Whirlpool Read online

  ELIZABETH

  LOWELL

  WHIRLPOOL

  (Originally published as The Ruby)

  Contents

  Prologue

  Jamie Swann really didn’t want to put his daughter on…

  1

  When the pager on Cruz Rowan’s belt went off, he…

  2

  Laurel Swann touched the agate with the tip of her…

  3

  A shiny Grumman Gulfstream executive jet flashed low over Cruz…

  4

  Flying gave Damon Hudson a sexual thrill. No matter how…

  5

  “Sammy, are you sure?” Laurel asked. Her voice wasn’t tense,…

  6

  Laurel hung up and turned back to the egg, halfway…

  7

  Cruz watched Novikov like a rattlesnake watching a rat. After…

  8

  Damon Hudson glanced impatiently at his watch. Surely it couldn’t…

  9

  Swann looked at his daughter.

  10

  Cruz was fed up with watching Novikov waltz around every…

  11

  Swann glanced at his watch and headed for the worktable,…

  12

  At just past four, a Cadillac limousine cruised down Hill…

  13

  Shutting out the lingering twilight, Cruz Rowan studied the dark,…

  14

  The Shrike touched down at the Paso Robles airport just…

  15

  The sound of her own name shocked Laurel. It had…

  16

  Without looking away from Laurel’s unusual golden eyes, Cruz picked…

  17

  West Los Angeles was full of discreet hotels that catered…

  18

  Moving as though underwater, Laurel pulled a loose cream-colored cotton…

  19

  Jamie Swann sat in the expensive hotel room, watching the…

  20

  Cruz Rowan studied the woman who had chosen to face…

  21

  Laurel shook her head roughly, trying to stop the savage…

  22

  Claire Toth stripped back the comforter on the king-sized bed,…

  23

  Cruz looked at Laurel’s rigid profile and wondered how much…

  24

  As soon as Laurel got to the garage, she automatically…

  25

  Although it was past midnight, the galleries of the Hudson…

  26

  By the time Cruz finally put away the cellular and…

  27

  The Russian workers had watched warily from the corner of…

  28

  Beyond the car’s hood, the plane’s engines were spinning. A…

  29

  Laurel awoke in darkness. Disoriented, still half asleep, she couldn’t…

  30

  Highland Park in West Los Angeles was almost like Gorkiy…

  31

  “You’re slow, white boy. Too slow, way too slow. Where’s…

  32

  At the jeweler’s urging, Hudson had stayed for a few…

  33

  Dressed finally in her own clothes, pleasantly full from a…

  34

  The lunch crowd milled around Jimmy’s on Santa Monica Boulevard.

  35

  The ambassador was as clever an opponent as Laurel had…

  36

  As the limousine cruised through Los Angeles, Claire Toth accepted…

  37

  “Do you think she’s going to run for it?” Gillespie…

  38

  The lobby of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel was a cosmopolitan…

  39

  Heat welled up from the floor of the low desert…

  40

  Aleksy Novikov pushed away from the bar, leaving Gapan with…

  41

  A small palo verde tree grew from the canyon floor…

  42

  The sheer inner curtains at the Karroo compound softened the…

  43

  The crashing, rhythmic thunder of surf met Claire Toth as…

  44

  Laurel forced herself to shower and dress, trying not to…

  45

  Silently Claire Toth prowled around the hot, muggy solarium, inspecting…

  46

  All around the rental car, Los Angeles spread out in…

  47

  Cruz shut the car door very softly and looked around.

  48

  Wearily Laurel went to the leather valise she’d brought from…

  49

  “Don’t scream, Laurie. It’s just me.

  50

  Jamie Swann tried to keep a lid on the rage…

  51

  Jamie Swann groaned and rolled his head slowly from side…

  52

  In the taut silence of the house, the ringing of…

  53

  Laurel talked into the phone without stopping, drawing from her…

  54

  From the cover of landscaping just inside the gate, Cruz…

  55

  Cruz waited long enough before responding to make Cahill swallow…

  56

  Cruz spun and brought Novikov under his gun.

  57

  With shuttered eyes, Laurel Swann looked around Cassandra Redpath’s office.

  58

  Cruz’s eyes never left Laurel’s face. She was too pale,…

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books By Elizabeth Lowell

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Kowloon

  Sunday, 1995

  Jamie Swann really didn’t want to put his daughter on the firing line. He just didn’t have any other choice. Reluctantly he handed over a package and special label to the freight agent. A hundred-dollar bill went with the label.

  The money vanished into the man’s pocket. The label went on the box. Before Swann could change his mind, the package was on a conveyer belt, headed for an airplane. Without a word he turned and hurried toward the part of the airport which handled human cargo. He had to beat the package to California.

