A well-dressed gentleman on the further side of middle age sat outside a cafe, sipping a macchiato while he scanned the afternoon’s headlines. “ ‘Twentieth Anniversary of Huntington Scandal.’ Has it been that long?” Benjamin Chiron frowned slightly at the next story. “ ‘Series of unsolved break-ins continues…. Objects taken at random, found abandoned short distance from scene of crime…. Several locations targeted twice. No apparent motive.’ ”
The pedestrian traffic on the street was gradually increasing as the workday neared its end. A block away, Trent Noble was hurrying along with the flow, messenger bag slung across his body. A fellow pedestrian jostled the young man; he stumbled, and felt someone impact his back. Instantly assuming he was the victim of a coordinated scheme to snatch his laptop, he seized his bag and whirled about to face the woman behind him.
He was just in time to see a hooded person turning from her, and the brilliant flare of scarlet on her throat. Her face was plastered with shock and pain, eyes fixed straight ahead at him; as the first screams rang out around them, her hand flew to her throat, and she swayed on her feet. Trent reached out automatically and caught her, controlling her collapse to the pavement. He drew a cotton pocket handkerchief and pressed it against her neck, alarmed by the streaming blood, and added his shout to the general din: “Help! Doctor! We need a doctor!”
Chiron, whose attention had already been drawn by the commotion, responded immediately when he heard that call. He jumped up and ran somewhat stiffly to the expanding crowd, authoritatively moving the bystanders out of his way. He emerged in the center, unoccupied except for three people: Trent, the woman he tended, and a man scant feet from them who was clearly injured.
“Keep pressure on that!” Chiron ordered, crouching beside the wounded man.
He had fallen face down; Chiron rolled him over, revealing a pool of blood and a wound on his neck, similar to but larger than the one the woman had suffered. Chiron hardly needed his medical degree to assess the man’s condition.
“One of you find a phone and call 999, for God’s sake!” he barked at the sea of gawking faces.
The young man bleeding out at Chiron’s feet made a mighty effort, focused on a point over the doctor’s shoulder, and gasped out, “Fairy, biscuit, daisy…. Black sand.” They were his last words, made with his last breath.
Chiron was already moving to inspect the woman. “Don’t take your hand off,” he hissed to Trent, who was staring fixedly at the dead man. Chiron fished through his pockets frantically, and an astonishing number of items flashed through his hands, until he withdrew a chocolate bar wrapper and a tiny bottle of fast-setting glue. With a curt instruction to Trent, he intently set to work on the woman. Her eyelids flickered, and, despite his remonstrances, she searched about until her gaze fastened on Trent. “Fairy, biscuit, daisy; black sand,” she muttered, and repeated the five words as if her life depended on them.
Just as the first sirens screamed onto the street, Chiron finished his improvisation; he spoke succinctly to the paramedics who arrived and handed off his patient to them. Despite his role in the drama, he found it easy to slip into the crowd, for its focus was on the victims, not their physician. He tugged Trent’s sleeve and pulled the pale and shaking young man along. “Did you see what happened?” he inquired softly.
“I- I don’t know, exactly. I saw someone moving away from her- I suppose it must have been the person who attacked her,” Trent answered breathily. “I really didn’t see him. Wasn’t that strange, how they were both going on about that gibberish- ferrying biscuits?”
“The same? Were they? Oxygen deprivation makes the brain babble all sorts of nonsense,” Chiron replied absently and halted on the fringes of the gathered crowd, glancing about the street. “That was a hit. Too carefully chosen a location for anything else… no cameras, a crowd to blend into. Let’s keep our heads down so we don’t become targets, too, hmm?”
“I- you mean, not speak to the police?” Trent clarified.
“For now,” Chiron said, studying him carefully. “Neither of us has any useful information to offer, and it’d only endanger us to come forward just now.” The doctor magically produced a packet of wet wipes from a suit pocket and handed several to Trent before he began cleaning off his own hands.
“Will she be all right, do you think?”
“She’ll live,” Chiron replied assuredly. “Let’s pay our friend a visit tomorrow morning at the hospital and check on her. Say, eight o’clock.” He walked away, one hand thrust into a suit jacket pocket and wrapped around its contents. Trent gaped after him, a hand unconsciously going to the newly full side pocket of his messenger bag.
