Whirlpool

by Elizabeth Lowell

  I haven’t mailed out pounds of jewelry to anyone, so they can’t be returning it to me.

  “Need any help?” Tom asked.

  “No, thanks. I handle heavier stuff all the time.” She looked at the label. There wasn’t a return address on the waybill. “Well, I hope no one’s made a mistake.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not expecting anything and there’s no return address on this. Can you tell me where it came from?”

  Eagerly the man leaned forward, happy to have an excuse to prolong the contact with her. He inspected the waybill on the box, saw that she was right, and muttered beneath his breath about hiring part-time help for full-time jobs.

  “Back in a sec,” he said.

  Laurel watched as he went to the van, grabbed a handheld scanner from the dashboard, and waved it across the bar-code sticker that was attached to one corner of the box.

  “Huh,” he said.

  “Something wrong?”

  “The waybill is domestic, but the bar code gives me an international routing number, like the shipment originated overseas. Who do you know in Tokyo?”

  “No one.”

  The response was automatic and probably untrue. Her father’s last letter had come from Tokyo.

  Laurel discussed Jamie Swann with no one.

  Part of it was her natural sense of privacy. Most of it was because as a child she’d had it drilled into her that no one—and that included her mother—knew where Jamie Swann was or wasn’t. All questions about Laurel’s father were to be ducked, ignored, or answered with bland lies. If the questioner became too persistent, her mother called an unlisted number.

  End of questions.

  “It must have come through a customs broker,” the driver said slowly. “It was shipped out of Los Angeles International Airport late yesterday.”

  Laurel searched her memory once more for an international shipment she might have coming.

  There wasn’t one.

  Silently she wondered if her father was on his way to her home once more, turning her life upside down with his easy charm and bleak eyes. Sometimes she was curious about what Swann saw and did during his long absences.

  Most of the time she was glad she didn’t know.

  “Thanks,” Laurel said to the driver. “I’m sure there’s a packing list inside.”

  “If not, give me a call.”

  “Mmm,” was all she said.

  With a final impersonal smile, she went back into her house and shouldered the door shut behind her. She glanced again at the package.

  Nothing had changed. It was still a shipping label with no return address.

  Suddenly the package’s weight triggered a memory of her mother’s funeral urn filled with cremated remains. A ripple of gooseflesh went down Laurel’s arms.

  Quickly she walked to what once had been the main room of the cottage and now was her studio. She’d been working on a large, elegant brooch of bent gold wire for a client’s wife. Actually, Laurel suspected it was for the client’s mistress.

  Just one more reason not to put up with a man, Laurel thought with grim humor. You can’t trust them even when their work keeps them close to home.

  She cleared away the bending jig to make room for the unexpected package. Casually she cut the shipping tape with the wickedly curved knife she used for cutting paper templates. As she peeled away layers of reinforced cardboard and bubble paper, a wooden box slowly appeared. Her breath came in with a rushing sound.

  This was no ordinary shipping container.

  The box was a work of art. Heavily lacquered, unmarked, it had been created from a pale blond wood whose grain was finer than any furniture Laurel had ever seen.

  “Can it be birch?” she asked softly. “Lord, it’s nearly as fine as ivory. It reminds me of something I saw once. Was it in a museum?”

  She couldn’t remember. With an impatient sound she examined the box’s construction. The corners were mitered and reinforced. Though the box had a seam down the longer axis, the position of the latch told her that the box was meant to stand on end.

  After setting the box upright, she undid the small brass latch. The front half of the box divided and swung open like the doors of a well-made cabinet.

  “My. God.”

  She blinked, shook her head, and blinked again.

  A jeweled egg winked back at her.

  Even though she was shocked, she couldn’t help smiling at the egg’s sheer beauty. It was nested in pale, creamy satin that set off the intense scarlet of the egg’s lacquer work. A net of gemstone-studded gold flowed over the egg in a pattern subtly enhanced by the shape of the egg itself.

