by Gayle Lynds
But Staffeld was fully aware that he wasn't the only one who didn't want that to happen. Neither did Vince and Creighton Redmond, because all Staffeld had to do was open his mouth and he could bring them down with him.
"You may be right," Staffeld said carefully. "Write this down." He gave him the ten numbers of a bank account in Colombia, South America. "Since I'm running such a ridiculously high risk to help you out on this matter, you're going to have to pay me more to do the dirty deed. A lot more. In fact, twelve million dollars."
Vince was stunned. It was a fortune. He said firmly, "There's no way I've been authorized to give you such an exorbitant sum—"
Staffeld filled his voice with menace. "Don't be a stupid turd. What I can do for you is worth far more than your original offer, and we both know it. If I hold the press conference you want, I risk exposing myself. Worse, I know bloody well you won't leave it at that. You'll hunt me down like a fox in the heather. I expect the money as a goodwill gesture and a guarantee I can disappear and protect myself."
So that was it, Vince thought. Staffeld was as smart as his reputation at Scotland Yard indicated. "I'll wire two million dollars now. The rest after the press conference."
Staffeld's voice remained harsh. "Half now. Half after. Six million wired."
Vince paused. Annoyed, he agreed. "It'll take me a couple of hours to arrange the first installment. I'll need a day for the second. Where do I call you?"
"You don't. I'll be in touch." Staffeld paused. "I hear you have three children."
Vince felt a wave of apprehension. "That's none of your business."
"Your wife's pregnant." In his hotel room, Staffeld found himself staring into a cracked mirror at his small, dark eyes. "That's just so you'll know I've been busy, too, lad. I also know you've got pit bulls. I have mine. If you break our agreement. . . if you kill me . . . my pit bull will hunt you and your family down. One by one, he'll kill all of you. Your father and uncles. Your brothers and sisters. Your cousins. But I've instructed him to start with your children. Understood, my boy?"
"Understood."
After they'd hung up, Vince sat alone in the den. He would have to take some precautions. They needed Staffeld alive for at least another twenty-four hours.
35
11:15 AM, SUNDAY
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
The Romanov Theatre was a smaller version of the magnificent movie palaces that had once been the lifeblood of the nation's entertainment. The lobby was ornate with gilt, marble, faded red velvet, and carved moldings and ceiling. Tense and watchful, despite Sam's certainty no one knew of his grandfather's theater, Julia and Sam descended ornately tiled steps from the apartment to the lobby.
Sam carried the flashlight, while she had the Walther because he was going to teach her how to use it. But this time she held it at her side, pointing down. Sam had insisted she transport it safely, "Not hugged close to your chest like a pet dog." As they reached the baroque lobby, she could almost hear the ring of the antique cash register and the excited voices of adults and children pouring in for the next matinee beneath the high rococo ceiling.
She said, "Tell me about the Romanovs. How did your grandfather get from there to here?"
Sam smiled, remembering his grandfather's colorful tales. "He was the son of Grand Duke Michael. When the October Revolution erupted, he was just a schoolboy, but by its end he was a teenage soldier fighting Communists in the Ukraine. When the monarchy lost, his Romanov name was a death sentence. So he made his way overland to the Black Sea and spotted a British war ship leaving port. He dived in and swam to it. Years later many of the Romanovs, including Czar Nicholas and his immediate family, were canonized as saints by the church. But my grandfather would never have been. He was considered too leftist. Even though he fought for the monarchy, he believed in democracy. That was popular with neither the Royalists nor the Communists. And then he had the nerve to marry an American girl, which definitely took him out of the running for Romanov sainthood."
"He must've had a touch of flamboyance, too, to have built this theater."
Sam pulled open one of the double doors leading into the auditorium. A gust of cool, dank air enveloped them. "He loved movies. He always said they were medicine better than any in a pill cabinet."
"So what does that make you? A grand duke, too?"