Not entirely certain why he was faithfully following the instructions of a complete stranger, Trent stepped into the hospital lobby the next morning at two minutes past eight. He hesitated within, scanning the room nervously, but Chiron spotted him first.
“There you are, my young friend,” he said, striding over, coffee in one hand, newspaper in the other. He was dressed in a fresh suit, as fine a one as on the night previous. “Did you see this?” he raised the paper, waving it too quickly for Trent to read. “It’s everywhere. Terrorist knife attack in the street against unidentified man and woman, one confirmed fatality,” he elucidated as he confidently began leading Trent to another wing and floor.
They arrived in front of a nurse’s station. “Hello there,” he greeted the woman seated behind it. “We’re here to see Irene Gibbons.”
She clicked a mouse and glanced at a computer monitor. “I’m sorry, we’ve no such patient,” came her bored reply.
“Ah- perhaps you have her listed as an unknown, then. A young woman, about thirty-two years of age, brown hair, blue eyes, brought in by emergency services last night at perhaps half-past five with an incision to her neck that nicked the artery.”
Suddenly, the nurse was alert and suspicious. “Who are you two?” she demanded.
“Forgive me- Dr. Benjamin Chiron,” he replied smoothly, producing his credentials. “You’ll find me in the system. I’m the doctor who treated her on site, and this is her cousin.”
“Nathaniel Gibbons,” Trent supplied quickly.
The nurse relaxed a fraction. “I’m sorry for your loss,” she said. “Your cousin died just after she was brought in.”
“Are you sure?” Chiron spluttered.
“Very sure, doctor. She bled out on the operating table.”
Chiron regained his composure immediately, thanked the nurse, and led Trent back the way they had come. “So you were wrong. She didn’t survive,” Trent remarked.
“Impossible,” Chiron snapped. “If she made it as far as the OR, there’s absolutely no reason she shouldn’t have lived.”
“-Unless whoever attacked her and her husband got to her here, somehow, to finish the job,” Trent supplied as they entered an elevator.
Chiron turned and faced him. “Husband? Why do you say that, Trent?”
Trent shifted, aware he had betrayed knowledge he should not have possessed. “Because they had the same last name, Gibbons,” he muttered. Under Chiron’s steady gaze, he reached into his messenger bag and withdrew the dead man’s wallet. “I was curious, all right? I took it while you were gluing her up, and then I couldn’t put it back. Just curious.”
“As was I,” Chiron chuckled, producing a fistful of personal effects from his jacket pocket, among them a woman’s wallet. “Not husband and wife, though. Fraternal twins, actually.”
The elevator dinged, the doors opened, and Trent trailed Chiron to the exit. Only once they were outside did the niggling sensation in his brain solidify. “Hey- I never told you my name!”
“No, you didn’t,” Chiron confirmed, “but while my proximity to Irene and Grant Gibbons yesterday may have been pure chance, I doubt yours was. How do you feel about visiting another crime scene with me this evening, then? Good,” he continued without waiting for a reply. “Meet me at the park bench under Draper Cliff at four-thirty.”
“Before I go anywhere else with you, I want some answers, Dr. Chiron,” Trent confronted the man seated on the appointed bench at the stated time. It was, he thought, more a great slab of rock than a bench, bearing an uncomfortable resemblance to a prehistoric altar.
“Such as?” the doctor inquired mildly.
His burst of confidence expended, Trent sat down awkwardly on the opposite end of the bench. “I’d like to know how you know my name, and why you think those two people were murdered right next to me,” he said to his shoes.
“Both of them addressed their dying words to you- and I had the pleasure of working with your mother, whom you highly resemble, some time before you were born.”
“I was raised by my-“
“Your father’s sister, yes,” Chiron finished. “You were very small at the time of the Huntington scandal, so you had the opportunity to live an untarnished life, unlike your older siblings, who disappeared quietly with your late father.”
“My aunt said it was better if I didn’t know what sort of trouble my mother had fallen into,” Trent said slowly. “The Huntington scandal…. Wasn’t that about a spy close to the prime minister selling secrets or something?”
“Or something,” the doctor grimaced. “I’ll summarize. Your mother was on a classified research team. Huntington’s intent, I believe, was for them to pursue a benign, even beneficial avenue, but the fact remained a potential application of their work was a biological weapon. There was a spy, passing on their research to a foreign power. He told the press that Huntington had authorized the research- end of the man’s political career, of course. An example had to be made, and your mother, Ara, was convicted on overwhelming circumstantial evidence and is serving a life sentence.”
