Moving Target (6 page)

“Bugger.” Niall sighed. “I’ll tell Dana that her favorite Fuzzy is off on a private quest.”

“It shouldn’t take long.”

“Neither does dying, boyo.”

L
ocal tradition held that Serena’s house had been built by a man who had made his first million smuggling hashish during the Hippie Sixties. He had paid that million, plus a lot more in hashish, to his lawyer to keep him out of jail. As a result, house plans that had begun in grandeur and excess ended in a drastically trimmed-down version that required a “special” buyer to appreciate.

The house had three thousand square feet unevenly divided into one bedroom, one palatial bathroom, one kitchen, and one huge, vaulted room overlooking Leucadia’s flower farms, Interstate 5, and the Pacific Ocean. There was no office. No media room. No spa or sauna or exercise room. There wasn’t even a walk-in closet. None of the essential luxuries for the telecommuter of the late twentieth or early twenty-first century. As a result, the house had stood empty as often as not.

By the time Serena bought it, the house was approaching its half-century mark. The vaulted “great room” became her weaving studio. Five looms cast long shadows in the afternoon sun. Two of the looms were tall, one was medium height, one was small, and one was tiny enough to use sewing thread for the actual weaving. A tall loom stood empty but for the warp threads, ready for a new weaving to begin. The other big loom held a wall hanging that was almost finished. The pattern was a heraldic device that had been carried into the Second Crusade. Tear-shaped white Norman shields with simple red Christian crosses on them formed a huge patterned cross against a black background.

Critically Serena looked at the hanging. It was a commission piece from a wealthy high-tech entrepreneur who was trying to feel some connection to his past—or at least the past he would like to have had. As with most commissions when the design was simply handed to her, she didn’t find the result particularly satisfying, but she wasn’t in a position to refuse a guaranteed paycheck. Especially one of this size.

Though a few of her weavings were now on display in galleries in Manhattan, Milan, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong, it might take years for any single piece to sell. In the meantime she still had to eat, make house and car payments, buy quantities of fine yarn, pay taxes, and find cat food that Mr. Picky wouldn’t turn up his black nose at.

The only things Picky really liked were fresh Pacific lobster, tiger prawns, smoked salmon, and chicken pâté from the French deli at the beach. Since Serena didn’t have enough money to eat such things on a regular basis, she and Picky had to make do with tuna, cheese, and peanut butter. And rodents, of course.

For the cat, not for Serena. She had never been tempted by any of the mice, voles, shrews, or moles Picky proudly laid out for her inspection every morning—particularly as the cat had already eaten the choice bits. It was his way of telling her what he thought of commercial cat food, canned tuna, cheese, and peanut butter.

The cat in question yeowed loudly and stropped against the back of Serena’s knees with enough force to make her grab the heavy wooden pillar of the loom for balance. Picky was almost as big as a bobcat. He had wonderful orange eyes, sleek black fur, a bobbed tail, and a tuft of hair on the tip of each ear. Knee-high, muscular, predatory, he ruled the house with velvet paws and sheathed claws. Other than attacking salesmen, he had no faults worth mentioning, and certainly none worth the trouble of breaking.

“If you’re hungry, go hunting.” Serena reached down and gave the cat a thorough rubbing. “If you’re thirsty, go terrorize the koi in the garden pond. If you want to go out, you know where the cat door is.”

Picky rubbed his chin against the ancient woven cloth she wore around her neck.

“You like it, too, don’t you?” Serena said, laughing. She hadn’t been able to let go of the scarf since the lawyer Morton Hingham had given it to her. She had even slept with it under her pillow.

And her dreams had been both vivid and troubling: violet eyes like her own beseeching . . . something. The wild cry of a peregrine frustrated in its kill. The hell-deep baying of a staghound circling at the edge of a mist that kept retreating.
Soon. Soon. He will see me and I will see him and there will be no more barriers, no safety, nothing but the fate I wrought on my loom.

Picky purred hard enough to make her hands vibrate. The dream-memories evaporated, leaving Serena feeling unsettled. Both the scarf and the purring cat were welcome distractions from the uncanny memories. No, dreams. She couldn’t possibly have remembered them, no matter how real they seemed at the moment.

