The Mask of Atreus (41 page)

She could turn back to him now, chat, laugh like nothing had happened, and then later, after dinner and their tentative lovemaking, she could call the Feds and end this once and for 346

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all. She just had to get through a few hours: less if she could find a way to make a phone call without seeming awkward.
You could use the bathroom,
she thought.
That's what he
did when he gave the order to kill the Greeks.

"You OK?" said Calvin, smiling his easy, feline smile.

"Yeah," she said, turning and smiling. "Just wet. I think I'll change."

"Eat first," he said. "I've always wanted to have dinner off some thousand-year-old relic. What do you say we dine on the Indian display over there?"

She forced her mouth to stretch wide.

"Sure," she said. "Set things out while I wash up."

"You sure you're OK?" he said. "You seem, I don't know . . . nervous."

"Let's call it anticipation," she said.

"For the Chinese food?" he said, smiling a lewd and oily smile.

You found him attractive.

"Not just the Chinese food," she managed.

He grinned and took a step toward her, reaching for her.

"Not till I'm all washed up," she said, backing away, gri macing.

"Maybe I'll come with you," he said, leering.

"You can use the little boy's room over there."

"Are big boys allowed to use it?" he asked.

He was being playful. She wanted to scream.

"Just this once," she said, taking another step away.

"Hurry up," he said. "I won't wait long before I come looking."

Deborah sat on the toilet inside the locked stall and fumbled with her cell phone. Her hands were unsteady.
Please, God, let it be working.

Come on . . .

Eternal God, who sendest consolation unto all sorrowing
hearts, we turn to Thee for solace in this, our trying hour.
The words had come unbidden from some long-sleeping half memory, and she shook them off as if forcing herself 347

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awake. She stared at the phone. The lightning storm could play havoc with signal strength, especially down in the creek basin where the museum was located.

She fished Cerniga's card out of her purse and punched the numbers in.

"Yes," she said, as a female voice answered, "can I speak to Agent Cerniga, please."

"Agent Cerniga has gone home for the night. Can I take a message?"

"I need to reach him right away. It's an emergency connected to the case he's currently working."

Come on. Come on.

"Which case would that be?"

"Richard Dixon and the two Greek men," she sputtered.

"Please, I don't have time for this."

"And who can I say is calling?" said the woman, unflappable.

"It's Deborah Miller," she said. "Please, I need to reach him
right now
."

The force of the stall door being kicked in knocked her backward and sprawling onto the tiles. She landed badly, and the phone skittered across the floor.

Calvin Bowers picked it up and dropped it neatly into the toilet bowl.

"You really ought to do something about the way sound carries in these vents," he said, his voice level and calm, his face impassive. He was a man she had had never met before.

"You just can't get any privacy in this building."

CHAPTER 71

She didn't cry. She didn't beg. She would not try to explain or appeal to his sense of justice or friendship or romance because she knew instinctively and beyond any doubt that none of those things had been real. She would have expected to be stricken with panic, but the strangeness of the thing robbed her of the terror which she knew was appropriate, leaving her oddly composed and separate and full of righteous defiance. She would not cry. She would not beg. But she was not quite on her feet when he struck her hard across the side of her head with the back of his hand. It didn't hurt so much as it surprised her with its casual brutality, and she crumpled down the side of the commode. With Bowers still standing in the doorway, there was nowhere else for her to go.

It occurred to her then that he might be planning to kill her where she was. What else was he to do? She pulled herself into a crouch and looked up. For a moment their eyes met, and he snapped on a clownish grin, deliberate and malevolent.

"You know," he said, unrecognizable now, "I think it's better this way. I really don't think I could endure having you touch me again, you know?"

Deborah tensed but said nothing.

"Did you hear what I said?" he added, still quite calm, adding in a whisper that sounded almost tender, "Jew?"

Then he was balling his fist and drawing his arm back to strike, and she was surging forward, meeting his gut with her head and lunging through him like a spear, thrusting with all the power her legs could muster. His punch glanced off her 349

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shoulder. It hurt, but its delivery had left him off balance, and her attack sent him sprawling backward. His head hit the tiled floor with a hollow thud so that she winced, even as she scrambled off him, hoping vaguely, horribly, that the impact had killed him.

For a second he lay on his back and she stood over him. There was no blossoming of blood from his scalp, and though his eyes had rolled back into his head for the briefest of moments, she knew he would be on his feet in under a minute. She hopped clumsily over him, pulled open the bathroom door, and ran into the bowels of the museum.
Get to a phone.

She ran unsteadily toward the office, fumbling for her keys as she did, her great loping strides uneven as her ankle began to twinge.

Not now,
she thought.
There isn't time for pain.
She was in the lobby when she heard the bathroom door crash back against the wall. He was coming.

She hesitated. If she went into the office now, there would be nowhere for her to go. He would probably smash his way in before she could make her call, certainly before anyone arrived in response. The call would have to wait. She needed to get out into the grounds. The road was only half a mile away, and she knew the area better than he did.

She turned to cross the lobby, and there he was, on the other side of the ghastly ship prow, making for the lobby doors, shambling past her and leaning to one side like a listing galleon. Maybe the whack to his head had concussed him a little.

Good,
she thought.

He thought she'd already made it out. Maybe he had lost some blood after all. Maybe he had blacked out for a second and lost track of time.

Good.

But not good enough. As she held her breath in the shadows, hoping he would blunder out into the rain and she could 350

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lock herself in and make her phone call to Cerniga, he slowed and stopped, considering the closed doors, animal-like. Then he pivoted and stooped. He seemed to be looking at something on the ground. She peered around the greenish snakewoman who was grinning out at him, and her heart seemed to leap. He was reaching down to a white plastic bag on the floor, touching its side with the flat of his hand. Distantly, as if echoing back from a nonsensical dream, she realized what it was: The Chinese food.

