The Illumination (13 page)

“That doesn't mean you have to go to Rome with me.” Natalie folded her arms. “Once Dr. Ashton analyzes the pendant, I'll call you—”

“You don't know me very well yet, Natalie. Once I find myself in the line of fire, I tend to take it personally. I'd like to meet with Dr. Ashton, too.” D'Amato hit the gas. “Our immediate problem is finding a transatlantic flight before morning. We'll probably have to hole up somewhere safe until dawn.”

Natalie turned in her seat to look at him. “And what will Mrs. D'Amato have to say about that?”

Still staring straight ahead into the damp night, D'Amato cruised through the next intersection. “Not a thing. There is no Mrs. D'Amato. Not for the past five years.”

Natalie's brows lifted. “So why the wedding ring? To remind you to pay your alimony?” Then a horrible thought struck her—perhaps he was a widower. “Sorry, that was a bit too personal.”

“Not a problem. You're right. I'm divorced.” A short silence. Natalie sensed the tension in him, the hesitation to say more. She waited.

“My wife and I never got past losing our only child,” he said.

She drew in a breath. “How horrible. I'm sorry for being so flip.”

“You couldn't have had any idea.” D'Amato blared the horn at a taxi straddling two lanes. “Tony had just turned seven,” he told her quietly. “After he died, we couldn't find any way to console each other. We couldn't even have a normal conversation. We just sort of fell apart.”

“I'm sorry,” Natalie said again. She watched the windshield wipers in silence, unable to think of anything else to say. She
knew something about things falling apart. Her relationship with her own sister . . .

“You asked about the wedding band.” He lifted his left hand from the steering wheel. “It was my dad's. Tony was named for him.”

Natalie nodded in the darkness. “So it's a connection to both of them.”

“Yeah, something like that.”

He was driving faster now. Maybe a little too fast on the slick streets, but she resisted the urge to tell him to slow down.

“What about
your
passport?” she asked at length. “I don't suppose it's tucked in your purse, as well?”

He managed a grin. “I'm hoping we can slip into my place and get it before any of our new friends ID me. Some of them are a little tied up in traffic right now, and hopefully whoever got to Luther hasn't had time to find my condo yet.”

Luther,
Natalie thought, seeing again the caramel-colored eyes brimming with spark and intelligence.
Dana, Rusty, now Luther.

“Was Agent Tyrelle married?” she asked. “Don't you want to be there for the funeral, for his family?”

“It's not safe for either one of us to be where we're expected to be right now. Besides, grief can be postponed. Justice can't.”

D'Amato had to circle the block twice to find a parking spot near his Park Slope condo, but at last he pulled into a space three brownstones away. “It won't take long to grab my passport and a change of clothes, but I don't think it's a good idea for you to wait out here alone.”

Peering out into the dark night, Natalie wasn't tempted to argue with him. She climbed out of his car and into a puddle, surprised that her legs could still hold her upright and that she was able to hurry alongside him as steadily as if she hadn't been a moving target tonight. She couldn't stop glancing at every shadow. Suddenly, the words the man on the phone taunted her with sprang into her mind.

I would not have been so foolish as to have killed her before
I made her tell me what I wanted to know. I am holding a souvenir of your sister's death.

Revulsion and anger filled her.
That bastard knows who killed Dana.

She clutched her shoulder bag tightly against her as she trudged up the stairs ahead of D'Amato. Each time a step creaked or a voice rang from another unit—or a noise rose from the street—she stiffened.

D'Amato's second-floor condominium was spare and orderly, its furnishings quietly masculine and streamlined. There was a sheen to the dark cherry hardwood floors, unbroken by any rugs, that made her wonder if he ever had visitors. He had a taupe leather recliner and matching sofa, set around a low, polished granite coffee table. She almost laughed at the straight, tight row of electronic remote controls on top of it—more remotes than she'd ever seen.

The off-white walls were punctuated with an occasional abstract print framed in heavy wood, and his chrome-and-glass desk was as orderly as a dentist's tray. Not a single loose piece of paper was visible beside the laptop.

