Moving Target (2 page)

She hoped the little white car broke an axle and the driver’s neck. It would save her the trouble of shooting whoever was following her—assuming she could still see well enough to get the job done before it was done to her.

You’re getting old
, she told herself roughly.

For more than fifty years she had outfoxed the fox; now she finally had been run to ground. But she wouldn’t be easy prey. Nor would she surrender the ancient, priceless Book of the Learned. She would die first.

The pickup truck lurched upward as it took the final steep quarter mile to her cabin.
NO TRESPASSING
signs rushed by in jolts of red. Stones spun and spat beneath the wheels as balding tires struggled for traction. Time went so fast these days; there was never enough to get everything done.

Or perhaps it was simply her certainty that death was closing in on her that made time hammer like a waterfall on the stubborn boulder of her life.

Was that how the female descendants of the first Serena felt when their death time came? Did they look at the old, worn loom that had passed through generations of Weavers? Did they lift frail hands to the shuttle to add their own final lines to the ancient pattern?

She didn’t know. She never would. So much had been lost to the devouring cataract of time. So much, but not all. Words whispered through generations of women told her that in the beginning the Book of the Learned had been more than six hundred pages long. Time and desperate circumstances had reduced the number to five hundred and seven. Those pages held the accumulated history and wisdom of the Learned, pages illuminated in gold and crushed lapis lazuli, bright with the green of life and the scarlet of blood.

No Weaver in seven generations had been able to decipher the lean, elegant words that graced the Book of the Learned, but no one doubted the value of the object itself: the binding was studded with vivid gems that were the heart of the intricate, mysterious designs etched into the solid gold cover.

And now, again, the ancient pages were at risk.

As the last in a long, long line of Weavers, she had had a lifetime to prepare for just this situation. The torch was waiting to be passed. If her own race was over, so be it. The Book of the Learned was safe from man’s greed.

Shielded from sight by a low ridge, her cabin lay in a small hollow. The wooden planks in the wellhead and in the walls of the cabin had been cooked to iron by the Mojave’s relentless sun. Though cool now, the piles of granite that poked up like bones through the dry land would be burning hot in a few months. Then she would bake bread and beans in the little oven she had made outside the cabin and feel midnight’s cool benediction whisper over her face.

If she was still alive.

She braked in a cloud of grit and dirt, shut off the engine, and grabbed for the package on the seat beside her. It was the precious pages inside that had lured her out of hiding, forced her to reach back into the dangerous past she had spent her life running from. Just as she must run now.

With the determination that had gotten her through almost eight decades of life, she forced her thin legs to run the short steps to the cabin. Sand ground under her worn sneakers. A Joshua tree’s twisted arms stood black against the burnished sky. Overhead a hawk keened into the emptiness.

She heard only her own ragged breath and saw only the beckoning door of her weathered cabin. Panting, she wrenched open the door and stumbled inside just as a white car shot over the crest and into the hidden hollow. She slammed the cabin door and levered a yard-long iron bar into place across it. Then she closed the interior shutters on the two windows and bolted them into place.

The darkness inside was nearly absolute, but she didn’t need a light to find her way. As a young “widow” she had built the stone and wood cabin with her own hands. As an old woman she knew every inch of the place: its strengths, its weaknesses, its secrets, everything.

She limped to the pegs over the door where the shotgun waited. She knew it was loaded. It always was.

A fist pounded on the front door. “Mrs. Weaver? I’d like to talk with you about—”

“You’re trespassing and I’ve got a shotgun!” she shouted over his words.

The man on
the other side of the door looked around quickly. No sign of cameras or spy holes. He hadn’t expected any, but he was careful; that was why he was alive and free when others were neither. There was no sign of telephone or electrical wires, or even a radio or TV antenna. He knew from personal experience that cell phones didn’t reach into this particular corner of the Mojave Desert. The old woman was truly alone.

He smiled.

With a smooth efficiency that told its own tale, he reached under his lightweight wind jacket. A gun appeared in his fist.

