Ice Blue. Anne Stuart
the girl, she and Peter, but in the end they both knew there was no choice in the matter. The young woman in Los Angeles was a liability of catastrophic proportions, and when hard choices had to be made, Madame Lambert could make them. Summer Hawthorne had no idea why she was so dangerous, and she’d have no idea why she had to die. It wouldn’t have made a bit of difference if she did.
Hana Hayashi had left the urn with her, and the knowledge of where the ancient ruins were located. The Shirosama needed both of those things to make his ritual complete. A crackpot ritual that would signal the onslaught of Armageddon, or as close to it as one powerful maniac and a hundred thousand followers could enact.
And history had already proved that that could be pretty bad.
They could trust Takashi O’Brien to do what needed to be done. He was just as much of a realist as the rest of them—you couldn’t survive in the twilight world of the Committee without being able to see things clearly, unemotionally, and make the hard choices. Summer Hawthorne was just one more in a history of hard choices, one that Taka would make without blinking.
These things took their toll eventually. Peter could no longer work in the field, while some operatives got deliberately careless, stepping in the way of a bullet. Others perfected their image as a cool, soulless automaton. No one—not even Peter Madsen—knew what roiled inside Isobel herself.
She smoothed her pale blond hair back from her perfect face. No one had any idea of her real age—in their line of work they used the best plastic surgeons—and she knew the image she presented to the outside world. A well-preserved beauty, anywhere between thirty-five and sixty, with the best face money could buy. If anyone saw her naked, her body would prove the lie, but no one ever did.
Right now she felt as if she were ninety years old, and as ugly as the turmoil inside her. She couldn’t go on like this. These decisions were part of her daily life; she couldn’t let them destroy her. Summer Hawthorne had to die—it was that simple.
Madame Isobel Lambert reached once more for her cigarettes, dry-eyed, practical, cool-headed. And if her hand shook slightly there was no one to see.
Summer never thought she would sleep, but she had, soundly. She had no idea what time it was when she woke up—her watch was somewhere back at her house and the darkened bedroom had no clock. Light was coming in from the clerestory windows overhead, muted, shadowy, and she didn’t know whether that had to do with the weather or the time of day. Her sense of reality was astonishing. It could be any time from five in the morning to five at night, and her body was giving her no signals whatsoever.
She pushed the sheets aside and climbed out of bed. She’d slept in her underwear, which in retrospect seemed ridiculous. She should have just stayed in her clothes—the baggy black T-shirt and jeans he’d brought from her house. At least he’d brought the fat jeans. She kept three sizes: fat jeans, which were miles too big for her, regular jeans and skinny ones. If he’d brought the skinny ones she would have been miserable; she needed to be ten pounds lighter to even begin to be comfortable in them. The fat jeans were way too loose, but right now she liked the extra folds of fabric around her, and she could have slept in them quite comfortably.
She didn’t remember when he’d left her in the room. Had he helped her get undressed? She didn’t think so; she’d remember if he put his hands on her. She wasn’t used to being touched by beautiful men. She wasn’t used to being touched at all, and she preferred it that way. She could remember almost nothing. At one point she’d been in his car, wrapped in her bedspread, in the next she was lying in her underwear in his bed.
She couldn’t say much for his taste in clothing, at least as far as she was concerned. While he was elegant bordering on fashion model, the clothes he’d brought her were baggy and too big, including the plain black granny panties and industrial bra circa the time she’d been on the pill and gone from a thirty-four C to a thirty-six D, thanks to hormones. He must have taken one look at her and decided she was a sloppy pudge. That shouldn’t bother her at all, given the circumstances. But it did.
A far more overriding concern was how absolutely famished she was. She hadn’t had time for dinner last night; she’d been too busy working on last-minute details for the museum reception. And during the party she’d been too caught up in circulating and trying to keep away from her mother’s slimy guru to eat. And of course, things had gone to hell in a handbasket right afterward, and she had sincerely thought she would never want to eat again.
Now she was starving.
She pulled on the baggy clothes, looking around for her shoes, then remembered she’d taken them off outside the bungalow. She needed those shoes.
The more Summer thought about it, the more she knew that getting away from her companion was as important as getting away from the Shirosama and his followers. She had no reason to doubt that it was His Plumpness who was after her, but she didn’t have any particular reason to trust her guardian angel, either. He might have snatched her from the jaws of death a couple of times, but she still couldn’t bring herself to put her life in his hands. Why would a Japanese bureaucrat appear out of nowhere like James Bond and rescue a hapless museum curator? It didn’t make sense.
The first thing she needed to do was get the hell away from him. But she couldn’t go back to her house, and she couldn’t turn to her beautiful, brainless mother, who’d probably just hand her over to her beloved master. Her stepfather, Ralph, let Lianne do whatever she wanted as long as it didn’t interfere with Summer’s half sister, Jilly. Summer had learned to take care of herself long before Lianne had met her third husband, and Summer’s mother and stepfather were hardly people to depend on. The best place was the house on Bainbridge Island—she could probably hide out there without anyone noticing until the Fellowship either stole the fake urn and disappeared, or gave up. She really didn’t care which, as long as the real ceramic bowl stayed hidden, out of greedy hands.
Summer had no purse, no identification, no money, which made escape a bit problematic. But not impossible. Once she got away from her rescuer there were a number of people she could contact. The head of the Sansone Museum, William Chatsworth, was a shameless glad-hander and publicity hound, but he would jump at the chance to get rid of her, including forking over money with no questions asked. And there was her assistant and best friend, Micah, who was more reliable. Her passport was in the desk drawer in her office, it was all the ID she’d need unless she wanted to rent a car.
If that failed, she could turn to her half sister, but that was a last resort. Sixteen-year-old Jilly Lovitz was a smart, cynical kid who loved her older sister unconditionally and harbored grave doubts about her mother’s good sense, but Summer didn’t want to put her in the middle of things or draw any attention to her. Last night with its danger and its violence didn’t seem quite real, but it was, and dragging her baby sister into this mess was the last thing Summer wanted to do. No, there had to be some other way.
But Micah would help her with no questions asked. And she didn’t need to worry about Jilly. Summer’s stepfather paid little attention to his wife’s enthusiasms, but he wouldn’t let anything happen to his teenage daughter, and Lianne probably knew that. She could offer up Summer without a qualm, but Jilly would be untouchable, thank God. And that was the most important thing in the world because Jilly was all that mattered.
She needed answers. What was so damn important about her porcelain bowl that people were willing to kidnap and kill for it? What exactly was the Hayashi Urn? And what the hell was going on?
But given the choice between getting out of there and getting answers, escape seemed the wiser choice. She really didn’t want to see her so-called rescuer again if she could help it. He stirred irrational things inside her, things she didn’t want to think about. She needed to get lost, fast, because too many people were out to get her.
And she had no guarantees that Mr. Takashi O’Brien, if that was really his name, wasn’t one of them.
5
His holiness tossed down the last of his Fresca, settled his white robes more sedately around his body and walked into the meeting room of the