Ian glanced at him, saying merely, “Coffee’s over there by Michele; wine’s on the table. Help yourself.”
Jon chose wine, then sat at the table and watched the activity in silence. Even though he said nothing, the room wasn’t silent, because Michele and Ian were clearly in the middle of an amiable discussion concerning his skills—and her lack thereof—in the kitchen. As he watched and listened, Jon felt a pang of envy. The relationship between the two was so close it was a tangible thing, as if they dovetailed perfectly.
He knew they were as worried about the dangers surrounding them as he was, yet they seemed curiously insulated, as if the love they shared was a kind of shield. His last misgivings about the relationship faded, and he could only feel something like awe at the knowledge that with all the generations of five hundred years ranged against them, they had found each other.
A few minutes later, Michele unconsciously echoed her brother’s thoughts by proposing a wry toast before they began eating, “To destiny,” she said, raising her glass.
The two men gravely touched their glasses to hers, and it was Ian who said, “Are you still thinking of the fortune-teller?”
“Well, dammit, she’s gotten more right than wrong.” While they ate, Michele told Jon about the visit on Martinique, and how one of the predictions made had prompted her to think of what had happened thirty-five years ago.
“Right now,” Jon said when she’d finished, “I can’t think of a better idea. It’s a long time to wait for revenge, though.”
“Maybe it took time to plan. And to raise the money. This has cost somebody plenty.”
Ian nodded in agreement. “Once we eliminate business competition, it pretty much has to be a personal grudge. And our fathers have hated each other as long as any of us can remember; if the beginning of that hatred hurt someone else, then that’s a good place to look for a common enemy.”
Jon looked at him. “Have you talked to your father about it yet?”
“No.” Ian glanced at his watch, and then pushed back his chair and rose. “I’ll call him now.” He went out into the living room to use that extension.
He was a little surprised when his father resisted talking about the subject; no matter how he argued, he couldn’t get anything out of the older man except the bare facts of the woman’s name and when she had left Atlanta.
“We may be on to something,” he told Jon and Michele as he rejoined them in the kitchen. “Dad sure as hell didn’t want to talk about it; it was like pulling teeth just to get a name out of him.”
“But you got that much?” Michele asked.
“Barely. Her name was Helen Gordon, and she left Atlanta exactly thirty-five years ago this past June.”
“Any idea where she went?” Jon wondered.
“Not really. Although Dad did say he thought she was originally from somewhere on the West Coast. An interesting coincidence, isn’t it?”
They looked at one another for a moment, and then Ian asked Michele, “Think you can track her?”
“There isn’t much to go on but, given time, I think I can. Driver’s license, social security number—most people have both of those. If she didn’t change her name or try to cover her tracks in some other way. But I’ll need to use the computer in my office.”
“Your office building’s closed on Saturday,” Jon noted.
“Security will let me in. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve worked during the weekend.”
Ian and Jon exchanged glances, and the former said, “Then we’ll all go.”
Michele didn’t object. With the threat against them all, she knew she’d worry constantly with Ian or her brother out of her sight. She was more than ever conscious of time ticking away, and was convinced that if they could only find out who was behind the attack on both families they would be able to find a way to stop the destruction.
“Where’s Dad?” she asked Jon as they all rode to her office building in a cab.
“Where he usually is on Saturday. The golf course.”
That relieved her mind somewhat. They were, she knew, tempting fate by being together downtown where they were known by sight to too many people. Even on a Saturday.
Tempting fate. The entire situation seemed to revolve around a fateful sequence of events, Michele thought. If they were right about what had happened decades ago, the beginnings were there; the old feud burned more brightly than ever after some conflict ended in hatred. Then a son and daughter of the right ages born to different sides, neither of whom was steeped in the bitterness of their families quite as much as they could have been. A lifetime of knowing each other from a distance, and an unexpected meeting on an island paradise far away from their homes.
What were the odds against that, Michele wondered, that she and Ian would meet unexpectedly in a place where their attraction could be nurtured? And, even more, the odds against love growing where so much mistrust and suspicion had been sown?
Was it fate, after all? Had the hand of destiny always meant her to love Ian, to forge a bridge between families at war for five centuries?
Michele was a sensible woman, her beliefs for the most part grounded firmly in reality. But it disturbed her to realize how many random factors had woven themselves into a pattern so complex and bewildering. If a single thread had snapped, the pattern couldn’t have held. If she had not met Ian, not loved him enough to trust him; if Jon had not been able to at least see the possibility of a common enemy; if that enemy had not chosen to use a state-of-the-art device still new enough to be traced with relative ease; if a fortune-teller had not made predictions so uncannily appropriate that they seemed to Michele a set of clues to the puzzle…
If. If all those connections had not been made, the feud would now rage more bitterly than ever, probably with violence and destruction on both sides.
Michele didn’t realize how long she had been silent until Ian helped her from the cab in front of her office building and asked quietly, “Are you all right?”
