Fifteen

“I’M MISSING SOMETHING,” MAX TOLD DARIUS, THE PHONE anchored between his chin and shoulder as he paced outside the infectious disease section of T-FLAC’s well-equipped hospital. “What the fuck is it?”

“The demand,” Dare told him. “What in the hell do they want? That’s what’s missing here. The tangos’ demands.”

“They don’t always fucking make one, you know that.”

“I know Savage isn’t going to break and give us anything.”

Dare didn’t need to remind him, Max thought, frustrated as hell. Catherine Seymour had cojones of steel. Worse, as a ten-year veteran at T-FLAC, she knew all the tricks and treats operatives had to offer tangos. She was one herself. She had a foot in each camp, and had played T-FLAC for fools for months, if not years. He embraced the slow burn of anger. It was better than the icy fear lying underneath his skin. “Call Daklin and get me that picture of Savage’s tat.”

“Will do.” Dare paused. “I know this is cold comfort, but on the plus side, what happened to Emily couldn’t have happened in a better place. We have the best medical team on the planet, and she’s right there to reap the benefits.”

“Until they know what the fuck the venom is they can’t do dick. Not until the toxin’s identified. Here comes my tech guy.” Max closed the phone, stuffing it into his pocket. “What’ cha got?” he demanded as a bald, middle-aged man with thick black-rimmed glasses approached. The young, fairly attractive blonde walking to his right easily kept pace.

Max knew the guy from the encryption department.

“Hey, Max,” Saul Tannenbaum hailed from twenty feet away. Other than the three of them there was no one else in the well-lit corridor, and all the doors were closed. Including the one behind which they were monitoring Emily.

There was a comfortable waiting area at the end of the hall, with good coffee, snacks, TV, even a computer—hell, everything that would make someone’s wait more comfortable. But Max wasn’t leaving until Emily was out of the woods.

“Rebecca Santos, Max Aries. I put Becky here on this Tillman list you gave us, and she’s put two and two together for you and came up with five.” Saul didn’t appear fazed that they were holding a meeting in the hospital corridor at eleven o’clock at night. “Check this out.”

He handed Max the file folder Max had gotten from Norcroft and had turned into the department for analysis. “Here’s a list of all the paintings and other assorted works of art Richard Tillman has purchased in the past ten years. We figured ten years was far enough back for our purposes. And of course we only know about the work he purchased legally, and that’s in the file you gave us.”

Max flipped the single-spaced pages one after the other. There were hundreds of sales line itemed, with the date, seller, dollar amount, and other details. “And?”

“We cross-referenced the anagrams on the drawing you gave us to the titles of the paintings on this list,” Santos told Max, pointing at the list with a short, unpainted nail. “Then compared that to the donations Tillman has made over the same ten years to various religious organizations.”

Max glanced at the door, wishing to hell he had X-ray vision. Or that they’d make his life a thousand times better and open the fucking thing. Two words. That was all he needed. “She’s fine.” That was it. Not a lot to fucking ask was it?

“Sir?”

He forced his attention to the page. “Yeah. You cross-referenced the name of the work, and the donations to the locations. Got it. What did you find, Santos?”

“There was one more element I brought in.” Max glanced at Saul, wishing the sincere young woman would hurry the hell up and tell him what he needed to know so he could start pacing again. His phone vibrated in his pocket, and he grabbed at it like a lifeline. He glanced at the screen to ID the caller. Not about Emily. “Aries. Hang on, Dare.” He looked at the woman. “Keep going.”

Santos stood up a little straighter, tugging the hem of her jacket down before she spoke again. “Tillman donated two hundred and seventeen paintings to churches, synagogues, and temples. If you turn to page seventy-three B, you’ll see that I’ve indexed each work to its new location.”

Max flipped to the page she indicated, his eyes scanning down the page, then turned to the next and the next. Jesus. He met her eyes. “This has all been authenticated?”

“Absolutely.”

“Good job. Send this in the report to Darius on Paradise ASAP.”

“Yo,” he said into the phone.

“The lab found an empty vial in Emily’s purse,” Dare told him.

“How come I’m right here, and you’re thousands of miles away, and you get this intel before I do?”

