by Judith Leon
“Marko, I can’t tell you what I’m doing. But I believe this was just a test. To see how I would respond. Basically to see if I’m who I’m pretending to be, a representative of a pharmaceutical company.”
“Well, if that was your intention, you fooled me.” He chuckled. “K-bar told me you attended a school for girl spies that taught you everything from survival techniques to martial arts to bomb-making, but it looked to me from that flaky swing of your purse that you were in big trouble.”
“Well, let’s hope they think so, too. The problem is, they need to think I’m alone, not with a partner.”
They trekked down narrow old streets, snow piled in banks beside barren trees. The arched spans of the Gothic bridge came into view. Built in the middle ages, CharlesBridge no longer carried vehicles, only foot traffic. Even on a thirty-degree winter day, a few artists, musicians, vendors and tourists sold wares or milled about. The towers on both ends offered climbers great views of the beautiful old city.
“They can just as well think I’m some guy on the street who barged in to rescue a stranger and is now escorting the frightened lady with no money and no papers back to her hotel.”
They reached the entry to the bridge and the clusters of people crossing it. She turned and looked up at the massive castle, the largest castle complex in Europe, maybe the world, now lighted for the night as the sun was setting. “They say the view from the bridge is spectacular. Let’s walk across. There will be cabs on the other side.”
They started across, and he took her arm, as though they were friends on a stroll, pulling her close against him. She liked the feel of being beside Marko, a man of action. Half an hour had passed since that look in his eyes when she thought he might kiss her. And she’d wanted him to, hadn’t she? She could feel his attentiveness as they moved side by side, making their steps match. If she smiled at him in this moment, she was pretty certain that he’d melt. This thought warmed her, despite the cold and the shivers from the adrenaline letdown. Suddenly she felt gratitude. He had risked himself to save her. “I’m calming down. I need to thank you for trying to help me.”
“Thanks gratefully accepted. In return, will you tell me what’s going on?”
She shook her head, and he didn’t press further.
An old man bundled in dark gray was roasting chestnuts the old-fashioned way over heated sand with added sugar. The nuts absorbed the sugar from the sand while they toasted, making the sweet chestnuts even sweeter. She heard the “popo-popo” sounds the nuts emitted when the shells turned brown, indicating that the toasting was done. The vendor handed Marko a bag, and Lindsey savored the taste of her first golden bite.
For a while they enjoyed the chestnuts and the stunning view of a fairy-tale castle covered in white snow and cast against a pastel mauve-and-purple sunset. Her reverie was abruptly broken when Marko said, “I should get you to the hotel. You should clean the wound on your neck.”
What was wrong with her? Falling into a fairy tale when lives were at stake!
Several imposing statues lined both sides of the bridge, and as they passed one, a patch on the statue’s dark patina caught Lindsey’s attention. “Wait, Marko,” she said, and took his hand, drawing him to the statue. The shiny spot covered a woman and a dog on a relief scene near the statue’s base. “Legend has it,” she said, “that if you rub the dog’s nose, a secret will be revealed.”
She took off her glove. The secret she wanted to know—where Teal was being kept. She rubbed the dog’s nose. But she gave the nose a second burnishing because she also wanted Marko to somehow know about the secret side of herself. Despite what she knew had to be, she would love to confide in Marko.
“You want to have a secret revealed?” she asked, waiting to see if he’d join in the fun with her.
“Sure,” he said. He took off his glove and gave the dog’s nose a vigorous polishing.
“So can I tell you my wish?” he asked as he took her arm and drew her close again, “or will that cancel the spell?”
She leaned into him and looked up at his face. “I don’t know. The brochure I read didn’t say.”
He grinned, a lovely smile with straight, white teeth and lips edged by corners that turned up. “Then we better not take a chance. Better keep our wishes to ourselves. I definitely want mine to come true.”
Snow started falling when they reached the other end of the bridge. They found a taxi stand and were soon back at the hotel.
At the elevators she said, “I’m on the sixth floor.”