He laughed. "No. Only sons, daughters, brothers, and sisters of emperors, and their children in the male line were grand dukes or grand duchesses." He paused for effect. "Since my mother is the Romanov, I'm just a prince."
"You're kidding."
"As always, I'm absolutely serious about everything."
"You're right. I should've known instantly. You're a prince of a fellow."
He grinned. "Good heavens, she believes me."
"I believe everything you tell me."
He howled. "Just like you do everything I tell you."
She raised her brows and shook her head. Sam had to have been a good spy—it was impossible to tell whether he was lying. Still, she smiled, because if he was a direct descendant of a Romanov emperor, which grand dukes certainly were, he could accurately claim to be a Russian prince.
They stood there a moment longer and peered into the auditorium. He felt her next to him, warm, inviting, and sadness swept through him for what he'd missed with Irini.
Julia was studying the auditorium. It was a cold, dark cavern with rows and rows of empty seats leading into what looked like a black, lightless pit. "No electricity?"
"None back here. It's been turned off at least five years. But there's plenty of space to shoot. First we'll talk about your weapon out here in the light."
He sat on the bottom step of the marble-tiled staircase and set the flashlight beside him. She chose a place nearly three feet from him.
He told her, "Sit closer so you can see."
She smiled a tight smile. "I can see fine."
He eyed her a moment, surprised. Then he took the gun from her bandaged hands. He had long fingers, and he handled the weapon with respect. "You stole a good gun. It's a Walther PPK with twenty-two caliber long-rifle ammunition—a weapon for an assassin who has a close-in job to execute. It's small, easy to conceal, and the smaller caliber is quieter. The disadvantage for most people is that it won't knock down an adult the way a weapon with nine or ten millimeter ammo will."
"Sounds as if I should've swiped something that shot bigger bullets."
"For someone like you, it'd be better," he admitted. "If you have lousy aim, you've got a greater chance at survival because all you have to do is put the larger caliber bullet anywhere—an arm for instance—and it'll blast most attackers off their feet. Which is good, because it gives you time to run. Or to close in and finish the kill."
She repressed a shudder. "What you're saying is an assassin's aim is perfect, so he—or she—relies on accuracy. But this is all I've got. I didn't know I needed to steal a gun with more powerful bullets."
He shook his head ruefully. "It's a damn shame you have to have any weapon at all." He showed her the safety button. "Push the button down, and the safety's on. Don't carry it around, load it, unload it, or dismantle it unless the safety's on." He checked the magazine. "Only two bullets gone. We don't have any more ammo for you, so there's no point teaching you to load the magazine." He slid the magazine back in. "This is a safer pistol than many, and one of the best self-loading ones around." He pointed again just above the hammer. "This is the signal pin, and when it's extruded that shows there's a cartridge in the chamber, which means the pistol's loaded. Even though it's uncocked, it's ready to use. All you have to do is pull the trigger through." He handed it to her carefully. "Stand up."
She took the gun, and now it felt heavy with ominous potential. She stood.
"Aim at the cash register."
"What?" She looked down at him.
He stared up at her unhappily. "The safety's on. Aim at the cash register. It's only ten feet away. You should be able to see that
."
"I can see it fine!" she snapped. She pointed the gun.
He sighed and stood. "Wrong. This is the way you do it." He took it from her, the warmth of his hand lingering against her skin. "Spread your feet for balance, one slightly behind the other. Grip the pistol like this." He used both hands with fingers overlooked. "Try it."
She retrieved the pistol, balanced, and used both hands to aim. Despite the bandages, her grip was sturdy.
"Better," he decided.
He moved in behind her, his legs pressed against hers, his chest against her back, his arms stretched along hers. She felt as if half her body had just been seared by a flame. Something deeply disconcerting passed from him to her. Sweat rose on her forehead.
"This is the way your hands should go." He worked her fingers around until they were just the way he wanted. He stepped back.
