She collected the bag and hurried toward the south end of the building, as far from the lobby as she could get. Once there, she slipped through a door that opened onto another stairwell.
At the top, Ellie paused, glancing down the long, dim length of the hallway. All was quiet, the guests all enjoying a five-course repast in the dining room, on the other side of the hotel. Still, her route lay elsewhere.
Ellie pushed through the door leading out onto the veranda lining the front side of the hotel.
Compared to the silent hallway, her current position left her feeling painfully exposed. Walking along the veranda, she was visible to anyone who looked up from the street below. Ellie forced her pace to remain even as she slipped her trusty hairpin out of her pocket.
With her other hand, she reached into the canvas bag slung over her shoulder and pulled out the revolver. She held it against her body, concealing it from the view of anyone below. Praying that no one would come onto the veranda in the next minute, she pushed the pin into the crack between the doors, felt it bump up against the latch, and lifted.
It stuck.
The fear was quick and urgent. She couldn’t afford this. At any moment, a guest could—almost certainly would—come out for a breath of air and see her, apparently a man in ill-fitting clothes, holding a gun and trying to pick a lock.
Please just work, she prayed silently. Taking a deep breath, she inserted the pin again, gave it another firm push, and felt the metal bend in her fingers.
Ellie pulled the crooked hairpin out of the door and stared at it in dismay. It was the only one she had saved from the massacre of her feminine locks.
She rapidly considered her options, but her awareness of how vulnerable she was standing in the open like this made it hard to think. Could she come back later? Steal the spare key from behind Smith’s desk? No, there was no other time she could be sure that Dawson and Jacobs would be out.
She had to get inside and find something that would tell her who her enemies were working for—something that might also serve as a bargaining chip if Jacobs decided to trim his “loose end.”
She looked from the clear pane of the French door to the solid steel weight of the revolver in her hand. Before she could stop to question the impulse, she drove the nose of the gun through the glass.
It shattered with a soft tinkling that sounded, to Ellie’s ears, roughly like a bomb going off. She reached carefully around the remaining shards of glass and felt for the latch.
A nail had been driven into the wood of the frame just above the hook, a crude but effective method of ensuring the latch couldn’t be lifted from the outside. Ellie wrestled with it for a moment before finally managing to wrench it loose. She pushed open the door and slipped inside.
The room was tidy save for a clutter of books and papers on the table, but as her eyes adjusted to the darkness a few other objects registered in her mind—a cluster of gear in the corner. Picks, ropes, brushes. A set of gaiters. A half-packed rucksack.
They had come prepared for an expedition, she realized, the thought filling her with anger. They had been that sure that they were going to get the better of her.
She moved to the desk, dropping the pistol to sift through the papers, holding them to the remaining light coming through the glass to see what they contained. There must be something here that would tell her more about Dawson’s employer, some piece of evidence she could pass along to Sir Robert Tyrrell to see that these men were brought to the justice they deserved.
She riffled through useless journal articles, her frustration mounting, until something more promising caught her eye, half-buried under a treatise on pottery types.
It was a telegram. The message was a garbled assortment of seemingly random letters and numbers, a bundle of nonsense. But the message had originated in London, and no one paid international rates to send gibberish to the far ends of the earth.
There was something about this particular gibberish, something that struck her as startlingly familiar.…
Then it came to her, as impossible as the insight was. The message was in a code. Not just any code: one that Ellie knew.
It was a standard cipher, one used by agents of the British Foreign Office during the Napoleonic wars, seventy-five years before.
A box stuffed with coded documents had been one of the more enjoyable items Ellie had cataloged at the Public Record Office that year. Of course, they had been intended as a lesson in failure. After all, how was she supposed to properly categorize papers she couldn’t read? It had been Henbury’s idea of a joke, a way to take Ellie down a notch.
Well, she had shown him.
A few days’ study, and a bit of rather brilliant research, had uncovered the secret of the cipher. Ellie had neatly translated the documents, placing both the originals and her decoded text in their proper places. It had been a thoroughly satisfying endeavor.
And now she held the same code in her hands.
It was impossible that the document had actually come from the Foreign Office. No agency worth its British salt would use the same cipher for seven decades. Ellie suspected these codes were changed as frequently as horses on a mail coach. Yet she recognized the call numbers for the London office where the telegram in her hands had originated. It was the Westminster office, just down the road from Whitehall.
Where the Foreign Office was located.
Ellie could see only two possible conclusions she could draw about the strange document in her hand. The first was that the Foreign Office was somehow directing Dawson’s and Jacobs’s activities.
That made no sense. Legitimate government employees did not lie, steal, and threaten innocent lives. Besides, what interest could the British government possibly have in a map to a ruined city? That was the territory of antiquities thieves, avid collectors, or organized criminals.
But what crime network would know a secret government code, even an obsolete one like this?
Perhaps the contents of the message would be more enlightening. Ellie grabbed a pencil, pressed the telegram to Dawson’s desk, and began to work.
