“I know. I have an auction to stop, remember?”
Her words caused a chill that must have dropped the temperature on the platform ten degrees. She huddled inside what felt like meager clothing, waiting for his reply.
“Give me three days of your time, and I’ll call it off for you.”
Chapter Eight
“Why should I believe that?” Christina faced him, her hand protectively cradled around the bag holding the wine, and her loose hair crackling with static energy from their embrace.
“Because I’m the only person in the last twenty-four hours who’s helped you.” Stig wanted to remain here to argue and make up, but their movements had turned on the lights in nine separate stations, including where they stood under a still-operating facility. He shooed her toward the end of the platform and a small catwalk that led past the buffer stop.
She snorted but obeyed. “You’re the source of my problems.”
She didn’t know the half of it.
“I apologize for all my previous transgressions, known and unknown.” As soon as she realized what he’d taken from her handbag, and what they’d been doing when he’d filched it, all chance of repeating those kisses would disappear. “But today is Thursday, and the auction is scheduled for Sunday. Come to France with me, and I promise, Saturday morning I’ll call Bodeby’s.”
Wend and Skafe would pass Ivar the message to be at the Greek’s tomorrow night, so he had a destination and a deadline. The Viking leader always paid promptly. Depending on Ivar’s proposition, Stig might be in a position to be similarly generous, but leaving Christina on the loose to report fake wine, fake shootings and hidden art would be counterproductive. “I’ll pull the fakes, all the Morrison and Mancini wines, whatever you say. I’ll purchase them personally so Lady Seymour has no complaints.” A quick sleight of accounting hand, but doable. “I’ll put the word out that she chose to withdraw those particular lots for family reasons.”
“No.”
He gripped the rusted rungs of the ladder below another grate and held up three fingers of his free hand, making sure his empty wrist was even with her eye level. “Three days. Then I’ll fix the auction and kill off Geoffrey Morrison. As gruesomely as you wish.”
Her lips twitched, their tight line dangerously close to becoming a curve. “That last part sounds perfect, but I won’t— We won’t—”
“I need your assistance, not sex.” He detected a softening from her hesitation, so time to give her a bit of space. He turned to scale the ladder, fully aware that she watched every move of his arms and legs. Indifferent she was not. “However, if you are completely bowled over by my irresistible charm, I’m happy to fulfill all requests ranging from toffee to latex.”
Below him, one corner of her mouth indented as she fought a smile.
Swaying her with humor meant he wouldn’t have to use blackmail. “For the record, I prefer chocolate sauce to rough trade.”
This time her smile was the full monty.
“Come on then,” he said.
She reached the top as he shifted the grate. They weren’t destined to be as lucky here as at St. Mary’s. Three men loitered, talking and smoking down the alley to the left.
He whispered, “Soon as we’re out, go to the right. Act like you’re reading meters. You’ve got the coveralls for the job.”
“Someone’s there?”
“They don’t look like they’ll care, but we shouldn’t hang about. We can continue this discussion when we’re far from the scene of our illegal entry of government property. Agreed?”
Her eye roll had the same relationship to agreement as skimmed milk had to butter, but it was good enough. Out they went, turned right, hit the bustle and traffic of Whitechapel Road and crossed to the left. After the black-and-white isolation of the Mail Rail tunnel, the blend of colorful jeweled fabrics, burqas and jeans that filled one of London’s vibrant immigrant communities made him want to grab Christina’s hand and twirl in the street.
But then they’d be hit by a bus. He didn’t have a second hospital escape in him.
“There.” He guided her to a small park to where two men lounged with rucks and bags on a bench. “Give them your coveralls.”
She nodded her immediate understanding of the need to change appearance, wiggled out of them, and they were walking with the late morning crowd again.
“I still don’t understand why you want me to go to France if you’re willing to cancel the auction anyway.”
He spotted one of the ubiquitous bike rental stations where the grass met the pavement. “I need a partner.”
“For what?”
“First, to help me get off this island.” He fished a prepaid, untraceable debit card from his wallet and inserted it into the hire bicycle rental terminal. “You’re quite handy.”
“Sounds like there’s a next.” When her hands readjusted the strap of the messenger bag and the chain of her purse, he willed her not to open the smaller bag, not yet. “What are you doing?”
“What’s it look like?” Nobody noticed idiots on Boris bikes, so day access would give them unobtrusive transport to his flat. “You heard my former associates. Their boss wants to see me. He’s going to demand I do a job, and I might need a partner.” The last time he’d shared a drink with Ivar at the Greek’s, the leader of the Vikings had given him a decoded schedule for Nazi art trains out of Paris and ordered him to save the contents. Seventy years, and the word ask still hadn’t entered Ivar’s vocabulary.
She leaned closer and dropped her voice. “You want me to help you commit a crime? In France? No thanks. No. And there’s nothing you can do to make me.”
“What if I say please?” They had a bit more than twenty-four hours to reach Calais and drive to the far corner of Belgium. Hopefully Stavros’s pub was still serving that corner of the Ardennes Forest, although the big Greek himself was presumably worm fodder.
