The Sinai Secret

FIFTEEN

Five Minutes Later

Louis was saying something.

"Pardon?"

The Belgian pointed to a shop with a copy machine visible through the plate-glass window. "We can make a Xerox there."

Lang turned and stopped. Was it his imagination or had the corner of his eye caught the reflection of someone whirling at exactly the same time to study a handbill posted on a stand? The man was certainly there, and he certainly wasn't the size of Witherspoon. He wore a leather jacket open, with nondescript slacks and black socks under the sandals so loved by Europeans.

Lang handed the rerolled pages to Louis. "Please, if you don't mind, make us two copies of each page."

Louis looked at him questioningly before ducking inside.

Lang studied the surrounding architecture, the boats along the adjacent canal, marijuana plants growing in pots in a coffeehouse window. But mostly he studied the man in the jacket, who seemed as intent on wasting time as did Lang.

Police? Perhaps, but law enforcement officers would be unlikely to waste resources following him when all they had to do was stop him and ask questions. There was a chance, slim as it might be, that Leather Jacket was simply early for an appointment of some kind.

The coincidence that a stranger would suddenly appear idling at exactly the same spot where Lang and Louis were was unbelievable. There were also the coincidences of two bogus cops, and that both the murder victims had been working on the fringes of the same project.

Agency training had included extreme skepticism of mere happenstance. If you refused to accept similarities as flukes, you might be wrong ten percent of the time. Conversely, accepting coincidence at face value was frequently fatal.

Then there was the question of those shots fired in Underground Atlanta. He had been certain they had been a warning. If the shooter had wanted him dead, Lang wouldn't be here right now. Yet the guys who had hijacked him at the Brussels airport weren't out to just warn him.

What was the connection?

Louis emerged from the shop with a bulging paper bag in each hand. He handed one to Lang. "The laboratory is just ahead."

Leather Jacket was still inspecting a window as they left.

"This is the Oost-Indisch Huis," Louis proclaimed, pointing to an attractive seventeenth-century brick-and-concrete building. "It was the offices of the Dutch East India Company. Now it belongs to the university. You have heard of the Dutch East India Company, yes?"

Lang was not so much interested in one of the world's most outrageously successful commercial enterprises as he was in making sure they weren't followed. "Yes."

Louis stopped before an ornate entranceway, waiting for Lang to catch up. Both men entered what looked from the street to be a series of buildings between two tree-lined canals with a block-long bicycle rack in front. As Lang soon discovered, he was in one of many passageways linking a large number of structures.

They passed through a courtyard, an outdoor cafe filled with students. One, a large blonde, followed him with blue eyes. Once again Gurt rose as a specter, this time dressed in motorcycle leathers, the same ones she had worn when she saved his life in Italy, her long blond hair flowing around her face. Two women, Dawn and Gurt: one his wife, one he wished had been. Both gone from his life.

He shook his head as though he could scatter the memories.

"Mr. Reilly?"

Louis was standing outside a door with Yadish's name etched on the glass pane.

Louis fumbled in his pockets and produced a ring of keys. He tried one. The click of a dead bolt signaled that he had found the right one, and he pushed the door open, ushering Lang inside. The room resembled the lab in Atlanta, except it was slightly smaller, and racks of test tubes and beakers flanking Bunsen burners occupied two long counters, instead of electronic equipment. Another difference was that this room looked as though Yadish might return at any moment.

At the end of one counter, in front of a long-legged stool on casters, was a cloth-bound ledger, the sort of thing Lang would have expected to see in any company's accounting department before computers made paper all but obsolete. From where he stood Lang could see that a number of pages had been torn out.

Thumbing through the pages, he asked, "Did Dr. Yadish keep notes here as well as electronically?"

Louis was standing in front of a computer on the other counter. "I do not know."

Lang left the book where it was to look over Louis's shoulder as the computer hummed to life. "The ledger is a journal of sorts. I can't read the language, but the last date's less than a week ago."

Louis left the machine to boot up and viewed the open pages. "A list of purchases-nitrate of mercury, two hundred milligrams, sodium phosphate, and so on. I would suppose he kept an account of the chemicals he used."

Both men returned to the blank blue screen.

Louis tapped a series of keys and frowned. "Nothing."

Lang could see that. "Did the professor have a password, perhaps?"

Louis was still pecking away. "He may have, but we are getting nothing. It is as if the hard drive is blank."

Or gone or erased.

"Did he have any special place to put things, a particular drawer, a file cabinet?"

Louis nodded and pulled the stool behind him as he went to the far wall, where a row of cabinets crowned two industrial sinks. "Steady me, please?"

Lang held the stool as the Belgian climbed up to kneel on its seat. He opened the cabinets to reveal rows of labeled opaque jars. He moved one or two before asking Lang to push him farther to his left.

"Eureka," he said with a smile, removing a container in each hand.

Behind the row of vessels Lang could see the black face of a safe built into the wall. "Swell. I don't suppose you know the combination?"

Louis's grin widened. "No need." He handed Lang several of the containers to put aside. He held one up, however, rotating it so Lang could see a series of four numbers on the back. "Dr. Yadish could never remember, so he wrote it down. I saw him take this down to open the safe."

Thirty seconds later the door swung open. From below the cabinet where Lang stood he could see nothing in it.

"Why keep an empty safe?" he asked rhetorically.

"Not empty." Louis reached into the safe and held up two letter-sized envelopes.

He handed them to Lang and climbed off the stool. Lang opened the first. Inside was a grainy white powder similar to the traces streaked across the counter in Dr. Lewis's lab. The second contained the same.

Lang wondered if Detective Morse had gotten the test results back from the state crime lab yet. If only the stuff hadn't vanished in the APD's property room, the evidence locker that seemed to have a leak bigger than the Titanic's.

He'd call Morse as soon as-

He heard the door behind him shut.

"I'll take that, Mr. Reilly."

Lang turned slowly. Leather Jacket and another man stood just inside the door. Each held an automatic obscured by a silencer.

He heard Louis's surprised intake of air, something between a gasp and a grunt.

Lang mentally kicked himself. He had fallen for one of the hoarier surveillance tactics. Leather Jacket had had every intention of being spotted, of keeping Lang's attention, so that when he failed to follow Lang and Louis from the copy shop, Lang wouldn't notice a second tail.

Shit.

The two men were a good five feet apart. No chance Lang could draw the SIG Sauer from its holster and fire before at least one of the intruders could shoot.

Lang slowly raised his hands, his fingers manipulating the envelopes so that one was squarely behind the other. "What can I do for you gentlemen?"

Leather Jacket motioned with his weapon. "The envelope you have in your hand, Mr. Reilly, put it on the counter and slide it toward me."

There was a trace of an accent Lang couldn't identify.

As Lang slowly lowered the hand with the packets in it, he turned his profile slightly so the hand was briefly hidden from the intruders. He let one envelope drop into a jacket pocket. He hoped the widening of Louis's eyes didn't give the sleight of hand away.

The question was whether these two intended to take what they had come for and leave, or if the plan included making sure Lang did not trouble them further. The silencers on each gun did not suggest a happy ending. It was unlikely a man would risk carrying something that bulky if he had no intent of using it.

If Lang was going to do something, now seemed about the right time.

But what?