Whirlpool

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “Of course not,” she said, smiling despite their unresolved past.

  She went across the room in a rush and hugged Swann hard, holding on to his strength, feeling safe for just a moment in some small corner of her soul.

  Swann hugged his daughter just as hard, but he was thinking even harder. He’d planned to arrive before the package did. It would have been so much easier that way.

  But when Laurel moved away from her worktable and into his arms, he saw the egg.

  Balls. This will bugger it up but good.

  Laurel was like her mother had been, honest to the soles of her feet. The explanation he’d worked out for the package would be harder to sell now. Much harder.

  Much more dangerous.

  “You’re taller than I remembered,” was all he said.

  “You always say that.”

  “Do I?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He laughed. “Guess you’ll always be somewhere between twelve and fifteen in my mind until I see you. Then I know all over again how much water has gone under the bridge.”

  Like the beard, the bitterness in Swann’s voice was new. She tilted her head back and studied her father’s face. Wherever he’d come from, it had been a long way away. He must have been traveling hard to get home. He looked as tired as she could ever remember seeing him.

  “Looking for new lines?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Just…looking.”

  Swann smiled sadly. “You remind me of your mother when you do that.” He released Laurel and glanced at the workbench. “I see you got my package.”

  “It came about an hour ago.”

  Just one hour, he thought savagely. Goddamn it. So close…

  But close only counted in horseshoes and hand grenades, and no one knew that better than Jamie Swann.

  Laurel saw the subtle shift of her father’s expression and knew that he wished she’d never unwrapped the box.

  “It was addressed to me,” she said evenly. “That’s why I opened it.”

  Saying nothing, her father walked slowly toward the egg. It glowed with a light that was almost eerie.

  “It’s something, isn’t it?” he asked softly.

  “Yes. But what, exactly?”

  Ignoring the question, Swann kept walking up to the worktable. When he was within arm’s reach of the egg he bent down. His squint became more pronounced. With a muttered curse he straightened, snatched a pair of half-glasses out of his shirt pocket, and started to put them on. Then he looked at his daughter.

  “I don’t know why I even carry the damn things,” he said. “Bad light is the only time I really need them.”

  Laurel felt a stab of sadness. Her father was stronger and more fit than any man she knew, however young, yet he felt he had to apologize for needing reading glasses.

  What will it be like for him when he’s truly old? she thought unhappily. How on earth will he deal with the loss of his strength?

  How will I?

  Impatiently Swann put on the glasses and bent down to the egg, inspecting it closely. He poked randomly at a jeweled fleur-de-lis. Nothing moved. He wiggled the gold wires that made the net around the egg. Nothing happened. He began picking at the net with his thumbnail.

  “Dad, be careful! The gold is so malleable, so soft, that it would be easy to damage.”

  For an instant Swann looked up at her over the top of his glasses. Then he went back to worrying the jeweled egg.

  Before she could think, Laurel was beside her father, protective of the egg.

  “Are you looking for anything in particular?” she asked in a neutral voice.

  “Just trying to figure out how it’s put together. Can’t see a seam anywhere.”

  “Let me look.”

  “You already had an hour and you didn’t get it open.” Swann paused and added softly, “Did you?”

  “I was too busy admiring the egg to wonder how it opened.”

  Swann let out a hidden, relieved breath. “You and your mother,” he said, shaking his head. “Ariel could look at the same thing for hours and never get bored.”

  “And you got bored after three minutes. Then you left.”

  Surprised by the bitterness in Laurel’s voice, he looked up from the egg. She took advantage of his distraction to move between him and the delicate objet d’art.

  “My guess is that the web of gold wire is designed to hide the seam in the egg,” she said.

  Swann grunted. “So peel off the froufrou and find out.”

  “Peel off the—” She took a breath and asked sharply, “Do you know what this is?”

  “Do you?”

  “It looks like one of Fabergé’s imperial eggs.”

  “Yeah, it does, doesn’t it?”

  “Is it real?” she asked.

