“Be more alright when they call this fuckin’ hunt off and we can get breakfast.” The faint scent of tobacco smoke drifted into the cool must of the tunnel, the men were that close.
If he could see the highlights of Christina’s face, so could anyone above who glanced through the grate, so he eased left, away from the mail platform and its motion-sensing cameras. The tunnel ended in a dented steel door. He moved slowly enough to feel more like flowing than moving as he relocated farther from the spots of light.
“See the shooting?” one of the voices asked.
Logically he knew they hadn’t looked down the grate because nothing blocked the faint light, but instinctively he held his breath.
“No, I got there after. Floor was a mess an’ the door was shattered where Neil missed the bloke. Three days’ advanced sidearm training didn’t help him, poor sod.”
Stig exhaled and shifted, and Christina eased after him, each step carefully selected for silence. Approval tingled in his fingertips. She was a fine partner, almost able to read his mind. Continuing to play Geoffrey Morrison past this auction might be intriguing. Of course, that would mean actually giving Lord Seymour’s daughter the money.
“Almost seven. What say you we call it done? I’m parched.”
“Agreed. As much blood as that bloke lost, no chance he’s left St. Mary’s.” A cigarette butt dropped on the grate, the sound as soft as a moth at a window, then tumbled through the opening, still glowing, to the ground where they’d stood a moment ago. “Dead in a closet, I reckon. They’ll find him when he stinks.”
“I’ll drive.”
“Piss off...” The sound of doors closing cut off the conversation, then the car pulled away.
Stig swallowed to relieve his dry mouth before he led Christina to the door that was his goal. He ignored the caution signs and opened it. This room was never locked, only marked, so that the curious could see the heaps of seventy-year-old canisters and empty crates that matched the signs about chemical storage.
“We shouldn’t be in here,” she whispered.
“Don’t get your knickers in a twist. I installed the signs.” He’d framed out the whole room and bricked up the walls during Churchill’s underground building boom. Installing masonry wasn’t that far removed from sculpting. He handed her the torch and picked his way through the junk on the floor.
“Are there rats?”
“Of course not.” Even the hint of female fear aided his lying ability. “No food rubbish.”
The steel lockers on the back wall had warped from years of being kicked closed or slammed into place. They looked as worthless as they were, until he fitted his fingers into the crack between them and the wall behind. He pulled until the whole mess pivoted on a central axis, revealing the darkened room behind.
“What are you?” She turned the torch on his face, blinding him until he raised his hand over his eyes. “A spy or something?”
“Will you please get that out of my eyes?”
“Oh, sorry.” She shifted the light to the side wall. “This is very impressive. I’m sure the world is full of smugglers who’d like to hire you to dig under a border, but I’m still waiting for an answer. Where are we? And who the hell are you?”
“This is the start of six and a half miles of tunnel connecting most of the major neighborhoods of central London north of the Thames. The closed-circuit cameras are monitored by the post office, not by the police, so yes, I know this tunnel well.” Keep talking, and she might forget the second part of her question. “Anyone who likes to move unobserved through London should.”
“That’s...” She trailed off to stare at what her beam revealed through the doorway. The upward glow showed her mouth hanging open speechlessly as she slipped through the opening toward the pale figure of the courtier reaching from the dark depths of a painting. Her light turned the gold frame into a sculptural relief of twining leaves and shadows that only emphasized the deeper mysteries of the painting it surrounded. “Oh my God. Is that real?”
“That rather depends on your definition of real.” Perhaps placing a Caravaggio directly opposite the door had been a touch melodramatic, but the disused tunnel made an excellent vault. This room was a steady sixty-three degrees Fahrenheit, a shade cooler than optimum, but completely stable so the paintings never expanded or contracted. The humidity hovered at fifty-five percent. Since installation of the Thames Barrier floodgates, he’d had no worries about flooding, never had to move his treasures, never had to explain them and never worried about them.
Somewhat guiltily, he realized he almost never thought about them.
“Who painted this?” She breathed her question barely louder than the brush of fabric across skin, but in a room where the only sounds were the occupants’ heartbeats, it was a shout.
He’d painted this particular memento mori, as well as all the Caravaggios, but that was impossible to explain.
“Why is the skull full of flowers?”
That was within his power to answer. “The skull implies death, but the vines and blossoms emerging from the eye sockets symbolize life. In the corner, you’ll see an hourglass on the floor, with the sand at the top instead of running out.” Ivar had extracted three paintings as payment for bailing him out of a cell in Rome, and this jibe at the futility of death to their brethren had been a weak stab at humor. Tomorrow night he’d have the opportunity to face Ivar again and see for himself if their leader had changed as much as Wend and Skafe had hinted.
Her hair swung forward when she leaned closer, and she raised her hand to flick strands away from her cheek like the intimate motion of bathing caught by so many artists. Perversely, her fascination with his work irritated him. Four hundred years ago, deliberately using Ivar’s features on the subject had been his way of telling the Viking leader to sod off centuries before invention of the term, but now he wished it had been a self-portrait.
“Have you finished?” he asked.
