The Lazarus Trap (31 page)

But before he could unleash the blow, a woman slammed out of the stairwell beside the elevators. Her lips were drawn back from small animal teeth. She charged.

Val reaimed and caught her square on the shoulder, driving her to one side. She collided with another heavy, and they went down in a tangle of scrambling limbs.

People shouted and pointed and raced in every direction, just so long as it was away.

Two of the bruisers were rising to their feet, watching with deadly expressions. Val dropped the ashtray and sprinted with the others for the exit.

He shoved aside the bellhop who tried to halt him. He banged through the revolving doors. His head scarred the glass surface with red trails. Then he was through and lurching down the street.

His legs refused to obey his commands. They merely stumbled when he wanted to run.

Then Bert's van roared up alongside, climbing over the curb. Val could not make himself stop. He rammed into the side and stayed there as the door flew open and hands gathered him up and bundled him inside.

Dillon pulled Val into the seat beside him and stared aghast at Val's bloody face. Bert wrestled them off the curb and roared away. Only when they were three streets out from the center did Bert risk a glance and a grin in Val's direction. “My guess is you won't be offered a second chance at that job, mate.”

Val remained silent. He bent over his legs, the aftershocks sending weak tremors through his frame. He was still being assaulted. Only now it was by memories.

Dillon stripped off his own bellhop jacket and handed it over. “Stick that on your face before you bleed to death.”

Val pressed the jacket to his temple. The pressure did nothing to stem the flood. He remembered.

Bert demanded, “What's the matter, mate?”

Val straightened in stages. “Do either of you have friends servicing the rentals around here?”

“What, you mean cottages to let?” Dillon looked askance at Bert. “I might do. Why?”

When Val explained what he wanted, Bert laughed out loud. “I'm ruddy glad we didn't meet up back before I took the straight and narrow, mate. You're a right one with the planning, you are.”

“You just watch the road,” Dillon said.

Bert paid him no mind whatsoever. “Our Val is covered in it, and all he wants to know is, can we help him with what comes next.”

Dillon asked, “What do we do now?”

“That's simple enough,” Bert replied for him. “We're off to save the lady. Isn't that right, mate?”

Val only pressed harder at his temple. But the mental torrent would not abate.

He remembered everything.

THE STORM HAD NOT YET ARRIVED WHEN VAL LEFT GERALD'S STUDY. He walked through the kitchen, easing his shoulders and wincing at the bite of new bruises. Dillon and Bert were busy at the stove making a late supper nobody much wanted. They must have seen the frustration in his face because they did not speak. The pressure of time and unspoken terrors weighed heavily upon them all. A pot of coffee had been sitting on the eye long enough to almost congeal. Val poured himself a mug and stepped out back.

The greatest source of anxiety was that no one had called. No threats had been made. No ultimatums. Nothing.

The hillside was a dark silhouette cut from sunset and the impending storm. The horizon was a solid wall of black cloud. The air smelled of coming rain, heavy and sweet. Thunder rumbled low and menacing. The chalk veins glowed faintly, as if the heat Val felt fulminating inside his heart lay exposed and gleaming.

He yearned for love. No incoming barrage of memories could change that. He yearned for the touch of a good woman. A lady who cared enough to see in him what only love could illuminate. What he had denied himself for far too long.

Gerald let himself out the back door and came to stand beside Val. Gerald had dumped the contents of Terrance's laptop into his own computer, then he and Val had worked in tandem for three frantic hours. Now his voice carried the grainy tension of a quest unfulfilled. “Further north they refer to such hills as fells. It's a good Gaelic-sounding word, that. The fells. Brings to mind all sorts of dark and craggy depths. Places where evil might thrive unobserved.”

Bert and Dillon let themselves out the kitchen door and padded over to stand beside them at the fence. Bert said, “You might as well go ahead and say it.”

Gerald said, “All we have to show for our efforts is a long string of numbers belonging to a file named after this bloke here.”

“That's something, right?” Bert searched both faces with frantic concern. “One of you tell me we're closer to getting the lady back.”

When Gerald merely rubbed his tired eyes, Val explained, “It's something. But not as much as we hoped. My guess is, Terrance set up the accounts in my name so the U.S. authorities can track how the money flowed, maybe even get a figure on what's sitting over there. But that's it. Jersey banking laws make Switzerland's system look like fishnet.”

“You guess,” Gerald quietly scoffed.

But Val was seeing anew how the file with the numbers had been set up. It was marked simply as
Haines
. “Terrance can claim they found the account numbers in searching me out. That's why he can carry them like this, to show the authorities. But they'll have some prearranged electronic signal for moving the money on. That's what we didn't find. I should have figured Terrance would set up firewalls.”

Bert complained, “You lost me back there around the first word.”

“Maybe they set up a secure Web site somewhere. One way in, one out. He brought the computer because there's a signal embedded in here that opens the electronic door. We have no idea where to look on the Web. He could have this thing hidden anywhere. A server for the phone company in Tasmania, an insurance group in Shanghai, anywhere at all.”

“Without the codes and the address, we're lost,” Gerald said. “I say it's time we called in the police.”

“Absolutely,” Val said.

Dillon pointed out, “If we do, mate, they're bound to discover your role in all this.”

“If you're hesitating on my account, forget it,” Val said.

Gerald said, “So maybe we should arrange a trade. You for her. The one thief within reach for Audrey.”

“I'm ready,” Val said. Meaning it.

“No, mate,” Bert decided, shaking his entire upper body. “We can't do that.”

