The Girl with the Emerald Ring: A Romantic Thriller (Blackwood Security Book 12)

by Elise Noble

  “It’s a picture of this room,” she told me. “Here’s the parrot and the Mona Lisa. Can you see any more corners?”

  If she was feeling any of the same uneasiness, it didn’t show. Then again, she was probably used to her father’s assistants coming and going. Emphasis on the going. I didn’t want to leave like the others, but since I had no desire to jump into bed with a smooth-talking playboy, I considered myself one step ahead of my predecessors.

  Gradually, the jigsaw took shape, and we both realised at the same time that there was one big difference between the picture and the actual room. A moment later, the two of us leapt for the rug.

  “There’s a trapdoor under here!” Rune said, breathless.

  A trapdoor with five dials, each engraved with the numbers one through nine. A combination lock, except we didn’t know the combination.

  “Good going,” Alaric said as he poured birdseed into the parrot’s dish.

  “Two-six,” it shrieked. “Two-six.”

  Ravi knelt and turned the second dial to the number six. “Guess this is how we get out. Somewhere in here, there are four more combinations. One’s on the shoes, but we need to narrow it down.”

  “Wait, wait,” Rune said. “There’s a piece of the jigsaw left over. A brown boot, left foot.”

  That gave us four-nine. Three numbers left to go, and now that I knew what we were looking for, I had a good idea where to find one of the codes.

  “Where are those glasses?”

  Alaric passed them over, and I slipped them on. Sure enough, the abstract picture changed under the tinted lenses, revealing two definite digits. I’d had a book of puzzles like that when I was a child, even had a go at creating them myself.

  “Three-one.”

  Two to go. But we’d tried everything obvious. What about the books? I pulled a copy of War and Peace off the shelf, checking for any hidden compartments or perhaps a scribbled note. Nothing.

  Then Alaric breathed on the mirror, and two ghostly numbers appeared. One-seven. My jaw dropped.

  “How did you know to do that?”

  He gave me a wink. “Just a trick that us businessmen use occasionally.”

  Businessmen my ass.

  “There’s only one number left,” Rune said, a little breathless.

  But Ravi shook his head. “No need to look for it. We have four definite digits, which means there are only ten possible options for the remaining dial. All we have to do is cycle through them, and…voila.” The lock clicked, and he heaved the trapdoor open, revealing a black hole. Spooky, but we’d come this far, and I wasn’t about to chicken out. “Who wants to go first?”

  Alaric stood at the edge, peering into the gloom. “There’s a ladder. I’ll go down first, then help the girls.”

  Teenage me, the tomboy my mother hated so much, would have insisted on going it alone, but as I’d got older, I’d been schooled into accepting assistance gracefully. Rune already had her manners, and she stood to the side with Ravi, who nodded for me to go next.

  Good thing I’d worn trousers.

  Alaric disappeared into the darkness, but it didn’t stay dark for long.

  “Ah, fu—” He obviously realised Rune was in earshot. “Fiddlesticks. There must’ve been a pressure sensor.”

  Rune snorted a laugh, and it was the first time I’d heard her sound anything other than reserved.

  “Fiddlesticks? Have you been reading parenting books again?”

  “Just trying to do things right.”

  “You already do everything right.”

  “Guys,” Ravi said. “Can we have this discussion later when the clock isn’t ticking? How much time do we have left? And what’s down there?”

  Rune checked the timer. “Fifteen minutes gone.”

  “Down here?” Alaric’s voice sounded a bit echoey. “Remember that part in Ocean’s Twelve with the laser grid?”

  Ravi grinned. “Best scene in the movie.”

  “Well, it’s like that except the lasers are green rather than blue, and there’s no music.”

  I’d seen that movie too. What on earth had we gotten ourselves into?

  CHAPTER 26 - BETHANY

  I LOWERED A foot, feeling for the ladder with my toes, and once I’d got down a few rungs, Alaric’s hands rested lightly on my hips, steadying me. I didn’t particularly need steadying, but I liked the feel of them so I didn’t say anything. Yes, I understood nothing could happen between us, but still… Those little touches sent flashes of heat through me.