“Not a popularity contest, Aries. I’m your Control. It’s my job to collect and assimilate. Nothing in the vial, of course. Manufactured in China by the billion. Which tells us squat. What they did find was a latent print.”

“Alistair Norcroft,” Max said grimly not waiting for Dare to tell him. “Son of a bitch. He made a big fucking production of helping Emily after her purse spilled all over Tillman’s floor the other day.”

“I’ve saved you some time,” Darius told him calmly. “Having the lab run matches between the symptoms of Brill, the other restorers, and Emily.”

“They better fucking be doing it fast,” Max told the other man flatly. “They’re fighting like hell to keep her alive.”

“Everyone is on this, Max. Emily will make it. In the meantime I’ve dispatched Daklin and Navarro to pick up Norcroft.”

“Yeah, well pick up Tillman’s son, too, while they’re at it.” Max paused, still scanning the long list of donations and locations. “See what one or both of them have done with Tillman senior while they’re at it.”

“You think the assistant and the son were working together?”

“I think one or both of them is a Black Rose asset,” Max said grimly. “Here’s the deal with Tillman’s paintings. The encryption people have linked the paintings to recent bombings. Every church, synagogue, and temple that has been bombed in the past ninety days received a painting donated by Richard Tillman.” Sibilant voices behind the door. That was fucking it. Max paused to listen in the hope someone was on their way out of Emily’s room to remove the garrote from around his heart. Mind.

“Tillman senior?” Dare’s loud exhale signified his disbelief.

“I doubt old Tillman wired up those bombs himself, if he even knew what was happening. But what the hell, for all we know, the old bastard could be the head of Black Rose.” Max started walking at a fast clip down the long corridor to get rid of some of the excess energy building up like a pressure cooker inside him. What the hell was taking so damn long?

He never should have taken the phone call out to the hallway; the wily doc had locked the door behind him and wouldn’t let him back in.

“And maybe Auntie’s the head of Black Rose,” Dare said sarcastically in his ear. “Auntie” ran the Paradise Island hotel where Dare was currently living.

“Thanks for that visual,” Max said, amused at the image of the large Polynesian woman as the head of one of the most lethal tango groups in the world. “That woman probably could run a small kingdom from right there in her master suite. But I think we can rule her out.” Black Rose assets tended to stay away from the deep-fried plantains. He turned at the end of the corridor and started back.

Saul and Santos were long gone. The only things left in the long corridor aside from him were a red molded plastic chair and an empty Styrofoam cup on the floor near Emily’s door.

He picked up speed, his soft soled shoes soundless on the linoleum floor. “According to this list, we have over a hundred otherwise unconnected bombings, linked directly to Tillman’s donations. Most of the explosions went unnoticed because the various religious leaders didn’t want to report them. Afraid of the repercussions within the community.”

“So whoever is behind this escalated the bombings.”

“Yeah. Black Rose throwing us a red herring? I don’t get why they didn’t just claim the damage they did—hell, they still aren’t raising their hands. Now a pretty freaking chilly pattern is emerging.”

“Don’t jump to conclusions.”

Christ, Max thought, feeling the familiar rush of adrenaline as all the previously unrelated pieces started falling into place like tumblers in a safe. “Here’s a fact—with each bombing, real estate and collateral damage have grown exponentially.” He and Dare were on the same page here.

“The most spectacular being this latest bombing. La Mezquita,” Darius finished. “How many paintings are unaccounted for?”

“Nine.”

“And the final body count?”

Max stared at the closed door. “Too fucking high.”

 

MAX SCANNED THE REPORT FOR A SECOND TIME. SPIDERS. HE HAD A new respect for the lethal arachnid. The fact that the spider’s dead body had been found squashed within the rumpled sheets of the bed where he and Emily had made love didn’t give him any satisfaction. Nor had the fact that the room had been swept and fumigated, and they hadn’t found any more spiders. One eight-legged killer had been enough.

Leaning against the wall, Max pulled out his cell and used his thumb to speed dial Dare.

“Darius.”

“They found a Sydney Funnel-web spider in our bed,” he said without greeting.

“Funnel-web?” Darius repeated, surprise in his voice. “Shiny dark brown buggers with a dark purple abdomen?”

There were several color pictures of the damned thing in the folder. “That’s the one.” Max ran a hand around the back of his neck where the muscles had locked an hour ago. This particular spider’s bite was lethal.

