Jade Island (20 page)

“Shove it, Archer. I’m serious.”

“So am I!” And this conversation was going nowhere fast. He glanced at the mess of electronics on the kitchen table, where Kyle had been working when Lianne called. “Looks like you dropped something.”

Kyle refused the chance to change the subject. “Listen to me, Archer. I know how it feels to be set up, on the run, not knowing who to trust except family. But Lianne doesn’t have any family.”

“What about her mother?”

“Anna and her lover are on the way to Tahiti. Lianne is all alone. Even if I wanted to, I can’t just turn my back on her. She’s alone. And she’s scared.”

“Shit,” Archer hissed. He raked lean fingers through his thick, already unruly hair and reined in the desire to give Kyle the fight he was begging for. “Okay. Who set her up?”

“Whoever stole the jades.”

“Breathtaking,” Archer said sardonically. “Any other brilliant insights?”

“I need to talk to Lianne.”

“So do it. You know where she is.”

“Not in a cell. Here.”

“I thought you said she didn’t have the fifty grand cash against the bail.”

“She doesn’t,” Kyle said, heading for the front door. “But I do.”

“Take the money to Vegas. Your odds of coming out a winner are much better.”

Kyle’s answer was a middle finger over his shoulder.

Archer’s fist hit the table at the same instant the front door slammed behind Kyle. The lamp jerked, shivered, and settled back into stillness.

“So,” Wen said in his dry yet strong voice, “the ungrateful female has been arrested.”

Harry and Joe exchanged looks. Neither one of them was in a hurry to speak. Lianne’s treachery had hit Wen harder than they had expected.

Daniel was young enough not to understand the risk of being the bearer of bad news. “She is in custody. I am sorry, Grandfather. Not for the arrest, but for the pain of having given so much ancient, honorable knowledge to a dishonorable slut.”

Saying nothing, Wen shifted on the garden bench and tilted his face toward the afternoon sun. He felt the light more clearly than he saw it. The increasing darkness of age was difficult enough; having Lianne use his failing sight to dupe him was a pain approaching agony.

He had trusted her with the Stone of Heaven. She had betrayed him.

“You were correct in insisting that Johnny and his concubine be far away when this happened,” Wen said, turning toward his Number Two Son. “There is enough pain. I would not have a daughter’s treachery turn son against father. Against family.”

“Thank you,” Harry said quietly. “We would have spared you, Father. We would have waited until you joined our ancestors. Such waiting was not possible.”

“She was too greedy,” Daniel said. “In a few more years she would have bled us dry. Our jade treasury would have been plundered down to the velvet lining of the drawers.”

Wen said nothing. He simply sat with his face tilted up to the sun he could see only as a faint lessening of darkness.

“When Daniel came to me and told me about the substitutions,” Harry said, “I waited until Joe returned. Then we decided that no good would come of pretending that nothing had happened. You are the head of the family of Tang. It is your right to be informed.”

Wen’s gnarled fingers settled on the cool jade carving that was the head of his walking stick. He had never felt so old, so weak, so foolish.

“She will be jailed,” he said. “She will enter the house of Tang no more. Ever. See to it.”

“Yes, Father,” Joe said, speaking for the first time. He was glad his father’s eyes were hazed with age. Wen had always been too shrewd, too clever, too quick to find fault in his sons. He never allowed for errors or simple humanity. He would never forgive Johnny’s bastard daughter. “I will see to it. If she so much as looks toward Vancouver, I will know.”

Wen sat motionless for so long that the others thought he had fallen asleep. Then he lifted one hand and dismissed his sons and grandson with a jerky motion.

The three men left. Wen sat in the spring sunshine, head tilted back. There was no one to see the slow tears coming from his blind eyes.

“What do you mean?” the man said, squeezing the other man’s arm like it was an enemy’s throat. Everything had gone so well up to now. Jade flowed out, money flowed in. Nothing threatened him or his pleasures. “She was arrested!”

“Kyle Donovan arranged bail,” the second man said simply.

“I was assured that bail was impossible.”

“The United States government influenced the decision. They want Lianne Blakely to be free.”

“Why?”

“To lead them to the Jade Emperor’s Tomb. To
us
.”

The first man put his head in his hands and wished he had never thought to rob from one in order to pay another. “I am doomed.”