  If he didn’t…

  Swann didn’t want to think about it.

  I’m sorry, baby.

  But don’t worry. I’ll get there before they do.

  The contents of the package were priceless. Yet in Swann’s world, everything had a price.

  Even his daughter’s life.

  1

  Southern California

  Monday

  When the pager on Cruz Rowan’s belt went off, he was waist deep in a hole the size of a grave, hacking away at debris in front of a rock wall, trying to find order at the edge of chaos.

  The pager wasn’t impressed by his search. It kept on beeping.

  With a grunted curse Cruz stabbed at the pager button and went right on digging. Only his boss had the pager number. At the moment, he wasn’t interested in talking to Cassandra Redpath. He had more important things on his mind.

  He wielded the twelve-pound pickax as easily as other men would swing a hammer. Each time the pick smashed rhythmically into rock, loose soil and chips of stone flew up and stung his face like birdshot. He ignored it. When he was chasing a ground fault, trying to discover if the earth had opened up a year ago or a century or an eon, he didn’t care about personal comfort. Human years and human fears meant nothing to geological time.

  Cruz liked that as much as he did the workout the rock was giving him. His short dark brown hair was nearly black with sweat. His naked back dripped like he’d just come from a shower.

  After a time he set aside the pick, stretched, wiped sweat from his eyes, and
grabbed a nearby shovel. With the easy movements of a man who was naturally coordinated and unusually fit, he attacked the rubble, clearing it away one shovelful at a time. At just under six feet, he wasn’t a particularly big man, but he was solidly built. The sun was a heat lamp on his hardworking body.

  While Cruz pursued the tantalizing fault, he didn’t notice the heat, the clouds of grit, or the increasing fatigue of his body. He was used to ignoring comfort in favor of the hunt, whether he was chasing scientific facts or international crooks.

  Despite the sun, despite the ache across his back and arms, despite the stubborn rock, he kept digging, chasing a strand of geological truth that had been ancient long before he was born. To him the fault lines in the earth were as fascinating as the flaws in human souls.

  The fault that had piqued his curiosity revealed itself for just a few feet in a wall of rock before diving underground beneath a cape of debris. Though small, the fault fascinated him.

  It was in the wrong place.

  There were dozens of faults over on the other side of the nameless flat-floored rift valley southwest of the Salton Sea. All those faults were offshoots of the famous San Andreas. But the fault Cruz was sweating over was all alone, located in a sun-baked slot canyon that cut into the base of the Santa Rosa Mountains. The slot canyon was several miles away from any other fault lines.

  Though modest to the point of invisibility, the isolated crack suggested new activity beneath the seamed surface of the land. He’d been all over the crack like a wolf on a lamb chop. His hobby and passion was to find signs of new seismic activity, tracks of weakness or stress. He believed that fault lines—unlike people in general and women in particular—could be understood by anyone willing to spend enough time, sweat, and logic on the matter.

  He was more than willing.

  When he was out in the desert, reality changed. There were no clocks. No desperation. No split seconds to decide whether to kill and live or hold fire and die. No willfully naive media types to sell ad space with bloody pictures on the front page and antiviolence editorials on the back.

  The desert didn’t have any newspaper except anonymous tracks quickly scattered by the wind. The desert had no ads to sell and no editorial judgments to make. It didn’t need any. The survivors left tracks and the losers left bones.

  End of story.

  Time in the desert wasn’t a clock ticking seconds, minutes, hours. Desert time was the slow shrinking of shadows as noon approached, followed by an equally slow expansion of shadows until darkness flowed from every crack and crease to reclaim the land in a cool black tide.

  Cruz loved the night as much as he loved the blazing sun itself. He loved standing in the desert, absorbing its silence into his soul, feeling peace well up inside him like a transparent spring. The desert was what had kept him sane when every institution and person he’d ever believed in had turned on him and demanded that he hate himself as much as they did. They had almost succeeded.

  He’d been a long time pulling himself back from the brink.

  Even now there were moments when he wondered how close that brink still was. And if any of it was worth the cost. Those were the times he headed out into the desert. There he listened to the silence until there was no past, no present, no future, nothing but the desert around him like a benediction whispered by a generous god.

  The beeper on Cruz’s belt went off again.

  With a muttered curse he jammed the shovel up to its rim in the rubble pile and stabbed the button on the pager, silencing it. Then he levered himself up out of the hole and got ready to head back to Risk Limited’s headquarters in Karroo.

  Cassandra Redpath beeped once if something was important enough to disturb Cruz even if he’d made it clear that he didn’t want to be disturbed. If he chose to ignore the summons, fine. Redpath would look elsewhere.

  Two beeps meant it was raining shit.

