Sidney Sheldon - Chasing Tomorrow

Jesus Christ.

Daniel Cooper’s going to crucify me!

CHAPTER 24

TRACY WAS AT HOME, reading, when the telephone rang.

“How are you with riddles?”

Jean Rizzo’s voice shattered her peace of mind in an instant, like a bullet through a windowpane.

“Terrible. I hate riddles.”

“You might want to improve your skills. Real quickly.”

“Yeah? Well, you might want to get lost. I’ve told you, Jean. Leave me alone.”

Tracy hung up.

Twenty seconds later the phone rang again. Tracy would have left it, but Nick was downstairs in the kitchen and might pick up if she didn’t.

“What?” she barked into the receiver.

“I need your help.”

“No. No more. You had my help and it didn’t help, remember? Please, Jean.”

“Daniel Cooper’s got Jeff Stevens.”

The silence on the other end of the line was deafening.

“Tracy? Are you still there?”

“What do you mean he’s ‘got’ Jeff?”

“Kidnapped. Abducted. Maybe worse, I don’t know. Cooper left a letter. It’s addressed to you.”

“It can’t be!” Tracy suppressed a sob. “Why?”

“I don’t know why. But I opened it and it’s a riddle, and I’m pretty sure that if you can’t help me solve it, Jeff Stevens is a dead man.”

More silence.

“I’m sorry, Tracy.”

After what felt like an age, Tracy’s voice crackled back onto the line.

“Read it to me.”

Jean exhaled. “Okay. This is it. ‘My dearest Tracy . . .’ ”

“He wrote ‘my dearest’?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. Go on.”

“ ‘My dearest Tracy. I have taken Mr. Stevens hostage. I hope, for Mr. Stevens’s sake and for your own, that you will act on the instructions contained in this note. What I write below will make sense to you and you alone. Do what I ask and neither you nor Stevens will be hurt. And come alone. Yours ever, D.C.’

“Has he sent you messages like this before?” Jean asked.

“No. No messages. Never. I’d have told you if he had. What else did he write?”

“Nothing. Just the riddle. You ready?”

Tracy closed her eyes. “Go ahead.”

“Okay, so it’s sort of like a poem. It’s in four stanzas.”

Four stanzas? Jesus. “Okay.”

Jean cleared his throat and began to read Cooper’s words aloud in his soft, Canadian accent:

“ ‘Twenty Knights at three times three

Waiting for the Queen will be.

Her lover, husband, destiny

Beneath the stars, where God can see.’

“That’s the first stanza. Mean anything to you?”

Tracy sighed. “No. Nothing. Knights and queens, maybe something to do with a card game?” She realized she was clutching at straws. “Go ahead and read to the end. Maybe it’ll make more sense as a whole.”

“Okay.” Rizzo went on: “So then he writes:

“ ‘Thirteen lambs at altar slain,

Fourteen suffers daily pain,

Soon to end, his sins erased,

The shroud of old will be replaced.’

“Then:

“ ‘Dance the dance in black and white,

Where masters meet, the time is right.

Six hills, one was lost,

Here shall sinners learn the cost.’

“And the last verse:

“ ‘Twenty Knights at three times three,

Upon the stage of history,

At last, my love will come to me,

And what the Lord demands will be.’

“That’s it.”

“That’s it?” Tracy sounded bereft. “Nothing else?”

“Nothing else.”

Silence descended again. Jean broke it first.

“Do you know what it means?”

“No,” said Tracy.

“Not any of it? You have no ideas at all?”

“I need time, Jean! You can’t just call me up out of the blue and read me some crazy poem and expect me to solve your case for you like that.” She snapped her fingers angrily. “Daniel Cooper’s insane. How am I supposed to know how his warped mind works?”

“Fair enough. I’m sorry. It’s just that we don’t have much—”

“Time. I know.”

Tracy could hear the disappointment in Jean Rizzo’s voice. The truth was, she did have an idea. But it was half formed and not yet clear and not a solution as such. She wasn’t ready to share it with Rizzo.

Jean said, “I’ll e-mail the poem to you now so you have it in writing. I have to leave Seville and fly back to France in the morning, but you know how to reach me. You will let me know if anything comes to you? Any idea or clue or thought, however unlikely.”

“Of course I will.”

“You’re the key to this, Tracy. I knew it before but now Cooper’s confirmed it directly. He’s trying to tell you something. This is personal.”

“Are you sure he has Jeff?” Tracy asked. “How do you know he’s not bluffing about that? Using Jeff as a ploy to lure me in?”

“I don’t,” Jean Rizzo said truthfully. “But do you really want to call that bluff, Tracy? If you’re wrong . . .”

He didn’t need to finish the sentence.

I know. If I’m wrong, Jeff dies.

Tracy sat back in her chair and rubbed her eyes. Her palms were sweating and her mouth felt dry, as if she were chewing a ball of cotton.

She thought, I’m afraid. I’m afraid for Jeff and I’m afraid for myself.

Jeff had saved Tracy’s life once. Now it was her turn to return the favor. Except that what she’d said to Jean Rizzo before was true. She hated riddles. She was terrible at puzzles of any kind, always had been. And this one had been concocted by a madman.

“Give me twenty-four hours,” she told Jean. “I need to think.”

“We don’t have twenty-four . . .” Jean began.

But the line was already dead.

TRACY DROPPED NICHOLAS OFF at school the next day. Instead of heading home, she turned onto Route 40 and headed toward the tiny town of Granby.

The Granby chess club met four days a week, in a small room above the general store. Its members were mostly retired men, some local, some from as far afield as Boulder or even Denver. For a tiny local club, Granby had a big reputation.

“I need to know about chess moves.”

Tracy sat at a Formica table, opposite a man in his late sixties named Bob. Bob had a wrinked face like a pickled walnut. He was short and bald, and had tiny, wide-set brown eyes that glinted with intelligence and interest as he listened to Tracy talk.

“That’s a big subject. Can you be a bit more specific?”

Tracy handed Bob a piece of paper with Cooper’s poem written on it.

“It’s a riddle,” she explained. “The answer should be a place, a very specific geographic location. It may also specify a time. At first I thought the writer was alluding to a card game, with the knights and the queens. But then I looked at that third stanza, and the phrases ‘dance the dance in black and white’ and ‘where masters meet.’ And I realized it wasn’t cards. It was chess.”

The old man nodded. “I can see the dance might be an allusion to chess. But there are no references to moves here.”

“Twenty knights at three times three, waiting for the queen?” Tracy asked hopefully.

Bob smiled. “A chessboard has four knights, my dear, as I’m sure you are aware. Two white, two black. There are no moves with twenty knights. Unless, of course, you had five boards. Five games, playing simultaneously.”

Tracy wrote Five games? on the pad in front of her.

“Let’s forget the numbers,” she told Bob. “Can you tell me about moves where a player uses knights to trap his opponent’s queen?”