At one end of the living room bookcases stood crammed with hardcover volumes and periodicals. At the other a wide-screen plasma TV was centered over the hearth of a modern stone fireplace. Everything was disciplined and a little cold. The place did not look lived-in.

After he disappeared into the bedroom to pack his duffel bag, Natalie steeled herself and phoned her aunt to cancel the shivah, telling her aunt Leonora that she had to leave town for an emergency. Gritting her teeth at her aunt's cry of disbelief, she reiterated, not untruthfully, that it couldn't be helped.

As she disconnected she could hear the sound of drawers opening, closing in D'Amato's bedroom. She pulled out her cell phone and dialed the airlines.

 

D'Amato stepped into his walk-in closet and closed the door. Quickly, he entered the combination on the keypad, and his wall safe whirred open. He removed five one-hundred-dollar bills
from the bank envelope and tucked them into his wallet, then selected four passports from the seven rubber-banded together. He put the one in his own name in his pocket and stowed the other three at the bottom of his duffel.

Then he looked at the Walther. No way to get it past airline security.

He'd just have to pick up another in Rome.

 

“You're right about the flights. There's nothing to Rome until 7:30 in the morning,” Natalie told him as he emerged from the bedroom. “And then we'll need to race like hell to make our connection from London. I booked two seats.”

“I'll pay you back.” D'Amato grabbed two bottles of Perrier and a chunk of provolone from his nearly bare refrigerator shelves and stuffed them into his duffel. As Natalie started toward the door, he punched his cell phone voice mail.

Hearing his footsteps stop, she turned. His face had changed, gone ashen. Then she watched it flush with anger.

He pressed replay and grimly held the phone out to her.

Natalie listened to the words of a dead man. Luther had called as his assassins were closing in on him.

“Middle Eastern males, two . . . five feet nine, five feet ten . . . wiry builds.” He sounded like he was running. She heard a shot. It sounded like it was at close range, as though Luther had fired. Then a burst of gunfire, a grunt, rapid voices shouting in Arabic, and then silence.

“Let's get out of here.” D'Amato took back the phone and shoved it into the pocket of his windbreaker. “They've got my cell number. If they've already triangulated it, they could be here any second.”

He ran to the door, keys in hand. She raced after him down the stairs, wondering when she'd begin finding answers rather than questions.

 

 

The honeyed glow of sunrise shimmered over the Judean hills as Menny Goldstein slipped out the back door of the Yoffi Café, muttering under his breath as he took his first cigarette break of the day. Yesterday Eli, his brother-in-law and owner of the restaurant where Menny worked the early morning shift as prep chef and cook, had pronounced the restaurant “smoke-free.”

He thinks declaring his restaurant “green” will save our lungs?
Menny inhaled and erupted in a fit of coughing. It had been two days since the police had lobbed tear gas at the Shomrei Kotel contingent demonstrating against the Temple Mount summit, and his throat still seared. He'd been front and center at the protest, decrying the government's idiocy in permitting the United States and the Palestinians to use Israel's holiest site as a staging ground for a mock peace agreement. The Shomrei Kotel knew the peace would never hold, because they knew the Palestinian leaders didn't really want peace. They wanted Jerusalem—in its entirety—and soon, at the summit, the Israeli government would start handing the ancient city over to them, piece by piece.

Menny was grinding his cigarette underfoot when a tall young man with a short-cropped beard loped around the corner and headed toward him.

“The next meeting is tonight after
ma'ariv
.” His friend, Shmuel, wasted no time in getting down to business. Menny sighed and pulled another cigarette from his pack.

“So we pray, and then we talk,” Menny complained. “Tell me, what is Shomrei Kotel prepared to
do
? I'm done with lettering protest signs, Shmuel. The summit is only days away, and our holiest site will be used as a backdrop for our nation's suicide—beginning with the amputation of our heart—Jerusalem. What is wrong with our supposed leaders? Don't they see that?”

Shmuel put a hand on the shorter man's shoulder. “Listen to me, Menny, tonight's meeting isn't about the summit. There is something even more important that Shomrei Kotel must address.”

