Shadowlight (24 page)

That surprised her. “Rowan speaks French?”

“She taught herself to read it from books, for cooking.” He placed a writing tablet and pen beside the books. “Will you translate into English what you read?”

“I can.” She glanced up at him. “I thought you read all these yourself.”

“Those in Latin and English I can read myself,” he said. “The stories in the other languages were read to me by a translator, but I did not write then.”

She didn’t understand what he meant. “You didn’t know how to write in English?”

“Ten years ago I did not know how to read or write,” he admitted. “Rowan has been teaching me, but I am a poor scholar.”

She felt appalled now. “It’s wonderful that you’re trying. Weren’t you able to go to school when you were young?”

“Yes, but not for reading or writing.” He started to say something else, and then seemed to change his mind. “I will leave you now.”

After he had gone Jessa took the first book and skimmed through it. Written in modern Spanish, the text detailed a number of religious trials that were held in Madrid in the late fourteenth century. The author of the book, a noted historian, had translated some of the medieval documents he had found while researching the legal proceedings. Jessa found one startling passage about the conviction of a Templar knight who had escaped persecution in France only to be apprehended in Spain.

She began with the desk, which she found unlocked, but the contents of each drawer proved to be ordinary: a collection of pens and pencils, blank paper, and some newspaper clippings stuffed into a folder. She went through the articles, which were all stories about people in America and Europe who had gone missing. The last clipping was the front-page story about her being wanted for killing Bradford Lawson, the same article Matthias had shown her. None of the other people in the articles had been accused of murder, but the one common denominator was that they had all vanished abruptly and without leaving any clues as to their whereabouts—exactly, she thought, as she had.

Were these the other Kyndred Matthias had spoken of? Had he abducted all of these people before her? She counted the articles; there were more than twenty of them.

She got up from the desk and slowly walked around the room, inspecting each bookcase and looking behind the books. Other than some dust and a few spiderwebs, she found nothing.

She stopped in front of the fireplace and looked up at the old bronze blade mounted in the glass case. The dark stains on it still repelled her, but there was something about the way it reflected the light that made her reach up and touch the glass.

“It’s hermetically sealed,” Rowan said from behind her, making her jump and spin around. The girl gave her a chilly smile. “The only way you can get it out is to break the glass. For which you’ll need a sledgehammer.”

“I was just curious.” Jessa kept her expression bland. “I’ve never seen such an old sword.”

“They were all the rage around two thousand years ago.” Rowan set a steaming mug on the desk. “Matt thought you might like some tea.”

She was a little thirsty. “Thank you, that was very kind.”

The girl ignored her and picked up the notebook with her translation. “Lovely handwriting. You dot all your Is and cross all your Ts. Do you starch your underwear, too?”

She decided to counter Rowan’s sarcasm by giving her a compliment. “Matthias said you’ve been teaching him to read and write. I think that’s really nice of you.”

The girl scowled as if Jessa had insulted her. “He’s not dumb, you know. It’s not his fault he never had the chance to learn.”

“I don’t think he’s stupid at all,” Jessa said. “But he must be from a very poor country.”

“Stop fishing, Queenie, and drink your tea.” Rowan sauntered out.

Jessa returned to the desk and picked up the notebook, turning it over in her hands as she gazed around the room, and then stared at the fireplace. The brick mantel surrounding the hearth stood out a good foot from the wall, and appeared to have been built in different sections. She got up and went over, checking both sides, and then noticed something about the brick.

As a child she had walked hundreds of paths through the city squares, and most of them had been made from bricks formed by slaves who used clay from the river. The distinctive, old-blood color of the bricks had been unique, a color referred to ever after as Savannah grey.

The fireplace had been built with the same kinds of bricks. Jessa sat down on the floor and touched the warm, rough surface of the hearth. The archaic bricks, so coveted by builders and restoration experts, were very rare, and almost never seen outside the city. Either she was back in Savannah or close to it.

Tears stung her eyes. She’d sworn never to return to her childhood home; it would have been too dangerous. She’d bitterly regretted everything she’d had to sacrifice in order to create a new identity for herself, but after waking up in the intensive care unit and discovering that the fatal gunshot wound in her chest had completely healed in less than twelve hours, she’d panicked and run. And had been running ever since.

Jessa braced a hand against the brick to stand, and felt something move under her palm. She looked carefully at the mortar between the bricks and found a seam, and traced it before she tugged at the stones. A large section of the hearth shifted, but it was too heavy for her to slide out.

This was where he was hiding everything, she thought, and tried pulling at the section of brick again. It didn’t budge, and there seemed to be something holding it in place. She spent the next thirty minutes trying everything she could think of to dislodge it, including wedging the tip of her pen into the seam, but under pressure the pen merely snapped in half and the section remained in place.

She muttered something rude under her breath as she stood and brushed the traces of brick dust from her hands before giving in to her temper and kicking the brick. That simply hurt her toes, and she hopped for a moment before she limped over to the desk and sat down to rub her sore foot. At least she knew where his hiding place was, and possibly where
she
was.

Now all she had to do was break into his cache, and break out of her prison.

No one complained, but a few eyes rolled.

He turned to his senior tech, a whiz kid Genaro had recruited straight out of MIT. “Bill, I’ll need all the files we recovered from Bellamy’s hard drive.”

“I was hoping to work on them this morning,” Bill said. “Yesterday I noticed some gaps in the ROM that didn’t look right. They could be hidden file markers or something like that.”

“I’ll follow up on that for you,” Riordan promised.