“The begging eyes are a nice touch, but no.”
As he secured bicycle release codes, he tilted his head toward two men in their distinctive black uniforms and caps walking across the park. They’d reach the homeless gentlemen with the overalls in about twenty paces. “If that’s your last word.”
Her eyes flicked to the cops, and back to him. “It is.” She sounded less certain.
“Then hop on. I’m in a hurry to get out of here.” He could see her indecision, so he pressed hard on his advantage. “I can’t count high enough to enumerate all the laws we’ve broken in the past twelve hours, and the main word you should hear in that sentence is the pronoun we. So please, get on this bloody bike and pedal your arse off.”
Her lips pulled away from her teeth, but she threw her leg over and settled that delicious bottom on the saddle, so he knew she was in. She just didn’t know quite how deep yet.
* * *
Thirty minutes later, Christina realized she might have preferred jail. “Don’t know why you chose bikes.” Her butt ached to holy hell from bouncing over cobblestones and bricks perched on the hardest, smallest seat imaginable. Stig apparently had no problems getting his bike to move as fast as he wanted, but hers probably weighed more than she did. “Freaking subway in this city, you know.”
“Cameras, my dear. The Tube is highly monitored.”
“A boat. Don’t tell me they have cameras watching those Thames river cruises.” Her legs kept pumping and the pedals kept circling, but they never seemed to arrive at their destination. The futility mirrored her fatigue. First an all-nighter. Maybe two, if this was more than thirty-six hours since she’d left home. But she couldn’t stop here, on the road. “We could have been resting. On a wide seat.” In the oversized combat boots, her feet slammed up and down and she felt the hot spot of a blister on her right heel. “If we’d taken a boat.”
“Did you know eight hundred and fifty peo
ple died when the Baltic ferry Estonia sank in 1994? The bow doors to the vehicle deck broke open and it flooded. Bloody thing flipped ninety degrees in thirty minutes.”
She watched his calves piston, his legs and back creating her only point of reference since her brain had stopped processing signs about two blocks into the ride. “I wasn’t talking about a freaking ferry.” Banging her words out with each downward pedal push felt like an accomplishment. The self-assessing voice in her head warned that all she was achieving was a world-class whine, but she didn’t have the energy left to edit herself. “I was talking about that motorboat I saw five minutes ago that looks like a school bus on the river.”
“Fifty-two percent of the water-related deaths in Britain occur on inland waterways. Rivers and lakes. Your American school buses must have a slightly better record.”
“What are you, an encyclopedia of drowning?” Why did tourists take bike tours of the Napa Valley when they could hire a limo, and then their asses wouldn’t be killing them?
“I do not enjoy boating.” His words were as clipped as her temper.
“You have cuff links from the—”
“Precisely.”
She could sense the revolutions of her legs on the pedals slowing, like a wind-up toy on its last jittering, jerky rotations when the buzz of gears devolved into separate mechanical clicks. She was disconnecting, clicking, no longer shifting thoughts and actions into smooth motions.
A block later, she tipped over.
His tires skidded as he stopped. “For fuck’s sake. You fell off the bike.”
“No, I went on strike.” She hadn’t been going fast enough when she fell over for any serious injury, but being tangled with the metal machine on the wet ground made her want to cry. Held at knifepoint, tackled by kidnappers, at the scene of a shooting, and the thing that brought her to tears was a bicycle. At least she’d wrapped her prize bottle of Perlus securely in its bag and it hadn’t shattered when she tumbled, although she was close to breaking.
“There you are now.” He kneeled beside her and shifted her leg to untangle her boot from the wheel spokes. “You’re quite alright.”
No, she wasn’t. “Did Sherlock Holmes ever maim Watson?” So what if he was careful and gentle and handsome and occasionally funny? He was responsible for all of this, everything that had happened to her. “You’re the worst partner ever.”
Her brain knew the edge of the road was littered and puddled, but it was flat and her neck couldn’t keep her head up. The sky above was gray, a puffy gray she never saw in Napa. The clouds seemed to be so full of moisture and low to the surrounding buildings that she knew if she was on a roof she could wrap herself in them like a blanket. The street, however, wasn’t much of a mattress.
“It occurs to me that you’re probably famished.” His head and shoulders blocked her view of the sky and his hands were careful as he lifted the bicycle and removed the pedal from her knee.
Predictably, his care made her hate him more. He wouldn’t have to be helping her if he hadn’t caused her to be lying here in the first place.
“Did you know the vole eats constantly, up to its body weight every day?” He turned her palms up, and she realized she’d scraped the right one on the pavement. “I’ve shamefully neglected to feed you.”
Her brain stuttered for a moment when he pressed his lips to the scrape on her hand, then started with a kick that matched the feeling in her stomach. The softness of his lips brushing her palm contrasted with the rough scrape of his unshaven chin on her fingertips.
“I think you just compared me to a rodent.” Drat her husky voice. It was tears of pain, exacerbated by tiredness and hunger. That was the only reason she sounded throaty. “On top of everything else, you’re going to insult me in such a lame way? You are clearly history’s worst criminal mastermind.”