  The objet d’art was almost the size of an ostrich egg, yet it was so exquisitely made that Laurel had a hard time believing it was real. Wonderingly she touched the egg with her fingertip, as she had the beach agate. Like the agate, the egg was cool, solid, real.

  For a time she simply stared at the unexpected piece of art. Then reason took over, prodding her out of her bemusement.

  She looked critically at the box. There wasn’t a maker’s mark. Bending over the box, she inhaled deeply. There was no faint savor of wood or glue telling her that the box had been recently made in a nameless Third World sweatshop. In fact, the more closely she inspected the box, the more clear it became that the box was the result of a long tradition of craftsmanship that was as exacting as that of the egg itself.

  And like the egg, the box did its job perfectly.

  Laurel knew her first feelings of surprise and pleasure at the egg’s beauty were exactly what the artist had intended. As a designer, she’d learned that a good piece of decorative art was much more than a handful of expensive metals and flashing gems. A good objet d’art should make viewers catch their breath and then smile with pleasure.

  The egg was a spectacularly successful piece, as close to flawless on first sight as anything she’d ever seen. She wondered how many people had reacted to this egg in the way she had.

  And how many years it had been hidden away in the private safe of a collector—or a Soviet commissar.

  “But it can’t be what I think it is,” she said in a raw whisper. “He never made one like this.”

  She bent down to see what she could of the egg without touching it. The gold scrollwork was finely made. If there were flaws in the design or execution, she couldn’t spot them without a magnifying glass. The red enamel of the shell was as perfect as a human hand could make it. The small gems set in colorful precision were clear and so clean she could hardly believe they were natural.

  Automatically she reached for her jeweler’s loupe. She examined stone after stone under the loupe’s ten-power magnification. A few tiny feathers and dark specks, invisible to the naked eye, convinced her that the stones were imperfect enough to have been created by nature.

  Under magnification the stones confirmed something else. The facets were just irregular enough to suggest that they had been cut before computers took over and created the monotonously regular, sterile gemstones that she so disliked.

  “Fabergé. It has to be.”

  The scarlet egg had been created in the workshop of the most famous craftsman Europe had ever produced.

  “But that can’t be. It must be a fraud.”

  She frowned and examined the egg again. After a long time she straightened, sighed, and set aside the loupe. If the egg was a fraud, it was a fraud so meticulously created that it was a masterpiece in its own right.

  Again Laurel looked at the label on the wrapper. Again she saw her own name and address.

  A chill rippled down her spine.

  In the past, Jamie Swann had sent her bright stones from various parts of the world, silent apologies from an absent father. Yet even taken all together, the stones he’d sent wouldn’t come close to touching the worth of a Fabergé egg.

  “A million bucks at least,” she said in a low voice. “Probably a lot more, if it can be authenticated and sold openly.”
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  But she wasn’t naive enough to believe that a national treasure could be bought and sold on the open market like oil futures.

  Her father wasn’t that naive either.

  “Daddy, where the hell are you when I need you?” she said loudly, then grimaced as her own words echoed in the empty room. “Dumb question. You’re exactly where you always were when Mom or I needed you. Somewhere else.”

  Laurel began to think about all the unhappy reasons why her father might have sent her a million-dollar gift with no warning and no return address. The longer she thought, the more certain she became. Somewhere on the violent face of the earth, Jamie Swann was in trouble.

  And now, so was she.

  3

  Southern California

  Monday

  A shiny Grumman Gulfstream executive jet flashed low over Cruz Rowan’s head and turned onto final approach. There was only one runway within reach, the six-thousand-foot private landing strip owned and maintained by Risk Ltd., Cassandra Redpath’s international security firm. The cryptic design on the Gulfstream’s fuselage was the Risk Ltd. logo, which meant that a new client was on the way to Karroo.

  A client who was the source of the two-beep summons.

