When Matt is finished, Seymour turns to me. “Why would the people behind Shanti be interested in a religious artifact?” he asks, and I can’t help but notice his use of the word “people.” Seymour refuses to accept that Shanti was possessed.
“She may have just been interested in those who are taking care of it,” I reply. But I have chosen the wrong person to lie to. Seymour looks as if he wants to snicker.
“Gimme a break. They want the veil,” he says.
I shrug. “You might be right.”
“You really fought the Nazis during the war?” he asks.
“Didn’t you say so in one of those books you wrote about me?”
“I’d have to go back and check. But why bother? I have the real deal sitting beside me. How did you get involved in the war?”
“I was living in France when it was overrun in 1940. I could have gotten out but I loved Paris. I decided to stay and see which way the wind blew. But after a while I got tired of watching the Gestapo’s brutality and decided to help out the French Resistance.” I shrug. “My involvement blossomed from there.”
“We had a record of your work with the Resistance in our files,” Brutran says. “But you seem to have vanished after the Allies invaded on D-day.”
Matt has brought up the fact that Harrah and Ralph Levine were friends of mine during the war, and that they possessed the Veil of Veronica, but he has not revealed how rough a time I had in Auschwitz, for which I’m grateful. I’m not in the mood to talk about those days. I wonder if I ever will be.
“It’s a long story,” I say, repeating what I told Matt.
Seymour reaches out and touches my hand. “We have the time to listen,” he says.
Matt notices my discomfort and interrupts. “Not now, Seymour. We have more pressing matters to take care of this morning.”
Seymour continues to study me, as do Brutran and Jolie. I feel like I’m sitting under a hard white light. The Nazis used to grill me under such lights, for days at a time.
“Like what?” Seymour says to Matt. “You know as well as I do that Sita’s already decided we have to go after these people—or I should say their grandchildren—and see if they still have the veil.” He stops and turns back to me. “True?”
“I’ll go after them on my own,” I say.
“Like we’d let you,” Seymour says.
“Do you have Shanti’s cell phone with you?” Brutran asks me.
I hand it over. “I’ve already checked for stored numbers. She had none. Not even a copy of her last call.”
Brutran accepts the phone and reaches into her bag and pulls out a small electronic device I don’t recognize. “The phone might show no obvious record,” she says. “But I should be able to read her SIM card.”
Brutran opens the back of the cell as she speaks and removes the battery. She clearly knows her business. Beneath the battery is a small transparent plastic card coated with lines of copper and silicon. Without a pause, Brutran slips the card into her mysterious device and plugs the latter into her laptop. She scans the screen, appearing to flip through numerous files. She frowns.
“Shanti was cautious,” she says. “This card has been wiped clean. Even my recovery programs can’t find anything, and they’re capable of reconstructing files that have been ground with sandpaper.”
“The phone might have been new,” Seymour says.
“No. Shanti used it to make numerous calls. I can detect that much. But she erased all the numbers before she put it back in her suitcase.”
“Hand me the phone, please,” I say.
Brutran tosses it to me, not worried that my reflexes won’t be up to the task of the catch. The woman knows more about me than I would like. Her comment about my activities during the war did nothing to diminish my suspicions about her. Okay, so she helped me destroy the Cradle—IIC’s headquarters, even. The company continues to exist, continues to print money like a paperback press rolling out the latest bestseller. She is staying close to us for a reason, I know, besides protection from those who pursue us. She still has an agenda independent of ours.
“I tell you, it’s empty,” Brutran says. “It’s a dead end.”
“Maybe not,” I say softly as I close my eyes and let my fingers play over the numbers. My hearing is my most powerful sense, but all my senses are more acute than a human being’s. The tips of my fingers, in particular, can detect things mortals couldn’t imagine. For example, I can tell if something is poisonous just by touching it. My skin cells react, they immediately send a message to my brain—Don’t eat it! They can also detect disease with the lightest of brushes. That was how I knew Seymour was infected with HIV the moment I met him. But lucky him, while he slept one night, I put a drop of my blood inside his wrist vein and killed the virus.
Now, though, I feel something unrelated to disease or poison. I can tell which numbers Shanti used most often. Five numbers—1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 9. They’re obvious to me from the amount of resistance they offer, which is less than the other numbers on the cell’s pad. These five numbers are more worn. Deepening my focus on the digits, I even get a sense of the rhythm Shanti used when she struck the keys, which tells me the order in which she dialed the numbers.
1-212-555-7819.
A New York number.
But not the same number on the lawyer’s card.
I gesture for the others to be silent while I dial.
Someone answers immediately, before the first ring is complete, as if they have been waiting to hear from me. It’s a voice I’ve not heard before, yet I recognize it. Not from the vocal cords it’s using—those are new—but from the evil I hear behind it.
It sounds like a young woman. Intelligent, resourceful.
But I know it’s really Tarana.
Ancient Egyptian for “the Light Bearer.”
Lucifer.
My blood turns cold, while my hand that holds the phone drips with sweat from the heat that suddenly seems to radiate from it. The pain in the center of my head, from last night, returns with a vengeance, and I feel I’m going to be sick. Worst of all, I, Sita, last of the vampires, am afraid.
There is no way I can put down the phone.
I know this for a fact.
Not without his—or her—permission.
“Hello, Sita,” the voice says. “Calling to make another deal?”