The Dark Hour (18 page)

The phone rang. Miles tore across the room, picked it up. “Yes?”

“I found them. Griffin and the woman.”

“Where are they?”

“Driving. I’m following them now.”

“To where?”

“Not sure yet. Southeast is all I can tell.”

“I want that package found.”

“Well, judging from their actions, I’m guessing they found it. They stopped at a store and bought a small ice chest and there wasn’t a six-pack in sight. Unfortunately, I was on the other side of the canal or I would’ve had them by now.”

“Good. When you get them, clean it up. I don’t want Griffin or this woman around in the end.”

Chapter 29

December 10

Two hours outside Amsterdam

En route to Winterswijk

M
oonlight cast its pale glow across the countryside, the vast snow-covered fields, with the occasional village seen in the distance. They’d been on the road for almost an hour, and Griffin checked his rearview mirror. The car was still firmly on their tail, had been since they left Amsterdam. Not hard to miss, since one of its headlights was slightly out of adjustment.

At the moment, there were no other vehicles on the road, which was sort of a good news–bad news thing. Good in that it allowed Griffin to verify that they were definitely being followed, which meant he needed to lose the tail before he led them right to his contact’s door. Bad in that no witnesses and lots of wide, open space left plenty of opportunity for whoever was on their tail to make an attack.

If there was going to be one, Griffin wanted it on his terms. He braked hard, and the car backed off momentarily, but not for long. It soon sped up, trying to jockey for position alongside them, undoubtedly trying to ram their fender, which would send them spinning. He’d seen the move, used it himself. Griffin hit the gas, pulled ahead, heard the screeching of tires as the other car followed. “Syd.”

He reached over, tapped her on the thigh. She opened her eyes, looked around sleepily. “What?”

“I can’t drive and shoot at the same time.” Griffin swerved slightly, braking, then stabbed the gas, hoping the car behind him would back way off.

“Can’t a girl catch a nap around here?” she said, opening the glove box, removing the weapon.

“Take out his tire, then you can sleep.”

Sydney rolled down her window, the icy wind whipping at her hair as she shifted in her seat. Unfortunately, he realized, it meant she’d be shooting weak-handed, never mind against the glare of the headlights, but that couldn’t be helped. He’d seen her on the range and in the field. She was a damned good marksman. When she was in position, he said, “Get ready.”

“I’m ready.”

The roadway straightened, and he looked in the mirror, saw the vehicle’s headlights. He let his foot off the gas. The car jerked suddenly as he hit a pothole.

“Not helping,” Sydney shouted.

“Sorry.” He focused on the road, tried to keep his driving smooth. She fired a shot. And missed.

Come on
, he pleaded silently.
Make it
. She fired twice more in succession.

He heard the sound of metal scraping metal, and he looked in his rearview mirror, saw the car skidding off the road, the beams from its headlights bouncing, then finally coming to rest, at a downward tilt as though the car had landed in a shallow ditch. From the corner of his eye, he saw Sydney scooting back into position, raking her hair out of her face with one hand, as she lowered the Glock to her lap, then rolled up the window.

“Nice job.”

“Yeah. Mind if I finish my nap now?”

Somehow he doubted she was going to be able to sleep. Even so, he smiled, relaxing for the first time since they’d left Amsterdam.

A
bout a half hour later, with no indication that they were being followed, Sydney looked up, reading the sign on the expressway. “Exactly where are we going?”

“Winterswijk. I have contacts there who can get me a decent passport. I need ID. Until I get some, we can’t go anywhere.”

“I thought spies had stacks of passports, one for every day of the week.”

“Until you get burned.”

The drive to Winterswijk, a small village on the eastern border near Germany, took an additional hour, and Sydney dozed for the latter part of the trip, waking as Griffin stopped, then made a turn down a long road. To the right, a thicket of trees, branches bare, stretched as far as the eye could see. Griffin drove past the village filled with quaint storybook houses, some with thatched roofs, all with windows glowing gold against the night. Eventually he turned down a street that led away from the village, and into a forest, his eye constantly on his rearview mirror as they wound their way down a single lane road that eventually led to a large white farmhouse.

Griffin parked in the drive, behind a gray Volvo wagon and a brown pickup truck. “We’re here,” he said. “Hope you like dogs. Dirk has a couple of Hungarian vizslas. They’re friendly as long as he’s around.”

They got out and walked up the snow-covered path to the door, which opened before they even knocked. Light spilled onto the walkway. A large russet-colored dog bounded down the porch steps, nearly bowling Griffin over in its enthusiasm to greet him.

