Moving Target (31 page)

But he didn’t give in to temptation because he didn’t want to discourage their tail. “Bad Billy” was more used to city surveillance than country chases. He didn’t instinctively take advantage of natural cover, the night shadows or the pools of strengthening light, or the terrain itself. Not that he was stupid. He wasn’t. He hung back in open places where his dark figure might be spotted against the lighter landscape, and he closed in whenever he thought he could get away with it.

Erik was certain that the portfolio itself hadn’t been out of Bad Billy’s sight for more than a minute at a time. That would change just as soon as they got over the ridge. That was when Wallace would start to get nervous and rush things. That was when even a very cautious man made mistakes.

Somehow, he didn’t think Bad Billy was overly cautious.

Erik went to Serena and gripped her high up on her left arm. “Brace yourself on me and get rid of the rock in your shoe.”

As soon as he was close enough, she began to speak in a very soft voice—he had already told her not to whisper, because whispers carried much farther than a low, murmuring sound.

“Is he still following us?” Serena asked, fiddling with her shoe like she was fishing out a rock.

“Yeah.”

“Hell. How much farther do we have to walk?”

“I thought you liked to hike.”

“Not when some stranger’s eyes are boring into my back.”

Erik didn’t argue. His neck itched something fierce. “In another quarter mile there’s a good place for an ambush.”

She stiffened. “You said you were going to be careful!”

“Keep your voice down,” he murmured. “Laying an ambush is a very careful business.”

“But—”

“Let’s go,” he cut in impatiently. “He’ll have to take off the glasses soon, no matter how much he dials them down. Then it will be our turn. And I don’t want it to be too light.”

He led off at a brisk pace. She followed no more than two steps behind. The portfolio poked out of his rucksack like a quarter panel of plywood. When she had pointed out that it would be invisible in the darkness, so how would their shadow know they had it, Erik had said three words to her:
night-vision lenses
.

Serena was sorry she had asked. After that, with every step she took, she had wondered if the man was staring at her close-up and damned personal while she struggled along the trail in her cutoff jeans, sweatshirt, and running shoes. And scarf, of course. It was the only thing that had kept her from freezing. At first she had been so cold she was sure their shadow could count her goose bumps with his high-tech glasses. But after a mile on the steep trail, she had warmed up. Soon she would be hot. Wherever full sunlight touched, the temperature went up about ten degrees.

For the last half mile they had been out in the open, scrambling up the steep shoulder of a ridge. She was thinking about pulling off her sweatshirt and tying it around her hips. Maybe then her skin wouldn’t crawl every time she thought about the goggle-eyed stranger staring at her butt.

Instead, she moved her scarf until the ends of it trailed down her back. Not much as concealment went, but it made her feel better anyway. Right now, she would take all the feel-good she could get. She liked to hike, but she usually stuck to a trail. Apparently Erik didn’t, or else he was following the kind of trail only a mountain goat could love.

As she scrambled upward toward the last nearly vertical pitch, pebbles turned like marbles under her feet. She skidded, grabbed a shrub that smelled like cedar, and caught her balance. At least the greenery at this altitude didn’t have thorns. The first time she had tripped, she had nearly gone facefirst into some cactus.

He looked back when he heard a low curse. “Need a hand?”

“I’ve got two, thanks.”

He smiled, but for the benefit of Bad Billy—who was hanging back farther and farther, either as a precaution against the growing light or because his feet hurt—Erik said clearly, “We’ll make better time on the other side of the ridge. The cave is only a mile from there. And stop worrying, honey. The pages will be safe there until we find out what’s going on.”

“They better be.” There wasn’t any cave and she knew it.

“Trust me.”

“I can’t believe you said that.”

Erik laughed.

After a moment, so did she. Despite the early hour and the man following them, the beauty of the dawn kept sneaking up on her. The air was crisp yet silky. The scents were subtle yet heady—heat stored overnight in the biggest rocks, midnight cold in the shadows, plants that were both brittle and resinous, clean dust that was finer than powdered sugar, a feeling of space and time everlasting. Ahead, black-velvet mountains condensed out of the night in endless geometries. Sunlight was a living thing: shifting, changing, making the delicate tracks of a lizard leap out in sharp relief against the dust. The wind was alive, too, rising with the sun, breathing over the land in a long, remembering sigh.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Erik murmured.

