Page 163 of Blood Game

“I don't believe you.”

He struck her. The blow sent her sprawling to the hard stone floor.

“There has to be more. Tell me!” he threatened, standing over her.

She slowly picked herself up off the floor.

“I told you, I don't know!”

Alyia's brother stepped between them. Articulate, educated, a brutal terrorist who constantly eluded coalition forces, according to the information James had, a purveyor of fine art and antiquities to finance terrorist activities.

How much did Jonathan Callish know about his brother-in-law's activities? Was he part of it? Or simply another victim?

She found it hard to believe that he was part of anything so complicated, illegal, or dangerous, with his polished nails, expensive Saville Row suits, and an equally expensive address in Mayfair.

His father had served with Cate's father during the war. After the war they had remained friends, bonded by that wartime experience. Years later, Cate considered Jonathan a good friend, trusting his expertise. She had worked with him on a collection of her father's photographs, planning that gallery showing.

But the London gallery had apparently not been doing well. They had seen it for themselves the day they went there looking for information about that photograph Cate had sent—the limited pieces that were offered, a cancelled showing, Jonathan's vagueness about the photograph at the same time he was planning a showing of his wife's works.

War and Aftermath—the images had been stark and brutal. They made one look away, trying to absorb what the brain was seeing as it tapped into something deep inside, the artist's form of expression.

Kris had seen it in gallery showings in New York over the years. There were pieces that drew you in, others that tapped into something inside you, still others that left a person confused about the message the artist was trying to convey.

There was no confusion about the message Alyia Malik conveyed on those canvases. And the Paris gallery was apparently a façade, a funnel for funding terrorist activities.

How much had Cate uncovered? Did she know the Paris gallery was merely a conduit for stolen artifacts used to fund terrorist activities? Or was the accident as simple as professional rivalry and revenge?

Faridani dragged Valentine in front of her. That slick, polished veneer was stripped away, in its place, a cold, dispassionate expression. It was like staring into the eyes of a snake.

“You will tell us,” he said, his voice low, dangerous with promise. “Or you little friend will die slowly, right here, before your eyes.”

He would kill her. Kris knew it. It came from the terror in London, then the abbey. And she saw it in his eyes.

Valentine's life, her life, meant nothing to him. Videos of beheadings, bodies dragged through the streets of some foreign city. One more death meant nothing.

Is this what her brother had felt? What he had experienced in those last moments? What James Morgan had experienced on that last mission that had gone so terribly wrong? That awareness of things all narrowed down to a single, fine point? And then death.

The look in Valentine's eyes told her that she also knew.

Please help me, God.

It came from some place deep inside, a place she had closed the door on after Mark's death, a need to believe in something more, even as she had pushed it away. Faith. Not for herself, but for Valentine…so young, she didn't deserve this, there was still so much life ahead of her.

Valentine shook her head. She understood. She accepted what was about to happen. It was there in the expression on her face, in her belief in the things Micheleine had stood for—that passion and conviction against the evil in the world. She woreit in the tattoo of that ancient symbol a young French girl had taken centuries earlier.

Afterward, there were things that she would remember, sharp, crystal clear—Valentine's smile even as the tears slipped down her cheek, the peacefulness in those last moments, a calmness that surprised her and oddly enough reassured her.

It came slowly, in that way of things that seem to move out of time, slow motion, an awareness and an image that she'd seen on the wood door across that room inside the quarry mine. A symbol Micheleine Robillard had given her life for. And the last symbol found in the letter. She almost laughed out loud. It was so obvious, but only those who understood Micheleine and what she had fought for would have known.

Jehanne, the people of France called her during that dark time, their own Joan of Arc, who lost both brothers and her father to the war, then went off to fight in her own way. She had done things, and the cost had been high—in the end she paid with her life. But she had never given up the one thing she vowed the Germans would never get their hands on. A symbol to the French people, something to believe in. The Cross of Lorraine.

Things that mattered.

“Wait!” Marcus shouted at Faridani. He followed the direction she stared beside the door.

The professor who had spent the last thirty years teaching Medieval history, writing about it, the symbol of a martyr centuries earlier, and the symbol of the French Resistance during the war.

“Of course,” he whispered.