Glass sprayed toward them as the car charged through the window.
Instincts kicking in like a mother lion protecting her young, Becca twisted at the waist, hooked Lester across the chest with her arm and sprang into flight. They landed on the stainless steel cart and rolled to the far wall, the rubber wheels crushing cardboard boxes as they went. Packing peanuts flew everywhere.
The microscope sailed over their heads and beat them to the wall with a metallic splat.
Becca’s shoulder impacted with the plaster wall. The cart wobbled, then tilted. Lester’s weight rolled over hers as the two fell to the floor. Shattered glass and white foam bits showered around them.
She crawled over Lester and lay on top of him, spreading her arms up to protect his head. Pressing her face to his chest, she felt a woolly pompom smush into her cheek.
A sharp metal track, previously supporting the ceiling tiles, stabbed the wall near Becca’s face. Amazingly, the cart blocked them from being impaled.
Becca pushed up onto her elbows. Lester lay immobile. Blood streaked from his temple to his jaw. She choked on the dust of Sheetrock and debris. Shivering with fear, she suddenly…relaxed. Her senses shut down.
And then it all flooded back in a mix of terror and confusion. She must have briefly passed out.
Pushing away from Lester’s body, Becca looked toward the gaping hole in the corner of the building. A black Mercedes had decided to park in Lester’s shop.
Becca released the tight hold on what she gripped in her left hand. The diamond’s pointed pavilion had impressed a dent into her palm. Smiling at the pain of it—because that meant nothing else was hurt more severely—she shifted off Lester and nudged his arm.
He flipped onto his back and moaned, then let out a swear word.
Becca pressed his shoulder firmly. “Just wait. It might not be safe to move yet. Give it a few minutes to let the debris settle.”
He nodded and rubbed his elbow.
“You all right? You’re bleeding.”
Lester tongued his lower lip. “Bit it when you flung me to the floor.”
“Sorry.”
“Sorry? You saved my life, you perfectly wonderful bit of action heroine.”
“So you owe me one.” Becca twisted and squatted to scan the vehicle.
The front right tire spun. The hood had crinkled and bulged open to reveal a hissing engine. The car horn sounded continuously. There was a splash of blood on the cracked windshield.
“You expecting company, Lester?”
“Just the pizza boy, but he usually comes on bicycle.”
Standing and brushing aside a broken bit of plastered wall, Becca reached down to help Lester up.
He yanked off his wool cap and looked around. “Sod it all!”
Slapping a palm on the dented Mercedes’s trunk, Becca stepped carefully through the broken glass and shattered wood around to the driver’s side. The window had not been safety glass, and so it had broken in long sharp shards. Impulsively slipping a hand down her side—no gun; customs would never have allowed her to pass through—she wished calling for backup was an option.
Where was Dane?
Now she realized there was not a valise dangling from her wrist. She held up her left hand and swung the handcuffs before her. The handle must have been ripped off during her flying trip to the wall. Her wrist hurt, but she could bend it, so it wasn’t broken.
She reached through the shattered car window and gripped the back of the driver’s head. The steering wheel had crushed his nose back into his skull. Blood drooled from his nose, eyes and mouth. Dead? Incapacitated, at the very least.
The smell of gasoline panicked her momentarily. Becca knew better; the car would not blow unless there was something to ignite a blaze. No gas heat, no flame. But she couldn’t take a chance; she had to get Lester out—
“Becca!”
Agent Dane stood before what was once the entrance, waving over the mountain of debris.
“We’re all right!” she called. Releasing the door of the car, she stumbled backward, settling less than gracefully onto a heap of crumbled brick.
“I leave you for five minutes and look at the trouble you find. You all right?”
“Peachy.”
Ten minutes later the emergency crew had arrived—two green-and-white ambulances and a police car. Dane had helped Becca and Lester out of the rubble and on to the street. As soon as Dane had reached her, she’d demanded he remove her handcuffs. No need to raise suspicion from the local authorities.
The ambulance crew had determined she was sound, no broken bones, just scratches. Thankfully, her wrist wasn’t even sprained. But her shoulder muscles would ache for days and she would have plenty of bruises.
The driver was dead. Dane had done a search of his pockets and the glove box—no ID. A crane was on its way to pull the Mercedes from the shop. The license plates were missing.
Gasoline fumes and dust still hung heavily in the chilly air.
“Suicide mission,” Dane noted. He leaned against the trunk of his car—if you could call it a trunk. The Brits called it a boot, and it didn’t appear as if it could hold much more than a pair of them.
Becca joined him and rubbed her aching shoulder. “What makes you think it wasn’t an accident?”
“Because I was standing across the street. The road was empty. Life was all sugar doughnuts and fat-free scones. All of a sudden a Mercedes guns it and takes a sharp swerve to the left.”
“Maybe the driver was drunk?”
“At eleven in the morning? A drunk could not have been so precise. Nor would he be driving a car without plates. Someone wanted you dead.”
