by Linda Howard
She still had the computer.
Computer. Kristian.
Oh, God. Kristian.
She had to warn him. If Parrish had any inkling Kristian knew about the files, much less part of their content, he wouldn’t hesitate to kill the boy.
Pay telephones, thank God, were far more plentiful and convenient than ATMs. She fished some change out of the bag, desperately clutching the coins in her wet palm as she crossed one corner and hurried up the block, then turned at another street, wanting to put plenty of distance between her and the two muggers before she stopped. God, the streets were so deserted, something she would never have imagined in a metro area the size of Minneapolis-St. Paul. Her footsteps echoed; her breathing sounded ragged and uneven, unnaturally loud. The rain dripped from eaves and awnings, and the buildings towered high and close over her, with the occasional lighted window indicating some poor office prisoner pulling an all-nighter. She was a world removed from them, all dry and warm in their steel and glass cocoons, while she hurried through the rain and tried to be invisible.
Finally, panting, she stopped at a pay phone. It wasn’t in a booth, they seldom were now, just a phone with three small pieces of clear plastic forming shelters on each side and overhead. At least it had a shelf for her to rest the bag on, propping it in place with her body while she held the receiver between her head and shoulder and fumbled a quarter into the slot. She couldn’t remember Kristian’s number but her fingers did, dancing in the familiar pattern without direction from her brain.
The first ring was still buzzing in her ear when it abruptly stopped and Kristian’s voice said, “Hello?” He sounded tense, unusually alert for this time of night—or rather, morning.
“Kris.” The word was nothing more than a croak. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Kris, it’s Grace.”
“Grace, my God! Cops are everywhere, and they said—” He stopped suddenly and lowered his voice, his whisper forceful and almost fierce. “Are you all right? Where are you?”
All right? How could she be all right? Ford and Bryant were dead, and there was a great empty hole in her chest. She would never be all right again. She was, however, physically unharmed, and she knew that was what he was asking. From his question, she also knew that Parrish had indeed called the police; the quiet neighborhood must be in a turmoil.
“I saw it happen,” she said, her throat so constricted that her voice sounded like a stranger’s, flat and empty. “They’re going to say I did it, but I didn’t, I swear. Parrish did. I saw him.”
“Parrish? Parrish Sawyer, your boss? That Parrish? Are you sure? What happened?”
She waited until the barrage of questions had halted. “I saw him,” she repeated. “Listen, have they questioned you yet?”
“A little. They wanted to know what time you left here.”
“Did you mention the documents I’m working on?”
“No.” His voice was positive. “They asked why you were here, and I said you brought your modem over for me to repair. That’s it.”
“Good. Whatever you do, don’t mention the documents. If anyone asks, just say you didn’t see any papers at all.”
“Okay, but why?”
“So Parrish won’t kill you, too.” Her teeth began to chatter. Oh, God, she was so cold, the light wind cutting through her wet clothes. “I’m not kidding. Promise me you won’t let anyone know you have any idea I was working on anything. I don’t know what’s in these papers, but he intends to get rid of everyone who knows of their existence.”
There was silence on the line, then Kristian said in bewilderment, “You mean he doesn’t want us to know about that Knight Templar guy you were trying to track down? He lived seven centuries ago, if he existed at all! Who the hell cares?”
“Parrish does.” She didn’t know why, but she intended to find out. “Parrish does,” she repeated, her voice trailing off.
She listened to his breathing, the sound quick and shallow, amplified by the phone. “Okay, I’ll keep my mouth shut. I promise.” He paused. “Do you need any help? You can borrow my car—”
She almost laughed. Despite everything, the sound bubbled up in her throat and hung there, unable to work its way past restricted muscles. Kristian’s mechanical monument to testosterone was a sure attention-getter, the one thing she most wanted to avoid. “No, thanks,” she managed to say. “What I need is money, but the ATM I just tried ran out of cash, and I was mugged as soon as I walked away from it anyway.”
“I doubt it,” he said.
He doubted that she was mugged? “What?” She was so tired she could barely move or think, but surely he couldn’t mean that.
“I doubt it was out of money,” he said. Suddenly his voice sounded older, taking on the cool intensity that meant he was thinking of computers. “How much did you take out?”
“Three hundred. Isn’t that the limit for each transaction? I remember the banker said something about three hundred dollars when we set up our account.”
“Not three hundred per transaction,” Kristian patiently explained. “Three hundred per day. You could make as many transactions as you wanted, until the total reached three hundred for that twenty-four-hour period. Each bank sets its own limit, and the limit for your bank is three hundred.”
His explanation fell on her like words of doom. Even if she found another ATM, she wouldn’t be able to get more money until this time tomorrow morning. She couldn’t wait that long. If the police could freeze her account, they would definitely have it done by then. And she needed to get out of Minneapolis, to find some safe hiding place where she could work on the documents and find out just why Parrish had killed Ford and Bryant. To do that, she had to have money; she had to have access to a phone, to resource material.
“I’m sunk,” she said, her tone leaden.
“No!” He almost yelled the word. More softly he repeated, “No. I can fix that. How much is your balance?”
