Hard to Kill Read online

  “This is lovely, Greta, thank you.” Kellen wasn’t being facetious. Not only did her room smell of lemon and beeswax, but she had windows looking out toward the river and a beautiful four-poster bed covered in handmade quilts.

  Greta beamed at the compliment. “I’ll leave you to put your things away. The general would like to see you in one half hour.”

  Kellen busied herself by pulling her few belongings out of the duffel bag and arranging them around the room until it was time to head back downstairs. As she descended the stairs, though, she could hear General Slater ripping someone to pieces. She realized it must be over the phone because she couldn’t hear any responses.

  Major Aimes popped into the hallway from the library, and seeing her surprised look (she had never heard the general so angry), Aimes leaned in conspiratorially and whispered, “He’s frustrated by the code breakers. He was hoping to get you more information to get you started on Chester Roy’s code.” Aimes paused dramatically. “He’s very invested in getting that painting.”

  Aimes flinched when Slater slammed down the phone in his office. “Excuse me, I’d better get in there before he blows up again.”

  Kellen was left alone in the hallway, wondering if she’d made a grave mistake by accepting this “quest.”

  * * *

  Kellen had such a headache.

  Apparently her injuries weren’t going to heal quickly through her sheer force of will. Her shoulder didn’t feel like it was being pulled out of the socket by a giant anymore, but still, she was in a huge amount of pain, and her left temple was constantly pounding where she landed during the Humvee crash. It was impossible to get anything done while taking the pain pills the Army’s medical team had prescribed her. Instead, she lay in bed with a pillow over her eyes, blocking out the light, and breathed calmly through her nose, as the doctor had ordered her.

  But remaining calm was hard for Kellen. She’d spent too long imprisoned on Gregory’s estate to ever be calm when her vision was obstructed.

  She had started the coding job by thumbing through Chester Roy’s diary and trying to get a sense of how he organized his thoughts. The parchment contained no lines or denoted margins, but nevertheless, he wrote in straight lines, with straight margins. He clearly had good spatial reasoning.

  Because of that, Kellen started by studying the maps Roy had carefully drawn into the text on a few of the pages. They were simplistic drawings and contained no place names to orient her, only numbers, which did not appear to coincide with anything in the lettered code. From what Benjamin Roy had told General Slater, the cave was in Germany, but Kellen refused to rule out that the location was somewhere else in Europe.

  Chester Roy’s diary seemed even older than its seventy-five years. The cracked leather cover held pieces of parchment, brittle from age. But the lettering itself was exquisite calligraphy with miniature paintings within the text.

  Exquisite and tiny. Even with a magnifying glass, studying the diary was killing Kellen’s eyes. With her head aching all the time from her injury, she had to limit the amount of time she spent staring at the lettering.

  Still, General Slater treated her well. He never reproached her for her lack of progress. She sat down every evening with him and Major Aimes at 1900 hours for a hearty dinner. The things Greta could do with a potato!

  The general did seem lonely. His wife had died two years prior, and the house still showed her decorating influence in the thick, deep red and gold carpets and the still-life paintings of red apples and golden pears. It was certainly easy to tell what Mrs. Slater’s favorite colors had been.

  But for all his loneliness, the general stayed carefully hands-off with Kellen. In fact, she couldn’t think of one time he had actually touched her since she moved in. He did get a little too close for comfort when she was working on cracking the code in the diary, but then again, she was very sensitive to older men hovering over her. Gregory had taken care of that.

  Besides, Slater was clearly interested in her code work. He asked after her progress every night at dinner, and he was charmingly enthralled by the smallest movement in the direction of cracking the code. Regardless of the lovely meals and the hospitality, she felt trapped, held in this house until she cracked the code.

  General Slater was incredibly dedicated to the work. If she asked for reference materials, Major Aimes provided them the next day. If she needed access to confidential documents about Chester Roy, they appeared as if from thin air. She liked working with General Slater on this mystery. If only he would back off a little.

  The person she was less enamored with was Major Aimes.

  He was constantly underfoot, running messages to and from base, with the help of General Slater’s driver, Eugene, and racing around the house to make sure the general had everything he could possibly need to work and live.

  It was impossible to lose Aimes. Even when he wasn’t near Kellen, she could hear him practically running down a hallway somewhere in the house.

  When Aimes skittered around the corner and into her study late in the afternoon, five weeks into the project, Kellen had finally decided to give up for the day, but she made a concerted effort to look alert and not at all tired.

  “Captain Adams, the general would like an update on the project.” He stood at attention, all spit and polish and obnoxious devotion.

  “Major Aimes, you may tell the general that I’m feeling confident that soon we’ll be able to follow the code, and I hope we’ll get that reward for Corporal Roy.”

  Aimes could not hide his surprise. “Corporal Roy?”

  Kellen was confused. “Yes, the soldier General Slater is trying to help by cracking his great-grandfather’s code.” Certainly Aimes must know this. The general kept him in the loop on everything.

  Still, Aimes’s face looked like a giant question mark. He seemed to gather himself and put on a more neutral look.

