The Givenchy Code (10 page)

I
held the disc up, examining it in the dim light. “It’s just a CD-R,” I said. “Someone burned this disc for us.”

“So our clue is about eating and drinking?”

“Maybe,” I said. “But I don’t think so.”

“I’m listening,” he said.

“I think I’m supposed to be Alice. And the voice on the disc was just to get my attention.”

“To let you know that the CD was the clue,” Stryker said. “OK. So we have to see what else is burned on that disc.”

“Exactly.”

“No time like the present.” He opened the computer case and slid the laptop out, then drummed his fingers on the armrest as we waited for it to boot up. As soon as it did, we slid the CD in and shut the drive door.

At first, nothing happened, then the familiar hourglass icon appeared on the screen, telling us the computer was busy. When the hourglass disappeared, Stryker slid his finger on the touchpad, clicked on the My Computer folder, then navigated to drive D.

“Here goes nothing,” he said as he double-clicked on the icon. The display for the drive pulled up, revealing two files. One was a .wav file, which we assumed was the Alice message. The other was a .doc file. I itched to take the computer from Stryker’s hands, but he was moving just as fast as I could have. He clicked, and the file opened—a Microsoft Word document with one line of text: http://www.playsurvivewin-message.
com/, complete with hyperlink.

“Do we have Internet access here?” he asked.

“We should. Jenn’s got an aircard. She’s supposed to be able to get on the Net from anywhere.” As a rule, Jenn is as broke as I always am. Her parents, though, are a lot more generous, and they’d set her up with the wireless system last Christmas. I coveted the technology myself. Like a cell phone, the wireless aircard let Jenn connect from pretty much anywhere. I knew it would be handy to have something like that, but aircards were expensive, and my need wasn’t as strong as, say, my desire for new shoes.

Sure enough, Stryker clicked on the link, and a Web browser opened. It took a second to pull the webpage down, and then there it was, just as I’d both hoped and dreaded. A message. Meant entirely for me.

Close, my dear, but not quite yet….

How long has it been since you felt my assassin’s kiss?

Like Dorothy, the sand slips away….

x
²
+ y
²
= r
²

y = mx + b

Like starlight in your pocket, a touch of the familiar

before your lights

go out

and you’re lost…alone…in the dark…never

again to be found.

S
tryker thought seriously of smashing his fist through the monitor. He was supposed to be protecting her, not slogging through the goddamn
Da Vinci Code.
“This is crap,” he said. “What the hell are we supposed to do with this nonsense?”

“We’ll be fine.” Mel’s hand pressed lightly against his wrist. “It’s okay.”

“The hell it is.” He’d served twelve years in the Marine Corps, protecting his country and the citizens of a whole slew of countries under the thumb of despots. But this damn game had thrust him into battle with unknown enemies. He was chasing ghosts—the assassin Lynx, some toxin hidden in Mel’s own blood. All unseen enemies, and each one ready to do her in at any time.

Ruefully, he glanced again at the computer screen. He couldn’t even make sense of the clue. How the hell was he supposed to protect her?

Beside him, Mel was pushing her door open. “Let’s go.”

“Go? Go where?”

“Where the message is sending us,” she said. “Circle Line Tours. The Harbor Lights Cruise.”

“Of course,” he said. “You want to tell me how you know that?”

She leaned close, brushing against him as she pointed to the x-y-r equation. “This is the standard form equation for a circle. And this is one equation for a straight line,” she added, pointing to y = mx + b.

“Sure it is,” he said.

She laughed, the first genuine laugh he’d heard since they’d first met. It was a wonderful sound, and he realized suddenly how much he wanted to hear it again. “Trust me,” she said. “That wasn’t even really a code. More like a riddle.”

“So that’s how you got Circle Line. The Harbor Lights Cruise came from the starlight reference.”

“Exactly.” She flashed an impish grin. “If this whole thing weren’t such a nightmare, it might actually be fun.”

