Caught

“Look, it’s a favor for my sister. Why don’t you just give it a look and see what you think?”

“I have a better idea,” Julia said silkily. “Why don’t you look at it?”

“I’ve got to leave for lunch with a big donor—” he glanced at his sleek Bulova “—like, right now.”

“And I’ve got meetings all afternoon.”

“Then it’s good she’s coming this morning, isn’t it?”

That stopped her for a moment. “Well, aren’t we sure of ourselves,” she said tartly.

“Oh, come on, Julia, it’s five minutes. It’s for my sister. Family.”

And if she didn’t watch it, she’d cave to him yet again, just as she had the night before. With everyone else she was intelligent, self-possessed, in control. It was only with Alex that she lost the ability to say anything but yes. “I don’t have time,” she lied. “I don’t know what made you think I’d agree.”

Alex stepped inside and closed the heavy wooden door. “Maybe I could offer you something in return.” He ambled across the room looking amused, as though he could read her like the Sunday Post.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked uneasily, already feeling the treacherous flutter in her stomach.

He didn’t answer, just leaned on the corner of her desk. “You know that your eyes always get a little darker when I come close?” he asked conversationally, reaching out to take her hand. “And they definitely get darker when I do this,” he added, touching the tip of his tongue to her palm.

And lust just exploded through her. For an instant, all she wanted was to have him naked, against her, on top of her. In her. Outside in the hallway, voices passed by the door, chattering about the weekend.

Inside, Julia froze, mesmerized by a touch, staring, boneless. And she’d just sat there and let him do it, she thought in annoyance. She wasn’t the type to just melt because some good-looking guy stroked his thumb over the back of her hand, stroked it and stared at her and made her think of what else those hands could do….

“Stop it.” She rose hastily. “We’re at work, remember?” And if she didn’t get at least a few feet away from him, she wouldn’t care.

“Forget it.” Alex stood and circled around the desk toward her, easy, relaxed, making her think of one of those clever, nimble border collies. Which, she supposed, made her the sheep. “Look, the door’s closed. And it’s not like I’m planting one on you, as much as I’d like to,” he added, approaching her. Julia took a few wary steps away. “Anyway, who’s going to care? It’s not like we work in the same department.”

“Wait a minute. I care.” She held on to the sudden flare of anger like a shield. “I’m not going to be the latest watercooler topic.”

He grinned. “Sweetheart, if people haven’t figured out there’s something between us by now, they’re blind.”

Sweetheart. He had no right to use the word to snatch the breath from her lungs. “Well, they’re behind the times, because there’s nothing between us,” she snapped. “It’s over, all right? Done.”

Alex blinked. “What are you talking about?”

“Us. This…thing we’ve been having,” she said, throwing her hands in frustration. “I was out of my mind to start it, I’ve been out of my mind to keep it going and now I’m finished. Want me to be any clearer? I want you out of my life.”

She’d never seen Alex in anything but easy good humor, so it took her a moment to realize he was angry. “Where’s this coming from? You don’t just come out of nowhere and cut it off.”

“I’ll do whatever I want to.”

“You said we were going to talk tonight.”

“I’m done talking,” she flared.

He rounded on her. “That’s right, you don’t talk, do you? No talk, just sex. Don’t get to know each other, don’t find out about each other’s lives, just get together to scratch an itch. Well you know what, Julia? That’s a crock of—”

A knock on the door interrupted his furious words. For a breathless instant neither of them moved. Then Julia smoothed her trim claret suit and walked over to open the door. “Yes?”

She saw a couple outside, the woman looking tense, the man clasping her hand protectively. “Are you Julia Covington?” the woman asked.

Julia nodded.

“I’m Marissa Suarez. This is my…boyfriend, Jamie Wilson. Alex Spencer said you’d be expecting us.”

Alex stepped up behind Julia and the hairs on the back of her neck rose as though in a field of static electricity.

“I’m Alex,” he said, stepping around her to put out his hand to shake. “Nice to meet you both. Unfortunately I’m late for a lunch appointment, so I’ll have to leave you in Julia’s hands.” Only Julia would have seen the spark in his eyes. “I’m sure she’ll be happy to talk with you. Julia’s always happy to talk with anyone.”

JEAN LUC ALLARD walked into the museum, sneering inwardly at the guard who stood at the front door. So tall, so cocky in his uniform, with his gun. Pathetic. He could no more block a professional like Jean from his desires than could a child.

It was always so. Those who were robbed were the weak. He was one of the strong. No one bullied him, not since he’d become a man. Not since he’d left his whoreson of a father crumpled and bleeding in that Marseilles alley, maybe dead, maybe alive. Jean neither knew nor cared, as his father had never cared all the times he’d treated him like so much filth beneath his feet. It was a debt paid, nothing more.

Jean took what he wanted and prospered. After all, there was always a market for a man with certain…talents. His clients knew how to find him, and he knew how to get them what they wished.

Like the White Star amulet.

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…

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.”