Honor Among Thieves Read online

  She swung her bag over her shoulder and stepped out onto the road. She began to walk slowly towards the house.

  They had chosen the location well. The farmhouse was several miles from the nearest building—and that was an empty barn—at the end of a track that even desperate lovers would have thought twice about.

  There was no sign of anyone being in the house, but she knew they were there, waiting, watching her every move. She opened the door without knocking and immediately saw one of them in the hall.

  “Upstairs,” he said, pointing. She did not reply as she walked past him and began to climb the stairs.

  She went straight into the bedroom and found the young girl sitting on the end of the bed reading. Sally turned and smiled at the slim woman in the Laura Ashley dress, hoping that she had brought another book with her.

  The woman placed a hand in her bag and smiled shyly before pulling out a paperback and passing it over to the young girl.

  “Thank you,” said Sally, who took the book, checked the cover and then quickly turned it over to study the plot summary.

  While Sally became engrossed by the promised love story, the woman unclipped the long plaited rope that was attached to the two sides of her shopping bag.

  Sally opened the book at the first chapter, having already decided she would have to read every page very slowly. After all, she couldn’t be sure when the next offering might come.

  The movement was so fast that she didn’t even feel the rope go around her neck. Sally’s head jerked back and with one flick her vertebra was broken. Her chin slumped onto her chest.

  Blood began to trickle out of her mouth, down her chin and onto the cover of A Time to Love and a Time to….

  The driver of the limousine was surprised to be flagged down by a traffic cop just as he was about to take the exit ramp onto the freeway. He felt sure he hadn’t broken the speed limit. Then he spotted the ambulance in his rearview mirror, and wondered if they simply wanted to pass him. He looked to the front again to see the motorcycle cop was firmly waving him onto the hard shoulder.

  He immediately obeyed the order and brought the car to a standstill, puzzled as to what was going on. The ambulance drew in and stopped behind him. The cop dismounted from his motorcycle, walked up to the driver’s door and tapped on the window. The chauffeur touched a button in the armrest and the window slid silently down.

  “Is there a problem, Officer?”

  “Yes, sir, we have an emergency on our hands,” the policeman said without raising his visor. “Your patient has to return to the Ohio State University Hospital immediately. There have been unforeseen complications. You’re to transfer him to the ambulance and I will escort them back into the city.”

  The wide-eyed driver agreed with a series of consenting nods. “Should I go back to the hospital as well?” he asked.

  “No, sir, you’re to continue to Cincinnati and report to your office.”

  The driver turned his head to see two paramedics dressed in white coveralls standing by the side of the car. The policeman nodded and one of them opened the back door while the other released the seatbelt so that he could help the patient out.

  The driver glanced in the rearview mirror and watched the two paramedics guide the well-built man to the ambulance. The siren on the motorcycle brought his attention back to the policeman who was now directing the ambulance up the exit ramp so that it could cross the bridge over the highway and begin its journey back into the city.

  The whole changeover had taken less than five minutes, leaving the driver in the limousine feeling somewhat dazed. He then did what he felt he should have done the moment he saw the policeman, and telephoned his headquarters in Cincinnati.

  “We were just about to call you,” said the girl on the switchboard. “They don’t need the car any longer, so you may as well come straight back.”

  “Suits me,” said the driver. “I just hope the client pays the bill.”

  “They paid cash in advance last Thursday,” she replied. The driver clicked the phone back on its cradle and began his journey to Cincinnati. But something was nagging in the back of his mind. Why had the policeman stood so close to the door that he couldn’t get out, and why hadn’t he raised his visor? He dismissed such thoughts. As long as the company had been paid, it wasn’t his problem.

  He drove up onto the freeway, and didn’t see the ambulance ignore the signpost to the city center and join the stream of traffic going in the opposite direction. The man behind the wheel was also contacting his headquarters.

  “It went as planned, boss,” was all he replied to the first question.

  “Good,” said Cavalli. “And the chauffeur?”

  “On his way back to Cincinnati, none the wiser.”

  “Good,” Cavalli repeated. “And the patient?”

  “Fine, as far as I can tell,” said the driver, glancing in the rearview mirror.

  “And the police escort?”

  “Mario took a detour down a side road so he could get changed into his Federal Express uniform. He should catch up with us within the hour.”

  “How long before the next switch?”

  The driver checked the odometer. “Must be about another ninety miles, just after we cross the state line.”

  “And then?”

  “Four more changes between there and the Big Apple. Fresh drivers and a different car each time. The patient should be with you around midnight tomorrow, though he may have to stop off at a rest room or two along the way.”

  “No rest rooms,” said Cavalli. “Just take him off the highway and hide him behind a tree.”

  Chapter Seven

  Dollar Bill’s new home turned out to be the basement of a house in Georgetown, formerly an artist’s studio. The room where he worked was well lit without glare and, at his request, the temperature was kept at sixty-six degrees with a constant humidity.

  Bill attempted several “dry runs” as he called them, but he couldn’t get started on the final document until he had all the materials he needed. “Nothing but perfection will do,” he kept reminding Angelo. He would not have his name associated with anything that might later be denounced as a forgery. After all, he had his reputation to consider.

  For days they searched in vain for the right pen nibs. Dollar Bill rejected them all until he was shown a picture of some in a small museum in Virginia. He nodded his approval and they were in his hands the following afternoon.

  The curator of the museum told a reporter from the Richmond Times Dispatch that she was puzzled by the theft. The pens were not of any historic importance or particularly valuable. There were far more irreplaceable objects in the next display case.

  “Depends who needs them,” said Dollar Bill when he was shown the press clipping.

  The ink was a little easier once Bill had found the right shade of black. When it was on the paper he knew exactly how to control the viscosity by temperature and evaporation to give the impression of old age. Several pots were tested until he had more than enough to carry out the job.

  While others were searching for the materials he needed, Dollar Bill read several books from the Library of Congress and spent a few minutes every day in the National Archives until he discovered the one mistake he could afford to make.

  But the toughest requirement proved to be the parchment itself, because Dollar Bill wouldn’t consider anything that was less than two hundred years old. He tried to explain to Angelo about carbon dating.

  Samples were flown in from Paris, Amsterdam, Vienna, Montreal and Athens, but the forger rejected them all. It was only when a package arrived from Bremen with a selection dated 1781 that Dollar Bill gave a smile which only Guinness normally brought to his lips.

  He touched, caressed and fondled the parchment as a young man might a new lover but, unlike a lover, he pressed, rolled and flattened the object of his attentions until he was confident it was ready to receive the baptism of ink. He then prepared ten sheets of exactly the same size, kno