Menny threw up his hands, oblivious of the cigarette ash tumbling toward the ground. “What could be more important than our national survival?” he demanded.

“It's all connected, Menny.” Shmuel's smile was slight and secretive. “Come to the meeting and see.”

 

Brooklyn, New York

 

Watching the clock in their green Ford tick toward dawn, NSU agents Foster and Biondi knew that capturing Firefly might be the most important mission of their careers. Prior to being recruited for this secret and elite branch of the Department of Defense, both had served their country with distinction—Foster in Special Forces and Biondi in the CIA.

By nature they preferred action to waiting, but were disciplined enough to know that both were equally valuable in the field. However, by the time the sun had peeked over the Brooklyn Bridge, Foster and Biondi were more than ready to get their hands on the search warrant for Dr. Landau's apartment. The woman was still MIA, and the only person they'd seen come or go from her building was a tall, muscular male in dark sweats who'd left the building and jogged down the street at 5:30
A.M
.

A black Impala finally sidled alongside their green sedan,
and the driver lowered his window to hand off the search warrant to Agent Biondi. Biondi took one last gulp of his now-cold coffee as the Impala took off. He set the empty cup back in the cup holder. He needed to take a leak, but he could do that once they were inside.

“Let's do it,” Foster said.

Almost simultaneously, they opened their doors.

They never saw the bomb hurtling toward them.

The explosion lifted the Ford into the air. The fireball engulfed Agents Foster and Biondi even as the roar of the inferno blew out the windows of the neighboring buildings.

Hasan Sabouri's skin burned from the heat as he sprinted past the carnage. He had only moments to get inside Landau's apartment before the street was filled with sirens and emergency vehicles. But he wasn't afraid.

If she returned here tonight, she was his.

And so was the Eye of Dawn.

 

The flight departed for London at 7:25, five minutes early. Still, as the jet lifted from the runway, Natalie fought back frustration at the long hours stretching ahead, hours in which she could only wonder what Dr. Ashton would uncover.

She'd slept fitfully at the Starburst Motel near the airport, wearing the jeans and white T-shirt she'd worn to meet Luther, and was grateful that the desk clerk had provided her with a toothbrush and enough toothpaste in foil packets to last her the day.

Yet, brushing her teeth, showering, going through the motions of a morning routine hadn't restored normalcy. Nothing could feel normal when someone was trying to kill her—and D'Amato. She wouldn't be safe until she found out who wanted them dead—and why.

Why was the pendant a magnet for evil? It was supposed to deflect harm, not attract it. But all it seemed to attract was death. Natalie didn't want to be its next victim.

Sandwiched between a compact older woman reading a paperback and a lanky college student with shaggy sand-colored hair and an iPod, Natalie felt safer than she had since Jim D'Amato had first broached his theory at her apartment.

Leaning forward, she glanced across her row at D'Amato in the opposite aisle seat. He met her gaze and nodded, then went back to his newspaper and his coffee.

She wondered if he ever slept. He'd been lying awake atop the cheap quilt on the second bed in the motel room when she dozed off for a few hours, and he'd been awake when she stumbled up at 4:30 this morning to shower.

She leaned back and closed her eyes, trying to get comfortable in the cramped economy seat, but the small of her back throbbed against the seat cushion designed for a man's spine.

No doubt by the time they finally made it through passport control and rented a car, Geoffrey Ashton would just be getting his second wind. The man was notoriously nocturnal, famous for haunting the sidewalk cafés until the wee hours of the morning. And when his companions staggered home to bed, he more often than not would head back, whistling, to his laboratory and work through the night, savoring the solitude and the quiet of a nearly deserted building.

She anticipated that he'd be more than happy to give the pendant priority over whatever else he might be testing in the Ion Beam lab. There was nothing Ashton relished more than a challenge. And she had one for him.

Natalie knew that if she could only drift off to sleep, the flight would go by faster. But she couldn't relax. She kept thinking about the man with the Middle Eastern accent who'd taunted her last night. About the cars chasing them relentlessly, about the gunshots.