Heart of Brass (34 page)

She’d had them in her wedding bouquet. He put one in her hair before making love to her the first time. The memory was like a kick to the chest, it came back so vibrant and real. Along with it came the emotions he’d felt at the time. He might have been an arse at times, but he had adored her.

Quickly, he pulled himself together, shaking off the overwhelming sensations. Arden was looking at the delicate piece in Alastair’s hand, her face white. “It’s a sentimentometer. May I?”

Alastair nodded and she took it from his palm, opening the top. “It is yours, is it not?”

“What is it?” Luke asked. He couldn’t recall—not that it meant anything—ever hearing of such an invention before.

His wife tossed a quick glance at him—she was engrossed in studying the device. “It’s an apparatus for determining a person’s emotional state. Very useful in an investigation. Alastair, you have to make certain I have access to the body.”

“Arden, you know the Director’s going to balk at that.” He shoved a hand through his hair. “Just tell me if this is yours, and how it came to be with the body. Please. I’ll go to Dhanya with you and plead your case. You know she’ll show lenience given the circumstances.”

“Lenience?” Luke drew back. “There’s nothing to be lenient for. Arden didn’t do it.”

But neither of them paid him any attention, and Arden didn’t do as Alastair asked. She scowled at him instead. “You do not agree that Dhanya will have a great interest in Miss Ogitani’s last moments?”

Luke’s jaw dropped. She could do that? Bloody hell. What had they ever talked about when he courted her, when they married? Perhaps he’d been comfortable being brawn to her brains. Regardless, he was going to have to start reading a lot more if he wanted to keep up with her. And he was going to spend much more time in that workshop of hers.

Wolfred didn’t appear nearly as impressed as Luke was, but then he was accustomed to Arden and all her “toys.” “You can ask her yourself, but she’ll probably want one of the agents who isn’t involved to use the spectacles—or do it herself.”

Arden made a face. “No one else knows how to use them—nor have they tried. Besides, one wrong adjustment could delete the images altogether. No, Dhanya will want me to do it, and me alone. And we’re going to keep it just between the four of us.”

Alastair sighed. “You know that appears suspicious, yes?”

Her frustration was palpable—like a child trying to communicate with adults who just smiled and patted it on the head. “Alastair,
this
”—she held up the sentimentometer—“is one of the first I built, and it’s been in a W.O.R. vault for four years. A Warden gave this to Ogitani. A Warden with vault clearance.”

Realization and horror dawned on Alastair’s face. “Damnation.”

Even Luke was smart enough to understand what that meant. The traitor. Whoever had given the device to Ogitani was a high-ranking officer in the W.O.R. He wondered if it was the same person who had given him over to the Company seven years ago.

If so, he dearly wanted to meet the son of a bitch.

Rani Ogitani would have been just as beautiful in death as she was in life were it not for the ragged hole in the middle of her forehead. The ghostly pallor of her skin only made her more striking, her hair all the darker. Arden stood over the petite body on the table and stared at it with a surprising lack of feeling. She wasn’t sorry for Ogitani, nor did she take any satisfaction in her death. This woman had played a part in trying to kill her, and Luke. Shouldn’t she despise Ogitani for that? It was as though any emotions she might have felt toward the woman had died with her.

“This is what’s left of the bullet I took from her.” Evelyn showed the three of them a distorted piece of metal in a small glass jar.

Luke held out his hand. “May I?”

Evelyn handed it over without hesitation. “Notice the markings that are still visible. They match several bullets we’ve seen in similar killings over the years. Whoever the assassin was, he makes his own ammunition. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. It has a fine point that penetrates the flesh and then the bullet spreads, doing even more damage. Small but terribly efficient when it comes to killing.”

“The Wasp.” Luke peered into the bottle with an intensity that Arden found as unsettling as the flatness of his voice. “He’s a Company assassin. This is his calling card. His work. He uses a specially designed rifle inspired by African blowguns that fires with incredible velocity and is accurate from a great distance.”

He and Ogitani were the only people in the chilly morgue who weren’t surprised. “Until today we didn’t have a name,” Alastair revealed, regarding him with an expression of cautious wonder. “Are you certain?”

Luke handed the bottle back to Evelyn. “Absolutely. I worked with him on occasion.”

