by Gregg Loomis
"Sump'n like that," Morse agreed through a mouthful of his chili steak. He swallowed, then added, "Don' mean somebody with sophisticated equipment didn't kill the professor for it. Where he get that stuff, anyway?"
Lang shrugged. "I assume it was a product of his work."
Product of their work. Lang was certain it was the same powder that had been in Yadish's laboratory, too.
Morse was unsuccessfully using a paper napkin to wipe a brownish stain from his shirtfront. "Oh, well, jacket'll cover most of it," he observed before looking into Lang's face. "You thinkin' somethin', Mr. Reilly, like maybe somethin' you'd like to share with me?"
Lang shook his head in denial. "What makes you think that?"
The detective's eyes narrowed," 'Cause I know you, Mr. Reilly. I knows there's somethin' here you ain't tellin me."
"And how do you know that?"
"I seen the shots-fired report down to Underground last week or so. Now, I don' much believe some perp takes a shot or two at you in a restaurant 'cause you with his woman." He paused. "Although you do seem to piss people off, Mr. Reilly. Some dude always tryin' to whack you. This time, though, I 'spect there's a reason-a reason that has somethin' to do with this dead professor and this powder that's really gold. Now, you wouldn't be planning on interferin' with a police investigation, would you, Mr. Reilly?"
Lang arched his eyebrows, an innocent man. The gesture, he hoped, hid his annoyance that, once again, the black detective had read him so clearly. "Me? Interfere?"
Morse shook his head in resignation. "Why I feel we done had this conversation before?"
Lang gave himself time to think by taking a swig from his paper drink cup. To tell Morse of Yadish's murder and what had happened in Amsterdam would only encourage the policeman to contact Van Decker and learn of the Dutch inspector's suspicions.
In short, there was no upside to telling what he knew.
"I have no idea why you'd think that," he said.
There was a sucking sound from the straw in Morse's cup. "Mr. Reilly, I got one homicide you kinda involved in. I don't want no more people breakin' into your house, blowin' up your car, or generally sowin' death 'n' destruction."
Lang stood, extending a hand, the meal over. "That I can understand, Detective. Believe me, I want any of the above less than you do."
TWENTY-FIVE
Park Place
2660 Peachtree Road
Atlanta, Georgia
6:27 p.m.
The Same Day
Knowing the temptations fast cars held for young men, Lang avoided the valet and parked his own Porsche in its assigned space and took the elevator to the twenty- fourth floor. His mind was still on what he had heard at Georgia Tech.
Yadish and Lewis had apparently achieved, or were about to achieve, what had fascinated man for centuries: alchemy, the transformation of base elements into gold. But what the hell did that have to do with finding a substitute for fossil fuels? The white powder and gold must have been by-products. Without the notes of their experiments, it would be difficult if not impossible to re-create the method by which they had produced the powder.
Another mystery: If someone wanted the gold-making process, why kill for it rather than steal it? Lang's original premise-that the two scientists had been murdered to conceal something or stop whatever they had been doing-was still the most likely motive. That was also consistent with the attempt on his own life in Belgium.
But conceal or stop what?
Something connected to those unknowable experiments.
Then there were the Hebrew documents he had copied. Yadish had thought them important enough to hide. Could they be related to the motive of his killer? One way to find out: Get them translated. There was a professor of Hebrew history at Emory, one he had consulted before…
No, he decided, best not to involve anyone nearby. Whoever had murdered the two scientists knew Lang was in Atlanta, and his consulting a local might be noted. Far better to use someone less easily ascertainable who understood Hebrew, both modern and ancient, and who was well equipped to take care of himself.
The door pinged open and Lang stepped onto the plush carpet of the foyer. Stopping to check the telltales he had left on his doorknob, he grunted his approval that they were still there. He clicked the key in the lock and swung the door open.
Grumps interrupted his twenty-three-and-a-half-hour- a-day nap to regard his master with one brown eye. His tail beat a slow rhythm on the floor.
