Some Like It Hawk(73)

“Wait for me down at the car,” Fisher said.

“Yes, sir,” the two voices said in unison.

The room door opened and closed again. Fisher glanced over, as if to make sure the guards were on the other side of it. Then he pulled out his cell phone and punched some buttons.

“It’s me,” he said. “No luck.”

Evidently whoever was on the other side of the call had a lot to say in response, and was saying it rather loudly. Fisher moved the phone ever so slightly farther away from his ear and waited, staring at the botanical print above the desk.

“I realize that,” he finally said. “But I can’t find it if it’s not here to be found. And if you want my guess, I don’t think he has it.”

More listening.

“Absolutely,” Fisher said. “It’s the only reason I can see for that whole crazy stunt.”

I found myself wishing Fisher would find some reason to put his phone on speaker. I had a feeling I could learn a lot if I heard both sides of this conversation.

“No.” Fisher was starting to sound annoyed. “It’s the only copy.… Well, it is now.… No, like I keep telling you, a photocopy’s useless. Same thing for a scan. Too easy to forge. If both sides show up with a photocopy, it’s a he said/she said thing, and we can win that. They show up with the original and we’re sunk.”

Caroline poked me, and pointed at the crack in the curtain. Did she think I wasn’t already listening to every word?

“That’s what I’m trying to do,” Fisher said. “I’ll fill you in later.”

He punched a button or two and then stuck the phone in his pocket as if glad to be rid of it.

He looked around, frowning, as if dissatisfied with his surroundings. Was he doubting the thoroughness of the guards’ search? Had he only just noticed that they’d not only searched but trashed the room? I’d assumed either that they didn’t care who knew the room was searched or that they were hoping to leave a message for Denton.

Suddenly he strode over to the window. Caroline and I drew back and quailed in our separate corners of the ledge.

“No wonder this place is such an oven,” he muttered. I heard him slide the glass door closed and then latch it.

“Great,” I muttered. “Now we’re really stuck.”





Chapter 27




“Sssh!” Caroline hissed.

“If we keep it quiet, he can’t hear us with the window closed,” I whispered. I was peering into the room again. “And it’s okay. He’s gone now.”

“It’s not okay,” Caroline said. “I’m stuck here on this wretched little balcony with my bum hanging over the railing, clinging for dear life to a geranium plant.”

“They’re petunias,” I said.

“Whatever. I’m not a botanist. How are you going to get me down from here?”

“I have my cell phone,” I said. “Do you have Ekaterina’s number?”

Of course, it took rather a lot of careful wriggling to extricate my cell phone from my pocket without knocking myself off the balcony. And after all that, Ekaterina’s phone rang on unanswered.

“She probably turns it off when she’s working,” I said.

“She could put the damned thing on vibrate!”

“Maybe she has and will call us back as soon as she can,” I said, in my most soothing tone.

“As soon as she can may be too late,” Caroline said. “I’m not sure how much longer I can hang on.”

I took a closer look and realized that she wasn’t exaggerating. I’d managed to wedge myself between the rail and the side of the hotel, but even so my perch felt precarious. Caroline was perched on the rail and wobbled alarmingly. To keep from falling, she had to hold on to the rail and the petunia pot, which meant she was supporting a lot of her weight with her arms—and she didn’t have the same upper body strength that my blacksmithing gave me.

I had to do something.

If I’d had any kind of metal tool, I might have tried breaking the window, but the closest thing I had to a hard object was my phone, and I didn’t think it would survive an abrupt encounter with triple-paned glass. I glanced down. If I could crawl over the railing and dangle from it as far down as possible before letting go, I would probably survive the fall. I might not even break anything if I relaxed.

At least that was what Rob would tell me. He was a total klutz but claimed he’d never broken a bone in any of his mishaps. According to him, the key was to retrain yourself so when you realized you were falling, your reaction was not “Oh no! I’m falling! I’ll break every bone in my body!” but “Hey, cool, I seem to be falling again.”