“You have less courage than a woman,” the second man said, turning away in disgust. “I will see that she talks to no one.”

“How?”

“Do you care?”

The first man said no more. All he cared was that the threat go away. He told himself what he always did when he found himself without money and thugs were breathing down his neck demanding payment of loans.

Just one more time. Just this once. Then I will stop and no one will ever know
.

L
ianne looked pale and much too tightly strung as Kyle helped her into his car. Her own little Toyota had been impounded. It would stay that way until the smuggling charges against her were dropped. If she was convicted, the car belonged to the Feds. Vehicles used in smuggling were routinely seized by the law.

“Thank—” she began.

“If you thank me one more time,” Kyle cut in savagely, “I’m going to gag you.”

He might have felt less guilty if Lianne hadn’t lit up like a Christmas church the instant she saw him walking toward her. She wasn’t able to hug him because of the handcuffs, but she had burrowed against him like a small animal seeking shelter.

Even while he had held her, wanting to comfort her, part of Kyle knew that he was using Lianne as much as he was setting her free. The knowledge had put a brutal edge on his temper. Telling himself that he had to find out what she knew in order to help her didn’t ease his guilt. Or his anger.

Wind raked through his hair, the same wind that had surprised the weather guessers by clearing the skies, turning spring gloom into a luminous golden afternoon.

Kyle slammed the passenger door and went around to the driver’s side, telling himself to take it easy every step of the way. Letting loose his anger wouldn’t help a bit.
He had almost decked the officious prick who insisted on keeping Lianne in handcuffs until the last sheet of paper was signed. The bureaucrat hadn’t been in any hurry to get the paperwork done, either. It had taken an unreasonably long time to get Lianne her freedom.

If Kyle had been a suspicious, untrusting, cynical sort, he would have thought the Feds were doing everything they could to drag out the process. Like maybe they needed time to set up a 24-7 tail on her. Even Uncle had to shuffle things around to put a watch on someone twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

And even if Lianne didn’t end up dragging Uncle’s agents behind her like a ball and chain, she wasn’t really free. Set one foot beyond the boundaries of the U.S. and she would be back in jail again.

But at least she wasn’t wearing handcuffs.

Kyle just managed not to slam the car door after he got in. He jammed his seat belt on, shoved the key in the ignition, and looked over at Lianne,

“Fasten your seat belt,” he said. His voice was too rough, but Lianne didn’t seem to notice. That bothered him most of all. She was too grateful to tell him to shove it when he chewed on her for no better reason than she was there and he was mad clear through.

Lianne reached for the seat belt, then stopped, staring at her hands as though she didn’t recognize them. Despite a lot of scrubbing, the ink that had been used to fingerprint her still lay like a thin black moon along the undersides of her nails. She curled her fingers to hide the shameful stains.

“Seat belt, Lianne.”

When she simply kept on staring at her hands, Kyle reached over and fastened her belt himself. She smelled more institutional than fresh, more like disinfectant and fear than rain and flowers. The black pantsuit she had taken from her overnight case this morning at his cabin was crumpled from use and vaguely dusty, as though some of the places where she had been sitting lately weren’t
very clean. Her hair was in disarray around her shoulders. Her jade hairpicks had been confiscated until their true ownership could be determined.

Lianne looked at her hands. Fists, really. They ached from being clenched. Like her jaw. Like her throat, closed around screams of rage and pain and fear.

The grandfather she loved and had worked so hard to please believed she was a thief.

“I didn’t do it,” she said hoarsely.

“That’s what we have to talk about,” Kyle said, turning on the engine. “Mercer can keep the Feds at bay for a while, but in order to mount any defense worth mentioning, she’ll need a lot of information from you.”

Numbly Lianne nodded.

Kyle started to ask a question, took another look at her, and decided to wait. She was quivering like a wild animal in chains. She probably felt like one. He certainly had in Kaliningrad, when a question arose about his passport and he was seized without warning and thrown in jail before Jake could straighten out the mess. To someone raised with the unquestioned belief that a good citizen’s freedom was as reliable as oxygen in the air, being grabbed off the street, handcuffed, put in a locked room, and treated like dogshit was as shocking as rape.

With an effort, Kyle loosened shoulder muscles that were bunched for a fight. As he left the parking lot, he automatically glanced in the rearview mirror.

