Hero Under Cover

by Suzanne Brockmann

  Annie watched her assistant cross to the telephone answering machine. Next to it, a stack of little pink message slips were held by a bright red wooden duck with a clothespin for a mouth.

  “Jerry Tillit called,” Cara said. “He’s back from South America, and he’s got some Mayan stuff for you to look at.”

  “Did you talk to him, or get the message off the machine?” Annie asked.

  Cara blushed. “I spoke to him.”

  “Did he ask you out again?” Annie grinned.

  “Yes.”

  “And…?”

  “We don’t date clients, remember?” Cara said.

  Annie corrected her. “Jerry’s not a client, he’s a friend.”

  “He’s also a client.”

  “So he’s also a client,” Annie admitted. “But just because I don’t want to date clients doesn’t mean you can’t, MacLeish. Will you please give the man a break?”

  “I did.”

  “You…What?”

  The taller woman grinned, pushing her hair back from her face and sitting down on top of the desk. “I told him I’d go out with him. He’s coming up to drop his finds off this Saturday. We’re going out after that.”

  Annie glanced around the cozy office. The room was really quite large, but with two desks, two computers, a fax machine, a copier and all sorts of chairs and bookshelves, there wasn’t much room even to walk. But Cara MacLeish was an essential fixture here. “Don’t you be going and getting married, MacLeish,” she said sternly. “No running off to South America with Jerry Tillit.”

  Cara grinned. “I’m only going to the movies with him,” she said. “The next logical step might be a dinner date. Not marriage.”

  “You don’t know Tillet as well as I do,” Annie muttered. “And that man has a definite thing for you….”

  “Speaking of marriage,” Cara said, flipping through the phone message slips. “Nick York called—five different times. Something about a party down at the Museum of Modern Art sometime this month.”

  Annie released her hair from its ponytail, letting it swing free in a gleaming brown sheet. She leaned back in the rocking chair, resting her feet on top of the computer desk. “Shame on you, MacLeish. You know the words marriage and York cannot be uttered in the same sentence,” she said. “York wants only two things from me. One of them is free lab work. And the other has nothing to do with marriage. Who else called?”

  “The freight guy at Westchester Airport said a package from France will be in Saturday.”

  “Great.” Annie sighed. “Like I’ve got any chance of getting to work on it in the next decade.” She closed her eyes. “Okay, so I pick it up on Saturday. What else?”

  “A guy named Benjamin Sullivan called,” Cara said. “Ring any bells?”

  Annie’s eyes popped open. “Yeah, of course. He’s the owner of the piece I just picked up. What did he want?”

  “He left a message on the machine, saying that we should ignore Alistair Golden if he calls,” Cara said. She laughed. “I didn’t recognize Sullivan’s name, but it seemed kind of mystically, cosmically correct to get a message from a stranger telling us to ignore Golden. I always ignore Alistair Golden. Ignoring Golden is one of the things I do best.”

  Golden was Annie’s chief competitor, and he usually handled all the U.S.-bound artworks and artifacts from the English Gallery.

  “And sure enough,” Cara said, snickering, “the little weasel called. He was in a real snit, whining about something—I’m not sure exactly what, because I was working very hard to ignore him.”

  Annie laughed. “I think I know what the bug up his pants was,” she said. “When I got to the gallery, Sullivan’s package was already crated and sealed. Golden had assumed he’d be doing the authentication job, so he’d already done the packing work.”

  “Golden packed the crate for you?” Cara said with great pleasure. “No wondering his whine was set on stun. He wanted you to call him back, but unless you want to subject yourself to a solid forty-five minutes of complaining, I wouldn’t. I give you my permission to use the ‘scatterbrained employee didn’t give me the message’ excuse for the next time he catches up with you.”

  Annie smiled. “Thanks. Did Ben Sullivan want me to call him back?”

  “He said something about going out of town,” Cara said, glancing back at the phone message slip. “Who is he? How do you know him? Come on, fill me in. Height, weight, marital status?”

