Curious Minds

  Riley crept down the hall, stopping at every door until she found the room with the whistler. There was no one else in the hall, and no sound from behind the door other than the whistling. If she opened the door and Emerson wasn’t alone, it might be ugly. She’d have to deal with it, she thought. Go into commando mode. She didn’t have self-defense training, but she thought she could improvise. She was up for sucker punching and eye gouging. She could probably even execute a crotch kick. She counted to three, sucked in some air, and opened the door.

  —

  Emerson was alone in the small, sterile room. He was sitting in a straight chair with his hands cuffed behind him. His face was bloody, his lip was split, and his left eye was starting to blacken. He stopped whistling when Riley entered.

  “Ah, Riley,” he said. “There you are. Could you untie me? I have an itch right above my left eyebrow that’s driving me crazy.”

  “My God,” Riley said. “What have they done to you?”

  “Beat me, somewhat. Nothing serious.”

  “It looks horrible! Doesn’t it hurt?”

  “I’ve risen above the pain.”

  Riley looked at the cuffs. “They’ve got your hands bound by plasticuffs. My dad used them all the time. I could cut them off if I had a knife or shears.”

  “I think Rollo left some tools on the table.”

  Riley looked over at the small black case holding surgical instruments. Scalpels, stainless steel pliers, and long metal rods.

  “Rollo was here?” Riley asked. “With those?”

  “Yes, but I think they were meant to simply intimidate me, not to flay. At least he hasn’t used them yet.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He went to get some first aid.”

  “For you?”

  “No, for himself. When he leaned to whisper something threatening in my ear, I gave him a head butt that made a gash in his chin.”

  “Are we talking about a gash that needed stitches or a gash that needed a Band-Aid?”

  “Hard to say. There was a lot of blood.”

  Riley studied the display of torture tools and chose a scalpel. “Why were you whistling?”

  “To lead you to me, of course.”

  “Of course,” Riley said. “Hold still so I don’t slit your wrist when I cut this plastic band.”

  A moment later Emerson was on his feet, shaking his hands to aid circulation.

  “We need to get out of here before Rollo returns,” Riley said, sliding the scalpel into a leather sheath.

  “Agreed. He mentioned vengeance as he was leaving. He said it would be unpleasant.”

  Riley thought that if Rollo used the instruments in the black case, the results would be beyond unpleasant. She squelched a grimace and stuffed the sheathed scalpel into her vest. It wasn’t big, but it was deadly sharp and it might come in handy. They hurried to the elevator and stepped inside the instant the doors opened. Emerson tapped a code into the keypad beside the door and pressed the B3 button.

  “No!” Riley said. “That takes us down.”

  “Exactly,” Emerson said. “It’s all part of my plan. It’s working perfectly.”

  “Working perfectly? You have a black eye and a split lip. We’re being pursued by a psychopathic madman. And we’re probably on television.” Riley looked around the elevator for a security camera.

  The elevator doors opened and Emerson stepped out at B3.

  “You are really self-destructive, you know that?” Riley said to Emerson’s back as he headed down a corridor.

  “Not at all,” Emerson said. “I’m inquisitive and I’m being proactive. You should be pleased that I’m assuming a leadership role. I’m very well suited for it. My analytic abilities and sensory instincts are superior.”

  “You are so annoying.”

  Emerson stopped at a door with a keypad, fed it the code, and pushed the door open. “If my calculations are correct, there should be another door at the end of this corridor to the right.”

  The corridor was long and dimly lit. More of a tunnel than a corridor.

  “We haven’t much time,” Emerson said, breaking into a run. “I’m sure they’re scrambling by now, trying to find us. And most likely there will be an alarm going off in a control room somewhere when we open the next door.”

  They approached the door, and Riley was chilled to see the Blane-Grunwald logo stenciled on it. The labyrinth of corridors under the busy Manhattan streets had led them to Günter’s “backyard.”

