Midnight Jewels (44 page)

"The night clerk mentioned it when Dallas asked a few questions and offered him a small bribe. The clerk was also obliging enough to tell Dallas where the combination was kept. We chose that motel for you precisely because we knew the clerk had a drinking problem and would be manageable." Isobel regarded Mercy with a gimlet gaze. "Dallas and Lance were instructed to make the robbery look like the work of a thief who was interested in getting everything he could, so they hit a few of the guest rooms as well as the safe. Dallas decided to try your room when they found the safe empty. But you apparently woke up at an inopportune moment."

Gladstone smiled charmingly. "It's unfortunate for both you and Mr. Falconer that you awoke when you did that night. If Dallas and Lance had been successful in retrieving
Valley
, we might have canceled our invitation to you both
and sent you away when you arrived at the first gate. As it is…" He let the sentence trail off into a small, regretful shrug.

Mercy stared at him. "I don't believe you. You would still have wondered who Croft was and why he was with me."

Isobel smiled. "She's not as stupid or as naive as she looks, Erasmus." She turned to Mercy. "You're quite right. Mr. Falconer was an unknown factor in the equation and we could not afford to ignore him. We would probably have had to arrange an accident for him sooner or later, just to be on the safe side. You might have been luckier."

"I doubt it," Mercy said dryly. Isobel merely smiled. "Are you going to take me to Croft?"

"He will soon be joining you."

Mercy allowed herself to be nudged toward the staircase that led down to the garden room. "Where is he?"

"With any luck we'll all soon find out," Gladstone told her as he followed the two women down the stairs.

Mercy halted at the glass doors, turning to pin Isobel with a savage glance. "He isn't here? You said you'd captured him!"

"We will capture him, Mercy, using you as bait."

Mercy felt ill. Croft was going to be furious. For some reason that was her chief concern at the moment. She pushed it aside and made one last effort. "Why do you need to draw him into a trap? You've got your precious book."

Gladstone nodded. "True, but I am a careful man, Mercy. I do not like to leave any loose ends. And I'm much afraid your Mr. Falconer constitutes a very dangerous loose end. Much more tidy to get rid of him before he can do any more damage."

Mercy was nearly blinded by her own fury. She had been so stupid. Now she had put Croft in danger as well as herself. She reached for the glass door and yanked it open,
wanting Isobel to think she was going to make a dash for the cover of the gardens.

Isobel reacted instinctively, stepping toward Mercy in an attempt to grab her. But instead of dashing futilely out into the gardens, Mercy whirled around and startled Isobel by hurling herself toward the other woman.

"Damn you!" Isobel raised her gun hand in a desperate effort to ward off the whirlwind, but Mercy managed to collide with her and knock her to the ground.

There was a brief, savage scramble on the steps. Mercy concentrated her attention on getting hold of the gun. She tried everything she remembered from her short course in self-defense, but in the end it was all useless.

Erasmus Gladstone simply stepped forward and slammed the copy of
Valley
against the side of Mercy's head.

Mercy didn't sink into unconsciousness, but she saw stars for several seconds.

By the time she had recovered from the dazed sensation she was being pushed into Gladstone's rare book vault.

The heavy door closed immediately with a final sounding thud.

A terrible silence and an even more terrible darkness descended instantly.

Croft stood in the shelter of a stand of aspen and watched the helicopter set down inside the Gladstone compound. The last of the twilight was going quickly, but the lights installed around the high walls gave a clear view of what was happening. A bleak anger tightened his gut as he watched Mercy get slowly out of the craft and start toward the front door.

As soon as he had heard the ominous sound of the helicopter returning to the estate, Croft had been prepared for the fact that something had gone very wrong. Now he knew just how wrong. Mercy was Gladstone's prisoner.

From his vantage point on the hillside Croft watched as Gladstone appeared in the doorway. A moment later Isobel, Mercy and Gladstone disappeared inside the house.

"Shit." Croft stared at the empty compound.

It didn't take much of an exercise in logic to figure out that Gladstone planned to use Mercy as bait. Croft decided
he could assume Mercy had been told that Croft, himself, was already a captive.

And she had come dashing recklessly to his side, even though it had meant flying in the small copter and facing Gladstone's gun. Croft shook his head, thinking about how much Mercy must love him. She would do just about anything for him, apparently.

Except obey orders
. She really did have a thing about doing what he told her to do. When this was all over, he was going to make love to her until she was limp, and then he would read her the riot act on the subject of staying put when he told her to stay put.

Whereupon, Croft decided, she would probably tell him she was not a dog, that she didn't like someone else telling her what was good for her, and that anyone who had as much trouble dealing with authority as Croft did had no right to give her lectures on following orders.

