Ice Blue - Anne Stuart [17]
Things were stable for the moment. The true Hayashi Urn was currently out of reach, though he was going to have to find out where, and damn soon. He had no idea how good a copy the urn at the Sansone was. If the brethren decided to go for it, then all hell might break loose.
Taka groaned, shoving a hand through his hair. They were going to want to know in London why he hadn’t taken care of things, and he wasn’t sure what he could give them for an answer when he didn’t know himself. He closed his eyes, listening to the sounds around him, identifying and then dismissing each noise—the traffic beyond the thick vegetation that surrounded the hotel; the sound of her breathing behind the closed door, slow and steady as she slept; the murmur of the wind; the steady beat of his own heart. He lay perfectly still, aware of absolutely everything. And then he let go, for a brief moment of respite.
Isobel Lambert stood in the window of her office, staring out into the breaking sunrise over London, a cigarette in one hand, a cell phone in the other. It was going to be another bleak, gray day, with a cold, biting rain that stung the skin and felt like ice. She hated January. But then, right now she hated everything.
She hated the small, elegant office in Kensington that she’d coveted for so long. She hated the cigarette in her hand. She hated London, but most of all she hated the Committee and the choices she had to make.
For that matter, she hated Peter Madsen. Her second in command was home in bed with his wife. He had someone to turn to to help wash away the stench of death and merciless decisions. A wife who knew too damn much, but there was nothing to be done about that. If Isobel needed Madsen—and she did—then Genevieve Spenser came with the bargain. And if Peter had complete faith in her, then so did Isobel, because Peter had complete faith in very few things.
She turned and stubbed out her cigarette, then cracked the window to try to air out the office before Peter got there. She hated smoking, had tried to quit a hundred times, but days like yesterday would send her right back. It could be worse, she supposed. People she’d started out with had turned to drink or drugs, or the kind of soulless abuse of power that Harry Thomason had wielded. It was a good thing her soul ached. The feeling proved she was still human beneath the hard shell she’d perfected.
The bitter wind swirled through her office, and she shivered, but made no attempt to close the window. She was ice inside; the temperature made no difference.
They’d argued about the girl, she and Peter, but in the end they both knew there was no choice in the matter. The young woman in Los Angeles was a liability of catastrophic proportions, and when hard choices had to be made, Madame Lambert could make them. Summer Hawthorne had no idea why she was so dangerous, and she’d have no idea why she had to die. It wouldn’t have made a bit of difference if she did.
Hana Hayashi had left the urn with her, and the knowledge of where the ancient ruins were located. The Shirosama needed both of those things to make his ritual complete. A crackpot ritual that would signal the onslaught of Armageddon, or as close to it as one powerful maniac and a hundred thousand followers could enact.
And history had already proved that that could be pretty bad.
They could trust Takashi O’Brien to do what needed to be done. He was just as much of a realist as the rest of them—you couldn’t survive in the twilight world of the Committee without being able to see things clearly, unemotionally, and make the hard choices. Summer Hawthorne was just one more in a history of hard choices, one that Taka would make without blinking.
These things took their toll eventually. Peter could no