  After a last regretful look at the fascinating crack in the bedrock, Cruz picked up his day pack, climbed aboard a battered ATV, and kicked its engine to life. Once he left the jumbled rock floor of the slot canyon behind, he twisted the throttle hard and headed back across the slope toward Karroo at forty miles an hour.

  And with every bump, he wondered what had blown up, and where.

  The last time Redpath had beeped him twice, he’d ended up negotiating at gunpoint for the release of an Italian businessman’s son. The boy had survived with no more than rope burns on his wrists to show for the experience.

  Cruz hadn’t been as lucky. He’d recovered enough to run and walk without a limp, but his left knee still ached with every change in the weather.

  When he pulled up to the main house in a cloud of grit, Cassandra Redpath was waiting in the shade of the ramada she’d built with her own hands. The structure was open on all sides to the wind and thatched on top to provide shade. She’d been so intrigued by the native structure that she’d done a short monograph on the ramada’s name. She postulated that the Soboba Indians had adopted the name from the Spanish ramada, which in turn sprang from Ramadan, Arabic for “the hot month.” The Spanish had taken the name from the Moors and then traveled halfway around the world to give it to a prehistoric Native American invention that was both ceremonial and practical.

  Redpath savored those kinds of unlikely historical linkages. They strengthened her conviction that mankind was connected by language and human need, even as it was separated by politics and greed.

  “Where’s the fire?” Cruz asked as he walked into the ramada’s ragged shade.

  Redpath squinted up at him. He was still a black shadow silhouetted against the burning light of day.

  He had no such disadvantage in watching her. The subdued light beneath the ramada revealed a lean, sun-weathered woman in cotton slacks and shirt, short red hair shot through with gray, and green eyes. Redpath was in her fifties or early sixties. Cruz had never been sure which, and it hadn’t ever mattered enough to ask.

  He knew that Redpath had started out in life as an academic historian, specifically a student of everyday life in other eras. But she’d an unusual turn of mind that allowed her to see patterns in contemporary life that others missed. As a result, she’d spent thirty years as an analyst and then as a senior executive with the Central Intelligence Agency. She’d resigned from the CIA to become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. She’d held that post for four years.

  Then she’d resigned in disgust and formed Risk Ltd.

  “You’re blocking my view of the fire,” she said.

  He stepped aside, turned, and followed her glance. Heat shimmered up off the blacktop runway where the company Mercedes waited, distorting the shape of the Grumman until it looked like something from a horror show. The airplane’s door opened. A staircase emerged like a rumpled steel tongue.

  After a few moments, a figure appeared in the doorway of the aircraft. He seemed to hesitate.

  Redpath smiled. “Some people are intimidated by the Mojave Desert.”

  “Good. Too many people out here as it is.”

  Redpath ignored Cruz.

  A man descended the stairway to the hot tarmac. Two steps behind, like a well-trained hound, came another man. The second man was taller and dressed all in black. Even at this distance, he looked stooped but powerful, a strong man who had to lean down to fit into the ordinary world.

  Cruz didn’t identify Redpath’s welcoming committee until he moved toward the plane. Sergeant-Major Ranulph Gillespie was a big man who didn’t bend knee or neck for much on earth. He was also a former operator and instructor in the British Army’s Twenty-second Special Air Services Regiment, a professional soldier, and one of the most deadly counterterrorists in the world.

  The sergeant-major briskly stowed his passengers in the backseat of the Mercedes, climbed aboard, and headed at a crawl down the shimmering runway toward Karroo’s headquarters. The passengers would get a good long up-close look at the ageless crucible of the desert.

  With a catlike sound of satisfaction, Redpath turned to Cruz. Her generous mouth turned down as she looked at him. In his dirty jeans and sweat-darkened, unbuttoned blue work shirt, he looked like a hard-rock miner at the end of his shift rather than the highly educated, thoroughly trained operative he was. His hair was streaked with grit, he hadn’t shaved for several days, and he needed a bath.