The torch wavered around the room, showing him the stash through her eyes by where the light lingered and where it passed quickly. Eight paintings, four from Caravaggio’s time, three in the Impressionist style and one Dutch Old Master that he shouldn’t have kept, reflected her beam, but femininity must confer extra senses because she homed on the portrait of Nora. All she could see was the back of the unframed five-foot-high canvas, but she reached her hand toward it.
“No!” It burst out of him, making her jump. He hadn’t meant to yell and struggled to modulate his voice. “Please don’t touch that one.”
The first version of Nora’s portrait had gone down in the sea, as if it demanded to join her son, but he’d repainted her. When nights were darkest during the 1940 Blitz, he’d talked to her. Returned for her through bomb-fires and a dozen other times when he should have been a hundred miles ahead of the bobbies, and had nearly lost her a few of those times. Then he’d stumbled into this tunnel.
“I’m sorry.” He kept his voice low and quiet. “That one’s fragile.”
She stepped back warily and looked at the treasures hanging around her. “Why are these here?” Her question was slow, as if muffled by the details of period clothing and velvet fabric.
“Vanity.” The worst kind, to have kept them together in one place. Even to a five-year-old the paintings unmistakably belonged in a museum. Millions of pounds’ worth of canvas and pigments on the walls, but Ivar wanted the images off-view, so Stig was unable to resell the paintings. To change the subject, he lifted the lid of a chest in the corner where he thought he’d stowed candles. The white tapers and safety matches were dry, so he set a handful of the candles in a mug on the seat of a chair. Their angled lengths stuck out like a bouquet, and their golden light made an informal candelabra.
“You’re an art thief too.” She flicked off the torch.
“Stating the obvious is such an Amer
ican habit.” He had lockers of clothes here, twenty or more years out of date and once again fashionable. “Since before there was an England, my name has been synonymous with ‘thief.’” Pronouncements like that gave him the pleasure of speaking truth no one ever believed.
“That’s the first honest thing you’ve said.”
He lifted the latch on the leftmost locker. “I was honest about the search in the hospital, wasn’t I?”
“I wouldn’t call that honest.” She returned to studying the portrait of Ivar. “More like experienced.”
“Not to change the subject—” although that was exactly what he intended, “—but I’m going to strip off my filthy trousers.” He opened his door with a flourish undermined by the squeak of the hinges.
“Paintings, emergency supplies, clothes.” She tried to peer around his arm. “Is this your storage unit?”
“The world above the street may be transient, but beneath London endures.” His navy blue wool suit didn’t have a single moth hole, thanks to the coolness, and the pressed shirts smelled only vaguely like a cellar. “Did you know the Guildhall in the heart of the City has a Roman amphitheater in the basement?”
He reached for the zip at his throat. His shredded dress shirt was in the emergency room, so the steady sixty-three degrees underground was bracing as he pulled his arms out of the overall sleeves.
“What are you doing?”
He glanced at her. “Changing.”
“Oh.” She was looking below his neck, not at his face, and while she wasn’t edging closer, she also wasn’t backing away. No man with an ounce of self-awareness could have resisted inflating his chest and checking his posture under her gaze.
Her eyes widened as she took a matching breath, but her outer layer was too baggy for return admiration. He slipped out of his shoes and dawdled shoving the overalls past his hips. Her gaze followed his hands, lingering at his stomach. He knew when she looked at the trail of hair leading lower from his navel, because her eyes were almost as hot as he imagined her touch would be. The need to rush disappeared, replaced by a hunger to see what she would do next. He rested his hands on the waist of his dirty trousers, and his thumb slipped behind the button to rest against his skin. Yes, she saw that too, and her hand clenched. “Fair notice. I’m going to remove these next.”
She remained silent, but a slight head movement seemed to be a nod, so he proceeded. Slowly.
He popped the button and unzipped without taking his eyes off her. She still didn’t move, as frozen as a marble statue, the flickering candlelight making her appear almost as translucent around the edges as the best of Bernini’s nymphs.
Bending to strip off the trousers would break the spell that bound them. He waited for a moment, savoring the silent connection, but a man couldn’t stand there with his fly drooping open if the woman wasn’t going to leap into action. Showing one’s boxers became rather embarrassing after a few minutes.
He glanced down. A chap had to keep a few secrets.
“Oh! I’m sorry.” She turned abruptly to the farthest locker and struggled with the catch. “What’s in here? May I open it?” Her words were rushed, satisfying him that he’d rattled her.
“It’s either that or turn around to see what you see. Which is scarier?” All she’d see was him stepping into a pressed pair of trousers.
She snorted but didn’t take his dare.
He knew when she recognized the bottles stored on their sides on the crisscrossed lattice, because she gasped the way most women responded to sapphires.
“A 1947 Chateau Perlus? Is this real?” Her hands hovered in dust motes like a baker in a cloud of flour. She didn’t turn toward him when she spoke, as if afraid to look away from the wine but afraid to touch it at the same time.
“Would I serve a fake?” The smoothness of the high-quality cotton was heaven after the rough denim-blend overalls, and he savored the slide of it across his skin. It wasn’t a replacement for her hands, but it would have to be enough. For now.
