Pressing a hand to her chest as if to calm her racing heart, Lucy reached for the phone and answered. “Yes?”
“It’s me, Marcus. I thought it best to act with haste—you mustn’t stay in the city any longer than you absolutely have to. So you’re in. You are Professor Sandra Duncan. Your colleague is Dr. Winston Marlboro.”
“I’m an actress from the seventies and he’s two packs of cigarettes?”
“I had to think fast,” Marcus said with a self-deprecating sigh. “Mr. Scofield Danforth will be expecting you. He’ll bring the pieces to you for examination. He’s been told this is a matter of national security, that he mustn’t tell anyone else. I didn’t say it had to do with the current issue dominating the news, but I said enough that he no doubt drew that very conclusion. So he’ll cooperate. Please stay safe, my dear.”
“I’ll do my best. You’ve been a good friend to me, Marcus. I’ll never forget it.”
“Nonsense. Go now, do what you must. Whatever it is, I know it’s the right thing.”
The phone went dead, and she hung up, smoothed her hair and lifted her eyes. “We can go now.”
He didn’t want to go now. He wanted to follow up on what had almost happened between them. And yet, that was ridiculous, wasn’t it? The survival of his race was at stake, and he wanted to put off saving them for the sake of making love to this goddess of a woman?
Yeah. He did. He wouldn’t act on that desire, but deep down, that was exactly what he wanted. Chuck it all for an hour in her arms. Buried in her body. Two hours. An entire afternoon.
Hell. Wrong time. Wrong place. And probably, he knew, the wrong woman. And yet the thought lingered, playing out in his mind in vivid Technicolor and making his lips tingle at the thought of hers beneath them.
They left the hotel. In a strained and nervous silence, they walked side by side, but not touching, to the museum.
After their brief visit to the museum’s gift shop and the purchase that would enable them to pull this thing off, followed by a quick stop at the rest room, they went to their appointment with the twitchy little man with the pretentious and unlikely name of Scofield Danforth who was in charge of the traveling exhibit. They waited at a table in a private room in the glass-lined administrative section. They were on the north side of the breathtaking building, and the office windows were unprotected, as far as she could tell. Not that anyone could get out via those windows, with or without any valuable artifact, painting or jewel. They didn’t open, and there was nothing outside them to use as an escape route. No trees, no fire escape on that side of the building. Only an uninterrupted, albeit brief, drop to the manicured lawns of Central Park below.
No way out. Hell.
The curator returned with the requested items, three nine-inch-tall limestone sculptures of a nude man. He set the pieces on the table and stepped out of the room.
Lucy took the pieces in her hands one by one, reveling, as she always did, in the miracle of holding, of touching, something that had been held, touched, fashioned, by the hands of people who’d lived more than five thousand years ago. The three pieces were similar, with rough surfaces and an overall weathered appearance, gray-white in color, with varying striations of rust and darker grays. Holding the first one, she noted that the priest king’s body was almost cylindrical, his legs one blocklike unit, with an incised line to differentiate one from the other and hash marks to separate the toes. The figure flared from the hips into the upper body. The arms were bent at the elbows and held close to the body, fists at the chest, and like the legs, they were only roughly delineated. The round face featured expanded cheeks and full lips, a disc-shaped beard and a band around the hair. The genitals were carved in more realistic detail than any other part of the body.
“He left us alone with them. Not very nervous about us taking off with them, is he?” James asked softly, interrupting Lucy’s reverent contemplation of the artifact.
“Why should he be? There’s no way out of here other than the way we came in. And besides, we’re under constant surveillance.” She nodded at the video camera mounted in a corner of the room.