  Emerson eased the heavy door open, and they blinked at the glare off the gold bricks that were stacked waist high in the large storeroom.

  Emerson took a brick from the stack in front of him and examined it. “I believe this is newly minted. New gold from old. I imagine there’s another room in close proximity where they melt the original bricks down and re-form them into new untraceable bricks.”

  “That’s ridiculous. How could they possibly get away with such a thing?”

  Emerson looked around. “This is private property, and I’m sure access is complicated.”

  “We walked right in!”

  “Yes, but first we had to break into the Federal Reserve and get arrested.”

  “This is a big operation,” Riley said. “People are needed to move the gold and melt the gold and protect the gold. Where do these people come from? How are they kept quiet?”

  “This would be no different from other conspiracy movements. Intimidation, reward, elimination of problem employees…like Maxine Trowbridge. Many of the people involved will be enamored with the cause. Whatever that cause might be. Blind ideologues. And this is probably the tip of the iceberg. I suspect they periodically move the gold to a more obscure holding facility.”

  “Holy moly.”

  “I had expected ‘crap on a cracker.’ ”

  “I thought you were getting tired of ‘crap on a cracker.’ ”

  Emerson grinned. “ ‘Holy moly’ is refreshing, but it’s hard to top ‘crap on a cracker.’ ”

  “What do we do now?”

  “We leave as quickly and as stealthily as possible. I’m hoping it will be easier to get out than to get in. Codes and keys are necessary to go down in the elevator but I’m thinking it’s like staying on the concierge level of a hotel. Nothing special is needed to exit.”

  They stepped into the elevator on the far side of the room, but the elevator refused to move without a code.

  “This is getting tiresome,” Emerson said, tapping a code in and pushing the only button.

  Riley stopped holding her breath when she felt the elevator moving up.

  “How do you know the door and elevator codes?” she asked Emerson.

  “I watched the first guard when he gave the elevator his code. Foolishly all the doors work off the same code. I’m sure it’s his personal code but it’s still a poor practice.”

  The elevator stopped and opened onto a small foyer with an armed guard at a desk. Beyond the guard was another elevator.

  Emerson approached the guard and said something in French. The guard took in their uniforms and nodded. Emerson signed the logbook, smiled pleasantly, and motioned Riley to the elevator.

  They stripped their guard uniforms off in the elevator and were relieved to see a deserted hallway when the doors opened. They dumped the Mauritius shirts in a trash receptacle, walked toward an exit sign, and found themselves in the main lobby of Blane-Grunwald.

  The front door to the building was roped off with crime scene tape, and beyond the big double-glass windows Riley could see police milling about in bomb disposal gear.

  “Back door,” Emerson said.

  Riley was way ahead of him, already having done an about-face. In less than a minute she was out of the building, walking toward the subway stop, and Emerson was matching her strides. She was on the platform for twenty seconds when a train rolled in, and she took it with no knowledge of where it was going. She just knew it was going to move her away from Blane-Grunwald a
nd the Federal Reserve.

  “I have a plan,” Emerson said, swaying with the motion of the train.

  “Oh boy,” Riley said. “Another plan.”

  “I’m going off the grid.”

  “Good plan. What about me?”

  “You should go back to your life.”

  “Which life would that be?” Riley asked.

  “Life is a series of natural changes. Resisting change only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.”

  “Gee, that’s really helpful…whatever the heck it means. Thanks a lot.”

  The train eased into a station and Emerson pulled a wad of money from his pocket. He handed the money to Riley and moved to the door. “I’ll contact you.”

  “No! Do not contact me. Erase me from your memory bank.”

  Emerson stepped onto the platform, the doors slid closed behind him, and the train lurched forward. Riley got off at the next stop and studied the route map on the wall. She was in Brooklyn.