She looked up at him and Jon as they stood on the pavement, and managed a smile. “I was just thinking of…connections.”
Ian squeezed her hand as if he understood, then said, “There’s one connection we don’t want made just yet; we’d better get off the street.”
Michele agreed with that. With the fateful twists that had already taken place, it would be all too ironically perfect for some roving journalist to see a startling sight on a downtown street corner and make the right connection.
The security guard let them into the building, as unsurprised by Michele’s appearance as she’d expected. He knew Jon by sight and accepted both Ian and Michele’s offhand explanation of needed research without a blink.
By tacit consent, they took the stairs rather than the elevator, a minor inconvenience since Michele’s office was on the fourth floor. The hall was deserted when they emerged from the stairwell, office doors closed and a high-countered reception desk near the elevators unoccupied.
Michele led the way to her office and got out her keys to unlock the door. But, with the key inserted, she suddenly went still.
“What?” Ian asked immediately.
“It isn’t locked. Jon, didn’t I lock up yesterday?”
He nodded.
Leaving the key in the door, she stepped back. “Maybe we should err on the side of caution.”
“Definitely,” Ian said grimly. “None of us is going in there until we’re sure it’s safe.”
Michele took a deep breath and made herself think for a moment, then said, “I think my brain’s in neutral. The security cameras. This way.” She led them back down the hall to the reception desk.
“You have a camera in your office?” Jon asked as she went around behind the desk. “I’ve never noticed it.”
“You weren’t supposed to,” Michele said. “This is an insurance company, remember? One of the things we do is recommend security systems to clients who want us to insure them; the better the system, the less chance we hav
e of taking a loss. This building’s full of gadgets, because the president thinks we should practice what we preach.”
She pressed a button on an enigmatic keypad built into the lower level of the desk, and a panel opened to reveal three small monitor screens. The two men joined her as she activated the camera in her office by pushing another button, and the center screen came alive with a flicker.
The screen showed a neat desk at first, the camera holding steady. Michele pressed more buttons, and the image shifted slowly as the camera panned around the office. For several minutes, she maneuvered the camera remotely so that they were offered a clear view of the door and the walls near it. Finally, she straightened with a sigh.
“Nothing. The door’s clear.”
Even so, it was Ian and Jon who went into the office first, neither of them giving Michele a chance to argue. The small room appeared peaceful, but both the men began to search methodically. After a few moments, Michele began to think they were all being ridiculously paranoid, and had started toward her desk where Ian was looking when his voice stopped her cold.
“Michele, get out of here.”
“What is it?” she whispered.
Ian had eased open the bottom drawer of her desk, where files were normally kept, and was staring down into it. “Another one of those damned timers. There’s five minutes left on the clock. Get out of here!”
Her heart was beating so fast it seemed to echo inside her head, but she forced herself to think clearly. Five minutes. Five minutes could be a very long time.
It could also be no time at all.
Steadily, she said, “There isn’t enough time to call in someone to disarm it. We’ll have to do it.”
“Great,” Jon muttered, joining Ian to stare down at the deceptively innocent-looking device.
“If it’s the same device he used before, I studied all the diagrams and specifications. It can only be detonated when the timer reaches zero; you could throw it out a window and it wouldn’t go off until then. I know what to do.” Her eyes held Ian’s as he looked up, and she went around the desk to join them.
Tautly, Ian said, “When this thing gets to a minute, we’re out of here—disarmed or not.”
“Agreed,” Jon said instantly.
Michele took a long look at the device and sighed in unconscious relief. “It’s the same one. But all I see is the timer; where are the explosives?” That, she knew, was the critical question. If their enemy had gotten as fancy with his explosives as he had with the timer, they were in trouble. If, on the other hand, either dynamite or plastique had been used, preventing an explosion would be simple.
Ian carefully pushed aside the files still in the drawer, and they all saw two thin red wires extending from the timer toward the back and out of sight. He followed the wires by touch, reaching all the way into the drawer without pulling it out any farther. “Out the back of the drawer,” he said. “I can’t tell where they go beyond that.”
“Under the desk,” Jon said, and knelt to peer beneath. An instant later, his voice strained, he said, “I can’t see the wires, it’s too dark. But there’s something wedged into two corners. It looks like plastique.”
Instantly, Michele said, “Find the wires and pull them out of the plastique; as long as the timer isn’t connected to the explosives, nothing can happen.” Unless, of course, there was another surprise planned. It would have been stupid to bank on anything where their enemy was concerned.
“Three minutes,” Ian said.
Jon reached under the desk and probed. “There’s one. Where the hell’s the other one? Wait—got it.” He emerged with the two red wires in his hand.
The LED indicator of the timer continued to count off the seconds methodically.
Jon rose to his feet, leaving the wires lying a safe distance from the plastique, and dusted off his hands precisely. “I suggest we wait outside,” he said with unnatural calm.
