Acquainted With the Night (9781101546000) (5 page)

Wilkerson stayed home from the office that day. He poured a glass of scotch and rehearsed a speech. The pregnancy wasn't negotiable. She'd get an abortion or face the consequences. After four years of marriage, he'd grown tired of her. True, Vivi was both exquisite and educated, but she was a bore, and besides, his mistress was far more titillating in bed.

He waited all day for Vivi to come home. At dusk, he began to worry. Had something happened? Was she injured?

I do love her, after all
, he thought.

When first light rose over the steep rooftops in Kensington, he'd changed his mind about fatherhood. What would his child look like? Would it have his hazel eyes or Vivi's strange pewter ones? Would it inherit the Wilkerson square chin?

He began to panic when Vivi didn't show up the next day. A sharp-edged fear, hard as shattered granite, sliced through his chest. He ran to his safe, spun the dial, and opened the steel door. Empty, except for a first edition Evelyn Waugh and Vivi's wedding rings. The bitch had left him. His detectives said she'd run off with a wealthy Frenchman she'd met at the auction, taking her unborn child and the artifacts with her.

For a time, Wilkerson went off the rails. His detectives lost Vivi at the Rome airport. Her passport had cleared Customs, and then she'd vanished. His men turned Italy inside out, but they hadn't found her.

It took him years to track down Vivienne. By then, he'd put vampires on the payroll, and they'd tracked Vivi and her Frenchman to a remote hilltop in eastern Tennessee, where they were raising a small girl.

Wilkerson sent six of his toughest Bulgarians to murder the Frenchman; the men were supposed to retrieve Vivi, the child, and the stolen artifacts. But the vampires had gone into a frenzy when the lovers had fought back. The house went up in flames. Everything had burned. Vivi, the child, the icon, and all ten pages of
Historia Immortalis
.

Now, years later, Vivi's doppelgänger had gotten her picture in the newspaper for being a little fool. Again, Wilkerson had investigated, on the off chance that she
had
made it out of the burning house with the artifacts. His in-house detectives had quickly learned the girl's name: Caroline Clifford.

Wilkerson's men had pressured the tour agency for more information. Not only did the director hold a low opinion of Miss Clifford, he swore he didn't have a London address on file, only an emergency contact at Norham Gardens in Oxford. A rather posh address for a silly guide. Until recently, she'd lived with an archaeologist—supposedly her uncle—but no one knew where she'd gone.

Vivienne had never mentioned relatives, except for some giddy cousins in Wiltshire. Wilkerson put his head detective on the case. Mr. Underwood learned that Sir Nigel Clifford was Vivienne's second cousin. But the cousin was excavating in southern Bulgaria.

Wilkerson had dispatched operatives to Kardzhali with instructions to kidnap the archaeologist and shake him down for information. But they'd shaken too hard.

Mr. Underwood shuffled into the office, carrying a stack of papers. He was a dainty-boned man who wore off-the-rack suits from Marks & Spencer. Before joining Wilkerson Pharmaceuticals, he'd worked at Interpol, where his talents had been underappreciated.

He gaped up at Wilkerson and took a step backward. He breathed so hard, the lenses in his thick glasses fogged.

“I thought you were at lunch, sir,” Underwood said in a high-pitched voice. His eyes were completely obscured by the mist.

“What do you need, Mr. Underwood?”

“We should have Miss Clifford soon.” Underwood set the papers on Wilkerson's desk, then pulled off his glasses. “I traced her mobile phone number to a Covent Garden flat.”

“Brilliant,” Wilkerson said. “Get someone on it.”

“I already have, sir.”

“Who'd you send?”

Underwood polished his glasses with his tie, as if afraid to meet Wilkerson's gaze. “Moose Tipper,” he said.

“Not him!” Wilkerson slammed his fist against his desk.

“He was the only available operative, sir.”