  “As far as I know, he’s single,” Annie said, then smiled. “But he’s also seventy-five years old, so get that matchmaking gleam out of your eyes.”

  Cara made a face in disappointment.

  “Ben’s an old friend of my parents.” Annie leaned back in her chair, breathing deeply. “I don’t think I’ve seen him since, wow, since I was about fifteen. Apparently, he was talking to Mom and Dad recently, and they told him about me—you know, that I opened this lab a few years ago. When the offer to buy came in on this death mask, he requested that I do the necessary authentication.”

  “Instead of Golden,” Cara said.

  Annie grinned. “Instead of Golden.” She sat forward, stretching her arms over her head. “Anyone else call?”

  Cara nodded. “Yeah. I saved the best message for last. It came in on the answering machine. Let me play it for you.”

  Cara slid off the table, handing Annie the message slips, then pushed the message button on the machine. The tape rewound quickly, then a voice spoke.

  It was odd, all whispery and strange, as if the caller had deliberately tried to disguise his voice. “The mask you have gained possession of does not belong to the world of the living. It is the property of Stands Against the Storm. Deliver it at once to his people, or be prepared to face his evil spirit’s rage. The doors to the twilight world are opened wide, and Stands Against the Storm will take you back with him.”

  There was a click as the line was disconnected. Cara punched one of the buttons on the machine and the tape stopped running. “So, okay.” She grinned. “Which one of your weirdo friends left that message? And who the heck is Stands Against the Storm?”

  But Annie wasn’t laughing. Swearing softly under her breath, she stood up, hoisted the crate containing the death mask off her desk and went down the hall toward the lab. Cara followed, her grin fading.

  “What?” Cara asked, watching as Annie locked the front door. “What’s the matter?”

  “We’ve got to put this in the safe,” Annie said, gesturing to the package in her arms.

  “Annie, who was that on the tape?” Cara asked, eyes narrowing.

  “Some crackpot,” Annie said, heading back to the sturdy vault that sat directly in the middle of the house, surrounded by the lab in the front and the office in the rear. It was secure, impenetrable. She would feel a lot better after she locked the gold death mask inside.

  “If it was just some crackpot,” Cara demanded, “why did you rush across the room and lock the door?”

  Annie opened the innocuous-looking closet door to reveal the combination lock of the big safe. She spun the red dial several times before entering the numbers. “Because it would be foolish not to take precautions, crackpot or not.” She looked up at her assistant. “You must not have had a chance to read the background info I left you on this project.”

  Cara shrugged expansively. “I cannot tell a lie. I had about an hour of free time last night, and I spent it watching ‘Quantum Leap’ instead of reading about nineteenth-century Indian chiefs.”

  Setting the package on the top shelf of the vault, Annie swung the door shut, locking it securely. “Native Americans, not Indians,” she corrected Cara. “In a nutshell, the artifact we’re testing for authenticity is supposedly a gold casting of a death mask of a Navaho named Stands Against the Storm. He was one of the greatest Native American leaders. He was a brilliant man who truly understood Western culture. He tried to help the white leaders understand his own people as thoroughly.”

  Cara followed her
back into the office. “How come I’ve never heard of him?” she asked. “I mean, everyone knows Sitting Bull and Geronimo. Why not this guy?”

  Annie sat down behind her desk, frowning at the chaos on its surface. Why was it that paperwork seemed to multiply whenever she went away for a few days? “Sitting Bull and Geronimo were warriors,” she said. “Stands Against the Storm was a man of peace. He didn’t get as much press as the war party leaders, but not from lack of trying. In fact, he was in England, trying to drum up support for his people among the British, when he died.” She shook her head. “His death was a major blow to the Navaho cause.”

  “If Stands Against the Storm was such a peaceful guy,” Cara said, “then why would he have an evil spirit?”

  “The Navaho believe that when people die, they become ghosts or spirits,” Annie said. “It doesn’t matter how nice or kind a person was during his life. When he dies, he becomes malevolent and he gets back at all the people who did him wrong during his lifetime. Chances are, the nicer the guy was, the more evil his spirit would be—the more he’d have to avenge. You know, nice guys finish last and all that.”

