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He had thought she would seek help immediately, so he had returned to his luxurious home in Wayzata to wait. He wasn’t worried about her accusations; after all, why would he kill two people in order to steal some documents he could obtain by simply asking for them? He was a respected and well-connected member of the community. He was on two hospital boards, he gave regularly and generously to all the politically correct charities, and several of the richest families in Minnesota had hopes—useless ones, of course—of enticing him into the fold by way of marriage. Moreover, he had an alibi in the form of his housekeeper, Antonetta Dolk. She would swear he had been working in his study all evening, that she had even taken coffee to him. Antonetta could pass any lie-detector test devised by man, a useful ability in a housekeeper, and one he valued far more than dusting. She worked, of course, for the Foundation; he had surrounded himself with people loyal only to him.
To think that the documents had surfaced after so long! They had come out of an insignificant dig in southern France, a dig that had produced so little, and nothing that appeared of any great age, that the documents hadn’t drawn any attention. Certainly no one whose job it was to evaluate all finds and report anything interesting to him had found anything intriguing in documents that seemed to be only a few centuries old. He would have to take care of the bungler—another job for Conrad. If the documents had been correctly evaluated, they would never have been photographed, stored, and the photographs sent to Grace St. John for routine translation. None of this would have happened, and the information would be in his hands instead of Grace’s.
It was Ford who had alerted him to the content of the obscure documents, and therefore caused his own death. Life could be so ironic, Parrish thought. Ford’s chance comment about Grace’s latest project, something about the Knights Templar, had set events into motion.
Parrish had quickly checked the assignment records and traced the original documents to their storage location in Paris. The French could be so difficult about allowing artifacts, even not-so-old ones, out of the country. Parrish had sent his people in to retrieve the papers, only to find that they had been destroyed, apparently by fire—though nothing else in the vault
had been damaged. Nothing remained of the documents except a fine, white ash.
Grace St. John had the only existing copies. And according to the assignment record, she had been working on the translation for three days. Grace was good at her job; in fact, she was the best language expert on staff. He couldn’t take the chance that she had already deciphered enough of the documents to know what she had; she, and everyone else who knew what she’d been working on, had to be eliminated.
Strange that Grace should prove more difficult than either Ford or Bryant. How long had he known her? Almost ten years? She had always seemed such a shy, mousy type, no makeup, her hair scraped back in an unflattering braid, slightly overweight. Her complete lack of style was an affront to his sensibilities. For all that, several times over the years he had been tempted to seduce her. Likely he had been bored, between women; little Grace presented something of a challenge, with her ridiculous middle-class morals. She “loved” her husband, and was faithful to him. But she had perfect skin, like translucent porcelain, and the most astonishingly carnal mouth he’d ever seen. Parrish smiled, feeling the blood pool in his groin as he considered the uses to which he could put that mouth, so wide and soft and pouty. Poor old Ford had certainly lacked the imagination to enjoy her as he could have!
She would be as helpless in the streets as any child. Anything could have happened to her during the night. She might already be dead.
If so, one problem would be conveniently solved, but he sincerely hoped she was still alive. She would keep the papers with her, and when Conrad found her, he would find the papers. If any of the human trash that prowled the streets at night killed her, however, her computer would be taken and fenced, and the papers thrown away. Once the copied documents disappeared into the maw of the night world, they would likely never surface again. They would be gone, and with them the long-searched-for, critical information. There would no longer be a purpose in the Foundation, and his plans would be reduced to so much ash, just like the original documents.
That couldn’t be allowed to happen. One way or another, he would get those papers.
Grace couldn’t sleep. She was exhausted, but every time she closed her eyes she saw Ford, the sudden, horrible blankness of his eyes as the bullet snuffed out his life, saw him toppling over on the bed.
It was still raining. She sat huddled in a metal storage building, hidden behind a lawn mower that was missing a wheel, a greasy tool box, some rusting cans of paint, and several moldy cardboard boxes marked “Xmas Decorations.” The eight-by-ten building hadn’t been locked, but then there wasn’t anything in it worth stealing, except for a few wrenches and screwdrivers.
She wasn’t certain exactly where she was. She had simply walked north until she was too tired to walk any farther, then taken refuge in the storage building behind a ’fifties-style ranch house. The neighborhood was showing signs of raggedness as its lower-middle-class respectability slowly deteriorated. No cars were parked in the carport, so she had taken the chance that no one was there. If any neighbors were at home, the rain had kept them indoors, and no one shouted at her as she walked slowly across the backyard and opened the flimsy metal door.