  Surprised, Swann’s glance shifted from the egg to his daughter. Usually she took her cue from his silence.

  “It looks damned real to me,” he said. “What about you?”

  For an instant Laurel wanted to scream in frustration. If her father knew anything about the egg, he wasn’t going to tell her.

  “It looks damned real to me,” she said, her tone an exact imitation of his. “What about you?”

  Swann shrugged.

  “Do you have any idea what this is worth?” she pressed.

  A cold, mysterious smile slashed across Swann’s face.

  “Millions,” he said succinctly. “Enough to keep me the rest of my life. Enough to keep you in beans and bacon when I’m not around to send you gems from all the shitty little backwaters on earth.”

  “I don’t want money. Not like this.”

  “Too late. It’s the same kind of money you’ve been getting all along.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing, Laurie,” Swann cut in, fixing her with his bleak amber eyes. “It’s time you learned how the world really works. Blood washes off gold, time only goes one way, and Jamie Swann takes care of his own.”

  As he watched the color drain from his daughter’s face, he knew he’d made a bad mistake in sending the package here. Laurel was Ariel’s daughter more than she was his. Laurel was too decent for her own good.

  And for his.

  He knew himself. He was an honorable if not always an honest man. He’d broken laws in more ways and countries than most people could name. Yet he hadn’t done it for his own gain, but for a higher good: the rule of law.

  Long ago he’d reconciled himself to the irony of breaking international laws in order to ensure an international rule of law. But other people didn’t have to face that irony on a daily basis. He often forgot just how harsh the truth looked to outsiders. Especially the innocent ones.

  “You okay, baby?” he asked, reaching for his daughter.

  “I’m fine.” She shook off the sensation of feeling the earth shift beneath her feet, tripping her. “Just fine.”

  Swann took his daughter by both shoulders and turned her, forcing her to look directly at him.

  “Listen to me,” he said. “Listen good. The package never came. You never opened it. I never was here. Got that?”

  It was a voice Laurel had never heard from her father—cold, savage, ruthless. Like his yellow eyes.

  Suddenly she knew why he left so often and came back so rarely. He hadn’t wanted his wife and daughter to know just how dangerous a man he was.

  “Laurel.”

  That was all Swann said, or needed to.

  “I’ll do the best I can,” she told him in a thin voice. “But I’m not much good at your kind of games.”

  He let out a long breath, changing before her eyes, becoming again the man she knew. He touched her cheek with surprising tenderness.

  “I know, baby,” he said. “I never wanted you to be. So forget about tonight. Okay?”

  The voice was familiar again, deep and warm, a little rough at the edges.

  “Okay,” Laurel whispered.

  Releasing her shoulders, Swann turned away. He sta
red out at the restless ocean for a long, silent moment. Finally he turned back to his daughter.

  “I think it’s time we had a talk,” he said calmly. “So sit down before you fall down.”

  As he spoke, he gestured toward the high work stool.

  Laurel sat without protest. In truth, she was glad for the support. Her worktable was familiar, comfortable, predictable—all the things her father wasn’t.

  Swann shoved his hands into the hip pockets of his jeans and began to pace.

  “You don’t know much about my life,” he said finally. “Neither did your mother. It was better that way. Safer. But not anymore.”

  Abruptly he turned and pinned Laurel with eyes that were like a wolf’s, clear and tawny and untamed. Untamed most of all.

  Poor Mother, Laurel thought distantly. She never had a chance. Not really. Jamie Swann is wild all the way to his soul.

  “For the past thirty years,” he said, “I’ve been employed, more or less continually, by the Central Intelligence Agency.”

  “I thought you were a mercenary.”

  “That’s what I told your mother. And that’s what I was, from time to time.” Swann’s teeth gleamed in a cold smile. “But never the times people thought I was. Even her.”

  “You were—are—a spy?”

  “Nothing that fancy. I’m what the media pansies call a ‘shadow warrior.’”

