Amber Beach Read online

  She hesitated. “Okay, I guess.”

  “I’ll meet you back here in ninety minutes,” he said, sliding out from the helm seat.

  “Wait! What do I do with the boat until then?”

  He gave her an odd look. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s running,” she pointed out.

  Jake turned off the ignition key, pulled it out, and dropped it in Honor’s lap.

  “It’s just an engine,” he said with exaggerated patience. “It won’t attack you. Treat it like a car.”

  All that kept Honor from saying Bite me, big boy! was the fact that he probably would.

  3

  JAKE TURNED HIS battered four-wheel-drive truck into the muddy tracks that led to his cabin. Surrounded by dark, wind-sculpted fir trees, the small house crouched on a cliff above Puget Sound. This was his getaway from company headquarters in Seattle, the place where he caught up on work, his home away from home, the one place whose address and telephone number no one had.

  That was why he swore when he saw a Ford utility vehicle sitting in what passed for his driveway. When a woman in a smart red blazer and black skirt climbed out and waved at him, he knew that the day had just gone from sugar to shoe polish.

  Ellen Lazarus was old news from a time in his life when he believed in saving the world from itself. These days his goal was less grandiose: all he wanted was not to be at ground zero when that great outhouse in the sky unloaded.

  He turned off the truck, climbed out, leaned against the door, and waited to find out how much crap was headed straight for his head.

  “What, not even a smile or a wave of welcome?” Ellen said, walking up to him.

  Jake watched her move with a cross between cynicism and male appreciation. She didn’t have to work to add an extra swing and jiggle to her ass. She had been born with that special locomotion, the same way she had been born with wide blue eyes, black hair, and a brainy pragmatism that made Machiavelli look like a choirboy. Not surprisingly, once she got over wanting to play cloak-and-dagger games in the field, she became an exceptional intelligence analyst.

  “I won’t ask how you found me,” Jake said. “The folks you hang with could find anything. Why did you find me?”

  “My, we’re in a bad mood, aren’t we? And it’s such a beautiful day, too.” She waved an elegant hand at the sun-dappled forest. “I’d heard that it always rains in the Pacific Northwest.”

  He grunted.

  “Does this mean you don’t want to talk about the good old days?” she asked.

  His scarred eyebrow lifted in a sardonic arc. “The good old days? That should take about three seconds. Bye, Ellen. Don’t call me, I’ll call you. Your three seconds are up.”

  Her cheerful smile vanished, leaving behind the restless, consuming personality that would never be satisfied with one of anything, including men.

  “Hey, c’mon, Jake,” she said softly. “It was good and you know it.”

  “Since when do you spend time looking over your shoulder at the ashes?”

  “You’re determined to do this the hard way, aren’t you?”

  “First thing a boy learns is it’s gotta be hard to be good.”

  She made an impatient gesture. “Have it your way.”

  “I plan to. Good-bye. Don’t give my regards to Uncle Sam.”

  Jake started to walk around Ellen to get to his cabin. She stepped out in front of him and looked up with eyes as blue and clear as a porcelain angel’s.

  “Would you be more cooperative if we sent someone else?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “You don’t even know what we want.”

  “I like it that way.”

  The wind gusted, rippling the black silk collar of Ellen’s blouse. Absently she patted the collar back in place and examined her remaining options. It didn’t take long. She wasn’t a slow or timid thinker.

  “I told them the old lover bit wouldn’t work,” she said calmly. “You haven’t made any attempt to get in touch with me for years. In fact, you never did. When you say good-bye, you mean it.”

  Jake waited, knowing he wasn’t going to get rid of her easily. What he was afraid of was that he wouldn’t get rid of her at all. U.S. government intelligence types—no matter what part of the alphabet soup of agencies they might work for—didn’t bother honest citizens unless the professionals were up to their lips in shit and the devil was coming by in a speedboat.

  “I could appeal to your patriotism,” Ellen said.

  He smiled.