  “But if Stands Against the Storm died in England,” Cara said, “then how could his spirit come after you? Assuming for the sake of this discussion that the Navaho are right about this spirit stuff,” she added.

  “Death is a major problem for the Navaho,” Annie said. She smiled. “Actually, I can’t think of too many cultures that look forward to death, but the Navaho really don’t like it. In fact, if someone dies inside a house, even today, that house will sometimes be abandoned. See, the Navaho believe that the place a person dies in, and the things he touches before dying or even after he’s dead, can contain his bad spirit. Making a death mask would be a real invitation to disaster. The Navaho would never make something like a death mask. But it was the custom at the time in England, you know, to make a mold of the dead person’s face and then cast a mask from it to get a likeness. I guess Stands Against the Storm was something of a celebrity—and certainly a curiosity, a Red Indian from the Wild West—so when he died, they made a death mask.”

  Annie looked over at the answering machine. What she couldn’t figure out was how it had become public knowledge that she was working on authenticating Stands Against the Storm’s death mask. Unless Ben Sullivan, or Steven Marshall, the purchaser, had leaked something….

  “Hey, Annie?”

  She met Cara’s worried brown eyes. “It just occurred to me,” the taller woman said. “That message on the answering machine is basically a…Well, it’s a death threat.”

  “It was just some nut.” Annie shrugged it off. “Besides, I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  “You gotta admit, it’s creepy,” Cara said. “Maybe we should, I don’t know…Call the police?”

  Annie groaned, dropping her head onto her arms on the desk top. “No more police, no more FBI, no way. I’d much rather be haunted by the spirit of Stands Against the Storm.”

  ANNIE SAT UP IN BED, WIDE-EYED in the darkness as the burglar alarm shrieked.

  Her heart pounded from being awakened so suddenly. She clicked on the light and grabbed her robe. Oh, Christmas! This damned alarm was going to raise the entire neighborhood.

  She ran down the stairs two at a time and turned on the lights in the foyer as she crossed toward the alarm-system control panel.

  Oh my God, thought Annie. It wasn’t a malfunction! The alarm schematic showed a breach in the system on the first floor. A window in the lab was marked as the intruder’s point of entry.

  Suddenly she was very glad for the shrieking alarm. Across the street, she could see the neighbors’ lights go on, and she knew they’d call the police—they always did. She ran back up to her room and opened the drawer on her bedside table. Oh, damn, damn, damn, where was it?

  She pulled the drawer out of the table and emptied it onto her bed. There it was.

  She grabbed the toy gun, unwinding a stray piece of string from the barrel, and headed toward the stairs. She ran down and kicked open the door to the lab. She flicked on the light switch with her elbow and the bright fluorescent bulbs illuminated the room.

  No one was there—either human or inhuman.

  But the window had been broken.

  Feeling just a little silly, she put the plastic gun down on the lab counter and stepped carefully toward the large rock that had been thrown through the window. There was a piece of paper attached to it with a rubber band.

  Spinning lights from two police cars caught her eye as they pulled into her driveway. She went to the front door and keyed into the control panel the code to cancel the alarm. The shrill noise stopped instantly. Taking a deep breath, she opened the door to the town police officers.

  They came inside and looked at the broken window. One of them made a quick survey of the house, checking to make sure all the windows and doors were still locked, while the other radioed in to the station.

  Big doings in a small town. Annie sighed. She went into the kitchen and put on a pot of coffee. Something told her this was going to be a long night.

  PETERSON WOKE UP INSTANTLY and answered the phone after only one ring.

  “Yeah,” he said, looking at the glowing numbers of his clock: 3:47. He ran one hand across his face. “This better be good.”

  “It’s Scott. Can you talk?” Whitley Scott said in his flat New Jersey accent.

  “Yeah, I’m awake,” Pete said, sitting up and turning on his light.

  “No, I mean…are you alone?”