"What a joy to come home to such enthusiasm," Lang said, reaching for the leash beside the door. "If you think you can spare the time
…"
Outside Lang made two decisions: First, the chances for anonymity were better if he left the Gulfstream for a commercial flight, even if that meant leaving his weapon behind. Second, he would see if Alicia was willing to make last-minute plans for tonight.
He frowned as he and Grumps headed back for the high-rise condo. The woman was popping up in his mind with increasing frequency. It wasn't the deep love that had grown between him and Dawn, his wife; nor was it the lust at first sight Gurt had inspired. His feelings for Alicia were… well, different, if undefined.
Quit introspecting and start dialing, he told himself, or the woman will already have made dinner arrangements.
TWENTY-SIX
Middle Temple Inn
Fleet Street
London
1022 Hours
Two Days Later
Lang was still red-eyed from lack of sleep. Even multiple drinks and the made-up beds into which the first-class seats had been transformed had not cured his aircraft- induced insomnia. Arriving at Gatwick Airport along with the dawn, he had randomly chosen a taxi rather than picking one up at the hack stand. He wanted no replay of Brussels.
The cab dutifully deposited him at the Stafford, a small hotel on a cul-de-sac in St. James's. He was in time for an ample breakfast in a lobby that resembled a parlor Queen Victoria might have visited.
A telephone call, shower, and change of clothes later, he had decided to enjoy the sights of London on foot. Grossing in front of Buckingham Palace, he strode across St. James's Park and Horse Guards to Trafalgar Square, where he paused, ostensibly watching pigeons and traffic swirl around Nelson's Column, an activity that gave him reason to look around like any gawking tourist should anyone be following him.
No one showed him any particular interest.
A short walk down the Strand, past the Savoy, and he stopped again, this time looking at the playbill posted by the theater in front of the hotel. If Lang were being followed, he was unable to detect it.
A block or so farther along was a brief section of old Roman wall that marked where the city of Whitehall ended and the city of London began. It also marked the place where the Strand became Fleet Street, once the center of the city's newspaper and publishing industry, enterprises long ago farmed out to the suburbs, former colonies, or anyplace where labor unions had little sway.
In the twelfth century, the Knights Templar had had a temple here. A short, unmarked path led from the street to what remained of it. Just past that was the ant hill-like Temple Bar, home to most of London's barristers. They located here because of its proximity to the Old Bailey, for centuries past the site of the principal criminal courts.
Lang trudged up a flight of stairs, pausing to flatten himself against the stone wall to make way for a distraught young lady in heels, a black gown, a starched white split dickey, and with a white periwig held atop blond curls by the hand that didn't have the briefcase in it. She gave Lang a baleful stare, muttered something that might have been, "Thanks," and hurriedly clattered on her way down.
Being late for court apparently was just as uncomfortable here as in the United States.
About halfway down a dingy hall, Lang stopped in front of a door bearing a plaque that announced, j. annueliwitz, barrister. There was no bell, so Lang knocked.
"Enter," came a voice from the other side just before the
sound of an electric bolt sliding back.
Once he was inside the door swung shut, the only sound being that of the lock returning to its place. J. Annueliwitz, barrister, like Lang, had old habits that died hard.
Lang stepped into what could have been the wake of a tornado: Papers were piled, not stacked, on every flat surface, including the floor. An occasional leather book cover peeked out from the debris. Roughly down the middle of the room a path had been cleared, and in the middle of it stood an older man.
"Lang Reilly," he observed, pushing spectacles back up on his nose. "You must be sorely oppressed to come to me for help."
Lang returned the ensuing bear hug as best he could. "Aren't most of the people who come in here?"
The man stepped back as though to inspect his visitor. A fringe of white hair encircled an otherwise pink scalp. "Oppressed or lost."
He was wearing a starched white shirt unbuttoned at the collar. Part of it hung outside gray trousers held up by bright red suspenders. Turning, he led Lang into a tiny inner office that was, if possible, more littered than the room they had left. Like icebergs, a computer monitor and rack of briar pipes on the desk towered above an arctic sea of paper.