She nodded and stroked the scarf that snuggled so comfortingly against the pulse in her neck. “Sunrise in the desert makes me think of a tapestry that weaves together light and time and life. And death. Death is always there, just beyond life, defining it.” She willed herself not to look at the man following them. “G’mom loved sunrise. She would weave through the night just to see the first light of dawn falling on her loom. She called it God’s illumination, more precious than gold.”

“So she was a ‘dawn raider’?”

Serena didn’t have to turn to see Erik’s smile. She could hear it in his voice. “More like a night raider. My grandmother loved the darkness, loved the silence.”

“You don’t.”

She yawned. “Once in a while it’s great. But I love all the thousands of colors sunlight brings. I love the burning heat of the sun in summer and the patience of hidden seeds waiting for the rains to come. I love the birdsongs and the flight of a butterfly and a horizon that’s a hundred miles away in all directions.”

“You love the desert, period.” His fingertip traced her smile, touched her scarf, slid it aside to feel the pulse of her life quicken at his caress. He wanted to do more, much more, but it wasn’t the time or the place. “Let’s go. The sooner I have a talk with that clown down the hill, the quicker we can start looking for the rest of the Book of the Learned.”

The rising sun slanted across his face, turning his eyes to golden crystal, so vivid that they stopped her breath. “The rest of it?” she said huskily. “Are you talking about the pages G’mom lost?”

“And, I hope, the pages she didn’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve been thinking about that note she left you.” He had been thinking about the pages, too, and he kept coming back to a single conclusion that he couldn’t prove and couldn’t ignore. He lowered his voice still more, leaning down until his lips were brushing Serena’s ear. “She was trying to tell you that she’d lost some pages, but that she still had most of the book.”

Serena took a deep breath. The air smelled of dawn and desert and man. “What makes you say that?”

“Early this morning—”

“Correction,” she cut in dryly, “late last night. This is early morning.”

He smiled. “Whatever. I got the bright idea of checking gather marks and marginalia on the duplicates I have, and on your pages. I think Erik used the red dots in the seal on every fourth page as a counter. If I’m right, your grandmother gave you pages from the front, middle, and end of the book. At least I’m guessing it was the end.”

“How many pages?”

“Close to six hundred originally.”

Her head jerked up so quickly she almost knocked against his chin. “But where’s the rest? Why didn’t she give it to me?”

“Maybe she wasn’t sure it would get to you.”

“Morton Hingham wouldn’t have—damn, she really was paranoid, wasn’t she?”

“From the way she died, she had reason to be.”

Serena flinched. She didn’t like thinking about her grandmother’s death by fire. “Then the rest of it is lost.”

“No. Not if you do what your grandmother told you to do: Think like her. Think hard, Serena. Think fast.
Think as though your life depended on it.
”

Without waiting for her to say anything, Erik turned and began striding up the final seventy yards to the top of the ridge. Hands on her hips, Serena stared at him. His ease with the steep, rough land both pleased and irritated her.

“Big guy, you don’t want to know what my grandmother would think of me climbing around a mountain with a macho man at dawn,” she muttered. As for last night . . . well, her grandmother had had a child, so maybe she had known all about the compelling heat and an ecstasy that was like the phoenix, death and resurrection in one.

But that was something Serena wasn’t going to think about. Not with some high-tech Peeping Tom following them. She shifted the canteen that was poking a hole in her hip and set off up the slope. By the time she got to the top, she was breathing deeply and pulling herself along on every bit of shrubbery she could trust. They hadn’t hiked up to the tree line yet, but some of the shrubs were taller than a basketball player.

“Watch the top,” Erik called back softly. “It’s covered with loose rocks. Go to the right.”

The last twenty feet of the scramble was a nearly vertical cliff. She saw where Erik had wedged his boots into cracks or pockets, taking a diagonal route to the top instead of the easier-looking, more natural route up the center. She took a deep breath and followed him, angling off to the right as he had. She didn’t have the skill or upper body strength to pull herself up using only her fingers or clenched fists, but she was agile enough to find other ways to climb than brute strength.