He's seeing if it's still hot.

Only minutes ago that was to be their dinner, their shared experience, their foreplay. The memory was so grotesque that it took her a second to realize that he was trying to decide how long he had been out, how far she might have got. He reached into his pocket, withdrew his cell phone as he straightened up, and began pushing buttons.

At the first sound of his muted voice, Deborah began to move back and away. Two silent steps, three, then her ankle turned underneath her, and she stumbled clumsily, her eyes still turned toward the man muttering into his phone. The sound echoed briefly, and he turned, finding her across the darkened lobby as she scuttled back the only way she could go, down the corridor to the double doors and into the museum proper. She knew the museum like the back of her hand. She could hide. She could double back. She could get to the residence and out that way . . . The double doors in front of her cannoned open. In between them, arms outstretched, phone squashed under his chin, was the skinhead kid with the tattoos who she had left unconscious in the subterranean stairway under Mycenae. The White Rabbit.

"Yeah," he said into the phone as he took another surging stride toward her, "I see her."

From behind his back, flourishing it like a magician or a striptease artist, he drew his knife. It was a different knife 351

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from the one he'd had in Greece. This one was long and slender, its hilt curved down slightly, a tiny swastika on its pommel. This was the knife which had killed Richard. This, she thought with a stab of deep, hollowing grief, was Calvin's knife.

CHAPTER 72

There was nowhere to go. Calvin was behind her and closing fast, the kid up ahead, humming to himself and watching her. She could run at one of them, but she didn't like her chances; there would be no element of surprise, and the other would be on her quickly enough. She had no weapon, no means of escape, no chance.

From her purse she plucked a vial of perfume, Chanel No. 19. For a second she aimed it at the skinhead, and he faltered, not out of fear for his eyes, but because he actually laughed.

"Drop it," said Calvin. He sounded more cautious, as if he thought it might be mace. "We're not going to hurt you. I want to ask you a few questions."

"Like what?" she said, managing a little defiance still.

"How long you've known," he said. "And who else knows."

"Bite me," she said.

"I don't think that this is the time for your patented feminist posturing," he said. He reached down to his shins. There was a brief tearing sound, like Velcro, and then he was upright again, training a small pistol on her.

She turned to consider him and pointed the bottle's atomizer head his way.

"Bitch," said the kid, still grinning disdainfully, "that's so pathetic."

He took two quick steps toward her, and Deborah, capitulating dramatically, let the vial fall to the ground. It exploded in a tiny nova of glass and aroma, part flowers, part musk. In three long and hurried strides, Calvin was next to her and grasping her arm.

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"Come with us, do as you're told, and you might live out the night."

Even if that's true,
she thought,
that's as far as it goes.
Once he's satisfied that he knows all you do, earlier if he fig-
ures out that no one knows you're here, you're dead.
It's hours away now, maybe less.

The kid half led, half dragged her through the museum to the residence, then out through the back door into Richard's private lot. There was an old blue van, dark and windowless except for the cab, parked there by itself, the engine running. She recognized it at once as the van which had tried to force her off the road the day she had fled to Greece. The windows were heavily tinted, but there was a light on inside, and she could see somebody turn to stare out, another skinhead kid.
Great,
she thought.
He has a private army. His own little
Hitler Youth movement.

"Here's a treat you don't deserve," Calvin said to her.

"You get to ride in the back."

"That's supposed to make me happy?" she answered.

"Sure," he said. "It's what you've been looking for, isn't it?"

Even now, even staring at the imminence of her own death, she felt a stirring of something like curiosity.
It's in there!

They had strapped her hands behind her with slick, gray duct tape. The kid pushed her inside roughly and slammed the door, locking it with the key from outside. She was doubled up on the floor of the van, the seats of which had all been removed. As they got in the front and started the engine, she twisted round to consider the crate beside her. It was quite unremarkable, or at least it was from where she was lying: a large, casket-sized box of black-painted wood. She couldn't see the top which was, presumably, glass, and the only thing which broke the object's blank regularity was a power cord which snaked a few inches from within. A heavy dark blanket had been thrown over the top. 354

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She lay there, feeling the presence of the thing beside her, as the van began to move.

They drove for about fifteen minutes, she thought. For a while at the beginning and end of the journey they moved relatively slowly through darkened areas and winding roads, but in the middle they went faster, and the buildings outside cast distorted reflections of flickering lights through the cab windows onto the ceiling. It rained constantly, and the windshield wipers droned and squeaked throughout the journey.

When they stopped, the kid got out first and was gone at least a minute before the creak of the rear doors made Deborah raise her head.

"Slowly," said Calvin from the front seat. "Get out. And do anything stupid, and I'll put a hole in your head. Got it?"

He's not kidding.

She said nothing, but shifted back until she could get her legs down to the gravel outside. The kid was waiting for her, knife still drawn, looking at her through the rain with malicious amusement.

"You hurt me back in Greece, Jew," he said.

He had a petulant voice tinged with the nastier side of rural Georgia. It was boyish and might have been absurd--a mere stereotypical cartoon--if it hadn't been so hard and full of hatred.

"That's 'cause you tried to kill me, hick," she said. He lashed his hand against the side of her head, and it popped so loudly she thought he'd ruptured her eardrum. Tears started to her eyes, and she bent over involuntarily, biting her lip to stifle a sob.

"You watch your mouth," he said.

She said nothing, but straightened, sensing Calvin had moved around to the back of the van.