  Laurel absorbed that for a moment before she asked, “What do you call yourself?”

  “Once we called ourselves heroes.”

  “And now?”

  “Now?” Swann laughed harshly. “Now we know what we were. Bloody fools. Bloody, bloody fools.”

  She winced at the bitterness in his voice.

  “You see, baby,” he said, “wars aren’t fought in nice, honorable, standup ways like they were before Korea. Now wars are fought in alleys where sewage draws rats, secrets draw gold, and men get their throats slit, often by friends. I should know. I cut my share.”

  She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again. All her life she’d resented being kept away from the true Jamie Swann. Now she had what she had always wanted—the truth, however difficult.

  “The name of the game I’ve played all my life is cross, double-cross, triple-cross, and keep on crossing until there’s no one else left standing,” he said.

  “Why? If it was that bad, why didn’t you quit?”

  “I didn’t believe it was that bad until it was too late to quit. Ariel was dead.” Without warning he turned sharply, facing his daughter. “Ah, hell, who am I jobbing? I would have gone nuts being in one place all the time with nothing more exciting than dying to look forward to.”

  “But if mother had been alive…?”

  “Big ‘if,’ Laurie. Too big for this cowboy.” He shrugged. “Anyway, I can’t complain. I chose the life and I’d choose it again. But I didn’t plan very well. I made good money when I worked, and I spent it all.”

  She thought of the rainbow of gemstones her father had given her over the years and felt guilty. “I know. Too much of it came to me.”

  A smile flickered over his lips. “Don’t worry about that. The stones I gave you were real bargains. Way, way below wholesale. Cheaper than dirt. Like life.”

  Laurel hoped the shock she felt didn’t show on her face. Part of her had assumed that her father’s talk of cutting throats was an exaggeration. Now she knew it wasn’t.

  Swann looked at his daughter’s face and swore beneath his breath. “Listen. If I’d gotten here before the package, you could have gone on being sweet and naive and kind and caring and all that horseshit. But there was a storm in Kowloon and a delay in Hong Kong and I got here late. So now you have to grow up, and grow up fast, or you’ll spill your guts—and mine—to the first asshole with a smile and a badge who comes knocking at the door.”

  Numbly Laurel watched her father and listened to all the answers whose questions no longer mattered. He was getting closer to the truth now. She sensed it.

  And she knew she wouldn’t like it.

  7

  Karroo compound

  Monday

  Cruz watched Novikov like a rattlesnake watching a rat. After the Russian’s slow, reluctant discussion of why he’d come to Risk Ltd., Redpath had relented and moved the meeting indoors. Cruz, Gillespie, and Redpath were used to the desert blast furnace at midday, but the Russians were getting beaten flat by the heat. Poor Gapan hadn’t said a word the whole time, as if he’d been struck dumb by the weight and intensity of the sun.

  Even Novikov had given up on half-truths and evasions in order to get out of the sun. He sank gratefully into a couch in Redpath’s cool, subterranean office, which was in the half of the compound that had been carved into the side of a hill. The surrounding earth moderated the desert’s extreme temperatures. Everything learned to accommodate the reality of the desert, even Cassandra Redpath.

  The thought made Cruz smile faintly.

  At an unseen signal from Redpath, Gillespie handled the refreshments. To Cruz, there was something both charming and amusing about the sight of the six-foot four-inch black giant—dressed in cammie shorts and khaki singlet—serving lemonade with the delicacy of a maiden aunt.

  Though Cruz was no stranger to the dark arts of mayhem, Gillespie could have taught him a new way to kill every day for a year. That was why Cruz was careful not to grin while Gillespie served everyone from a plate of ginger cookies he’d baked himself. The big sergeant-major was a complex man, proud of his Scots birth and Zulu grandparents, a deadly fighter, an excellent cook, and intelligent beyond the understanding of most men.

