Death of an Adept

"I have a pretty fair idea," he acknowledged bleakly, crouching down on his hunkers. "But before I let you in on my suspicions, I'd like you to tell me everything you can about what happened."

Ximena nodded numbly, drawing the tartan rug closer around her with a shiver. "It happened so fast," she murmured. "They seemed to come out of nowhere. I think they stunned Adam when they slammed him into the plate-glass window." She gestured vaguely toward the front of the antique store. "They were dressed all in black, and wearing gloves and ski masks, so I couldn't make out anything of their faces. When they grabbed Adam, they clapped a cloth over his nose and mouth. They tried the same thing on me, but I managed to get away. It was chloroform, Noel. They had this planned."

The remainder of her account only served to confirm McLeod's worst fears.

"I expect they've been tailing him for some time, waiting for their chance," he observed grimly. "And today was a bonus, because they might have got the two of you at once - followed you to the engraver's studio, where there weren't apt to be as many people around, then set themselves up to jump you when you came out.

"After that, I'm afraid the pattern is all too familiar. I don't think there's any doubt that the man we want is an old adversary by the name of Francis Raeburn. We've been after him for some time, but by God, I intend to nail him this time."

Philippa met them a short time later in the casualty department of Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, while they waited for Ximena's skull films to come back. She, too, was looking pale and shaken; and McLeod was not surprised to see that she was wearing the heavy scarab ring of gold and sapphire which symbolized her Adeptship.

"I suppose we should have expected something like this, after that attempt on Peregrine and Julia," she told Ximena grimly, "but somehow we all must have thought Adam would be immune to such a direct attack."

"What is that supposed to mean?" Ximena asked.

Philippa passed a hand across her brow. All at once she looked every one of her seventy-seven years.

"It means," she said with bleak candor, "that we have every reason to fear for my son's life."

Chapter Thirty-One

ADAM returned groggily to his senses to find himself sprawled on his right side, cramped arms stretched upward and his head half-cradled against his shoulder. Dull pain throbbed behind his eyes, accompanied by a faint stir of nausea when he opened them and tried to focus - though he could see only the rumpled white of his shirt sleeve close beside his face.

Swallowing down bile and a moan, he tried to draw his hands to his aching forehead - and found his wrists secured above his head by a pair of handcuffs run through the white-painted frame of a narrow iron bedstead. The restraint brought back memory in a head-splitting surge of alarm and dull despair. Still reeling, he risked moving his head a few painful centimeters, trying to get some idea of his surroundings.

Harsh light from an aged ceiling fixture revealed a tightly shuttered window, four blank walls in need of paint, a grey metal bedside locker, a single straight-backed chair, and a metal-reinforced door. The blinking red eye of a closed-circuit television camera looked down from a corner. The effect suggested a prison cell crossed with a mortuary.

The analogy made him shiver, and he let his head fall back against his arm, suddenly aware of the pounding of his heart, in rhythm with the aching in his head. The dry thickness of his tongue and the erratic behavior of his pulse suggested he might have been subjected to something more potent and long-lasting than the chloroform used to subdue him initially. Trying to pull himself together, probing sluggishly at memory, he realized he had no idea how long he had been unconscious, though the state of his bladder suggested a significant time span.

The memory of his abduction was all too clear - the sudden attack, the chloroform disarming him, resistance and then awareness fading as his abductors bundled him roughly onto the floor of a taxicab, like a heap of dirty laundry. As he shifted position slightly, attempting to ease cramped muscles, the twinges he could feel attested to the likelihood that he had cost them enough trouble to warrant a kick or two. His single fragment of consolation within that final waking memory was the image of Ximena's would-be abductor abandoning his quarry in order to keep from being left behind.

The fact that they had been willing enough to let her go suggested that Adam himself had always been the main prize. Nor had he any doubt who was responsible for his present captivity. The method of his abduction followed an ail-too familiar pattern - palpable evidence that despite repeated setbacks, Francis Raeburn retained the will and the means to exact retribution.