Iron Dove

by Leon, Judith

  She shrugged off the second climbing rope, attached it to the chimney by looping it around the base and securing it with two prongs of a trident hook. A firm pull assured her that the trident would not give way. Since the break-in must be undetected, breaking a window wasn’t an option. Besides the windows and exterior doors were wired. If by any chance Mrs. Sorokin decided to activate the security system while attending to her party on the lawn, messing with a window would cause all hell to break loose. Joe, Nova, Cesare and finally Provenza had agreed that the large, old chimney was the way to go.

  She removed her climbing gloves and from one of the jumpsuit’s leg pockets she fetched the specially modified, shortened crowbar and a screwdriver equipped with heads of several sizes. The chimney cap, designed to keep out debris and animals, held two chimney pipes and only two screws held it in place. It came off easily, exposing a top-mounted damper.

  From plans of the house, she knew the flue dimensions to be twenty by twenty-six inches. A tight fit for her, and a really tight fit for Joe, given his broader shoulders, but not impossible. The mansion was old, constructed in the early twentieth century, with a fireplace opening four feet wide and three feet high.

  She set to work removing the four screws holding the damper in place; in less than a minute, she stared down into the dark, filthy mouth of the twenty-foot length of soot-filled flue. After donning a surgical mask, goggles, and her gloves, she let the rope down, eased herself over the edge and dropped inside.

  Despite the mask, she held her breath as she shimmied down. Once down and squatting just inside the fireplace, she took out a folded sheet of four-by-four plastic from one leg pocket, opened it, and spread it over the marble hearth.

  She stepped onto the plastic and removed her gloves, mask and goggles, and unzipped the jumpsuit. Under the suit, she wore a full-bodied black leotard. After stripping off the climbing shoes and jumpsuit, she stepped barefoot onto the wooden floor of the den.

  Drapes at the two windows were half closed, the room suffused in dim light. The door was slightly ajar. The house seemed almost eerily silent. Only a standing clock ticked away softly, like her heartbeat. She sent thoughts for good luck to Joe, who was at this very moment enchanting suspect number two with a magnificent old Ferrari.

  The Sorokins employed only one full-time servant who doubled as cook and maid. She, along with Mrs. Sorokin, should be fully engaged in either the kitchen or the front lawn for the next three hours or more. Just to be on the safe side, though, Nova crossed a couple of oriental carpets to the door, closed it, and propped the edge of a straight-back armchair under the knob. She placed the laptop onto Sorokin’s desk and slipped off the straps of the safecracking kit.

  Tapestries, thick rugs and dark walnut furniture upholstered in soft green and brown tones gave the room a cozy feel. It took her less than half a minute to find the safe, amateurishly hidden on the floor under an inch-thick red-and-gold Saurek rug that looked like a masterpiece. Her toes reveled in the carpet’s feel even as she was thinking that Sorokin would be a fool to hide something illegal in such an easy place to find. But then again, sometimes arrogance led to over confidence which led to the mistakes that allowed authorities to catch people. Maybe Sorokin suffered from such over confidence.

  She sighed. The safe was a Bergan-Soffit, the model with a three-number combination, and not electronic. Using the laptop was out. She’d have to do this the old-fashioned way.

  Praying that Sorokin would make it easy, she began with the safecracker’s standard method number one, a systematic search of the desk’s contents and drawers. People could never be sure they would remember a combination and so they almost always wrote down the number. And being lazy, they usually left those numbers in the same room as the safe. Just a series of three unidentified numbers, that’s what she needed to find.

  Fifteen minutes later, after finishing a search of the bookshelves, she straightened and sighed again. If he’d hidden the combo in this room, he’d done a good job. More time spent looking would be a waste.

  A cracking sound in the room’s far corner triggered a freeze reflex and a skipped heartbeat. She turned her head, held her breath, then let it out when she realized the sound was the house itself, creaking with old age.