  Swiftly followed by a chill when I turned to see the lasers. How the hell were we supposed to get across that? A big button glowed white on the other side—presumably we had to press it? Alaric reached out a hand and cut one of the beams. A buzzer sounded, and the button turned red and began a countdown from thirty seconds. Did that mean we couldn’t complete the task until the clock hit zero? When he cut the beam a second time, the timer increased by a minute.

  “Perhaps leave it?” I suggested.

  “Just seeing what would happen.”

  Rune climbed down and quickly took in the scene. “Ravi can do this one?”

  “I’d put my back out if I tried it,” Alaric said. “Unless Bethany wants to have a go?”

  I might have worn sensible shoes today—black suede boots with gold zippers on the sides—but that didn’t qualify me to be a contortionist.

  “Ravi’s welcome to—” I jumped as I realised he was standing right beside me. How had he come down the ladder so quietly? “Uh, be my guest.”

  He studied the array of lasers for maybe ten seconds, then leapt, skipped, and limboed around the beams, finishing with a freaking backflip. The buzzer stayed silent, and the countdown reached zero a second before he punched the button. Perfect timing.

  “Show off,” Alaric muttered.

  “What the…? Did he do gymnastics as a child?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Wow.”

  The lasers vanished, and a door in the far wall swung open, revealing Krankov’s lab. A ceiling fan whirred overhead, casting eerie shadows over the room. Bubbling flasks of coloured liquids lined one wall, and another held a bunch of animal skulls in glass cases, each with a plaque underneath. Were they real? A scarred wooden bench spanned the room, complete with three sets of electronic scales holding empty glass beakers. Brilliant. Science had always been my worst subject at school, and dead animals gave me the creeps. Dubious specimens floated in jars, atomic models sat on shelves, and I hoped to goodness the DANGER: RADIATION sign was a fake.

  “What’s that on the chalkboard?” Ravi asked. “Is that algebra? Or Russian?”

  “Both,” Rune told him.

  I had an “aha” moment. “That’s what the books are for upstairs. Russian and algebra. They’re to help us down here. I’ll go and get them.”

  “Time is of the essence,” Alaric said.

  “I know. I’ll be quick.”

  “No, that’s what the Russian says. It’s a red herring.”

  “You speak Russian?”

  “Enough to get by.”

  “Oh.” Colour me impressed. “That’s…that’s… But we still need the algebra book. All those x’s and y’s are like Greek to me.”

  “Thirty-seven,” Rune said.

  “Huh?”

  “The answer is thirty-seven. I can’t speak Greek, but I can speak English, Thai, French, German, Spanish, and algebra.”

  Flipping heck. I turned to Ravi, questioning, and he backed away with his hands in the air.

  “Hey, don’t look at me. I can only speak English, Spanish, Hindi, and enough French to get laid.”

  Alaric glared at him, then cut his eyes to Rune, and Ravi took another step back.

  “Shit, sorry.”

  Rune just giggled, high-pitched and musical. “Time’s ticking. What do we do with the thirty-seven? Do you think it’s something to do with these atomic models? Thirty-seven on the periodic table is rubidium.”

  “No, no
t that. There isn’t a copy of the periodic table in here, and they can’t rely on us knowing that information. We’re not all smart-asses.”

  “Are you supposed to say ‘ass’?”

  “Dammit, probably not.” Alaric smacked his forehead. “Sh— Shoot.”

  “We do swear at school, you know. And I’m fifteen now.”

  She looked younger, although I wasn’t about to point that out. “Only a couple of years until your dad’ll be fighting off the boys with a stick.”

  If I hadn’t been looking right at Rune, I might have missed it. The flash of fear in her eyes. I was sure I hadn’t imagined it, but she quickly shook it away.

  “No, no, that’s no problem. I’m not interested in boys. No, never.”

  “Shall we get on with the game?” Alaric asked, and there was nothing subtle about his change of subject. Should I apologise? I wanted to because I’d obviously upset Rune, but at the same time, I didn’t want to prolong the pain by pushing a topic nobody wanted to discuss. Maybe I’d ask Alaric later, see what he thought was appropriate.