  “Mother,” she muttered. “Reformed idealists are the worst. Once the fairy dust gets out of their eyes, they don’t want to play anymore.”

  “We’ve had this conversation before.”

  She tapped a manicured nail against her little leather purse and looked at the unfenced woods beyond Jake’s truck. A bald eagle soared overhead, its pure white head turning as it looked for prey. Though the bird’s shadow whipped over her face, Ellen didn’t look up.

  “All right,” she said, deciding. “You want to find Kyle Donovan. So do we. We can help each other.”

  Jake’s impassive expression didn’t change. He had been expecting something like this since he had seen Ellen get out of her car.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Why what?”

  “Why are you after Kyle?”

  “You know why. He stole a million bucks in amber.”

  Jake knew the amber was worth only half that. But if that’s what the Donovan family was claiming on the insurance, no one would listen to him anyway. The Donovans had wealth and friends in high places—same thing, really.

  “So Kyle stole some amber,” Jake said. “So what? People steal ten times a million bucks and our dear Uncle doesn’t break a sweat unless taxes aren’t paid.”

  “Kyle stole this money from a foreign country.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Wrong.”

  “Get real. This is me you’re talking to, not some freshman politician hoping to get in your pants. You’ll have to come up with a better reason for chasing Kyle. A lot better.”

  Ellen considered her remaining options. Option, really. The truth. The only question was how little she could get by with—and how to shade it to the best advantage. But not too shady. Jake could be an abrupt bastard.

  “Kyle was involved with Lithuanian separatists,” she said. “We’re afraid he took the amber to them to finance some grassroots terrorism.”

  Jake hoped she was wrong, but he doubted it. Even so, it still didn’t explain why Uncle Sam cared.

  “Still not good enough,” he said. “When it comes to geopolitics, Lithuania is very small beer. So where’s the damage to Uncle?”

  She didn’t want to answer but she knew she was going to. “I told them you would get to the bottom line.”

  Jake waited.

  “Kyle’s driver added something to the shipment before he was killed,” Ellen said.

  “What was it?”

  “No answer.”

  “Don’t know or won’t tell?”

  “Same difference. No answer.”

  Jake tried another direction. “I don’t buy it. Kyle wasn’t stupid enough to get involved with nukes.”

  “If it was nukes, we wouldn’t be asking for anyone’s help. We’d be demanding it.”

  He didn’t disagree. “So it’s more than raw amber and less than nukes, but still enough to bring Uncle running. Must be damned valuable. I don’t think Kyle is that stupid.”

  “Idealism, fairy dust, and a piece of ass,” Ellen said succinctly. “Makes ’em stupid every time.”

  “Are you talking about Marju?” Jake asked.

  Ellen nodded. “She’s the granddaughter of a hard case left over from World War Two. He fought the Germans. He fought the Russians. He fought the Soviets. He fought his own countrymen when they wanted peace.”

  Jake bit back some searing words of disgust. He knew full well how a woman could lower a man’s IQ. “I
told Kyle that Marju was more trouble than she was worth, but no, he was in love. He was going to be her bold knight in bright armor.”

  “I don’t know about bright, but he’s a bold son of a bitch. He killed the Lithuanian driver, got in the truck with the amber and headed off into the night.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “Tell me what you know and I won’t bore you with repetition,” Ellen shot back.

  “Where did you lose Kyle?”

  “We never had him to lose. He wasn’t ours.”

  Jake wondered whether to believe her, then decided it didn’t matter. “I managed to track him out of Kaliningrad and through Lithuania. I lost him when he crossed over into Russia.”

  “That’s where we lost him,” she agreed.

  “And if I said I’d tracked him to Tallinn . . .?” Jake asked sarcastically.

  “I’d be on the phone right now. We’re being chewed up one side and down the other to get results. Did you?”

  “Track him to Estonia? No. He went east, not north. I lost him about three hundred kilometers inside the Russian border. Before I could find him again, I started running into bureaucratic walls and some nonbureaucratic types with nasty guns. Officially, I was invited to leave the country and not come back.”