The sound that came out of her lips wouldn’t have been out of place at a football match. “I suspect you’d serve fortified grape juice to the Queen of England and call it Gamay Beaujolais, so yes, you would.”
“Let me rephrase that for my cynical audience.” Doing nothing more than talking with a woman hadn’t felt this exhilarating in years. “Would I bother to store a fake here?”
“If it helped one of your plans, I bet you’d store it in your pants.” She still hadn’t touched the bottles or looked away.
“That worthy vintage is not part of this morning’s plans—” a pity, “—but we can bring a bottle of the ’47 Perlus with us.”
Her breath caught, before she continued in the higher-pitched register of hope. “With us?”
“We’re catching a train to France.” Only three ways off this rock: plane, ship or train. Airport security deployed too much face recognition software, and when she wasn’t dazed with tiredness, Christina might call his bluff and walk away in the midst of an airport. The Dover ferry was for men who trusted that metal floated; he knew better, so process of elimination left the train tunnel under the English Channel. “The Met is searching for us, ergo, we leave London.”
As if she hadn’t heard, she lifted the bottle with two hands, almost like an infant. “I’ve wanted to taste the ’47 my entire life.”
“That’s a lot of procrastination.” He removed his lock picks and passports from one pocket of his discarded trousers and his wallet from the other. His Walther PPK pistol and his watch were gone, but he could retrieve his cuff links from Christina.
“What really happened at Paddington?”
The question stopped him in the middle of settling the last items in his new pockets, and he refocused on her. When he’d met her at the party, her hair had been confined in a tight bun. During the night it had fallen down until its length swelled over her shoulders, making her appear loose and free, almost relaxed, present circumstances notwithstanding. She looked like a woman he could trust.
When she half turned, the coveted wine in her hands seemed less important to her than her question. “How did you manage the trick with the gun and the blood?”
“The truth?” He was unbearably tired of lying. Most of the time there didn’t seem to be a point, only a habit.
“Of course. Or I wouldn’t have asked.”
Seeing her surrounded by five hundred years of his paintings, on the run from his past and threatened by his present problems, instead of sleeping safely in her own bed in California, he realized he’d dragged her deeper into his business than any woman in decades. Maybe a century. “It wasn’t a trick. It was real blood, from a real bullet. I shot myself.”
The candlelight was bright enough to show her frown as she waited for the rest of his explanation.
He took a huge breath. This was the part where people usually failed him. “I’m immortal. So are Wend and Skafe. Nothing hurts us for long.”
Chapter Seven
“Immortal? And how did that happen?” They were back at square one, his lies and absurdities and insults about girls in cheap dresses rising up to overwhelm the fragile trust getting away from the kidnappers had created.
He seemed to let out a breath, and his shoulders relaxed. “We were part of Beowulf’s crew. Vikings is the English word. It seems that the monster Beowulf killed had some sort of—” he shook his head, “—contamination? A virus? Those of us who handled Grendel’s arm or head haven’t aged a day since. Our wounds always heal.”
He’d completed that whole story as if he thought she believed him. “Right. You and your friends are immortal Vikings. And you’re also Geoffrey Morrison, figment of my imagination, and you’re an undercover cop named Will and an art thief and I don’t know who or what else except a...”
She stopped before saying the word li
ar because he looked like a puppy, a pathetic, lonely puppy in one of those woodchip-lined cages at a big box pet store, with his overly long white sleeves dangling over his hands like outsized paws and his slumped shoulders. His little act made her feel guilty for not buying into his fantasy story, and that made her mad all over again.
“Whatever.” She put the wine back in its rack and yanked at the door of the next locker hard enough that when it popped she staggered two steps backward. Papers cascaded out. “Dammit.”
From the corner of her eye she saw him stare at his sleeves. He still hadn’t spoken, not a word of banter or defense. Damn, damn, damn.
She crouched to pick up the folders, not doing a very good job of it in her state. “I shouldn’t have busted on you. I’m sorry—” Then the illustrations registered on her consciousness. “Hair stimulation for discerning gentlemen? This is you?”
Two black-and-white drawings captured a businessman in a knotted tie and boutonniere, the before sketch showing him with a horseshoe-shaped smooth patch on his head, and the after showing hair exactly like the man five feet away.
“Male pattern baldness has always been a sure money-maker. Believe I leveraged those brochures into a country home, a three-time champion steeple-chaser and a Bentley.” He was back to being the suave fast-talker, which made her miss the man of shorter sentences from a few moments before.
“Is everything a scam?”
“One must relieve the boredom of eternity somehow, mustn’t one?” He lifted his hands. She knew enough about fine gentleman’s clothing from her work with rich wine collectors to recognize that his double-length French cuffs were in dire need of links. “Would you mind returning my cuff links?”
“Oh. Those.” They were in her purse, hanging cross-wise inside her janitor clothing. Minutes ago he’d taken off his clothes, and now she was doing the same. Her skin was already warm, and she couldn’t stop the awareness of each gesture, her right hand on the tiny metal tab, her left hand hovering empty in the air in front of her breasts, conscious that he was watching.
The Second Lie (Immortal Vikings Book 2) Page 9