  2

  Cambria, California

  Monday

  Laurel Swann touched the agate with the tip of her index finger. The translucent stone was smooth, cool, and had a single band of pale amber the exact color of her eyes. And her father’s eyes. Seeing the color made her wonder where Jamie Swann was, if he was healthy or sick, thin or well fed, free or captive in some country whose name changed with every headline.

  “Don’t think about it,” Laurel told herself aloud. Living alone as she did, without even a pet, made the house pretty quiet. Sometimes she broke the quiet by talking with herself. “There’s nothing you can do about your father. He’s old enough to know better. Hell, he’s old enough to retire, get a cat, and write his memoirs.”

  The thought of it made her smile. Like her mother, Laurel couldn’t stop caring about the man whose open smile and guarded eyes had shaped her life. Now that her mother was dead, there was only Laurel to care.

  Slowly she turned the agate in the light from the north window of her weathered A-frame cottage. Sunlight spilled over her workbench, making the stone glow like it held all the sunshine it had gathered during countless years of being tumbled by surf on a beach.

  As a professional jewelry designer, Laurel had much more valuable gems in the safe in her workshop. That just made her appreciate the agate more. This stone was different, a small treasure discovered on the beach in front of her house. A clear agate like this was a slice of time, a memento of the forces that shaped the earth, the mingling of enduring rock and restless ocean.

  There were tiny specks scattered through the agate, dark bits of the stone’s history preserved in a crystalline frame. The flaws made the agate more interesting to Laurel than perfection would have been. As she turned the stone in the light, she began creating a design in her mind. A simple setting of flowing gold would bring out the best in the agate. A geometrical silver setting would kill the stone’s beauty.

  That was the endless fascination of making jewelry. Each stone challenged her to create a setting that was as unusual and enduring as the gemstone itself.

  The rattle of a truck turning into Laurel’s steep driveway broke her concentration. Frowning, she set aside the agate and looked out the ground-floor window of her small house. A delivery van was idling just outside. The driver had driven down to the garage level, saving her a trip upstairs to the street.

  Even so, she wasn’t happy to see the truck. She hadn’t ordered anything, which meant that someone was sending something back to her. Not good news. Selling jewelry on consignment was a chancy way to make a living.

  “Damn. There go the new tires for my car.”

  Mentally rebalancing her checkbook, Laurel headed from her workroom and opened the small door that connected to the garage. The living area of the house was overhead, on the same level as the street. It was an odd, cramped arrangement common to Cambria houses that had begun life as weekend beach cabins but had been transformed into full-time residences when land prices soared.

  Outside, the driver hopped down from the van and headed toward the open garage door. He carried a clipboard in his right hand. He’d stuffed a rectangular box under his left arm. The box was big enough to be awkward, but obviously it wasn’t very heavy.

  “Hi, Tom,” Laurel said. She received and sent parcels often enough to be on a first-name basis with several delivery agents.

  “Hello, Ms. Swann.”

  Tom tried to be casual, but he spent too long looking at her. He started at her cap of black hair, took in the loose man’s shirt she wore knotted to one side, and lingered on jeans whose snug fit came from countless washings. Though she spent no time trying to catch a man’s eye, there was an offhand sensuality to her that was more attractive than the overproduced blondes that California turned out with numbing regularity. Those blondes were spectacular, but not for the likes of a deliveryman. Laurel Swann, on the other hand, was a real woman.

  Guiltily, Tom switched his attention back to his job. “Is it your birthday?” he asked.

  “Nope.”

  “This week, maybe?”
r />   “Nope.” Though she smiled pleasantly enough, she didn’t say anything more.

  He sighed, accepting that this contact was going to be like all the rest had been. Business, plain and simple. He began flipping slowly through papers, finding the one for her to sign.

  Laurel kept her professional manner in place. She was so accustomed to holding men well beyond arm’s length that she hardly noticed any longer that she was doing it. Watching her parents cope with love, anger, regret, rage, despair, and finally divorce had taught her that diamonds might be forever, but a relationship wasn’t.

  And if it wasn’t forever, it wasn’t worth the pain.

  “Well,” Tom said, “this must be your lucky day. Somebody’s sending you a big present.”

  She made a sound that could have meant anything. Like most jewelry makers, she shipped her work materials without fanfare. She hid gold and even parcels of precious stones in plain sight beneath brown wrapping paper and ordinary packing tape.

  But she’d just gotten a shipment of gold from her Armenian metals broker on Hill Street in Los Angeles. She wasn’t expecting anything interesting to come her way—unless finding new ways to stretch a dollar qualified as interesting.

  “Here you go,” Tom said.

  Laurel took the box in both hands. Ten pounds. Perhaps more. Certainly not much less. She gave a mental sigh of relief.