  “And unofficially?”

  “I was offered permanent residence in a three-by-six-foot slice of Mother Russia.”

  She shook her head. “Whatever happened to Byzantine subtlety?”

  “Same thing that happened to Byzantium. It lost.”

  “So about ten days ago you came back here to lick your wounds. And maybe to have a late-night look around Kyle’s cottage?” Ellen asked.

  Jake shrugged and said nothing. It was close enough to the truth to be uncomfortable.

  “Then you noticed one of those cards tacked up all over Anacortes asking for a fishing guide and signed by H. Donovan,” Ellen continued.

  He waited, watching her.

  “And then you turned on that Jake Mallory slow grin and got hired,” she concluded.

  “Half right. I got hired, which was more than your man did.”

  “How did you know about—hell,” she said in disgust at falling into his trap.

  “No harm done. Duping someone in as her guide was an obvious move.”

  “Did you tell Honor that you’re looking for her brother?”

  “The subject didn’t come up.”

  “That’s what we thought,” Ellen said with cream-licking satisfaction. “The Donovans have stonewalled everyone overseas, including you. So you’re going to backdoor them, using the younger sister in America.”

  There was no disapproval in Ellen’s voice. If anything, there was a note of congratulations on finding an opening no one had before now. Jake would have preferred it if she had been shocked. But people with a low threshold for shock didn’t last long in a world without fairy dust.

  “We won’t get in your way,” she said quickly. “Just keep us informed.”

  “You’re in my way right now.”

  “Get used to it, or I’ll drop in on Little Miss Muffet and tell her who her fishing guide really is.”

  For a few moments Jake simply looked at Ellen. Then he shook his head slightly. “I don’t think so.”

  “What?”

  “Right now I’m all you have inside the Donovan clan walls. You’re not stupid enough to blow my cover until you’re certain you can’t use me at all.”

  Manicured nails tapped on black leather. A cool wind gusted and then gusted again, making a grove of slim, red-barked madrona trees shudder.

  Jake knew without looking up that the clouds to the southwest were slowly reclaiming the sky. It would probably rain before sunset. The forests hadn’t gotten green by accident.

  “All right,” she said. “What do we have that you want?”

  “Did Kyle come through SeaTac about two weeks ago?”

  “His passport came through. The Immigration guy we interviewed said he looked pretty much like his picture, given that he was coming off a two-week fishing trip on the Kamchatka Peninsula.”

  “What do you say?”

  “We’re betting if the man and the picture matched, neither was Kyle Donovan.”

  Jake’s eyes narrowed. “Bad news.”

  “For Donovan, certainly. He probably got that chunk of Mother Russia they offered you. But bad for us? We don’t know.”

  “Did—”

  “My turn,” she interrupted. “Have any of your Emerging Resources contacts heard rumors of prime Baltic amber for sale from shady sources?”

  “Raw or worked?”

  “Both.”

  “Just the usual. Petty smuggling and theft in the mines are commonplace and not part of any larger conspiracy. The big-time smugglers are all connected to government. Hell, half the time they are the government.”

  “Welcome to the former Soviet Union,” Ellen said sourly, “where a conflict of interest is your best hope of getting rich.”

  “When your currency is in freefall or you don’t even have a currency to call your own, you have to expect a little creative bartering by the natives.”

  “Creative bartering.” She smiled briefly. “That’s good. Have any of your people turned up anything having to do with Russian amber specifically?”

  “The usual small forgeries from Russian plastic factories. Some estate stuff that probably came from stolen World War Two household goods. A pretty decent replica of a corner table from the czar’s legendary Amber Room.”

  Only someone who had once played the game would have recognized the subtle tightening of Ellen’s features. Jake noticed the predatory sharpening of interest and felt a cold stone settle in his stomach.

  More than raw amber and less than nukes.

