I knew he was close to the edge and I said, “Take it easy. I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid. It took me a few hours to work it out, but I have some geek friends, and a thorough electronic scan of the box showed me where the sensor switch was. Did you really believe I wouldn’t try to open it?”
I picked up my cell and dialed. After a moment I heard Noddy’s inimitable, “Wha’?”and said, “Noddy, will you bring it up please?” I hung up and saw them both looking back at me. I said, “It’s on its way.” I glanced at the clock. “But before we wrap this up, there is one more thing I need to be settled.”
Perfectly on cue, the doorbell rang. I called out, “Come on in.”
I heard the door open and her voice, smiling, calling down the hall in her beautiful, husky, cut-glass tones as she walked, “Mary-Jane couldn’t make it. She—”
She froze as she stepped into the room and looked around. She saw del Roble first, then she saw Rupert. I was already on my feet studying their reactions as I slipped behind her and locked the door. As I came back in, del Roble was scowling, but Rupert was getting to his feet, his hands were shaking, even his left knee was shaking. I could see his eyes glistening with tears and he was having trouble speaking as he reached out for her. Catherine’s hands went to her mouth and she looked back at me then at Rupert.
Finally, he said it. “Mary-Jane? Your hair… Your eyes…”
She shook her head and turned to me again. I never saw so many emotions in one pair of eyes at the same time—shock, fear, anxiety, confusion, but most of all betrayal. He said, “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again. I thought…” Then, as the tears spilled over, “Why?”
She kept staring at me. As he stepped toward her, she backed away. I was blocking her exit to the door. She said, “What is this? What have you done?”
I said, not for the first time that day, “Sit down.”
I walked to my dining table and leaned my ass against it. I pulled a Camel from my pack and lit up. As I let out the smoke, I looked at her, where she was staring at me. I said, “I had a hunch. I didn’t want to believe it. I wanted to believe the story about the good sister and the bad sister, but I had to know the truth.” I inhaled deeply again and watched her for some reaction. There wasn’t one. I said, “You played the vulnerable victim who was falling for me, her knight in shining armor, but you set me up twice to murder del Roble for you—or at least be in the frame for his killing. Once in New York, where you took pot shots at him from out on the river, in the hopes of starting a gunfight where either I’d kill him or you would take him out and make it look like me. Then again with your plan at the beach house.
“Only both plans went wrong, not only because del Roble here decided to do some thinking for himself, but also because I wouldn’t play ball. I kept telling you I wouldn’t be your hit man, but you thought you could get to me and play me. You almost did, but not quite.” I paused and nodded, and spoke with genuine admiration. “You handle a .44 pretty good for a girl.”
She didn’t say anything so I went on. “But your planning is about as good as del Roble’s, Catherine. Using my gun and telling del Roble you had the box? That was stupid. And that was what began to confirm for me that you and Mary-Jane were the same person.
“When I went to collect Mary-Jane from the abbey, she’d gone. Why would she do that when she’d already told me she had arranged for you to come and get me? Then del Roble didn’t even bother to try dealing with me. He went straight to a meeting with Mary-Jane at the beach house. That meant he really believed she probably had the box. But I knew that you, Catherine, had the box, because I had given it to you. The trouble was, you were losing track of who you were—and when.
“But from where I was, it was simple. Either you had given the gun and the box to Mary-Jane—and that didn’t make any sense—or you were Mary-Jane. And the more I thought about that, the more sense it started to make. When I saw you in the full light of my headlights, even in your blonde wig, that pretty much clinched it. The similarity was too much, even for sisters.”
Nobody spoke. I stood then went and poured myself a whiskey. Rupert returned to his chair, but Catherine was frozen. Her eyes were glazed. She looked catatonic. I perched back on the table and started talking again.
“It also explained why you asked me to have dinner with you at The King’s Hart, and you never showed. You were busy cracking my safe, with the skills you’d learned from your old pal Strickland, the pro yegg.”
I took a pull on the Bushmills and thought for a moment. Rupert was lost in his own world of pain, but del Roble was watching me carefully. I glanced at him and turned back to Catherine.
