Sidney Sheldon - Chasing Tomorrow

The old man’s face lit up. Now Tracy was talking his language.

“I can do better than that, my dear. I can show you.”

TWO HOURS LATER, DRIVING back to Steamboat Springs, Tracy knew a lot more about chess moves. But she still had no idea what Daniel Cooper was trying to tell her.

She tried to think sequentially.

Chess.

Jeff and I did a scam together on the QE2 where we hoodwinked two grand masters, Pietr Negulesco and Boris Melnikov. Does Cooper know about that? Is the QE2 “where masters meet”?

Presumably I’m the queen in this “dance of black and white.”

But who are the “twenty knights” waiting for me?

Five boards. Twenty knights . . . Shadows of answers danced before her eyes, but there was nothing she could grasp, nothing that was real.

THE STEAMBOAT LIBRARY WAS practically empty. A few young mothers sat in a circle in the children’s section, listening to “story time” with their toddlers, but that was it. Tracy remembered coming here with Nick when he was little and felt a momentary pang of nostalgia.

“Can I help you?” The librarian smiled at Tracy. “Mrs. Schmidt, isn’t it?”

“Do you have a history section?” Tracy asked.

“Of course. I’ll show you.”

“Thank you. Also, do I need a code to log on to the computers here?”

The librarian nodded. “I can give you a temporary library card so you can log on.”

THAT NIGHT, AFTER NICHOLAS was asleep, Tracy read through the notes she’d made until her eyes began to cross. Numbers swam in her head like pieces of an elaborate jigsaw puzzle

Twenty knights. Five chessboards. Thirteen lambs . Six hills. One lost.

At the library earlier, she had searched both the books and online for references to “six hills” and “places with six hills.”

The results were not encouraging. There were six hills in Alpharetta, Georgia. The Russian city of Tomsk was integrating its universities into a “six hills” campus. Then there were the tepeta, six syenite hills in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. A famous string of Roman long barrows—ancient burial grounds—in Hertfordshire, England, was known as the six hills. Jerusalem famously had seven hills—seven was six, after “one lost”?

It was hopeless. Jeff could be anywhere from Jerusalem to Georgia. She tried not to think about what might be happening to him, what torture a man like Daniel Cooper might have devised. But panic crept into her body with each passing minute and hour. Jeff needed her! She was his only hope. If Cooper was playing chess with Tracy, he was winning. Hands down.

She read the poem again. The only verse that made no sense at all to her was the third, the one about the shroud and the lambs. Fourteen suffers daily pain. What significance did the number fourteen have? None. All that Tracy could think of was “unlucky thirteen,” and that wasn’t going to get them very far. She’d been sure that chess was the key to this, but her trip to Granby had made her more confused, not less.

Someone would be waiting for the queen —was she the queen? —beneath the stars. Did that mean Cooper’s meeting place was outside, in the open air?

A thought suddenly occurred to her. The line in the last verse: upon the stage of history. A stage could be outside in the open air. Something of historical importance.

Racing into the study, she switched on her computer. Her first idea was London and the Globe Theatre. The meticulously restored stage where Shakespeare’s plays had first been performed was in the open air, beneath the stars. But how did it link to six hills? Or chess?

What about other outdoor theaters? Greek or Roman amphitheaters?

Cooper knew about Jeff’s interest in archaeology. Was that a clue? What about the six hills in England, the Roman long barrows? Was there an amphitheater nearby?

Tracy could feel herself getting closer. But as the hours ticked by—eleven, twelve, one in the morning—the answer still eluded her. She went to bed and had terrible nightmares of torture and death, of Jeff Stevens being ripped from her arms out into a cold, black, endless sea.

TRACY AWOKE WITH A start. The clock beside her bed read 5:06 A.M.

Five chessboards.

Six hills.

And suddenly it was there. Not the answer. But the question.

I know the question Cooper wants me to ask.

I know where I’m going to find Jeff.

JEAN RIZZO PACED HIS Lyon apartment, depressed. He’d picked up his children from school today and taken them to a pizza place for lunch. They’d all talked politely. Jean felt like a stranger.

Sylvie told him, “There are no shortcuts. You need to see them more.”

Jean had snapped at her out of guilt, because he knew she was right. Then he’d gone home feeling even worse. Checking his phone and e-mails, he found no message from Tracy, but two from his boss summoning him to a meeting in his office first thing tomorrow morning.

That could only mean one thing. Henri Marceau was assigning him to another case.

Jean couldn’t blame his boss. Henri had already cut him far more slack than he would have with any other detective, out of respect for their friendship. But Henri had bosses too, and budget cuts to deliver. The Bible Killer case was as cold as ever. Jean’s investigation had been an expensive failure.

Pouring himself a large glass of whiskey, Jean dialed Tracy’s number.

“Any progress?”

“Not really.” Tracy told him about her conversation with the chess player and her research into “six hills” and Roman ruins. Jean couldn’t put his finger on it, but something in her tone made him suspicious. Perhaps it was the fact that she sounded so relaxed. Jeff Stevens, a man she had married and clearly still loved, was in all likelihood being held captive by a known killer. And yet Tracy was talking to Jean about dead ends and false leads as if this were nothing but a game they were playing.

He asked her bluntly, “What aren’t you telling me?”

“Nothing! Why are you so suspicious?”

“I’m a detective. And you’re a con artist.”

“Retired,” Tracy reminded him.

“Semiretired,” Jean reminded her back. “You know where they are, don’t you?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Why aren’t you telling me? Do you want to go alone, is that it? Because he asked you to? I hope you know that’s out of the question.”

“I don’t know where they are, okay? I don’t know and that’s the truth.”

“But you suspect?”

Her split-second hesitation confirmed it.

Jean’s voice became urgent, anxious. “For Christ’s sake, Tracy. Do not go to find them alone. It’s madness. If you know something, anything, you must tell me. Cooper will kill you, whatever he wrote in that note. He will kill you both without blinking.”

Tracy said, “I don’t think he’ll kill me.” Jean could hear Nick’s voice in the background. “I have to go.”

“Tracy!”

“If I find out anything concrete, I’ll tell you, I promise.”

“Tracy! Listen to me!”

For the second time in a week, Tracy hung up on him.

“Goddamn it!” Jean said aloud. Tracy Whitney was without a doubt the most infuriating woman he had ever met.

If anything happened to her, he would never forgive himself.

CHAPTER 25

BLAKE CARTER WATCHED TRACY and Nicholas as they rode up the hill toward him. Tracy’s hair had grown out a little and was now almost at her shoulders. It sailed behind her like the tail of a kite as she galloped into the breeze, racing against her boy, her slender figure perfectly meshed with the horse’s rhythm and movements as if they were one creature, not two. Tracy was a natural horsewoman. You couldn’t teach that kind of skill, just as you couldn’t fake the natural beauty that shone out of her like light from the sun.