Caught

The shadows outside had grown long by the time she spun the dial of her safe and drew out the unadorned wooden instrument box that held the amulet. It was the box that usually cradled her loupe, but she’d switched it for the Suarez woman’s piece earlier that day. Her loupe would do just fine unprotected for a short while. A three-thousand-year-old ivory amulet—if it was indeed the White Star—wouldn’t.

Julia put down a padded mat on her desk and laid out the amulet. She wouldn’t allow herself to think of it as the White Star, not until—unless—she demonstrated its provenance. That was her task. That was her challenge. But for a moment, just a moment, she let herself look. And with her hands freshly washed to remove all possible contaminants, she gave herself guilty permission to touch.

Power, warmth hummed up her arm.

She was a scholar, an educated woman with a disciplined mind. Hocus-pocus made her impatient, but her secret, the thing she told no one, was that she could feel something in the truly ancient objects, something beyond what her trained eye could see, beyond what her educated mind could know. There was some connection she made with the past.

And she could feel it in the amulet, stronger than she’d ever felt before. She felt age, hot desert air, the whisper of sand. And a bittersweet mix of love and sadness that had her jerking her hands away.

After a moment she shook her head. That was what she got for being ridiculous. She knew what she needed to do, Julia thought, snapping on gloves. Characterize, compare, research, document.

The fundamental steps to authentication all began with a physical record, of course. Digging out her digital camera, she began snapping photographs of the piece from every angle. Annie Leibovitz, she wasn’t, in oh so many ways. The very paleness of the ivory foiled her every effort; even with the light dimmed, she couldn’t capture the carvings. So she got out a pencil and paper and began to make a set of careful, painstaking drawings, studying the amulet through the loupe, front and back, from every side, recording every possible detail. Okay, so she wasn’t da Vinci, either, but at least she finished up with a detailed record.

Finally, she put the amulet into the box and rose. Characterize, compare, research, document. She already knew the museum had nothing precisely like it, which eliminated the need to compare. Time to get on to part three.

In the hall, she heard the familiar end-of-day sounds of people closing up shop and going home. For her, it was time to get to work.

“Hi, John,” she said to a passing security guard as she exited the office wing into the Mesopotamian gallery.

“Where are you going?” he asked. “It’s quitting time. Time to go home.”

“Is that why everyone’s been leaving every night?” She laughed and took the unobtrusive door that led down the stairs to the basement level, headed for the conservation lab and its rare-book repository, her favorite place in the whole museum.

She’d always loved books, from the time she’d been little. The day she’d seen her first truly old book, though, she’d felt a deeper excitement. There was something magical about holding a volume that had been labored over a thousand years before or a scroll written by a man long since dust, something that fascinated. There were secrets in the leather-bound tomes from centuries gone by, mysteries in the scrolls of papyrus and parchment. And now, she was on the ultimate bigger-or-better hunt, hoping to find a trail of clues that would lead her back through the ages.

Hoping to find the story of the White Star.

She had help. An indexing project a decade before had produced an electronic card catalog of the materials in the library, with summaries, chapter heads, even main topics covered. There was no substitute for the real thing, though, for the rich gleam of illuminated manuscripts, the careful script of the Greek codices, the writings of Pliny, Clio, Herodotus.

As she hit the crash bar of the door to the basement level and turned into the hall, she heard the tread of feet above her. Someone doubtlessly headed home from upstairs, she thought. Friday night, the time to meet friends for drinks, go to a club, relax. The museum was quieting, all the visitors gone and the staff quick to follow.

It was her favorite time.

The rapid tap of her heels rang in the hall. The museum’s Gilded Age founders had spared no expense in the construction of the building, even down here. Veined marble walls soared up to nine-foot ceilings. The ornate locks and hinges on the solid-oak doors made collectors salivate. The “modern” bronze light fixtures that had replaced the original gaslights sometime in the 1920s had become antiques themselves.

Julia stopped before one of the dark, heavy doors. Hefting a five-inch skeleton key, she fit the complicated head of it into the keyhole. And jiggled and fiddled with it the way she suspected people had jiggled and fiddled with it for the last hundred and forty years. Though they may not have cursed the locksmith in quite as creative terms as she did. Antique and still unpickable—that was what they told her every time she complained. Forget about unpickable; the damned thing was almost impossible to open when you did have a key.

