Sidney Sheldon’s Chasing Tomorrow (Tracy Whitney)

SHE OPENED THE BRIEFCASE and looked at the money.

“Two hundred and fifty thousand?”

“Of course. As agreed. Feel free to count it.”

“Oh, I will. Later. Not that I think you’d cheat me.”

“I should hope not.”

“But ­people do make mistakes.”

He smiled. “I don’t.”

He had made mistakes, of course, in the past. Mistakes that had cost him dearly. The worst mistake he’d ever made had involved taking Jeff Stevens and Tracy Whitney at their word. Those two repellent swindlers had destroyed his life, once. Now, in some small way, he had returned the favor. Destroying their marriage wasn’t enough. But it was a start.

“I didn’t enjoy this job,” the girl was saying, emptying the contents of the briefcase into her own, tattered backpack. She’d cut her hair since he last saw her in London and now wore it short and black, in a sixties-­style bob. He preferred it to the look she’d ­adopted for Rebecca Mortimer, all long tresses and freckles. Youthful innocence didn’t suit her.

“Tracy Whitney may be a bitch, but Jeff Stevens is a nice man. I felt bad for him.”

The man’s upper lip curled. “How you felt is not relevant.”

It is to me, she felt like saying, but she didn’t bother. She’d learned long ago that arguments with this man were fruitless. Despite his brilliant intellect, or perhaps because of it, he had the emotional sensitivity of an amoeba. Come to think of it, the analogy was probably unkind to amoebas.

“Anyway.” He smiled that creepy smile of his, the one that always made her shiver. “You got fucked, didn’t you? Women all love getting fucked, especially by Stevens. Your little titties are probably tingling right now just thinking about it, aren’t they?”

She ignored him, zipping up her backpack and locking it. She had not slept with Jeff Stevens, as it happened. Rather to her annoyance, Tracy Whitney had interrupted them right at the crucial moment. But this was not information she intended to share with him. She’d be happy when they got back to robbing art galleries and jewelry stores.

“I mean it,” she said, standing up to leave. “Any more old scores you can settle yourself.”

“I’ll be in touch,” said the man.

FOR A MONTH AFTER Tracy left him, Jeff went to ground. He rented a flat in Rosary Gardens in South Kensington, unplugged the phone and barely went out.

After more than ten unreturned voice mails, Professor Nick Trenchard tracked him down at the flat.

“Come back to the museum,” he told Jeff. “You need to keep busy.”

He tried not to show how shocked he was by Jeff’s appearance. Jeff wore a full beard, which made him look decades older, and his crumpled clothes hung off his skinny frame like rags on a scarecrow. Empty beer cans and take-­out boxes littered the apartment, and the TV was permanently on low in the background.

“I am busy. You wouldn’t believe how many episodes of Homeland I missed since I got married,” Jeff quipped. But there was no laughter behind his eyes anymore.

“I’m serious, Jeff. You need a job.”

“I have a job.”

“You do?”

“Sure. Drinking.” Jeff collapsed onto the couch and opened another beer. “I’m pretty good at it, as it happens. I’m thinking of giving myself a promotion. Maybe something in the Jack Daniel’s division.”

Other friends tried and failed to intervene. In the end it was Gunther Hartog who refused to take no for an answer.

“Pack your bags,” he told Jeff. “We’re going to the country.”

Gunther had turned up at the flat in Rosary Gardens with a small army of Brazilian women who set about picking up the mountains of trash that Jeff had accumulated during his self-­imposed imprisonment. When he refused to move from the couch, four of the women lifted it off the ground with Jeff still on it, while a fifth swept the floor underneath.

“I hate the country.”

“Nonsense. Hampshire’s beautiful.”

“Beauty’s overrated.”

“So’s alcohol poisoning. Get your suitcase, Jeff.”

“I’m not going, Gunther.”

“You are going, old boy.”

“Or what?” Jeff laughed. “You’re gonna ground me?”

“Don’t be silly,” said Gunther. “That would be ridiculous.”

Jeff felt a sharp stabbing pain in his left arm. “What the . . .”

He just had time to see the syringe, and Gunther’s satisfied smile, before everything went black.

IT TOOK AN ENTIRE month to dry Jeff out. By the time he was sober, and sane enough to start eating and shaving again, summer was already upon them. Gunther had hoped that perhaps Tracy would have gotten in touch by now, but there was still no word.

“You must move on with life, old boy,” Gunther told Jeff. “You can’t spend the rest of your days waiting for the telephone to ring. That would drive anyone mad.”

They were strolling in the grounds of Gunther’s seventeenth-­century manor house, a thirty-­acre paradise of formal gardens, lake and woodland, with a small farm attached. Gunther had been a pioneer of self-­sufficiency long before it became fashionable and prided himself on the fact that he lived almost entirely off the fat of his own land. The fact that the land had been bought with stolen antiques didn’t dim his view of himself as an honest farmer.