“There’s no need to be frightened,” he said reassuringly. “I don’t want to hurt you. I want to make you rich. I’ll give you two million dollars for the Book of the Learned. Won’t you let me in so we can talk?”

“I’ll give you sixty seconds to get off my property.”

“Be reasonable, Mrs. Weaver. Two million dollars is a lot of money. It’s better than anyone else will pay for what’s left of that damned Druid book.”

“Thirty seconds.”

“At least take my business card.”

The only answer he heard was the unmistakable slide of metal over metal as she readied the shotgun. He gauged the thickness of the stone and walls, the sun-hardened thick wood of the door, and the surprising strength of the prey. He would need armor-piercing bullets for the cabin. For her, too. That was one tough old bitch.

With a vicious curse he turned, got in his car, and drove away from the very thing he wanted enough to kill for.

The wind came
up after sunset. The invisible rush of air was dry, cool to the point of chill, and smelled of time rather than life. The kerosene lamp inside the cabin threw odd, living shadows over the windows and walls. An old loom waited in one corner with an unfinished weaving partially filling the frame. Bobbins wound with colorful yarn dangled from the loom’s warp strands, waiting for the moment when they would be woven into a seamless design.

A young fire burned companionably in the hearth, chasing the desert’s nightly chill. The woman wore around her neck a long scarf that was as old as the loom itself. Normally the scarf felt rough to her, and she left it with its companion, the Book of the Learned. But tonight her own spirit was chilled, and the scarf soothed.

Numbly she sat in front of the fire, staring at the sinuous flames without really seeing them. All she saw were the pieces of thin, blank cardboard that she fed one by one into the fire.

He had promised to send her the stolen pages of the Book of the Learned. He had betrayed her again, promises made and broken. He had sent modern paper, not ancient vellum. There were no pages of lean, somehow dangerous writing, an old language speaking in silence of people and places long vanished. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t read the words themselves. It was enough that she kept the book safe and passed it on to the next Serena.

Family tradition held that the Book of the Learned was the soul of a man written on vellum with ink made of oak gall and iron. A powerful man. A proud man. A mysterious man. A deadly man. Erik the Learned. Erik, who had learned too late. But what he had learned and what he had lost were themselves forgotten when the keepers of the Book of the Learned no longer could read the ancient language.

Yet even without knowing the words, she knew the book itself was a treasure beyond price. Beyond the value of the ancient strip of cloth that she now wore as a scarf, beyond the value of the hammered gold and brilliantly polished gemstones on the cover, knowledge called from the Book of the Learned with its ancient, double-edged lure. Elegant, intricate capital letters teased the mind with designs whose meaning went deeper than words. The feel of previous generations, her own ancestry, people who were wise and foolish, saints and criminals, warriors and witches, advisers and hermits, peasants and aristocrats: the whole experience of humanity called forth in rich colors—sapphire, ruby, emerald, and gold. Above all, gold, illuminating darkness with a light like no other, shimmering with timeless endurance.

And she was but flesh, worn-out with enduring.

A sound from outside jerked her from her bitter reverie. She turned in time to see one window burst inward. A bottle hit the stone floor and exploded, showering the small room with burning gasoline. Another bottle followed, then another and another and another in a merciless rain that burned even the air.

At the end she saw the pattern that had eluded her for her entire life. Laughing, she reached to embrace it. Her only regret was that she wouldn’t be alive to see his face when he discovered that she had outwitted him again.

She had already passed the Book of the Learned to its next keeper.

L
ike much of the town, the law offices of Morton Hingham were left over from a more leisurely, luxuriant time. Second-story arched windows framed a view of low-roofed buildings, tall palm trees, and stony mountains that dwarfed everything human. Inside the reception area, creamy walls and rich green plants soothed the eye. Solid wood furniture gleamed with polish. The carpet was worn, but tastefully so, like a dowager princess.

The secretary-receptionist was the same. Her voice was crepe, irregular without being rough. “Ms. Charters? Mr. Hingham will see you now.”