“Sure it wasn’t a Trapdoor or a Mouse spider? They look very simil—”

“It wasn’t,” Max said grimly, pushing away from the wall.

“Has the antivenin been administered?”

“The doc just gave it to her. We won’t know anything for another hour or so.”

“She’ll be all right, Max.”

“She better be.”

If Emily had been bitten en route to Montana, thousands of miles away from medical attention and the antivenom, the ending to this report might be chillingly different.

Left to its own devices, his brain wanted to connect Emily to his heart. Which was bullshit. He passed by the desk and laptop with a printer that Rifkin had set up outside Emily’s room. Max wasn’t leaving her, but he didn’t want to disturb her either. There’d be a parade of people from various divisions coming down to report their findings. The jigsaw puzzle pieces of the op were starting to come together. The picture wasn’t completely clear, but the image was starting to come into focus.

He’d been on ops where he’d lain in the wet grass/mud/water/ on a rooftop, without moving, barely breathing, for five hours straight. Now he fucking couldn’t stand still for a few minutes without feeling as though he was about to jump out of his own skin. To think he’d always thought of himself as a patient man.

Except when it came to Emily. It was an unwelcome revelation.

There were nine hundred steps to the end of the corridor. He’d walked it fifty-six times, encountered forty-four people in passing in his travels, consumed seven cups of coffee, drunk two bottles of water, gone to pee twice, and sat down once. His body was out here in the corridor, but his mind was behind that closed door with Emily and the doctors.

He could have sat dead still for hours if they’d damn well let him in there with her. Even though he had absolutely no imagination whatsoever, he couldn’t get the picture of Emily’s pale face out of his mind. She’d looked translucent. Insubstantial.

She’d looked, God damn it, as though she were seconds from being dead. That’s what his job had done to her. That’s what his trying to protect her had done.

Life vs. T-FLAC.

He realized that he hadn’t heard a word Dare had said.

“What are you doing?” He could hear Darius tapping at his keyboard.

“Clearly not sleeping,” Dare answered absently. “I’m cross-referencing. Let’s find out which of our suspects took a side trip to New South Wales recently while we wait. Call me the second you know about Emily.”

The phone went dead. Two seconds later it vibrated again. Max hadn’t even dropped it in his pocket yet. “Aries.” He made the turn at the end of the long hallway and headed back.

“Daklin. I have a four-one-one. Savage has the Black Rose tat on her back all right—”

Emily had been right. “No surprise there; is it any bigger or smaller than any others we’ve seen?”

“It’s not a rosebud,” Asher Daklin informed him. “It’s a fully open flower.”

“Jesus fuck,” Max breathed. They’d been able to ID Black Rose assets over the years because of the tightly furled rosebud tattooed in the small of their backs. The full-blown rose Savage sported was sure to indicate she was the head of the worldwide tango group. It was hard to believe she’d been operating right under T-FLAC’s noses, undetected, for years.

“The head of a tango group a T-FLAC operative? Shit. No wonder they were always two steps ahead of us. Savage had access to everything we knew about the Black Rose.”

Max was livid. She of course knew where every safe house was located. She was the one who’d hit Wiesbaden.

Savage had snuffed out the lives of the very people she was supposed to be protecting, and shielding and perpetuating the activities of the same people she was supposed to have been eliminating. “You better believe we’ll close that goddamned gap ASAP. From here on out everything is going to be even more compartmentalized around here. Hope they take the death penalty off the table. I want to know the traitorous bitch has concurrent life sentences and will remain locked up in a small cell until the day she dies.”

“You’ll get your wish.” Daklin didn’t sound any less furious than Max felt. “But don’t start mailing out congratulatory cards just yet. Savage had two tats in the small of her back.” He paused. “The rose and a lily bud. Black Rose wasn’t the name of the entire group, Aries. It was merely the name of a cell. We have a sleeper tango organization, apparently called Black Lily that we knew fucking nothing about.”

 

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, MAX WAS FINALLY ALLOWED INTO EMILY’S room. While it had seemed like an eternity to him, he had to thank God for the speed and effectiveness of the antivenin.