She had scrambled over the clutter until she reached a back corner, then settled down on the dirty cement. She had sat in a stupor, staring at nothing. Time passed, but she had no grasp of it. After a while she heard a car drive up, and several car doors slammed. Kids yelled and argued, and a woman’s voice irritably told them to shut up. There was the squeak of a storm door opening, then the slam of another door, and the human clatter was silenced behind walls that held warmth and normalcy.
Grace leaned her head on her knees. She was so tired, and so hungry. She didn’t know what to do next.
Ford and Bryant would be buried, and she wouldn’t be there to see them one last time, to touch them, to put flowers on their graves.
Her throat worked, closing tight on the surge of grief that made her rock back and forth. She felt herself flying apart, felt her control shredding, and she hugged her arms tightly as if she could hold everything together that way.
She had never even taken Ford’s name, Wessner, as her own. She had kept her maiden name, St. John. The reasons had been so practical, so modern; her degree had been awarded to Grace St. John, and there was her driver’s license, her social security, so much paperwork to be changed if she changed her name. And, of course, Minneapolis was in the vanguard of political correctness; it would have been considered hopelessly gauche by the academic crowd if she had taken Ford’s name.
The pain was almost unbearable. Ford had been willing to die for her, but she hadn’t been willing to use his surname as her own. He’d never asked, never even mentioned it; knowing Ford, it hadn’t been important to him. He’d been so grounded; their marriage had mattered to him, not what name she used. But suddenly, to her, it mattered. She yearned for that link to him, a link she would never have now, any more than she would ever have his children.
They had planned to have two. They had talked about it, but put parenthood off while they both built their careers. After this past Christmas, they had decided to wait another year, and Grace had continued taking her birth control pills.
Now Ford was dead, and the useless pills had been left behind in a house to which she would never return.
Oh, God, Ford!
She couldn’t bear this. The pain was too great. She had to do something or she would lose her mind, run screaming from this filthy little metal building and stand in the middle of the street until she was either arrested or killed.
Jerkily she pulled the computer case from the plastic bag. The light in the building was a dim, muted green, too poor to do any translation work off the copies themselves, but she had already had some of them transferred to disk and she could work on the computer. She was too tired to get much accomplished, but she desperately needed a few minutes of distraction. She had always been able to lose herself in her work; maybe this time it would save her sanity.
She didn’t have much room, crammed in the corner the way she was. She repositioned the boxes of Christmas decorations, sliding one in front of her to use as a desk; she knew from experience that the laptop generated too much heat to rest it on her legs. She slapped down the mouse pad, then opened the top of the computer and pushed the switch on the side. The screen lit and the machine made its musical electronic noises as it went through the booting process. When the menu appeared on the screen, she moved the cursor down to the program she wanted and clicked the mouse. She already knew which disk she wanted, and had it ready to slide into the A drive.
The disk contained the section she had been working on before, when curiosity had led her to do more research on the Knights Templar. The language was Old French, something she was so familiar with that she should be able to work even with her mind so numb.
She accessed the file, and the words filled the screen. The letters were indistinct with age, strangely formed, and medieval people had been very creative spellers. There hadn’t been any standardized spellings back then, so people had used whatever sounded right to them.
Grace stared at the screen, slowly scrolling as she read and reestablished herself in the work. Despite everything, she could feel her concentration gathering, her focus narrowing as the documents pulled her into their power. The name popped out at her again, “Niall of Scotland,” and she took a deep breath. She eased down into a cross-legged position on the concrete, moving closer to the computer as she automatically fished out a pen and the pad that was always in the computer case for taking notes.
Whoever this Niall of Scotland had been before joining the Order, he had quickly become renowned as its greatest warrior. She skimmed over the cramped lines on the screen, jotting down notes on sections she couldn’t quite make out, or on words that were unfamiliar to her. She didn’t notice her heartbeat speeding, or feel the increased oxygen boosting her concentration. Instead she felt as if she were being sucked into the screen, into the epic account of a monk who had lived and died almost seven hundred years before.
Niall had been “of great size, three elnes and five more.” Since this document was in French, Grace decided the measurement would more likely have been a Flemish ell, twenty-seven inches, rather than an English one of thirty-seven inches. And though Niall had been Scots, the Scots ell was something like forty-five inches, which meant that by Scots measurement three ells and five inches would have placed him close to twelve feet tall. The Flemish ell was more reasonable, making the man stand about six feet four, tall for his time but not freakishly so. Medieval people had been of varying sizes, depending on their nutrition during childhood. Some knights had been ridiculously small, their suits of armor looking as if they had been made for children, while others had been big even by modern standards.
