Bound To Love (11 page)

‘That’s them.’

An unmarked white van idled at the curb and as they strode towards it, the side door slid open, revealing two men who sat before a bank of electronics. They climbed inside, and set off for the underground parking garage of the museum.

‘No activity yet.’ The man behind the bank of monitors grinned a welcome. ‘I’m Michael.’

‘Jake.’

The van was full of monitors displaying the feed from multiple cameras rigged around the museum. He glanced at each in turn. No movement.

‘Has my mother left her house yet?’

Michael nodded. ‘About ten minutes ago. The helicopter is tracking her car. She’s not alone. A couple of men are with her since yesterday.’

Jake wanted to pace, but the cramped confines of the van ruled that out. His foot tapped on the floor instead and he crossed and uncrossed his arms as adrenaline spiked.

‘How far away is she?’

‘Minutes.’ Michael held his hand up. A tinny voice bled through the earphones. ‘She’s here; the car has just driven into the car park.’

His mother’s car drove past the blackened windows of the van. Paul sat next to her and a large, heavyset man filled the back seat of the tiny car, stuffed incongruously into a silver grey suit, dark aviator sunglasses shading his eyes.

Jake’s hands clenched into fists, and the muscles in his jaw twitched as his diminutive mother strode to the lift, her two captors trailing in her wake. True to form, she looked defiant, even after three days not knowing if her only child was alive or dead.
Not long now, Maman.

Jake’s tone was much harsher than intended. ‘What are they saying?’ Being relegated to the sidelines was killing him.

‘Here, I’ll set you up with a headset.’ Michael plugged a spare set into the outlet as Smith pushed a chair over to him.

On the monitor, the small figure of Vivienne Delon entered the empty space that held the Egyptian exhibition.

‘Why is there no-one else there?’ Jake asked.

‘Too early, the museum doesn’t open for two hours and her staff doesn’t get in for another half an hour,’ Smith explained.

Michael jabbed at a monitor.

‘She’s accessing the alarm system.’ Vivienne’s iris filled the screen. Around it were six segmented panels. ‘She can signal us by looking into different segments.’

Jake bit down his response. He knew better than anyone how the system worked. When he developed it he’d never dreamed he’d be on this side of the screen, watching his mother’s eyes for hidden messages. Her iris stayed steady, focused straight ahead.

‘But she won’t,’ Jake said.

Silently, he counted to ten. The green light clicked on, the alarm was off.

Vivienne had never liked Paul, even when they were children. She had questioned Jake carefully at Christmas after Paul joined them for dinner.

‘He’s very ambitious,’ she’d said. ‘Quite hard, sometimes.’

Jake had brushed off her concerns. Dismissed them out of hand. Now, he could only watch from a distance as she unlocked the case holding the Rameses Bracelets, unable to extricate Vivienne from a hell of his own making.

‘So that’s your business partner?’ Smith asked.

‘Paul Grey, yes that’s him.’ Acid bit at his gut. His lying partner.

Paul whispered into his mother’s ear.

‘Audio?’

Michael shook his head. ‘He spoke too quietly, we couldn’t pick it up.’

Vivienne unlocked the cabinet and opened the glass top wide. Light poured through the window, and a shaft of light illuminated the gold surface of one of the Rameses bracelets as she handed it to Paul before reaching for its twin. Paul bowed to Vivienne, taking her hand in his and kissing it.

Jake’s blood boiled as Paul touched his mother. ‘Bastard.’

‘Happy bastard.’ Smith added. He glanced at Jake’s impassive face. ‘That’s a good sign, Jake. It means he thinks he’s got away with it.’

Jake nodded. The knowledge didn’t lessen his anger any, though. The second man loaded the gold into a black briefcase. They disappeared from view and the fading tone of the tracking device echoed in the van. Everything was going according to plan. At long last, Vivienne was alone. She slumped on a nearby chair, head in her hands.

The shout from the earphones was almost deafening, ‘He’s out of the museum. Go!’

Suddenly his mother was surrounded by three armed men, dressed in black.

‘Those are our guys,’ Smith explained.

The door was yanked open from the outside. Jake wrenched the earphones off and ran towards the elevator. His legs burned and his breath rasped from his lungs. The heavy metal doors parted just as he got there, and his mother stood in front of him.

