Hell,Neil thought inwardly, fighting the urge to panic.
He forced his feet to move, hurrying back into the ornate Mughal hall after the spymaster.
“Have you been in India long, Dr.Culpepper?”Borthwick asked without looking back at him.
“Just a day or so.”Neil swallowed thickly, studying Borthwick from behind.The man had a whip hanging from his belt.The coil of dark, braided leather was held in place by a brass snap.
Neil didn’t know much about military equipment, but it seemed like a very odd accessory for a secret policeman.
It was even odder that the man would have been wearing it while sipping scotch on his patio.
“Where were you before?”Borthwick casually demanded.
“Egypt.”
Borthwick stopped.
Neil froze, conscious of Constance’s presence at his back.The hall was lit by only a single lamp, but it glared like a spotlight after the gloom of the garden.
“Egypt,” Borthwick echoed thoughtfully.“Interesting.What were you doing there?”
Neil reached for a response that was as close to the truth as he could get without stumbling into something Borthwick might actually have heard about.“Excavating an Old Kingdom funerary chapel in the Giza necropolis.”
Borthwick absorbed Neil’s answer.Nothing in his expression gave any clue as to what he thought about it.
The colonel turned away to climb the stairs.“What brought you to India, then?Presumably, it wasn’t Lord Aldbury.You would hardly have had time to get here from Egypt on his word.”
Neil had half anticipated the question and quickly rattled off his story.“I’m researching a paper on Gupta-era architecture.I’ve a theory that the Persians actually brought Late Period Egyptian influences with them when the Achaemenid Empire invaded, which carried over into later municipal building styles.”
“Hmm,” Borthwick commented neutrally.
Was he bored?Neil hoped the man was bored.Bored was much safer than interested.
They reached the top of the stairs, Neil’s nerves jangling with his sense of how far they had come into the palace—and how far they were to an escape should they need one.
His attention dropped once more to the whip at Borthwick’s belt.
“That’s not standard issue, is it?”he blurted out.
Borthwick’s eyes glittered with a spark of amusement.“No.Surprisingly useful piece of equipment, though.”
Useful.Neil wondered what that meant—and felt even more deeply uncomfortable.
Borthwick led him into one of the rooms that faced the drive.The space was set up as a library.A heavy oak desk in the center held a stack of blank paper and little else.
One wall was lined with bookshelves, though Neil could tell that the volumes were merely decorative.A few landscape paintings hung on the walls, just as dull as the ones in the clubhouse.
A plinth by the window held a marble statue of a robust Englishman in Georgian dress and a wig.Neil could just make out the name on a plaque beneath it.
CLIVE
Borthwick swung back one of the paintings to reveal a safe set into the wall.He twisted the dial for the lock, and the door popped open.
The colonel took a carved wooden box from inside and set it down on the desk without any ceremony.“There you are.”
Without waiting for Neil to respond, he moved to the window to study the incoming storm.The opening reached from just above the floor to nearly the height of the ceiling, some twelve feet overhead.The narrow glass had been swung aside to admit the evening breeze.
Neil risked a quick glance at Constance.She had positioned herself in the corner of the room and answered his look with a glare.He could readily interpret the meaning of it.