  It was a couple minutes after midnight when Riley retrieved the key she kept hidden in a fake rock near a shrub next to the front steps and let herself into her apartment. So far so good, she thought. She hadn’t been stopped by the NSA. No sign of Rollo. No SWAT team waiting for her on the sidewalk in front of her building. If her apartment had been searched at least they’d been neat about it, because nothing seemed out of place. She poured herself a glass of wine, took two sips, and decided she was too tired to drink the rest of it. The day had been mind-numbing. Confusing, terrifying, exhilarating, and exhausting. Her purse had been left behind, so tomorrow she was faced with the chore of replacing her driver’s license, smartphone, and credit cards. She hoped she lived long enough to do it. She had no clue how she stood with Werner but she took it as a good sign that her apartment hadn’t been booby-trapped.

  She had a nervous flutter in her stomach when she fell asleep and it was still there when she woke up in the morning. Her life was a mess. One day everything was on track and then WHAM! Emerson Knight.

  Riley checked her email while she downed two cups of coffee and a bowl of cereal. Her mother had sent her a picture of the cake she’d made for Uncle Mickey’s birthday party. It was followed by a picture of Uncle Mickey eating a slice of the cake and a message that everyone misses Riley but is excited that she has her dream job in Washington, D.C.

  Crap on a cake, Riley thought.

  Her oldest brother, Lowell, usually sent her a conspiracy-laden tirade about the government being in cahoots with Big Oil, the Russians, and the Taliban, in no particular order. Today Lowell was going on and on about the Treasury Department and Big Gold. He said a rumor had appeared on the Internet just last night, claiming that the gold treasuries at the Federal Reserve were all fake. Bogus. Counterfeit. Nothing but hollow shells filled with tungsten.

  Riley broke out in goosebumps. It was unusual for Lowell to strike a note so close to reality. Usually, he favored the black-op-helicopter-time-machine-was-behind-the-Kennedy-assassination type of theory. Lowell was part conspiracy theorist and part aspiring author. Sometimes it was hard to tell where his political rants stopped and his thriller plot took over.

  Riley scrolled through the endless text where Lowell seamlessly floated between fact and fiction and finally gave credit to the origin of the fake gold disclosure. Lowell stated that his information came from an unimpeachable source, the well-known philosopher and mystic Mysterioso.

  More goosebumps. Emerson had “outed” the Grunwalds through the blog he shared with Vernon. Riley clicked over to the Mysterioso site and read down. It was all there with names omitted. Emerson and Riley had become Mr. K. and Miss M., but the rest was there, in all its unbelievable glory. The car bomb, the infiltration of the Fed vault, drilling into the gold bars, finding the tungsten, escaping. It sounded like the ravings of a madman.

  And it was all true.

  If she hadn’t been there, she’d never have believed it, not for a second. No one would. Except nuts like her brother Lowell. She closed her computer and sat for a moment in numb disbelief before trying to continue on with life in its normal rhythm. She rinsed the dishes and put the cereal box back in the cupboard. She moved on to the bathroom.

  She took a shower, applied minimal makeup, and stared into her closet. Now what? She asked herself. Do I put on jeans and a T-shirt and go home to Texas? Or do I get dressed in a suit on Monday, march into Blane-Grunwald, and act as if nothing unusual happened and I still work there? None of the above, she decided.

  It was Saturday. Blane-Grunwald was mostly closed. There would just be a skeleton crew in the building, tending to emergency transactions. She’d retrieve her Mini Cooper from Emerson’s house. Then she would calmly and casually stroll into Blane-Grunwald, clean out her desk, and sneak off. By the time Monday rolled around she’d have figured out the next step.

  —

  Riley flagged down a cab two blocks from her house and directed the driver to Mysterioso Manor. Aunt Myra was on the front porch when Riley arrived.

  “Were you going out?” Riley asked Myra.

  “No. I was just coming in from feeding some of the critters. They’re scattered all the heck over the place. Sometimes I think I should just let them eat each other and be done with it.”

  “I came to collect my car and to talk to Emerson.”

  “Emmie’s not here, hon. I thought he was with you.”