“And do you know why, Mr. Underwood? Because he's a buffoon.” Wilkerson waved an imperious hand. “Ring him this instant. Tell him to back off.”

“I believe it's too late, sir.”

Wilkerson's jaw tightened. “Find him.”

Underwood's hands shook as he pulled out his mobile and punched in numbers. The call went straight to voice mail. Wilkerson sneered when Moose's nasal, Cockney voice boomed from the phone: “Sorry, mate, I can't take your bloody stupid call. Leave a message if you dare, but I won't ring you back.”

“Mr. Underwood, I want Moose off this case. Send your men to Covent Garden this instant.”

“But that's just it, sir.” Underwood's Adam's apple clicked. “There's no one to send. They're at the Hammersmith facility, getting transfusions. And that's where Moose will bring the girl.”

“You'd better hope he does,” Wilkerson said. “Or you'll end up as a guinea pig in my lab.”

 

Caro stepped into the arrival hall at Sofia International Airport and walked past a throng of taxi drivers. A short, stubby man began to follow her, and she flashed a stern glance over her shoulder to discourage him. A tall man loomed in the background. Both of them were wrapped head-to-toe in reflective capes, the type worn to deflect light in the desert. They wore wraparound sunglasses, too.

Their odd attire drew stares from the people around them. A woman in a red puffer jacket crossed herself. Two punks with blue hair called out something in a Slavic language—Croatian, maybe? Caro wasn't sure. She'd almost made it to the Hertz counter when the squatty man hollered, “English girl! Stop!”

She had the impression he was speaking to her. But how did he know she was a Briton? Surely the embassy hadn't sent him. If they had, forget it. She wasn't letting this freak drive her to the train station. She'd take her chances with a taxi. Then cold air whooshed over her, and suddenly the man was in front of her. He snatched her duffel bag and bolted.

Dammit. Son of a bitch.
Caro choked down a scream. Rule one for a tour guide: Don't panic. But her icon was inside that bag. As she vaulted down the corridor, her hat flew off, and her hair burst out in every direction. All around her, the airport traffic seemed to blur. She heard shouting and a screech. In a flash, she was behind the man. She grabbed his ears and twisted, hard. He tripped over a suitcase and fell against the tile floor.

“Let go, you bloody lout!” Caro grabbed one end of the bag and yanked hard. The man rolled over and tugged in the opposite direction. He jerked the bag out of her grasp and started to rise. An officer blew a whistle and ran toward the commotion.

“He snatched my bag,” Caro explained.

The policeman seized the thief's arm. Caro found her hat and slipped it over her head, tucking the militant curls inside. With as much dignity as she could muster, she unzipped her fanny pack and showed the policeman her passport.

He shoved the thief down the aisle. Caro looked for the man who'd yelled and the tall man who'd also been following her, but they'd vanished. She lifted a shaky hand and wiped her eyes, then she started down the crowded hall. Uncle Nigel had always made traveling seem easy. Negotiating with taxi drivers had been a snap because he'd spoken all of the Romance languages, including some Romanian. As soon as Caro had come to live with him, he'd placed one hand on her elbow and steered her through the world.

Over by the Supertrans window, she saw a man in a brown Harris Tweed jacket with a sign that read
Clifford
. She took a breath, walked over to him, and introduced herself.

“Lovely to meet you,” he said in a loud, nasal voice. “I'm Thurston Hughes, from the embassy.”

She smiled, then pulled off her gloves. They were black angora, patterned with sequined cats; Uncle Nigel had given them to her last year as a gag gift—
Happy Christmas, Love, Dinah
, he'd written. He'd always given presents from their felines.

“So sorry about your uncle.” Mr. Hughes paused. “Was he your only relative?”

“Yes.” Her hands shook as she tucked the gloves into her pocket.
Be strong
, she told herself. Uncle Nigel had always said that tears were for the living. The dead needed an Irish wake with lots of whiskey and laughter. God, she'd miss him.