“So am I.”
“Jeez, Marko.”
They rode up in silence, but when they stepped out, he said, “I have a small emergency travel kit with antiseptic. I could go get it.”
Marko. In her room with her. The two of them alone. She should say no.
“Sure. That would be fine.”
Chapter 17
T he more Jeremy Loschetter obsessed over the possibility that an Athena woman had discovered his whereabouts, the more he felt as though something had him by the throat. Darkness had settled in on the old chateau. The place had proved difficult to light. No matter how much wattage burned, the angles of the vaulted ceilings, beams, nooks and crannies all cast black shadows.
He sat near the fire in the den with his latest missive from A in his hand, the one that had explained exactly how, where and when to hook up with Tulio for the Colombian connection of the kidnapping. He stared at the letterhead, a spider’s web. He was frequently drawn to these letters and studied them for style, trying to figure out who A could be. What age? What nationality?
He could tell nothing. “May you be skinned and burned alive!”
His predicament was his own fault, which made it all the more maddening. Knowing that before his death, Aldrich Peters had been dealing with this A, after fleeing the lab, Jeremy had used information he’d stolen to contact A, thinking he could do the same business as Peters. What a stupid, stupid move that had been. All for love of excellence in science, for the chance at the recognition he deserved, the chance to stagger the smug geneticists of the world with his own brilliance. But now A called the shots. A knew too much about him, would sabotage him at every turn if he didn’t play ball. Tomorrow night’s auction could change all that. The future of his new fertility company depended on it.
He returned the letter to the safe, closed its door, and threw himself in anguish and disgust into the swivel chair.
When will Pietro show? I must know that the new woman is no longer a threat.
The auction of genetic secrets seemed to be veering out of control. First, the Platt woman, a new bidder at the last moment. Then the meeting with Foo Hai, the representative from Hong Kong, had taken place in the bar of the Hotel Vlensk, in the middle of OldTown. It had gone well, although he found the man even more menacing in his silence than Pietro could sometimes be. Jeremy had returned to the chateau at five-thirty. It was now approaching six o’clock.
His gut was in knots. He pictured angry ulcerous lesions just where his stomach joined his duodenum, undefended against the hot baths of hydrochloric acid and pepsin ever since he’d started this project. Take a deep breath!
He pictured the black, poisonous spider in his shoe. That was surely no accident. Had A punished him for losing the second girl? Hired one of the Colombians to try and kill him? The knot at his duodenum squeezed tighter.
He would like to think of himself as fearless in the pursuit of science, but his body seemed to think otherwise. There was no going back, though. He could see no other route of escape from A’s hold on him. And yet, he had the Arnett girl. He had the Lab 33 files. He, and he alone, knew all aspects of the procedures. He would not back down from his plan to cut A out of his profit.
Still, so much could go wrong.
The woman he hired for cleaning and making evening meals had set a fire in the fireplace. He rose and stood with his back to the cedar-scented blaze, thinking of the strange taste of his tea at dinner. Could A have sent som
eone here to poison him? A knock on the door caused him to flinch. “Enter!” he called out.
The very sight of Pietro caused that miserable fist in his stomach to clamp down again. “Is she dead?” Jeremy asked.
In his hand, Pietro held a woman’s black purse. “You got this woman wrong.”
“What the hell do you mean?”
“She is not an Athena woman, that is certain.”
“Is she dead?” Jeremy repeated.
“No. But not because we had any trouble with her. A man from the street tried to be a hero.”
For a moment, anger and fear choked off his breath, then he exploded. “You didn’t kill her?”
“Cool down. This is no problem. She was a screaming, hysterical woman. If the man had not interfered, I could have killed her easy. Now we have her papers. We can check her out.”
“Maybe the man was with her. A partner.”
“No. He just came running down the street.”
“Hmmm.” Certainly he would not expect a woman who was spying for Athena in this kind of undercover operation to have a partner backing her up in the way Pietro had described. Athena women were famous for being able to handle a man like Pietro on their own, the reason Jeremy had insisted that Pietro take Hudak along.