“I agree that I need to move on,” said Jeff, stopping to admire a cote full of homing pigeons. He and Tracy had used one of Gunther’s birds on their last job together in Amsterdam. “But I can’t face going back to the museum. Rebecca ruined that for me. Along with the rest of my life.”

The bitterness in his voice was painful.

“Ah, about that,” said Gunther. “I managed to unearth some information about the young lady. If you’re interested.”

“Of course,” said Jeff. In some strange way, Rebecca felt like a link to Tracy, one of the few he had left.

“Her real name is Elizabeth Kennedy.”

If Jeff was surprised that “Rebecca Mortimer” had been an alias, he didn’t show it. He’d spent most of his life in a world where nothing was what it seemed.

“She grew up in Wolverhampton, poor thing, raised by adoptive parents who couldn’t control her from the start. Very bright, evidently, but she did poorly at school. Two expulsions by the time she turned eleven.”

“My heart bleeds,” said Jeff.

“At sixteen, she’d had a string of minor run-­ins with the law and got her first custodial sentence.”

“For?”

“Credit-­card fraud. She volunteered at a local charity and downloaded details of all the donors from their computer. Then she skimmed tiny amounts, a few pence here or there, off each contribution. She made off with over thirty thousand pounds in eighteen months before anyone caught on. Like I say, she’s smart. She kept it simple.”

Jeff thought about the amateurishly doctored video footage of Tracy and Alan McBride and felt sick.

“After she got out of prison, she never went home again. These days she’s after bigger fish. Jewel thefts mostly. She’s quite the expert. Works with a partner apparently, but nobody knows who.”

“What was she after at the British Museum?” Jeff asked. “Apart from me.”

“We don’t know. But I suspect nothing. She used the internship as cover while she pulled off other jobs in London. Her name’s been linked to that hit on Theo Fennell last Christmas.”

Jeff’s eyes widened. The theft of half a million pounds’ worth of rubies from Theo Fennell’s flagship store on Old Brompton Road had been the talk of the London underworld. The job had been perfectly executed, and the police had been left without a single clue.

“Any idea where she is now?”

“None,” said Gunther. “Although if I knew, I’m not sure I’d tell you. I’d hate to see you spend the rest of your days banged up for murder, old boy. Such a waste.”

They strolled on, along a gravel pathway lined with cottage garden plants: roses and hollyhocks and foxgloves and lupines. He’s right, thought Jeff. Hampshire is beautiful. At least Gunther’s little corner of it is. He wondered if he would ever be able truly to appreciate beauty again. Without Tracy, every sense seemed dull, every pleasure blunted. It was like looking at the world through glasses permanently shaded gray.

“I do need a job,” he mused. “Maybe I could try a smaller museum. Or one of the university history departments. University College London is supposed to be looking.”

Gunther stopped dead in his tracks. When he spoke, he was quite stern.

“Now look here. Enough of this nonsense. You’re not cut out to be a bloody librarian, Jeff. If you want my opinion it was the nonsensical decision to give up your career that caused all the problems with you and Tracy in the first place.”

Jeff smiled indulgently. “But, Gunther, my ‘career,’ as you call it, was breaking the law. I was a thief. I ripped ­people off.”

“Only ­people who deserved it,” said Gunther.

“Maybe. But it still meant I lived my life on the run, always looking over my shoulder.”

The older man’s eyes gleamed mischievously. “I know! Wasn’t it fun?”

Jeff burst out laughing. It was the first time he could remember doing so in months. It felt good.

“Just think what a comeback you could have,” Gunther said, waxing enthusiastic, “now that you’re a bona fide specialist in antiquities. You have the contacts and the brains. You can talk the talk and walk the walk. Nobody else out there can do that, Jeff. You’d be unique! Have you any idea what some of these wealthy private collectors are willing to pay? These are ­people who are used to buying whatever they want: homes, planes, yachts, diamonds, lovers, influence. It incenses them when they covet objects that simply aren’t for sale. Unique pieces of history. Objects that only you can track down and acquire.”

Jeff allowed the appeal of the idea to wash over him for a moment.

“You could name your price,” said Gunther. “What do you want, Jeff? What do you really want?”

The only thing I want is Tracy back, thought Jeff. I’m just like Gunther’s collectors. I can have it all. But the one thing I really want, no one can give me.

Gunther watched Jeff’s face begin to fall. Realizing he was losing him, that the moment was passing, he made his move.

“It just so happens I have exactly the job to get you started,” he said, clapping his bony hands tightly onto Jeff’s shoulders. “How would you like a lovely little jaunt to Rome?”