  Smiling sheepishly, she went back to the safecracking kit and pulled out the stethoscope. She was already wearing latex gloves. Later she would need pencil and graph paper.

  “Patience,” she muttered. First, using the stethoscope and carefully listening as she turned the dial, she had to determine the contact points on the drive cam. Next, she turned the dial to park all three wheels in the wheel pack at zero, listening again to determine the right and left numbers, indicating a contact area. Working around the entire dial, she reset the lock then reparked the wheels at three number intervals. She repeated the process again and again, tediously graphing, for each contact area she detected, the numbers of its right and left side. Every time she reparked the wheels at a different number on the dial, the contact areas she detected changed slightly. In the end, the graphed points of all the contact areas gave her the numbers of the combination.

  As the minutes ticked away in her subconscious and in the heart of the big old clock, she resisted the urge to check the time. It would take however long it would take. Twice more, the house creaked, and she jumped and froze both times.

  “Got it!” she finally said with satisfaction. She glanced at her watch. Thirty-eight minutes after one. Only an hour and thirty-five minutes had passed. Excellent, really.

  She opened the safe.

  Remembering her lessons, she took care to remove and then place the items in order so they could be returned with no one the wiser. She ignored the usual jewelry and cash, some gold coins, some bonds, and a will. No laptop or disks here either. Just some business papers.

  She sat quietly a moment, thinking and chewing her lip. This was not good. Two of their three suspects were not Lynchpin. This left only Ya Lin. If Ya Lin turned out to be a negative, then as Aldo Provenza once so colorfully had said, this op was screwed.

  She had no way to know if SISMI and the Company or maybe Interpol were working other leads by now. That information would be on a need-to-know basis only. But she had, for some reason, thought that Sorokin would be the one. The truth was, hunches didn’t always pan out. Although it was certainly nice when they did.

  She wondered for a moment if perhaps what they were searching for might be elsewhere in the house. But Provenza, relying on specific information from the informant, believed that the “stuff” was in Lynchpin’s home safe. She had no instructions to make any other searches, and they certainly hadn’t made any time allowance for it.

  She returned the items, bundled up the computer and put the break-in kit back on, took the chair from the door, then, everything again secured, she stepped onto the plastic and into the jumpsuit. She zipped it, put on the climbing shoes, and then, squatting, backed into the three-foot high fireplace opening, and gathered up the plastic.

  A sound—someone humming—nailed her in place. A woman had entered the room, and Nova could see her black skirt from the waist down. She walked toward the fireplace. Were Nova to be caught crouching inside it, Nova imagined that the woman would scream loud enough to be heard for a mile in all directions. And Nova would have to silence her quickly.

  Nova tensed, ready to leap out. The woman moved to Nova’s left toward the bookcase. She halted briefly, then turned and left the room. Nova resumed breathing. She would never know what the woman had been sent to get, but my God, had the timing been fortunate, for Nova and the woman, who doubtless would not have enjoyed being knocked unconscious.

  The plastic had done the job. Nova had a damp cloth in case some soot escaped the plastic onto the marble or wooden floor, but there was no need to tidy further. She realigned the iron log holder, which she’d inadvertently moved out of place.

  The climb back up the chimney on the knotted climbing rope was dirty but easy. I shou
ld send them a bill for chimney sweeping. The expression light a fire under you, popped into her head, one of her mother’s many such sayings. At one time, perhaps the late 1800s, in places like this in Europe, small people, often women and especially children, had been put to work climbing up chimneys to clean them out. Often their rather tyrannical bosses burned something in the fireplace to make their workers hurry. A pretty grim origin for that particular saying.

  She gathered up the rope, slung it across her chest, and collapsed and pocketed the trident. Even though she knew she couldn’t be seen from the lawn, she stooped as she ran to the spot on the cliff face where the climbing rope still dangled. The rappel down had been fast. The climb up was going to be slower, longer, providing a greater risk that someone might look up and see her.

