the 13th Hour (21 page)

A
S
J
ULIA THOUGHT
of the plane crash, of all the lives lost, of the kind, older woman whom she had been sitting next to, tears filled her eyes. She had been called off the jet by an automatic text message that stated that Shamus Hennicot's Washington House had been breached. It was that call that had allowed her to live another day. But not just one life had been saved. Two lives had been rescued from death's grip.

She took it as sign that this child was meant to be. As far as she was concerned it was a miracle.

Initially annoyed, thinking it to be a false alarm, she had exited the plane, hopped right into her car, and gone to Washington House. She walked the perimeter, checking all the doors, all the windows, finding them all secured.

But upon entering, she knew something was amiss. She had been inside for all of thirty seconds when a rumble shook the house. The china in the cupboards rattled, the glasses in the bar clinked as if an earthquake had hit the area. While there was a deep fault under the New York granite mantle, earthquakes were as few and far between as snowball fights in Bermuda. The lights flickered, fighting to stay on, and went out. The emergency lights quickly flashed on, illuminating the stairwells and exit doors. Intermittent beeps sounded from the computer battery backups signaling the power failure and shutdown protocol. She looked at her watch: 11:54. She should have been on her way to Boston instead of walking about in a power-deprived vacant house that shook from the slippage of some fissure deep beneath the county.

She headed to the kitchen, ran her security pass card over the reader, knowing it had a twenty-four-battery backup, and opened the heavy fire door to the basement. The overly bright halogen emergency light guided her down the stairs, its glow abusing the expensive fleur-de-lis wallpaper that Hennicot had had shipped from Paris. She punched her Social Security number in on the keypad and waved her magna-card over the card reader three times. She pulled out the octagonal security key, inserting it, with the letter D on top, into the large brushed-steel vault door.

With a forceful turn, she opened the door and was greeted by darkness. Pulling a chair over, she propped the door open, allowing the bright wash of light to pour forth.

Her eyes immediately fell on the broken display cases in the center of the room, the out-of-place red-domed box on the wall. An anger instantly rose in her, as if she herself had been violated. She walked about opening doors, poking her head in. An emergency light was lit in the climate-controlled storage room; it didn't appear any of the crates had been disturbed. She walked back through the main room, through the shaft of halogen light pouring out of the stairwell, and opened the door to Shamus's office. She stepped right to the hidden wall panel door, seeing it cracked open, and pushed it in.

The room was almost completely dark. Slight reflections of the outer room's light danced about, but not enough for any clear vision.

She knew there were only two items in the room. In the center. She took two cautious steps forward, her eyes desperately trying to adjust, and came upon the safes. She ran her hand over the first, finding it closed, but the second . . . she didn't bother with any tactile investigation. She could just make out the shadow of the thick open door.

And all at once, she felt fear wash over her.

She had entered the house and come down here instantly to confirm the robbery, her anger blinding her to the danger as she ran about in the darkness, foolishly tempting fate. Julia had never been stricken with claustrophobia, but now she felt the darkness closing in on her. She didn't know if anyone was in here, if someone was hidden behind a doorway, feeling trapped like a wild animal, prepared to kill her in order to make his escape.

This was not a good day to die.

She charged out of the room and up the stairs. She pulled out the octagonal key and opened the hidden security room behind the false wall in the pantry. Her eyes fell immediately on the broken computer servers, the hard drives torn out and missing. Whoever pulled this off knew exactly what to do, knew exactly how to erase their tracks.

Julia was thankful for the redundant backup in her office, resident not only on her computer but also on the company server. Whoever pulled this job would never think of looking there.

Stepping from the security closet into the pantry, Julia's fear abated. Whoever had pulled this theft was gone. This inside job had probably been pulled off in a matter of minutes, without leaving a trace.

She grabbed a flashlight off the pantry shelf and a digital camera from her car and re-entered the basement. She took an inventory of what was missing, snapping pictures of the broken case, the open safe. There was a specificity to the robbery, the storage room surprisingly untouched, despite the crates containing tens of millions in paintings. The thieves' only focus had been the armory items and the simple safe.

While Julia had possession of the inventory on all the art, antiques, and gems that Shamus updated a few times a year, she did not have the specifics on the safe. Other than the fact that he stored several pouches of diamonds and some personal effects, the contents of the two safes remained a mystery.

Once back upstairs, she called Shamus Hennicot at his summer home in Massachusetts to give him the bad news. She didn't hesitate as she dialed the number--she had learned early in life that bad news couldn't wait.

When his assistant, Talia, told her Shamus was unavailable, handling some family emergency, Julia simply asked Talia to have him call her as soon as possible and to tell him there had been an incident at Washington House. Julia followed his directions concerning
incidents
to the letter. He didn't want the police involved on any matter until he knew the facts and could decide the best course of action. That was his decision and she would respect his wisdom as she had done for the last three years.

Shamus had been sick for the last few weeks, but for a sick man of ninety-two, he still had more energy than she could muster at the age of thirty-one. They had spoken two weeks earlier regarding a loan of some of his Monet collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, but as was so often the case, their conversation had veered to matters of family and life. She had such respect for Shamus and his accomplishments, she so trusted his advice and counsel, that she often found herself confiding in him, seeking his perspective on matters far beyond business.

Though he had no children of his own, Shamus always spoke of what was truly important in life: love and family, the true legacy of success, the true key to happiness. As anxious as Julia had been to tell Nick her news, she was equally looking forward to telling Shamus, knowing the genuine joy he would feel for her. Julia's parents were older when they had her and had passed away several years earlier. In an odd way, Shamus Hennicot had filled that empty space in her heart, becoming like a surrogate grandparent, praising her achievements, sharing wisdom, imparting guidance with a warm smile and cheer in his voice.

