Caught

So beautiful, so alluring, a treasure that demanded to be touched. A seductive beauty that did not easily release the mind. When he’d sat across from his contact in the dark corner of that Parisian tavern, he’d been given only a description, a location, a name. Now that he had seen her, he knew what she could drive a man to do. He knew what a man might do to possess her.

And he knew his client would pay more.

All he needed to do was retrieve her from the foolish Suarez woman. Perhaps she had been lucky since he’d been forced to place the amulet in her bag to avoid detection, but it was of no matter. He had been punished for his foolishness, and now it was at an end. The White Star was his to take.

He walked down the hallway with its echoing marble walls. Friday midday and all the little people had scuttled out of their cramped offices for lunch before their afternoon of meaningless rote work, like rats on the wheel. Pah. Fools, all of them, laboring their lives away for nothing, telling themselves they had control, deluding themselves they had security when he could move among them at will and take whatever he wanted.

And what he wanted, he thought, listening to the voices inside the open office door, was his White Star.

2

Friday, 11:00 a.m.

“PLEASE, SIT DOWN,” Julia said, waving Marissa and Jamie to seats before she crossed to her own chair.

“Thank you for agreeing to see us,” Marissa said. “I’m sorry we interrupted you.”

“It was nothing.” Julia welcomed the distraction. It let her heart level. It kept her from thinking about the look in Alex’s eyes. Instead, she studied the couple sitting across from her. For they were a couple—she would have known it before Marissa had said a thing. It wasn’t the clasped hands, but something that hummed between them, something that tied them as surely as a physical bond.

She wouldn’t have put them together at a glance. Marissa looked too polished, too fiery for Jamie’s slightly rumpled, abstracted air. They seemed…glowing, somehow, though. Connected.

Shrugging the thought aside, Julia folded her hands. “So,” she said briskly, “what have you got?”

The two of them exchanged glances. Marissa moistened her lips. “I was just on vacation,” she began. “I wound up with something, and…”

Ah, the dreaded vacation find, Julia thought in resignation, but then she realized there was a tension about Marissa, a strain in her liquid dark eyes that didn’t bespeak a flea-market tchotchke. “And?” she prompted.

“Look,” Jamie broke in. “How about if we don’t tell you anything about it. Just…look at it. Tell us what you think. Tell us if you think it’s real.” He turned to Marissa. “Okay?”

She nodded and opened up the leather bag she wore strapped across her chest. Reaching inside, she brought out an object wrapped in cloth and laid it carefully on the desktop before unwrapping it.

And Julia felt the unholy punch of excitement in her gut. This wasn’t a vacation find brought in by some poor, deluded soul. This was the real thing. Where it had come from or how it had gotten there, she couldn’t say, but she could sense the power of its age as though it were radiating waves of antiquity.

It wasn’t colored as so many of the pieces of that time were, and yet she was as certain as she was of her own name that it was ancient. Thin veins of gold chased around the carved ivory, an ivory so white despite the years that it seemed to radiate somehow. It was shaped like a star, with a hole through the center. Looking closer, she saw shallow etching, so faint and small as to be almost invisible, worn away, perhaps, by the years. Gods, designed to carry the bearer to the afterlife?

Julia rummaged blindly in the desk drawer for the wooden box that held her loupe, unable to take her eyes off the piece. Who had carved it long ago, sitting in some dusty desert workshop, never guessing that his handiwork would leap across centuries, millennia? What had it meant? What power had he believed it held? Slipping the loupe in place, she looked closer.

Only to be astounded by the detail. The figures stood facing one another, hands clasped. A man, a woman, staring into each other’s eyes. In each of their breasts a tiny dot of embedded carnelian flamed red, seeming almost to pulse before her eyes. And the hairs prickled on the back of her neck.

Not gods. Lovers.

A ribbon had been strung through a faceted hole that pierced the amulet just below the joined hands. “Have you been wearing this?” Julia asked, glancing up.

Only to see Marissa’s cheeks tinting. “Only once,” she said, refusing to look at her boyfriend. “Before I realized it might be valuable. Is it?”

