“We’re up against a wall now, Hurley,” she said quietly. “We have nothing concrete to link Etherington to the attempts on the lives of the Al Arifs. Or to these recent deaths. Or my attack.”
“You still have the fact that Tariq is alive, if these photos are a match. That’s a big story in itself. We run that, and we could get more tips. Plus Scoob is still trying to clean up that audio we recorded of Senator Etherington and his aide, Isaiah Gold, near the fountain last summer. That new parabolic mike design picked up everything, the trouble is filtering out the noise of the water.”
“The odds of something coming from that audio are practically nonexistent, even if Scoob does manage to clean it up. They could’ve been discussing baseball for all we know.”
“There’s a reason Sam and Isaiah routinely leave the office and cross the lawn to talk by a noisy fountain. We think it’s to discuss things they don’t want on tape. We took photos of them doing it—if we find something on that audio—”
“It’s a long shot, Hurley. You guys have made a hobby of eavesdropping on politicians with your gimmicks for years, and what have you got so far?”
His mouth flattened, and she instantly felt sorry.
“I’m sorry. It’s just...I’m rattled about Althea’s death.”
“We all are. Go get the sheik, Bella. Get him to talk. Somehow this all ties back to Sam.”
She signed off, shut her laptop and sat staring into space awhile. Outside the snow continued to fall. She’d survived her attack. Althea Winston had not been so lucky. Had it been the same people?
Bella’s assailants had spoken Arabic and she figured they might be part of MagMo. Two of them also had Arabic daggers. But this wouldn’t fit Sam Etherington’s people.
Bella reached into her pocket and took out a small, gold medallion. She’d ripped it from the neck of one of her assailants as she’d tried to fight him off.
The medallion depicted a sun superimposed by a hooked dagger, and it lay warm in her hand, the gold gleaming dully in the light from her lamp. She hadn’t shown it to the police—the cops had been no help when her apartment had been ransacked, and by that point, Bella trusted no one.
It was also when she’d fled the country.
Slipping the medallion onto a chain around her neck, she turned up the oil heater and climbed under the duvet on her small cot. She lay there, feeling alone, vulnerable. Scared. This story was potentially so big it overwhelmed her.
She muttered a curse. She was a journalist. This was everything she’d wanted, surely—an earth-shattering scoop? And when something truly scared you, it generally meant you were heading in the right direction. Wasn’t that the mantra of self-help gurus?
This was going to be her ticket back into the mainstream, her revenge against the Daily for dumping her. She wanted to shove this story in Derek’s face, show him she was worth something. She wanted the whole world to see Bella DiCaprio was not some little orphan cast-off. She was someone to be reckoned with.
A familiar, stubborn anger filled Bella, and determination steeled her. She was not averse to risk. She was going to get this. The trick would be in finding a way to get the sheik to talk to her, to find out how much he knew, and how this might all be connected.
And tomorrow was her chance, when she went to see him in the abbey.
* * *
The following afternoon found Bella pushing her bike through several inches of snow for the last mile to the monastery. The wind off the Atlantic was biting, the sky low and somber. Hurley’s words threaded through her mind.
We need to figure out who they are before they find you...
She rounded a hill of rock and the stone walls of the abbey suddenly loomed in the distance, black and menacing under skiffs of white. It would be full dark within the hour, she thought. A bite of raw fear twisted into her sense of foreboding.
What if her assailants back in D.C. were linked to Tariq’s people—would his family kill to keep his secret? Would they come after her if they knew she was here, on the island, now?
As she reached the iron gates, her fingers felt numb on the handlebars despite the gloves she wore. And another, more sinister thought niggled into her mind—what if Tariq’s reason for suddenly summoning her to his monastery was to silence her?
Her attackers in D.C. had spoken Arabic. And they had carried traditional-looking curved daggers. Sam’s people would not have done so, surely?
She paused and looked up at the row of hostile iron spikes, thinking of the gold medallion in her pocket—the image of a sun, superimposed with a hooked Arabic dagger. The wind was picking up and it had started snowing again, tiny ice crystals pricking into her face. Bella reached up and pressed the intercom in the stone pillar on the right side of the gate. A bell clanged somewhere inside the monastery, resonant, distant, an ancient sound that seemed at odds with the modern security. Her gaze was pulled up to the high-tech motion-sensor cameras watching her. Anxiety wrapped around Bella.
She told herself to relax. It was unlikely Tariq knew who she was at this point. But her alias was superficial—it wouldn’t hold up to any real background investigation. She needed to get to the heart of the reason she was here sooner rather than later.
Bella waited almost a full minute. Snow came down faster now, angled by the wind.
She rang again, and at the sound of the clanging something moved under the blanket in her bike basket. With a sharp start Bella realized she’d almost forgotten the Papillon pup Madame had insisted she take with her if she wanted time off this evening.
“Kiki needs attention and exercise, Amelie,” Madame Dubois had said. “This is why I hired you. If you want to go to the abbey, you will need to take Kiki.”
The Papillon was not the only thing Bella had been obliged to trek up the hill this evening—in the carrier on the back of her bike was a hamper, which Madame had shoved into her hands as she left.
“What’s this?” Bella had asked.
“The way to a man’s heart, Amelie—” Madame said, nodding to the hamper “—is always through his stomach. Take the basket.”
“I’m not looking for a way into anyone’s heart,” Bella had responded irritably. At the same time she reminded herself to play along. If Estelle Dubois believed in her eccentric old mind that Bella was romantically interested in the mysterious stranger from the abbey, it could make coming up here a lot easier.
Bella lifted the edge of the blanket. Kiki poked her nose out into the cold, giving a little body wiggle and whimper. “Hang on,” she whispered to the pup. “You can run around when we get inside.”
As she spoke the iron gates suddenly began to creak open, no one in sight. A frisson of nerves chased over her skin.
She began to wheel her bike through the gates and up to the great stone entrance, her tires making narrow tracks behind her in the slush.
Stone columns flanked a double door of heavy wood that was carved with warring demons and angels and arched to a point. The handles were iron rings.
As Bella approached, the door opened a crack and a slice of pale yellow light spliced the gloom. A butler with dark complexion and hooded eyes appeared, unsmiling.
“I’m Amelie Chenard,” she said, unnerved by the inhospitable set of the man’s features. “Monsieur Du Val is expecting me.”
He gave a barely perceptible tip of his head and stepped back, making room for her to enter. Bella rested her bike against the wall and removed Kiki from the basket. She asked the butler to bring in the hamper from the back of the bike.
With