“Chip,” a deep voice called out from the porch. The dog stopped in its tracks, its tail wagging. Just behind it, a man, tall as the doorway, stood there, and the dog returned to his side as he waited for them to enter the house.

“Zach,” Dirk said, clasping Griffin’s outstretched hand with both of his. “You made good time.” He stepped out onto the porch, looked around, his gaze sharp.

“The weather held,” Griffin replied, stomping the snow from his shoes before entering. “How have you been?”

Before he could answer, a woman walked up. Sydney figured she was somewhere between forty and fifty, a head shorter than Sydney, with brown wavy hair that framed a pretty face and blue eyes that lit up the moment she saw Griffin. “Zachary!” she said, rushing forward, her hands outstretched.

“Monique. You still look the same. As beautiful as ever,” he said, having to bend to accept her greeting, cheek to cheek, three times.

She turned to Sydney, a look of curiosity in her gaze. “And who is this?”

Griffin made the introductions.

“How long can you stay?” Monique asked.

“Only until morning.”

“Sometime you must come when you can stay longer,” she replied, taking their coats. She led them through the front parlor past a piano to a room that opened up on the right just before the kitchen. A small sofa and chairs faced the hearth where a fire crackled within.

“Now sit. Drink, while I cook dinner.” She left the room.

Dirk poured wine and handed them each a glass. “Surely you didn’t make this trip just for a passport.”

“You’re right.” Griffin gave him a brief history of the last week’s events, culminating with finding the sealed vial at the museum. “Two people are dead, and someone followed us here. I have a feeling they’re after what’s in that cooler.”

“What do you think it is?”

“In my line of work? Things that are frozen in cryo tubes, then placed in another vial and then in an airtight plastic bag usually have deadly consequences. The question is, why would someone send it to Faas?”

“Faas’s niece didn’t mention anything about this to you?”

“No. Just that Faas had recently received something I’d be interested in that might answer the who and why. Specifically something I’d want to see in person, because I’d been looking for it for the last couple years. I assumed, naturally, that he meant information on who killed my wife. Not a frozen biological sample.”

Dirk poured more wine into his glass. “Maybe there’s something else. Something about where it came from?”

Sydney, recalling what the curator told them at the museum, said, “Faas received a knife from France. Possibly the knife he was killed with.”

“What sort of knife?” Dirk asked her.

“The curator thought it was an antique, because that’s what Faas dealt with. Originally that’s what we thought we were searching for.”

“Only because Faas seemed to be handing the knife to me when we approached him.” Griffin repeated Faas’s dying declaration. “At first, I thought he was asking me not to let them get the knife. That he dropped it and I needed to find it before they killed everyone.”

“A logical conclusion, considering the circumstances,” Dirk said.

“It was what he uttered at the end, ‘from Atlant,’ that didn’t make sense.”

“He was dying,” Dirk pointed out. “Hard to say if he was even talking to you.”

“Looking back, Faas was obviously telling me he’d dropped the vial and that’s what I should be looking for. The knife may have been a ruse to make sure the package had a purpose to get it to Faas without question.”

“Unless we’re overlooking the obvious. What if there was something significant about the knife? Something that might be a clue as to where the vial came from?” Dirk asked.

Griffin rubbed at his temple, the day taking its toll on him. “The pattern on the hilt maybe. Distinctive. Black and gold. Other than that, it didn’t look like anything more than a convenient murder weapon.”

“Short of recovering the box it was mailed in, it may be your best lead. What sort of pattern? Maybe it was an antique specific to somewhere in France?” Dirk took a pad of paper and a pencil from an end table drawer, handing both to Griffin.

He sketched out the design. “Mind you, art is Sydney’s strong suit, not mine, but I think it’s fairly accurate.”

Dirk eyed the rough drawing of the knife and the pattern on its handle that resembled a string of tulips placed end to end. “This I have seen before . . .”

“Where?” Griffin asked.

“Something makes me think at my wife’s office.” He glanced at Sydney, saying, “She’s a doctor, so maybe it is medical . . . Mo?”

Monique stepped out of the kitchen to see what he wanted, her fingertips slightly dusty from flour. He held up the knife drawing. “This pattern. Where have I seen it recently?”

“Very likely when you met me for lunch, and we walked past the lab at the hospital. Well, the individual portion of the pattern,” she said, covering up all but one of the tulip-shaped symbols. “It’s the Greek letter psi. Or rather a string of them. In virology it represents a viral packaging signal.”