“But the real mystery was the third woman in the fantasy. The queen of smoke and mirrors—Sinead Tiernan. At first I wondered if she and Mary-Jane Carter were the same person too. But then I realized the connection went deeper than that. Didn’t it, Catherine?” As I asked her, I saw that her hands were beginning to shake, and tears were beginning to spill from her eyes. “You were both trapped in del Roble’s mad dream. You were both prisoners of his fantasy. God alone knows how long you’d been trapped there, but somehow one day you met. At first you both shared a dream of your own. To escape. To get away and have what you called, a normal life. But then the shared dream grew into something more. It grew into love, and you became lovers. It wasn’t Rupert who made Mary-Jane feel like somebody for the first time in her life. It wasn’t Rupert who made her feel valuable inside. Rupert wasn’t her knight in shining armor. It was Sinead. You were in love with her, and she loved you. And that was something that was not allowed by the Brotherhood.”
She spoke suddenly, not looking at me but at an empty space. “I trusted you.”
I felt an unexpected stab of anger and heard myself snap, “Trust is a two-way street, sister. So what did you do? You took action.” I turned to del Roble. “How did it go? You were working on Hugo because you knew the world’s future in terms of energy lay with Hugo’s research and development. You knew you had to control this man. So you had Mary-Jane hook him, then Sinead seduce him and work to take control of his company. Am I wrong?”
He sneered at the floor and said, “You know nothing! Our purpose was to kill his research. You understand nothing!”
I ignored him and went on, turning to Catherine. “This was the opportunity you had been looking for. I don’t know for sure, but two gets you twenty Sinead was highly placed in the organization.”
“She was one of my most trusted lieutenants. She is a hybrid of the purest Ael strains.”
“So she was in a position to get hold of something of the greatest value to you—to all of you.” Del Roble put his face in his hands and whispered something I couldn’t hear. I went on. “She stole it from under your nose and she gave it to Hugo. And he put it somewhere you couldn’t get hold of it—in a safe, a vault. It wasn’t important, because you were so damned confident you’d had him sign everything over to you and to your organization of raving lunatics.
“The poor bastard didn’t realize that when he signed his amended will, he was also signing his death sentence. Knowing his will was in your favor, you had him killed. But you were wrong, weren’t you? He hadn’t left everything to you. Because Sinead had made him promise to leave the box and its contents to his nephew, Rupert, whom Mary-Jane could control as her own little puppet.”
Del Roble shook his head and gazed at me as though I was insane. “You have no idea what you are playing with, Murdoch. You have no idea. These stupid girls have jeopardized everything!” He turned to Catherine. He was appealing to her but she avoided his eyes. “How could you do this? You know what is at stake!”
I plowed on. “You still didn’t know, did you? Maybe you knew someone had gone bad. Maybe you even suspected Sinead. But you thought Mary-Jane was still on your side. So you dispatched her, the very woman who was out to steal it, to get back your relic—or whatever the hell it is. She recruited Strickland through Sinead and got him to steal it. He took
it home to his pad and she went to him that night.” I turned to Rupert. “The night you drove her home to Whitechapel. The night she left you.”
I gazed at Catherine awhile. Then I said to her, “You people are special. You lay down in bed with him. You had sex with him, and while he was sleeping, you shot him in the brain with your fiancé’s gun, so that he would be in the frame for it. I think that makes you special.” I had to stop and laugh.
Her face was changing. It seemed to be contracting in on itself. She hissed, “I trusted you.”
The doorbell rang again and I called out to Noddy to let himself in. I heard his key in the lock and, after a moment, he stepped in. He glanced at Catherine, but she didn’t even see him. Her eyes, like Rupert’s and del Roble’s, were fixed on the bundle he had in his hands. He passed it to me and I put it on the table beside me. Noddy left quietly.
The object was wrapped in a big white tea towel. It was the size of a large bread roll, about two and a half inches deep and six inches long. I put my hand on it and studied it for a moment.