When that argument was done, he would give up trying to reform her and just take her to bed again.

But first he had to get her out of Gladstone's compound and that wasn't going to be easy. Getting in was no problem. He had already figured out how he was going to do that. Getting at Gladstone might be more complicated, but Croft was confident he could handle it. Isobel was a factor, but she could be dealt with if she got in the way.

The problem, Croft realized, was to get Mercy out of there before he went back for Gladstone. Mercy was the number one priority. As long as she was in Gladstone's hands, Croft was also held in check. Apparently Gladstone had figured that out for himself.

Croft continued to stand silently in the trees for a while, thinking. He was distantly aware of the chill in the night air, of the breeze that was making the aspen leaves shiver and of the sounds of the night around him. He let himself meld with
his environment, accepting it and being accepted by it. Then he started to think as Gladstone would think.

It was possible Mercy would be locked in an upstairs bedroom. It was also possible she was being held downstairs at gunpoint. But as things stood now, Gladstone and Isobel didn't quite know what to make of Croft. He was a mystery to them, an unknown factor. They wouldn't know when or where to expect him. As far as they knew he might be keeping to the original agreement, in which case they wouldn't see him until dawn.

But they would have to be prepared for the possibility that Croft might try something unexpected, in which case Gladstone and Isobel would want their hands free. They wouldn't want to have to worry about Mercy. She was merely a nuisance to them at this point. People like Gladstone and Isobel frequently made the mistake of not taking people like Mercy seriously. They didn't look beneath the surface. They would keep her alive until they had Croft, but they wouldn't want to be bothered with her until they had achieved their main goal. They would want her out of sight and out of the way.

The vault was the most secure room in the household, a natural and logical choice as a jail cell. It would be much more secure than an upstairs bedroom and much less taxing on the captors than holding a gun on Mercy for several hours. And instinct told Croft the vault was more than it appeared to be at first glance, just like Gladstone/Graves, himself.

Gladstone, Croft decided finally, would probably have stuffed Mercy into the vault and locked the door. Mercy wouldn't have a chance of figuring out how to open the trap from the inside.

Croft turned the logic over in his mind one more time and decided it was sound. The vault was the first place to go looking for his sweet, reckless Mercy. If she wasn't there he would go through the house until he found her.

He continued to stand among the aspens for a long while, letting dark settle in around him until it dominated everything. The lights blazing on the compound walls were the only bright spot in the enveloping shadows, and as far as Croft was concerned, their glow would prove to be only a futile attempt to hold back the night.

He could see twin spots of darkness moving about in the compound now. The Dobermans had been released. The dogs were the least of Croft's worries. He understood them and they responded accordingly.

The easiest way into the compound was over the wall at the back of the house. He would have to avoid the electronic security cameras, but that would be no problem. The discreet monitors were set up to see human beings, not ghosts, he told himself wryly.

The next step was to get to the helicopter and the one remaining vehicle that stood inside the walls. A few minutes with the machines was all he needed. After that he would enter the house.

He took a deep breath of the clear, cold air, letting the energy of it sift through his senses. The darkness was a friend and companion. He was a shadow among shadows. He followed paths that could not be seen by others; moved with a silence that could not be detected by others. All this was natural to him. He was a part of it.

The night was his.

Inside the vault Mercy fought a silent battle within her mind. She had thought at first she would be able to handle the confined sensation, especially after she managed to find the interior light switch. After the utter darkness, the illumination was a blessed relief.

But the relief was short-lived. As time passed it became increasingly difficult to block out the closed-in feeling. Mercy found herself prowling the small room the way a zoo
animal paced in its cage. The restless movement only seemed to make things worse, yet she could not stay still.

She studied the locking mechanism for a while, but that was futile and she soon gave up on the project. Croft might have been able to deal with the complicated lock system from the inside, but Mercy was a bookseller, not a locksmith.

Gladstone had said this room was not a trap for him but that it would be for anyone else. Mercy shuddered.

When the brief shudder became a more long lasting shivering sensation, Mercy really began to worry about the state of her mind. It was cool in the vault but not cold. There was nothing wrong with the air, she told herself. Eventually she might need a bathroom, but she would deal with that problem when it cropped up. In the meantime, other than being confined she wasn't in any great discomfort.

The little lecture didn't help very much. Mercy kept prowling her cage and time passed. Isobel appeared once, unlocking the outer door and motioning Mercy silently into the downstairs bathroom. Mercy tried a few sarcastic remarks but her captor ignored them.

When they returned to the vault Isobel made Mercy stand to one side while Gladstone stepped inside the metal room and quickly removed a number of books from the shelves.