  At that moment, Kellen realized that something was terribly wrong.

  Aimes kept his expression carefully blank. “I’ll pass on your message to the general. Have a good evening, Captain.”

  Then he was gone, leaving Kellen alone with her computer and the files on Chester Roy. She searched the files but found nothing about Roy’s great-grandson and his military career. But when she typed “Corporal Benjamin Roy” into a search engine, an obituary from a local paper in Nebraska came up immediately.

  Reading through the short article, Kellen felt a cold sweat break out.

  Corporal Benjamin Roy, only son of James and Laurie Roy, was killed last month in a friendly fire incident outside of Kabul, Afghanistan. Benjamin was a local hero prior to joining the Army through his extensive volunteer work with the Boys and Girls Club, as well as his winning streak as the star running back for the local high school’s Fightin’ Falcons. He is survived by his parents, his sister, Katrina, and his beloved dog, Samson.

  Kellen could barely believe it. Corporal Benjamin Roy was dead. Killed by friendly fire in a war zone, no doubt under the command of General Slater. Kellen put her elbows on the desk and her face into her open palms.

  General Slater had lied to her.

  Now there was no way out for her. He was her source of information; she was quite sure he wouldn’t look kindly on her request to review the file of the apparently dead Benjamin Roy. Especially since he’d told her that half the reward was going to the corporal.

  Kellen felt sick to her stomach. Her headache returned, drumming against her temples.

  General Slater had lied to her. And she knew the hard truth. A greedy man who would kill to claim another’s share of fame and fortune would kill again. If she could break the code, her life would be worth nothing.

  When she broke the code, he would eliminate her.

  5

  With the fear and anger of discovering Benjamin Roy’s death fueling her, Kellen sat up through the
night. In the early hours of the next morning, she rubbed her eyes and sat back in the squeaky office chair in her study.

  She was so screwed.

  She had managed to break Chester Roy’s code.

  6

  The next morning, Kellen woke at her desk, an old, familiar nightmare chasing her into wakefulness. She had dreamed Gregory was trying to push her off a great precipice. She tried to fight him, tried to scream, but she was helpless. Always so helpless. Then as she was falling, she looked up, and instead, General Slater stood at the edge of the cliff, a cheery smile on his face.

  Trying her best to shake off the dream, she wiped the sleep from her eyes—and gasped and jumped.

  Major Aimes stood in the doorway.

  What a way to begin her day.

  “Captain, when I mentioned to the general that you worked through the night, he was hopeful that you’d had a breakthrough.” Major Aimes stared at her expectantly.

  Kellen carefully considered what to say. She was trapped in the general’s house. She was required to break the code. Until she did that, she had no chance for escape. So—“I’ve broken the code, Major.”

  Major Aimes looked like the cat that got the cream. “Wonderful news. You know, I suggested you for this job.”

  General Slater had claimed that Aimes didn’t know about the Roy journal until after he had hired her.

  Liar. Someone was a liar.

  “I’m expecting a promotion once we recover the painting,” Aimes said. “Tell me what you discovered!”

  Yeah. Like I’m going to tell you, asshole. “Where might I find the general?”

  Aimes’s excitement faded, and observing her caution, he became wary. “He’s in the breakfast nook.”

  Kellen gathered her books and papers and put them in her backpack. She walked into the sunlit breakfast nook and found the general sitting at the table. He looked up from a report he was reading.

  Kellen poured tea and added milk before she seated herself across the table from him and said, “General, I have good news. I know where the painting is hidden.”

  He pushed his report aside, and his flinty gaze rested on her with expectation and...something else. Caution? Contempt? Did he think she would easily fall prey to his conspiracy?

  She gathered herself to play the game, to give the information necessary and withhold the information that would save her life. She opened the book and pointed. “It’s the paintings. They don’t look like the usual miniatures on an illuminated manuscript. These are created using thick layers of paint. They rise above the page by an eighth of an inch in some places, and under the lamplight, they cast shadows as they did not in the daylight. Each miniature’s shadow provided a number and a place name. As I worked through the night, I was able to match the place names to the numbers on the four maps drawn into the diary.”

  She had General Slater’s full attention. “That’s brilliant. Not a code so much as an illusion.”

  “Exactly.” For a moment, she met his gaze and saw in him the same appreciation she felt for such a clever ruse. Determinedly, she ignored the warmth she felt, and when she looked again, nothing of enthusiasm remained in his expression.

  She showed him the first two maps—the two that led to a cave under the Altdorf Forest. “You can see here that Chester Roy noted the amount of rubble he packed at the tiny entrance of the cave,” She pointed to the second map. “We’re going to need excavation equipment.”

  “I’ll alert Aimes to acquire some men and shovels. The sooner this is done, the better, and you can go your way.” Clearly, he wanted to be rid of her.

  “Yes, sir, when I’ve received my medical discharge, which you will now expedite.” She matched his flinty-eyed stare.

  “The discharge papers just arrived on my desk.”