“You won't be taking the train, after all,” Mr. Hughes said. “We weren't sure if you knew the Cyrillic alphabet. It's frightfully easy to mix up the platforms. So I'm driving you to Kardzhali.”

Caro followed him through the glass doors, onto the sidewalk. Taxis and vans were lined up along the curb. Mr. Hughes stopped in front of a black Mercedes with a British Embassy seal on the doors. He helped her into the passenger seat, then scuttled around to the other side of the car. He eased into the leather seat, advising her to buckle her seat belt, and without further ado, started the engine.

“The ambassador was outraged about your uncle's death,” he said. “He's pressuring the Interior Ministry.” Mr. Hughes pursed his lips as he drove down a narrow concrete incline, steering past a row of taxis into the spitting snow. “I've arranged for you to meet one of their officials, Ilya Velikov. Quite bureaucratic but incorruptible. You're to meet him at your hotel this evening. Around seven-ish. I believe he said the mezzanine bar.”

“That will be helpful, thanks.”

“Not at all,” he said. “You look a bit peaky. There's bottled water in the backseat. And a pillow if you wish to nap. It's two hundred forty kilometers to Kardzhali.”

She looked out the window. A girl with blue-tipped hair and a nose ring jogged down the sidewalk. When Caro was her age, in a punk phase and longing to get a butterfly tattoo, Uncle Nigel had taken her on a dig near St. Petersburg. He'd bloodied the nose of a KGB agent who'd sold artifacts to black marketers. Uncle Nigel had been arrested, and the British embassy had made a diplomatic protest. The incident had made her uncle an archaeological rock star. She'd been left alone at the Dostoevsky Hotel for two days. Without adult supervision, Caro had entertained herself by hoarding room service rolls and throwing them off the balcony at BBC reporters.

“I don't want to alarm you,” Mr. Hughes said, “but do be careful while you're in Bulgaria. It's not a hotbed of crime, but it's not exactly bucolic, either.”

“You aren't kidding. A man in the airport tried to steal my bag. He was rather peculiar—all covered in a foil poncho.”

“I saw him—he was with another chap, wasn't he? They were wearing sunglasses. Probably to hide their pupils. I'm sure they were drug addicts.”

“I chased him. And I got my bag.”

“You were brave.” Mr. Hughes chuckled, and then his lips drew into a frown. “But next time, you might not be so lucky. Not all of the dangers are human. Not too long ago, wild dogs killed a British tourist.”

Caro thought of her dream and hugged herself.

“Not to scare you,” Mr. Hughes said, looking rather alarmed himself. “But it was frightfully grisly. Of course, we have the mundane, mafia-style killings. The European Union is pressuring Prime Minister Stanishev to deal with organized crime. But the country is steeped in it. People have gone missing, too. Of course, vanishings have always occurred in this part of the world.”

“But that was when Bulgaria was part of the Eastern Bloc,” she said. “People were defecting like mad, weren't they?”

“That accounted for some disappearances. Now, of course, there's no reason for defection. Last month, a town near the Greek border reported dozens of missing people.”

“What happened?”

“To the people? No one knows. The Interior Ministry looked into it. Apparently it's not a communicable disease, and it's not the Mafia.” He cast a sidelong glance. “But never mind that. Have you been to Sofia before?”

“Ten years ago.” She frowned. All this talk of missing people was making her jumpy.

“Bulgaria has joined the European Union since you were here,” Mr. Hughes said. “But the roads haven't changed.

They're paved but pocky. And the Bulgarians don't believe in marking the lanes. Sometimes it's slow going. The ruddy drivers don't signal or observe the speed limit. One could reach Kardzhali sooner on a bicycle, I daresay.”

She smiled into her hand. Uncle Nigel had disliked the sluggish, rural traffic even more than he hated warp speed on the Autobahn. The summer they'd driven from Sofia to Polovitz, they'd kept stopping for goats and horse-drawn carts.