  She grabbed hold, started climbing, and ascended no more than four feet when the cliff started shaking. The rope snapped her against the cliff face. Her cheek slammed up against rough, cold granite. By sheer reflex, her grip on the rope turned to iron, as if her fingers were welded to it.

  The cliff and rope continued to collide, and she heard the deep rumble of the earthquake just as the rope gave way. She dropped. Straight down. Hit feet first. A hot poker of pain jabbed through her left ankle. She toppled backward, cracking her head against the stone house.

  Her vision swimming, her ankle throbbing and on fire, she sat stunned with her back against the house wall. Rocks and dust from the cliff continued to rain down. She shrank together and covered her head.

  Finally the shaking ceased. She put her hand to her temple until the spinning stopped, but the pain in her ankle didn’t let up. She bent her leg, ran her hands over her ankle. She wiggled it. It didn’t seem to be broken.

  The climbing rope lay in a heap all around her and around the fallen boulder, the size of a beanbag chair, to which it remained attached. The boulder had avoided hitting her by a scant inch. She looked up the face of the cliff. If she was in good shape, she could easily free-climb out of here. She wiggled the ankle again and bit her lip against the sharp jolt of pain.

  She could try to free-climb out with a bum ankle, which would take thirty or forty minutes or more if she could manage it at all. Her only other alternative was to take off through the party on the front lawn.

  Chapter 24

  “So how bad is it?” Nova asked, staring at her ankle.

  She put weight on it, slowly. It hurt, but she could walk. Climbing a cliff face, however, seemed a distinctly bad idea.

  She gathered the climbing rope, then ducked around the side of the mansion. Near the front of the house, she heard the voices of children and adults screaming.

  Wanting to get away quickly, she started a limping jog toward the crowd clustered around something on the opposite side of an overturned long table. No one even looked her way. A woman kept screaming “Angela! Angela!” over and over. Angela was Sorokin’s daughter, the birthday girl.

  Good sense said to use the confusion to slip away unnoticed, but the terror in the woman’s voice yanked Nova to a halt. She caught a glimpse of a body on the lawn and blood across a white dress.

  She shoved her way through kids. On the ground lay Angela and beside her, still shrieking her name, crouched her mother, her lap covered in blood. From the girl’s neck came a stream of blood.

  Nova rushed to the woman, pulled her up and away from Angela. She shoved the mother into the arms of a woman right behind them. In Italian she commanded, “Please keep her away.”

  She fell to both knees beside the girl. The table had fallen. Somehow, the glass of a huge punchbowl had shattered and struck her in two places, the most obvious wound being to the jugular vein that pumped Angela’s life away at a rapid clip. Another wound, on the girl’s arm, needed attending.

  Nova pulled the white tablecloth under Angela’s neck for support, then pressed, hard, above and below the cut vein. The bleeding stopped at once.

  “You,” Nova said, looking up to another woman. “Get down here and put pressure on the arm where she is bleeding.”

  The woman responded quickly.

  Searching the faces above her, Nova asked, “Has anyone called for an ambulance?”

  “Yes, yes. I did,” said a woman, the front of whose dress was also blood-soaked. “They are coming.”

  “Did you tell them that the girl has a bleeding jugular vein?”

  “I—no.”

  “Call them back. Tell them she is bleeding from the jugular vein and they have to be here now if they are going to save her.”

  “Yes. I will.” The woman pulled her cell phone from her purse and stepped back.

  Angela’s mother, frantic but no longer hysterical, knelt beside Nova. “She will be all right, yes?”

  Nova said nothing. She wasn’t in the habit of making false promises. She wouldn’t have survived killing her stepfather or the years in prison if she’d believed in false promises, so they never came easily, if at all. In what she guessed was no more than two minutes, an ambulance rushed into the yard, siren blaring. A forty-something man with big shoulders traded his hands for hers on Angela’s neck.

  Nova stood, her legs shaking. Her hands and arms were covered in blood, her jumpsuit filthy, her own face streaked with green and brown camouflage paint and soot. Half the crowd watched the medics moving Angela. The other half stared in stunned amazement at Nova.