“Why not?” Gerald's voice was flat as a cop's.

“They'll murder the bloke. You know that same as me.”

“So what do you think they're doing to Audrey?”

Bert sneered. “You're telling me it'd be right to feed the bloke to the lions?”

“If it saves Audrey, absolutely.”

Val backed away from the three men. “I'm the one who brought this down on you people. I'm the reason the bad guys have Audrey. I've made a total mess of everything.”

“What about your plan?” Bert said.

“Will you just listen to the man!” Gerald snapped. “We can't access the computer codes!”

“Your plan,” Bert insisted to Val. “The one you were thinking of back before we hit the hotel.”

“It could still work. Maybe. I'm not sure of anything anymore except that first you need to decide whether it'd be better just to offer me up for her.”

A silhouette appeared in the kitchen doorway. Arthur d'Arcy held himself canted slightly to one side. He pushed futilely at the back door and then turned away. Val started back for the house.

Gerald shouted, “We're not finished here!”

Val kept going. A gale-force wind blasted out of nowhere. Thunder tore shreds from the feeble sunset. When Val let himself in through the door, Arthur d'Arcy was seated at the kitchen table. Arthur looked once in Val's direction, then planted his elbows on the table and placed his face in his hands. The motions of a defeated man.

Val understood perfectly how he felt.

The kitchen held a sulphurous odor. Far more than coffee had burned down to sullen residue. Val poured a second mug. The coffee was black as pitch and smelled charred. He doubted very much that Arthur would notice. Val set the mug down by the old man's elbow and took the chair on the table's opposite side.

Val tasted his own mug. “Apparently the fight with Terrance jostled my brain. Things are coming back to me now.”

There was no sign from Arthur that he had heard at all.

“I remember everything. Well, not everything. But enough. I remember why I sent Audrey away. Right now, that's pretty much all that matters.”

“I long to forget.” Arthur did not raise his face from his hands. The words came out malformed, shards of trauma and regret. “My entire life has been quilted together from horrific errors. I should never have married Eleanor. But I was convinced my love was great enough for the two of us. I should have fought my father's decision. I should have . . .”

Val sipped his coffee and waited the man out. The voices out back had gone silent. The only sounds were the tick of the kitchen clock and distant thunder.

Arthur went on, “Everything Terrance accused me of was true.”

“Partly,” Val corrected.

Arthur lifted his head. He blinked slowly, having difficulty placing the man across from him.

“Partly true,” Val repeated. “Finding his enemy's weakness and attacking hard are Terrance's trademarks.”

“His enemy,” Arthur croaked. “What a dreadful legacy I've created.”

“What about Audrey?”

“They have her.”

“That's not your fault. If you want someone to blame for that particular calamity, you're looking straight at him.”

But Arthur was too lost in self-remorse to accuse anyone else. “I thought giving my family peace and harmony and stability was doing right by them. But that was what I wanted. Not them. They wanted . . .” He dropped his face back into his hands. He might have finished with the word “everything.” But Val could not be certain.

The clock on the wall above the stove sounded like a pick working at the wound on Val's temple. Chipping away at his composure, exposing the bubbling fear that threatened to erupt at any time. They had Audrey. He had looked into the faces of four of them, Terrance and the woman and the two bruisers, and he knew them for killers. Val wanted to grab the clock and fling it onto the stone floor and stomp it to bits.

“Fourteen months after my wife left me for Terrance, I met Audrey,” Val went on, his voice steady. “She showed me the same talent as her brother, only in reverse. Terrance hunts out weakness to attack. Audrey seeks only to help. She is the most giving person I've ever met. The most loving. I saw it even then. But I couldn't accept it. Back then I woke up every night drenched in rage. I couldn't see further than wanting to tear a man apart with my own bare hands.”

Val looked down at his hands. He was amazed to find that they were not trembling. He could remember now what it was like, walking into the bathroom at one or two in the morning, knowing he would not return to sleep. Living on three or four hours of sleep a night because that was all he could have. All he would ever have. His bathroom was like the rest of the house, empty of life. Even when he was there. Two o'clock in the morning was a terrible time to face the fact that he had lost everything. All because of one man. His hands had trembled then. He would wash his face and clench his fists and press them to his forehead, trying to cram the rage and the hatred all back inside where it lay hidden during the day.

“Audrey arrived in Florida a week after I learned Terrance was stripping the pension funds. I had not slept in seven nights. I never knew a man could live without sleep. All I could think of was, how was I going to catch Terrance red-handed? If I blew the whistle too early, the fund would collapse and pull the company down with it. And Terrance would escape free and clear. And I wasn't going to let that happen. I was going to bring him down. I was going to crush him.”

Val was lost in a morass of remembrances. The kitchen's sulfurous odor was identifiable now. It came from himself and the rage he had refused to let go. “Audrey caught me at my weakest. All she wanted was to give me hope in the future. I see that now. But at the time, I thought she was asking the impossible. She wanted me to forgive Terrance.” The words were almost too large to fit inside his mouth. “She gave me an ultimatum. Give up the hatred, or her.”

He could hear Audrey's voice so clearly she might as well have been seated there beside him. He felt anew her intense longing to reach him. To
turn
him. “She told me the only way forward was to release my desire for vengeance. Otherwise I would serve a life sentence, trapped in a prison of my own making.”

Val saw her face again, the flame he had extinguished burning so strongly it illuminated his own heart. “But I wouldn't let go. I couldn't see beyond my hatred for Terrance. I knew it was consuming me, and I didn't care.”