She was genuinely touched by the man's selfless spirit, his charity and nobility. He was a gentleman in a world where that word had become forgotten. He was a man who still cherished the written word, sending her letters in his impeccable cursive handwriting, avoiding the impersonal world of email.

It troubled her to have to tell him of the burglary, of the theft of his family's valuables that had been passed down through the years. While she knew he would simply say, "Not to worry dear, pieces of metal and rock and canvas are not the true valuables in my life," she wondered if he would be troubled by the incident, if there was something more to the collection he possessed that was not in the inventory.

As Julia exited the house, her PDA began humming with an incoming email from her office. Surprisingly, it was the Hennicot files and security data. She realized it was the download protocol when a power failure hit: Her offices were obviously under the same blackout that had hit this part of town.

As she drove out of the driveway, police and fire trucks flew by. The traffic lights were out, and people milled in the streets, all looking south. And as she finally turned her head, she saw the giant plume of black, acrid smoke.

Now, sitting in her Lexus, fifteen miles north of the crash site, Julia could see the dissipating smoke hovering on the southern horizon. She looked at the clock on the dash of her SUV. It was just after two and she had yet to speak to Nick. She had picked up her cell phone to try him again when the passenger door opened and an old man climbed in.

"Thank you for the ride," the man said as he fastened his seat belt. "I'm Dr. O'Reilly."

"Julia Quinn," Julia said as she extended her hand.

As they shook hands, Julia looked more closely at the old man. Though his hair had gone to white, his eyebrows were as black as night and seemed to imbue him with a touch of youth. Tilting her head in curiosity, she asked, "Have we met before?"

"I don't think so." O'Reilly shook his head. "Unless you had business with the medical examiner's office more than five years ago. Sadly, my retirement has been ended by today's tragedy."

The doctor looked out the window, ending the conversation, becoming lost in what could only be horrible thoughts about what he was heading off to see.

Without another word, Julia started the Lexus, drove out of the driveway, and headed back to Byram Hills.

N
ICK SAT IN
his leather office chair behind the desk in his library. He was soaked, heaving for breath, his mind a jumble in its disorientation. He had thought himself dead as his mind went blank on the bottom of the lake, his last thought that he had failed Julia.

Calming himself, he looked at the wallet clutched in his hand. It was calfskin leather, black, Gucci. He had taken it from the pocket of the dead man on the bottom of the Kensico Reservoir. He opened it, finding it filled with hundred-dollar bills. There was a black American Express Card and a Gold Visa, but he bypassed it all, finding the driver's license, the object of his search, right on top.

But identifying the dead man was not a eureka moment; it instead created more questions than Nick had had an hour earlier. He reread the license once more: 10 Merion Drive, Haverford, Pennsylvania. Born May 28, 1952. Five feet ten inches tall, brown eyes, the organ donation box checked. Paul Dreyfus, the owner of the security company that did the installation on Shamus Hennicot's building, was dead, drowned, his body at the bottom of the Kensico Reservoir.

Nick ran upstairs and tore off his wet clothes, quickly throwing on another pair of jeans and a white shirt. He grabbed another dark blazer from the closet and emptied out the pockets of his drenched pants and jacket. He found Marcus's letter to Marcus, along with the letter from the gray-haired man he'd received in the interrogation room, the ink on the exterior envelopes only slightly running. He picked up the watch and flicked open the watch cover. The timepiece was well crafted and watertight, seemingly unaffected by its submersion, as the second hand swept past twelve to read 2:05. His phone was another matter, shorted out. He was actually glad it was ruined, as that had erased Julia's death image from the world. He grabbed his wallet and keys, the St. Christopher medal, Dreyfus's wallet, and the letters and tucked it all in his pockets.

He ran downstairs, back to the library, and opened the safe. He let out a wide grin as he found his gun sitting there along with a supply of cartridges. This wasn't some kind of magic. It hadn't leaped here through time from Dance's car. As it was now 2:05, it simply had not yet left the safe.

Nick grabbed it, along with several cartridges, and tucked it in his waistband, at the small of his back. He moved the stack of papers on his desk aside and found his personal cell phone sitting there dry as a bone, ready for use. He momentarily laughed, but the humor quickly faded as he became angry with himself. He had almost died, and in so doing, he would have taken Julia along with him. He had been foolish and arrogant, thinking he could simply ride backward in time and easily save Julia.

He had not used anything he knew of the future to change the past. This was like a game, a game he was playing very poorly, running around relying on chance-met strangers for help. He had to effect change and he had to effect it now. Time was ticking down; the time to save Julia was running out.

He picked up the wet wallet he had plucked off the corpse and slipped it in the pocket of his blazer.

He would no longer passively let things play out by chance. He had a plan now.

He was going to see Paul Dreyfus.

N
ICK PARKED HIS
car just outside the roadblock at the crash site, right behind the blue Chevy Impala, the car that would carry Julia's killer, the car he would chase down hours from now, forcing it off the road and into a tree.

He walked briskly toward Private McManus, the same National Guardsman who had stopped him from entering when he came and met Shannon.

"May I help you?" the young man said.

"I'm bringing evidence concerning the plane crash to Captain Delia." Nick held up the wet wallet without stopping.

The young guard didn't question Nick's authoritative tone or manner and nodded as he passed.