A Time of Shadows (Out of Time #8) (7 page)

Travers frowned. “Yes. There was a sighting last week. I tried to verify it, but there’s no security footage, I’m afraid. I sent my two best men,” he added his eyes sliding to Tess and then back to him. “Jason Saunders and David Quint.”

He paused and cleared his throat, then handed Jack a slender dossier.

Inside were pictures of the two agents. Saunders was young, late twenties, sandy brown hair and an open face. Quint was maybe mid-forties, short blond hair and a lantern jaw.
 

“Saunders’ body was found on the shores of the Bosphorus three days ago.”

Jack looked up from the dossier.

“And when Quint failed to check in…” Travers said, his eyes briefly landing on Tess again. Tess looked down at her clasped hands. Clearly, there was some connection between the two.

“That’s not like him, I take it?” Jack prompted and glanced down at the photo. “He looks ex-military.”

“He spent ten years in the Marines before he joined the Council,” Tess said.

Travers smiled sadly. “Yes. Saunders was relatively new, but Quint was a very experienced operative. In fact, many thought he should have replaced Alistair as director, instead of me.” His face fell again. “Perhaps they were right.”

Jack knew how Travers felt. He’d sent men on missions they didn’t return from. Right choice or wrong, it haunted the man responsible.

“Tough times call for tough decisions,” Jack said. “I doubt you’d be sitting in that chair if they didn’t think you’d make the best ones possible.”

Travers nodded. “I’d never sent men to their deaths before.”
 

He cleared his throat and sat up a little straighter.
 

“But here you are doing it again? Jack supplied. “Minus the dying, hopefully.”

Travers nodded. “Hopefully,” he said with a small smile.

Jack flipped through the dossier and found two more pictures, presumably of Skavo.
 

“So,” Jack said, “you want me to pick up the trail. Find Skavo.”
 

“Quite simply, yes.”

“Simply,” Jack said with a small laugh as he closed the dossier.

“Yes, well…” Travers said, a little embarrassed. “Will you do it?”

Jack knew what they were asking was dangerous and damned important. And it felt good.

“I’ll try.”

Travers stood. “Thank you. I’ve got a charter on stand-by. You’ll both leave—”

“Both?” Jack said as he stood. He glanced over at Tess whose expression was confident and even a little amused.
 

“I work better alone. No offense,” he said.

“Funny. I said the same thing,” Tess said with a grin. “But, two heads are better than one, and other clichés. Besides, my father was at the heart of this. I know he’d want me to go. And I won’t let him down. Not now.”

“We can’t afford to fail here,” Travers said. “If the Shadow Council should have the same intel I do, and at this point I have no reason to think otherwise, need I impress upon you what’s at stake here?”

“I fought the Nazis. World domination, I get.”
 

“I need my best people on this,” Travers continued. “And you two are it.” He sat back down heavily. “And I mean
it
. There’s no one else.”

He looked small and defeated, and it was no wonder. Having the fate of the world on his shoulders tended to press a man down.
 

“Well?” Tess said, turning to him.

“Have you ever done this sort of thing before?” he asked.

“This exact sort of thing? No.”

Travers came around his desk. “Tess is one of our best field agents. She can hold her own.”

Jack still had his misgivings, but it looked like there wasn’t much of a choice in the matter being offered.
 

“All right, then,” Jack said as he stuck out his hand and grinned. “Partner.”

She smiled back, shook his hand and then turned to Travers. “When do we leave?”

“Tomorrow.”

“And where exactly are we going?” Jack asked.

“Istanbul.”

“T
HIS
WILL
NEVER
WORK
,” Simon grumbled under his breath.

“It will,” Elizabeth assured him. “Just be extra British.”

He shook his head. “I don’t even know what that—”

“Sir Simon!”

Elizabeth turned to see a very large man shuffling through the crowd in the entryway of the Ferry Building. It took some effort for him to weave his girth through the throng. It was a warm, beautiful late summer’s day and the Ferry Building was crowded with tourists.
 

