LITMIR.BIZ

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Damn, she was tired. Damn the CIA and damn the FBI and damn everyone who was working so hard to make her life so miserable.

      Five months. The harassment had been going on almost nonstop for five months. And now, after the bombing in England, it was only going to get worse. Already everyone in town knew that she was the subject of an FBI investigation. The agents had talked with everyone she knew, and probably a lot of people she didn’t know. Her college roommate had called last month to say that even she’d been questioned about Annie. And it had been five years since they’d last gotten together….

      Damn, damn, damn, she thought. And particularly damn that horrible man who’d spoken to her from behind the one-way window. Somebody had referred to him as Captain Peterson. If she ever ran into him, she’d let him have a good swift kick where it counted. Except she didn’t have a clue what he looked like. She wouldn’t even be able to recognize him from his voice, not from hearing it over those awful interrogation room speakers.

      She stepped out of the car and went around to the other side to pull the package from England from the passenger seat. Damn these gold artifacts, too, she thought, as she barely lifted the crate. They always weigh a ton.

      Her assistant’s car was still in the driveway, so instead of going up to her apartment on the top floors of the house, Annie went into the lab. She could hear the sound of the computer keyboard clacking and followed it to the back room, where the office was set up.

      Cara MacLeish was inputting data at her usual breakneck speed. She didn’t even stop as she looked up and grinned.

      “Welcome back,” she said. Her short brown curls stood straight up in their usual tangle, and her eyes were warm behind her horn-rimmed glasses. “I thought you’d be here sooner. Like six hours ago.”

      Annie lowered the crate holding the gold death mask onto her desk top, then brushed some strands of hair back from her face. “I was detained,” she said simply.

      Cara stopped typing, giving her boss her full, sympathetic attention, swearing imaginatively.

      “Took the words right out of my mouth,” Annie said, smiling ruefully.

      “FBI again?” Cara asked.

      “FBI, CIA.” Annie shrugged. “They all want a piece of me.”

      “Well, look on the bright side,” Cara suggested.

      They both fell silent, trying to find one.

      “They haven’t been able to make any charges stick,” Cara finally said.

      Annie pulled a rocking chair closer to the computer console and sat down.

      “And you haven’t lost any business because of this,” Cara said, warming up to it now. She stretched her thin arms over her head, then yawned, standing up to get the kinks out of her long legs. “In fact, I think business has picked up. We had a ton of calls while you were away.”

      Annie watched her assistant cross to the telephone answering machine. Next to it, a stack of little pink message slips were held by a bright red wooden duck with a clothespin for a mouth.

      “Jerry Tillit called,” Cara said. “He’s back from South America, and he’s got some Mayan stuff for you to look at.”

      “Did you talk to him, or get the message off the machine?” Annie asked.

      Cara blushed. “I spoke to him.”

      “Did he ask you out again?” Annie grinned.

      “Yes.”

      “And…?”

      “We don’t date clients, remember?” Cara said.

      Annie corrected her. “Jerry’s not a client, he’s a friend.”

      “He’s also a client.”

      “So he’s also a client,” Annie admitted. “But just because I don’t want to date clients doesn’t mean you can’t, MacLeish. Will you please give the man a break?”

      “I did.”

      “You…What?”

      The taller woman grinned, pushing her hair back from her face and sitting down on top of the desk. “I told him I’d go out with him. He’s coming up to drop his finds off this Saturday. We’re going out after that.”

      Annie glanced around the cozy office. The room was really quite large, but with two desks, two computers, a fax machine, a copier and all sorts of chairs and bookshelves, there wasn’t much room even to walk. But Cara MacLeish was an essential fixture here. “Don’t you be going and getting married, MacLeish,” she said sternly. “No running off to South America with Jerry Tillit.”

      Cara grinned. “I’m only going to the movies with him,” she said. “The next logical step might be a dinner date. Not marriage.”

      “You don’t know Tillet as well as I do,” Annie muttered. “And that man has a definite thing for you….”

      “Speaking of marriage,” Cara said, flipping through the phone message slips. “Nick York called—five different times. Something about a party down at the Museum of Modern Art sometime this month.”

      Annie released her hair from its ponytail, letting it swing free in a gleaming brown sheet. She leaned back in the rocking chair, resting her feet on top of the computer desk. “Shame on you, MacLeish. You know the words marriage and York cannot be uttered in the same sentence,” she said. “York wants only two things from me. One of them is free lab work. And the other has nothing to do with marriage. Who else called?”

      “The freight guy at Westchester Airport said a package from France will be in Saturday.”

      “Great.” Annie sighed. “Like I’ve got any chance of getting to work on it in the next decade.” She closed her eyes. “Okay, so I pick it up on Saturday. What else?”

      “A guy named Benjamin Sullivan called,” Cara said. “Ring any bells?”

      Annie’s eyes popped open. “Yeah, of course. He’s the owner of the piece I just picked up. What did he want?”

      “He left a message on the machine, saying that we should ignore Alistair Golden if he calls,” Cara said. She laughed. “I didn’t recognize Sullivan’s name, but it seemed kind of mystically, cosmically correct to get a message from a stranger telling us to ignore Golden. I always ignore Alistair Golden. Ignoring Golden is one of the things I do best.”

      Golden was Annie’s chief competitor, and he usually handled all the U.S.-bound artworks and artifacts from the English Gallery.

      “And sure enough,” Cara said, snickering, “the little weasel called. He was in a real snit, whining about something—I’m not sure exactly what, because I was working very hard to ignore him.”

      Annie laughed. “I think I know what the bug up his pants was,” she said. “When I got to the gallery, Sullivan’s package was already crated and sealed. Golden had assumed he’d be doing the authentication job, so he’d already done the packing work.”

      “Golden packed the crate for you?” Cara said with great pleasure. “No wondering his whine was set on stun. He wanted you to call him back, but unless you want to subject yourself to a solid forty-five minutes of complaining, I wouldn’t. I give you my permission to use the ‘scatterbrained employee didn’t give me the message’ excuse for the next time he catches up with you.”

      Annie smiled. “Thanks. Did Ben Sullivan want me to call him back?”

      “He said something about going out of town,” Cara said, glancing back at the phone message slip. “Who is he? How do you know him? Come on, fill me in. Height, weight, marital status?”

      “As far as I know, he’s single,” Annie said, then smiled. “But he’s also seventy-five years old, so get that matchmaking gleam out of your eyes.”

      Cara

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