Caught. Kristin Hardy

“How did you come by it?”

      “The guy who stole it might have dumped it in Marissa’s bag at the airport. We think we’ve seen him,” Jamie added.

      Which explained the questions about security. And the strain. Then again, the strain could have stemmed from taking a criminal risk.

      “What do you think?” Marissa asked.

      Julia looked down at the amulet, the lovers frozen hand in hand. The White Star. There were legends, she remembered vaguely, something fanciful about true love. “It’s possible,” she allowed. “But you have to understand, even if it is the Zander piece, it may not necessarily be the real White Star. It’s very difficult to authenticate antiquities, especially if the forgery itself is an antique.”

      “But it was being auctioned off,” Marissa protested.

      “Even the best experts aren’t infallible,” Julia said wryly. “We can all be taken in. Leave it with me for a few days. I’ll take some time to look it over, check to see if I can find anything definitive to authenticate it.” And if it were the real White Star, she could get the police involved.

      “Whatever you can do,” Jamie said and rose.

      Marissa stood and reached out a hand longingly toward the amulet but stopped short of touching it. “It’s so beautiful,” she murmured. “I don’t care if it’s real or not.”

      “If it is the White Star, it’s not ours,” Jamie said gently, putting an arm around her shoulders. “We only got to borrow it for a little while.”

      And to Julia’s everlasting shock, Marissa laughed and threw her arms around Jamie’s neck and gave him a kiss hot enough to vaporize metal. “And honey, we made the most of it.”

      FOOLISH WOMAN, to boast of security. As though motion detectors and pressure plates could keep him out. As though a mere office safe could block him from his prize. The White Star was his in all but actual fact. It was but a matter of time.

      He itched to hold her again. It was maddening to have her so close, yet out of his grasp.

      But he was a patient man.

      For now, hovering in the gallery near the entrance to the office wing held the most promise. He could linger, invisible to the imbecile guards, and watch. It was, after all, a museum, a place designed for lingering. He would bide his time, learn what he could. He could wait as long as he needed.

      And when night fell, he would strike.

      HELL, JULIA THOUGHT wearily at day’s end, probably bore a lot of resemblance to the twelve-person, three- time-zone telecon she’d just suffered through. There was nothing like trying to pull off a tricky negotiation with a host of stakeholders, none of whom you could see. Foolishly, naively, she’d assumed that because everyone stood to benefit from the multimuseum traveling exhibit she was hoping to pull together for early 2008, they’d all cooperate. Ha. Throw in egos, tempers and language barriers, and you had a recipe for chaos.

      Meanwhile, she’d been almost entirely unable to keep her mind from drifting back to the amulet. And to Alex. Things with Alex were over, she reminded herself. She should put him out of her mind. The amulet, however…

      The shadows outside had grown long by the time she spun the dial of her safe and drew out the unadorned wooden instrument box that held the amulet. It was the box that usually cradled her loupe, but she’d switched it for the Suarez woman’s piece earlier that day. Her loupe would do just fine unprotected for a short while. A three-thousand-year-old ivory amulet—if it was indeed the White Star—wouldn’t.

      Julia put down a padded mat on her desk and laid out the amulet. She wouldn’t allow herself to think of it as the White Star, not until—unless—she demonstrated its provenance. That was her task. That was her challenge. But for a moment, just a moment, she let herself look. And with her hands freshly washed to remove all possible contaminants, she gave herself guilty permission to touch.

      Power, warmth hummed up her arm.

      She was a scholar, an educated woman with a disciplined mind. Hocus-pocus made her impatient, but her secret, the thing she told no one, was that she could feel something in the truly ancient objects, something beyond what her trained eye could see, beyond what her educated mind could know. There was some connection she made with the past.

      And she could feel it in the amulet, stronger than she’d ever felt before. She felt age, hot desert air, the whisper of sand. And a bittersweet mix of love and sadness that had her jerking her hands away.

      After a moment she shook her head. That was what she got for being ridiculous. She knew what she needed to do, Julia thought, snapping on gloves. Characterize, compare, research, document.

      The fundamental steps to authentication all began with a physical record, of course. Digging out her digital camera, she began snapping photographs of the piece from every angle. Annie Leibovitz, she wasn’t, in oh so many ways. The very paleness of the ivory foiled her every effort; even with the light dimmed, she couldn’t capture the carvings. So she got out a pencil and paper and began to make a set of careful, painstaking drawings, studying the amulet through the loupe, front and back, from every side, recording every possible detail. Okay, so she wasn’t da Vinci, either, but at least she finished up with a detailed record.

      Finally, she put the amulet into the box and rose. Characterize, compare, research, document. She already knew the museum had nothing precisely like it, which eliminated the need to compare. Time to get on to part three.

      In the hall, she heard the familiar end-of-day sounds of people closing up shop and going home. For her, it was time to get to work.

      “Hi, John,” she said to a passing security guard as she exited the office wing into the Mesopotamian gallery.

      “Where are you going?” he asked. “It’s quitting time. Time to go home.”

      “Is that why everyone’s been leaving every night?” She laughed and took the unobtrusive door that led down the stairs to the basement level, headed for the conservation lab and its rare-book repository, her favorite place in the whole museum.

      She’d always loved books, from the time she’d been little. The day she’d seen her first truly old book, though, she’d felt a deeper excitement. There was something magical about holding a volume that had been labored over a thousand years before or a scroll written by a man long since dust, something that fascinated. There were secrets in the leather-bound tomes from centuries gone by, mysteries in the scrolls of papyrus and parchment. And now, she was on the ultimate bigger-or-better hunt, hoping to find a trail of clues that would lead her back through the ages.

      Hoping to find the story of the White Star.

      She had help. An indexing project a decade before had produced an electronic card catalog of the materials in the library, with summaries, chapter heads, even main topics covered. There was no substitute for the real thing, though, for the rich gleam of illuminated manuscripts, the careful script of the Greek codices, the writings of Pliny, Clio, Herodotus.

      As she hit the crash bar of the door to the basement level and turned into the hall, she heard the tread of feet above her. Someone doubtlessly headed home from upstairs, she thought. Friday night, the time to meet friends for drinks, go to a club, relax. The museum was quieting, all the visitors gone and the staff quick to follow.

      It was her favorite time.

      The rapid tap of her heels rang in the hall. The museum’s Gilded Age founders had spared no expense in the construction of the building, even down here. Veined marble walls soared up to nine-foot ceilings. The ornate locks and hinges on the solid-oak doors made collectors salivate. The “modern” bronze light fixtures that had replaced the original gaslights sometime in the 1920s had become antiques themselves.

      Julia stopped before one of the dark, heavy doors. Hefting a five-inch skeleton key, she fit the complicated head of it into the keyhole. And jiggled and fiddled with it the way she suspected people had jiggled and fiddled with