  “No. We got separated in New York. He said he was going off the grid. I wasn’t sure how off he was talking about.”

  “Well, he’ll find his way back. I remember when he was nine years old and ran away to join Greenpeace.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yes. We were very worried. But he was back two days later, ready to eat everything in the fridge. He’s got some homing pigeon in him.”

  Riley glanced at the monkey curled in a rocking chair. “Looks like the monkey is still here.”

  “Seems like he comes and goes. Already had a runaround with the armadillo this morning,” Myra said. “Truth is, I’m not sure it’s always the same monkey. I think we might have a pack of them.”

  Riley wondered if Rollo was coming and going too. Hiding out there somewhere, watching, waiting to pounce on Emerson. And maybe on her as well. It was a chilling thought. It reminded her that she needed to stay vigilant.

  “Have you seen Emerson’s and Vernon’s blog?” she asked Myra. “Why the Sam Hill would he provoke the Grunwalds?”

  “Emmie wants to expose the gold stealers. He said if he couldn’t bring Muhammad to the mountain, he’d bring the mountain to Muhammad, or something like that. Guess that’s his way of saying if he can’t get to the bad guys, he’ll have the bad guys come to him.”

  “That sounds like Emerson.”

  Riley moved off the porch and walked toward her car. “Tell Emerson to call me when he comes home.”

  “I’ll have him call you first thing,” Aunt Myra said.

  Twenty minutes later, Riley was at the Blane-Grunwald building on Constitution Avenue, circling it repeatedly, trying to decide whether to pull into the garage or to get on I-66 and go back to Texas.

  Her dad would tell her to hitch up her jeans and just get on with it, so she turned in to the garage and drove down to her space, feeling like she was driving down the Nine Circles of Hell. Plus a few more. She parked, took the elevator to the lobby, and was relieved to see a familiar face at the reception desk. She was waved through to the bank of elevators, took one to the fourth floor, and made her way through the maze of desks to her cubicle. She could hear someone working on the far side of the room. Eager beaver, she thought. Someone going the extra mile to impress, hoping to move up the food chain. That would have been her if she hadn’t gotten involved with Emerson Knight.

  She put her few personal belongings in a tote bag she’d brought. A couple granola bars, a roll of peppermint Life Savers, a Starbucks coffee mug, Burt’s Bees lip balm, and a picture of her fa
mily standing in front of a Christmas tree. She hadn’t occupied the desk long enough to really take possession. She would have left all but the picture.

  —

  Werner was on the golf course when a text message came in from office security, alerting him that Moonbeam was in the building. Ten minutes later he received a text that she had removed personal items from her desk and was offsite. He couldn’t care less except that he knew the message had also been sent to the old man. The old man was informed of everything. And the message would trigger a phone call. The one phone call he couldn’t ignore. Ever.

  Werner’s phone dinged and he pushed down the panic that always arose in his chest whenever he heard the telltale ringtone.

  “It’s under control,” Werner said on answering. “He’ll be taken care of. And so will she.”

  There was a long pause before the sound of labored breathing came through the line. “I hope so. For your sake.”

  —

  Riley drove back to her apartment and parked in the space allotted to her in the alleyway behind the Victorian. She hiked the tote bag onto her shoulder, locked her car, and crossed the small yard to the house’s rear entrance. She had her house key in hand when a man rounded the Victorian from the street side.

  “Stop!” he shouted at Riley. “You need to come with me.”

  He was big. Over six foot tall and built like an NFL linebacker. In his late fifties, Riley thought. Used to giving orders and being obeyed. He had a scar running down the side of his face and a military-style buzz haircut.

  Riley’s assessment was that he was scary as hell and made Rollo look like a choirboy. No way was she going anywhere with him. She rammed the key into the lock, pushed the door open, and rushed inside. She threw the bolt, ran down the short hall to the front foyer, and ran up three flights of stairs to the safety of her apartment. She let herself in, locked her door, and looked out a back window at the man standing in the yard.