It took her only a few minutes to decipher the brief message, but the true contents of the telegram were just as confusing as the coded text had been.
Candidate for Tulan Zuyua.
If present acquire Smoking Mirror.
Ellie looked at the call letters for the London telegram station. Perhaps someone there would remember sending the message. It was unusual enough to be memorable. Coded telegrams weren’t generally sent from public offices. She was certain the various government departments used their own lines for secret transmissions. The message in front of her would surely have struck the clerk who tapped it out as odd. It was possible he might remember something about the man—or woman—who had sent it.
Ellie tucked it into her pocket. The lead, slim as it was, would have to do. There was nothing else of promise on Dawson’s desk, and she couldn’t afford to waste much more time.
Then a familiar sight caught her eye. It had been shuffled under a stack of books on Central American history, only the corner peeking out, blending with the mess on the desk.
The map.
She stared at it, stunned. It had never occurred to her that Dawson might be so foolish—so utterly confident—that he wouldn’t take the document with him when he went to dinner. He had left it here, certain it would remain undisturbed while he enjoyed his fillet of sole and apple tart.
Ellie snatched it, upsetting the pile of books in the process. She winced as they hit the floor with an audible thud. She carefully folded the map and was about to add it to her pocket, beside the telegram, when she heard the sound of a metallic scratch against the lock.
Someone was at the door. Someone with a key.
Her hand moved instinctively to the revolver. There was no time for anything else, and no place to hide. She pointed the gun at the door as the lock clicked and it opened.
Dawson froze in the doorway. For a moment all Ellie coul
d feel was relief that it wasn’t Jacobs, but she knew the professor’s partner wouldn’t be far behind.
“Inside, and close the door,” she ordered.
“Miss Mallory? What on earth have you done to your—”
“Now,” she added sharply.
Dawson’s eyes moved from her cropped hair to the gun, and he stepped inside, closing the door behind him.
“You are making a very grave error,” he said calmly. Too calmly. Ellie felt the cold weight of the gun in her hand and was suddenly very aware that the bullets were stuffed into her other pocket. If Dawson decided to call her bluff, the best she could hope to do was knock him over the head with it. She cursed her moral superiority. But then, if the gun had been loaded, could she really have pulled the trigger? Even against a man she knew would do her harm if he could?
She didn’t have the answer to that question, and it hardly mattered anyway. What she needed to do now was escape.
“You have no idea who you’re trifling with. What you’re trifling with,” Dawson said.
“Do I look like I’m trifling?” Ellie shifted her grip on the gun, hoping she looked fiercer than she felt. “Who are you working for?”
Dawson gaped at her.
“Your employer. His name.” She pulled back the hammer of the revolver. Going by Dawson’s expression, it made a satisfyingly intimidating click.
“I don’t know.”
“I said—”
“I don’t know!”
Ellie stared at the older man. His face was pale, his hands shaking. There was no doubt that his fear was real.
She had the distinct impression that it wasn’t entirely due to the weapon in her hand.
Something shifted in Dawson’s expression. For a moment he looked almost desperate.
“Listen to me—please. If you want to live, let this go and get back to England.”
His tone surprised her. His concern sounded almost genuine. Not that it mattered, she reminded herself.
“I’d still be a ‘loose end’ in London,” she spat back.
Dawson winced. “Then for God’s sake, just disappear.”
“That’s exactly what I had in mind.” She kept the pistol pointed at him as she backed through the French doors.
Ellie stepped onto the veranda, trying frantically to plan her next move. Then a shout sounded below her. She looked down to see the boy from the steps staring up at her, recognition clear in his gaze. He called again and turned, dashing into the building.
He was going for Jacobs, which meant there was only one strategy left to her.
Ellie turned and bolted down the veranda, all pretension of blending in abandoned now. She reached the far end of the building and skidded through the door to the interior.
The back staircase lay before her. She pounded down it, trying to calculate her best chance of escape. She needed to disappear, quickly. It was her only chance of surviving long enough to make a better plan.
She would be too exposed on the street, but the verdant, shadowy foliage of the back garden could offer cover, and the fence that surrounded it wasn’t too high to climb. If she could scale it and pass into the warren of yards and alleys behind the hotel, she might be able to slip away.
But to where?
She would worry about that later, when she wasn’t running for her life.
Ellie reached the ground floor and heard shouts echoing down from above. She had less time than she’d thought.
She burst through a door that opened onto the patio that ran beneath the veranda at the rear of the hotel. In the falling light, the length of it was cloaked in deep shadows.
Ellie’s eye lit on a shed that might provide an easier way over the fence. She dashed toward it along the patio. She dodged around a massive potted palm and promptly slammed into a dark, solid object.
A powerful hand gripped her arm. She felt a burst of panic. All her wushu maneuvers went out of her head. The only thing she could think to do was swing the heavy bulk of the revolver, still gripped in her hand, in the vague direction of her captor’s head.