“Too bad somebody fixed you,” she said to Picky. “I’d like to have a couple more like you.”

The look he gave her said:
Eat your heart out. There aren’t any more like me on earth.

“Scoot. I have to work.”

As soon as she picked up the shuttle, Picky stalked off. He had learned that the fastest way to get locked out of the house was to be underfoot while Serena was weaving. He could watch. He could pace. He could lust after the rapidly moving shuttle. But if he made a pass at it or at even one of the dangling yarn-wrapped bobbins or lovely heaps of yarn piled around the room, he was out in the cold.

Absently Serena snapped her fingers. A remote switch kicked over and music poured out of speakers all through the house. Normally she preferred chamber music, Renaissance motets, or twentieth-century blues, but the austere Crusader design seemed to call for martial music and laments. At the moment, American Civil War ballads wept in all their sad beauty. Not exactly the same war as the Crusades, but not all that different, either. Hell on earth in the name of a higher morality.

The phone rang.

She made no move to answer it.

She had ignored the phone twice already. It was a bad habit of hers, one she had promised various galleries that she would break, or at least get an answering machine that was reliable. But Picky adored any blinking light, and batted with his paws until answering machine, computer, telephone, whatever, was well and truly fouled up. She had tried to explain this to people who insisted that she find a better way to receive their messages. She no longer bothered. People always found a way to get to her. If it wasn’t easy, that just gave her more time to weave.

The phone rang. And rang.

And rang.

Serena finished the row and reached for the phone, hoping no one would be there. “Hello.”

“Good afternoon. Is this Ms. Charters?”

“If you’re selling something, I don’t buy over the phone. I don’t do surveys, either.”

“This is the House of Warrick,” a woman’s voice said crisply. “Janeen Scribner speaking. May I please speak to Ms. Serena Charters?”

“Oh. Sorry.” Serena put a lock of silky, wavy red hair behind her ear with a motion that was half exasperation, half embarrassment. “I’m Serena.”

“You sent us four color copies taken from an illuminated manuscript, correct?”

“Yes. I wondered if it was worth the trouble of getting a full, formal appraisal.”

“The person who could best answer your question is Mr. Norman Warrick himself. His specialty is illuminated manuscripts.”

“I’m reluctant to send the original pages to New York,” Serena said, “and I don’t have time to bring them myself right now.”

“That won’t be necessary. Mr. Warrick divides his year between New York and Palm Desert. He and his family are presently in Palm Desert. They will expect you this evening, if at all possible.”

“Tonight?”

“Yes. Mr. Warrick is almost one hundred. He never wastes time.”

“Oh.” Serena looked at the nearly finished wall hanging. Then she thought of the luminous pages lying inside their leather envelope in her locked van, where Picky’s curiosity couldn’t get to them. “Fine. What time and where?”

Janeen gave her directions and added, “Naturally, Mr. Warrick will want to inspect the originals.”

It wasn’t exactly an order. Nor was it a question. Serena’s full mouth firmed even as she told herself that she was being ridiculous. If she couldn’t trust the head of the House of Warrick, she couldn’t trust anyone.

Even so, each time she looked at the pages, her sense of possessiveness toward them increased. In some indefinable way, they were hers. The thought of sharing them with anyone made her uneasy. Or maybe it was just that she couldn’t forget her grandmother’s warning.

Even at nearly one hundred, Norman Warrick was still a man.

“Seven o’clock?” Serena asked.

“Mr. Warrick will be expecting you and the sheets.”

Click.

Serena looked at the dead phone, shrugged, and picked up the shuttle again. She didn’t have to leave for half an hour. Forty-five minutes if she pushed it.

She would push it. She always did.

E
rik looked at his twenty-six-inch flat-screen monitor as intently as he would a manuscript for appraisal. He wouldn’t buy pages over the Internet, but he sure didn’t mind previewing them that way. It saved a lot on airline tickets or special-delivery services.

For more detailed research and comparison, he preferred using his extensive CD-ROM library of entire manuscripts or collections. Viewing by CD-ROM wasn’t as good as thumbing through a manuscript in person, but it was a hell of a lot more convenient. In any case, most of the manuscripts that interested him were locked away and simply not brought out for viewing by anyone, for any reason. As a way of protecting the precious manuscripts, it was very effective. It was real good at frustrating scholars, too.