She tried to concentrate on her hands, on the gun, but his body seemed to be still pressed against hers and she breathed shallowly. She fought to calm herself. She bounced on her feet, testing her stability. She had a runner's reflexes, and anything to do with balance came easily. She lifted and lowered the pistol, drew it closer and then extended it again. The grip felt strangely comfortable.
With a swift movement, he took the Walther.
She turned. "Hey! I was just getting used to it!"
"I know." He handed the pistol back. "Do it again."
For the next twenty minutes they passed the gun back and forth, and each time she refound her balance and grip. Finally she seemed to know what to do instinctively.
He nodded, pleased. "You're a fast learner."
"It's all those years of being blind. My hands filled in for my sight."
For a moment he'd forgotten her blindness. He was fighting a losing battle for concentration. He didn't want her to have a gun anyway because it might make her death even more likely, and now that he was teaching her to use it, there was much too much body contact.
"Of course," he said, forcing his voice to be neutral. "Now let's pretend you're going to shoot." He showed her how with her right hand—her dominant hand—to use the thumb to push off the safety and her finger to pull the trigger through. "This cocks the hammer," he explained. "If for some reason the pistol won't shoot, pull the trigger again right away. Sometimes knocking the firing pin on the primer cap a second time forces even a faulty round to detonate."
She nodded. She pushed the thumb safety up and pretended to pull the trigger, at the same time completely aware of each of his movements, his closeness, and the radiating waves that rolled back and forth between them like a great, hot current. She gave a slight shake to her head. She tried to forget his presence, forget that he was making her feel emotions she didn't want to feel.
She concentrated, and soon she was able to make the practice moves fluidly.
He said, "Okay. You can shoot it a couple of times, but that's all. It's a lousy way to learn, and I'd never recommend it. But you don't have many bullets, and this is as good as we can do under the circumstances. Let's see whether you can hit a target."
They walked side by side toward the double doors into the dark auditorium.
The inside of the dark cavern seemed vast, although it probably held only five hundred people—far fewer than the Albert Hall or the Kennedy or even the Carnegie. As they walked deeper and deeper into the gloom, Julia had a peculiar feeling of déjà vu. It was almost as if she were blind again.
Sam switched on the flashlight. "Damn! It's too weak." A feeble beam of narrow light barely penetrated the deep, inky black of the auditorium. "I saw some batteries up in the kitchen. I hope they're not as old as these. Sit down here in the back row and think about how to hold a gun. Visualize it in your mind. I'll be right back."
A long shaft of light penetrated the theater as he opened the door and left.
Julia stared into blackness, and it seemed to call her. There was only a thin line of light showing from under the lobby doors behind her. The feeling of déjà vu returned in a rush, and she had a sudden need to revisit her blindness. Test it. She walked down the all-but-invisible aisle. The closer she approached the stage, the deeper the blackness grew, and the less visible the aisle became until it vanished completely in the overall black. Light simply didn't carry this far.
She realized she was monitoring her steps—feeling the sensations of the old carpeting beneath her feet. . . the rippled effect of the seats on both sides . . . the cold, hollow sound of the stage ahead, waiting to swallow her. Her mind was storing up the sensations just as she did when she practiced her walk to her Steinway. With relief she noted her facial sensitivity was at high pitch, and she pulled back whenever she was about to bump into the rows of seats.
But she didn't have the joy. No music vibrated within her, eager to burst forth. Instead, dread had taken its place. Like a heavy fog, it drifted through her brain cells and bloodstream, leaving a sense of imminent peril. If Maya Stern found her, she could die. At any instant, no matter what care she'd taken, violence could sweep in from some unexpected source. And kill her.
Her face had felt a barrier ahead when she passed the last row of seats. Now she was trying to sense what she guessed had to be the raised apron of the proscenium stage, somewhere in front of her, without reaching out with her hands.
Abruptly a bright beam of light slashed through the auditorium. It found her and pinned her like a butterfly to a board.