  Ravi followed Alaric’s lead. “It has to be the beakers. We need to put something in them—thirty-seven of something.”

  “Thirty-seven millilitres?” I suggested. “Thirty-seven grams?”

  Rune moved to the back wall, to the flasks of coloured liquid. “If this is water, then one millilitre equals one gram, so it doesn’t matter which. And I can’t see thirty-seven of anything else unless we start popping hydrogen atoms off all these hydrocarbon molecules, and I don’t suppose they’d thank us if we did that.”

  Alaric grinned at her, the proud papa. “No, I don’t suppose they would. Do you want to measure?”

  Now Rune looked like the kid she was as she gleefully poured exactly thirty-seven grams of blue liquid into the nearest beaker. Nothing happened. No flashing lights, no hint as to whether we were correct. Did we just trust that we were on the right track? I didn’t see we had a lot of choice.

  “We need two more numbers,” Alaric said. “Look for anything out of place, and say what you see the way we did upstairs.”

  We fanned out, and as luck would have it, I got the animal skulls. I peered closer and breathed a sigh of relief when I spotted a telltale moulding line—they were plastic, not real bone.

  “Methane, ethane, propane, butane, hexane, octane…” Rune said, picking up models that could have come from any high school science lab. “No pentane and no heptane. Do you think that means anything?”

  “It’s possible, but again, not everyone would know that.”

  “Can I try fifty-seven?”

  “Why not?”

  Rune got pouring again while Ravi picked up a black box. “There’s some kind of electronic thing, but I don’t know what it is or what it does. Do you think these scribbles on the wall mean anything?”

  Alaric went to check while I studied the skulls. They ranged from the size of a grape to bigger than a watermelon, and out of all of them, I only recognised one—a horse. Except the plaque underneath said Tamias striatus. Now, I had no idea what a Tamias striatus was, but it certainly wasn’t the scientific name for a horse. That was Equus caballus, which was attached to something the size of a fist.

  “I think these skulls are mislabelled.” When I picked at the top plaque, the Velcro behind it loosened, and it came away in my hand. “I think we’re meant to rearrange them. Should I get the zoology book from upstairs, or…?”

  Alaric leaned over my shoulder. Usually, I hated when people invaded my space, but he was welcome to as much of it as he wanted.

  “Simia paniscus—that has to be some sort of monkey. The top one? Rune?”

  Rune managed to match five more. Nandinia binotata and Nyctereutes procyonoides were a mystery to all of us. But it didn’t matter anymore because I suddenly realised the connection.

  “Look at the first letters. We’ve got two N’s left, and it really doesn’t matter which is which.”

  Simia paniscus

  Equus caballus

  Vulpes vulpes

  Eudyptes chrysocome

  Nandinia binotata

  Tamias striatus

  Erethizon dorsaum

  Enhydra lutris

  Nyctereutes procyonoides

  Rune’s face lit up. “Seventeen! I’ll pour it out.”

  We had three filled beakers on three scales, but nothing happened. No bells, no whistles, and certainly no way out of the room magically revealed itself.

  Rune muttered under her breath. It sounded like “ai-shia,” and from the delivery, I suspected it would be frowned upon by the Thai language version of Alaric’s parenting book. Luckily, she’d spoken too quietly for him to hear.

  “The fifty-seven’s probably wrong,” she said more loudly. “We’re missing something. What else doesn’t fit?”

  Ravi picked up the black box again, and this time, a light started flashing, bold and bright, like something out of a disco. He started jigging around, and Rune groaned.

  “Did you read the ‘dad dancing’ chapter from Alaric’s book?”

  She used his forename rather than calling him Dad? Odd. Mind you, a girl in my ballet class had done the same, although her parents followed some sort of new-age religion that meant they didn’t wear shoes or wash their hair. Rainbow Starshine, she’d been named, although her parents were Bob and Susan.

  “Would you rather do the foxtrot?”