 
One of the few buildings to survive the 1906 earthquake and fire, the Ferry Building was immense and grand. They stood in the huge nave as long as two football fields with a skylight that ran nearly the length of it. In the years since the quake it had become more than a place to catch ferries. Inside the building was a bustling marketplace with food shops of every variety lining the sides.

Elizabeth caught a whiff of something and turned to see a man walking by with some sort of meat on a stick and another with a freshly baked pastry. Her stomach gurgled with envy. She knew she should have eaten before they’d come.
 

“Hello!” The big man finally reached them, his ruddy face shining with perspiration.

“I’m so sorry. There seems to be some mix-up.” He turned back to glare at his assistant who pursed his lips defiantly. “There was no paperwork.”

“My secretary took care of all this weeks ago,” Simon said, his cut glass accent razor sharp and his patience already thin. “If this is how you treat visiting dignitaries, I can only—”

“No, no,” the large man said quickly, shooting daggers back at his assistant. “I assure you. The mistake is ours, Sir Simon.”

Simon held his lordly expression in place before nodding once in acceptance of the apology. The large man beamed and wiped the sweat from his glimmering forehead with a handkerchief.

“Charles Dewhurst. It’s an honor.” He stuck out his hand to shake, but realizing his palms were sweaty, took it back. He gave them a quick wipe with his handkerchief before stuffing it into his pants pocket.

Elizabeth felt sorry for him and was starting to regret their charade. But, she reminded herself, a little trickery was a small price to pay if they could find the watch.
 

Next to her, Charlotte stood smiling demurely, and finally not tugging on the hem of the dress they’d bought for her. Her jeans, t-shirt and tennis shoes were not the stuff a young lady of her position would wear on an official holiday. But she, like Elizabeth, was far more comfortable out of a dress than in one.
 

“I’ll be sure to tell the Society of your kindness,” Simon said.
 

Dewhurst visibly relaxed then. So did Elizabeth. Their plan seemed to be working.

The tower clock was closed to the public, and there wasn’t time to try to arrange a legitimate tour. Instead they’d concocted a plan that Simon would be a visiting English Lord who fancied clocks, a member of the Royal Society for Horology. He would pretend that his staff had made arrangements for a special tour of the clock tower that were somehow misplaced, and hope they could bluster their way into getting one anyway. So far, so good.

“If you don’t mind,” Simon said, “and pardon the pun, but my time is limited. You understand, of course?”

“Of course,” Dewhurst said as he elbowed his assistant, who forked over a ring of keys. “This way.”

“You’re too kind.”

Simon gestured for Dewhurst to lead the way and Elizabeth hooked her arm through Simon’s. Next to her, Charlotte giggled. Elizabeth shushed her but was on the verge herself. Imperious Simon was very entertaining.

“Mr. Barnum, who usually takes care of this sort of thing, is sick today. I’m afraid I’ll have to do.” Dewhurst unlocked the door that led to the tower. “There’s no elevator. It’s nine floors up.”

Elizabeth could see the fleeting hope in his eyes that Simon wouldn’t want to make the trek, but Simon, as cool as the other side of the pillow, merely nodded.

Dewhurst swallowed and then eyed the stairs before starting up. The stairwell was hot and humid. They’d barely gone two flights before he began to labor and Elizabeth seriously started to worry he was going to have a heart attack.

She glanced at Simon, nodding toward Dewhurst. They’d barely reached the fourth floor and he looked ready to pass out.
 

Elizabeth saw him look up and hesitate. “Mr. Dewhurst, perhaps you would prefer to wait for us downstairs? Perhaps arrange refreshments?”

“I’ll call down for—” Dewhurst reached for his hip and then frowned. “Always forgetting my phone.”

He smiled, embarrassed.

“It is so hot,” Charlotte said suddenly in a perfectly crisp English accent, earning surprised looks from both Simon and Elizabeth. “It would be lovely to have lemonade waiting for us. It would be so very kind of you to do that.”

Dewhurst hesitated, but it was clear he was not thrilled at the idea of continuing the climb. He eyed the stairs warily before addressing them. “It’s against the rules for people to be in the tower unattended.”

“It can be our little secret,” Simon assured him. “We’ll only be a few minutes.”