"Exploring your other-sense seeing?" Sam's voice said from behind the flashlight beam.
"I could go blind again any second, according to Orion, until I really know what caused the conversion in the first place."
He strode down the center aisle to the edge of the stage and played the flashlight beam all across it, side to side and back to front.
"What are you looking for?" she asked.
"An easel. I remember a big, thick one. It used to be here somewhere. My grandfather tacked ads on it and put it out on the sidewalk. It'd be a good target."
As the bright beam probed the stage, it illuminated a ladder, a stack of some soft material like an old stage curtain, quite a bit of furniture, some music stands, and some folded chairs. But no easel.
He muttered, "There's a storage room back there somewhere—"
They found the stairs at the side and climbed up to the stage itself. The back wall was bare, except for a padlocked double exit door and rows of brackets for tying off scenery up in the flies. There was no scenery up there, but old lengths of rope moldered on the brackets. They searched stage right and then left, and finally found the storage room.
"Good thing I brought the theater's keys," Sam muttered.
The storage room's door had no knob or lock. It was simply flat and solid and apparently was never intended to be locked. But someone had attached two top-open brackets on the right side of the door and on the wall. A heavy steel bar some three inches wide and an inch thick was attached on the door's left side and lay inside the brackets on the right side. A padlock through the bracket on the wall to the right held the bar in place.
Sam used a key from a crammed ring to unlock the lock. With ease he swung the heavy door open. He swept the flashlight beam through the room. It was packed from floor to ceiling with more furniture, billboards, old stage lights, long bars that had been used to fly scenery, rusted projectors, rolled screens, and all the rest of the flotsam and jetsam of an old theater that in its day had shown both staged events and movies. But no easel.
Then Sam announced, "Wait, that's even better."
He settled the beam on a bale of dry, dusty hay from some long-ago stage play. They pushed the door open wider.
She helped him carry it out. "You're going to a lot of trouble for me."
"It's for the theater. Don't want it all shot up."
She smiled. He didn't give an inch. They set the bale on two chairs in the middle of the aisle. They walked back to the lobby doorway, and she faced down the dim passage toward the hay. Sam held the flashlight beam on it.
Without his telling her, she took her stance and wrapped her hands around the Walther.
"Don't clench it. Hold it firmly but not in a stranglehold," he instructed. "Think of your body as part of it. The Walther's going to kick, but you're going to flow with it, not bend, and certainly not brake or choke. You're going to cooperate."
"Just like I do with you."
"I wish." He studied her. "And for God's sake don't close your eyes! Look at the target and think about the gun being an extension of your arm. Your eyes and your arm are in complete coordination. Where your eyes look, your gun will fire." As if it would help her, he took a deep breath. "Breathe. And shoot."
She squeezed the trigger. The explosion was deafening. Her body shuddered, and the tingling went on and on. Like an echo, there'd been a quiet thunk far off. And the bale sat unmoving. "Did I hit it?"
"Let's put it this way—the bullet's somewhere in the theater. It will remain a mystery exactly where. Fortunately, it didn't sound as if you hit anything important."
Inside she seethed. She desperately wanted to close her eyes, to feel the instincts of her blindness that had taught her so much about distance and orientation. Instead she concentrated. She could do this.
She aimed, breathed, and squeezed the trigger.
The bale of hay jumped. But before she could feel any sense of victory, she was crushed onto her back on the aisle's floor, Sam on top of her. She was stunned by the suddenness of it. By the ease with which he'd flattened her and ripped away the Walther. He lay on top of her, the gun in his hand, the flashlight beam angling up toward the high ceiling of the auditorium.
His breath was fire. She was pinned. Her back throbbed and ached. And she felt the sudden, unmistakable attraction of sex. His hard body radiated heat and tantalizing desire. Warmth spread from her belly to her groin.
She shoved against him, struggled. "What are you doing!"