First Thrills, Volume 4

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  Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  THE GATO CONUNDRUM • John Lescroart

  AFTER DARK • Alex Kava and Deb Carlin

  EYE OF THE STORM • John Lutz and Lise S. Baker

  SCUTWORK • CJ Lyons

  PROGRAM WITH A HAPPY ENDING • Cynthia Robinson

  CHLOE • Marc Paoletti

  THE PRINCESS OF FELONY FLATS • Bill Cameron

  COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The Gato Conundrum

  JOHN LESCROART

  The Uffizi Gallery—Florence

  Don Matheson, also known as Nishion der Matosian in Armenia and Nishi ibn Matos throughout the Arabian world, was starting to develop museum fatigue.

  And no wonder. Every wall of the Uffizi was essentially wall-papered with masterpieces by Botticelli, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and (Matosian’s favorite, mostly because of his name) Fra Filippo Lippi.

  All the art in one place wore a guy out.

  Even if, like Matosian, you were a thirty-eight-year-old ex-Navy SEAL in perfect physical condition who ran six miles in under an hour every morning before the sun was up. And even if, as happened quite frequently, you’d enjoyed phenomenal, acrobatic, and oftentimes tantric sex the night before.

  But conjuring up a deep artistic appreciation for fifty or sixty paintings should not be the work of an hour, or even of a day. Matosian much preferred the Rodin garden in Paris, where you could go outside and sit looking up at The Thinker and let the power and meaning of the sculpture get inside your head and heart and leave you, somehow, changed for the better.

  Enriched.

  In truth, he wasn’t here to enjoy the art, but to meet a contact who was driving up that morning from Rome. When that contact hadn’t arrived by the appointed hour, he’d decided—since he was here—to take advantage of the opportunity to check out the art, which he’d been doing now for nearly forty minutes.

  It occurred to him that the late contact might not be the fault of Italy’s roads or the Florentine traffic, but a deliberate attempt to lull him into the semisoporific state in which he now found himself. Museum fatigue could not literally kill, of course, but it could leave you dull-witted and exposed.

  And in Matosian’s life, these states were often the precursor to disaster.

  Matosian tore his eyes away from Raphael’s Madonna of the Goldfinch and quickly but surreptitiously scanned the milling crowd of tourists surrounding him. Nothing untoward caught his eye on the first sweep, but then, in the limit of his peripheral vision, a flash of blond hair appeared and then disappeared behind the entrance to the next room.

  He turned, but had only taken his first step in that direction when he heard a scream. In that first second the crowd around him froze, and he used that moment to push his way through the press of people. By now others had taken up the cries, but Matosian ignored them, getting over to where a beautiful young woman lay where she’d fallen.

  Matosian was the first one at her side. He felt the slight pulse in her neck, noted the shiny pallor and heat of her skin. Clearly, she’d been poisoned, probably right here in the Uffizi while she was waiting to make contact with him. Now her eyes opened and even through her obvious pain, he detected a softening in her expression—she recognized him. “Veni,” she gasped. “Come.” And lifting her arm, she brought him down close to her lips.

  “Gato,” she whispered.

  The agreed upon password. Cat.

  She pressed something now into his hand—it felt like an ancient key—and closed his fingers over it. “Gato,” she repeated.

  And then she went still.

  Hyde Park—London

  There had been no time to search for the woman’s killer in Florence. It would have been a futile exercise in any event. No doubt, the assassin had done his damage and disappeared into the crowd even before Matosian had gotten out of the museum.

  And there was no time to waste.

  But the good news was that Matosian had received the key and immediately recognized it for what it was—as a youth, he’d been trained by traveling gypsies in the arcane art of lock picking, and now could not only pick any lock, ancient or modern, that he encountered, but he could identify by sight or touch any one of the 314 closely guarded discrete patterns used by ancient guild of locksmiths in setting the internal tumblers in locks since the late Middle Ages.

  Now, in the swiftly darkening evening of the same day that he’d left Florence, and dressed in a low-key gray business suit, Matosian walked along the calm waters of the Serpentine in a deep fog. His destination: the shelter/pump house for the Italian Fountain at the north end of the park.

  As he walked, something began to nag at the borders of his consciousness. Walking at this time in this weather, he wouldn’t normally expect to have any company on this gravel path. But his training let him hear things that others could not, and now he came to an abrupt full stop.

  Sure enough, steps sounded behind him. They kept on for one or two steps before they, too, stopped. But that was enough for Matosian.

  Side-stepping over to the grass, he waited until the steps began again. And another set of them, clearly several men, converging from in front of him as well. And then—he sensed rather that actually heard them—another set of footfalls registered from directly behind him on the grass.

  They were closing in on him now from three directions, with the freezing waters of the Serpentine as his only escape.

  Even now the shadows were beginning to appear out of the fog. Big men in trenchcoats. Matosian could take care of himself in any fight, but now he estimated a force of at least six men bent on taking him down.

  And then he heard his name, in a female key. “Don,” the voice said. “Gato.”