He threw back his head and laughed at her. “And there was me, thinking I was clever.”
“Jerk,” she said, but it didn’t even sound to her like she meant it.
“Guilty.” He pulled her to her feet. “I generally suck, absolutely.” He looked at the sky. “Let’s get to my flat before it rains, shall we?”
“How far?” Kicking the damn bike would not solve her problems.
“A few more blocks to the cycle return, then we can walk.”
“We’re returning the bikes? Not abandoning them?”
“That would be disorderly, not to mention a crime.”
“You’re serious?”
He placed a hand over his heart. “Henceforth, no lies shall issue from these lips.” His slight bow and outstretched arm undermined his sincerity, but his theatrical performance gave her the spark to lift her feet and move.
Ten minutes later, she conceded that Stig hadn’t lied to her about the distance to his apartment, although the method of getting in was more complicated than unlocking the front door. She glanced along the cobblestone alley but saw no one else in the dim afternoon, perhaps because it was a quiet dead end in a gentrified neighborhood of three-and four-story brick buildings.
He unlocked an ornate black iron gate in a matching fence and motioned her down a short flight of steps to a flagstone-paved landing about four feet below street level. Potted tulips were only days away from blooming around the door.
“Another basement?” she asked.
“This used to be a violin factory with connected below-ground storage. When they divided the building into flats, they left one utility access here for the whole block, although the front façade looks like separate buildings. If the situation requires discretion, I use this route.”
“Discretion. So that’s what weaseling through a locked basement window is called in this country.”
As they climbed an interior staircase of black-stained hardwood and steel fittings against white walls, watery sunshine from the skylight filtered to them. Thin and gray, it matched her mood.
His apartment was on the top floor. The sleek furniture, white walls and oversized abstract paintings made her more aware of her grubby clothes and the two days of dirt clogging every pore.
“Don’t touch it!”
Her hand froze over the light switch.
“No lights yet. Nor opened curtains.”
She dropped her hand to her side. It was dirty anyway and probably would have left a gray smudge on his immaculate white controls.
“I don’t rent under the name Geoffrey Morrison, but in case Geoffrey’s identity was connected to this address, we shouldn’t announce our presence.” From the living room, he pointed to the left and the right. His apartment was at least twice the size of hers, and the cost and style of the furnishings proclaimed his lifestyle to be on the side of the ledger where she put clients. “Food or shower?”
“Shower.” Nearly impossible to imagine being clean, a time when she’d be willing to stand still in air permeated by her own odor because the scent would actually be pleasant.
“Towels and robe in the bathroom. How do you like your eggs?”
A woman could do worse than a man who took breakfast orders and let her go first. “I’m not picky.”
His smile and eyebrows managed to convey his disbelief.
“Not about eggs.” If only her California life included a real Geoffrey Morrison who cooked meals for her, made her laugh and looked like a James Bond double.
That thought was dangerous enough to make her flee for the bathroom.
Chapter Nine
The click of the lock and the rush of water signaled that he had a few moments, so Stig brought the small blue passport folder with the gold-embossed seal of the United States of America out of his pocket. The name and photo inside nearly made him burst into laughter.
This was a passport for Angelina Rivera, born 1987, Yolo County, California, not Christina Alvarez Mancini. Superficiall
y, the woman in the photo and the woman taking a shower looked alike, with masses of long dark hair, slightly tan complexions and heavily lashed brown eyes, but if he’d been asked to sketch them, he could spot twenty differences. The other woman had a fuller bottom lip and a round chin, whereas Christina’s cheekbones were more pronounced and her chin came to a point almost like knuckles on a fist. He grinned at the blank white door where she’d disappeared to clean up. No wonder she hadn’t ditched him for the cops hours ago. She was as big a fraud as he was.
Gloating would delay their meal, so he stowed her false identity in his pocket and went to the kitchen. What he’d taken mostly on a whim was as good as a pair of handcuffs. With Angelina’s passport in his control, Christina didn’t have an easy return to the United States, and denouncing him would also reveal her problem. Miss Holier-than-Him would have to do as he asked or face the repercussions of identity theft. All reasons to give her still one more passport, one that actually had her photo on it, as an enticement.
He clicked on the screen mounted under his cabinets to stream a news channel while he pried the bottom off the spare electric kettle, where he hid blank passport covers and pages. Italy, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain...Spaniards had flocked to London since the economic crisis. Christina’s English wouldn’t pass as anything but American, but he’d bet all six of his other antique Swiss timepieces that she could easily pretend to be a native of Spain, so he chose the red and gold cover for her new identity. When she was out of the shower, they’d print a photo, add a spot of acrylic nail glue to the photo and the laminated page cover, and she’d have the paperwork to become a new person, even without bothering to embed data on the biometric chip under the cover. French immigration officers who handled pre-clearing of passengers destined for Calais on the vehicle train didn’t give a frog’s tit about whether the embedded chips worked, because their readers usually didn’t. Airport security was the black hole for money, and tight budgets left nothing for anyone else.
The Second Lie (Immortal Vikings Book 2) Page 11