He pushed open the door and strolled in. Mildly concerned, business as usual. She didn’t need to know the condition of his guts or the discomfort of the hole he’d gnawed in his cheek.

She was hooked up to a monitor and drip. The room was dim, and filled with a steady beep-beep-beep. Though she was still a little on the pale side, she smiled the second she saw him, and held out her hand. “Hi.”

Max looked at her beautiful face, a face he now knew better than his own, and his chest hurt. Despite the previous few hours, despite her wan smile, despite it all, her large expressive brown eyes shone with her love for him.

If you love someone, set them free… The words came to mind out of nowhere. He didn’t know where he’d heard or read them, but the truth was unmistakable. He had to send Emily as far away from himself and his job as possible. If his enemies didn’t succeed in killing her—eventually— his own death would.

If she felt half as deeply as he did, his death would annihilate her. And in his line of work that wasn’t a possibility. It was a certainty.

It had never bothered him before.

He cleared his throat as he approached the bed. “Welcome back.” He took her hand, forcing himself not to gather her up against his heart—chest—and hug the hell out of her. Maybe not let go. He hooked a chair leg with his foot and dragged it up beside the bed. Still holding her hand, he sat down, his muscles relaxing for the first time since he’d watched her drop like a stone what felt like a year ago.

He brought her hand to his mouth and kissed her soft palm. Her touch was a temporary balm to the widening ache inside him.

An hour. He’d give himself an hour. Then he’d rip himself away from her like a bandage from an open wound. Better that way. For her. For him.

Emily reached up and stroked the side of his chin with the back of her hand. The vulnerability, fear, and…something indefinable in her big brown eyes worked like a vise around his chest. “Thank God you weren’t bitten as well.”

He would willingly have fielded a hundred venomous spiders’ bites to protect her from the one. “Hide’s too tough. How are you feeling?” he asked, taking both hands in his so she’d stop making those distracting little circles with her knuckles on his jaw.

Her smile didn’t reach her eyes. “Like someone who almost died. Just guessing. It’s not like I’ve ever actually faced my own death before. How do you do it?”

“It’s my job. I’ve done it for so long that I don’t think about dying.” Until now. Until you. Fuck. “I’ve got—Hang on.” Max reluctantly let go of her hand, and reached into his pocket to retrieve his phone. Some ass was cutting into the most important hour of his life. “Aries,” he growled.

“We’ve got a problem,” Dare said.

No shit. Max thought as he struggled to yank his attention away from the soft outline of Emily’s breasts as she breathed. He would carry a picture of her body, of her dolphins, of her lush mouth, into the next lifetime with him.

“Yo. Aries?”

“Yeah.” He got up and moved away from the bed so he could focus. “What’s the problem?”

“Just heard from La Mezquita. Samples from the point of detonation taken at the bomb site showed higher levels of radiation than would be expected.”

“Say what?” He really needed to concentrate. He rubbed a hand across his eyes. “The painting was rigged with nukes?”

“Nope, but it sure as hell wasn’t painted in fifteen hundred and whatever. According to the geek squad, the suspect painting had to be done after 1945. Something about worldwide, post-Hiroshima radiation levels being absorbed by white paint. Bottom line? Tillman, Norcroft, Tillman junior, or any combination of the three, were passing off copies as the originals.”

“So where are the originals?”

“Working on it.”

Max snapped his phone closed and shoved it back in his pocket.

Emily’s brow was pinched together as she struggled to sit up. “Originals?” she asked over the aggressive beeping of the monitor.

“Relax, okay?” Max helped her sit up, then shifted some of the wires and the tubing from her IV so it wasn’t obstructed. He stuffed several pillows behind her. “You’ll pull all this shit out of your arm if you flop around like that.”

She raised a brow. “Flop—? Never mind. Original whats?”

“The painting that exploded in La Mezquita wasn’t the original, it was a copy. An excellent copy, but a copy nonetheless. It almost fooled the lab people.”

“Are you telling me that it was my copy hanging at La Mezquita? Not Mr. Tillman’s original? That would be wonderful! Losing the copy would be no loss at all. But there’s no way they would know that. With no modesty whatsoever, I can tell you that my copies can withstand the hardest, strongest scrutiny. It would take longer than a few hours to tell the difference. I’m good, Max. So was your father. We didn’t paint copies. We replicated, down to manufacturing our own pigments and dyes, down to producing our own canvases, down to tying our own brushes. The paintings we did were identical in almost every way possible to the original.”