“You’re probably the type who works the Sunday crossword puzzle.”

“Oh no,” she said, but the corner of her mouth twitched. “But I do play chess in the park on Sundays.”

“So do a lot of folks,” he said. “The question is, do you win?”

She looked at him as if he’d just asked if she needed air to breathe. “Of course I win. What’s the point of playing if you don’t win?”

And that, he thought, pretty much summed up the whole damn day.

“W
e have to hurry,” I said, jogging along Broadway with Stryker at my side. I was looking for an available taxi, but of course there were none. “The boat leaves at seven.”

I was right about the clue. I knew I was. But if that boat left without us…
shit.
I needed that antidote. Twenty-four hours, the message had said. And time was ticking away.

A taxi turned onto the street half a block ahead of us. I jumped into the roadway and held out my hand, but some bastard in a suit stepped out ahead of me, and the taxi pulled over. “No!”

Naturally, he didn’t pay a bit of attention to me. Stryker, though, grabbed my hand and pulled me into a dead run (a hell of a lot faster than I ever thought I could move). “I’ll give you fifty bucks to take the next taxi,” he yelled at the suit as we tumbled to a halt beside the cab. Stryker let go of my hand to fumble for his wallet even as he ushered me into the backseat.

“Hey!” the guy said, glaring at me. “Get your ass out of my taxi.”

“A hundred bucks,” Stryker said, peeling off bills and pressing them into the guy’s hand.

“I got a meeting,” the guy said, but most of the oomph had left his voice.

Stryker elbowed the guy aside and squeezed in next to me, passing another fifty to the driver. “He can wait for the next one.”

The driver didn’t answer, but he did accelerate, leaving Stryker to tug the door closed to the sound of the man’s curses echoing after us.

Now
we had a chance of making it in time.

My optimism lasted all the way to Broadway and 38th before it came to a screeching halt along with the traffic.

I exchanged a frustrated glance with Stryker. “Twelve minutes,” he said. “From here we go on foot.” He checked the meter, passed the fare plus some over the partition, and opened the door. “It’s about ten blocks total, at least five of them crosstown. You okay with that?”

“Believe me, I have incentive.”

He nodded and took the computer case from me, slinging it over his shoulder before he grabbed my hand and turned left, hauling ass down 38th Street and right into the heart of the garment district.

It was a testament to how frantic I was to get to the pier on time that I didn’t even slow my pace to gawk in the windows. Instead, I just ran.

I never in a million years thought I could keep up with a Marine where anything remotely related to exercise was concerned, but I didn’t do half bad keeping up with Stryker. Of course, by the time we reached Pier83, I was thoroughly winded and had a stitch in my side. On the upside, I was glad I’d chosen my Prada sneakers over the Givenchy pumps. Score one on the side of practical fashion.

“Time?” I yelled, breathless, as I hunched over, my hands propped on my knees while I sucked in air. At least I didn’t have to feel guilty about not making it to the gym that morning; I was getting one hell of a workout.

“Six-fifty-eight.”

“Thank God.”

The Circle Line building loomed in front of us. A massive structure, it takes up the width of the pier and rises several stories. The top resembles a whitewashed water tower, with red letters spelling out Circle Line, a logo featuring Lady Liberty taking up the space between the two words. The main floor is not much more than in and out driveways flanked on either side by ticket windows, which I knew very well. I’d done a very brief stint behind one of those windows when I’d first moved to New York.

Now Stryker raced to the window on the left, his wallet already open. I was right beside him, terrified that his watch was slow and that the boat had already left the dock.

We were in luck, though. We really had made it with two minutes to spare, and we rushed down the pier toward the sleek white yacht that would take us on the two-hour cruise around lower Manhattan.

As soon as we were on the boat, I burst out laughing. Stryker shot me a curious glance, but I couldn’t help it. I was giddy with relief. It had been a hell of a day. Exhausting, terrifying and a whole lot of other
-ings
I couldn’t think of at the moment. But we’d made it! We’d solved the clue, we’d made it onto the boat, and damn it all, that was a victory I intended to revel in.