Pietro continued. “We should not panic. We check out her papers. There is a passport. Credit cards. An international driver’s license. There’s a bank debit card from an Italian bank. I can handle most of it.”
Jeremy hated to turn to A’s astonishing resources, but A had ways of checking out information and accounts. He refused to deal with A directly, though—Pietro would handle it. “All right. Contact A. I already called the woman’s company. Griffin Pharmaceuticals. They confirmed that Sylvia Platt works for them.”
Jeremy felt stymied, but the knot in his stomach slowly uncoiled. He moved from the fire, which now felt too warm, and sat again at the desk. If A found out that Jeremy had rejected a legitimate bidder, and a possibly very high bidder at that, there could be serious and unpleasant repercussions. It might have been disastrous to have killed her. Perhaps it was good fortune that Pietro had failed.
Pietro approached the desk, and leaning down with both hands on it, said, “The transmitter is off the Platt woman. Send Hudak to the hotel. See if we can pick her up. He is a good shadow.”
Jeremy said nothing. Pietro, as always, was pushing him, the meat-brained sleaze. As Pietro turned to leave, Jeremy glimpsed what looked like a small tattoo of a spiderweb hidden beneath Pietro’s collar-length hair. He’d had no reason to connect A with Pietro before, but a chill wiggled down Jeremy’s spine. “What is the significance of the tattoo you have on your neck?”
Pietro slowly turned to face him. “Why the fuck you ask that?”
“I don’t know exactly.”
“Well, there is no significance. I just liked it. Why you always wear that ring?”
“The ring stands for excellence in learning.”
“Well, my tattoo stands for time in jail.”
They were at a draw, but the images of a spider’s web on A’s letter and on Pietro’s neck…Jeremy hated this kind of coincidence.
For the moment he must let it go. “Do as you say. Check out everything and have Hudak tail her.”
If the beautiful Sylvia Platt could not pass inspection, he could send Pietro again. Surely Pietro would not screw up twice.
Pietro left and Jeremy returned to the fire, a chill in his bones despite the heat.
Chapter 18
M arko knocked on the door to Lindsey’s hotel room with his emergency travel kit in hand, still wearing his coat. Keep the coat on, he advised himself. Lindsey would understand that he didn’t intend to be invited in.
She’s K-bar’s daughter. You will keep your damn hands off.
She opened the door and smiled. The black suit, the slicked-back dark-red hair, everything about her still said dangerous, but sweet Madonna, she was beautiful.
“Come in,” she said. “You must see this exquisite stove.”
He knew what she meant about the stove. The hotel receptionist had explained when Marko registered that one of the hotel’s features was that the suites were not only decorated with authentic reproductions of period furniture, each was warmed by an antique, wood-burning ceramic tile stove.
A little voice at the back of his mind whispered, “Say no.” But hadn’t K-bar sent him here to find out what she was doing? Wasn’t this the perfect time to squeeze out the juice, while she was relieved, recovering from stress?
He went in, for the second time today, but now the room was toasty. Apparently staff fired up the stove early in the evening so that guests did not return to a cold suite. His single room provided no such luxury.
“Let me take your coat,” Lindsey said.
She moved close to him and he smelled just the hint of a perfume that reminded him of…of a ripe peach. He watched the sway of her hips as she carried the coat to an entry closet in the sitting room. You will keep your damn hands off.
When he’d dashed into the room behind the maid, he’d paid little attention to its details. The space was small but the furnishings shouted money. The antique stove stood in the far corner, the flickering light of the burning wood shining out through the glass fire door. The stove’s enameled color was a pale green that matched the forest green of the furniture. Like virtually all of these classic old stoves, it was decorated with crenellations studded with many colors of tiles, in this instance mostly red and gold. The tiles along the top created flower patterns.