“I wanted to trust you too, Catherine, but every time you changed your story, the one thing that remained constant was that what you really wanted was for me to take care of del Roble for you. It was obvious, once I thought about it. You had taken something from del Roble you believed was going to make you rich and free, but you knew he was a ruthless son of a bitch who was going to hunt you down to the ends of the earth to get it back. So one of you came up with the plan. Sell me the story of a blackmail payoff then set it up so there’s a fire fight and get me to kill del Roble. But, of course, once the damned box was in my hands, you couldn’t get it back. Because while you were ransacking my apartment, hunting me in Spain, tearing the Land Rover apart, this”—I began slowly to unfold the tea towel—“this was in the post, to my good friend Noddy.” I paused and looked at them in turn. “All of this killing, murder, torture, violence, war, is over this.”
I unfolded the last of the tea towel. Lying there on the white cloth was what looked like a very smooth, very black, giant pebble, hollowed out in the middle to look like a shallow bowl with symbols engraved in a circle around the inside. I looked at it a while, then raised my eyes to the row of three faces that were staring at the stone.
Catherine’s face was transfigured. Her green eyes were lost in a dream and her face was drained of all blood. Rupert looked infinitely sad, gazing at a simple rock that his woman had come to steal from him and had wound up stealing her. Then there was del Roble, whose eyes were on fire, whose tongue kept flicking like a lizard’s, whose fingers were twitching.
It was Rupert who finally spoke. He said, “It’s supposed to be the Ael Rune.”
Del Roble turned and screamed at him, “Supposed to be? Supposed to be? This stone has been in our vaults for over fifteen thousand years. We have guarded it since the interglacial melt started, you fucking gray moron!”
I interrupted. “This has been in your vaults for fifteen thousand years?”
“Yes!” He snapped it, got to his feet and rushed across the room to where the box had fallen. He picked it up and took two strides at me then waved the box in my face. “Have you touched this? Have you felt it? You fucking gray fucking moron! You bald fucking ape! Have you touched it? Do you know what it’s made of? Have you felt anything like it? Ever?”
I said, “Yes. It’s carbon fiber.”
He screamed a laugh that sounded like a parakeet, slammed the box on the floor and jumped on it. He staggered and almost fell, then stamped on it with his heel five or six times, grunting as he did it. The box remained undented. He turned to me, pointing at the box, “Take it. Keep it. Have it analyzed. There is nothing your retards have ever produced that comes close.” He took a step closer, pointing at the stone with a trembling hand. “Bring a hammer. Bring a drill. Bring a masonry drill. A diamond tip. Try to scratch it. Try!”
I said, “Take it easy.”
He screamed, “Try! Have you any conception what this is? It’s the Holy Grail! The Philosopher’s Stone! This is a nano-particle programmer! You slugs haven’t even begun to dream about this kind of thing. This technology bridges relativity and quantum mechanics. With this”—he pointed a trembling finger at it—“you can create matter out of simple possibilities! Can you even conceive of that?”
He was screaming, almost hysterical, so I shouted at him, “Take it easy!”
“All my fucking life I was reared caring for this sacred stone. Waiting for the time, herding sacred goats during the day and sleeping at night in the light of the stone. Since I was a small child, I was reared to care for it. And you gray morons sneer and mock.”
I got to my feet. His face was crimson and the tendons in his neck were standing out. The vein in his head was swollen. I thought he was going to have a stroke. I said, “Take it easy, del Roble!”
But as I spoke, something horrific happened. Maybe the stress caused a kickback to the drugs they had given me in Çalares, but as he screamed, “Give it to me-e-e!” his voice seemed to rise in pitch to a horrible screech, his skin stretched then changed from red to green and blue in luminous patches across his face and neck. There was a snap and sharp spines sprang from the back of his neck, webbed with multicolored skin and scales. The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I went cold. Then he spat and I felt the skin on my face burn. As I closed my eyes and turned away, he lunged at me and knocked me to the floor.