  He turned and saw her, frail and beautiful, yet somehow strong and competent, sitting on the metallic bench that bounded the gravel walk. With no time to reason it out, he went over to her. She had wrapped herself in a heavy scarf over her peacoat, and now she brought it up around his neck, and brought her lips to his. As her tongue probed his, he realized that she tasted of almonds.

  His pursuers had by now converged on the path, thirty feet away from them. He could hear them talking as the kiss continued. And then, as a group, they began to come down toward the bench.

  “Excuse me,” one of the men said, “have you seen…?”

  The woman broke their kiss and, holding Matosian’s face against her shoulder, snapped out in a rich Cockney accent. “Does it look like we’re looking out for somebody here, guvnor? Now piss off.”

  And then she came back to the kiss.

  After the men had gone, spreading out to find their quarry, the kiss finally ended. And now Matosian saw that tears filled her eyes. “Daphne,” she said. “The girl in Florence this morning? She was my sister.”

  * * *

  The pump house for the Italian Fountain did not get a lot of traffic. Matosian and Chloe—for that was the name of the woman who’d saved him with her kiss, Daphne’s almond-scented sister—had no trouble finding the door that was the match for the key he’d carried from Florence.

  Once they were inside, Chloe turned to him. “Wh
at’s supposed to be hidden here?” she asked. “Daphne never told me before…” Her voice broke as the sentence trailed off.

  Matosian took her in his arms. “It’s all right,” he said. “She felt no pain. They were professionals. As for what’s hidden here, we’ll find it. I’ll know it when I see it.” He flashed his laser penlight around the dark room. The pumps churned hundreds of gallons of water and most of the space was filled with pipes and plumbing. The light traced what looked like ancient graffiti on the walls, and suddenly Matosian came forward to examine the writing more carefully.

  “This is it,” he announced. “It’s not graffiti, though they’ve done a good job of making it look like it.”

  “What is it then?”

  “Cyrillic. Early Bulgarian Cyrillic.”

  “What does it say? Can you read it?”

  “Yes, of course,” he answered abstractedly. Matosian could read sixteen different alphabets and was fluent in twenty-two languages. “It’s … just a minute. It’s nonsense. ‘Roses are pie, are is the area of a circle.’”

  “‘Are is’? Is that what it really says?”

  “There’s no doubt about the words,” Matosian said.

  “Maybe it’s a code,” Chloe offered.

  “No, not a code. A puzzle.” His voice became more animated. “That’s it, a puzzle! Roses are…”

  “Red!” she said.

  “Yes they are.” Getting into it now, Matosian came back to the script. “So what’s left?”

  “‘Pie are is the area of a circle.’”

  “But it’s not,” Matosian exclaimed breathlessly. “That’s pi r squared.” A pause. “So what two words are left out.”

  “Red Square,” she said.

  “Exactly.”

  The Kremlin—Moscow

  Matosian normally worked alone, but Chloe now clung to him, both of them shivering in the north wind that whipped through the square. She had refused to leave him in London even as they’d sped to the private airfield just outside Dover—bereft over the loss of her sister, and fearful for her own life, she saw him as her last ray of hope.

  On Matosian’s personal jet, she’d fallen asleep until they were making their descent into Russia, and now suddenly, as an early morning crowd of tourists and bureaucrats hurriedly brushed by them, the enormity of their situation seemed to strike her for the first time.

  “So Daphne never got to tell you what this was ultimately about?” she asked.

  Matosian shook his head. “They got to her two steps ahead of me. She barely managed to get out the password and pass me the key before … before she was gone.”

  “Do you think it might have something to do with the password itself? Gato.”

  “Shh.” He put a gentle finger to her lips. “Let’s let that remain unspoken until we need it.” He looked around at the milling crowd. “But yes,” he went on, “I don’t think that’s impossible. My initial contact…”

  She stopped him. “Who was that?”

  A grim smile. “People say it as a joke, but in this case it’s as real as a heart attack. I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you. But let’s say it’s a high-ranking official of my country’s government. Very high-ranking, and all but invisible.”

  “And he told you something about … the password?”

  “Not in so many words. At Langley…”

  “So it’s CIA then?”

  “Forget I ever said that.” Matosian cast around, checking the faces in the crowd. Then, back to Chloe, he lowered his voice. “I don’t know if it started there. Just that it came through there.”

  “I understand,” she said. “I’ll tell no one. Ever.”

  He looked at her for a long moment. Then, coming to the decision that he would trust her, he went on. “When he mentioned the password to me, I got the feeling that a cat, or the symbol of a cat, would play some role in what we were trying to locate, but when I asked, he just smiled that enigmatic smile of his and said, ‘I think you’ll find out when you need to.’ And then I was off to Florence.” He shook his head in apparent disbelief. “It’s hard to imagine that was only three days ago.”

  “So what are we looking for here? This venue—Red Square—is a lot bigger than the pump house back in London. Whatever it is could be anywhere.”

  “You’re right.” Again, Matosian shook his head. “All we know is that somebody wanted me here and believed I would find and recognize whatever it was.” Now his face grew somber. “I feel like I’m letting my people down, that they might have picked the wrong man, that I wasn’t up to the job.”

  “But no one’s told you what the job is!”