A tan Ford Taurus pulled into traffic right behind him. The agent’s maneuver was about as subtle as turning on red lights and a siren. Obviously fifty grand and signed assurances about the rest of the bail hadn’t been enough to comfort the good guys. They planned to keep an eye on Ms. Lianne Blakely.

And they were letting her know it.

“That does it,” Kyle said through his teeth. “Time to talk, sweetheart. What the hell is going on?”

Lianne turned and gave Kyle a confused look. “I told you, Wen Zhi Tang thinks I’m a thief.”

“Not good enough.” Kyle goosed the accelerator and shot through a yellow-going-red light. Might as well make the tail work for his salary, benefits, and early pension. “You were accused of stealing—what, a million bucks’ worth of jade?”

Lianne’s eyes squeezed shut, like her lungs, her throat, her hands, everything. She desperately wanted a bath, a cup of coffee, and the clock to turn back to a time when Wen had trusted her, when she had believed that someday she would be accepted by the Tangs as a member of the family.

“Yes,” she managed. “A million dollars.”

“Even if you sold all the jade at face value—not frigging likely, because hot goods are always heavily discounted—your bail is still way out of line.”

“What do you mean?”

“Bail is supposed to reflect the severity of the crime and the likelihood of flight. The theft was hefty, but not violent. You aren’t likely to flee for the simple reason that you have nowhere to go that you wouldn’t be extradited. Contrary to popular belief, a million bucks cash won’t buy freedom in a Third World country. Ten million, maybe. The price goes up every month.”

Lianne opened her eyes and looked at the dazzling, late-afternoon sky. It had turned into the kind of yellow-and-blue spring day people prayed for and rarely got. “They took my passport,” was all she said.

“And gave you a tail.”

For a moment she didn’t understand. Then she glanced in the side-view mirror. An American car with a suit behind the wheel was locked on Kyle’s bumper like a tow job.

“Not very subtle,” she said.

“Yeah. It’s enough to make a tax-paying citizen wonder what the hell the Feds are really after.”

Lianne’s expression told him that she didn’t understand.

“Look,” Kyle said impatiently, “I know of murderers, child molesters, rapists, and drug traffickers who aren’t
considered important or dangerous enough to warrant a full-time tail. So I’ll ask you again: what are the real stakes in this game?”

“A million dollars in jade isn’t enough?” she asked in disbelief.

“No.”

“Then what is?”

“Christ,” he muttered. “Lianne, I can’t help you unless you trust me. What in hell is really going on?”

“
I don’t know!
” She took a broken breath and shook her head as though to clear it. “This morning I woke up smiling and you made love to me like I was a goddess. An hour later I’m in handcuffs and treated like a criminal. Happy thirtieth birthday.”

“Today is your birthday?”

“Yeah. Bake me a cake with a file in it.” Lianne started to laugh, didn’t trust herself to be able to stop, and shivered violently instead. She wished her mother wasn’t on the other side of the world with her lover. “God.” She shivered again. “The things you learn when you’re arrested.”

“Like?”

“How alone you are. I never thought I’d turn thirty with no one to care if I’m in jail and the key is lost. No husband, no children, no real friends, no lover, no—”

“There’s me,” Kyle interrupted before he could think better of it.

“One night.” Her smile trembled on the edge of turning upside down. “And what a night. But there are the days, aren’t there? All the days. I thought it was enough to be independent, owing nothing to anyone, building my own business so that no man could wave his hand and kick me out on the street if he got tired of me.”

Kyle didn’t have to be a mind reader to know what Lianne was talking about. “Johnny Tang and your mother have been together longer than a lot of married couples.”

“I’m sure that comforts her when Johnny spends Chinese New Year with his family, shows up for their birth
days and christenings and misses ours, gets his wife pregnant as often as he likes…”

Another violent shiver racked Lianne, the only outward indication of how hard she was holding onto her self-control. “How they hate me,” she whispered.

“Your mother?” Kyle asked, shocked.

“No. My father’s family. They would send me to hell with a smile.”

“What about your father?”

“What about him?” Lianne asked wearily. “His money raised me, clothed me, educated me. That’s more than some fathers do for their legitimate kids. As for the rest, it’s my fault.”

“What is?”

