“Fancy meeting you here,” Werner said to Riley.
“Just doing my job,” Riley said. “You told me to assist Emerson, and that’s what I’ve been doing.”
“Understood,” Werner said. “You were working as an operative for Blane-Grunwald. You obviously are everything we hoped you would be.”
Riley wasn’t so sure that was a good thing.
“Emerson clearly went to a great deal of effort to get himself into the Federal Reserve vault,” Werner said. “Why was that so important to him?”
“He wanted to look around,” Riley said. “He wanted to see his gold.”
“And did he see his gold?”
“No. He couldn’t find it.”
“He couldn’t find it because he was in the wrong vault,” Werner said. “His gold is in the Blane-Grunwald vault. Surely he knew that.”
“Sometimes it’s hard to tell what he knows,” Riley said.
Even as she said it, she knew she was in trouble. She was being evasive with Werner because she didn’t like and didn’t trust any of the men who were in the room with her. In her heart she knew there was something bad happening to the world’s gold supply, and the Grunwalds were tied to it somehow. And there was a good possibility that people were getting killed over it. Bye-bye, dream job. Hello, unemployment.
Werner reached for the water, thought twice about it, and withdrew his hand. “As you know,” he said to Riley, “our brother is about to take his seat on the Supreme Court next week. His seating will coincide with the Red Mass being held at the Cathedral of Saint Matthew.”
“I’m not familiar with the Red Mass,” Riley said.
“The Red Mass is celebrated annually by the Catholic Church to request guidance from the Holy Spirit for judges, attorneys, law school professors, students, and government officials. Needless to say, the last thing we need is a scandal disrupting the proceedings. It doesn’t matter if it’s a genuine scandal or a bogus rumor started by a conspiracy theory nut.”
“Like Emerson.”
“Exactly. Like Emerson.”
“Have you spoken to him yet?” Riley asked.
“Yes, and he didn’t have much to say. We were hoping you would have an explanation for his behavior. We know he set off the bomb in front of the building.”
“I don’t know anything about a bomb, but we did park his car in front of Blane-Grunwald. Emerson said it was equipped with a special delivery system.”
“Indeed,” Werner said. “And when Emerson was in the vault alone, he did nothing more than look for his gold?”
“So far as I know. I wasn’t with him the entire time. I waited in front of the Germany locker.”
Riley resisted the urge to scan the room for security cameras. Hard to believe they wouldn’t have any. Her hope was that she’d have a chance to escape before they reran the tape.
“We found a drill on him. What did he expect to do with the drill?” Werner asked.
Riley did a palms up. “Don’t know. He’s odd. And he doesn’t talk a lot. Maybe he was going to drill into his gold when he found it. He’s worried that his gold is fake.”
Werner and Hans exchanged glances.
“His family has a long history of crazies,” Werner said. “My father was very close to Emerson’s father, so we feel somewhat protective of Emerson. Still, there’s a limit to what we can tolerate.”
“Sure,” Riley said. “I get that.”
The Grunwalds stared at Riley for a beat, and Riley stared back.
They’re trying to decide if I’m a team player, Riley thought. They’ve been using me to keep an eye on Emerson, but now they’re worried I might know too much. And they’re not sure where my loyalties lie. And it’s possible they’re trying to decide whether they need to kill me. And who knows if they’ve already killed Emerson?
Werner took a step back. “I think our business is concluded here. Emerson won’t be needing your assistance any longer, Moonbeam. You can report to work as usual on Monday. Wait here and I’ll send someone to escort you out.”
The three men left the room and the door clicked closed.
Riley had no confidence that someone would escort her out. In her gut she felt like the escort would be Rollo, and he’d escort her out tortured and dead. She supposed there was a slim chance that Werner had decided she’d come over to the dark side and was usable, but she wasn’t going to count on it. She was going to sneak out like a thief in the night, and she wasn’t going to stop running until she was safe at home in Texas.
She tried the door and was relieved to find it unlocked. She poked her head out and looked up and down the hall. No one there. She retraced her steps down the empty corridor and came to the intersection where she and Emerson had gone in separate directions. The elevator was in one direction. Emerson was in the other.
Riley moved toward the elevator, got about twenty feet, and stopped. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t leave Emerson behind.
“Crap!”
She put her head down and marched back to the other corridor. The first four doors she came to had labels. MECHANICAL ROOM, HOUSEKEEPING, WOMEN, MEN. There was a chunk of hall without doors and then there were doors without labels. Someone was whistling behind one of those doors. It sounded like the stuff Emerson listened to when he meditated.
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 and 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.