  But not beyond Redpath’s understanding. She savored the evenings of chess and conversation with Gillespie. So did he. Being Redpath’s bodyguard, tactician, and confidant had brought out a gentle, almost sweet aspect of Gillespie’s nature. He even managed to play houseboy with grace, although Cruz sensed that Gillie would like to serve Novikov cyanide with his cookies.

  Elegantly at ease but for his shrewd eyes, Novikov finished his third glass of lemonade with too much enthusiasm for mere politeness. Though he’d been outside for less than half an hour, the overwhelming reality of the desert had created a thirst in him that was only partly physical.

  What really irritated him was that Cruz knew it.

  “More lemonade?” Cruz asked gently.

  Except for a sideways glance, the Russian ignored Cruz. Novikov was beginning to enjoy the coolness of Redpath’s office and the chance to decide for himself whether rumors of a sexual liaison between Redpath and Gillespie were true. Obviously there was respect between them, and probably affection. As for sex…

  Novikov hadn’t decided yet. If it became important, he’d find out. Until then, he’d just have more lemonade and be grateful to be out of that hellish sun.

  “I don’t mean to rush you, Aleksy,” Redpath said, “but if the matter that brought you here is urgent, and I must assume it is, it should be addressed.”

  Novikov frowned.

  Sourly Cruz noted that the lines in the Russian’s forehead only increased his physical beauty. Maybe Novikov practiced the expression in front of a mirror. Several mirrors. He talked out of so many sides of his mouth that one mirror wouldn’t be enough.

  “I am forced by circumstances to reveal several important state secrets,” Novikov said reluctantly. “Therefore, I would very much appreciate speaking to you alone.”

  Impatiently Cruz rattled the ice cubes in his glass of lemonade. They’d been around this track before, when Cassandra had been trying to melt Novikov under the desert heat.

  “I’m here because Cassandra wants me to be and you know it,” Cruz said. “Stop doing laps and get to the point.”

  For a time Novikov studied his former adversary. There was something different about Cruz now, something that the Russian couldn’t quite name.

  It made him more wary.

  Cruz Rowan had been an operative with a peculiarly American sense of world politic
s as a grand adrenaline-filled game. Despite that exuberance, he’d trapped Novikov as neatly as a chess master traps a less-gifted opponent. It had galled Novikov.

  It still galled him.

  But he was too intelligent not to realize that while he’d won the final round by using his diplomatic credentials like a second queen added to his side of the chessboard, all the other rounds in the match had gone to the American.

  Again, Novikov tried to put his finger on what had changed about Cruz. The operative had always been cheerfully ruthless and efficient. Now he was cold rather than cheerful. More Old World than New. The change made Cruz all the more dangerous.

  At that moment Novikov decided that Cruz had to be removed from the game.

  “When we last met,” the Russian said to Cruz, “you thought I was merely a spy who used art and culture as a cover.”

  Cruz gestured abruptly with his glass. “Water under the bridge.”

  “For you, perhaps. You chose your work. I did not. My KGB assignment was forced upon me. I was, and still am, an art historian by training and by inclination.”

  “Yeah. Right. Whatever you say, darlin’.”

  “In fact,” Novikov said, ignoring Cruz’s sarcasm, “I am the chief curator for the most important traveling exhibit of Russian art ever assembled. Perhaps you have heard about it? ‘The Splendors of Russia’?” Before Cruz could speak, the Russian answered his own question. “No, of course you haven’t. Art means nothing to you.”

  Novikov turned to Redpath. “But surely you have heard of the exhibit. It is scheduled to open this Friday at the Damon Hudson Museum of Art in Los Angeles.”

  Redpath’s neutral expression shifted to one of faint amusement. “I did hear that Hudson was christening his latest monument to narcissism with an exhibit of Russian works.”

  “The show just closed in Tokyo,” Novikov said. “It was very successful there.”

  Cruz held out his glass for a refill.

  Without a change in expression or position, Gillespie poured. The big man was never more than an arm’s reach from Novikov or—more to the point—Gapan.

  “The exhibit was packed up and moved as a single group,” Novikov said. “One shipment, you understand?”