A red Oriental rug covered a parquet floor. From the center of the stark white ceiling hung a crystal chandelier, and on the plaster someone had painted a mural of a forest scene with scantily clad nymphs. A desk stood in another corner with Lindsey’s laptop sitting open on it. A comfortable sofa and two chairs had been arranged so that occupants could enjoy the stove or a TV. There was an armoire that, if opened, probably held a minibar. And in the room’s center, under the mural, was a table of finely inlaid woods on which sat a vase of white roses and a bowl of fruit.
He helped himself to a red-skinned apple, following Lindsey to the stove. “It’s a Gyula Kovacs,” she said of the stove. “He was a Hungarian master. Nearly a hundred years old and still working beautifully.”
He bit into the apple’s sharp sweetness, set it down and held out the kit. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”
She started to touch the wound, and he grabbed her hand.
She didn’t immediately pull her hand away from him.
Why not just pull her into my arms and kiss her? That’s what I want.
“Okay,” she said, as if in response to his thought and not his words. He let go. She took the kit from him and turned toward the bathroom.
He followed her.
“Fortunately,” she said, smiling and using the mirror to examine where she’d been cut, “blood won’t show up against black.”
“Sit and I’ll clean it.”
She gazed into his eyes a moment and then sat, and he felt his pulse rise a notch.
The bathroom floor was tiled in a black-and-white checkerboard pattern. The tub, sink, toilet and bidet were virgin white, and all the fixtures gleamed like gold. He wet a fluffy white washcloth as she tilted her head, exposing the wound, which had bled a lot but was shallow.
“A cut at the neck is very dangerous. You’re lucky it was just a nick.”
She touched the scar under his left eye. A jolt of fire flashed over his chest and down his belly. Madre di Dio, did this woman have any idea what she was doing to him? What the hell was she thinking? And what the hell was he doing?
“How did you get this?” she asked.
He took a long, deep breath. “I took a crazy dare when I was fifteen. I was raised in Venice, and I jumped off a balcony into a canal. I hit a boat.”
She smiled. “I have no trouble imagining you taking a lot of crazy dares.”
“What about you? K-bar says the school you we
nt to was full of girls who learned to meet any challenge. I suppose you did your share of risky things.”
“The years in Phoenix were wonderful. I met friends with whom I’m still close.”
“It’s clean now.” He reached for the tube of antiseptic.
“I learned how to take care of myself in a lot of situations, but I also have memories of being very scared.”
He remembered her trembling against him on the plane, the stiffness of her body, the paleness. It hadn’t been the excitement. She’d been terrified of the jump. He had another thought, given her risky side business and what she was doing now. “Did you ever tell your dad it was scary?”
She stiffened and shook her head. “No. Of course not. Scary would be the wrong word with K-bar.” She relaxed again as he put the cap back on the antiseptic tube. “I just meant challenging. I wanted to make K-bar proud.” Her lips thinned. “That wasn’t—isn’t—always easy to do. He has very high standards.”
He recalled her apartment—her paintings—her apparent preference for art and history rather than martial arts and weapons. Was it possible that Lindsey was caught up in continually pushing herself to impress her father? Unlike Marko’s by-the-gut way of working, Lindsey was methodical, maybe a reflection of essential cautiousness. “I can tell you that he is proud of you. I’d say he adores you.”
She looked up at him with those huge, dove-gray eyes. His gaze traveled from her eyes to her lips. Luscious. Would she taste faintly of peach, like the scent of her perfume? “Why do you do this…dangerous stuff? You could have been killed this afternoon. If your father dared you to plant yourself in front of a high-speed locomotive and only jump away at the last minute, would you do it?”
“What kind of question is that? Of course not. He’d never ask such a thing.”
The uneasy look in her eyes suggested that she wasn’t all that sure of what K-bar might expect of her. “What the hell are you doing here in Prague? Tell me, Lindsey. I could help you.”
She stood. The urge to kiss her shook him so hard that he stepped backward quickly. Was he imagining it, or had she seemed to hesitate for a moment, as if expecting a kiss, maybe wanting a kiss?