Jacob Annueliwitz surveyed one of two Naugahyde chairs before stooping and gathering up a file folder, spilling its entrails onto the floor. "Sit, sit." He retreated behind the desk. "Sit and tell me your life's story since I saw you last. Is Gurt well?"
The unintentional wounds are the most painful, Lang thought as he gingerly sat. "Don't know. She left me almost a year ago."
"Can't say I blame her, nice girl that she is." He was reaching for a pipe. "And such a bounder you are."
Lang watched the pipe being packed with tobacco from a leather pouch. "I thought Rachel had finally gotten you to quit."
He nodded as he struck a wooden match. "And so she has… at home, at least. That's why I still have this wretched office: to have a place where I can enjoy a pipe or two in relative calm."
Calm was hardly this man's life story. Born to Holocaust survivors in Poland, he and his family emigrated to the new state of Israel after the war. As a young adult Jacob had come to university at Oxford after his obligatory military service. For reasons known only to him, he had preferred the dank English climate to the Mediterranean sun of Palestine and had become a citizen, then studied law. His new citizenship did not deprive him of his Israeli one, and he had been contracted by Israel's intelligence agency, Mossad, to keep an eye on Arab embassies and diplomats.
Both MI5 and the resident CIA had been aware of his activities and, if not approving, did little to interfere. After millennia of shifting attitudes toward them, the Jews felt compelled to spy evenhandedly on friend and foe alike. What had not been so widely known was Jacob's expertise-some said artistry-with explosives, learned during his time in the Israeli army. He was the nuncio of nitrates, the pundit of plastique, a technician of T4.
He and Lang had met while Lang was briefly assigned to the Agency's London office and had become fast friends, a relationship further cemented when each had had a chance to save the other's life.
Lang inhaled deeply before the blue cloud of foul- smelling tobacco smoke reached where he was sitting. "Does Rachel know you still smoke here?"
Jacob took the pipe out of his mouth long enough to survey the bowl. "As you know, the source of all law lies in its enforceability. I think Locke made that observation."
"He probably didn't have a wife who wanted him to quit smoking."
"Quite likely. Now, what, besides my scintillating wit and brilliant powers of observation, brings you here? Or, in the vulgate, what crack have you gotten your arse into now?"
Jacob listened without interruption, poking and prodding his pipe with what looked like a nail. When Lang finished, Jacob made a sucking noise on the pipe before tapping it against an already overflowing ashtray.
"Bloody hell! I'm sorry to hear about Professor Lewis. Seemed a nice chap. For a goy, anyway. Handled a really nasty divorce for him. He wanted to get as far away from his ex as possible. Atlanta was as distant as I could do for him."
Lang didn't reply.
Jacob extended a hand across the desk. "These Hebrew writings, you think they may contain clues as to who is after what?"
They're one of those stones I'd hate to leave unturned."
"I suppose you want me to translate them for you."
"You bragged you could read the language."
"No brag, lad. I can and do." He moved his fingers in a give-it-here gesture. "Let's see."
Lang reached into his coat pocket and produced them. "You understand those are only copies. The originals are somewhere in Austria."
Jacob was pushing his glasses up again. "I'll bear that in mind if it becomes bloody relevant." He looked up. "What's your stake in this, anyway?"
"Somebody tried to kill me, remember?"
Jacob was sucking on an empty pipe. "Happens daily to someone in your country, if what I see on the telly is correct."
"This wasn't in the U.S.; it was in Brussels and Amsterdam."
Jacob looked up. "I can see why any number of blokes would be interested in the process of making gold, if that's what your two murdered scientists were really doing. I'm a bit at a loss as to what an ancient manuscript would have to do with it."
"That's what I hope to find out."
Jacob was inspecting the copies carefully, as though they might contain something toxic.
