Chapter 16 - The Second Layer of the Conspiracy
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A sudden, icy current ran down my spine.
"Wait a second," I said softly, leaning closer across the coffee table. "The basement linen chute doesn't connect to the eightieth-floor wine cellar corridor, Rosa. And our building hasn't hired a new afternoon maintenance man in three years. What did this maintenance man tell you when he brought the rabbit back to your door at six-fifteen?"
Rosa frowned, looking down at her sleeping daughter.
"I was in the shower when he knocked on the staff suite door," Rosa said slowly, a flicker of confusion entering her voice. "Lily answered the inner screen latch because she heard him say he had Barnaby. When I came out with a towel wrapped around my hair thirty seconds later, the hallway was already empty—and Lily was standing there holding her rabbit. Wait... ten minutes later, right before I noticed the baby gate was unlatched, Lily said she had to go upstairs to find Barnaby’s secret."
My heart began to hammer against my ribs with a rhythm it hadn't hit even when Viktor Kael pointed a gun between my eyes on the stairs.
Very carefully, so I wouldn't wake the sleeping three-year-old, I eased Barnaby the stuffed rabbit out from beneath Lily’s relaxed fingers and replaced the toy with a soft velvet throw pillow.
I carried the battered stuffed rabbit over to the floor lamp by the window and felt along the freshly stitched nylon seam on its back.
Inside the soft polyester stuffing, my fingers closed around something hard, flat, and metallic.
Using my pocketknife, I snipped the two inches of new black nylon thread and pulled the object out of the rabbit’s stuffing.
It was a sub-miniature military-grade directional audio transmitter and proximity beacon—not the kind used by corporate spies like Viktor Kael, but a custom-frequency encrypted transponder paired with a tiny folded slip of waterproof rice paper tucked around its casing.
I unfolded the tiny square of rice paper beneath the lamp light.
Written across the paper in neat, unmistakable block handwriting—handwriting I hadn't seen in five years—was a single sentence:
Julian is only the broker. Check the third partition on the Post-Mortem drive with key 10-14-92.
My breath caught in my throat so sharply that Cole Mercer, standing guard outside the sitting room doorway, stepped inside with his hand on his holster.
May you like
"Boss?" Cole asked, seeing the color drain from my face as I stared at the tiny slip of rice paper and the one-eyed stuffed rabbit in my hands. "What is that?"
"Lily didn't wander up to the eightieth floor by accident tonight, Cole," I whispered, my hand shaking slightly for the first time all night. "And she didn't accidentally overhear Diana and Julian behind the wine racks."