Once his techs returned to their cubicles, Riordan went into his office. Lori, his assistant, had gone down to collect the mail, but had left his morning drink—a chilled bottle of vitamin water—on his desk next to a pile of messages. He drank half the bottle while sorting through the slips and waiting for his terminal to boot up.

The morning conference had derailed his schedule, something he couldn’t afford with Genaro on the warpath, but he had a dedicated crew and they’d work quickly to pull the necessary data. Everything else would have to wait.

Bill came in with a CD containing Bellamy’s files and closed the door. “What’s going on, Andy? Everyone’s been so jumpy today you’d think the floor was hot-wired.”

Riordan had kept his staff loyal by keeping an open-door policy and working alongside them rather than over them. At times, like now, he regretted that he couldn’t be more honest with them. “You want me to give you the need-to-know speech again?” he asked as he took the CD.

“No, I get it.” the tech admitted. “But it’s hard to work in the dark. The newspapers are saying this girl killed the director. We know she didn’t.”

“If and when I can tell you anything more, I will. Damn it.” The pen he was holding had snapped, and was now leaking blue ink onto his fingers. “Lori’s downstairs. Cover the phones for me for a minute, will you?”

Riordan went to the men’s room closest to his office and tried to scrub the ink from his hands. As he did, one of the guys from accounting came in with a newspaper under his arm.

“Morning.” The man nodded and stepped into a stall.

Riordan dried his hands, studied them, and reached again for the soap dispenser. As he did, Delaporte came in to use one of the urinals. As the heavyset man passed him, he caught a whiff of something.

“That a new cologne?” Riordan asked him.

Delaporte glanced at him as he stood in front of the urinal and unzipped. “What?”

Riordan grinned. “You smell like perfume and coffee, Del. Been chasing one of the girls around the typing pool?”

“No, I …” He frowned. “I was just going about my business.”

“That feels better,” the accountant said as he stepped out of the stall and came to the sinks. “Hey, Andy, who do you like for the Super Bowl this year?”

“Cardinals are looking pretty good. So are the Steelers.” Riordan soaped his hands. “But the Bucs still have a shot, I think.”

As the other man expressed his opinions of all three teams, Riordan saw Delaporte glance at the stall the accountant had used before joining them. Now he understood why the security chief had come here when he had his own office and private restroom five floors down.

Move.

“You won’t get that off with regular soap,” the security chief advised him. “Go over to the lab; they have a solvent hand cleaner that removes everything.”

“Thanks, Del.” Riordan dried his hands a second time, nodded to the accountant, and walked out and down the hall to the elevator. As he did, he checked his watch. He had rehearsed and timed everything he needed to do, and he knew it would take him precisely four minutes and nineteen seconds to either get out alive or kill himself.

Andrew Riordan had no intention of committing suicide.

He pressed his fingertip into a recess hidden on the underside of the rail at the back of the elevator, triggering the unit he’d installed in the ceiling of his office. He then set his watch to countdown as he heard muffled shouts coming from the data center. He stepped through the doors into the elevator and pressed the button for the lobby level.

Four minutes, ten seconds to live.

Footsteps thudded in the corridor, and someone called, “Hold those doors, please.”

Riordan pressed the Close Doors button and held it until the panels slid shut and the cab began to descend. He didn’t glance up at the security camera hidden in one of the lights, and kept his stance and expression casual.

Three minutes, forty-one seconds.

Forty.

Thirty-nine.

At the lobby level he stepped out of the elevator and walked through the back hall to the secured exit to the delivery platform. He took a key card from his wallet, swiped it, and pushed the heavy door open. Once outside the building, he jogged away from the senior employee parking lot, where his car was waiting, and went to the back lot where the platform workers kept their vehicles. There he took a duplicate key he’d made to Bill’s compact car, unlocked it, and got in.

Two minutes, ten seconds.

He saw the first of the security guards emerge from the building as he was pulling out, and made a one-eighty turn to head toward the eight-foot-tall fence running across the back of the property. Bill’s tiny car bumped and bounced as it left the paved lot and traveled over the uneven ground, but it had a lot of pep and picked up speed nicely. Riordan had it up to eighty mph by the time he reached the fence and rammed the car through it.

One minute, thirty-eight seconds.

Metal shrieked and sparks exploded as Riordan flew over the deep ditch beyond the fencing and landed with a hard jolt. The little car’s back wheels spun for a few seconds as they hung on the opposite edge of the ditch; then the tires dug in and the car shot forward with a high-pitched roar of its small engine. Riordan drove expertly through the back property, following a trail winding around the trees and the brush until he came to a utility road and made a sharp left turn.

Seven seconds.

Riordan opened the driver’s-side door, braking enough to reduce the car’s speed to a safe level before he jumped out and hit the ground rolling. Bill’s car continued down the straight road for another quarter mile before it ran off into the trees and crashed.

His watch beeped, indicating his time was up. Drew switched off the countdown function as he retreated behind a ficus tree and watched the road until he spotted several dark vehicles driving at high speed toward Bill’s wrecked compact.

Time to live.

Riordan ran every morning before he came into work, and covered the mile of uneven ground to his next destination in less than five minutes. Under the camouflage tarp covering the four-wheeler he’d stashed in the woods were also two tanks of gas and a backpack containing ten thousand dollars in cash, clothes, a disposable cell phone, and his new identity. The ATV started up at once, but the cell phone’s battery was drained and needed recharging.

“Shit.” He had forgotten to pack a charger, and would have to buy another phone before he could call in to Rowan and let her and Matthias know he’d been exposed. That wouldn’t happen for at least four or five hours, after he’d put some distance between him and GenHance and picked up the rest of what he needed, but it couldn’t be helped.

He climbed on, started the engine, and took off.