  The pale, glittering slits of blue that were his eyes warned that he was not a happy camper.

  That made two of them.

  Cruz noted the thinning of Redpath’s mouth and the narrowing of her eyes. He didn’t need a road map to know where she was going. She required a minimum level of personal cleanliness in her employees. At the moment, he was well below her standard.

  “I’m off duty,” he said. “Remember?”

  “I could have called Bob Williams, I suppose,” Redpath said.

  “But you want your best, right? So you’ll have to take me the way you find me. And so will our client.”

  She shrugged. “Even if you were willing—”

  “I’m not.”

  “—to clean up, it’s too late,” she finished, ignoring the interruption.

  Cruz glanced toward the Mercedes. It was still too far away to make out the sex, much less the faces, of the passengers. Gillespie still hadn’t kicked up the speed, which told Cruz that Redpath wasn’t thrilled with the client.

  “Who is it this time?” he asked. “Not the government of the Philippines again?”

  “They can afford us.”

  “I know the president is a powerful personage, and I know they’re still trying to recover the fortune a previous first lady invested in Italian footwear, but the woman is a major pain in the ass.”

  “How do you think women get to be president?” Redpath retorted. “Or ambassador, for that matter. I made a lot of people unhappy along the way.”

  “You still do.”

  “Thank you.” She bared her teeth in a smile. “But the specimen coming closer with each breath isn’t a female politician. He’s from the artistic side of the political spectrum.”

  “Bloody wonderful,” Cruz said under his breath. “They’re the worst. What is he, a ballerina?”

  “Our potential client is a curator of art for Russia.”

  “Does he have a name?”

  Though Redpath didn’t move, Cruz sensed that she was bracing herself.

  “Aleksy Novikov,” she said with outward calm.

  “Christ.”

  She waited for the rest of the explosion.

  Silence.

  The kind of silence where you could hear yourself sweat.

  Finally Cruz asked softly, “Are you aware that Novikov and I
have what is politely called a history?”

  “Your paths crossed while you were with the FBI,” she said. Her tone said that it didn’t matter.

  “Paths crossed,” he said as if tasting the words. “That’s one way of putting it. I spent six months chasing Novikov’s charismatic ass all over Silicon Valley.”

  “Your approach was very creative.”

  “Not enough to get the job done.”

  “I disagree. Novikov was sent back home.”

  “I’d rather have given him a permanent home in a federal pen,” Cruz said grimly. “Novikov’s passport said he was a cultural attaché with the consulate in San Francisco, but we caught him with all kinds of classified material, as well as a basket of trade secrets from a company that was working on laser information retrieval technology for the Pentagon.”

  “In other words,” Redpath said, “Novikov was an intelligence operative. Quite a good one, actually. If I could trust him, I would hire him myself. But…” She shrugged. She was too smart to trust Novikov.

  “As far as the FBI was concerned, every Soviet diplomat was an intelligence operative,” Cruz said. “Novikov had a real appetite for it. He just loved getting in a closet with that Cal Tech engineer. Wonder if the poor fool was tested for AIDS before he killed himself.”

  Redpath shrugged. “Novikov’s sexual preferences are well known.”

  “It came as news to the engineer Novikov seduced, especially when the flashbulbs went off.”

  “Ancient history. Novikov is no longer a Soviet diplomat. He’s a Russian, and the Russians are our friends.”

  Cruz smiled thinly. “If I thought you believed that, I’d quit. Nobody has friends in this brave new world.”

  Redpath’s smile was feline, predatory. “That’s why Risk Limited is doing so well.”

  “What does Novikov want with us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Good. Keep it that way. There are some things that don’t come off with soap and water. Novikov is one of them.”

  “Risk Limited is a private agency. We don’t have to take clients if what they want offends us.”

  “I’m offended just knowing that bastard is alive.”