She was safe.

Casting off his shackles of worry and despair, Jake pulled her close, reassuring her in French that it was over, all over.

Chapter Seven

Jake put down his umpteenth cup of cold coffee on the scarred wooden desk and glanced sideways at his mother. After over an hour, the enthusiastic young detective showed no signs of flagging, but there were dark shadows under his mother’s eyes, and her shoulders drooped with fatigue as she patiently answered questions.

‘That’s enough for now.’ He rose to his feet and frowned at her interrogator. ‘My mother is tired, and we’re both hungry. Surely you have enough information from her?’

The detective closed his notebook.

‘If I need anything else can I contact you tomorrow, Mrs. Delon?’

‘Absolutely.’

Vivienne rose gracefully from the chair, sliding her arms into the jacket that Jake held ready. Jake linked his arm through hers as they walked silently out of the bustling police station to the car. They picked up a Chinese takeaway on the way home as hunger overwhelmed exhaustion, and were just starting to eat when a chime sounded repeatedly from Jake’s leather jacket.

‘Jake, it worked, we got them.’ Smith was jubilant. ‘They went straight to the fence, so we picked him up too.’

‘And Paul?’

‘He got away,’ the detective admitted. ‘He took a different route than the others and he didn’t have either of the bracelets.’

‘So Paul’s still at large.’

Foreboding hollowed out Jake’s stomach. It wasn’t over then. It wouldn’t be until Paul was in custody. What had made him break from the others? Could he have got some inkling that the trap was set and cleverly avoided it? The thought of Paul out there somewhere, perhaps watching them, clutched icy fingers around his heart.

Smith was jubilant. ‘Yes, but we’ve put out an APB on his car, and circulated his photo, so it can only be a matter of time before we have him.’

Jake closed the phone, and placed it on the table next to his plate as Vivienne opened a bottle of wine and poured them each a glass.

‘I have no energy left.’ She sank into a chair and loaded her plate from the take-out’s paper carton.

‘I know how you feel. It’s been one wild ride. Did you get all that?’

His mother nodded wearily. ‘But Paul…’

‘Is still out there,’ he finished. ‘I need to call Tempest after we’ve eaten.’

‘Phone her now,’ Vivienne urged, staring at the pink phone in amazement. ‘I like your new phone.’

‘I thought I needed a change.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘Do you like it?’

Vivienne was either too surprised or too exhausted to answer.

‘Tempest lent it to me. I’ll phone her later, I’ve got quite a lot to tell her.’

‘I would like to thank her for everything. I don’t understand why they kidnapped her.’

‘They didn’t have much alternative, she left the museum after me and saw them bundling me into a van. She jumped right onto the back of one of them, and tried to rescue me. If you saw her you’d realize how ridiculous that is, she’s not much taller than you.’

He smiled. She was a ferocious firebrand in her defence of a total stranger. Brave, but reckless. Disturbingly reckless.

‘I’ve spent most of the week telling her off for acting so impulsively, but in one way I quite admire her.’

He ate his noodles hungrily. The quicker he finished the sooner he could call her. The need to hear her voice when he told her the day’s events was overwhelming. He’d settle Vivienne for the night, and when he was alone, call her.

‘She’s a very beautiful girl,’ Vivienne probed.

He nodded. ‘She is.’

Vivienne had that look on her face again, the one that she always got when her radar was working.

‘Well?’ She wiggled her fingers in the universal gesture for ‘tell me all about it’, and he snorted with laughter.

‘You, Maman, are unbelievable. You’ve spent days in the hands of a gang of thieves, and all you want to know about are my romantic adventures.’

‘Aha! Romantic adventures! I knew it!’

He put his head in his hands and moaned, just for the hell of it.

‘I can’t believe I walked right into that one. I like her. She’s different and much too reckless, but she’s fun.’ As his mother wearily put down her fork and drained her wineglass, he told her the truth for the first time in years. ‘We like each other. We’ve spent a lot of time together over the past week.’

‘I only saw you four days ago, darling. I met Tempest then, and I liked her. She has suffered too, with the loss of her father in such terrible circumstances.’

Jake put down his fork and waited. Tempest hadn’t revealed everything about her father’s death. Finding out this way seemed underhand, almost like eavesdropping on a private conversation.