“I don’t know exactly. A couple of thousand.”
“Find another ATM,” he instructed. “I’ll get into your bank’s computer, change the limit to… say, five thousand. Empty out your account, then I’ll change the limit back to the original amount. They’ll never know how it happened, I promise.”
Hope bloomed inside her, a strange sensation after those past nightmare hours. All she had to do was find another ATM, something easier said than done when she was on foot.
“Look in the phone directory,” he was saying. “Every branch of your bank will have an ATM. Pick the closest one and go there.”
Of course. How simple. Normally she would have thought of that herself, and the fact that she hadn’t was a measure of her shock and exhaustion.
“Okay.” Thank heavens, there was still a directory chained to the shelf. She opened the protective cover. Well, there was part of a directory, at least, and it contained the most important part, the Yellow Pages. She thumbed through them until she reached “Banks,” and located her own bank, which had sixteen of those so-called convenient locations.
She estimated it would take her half an hour to get to the nearest one. “I’m going now,” she said. “I’ll be there in thirty to forty-five minutes, unless something happens.” She could be picked up by the police, or mugged again, or Parrish and his goons might be out cruising the city, looking for her. None of the things that could happen to her would be pleasant.
“Call me,” Kristian said urgently. “I’ll get into the bank’s computer now, but call me and let me know if everything went okay.”
“I will,” she promised.
The thirty-minute walk took almost an hour. She was exhausted, and the laptop gained weight with each step she took. She had to hide every time a car went past, and once a patrol car sped through an intersection just ahead of her, lights whirring in eerie silence. The spurt of panic left her weak and shaking, her heart pounding.
Her familiarity with the downtown area was limited to specific destinations. She had lived, gone to scho
ol, and shopped in the suburbs. She took a wrong turn and went several blocks out of her way before she realized what she had done, and had to backtrack. She was acutely aware of the seconds ticking away toward dawn, when people would be getting up and turning on their televisions, and learning about the double murder in her quiet neighborhood. The police would have photographs of her, taken from the house, and her face might be on hundreds of thousands of screens. She needed to be somewhere safe before then.
Finally she reached the branch bank, with the lovely ATM on the front of it, all lit up and watched over by the security camera, so if someone got killed right there they’d have a tape of the murder to show on the evening news.
She was too tired to worry about the camera, or the possibility that another couple of jerks might be watching her. Just let someone else try to mug her. The next time, she would fight; she had nothing to lose, because the money meant her life. She walked right up to the machine, took out her bank card, and followed the instructions, asking for a full two thousand.
The obedient machine began regurgitating twenty-dollar bills. It coughed up a hundred of them before it stopped. Oh, blessed automation!
What with the three hundred she had already withdrawn, she didn’t think there could be much left. She didn’t try to find out the exact amount, not with two thousand dollars in her hand and time pressing hard on her. She darted around the corner and hid herself in the shadows, hunkering down against the wall and hurriedly stuffing bills inside the computer case, in her pockets, in the cups of her bra, inside her shoes. All the while she scanned the area for movement, but the streets were quiet and empty. The night predators would be heading for their lairs now, turning the city back over to the day denizens.
Maybe. She couldn’t afford to take any chances now. She needed some kind of weapon, anything, no matter how primitive, with which she could protect herself. She looked around, hoping to find a sturdy stick, but the only things littering the ground were small pieces of glass and a few rocks.
Well, weapons didn’t get much more primitive than rocks, did they?
She picked up the biggest ones, slipping all but one into her pocket. That one, the biggest one, she kept clutched in her hand. She was aware of how pitiful this defense was, but at the same time she felt oddly comforted. Any defense was better than none.
She had to call Kristian, and she had to get out of Minneapolis. She wanted nothing more than to lie down and sleep, to be able to forget for just a few hours, but the luxury of rest would have to wait. Instead Grace hurried through the streets as the sky began to lighten, and the sun began to rise on her first day as a widow.
Chapter 3
“IT SHOULDN’T BE DIFFICULT TO FIND HER,” PARRISH SAWYER murmured, leaning back in his chair and tapping his immaculately manicured nails against the wooden arm. “I’m sadly disappointed in the Minneapolis Police Department. Little Grace has no car, no survival skills, yet still she’s managed to elude them. That really surprises me; I expected her to run screaming to a neighbor, or to the first policeman she could find, but no, instead she’s gone to earth somewhere. Annoying of her, but all she’s doing is delaying the inevitable. If the police can’t find her, I’m confident you can.”
“Yes,” Conrad said. He didn’t elaborate. He was a man of few words, but over the years Parrish had found him extremely reliable. Conrad could have been either his first or last name; no one knew. He was stocky and muscular and didn’t look very bright; his bullet-shaped head was covered by short dark hair that grew low on his forehead, an unfortunate apelike resemblance that was only heightened by his small dark eyes and prominent brow ridges. His appearance, however, was deceiving. His chunky body could move with amazing speed and finesse, and behind his stolid expression was a brain that was both astute and concise. Best of all, Parrish had never seen Conrad exhibit any distressing signs of conscience. He carried out orders with admirable, machinelike precision, and what he thought of them no one but himself ever knew.