All hell broke loose. I heard Catherine screaming and Rupert shouting. There was a crash of falling furniture. I scrambled to my feet, my face burning down one side, and saw del Roble, still freakishly distorted, making for the door. Catherine got there first and clawed at his face, but my hallucinations must have been getting worse, because her face was like his, covered in colored scales with a wild, webbed crest rising from the back of her neck. The screeching was like a nightmare version of feeding time at the parrot house. I held my head and saw Rupert rush at Catherine and put his arms around her to pull her back. He was sobbing and kept repeating over and over, “Oh my God, oh my God.” But as he took hold of her, she turned on him and, with a horrific savagery, plunged a long talon into his belly and wrenched upward. He looked astonished and searched for her eyes, but as he fell, she was already turning away.
Meanwhile del Roble had grabbed the stone. I saw him slip it into the big, left hip pocket of his baggy jacket and lunge for the door. Catherine raced after him. I staggered over to Rupert and checked his pulse, but he had died almost instantly. I stood and pulled my phone from my pocket. I punched Russell’s number and when he answered, I said, “Don’t ask questions. Call your friend the brigadier. Tell him to come to my place with a couple of his most discreet friends—ten minutes ago. There is a big mess. And I mean big!”
I didn’t wait for an answer. I took the stairs a flight at a time.
Chapter Eighteen
I hit Church Street at a run. At first all I saw were crowds and chaos—a red double-decker bus pulling away from the stop, a taxi stopping with his hazards flashing, people dodging cars, crossing the road, spilling in and out of shops. Then a car gave a long blast on its horn and I saw them. Ten or fifteen yards to my right, del Roble had the driver’s door of a black Audi 8 open into the traffic and was trying to climb in. Catherine was clawing at him, trying to drag him out. I guess she had the strength of madness because he was getting the worst of it.
I tried to dodge through the crowd at a sprint. It wasn’t easy. But as I was nearing the car, del Roble turned and gave Catherine a powerful backhand that sent her sprawling into the path of a car. Brakes squealed. There were more blasts from horns. Men were getting out of their cars, looking angry. I negotiated a small clot of people and heard a voice call, “Here! What’s your bloomin’ hurry?” As I got past them, del Roble was pulling out, doing a U-turn across the stream of traffic. I looked for Catherine and found her climbing into a convertible Merc, two cars back. I saw her lean under the dash and knew she was hotwiring it. I was sorry
for the owner, but it gave me precious seconds. I turned and sprinted up the road toward my TVR, pulling my key out as I ran.
I vaulted the door and hit the ignition. The engine exploded into life and I pulled out into the traffic as Catherine’s Mercedes was doing a U-turn after del Roble. I could see him at the bottom of the hill, caught at the lights. There was a hell of a lot of honking and shouting, and I apologized as best I could, then accelerated down the road after Catherine. As I approached, I saw her shaking something big and black in her left hand. Then I realized she was shaking a piece free from her handbag. Next thing, she was pulling into the central reservation, heading toward the lights to draw level with del Roble and blow him away. I was having déjà vu.
I guess it was del Roble’s lucky day, because as she was pulling up next to him, the lights turned green and he was off like a greyhound with pepper up its ass. His tires screamed as he turned right into Kensington High Street and hightailed it down toward Olympia. I wondered then where he thought he was going or even if he knew.
Catherine was after him like a shot, jumping the raised island and cutting across the oncoming traffic. The TVR Daemon will do zero to sixty in three seconds. I was on her tail like a coyote with an Acme jetpack chasing a roadrunner with lead boots.
There are nine million people in London, and they were all on Kensington High Street that day, only del Roble and Catherine didn’t seem to see them. Del Roble was doing sixty, breaking and swerving to avoid other traffic, and accelerating fast every time he saw an opening—and sometimes when he didn’t. Catherine seemed to be stuck to him with a tractor beam. Their reflexes were extraordinary. I was having trouble keeping up with them, and if it hadn’t been for the power and acceleration of the Daemon, I think I would have lost them.
But del Roble didn’t even try to shake us. He went hell for leather in a straight line—Kensington High Street, Hammersmith Road, Chiswick High Road. It was one, long road, and he jumped every light along the way. And Catherine and I were stuck to his tail every inch of the way, driving along the central reservation, screeching around buses, dodging taxis. It was a miracle nobody got killed. Whatever ancient gods take care of pedestrians, they were out in force in London that day.
A Love to Kill For Page 24