Stryker indulged me for a few minutes, the corner of his mouth twitching in amusement. Then he put a firm hand on my arm and steered me across the deck and into the cabin. I’d worked at the ticket window, but I’d never actually taken one of the cruises before, and now I drew in a breath, impressed by the polished and gleaming interior. The crew member who’d welcomed us aboard had mentioned that the ship was new to Circle Line’s fleet, and I could tell. Everything seemed shiny and snazzy, much more like a hotel ballroom than the dingy, damp interior I’d always imagined.

We crossed a parquet dance floor, the various shades of wood tiles set to form a star pattern. Now, tourists holding drinks mingled there, but I could imagine ballroom dancing if the yacht was rented out for black-tie extravaganzas.

“This way,” Stryker said, leading me past rows of royal blue upholstered benches and snazzy chrome and wood tables. The walls were almost entirely windows, slanting up to give some view of the sky. I heard the low, mournful cry of the yacht’s horn and realized we were starting to pull away from the dock. Lower Manhattan filled the view, and I paused for just a second, staring at the magnificence of my city, before Stryker urged me on. We passed a mahogany bar, behind which two busy bartenders filled glasses with wine for the gathering crowd. I looked longingly but didn’t ask Stryker to pause. We both needed to stay sharp, after all.

“Look at every face,” Stryker said. “If Lynx is here, I want to see him before he finds us.”

I nodded, suddenly less interested in Circle Line’s interior decorating skills and much more concerned with my companions. We continued on up the stairs to the mid-deck, this level less formal than the first. We walked the length of it, examining every face, then moved outside. A walkway ran the length of the boat, the interior side lined with padded benches and the ocean side protected by a chest-high rail. We covered the entire deck, didn’t see Lynx, then moved back into the cabin.

I noticed a ladies’ room and told Stryker to wait up. For a second I didn’t think he was going to leave my side, but fortunately we didn’t have to have that argument. He silently conceded my privacy, turning to lean against a wall as I pushed open the door and entered the less plush but sparkling clean ladies’ room.

I’d been desperate for a bathroom, and as I was washing my hands, I realized I was also desperate for a touch-up. I looked totally bedraggled. Not too surprising, I supposed. In the short span of a day, I’d been poisoned, chased, terrified and threatened. I still looked better than I did after a long night of drinking, though. I suppose that counted for something.

I dug in my tote until I found my brush, then tried to do something with my hair. The summer heat and humidity from the boat had hit it hard, and somehow it was managing to be both limp and frizzy at the same time. In my own bathroom—which Jenn and I keep stocked better than Frederic Fekkai’s warehouse—this would be fixable. On this boat, with no product except a sample size of TIGI hairspray, I had no options. I brushed my hair back from my face, gathered it with a barrette at the base of my neck, then sprayed the flyaway ends into place.

Not bad, except that now my pasty skin couldn’t hide beneath my hair. Time for drastic measures. I dumped my tote on the counter, then put everything back in, one item at a time, except for my makeup. I did a quick touch-up with foundation, used a light shade of eyeshadow to make my eyes seem wider, brushed on a hint of blush so that I looked alive, then dabbed the shiny spots with powder. I did my lips last, lining them first, then using the same MAC lipstick I’d used to leave Stryker a message in the parking garage. I had to smooth the lipstick with the tip of my finger to get rid of the dust and dirt, but once it was cleaned up, it worked just fine. See? That’s why I spend a fortune on quality cosmetics. They can take the abuse.

Once I was done, I took a step back from the mirror and inspected the results. Not bad, especially when you considered that what I really needed was a shower and a nap. But I did feel better, and just knowing I didn’t look like a vagrant gave me a boost. Considering my life was on the line, I figured I needed all the help I could get.