There was something familiar about the loud, creative string of curses that followed the gun’s impact. The weapon fell from her fingers as she was yanked into a pair of iron-strong arms.
“Let go of me!” she said desperately, and found herself looking up into the surprised face of Adam Bates.
They stared at each other in shock for a moment. Then Ellie winced at the sound of more shouting from above.
“That for you?” he asked. He shook his head, not waiting for an answer. “Inside.”
“But I—”
He cut her off by half tossing her through the opened doorway behind him, a pair of French doors much like her own on the floor above. He paused to collect the gun, tucking it into the back of his trousers, then crushed out the stub of his cigar. He quickly closed the doors behind him.
Inside the room, Ellie clambered to her feet, fury mixing with fear. She lunged, trying to push past him. Adam caught her easily, lifting her off the ground.
“I will not let you—”
He silenced her with a hand clamped over her mouth. He pulled her up against the wall, out of sight of the French doors, and Ellie stopped fighting as she heard the sound of footsteps on the patio outside.
Ellie froze, her pulse pounding, letting Adam hold her.
“Check the garden.”
The voice belonged to Jacobs, and it sounded from just beyond the fragile glass of the doors. “Thoroughly,” he added.
Adam’s grip on her remained firm until the sound of Jacobs’s steps had faded.
“Promise not to do anything stupid if I let go of you?” he murmured.
Biting back the retort that leaped to her lips, Ellie merely nodded tightly.
He released his grip, stepping away from her. With a yank, he closed a heavier set of curtains over the French doors. Then he moved to the table and turned up the lamp.
Ellie let the canvas bag slip from her shoulder, momentarily transfixed by her surroundings. The room was a glorious chaos. Every flat surface—including the floor—was covered with stacks of books and papers. Crates of yet-to-be-cataloged pottery shards teetered precariously on top of one another. Sketches and photographs lay in piles on tables or the seats of chairs, and maps, old and beginning to yellow, were tacked to the elegant paper covering the walls. In every corner lay some bizarre assortment of equipment: picks, shovels, mosquito netting, even a pair of broken hammocks. It reminded her of the basement of the British Museum, a place she’d been to only once and had been dying to get back inside of since.
Adam let out a low whistle.
“Hell of a new look you’ve got going there.”
She resisted the urge to put a hand to her newly cropped hair. Instead she treated him to her best glare, though she was admittedly somewhat distracted by the impact the sight of him had on her concentration. He was in his shirtsleeves and looked as though he hadn’t shaved in a few days. The golden grizzle marking his features combined with an angry red mark on his left cheekbone to give him a rather dangerous air. Then Ellie realized who was likely to blame for that soon-to-be-vicious bruise, and winced.
“I need to get out of here.”
“How about first you tell me what sort of trouble you managed to get yourself into?”
“And why should I do that?”
He shrugged. “Because I might be able to help.”
“I can do without your—”
Adam cut in before Ellie could finish her retort.
“It looks to me like you could use a friend right now, princess, and I don’t see anyone else lining up for the job. So how’s about you hold whatever it was you were going to say and think for a minute?”
Ellie closed her mouth. Her eyes traveled over the layered pages on the walls, and a thought—not a particularly welcome one—forced its way into her mind.
She had the map. She had stolen it back, and that meant there was still a chance she could find
the city. After all, Dawson had told her to disappear, and what better place to vanish than into the bush?
But she wasn’t foolish enough to believe she could do it alone. As much as it galled her, she needed someone to guide her. And the only person in the colony who’d admitted to being that crazy was standing in front of her.
“Whatever you’re thinking right now, it looks interesting,” he commented wryly.
She stepped over to the table and looked down. On top of it were a pile of sketches—very good sketches—of ruins surrounded by thick rain forest.
“Are these yours?” she asked.
“Just—don’t touch anything.” He gently removed her hand from the papers. Her eyes drifted to the huge map on the wall, an amalgamation of sketches like the ones on the table, prints, and notes, all tacked onto the surface with strings running from one place to another. She let her eyes follow the course of rivers, the detailed drawings of mountain peaks.
“You’ve been to all these places?”
“Most of them,” he confirmed.
She turned to him, steeling herself. He raised an eyebrow.
“Do you even realize it when you’re glaring like that?”
She frowned, then caught her reaction and forcibly cleared her expression.
“You once told me you were the only guide in this city who would take a woman into the bush,” she said. “Did you mean that?”
He regarded her evenly.
“Depends on the woman, and what she’s after.”
She could feel how precariously the situation was balanced. However little she liked the form it happened to be taking, Ellie knew that this was her chance—possibly her only chance. But if she was going to convince him, she needed to make an impression, and she knew of only one way to do it.
She could feel the medallion’s cool weight against her chest.
Steeling herself, she slipped the ribbon over her head and pulled off the dark circle of stone. She handed it to Adam.
He stared at it, then carried it over to the lamp and turned up the flame. He sat down and looked at the piece in the light.
The Smoke Hunter Page 11