Trent sat silently, face slack, digesting the news. Realizing Chiron was staring at him, he muttered, “It’s rather a lot to take in, you know, being told your family’s whole sordid past by a stranger.” He paused, and Chiron nodded sympathetically. “You said it wasn’t a coincidence they were killed near me.”
Chiron stood, displaying a slip of paper that had come from Irene Gibbons’s effects. “Your siblings were systematically breaking into locations on this list, doing a shabby job disguising it as robberies, and someone was hot on their heels, breaking in after them. But your sister stopped crossing addresses off at a certain point, even though they kept up the pretense of robberies the last two nights.
“I think they were looking for something, and they found it- and they were attempting to tell you about it before they were killed. Come with me. If I’m right, you’ll have a decision to make.”
“Is it safe?” Trent stood, too overwhelmed to demand additional information.
Already briskly striding off, the doctor acknowledged over his shoulder, “Probably not one bit.”
Some time later, Trent followed Dr. Chiron into a mostly empty lab building and up to a door marked off with police tape. Undaunted, Chiron ducked in and off to the side, where he threw the light switch.
“Well, come along, then,” he said testily. Nerving himself, Trent stepped through with significantly less bravado, only to find himself in a perfectly ordinary lab, the neat rows of metal tables and refrigerators slightly disturbed, doubtless from the supposed robbery.
“Now then, let’s see- fairy, biscuit, daisy… walk forward,” Chiron instructed.
With a slight shake of his head, Trent did as instructed. “Till when?”
Scarcely distinguishable from his footfalls came a quiet click. “Till that,” Chiron said, and Trent stopped. “Don’t turn around. Walk backward.”
This time when the click came, Trent stopped without prompting. “And?”
“No stairs,” Chiron muttered, then shrugged. “The floor’s obviously sensitive to pressure. Jump. Hard.” Trent complied, to no detectable result. “Again.”
Five jumps later- at least six since Trent had begun to feel entirely ridiculous- a third click sounded. The tiles under his feet swung away, revealing a trapdoor that he tumbled through.
After a moment and an embarrassed scuffling, he called, “I’m okay.” Then he added, voice squeaking, “It’s dark down here.”
“Very ingenious!” Chiron exclaimed, walking to the hole in the floor.
“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you, you daft old man?” Trent accused.
With a soft grunt, the doctor got down on his knees, took a torch from a pocket in his suit, and handed it down. “Daft, is it? I’m not the one who fell through the trapdoor. Time for black sands: backwards and sideways.”
“Which way sideways?”
“Just go backwards. Something will come up to make it clear.”
Several footsteps echoed up, followed by a grunt. “I hit the wall,” Trent informed Chiron peevishly. “Something clicked. Left or right?”
“Hm. Sinister ad dexter, perhaps?” the doctor muttered, then spoke distinctly: “Sinister. Left.”
Trent shuffled to his left, the torch doing nothing to ease his anxiety in the dark, confined space- a storage room of some sort, apparently. However, within moments the fifth, final, and by far loudest click came. The tile directly in front of his feet swung up, revealing a cubbyhole that contained only a briefcase. He handed it out, then set about constructing himself a set of stairs using the empty crates lying about.
When he emerged from the trapdoor, Chiron had the briefcase open and was rifling through its contents; it looked to have been stuffed full of documents and several packages. “You could have told me that’s what ‘Fairy, biscuit, daisy; black sands,’ meant,” Trent grumbled.
Ignoring the complaint, the doctor said, “It’s all here- everything that will exonerate Ara, and also prove the guilt of someone very powerful indeed.” The doctor snapped the briefcase shut and held it out solemnly. “This is family business that your siblings were trying to bring to you, not me; you’ll have to decide whether to come forward with the information. Once you’re in the public eye and connected to this scandal, your life will never be the same. You’ll be in danger, yourself, until he’s brought to justice.”
His hands shook as he accepted the briefcase, but Trent’s voice was steady when he spoke. “I’m already in danger. An innocent woman’s good name and freedom depends on this- not just anyone’s, either- my birth mother’s. Siblings I never knew sacrificed their lives to make things right for her. I think the least I can do is sacrifice my anonymity to get this bastard brought to justice.”