  The Amber Room.

  Jake had heard rumors that the Amber Room had been found . . . but there were always rumors about World War II’s most famous lost treasure. In 1941 the Nazis had dismantled one of the czar’s extraordinary palace rooms, a room whose ceiling, doors, wall coverings, and furnishings—tables, chairs, lamps, knickknacks, candlesticks, vases, knives, forks, spoons, snuff boxes, objets d’art, everything—were carved from solid amber or surfaced in mosaics of precious amber.

  The only exceptions to the amber rule were the tall, gilded mirrors that doubled and redoubled the play of light throughout the magical room. When the room was intact, walking into it must have been like walking into a shimmering golden paradise suspended within the vast, icy gray of the Russian winter.

  The Germans shipped their unique golden loot out of Saint Petersburg to Kaliningrad. From there, it vanished, thus beginning a treasure hunt that would endure as long as human imagination and greed or until the lost Amber Room was recovered, whichever came first.

  “The table was fake?” Ellen asked.

  “The mosaic inlay was real amber. The table itself was real and very well made, but it had never been part of the czar’s Amber Room.”

  “How can you be certain?”

  “It’s my job.”

  “Convince me.”

  Jake thought it over for a split second and decided to be gracious. That way he had a fallback position.

  “Quantities of Baltic amber are hard to come by,” he said, “unless you’re very well connected with a Baltic government or a local mafiya chieftain, take your pick. Mexican and Costa Rican amber are available to anyone with money. Whoever crafted the forged table was forced to use some clear amber from the New World.”

  “How can you tell the difference between New and Old World stuff?”

  “Ask your experts.”

  “You’re here. They’re not.”

  Wistfully he looked at the sky. Clouds were thickening off toward the Olympics, but there was still plenty of time to try out the Tomorrow before the weather got nasty.

  “Baltic amber is called succinite because of its high percentage of succinic acid,” he said. “It’s unique among ambers. In fact,
some purists claim that succinite is the only real amber. All the rest is something else.”

  “All Baltic ambers are unique for the succinic acid content, no exceptions?” she asked.

  “None that matter.”

  “Tell me about the ones that don’t matter.”

  Jake looked at his watch. He would rather have been photocopying Kyle’s log than telling Ellen what any amber dealer could have told her. He hoped that a little patience now would pay big dividends later on.

  “About ten percent of Baltic ambers don’t have succinic acid,” he said, “but they didn’t end up in the czar’s palace.”

  “Why not?”

  “That kind of Baltic amber is too soft, too brittle, or too ugly for decorative use. It was turned into varnish or medicine or burned as incense. The amber I saw in the forged table was as clear and radiant as liquid sunshine. First-class amber in the New World. The Old World still prefers bastard amber.”

  “Bastard?”

  “Opaque or semi-opaque. Depending on its color and ‘feel,’ nontranslucent amber is called butter, bone, ivory, fatty, cloudy, semi-bastard—”

  “I get the picture,” she interrupted. “A lot of names.”

  “A lot of variations in color and transparency. Amber’s link with human culture is long and richly textured, especially in the Baltic regions. They spent as much time describing and naming minute differences in amber as we did counting angels and pinheads.”

  Polished red fingernails tapped in slow counterpoint to the dying wind while Ellen ran what she had just heard through her first-class brain.

  “Are color and clarity a reliable way to tell Baltic from other amber?” she asked.

  “No. What I just gave you only skims the surface. There are literally hundreds of words in the Baltic languages describing varieties of amber. Each variation of clarity and/or color has its own passionate collectors and its own mythology.”

  “The czars traded all over the world,” she said. “Could some high-quality non-Baltic amber have been used in making the original Amber Room?”

  “Anything is possible.”

  “Is it probable?”

  “Not really. The amber discoveries in Mexico and Puerto Rico are recent. The Amber Room dates from Prussian times, the early eighteenth century. Besides, why trade halfway around the world for goods you can get at home for a great price?”