“When you find her,” Parrish continued, “bring the computer and the papers to me immediately.” He didn’t give any instructions on how to deal with Grace St. John; Conrad wouldn’t need direction on anything that simple.
There was a sharp, slight incline of the bullet head, and Conrad silently left the room. Alone, Parrish sighed, his fingers still drumming out his frustration with the situation.
It had turned unaccountably messy. Nothing had gone as planned. They should have been there, all three of them; he had made certain all three vehicles had been present before going in. But Grace hadn’t been there, and neither had her computer or the documents. Moreover, Ford and Bryant had been remarkably good liars; Parrish hadn’t expected it of them, and he didn’t like being surprised. Who would have thought two nerdish archaeologists would have sized up the situation so accurately, and in an instant formulated a very believable lie?
But they had, and he’d made a very bad mistake in believing them. Such gullibility wasn’t at all like him, and the sense of having been made a fool of was irritating.
Unfortunately, it seemed Grace had been just outside the house, watching and listening. That strange little sound he’d heard outside the window had probably been her; leaving a gap in the curtains, even a tiny one, had been another uncharacteristic mistake. Some days were just a bitch.
He and Conrad’s team had quickly withdrawn, leaving no fingerprints or other sign of their presence behind, and the scene in the bedroom had looked pretty much as they had planned. Any cop walking in on that, two men half-naked together in a bedroom, both of them shot in the head, and one’s wife missing—well, it wouldn’t take a genius to figure it out. Minneapolis’s finest had reacted just as he had expected; they were being circumspect, keeping details from the media, but Grace was their prime suspect.
He had thought she would seek help immediately, so he had returned to his luxurious home in Wayzata to wait. He wasn’t worried about her accusations; after all, why would he kill two people in order to steal some documents he could obtain by simply asking for them? He was a respected and well-connected member of the community. He was on two hospital boards, he gave regularly and generously to all the politically correct charities, and several of the richest families in Minnesota had hopes—useless ones, of course—of enticing him into the fold by way of marriage. Moreover, he had an alibi in the form of his housekeeper, Antonetta Dolk. She would swear he had been working in his study all evening, that she had even taken coffee to him. Antonetta could pass any lie-detector test devised by man, a useful ability in a housekeeper, and one he valued far more than dusting. She worked, of course, for the Foundation; he had surrounded himself with people loyal only to him.
To think that the documents had surfaced after so long! They had come out of an insignificant dig in southern France, a dig that had produced so little, and nothing that appeared of any great age, that the documents hadn’t drawn any attention. Certainly no one whose job it was to evaluate all finds and report anything interesting to him had found anything intriguing in documents that seemed to be only a few centuries old. He would have to take care of the bungler—another job for Conrad. If the documents had been correctly evaluated, they would never have been photographed, stored, and the photographs sent to Grace St. John for routine translation. None of this would have happened, and the information would be in his hands instead of Grace’s.
It was Ford who had alerted him to the content of the obscure documents, and therefore caused his own death. Life could be so ironic, Parrish thought. Ford’s chance comment about Grace’s latest project, something about the Knights Templar, had set events into motion.
Parrish had quickly checked the assignment records and traced the original documents to their storage location in Paris. The French could be so difficult about allowing artifacts, even not-so-old ones, out of the country. Parrish had sent his people in to retrieve the papers, only to find that they had been destroyed, apparently by fire—though nothing else in the vault
had been damaged. Nothing remained of the documents except a fine, white ash.
Grace St. John had the only existing copies. And according to the assignment record, she had been working on the translation for three days. Grace was good at her job; in fact, she was the best language expert on staff. He couldn’t take the chance that she had already deciphered enough of the documents to know what she had; she, and everyone else who knew what she’d been working on, had to be eliminated.
Strange that Grace should prove more difficult than either Ford or Bryant. How long had he known her? Almost ten years? She had always seemed such a shy, mousy type, no makeup, her hair scraped back in an unflattering braid, slightly overweight. Her complete lack of style was an affront to his sensibilities. For all that, several times over the years he had been tempted to seduce her. Likely he had been bored, between women; little Grace presented something of a challenge, with her ridiculous middle-class morals. She “loved” her husband, and was faithful to him. But she had perfect skin, like translucent porcelain, and the most astonishingly carnal mouth he’d ever seen. Parrish smiled, feeling the blood pool in his groin as he considered the uses to which he could put that mouth, so wide and soft and pouty. Poor old Ford had certainly lacked the imagination to enjoy her as he could have!
She would be as helpless in the streets as any child. Anything could have happened to her during the night. She might already be dead.
If so, one problem would be conveniently solved, but he sincerely hoped she was still alive. She would keep the papers with her, and when Conrad found her, he would find the papers. If any of the human trash that prowled the streets at night killed her, however, her computer would be taken and fenced, and the papers thrown away. Once the copied documents disappeared into the maw of the night world, they would likely never surface again. They would be gone, and with them the long-searched-for, critical information. There would no longer be a purpose in the Foundation, and his plans would be reduced to so much ash, just like the original documents.