  So now all she had to do was stay alive long enough to collect those papers. The general didn’t realize the kinds of battles she’d fought long before she joined the military. She was a survivor, and she intended to deflect the general’s attacks with a combination of force...and deception. “There’s more,” she said. “I was going over and over these two numbers that are written on both of the maps. Eleven and forty-three. At first I thought they must be latitude and longitude. But that would put the cave in Djibouti.”

  “Unlikely,” he responded. But she had his attention.

  “Last night I realized there was another system that uses two numbers. The Bible.” Kellen pulled an old copy of the King James Bible from her backpack. “I found this in the library. Look, John 11:43 is Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead.”

  “What exactly does that tell us?”

  “I researched paintings missing after World War II, and I came across this.” She pulled a printout from between the pages of the Bible and handed it to Slater.

  He read the information in a glance, and then he looked up, his eyes snapping. “Are you telling me we’re going to re-acquire a Rubens?”

  Kellen was almost giddy with excitement. “I believe so, sir. It’s called ‘Raising of Lazarus’ by Peter Paul Rubens. And it has been missing since 1945.”

  General Slater sat with his mouth agape, and then he broke out in a grin. “I knew I had backed a winner when I picked you.” Then his grin disappeared. “More tea, Captain?” Without waiting for an answer, he rose from his seat, brought the teapot over to the table, walked to Kellen’s right side and refilled her cup.

  “Thank you, sir.” She reached for it.

  He grabbed her wrist hard enough to bruise. “I don’t know what the hell you think you’re doing, but you’re not going to get away with it. Don’t even think you can.”

  Looking up into his twisted face, Kellen could only think of her husband. She would never let someone hurt her like that again.

  But Major Aimes must have been hovering just outside the door, for he appeared at just the right moment to divert a fight.

  Slater dropped her wrist and strode to the other side of the table. He gathered up the pages of his report and turned to Aimes. “Captain Adams has cracked the code. As soon as you assemble men and equipment, we’ll head to the cave’s location.”

  Aimes gave his obnoxiously smug smile. “I anticipated your needs, sir, and we can be on our way within an hour.”

  Suck-up, Kellen thought.

  “Very good,” Slater said. “Captain, be ready to go by 0900. This mission is almost finished.”

  Slater and Aimes left the room, leaving Kellen to her tea. But she found her hands were shaking too much to get the teacup to her mouth. Today would decide her fate—would she be honorably discharged and start her life over, or would her life end in a dark cave in Germany?

  7

  Once General Slater had the painting in hand, how did he intend to kill her?

  Major Aimes drove the general’s personal truck through narrow mountain roads, the general at his side, while Kellen sat cramped in the back, dreading their arrival at the cave. Behind them, a pickup full of men followed with shovels. Behind them, an art historian followed in her Volkswagen; the general had contacted Samantha Becker to ensure the removal of the painting was done with proper care.

  With so many witnesses, Kellen didn’t see how Slater could eliminate her. But he was a general; strategy was his strength, and he’d managed to murder Corporal Benjamin Roy quite efficiently. Friendly fire was probably his modus operandi. A quick bullet to the back when she was done procuring his painting would be an effective finish for her. The cave would be a good tomb. No one would ever find her bones...

  She focused on the maps, giving Aimes instructions until they reached a lush green section of the Altdorf Forest, with a few fallen trees and what appeared to be a rockslide. According to the map, they had arrived.

  Aimes and Slater climbed out of the front seats, leaving Kellen to struggle out on her own.

  Yes, the
general’s gentlemanly facade crumbled now that he had achieved his goal. She squinted at Roy’s map. “General, the map says this is the entrance to the cave. We’ll need to clear this debris.”

  General Slater crossed his arms over his chest. “Major, you heard the captain.”

  Aimes gestured to the assembled workers. “You heard the general. Get these rocks moved.”

  The men started digging.

  General Slater said, “Aimes, grab a shovel and get to work.”

  Kellen did not smile. She did not smile. She did not...until Aimes had turned his back and started shoveling. Then she smiled, and broadly, too.

  The general saw her, and he winked.

  She didn’t know what to think of him. He blew hot and cold, he liked her and he didn’t, he wanted to kill her and...and that was all that mattered.

  “Show me again the parts of Chester Roy’s diary relating to this excavation,” General Slater said.

  She showed him what she had discovered, and added, in a voice laden with regret, “Parts of the code are still unintelligible.”

  He pulled a couple of camp chairs out of his truck, set them up and invited Kellen to seat herself. “You’d better continue with your code breaking, Captain. We don’t want to find any unpleasant surprises in the cave.”

  “As you say, sir.” She bent her head to the diary.

  Hours later, a dust-covered Aimes shouted, “General, we’re through!”

  General Slater came to his feet.

  Kellen tucked the diary into her backpack and followed more slowly.

  Aimes ordered the excavators to keep digging and widen the opening to the cave, as Aimes and Slater, along with Kellen and the art historian, Miss Becker, climbed over the remaining rubble to duck into the cave. Behind them, the men continued to pull rocks away from the cave entrance, letting in more of the weak forest light.