Too bad the conservators weren’t still there to let her in. If it hadn’t been for the telecon from hell, she’d have gotten down to the lab earlier. Instead, she stood juggling the amulet box and folder of photos while she fought with the lock. Then again, Paul Wingate and his staff of conservators were known for keeping eccentric hours. There was no guarantee they’d have been around. Temperamental? Sure. Eccentric? Yep. Skilled? Beyond all doubt. And when you were dealing with history, skilled won the day.

With a snick the lock turned. “Thank God,” Julia muttered and swung the ponderous door open into blackness. She’d extended a hand for the switch when she heard a faint metallic sound behind her. A quick glance at the deserted hall, gleaming with a soft gray luster, showed no one in sight. The hairs prickled on the back of her neck. Probably an echo from the stairwell around the corner, she told herself firmly. The hard marble walls magnified sounds, made them travel farther than they normally would. Security, she decided, flipping on the lights. Probably doing their rounds.

Fluorescent bulbs flickered to life, gleaming anachronistically in a workshop that was a blend of nineteenth-, twentieth-and twenty-first-century technologies. Heavy wooden tables, smoothed from years of use, sat side by side with white-metal-and-Plexiglas fume hoods more suitable for a chemistry lab. On one table, someone was laboriously reconstructing a terra-cotta statue of three stone figures sitting side by side. By the door, a stone sarcophagus lay on blocks, underneath the railed gantry that they’d used to hoist it; the actual mummy lay draped on a wheeled table nearby. A tank held some pottery recently acquired from a dig outside of Luxor, soaking in a bath of deionized water.

Nearby lay a section of an Egyptian bas-relief from the museum’s permanent collection. Flaking pigment, Julia saw. Setting down the wooden box and the folder absently, she walked forward to study the work. The conservation staff appeared to be laboriously reattaching the flaking pieces fragment by fragment.

Five minutes of it would have had Julia’s eyes crossing. The conservators, she decided, deserved to be as eccentric as they liked. After all, it wasn’t everyone who could—

She jolted, whipping her head around to stare at the door. A sound. She’d heard a definite, distinct sound that wasn’t just her imagination and wasn’t just far away. It was here, right outside, coming down the hall. Not a snick of metal, this time, but the quiet pad of footsteps.

Footsteps where no one should be. It wasn’t a guard—they jingled and clanked from a mile away. This was someone else, walking down a basement hallway in a museum, an hour after closing, at a time everyone should have been long since gone.

The hairs rose on the back of her neck. The Zander heist had been carried out by a master thief. And if her nervous visitors actually had somehow gotten the White Star from the thief and passed it along to the museum, well, that thief might just be looking for it.

And that thief might just be here.

Quietly, Julia slipped out of her heels and closed her hand around one of the heavy lead weights that sat on the table next to the bas-relief. Holding her breath, she stole forward.

Out in the hall, the footsteps halted before the door. For a moment, everything was so silent she could hear the pulse thudding in her ears. Then with a creak the doorknob shifted.

Her heart jumped into her mouth. Swiftly, she raised her weapon. The door opened—

And in stepped Alex.

3

Friday, 6:50 p.m.

THE BREATH EXPLODED out of her lungs.

“Jesus, what are you doing down here?” she demanded, knees weak.

He eyed the weight she held. “Clearly, taking my life in my hands.”

“It would have served you right if I’d brained you, you idiot. You scared me to death.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, taking the weight out of her hand and setting it on the nearest workbench, “you look pretty lively to me.”

She glared at him as he shut the door, willing her system to level, not wanting to admit the relief she felt. Not wanting to admit how good he looked. “How did you find me?” she asked instead.

He shrugged. “I went by your office and saw you walking out of the office wing. I figured I’d follow you.”

“No one’s supposed to be down here now.”

“You’re here.”

“I’m working.”

He made an elaborate show of checking his watch. “Six fifty-four? You didn’t tell me you’d switched to swing shift.”

“It’s your fault.” She slipped her shoes back on and walked over to the entrance to the rare-books repository.

“My fault?”

“You brought those people in.” The modern door to the climate-controlled room opened with a little hiss of escaping air.

Alex fought a smile. “I take it the flea-market find turned out to be more exciting than you thought?”

“Possibly.”