  She limped across the lawn and out onto the street. From yet another jumpsuit pocket, she pulled out her cell phone and dialed Cesare.

  He picked up and she said, “Big mess, Cesare. I am out here on the street loose, covered in soot and blood. You’ve got to come pick me up and quick. I’ll go three intersections down from the Sorokin mansion and hide behind a bush or something until you get here.”

  “I will be there at once,” he said, and rang off.

  God, what madness.

  She hurried her pace to just short of jogging. A red Ferrari approached—Joe and Sorokin.

  As the car passed her, heading for Sorokin’s place, Joe twisted in the passenger seat. The wide-eyed look on his face was priceless.

  Chapter 25

  The Laforza SUV pulled to a stop at the corner, and Nova scrambled up. She’d hidden behind the only bush she could find. She limped to the door and climbed in.

  “My God, what a fright you are,” Cesare said. “And you are hurt.”

  She sighed and leaned her head back against the seat. “I need to get ice on my ankle as quickly as possible. It’s not broken, but it hurts like hell, and it’s going to start to swell.”

  “I know just the place.”

  He jolted the van into motion. She’d thought his driving erratic before, but now she clutched the armrest in a death grip to keep from rocking back and forth as he took the turns at what she figured was as fast as you could go in an SUV without overturning.

  Up ahead a small market appeared on the opposite side of the street. “Hide,” he said. “Lower the seat and lie down.” He swerved into the single-row parking lot, hit the brakes and was out the door as quick as quicksilver.

  Principessa, who had been in his lap, put her paws tentatively on Nova’s seat, her nose quivering with each breath as she took in these strange, strange smells. She was not so foolish as to climb into Nova’s lap. Much too fastidious was Principessa.

  “You should have been there,” Nova said, smiling faintly while resisting the urge to pat the beautiful white fur with her bloody hands.

  Cesare returned and tossed her a plastic bag. He returned them to the road as she pulled from the bag a packet of four white dishtowels and a sack of ice cubes. She put the seat upright and set to work, first washing her hands a bit by swishing them among the cubes and then using a towel. Then she fashioned an ice pack using ice and two more towels, which she tied around the ankle.

  “What happened?” he finally asked when she laid the seat down again and took a deep breath. “All that blood. Where are you most hurt?”

  “The blood’s not mine. T
he earthquake brought down the climbing rope and me. I landed on fresh-turned soil, thank God. It was a two-story drop onto what could just as easily have been cement. I only twisted my ankle. Obviously I couldn’t climb back up and had to leave on foot. Ran right through the birthday party. The quake had turned it into a nightmare. Somehow Sorokin’s daughter got cut. The jugular.”

  “Madre di Dio.”

  “I think I may have saved her life. She was alive when the ambulance arrived.”

  “Nova, please forgive me. Don’t think me crass. But what about Sorokin?”

  “Bad news there. He’s not Lynchpin.”

  As soon as they reached the apartment, Nova insisted that Cesare call the hospital.

  “They may not know anything for sure yet,” he protested.

  “Just call.”

  When he snapped the cell phone shut, he said, “She’s in intensive care but stable.”

  “That’s a good sign. The gods be praised the ambulance got there quickly.”

  “Probably her family should be thanking the gods that someone with the knowledge of what to do when someone has a cut jugular had been breaking into their safe,” Cesare replied dryly.

  Wanting to keep the ice against her ankle as much as possible, Nova showered quickly, pulled her hair into a ponytail, slipped into casual khaki slacks and a green tank top, and threw herself onto the sofa.

  At two-thirty Joe called asking Cesare to pick him up at the home of the owner of the Ferrari. At three-forty Nova greeted them from the sofa, her foot propped up and her ankle surrounded with ice.

  Joe strode to the sofa and squatted beside her.

  “I will fix us all a bit to eat,” Cesare said. He and Principessa disappeared into the kitchen.