“Impossible that someone could have known I was in Lester’s shop,” Becca argued. “I just decided to come here thirty minutes earlier. I didn’t call Lester to tell him I was coming, either. If it was preplanned, the target had to have been Lester.”
They glanced to the back of one of the open ambulances, where Lester flirted with two female techs. One of them toyed with the pompom on his hat.
“Pity.” Dane crossed his ankles and sighed. “We lost the stone.”
Becca dug into her coat pocket and handed him the diamond.
“You hung on to it? And rescued Lester from becoming a piece of squish? Pure dead brilliant, New York.”
“It was more like self-preservation. I just took Lester along for the ride.” She glanced at the diamond. “Don’t get too attached to that baby. I’m not ready to turn it back into evidence. Lester found traces of dust on the crown. I need equipment that is not scattered all over an accident site, and preferably, a steel-walled lab.”
“Dust? It’s evidence.” Dane tossed the stone and caught it in his palm.
If he was going to start that again…“That will sit in a storage safe when it could be utilized to help me solve this crime.”
“Me?”
“What?”
“You said me, as in, you are trying to solve this one. You’re just the gemologist, right?” He bent before her, a curious glint in his aquamarine eyes. “What’s your objective? You want to take this beauty back to the States?”
“I’m… I thought we were playing the need-to-know game? You show me your objective, I’ll show you mine.”
“Well. That’s peachy.” He straightened. “But you’re simply a glorified jeweler, love. MI-6 will get this. And I’m not required to provide you any evidence.”
And this mission was supposed to breed goodwill?
“The CIA will have a problem with that.”
“The diamond stays with me until I can check it into evidence, which is what I should have done in the first place.”
Becca huffed out her growing anger. Cocky British jerk.
“What if there is something inside the diamond that can help me—er, us—solve the case?”
“What could possibly be inside a rock, Miss Whitmore?”
Becca winced at the ache in her right shoulder. She’d fallen hard.
“You sure you’re all right?”
She flinched violently when Dane touched her shoulder.
“You’ve hurt something, love.”
“I don’t like to be touched.” That confession came out a little too bluntly. Her family had never been the touchy-feely sort.
Dane twisted his lips wryly. Now, besides a strong-willed bitch, he surely also thought her a prude.
“Just…the standard bruises following having a building fall down around me. I’m tired. I ache all over. I was almost killed. And now I’m frustrated. Please, Agent Dane, I need that diamond.”
“Again with her needs.”
If he only knew. Needs, wants, requirements. And everything in her wake was imperfect and based on lies. “Your life will become a lie.” Becca recalled Renee Dalton-Sinclair telling her that when she’d decided to join the Gotham Roses spy club. “Can you live with that? Lying to friends, family and even lovers? Your needs will change. You will crave what you have always ignored—emotion.”
Growing up in a family of old money and zealous ambition, Becca found that emotion fell to the wayside in favor of putting on a good face for the public. The rare bit of human contact Becca cherished was the music she shared with her father.
Sure, there had been minor emotional casualties because of the choices she had made. But she loved what she did. The covert lifestyle? It fitted her like a glove.
As for needs? Oh, she had them. Right now a steam room and hot-rock massage would feel perfect.
Dane joggled the diamond in his palm. “Something inside, eh?” The cold winter sun glinted in the facets.
Becca couldn’t find the strength to argue her case for keeping the diamond. She needed to rest for a few minutes. And where was that scone?
Lester walked over and leaned on the trunk next to her, forcing her to slide closer to Dane.
“How are you, Lester?” she asked with as much interest as she could muster. “All in one piece?”
“They want to take me to Casualty for some X-rays. I can tell them already it’s just a fractured rib or two. You’ve still got it? Brill. I know what I saw, Becca.”
Dane sent him a curious glance. “First name basis, eh?”
“We’ve worked together previously,” Becca said. “I already told you that. Now talk to me, Lester.”
“Agent Dane…” Lester murmured.
“Yes, Agent Dane can hear what you’ve got to say,” Dane said, obviously miffed.
“Well, Becca said she saw something in the rock earlier, and now it’s gone.”
She nodded in confirmation. They all three watched as Dane manipulated the stone across his fingers.
“So, I’ve been postulating,” Lester continued, “and this is a bold speculation—but it might be an EPROM.”
“Speak English, boy,” Dane said. “The queen’s English, if you please.”
“You know what I mean when I say ROM? Like the CDs and computer data?”
“Yes,” Becca said.
“Well, an EPROM is programmable read-only memory that can ultimately be erased. I think there’s a chip in this diamond.”
“Impossible,” Becca said immediately. “You cannot put something like a computer chip inside a diamond.” She caught Dane’s nod of agreement. “Unless it’s a synthetic stone, and I know it’s not. It’s too perfect.”
“Save the nanodust.”
“You think the dust is actually some sort of microscopic computer chip?”
Lester shrugged. “I’m no scientist.”
“I’ll never believe it, Lester.”
“Nanotechnology can do amazing things, Becca. Don’t think of the chip as a piece of metal or even anything tangible. It’s nanosize, maybe even organic or biological in nature.”