  “Yeah, I’m alone.” Pete rubbed his eyes. “If you check my file, you’ll see that I haven’t been involved with anyone since last March.”

  “I’ve already checked your file,” the FBI agent said easily. “And it says you’ve got something of a reputation as a tomcat.”

  Pete was silent, thinking about that new administrative assistant in the New York City office. Carolyn something. She had curly brown hair and legs a mile long. And eyes that made it more than clear that she was interested in him, no-strings-attached. She’d invited him out for a drink last night. If he had gone with her, she’d probably be lying here right now, next to him.

  But he’d turned her down.

  Why? Maybe because, regardless of the fact that he’d be using her the exact same way, he was tired of being the flavor of the month for ambitious, upwardly mobile women.

  Even though he wasn’t overly tall, he knew that with his black hair and his dark brown eyes, he had the dark and handsome part down cold.

  For years, he’d used his good looks to his advantage, but recently it had been rubbing him the wrong way. His relationships, which usually lasted a month or two, were getting shorter and shorter. And when he’d looked at that administrative assistant last night, he hadn’t felt the usual heat from knowing that she wanted him. If he’d felt anything at all, it had been disdain.

  More than once over the past few months, the thought of retiring from the agency had crossed his mind. The closer he got to his fortieth birthday, the more aware he seemed to become of an emptiness in his life.

  He couldn’t figure out what he was looking for. He was far too jaded to believe in true love—hell, he was too jaded to believe in any kind of love. And if he stopped having relationships based on animal attraction, on sex, he was in for a whole lot of cold, lonely nights….

  “You still there?” Whitley Scott asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “We’ve found a way for you to get close to Anne Morrow,” Scott said. “She practically handed it to us on a platter.”

  Pete listened intently as Scott explained. It would work. It would definitely work.

  After he hung up the phone and turned the light off, Pete stared up at the dark ceiling, feeling a wave of anticipation so charged that it was almost sexual. In a sudden flash of memory, he saw black lace against pale skin, and a pair of wide, blue eyes….

  “THE NOTE SAID WHAT?” Cara’s voice rose sharply.

  “It was
stupid,” Annie said, clearing some of the clutter off her desk. “I can’t believe the police took it seriously.”

  “When someone bothers to send a message via a rock through a window,” Cara said tartly, “it should probably be taken seriously.”

  “But, God, did they have to notify the FBI?” Annie said. “You know, the Federal agents got over here really quickly. I’m wondering if they weren’t somehow responsible. I mean, they’ve been hassling me every other way imaginable. Why not a rock through a window?”

  “With a note saying ‘Prepare to die’?” Cara asked. “I doubt it, Annie.”

  “And I seriously doubt that a Native American group, no matter how radical or fringe, would resort to this kind of petty threat,” Annie said. “The FBI can go ahead and investigate, but they’re just wasting their time.” She sat back in her chair, her normally clear blue eyes shadowed with fatigue. “I just don’t need the FBI’s garbage on top of everything else. You know, they wanted to provide me with round-the-clock protection. Surveillance is more like it. I told them I could protect myself perfectly well, thank you very much.”

  “I don’t suppose you told them that the likeliest suspect is a ghost called Stands Against the Storm,” Cara said. “Maybe we should’ve called Ghostbusters instead of the police.” She sang the familiar horn riff to the original movie theme.

  Annie laughed, searching for something on her desk to throw at her friend. She settled for an unsharpened pencil.

  Cara dodged the pencil and grinned. “Of course, if a ghost isn’t a freaky enough suspect, there are always Navaho witches.”

  Annie tiredly closed her eyes. “I see you finally read the background information I gave you.”

  “‘Quantum Leap’ reruns weren’t on last night,” Cara said. “So I had some free time. Fascinating stuff. I particularly liked the part that said the Navaho believe some people—who appear to be normal during the day—are really witches. And if plain old witches who can cast spells and wreak havoc aren’t bad enough, these witches can transform themselves into giant wolves at night and roam the countryside. Very pleasant.”