Fortunately, the pages he was looking over right now were being put before the public quite cheerfully. They were for sale to the highest bidder. His favorite auction site to search was the Bodleian Market, named after England’s world-famous Bodleian Library, with its breathtaking collection of illuminated manuscripts. He keyed in his usual request: palimpsests; fourteenth- or fifteenth-century-style illumination; sheets or whole manuscripts; new listings for this month only.

Because of the short time frame for the listings, and the narrowness of the request, he didn’t expect much. He checked often enough that there were usually only a handful of new entries.

This time there were six, but the only one that interested him was posted by Reginald Smythe, a small-scale trader who had once been a curator of manuscripts at a minor museum and then an estate chaser with his own agenda. Erik had never met Reggie personally but knew him by reputation.

The man was perfect for Erik’s purposes. Erik wanted the pages that slipped beneath other people’s radar, the pages that said they were one thing on the surface but really were something else underneath. Palimpsests, in a word, vellum sheets on which the original text had been scraped off and a new one painted or penned on top.

He clicked on the photo button. Instantly a picture appeared on his screen. One of the side benefits of consulting for Rarities Unlimited was the uplink to Rarities’s satellite-supported computer system. Light speed beat the hell out of even the most recent commercial Internet offerings.

When he saw the picture, adrenaline kicked in in a tingling rush. Then he frowned. The miniature wasn’t up to the standards he had come to expect of the Spanish Forger, a man whose illicit work had become quite valuable in its own right. Instead of the near lyric style of a late-nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century forger imitating the Romanesque style of the early fifteenth century, the drawing appeared almost clumsy. Almost, but not quite. It was certainly close enough to fool most people. It could possibly be genuine; even the best artists had bad periods.

Thoughtfully Erik checked the leaf’s availability. No bids yet. The leaf could be inspected at Reggie’s shop in Los Angeles or at the International Antiquarian Book Celebration.

With a grimace that said he really didn’t want to attend the world’s biggest antiquarian rummage sale, Erik moved on to the category called “Provenance.” The first of the leaf’s three most recent owners—all that were required to be listed—was Christie’s (brokered on behalf of a very private client); it was later sold to a private collector by the name of Sarah Wiggant, who died last year, and was then owned by Reggie himself, the ultimate death chaser. He had purchased it from her estate less than a year ago.

Erik didn’t have to look at his hand-size portable computer/cell phone to key up the Research department at Rarities Unlimited. He could find the code in the dark—and often had, when he got up in the middle of the night with an inspiration.

Since his own code automatically registered as he “dialed,” his call was routed directly to the person who was handling his previous research request.

“Shelby here. Whadya think I am, God? I haven’t had your stuff long enough to—”

Erik cut in quickly. “Just wanted to add to the search list. I copied my screen to your computer, so all you have to do is—”

“Yeah yeah, got it. Anything else?”

“No.”

The cell phone went dead.

“Say hello to the wife and kids for me, Shel,” Erik said into the useless phone. “And good-bye to me, too.”

But Erik was smiling as he dumped the handset back into its charging cradle. Shelby Knudsen was a black former pro football player who had broken his back during scrimmage and discovered while in traction for a long, scary recuperation that he had a gift for tickling facts out of computer files.

Researchers could be trained. Born researchers had to be found. Next to Factoid, Shel was the most brilliant researcher Rarities had. Erik knew it was a sign of Dana Gaynor’s high regard that he had been given Shel on such short notice.

Or else she knew something about those pages she wasn’t telling Erik. It wouldn’t be the first time.

It wouldn’t be the last.

B
y the time Serena followed the directions to Warrick’s Palm Desert estate, it was dark. Even at night, the place was impressive. The Mediterranean-style house was set dramatically against the stark black rise of the mountains, pinned by static swords of security lights, and surrounded by stucco walls, wrought-iron gates, palm trees, ocotillo, and barrel cactus. Exterior security lights set off vast colorful plantings of snapdragons and petunias. Sprawling bougainvillea vines shed bright petals that piled up in windrows at the base of the high walls.