Stryker was waiting right where I’d left him, and as I stepped out of the restroom, his gaze skimmed over me. I expected to hear a sarcastic comment about females and primping and wasting valuable time. It didn’t come. Instead, I saw a flicker of heat in his eyes, and for just one moment, that reaction made me forget the direness of my situation.

“Feel better?”

“Loads.”

“Good. You look great.”

I smiled, feeling pretty and feminine as he took my arm and led me up the stairs to the sundeck.

Smaller than the previous two, this deck was my favorite simply because it placed us out in the open with a grand view of the skyline and the sky. We were high above the river now, and the cool breeze from the water felt fabulous after the heat of the summer day. Benches were lined up one behind the other, and we walked to the back of the boat, taking a seat on the very last bench. The yacht’s wake churned just below us, and that, coupled with the steady pulse of the water beating against the sides of the boat, created a cacophony of sounds that enveloped and soothed. I turned sideways in my seat, relaxing just a little as I took in the stunning skyline passing beside us.

“Keep a lookout,” Stryker said. “But I don’t think he’s here.”

“Me either.” Reluctantly, I turned away from the view, the game sucking me back to reality. “I don’t think I’m fair game yet, anyway.”

That obviously surprised him. “Why not? The clue on the CD is the qualifying clue, right? I thought you said that in PSW once the target solves the qualifying clue, then the assassin can start doing his thing.”

“That’s right. But I don’t think we’ve solved it yet.”

He held his hands out, indicating the boat. “Not that this isn’t a lovely way to spend an evening, Mel, but if the solution wasn’t Circle Line Harbor Lights Cruise, then why are we here?”

“Maybe I just wanted to spend some quality time with you?” I retorted. My intention had been to tease, but there was too much truth in the words, and I felt my face heat. Spending time alone with Stryker
was
appealing, and under other circumstances, a slow cruise around lower Manhattan with him would be the perfect way to spend an evening.

Too bad the specter of possible death had to step in and ruin my good time.

“Sorry,” I said, before he could answer. “I’m just a little punchy.” I shifted again on the bench and prepared to explain. “We solved the Circle Line part, but so what? We haven’t found any other clue or noticed anything relevant to the game at all. If we were online, we’d probably be maneuvering through a digitized version of this ship, clicking on various items around us until we found the solution.
That
would trigger the assassin.”

“The solution,” he repeated. “You mean it would be over? The whole thing just turns into a race for your life?”

“No, I just meant that particular solution. It would be another clue, actually. And then we’d have to solve it in order to find the next clue. And so on and so on until we get to the end or the assassin makes a kill. Whichever comes first.” I said the words blandly, as if I were simply stating a geometric proof. But there was nothing bland about these facts, and I shivered.

Beside me, Stryker slipped off his jacket and put it over my shoulders. Before he did, I saw him take the gun and slip it into the waistband of his jeans, using the tail of his shirt to hide the butt.

“I’m not really cold,” I said.

He met my eyes, and I saw understanding there. “I know.” He took my hand, his fingers twining with mine. I hesitated, then leaned against him, relief pouring over me when he curled his arm around my shoulder. Beside us, the skyline seemed to float by, the lights of the buildings starting to twinkle in the growing dusk.

We sat in comfortable silence for a few minutes before Stryker spoke again. “You’re probably right. But I still want you to be careful. Don’t drop your guard.”

“I won’t.” I turned in his arms. “Too bad we can’t just stay on this boat forever. If we never solve the clue, he can never start hunting me.”

There were a lot of reasons why that plan was unworkable, but we both knew the biggest one. It was Stryker who finally voiced it. “If we don’t solve the clue, we’ll never find the antidote. And the clock is ticking. Any ideas what to do now?”

I wanted Stryker to hold me and make it all better. But that wasn’t an option. I was the one with the skill to interpret clues. And I was the one whose ass was on the line. I sat up straight, shifting out from under his arm as I leaned across him for the laptop case. “We go back to the clue,” I said. “And we figure out what we missed.”