So did Percival. “This very morning, a giant of a man, dark suit, barged right in, I had to scare him off, he forced me to shoot, but, no, he wasn’t hurt, ran into Christa right out on the front walk, she was shot, in the arm, flesh wound.”
“Colonel, you said you had a message,” Christa interrupted, before Percival could tell him about Lucia. Donohue was a bulldozer. They needed to rescue a flower. And did Percy really say flesh wound? “About Gabriella.”
Donohue targeted his sites on her. “Before she left for Colombia, Gabriella asked me to check with my connections in the Pentagon.”
“Gabriella asked you,” Christa confirmed.
“I told her intel is keeping tabs on a new group of commandoes trawling the Muisca’s rainforest.”
“Drug runners,” Christa said. So that’s why Gabriella had brought in Donohue. Drug runners were spreading like a cancer down there and they were as potentially deadly.
“Not drug runners,” Donohue said. “Mercenaries. Maybe hired by the local drug lord to take down his competition. Maybe not.” Churchill whimpered. He tugged on his leash, hoping to sniff out the kids. They loved that poodle. “Now we know. Our local contact learned that the commandoes are heading towards Gabriella’s camp.”
The Seventh Stone Page 13