“So you’d know him if you saw him.” Alastair’s excitement was obvious. Arden was still trying to come to terms with the fact that her husband had worked with a Company assassin. He
was
a Company assassin. Dear God. How many W.O.R. agents had he killed?

He didn’t know better…. He is no longer that man…. Hell’s bells, stop thinking about it!

And then she thought about Victor Erlich, and the expression on the bastard’s face as she shoved enough electrical current into his body to kill him. It had had taken more than one go. It hadn’t been simple self-defense, or she would have been content to incapacitate him. No, she’d intentionally killed him. At the time she hadn’t thought of it as such—she just couldn’t seem to stop herself. He had hit her, tried to rape her.

And in return she killed him. On purpose. That made her a killer too. Perhaps Alastair hadn’t been so wrong to suspect her of killing Ogitani. Perhaps she and Luke weren’t so different after all.

Luke shot the other man a wry glance. “I won’t see him. His victims never do. But yes, I would recognize his face.” His gaze flicked to Arden, and she saw what he wasn’t saying in his eyes.

“The Company sent him to finish the job you didn’t. He’s here to kill me. Us.” Her voice sounded oddly calm in her own ears, despite the icy fear that gripped her heart.

His expression darkened. “Not if I kill him first.”

“How do you plan to do that?” Alastair demanded. “You might recognize him, but he’ll take extra care to conceal himself from you. Hell, he doesn’t even have to get close to kill you both.”

“He has a transmission device in his ear, same as I did.” He gestured to the corpse. “The same as Ogitani still does. Let Arden look at it. I wager she can come up with something to intercept transmissions—if she hasn’t already.”

“But they won’t be sending her any more messages,” Arden interjected, pleased that he thought so much of her intelligence. She had been working with transmissions in making Beauregard’s new collar. “They know she’s dead. Trying to find them without that originating signal is next to impossible. It would all be guesswork.”

Luke’s frown eased. “What if they think she’s alive? If they think she’s not dead, they’ll send a signal to drive her out—or at least to listen in to the noise around her.”

“They could be listening now,” Arden remarked. “In which case, they’ll know our plans.”

“They’re not listening,” Luke responded with bitter conviction. “They’re too sure of themselves. That’s why they didn’t have Wasp dig the thing out of her. They don’t care if the W.O.R. finds it because they’re sure it’s inactive. But if they suspect he failed in his mission, they’ll not only try to flush Ogitani out, but the Wasp as well.”

They were all looking at her now. “Can you do what Lord Huntley suggests?” Evelyn asked.

Arden shrugged. “Yes. It won’t be easy, but if the Company does open up the communicative channel I should be able to isolate it. I don’t know if I can tell you where it’s coming from, but we could eavesdrop on their transmissions.”

“I’m married to the most bloody brilliant woman in all of England.” Pride shone in Luke’s eyes as his lips curved into that lopsided smile that made her knees quiver.

She flushed, but not before she caught the expression on Alastair’s face. He was looking at Luke as though he were speaking in tongues. But then, Alastair had always treated her talent for mechanical devices as a given, not as something special. Whereas Luke…well, he’d always admired the things she and her father created, but this verbal praise was new.

“Thank you,” she said, meeting his gaze. Time stopped for a second, closing in around just the two of them, blotting out everything else.

“Right.” Evelyn clapped her hands, breaking the trance. “I’ll remove the device as soon as we know what our girl was up to when she died. Arden?”

She started. “Yes. Of course.” She hid her embarrassment by turning to the corpse on the table. She took the A.R.O.T.S. from her bag and set each pair into place. As she wound the key she heard Luke ask Alastair what she was doing, but she didn’t hear the other man’s explanation, as images began to play out in front of her eyes. As the scene unfolded, she reported it to her companions.

“She met him in her room at the brothel. At least I think it’s hers—it looks lived in. He’s wearing a hat pulled low over his face.” She squinted. “I can’t see his face. He’s wearing a long black greatcoat and carrying a walking stick with a brass ram’s head at the top. She’s just picked up her coat and they’re leaving together.” She paused, waiting for them to reach a destination. “They’re in an alley behind the building. I think they’re arguing, she’s gesturing angrily at him, grabbing the front of his coat, and then…bloody hell.”