As she pulled herself up and over, she saw why he hadn’t gone straight up. At the center of the cliff, just back from the lip and invisible from below, there was a hump of rubble that featured rocks of every size from grapes to cantaloupes. If she had tried to climb out at that spot, she would have grabbed loose stones and probably tumbled right back down the rocks.

“Nice going,” Erik said approvingly as she slid down the other side and into his arms. Reluctantly he released her, but he let his hands caress her every bit of the way. “See that pile of boulders down there?”

Serena told herself that she was breathless after the scramble up the slope. It was true as far as it went; it just didn’t include having her heart turn over when she felt the lingering touch of his hands.

“Boulders,” she said, forcing herself to concentrate on something other than the smell of heat and man. She licked her dry lips and told herself that she didn’t want to taste him. Not at all. She knew what sweaty skin tasted like. Salt. Big deal. So why was her mouth watering? “Those big rocks about twenty yards away,” she asked, “the ones that look like they were assembled by a drunken giant?”

“Yes.” His nostrils flared as he drank her scent. He wanted to drink more, and he wanted it with a force that shocked him. “There’s a hollow with enough room to hide in there.”

She looked doubtfully at the boulders. “For a rabbit, maybe.”

“I hid there during a thunderstorm once. The opening is on the far side. Watch for snakes.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Wait for Bad Billy to reach that last ten feet.”

“And then?”

“I’ll think of something.” Erik’s eyes narrowed. “Have you ever used a gun?”

“Does a rabbit gun count?”

“Did you hit anything?”

She raised one eyebrow. “I rarely missed. G’mom made a really tasty rabbit stew. It was a break from pinto beans and jalapeño peppers.”

“Okay.” He reached behind his back, under his lightweight jacket, and drew the nine-millimeter gun from its holster. “Safety’s on,” he said, pointing. “The first shot requires a double pull. After that a single pull gets it done.”

She accepted the gun, taking care to keep the muzzle pointed away from both of them. That alone reassured him. He watched while she took the safety off and put it back on a few times, getting used to the feel of the mechanism. Then he clipped his communications unit on the belt he had loaned her—after he had cut a row of new holes for her much smaller waist.

“I’ve already put in Niall’s private number,” Erik said. “If something goes wrong, hit
TALK
, take off the safety on the gun, and stay hidden. If Bad Billy is dumb enough to come looking for you, shoot him and keep on shooting until he gives up or you run out of bullets. Don’t be girly or coy about it, either. You’ll be fighting for your life against a murderer.”

Her eyes widened, then narrowed as she realized what he hadn’t said: if someone came after her, it would be over Erik’s dead body. “Keep the gun,” she said starkly.

“I’ve got a much better weapon.”

“What?”

“The land.”

Her eyelids flickered. She wanted to ask a hundred questions and make a thousand objections, but none of them would change Erik’s mind or their circumstances, and she knew it.

“Don’t look so worried,” he said, smiling. “I plan to keep the upper hand all the way with Bad Billy. But if I don’t . . .” His mouth flattened. No matter what, he would see that she wasn’t hurt. “Niall will tell you what to do.”

Before she could say anything, both of them heard the rattle of rocks from the other side of the ridge. Wallace was on the move up toward them. From the sliding, grating sounds he made, he wasn’t having an easy time of it.

Erik jerked his chin toward the boulders.

Serena’s mouth tightened into an unhappy line, but she didn’t argue. There was no time and she knew it. She headed for the boulders, found the opening, and tossed a handful of pebbles into the gloom beyond. No snake rattled a warning. She went in headfirst and began mentally revising Erik’s plans.

For openers, she wasn’t going to sit and suck her thumb while he risked his life.

R
isa Sheridan stared at the ringing phone like it was a rat. Outside her modest hotel room, L.A. was up and moving, but not very fast. Saturday morning wasn’t a big hustle-bustle time in the city. Most folks were still sleeping off Friday night.