“At a glance I’d say it’s possible, but I’d have to spend more time looking at it.” Caution was the way to go. As certain as Julia felt, she’d seen the best and brightest fooled by clever forgeries. The article in her magazine just that day had detailed more than a few instances where shady dealers had profited. Something else nibbled at the edge of her memory. “Could you leave it here with me for a day or two?” she asked impulsively.

“But we—” Marissa objected.

“Hold on,” Jamie said to her. “It might be the safest place for it. Keep anything unexpected from happening to it.” He stared at Marissa intently and some message passed between them. “How is your security here?” he asked, turning to Julia.

She blinked. “The best. Why?”

“Just want to be sure it’s protected,” he said affably.

“We’ve got twenty-four-hour guards, electric eyes, motion detectors, the whole deal. The amulet will stay locked in my office safe unless I’m working with it. It looks familiar. I’ve got some source texts downstairs I want to consult.”

“We think it might be the White Star amulet,” Marissa blurted.

That was it. Stolen from Zoey Zander’s collection, Julia realized. But that heist had been carried out by professionals. She frowned. “Why haven’t you gone to the police?”

Marissa flushed. “We wanted to be sure it was real,” she explained. “You have to admit, it seems pretty unlikely.”

Certainly they looked like the unlikeliest of thieves. Then again, the best thieves did. “How did you come by it?”

“The guy who stole it might have dumped it in Marissa’s bag at the airport. We think we’ve seen him,” Jamie added.

Which explained the questions about security. And the strain. Then again, the strain could have stemmed from taking a criminal risk.

“What do you think?” Marissa asked.

Julia looked down at the amulet, the lovers frozen hand in hand. The White Star. There were legends, she remembered vaguely, something fanciful about true love. “It’s possible,” she allowed. “But you have to understand, even if it is the Zander piece, it may not necessarily be the real White Star. It’s very difficult to authenticate antiquities, especially if the forgery itself is an antique.”

“But it was being auctioned off,” Marissa protested.

“Even the best experts aren’t infallible,” Julia said wryly. “We can all be taken in. Leave it with me for a few days. I’ll take some time to look it over, check to see if I can find anything definitive to authenticate it.” And if it were the real White Star, she could get the police involved.

“Whatever you can do,” Jamie said and rose.

Marissa stood and reached out a hand longingly toward the amulet but stopped short of touching it. “It’s so beautiful,” she murmured. “I don’t care if it’s real or not.”

“If it is the White Star, it’s not ours,” Jamie said gently, putting an arm around her shoulders. “We only got to borrow it for a little while.”

And to Julia’s everlasting shock, Marissa laughed and threw her arms around Jamie’s neck and gave him a kiss hot enough to vaporize metal. “And honey, we made the most of it.”

FOOLISH WOMAN, to boast of security. As though motion detectors and pressure plates could keep him out. As though a mere office safe could block him from his prize. The White Star was his in all but actual fact. It was but a matter of time.

He itched to hold her again. It was maddening to have her so close, yet out of his grasp.

But he was a patient man.

For now, hovering in the gallery near the entrance to the office wing held the most promise. He could linger, invisible to the imbecile guards, and watch. It was, after all, a museum, a place designed for lingering. He would bide his time, learn what he could. He could wait as long as he needed.

And when night fell, he would strike.

HELL, JULIA THOUGHT wearily at day’s end, probably bore a lot of resemblance to the twelve-person, three- time-zone telecon she’d just suffered through. There was nothing like trying to pull off a tricky negotiation with a host of stakeholders, none of whom you could see. Foolishly, naively, she’d assumed that because everyone stood to benefit from the multimuseum traveling exhibit she was hoping to pull together for early 2008, they’d all cooperate. Ha. Throw in egos, tempers and language barriers, and you had a recipe for chaos.

Meanwhile, she’d been almost entirely unable to keep her mind from drifting back to the amulet. And to Alex. Things with Alex were over, she reminded herself. She should put him out of her mind. The amulet, however…