“What?” Alastair demanded.

Sighing, Arden removed the spectacles. “That’s it. She grabbed the front of his coat and then everything went black. I’m assuming that’s when she was shot, but she wasn’t killed by the man she was with.”

“You didn’t see his face at all?”

She shook her head. “I’m afraid not. And of course, I have no idea what he sounds like. But…” She looked at the corpse. “Evie, did you look in her left hand?”

“No.” The doctor came forward, the starched white of her apron brushing against her boots. Carefully, she uncurled the fingers of the dead woman’s hand. Inside was a shiny brass button. Evie held it up, and Arden’s stomach dropped at the sight of it. It had a gryphon wearing a crown of roses on it.

“The Warden crest,” she whispered.

Both Evelyn and Alastair looked grim at the discovery. Alastair massaged the back of his neck with one hand while the other balled into a fist. “Since no one’s come forward saying they were with Ogitani at the time of her death, we have to suppose her companion was also a traitor.”

“Or also dead,” Arden added. Perhaps she was naive, but how many traitors could there be within the Wardens’ ranks? She thought of how many spies she’d met through her father who had infiltrated the Company and decided she didn’t want to know.

“Perhaps it’s the same bastard I was onto years ago,” Luke remarked, a dark edge to his voice. Arden shivered at the sound of it. He’d been so sweet to her that sometimes she forgot how very dangerous he could be. There was a glint in his eye that told her he yearned for revenge. How many years would it take for him to have it? Another seven? Would he be lost to her once again as duty and vengeance took over?

She wouldn’t wait for him if it happened again. She would not be a fool twice. She would remain his wife, but she would live her own life. Perhaps she’d move to Paris or Greece and have affairs with charming men who spoke languages she didn’t understand but liked the sound of.

The thought made her chest hurt, so she pushed it aside for the time being. Getting overly emotional never solved anything.

“You’ll want to check the Warden tailors,” Luke told Alastair. “Make certain they alert you if anyone brings in a coat to have a new button sewn on.” When his friend shot him a startled glance, Luke smiled. “I’m sure you would have thought of it eventually.”

Arden almost grinned at the sight of them, so like she remembered. They’d always had a good partnership—one remembering what the other had forgotten, thinking of what the other had missed. Working with Alastair, being friends with him, had allowed her to feel close to Luke during his absence. She thought again that it hadn’t been fair of her to use him like that.

“To have gotten away with it for this long, to have vault clearance…” Alastair’s voice dropped off as he turned his stormy gaze on each of them. “It has to be someone high up.”

“And male,” Arden reminded him. “That was definitely a man I saw talking to her.”

“Were they involved, do you think?” Evie inquired. “I didn’t find any evidence of copulation, but I did find a sandy-colored hair in her clothing.”

“He was wearing a hat,” Arden replied. “I couldn’t see his hair clearly, but I don’t think it was dark.”

“So we’re looking for men in higher offices of the W.O.R. with light hair and a missing button, and a cane with a ram’s head on it.” Alastair shrugged. “We’ve worked with less.”

Arden packed up her spectacles and snapped the case shut. “If that’s everything, I believe I’ll take my leave. Evie, if you could get that transmitter out of her ear I would appreciate it. I’ll take it with me to analyze. Hopefully someone will try to use it.” She turned to Luke as the other woman went to work. She had no desire to watch the potentially bloody procedure. “Will you return home with me, or do you wish to remain?”

He seemed surprised that she would even ask, which didn’t paint a pretty picture of her, she supposed. She had been ordering him around a fair bit, but only because she wanted to protect him. That hadn’t been good form on her part. He was a man, not a child, and treating him as the latter would only drive him away from her all the faster.

“Why don’t you stay for a bit?” Alastair suggested. “I’d like to go over that old investigation and see if anything triggers your memory. There might be useful information in the notes you wrote for the Director. Perhaps we’ll unlock a clue.”

Luke seemed eager at the prospect, and Arden had no desire to interfere with the rebuilding of an old friendship, no matter how much she wanted him to come home, and to bed, with her. She forced a smile, said good-bye to the three of them and strode quickly to the morgue exit, her boot heels clicking sharply on the tile. The stiff ache in her muscles only made her steps all the more clipped.