Vivienne sighed. ‘Ayman told me that her father was attacked in the street in Cairo and robbed. Apparently, he was close enough to a hospital that he could have survived if someone had helped him. The street was crowded, but none of the many passers-by stopped or offered aid, they walked past the poor man dying on the street as if he wasn’t there. He died on the street. It had an awful effect on his family.’

Sadness transformed Vivienne’s face. She shook her head slowly, as if feeling Tempest’s pain.

Tempest had cried when she told him of her father’s death and tried to explain she wouldn’t leave someone who was in trouble. And he’d dismissed her bravery in helping him as foolish recklessness. Tempest’s family history explained a great deal about her. If a Good Samaritan had done the same for her father, he would still be alive today. The knowledge burned a hole in his gut.

Maman could find her own way to bed. There were more important things to see to.

Jake slipped the small pink phone into his pocket, and strode to the door.

‘I’ll send her your best.’

‘Go.’ With a wave of her hand, Vivienne released him.

He closed the door carefully, and settled down on the bed to dial her number.

‘Red?’

He smiled as she sighed, imagining her tangled in the blanket that she kept thrown over the sofa.

Her voice was husky with sleep. ‘Hey, you.’ His vision of her morphed into an image of a soft and sleepy Tempest in bed. ‘I wondered if you were going to call me tonight.’

‘It’s been one hell of a day… did I wake you up?’ Her deep chuckle made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. ‘Wish I was there.’

‘I wish you were here too.’

She sighed again, she probably had no idea of the havoc that the soft sound played on his body.

‘I miss you.’

I miss you too.
He caught the words before they leaked out. They’d only known each other for four days, how had she become such an obsession? He cleared his throat. He had news to give her.

‘Smith called. The trap worked. The police caught them.’

Her voice was tinged with fear. ‘I know, Philip rang us too. He said Paul had escaped.’

If he were with her Jake could hold her in his arms, smooth the wrinkles from her forehead, reassure her. The telephone was such an inefficient instrument. He forced down his own fears about Paul and spoke in his most calming voice.

‘He is, but with half the police in the country searching for him I don’t fancy his chances.’

He swung his legs from the bed onto the cream carpet of the guest bedroom. ‘I have some work to do here for a couple of days.’ He walked to the window, pushing away the thoughts of Tempest lying in bed, which were having a powerful effect on his libido. ‘I have to go to the office, talk to them about Paul, and set up a meeting with some investors.’

None of it held any appeal. Frustration roiled in his gut. He had responsibilities, he couldn’t follow his heart’s desperate urgings and drop everything to climb into the car and drive through the night to her.

There was no need to go into the details of the upcoming boardroom trials. That was something he’d have to handle on his own.

‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’ He lay down on the bed again, his voice as husky as hers. ‘Dream of me?’

‘I was.’ He heard the smile in her voice a moment before a small click signalled the end of their conversation.

****

It seemed strange to be dressed in a suit again, and Jake ran a finger around his collar, undid the top button and loosened the silk noose around his neck. The intercom on the long beech wood table buzzed discreetly.

‘The Argenti Group are here, Mr. Forrester.’

He pushed the button ‘Send them in, Angela.’

‘Gentlemen. Let us begin.’

The little group watched his every move intently.

‘Paul Grey will be arrested. He kidnapped me and attempted to steal a large cache of Egyptian gold artefacts from the British Museum.’

He paused to let it sink in, even though the news of Paul’s arrest must have permeated all of London by now.

‘From this moment on, I will conduct all of our meetings personally. The police have apprehended most of the thieves, but I’m afraid Paul is still at large.’

Still out there somewhere, no doubt plotting his next move. There was no way he’d be able to carry out his plans now, not with half of the police force looking for him. Jake’s hands clenched into fists, and a tight grin stretched his mouth.

‘Needless to say gentlemen, if he contacts any of you, call the police immediately.’

He indicated the identical stacks of paperwork that lay before each of them.

‘Paul had his own agenda, and misled all of us. We need to go through these documents and clarify what both sides want from our association.’ He glanced around the table at the expectant faces. ‘I indicated to Paul that I was interested in a limited merger, although he was pushing for a larger deal.’