“Isolation. Building Jade Statements took every bit of my time and energy. While I was doing it, I didn’t regret it. I might have been alone, but I wasn’t lonely. Besides, I was always going to get to a point in the business when I would have time for a personal life. Someday. Now…” Lianne cleared her dry throat. “Now I’ll have time, all kinds of time. My business won’t survive the loss of my reputation.”

“Assuming you’re guilty.”

“Why shouldn’t people assume it? Wen does. Johnny’s youngest son does. And so do you.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.” Lianne turned away from the bright sunlight pouring through the windshield. “You just keep watching me with those cool, measuring eyes and asking me what really is going on.”

“That’s—”

“No,” Lianne cut in, lifting her hand abruptly as though to ward off an attack. “I’m not complaining. You barely know me, yet you got me out of handcuffs. It’s a lot more than I had a right to ask of a one-night fling.”

“Is that how you feel?”

“No. It’s how
you
feel.”

“Right now, all I feel is pissed off.”

For a time only random traffic noises disturbed the strained silence. Kyle drove with an unconscious expertise that left him plenty of time to think. Too much. He kept remembering Kaliningrad and how he had nearly died. Then he remembered how the Donovan family had closed ranks around him. He hadn’t asked for their help. In fact, he had been determined to go it alone. Yet he had always known that help was there, waiting.

Then he thought of Lianne.
You barely know me, yet you got me out of handcuffs. It’s a lot more than I had a right to ask of a one-night fling.

Kyle let out a hissing breath. “My gut believes you’re innocent. My mind is asking questions.”

And his dick still didn’t care.

Lianne lowered the window and let the cool air wash over her. It wasn’t a bath, but it was the best she could do for now.

“Ask away,” she said finally, pushing hair back from her eyes. “You might get lucky. I might know something useful. But I doubt it. None of the people who questioned me seemed happy with the answers I gave them.”

Kyle’s mind said there were two explanations for that. The first was that she didn’t know anything, so she could hardly help. The more likely explanation was that she knew exactly what everyone wanted and had no intention of sharing.

The Feds were a lot of things, but rock stupid wasn’t usually one of them. Unless politics were involved. Then everybody’s IQ dropped off the scope.

The Jade Emperor’s Tomb made for a nasty bit of politics.

“Did you get a list of pieces that are missing from Wen’s collection?” Kyle asked.

“Ms. Mercer requested it.”

“And?”

“The Tangs are working on a complete inventory.” Lianne smiled brittlely. “That will be hard.”

“Why?”

“Other than me, Wen is the only person who knows each and every piece of the collection on sight. Or did. Now he can’t tell the real from an inferior substitute.”

“Substitute? Are you saying that the pieces of Tang jade aren’t really missing, that the Feds just made up charges out of thin air?”

“I don’t know what they’re doing. I do know that at least two pieces of Wen’s jade collection have been taken from the vault and similar, less valuable pieces have been left in their place.”

Three, if she counted the jade shroud. Assuming that there had been a substitution at all.

She didn’t know. The only way to find out would be to get inside the vault and have a look around. That would be hard to do when the Tangs didn’t trust her and the Feds would arrest her if she crossed the border into Canada.

“Are you certain about the substitutions?” Kyle asked.

“Yes,” Lianne said bleakly. “Turn left after the next light. My apartment is in the same building as the Jade Trader.”

“Just two pieces have been substituted?” he persisted.

“There could be others. I don’t know. I didn’t even know about those two until yesterday. That’s why I was so late meeting you for dinner. I kept waiting for Daniel to leave so I could do a fast check of a few other drawers in the vault. But he didn’t leave.”

“Daniel?”

“Johnny’s youngest son. Wen is teaching him about jade. I think Daniel must have been the one who put Wen up to filing charges.”

Kyle filed that fact as he dodged a bicyclist, pulled around a stopped bus, and decided against pushing the stoplight. It was already red.

The tan Ford stuck with him through all the urban maneuvers.

“So Daniel believes you stole from Wen?” Kyle asked.

Lianne remembered the hatred and contempt in Daniel’s eyes. “Yes.”

“Why?”

“He knew about the Neolithic blade. It was Wen’s.”

Kyle’s glance snapped away from the rearview mirror, where the Ford grew like a tumor on the BMW’s bumper. “The one at the auction?”