“You won’t get an argument,” Ian said, taking Michele’s hand and guiding her from behind the desk.
They picked the farthest spot from Michele’s office—the stairwell—and waited there. Ian kept his gaze fixed on his watch, but held Michele close to his side as the seconds ticked away. “Three…two…one…zero,” he murmured.
The silence was unbroken. After another eternal five minutes, Ian sighed roughly and hugged Michele hard.
Jon was leaning back against the wall with his hands in his pockets, his face as pale as those of the other two. He looked at his sister and said very politely, “I’ll never again give you a hard time about your job.”
Michele was trying to quit shaking, her face pressed against Ian’s chest, but at that masterly statement she couldn’t hold back a watery laugh.
Sometime later, after the plastique had been removed from her desk and stored with relative safety in a thick metal box Michele found in the storeroom, she sat in her chair and watched as Ian and Jon examined the timer.
“What I’d like to know,” Ian said, “is how the bastard activated the timer. He doesn’t seem to have much trouble getting into security-conscious buildings, but how would he know when to set the clock? He couldn’t have known we’d be here, or when we would be.”
“He’s watching,” Michele told them. “That timer can be activated remotely. All he had to do was get in here to set the explosives, and then stand by outside until we came into the building. Or until I did.”
Ian frowned. “You think he was after you alone?”
She drew a breath. “I think so. Because if he was after all three of us, then he expected us to be together, and that doesn’t make sense.”
“How do you mean?” Jon asked.
“Look at his apparent plan. Divide and conquer; he’s been out to set the Logans and Stuarts at each other’s throats from the start. Now, I could accept that he realized we were working together and decided to eliminate all three of us, but I would have thought he’d have asked himself first of all why we’re working together.”
“And if he did,” Ian said slowly, “he might have found out about you and me.”
“Oh, hell,” Jon muttered as he realized.
Michele nodded. “If he knows, and if he wants to push Dad over the edge, he has a perfect weapon. Why bother to blow us up? Tell Dad about Ian and me, and then he can just sit back and watch.”
“We’re out of time,” Ian said.
She turned on her computer and stared at the blank screen as the machine warmed up. “Even if he doesn’t know for sure,” she murmured, “the sight of us together might give him ideas. And it won’t take any more than a hint to Dad.”
Michele got to work. With so little information about Helen Gordon, it was a slow process, and since data storage by computer was a fairly recent thing, a large number of older records hadn’t yet been converted into sophisticated electronics. Michele made several phone calls, but she had to resort to personal contacts made over the past few years because few record-keeping facilities boasted weekend business hours. And more than once, a computer hacker who owed her a favor—or wanted one owed to him—gave up an access code never meant to be public.
Around four o’clock, Jon went out and brought back food and drinks for them, and Michele ate while she worked. The men talked quietly at first, then later pored over the information that began chattering from her printer. Michele was tapping into every source she could think of, assigning some to the printer and some to her screen, but it wasn’t until nearly six o’clock that the information began falling into place.
“I’ve got a record of a California driver’s license. Helen Gordon, a Los Angeles address. It expired almost ten years ago, and was never renewed, but the address is the same going back more than thirty years.” Michele looked up, frowning.
“Is she the right Helen Gordon?” Jon asked. They had already located and discounted several of that name.
Ian, who was studying a printout of students registered in the Atlanta area colleges and universities thirty-five years
before, suddenly asked, “What’s that address?”
Michele glanced at her screen and rattled it off.
“Bingo. You were right; she must have come out here to go to college. Listed as a transfer student from Los Angeles, and at just the right time. Dropped out in the spring quarter thirty-five years ago this past April. No reason given.”
Within the next half hour, they found more indications that they were on the right track, and when Michele uncovered a coroner’s report dated ten years previously, there was little doubt they had found the right woman.
She read the information on her screen, then sat back in her chair feeling a curious little chill. She looked at the waiting men and said flatly, “Helen Gordon died ten years ago, in an accident. An elevator cable snapped.”
“So at least now we know why it’s been elevators,” Ian said tiredly. “But if she’s dead, who’s after us? A husband? Offspring?”
Michele stared at him for a long moment as a final connection was made in her mind, then muttered, “Oh, damn…” and began very quickly typing commands into her computer. With the right question finally asked, the answer came through in minutes. Even so, Michele couldn’t believe the answer—though it made all too much sense.
“Michele?” Ian leaned forward, his eyes concerned. “What is it? You’ve gone white.”
“Oedipus,” she said dully. “I must have already known. I just didn’t make the right connection this morning.”
Jon looked totally bewildered. “What?”
“The love of a boy for his mother, his jealousy of his father. And a hundred times worse for him if she was bitter.” Michele drew a deep breath and said, “We know Helen Gordon left here in June of that year. Six months later—exactly thirty-five years ago on this coming Monday—she gave birth to a son. She wasn’t married; maybe that was why she combined two family names for his. According to his birth certificate, he was named Nicholas Gordon South.”