“The fragments came here to the T-FLAC lab.”

She thought about that for a nanosecond, then said with a small smile, “Okay. Let’s say that they’re right, and they could authenticate that the painting that was blown up was my copy.” Her expression said she didn’t believe even T-FLAC was that good. That fast. She frowned as she leaned against the bank of pillows.

She chewed her lower lip as she pleated the sheet with her fingers. “The whole point of Tillman getting people to produce copies was so that he could donate the original and keep the copy.” She pushed her hair out of her face and sighed. “Okay. I can see by your expression that you believe the Canigiani Holy Family was my copy. But what if it wasn’t? Let’s say for a second that your lab is wrong. It wasn’t my copy, but was the original. Priceless paintings of that historical importance don’t just waltz out of a building once they’re in. There’s always heavy security and a chain of custody is carefully documented to protect a painting’s provenance.”

He cocked his head, listening, prepared to go with a different hypothesis even though he’d pit T-FLAC’s expertise—in anything—against that in the regular world. “What about before it reaches the building? How would that work?”

She pressed her lips together. “It wouldn’t. Unless the owner or curator was in on the fraud.”

Max sat on the chair beside the bed. “Suppose he was.”

“Tillman?” she asked. “You think Tillman’s donations were all a scam? That for whatever reason he had us make perfect copies, then donated the copies instead of his originals? To what end?” She ran her fingers through her hair and tugged. “I’m not disagreeing with you. I’m just trying to make sense of it all.”

“For one thing, you and Daniel made exact replicas. It would take a normal lab weeks, if not months, to uncover the fraud. And because you’re that good, it would be almost impossible to tell the original from a copy. What if the plan was to donate those excellent copies all along? What if they knew the painting would be part of an explosion. An explosion that would destroy all the evidence? Why blow up an original when they could replace it with an excellent fake?”

Emily shook her head in disgust. “Think about his house. The man doesn’t exactly have discriminating taste. He wanted to look good to the media for whatever reason, but also wanted to hold onto his valuable paintings.” He watched as she put two and two together. “The son of a bitch had his cake and ate it, too. What a jerk.”

“That, too,” Max couldn’t help smiling because she was adorable when she was pissed. Pink bloomed in her cheeks and her dark eyes held a glint of fire.

I miss you already, he thought tenderly. “I believe several of Tillman’s donated masterpieces, or their copies, have blown up in the last several months. Far too many to chalk up to coincidence.”

She bit her lower lip as she gave that some thought. “Okay. I’ll go there with you. But where’s the benefit to him? Why bother? You said he’s never had an altruistic bent until what was it—ten or so years ago? Why suddenly find religion and a conscience, and claim to want to give away his entire art collection? He wouldn’t do something like that for a tax break. The man’s got more money than Midas.”

“Pretend he didn’t. How would he go about switching copies for originals?”

“The switch would have to take place between the authentication process and the actual delivery. That could only happen if he handpicked the authenticator and got the receiving institution to agree to accept that authentication.”

Max reached up to brush a strand of hair off her cheek with his finger. The satin feel of her now-flushed skin broke his concentration. The only way he’d be able to focus was if he put some physical distance between them. Emily was just too much of a temptation.

He got up and went to lean one shoulder against the wall. “If you were Tillman, who would you use?”

“I can think of about a hundred possibilities for authenticators.”

“Can you narrow it down? Maybe concentrate on the Denver metropolitan area?”

“Jim Praley is highly regarded as a Renaissance expert,” she said, though she was shaking her head as soon as the name spilled from her tempting mouth. “But I’m telling you right now, he wouldn’t be part of any scheme.”

“He wouldn’t necessarily know, though, right?”

“True. There’s a woman at the Denver Art Museum. Her last name is Heller, Hellman, something like that. I’ve heard good things about her.”

“That’s a start,” Max said, already texting the names to Darius. “If I get you a pen and paper could you make a list?”

“Sure.”

“If you’re not up to it, we can do this later.”

She grinned up at him. “No we can’t. I am starting to understand you a little more, and I get that everything you do is time sensitive.”