For a moment Serena stared blankly at the receptionist. In this cool, gracious room with its stately aura of law and civilization, it was hard for her to remember that her grandmother had died from a random act of violence of the kind more often associated with inner cities than with the desert’s ageless wilderness.

Very few animals killed simply because they could. Homo sapiens was first among them.

“Thank you,” Serena said in a husky voice.

The older woman nodded, ushered the client into Morton Hingham’s office, and shut the door behind her.

A quick glance told Serena that the lawyer’s office had shuttered windows and no visible wallpaper. Every vertical surface was concealed by books whose covers were as dull and dry as their titles. Various legal documents lay stacked haphazardly on Hingham’s heavy desk. An array of computers along the far wall looked out of place amid all the leatherbound monuments to past decisions, writs, and opinions.

Hingham’s swivel chair creaked and jerked when he stood to greet his client. Long past the age when other men retired, the lawyer kept his shrewd mind engaged with the trials and tangles of people generations younger than he was.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, Ms. Charters,” Hingham said, clearing his throat. “There is a particularly difficult custody case that . . .” He cleared his throat again.

“I understand,” Serena said, a polite lie. “It doesn’t matter.” The truth. She had been quite willing to look out the windows at the mountains that had ringed her childhood and formed her adult dreams. “I take it that the State of California is ready to close the books on my grandmother’s murder?”

“The books will never be closed until her killer is found. But, yes. I’m empowered as her executor to turn over to you all that remains of Lisbeth Charters’s—er, your grandmother’s—
worldly goods
.”

His use of her grandmother’s real name—Lisbeth Charters—told Serena that her grandmother had trusted this man as she had trusted only one other person on earth: her granddaughter.

Then the rest of the sentence penetrated Serena’s mind. She compressed her lips against bitter laughter. Worldly goods. Her grandmother had lived a simple, spartan life. Her reward had been a cruel, savage death.

“I see,” Serena said neutrally. “Does the fact that I’m finally receiving my so-called inheritance mean that I’m no longer a suspect in G’mom’s murder?”

The controlled anger beneath his client’s voice made Hingham examine her more carefully. Middle height, casually dressed in blue jeans and an unusual woven jacket, a slender yet female body that once would have aroused him and even now interested him, red-gold hair in a long French braid down her back, triangular face with eyes as cool and measuring as a cat’s. The papers in his hand told him that she was in her early thirties. Her face looked younger, though her oddly colored eyes held an unflinching power that belonged to an empress twice her age.

Lisbeth Serena Charters had had eyes like that. Violet blue. Wide-set. Fascinating.

Unnerving.

Hingham cleared his throat again. “You were never under serious suspicion, Ms. Charters. As the detective explained, it was simply routine to ascertain your whereabouts the night your grandmother died, especially as you were her sole surviving heir.”

“The detective explained. It didn’t change how I felt.”

“Yes, well, it must have been very difficult for you.”

“It still is. Even though G’mom and I weren’t close, she was the only family I had.”

And every day, Serena asked herself if she and her grandmother had been closer, would her grandmother still be alive?

There was no answer. There never would be.

Abruptly her hand moved in an impatient gesture. “Let’s get this over with. I have work to do.”

“Work?” Hingham glanced at the papers in his hand. “I understood that you were self-employed.”

“Exactly. No time off for good behavior. My employer is a bitch.”

A ghostly smile rearranged the wrinkles on the lawyer’s face. “Would she mind if you took time for coffee?”

Serena smiled despite her unhappiness with the law, the legal profession, and the bureaucracy of the State of California. “Thanks, but I really should get back to Leucadia before the freeways turn into parking lots.”

“Then if you’ll be seated . . . ?”

Despite the restlessness crackling along her nerves, Serena went to the wing chair that waited beside Hingham’s desk. Outwardly calm, she forced herself to sit quietly. She had spent a lot of her life masking the energy and intelligence that poured through her with such force, they made other people nervous. Deliberately she leaned back into the chair, crossed her legs, and waited for the old lawyer to tell her what she already knew: her grandmother had no worldly goods worth mentioning.