She sighed.
“I’ve got another theory,” Lester added. “It could be photoreflective polymers, which would explain the odd-colored fluorescence. They can be viewed by shining different colored light on them, like the UV disk.”
“Again, how would these polymers get inside the stone?”
“You said you knew the ion beam branding process?”
“Yes.”
“Same way those markings get onto the stone. Ultraprecise nanolaser. And they aren’t exactly inside, but on the surface.”
“All this from a glance?” Dane queried. There was no belief whatsoever in his voice. “The lady was in your shop less than five minutes.”
“Of course, it’s all theory. I’ll need to do further study of the stone,” Lester said.
Dane again tossed the diamond and snatched it out of the air. “Evidence.”
“Stop that,” Becca said to him, and then added, “If Lester is right, this could help our—your investigation.”
“You believe him? You, the expert on gemstones, believes someone embedded a tiny computer chip into an object that is one of the hardest substances known to man?”
Well, there was such a thing as flaws. Natural inclusions in rocks. If flaws could get into a stone, then… It was an incredible leap to make, Becca thought.
“It’s just a hunk of carbon,” Lester said with a sigh. “Carbon can easily be altered at the molecular level. I could go into fullerenes and buckyballs, but then I’d really see your eyes glaze. Unfortunately, my equipment is trashed.”
“And why is that?” Dane walked up to Lester. The agent was a full head taller, and seemed to loom over his stooped figure. “You get a look at the driver?”
Lester shrugged.
“Why would someone drive a bloody Mercedes through your shop window? You in for a bit with any dark sorts, Lester?”
“No! I mean, I haven’t a clue, Agent Dane. Maybe someone knew Becca was carrying the diamond?” he suggested.
“Impossible,” Dane countered. “Besides, why commit a suicide mission and leave the stone untouched? That’s two suicides in less than two hours.”
Both men glared at each other. Becca could feel the testosterone oozing from Dane. Lester looked even punier and weaker.
“He’s hurt. He needs medical attention,” she said to break the standoff. “We’ll question him later at the hospital. After he’s had a thorough look at the diamond.”
“I’m sorry, Becca, I’d need the right stuff,” Lester said. “You know that.”
“What about the hospital?”
“St. Mary’s? What about it?” Lester met Becca’s gaze, and within two blinks, he nodded. “They’ve got electron microscopes. And I am going that way…”
“Give me the stone,” she said to Dane. He shook his head, like a petulant child not about to hand over his stash.
Becca lowered her head, looked up at Dane through her lashes and licked her lower lip. “Agent…”
“Oh, don’t even try.”
“Try what?”
“You think batting those thick dark lashes and licking those full lips will get you the diamond?” He bristled and gave a tug to his turtleneck. “I am impervious.”
Becca fluttered her lashes, all innocence.
Behind her Lester chuckled.
“No,” Dane said. A bit less defensively he added, “Abso-sodding-lutely not.”
“What if you send an MI-6 agent to babysit Lester?”
Dane huffed through his nose, obviously not about to back down so easily.
Becca ran her fingers over her ear and tucked in her hair. It hurt like hell to make such a move, but she had to try. How difficult could it be to seduce Agent Swank?
“Rot it.” Dane grabbed Becca’s hand and slapped the diamond onto her palm. “But you realize you just made me a silent promise?”
To what, she could guess. She’d worry about that later. At the moment, all that mattered was her mission. She twisted and palmed the stone to Lester.
To Dane she said, “Call up your watchdogs.”
“Already doing so,” he said with a flip of his phone.
“You’ve got my cell number, Lester? Call me as soon as you’ve had a look.”
“Will do.” Lester waved to the ambulance techs waiting for him. “Becca. Agent Dane.”
Five minutes later a plainclothes agent arrived. With an acknowledging wink to Dane, the man climbed into the back of the ambulance. They watched it roll off, leaving thick clouds of exhaust hanging above the tarmac in its wake.
Becca absently curled her fingers around the gold heart at her neck. The gold was still warm despite the weather.
“No jewels for the gemologist?”
“Hmm? I prefer gold.”
“Interesting.”
“Don’t get me wrong, gemstones are a passion.”
“You don’t strike me as the passionate sort.”
That comment punched her in the gut. Did he mean sexually? Certainly, she liked to put distance between herself and new acquaintances. One had to be leery in her line of work. But she wasn’t cold. Was she?
Not about to let on that he had wounded her, Becca turned and looked around to the passenger side of his buglike car.
“The auction is this evening. Much as you’d like it to be a singular operation, we are in this together. And—” she delivered an admonishing slash of her finger toward him “—if you’re keeping anything from me, evidence, intel, information, anything— I promise you will regret it.”
“I love a woman who can make a threat with a smile.”
“I won’t be smiling if I discover you’re holding out on me.”
“Me, keep secrets from you? You’re too gorgeous to want to upset, love. Just stay one step behind me, and try to keep up.”
“I never stand behind any man.”