  Rune giggled as Ravi twirled her around, and I was surprised to note that he actually was dancing the foxtrot. Where had he learned to do that? This trio kept surprising me, yet I knew I’d only scraped the surface of their personalities. Working for Sirius promised to be far more interesting than my time at the gallery, and infinitely more fun than a decade of playing the perfect hostess. I started laughing too, not just because of Ravi’s dancing but out of relief. When Hugo fired me, despair had threatened to overwhelm me again, the way it had after I walked in on Piers and his floozy, but somehow, I’d managed to land on my feet, even if the job interview had been a little unorthodox.

  Alaric caught my eye, then rolled his. “Do you guys want to get out of here or not? Next time, I’ll book dance lessons.”

  Ravi gave Rune one last spin, and Alaric caught her before she stumbled into the wall of flasks. I was so glad to see her enjoying her birthday. My own fifteenth had been a disaster. I’d wanted to go for pizza with my friends, but Mother had insisted on a marquee, a string quartet, and a finger buffet. As if trying to stomach caviar wasn’t bad enough, I’d fallen asleep in the sun the day before and turned the colour of a lobster. My dress chafed against my burned skin with every step I took, so I’d snuck out in tears at seven thirty and hidden in the hay barn until everyone went home.

  “We have twenty-six minutes left,” Rune said. “What are strobe lights used for?”

  “In the FBI, we used them to stun criminals.”

  Alaric had been an FBI agent? I suppose I should have guessed he’d been law enforcement of some kind before he moved into the private sector. What about Ravi? He didn’t exactly scream “cop,” but perhaps he’d done undercover work or something.

  “When I worked in nightclubs, the strobe lights slowed down movement. Either that or they made people vomit.”

  Okay, definitely not a cop.

  “What movement are we gonna slow down?” Alaric’s forehead creased into a frown, then relaxed as he glanced upwards. “The fan. It’s the fan. See the AC ducts? There’s no reason to have a fan too, so it must be part of the game. Can we adjust the speed on the strobe?”

  “There’s a dial.” Ravi held out the unit to Rune. “Care to do the honours?”

  It was like magic. The fan flickered and flashed, and then suddenly, it stopped. Not really, but it looked as though it did. Eighty-four. The numbers were clear on the blades.

  “Yeeeah!” Rune shoved the strobe back at Ravi and grabbed the flask again, measuring carefully. This time when she stood back, the entire blackboard lifted up, revealing a set o
f stairs leading upwards. Ravi hopped through the hole first, and Alaric lifted Rune through to him, her feet clearing the remaining three feet of wall.

  “Need a hand?” he asked me.

  “It’ll be an ungainly scramble otherwise.”

  I’d expected just a hand, as he said, but he shocked me by swinging me off my feet, bridal style again. I ended up nestled against his dark grey cashmere sweater. I’d say it reminded me of my wedding night, but when Piers had attempted the same move at Château de la Messardière in Saint Tropez, he’d put his back out, then spent the whole of our honeymoon zonked out on painkillers prescribed by a local physician. With hindsight, that was probably when his habit started. On again, off again, worse whenever things weren’t going his way at work. Of course, he always denied there was a problem, but nobody had that many tennis injuries. What he did have was a number of doctor friends who’d write him prescriptions with no questions asked.

  Over the years, I’d given up trying to help him. It only led to arguments, and quite frankly, he was easier to live with when he was under the influence.

  What was Alaric like to live with?

  What was I even thinking?

  Rune belted up the stairs, and the rest of us followed as she pushed through the door at the top. I half feared we’d find ourselves in another freaky room, but no. Keiran was slouched on a plastic chair with his phone in his hand, and judging by the hasty way he shoved it into his pocket, he hadn’t been expecting to see us quite so soon.

  “Uh, that was quick. Maybe even the quickest.” He checked his twin of Rune’s electronic widget. “Yes, that was the quickest. Congratulations! You win a prize.”

  Over the course of thirty-seven minutes, Rune had gone from shy to animated. “Yay! What prize?”

  “A free go in one of our other escape rooms. Wanna try the dungeon? The asylum? The haunted house?”

  “Today?”

  “Well, we’ll give you a voucher, and you’ve got a year to use it.”

  “Then I think we’ll come back. Okay?” She checked with Alaric, and he nodded. “I’m starving.”