“Please?” Charlotte asked with a painfully endearing smile.
 

Against that, Dewhurst had no comeback, and nodded. “Of course.”

He glanced once more up the stairs. “You won’t tell anyone?”

Simon inclined his head and Dewhurst nodded. “I’ll have some drinks ready for you.”

“Thank you,” Charlotte said, every ounce a princess.

They watched him start to go downstairs and then turned and continued their ascent.
 

“Where did that come from?” Elizabeth whispered to Charlotte.

“We’ve summered in Grey Hall, you know,” Charlotte said haughtily.
 

Elizabeth snickered and Simon frowned.
 

“We have?”

Spending summers at his English estate was probably the very last thing Simon had expected he’d do. His childhood there had been on the uptight, “let’s send you to boarding school” side, not exactly the sort of place he seemed likely to take his family.

Charlotte shrugged. “It was fun.”

Simon shook his head and nodded toward the stairs again. “We should hurry.”

They climbed the last few stories, the heat increasing with each. By the time they reached the ninth floor, it was hotter than blue blazes in the stairwell.

Simon opened the door and they went inside the room that housed the clockworks for the enormous clock.

“Well,” Elizabeth said, looking around the dark room for a light switch. She found one and flipped it on. “What exactly are we looking for again?”

“Anything out of the ordinary,” Simon said. “Teddy would have marked his hiding place somehow, but not so obviously that it would attract attention.”

“So look for something out of the ordinary that looks ordinary?”

Simon frowned and sighed. “Yes, I suppose so.”

The three of them started to scour the walls and floors of the room. The clock mechanism clicked rhythmically in the background.

“He specifically mentioned the face,” Simon said as he approached the backside of the great clock face. “As good a place as any to start.”

Elizabeth looked for…whatever they were looking for, but all she saw was clock. A lot of clock. The face had to be twenty feet across.

“Be careful,” he warned Charlotte. There were exposed gearing mechanisms that looked ready to take off a finger.

Had Teddy hidden the watch inside the works somehow? It would be fitting in a way, but a pain in the butt to find.
 

“He couldn’t be a little more specific?” she complained.

Next to her, Simon sighed. “Maybe he was and we’re just not seeing it?”

Elizabeth turned to him and nodded before returning back to the clock face. Teddy would have given them something else. Finding some unknown object in a room this large with this many moving parts was going to be impossible. “What are we missing?”

Simon didn’t respond but kept staring straight ahead. His eyes narrowed. “The moon, it seems.”

He took a step forward and touched one of the large wooden support beams, a remnant from the original building. When he moved his finger aside, Elizabeth saw what he meant. Embedded in the wood was a small, tarnished silver medallion with the moon imprinted on it, a first quarter moon.

“I’ll be damned.”

Simon reached into his pocket and pulled out his car keys. With a little effort he was able to dig it out of the wood. But it wasn’t just a medallion Elizabeth realized as Simon slid it from its hiding place; it was the top of a small silver tube.
 

He was about to open it when an accusing voice came from behind them.

“I’m sorry, but you’re not supposed to be here.”
 

Simon quickly slipped it into his pocket as they all turned.

It was Dewhurst’s officious assistant. “Not unsupervised.” He looked around for signs of damage. “Legal issue, you understand?”

“Quite,” Simon said and then gestured around the room. “Magnificent.”

The assistant hmm’d in agreement, but it was clear they’d worn out their welcome.

They hurried down the stairs, sure that the assistant was going to start asking questions they might not be able to answer.

As they exited into the main floor, a man bumped into Elizabeth.
 

“Sorry,” she said reflexively, expecting the same in return.

Instead of apologizing, he glared down at her. The scar on his upper lip made him look like he was perpetually sneering. Or maybe he was sneering. And staring. Either way, it was unnerving and Elizabeth drew back.

Simon stepped next to her and took her elbow. “Problem?” he asked and then looked at the man in a way that said he hoped the answer was yes.

“My fault,” Elizabeth said, although it wasn’t. And if he was a pickpocket, all he’d get from her was a wet nap that wasn’t wet anymore and two fuzzy Advil.