  “That,” Matosian said, “comes with the territory.”

  Suddenly a large black car pulled up and six men in heavy trenchcoats appeared from its doors almost simultaneously in front of them. Matosian took Chloe’s arm and started to turn when he realized that one of the men had already gotten around directly behind him. He smiled in a relatively pleasant fashion and said in heavily accented English, “I have a gun and I will use it. You are both please to come with us.”

  Somewhere Underneath the Kremlin—Moscow

  Matosian had been tortured before—in Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, and Colombia. He liked to think of himself as somewhat of an aficionado of torture. He knew that he would probably survive whatever they had in mind, but he wasn’t sure he could say the same thing about Chloe. And, now that she was in his care, he couldn’t live with that scenario.

  He was going to have to break out and find her.

  But currently he was in a dark subterranean room, the doors closed behind his captors after they’d tied him up on the simple wooden chair. They were obviously going to work first on his feet, and to that end, they had removed his shoes. But they’d thrown them to the side and left them against the wall. He was far better trained than they were and he’d already loosened the ropes with which they’d bound his legs and arms, but he wanted the ropes still to appear tight when they came back in to question him, so when he was sure he’d sufficiently weakened the knots, he rested.

  He didn’t have long to wait. The big man with the heavy accent opened the door and turned on the light, one glaring bulb in the center of the ceiling.

  “Mr. Matosian,” the man said as he came to stand in front of his captive. “I am Viktor. My last name, unimportant.”

  “But enough about you, Viktor. What have you done with her?” Matosian asked.

  “She’s safe. We haven’t touched her. Yet.”

  “You don’t have to hurt anyone,” Matosian said. “I’ll tell you whatever you want. Whatever I know.”

  “You care very much for this woman, no?”

  “Very much, yes. But you know, these ropes, they are too loose. You should know I can slip out of them whenever I want.”

  “Very funny, that is. I watched Vladimir tie you up myself, of which no one is better.”

  “Still,” Matosian said, “maybe you’d better check again. If you’re going to be tickling my feet, you wouldn’t want me to come undone from laughing too hard.”

  Chuckling without any humor, Viktor took a step closer, bringing him into Matosian’s range. In a series of lightning moves, the seated man struck twice with his fists, once in the neck and the second shot to the nose, crushing the cartilage there. Before the blows had completely straightened Viktor up, Matosian had stepped out of the ropes binding his legs as well and now kicked out, hitting his captor again in the chest. Viktor went down in a silent hump.

  Quickly donning his shoes and socks, Matosian was out into a narrow, dimly lit corridor within five seconds. Chloe had still been with them when they’d turned into his room, so she must be farther down the hall the way they’d been walking. So, turning in that direction, he started jogging, stopping to check the doors.

  She was behind the third one, bound as he’d been, hand and foot, though they’d left her shoes on, and had put duct tape over her mouth.

  Where had her captors g
one? Where were the rest of them?

  There was no time to ask those questions, and Matosian wasted no movement wondering about it or getting her untied. When he gently removed the duct tape from her mouth, he paused for a half second to touch her lips with his own. Then, taking her by the hand, he pulled her from her chair, and they were off and running down the hallway, toward a stairway beyond which shimmered the glow of sunlight!

  They came out into an all-but-deserted alley that led off Red Square, and a fortuitous one at that. At the end of the block, as they were just coming out into the crowded square and the view of the Kremlin again, Matosian suddenly stopped, looking up.

  “What is it?” Chloe asked.

  “Look.” He was pointing to an ornate iron streetlight right above their heads. Matosian had almost run into it. The light was off since it was daytime. But its spherical bulb was held up by an amazingly realistic sculpture of the Sphinx. “This is it,” Matosian cried.

  “I don’t see it,” Chloe said.

  “Sure you do,” Matosian answered gently. “It’s the face of a woman and the body of a lion. And what is a lion?” he asked.

  “A cat!”

  His face lit up into a huge smile. “Hurry,” he said urgently. “There’s still time.” And taking her hand again, he started to run.

  The Louvre—Paris

  “I didn’t even realize that there was a Sphinx here,” Chloe said.

  “They’re all over the place,” Matosian answered. “Santorini and Thebes in Greece, Giza in Egypt, St. Petersburg in Russia, and many, many more.”

  “But then, how did you…?”

  “As they knew I would, I recognized that the specific Sphinx on that streetlamp was based on the one here at the Louvre.” He stared for a moment at the enormous stone carving. “I really do think we’re getting close now,” he said.

  “But who are ‘they’?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Who are ‘they’?” He sat on a stone bench across from the ancient sculpture, patting the space next to him in invitation.

  Chloe lowered herself down next to him, close enough so that their thighs touched. She took his hand and after a moment, he turned to her. “When I thought they were going to hurt you,” he began, and then could not go on. She reached up then and touched his lips with her free hand, and then that hand went back around his neck and brought his face down to where their lips could again meet—this time not as a ruse to fool Matosian’s pursuers as their first kiss had been in London, nor out of relief as the kiss they’d shared under the Kremlin. This time, their bodies lingered, their mouths locked in a transporting kiss of passion and connection.