"Quite thick for a truly old manuscript," Jacob muttered, running his free hand across a shiny scalp. "Not something I can do in an hour or two. Have to consult references and the like." He made a vague motion toward the debris of his outer office.
"I don't think I'm in a rush."
Jacob put the papers down and produced a cell phone. "Excellent! I'll ring up Rachel and tell her to put a little more water in dinner's soup."
Lang felt a jolt of near panic.
In the tight intelligence community, Rachel Annueliwitz had been famous as the world's worst cook. Excuses to avoid her dinner parties were as creative as they were varied. Some merited Pulitzer prizes for fiction. The last time Lang had been cornered into eating one of her concoctions had been over two years ago, and he still could not decide whether it had burned most going in or out. Either way, he had been reduced to a state of flatulence that would have rivaled a Greyhound bus for emissions.
"You were kind enough to feed me last time."
"Loaned you the Morris, too," Jacob added, referring to the diminutive automobile he had driven as long as Lang had known him. "So what?"
"Last time I didn't exactly feel free to be seen in public. Seems only fair that Rachel not have the burden of feeding me again. Let me take you both out."
Jacob had put the phone down and was using the naillike thing to scrape the bowl of his pipe, producing a crunching sound. "Fair? What else does the woman have to do? Besides, I'll bet you eat only takeaway, haven't had a good home-cooked meal in a bit."
And not likely to have one tonight, Lang thought. Not only is love blind; it has no taste buds. the prospects were bleak either way. The average London pub or restaurant provided only marginally better fare, usually featuring stringy beef burned beyond recognition and vegetables so thoroughly boiled that they offered little color and less taste. Lang had a theory that this small island had established an empire and dominated the world because the Drakes and Hawkinses, the Wellingtons and Nelsons, the Churchills became morally and mentally tough by enduring English cooking, second only to Aleut Eskimo whale blubber as the worst cuisine in the world. A man who could enjoy steak-and-kidney pie was unlikely to flinch at an enemy broadside. Faced with eating Yorkshire pudding or charging emplaced cannon, who would not choose the guns? The onslaught of the Luftwaffe was nothing compared to a lifetime of blanched peas.
Waterloo was not won on the playing fields of Eton. It was won at the English dinner table.
The quality of British food, or lack thereof, was the reason
Chinese and Indian establishments flourished in London. In the last few years one or two French eateries had opened, with great success.
Lang had an inspiration. "Why don't we try Mirabelle's?" Although the food wasn't a whole lot better than the city's dismal average, the checks were astronomical. The theory, Lang guessed, was, Who was going to complain about a dinner that cost more than Great Britain's average weekly salary? "It'll give Rachel a chance to put on some nice clothes."
Jacob grinned, agreeing. "The bird does like to tart up a bit. You'll stop by for a tot or so before dinner?"
Lang tried not to show his relief as he assented.
That evening Lang took the tube's Waterloo Line to St. George's Circle at South Dock, where contemporary high-rises peered at Westminster and the Houses of Parliament across the Thames. Since the addition to the skyline of the London Eye, a huge Ferris wheel along the Embankment, the view was different, perhaps slightly disconcertingly so, from the one Lang had known. The subway, or "tube," had its own amusement system of aspiring musicians, singers, jugglers, and magicians. Lang paused a few minutes at his stop to see an attractive young lady contort her body into what he had thought were anatomically impossible positions before dropping a pound coin into her bowl and heading up the stairs.
Once on the surface, he walked a few blocks to Lambeth Road. Ahead of him were the massive naval guns that marked the Imperial War Museum. He turned left and entered the foyer of a glass-and-steel tower indistinguishable from its neighbors.
The Annueliwitz living quarters were nothing like Jacob's office. Chrome and glass furniture threatened to be a great deal less comfortable than it was. Several pieces of modern sculpture displayed on acrylic stands looked as though they had been machine parts in a former life. On the walls were squares of earth-toned canvas that could have come from a military shelter, each a testament to the gullibility of collectors of modern art.